katusha animal: How I Sold 450 Copies of My First Product

Note From the Editor: The following post was contributed by one of our long-time students and top affiliate ? Joshua Zamora! If you?ve been following my blog for any amount of time you?ll know that I RARELY accept guest posts. They quite literally have to be powdered with gold dust for me to publish it here on BuzzBlogger.com.

But when Joshua sent me this exclusive case study ? I was smiling from ear to ear. If you?ve ever wanted a step-by-step guide to creating and selling your own product ? this is a post to bookmark for future reference.

Please give Joshua a warm welcome, enjoy and share!

Hey guys! Firstly, I want to say thank you for being here taking the time to read this article. My name is Joshua Zamora and I plan on sharing with you, step-by-step, how I launched my first product which sold over 450 copies in its first 2 weeks of being live?

For some of you, that may seem like nothing but for someone like me who had never launched a product before, having over 450 people find value in my product enough to pay me for it, was a HUGE accomplishment.

I originally got into online marketing to be an affiliate and make money selling other people?s products, which I?ve done successfully for the past 2 years, but one thing I noticed was that the biggest affiliates online were the product creators, so I decided to put my product creator hat on and give this thing a shot.

So over the next few paragraphs, I plan on sharing with you exactly what I did to pull off my first ever successful product launch.

Creating The Product:

The first thing I had to do was come up with a product idea that I felt would provide enough value to the marketplace that people would pay me for it. The best thing I could think of was to train about what I know a lot about which was making money online as an affiliate with video marketing.

But I wanted my training to stand out and be different, so I went out and studied all the video marketing training programs that had been released within the last 2 months, and although the training was great, it lacked some real concrete proof that their methods actually worked.

I?m not saying their methods did not work but for me personally, I learn best when I can actually see the results the trainer is teaching about. So what I decided to do was create a brand new video marketing campaign and record myself performing the exact steps I take to quickly rank videos at the top of Google. What happened over the next few days was pretty astonishing to say the least.

My new video ranked on the first page of Google in 24 hours and made $50 in the first 5 days in an extremely competitive, evergreen niche ? the best part is that I captured everything I did via screencast videos. BAM- My first product just came to life, a step-by-step Case Study!

On Top of my Case Study, I also created a few extra videos that I wanted to use as a One Time Offer (OTO) which, if you have ever bought a product online I?m sure you?ve seen an OTO before.

One time offer?s (a.k.a OTO?s a.k.a ?The backend?) is where product creators make the most of their money, so I knew I needed a backend offer to be able to make some extra cash while still being able to provide additional value.

One thing you have to keep in mind when setting up an OTO is that it must flow with the front end offer for it to convert well. In my case my OTO was 1. teaching the customers how to use video marketing in their local market and offer it to their local clients, 2. how to use video marketing to promote product launches, and 3. a crash course on using Power Point to create professional videos.

So now I have my front end product as well as my OTO complete in under a week and I have real concrete proof that I can use as my Unique Selling Proposition to convert prospects into buyers. All I had to do now was get my product online in a members area so people can access the content once they bought. Without getting too far off track, I basically used EasyVideoPlayer to host my videos, OptimizePress to build the membership site and a free membership plugin called WP Members to lock down the content.

The Sales and Affiliate Platform:

Ok so now I have my product complete, I have my members area complete, it?s time to find a great selling platform that not only allows easy delivery of my product but the ability to attract affiliates to promote my product to their list of prospects. I decided to go with a fairly new affiliate platform that has been gaining a lot of traction lately and getting a lot of great reviews, that platform is called JVZOO. (I?m not affiliated with JVZOO in any way, I?m just a happy customer of theirs)

JVZOO is real popular among product creators who sell their products through the Warrior Forum as a Warrior Special Offer (a.k.a WSO), which is where I decided to sell my product. The reason that I decided to sell my product on the Warrior Forum is because:

1. It was my first product and the Warrior Forum already has established traffic that I can capitalize on.

2. My product will be exposed to a ton of Warrior Forum members, a good majority who are also marketers that can promote my offer to their list.

Selling on the Warrior Forum is great way for first time product creators like me to start because I?m going where the traffic is, as well as where the affiliates are. Keep in mind as well that many people who sell WSO?s use it as lead generation to feed their higher ticket coaching, training program or membership site.

If you already have an established higher ticket product or a membership site that you really want to get off the ground or feed it more customers, you can use a WSO to build a buyers list and funnel that traffic back to your higher end
offer.

Getting back to JVZOO?

JVZOO makes it extremely easy for you to go in and setup your funnel so that your buyers flow through your front end and OTO?s seamlessly. Also, it allows your affiliates to get paid instantly through Paypal, which is another reason why so many people like selling and promoting WSO?s.

The way I set up my funnel was ? $9.95 for the Case study and $17 for the additional One Time Offer training.

At this point I have my entire product ready, I have it listed and ready to sell on JVZOO, now I just have to get my hustle on and recruit affiliates. I wanted to give myself ample time to recruit affiliates to make sure I made a good amount of sales. I scheduled my launch 2 weeks out from the moment I finished the product, to give myself time to recruit affiliates.

Affiliate Recruitment:

Although I did mention previously that the reason I wanted to launch on the Warrior Forum is because my product would be exposed to affiliates who can promote my product I am by no means expecting a ton of affiliates to run over to my JVZOO product listing begging to promote my product.

I understand that it?s my job to get out there and make my product known to affiliates so they can make the decision whether to promote it or not.

Before I even thought about approaching affiliates to promote, I needed to set up an Affiliates page on my site where I can direct them to get more information on my product. So I set up a simple page that had a video of me explaining what the training is about, what the funnel will be like, and how much they will make promoting my product. The page also had swipe mail, the links to request to be an affiliate and an optin form so they can stay up to date with the launch.

Now that my affiliate page was set up it was time to start hustling.

The first step I took was to list my launch on all the major launch announcement boards that are out there. A launch announcement board is a website where product creators list their upcoming launches to attract affiliates.

The launch boards that I listed my product on were:

1. WarriorJV
2. Muncheye
3. JVNotifyPro.

These are some of the most popular launch announcement sites on the internet today and the best part is, it?s FREE to get your product listed. (jvnotify pro is free to list and you will show up on the sidebar but to get listed on the front page there is a fee)

That was step one for getting my product out there to potential affiliates.

Step 2 was joining all the Facebook Groups centered around WSO?s, product launches, etc. and start networking with fellow product creators. Notice that I said network and not go in and start spamming these groups about my product.

What I did was join the group and start replying to people?s questions, interacting with other group members, sharing my experiences etc.

Then I would befriend a few who I connected with in the group and send them a private message asking them if they were working on any upcoming launches. From there, a few would ask about what I?m working on and that?s when I would bring up my launch. You do not want to be the person who just blatantly asks someone to promote your product, through a private Facebook Message, having never spoken to that person before.

Step 3 of my affiliate recruitment process, was to get in contact with other sellers on the Warrior Forum within the video marketing niche and let them know about my upcoming launch. Inside of JVZOO you can go into their marketplace and find sellers based on specific keywords you type into the search bar. So what I did was look for people that have launched products within the video niche but NOT sellers who had launched products that teach people how to rank videos in Google, because I am their direct competition. Why would they want to promote my product when they can just sell their product to their list?

So I went after those people who launched similar products like Video WordPress themes, video software creation sellers, people who sold SEO products, pre made video marketing materials etc. But to be more specific, I went after the lesser known marketers who sold between 100-500 units of their product which you can see within JVZOO.

What most people want to do is go after the biggest affiliates who get 10-20 messages per day from people wanting them to promote. I went after those who were like me, kinda brand new to product launches, who recently launched a product and have a fresh list of buyers and can send me 10-20 sales each.

What I did was simply visit their sales page and learn about what their product was about. Then I would send them a private message through the Warrior Forum and talk about their product before mentioning my launch. Again I did not want to be that person who just blatantly messaged them saying ?Hey Promote me?

By doing those 3 things to recruit affiliates, I was able to get over 100 people to sign up to promote my launch. Now of course this is a numbers game, so not all 100 affiliates mailed for my offer and the 80/20 rule applies here, where 80% of my sales were made by 20 % of the affiliates.

By putting forth the effort and getting over 100 affiliates on board, I was able to sell over 450 front end copies of my training and 151 of those people took me up on the OTO.

Actionable Takeaway:

For those of you reading this who have not launched a product before, I want you to know that anyone can do what I did. All you need is a great quality product and the drive to get it out there. I have no special skills or fancy training, all I did was record myself ranking a simple Youtube video following a simple system that anyone can implement and charged people $9.95 to get access to it.

If you do any kind of marketing online or offline, you can put together a short and sweet product to sell as a WSO to generate leads. You can sell a training program, WordPress theme, WordPress plugin, pre-made marketing materials, graphics pack, just about anything you can think of to help someone make money in their business.

I hope this article inspires you to get out there and launch your first product!

My name is Joshua Zamora, better known as the ?Zamurai Blogger.? I?m a pretty darn good Chess Player on a mission to build a list of 10,000 subscribers by December 31 2012.