After the initial seminar with Brett, I was very busy with other things. I was going to move permanently to Thailand in 6 months and the list of things I had to do was endless. Stretching from re-organizing my office work flow, so that I could do virtually everything over the Internet, to applying for visas, and selling all my major assets, including my residence. Still, I felt that I also wanted to start out on my Internet Marketing journey straight away.
But where was I going to start? I was working hard in the office, living alone and looking after myself, had a penchant for going to the pub in the evenings, and, unknown to me at the time I had suffered a stroke which was slowly but surely robbing me of my mobility. I looked over the scribbled notes and URL’s I had jotted down at the seminar and decided in the end that I would spend the next few Saturday and Sunday mornings, as many as it took, to write an E-book on the subject I knew most about in the world, Double-Entry Bookkeeping. If I knew then, what I know now, creating my own product was probably the last thing I should have tried as my first venture into Internet Marketing, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Did I do any of the many things that Brett had told me were essential before I created my own product? For example:
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Did I research my niche to ensure that there was a demand?….. No!
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Did I look to see if I would be able to recruit affiliates and J.V. partners to help me promote my product?….. No!
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Did I think about contracting a professional to write my sales page for me?….. No!
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Did I think about where I was going to find people to provide testimonials?….. No!
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Did I think ahead to possible up-sells and bonuses that I could offer?….. No!!
And so the list of things that I should have, at least been considering, if not actually working on, went on and on. Instead, I kept within my “comfort zone” and twice a week for six months I sat at my computer for a couple of hours each time, and wrote about what I really knew about, Double-Entry Bookkeeping.
During my working life I had come up with a unique way of teaching this otherwise boring subject to my subordinates, and I concentrated on writing as interesting a book as possible, attempting to put “my” system on paper. I decided that the book should have a diagram, which in itself was unique, and it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to offer the diagram, in a larger format than the one in the book, as a separate file, which purchasers could print out and hang on their wall, as a constant reminder of the book’s basic teachings. That became my first bonus.
Like most things in life, the E-book and diagrams took longer than I expected to complete, and they weren’t finished until a few weeks before I was due to go to Thailand. The web-site would have to wait until I was settled back with my first wife a quarter of the way around the world.
After I had traveled to Thailand, and settled into my new way of life, and got wi-fi installed where we were living, I decide that my next step was to buy a URL and get it hosted. I went back to the list of URL’s I had scribbled down at the original webinar I attended and found www.godaddy.com for purchasing a URL and www.hostgator.com for hosting. I needed to come up with a name that suited the purpose of my proposed new web-site and which, of course was not already in use by somebody else. I also had a note that indicated, wherever possible I should go for the suffix “.com” over any other like “.net”. “.org” or “.info”. Nowadays there are many more suffixes that are available than there were in 2010, but I would still go for “.com” wherever possible. In the end I settled on www.bookkeeping-theeasyway.com. However, after I registered with www.hostgator.com I found that I had to change what are called the “nameservers” so that they “pointed to Hostgator from Godaddy which was a bit of a chore.
From then on, I decided that, for the sake of a couple of Dollars extra a year, I would buy any future URL’s that I wanted from Hostgator, just to keep everything in the one place, and I recommend that you do the same thing. For more information about Hostgator, click on the ever-changing icon above.
I went back to Brett’s Warpies web-site and discovered that he owned a company that helped users to create their own web-sites. I can’t even remember the program’s name now, but I found it very confusing and I gave up after a few days and asked Brett’s head support lady, Donna-Marie, for suggestions for an alternative. She suggested WordPress, and even gave me the URL of someone who offered free WordPress advice. I’ve used WordPress ever since, and I can’t imagine ever changing to another system.
Choosing to go with Hostgator for hosting and, WordPress for web-site creation were probably 2 of the best decisions I made in those early days. Hostgator’s help desk is very helpful and there is a huge amount of information you can learn about Wordress available for free. Just type “WordPress” into any search engine and you will be able to find all the information you need. However, I have plans to write a blog solely concerned with WordPress sometime in the future.
Now back to the errors I made, trying to make my fortune with a 49 page e-book on a subject that very few people were interested in. My main error was trying to write the sales page myself. I think that I am a fairly good writer of English, but “copy-writing”, as the art of writing compelling sales and marketing material is known, is a completely different ball-game.
My first mentor, Brett McFall, who I have mentioned before, had a copy-writing software program called “Burpies”. The name “Burpies was actually an acronym for whatever Brett had named the 7 steps in his copy-writing system (can’t remember what they were now) but the software did help me to put together a sales page of sorts. However, even although I published it using www.bookkeeping-theeasyway.com, and got the E-book registered on Clickbank I knew that the sales page wasn’t really good enough.
By the way, there are a mountain of hoops you have to go through before you will manage to get anything accepted by Clickbank, which is another reason why this post is subtly suggesting that there are better, and definitely easier ways to make money on the internet than creating and launching your own product. Internet Profits, the Level 1 Promotion on this blog site is a great example of how, with a reasonable amount of dedication, you can make a healthy full-time living without the hassles of product creation, sales page creation, and all the other difficulties connected with launching, and then supporting, your own product, be it an E-book, your own software, or anything else, a training video for example.
I published the first edition of my E-book web-site, which offered Bookkeeping The Easy Way for $27.00. For some obscure reason, which nobody really understands, Brett had said at the original seminar that I attended that products on the net sold better if their price ended in a 7, whether it be $7.00 or $9,997.00. This strange fact has been repeated to me many times, by other successful marketers. As well as the PDF file of the secret diagram, I added an hour of my time to answer any bookkeeping or accounting related question as a bonus, and I also came across a free E-book on the subject of controlling a business’s cash flow as a third bonus. 97% of businesses, both on and off the Internet fail, and a good proportion of those fail, not because they are unprofitable, but because they don’t control their cash properly, and they simply run of money, while they are, in fact, trading profitably. I still had no testimonials or affiliates though. I actually, at that stage, had made no effort to find any, and I had no up-sells or down-sells.
Over the next 2 years, I did manage to sell 5 copies of the book at $27.00. Although nobody ever asked me a question, nobody asked for a refund either. But was it going to make me rich. The short answer was “no”.
A few years later, when I was with a different mentor, (I will discuss mentors in a separate blog post to be written in the future) I did raise the subject of my bookkeeping sales page and I was given help to improve it a little. I also was able to give copies of the book to several other members of the group and so obtain some positive testimonials. I re-launched the book on Clickbank, discovering that the number of hoops I had to jump through had doubled, but this time I priced Bookkeeping The Easy Way at $17.00, instead of the original $27.00. However, despite the better sales page, the addition of eight positive testimonials, and the reduced price, I only managed to sell one more copy.
At a much later stage in my Internet Marketing “career” I did have an idea for a WordPress plugin (if you don’t know what a WordPress plugin is, I will be covering the whole subject of WordPress in a future blog post), and I did contact a programmer through www.elance.com, which has recently changed its name to www.upwork.com. This programmer thought that he could create the plugin I could envisage for $250 or thereabouts, and he quickly went to work. But after about a week, when he thought he had completed phase one of the project and he sent me a file containing his work done to date, it was nothing like what I wanted it to be like. I spent hours and hours trying to explain to him on paper exactly what I wanted, but it was all to no avail. We never get phase 1 completed to anywhere near my satisfaction, and that’s where I stopped it. I had spent hours, if not days, trying to get him to understand what I wanted, and he didn’t get paid a cent for all the effort he must have put in. So, despite the fact that many people will tell you that outsourcing is the way to go to get our own product, especially if you are trying to have something created in a medium you know little or nothing about (I wouldn’t have a clue how to produce a plugin) outsourcing is not always as easy as it sometimes is made out to be. Perhaps I should have outsourced my E-book sales page, when all I would have needed to say is “Improve on this please” as I had my own attempt as a reasonable example, but as I realized that the main cause of Bookkeeping The Easy Way‘s failure was the lack of demand for the product, I didn’t think that the expense involved in getting a sales page professionally written was justified.
So please, if you are ever tempted to go down the route of producing your own product, thoroughly investigate the points I mentioned at the beginning of this post, adding the need for good S.E.O. on your web-page. And for goodness sake don’t assume that just because you are interested in a particular subject, the rest of the world will be as well. If you have never written a successful sales page before I would certainly consider outsourcing it by using someone you can find on www.upwork.com, but make sure that he or she has plenty of good testimonials. You can, of course avoid all of the difficulties of product creation and sales, by joining Dean Holland’s iPro system, the level 1 promotion on this blog, and join me and a thousand other people happily making money on the net without a care in the world.
You can access the current sales page for Bookkeeping The Easy Way by clicking on the cover near the top of the right side bar, not the one surrounded by the heading to the blog post. However, if you are interested in it don’t purchase it through any of the links to Clickbank. Instead send me an email to phil@bookkeeping-theeasyway.com saying that you are interested in buying the E-book and mention the password “III Blog”. I’ll send you my Paypal email address, which is a different one, and if you deposit $10 in there I will send you the book and the 2 electronic bonuses straight away. At a later date, you can also ask me any one bookkeeping or accounting related question you may have, and I will do my best to answer it for you. To be eligible for this discounted copy, you have to be a current member of my list, so, if you are not please join first using the form which is at the top of the right side-bar on every page and use the email address you used to join to send me your request.
I would also be interested to know if you would be interested in buying a $50.00 (well, it would be $47.00 lol) simple Excel based General Ledger, which would be designed around the teachings in the E-book to keep track of your Internet Marketing income and expenses. I would design it in such a way that only a very basic knowledge of Excel would be required on your part to operate it. Tell me in the email you use to buy the book at the discounted price, or simply leave a comment to this post.
I hope you have found this post to be of interest.
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