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Another “Learning Experience”
By Stephen Spry
Towards the end of 2007 I had, what was in hindsight, a major brain freeze!!!
Actually there was a product “package” that was available for the personal development market, and I thought it was a doozie.
Well worth the US$997 to purchase, or so I thought!
Now you didn’t actually get private label rights, where you can actually re-write the source docs and brand them as your own.
But it DID give you a reseller licence for a package that was (supposedly) doing really well in the personal development arena.
And that meant I could practically do what I wanted with the marketing of that package to make a killing… Oh yeah. Like I said earlier… Brain Freeze! I believed the hype and bought the dream…
Wot was I thinking???
Well the sad news is this was another “failed” experiment, and an expensive one.
Not only in the money it cost to purchase the product in the first place, but in the TIME it took to actually modify the “complete” sales material provided so you could actually DO something with it.
The product was promoted as complete – sales letter, graphics, auto-responder messages – all that stuff. All you had to do as a reseller was your own little bit of “branding”, get it up on the web, do some promos, and the money would start rolling in…
Yeah well.. as an HTML web designer, I can assure you that even MINOR modifications to the sales page meant the whole lot had to be recoded from scratch.
The auto-responder messages were a direct lift from the original! Again, HEAPS of references to things needed to be edited/removed. And that included affiliate links to products I wouldn’t normally promote myself, and promotional “events” I wasn’t running. So these were pretty useless.
Even the promotional pdf’s that came with the product – the things you were supposed to give away to build your list – were not particularly useful and needed modification.
So… to cut a long story short… it took a couple of months of some fairly intensive full-time effort to get this turnkey “system” up and running properly.
God help those buyers who didn’t have the skills/knowledge I needed to do this!
And the Sales?
Well – that’s another story!
Despite support from a blog (one of my first) and lots of good inbound links, which resulted in some great search engine placement (and STILL gives us positions #5-7 in a Google search for the product name) then end result was nothing short of totally pathetic.
I’d be lucky if there have been any more than a handful of sales made in the past three years!
Maybe enough to cover the hosting and domain name rego… but absolutely no reward for the initial time and financial outlay that was needed.
This was my first real experience with a turnkey “high-end” resell rights package… and I’ll probably NEVER go near anything like this again!
And what is even more disappointing is that I KNOW there were LOTS of other people who also purchased this great “opportunity”… only to find the exact same thing happen to them.
What I Learned From This?
Oh well… Another one of life’s little lessons for all participants eh?
At least it DID teach me what you SHOULD include in such a package if you are developing and marketing one yourself.
It also introduced me to the Ultimate Marketing Center, particularly in using their hosting, auto-responder, affiliate management and link tracking services… all provided for under $20 a month!
And that referral to Kavi’s web hosting and marketing services has also provided me with a small, ongoing monthly affiliate income since 2008, which is an added bonus!
But the biggest lesson I suppose is that I also began to use the list management and auto-responder software provided for my own email marketing – i.e. signing people up to my lists so I can send them stuff later!
And while all of that also takes time to build on… eventually you hope that it will generate results for you down the track – but THAT depends a lot on what niche you are trying to market to!
So I suppose my little “failure” wasn’t all a waste of effort,
Remember Edison made thousands of attempts before he developed a commercially viable version of the light bulb!
After struggling to develop a viable electric light-bulb for months and months, Thomas Edison was interviewed by a young reporter who boldly asked Mr. Edison if he felt like a failure and if he thought he should just give up by now. Perplexed, Edison replied,
“Young man, why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp.”
And that’s how you should view the things that don’t work out for you.
Just necessary steps down that path to finding out what DOES work.
Oh… how philosophical 🙂