Selling your own product in the same fashion you would advertise a CPA offer!
Lots of times when people start their own products, it’s to become either an advertiser or a recognized brand in a certain space. This post is how you start/advertise your own product using the exact same methods as if you were running an affiliate offer (this is usually done for a trending product or something you know won’t last more than a year).
This story is of the unconventional way i made $80k profit in a couple months right when i started college, and tells you the key methods i used to jump from 100% ROI, to 400% ROI. As usual i’ll tell my story in point form because i can make it more coherent and it’ll be easier to refer back to if you plan on doing something similar.

Part 1
- I found a niche market that was trending at the time, and there was a couple ebooks for this niche but no other affiliate type of offers.
- I found a clickbank product that was doing well in the niche, but their landing page was horrible. (i don’t mean it looked bad and converted well, i mean it was complete shit but the product was hot news!)
- So i started a campaign on Adwords and it quickly started to profit with this ‘meh’ ebook
- Eventually i moved on to private buys (which we’re really annoying to handle, but had great ROI), and then i got into Facebook! (Facebook at the time was still very new and it allowed me to scale a lot higher then i currently was)

So at this stage i’m doing pretty well, and things were very consistent (which i wasn’t used to). So i knew it was time to scale this more! Here’s where it got interesting

Part 2
- I was making ~100% ROI, and had great volume, but the product wasn’t going to sell for ever so i needed to maximize ROI while i could
- I decided to make my own version of the product, which at the time was quite the leap.
- I outsourced it to someone from india (i forget where i found him, i think Sitepoint) and we started working together to create a much better version
- 2 days in, my friend showed me a another ebook which you could buy the selling rights for! It was just $200 to buy the rights to resell it myself! So i paid the mumbai guy for his time, bought the re-sellable ebook and got cracking on merchants and my most epic landing page of all time.
- It started getting complicated with merchants because i heard so many nightmare stories with paypal, but eventually i started hearing nightmare stories with all the merchants i researched so i just stuck with Paypal.
- I then began 2 different versions of landing pages for the ebook and I’d say the one i used is one of my best landing pages of all time.

The Landing Page
I had conversion tactics on the landing page such as an urgency notice, i welcomed users from the site they came from, I included a free gift (explained below),  and had geo-targeting (was very useful). All these things played very important roles in the conversions but the key to my landing page was keeping all the benefits of the product in a very well organized layout with big simple headlines.

The page was formatted like this:

————————
HEADER
————————
Big Bold Benefit 1
details…details…details…
————————
Big Bold Benefit 2
details…details…details…
————————
Big Bold Benefit 3
details…details…details…
————————
Time to Buy!
————————

Each benefit was explained in simple ‘everyday’ terms and my conversion rates were through the roof. Looking back on a lot of my campaigns i should have been following this format more often, even flogs these days look like chaotic hurricanes, no solid flow of information. All landing pages need to be simplified and more organized and you’ll notice an increase in conversions!

Part 3
At this point i was selling a product that now cost me $0 for each ebook, and i was selling for $49!
–> $49 PROFIT! (minus advertising & credit card fees). I was advertising a very similar product just a couple weeks before with lower conversions rates, only $25 profit per sale and i was still profiting quite well.

- A few weeks later i had an idea to add an actual product that i would ship with each ebook. It was something small that related very well to the core idea of the ebook.
- I did research and found it’d cost me ~$2.00 for each product (when i purchased 200 or more). So i decided to give it a test, bought 50 of them, edited my landing page, and tested how much the conversion rate would go up with the physical product add-on (which was a ‘free’ bonus — seen all the time in infomercials!)

The result?? Well it nearly doubled! about 70-80% more conversions each day from this 1 little item. BOOM!  I Bought 500 of them and called it a day.

That’s the story of how i sold my own product in the same fashion as i would do CPA marketing, and increased my ROI from 100% – 400%.

July 2011
Last month a great idea came to me. It has no relation to the product i sold years ago, but the concept is the same except this time I’ve created my own niche. I’ve been working on it for a month, (no ebook this time) found a physical product from alibaba.com. I’m selling it for $45, i purchase them for $4 (in bulk). Preliminary tests are looking great! Maybe it’s time you try something unconventional?

Want To Run A Campaign Like This?
Doing this type of online marketing has it’s own group of hassles/complications but the nicest thing about this campaign was i had VERY little competition. The lack of competition and higher profit margins are the main reasons to run a campaign like this.

So keep in mind:
- You CAN create your own niche. There’s no rules to what you can sell!
- If your looking for an existing niche: look for niches that are small and have little competition
- Make sure your campaign idea is better than your competitions
- Be ready to handle merchant issues and refunds

>> Ask me questions in the comments section (that don’t involve me divulging exact details) and i’ll answer them!