Selling With Free Offers

Traditional Website Conversion Sucks

No matter what kind of site you have, only around 1% of your visitors are ready to buy. The remaining 99% are not there yet. The percentage can be different (higher or lower) for e-commerce stores, but it's still a very low percentage. 

Because these visitors are sent over to a sales page prematurely, they are not receiving the experience they desire. The problem is not just the low conversion rate, but you also lose them FOREVER.

Many site owners are obsessed with traffic. But what if you increased your sales conversion from 1 percent to just 5 percent? That would 5X your earnings without increasing your traffic.

Blogging vs Info Products

The standard affiliate marketing blog model consists of churning out keyword-targeted blog posts that recommend affiliate products to visitors. Then links are built to rank these in Google. 

Everyone is doing this, therefore competition is high. There is a considerably smaller percentage of bloggers that step up their game by creating a course.

If you really look at it, there isn't a huge difference between learning something from a blog post or learning the same thing from a course or an e-book. Still, info products have a higher perceived value.

Creating A Course

Creating a course is not that hard – if you put a bunch of blog posts in a sequence, you have a course. (Yes, there are some technicalities with access restriction, sales, etc, but that is the main concept.)

The layout of my courses, which you see below, come from the Thrive Apprentice plugin, not the theme.

For a one-time fee of $67, you can install it on 1 website and get 1 full year of support. Unlike other plugins, you get unlimited free updates even when the year expires.  

You will also need to create squeeze pages, sales pages, etc.  

I use Thrive Architect for this, because its landing page gallery contains over 250 landing pages, all tested for conversion by real marketers.

Architect has a very similar pricing - costs $67 for 1 website with 1 year of support and unlimited free updates.

I also use Thrive Leads, because this plugin will help you get more opt-ins by automatically placing your opt-in forms into every post, pop-ups, slide-ins, ribbons, etc.

Each of these plugins are available for 5 sites for $97.

Smart choice: Instead of buying plugins separately, for $228 you can get all of the Thrive Themes plugins, including Thrive Quiz Builder and all of their premium themes, to use them on 25 sites. Even if you cancel your membership after 1 year, you still get lifetime free updates on everything, the only thing you don't get is live support.

Suppose you team up with a blogger friend to share your costs, paying $114 to have this for the lifetime of your blog is an awesome deal.

The Procedure

The point is that just by the fact of creating a course, you can beat the portion of your competition that only has blog posts and you also give more apparent value.

• Your course or e-book gets into the hands of the reader.
  
• Reader begins to read in order to learn more about the problem they want to solve.
  
• Reader encounters relevant, organic plugs to your service or product throughout the text.
  
• They take action (convert)
  

This course is a live example of the Free Info Product strategy in action. The above section is a perfect example of how you can naturally plug your products into your courses/e-books, without sounding salesy.