Como crear sus productos de Información. 05 (Inglés)

Welcome back to your free course "How to Create Your Information Products!" It's time for lesson 4 - "How to Build Your Website".

How many times have you arrived at a website, maybe because you are actually interested in purchasing a product, only to get there and be greeted by a "flash" intro? Lines and graphics are whizzing around your screen and the next thing you know they're being accompanied by music, too.

Sure they've produced a website that's properly won several design awards here. When it comes to aesthetic pleasure, you can't fault it. It's a pure beauty! The trouble is, this kind of website just won't sell much. They fail to sell for two reasons:

The sales copy is insufficiently powerful and doesn't create the right environment for a sale.

The website has too many distractions that the purchaser simply ends up losing interest. The odd thing is that most web designers don't recognize this problem. They think that the more sub links, navigation bars and onscreen help they present to the browser, the better their website will be. But in reality, the more of these things you do, the less likely you are to succeed with your primary object - making a sale!

The only goal of your website is to persuade your potential purchaser to pick up a copy of whatever you're selling. And the chances are, it's either going to happen right here, right now, on impulse, or not at all.

In other words you must lead your prospects through the entire sales process from the first prick of initial interest in whatever you have to sell, through to an engaging middle section that arouses deep interest, then desire, and then finally you need to stir the "must have" mentality in your customer.

As someone who plans to create a website to sell product, you should build a simple one page website that all leads to one inevitable conclusion - the "Buy Now" button. Look at my website (http://www.cashknowledge.com) and you'll find the following:

You are looking at one long page.
There is nowhere for the potential customer to get distracted, so the only option is to continue reading by scrolling down the page (there is an exception that is the popup page that I will cover in later part of this section).
At the bottom of the page there is only one course of action offered, i.e. "Order Now".

The above short list may sound blindingly obvious, but now have a quick zoom around the net and see how many times these simply rules are broken. Now we can see why so few websites actually make money for their owners.

I come from a printing background and had always previously believed that people would only purchase a product if it were well designed and looked good.

Now I've changed my earlier belief.

I am now utterly convinced that, as far as this type of eProduct is concerned, people will only buy if your sales copy sends them the right messages.

Now if you are the type to spend hours messing around with pretty graphics, banner headings, flash, and worst of all, hyperlinks that take visitors away from your web page, then you'll feel disappointed about the point I've just made.

It is the words on your page that will sell your product. The graphics and everything else takes second place.

Your sales copy must be top notch and it will need to take your reader through the following phases:

An opening that creates interest and bridges the credibility gap
A middle section that builds on that interest
An end section that creates desire and the "must have" attitude.

Let's take each of the above in turn.

An opening that creates interest and bridges the credibility gap

There's probably nothing more crucial than the wording you use right at the top of your page. John and Jonathan set us some good examples by using the follow strategies to create the opening.

Testimonials right up top. Testimonials are a great way of creating credibility that would otherwise be missing. A good testimonial will be believed far more than even your best-crafted own words. Think about it. If someone else is saying something good about your product, then it must be good. And of course the strength of that testimonial will be multiplied even further if the person providing the testimonial is known and trusted.
Open with a passion inducing statement or a question. The first line of your actual letter is one of the most important items on your page. It must create the interest and there are a few well-worn techniques to achieve just this. My favorite method is the technique where you open the letter by asking a question. Asking a question can create interest and provide a great start to your sales letter.
Dear salutation. Everyone who arrives at your website will have one primary question in mind - "Does this website apply to me and the problem that I'm trying to solve?" You can use the salutation to help answer that question.

Ideally you'll use the salutation to narrow down the focus. For example:

John uses "Dear Test Takers" for his ePackage "Winning ACT Strategies". Another choice can be "Students".
Jonathan uses "Dear Job Hunters" for his ePackage "Perfect Resume Writing". Another choice can be "Job Seekers".

A middle section that builds on that interest

This middle section is designed to pick up on the interest you've just created with your opening. It must paint a picture of how life could be if only your prospect owned a copy of your product. You must present an image of a new world, where your product answers the pressing problems that exist today.

The key here is to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect and imagine that you just surfed the Internet looking for a solution to your problem and up popped the site.

Let's return to John's product: "Perfect Resume Writing". John put himself in the shoes of someone searching for a job by answering the three main questions they have in mind:

Why have I sent out so many resumes, but still got no interview?
How can I improve my resume?
Is there anything that I don't know about writing a resume?

1. Paint the picture

The middle section must paint a picture of how life could be if only your prospect owned a copy of your product, to let your prospect's imagination run wild. Here's Jonathan wrote the middle section for his product "Perfect Resume Writing" including the bonus "55 Interview Traps":

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Imagine that you created a perfect resume that put you in front of all your competitors. You sent out the resume, and within weeks you got several interview invitations. You did flawless in the interviews. Then within another few days you received three job offers. So the employer didn't choose you. You literally chose the employer!
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2. Use bullet points to list benefits

Bullets provide the most excellent way of presenting your message. People are lazy, they want to cut to the chase and your bullets allow them to do just that.

3. Make the price seem cheap

When it comes to money, nobody is willing to pay. You can only settle the deal by removing the "money obstacle" and persuading your prospects to reach pocket. There are four techniques to achieve this:

Compare your product with similar products.
Contrast your price with the benefits that they've just been reading about.
Use bonuses to help the prospect cross the line and buy.
Push the sales by setting a timescale

An end section that creates desire and the "must have" attitude

Your prospects like what they've been reading. They're already convinced that your product is worth the price. Now it's time for you to close the sale.

Bonuses help close the sale. Here's where bonuses can make all the difference. They turn a rational possibility of a purchase-taking-place into a "must-have-it-right-now" attitude.
Re-assurance prior to purchase. Not everyone is happy about purchasing on the Internet. They don't know you and you don't know them. So you need to build confidence and trust.

A cast iron Money Back Guarantee can help achieve just that.

The above three phases are discussed in more details, with lots of real-life examples and graphic demonstration, in my ebook "Cash Your Knowledge". You can get a copy through the Website: http://www.cashknowledge.com.

Before we talk about the technical practicalities of building your website, you should know this - you don't need to be an HTML expert to build your website.

Because your website should be a simple one-page website instead of some slick flashy website, you can certainly do it by yourself even if you don't know how to write a single line of HTML (the language that websites are built in). Your website will largely be text based and therefore incredibly quick to load as a result. This level of website development doesn't require any experience in creating websites.

If you can type in Microsoft Word, then you are able to build your website in a user-friendly application like FrontPage. You use FrontPage just as you use Word. Just typeset your words in the "Normal" window of FrontPage, and then save the file in HTML format. FrontPage is so easy to use that there's no need for me to do demonstration here.

If you currently don't have FrontPage or any other HTML editor that you are familiar with, that won't be a problem, either. I recommend you an excellent HTML Editor.

Just like FrontPage, the HTML Editor is extremely easy to use. I've been using it for quite some time, and I haven't found any limitations really limiting my work at all.

The HTML Editor comes with my ebook "Cash Your Knowledge".

When you build your web page, keep the following in mind: remove every possible distraction from your reader, such as pretty graphics, banner headings, flash, and worst of all, hyperlinks that take visitors away from your web page. Instead, your website should be a simple long page with the scroll bar on the right hand side and everything should lead the reader to the "Buy Now" link at the bottom.

I'm not sure if I mentioned "Pop-up Windows" in the earlier lessons.

Like them or not, pop-ups work!

Pop-up windows are ads launched into a new, smaller browser window when you open a page. They obscure the page that you are trying to read, so you have to close the window or move it out of the way. You may not have good feeling towards them, but if you choose to ignore them and not incorporate them in your sales website, you'll instantly be deciding to lose a significant number of subscribers and ultimately sales.

My strong recommendation is to use them!

There are three types of pop-ups:

Pop-ups. These appear as you open a page.
Exit-pops. These appear as you leave a page.
Pop-unders. These appear underneath the current website and are therefore generally not noticed until after the visitor has closed the page.

According to experiments, a pop-up advertisement brings three times more sales than a banner advertisement. Pop-ups can boost subscription levels on any website by up to 500% or more. There's no doubt to say that pop-ups (and the rest) are very powerful marketing tools.

However, you must resist the temptation to overuse them for the following reasons:

People will get tired of continually needing to close off additional windows that keep popping up onscreen.
Too many pop-ups will distract from your central aim of getting people to buy the product onscreen.
Some search engines won't allow you to list your website with more than one pop-up.

Of these three reasons the last one is the most potentially serious problem. You will be marketing your product by search engine submission (I'll cover search engine ranking in the later lesson "How to place your website in top 10 positions in search engines"). The most important search engine is Google and it checks for the number of pop-ups that you use, before approving your keywords. At the time of writing, its current policy allows just one pop-up, so you need to make the choice between a pop-up and an exit-pop. I personally like exit-pop better.

What exactly is the use of exit-pops in your business?

Well, let me put it this way...

To some extent, your business is like fishing. Your sales letter (your website) is the hook. Fish doesn't bite a naked hook. So your sales letter, no matter good you make it, is not enough to bring you a lot of sales. You need the bait!

Your bait is your free mini-course. It can be excerpt of a small part (ideally three chapters) of your ebook and is given out to your prospects for free. Your mini-course has just one purpose, to sell copies of your product. It achieves that by raising your prospects' interest and excitement level on your product to the greatest extent. If you are not allowing people to subscribe to your mini-course then you are missing one essential component of your online business. You certainly want as many people to subscribe to the mini-course as possible in order to maximize your sales. This is where exit-pops kick in:

When a visitor leaves your website without purchasing your product, an exit-pop window appears and invites him/her to subscribe to your mini-course. Once he/she subscribes to your mini-course, he/she becomes your potential buyer - chances are, he/she will come back and buy your product after reading your mini-course.

You see, the key point of above scenario is to hook up the visitor and turn him/her into your prospect with your mini-course. Then you know he/she will probably buy sooner or later. If you don't hook him/her up, he/she will leave forever and you'll never see him/her again in your life.

I'll cover the mini-course in more details in later lessons. But now let's compare the two real-life cases:

Case #1 - static sign-up. Before Jonathan knew the great benefits of exit-pops, he used a static sign-up form on his website - people came to the website, read the sales letter and went on filling out the sign-up form to subscribe to his mini-course. The weekly subscription rate is 300, which brought him 10 sales.
Case #2 - pop-up. Then Jonathan started to use exit-pops to promote his mini-course. His weekly subscription rate instantly jumped to 1500, which brought him 50 sales.

It is a fact that you won't achieve a high subscription level by simply placing a static sign-up form on your website. You really must use more aggressive means - exit-pops (or pop-ups) to achieve a significant level of sign-ups, and ultimately more sales.

When you get the ebook, you also get the Pop-Up / Exit-Pop Generator so you can create your pop-up / exit-pop pages by a few simple clicks.

Now we come to another big issue about your website - publishing it.

You know you can't put your website online without a domain name and web hosting service. You should use one domain for each of your products.

People search the web looking for answer to their questions. Your prospects come to your website looking for a specific solution to a specific problem they have and therefore one of your specific products. You do not want to confuse them by bringing out a page that displays several different products. Instead, you should set up a different domain name for each product you sell.

Should your product name be the same as your domain name? Not necessarily. While there is a limit to the number of characters in your domain (65 characters), your product name can be as long as you want. There's nothing wrong with a long product name. People buy your product only because your sales letter (your website) clearly answers the question they've been wanting to understand. The job of your product name is to sum up what your product does and to rank your website high in search engines (I'll talk about search engine ranking in later sections).

Domain registration and web hosting service are ONLY two items you must pay for in the entire process of building your online business.

However, your cost should be tiny, next to nothing.

Because of the competition over the Internet, domain registration and web hosting service have become really cheap. For example, FreeHomePage.com offers a service package for only $13.30 a year, including domain registration (www.yourname.com), 15MB space and your email account. This is just one example to show you how cheap the domain hosting service can be.

ClickHereFree.com is a website where you can search for web hosting service. FreeWebSpace.net is another website for hosting search. What make the later one better is that it has a "Customer Review" section where you can check how people say about each hosting service.

There're even companies offering free web space, and there're nothing wrong using free space. However, do not use the service if they have the following limitations:

They require you to put their advertisement on your website, e.g. banner or pop-up ads.
What they offer is actually sub domain, e.g. "yourname.theirname.com" or "theirname.com/yourname".
They do not offer email account.

I'll be back in two days with lesson 5 "How to Automate Your Marketing Work".

Sincerely,

Martin Johnston, President
(c) Cash Your Knowledge

El retorno de la inversión en entrenamiento ejecutivo de equipos gerenciales es exponencial y en minutos. Norman Vincent Peale.

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