In this podcast, Justin Wheeler and I talk extensively about he got WSO of the Day on June 4th, 2012.
In case you aren’t familiar with what a WSO is, let me explain.
WSO stand for Warrior Special Offer and it is a way for anyone to sell a product on the WarriorForum – which is the most popular forum for Internet Marketers that I know of. The cost for a WSO is just $40, and for that, you can put up a sales page that promotes pretty much anything you like. To see some examples, just head over to the Warrior Forum and look in the WSO section.
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The major benefit of a WSO is that, if you are successful, you can generate a lot of cash and a lot of new customers in a very short period of time.
In other words, you can build your list super fast, and, you can make a profit while you are doing it. Obviously, there is much more to launching a successful WSO, and in this podcast, we are going to be discussing exactly that.
In This Episode, Justin and I Discuss
What a WSO is and why using them to grow your list is so powerful
How much money he made from his WSO
How to spot changes in the marketplace that will give you ideas for killer products
How to get a new product developed in a short amount of time
The timeline for product release and 3 key steps you must include
How to contact Justin
Transcript
Click Here to Read the Transcript
OIL 025: An Interview with Justin Wheeler on How He Got WSO of the Day
Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! What’s up? It’s Trent here. Welcome to episode no. 25 of the Online Income Lab podcast. Today, we have got another super, super interesting guest on the show. A guy who’s been having a lot of success online as well as offline. His name is Justin Wheeler and we’re gonna cut over into the show here in just a minute but I wanna tell you a little bit about what you’re gonna be hearing today.
So back on June 4th Justin got, was awarded something called WSO of the day. Now if you’re not familiar what that is WSO stands for Warrior Special Offer. And it’s a place on the warrior forum which is probably the most popular internet marketing discussion forum on the web. It’s a place on that forum where you can put up anything for sale that you would like to sell. You can sell software. You can sell training. You can sell webinars. You can sell whatever you like and if you market it really well and you hit up and you create a product that is something that people are gonna wanna buy you’re gonna sell a lot of it. You’re gonna generate a lot of revenue and you’re gonna build your list really fast. That is exactly what Justin did with his special offer that you’re gonna hear about in this interview. So let’s hop on over and welcome Justin to the show.
Okay so on the show with me today is Justin Wheeler. And I came across Justin a while ago and have been kinda watching his stuff and he really popped on my radar screen the other day when he got WSO of the day. And the opportunities for WSOs are so significant and there’s so many people that I know that are doing so well with them that I really decided I wanted to get some guests on the show who can speak from experience in having achieved WSO of the day and so that’s what Justin and I are gonna talk about today.
So Justin, thank you very much for making some time from all away down there in Peru to come on to the podcast with me.
Justin Wheeler: It’s a pleasure Trent. It’s nice to be here.
T: So first of all, let’s give the audience an understanding. So it was June 4th you got WSO of the day. What was your WSO? Who is it for? And what is it selling?
J: Well WSO of the day that we got was a joint collaboration to myself and John Flynn. And we are both offline marketers fundamentally and we make money by selling services to businesses of all sorts and sizes. And it so happened that last week, last Wednesday, Google made a huge change to the way that Google places works. Flynn and I know where Google places are. In effect everytime we go on to google we search for restaurant or bar or something invariably you’ll find map results coming up on Google. And if you click thru that it will take you to what they call Google places page or it’s called a Google places page and I’ve had little bit of information about the business and some reviews.
Last Wednesday Google decided again to integrate that inside the Google + search network which is their sort of attempt to be the next Facebook to overtake Facebook in search networking. And so that was quite a big change and I’m in quite a few of these Skype channels. I don’t know if your audiences are completely familiar with what they are. But on Skype there tend to be groups of people who will talk about certain subjects. And so I’m in Skype group for WSO masterminding. I’m in another Skype room for offline consultant masterminding. I’m in another Skype room trying to find affiliates for my products, etc. There’s a number of these Skype groups and I’m in a few of them. And they’re a good resource to be in. See if your listeners are listening or not in the Skype group. We’ve been in some relation thinking about trying to join and there are different ones. Some are paid. Some are free. But invariably you’ll get good value from them. And it so happened that in this Skype room everyone was panicking really about Google locals plus Google local business pages as well as the previous Google places. And I rather jokingly said what type of slew bad products about Google places. And then it suddenly struck me that I actually wasn’t watching out for slew bad products on Google places. It was a very good opportunity for me to put together a really good product to make Google places which is what I tried to do.
And John Flynn is a friend of mine for a couple of years. I first met him when he bought one of my products and is really talented offline consultancy where they serve 500 clients. The reason he started his own WSO and he launched a while back called Google map hack which is all about ranking on Google places. And I said he seems like a very good person to team up with to do this WSO so I spoke to him about it. He said yeah he definitely would be up for it. And it so happened in fact he has a mastermind group of who would have bought his map hacks. And he was thinking of doing his own products. I said it seems to make sense that the two of us to join together which is what we did and we released it quite fast. I mean the change is on Wednesday and we put our products on Sunday. We produced it 3 days later. And if you’re looking to create a product of your own a really good idea is to find out something which is changed that people want to find information about. And this is a topical product. I’ve been finding Google+ has got some long legs in it because Google+ is gonna be around for a long time. For example I mean 2 weeks ago Facebook introduces scheduling for posts to Facebook pages and that’s another great subject that somebody actually then went off and did a good product to buy. And so that is a good thing to look for. Something that’s topical in the news and it’s always a good idea for product creation.
And Pinterest has been another classic example. And that suddenly appeared in everyone’s radars in the last few months. And suddenly there’s a whole range of pinterest related products coming on to the market place. And so that’s how Google+ invasion came out. Do you know I’m very proud of it?
T: Yeah that’s an excellent piece of advice to pay attention to the news coz I’m actually myself, that’s a double sentence, I myself – fail for grammar for me. I’m looking at developing some software and one of the things that I’m thinking about is where is the stimulus and where is the ideas gonna come from for the products that I wanna create. And so a little nugget there for me. Thank you. I wanna jump back just a little bit you mentioned that it’d be a good idea for people to be able to join Skype groups. I’m in one. How I found it was I knew a guy who was in it, Chris Guthrie, and he invited me into it. If somebody’s listening to this podcast and they’re not in any Skype groups, is there any tips you can give on how they could find Skype groups?
J: They’d probably try googling Skype. I mean if he gonna look for, since we’re talking about WSOs and if he’s gonna look on the warrior forum itself. They have some label there hence masterminding networking section and that’s quite a good place to kind of find Skype groups. You can visit my website, contact me and I’d add you to one of my Skype groups. But I mean yes there are some ways I pay to be a member of a Skype group. Both of which are hugely valuable. One is owned by a guy called Andy Fletcher who runs a series of affiliate networks. I think he charges mine $7 a month to be a member of his. And I’m into a blog course mastermind which is a Skype group and a few other things as well. So I pay to be in those and I get great value to a couple of this.
T: Okay maybe need to have a whole other podcast about Skype groups. I don’t want to get us too focused on this one.
J: Maybe we should you start you in Skype group.
T: Maybe we should.
J: Maybe we should. Anyone who’s listening can call and come and join us and hang out with Trent’s mind.
T: Absolutely. If you are listening to this and you make it to my podcast and you think that’s a good idea leave a comment at the bottom of the podcast and maybe we’ll consider doing that if there’s sufficient interest.
Okay so now we kinda have an idea what your WSO was about. It was about this big change and how people could take this change presumably and turn it into a benefit for themselves. Is that correct?
J: Absolutely yeah. Well the first one is explaining how the change works and second is explaining how there are additional opportunities that can come out of that change to make more money or to add more service offerings to their clients and therefore make more money.
T: Okay. So you put together this WSO in a very short period of time. I noticed that the product delivery model was a webinar so that is one of the things I’m assuming that contributed to your ability to put it out so quickly. Is that really what you had to do is put up a sales page and then x number of days later you needed to be ready to deliver the webinar no. 1 and I think there was a second webinar and there was a couple of bonuses. Can you talk a little bit about what thinking that went in product delivery?
J: Well I mean yeah you’re absolutely right. Webinars were key components of that. And you know I was talking to John about how best we could do it and we asked do we sit down in a quarter of the videos like crazy. Or do we try to do something live and take people’s questions live. And there’s a very talented marketer by the name of Chris Munch who released a product a few months ago called hook pigeon. And his entire delivery method for product was via webinar. And I thought that would be a good way of doing it because we could demonstrate what’s going on and demonstrate the changes live. But then also take questions live, get feedback live. And on the second webinar we’re doing we could cover anything that we didn’t cover properly the first time. And then maybe we’d make a third webinar a bit later as well.
The thing is webinars are a fantastic way of doing all sorts of things. One of the things I particularly like about webinars is when you’re listening to somebody on the webinar it’s much easier to get a feel of who they are than almost any other way of building a relationship with somebody faithfully. I look at relationship at the back of the webinar so they can’t stand the sound of your voice or what you’re doing whatever. Hopefully people will like what you’re saying and like the content that you’re giving. And by doing the webinar it’s much easier to get some new ones from what people are saying.
I think I like it as a method. And I think I want to describe webinars as being like relationship building on crack coz it’s a very good way building relationships. That was why we went on. And the other thing is we’re adding some others with PLR packages people can use when they sell those Google+ local services. And to get the quality that we wanted we were running 2 1/2 days because you’re hiring professionals for you. And say we want to put our coming ads sooner than later. You want to capitalize on the fact that it was big news. And say the webinar seems the most obvious way of doing it.
T: Brilliant! Plus you get to record the webinar and now you’ve got really great content that you can use for bonuses or any number of things down the road.
J: Absolutely.
T: Okay so let’s talk about the numbers if you don’t mind. And if I ask you that you don’t wanna answer just say you don’t wanna answer. What’s the total revenue that that WSO generated?
J: This one it wasn’t huge. I think it was about $10,000. I think so in the schemes of huge successess it wasn’t in there. But it was a good WSO. It was a good return on our time and investment to put that out.
T: So $10,000 was that front end revenue or is there a back end as well?
J: Well actually in this particular case we didn’t do a back end. We thought about it and we thought about doing the webinars from the front end and having a back end offer but actually we didn’t have any of the content that we want to sell them immediately. And also there’s a lot of people complaining about OTOs the one time offers. This is all front end.
I’ve organized an event in London recently with a guy who brokered for the warrior gathering. He organized weeks of the gathering of the warriors with Andy Kay and a few from the states. And one of the guys there, this guy Alex Jeffrey, your listeners may have heard of. His been a phenomenally successful english internet marketer. He’s gone completely crazy. He’s doing a million dollars in 21 days. But what he makes the point, his main point his presentation is about is the key things he’s been focusing on is customer acquisition, acquiring customers and the value of those customers, the lifetime value of those customers. Now I would argue that he wants on customer acquisition and making him good value as well but the fact that they are the core matrix. If you can get in 400 new leads into customer base off the back of a WSO then those 400 leads it’s not just the WSO itself. When you’re making the money it’s the long term future of those leads. There’s other products you can sell that’s more expensive products so you can sell them etc.
And I hang on that a lot of people get along with WSOs and the WSO marketplace. They seem to have the idea that what we should be doing is long term WSOs and keep on launching WSOs. And then you make money from the back end by promoting other people’s WSOs. But it becomes just a bit of a necessity for doing that up. Nowadays people get bored of receiving emails from 20 different people promoting the same WSO.
If you can learn to try and keep them to yourselves finally and your products processes and the othe products that you have then that is I think so much better. And it will obviously give you much greater customer value. And if you’re providing really good value to the customers as well that’s even better.
T: You know I’m so glad you mentioned that. I wrote a post a while ago and I titled it I wanna sell you to much of my stuff as possible. And in the post I talked about the difference between a real business and not a real business. And the real business has 3 pillars: customers, product, and a way to get paid like a natural transaction processing. And so many people and self included when I started we didn’t really have that model while building all these niche sites. We didn’t have customers, we didn’t have products, we just had a way to get paid which was whatever they would click on your site. And I’ve been, you know, since the big changes with Google I don’t build any of those really ranky dink sites anymore. But I’m really trying to stress to my audience that the importance of having those 3 pieces in your business, you’ve got to have customers, you’ve got to have a mailing list because the repeat business opportunity is just so significant and so long as your producing really great products people will be very, very happy to buy more products from you. It’s the same reason people go back to the same restaurant over and over because there’s an expectation of what they’re gonna get and it gets met over and over again.
So another guest who is recently on my podcast and Paul was too actually. He was on the last episode. We’re talking about his new product that’s coming out but before that I had a guy by the name of Mike Cooch and he recently did a WSO and got WSO of the day. And he’s segway that into a live event which has generated some $40-50,000 I think in revenue. And the key thing that he talked about with WSOs and I don’t remember if this was offline or during the podcast is that he saw just a phenomenal customer acquisition tool and I agree with him completely. Coz in the real world, in the regular world. there’s client of yours that your consulting to they’re ingrained and thinking of having to pay to get a customer. You know, cost per lead. Advertising, postcards, whatever it is that you’re doing that you’re thinking about paying.
With WSO is you can get paid to get a new customer which it’s a pretty phenomenal model and so you’re gonna be seeing more WSOs from me coming out in the future. Okay so total revenue, that worked out for probably 500 customers, something like that?
J: Yeah I think so yeah.
T: Okay so 500 new customers in the space of a couple of days. That is pretty darn awesome. Okay so now that we know what you accomplished and why you did it, let’s back up a bit to the day that the news came out and you and John said “hey there’s an opportunity here. We need to go like mad.” You must have had some type of project plan or something. There’s a series of events. There’s a lot of details in that series of events that has to all happen in order for someone, for a successful WSO to be launched and to do what you did and which was a shift WSO of the day. So can you help me and my audience to understand what it is that you did from that moment that the light bulb went on and you thought “hey we wanna make a product and we wanna make it a WSO.”
J: Yeah the first thing we did we planned out the product for what it was to what we really want to try and cover in there. They have a basic webinar outlined for 2 webinars for who wants to try and do it. And then we saw that speaking to people that we know who might be in some promoting it and seeing if they were. And obviously there’s virtual notice in it. For a WSO to be really successful you need to give your affiliate as much work pretty much as much pay as you can. And you’ll notice but you may not know it yet and your listeners may not know this but you will see around the web you’ll see this, I forgot the name of the website, jvnotifypro is an example. Another website is iamlaunch.com. And you’ll see on there people are planning out their product launch for months in advance. And they’re doing that coz they want to try and get anyone who’s trying and stake their claim to build their specific product. But also they want to start attracting affiliates, get people committed to promoting their particular product.
On the 3 day lead time it’s much harder to get affiliates on board versus you have a 4 week lead time. So that was one of the slight problems that we had. We managed to get some affiliates on board. And then obviously being WSO of the day really helps because a Mike Lance will send you a lot of traffic. For those who don’t know Mike Lance is the guy behind the warrior plus payment platform that is used for many of the WSOs on the warrior forum. He’s sent us a lot of sales and that really helps. And also because we’re WSO of the day people who may not have been paying much attention to our, so they’re trying to get on board as a jv for a WSO of the day and therefore they were interested in that information themselves as well. So I think that helped too but that’s one of the biggest problems you’ll have on the 3 day launch ever in the long term, getting these affiliates on board.
And obviously you’ve never done a WSO before which I suspect some of your readers may not have done. Getting affiliates on board for the first one is particularly hard coz you have no kind of track record whatsoever and no one has seen who you are. But there are ways around that but you just have to be sort of clever how you do it if it makes sense.
T: It does make sense. And I do want you to elaborate.
J: I thought you might say that. Well I think the best ways of doing it is to start trying to build a relationship with people who you think have good potential affiliates for you. So if you’re doing a product about something and you want to try and get them touch that product, the best thing you can do is buy from their products. And then it’s a nice way to help and try to get them on Skype and start trying to build up a relationship with them really. And it’s not “hey your product was great. I’ve got a product coming out now. Can you promote it for me?” That’t not gonna work. I get pm’s everyday from people saying this is my product. I might want you to promote it for me. And then I say “why should I?” I’m not necessarily instantly promoting your product for you besides I’m not familiar. I’m not sure it necessarily makes sense to me and my list. That’s not the way to get them to promote. You get them to promote because they like you. And if they like you then the chances are they will promote for it anyway. There’s a really nice guy, there’s a couple of nice guys out there who have actually been known to promote for people’s past WSOs without even taking any affiliate commission because they know how hard it is and they want to try and help you get your thing off the ground. So that is one of the things that can really help.
The other thing is that if you used to write platform. There are 3 main platforms that are being used for warrior forums special offers. The biggest I think is still warrior plus. The second one I think is jvz. And the third one is probably digiresults or maybe clickbank. Clickbank has started to be used quite a bit for WSOs as well. But if you list your product on one of those marketplaces and you manage to get some sales there people will look at the number sales that you’ve got and also how much money you’re making per hop or per click. Say fairly a hundred clicks. If you’re selling a $100 or more every hundred clicks you get your offer. Then that becomes attractive to potential affiliates. There’s a rule on the warrior forum in there sort of people are looking for that times per click in excess of $1. Which means for every hundred clicks you send someone you get a $100 back. So by having it on those marketplaces and having these statistics showing that will also help you to get new affiliates.
Again it’s hard on those first ones. You really try to find a couple of really good people that you really like and admire and try and get them to commit promoting for you. And the good ones will be able to send to you a hundred sales. And if you can get 1 or 2 of theirs on board for your launch and they will definitely promote for you. Then you know that chances are that you’re stable from there.
And to give you an idea we used to plugin actually about 3 weeks to get a piece of software 3 weeks ago which was Pinterest related and it was called pin to mark. An effective sign up I did for clients. So we build this plugin for clients and it’s actually a really good little plugin. I was going back to doing event and I thought well actually why not release this as WSO. And so we give the plugin to clients and they absolutely loved it. And 3 days later I launched that as WSO and I launched it with such short amount of time coz I was going back to England and I wanted to launch before I went back to England. I launched that within 3 days and found out that one sold more actually than this one. I think that one brought me about a thousand new customers and it made slightly more money. But it did that because I have a list of potential buyers who like my stuff generally and so they bought it. And so then you could see the warrior forums statistics in the warrior plus page. And you could see that this has high earnings per click product. And they all want to promote it as well off the back of that. So that went very well even though I actually didn’t know affiliate recruitment beforehand at all. And I was surprised with that. I wasn’t expecting it to do nearly as well as it did. I just thought it’d be nice to get it a bit of my spending back at the airport. I was stuck in Miami for 14 hours and it did better than that so it was nice.
T: You know it’s a very good point that you’re making about this epc, your earnings per click statistic. And for those people who are listening who aren’t familiar I wanna make sure that I really list this down so that you really get it. So if you’re sending traffic to a page and there’s a certain amount of total revenue that’s generated and you divide that by the number of clicks on that page. That’s gonna give you this number of earnings per click. And the reason that this is important for your jv partners is because if you’re a list owner and you know a lot of people there’s lots of offers for you to choose to promote. You don’t wanna promote too many because then you’ll burn out your list and this people often so forth. You need to be very selective about what you’re gonna promote and one of the ways, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that people, the list owners’ looking at first the relationship with the person – do they wanna help you? All of being equal if I’ve got 2 buddies that I really like the same and they both have an offer I’m probably gonna pick the one with the highest epc because it tells me that for every hundred emails that I send I’m gonna make more money by mailing the higher epc offer than the lower epc offer.
So it’s a really important thing to have but I think your comments on building relationships are excellent. You know at the start don’t be worried that you don’t know a whole bunch of people. It’s like building friends in the offline world. You don’t just walk up to somebody and say “hey, let’s be pals.” They’d look at you like you’re some kind of weirdo. But you can start to retweet people’s messages. You can start to comment on their blogs. You can start to promote their stuff to your audience. You can buy their products. You can engage in dialogues. You can see if they’re in a Skype group. You can get conversation going on with someone. And I know in my situation you mentioned Paul Clifford. Paul says “hey Trent, next time you come up with a product I’m definitely gonna mail for you.” And same with Chris Guthrie and the reason for that is I think I’ve put some effort in getting to know these guys. And I definitely promoted their stuff before I ever asked them to promote my stuff. So it’s just kind of common sense but I wanted to make sure that we talk a little bit about it for those of you who may be newer over the listing and thinking how do I get going when I don’t even have a list or I’ve never done a product and so forth. Don’t let that limiting belief get in your way.
Okay so you’ve got an idea. You mapped out what was gonna be involved in the product delivery. You had a very small amount of lead time which is highly unusual for WSO. Is there a critical success path that you think your way through, you know, what are the actual detailed steps for someone that hasn’t done this before besides creating a product and besides knowing that they wanna sell a bunch? Yes you’ve gonna get interest from a jv partner so okay they’re interested. But what are some other things that you normally if you had longer than 3 days that you would normally be doing to make sure that you got the highest probability of the most successful WSO that you could?
J: There’s a concept called pre-launch for WSO which I actually haven’t done. But you may well see it for other products. I’ve seen pages like the warrior forum where you go and you get to see a video and then trying to get an opt in and the next they’ll show you another video and after that to another video. And that sort of idea is beginning to come to the warrior forum but it’s people starting to pre-launch their products. And then try to get some buzz building out if you can get people excited about it. And really start bloggin about a little bit before then start to get comments from the blog. There’s a lot of other ways, a few cover their prices, for example in there if you cover your prices there’s a demonstration beforehand and just start to build out some buzz for that product before it’s ever launched. I think that is a very good thing to be doing. And it’s I actually haven’t done and probably should do in the not so distant future. I have a few more products coming out that I may find that useful.
T: Did you buy the WSO called WSO Launch Code? Coz it goes through all that in great details from a guy who’s had 12 WSOs of the day?
J: Yeah that was a guy called Aikon. He’s an incredible guy. Well I’ve been told last week he’s a full time army officer in Ireland. I don’t know how he managed to do it coz I just find time to do anything. Aikon despite being a full time soldier manage to lead super WSO heads after super WSO heads. And it was a phenomenal thing to watch. He’s got a fantastic reputation. And that’s how I released a WSO launch code and then you can even buy it but it’s very good to finding stand to launch a WSO. I would say that what you want to try and do is you just want to go off and want to go and launch something, anything. Just so you can get my idea of how the process works.
I actually started off, my first ever WSO was a free webinar about ad sourcing coz I work as an offline consultant but I do web services and SEO services and social media services. And we do a lot of that for you ad sourcing. First I’ve ever done is a free WSO about ad sourcing. And I think about 60 people signed up my free WSO and about 10 people turned up to the webinar. And they bought a product from the back end of the webinar.
And the second WSO I did was a series of interviews of successful WSO creators and I did those and sold 30 or 40. Then I started doing software and the first thing I sold was a plugin released to Facebook design which sold really well. Theoretically it’s got the best nab in everything I created ever since but they’re not quite. But certainly in trajectory in this work moving in the right direction from WSO to WSO but hey the game’s back and I was trying to say I think the idea of doing a launch, a pre-launch of your WSO is a good idea and it’s not something I’ve done so I can’t really talk about it with any degree of expertise other than to say that I’ve seen some people doing it really well.
T: I haven’t done it myself either. I have read through the launch code and in a nutshell it’s basically you’re putting up your WSO but nobody can buy these yet. You’re “leaking the concept thru video” and the whole idea as you explained earlier is to build buzz. There’s a lot more detail than that. So if you’re listening to this I would do your best effort to try and get yourself a copy of the WSO launch code. Don’t know if it’s available anymore.
There’s this thing I was hoping you’re gonna talk about and maybe you didn’t do this was a jv launch page. Did you create one of those?
J: Yes I did. And that is absolute potential. Finally we created a launch page but I forgot much what’s in the launch page. So it wasn’t the most useful jv launch page in the world. But you’re absolutely right. You need to have a page for your potential jv partners to use so they can find all about the product. They can find whether you like them to earn. And if you’re offering any prizes they can find out whether you’re offering any prizes. Offering a prize can really really work well to jv’s.
T: Yeah most of the guys that I’ve talked to who have had successful WSOs have always included a fair amount of prizes and so it seems to me like it’s a pretty good idea to do. With that said if you’ve done maybe and maybe this is wrong but when you get to the point where you have enough people who have consistently mailed for you in the past and consistently realized high earnings per click from your products, maybe the prize isn’t such a big deal for them. They’re just mailing coz they know that they’re gonna get money everytime they mail coz you produce products that sell. I’m obviously not at that point yet so I can’t speak to it but it seems to me most of the successful WSOs are well promoted, well supported in their jv pages with good contests on them.
J: Yeah. I have done that. If I’ve ever done that I think I had 2 contests on my WSOs. And actually I haven’t seen any dramatically different results on having a contest and not having a contest but I know exactly why that is. And the reason for that is that I have this contest but I didn’t tell people about the contest too much. For example, I sent some real money after you promoted on my WSOs where I had a contest. He said “thanks very much. What’s this for?” So I said “you won my jv contest.” And he didn’t even have a clue that there was a contest. So it was slightly absurd. I mean contests are fantastic but they’re only worth having if you make a big song and dance about this contest. So you want to make sure you’re sending out emails to jv’s regularly saying “some testing really well on the jv contest and some isn’t”.
What you want to try and do if you’re listening to this and you’ve never done a WSO and you’re interested in trying a WSO you want to try and get on the jv page on somebody like Ben Aikon or Donna Wilson or Chris Munch. Somebody who has big names and see how they do it and watch what they’re doing and that’s better actually probably than buying somebody else’s WSO. Watch the way they do that launch process. And these guys just do it very, very well. I said that with envy “Why can’t I do it? Why can’t I do it as well as they do?” So watch what other people are doing. It’s a good thing. If you go to a warrior forum itself there’s a thing called warrior plus which is affiliated with the warrior forum and you have to pay $3.99 a month to be a member of that. And that allows you to promote other people’s WSOs. One thing you can do on that is, I don’t have the link at hand, but you can look there and you can see the top 10 WSO sellers of all time. And you’ll see Aitkon’s on there, Chris Munch is on there and a few others are on there. These guys you want to try to find their jv pages and follow what they’re doing and then use that as a process or mind map for what you want to do. And I think that will really help. I’ll just say “get out of there and do something.” Peter is another fantastic warrior, a very bright guy, a really lovely guy as well. He was one of the speakers in this event they organized in London. He said his first ever WSO sold 8 copies. His second WSO I’m not sure how many copies it sold. But now he sends out an email to his list and he’s selling the excess of 500 copies within an hour. And so these guys you just need to watch and see that you’ll learn a lot from them.
T: Absolutely. And that is one of the beauties of WSO marketers. You can see plain as day what everybody’s doing. You wanna see someone’s sales funnel. Most WSOs are under $20. I have their products and you get to see every step of the sales funnel and you get to see all the product delivery, the up sell, absolutely everything. And if you’re smart for your $20 tuition as it were I mean maybe you’ll benefit from having that product screen shot everything on your way through. Screenshot every email, screenshot the sales page, the funnel, absolutely everything. And it’s like getting free school. If you’re sitting here listening to this podcast and you’re scratching your head going “what? I don’t know what kind of product that would make?” Go on the warrior plus which I’m on and just look every single day. There’s a WSO of the day. Look at them. Pay attention. Why is it that that product was so successful? Why did people buy that? And if you start paying attention to what’s selling it’s not actually gonna be difficult for you to figure out what it is that you should be selling because you’ve already seen that the market has an appetite for.
Paul and I are gonna be doing another podcast about software as a WSO and we could be going into detail. And one of the things, it was either him or somebody else outside I was talking to the other day, said when it comes to software that’s in the SEO space it’s just like a never ending opportunity. There seems to be just an insatiable demand for people to buy software that is gonna in some way shape or form make their SEO efforts easier.
So a couple other questions, and how are we doing on time? We got some more time yet. Did you make use of any outsourcing for anything? Like you outsourced traffic or anything at all on this?
J: Yeah absolutely. From this product and all the webinars are being tested by outsources. The plr video content is being given to an outsourcing company. So yeah quite a little bit of the content has been outsourced. It makes sense that we don’t have 3 hours worth of webinar content in full. I don’t want to sit down and listen to webinars and transcribe at all. This may take me, I dare to think I can’t for a long time. And I send it off to outsourcing company and we pay them $40 or $50 or whatever it is and it comes back as done. It’s just very easy and it’s just very forward. And I think that is a good way, outsource whatever you can ultimately.
T: Yap.
J: It makes life a lot easier, graphics, sales copy, everything. And in this case John made the sales copy while I didn’t know what a sales copy. I tend that if I get stuck into sort of a black hole of misery when it comes to sales. I’m fascinated like hell. And it ends just as awful as complete hell so I just find different outsources to do sales copy. But I target somebody really good. And if I find somebody really good and they will do everything for me and I’ll cut them in on the share because it was your copy. It’s one of the most important things. Looking back at the warrior forum there’s 3 things you want to try and concentrate on really. You want to try and have good products. You want to have good conversions. And you want to have traffic. And that’s actually for anything you’re doing, right? You want to have conversions, product and traffic. And these 3 things are critically important. But the most important of them is probably conversions. I’ll say I’d like to think it’s the product but actually it’s the conversions.
And it’s a sad fact about the warrior forum market and if you’re listening to me and you buy WSOs think about this. If you buy WSO you use it and if you don’t use it don’t buy it. I released plugin, it’s an expensive plugin, it’s an expensive piece of software. The average price was about a $100. And I was looking through the buy something system and about 80% of people bought it. I’ve never even licensed that software. They’ve bought it because they thought it sounded cool and make out at some stage. But actually I have a rule if I needed to buy something I know I’d use it. This is completely off the subject of WSO but I do the same thing. So I always enable the hard drive full of apps and rubbish or not necessarily rubbish but old content. You’ll never have a chance to get a look at. I’ve got some on my hard drive from a few years ago and I first started looking into this. And I keep saying one of these days I’m gonna go through it and look through it. But I don’t know when is that gonna happen. I’ll just transport it from my old computer to my new computer and it’s certainly gonna pile. I think “I’ll get to use this at some stage.” But you know I don’t know when.
T:It’s a very good point. For every WSO that you buy you need to think it’s probably gonna cost you 2-8 hours to go through everything that you just bought. You need to think about that. Think about when you’re gonna create the time or when you’re gonna have the time. Unless you’re buying just for market research purposes and you really have no interest in using it. You’re buying it because you’re thinking of what I was explaining earlier the type of WSO that you wanna launch and you wanna look at somebody else’s sales funnel that’s different. You can do that at a really short period of time.
J: Often the product from Trent and myself, in most case press the buy button. Do not pass the chance. Buy now.
T: Don’t even read the copy. Just scroll down and press the buy button.
J: Save it. You don’t ever need to read a copy.
T: Maybe even buy it twice just in case.
J: Exactly. We like that.
T: Alright. So payment processing coz that’s obviously pretty important part of the WSO. You’re using warrior plus I assume?
J: I’ve used warrior plus, jvz and digiresults, yeah. They’ve all got their strengths and weaknessess.
T: So with respect to your product being a webinar, how did you make it so that every one who bought gets to go to the webinar and people who didn’t buy don’t get to go to the webinar. How did you handle that?
J: Well we didn’t. So they may well look into the webinar who didn’t buy who found the link. But the link to the webinar was inside the membership area. So you had to be a member to see the link to sign up for the webinar but we didn’t sit down and compare who’d sign up compared to who paid.
T: Sure so you had a membership site that when the payment processing occurred a member account was created automatically. The emails, it’s just like Niche Site Mastery, when somebody buys something the whole account creation, email going out here’s your login details, all of that happens automatically. And you used the similar process and once they log in to your membership site they could get the URL for the webinar they were gonna go to. Now if they shared that with other people nothing you could do about that other people who are gonna be at the webinar. Is that right?
J: Exactly.
T: And what did you use for webinar delivery?
J: We used gotowebinar.
T: Gotowebinar. Okay.
J: I think it’s the best actually.
T: Does it record on the mac yet? I know when I was using it before and that’s why I switched. I couldn’t record my webinars because I’m a MAC user and it was a real pain in the butt.
J: It does record on MAC. Yeah I think it does. I’m actually into PCs but John is a MAC user and he used to record his webinars and it seems to work fine. So I say it does record on a MAC.
T: Okay. I will have to revisit that then. Alright so we’ve talked about the steps that led up to it. We talked about how you created your product. How you got your audience. We talked about payment processing, product delivery. What did I miss? Was there anything that was on your when you were thinking through how to make all this happen? Was there anything that I didin’t ask you about yet?
J: No I don’t think so.
T: OKay.
J: I’m thinking is there anything else I’d answer that. If anything I’d say is concentrate on putting out a good quality product. And if you do that people come back.
T: Absolutely. And for those of you who are listening and you’re still stumbling around “well I don’t know what kind of product to make or I’m not sure.” Just pay attention to what’s going on to the warrior forum. See what’s selling. There’s a lot of software that you could build very very inexpensively. And the great thing about doing software is one it’s easier to sell. I was speaking to Chris over email or Skype the other day and he’s got a bunch of software he’s doing now and he keeps doing them because it converts so much better. And the reason for that is if you wanna sell a training course you have to been doing what you’re training for quite some time before you can launch that product because you have to have a proof and the credibility that you know what you’re doing so that people will buy your stuff.
But if you’re making a piece of software you could be 2 weeks in the internet marketing. If you figured out a problem that people are having and you make some software that solves that problem or in some way streamlines it, saves them time, automates, whatever and they watch a little demo video, they don’t really care who you really are as long as the software is going to do what you promised that it would do and it actually solves the problem that a lot of people have. So that’s one of the areas if you’re paying attention to the software that’s already selling you’re gonna get lots of stimulus into your mind that hopefully you’ll be able to get extra ideas on how you might improve those pieces of software. Go look at what sold a month ago. Go look at what’s sold 2 months ago because I was talking to Paul and his got his curation product and I think somebody knocked it off shortly after he launched it. I don’t remember the exact details so forgive me on that but I think they launched it after a few weeks after he did it and they sold a whole bunch of copies as well. So there seems to be this never ending appetite for people to buy the same stuff or versions of the same stuff over and over again.
J: You know you’re absolutely right. There’s sensational demand and I’ve done quite a few plugins and I’ve quite a feel of what I’ve done. I’ve seen similar versions that I’m kinda off to and in similar cases beforehand that I’ve thought this is better. And I think that’s a very good thing to do. You find a piece of software that you see on the warrior forum. If the last one’s really good wouldn’t it be much better if we did this. And then you go and find a programmer to do that. And it’s quite a difficult process. It sounds very easy and in some ways it is. But sometimes it can be a bit of a pain. A constant support for the software can be much bigger than on other products. But ultimately you’re absolutely right software is a very good place to be in and look and see what softwares has been released and see what you can do that makes the system better or makes it better. Then you release it or you don’t release it.
Or have it re-coded by somebody else and release it that way. Just make sure you use a reputable coder who you can find again coz I’ve heard some horror stories usually in a way where somebody paid somebody a lot of money on Odesk to do some software and the guy completely disappeared for 6 months. Having have paid 75% of the money and then when he came back and wanted to try and get some more money to finish off the software. So it can be a nightmare. Just find really good quality people. What I’m doing is start with really small and build that from there as you build up a relationship.
T: I’m actually my first software project right now. I have an iphone game. It’s a sniper game actually. You just shoot stuff.
J: That’s fantastic.
T: We have enough time I’ll talk briefly about this. I went to a store and I bought like one of these little notepads with just white paper no lines. And then I’d lay my phone down on the pad and I traced the perimeter of the phone so that I had the screens and I would just start to draw with my pencil what I wanted each screen to look at. The home screen with the play button and the options button and the buy more guns and this button and that button. And then I was just able to story board out my application. And I got it to a point where there’s, I don’t know what it was like 15 or 20 screens something like that, and I thought “okay I’m definitely not gonna go hire a developer I’ve never worked with before and say here just build this game” because to me that has time bomb written all over it.
So instead I actually put up the postings this morning on elance and odesk is I thought I’m just going to have the developer make an application that at first I’m not even gonna release on the itunes store. It’s gonna have the home screen of the four buttons on the home screen only one will work and that will be the button that says play and when they hit play button it will jump them right to the very first mission where in my case they’re gonna shoot some beer bottles and then after it’ll take them to the second mission and after that it’ll take them to the third mission. And that’s it. That’s the whole game. So what is that? 4 screens in total. That’s it.
So from my perspective of hiring a developer if the person can execute my little 4 screen goofy game that I’m never gonna released they’re not like the limited version, and they can do that for me for $500 or $800 or whatever I think that’s money exceedingly well spent because I’m gonna see the finish product that they develop for me. I’m gonna see how they communicate. How they manage expectations. Whether it was on time or on budget and so forth. And then once you’ve got that you’re confidence in that developer is gonna go up exponentially and then you can say “okay well here’s the rest of the screen. Let’s go out ahead now and build the entire application” and then put it on the itunes store and do all the marketing and blah blah blah.
So I don’t know whether you can do that with the plugin or not coz I don’t know how you make a 1/3 of a plugin. But it’s pretty easy to make in software.
J: Maybe even. You can start off with a simple plugin but I think games are fantastic. My nephew has made lots of money from making iphone game.
T: Really?
J: He’s 14 and I think he’s made about $20,000 from his iphone game.
T: Really?
J: And I think I just love this story. If we’ve got time he’d share very quickly. At home he’s really smart kid and he’s really smart guy and he’s absolutely fantastic. And he developed an iphone game called sticklife which it seems so phenomenally well. The way he did it was he went to a site called game salad which you go MAC users but you can create your own app game. And it has game salad bonding on everything else. It’s a simple little game and he then got all of his friends at school to buy it. And so the first day he released it he got about a 100 sales. And I think he was the fastest mover of the day it launched. And the whole thing just took off from there. And since then he’s gone to sell about $3,000 worth. So it’s worth really well. And that was all because his dad said he wouldn’t buy him a MAC and he took so much of it. He made his own game.
T: Really? So he used the game salad development platform and actually built the game himself. He didn’t even hire a coder or nothing he just sat down and did it.
J: Yeah he used the game salad development platform and built the tool himself. He’s not what I’d call a geek. He’s not also a code genius. I’m fortunate I have a pc and we see games out of it. The thing is whether he will stay forward. I often think if you should find an outsource to develop the game and bring it forward. If you look on the iphone store.
T: I’m gonna check it out, stick life.
J: Yeah go and buy it. Make Tom richer.
T: Sure. Maybe I’ll buy it twice.
J: Exactly. Buy a few copies. I was gonna buy stick life by will again on the iphone. It’s a fantastic little game. But I think one of the big comments and feedback is when is the update coming. We need an update. So many people want a new updated version. I’m not sure what Tom’s gonna do if anything. I have a feeling that probably I think he’s more into girls now than future games. He’s got money for a while to go take the night.
T: Maybe I’ll have to buy the code base off of him to take it off his hands.
J: Yeah absolutely.
T: Alright well I think we’re getting way off topic here so it’s probably time to wrap this up. Earlier in the show you mentioned you had a website for people who wanted to get a hold of you. Would you mind rattling off what that URL is?
J: I do have a website and it’s www.justinwheeler.net and it is my personal blog but it doesn’t get updated nearly often enough. But I’m gonna talk weight and size and list some of my products. And when you go and see the blog for the first time you’ll see my presidential list building machine. It’s a plugin I’m particularly proud of. It’s a squeeze page similar to the one on the white hat. But it’s not actually on the same thing. I got a graphic designer to redo that. It’s okay. Justinwheeler.net. Just say hi. Sign up to my mailing list. I promise you I wouldn’t bombard you with those stuff.
T: Alright. Just a little bit of stuff.
J: Just a little bit of my stuff.
T: That’s right. Well I wanna thank you Justin very much for coming to my show. It’s been a joy as it always is when I have a guest on who’s had some success and they’re open and willing to share with myself and my audience the things that helped them to have that success. If you’re listening to this on itunes or in your car and you haven’t been to my website before you can get there at onlineincomelab.com. If you’d like to get a hold of me just go that page and fill out a little form and I will get back to you. If you’re interested to be on my mailing list you can’t miss how to do it when you go to the Online Income Lab. You’ll be presented with more than one opportunity to join the mailing list. And finally if you enjoyed this and maybe other episodes I cannot tell you how much I’d appreciate if you can take a moment to go to the itunes store and give me hopefully 5 star feedback for the Online Income Lab podcast. I have grand ambitions for the future of this show. I have a lot more bright people on as my guests and of course if you thought this was good and you subscribe it at the itunes store you will never miss a single episode. So I wanna thank you all. I love it that you come and read my blog. I love it that you listen to my podcasts.
Again Justin thank you for being a guest.
J: My pleasure.
T: It has been my privilege to have you on the show. It’s my privilege to create the show for all of my listeners and I have another really good one coming up soon. As a matter of fact I’m recording it later today. So I’ll see you on the next episode of the Online Income Lab podcast. By the way this is session 25 so if you wanna go directly to this session it’s onlineincomelab.com/session025.
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