At Affiliate Incubator, one of the speakers was Mike Koenigs, of Traffic Geyser. You’ve heard me talk about Traffic Geyser before, but he really opened my eyes to a different way to use video. 

This week I’ve been working on videos, pretty much straight for three days. I’m nearly done. However, my new approach, instead of spending a lot of time creating one video, is now to spend my time creating tons of videos. I’m aiming for 15, all about the product I’ve chosen. Oh, did I mention I’m doing this for an affiliate product?

So your first question is probably how in the world can I create 15 videos about someone else’s product? A very good question indeed. 

What I did is I bought my target product, and read through it carefully (it is an ebook). I took notes on any questions or things I thought people might not know about it. I then did a bit more research on my niche, checking out About.com for the top five most common questions regarding it. After all was said and done I had roughly 15 frequently asked questions. I then went through and wrote a 100 to 150 word answer to each of them. It takes roughly 40-60 seconds to read that number of words. 

Next I created a bunch of title slides, introducing my question, answer (ie No, but…) and my URL. Then I went to stock.xchng and downloaded pictures (for free, with free-use rights) for every part of each video. I have roughly 6-10 pictures per video. The pictures don’t have to all relate strictly to your overall topic, just to the sentence you’re saying at the time. This actually gives you a lot of leeway to use different pictures. 

My next step is to get some royalty-free music to add to the videos. Because each video is no more than 60 seconds long, I think I’ll buy three different full length songs, then hack them up into sound bytes to use with each video, so each video will be slightly different. I’ve used PremiumBeat.com in the past and was happy with them. 

So the plan is the finish off the videos, create a squeeze page with an opt-in form, create an autoresponder series, then submit all 15 videos twice on Traffic Geyser using their timed delivery. That should give me about 120+ videos out there; a far cry from my previous 25 or so. Plus, and this is key, for each video I will be identifying uber-popular competitors on YouTube and matching titles and tags. So each matched video theoretically will show up just after the popular one, and hopefully gain more views that way. 

So there you have it. Initially I thought I would wait until I was all done and had some results to tell you about, but this way is more fun for everyone I think. Part of the purpose of this blog is to give you a window into what I’m experimenting with, and to show what works and what doesn’t. I’ve got high hopes for this, but I’ve been wrong often enough before.

If you’re selling anything online, testimonials can help your sales letter / process. People would much rather be convinced by someone other than the person they’re buying from. Think about it for a second - if a friend, or even a friend of a friend recommended a product to you, it would already be a ’shoe in’ so to speak once you’re in the store, right? Well, using testimonials is exactly the same idea.

I don’t know how many sales letters I’ve read, especially in the info-marketing / internet marketing niche. I can tell you that I frequently scroll down to see whose testimonials they’ve got on the page. Because I’ve started to get familiar with the players in the niche, I can usually recognize at a glance a few of the testimonials. This lends a huge degree of credence to the sales letter for me, and can often help tip things in favor of a sale.

So the first question many of you will ask is: “How do I get testimonials?”

Well, it might be a lot easier than you think. Have you tried asking? In your autoresponder series, try asking for the testimonial, same as you’d ask for the sale!

I recently implemented this on my webstore. I’ve got a “buyer’s guide” that I’m giving away for free to help potential customers better understand the product. Just the other day I added an email a few days after the download email, following up with them, and in the email I asked them if they had had a chance to read through the guide, and if they had any comments to please reply to the message. Well I haven’t had many downloads yet (I’ve still got pretty low traffic) but I’ve already gotten one reply! Percentage-wise, that’s a pretty high response rate.

You might be surprised what you can get by asking.

Ok, #2. What should be included in a testimonial?

Everything you can without being tacky. Some people are willing to send in video testimonials, which in my opinion is pretty much golden. Audio is next best, but written testimonials are still terrific. If possible, try to include a picture of the person. Name, location, sometimes profession, or website are all details that are good. Usually for credibility you’ll want at minimum the name, and some other identifying detail. The name alone for some reason isn’t quite perceived as well.

#3. “Do you have any more tips?”

Sure, why not? The other day I came across a great site that generates free testimonial graphics. This site is by the same guy (Mike Capuzzi) who created CopyDoodles (worthy of another post). It’s pretty cool, basically taking your text and making it look like it was handwritten on a piece of stationary or notepaper.

If you’re interested in more information about the power of testimonials, Brian McEvoy is the testimonial expert and has a great product along those lines. It’s well worth checking out.

I recently got an edition of SmallBusinessNewz in my inbox with an article by Chris Crum on “7 Steps to Earning Customer Trust Online”. The complete article can be found here. I thought it was worth mentioning here, as I’ve been striving to build credibility and trust in my own online store. At the risk of ruining your read of the actual article, I’ve re-summarized the 7 points here as well, though with my own notes.

Chris starts with a stat claiming that 81% of consumers don’t trust small online businesses. Shocking? Not really, if you think about it. Personally I’ve grown over-used to trusting things online, and I’ve slapped down my credit card for more offers than I care to think about. So it came as a small surprise to me the other day when my sister asked my advice on buying a study guide online. I had a look at the sales letter, and turns out it was hosted by ClickBank. To me, that was golden. I realized though, that for most people, at least that first initial ebook purchase can be quite intimidating. The same holds true for physical goods.

So what’s important?

1. Branding

You might ask what can a small company do in terms of branding? Well there’s lots. You don’t have to be Coca Cola with $58.2 billion of brand equity to be successful at branding. I’m working hard on this with my store, DigitalFrameGuy.com. Putting forward a consistent image, whether it be your logo, your signature, or your marketing claims, all helps to build your brand. People tend to trust the familiar more than the unknown, unless you’re one heck of a copywriter.

2. Make Yourself Appear Larger

Do you have a toll free 800 number? If not, go get one for $10 a month. I specifically chose an 800 number over cheaper 888 or 877 variants, simply for the psychological “big company” factor. If you hear 1-800, your brain has been trained to think corporation. Even though it is just me, there are ways to appear much larger.

Using your home address? Throw a “Suite 110″ in front of it and mail yourself a letter. I’m actually trying this as I write it, but I’ve read it works. Plus, chances are “Suite 110″ sounds more official than your street address. By law you need to include your address on emails (for instance if you use Aweber), so why not try to use that as a trust builder?

On your email and voicemail, you can create separate departments as well. Now, you don’t want to confuse people or cause unnecessary bureacracy, but separate lines for service and sales is usually pretty straightforward. You can do that all for free with Ring Central.

I’ve got more ideas, but perhaps that is a whole separate post

3. Design

Site design is crucial. Ever visited one of those websites that was clearly somebody’s 1990’s brainchild that never grew to maturity? The instant I see a site like that, red flags and alarm bells start up even as I’m clicking back to Google. People tend not to trust the digital donkeys that don’t have modern site designs or technology. Plus, the site needs to be straightforward and easy to use. Have you searched for your site in the search engines, and then followed the process all the way through to checkout? I did that the other day and found a glaring error that I fixed immediately. You might be surprised with what you find.

4. Reputation

I care quite a bit about my businesses’ online reputation. Once that gets dragged through the mud it would be very hard to recover. Because I want people to trust me, I’ve given my customers my 100% guarantee that I’ll take back their order for any reason within 30 days. If my supplier won’t take it back, then I’ll be on the hook for it. However, I’d prefer to sell it on Ebay for a bit of a loss than to take the PR hit in some forum or blog somewhere. I recently stumbled upon a blog where the owner had had a run in with one of my competitors (do you Google to see what your competition is up to?) and he had quite the horror story going on! I jumped into the comments, trying to console him while at the same time explaining how my store was different. There are emotional people online, and they won’t keep silent. Use it to your advantage. Provide much more than they anticipated and they’ll heap praises on you! Let the down, and you better look out!

5. Security and Privacy

SSL certificates. Privacy Policies. No, you cannot sell or rent your list. Pretty straightfoward, but some merchants still aren’t getting it.

6. Testimonials

People are far more likely to believe someone else who’s walked a mile in their shoes than they are to believe you. Get over it. Once you get over it, use it to your advantage. Don’t have any testimonials yet? Have you asked? Send out an email asking for testimonials to all your past clients. Offer them a discount or something if you want. But you must use testimonials - they are a very powerful marketing tool!

7. Humanize Your Business

I started out right from the beginning with this one, calling the store “Digital Frame Guy” which has a personal feel to it. My logo has a guy in it, and I’ve tried to keep the site copy personal, especially the guarantees and such.

Looking for more ways to personalize your site? Put a picture of yourself the About Us page, or do some employee profiles. My next step is video - I’ll shortly be rolling out a series of videos for the site which I hope will both drive traffic and build a personal touch for the site. If you’re doing a video series, you’ve got a great opportunity for branding there as well. More on that in a different post, once the videos are out. We can’t give everything away all at once, can we? =)

Do you have any other suggestions or comments for building trust online?

These days it seems like there is no shortage of review sites out there, promoting this product or that. I recently had the opportunity to listen to Russell Brunson on a webinar and he was talking about a different spin on the old trick. It was new to me anyways, so I thought you might benefit.

The idea here is that you pick the affiliate product you’re going to market. I’m assuming you have an idea how to pick a decent product, if not let me know and I’ll post about that later on. So, assuming you’ve chosen a decent affiliate product to promote, the next step is to find out how it fits into the value ladder.

The Value Ladder

Russell talks a lot about his value ladder. In brief, the steps are as follows:

1. Some sort of freebie
2. Some sort of text based ebook. Could be free or cheap.
3. Audio based version of the same thing. Could be worth a bit more.
4. Video based version of the same thing. Again, worth more.
5. Home study course developing the niche a lot further.
6. Seminar, could be a webinar.
7. Workshop. At this point we’re talking about in-person events.
8. Live coaching.
9. Direct one on one coaching with yourself.

That’s the value ladder in a nutshell. I know, you’re sitting there thinking, how could I possibly get all that going for me? Well, it takes  quite a lot of work, and the good news is, you don’t have to have it all working for you to take advantage of the concept.

So you’ve got your affiliate product, (note the affiate product - you don’t need your own product to make this work), the next step is to figure out where on the value ladder your chosen product sits.

Let’s pick a mid-level internet marketing how to product for our example here, just because there are so few of them out there ;-). Let’s call it Affiliate Cash Grabber. It is an in-depth guide to affiliate marketing, and it really has a ton of great ideas and content.It is a mixture of video and ebook.

The first step is to see if you can get a copy of it for free, from the author. Try the WHOIS information on the site the sales page is listed on. You should find a phone number there. Give it a try. Barring that, you can try the contact email.

If you’re utterly unsuccessful at getting a free copy of the product, but you really want to promote it, you might want to consider buying it yourself. Use your own affiliate link, so it doesn’t cost you much. If the product is on Clickbank, you can ethically use your own links as long as your account has processed sales from more than five different credit card numbers. Don’t do this on a brand new account, but rather from an established account you’re using for other sales.

Sit down and immerse yourself in their product. Chances are you will learn something you never knew before. Take notes. After you’re done, create your review product. This will be essentially a Cliff Notes version of the product. You can talk about what you learned, or how you think this could be applied, or how you know this is going to help your own business, or whatever. You get the idea.

Depending on where the product is on the value ladder, you want to create a product that is one step down on that same ladder. Now, because Affiliate Cash Grabber (I hope that isn’t a real product) is both video and ebook, you can pick what method you want to use. Video might be a good choice, because it is perceived as higher value, and it might take less effort to create a quick review on video than to produce a written report. Take your pick.

Once you’ve decided, you create your product and use that as your giveaway on the squeeze page. You then upsell from that free product to the real deal. It is a lot easier to sell to someone who has already “done business” with you, even free business, than to get someone completely cold to drop their MasterCard on the digital counter.

Alternatively, you can use a service like Traffic Geyser to upload your review video to a ton of different video sharing sites around the internet. If you do this, make sure you put a title in your video somewhere, showing people how to find your site.

So there you have it, the Value Ladder approach to selling an affiliate product in a nutshell. Once you’ve got everything set up, you’ll still need to promote your site in the usual fashion, however this method should give you a good edge over the competition.

I’ve been getting Dan Kennedy’s newsletter for several months now. Each month it is packed full of unique sales and business advice, with great testimonials and case studies. Anyways, I recently went over to Amazon and picked up enough of Dan’s books to get free shipping. Today I received my package, so I dug right into “No B.S. Sales Success. The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners & Make Tons of Money Guide.”

That’s a bit of a mouthful right there, but once you get into it he really does have a lot of insight into sales. In my previous job, I worked closely with our sales force. I wasn’t selling myself, but I worked with those who did. This book is therefore very interesting to me. I often wondered how I would do in sales, but ultimately chose to work for myself rather than pursue sales. I think the experience would have been beneficial, but I can make as much or more money from home doing far less work, so I guess laziness won that round.

Anyways, here’s a tidbit from the book.

Keep It Simple, Salesman (or Stupid, if you’re down on yourself)

Dan talks about “complexity creep” and how that tends to sneak up on us unawares. I know I love having systems in place for different things, and that can actually be a detriment to the sales process. I’m not selling directly, but I am selling on the internet. So how does this relate? Well, we need to make sure that the website is geared towards the sale. Everything on the site needs to be pointing the customer towards handing over their credit card. Articles can be extolling the benefits of your product, helping the prospect to imagine what life will be like once they have it. Testimonials should be there, telling people what a great experience it was dealing with you. Basically, don’t miss anything you can have in the mix to point people towards that sale - but don’t let those very things get in the way of the sale! Make sure that the sale is always easy to get to, technically easy to complete, and overall as efficient a process as possible.

P.T. Barnum once said “No man ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

Even if you think your prospect is highly trained, intelligent, and attentive, don’t take that for granted! Boil everything down to the simplest common denominator. Dan mentions that salespeople often overestimate how smart and sophisticated their customers are, because it feeds their own egos. People like to think they serve the best out there. That may be true, but there are a lot more people that aren’t the smartest of the smartest out there, and their dollars are just as green as the next person. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to put down the customer, I’m just saying you need to present things in a way that everyone is going to understand intuitively.

Have you ever dressed your website up as a giant carrot? Probably not. If you have, please let me know ASAP because I’d love to hear that story!

Occasionally you hear about unique marketing methods that work really well. Someone comes up with a brilliant idea, and implements it. Often these ideas are quite cheap, but just require you to be unusual, which a lot of people aren’t comfortable with.

A good example is a story I recently read where a guy dressed up as a giant carrot, and started going to events around Saint Paul, Minnesota. His business, the Crazy Carrot Juice Bar, got a huge amount of free advertising in the newspapers, radio and even on TV. He quickly grew the company to 5 stores with 65 employees, and then sold it to Jamba Juice, presumably making a bucketful in the process.

Here’s the best part: the suit cost him $73 to make.

Examples of this kind of marketing are all over the place - the question is, how can you, in your business, make an impact? Chances are there is a way you haven’t thought of to really get your business the public attention it needs to become profitable. As affiliate marketers, we’re typically confined to the internet (not always though - that’s a different topic), but how can we use these concepts to promote our products? Viral videos can make a big splash, and blog contest giveaways can be huge as well. There are lots of ideas out there - which one will you use?

I read this e-book recently called Project Quick Cash. The basic premise was why bother with all this “build your marketing empire” nonsense when you can reliably make a few hundred bucks from 10 minutes of work? Well, he’s got a decent point I guess; it is at least worth considering.

So one of the methods talked about is a way of capitalizing on a tool called Google Hot Trends. The purpose of this tool is to flag any terms that are skyrocketing above their average search volume. For instance, if national TV suddenly runs another expose on Britney Spears, even though her name is normally searched quite a lot on Google, the sudden increase in traffic due to greater interest at that moment causes Google to register a spike in traffic and call it a hot trend. This list contains the top 100 and is updated hourly.

So as marketers how can we capitalize on this laser targeted interest? Well in theory it should be easy: find a product that people consider relevant to the hot trend and put it in front of them! This can be accomplished in a couple of ways. The most obvious is to find an affiliate program selling exactly the thing people are searching for. For example, often times the hot trends include specific models of a product. I’ll open Hot Trends and see what is up right now to illustrate (click on the graphic to see it fullsize):

The above pic is a screen capture from today, and several items are immediately obvious as specific products. Checkout #19 and #27. These are two keyword versions of the same product, a Kodak v1003 digital camera. So now that you know there are lots of people looking for this particular item right now. The trick is, you’re not sure why people are looking for this item - perhaps it was just featured a “Worst 10 Products of All Time list!” Then again, more likely it was featured as a great product on some review program. If possible, it helps to figure out why it is hot before you promote it, but use your judgement.

So now you have a product idea; now you need to find a site selling it that has an affiliate program. Amazon and Ebay are two obvious choices, though there are many others. Try searching for your keyword and “affiliate program.” Another good idea is to search for exactly the terms shown, find the top site or two and see if they have an affiliate program. Sign up, and setup a Google Adwords campaign using the keywords provided by Google and turn it loose!

A word to the wise: pay as little as possible for your keywords! Using this strategy you WILL get hundreds of clicks in pretty short order; you need to make sure you aren’t paying through the nose for a lot of lookey-loo traffic.

My Experience

So I’ve tried this tactic myself a couple times so far, because the principle of it really clicked with me. It’s like selling umbrellas when it’s raining, and sun lotion when it’s hot, which just makes good business sense.

I noticed that a weight loss book was featured on Hot Trends one day, so I got an affiliate link setup through Amazon and setup a Google campaign. My results:

Clicks: 675             Cost: $80.29             CPC: $0.12
Total Amazon Sales: $351.56                Amazon Commission: $20.67
Net Profit/Loss: ($20.67-$80.29-) = -$59.62

On a different occasion I found a Panasonic digital camera trend, and again used Amazon:

Clicks: 196             Cost: $23.69             CPC: $0.12
Total Amazon Sales: $32.14                  Amazon Commission: $1.29
Net Profit/Loss: ($1.29-$23.69) = -$22.40

As you can see, I kind of missed the profit boat on these experiments, losing nearly $80 altogether.

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes \
that can be made in a very narrow field.”
-Neils Bohr 

Experience rarely comes free: I’ll chalk this up as part of my tuition. Another quote:

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over
and expecting different results”
- Albert Einstein

Burning $80 just to pass time does no good unless you can learn something from the experience. Here are a few lessons I learned:

Lesson 1: Don’t Pay Whatever The Heck Google Wants You To Pay

Google is now infamous for the “Google Slap” part of which means they can just arbitrarily make your minimum bid whatever they want to. Some keywords are okay at 5 cents, and others Google mandates you need to spend 25 cents, or even several dollars. Presumably, this all relates to their epic quest for relevancy; however often it is hard in practice to see how. Anyways, on the weight loss experiment, I was a cocky little newbie and bid way higher than I should have. I actually accepted some of Google’s minimums (20-35 cents) because I wanted active keywords (the alternative is your keywords don’t run). This led to a much higher campaign cost than I should have had. One thing I noticed though: I had incredibly high click through rates (in excess of 20-30%) and as I checked back in every few hours, Google would let me slide my bids downwards a bit because they recognized the high relevancy. Over time I cut out the high-cost keywords, and my overall CPC came down a bit.

On the camera experiment, I didn’t cave to Google unless their minimum was only a few cents higher than I was willing to pay (I was aiming for 10 cents or less; they offered 12-15 cents for some keywords). However, I still ended up with a 12 cent CPC overall.

I suggest aiming for 5 cent keywords and little else, unless you know you have a real winner of a sales page/product combo.

Lesson 2: Amazon’s Commission Structure Sucks for PPC

When you are making in the 4% range, it is difficult to make pay per click work with Amazon. The interesting thing was that I only sold a half dozen weight loss books and all the rest of the revenue came from items like Brita water filters, camera tripods and DVDs. So I was able to take advantage of additional revenue, because my cookie was on record as the referral. This is a benefit of using Amazon versus a more targeted site; however I suspect a more targeted site would perform FAR better on the promoted item.

I suggest finding a more direct affiliate program where you’re actually able to make a good return on each sale.

Lesson 3: Pick a Good Sales / Landing Page

On the weight loss example, I was too eager to get going because the trend was volcanic hot and it was my first one, and I just KNEW there was money to be made ;). So I looked on Amazon, and they were sold out of the exact book that was listed, except for a couple of used copies, and they didn’t have a real good sales page for it. (Many products they have a good product page, but this one didn’t for some reason). So I linked to the page displaying the Amazon search results for that term. My book was top of the list, but there were a lot of other related items on there too. Mistake. I suspect this caused a number of dropped clicks right there, as people really wanted THAT product, and probably went back to Google to find it.

I suggest picking a good landing page that clearly displays exactly what people are searching for. Make it easy for them to buy! This is PPC 101.

Conclusion: Does it Work?

Although I haven’t made any money on this strategy so far, it makes so much logical sense that I find myself wanting to try it again. I think I’ve learned a few lessons, and I think with tweaking (and the right products) there is good money to be made. One serious advantage of this strategy is the sheer lack of time required to get setup. If you’re familiar with PPC, and have the necessary accounts setup already (Google and a relevant affiliate program) you can have one of these setup in less than 10 minutes.

Project Quick Cash has additional tips to making this strategy successful, but I don’t really have time to get into them here. There are also about five other low-cost strategies to turning a quick buck in the book; perhaps I will experiment with them as well and then share my results here later.