Earning More as a Product Creator
As a product creator, you’re always looking for ways to earn more from each of your products. It can be discouraging sometimes. You have a fantastic library of products you’ve created for your audience. When you launch those products, you seem to do well with sales. Your list grows and you’re proud that your product is helping your audience.
Your hope is that your customers will love your product so much that they’ll go through your back catalog and buy absolutely everything you put out. The problem is, they might not even know about the other things you’re selling.
This can be really frustrating for you. You may have even heard from customers that they would have bought more from you if only you were selling more. Through a forced smile you tell them about all the products you have for sale. They’re shocked that you had all that on the market. You’re shocked that they had no idea.
It’s clear to you that once customers know that you have more products, they eagerly want to buy more from you. That makes you feel great because it means they love what you’re selling. You work hard creating your products and you create them specifically to help your customers. They aren’t doing much good, though, if they aren’t actually in the hands of your customers in the first place.
Occasionally, you’ll get that rare, amazing customer who is so loyal to you that they actively seek out your products. They look for your new releases and buy everything you put out. That makes you feel fantastic. What if you could double, triple, or quadruple the number of customers like that? What if you could turn half of your customers into huge fans of your work who get addicted and want to buy everything you put out?
Unfortunately, you know it’s much more likely that people buy one or two of your products, but then they fall off the radar. It’s not that they don’t like your products– that’s not it at all. If they were aware of them, they’d buy them. But they have other products to buy. They have other products they’re interested in. If people aren’t aware of something they typically aren’t going to go out of their way to seek it.
As a product creator, you’re not content with this– or you shouldn’t be. You work so hard on your products for so long, that it shouldn’t be a ‘one and done.’ By that I mean, that your product should sell for you now and years from now. It should be a passive income earner for you. It’s really disappointing for you if your product sells when you launch it and not at all beyond that.
It’s time to change that– and I’m going to give you solid strategies that will show you how. You can sell more products… without doing a bunch of extra work. You’ll be happier and make more money. Your customers will be happier as well. Your products are designed to help them, right? Now you can help them even more because they’ll be buying more of your products.
Cross Promoting for More Money
Let’s talk about cross promotion. If customers take a look at your products right now, do they have any way of knowing that you’re selling additional products? This might sound oversimplified, but there are so many other things you’re thinking about when creating a product that this is one you may not have thought about.
Once someone has gotten to the end of your product– let’s say it’s an ebook– what’s their mindset? It’s probably (hopefully)- “Wow! That was great- I’d love to read more of this person’s work!”
If you don’t have a link or mention of any other work you’re selling, they’ll close the product on their hard drive and go about their business. They’ve learned something and enjoyed it– but that’s the end of the ‘story.’
Let’s try a different scenario. They get to the end of your product and they’ve found it really helpful. Right after they’ve finished, you link to a very highly related product of yours– something you know would be perfect for a customer of that product. You also include a really enticing, short description– with a bit of mystery involved– that gets people to click to learn more about the other product.
Since they’ve just completed something of yours they really like, they click over to that other product. They’re in the moment. They see the special offer you’ve created for them as a valued customer (hint: this is a great sales tactic!) and go ahead and buy!
The new product they buy has a different, highly related product pitched at the end of it. The same thing happens. They’re in the mood to buy and now they know they’re truly a fan of your work. They can’t get enough– because you know what they need and want and you now seem to have a sixth sense for delivering exactly that to them.
Creating a List of All Your Products on Your Website
It can also be really helpful to make a full, categorized list of all the products you sell to list on your website. You can link to this list within your emails, products, social media accounts, and so on.
Whenever people need a product or how-to on a topic they know you cover, they’ll be trained to go look at this list to see if you have it first. Part of this cross promotion is training people to come to you first for the products they need.
Get that link of all your products in front of their eyes and that will start to happen for more and more of your customers.
Cross-Promoting Via Your List
Are you marketing via your list? You absolutely should be? Every time someone buys a product of yours, they should be added to your email autoresponder list. Aweber works great for this.
Once someone has been added to your list, they should receive messages from you. The first message might be a welcome message. The next few messages might include helpful tips.
But, what do you do with messages after that? Many marketers simply neglect this part of things. They don’t send any messages after that. Or if they do, they just send broadcast messages every now and then.
It’s time to start using your list more wisely. Consider which products of yours you can cross-promote. Which products will the buyers of this one be most likely to buy and benefit from?
Write three emails per product you decide to promote to this particular product list. The first one can be a general email on the topic the product you’re cross promoting covers. The second can be a follow up to that email– with a soft sell on the product you’re cross promoting. The third can be an email that directly sells the product.
Remember to make your emails really enticing and to think about the principles of good copy. Stir up the problem people have, talk about your journey, dangle the solution and a bit of mystery, and get them to want to buy the solution you’re selling.
Do this for each of the products you’re cross-promoting and load them up into your autoresponder. There you have it! Now every person who buys that original product will receive promotions for your other related products, in turn.
They’ll also see the promotions you have in the back of your product. They’ll have multiple exposures to your other products– which means they’ll be more likely to buy from you over and over again.
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