Selling With Free Offers
Lesson 5 Chapter 1
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.
Take note that this course is NOT a shallow "give-me-your-email-address" type of fake course. It is a full-blown premium course. Others sell similar courses for $997 or $347.
And I am not giving it away for free as a "beta" or a "charity gesture". It is forever free and that decision is final. The only return I am asking you is the following:
If you feel that this course is valuable,
- please share it with others so that they can also enjoy its benefits,
- consider linking to it as a resource from your site
- If you decide to buy any of the products I recommend, please do so by clicking on my affiliate links. This way I will receive a commission which enables me to create more free training like this.
To learn more about funnels and collaborate, you can join our FB group: WordPress Funnels Pro
The Free Info Product Approach
We hear a lot about providing value, building relationship and trust, etc. These are all valid, but there is an approach that works a lot better:
Focus on teaching people achieve RESULTS.
Regardless if they ever pay you or not.
The second part of that sentence is unusual. The approach is simple:
You teach people EVERYTHING about a subject, how to do something, without charging a penny. While you do that, you naturally recommend the products/services they will need in the process. The recommended products can be affiliate products or your own products/services.