Making Your First Sale
Big travel day today back from Joel Marion’z SuperBowl party down in Tampa (another powerful networking event), so I’m turning over today’s lesson to high-energy Mastermind Superstar, Mike Whitfield.
He’ll explain to you what he did to make his all-important first sale.
Craig Ballantyne
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How I Made My First Sale
By Mike Whitfield
In June of 2011, I hades on my own site and Craig’s Turbulence Training blog with metabolic workout finishers that people could use at the end of their favorite workouts. The response was really cool. People loved them and even contacted me about some more.
I had found a gap to fill in the fitness world.
I had no clue of what to do, but I rolled up my sleeves and somehow, some way, I was determined to succeed.
The first thing I wanted to do was secure a website domain. I thought to myself, “Well, I’m going to call it something like Workout Finishers, so I’ll see if WorkoutFinishers.com is taken.”
Sure enough, it was available. I knew Godaddy was a popular choice to secure my domain, but their commercials get on my nerves. I’m weird like that. So I simply Googled something like, “website domains for cheap”.
Network solutions came up and I believe it was $10 for the domain and around $88 for two years of hosting. I didn’t know about Bluehost or other less expensive hosts, but I didn’t want to waste my time searching and searching to just save $1 to $2 a month. I just wanted to get it done.
The website and hosting were secured. It was a small victory, so yes, we celebrated. My wife and I went to dinner and I toasted a nice cold glass of iced tea to “Here’s to not having a clue of what I’m doing, but I’ll find out and it’s going to be awesome”.
This is where I used Craig’s Financial Independence Monthly system.
I literally took the guide and completed the step-by-step process it showed. I remember creating my outline, which made creating the product a hundred times easier. It also made getting up at 4 AM a lot easier because I knew what I would be implementing the next morning.
After I created the outline and the main product in Word, it was time to put it into a pdf. That cost nothing. I used Open Office as well as Primo PDF. You can get Primo PDF at www.download.com and Open Office at www.openoffice.org. Free stuff is cool.
This is the part where I had to get out of my comfort zone. I actually had sold a workout program to my own list a few months earlier using Paypal. I designed it myself. It took many hours and time away from things that I only I could do, and to be honest,
the graphics looked really cheesy.
But that experience taught me a couple of good lessons on time management. I did some digging and decided to go with www.proebookcovers.com.
I got out of my comfort zone and asked a couple of others in the fitness industry for their feedback. This company had a really good reputation and now I see why.
Between site design, ebook cover design, the affiliate page, download page (basically the whole enchilada), it cost me about $1200. I probably could have kept it at around $1000, but I was like a girl shopping for a prom dress and kept changing my mind on the header and opt-in graphics.
Now here’s the cool part – I didn’t have to mess with the Clickbank setup, any ftp upload jargon, or any of that stuff. This company did all that for me.
By outsourcing all that work, it allowed me to continue working on my product and shooting videos. Honestly, I’d still be working on it today if I didn’t outsource it. And instead of drinking a nice cold Diet Pepsi while I type this, I’d still be without a product.
All I had to do was give them sales copy. I asked for “dark, bold, yet appealing” and that’s what they gave me. I gave them Craig’s “Metabolic Resistance Training” workout cover as a loose guideline. They did a phenomenal job.
For the bonus ebook covers, I used www.fiverr.com. It’s amazing what people will do for you for $5. Once I found someone, I used him for everything. He has designed over 10 covers for my opt-ins and bonuses and I referred him to people in my mastermind group.
Because of that, his turnaround time has been great and he takes care of me. If you help someone, they will help you.
Now to me, $1200 wasn’t money I had. But that wasn’t going to stop me. I ran a couple of extra personal training bootcamps in my offline business to fund my online business. Find a way – you can do it.
The only thing left was to get my product approved through Clickbank and to pay the $50 registration. It was approved about two days before I left for Craig’s Turbulence Training Trainer Summit in August, which was two days prior to my goal deadline.
I can’t quite explain it, but there is something magical about setting solid deadlines and making them public to other people so you are held accountable. I even told my clients that the product would be done before I left for San Diego.
The week prior to the Summit, my mentality was “If I get up at 3:45 instead of 4 this week, that would give me over an additional hour over the course of a week”.
So, we’re looking at roughly $1300 for every little detail including:
● Website design (included affiliate, download, and disclaimer pages, etc.)
● Graphics
● Ebook cover
● Website domain/hosting/email
● Aweber (email service) integration and opt-in graphics
● Clickbank setup
● Being awesome
It was money well invested for something I strongly believed in. It was also well worth it. I got all that back plus some in less than 3 days with my launch in mid September.
The one thing that helped me the most was not thinking, “What is a product that doesn’t compete with others?” but rather:
“What is a product that compliments others?”
That’s how I made my first sale online at www.WorkoutFinishers.com.
Your friend,
Mike Whitfield