Marketing Your PLR

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:

Private Label Rights Primer – I reveal what this PLR stuff is…
Sell A PLR Product – I reveal how you can sell some of this PLR stuff…

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.

1. Write blog posts.
2. Create videos about the target market.
3. Post in forums in my target market.
4. Social media posts about my target market.
5. 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.

Sell A PLR Product

In the first installment of this long series… (yes this is a lifetime of learning and taking action)… I gave you a condensed version of the make money online using PLR method:

• Sell a PLR product
• Build a list of buyers
• Build a list of potential buyers
• Sell commissionable products
• Create your own product
• JV with other product owners
• Write a book about your target market
• Create a video series about your target market

Today we are going to concentrate on the selling a PLR product. This can be broken down into three simplified steps:

• Editing the product.
• Setting up the sales page and download page.
• Marketing the product.

Buying PLR Products

If you read through my previous post, I mentioned that you should look at getting more than one PLR product but did not go into more detail. Mainly, when you purchase a higher quality PLR product, it will contain a few of the things we need for a successful PLR product sales campaign.

Obviously, the first part is the eBook itself. It should also have a sales page, a download page and product graphics. What you also should be looking for is one or more reports related to the product along with a squeeze page and download page for the reports. If the package you purchase does not have the report, you can have one written for you inexpensively at iWriter. PLRInsider.info also will have PLR reports available from time to time in many niches.

Why The Reports?

Reports are handy for building a list of potential buyers and for our marketing funnel. We will discuss the marketing funnel in more detail in a future post when we get to the building a list portion.

Reports are also great because you can also turn them into affiliate landmines. You take the report, edit it similarly to the way I outline below for your eBook – include an about me section and an additional reading section where you can send people to affiliate products – but your primary goal is still to send people to your sales page for the product you want to sell them – your product. So when you work with the reports, make them high quality and educational without giving away all of the information that is available in your follow-up book.

Editing the product

PLR products will usually come to you with the source documents in a commonly editable format. If you have Word, then you will be ready to go. If you do not have Word, you will need to download and install Open Office, a program suite that is open source (and free) and is compatible with Microsoft Office.

The main thing you want to do with your editing is to make the product look good. A high quality product is less likely to get refunds. Look for obvious errors. Use a uniform font throughout the ebook – make sure it is easy to read, as more readers are using tablets and cell phones to read their documents, fonts that look good in smaller sizes are important.

I won’t go into a whole lot of detail here on the formatting, because a lot of it is software intensive, but the point in to make the product look like it was worth twice the price you charged for it.

Insert your own stuff

You want your buyers to know about you as much as you want them to know about what they purchased the product for.

Why bother with that?

Mostly, you want your buyers to want to buy from you again and again. If you give them a product and then they don’t hear from you again, they will quickly forget who they got it from, so when the time comes for them to buy something else, you want them to remember that you took good care of them and you gave them a quality product for the money they paid you!

About Me

So, you want an About Me section in the book, that tells them about you and how they can get more stuff from you. You should have a blog to send them to as well as some social media links. (we will cover those things in the promotion section, but you should go ahead and create a Twitter profile, Facebook Fanpage and Google Plus Page for your persona (I say persona because you could be marketing as a company, a pseudonym or yourself – but you don’t want all your business stuff mixed in with your personal stuff, especially since you are limited to 5000 personal followers on Facebook)

If you tell them about you, they will have a deeper connection with you. Even if you are not marketing as yourself. If you are not a golfing expert, you might want to create a golfing persona that “is” an expert. I found a golf site that made me laugh because it was obviously a golf persona and the owner was not afraid to run with it. He told stories about his exploits on the golf course and worked in references to products within the stories. It was really entertaining. But choose wisely, because if your market “takes off” and you find yourself becoming a high profile personality in that market, you will have to decide whether you want to be known as that persona or yourself. I can’t advise you on that, but you can ask Alice Cooper about that, since his name is a persona…

Additional Reading Section

A section of your ebook should tell your readers about other books they may be interested in. If you already have other PLR products or your own products, they can be added here as well. But the majority of the recommended reading should be affiliate products. (you should include a short disclaimer telling people that you are compensated for any purchases at the bottom of the page on in a section of your book to protect yourself from FTC pursuit). This gives your readers that ability to keep on reading about their favorite topic and gives you a chance to make come money. (You should have grabbed the affiliate links to these products when you did the research phase…)

Graphics

You will need graphics. Well, you don’t have to have them, but you will find that people consider a product with graphics more valuable than one without. You can take screen shots if the product is demonstrating software, or go to the store and take pictures of various items that may be mentioned in your product (like golf clubs, balls, bags and ball washers in the case of the golfing niche). You can also get royalty free images on sites like stockvault.net or stockxchange.hu (those two are free – many exist that charge per image or a monthly, it depends on how much you need graphics. I tend to pay as I go, but I don’t use a lot of specialized graphics, either. Some in the medical field are very expensive).

Use graphics that help people get in the frame of mind for the chapter that you are adding it to, or that tells a story about what you are about to reveal. For example, if I were going to talk about how dangerous it was to play golf in swamplands, I might use a photo like this:

Just don’t get yourself in hot water – use royalty free images.

Setting Up The Sales and Download Page

Most PLR comes with a sales page and a download page. But you will need to change things on them, or you will not make any money.

Find all references to the product name on these pages and change them to your new product name. Remember, you are renaming the product. Get the graphics changed to reflect the new name as well – nothing says “I didn’t really create this product” more than a graphic that says Golfing Putts Explained when you are stating the product name as Putting Explained. Go to Fiverr.com and pay someone $5 to make you a nice ecover.

You will want to set up a payment button so that people can pay you. I recommend using JVZoo or ClickBank, simply because you can end up with affiliates promoting your product for you. But in the beginning, you can also use PayPal links. Again, it is beyond the scope of this post to give you step by step on how to do this, but please do it!

Get Hosting

You will need a hosting account to store the downloads and your website. You can find good hosting for $10 a month!

The cool thing about this is that you can also create a blog on that domain, too. Now, I have an idea. 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

And it will also give you another piece of the puzzle that you will need in our next installment – building a list.

We have covered a lot in this installment, and I wanted to get through the marketing part, but it is a whole post in itself. Also, it will require us to have some of the other steps ready as we start our funnel…

So in our next installment, I will cover a brief overview of the marketing. For now, get your PLR and get it edited. Get your hosting, and Carlton and I will get you set up with your first blog on your own domain. (wow! I didn’t even mention getting a domain… I used to use GoDaddy for my domains, but they have become unreasonable in their renewal fees. So I have switched over to NameCheap. Use Coupon Code DOMAINZZ to save on domain registration or transfer)

Ok, see you in the next installment.

Private Label Rights Primer

Making money on the Internet is not as easy as people would have you think it is. Work is involved – but it can end up being very easy to maintain once you get it rolling the right way. Considering that most jobs involve you having to do things you don’t like to do with people you don’t like to be around for way too little money compared to the amount of time you are spending doing them, you are way more likely to enjoy working for yourself.

When choosing something to do online, it is often a good idea to start off with products that have already been created for you. The best of these are called PLR products.

What is PLR?

PLR stands for Private Label Rights. It means you have the right to turn these products into something that you can put your name on. Usually that only entails changing the title, reformatting the content and adding a few images (royalty free) to make your product unique. You would also want to change the cover graphics to reflect the name that you have given the product, but that can be outsourced for a very small fee.

PLR is a great starting point for online marketers, because it allows you to break into a market with very little work in the beginning (the product creation part). Now, the work you will have to take on is crucial to getting your product sold. And that is what I am going to talk about here.

Where can I get PLR?

The point of this article is not about the PLR itself, but what you do with it, so I am not going to sell you anything here. If you want a good source for PLR, go to PLRInsider.info and look at the extensive variety of PLR that they have available. They don’t write it themselves, but they do market it at the lowest prices around.

Research – I hate that word

Researching is more like detective work. You have to find out what your market is craving. If you decide to go into the golf niche, for example, you might do some research and find out that putting is an area that many golfers are begging for a way to reduce their strokes on the green. If you go to Clickbank Marketplace, you can research the various products that are available for putting. These products will be great ways for you to make additional money in affiliate commissions after you have built your list. (more on that later).

Once you know that the market you are targeting has a lot of potential affiliate products for you to sell, that is when you look for the PLR products that you want to use to build your audience.

How to make money – “condensed version”

Once you have decided on the target market, the following will be what you do to make money:

• Sell a PLR product
• Build a list of buyers
• Build a list of potential buyers
• Sell commissionable products
• Create your own product
• JV with other product owners
• Write a book about your target market
• Create a video series about your target market

Again, this is a condensed version. I will explain these in more detail, but not in this post. If you would like some one on one tutoring about how to do this, Micheal Savoie is very reasonable and knows what he is talking about. You can listen to his show on Tuesdays at 11AM Eastern – The Blogging With Micheal Show. I actually picked up a lot of what I discuss here from listening to him.

In closing…

I know, I opened up more questions than I answered, right? That is the nature of this marketing beast. You need an MBA to understand it all (I do not have an MBA). But the good thing is, you only have to understand the next step.

Right now, if you are a beginner, your next step is to start researching your market.

Find the target market that will make you money.

Find a PLR product (or products – I will explain this in my next post) that you can use to start building a list of buyers. I will give you the details of what you should be doing with the PLR product on the next post.

The most important thing you need to do is: