Internet_Millionare_System_Quick Money-Makers To Long-Term Business

Internet_Millionare_System Quick Money-Makers To Long-Term Business

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n the previous modules, I’ve showed you how to find a market to target with your reprint rights product, how to set up your website to sell that product, and how to get loads of free traffic (and possibly some paid traffic eventually) to boost your sales.

That’s a great start, but let me brutally honest.

Have you ever heard of music bands who are “one hit wonders”? They might have a hit song, and then fade away into obscurity because they can’t follow that up with another popular song.

Well, online businesses can be the same way. When you first start, you understandably want to focus your efforts on turning a profit quickly. That makes good sense. But you can’t keep your focus on making quick money, or you’ll never build a business that will grow your income steadily over the long run.

That’s what this lesson is about.

I’m going to show you how to make money through backend selling.

Your frontend is what you offer initially (and it really includes any free item you offer on your squeeze page, and the initial product you sell. Your backend is the set of additional sales (even if it’s just one) that you make after you sell your initial product, or potentially at the same time you sell your initial product.

First, I’m going to give you an overview of the entire backend process so you can get the big picture.

Then I’m going to show you how to make money at the point of sale (POS), meaning you’ll make money on additional products at or very near the time you sell your initial product. This is still your backend, but it happens very close in time to your frontend.

Next I’ll show you how to make more money on the backend over time. I’ll talk about building a relationship with your list and how to translate that into sales.

Finally, I’ll talk about how to create high-performing residual income opportunities.

If you want a real business, you need a platform to build it on. You have one part of that, since you’ve set up your frontend. Now let’s build the rest!

1.0      Backend Overview

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our backend is where you’ll make most of your money over time, so you need to understand what it’s all about.

The biggest concept to get is the idea of a sales funnel. A funnel has a big opening at the top, and tapers down to a small opening at the bottom. You can pour a lot of stuff into it, and it all comes out the smaller hole at the bottom.

Well, your sales funnel is sort of a funnel like that, but it has leaks in it. Not everything you pour into it makes it out the hole at the bottom.

Think of the first product you sell to a new buyer as the entry point to your funnel. You price it relatively low, so lots of people buy it. That’s the wide end of the funnel.

What you want to do over time is migrate those buyers to more expensive products so you can make more money on each repeat sale to those customers. Along the way, you can also sell customers additional products at the same or similar prices at any level of your funnel.

Not every customer will migrate all the way to most expensive product you sell, and some who do will only buy one of your most expensive products instead of buying them all. That’s why you can think of your funnel as having leaks—not every customer who enters it makes it all the way to the bottom.

But the funnel concept gives you a nice picture of what you’re trying to do:

You want to sell more products to existing customers, and migrate as many of those customers as possible to more expensive products over time.

Your funnel obviously has different levels, where you sell different products at different price points. In this module I’m going to talk about two of the main points in that funnel—the point right when you’re selling something else (called the point of sale, or POS), and the point where you leverage an existing sale to migrate customers. And I’m going to give you two ways you make a very nice residual income from the customers you develop from your initial sales.

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t be satisfied with a single sale to a new customer. You should always try to turn that into more income over the long(er) term. Let’s start with the POS to see how you can start doing that right away.

2.0     Making Money At The Point Of Sale

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he point of sale (POS) is a somewhat magical point for marketers, and many of them completely miss the boat.

The POS is where a buyer is in what you might call a “buying mood”. He’s just decided to spend money for something you sell, or he’s just spent the money. Either way, his brain is already in gear to buy.

Now you need to exploit that opportunity and give him the chance to buy more. It sounds simple, but it’s quite possibly the most effective way to scale up your online profits.

2.1      What To Sell

What you try to sell at the POS is extremely important. There’s no one “right” answers, but I can give you one big guideline based on my experience…

Sell something complementary.

If a customer either just bought or is considering buying website creation software, for instance, you might offer him a package of website templates to expand his purchase. It’s a natural fit.

The more strongly complementary your additional POS offer is, the more you’re likely to sell.

To illustrate the point, I offer some free website building software at http://www.MyFreeWebsiteBuilder.com. The main page looks like this:

That’s a free offer, so I’m not even selling anything! But it still illustrates the point of offering something else complementary at the POS, because when somebody clicks the button to download the free software, he’ll see an offer for a website graphics package:

That’s a naturally complementary offer. Getting graphics on your own costs money, as you know, and being able to grab a nice set of pre-made graphics simplifies the process of building your own website.

The initial offer (the software) is free, and the graphics package costs $29.97. That immediately migrates somebody who’s just signing up for a free offer to being a true customer (a buyer).

You can do the same thing. All you need is a complementary offer. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to come up with one:

• What else does somebody need? In the example I just showed you, I know for a fact that anybody creating a website needs graphics. Most people who try to make their own do a poor job of it. So my offer is a natural, based on a known need.
• What else could somebody want? A person might not need something else, but does he want it? For example, I didn’t offer website templates, but lots of people creating their own websites want them.
• What would make the initial offer easier/cheaper to use? The website templates idea is a good example of the “easier” angle—having a website template makes it easier to create your own website. For the cheaper angle, perhaps a discount on a third-part service (like an autoresponder service) would be a good fit.
• What would make it easier to make money with the initial offer? This is usually a winner for any POS offer for an Internet marketing related product. The people in my market want to make money online, so if I can show them a way to make more, or make it easier, they tend to buy. In a way, the graphics offer I make is an example, because nice graphics have been shown to improve website sales.
• What “advanced” material can you offer? This is one many people overlook. Dig into your initial offer and see if there are some advanced (or perhaps just more detailed) techniques you can tack on. If there are, many people will pay extra to the get the advanced material.

All of those questions are common sense. You need to ask yourself what naturally adds to your initial offer, and make that your POS offer.

What form your offer takes is another matter…but it’s easy to create an offer (essentially another product) in pretty much any form you want.

Back in Lesson 3, I showed you how to create reprint rights products in several different formats. That’s exactly what you can do here. Here’s what I mean:

• You can write or package another ebook. This is always an option, and it’s easy to do.
• You can create audios or videos of existing written material. You can use tools like http://www.NaturalReaders.com and http://www.CamStudio.org to do that.
• You can create audios or videos of new material. This is similar to the previous one, and you can use the same tools. The only difference is that you’ll have to come up with the new material first.

And remember, you can use reprint rights material to do all of that. You do not have to start from scratch. In fact, it’s usually smart not to start from scratch—that takes too much time. There’s nothing wrong with starting from scratch if you want to create something one hundred percent fresh, but that’s rarely a requirement.

2.2     How To Price Your Offers

Once you know what you want to offer, you have to put a price on it.

This is more art than science, and experimentation is really the best way to figure out which price works best for your particular offer, but broadly speaking, you have two options:

• Make it a fraction of your main offer price, so you can get the impulse buy
• Make it a multiple of your main offer price and use urgency to sell it

When in doubt, choose the first option. Getting an impulse buy is usually easier than trying to get a buyer to spend a lot more than he initially spent.

For example, next time you buy a meal at a fast food restaurant like McDonald’s, notice how the people behind the cash register (called a point of sale terminal, by the way) attempt to sell you additional things. The famous phrase, “You want fries with that?” is a perfect example. They’re not asking you to double the price of your meal—they’re just asking you to take on an additional cost. The same is true when they ask you if you want to “biggie size” your soft drink.

As a specific example, let’s say you’re selling an ebook about how to promote ClickBank products as an affiliate. You’re selling it for $37. Your POS offer could be another “report” about advanced selling techniques. Again, your pricing options are these:

• Sell it for something like $17 to get an impulse buy, since the total of $54 is still pretty low
• Sell it for something like $47 or even $67 as “advanced” material

You can do either one, and I’ve seen them both work. Consider my offer at http://www.MyFreeWebsiteBuilder.com. That’s a free product with a POS offer that isn’t free…and it works great. That tells you that selling a POS offer for more than your initial offer is doable. All you really have to do is attach an attractive price to your POS offer, no matter what that is relative to the price of your initial product.

But selling your POS offer for a lower price than your main offer is usually an easier sell.

2.3     How To Present Your Offers

You have several options for presenting your offers. In many cases, decisions about how you present your offer and when/where you present it go hand in hand. Let me describe the options.

2.3.1   Upsells

Upsells are what you experience at the movies or fast food restaurants when people ask you if you want to upgrade your purchase in some way.

For example, suppose you walk into the movie theater and you buy some popcorn and a soft drink. The person behind the counter asks if you want to get the jumbo drink for only fifty cents more. That’s an upsell.

Or let’s say you go into McDonald’s and the person at the cash register asks you if you want to “biggie size” your fries. That’s an upsell too.

Upselling in the offline world is offering a buyer the chance to buy more right before he hands you the money.

Upselling in the online world is a little bit broader than that. Most people use the term upsell to refer to an additional offer that doesn’t really have any immediate urgency to it—it’s just an additional offer at your POS.

It can apply to an offer you make before somebody buys, or just after he buys.

To summarize, an upsell is asking somebody if he wants to add this extra item to his purchase.

Implementing an upsell is actually pretty easy. All you do is link your sales page order button or link to your upsell page, instead of sending people straight to your payment processor, like this:

If you want to do things the simple way, without having to do any fancy scripting on your website, you can have two page flows after your upsell page.

The first flow is for people who do not buy your upsell. They would go through the typical page flow as if you had no upsell at all, like this:

They would end up on a Thank You page that lets them download your product without the upsell offer.

The second flow is for people who do buy your upsell. They would pay for a different product with a different (higher) price when they go through your payment processor, like this:

They would end up on a different Thank You page that lets them download both your main product and your upsell offer.

Again, to keep things simple, I suggest that you set this up as two separate page flows rather than trying to use fancy scripting or special software packages to make it happen. You can certainly do that, but it’s usually more expensive, and it requires more technical savvy than you absolutely need.

To have two different page flows, though, you need to set things up with your payment processor so that you have two products, with different price points, that lead to two different Thank You pages. Watch the video that shows you how to set that up in ClickBank.

As an example of this technique, here’s a course I sell to the resale rights niche (people interested in making money with resale rights products):

At the bottom of the page is the order button you’d expect to see, which leads to an order page that looks like this at the top:

All I’m doing here is presenting another testimonial about how great the product is, which reinforces the customer’s buying decision.

Then I summarize what’s included in my product, state the total value of all of those components, and present my money-back guarantee again. Then it’s time to offer my upsell, like this:

In this case, my offer is a resale rights license for the course itself! That’s often a great upsell, but it’s especially effective in the resale rights niche.

I already know people want to make money with resale rights, so I offer them a great product to sell and keep 100% of the profits.

At the bottom of the offer, a reader sees his two options:

He can buy the upsell plus the core product for $197 through ClickBank, or he can buy just the basic package through ClickBank for $47.

Notice that I clearly stated what the options are, and the reader can choose whichever one he wants. In just a minute, I’ll talk about some copywriting techniques that can help you get more people to buy your upsell.

2.3.2  One-Time Offers (OTOs)

Another option for offering an upsell is to offer it after somebody enters his payment information and buys your product, but before you actually deliver the product.

This is a psychologically compelling place to make the offer, because the buyer has already mentally committed to the purchase.

He wants to buy, because he’s already entered his credit card number. Increasing the amount he’s spending is often something he’ll do without thinking about it. That’s the kind of impulse buy you’re looking for.

The typical OTO page flow looks like this:

What you’re doing here is presenting a buyer with an additional offer before you deliver the first one.

You’re giving him the clear option to accept your offer or not, but you’re making him choose before you simply give him what he bought. It’s very much like a salesman asking you if you want the extended service contract before he hands you what you bought.

You can set this up very much like you set up an upsell. The only real difference is that your payment processor needs to redirect a buyer to your OTO page instead of straight to your Thank You page.

If the buyer accepts your OTO, you charge him for it. If he turns you down, you just deliver what he originally bought. Pretty simple.

As an example, here’s a site where I use an OTO:

The product is an easy, step-by-step guide to making money online, even if you’ve never made a penny before. It shows you how to get started and see your first profit fast.

When somebody clicks the order button at the bottom of the page, I take him to the ClickBank order process. After that, I send him to my OTO page:

My OTO is a package of tools called the Newbie Cash Machine Instant Cash Infusion Toolkit. The tools in the package include things like website templates, software for writing sales copy, and other items that will help people get up and running faster.

At the bottom of the page, I summarize the offer and give the reader his clearly stated options:

Once again, he can accept my offer or not.

If he does, I’ll send him through ClickBank again to buy the OTO, and then redirect him to a page where he can grab the main product and the OTO.

If he turns me down (and some people will, so don’t be surprised), I’ll send him straight to the download page where he can get his copy of Newbie Cash Machine.

2.3.3  Thank You Page Offers

A third option for making money at your POS is to make an offer on your Thank You page.

This is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to increase your sales. It’s a technique most of the pros have been using with amazing success for years now, and you can do the same.

On the front end of this, I’m selling an inexpensive report about three quick and easy ways to make money online. The cost is only $9.97, so a good number of people purchase it. After they do, I take them to the Thank You page, which begins this way:

As you can see, I immediately make another offer on this page, right after someone has bought my frontend report. I make the offer in a dashed box called a Johnson Box. At the end of the offer, I give the reader a link to buy, and then just continue with the business of giving him what he already bought:

The link to my offer leads to an entirely different sales page with a completely separate purchase process.

Remember, the best time to make another offer is right after somebody just bought. That’s why Thank You page offers work so well.

2.4     Copywriting Tips

Upsells, OTOs and Thank You page offers all require special types of sales copy. Many of the sales copy principles and techniques are the same, but there are some special things to consider. Let me address those for each type of POS offer.

2.4.1   Upsell Copywriting Tips

Generally speaking, it’s good to keep your upsell copy short. Remember, you want this to be basically an impulse buy, so it’s smart not to make people read a novel before you present your offer ask for the sale.

You can use a simple formula to present an upsell, like this:

• Relate it to your main offer. This can take just a sentence of two, something like this:

WAIT! Before you grab [your product], here’s an exclusive offer for you…

[your product] is a great tool for [doing whatever it does], but here’s something that makes it even easier!

• Outline your upsell benefits with bullets. These are similar to the bullets you use in any sales copy. Focus on what a buyer will get out of the product, not the “features”.
• Add bonuses to boost your upsell value. These could be additional reprint rights material you have in your library.
• Ask for the sale. Give the reader his two options (accept or decline), but then use one more trick…
• Make accepting the more attractive option. This is a psychological tactic, and it really works. For example, you could say something like this:

YES! Give me the super-exclusive “insider secrets” package that can show me how to triple my income within a month

No thanks, I’ll just take the basic package.

The option to accept is a larger font, and it emphasizes the key benefit of the offer. In other words, it looks more attractive. The option to decline is clearly visible, but it certainly sounds less exciting.

Keep in mind that upsells aren’t really hard sells—you aren’t trying to sell your main product. You’re just trying to get a buyer to spend more when his mind is prepared to do so. If you press the right buttons, he’ll pay more.

2.4.2  OTO Copywriting Tips

OTOs require a little extra care based on where they are in the sales process.

You present them after somebody buys, and before you deliver. That means a customer is anxious to get what he paid for, and you need to respect that. So I recommend starting with a statement something like the one I used a previous example:

Notice how I told the reader that he can get what he paid for by scrolling down to the bottom of the page. This does two things:

• It removes any apprehension the reader might have that you’re trying to take his money without giving him anything
• It immediately makes him curious about what else you have to offer

If he’s not worried, he can pay attention to your offer…and he’s much more likely to take you up on it.

One last thing to remember with OTOs is that your buyer will be a heightened state of desire. He’s really anxious to get his hands on what he bought. That means you have to work extra hard to compel him to act. Injecting some urgency into your offer can help. It’s pretty easy to do.

An OTO gets its name from the idea that it’s available one time only. In other words, you have to take the offer right now, or it’s gone forever. That’s a built-in urgency factor, and all you have to do is remind your reader of it. There are two places where you especially want to do that.

The first place is right at the top, after you put his mind at ease that he’ll get what he paid for. You can do that with a subheadline like this:

Then you’ll want to remind the reader of the urgency at the end of the page, like I did right above and inside of my “yes” box:

If you’ll inject urgency like that, and you’ll put your reader’s mind at ease right at the beginning, your OTO will convert better.

2.4.3  Thank You Page Copywriting Tips

Thank You pages are excellent places to sell things…if you do it right. Fortunately, it’s not hard. Here’s what you need to do:

• Give the buyer what he bought first. Don’t hide what he bought on the page or use gimmicks to get him to read your ad. That will frustrate a buyer and probably make him ignore your ad entirely.
• Keep your copy brief. This is the thing that could improve most in the example I showed you earlier—the copy is a bit long. You want a short, hard-hitting ad, not a long-copy sales letter.
• Include a picture of your product. Pictures sell, assuming they look professional.

Other than that, Thank You page ads are simple to create. Just having them there is probably enough to grow your sales.

3.0     Making More Backend Money

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ncreasing your profits at the POS is important, but the bulk of your long-term profits is going to come from your backend.

In a sense, your POS is the first part of your backend. But I (and other people) refer to your backend, I’m talking more about what you do after the initial sale takes place.

This is a potentially vast topic, so I’m going to focus on two things you should do, and help you know how to do them well.

3.1      Building Relationships With Buyers

This is the single biggest thing you need to do to grow your business into a long-term money-maker.

The way you’ll make money from doing this is to offer additional products to previous buyers, and to work on increasing their confidence in you as a source of good material…and recommendations, which I’ll talk about in a second.

The first thing you need to consider is how to build a relationship with your list. Here’s how NOT to do it…

Don’t send 27 promotional emails a day!

Frankly, you shouldn’t send more than once per week, and you should consider sending even fewer than that when you’re first starting out.

The point is, sending a promotional email doesn’t build a relationship with your list—it’s profits from that relationship. If there’s no relationship there to start with, your profits won’t be very big.

Here’s how you build a relationship with your list:

Offer your list mostly free information and special deals, and then promote 25-50% of the time.

If you send one email per week, you should be offering free, helpful information two times per month, and promoting products the other two times. It’s that simple.

You want your list to trust you when you say they should buy something. The only way they’ll trust you is if you earn it. And the only way to earn their trust is to offer them what they want without always demanding money from them.

There’s definitely nothing wrong with promoting things, but if that’s all you do, you’ll burn your list. They’ll eventually stop paying attention to you, and your promotions won’t earn you any income.

Here are some things you can offer to build your relationship with your list:

• Free ebooks. You probably have a bunch of these in your reprint rights library (check the usage terms to make sure you can give them away). Then every so often, give your list a free ebook. It’s all right if some people already have it—the fact that you offered it at all will build your rep with your list.
• Free reports on topics of interest. You don’t always have to offer a full-blown ebook. A simple, brief report that covers a topic your readers are interested in is a great thing to offer. And you can often assemble these from existing PLR material you have.
• Free gifts. Imagine how your subscribers will like you if you hand them a free set of website templates, or a free piece of software. That’s a great way to have people remember you as somebody they want to pay attention to.
• Pure information in email form. You don’t have to require your subscribers to download anything…just give them good information in the email! That could be a personal story or case study, a review of a product, an explanation of a concept, or anything else that might be helpful.

As you build your relationship with your list, don’t forget to sell to them as well. It’s not 100 percent relationship building or 100 percent selling—you need to balance both.

But what do you sell? You have three options:

• You can promote other people’s products as an affiliate. This is always an option when you have a list…but I encourage you not to do it for a while. Stick to your own stuff for a bit before you start sending customers to other marketers.
• Additional reprint rights products. You don’t have to promote only product you’ve built from scratch. Mine your RR/MRR/PLR library to find additional products and packages you can create and sell to your list. I suggest coming up with at least one reprint right product every three months. At the end of a couple years, you’ll have eight products that not only made you money when you sold them, but also give you additional fodder for future bonuses.
• Your own products. Over time, you’ll want to create your own products as well, without using reprint rights material as a starting point. This is where your buyers will start seeing your unique added value, and they’ll keep coming back for more.

When you offer your list a reprint rights product or a product you’ve created from scratch, you’ll be making the offer to people who have either bought from you before or have at least opted into your list. This is a friendly crowd—it’s not like trying to convince somebody who’s never met you to buy.

That said, you still need to focus on increasing the perceived value of your product so you can charge as much as possible for it. Here are a couple things you can do:

• Add components. Remember that products with multiple components are frequently seen to be more valuable. If you can add an audio or video to your product, or add another reprint rights component that creates a system, that’s usually smart to do.
• Add bonuses. You don’t necessarily have to have a system where all of your components are part of an interrelated package. You can also offer bonuses that more loosely related, but still add value. For example, if you’re offering an ebook called Photoshop for Newbies, you could add some bonuses like some graphics templates, or a video tutorial. That’s not really a system (although you could pitch it that way), but it’s all related.

Whenever you offer one of your own products to your list, you want to be sure you don’t assume they’ll love it just because it’s from you. Knock yourself out to give them great stuff. When you combine a solid offer with the fact that your list at least likes you enough to stick around, you’ll probably make some healthy sales.

3.2     Promoting Within Products

One of the easiest ways to make money on the backend is to embed promotions for other products inside the products you sell. When people buy your products, they’ll see the promotions for other products, and they might buy those as well. That can be a source of ongoing income for you.

Here’s a quick overview of how to build promotions into your products.

3.2.1   What To Sell

You can promote anything you want inside your products, but here are some guidelines:

• Promote affiliate products. This probably goes without saying, so I’m not trying to insult your intelligence. But I’d rather be safe than sorry. When you promote other people’s products, make sure you’re getting paid a commission. There’s nothing wrong with including links to products you don’t get paid a commission on as well (as is the case with free tools), but be sure to include at least a few that you do get paid for.
• Promote complementary products. These are products that help people use yours better, or easier, or cheaper. For example, if you sell an ebook about website creation, it would be a very natural thing to promote the Aweber autoresponder service. If you promote something random, like a pet training ebook, you won’t get any affiliate sales, and people will think your product is junk that’s just trying to promote random products…because that’s what it will be.
• Promote fresh, popular products. If you use space to promote products that have been around for years and are pretty much available everywhere, you’re missing an opportunity. Once you include a promotion in a product, it obviously will stay in every copy you sell, and you can’t change it once somebody buys it. But at least start with products that are still good sellers at the time you launch your product.
• Whenever possible, promote your own products. If you have a complementary product out there, don’t be afraid to promote it from within other products you sell. For example, I have my own autoresponder service at http://www.MonsterResponse.com, and I freely promote it within my other products. It’s a great service and I’m proud to offer it. Over time, you’ll build up your own library of helpful products you can offer inside other products you sell.
• Favor products that get you residual commissions. If you can promote a service that gets you monthly recurring commissions when somebody signs up (Aweber is a good example of this), that can be like striking gold. You don’t have to do any extra work to get paid the residual commissions, so why not promote something that gets you paid over and over again?

Anything that gets you paid when it sells is fair game for promotion. Whether it’s your own product or an affiliate product doesn’t matter. If you’ll follow the simple guidelines I just gave you, you’ll put yourself in a position to be making money from the products you sell for a very long time.

3.2.2  How To Structure Your Links

Saying you should have links in your product is one thing. But let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of how to do it.

First, how many links should you have?

There’s no set number that’s acceptable, but you don’t want to “stuff” your product so full of promotional links that there’s not enough real content to be helpful. You also don’t want to over-promote and fix it so your readers ignore the promotions you really want them to pay attention to.

So what does that mean? To keep things simple, if your product is an ebook, don’t average more than a few links per page. This is a judgment call, not a hard and fast rule. Ask yourself a couple questions:

• Would the number of links annoy you if you had purchased the product?
• Would the number of links make you essentially blind to links, such that you didn’t have any desire to click?

If you answer yes to either question, you have too many links.

But there’s no denying that up to a certain point having more links will maximize your chances of somebody clicking one and buying something as a result. The key is to include links in a variety of ways inside the product.

One flavor of link is to include it where it fits naturally in the flow of the text (whether that’s on a slide or an ebook page). Here’s an example of how I did that earlier in this lesson:

Word processing programs like Microsoft Word will automatically turn text that looks like a link into an actual hyperlink. When you convert to PDF format, most PDF converters will make the link clickable in the PDF file.

Another way to include links is to include specific promotions for products. This is similar to the first flavor, because you’re including a link in the text, but you’re specifically promoting a product in more of a sale copy kind of way.

For example, you might have a promotion that looks like this example from inside one of my products:

That kind of promotion can be very effective, because it attracts attention and lets you be more explicit about the fact that you’re promoting a product.

A third way to include links is to list the links in a place where people expect to see a list of links, such as a Recommended Resources section of an ebook, like this:

You’ve seen examples of that in every lesson of this course. Readers expect to see links there, so it’s a natural place to put them. And it lets you collect all of your links in one place to give a reader another chance to click.

Regardless of where you put your links, though, you’ll generally want to make them redirect links.

A redirect link redirects somebody from your site to the site you want to link to. It allows you to change where the link points without changing the link inside your product. This is a real advantage in two ways.

First, if you want to swap out something you’re promoting, you can do that with a redirect link. For example, I could promote an autoresponder service like this (none of the links I’ll show you work—I’m just illustrating the concept):

I highly recommend this autoresponder service.

The link in that text could point to a link on my site that looks like this:

http://www.OneOfMySites.com/favoriteautoresponder

That link points to a page on my site that nobody will ever see. It has code in it that redirects somebody to the actual site I’m promoting. That code might look something like this:

<?php
header(“Location: http://[some site I’m promoting]“);
?>

That code is in a programming language called PHP. I would put it in a page called index.php inside the favoriteautoresponder directory (folder) on my site. When I point to that folder with a link, my server knows to load the index.php page and execute the code. Here’s a brief video that shows you how to set up a PHP redirect page on your site:

[video]

The second reason to use redirect links is that it “cloaks” your affiliate links. If you don’t do that, people can swap out your affiliate ID for theirs and steal your commissions. If you use a redirect link, though, they can’t even see your affiliate link, and they won’t be able to steal it.

I obviously didn’t use redirect links for all of the links in this course, because I wanted to be sure you could get to the tools I recommend. I used redirect links where they made sense, and I used direct links where I thought it would be more helpful. You can make the same choice yourself.

4.0     Residual Income Opportunities

I

n the previous chapter, I told you about what amounts to a residual income opportunity—promoting other products within products you sell. In this chapter I’m going to give you two more formal approaches that can put some serious money in your pocket.

4.1      Membership Sites

A membership site is a site where people pay a recurring fee, typically every month, to get the content and/or benefits of the site. Here’s an example of one of mine at http://www.SuperAffiliates.com:

Most membership sites use some kind of web server script to handle member management, and they need to integrate with a payment processor that supports recurring billing (ClickBank does).

In the site I just showed you, I give people some material right away after they join. That includes things like the Super Affiliates™ Blueprint, which shows people the exact step-by-step system they can use to go from earning nothing as an affiliate to becoming a super affiliate very quickly.

It’s a meaty book (120 pages), and it’s just one of the items new members get right away.

I also give members new material every month, such as audio training, a monthly live case study and a mystery “business in a box” they can plug in and profit from immediately. That fresh, helpful monthly material keeps people signed up as members, because they can’t wait to get the new goodies every month.

Membership sites are a great way to make a solid income online, but let’s explore the pros and cons more fully.

4.1.1   Pros And Cons

On the pro side:

• You’ll make a recurring income. If you sell a one-time purchase product, you can certainly make more money on the backend, as I’ve shown you, but you’re making money only once on each initial sale. With a membership site, you’ll do the setup work once, and get paid over and over again.
• They’re not extremely difficult to set up. Tools like recurring billing at ClickBank make is much easier than it used to be.
• It’s easier to increase your perceived value. If a buyer will get new stuff every month, it’s easier to convince him that he’s getting what he pays for. For example, if you just offered a single new ebook every month, it’s pretty easy to make the case that it’s worth $17, or $27, or whatever you charge.
• You don’t need as much traffic. More is often better, but it’s obvious that you don’t need as much. If you’re selling a one-time purchase product, you need a steady stream of new traffic to fuel your sales. If you’re selling a monthly recurring payment product, one visitor who buys will fuel your sales for months.

There are some cons to membership sites, though:

• A membership site can be more work to manage. You’ll have a set of members who expect what you promised, and they’ll be around for at least a few months. This is a little more involved than selling a one-time purchase product where all you have to worry about is sales and refunds.
• They can be a bit more technical involved. As I mentioned before, many membership sites require a script for member management. You can do it without a script, as I’ll describe later, but there’s the potential that you’ll need more tech savvy than with one-time purchase mini-sites.
• They can take more work to maintain. When you sell a one-time purchase product, you do the work to create the product and set up your site, but you’ll essentially make passive income from it. Membership sites (SuperAffiliates.com is a good example) need new material every month, which can mean more effort to create it.

When you look at the pros and cons, though, the pros come out way ahead most of the time. The biggest factor is the recurring income. If you can set up a simple membership site that requires little additional work versus a single product mini-site, it’s usually worth it to get the recurring income.

4.1.2   The Simple Membership Site

You can get fancy when you set up membership sites and use scripts to help you do it. But you don’t have to go the fancy route. You can use simple tools to get the job done.

The first step, regardless of how you implement the site, is to decide what you’ll offer. Let’s assume you’ll charge a monthly fee for your site. All you need is

• An initial offer to entice people to become members
• Your monthly offer (reports, ebooks, audios, etc.)
• Monthly material to fulfill your monthly offer

Every single bit of that can come from reprint rights material. You can supplement it with your own products that you make from scratch, or that you hire people to create for you. In fact, it’s often easier to start with customized reprint rights material to get the ball rolling, and then move to your own products over time. And you can always mix them together at any point.

For example, let’s say you create a membership site to target the technical aspects of running an online business. You want to set this up as sort of a “IM Tech for Dummies” offering. It’s a great market to target, because lots of people fear the technical hurdles to running an online business (even though those hurdles really aren’t that high).

Your initial offer could be some PLR training manuals and videos about how to set up a simple website. You can tell people they’ll get those initial materials right away, and that the value of videos is some multiple of your monthly fee. That makes the initial offer look very attractive.

Your monthly offer could be similar. You could offer additional training videos, for example, that you create with CamStudio.

Or you could offer a new mini-site template every month. Or you could offer both! As long as what you’re offering is worth more than what you’re charging each member per month, you’ve got a good offer to make.

Your templates might cost $37 if somebody buys them himself, but you’re only charging $17 a month for your membership. So he’s immediately getting $20 of benefit he didn’t have to pay for.

That’s literally all you need on the content side—your initial and monthly offers.

On the technical side, you can keep it very simple. You’ll need two tools:

• ClickBank
• Your autoresponder service (Aweber is a good choice)

ClickBank lets you set up recurring billing, which will handle charging customers every month automatically. Even better, it’ll handle paying your affiliates automatically every month, which is a huge time saver for you.

All Publisher accounts are automatically enabled for recurring billing, so you can easily set up your membership site (assuming ClickBank approves it, of course).

Recurring billing through ClickBank gives you a lot of flexibility in how you set up your initial charge, whether you offer a free trial period, what your recurring charge will be, how often you’ll rebill, etc.

Watch the video that walks you through how to set up a recurring billing product.

The only other technical component you’ll need is your autoresponder service. This is how you’ll send monthly information to members. To keep things simple in the beginning, you can do this manually. Here’s how to do it:

• Require people to register for monthly updates after they sign up. This is a must, and people don’t mind doing it—they signed up for monthly material, after all. After they purchase your product, send them to a sign-up page where they can join your member list. This is no different from how you set up any autoresponder sign-up page, except that you might want to require people to enter their ClickBank receipt number so you can have another way to identify them later.
• When people cancel their memberships, unsubscribe them from your list. You will get cancellations—it’s just part of running a membership site. When ClickBank notifies you that somebody cancelled, look them up on your autoresponder list and unsubscribe them.
• Email the new monthly page to members every month. Set up a new page for the month on your site, and make sure the page name doesn’t fit a pattern people could easily guess (such as “jan2009.htm”). Then email the link to your members every month. If you want to set up your material ahead of time, which is a great way to go, you can create your monthly pages and queue up your monthly messages in advance.

Over time, you’ll probably want to cut your workload for ongoing management by installing a script to handle subscriptions/unsubscribes automatically, and to let you offer new monthly material to members. But that’s something you can do when you have 100+ members paying you a monthly fee that will more than cover the cost of your upgrades.

When the time comes to consider automating, you might consider a script like Amember, which gets positive reviews from lots of marketers.

You also might consider a more expensive option in MemberSpeed. It integrates with ClickBank recurring billing, and has an impressive list of features for the price.

4.1.3   Value Adding Strategies

Membership sites thrive on offering material to members that they really want. Your initial offer has to attract attention, of course, but you also need to hold people’s attention over time…which is what keeps them paying you!

Here are some things you can do to add value to your initial offer:

• Offer training for “newbies” in your niche. You can almost always find reprint rights training material (remember, that includes PLR, MRR and RR products) in any niche that needs “how-to” information. When you offer it, it makes your initial offer seem that much more attractive.
• Offer free trials and/or discounts on tools. This is an easy way to increase the perceived value of your offer without doing a lot of extra work. Many online service providers and product creators will consider a partnership with you where they offer a free trial or discount if you send them prospects. If the don’t advertise that they do that, send them an en email and ask. It’s really a win-win deal, so most will at least consider it.
• Offer bonuses. This is a strategy you can borrow from one-time sale sites. Come up with a set of complementary bonuses that represent an attractive immediate offer for people who sign up. It could be a several ebooks related to your niche (you’ll probably have some in your reprint rights library), some helpful software (you’ll probably have some of this too), or some audios or videos (these are especially good bonuses).

Here are some things you can do to add value to your monthly offer:

• Offer a “business in a box” component. I mentioned this for my SuperAffiliates.com site. If your site focuses on some facet of making money online, offering a business in a box is a great addition to our package. It presents your members with a compelling reason to stay around. The best news is that it’s usually not a lot of work for you. Many reprint rights packages come with products, squeeze pages, sales letters and other stuff. All you have to do is sweep through to correct any errors and maybe polish some things up, and you’ve got your business in a box for the month finished.
• Offer “surprises” that will delight members. A great idea to consider is doing interviews with experts in your niche, which your members will get as an exclusive benefit. You can sometimes find these people at forums. Initiate contact with them, offer to interview them and record the interview, then give it to your members for free and give it to the person you interview as a free product he can use however he wants. You can use a service like http://www.TalkShoe.com to record your interviews.
• Offer bonuses for people who maintain their membership. This is also pretty easy to do. You can offer a bonus to people who maintain their membership for 3, 6 or more months (which obviously will increase your total revenue per member). This can be anything a member might consider valuable, but I suggest that the value of your incentive offers grow as a person stays a member longer. For example, your three-month bonus could be a free website template from a well known designer, your six-month bonus could be six months of free hosting from a popular hosting company, and your 12-month bonus could be entry into a drawing for a very limited set of custom ghostwritten ebooks. You’d have to negotiate those deals…or not. Remember, you can craft your bonuses based on reprint rights material you already have. If you bought a set of PLR website templates, for example, you’ve got your three-month bonus right there.
• Add a forum. You can do this with a free script. Google free forum script to find lots of options. A forum gives you an extra feature without lots of extra work to set it up…but be careful. Unless you want to risk having people spam your forum, or post things you find objectionable, you’ll need to spend some time moderating the forum (or hire somebody to help), so consider the possible time and expense before you add one.

If you’ll focus on adding value to your membership offers, you’ll find a steady stream of new members joining your list, which will increase your monthly income without any extra effort on your part.

4.2     Forced Continuity Memberships

Forced continuity is a variation on a membership site. It’s more of a marketing difference than a technical one.

The idea of forced continuity isn’t new. You might remember the old record clubs, or more recently CD clubs. You signed up to get some number of free CDs (you just paid for shipping) and then you got a new CD every month that you had to pay for…unless you cancelled.

The “continuity” part of the program is easy to understand. You’re paying a recurring monthly fee, which maintains the continuity of your membership.

The “forced” part is that you’re automatically billed for that membership unless you explicitly cancel.

Notice that that’s exactly what ClickBank recurring billing is! Unless somebody cancels, he’ll keep getting the monthly bill. Like I said, it’s technically the same as any other membership site. The difference is usually in how you make your initial offer, and the language you use to present it.

You’ve probably seen examples of a forced continuity model before. Some marketer might offer you a free set of DVD videos that he’ll ship right to your door, if you’ll try out his monthly newsletter.

When you sign up to get the free stuff, you’re signing up for the free trial of the monthly component. If you don’t cancel, you’ll be billed for that monthly newsletter every month for however long it lasts.

Here are some other examples of how you could use this model:

• Offer a free immediate download if somebody will try your monthly service, such as a monthly website template service
• Offer a free prize from someplace like http://www.FireBox.com if somebody will try your monthly newsletter
• Offer a free trial of your service that automatically shifts to a recurring monthly charge at the end of the trial period (this is something ClickBank recurring billing lets you do)

And I’m sure you can think of other ways to implement the concept.

4.2.1   Pros And Cons

On the pro side:

• It’s as easy to set up as any membership site. There’s no technical difference at all.
• You’ll get recurring income. This is the same benefit as a regular membership site has.
• Many people forget they signed up for a monthly offer. That means you’ll probably make at least 1-2 months of recurring revenue before people cancel. There’s nothing wrong or illegal about that. If you’re up front about your offer, it’s a member’s responsibility to cancel in a timely manner.

There are some cons to forced continuity offers, though:

• You increase your legal risk. I’m going to show you how to present things so you can avoid legal problems, but there’s no doubt that some customers will blame you for billing them monthly when they didn’t want that. If they decide to take legal action, you might be stuck paying to defend yourself.
• Customers can get angry. Even if somebody doesn’t take legal action against you, he might get upset that you did something “sneaky” (in his mind, at least), and he might hurt your reputation in forums, when talking to friends, etc.

I think the pros most often outweigh the cons, but please consider whether a forced continuity offer is worth doing. Can you accomplish the same or very similar goals without forced continuity?

4.2.3  How To Implement Forced Continuity

You can implement a forced continuity membership site just like you did any kind of membership site. Remember, the difference isn’t really technical. You’ll still have members you need to manage, you’ll still have monthly material you need to give them, and you’ll still charge them a monthly fee for that material.

The difference is in how you present the offer. You need to be very careful here, and I strongly recommend that you have a lawyer look over you’re the wording you use. The more explicit you are, the better off you’ll be.

Don’t hide anything, or force people to sign up when they really don’t want to. That’s how you get in legal trouble.

In fact, that’s why I’m telling you forced continuity shouldn’t be much different from a regular membership site.

In reality, if often is. For example, you’ll see somebody offer a very inexpensive initial product and buried in their confirmation email you’ll see something like this:

Thanks for your purchase. And as a special gift, you’ve been signed up for my monthly newsletter automatically! You’ll pay just $27 a month for it. You’ll get your first issue within 15 days, and you don’t have to lift a finger to get it. You can cancel anytime within the first 30 days.

That’s legally wrong to do. You can’t sign somebody up for something he didn’t explicitly approve. More often than not, when a marketer (or a company) does this, they also make it difficult to cancel, which is also punishable by law.

You want to stay as far away from that approach as you can. You can certainly mention your continuity program in a follow-up email, but that shouldn’t be the first time somebody hears about it.

There are two easy options for avoid almost all possible problems. Both involved presenting your continuity program as an alternative with extra benefits…

First, you can make your continuity program an option right on your sales page. You might present the two flavors of your product side by side, like this:

Option 1 You can pay a one-time fee of $27 for Product X. You’ll get all of the benefits I’ve described here, including [a key benefit you want to highlight]. Click below to take this option. [order button]

Option 2 You can pay only $7 for Product X if you’ll also try my premium monthly newsletter. You’ll get the first month free, and then pay only $27 a month automatically from then on. You can cancel any time with a simple procedure that takes about 30 seconds. [order button]

That makes your continuity offer clear and easy to understand. Sine you present it right next to the non-continuity version, people will almost certainly read it and know what they’re signing up for. They definitely can’t blame you for making it explicit.

Second, you can make your continuity program an “upgrade” on your order page. The language you use can be essentially the same, but you’ll present it on a page right after your sales page. You might say something like this:

Yes! I Want Product X!

I’ve made a great decision here. I’m going to love Product X, and that it will a tremendous help to me. I understand that I’ll pay just $27 for it one time, and that the one-time purchase price includes:

• [your list of benefits]

It’s as easy as clicking the link below to enter my 100% secure credit card information…

WAIT! SPECIAL EXCLUSIVE OFFER

I can pay only $7 for Product X if I sign up for a free one-month trial of [your name]’s premium newsletter. If I like it, I’ll keep receiving it automatically for $27 a month. If I don’t like it, I can cancel at any time during the trial period and owe nothing.

[order button]

No thanks, I’ll just take Product X for $27

This is essentially presenting your continuity program as a clearly stated upsell, with the obvious options of accepting the offer or turning it down. That should keep you out of legal trouble as well.

But remember, I’m not a lawyer, so when it doubt, consult legal counsel to make sure you’re not putting yourself at risk.

5.0     Conclusion

N

ow you know how to turn your business into a long-term money maker by building in various types of backend profit engines

I gave you and overview of the backend process so you can see how it relates to your frontend offers.

Then I showed you three different ways to make money at the point of sale (POS) by offering complementary product.

You might remember that those methods were upsells, OTOs and Thank You page offers. And I gave you some specific copywriting tips for each kind of offer.

Next, I showed you how to make more money on the backend over time.

I walked you through how to build a relationship with your list, gave you some ideas for what you can offer your established buyers, and described how to build links into the products you sell.

Finally, I told you how to a build a nice recurring income with membership sites.

I told you how to set up a membership site simply and quickly, and I gave you a couple different flavors of membership site, including forced continuity programs. Remember that I told you consider the potential legal risk of forced continuity before you got that direction.

Now you have your entire business up and running, including your backend money-makers that will let you reap the rewards of your efforts for months or even years.

In the next lesson, I’ll give you some advanced techniques for taking your reprint rights business to the next level.

I’ll see you in the next module!

Recommended Resources

This book is full of great resources, so I wanted to collect them all in one place for easy reference.

http://www.MyFreeWebsiteBuilder.com – My free website building tool that lets people without any HTML experience build attractive websites.

http://www.NaturalReaders.com – A text-to-speech tool that lets you create audios of ebooks quickly and easily.

http://www.CamStudio.org – An open source (free) tool to create your own screen capture videos for products.

http://www.SuperAffiliates.com – My monthly membership site that shows you how to become a super affiliate in record time.

http://www.ClickBank.com – The web’s most popular affiliate product marketplace. It’s free to sign up for a nickname which will let you promote any of the 10,000+ products they host.

http://www.AWeber.com – An excellent autoresponder service that gets rave reviews from online marketers, and has for years.

http://www.Amember.com – A relatively inexpensive membership site script that will let you manage your member list, integrate with ClickBank and other payment processors, etc.

http://www.MemberSpeed.com – A more expensive membership script that has a fuller set of features, and still doesn’t cost a ton once you’ve established some recurring revenue.

http://www.FireBox.com – A great source for dropship gadgets and prizes you can use for forced continuity offers.

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