Since the time I announced that I was going to go forward with making the ebook, it has sold an additional 10 copies! Even though the Adwords campaign was paused, people still found their way to the sales page through some EzineArticles I wrote.

I thought about the book a lot, but the actual writing of it wasn’t extremely time consuming. I drew information from books I’ve read, new books I found at Barnes N’ Noble & Borders, and of course from a lot of personal experience.

I’m happy with the final product and I think James Bond fans will really dig it.

Stay tuned. Thanks for your patience.

In the resource box, I write something like this: “To download a free report please click here.”

They are taken to my sales page and hopefully enter in their email address to get the report. The free report is just something simple I whipped together on one subject related to my product. It took me 20 minutes to write.

In the newsletter, I give away useful information then make sure to link back to the sales page telling them to buy the product for more indepth info.

I’m slowly building a list so once the product is completed I’ll have many more people to sell it to.

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

We really should wait until we’ve had 200+ visitors to make any kind of conclusions but I’m just going with a gut feeling here. The product isn’t as defined as I want it to be. And like I said, this would be better as a back-end product to sell. But who knows, maybe something will happen with this in the future.

This is the beauty of testing the muse – if something isn’t working we can move on quickly and inexpensively. I’ve got a few other projects in the works that I’m really excited about testing. We’ll just keep doing this until something sticks.

+++++

Comments, questions, anything? Post ‘em up. Let’s get some discussion going.

We’re doing for this for two reasons:

• If someone puts in their email address we’ll count it as a definite sale.
• If we do go forward with the project we have a way to contact them in the future.  (I’m also offering early subscribers a half-off discount so they can’t get too mad)

I’m still trying to gather data on the website traffic so I’d rather not have you guys click on the buy button at MuscleMeditate.com right now. I set up some example pages that you can look at here:

• The thank you page where they must put in their email address – http://talkmuse.com/mmsqueeze
• The ‘order’ page where it tells them it’s not available right now – http://talkmuse.com/mmsqueeze/order.html

If you so desire, put in your real email address on the thank you page and you’ll be added to the Talk Muse list. I’ll be sending out helpful tips and any other information I feel is worthy in the future.

Resources:

Aweber

The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords

Google Adwords is going to the primary way that I drive traffic to my test sites. It’s fast and ‘easy’ if you know what you’re doing. But of course, that’s the hard part.

I set up a campaign with Google Adwords for MuscleMeditate.com, got 30 clicks, and spent $5.89 before I realized I wasn’t going about it right. The keywords I was targeting weren’t right so clicks I got weren’t targeted correctly.

So, I looked around and found the best Adwords book on the market – The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords by Perry Marshall. From what I’ve read it really is the definitive guide.

I’ve been pouring over the book in the last few days and I’ll soon be setting up another campaign using all the strategies I’ve learned. As of now, I’m considering this required reading for anyone who’s trying to start their muse.

Marshall goes in depth on:

• How to bid correctly on keywords
• How to split test your ads
• What keywords to target for your ads
• How to test your sales page and opt-in page
• How to test product titles
• How to make your clicks worth more
• and on and on…

Every question I’ve had about Google Adwords has been answered here. The real ’secret’ to Google Adwords is testing and more testing.

I’ll run you through a Google Adwords campaign very soon and show you what I’ve learned with Marshall’s book.

For now, your homework is to go sign up for this 5 day free E-course on Google Adwords to familiarize yourself with Adwords a little bit.

What Is An Ezine Article?

EzineArticles.com is a website where you can submit articles you’ve written. Your article can be related to pretty much any topic you want. If you can write in complete sentences, and use the basic Google search function, then you’re overly qualified to write an Ezine Article.

The articles are usually short 250-350 word snippets on a given subject. The blog entries on this site are articles. And news story you read on CNN.com or elsewhere are articles.

An article is written the same way you’d write a paper in high school or college. But the good part is you don’t have to do nearly as much research (5-10 minutes at most) and you usually don’t have to form any sort of opinion (no freaking thesis statments!)

How To Write Articles

Go to Ezinearticles.com and peruse the articles there. There are hundreds of thousands of articles in their database that you can look at for examples. And, you can even use a lot of the articles for your own research (i.e. rewrite them to be better).

This is the absolute best article I’ve read on writing articles:

Steven Wagenheim’s Post On The Warrior Forum – A Deep Look Into Article Writing

Keywords

Most of the time, you’ll want to write the article around a ‘keyword’. A ‘keyword’ is simply a search term that a lot of people plug into Google to try to find information or a product.

For example: if you type, “how to make money while traveling” into Google’s search box, that phrase is the keyword.

(Author Note: I’m going to be talking about the importance of keywords a lot more very soon)

You want to put the keyword in the title of the article, in the first paragraph, somewhere within the body, and once in the final paragraph. EASY.

Titles

Titles are the most important part of an article – seriously. If you can’t spark attention in the title and get people to click on it, there’s not point in writing the rest.

Go to Copyblogger.com for “10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas.” Make sure you add the keyword into the title by manipulating these 10 formulas.

Resource Box

The resource box of your article is arguably just as important as the headline because it contains a link to your website. You can link to your website twice in the resource box, so make sure you take advantage of that.

Convince the reader why they should click on the link. Have a strong call to action.

My Articles?

Once my articles have been published to Ezine I’ll send you a link so you can check them out. I wrote 7 articles in about an hour and submitted them to EzineArticles.com. I can’t stress enough how easy this really is and I should get some good traffic from the articles.

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.

When you sign up your website for Google analytics, you get a script to paste at the end of your html website code. Once installed, analytics gives you all kinds of useful information: how many visitors, page views, if the visitor clicked away immediately, what country the visitor is from, how they got to your site, and the list goes on.

It’s completely FREE. Once I’ve driven sufficient traffic to MuscleMeditate.com, I’ll be analyzing my results with Google Analytics.

Split Testing

Do not overlook split testing! It’s not enough to just track our visitors. We also need to know if certain things about our website are sparking visitors interest or pushing them away.

To split test different page designs, sales copy, and prices, I’m using another free service by Google called Website Optimizer. Website Optimizer allows me to see which pages are converting best = the most visitors clicking the buy button. 

Right now I’m cycling visitors between two different headlines to see which one is most effective. Soon, I’ll be adjusting the price to see if any changes occur. This essentially could be an endless cycle until I find the perfect combination of words, price, and design for my muse.

Resources

Track

Google Analytics

Split-Test

Google Website Optimizer

You can see the sales letter here: MuscleMeditate.com

Resources for creating your sales letter

Free

• KompoZer – Basic and simple. Can be a hassle sometimes, but the price is right and it gets the job done.

Paid Resources

• Site Sell – I’ve heard great things and I may end up using them in the future.
• Dreamweaver - Like KompoZer but 10 times better I’ve heard. Pretty expensive though. Made by Adobe.
• Elance.com – Hire an outsourcer to do it. This is what I’ll be doing to design the final site (if the muse test goes well).

Creating Logos & Graphics

Free

• Gimp – Gimp is awesome. I use it exclusively. It’s very similar to Photoshop.

Paid

• Adobe Photoshop – The standard in graphic design.

Open Source / Free Pictures

• Flickr Creative Commons – A lot of high quality pictures that you can use for free.

Using Gimp and KompoZer you can test your muse’s sales letter for free. But I’ll warn you, these programs aren’t perfect.