{"id":437,"date":"2010-04-02T08:22:04","date_gmt":"2010-04-02T08:22:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetsmsblog.com\/?p=437"},"modified":"2010-04-02T08:22:04","modified_gmt":"2010-04-02T08:22:04","slug":"72-hours-of-money-making-revealed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johnthornhill.com\/blog\/72-hours-of-money-making-revealed\/","title":{"rendered":"72 Hours Of Money Making Revealed"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s early on Good Friday morning as I write this blog post and I\u2019m almost ready to go away for the weekend but I thought I\u2019d get this information out to you first while it’s still hot on your mind.<\/p>\n

As you probably know this week I ran a Firesale, if you missed it you can check it out here<\/a>, the sale is over but you can still see the sales page to see what I did. The sale was a huge success and generated over $20,000 in sales, not bad for simply selling a few of my existing products at a discount. In this blog post I\u2019m going to share some tips with you that will hopefully help if you ever decide to do something similar.<\/p>\n

First of all I am not claiming to be a Firesale expert, in fact I had never ran a Firesale before and now it\u2019s over I know I made a few mistakes. The main mistake I made was not notifying affiliates sooner. I only let my affiliates know 24 hours before launch, this is really short notice as most affiliates will have promos marked out up to 2 months in advance. I still got quite a few affiliates to promote but I know I could have had more if I had mentioned it sooner.<\/p>\n

Another mistake I made was not warming up my own subscribers before launch. I actually never mentioned this sale to my subscribers before the site went live. Looking back I should have maybe sent a couple of pre-launch emails out. Maybe explaining what I was going to do. So if you ever do something like this notify your affiliates and subscribers sooner and you should see better results.<\/p>\n

Now I may have made a few mistakes but I know I got a few things right. In fact the biggest thing I got right was adding an affiliate program in the first place. I initially wasn\u2019t going to do this but at the last minute and with the advice of Dave Nicholson I decided to get affiliates on board. This resulted in a ton of sales generated by affiliates (thanks for the advice Dave). I also told all affiliates they would be paid on Friday (today) and I know this appealed to a lot of affiliates. After all we all like to get paid promptly when we promote a product so I decided to pay out as soon as the sale was over. I got round this by not offering a refund on the sale itself. Whether this was the right thing to do I don\u2019t know but I don\u2019t think many people would have refunded anyway as the value was so great.<\/p>\n

And this brings me on to the next thing I feel I got right. I piled on the value, not only did I offer almost all of my products for one low price, I also offered extra material such as consultations, business reviews and more. The reason I did this was because I realised a lot of people would have already bought some of the products on offer so I wanted to offer something extra to tempt these people and it seemed to work.<\/p>\n

Now, you would have thought anyone who had paid the full price for any of the products on offer would have complained about the price and the fact they paid the full price. This was a major concern for me and it almost stopped me doing the sale altogether but I thought to myself that if anyone complains I will offer them an additional product or two, guess how many complaints I had? None! Yes, not one person complained<\/strong>, this actually surprised me. In fact I received a ton of emails from people thanking me<\/strong> for making such an offer. I did have a few queries from people who had already bought some of my products and I just offered something extra. So if you have ever had any doubts about doing this because of fear of complaints don\u2019t worry about it. Your subscribers will thank you!<\/strong><\/p>\n

So what else do I feel I got right? Well I think the fact I gave the sale a name was a major plus point. It\u2019s no use saying, \u201cI\u2019m having a sale, here it is\u201d is it? You need to make an impact with your sale, so give it a name, a name such as \u2018Bob\u2019s Birthday Bonanza\u2019 or Steve\u2019s Summer Spectacular\u2019, you get the idea. Then get a domain name to correspond with the name of the sale and get some graphics created. This will give you a template to work from.<\/p>\n

Then list all of your products for sale and link to each product sales page individually, let the visitor see what each product costs and make sure you put the cost of each product on your page and add a total at the end. As you can see the total value of the products offered in my sale was $6673, not bad for a $97 investment.<\/p>\n

Next, limit the sale, if you limit the time on your sale you will see better results. However, when you say it ends take it down or you will be seen as someone who can\u2019t be trusted. My sale ended the second I said it was going to and now its over and no one else can get in. Now what do you think that did to people who knew the sale was about to end? Well let me tell you most of my sales were made in the last 24 hours, need I say any more? In fact look around you in the \u2018real world\u2019 and see how many companies are having a sale just for the Easter Weekend, how much money do you think they will make as a result of this. I bet DFS have a sale on this weekend \ud83d\ude42 (For our international visitors DFS are a sofa company who always seem to have a sale on)<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be afraid to mail often, at least on a daily basis, make sure you keep your subscribers informed about what’s going on, be sure to remind them how much time is remaining, especially as your sale comes to an end. I would also advise you warm your prospects up with some pre launch emails, remember the mistake I made by not doing this?<\/p>\n

Add a countdown timer as the sale comes to an end. When there were 36 hours remaining I added a countdown timer and I know this had a dramatic effect, especially in the closing hours, it also help\u2019s people see when your sale ends as things can get confusing with people viewing your page from different time zones. There are a ton of countdown timers available online so they are not hard to find.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s about it really; if you already have products under your belt you should have no problems, remember the key areas to cover.<\/p>\n