You may look at OTOs, upsells and downsells as being really complicated if you have not done them before, but as an online marketer you should consider incorporating some combination of them. Why? Because they will help you to earn more money than you would with your initial product by itself. Look at it like this… while you are setting up to promote and sell one product, why not try to offer three products to the same number of people with just a little extra work. Rather than just make $17 x 100 people, you could also make $97 x 100 people on your upsell, or $47 x 100 on your downsell, or any combination.
- OTO
One time offers are usually offered between the order page and product download page. They are normally an offer for a product at a discounted price and they should truly be a one time offer. For that discount in the one time offer to be seen later would certainly hurt you credibility with your clients.
- Upsell
When you make a sell to your customer, you immediately offer them an upsell. It should be a related product and often at a higher price but that price can be higher or lower than the original product your customer purchased. Try offering PLR rights as an upsell, or a membership site that will give them more of the same product as they just purchased. It is usually considered the time right after the initial sale is the best time to sell another product to your customer; as that way they get to skip buyer’s remorse.
- Downsell
A downsell is when you offer a less expensive product after your customer has said no to your original upsell. This should be presented immediately after the upsell is declined and many times it can be a scaled-down version of the upsell product. You could offer the PDF without the accompanying videos, or maybe the videos without the written transcripts. And you might not want the downsell to be the exact same offer as your upsell at a lower price!
- Backend
Now when a marketer talks about their backend, you can be sure they are not talking about the part of their body they sit on. 
That is a marketing term they are using that means anything you sell to your customers, after your customers have have bought and entered your sales funnel. It is true that if you have sold them a valuable product, your customers are more likely to buy from you again. Hopefully you have put them on your list and have carefully created a plan to send them helpful information as well as recommendations for your other products, services or affiliate products that are in the same niche.
You just have to remember that while it might be more work to initially set up upsells, downsells and the like, you can believe they will work on auto-pilot, continually making you more money than you might have with just the initial product you are selling.
January 27th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
Adding the rest of the pieces that you have described makes the diffeence often between breaking even on your advertising and generating a nice profit.
January 27th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Nice job defining the different ways of making sales to someone that enters your sales funnel. All of these are essential to insure that you maximize the return for your initial efforts.
January 28th, 2010 at 3:27 am
Great points, Andre, and there’s another big benefit too – if you hook your OTOs, upsells, downsells & backend products into your affiliate program too, then affiliates can potentially make that much more per person they refer to your site. And the more you pay out in affiliate commissions, the more targeted traffic they’ll be trying to send to you!
January 31st, 2010 at 2:27 pm
If people don’t yet have their own products to offer as an up or downsell or back end, consider using affiliate products. I was quite successful with a free video I offered as a free bonus. One of every 6 or 7 people who took advantage of the free video ended up buying the underlying program resulting in a commission to me. It was only after I discovered this concept that I started making some real money online. So take this concept and play with it. It works.