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How To Make a Fantastic Income
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Louis Allport: I forget the exact figures, I worked these out about a year ago but I haven't checked them recently, I think it is broadly around $2 per visitor. For every visitor I sent via this link to this private page I get on average $2, or $1.80, something like that. It is doing pretty well and I am surprised more people aren't promoting it, and I have consistently promoted it since the site launched around June 2008.

And it's made me a lot of extra income easily, just linking. All I pretty much do is link from here and it sends regular visitors everyday and then a percentage buy and so on and it just creates extra income.

I'm going to check back to the overview in a minute to see whether I have stayed on track or to see whether I have gone wildly off track but I will mention this as well. This is the site I have partnered with Jeremy - InstantVideoEmpire.com - but this is actually separate to the membership I just talked about, this is actually a physical offer delivered monthly: InstantVideoEmpire.com.

Lots of sales copy; scroll down to the bottom. That's what we send out for just $9.95: 3 DVDs, 1 CD and an introductory booklet.

Okay, let's quickly find these pictures so you can quickly get the idea. There you go; the actual collection is almost a meter and a half high, about five feet. It's huge, it's 83 discs and the actual price is around $4,000 because it's a niche offer. Basically, this offer has made a lot of people a lot of money so it's not inexpensive and rightfully so.

However, we do allow people to try it out gently, just with a $9.95 trial for 30 days. So 12 installments is $347 a month, 36 installments is $127 a month. We may at some point soon add an all-in-one option, I think some people want to buy all-in-one. We have had quite a few queries which I haven't managed to take up yet, so we may add an all in one option sometime soon, and maybe delivery over four months as well.

For example, if you click on 12 months, $9.95 for 30 days and then $347. Okay, so we just ask for shipping details and then eventually get to payment options.

So, when you are promoting anything which is monthly billing, a trial really does help. For example, one of my very first sites which is no longer running, I ran it for about five years, it was just $29.95 a month, so quite inexpensive. It was a monthly membership site, $29.95 a month but the first month you could get membership for just $2.95.

And for example, for a while when somebody wanted to become a member they had to pay $29.95 immediately and every month they were billed a further $29.95. And sales were quite low because people are often reluctant to get into a monthly billing program. To overcome that resistance, you have to really make an irresistible offer and I would say part of that is a very low-priced trial. So when I did $2.95 for the first 30 days and then $29.95 a month sales went up about fourfold, 400%, and dropouts increased - the period between the trial payment and the first full payment the dropouts were higher - but overall I probably made about twice as much money.

So you get more customer service issues when you do offer a trial, it does make more work for you, but generally you do end up making more money in my experience.

So it's the same here: $9.95 for the first 30 days then either $347 or $127, and it importantly makes it very obvious that they can cancel at any time at all.

Really, in a way, this monthly billing - if everything is online it is obviously a membership site - but when you are sending something physically every month it is often called a continuity program; you are billing them monthly and you are continually sending them something new every month.

Recurring billing is an important part of your business, it doesn't have to be the focus but it is an important part of your overall business. It is important that you have multiple offers within your business and I do suggest recurring billing as some of them, or one of them at least.

So recurring billing gives you an instant back-end because you could say in a way the front-end purchase is the $9.95 and every further $347 purchase is a back-end purchase, so you have turned a $9.95 customer automatically into a customer potentially worth over $4,000 dollars over a 12 month period. Obviously, you are never going to get 100% of customers staying on to the end, you are going to get drop outs every month, it is just the way it goes but I find the model works very well.

Let me see if I can put a concept across clearly. I've just brought up MS Paint, Microsoft Paint, which comes as part of Windows. This isn't going to look professional at all but I am going to try and get this important point across.

Let's say this is your number of dropouts, and this is high dropouts, and this is low dropouts, and then the horizontal line is time. You'll find your dropouts go like this: basically the longer they stay the less likely they are to drop out.

If you consider your monthly drop outs as a percentage of overall subscribers, the percentage will get smaller and smaller the longer the subscriber is in subscription. It always happens that way because there is the most resistance at the beginning, because they are not sure if they want to stay, they may not know you, a lot of people just want to take advantage of the trial and that's all.

But I really prefer continuity over membership. I feel it is important to send something physically every month because they receive something tangible, you are not just billing them for nothing really. I know it is not nothing (a membership site) but it can sometimes be perceived as that. I feel it is important to have something tangible to actually reach them in their home, they build up a collection, and the more you send them the more they become attached to the product.

If you think about any subscription, for example Netflix, anything you are billed monthly, you will find the longer you are billed the more you will get used to being billed, the highest resistance is always at the start. You [the end user] gets used to receiving something through the post every month.

I will just pause the video to double-check the interview overview.

I don't want to go too much over what Jeremy has already said but maybe visually demonstrate a lot of what he talked about and also demonstrate how you can get started with this.

One thing we touched upon which may be useful to talk through further is the market. At the simplest level, if you understand the market that is very important. It is often said that it is important you have affinity with the market; you have to understand who you are trying to sell to.

If you don't understand them you won't understand their motivations, you won't understand what they want. Obviously you can research a market, but it's important you get understanding.

For example, a good way to start doing some research is ClickBank.com. If you click on Marketplace, it basically lists all their products. You can chose a category, let's open up a couple... let's say Business-To-Business and Sports And Recreation.

So Business-To-Business, this is good because it is showing you what sells. And also another good place to check is Amazon, of course. Just go to Amazon and just see what the best-selling products are and it might give you some ideas of what people are really interested in.

It obviously does make things easier if you sell what you know people want to buy. The only important thing is you want to differentiate yourself if you can slightly from the competition and a good way to do that is to improve the product, make the offer even stronger.

It's good to find out what people are actually spending money on, rather than guess or create a new market. There are easier ways to make money - for example 'new day trading robot', this is software that buys and sells stocks automatically for you, I'm not really familiar with it but stuff like that seems to be popular. I'm not sure why it is in Business-To-Business but 'Registry Cleaner and System Optimizer' - these seem to be popular. Obviously software can be quite difficult to create and you might have to pay someone to do that.

Let me just show you very quickly, sites like ScriptLance.com, Guru.com and Elance.com, you basically post projects there for free and service providers will bid on them for you, and you can then chose who you go with. It can be slightly hit and miss, and you have obviously got to be careful who you chose. It is like eBay, they give you feedback on the different service providers so you can get an idea of who is good to work with. I have found someone off eLance who I have worked with for about three years or so, so that has worked very well. In other cases it hasn't worked so well - it's just the way it goes.

If you are dealing with programmers it can be a lot work, so just something to bear in mind because you need to lay out, describe to them exactly what you want created and it is invariably, in my experience, almost impossible to communicate exactly what you want in software and things always go wrong and things need to be changed and then it needs to be tested and improved and so on.

Alternatively, and this is just my opinion - you may find working remotely with a software engineer, or team of software engineers, is fine - or you may want to find someone local who is quite inexpensive so then working with them side-by-side may actually make the whole project go a lot easier.

For example, if there is a University close to you maybe you can hire students quite inexpensively to help you and that may be a good way to go. I have heard of some people who use Universities for getting reports and even books written quite inexpensively by students or even by professors, just for some extra income.

For example, in the past when I have had software created, I prefer to spend less rather than more. But when you are spending less you are often dealing with someone who doesn't have English as their first language which can sometimes present problems, and plus you may never speak to them on the phone, you have got to do it by email or Yahoo messenger or however you do it.

I have dealt with Romanian programmers in the past, and an American student programmer as well. If you want to go down the route of creating software you have to find someone you are happy working with and then stick with them and that is pretty much what Jeremy has done. He has got his technical team, which are in India and he has used them for years, they basically work on all his sites.

I got a little bit sidetracked there, so back to ClickBank. A popular subject seems to be money-making surveys, how to make money just taking surveys. Some of these seem to be general audience products, and I would say for a general offer you really can't charge that much, whereas with more niche offers, the more specialized something is perceived as the more you can charge for it.

That is why with the InstantVideoEmpire.com offer we can charge $347 a month because it is a very niche, very specialized and potentially for the customer - and it has been for quite a few customers - a very lucrative offer.

But for something which is general, I think it is difficult to charge a higher price. Maybe you can charge a higher price to your back-end customers but on the front-end I would say it is difficult.

 

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