Jeff: I talked about how we need to figure out what the goal is for our product. What I’ll do in this case, because we are going to go further into this, I’m going to say that we are going to create a software product (so again, I don’t know how to do it and would go to eLance).
So whatever the software product is, again, we’ll do something in dog training. Maybe people are confused as to when to exercise their dog and to do all this other stuff. So they want some program that will help them do all this stuff or give their dog shots or whatever it may be.
They need some program to organize their life or their dog’s life. So that is what we are going to create. But I have decided not to make money with this program, but I want to get my name out there and create a customer list because I have all these other great ideas on dog training in the same niche.
Or I want to also sell other people’s products and be an affiliate marketer in that niche. So my goal is to create a list.What we are going to do is, the software product, we are going to give that out for free. We are going to solve all these people’s problems, give it out for free.
We are going to let other people give it out for free, meaning we could contact other Web site owners and say, “Hey, I notice you are selling this great course on how to groom dogs for a dog show. How about if, as a bonus, you give your customers my software product?”
If it is a good product, most people are going to be like, “Cool,” because that’s going to help him sell more courses on his dog grooming product.
But what is going to happen is when they go into this software product we are making, they have to register their software product for updates. By doing that, you have now captured these people’s names and e-mail addresses to use them further on for your next product or for when we want to affiliate market toward them.
Because of this little scenario that we have come up with, we need to then create kind of a name squeeze page. We have already talked about having a sales letter that we will be giving out this free product. We also need, because when they go to open up the program it’s going to pop up a page, and this one is going to be pretty easy. We are not going to have to try too hard to try and get their name and e-mail address.
It is just going to have to pop up and state that, “Hey, if you want updates, you need to register this software product.” But now because you have the sales page and your product, you are going to need to come up with the autoresponder that is going to capture all those names.
What that is, it’s a separate program that’s run by a different company and it’s done automatically where you put code into that box, people type in their name and e-mail, you press a button and it goes right into, for example, AWeber.
If you go to www.AWeberList.com, that company will store all your e-mails for you. Then when you go to send them emails back out again, all you do is type in one e-mail, you push a button, and it will go to whatever list you specified.
I’ve pushed buttons and sent out tens of thousands of emails in one shot. It’s a beautiful system. You are going to need that, and it’s fairly inexpensive.
Some of these companies are anywhere from $20 a month and maybe if you buy for the year, it might come down to like $15 or $14 a month, something like that. It’s one of those essential tools that you need to buy.
CeeCee: That could be for a complete beginner who doesn’t even have a list that’s started. Right away get into the autoresponder and get to Aweber and have that going right away.
Jeff: Yes, because you are going to need it. This is another thing that I recommend; never buy stuff from this point on because we are on the 30 day schedule here. Never buy anything else and I’m assuming that other than my recommendation that you learn about the sales process stuff. If you don’t need something for this product you are making, do not buy it.
If all of a sudden you find the latest and greatest offering on lead generation, if at this point you don’t need that software, don’t buy it.
I’m only recommending you purchase a couple things during this 30 days. One of them is you are going to need an autoresponder list, or autoresponder service. That’s one of them.
So far up to this point, you maybe went and put in your product that you want to have made into eLance and you are just having the bids come in. So you haven’t even paid anything at this point.
Maybe you had to spend some money but you can still get a formula, and the beauty of this is you don’t need that great of copy when you are giving away something for free.
You still need to put down the bullets, the benefits, why they should download it and all that stuff, but it doesn’t have to be the greatest of copy. So far we are doing well there.
CeeCee: You just said that 30 days, and maybe I missed that in the beginning, but these 20 steps that we are going over right now, these beginner steps on how to get started, you can get this done in 30 days and have a product ready to go?
Jeff: The software program, most people don’t start with a software program. It might be an e-book, it might be a report. Software tends to be a little longer.
You can still get some easy software coded in just a matter of weeks. So that might spread it out a bit. I just use the software. I could have some of my guys code stuff pretty quickly.
If it’s like an e-book, you can get a writer. If they have nothing going on, and you can specify that “I need this ebook written in three weeks,” and that’s part of the deal. They have to write it.
You tell them what to write the book about and they will get it to you in three weeks or two weeks. That’s part of the bidding process. If they don’t do it, then if you don’t want to you don’t have to buy it because they are late with the product.
So yes, you could easily, because we kind of did the bidding at the very beginning of this process, you could be doing that on day one or day two after you fill the need, you figure out what you want accomplished, you have day three you could be putting your bid or your idea or project into eLance and get something back in just a couple of weeks.
CeeCee: You got it. Good!Jeff: And then the next thing you need, because we are talking about having a sales page and having your webmaster that you eventually hire put stuff up, you are going to get a domain and also a hosting account.
Usually people’s first product is not going to have a massive launch where you need a big huge hosting account. You can buy a domain, and I actually have a reseller account. It’s actually a GoDaddy reseller account at www.CheapNicheDomains.com.
Domains are only like $8 or $9 a year, so just go to www.CheapNicheDomains.com, you pick up a domain for your first product and you can also get a hosting account. The hosting, you can spend anywhere from just $5 a month up to $10, $30. You can do a lot on a $30 a month account.
I have a massive server that is over $400 a month just because we run so much traffic through it and I have so many sites, and when I do a launch, I want it to be able to handle everything. So that’s a massive cost for me, but you can get really inexpensive hosting when you first start off, $4, $5, to $10 a month.
The next step you are going to need to do after you know what your product is, and you kind of know the benefits, because sometimes in the graphics you are going to want to obviously have the name and the domain maybe and you want to put maybe the main benefit, then you want to go buy graphics.
Now there are a ton of different graphics out there. You can do a search on Google and find a ton. I would recommend going to the Warrior forum. I think it is www.WarriorForum.com. Do a Google search of “Warrior forum” and you will find it.
Within the Warrior forum there is what’s called Warrior Special Offers and this is mainly Internet Marketers and small business type people that are in this kind of Internet Marketing niche. There is anybody and everybody you can find that will give you different things you can purchase in the Warriors Special Offer and there are a ton of graphic artists.
I just this week have picked up graphics done for my sites for $27. I had another one done that’s $47. A couple of weeks ago I spent something like $67, and that’s for complete graphics. That’s graphics for the header, footer, background, buy button, some type of e-cover. You could have a software box made.
If your software is going to be downloadable on their PC, when it pops open you can have a little header on your software itself. You can buy that for, I would say, easily, $50 or less.
So domains $9, hosting, let’s say it’s $10, graphics $50, your autoresponder might be $20 a month. So far we haven’t spent a lot of money, depending on what you make or have created over at eLance.
Again, maybe you can create that stuff yourself. You might have enough knowledge to sit down in one week and bang out a great special report or e-book then you might not even have a cost there. But so far we haven’t spent all that much.
The next thing you need to create is the download page. You want to actually give them the software. Again, it’s fairly easy. You can just look at other download pages. I’m sure you’ve purchased a lot of products like I have. There’s no use reinventing the wheel.
Go look at a download page that you like and copy how they do it. At the beginning you want to thank the customer and then you want to tell them how wise they were for buying your product. Remind them of what great things your product is going to do for them and how they are going to have their problem solved.
Then you want to give them the download link and then if they don’t have Adobe pdf or if they don’t have an unzipping program, you want to explain that. It’s almost like a little formula.
What people don’t remember to do, though, and I mentioned that when I first came on, that course at www.HiddenSalesProject.com that teaches people how these big gurus, these guys making a lot of money, how they really make a lot of their money. They do it behind the scenes.
In your case, we talked about this scenario, about how we are going to create this software program and give it for free and create a list.
With regard to backend sales, people don’t realize that you can put some type of additional offer right on your download page itself. Or, they’ve already been given the software for free by, say, that other person that had the dog grooming course. They are given the download link right from that guy, right after they register you can hit them with a one-time-offer.
What I mean by that is that it will pop open a page that’s only good for just that visit. You can cookie it where they will never see it again. They close that page and they will never be able to open that page again.
If people don’t know what a one-time-offer is, you can go to my site and see an example of one of my most successful one-time- offers. Go to www.JeffDedrick.com/greatoffer. That’s actually a one-time-offer that people can buy, and they get the one-time-offer and usually with a one-time-offer you get some products or you get a better bonus or some added feature, whatever it may be.
In this case, I actually gave people the ability to purchase their own one-time-offer. The exact same one-time-offer page that is on that URL, people would get that. They would get the 50 products and they get the one-time-offer.
Again, don’t try to recreate the wheel or come up with the newest, biggest thing. Go ahead and copy what people are using now that is working. Look at that offer, see how it’s made up, and you can copy that page.
In the case of the people coming in and getting that dog software, they’re going to be interested in dog stuff. They’re not going to care about Internet marketing stuff. They don’t even know what Internet Marketing is. All they care about at that moment is their dog.
On your one-time-offer scenario that we’ve come up with, this software product, you want to give them the ability to purchase a one-time-offer of a product that will be in the dog niche. Maybe it is going to be interviews with those dog experts or an added feature for the software, maybe a second software program. Whatever it may be, it has to be in the niche.
That is one of those things that most people don’t think about. There is so much money that people leave on the table that they could have made but just don’t know about.
If you want to learn more about that, go to www.HiddenSalesProject.com right now. The price of the regular offer is $77 and then if you click the Buy button, you’re taken to a platinum offer. That’s a perfect example of one of these hidden sales, these additional sales. That platinum offer is $97.
If you go to www.HiddenSalesProject.com/discount, instead of $77 you would pay just $47. It’s a great course where we not only lay out all the different things where people can make additional money online, but we also have over 20 experts who talk about how they’ve made money, and some of them have made hundreds of thousands of dollars doing all these little backend processes to make all this additional money that you would never know.
Some of this stuff is so powerful that I instantly changed some of the things I was doing and even how I launched that product, the Hidden Sales Project, I changed how I launched that product because of what I heard.
So that is something I feel is a great product. It’s had great reviews. If you really want to double or triple your money, do some of these hidden sales processes. It’s definitely something you should look into.
Let’s get back to our list. We’ve created this download page. We have different offers on the download page and we talked about creating some type of bonus for the download page. Or you could just go to someone within the niche that’s selling a dog product and say, “Hey, would I be able to offer my customers a discount on your product?”
Often, if you have some good traffic and good people coming through to your download page, they might say, “Sure, I’ll make up a special page that says, ‘To the owners of this Dog Training Software Program, you get $20 off.’” Of course, that would be your affiliate link going off to that person’s page. When anyone buys that product, we would make an additional 50%. That’s just another way to make more money.
You don’t even have to create a bonus there. At no cost you just hook up with another possible affiliate partner and let them sell the product.
Jeff: Let’s see, we have the next one. We talked about the autoresponders. Well, we’re going to have to write messages.
With the messages, there’s are a little bit of copy involved there. It’s called a stick strategy. When someone purchases something from you, in our case we’re kind of giving it out for free, but you still want to do a little stick strategy. You want to thank them for downloading your product and you want to introduce yourself.
You also want to tell them all the great things your product is going to do for them. You want to remind them because a lot of people buy stuff, they get busy, and they kind of forget what they bought. I’ve had people call up and say, “What did I buy from your for $47?” They don’t even remember.
You want to mention that in your e-mail because people can always go back in their e-mail and find it, no problem. If they download something, they can’t usually find it on their computer, but they can usually find the e-mail.
So you want to remind them about the great product. You want to give them the download link again or whatever it may be. You want to thank them and now you want to start introducing yourself and your personality to your list. You can do that in all these follow up messages.
CeeCee: You have to brand yourself there, too.
Jeff: Exactly. If you have a sense of humor, then put that in your e-mails. If you are really super knowledgeable, then put that in your e-mails. If you have the ability to be warm and fuzzy and that’s what your marketplace likes, then put that in your e-mails.
Start giving them additional bonuses and then, at that point, continue to market to them some of these other affiliate programs or maybe your next product. Maybe it is just great articles you’ve seen or free resources. You want to continue to give them great information and bonuses because you want them to continue to open up your e-mails.
You also want them to get a feel for you because if they have that connection, then when you do roll off another product down the road, they’re going to be standing there with their wallets open ready to buy it. People buy from people they like and love and trust and know.
CeeCee: Right.Jeff: We talked about this whole process. In our scenario we’re giving it away for free, but let’s say we wanted to sell a product. You can worry about getting some type of shopping cart and then you have to go get the approval from a merchant for a rider so you can take Visa and MasterCard and all that junk.
I would suggest you don’t even worry about that stuff to start with. You can just create an account at PayPal and you can make order buttons right in your account. People can just order through PayPal. That seems to be the easiest and quickest way to do it.
Go to and they have tutorials and they explain everything that needs to be done. It’s a pretty simple process and they walk you through that whole thing. I would suggest that.
ClickBank is pretty darn easy, too. You can use them as your processor. Basically, they collect all the money; they even pay all the affiliates. If you have a lot of affiliates for a product, ClickBank is a pretty good service to use also.
One of the last steps in this is that you need to be planning out your next project. What we teach in Hidden Sales Project is that ideally, you need to have your next product already made because you want to sell them the next product instantly.
In our case, we’re giving out that software for free, but we should have something ready to sell right then when they register, right after they register.
If you even wait a week or two weeks it will make a big difference because they might not even remember getting your software or who you are.
But if you are selling them something right there on the spot, right after you gave them something, reciprocity kicks in. They’re going to like you just because you gave them something for free.
So you want to plan your next project right away. I believe it was Gina Gaudio-Graves talking to me about her hidden sales stuff. She is a JV broker meaning people would come to her with their products and she would get it out there in the marketplace and get JV partners for them and do all that kind of stuff.
Well, she would not even take on a product or broker a JV deal if they didn’t already have their next product planned out, all ready to sell. If they didn’t have some type of backend, a lot of times she was not even interested in doing it. It’s that important.
But, in this scenario, because we want to do something in 30 days, don’t let that hold you back. Even though it may not be the totally correct thing to do, you still need to go forward.
We talked about not taking action. A lot of times you just have to get out there and do it. If you follow these simple steps, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to mess up and figure out that the autoresponder was hooked up wrong or all these different things; you’re going to figure it out. That is going to make you that much stronger on your next project.
But if you never get started, you’re not going to learn how to do it. It’s almost like it snowballs. Once you do one product and you see that it isn’t that hard, it just keeps going. Before you know it, you’re coming up with so many ideas and you’re pumping them out as fast as you can make them.
But until you do that first product and you’re just sitting at a computer and not doing anything, you’re still not learning that much.
CeeCee: You have to make the mistakes to learn it. Jeff: Exactly. You need to just take that leap of faith, jump out there, and do it.CeeCee: I’ve been listening to you talking and, you know, there are a couple of things that really jump out at me.
First of all, really take the time to do your research and stick with it. But more than that, it’s also developing all these relationships along the way, not only with the people on the list who buy your product, but with the people who could possibly help create your product.
Jeff: Definitely. It’s the partners with whom you are possibly going to be creating products or bonus products or creating products down the road, do membership sites together or whatever it may be, it’s amazing how these connections you make in your niche helps brand you. It helps make you more money.
A lot of times you can look at people and 50% or more of their success is because of the connections they made. In my case, I would say it’s even more than that. I would say probably 60% or 70% or 80% of my success online is because of the connections that I’ve made. That’s hugely important.
Most people don’t really put that much importance on it. They just stay at their computer and they don’t get out there and make these connections. Just get on the phone and call some people.
E-mail is the easiest way to get someone’s attention or meet them. You need to pick up the phone and make a connection, too.
CeeCee: When I first started that’s exactly how I pictured it. I had this image of Internet Marketing as being off alone doing your own thing in a corner or an office. But the thing that was the most surprising to me is how the relationships and the people that you meet are a huge part of being an Internet Marketer.
Jeff: Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I go to seminars and my main goal is not even to listen to the seminar. I’ve skipped three or four-day seminars where I never even walked in the room because I was out in the hall or in the lounge non-stop just talking to people, joking around, making friendships the whole time.
CeeCee: Sure. It’s great.Jeff: Those steps are pretty much it. I think that was something like 15 steps.
CeeCee: I wrote 13.
Jeff: We kind of walked through everything. There are a couple extra things that should be done. I don’t know if it’s really a step, but it’s very important.
The one thing that of all those things that we rattled off, and people who are listening can go back and take better notes or jot them down, but the thing that you need to do is put everything on a calendar.
Don’t just keep it random and say, “Okay, now what did he say? I think he said I need to do...” No! Don’t do it that way. Put it on your calendar. “Monday I will go to eLance. Tuesday I will study Yanik Silver’s and Dan Kennedy’s sales letter writing material. On Friday I’ll buy a domain and after that I will go buy graphics at the Warrior forum.”
You need to write everything down on a calendar. I almost do it the opposite. I figure out when I want to launch a product and then I go backwards and I write everything in.
We have it down now where I think our launch process is about nine weeks. So I know right now if we come up with an idea, nine weeks is about the earliest I will be able to launch it. We have it down to a system.
But right now, put everything on a calendar and keep total notes on every single thing you’re doing along the way here because you’re going to forget stuff. Here are some examples of what we’ve forgotten.
We were about to launch a product and we forgot to write the original e-mail that goes with the receipt. We talked about doing follow up sequences; we had those already in the autoresponder. But we were missing the e-mail that said, “Here’s your order. Here’s your login. Here are your passwords,” and et cetera. We didn’t even think about that stuff.
There are so many little things that you totally space on. There are little things you don’t have checked. For example, we were launching and we had one of those scripts on top of a site that had a countdown on when we were going to launch. We were going to launch at noon.
Well, something was wrong in the script to wherever in the world the person was, it was thinking the launch was at noon. So people in Australia were sitting there looking and it was doing a countdown for their noon, for their 12:00, not my 12:00 Eastern Standard Time that we had for the launch.
All of a sudden it came to their 12:00 noon, and the site was not launched. They were e-mailing me trying to figure out why it was not launched. Well, that’s what the problem was; we didn’t have this script set up correctly. In fact, in our case we figured it out three days early, but then one of my friends who will remain nameless, was launching and I was sending out e-mails to prelaunch, and I had customers in Australia saying, “Hey, what’s up with this person’s site? It’s not launched yet.”
I knew right away what the problem was and I e-mailed him. I said, “Dude, you have your script wrong.” There are certain little things like that that you need to be writing down. When you are thinking of your next product it is going to help you. When you go back to your second product, your second launch, you’re going to see all these mistakes and problems and tweaks and things you forgot to add to it.
This 30-day scenario is not doing a full launch. We’re not talking about affiliates, coming up with tools for your affiliates and e-mails and banner ads. It’s not doing everything. The first important thing is just to get your product out there. Then you can come up with a way to market to affiliates, you can buy banners and so on.
CeeCee: We’ll have to do another talk so we can share that information on the next step after you have your first product out there.
Jeff: Yeah. I would say the last thing to do is to test everything. We launched a site and we forgot to test it in Firefox. That’s a different browser. Everything looked great on Internet Explorer, but things were looking screwed up in Firefox or on Mac computers.
You just have to test everything. It’s really important to have someone else go in and test everything because often the product creator is too close to the product and they don’t see things. It’s like, “Oh, I didn’t even notice that I had my own name spelled wrong,” or dumb stuff like that. You don’t even realize these mistakes that are so obvious to someone else who is looking at it for the first time.
So I recommend having other people go through the whole sales letter, the whole process, the downloading, the ordering, and have them do everything. Have them get your e-mails and look at your follow up sequences and look for mistakes, formatting mistakes, and look at it on different computers, even different Internet Explorer editions and different browsers. Have them do all that.
The final most important thing is to get started right away. We’ve just come up with a complete little game plan, 30 days to get up and running. People are going to listen to this and take great notes, but then they won’t put it on that calendar I mentioned.
Even I did this. I still remember how I got up on Mother’s Day back in 2005 and all of a sudden I was kicking myself. “Why am I not moving fast?” Typically, on our restaurants we would move fast. We put in three stores one time in one year. These are full blown stores including the build out.
With two of the stores we actually bought the land, built the building, and then put our stores in. One of them even had additional buildings with additional businesses to it. We did all that stuff, three of them in one year, and here I was taking four months, or whatever it was, to get my first dumb Web site up.
That morning I got up and I went right to eLance and I posted my first ad. I think it was on RentACoder and within 30 minutes