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How Yanik Silver grosses $200,000/year by breaking all the rules

When it comes to Internet marketing, Yanik Silver says most of the popular advice is dead wrong. He’s discovered a much more profitable way to quickly and inexpensively launch web sites which sell ebooks, audios and other types of information products.

Silver is worth listening to because he now has five profitable sites up and running, including his flagship site www.InstantSalesLetters.com. In the 14 months since the site debuted, Silver has turned a $3,000 investment into a business which now grosses more than $200,000/year and nets over $100,000 -- all while taking less than an hour or two a day to maintain.

The site sells $39 to $55 kits containing how-to reports plus fill-in-the-blank templates for direct mail and other promotional letters. Most of Silver’s customers are small business people who need to prepare advertising materials but can’t afford to hire a professional copywriter.

Here are some details about Silver’s approach.

Tools, not just info. Silver says people will pay more for "tools" -- fill-in-the-blank templates in his case -- than they will for mere "how-to" information. "If I just sold an ebook on how to write a direct mail letter, it wouldn’t sell nearly as well as giving them tools to help actually do it."

60 hours and $3,000. In creating the product, Silver drew on his background as a freelance direct response copywriter and it only took him about 60 hours to create the product. When he started, he knew almost nothing about web design or programming so he farmed out the site design and construction. Total cost was less than $3,000, including a merchant account.

Digital delivery. As soon as the customer buys the product online, Silver’s site takes them a download page so they can get the templates and how-to product immediately in the form of a Adobe Acrobat PDF, MP3 and Excel files. The customer is happy because there’s no delay and Silver is happy because there’s nothing to ship.

Site is 100% focused on making sales. Silver’s site is unusual in both philosophy and execution. First, he designed the site with only one purpose: to sell a single product, his sales letter kit. That’s it. The site’s entire focus is on selling one product, not a bunch of products. As a result, the site is just one long sales letter. There are no links to other sites ("why encourage them to go elsewhere?"). There’s nothing else to do on the site except buy the product or leave.

Sales copy is key. Silvers says the sales copy is the key ingredient in making the site work. Your copy has to be very hard-hitting with compelling headlines, subheads and body copy and as many testimonials as you can get. In fact, Silver regarded the sales copy as so critical that he spent two full days writing and re-writing it.

Pop-ups capture emails for follow-ups. If Silver can’t sell you on the first visit, he at least wants your email address so he can follow-up. Accordingly, when you leave his site without buying, you’ll get a pop-up window which offers you a "free 3-day course in sales letter writing" in exchange for your email address. Then you’ll automatically get a different "lesson" every other day for a week, all of which try to persuade you to buy the Instant Sales Letter kit. Silver uses GetResponse.com to process these follow-up "autoresponder" messages and says they account for a significant portion of his sales – all from people who might never have returned to his site if it weren’t for the pop-up window.

No paid ads. To draw traffic, many site owners buy banner ads on other sites. Silver thinks that’s too risky. You might buy an ad and get nothing from it. To reduce his risk, he’s created an affiliate program where sites can run ads for his site but he won’t pay them a penny until they generate sales. When they do, he’ll send them a check for 45% of purchase. This performance-based approach accounts for more than half his sales each month – with no upfront cost or risk. Silver stresses though that before rolling out your affiliate program, be sure your site actually sells. You should be converting at least one percent of visitors to buyers. If not, re-write your sales copy until it does.

Finding affiliates. To launch his program, Silver developed a list of sites he’d found in various search engines by searching for relevant keywords. Then he went to each site to determine if they might be right for his offer. Next he contacted appropriate site owners via email (being sure to personalize the email so they wouldn’t consider it spam). He also registered with several affiliate program directories including AssociatePrograms.com. Often one affiliates will refer another, largely thanks to a 5% override commission. Lastly, many of Silver’s satisfied buyers become affiliates themselves and offer his products to their own customers.

Provide tools for affiliates. Silver provides his affiliates with lots of tools to make it easy to sell his products including pre-written ads, articles and other tools for affiliates (go to www.instantsalesletters.com/affiliate/toolbox.html to see them). Unfortunately only a small minority of affiliates sell much, if anything at all. Of his 2,500+ affiliates, only about 150 get checks each month. Silver uses software from AffiliateZone.com to manage his affiliate program which allow affiliates to log-in anytime to see how many visitors and sales they’ve generated.

Other traffic generating tools. While Silver hasn’t bought ads, he has found it profitable to buy click-throughs from Goto.com, the "pay per click" search engine. He buys clicks for more than 150 keywords including "sales letters" and "business letters." When he first launched the site, he generated traffic by writing a bunch of articles and submitted them to 300-400 ezine editors he compiled from the LifestylesPub.com directory.

Automate and repeat. The beauty of Silver’s model is that once the site is established there’s very little on-going work required to keep it going. Once the InstantSalesLetters site was profitable and on quasi-auto pilot, Silver went on to create several other sites, all of which are profitable. His sites include www.InstantInternetProfits.com (a superb manual for creating profitable sites); www.AutoResponderMagic.com (sample autoresponder messages and www.MorePatients.com (marketing tools for doctors).

Want Silver’s help for your site?

We’ve been so impressed with Silver’s Web success and savvy that that we’ve decided to co-sponsor a six-week program in which he’ll personally tutor 15 people in creating profitable sites based on the model described above. If you’d like to be one of the 15, for free details go to: http://instantinternetprofits.com/bradleyclass/