Just completed my first Residual Income Muse

[Peter Bowen]

Greetings,

We'd discussed building your own muse instead of outsourcing to India some time ago.

I built my first muse and talked about it on these forums but it had a fundamental problem - it was a "buy once" muse.

I decided that future muses should have a subscription model to generate ongoing revenue rather than once off sales. (I suppose it's obvious but I'm not always that quick).

The marketing model for this is an inverted pyramid with a number (8 so far but more to come) of landing pages feeding into in industry specific sales page.

The product is versatile enough to be able to be used in a number of different industries but I think that it makes sense to target specific industries with the sales pages rather than just one sales page and let the reader figure out how he's going to use it.

My goals for this muse are fairly modest - 200 subscribers at $49 per month.

Enough said. If you're interested take a look at www.salesrepeater.co.uk/service/salon/index.html

I'd appreciate your comments

Cheers

Pete

[shanerbock]

This is a great idea! I remember one forum poster around here discussing their product to teach debating/persuasion (this could have been on another forum, but it doesn't matter).... I suggested to that person that they develop different sales pages for each market: Debating in General, Debate clubs, Persuasion for Sales, Influencing others as a Manager, etc, etc).

Great job getting this out there!

Suggestion... get out there and write some free reports... put them on an opt in page, giving them away for free when they opt in. Then send them to your sales page...

This way you have a list you can sell to, even if they don't buy your product, at least you could try again with yours, offer good advice, and also sell them other related product.

In short, I am simply suggesting you 2 more things that I can't see you have done:

1. Add value and provide excellent value by starting off with a free report. (10 ways to increase your sales, or something like that)

2. Build your list, even when you don't make a sale on your product.

Anyway... Great job!

[wrkgmom]

This is a great idea. I only have two suggestions. I see that a message is generated once the appointment is booked (in this case for the Salon page), and there are follow up messages after the appointment. However, as a frequent customer of salons and also an email marketer by trade, I would suggest adding in one reminder communication.

For example, I should get an email with the date and time once I book, but with a lot of salons your appointment is booked 6-8 weeks in advance, so a reminder 72 hours prior would be very helpful and truly reduce no shows.

Also, you mention upselling/cross selling products in appointment follow-up emails...kudos! But it would be great if there were links to actually purchase these products online. Perhaps even weave in a commission for yourself if these emails generate sales, etc. Most salons don't have online marketplaces so it might even be a whole other business opportunity. In fact...you've got my mind running now...

Congrats!

[FrozenCanuck]

Peter: I have some questions and comments.

First, the typo (before the x2) here needs to be fixed. "are to be sent before the before the" ... this is located in your first bullet.

Next - you shoudl get a dotcom address also for US clients, small businesses might be afraid of .co.uk as being "too far away" whatever that means. I also think it might make sense to get some sort of US postal address so you can appear to be a US-based business, I just wonder if some folks might not want to buy software or be billed from a place in Ireland. That's just a guess, you'l have to dig a bit to find out.

Question: Can you tell me how much you had to spend to develop the software? how much time did it take? I assume you outsourced the thing right? Or are you a software guy? You've caused me to think that I could do software applications that are customized for my niche markets, even though I know nothing about writing the software, I could hire it out.

[Peter Bowen]

This is a great idea! I remember one forum poster around here discussing their product to teach debating/persuasion (this could have been on another forum, but it doesn't matter).... I suggested to that person that they develop different sales pages for each market: Debating in General, Debate clubs, Persuasion for Sales, Influencing others as a Manager, etc, etc).

Great job getting this out there!

Suggestion... get out there and write some free reports... put them on an opt in page, giving them away for free when they opt in. Then send them to your sales page...

This way you have a list you can sell to, even if they don't buy your product, at least you could try again with yours, offer good advice, and also sell them other related product.

In short, I am simply suggesting you 2 more things that I can't see you have done:

1. Add value and provide excellent value by starting off with a free report. (10 ways to increase your sales, or something like that)

2. Build your list, even when you don't make a sale on your product.

Anyway... Great job!

Thanks - I have actually built some autoresponder marketing in already - It's on the top right page but I'll make the signup a little more obvious.

I'll be putting a whole bunch of affiliate sales stuff into the autoresponder so that those people who don't buy my product can still buy some stuff down the line and earn me some commission.

[Peter Bowen]

This is a great idea. I only have two suggestions. I see that a message is generated once the appointment is booked (in this case for the Salon page), and there are follow up messages after the appointment. However, as a frequent customer of salons and also an email marketer by trade, I would suggest adding in one reminder communication.

For example, I should get an email with the date and time once I book, but with a lot of salons your appointment is booked 6-8 weeks in advance, so a reminder 72 hours prior would be very helpful and truly reduce no shows.

Also, you mention upselling/cross selling products in appointment follow-up emails...kudos! But it would be great if there were links to actually purchase these products online. Perhaps even weave in a commission for yourself if these emails generate sales, etc. Most salons don't have online marketplaces so it might even be a whole other business opportunity. In fact...you've got my mind running now...

Congrats!

Thanks for pointing that out.

I'll make it a little clearer - the message is created on marking the booking complete but is scheduled and sent before the appointment - you get to decide how many days before the appointment it gets sent.

The online sales is a good idea - maybe I'll add something like that if you don't beat me to it :)

[Peter Bowen]

Question: Can you tell me how much you had to spend to develop the software? how much time did it take? I assume you outsourced the thing right? Or are you a software guy? You've caused me to think that I could do software applications that are customized for my niche markets, even though I know nothing about writing the software, I could hire it out.

Thanks for pointing out the typo - I'll get onto that right away.

I developed the software myself. I am not a software guy although I have had some experience writing databases (to make one or two things a bit easier when I had a job about 10 years ago) - but still consider myself on the beginner side of average.

I had previously outsourced software development and found it too painful a process. For me design is iterative which doesn't work well for a contracted model where you have the entire spec upfront. I've spoken elsewhere on this forum about the difficulties I faced using coders.

The package is built in FileMakerPro a cross platform database that I have fallen in love with. The advanced edition allows you to package (and sell) your databases in such a way that the users don't have to have Filemaker to run them.

The software development took about a week but to be fair I built it based on another very similar package ( a retail version of sales repeater) that I had built in about 40 hours.

This time includes a lot of learning time - probably a third to a half of the time was spent trying to figure out things that a more experienced developer would already know.

The software, an email sending plugin, membership of technet and a really nice book ("The Missing Manual") cost me about $1000 which was quickly recouped from the sale of the first product I built (http://www.NoMore247.com) which was a desktop version of the package I outsourced.

I had intended to develop one new product per month but I thought that it might be better to develop one new market per month for this product because it has fairly wide application - pretty much anyone in the service industry.

[mbolton2181]

this is a good idea. Nice work

[webgal]

I like the idea. And I like that your site is clean and uncluttered. But it could use some visual elements. It can be clean and simple but it's almost antiseptic it's so clean. Don't get me wrong. There are more sites with too much. But usually salons would need a bit more visual interest.

Thanks for the database builder info.

[Legend]

Hi Peter,

This is BRILLIANT! I just have one question. Do you have any affiliate type thing for those who want to spread the word. I'm one of those people who knows people who could benefit from things.

This is great! I would love to share it w/ a few salon friends (6 in mind right now). I'm happy to do that w/ no affiliate program, I just wanted to check it and see if you did have anything before I go out and spread the word.

Also, seeing as you've gotten your muse up and running I am wondering if you have found a good VA service in the process? Who do you recommend?

Thanks!

Warmly,
L:D

[Peter Bowen]

Thanks for both of the comments.

Regarding affiliates - I had my own affiliate program for a while - it sucked. I spent ages setting it up and had very few sales through it. Other people have had similar experiences.

I'd really appreciate you referring me to your friends and I'd like to pay you for doing that. I'll probably put it up for sale on clickbank which has it's own well respected affiliate program where they handle all the payments to affiliates etc. I'll let you know when it happens.

I don't have a VA - horrors!

If there is something particularly boring to do I bribe my wife to do it - right now she's typing up 1200 entries from the yellow pages into a mailing list.

There will obviously be stuff that can be VA'd in the future but right now everything is handled by computers and specialist service providers.

Cheers

Pete

[intrepidtraveler]

First, I like the design. There's a nice clean aesthetic in British Isles web design that I find refreshing.

I would suggest creating entirely different sites to appeal to different market segments and including copy (and maybe a graphic element) that immediately identifies the market and lets readers know you understand their problems and feel their pain. (It took me a while to understand that the page was specific to hairdressing salons.)

This product should have international appeal, so be careful that the language and terminology doesn't sound too "local."

Nice work.

[Peter Bowen]

I appreciate all the comment so far.

Thanks - the design took all of 30 seconds to do. It's a rapidweaver template that came with the program - the only thing I did was to increase the spacing above the h2 tags - I think that gives easier understanding of how things fit together.

I've failed if you didn't immediately know I was talking about a hair salon. I got some nice pictures off istockphoto.com which might work to strengthen the impression - I'll get these up in the next couple of days.

The plan is to have several landing pages pointing to an industry specific sales page. The landing pages are each written around one feature of the software and hopefully optimized to increase natural search traffic.

The content for these landing pages is also recycled as ecourse content.

Here is an example of one of the landing pages: http://www.salesrepeater.co.uk/service/salon/ec/ec2.html

You'll notice the gentle enticement at the bottom to visit the sales page.

Internationalizing makes sense - this will be the second part of my plan. I am supplementing my online marketing (PPC and forum work) with offline stuff (magazine advertising, direct postal mail). Right now this is aimed at the local market and so I need to give the site a local flavour (including spelling flavour the UK way).