Working on own Fitness / Weight loss offer (8)
Hey stackers,
So my partner and I have been (re)working on our own offer for the last few weeks.
We both have made products in the past so product creation doesn't feel like a problem to us. We also had worked on this project last year already (then got sidetracked), so all the content was nearly finished and it was silly to not capitalize on it. My partner is a fitness and nutrition expert so the content is good + fairly unique.
Mostly we are now working on the marketing and traffic side. So far we've:
-Produced a 45 days autoresponder
-nearly finished an opt-in video and several videos for later on during the sequence
-updated the sales page and soon converting it into a video sales page
Doing research on Clickbank, we noticed that:
1. top fitness products focus on weight loss rather than exercising / muscle mas
=> so we changed our message to be more weight-loss focused. We'll target middle aged men first as these seem to convert best.
2. top products* send traffic directly to a video sales later not a squeeze page
=> so we are going to split-test both
3. tops products do not sell rebills but an ebook, usually with a rebill on the back end
=> initially our offer was a rebill membership, but we'll split test both
=> our rebill will happen through clickbank. This is already set up and working. We've run a small test months ago and converted a small number, many stayed on for a few months. Not sure what to expect though from clickbank when driving more traffic and potentially getting more chargebacks etc. Thoughts?
4. the economics in the fitness/weight loss niche are pretty tough. Our benchmarking research (from top offers that are well optimized) shows that cold traffic converts at 0.3 to 1%, usually somewhere on the low end. This means 4-5 sales for 1000 clicks (on direct sales page, no squeeze).
=> The back end better be good...seems it's all about the CLV.
=> This also means testing will be relatively expensive as you need to gather thousands of clicks before getting stats that mean anything
=> This is why going the opt-in route is tempting because you can reach them multiple times, however, again, most top products do not do this and send traffic directly to vsl...(we aren't quite sure why, see prior discussion in this thread..)
We are getting there but we've invested months into this. Doing your own product is a lot of work without quick results, and demotivation or analysis/paralysis can be tough to deal with, as there are so many pieces to consider. Not for the faint of heart.
Re: mindset, it's funny that we suffered from the "grass is greener" syndrome on both sides. When we were doing AM full time, we felt like payouts were too low and we should do our own thing, yet after weeks of working on our own thing, we sometimes feel so frustrated that we discuss going back to AM - true story bro 
We're knee-deep into this and probably starting to get blind spots, so we need advice on where we could go wrong. Any feedback is welcome. I'll update as we go.
*(By top products I mean: Diet Solution, Fat Burning Furnace, Muscle Maximizer, Truth About Abs, Six Pack Shortcuts, 31DaysFatLoss, and the like)
We are planning to drive traffic ourselves first, if only to optimize the offer, we wouldn't want affiliates to beta test it.
Later we'll open it to affiliates and see if we can get interest, but there are thousands of offers out there already who can't get affiliates, so I'm not holding my breath. The idea is to push our own traffic.
For traffic sources we are thinking:
-Facebook - approval may be tough, but we want to apply for a "brand account" as advised by polarbacon a while back. Not sure if this still works. Anyone knows?
-Google search - using some of shermanchoo's advice to not get banned, should work since the offer is legit and not shaddy, but we'll have to be careful with claims in the funnel.
-Content network
-POF
...mostly because these are the sources we are familiar with.
If you think other traffic sources are better for this niche, please advise, I'm all ears 
Any idea why there is a difference between some top offers (truth about abs) splitting their funnel between female and males, while other top offers keep a sales letter selling to both at the same time?
Definitely worth a try! Think about it, major brands have lines for men versus women. I don't have a problem using my wife's body wash/soap if I run out, but I'm not gonna go to the store and buy it. It's a way to segment an otherwise large demographic and sell more specifically to them!
Yeah, it definitely makes sense at face value. Yet a lot of top offers don't do it. I wonder why.
To update the above, I found an old (2009) talk from the owner of Truth About Abs where he says splitting his copy in a special page for men and another for women increased conversion by 78%.
Starting to do some traffic test.
Do you think POF is a good traffic source for such an offer? I've never tried weight loss on POF.
subscribed'
I am setting up my own product as well, in a different niche, hoping to learn alot from the experience.
I also wonder why the top offers dont send all the traffic through backend email lists?
I guess well find out via testing...
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