Most of us start out with one product as our first step in having something of our own to sell. I started with Power Linking in 2002. Today I have many different products from books to membership sites to consulting. I can tell you one thing: Having a product LINE is far more profitable than having one successful product even if it sells really well.
That’s sort of stating the obvious. Most people will assume having more to sell equates with making more money. But understanding that and implementing it for yourself are two entirely different beasts.
In this post I’ll go over some tips to help you plan your first product in a way that it leads naturally to another so that you can take advantage of profit-boosting tactics sucj as the one click upsell and increasing your average customer value by 100% to 300% or more.
Your First Product
Whether it is an ebook, a series of audios, a webinar, or a set of videos, your first information product is a big deal. It sets the tone with your market and potential joint venture partners and affiliate base and dictates how well you will do with other products you come out with.
So, in a sense, you are not just creating a product to sell and make money from. You are also creating a product that will get the attention of players in your market who will judge whether to help you sell it or not based on how much buzz it recieves and how they like it personally. You are creating this product for 2 audiences then. Potential customers and potential marketing allies and thought leaders in your market.
Creating your first product becomes a matter of great importance when you consider these issues. You have to to everything you can to knock it out of the ballpark on two fronts. You also have to think 1 or 2 products ahead and make your first product lead naturally into some kind of upsell to more premium content, consulting, coaching, or any number of other possibilities.
Your First and Second Product at the Same Time?
The way I teach my clients to get started in product development is to think about 2 products at a time, minimum. Think of it as one big product split in two. For instance, an ebook that guides dog owners through puppy training is going to naturally lead into a guide on teaching people who get past the puppy year how to train their dogs on the leash and do tricks.
This product set can and should be created all at once and launched at the same time. How? By anticipating what your customers are going to want next and giving it to them before they even think to ask for it. To keep it simple, we’ll say you’ve now created 2 ebook guides on dog training. One for puppies on house breaking and one for young dog owners who want to start dealing with leash and discipline issues.
Instead of releasing product 1 and getting to work on product 2, I coach my clients to get them both done at the same time and offer them in a “sales funnel” at the same time of purchase. If the second guide doesn’t convert well, I’d coach the client in this instance to tweak the offer to something that people in the puppy stages of dog ownership would be most desperately interested in adding to their order at time of purchase.
Maybe the jump from puppy guide to intermediate dog training isn’t appealing to owners who have a dog that pees in the house. They are desperate at the time for anything that’s going to take care of that problem. Move the 2nd guide to a third offer in the funnel and replace it with an upsell to some videos that go along with the first guide. Premium content on the topic most dear to your customer base at that moment really does well in upsells.
So, you have product #1 and product #2 and #3 ready to go.
The Difference Between A One-Off Purchase and an Optimized Product Funnel Sytem
If you launched your dog training system with one product, a puppy training guide, and charged $19.95 for it, your customer value is $19.95.
But if you launched a set of products inside a sales funnel system and your second product upsells for $47, and the third for $97, the numbers change dramatically.
Not everyone takes the 2nd and 3rd offer, a percentage of your customers always will. And this affects your average customer value. Set up the right kind of funnel with the right kinds of upsells, and you can easily increase your average customer value by thousands of percentage points. Meaning you’re selling more per customer by a long margin than you can just selling your first product by itself.
But how do you put everything you have to offer into a funnel so that customers can upgrade their purchase of product #1 to #2 and even #3 right at the time of purchase?
Used to be you had to buy terribly expensive software and shopping carts to do this. Today things are much easier and far cheaper. In fact, today there is a new kid on the block when it comes to sales funnels called “Tornado.”
This software plugs into Paypal and offers you the ability to build a sales funnel without any programming or technical acrobatics. In fact, it comes with templates for your squeeze, sales, and thank-you pages so you can copy and paste to your hosting easily.
It integrates with your Paypal account to make it so, for the first time in history, you can do one-click upsells. This wasn’t possible to do with Paypal till now. Before you simply had to acquire a merchant account and ignore Paypal alltogether. Not being able to serve the millions of Paypal users in a funnel system checkout process was a massive problem many merchants wanted solved 2 years ago.
Now it’s solved, thanks to programming whiz kid William Frazier. Grab a free guide on the Tornado Funnel System to learn more about setting up a product funnel from top to bottom.
Takeaway
- Product development should be planned for a funnel system that includes one-click upsell offers (at least one offer before final checkout on original purchase).
- Make a big product and split it into 2 or 3. Think about adding other things like consulting, coaching, or other services you provide as upsells too.
- Get the products into a tight, well programmed funnel system by using Tornado and Paypal. This is the fastest and absolutely cheapest way to do big things to your bottom line!
Related Posts
Related Posts
Video chat made easy.
