The KST: A Way To Promote Products And Have People Thank You

Do you want to know how you can sell way more of your product, service, or affiliate offers without actually feeling like a sleazy salesperson? Better yet, do you want to sell a ton of your offer and have people chase you up just to say thank you for selling it to them?

It’s actually pretty easy.

If you’ve followed me or my partner, Joe, for a while, you’ll probably already know that our main focus, our entrepreneurial superpower, is creating content that people love. However, what you probably don’t realize is that all of our content serves a purpose. We don’t simply blog for the sake of blogging or put out videos because we want people to think we’re cool… Every single piece of content serves a purpose.

In this post, we’re going to focus on one content strategy that drives a ton of sales for us and our clients. We call them “Key Step Tutorials” (or KSTs for short). Others may use a different term for it but this is what we call this internally… And we’ve never seen this being taught before so we’ll call it what we want.

Using a Key Step Tutorial, you will create content that people will enjoy, learn from, buy from, and thank you in the process. When done right, people never feel like they are being sold to and will actually feel like they came to the decision to buy it on their own, without outside help. It will also establish you as a credible expert on the topic, which is a nice bonus.

A Key Step Tutorial will drive traffic to a sales page. Let the page that was designed to sell do all the selling. Let the KST get people excited to go see the sales page.

Let’s take a look at the actual process:

The Key Step Tutorial Process

The first step in the KST process is to decide on something that you can teach around the product that you are going to promote. It should be a process that requires your product, service, or offer to complete.

Some examples might be:

• You sell shovels – Create a tutorial that shows how to grow the perfect tomatoes.
• You sell pest control services – Create a guide on how to rid your house of the most common pests.
• You’re a chiropractor – Create a tutorial on steps someone can take to ease lower back pain.
• You promote an autoresponder service as an affiliate – Create a tutorial on how to build a massive email list.
• You sell an info-product teaching Excel – Create a tutorial that teaches how to create a loan amortization sheet.
• You probably get the idea…

You’re going to create a step-by-step tutorial that walks people through a process that’s very relevant to what you sell… However, there’s a key ingredient.

While teaching this process, you must ensure that at least one step in your process requires your offer. The reader can’t actually complete every single step in the process if they don’t either own your offer or purchase your offer… And, of course, you’re going to have a nice shiney link to that offer sprinkled throughout your tutorial so that there’s absolutely no doubt about how they can purchase it.

You see, creating a step-by-step tutorial, like we do in our KSTs, gets people excited. They read through the tutorial and believe that they can complete the task at hand. It gives them a feeling of being one step closer to accomplishing a goal.

The truth is, people don’t really want your product. They want the end result that your product provides. Show them how to achieve that end result once they have your product and you’ve knocked down a major barrier for them to buy. There’s no hard-selling necessary. Simply teach, blow their mind with a good action plan that they can follow, and make the link to take the next step easily accessible throughout your content.

You will be shocked at how well this works once you start driving traffic.

We’ll get to the traffic element in a minute but first, let’s continue to play with the examples from above and talk about what the “Key Step” would be from each of the processes mentioned.

The Key Step

• Shovels – A tutorial that shows how to grow the perfect tomatoes.
  • Key Step: Use this specific shovel to ensure the correct depth and size of your hole.
• Pest control services – Create a guide on how to rid your house of the most common pests.
  • Key Step: Termites need specific treatment from a specialist, use this form to schedule a free consultation.
• Chiropractor – Create a tutorial on steps someone can take to ease lower back pain.
  • Key Step: The exercises you just read will provide some temporary relief for your lower back pain. Use this link to schedule a free consultation to help rid it for good.
• Autoresponder affiliate – Create a tutorial on how to build a massive email list.
  • Key Step: In order to begin growing your list, you need what’s called an autoresponder. Use this link to sign up for your free trial.
• Course – Learn Excel – Create a tutorial that teaches how to create a loan amortization sheet.
  • Key Step: Download this ready-made spreadsheet that’s available for you in the members area.

That’s the main idea. I could write hundreds of examples but I’m fairly certain that you’ll be able to pick out something that you can create an in-depth tutorial around for your business.

Finally, to kickstart the traffic, simply use Facebook’s “Boost Post” feature.

Assuming that you have a Facebook Fan Page already, you can share your blog post to your fan page, click on the “Boost Post” button and pick a few relevant interests to get things kickstarted. If you need help with getting some Facebook ads up and running, check out this podcast and this podcast about Facebook ads.

A Key Step Tutorial Example

Back in 2015, I created a single blog post that still generates income for us today. It was a KST for a product called EverWebinar, a platform for creating automated webinars. I've since changed up the KST to promote EasyWebinar instead. In this tutorial I walked people through a step-by-step process to promote products as an affiliate using automated webinars. The post can be seen here.

Here are the steps that were mapped out in that tutorial. Consider this the “Cliff’s Notes” version:

Step 1: Pick a product that you’d like to promote as an affiliate.

Step 2: Find the contact information of the creator of that product and chase them up to ask for an interview.

Step 3: Download Skype and Skype Call Recorder so that you can record the interview.

Step 4: Interview the product creator. Have them teach something about the product for the first 20 minutes and then have them sell the value of the product for the final 10 minutes.

Step 5: Create a couple quick bonuses to make the product offer even more valuable.

Step 6: Take your interview and quick clip of you explaining the bonuses and load up the video file into EasyWebinar to create an automated webinar.

Step 7: Create an ad on Facebook and drive traffic to the registration page of the webinar that you just created.

That’s it. That was the 7-step process that I taught to generate affiliate commissions through a combination of automated webinars and Facebook ads.

This promotion was effective because it taught a strategy that anyone could follow. You don’t need a product of your own, you don’t need any special skills, you don’t even need a dang website. You could literally follow that process to the letter and see affiliate commissions start to roll in.

Did you catch the Key Step in there? In step 6, I instructed the reader to load their video into EasyWebinar. I wrote it in a way the assumed that the reader already had EasyWebinar and, of course, linked to where they could get it if they didn’t. It bypassed any pitching or even asking for the sale. If someone read that tutorial and was excited by how easy the process seemed, purchasing EasyWebinar was a no-brainer.

I simplified the end result that the reader truly wanted. They didn’t want to own a cool new piece of software… They wanted to create an additional income stream. This tutorial closed the gap between owning a tool like EasyWebinar and generating an additional income.

Here’s a screenshot from the total sales done for EverWebinar (before switching to EasyWebinar):

And here's a screenshot from the last couple months from EasyWebinar:

Over $13,500 (combined) to date… Over about a 2 year period. Now, this may not seem like a lot to some. However, this is just one example of many similar campaigns we have floating around.

A KST Template That You Can Use

Finally, we don’t want to leave you hangin’ without a bit of a template that you can use to shortcut the KST process … So here’s a blog post flow that you can use to create your first KST.

1. Establish why you’re credible. Tell people why you’re an expert on your topic.
2. Briefly describe the problem that your tutorial is going to solve.
3. Introduce the concept of what you’re about to teach. Explain the benefit that the reader will receive after successfully following your step-by-step process. This should negate the problem that you just introduced.
4. List and explain each step in the process. Use images or screenshots if possible. Remember to be sure that at least one step requires the product that you are promoting.
5. Restate the benefit and the problem solved if someone completes this successfully.
6. Remind them of the single product that makes this whole thing work.
7. Close with a call to action to share this post if people found it helpful.
   (We don’t close with a CTA to buy the product because it’s not this page’s job to sell the product)

Follow along to that flow / template when creating your first KST and you’ll be seeing sales (and thank you letters) in no time.