The way we market and sell online is changing.
There are more people online than ever before, spending more money than ever before on things that give them a leg up in the world. That means more money going to ebooks, ecourses, and other forms of online education; coaching, consulting, and advisory services; software solutions, and high quality implementors (engineers, designers, etc.).
This growth comes with a price: more noise (aka competing offers other than your own that are targeting the same market).
And things are only going to heat up over the next 3 to 5 years.
Question is:
Are you positioning yourself and your business in such a way that you can profit from these changes over the next decade?
Not sure? No sweat.
I explain how it all works in this video:
(p.s. did you know you can subscribe to my youtube channel here?)
In this video, I'll show you how to make a profit from digital products during these changin' times.
Things I cover:
Things I mention in the video:
Additional resources and references:
What’s your “niche” or long tail space / area / topic? Have you considered going deeper / more narrow? Why or why not?
AJ Wilcox is an online marketer since 2007 and founder of B2Linked which is a LinkedIn Ads performance agency.
Extremely active in the online marketing community, he is a LinkedIn Certified Ads Partner, and he manages the official LinkedIn Ads group forum, and he is a board member of SLC | SEM among other things. An exotic car nut and a triathlete. He lives in Utah with his wife and four kids.
In today's call, AJ and I discuss: How he got his start growing this agency? How he was leaving from his company as an employee and then decided to start this company from scratch and what that process was like, and also how quickly he got it up and running to a point where it replaced his day job income, and then somebody has grown substantially since then?
All right. Let's go ahead and dive into today's conversation.
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Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes
Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Seth Godin is the bestselling author of 19 books, a successful entrepreneur (founder of Yoyodyne, Squidoo, and others), has been inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame and the Marketing Hall of Fame, and was recently quoted on the TV show "Billions" (which is braggable, so I had to include it). A self- proclaimed teacher, Seth motivates and inspires countless people around the world.
In today's conversation, we talk about the state of marketing, what is working and what's not, and this critical idea of "the smallest viable audience." Seth and I also dive into some more contentious marketing topics like growth hacking (good or bad), how we can do meaningful work while avoiding the race to the bottom, how to be an agent of change, and more.
If you enjoyed today's interview, please do me a favor and share! This podcast spreads through word of mouth alone (I don't advertise). So thank you in advance for your support.
And much more...
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Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Fact: 1/3rd of all self-published authors earn less than $500 a year from their publishing efforts.
Take that in for a moment…
$500.
That’s not even enough money to pay for a single month’s rent in most major cities.
This makes sense when you consider that 80% of books tracked by Nielson Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies in 2004.
In other words, 4 out of 5 books won’t even hit triple digit sales in a year.
The correlation is pretty clear: if you can't sell 100 copies of your book in a year, you probably won't be cracking $500 in annual income from your writing, either.
If you’re a self-publisher, time to throw in the towel then, right?
Well, maybe not…
Making money from your writing is not impossible.
I do it, as do many of the authors I work with and publish. Many make decent incomes this way, too (from $20,000 to $100,000+ per year).
The reason they're successful where most authors fail is because of two reasons:
The first part of this is a personal issue - are you capable of writing a book worth reading? For the purposes of this guide, I'm going to assume you are.
The second part is all about developing the right marketing and sales channels.
A marketing channel is any avenue or outlet that lets you promote a message to your target market.
Podcast, radio, tv or magazine advertising; blogging or guest posting; billboards, sponsors, etc. Any of these can be used to market a product. Done the right way, they put the appropriate product in front of the appropriate audience (this is a billion dollar industry, so you can be sure they're getting better at this every day).
A sales channel lets you turn this awareness into a sale. So you might pay for advertising on a podcast, but you won't sell the product on the podcast. Instead, the advertising, if done right, will point the listener to the right place to purchase.
This could be Amazon, or your website if you’re selling via Gumroad, or a third party website where you can buy the product. In this case, any one of these outlets would actually complete the sale.
Here’s how one Quora user defined marketing vs. sales channel:
"Marketing channels create demand. Sales channels harvest demand."
So back to you, the author with a book worth selling...
How do you sell your book?
If the answer is Amazon, you're missing half the equation (and you’re probably one of those unfortunate people selling less than 100 copies of your book a year).
With very few exceptions, Amazon is a sales channel, not a marketing channel. Putting a book on Amazon allows you to "harvest demand" but it doesn't create it.
You've probably heard the philosophical question: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it still make a sound?"
For self-published authors, it's more like "If a book is published on Amazon and nobody knows about it, is it really for sale?"
By itself, Amazon is not a sales strategy.
So if you can't use Amazon to market your books, what can you use?
The answer is an email list.
With an email list, you can promote and share new ideas, products, and services and then direct readers to a place where they can make the purchase (Paypal, Gumroad or Amazon).
Moreover, email is the fastest, cheapest, most powerful way to engage with your readers at scale.
No other service (not even social media) is as personal as email, and if done right, you'll sell way more books through email than you could any other way.
I started this blog in late 2012. I wrote and published my first book, The Art of Instigating, shortly thereafter. I had no audience, so I decided to give the book away free in exchange for people signing up for my newsletter.
In 2013, I released my second book, Notes From Seth Godin’s Revolution Conference. I made this book free as well but with a twist – I let people contribute as much or as little as they want to my creative work. I shared this with 166 subscribers and made $492 in the first month.
Over the course of the next year, I experimented with many small guides, ebooks, and resources – all pay what you want.
In the fall of 2013, I released my third book, The Complete Guide to Pay What You Want Pricing (all the experimenting did not go to waste). This time I shared it with an email list of 467 subscribers and generated $954 in the first month (including presales).
In 2014, I launched my fourth book, Collaborate, via a crowdfunding campaign. This book raised $12,979 in 30 days from an email list of 1559 people.
If we break this down into a chart, here’s what that looks like:
As you can see, there is a very real correlation between subscribers (list size) and revenue. While the crowdfunded book is an outlier because I was selling more than just the book (consulting packages, for example), the results are still relevant.
Bottom Line:
If you have an email list, you will sell books.
If you don’t, you might, but you might not.
Therefore, your best effort is spent building an email list so you can sell more books.
Note: In order to sell more books, you're going to have to invest in a few tools (sorry, sometimes you have to pay money to make money).
That said, I'm a bootstrapper by heart. So if there's a faster, better, and/or cheaper product or service available that does what I need it to do so I can focus on bigger picture stuff, then I'm going to jump on it.
In this guide, I’m going to share tools, software, and technology I use to market and sell books, my own and those that I publish or market through Insurgent Publishing. You can use them or find alternative solutions for your situation. I’m affiliated with several of these items, so if you do buy through me, I get paid a fraction of the price as a finder’s fee, which does not come out of your wallet, but helps me operate and pay for expenses around this free blog so I can keep making content like this for you.
A Content Management System is what you use to create and manage your website.
It's basically the backend piece you'll interact with on a daily or weekly basis to post new blogs, create book sales pages, reply to comments, etc. There are lots of options out there for your CMS, but I like to keep things simple, cheap, and proven, so I recommend WordPress (www.wordpress.org).
If you're just building a simple author's platform, WordPress will have everything you need and then some. Because WordPress is one of the most popular CMSs, they also have thousands of plugins available to tweak your site to your hearts content. Plus, you'll never find yourself without a designer or engineer to fix whatever problems you have because there are so many options available.
If you want to be taken seriously as an author, you should have a website and you should own the url. Some big name authors can get away with a .blogspot, but if you're an unknown author, this will detract from your credibility.
I recommending picking up a domain name url from www.iwantmyname.com and hosting with a reliable company like www.bluehost.com or www.webfaction.com.
Another option is www.newrainmaker.com, which is like the Lamborghini of WordPress frameworks and is an all-in-one solution (hosting, podcast hosting, SSL, ecommerce solution, Learning Management System, etc.). A lot of successful bloggers and authors are choosing Newrainmaker for their all-in-one solution, like Chris Ducker, Chris Brogan and yours truly, among others. That said, it costs a pretty penny, so if you're just starting out, you may want to start generating enough monthly revenue from book sales before switching over (at least $1,000 in revenue per month would be my recommendation).
A theme is the skin of your WordPress site. You get professional looking themes for as cheap as $50 (sometimes less) through Themeforest. Don’t worry too much about flashy design. What matters is structuring your website the right way, which we’ll talk about later in this guide.
Every now and then you might run into some issues with your website. If you're not technically inclined, you should either invest in something like www.newrainmaker.com, which comes with unparalleled support (literally anything I need they either do for me or show me how - it's incredible) or go with a service like www.wpcurve.com, which allows you to make unlimited small fixes to your WordPress website for a fraction of the cost it would take to hire a developer.
This is particularly important if you’d rather spend time writing and selling books, and not fixing widgets on your site.
An Email Marketing Service (EMS) is something that allows you to send bulk emails to people who have given you permission to stay in touch.
Remember, one of the keys to selling more books is engaging with readers. To do this, you're going to need an EMS so you can stay in contact, share updates about your book, or otherwise provide useful, valuable, relevant content your readers would like.
I started Tommorkes.com with Mailchimp, but after two years of pulling out my hair (and I have very little left) trying to do the most basic things, I switched to www.convertkit.com. I haven't looked back.
ConvertKit is the new EMS on the block and it does everything an author could want his or her EMS to do and more, with none of the headache of other platforms like Mailchimp, Aweber, nor the restrictive cost of Infusionsoft.
A lot of the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures I'm sharing with you today are possible because ConvertKit makes them so easy, so while you don't have to invest in ConvertKit, it will surely make your life easier. Up to you.
Most authors immediately think Amazon is the only place to sell a book. Amazon is great, but it’s by no means the only place to sell your book, especially if you’d like to capture more revenue than the paltry 30 – 70% Amazon gives you.
As an author and blogger, my personal favorite ecommerce solution is www.gumroad.com. With Gumroad, I can easily setup a new product, in this case a book, and start selling it within minutes. The process is painless, simple, and fast. And while Amazon will take 30 – 70% of your profit (plus hidden charges, depending on how big your book is), Gumroad only charges 5% plus $.25 per paid transaction.
Paid transaction is the key word, because I use Pay What You Want pricing and this makes Gumroad a very, very powerful tool for building an author’s email list and selling books – I’ll touch on this later in the guide…
In order to build a list, you need to give people a good reason to sign up and pay attention to you. One of the best ways to do this is through an optin gift (some sort of bonus you give the reader for subscribing). Here are a few examples:
The simplest way to encourage potential readers to sign up to your email list or to buy your book is to offer them the chance to read part of it.
Giving away part of your book, whether a chapter or the first 20% of your book, is a simple, fast way to start building your list. Not everyone is going to sign up for this, but you can bet that those who do are your target readership, which means you should make sure you have an autoresponder set up to email them several times after they receive the free sample to encourage them to buy (more on this later).
A more compelling option than a free chapter is a free copy of an entire book.
I did this with The Art of Instigating, which you can see above. It’s by no means the most compelling gift – after all, if you don’t know me, why would you care about my book? – but the act of getting a full book for free, especially if it has a price tag in the Amazon book store for $10, for example, makes it a much more compelling incentive and increases the perceived value of the gift (which is important to encourage email optins).
Hands down, the most effective way I’ve been able to get new subscribers and sell more books is through creating free email courses.
I’ve done this for The Complete Guide to Pay What You Want Pricing by creating a free course: Pay What You Want Pricing 7 Day Email Crash Course, which leads people through a series of training emails on how to use PWYW pricing. At the end of the ecourse, I share my book and ask people if they want to contribute. This generates several hundred dollars a month for me, completely on autopilot.
“I giveaway all my books for free to subscribers: no matter how big my list is, I want their support in the form of downloads and reviews, not money.
But that won't matter if they haven't read the books yet, so I also leave really long excerpts and have some perma-free books for visibility.
But that's not enough either... so I send out special gifts for each book, as a thank you for followers who review - silver mermaid charms, postcards of the cover art, appreciation mail... that works great for engagement, but only for readers who liked the books.
For strangers, it's harder to get them to sign up, but an expensive prize and raffle is great for list building before a book launch. Maybe a special mermaid vacation/party or a vampire-hunting set. Something over $100; worth signing up for and having a chance at winning; something that only appeals to target readers of the genre. Then I can warm them up with some cool genre-related trivia, or history, or fun news, and finally launch the book, with another chance to win what they signed up for in the first place.” – Derek Murphy
If you take a look at the analytics of most websites, you’re probably going to find that most readers land on a few select pages. These are usually the home page, about page, and the resources page.
Here’s what Tommorkes.com looks like:
As you can see, my top pages are my home page (www.tommorkes.com), my about page (www.tommorkes.com/about), and my books and resources page (www.tommorkes.com/cache).
Knowing this, these are three pages you should make sure are optimized to get subscribers.
A strong home page is one where the experience is tailored to the type of reader you want.
The most effective home pages are clear, compelling, and make people want to sign up for your email list because they're getting something of value immediately.
My current home page is entirely geared toward building an email list. If someone doesn’t want to subscribe to my newsletter, I don’t really care if they hang around. On the other hand, I want to over-deliver for the people who want more writing / books / etc. from me. That’s why I create so many free and Pay What You Want products – to hopefully delight my readers and give them an incentive to keep coming back and to keep supporting my creative work.
The about page is usually the second most visited page on any website after the home page. This makes it an ideal place to turn readers into happy subscribers. Yet so many authors miss the boat on this one by making their about page about them, instead of the reader. Mistake!
For my about page, I tried to make it about my target reader – someone who has just stumbled over to my website via word of mouth referral (where most people come from). I try to hook the reader in a few sentences and then give him or her a lot of opportunities to sign up for my newsletter or one of my email lists, either directly, or by sending readers to my books (where their purchase will lead to becoming a subscriber), or by sending readers to particular blog posts with blog-specific optin incentives.
This is another commonly accessed page on a website or blog: the free resources / books / guides / whatever page. You should make sure this page delivers and gives away some compelling stuff to get people to optin.
Every book I sell is Pay What You Want and I set it up to automatically subscribe downloads to my “Gumroad” list, which is something I set up directly inside ConvertKit. Because of this, every book sale builds my email list – which is way better for my platform than selling on Amazon (one of the reasons I personally avoid selling most of my books on the platform).
Note: every reader can easily opt out of my email list after purchase, which means not every single sale leads to a new email subscriber (some opt out), but it's still incredibly effectiv.
Just like your home page, every blog post is an opportunity to build your email list.
The way I was able to go from 500 to 3,000+ subscribers in less than 12 months was from creating blog-specific optin gifts. This works the exact same way as creating a free chapter or book giveaway, but instead focusing on creating something specific for individual blog posts. This is incredibly effective because people reading a particular blog post might be interested in a certain subject, but not everything else you write. So if you sell lots of books in different genres, this gives you the opportunity to properly segment your email list.
Here’s a guest post I wrote that shows how to create blog-specific optins for your website.
I find that a lot of fiction authors have trouble applying what seems like non-fiction-specific advice to their book marketing and author platform building. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but I have a feeling it’s because there simply aren’t enough good examples to reference.
That’s why I connected with Toby Downton, author of Solaversia, who is building a huge email list before the hard launch of his book this fall.
“Here are some quick facts:
I knew right from the start that I faced a monumental challenge as a first-time self-published author; nobody knew who I was, yet I was asking for the most precious a person can give - their attention. And not just a few seconds of it either, like when you're asking for a retweet or a like, but 10-15 hours of time. That's a huge ask.
I'm building my platform by getting readers invested in the bigger picture - the aim is to create Solarversia (the virtual world the book takes it name from) for real, to launch in 2020 so that people can play it. I use the word "Solo" to identify players of the game in the book and people have already started to call themselves Solos when I talk to them on Twitter (I've also encouraged people to use the #Solarversia hashtag). In this way, readers are slowly connecting with each other and getting collectively excited.
Finally, I've created a promotional game that is themed to the book. Every one of the 100 million players of Solarversia has a number from 1 to 100 million, located in the Player's Grid. It's a central concept within the book, acting like a giant scoreboard, and it's even used in one of the later rounds. I've selected a 10x10 section of it, called the Golden Grid, and will assign the 100 numbers via a series of competitions starting on the launch date. A competition will run every month or so, meaning that the "story about the story" provides ongoing exposure." – Toby Downton
According to Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, there are 19 traction channels (i.e. 19 marketing channels to find and acquire users). Not all of these are relevant for authors (billboards, for example, is only relevant if you have a lot of money to spend toward your promotional efforts, which I assume you don’t), so I just want to focus on a few high-impact, low-cost ways to acquire new potential readers or your books.
Note: for a full list of all traction channels, check out this great post on Zapier: How to Acquire Customers
This is a fancy term for writing blogs or creating other content that encourages people to come to your site. If you’re writing in a particular genre, writing about that genre is one way to drive readers to your site (in such a way that they may want to buy your book).
For example, I sometimes write about Pay What You Want pricing, which is the perfect content to attract my ideal reader (someone who would be interested in buying my book on the subject).
For a great example of a fiction author killing it with content marketing, check out Solarversia by Toby Downton. He is building a universe around his writing, and it’s captivating to say the least.
Ryan Hanley is the author of Content Warfare. He uses a combination of free webinars and an email autoresponder to automate book sales. Here’s what he says:
"Webinars are incredible. I use WebinarJam to run interactive webinars with my audience. Attendees must register for the webinar with their email address. The last two webinars have added over 100 new subscribers each. These were pure education. I want to break the audience in with 100% value and then add CTAs as we go. All are soft sells for the book. I do have an autoresponder set up which sends new subscribers emails directing them to old posts that are still popular. They get one post each Sunday and the 4th Sunday is a pitch for the book." – Ryan Hanley
Bottom line, your book should encourage word-of-mouth referrals. But your website and your sales funnel should also be optimized to draw in new readers.
A simple way to do this is by adding book-specific thank you pages that encourage your readers to share your book, free resources, free courses, etc.
One of the best ways an author can drive email subscribers is to add a Call to Action inside their book. After all, if someone enjoyed your book, they probably want more books from you, right?
Here's how Rebecca Howard gets readers to join her email list:
“I just released a new book. In the book (a paranormal mystery) a minor character refers to something scary that happened to her a long time ago. At the end of the book, I put a little blurb "want to know what Susan REALLY saw all those years ago?" and then offered a free companion story download from "Susan's" perspective. Yes, it's free, but it’s not made for the masses-only for those who purchased the book. And I wrote it specifically for that purpose. I sent it out into the world 2 weeks ago and am now up to 200 subscribers on that list. These are just readers who have downloaded the short story. They're already fans of the series because they bought the original book and most have already read the first 3 books in the series. There are about 6 overlaps from my other, regular list, so I gained lots of new subscribers.”
Rebecca Howard
Here’s the deal – nobody is going to buy your book if they don’t know you. Yes, there’s the potential that a captivating cover, title, and description can encourage a stranger to part with their time and money, but it’s unlikely.
The most successful authors have readers that buy all their books. That’s why a sequel makes so much more money than the first book in a series – repeat customers (aka happy readers).
So the point is, you need a referral from someone your reader trusts, or you need an introduction to your reader if you want the best shot at building a relationship with your readers.
The fastest, cheapest way to do this is through guest posting or getting featured on podcast interviews.
Once someone signs up to your email list, then what?
This is where a lot of people differ, so I'll keep it simple: you need to stay in contact just often enough so people don't forget you exist...and when you do get in contact, you need to offer something extremely valuable so people will allow you to keep sending them stuff. On that note - extreme value is relative. It doesn't mean you need to give out free gifts all the time, but you do have to provide useful or relevant content to your readers, otherwise, they will unsubscribe.
As you build your list, remember a couple things:
What good is doing all this if you don’t know what’s happening?
Most people would create these types of optin gift incentives, then simply look at how many people sign up for their website every day. This is a good start, but generally useless. After all, how do you know whether the problem is the optin gift itself, driving people to the wrong page, or something else entirely.
The key here is to make sure you’re tracking the right statistics.
For example, if you create an optin gift, you’ll want to know how many people look at it and how many people subscribe. If you just look at total subscribers, you’ll have no idea what your conversion rate is (how many people view versus sign up), which means you’ll have no idea whether you should try a new one, or keep going with what you have.
Here are a few ways to track and measure results:
Google Analytics will give you a basic overview of traffic to certain pages on your website. You can learn a lot more from it, but honestly, I’ve lost too many brain cells from getting punched in the face, so figuring out Google Analytics just isn’t happening for me.
Luckily, my friend Dave Chesson, founder of Kindlepreneur, is really good at these things (and has more brain cells than me), so I asked him for advice. This is what he recommends authors do to best utilize Google Analytics:
"I use Analytics to tell me what pages or posts are getting the outside traffic (through either SEO, referral, or other means). To me, this traffic is the "initial views" - the people who are there for the first time. Therefore it is imperative to me that I get a second chance with them, which is through email.
So to ensure I get that, I will create blog post-specific optins. The way I see it, if they came to that post from an outside source, then they are super interested in that subject. So giving them an extra bonus on that subject really captures them.
In Google Analytics:
This will let you know which blog posts are getting the most readers. Systematically create an optin bonus for each of these blog posts and you’ll start increasing conversion right away.” – Dave Chesson
Here's what my Google Analytics told me:
According to this, I should be creating optin gifts for these top posts. This will lead directly to more email list signups with minimal effort (a great place to start).
ConvertKit has incredibly powerful analytics baked into the software (not to mention, very easy to use and understand).
As a point of comparison, with Mailchimp or Aweber, I can see how many people receive my email, open my email, and click through a link in my email. This is a good start, but it doesn’t tell me anything about what or why people are signing up in the first place. That’s why I spent the better part of 30 hours and hundreds of dollars on education to figure out how to track conversion rates on signup pages on my website via Google Analytics and Mailchimp.
To no avail.
Luckily, ConvertKit tracks this information right out of the box.
The reason tracking this is so important is so that you know what people are responding to, positively and negatively. If one of my forms only converts at 5%, and a similar form but with different sales copy and images, converts at 55%, which do you think I should use?
With ConvertKit, I know what's working and what’s not. This allows me to fix, modify, and optimize my site to achieve my goal (more readers, more subscribers).
Note: It is essential to measure conversion rate properly because this is the start of your sale funnel. Eventually, as an author, you’re going to sell your books. But before you can do that, you need to see if the message you’re spreading is resonating with anyone to begin with. ConvertKit will let you do that out of the box very easily, which means a more lucrative sales funnel down the road (i.e. you will sell more books with a better optin form).
Leadpages offers built in analytics as well. Not only can you see which pages and which Leadboxes (double optin subscription forms) are performing, but you can do A/B split testing with them to improve their performance even more.
Here’s what that looks like for me:
Knowing this information, I can test out new optin forms, new headlines, new images, etc. in order to optimize and improve optins. For smaller authors like myself who are not driving millions of visitors to our websites, it is essential that we improve conversion as much as possible to capture the smaller amount of traffic we do get. Leadpages offers simple A/B split testing which helps dramatically, and makes optimization possible on a very limited budget.
Unfortunately, the stuff I sharing with you today is not static.
Even once you have everything setup, you still need to put time and effort into improving your platform. This means taking the time to act on the results you’ve been measuring in the last step.
But whatever you do, make sure to measure the results so you can act on the information in a deliberate, calculated way.
This is the only way to improve your author's platform, build your email list, and ultimately sell a LOT more books.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I'm going to break down author's websites, show you how I would improve them to increase email signups, as well as show you how to create free gift optins, how to create free ecourses, and much more.
For now, though, leave a comment below and let me know what your biggest takeaway is from this.
Have you written a book? Is it selling more than 100 copies a year?
What could you implement today from this article that would have the biggest impact on your success as an author?
Share below and let's get the conversation started!
In 1993, Jeff Miller took over as CEO of Documentum, a document management company that had been stagnant at $2 million in revenue for the past several years. This might seem like a good problem to have, except that companies that aren’t growing are usually dying.
Something had to change.
So Miller started at the beginning - "who is our target customer?"
As it turned out, Documentum served everybody. Or at least anyone who would pay.
After analyzing their sales data, the state of the market, and evaluating their current customers, Miller made the controversial decision to redefine their target customer.
Instead of serving everyone, Documentum would focus on executives within pharmaceutical companies that relied on efficient and effective document management for new drug proposals (which was worth about $1 million a day to these companies).
Documentum went from a target customer group of millions to focusing on less than 1,000 people worldwide.
Documentum put all their energy into these 1,000 potential customers, focusing specifically on the executives of these pharmaceutical companies, the ones who recognized the pain most clearly and who were capable of purchasing and implementing Documentum’s solution. The promise Documentum made: their technology would speed up new drug proposal documentation and submittals, thereby freeing up millions in cashflow for these companies.
Documentum was able to deliver on their promises and within one year 30 of the top 40 pharmaceutical companies bought in.
This alone generated $25 million in revenue and the first profitable year for Documentum (or about 1,250% growth in two years).
How can you turn an idea into a business:
That’s what Jon Nastor, ex-punk rocker turned entrepreneur and founder of Velocitypage.com, wanted to know.
And for the past 12 years, Jon has been actively answering this question.
Here’s a direct quote from Jon’s Clarity.fm consulting page:
I have been an entrepreneur for 12 years and full-time online for 3. I have built, from the ground up, 6 different SaaS products --- all with zero technical ability. I have built multiple businesses from zero to $45k/month+ recurring revenues, with no debt and no financing.
How is this possible, though?
Conventional wisdom tells us we need to master the skill or trade we want to make a profession out of, or that we need lots of money or financing to build something profitably.
But here’s Jon, a person who self admits to having “zero” technical ability, yet he’s started multiple businesses with no debt or financing.
What is Jon doing differently that allows him to succeed where so many others fail? (more…)
In 2014, I collaborated on and launched a premium mastermind program.
What started as just an idea several months prior culminated in a launch that brought in $40,000+ allowing us to fund our startup operation without a loan or investors.
In part 1, I wrote about “The Open Loop Product Development Framework” - a process I use to thrash an idea until it’s clear.
What exactly needs clarity?
“The Open Loop Product Development Framework” allows us to systematically find this clarity as we thrash and build out a basic (but useable) business plan.
The fundamental principle of “The Open Loop Product Development Framework” is this:
Great ideas don’t matter without great execution.
At this point, you have a clear idea of:
Now we need to focus on turning this basic outline into a shippable product.
This means:
In next weeks blog post, I’ll explain in more detail how to build a product wireframe you can sell on proof of concept alone (as well as how to sell it). Today, I want to focus on building everything around your offer - the stuff that determines if your product or service ends up a success or failure.
In other words: how to create a sales funnel.
Indonesia is a funny place.
On the one hand, you find some incredible artisan craftsmanship – stuff that would cost 10 or 20 times more in the States (minimum).
On the other hand, you have someone trying to sell you something (anything) every ten feet.
*true story: as I was walking down a street in Bali, amongst the offers of lunch, massages, and places to stay, a guy asked me if I wanted a tune up for my car. I was walking… I had no car.
I’m not going to lie: I definitely got sold more than I’d like to admit while I was there.
Most of the purchases I wanted or needed, of course, but still – I was impressed by this culture of people who are so willing to - and so skilled at - closing a sale.
But nothing tops the two 5 year old girls I met in Kuta, Lombok.
We just arrived in Kuta after a full day of travel (no, not your conventional travel– think: 1 hour boat ride in a rickety boat that almost capsized multiple times, negotiating a ride with middlemen who triple the rates to get their cut, and finally getting a ride only to find out he’s not taking you where you want to go, etc.).
Needless to say, we were pretty tired and just wanted to relax for a little while before another day of travel the following day.
After finding a place to stay, we dropped off our luggage and decided to explore the small beach town of Kuta.
It didn’t take long after hitting the main road for these two to find us:
I never did get their names, but I do have their bracelets (yes, plural).
And while the value of the bracelets is probably only a few cents, the lessons on selling I learned from them are priceless.
These two girls didn’t wait to swarm: they were on us the first moment we stepped foot on the main road.
They literally raced ACROSS the road in traffic (albeit light traffic) to get to us first.
Why does this matter?
Simple - because I had never been to Kuta before, I had no idea what the town was like. I would come to realize (just a few minutes later) that the town is full of little girls trying to sell you bracelets. If I had known that, I probably would have ignored them.
But because these two got to me first (before I knew what I was getting into), they got my cash.
Me saying no to dozens of more salesmen (it pays to be first)
There are millions of people searching for things every day online.
The majority of these searches are for things that are brand new to the person searching.
If we already have a trusted website for something, we go there first. If we’re unsure, we search.
If you don’t recognize the power of being first (in rankings, in someone’s inbox, and as the first person people recommend for service X or product Y), you’re missing a great opportunity to increase your sales.
*note: being first is mandatory for selling commodities, but it’s also important when it comes to more premier items because exposure to your name, brand, and ideas matter (see: the exposure effect for reasons why).
These girls didn’t wait for me to come to them.
They ran to me.
If they had waited, I would have walked right by – but because they got in my face (in a polite but demanding way), I felt compelled to stick around and see what they had to offer.
They closed the sale precisely because they instigated the conversation.
But more important than this simple action (getting in front of the customer) is actually understanding WHY and HOW it works.
It works because these girls KNEW their target demographic (white adult males – we’re suckers). At a young (but wise) age, they knew who they should approach, who they should spend their time ‘selling’, and who they should avoid (time wasters – people not in their target demographic).
These little girls understood the 80 / 20 principle of selling to a T: the top 5% of your customers will bring in the most cash. Focus on them. Ignore the rest.
Simple: you need to get in front of your customers.
As in ACTIVELY get in front of them.
A newsletter (like The Resistance Broadcast) is a great place to start - it allows you to get an 'okay' from your reader / customer / client to start a conversation in their email inbox. If they're on your list, they want to hear from you (or they can unsubscribe).
This is Permission Marketing 101.
Taking this a step further: sending direct messages / emails / video messages makes things even more personal (and therefore even more powerful as a sales tool).
I can’t tell you how many ebooks, programs, and other digital media I’ve bought because someone approached me and asked me to buy.
And honestly, the reason they asked wasn’t as important as the fact that they asked me - directly. Not a mass email – a personal email, or a personal message. That closes a sale better than being passively on top of a search engine.
*note: I’m using this technique right now when I promote this blog post to The Resistance and to my social networks – I’m actively getting in front of my target audience – something anyone trying to sell anything (from art, to widgets, to ideas) ought to do.
Looks matter.
They do.
If you like your facts backed up with scientific studies, here you go.
While some might be discouraged by this, it really should be seen as a positive because ‘looks’ are highly controllable (whether we’re talking about how you dress, to your webdesign).
These little girls obviously didn’t deliberately plan this, but because they were so cute (even the one in the hijab – I mean, come on!), I couldn’t help but pay attention.
Make sure your website looks good (enough).
Make sure your sales page is easy to read, your products look sexy, and spend more time than you think you should on the visual aesthetics of whatever you’re working on.
This isn’t just important for closing a sale, but for charging a premium.
The same beer in a high-end hotel sells for double (or more) what it sells for at a gas station (this is true even if you’re not in the hotel, but simply told the beer CAME FROM the hotel).
Is your website (product, or service) a high-end hotel or a gas station?
The first thing these girls did, once they stopped me in my tracks, was get the bracelet they wanted to sell me on my wrist.
It’s still on there months later.
Me forking over cash...notice the bracelet already on my arm.
Getting the product on the customer’s hand (or back, head…whatever) matters because it increases our perceived ownership of the product.
Once those girls got their bracelets on my wrist, it wasn’t a matter of ‘do I want to buy this?’ but ‘do I like wearing with / could I see myself wearing this?’
And yes, that question changes everything.
Give a piece of whatever you’re creating away for free.
It doesn’t have to be the whole eBook, or the whole collection of digital comics, or the whole program / manual / guide / whatever.
Just a piece of it gives me ownership over the product.
Software companies do this with free trial periods and the ‘freemium’ business model (basic use is free – if you want the good stuff though, it’ll cost you).
Point is, I’m (and human beings in general) more likely to buy when I get to hold the physical product in my hand (and whatever equivalent that looks like in the digital space).
I only agreed to buy one bracelet - from the girl on the right.
She got her money and was very happy.
Then the girl on the left said: “What about my bracelet?”
Me: “I just bought one and it’s great but it’s all I need.”
Girl: “but you bought from her, not from me. Be fair.”
She got me.
I had to be fair.
I wouldn’t recommend this except as a last resort.
If you’re product isn’t selling, it could be because it’s boring, bad, unnecessary, lame, or something else people don’t want to buy.
In this case, you can use sympathy.
The only problem is sympathy-purchases canabalize sales (and customers), which is to say: once you made a sympathy sale (someone bought because they feel bad for you), you’re not making another sale from that person.
Sympathy sales only work once.
Once your Kickstarter campaign is over, don’t try going back to the same customers to back another product launch. I’ve seen this done many times before, and every time the second launch is weaker (or fails).
Again, use just for last ditch attempts and realize you’ll be ignored afterward…so count the cost before you decide.
These are, hands down, the 5 most effective sales techniques for anyone trying to sell anything online (or off).
Nothing beats the hard work and hustle of someone interacting DIRECTLY with her customer.
Is it easy?
No.
Are there other techniques that automate the sales funnel, transactions, etc.?
Yes.
But realize this: none of the big players you see got to where they are by starting with automization. Even Bezos started in his garage, making calls and closing sales – one at a time.
So if these techniques seem old-school, it’s because they are.
And they work.
* * *
So I’ve been on the road for a while now – for the past 6 months, actually.
The Resistance Headquarters is now in South Africa, based in Cape Town for the next month.
If you’re in South Africa, reach out and let’s connect!
If you’re not, stay tuned for more lessons on selling, marketing, artisanship, and entrepreneurship from the road.
Started, finished, and shipped in Cape Town, South Africa.
Writing time: 1 hour 56 minutes
Formatting time: 55 minutes
This is the second post in the Seth Godin meetup series. You can find the first post here. Stay tuned and sign up for my free newsletter so you don't miss the next post in the series (hint: it's about designing a website that converts, telling a story that sells, and building a brand that people remember).
If you've been following the blog, you know I attended a Seth Godin event last week.
Seth is the marketing and writing genius behind Poke the Box, Linchpin, Purple Cow, and over a dozen other best sellers.
Below, I've compiled a list of 21 insights, lessons, thoughts, and riffs from the first day of the event.
The main ideas are Seth's, but I've taken liberty to expand and explain to make the content actionable. Enjoy!
Make being on time and shipping on time a discipline. Never be late - never ship late. Set a date and commit to it. Once you've committed to the date rather than quality, the quality of your product will go up.
Once you realize you're a teacher, it's not hard to find students.
Freelancers get paid when they work (hours for dollars), entrepreneurs get paid when they sleep.
Here’s the thing: when you're freelancing, the cheapest possible person to hire is YOU. This is dangerous. It means you’ll keep resorting to hiring yourself. And if you keep hiring yourself, there’s no one to focus on the vision or growth of the company.
So if you’re going to focus on being a freelancer, then hire someone to do the entrepreneurial aspect of your work (to manage resources and focus on growing and expanding the business) or get over your fear of doing it yourself.
People don't know what they want, so don't ask them. Build, ship, refine, repeat.
Your job isn't to persuade or change peoples minds; your job is to amplify the people who already get the joke. The people that understand and appreciate your message - those are the people you should aim to please and delight, not the stranger who doesn't get what you're saying.
Reviews don't matter (good or bad). Comments don't matter. If you worry about reviews or comments, you're letting the lizard brain hold you back.
Sales are a side effect of giving. If you give consistently and for a long time, when it's time to offer something for sale (seminar, conference, book, product, etc.), people will be ready and willing to buy it.
Instead of trying to make a sales call (which immediately puts up a wall and makes the conversation antagonistic), take people to lunch.
If you're going to write something, make sure it's worth reading. Instead of worrying about the masses, worry about the small group of people who want to hear from you. The masses won't read your book anyway - they've already read 50 Shades of Grey, their one book for the year.
Write your book only if you can say to yourself with certainty: this is going to blow the minds of 10 people. Now write out loud for these people.
Everyone wants to be on the Forbes 100 (everyone in that niche, who reads that publication); everyone wants to be on the Inc. 500 list (again, everyone in that market).
By creating a top 50, top 100, top whatever list, you make people who AREN'T on the list want to be on the list; you make people who aren't number 1 try to be number 1 next year; and you make number 1 try to stay number 1.
Creating a list is a self-feeding marketing tactic. Use it if you can.
You can't protect an idea. If you’re worried about someone stealing your idea, stop worrying. It’s a complete waste - you can't keep them from finding out eventually, so why worry?
Ideas aren't scarce. What’s scarce is doing the difficult work to bring the idea to life (because someone will quickly take your place)
Deep (meaningful, personal and few) is better than wide (shallow and many)
It's natural to feel like a fraud. It's natural to be scared of what people might think of you. Instead of stressing out over this, ask yourself this question:
If people knew your story (fully exposed) would they still buy your book?
What do you want? Do you want more customers, more readers, more clients, more revenue per share, more revenue per customer, more buzz about your product, more growth....?
Decide what you want so you know where to go.
When you're more afraid of letting people down than doing the work, you'll do the work.
Do you think Martha Stewart comes up with the apple pie recipe she makes on tv? She doesn't worry about that; she simply curates. Her NAME is what makes money – people want the product because she uses the product. If she had someone else present the material, show it off, run the show, people wouldn't want it.
We want to hear it from Martha, not Martha's team.
If you want to be an expert (in this style, form or fashion), then you can't build a team to tell people about products that they want YOU to tell them about.
Whatever you're building: you can't have insiders if you don't have outsiders. Don't be afraid to make people angry or upset at what you produce. It's important that those people exist - it means they are the outsiders and you can focus on delighting the insiders.
Don’t end the conversation when someone says no to your sale. Instead, tell them a personal story. Tell them how you felt the same way, but then you found out a new piece of information that made you change your mind (I didn't want to buy this new car, but then I took it for a test drive and found the comfort of the seats and the handling remarkable). Or explain how others felt the same way, but that was BEFORE they learned this new piece of information (ex: after they went for a test drive they changed their minds).
Writing a novel is a long, lonely journey with no immediate pay off. It's only payoff, if ever, is after a long, long time. The feedback from your effort takes a while; you have to push for a long time to get any sort of response.
Blogs, on the other hand, have a short reaction time and almost immediate feedback (push, get response).
Regardless of the feedback time, don't let "the lizard brain" neuter your storytelling (if the story you have to tell might offend people, don't change it).
People don’t want to hear what you do, they want to know what you're passionate about, what you struggle with, and they want to be told a story.
What results do you want (from your business, product, book, etc.)? The focus of what you measure will be your results (if you focus on revenue per share, you'll increase revenue per share). Your results are the consequence of where you focus.
What is your super power?
Be remarkable. Be memorable. Be something and do something that many people will hate and that others can’t live without. The more you push to the edge, the more remarkable you become.
By becoming more stereotypical, you become the person to go to for that topic/niche/market.
Don't water down your message.
Be edgy.
Hope you enjoyed these nuggets of wisdom. If you did, I only ask 2 things:
1) Share this post with someone else (spread the love!)
2) Post a comment below and let us know how you're using these insights to improve your business, brand, or blog (or whatever you're working on!).
p.s. if you don't want to miss the next post in this series, sign up for my free newsletter.
