Author Archive | Zed Debebe

Let’s say you’re building a sales funnel to promote a new weight loss program. Your lead magnet should detail ways to lose weight. But here’s the key – make these methods painful. Discouraging. Problematic. Complicated. Etc.

Maybe you give them a diet that’s difficult to follow. Or a workout plan that’s enough to make an athlete cry. Whatever.

It should be something that will definitely get the job done, IF they follow it.

But they won’t want to, which is the point.

Because then you will ‘save the day’ by offering them the ‘easy solution.’

Which is, of course, the program you are promoting.

This way you get the exact people you want to enter your funnel (people who want to lose weight) and you prime them to grab your easy solution, because otherwise it just seems too difficult.

This works for almost anything. Do you sell software? Make your lead magnet about how to manually get the same result your software will provide for them automatically.

Do you sell a book writing service? Tell them how to write a book in excruciating, pains-taking over the top detail. Remind them at the end of every chapter that you are there for them if they want to do what so many others have already done, and hire you to write their book for them while they go about their merry lives.

You get the idea.

Make your lead magnet helpful but painful. Then offer them the easy, fast solution they really want.

Do you sell a monthly membership? If not, you might want to consider it.

Here’s 3 reasons to start a membership site:

1. Monthly memberships mean residual income. You sell a membership once and you get paid for it month after month until the customer cancels.

2. Selling a membership generally isn’t any harder than selling a one-time product, yet you can get paid a whole lot more for the same effort.

3. If you offer a trial membership, it’s even easier to get new subscribers. In fact, it can be easier than selling a regular one time product. Yet you can make a LOT more, as this case study will show.

Michael Hyatt has a membership site called Platform University. Twice a year he opens the site up for enrollment. Of course, you can take new enrollees into your membership site as often as you choose, but Michael likes to do it just twice a year – probably because it seems more exclusive that way.

Membership costs $37 a month.

But when his recent launch ended, he decided to offer a $1.99 trial membership to anyone who didn’t take the full $37 a month membership.

So after the one week trial period ended, he sent out an email to everyone who didn’t become a member.

In the email he offered a 7 day trial for $1.99, but the catch was they only had 24 hours to grab it.

That email went out to 40,000 people. 819 signed up for the trial offer.

(If you’re going to do the math to see how much 819 times $1.99 is, you’re going to miss the point. But it’s $1,629)

Of those 819 people, 292 cancelled the membership before it rolled into the $37 a month auto payment.

That sounds bad, doesn’t it?

It’s not. Because that means 527 new members paid their first $37 a month.

At $37 a month, that’s an additional $19,499 of monthly recurring income that Michael never would have had if not for the trial membership.

And things get even crazier, because the average member stays for 17.3 months, which is a lifetime value of $640.10 per member.

Which is to say, that $1.99 trial offer resulted in over $300,000 of possible future revenue.

Wow.

Really, it makes you wonder why he doesn’t just offer the trial membership.

But here’s the thing: By spending a week or even two weeks selling the membership at full price, he really builds the value.

So when he does offer the one week trial for just $1.99, it is such a no-brainer that people sign up in droves.

The campaign to get new $37 members is really a campaign to show people how valuable the membership is, and set it up so that the $1.99 is just too good to pass up.

If he had ONLY offered the $1.99 membership, he would not have properly established the value of the membership, and I don’t think his results would have been as good.

And all of this isn’t even counting the members he did sign up during that week long campaign at $37 a month each.

So how can you use this in your own membership?

First, you want to provide plenty of value inside your membership so that new members stay for a long time. Find out exactly what members want and give it to them. Have a place inside your membership where members can actually request new features to be added to your membership.

Next, really establish the value to prospects. Use lots of testimonials to show how your membership helps members to achieve their goals. You want to build the value so high that the cost of membership seems low by comparison.

Lastly, offer your trial membership for only a day or two before closing it. This gets people off the fence and grabbing the trial before it’s too late. You can always open the trial back up again in a month or two, as you see fit.

Finally, track your numbers. See how many people sign up at the regular rate, how many sign up for the trial, and how many convert from the trial to the regular paid membership.

Of course, keep track of how long members stay. Find ways to get them to stick around longer and you will consistently increase your monthly income for even bigger paydays.

One more thing – imagine working your tail off to get your membership up and running. You might invest, say, two months into finding out exactly what people want, setting up the membership and filling it with content, software, etc.

Then imagine four months beyond that – you’ve got hundreds or even thousands of members with more joining. You’re making residual money on people who joined months ago. In fact, every month your income increases. You invest part of that money to continue to provide the content, software or services that members get, and the rest is yours. And life is sweet.

If you haven’t started a membership site of your own yet, what are you waiting for?

I just visited the site of an EXCELLENT marketer who knows his stuff. But…

Here’s what happened. I’d clicked over to one of his blog posts. Black background, BIG long hard to read headline. Okay, it’s a little much, but I can handle that.

Wait, there’s a banner across the bottom in bright blue. Hmmm, I’m leaning towards the screen, trying to figure out what it says and what it means when…

BOOM!

A bright pop up covers the entire right side of the screen, causing me to jump back from the computer. Too much.

I hadn’t totally grasped the headline when I spotted the banner. I was still trying to decipher the banner when the pop up appeared.

What next? Lions and tigers and bears doing a jig across the screen?

Three headlines and I can’t tell you what any of them said because I kept getting interrupted.

Does your site distract and overwhelm visitors?

I hope not. 😊

Remember the KISS rule for success. Keep it simple, stupid. It is a principle which states that designs and/or systems should be as simple as possible. Wherever possible, complexity should be avoided in a system—as simplicity guarantees the greatest levels of user acceptance and interaction.

Your website will likely create far better results, and more conversions if you keep it simple for your users. Keep this in mind, and have a re-look at your own website and sales pages to see where you might be muddying the water for your visitors, and how you can simplify to increase the results you want.

When you think about someone who is successful, what comes to mind? Most people would think of the end result of being successful – the luxury cars, first-class airline travel, the financial freedom to see the world and the ability to buy anything they wanted.

But if you look closer at the successful person, you will see that behind all the money, beyond the expensive suit and underneath the power they have a successful mindset. In fact, their mindset is the most important contributing factor to the success they have achieved and if you choose, you can have a mindset that is exactly the same, opening you up for success in the very same way.

What is a Successful Mindset?

Your first step to developing a successful mindset is to know what one is. When you define a mindset for success, it seems simpler than it actually is. For example, the definition of a successful mindset is someone who is willing to accept success and take advantage of opportunities.

Many of you might be thinking, “Well, that’s me! I’m willing to accept success. I’ll take advantage of an opportunity if it comes along.” But don’t let the simplicity of the definition fool you because there is much more to it than the literality behind these words.

For example, you might think that you are willing to accept success, but most people aren’t. Some people want success, but they don’t think that they deserve it, they don’t think they are smart enough to achieve it, and they lack confidence in themselves as a successful person.

In addition, those same people who think that they would take advantage of an opportunity if it came along have already passed by dozens of opportunities that might have resulted in their success if they were willing to put in the work. What they really meant was – I’ll take advantage of an opportunity if I don’t have to do a lot of work.

The Successful Mindset Difference

The difference between a successful mindset and one that just wants success is how much work they are willing to put into the effort to get success. It all comes down to how much you believe in what you are doing and how passionate you are about it.

For example, someone who is passionate about their business and believes that they will be able to be successful at it may spend hours working on it that other people might spend watching television, going out on the town or hanging out with their friends.

Some successful entrepreneurs have been able to build their business while still working a full-time job to support their family. This means that they had to work on their business or income streams while everyone else was enjoying leisure time. This is very common in the case of a novelist who suddenly makes it big. Odds are, they were slaving away at the computer for years while so-called aspiring writers were watching The Bachelor.

How to Develop a Successful Mindset

So, how do you actually develop this successful mindset? Well, it involves a process with many steps and if you are like most people, you are going to have to start at the bottom. You’ll start with step one and when you have mastered it, you’ll move onto the next step.

However, keep in mind that it takes time to completely change your mindset. You have had the same basic mindset for success for many years and it can be difficult to change at first. That’s why using daily habits to change your mindset is the number one strategy used in the business world.

Here are the steps for creating a mindset for success:

Give yourself permission to succeed: Many people just don’t believe that they should have the success that they desire, so their own mind actually keeps them from getting there. Maybe they feel guilty because of past mistakes, or do not think that their religious or moral beliefs will permit them to have a great deal of money. Whatever the reason, you first need to give yourself permission to succeed or else you won’t even be able to start the journey.

Believe in your ability to succeed: Just as important as giving yourself permission to succeed is the belief that you have what it takes to be successful. Everyone has something that they are good at, and some of the people you would never think could have made a success of themselves because of physical health, mental illness, financial difficulties, lack of education or other circumstances, have become some of the most well-known success stories of our time.

Take care of Yourself: Research conducted into the personal habits of some of the richest and most powerful people in the world who have achieved success on their own show certain trends that are far too common to be coincidence. Successful people take better care of themselves than the average person does. They sleep better at night, with most getting between 6 to 10 hours, they exercise regularly and stay in shape, and they eat healthy most of the time.

Set Goals for Yourself: So, you want to be successful. How are you going to achieve it? Setting goals and creating a plan for success is often what separates the average person from the very successful one. The average person might know that they want to be successful, but they have no plan to get there. Just as ineffective as having no goals at all is something that many people do – setting goals that have no clear path to achievement. For example, one of these goals might be: I want to be rich in 10 years.

Keep Track of Your Progress: You should also be tracking your progress every day or week to determine how you are coming with your plans for success. Even if you aren’t doing as well as you should be, you still want to write down what you have achieved. There are a couple of reasons for this: first of all, you will be able to look back and see how much success you have achieved and be motivated to continue reaching for your goals. Second, you can easily see where you need to make adjustments in your plan when you have tracked it over a period of time.

Concentrate on the Things That Matter: If you want to be successful then you don’t want to waste your time on things that aren’t going to give you success or are not working out the way you had intended. Successful people know when to fold their hand and leave the table to try a different game and you should avoid continuing futile efforts when you are fairly certain that you aren’t going to reap any benefits from them. Of course, that doesn’t mean to jump ship at the first sign of trouble, but it does mean being aware when you have reached the point when you just need to move on.

Be all you can be: If you aren’t going to give 100% of your effort to the task of being successful then one of two things are going to happen: one, you aren’t going to achieve the level of success that you want at all, or two, you are going to take a lot longer getting there than you should have. If you are going to write a book, start a business or work in the ever growing internet marketing industry, make sure that you are giving it your best effort and don’t hold back.

Be Flexible: One thing that you will learn as you start the journey towards success is that things are almost never going to go according to plan. If you create a set-in-stone goal and milestone list and then try to achieve them, you are always going to fail unless you are able to be flexible. Anything might happen that could derail your efforts and you need to be able to roll with the punches and continue the journey even when your original plan didn’t work out. For example, suppose that you planned to train for a marathon this summer, but ended up breaking your leg. You need to change your plan and figure out some other way that you can work towards your success, and then come back to the marathon training at a later date when you are healed up.

Develop Daily Habits That Stick: When you want to be successful, you need to understand up front that it is a long journey. Everyone proceeds at a different pace, but the number one thing that you can do to speed things up is to develop habits for success and make them stick. Habits like getting up early, getting enough sleep, putting all of your efforts into your work, saving money and learning as much as you can will help you shape your future and make your success come much quicker.

Don’t Remove Bad Habits, Replace Them: If you have bad habits that you are trying to get rid of, keep in mind that you will have a much better chance of doing that if you replace them with good habits instead. For example, if you are trying to change a bad habit of eating fast food for lunch on a daily basis, you will have much better results if you try to make eating healthy a daily habit rather than attempting to get rid of eating poorly.

Other Ways to Develop a Successful Mindset

If you want to develop the kind of mindset that you need for financial success or any other type of success that you are trying to create in your life, then you should start by learning as much as you can about certain aspects of psychological development that pertains to successful mindsets such as cultivating productive habits, creative problem-solving, setting goals, working with others, etc.

One of the things that you can do that will help you a great deal is to study what other successful people that you admire are doing, and how they were able to get to where they are today. This is called modeling and it’s one of the fastest ways to accelerate your own success. Many successful people have biographies or autobiographies that will give you lots of good information as to how they were able to achieve their success and how you can model your own efforts and mindset after theirs.

You also need to decide what is most important to you and have a clear picture of it in your mind. Success comes in many different forms. For example, some people seek after financial success while others want their work to be recognized and consumed by the masses. Whether you are starting the next dotcom revolution or you are writing the Great American Novel, you want to have your end goal first and foremost in your mind.

A successful mindset is only the first step in achieving success. This is also something that you need to bear in mind. The hard work actually comes after you prepare yourself and set your goals – the part where you put forth the effort that will be required in order to achieve those goals.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to believe in yourself and in your ability to be successful. There are people out there who have more education than you; people who have more money to invest into a business than you do and people who have plenty more free time than you do to work on their success.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have the things you desire. Your current circumstances have little to do with how much success you will be able to achieve. Instead, how motivated and willing you are to put forth enough effort will determine how far you get.

Advantages of having more money and time can certainly be a big help on the road to achievement, but the most important factor in determining if you will be successful is how bad you want it, and your commitment to take consistent action until you get it.

To get lots of good reviews you’re first going to need a place where people can leave their reviews. For example, if you sell on Amazon then Amazon is the place to capture your reviews. If you have a review system on your website, then that’s where you’ll be sending people. Here’s how it works…

You send your product to your customer, whether that means shipping it to them or sending them to your download page.

In your product where it cannot be missed, you enclose a card or page that says something like:

How Would You Like a ___ 100% FREE with FREE Shipping?

Visit: GetFreeProduct.yoursite.com

Fill out the form, choose a product and we’ll ship it to you 100% FREE.
– No Shipping Charges!
– No Hidden Fees!
– No Credit Card Required!

Naturally if you’re delivering products electronically, you will alter the language on this. You can either specify what product you will send or you can let them choose.

When they go to your site, there will be a simple form asking what they purchased from you, what they want to receive for free, their address and the invoice number (if applicable). Once they fill this out they are feeling HAPPY because they are about to receive a free product, and who doesn’t love FREE?

This exact moment is the PERFECT time to ask for feedback (a review) on the product they already have. Simply take them to the next page where they are asked for feedback on the product they purchased.

Naturally, many of your customers will want to reciprocate your goodwill and leave a review, and more likely a good review due in part to the positive experience this process is providing for them.

I’ve seen three different marketers doing a variation of this business, all with the same result – they earn a bare minimum of $5,000/month and usually 2 to 3 times that much.

Two of them are completely unknown marketers who are quietly doing this in their spare time. The third marketer is a fairly big name, and odds are you’ve heard of him. He doesn’t do any of this work himself. He simply outsources the whole thing and brings in over $10,000 a month in profit doing it.

All three of them do this business in the online marketing niche. Essentially, they are helping new marketers to quickly have a money generating business of their own by building it for them. No doubt you’ve seen these ‘business in a box’ packages you can purchase that contain a product, a sales page and so forth, right? You put your own name on them, upload them to your site and start promoting.

There’s nothing wrong with these, and if you have your own list, you can often make good money with them. But these marketers have taken things a step further by creating a unique business in a box for each customer. These are genuinely one of a kind and even include a list.

Here’s how it works:

They start by creating a unique funnel complete with a squeeze page, high-value free gift and unique upsell product. The free gift is usually a plugin, because they have a higher perceived value than a report. You can find plugins with giveaway rights available all over the internet. Buying the rights is usually about $37-47 and then you are free to give it away to your heart’s content.

You can get a coder to rebrand, tweak and/or rename the plugin, usually for $100 or less. This is optional but again, it makes your package unique from anything else out there.

The upsell product is made from good PLR that’s then reworked and rebranded, complete with a new name, new graphics and so forth. It’s important here to use truly quality PLR – don’t skimp on this.

The cost of the content will be perhaps $150 if you rework it yourself, and twice that if you hire someone to do it for you. Since you’re going to price the upsell at around $47, you want the product to look and feel like it is worth at least that much if not more. In other words, make sure it doesn’t look like PLR.

Once the squeeze page and upsell are set up on a domain, it’s time to spend about $250 to purchase 1,000 solo ad clicks. Send them to your squeeze page.

Your goal here is three-fold:

→ Start building a list
→ Establish that the squeeze page and upsell convert
→ Make some money on the upsell

From 1,000 solo ad clicks you should hopefully get about 300 new subscribers. Maybe 10 of those will buy the upsell, bringing you about $470. That’s covered some of your costs right there.

Once you’ve done this, it’s time to cash in. You’re going to flip the entire funnel to one buyer. You can use Flippa, Warrior Forum or any of the site flipping websites out there.

You’re offering a proven funnel with a list, a proven squeeze page and a proven upsell page complete with the lead magnet and the product. This is VALUABLE because it’s proven and because it’s unique. Bonus points if you’ve chosen a great name for the URL, lead magnet and upsell.

Once you master how to do these things (and they’re not difficult) you can probably build 3 of these a month all by yourself and still have plenty of time to do other things, too.

And you can flip these packages for $2,500 to $7,500 each. Not bad for a part time business!

Okay, I love working with my own list, nurturing it, emailing it everyday… but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. So when I run across a business that makes good money without having to nurture a list, and it only takes a few hours per week or month, I figure it might be worth sharing.

Mind you, the $5,000 a month figure is somewhat arbitrary.

You could make less or more, depending on how good you are at this and how many deals you do a month.

And perhaps the best part of all is you’re providing a very valuable service to new marketers looking to start their own online business without having to worry about the details.

Here’s how it works as told to me by someone who has been doing this for months now…

You’re going to be creating unique, ready-to-go sales funnels that are proven to convert.

No worries, you’re not doing this from scratch. Far from it. Instead, you’re using PLR – the kind that provides everything ready made to build a sales funnel.

The key is to make everything in the funnel unique, even though you’re using PLR.

So you find some good PLR that fills a real desire in the marketplace.

Rename everything and create new graphics, too.

You can even go in and change the coding on the plugin, if that’s what you’re using. Just hire someone to tweak it, maybe adding a new feature.

If you’re using written PLR, hire someone to flesh it out a bit more and change it up a little.

Then you create a squeeze page to offer something for free in return for the visitor’s email address. It could be a report, book, plugin, etc. Remember to use PLR that includes giveaway rights.

Focus your effort on making this offer as irresistible as possible. You might need to rewrite the sales page to do this, or hire someone to write it for you.

Next you create an upsell offer. This can be a high quality PLR course. Again, rename it, and create a new sales page that converts. Charge a fairly low price for the upsell – between $19 and $39.

Yes, you might need to invest some money in copywriting and even setting this up if you don’t want to do it yourself. But if you shop around, you can probably get it done for $200 to $500, depending on how much you do yourself.

Now that you have your funnel set up, buy 1,000 clicks from solo ads or Facebook. Send them to your squeeze page and through the funnel.

You’re doing this to prove the funnel works, as well as to start building the list.

After 1,000 clicks, if you get a 40% opt-in rate, you’ll have 400 subscribers.

If 5% of the subscribers buy the upsell, and the upsell is $30, then you’ve brought in $600.

This can cover your costs or come close to it, depending on how much you spent.

You can then buy more traffic if you like, building the list and testing and tweaking the funnel.

But you don’t have to. If you want to stop at this point, you can.

Or continue on and build the list bigger, either one.

In either case, when you get to the point that you’ve had enough testing, tweaking and list building, it’s time to flip the funnel and make the real money.

You’re selling a funnel that comes complete with a list of several hundred subscribers that’s already generating profits on the upsell, which means it’s proven.

And just as important, your funnel is unique, too. It has its own proven squeeze page, its own proven sales page, its own lead magnet and product…

…it’s a complete one-of-a-kind proven sales funnel.

You can sell this for $3,000 or more – sometimes a lot more – on Flippa.

The fellow who told me about this averages about $5,000 a sale. Some sites have sold for more, some less.

And he does two of these a month by outsourcing the work.

Frankly, I don’t think he personally invests more than 5 hours into each website.

So it’s a very lucrative side income, so say the least.

The key here is to pick niches with ready-made markets – niches where people are already spending lots of money.

You’ll want to find the best PLR you can get your hands on.

Make everything unique.

And practice.

The first time my friend tried this, he only cleared a few hundred dollars.

The second time, he cleared over $2,000.

Now he averages about $5,000. So practice and experience do count.

Perhaps best of all, there is no customer support. Once he sells a site, it’s totally out of his hands and he’s on to the next one.

So it’s great for somebody who doesn’t like to email a list day after day, build a relationship with readers and so forth.

If this is something that interests you, spend some time researching which sites are selling well, and also where to find the best quality PLR.

Once you know those two things, everything else will fall into place.

As always, your numbers and results might vary, but here’s what Rainy (not her real name) is achieving with one day of work per week…

She creates a product each week which she then sells to just 25 people at $25 each. Limiting the number of copies sold creates scarcity, and she usually sells out in about half a day.

You can do this if you have an internet marketing list or an internet marketing social media group. The point is you need an audience to offer this to, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a list.

In Rainy’s case she doesn’t even have a website. When she offers the product each week, she does it through a Facebook Group and her own small list. She instructs buyers to send her the money through PayPal and then post on Facebook that they’re in.

This creates excitement as people see the copies are being snapped up. Anyone on the fence about buying realizes they better jump in quick or they’ll lose out.

The product Rainy creates each week is a directory of the top offers in online marketing for the week. She gives the names, URL’s, descriptions, conversion rates, backgrounds of the authors and her own personal insights. This information is super valuable to anyone who promotes internet marketing products to their list.

But it’s also valuable to the people on these lists, which is why Rainy gives PLR rights to the weekly directory. Buyers can give it away or sell it without rights, and they know it won’t be saturated because only 25 copies are sold.

At least a couple of her regular customers offer these reports as freebies to get internet marketers to join their list, and it’s quite effective. Essentially, they are paying $25 every week or two to provide fresh, timely content to their new subscribers.

Of course, if you want to follow this business model, you don’t necessarily need to write about the latest offering in online marketing. Anything that is timely and of interest to others has potential.

And if you find that your weekly offerings are selling well, you might consider launching them into a paid membership, too, for even more money.

One of the biggest obstacles holding you back from success online could be the fear that your writing is lousy. But let me ask you… can your readers understand your meaning?

Or are they as flummoxed as I was when I read this YouTube comment?

The unwieldy downtown conjecturally suffer because belt seemingly buzz vice a jumbled goose. scandalous, adhesive september

I don’t know if this came from one of the early bots, or perhaps someone who knows no English but received a dictionary for his birthday, or just someone who drank a few too many.

Whatever the case, it received two replies (both positive!) within three days and I’m betting your writing is better than that.

So, stop sweating your writing skills and just write. You’ll find the more you do it, the better you get.

And have fun. If you don’t find at least some pleasure in creating your posts and products, maybe you’re in the wrong niche.

Content marketing isn’t supposed to be that hard. After all, if you find that your belt seemingly buzzes vice at a jumbled goose in a scandalous manner, then sticking to September might be the right move after all. 😉

Relax. Have fun. Make some mistakes.

And just write.

This one is so simple, yet diabolically effective…

When you first introduce a new product to your list or your blog readers, do you simply pop a link on there with a line of text and hope they click?

Of course not. You introduce the product. You tell them what’s good about it, how you use it, why it can change their business or help them achieve their goal, etc.

In other words, you’re introducing the product and warming up your readers BEFORE you send them to the sales page.

Now here’s the mistake I see marketers making all the time…

…when they first introduce the product, they take the time to do everything we just said.

And they make sales.

Later they decide to promote the product again, only this time they forget a crucial step.

They slap that affiliate link or product link up on social media and figure people will click it and buy the product.

But they don’t click.

Why not? Because there’s no introduction to entice them to click and learn more.

So here’s what you do…

Take the copy you wrote in that email or post that introduces the product, and give it a page of its own on your site. Add your affiliate link or sales link to the bottom.

Now when you advertise the product on social media and other venues, send visitors to your intro page first. I’ve seen this little technique increase conversions 4 fold.