051: Rise Above Being a Geek: Use This One Little Trick to Shortcut Years of Trial and Error in Your Internet Marketing Business

Whatever project you have going on, what would it take for you to complete, round out or get to the next milestone of that project today?

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Turn that project into a product. A project is something that you're just always tinkering away at, an ongoing venture that is never going to be completed. You need to complete it.

Robert comes across so many people who have websites that aren't done and the reason why is usually pretty silly...

"I need to have one-click upsell in place", or "I need to have this special thing in my member's area."

Ask yourself: Is that really going to make a difference? Is the missing element really going to double your income? Is it worth delaying your income for X number of weeks? Or worse, is it ruining the potential to make income on that product at all?

You can round-out what you have in the next 24 hours.

What if you have an e-book that you planned to be 100 pages but you only had 10 pages completed? What if you just put that out there at this moment? Just about anything you put online, is re-doable. You can edit your sales letter later if you do an expanded version of the book.

Psychologically, it's really important to have something out there right now for sale.

Let's say you have a website with an information product about selling on eBay. You wanted to have a huge 12-part course but right now, you only had time to make 3 parts. Maybe then you edit your sales letter to remove the parts promising Parts 4-12. So, now, just for the time being, it is a ‘beginner' eBay course. Maybe your original intent was to make it $97 but now that it's a fractional part of the entire series that you can market as a Beginner course, you price it at $17.

There is something very psychologically important about having at least something completed. Now, you just have to go back and complete the rest and edit your sales letter, if you feel like it.

That's the entire basis of thinking behind Robert and Lance's program called Income Machine.

"If You Give A Mouse A Cookie"

The plot of this children's book is that if you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to want a glass of milk. If he drinks the glass of milk, he's going to want a napkin to wipe off his milk mustache. Then, he's going to need a mirror to make sure he's wiped it completely off. After looking in the mirror, he realizes he needs a haircut, so then he needs scissors.

It's about how one silly thing can take you down a very long path where nothing is ever complete.

The Promise

A promise means that you live up to what you told your customer the product is about.

Don't tell your audience that you're going to show them how to create a 5-Minute Video Sales Letter but then spend 90 minutes explaining it. You are going to confuse and frustrate them and lose their attention.

Put yourself in the attendee's shoes. If you "promise" to show them a video sales letter, they want to know what that is. They don't need to know every technical detail.

How To Rise Above Being A Geek

Being a geek is not just about being a techie who knows A-Z about computers. Instead, it's about being so detailed and over-inclusive of every tiny factor that you exhaust your audience.

How do you avoid doing this?

#1: Avoid the "OR" as much as possible.

Don't give your audience an endless list of choices.

If you're teaching a class on podcasting, don't give them a list of 5 microphones they can use. Tell them the one that you personally use.

If you do that for every single step of your presentation/course, your customer is going to be more confused than when they started.

That's why in their Podcast Crusher course, and their Make A Product course, Robert and Lance say, "Use this one piece of software and you can get fancy later if you want." They're only going to give you one solution for each step.

#2: Tell Your Customer What They Can Do With the Finished Course/Product

Going back to the video sales letter, show the customer how it is used successfully.

Give a before and after on a site that didn't have a good rate of conversion and after the video sales letter was done, it drastically improved.

This means that your know what your end game is and what the result will be. In other words, you are ‘promising' the customer what result they are going to have when they are finished with your course. If you know what your end result is, you will know when you get there.

#3: Have a Superhuman Demonstration

This means that you take something that normally takes "forever" to figure out and compress it into 5 or 10 minutes. That's huge!

Why only 5 or 10 minutes? Because of people's short attention spans.

Going back to the video sales letter example, that would take the average beginner days to figure out, learning it on their own, etc. If you say "I'm going to do this really fast. I'm going to prepare a PowerPoint presentation on this and record it in 5-10 minutes from start to finish", that's not something most people can do.

For one, it will really impress your customers. Secondly, it will give them everything they need to know without confusing and tiring them out. If you tire people out, they miss half of what you're telling them anyway.

#4: The Easy Button

To rise above being a geek, what can you lay out for someone that is just a no-brainer, no work easy button?

If you're selling your course on video sales letters, what if you said "I will record your first 5 minute video sales letter for you." Or, that you'll critique it for them. Or, if they create it, you will record a split test. Or, you'll review it and record your version of it to show them possible improvements.

That might help out some people with their fears and frustrations.

Sadly, if Robert asks most people, "What if you sold a $97 course on how to record a video sales letter for your online business, and for that $97, you will also record a 5-minute video sales letter for them?" The average person says, "Forget it. Because if I get 20 sales then I'm going to have to do 20 x 5 minutes of work ." There are a couple answers to this:

• If you make 20 sales at $100 you made $2000. Not too shabby!
• And, a fair estimate is that only 10% of your customers are going to take you up on your offer.
• You can also add in a couple of hoops to jump through. For example, "If I am going to record your video sales letter, I am going to need these 10 things from you. (a headline of this, a screenshot of that).
• A very small percentage of people are actually ever going to take you up on this.

So, if you sell 20 and only 10% take you up on it, that's TWO people. Now you've done 10 minutes of work for $2000.

When you do these above-and-beyond things, this is a chance to get a customer for life. If you end up being flooded with so many sales of your course and you are swamped with all of these video sales letters that you have to create, then it's a good problem to have and it's time to outsource it.

You could increase your price now to $120 and take that extra $20 from each one and hire a freelancer to create the video sales letter based on the 10 things the customer provided in that checklist.

Checklist Marketing

This is a way of marketing that shows a path for getting someone to the end point with the use of templates and checklists, something you can create very easily and sell pretty inexpensively.

To use the example for the course on video sales letters, you present it as "What you want at the end of this course is to have this and this done. When you have these in place, your video sales letter is ready to go!"

Put together a series of steps that someone is going to take from having nothing to being at the end point of that video sales letter.

Make a series of questions that are formatted as "Did you….?" The first 10 questions might be equipment based. Then you have another group based on setup/preparation, etc. etc. You want to do about 30-40 questions in groups of 10.

To make this process very easy, Robert has a WordPress plugin called WP Notepad that will enable you to set up this checklist/questionnaire and put it on your membership site. The cool thing about this plug-in is that you can "spy on" your members. Don't worry, this isn't nefarious spying! You can pull up an entire screen and see what checkboxes people have clicked on, what parts they filled out, how far along they are, etc.

This is powerful because you can see where people are getting stuck in your course and you can focus on where you can help people complete it instead of getting focused on geeky little details that people don't care about and that will only discourage and frustrate them.

The Other Side of the Coin

While you need to avoid being too geeky and advanced, you also need to avoid being too "basic" about a subject.

No one wants a course about "Internet Marketing Basics." The Basics sounds like you're only going to give theory but not any kind of result.

Make it exciting and focus more on the results. People don't want to know all the chemicals and processes that go into building an atom bomb. Instead, they want to know what they can DO with an atom bomb.

Robert's course Income Machine is "secretly" about the "basics" of setting up a list, creating content, starting a blog, running a membership site, etc. but the end goal is that you have all these pieces in place. Yes, it's about learning the terminology but it's also about having everything in place with the end result being a membership site where users can start making money.

You wouldn't call it "Membership Site Basics." Whew, that's boring. No, you want to focus on the result, which is "Get Your Membership Site Up and Running and Making Money in Three Days!"

Have a Case Study

If you have a course about creating podcasts, like Robert's Podcast Crusher, you want to actually create a real podcast during that course.

In other words, don't just give your customers "words." Give them a real-life demo. There's something really helpful in telling people exactly what you're going to do and then doing an actual real version of it, and not a test.

Then, you can go back to the checklist showing them everything you did together. Now, your customer knows they can apply it themselves. When you show people something "for real" it makes a lot more sense than just written text or speaking.

Closing Thoughts

• Rise above being a geek.
• Avoid the "OR" because that just confuses people.
• Have an end goal so you know when it's been achieved and it shows your customers the results that they can have.
• Show something simply and "super-humanly" that most people can't do.
• Use the easy button.
• Have a case Study both in the pitch and in the actual product. It's huge if you can have a "Before and After."

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Filed in: Archive 1: 2012-2016 • Podcast