How two Technophobes from Queensland made US$250,000 in their first 12 months on line

We have put this website together to guide you through the process that we used to make US$250,000 in the first 12 months of our online business. We’ve included all the steps, resources, hints and tips that we discovered along the way.
Here are some examples of profitable websites that we have built:

www.practical-report-writing.com
www.skin-cancer-advice.com
www.inspirational-kids-stories.com
www.adoption-advice.com

There are six basic steps to building one of these websites. If you are looking for a specific part of the process, simply click on the appropriate step below. Otherwise, continue reading after this list for all of the detail and links to resources you will need.

The six basic steps to building a profitable website are:

1. Identify a potential topic—one with enough traffic, a hungry crowd, and low advertising costs on Google.
2. Run a test campaign using Google ads for 3 days to check if the product is likely to be profitable, and to research what customers are looking for.
3. Develop the product (usually an e-book).
4. Write the sales letter.
5. Build the website and set up a process to collect the money.
6. Monitor and fine tune to maximise profits.

Step one—Identify a potential topic

You are after a topic which lots of people are looking for, and where people “must have” (rather than “need”) the product.

You also want a “niche”, ie a topic which is not too general. For example, “health” is far too general, but “melanoma” is specific enough.

You don’t necessarily need to know anything about the topic, but it helps if it’s something you are interested in.

The tool we use to determine how popular ideas are is http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html.

Click here for a list of the 204 best selling topics on line.

Once you have come up with some ideas, search for the key words you think people interested in a topic might look for. You are looking for words or phrases which total more than 30,000 hits per month on keyworddiscovery for your topic. For example if you type in “skin cancer” you get over 53,000 hits per month.

Next do a search on Google for the same words. You are looking for:

• The number of websites on the topic (you want this to be in the millions)
• Existing ads. You don’t want a topic where someone is already using a good sales letter and selling an e-book. You also don’t want heaps of ads, otherwise you end up paying too much per click to get in the top three.

Step Two—Test the idea to see if it will be profitable

We generally find that we test about 10 ideas to find one that is profitable. Here are the steps to do that testing:

• Find a good domain name. You can do this at www.godaddy.com You are looking for a name which is descriptive, eg www.skin-cancer-advice.com . Always get a “.com” domain name if you are selling an information product world-wide. You then need to buy the domain name using a credit card or Paypal account. Domain names cost about $10.
• You can also get Godaddy to host your site, for a cost of about US$4 per month. Initially it's a good idea to only buy one month of hosting, since you don't yet know if the topic is going to be a goer. You can extend or change the hosting later.
• The other company we use for hosting is HostGator . Their "Baby" option costs US$9.95 to host an unlimited number of sites per month. If you are setting up a lot of sites, this one is the best value that we've found. You only need to pay for one month initially. It takes about 24 hours for a new site to start up.
• Build a “survey” site like the one we had for Practical Report Writing. You will need a data gathering tool such as the one at www.aweber.com to be able to gather people’s email address and feedback. If you need help building this site, you can go to www.youreasywebsolutions.com.
• Set up a Google ad campaign. To do this you will need to register for Google adwords at www.google.com.au/ads/. This costs about $7. Google AdWords allows you to advertise on a “Pay Per Click” basis, in other words, you place your ad for free on Google, and you only pay if someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website.

When you register with Google Adwords you will also need to give them a credit card number that they can charge advertising costs to. Just follow the prompts to put in the details of your campaign. Things you need to add are:

• Key words—get these from the search you did on keyworddiscovery.
• Advertisement—think of a good catchy headline and content. You can have up to 25 characters in the headline, and 35 in each line of text. You can have as many ads as you like. Three is good to start with.
• Price per click—you can experiment with different prices in the set up. The more you pay, the higher up the list of ads you’ll be. You really want to be in the top 4 or 5. We aim to get into the top 5 for around 10c per click.
• Daily budget—this tells Google when to stop running the ad. Usually $10 or $20 a day is enough to start with, but you need to monitor it to see if it “maxes out” during the day. If it does, you will need to increase it.

 Watch it run for 3 days. You are looking for two things:

• Number of clicks. You want at least 100 clicks a day to start with. Ideally you want 500 a day.
• Number of responses. People will answer the survey question about what they want to see on the site. The more responses the better. Ten or more over three days is good. Ideally you want a 5% response rate or higher.

Pause the ad campaign. This means that, although your website is still there, it is not being advertised, so it is unlikely that anyone will get to see it. This means that you’re not paying advertising costs while you continue to develop your product and sales letter. You can easily reactivate your ad campaign at any time.

Put the results into the Excel spreadsheet to see how profitable it will be. If you have tested 10 ideas, pick the one with the highest results.

Step three—Develop the product

If the topic looks like a “goer”, you need to develop the product. If it is an ebook, you can either write it yourself, or get someone else to write it.

If the topic is something you know a lot about, it will be cheaper to write it yourself. Do this in MS Word, and turn it into a PDF file once it’s finished.

If the topic is not something you know much about, you can get someone else to write it. We use www.rentacoder.com to find people to write books for us.

To get someone at rentacoder to write your book, you will need to register as a buyer, and post a job. Go to www.rentacoder.com and follow the prompts. You will have people from all around the world offering to write your book for you. Once you have chosen one you are happy with, you will need to put “funds in escrow”. This means that rentacoder charges your credit card, but doesn’t release the funds to the writer until the work is finished and you are happy with it. This way, you get what you wanted, and the writer knows they will be paid for it. A book could cost you anything up to $500, depending on the content and how hard it is to write.

The book on www.skin-cancer-advice.com “Melanoma can be beaten—7 survivors tell their stories” was written using www.rentacoder.com for about $500. You can get books written for less than this, but the quality can be a bit variable. We generally look for a writer with English as their first language. Rentacoder has a rating system, based on work each writer's done in the past, so it's worth checking our their track record first. You can either request a specific coder, or put the job out for anyone to bid on.

Click here to get a copy of the specs we prepared to get a book written for $150.

Other ways we have developed products is by interviewing an expert (either face to face or over the phone), recording the interview, and then having it transcribed, again by someone from rentacoder. The software we use is TRX Recorder, from www.nch.com.au. This software allows you to record a phone conversation directly onto your hard drive. From there you can burn it to a disc, and you have an instant product!

Once the book is written you will need to edit it and turn it into a pdf file.

Step four—Write the sales letter

This is probably the trickiest bit. However, you do have a couple of options:

Your first option is to learn the skill of copywriting and write it yourself. Most sales letters follow the formula:

• Problem—what are the buyer’s biggest fears, frustrations and needs?
• Aggravate—how does the problem get worse if they don’t do anything about it?
• Solve—what can you do to help?
• Prove—substantiate your claim with testimonials, research, etc, and give a money back guarantee
• Call to action—ask them to buy and make a special offer.

There are plenty of examples around that follow this formula. Look at any of our sites mentioned above to see how this works.

There are also plenty of training programs or materials that can help you with your copywriting technique. Some of them come with vouchers which enable you to get feedback on what you’ve written. The training programs that we think are the best are:

• Mal Emery's Gold Pack from www.malemery.com
• Yanik Silver’s Copywriting Pack, the Ultimate "at-Home" Internet Copywriting Workshop from www.surefiremarketing.com
• Brett McFall’s AdPack from www.brettmcfall.com

The other thing you need is a good headline. Headline generator is software that is an easy, automated way to generate hundreds of headlines in just 5-10 minutes. You can get it from www.headline-creator-pro.com

Alternatively you can pay someone else to write the sales letter. This can be a bit expensive in the short term (up to $10,000 per letter), but a good copywriter will more than pay for themselves in the long run. The copywriter we use is Pete Godfrey. You can contact him at petergodfrey@iprimus.com.au and please mention our names!

Step five—Build your website with a process to collect the money

You can now change your survey site to a full sales site. The pages you’ll have are:

• Your home page. This has your sales letter on it, and buttons people can click on to buy. It also has buttons to get to the other pages.
• A Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page. You should start with some basic questions, such as:
• Can I buy the book if I live outside the United States?
• I don’t have a credit card – how else can I pay for the book?
• Can I get the book in hard copy, or only as an e-book?
• How do I know that what you’re saying is true?
• How secure is Clickbank?

You can then add other questions as people email you queries.

• A “contact us” page, with a form they can submit with boxes for their email address, name, and question or comment.

Here are the steps to building the website:

• Create each of your pages in MS Word. Once you are happy with the content, do a “save as”, and save them as webpages.
• Edit the look of your webpages. The software we use for this is Dreamweaver, from www.adobe.com
• Upload the finished page to the web via ftp.

You can make your website look really professional by doing the following:

• Have a good template and graphics, such as an ebook cover. www.youreasywebsolutions.com is really good value for doing this, and we always find that sales go up when we change the look of our sites to being more professional.
• Add audio or video for real impact. Instant audio / video generator is the software we use for this. You can get it at www.instantvideogenerator.com

Throughout your sales letter you give people the opportunity (and the encouragement) to buy your e-book, and include a link which says something like “Click here to purchase”.

It’s easiest to sell your e-book through Clickbank (www.clickbank.com). Clickbank is the internet’s largest on-line distribution centre for electronic products. When someone clicks on the “Click here to purchase” button on your website, they are immediately taken to Clickbank’s secure server. Clickbank take their credit card details and do all the payment processing. They are then sent to a page on your site from which they can download the e-book.

Using Clickbank does two things:

• It makes people feel more comfortable buying your book on the internet, as Clickbank is well-known and trusted. Clickbank also honours the guarantee, making the purchase risk-free for the buyer.
• It also stops people ripping you off by giving you false credit card details.

Every fortnight, Clickbank then posts you a cheque (in US dollars) which you can deposit into your bank account.

It costs about $60 to set up a Clickbank account. You can register as many products as you like on one Clickbank account.

The other useful thing about Clickbank is that they have an “affiliate” program. This means that other people can see that you are selling your book on line, and can promote your book on their site. They get a percentage of any sale they make (and you can nominate the percentage), but it costs you nothing to advertise on their site.

The process for registering your product on Clickbank is a bit complicated.

You need to fill out a list of information about your product:

• Brief description of your product
• The retail price ClickBank should charge for this product.
• Are you the creator of this product?
• If not, from whom did you obtain a license to sell it?
• Do your product promotions match all of our guidelines (above)?
• Did you make a $0.00 test purchase yet? (ie did you test that the links all work?)
• How is this product digitally delivered? (web page, email, etc)
• How fast is this product delivered? (5 seconds, 5 minutes, etc)
• The address of your sales page.
• The address of your Thank You Page.
• Comments.

You then need to wait until Clickbank has approved your book (1-3 days) before you can start to sell it.
Once your product has been approved by Clickbank, you need to double check that the links to, from and between your web pages are all working. You also need to ensure the down-load process for your e-book is working, so that once someone has paid for your book, they can get it easily and instantaneously.

Step six—Monitor and fine-tune to maximize results

Activate your sales campaign by going to Google adwords and reactivating your ads. The campaign is generally up and running in under 30 minutes. You can check that it’s working by doing a Google search on one of your key words, and clicking on the ad. It should go straight to your home page with your sales letter.

Every day for the first few weeks (or until the campaign is consistently profitable) you need to monitor two things:

• Number of sales—You can check how many books you are selling by logging onto Clickbank and looking at the Daily Sales graph. You generally expect about a 1 % buy rate, that is, for every 100 people that click on your site, you should be selling 1-2 books. If you are selling less than this, you may need to:
• Make some changes to your sales letter
• Increase your advertising budget, as your ad may be stopped (if it hits your budget) before your market is “awake”.

If you are making changes, it’s important to change only one thing at a time, so you can see what’s working.

You will also need to monitor the number of refunds. This is also done via Clickbank.

• Effectiveness of your advertising—You can monitor this on Google adwords. The things you need to watch and improve on are:
• Number of impressions—this is the number of people who see your ad. You can increase this by adding more key words. You will also find that the number builds up naturally over time as other people pick up your ad and place it on their own websites.
• Number of clicks—this is the number of people who’ve seen your ad and clicked on it. You are aiming for a few hundred clicks a day, but the more the better. You can improve this by adding more key words.
• Click through rate—this is the proportion of people who see your ad, who actually click on it. You can increase this by changing the wording of your ads, or deleting the ads that are not performing well. You can also increase the price per click, which will put your ad further up the list. You should be aiming for about 5% on your top key words.
• Conversion rate—this is the proportion of people who click on your ad, who actually buy the product. This will also tell you how much it costs you in advertising to get each sale. Expect it to cost about $8-$10 per book, for a $27 e-book.

If you have put a “contact us” button on the home page, you will also have to reply to email questions and comments regularly.

We found that Perry Marshall’s “Definitive Guide to Google Adwords” improved our income enormously. Go to www.PerryMarshall.com for his manual.

The easy way to do it

If all of the above seems just too hard, there is an easier way. For just $49 per month you get access to our mentoring program to guide you in detail every step of the way. Plus you get access to us via email and phone to answer your questions, make suggestions, and point you in the right direction. To find out more about what the mentoring program covers, please click here.

Good luck!

While we are happy to receive email queries, we don't guarantee that we will get back to you immediately. However if you decide to join our mentoring program you get access to us and the team of experts who support us. We look forward to helping you to create your own money-making ebook business.

Kind regards

Andrew and Daryl Grant