How to Create a Big Payday!
In most businesses, we aim to bring in revenue week after week, month after month but in the Internet Marketing world, there is another business model that works up to having huge paydays. These are usually known as product launches where work is done to build up to some event on which a ton of sales are made in a single day or other short period.
Last week I ran a similar promotion for my birthday and reduced my course about making money blogging down by 68% for just 24 hours. I expected to get a good handful of sales but I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it brought in quite a few more than I expected and I made well over $4,000 on that day! That’s more than I usually make in a couple of months!
The Reality v The Myth
You often see Internet Marketers use days like these to promote their other products. They will want to show you how you can make $10k or $100k in a single day. It looks damned impressive and when you can back it up with proof of earnings, it’s a serious lure for the uninitiated. I don’t try to prove my earnings – I just report it and assume that people will believe that I’m not just making up the numbers :-)
The problem with these kinds of days – the big payday’s is that although they are entirely possible to create, it’s a little more complicated than it seems. I’m delighted by the payday I got for my birthday but I know it’s a one-off so I just want to bust some of the myths that go around about these things.
You Need a Product
To have a big payday, you need to sell something! Though technically, it doesn’t have to be your own product – you could sell somebody else’s but then you are relying on that person’s launch and so you’re working to somebody else’s timescale. To create your own big payday you need to have your own product that you can sell and it needs to be something substantial. Unless you are going for massive volume of sales, you need to be able to have a reasonably high price tag.
Building the Audience Takes Time
This is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in all of Internet marketing. I don’t care if you are a blogger, an affiliate marketer, an ebook writer, developer of Internet tools or whatever else you may do – you need some kind of audience to which you promote your product. This is often built up using an email list and this is the part that takes time to build. To get people onto an email list in the first place you need an audience in itself – some kind of traffic.
For me, this blog draws in the traffic from the search engines and other sources and it directs people to my email list which sends out the free version of the Bloggers Bible lessons every week. I introduced the Bloggers Bible just under a year ago, at the end of October 2008 and started building my email list then. During that year, over 7,000 people have subscribed and that is what gave me the audience for last week’s birthday promotion. If I only had a few hundred people on the list, I’d only have got a fraction of the sales – it’s all a numbers game.
This is very often the factor that Internet Marketing gurus leave out. There are ways to use other people’s audiences – advertise on somebody else’s list for example, but once again you’re not in control so for best effect, you need to build your own list and this is something that takes time.
You Need a USP (Unique Selling Prospect)
Whatever you sell, you need to give your audience a reason to buy it and in the case of a big payday, you need to give them a reason to buy it right now! There are various tactics for doing this but two very common ones are the urgency factor and the scarcity factor. Urgency is simple – you have your offer open for a limited period of time. In my case, I offered my discount for just 24 hours. I ended up running over for a few hours but it was still very limited. The other common tactic is scarcity where you only offer a limited number of your product.
The Payday is Usually a One-Off
I was able to run my promotion because it was my birthday. It’s not something I can repeat over and over. Firstly, most of the people who are interested in buying will have now done so therefore I would not make as many sales next time. Also, if I was run these offers on a regular basis then the urgency factor simply disappears because the unique offer becomes a lie! Have you seen some products that are launched, and then closed down and then re-launched some time later for no apparent reason? I must say, this is something that annoys me a little bit because I can see no reason for it other than as a marketing tactic.
The Reality of the Big Payday
Let me backup and show you exactly what needed to happen for me to be able to pull in over $4,000 in a single day. First of all I needed a product and it took me a few months of hard work to produce the Bloggers Bible. Then came the promotion and here is where we need to back up a bit more. I promoted the course on the blog and it was a combination of the existing subscriber base of my blog and then the continued on-going traffic that gave me the 7,000+ subscribers to which I ran the promotion.
However, my blog has been running over two years – there’s now almost 400 posts and I have spent countless hours building it up and promoting it. Without that I would not have RSS subscribers and I would not get the search engine traffic that I do month after month.
The reality is that I could never have had a day like that without the 2 years of effort that went before it. Of course I’ve also earned a lot of money month after month in those two years as well as last week’s big day but the point being that some marketers will try to hype the big payday and make it look like something that can be achieved very easily by a complete newcomer which is not really the case.
For those who are interested, full sales stats will of course be reported in the October stats report.
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Glen Allsopp
October 19, 2009
Great advice here Caroline and congrats on the $4,000 day. I’ve had a few $2-3,000 days recently but none that high.
It definitely makes me consider doing something similar :)
Glen Allsopp´s last blog ..Analysis: Top 100 Twitter Users