One of the things that many internet marketers and businesses owners dream of is generating a passive income stream, or revenue that constantly comes in while you work on other things, vacation, sleep, etc. In order to do this, you have to create an offer that is going to drive sales 24/7. In this post, you will learn how to do just that – create mega-successful offers that drive sales like crazy all of the time on autopilot.
Identify (or Create) Your Core Offer
Chances are, you already have a product that you sell around the clock. An ideal core offer would be an information product, membership site, template, plugin, software as a service, or physical product. In other words, anything where delivery of the product is automated once the customer makes the purchase or where the delivery of the product is not handled by you. If you have a service, such as consulting or coaching, that can work for your cover offer too. But services do not lend well to the 100% passive income model if you have to deliver the service yourself. If someone else is delivering them, that’s fine. For those that do not have a core offer, there are two options. Your first option is to create a core offer from scratch. Information products, in particular video training courses, work best as they can be sold for a higher premium than other information products (like ebooks) and can be delivered instantly upon purchase with minimal support needed. Membership sites also work if you do not mind creating creating new content on a weekly or monthly basis for members and/or having a team of experts in your niche to interact with members in a Facebook group or forum. On one hand, they can be easier to create than an information product because you do not have to create the content before you start making sales. On the other hand, it’s less passive because you have to keep creating content and supporting your members. Your second option is to promote affiliate products as your core offer. In this case, instead of creating a product from scratch, you are going to find a product by someone else that you can promote to your audience. Then you are going to create an offer that will generate revenue from commissions from your sale of that product. Since someone else handles the distribution and customer support of affiliate products, it is a great way to enter the passive income space. Depending on the product you choose to promote, you may not make as much as if you sold your own product, but you save the time of creating something yourself and supporting it.
Bulk Up the Bonuses
What makes a great online offer a mega-successful one? Bonuses. Bonuses are the reason book authors can lure people into buying their book direct from them at full price versus for less on Amazon. Bonuses are the reason that some affiliates make more off promoting offers than others. There are a few ways to approach bonuses for your core offer. The first approach is to take some of the components of your core offer and break them into bonuses. For example, if you are selling a video training course, the bonuses could be a private Facebook community for group members, weekly Q&A calls, worksheets, checklists, and interviews with other successful people in your niche talking about the topic of your course.
Interviews make especially valuable bonuses for a few reasons. First, they validate your core offer by showing that other influential people in your industry are willing to participate. Second, the people you interview will make for great JV partners and promoters of your core offer. Third, it’s simply an easy way to create a lot of bonus material without having to really create it on your own. Also, if you are selling a video training course, or any information product for that matter, you can break out parts of the course itself into bonus material. For example, you may have created a 20-module course on getting leads from social media. If you have any modules that don’t directly focus on that goal, you can turn them into bonus videos or bonus training. The same tactic can apply to any kind of product. If your core offer was leather cleaner, the sponge you send with it could be marketed as a bonus. The second approach is to throw in as many bonuses as possible, whether or not they were created by you. For example, someone selling a weight loss supplement may offer bonus diet planners, exercise planners, six ebooks about living healthy, inspirational mp3 recordings, a collection of videos of customer success stories, etc. If you like the sound of adding ebooks as your bonus material, but don’t actually want to write an ebook, look for PLR (private label rights) ebooks in your niche that relate to your core offer. This is a great way to get supplementary content for your core offer without having to create it yourself. Just make sure to read the content first to make sure it aligns with your business and customize it to match your product. The third approach is to turn your other products into bonuses, even if they don’t relate 100% back to the main core offer. If your core offer is a high-ticket product, you may want to consider giving bonuses that are also high value, like a ticket to your annual live event or a half-hour consultation. Bonuses work especially well with affiliates promoting other people’s products. If you have other products you have sold in the past, you can offer those as bonuses when people buy someone else’s product using your affiliate link. You can also offer to simply create supplementary material for the other person’s product, such as the checklist that helped you implement strategies presented in a course or a private community on Facebook where you help buyers of the other person’s product. Just make clear directions that the buyer has to contact you once they made the purchase for you to send them your bonuses.
Craft a Solid Money Back Guarantee
Money back guarantees are almost essential when creating an offer that you want to be highly successful. They make customers who are new to your business confident that they can try your product out without being committed to it if it doesn’t work. They will also limit the number of chargebacks to your merchant account from people who buy your product and then want a refund regardless of your policy, or lack thereof. While there are customers who will use this to their advantage to get your offer for free, you will ultimately make more sales by adding this to your core offer. You will generate more revenue from 100 sales and five refunds than from only twenty sales due to lack of customer confidence. There are a few different types of money back guarantees you can use for your core offer. The traditional one is the no questions asked money back guarantee. For information products, this is usually a 30 day guarantee. If you have a course, and you want to ensure that no one gets all of your material and then asks for a refund, you can use a platform that releases modules on weekly basis so that anyone who wants a refund by the end of the 30 days doesn’t get the full material. Another money back guarantee that works in your favor is one that gets the customer to prove that your product didn’t work for them. For example, if you have a course, you can create homework that the customer has to send in completed to show that they at least consumed the content and genuinely didn’t get it to work. If you have a weight loss supplement, you can have the customer send in a before and after photo of their scale. You can also do a long money-back guarantee period in the hopes that people simply forget about it or have time to make it work for them. Some offers come with 60 to 90 day money back guarantees for this reason. In two to three months, the buyer has had plenty of time to use the product and see its results. Or they’ve had plenty of time to forget about it altogether.
While this won’t work for every product type, it will work for some. It will give legitimate buyers the same confidence of the guarantee while weeding out the people who just planned on buying your product and getting a refund later. It also ensures that people actually use your product within the time allotted – chances are that if they do that, they will get results, and will have no desire to request a refund.
Create Promotional Content for Specific Customers
Once you’ve chosen your core offer, your next job is to identify your core offer’s main customers. If your core offer is a video training course on marketing for chiropractors, chiropractors would be your main customers and you would create all of the content promoting your core offer focusing on chiropractors. If your core offer is a video training course on marketing for small business owners in general, you have some options. You can start by creating all of the content promoting your core offer focusing on small businesses owners in general. One automated webinar, one webinar registration page, one sales page, and one email followup series applicable to almost anyone. Then, to really amp up your conversions, you can go the extra mile and create custom webinar content, webinar registration page content, sales page content, and email content for specific types of customers. Since your course would work for chiropractors, dentists, veterinarians, dance studios, landscaping businesses, and a number of other small business types, you could create promotional content catered specifically for them. Take Shopify as an example. They offer one product – ecommerce software. It’s the same software, no matter who buys it. But they customize sales page content for specific audiences, like people who want to sell seeds.
This way, when someone searches how to sell seeds online, they get Shopify’s custom sales page for businesses that want to sell seeds. Shopify has over 100 custom sales pages so that they reach more audiences than just those searching for an ecommerce software. They reach audiences searching for how to sell jewelry, how to sell books, and how to sell over 100 other types of products online without changing the product itself. The same can apply to your core offer. If you take your video training course on marketing for small business owners and create automated webinars, webinar registration pages, sales pages, and email followup series catering to specific types of customers, you get the chance to be found in search for more than just small business marketing. You get the chance to be found by audiences searching for chiropractic marketing, dentistry marketing, veterinary marketing, and other specific terms. Is it more content to create? Sure. But that specific type of content can lead to more sales for your core offer in the long run.
Create Scarcity
If people know that your core offer is available forever, then they will put it on the backburner until they are “ready”. And many people will never feel truly ready unless they are given a little incentive. This is where scarcity comes in. Scarcity is very popular in the information product industry – people who sell online courses will “close the doors” after an enrollment period has ended, meaning that anyone who misses it is out of luck. Of course, that approach won’t help you generate passive income throughout the year. That is why you need to implement other forms of scarcity into your offer. Another common scarcity tactic that works with any product is a pricing increase. This is where you tell people watching your automated webinar that your product is now $997, but soon you will be raising the price to $1,997. On the sales page, you match the message by crossing out the $1,997 and placing $997 above it so people feel like they’ve walked in on a limited-time deal. Losing the price of your product is not always the best thing – some people may assume that it is a scarcity tactic, or simply a tactic to make the product look more valuable than it actually is. That’s why you use limited-time value upgrades instead. For example, you can promote that a specific bonus is only available to a specific number of customers.
Note that if you specify first 50 customers, you need to make sure that people can’t easily find out that there are more than 50 customers for your product. If you have a private Facebook community with thousands of members, that will reveal it as a fake scarcity tactic. Both limited time pricing and value upgrade scarcity work well with automated webinars. Just incorporate the message into the webinar. You could even put a countdown timer on your screen near the end of the webinar while answering Q&A questions for a limited time offer that expires at the end of the webinar. Just make sure you have a special landing page for just that offer.
In Conclusion
Want to create a mega-successful offer that drives sales like crazy? It all comes down to choosing the right core offer, adding bonuses that your target customer can’t refuse, giving customers confidence with a money-back guarantee, and implementing a little scarcity so they take action right away. Combine these things with some custom automated webinars and sales pages, and you have the keys to a successful offer!
