7 Ways To Sell More Of Any Existing Product

Many marketers love launching new products, simply because the excitement surrounding a product launch tends to deliver a lot of new customers and sales. However, once the launch is over, some of these marketers neglect their existing products. Instead, they’re always looking to create excitement around their next new product.

Now what if I told you that you could enjoy those same sales rushes without having to do all the work of creating an entirely new product?

Sounds good, right?

Here’s what I’m talking about: you can breathe new life into an existing product. All you have to do is make a few simple tweaks, and you can start creating a lot of excitement and sales around the product again. It’s easy.

Let me give you a sneak peek at the seven strategies you’re about to discover:

1. Furnish Fresh Freebies
2. Schedule Special Sales
3. Update and Upgrade
4. Perfect the Process
5. Launch “Litely”
6. Focus on Formatting
7. Create a Contest

If this sounds like a good way to make more money while doing less work, then you’re going to love learning about these surefire revenue-boosting strategies.  Let’s jump right in…

#1: Furnish Fresh Freebies

One of best ways to generate interest around a product is to create related freebies to give away to the prospective market.  Better yet, if you can create something that will go viral, then your market will pass your freebie along to other prospects.

A good example of this is what I’ve done for SixFigureSeller.com. This site naturally created a lot of interest from people who want to start successful businesses selling information products. However, after the launch and my initial marketing, the interest leveled off – and so did the sales, as expected.

My solution to bumping sales back up to launch levels was to create new freebies, such as webinars and reports.  It’s an easy way to bring interested prospects into your sales funnel so that you can show them the value of your paid offer.

Now, you can offer most anything as a freebie, as long as it has these four characteristics:

1. Your freebie should be highly desirable. You probably did your market research to make sure your paid product is in demand, right? You need to do the same thing with your freebie. Hit up marketplaces like Amazon.com, Clickbank.com and JVZoo.com to find out what products are in-demand in your niche, and then create something similar to give away.

• Your freebie should be valuable. Just because you’re giving away a product doesn’t mean it’s not worth much. On the contrary, you should be giving away products that you could easily sell for $25, $50 or more. When people see the high value you offer in your free products, they’ll be excited to see what you offer in your paid product.

• Your freebie should be easy to deliver. If you create a freebie that generates a lot of interest, you don’t want to be tied to your desk manually delivering or shipping freebies. That’s why a good choice for a freebie is a downloadable (digital) product or even a live event that you create once and profit from continuously thereafter.  

Examples of good freebies include:

• Reports
• Ebooks
• Videos
• Audios
• Webinars
• Teleseminars
• Software, apps or other tools
• Access to a membership site
• Mind maps, process charts and worksheets
• Infographics
• List of recommended tools
• ….and other similar tools and resources.

• Your freebie should naturally lead to your paid offer. This is perhaps the most important part of your freebie. While it should be useful all on its own, it should also be incomplete. That means that your prospects will get the most value from your freebie if they purchase your paid product.

Let’s suppose you have a complete course on how to set up and run a profitable blog. Examples of freebies might include:

• A report showing readers how to install a WordPress blog. They’ll then need to purchase your course to find out how to turn this blog into a money maker.

• A webinar giving prospects an overview of how to run a successful blog. It shows them what to do, but not how to do it. Prospects will need to purchase your full course to get all the details.

• A free WordPress plugin that helps bloggers create blogs that are optimized for the search engines. These prospects will need to purchase your course to learn exactly how to get traffic to their blogs.

So you get the idea – create a freebie with these four characteristics, and you’ll have impressed prospects who’ll develop an interest in your paid offer.

Now let’s take a look at the second strategy for renewing interest in your offer…

#2:  Schedule Special Sales

Another great way to drum up renewed interest and boost sales is to create a special offer, which generally comes in one of two flavors:

1. Offer a sales price. There are several ways to offer a better price on an existing product. For example:

• Buy X, Get Y for free.  You can see an example of this on SixFigureSeller.com, where you can buy one month of training and get the remaining three months for free.

• Percentage discount. This is where you offer a percentage off the regular price, such as 30% or 50%. This works well if your offer has multiple levels, such as bronze, gold and platinum tiers, because then prospects know they get a good deal no matter what option they choose.

• Flat discount. This is where you simply offer a “dollar off” figure, such as $50 off the regular price. This works well if you’re selling a single product, such as video or ebook.

• Offer a low-cost trial. This works well for membership sites or software as a service (SAAS) offers. In fact, you’ve probably seen these different types of trial offers for your cable bill or cell phone bill. Basically, the idea is to “hook” prospects by giving them three, six or more months at a greatly reduced rate, after which time they’ll pay the regular monthly fee.

• Offer additional bonus products. The idea here is to sell your offer at the same price, but your customers get more bang for their buck. 

For example, let’s suppose you sell a weight loss product that includes a free low-calorie cookbook as a bonus. You might generate renewed interest in your offer by tossing in a calorie-counting app as well.

Now, in all cases, the key to using this strategy to boost sales is to attach a limit or an expiration date on your offer. 

For example, your 50% discount might end in one week. 

Another example: the free bonus offer ends when 100 people have claimed it.

Still another example: a discount or bonus ends when 100 people have claimed it OR it ends in one week, whichever comes first.

TIP: When you impose these sorts of limits, you can include a live countdown clock or “items left” ticker to increase the sense of urgency.

Now let’s have a look at the third method for renewing interest in your product…

#3: Update and Upgrade

This particular method is often used to renew interest in software. Indeed, even people who’re currently using one version of the software often upgrade to get the latest version with new and better features.

For example, Microsoft Word puts out a new version every couple years. Even folks who’re using a perfectly good copy of an older version will sometimes purchase the new version to get the latest features and benefits (such as saving to the cloud, for example, or a more user-friendly interface).

However, while it works great for software and apps, you can also use it for infoproducts. You can let people know it’s an updated version by including a version number or a year. For example:

• The Whiz Bang Diet, Version 3.0
• This Whiz Bang Diet, 2015 Edition

Below you’ll find the sort of updates you might include in your new and improved version. We’ll continue the example of a weight loss book for the examples…

• Remove dated information. Let’s suppose your original version included tips for a specific exercise that has now proven to be ineffective. You can remove this outdated information.

TIP: To make your product more evergreen, avoid making any references that date the content. 

For example, saying “last year during the winter Olympics” makes the content seem old if the winter games haven’t been played for three years.

Other examples include mentioning current news events, years, or references that pinpoint a timeframe (such as who the current president is).

• Update the list of tools, products and other resources. The next thing to do is update any other resources or tools you recommend. For example, if your diet book recommended a type of whey protein that is no longer available, then remove this recommendation and replace it with a different whey protein.

TIP: Use redirect links for resources that aren’t on your site. Preferably you should redirect these links through your own site, or you can use a service like Tiny URL. 

The reason for doing this is if a resource gets moved or there is another product you want to recommend, you won’t have thousands of copies of your products floating around with dead links. Just change the destination on your redirect links, and your product’s links will never be outdated.

• Update the content. Have you developed a new research since the original version? Has there been new research presented? This is the sort of stuff you can include in your updated version.

• Add new tools. This includes tools such as mind maps, spreadsheets, worksheets and similar tools to help people take action on the information.

For example, your weight loss product might now include calorie-counting worksheets to help people determine exactly how much they should be eating.

• Expand on important concepts. Finally, you can go into more depth in certain sections of your product. For example, a weight loss book that focused on nutrition and exercise might be more well-rounded if you expand the section on getting and staying motivated.

So creating a revised, updated or upgraded version of your product is the third method for generating more sales. Let’s take a look at the fourth method now…

#4: Perfect the Process

Often when people want to generate more sales, one of the first things they do is expand their advertising reach. That’s a great idea, and it’s something you should be doing on a regular basis. However, there is a way to get more sales without spending a single minute or investing a single dime in advertising.

How?

Simple: by tweaking your sales process. In other words, do some testing to create a sales letter that converts as high as possible. 

Sometimes marketers think that if their sales letter is pulling in a decent conversion rate, then it’s “good enough.” They might even say, “Why fix something that’s not broken?”

But the thing is, just a small bump to a conversion rate can really make a difference in your bottom line.

For example, let’s suppose your getting a 2% conversion rate on a $100 product. That means for every 100 people who visit your site, two buy and you make a total of $200. Even if this traffic costs a buck a visitor, that’s a nice profit.

However, just crunch a few numbers to examine the possibilities. If you bump your conversion rate just one percentage point to 3% on a $100 product, then you’d be making $300 for every 100 visitors. That’s an extra $100 for every 100 visitors on the front end. But you also have an extra customer whose lifetime value might be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars to you.

Point is, it’s well worth your time to test your sales letter. So let me give you some tips for doing this…

Tip 1: Get a tracking tool.

In order to make tracking easy, you need a tool that counts visits and calculates conversions. One such tool is Google Analytics, or the open source alternative at Piwik.org.

Alternatively, you can use a simple split testing script, which is also called an “A/B split testing” script. You can find numerous options available using a Google search.

These simple scripts work by randomly dividing your traffic and sending half your visitors to “Version A” of your sales letter, and half your visitors to “Version B” of your sales letter. 

I’ll explain these different versions in the next tip…

Tip 2: Test one factor at a time.

The key to testing and improving your sales letter is to choose just ONE element of your sales letter to test at a time while holding all other variables constant. That way, if there is a significant difference in conversion rates, then you have confidence that it’s due to the item you were testing.

Here are some parts of the sales letter you can test:

• The headline
• The subheadline
• The opening paragraph of your letter.
• The body of your letter.
• The P.S.
• The call to action.
• The guarantee.
• The price of the product.
• The name of the product.
• The bonuses offered with the product.
• The placement of testimonials.
• The graphics.
• The overall design elements of the page, including color and font style.
• The order button.
• A text letter versus video sales letter versus video plus text.
• Long form copy vs. short form copy.

So let’s suppose you’re testing a headline to see if you can improve your overall conversion rate by creating a better headline. You’d create two versions of your sales letter: Version A and Version B.

These two versions of your sales letter would be exactly the same, with the exception of the headline. What’s more, you’ll send the same type of traffic on the same day so that you know any difference in the conversion rate is due to the different headlines, and no other variable.

Once you’ve determined which headline “pulls” better, this winning headline becomes your control. Now you can test your winning headline against other headlines to see if you can improve your conversion rate some more.

Once you’ve tested several headlines and come out with a clear winner, then you can test another element of your sales letter, such as the call to action.

Which brings us to the next tip…

Tip 3: Start with the significant factors.

There are certain parts of your sales letter which will  have the biggest impact on your conversion rate. These include the price, your headline, the name of your product, your P.S., and your call to action. These are the main items you should test first. Time permitting, you can test the other items mentioned earlier, such as the guarantee.

As you can see in the example at the beginning of this section, it’s well worth your time to track and test your sales letter as well as your overall advertising campaigns and sales process.

Now let’s look at another method for generating more sales…

#5: Launch “Litely”

The idea here is to offer a lite version of your product, which means this new product comes with fewer features and benefits. The benefit is not only do you make money on the lite version, but you also make even more money when people choose to upgrade to the full version of your product.

While this is common with software and apps, you can certainly offer a lite version of just about any infoproduct as well. Let me give you a few examples of how to create a lite version for different types of products:

• Lite version of software with fewer features. Let’s suppose you have a weight-loss app that helps people calculate how many calories are in the meals they’re eating, how much protein/fats/carbs in each food, food suggestions for balancing the meals for better nutrition and to hit weight loss goals, and so on.  A lite version of the software may count calories and nothing else. Customers will need to upgrade to the full version to unlock the other useful features.

• Lite version of a home study course. Let’s suppose you sell a big course that includes a main manual, worksheets, and several bonus reports and tools. Your lite version may be the main manual only. People will need to upgrade to get access to all the other beneficial goodies.

• Lite version of an ebook or video. A lite version may excerpt out part of the product, such as the first half of a book or video. While it stands alone as useful, customers will need to upgrade to get all the details and “how to” information.

You get the idea.

The key in all cases is to present an upgrade option not only on the sales page, but also within the lite version of the product itself. 

So, for example, people who purchased software should see a call to action and an upgrade link every time they log into the software. Likewise, people who watch a lite version of a video, listen to an audio, or read a book should see a link to upgrade to the full version.

Now let’s take a look at the sixth method for generating more excitement and sales around an existing product…

#6: Focus on Formatting

This is actually pretty simple – you can create excitement around your product simply by changing the format. And in some cases, changing the format will actually increase the perceived value of the product as well.

Text-based products tend to have the lowest perceived value, followed by audio products, video products, coaching courses and live events (which have the highest perceived value).  

You can boost the perceived value of an ebook by using it as the basis for creating a video product. If you have a video product, you can boost its perceived value by using it as the basis for a coaching class.

For example, let’s suppose you’re selling your ebook for $20. You may be able to sell the video-based course for $47, and the coaching class version of this product for $97.

Now, there are two ways to use this method:

1. Offer a stand-alone product in a new format. For example, your prospects get to choose at checkout whether they want an ebook, video or even both. Each of these three options would carry a different price tag, with the ebook being the least expensive option, followed by the video, and the combination package carrying the highest price tag.

• Add the new format as a bonus. Another way to use this method is to offer the new format as a bonus to the existing product. So, for example, if you’re selling an audio or video-based product, then you may offer the transcripts as a bonus.

Another way to generate interest by changing the format is to turn a digital product into a physical product, or vice versa. Keep in mind that physical products carry a higher perceived value, so your product will be worth more if you turn it into a physical product.

For example, you may take your downloadable video, burn it on a DVD, and ship the DVD to customers.

Another example: you might turn a PDF ebook into a physical ebook using Amazon’s CreateSpace.com services. Then you can even sell the physical book in the Amazon marketplace.

Still another example: you can turn a downloadable home study course into a physical product. This is the sort of product with many components that will come in a big box delivered to your customer’s door step. Just seeing the big box will create a lot of value in your prospect’s mind.

TIP: Another benefit of creating a physical product is that you’ll have a lower refund rate versus digital products. That’s because customers need to actually do some “work” in order to obtain a refund, such as repacking the product and shipping it back. Compare that to simply sending an email to request a refund on a digital product, and you can see why the refund rates differ so much between downloadable and physical products.

The cool thing about this method is that people will often purchase both versions of the product. For example, someone who really likes the book may also purchase the audio version to listen to in their car or when they’re working out.

Now let’s look at the 7^th method for generating interest in your existing product…

#7. Create a Contest

There are two kinds of contests you can create to generate interest in your product:

1. A contest for prospects.
2. A contest for affiliates.

Let’s look at these two separately…

Contest for Prospects

You can build up your prospect mailing list and generate excitement around your product by offering a contest. There are four keys to this strategy that will really help generate excitement and sales:

Key 1: Offer your product as the prize. Don’t offer cash or anything else not laser targeted to your niche, otherwise you’ll end up with a lot of entrants who aren’t interested in what you’re selling.

Key 2: Make it go viral. You can use a tool like Rafflecopter.com to give people extra entries into the contest when they tell their friends about it on Facebook or other social media.

Key 3: Get people excited about your product. One way to do this to create a contest entry that requires people to tell you what they’d do with the product. This gets people imagining themselves using the product, which increases their desire for the product. Which brings us to the fourth key…

Key 4: Offer discounts to all entrants. You should have three or four top winners who get your products and perhaps other related prizes. However, you can then offer ALL entrants a deep, limited-time discount. Since they’re already excited about your product, this discount should be enough to give you a nice sales boost.

Naturally, you’ll now have a new mailing list of prospects that you can follow up with frequently to close the sale on your main offer and other related products and services.

Now the second method…

Contest for Affiliates

Sometimes sales drop off because affiliates lose interest and stop promoting. If you can get affiliates interested in your offer again, then you can boost your sales. One good way to do this is to offer a contest for affiliates with generous cash prizes and other rewards (such as iPads) for those who sell the most products during the contest period.

TIP: If you don’t yet have an affiliate program set up, then get that done ASAP. It’s easy – if you’re selling digital products, just use a platform like Clickbank.com or JVZoo.com.

In addition to offering prizes for the top three to five top-selling affiliates, you may also want to offer random-draw prize entries to anyone who sells at least one or two products. That way, even your smaller affiliates will get excited about the contest – though they know they can’t win the prize for most sales, they at least have a chance of winning the random drawing.

Now let’s wrap things up…

Conclusion

If you have an existing product with stagnating sales figures, it’s time to breathe some life back into the product, create some excitement around it and start getting those sales notifications lighting up your inbox again.

The good news is that you just learned seven proven ways to do it, and you can use any of these methods (or a combination!) to get your sales snapping and crackling again. Let’s recap the seven methods:

1. Furnish Fresh Freebies: Where you giveaway new products to generate interest.

• Schedule Special Sales: Here you offer discounts or bonus items to boost your conversion rate.

• Update and Upgrade: This is where you offer a “new and improved” version of your product.

• Perfect the Process: Here you discovered how to improve your conversion rate to make more money without getting more traffic.

• Launch “Litely”: The idea here is to create and sell a lite version of your product, which naturally leads to people purchasing the full version.

• Focus on Formatting: Here you found out how to create excitement and even boost the perceived value of your product by changing the format.

• Create a Contest: In this last method you found out how to use both contests for prospects and contests for affiliates to create more sales.

Now you’ve learned some solid strategies for making more sales and sliding more money into your pocket with your existing products.

Get started right away!