4 times out of 5, the answer is a resounding YES. Maybe you’ve heard this advice before. Maybe it sounded crazier than clown college to you. But… it works.
It doesn’t matter if you’re creating a lead magnet, a paid product, a video to share with your list or whatever. When you create the sales copy first, you think bigger. You get more creative. You find solutions you didn’t know you had. You’re more excited about your product idea, and the excitement shows in your writing.
You’re shaping a better product than if you had created the product first. You’ll have the best product possible because you sold it first.
But what if you write bullet points or sales points and then realize you can’t fulfill them? Simply remove that portion of the sales letter. You will need to revise and tighten up your letter when the product is done. But 90% of your letter will likely already be finished.
And here’s one of the best benefits of all – you don’t have to write the sales letter after the product is finished. Many marketers find they have just enough enthusiasm to get through the product creation and have none left for the letter. But by writing the sales copy first, you don’t have to worry about that.
I learned this technique a long time ago, and every time I remember to do it, I not only have a better product created with a lot more enthusiasm – I also make a ton more sales.
I just read an article over at HubSpot that touts the ‘10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint’ as created by Guy Kawasaki. I want to state up front that I have nothing against Guy. I’ve read his books and he gives great advice on many topics. But I suspect that one day Guy needed something to write about and was fresh out of ideas. That’s when he decided to share his own 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint with readers, and now it’s gospel among speakers and video creators.
It’s also, in my opinion, nonsense.
The rule says that you must never use more than 10 slides in a presentation, you must never go over 20 minutes and you must never use fonts smaller than 30 point. Even if you don’t do PowerPoint presentations or make slideshow videos, you can tell at one glance this rule is wrong. The clue is a certain phrase that appears not just once, but three times. Go back now and see if you can spot it.
That’s right…
“You must never.”
You must never do this and you must never do that, and it’s all rubbish.
Very few rules apply all of the time. In fact, the only hard and fast rule I can think of right now is that if you want to keep living, you have to keep breathing. But I can even think of an exception to that rule, too.
And yet I see new marketers make this mistake time and time again. Their favorite expert-guru type says they MUST do this and this and this without deviation, and the new marketer will struggle to follow those rules until they collapse in frustration.
Never mind that the expert-guru works in internet marketing and the new marketer works in hobbies. Never mind that the expert-guru has a following of 100,000 with huge name recognition while the new marketer has neither. Never mind that the expert-guru has a staff of 5 with 20 outsourcers at his beck and call while the new marketer is trying to do it all herself.
Almost no rule applies all of the time. While it makes perfect sense to follow the guidance of someone wiser and more seasoned than you, it makes equal sense to adapt their advice to your situation, to your niche and to your audience.
There will be times when you need more than 10 slides, when your talk might be a lot longer than 20 minutes (especially if you are teaching) and when your font might not be 30 point. And that, my friend, is okay.
One last thing… when you become a big shot in your niche, or if you already are a big shot, please do everyone a favor and teach others not to work in absolutes and to instead think for themselves.
And the next time you catch me saying “you must” do anything, be kind. I make this mistake myself from time to time, but I’m working on removing words like ‘must,’ ‘should’ and ‘never’ from my vocabulary.
Most new marketers make the painful mistake of thinking the sale is done when the customer buys the product. Nope. That’s just the first sale. Wise marketers who want to stay in business and continue to profit know there are two more sales to be made.
First, you’ve got to sell the new buyer on how great your product is. If you don’t, you’ll get more refund requests.
Second, you’ve got to sell your new buyer on consuming and using your product. When you do, these new customers are far more likely to purchase additional products from you, often at much higher price points.
Interestingly, you can make both of these sales with one simple technique.
I’m going to assume that the product in question is an information product, and that it’s a good one – no junk. Here’s what you do:
When you collect reviews and testimonials prior to launch (you are doing that, right?) you’re going to ask a couple of extra questions of your reviewers:
1: Which is your favorite section/chapter/video of the product?
2: What did you discover and how will you use this information to achieve your goal?
Your questions might be slightly different depending on your product and your niche. The gist is to get each reviewer to choose a favorite section of the product and tell you what they’re going to do with this information.
For example, “The third video taught me how to add an additional $10,000 to my monthly income with just a few small tweaks to what I’m already doing.”
Or, “The fifth chapter revealed a mistake I’ve been making that nearly cost me my marriage. Now that I’m aware of it, I’ve made a simple adjustment that’s brought my husband and me back together again and we feel like newlyweds!”
You can use these in your sales material, but you can also place these INSIDE your product to remind your customers of why they made the purchase. You might place the testimonials at the beginning of chapters, or one the page containing that particular video, or wherever it’s appropriate.
After people buy your product, they naturally forget most of what the sales letter or sales video told them. A week or two later, they might only remember they paid $199 for a product that will teach them how to blog. If buyer’s remorse sets in before they even consume your product, you’re done for. A refund request will be on its way to your inbox.
By adding these very specific testimonials, you remind them that others have found your product particularly helpful. This can get them to read or watch your product and see how great it is. Then instead of asking for a refund, they’ll be wondering what else you can offer them.
A couple more tips:
→ Use these testimonials as well as bullet points in the follow up email series you send after making the sale. This will remind new buyers of what a great decision they made in purchasing your product and encourage them to consume it and use it.
→ At the beginning of each chapter or section, as well as on the page where each video is loaded, add in a list of bullet points telling them what they’ll discover in this material.
Remember, it’s important to not just make the initial sale, but to also sell your customers on the idea that they made a smart purchase as well as selling them on USING your product. When you do, you’ll reduce refunds dramatically as well as encourage your new buyers to make many more purchases from you in the future.
“The Guide to Oysters” was the first ad advertising expert David Ogilvy wrote for his own agency. In the full-page ad, details on different oysters, where they come from and how they are prepared are given, along with photos of each.
It’s a highly informative article; the kind people might rip out of a magazine for future reference. Oh yes, and in the bottom right corner, Guinness Beer is touted as the ideal drink to have with oysters. You guessed it… the ad wasn’t for oysters at all but rather for the beer.
Sneaky, huh?
No doubt you’re already creating “how-to” content for your readers and sending it out in emails, posting in your blog, social media and so forth. And at the end of your content you might promote a related product, too. For example, you tell how to use a certain method to get traffic. Then you offer a product that teaches 20 more traffic methods.
But what if… now think about this, because it’s a bit of a mind shift…
What if your content told how to USE the product you are promoting? You take that same traffic product, regardless of whether it’s your product or an affiliate product, and you write a post on how to use it to achieve a goal.
I have a friend who does exactly this and it’s made all the difference in his business. Before he started using this method, people would thank him for his great content but never buy the product he was promoting. After he started doing this, people started buying. It was frankly kinda spooky how well this worked.
Me, I was skeptical. But numbers don’t lie.
Before this method, my friend worked a full time job. 4 months after he made the change, my friend quit his job and now does online marketing 20 hours a week and surfs, scuba dives and climbs the rest of the week. I promised him I wouldn’t reveal his name or niche, but let’s go back to our traffic example and I’ll give you an idea of how this works.
Let’s say the product you’re promoting is a course on how to do Facebook Advertising, and the headline for your latest post is something like, “How to Get 50 Buyers a Day for Your Product Using Facebook Ads”. In your post you basically outline some info (not all the info, of course) on how it’s done. But here’s the thing… more than once you reference the product you’re selling as being a key part of the Facebook Ad process.
Jumping into the middle of our imaginary article: “When you get to Step 3, just reference the tool on page 43 of the “Super Traffic Course” and you’ll know immediately which ad is more likely to get the best results.” Or something like that… please note I’m doing this off the top of my head.
“If you don’t have the Super Traffic Course yet – seriously? What are you waiting for? – you can grab it here. Or you can spend a few hours gathering the same info that you’ll find on page 43… not the best use of your time, perhaps, but trial and error will eventually see you through if you stick to it. Once you’ve used the tool of page 43 and you have your numbers, you’ll know exactly which ad to run first as well as the best time to run it. Now the next step is to…”
Using this method requires two things:
First, you need a shift in your thinking. Odds are you’ve always written something like, “Tip 1, Tip 2, Tip 3, oh by the way, buy this product.” But now the product is actually an integral part of the content. You are teaching them as though they ALREADY OWN the product, which does something wonderful to your reader – it makes them THINK as though they already own it.
Except… they don’t.
So now they feel like an insider but still on the outside. Darn it, they’re missing something really awesome!
It creates a cognitive dissonance in them that can be easily resolved by… TA-DA! Purchasing the product, of course. This is soooo sneaky, isn’t it? Ha! I love it.
The mind shift on your part is the first thing you need. The second thing is some well executed balancing which will come with practice. You want to give enough info to make the post helpful even if they haven’t purchased the product. Your posts should stand on their own. But they shouldn’t give away all the secrets of the product – not even close.
You’re creating intrigue and a sense of missing out for those who don’t own the product while simultaneously giving good info they can use. See? A balancing act. And all the while you are also making it completely clear that owning the product will make the process easier, faster and in this case more profitable.
My friend says this was the hardest part to learn. He had to figure out how much info to give, what to withhold and how to seamlessly promote the product within the article. He also said the first time he tried was a hot mess, but he kept at it and within a week it was easy and within two weeks it was second nature.
It’s simply a matter of learning a new way to frame what you’re writing.
His posts aren’t super long, either. They’re usually just 500-1,500 words, depending on how much he covers. And then he promotes his posts extensively and shamelessly through social media as well as to his ever-growing list.
Million Dollar Side Point: Half of his posts actually reference and promote free lead magnets he’s giving away to build his email lists. He has lists in a dozen sub-niches to his main niche, and those lists are growing FAST. He especially promotes these posts on social media. And he reposts these posts every month or two and again promotes them on social media as if they are brand new. His rate of list building using this simple technique is blowing my mind right now.
I think I may have ‘buried the lead’ with that last paragraph, so if you’ve read this far, congrats. You now have a secret to list building that others missed!
Bottom Line: Write “how-to” content that works in conjunction with the product you are selling (or the list building lead magnet you’re giving away). These posts work as covert sales letters that set you up as the authority, teach useful skills AND sell the product or the opt-in.
I know it might be different from what you’ve done before. And the first time or two you write content like this, it might seem weird, awkward or strange. But done correctly, it can also be super profitable.
In the 70’s they did an experiment to see if the same college students who turned in their assignments on time also had clean socks. (No joke – they seriously did this.)
The hypothesis was that people who got their schoolwork done would be the same people who got their personal chores done as well. But the results were the opposite of what they expected.
Students who turned assignments in on time were terrible about keeping up with their laundry, and students who kept up with laundry turned in their assignments late. What has happening?
Researchers later realized that we only have a certain amount of attention and willpower we can pay during any one day. If we first pay that attention and willpower to doing laundry, we feel depleted before getting homework done. If we do the homework first, we tend to put off doing laundry for another day or even another week.
In a second experiment, people were left alone in a room with cookies. Some of them were allowed to eat the cookies while others weren’t. Both groups were then given an extremely difficult puzzle to solve.
Those who were allowed to eat the cookies along with a control group who never saw any cookies spent an average of 20 minutes working on the puzzle. But those who had to practice willpower by not eating the cookies only spent 8 minutes working on the puzzle because they’d already spent much of their willpower.
If you go to a mall and give people simple math problems to solve, those who have spent a long time shopping will give up on the simple math problem much faster than those who just walked into the mall and haven’t been shopping yet.
Understanding what these experiments mean for you can completely change how you plan your work and how much you can accomplish in a day and in your life. Each of us has a finite amount of willpower each day, and it gets depleted as we use it. And here’s another surprise: We use the SAME stock of willpower for ALL tasks, regardless of what they are or how important or unimportant they might be.
We don’t have laundry willpower, homework willpower, cookie willpower and math willpower… we just have one amount of universal willpower that we are given each morning when we wake up.
If you think you lack willpower to exercise after work, it’s more likely that you used up all of your willpower at work and have none left. Exercising before work will solve your problem.
If you decide to go grocery shopping before you get your work done, you’ll use up your willpower making hundreds of little decisions on what to buy and what not to buy. That’s why when you get home from the store you might find yourself wasting time on the internet or television, because you have no more willpower for doing real work.
If you do your creative work first thing when you get up in the morning instead of putting it off to the end of the day, you’re going to get a lot more accomplished.
There are ways you can conserve your willpower and attention so that you have more of it for your important work. For example, you can prepare the same foods for each meal so that you don’t have to decide each day what to make. Better still, you can pay someone to prepare a week’s worth of meals for you. If you don’t understand how willpower works, this may seem like an expensive option. But when you eliminate the attention, decision making and willpower needed to shop for and prepare 21 meals a week and instead use it on your work, you will likely make far more money than you spend on the meals.
Much like Steve Jobs, you can wear the same style of clothes each day so that you don’t have to decide what to wear. Steve Jobs would grab a pair of jeans and a black turtleneck each day without expending any of his attention and willpower on what to wear.
Don’t check your email in the morning. Reading a hundred subject lines, replying to 30 emails, writing 5 emails… this all adds up to a tremendous amount of decision making, attention and willpower that could be better spent doing the work that makes you money.
Any unimportant tasks that you can eliminate or delegate will reduce the number of decisions you have to make and the amount of willpower you expend each day, leaving more willpower and attention for your main focus. You’ve no doubt heard this technique of prioritization referenced as the “highest use of your time.”
A $5,000 an hour professional does not spend 5 hours a week cleaning her home. Why would she, when she can hire someone at $20 an hour to do that for her? She is still able to earn $4,980 an hour employing the maid while doing her own work. But if she spends 5 hours cleaning her own home, she has lost $25,000 in revenue. Or to put it another way, she spends $25,000 a week cleaning her home, which is ridiculous at best and incredibly stupid at worst.
Here are the only three takeaways you need to revolutionize your life and double or even triple how much you accomplish:
1: Eliminate every little job and decision you can, freeing up willpower and attention for what is important. Get someone to clean your house, cook your meals, run errands and so forth. Get rid of anything that takes time and attention but doesn’t provide you with a good return for your time. This might mean eliminating obligations such as being on a committee for a non-priority cause, quitting a hobby that doesn’t give you satisfaction, simplifying your home and belongings, simplifying your wardrobe and so forth.
2: Start your day doing the most important thing, followed by the second most important and so forth. This might mean you first exercise, then perform the highest value work task, then the second highest value work task, etc.
3: While we didn’t cover this, it is important to find something you completely enjoy that is totally unrelated to what you normally do. In other words, get a hobby you thoroughly love and spend a little time on it at the end of the day. This will take you out of the work realm, reduce stress, give you satisfaction and make it easier to get up tomorrow and jump right into your most important task of the day.
Don’t even second guess when I tell you that an abundance of typos on your sales page will create doubt in your prospect… They’ll suspect you have no clue what you’re doing.
Further, they may suspect you’re a fly-by-nighter, someone who threw a site up to grab sales and then disappear like vapor in a storm.
Yes, we all make typos – including and maybe especially me. But I take great pains NOT to make them on sales pages, for good reason.
Recently I was intrigued by an email promising to build a news site that would generate an income for me. Okay, I know what you’re thinking already. Yeah. Right. Sure it will.
But what the heck… I clicked the link, scrolled down a bit, and here’s the first paragraph I read:
Last Trending News Your News Dashboard Bring To You The Last News to Easly Click and Post. You Can Pin The The News With One More Click To Make Your Posts Unique.
How many errors did you find in this tiny bit of copy?
I found 6 or 7, depending on how you count them.
It should read…
Latest Trending News Your News Dashboard Brings To You The Latest News to Easily Click and Post. You Can Pin The News With One More Click To Make Your Posts Unique.
Even then the writing is terrible.
Yes, English is obviously their second language. But they couldn’t spare a hundred bucks to get someone to check their copy for them?
Sale lost.
Lesson learned: Typos in sales letters can and will lower your conversion rates. Go the extra mile to avoid them, and always have at least one additional set of careful eyes look over your pages before going live.
When I first heard this one I dismissed it as something that couldn’t possibly make all that much money. I was wrong.
Here’s what a friend of mine (we’ll call her Beth) is doing with Amazon to currently clear several hundred dollars a day and quite possibly reach the 6 figure mark this year.
She is, in a nutshell, buying and selling books.
But Beth’s not haunting thrift stores or yard sales to do this. In fact, she never leaves home. She has two methods she uses that go hand in hand, sometimes clearing over $100 PER BOOK.
Beth’s first method takes advantage of the fact that most Amazon shoppers want to use their Prime account to get free, fast shipping. Because of this, they will often pay far more for an item than they need to.
She looks for new and used books (HINT: Textbooks work really well for this!) that have a large Prime price tag and a much smaller price if you buy it directly from the seller. For example, she showed me a textbook that is selling for $170 on Prime, and for $12 plus $3.99 shipping directly from the cheapest seller.
There were actually a couple dozen copies selling for $50 or less. She buys up all of the cheaper copies, ships them to Amazon and then sells them through Amazon Prime for much larger prices.
I know, this sounds like needles in haystacks, but she has gotten really good at finding these deals. She wouldn’t divulge her search technique, except to say that she perfected it one rainy afternoon when she had nothing else to do.
She also searches other book sites beyond Amazon, and she says that some of her very best deals come from purchasing books from other sites and then selling them on Amazon.
That’s the first half of her business. The second half is weirder still.
If you’ve ever looked closely at Amazon book listings, you’ve seen that little box on the right of some listings that say, “Do you have one to sell?” Amazon will pay you to send them books that they can then sell. But here’s what’s so weird…
There are times when you can buy used books from Amazon sellers for a lot less than Amazon is willing to PAY for the books. And when you tell Amazon you have a book to sell, they lock the price for 25 days. This gives you time to receive the book you purchased and send it on to Amazon. If the price Amazon is willing to pay goes UP in this period, you cancel the price you were going to receive and get the new, higher one.
You can buy more than one copy of a book and trade it in. You can also find cheaper books on other book sites and then sell those to Amazon. You can also find other websites that will sometimes (often?) pay more than Amazon.
Here’s another weird fact: Every book site that buys books pays you in cash except for Amazon. They pay in gift cards. That seems like a flaw in the system, right? But Beth uses these gift cards to buy more cheap books that can be resold at higher prices, making even more profit. Gift cards may also save you on taxes but you didn’t hear that from me. Consult your tax person.
Beth handles the books herself – both incoming and outgoing – by purchasing a scale and a thermal postage printing machine that makes everything simple and easy. But I understand there are also third-party process centers that will handle the books for you for a fee. This includes both receiving the books from individual sellers and packaging them up to send to the book websites of your choosing.
And there you have it: A weird little arbitrage book business that almost anyone can do. The downsides as I see it are you need money up front to get started because you’ll be purchasing books. The more money you have, the faster you can build your business.
Also, if you’re selling books to individuals, you will have to sometimes wait to make the sales. That’s fun, though, because you never know how many sales you might wake up to each morning.
If you’re interested in this, start with books you know sell for high prices such as textbooks and branch out from there. It could be a great way to make your mortgage payment each month, or possibly even build a full-time five or six figure income.
You send out an email to your list promoting your webinar replay. Of course, you might not call it a webinar replay because some people don’t want to sit through a recording that lasts for an hour or two.
They like what they read in the email.
They click over to the page with the replay.
They like the copy on that page… “This is interesting! Maybe I want to buy this… hmmm… let me click on this video…”
“ARGHHH!”
“Two hours long??”
“No way.”
They close the page.
And you just lost them.
Whoops.
What happened?
They liked what you said in the email. They really liked what you said on the page. But when they clicked the video and saw how long it was going to be, they abandoned ship.
How can you fix this?
A couple of thoughts…
First, tell them what they’re going DISCOVER in the video. Sell the video, not the product. Let them know the video is chock full of awesome, usable information. Invoke a strong sense of curiosity as well as the feeling they will miss out if they don’t watch it.
You might think of this step like a movie trailer… showing just enough of all the best bits to pull them to the screen and make them drool for more.
Second, don’t make the video two hours long.
Or even one hour long.
Make it about 10 minutes in length.
“Wait! I can’t sell my program in 10 minutes!”
You don’t have to because you’re going to use more than one video.
Here’s the key…
In the first video, hit the ground running and immediately give them something great such as a huge benefit and what they need to do to achieve it. Leave out the step-by-step instructions of how to do it because you’ll teach that in the paid course.
Then tell them what you’re going to reveal next…
And here you can either use a script that automatically brings up the second video, or if you’re not that fancy, give them the link.
The end of the first video sells them on watching the second video. The end of the second video sells them on watching the third video. They are binge watching your videos, something they are accustomed to thanks to streaming services like Netflix.
In each video, gently let them know that as great as this information is, paid members get the mother lode of life-changing or business-changing info. Using this method has a couple of advantages…
You are hyper aware that every second of video needs to either convey great info or sell them on watching the next video. You don’t allow yourself the business-killing luxury of being boring.
And the viewer gets pulled in bit by bit, much like a seduction. Done right, there’s no way they want to miss what’s in the next video. Throughout the process, viewers are being courted into purchasing your product.
Give it a try… I bet your conversions will increase dramatically.
When teaching and selling via video, nearly all of us could do just a little bit better. We could be a little bit more interesting, a little bit more enthusiastic, a little bit more entertaining and a little bit more charismatic.
It’s not easy to narrate a long slide show or to face the camera for a length of time and hold attention. Most of us are not professional presenters or announcers and we haven’t been trained in how to hold an audiences’ attention.
But there is one trick I stumbled upon that can instantly improve almost anyone’s delivery, and it’s this:
Speed up your performance just a little bit.
You can do this one of two ways:
Either edit your audio/video to remove any ‘umms’, ‘ahhs’, ‘let-me-see’s and so forth. Remove them entirely. Long pauses? Remove them. Anything that doesn’t move the story forward? Rambling? Needlessly repeating yourself? Remove it. If you don’t want to edit your video, get someone to do it for you.
The second thing is to speed it up. Just a little. You don’t want to sound like a chipmunk. But if you slightly increase the speed of delivery, either by speaking faster or speeding up the video, it can make a remarkable difference.
Play around with this and see what happens.
One last thing… smile. Regardless of whether they can see you in the video or just hear you, they will know when you are smiling. Laughter is great, too.
There are times in our lives where we are compelled to stop and take a look at ourselves and ask the question: Who am I?
Obviously there are several follow up questions to that one, most often: Am I happy? Or What do I want now? But really all the follow-up questions we might ask are simply extensions of the first: Who am I?
We might ask that question on the eve of graduation from high school, or university, just before we start that first job, as we enter that first or last relationship, begin a family, buy a house, or start a business.
How do you answer that question? What would you identify yourself as?
Each of us is unique in the world, but we also each try to conform to a type. A mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a professional, an employee, an employer, an entrepreneur. You tell yourself that you are the role you are in.
Whatever you think fits you most comfortably is what you conform to. That is what you think you owe to yourself and others to be. And of course, you want to be that to the best of your ability.
In the case of building an online business, we are entrepreneurs.
So let us look at that word and honor what it really means to fit into that role. Our goal isn’t the financial gains, since for the entrepreneur that is simply a scorecard. Our role is to gain independence and freedom, to follow our passions and to dream bigger than a normal 9-5 job would allow you to.
It is to see gaps in the market that others don’t and to not be afraid to take risks and leaps in investment. Being an entrepreneur is often to follow your gut feelings and to want more: to see the bigger picture.
You have to be who you are in this world, in accordance with how you define yourself no matter what, and as always – remember that money is not the only goal – the journey is!
