I’ve been running myself silly lately creating sales letters for transient products.  Adding marketing materials is almost always more work than creating the product itself.

Here’s the items that must be dealt with between finishing the product and making the first sale:

1. Write a sales letter
2. Add conversion tracking to the sales letter
3. Add a working payment button
4. Add a mailing list to your autoresponder to keep track of buyers
5. Add a follow-up message for purchasers
6. Add an opt-in page to capture the info of the buyers
7. Add a download page to get the product
8. Add tutorials / instructions on the use of the product
9. Send emails about the product to past customers
10. Post about the product in related forums.

Some product warrant all this work — specifically if a lot of sales are expected and you want to optimize your conversion rate.  But if the product will likely get less than 50 or so sales and will only be sold for a limited time, there’s not much need to write a full sales page complete with conversion optimization.

(By conversion optimization, I mean specifically multivariate testing.)

I released such a product today… resell rights to my Find-Blogs script.  I didn’t expect too many sales, but nonetheless spent about 5 hours going through steps 1-10 above.   I am trying to steamline my business — not add more work.  So this was definitely not ideal.

I’ve decided to make more use of this blog for launching special offers  and consolidating my online business(es).  Very soon, I’d like to set it up so that when I don’t even use my autoresponder directly… I’ll just post new messages to this blog and have all my subscribers (7,000 or so currently) from various email lists all receive the message automatically.

That will take some work, since only 5 or so people are currently on the blog list :).