Use this real life example of an easy-to-launch, low budget project, you can get off the ground in just a few days.

Creating and launching profitable information products doesn't always have to take time, money, or skills. As this project proves, you can successfully launch a profitable product, while working on a shoe string budget - even if you are playing Robinson Crusoe on a South Pacific Island.

The Details

I was living in New Zealand at the time. Had a small beach house on the Esplanade in the village of Sumner, located in the South Island of New Zealand. It was 1992, long before the internet, and I was a long way from home, practicing being 'semi-retired'.

It didn't take me many days of 'semi-retirement' to realize I wanted to have some kind of business going, something to generate a little pocket money. As a non-resident guest of New Zealand, I wasn't allowed to hold a job or own a business located in New Zealand. And that was OK, because I really didn't know enough about New Zealanders to create and sell a product they wanted.

But I did know a lot about Americans. And I knew that a lot of them had a dream of retiring to New Zealand or Australia (it was a part of the culture of baby-boomers to want to travel to the land of down-under.) The fires of this dream were often stoked by articles appearing in publications like 'International Living', 'Island Properties Report', and 'Islands' magazine (all of which I subscribed to at the time.)

I decided that I wanted to create a product that would appeal to the people who read the three publications mentioned above, and I wanted the product to be something I could get in New Zealand and Australia, but wasn't readily available in the United States.

The Product

While living in New Zealand I often traveled to Australia, and while there I always picked up the latest real estate magazines. I enjoyed looking at all the different properties and businesses being offered (both in New Zealand and Australia), and dreamed of the possibilities (Opal mines in Coober Pedy anyone?)

I felt that other US dreamers might also enjoy these real estate magazines, especially those dreamers that read the Island Properties Report, Internation Living, and Islands Magazine.

As a product, the real estate magazines offered the following advantages:

• They were unique, and not readily available in the US
• They created a strong emotional pull to customers wanting to get closer to their dream
• They had no competition - you couldn't get these from any other source in the US, and no ads for similar products were running in the US.
• They were high quality (often hundreds of pages with color photos)
• It was easy to create a visually interesting 'out of the box' experience.
• They had a low acquisition cost (these products had zero cost to me - they were provided free by the real estate magazines)
• No support or training involved. (People already know how to use a magazine).
• Easy to ship - not fragile, no special wrapping required.
• Easy to reach target audience with low cost ads.

To me this looked like the ultimate product - considering where I was at the time.

I had no illusions of getting rich, but with the US to New Zealand currency conversion rate, for every 100 of these I sold, I'd clear about $5,000 NZ$. And as anyone living in New Zealand will tell you, earning an extra $5,000 NZ$ a month can make life there a lot more interesting.

The Ads

I decided to run ads in three different publications (Island Properties Report, Island Living, and Islands magazine). Because each publication reached a slightly different audience and had substantially different ad rates, I created a different ad for each publication - optimized to give me the best (and largest) ad at the lowest cost in each publication.

In the publications where the ad rates were lower, I ran a larger ad. And in the publications were the ad rates were higher, I ran smaller ads. Two of the actual ads I ran are shown below:

Over the life span of the project, I tested different wording and headlines in the ads, the ads above are what I ended up running most of the time (except with change to ordering information and prices as noted below).

The Results

When running a project like, you want your revenue from sales to be at least three times the cost of running the ads. So if the ads cost $125 a month to run, I'd want at least $375 in sales before I considered the project a success.

My actual results varied from month to month, but here's what I found.

• The ads in Island magazine were expensive (over $1,300 for three months), and while they did pull enough orders to cover expenses, the results were not good enough for me to continue running ads in that particular publication.

• The ads in the two newsletters (International Living and Island Living) did much better. Ad costs were running less than $125 a month per issue in these newsletter, and almost always pulled 40-50 orders per ad.

  While 50 orders per month per ad may not sound like much, considering that ads costing $125 each were generating almost $2,000 in revenue each - this was a real winner by any definition.

Having proven the ads were profitable the two newsletters, I knew that to increase monthly revenue I only needed to find newsletters that reached the same target audience, and run ads in those. If I could just find three other newsletters which could pull 40 additional orders per month per ad, I could get the monthly revenue up to $10,000 a month.

Fine Tuning the project

After the first set of ads ran, I decided that including an Arkansas address in the ads where money to be sent, was hurting sales. Most people don't associate Arkansas with either New Zealand or Australia, and including an Arkansas address in the ad hurt the trust factor.

I replaced the Arkansas address with an 800 phone number answered by an order taking service. I also raised the price of the product to $44 (and then later to $54) to cover the order taking and shipping costs I was incurring.

Both of these changes seem to improve sales. As soon as the new ads started running, I got more orders.

As I analyzed the income/expenses associated with the project, I found that my only real expense (the cost to ship the product from New Zealand to US customers), was more than I wanted to pay. I did a little research and found a better way.

Instead of shipping each order from New Zealand, I'd box up 100 ready-to-ship packages, put them all in one large box, and ship the box to a company in the US that would do my order fulfillment from there. That reduced my shipping expenses by 70% and my customers always got their product within 4 days of ordering it (because individual orders were being shipped from the US rather than from New Zealand).

Another thing I did was to include a 'back end' offer with the thank-you letter included in the product package. This offer was for a more detailed New Zealand/Australia information package which included local newspapers, auto trader magazines, boat trader magazines, maps, immigration materials, and a lot more for $70. About 25% of the people who bought the original product ordered the back-end product.

Exit Strategy

After living in New Zealand for six months, I moved back to the states. I brought with me enough New Zealand and Australian real estate magazines to fulfill orders for the next three months. Because I was away from New Zealand and restarting my US business, I stopped running the ads for this product - I had other things I wanted to focus on.

Project Review

Adding everything up, this was a profitable project. The only area where I got hurt was running the expensive ads in Island magazine. They didn't lose money, but those ads cost 5 times more than the ads in the newsletters, yet their pull ratio was significantly less. If I were doing this project again today, I would concentrate on advertising in targeted newsletters with low ad costs, and avoid the high priced publications.

I would also have started out with a higher product price. I learned quickly that people who wanted this package didn't care whether it was $34 or $44 or $54. I tested all three prices, and even the highest price had no impact on sales.

Why this Project Worked

This project was a success because:

• I chose the target audience before I chose the product
• I found a way to reach the target audience (via newsletters) before I chose the product
• I chose the kind of product my target audience was interested in
• I chose a product that had high perceived, emotional (get them closer to their dream), value
• I chose a product with no competition
• I chose a product that was unique, and not readily available to my target market
• I chose a product that was easy to describe in just a few words
• I chose a product that required no special training, skills, or support to use
• I chose a product that was easy-to-ship
• I chose a product that had little or no cost for me to duplicate
• I chose a product with an extremely low break even point
• And most importantly, I chose to follow through with the idea. I actually ran the ads and saw the business through.