Scott Anthony of the Harvard Business Review did a piece on “3 Ways to Prioritize a Long List of Ideas, which you can read here…

It’s all about how to choose what it is that you should do next, which product to run with, which decision to make and so forth. Of course it’s written with large companies in mind, but the essence applies just as well to the Online Marketer. For example…

When choosing which product to create next, don’t always trust what people say they will do.

Rather, trust what they do. When I survey my readers to find out what they want to buy next, I also take into consideration that they may not know their own minds.

For example, if you ask someone what they want to eat tomorrow, they’re likely to say they want something healthy like a salad. But when tomorrow comes, more often than not they will order the pizza or pasta instead. It’s not that they weren’t telling you the truth; it’s just that people tend to think about the future in one way and act in the present in a different way. They’re certain tomorrow is the day they buckle down and do their work, or go on a diet, or begin exercising. Today? Let’s watch TV and eat chocolate cake.

So when you survey your customers asking what they want to buy, realize that what they say isn’t necessarily so.

Limit studying and planning. Prioritize action.

If all you’re doing is studying and planning so that you can make the right decision, then you’re not acting. And without action, there can be no reward. As Anthony states, visualize success and then figure out what you need to do to get there. For example, if you visualize your next success as selling a thousand copies of your new training program, figure out what you need to do to make it happen, and then do it. If you get stuck on the planning, you’ll never get anywhere.

Look for ideas and solutions outside of the box.

Whatever your niche of choice might be, don’t confine your explorations and learning to just your niche. Explore other avenues outside of your realm to see how they solve problems and how that might be applicable to your niche. Becoming myopic to your own area of expertise to the exclusion of all others can mean you’re missing out on stellar ideas to increase your bottom line.

Here’s a simple example: Angie has her own line of make-up products targeted to women over 50 that she sells exclusively online, and she’s been struggling with lead generation. The other day she received her order of vitamins from a well known health company with millions of customers, and it hit her: What if she asked this company to place a postcard promoting her website in every box that contained one or more products designed exclusively for this target market?

Most online marketers would never even think of this – yet it’s an excellent way to get her website in front of her exact target market. And all it will cost her is the printing, since the health company is taking a percentage of sales as her affiliate rather than a flat fee for inserting the postcards.

Sometimes we find ourselves bogged down while trying to decide what to do next or how to do it – when really all we need are simple systems to keep us moving, and our business growing.

If you’re using Paypal to take payments, here’s a neat little trick to increase your sales…

When someone adds your product to the shopping cart, it takes them to the Paypal checkout page. The problem is, some people will back out of the purchase at this point. However, what most marketers don’t seem to know is that Paypal allows you to place a banner at the top of this checkout page. Moreover, what you choose to place in this banner can reduce shopping cart abandonment by allaying your customer’s fear.

For example, recently when I purchased a product I saw a banner at the top of the Paypal checkout page that actually asked me to visit another website to sign up for a different product launch! This is obviously NOT the way to use this banner space.

Instead, do what I saw one enterprising entrepreneur do the other day – create a simple banner with a short TESTIMONIAL in it for the product they are about to purchase.

It can be something as brief as:

I Can’t Believe This is Available for Such a Low Price.

– Customer Name

or

ABC Product Saved Me $xxxx in Just The First 3 Months.

– Customer Name

Be sure to use quotes and the person’s full name – and if applicable, their company name. This provides third party validation that the buyer is in fact making a smart decision by purchasing your offer, and thus reduce your Paypal shopping cart abandonment rate.

Of course, this same tip can be applied to any shopping cart or online checkout experience really. Using social proof to reinforce your buyers confidence just before checkout will boost your sales.

Now just make sure you are giving your customers experiences WORTH writing you glowing reviews and testimonials for and you’ll be all set!

If you look at the wealthiest people in America today – Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Michael Dell, Paul Allen – you’ll notice they’re all first generation multi-billionaires.

And here’s the wonderful thing: If you do what other successful people do, you’ll eventually get a similar result to what they got, depending on things like timing and market, of course.

But let’s say you only do 1/10th as good. Or even 1/100th or 1/1000th. That’s still better than if you did nothing.

So look at what successful people do. Copy them in your own way. Expect it to take work. And time. And lots of effort.

And then be proud of your results, whatever they might be.

There’s been a trend online for the last 20 years to write sales letters that are shorter and have more and more graphics and fancy images.

But just because everyone is doing it, does that make it the most effective form of selling?

Maybe not.

Do you remember direct mail selling?

You get a fat white envelope in the mail, and inside is a long form sales letter. No fancy graphics, just plenty of great copy.

Here’s the thing: Anybody and everybody can throw up a sales letter online. And they do.

But when it comes to direct mail, these companies are hiring the best of the best copywriters to write their letters.

How do I know? Because no company in their right mind is going to spend the money to mail thousands (hundreds of thousands, even millions) of these letters unless they know for a FACT that they’re going to convert.

And how do they know? Because they test them. They pit one version against another to determine which one is more effective, and that becomes the control.

Then they write another version and test that against the previous winner, and they keep this up until they are making serious money.

Then they mail out these letters by the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, and the money rolls in.

These are the best of the best in sales letters, and they’re not to be confused with online sales letters in quality.

After all, it costs nothing to slap a letter up on the internet and see if anything sticks.

But mailing out thousands of letters the old fashioned way is a serious investment – which is also why these companies are willing to pay the very best writers 5 figures plus royalties to write these letters.

So, get on as many mailing lists as possible and when these letters start coming in, read and re-read them.

Dissect why they work, and then use them as templates for your own letters.

I have a friend who is experimenting with this very technique, and his first try out of the gate more than DOUBLED his sales compared to the sales letter he was using.

He simply took a sales letter that he’s received in the mail twice (a sure sign it’s converting) and he used it as a template for his online letter for his own product.

He didn’t use any graphics at all. No flash and no sparkle – just a plain old sales letter full of words that convinced his online buyers to… BUY.

Try it. You never know – maybe you’ll double your sales, too.

If you’re a product seller, you already know that not all affiliates are created equal.

Some will never promote. Others promote once and disappear. And a small percentage will promote your products over and over, making a lion’s share of sales for you.

So how do you recruit great affiliates?

While there is no one answer, there are many ways to find and recruit those key affiliates who will take your business to the next level.

1: “Wanna Promote?”

Contacting websites, blogs and other web publishers.

Send them a well-written email to ask them in a very polite way if they would like to become your affiliate.

You’ll likely have to contact a lot of people to get results, but it can be totally worth the effort.

2: Use a Service

Use a service to locate potential affiliates by category, keyword or advertiser.

3: Bloggers

Group High is a site that will help you find the best bloggers and influencers, as well as manage your relationships.

4: Outsource

If you have the funds, you can hire a service such as Experience Advertising to do your outreach and recruiting for you.

5: Use PPC Search Ads

Did you know that affiliates are actively looking for great programs to promote? You can find them by running PPC ads in Google Adwords and Bing Ads.

Don’t forget to track to see which ads are bringing in the most effective affiliates.

6: SEO’d Affiliate Pages

Create a page just for affiliates. Then optimize that page for SEO results, so when people are searching for affiliate programs in your niche, they can find you in the organic search results.

7: Press Releases

Write press releases for online distribution. Press releases can be another way to gain traction in the organic rankings.

8: Facebook Ads

Did you know you can find affiliates on Facebook? Target people who are interested in affiliate marketing and blogging in your niche.

9: Networks

Launch your product on an affiliate network.

There are many to choose from, including Clickbank, Commissions Junction, JVZoo, Linkshare and Sharesale.

In some cases you might want to screen affiliates from these networks to be sure you’re only dealing with reputable people.

10: In Person

Trade shows, summits and conferences are great places to meet new affiliates. You might even consider getting a booth at some of these events, so affiliates are coming to you instead of you hunting them down.

11: Affiliate Forums

Build and maintain a presence on affiliate forums. These are great places to meet and recruit affiliates. Here’s a few to get you started:

Affiliate Fix https://www.affiliatefix.com/

Affilorama https://www.affilorama.com/forum/

Black Hat World https://www.blackhatworld.com/

DN Forum https://www.dnforum.com/

Digital Point https://forums.digitalpoint.com/

Site Point https://www.sitepoint.com/community/

Warrior Forum http://warriorforum.com

Wicked Fire http://www.wickedfire.com/

12: Twitter

Twitter is a good place to meet potential affiliates. Search for your keywords to find who is talking about your niche, and then follow them and start interacting.

13: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great place to meet affiliates and just network in general. You can post and participate in discussions and connect with people in a professional atmosphere.

14: Talk to Your Customers

This is a great way to get new affiliates who truly use and believe in your product. Reach out to your buyers and see who would like to be your affiliate, and take it from there.

15: Customer Referral Program

Tools such as Referral Candy and Friend Buy make it super easy to set up and run a customer referral program.

Plus it automates the process, so you can put your focus elsewhere.

16: Your Own Site

Place a link on your website. This is perhaps the most simple, yet most overlooked technique of all.

Place a link at the bottom of your website, and anywhere else you choose, pointing people to your affiliate page.

17: You Promote Mine, I’ll Promote Yours

Approach other product sellers and offer to do a deal in which you promote each other’s product.

A few notes about this one: Obviously you want to find product owners in your same niche.

You want to love their product enough to promote it – don’t promote junk just to make some sales of your own.

And while many will tell you that you cannot be direct competitors to do this, it’s simply not true. For example, let’s say you have a product that teaches traffic generation techniques.

You find another product that also teaches traffic generation techniques, so naturally they seem like a direct competitor. But the actual techniques they teach are somewhat different from yours.

I can tell you right now that your customers are not buying just one product on generating traffic – they’re buying several. You can be the affiliate who introduces them to a traffic course you truly believe in, and in return get your own product promoted as well.

18: It’s Super Affiliate!

Look for super affiliates – the top affiliate performers who can generate significant revenue for the merchants they choose to promote.

They’re going to be looking for high conversion rates and a decent percentage of the profits.

Be sure you’ve got everything running smoothly and converting well before asking them to promote. If they make a lot of sales, they may continue to promote you into the future.

But if there are technical glitches or low conversions, you will never hear from them again.

19: Spy

Watch to see who is promoting similar offers. If you’re about to launch that traffic program, so some research to find out who the top affiliates were for previous traffic programs.

Perhaps the easiest way to do the research is proactively. Sign up as an affiliate yourself so you can see who the top promoters are, and contact them well in advance of your own launch.

20: Contests

Run an incentive contest, promote it everywhere. Running a contest with cash prizes for top performers will entice new affiliates to join your affiliate program.

21: Affiliates Recruiting Affiliates

Offer an incentive to current affiliates to bring in new affiliates. Affiliates know other affiliates. And offering a percentage of profits on their affiliate recruits is a great way to incentivize them to do your affiliate recruiting for you.

Above all else, take care of your best affiliates and keep them happy. Affiliates can make or break your business. If just one affiliate has a bad experience with you, they can potentially tell dozens of others to steer clear. Once this happens, you’ll find it very difficult to recruit new affiliates.

But when you treat your affiliates well, they will send you sales – often a surprising number of them.

Just think – all it takes is one really good affiliate to add 5 figures to your business.

A half dozen of these affiliates promoting you on a regular basis can move you into the 6 figure range. All for just recruiting and taking care of your best people.

If you decide you’re going to do something, do it.

They’ve done dozens of studies over the years and they’ve found there is one major difference between successful people and unsuccessful people:

Successful people launch.

They get started.

They get on with it.

They just do it.

Unsuccessful people get the same ideas and the same information, but they’ve always got an excuse for not starting.

This method costs you nothing but time – yet it can add mightily to your bottom line. As you already know, a buyer is worth far, far more than a simple subscriber, and here’s how to get buyers added to your list for free…

Step 1: Create a short report that solves a key problem. In other words, one problem, one solution. Simple. Now give it a great title. In fact, spend as much time on the title as you did writing the report, because the title has to grab attention and get people to read it cover to cover.

Step 2: Repeat step 1, only with a different problem and solution in the same niche.

Step 3: Set up a squeeze page to offer Report #2 for free in exchange for your prospect’s email address.

Step 4: At the end (and possibly the beginning) of Report #1, write teaser copy to entice them to go to your squeeze page and grab Report #2. If you did a good job of giving great content in Report #1, this should be easy because they’re going to be eager to read more from you.

Step 5: Go to forums and give away Report #1 with Master Resale Rights. This means they can sell the report or give it away with paid products, but they cannot alter the report in any way. This is crucial because you don’t want your link altered or removed.

Step 6: They add your report as a bonus to their paid products, or sell it outright for a nominal fee such as $7. People read it, love it, and go to your squeeze page to give you their email address so they can get more great stuff from you, like Report #2.

That’s it. It’s a system you set up once and forget about, other than periodically checking to see how many new buyers have been added to your list. The beauty of this system is 4-fold…

– It’s fairly easy.

– You only have to set it up once and then you can forget about it.

– You’re building a list of buyers and buyers ONLY.

– You’re building your list on other people’s traffic.

Brilliant!

So many times we don’t want to tackle anything new until we know step by step what we’re going to do and how we ‘re going to do it.

You might call it the paralysis of analysis – instead of taking action we…

…think about how we’ll do it and
…try to work out all the details and
…do more research and
…think about it some more until
…enough time passes that we
…just blow it off and decide we’re going to do something else.

Hopefully you can see why this step-by-step mentality can be a real motivation killer for you. You’ll never know every step it’s going to take to achieve something because you simply don’t know everything that’s going to happen (and not happen) along the way.

Personally, I think all you need are 2 things to get started on any project: You need to know what your end goal is, and you need the first step to take to begin moving towards that goal. Oh yes, and then you need to TAKE that first step. Once step 1 is out of the way, step 2 will reveal itself and so forth.

With this mindset there is nothing to bog you down and nothing to get in the way of taking action and making progress, even if the progress turns out to be discovering a way that does not work. Remember Edison and the light bulb – he discovered hundreds of ways NOT to make a bulb, clearing the way to inventing it.

Dean Hunt has his own take on the step-by-step mindset of knowing every step you’re going to take before you begin the journey. In fact, he has a brilliant 3 letter word for it – but I won’t steal his thunder, so you’ll want to watch his short video to discover what that word is…

What’s your next step? Take it.

You’ve just finished writing the sales copy for your new product. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to test your copy BEFORE you actually send prospects to it?

Because think about this – if you send 1,000 people to your sales letter and NOBODY buys, you’ve just wasted all that traffic. And if you spent money to get that traffic, you’re out that investment.

Even if it was free traffic, you’ve still burned your chance to sell them on your product. Odds are, even if you do rewrite the copy, they’re not going to go back a second time and read it again. (Unless you offer some kind of incentive, in which case you might be able to bribe them into taking a second look.)

If only there were a way to know ahead of time whether your copy is good or not… Wait, there is!

Here’s what to do – turn off the phone, sever your Internet connection and refuse to be distracted for the next hour.

Now then, imagine you are the prospect. You are thinking like the prospect, feeling like the prospect, experiencing the same issues, same problems, same questions as you prospect, etc.

Put yourself in their shoes and reread your letter from start to finish. Do not spend time making corrections or anything else – simply read the letter as though you are a prospect considering buying this product.

Finished?

Now rate how well your copy accomplishes the following, assigning a number 1 – 5 to each element.

1 means “Practically non-existent”
2 is “Room for serious improvement”
3 means “Not horrible, but could be better”
4 is “Strong”
And a 5 indicates “You positively NAILED it.”

Ready? Here we go…

Does the headline instantly grab your attention? _____

Does the lead-in compel you to read further? _____

Are the headline and lead-in completely believable? _____

Is the headline and lead-in combo likely to resonate powerfully with a significant number of your prospects? _____

Does the headline and lead-in combo offer powerful benefits? _____

Does the spokesperson establish his/her qualifications beyond doubt? _____

Do the emotions you experience while reading the first few paragraphs compel you to want to read further? _____

Is the prospect given a reason why he or she must read this, and must read this now? _____

Does the copy read like a conversation between two friends? _____

Is it clear that the spokesperson truly has the best interests of the prospect at heart? _____

Are the product’s benefits fully explored? _____

Are the emotional reasons for purchasing fully developed? _____

Does the letter entertain and inform as well as sell? _____

Is the price fully justified? _____

Is the guarantee prominent and does it restate the benefits? _____

Is there a compelling reason why the prospect should immediately make the purchase? _____

Is there a sense of urgency? _____

Do you feel yourself getting more and more excited as you move through the letter? _____

Is the call to action compelling enough that you would feel silly for not ordering immediately? _____

Is the prospect told exactly what to do next, how to order and how s/he will receive their product? _____

If you were a prospect, would you make the purchase? _____

Scoring

21- 50: Stop right there. Do NOT use this copy until you make significant changes.

51 – 65: Not good, but at least you’ve made a start. Now go back and make the adjustments your letter needs.

66 – 80: Not bad for a draft, but not good enough to use unless you just don’t have the time to fix it, OR your offer is so compelling ($100 cars, for example) that it doesn’t need a strong letter.

81 – 95: Looking good. A little tweaking here and there can still improve your conversions.

96 – 105: Congratulations! Maybe you should be writing copy for a living!

Work expands to fill the time allotted – and even more time beyond that – if you don’t have a hard deadline. Thus, if you make it a goal to finish your new ebook in 3 months, at the 3 month mark you’ll either just be finishing, or worse yet you’ll realize you’re only halfway done. If, however, you had a hard launch date, then you’ll have the book ready. Deadlines are a magnificent thing – they give you permission to ignore the email, ignore Facebook, turn the phone off, tear yourself away from the video games and television and actually get your work done.

So how can you create a product in a short amount of time? By doing two things:

First, set a deadline that is almost impossibly close, such as 10 days from right now.

Second, hold yourself accountable on a massive scale. That is, call up your best marketing buddy and schedule a live webinar with him or her to sell your new product. Now promote the webinar heavily.

Guess what? For the next 10 days you’re going to move heaven and earth to get your product finished for that webinar, and on Day 11 you are going to party!

First, you’re going to be celebrating the sales you made on the webinar.

Second, you’re going to be looking forward to all the sales you will make in the future with your new product. In fact, you’re going to take the momentum that webinar created and use it to contact other marketers and set up more live webinars for their lists.

Third, you are going to feel fantastic. That new product that you thought would take 3 months of your life only took 10 days!

Fourth, you’ve now got a system for not only getting products done fast, but also getting your first sales the moment the product is completed for an immediate payoff.

How great is that?!