I recently received this question from a Prosperly reader:
Thanks for the article Adam. Yes I’m aware that this is a great way of earning some money but the thing is, how do you come up with something interesting enough for people to actually buy online? I mean a book or a guide. How many people would actually do that?
Believe it or not, getting people to buy is not the issue. In fact as long as you know a little about creating sales copy and internet marketing, getting people to buy is the easy part. Getting qualified people to your website is the hard part.
The reality is, if you do your sales copy and internet marketing properly you can expect to sell to 1-2% of your visitors. That is simply a fact of life. Some people will say they get more than that but for the majority of the internet world that is where they are.
If you want a quick way to increase revenue, look at your conversion rate and figure out how to get it closer to the 2%. Think about it, if your site converts at 1% and you raised the conversions to 2% you just doubled your money. Not bad considering you didn’t have to get any more visitors to your site to do it.
Website Optimizer is the best free tool to do this. You can do straight up A/B testing which means you take to versions of a page and test them against each other to see which one converts higher. Or you can do multivariate testing where you take small pieces of a page and change them and test them against the original (ie a headline, testimonial and buy button etc).
I use it all of the time and it works like a charm. ABT – Always Be Testing
As far as creating the product is concerned, back in 2003 or ’04 I created a digital product teaching how to start a lawn care business. How did I know people would buy it? Because people were searching for things like “how to start a lawn care business” and “starting a lawn care business”. They truly wanted to learn. If I could teach them I knew I could get them to pay for it.
Now remember 98 out of 100 people will not buy it, but 2 people out of those 100 will. Its a numbers game.
So I created the product and then put together some long sales copy for it and people started buying it. I already had the traffic from good organic SEO rankings. The day I launched the product and from then on visitors to my site bought my product like crazy. Give your customers what they are looking for and they will buy from you.
