SOFTWARE PIRACY AND FIGHTING IT
If your product isn't physical in nature--a new font, a piece of digital art, or a
software suite, for example--then shipping issues don't enter into the equation.
What does enter into the equation, however, is the problem of piracy.
The great virtue of an information economy is that its products require very little
in the way of production costs to distribute--all you have to do is pay the
bandwidth costs necessary to send the file to your customers. But the great vice
of an information economy is exactly the same thing: files on a computer can be
produced so easily that stealing your product is as simple as finding a way to
download it without your knowledge. (As anyone involved in the music industry
already knows.) This is a problem under any circumstances, of course, but it
becomes an exponentially greater problem with time. If one person downloads
your product without your knowledge, that isn't a serious issue. If that person
then posts your product on a public file server or peer-to-peer network, however,
then hundreds of people can download it--which is a very, very serious issue for
you.
So you'll need to take measures to prevent piracy. A full discussion of that is
outside the scope of this book, of course, but here are a few ideas:
Never provide a direct download link for your product--meaning never link to
the product's file on any server. Use redirect techniques to keep people from
knowing exactly where your product is on the Internet--and from then
disseminating that information. A good coder can help you with this. Only
make your product available in an encrypted form, and require customers to
enter a code in order to unlock the content. Customers can then download the
product freely--you'd just be selling the code to unlock the freely-downloadable
file. Require customers to register your product, and digitally "mark" their file
once they register it with you. This is basically the same technique used to
combat physical theft: putting unique serial numbers on the product. This way,
if you start seeing pirated copies of your content on the Internet, you can
check the pirated copy against your records, determine who distributed the full
version of your product, and take whatever measures are necessary.
TO REINVEST OR NOT TO REINVEST?
The answer to the question of "to reinvest or not to reinvest" is simple: reinvest!
That is, reinvest as much as you can to keep the business profitable for yourself:
if your online business is your sole source of income, reinvesting all of your
money is not a good idea. But if you're starting your online business in addition
to a day job, definitely reinvest as much of the profits as you can into improving
your business.
The logic behind this is simple: the more money you put into your business, the
faster it can start to grow. If you improve your website server or pay for a new
commerce system or redesign, you can improve your customer's experience at
your site, which makes them more likely to buy your product and improve your
business. If you refine the product itself, then you make it more attractive to
customers and boost sales even more. (It may even lead to a new idea or an
expanded product line down the road.) Taking the profits for yourself beyond
your basic expenses is an attractive option, of course--and usually the reason we
go into business in the first place. But putting the money you make back into
your business allows you to make more money eventually, to increase your
overall profits, and to keep your customers coming back, extending the life of
your business significantly and keeping the revenue stream steady. A central
tenet of modern capitalism is that if your business isn't growing, it's failing: make
sure that your business grows by putting as much money back into it as you c
Above all, put money into promotion for your site and your product--a topic which
we'll cover in more detail in the next chapter.
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9
PROMOTING YOUR SITE
By this point, you have your product ready to ship or distribute, you have your
site and sales letter online, you've got your commerce system in order--in theory,
you've got everything you need in order to start selling products and making
some money. The problem, however, is that you can now sell products only in
theory. In order to sell your product in practice, you'll have to get people to
actually visit your site so that all of your careful design work and sales writing can
have their effect and turn visitors into customers. And in order to do that, you'll
need to learn how to promote your site.
BASICS OF DIRECT RESPONSE WEBSITE
PROMOTION
Promoting any website means promoting the website address. In traditional
advertising, you can promote your business perfectly well by promoting its name,
products, or business description--as long as you give customers an easy way to
get in touch with you, of course. In online advertising, all of those attributes
should be included within your website--leaving you only the method of
contacting you, the link, to promote. A link is not only your digital "phone
number", but with a well-designed website, it's an advertisement in and of itself.
Direct response website promotion still follows this basic rule, but varies it to
some extent, pushing it more in the direction of traditional advertising. Th
because with direct response marketing, you're not ultimately selling your
website to people (from which they can then order any products you have to
offer), you're selling the product itself. The website is only a means to an end.
And if you simply market your link without any information about the product
you're selling, your customers aren't necessarily going to be interested in your
product once they get to your site-making the work that your site has to do much
harder.
The simplest solution to this is simply to market your link as a short description of
your product. A typical link might look like this: http://yoursite.com. People
click on the link, go to your site, and your promotion is successful. A direct
response link should instead look like this: New Foo From YourCompany at
yoursite.com, in natural language. When people click on those words, set up the
link to take them to your site. This way, you get two benefits for the price of
one: your URL is still being mentioned (raising the possibility that people will
remember it and type it in independently in the future), but you're also letting
customers know what you're selling before they even get to your site.
If you have the opportunity to give a brief product description as well as your
link, take it. These descriptions shouldn't be on the same order of complexity as
your website is, of course, but in a sentence or two you can get across to
customers the basic nature of your product, a notable feature, and possibly a
price (which, if it's low enough, may spark interest all on its own.) This makes
your link more attractive to customers, making them more likely to click on it--
and once they click on it, if you've done your job right, they'll be infinitely more
likely to purchase your product.
DIRECT ADVERTISING
Just as there are two types of website (direct response website and traditional
websites), there are two types of website marketing: direct marketing and
indirect marketing.
Direct marketing is the simpler form: make your link available to as many people
as you can. The easiest way to do this is just to distribute your link to any of
your online contacts. This has a few advantages: no one is likely to be upset with
you for marketing, and you'll probably get a few sales just on the strength of the
personal connection. The disadvantage, however, is massive: no matter how
many people you keep in touch with on a daily basis, you always have a much,
much larger group of people who could buy your product--if only they knew about
it. So relying on your contacts alone is obviously not a good overall strategy.
A more effective option is to post your link on various forums, blogs, on sites.
This reaches a large number of people and allows you to target your marketing to
the people most likely to buy your product: a graphic design forum, for example,
would be a good place to promote your graphics software package. A blog about
handcrafted art would be a good place to promote your wood carvings. A website
devoted to literary reviews would be a good place to promote your book. Any
number of options exist, depending on your product and the people most likely to
buy it.
The disadvantage to this type of direct marketing, however, is the problem of
reputation. Directly placing your link in as many places as possible may give you
a much larger pool of potential customers, but if done improperly, it can easily
give you and your business a bad name. At best, this makes it impossible to
promote on a single forum. At worst, people will start actively disparaging you,
your business, and your product on other forums--giving you a bad name before
people even see your link.
The solution to
• Don't post your links in places unrelated to your product.
• Don't interrupt forum conversations in progress in order to promote your
product.
• Be careful when promoting your product in forums that you don't regularly
visit. Read the forum policies and act accordingly.
• Don't react negatively if anyone disparages you or your
product after you make your link available. Talk to the person--publicly, if
you can--and respond to their criticism.
This not only negates any resentment that exists toward you, but actually
gives you something of a positive reputation as a reasonable person--
which makes forum dwellers more likely to buy your product.
One easy workaround to the problems of etiquette is to promote your product
passively, simply by participating in a forum or discussion. Most forums or blogs
have a "signature" option that's appended to any posts you make on that forum
or comments on that blog. Simply include your website link in that signature and
comment normally on the forum, referring to your product only when it's
appropriate to do so. You're not calling attention to your link by doing this--but
you are making it available online, and that's going to result in some site traffic
and some purchases.
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INDIRECT ADVERTISING
Indirect advertising involves one of the following:
• Getting people to promote your product for you.
• Promoting your product on wide-reaching advertising networks.
This has the advantage of making your link available to even more people than
direct marketing can reach, even if you're posting on widely-traveled forums or
highly-trafficked blogs. Each of these can reach a good number of people, true--
but they're still limited by the number of people who visit those forums or blogs
on a regular basis. What's more, the number of blogs or forums you can visit is
limited by your own searches and your own ability to think up new places to
promote your product. With indirect marketing, you can promote to a far wider
audience without having to think about each individual blog, forum, or other
venue for promotion: you can do all of that work automatically, or you can get
other people to do it for you.
There are many ways to get people to promote your product for you. The
obvious way, of course, is just to ask people to do it, or to hire a permanent
marketing employee whose job it is to find potential opportunities for promotion
and to post your link. A better way, however, might be to offer incentives: a
discount on your product, for example, if a certain number of sales can be traced
to a customer's marketing efforts.
This means that you might take a loss (or simply break even) on one sale, but it
means a guaranteed number of other sales at full price, plus some publicity for
your site and company (for future expansions of your site or product line.) You
might also offer incentives for bringing people to visit your site with a higher
threshold--100 referred visitors would equal one discount, for example. This can
be problematic if those visitors don't actually buy the product, of course, but if
you've done your work well when building the site, you can convert a good
number of those visitors into paying customers and still come out ahead on the
deal.
You can also promote your link indirectly by making use of advertising networks.
Google Ads is one of the largest networks currently available, and can be doubly
advantageous for you in that you get a certain amount of money if people click
on your link on top of the money you'll get if those same people then buy your
product. Other marketing networks like Project Wonderful can publish your link
on a wide variety of sites for a nominal cost, with the cost depending on the
average traffic of the site. If you have the money to invest in paying for
advertising--and if your site is good enough to convert visitors into customers--
then this can be an excellent option for promoting your site.
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AFFILIATE MARKETING
Outside of promoting your link, you can still make some headway on the Internet
by selling your product directly through affiliate marketing networks. Affiliate
networks sell your product directly through their website, taking a small
percentage per sale (usually about 8%). The advantage of this, however, is the
ability to set commissions for people who market your product for you. If an
affiliate's marketing efforts result in a sale, they'll receive a portion of the money
from that sale, giving them a strong incentive to market your product in ways
that will be useful to you.
The real benefit of affiliate networks is their cost-effectiveness for the business
owner: you don't have to pay to publish your link to an extremely wide audience
unless you actually make money as a result of your affiliates' efforts. If you don't
sell any additional products through affiliate marketing, you don't lose any
additional money. Depending on the commission you offer, however, this could
be either very useful or very problematic--a 22% commission, for example,
means that you'd be paying out 30% of your product's price for every sale and
only keeping 70%. (This also means that much of your careful site design work
isn't being used.) But used in conjunction with other advertising methods, you
can sell your product to a much wider audience, still make a profit, and increase
the overall visibility and reputation of your business for any eventual expansion.
We've given you a number of potential strategies for promoting your product in
this chapter. Don't think, however, that the key to successful promotion is simply
to choose the most effective of these strategies. The key to successful promotion
is to use all of these strategies as often as possible: to distribute your link to
friends and to directly promote your link on sites and forums while still paying for
some wider-range advertising or affiliate networking. The more strategies you
use, the more people you reach--and the more sales you'll get.
And if you follow our advice about reinvesting your profits whenever you can,
you'll eventually achieve one of the most enjoyable signs of success: the ability to
expand your business.
We'll talk briefly about this in our next and final chapter.
10
EXPANDING YOUR
BUSINESS
If you've followed our advice to this point: congratulations. You've mastered site
design, managing the bridge between online business and offline accounting and
shipping, and promoting your site. At this point, your business is either
successful--or it's well on the way to being successful. And you've earned it.
The big question that this chapter seeks to address is: what's next? How can you
expand your site or expand your business to take advantage of any other
products you might have? How might you improve your site to do more business
in the future with your existing product? We'll look briefly at both of these
possibilities in order to give you some ideas.
EXPANDING AND IMPROVING YOUR SITE
If your business is already successful enough to warrant expansion, then you
probably did something right with the initial design and layout of your website.
There are any number of reasons that you might be unhappy with your current
website, however: maybe you ran out of money for design costs and weren't able
to implement some of your favorite ideas. Maybe you've noticed a significant
problem in the basic layout of your site that you wish you could fix. Or maybe
you're tired of paying service charges to your commerce system and you want to
design your own and integrate it into your site.
These are changes that you know for certain that you need to make, and now
that you have the money and the time, you should make them. The problem,
however, is to identify changes that you don't know that you should make, but
that would immensely improve the efficiency, look, and conversion rate of your
site.
In order to identify these changes and decide whether or not to make them, you'll
want to have some feedback from your customers. One improvement that you
should always make in order to get that feedback is to provide your customers
with some means of talking to you about your site and suggesting changes. An
easy way to do that is to include a "comments" section in your commerce system
or in some unobtrusive part of your site, allowing customers to leave their
thoughts about your design and overall site. You might also email some of your
satisfied customers and solicit their ideas for site improvements: they've used the
site, after all, and they know from experience what you might need to change.
Either of these options is workable as long as you keep the basic principles of
direct response in mind before making any changes--or before implementing a
feedback system that ultimately distracts new customers from buying your
product.
Whatever improvements you choose to make, try to use the same coder that you
used before (unless there were significant problems with that person.) They'll
know your site from the ground up, which means that they know what changes to
make and how to make those changes--and they'll be more than willing to work
with you.
EXPANDING YOUR PRODUCT LINE
In a traditional online commerce model, expanding your product line is simple.
All you have to do is develop all of the materials you need to effectively market
your product, expand your website to include those materials, and promote your
new product in much the same way as you promoted the old one.
But adding a new product when your website model is based on direct response is
more complicated. Remember our basic rules about direct response marketing:
don't distract customers from your product with unnecessary information or
external links, don't attract unnecessary traffic to your page, and keep your
website simple by putting no more than three clicks between your front page and
the start of the purchasing process. A new product on your existing site makes it
much more difficult to follow these basic rules: your new product will necessarily
distract people from your old product, will raise the bandwidth cost for your
existing product without converting that higher traffic into sales, and will make
your site more complicated to navigate.
So in order to expand your product line, you need to get creative and think about
investing a bit more money. (Fortunately, the successful marketing of your first
product should mean that you have that money to invest.) There are two basic
options:
• Build a new direct response site for your new product.
• Build a new front page (at a separate URL) for your business and link to
both of your products from that front page.
Whichever of these you choose, you'll need to build a new direct response site for
the new product in order to achieve the same results. If you choose the latter
option, you may need to do some work on your existing site as well in order to
preserve the three click rule: a front page, whatever its merits, adds an extra
click to your total before the customer can purchase a product. What all of this
gives you, however, is an easy way to promote all your products while promoting
your overall company as well. You can promote the link to your front page to
promote your entire product line and raise awareness of your company, while you
can still promote your existing products directly to targeted markets. If you are
willing to do the work, it can be a win-win situation.
Ultimately, how you expand your business is up to you. And that is the beauty of
direct response website marketing. The ability to convert viewers into sales gives
you an excellent revenue stream-which gives you a decent stake of money--
which gives you the power to decide whatever you want to do in your life and
with your business. And if you follow our advice, you'll have that power--and
you'll be a success at direct response website marketing.
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