Creating your muse can be one of the most truly unique challenges you’ll take on. Every step of the way can seem to present more problems than solutions, and staying focused on your niche and your product can prove surprisingly challenging. I composed the following case study as a recap of the entire muse creation process for one of my products, the Audio Mixologist Rapid Memorization System.
Starting with only the spark of an idea – to create an audio learning course for aspiring bartenders – I decided to see what would happen if I set out to create a world-class audio learning system to sell as an information product. This is how I made it happen, presented as a model you can easily replicate…
Testing an unproven niche market
The first unbreakable rule of muse creation is ensuring you have an audience willing to exchange money for the value of your offer. A beautiful website, compelling copy, a perfect product – none of it matters if no one wants what you’re offering. The critical misstep you should avoid at all costs is committing extensive time and energy to creating products for a market that doesn’t have an appetite to buy.
- Offer your product to your niche to gauge interest.
- Measure market interest to justify the cost/time required.
- Create the product only if the interest is irrefutable
“How the hell do you offer a product that hasn’t been created yet?” you’re asking. You’ll understand how that works as we move forward…
Writing the copy
Start by writing the sales letter. Forget aesthetic, forget the product – just focus on benefits. Sell solutions, sell ease of pain, sell peace of mind. Evoke emotion however you can – just make it impossible for someone in your niche to ignore you.
One fact that’s come as a surprise to many is that the story used on the landing page is actually true. For future products, I intend to include similar stories, even if they’re works of fiction. Giving your product an origin, a eureka moment, is strongly compelling and I’m a firm believer in making your story the focus of your sales copy. Writing sales copy based on fictitious events raises some controversial questions. The principles behind writing effective copy is something I’ll dive into in another post shortly.
Building the website
Coming from a background in design/development, I personally managed the creation of a simple sales letter website to present my offer’s sales copy. As with every step of the process, I handled much of it myself the first time through. I strongly believe, though I intend to outsource 98% of my tasks in the future, the first time presents an opportunity to move through a process first-hand, gaining an understanding of how to effectively manage each moving part. The intention was to create a workflow and a prototype to be replicated.
The original “test-only” website (since replaced by the up-to-date version) included nothing more than the following:
- Header graphic touting my USP (unique selling proposition) with Buy Now button
- Sales letter (story, benefits, offered solution, product breakdown, money-back guarantee, order form)
- Audio sample
Given I had no product, you might ask how I could offer an audio sample. Good question. This was an opportunity to get creative. I’d selected my voice talent (via Elance), prepared a script and planned out all the materials. The product itself was perfectly planned but not yet created. Research told me start-to-finish creation will take exactly 3 days and cost $600 USD (for voice talent). Clearly, it made sense to test my market first. If hypothetical sales justify creation of the product, I’d move forward.
This approach allows you to test multiple ideas in parallel without investing the time/effort to create a possibly worthless product. No matter how much you dig your own ideas, let the market decide if it’s worth pursuing.
Accepting orders… without accepting orders.
The next obvious question focuses on ordering. Clearly you should never accept payment for a product not immediately available to the customer. The key is to allow someone to approach the ultimate point of purchase, which gives you clear indication of purchase intent. To capture orders, simple create a mailing list with AWeber and present it as Step 1 of your order process. When someone submits an order, capture only their name and email address and bounce them to a page that says something like:
“We apologize but we are currently updating our product and not accepting orders at this time. We will notify you when the product is available for purchase.”
As a sort of pay-back for my early-interest customers who end up seeing this message, I make a point in the future to send them all a code for a hefty discount on the product once it’s ready for purchase.
Google time.
The specifics of launching and managing a Google Adwords campaign is the subject for future post. Simply stated, I ran a simple Adwords campaign – spending no more than $10/day – to push traffic to my sales letter. I ran this for 2 weeks to gauge day-by-day metrics.
After day 15 running Adwords, these were my metrics…
19 orders placed @ $59 price point. Theoretically, the product would have generated ~$1,100 in 15 days. Projecting on that alone equated to ~$2,240/mo or over $26,000/year in revenue.
Total Google Cost-To-Date:
$72.72 (@ avg. CPC of $0.61) with a daily budget capped at $5.
Needless to say, this was all the market demand validation I needed to see to press forward with creating the final product and laying the groundwork for generating actual sales.
