919 – Sneak in more sales: Tom talks Sneakiest Way To Sell Stuff

Episode 919 – Sneakiest Way To Sell Stuff
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 919 of the Screw the Commute podcast. Today, I'm going to talk about the sneakiest way to sell stuff, especially big stuff. Before you get too freaked out there, you know, I'm all about ethics and so forth. So none of this is fraudulent or mean spirited or cheating or ripoffs. But it is sneaky. It's really powerful. So let's see. Hope you didn't miss episode 918. That was a bunch of cell phone tips. Like I said, if you follow it if you do some of those tips and you do a lot of the other episodes that I did on cell phones. You will be lightning fast on your cell phones and tablets. Okay. Pick up a copy of my automation e-book on screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Just one of the tips in this book has saved me an estimated 8 million keystrokes, so you're crazy if you don't download it and use some of these techniques. And of course, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. Now you probably want to check out episode 22, which was on upselling, and more details on advertorials, which is what I'm going to talk to you about today. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. That was episode 22. So screwthecommute.com/22.

[00:01:52] All right. Well, I learned this technique back in 1996 from Corey Rudel, who was my first internet mentor and pretty much considered the 30 year old grandfather of internet marketing for small business. That was my first mentor. Until I met him. I wasn't making a nickel. I was studying like crazy, and then I got good mentorship and immediately started making money. And it grew and grew and grew and grew. And it still does today. Of course, he'd be wildly crazy about all the stuff available to us today that wasn't available then. In fact, he invented some of the stuff then. All right, so I hired him for a consultation. And back in those days, folks talk about investing in yourself. It was 1200, I think, and $63 for 30 minutes, $1,263 30 minutes back in the the mid 90s. All right. So this was serious money. I was investing in myself. But I'll tell you what. Just one of the tips he gave me, which is what I'm going to talk about today, made over $1 million, well over $1 million. I lost track of it years ago. I'm sure it's been several million for the different products that I've used this technique on. All right. So so the way it occurred is I was selling my wake em up video professional speaking system, which I still sell today, and I had this big, long sales letter with a big picture of the product at the top, and then all the details and all the stuff you'd learn and all these great things about the product.

[00:03:28] And so as soon as he saw this, this was on this consultation, he says, Tom get that picture the heck off of the page. He said, you're a smart guy. Think about it. If somebody sees an expensive product right at the top of the page, what do they do? They scroll to the bottom to see the price. And here's the kicker. Before they've seen the benefits of the product. And he says, come on, Tom, you know you're logical. Is it more is it better for somebody to see the benefits first and then the price or the price first and then the benefits? And I said, oh man Yeah. That's like a two by four to the head. Like that was pretty obvious right in front of my face. He said people see that product. They scroll to the bottom, see the price, and then they leave. I don't want to be a speaker that bad because they haven't seen all the benefits. So he taught me the concept of advertorials, an advertisement that does not look like an advertisement. Now, in some places now, you have to tell people that this is an advertorial, but sometimes you don't and sometimes it doesn't. It's like a grey area where it's just a blog posting. But in the blog posting you mentioned something that they can buy and that they need to do what's in the blog posting and you get a sale, even though it wasn't called an advertorial. So I'm not telling you to do anything illegal.

[00:04:55] I'm just telling you that, you know, a lot of times it's just not that big a deal. Okay, so anyway, he said, rewrite this sales letter and don't let them know until. And this is called the three quarter rule. At least three fourths of the way down the sales letter until you belie the fact that there is a product. And so I rewrote the sales letter, took the picture off. In fact, people did not know what they were getting in the mail until this big £11 box showed up because I took the picture off totally. And he says, yeah, don't let them know. Even if they scroll down quickly that there's a product involved. He says, don't make a giant guarantee. You can have a guarantee, but put it in just a regular paragraph, text and even testimonials, he said. You know, it's perfectly legitimate as long as you don't change the meaning of a testimonial to change the words a little bit. So if somebody was saying, oh, Tom's wake him up speaking system taught me a fortune about speak about blah, blah. He could say, you could just say Tom taught me a whole bunch about speaking. That's made me a lot of money. All right, so it's still the same gist of the testimonial. And the people giving you the testimonial don't care. I mean, if they like you that much to give you the testimonial, they probably don't care. And you're welcome to clear it with them if you want.

[00:06:22] You know, if you if you're that much of a stickler on it. So anyway, I went through changed the whole thing and and by the way, I had I was really upset because I had been selling lots on the internet. But when I put this product out, nobody bought it. And I'm thinking, oh my God, this is the first zilch zippo, you know, bomb I ever had that kind of stimulated. Why I called him. And then when I put this, the new version of the sales letter out to the same group of people, the same email list, it sold $10,000 worth of first day. All right. So that's the power of this advertorial concept of showing the benefits first. And basically it looks like an article. It has a big headline and an opening to the article and talking about the benefits of this, that and the other. Whatever your product or service is. And then it's at least three quarters of the way till I transition, which I usually say, you know, because all these people had these problems, I decided, you know, I couldn't handle them all by phone one on one. I decided to make a product about this and, and let me tell you about it. By that time, they're already sold. They want the first class air travel. They want to be paid to speak. They want the standing ovations. They want the the international travel on somebody else's dime and all these great things that are benefits of speaking.

[00:07:48] And so then when a lot of times they're like, how can I get this? How can I learn about this? What can I you know, they're begging for information, say so. That makes the sale a lot easier. So yes, it's a quote sneaky, but it's not underhanded. It's not fraudulent. It's not a rip off. It's just showing the people the benefits before the price, before they even know that there's a product, because that takes when they don't know there's a product, it takes away all the sales resistance. See, if I say, hey, I got a big speaker system, all of a sudden everybody's got the brakes on, they got their walls up. They're saying, oh, he's trying to sell me something. You don't want to fight that stuff. And again, they may not buy it. That's okay. But at least you know I sleep at night because I'm not tricking them. I'm just showing them the benefits before they see the price. So that's the the idea of advertorial. I highly suggest you go back to episode 22. Listen to that one, because it also has a really powerful segment on upselling, which is, you know, making way more money from each customer. So, so check it out. Check out my mentor program where you learn this and a million other things you need to be successful online at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.