How To Turn A $15 Product With Virtually No Sales Into A $500 Product And Make $1,500 A Day.

Back when I left my sales job a few years ago, I was on the lookout for products that I could purchase and resell myself on the internet.

I was browsing Digital Point (a webmaster forum) and saw a thread selling a brand new script that allowed people to build a custom MP3 Search Engine for $15 a pop.

The sales copy, as is pretty normal for these types of threads, was horrible. So I decided to contact the creator and ask how he was doing….

His thread had been live for a week… And he’d made a whopping 2 sales for a total of $30. I talked with him for awhile, he offered to sell me exclusive rights to the script for $500, which might SEEM like the smart move to take, but it wasn’t , and I’ll tell you why in a moment.

Instead, I proposed a partnership. Let me handle all of the marketing and we’d split the profits 50/50.

Here’s what I did:

• Told him to IMMEDIATELY take the listing off of Digital Point.
• Completely reinvented the product… Instead of selling the scripts, I hired a designer and started having the “script” turned into full blown websites with unique designs.
• Created and promoted one of the sites on my own… This would serve as proof of concept when I brought the sites to market.
• Created a long form sales page for the product, talking about every benefit of ownership, how it’s the perfect turnkey business, ect.
• I put a limit on the number of sites to be sold… Both to conserve the integrity of the product and to build a sense of urgency.
• Wrote up a “How To Promote A Website For The Complete Beginner” type of guide and included it in every sale… This served to both reassure customers that ANYONE can promote these and significantly cut down on after sale support.
• Listed the sites on Ebay using several of the upgraded features and set an extremely low reserve price.

The result? For over a month straight we averaged 3-4 sales per day (average bidding ended at $500). I hired people to handle most of the work involved in putting the sites together, and after paying for all of the outsourced work, my partner and I were left with an average of $1k-$2k per day.

Eventually competitors caught on and flooded the marketplace with similar sites… When sales started to dwindle, even though it was still profitable, I decided to move on to other things.

There are a few lessons to take away from this.

1. How people perceive your product GREATLY influences how much you can sell it for… In this case the market was dictating the price, and since it was a complete custom website instead of a script the market decided $500 was a fair price.
2. The market you target is extremely important… The forum he was selling on is used to buying $15 scripts… They aren’t keen on buying brand new websites for $500 though.
3. You have to provide VALUE. I sold these as a long term investment strategy, and explained that there would be work involved to turn a profit on these sites… I received 100% positive feedback and numerous emails thanking me for selling them the sites.
4. Expanding on the last point, I offered a bonus that taught the basics of promoting the websites… This bonus was extremely relevant and directly contributed to the sales totals.
5. I also offered a “60 day 100% satisfaction or I’ll by it back” guarantee. Out of countless sites sold, I received 1 refund request. But because of the guarantee we probably sold 10x as many sites than we would have without one.
6. Long copy does work… I wish I still had the letter I was using (I don’t) but we were killing our competitors who were just using a few lines explaining the products.

Remember when I said that buying the programmer out would have been the smart idea? It wasn’t…

Turns out, he’s an excellent programmer and we teamed up and went on to sell tens of thousands of dollars in different products… So instead of a one off investment of $500 I formed a partnership that’s going to be worth a fortune to me throughout the rest of my life.

And that leads me to the final point… Positioning and your market is KEY.  Is your product positioned as a $15 piece of code or a $500 low risk/high reward investment?

Peace,

-Scott Murdaugh

P.S.  If you want an IMMEDIATE boost in your conversion rates check out my FREE guide “How To Increase Your Sales By 300% Or More In Less Than 5 Minutes”… You can grab it at the top right hand side of this page.

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