OTO stands for One Time Offer and it’s a useful mechanism for trying to sell someone a little extra once they’ve bought your primary offer. Here’s how it works in general:

We’ll assume the customer has already decided to buy your ebook (or digital download of whatever sort). They go to Paypal and pay (Paypal is just an example, you should be able to do this with any payment processor). After successful completion they are re-directed to their download.

Except we intercept them on their way to the download with another sales page. Now you need to be careful not to tick people off here, after all, they just paid you and they’re keen to get their download. You need to offer something closely related, at a big discount  or an upgrade to a premium service. The OTO can be, and often is, a more expensive item, but it needs to be a very attractive offer otherwise you risk losing the customer.

Generally it’s pointed out that they’ll not see an offer this good again, hence the “One Time Offer”.

You also absolutely must also give them a clear opportunity not to take the one time offer and just get the download they’ve already paid for.

If they take the OTO they’ll return to Paypal and this time go to a page which gives them downloads to both products they’ve ordered. You made two sales instead of one. Waahaay!

The easiest way I know of to implement an OTO is using the $7 Script. I do this often, especially as the initial purchase it quite low cost. In most cases the OTO is a more expensive option but not always. I frequently offer a companion product at half its normal price and this works well for me.

You could argue that I’m giving half the price away. I prefer to look at it that I made half as much again as I would have done had the buyer only bought one ebook. They might have returned at some point in the future and paid full price for the second, but I’d rather have real money now than promised money later!

The $7 Script and an OTO also work well for affiliates. Normally the affiliate will get 100% of the cover price and 50% of the OTO. In reality they don’t actually get 50% because Paypal can’t handle that kind of split transaction. What really happens is that every other sale goes to the affiliate so they get the full one time offer price on the first sale, then the original ebook publisher keeps it on the second sale. The affiliate gets all of the third, the publisher gets the forth, and so on, and so on…

It’s good for the ebook publisher and it’s great for the affiliate who doesn’t need to wait until the end of the month, or longer, to get their money – they get paid instantly.