Today, I want to share some information with you that I've never seen shared in public before.
It's the result of a recent list building experiment I tried using the $1 WSO method.
For the uninitiated, the Warrior Forum is an Internet Marketing forum. WSO stands for Warrior Special Offer. It's an area of the site in which marketers can pay to advertise their own product.
I recently ran a $1 WSO selling a proven product. A lot of marketers recommend this type of WSO. The stated benefit of the $1 WSO is not financial, but is from capturing proven buyers onto your e-mail list.
In fact, out of every $1, only 66c is transferred to your PayPal account. The rest goes in PayPal fees. So, financial motivation should definitely not be a reason for running one of these WSOs.
It is about delivering to customers. The buyers benefit from a quality product, worth much more than the $1 spent.
The $1 offer was live for 48 hours. During the WSO, the product amassed 716 views, which is a good number for anything in the WSO Forum.
The cost of running was WSO was $40.
Exactly 60 sales were made, for takings (after PayPal fees) of $39.60.
So, this was a breakeven experiment.
(actually, the sales themselves made a very slight profit for reasons which I will go into another time – although the product acquisition costs meant an overall loss. Of course the product is still on sale, just not at the WSO price).
What does all this mean?
It means that the $1 WSO can work and it can, with the right offer, be a low risk proposition for both the buyer and seller (and in internet marketing, spending $40 is a pretty low risk).
The gains however, may be relatively modest, depending on how you value 60 new buyers and subscribers.
In my case, I consider it a success, but not an overwhelming success. But enough of a success to try it again in a few months with another suitable product.
So, if you are considering running a $1 WSO, go ahead. Don't overthink it. You will see results.
I'd appreciate comments from anyone who has run a $1 WSO, or is thinking about it.
Even better, do comment if you've run a $1 WSO as a result of this blog post. 
All contributions to the blog are highly valued.
13 replies on “The $1 WSO – Does It Work?”
I haven't made a $1 WSO, but two "ordinary" ones, selling products for $17 and $7, if I remember correctly.
My guess is that if you don't have a big name in that area, it is easier to sell something for 17-27 dollars than for $1, because the latter seems really cheap and therefore, to many, without value. So you either have to have a big name, or sell something made by somebody with this big name, which was what you did.
But I might be wrong – this is only guessing 🙂
It doesn't make sense to me. If you have a valuable product offering then $1 is presenting it as a throw-away item.
Even $2 makes you 2x the revenue and your Ad exposure will be for a very limited time so you should sell for more like $50 if your product is worth buying, IMO.
Andy, yes I think $2 as a pricepoint is definitely something worth testing.
My view is that the $1 WSO isn't as a means to make money, but rather to get the mailing list built up. So it's a sacrifice of short term profit against long term potential.
Britt, maybe you're right and that it's best to go straight to $7, or $17. The lack of value comment is definitely true.
Something for further tests I think. Anyone who has tried all the price points, thoughts are more than welcome.
Hi Tom,
I am thinking about doing a WSO. I have a paid product which is still in the process of being created. I will be selling it on my site for $47 but was going to do WSO.
I was going to sell it for approx $5 as a way of gain some more subscribers.
Craig
Hi Craig,
To me, a $47 product for $5 sounds like insane value, so you should get some subscribers out of it. I'd suggest $7, solely because that's the Warrior Forum norm. Bill it as a Warrior Prelaunch (before it goes live on your site).
You might also want to introduce scarcity into it, say the first 10 copies for $7, then incrementing the price every 10 copies? You want people to buy straight away so you positive feedback in the WSO thread as soon as it goes live, and that seems to be a good way to do it.
Thom
What an interesting way to build a list. I would have never even thought about doing a WSO for list building, but I'm sure that it works. Especially if the product is the right price.
Altering the price of a product after every ten sales is a clever way to use price descrimination to influence the demand for a product. When the product goes live people will rush to buy it.
The problem with this method is thats you may alienate the customer. New customers will see the earlier prices people paid and question if they can now get the product cheaper somewhere else now that you have raised the price. You just need to hope that the positive feedback that the earlier buyers leave is enough to convince the new ones.
These are all good methods of price desciminating, however I've personally always believed in just discounting depending on the amount of units someone is buying.
Craig,
I am so sorry if I cant understing what WSO means though I am just a beginner so I would love to hear you explain it to me like you are talking to a kid.
In some point I am interested so please do reply,
Hey Jay,
WSO means Warrior Special Offer, which can be found on the Warrior Forums. It's basically where you're offering a random product that you have selling rights to for a really cheap price. The idea of a WSO isn't to make much money from selling the product, but to build up an e-mail list for the future where you can sell other products to the people who bought the WSO.
Hope I helped.
[…] me give you an example, which I touched on in an earlier post (The $1 WSO). The theory being tested, that selling a product for $1 is a good list building mechanism. My […]
Hey IMJamie & others:
I'm rather new in WF but I am almost certain that a product has to be "self-created" to qualify as a WSO. It sounds like some of you are saying that a WSO can be a product created by someone else but that I have the rights to resell. Which is correct?
Dave, yes a WSO has to be your own product. Of course, your own product could be something you've paid to have written for you (as I do regularly, to my specifications), or it could be a product written by someone else which you have purchased the sole and exclusive rights to (i.e. you can now sell it and they can't).
The product in the example above is the latter, as I wanted the advantage of the other Warrior's name to help to sell more copies. It's a viable strategy to work with, just as forming a partnership is when you're trying to get started selling products online.
What you definitely can't do is to just take another product which comes with resale rights (or Private Label Rights) and just sell that. You may get banned and you'll definitely have wasted the $40 that it now costs to run a WSO.
Hope that helps to clear things up.
Thom
[…] how Thom Lancaster successfully tested the Special Offer strategy, and exactly what he recommends. You can read many more of Thom’s posts on his blog […]