PLR or private label rights don’t always enjoy the best reputation. Most marketers figure PLR was written by someone who either doesn’t speak English well or has no background in the subject matter. Oftentimes the PLR is cobbled together with a lousy sales letter with amateur graphics and sold as a package to unsuspecting marketers.
Is that how you view PLR? If so, it’s no wonder. Many PLR packages aren’t worth the money which is why potential buyers are leery of new offers. But there is a way to still sell boatloads of PLR to marketers, and it works like this:
Before you sell PLR licenses, sell the product as it is. Launch the product on its own without rights. Sell it to your list, put it on JVZoo or wherever you want. Make no mention that you will be selling the PLR rights to it, not even as an upsell.
The idea is to let it stand on its own. Now it’s tried and tested, there is no question it sells, and it stands apart from every other PLR offer out there because it’s proven.
Wait a couple of weeks and then offer the rights to it. Often the people who purchased the product from you in the first place will be the first people to buy the rights, too, because they’ve seen the product and they value it.
If you want to sell the PLR licenses for a higher price, then simply restrict the number of people who can purchase a license. And you won’t need to convince anyone that your PLR is of great quality because it will already be a proven seller.
We talk a lot about storytelling in marketing, but what’s the meaning of it all? With one simple story – the right story – you can turn an unsuccessful business into a success, and a successful business into a behemoth of customers and sales.
Stories are 22 times more memorable than facts and figures alone. And our neural activity increases five times when listening to a story. Storytelling lights up the sensory cortex in the brain, allowing the listener to feel, hear, taste and even smell the story.
And because consumer attention is the ultimate commodity, it’s more important than ever to tell the right story.
Since the best stories are often not your own, Land Rover tells their customers’ stories. They find people who depend upon the Land Rover vehicle – such as a team of local transport drivers in the Himalayas – and share their remarkable stories.
IKEA uses puns and humor while sharing stories of how their products improve the private lives of their customers. They shared funny stories of how their products are used in the bedrooms and bathrooms of customers with tremendous success.
Sanlam Bank educated South Africans on the importance of saving money by filming the trials and tribulations of a young professional who got paid only in rand coins. These coins were worth about 7 cents in US dollars or .34 pounds sterling. Combining the story telling with valuable personal finance advice earned the video series 900,000 South African views on YouTube and generated 74 million media impressions.
Here’s how to get into the right mindset to uncover your own story. And guess what? It’s in the form of a story…
This guy is walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep he can’t get out. A doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, “Hey you, can you help me out?” The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.
A priest comes along, and the guy shouts up, “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?” The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on.
Then a friend walks by. “Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, “Are you crazy? Now we’re both down here!” The friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”
Be the friend to your customers. Jump in the hole with them. Let them know that you’ve been in that hole before, but you know the way out. Tell them your story, show them how it parallels their own story, and then show them the solution.
Would you like to know how the highest-ranking affiliates are making their sales?
Here’s how to find out:
Research the top selling evergreen products at places like JVZoo and Warrior Plus. See who is winning the leaderboard competitions and then get on their lists.
You might have to do a little Googling to locate their sites, blogs, squeeze pages or whatever, but it’s not that difficult.
Join their lists and then watch their emails.
You’ll see how they warm their lists as well as the exact email sequences they use to sell products.
Don’t copy their emails word for word, but do study them and figure out what makes them work. Then write your own.
You’ll have email sequences for all of the best evergreen products, written in styles that you already know convert. Plug them into your autoresponder and make sales!
I once knew a marketer who wouldn’t lower his prices no matter what. He lived in constant terror that old customers would be mad that the course they bought last month or last year for $197 now cost $97. Heck, they might even demand a refund of the price difference. I’m pretty sure he imagined that every one of his customers was sitting at the computer just waiting for the price to drop so they could complain.
News flash: They weren’t.
And I’ve known plenty of marketers who wouldn’t raise their prices. Again, they were afraid of angering customers and losing business.
But Dan Kennedy’s first advice to almost every business owner is to immediately raise their prices. Most of his clients balk at this and some are so opposed they even throw a fit. But Dan wears them down until they acquiesce, and guess what happens? The sky doesn’t fall down, customers don’t disappear and the business starts making a whole lot more money.
As marketers we bring our own psychological ‘money baggage’ to the business. All those things we were told as kids about money can still cause us problems, and it’s usually our business that pays the price.
Next time you want to raise or lower your prices, you might refer to this list to find a way that makes both you and your customers comfortable with the process.
1: Timing. If you want to permanently raise prices, first make sure that your customers are happy with your product or service. Use the good feedback, reviews and testimonials when you explain your new pricing.
2: Sound the Alarm. Before you raise your prices across the board, consider telling EVERYONE that it’s going to happen. While some marketers prefer to make as little noise about price increases as possible, other marketers take advantage of the situation by telling the world that if they want the lower price, NOW is the time to jump in.
3: Add or Subtract Something. You can justify raising or lowering your price by adding or subtracting something from your offer. Maybe you add another product – such as an older course you stopped selling – to the mix to justify an increased price. Or if your product’s sales are dropping, you can remove one of the bonuses – such as coaching – and lower the price to make it more accessible to everyone.
4: Bundle. Offer discounts if they purchase more than one item.
5: Play with Numbers. Let’s say you sell a tangible product. You offer 10 units of a product for $100 but you want to raise the price to $115. Add two more, different-sized packages such as a 5 pack for $75 and a 3 pack for $50. This makes the 10 pack look like a good deal, even at the higher price.
6: Add fees. This only works with some product categories, such as gym memberships, mortgages, cars and so forth. But it can be possible to add in a ‘fee’ for signing up. You can call it an administration fee, set up fee or whatever you choose. If fees are standard in your industry, then it’s certainly an option.
I’m not fond of fees, but they can be especially effective as incentives when you offer to waive the fee if they join today. It’s like having a sale without having a sale, if you know what I mean. Yes, that is a gray area, but something to think about.
7: Improve the Offer. Do you want to sell your $197 course for $297? Update it and add some new content, making the old version look obsolete. Let the buyers of the old version know they can upgrade to the new version for whatever fee you choose (in this case, $0 to $100).
8: Change Sizes. If your product’s size can be adjusted – more or less of a product or service – then you can change the price accordingly.
9: Schedule Price Increases. If you schedule your price increases in advance – such as every January or July – and you let customers know about your schedule, they won’t be surprised or upset.
10: Target a Different Demographic. If you find you need to significantly raise your prices, consider targeting a different customer base altogether. For example, maybe you’re helping yoga instructors with their marketing and you realize they don’t make much money and thus can’t pay you much money. Switch to plumbers, dentists, chiropractors or lawyers and you can likely double or triple your prices without doing any extra work.
Last thoughts: If you’re raising your prices, it’s best to plan ahead. It doesn’t turn out well if you tell your customers you’re going to raise prices just once this year only to discover you have to do it a second time before the year is over.
If you lower prices, such as when you have a sale, then there might be a previous buyer or two who notices and sends you a disgruntled email. Write back and offer them a free electronic product of their choice. It costs you nothing and they will likely be happy that you responded to their concern.
Let me preface this by reminding you that the greatest selling tool in all the world isn’t the internet, or sales letters or sales videos or even word of mouth. It’s stories.
Stories sell like nothing else because we are hard wired to listen to and love stories. It’s in our genes. There was a time when storytelling could literally save our lives. Think of primitive man coming back from a hunt and telling everyone in camp the story of how ‘Bob’ was killed by a saber tooth tiger in the sixth valley to the south.
Do you think anyone would venture into the sixth valley to the south after that? No way, because they knew the story of how Bob got killed by the tiger who lives there.
Now then, here’s how to get experts to practically write your blog posts for you AND get them to do it in story form:
Ask them a question that invites a personal story.
For example, your blog is about investing in commodities. This week you want a blog post on pork futures (I’m making this stuff up right now) so you send out an email to every commodities expert you know of, asking them about their most memorable pork futures story. It doesn’t matter if they made or lost money, you just want to hear their story. A dozen of them write back and you put those stories together into a post.
You’re doing a few things here:
First, you’re getting experts to weigh in on an interesting question, which means you get to ‘borrow’ on their credibility, making you look good to your readers and customers.
Second, you’re doing this in story form, and since people love stories, they are coming back to your blog every week for more of these stories.
Third, you’re building a relationship with these experts. Sure, some of them won’t respond to you, but others will be eager to share their stories. And down the road, who knows what might happen. They could end up promoting your product to their lists, or asking you to do a JV, or even becoming good friends with you.
Fourth, blog posts like these tend to get shared on social media which brings in more traffic.
Fifth, your experts might also share your posts with their followers. “Hey, my hog futures story is featured in this post, check it out.”
The trick here is to phrase your questions in such a way that it invites personal stories.
And don’t forget to ask your readers the same questions. Sometimes it’s the everyday guy or gal you don’t know who has the best story – the one that makes your article go viral or even get referenced on other major sites.
One little notebook could be worth a million dollars to you. Or more. Here’s how…
Keep track of everything you do and especially all of your ideas. When you start something new, keep a running record of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.
Two things will happen:
First, you’ll have more and more ideas, and better ideas, too. The simple act of writing ideas down drives your subconscious to create more ideas. Review your ideas weekly and find the gems. Test out the best ones, choose one and run with it. It could be a million-dollar business.
Second, teach others how to do that business. If you find an awesome new way to build an email list, build your own lists and then teach others to do the same. If you discover how to launch a product from start to finish in 3 days, teach others to do the same.
Keep your notebook with you at all times. Write in it when the mood strikes, and even when it doesn’t. Resort to an online journal only when necessary. There’s something about the brain and handwriting connection that inspires more creative thinking than simply tapping keys.
I know firsthand how difficult it can be to continually come up with new topics for your emails. The first 20 are easy. The next 30 aren’t too difficult. The next 50 take work. And once you’ve done a few hundred emails, you’re pretty sure you’re just writing the same things over and over again – most likely because you are. If you want to keep your emails fresh, interesting and even exciting for your readers, then it’s time to step up your game and find something new to offer. Which is why I thought of… jokes.
Because who doesn’t love to hear a joke? Even if it’s one that makes us groan, we still enjoy the anticipation of seeing whether or not it’s funny, whether we laugh, and maybe even whether or not it’s good enough to share with others. I know that when I receive an email from an individual or a business that says, “Joke enclosed,” I almost always open it, because… why not? I need more laughter in my life, and I’ll bet your readers do, too.
So how do you turn a joke into a marketing email?
That is the question.
First, let’s find a joke. I just did a quick search and found this one…
“When I asked my 3 year old niece Anna what she wanted for her birthday, all she’d say was “reading glasses.”
Thinking it must be some sort of preschool fashion trend, I bought her a pair with plain glass lenses. A week later, I picked Anna up from daycare and asked where her glasses were.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “But they don’t work anyway.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, I still can’t read,” she sighed.
Ha!
Okay, I thought it was pretty funny.
How do we segue this into an offer? Let’s use the online marketing niche for our examples:
1: We could say something like, “Wouldn’t it be great if you could put on a pair of marketing glasses and suddenly know how to make sales on autopilot? This product is the next closest thing because…”
2: Or we could say, “As you see Anna took ‘reading glasses’ quite literally, which is exactly how I want you to take my guarantee on this product. I 100% absolutely, positively guarantee that when you follow the program, this is what will literally happen for you: …”
3: Perhaps we might go with, “Poor kid. Obviously, the glasses didn’t perform like the name, ‘reading glasses’ promised her. Have you ever purchased one of those, “Make X Money in X Days” programs, only to discover that what they really meant was, IF you have a website and IF you have a list and IF you have a product, then this will work?”
“Well with my $10,000 in 30 Days program, you don’t need any of that in place. In fact, you can be a total beginner and this program will still perform exactly as the name implies, with no catches and no disappointments.”
4: Last example: “I can’t promise you reading glasses, but I can do one better than that. This course will open your eyes to an entirely different way of thinking and doing business, resulting in you being more excited about your future than you have been since you were Anna’s age.”
All 4 examples need a little polish but you get the idea.
I took a random joke, typed it out and then came up with four segues into offers. Of course, there is no right or wrong way to do this and there are an infinite number of possibilities. In fact, if everyone reading this tried this exercise, we would have thousands of examples and no two would be exactly the same.
Here’s your assignment: Go online and find 3 jokes that make you chuckle or even laugh out loud. Copy and paste them into your writing program and then come up with 3 segues into any product you are currently promoting or plan to promote in the future. If you don’t have a product, make one up.
The point is to see that you can indeed use almost anything interesting or entertaining to begin your emails, and then segue that into the message you want to convey. It might not even be to sell something, but rather to teach a tip, make an announcement or simply remind them that you stand ready to help when they need it.
Taking this to the next level: Keep a file of everything that catches your eye, whether it’s humor, news, off-the-wall ideas or whatever, and dig through this file when you need an opener for your next email to your list.
Have you ever driven your car onto a frozen lake, parked, cut a hole in the ice and started fishing? This might sound like a crazy idea if you’re from a warm climate. Why would you sit there on the ice for hours, freezing yourself silly, waiting for a fish to wake up from its cold slumber and bite your hook?
One way to make this sport more bearable is to build yourself an ice-fishing shanty. About the size of a garden shed, this is a small structure that is towed out onto the ice. The structure has one or more trap doors in the floor where you can use an auger to cut through the ice.
You can furnish these shanties with comfortable chairs and a propane heater – just don’t get your shanty so warm that it melts into the ice or worse yet – through the ice.
“What in the heck does this have to do with email marketing?”
Maybe nothing, but let me continue…
A couple in Princeton, Minnesota, decided they’d rather have chicken eggs than fish, and so they converted their ice fishing shanty into a chicken coop. They added nesting boxes to accommodate 80 chickens and used the trap doors to clean out the old bedding and chicken poop before moving the structure – on wheels – to a new location. When a chicken hawk appears in the sky, the chickens can dive under their chicken coop for safety.
Really, I think this is a much better use for the ice shanty than sitting in the cold for hours hoping a fish has had enough living and is ready for the fry pan.
If you’ve been doing online marketing for any length of time then I’ll bet right now you have assets that you aren’t using fully. It’s just a matter of identifying those assets and converting them into a better, higher use.
For example, do you have…
• Old email lists? • Social media followers? • Products you’ve created but no longer sell? • Content that is languishing with no readers? • Special knowledge you’ve gained on how to do certain things? • PLR products you’ve purchased but not used?
Any of these assets and loads of others I didn’t list can be repurposed to increase your business. Think about it… if an old ice shanty can find new life housing 80 chickens, couldn’t you…
• Revive your old email lists by sending a 30-day campaign of emails people WANT to read? • Start a new, coordinated campaign to bring your social media followers to your website, your squeeze pages, your products? • Update, refresh and re-release your old products, or sell resell rights to them? • Update and repurpose your existing content into audios, videos, new posts, books and so forth? • Take your own specialized knowledge and turn it into new posts, lead magnets and products? • Dig out those PLR products you purchased, find the gold and repurpose those into content and products, too?
You might want to take inventory of everything you have, whether it’s languishing on your website, on your hard drive or in your memory, and make a list. Then after each item, think of 5 ways you can repurpose and reuse it to either build your audience or make more sales.
If you’ve been doing online marketing for any real length of time, then I’ll bet you an ice-fishing shanty that you have thousands of dollars in assets going to waste right now. The challenge is to identify them, decide on a course of action and then get busy.
Most new marketers make the painful mistake of thinking the sale is done when the customer buys the product. Nope. That’s just the first sale. Wise marketers who want to stay in business and continue to profit know there are two more sales to be made.
First, you’ve got to sell the new buyer on how great your product is. If you don’t, you’ll get more refund requests.
Second, you’ve got to sell your new buyer on consuming and using your product. When you do, these new customers are far more likely to purchase additional products from you, often at much higher price points.
Interestingly, you can make both of these sales with one simple technique.
I’m going to assume that the product in question is an information product, and that it’s a good one – no junk. Here’s what you do:
When you collect reviews and testimonials prior to launch (you are doing that, right?) you’re going to ask a couple of extra questions of your reviewers:
1: Which is your favorite section/chapter/video of the product?
2: What did you discover and how will you use this information to achieve your goal?
Your questions might be slightly different depending on your product and your niche. The gist is to get each reviewer to choose a favorite section of the product and tell you what they’re going to do with this information.
For example, “The third video taught me how to add an additional $10,000 to my monthly income with just a few small tweaks to what I’m already doing.”
Or, “The fifth chapter revealed a mistake I’ve been making that nearly cost me my marriage. Now that I’m aware of it, I’ve made a simple adjustment that’s brought my husband and me back together again and we feel like newlyweds!”
You can use these in your sales material, but you can also place these INSIDE your product to remind your customers of why they made the purchase. You might place the testimonials at the beginning of chapters, or one the page containing that particular video, or wherever it’s appropriate.
After people buy your product, they naturally forget most of what the sales letter or sales video told them. A week or two later, they might only remember they paid $199 for a product that will teach them how to blog. If buyer’s remorse sets in before they even consume your product, you’re done for. A refund request will be on its way to your inbox.
By adding these very specific testimonials, you remind them that others have found your product particularly helpful. This can get them to read or watch your product and see how great it is. Then instead of asking for a refund, they’ll be wondering what else you can offer them.
A couple more tips:
→ Use these testimonials as well as bullet points in the follow up email series you send after making the sale. This will remind new buyers of what a great decision they made in purchasing your product and encourage them to consume it and use it.
→ At the beginning of each chapter or section, as well as on the page where each video is loaded, add in a list of bullet points telling them what they’ll discover in this material.
Remember, it’s important to not just make the initial sale, but to also sell your customers on the idea that they made a smart purchase as well as selling them on USING your product. When you do, you’ll reduce refunds dramatically as well as encourage your new buyers to make many more purchases from you in the future.
“The Guide to Oysters” was the first ad advertising expert David Ogilvy wrote for his own agency. In the full-page ad, details on different oysters, where they come from and how they are prepared are given, along with photos of each.
It’s a highly informative article; the kind people might rip out of a magazine for future reference. Oh yes, and in the bottom right corner, Guinness Beer is touted as the ideal drink to have with oysters. You guessed it… the ad wasn’t for oysters at all but rather for the beer.
Sneaky, huh?
No doubt you’re already creating “how-to” content for your readers and sending it out in emails, posting in your blog, social media and so forth. And at the end of your content you might promote a related product, too. For example, you tell how to use a certain method to get traffic. Then you offer a product that teaches 20 more traffic methods.
But what if… now think about this, because it’s a bit of a mind shift…
What if your content told how to USE the product you are promoting? You take that same traffic product, regardless of whether it’s your product or an affiliate product, and you write a post on how to use it to achieve a goal.
I have a friend who does exactly this and it’s made all the difference in his business. Before he started using this method, people would thank him for his great content but never buy the product he was promoting. After he started doing this, people started buying. It was frankly kinda spooky how well this worked.
Me, I was skeptical. But numbers don’t lie.
Before this method, my friend worked a full time job. 4 months after he made the change, my friend quit his job and now does online marketing 20 hours a week and surfs, scuba dives and climbs the rest of the week. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal his name or niche, but let’s go back to our traffic example and I’ll give you an idea of how this works.
Let’s say the product you’re promoting is a course on how to do Facebook Advertising, and the headline for your latest post is something like, “How to Get 50 Buyers a Day for Your Product Using Facebook Ads”. In your post you basically outline some info (not all the info, of course) on how it’s done. But here’s the thing… more than once you reference the product you’re selling as being a key part of the Facebook Ad process.
Jumping into the middle of our imaginary article: “When you get to Step 3, just reference the tool on page 43 of the “Super Traffic Course” and you’ll know immediately which ad is more likely to get the best results.” Or something like that… please note I’m doing this off the top of my head.
“If you don’t have the Super Traffic Course yet – seriously? What are you waiting for? – you can grab it here. Or you can spend a few hours gathering the same info that you’ll find on page 43… not the best use of your time, perhaps, but trial and error will eventually see you through if you stick to it. Once you’ve used the tool of page 43 and you have your numbers, you’ll know exactly which ad to run first as well as the best time to run it. Now the next step is to…”
Using this method requires two things:
First, you need a shift in your thinking. Odds are you’ve always written something like, “Tip 1, Tip 2, Tip 3, oh by the way, buy this product.” But now the product is actually an integral part of the content. You are teaching them as though they ALREADY OWN the product, which does something wonderful to your reader – it makes them THINK as though they already own it.
Except… they don’t.
So now they feel like an insider but still on the outside. Darn it, they’re missing something really awesome!
It creates a cognitive dissonance in them that can be easily resolved by… TA-DA! Purchasing the product, of course. This is soooo sneaky, isn’t it? Ha! I love it.
The mind shift on your part is the first thing you need. The second thing is some well executed balancing which will come with practice. You want to give enough info to make the post helpful even if they haven’t purchased the product. Your posts should stand on their own. But they shouldn’t give away all the secrets of the product – not even close.
You’re creating intrigue and a sense of missing out for those who don’t own the product while simultaneously giving good info they can use. See? A balancing act. And all the while you are also making it completely clear that owning the product will make the process easier, faster and in this case more profitable.
My friend says this was the hardest part to learn. He had to figure out how much info to give, what to withhold and how to seamlessly promote the product within the article. He also said the first time he tried was a hot mess, but he kept at it and within a week it was easy and within two weeks it was second nature.
It’s simply a matter of learning a new way to frame what you’re writing.
His posts aren’t super long, either. They’re usually just 500-1,500 words, depending on how much he covers. And then he promotes his posts extensively and shamelessly through social media as well as to his ever-growing list.
Million Dollar Side Point: Half of his posts actually reference and promote free lead magnets he’s giving away to build his email lists. He has lists in a dozen sub-niches to his main niche, and those lists are growing FAST. He especially promotes these posts on social media. And he reposts these posts every month or two and again promotes them on social media as if they are brand new. His rate of list building using this simple technique is blowing my mind right now.
I think I may have ‘buried the lead’ with that last paragraph, so if you’ve read this far, congrats. You now have a secret to list building that others missed!
Bottom Line: Write “how-to” content that works in conjunction with the product you are selling (or the list building lead magnet you’re giving away). These posts work as covert sales letters that set you up as the authority, teach useful skills AND sell the product or the opt-in.
I know it might be different from what you’ve done before. And the first time or two you write content like this, it might seem weird, awkward or strange. But done correctly, it can also be super profitable.
