What I Did

1. As a consumer, I’m weary of sales pages similar to the one I made for Muscle Meditate. So, I outsourced a site design that I feel is better looking for sales pages targeted at non-internet marketers.
   I told the designer to use David Walsh’s sales page for his muse as inspiration for the site design -  you can find the page on Muselife.com. David is both an excellent website designer and a damn good marketer. He’s already created a successful muse and is now working towards helping others do the same. Check it here – Muselife.com.
2. I made two sales pages to split test – 1 with story-like copy, and 1 that pretty much just listed the benefits of the product. They both converted equally as well.
3. I drove 115 visitors with Google Adsense using Perry Marshall’s product as my guide once again.
4. I made 5 ‘hypothetical’ sales at price point of $19.97

What I’m Going To Do Now

I’m going to go ahead and make the product. I’ll hopefully have a rough draft done by the end of this week. It’s an eBook and I’m going to need to do a lot of research to make it incredible. Then I’ll be traveling around Colombia for 2 weeks, so I’m not sure I’ll have time to do much else besides make revisions.

Once I’m done with creating the product and getting it up on the market, I’ll let you in on EVERYTHING. I want to focus on actually making the product right now and not on making Talk Muse videos about it. But don’t worry, you wont be left in the dark for long.

I’ll also write a post on how I found my webdesigner plus tell you a story of how an elance provider tried to scam me.

And, I’ll answer questions if you’ve got ‘em.

- Derek

It's Not Easy (by: tosaytheleast)

Writing the sales copy is probably the most difficult part of testing your muse. It’s especially difficult if you’re testing the creation of a product that doesn’t exist in the market – i.e. a product about visualization for bodybuilders.

The easiest method for writing up a sales page is to check out your competitors, copy their format, but make it better. Offer:

• A lower price
• A better warranty
• Better bonuses

Then test, test, test, to see what’s working and what’s not.

The best advice I’ve heard is to constantly focus on the benefit of the customer. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer and always ask yourself, “How will this benefit me?”

Free resources for learning how to write good sales copy:

Make Your Words Sell – A terrific free eBook that I reference time and time again.

Copyblogger – It’s a site designed for bloggers who want to write better copy but it still applies in many ways.

Clickbank.com – Cruise around the ‘marketplace’ in Clickbank for an hour and you’ll see dozens of perfect sales page examples. Many of these pages sell like crazy as hard as it is to believe from the looks of them.

A Book You Should Buy

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Even if you don’t care to write your own sales copy, this is a book that you should buy. Robert Cialdini talks about all the tactics marketers use to influence you into a purchase. It’s a great way to safeguard yourself from mindless consumption and it’s also great for insight into the human mind.

Over the next several months I’ll walk you through my experiments with creating a profitable muse that will allow me to do the things I love. No matter what your situation is in life or in your career, you’ll benefit from watching over my shoulder. You’ll see all my mistakes and successes. Most importantly, I hope I’ll inspire you to create your own muse.

I’ll be updating the blog with videos and articles. If you haven’t already read The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, I suggest you do so. It will help tremendously in understanding my mindset. There’s a link to book on Amazon.com on the right hand sidebar of Talkmuse.com.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions, criticize my decisions, and contribute to the discussion. Let’s make this an honest, open, community – not a ‘get rich fast’ scam.

Thanks for watching.

-Derek