Video Transcript
David: Yeah, that is pretty cool. And there was another point I was gonna make. I forget what it was… It’s gone!
Alex: Something about raising your prices…
David: It was connected to raising prices, yeah. It was connected. So you don’t wait for perfection.
Alex: Right.
David: Raise your prices when you’re adding value, your value’s going up. Yeah, yeah, it’s about, that’s right, it’s about a lack of confidence that we all have in the beginning. So you feel… But the market will value you on how you value yourself. So actually, a posture of value, of something to offer, will quite often bring about an increase in sales, not a decrease, as you said.
Alex: It’s funny because I had a different supplement that I had on Amazon for a while, and I wasn’t selling at all. And then I talked to a friend of mine who’s not into online marketing, but his advice was, “Raise your price, make it more expensive than anything else.” And I was thinking, even with having had this experience, I was still hesitant as… I said, well, you know, Amazon customers are not really known for wanting to pay higher prices. They weren’t gonna be, they’re known for lower prices. And he said, “Yeah, but you know what? There’s gonna be that sub-section of people like me who think, I don’t care if I’ve got ten different options, I want the highest price because I automatically think that’s the best.”
David: That’s an important point, actually, because you’re calling out to your market.
Alex: Exactly.
David: “The people that you want to, the type of person you want to sell to. So you kind of imagine that and go from there…
Alex: The ideal customer.
David: The ideal customer, instead of the cheapskate customer you’re trying to pull it with a $3 product, then wonder why they don’t follow up, yeah.
Alex: Yeah, and then you have to spend 20 hours email supporting them because they know so.
David: And then they’ll ask for a refund!
Alex: And then they’ll ask for a refund.
David: Yeah, there’s another point, which was that – and this comes, this feeds in from the point about knowing who your customer is, which is also the niche market idea. So, your product is an incredible niche market. I mean, health, the health industry is a kind of niche, but it’s a massive niche.
Alex: Yes.
David: In there you’ve got runners – what would it be, that’s for runners is it? What kind of people have the problem?
Alex: well, pretty much anybody. I mean, technically it’s health and fitness niche, but like you say, you know, I mean that encompasses a huge… you know you got runners, weightlifters, yoga people, you know, the vegans are in the, you know, they’re in health. So you’ve really got a huge, you know, spectrum of people that you’re talking about.
In my case with the tendon issue, the tendon book, lots and lots of people have tendon issues. I’ve gotten… my background is in sort of fitness, weightlifting, with an eye towards fitness, but you know, runners get tendon issues. I’ve had sixty-year-old women who are knitting and they have bought my book. And it’s interesting to educate somebody like that because they do not know the very, you know, the function of the various muscles, which is my background. That’s where I come from. And so, you know, to educate a 60 or 65-year-old, you know, grandmother who’s sitting their knitting and she doesn’t understand why her arm hurts. And its, you know, every time you turn your arm, your bicep contracts a little bit. And she goes, “Oh, I thought it was just this way.” And well, no actually, there’s supination and pronation and all this other technical stuff that I won’t bore people with. But it’s, it’s good to be able to, you know, just educate people.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Alex: And it makes you feel good.
David: So the niche is not so much the type of person, because it could be anybody.
Alex: It could be anybody.
David: It’s a specific bodily problem.
Alex: Right, right.
David: So you niche right down, you focus down on a part of the body, and a particular problem.
Alex: Exactly. It’s like if there were a doctor’s office on the corner, in some city, and he said, “We only do tendons.”
David: Right.
Alex: That would be my office.
David: Right, yeah.
Alex: Yeah. And just to be clear, I’m not a doctor, so pease, don’t anybody sue me. Yeah, go and see your doctor, get a professional medical checkup. If you can’t help you, buy my book.
David: Yeah. So from a small… It’s a very narrow niche market, isn’t it.
Alex: Very, very specific
David: But from that, you can make at least a part-time income, a thousand a month.
Alex: Sure, sure.
David: And how would you… I mean, this, our report covers from zero to a thousand. But once you’ve got to a thousand, what happens then, what do you do then?
Alex: Well, you can, at that point I think you’ve got all the basic parts in place and it’s a matter of scale now. One thing that I would do that I’m not an expert in by any means, would be to investigate how to get more traffic. And that can come from, you know you can make alliances with website owners, you can pay for traffic, you can do all kinds of stuff to get that sort of thing, but once you’ve got a thousand a month it really becomes a matter at that point of putting in more time, I think.
I was doing a thousand a month and I was writing one blog post a month to support that, but that was after I had everything else set up and…
David: That sounds doable.
Alex: Yeah, it’s doable.
David: You write one thousand word…
Alex: It’s like a dollar, that’s a dollar a word.
David: A dollar a word!
Alex: So, it’s a bad gig if you can get it!
I think that there would be another product actually, because what gets you from A to B is not necessarily what gets you from B to C, right. But I do think that with the basic skills that you will have in place after going through this and putting it into action and seeing how it works on your particular product or in your particular area or your particular market, then you’re gonna have a pretty good idea about how to go forward from there.
And one thing that I’d like to emphasize is, like I said, I don’t think that it’s the case that just anybody can make a million dollars a year out of online marketing. I do think anyone can make a good five figure income, talking about US dollars, about a you know 50, 40, 50, 60 thousand dollars a year I think it’s very very doable. Very very doable.
David: And very welcome as well!
Alex: Yeah, and very welcome as well, yeah. So if you want to take it like that and you want to get rid of your day job, you’re working for somebody who you just hate, or you’re you know you’re slaving away you know, I’ve worked construction in my life for example. It’s rough, especially if you start getting older you know you just can’t keep it up after a while. But if you’re in a position where you want to quit your day job and go ahead and do this, once you’re at a thousand a month I think that you’ve got a pretty good base to make that leap. Before then I definitely would not recommend it
David: So one path is to increase the traffic, to get more sales of that product.
Alex: Yeah.
David: And then I guess the second path is to create a new product, or a spinoff product.
Alex: Yeah, you can make a spinoff product, which I think we talked about in here. In my case, I started out with tendons, and I have to get a little technical here, but I had a woman from Texas who wrote in and said that your stuff worked for plantar fasciitis. And tendonitis and fasciitis are a little bit different. Basically the plantar fascia runs down – this is your foot – it runs down the sole of your foot, and runners have a lot of problems with it because just in the repetition of running. And I thought, well you know I actually don’t know, because fascia tendons are a little bit different, but let’s try it. And so I you know I gave her a huge amount of email support and we went back and forth quite a bit, and it turned out that it actually did work for her, so I made a new product which was a second ebook called “Target Plantar Fasciitis.”
David: And the first ebook’s title was?
Alex: “Target Tendonitis,”
David: There we are!
Alex: Thank you. And again, here I am assuming more knowledge than I should. But yeah, so “Target Tendonitis,” and then “Target Plantar Fasciitis,” and from the Plantar Fasciitis book, also, it the turns out the feet and ankles are really really complex. You’ve got a lot of tendons, a lot of stuff going on in there, and so I made a second target tendonitis that deals only with the feet and ankles. So I actually have three ebooks now off of the original one.
David: Right.
Alex: And to make the second one really…