This post is part 3 in a series on Making Money With PLR Products. If you came upon this post without reading the first two, here are the links:
Well, I started to reveal how you can make money using PLR products in the previous post, but mostly I talked about getting ready to sell it. The actual selling comes in this part, because to sell, you must market.
Marketing 101
When marketing a product, your goal is to get prospects to look at your sales page. But getting them to do that take a lot of little steps and planning along the way.
Your Marketing Funnel
The first step is the most important. You create a marketing funnel.
You need to drive traffic to the mouth of the funnel using lead generators like the reports we talked about in the previous post. These are important, because you are building a funnel in a specific niche – so the reports must provide important information for people who are hungry for more information in the niche. The primary goal with these reports is to put them on your list. (we will cover the list in more detail in a few minutes)
If we are driving people to a golf niche, then maybe a report on the top ten golf courses in the south would interest people into getting on your list. The ultimate goal of having them on your prospect list, is then to get them off the prospect list and onto your buyer’s list. But you are going to have people who stay on the list and never seem to move from there and that is something you will have to keep in mind.
Lead Generators bring us the prospects. The first thing we do with those prospects is offer them Product 1 (I know, the funnel shows affiliate offers, but read on…). We want them to see OUR PRODUCT before we tell them about anyone else’s product. Give them a chance to skip that second part of the funnel. Our ultimate goal is to have them on our buyers list, remember? Once they have said no a couple of times to your product, you can start sending them offers for your affiliate products. (These are the products you found during your research phase).
These affiliate offers will take some of your prospects off of your list and onto someone else’s buyers list. But there are ways of making this work in your favor, too. If you offer a bonus to your prospect for buying the product of your competitor – let’s say you give them a discount on your product 1 or give them product 1 for free if they buy the affiliate product – at that point you can move them onto a buyer’s list, too! They bought something. They have proven that they own a credit card and are capable of making a transaction with it in the niche that you are targeting. So they are now on your product 1 buyer’s list and it put money into your funnel.
Quick note: you want to make the affiliate offer that you give your product as a bonus on worth way more than your product, that way you are compensated properly for sharing your lead. It also will not devalue your product. If you are selling your product for $17 and you give it as a bonus for something worth $7, then you are telling your list that you would take $7 for your product (actually, less than that, because you are not always getting 100% commissions on affiliate sales, right?). So if you are selling your product for $17, then a $37 product is more than acceptable, because you are giving your customer more value in return for a transaction that they would have probably done anyway, but now they also have your product in their hands and they are moved to your buyers list.
As you can see in the graphic, you should also be producing more products of your own (either from more PLR or having new products created for you using iWriter or fiverr.com to have stuff done. In my opinion, fiverr.com is more useful for having the graphics done or for getting a book formatted, but not for having a product created. iWriter can have you getting a complete product done in less than a week for less than $100. If you want to create a complete book, it is around $200, but you can have a series of articles written for around $3-5 each on particular topics and then weave them together in Word into your own product). A proper funnel should be never ending. It should always be putting new $ into your account.
How do I find prospects?
Lead generation is the big buzz these days. I find that doing lead generation is actually easy but it takes effort and time (and if you want to shortcut the effort and time it costs money). You also need tools to do this properly. Here is what I do to create buzz about my products and reports.
- Write blog posts.
- Create videos about the target market.
- Post in forums in my target market.
- Social media posts about my target market.
- Rinse and repeat.
The possibilities of lead generation are endless, actually, but these are ones that I can do for free. Well, free in the sense that I don’t pay anyone to do them. I have to pay for my hosting on my other blogs (I am using Blogger here, but you should always have other blogs on other platforms).
Blogging
Blogs are a wonderful platform for building a following. But you should never rely solely on a single blog for your livelihood. All it takes is a server malfunction, a host losing its IP addresses, a spam complaint or simply a change in terms of service on a platform and your blog is vaporized into little electrons all over the web, never to be seen again.
You may or may not want to use your own name on your blogs, it is up to you. I tend to use pseudonyms on a lot of different platforms, so that I can concentrate on different niches without appearing to be spread too thin. Set up your blog to be easy to read, and pleasing to the eye. Don’t get caught up in the latest fancy black background with neon text (people will get eyestrain and will look for someone in the eye care niche). Choose simple themes and easy to read fonts (similar to your eBooks, preferably).
I could go on and on about blogging, but you really should listen to some back episodes of Blogging With Micheal, especially last year’s episodes. This year he has been talking about Google Hangouts and while those will help us with the video section of the marketing, he can get you going on the blogging aspect.
Video Marketing
Really, video marketing is just video content that sends people back to your site to find out more about what you do. Make your videos more about the content than the sales pitch. People don’t share commercials unless they are hilarious or they get something for showing it to you. They share great content when they feel it will help others.
If you are selling golf PLR, you may want to find a few reports about golf that you can turn into PowerPoints and make a video out of them. Using Google Hangouts for creating these PowerPoint videos will do some incredible things for you, too. We’ll discuss that in the Social Media section.
You want to create a YouTube channel for the niche you are targeting. THIS IS CRUCIAL!
Forum Marketing
Forum marketing is a misnomer. You actually do absolutely no marketing on the forums. What you do is interact on forums that are in your niche. If you are in the golf niche, get on as many golf forums as you can and interact with others. Help people, answer questions and basically be an expert. Make sure your profile page has your blog and your YouTube channel links on it along with a brief paragraph talking about how you have been helping golfers.
Spamming forums is a great way to get your name blacklisted and keep people away from you and your products. Do not do it!
Social Media Marketing
Again, more effort should be placed on the Social Media than the marketing. You want to effectively brand your identity as an expert in your niche. You will want a Fan Page on both Google Plus and Facebook, you will want a YouTube Channel devoted to your niche and you will want a Twitter account for your brand identity.
An example is a football blog I like – BlogTalkFootball.com – it has all of the pieces for good social media connections. Of course, they are in an audience building stage right now, so they are not marketing any products. But if they set themselves up with the right social presence from the start, they will have a great body of work that people can look for and enjoy. The marketing can come later. In the mean time, they can earn money from the ads on their videos from YouTube.
When you post on your blog, you want to make sure that your Fan Pages and Twitter know about it. This will help keep engagement with your followers and give you more chances to have your content shared.
Sometimes I get asked where I get ideas for new stories on my blog. The real answer is the news. I go to Google and search for my niche. I read a couple of stories and then talk about them and how they may relate to the product or report I have on that topic. Sometimes your blog post can be a video that you did on Google Hangouts. I especially enjoy doing those. I can talk about the stories, give my opinion on them and then tell my audience about a report I am giving away. I do tend to write reports when I get inspired by stories I read in the news about my topics, too. So I don’t just use PLR, and since I am giving away the reports, they can still get to know me without spending money.
Rinse and Repeat
If something seems to be working, keep doing it. If something you are doing is not getting results right away, keep doing it, but track your results. Your stats page is a great way to tell where your traffic is coming from.
I use Google’s Webmaster Tools for each of my blogs and it is a great help in making my site as Google friendly as possible and it also gives me a great way to look up my stats. You can use it in conjunction with Google Analytics (recommended) to get very accurate traffic stats.
It is especially cool to see the keywords that people searched for to find you, because sometimes we didn’t even think that a particular term would be useful, and it gets us traffic. A lot of that has to do with how your blog posts cover the niche. If you are tightly focused on a very specific segment of your market, you may not get oddball keywords coming to your site. But if you are a little more general, sometimes the traffic will come from less specific searches for the niche you are targeting. In either case, you have gotten eyeballs on your page that could end up on your squeeze page.
Marketing Minute?
As you can see, I really tore through the marketing section. You could do a lot of things to get traffic to your reports. Remember that you want to send them to your squeeze page, ultimately. But don’t be afraid to send people to your blog and as a call to action in your post, have them opt in to download a report.
Or do a series of PowerPoint videos and give the first away without opting in, and have them fill out your squeeze page to get the rest of the videos. This is a great way to tease your prospects with your content and then have them begging you for more. They are more likely to buy your products if they are already hungry for your content.
We have not talked about paid traffic. That is more for the experts. You do not need to be spending money on the traffic until you have your funnel set up and ready for the traffic. Get that funnel fully functional, set up your social networks and blog. Be ready for the traffic, then we will start to talk about paid traffic.
What’s Next?
We have to discuss list building in our next installment. It is an integral part of the marketing funnel, since they have to be on your list to get to the good stuff. If you have not taken me and my partner Carlton Lybert up on our offer to help you set up your blog on our hosting platform, I should probably mention that the hosting plan for $10 a month also includes an autoresponder account so you can start building a list. I will go into more details on the autoresponders in the next installment.
If you want a blog installed and set up for you, I can do it for free. But you will have to buy the hosting through my partner, Carlton Lybert. He will receive a notification that you have signed up and will contact you directly. Here is his link for the hosting:
http://carltonlybert.hostthenprofit.com
See you next time.
