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TLDR; Feedback on my sales page (Plus a brief progress/execution episode)

Conrad B

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Hi Guys,

TLDR
; First-time entrepreneur. It seems taking on a partner is a bad idea, so I’ll be occasionally engaging you guys and seeking your priceless thoughts. For now, I would appreciate your brutal feedback on my sales page here: The Ultimate Guide!


First time I was here, I could hardly imagine myself having anything of value to share with the group. At the time, I was practically a wantrepreneur; the theoretical entrepreneur.

Gladly, a couple of months down the road, I have both some lessons to share and others I seek to learn. Let's get right down to it.

So I have financial burden I need to lift; well something of a debt, and I need to make some decent money. I decided to write an eBook despite the advice I got that eBooks are really not the best content to sell in this day and age. Courses or coaching would have been a better, option, I was told.

In any case, my friend and mentor also advised that if I were to write an eBook, it had better be about how to make money online for begineers, and within a definite time period. In fact, he insisted I titled it, " How to make your first $100 in 10 days or less!" I didn’t. (There's an idea you can steal and execute on!)

First forward, being in the transcription niche, and since experience books are easier to execute on than research books, I chose to write a beginners guide to online transcription, as I 'd searched in vain for such a book back when starting out.

Transcription is this super slowlane thing where you listen to audios and type out what you hear while adding punctuation and formatting to the resulting document called a transcript. Online transcription is when you do this online, for online transcription companies that have an online workhub and a whole load of clients and work.

Transcription (and essay writing) is one of those work-from-home niches for the absolute beginner that needs make legit money online. Here, if you pass the test/interview, you get hired! No need to stand out from the crowd, or to bid, or to be creative, as is the case with traditional freelancing on Upwork or Fiverr.

Beginners always have a challenge starting out, they're not sure how to begin, not sure how and where to practice, not sure which companies hire beginners and which ones don't, not sure which companies hire freelancers from all over the world, that sort of thing. So I chose to provide a sort of blueprint they can follow, hence the writing of the guide.

So I wrote the guide, took me about a month or so. I got a guy in Fiverr to do the cover, he sucked. So I got one of my designer friends to do the cover (although working with friends can be complicated (as you would imagine.) I later asked the Fiverr guy, as a btw, to make quite a bit of revisions and he eventually came through with a half-decent cover, to be fair to him.

I got a someone on Fiverr to proof-edit the manuscript. Got my designer guy to do the WordPress (WP) sales page, although I had to learn WP on the job and pretty much customize the sales page myself for hours on end. I subscribed to SendOwl, as my payment processor (had used their free trial when giving away free copies of my first draft).

Another important bit of advice my friend and mentor had initially given me - and of course, it's the same advice I picked from every single article or free eBook I read on self-publishing - is the crucial technicality of having an audience.

Nuh, I waived this off and thought, “Since I know of a Facebook transcription group of over 65k members, I don’t need an audience. That’s my audience.” Big mistake. If they don’t know and trust you, then they’re not your audience.

As it turned out, I should have been valuable to this group much earlier before I even released my book.

I should have been posting helpful and valuable info, maybe transcription tips on a daily, to sort of build trust and establish myself as an expert in the group so that by the time my guide drops, these guys F*cking know and trust me. Then, these guys get to recommend me to the newbies, these guys get to like my ads when I subtly post them. These guys get to affiliate market my damn book! Smooth sailing!

Anyway, I didn’t think of that. I just thought, as long as the product is good, and the audience is there, just hit them with the ads, and bammm...sales will come in! I was so wrong. If they don’t know and trust you, they’re not your audience.

So anyhow, the thought of getting a partner has been crossing my mind repeatedly and I thought this would be the perfect place to get one.

You tend to get overwhelmed when in your first entrepreneurial endeavor; you've invested quite a bit on writing the book (time), getting a cover ($16 fiver, $13 my designer friend), hosting and domain (about $30), sendowl subscription ($15), internet cocsts, designing ads in canva (time), writing and refining a hell lot of copy (time), running campaign of giving away a free copy of my first draft on a limited time basis (time), customizing my sales page (time), changing the copy on the book cover, et cetera, et cetera. After all that and two weeks into your launch, the account reads zero – I mean $0 – it starts to take a toll on you. (That existential crisis shit; you know that shitJ)

So I thought, I really need a partner. I mean, two heads are always better. I can't even get someone impartial with whom I can brainstorm the customization of the F*cking sales page!

But then, I found out (when I searched ‘business partner’ in the forum) that getting a business partner wouldn't necessarily be the smartest thing to do. Apparently, they suck, tend to laze around while you do all the work and tend to rip you off in the long run.

Anyhow, since I won't have a business partner, I thought I might maximize the resources here, of you my "tribes-mates" [Seth Godin, Tribes). I would very much appreciate every little bit of wisdom I receive here.

I’m now still customizing my sales page. I’m being valuable to the Facebook group; posting daily transcription tips and all. I answer questions on Quora relating to my niche, while being very helpful to the OP, and only dropping my ad at the very end just in case it might benefit the OP, that sort of thing. (The kind of shit I should have been doing waaay before I even wrote the damn book! This whole thing has been such a learning process.)

Anyhow amigos, thanks for taking the time to read through. At this stage, I would like some brutal feedback on my sales page. It seems I’m starting to get some traffic to it after all!

Here's the guy right here: The Ultimate Guide!

Thanks.

EDIT: Some guys had no clue about what transcription is, so that explains why I added a couple of paragraphs talking a bit about it.
 
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Late Bloomer

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There's not a single word in your post about who you serve, and what needs and wants they have that you are well equipped to fulfill.
 

MisterBHZ

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I don’t know what the hell online transcription is.

And you definitely didn’t explain it on that page.

You gotta add a video of YOU going into detail about the “who, what, when, where & why” of your product.

I’m viewing your page on my iPhone and the text is all screwed up. Fix that.

Add some pics of you or something related to your product that break up the text.
 

motivatedesign

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In all honesty, I think if you want to gather more trust, you need to remove the testimony from the guy from Nigeria. Unfortunately (as I'm sure you know), the trust declines. I really encourage you to give away a few copies of your eBook with the cavet that you can use a persons review on your page.
 
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Conrad B

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In all honesty, I think if you want to gather more trust, you need to remove the testimony from the guy from Nigeria. Unfortunately (as I'm sure you know), the trust declines. I really encourage you to give away a few copies of your eBook with the cavet that you can use a persons review on your page.
Thanks for that. I'm indeed aware of the Nigerian trust effect, will take off that testimonial.

Interesting fact, when he downloaded a free copy of the guide, my payment processor actually picked that guy's location as South Africa. The whole time we interacted, I thought he was from ZA. How he turned out to be from Nigeria baffled and amused me at the very last second went he sent the testimonial. He must have used a VPN or something!!
 

Conrad B

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I don’t know what the hell online transcription is.

And you definitely didn’t explain it on that page.

You gotta add a video of YOU going into detail about the “who, what, when, where & why” of your product.

I’m viewing your page on my iPhone and the text is all screwed up. Fix that.

Add some pics of you or something related to your product that break up the text.
Thanks a lot for the feedback!

I figured that since most of my traffic is from transcription facebook groups, I didn't need to go into detail about transcription on the sales page, as these guys already know the basics.

I've however updated my OP with a bit of insight into transcription.

Let me work on adding some pics to break up the text, and on the device- responsiveness of the page.
 
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Late Bloomer

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He that blooms late, thanks for pointing out that oversight. I've updated the post accordingly. Hadn't wanted to make it so long.

Excellent rewrite, it's so much clearer and easier to follow now that you explained the whole story. It's like when I saw the ultra extended super deluxe added-scenes premium Director's Favorite version of Lord of the Rings. Man that was a LOOONG show but I was never once confused about the plot! ;-)

I'm doing some online transcription now myself. I hadn't thought about doing it, but a friend of a friend asked if I'd like to give it a shot. I agreed.

I figured out for myself how to set up audio and typing software (all open source) in a split screen configuration that works okay for me, and then how to format the text in LibreOffice to generate a Word document with styles to tag the different speakers. The client didn't ask for that but he was happy to have it.

If I hadn't been able to figure out the technical part of this myself, I'd have done a web search and, I bet, could have quickly found some free blog posts from people who explained their setup.

The work's reasonably interesting for the interviews I'm typing up. But if you type slower than the speakers, it takes a multiple of real time to be sure you caught it all. That makes the effective hourly rate not very good. I'm a fast typist but not as fast as the average business speaker who's really on a roll, so that affects me.

I agree it's a slowlane activity because there's not much unique about a skill a lot of people have, and the only way to scale is to make an agency selling a commodity service. But it can be done from anywhere you can comfortably type, which puts it ahead of a lot of slowlane jobs.

The only other part of it is the basics of finding clients for a commodity service one can do from home, for online clients from anywhere. That's pretty much the same for transcription and for some other services too... basically, how can you do the kind of gigs shown on Fiverr, without needing to use a site like Fiverr to get clients?

Instead of just transcription, I imagine it would be a lot more compelling to have an ebook about how to get clients for ten different types of businesses anyone with basic computer and English skills can do from the coffee shop... and then a couple of pages of specifics about the technical part of each of those jobs.

The Warrior Forum may be able to help you shove this book to some folks who will buy it... but with what you know now, maybe it would be worthwhile to pick a next offer that's more valuable according to MJ's CENTS formula?

I haven't looked yet to see if there's already a thread here about how publishing stacks up by CENTS criteria. I think it would be a good topic.
 

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