Business Acumen – It’s All About The Bonus

It’s easy to find bonus items that will boost the perceived value of your product, but while it’s easy, you MUST NOT fall into the trap of just grabbing a bunch of products you can get cheap with rights and throw them in.

If you have ten bonus items that have been advertised all over the place and it’s known that they can be bought as a set for next to nothing, and you try to convey they are worth hundreds, not only is there no perceived value in the eye of most readers, but you’ve flushed your credibility down the toilet.

It’s okay to use products that have been around a little while, but only if they are going to hold a high perceived value. But remember, if you have a few products as bonuses like that, there’s a chance many readers of your sales letter could already own all the bonuses, which reduces for them the power of your offer, which in turn will probably lose you the sale.

Possibly the best approach is to seek out some products with low-cost reprint rights that fit in with what you sell, but the key word is SEEK. Don’t go for the things that are already advertised all over the place.

There are some products out there that have not done well because the author has not had a clue how to write a good piece of sales copy or how to promote his or her site. Even if they don’t seem to offer reprint rights – contact them anyway.

Another great idea is to write your own bonus report – that way you have a 100% exclusive.

If you mix something of your own with something that you have rights to and was underexposed and something that might have been around a little, but still holds its value, then you are probably well on your way.

But no matter how you build your sales page, how you construct your bonus items or how you price your product, it needs to convert well. Make sure you’re tracking everything and assess the results to determine what needs to be improved.

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Quick Notes:
1) Your bonus items must have value to be a bonus.
2) Don’t use products you can get a hold of for free as bonuses.

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This article was written by Kevin Lam from rankaboveothers.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.

The Master & 1,000 Men

What difference is there between a martial artist who has mastered 1,000 weapons and a person who is a master of 1,000 men? Who would win in a battle?

Jet Li, Jackie Chan and Donnie Yen are among my favorite martial art experts. They are who I admire and look up to in the martial art realm. But I would, without a doubt, bet that these three would be defeated by a group of 1,000 men even if they fought together.

If you want to win the Internet business battle you must also be a master of 1,000 men. Think of that as my very own proverb.

“But I can’t afford to and I don’t know how I could control 1,000 men.”

Of course, you already know I’m not talking about 1,000 actual men. I’m talking about autoresponders and affiliates.

Autoresponders:

Imagine a machine that automatically collects your visitor’s information, sends out sales letters, sends your products and much more 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without complaining, whining or screaming for a raise.

An autoresponder is valuable for one important thing: AUTOMATION.

Autoresponders help put any Internet business on autopilot. You can help determine which direction your business will go.

Sure, manually sending out emails to your visitors and clients is important but by utilizing autoresponders you could customize it to where each email is a personal email and yet you don’t even have to keep retyping or reclicking to send it out to all your visitors and clients.

An autoresponder is a great way to automate a lot of the sales process that you used to use after someone visited your web site. Do you want someone to receive a fixed number of mailings at certain times? Do you want to continue enticing the visitor to buy your products? Do you want to continuously convince your current buyers to buy more? Autoresponders are the way to go.

You can have people opt themselves into your autoresponder and have them get a different mailing every 3 days or every week or at any other interval you want.

With the technology today, you can also use professional autoresponders to reach each customer who triggered your autoresponder to message them with their own name. Instead of having pre-written letters with just “Hello!” it could now be “Hello Kevin!”

It’s possible for you to mail too much or too little. Mailing too much will have people opting out of your materials because they perceive that you are bugging them. Mailing them not enough will not only result in the waste of a good autoresponder but also more people will opt out because they won’t remember who you are.

Many of you are probably already using autoresponders and have been saying “duh” to me this whole time, but are you utilizing this machine to its full potential?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Use it to send your products/services.
2. Use it to sell other products/services.
3. Use it to send your follow-up sales letter.
4. Use it to send out your e-zine/newsletter.
5. Use it to teach your customers/members by providing ecourses.
6. Use it to bring back old customers who haven’t purchased anything in a while.
7. Use it as paid advertising for sponsors.
8. Use it to test by sending out surveys.

Affiliates:

Here’s where I have to vent a little. A lot of these so called “gurus” will claim in having the secrets to getting thousands of visitors each day for free, without doing anything and blah, blah, blah. They won’t tell you how at first but the truth is, once you buy into their scheme, you’re going to find out that these thousands of free hits actually came from their affiliates!

Whoopty-do, some big secret that is.

Yes, it is possible to have as much as 100,000 hits a day because of affiliates but that means you need about 1,000+ affiliates promoting your website. You have to consider the fact that not all affiliates are going to produce the same results and so you have to shoot below the estimates a little.

Imagine that each of your 1,000 affiliates were only able to bring in 50 visitors to your website each day. That of course would bring in 50,000 visitors a day. Here’s the catch, it’s not easy to recruit 1,000 affiliates as these gurus claim.

Hey, you’re no Mark Joyner or Jimmy D. Brown, are you? If so, please contact me at 1-800-IAM-RICH! That’s not a real number of course. The fact of the matter is, having an affiliate system in your business will help multiply your earnings and your traffic, but you shouldn’t have to pay someone to realize that.

With this in mind, go out there and build your army!

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Your Take Away:
1) You don’t have to fight the battle alone.
2) Utilize autoresponders to its full potential.

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This article was written by Kevin Lam from rankaboveothers.com – Texas SEO is a Dallas-based web marketing and consulting company. We can help you improve your on-site and off-site optimization so that your website not only looks good to visitors but rank well for the keywords you need. Let us increase your business by first giving you a free analysis.