Info Product Earnings

It’s all in the copy, isn’t it? Without sales copy that converts, you have nothing. You can have the best product in the world, but without copy that converts readers into buyers you are lost.

 What, then, makes great sales copy? How do the master copywriters manage to command $10,000 or more for writing one single sales page?

What are the triggers that fix a visitor to your copy and lead them to the all important part–the “click to order” button? These are the questions we will address here. Continue reading “Ten Tips For Creating A High-Converting Sales Page”

We all use images in our work!

Whether you are writing an ebook or creating an online sales page you will want to use images in your work. They kind of break up your content and can make the reading experience more enjoyable for your readers.

But keep in mind that images can be huge files. A little .png or .png file might be only 100k or less. But a larger, high-def image could easily be in the megabyte range. Images like that can make your web page load painfully slow or make your ebook’s file size huge.

There are many ways to reduce the file size of images you use. One of the things I always use it a free online utility called Tiny Ping. You simple go to Tiny Ping and drop your image file into the box and in just a few seconds it will compress your image (only jpeg and png images) and provide you with a download link to that compressed image.

Yes, if you’re wondering, their compression algorithm is a lossy one. Your image will lose some of its data but it will absolutely be impossible for the human eye to distinguish your original image from your new compressed one.

Typically, TinyPing will reduce the files size of your image from 60-75% which can be a huge savings if you’re using lots of images. Give it a try. It’s fast and very easy to use. Compressed images will make your web pages load much faster and downscale the file size in your ebooks.

I see people all the time saying that grammar, spelling, word usage and syntax don’t matter when writing an ebook. They say that all buyers want is good information. Yikes!

Running a successful info product business is all about coming across as an authority figure in the minds of your buyers. The people who say the things I mentioned in the first paragraph are almost always people sho have no grasp of the English language. They say those things don’t matter because they haven’t mastered those things themselves!

Language is the antecedent to knowledge. Read that sentence again because not only is it 100% true; it is also very important. If you want to come across as an authority figure your writing must reflect that. Let me give you an example. Consider the following sentence.

Grammar: the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.

See what I mean? If you don’t want to sound like a dweeb, then work on improving your writing skills so that you do sound and write like the authority figure you need to be.

Read what you write. Edit it and re-read it. Go through that cycle many times until you’re confident you have expressed your thoughts properly. Good writing doesn’t happen by accident. It is the result of learning the rules of writing and applying them vigorously every day in everything you write.

Nothing comes out perfectly first time. Make each paragraph lead logically to the next. Make each sentence cue up the next sentence in a logical way. Good writers have become good writers because they have studied and learned the rules to the craft. Does proper grammar matter? You bet it does! Writing is your stock in trade. Master it and apply it.

I’ll leave you with a quote from William Zinsser’s book, “On Writing Well”.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb which carries the same meaning that is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves she reader unsure of who is doing what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.

Those are some powerful words to ponder. Zinsser’s book is available on Amazon here… On Writing Well

So you want to create a book or ebook and market it. Good for you. Writing ebooks it isn’t a difficult thing to do, but getting to the place in your mind where you can actually do this is another matter entirely. What we are going to do here is to create what I call the Friday Afternoon Syndrome. That will be your home base, a place not so much of time and space, but one of mind–a secret place all your own.

I was an inner-city high school teacher for 14 years. I loved teaching, but the bureaucratic crud one has to endure can wear you down. By the end of the day, the one overwhelming thought was–oh my gosh, there’s going to be another day tomorrow just like this one. That was depressing.

But I recall the feeling of Friday afternoons. The drive home from school thinking to myself, thank God, I’ve got two days off from all of that insanity. That feeling, and it’s hard to explain, but that feeling of relief, of feeling of being set free for a few days was invigorating.

I did my best thinking on Friday afternoons and evenings. I would often sit down with a notepad and start writing down ideas–ideas for writing new books. It was like I was in some manner of a psychogenic fugue state where I was many people at once and they were all sending me great ideas unfettered by the distractions of the classroom.

I took those ideas for writing ebooks and ran with them. I remember the utter excitement of developing ideas for new books. And I worked fast. I wrote 100 page booklets in a weekend and they ended up selling better than I could ever imagine.

So how does one get into the “zone” for writing ebooks? How can we jettison the distractions of everyday life to achieve that Zen feeling of being one with the writing project we are working on?

You need a place, a special place all of your own. Try to keep it separated from the rest of your house as much as possible. Use your basement, your garage, your workshop, heck–use your washing machine as your desk if you have to, but create a special place. I wrote many of my best books working from an unfinished loft over my garage.

I filled the area with artwork, plants, my favorite books, a mini-refrigerator and a coffee maker. My area was filled with stuff that was important to me. There was no phone, no television, no radio, no music–I didn’t want anything to distract me from my mission.

Remember when I talked about “Friday afternoons” above?–how much I enjoyed Fridays when I was teaching? Well, when I was in my special room, it was like every day could be a Friday afternoon. When I got into my zone, into my groove, I could get more writing done in one hour than I could in a week of working around the clutter of everyday living.

So get a zone, make it your special place and fill it with things you love. Create your own little world where you can forget about everything else and I think you’ll find it will create an environment for more efficient writing.

Everyone will tell you in the info product business that the money is in the list. Your subscriber list will someday become your biggest money-making asset. You can market your own product, or affiliate products to your list and crank out daily revenue.

But one of the big problems lies in getting your emails opened by your subscribers. If they recognize that all you are sending them are spammy, overly salesy emails they will simply ignore your emails after a short period. So delivering some actual content is important. You need to build trust with your subscribers before they will do business with you.

A great fear with email marketers is having their emails ending up in the spam or junk folders in their subscriber’s mailboxes. If they go there they will likely never even be seen. I’d like to share something with you today. The following is a list of ten emails I got today–and I picked them because they all ended up in my spam folder. A lot of the good email services are pretty good at sorting out the spam from legit emails. So look at the subject lines in these typical emails gmail tossed into my spam folder today…

1. Activate your order immediately
2. WOW – a stupidly simple m0ney maker…
3. Your new registration number is 90015977
4. Transaction code [#2554ghh32]
5. Congratulations! Confirm your Free Bonus Gifts
6. As Requested, Exclusive Access Granted
7. [Approved] Your Scheduled Commission Payment
8. Deposit of $5795 approved!
9. Broken link fixed
10. Please confirm your payment

The people sending emails like this must think they are dealing with idiots–and perhaps most of their subscribers do fit in that category.

Worse than the fact that the above emails all use spammy subject lines (which land them into my spam folder) many of them, if opened, have a Google warning statement in a red box at the top of the email stating one of two things:

• Why is this message in Spam? It’s similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters.  Learn more.

• Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information. Unless you trust the sender, don’t click links or reply with personal information.  Learn more.

Those warning messages don’t do much to instill confidence in the sender do they?

So if you want to get your emails opened, don’t use spammy subject lines like the desperate marketers did above. And sure, try to sell some stuff, but also deliver some value-laden content from time to time as well.

On a more positive note, here are some subject lines in emails I got recently that actually caused me to open the email. The subject lines pulled me in, none of them ended up in my spam folder, and all were from very reputable online marketers…

How to Crack Six-Figures as a Consultant
(from Perry Marshall)

Watch Me Create A Membership Site LIVE — in just 14 minutes
(from Chris Farrell)

$10,000 on my first webinar? Yes please.
(Amy Porterfield)

1 Thing I Include In Every Marketing Funnel
(Todd Brown)

#1 Product Launch Tip
(Kim Roach)

Can you see why I opened the emails? First, there were all sent by marketers who had earned my trust, and second, the subject lines pulled me in to want to learn more. Hope that makes sense! So take your time to craft great emails and deliver some good content from time to time to earn the respect and trust with your subscribers!

Sometimes when people sell info products online they feel as if, because their customers are far away and they will never meet them in person, they don’t have a responsibility to deliver high quality goods or services. After all, they will never see them face-to-face. But your online reputation depends on what your buyers think of your products. And a bad reputation can kill a business!

Think of it this way. Pretend that every customer is your next door neighbor. Pretend you go to their cookouts and their children play with yours. Pretend you interact with them at social events and you trust and respect them as good friends. And you value that friendship!

Now imagine they just bought your product online. Do you feel comfortable with that? Will they appreciate the value of that product or service, or will they think you have scammed them by taking their money delivering a shoddy product or service to them?

So at your next cookout with your neighbors look around. If the people there, your friends and neighbors, bought your product would they still respect you? Will they still respect you? Will they think that you’re their hero for providing them with tremendous value and content in your product. When you think selling your product in those terms you can see the importance of delivering nothing but high-caliber, reputation-building products to your customers.

If it takes more than just a very few seconds for your product sales page to load, visitors will click away in droves. There is no magic number but if your page is taking more than three seconds to load you need to work some magic on it.

One problem is when someone creates a new sales page they will visit it frequently while creating and tweaking up the copy. Their web browser will cache the page content. The browser does this because the content, especially the images, will load faster from the local computer than from the network. So once their page is cached it will load faster for them than it will for a visitor coming to that page for the first time. The person who created the page thinks all is well, but new visitors may find it loading terribly slow.

Of course usually the things that cause slow load times are the images on the page. There are several things to consider in placing images on a web page. The first thing I recommend is going to PingDom and testing the load speed of your sales page–it’s free to use. You simply input your URL there and in just a few seconds you are provided not only with time time your page took to load but tons of other valuable data as well.

Pingdom will show you exactly the time required for each image to load as well as how long it took to load the HTML, and CSS files, and javascript, the time for DNS calls and much more. They provide you with both numerical data and a graphical representation that lets you see the total load time as well as the load times for every asset on your page. You can immediately identify where the loading blockages occur on your page so you can remedy the problem. Again, it is most likely that the images you use are what involve the most time in loading.

There are several pages on the pingdom site. Many involve paid access but you don’t want those. The free website load time tester is at… Pingdom

One word of caution when using Pingdom. Just to the right of where you input your URL they ask you where you want your page tested from. In the U.S. they have servers in New York City, Dallas, and San Jose. They also have servers in Melborne and Stockholm. I would select the test server closest to where you think most of your visitors will come from.

But after you do your first test, they will rotate the server to another city. Make sure you click to get the same server location if you tweak up your site and go to test it again or else your load times will be skewed by comparison. For example, I just tested the sales page for my http://infoproductearningsclub.com product from both the New York server and the Melbourne server at Pingdom.

Load time from New York server  831 ms
Load time from Melbourne server  1,440 ms

That’s quite a difference. Try out Pingdom yourself before you turn your your sales page loose on the world. It can help you see what is taking up the most load time on your page.

Invariably, when someone asks me about the biggest secret to success in the info product business I reply with the same answer. It’s a simple thing but it’s at the core of how I create my own products. The first thing is to realize that without an online sales page for your product that converts well you really have nothing.

What I always recommend is that one puts together a draft of their sales page BEFORE they actually create their product. No, it doesn’t have to be an HTML document at this point, just a simple text file. Forget about graphics or layout, just get the words down. The headline must pull readers down the page into the main content. You must focus on the key benefits of the product. What problem will it solve for the buyer?

The text should be broken down into bite-sized pieces that the reader can digest easily. There should be sub-headers throughout the text to break it into logically developed thoughts. If you are reading a great sales page you should be able to get a good idea of what the product does by reading the sub-headers only!

Once you have your sales page draft finished it can act as a blueprint for what your product must contain. That makes the actual product development process much easier down the road!