A couple days ago, I wrote email about how I’d eat ecom copywriters’ lunch… with some fava beans, and a nice chianti.
That email was based on my own experience from a few years back, writing lots and lots of advertorials and revshare emails for ecom clients.
Today, I got another idea for you along the same lines, an idea I was very excited about at the time. This idea could have made me a profitable info publishing business on day 0, but it never happened, because I committed a classic persuasion blunder.
First a bit o’ background:
Like I wrote on Monday, I got ecom clients by writing advertorials. Then, I offered those same clients to write emails on a revshare basis, which made me much more than working as a per-hour copywriter.
But there was one ongoing problem, and that was a lack of good offers to promote in those daily emails.
The clients I worked with had a half-dozen or so live dropshipping offers. Some worked great, some ok.
Ideally, I’d promote each of those offers only twice every month, because otherwise I noticed the response dropped off.
What to promote all those other days?
There were affiliate networks that specialized in “viral” ecom products like the ones my clients were selling. But no matter how supposedly “viral” these offers were, my tests showed that only a handful were worth promoting, and even those underperformed our in-house offers.
Beyond the affiliate ecom products, there were a few ClickBank info products that we could sell to our audience. But since our audience (dog owners and kitchen and household gadgets buyers) was outside the popular and cutthroat ClickBank niches like dating and weight loss, the only ClickBank offers I could find had awful marketing and sold poorly.
So I had an idea.
What if I were to simply create custom info products to sell to my clients’ list?
I had a good sense of what offers could sell well based on my emails, plus I could research what’s selling on Amazon, what’s getting views on YouTube, searches on Google.
I could create some ebooks, simple sales pages for those ebooks, maybe some upsells. It didn’t need to be perfect, just attractive and quality enough to put confidently in front of our list, and to complement the physical products we were selling.
I pitched the idea to my clients. I said I will do ALL THE WORK and split the money with them.
They liked the idea, and said they would talk about it at “the partners next meeting.” Aaand… they came back a few days later, with the results of their partner deliberations:
“We discussed it extensively last meeting and decided it’s not exactly the direction we want to go (although we do see the huge potential there).”
… in other words, they said no because my “no work and no-risk offer” still sounded like some work, some risk, or at least some uncertainty or obligation.
That’s the classic persuasion blunder I told you about at the start. It goes back to the old Dean Jackson “Would you like a cookie” analogy.
Says Dean, imagine you have a guest at your house, and you know she loves oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.
You could sit there with your guest in the living room and then suddenly jump up and say, “Hey how about I go in the kitchen and bake you up a tray of those cookies you love? It won’t take a minute, really!”
Do this, and odds are great your guest will think, frown, and say, “Oh no, don’t worry about it.” She might even look at you a bit weird for offering to go out of your way like that.
But what if you preemptively bake those cookies?
And then, when your guest settles in on the couch, what if you come out of the kitchen with a trayful and say, “Would you like a cookie? It’s one of those chocolate chip oatmeal ones I know you love.”
… in this case, odds are excellent your guest will wolf down the whole trayful.
Same thing here.
I could have done the work ahead of time. Created an ebook, a sales page, and even some upsells.
That done, I could have simply told my clients that I have a custom new info product offer I’ve special-made for our audience.
If they’re ok with it, I will send out a day’s email to it to test it out. I’ll also set up an affiliate account for them so they can track the sales, and give them 50% (or whatever) of the sales. If it works well, I can keep promoting it and keep splitting the profits with them.
Had I done this, there’s an excellent chance they would have said, “Sure go ahead.” After all, I was testing out new offers all the time. Many turned out to be duds, while a rare few turned out ok and became regular sellers.
Of course, I never did this. You can probably guess why.
Creating an info product, even a generic one like a dog-training ebook, takes time.
Creating a sales funnel for said ebook, even a basic one, takes time.
Creating upsells? Time.
Plus, there’s still a chance it won’t work, even though my intuition said it would.
Which brings me to my offer for you for today.
Everything I’ve just told you about happened back in 2021. The world has changed a tad since then.
If I were doing this today, well — take a look at the link below.
It’s a webinar. it demos an “AI Super Agent” that does everything I just talked about — the market research, the product creation, and the funnel building. It does it in a matter of minutes, instead of a matter of weeks/never that it would have taken me.
The guy behind this AI gizmo is Josh Rosenberg. A couple decades ago, Josh used to be a copywriter. Then a decade ago, he became a big ClickBank seller in the “teach you a guitar” and “sex & dating” spaces. Then towards the end of the 2010s, he went on to work behind-the-scenes CMO for a bunch of big direct response clients, to the tune of over $150M in sales.
A couple years ago, Josh started focusing aggressively on creating AI tools for direct response businesses.
He says he’s taken his knowledge and expertise from the various stages of his career, and baked them into this “AI Super Agent,” so it does 95% of the work of creating an effective info product funnel for you.
I haven’t used the thing myself, and so I cannot vouch for it. The reason for this is I don’t think this “AI Super Agent” is a fit for the kind of personality-based, “let me tell you something new” approach that I offer via this newsletter.
But I think this “AI Super Agent” can be very tempting if you’re in a situation like I was back in 2021. In case you’re interested in spinning up and testing out a new info business in a few clicks and taps, this might be worth a watch: