Posted by It’s my opinion that any online marketer – regardless of niche – who doesn’t do the following is essentially hiking up a rocky mountain barefoot when s/he could be taking the ski lift.
Online marketing boils down to this: We either create our own products or choose affiliate products, and then we spend our precious time, energy and money getting people to BUY those products.
But only a relatively small percentage of marketers make the one simple shift that will catapult them to success.
I’m going to focus on product creators here but this applies to affiliate marketing as well.
Here’s the traditional launch a product method:
- You get an idea for a product.
- You do some research and you believe this product will sell well.
- You create the entire product.
- You create the entire sales funnel that will sell the product, including squeeze page, upsells, downsells, sales page, product delivery page, affiliate page, etc.
- You line up affiliates and convince them to promote your launch.
- You launch and you make sales and you don’t sleep for a week because of all the customer service requests and affiliate hand holding necessary.
- Then you pay affiliate commissions, pay affiliate bonuses, pay your web designers and copywriters and all of that if you haven’t already.
- You’re exhausted. And this didn’t make the kind of money you thought it would, so you…
- …start over with a new product and new sales funnel.
- You do this as quickly and as often as you can without going insane.
- Idea – product – funnel – affiliates – launch – repeat.
- You realize you’re working 60 hours a week.
- Within a few months or years you are so burned out you wish you still held a job working for someone else.
Sound familiar?
Let’s add a twist.
- You get an idea for a continuity product like a membership, newsletter or software as a service.
- You do research to confirm this product will likely sell well.
- You create just a small portion of the product if it’s informational – about one month of content. If it’s software, you outsource the creation of it (unless you’re a coder, which you’re probably not, so let someone else do it for you).
- You create a page to offer either a free or $1 trial of the product. You could create an entire funnel, but you’re lazy so you just create the one page.
- You drive traffic (free or paid) and you get your initial members.
- You continue to get paid on those sales every single month.
- You see which traffic methods are working and you keep using those.
- You regularly update the product.
- You continue to get trial members, many of which continue on as full paying members.
- You may or may not use affiliates – that’s totally up to you.
- This same membership sells for years. YEARS. Because you keep updating it.
- Life is good. You know how much money you will make next month. You work 10-20 hours a month.
- You’re not breaking your own spirit by continually having to create new products. There is no way you would ever get a ‘real’ job again.
This second scenario can be just a small launch, perhaps to your own list just to see if it’s going to sell well. You don’t have to sweat the 101 things that go along with a huge launch because this isn’t a: “Sell it hard and get out fast.” kind of thing. You’re selling this membership, newsletter or SAAS for months or years to come, and earning residual income, too.
You can start a membership site in a week and buy enough traffic to see if it’s a winner. If not, tweak it and try again, or get a better idea. You’re not out much money or time. (A full-blown launch can cost you hundreds of hours and a small fortune in copywriting, page design, affiliate contests and so forth.)
You’re essentially giving away initial access, so affiliates are optional. Fancy sales copy is optional. If you’re offering the right product to the right audience at the right price (free or $1) then selling just got a whole lot easier.
And it’s residual. $10 a month. $20 a month. $47 a month. You pick the price. You get 200 new trial members the first week and 100 stick with you – you can do the math. You get 200 new trial members every single week for 52 weeks and half of those stay in the membership for several months – you can do the math.
Yes, there is attrition. But if you’re offering the right newsletter or membership or software, that attrition rate can be surprisingly low. Think of a software someone needs to run their business. Are they going to cancel? Not unless you stop updating.
Think of a newsletter or membership that gives them the crucial info they need to succeed (business or personal, doesn’t matter). Are they going to cancel? No way.
I love products that pay residual income.
I sell my own and I sell other people’s residual products as an affiliate.
My reasoning is simple: Why work myself to death to create products that only pay me one time when I can create products that pay me over and over again? And these are products that I can keep selling for years to come.
Consider this: Do you want to do 2 to 4 major product launches each year? I know guys who do one per month. It’s crazy.
Or do you want to have maybe 1 or 2 products that you can continually sell for years that happen to bring you residual income, too?
Residual income might well be considered the 8th wonder of the business world. When you’re earning residual income, you have income security with LESS work than if you did a big fancy launch every 2 to 6 months.
Do you know what it takes to do a big launch? It’s exhausting. And when it’s over and the affiliates are paid and the bonuses are paid and all the expenses are handled, you realize that even though the launch went great (assuming it didn’t flop) you still didn’t make as much money as you thought you would.
Which is why you see marketers doing one big launch after another after another. It’s work and frankly it’s not fun.
If you wonder why so many ‘big name’ marketers come and go after a few years, this is the reason.
Be kind to yourself and work smart. Sell products with residual income.