D'oh!

I was making a promotion for the one year anniversary of my product site. I had an autoresponder sequence set up for the past 3 days....only I didn't que yesterday's message to go out! I probably lost 2-3 sales from that. D'oh!!

Good news, though. Jean-Rene and I sat down for a chat on AIM last night. We traded ideas and and had a great time. Bouncing ideas off of each other is a great way to develop tactics and strategies you would never have thought of on your own. I suggest you do it sometime.

I have found a microniche that may or may not work for a product. The problem with it is that there is plenty of free information for anyone who wants it. We will see if I decide to test it out or not. The other markets are being fine tuned to make sure there is enough traffic in them to sustain a profitable business.

More news soon.

Commercial #1

I am having someone make a commercial for my first product. I was able to see the rough cut today and it is awesome. There are a few things that need to be tweaked but it is really good for a first iteration.

I am having him make 3 commercials in all. These will be posted on YouTube, sent out to my list, and also provided to my affiliates so that they can use it in their promotions. Exciting stuff.

I was able to narrow things down to 8 possible markets, with one of them being a definite. I would like to shoot for a price point of $75+ for both products. With the way the commercial for the first product came out, I will have him make commercials for the two new products when the time is right.

Potential Product #2
I have started working on the namesqueeze page for this one. For now it will redirect people to a CB product after they sign up. This should help cover costs as I develop the product.

Product Progress

I have a definite for one of the products I am going to make. It is highly competitive but that just means that there is a market for it. I'm very excited about it. I'm thinking about a price point of at least $75. Depending on how I flesh things out and what the market can handle, I may bump it up to $100+ after the product is out.

The second product may or may not be in an area that is as competitive. I'm not sure yet. Either way it goes, I'm shooting for two again in August. This time around I am putting A LOT of focus on market research. After seeing how my first product has performed, I'm convinced that heavy market research is the way to go. Everything else should just fall into place.

At least four products by the end of the year in at least 3 niches. If I can get 3 niches to $1500 each, we are looking at $4500/month.

Plugging Away

The problem with coming up with 300+ markets to research is that it means you have 300+ markets to research. I have found one with major potential though. It is in a very competative market with PLENTY of affiliate opportunities. Now I'm on the look out for any others that my have the right items for a possible product.

As to Jean-Rene's question, the reason I'm going into more markets is diversity. I seriously want to quit my job soon and I just can't do that if all of my income is generated by one site. Yes, that site may have multiple streams of traffic, but that doesn't matter. If something happens to the site directly (hacker, spam complaints, server melt down, etc.) then my income evaporates instantaneously. More eggs, more baskets.

Also, the niche for my first product is not big enough to provide me with enough income to live off of and expand the business. Need more markets to more consistent income.

I don't know if I mentioned it before or not but I found an ebook that was in a niche similar to Product #1. I offered it to my list and made 9 sales before the site suddenly disappeared. It took me 2 weeks but I was finally able to contact the owner and see if they would be willing to sell the site and the rights to the book. The guy is and would like $2500 for all of it. I have asked for records on income for the last 12 months so that I can determine how much it is worth.

Back to the Drawing Board

With the coming of August and the goal of creating two products by the end of the month, I have gone back to the drawing board on my markets. I added a few today and the total is around 358 ideas. There has to be a winner in there somewhere, right?

I uploaded a free report that I had written for Product Site #1. Hopefully this will encourage more sign ups and more verifications. I also offered it as a free gift to my list today. One of the psychological triggers is reciprocity. Hopefully by giving them the free report, it will butter them up enough for the deal I'm going to launch by the end of the week. It will either be a physical version of my product that I will mail to them or a discount on my product if they buy something else through my affiliate link.

The later worked very, very well toward the end of may and helped pull in $500 in something like 12 days. Not a monsterous amount for big dogs but it was huge for me. I'd like to try it again and it is looking like that will be my only recourse. I had planned a big launch of a physical version of my product to celebrate the site's 1 year anniversary but Clickbank is giving me the run around. I want to price the special at $65.00 but to do that, you have to have CB's approval. To get that, the physical item must be a complimentary bonus and not something people have to pay extra for. We will see if I get the approval.

Also my big affiliate partners are out of pocket, as they say on The Wire. One is on vacation and the other hasn't answered my email. Alas.

SEO is Not Cool

I know, I know. It is no fun and is the reason I switched to PPC over a year ago. Time have changed. You can't just throw up a one page site anymore and test a market for a few days. I tried and ended up paying something on the order of $0.40 per click just to get in the top 10 on in 3 markets. After that debacle, I've decided to focus on Product Site #1 until the Thirty Day Challenge.

If you have not heard of the Thirty Day Challenge, listen up. It is good stuff and teaches you how to create a product. Go check it out if you are interested.

On a more pressing note, I was planning to launch and upgrade for my product this week. I'm waiting on Clickbank to ok the $65 price point. After that I will launch the upgrade for 5 days and cut things off on the 31st. Hopefully this will spur some more sales for the end of the month.

Scrapped!

Due to numerous factors including my vacation and other difficulties, I have had to scrap the product creation products this month. Instead I have focused on building SEO traffic to my product site instead.

Product creation picks back up in August.

Yes, I am back from vacation.

... and way behind on the July Challenge. I have narrowed down my markets and today at work I will be creating the namesqueeze page for the top 5 markets based on criteria that I have yet to determine. If I'm lucky 2 of those markets will pan out. I don't see that happening for some reason though=)

My painter and his girlfriend are signing the lease today. It will be a huge load off to have the place rented and $900 going to the mortgage. The place is still a mess but they really want to move in now. I'm going to write a clause into the lease stating that they chose to move in in its current state so that it won't come back to bite me later on.

Happy 4th of July!

Yes indeed! Happy Independence Day, everyone!

I will be out of town for a few days, hopefully I will be able to find an Internet connection so I can do some work. The list is down to 27 possible markets. A few that I was really interested dropped off and I have been able to add some more to another list that I plan to test out eventually.

Hopefully being gone won't set me back too far. I'm thinking that I will take 5 from the 27 possible and test market receptiveness. The goal is 30-40 autoresponder sign ups per day. I will also implement an autoresponder sequence selling a Clickbank product to see how responsive people are to buying information products. If I can get them to buy someone else's product, I could probably do better selling my own.

Narrowing Down the List

Two posts in 2 days! How about that!

I spent the latter hours of the evening narrowing down my list of 306 markets based on specific criteria I set. Items such as predicted traffic levels and the availability of affiliate products came into play. The list is now down to 33 potential markets. I have some other elements to sift the topics through before performing actual market tests. Hopefully 2 out of those 33 will prove to be winners.

This time around I have tried my best to be as dispassionate as possible when picking the topics. Last year when deciding on my first project I let a number of factors play a role in my decision. I think that hurt me in the long run when it came time to make sales. This time it is all about the numbers and the criteria.

Congrats goes to Jen! She made some big moves last month, go check it out.

The End of a Crazy Month

June was so rough that my girlfriend and I went out and had a celebration that the month was ending last night. No lie. I was close to breaking a goal but didn't quite make it.

June Numbers
Gross: $1062.41
Expenses: $189.72
Net: $872.69

Granted, this is the first time I have broken $1k in gross for a month. Yea! for me and all of that. I'm still a bit disappointed, though. There were several days that I made no sales. If I had even one small affiliate sale on each of those days it would have put me over the top. Alas.

The thing that really gets me though is that if I had been able to focus on making those sales, it would have been easier. Unfortunately (and fortunately in some cases) my tenant broke the lease and ran away, they had destroyed the other unit, a big tree fell in my yard, and one of my window was broken along the way. Good news is that having that tenant out allowed me to fix up the unit plus the guy and his girlfriend who own the company that did the cabinent painting want to rent the unit now for $900. That is a full $150 more than the previous tenant=)

Now it is time to refocus on the business. It is now July and I'm in product creation mode. I have a list of 306+ ideas for markets that need to be researched.

Stay tuned.