The value of the knowledge that we share does not go away, so how do we promote our products for the long term?

It’s a completely different game to promote products in the long term vs. in a single event.  You are positioning yourself more as an e-tailer instead of a one off product launcher.  And this is where you get to make more of your money “while you sleep” as well.

Giving Your Product Longevity

One of the most powerful ways of learning anything is to model the success of others.  The exact details will almost never be the same, but the general principles almost never change.  Throughout this list, you’ll get to see how some of the A-List and B-List blogging pros are using these techniques to turn their products into long term revenue streams, and how simple it is to do so for your own products.

1. Birthday Bash

If you’re friends with Ash Ambridge of the Middle Finger Project, you probably saw on Twitter that it was her birthday recently.  How did she celebrate? By letting you snag a copy of her premier product at a steep discount.

To celebrate her birthday, she gave you a gift – not bad, right?

Mileage may vary, of course, and will work best on sites where the audience loves you a lot

2. Holiday Sales

You can rock a holiday sale for anything from the Fourth of July to Black Friday (you can even invent your own).

Set a discount. Set a deadline. Let your audience know what is going on in advance (and some affiliates if you’d like to get them in on it).

Enjoy the results while you’re most likely celebrating the holiday in your own swanky way.

3. Email Series

My buddy Sam Spurlin offers an email series on his site (that just re-launched and that yours truly built), called Exploring Consciousness. This series directly supports his e-book, Regaining Consciousness.  You go through the email series, and as you explore facets consciousness, you gradually see how it can be useful in your life.

At the end, Sam gives you the opportunity to buy the e-book.  It’s a soft pitch: “Hey, if you dig this series, consider picking up a copy of the e-book to deepen your own practices.”  Not slimy, not sleazy, and it’s all value to the reader, whether they buy the e-book or not. Kudos, Sam.

4. Daily Deals

Are you a fan of Groupon or LivingSocial?

Me too – and you can do this for your own products.  Set up a group deal and if enough people buy your product, then they all get a massive discount (50% is a good standard).

There are some great tools out there to do this as well.  I’d recommend the Group Deals plugin to make it happen on your own site.  The investment is easily recouped in your first sale, and the rest is just gravy.  If you’d prefer to outsource this task, consider putting your product on AppSumo or similar sites if they are a good fit.

5.  Dime Sales

My friend Jonathan Mead recently ran a sale on his site called a, “dime sale”.

A Dime Sale works like this: at a specified time, your product goes on sale at an absurdly low price – $11 for a $99 product.  For each person that buys the product, the price goes up by fifty cents or a dollar, all the way up to a cap that you set (let’s use $73 for this example).

It might sound crazy, but it just has crazy potential.  Let’s look at some numbers. If an author reaches the cap, here’s what they end up with in this hypothetical situation:

• At 10 Sold: $176
• At 20 Sold: $441
• At 30 Sold: $806
• At 50 Sold: $1271
• At 60 Sold: $1836
• At 73 Sold: $2646 – and you’re still offering a 25% discount on the product, so more sales are likely.

Not bad for one a one day sale.

There are tools such as Instant Dime Sale Creator to get you started with this type of sale for your own products.  It requires a little technical know how, but it’s worth the effort.

6.  Bundling Products

One of the easiest ways to add more sales to your bottom line is to bundle products together and offer them at a discount.

In Chris Guillebeau’s Empire Builder’s Kit, he suggests offering all of your products in a single bundle. Most people won’t want this, but for the ones that do, who are you to turn down a $500 sale?

If your products fit nicely into categories, create smaller bundles that cover the category in addition to the “Get everything at once” bundle.

7. Breaking Products Up

Do you have an absolutely massive product?  Then it’s time to do the reverse of bundling your product – you need to break it up.

While I was working for Alexis Neely, I helped her re-launch the Money Map to Freedom, a $1000-2000 business and financial product.  The product is amazing, but not everyone has that type of dough to drop when they’re starting out.

The solution?

Break off part of the product, repackage it and give it to people as an entry level alternative.  Alexis released a Truth Telling product from the first two modules of the Money Map, which eased people into the Money Map process at a more affordable level.  The result? More customers, more loyalty and greater exposure.

8. Upsell

Upselling is “optional bundling.”  Chris Guillebeau does this the better than any other online blogger/entrepreneur I have seen.   When you check out of his store online, you’ll see an offer for another one of his products – and if you add it to this purchase, you’ll get it for a massive discount.

Think about it – when you sell a new product, why not do this with your old products? Simply offer them as an add-on to the purchase of a new product.

This upsell technique can dramatically impact the almighty “bottom line” of your business, simply because you’re giving the customer the option of getting what they already want at a mind boogling good price.

Win-win.

9. Pay What You Want

I believe that the natural state of being for people is one of generosity.  When you give people the opportunity to pay what they want for a product, you’re saying, “I trust you and this relationship.  I know that you’ll continue to support my gifts to the world.”

Danielle LaPorte combined this strategy with a birthday celebration on WhiteHotTruth last year to great success.  Instead of a, “Buy Now!” button, you left a comment indicating how much you’d like to offer for the FireStarter Sessions – be it a reduced amount or a payment plan or a generous overpayment.  Her team then sent you a PayPal invoice based on your offer, and if you followed through, you got the sessions.

1. In watching her and others do this, I picked up a few best practices that I want to share:
2. Give them a ‘suggested donation’ that is less than the actual cost.
3. Poll your existing customers and ask what they would pay in a “pay what you can” sale, knowing what they do after having received the product, and include that information as social proof on the sales page.
4. Protect yourself – if someone is trying to take advantage of your business, you have the full authority and power to say no.

Take a risk on the generosity your audience – you’ll probably be surprised.

10. Buy One, Get One For a Friend

More from the land of generosity: offer a buy one, get one for a friend (or give one to a stranger) sale.  This is beautiful because it helps people feel good about themselves in the process of supporting you – and it’s more concrete than the more typical, “I’ll donate x% to a charity,” efforts.

Danielle LaPorte did this last September with the Firestarter Sessions.  She told the world that if you buy one, you can nominate a friend or a stranger to also receive a copy.  In doing so she showed her marketing acumen while increasing the number of positive feelings in the world.  Doing so with your own higher end products is simple, and requires little or no tech implementation besides what you already have set up.

What are you waiting for? Just don’t call it BOGO – that’s just weird.

11. Twitter Party!

I’ll admit, I had no idea what a Twitter Party was until recently, when I received an email from Kelly Kingman inviting me to be a part of one.  A Twitter Party boils down to creating another event where people interested in your product might take the leap and buy – because they are getting extra reason or incentive to do so.

For example, Kelly emailed me last week asking if I would be interested in participating in her Twitter Party for eBook Evolution (check out the review, it’s a great product) by offering an extra coaching session or two as a prize to people that come to party.  And I’m not the only one – there are a bunch of other people giving away goodies.  There’s going to be a hashtag that we all pow-wow on tomorrow night (#ebookParty), and a phone call that we can all join in on.

The power of the Twitter Party is that you get the opportunity to turn your product launch (or promotion) into an event that people are attending.  This ups the engagement level, which is good for your product and your business.  So far, the only person I’ve seen running Twitter Parties is Karl Staib from PartyBizConnect, and he has lots of resources on Twitter Parties for you to dig through and learn more.

If you’re the least bit curious about eBook Evolution and want to learn more, I encourage you to check out the eBook Twitter Party tomorrow evening.  You can grab the details and sign up here.  I’ll be giving away two product creation coaching sessions, so if you’re interested in a chance at winning that or any of the other amazing prices, I look forward to hanging out with you tomorrow night!

What Creative Strategies Have You Seen?

Like the birth of a child, the launch of your product is a huge occasion; but it is by no means the end of that products life.  You wouldn’t put a child on a shelf and show it to people occasionally, so why would you consider doing so with a product?

A banner ad and an occasional in post mention is not a marketing and sales strategy.  You poured your heart and soul into creating a worthwhile product – don’t be afraid to put your heart and soul into the sales and marketing.  Your product will make a difference for the people that use it – so don’t be shy about helping get it into their hands.

What creative strategies have you seen with launches and long term promotional strategies for online entrepreneurs? I’d love to hear what you’ve done or what you’re looking forward to doing with your products.  Leave a note in the comments and share your thoughts.

Image by urvetson