Advertisments

Feature

Passageways to Profits: A regular column of advice on making your publishing company more profitable. This issue: "Marketing the Back-End." (Part 1)

Few publishers or authors make any serious money from their book(s)alone! To do so, they need to explore the concept of the "back-end."

by Fred Gleeck

The key to making money as an information marketer is to understand the concept of a "back-end." Your front end product (usually your book) is what you sell first. Your back-end products are any and everything that you sell after that. Ideally, you don't even want to have your book on the market until you have developed a fairly extensive back-end. If your book is already out there, don't worry--you can recover.

Here is the basic concept. After people buy your book you want to get them to contact you. After they contact you, you want to trade them up to more and more expensive products that you offer. As a bookseller, some of your books you sell direct. It is easy to capture the contact information for those who buy from you in that manner. Those who don't buy your book directly from you are another story. It is very difficult to get their details.

How do you get their contact information? You BRIBE them!

Any book you sell must have a mechanism for "seducing" your buyer to get back in touch with you. You need to make them an "offer they can't refuse" in a prominent location in your book. Give people something of high perceived value with little or no cost to you. Offer them this item in exchange for their very valuable contact information.

The reason for doing this is that your database is your most important asset. A well-maintained database will pay you dividends FOREVER!

The best thing to offer people in exchange for contacting you is a short report that is directly related to the information you cover in your book. You must offer something that can be digitally delivered. That way there will be no cost to produce or mail it. You will also want to have it set up to be delivered automatically. If you have already printed your book, you can stick a postcard somewhere in the middle of the book that makes them an offer. This is better than nothing.

Now that you have their contact information, you need to start mailing to them on a regular basis. They have bought your book, and now you want to trade them up to your more expensive items. Your "special reports" will be priced less than your book, usually in the $5 to $10 range. I encourage you to offer your customers these inexpensive items, but I would rather have you sell them the MORE expensive items.

After people buy your book, your goal is to sell them anything and everything you have. Since the book is the second least expensive of your items you will primarily be UP-Selling them. Authors and publishers who develop higher priced products and sell them to readers will not only make more money, but they will also give their customers more of what they want. How often have you read a book that you liked and wanted more? The problem is that few authors offer any "more." Don't you be one of them.

Sure, you can write another book, and I encourage you to do so. The problem is that books take a long time to produce. Also, they are priced so much lower than the other products I am encouraging you to produce. For starters, I suggest that you produce audio and video tapes for your market. These can be offered at significantly higher prices because of the higher perception of value. People are willing to pay more money for audios and videos. In certain niche markets, people will pay significantly more.

Eventually, you need to develop products at a variety of price points, starting at $10 and going all the way through $1000. I have a number of different niche markets that I target. Here are my price points in one of those markets:

* I offer a two cassette audio program for $49.
* I offer a newsletter for $99.
* I offer a live recording of a seminar at $197.
* I offer a one day seminar at $297.
* I offer one-on-one coaching for $500.
* I offer a package of all of my products in this market for $777.
* Finally, I offer a " 3 day bootcamp" for $997.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. There certainly are other things you can offer. Does this have your wheels spinning? Not to worry--you don't have to offer all of them tomorrow...

At the price point over $1000 there is high-end consulting. A certain number of people who enter your "funnel" will eventually be traded up all the way to hiring you for high-end consulting. There are people who have bought my books that have gone on to pay me thousands of dollars in consulting work. You can do the same.

To make all of this happen, you MUST have a system. And, the system must be automated.. Preferably, the system will also be on-line and require a minimum of on-going effort on your part. When anyone buys your book, your system should immediately send them a "thank you" message (via email) along with an offer to buy your next, more expensive, product.

Quality Products
You MUST produce high quality products. If you don't deliver a high quality product at any point in the process, you're dead! Your customer will not only return the product, but they won't buy anything from you again. If you aren't 100% delighted with the products that you create, don't try and sell them. And remember, it isn't how they look, it's what they offer in terms of content.

Your Guarantee
People get very nervous about offering strong guarantees. My marketing research has confirmed time and again that offering a strong guarantee will increase your sales by an amount far greater than the returns that result. This assumes you are producing a high quality product. I offer people a lifetime guarantee on almost everything I sell and my return rates are less than 1%.

Next time we will talk about creating specific products. By way of review, I leave you with these statements:

Your database is your most important asset. Capture all the names you can and more specifically, capture email addresses. Email is the least expensive of all contact options.

Automate your process. All of this "stuff" is great to do, but you need to make it easy for yourself. I suggest you check out a site called WebMarketingMagic.com.

Fred Gleeck has been an information marketer for 15 years. He is a speaker, author and consultant. He coaches authors and publishers on how to dramatically increase their revenues through a variety of creative and non-traditional means. His new book, Self Publishing for Maximum Profit will be out later this year.