Preneur Marketing - The Blog of Entrepreneur Pete Williams

Hi All…

As I say in the video - After a lot of begging, pleading, blackmailing… oh yeah, and name calling, Dan and Ed have allowed me to put together this short “exclusive look inside the edge”

If you have been debating whether you should join the Edge, this behind-the-scene look will hopefully show you why you must be a member.

Download Hi-Def m4v Version Here (Right Click and download it)

If you’ve been around the info-marketing game for awhile now, you’d have a good grasp of the sales funnel model… and how you need to structure your products range in a way then ensure your offerings fit along the sales funnel so people opt-into your funnel with a FREE report, e-book or seminar and then move through the funnel by purchasing ever increasing priced products and services.

BUT, if your upsell conversions are not where you want them to be, how do you structure your sales pipe to ensure your customers NEED your next offering and continue along the slippery slide ?

Just offering a range of ever increasing priced products around the same niche topic ain’t going to do it folks… You need to structure the information you are offering at each stage of the funnel so that it’s an obvious and needed extension of the last product your customer has bought…

Enter the Why-What-How Structure of Information Marketing.

Let’s take a look an an analog (traditionally offline) example of how to implement this structure - The ’stock or share trading’ education niche.

Stage 1. They offer a free report, or no-cost evening seminar where they talk exclusively on WHY you must start trading equities; The speak about how your 401k or Superannuation won’t be enough for you to survive on, they pull pretty graphs showing how the stock markets value as risen a steady X% of the past 16 years and they even provide convincing examples of how others are now making $100,000 per month using the strategies they teach - All in an effort to convince you WHY.

Stage 2. At the end of the WHY presentation, they pitch a book, audio program or home study program that details exactly WHAT you must do to achieve this level of passive income. The course covers that you need to set-up a trading account, use a latest meta software and follow a fool-proof system. It talks in generics, on a high level simply explaining WHAT you must do. And as a customer you walk away feeling satisfied because you now know WHAT you need to do to get started.

But hang on, 3 weeks have past and you haven’t really taken any action… how can that be? You know WHY you must do something and WHAT it is you need to do?

But do you really know HOW to do it?

Enter stage 3. The 2 day live weekend event. It’s at this high priced seminar (at the bottom of the companies sales funnel) that they will reveal the inside secrets, the step-by-step techniques on HOW to do it… They will walk you through the exact steps on setting up a trading account, they will do live presentations on HOW TO use the trading software all so you can walk away and start doing.

It’s this structuring of information that ensures the next sale - They don’t reveal the HOW-TO information too early, they won’t teach the HOW-TO in the first to stages because if they do - ‘Why would you need their upsell product?”

What you need to do is structure your sales funnel (and offerings) so that your customers NEED to buy your next product… It’s about leaving the ‘key’ to it all in the next level down the sales funnel, so the customer must have the next product to finish the jigsaw puzzle that is your niche.

So how can you apply this WHY, WHAT, HOW approach to your internet marketing sales funnel?

Here’s a few examples:

Most people get the sales funnel model, and have structured their PRODUCT OFFERING in a correct way, with each product getting more and more expensive, but the majority of people haven’t structured their INFORMATION OFFERING to match.

If you are finding you are not converting your up-sells at a reasonable level, take a step back, forget about tweaking the sales letter…. and take a look at your information structure…

Are you giving away too much GOLD in your early products?

Do your customers really need this new, more expensive product to overcome the need they went looking to fulfill when they first downloaded your FREE e-book ?

If you find that you are giving your customers the HOW TO right up front, why would they spend money later to learn the Why or What? Because when you break it down, everything you offer falls into one of these three categories, so make sure you reveal them at the right time.

Still lost? Try this?

Re-write your entry level product, that’s the free report or ebook to simply reiterate to your prospects WHY they need your stuff, build the bond by showing you understand their frustrations and even throw in some new issues that hadn’t thought of. (Most people attend a stock trading free seminar to make more money now, but leave thinking they need this just to survive when their on the pension) That’s all your free entry offering has to do - build trust and understanding with your prospect so they feel you ‘get-them’

Then jump right to producing the HOW-TO product, and make sure this course covers everything they need to do to reach the holly-grail of your niche, every step-by-step technique they need.

Once this end-product is created, produce an extra-large executive summary outlining WHAT the end-product covers.. talk in generics not details. Make this report/audio/course a educational “list” of WHAT they will need to do to fulfill their need. And you guessed it, this “executive summary” (AKA the how-to’s index page) becomes your WHAT product, the second offering in the sales funnel.

For those playing along at home… please leave other examples of how you might implement this Why, What, How Structure to your info-marketing….

OK, so I’m a little behind the conversation.. like 3 months… but there’s been a lot of chatter recently about “moving the freeline”

Now, the “free line” concept comes from the sales funnel, where typically, the sales process begins with a free ebook, white-paper or audio download… in an effort to build trust with the prospect so they will buy from you further down the funnel. Nearly everyone online has experienced this - it’s what the industry was built on.

Moving the free line is the concept of giving even more stuff away for free and converting what previously were paid for products into free resources. So, what was previously a front end product you had to pay for, becomes a free resource now sitting above the free line.

Eben Pagan is the man who has been credited with coining the phrase and this is his take on “moving the free line:

“MY EXPERIENCES MOVING THE FREE LINE

… BUT that’s exactly it, and the point so many people are yet to articulate:

You are not giving away free resources - You are trading your resources for something of value that is perceived to be free.

As an business owner, online or off (there I go again; on my “you’re not an internet marketer, you are an internet business owner” rant) you never want to give anything away for free, you always need to get something of value in exchange for this “free”. Notice I said ’something of value’, not necessarily money.

An email subscriber (as Eben mentions) is something of value, that doesn’t cost the prospect anything out of their pocket.. but it does have an empirical value.

This empirical value can be calculated by working out how much profit you made last year, and divide that by the number of subscribers on your list…

And that right there folks, is what each subscriber is worth to you.

So in reality you are *selling* what is perceived as free, for a real $$ amount (in future income), because you are trading an ebook for an email address,… which in turn is worth $X to you.

So if by moving the free line you can exchange more email addresses for “free” stuff then, and only then, does the theory/concept/practice makes commercial sense.

So for those playing along at home…

No matter what form of business you are in;

Give a free ebook… get an email subscriber.
Give a discount.. demand a referral (or three).
Give an audio… extract a suggestion/feedback/response.
Give a bonus… require a testimonial.
Give X… insist on Y
Go above and beyond… get some value in return.

I stole this idea from the SEO Black Hat Blog (after taking part with this entry)

1. Download the blank,
2. Write in your own clever comment
3. Post it on your blog.

Then let me (and the SEO BlackHat Blog) know about it (comment, trackback, contact form).

I’ll link up all the best ones later this week.

Firefox is regarded as the best Web browser in terms of extensions - i.e. small browser add-ons which modify or add to existing functionality. It has hundreds of add-ons, which can be downloaded from here…

But out of all of these, which is the best for us Internet Marketers… watch the video to find out.

Download Hi-Def m4v Version Here (Right Click and download it)

Here’s the list…

Google Global - Google Global is an unobtrusive Firefox extension that allows you to see what the Google search results that you are viewing look like from different geographical locations.

ScribeFire - ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.

Update Scanner - Monitors web pages for updates. Useful for websites that don’t provide Atom or RSS feeds.

CoLT - CoLT makes it easy to copy either a hyperlink’s text or both the link and the link’s text (in a format you specify). Two handy context-menu items make this possible, and don’t add clutter; the items are only visible when right-clicking a link!

Window Resizer - Allows you to resize your browser to common resolution sizes allowing you to view website designs in a variety of popular browsing dimensions.

MeasureIt - Allows you to overlay a ruler on a browser page so you can verify width, height and alignment of page elements.

DownThemAll! - Download one link or multiples, has a built-in accelerator.

Screengrab! - Saves the entire web page as an image.

Download Helper- Will extract content (read:videos) from many different sites (read:youtube)

Firefox Companion for eBay - Keep an eye on your eBay trading wherever you are on the web when you install the eBay Companion for Firefox.

Dummy Lipsum - Generate “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text (from http://www.lipsum.com).

ColorZilla - Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.

Fast Video Download - Download video files from popular sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Break.com and more.

Tab Scope - Preview and navigate tab contents through popup.

Shareaholic - Shareaholic allows you to share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages quickly via a wide array of web 2.0 social websites without cluttering up your browser!

Session Manager - Session Manager saves and restores the state of all windows - either when you want it or automatically at startup and after crashes. Additionally it offers you to reopen (accidentally) closed windows and tabs.