I was asked to do a review of the MindValley Labs Guide to Ecommerce Success which I just completed tonight. I was very impressed with the course and as there’s a lot to write about I’ll break this review up to a couple of posts - this is the first part of my review of The MindValley Way to Ecommerce Success.
The eBook starts with an introduction on what the book will cover which attempts to be a guide to conceive, price and market a product or service online. The Authors, Michael P. Reining, Vishen M. Lakhiani, Anita Patwardhan and Anne Dubelaar, who was the person who contacted me about writing this review.
There’s also several other writers that contributed research into Analytics and Technology including Ng Khai Lee, Adelle Magsombol, Haresh Tilani, Wan-Leong Jiangti, Dani Kahlil and Hannu Nikupeteri. There’s actually a lot of expertise in this group of writers that impresses me – the more I read, the more I like what I see.
MindValley wrote 40 tactics on how to boost traffic and the conversion rate of any web business.; the complete course is selling it at $297 US on www.MindValleyLabs.com and contains 40 tactics to boost traffic and the conversion rate of any web business.
The 40 tips divided into 8 sections - Creating Products that Sell Online, Setting Up Your Site for Success, Creating a Bond with Email Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising Secrets, Turning Browsers into Buyers, Closing the Sale and Profiting from Untapped Channels
Section 1 shows how to determine what to sell online it shows you how to find your Niche and define what the product is going to be by using a 8 point checklist (because the authors feel you need to find a Niche to succeed). Once you find one Niche you can expand to other related Niches. To do research the authors suggest Overture’s Keyword Selector tool – which I feel is highly inaccurate – but it has a low barrier of entry (it’s free – but then, so are a lot of better keyword research tools); but they put through an interesting notion – multiply the number of Overture / Yahoo searches by 5 as Yahoo only dominates 20% of the Searches in the US; that is different than the 2.2 Multiplier that Bill Hunt and Mike Moran put forth as the multiplier in their book on Search Marketing.
Most of the time, what your going to end up selling is Information (which can be downloaded) or a product that can be Drop Shipped (and they cover the details of how to do that). The authors suggest you make products that cost over 97.00 and find affiliates, if you can, because anything under 97.00 is probably not going to be profitable; honestly, I don’t know if that’s true or not since I have bought eBooks for far less, and if enough of them sell, it’s very profitable for the author and those affiliates that drive a lot of sales. The higher prices for the product are needed, however, to drive Affiliate interest (if it’s priced too low affiliates won’t be as interested in promoting it).
I found the business model approach to selling a product online, while somewhat familiar, intriguing because the way you market something has as much to do with how successful your online business will be as what the product or service is – maybe it’s even more important. Also, it helps to be passionate about the idea, product, and service to begin with – because you can’t sell something your not passionate about.
If your developing a product that is price sensitive you may get more profit from lowing the price and increasing the volume of sales.
A simple methodology to determine the right price range is offered which I think could be useful in the SEO work I do with clients – because SEO and Metrics work is often about more than traffic, it’s about the entire process from finding your site in search to the sale, and measuring all of it. Part of generating demand is getting the price right – and the authors give you an easy path to that. There’s excellent advice for small businesses in pricing because your options are different than larger companies with deeper pockets – that needs to be a consideration in how you price and market the product; shipping costs are an example – again some excellent points I will pass on in my evaluations of other sites.
Advice is given in how to offer samples and giveaways to increase your products value and sales. One fear that many business have it that by offering free samples they may cannibalize their paid sales; that’s a valid point but often by giving away a free sample (or mini-offering) you can up sell rest of the product. Advice is given on how to give away parts of your product to increase desire for it.
Section 2 – shows you how to design your site on a programming and copy level. A checklist to decide what to write about is: What is the Problem? Why Hasn’t the Problem Been Solved Yet? What is Possible? How Does Your Product/Service Make This Possible? What Should You Do Now? Tips on how to improve your conversion rate are also given in this section as well as ways to test your conversion rate.
Search Engine Optimization tips are offered, and being as this is one of my specialties I can tell you how good the book is for SEO tips – they’re pretty good as far as they go and cover all the basics. One of the truisms is to avoid Flash if you want your site do well in Natural Search Results. That’s somewhat simplistic as many sites want to rev up the Rich Media and you need to come up with a strategy that will succeed for Search despite a site’s usage of Flash – this is not covered in the course. The course rightly points out that SEO is not something that happens overnight – it’s a slow, steady process that takes a bit of time.
Section 3 covers things like designing the signup forms – and is invaluable! I found this a very compelling reason to buy the course just for this section – because getting the Signup form right is essential in being successful online. There’s excellent information about how to set up email marketing and newsletters that I find is worth the price of the course – just for this section.
I’ll cover sections 4 -6 in the following post.
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