How I Made Money By Accident!
July 16, 2008 · Print This Article
I wasn’t sure I should share this with you as it makes me look rather silly, but I thought you might find it amusing, if not a reason to get started building your mailing list today.
Sales Confusion
I checked my email on Monday night and saw that I had a sale for a product I hadn’t yet promoted. I sat scratching my head wondering where the sale had come from. Just then, another payment notification - another sale and then another!
Don’t get me wrong I was pleased but I was a little confused because I like to keep track of these things and I couldn’t remember promoting this particular product.
What am I selling?
The product in question was Terry Dean’s Foolproof Method of Choosing Slam Dunk Markets for Beginners which I recently bought with the intention of promoting at some stage since it’s a great value packed product.
This product makes use of the $7 script and during the sales process there is an option to send a recommendation message to a bunch of people but I’m sure I didn’t fill that out. In fact, I know I didn’t.
Moment of Clarity
It slowly began to dawn on me. Being a subscriber of this blog you know that I don’t send many promotions to this list. In fact, I hadn’t sent any until a couple of nights ago.
There are no follow up messages on this list and no promotions, which some might think is crazy. Anyway, on Monday evening I decided that I should test an email series to go along with my blog broadcast messages.
I grabbed a sample email from my desktop and pasted it into AWeber to make sure the formatting was correct. I sent the message to myself to test. Everything was fine, but before I had the chance to change the message I was interrupted in the middle of the process and I hit save.
As you know when you add a follow up message to your list it’s not only your new subscribers that receive this message. Depending on where your subscribers are in your follow up sequence previous subscribers will also receive your message.
As I had no follow up messages at all on this particular list my new message was sent to everyone.
Startling Results
I have a small but loyal following here at JohnSzram.com but I was taken aback by the results. A staggering 13.3% of people on my list bought this product from me which as you can imagine was a nice surprise.
That’s quite a startling percentage when you consider I never even edited the body of the email. I just changed the links, put my name at the end and hit save (send). It was simply Terry’s default message with my links in it, no other changes.
For those of you that bought the product from me thank you, you simply have it in your hands sooner than I thought you might which is great since you can start using the product and making your money back immediately.
For those that don’t yet have it, you might want to try promoting it yourself, you can pick up a copy below for only $10. I made my money back in no time and much sooner than I had planned too!
>> Choose Your Market <<
Let me know how you get on.
John,
It’s those kind of things that everyone likes to see, not the ‘accident’ but payments rolling in. I can see how you were puzzled and I would be too!
I can just see it, a report…
“How An Accident Netted Me $1,285!”
…OK maybe not that much, but the thought sounds nice!
Anyway, see you around!
Thanks
Mark
Good job John, even if you didn’t mean to do it! That’s pretty cool. Good incentive to keep plugging along!
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. I didn’t have a second thought about it. I knew that if you approved it that it was good enough for me.
Keep up the good work.
Carol
Eighteenth Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life…
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[...] Szram from John Szram.com talks about “how I made money by accident. [...]
Good post John!
Nothing beats that feeling when you have a few unexpected sales does it?
Great work!
Lee McIntyre
Thank you for your kind comments everyone!
And don’t worry, I won’t be bombarding you with more and more offers after this recent success!
I might add some nice content filled follow ups for you though!
John Szram
a make money blogging carnival - July 18, 2008…
International Marketer Review Blog Carnival #9…
John Szram presents How I Made Money By Accident! posted at Internet Business Blog By John Szram.
This post has been included in the 69th Carnival of Money Stories, going live at Almost Frugal on July 22, 2008.
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