Just so you know what to expect in the next chapters: Step 2 is about assembling the business[NPGS*]. This chapter – Chapter 1, is an example of the process from A to Z from Ben’s experienced perspective. Now, the 4 lessons.
1. Email is King
3 Ways To Sell
There are 3 often used options to sell a birdhouse, but one of them beats the others according to Ben. They are:
A. One-on-one [Door-to-door, flea market, street approaches, sales calls]
B. Retail [Amazon/Barnes & Noble/BAM] or
C. Mail [Email/Snail Mail].
Why Mail Beats The Others
One-on-one requires your personal presence and a lot of time. Retail takes a big chunk of your money and takes away your control over marketing and often over how and when you’re being paid.
Mail (In our case Email) – Allows us to save a lot of time by using one sales message with a lot of people and save the middleman fee, because you communicate directly to the customer.
For that reason Mail(Email) is the most effective of the 3 methods.
Your task - Building a List
Many influencers in the area of content creation like John Sonmez, Joe Pulizzi and Jeff Walker, to name a few, point out the importance of building an email list(1)(2)(3). According to many books I’ve read, there’s a wide consensus that our job as content creators is building one.
Question/Exercise: How Well Did You Listen?
2. Everyone is NOT Your Audience
Random Phonebook People - Least Effective[1% Response]
When the birdhouse seller in our story tried to sell a birdhouse he began by mailing random people from the phonebook A.K.A. Everyone.
He mailed a 1000 mails and got 10 responses[orders][1%] .
*Note: In one place it says 1 response and another – 10, I believe 1 is a typo.
Why just 1%?
From a door-to-door survey of the mailed people, he discovered that some people didn’t have a garden, others had no interest in birds, etc. So the next list he tried was
A Birdbath Buyer List - 10% Response
To reduce many of the above reasons he mailed a birdbath buyer list and got one response for every 10 letters[10%] – a 10-fold increase.
YOUR Buyers List - 33% Response
Next, he mailed these same folks, now also his first time birdhouse buyers list and it increased even more, to one response per 3 mails[33%].
Buying Chance Rises Along With Buying Frequency
If that seems a lot to you, you also need to know that there’s a well known principle in direct marketing, Ben says. It is that when you keep mailing customers and they keep buying – the response often rises. It is probable to get 50%, 70% for the 2nd,3rd time buyers and even 100% eventually, as they buy more.
For content creators, the same applies for email subscribers, I assume, which brings me to say that…
Follow-up is Critical for Established Relationships
To move subscribers from 1st response to 2nd and so on, arguably the most effective method is email
and email automation allows to make it even more effective. That’s why I suggest the following:
Exercise: Work On Email Automation
Devote 10 minutes to writing your first, or one more email for your automation sequences.
3. You Often Lose Money When Acquiring Customers
When you’re acquiring customers in direct marketing you’re mostly losing money because you know
that you will regain it on the backend* according to your previous tests.
Because the more someone buys from you or, in our case, watches your content – the more likely they are to do it again. This means our goal is to practically storm content creation and publication with all our power in order to get new viewers, which increases the likelihood of them watching again and subscribing.
Exercise: Publish Hard Now, Reap Benefits Later
4. 9 Ideas for More PDF Downloads [Email subs]
The Two Remaining Factors: Product and Promotion
Once we’re pretty set with the 2 factors of audience/medium, meaning, Type of list[Phonebook Names/Birdbath buyers, etc.]/Email, accordingly, it’s time to tweak some other stuff. To be more exact there are 2 more factors that affect our bottom line according to Ben – Product and Promotion.
Ben mentions quite a few examples of things we may improve, here they go as I interpret them for content creators:
Note: I would test all the ideas, because after all, 30 years passed since he suggested them and there’s a difference in mediums [Snail Mail vs. Email].
Promotion: 2 Tweaking Ideas
1. Try shorter videos – In the book he says postcards were too short to do a good selling job, but this might not be true in our case, so I say test.
2. Try to present a preview of the workbook, to create a clearer image of what the audience is going to get – Ben says he added a 4 color brochure of the bird house promotion. Here’s how Nathan from Productivity Game does it on YouTube:
Product: 2 Tweaking Ideas For More Returning Customers
[ These ideas usually won’t help for first time buys because they’re only discovered after the “buy”, but are the key to repeat buys]
3. Reduce product production cost, E.G. plastic birdhouse instead of ceramic – In our case, you could reduce product cost [ timewise ] by reducing the length of your PDF, say to one page instead of 10, again like Nathan does above
4. Again 4 color brochure – This time interpreted as drawings inside the PDF
Product: 2 Low Cost Additions
5. A booklet on how to care for birds – Quotes in the PDF
6. Bird hanging apparatus – A link to some software in the PDF, for example, Sober time
3 Other Tweaks
Once you’re done trying all those you may still try some other things like:
7. Sweepstakes – Set up a giveaway, For example, “One of the people who comment on the video until __.__ will get a physical copy of the book ______”
8. Related offers – Trying another PDF
9. Volume costs less to produce – The more automated emails you have in your sequences, the less time you’ll have to invest to manually write to each prospect to convert them [in terms of likelihood]
Exercise: Present A Visual for the PDF
If you’re doing content marketing, you most probably should be gathering email addresses as we just said in “Your Task – Building a List“, and you probably have a method to do it. Very often it is by offering value with a PDF. When you offer your PDF or other Lead-Magnet, if you don’t do it already, present a visual of it. As an example you may look at the PDF form for this post below 🙂
The Gift for Reading This Post [PDF :)]
The best gift I could give you at this point in my opinion is to have anything you read applied to your content, which will help you increase engagement/leads/sales[advanced]. That’s why I made a FILLABLE workbook for you to fill along with this post, to increase the likelihood of you writing and executing the exercises
which in turn increases the chance of understanding and application. Because knowledge is not power, it is just potential power, unless you apply it.
You may get the workbook below.
Sources
1. When To Create Your First Product – Bulldog Mindset – Minutes 0:29 – 0:35
2. “Email subscribers are critical to your content Inc. plan” – Joe Pulizzi, Content Inc., Selecting Your Platform
3. “an email list … gave me the ability to create income on demand” – Jeff Walker, Launch, A License To Print Money: Your List
Image Sources
1. Book Cover – Scientificadvertising.com
2. Ben Suarez – Beaconjournal.com
Previous Book Summaries
The Lazy Mans Way to Riches – 4 Takeaways
