Product Creation - Ghetto Testing

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I coined the term "Ghetto Testing" mostly because when I come up with something, and have never heard it referenced anywhere else, I have a need to name it, especially when I may need to reference it to other people who may be working for me, and now, conveniently, you.

Quite simply, Ghetto Testing came to me in the shower one night, I consistently come up with the best ideas in the shower for some reason. I've heard other people say they experience the same genius in shower taking, whatever, I choose to embrace it since showers have been the gateway to a lot of money for me.

Anyway, the idea came after a long couple weeks of trying to figure out how the hell I was going to come up with the $9,000 I needed to produce a certain diet product, then thousands more to market and ship it without putting myself in a large financial risk of losing it all and ending up with a garage full of pills.

As you may have already guessed, from the high price, this was my first product a number of years ago, and being that I didn't have a Dominate IM or any solid course to rely on, I had no idea what the fuck I was doing and basically just took the smaller of 4 quotes I had received from "labs" which I now know we're just middle men raping me on the price.

This is why I talk about things like doing weeks of research and calls before settling on a lab or any provider of anything for that matter. I speak from the only thing that matters in business, real experience, and had I made a couple dozen more calls, I probably could have got that same product made for $2000.

But at the time, I didn't know any better, so I was thinking it was going to cost me at least $20,000 to get this whole thing setup and though I was actually very fortunate to have that kind of money at the time from CPA and affiliate income, I was extremely hesitant to just blow a wad of cash on something I knew very little about at that point.

Then, one night, it hit me:

Who says I need to actually HAVE a product in order to test if it's going to sell?

What's to stop me from putting up a website, getting my graphics guy to do a nice looking product image and rolling out advertising to see how it would do?

The answers:

NO ONE, and NOTHING

And so the birth of Ghetto Testing. That simple idea could have easily saved me $18,000.

I rolled out the site, ran traffic, did direct mail campaigns and got to sit at the helm and watch the stats roll in.

With no real financial pressure on me to move product quickly and recoup costs, I was able to optimize the website sales page and creatives to an optimal level before ever writing the check to go into production.

If it bombed, nothing lost but a few grand worst case, in fact probably less than that.

As I had half expected and definitely hoped, the product (which didn't even exist yet) did pretty good from almost day 1, and I was able to play with the design over three weeks with my developers to find the best converting sales page design.

That little idea had a second astronomical benefit which I now use on virtually every product I create today:

Scarcity.

Now scarcity is not new by any means, it's basically marketing 101 stuff that's been around forever, however there's a lot of different ways to use scarcity, some good, some bad, some great.

I ended up stumbling on to one of the greats by pure accident.

Obviously I didn't actually HAVE a product in the beginning, but I was still running traffic, lots of it actually, and more importantly trying to get it to convert at a high level.

So basically I had dozens of orders rolling in for a product that didn't even exist yet.

Well I couldn't just take their money, they would have charged back and killed my merchant account if the product didn't come fast enough.

So I instructed my order takers to simply turn the customers away and say we were sold out, this was simply a test.

Now I'd love to be a marketing hero and say I had a whole system in place and did it all on purpose, but the truth is I was so wrapped up in doing this ghetto test thing I hadn't even considered the customers that we're coming in as a financial factor, I just wanted to see if I could get people to buy, I'd worry about making money when I actually had the product ready.

So about 3 days in I get a call that basically changed the way I market my stuff forever.

One of the girls taking orders for me, or I should say refusing orders had called to ask me if we had a waiting list.

Being drunk at the time (true story) I said, "don't you think I would have mentioned having a waiting list? no we don't have one"

She then said something roughly to the effect (I was drunk so it's probably not exact) "Ok well a lot of people are asking for one or if they can place an advance order, we'll just keep saying no".

In less than a month I had come up with ghetto testing that saved me thousands and thousands of dollars and a lot of time and risk AND in the process of that, I had now found a way to basically triple my conversions forever:

The fake sell out.

I had a fake product generating sales, which by not existing was billed as "sold out" to callers looking for more info or to place a trial order, and those callers, simply for the fact that they couldn't have it, instantly wanted that product like we were selling drinks from the fountain of youth.

From there I optimized the phone pitch to have them explain that we were happy to answer any questions they might have but were unfortunately sold out due to excessive demand of new customers coming in as well as additional orders from previous customers which had overwhelmed our production and we were very sorry but could put them on the waiting list to be contacted in a few weeks when a new shipment comes in.

Most customers jumped right on the waiting list, they naturally wanted to know what all the "hype" was about.

Curiosity is the poison of rational thought.

Even the most skeptical of buyer will often fold instantly when the tables have turned and they are no longer being sold to, but instead trying to get you to sell to them.

As if it couldn't have gotten any better for me at that point knowing that these people were ready and willing to buy as soon as the product was available.....

It actually did.

When I got into direct mail I read every book I could find on the subject, same with product creation. Most of it sucked, much of it cost me unnecessary money, but bits here and there were very helpful which made up for the garbage, and most of the time, good ideas come not from the actual content itself, but your own adaptation of it.

Multiple authors I had read talked about selling multi packs aka multiple packs of the product for a perceived discount off the retail price of single.

Some of these guys made it obvious they had never actually marketed a real product, suggesting you try and "upsell" a multi pack on the first call in. Good luck trying to sell 4 of something when the customer hasn't even seen if the thing actually works.

Other books were more on point, saying the upsell wasn't really a great option since only a small percentage will take advantage, which is true, but multi packs were always in the back of my mind even though I knew I wanted to focus on auto ship of singles each month instead.

Now that I had pretty much by accident built a list of daily customers who were falling all over themselves to try my non-existent product that was so "in demand", I decided to try a quick experiment since it was going to be a few more weeks until the actual product was ready to be shipped out.

I told the girls that after they had gotten the customers information for the waiting list, to pretend to suddenly realize that we did actually have a small amount of two packs in our warehouse if they were interested in taking one of the few remaining of those since it might be up to 6 weeks until we were able to get their first single trial bottle to them.

Now being the skeptic that I am, I sort of expected a lot of people to see the bait and switch, but they didn't. A surprising amount of people ordered the two packs on the spot which were about $58 at the time.

Now keep in mind that this was my first product in this field, and I had no idea how many re-bills I'd be able to get off the trial orders. At the time I was actually losing money on every trial, I believe a loss of like $2.80 because I was overpaying for the product and undercharging for the shipping.

You make a lot of mistakes when you're flying blind in a new industry.

For me, this was fantastic, enough people were letting their curiosity poison them and ordering the two packs which covered all my costs up to that point including the order I just placed, plus leave me with a hefty profit.

Later I split tested re-bills on straight trials and re-bills on people that took the two pack and the trials actually came out to more revenue lifetime per customer for that product, but it's still a viable strategy as what I like to call "bail outs" which we'll talk about shortly, basically they are creative ways to ensure you never lose money on a product you create even if it won't sell the way you want it to.

I've used Ghetto Testing at least 70-80 times over the last few years, it can be applied to ebooks, home business sites, physical products, services and anything you can think of.

9 times out of 10 all of your money and effort goes into the actual product, whether it be creating it yourself, or having it created with no guarantees of success.

So my question to you here today is, Why risk it when you don't have to?

Gun to my head, guy holding it asking me to say without hesitation the top 10 best strategies I could give someone hoping to make a fortune in the product creation business, this one easily makes the top 3.