Wednesday, January 09, 2008

The truly poor sales pitches continue - how to spot and handle them

Wading through my e-mail inbox is getting simpler these days. The really obnoxious sales treatments are easier to spot once you know what makes up a sales page. ( See Section 0 - Basics, and Section 1-2 - Copywriting) Those obvious ones can go into spam right off, unless you've subscribed to them - which you can unsubscribe.

Harder to spot are those mailing lists you've opted into which seemed to be valuable - and give valuable information along with the pitches. However, if they start only giving you several joint venture propositions in a row, then they go as well.

Why are they getting the pitch? Because they aren't bothering to find out about you as their client first. Note I said "client", not customer (creature of habit) or consumer (one who consumes). They are there to help you succeed. The more you succeed, the more you will want more services from them.

Now, I seem to violate the "freebie" rule with my own mailing list. I'll tell you why - I'm giving out valuable data, samples of the books I sell, and in a format which makes them viral. They all contain ads with hot-links to my products. So I'm asking them all to become distributors of the products I give out. And what they give are mini-catalogs.

But I make sure to give something valuable with each broadcast I send out to my list.

Right now, I don't joint venture. I'm busy building up my own funnel and I haven't seen anything worth promoting. There are a couple (that's TWO) product lines I would recommend through An Online Millionaire Plan - but these are tested, proved product-lines and they do a great deal to promote to their affiliates as affiliates. They give out tools and links to new, hot sales pages. But mainly, their basic product is very, very good.

My files are filled to the gils with also-rans. I literally could't fit all this stuff onto a single DVD when I tried. Not bad stuff overall, but once you've boiled it all down to a single volume, you can see how most of it pales to insignificance. (Oh, and by the way, if you purchased the full book, either download or printed copy, I'll send you a personally-burned DVD at my cost - just send me a copy of your reciept.)

Don't worry, I'll be offering the good ones to my subscribers when I get around to this...

But right now, I'm back to my philosophy books and working up their funnels and so on.

As well this is becoming how to work up online seminars with audio and video - very "web 2.0". At least paid products would work to pay off that bandwidth...

Back to the main point here - don't put up with hacks that can't and don't really give value to their mail lists. Read the ClueTrain Manifesto and Jay Abraham and figure out for yourself how you can consistently give great value everyone you meet. Then your millions will flood in.

Only then.

1 comment:

Paul Simister, Your Profit Coach said...

I know just what you mean.

You subscribe to a list because of something that sounds like great information.

then all you get is offer after offer after offer.

I create a separate email file for each of my newsletters so that I keep the ones I like and find them quickly. Great for example if you subscribe to a mini course but you really want to read the whole thing at once.

It also helps me identify those that are heading for the bin.

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