Steps to Making Your First Sale Online
There are so many different ways to get traffic, build sites, and pick products to promote when starting your online business, as Ryan Lee an entrepreneur and success coach shares with us yesterday in part 2.
Ryan is the author of 2 books “The Millionaire Workout” and “Turn Your Passion to Profits”. Today, lets take an inside glance at some of his suggestions to making your first online sale.
Click here to listen to the call.
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Craig: Right, fantastic. Something that that guy said, he said he spent three months doing his product and I hear that all the time from people. It’s a huge mistake, even if you’re creating the right product. So why don’t you talk about how quickly people should be able to create a product, get it out there, and make that first sale.
Ryan: Well, I’m like you. Depending obviously on the product and how much research is involved, there are obviously different things at play, but I personally don’t think there’s any reason why it should take more than a week to create a product, especially if it’s something you know pretty well.
One of the easiest way I do it, I like multimedia products. You can create a multimedia product just using something like PowerPoint. What I recommend is you create a presentation of the product in PowerPoint. You have all the different slides and the handouts and all the different screenshots. If it’s fitness, you do the pictures of exercises and all that kind of stuff in PowerPoint. You record it right through your computer as you’re giving the presentation. You could use a screen capture video program like Screen Flow or Camtasia, and now you’ve got video.
You can then get a program that can take the audio right off of that so now you’ve got MP3s you can give out. And then you take all those handouts of the PowerPoints, you turn them into a PDF file, and now you’ve got handouts. You could even go a step further and then have the whole thing transcribed and now you’ve got more text.
So you’ve got audio for the aural learners, you’ve got the video, and you’ve got the text for the people who like to read and the handouts. You’re getting all the learning styles. You can get it done in one day and there you go. You get the product out. It doesn’t have to be perfect but you start testing it. You start testing the market to see what‘s working and what’s not. I’ll give you a little trick, not really a little trick but a little piece of advice.
If you put the product out and you’re not sure it’s going to sell, here’s what I recommend you do. Put it out and offer it as, “Hey, I just created this new product. We’re going to be selling it soon but I need some feedback. So I’ll be giving it away to the first 50 people who email me and tell me why they want a review copy. But in exchange for you having this program, you have to promise to give me some type of review, good or bad, whatever. What that’s going to do is a few things. It’s going to give you really good feedback to make your product even better and here’s what it really does. If you can’t give away 50 copies of your product for free, how the heck are you going to sell it?
Craig: Right, great point.
Ryan: If you can’t give it away for free, you’re not going to be able to sell it. If you find you’re like oh my god, I have this greatest program, it’s called Stop Sweating 101, people are going to love it, and you can’t give away 50 copies, there’s no way you’re going to be able to sell a thousand or ten thousand of them. That’s what I recommend.
Craig: That’s really great. I’m absolutely with you. You can create a product really fast. You should be creating a product on something you already know and people just want great content. It was really amazing how you walked through delivering it in every learning style. The other tip that I would throw in is that one thing that you’re doing with the live seminars, you put money on the line. You can’t back out. And I found that doing that, a different version of the method you use, where you actually go and you hire a videographer and you film a seminar, even if it’s just you in a hotel conference room, you’re at least on the hook for a couple of hundred bucks, and you’re going to get the content ready, and it’s actually going to get done by that deadline day when you booked the videographer. So that’s another way to light the fire under someone’s butt to actually get it done.
Ryan: It’s funny because I do talk about that a lot, about setting external deadlines. I’m a huge proponent of that. When I did my first fitness DVD, that’s what I did. The first thing I did was hire the videographer. Even with this event, the first thing I did, the very first thing I did was open my calendar saying here’s the date I want. If I’m going to kind of run you through the process, that was I had the idea, I let it kind of roll around in my head for about 24 hours, I always want to sleep on it. Sometimes it sounds really good today, and tomorrow I’m like what the hell was I thinking? But I don’t let it sit for more than that. I let it sit for 24 hours.
First thing I did was say okay, I want to do this live event. I open the calendar. “Okay, what kind of date and timing is going to work? I didn’t overthink it. I didn’t look at every single holiday in every country. Well, it’s beer day in Germany, I can’t do it. Enough with the excuses. Obviously, you don’t want to launch it on Super Bowl but besides that, just roll with it. I got it in the calendar then immediately I found the space. I called three to four different spaces, I drove around, I looked at all the space and I found the one space that’s going to work. I negotiated, I locked in the space and then I got the videographer. So now you’re right. I was on the hook. I had that external deadline and come hell or high water, I’m putting it together because I have no choice. You have to.
It’s almost like when I used to have a job where you would work and you knew at Friday at 5 o’clock, you’re going on vacation and you had something to get done. You’re going to get that thing done by vacation and you’re going to work like a mad man to get it done. I’m with you 100%, setting those external deadlines and even putting some money in it. Knowing you have to get it done is a great motivator.
Craig: Absolutely. Now what about the next step of having like an upsell or a back end product, where does the beginner-intermediate go with their next level?
Ryan: So obviously, you want to try to have some thought about it, sitting down first and looking at kind of what’s going to be your mix of products. Essentially, you’ll want to divide it. If you want to get really kind of the most simple version of it, you want to have some type of front end and some type of back end.
The front end is going to be that first product people usually buy. I’m saying usually because I had people come in and the first thing they’d buy is a thousand dollar workshop with me. It used to be more the rule when it was direct mail and you’d just mail someone and they’d buy that first thing, but essentially, people are really going to buy maybe a $40 or $50 or maybe a $100-type product, usually under $50, and that’s just to get your buyer.
From there is where the big money is made and that’s the back end. Then there’s going to be products anywhere from $99 to like $500. That’s what I call kind of the mid-range products and the bulk of your sales is going to be there and that could be combinations of home study kits and webinar programs and training and multimedia courses. So that’s again between the $100 and $500. Then for $500 and up is going to be usually be more coaching-type programs, inner circles, the more expensive continuity programs.
So you want to look at it as a little bit like a funnel. People call it the marketing funnel although I don’t necessarily think it has to be a funnel. But the thing is, the most difficult thing to make is that first time sale. The person who doesn’t know you, getting them to your site and buying is the toughest thing to do. But once they’re in, once they’ve purchased and assuming they have a good experience, you deliver what you promised, they see that you really care about them, then selling future products is simple. You barely even have to rely on sales copy.
Now I’m not saying your sales copy should be terrible, it should still try to be good, but you really don’t have to work that hard. You can probably do it, Craig, and I could do it. Once you have someone in and they’re buying, you can easily then do a $200 or $300 product with one page of sales copy or even a short video. I’ve done a videos sitting at my pool with my kids, talking for two or three minutes and selling a multi-hundred or multi-thousand dollar product. Just concentrate really two things, the front end, low priced, get them in as a buyer.
Then you’ve got the back end stuff.
Craig: That’s awesome, man, really great. Now what about when somebody comes to you and just joins your free list. What approach do you take to help them see that there’s more value in your products? Do you do autoresponders? Do you get into webinars? What’s your best way doing things there?
Ryan: You know, I’ve gone back and forth with so many different things. I’ve gone the whole autoresponder out, I understand the power and I know they work. However, what I’ve been doing lately? I stopped my auto-responders and all I do is once someone subscribes, because I am prolific and I’m always putting out new content, once they subscribe, they’re just in my daily updates. Almost every day, I send new content. It’s always fresh. It’s always topical. That way, right in, they kind of get the voice of what I’m saying. I send them to my blog, they comment, they start interacting. So for me, right off the bat, I get them into the content funnel, essentially.
Craig: But then how do you communicate with people? Is it mostly written words still? Are you doing half and half with video? Or mostly video?
Ryan: It’s s still mostly written. For a long time, I was doing almost all video and I know video works really well. The only reason I stated doing written is because I started working from Starbucks more because I just find I’m more creative when I’m working at a coffee shop and it’s really hard to do a video in a coffee shop. Even though it might not be that loud, it picks up, the camera and the audio picks up everything and it’s really loud. So that’s why I started doing written and I just find that people really like the written. They could read it anywhere. They could read it at work. I am going to be doing some more video. I’m going to be doing some more audio but for now, it’s mostly written.
Craig: Yeah, when it comes to your products though, it changes, right?
Ryan: Yeah, my products are mostly, they’re usually multimedia. Like I was saying before, it’s audio, video, and text so I get all the different learning styles. And the sales process of the products, I’m always trying different things. One time it could be a video sales letter. Another time, like I said, it could be me sitting at the pool. If you look at WorkAnywhereLIVE.com, depending when you go, if you go there now, it’s a video of me in my home office, it’s like three minutes long and that’s it. I’m always trying to change it up. I don’t want them to ever, always say, “Okay, here’s Ryan. Here’s what you’re going to do. Here’s how’s he’s going to sell me.” I want to keep them kind of guessing and keep it fun and fresh as well.
Craig: Yeah, I mean that’s one thing about you. You’re just like a really super fun guy and that’s your personality. That’s your approach that comes out here. Now what do you teach people who are a little less extroverted? What do you teach them and how do you guide them towards having success through their personality?
Ryan: That’s fine. I don’t expect everyone to be like me, always joking around and having fun. There are people who are successful who are definitely more introverted. You’ve just got to find your voice and if you’re really bad on video then don’t do video. Then just stay with written word. If you have a terrible voice and no enthusiasm, then stay away from audio as well and stick with the written. It’s also tough because if you’re building a whole brand around, let’s say—just because we know fitness so well—let’s say you’re fitness guy and you’re whole brand is you know hey, I’m a boot camp guy and I’m going to kick your butt and blah, blah, blah and you’re like, “Hi, my name is Jonathan,” and you’re like dry as toast, there’s a real disconnect between what you’re saying and what you’re doing.
As long as there’s continuity between your message and you then I think it’s okay. If you’re a financial analyst, people want you to kind of be a little bit more serious and if that’s the tone. You just have to make sure the tone matches. If you’re reading my emails and you’re reading my blog posts and then you see me on video and you hear me on an interview, I’m the same guy. It’s the same voice. It’s the same words. It all kind of connects and it makes sense. It’s congruent essentially, as opposed to me being up one time and really serious in an email and then joking around. It just feels kind of goofy. I hope that makes sense, Craig.
Craig: It totally does. Being yourself is really what it comes down to and being around Ryan Lee is something that a lot of people want to enjoy every day. That’s one thing that’s really great and you’ve done a great job of leveraging your personality.
We’ll be back more tomorrow with more tips on how to make money online.
To your success,
Craig Ballantyne