So like I said, I’m going to be giving you this tool. It’s a spreadsheet that we used to keep track of testimonials in-house. At the end of this episode, I’m going to tell you how you can download this spreadsheet for free to apply and use in your business. But before we do that, I want to outline the four parts of a killer testimonial and give you a process for ensuring that you collect amazing testimonials from your customers and from non-customer so you are never left without an amazing testimonial for your new coaching program, for your new product, for your new service, for your new software, etcetera.

Examples Of How To Get Great Testimonials

So here are the four parts of a killer testimonial, and you can actually give this to your customers who are looking to give you testimonials or who ask you what should be included in a good testimonial. So part one of a good testimonial is where your customers were before your product. What was their life like before they encountered you and encountered your material and your product? What did things look like on the ground? What were their frustrations? What made their life unbearable, etc., things like that.

Part two, the specific transformation that your product provided. If you have a weight loss product, for example, did it take your customer from being 50 pounds overweight to having an 8% body fat level, being able to run a marathon? Do they now have six-pack abs? Are they more comfortable wearing their swimsuit at the beach? You know, do they have a lot more confidence around the opposite sex or same sex, whatever they’re inclined to? What happened as a result of using your product specifically? And the more specifics they provide the better. You want those tangible nitty-gritty details, preferably real stories from their life that illustrate what happened as a result of using your product.

Part three, how does your product compare to the competition? And you’re looking for statements like, “I used every other product on the market.” This one was better. The most specific they can be again about how your product outperformed other products, about how your product got them results when other products would not, or just your product being superior. Again, specifics are absolutely key when it comes to testimonials.

Finally, you want to know where they are now. What is their life like currently, presently on the ground as a result of having your product? What does their life look like now that they used and implemented and benefited from your product? And with all of these points, points one through four, you want as much biographical data as possible. So if they’re a mother, you know, with three children, who has stress in these four areas of their life, you want that to come out in the testimonial as much by graphical data as possible. Now you could edit that out later, but we’re going to talk about that in just a second.

So how do you get killer testimonials? First, ask them by e-mail, you know, if it’s come across your radar that someone has had success with your product, ask them via e-mail where they were before your product, right, all the questions we mentioned before the specific transformation that your product produced, how your product performed relative to the competition, where they are. You can ask them this via e-mail or you can interview them via phone, have it recorded, and transcribed, so you can sort of dig out those details from them.

So via e-mail or via recorded phone or Skype conversation, ask them these questions. Again, sometimes, phone is really great because you can tease out those nitty-gritty details. But basically, ask them these questions then either have the phone conversation recorded or take the e-mail and put everything they said together. Compose it, right. Edit out all the fluff. Get out all the stuff that does not belong in that testimonial, so it’s just a powerful stuff compressed into one succinct testimonial where every single line is effective. Remember, this is copy. Like all your other copy, this is copy.

So edit that testimonial and get their approval, right. So you’re starting out with a bunch of text, you’re editing that down, get their approval for the edited version of their testimonial, and finally, send them that edited testimonial, and ask them to record a video of them saying the essence of what’s in that edited testimonial. They don’t need to read it word for word like a script, but they should look over how you edited what they said, and they should give you a video testimonial that basically reiterates what is in that edited text.

So why are we asking for video, right. Why is the end product of all this a video testimonial? Well, here’s why. Video is incredibly powerful. When someone can see a real person who benefited from your product and you hear them saying good things about you, it’s much more believable, but not only that, a video testimonial can be turned into an audio testimonial, and can be turned into a text testimonial, right. You can have that video testimonial transcribed.

So a video testimonial can be turned into an audio testimonial, and an audio testimonial can be turned into a text testimonial. So the first best kind of testimonial is a video testimonial because it can be turned into audio and text. An audio testimonial is the second best type because it can be turned into text, and a text testimonial is the third best type of testimonial.

Anyway, since you wait into the end, I’m going to give you this spreadsheet that we use to keep track of testimonials that come our way. So if someone says something good about us or our products or anything about us on Twitter, on Facebook, in a blog, comment in one of our forums, via a private e-mail, any of those places, if someone says something good about us, that is recorded by our company.

So what do we keep in this spreadsheet so that nothing slips through the cracks. The first thing is their name. What is the name of the person that said something good about us? Second, what is the date? What is the date of the testimonial? When did they say that on Twitter? When did they put that in a blog comment? When did they send this to us via e-mail, etc.? Next is the e-mail. What is their e-mail address if we have this? Often, we don’t have this e-mail address, but you know, we just hear that someone said something good, or you know, we read it on Twitter, but we don’t necessarily have this. So if we have this, we’ll put this here.

Next, what is the testimonial? What did they say? And here, we’ll put the long version of that testimonial, right? So this isn’t the edited version of the testimonial. It’s the long version.

Finally, where was this left? Where did they say this? Did they say this in a public forum? Did they say this in a private e-mail? Did they say on a mentorship call or during a private coaching call? Also, what was the testimonial about? Was it about, you know, for us? Was it about the interactive offer? Was it about the marketing program? Was it about the marketing show? Was it about private coaching, you know? What was the testimonial in regards to? And finally, do we have permission to use the testimonial publicly?

Anyway, our entire staff has access to this spreadsheet. This is a small sample of it. There’s hundreds of things in here at this point, but our entire staff has access to this spreadsheet, and whenever anything comes across our path that we want to take note of, we put it here. And often, we follow up with people and we take them through that interview series that I showed you earlier in this Marketing Show episode. So you can download this spreadsheet by opting on the right side of this video, and I will send it to you via e-mail, and you’ll have that, and you’ll be able to make sure that no testimonial ever slips through your cracks.

Anyway, that wraps us up for today’s episode of the Marketing Show. If you enjoyed this material and benefited in any way, I would be incredibly grateful if you would share it on Facebook, and share it on Twitter, and share it anywhere you feel someone would benefit from this information. My name is Clay Collins, and thank you so much for watching the Marketing Show. I’ll talk to you next week. Good bye.

So like I said, in this episode of the Marketing Show, I am going to hand you all eight components that must be part of a killer product offering to your market if you want to be financially viable and if you want your market to purchase what you’re selling. So here is the eight-part formula. It goes like this. MT + ST + C + PA + PR + B + G + U = cash. So let’s break down exactly what each of these components are in this marketing formula.

Product Offering: Marketing Strategy And Plan

So like I said, a well-crafted offer equals MT + ST + C + PA + PR + B + G + U and when you add those things up you get a whole lot of money. So the first component of this equation is MT, and MT stands for main transformation. This is the main transformation that your product helps your market achieve. There are two components of the main transformation: a starting point and an ending point. So if you have a product on how to get six-pack abs, you need to specify that your product takes folks from having a beer gut to having a six-pack. There must be a starting point and an ending point. If you don’t specify the starting point, folks won’t believe that you can help them achieve the ending point, right?

So if you have a product on how to get six-pack abs, people might believe that that’s for people who are mostly in shape, but just want to chisel away that, you know, final five pounds of those final ten pounds to get the six-pack. But if your product truly does help someone go from having a beer gut to having a six-pack, you must specify the starting point that you can work with when working with people. If you have a product on meditation, you need to specify that this takes someone from potentially having generalized anxiety disorder to living their life in a state of pure calmness where they no longer have to be on medication. So starting point is generalize things, i.e. disorder, taking medication to ending point. No anxiety, no longer need for medication, and no panic attack. So both of those pieces must be there.

Point number two is sub-transformation. So you must list all the sub-transformations that line up under that main transformation. So let’s use the first example from beer gut to six-pack or six-pack abs, right. So some of these sub-transformations that might occur as someone is going from having a beer gut to a six-pack is they might have increased self-confidence. They might have increased energy. They might have increased or improved eating habits. They might have more stamina both on the treadmill and in the bedroom. They might have a whole host of things that line up under that main transformation, and the sub-transformations must be benefit-driven. They can’t be feature-driven. They must be benefit-driven.

The third component is the content. So what is the content that you’re giving people that creates the sub-transformations which in turn create collectively the main transformation? So for example, in the beer gut to six-pack example, you might state that folks get menus. You might indicate that they get exercise regimens. You might indicate that they get a meditation for their iPod or computer that they can listen to, to help them get in a good mental state and to help them be positive about what they’re doing in terms of their fitness. You know, you might send them a jump rope. Who knows? But what is the content that helps folks attain those sub-transformations which then in turn helps them achieve that main transformation?

Part four is packaging. How is this being delivered? Is it being delivered by an e-book, physical book, membership site, one-on-one coaching and training program? How are folks getting this? Is it, you know, maybe it’s a physical product, but how is this being packaged?

Part number five, pricing and payment plans. What is the pricing that’s being offered? Is there a payment plan being provided? Is this on a continuity base through a membership site? How are folks going to pay for this?

Point number six, bonuses. Did you know that ten e-books for a $100 will not sell as well as one e-book for a $100 with 9 bonuses? You must provide bonuses because it’s been proven that when you provide bonuses conversions increase. So in many cases, you can take something out of that main product, and include it as a bonus, and give that away, and that will increase conversions.

Point number seven, the guarantee. You must have some kind of guarantee. Often, you might have a 30-day money back guarantee, and often, in some cases, you might have two guarantees. For one of our products, we not only provide a 30-day money back guarantee, but we provide a double-your-money-back guarantee if folks don’t see success within six months. So you often can benefit by having multiple guarantees and strong guarantees. A lot of people are worried about this, but in every case, I’ve seen giving an aggressive guarantee will do more good than harm, and even though you might lose some of that initial money, you’re going to gain a lot more in terms of conversion, and it’s going to be well worth it. The math absolutely works out in your favor.

Point eight, upsells. What are you going to do to maximize the lifetime value of your customer? When someone’s in a buying mode, and they just purchased something from you, chances are extremely good that they want to purchase an enhanced version of what they just bought. So for example, if you sell someone an e-book on going from a beer gut to a six-pack, chances are very good that they’re going to want to pay some fee for additional help or they’re going to want a weekly coaching call to check in with them, to help customize the diet plan that you offer in their e-book. Are they going to want access to a forum where they can get, you know, interaction with other people who are sort of in the struggle together? In a lot of cases, as many as 60% of people who purchase a product are willing to purchase an enhanced version of that product if they believe that it’s going to increase the likelihood that they’re going to have success.

Anyway, those are the eight parts of a killer, killer product offering. And I’ve used this formula myself to create multiple six-figure launches. This has been instrumental in creating the seven-figure business that we currently have now, and this is the backbone behind every single offer that we’ve provided. Now, you probably will need help to figure out what your pricing is, to figure out what your main transformations are. There’s still lots of work to be done here, but this is the main framework.

Anyway, that wraps up today’s episode of the Marketing Show, but before we go, I want to offer you this. This is a checklist that spells out all the major components of a killer offer, and you can download it by opting in just to the right of this video. We will send it to you via e-mail. The second thing I want to share with you is that this episode of the Marketing Show was brought to you by you. It was brought to you by your encouragement, by your kind words, by your willingness to share this with others. So if you’ve benefited from this information in any way, I would be extremely grateful and humbled if you would share this content with your friends on Facebook or Twitter. That would mean a lot to me.

Anyway, my name is Clay Collins. I am so glad you’re joining me today, and I’ll talk to you next week. Thanks for watching this episode of the Marketing Show.

So if you follow The Marketing Show for any length of time, you’ll know that we usually do it on a live action set. We spend a lot of time on motion graphics and making it look good. This week, I do not have that luxury. I’m flying out to Austin and I’m doing a number of things, and I don’t have the luxury of doing it how I normally do it. So I’m going to do it old school.

Anyway, Tracy was like, “You know, you should still have a picture of you so people know that this is coming from a real person and not from some disembodied marketing weirdo.” So that’s my girlfriend and I at Seal Beach, and it was during a recent trip up the coast of California. We’re just about to go into a wine tasting. My girlfriend wanted to include this picture as well. No comment. I guess that’s a penguin on the right side of the candle and a ground hog on the right side of the wine glass.

So like I said earlier, I’m going to be telling you the top two bestselling types of information products of 2012, but before I do that, I want to lay out five different types of information products, and then I’m going to tell you which of those work the best.

Types Of Information Products

So the first type of information product is the identity-based product. This is the kind of product where you’re selling someone an identity that they want to have, so an example of this might be the Third Tribe or Rich, Happy, and Hot, or Experts Academy where people are wanting this identity in a lot of ways in your marketing for these products. What you’re selling someone is the identity that they’re seeking to have and you make the connection that if they buy your product that they will then be able to have that self image and that identity.

The second type are mechanism-based products, and these are products that help people accomplish their goals through a mechanism that you’re giving them, and a lot of times, people have goals, but they don’t believe that they are achievable and tell you, point them to a mechanism that can help them accomplish those goals. And this is another type of information product. So an example of this might be Product Launch Formula or the Interactive Offer, and I have some more examples. We’re going to be diving into these in more depth.

A third type of information products is the goal-based product. So these products are basically about how to do X, right? So how to get up your WordPress website, or how to become a golf pro, or how to write a New York Times bestseller, or something like that. A lot of times, these products have how to in the title.

Another type of product is the philosophy-based product, and these products are all about a certain philosophy on life. They don’t focus at least in their marketing on mechanisms or identity, but upon the philosophy that is often created by the author of the product. And the fifth type, I call this stupid-based product, and I’ll be explaining what that means in a second.

So I’m going to tell you which kinds tend to sell the best in 2012. So the first kind is the identity-based product, and this is one of the top two bestselling types of information products of 2012, so an example of this is the Third Tribe. People who see themselves in the third tribe – and this is a community created by copy blogger media – purchased this, and a lot of times, they actually aren’t in the third tribe, but they seek to belong to the third tribe. Other people certainly are in that tribe. A lot of times, these things are aspirational or these identity-based products are aspirational, so people don’t necessarily have these self images or these self identities, but they are purchasing that product because they want to have that identity.

So for example, a customer of mine, Jonathan Mead, has a product called the Trailblazer, and it is for people who aren’t currently trailblazers who want to become trailblazers, and you know, inevitably, people do buy it who are trailblazers and want to become better at being trailblazers. So I don’t want to speak for Jonathan as to what that product is for. Rich, Happy and Hot by Marie Forleo and Laura Roeder is another example of an identity-based product. Presumably, someone purchases this product who is not rich, but they want this identity, and in selling this with the marketing around this program from what I’ve seen is selling someone the potential of having this identity and having this be the reality in their life.

Another example of this might be Experts Academy by Brendon Bruchard. Someone wants to become an expert. They want the identity of being an expert. They want this self image of being an expert. And so Brendon sells them that identity or at least sells them a product that potentially will help them have that identity, help them become an expert. This is all about becoming. That’s what these products are about. It’s about becoming a trailblazer; becoming rich, happy, and hot; becoming an expert.

So the first type is identity-based products, and usually, when you’re doing this, when you’re selling identity-based products, you’re selling to your prospect’s fantasy identity. There’s Jonathan Mead in one of his launch videos. He’s about to go on a run at this point in the video. He’s explaining that the way he lives his life is the way where when he gets up in the morning, he does whatever he wants to do, and he goes on running. That’s part of the video. So that’s part of the identity that he has and that’s part of the identity that he’s offering to his customers.

In Rich, Happy and Hot launch video, you see Marie Forleo and Laura Roeder walking around the streets of New York. You know, they are wearing expensive clothes. They got that rich part. They are smiling so they look happy, and people tend to think that they’re hot. So the second type of information product that tends to do extremely well is the mechanism-based product, and this is one of the top two bestselling types of information products of 2012. You know you’re dealing with a mechanism-based product when you hear the word formula or blueprint in the title.

So you’ve often heard like traffic attraction formula or product launch formula, or you know, commission blueprint, or you know, whatever things like that, but these are mechanism-based products. An example of a mechanism-based product in the golf industry is stack and tilt. They’ve got a mechanism and the method for helping you achieve specific results. The interactive offer is an example of a mechanism-based product. One of the most popular in bestselling books on relationships is called the Five Love Languages, and they’re saying that if you understand these mechanisms, these Five Love Languages, then you can accomplish your goal. Another thing is called the Presence Process. So I’m reading a book right now called The Presence Process. It’s extremely good. It’s by Michael Brown. I highly recommend it. Product Launch Formula is another example of a mechanism-based product, and by the way, there is me speaking at Product Launch Formula, so I’m a huge fan of what Jeff has done with that.

So mechanism-based products really allow folks to accomplish one of the biggest and well-known goals in the market. So generally speaking, mechanism-based products, if you’re in the marketing space, it’s going to help address one of the biggest problems in marketing. If you’re in the golf space, the mechanism generally helps people accomplish their biggest goal in that space, but it’s not a goal-based product. So here’s the deal. Often, people have given up on their goals. They believe that their goals are not possible, but when you introduce to them a mechanism that can help them accomplish what they previously thought was impossible, they will again renew their work in a specific area.

So marketing around mechanism-based products is all about convincing people and showing them and proving to them that a goal that they have or have had in the past is now possible or can be accomplished much quicker with a specific mechanism that exists. And sometimes, and in fact, in most cases, in some markets, the mechanism that is being told helps people accomplish a goal that they didn’t even know that they had. So they are excited by the mechanism and the possibility that it can create, and they go out, and now they’ve got a new goal that was actually created by that mechanism, and in a lot of cases, that can create confusion.

So you’ll see this especially in the marketing space. You know, so many products will come out that introduce so many mechanisms, and people think that they have to do article marketing because they saw a good mechanism for doing it, or they think they have to do social media because they saw a great new mechanism for doing it, and they find out about all these things, and they forget to focus on the basics, things like having a good solid offer in place because they’ve been distracted by these mechanisms which imply that they should have goals that in fact they never have had in the first place. So that’s something about mechanism-based products.

A third type of information product, which seems to not do as well is the goal-based product. Now there are some notable exceptions here. There are some goal-based products that have done incredibly well in the past, but on the whole, not so much. So examples in the past are How to Win Friends and Influence People. These are usually how to. You see “how to” in the title. The 4-Hour Work Week, right? So someone has a goal of having a 4-hour work week. This is not based on mechanisms, and it’s not based on identity, and frankly, it’s hard to sell goal-based products without a mechanism that is front and center and usually in the title.

So frankly, I had a difficult time coming up with goal-based products that have done well in the past because there are not a lot of goal-based products that have done well in the past. How to Create a Killer Website? How to Create a Logo? You know, these are not things that people are typically interested in because they do not believe, generally speaking, that they can do these things unless you introduce to them just an amazing mechanism for helping them accomplish this. And unless you make the marketing about the mechanism instead of why it would be great to have a website or why it would be great to, you know, whatever you’re teaching people to do.

The fourth type of information product, and this is a type of product that tends to not do very well is the philosophy-based product. So products like these are generally named after a philosophy on life or a philosophy of doing things. So you know, Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, things like that, that’s not really an information product per se, but it was hard for me to come up with list of this because there aren’t a lot of these that have done very well.

And of course, the fifth type of information product I call the stupid-based product, and these types of products tend to be inside jokes among clever bloggers who have a great idea about what to name a product, and these product names are generally an inside joke among a particular community. They don’t convert on cold traffic. They don’t convert on SCO traffic. They don’t convert on paid traffic, but they’re normally like clever names, and they usually don’t sell very well. They’re not going to be products that are sort of added to the cannon of information products that exist in any particular market, and they can be fun to name, but they’re not going to be your bestsellers. So that is the fifth and final type of information product.

And the winners are, right, the top two bestselling types of information products, of course, are identity-based products and mechanism-based products. Anyway, this episode of the Marketing Show was brought to you by you. It was brought to your enthusiasm around what we’re doing here. It was brought to you by your hopes and dreams and goals. It was brought to you by just the large number of people who have e-mailed me, telling me how this information has impacted your life. And so, if this has been a benefit to you, I would be truly grateful and humbled and honored if you would donate a Facebook share or a Tweet, and let people know about the work that’s being done here and about the content we have.

Anyway, my name is Clay Collins, and thank you so much for watching the Marketing Show.

So in just a second, I’m going to get in today’s marketing lesson, but before I do that, it’s time for today’s marketing quiz. So here’s today’s marketing quiz. The first banner ad appeared on the worldwide web in 1994. Who produced that banner ad and who produced the marketing campaign that that banner ad was a part of? Was it Hewlett-Packard? Was it AT&T? Or was it Xerox? We’ll answer that question and we’ll actually show you the first banner ad ever run on the internet at the end of the show.

So like I said at the beginning of this episode, we used a specific contest during our multiple six-figure launches to accurately predict how many copies of our product we’re going to sell in advance of the launch, and also, to skyrocket conversions, and to increase interest in our launches. This has been responsible for multiple, multiple tens of thousands of dollars that we’ve made as a company this contest has that we’re about to share with you.

How To Use Contest Marketing To Increase Your Conversion Rates

So here’s how the contest works. Before we launch our product, we create a contest where people can win a free copy of our product, right? We give away one or two copies to the winners of this contest. To enter into the contest, people answer the following question. Why is blank the perfect product to help you blank, blank, and blank. So if we were selling a golf product, we might say, “Why is golf swing pro or whatever it’s called the perfect product to increase your drive, reduce the number of strokes, and help you beat your friends when you’re on the green?” That’s an example of the question. And when we run this kind of contest, we typically get a lot of responses. You know, you can see how long they are right here. Some of these just go on for pages and pages, so people really put a lot of time into them. What they’re doing is they’re telling us why our product would be an excellent match for them because they know that the person who does the best job doing that is more likely to win the contest.

So there’s a lot of things going on under the hood when we run this contest, and there’s a lot of reasons why this is such a powerful thing to do when you’re marketing. Well, one of the reasons is social proof. When people see how so many people are entering into this contest, it makes them interested, right. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. So if a lot of people are seeing other people writing such long entries about why your product is perfect for them, other people in your market are going to start wondering about your product and what it does. They’ll also start reading other people’s entries and become convinced themselves that your product is something that they should pay attention to.

In fact, every single contest entry is copy that your market is writing that is read by other people in your market, if you get my drift. So it provides social proof when someone sees that a whole lot of people are interested in something. They are much more likely to be interested in it themselves, and when you run this kind of contest, people who otherwise wouldn’t purchase your product end up purchasing it because they get hooked into your marketing campaign by seeing the amount of interest that’s there for it.

Second, consistency and commitment. A lot of people who otherwise would not buy your product end up talking themselves into desiring your product because they’ve entered into this contest, right. So let’s say they’re not initially interested, but they are perhaps interested winning a free copy, so they write a long entry about how your product is perfect for them, and they end up talking themselves into wanting it. So even if they don’t win the contest, they might end up purchasing it during launch day because they’ve talked themselves into desiring it.

Third, when people enter into your contest, it provides insight into how people are viewing your product and your marketing message. So a lot of times, I think that a resonating with your market when you’re marketing your product aren’t the things that you think you’re saying so people might be latching on to one piece of your marketing message and seeing your product in a certain light when you believe they’re seeing it in another. This exposes that and helps you correct the situation or it helps you realize what aspects of your product in what you’re doing are most appealing to your target market, the things they’re most excited about doing with your product.

Fourth, this gets your market to write copy for you. Every single entry in your contest is someone essentially writing copy, sales copy for your product, and a little secret of mine is that through this contest, my audience and my target market ends up writing about a fourth of the sales copy on my sales pages because I’ll take different pieces of people’s entries and mix and match them, you know, and cut and paste, and you know, arrange things. I’ve got to do work, but it’s all fed by entries into this contest so you can actually get your market to write sales copy for you.

Fifth, this increases consumption of your marketing material. So a lot of people who enter into this contest might not have a good argument for why your product is perfect for them, but when you tell them to in the contest entry explain why your product is best for them, they end up watching your launch videos. They end up reading your, you know, pre-launch sales material. They end up finding out more about what your product does. So in short, this kind of contest increases consumption of your marketing materials. It gets people to actually read you for your reports, actually go through the interviews you’ve done with people who’ve used your product and things like that.

Finally, this kind of contest, when it’s done the way that I do it, can predict how many copies of your product you’re going to sell. So we found that with about a 15% margin of error, the number of people who enter in this contest is the number of people who end up buying your product by the time you close the cart. Now I have a few additional notes on this contest. The first is that I’m not making any income claims. We’ve used this to launch multiple six-figure products, but I’m not guaranteeing that you’ll have the same result to yourself. I’m simply sharing what we do. This is a free marketing show video. Nothing for sale here. I’m just sharing with you what we do.

Second is that we’ve been testing variations on this contest for a while, and it’s much more in-depth than just asking people to, you know, enter into the contest with that entry. When we do this contest, it takes three blog posts and it’s a sequence of four e-mails that sort of launches this contest as a mini launch within a larger launch. There’s a lot going on when we do this ourselves. Fourth, again, this helps us predict how many copies of our product we’re going to sell, and fifth, we outlined exactly how we do this. You know, you might not need to run this contest, but if you want all the details, we outline exactly how to do this in both of our products, both the interactive offer and in the marketing program.

Anyway, that wraps up today’s marketing show, but to answer the marketing quiz, it is AT&T that ran the very first banner ad on the worldwide web in 1994. It was part of the You Will campaign, and here is a picture of that very first banner ad that ran on the internet.

Anyway, that wraps up today’s marketing show. I want to let you know that this marketing show was brought to you by you. It was brought to you by your tweets, by your shares, by your constant enthusiasm, and by your willingness to share this with your friends. So if you’ve gained anything from this episode, I invite you to share this episode on Facebook and to share it on Twitter or both if you so desire and to generally pass on the word. We do appreciate the work that you do, and it makes the stuff we do here completely worthwhile. Thank you so much and I’ll talk to you next time. Goodbye.

So in this episode of The Marketing Show I’m going to tell you and show you exactly how I got over 740 tweets about my About Page on my website. I’ve never seen an About Page that’s been talked about so much or shared as much on social media. So I’m going to show you exactly how I did that. But before I do that, it’s time for today’s marketing quiz.

So for today’s marketing quiz, we are going to again dig into the archives of The Marketing Show. So my question is this, “Which episode of The Marketing Show has generated the greatest number of comments?” Is it Episode Number Three, “Stop Helping People,” Episode Number 30 entitled “Why You Can’t Monetize Your Knowledge,” or Episode Number 35 called “Why You Shouldn’t Create A Scalable Business?” We’ll answer that at the end of the show.

So like I said, I have an About Page that’s been shared over 740 times on Twitter at this point. Now, this About Page is super long and extremely in-depth. This isn’t the kind of quick bullet-pointed About Page that you would expect to be shared a lot, but nevertheless it’s been shared a whole lot of times. And the reason why this About Page has been such an asset to my business and such an asset to me and has been shared so many times is that it has followed a very specific, very, very specific formula called “The Super Hero Formula”.

So just to explain what’s happening here; if you want to be successful in your market, your market must see you as a super hero, which means that your story needs to conform to a specific and certain structure. And I’m about to share that structure with you in just a second, but first I need you to grasp that you truly need to be a hero to your market. You need to be version 2.0 of the target person who you’re marketing to.

Superhero Formula: How To Write An About Page (Cult Of Personality)

So let’s delve into this. What is this super hero formula and what’s the format that your About Page and your story must conform to?

Well the first element that must be in your story and the first part of the Super Hero Formula is a common enemy. You and your target market must share a common enemy that you fight against when you’re fighting on behalf of them, right, you are in a lot of ways their savior. You’re helping them accomplish specific things and part of that you go to battle against a common enemy. Now this common enemy can be something specific or it can be an idea or a concept.

Part two of the Super Hero Formula is super power. So what is your super power? What are you better at doing than just about anyone else? How do you make miracles happen for yourself and for others? Every single super hero and every single major personality has a super power. You need to have one as well.

Part three of the Super Hero Formula is purpose. Your market and the people you represent need to know that you are doing things not just for the money, that you have a larger purpose that you are serving and please when you’re writing your About Page or you’re creating the story about how came to do what you do, you must be truthful. I beg of you please be truthful in all of this, but make sure you cover all of these points if you can.

The next attribute that you must have and that everyone has, is a fatal flaw. So for example, my fatal flaw is that I can’t for the life of me get up before 10:00 AM in the morning, unless I have a plane flight or something like that in which case I am completely non-functional. Another fatal flaw of mine is that I am incredibly unproductive. I truly can only get about one thing done per day. If I try and get more than one thing done per day I end up having a lot of problems and I end getting kind of distracted and not getting anything done at all.

Part number five of the Super Hero Formula is your origin story. You must have a story that explains how you went from kind of an ordinary person to someone who does what you do. How did you transform from someone who is just going about your life to someone who does the kinds of things that you do for a living? How did you become the personality that you are today?

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed the Super Hero Formula. I hope you truthfully and authentically and honestly implement this in your About Page and when it comes to writing your own story about how you came to do what you do.

Finally, I must give credit where credit is due. I read a bunch of different pieces of this Super Hero Formula, not this exact articulation of it but I read different pieces about this from a number of different people and a number of different books. But perhaps the most insightful look at this came from some writings by a man named Dan Kennedy. So I do want to attribute credit where credit is due.

Well that just about wraps up today’s marketing show. But before we end for the day, I want to answer today’s marketing quiz.

So the answer to the question, “Which episode of The Marketing Show has generated the greatest number of comments?” is episode number three. Episode Number Three, entitled “Stop Helping People,” has generated more comments than any other episode of The Marketing Show.

Anyway, that wraps up today’s episode of The Marketing Show. This episode of The Marketing Show was brought to you by you. It was brought to you by your comments, by your endless support, by all the emails of enthusiasm and encouragement that I receive. So if you enjoyed this episode, please consider donating a tweet or donating a Facebook share and telling your friends about what we’re doing here.

My name is Clay Collins, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of The Marketing Show and I’ll talk to you next week. Take care.

So I’ve got a super, super important and timely and must-see episode of The Marketing Show to watch today. But before I do that, let’s get to today’s marketing quiz.

So for today’s marketing quiz, we’re going to go back into the annals of history of The Marketing Show, back to episode number 10. So if you’ll recall in episode number 10, this adorable penguin was the star. So here is today’s quiz. Was the name of this penguin either, A) Oliver T. Finley Lucas Crunk, B) Paddington the Penguin, C) Mr. Pemberton or, D) Nancy P. Pennysmith? We’ll answer that at the end of the show.

So in this episode of The Marketing Show, I’m going to talk about offers, product offers, that are just good enough. Okay, so let’s talk about this. What is a good-enough offer? Well, a good-enough offer is often created by someone who’s just monetizing their list or they’re about to do a launch and they just come up with an offer last minute because they want to sell something, anything. And they just kind of hawk up an offer.

Why A “Good Enough” Product Offer Requires Aggressive, Event Based, Strong Marketing Tactics

When your offer is just good enough, in order to move a product, you need to have like four-day, 50 percent off sales, right? You need to do lots of event marketing. When your offer is good enough, you only move product when the cart is constantly opening and closing, when you’re constantly launching and re-launching. You truly have to hustle for every single sale. When your offer is just good enough, aggressive marketing tactics have to compensate for a weak product offering, right? Your product doesn’t just move on its own, you have to strong arm it into happening.

When someone has a good-enough offering, right, and it’s just good enough, you see them doing things like offering like 4,000 dollars in bonuses, right, or bonuses that are going away if you don’t buy by the end of today, things like that. You see lots of false scarcity. You see people saying things like, “It’s my birthday, so this is half off,” or, “It’s my anniversary, so pay what you want,” right. People have to do a lot of strange and weird and aggressive things to make sales. They always have to be hustling if they want sales, right? Sales volume doesn’t just keep up on a week-by-week and month-by-month basis. An event is required in order to make sales.

So let’s talk a little bit more about good-enough offers. Well, good-enough offers are often created by dispassionate folks who really are just looking to monetize, they’re looking to capitalize on a trend. They’re looking to launch a product because there’s an opening in their calendar. They’re usually not offers that just create sales left and right. And the result of good-enough offers, I think the main result of good-enough offers are these drive-by products. So if you’ve seen much information marketing, you’ve probably seen a lot of products launched where you see them launch once, right, and maybe it’s a million-dollar launch or maybe it’s not, right, but you see the product launch once, and then you never see that product launched or sold again, right? Maybe they launch it twice, but then, poof, it’s gone.

And the reason why this happens is because the product publisher or the product owner realizes that in order to make sales, they have to constantly be launching and re-launching. They realize that they always have to be hustling if they’re going to make an income with that product. And so they end up closing the cart forever and that product never sees the light of day again. That’s called the drive-by product. And the graveyard of drive-by products especially in the Internet marketing space is endless. And sadly, good enough offers and drive-by products have become the status quo in Internet marketing, and I am sick and tired of it. I think good-enough offers have to stop. Don’t casually launch products.

At this point, you might be wondering what is the alternative to good-enough offers. Well, the alternative to good-enough offers are really bull’s-eye offers. So let’s talk about the difference between bull’s-eye offers and good-enough offers.

When you have a bull’s eye offer, customer demand and word-of-mouth drive regular evergreen sales that happen on a regular basis, right. You don’t have to launch the product every time you want sales. When Apple launches the iPad or a new version of their product, they launch it and sales continue to happen throughout the year even after that launch is over. But when you have a good-enough offer, sales only happen when scarcity and aggressive tactics are used. Like I said, when you have a good-enough offer, strong marketing must compensate for a weak offer. When you have a bull’s eye offer, very little marketing is required after the initial launch. But when you have a good-enough offer, you must constantly be hustling and marketing and adding bonuses and making things go away and launching and re-launching in order to get sales. When you have a bull’s eye offer, you are truly freed up to work strategically on your business because your product sell week-after-week, month-after-month on their own. The product sell themselves, right? But when you have a good-enough offer, you always have to be hustling and it’s truly unfortunate. In short bull’s-eye offers create sales that happen without your involvement but good-enough offers require you to create campaign after campaign to recreate excitement for your product. So just to close this out, bull’s-eye offers are awesome and good-enough offers suck.

So in conclusion, bull’s-eye offers create constant evergreen sales that occur without special promotions, hype or event-based marketing. And let me just tell you a story from my own business about when I knew we had a bull’s eye offer. I was flying. I just got off the plane. I had a webinar that I had to put on immediately to promote a product. During that webinar my sound went in and out. My video went in and out because I was on one of those crappy hotel Internet connections. I couldn’t demonstrate the product. I couldn’t demonstrate what was happening. A lot of stuff went haywire but we still got out an outrageous conversion rate on our webinar. I believe it was like 20 percent. And that’s because we had a bull’s-eye offer, people inherently wanted what we had to sell. We didn’t have to create a lot of hype. We didn’t have to create a lot of scarcity. And we didn’t have to take the product off the market in order to create sales. It was just a product that people wanted because we had a bull’s-eye offer.

So here are today’s takeaways. The first one is that it is absolutely worth it to create a bull’s-eye offer and I highly recommend that you take the time to create one because it does take time. The second takeaway is this, “Launches are just that.” They’re for launching the product but you’re really in a bad spot when you have to launch every single time you want any significant amount of sales volume to come into your business. Third, without a bull’s-eye offer, the hustling never ends. And finally bull’s-eye offers allow you to work on your business because sales happen without you, but good-enough offers require you to constantly be working in your business whenever you want sales and constantly be working in your business in order to stay afloat.

So with that said and with this main message driven home, let’s conclude today’s marketing show by wrapping up the marketing quiz. So the answer to today’s marketing quiz is Mr. Pemberton; the name of the adorable penguin who starred in episode number 10 of The Marketing Show is Mr. Pemberton.

Anyway, that wraps up today’s show. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll talk to you next week.

So in just a second, I’m going to show you some ridiculous split testing result, and I’m going to talk about how they apply to your marketing and your business, but before we get to that, let’s go over today’s marketing quiz. Today’s marketing quiz is all about split testing and split test results. So here’s the quiz. What is the best location to put an opt-in box on your blog if you want the highest opt-in conversion? Is it the upper left-hand side of your blog? Is it the upper right-hand side of your blog? Or is it below each blog article? We’ll answer that at the end of the show.

Here’s the incredibly interesting compelling and relevant and somewhat counterintuitive for a lot of people split test. So I was looking at different split test results the other day, and I came across this split test. It’s by HubSpot, and they tried two different versions of a landing page.

So HubSpot wanted to optimize and increase the percentage of people that downloaded the trial version of their software. So they ran two different versions of their page and measured which version of that page created the highest opt-in rate. So here are the two versions. Version one looked like this. It said what is your sales and marketing goal and someone could selected their marketing goal was to use the web to grow their business, or to deliver more quality leads for less. So this is a goal-based landing page. You decide what your goal is.

Another version of the page looked like this. Choose your profile, right? You could either select that you’re a business owner and then download the software or you could indicate that you’re a marketer and then you’d be shown good reasons why you should download their software as a marketer. Well, which version of this landing page do you think had the best result? Was it this version of the page where the visitors indicated what their goal is, what they’re trying to accomplish, or was it the version of the page where folks indicated what their role was? Which version do you think did better?

Well, interestingly, this version right here did better, the Choose-Your-Profile version. In fact, this version of the page did 50% better than this version of the page. The role-based marketing outperformed the goal-based marketing, and this actually conforms to just about everything I know about marketing over and over and over again. My clients and I have seen that generally, folks have an extremely vague notion of what they want to accomplish, but they have a very strong identity. They know who they are, and that’s pretty strong, and they have an idea what they want to accomplish, and that’s weak.

So let’s say someone searching for plumbing business advice. They generally know that they want to increase their income and that they have a plumbing business. They’re very certain that they have a plumbing business, but when it comes to their goal of increasing their income, it’s kind of fuzzy. They know that they want things to be better, but they generally don’t have a very crystallized specific goal, right, other than wanting things to be better. They generally know what their biggest frustrations are. They know what they’re upset about. They know who they’re blaming for their problems, but in terms of an incredibly articulated goal, they usually don’t have that.

In your marketing, you must speak to your prospect’s identity. You must say some version of this product is for chiropractors or this product is for women between their 30s and their 50s who are looking to accomplish X. You must address who that person is because people are very reluctant to embrace your strategy if they don’t believe that that product is for them specifically. When I do webinars, time and time and time again, I find that at least a third of the sales come from people who say things like, “You know, I am a healer from Ohio who is male and in my 40s. Is this product right for me?” And they want to hear you say, “No, this product is for healers in generally,” but they want to hear you say, “Yes, you Bob, in your 40s, from Ohio, as a healer, this product is for you,” because so many people, in fact, most people make buying decisions based on identity, not based on an incredibly clear idea of what they want to accomplish. So ensure that you not only include language about what people want to accomplish with your product or what your product will help folks accomplish, but also be sure to address the identities or the kind of people that your product can create success for.

So the best place to have an opt-in box on your blog based on numerous split testing results is the upper right-hand corner of the page. The right-hand side far outperforms the left-hand side, and it far outperforms the area below each blog post.

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed today’s episode of the Marketing Show. This episode of Marketing Show was brought to you by you. It was brought to you by your support and your constant feedback, and you know, energy that you send my way. I’m incredibly grateful. Anyway, if you’ve enjoyed the show, if you’ve benefited from it, if you’ve learned anything, I’d be super grateful if you’d donate a twit or donate a Facebook share, and go ahead and let your friends know about the good work that we’re doing over here.

Anyway, my name is Clay Collins, and thank you so much for watching the Marketing Show. I’ll talk to you next week.

So in just a second I’m going to tell you how we went from a six-figure company to a seven-figure company and The Rule of “Five 1s”; but before I do that here is today’s marketing quiz.

So every single day, approximately how many billion emails are sent online? Is it 50 billion? Is it 150 billion? Or is it 250 billion. I’ll answer that at the end of this show.

So in this episode I’m going to be explaining The Rule of “Five 1s” and this has been key to the growth of our company. So what is The Rule of “Five 1s”? Well, here it is. If you focus on one and only one product in your business, okay, your flagship product, only one, not multiple products, one product and you focus on mastering one and only one conversion mechanism – okay, so a conversion mechanism is like webinar, a sales page, a sales video, direct mail, cold calling, inbound calling, whatever it is – so you master one product which you make amazing, you master one sales mechanism, all right, you get really good at tweaking your sales page or tweaking your sales video or mastering your sales webinar, whatever it is, so one product, one conversion mechanism, and you master one traffic source, so that might be SEO, that could be pay-per-click, that could be partnerships, joint venture partnerships, that could be media buys, you know, it could be a lot of different sources, so you’ve mastered one product, one conversion mechanism, and one traffic source, and if you do this and you spend one year finding the right combination of the right product with the right traffic source with the right conversion mechanism and you really perfect those three things and you spend one year doing it, then you will get to $1 million or seven figures.

That is how we did it as a company and that is how I have seen so many businesses get to seven figures. Not by focusing on multiple products and selling them with multiple sales mechanisms and focusing on multiple traffic sources, but focusing, in fact, hyper-focusing on selling one product really well using one sales mechanism which they’re constantly split testing and tweaking and honing and refining, with one traffic source that they really master, right, it can take a long time to master one traffic source, let alone two or three; if they do this, in more cases than not, according to what I have seen, people can go really far in a short period of time.

So let me just give you an example of what this might look like. Let’s say you have one product called, “How to make your fuel-dependent car run on 100% electricity,” okay, so that might be your one flagship product. Your one conversion mechanism might be a webinar, right, you’re really good at giving a webinar that gets people who are interested to end up purchasing while educating them and teaching them a lot of stuff. If you focused one traffic source, let’s say that traffic source is pay-per-click ads, maybe in Google, maybe in other sources but pay-per-click, and you take one year testing and tweaking, you know, how can I improve my webinar, how could I make my product offering more appealing, how can I split test different price points for that one product and you get $2 million in a year. This requires, of course, tons and tons of focus.

So why is this key? Well, the reason is simple. It’s because of skill and focus. It takes, in a lot of cases, a lot of skill to really master one sales mechanism—to master the sales letter; to master the sales video; to master the webinar; to master cold-calling; to master direct mail sales letters, et cetera. That can take a lot of focus, right? Let alone, working on your product, that can take a lot of time; and finally, mastering a traffic source, really truly mastering a traffic source. If you do all of those three things, you can become good at them. But if you try and do more than one of any of those in a short period of time you’re going to end up being pretty poor at everything, plus there is a multiplicative effect.

Let me demonstrate. If you have two products, let’s say you have an entry-level product and a high-end product. You have two sales mechanisms, let’s say you’ve got a webinar and a sales video and you have three traffic sources, let’s say you’re focusing on SEO which is search-engine optimization; PPC, which stands for pay-per-click; and joint-venture partnerships, right? So let’s say you have two products, two sales mechanisms and three traffic sources, right? That means that there are twelve different combinations that you potentially have to make work because every single traffic source is going to react differently to your product and to your sales video, right? Some traffic sources prefer webinars; some of them prefer direct mails; some of them prefer this or that or the other thing; and some of these traffic sources prefer different products. So there are these tons of different combinations that you could potentially have when you start having more than one product, more than one sales mechanism and more than one traffic source. So the way you truly get good at what you’re doing is by having focus.

Anyway, just to sum this up, The Rule of “Five 1s” says that if you have one product and you truly focus on that; you have one conversion mechanism and you truly focus on that; one traffic source and you really master that traffic source; and then if you spend a year tweaking that traffic source, you know, getting better and better at split testing and improving your sales mechanism and you get better and better at crafting the offer for your product, then if you really stick with it, you – from what I’ve seen – and, you know, this isn’t a promise but this is based on a lot of looking at different people’s businesses, you can get to seven figures in one year.

Anyway, that is The Rule of “Five 1s”. It takes a lot of focus. Most people never get even close to having this much focus and that’s why most people never even get close to getting these kinds of financial numbers.

So, that wraps up today’s teaching. But to answer today’s marketing quiz, on average per day, around 250 billion emails are sent each and every day; 80 percent of which however are pure spam.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Marketing Show. If you’d like to contribute, please consider donating by sharing this link on Facebook or Twitter. And if you’d like to get all kinds of wonderful information and tips and tricks sent to your inbox, please subscribe to The Marketing Show by going to marketingshow.tv and opting in.

My name is Clay Collins and I’ll talk to you soon. Take care.

So last weekend, I went to Colorado. And as I was going there on my flight, I saw this, a pop-up, no less a pop-up meant to capture email addresses from people visiting WhiteHouse.gov, in fact, this is the very first thing that you see when you got to WhiteHouse.gov and it goes to confirm a fact that every single direct sales marketer on the Internet knows which that the email address is the most important asset when it comes to marketing online. Now, the pop-up is incredibly controversial, incredibly.

But as we’ve seen in our own business and as others have seen, it is highly effective – we have a website called businessideas.net which currently gets about 1,000 opt-ins per week, that’s 52,000 email addresses added per year. And it’s remarkable. We do that because among other things we have a pop-up that captures email addresses. And a lot of people have both criticized and praised the use of pop-ups.

And I’m here to tell you if President Obama at the White House can use a pop-up, then so can you. And I’m going to be talking in a second on how to properly use pop-up in your business.

So back to today’s marketing lesson, as I said, pop-ups are extremely effective, in fact, as you can see here, this graph illustrates the use of pop-ups as recorded by my friend Mary Jaksch who runs A-ListBlogMarketing.com. And as you can see here, when she turned on the pop-up, opt-ins skyrocketed. When she turned it off, they decreased. When she turned it back on again, they skyrocketed; and when she turned it off, they decreased.

So given that the data shows that this works and given that the White House is currently using this to build their email list, shouldn’t you? I’m here to argue that you should. And here are four tips for doing this correctly. Pop-up guideline number, graphics are absolutely key. The difference between a spammy-looking website often and a professional-looking website often has nothing to do with tactics that are used on the website. As you can see, spammy websites often have pop-ups but so does the White House. The difference is presentation and graphics and, of course, what you do after you can capture the email address. So if you want to do this and still remain professional and still be viewed as a professional, you absolutely must have a beautiful well-designed pop-up on your website.

Point number two, when someone goes to your site, the pop-up should not appear immediately. Someone is going to your website to get some specific content, and when that pop-up comes up, immediately, it’s obstructing them from what they want to see. So I like to set the delay on my pop-up for about 30 seconds. At that point, folks have time to navigate around the website, see some different things, maybe begin reading an article and evaluate whether or not you have a helpful website; 30 seconds after they’ve been to your website, however, that’s when the pop-up appears. They’re much more likely to opt-in when you have a delay and they’re much more likely to be happier about their experience when you do it this way.

Point number three, the pop-up should never appear more than once per visit. If someone comes to your website, a pop-up appears, and they either enter their email address and move on or they click to make the pop-up disappear, they should not see that pop-up again while they’re navigating around your website.

Point number four is that you should make the pop-up easy to close. Folks shouldn’t have to search around for a long time to find out how to close your pop-up. That should happen easily and you should clearly indicate how to go about closing that pop-up.

Anyway, if you’ve enjoyed today’s show, I’d appreciate it if you donate a tweet or a Facebook share. Leave a comment below and if you’d like to get more marketing goodness sent to your inbox, subscribe to our email list on the right-hand side of the page.

Anyway, my name is Clay Collins and thank you so much for watching The Marketing Show. I’ll talk to you later.

So today, I want to talk about what I call the Rituals of Receiving and how they apply to you. So most people who enter my life do not have a giving problem. They know how to give. They know how to give when they do coaching. They give free sessions. Their e-books are filled with so much value it’s absurd in a lot of cases. So most people who come to me and who are seeking marketing advice do not have a giving problem. They have a receiving problem. They have trouble receiving value that is proportional with the amount of value that they give in their products, and marketing, like I say, is the receiving arm of your business.

So most people, when they are not receiving the amount of money that they deserve, it’s because they do not understand the rituals, the cultural rituals of receiving. In every single culture, there are standard rituals for receiving things into our life. For example, during Christmas, there is a very specific ritual for sitting around the Christmas tree during the holiday and receiving presents. When you get married like Kim Kardashian, you receive all kinds of things from your relatives and presents, and there’s wedding showers and things like that. If you’re a Muslim, there’s a holiday called Eid, which is a time when you receive things. There are lots of rituals of receiving in every single culture.

Well, if you’re a business owner, there are rituals of receiving for businesses. One of those rituals is the product launch. Another one of those rituals is the interactive offer. So if you’re a coach, consultant, expert, leader, teacher, then one of the greatest rituals of receiving that you can take advantage of is something called the Hero’s Journey. There’s a man named Joseph Campbell who wrote a famous book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and in that book, he describes how every single mythological hero from every culture, the mythological heroes from fiction and movies, etcetera have all kind of gone through a very specific experience.

The book again is called The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and he describes this hero as going through what’s called the Hero’s Journey, and the hero’s journey has a number of faces, but I’m here to tell you that the hero’s journey is one of the greatest rituals of receiving that exist for you again as a coach, consultant, teacher, expert, etcetera, and when you want to take advantage of this, here’s how you do it, right. You need to take your tribe, your audience, your followers to an experience where they follow you as you go through the hero’s journey. It starts out being in the ordinary world, right. They see you as you are now. Then you receive a call to adventure to fix a problem for them, to discover a cure for whatever fears they’re facing, for overcoming something that is plaguing them. That’s your call to adventure. You move through a threshold where you go from the ordinary world to a world where you’re faced with ordeals, right. You encounter things in phase 4 during this ordeal phase where you rustle with their issues, where you fight their dragons, where you rescue them from some external force or army metaphorically speaking that is attacking them, and the final step that every hero with a thousand faces faces is the reward, which is the receiving.

Now I don’t have time to go into the specifics of how to implement all of this, but this is the backbone behind the training that we give to coaches, consultants, experts and teachers to show them how to receive in a way that is adequate and is proportional to the amount of value that they give to the world.

Anyway, to answer this week’s marketing quiz, Kim Kardashian was paid $10,000 per hour that she was married approximately.

That wraps up this week’s marketing show. My name is Clay Collins, and I’ll see you next week. Thanks for watching.

So today, I want to talk about how to really get started online if you are just starting an information product business or a coaching or consulting kind of business. So here are the facts. If you have a product that is $7, if you want to get to a million dollars in revenue, you have to sell over 142,000 units of your $7-product to get to a million. If your product is $97, in order to get to a million, you need to sell over 10,000 copies. If your product is $297, about 3,000. If your product is $2,000, you’ll only have to sell 500 units, and if you want to make a million dollars at a $10,000 price point, you only have to sell 100 units, not including any kind of affiliate payouts that might be coming out of that million dollars.

So here’s the deal. Although these items here are more scalable and they appeal to the masses a hell of a lot more than these more expensive items, these more expensive items are what are going to make you profitable at the beginning. It takes a lot of money to support 142,000 people at a $7 price points or 10,000 at a $97 price point. It takes a hell of a lot of infrastructure to distribute a product, to accept payment at this level when you’re doing this many transactions even if it’s just a downloadable e-book. If you sell 10,000 units, that is a hell of a lot of customer support. That’s a hell of a lot of automation that you have to create, and it’s frankly something that most people can’t do when they’re just getting started, yet most people start out charging very little when they first start.

So let’s say this $7 item is an e-book. This $97 item is maybe a series of videos. This $297 product is a series of videos with maybe some group coaching. This $2,000 product is maybe one-on-one coaching, and this $10,000 product is perhaps a mastermind or something of that nature if you’re a coach or consultant or expert, or something like that. What I’m saying to you is that when you are first getting started, you need to start out with the most expensive product that you can sell if you don’t want to go out of business. So many businesses fall flat. They never get off the ground because they start on this end. And I’m saying that you need to start with the most expensive thing that you possibly can.

So here’s the bottom line. When you’re first starting out, sell the most expensive product that you ethically can, and it’s this sort of truism, this truth that’s going to keep you in business initially, and it’s why in the marketing program, we focus very heavily on teaching people who are just getting started online, who are just getting started in their fields how to sell high-ticket items like coaching, masterminds, you know, lifetime membership things of that nature.

So the take-home message is when you’re first getting started, start out selling the most expensive products that you ethically can. Maybe that means that you sell just a handful of $1000 coaching packages. You’re going to be profitable in a much shorter amount of time with much fewer customers and a much smaller list if you start out with a higher-priced item.

Anyway, in conclusion, the answer to the weekly marketing quiz is $2 billion. In the most recent Halloween season approximately $2 billion worth of candy was sold.

My name is Clay Collins, and thank you so much for watching the Marketing Show. I’ll talk to you next week.

So in between the filming of the last episode of the Marketing Show and this one, something significant happened. I celebrated the birth of my grandfather who died just over a year ago. You’ve probably heard me talk about my grandfather. I talk about him a lot. In a lot of ways, he has affected me more when it comes to business and entrepreneurship than anyone who’s ever lived. As a child, I grew up standing in fields with him while he worked. A little bit about my grandfather, he grew more citrus trees than any person who has ever lived, you know, in the history of this earth. He grew over 600,000 citrus trees per year, and those citrus trees served hundreds of millions of people. Those citrus trees fed hundreds of millions of people.

So in honor of my grandfather and the legacy he left, I want to give you two takeaways from his life that have impacted me quite a bit. The first is that you do not need to ever justify doing work that makes you come alive. My grandfather didn’t have a narrative surrounding the work that he did that was sacred to him. He didn’t talk about purpose-driven tree growing. He didn’t write manifestos about purpose-driven tree growing. He didn’t start revolutions about it on Twitter. He didn’t talk a lot about why he did what he did, but he gave almost more than anyone else, and it meant more to him as a result. So that’s takeaway number one. You don’t need to justify doing what you love to do and what makes you come alive, and you don’t have to create a narrative around it.

The second takeaway comes from something that I remember my grandfather saying quite a bit, and that is that he wanted to die in his fields growing trees, doing the work that he loved, surrounded by the mountains of California and the earth that he had worked on for so long. He started Young’s Nursery, his citrus nursery with my grandmother immediately after their honeymoon. They had a very short two-day honeymoon, and then the next day, they started planting citrus trees together. And he lived on his nursery and he worked on that earth for multiple, multiple decades, over 50 years. And so, sort of with that memory of him saying that he wanted to die working in his fields, I’m left with the second takeaway, and I want to share it with you. Life is way too short to spend working in a field that you don’t want to die in. I want to say that again. Life is way too short to spend one minute, one hour, one week, one year, and especially one decade doing work that you don’t want to die doing. Life is too short to spend it working in a field that you don’t want to die in.

So in honor of my grandfather, I want to challenge you to not spend one more day doing work that you don’t want to die doing. So in closing, I want to say this. Happy birthday, grandpa. I miss you quite a bit, and you are missed incredibly.

So welcome to today’s show. I just got back from Phoenix, Arizona, where I was speaking at Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. Check me out rocking that pink t-shirt. Anyway, I just got back from that, and I’m about to in literally like 5 minutes, I’m about to depart to Las Vegas, Nevada for my own personal mastermind that I’m running at the Bellagio. Anyway, before I do that, before I run out for that, I wanted to unleash this show to the world, and as always, here is today’s marketing quiz. According to the website Socialnomics, which activity has social media overtaken as the number one activity on the web? Is it one, searching on websites like Google; two, porn; or three, e-mail? We’ll answer that at the end of the show.

So today, I want to talk about an incredibly, incredibly important concept. It’s called the Internet Marketing “Cycle of Stupid”. Let me explain to you how this works. So the cycle of stupid starts when someone begins with a stupid traffic strategy. Let’s say they spend all their time logging and tweeting and doing stuff on Facebook, and really engaging an incredibly non-scalable labor-intensive traffic strategy where they only get traffic when they blog on a regular basis, when they only get traffic if they’re tweeting it up and they’re doing all these activities that really kind of require them to spend an hour or two just to get one or two or three new subscribers to their list. Maybe they’ll spend an entire day writing a blog post, publish it, and that only brings them, you know, two to five new subscribers to their list. That is a stupid traffic strategy.

So it begins when someone starts with a stupid traffic strategy, and let’s say they continue doing this, and they build up a blog. They get maybe 2,000 or 5,000 blog subscribers, okay, completely free. And then because they perceive that the traffic they got was free – Let’s say they spent a year blogging. They get 5,000 blog subscribers – they perceive this entire activity to be free. And then someone says to them, “You know, you have all those people on your blog. You have all these people on your list. You’re blogging 3 to 5 times per week. You should monetize it.” And then what they do is they throw together, they slap together a stupid offer, right? Maybe an e-book for $47. Maybe something that they’re creating primarily because they want to monetize their list. So they create a book called The Awesomification of Awesomeness Awesome E-Book, you know, something ridiculous like this. They don’t think through the copy. They don’t create an incredibly compelling offer. They just merely throw something up because someone told them it was time for them to create a product. So they throw up a stupid offer and it doesn’t convert very well. Let’s say they make maybe, you know, $500 or $1,000.

So because their offer didn’t convert very well, because they didn’t make very much money, and because the percentage of people who see the webpage for this offer for the sales page don’t end up buying, they’re back to getting stupid traffic, right? They can’t pay for traffic because they have such a low conversion rate on their offer that they would actually lose money if they bought traffic. So if they paid $5 to get some visitors the website, the majority of those people who came from paperclip advertising wouldn’t buy because it’s not a very good offer. It’s just something that’s thrown together, and it’s an offer that most people who had not heard of them would never buy, right? Cold traffic would never buy. Also, they don’t end up being able to get partners for their product. They can’t get JV partners to promote it because it’s not converting very well, and it was just something that was thrown together because they were told that they needed to monetize, and so they don’t create a very compelling offer. Maybe they create the sales page in a day. Maybe they create the product over the course of one or two months.

So because their offer doesn’t convert, they’re back to getting stupid traffic again. They’re back to social media and blogging and tweeting and doing all these non-scalable activities to grow their list, and the cycle just perpetuates like this. The first offer didn’t convert very well so they end up creating a second offer. Maybe it’s a coaching program, maybe it’s something, but it’s something that only appeals to groupies. It’s not something that appeals to cold traffic, and so they can’t get paid traffic and they can’t get JV partnerships. So that’s the Internet Marketing Cycle of Stupid.

Well how do you overcome this? How do you overcome the Internet Marketing Cycle of Stupid? Well you do it by creating one compelling offer. Only one. You only need one compelling offer that reliably converts to build a seven-figure or an eight-figure business, much less a six-figure business. You need one offer where whenever you go, and you buy traffic, and you send that paid traffic to the offer, it converts. You need one offer where every time you approach, a joint venture partnership, when they promote for it, it converts, and all of a sudden, those joint venture partners tell others. All of a sudden, paid traffic. You start being able to acquire from all kinds of sources, and you can scale a business based on one offer that converts. You only need one offer. And yet, so many people, so many people spend maybe a month working on their offer when they can have a seven-figure business or easily have a six-figure business if they just had one offer that converts.

So what is it worth to you to have one offer that converts? I’ve spent 3 months to 6 months crafting one offer that converted, and that’s how we became a seven-figure business. That’s how we have doubled in size nearly every year that we’ve been in business. That’s how we grew from me to a team of seven people. That’s how we became one of the leaders in this industry when it comes to rapid, rapid growth.

Anyway, to answer the question, social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the internet. That wraps up our marketing show. I’m about to hop on a plane to Vegas, and I’ll talk to you next week. My name is Clay Collins and thank you so much for watching. Take care.

So I’m about to tell you my favorite quote of the last 3 months, but before I do that, I want to share a random little fact with you. According to the Washington Post – and I’ve just read this the other day – the average American buys 3.4 pairs of underwear each year. Actually, the average American male does. James, that’s kind of gross, right?

James: That’s disgusting.

Clay: Yeah, how many pairs of underwear do you buy per year?

James: It’s been 10 years since I bought a new pair.

Clay: Okay. Yeah, I buy a pair everyday. I have an Amazon.com subscription actually.

James: Nice. I should get one of those.

Clay: Yeah. So I want to start out this episode by telling you a story about a friend who recently attempted a product launch that kind of bombed. It didn’t do as well as he had hoped and as well as he had thought. And the reason it bombed, according to this person, was they had heard my friend, Jeff Walker, speak on stage about product launches. They had gotten some accumulated knowledge. They’d heard stories from other product launches and they had seen product launches, but they had never bought a product on how to do product launches. They had lots of general knowledge about how to execute, but they had very little specific knowledge, specific knowledge on how to launch their product. So they winged it based on generalities. And this brings me to a quote by one of my favorite people, Napoleon Hill, who said this: “General knowledge, no matter how great in quantity or variety it may be is of little use in the accumulation of money.”

Well, my version of this quote goes like this. “General knowledge, no matter how great in quantity or variety it may be is of absolutely, positively no use whatsoever when it comes to marketing. Period and end of story.” If you were going to go skydiving, you wouldn’t just watch someone else skydive, and you wouldn’t just collect a bunch of stories about skydiving and how and why it works, and then do it yourself. You’d probably get specific tactical training about what cord to pull at what time, how to position your body when you’re about to land, and you’d probably, you know, do tandem parachuting for a while before you even attempted it.

So why is it that so many people in their businesses bet the farm and their entire business on a marketing campaign about which they only have general knowledge, hearsay knowledge? Why do so many people try and launch with only conceptual information about how to launch? Why do so many people do interactive offers and presells with only general knowledge and conceptual knowledge about how it works rather than tactical, specific, email-by-email, step-by-step knowledge about what time to send specific messages and the psychology behind them, etcetera? Why do so many people bet the farm with only general knowledge when it comes to their marketing? Well, I’m here to tell you that they shouldn’t.

So here are the criteria that you should use before moving forward with a marketing campaign. Don’t move forward until you have specific knowledge on how to execute your marketing directly from someone who’s had enormous success. That’s criteria number one. Criteria number two is invest in specific knowledge. If someone has a course with specific knowledge on how to execute the marketing campaign that you’re looking to roll out, acquire it. Don’t go it alone with general knowledge.

So I’m about to go and purchase that ticket to Hawaii, but before I do that, I want to close out this Marketing Show by reminding you to market responsibly, market with all your heart, and market to change the world. My name is Clay Collins, and thank you so much for watching. I’ll talk to you next week. Take care.

So here’s the deal. 95% of businesses are stuck in their growth because they cannot go out and simply acquire the traffic they need to grow as a business. So many entrepreneurs are stuck blogging to grow their list or doing guest posts on other blogs to grow their list, or you know, tweeting and Facebooking, and they get stuck, right. They only grow so far. And here is the deal. If you want your business growth to be a hundred percent in your hands, you need to be able to just go out there and acquire the traffic that you need to grow to the size that you want to grow to. And the way to go out there and just get the traffic you need, just grab it, is paid traffic where you could just go out and buy what you need. But it doesn’t make sense to get paid traffic if you’re going to lose money on it. You want a situation where you’re paying $5 in order to make $10, instead of paying $10 in order to maybe get $5 worth of sales.

So let’s talk about how to do this. Let’s talk about how to create advertising campaigns, paid advertising campaigns that make money for you that have a positive ROI instead of losing money. So how do you do that? Well, the number one thing you need to do is have alignment in your paid marketing campaign or your paid advertising campaign, and the number one mistake that I see people making is that they don’t have alignment with their marketing campaign.

So what are the things that you must have alignment with in order to make this work? Well, you must have alignment between your ad placements, where it’s appearing, your ad content, what the content of the ad actually says, your landing page, and what you’re eventually selling or your offer. So let’s go into the computer so I can show you an example of exactly what I mean.

So like I said, there must be congruence between four things. The people who see your ad need to see an ad that is perfectly suited to them so the ad must be in complete alignment with where that ad is being placed. The landing page that people go to after they click on that ad must be a complete match to the content of the ad. So exactly what you promised in the ad needs to be delivered on the landing page and the eventual product that you offer needs to be lined up with everything.

So let me just give you an example of this done well, okay. So this is an amazing example. Let’s say you placed an ad on an online forum for aspiring actors. So people are hanging out in this forum who are interested in breaking into Hollywood and getting paid acting jobs, and you place an ad on that site that is all about becoming an actor or an actress, so getting paid to be an actor or an actress. So people are on a site where they’re interested in becoming actors and actresses, they see an ad about, “Here’s how to become a paid actor and actress.” The landing page that they go to after they click on that ad is about a free short course being offered in exchange for someone’s e-mail address that shows them how to get their first Hollywood job, and the eventual offer, what’s going to be eventually sold is a product that shows people how to get jobs as actors.

So see how there’s complete alignment. There’s an ad on a forum for aspiring actors. The ad itself is all about how to become an actor and actress. Just click here to learn how to become an actor and actress. They go to a landing page and they are offered a free short course on how to get your first Hollywood job and the eventual offer is about get a course or their coaching program or whatever on how to get a job as an actor. So it’s an aspiring actor seeing an ad on how to become an actor or actress. They’re brought to a page when they click on the ad on how to get their first Hollywood job, and the offer that they finally get is about how to get a job as an actor. That’s the course being sold. So that’s a good example.

Here’s a bad example. Here’s how to screw it up. So let’s say we have the same ad placement. We have an online forum for aspiring actors, okay, but the ad content says, “Learn How to Move Confidently: What Acting School Never Taught You.” So the landing page says something about how movement is negatively affecting your self-esteem and keeping you from jobs you want, and the eventual thing that is being sold is about how to move in a way that demands respect and gets you noticed. So you’ve got an online forum for aspiring actors. An ad is being shown that says, “Learn How to Move Confidently: What Acting School Never Taught You.” The landing page is about how movement is negatively affecting your self-esteem and keeping you from the jobs you want and the eventual offer is about how to move in a way that demands respect and gets you noticed.

Now do you see how this becomes diluted over time? You’ve got aspiring actors, and then, you’re kind of talking about how to move confidently. You kind of have them there. The landing page that they go to when they click on an ad says how movement is negatively affecting your self-esteem and keeping you from jobs you want, so it gets the message. It gets a little bit more diluted, and the eventual offer is about moving in a way that demands respect. So, you know, we started out in a forum for aspiring actors and we ended up at some course that’s about how to move in a way that demands respect. So there isn’t absolute alignment here and there should be.

So just to reiterate, a good example is ad placement is an online forum for aspiring actors. The content is about how to become an actor or actress. The landing page is about getting your first Hollywood job. Eventual offer is about how to get jobs as actors. That example is that same online forum where the ad content is, “Learn how to move confidently,” kind of overlaps, the landing page is about how movement is negatively affecting your self-esteem and keeping you from jobs you want and the eventual thing sold is about moving in a way that demands respect and gets you noticed.

So the good example is all about acting jobs. So you’re on a forum for aspiring actors. You know, the ad is about how to get an acting job. The landing page is about getting an acting job. Eventual offer is about getting acting jobs. The bad example is a forum for aspiring actors. We talk about how to move confidently. The landing page is a little bit more diluted. The eventual offer is a little bit more diluted. So it gets more diluted over time.

So just to reiterate, there needs to be complete alignment between who sees your ad, the ad content, the landing page, and the offer. So the take-home messages here are really that there must be absolute congruence in the entire ad campaign if you don’t want to lose money. Everything must line up. And the second take-home message is really that you can’t convert traffic that’s seeking one thing into traffic that’s seeking another. I’ve talked about this. I spoke about this in a previous episode of The Marketing Show where I talked about one client who had lots of traffic for dog cages. So lots of people were visiting their website looking for dog cages, and they were trying to sell a course on how to train your dog thinking that if someone was seeking a dog cage if they own a dog, and that they would also be interested in courses on dog training, and that course didn’t sell because you can’t convert traffic that’s seeking one thing into traffic that’s seeking another.

That wraps up this episode of The Marketing Show. If you enjoyed this content, I highly recommend that you subscribe to the show, and if you’d like to do me a favor, if you’ve enjoyed this, if you’ve benefited from this, I’d really appreciate it if you’d click on the little iTunes link below and give us a rating in iTunes. Give this podcast a rating inside of iTunes. Anyway, I’m about to get on that flight to Seattle, and I’ll see you next week. My name is Clay Collins, and thank you so much for watching the Marketing Show. Have a beautiful day.

But before I get into that insight, which is hugely important, and this is one of the most important episodes of The Marketing Show, but before I get into that insight, I just want to talk a little bit about some of the people that I met when I was speaking at the event. When I speak on stages, and you know, share my content, share my message to the world, I often meet some really interesting and great and fantastic people who I would like to recommend to you.

So one of the guys I met was this guy, Robert Evans. You can check him out at TheMessengerNetwork.com. Robert Evans has been behind the success of so many authors and speakers and people who have a message to get out into the world, but primarily authors, primarily people who publish books, and primarily spiritual authors, but he’s doing fantastic work. He’s creating a huge movement, and he’s becoming a really good friend, and he’s a great guy, and he’s also the guy who put on the event that I spoke at. So he’s a really great guy.

Another guy who was on stage with me at that event is this guy, Bo Eason. And Bo has created what the New York Times called the Best Play of the Decade. So he’s a playwright and he has been performing on Broadway for I believe – don’t quote me on this – but I believe the last 12 years, he has a play called Runt of the Litter, and it’s actually about his own history as a professional football player. How many football players do you know who later become award-winning acclaimed playwrights and actors? Not many, but he’s an absolutely amazing person, one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard speak, and just an amazing all-around guy with a lot of great things to share.

Another person I met was this guy, Kyle Cease. Kyle Cease has his own comedy central one-hour special. I believe it came out in 2009. It was voted the best comedy central special of 2009. The guy is amazing. He’s funny, but unlike most comics who are really negative, he has an incredibly inspirational message, and Kyle is out there speaking at colleges and changing the world, an absolutely fantastic guy. So I wanted to introduce you to those guys because they’re pretty incredible.

So I’m going to talk today about the need for absolute alignment in your marketing and really why you need to stop fooling yourself, okay. So this is kind of part 3 in my rant against monetization, but I’m also going to talk about what you can do about it. This is incredibly important. So please, please, please, if you absorb no other content about marketing this week or this month, please absorb this message. This is highly controversial, but I think by the time you’re done with this you’re going to be agreeing with me. If not, leave a comment.

So here’s what most people want. This is what I’ve seen most people want. They want to take what’s in their brain, their existing knowledge and information, what exists now, and then they want to use marketing like it’s this machine, and use marketing to convert what’s in their brain to cash. So they start out with what they’ve got, right, some knowledge, a book, some expertise, and then they want to put that through a machine, and then they want money to come out at the other end. They basically want marketing to convert what exists now in their head into cash, right? So marketing is this conversion mechanism.

And I’m here to tell you that that is absolutely false. This does not work. It is so rare that I have seen this work, and the instances of this working where you have something and you convert it to cash or you monetize your mission, or you monetize somehow, this works so infrequently it’s ridiculous, okay.

Here is what works. What works is when you create a store from the ground up to create income, and that income appears, right? When you create a store or when you create a business, you’re not monetizing. Monetizing is the act of taking something that was never meant to create money and converting it into cash or converting it into money. No one would ever say that they monetized their food cart, right, because a food cart business was created to make money.

Wal-Mart – And I’m not a fan of Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart would never say that they monetize their stores because their stores were created as businesses from day 1. So what works is creating something from the ground up to generate income and then making income from it, not taking something that was never created to make income, right, and then converting that somehow to cash, but the point here is that there’s no monetization or conversion happening with this food cart whereas when you take something like a garage sale for example and convert it then you’ve got something jerry-rigged.

So here’s what I mean. On the left, you have a garage sale. Now a garage sale is a version of monetization. Someone did not deliberately go out and acquire everything that’s at that garage sale so that it could be resold. People did not deliberately produce all the items that are at that garage sale to create money. A garage sale is an afterthought. A garage sale is saying we have all this stuff – and in a lot of cases it’s junk – we have all this junk, how can we turn this into money? And that’s what a garage sale is. It represents monetization, taking just some stuff that’s lying around and saying, “How do we convert this into cash?” Whereas a real business like the Apple store was engineered from day 1 to create an income, right? Apple never said, “How do I monetize the iPad? How do I take the iPad and make money?” They created the iPad from day 1 to be something that was for sale.

So an analogy from monetization is a garage sale. It’s awkward. It’s not in a traditional storefront. It isn’t really good at creating income whereas a real business, right, let’s say, Apple or Apple Storefront, is created from the ground up to create income. But let me drive this point home a little bit further. The reality is that instead of monetizing your current assets to convert them “into money,” you need to create something that’s designed from the ground up to generate income, i.e, a real business.

For example, like I said before, you’ll never hear Apple say that it monetized the iPad because the iPad was created from the ground up to create income. Wal-Mart doesn’t monetize its stores because they were created from the ground up to create income. You’ll never hear your local gym say it monetized its gym space because making money was kind of the point in the first place, right? None of these people are monetizing. And none of the great successful businesses are monetizing. They were created from the beginning, from the ground up to generate income.

Monetizing is awkward and backwards because it’s taking something that was never created to generate income and just jerry-rigging it to squeeze some cash out. So what we end up monetizing, so often, are things that were never intended to create money in the first place, and the result is kind of awkward and unnatural and amateur, right? We see this all the time. Amateurs occasionally write mediocre e-books that anyone else could have written to squeeze a little money out of their website. They say, “I have all this traffic. How do I monetize it?” But they didn’t generate that traffic in the first place to feed into a business that would create an income so they end up just kind of like throwing up some ads or writing some junkie e-book to try and squeeze a little money out of it, and that never quite works out very well and it’s awkward.

So let’s talk about professionals versus amateurs. Professionals get up everyday, look at themselves in the mirror, rededicate themselves to their mission all over again, execute like madmen and produce excellence week after week. Actually, they produce excellence week after week regardless because that’s the difference between an amateur and a professional. But amateurs monetize, right? They have garage sales. Professionals build businesses. So to bring this to some kind of a conclusion, I want to say this. Monetization in marketing rarely works and rarely works well because it is a form of conversion thinking, and conversion thinking rarely works well in marketing.

So let me give you just some other examples of conversion thinking. People are all the time trying to take traffic that is looking for one thing and convert into traffic that wants to buy something else. So for example, I had a client that ranked extremely well for the term doghouse in Google, and they assumed that if people were searching for doghouses that that same group of people might also be interested in purchasing dog training products because if you’re searching for a doghouse, you probably own a dog, and you might need dog training products. And so, they threw up an advertisement and a sales letter for dog training products, and they sold almost nothing because they were trying to convert doghouse traffic into dog training traffic. The only way, if you’re really going to do well at selling dog training advice is to get people who were searching for dog training, but they were trying to do this conversion, and this conversion almost never works. So it’s very difficult to convert that, and conversion thinking almost never works.

I also see people trying to do things like take a piece of their product and give it away as a bribe in order to get people to buy their overall product, and that’s another example of conversion marketing because they’re trying to take something that was intended to teach and convert it into something that will sell, right? That free piece of their product was intended to teach and they’re trying to give it away in order to generate a sale. And again, giving away a piece of your product in order to sell that product almost never works because you need to give away a free bribe, right, in order to get people to opt in that was generated from the ground up to create desire, not to teach, if you know what I mean.

And there are a lot more examples of this conversion thinking failing time after time. So in the next episode, I’m going to talk about how conversion thinking, right, taking something that was intended to do one thing and trying to get it to do another, I’m going to talk about how conversion thinking is screwing up your ads. If you are like most people online, your ads are not making you money. You’ve bought piece of advertising after advertising after advertising and you place your banner ads in such a way, and you’ve created those banner ads in such a way that you are not making money. Most people who spend money on advertising online fail miserably, and this conversion thinking is really at the root of this whole problem. So in the next episode, I’m going to talk about how conversion thinking is screwing up your ads, and I’m also going to talk about how to create ads that actually make you money.

So sort of the take-home lesson here is that you should create products and businesses that are created from the ground up to create income so that you don’t have to monetize, and monetization is something that’s done as an afterthought where you jerry-rig a website that was not intended to create money, to create money, and it’s awkward.

So that’s the end. I look forward to speaking with you on the next Marketing Show where we’re going to talk about how to create profitable ads by avoiding conversion thinking. My name is Clay Collins, and thank you so much for watching The Marketing Show.

And he, in fact, missed something that a lot of people miss. And so today, I want to talk to you about why your customers think you’re full of crap. I’m not saying you are a full of crap, I’m just saying that when they think you’re full of crap; this is probably the reason why.

So, when it comes to their money most people and most of your customers are incredibly, incredibly smart. People inherently grasp things that they normally do not grasp when it comes to their money. For example, most people know that if they are buying something that purportedly creates an internal change, that it’s going to change them on some emotional level in terms of their confidence or level of freedom or something spiritual. Most people know that if they buy something that creates an internal change and it doesn’t create an external change, a very real external change, that the internal change was bogus. Most people grasp the mind-body connection; most people grasp the connection between the spiritual and the physical.

So, if you sell something that purportedly creates an internal change and you do not spell out how it’s going to help them on the external claim, they’re going to think you’re crap. Likewise, if you say something to help someone with an external issue, let’s say money, but you don’t describe the internal shifts that will happen, they’ll probably think you’re full of crap. And I’ve tested the hell out of this. You need to sell both especially if you sell information products or courses or consulting or coaching or expertise or advice or anything like that.

If you are selling a transformational experience, if you just focus on the external, people are going to wonder why it doesn’t produce an internal result. If you just sell a change in mind and it does not affect the body, people will not believe you. So, let me give you some examples here, and I’m sorry about the lighting situation. My studio is in transition and this is actually some natural light that’s coming in through the sunroof.

So, if you are selling freedom and control, okay? You are selling an internal sense of freedom and control but you don’t spell out that it’s going to produce some sort of external change and this is going to vary from market to market and from customer base to customer base.

But if you say that you are selling freedom and control and that you are going to create an internal shift in them thru meditation or thru whatever you do and that does not produce an external outcome, again, people grasp the mind-body connection, people grasp the connection between the spiritual and the physical and the non-physical and the physical. So if you are selling freedom and control thru meditation or whatever, some kind of internal shift, and you are not saying that it’s going to produce something external, let’s say for example, enough money to do whatever you want, right? You’re not selling a path to that while you’re selling freedom and control, then people are going to know you’re bogus. Now, it doesn’t have to be, you know, anything on this side, I’m just saying if you’re selling an internal you need to know what an external component your customer base wants, okay.

So, let’s say it also goes the other way around. So if you’re selling enough money to do whatever they want and you’re not talking about how it’s going to create an internal shift for them when they go through your course or your program or whatever you’re doing. People are also going to know it’s bogus. It’s not possible to make a whole lot of money from nowhere, from poverty, without some internal shifts happening. And, yes, there are people who are successful and just selling the spiritual without the physical and there are people who are successful at just selling the physical without the spiritual.

But the people who sell the most are people who sell both because, again, the human brain gets that connection.

Let’s say you sell confidence around women. So you sell to the guys who want to be more confident around women. If you don’t claim that this is going to help them get a girlfriend and help them get, maybe, more sex in their life or whatever you’re selling, I mean, this is a biggie for guys, the whole sex thing. If you don’t claim that, then people are going to go, “Well, is the confidence around women really real?”

Is this internal state really real if it doesn’t produce an external outcome? Likewise, if you just go around selling sex, like, “Hey, you know, this course will help you get laid 10 times a day,” but you don’t talk about how the course will also help people create an internal shift, they’re not going to believe that the external is real. Or they’re going to see the whole thing as just a meaningless exercise, because they know that the external without the internal is likely to just pass away. So why don’t people sell both?

Why is it that so many people just sell the external and don’t sell the internal while other people just sell the internal but don’t sell the external? I believe that it’s because of confidence. People who sell meditation courses and internal changes often are too scared to claim that this is going to produce an external result.

And I do not believe that it’s because what they do does not produce an external result, I believe that it’s because they are so narrowly focused on what they teach and what they provide that they are often blind to the real world effects of what they do.

So I challenge you to think hard about what you generally sell. Are you selling the internal or the external? If you are providing the internal, I challenge you to figure out in a very specific, real way, the external result it produces; the specific external result it produces. And if you sell the external, then I challenge you to figure out internally the shift that people make once they’ve mastered the external that you teach.

My name is Clay Collins and thank you so much for watching The Marketing Show. I’ll talk to you next week. Bye.

So back in the day, people sold features. So let me just give you an example. We’re going to use a consistent example here. A feature of a product might be that it comes with 12 videos, let’s say you sell an online course and it comes with 12 videos. So a feature might be that you have 12 videos. The benefit of these videos might be that you show someone; let’s say they’re your videos, that you show someone step by step how to set up a WordPress blogging platform or system for their business.

And what’s beautiful about the videos is that they are screen captures and you show people step by step exactly what to do, nothing is left to the imagination and they can see it happen. That’s the beauty of having these videos. So the feature is that there are 12 videos. The benefit is that after you watch them, you’re going to see exactly how to set up this blogging system for your business step by step.

Okay, so we’ve evolved from features to benefits to outcomes. Well, let me just explain that. Let’s say these 12 videos that show “someone” actually show a business owner how to set up a blog and blogging system for their business and further that they’re specifically created to show a cosmetic dentist how to start blogging and become local respected authority on cosmetic dentistry in their local market, to become the trusted authority on cosmetic dentistry in their neighborhood to build trust and to blow everyone out of the water. So the outcome of setting up this blogging system might be that cosmetic dentists on average double the number of clients they have as a result of becoming the trusted authority, using their blog to rank high on Google; all this stuff.

So the feature is that there are 12 videos in the course. The benefit of watching those is that you get step-by-step instructions; you get to see how to do it with your very own eyes. The outcome would be that you could double your business or double your client base.

So people have been preaching outcomes here for, I don’t know, a couple of years now, two or three years. What we’re seeing now is that the best thing to sell is really a transformation. And let me tell you about the difference between an outcome and a transformation. An outcome is selling a very specific end point as a result of the training you’re selling, for example. You are selling an externally verifiable outcome when you’re selling outcomes. And what I mean by externally verifiable is that other people can verify that you achieved this outcome.

So if you’re selling like eternal bliss, that doesn’t work. But if you’re selling an externally verifiable outcome, and this example, other people can see, they can look at your income statement, they can look at your tax statements, they can look at your business accounting and they can see that you at least doubled your client base, right, on average. Right, so obviously, this has to be true. But you’re selling an outcome, for example.

The next part of this and where we’re at now is selling a transformation. And the difference between selling an outcome and selling a transformation is that while an outcome delineates or is selling this endpoint, this externally verifiable outcome and endpoint, a transformation is selling the difference between point A and point B. So when you’re selling a transformation, you’re not only selling the end point, right, this externally verifiable outcome or end point as a result of using your training, your product, but you’re also describing the starting point; and that requires you to know a lot more.

When you sell a feature, you don’t have to know anything about your customer. You just have to know about the features of the product. When you sell a benefit, you kind of have to know what would benefit your customer. Don’t talk about always having an ice-cold glass of water when you come home from work if that’s not something that’s really a benefit to them, right? So this requires an even greater knowledge of your customer. When you sell an outcome, let’s say, increasing the client base of a cosmetic dentist practice, you have to know even more about the customer and where they’re looking to ultimately go.

It’s not just enough to say, we’ll make you an authority. You’ve got to provide them an outcome, what is being an authority going to provide, right, being an authority in your market is a benefit; the outcome is that you double your client base, hugely important.

When you’re selling a transformation, you not only need to describe the endpoint but the beginning point. So what you might say if you were selling a transformation is the average income per dentist will go from 100,000 to 200,000 per year to 200,000 to 400,000. Now, you could just say that someone is going to make 200,000 to 400,000 as a result of using this system, but that’s not a transformation.

A transformation also describes the beginning point; you know where they’re starting. And if you create marketing that is incredibly aware of where people are starting out and where they end, conversions will be much higher than if you just describe where people end up. Someone might have a course telling me that I’m going to make a billion dollars; but if I don’t believe that it’s created for someone who’s starting out at my particular point, then I’m not going to believe that they can take me to where they say I’m going. And a lot of people believe that when they are this specific in their marketing that they lose customers, but they actually gain so many more.

So we’re evolving from features to benefits to outcomes, where you just specify the endpoint in your marketing, to transformations where you specify where they are to where they end up. For example, if you weigh 300 pounds, this is a product that will get you down to 200. For example, if your business is currently bringing in 2,000 a month, we can help you bring you 2,500; that’s a transformation. If you just say you can help someone to get to 5,000, that’s selling an outcome. If you tell them that you can bring them from 2 to 5, that’s a transformation.

Anyway, I hope this has been useful. I hope you seriously consider implementing transformations in your life. I wish you all the best. Thank you for being here and I’ll talk to you next week. My name is Clay Collins and you are watching The Marketing Show. Take care.

The realization is that it’s time for you, not for me, this isn’t about me, but it’s time for you to start receiving. There’s a lot of talk about what marketing is and what marketing is not. And a lot of people believe that marketing is a bunch of voodoo. They tell themselves that they’re not marketers, that this isn’t something that they are wired to do, and that this isn’t something that they are fundamentally good at. Marketing is something that they are fundamentally not good at. And I’m here to tell you that marketing is not a thing in itself. Marketing is not a science, okay. Here’s what marketing is. Marketing is the part of your business that is responsible for the receiving of value. So every single business gives value and receives value. Right? It does both. My guess is that you are fundamentally aligned with the giving part of your business. You know how to give. The majority of my customers come to me and the majority of people I work with do not have a giving problem. They give abundantly. In fact, they’ve given themselves in some cases into poverty.

Most of my customers do not have a giving problem, they have a receiving problem. And I’m here to tell you that marketing is nothing more than the receiving part of your business energetically. And you were meant to receive. You were meant to receive abundantly. And there is an imbalance in your business between giving and receiving. And that imbalance has put you in a state of crisis and things are not going as they should if you are most people. There is an imbalance between the giving and the receiving.

And so my job is to stand here and hold a space open for you to receive and for you to feel like you deserve the receiving that is coming to you. So just to break this down a little bit I want to make it abundantly clear that you cannot, you cannot, give your way into receiving. A lot of people believe that if they just give away enough ebooks, if they just give away enough information products, if they give enough free coaching sessions that they will receive, that somehow if they give more they will automatically receive more.

And I’m here to tell you that giving and receiving are two separate parts of your business in a very real sense. You cannot give your way into receiving. In fact, in almost every single case you must receive abundantly before you can give. If you are a dentist, you might be the very best dentist in the world, you might be more qualified than anyone else to repair my teeth but you do not have a shot at my teeth unless you have received my money, unless you have received me as a customer.

As a child, your parents invested in you. They gave to you, they loved you, they nurtured you for years before you got that first job at the age of 14 and were able to give back. You must receive before you can give. And I’m here to tell you that that thing that you were born to do, that you are put on earth to do, or that you have fire inside about doing… you can’t give that like you need to unless you receive like you need to.

Marketing is the receiving part of your business. Marketing consists of two things fundamentally. And this is what I like to provide to the people and this is the purpose fundamentally of what I do here on this earth. Okay, it’s to provide this. Marketing involves the rituals of receiving.

So just like during Christmas there are rituals that involve sitting around the Christmas tree and receiving gifts. There are rituals around receiving around your birthday. In business, there are very specific rituals for your business to receive income and to receive value from the world in exchange for the investment and for the what you give out to the world.

So marketing is the rituals of receiving for your business and also the tools of receiving. The rituals of receiving are the marketing campaigns, the specific strategies. You know, how to construct the sales letter, how to construct mechanisms and marketing campaigns that allow you to receive from the world. It also is the tools of receiving. The shopping carts, the affiliate systems, everything from maybe a technology perspective that allows you to logistically receive value from the world.

A big component of this that will also help you is a community to support you in your receiving because you were taught from the time you were born to give and give and give. But something that the world probably did not teach you to do is how to receive. And marketing in your business is the receiving arm of your business. And if you’ve been in business very long and if you’ve tried much you can probably affirm that you cannot give your way into receiving. They are separate. You cannot do more giving to receive and you cannot receive more in a way that makes you automatically give.

But your inability to receive will definitely hinder your ability to give. Anyway, I would like to conclude this very important episode of The Marketing Show by encouraging you to do one thing. Before today is over I want to challenge you to go to your customer base even if your business doesn’t exist yet. Go to one person and ask them to make an investment in themselves. Open up your hand and be open to receiving from the world. You were meant to receive. And it is a specific skill set, it is a specific set of tools, it is a specific set of patterns that you probably have not been given if you are struggling in business or if you are not receiving value from the world that is adequate or as proportional to what you are giving.

Do this tonight. My name is Clay Collins, thank you so much for watching The Marketing Show. Take care and I’ll talk to you next week.

When I first started in business, I believed I was going to fail but I bet on myself anyway. In fact, the truth is that every single entrepreneur I know, during every single major junction in their business, when they really took something on that was huge, they believed on some very real visceral level that they were going to fail. The difference is that they bet on themselves.

You see, you can live your life in one way or another. You can live your life betting on yourself or you can live your life betting against yourself and the odds are irrelevant. They’re irrelevant. People spend so much time calculating the odds, trying to figure out if this is going to work or that is going to work, when the only thing that matters is whether you’ve oriented your life in a way where you are betting on yourself or whether you’ve oriented your life in a way where you are betting against yourself. Even if the odds are 99 to 1 against you, you will be miserable if you’re betting against yourself. The odds are irrelevant. So I want to share some things with you, some incredibly important things.

Most people’s lives are fundamentally designed around, “What if this won’t work?” Most people’s lives are fundamentally designed around them betting against themselves. Most people get up and go to jobs they hate, they’re in relationships they don’t want to be in. They’re doing all kinds of things that they don’t want to do because they have decided that what they want to do, what they were born to do, what they feel in their heart they should be doing isn’t viable. They’ve decided that their heart’s wish, that their real intention won’t work. They’ve hedged their bets and decided that they’re going to loose, and that’s why they have never stepped into the greatness of who they are.

Like I said before, most people are in day jobs they don’t want to be in. Most people have never written that book that’s been burning inside them that they know they were put on this earth to write. In fact, most entrepreneurs, this isn’t just something that applies to people who are in day jobs, most entrepreneurs are in markets they know will work, they’re creating products they know will sell. The reason they started their business in the first place has been put on the back burner because they have found a reliable source of income and they’re not willing to give it up to bet on that reason they got to be in business in the first place. They’ve decided even in business, even when everybody else thinks they’re living the life, they decided to play it safe because they found what worked, and they’re not willing to step into something that won’t work because they do not want to risk failure. But there are two ways to live … you can either bet on yourself or you can bet against yourself, and when you bet against yourself you will always loose.

Let me go into this just a little bit further and talk a little bit about investment theory. When you bet on a stock that costs $50, the most you can loose is $50. Right? If everything goes horribly, which it usually doesn’t, usually a stock that $50 doesn’t go to zero, but if you loose everything the most you’ve lost is $50. But the most you can gain is several multiples of that $50. That stock might go to $100, $200, $300, $1000. It’s not unheard of. I want you to know the ceiling on what you’re capable of is absolutely infinite. It is immeasurable. You were put on this earth to do something and if you live a life of dissatisfaction, it’s probably because you know what you’re capable of and decided to bet against it.

Just going into this a little further. Most people will not invest in you until you’ve invested in yourself. Most people will not give you money; most people will not invest in your business until you’ve invested in you and until you bet on you.

Finally, I want to say something that I think is pretty key to all this. Most people are constantly calculating and working the numbers and trying to figure out is this the right product, is this the right market, and is this the thing that’s going to work? How can I work this angle? Do I have some competitive edge? Are there any competitors in this marketplace? If there are, I don’t want to go into this. Et cetera, right? Life becomes very anxiety-ridden and confusing when you’re trying to play the odds because, fundamentally, things are going to work out in one way or another, regardless of whether or not you play the odds. They’re going to work out in the way such that you are betting in the fullness and immensity of what you know you’re supposed to be doing, and you’re not doing that. You know what that thing is, and what the market says is often irrelevant. I’ve seen people who trade markets out of thin air in less than six months because they bet on themselves in a huge way, and the power of their commitment created such unlimited demands that they couldn’t fulfill it.

So I want you to do something today. I want you to think of one, real, putting-yourself-on-the- line kind of way to bet on yourself. And I want you to not go to bed tonight until you’ve done it.

Thanks so much. I want to let you know just in conclusion here that we have an iTunes podcast. I’d love for you to click on that iTunes podcast and rate this podcast what you think it is. If you think it’s 5 stars or 4 stars or whatever the greatest number is, that’s wonderful. If you think it’s 1 star or zero stars, that’s fine, too. But I would love for you to give us a rating on iTunes. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll talk to you next week. My name is Clay Collins and this is The Marketing Show.

I see a lot of people creating name for programs that have names like, you know, the awesomification – awesomesos, awesomeness program or something like that. And they’re really cool, but they only work on people that they have a long term established relationship with. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want the people who by my stuff to be limited only to people who know me. And that’s why I create marketing that appeals to cold, cold traffic, people who have never ever heard of me. And I think that with the advent of social media, people have gotten lazy. People believe that they need to first create a relationship with a bunch of people that they have to be popular, that they have to be admired, that they have to set up a blog then blog for a year or two then become famous then put out a product.

And that mindset has created lazy marketing that assumes a relationship. And the difference between hardcore marketing and a lot of the marketing that’s done on the internet is that hardcore marketing is created to convert or create buyers from a list of people who have never heard of you before. Back in the day, direct response copywriters would write an ad for a stove and someone would put three months of their savings in the mail, right? Cash, in the mail and hope that a stove would arrive. That’s how good the copy was, there was no existing relationship. People operated by faith because the copy was that good. Old school direct response marketers wrote ads and mailed them out through the mail. And people bought.

No existing relationship, no Facebooking, no blogging everyday of the week to create a relationship. Now I’m not saying those things are bad at all, in fact those are great things. I make this Marketing Show after all, but what I’m saying, and what I’m proposing to you, is that you need to be creating your marketing for people who have never heard of you. So let’s break this down. Let’s talk about getting old school, right, old school. So let’s talk about marketing for warm traffic versus marketing for cold traffic, okay? When you market for warm traffic, it requires that you be popular first, right? You have to create an existing relationship, you have to be popular. This takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of blogging, and it takes a lot of work that you have to do. You have to be present on the market place all the time. And that’s okay to do.

But I don’t want my marketing to require that I do all this stuff. On the other hand, when you create marketing that works for cold traffic, it does not require you to be popular or famous. The marketing does all the work, right? You’re fame does not have to take over and compensate for your crappy marketing, okay? When you create marketing for warm traffic, it does not convert paid traffic, right? If you go out and you pay for traffic, that traffic will not convert because that traffic has never ever heard of you. And I propose that the difference between a business that is scalable and a business that is not scalable is that a scalable business can buy customers.

Do you know why the Yankees crush it every single year? It’s because they buy whoever they want. They don’t rely on draft picks, they don’t rely on a bunch of other things…

…they buy their success. And if you want to do well in business, you can’t rely on joint venture partners exclusively, you can’t rely on your Facebook friends, you can’t rely on anyone to do you a favor. You need to be able to buy traffic. And you can only afford to buy traffic if that investment you make in that traffic is going to yield the result. And if you call your product something like, you know, the awesomification, awesomesos, awesomeness package, no one’s going to buy that because it’s not going to connect to their core desires. Maybe your list who loves you and is fanatic about you is going to buy that, but paid traffic? No, probably not.

So when you market or create marketing that works on cold traffic, it converts paid traffic, okay? Let’s talk about this, marketing for warm traffic. When people are marketing to their own list, they often have a narrow view, they’re often incredibly insular in their thinking and they come up with lazy names, they come up with offers that have inside jokes and maybe are kind of cutesy, and don’t work on people who’ve never heard of them, and they come up with copy that maybe they write in a day. The best converting marketing material that I know right now, okay, it’s a one and half hour webinar, the person who created it, spent two months non-stop, non-stop creating it. Marketing really good copy takes time.

But most people who are spending every single day, blogging and tweeting and doing all that, they don’t have time to invest in a marketing asset that converts paid traffic that converts people who’ve never heard of them before. Okay, when you market or create a marketing that works on cold traffic, it requires you to know marketing. You can’t have lazy names, you can’t have stupid offers, you can’t have lazy copy, it does not convert. Okay, let’s talk again about marketing for warm traffic. Marketing for warm traffic is when you create marketing that only works for people who know you, it requires people to admire you. When you create marketing for cold traffic, it works for everyone.

This is huge, okay? This might be the biggest one on here. When you create marketing for warm traffic, you develop that product, and you develop that marketing message around your list, right? That’s who you test your marketing concept on. But when you create marketing for cold traffic you test your offer, you test your sales letter on cold traffic, traffic that’s never heard of you before. Maybe use pay per click ads, maybe use Facebook ads, but you need a product that people who have never heard of you to buy. Now that’s not to say that you should not be doing social media, none of these is to say that you should not be on Facebook because I have a reality to sort of put your way, and that is this, marketing that works on cold traffic works even better on warm traffic because your copy is better, your offer is better, your marketing messages honed and refined and tested.

And when you add a solid relationship to that mix, conversions go up even more. So the marketing that you create for cold traffic converts even higher on warm traffic, okay? So yes, you still need to be known in the market place, yes, you still need to be our there, and you need to be seen and you need to be a leader. But when you go to create your marketing, you need to create marketing that works for someone who has never heard of you. You need to create marketing that does not assume that relationship because marketing that is created for cold traffic is infinitely scalable. You can buy more traffic if it works, right? If you create your marketing for warm traffic, your products and your business can only scale as big as the circle of people who know about you.

Anyway, I have a question for you and it ties into the next episode of The Marketing Show. In the next episode of The Marketing Show, I’m going to be talking about the difference between fear-based selling and pain-based selling. So I have a question to ask for you, are people more likely to buy from you because they are experiencing pain and looking for a solution? Or because they fear? Leave your response in the comments, and I’ll let you know the answer in the next episode of The Marketing Show.

And before I wrap this up, I want to let you know something; my job is never ever to be admired. My job is to be effective. I am like an alarm clock, often you have your alarm clock, but most Americans use it because it’s effective. So my job is to be effective and to wake you up whether you like it or not. My name is Clay Collins and thank you so much, so much for watching The Marketing Show. Take care.

However, making a sale requires two things. Okay? The first thing that it requires is desire, and desire-based tension that is relieved when someone buys the product. The second thing that it requires is often overlooked. And this truth is going to be painful to a lot of people. But the second thing that is required to make a sale is a decision. Okay? And I know this is obvious, but let me drag this home because this is one of the most important marketing distinctions you will ever hear.

I want to just sort of introduce you to something. One hundred percent of the people that don’t decide whether to buy your product or not, will not buy if you are not relevant enough in the mind of your customers, to get down to make a decision that they will never ever buy. Most people who are of your target demographic, who are likely to buy your product, most of those people who don’t buy, don’t buy because they carefully thought about your product, considered it, and decided not to go with it. Most of them didn’t buy your product because they never made a decision about it in the first place. The return on investment of making a decision is often very, very low. We encounter things all the time, every single day, that we never make a decision about. So many decisions come across your plate as a business owner that you don’t decide to do one thing or another about them. And that’s the case in your market. Most of your customers have never made a decision about whether or not to buy your product. And that is why you haven’t had many sales.

And if you can get your customer base, or if you can get your prospect base, to make a decision about you, even if most of them decide not to buy your product, you will have more sales because a whole lot of people will decide to buy your product. And that’s why when you see launches, on the internet, that’s why so many people have cut off dates, where they’re saying, “We’re closing the cart. We’re cutting this off at 50 people.” Often it’s not to create scarcity; it’s to get people to make a decision, one way or another. But often those kinds of false cut offs don’t work at all, because even with those false cut offs, people don’t decide one way or another, whether they want the product. And they don’t buy it by default. That cart closes and no one buys it by default.

So your job as a marketer, I propose, is not only to create desire-based tension, that’s part of it. You do have to have desire. But often, even more important than creating desire, is being relevant enough to get people to make a decision about you. And on this mentorship call that I was doing with this client, we figured out how they can be relevant enough to get people to make a decision one way or another. The purpose of good marketing is not to get people to buy your product. The purpose of marketing is to get people to make a decision about you, because almost no one in your market is making a conscious decision about whether or not to buy your product. They’re not buying your product by default. They never made a conscious decision about it. And your job as a marketer, and your job in the world, is to be a fork in the road. Someone can go one way, someone can go another, but they cannot go on, like they were before, before they knew you. Your job as a marketer is to be relevant enough that the force of presence that you have in your market is a divider. It is a scalpel, it slices things up. And after someone has encountered your marketing message, did they not have the choice to go along like they did before. They can either go one way, or they can go another. But their life has changed because of the concepts and ideas that you have introduced into your marketplace. Your job is to be a fork in the road. And I have some sad news. And that is that most people in this world are not relevant enough to their customers to even warrant a decision. They are completely ignored. And there is a whole system and a whole arsenal of tools to ensure that you are relevant enough to your marketplace to warrant a decision being made about you, one way or another. Because the purpose of marketing is not to get people to buy your product. It is to get people to make a decision. This should be relevant enough to make a decision.

I don’t have time to go into all of that. Luckily on this call, we had time to work out a plan for during the mentorship call, but really I could talk about this, and I have material about this that goes on for hours. But here’s what I want you to know, and here’s what I want you to figure out and to let sink in, and that is this. Almost no one has made a conscious decision whether or not to buy your product. And your job as a marketer is to get people to make a decision. And even if the majority of people who make a decision about you, decide not to buy, you will have so many more sales because you are relevant enough to be worthy of making a decision about.

My name is Clay Collins. Thank you so much for watching The Marketing Show. And I’ll catch you later. Take care.

So, in my experience and from what I’ve seen from clients, so many people with amazing content to offer, amazing blog posts, amazing things to say, are not making sales because they have fundamentally confused education with marketing. We have heard a lot of talk about moving the free line. And we’ve heard a lot of talk about giving information away as a way to create sales and to create customers. And in most cases, people who are just blindly teaching how to do things are running their businesses into the ground. If you have a popular blog and people say time and time again that they love your stuff, but they’re not buying, what you’re doing is you’re doing education instead of marketing. And there is a huge difference.

So I want to go over some of the differences. And then I want to talk about how you can fundamentally shift what you’re doing to start creating real results in your business, and to start creating a real income in your business.

So the first distinction here is that marketing goes with the grain of human psychology. If you fight against human psychology, you will lose every single time, and you will go broke, and your business will do extremely poorly. So marketing harnesses existing desires, existing fantasies, existing hopes and dreams and thoughts and predispositions to its advantage. Whereas education, on the other hand, often goes against the grain of human psychology. Not always, but in many cases goes against the grain of human psychology, right? So in other words, the purpose of marketing is not to change people’s mind, it is not to change human behavior. But the purpose of education often is to change minds and intention and behavior. Okay?

Another key distinction between marketing and education is that marketing creates desire- based tension. It creates this tension, right? When people see something that they really want, and they want to get it, there is an inner tension because they want something but they don’t have it yet. And marketing exists to create that tension. Whereas education is often created to relieve desire-based tension because you are seeking change and you are seeking something. And in the receiving of education, that desire decreases. Okay?

One final and huge distinction, and there are other many but these are the ones I’m pointing out today, is that the return on investment, of harnessing people’s existing fantasies and existing desires and existing behaviors, is infinite. The return on investment, when you do education in place of marketing, is often one to one. So if you spend $50 on education-based marketing, you will often only get $50 back. Okay? So, the key takeaway here is not that you should never do education. It’s that marketing should come before education especially if you sell information. Marketing is what generates the sale. Education is what you deliver when you deliver your product.

So let’s just take an example. Let’s take the guitar market. A lot of people who want to learn how to play the guitar want to be rock stars. They want to impress maybe their girlfriend, or they maybe want to show off at a party. A lot of guitar educators are completely adverse to that and don’t want to market to people’s desires to be rock stars. So what they do in their marketing is completely different than the fantasy that’s in people’s heads. What I advocate is that you…

…sell people what they want. And then you deliver to them what they want and what they need.

So you might sell the product if you’re in the guitar space called, you know, How to Play the Top 10 Rock Solos of All Time. And you absolutely should deliver that educational information. But before you deliver that, you might want to say something like, “I believe in the deep power of music. I believe that when you fundamentally understand music, that it can change your worldview. It can change the way you interact with things. And it can change the way you creatively problem solve and that you process things. And so, before I jump into showing you how to play the Top 10 Rock Guitar Solos of All Time, I’m going to talk a little bit about music theory. I’m going to talk about music composition. I’m going to talk about how to play different scales and I’m going to give you the history behind these songs and tell you why they are so important.”

So you’re selling people what they want and you are also giving them what they want and what they need because you have sold based on your marketing. And then you have delivered in a way that is consistent with solid education.

So, the take home point is, do marketing to make the sale, do education to deliver on the product. Please do not confuse the two or your business truly will never take off. My name is Clay Collins and thank you so much for watching The Marketing Show. I’ll talk to you later.

So we all know that trading dollars for hours sucks, right? Everyone knows this. When you get into business, if you want to have a scalable business, that business cannot be something where you are trading your hours for a dollar amount, because you only have a finite number of hours in the day. And if you truly want a freedom based business – a business where you can go on vacation – a business where you can do the things that you really want to do in your life, you need to disconnect the money link between dollars and hours. If you want a scalable business, a business that does not have an income cap, you need to disconnect dollars from hours. We’ve all heard this ’til we’re blue in the face. We’ve heard other people say this ’til they’re blue in the face. We get it, right? We totally get it.

The thing that I think a lot of people don’t get, even though they get that freedom requires disconnecting hours from dollars, is that in order to have a truly scalable business, and to truly have a freedom based business, they need to disconnect the link between hours and traffic, right? Because traffic is needed to get customers, right? We need people looking at our sales page and buying.

Ironically, the people who rail against trading dollars for hours are the very same people who suggest blogging for traffic, right? There are a number of people out there in the lifestyle design space, whose primary, primary and only traffic strategy is, you know, tweeting a bunch about their blog post and writing a blog post to get traffic. In fact, there are a whole lot of people who literally would have no traffic at all if they didn’t blog at a regular basis. They would have no traffic at all.

So, let me just share this with you. If you have to spend your hours writing blog posts in order to get traffic, in order to get people to buy, right? If you have to spend hours writing blog posts, or doing social media stuff in order to get traffic so you could get dollars, then you are trading hours for dollars. And that really sucks and in fact, that’s no way to live. I refer the need that people feel to create blog post after blog post after blog post in order to get traffic, so that they could get money, I refer to that as the content hamster wheel of death. And like I said before, if you want a freedom based business, you need traffic that comes even if you aren’t writing a blog post, even if you weren’t on Facebook, even if you weren’t tweeting all the time.

I’ll give you an example form one of my businesses. One of my website, businessideas.net gets around 100 email opt-ins per day. It gets a whole lot of traffic and that traffic comes, day in and day out, even though I haven’t thought about that site or logged into that site for over a year. It’s traffic that comes regardless of what I do, and that has created a whole lot of freedom in my life, okay?

So this is what it comes down to, right? This is the heart of it. Automated scalable income requires automated traffic. Okay, I want to say that again. Automated scalable income requires automated traffic. Automated income requires automated traffic. Period. End of story. And the solution to all of this is simply grown man marketing. When you first get started online, a lot of people believe that they have to write blog posts after blog posts after blog posts to continue to bring in traffic. And that simply is not true. And the way out is marketing.

And I’ve created so much material on this in my courses. It’s just insane. But the purpose is not to talk about my courses right now, the purpose, my purpose in this video is to let you know that there is a way out of the content hamster wheel of death. And I want you to open up your mind to ways of disconnecting hours from traffic, right? You don’t need to blog endlessly. You don’t need to slog away creating article after article after article in order to bring in the traffic necessary to make the sales you need in your business. My name is Clay Collins. Thank you so much for watching The Marketing Show. And I’ll talk to you later. Goodbye.

So I want to talk today about how to get your customers to believe you. A lot of us are in the business of creating quantum shifts in people’s lives and in creating miraculous transformations. But a lot of times, our customers, when they encounter our marketing, do not believe that we can actually create those results in their lives because personally they don’t believe they can experience anything better than what they’re currently experiencing. They don’t believe that it can truly happen to them.

And so, any marketing we put up comes against the challenge of them not believing inherently, like at a deep personal level, that they can experience the outcomes that we are selling. So how do you get around this? How do you get your customers to believe you?

Well, here is one way. There’s a lot of different ways to poke holes at this, right? There’s a lot of different ways to make progress. But one way is to poke holes in their ideal outcome, right? Every single person who comes to us for help, even if they don’t know it, has an ideal outcome in mind. There is a fantasy situation that they want to achieve in their life. And a lot of us are in the business of helping people reach their fantasies, truly. So, how do we convince them that they can actually do it and that we can provide the transformation that we say we can provide and that we do actually provide, in our course materials or through our coaching or consulting, or through selling our information products or membership websites, or even our physical products, you know, whatever. How do we show them that we can provide this, or rather how do we get them to believe that it’s possible? Well, you do it by again poking holes in their ideal situation.

So let’s say we’re in the business of helping people overcome their back pain. Okay, let’s just use that example. Well, if you poke holes in that reality and say to someone who is looking to get rid of their back pain, something to the effect of, “Look, I know you want to get over your back pain, but I’ve helped people overcome and get rid of their back pain so many times that I can tell you that it’s not all fuzzy bunnies and green pastures. That most people, when they’ve experienced a lot of back pain for a long time have used their back pain as a crutch. They’ve used it as an excuse for not exercising. And they’ve used it as an excuse for the waking that they’ve experienced. They’ve used it as an excuse for not going on dates or not being a social as they can be. They’ve used it as an excuse for not going out and getting a job or not doing everything that they possibly can, including taking care of their kids. They’ve used it to justify endless hours in front of the television. And I’m here to tell you that after you work with me and this back pain goes, that everything’s not over with. There’s still a lot to work through.” Okay?

Do you see what just happened inside yourself when you hear that shift, when I work from trying to convince you that this was possible to explaining all the negative effects that happen after you experience this? All of a sudden, it becomes more visible. And this has been shown a lot, to me and to fellow marketers who are operating at this deep level.

Alright, let’s talk about something else. Fully funded retirement. Let’s say you help people prepare for retirement. You help people save for retirement. Here’s how you poke holes in that situation. I mean, I’m just throwing out an example. You’re the one who knows your market best. And literally, I just wrote this randomly, seconds before I started filming this. So, let’s say you help people get ready or prepare for retirement. You can say things like, “You know what, you’ve been chained to your job for so long or you’ve worked for so long that to truly have all the money you need for retirement and not have to work…

… a day in your life to make it through retirement is challenging for a lot of people. Having all that money makes a lot of people absolutely stir crazy. They don’t know what to do. They don’t have to go work anymore. They have this huge vacuum of time and that time used to be filled up with work. But now that work is gone, they literally don’t know what to do with themselves and they start going a little crazy and a lot of bad habits start developing. People start drinking more. People start eating more or eating less healthy. You know, this isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s the line. This isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.”

Let’s say, you know, just for kicks, that you teach people how to be good amateur boxes. People who don’t box, you know, usually but, you know, are kind of interested in it as a hobby. You could say, “You know what, being an amazing boxer and your friends knowing that you’re an amazing boxer is kind of fun. But it also sucks because every time you go to a party, there’s some huge seven foot dude, and some girl tells him that you’re a boxer and, you know, tells you have to like fight against each other. And it ends up being a pain in the ass, right? It kind of sucks. So even though you’re going to be amazing at boxing after this, just know that I’ve helped a lot of people become amazing boxers and it doesn’t mean you should always tell everyone especially at a party that you’re a great boxer because it could get you into some trouble including at bars as well.”

Let’s say you help people with social media. You could say something to the effect of, “You know it’s really cool to have all this Facebook friends and Facebook fans, but that means they’re asking questions on your Wall, they’re hitting you with messages. You know, it takes a whole lot of time to maintain and you look like an absolute idiot if someone’s a fan of you on Facebook or you have a billion Facebook friends and you’re not responding to all the messages that they’re sending you. Now they think you’re their real friend and, you know, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, right? You know, I had an experience like this too when my very first launch online. See, I’m just going to like switch this up a little bit. My very first launch online, I had a 25% conversion rate from my list and I had to, in my marketing, you know, show people.

So, that’s how you go about doing it. I hope these examples have been helpful. Please, only use this tactic if you can deliver the results that you say you can deliver. But that’s it in a nutshell. So in the comments, I want you to tell me how you can show prospects the downside, the legitimate downside, of the ideal outcome that you provide. Because there is truly a downside so to speak to every ideal situation. So go ahead and let me know what that is in the comments. My name is Clay Collins. Thank you for watching The Marketing Show and I’ll talk to you later.

The most important skill in marketing is like whatever the hell you need to be doing next in your business. So, if you need to get a squeeze page up and you don’t know how to do that, the most important skill is getting up a squeeze page or being able to find someone who can get up a squeeze page. But you need to make that happen. There’s so many agendas for what you should be doing with your time and you need to ignore them all and single-mindedly focus on where you need to go. So, the most important skill in marketing is this. It’s finding the straight path from where you are to where you want to go.

What most people do is they end up sidetracked by other people’s agenda for their time. So they’re like, “Oh, I need to learn copywriting and I need to like learn social media and then I need to like learn this and then, I’ve got to like blog for a year. And then I need to like build a freaking logo and spend 20 years of my life writing a sales…” I’m just exaggerating here. But they buy into other people’s agendas for their time and they end up doing all these stuff and it takes them forever to get to their destination. And the reason why the path is so circuitous is that one, getting to their destination feels difficult so they make it difficult.

And it feels like it shouldn’t be easy. So they put obstacles in their path because they don’t feel like they deserve it. And inevitably, what happens, as they’re going up and down and pursuing all these paths, is someone comes along who has their internal stuff figured out and they just doo de doo de doo de doo. They take the straight path to the destination. They just go directly there. And usually, the person who’s been screwing around says stuff like, I don’t know, “They’re doing this wrong or they just screwed this up or their product sucks.”

So, they come up with all these reasons why this person had just went directly there while they were doing all these other stuff. And so, in the coaching I do inside The Marketing Program, every single week, I spend the majority of my time on those calls kicking people’s asses and showing them over and over and over again that there is a direct path from where they are to where they need to go and pulling out the bullshit that’s keeping them from taking the straight path there because the mind is a bullshit machine that wants to take your beliefs and put them into reality.
And the reality is that you are an incredibly powerful person, that your wants and desires and dreams are easily accessible. And it is only the feeling that you have that it is difficult, that is holding you back. My name is Clay Collins. Thank you so much for watching the Marketing Show and I’ll talk to you later.

And so often, the process is overlooked. But nine times out of 10, not in every case, but in nine times out of 10, the marketing process is more important than the marketing message. And let me just give me an example of this, just a small, tiny, tiny, microcosm of an example. I’ve just used the word microcosm incorrectly here. But a small, just a small piece of what I’m talking about. Okay?

Pop-ups, right? There are sites and blogs where you go to the website and then a pop-up comes up a lot. People hate them but like this is the example we’re using here. But a pop-up comes up and says, “Hey, want this free thing? Enter in your email address and I’ll give you this awesome thing.” Right? So, I’ve split test these pop-ups before, right? And version one that I tested was a pop-up that came up immediately, immediately. Boom! You come to the site, the thing pops up. It has this beautifully written offer on it. But you see it immediately. Okay.

People in general responded very poorly to those pop-ups that come up immediately. And they respond poorly to the pop-ups that come up immediately because they’re trying to get to the content. They came to the website for a reason. They’re interested in what’s there. Here comes this pop-up. That pop-up is keeping them from the content that they want to see and so they close it as quickly as possible. Okay? So, that’s one version of the pop-up. And then, I’ve tested another pop-up that comes up after 30 seconds, right?

So, someone’s on the page. You’re giving them access to what they want to see. Thirty seconds later, a pop-up comes up. And, when you wait 30 seconds, people are like a billion times– that’s a scientifically proven number. People are a billion times more likely to opt in. A billion, not really. But like in a lot of cases, 10 times more likely to opt in when you wait 30 seconds even if, even if the marketing message sucks. For example, just because I was playing around, I tested an awesome, awesome pop-up with a headline and a proven marketing message that came up immediately, right?

So, version one, pop-up comes up immediately and it is an amazing marketing message, that’s been proven. And I split tested that against a pop-up that comes up after 30 seconds that says, basically, enter in your email address to get updates. And the one that comes up after 30 seconds wins because it’s not keeping people from the content that they want to see. But this isn’t about pop-ups. This episode of The Marketing Show is not about pop-ups. It’s about this – process so often is so much more important than the message.

Now, if your message is like you should worship Satan or something like that, then obviously, you have a problem. If your message is a liability, then you have a problem, right? But if you have a decent message focusing on process, it’s going to have a much bigger improvement than like obsessing about the message. And most of the time, and I’ve seen this happen so many times, if you are being blindsided by a competitor who’s coming along and cleaning your clock.

And you, for the life of you, cannot figure out why they’re making so much more money than you and they’re doing so much better than you and their message is so much more effective, often, it’s because they get process. And you don’t. My name is Clay Collins and I have a question for you. I have a question for you. What are you most excited about…

…doing this summer? What are you most excited about? What’s the vacation you plan on going? What’s the trip you want to go on? What are you so fired up about this summer, because it’s coming. Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you for watching The Marketing Show. Answer your question in the comments and I’m about to salute you. Have a wonderful, wonderful day. Take care.

And the two problems are the false positive and the false negative. So, a false positive happens when you give a free product away to a prospective customer and the act of giving that product away makes the prospective customer believe falsely that they can accomplish what they need to accomplish with your free product alone. So, in this case of the false positive, you give something away, the person receiving it says, “I don’t need to buy your entire product because your free product is enough to get me where I want to go.”

And that is a false assumption, right? The other thing that can occur is that you can have a false negative, right? So, you give something away and the person who receives that free product incorrectly believes that you because you have cluttered up your free product with so much information, they start throwing up their hands and they say, “I can never get this done. I can’t even get through the free product that they gave me.” Right?

So, if you’re giving… if you sell a course on cooking and you give away a free product on how to cook a specialty kind of appetizer and they go through and they’re like, “I don’t have a crème brûlée torch and I don’t have this ingredient, that ingredient.” You create a false negative because the person who receives the product believes that they can’t actually do what they want to do. And so, if your free thing is so confusing, why would they ever buy the full course, because the full course is also going to be similarly difficult.

So, the solution with false positives is really to never ever, ever, ever, ever give steps to the final destination because, if you give steps to the final destination, even if they are summary level steps, even if those steps lack the necessary detail to actually getting someone to that final destination, the reader will usually believe that they can get there by knowing the steps. But knowing the steps alone does not get you to your destination.

For example, if I was telling someone how to build an online business, I would say, first, get a website then put up an offer then get traffic and then get a conversion mechanism and then buy more traffic, right? So, it could be some version of that. But if someone is very new to online business, they might say, “Okay, okay, okay. All right, I see what all the steps are. I don’t need your product anymore because you just gave me the steps.” But the truth is, if you just have those steps, you will very likely fail. Same with whatever you’re selling.

If you give steps, newbies will often infer that they can get to the destination with those steps alone when there’s a lot more to it than just knowing the steps. So, don’t give steps. Also, tell them that your product is incomplete… that the free thing you’re giving away will not by itself get them to their destination, right? So, if you have a course again on cooking, you might show someone how to easily and simply cook a gourmet appetizer but you’re not showing them how to make an entire gourmet meal. You’re just showing them how to do the appetizer.

And you might want to say something in that free product that goes like this: “I know that you might be excited by going through this material and seeing that you, too, can make gourmet appetizer. But I don’t want you to be misled. Some people might read this and think that they can take an entire meal with this information but I feel like it’s my moral obligation to tell you that, if you go and use this information, try and make a gourmet meal, you could embarrass yourself. You could waste a lot of money on ingredients and incorrectly prepare them because you need a lot more than this free thing that I’ve given you to make the entire meal, right?”

So, let them know that it’s incomplete. Finally, you want to give an in-depth solution to only part of the problem. You never want to tackle the entire problem in a free report or any kind of free information. So, now that I’ve talked about how to overcome the problem of the false…

…positive, let’s talk about how to overcome the false negative. Well, one solution to overcome the false negative which is, again, situations where people get the free material, and it’s so damn complicated and you give them so much to do and you give them so much to read that they decide that they don’t even want to buy the full thing because the free thing is already too complicated and it’s already going to take them months to get through.

So, you want to simplify the solution and you want to give them an easy and elegant solution to only part of the problem. Finally, in overcoming the problem of the false negative, you want to demonstrate that the difficult task that they are looking to accomplish and they probably believe that they really can’t accomplish– whether it’s losing weight, making more money, having improved health, having better relationships or whatever product you sell and whatever solution you are selling.

You want to demonstrate that whatever they believed was difficult can be simplified in a manner that will ultimately make it easier to achieve. Anyway, my name is Clay Collins. I am so grateful that you watch The Marketing Show and I’ll see you tomorrow.

So, let’s just take this example here. If you teach writing or book marketing, you will have a lot of customers who truly think about it this way. They want to write a New York Times bestseller, how do I do it? And you know that there’s a whole range of ways to do it, and that it is different for every single genre, if you’re writing for nonfiction, if you’re writing for fiction, if you’re writing, like, biography. There are a bunch of different ways to do it. And in fact, it all depends on what asset people are coming to the table with. Fo they have a blog, do they have a list, do they have, you know, a public speaking platform? There is no it in reality, it doesn’t exist. You can’t do it. But “it” is a very real reality that exist in the minds of the customers and you cannot fight human psychology when you are marketing. If you fight human psychology when you are marketing, you will lose and you will be poor and your business will go broke, period and end of story.

So, what I’m advising you to do is always be mindful of the “it” that exists in your customers brain and create your marketing around that “it” because you can’t change that “it.” You have no say on that “it” when you are marketing. So, let me give you an example. What I see people doing all the time is they’ll take market, right? They’ll take a market of people that want to write a New York Times bestseller and they’ll end up coming up with some title that’s, like, “The Zen of Writing,” that has nothing to do with “it.” Your customers want to do it, right? They want to speak Spanish. They want to be a wakeborder. They want to be a billionaire. And you’re creating a title, like, “The Zen of Writing,” it doesn’t address it at all.

So, the first thing you need to know is what is the “it” in your customers’ brain. And it’s going to be an “it” that doesn’t exist in reality. It’s only going to exist in the mind of your customer. But once you know that “it” that your customer is willing to pay for, because they’re not going to pay for the complex version that’s in your brain, they’re going to pay for the “it” that’s the reality in their mind. Once you know what that is, you need to sell the “it.”

And here’s how to do that ethically. The way to do that ethically is to, one, create your product around giving them the fastest path to “it” that you know of. There are probably multiple paths to “it.” There’s a whole lot of variables, but pick the most effective version of “it” that you know of. Pick your favorite version of “it,” right? Let’s pick the guitar market. Someone wants to learn how to play the guitar, how do they do it, right? You might know that there are a lot of variables involved, that they want to play classical, whatever, pick your favorite one. Rock guitar, you want to show them five songs, show them how to do “it,” right? So, that’s the first thing you should do in your course so that you can ethically sell it, because if you’re not selling it, you’re not going to make sales.

So, you need to sell them your favorite version of “it.” And the second thing you need to do in your product is to expand their reality. As an expert, the way you conceive of your subject matter is very different from the way they conceive of it. And so, part of your job as a teacher is to broaden their horizons, expand their reality, obliterate the “it,” right, and give them a bigger version of what they’re seeking, give them a bigger vision.

Anyway, what I’m suggesting to you is that you sell customers what they want and that you give them what they want – your version of “it” – and you also give them what they need.

My name is Clay Collins. Thank you so much for watching the marketing show, and I’ll talk to you soon.

And I really believe that we are entering an era of online business. We are moving from the biz era, right? Hobbyists, one-man guru shops, people who, like, would never in a million years, like, higher an employee, an employee, not some VA that’s like $3 an hour somewhere and they’re trying to get, like, the cheapest till they can and there’s some human resources race to the bottom. But an employee, they would never do that, right? Actually, there’s a whole bunch of things that they would never do. And we’re moving to an era where the businesses, the real businesses are going to take over where the biz’s used to be, right, where there are a bunch of one-man guru shops and hobbyists and people dabbling around and people wanting to do stuff for the lifestyle and not because they really care.

So, I want to really talk about the difference between a biz and a business and why having a business, a real business is an incredible opportunity right now for you online, if you’re dedicated, if you care, if you’re willing to play a big game and really step in to this thing and do what you were born to do with regards to your passion and what you care about. So, let’s talk about the difference between a biz and a business, okay? A biz can’t sell without discounts and cart closing and all kinds of, like, hoopla, and there’s only two more spots left and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

We see this so often, right, with Groupon and, you know, online, and it’s my birthday, there’s a sale, and all this stuff. We see so many businesses that literally cannot make one sale unless their thing is half off. In fact, I’ve seen some businesses where you never see the product on sale at full price. It’s always 50% off, right? And there’s always a sale. That’s a biz, right? And you see, businesses that can’t sell a damn thing unless they’ve got some huge scarcity play and the products coming off the market and there’s only four more spots left. You know what that is, that’s just crappy marketing. If you can’t make a sale without a whole lot of scarcity or a huge discount, then you’re kind of a crappy marketer. A business on the other hand, has a product that is so essential that they don’t need a whole bunch of hoopla and hype to make sale. It’s a good product. There’s a need for it. They’ve either created the demand or the demand already exist, but they don’t have to do a bunch of, like, crazy nonsense to get a sale, right? It’s an essential product. It’s part of the cost of doing business. It’s part of the cost of whatever the pursuit is, okay?

Another difference between a biz and a business is that a biz is 100% dependent on partners for traffic, right? The only way they get traffic, the only way they grow their list, is they get a bunch of their buddies to mail for them, and that’s how they make the sale. They are not buying ads. They’re not doing SEO. You know, they are 100% dependent upon their competitors to send them traffic, to get any kind of traction in their business. A business, not a biz, a business isn’t dependent on anyone for traffic. They have diversified traffic sources. They can buy traffic. Maybe they don’t – you know, if something goes bad with Google, they’re buying it from Facebook.

They’re buying it directly from websites. They’re not dependent upon their buddies and the little circle of influence or whatever is going on… a little cabal, to get traffic. They can buy it. That’s another difference between a biz and a business. A third difference, and there are lots of them, but this is just the third one, is that a biz has a fluctuating product line. Every single six months, they have a new product and the old one is going away. And the old one is going away because during the last sale they said it would never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be available again ever. And they have a fluctuating product line. You never, you know, every three months, four months there’s a new product and the old one’s going away. A business has a stable product line. In fact, you can make recommendations to other people that they should buy this product because it’s been around for the last four or five years. And the product has a consistent history of producing results and being good and being a quality flagship amazing product.

The final difference between a biz and a business that I’m going to mention today is that a biz is engaged, when it comes to human resources, in a race to the bottom. And what I mean by this is that people who have a biz want to find the cheapest labor they can find. They want to go get a team from, you know, the Philippines, or whatever, and they want to hire them on a project by project basis. And every time there’s a new project, they have to hire a new team. Every time there’s a new initiative, they have to retrain a new team and they have a revolving door of people in their company that are coming in, coming out, coming in, coming out, coming in, coming out, so that no one, no one really gets to become invested in their business other than them. And they just get this revolving door, right?

A business on the other hand hires employees. They hire people who are a long-term experts at what they do. And over time their value to the company increases exponentially as they get better, right? So, a business owner hires long-term. And what I’ve seen in this internet marketing space is that most people right now are engaged in a race to the bottom when it comes to hiring. People who own businesses are coming in left and right and cleaning their clocks. And the reason for this right now is that we are in one of the only markets that is profitable, that is not engaged in a talent war. There are VAs who have been working in online business for ten plus years who cannot find a stable employer because business owners who are doing business online are not willing – I guess, biz owners who are doing a business online, are not willing to hire someone for the long term. They want to hire a bunch of short-term people for short-term projects. And all the best people right now are being passed around. And this represents a huge opportunity.

So, my message to you for today is be engaged in business, not a biz, because we are moving from an era of the biz to an era of the business. And it is the businesses that will ultimately win while the biz’s and the one-man guru shops and the hobbyists and the people who are amused by this, who are doing for it for the lifestyle, you know, who are not passionate, are going to lose, and business will win.

My name is Clay Collins. Thank you for watching the marketing show, and I will talk to you tomorrow. Take care.

The number one reason why people don’t do it is because they have heard, someone told them, and it’s sort of gone through the grapevine, maybe they read it cause some, like, you know, hack blogger said it somewhere. But they have heard that they need a bribe. That you have to have an amazing bribe to get people to opt-in. And I’m here to tell you that this is absolute BS. And what I see most people doing is spending months creating a bribe to get people to opt-in and then they get perfectionistic about it, and they hire a designer to make the cover for their free thing and then they keep on writing it and writing it and writing it. And they never get it up, right? They end up getting paralyzed over this task and it stalls them and they leave thousands upon thousands of dollars on the table.

Well, I want to share some kick-your-ass facts with you, okay? So, here’s kick-your-ass fact number one, all right? I did a split test on this blog, marketingshow.com, where I had an opt-in box with the bribe and I had an opt-in box without a bribe. And there was only a half of a percent difference between the opt-in rates without a bribe and with a bribe. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a bribe, right? There should be a good incentive for someone to opt-in. And the one that I have in my incentive was tested and proven and it worked in other businesses. And it was creating an increase in mind, but only about half a percent.

Now, again, I’m not saying don’t have a bribe. But what would happen if I had waited until I had a perfect bribe in place or any bribe in place to start accepting email addresses? Well, I would have been short thousands upon thousands of email addresses and the difference was only about half a percent. Now, granted, with the kind of traffic we get, scale that half of percentage and that’s a lot over the long run, but it’s not as much I would have lost if I never had an opt-in box in the first place.

Kick-your-ass fact number two, I have a website called businessideas.net, and it rings – it beats out about sixty million pages, sometimes over 100 million pages to rank around number three for the term “business ideas.” We do not have a single bribe on that site. There has not been one bribe to get people to opt-in to that site from day one. And every single day, we get about 100 opt-ins to that site. One hundred. Now, I haven’t logged in to that site for over a year now. I haven’t touched it. I haven’t done anything with it. Where would I be if I had waited to create a bribe for businessideas.net before putting up an opt-in box? I would be absolutely hosed, right, and you probably are too. So, I want to talk about, now that you have this data, right, and you know that you can just go ahead and – there’s a whole lot of psychology behind why people opt-in. And often, in fact, in most cases, it has nothing at all to do with the bribe or what you’re sort of, you know, the carrot that you’re dangling in front of them. A lot of times it has to do with just that they like you or community or belonging or, you know, a whole lot of factors go into it, right? And that’s why these kick-your-ass facts exist, okay?

So, I want to explain now the theory behind why people don’t take action and why people do take action. So, here’s why most people don’t take action. Most people don’t take action because they go through a theoretical marketing course.

And that theory gets them all excited, but when they go to implement, they experience a whole lot of uncertainty related to that theory, right? They don’t know how to apply it, what should the copy be, where should the page be, should I do WordPress, should I do Drupal, you know, how should I do this, should I have a statistic HTML page, what kind of bribe should it be, how long should it be, what should the cover be, what, you know – they get mired in details because when they go to apply the theory, they encounter uncertainty. And what results is that as a result of that uncertainty, perfectionism sets in, right, because they feel this feeling of anxiety. They start becoming perfectionistic. They start spending four months, five months creating this eBook to get people to opt-in that never comes to pass, right, and then paralysis ensues. And I want to tell you how to get over this and how all the best marketers get over this. Okay? Here it is.

Good marketers, people who have success, get data, right? They get data about marketing campaigns that work. They pay for it. They pay for access and masterminds in courses. They don’t take theoretical courses, they get data about what works. And by the way, this is the underlying basis for everything I’ve ever taught in the last year, get data or I give data in my courses. And this data leads to implementation, right? You don’t know if it’s going to be perfect, but because you saw a squeeze piece that work, because you saw a bribe that worked, because you know that people will opt-in even without a bribe, because you know that you could be losing out upon thousands upon thousands of email addresses if you don’t have a bribe, because you have this data. You implement, you do something based on what you’ve seen worked in other businesses. And that implementation leads to some sort of feedback. When you implement, you get some sort of feedback of some kind. And that allows you to calibrate, that allows you to adjust and tweak and improve.

So, I’m encouraging you to consider that theoretical education produces theoretical results. And that this whole theory leading to uncertainty, leading to perfectionism, leading to paralysis is the path you want to avoid. And instead, get data, use that data that you’ve seen with your own eyes, right? You’ve seen what worked, you know, the outcome, you know the opt-in results. Just like I’m telling you right here, I haven’t opened up my entire business here because there isn’t enough time. But get data, use that data that you have about what worked, right? A campaign you saw with your own eyes, data that you got behind the scenes and use that as the basis for implementation and then calibrate based on that.

Anyway, my name is Clay Collins. This has been kick-your-ass Mondays, and I will talk to you later.

On, I believe it was April – no March 14th of this year, Gary, you know, the famed wine store salesman, I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk started a web show called the Daily Grape. Incidentally, that show has not come out every single day as the name implies.

About a month after he started that show, I started the marketing show. I never said it would come out every single day. I’d put it out about two to three times per week. But given Gary’s kind of spotty record here, I have a little friendly competition. I am going to race him to 100 episodes and I’m going to beat him, okay? And here’s how I’m going to do it. I’m not going to do anything special. I’m just going to put out an episode every single day until I get to 100.

So, what’s the score right now, given that Gary started out a daily show, given that Gary started about a month before me? Well, Gary has 39 episodes posted. I have 14. And in the next few months, you’re going to see me clean his clock.

So, Gary Vaynerchuk, I am calling you out. I am the underdog here. And this is going to be like the Jets versus Colts in the ’69 Super Bowl. And guess what, I’m the Jets and you are going down. See you at the finish line.

As you can tell, I’m super excited about this. There is exposed brick, you know, exposed duct work track lighting, a number of cool features. But, we’re still ironing out the video situation. So, you may or may not be able to read what’s on the board. You probably can’t. And this will all be resolved over time. So, thanks for bearing with us.

Another thing I want to mention is that somewhere on this page, there is a place where you can join our – or my – actually in this case – my Facebook community. And the reason I started this is that I’m blogging on the marketing program blog. I’m blogging on my own personal blog. And I’ve got the marketing show. And I wanted a place to aggregate everything that I’m doing. And that is a good place to do it. So, we’re going to be posting content on there that you can’t get anywhere else. And I would absolutely love for you to join me in that community.

So, with that, we’ll go ahead and start with – with this episode of the marketing show. So, today, we’re going to be talking about really the fast track to poverty in your business. And I get emails – I probably get an email about once a week that says something to this effect. The email says, “I’m not ready to start thinking about business or about marketing yet because, before you even think about marketing, or business, or, you know, whatever I’m doing, I need to one, you know, first, build a blog, okay. I need to build a blog first and I need to figure out the right theme and get a logo made. And I need to do all this stuff. And then, after I’ve built that blog, I need to build an audience. I need to blog my heart out and really build a community and an audience. That will probably take about a year. And then after I do all that, I’m going to launch a product.” And for every email that I get, that says something to that effect, I also get an email that says, “I don’t know what went wrong. I really need your help. I built a blog and then I built an audience. And then I launched the product and no one bought it, not even my mom. And I have to go back to my day job now.” “This whole dream of being a pro blogger or whatever did not work. No one bought the product after all this time.”

The reason why this whole process, build a blog and build an audience, then launch a product and, you know, hope that it makes money, the reason why this fails is because this is the monetization model of doing things. And the monetization model is predicated of the assumption that you can take something that was never created from the ground up to make money, and you can monetize it and turn it into money. And the truth is that things that are created – or I’m sorry – the truth is the things that are not created from the ground up to make money are very difficult to “turn into money”.

We see this problem, you know, one analogy for this, it comes from the weight loss sector. People talk about converting fat into muscle. And you cannot convert fat into muscle. You can lose fat and you can gain muscle, but you cannot convert fat into muscle. And I think there’s this assumption that is less and less accurate every single year, that you can convert a blog or you can convert any kind of web property into something that will make money. And it is very, very, very, very difficult to do. Monetization is incredibly hard.

You don’t hear Wal-Mart talking about monetizing their stores because their stores were created, from day one, to create an income. Now, I’m not a big fan of Wal-Mart, but I think you get the point. Real businesses never monetize because they were created from the ground up to make money. So, what is the process that you need to be following to not screw this thing up, okay?

Well, the first thing is you need to start thinking about marketing from day one. If you think about marketing only when you’re product is about to come out, then it’ already too late. So, I have people come to me, all the time, that say, “Clay, I have this product. Can you help me, you know, can you help me sell it?” And in most of the cases, if that product isn’t already selling a little, there’s really nothing I can do because it wasn’t created with a focus business outcome in mind from day one. It wasn’t created with marketing in mind from day one. They’re trying to monetize. They’re trying to convert something that was not created from the ground up to create income, and they’re trying to make income with it.

So, step one, when you’re trying to do this whole online thing, is learn marketing and learn business from day one. And you can still do what you’re passionate about, but when you’re doing what you’re passionate about, you take a business model, a solid established business model and you plug your talents and your abilities into that business model. You do not start with the business or you don’t end with your business model. You start with your business model.

The second thing, after you’ve fundamentally understood how business and how money is made on the internet, right, by learning about this stuff, maybe you joined the marketing program or maybe you take another course. After you’ve done that, you create a business from the ground up to take advantage of your talents and your abilities. You don’t monetize. You never turn something that was never created to make money into something that you’re hoping will make money. You create a business that’s engineered strategically from the ground up to create the income and the lifestyle you want, okay? That’s step number two.

And step number three is all along, throughout this entire process, you’re learning from real case studies from real businesses. I know there is a lot of, like, products out there that have the word, awesome. They’re like awesome-ify your awesome brand or some stuff like that. And they’re usually, when there’s just a bunch of like hoopla and like crazy language like that, usually, they’re not based on solid, solid case studies from actual marketing campaigns that made money in the last few months. Remember, most of the stuff that’s being taught online about how to generate income is stuff that worked two to three years ago and that worked for businesses that had more resources than you have. So, I encourage you to learn from case studies that you know made money in the last few months which is how, like, Harvard, actually Harvard education, Harvard business school teaches 100 percent using case studies. The marketing program, 100 percent uses case studies and there are a lot of other pro – this isn’t a pitch for the marketing program, a lot of really good courses that are all case-study based and are all about generating solid, focused income for your business.

The last thing I want to remind you of is that there is no proxy for profit. When you are learning how to run a business, Twitter followers does not equal money. Facebook followers do not equal money. You know, when you’re looking for models of how to do business, you know, RSS subscribers do not equal money. The only thing that equals money is money. So, when you’re learning how to create an income for yourself in your business, you need to make sure that you learned it from case studies that you know actually resulted in income. And you need to see the conversion rate and you need to see everything that sort of underlines them or underlies them.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s marketing show. I want to remind you that today, if you’re watching this on Tuesday, I am doing a webinar with my friends Lewis Howes and Sean Malarkey at 3:00 o’clock Eastern. I would love for you to join me. It’s going to be a great time. This is the first time that I’ve invited someone else to give a webinar with, you know, to my audience. And I think it’s going to be a great time. And I’m looking forward to it. And I would love to see you there.

So, that’s it for today’s marketing show. Thank you so much for joining me. And that wraps it up. See you soon.

So, a lot of times, people blog about things or they write about things in their newsletters that creates a personal connection. And then the person reading it, someone reading it, a prospective customer reads that and says, “Wow, we are so on the same wavelength. I can really feel you. I’m at the same place myself in my business, or with regards to my health, or my finances,” or this, you know, this – whatever – whatever market you’re in, they really feel like you’re basically at the same point that they’re at. And when they feel that, you better, like, you better say goodbye to any money that they will ever give you as a customer. And if they’re writing it, chances are a lot of people are thinking it, but aren’t writing it. And here’s the reason why.

People don’t want to buy from themselves. People want to buy from the 2.0 version of themselves. People don’t want to buy from people with their problems. They want to buy from people who have overcome their problems, right?

So, again, people don’t buy from themselves. Most people inherently have a low self esteem. And what happens is when people are saying to you, in essence, “You’re basically the same person as me. I can so feel where you’re at. This thing you’re struggling with, I’m struggling with it too.” They’re basically putting you in the friend zone. And I think, you know, I can relate to this, a lot of guys can relate to this. When you’re in high school and maybe there’s that cheerleader that you really like, that hot girl that you really like, and she talks to you all the time about her asshole boyfriend who’s really horrible to her. And you really like her and she’s telling you about the problems that she has with guys and asking you for opinions and you become like her counselor. And, oh, she feels so close to you, but like, there’s no chance in hell that if you ever ask her out on a date, she would say, yes. And in fact, if you ask her out, she might say, “Oh, we’re friends, you know. We can’t do that.”

So, people who say things like, you know, “Oh, I can totally understand where you are, like, I really – I’m in the same place myself,” these are people who you will usually find out later on are going to ask you for advice about what products to buy in your market. They don’t want to buy your product. They’re asking you for advice about what other products to buy, not yours. So, you are so hosed when you hear this.

So, how do you get over this? Well, you get over this by not talking about the problems you’re currently having, right? A lot of times, people will share damaging admissions or things that they’re going through as a way to create bonding and to open up to their customer base. And that’s fine, but you want to talk about damaging admissions in your past. If you had a real problem with alcoholism and you almost lost your business as a result of it, don’t talk about it when it’s happening. Talk about it when it happened in the past and talk about how you overcame it, right. If you have a mother with Alzheimer’s, right, and you’re in the Alzheimer’s market where you give advice on that topic and how to be a caregiver for someone with Alzheimer’s, then talk about how you struggled with a parent in the past and how you overcame it, right, because people want to buy from the actualized versions of themselves.

So, when you make damaging admissions, when you talk about things that you overcame, make them things that you overcame in the past, not things you’re struggling with right now. So, I – I just would encourage you not to publicly air those things because you’re going to create this, you know, friend zone affect where people basically feel like they’re you and then they’re never going to buy from you ever, ever, ever, ever again. And maybe once awhile, once a blue moon, they will. But chances of that are pretty well.

So, just to wrap this up, you know, if you hear a phrase like that, you’re, you know, saying goodbye to that customer. You know, it’s kind of like Humphrey Bogart, at the end of Casablanca, and here’s looking at you, kid, you know, you’re never going to see him again. And when you talk about damaging admissions, when you reveal struggles that you’ve had, talk about the ones that happened in the past. Don’t talk about what you’re currently struggling with, with regards to your market and what you’re going through.

Anyway, that wraps is up for this episode of the marketing show. I’m Clay Collins. I’m so glad you’re here. And we’ll speak soon. Take care.

So, what is the huge mistake? Well, the huge mistake is to label your prospect or the person who’s reading your copy by their role in your business. So, I see all the time. People will say things, for example, in a blog post, like, “I’d like to take the time to thank you, the reader, for reading this,” or, “for doing X, Y, or Z.”

See, this refrain, someone’s reading this, doo-du-doo-du-doo, they’re having this personal connection with you. You are referring to them as you. You’re talking to them like they’re in the room with you, and all of the sudden, you say that they’re reader. You label them by their role in your business and you let them know that they are one of a lot of people who’s reading that and you break that personal connection.

Another example, “I really want you, the customer, to know how important this is.” Anyway, by doing this, you hurt yourself in a lot of ways. First and foremost, you break…you just absolutely shock their cognitive frame and you break that personal connection. It’s horrible, right? They – they are in a mindset of being in a room with you, really connecting with you, and all of the sudden, you say, “You know what, you were the reader, right? You’re the customer? You are a person who this role in my business and that’s why I care about this. And that’s why I’m talking to you.”

Second, you define them by their role in your business. You’re saying, “I’m only interested in you insofar, as you are part of my master scheme and my master plot.” And this is just bad. You don’t want to do that.

Third, you let them know that they are one of just many people whose reading that piece of text or one of many people who’s watching that video. So, again, the written word or video, but particularly the written word, has the ability to take people to places that they normally don’t go. And if you’re really connecting with your prospect emotionally and you’re speaking to them in a way that’s moving them, and all of the sudden, you say, “Hey, you’re the reader, right? You are the customer? This is the label that I use to think about you, right?” You’ve really just broken that and you let them know that you are just speaking to a whole bunch of people. You’re not speaking directly to them and they’re going to feel like it’s less applicable to them.

So, in closing, I want to tell you when you are correct in writing copy that acknowledges that they are part of the group. You want to do that when there’s a limited availability for something and you’re asking for the sale, right? So, let’s say you’re offering a coaching program, or you’re offering a special boot camp, or there’s something where, maybe there’s only 50 spots, maybe there’s only 100 spots, maybe there’s only 1,000 spots and your list is like, maybe a million, right?

In that context, you might want to write something and say, “As one of the 200,000 people on my emailing list, I want you to know that there are only 10 spots available.” But you only do that at the end of the launch when you’re asking for the sale and when you want people to know that there is limited availability and that’s why they should act. And that is the only time that you should speak to people as if they are one of many people that’s receiving your message.

Anyway, I hope this has been helpful. Don’t let me see you doing this on your blog or in your copy. Don’t refer to people as their role in your business. Anyway, again, I hope this has been helpful. And I’ll speak to you soon.

Thanks for watching the marketing show and take care.

So what we’re talking about today is the number one marketing skill in the world, period. And the number one marketing skill in the world, period, is something called “Theory of mind.” Theory of mind is your ability to guess what someone else is going to think in a particular situation. So let me give you an example. I’ll actually do a psychological experiment on you on theory of mind.

So to help us illustrate this experiment, to help me illustrate it to you, I brought in a special guest. This is my girlfriend’s penguin. His name is Pemberton. He’s a little nervous today. I had to do his hair to get his hair out of his eyes because we wanted to showcase his best feature which is his eyes. So Pemberton is here to help demonstrate the theory of mind.

So I’m going to do the experiment on you. This is an official psychological experiment. Well, not official, but it’s one that’s been done a lot and it’s the standard experiment for testing theory of mind. So here’s how it works. You’re in the room and you’re watching this happen. You see that Pemberton sees that this Hershey’s Kiss is going in my pocket. Now, Pemberton has a vested interest in knowing where this chocolate is because if you knew Pemberton, you’d know that he really, really likes chocolate.

So Pemberton sees this happen. So let me just ask you, because I’m doing the experiment on you, where Pemberton believes the chocolate is. Well, if you’re like most people, you would tell me that Pemberton believes it’s in my pocket because he saw the chocolate go into my pocket. But let’s spice things up a little bit, okay? Let’s turn Pemberton around and put his head down. He can’t see what we’re doing here and he also can’t hear us, right? And we take this chocolate and I remove it from my pocket and I put it in my hand.

Now, Pemberton turns around and if I were to ask you where Pemberton thought the chocolate is and you have theory of mind abilities, you would tell me that Pemberton still believes it’s in this pocket because he didn’t see me put it in this hand. So that’s what people with theory of mind would do.

Now, if you had autism or if you are a young child, you would not have theory of mind abilities and you would tell me that Pemberton believes it’s in this hand because you would be projecting your own beliefs on Pemberton. If you do not have theory of mind, i.e. if you’re a young child or you have autism, then you project your own beliefs on other things because you’re not able to take another point of view into consideration. So that’s theory of mind.

And I have news for you. When it comes to marketing, most marketers suck with theory of mind about their customer, okay? So let’s talk about why most marketers don’t have theory of mind about their customers and fail. The first reason is that they don’t have a specific point of view to consider.

So let’s say I’m making a restaurant, right? If I know that Pemberton is my target demographic, I’m going to put lots of little fish on the menu because he likes fish. I’m also going to put lots of Hershey’s Kisses on the dessert menu and I’m going to have that restaurant be fairly cold because he’s a penguin and he requires a certain temperature, right? But if I we’re going to make that restaurant for a dog or a cat or, you know, any number of animals, things would be quite different, right? A restaurant for a dog would have different food; it would have a different temperature, altogether.

But what most people do, because they don’t have a specific point of view to consider, they don’t know who their customer is, in the absence of that point of view to consider, they end up creating a restaurant for them. They end up creating a product for them and it completely bombs and it completely fails because their marketing is absolutely self-centered. I don’t mean self-centered in a selfish way, but I mean, their marketing is centered around themselves, not the beliefs of their customer.

The second reason why most people…

…completely lack theory of mind when it comes to their customer is because they make marketing that appeals to multiple point of views. You hear people say a lot that they don’t want to create marketing that’s very specific because they want their marketing, or they want their product to be available to everyone in the world, everyone under the sun. And so they create marketing for multiple point of views and they end up making a product that is supposed to appeal to everyone, but in fact appeals to no one at all whatsoever.

So I really, really, really believe this whole theory of mind is so important and I want to leave you with just two bits of information. The first one, you can’t see these. They’re below here on the board. But the first thing I want to let you know is that I do all my marketing – all my marketing – to one person, right? His name is Jeff Campbell; here’s his profile, right? I look at this and I consider this every single time I create marketing. In the marketing program we have a step-by-step system for doing this right. Almost everyone does this wrong and they end up having theory of mind problems all over again.

The second thing is that when you do marketing for one specific person, a lot of people believe that they are going to lose customers because all of a sudden their marketing isn’t going to appeal to everyone in the world. But, in fact, the opposite happens. When you make marketing for someone in particular, for one person, you end up having an incredibly laser-focused marketing campaign and, you know, list of campaigns and you have a bunch of very focused marketing materials. And even if there are very few people that match the demographic that you’re marketing, you will have more sales than if you do your marketing for everyone.

And just to illustrate that, let me just give you an example from my own neighborhood. There are very few hardcore bikers in Minnesota. I live in Minneapolis. There are very few hardcore bikers here. But there’s a biker bar down the street that is absolutely packed. All the marketing for that bar is to bikers. It’s a grizzly, you know, hardcore biker bar. Yet, that bar is always packed and it’s packed with people who are not necessarily bikers; but it’s packed with people who want to go to a hardcore biker bar.

So the marketing works because it’s focused. And even if your marketing appeals to very few people, you will still have more customers than if you do not have a focused marketing message, because you will attract people who identify with who you’re marketing to or who want to be associated with it.

Anyway, that wraps up the marketing show. In the comments, please thank Pemberton for being so nice and appearing. He’s a little shaky and nervous but I think he did a great job. Anyway, thanks for joining me today and I’ll talk to you soon. Take care.

So let’s say we have Sue, okay? Sue is a financial coach and she helps people reach their financial goals. So on the description of what she does on her website she says, “I help people reach their financial goals.” Now, let’s say Bob comes to her website. And Bob wants to make 1 million within the next six months. Can Sue say, truly, can she come out and say, “I help people make $1 million in the next six months.” Can she say this? If the answer is no, then Sue should not be saying that she helps people reach their financial goals.

Because what people do inevitably is they insert their own financial goals in this word here. When you tell people you help them reach their goals or you leave any of your marketing up for interpretation, people will project their own intents and wishes on it. And, usually, when you’re vague like this, right, when you don’t specify exactly what you do, you are hoping that people will project their wants and their goals onto your marketing because you don’t know exactly what the value is that you provide yet. You haven’t gotten really specific yet about what you do.

I think this is something where if Sue cannot say that she helps people make $1 million in six months, if she honestly couldn’t say that, then she should not be saying that she helps people reach their financial goals, because people have financial goals that are all over the map.

But let’s get a little bit more specific here. Let’s say Ron is a personal coach. And Ron helps people to make six figures doing what they love, okay. This whole doing-what-they-love piece is open to interpretation, right? Let’s say Jane reads this. Jane loves gardening. Can Ron say, “I help people make six figures gardening?” If Ron cannot say that, then he should not be saying that he helps people make six figures doing what they love, because his marketing doesn’t apply to Jane. And if he is specifically engineering his marketing to encourage other people to project their own wants onto his marketing and to read themselves into his marketing, then he is being misleading.

Now, if you’re doing this, I’m not calling you a liar. This isn’t something that’s illegal. This isn’t something where you’re somehow breaking FTC regulations, but I want you to think about this long and hard. But let’s for a second put ethics aside; I one hundred percent believe in being as ethical as possible and being as conscious about how we market as possible. But let’s just put this aside. Because I’m here to tell you that Rorschach Marketing or marketing where you are encouraging other people to project their own wants and desires on to your generic marketing message, which is what I call a Rorschach Marketing, is ineffective; it really is. It’s somewhat effective, but not very.

And there’s two reasons for this. The first reason is that Rorschach Marketing usually stems from lack of confidence. When people don’t know exactly how they can help people, when they can’t get specific about the value they provide, most people get very general about their marketing. You see this all the time. Life coaches especially say, “I help people attain their goals,” you know. And people and life-coaches who say things like that with the exception of people who have been around for, you know, decades like Tony Robbins- but people who make very general statements like that about what they do tend to do very poorly.

In fact, if you have a statement like this about what you do, chances are, you aren’t making a healthy living online; chances are you aren’t even making like 40 grand online at this point. So it’s usually lack of confidence that encourages people to practice what I call Rorschach Marketing. And unconfident marketing is usually bad marketing, because you usually can’t…

…fight for your message because you usually can’t grab people with your marketing and show them exactly the value that you provide. And that handicaps you.

The second reason why Rorschach Marketing is poor marketing and somewhat ineffective marketing is that non-specific marketing almost always fails. Now, if you’re a company like Coca-Cola where you have a product that could potentially be consumed by every living human on earth, then maybe there’s an exception for you if you started, you know, 60 years ago. But right now, in the present, non-specific marketing fails. You need to get crystal clear about the value that you provide.

So I would highly encourage you to stop practicing Rorschach Marketing. That’s just an R because I have no idea how to spell Rorschach off the top of my head. But I would highly encourage you to stop vague marketing, because it’s hurting you, because it’s hurting your client who’s projecting their own intentions on your marketing even though you might not be able to fulfill them and it’s ultimately hurting your business long term.

Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts about this in the comments. Thank you so much for watching today’s marketing show and I’ll talk to you soon. Take care.

The first problem is that your latest may not be your greatest. So your last blog post might have received very few blog comments which gives you negative social proof. Your last blog post might not be very good and your last blog post might have been months ago. And when you put a blog at the root of your website what you do is put a whole lot of pressure on yourself to blog on a regular basis when maybe you need to be creating marketing systems. Maybe you need to be creating a newsletter, maybe you need to be writing a sales letter or creating a product, right? So it’s a whole lot of pressure and what you have on your blog most recently might poorly represent you as a company and as a business.

Second, you need to control the message on your homepage. You need to be able to ensure that when people come to your website that there’s a finally honed and crafted message that is engineered from the ground up to create the response that you’re looking for from your visitors. Do want them opting-in to your email list? Do want them going to your sales page? What do want them doing? And once you establish that and you engineer your website content on the front page to engender that response, you can split test different versions of that home page to see which one is more likely to produce that response. You can do a whole host of things but you really want to be able to control that core message that people see when they come to your website because like –I don’t know, like a shampoo company said you never get a second chance to make the first impression and often that’s very true.

So what you do if you’re just getting started and you just want to start blogging? You just want to get that blog up. What I recommend you do is you put that blog up at –you know, your site.com forward slash blog and then you redirect your homepage, your site.com, to point to your site.com forward slash blog. And that frees you up, so that if one month, two months, six months, a year down the line, you want to have a homepage that has a static message that you’ve crafted to create the response you want and to convey the message that you want, you can do that. Essentially, when you decide what you want to have at your homepage, you cut the redirect that sends people from your site.com to your site.com forward slash blog. You might notice that here at the marketing show, all the episodes are at forward slash show and that frees me up so that, if at some point down the road I want to put something at the homepage of marketing show.com, I can absolutely positively do this.

Now this does not apply, this whole episode marketing show, does not apply if you’re a newspaper, if you’re in the business of selling page views, if you’re like a gizmodo or a copy blogger, that has an entire staff of writers and you’re really in the magazine business or the newspaper business or the publication business. But if you decided that as a company, your main purpose is not to produce regular free content –you know day in and day out, then you really need to be thinking hard about this.

Anyway, that’s it for today’s marketing show.

Question of the day, in the comments let me know what you’re going to do this weekend. It’s Friday, you know, you’re getting your vacation mode on. Maybe you’re going to take a three day weekend. Let me know what you’re doing.

Anyway, that wraps us up. Thanks so much for watching and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye.

The reason for this is because –here’s why actually. When you promote products, people buy products, right? Product marketing results in product sales, right? A lot of money. But when I promote my company I make very little money. I’m not selling my company, I’m selling my products.

So that’s reason number one why I do no marketing whatsoever around my company. Again, I don’t have a company logo, I don’t have a company website. And unless you’ve seen –like unless you’ve bought something from me and had the company name appear on your receipt, you don’t know that the name of my company is Avenue 81, which is actually the name of the street that I grew up on when I was kid.

It was a wonderful childhood. I grew up on a farm in rural Southern California and like rode around on a bike, my dog followed me… it was just an awesome time. But that’s little side tangent.

The second reason why I don’t do any marketing whatsoever around my company is that, the brain has a really difficult time processing company brands. So your personal brand, people understand. People understand fundamentally what a personal brand is. You can talk to another person, you can interact with another person, you can relate to another person.

Product brands are similar. You buy products, you interact with products, you consume products, you watch products, you play with products –you know. They’re tangible things that the brain can process. This whole company thing is in a lot of ways a figment of our imagination and largely a product of the modern industrial era. So, that is why I do no marketing whatsoever around my company.

Anyway just in the comments I want to know from you what you spend the bulk of your marketing efforts and marketing dollars on. Is it on promoting your company brand, your personal brand or your product brand?

Anyway that’s it for today. Thanks so much for watching today’s marketing show and I will talk to you next time. Take care.

So the first way is to increase products, right? You can sell more products to your existing lead base or your existing customer base. So that’s method number one.

The second way is to increase traffic to your existing offer. So you send more people to your sales page or to your offer page and that results in mo’ money.

The third way is to increase conversion. So you can have the same amount of traffic going to the existing offer and if the percentage of people who buy based on that sales pages increases then your gonna make more money, right? Because you’ve tweeted that sales page, you’ve honed the message, you’ve refined the message, you’ve done stuff to increase conversion.

So these two bottom things, right? Increasing traffic and increasing conversion, come about as the result of marketing. These are marketing activities. Getting more traffic to your website is absolutely a marketing activity. Increasing the percentage of people who see your offer who end up buying is also a marketing activity. Creating more products is absolutely not a marketing activity, which doesn’t mean it’s bad. I’m just saying it’s not a marketing activity. Now most people, when they need to create more income in their business, go about it by creating more products. And the reason for this really comes from a limiting belief that, drastically increasing their traffic, is going to be difficult to do, and drastically increasing conversion is difficult to do. And because they don’t really know how to increase traffic or increase conversion, they end up increasing the number of products that they produce. And long term this is much-much-much more costly than increasing traffic and increasing conversion. The reason for this is really twofold.

The first is, increasing the number of products that you create is incredibly- incredibly costly. Every time you create a new product, you need to divert your focus away from the marketing piece and you need to create a, you know, not only a new product but you need to create a new sales letter, you need to create a new website, you need to create a new message, you have to, you know, there’s just a flurry of activities that happen when you create a new product from scratch. It’s not about the product at all, in terms of the time. That takes up some of the time, but the majority of your time, you spend creating new sales messages, new email marketing campaigns, getting new affiliates for your new product, and doing a whole bunch of stuff. Every time you start from scratch to create a new product, it costs you. It also costs you because it confuses your customers. If you are in a certain market and you spend the bulk of your time promoting one product in that market and all a sudden you have a new product, I guarantee you that no matter how clear you are about who the two products are for, people are going to get anxious and they are going to get confused and they are going to be much-much less likely to buy when you have multiple products.

Because, what happens, there’s a book called The Paradox of Choice that’s entirely about this, but what happens is people don’t like the anxiety they feel when they have to decide between two different things, and often, they end up purchasing nothing at all. So, this is incredibly costly to do. Why is this less costly to do?

Well, you can create systems to increase traffic. You can create pay-per-click campaigns, you can create SEO campaigns, you can do a variety of things to automate the process of bringing traffic to your business. It does require some investment, it does require tweaking and honing and testing and tracking and doing some analytics goals, and you know, creating systems.

But when you invest in increasing your traffic, you’re investing in a high ROI activity that can be automated, right, and scaled. Buying traffic and converting it is something that absolutely can be automated, and absolutely can be scaled.

Increasing conversion also is something that can be automated and that can be scaled. You can hire a copywriter, you can bring people in house, you can create a system around testing and tracking in your business that allows you to increase conversion.

On the other hand, creating products is something that is very-very-very difficult to automate and scale. Yes, you can create systems around creating products and you can outsource it, and you can do a bunch of things there, but a know very few truly great products that have been created as the result of automation, right?

Normally if you want to create a good product, you bring in your best people, your best engineers, your best thinkers, and you have them dedicate, you know, some serious brainpower and some serious creativity and some serious research and development funds to creating a product.

So, you know, this is an incredibly costly thing that you can do. What most businesses do, and why most businesses fail, is that they spend about 80 percent of their time making new products from scratch. And they spend about, oh, anywhere from, you know, 20 percent of their time to 10 percent of their time, creating sustainable marketing systems for increasing their traffic and increasing their conversion in a sustainable, automated fashion that grows their business long term.

So, I guess what I want to propose to you is this. Every time that you think you need to create a new product in order to increase your revenue by selling a new product to your existing customer base, it’s costing you. It’s costing you time. It’s, in a number of cases, decreasing conversions in your business because people are becoming more and more and more confused about what to buy.

So, instead of creating new products – which you do need to do occasionally – I encourage you to focus on traffic and to focus on conversion and drive more traffic to the same offer. Tweak that offer. Test that offer. Hone it. Refine it.

Create a system around marketing your product and tweak it and hone it, little by little, ratchet it up, you know, make little tweaks here and little tweaks there, to your existing marketing systems. Drive more traffic, increase conversion and you will have a much, much, much higher ROI than if you just go about increasing your products.

But again, this is a serious marketing activity, and as much as people would like to think of themselves as marketers, most people are not ready to go out and buy traffic. They aren’t ready to really, really, really test conversion and do what needs to be done there. They’d rather just write 50 more blog posts. They’d rather just, you know, just have another brilliant idea about creating a new product and have a suite of products, right?

So, the real marketing work is going to result in higher ROI. So, my advice, once again, is that, if you think you have to create another product in order to increase your income, you have a marketing problem and you need a market solution.

Anyway that’s it for today’s marketing show. Thank you so much for watching and I will speak to you soon. My name is Clay Collins, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Take care.

And I was inspired to create this post by this picture I saw. Let’s see if we can get that on the screen. Yup. So by this picture I saw, that my friend Chris showed me the other day. And just so know that’s an example of how to, you know, give stuff away incorrectly.

So here are the principles that are going to result in free stuff that you give away that actually builds your business, results in more people buying your main product, not fewer people buying your main product. And the principles are these—your free product creates desire-based tension and inspires people and doesn’t give steps to final destination.

Now, before you start thinking I’m, you know, doing some stuff that you don’t agree with, let’s break this down. So the purpose of good marketing, all good marketing, is to create desire-based tension. I was thinking the other day of like, what’s a good definition of marketing and this is the best definition I could come up with. Good marketing creates desire-based tension. It does not relieve desire-based tension.

So, you know, for example, let’s use the free stuff example. If I go to a restaurant and they give me just an amazing morsel, an amazing sample of a gourmet meal and I like it and I realize that I’m hungry because I just had this sample and I realize that I want more of it, what that restaurant has done is they have created desire-based tension. I now am experiencing tension after I have experienced the free sample, because I want more of it and I don’t have more of it. So that creates this tension that gets me to buy that amazing meal. Okay?

What most people do is instead of creating tension with their free stuff, they release that desire-based tension. So you want to create marketing that creates tension and that does not relieve it – and I’m not talking about anxiety. What I’m talking about, in most cases, is inspiring people.

So if someone believes that something that they want to do that they previously believed they could not do, if you can convince them that that thing is now possible for them, then that creates desire-based tension because they want to go somewhere, they don’t know how to go there themselves, but they now believe that they can do it because you’ve proven to them, let’s say, in your free material that they can accomplish something that they previously thought they could not accomplish. That’s an amazing way to create desire-based tension.

Let’s use the weight-loss market, for example. If you can convince someone who has tried everything to lose weight, if you can convince that person that they can indeed lose weight after all, then you will create desire-based tension.

If you have someone who their entire life has, you know, struggled to learn a given language and you can prove to them that it’s possible for them, then you’ve created desire-based tension because you’ve inspired them to believe that something that they believed was previously not possible is now possible. So the best way to create desire based tension, like I said before, is to inspire people which I think is a wonderful thing that you can do for someone if it’s done ethically, if it’s done honestly, and if you only inspire people to do things who can actually do it. Don’t make any false promises.

The third thing here is that when you’re creating free stuff that helps your business instead of hurting it, is that you give free stuff away that doesn’t give steps to the final destination. You can give people steps that move them closer to their final destination. But if you give people steps to their final destination in your free product, what you’re going to do is you’re going to give them the illusion that they have all the information they need to achieve the desired outcome without them actually having that information.

So if I were to say to a lot of people who are looking to increase their marketing that they needed to do like how to know eight things, let’s say I broke it down to eight steps and I gave them those eight steps, a lot of people will believe that because they understand conceptually what needs to be done that they can actually go do it. And that’s going to not create desire-based tension but relieve that desire-based tension.

And, you know, eventually, they’re going to find out as they try and do each of those steps that they actually need a more specific action plan. Okay? So if you give most people a map to the gold, they will believe they can actually get to that gold. But often there are rivers that need to be crossed that they can’t cross on their own. There’s, you know, moats and booby traps and all kinds of things going on. But if they just see that map, they’re going to falsely believe that they can accomplish something on their own without your big product that they actually can’t accomplish without your product.

So when you create free stuff, try not to give steps; prove to them that they can accomplish it. Show them a picture of the gold, but don’t give them a map to that gold even if that map is incomplete and even if they need your course to sort of finalize that map or to effectively use that map to get to where they need to go.

Now, I understand there might be some marketing nerd or, you know, intelligent people could disagree with me about that third point and, you know, refer to specific cases that may or may not be applicable, but this is what has worked for me incredibly well. This is what has worked for my clients incredibly well. And to the extent that this makes sense for you in your business, I encourage you to use this. Again, the main thing is this one here at the top, make sure that you’re marketing creates desire-based tension and does not relieve it.

So that’s it for this marketing show. Thank you so much for joining me today and I will talk to you in the next episode. Take care.

Okay, so I was browsing around the web and I saw this picture… okay, I don’t know if you can see it. But it’s basically a picture of kids playing in a little, you know, house fort that they’ve made for themselves. I don’t know if you did this as a kid but my brother and I used to do this. We’d arrange couches. We’d, you know, take a chair and prop up the leg rest on like my dad’s easy chair. We’d, you know, put covers around everything and then we’d build this fort. And it was so cool. It was awesome. We had this project that we were working on together. We were excited about the project. It was real to use. We had this creativity and this energy that was just amazing. And then when we were inside the fort, we thought no one could see us. You know, it was just amazing. It was a wonderful childhood experience.

And when I saw that picture, you know, on the web, I thought about this phrase that people have a lot when they’re referring to hiring someone in their company. Okay. The phrase is this, “I need to get stuff off my plate,” okay. And that’s what I see most people thinking about and talking about when they’re referring to hiring someone in their business, maybe hiring a virtual assistant or hiring someone else to help them “get stuff off my plate,” and I think this is dead wrong. Okay?

I think this is absolutely wrong. I think it’s bad for business. I think it’s bad for the lives of the people you hire. And I think that it’s not going to help you grow where you need to grow. Okay. So let’s just talk about this. When you hire someone to get stuff off your plate, you’re basically saying there’s this junk or these tasks that I have to do and I want someone to do these menial tasks that I don’t like to do and I really don’t care how well they handle them. I just need someone to take my shit. Okay, I need someone to take my crap. I need someone to get stuff off my plate. I need to unload on someone.

What this results in when people do “I need to get stuff off my plate” hiring is it results in a vision bandwidth problem in your company. So if you’re hiring someone to get stuff off your plate, chances are you have a time bandwidth problem, okay. You don’t have enough time to do everything that you need to do in your business.

When you hire someone to get stuff off your plate, you end up having to do more work than you originally did just to manage them because all you did was unload a bunch of little tasks that may or may not be related. And that might temporarily relieve the time bandwidth that you have in your business.

But, I think you have a much bigger issue in your business than time bandwidth. In fact, most businesses have a much bigger problem in their business than time bandwidth. The problem that most businesses have in their business is not time, okay, it’s vision. Most business have vision bandwidth issues.

Let me give you an example. Back in the day, I hired someone to do support for my company, okay? I hired someone. I had all these support issues to do and I needed someone to get that off my plate. And I ended up hiring someone who had no vision for customer support. They had no, you know, necessarily, like they had no interest in it long-term but that’s the person I got because I was looking to just get stuff off my plate. That didn’t end up working out so well.

What I ended up doing is working with Tracy who now I worked with long-term. But Tracy came in and what she had was she had a vision for customer service. She wasn’t getting stuff off my plate, she came in with a vision for customer services, a bigger vision than I had for customer services. I knew all along that I wanted us to have amazing customer support and amazing customer service. But I did not have a vision for it other than that I wanted it to be good.

I had a vision bandwidth problem and I tried to solve it with a time bandwidth solution. Okay? So Tracy ended up coming on board and that month, okay, that month that I spent money to hire her that I thought I did not have at that time, our profits…

…tripled immediately, because we had a vision bandwidth problem and then it got plugged. Okay?

And I submit to you that in cases where you are looking to just get stuff off your plate, if you spend the additional money necessary to get someone who not only will take stuff off your plate but who has a vision, a long-term vision to address the things that you want to get off your plate, your business is going to do much better and you will transform from a company where everyone is sort of slaving away to do the things that you’ve gotten off your plate to a business where everyone is building their own fort and they’re being excited and they’re having fun. And that is a truly great company.

And just to sort of wrap this up, I want to say, just my little piece here, my little rant on the state of hiring in this online space, the information marketing space, this little community that we have, what I’m seeing here in this online marketing space is essentially a race to the bottom. In almost every single developed legitimate market, you see a talent war for the very best and brightest people.

In the online space what we see over and over and over again is the exact opposite of a talent war, we see people going to get the cheapest people they can possibly find in, I don’t know, places like India where they can pay as little as possible and shove as much stuff off their plate.

And in time, after time, after time, everyone I see who tries to, you know, initiate that race to the bottom to get someone to take the stuff off their plate and to pay the cheapest amount they possibly can to get someone again to hire someone off their plate, every time I see that happen, almost without exception, it fails.

What I would encourage you to do is hire the person who has the biggest bandwidth, the biggest vision bandwidth for your issues, the person who has a long-term solution, the person who has a vision for what you need handled. Okay, the person who can play in a fort and address the issue that you have.

So that’s the marketing show for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Hire employees who can work in a fort. Hire the best people you possibly can. Pay them as much as you can possibly pay them and build a truly great company. Don’t hire people just to get stuff off your plate. That’s it.

But my counter-intuitive piece of advice for you today is this. Okay, here it is, “Stop helping people.” I see lots of coaches and consultants and people who sell information products and people who sell advice, and people who position themselves as experts saying things like, “I help you lose weight,” and “I help you change your life,” and “I help you set goals,” “I help you create the life you want.”

And whenever I hear people say this about themselves, I cringe, okay, I cringe. And the reason for it is this. Most people will not buy from you if you say you are going to help them. We hire helpers to help us move, okay. We hire helpers to help us set up a video studio, like, the video studio I have here.

But when people want to lose weight, when people want big transformation in their lives, when people want to grow their business, they do not want a helper. They want a visionary. They want someone who has a bigger vision for them than they have for themselves. Because when you say you’re a helper and when you position yourself as a helper, you are implying that you are in charge and someone else is helping you reach a destination that you already have in mind.

But the truth is most people are stuck where they are because they do not have a bigger vision for their life. And I’ve seen over and over and over again that people who have books, people who have e-books, information products, DVDs, people who teach frameworks end up getting the most amount of consulting clients and the most amount of, you know, coaching clients because people read their e-books or people read, you know, whatever information that they have out there and they get a bigger vision for their life than they already had by reading an expert’s book and then they hire that expert to help them sort of incarnate that vision in their life that the expert put out in that book.

So most people, just to reiterate, if you say you help people, most people will not hire you because they’re not looking for someone to help them; they’re looking for someone to have a bigger vision than they already have for themselves and they’re looking for that person with the bigger vision to help incarnate that vision in their lives.

For example, back in the day, I needed an SEO strategy, I needed a search engine optimization strategy for my business. I was not looking for a helper; I was not looking for someone to help me do SEO. I was looking for someone who had an SEO vision that could bring that vision to my business and make it come to pass. If someone said they were going to help me do SEO, I would have never hired them.

You also, you know, decrease your value when you say you’re hiring a helper, a CEO of a company is not a helper, a lead expert in any field is not a helper.

So just to conclude this up, just to wrap it up, stop calling yourself a helper; you are a visionary; you are not a helper. And that’s my input for the day. This is going to radically help your positioning. This is going to increase the amount you can charge just by changing this one small word alone.

So with that, thanks so much. Thanks for watching the Marketing Show. This has been episode number three. It’s so great to have you here. Take care and I’ll see you tomorrow.

The first time I went online in a big way was a blog called the “Growing Life” where I pretty much just railed phonetically against productivity and the productivity industrial complex. I hate the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. In terms of my own personal productivity, I rarely get up before 10 in the morning, I’ve really enjoy sleeping in and I don’t get more than one thing done per day. So, this show that I’m doing today, this is the only thing that I’m doing today but despite that, the income for my company keeps on going up and up and up. The results we’re having are increasing steadily and I attribute that largely to the system that I’m about to share with you. So, let’s head on into the computer and I will show you what I got.

Alright. Now, before we start implementing this goal setting system, we need to do some basic, good old fashion financial money based goal setting. So, financial money, I guess that’s kind of redundant but – alright. So, the first thing we need to figure out is how much money we want our marketing to make us per year. So, let’s just say we want to make 2 million. Alright, there it is, 2 million. Now, in order to make 2 million per year, we need to make – let’s see, we need to make roughly $166,000 per month.

Now, I don’t like that number, it’s not very satisfying to me, it’s kind of messy so let’s just round that up to 200,000. Alright, so we have to make roughly 200,000 per month to make 2 million per year. If we have to bring in $200,000 per month then that means that we need to bring in how much per week. Let’s just divide this by four, around 50k and let’s just assume that we have two solid productive days per week. Now, most people don’t even have that but let’s just assume we only have two productive days per week, right? So, if that were the case, that means the work that we do during those two solid productive days per week need to bring in roughly $25,000 per day.

So, now that we figured out the kind of money that we want to bring in, we can proceed with this productivity system and this productivity system is basically four quadrants. It’s that simple. And these quadrants could be written down on a piece of paper, they could be written down on your hand, a 3 by 5 card, it really doesn’t matter. You don’t need any complicated technology to do this.

So, there’s basically four quadrants in this system. In the first quadrant, you write down one thing for the month and this thing needs to produce $200,000 because that’s what we need to bring in per month. We need to write down one thing for the week and that one thing needs to bring in $50,000 and one thing for the day which we determined needs to bring in around $25,000 and then a section called now, right? So, here’s what you do with this. At the beginning of your month or of each month, you sit down and you ask yourself, “What activity could I do this month that over the course of a year would result in $200,000?” right, because we’re starting with this month’s quadrant.

And let’s just say that activity is to launch a product. Now, if you launch a product during a given month, it could be that you don’t necessarily bring in $200,000 that month but over the course of the year, because that’s sort of the scope that we’re looking at over the course of the next 12 months, launching a product, you know, if you set it up on repeat, I mean, if you do it right, launching a product could result in $200,000 over the course of a year, right? And based on this one activity that you have for your month, it’s going to meet your desired income goals, you can go ahead and pick some of the one thing that you’re going to do that week and of course this is a derivative of the thing you’re going to do for the month.

So, if you are to launch a product, obviously you need to create a sales video to sell that product. So, this thing of course is derived from this thing, right? And if you’re going to create a sales video, one thing that you might want to do is you’re going to write a script. You’re going to inevitably need to write a script for that sales video. And you know, writing a script for a sales video which is what you might do during a one day during this week which is part of this month certainly has the potential to result in 200 – I mean, in $25,000 in value for your business over the course of the year and then of course based on, you know, this activity which is to write a script for your sales video, you need to outline the sales video or outline the script for your sales video.

So, what you’re doing now, right, in any given moment is derived from the thing you’re going to do for the day which is derived from the thing you’re going to do for the week which is derived from the thing you’re going to do for the month and whenever you place one of the activities in this box, it needs to match up with the dollar value you have for that quadrant, okay? So, this is my productivity system in a nutshell and what this has forced me to do is think very hard about the things that I plan to do and how they align with the business objectives of my business and this has been a responsible for us nearly doubling our business revenues every year. This has just been a fantastic tool for us and I encourage you to use it yourself. There are a lot of people going around doing a lot of things in their business that really aren’t productive, really aren’t going to move their business forward and really aren’t going to give them the cash flow necessary for them to tackle some of the bigger goals they have for their business.

So, I’ll leave this in your hands and I hope you make good use of it. I hope you apply this and I hope you use this to really skyrocket the success of your business and your marketing.

Alright, that about wraps us up. Thank you so much for watching. Before I go though, I have a question for you. It’s the question of the week and that is this, alright? I just got this Kindle, yes, it really does fit in my front pocket. And, you know, frankly it got a bunch of geeky nonsense on here that you would expect someone like me to have. So, you know, gain based marketing, scientific advertising, you know, classics like that, you know, Breakthrough Advertising Eugene Schwartz, stuff like that, right? I need to lighten up a little bit here.

So, here’s what I need to know. I want your recommendations on trashy, trash, trash, trash page turning fiction, right? Like, I want to be caught in like a sea of drama that won’t let me go, right? So, what are your recommendations? Don’t tell me Tolstoy, don’t give me Warren Piece, you know, I don’t want classic literature here. Not like, you know, The Bell Jar or something depressing like that. I want trash fiction here. So, go ahead, give me new recommendations. I want them all. And I’m going – I’ve mean to start reading something like this soon. I think it’s going to be good for my copywriting and just fun in general.

So, you know, let me know what you think. And I will see you next week. Thanks for watching the show, I do appreciate it. Take care.

We also have purchased marketingshow.com. And so, in the future, Marketing Show will be hosted at marketingshow.com. But, for now, you’re not going to see my face. You’re just going to see the slide. But you are going to learn at lot of things that have made my clients and I a lot of money. And this is one of the bigger secrets that I have to reveal here.

So, I should also mention that this marketing show, this episode of Marketing Show is brought to you by Marketing Program, which can be found at themarketingprogram.com. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit later.

So, let’s talk about what you’re going to learn in this episode. In this episode, you’re going to learn the magic formula for creating a marketing hook. And this marketing formula has three parts. And we’re going to talk about why they’re so important and how you can use this formula to not only make your product and service or whatever you have to sell instantly desirable from the point of view of your customers, but how to get your customers or your potential customers to market your product to their friends for you.

All right, so if you don’t master this stuff, there is a good chance that you’re going to put out awesome stuff that no one buys. So there’s going to be cricket chirping in the background. And if you don’t master this stuff having an amazing product, having an amazing sales letter and having an amazing website, it just won’t help. You can do everything in the world, but if you don’t master, this you’re going to have a really difficult time selling your stuff for enough money to make your business and yourself profitable.

If you do master this, you’ll be selling stuff that people instantly like and want and stuff that people literally can’t stop themselves from buying. They’re going to be so magnetically attracted to your stuff that they’re just going to – are going to be able to put it down. They’re not going to able to put away their credit card. They are basically going to be beating a path to your door. That’s what this has done for me and that’s what it’s going to do for you as well.

So, here is the back story behind this formula I’m going to give you for creating instant desire. So, I was thinking yesterday morning about why my stuff has sold so well. You know, every single product that I’ve ever put out has sold out. We just opened round one of Marketing Program and that first round completely sold out before the sales letter had even gone out. There are still spots available, but that first round of people we are accepting into their program just completely filled. And before that, you know, Project Mojave sold out, the piece of formula, the interactive offer all that stuff has done extremely well.

And I was wondering, you know, I sort of reflecting to myself why I’ve had so much luck. And I really think it comes down to a few major reasons, but one of the reasons is this formula I’m going to give you, which I have sort of created without even knowing about it. It’s something that I’ve done over and over again, but I had to kind of reverse engineer how it works and why it worked for me. But it explains a good deal of every major success I’ve had.

All right, so here is the formula revealed. It’s SO plus ST or SG equals a whole lot of money. And that’s been true for my clients and I every single time. And I can’t – I can’t think of one exception. There might be one, but this has always worked. So, SO stands for specific outcome. And this has to be an outcome that your clients are going to get from your product that is third-party verifiable and it’s wanted by them. So, it has to be an outcome that someone looking from the outside can verify has happened.

So, it can’t be like enlightenment or, you know, that you doubled your happiness level or something like that. It has to be a specific, verifiable outcome. And it has to be something that your client really wants. So for example, in the weight loss market or the fat loss market, you could say that someone could lose 10% of their body fat if they used your product, right? That’s externally verifiable – someone can look and see that before you started the program you had a certain percentage of body fat that can be calculated and that after you had 10% less.

The second component of this formula is specific timeframe. And, again, this has to be a wanted desirable timeframe. If you told someone that they were going to lose 10% of their body fat in 20 years, that wouldn’t be a good thing. That wouldn’t be particularly desirable. So, in our example, we’re going to say “in two weeks.”

And then SG stands for specific guarantee, right? So, something like if you don’t get the result, you get your money back. So, if we were to combine all of these elements in this formula, you’d get, you know, lose 10% of your body fat in two weeks or your money back. And if you’re really good at what you do, you can have an amazing guarantee like you can say “or double your money back.” So, you’re actually going to pay them twice what they paid if they don’t do what you say and get the results that you promised them.

So, as you can here in this example I just gave you, we used both ST and SG, right? So it’s a bonus if you can incorporate SO plus ST plus SG. But if you can’t do that, you definitely need to have the specific outcome specified and then you need to name a specific timeframe or a specific guarantee. So, you could say lose 10% of your body fat or your money back, or you could say lose 10% of your body fat in two weeks. Of course, if you can use all the components here, then please do.

I’m going to give you an example from my stuff, right? So, in Project Mojave, the toggling was to create a freedom business in 3.8 months. Of course, that’s not an incredibly specific outcome, but people knew what I meant. In Marketing Program, we guarantee that if they do one thing in their business each month that they’re going to double their income or make an extra 25K or double their money back. Now, that guarantee is subject to change in Marketing Program. How it’s currently open, we’re giving that guarantee. As we change things in the future that guaranteed might get a little bit better or we might just have a normal money back guarantee, but for people who purchase this when this video is being made, we’re guaranteeing double your money back if you don’t get the results that we promised.

I want to give you an example of the instant desirability formula in other people’s businesses. So, Domino’s Pizza has this hook – fresh, hot pizza served in under 30 minutes guaranteed. That has an externally verifiable outcome. It has a timeframe and it has a guarantee. I guess it’s debatable how specific that guarantee is, but it certainly has attempted to fulfill all three components of the formula.

FedEx, “when it absolutely, positively has to be there over night,” right? So, you have a specific outcome absolutely, positively being there over night. And that outcome includes a specific timeframe, right? The timeframe is overnight. So, again, the magic formula is specific outcome plus specific timeframe or specific guarantee equals a whole lot of cash in your business. And, again, it’s a bonus if you can incorporate SO and ST and SG.

All right, so now that we’ve talked about this formula and how it works, let’s talk about how you can do it in your business. So, step one is to get out a piece and write down the most desirable outcome that you can deliver to your market or to your people or to your customers. Step two, write down the timeframe that you can deliver it in – usually the shortest timeframe possible where if someone does everything you tell them to do, they’ll get the results that you’re promising them.

And step three, write down your specific guarantee. Step four, put it all together in one or two sentences – again, something like fresh, hot pizza delivered in under 30 minutes guaranteed, or do one thing per month in your business and double your online income or double your money back like we used for Marketing Program.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this gift for you. I certainly enjoyed making it. The formula that I’ve shown in this episode of Marketing Show has been responsible for making me a lot money. It’s been responsible for making my clients a lot of money. And I know that it can make you lot of money as well. And, selfishly, I hope you use some of that money that this makes for you to buy more of my stuff.

So, I’ll end here with a word for our sponsor. So if you like the kind of stuff that I’ve just shared with you, then you will absolutely love Marketing Program.

In Marketing Show, right, in this episode that you just saw, I give small tips to make more money. Well, in Marketing Program, each month, I give you a step by step mission to complete. You complete the mission, and I guarantee you amazing results. In fact, at the time that this video is being made, if you join Marketing Program and you complete each month’s mission, then I guarantee you an extra $25,000 this year in your business or double what you did last year, and if you don’t give those results, then I give you double your money back.

So it’s pretty amazing. And I would love for you to join us. We’ve got a thriving community that’s really helping each other out. We’ve got amazing missions to complete. We’ve got a lot of support in place. And I know that if you join us and you apply what I’m going to teach you that you’re just going to have phenomenal results in your marketing.

I created Marketing Program because I saw so many amazing people with beautiful things to offer the world, but who were unable to continue in business and unable to sell their products because they just couldn’t get their marketing right. So, we’re here to help with that and I would love for you to join us.

That about wraps this up. Thank you so much for watching today’s marketing show. It’s been an honor to teach you some of this stuff. And I hope you’ll stay tuned for the next episode.

Good bye and talk to you soon.