Review: $7 Secrets

Another review. Maybe I need to set up a formal review blog… anyhow. Today's reviewee is Jonathan Leger's $7 Secrets, a 30-page report costing only $7 that shows you how to make money selling… well, 30-page reports for $7 each. Hmm, I like the Escher-like recursion there.

Now, you might be wondering why I'm reviewing this product here, when it doesn't have any obvious link to AdSense. Well, there is a link, and I'll get to that after the review.

$7 Secrets

The $7 Secrets sales page isn't very long and it didn't take much to convince me to shell out my $7 for the report. After all, what's $7? It's a couple of lattes. A magazine. A movie rental.

And that, my friends, is the premise of this entire system. Convincing someone to spend $97 on an ebook, even if it's 200 pages long, is a lot harder than convincing someone to spend $7 on a 30-page report. I know this firsthand, of course, since I'm flogging a $47 ebook myself (you know, Uncommon AdSense — and it's worth every penny, trust me!) and I can just imagine how much harder my job would be if I had priced it at $77 or even $97.

So after convincing you that $7 reports are easier to sell, Jonathan gives you tips on how to quickly create such a report. He says, and I generally agree, that it should be easy enough to create one if you have expertise in a given niche. And converting the PDF for the special report is dead easy, you can just use (like I do for Uncommon AdSense) OpenOffice and export the document as a PDF or use a free “PDF printer driver” like PrimoPDF to convert a Microsoft Word document into PDF format. The only hard part is creating a cover for the report — Jonathan actually recommends that you hire a graphics artist to do it. That's not a bad idea. You can do it yourself, of course — I've even put up some simple instructions on how to create ebook covers with PaintShop Pro — but chances are good that your covers will look pretty lame if you do it yourself. Listen to the voice of experience!

Now comes the hard part, actually selling and promoting the $7 report. Actually, it's not nearly as hard as you think because $7 Secrets ships with the same web server scripts (written in PHP, so they'll work almost anywhere) that Jonathan uses to sell his own $7 reports via PayPal. And they come complete with instructions. And, even better, they support an affiliate program…

The 100% Commission Affiliate Program

You've probably seen that many low-priced infoproducts get sold these days via a “100% commission” affiliate program. In other words, when you buy the product, the affiliate who referred you to the product site gets 100% of the purchase price. This is the model that $7 Secrets espouses as well, and the scripts they provide support this kind of affiliate selling.

How it works is very simple: when someone clicks the “pay now” button on your site, they get sent to a standard PayPal order form. But the email address the payment gets sent to is the affiliate's email address, not yours. (Obviously, if there's no affiliate then your email address is used and you get the money.) After the customer has made the payment they're redirected back to a download page on your site.

Now, it may seem strange to give the affiliate all the revenue like that, but you can benefit in three ways. The first way is by requiring the purchaser to join your mailing list in order to access the product; this is done quite easily by modifying the download page script. The second way is to embed affiliate links into your report and make money later if they buy a product you recommend. The third way is to present a one-time offer that they have to accept or not before being able to download the purchase.

And once someone buys your infoproduct, they can immediately start turning around and selling it themselves. They don't even have to register with you — the provided scripts make it dead easy, all they do is send traffic to your site with their email address embedded in the link.

On the whole, I've been very happy with $7 Secrets, because the scripts alone worth more than the $7 it cost me to buy the report. I'm skilled enough technically that I'd be able to code something similar myself from scratch, but this saves me a lot of effort. Much the same way that a product like the Landing Page System saves you effort in creating well-targeted landing pages.

Opportunities for AdSense Publishers

But this is an AdSense blog, after all, so how does any of this relate back to AdSense? Well, if you're building quality AdSense sites (like I always recommend) then writing a 30-page special report on your particular niche should be a simple enough matter, especially if you're already writing articles for traffic purposes. A special report is really just an extended article, after all. It can be a condensation or summary of what's on your site. You don't even have to make it a 30-page report. Write a 10- or 20-page report instead and lower the price a bit or throw in a related bonus. (If the writing aspect really bothers you, a good ebook like Turn Words Into Traffic can help you get started.)

Once you've written your report, take advantage of the scenarios shown in $7 Secrets to get more traffic to your site. Sign people up for a mailing list you run that feeds traffic to your site. (The mailing list could just be blog postings you make, sent out via facilities like the Subscribe2 WordPress plugin.) Or link back to your site in the report itself. Be creative!

If you do try this alternate method of monetizing your content, feel free to drop me a note — I'd love to hear how it went…

Coming Soon: Expect a frenzy on the mailing lists next week as the new ebook Day Job Killer (what a name!) launches on Tuesday. DJK is a follow-up to Affiliate “Project X”, which I've reviewed here already. I will be buying this book and reviewing it here, so if it interests you and you want an objective look at it, just wait for my review, I'll try to do it as quickly as possible once I have it… I'm assuming it will be as interesting and controversial as the first book, but I'm only basing that on what I know about APX and AdWords Miracle.

And yes, meanwhile we'll continue the AdSense arbitrage series.

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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