In this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by software publishing expert, Paul Clifford to discuss how he generated $160,000 in revenue and gained 3,500 new customers in just 7 days by creating Page One Curator and then selling it as a WSO on the Warrior Forum.
If you aren’t familiar with it, the Warrior Forum is by far the most popular forum for Internet Marketers. It is also a goldmine of opportunity for those that understand the dynamics of the marketplace. But beware, it’s not easy to figure out unless you are first given a look behind the scenes. In this podcast, Paul and I do exactly that as we examine, step by step, the exact process that he went through when he created Page One Curator (link to my previous podcast about the product) and and launched it as a WSO.
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About Paul
Paul started his Internet Marketer business in 2009 after leaving his last job as the CTO of a software company. He makes money online through software publishing, SEO consulting, Adsense, and various other streams of income. Having created a sold multiple software apps, Paul is now an expert in the business of ‘software as a WSO’.
In This Episode, Paul and I Discuss
Why software is such a good business to be in
How to get ideas for killer applications that will sell like hot cakes
How to design them so they cost under $500 and can be developed fast
How to find and manage a developer (and what not to do)
How to use the Warrior Forum as your primary marketing platform
and so much more…
Links
Paul’s Blog
Transcript
Click Here to Read the Transcript
OIL 030: An Interview with Paul Clifford
Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! It’s Trent here from the Online Income Lab podcast and welcome to session no. 30. This episode is another in my series of software as a WSO. So if you don’t know what that is you definitely need to listen to this coz on the show with me is a guy by the name of Paul Clifford. And Paul recently launched a product called page one curator. He did a $160,000 in sales. Added 3500 people to his list and he did it all in a week if you can believe it. When software was far far far less expensive to develop than you can ever imagine. So in this episode we’re gonna go through all the details on why software, how to come up with an idea, how to design it, how to find developers, how to manage the development process and a course how to market it and make sure that it sells. So you’re in for a real treat. This is probably the longest and most informative podcast I’ve ever done. So without further adieu let’s jump on over and welcome Paul to the show.
Alright on the show with me today I have Paul Clifford who’s been on the show before. We talked about his page one curator software if my memory serves me correctly and I don’t remember the exact episode no. but it was probably the last 5 or 6 episodes something like that. And Paul produced this software and then sold it as a WSO and did incredibly well. So while we were talking about that I said “you know I really wanna get you back on the show to talk about the business model of software as a WSO.” So that’s exactly what we’re gonna do today and we’re gonna use his success as our case study for the conversation. So you’re gonna learn a whole bunch of stuff.
Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul Clifford: Hey good to see you again.
T: Yeah you too.
P: I think last time we talked I was leading up to launching page one curator.
T: Yes you were.
P: Yap pretty that so now we’re done.
T: So first question of course is how did you do?
P: Yeah it did quite well I see. It did really well. So we did a $160,000 in sales. And then it did that in a week and then we closed it. And so we’re launching out on the main market. In fact it’s live in the main market now. I say main market as in it’s got it’s own web page and everything and own video and so you know you can go see that now.
T: And that’s it?
P: Yeah the WSO site was just 7 days since they launched.
T: You did a $160,000 in 7 days?
P: Yeah. The thing is it’s a nice, it’s not so much than just a nice product you know. It’s the right time at the market. I got good jv support. And the pricing and the funnel was just right as well. Everything was in its sweet spot. When all those things come together then you got a big winner.
T: Yeah and this was definitely a big winner. And these were added approximately I think you told me 3,500 new subscribers to your list.
P: That’s right yap.
T: So not only do you capture the $160,000 in revenue. Those people are all buyers. They are very interested in internet marketing software. You undoubtedly are gonna create more software which I know that you have or you’re about to launch more. And so you get to remarket to this people over and over again and the next time because they’re on your list you don’t have to pay out the affiliate commission to get the business.
P: Sure.
T: So it means to me that even the revenue is great but listeners what I really want you to understand is you don’t necessarily wanna do one of these things and try and capture all the revenue up front. We’re gonna get in to that as we get to the marketing program and jv recruitment as to maybe why you wanna pay up a big chunk up front to affiliate partners coz it’s the list, the money is in the list. When you own a list of people who you know are buyers you can monetize that list by continuing to create great products for them as well as monetizing or rather offering other people’s products as an affiliate.
We’re gonna talk about that all but before we get in to that so of all the things that you could do as a WSO why software? Why do you think that’s such a compelling model?
P: Software is I think that the key things about software is it’s a real, to people it’s got a high proceed value. Like an information product or training product or something like that I mean they’re great but when you got a piece of software the ultimate or streamline something good you’re already doing that makes it faster, easier, quicker then often it’s a no brainer to people because they get it right away. So if you’ve got a tool that streamline link building or enables you to do something that gets success faster then people get that because that’s what software is all about, right? Whereas with the training product or info product they know they’ve got to learn something. So the proceed value of software is a lot lot higher. People also know that software in a way is more expensive even though I should find it easier to get software built because I find it easier to outsource. And some people don’t get that because and I can understand why. If you think about it if you wanna create a training course or an info product then the only person that’s got that knowledge is you. So you have to invest your time in building that whole course because it’s in your brain.
T: Trust me I get it. I’ve done it. Exactly it’s a lot of work. I don’t think you can never say never but in this point in time I have no plans to create another information product that I’m gonna market as a WSO. I am actually in the process of doing my very first software as a WSO. We just hired the developer yesterday and I’ve got a partner that I’m working with on. And that largely was inspired by seeing the success that you’d had with your own so which is obviously why we’re doing this podcast right now. Coz I’ll make sure that I learn more and I’m not doing anything wrong. And I thought that my listeners would appreciate it as well. And I just want to reiterate for the audience that I’m sure you guys all agree but what I buy lots of software that is WSO. I mean it’s $10, $12, $17. You kinda look at this stuff and you think why not. I mean it’s a good time saving tool. There’s no training manual. It’s not gonna take a bunch of time before I can start using and that’s one of the things you gotta remember with information products especially when you’re a buyer. For every WSO that you buy that is gonna teach you how to do something you better carve out 8 or 10 hours to go through all of the training in order to be able to do what is it they’re teaching you. Whereas with software buy it, gonna love it, install it, learn it and that’s it. It’s easy.
P: Yap. So your question was right so far you know. So that’s the main reason and often it’s a lot easier to create a design and outsource it. Maybe retouch on a few I’d gladly touch on a few techniques on how to optimize that and how to do that but it’s wrong. But the other reason so far is it converts better. It’s a harpsy value, it converts better. You get more respect from people at paypal. As you know the paypal as an organization is very hot on internet marketing and they have some very strict rules about things like make money online. So if you ever try to sell or create a make money online product they’ll never sell it through paypal coz they’ll come down on you and say they don’t like that at all. If you’re selling software they sell tons of software through paypal. Straightaway you can sneak up more respect from them alright. And I guess the last thing is you’re selling software you’re a software company. There’s conversations you have on the borrower, whatever, what do you do? It’s right I’m an internet marketer. Or how do you explain monetizing adsense to someone, right?
T: Trust me I tried. I just gave up and said I’m a blogger.
P: But if you own a software company everyone gets okay. In a way it changes your mind set and it changes the mind set of people who you meet as well because they can categorize you then.
T: Yap absolutely.
P: That’s why I like it.
T: And there’s one other point too which we’re gonna touch on later but I’m gonna bring it up now. It’s gonna make jv recruitment a whole, jv stands for joint venture partner recruitment, a whole lot easier coz everybody who’s been around for a while knows that software converts better. I was talking to Chris Jenkins and I said “hey I’ve got some software.” Oh this is my list. I love software. He says I’ll definitely promote it for you. He hasn’t even seen what it is yet. Or if you come up with an information product, you know, they’ve gotta see it, they gotta make time, they gotta look through it. It just makes it harder. You’re causing more friction to your success because every jv partner if they haven’t promoted for you before they don’t know what your stuff is they gotta carve out their own time to go through and look and watch your video and do all that stuff. And you know what? When somebody contacts me that I don’t know and they got a training product, sorry man no time. But if they got a software product, make me look at it and understand it in 5 minutes, yeah no problem maybe I’ll promote for you.
Alright so we’re clear on software as a heck of an opportunity. Now for those of you who are listening who’ve never built software before I want you to understand something. And I’ll get Paul to answer this coz he’s the guest and he’s the smarter guy than me. It doesn’t cost much, does it?
P: It doesn’t cost much.
T :For building basic application. What do you think someone’s gonna have to spend?
P: The basic rule of thumb if you like if it’s gonna be a desktop app let me take 2 steps back because the one there’s a few mistakes that people make. First of all they make things too complicated. So if you’re gonna get into software don’t try and create this huge application that’s gonna solve all the problems of the world. Deal with basically one problem and one solution. And the reason I say that and I live by that rule even today is that back in my career I was a CTO, Chief Technology Officer whatever you wanna call it, I have huge teams of people working for me. I’ve developed those rule of the world and everything and to get stuff done it took an age.
There’s an old book written by a guy I can’t remember his name now he wrote this book called The Mythical Man Month. And you know is basically if you’ve got one guy and you want to develop and application that’s gonna take one month or 4 weeks if you put 2 guys on that same project it doesn’t half the time. It just takes like a week off. And if you put 3 people on there it doesn’t reduce by a third it just shaves another slice off. If you carry on that paradigm the fact is that you’ll never ever finish the project. The more people you put on a project the slower it takes.
Obviously if you’re building some huge enterprise application you need that they can see that one guy and I get that. But for people like you and me who may just want to solve, you just want to get apps out there then just deal with one problem. Even within SEO just deal with one little problem within SEO or if you try to build authority sites or something like that. And that way if you’ve got one problem you can design it really really quickly so it’s like 4 or 5 screens and then you can just get one guy on it, one developer and then it’s just the relationship it’s just you and the developer. And that’s it. You don’t bring in anyone else or stuff like that. And the more experienced you get and then okay you bring him in maybe your right guy and a bit more formal testing and things like that. But to get going just keep it simple because that’s how you do stuff really really quickly. Because you can provide instant feedback to the developer and they can give you instant build. They can make changes in minutes and have it released to you on your desktop within half an hour. And that’s the way to get stuff done really really quickly. Coz once you get too complicated everything takes too long and then you never get to finish then you lose interest then the developer lose interest in you coz you’ve lost interest in him and everything then it becomes a headache, right?
T: Yap.
P: So just understand that one thing. Then the next thing think about when you’re trying to think of ideas because of you will say I just don’t know what to do. Look on first of all focus on what you know. Don’t try and tackle some brand new area within that market you have no clue about. Always stay within the boundaries of what you know so if you’ve done SEO then stay within SEO. If you’ve done authority sites and sorts of stuff you’re doing then look for opportunity around there. There’s something that I can automate or tweak or something like that. I know your authority sites I’m sure your training probably talks a lot about where to put ads and things like that on a page for example. What converts better? How to get a good ctr? And all that sort of stuff. So maybe there’s a map that can just take webpage and just analyze it and give you a score out of 10 about whether your ads are laid out in a good way to convert.
T: Yeah.
P: Or something like that. So stay within your niche and what you know and that way you’ll have the confidence on what you’re delivering is gonna work or not.
T: In other words look in your own day to day work life and see what problems do I have. What ways am I wasting time. What is something that I really hate doing that I could automate. And in doing so you’re going to have a very high probability of finding a problem that other people have as well. And all I can think of multiple situations my partner in this particular project is the owner of socialadr and that is a very very successful business. And he started because he didn’t wanna create all these social bookmarks in all the social bookmarking sites. He thought it takes too long. So that’s a more complicated project obviously. It took him a while to develop it but he had the software development chops to be able to do it. But he started off just solving a problem that he had.
And so one of the things that I have been advised to do in the past, I think I’ve talked about in the past and it might even have been with you, if you’re still kinda stuck for an idea it’s pretty smart to pay attention to the warrior forum and go to the WSO section and just see what’s selling. Now I think that coz you want it you don’t wanna call it I call it if you wanna get wet stand under a waterfall. Some people are mistaken and they think I wanna come up with some idea that nobody’s ever done before. And if you’re Steve Jobs good for you you’re gonna get rich but most of us are not Steve Jobs.
P: Yeah.
T: So if you’re gonna come up with some far fetched whatever idea where there’s nobody’s ever done it before chances are and chances are pretty good that there’s no market for it either. Either wise if there was a market for it somebody would have made it already. So in other words don’t stand under a garden hose coz you’ll only get a little sprinkle. If you wanna get wet stand under a waterfall. So when you pay attention to what’s selling in the WSO market and you can do that just by paying attention to the WSO of the day. There’s a WSO of the day everyday. You can sign up for warrior plus I think it is. It’s $4 a month and you get an email everyday that says what the WSO of the day was. Go look at the sales page. You can buy the product. Go test it out. Look what it does and start a spreadsheet. Start tracking this stuff. Is there anything you wanna add to that in terms of idea generation?
P: Right. I mean you spot on. People say that to me it’s a great idea for now. It just sounds amazing. Who’s gonna buy that? I said I don’t know. So if you’re in the internet marketing niche and the warrior forum is the place to go. And on the warrior forum stuff sells in the areas of traffic generation, SEO, anything facebook, offline consulting is massive and growing, and obviously within offline consulting lead generation. The toughest part of offline is generating leads. So anything in that area and in PLR. PLR is always a good seller. Yes and that is for the IM niche definitely. And for other niches go to start with Google adwords. Just go into the Google adwords tool, the keyword tool, and if you’ve got an idea in your mind then check. There’s loads of traffic for it. There’s loads of different keywords for it and loads of traffic. And if there’s loads of traffic then you know there’s a demand for it. Then you’re on your way.
T: Absolutely. Okay so lots of ways to come up with ideas. Pay attention, do your homework for 2, 3, 4 weeks. And the other thing to that I wanna add coz I think this happened to you. Didn’t somebody come out with another piece of curation software like 3 or 4 weeks after yours?
P: Yeah. They did.
T: And was the functionality more or less the same?
P: Yeah I mean it’s scary.
T: Did they get WSO of the day?
P: Yeah they did really well.
T: There’s a pretty good lesson there. You got WSO of the day with the original page one curator. A month later somebody else comes up with more or less the same product and gets WSO of the day again. The lesson there is it’s good to be original but you don’t need to be.
P: Yeah. My first software app that did really well was called linkfinderpro. All it does is it’s got a search interface and you type in your keyword and it’ll come back with loads of blogs that you can leave a comment on. It’s got backlink and it did really really well. Everything launched and it’s going really, really well and on page 2 there’s someone ask a question “is this related to linkfinderpro that launched last week?” I was thinking “no I checked all the domains.” I bought linkfinderpro domains. I did search in the warrior forum but sure enough someone else had launched an app like 2 weeks before mine called linkfinderpro and it did the same thing.
T: And so he’s sold a bunch and you sold a bunch?
P: He sold before me the product called linkfinderpro.
T: Yeah I mean what I was saying so he sold a bunch of copies of his and then 2 weeks later you sold a bunch of copies of yours.
P: Yeah. Okay. And they both did very similar things and what was funny is they both have exactly the same name. It’s just pure coincidence nothing you could do about that. And as you said with page one curator did really really well and someone launched almost exactly the same type of software. They even used some of the same techniques and the same libraries and obviously looked into it. I must put that feature in. You look at it and you feel really bad obviously but that’s life you know. That’s life in software. It’s like when the iphone came out bang! all the others come out straight afterwards that day. You got the samsung ones and all that. Everyone’s jumping on the same market that apple created. So you can never get away from that and you gotta just accept that it’s gotta happen.
T: That’s not just life in software that’s life in business. Otherwise there’d be only one maker of washers and dryers. There’d be only one maker of cars. There’d be only one internet marketing blog. I mean that’s just not the way the world works. Everybody copies everybody. They try to innovate and make their version better. At least some people do. Some people are happy just making an exact copy but most people are gonna try innovate and make it better. The point of it is because we need to move on I’m gonna keep on top of my pacing here is you don’t have to go and reinvent the wheel. So if you’re sitting there listening to this podcast and you’re thinking “oh I don’t know how to think of a good idea” just pay attention to what’s already selling and make something that’s better or similar, something like that.
Alright so let’s move on. We have an idea now. We’ll say for the purpose of our discussion the idea is curation. So now you gotta design it. What are some strategies for designing software coz you gotta get the idea out of your head in such a way as that you can communicate it effectively to a developer.
P: Yeah. And straighten it in your head as well.
T: That too.
P: Because you got the idea but it’s in your brain and you’ve also gotta reformulate it and make it in a way that it actually works even though it’s gotta be on paper but it’s gotta actually work logically. So the tips for that is start with the wire frame. On a wire frame it’s like a very basic on screen design, it’s like a sketch. You draw your app, you draw the windows, you draw your search box, you draw your search results, you draw your okay and cancel buttons and everything around that. And as you start drawing that it starts to come to life at least in your mind and on paper and you can start then saying that’s not gonna work. If you click on that they’re gonna go after there. You know what I mean?
T: Yeah.
P: That’s where it all starts to come in together. Then once you’ve got your wire frame done or at least drafted then you can put the words or the meaning behind some of the buttons. So then if you got a function that goes out and or let’s use that example I was talking about before so the need to scan your website to see whether it’s adsense optimized so you need a box to enter an URL. You probably need some code there to check that you’ve entered the URL correctly. Check with genie http or genie www or not you can do either but you just need to make sure it doesn’t create a bug if you put in the wrong one. So all of those little things start coming out of the wood work. In fact most of other post rush you do a lot of that for. You’d also be surprised at how many developers who just completely miss that. And then go from there. The good app to use for designing is called balsamiq.com. So it’s like balsamiq instead of the c the end is a q. And that’s what I use. It’s a great tool for wire frame. You can wire frame anything there. You can do your desktop apps, word apps, anything you like and it’s cool. It’s a good app.
T: And there’s another too that we use it’s called cacoo.com or you can just google it cacoo and you’ll find it.
P: Cool. I’ll look that up.
T: So I just want to take a quick second here. I’m slowing down the show I realize but I might have a question once I see this that’s why I’m taking a minute to do it. Well that page is loading. So in the design phase is there any kind of common mistakes that people make or is there any best practices that you would advise?
P: Not really. I mean you’ll find the developers aren’t great at user interface. You take it for granted when you look at an app you think “oh that looks cool. That will work.” It’s often it’s not the developer that’s done that design. The bigger apps have a what do you call a UI specialist or and HCI guy or something like that or UX they call them. So put some effort in your wire frame into making your look and feel look almost like as you want it at the end.
T: Yap.
P: So make sure your wire frame looks proportionately right. Make sure your button is the same size. Put the extra bit of effort in because what will happen is when you start getting your draft back from your developer it’ll be iggly biggly. And the developer will say “oh we’ll sort that out in the end.” And then at the end when he hasn’t done that it’s very easy then for you to go back and say “right can you then finish the UI please.” And they’ll say “what’s wrong with this?” We’ll just go through and check the spec. And you’ll see that everything I’ve done is lined up correctly. So if you can just align everything proportionately to that then the jobs done.
T: I think to give more effort.
P: That’s one of the main things. The other issue that a lot of people get hang up on is the license thing. How do you protect it. What you have to decide first of all is is the app that big that you want to protect it. Because once you put in protection and license control and things like that it comes with the big overhead off support. So if you gotta use a user ID and password to unlock the app for example then you gotta have all the technology to manage that behind the scenes. And then you’ve gotta have all the payment mechanisms behind the scenes to automatically create those accounts. And all that stuff. And also a lot of things can get wrong with that so you’ll have a lot of people who haven’t received their account or can’t log in or the password’s wrong or they’ve got a space after the password usually like that. You’ll get a lot of that. And so you do have to ask yourself is this app revolutionary. Is this gonna be the one I’ll make a million on. If it is then yeah maybe you do something like that. If you think I just wanna get going it’s a wordpress plugin or something like that if it gets out in the wild it gets out in the wild then it’s a good call to make not to worry about licensing because there’s a big overhead. If you do want to use licensing a good tool I use is DL Guard to manage your customer database, your licensing database.
T: Okay. I was gonna say another perspective to think about this licensing is for the people who are actually worried about it. If you came up with an app and you were gonna design it and wanted to give it away it wouldn’t just magically find an audience. You would actually would have to put effort into marketing it which so you need to think about that as well. If you’re overly concerned about licensing it’s not like the whole world is gonna suddenly magically find out about your app that they can get access to for free without paying. It would actually take quite a bit of effort to get that much awareness for your app. So especially in your first time around I would suspect it’s probably not worth the time and the effort to do.
P: Yeah. And no matter how strong your protection is you’ll get in the black hat forums and they want to crack it just for the fun of it. I’ve had free apps that all you have to do to use my app is just login with your email address and confirm your email address and you can use it for free. And yet it’s still like a whole thread in one of the black hat forums about how they managed to hack that and bypass the fact that they had to register with their email address. It’s a free app for god’s sake. They’re not there for the money or anything else they just do it for the pleasure of having done it.
T: Yes. It’s a hobby.
P: It will happen.
T: Okay so there’s some basics on the design. Use either balsamiq or cacoo. Put a lot of effort into really carefully designing your user interface because the more work that you put in up front the more streamlined the development process is gonna be and the fewer problems you’re gonna have later. Without be a fair assessment Paul?
P: Exactly.
T: Okay. And with those tools by the way I mean the buttons and all the stuff a lot of it is all pre-made. So you’re just dragging and dropping all around the screen it’s not like you’ll spend 20 minutes drafting a submit button. They’re just all there and it’s objects for you.
P: Yeah exactly.
T: So now you got a design. You gotta get someone to build this thing for you. How are you gonna do that?
P: So I use vworker but I use odesk as well. What’s the other one elance I think. Any of those sites. Vworker is probably the clankiest of them all as in it doesn’t look as sexy as something like odesk but it’s much more mature. Used to be rent a coder. So it’s one of the originals of outsourcing apps for developers. So you do get a lot of technology behind the scenes that control things like escrow and stuff. And as I mentioned escrow what escrow is when you so you put your project on there and people bid for it and you then start interviewing the bids, the people who come in.
T: How do you do that? How do you do a good interview?
P: So what I tend to do is that I just first of all I make sure the price isn’t too cheap or too expensive. You go in between. Don’t hire the cheap people because that’s just where I work. And of course you don’t know what’s cheap till you get a few bids in. You need to go to the middle of the road. And then look for the history. So first of all you make sure they’ve actually got history of actually developing apps in your technology field. Because often you’ll get like software companies in the east or India or somewhere like that. They’ll just reply to every single ad and they’ll bid on everything. And then they’ll find the people to do it. So obviously there’s a lot more risk in that. Ideally you want a sure developer and you want to know that he’s actually done a similar app using similar technology as what you’re already doing.
T: So here’s a tip for you. When you’re posting your ad up and I do this everytime I do it in the description of the job put a code word and tell them that in the application you’ll often use the word blueberry. When they apply to you they have to include the word blueberry in their email and put it at the end and that way you’ll know that they actually read your entire job description. So anyone who doesn’t have blueberry in the subject line you can just automatically delete that will save you a bunch of time.
P: Yap. And then what I try so the people who I think are interested I try to get them on skype.
T: Voice or chat?
P: No just chat. But at least it’s a lot faster talking to chat than an online tool like odesk or whatever.
T: Yeah.
P: Then I’ll ask what they’ve done before and I’ll ask them to show me. In other words send over the apps that you’ve done. Let me see it. Let me see it working and if not. And then that gives you the confidence that they know what they’re talking about.
T: How do you know they don’t send you an app that somebody else built?
P: You don’t.
T: Okay.
P: You don’t. They could but then the developers not inherently dishonest. They’re very scared about their ratings.
T: Yes they are.
P: They’re protective about their ratings. They want like a 10 out of 10 rating because what you and I might see is a $500 app is nothing. To them it’s huge amount of money and it’s their business. It’s what they live on. So it’s very very important that they have good ratings and good recommendations from their employers.
T: I wanna take a little sidebar for a minute. If you’re listening to this and you’ve heard that $500 figure and you think “oh you know. I don’t have $500 to just put at risk on an app.” Let me give you an idea on how you can develop something for nothing. Go on to meetup.com to whatever time you’re in and find meet up groups like wordpress developer groups, php developer groups, any type of developer group that would have the people that would have the skills to be able to build whatever it is that you wanna build. Go to those meetings then work around the room. More than likely you’re gonna find a lot of people who know how to write code but they don’t know how to market or sell anything to save their lives which is why they go from project to project to project as a hired developer. If you find someone that you like and have a rapport with you you can say “look I happen to know how to sell these things really well. I know what market to sell them on. The warrior forum. I know how to do the jvs. I know how to do the sales page and the sales video and all those stuff. I can make sales if you can make the app. Why don’t we go 50/50? You put your time into building it. We’ll figure out an idea together. You put in your time to building it. I’ll put in my time to market it and we’ll split it down the middle.” If you ask enough people you’re gonna find somebody. Paul wouldn’t you think you’re gonna find somebody who’d take you up on that offer?
P: Yeah definitely. And another easier method is to find, let’s say wordpress plugins, there are lots of sites out there that sell wordpress plugins. They’re often run and run by developers. So some of them build plugins but they just don’t know how to market it. There’s nothing wrong with you just pegging one of those guys. Even on wordpress.org you’ll find a really cool plugin and that’s not really sending or downloading their ID and you think you can sell it. Then contact the developer. Say how about making a pro version and I’ll market it for you. We’ll go 50/50.
T: That’s a brilliant information. Yeah there’s your market research and your product development, design and app all in one step. It’s the guy who could knock out a pro version throwing an extra feature killing he can probably do that in 4-8 hours of his time depending on what the future set is and then have a marketing partner meaning you. And so there’s another bet. That’s a brilliant idea. I like that.
P: So you got 2 now right?
T: Absolutely. See why I like doing these podcasts. I get all the good ideas. Okay. So we gotta keep moving because we’re at 37 minutes and I know we’ve gotta talk marketing coz that’s a big thing and we’re gonna get there real quick. But before we move on to the development phase assuming that you have either partner with a developer or hire the developer there’s still this thing called the development process and if you are hiring and outsource to work for you you still need to manage that development process so that what you end up with is what you had hoped you would end up with. And so Paul what can you tell us about tools and methodologies for managing a rapid development process.
P: Well you know in my curator days we talked a lot about development methodologies. We tried a lot of development methodologies and in fact the ones we used to use are pretty much mishmash at about 5 or 6 because the people who develop these methodologies make a lot of money selling these methodologies so they want you to stick to it. But in the reality it does a lot of smoke and moors in that game. What we’re talking about in developing small apps all you need to focus on is getting built as frequently as possible and what I mean by that is that as soon as you’re draft one, your version no point no one is runnable so you know you can as you run it on your desktop or install it as a plugin and the developer will know when it’s read then you start using it. And as soon as you start using and it might look a mess but at least you can see the mess and you can start dealing with it straightaway.
And your testing methodologies is a spreadsheet so you just have a spreadsheet, you just have a column with the feature, the name of the feature, and you have another column that says this is what it should do and another column that’s saying this is what it’s doing at the moment. And what I used to do is to put them in red or green. Whether they’ve been fixed or not. And just do that Don’t look for any big methodologies or any of like that and then so as soon as you start having that sort of that rotational it’s what we call an alternative process. So as soon as they start delivering versions to you and then you start using the spreadsheet, has that been fixed, yes so I’ll put that red and green coz that’s being fixed and then I’ll have another look through oh it’s not about there I’ll put that in there. And then I’ll send that spreadsheet back to the guy and say right, these bugs come up, can you look at those please. And they bug fix as they’re developing.
What you don’t want to do is wait until right at the end and developers say I’m almost finish, I”m almost finish coz he’s got a few things to perfect, and then I’ll send it to you. You don’t want to leave it that long because what you could end up with is something that can be completely off tangent full of bugs. What you’re better off is getting a rough cut or something as early as possible and even though it’s gonna be riddled with bugs you get exposed to those bugs very early on in the process. So you can free those bugs and easily get it fixed early in the process and not end up with a massive bug fixing phase at the end of it.
T: Which is probably the part that the developers hate the most anyway. So towards the end of the project their enthusiasm is waning. Maybe they have another project lined up that they wanna go on to and you’re telling them fix this bug, fix that bug, fix this bug. Maybe they’re settling out their commitment to completing the project starts to wane and you end up paying the price. So I really think that’s a fantastic piece of advice. I like that and it’s simple too.
Before we move on and I know we’re going quick here but the marketing is so important that I wanna have time for that. Any other gold nuggets on the development process or is that for a simple app is that pretty much it?
P: That’s pretty much it. The other thing to be aware of is go creek. So as you start seeing this thing take shape you’re gonna come up with more ideas. And that’s where you gotta rain in your ideas a bit and not so stuff throwing over to the developers right away. So you have a ton of ideas making note of them and just formulate all those ideas as time goes on and then when you start to see the thing really mature then you can decide on how to chat the developers “I’ve got 3 of these features I’d like to put in. How long does it gonna take? How complex is it?” Coz then you can make a judgement call as to whether that’s really gonna extend the project and it’d be great or not. Because what you don’t want to do is end up with a project that never finishes. You gotta be focused on getting that version 1 out the door. Coz version 2 is really easy. Once you got the customers coming in it’s really to shoot the version 2 and how you can charge for a version 2.
T: Yes you can.
P: So focus on getting version 1 out the door but you wanna make sure it’s complete. And you also wanna know it’s feature is the people are gonna get a bit of a wild fact there or they can really appreciate it. So there’s a balance between putting in new features or not. But my point is that with all these ideas just make a note of them and only start thinking of incorporating them towards the end of the project when you can see the thing finishing.
T: Alright. Let’s move on to marketing. So marketing is a big topic. There’s several critical components as I see it. You’ve got your jv recruitment, you got your sales page and of course then you get the how you’re gonna get paid and you got your sales funnel front ends, back ends that kind of thing. At the very high level is there anything I’m missing before we dive into this?
P: Yeah. Well at a very high level?
T: It’s very high level that I might be missing here coz I’m keeping notes here on what we’re gonna be talking about so I make sure I keep asking any questions. So jv, payment, front end, back end, sales page?
P: Yes so if you’re doing a WSO launch, so if you’re doing that thing so you know to do a WSO you have to do jv recruitment and that’s something that you really need to start quite early in the process. So commit to a day, pick a day that you know you’re gonna go out to jv around. And you do everything you can to make sure you get it live on that day. And you get that day out to everyone you know and that’s what everyone works towards. And then you need to get jv’s on board at least 2 weeks before you’d go live. So you’re ready to be speaking to jv’s telling them all about it.
You need to have what’s called a jv recruitment page either a website called jvwithpaulclifford.com and that whole website is just around jv’s and my launches. But most people have the product name the domain names and have like an affiliates’ page within that. So build a jv recruitment page. And your jv recruitment page needs to have the date and time of your launch. It needs to have what’s in it for them. So what’s in it for the jv’s. So by that is what is the funnel in other words what surprising strategy on what we call the front end and then an upsale with this another upsale. You need to keep all that, you need to publish all that structure and what’s the commission you’re gonna pay on it. And then by doing that first of all I can see what’s in it for them. And then you need to explain what the thing is. So in pages I see that they talk about it but you don’t really know what the product is so explain what the product is. And what I do is I explain why it would sell. So I’ll do a piece on the market. It’s what the market is, what the problem is and what my solution is. So then it all kinda makes sense.
And then depending on how experienced you are with WSO’s you need a competition to run a jv contest as they call it to attract some of the bigger heavy weights. You pay a prize of first, second, third, fourth, fifth, etc.
T: Do you really think that the competition is mandatory? I just had a guy on I think on episode that went live yesterday a fellow by the name of David Coss. He didn’t do a competition. And if you’re jv partners have partnered with you before and they know that your stuff converts the competition is really not big of a deal?
P: Well you like to think it doesn’t but it does. And it’s not just the prizes, it’s not actually the amount, it’s the fact that there is a contest because people want to lead the board. There’s this camaraderie around the bigger jv’s and stuff like that. And I mean if you think this thing’s gonna sell do a jv contest. Don’t think oh no one does them. Everyone does them. If you look at the bigger launches they all have it. The biggest, if you look off the WSO market, if you look at any clickbank launch they’ll have huge contests. And the contests in the clickbank the prizes are crazy. There’s one coming up soon with the aston martin as the first prize. It’s completely nuts.
T: Who’s giving that one?
P: I think Jonathan Kronstadt. That’s a big cb one. If I know I don’t think it’s on cb but it’s not a WSO one. It’s probably there right in the affiliate platform.
T: Yeah a car would be a bit big for a WSO contest.
P: But it has been done.
T: Seriously?
P: So Maria Guidanez did one last year and she gave away a Mustang, Ford Mustang, that one.
T: Wow! You know with the logistics of that she may have to ship that thing half way around the world.
P: But I think it was some sort of prestige. You gotta come and collect.
T: Yeah. Or you get the cash equivalent or something.
P: Yeah. The thing is that the competitions they do attract jv’s so it’s definitely, definitely something.
T: So what kind of prizes did you do with page one curator coz obviously it worked?
P: It depends. The structures all change and they’re all different. So you generally have a $1,000 first prize. Maybe $500 for second, $250 for third or you could have more than that but then through out the launch week you could have additional contests so you could have like a $1,000 for the over all one and then you could have a $500 bonus for the most in 24 hours then you give another $500 bonus for the most for 48 to 36 hours. Because you want to keep the whole buzz going and you want to keep people mailing for you. So readers help to stretch out the competition so stretch out the contest I would say enough for more prizes. But the beauty of it you don’t have to offer all the bonus prize until after you’ve launched because you can wait and see. So if you have a massively successful launch that just completely explodes then you know you’re gonna make a lot of money so then you can then right let’s do a couple of more contest prizes throughout the week. To get more market to mail. You got me?
T: Yeah.
P: I mean there are loads of different ways to structuring and I suggest you just start getting involved in the WSO world and start looking at other people’s jv pages and you’ll start to get an idea what works and what doesn’t work.
T: And you can do that as well, how do you find out about other peple’s launches? What are the great ways to do that?
P: The easiest way publicly coz obviously there’s a lot of private members’ group and things like that, publicly there’s a good site called warrior jv central I think it’s called.
T: Is that Chris Munch’s site? He’s got one.
P: No. Yes Chris Munch’s got one. Warriorjv.com. So if you go to warriorjv.com you can see right now all the upcoming launches and there’s a link to all their jv and buy pages. So in one page you can learn everything about competitions.
T: Yeah this is Chris’ site. I’m pretty sure it is.
P: No that’s not Chris’ site for a jv. For Chris’ site it’s called munch eye.
T: Okay.
P: This is Kenster’s site.
T: Oh that’s right. I knew coz I talked to one of the guys and examined this one when I was getting ready to do one. I love Chris and Kenster they both do very very well so these are good sites to know about. Okay so you can give endless endless examples of other people’s jv pages by going to that site.
Alright so that’s a little bit the jv page and affiliate recruitment. You gotta get it happening early on. Let’s talk a little bit about sales pages. There’s definitely been a shift as of late to more graphically intense or graphically pleasing sales pages. So assuming that someone, well first one do you think that’s mandatory? I think you used a fair amount of graphics in your sales page did you not?
P: No I don’t actually. I know what you mean.
T: Alright so where we left off we were talking about muncheye.com and warriorjv.com as places to get a look at other people’s jv pages. And now I remember we were just talking about your sales page and use of graphics or not use of graphics.
P: Yeah so obviously a lot of people go into great graphics and they do look great. And I think it’s important not to forget the words which is my point. You still need good sales copy. Well I believe you still need good sales copy. And secondly the videos are very very powerful. So you can embed youtube videos and if you’re doing software you have to have to have a demo.
T: Well I was just gonna jump in to that. If you’ve got the whole idea of software of converting better is people see it and they go “oh yeah that will save me time” I gotta think that if you’re solving a problem that’s in the traffic, SEO, facebook area where you can use software that the youtube definitely demonstration would go much much further to make conversions than any words that you would put around it. Wouldn’t you think so?
P: Yeah definitely. But we have to kind of remember everyone watches video. They might work and not be able to. So you still have to have this written texts. And what I find is that I follow through almost classic formula in terms of sales copy and that is you start off with just explaining what the problem is so that the people understand that and they relate to that and obviously you need to introduce yourself and why you’re an expert on it. What’s the big discovery you made. And then you sort of expand on the problem a bit more and then you start to talk about a possible solution and then start to introduce your product as the solution. And then you need to introduce social proofs and testimonials and then start sort of the breakdown of what the offer is, what the price is and the scarcity and all that sort of stuff.
T: Okay.
P: So yeah that sort of stretch you’ll have and then obviously in that somewhere I would definitely have a demo video.
T: Okay. And folks who are hearing you’re thinking about how do I make a demo video of a piece of software it’s really really easy to do. Just google screencasting tools. I use screenflow for mac. There’s a tool called camtasia. Those are both paid pieces of software. I think now there’s also quite a number of free pieces of software that are gonna allow you to do screen cast. I don’t know a name it’s more off the top of my head but I’ve definitely stumbled across them. So it’s enough super difficult to do. You don’t need a fancy microphone or anything like that. Just make sure that you speak clearly and enunciate your words because not everybody watching is gonna be english if that’s the language you’re speaking in. It’s not gonna be english as the first language for them so you don’t wanna be talking fast like that coz people who speak foreign language are thinking if you can talk a little slower.
P: Yeah. Check camstudio. That’s the free one.
T: Okay terrific. So you get to go there and if you really are stuck on “what does my sales page need to have?” Just look at the sales pages of other WSO of the days. Don’t copy them coz they’re gonna have different products, features and benefits. Copy the process that they go through. What do they write about first? Are they spending time to make sure that people understand the problem then how do they present the solution? How did they do the benefits? Then how did they do the testimonials? And kind of the flow of those sales pages obviously have proven to work very very well because that particular product sold very well. And you can get all sorts of ideas on how to do stuff so you don’t have to start with a blank slate and think “I’ve never written a sales page before.” It’s not just that hard to do.
Okay so let’s talk the last few things coz we’re christening on an hour here. You gotta get paid and then there’s this thing called the sales funnel coz we kept talking about the front end versus the back end. So quickly how do you recommend people to actually get the money to come in and pay affiliates for this stuff and then we’ll talk about the sales funnel when we finish up.
P: So you can launch, there’s 3 main affiliate networks. Warrior plus is what everyone knows. And that’s always one of the easiest to use. There’s another one called digiresults. And digiresults is pretty advanced. It’s a very very good network. And it’s definitely good to get on there. And the other one’s called jvzoo. But if you’re starting out then use warriorplus coz it’s the easiest to get started. And if you’re after leads then warriorplus has the advantage of, has very active market place and so when something is converting very very well the statistics for that are very visible very very quickly. So you can see whether something’s successful or not quite quickly.
T: And other people I’ve talked to if your offer starts to convert you’re just gonna find that other major affiliates jump on the band wagon and start to promote you because even though they’ve never heard of you, they never saw your jv page, they’ve not known any of your jv contest they’re seeing that your offer has a high earnings per click and they got a big list and they’re thinking “wow, I’m definitely gonna promote that offer coz I know I’m gonna make money coz stats are staring me there right in the face.”
P: Yeah exactly.
T: Okay let’s talk about the sales funnel. I mentioned earlier in the call that it’s not such a big deal to worry about making much on the front end and what I meant by that is pay out 75% of it. If it’s your first one you may wanna pay 100% of the commission to your affiliate partners because you need to get these people to promote for you. You need to build a relationship. You need to start with a transaction. And if they promote something for you and it goes well obviously it’s gonna be a lot easier to get them to promote the next time you come up with your next piece of software. So what did you do with page one curator? How much did you pay out? And then how did you end up like how did your sales funnel go and what is your back end and what did you do there?
P: With the curator it’s probably a bit different than what most people would do especially if they’re reasonably new. Because the people who make it big in this game they invest masses in their strategic partnerships in their jv’s. Literally if I’ve got a product that wasn’t converting very well or I was a bit disappointed and I went in and I increased the commission to all my best jv’s and didn’t even tell them until afterwards but I bumped it up so I hardly made anything on the product. It did arrive very well in the end but I made everything I could to make sure that jv’s walked away thinking yeah that was good. I made some bucks.
T: Yeah. Coz if they don’t they’re never gonna promote for you again.
P: Yeah. And what you find is when you develop these relationships actually they, even if you have a disaster one day they’ll be with you. Once you built that relationship they’ll be with you rain or shine because they have been through bad launches as well but the point is when you’re starting out you really need to give give give. And so if you’re looking to do a funnel for someone starting out if it’s an info product then really you should be selling it for like $9 on the front end a 100% commission. That’s it. If you go up too high so if you go up $17 for an info product your conversions will decrease. Your upsale is many. And you wanna get as many buyers through that front door as possible because they’re on the first upsale. It’s where you’re more likely to make money. But the point is on the front it has to be a 100% commission for anyone willing to take an interest. And then your upsale if it’s priced around sort of between $27-37 then you should be again at least 50% maybe if it’s your first time marketers around 60-75%. Or if you wanna make a splash then do a 100% on the front end and the upsale even top flight jv’s still do that. So some of the bigger bigger launches will do a 100% almost through the whole funnel and the reason is because they know that they will make so much from their leads from the list. They don’t care about the WSO making money at all. They’d rather give all that to their jv’s and make sure they’re jv’s make as much money as possible coz they’ll be there again for the next one.
T: And that’s the big I don’t if I want to use the word secret or not but that’s the concept that I think so many people who haven’t done this before or brand new to this fail to grasp. You’re not actually doing WSOs to make money right away perse. You’re doing them to build your list. If you’ve got a really high converting product and you’ve got a lot of jv support. Paul, in a week 3,500 people on his list. You tell me what do you think those people are worth each subscriber per month? Dollar a month per subscriber?
P: Yes. It what you should be working towards and it depends. You gotta treat your list with respect. I don’t think of them as a list. I actually think of them as customers which is quite an important mindset distinction because if you treat them as customers then you feel more duty bound to treat these customers if you want to remain safe. That means that recommendations you make to them are genuine recommendations and they’re not just the next thing that’s launched. And you know that that recommendation is good for them as well. And I often get customers emailing me just to drop by just to make sure or not. I can look back instantly and I can see what that customers bought. I got the whole history. And if I think it’s not suitable for them coz there’s some real beginners on my list and some experts and I’ll say often don’t buy this one or something like that. If I don’t think it’s suitable coz I know they trust you then they’ll come back then buy something else. Every single customer is an individual so every single question you try and this is hard believe me when you start to take numbers of big customers it’s hard but you try and answer every customer individually. Not support but if they ask you questions like can you take a quick look at my site or something like that. And if you can spare the time it’s worth doing that. And treat every customer as unique. And the point we’re trying to make is that if you do that and if you treat them with respect then you should be getting like $3 per customer per month in terms of one day in revenue. So when you get to a list of 10,000 for example which isn’t big at all then that’s gonna get you $30,000 a month in terms of revenue from the list.
T: Just take a moment and let that sink in because that’s a big deal. I’ve built my list organically and it’s been slow. It’s taking me 18 months I got roughly 4,000 people on there. It’s taking time because it’s a few people everyday everyday. But I can promise you that when I do launches, I recently launched a mastermind group, it went very very well because I have the list. And I’ve promoted products for Paul before and I’ve promoted products for Chris Guthrie before. Guys that I know whose products I know are gonna be good products and they’ll be good for my list and I promote them and you get paid when you do that. Because people they want to be informed of that kind of stuff. They wanna have the opportunity to get those deals. So that’s the point that I was trying to make earlier. You know if you’re thinking I put all this time and effort I don’t wanna give a 100% of commission well you’re not looking at the big picture. You’re only looking at the transaction and I would encourage you to really pay attention to what Paul is saying because the lifetime customer value of having a relationship with those people is just so much much more than the money that came in upfront.
Alright so that covered the front end $9 100% and there’s the OTO the upgrade offer. What are some other best practices in creating the funnel? Figuring out the sequence of emails. How does that happen in your head?
P: The funnel the structure you’re thinking of?
T: Yeah.
P: Most people will have a front end product and then an upsale. And so your upsale you should always make sure your upsale is in line and in the same context as your front end offer. Don’t try and sell them