Your most profitable product will always be your own product. This is because you have total control in every phase of its marketing.
Selling complementary products helps make your business become more profitable. They help you attract more customers to your website and will help establish your creditability as an expert within your area of expertise.
For example:Lets say you sell drift boats and your target market is fly-fishermen. A natural complementary product line for you might be to sell fly rods and tackle.
Today I will share the process I follow when I launch a complementary product.
Buy The Product Yourself
I can't over emphasize the importance of owning products you sell. This is a must, and hardly anyone does it. Most products you buy on-line offer a guarantee so there isn't much risk to you involved. If you won't buy it, chances others won't either.
You will naturally be able to answer questions with authority, if you own and use the product.
If your complementary product is marketed through a multi-level affiliate program, encourage your reps to buy the product also.
For example: I have over 200 second tier affiliates in a web hosting affiliate program. In the last 2 years over 90% of all sales by my second tier were made by reps who were also customers.
Collect Information
Spend considerable amount of time collecting all of the information you can find about the product before doing any marketing. Most on-line products provide you a free website, and usually, additional copies you can use to help market their product.
Create List Of Features And Benefits
Create a list of points - features, & benefits, as well as concise text. Microsoft Word 2000 has a great feature that will create a summery of all the information in a file. It will pull out the key points for you. The feature can be fine tuned to collect a higher or lower percentage of the total material into a summery. It can also be done manually
Organize Your Information
The News media always place the most important information up front, and the least important at the bottom. The reason they do this is because most people have limited time and patience to research. This is especially true on-line. Most people are satisfied with a little information, but others want as much as they can get.
In order to satisfy everyone's needs, I place the most important selling points at the top and the least important at the bottom. I follow that same process for the features bullets and again within the text within each paragraph.
Create Opt-In Follow-up Messages
Everyone is impatient, especially on-line. Most people will not buy the first time they see your ad or visit your web page. That's why it's vitally important to offer an opt-in follow-up messaging system for every product you sell. I have found that following up with informational and/or educational messages are the most effective tool in my marketing arsenal.
I make it as easy as possible for my visitors to request more information. I create 3 to 10 opt-in follow-up messages for each product I sell. These messages are delivered over a period of days or weeks. Each message embellishes one or two of the most important benefits my product offers. These messages gradually build a positive relationship that converts prospects into loyal customers over time.
Collect Or Create Graphics
Graphics and banners are not the most important marketing tools; however they can be useful. I use banners and text links on my content pages if they are related to page content. I ask myself the test question, "Will placing this proposed graphic on this page add value to the content?"
Create Your Own Web Page
Prospects are more likely to buy from a web site they know and trust, rather than the obvious reseller URL. Most affiliate programs offer a free web page. I link to these supplied pages only as a source of additional information or to use the supplied order page or affiliate sign-up page
It's important to brand your website's look and feel with your own introduction page. Trust is developed over time. People buy from merchants who are invested in the products and services they sell. Your own web page helps tie your business' complementary products and services to you.
Make It "Sticky"
Make your page as simple and organized as possible if you want your prospect to stick around. Place the most important information first in short, choppy sentences, with lots of bullet points. In addition, make it more interactive by offering to answer specific questions. Offer links to additional sources of information from your supplied website, your follow-up messages, and to you directly.
Generate Traffic
One of the secrets of attracting more traffic is to develop very specific answers to anticipated search engine information requests.
Start by creating a list of keywords using the content you already collected. You will find additional keywords using Jimtool's great keyword generation tool.
This is where you can use all the information you collected earlier. Create a separate page consisting of a single feature or benefit. Include liks to your complementary product's web page and to your other web pages.
The following is an example of a useful doorway page. This page helps sell virtual hosting services by dealing with one specific subject.
http://www.smithfam.com/hosting/buildit.html
Remember, we attract visitors by offering the specific information our prospects are seeking. Doorway pages help us by helping the search engines results yield the most reverent information for a given search term.
In Summary
Your most profitable product will always be your own product. Offering complementary products will help make your business more profitable and establish your expertise and credibility.
Always buy products yourself before considering selling it to others.
Use of interactive opt-in follow-up messages to help you sell by repeated exposure.
Create your own web page to establish your brand and show your investment in your complementary products. Use banners and graphics sparingly. Create additional doorway web pages that focus on solutions your prospects needs, and use the search engines to attract prospects to your solutions.
If you want to research a couple of tools I use to generate over a million hits a month, visit the following pages.
Web Position Software
http://www.smithfam.com/wpg/
Traffic Builder Software
http://www.smithfam.com/ts.html
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