Robert Plank

Reading time: 2 - 4 minutes

Let's say you went to the store and saw two parachutes, side by side... one looks okay and costs 50 bucks. The parachute next to it looks HALF as good and costs 25 dollars. Which one do you choose?

The "regular" $50 one, right?

Then you notice there's also a 100 dollar parachute on the shelf.  It comes with an extra emergency backup chute, a checklist for what you should check for before jumping out of an airplane, and a DVD with skydiving tutorials.  You also get one free skydiving lesson included... and one free issue of "Skydiving Magazine."  (Ok I'll admit, I've taken this analogy way too far.)

NOW which parachute would you go for... the regular one or the fancy one?

You might be able to get by with the regular parachute, but you'd feel a lot better if you had that checklist, the DVD, the magazine, and the lesson.

People will pay more for handholding.  Don't try to sell the smallest amount for the lowest price, try to sell the most USEFUL stuff for the highest price.

But not at first.  Put out a small product for a low price with a few features... if people buy that tells you it's worth your time to work on it... add value and increase the price.

That's exactly what I did with this week's launch of Time Management on Crack.  17 dollars JUST for the report.

After 150 people bought, I bumped the price to 27 dollars... and added videos with the same content as the book... so you get the same info with less work and in less time.

Another 150 people and the price is now 37 dollars... I added an additional three hours of video showing me writing a sales letter in one sitting, and gave a TON more details on productivity and articles.

When the price gets to 47 dollars, I'll throw in the recording of the 90 minute webinar where Jeanette Cates grilled me on everything time management.

Start with low ticket stuff... see if they buy... add more stuff and increase the price.  But aim for that high price.  A couple people missed the $17 offer and asked if they could still get that low price.  My response: tell me what one bonus I can add to this package to make it worth $27 for you.

It's so easy to compete based on price, but you're killing your profits.  Most people would have paid $100 for that $50 parachute you're selling... if you only included hand holding.

If you're worried about pricing too high, offer a barebones downsell.

p.s. You can still get Time Management on Crack for under $47... for now.

What do you guys think about selling based on value instead of price?

Post a comment below...

Reading time: 3 - 5 minutes

$30K month is going very well, last night's launch of Time Management on Crack put me over the $26,000 mark. I've got two offers lined up for this week but I might only need one to push me over my goal.

This is what I've been doing the past week.  Product launch was just about automated, so I went on the "lecture circuit" to land a couple of joint ventures, have fun and add value.

Last night, Jeanette Cates interviewed me about time management... which was the perfect time to launch the time management report.  We shared a ton of tips with her subscribers and had fun.

You know what, a short time ago my sister sent me a job posting for a teaching position up in the mountains at a community college close to Yosemite National Park.  More money than I make at my current day job and less hours.  No master's degree or teaching credential required, just a bachelor's degree which I have.

Here's what I would have done if I was laid off from my current job and really needed that job: I'd implement stuff from Time Management on Crack!   It's not what you think: let me explain...

I would look at the exact job description and do a search for resumes plus some of those descriptions to see how people were customizing their resumes to fit that kind of job... measuring marketplace demand!

I'd use my copywriting skills, especially the A.N.S.W.E.R. formula explained in the time management report to draft one heck of a benefit-oriented cover letter that showed my personality, presented an irresistible offer and gave a clear call-to-action (call me up and tell me I'm hired).

Finally, and I wouldn't spend longer than an afternoon on this, I would take 30 minutes to find a handful of pain points based on the subject they wanted me to teach (I think it was PHP programming).  I'd find the things community college students have the toughest time learning about PHP.

Then I'd use my 5x10 video creation formula to solve those problems and make a DVD demonstrating PROOF that I know what I'm talking about, with the URL embedded in the three ways I explain to have a call-to-action in video.

I know a lot of places only accept online resumes these days, so I might have to settle for making it web video and adding the URL in the cover letter and resume.

I'd send that out, and if I ever felt like I had nothing to do while "waiting" for a response, I would put those videos on a blog at the same URL I provided in the resume, stick the videos on there, and use the R.A.T.G.U.M. blogging formula to whip out a bunch of blog posts in an hour... even more proof.

Worst case scenario, not hired.  Then I have to be willing to relocate a little bit.  I'd go to job sites like Monster.com and apply for similar positions and have a kickass web site to show that will stand out better than 95% of the other applicants.

Regardless if I was hired or not, how hard would it be to turn that proof into a product?  Surely I must have come across a few gotchas, do's and don'ts... I could turn my job posting process into a system, turn the cover letter and videos into templates and give a step-by-step of what I did EXACTLY.

How hard would it be to create a product like that, if you already DID anything in it? It would be tough to keep it under 20 pages... real tough.

Anyway, copywriter Karl Barndt is interviewing me tonight about e-mail marketing for his blog, that'll be a lot of fun.  In the meantime check out Time Management on Crack if you haven't already.

For you commenters, the question of the day is: if it was an emergency and you absolutely HAD to get a day job... what internet marketing skill would you use to make yourself irreplacable?  I need 10 comments to keep this party going... thanks.

Leave me a comment below to share your thoughts with me.

Reading time: 2 - 2 minutes

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Reading time: 3 - 4 minutes

A big part of why I can get so much accomplished is from challenges. I consider a challenge to be something somebody dares you to do that is totally ridiculous.

Remember the Daily Video Challenge?  I dared you guys to record one video a day for 30 days to get the hang of it.  Most people didn't get through all 30 days but they still recorded a handful of videos they otherwise wouldn't have made.

I attempted a challenge this last weekend.  The challenge was to record 100 videos in one work day.  I "failed" and only made it to 50.  Now I have a handful of videos I can market on YouTube as video responses, I can insert a few in my sales letter and I have a ton of very easy to implement pre-sale and post-sale follow-ups for a couple of my products.

Most of the stuff I did this month was the result of a challenge... the 30K Month challenge... and I'm close to $20,000 for the month so far... I might even break over it today when our PHP Copywriting class fills up -- there are still a couple of slots for people eager to learn how to write sales copy the easy way, and add a few conversion-boosting PHP scripts without any real work.

Heck, on the phone last night, I challenged my business partner Jason to speak at an internet marketing event within 30 days.  He kept talking all kinds of NLP tricks he could use onstage, so I finally said, "Just DO it!"  I don't care if he presents at a super crazy big Armand Morin style seminar if a speaker backs out or if it's at a tiny little Terry Crim event where no one attends.  If he has to give 100% of the commission to the seminar host, or donate whatever percentage of his backend sales to a charity, even PAY to speak there... it's got to be possible.

Even if he doesn't do it, even if it takes 60 days to speak at an event, that's still an accomplishment!

You have to have unrealistic goals to get a lot of stuff accomplished... you just have to.

Okay, your turn.  Can you try something for me... choose one of the 7 choices below, and DO that thing by this time tomorrow.  Knock TRY to knock out just one of the tasks below... it doesn't matter if you can't go all the way.  If you choose to write 10 articles, and only write 3, that's probably 3 more than you would have made... if you didn't have that pressure.

1. Write 10 articles and have them published by this time tomorrow.
2. Write a quick report (and launch it) by this time tomorrow.
3. Write and schedule the next 5 e-mails you're going to send to your list.
4. Record 10 quick videos by this time tomorrow and upload them all to YouTube.
5. Host a webinar or teleseminar by this time tomorrow, even if it's a freebie call-in gift to your list.
6. Interview someone (or be interviewed) for 20 minutes before this time tomorrow.
7. Take a product that's been lying around on your hard drive collecting dust... and freaking launch it!

Are you going to try out my challenge?  Which item did you pick?

Please let me know what you thought of this post... I'm dying to find out...

Reading time: 3 - 5 minutes

Today's tweak to your sales letter:

Do you have any overused words like "unlimited" ... "lifetime" ... or "fast" in your sales copy?  Those don't get attention because everyone uses words like that.

• If something is unlimited, tell visitors instead they can get "50, 100, even 10,000" of something.
• If something gets unlimited updates, make it 365 days or 1000 days or 10 years of updates.
• If something is fast, tell people your technique works within 5 minutes or 20 minutes, whatever applies.
• If something is easy, share the success rate (percentage), a testimonial, or a case study...

I guess it comes down to the show-not-tell approach!

As Jason Fladlien would say, if you're telling a story about how mean and tough a guy is... don't TELL people about how he's mean and tough.

SHOW them how he weighed 280 pounds, wore a big leather jacket, had a huge beard, and you could hear his Harley Davidson motorcycle coming a mile away... he screeched to a halt in front of your house leaving a thick rubber skid mark... and even today, 7 years later, you can step outside and see the rubber mark still in the street... cracked over the years but still there.

In my last few sales letters, at the very end, I've been saying one or both of these things:

• You can check out my product and get a refund at any time within the first 30 days.  If you're still undecided, try it out for an ADDITIONAL 30 days before deciding if you want to keep it or return and get your money back.  (This language is a lot more specific than the usual "60 day refund" explanation.)
• You get 750 days worth of updates. I used to tell people they get lifetime updates, but everyone says that, so I tried saying 365 days of updates... but that seemed too ordinary, so I made it 750 days of updates.

"Lifetime" is too ambiguous. Is it your lifetime, my lifetime, the lifetime of the product?  (Is it Lifetime: Television For Women... with weekly made-for-TV movies starring Meredith Baxter?)

Does the "lifetime" only count for versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, etc... and when I switch the book over to version 2.0, that counts as a different lifetime?  (I'm having Scott Bakula Quantum Leap time travel flashbacks here... "oh boy.")

You have to be different.  Using your own numbers makes you unique. In your headlines, bullet points, offer, guarantee, even your update policy. Remember the movie "There's Something About Mary?"  Harlan Williams says there is a how-to video called 7 Minute Abs ... so his big idea is to create a how-to video called 6 Minute Abs.  "If you aren't satisfied with the first six minutes, we'll throw in an additional minute for free!"

When I told my subscribers that moving my upsell to AFTER the original sale boosted conversions from 2.6% to 5.5% it had a lot more impact than just saying, "It improved conversion rates."

As I close this up, the ultimate irony of today's story is that I didn't split test the "lifetime" versus "750 day" update offer.  There just isn't enough time in the day to split test every little thing.

I'm a sloppy copywriter.  My Fast Food Copywriting method says write it quickly and sloppily... get it out there... then go back later and fix it up.  A really quick and easy patch-job is to remove ambiguity and add imagery... add numbers!

What's your best technique to add specificity to your sales letters?   Comment below to tell me!

Please comment below and let me know... I would really appreciate it.

Reading time: 6 - 9 minutes

Quick update on the 30K month: I left it in a blog comment but here it is again. The launch of WordPress Crusher (how to make your own WordPress plugins using my fill-in-the-blank PHP templates) made me $6500 in 24 hours, income for the past 4 days is now over $7000 (so I'm very close to hitting my goal for the week).

Three more quick things: the sales letter converted at 16 percent, all I did was send one e-mail & make one forum post, and I'm awesome.

$30,000 is a very significant number for me because it's about what I make per year at my day job, after taxes and deductions.

Speaking of day jobs and numbers, did you ever watch the 1960's TV show The Prisoner? It starred Patrick McGoohan (who just passed away a couple weeks ago) as a spy who quit his day job...

... Only to be abducted minutes later and sent to a remote island which looked like a retirement community. They played mind games on you to figure out why you quit. He never revealed why he quit, because he didn't know if "The Village" was run by the East or the West.

It was the wackiest show ever. They had cordless phones (in the 60's!), cameras hidden in statues, helicopters that flew on autopilot, and mechanical chairs that came out of the floor. Nobody had a name, only numbers. I think maybe four people in all 17 epsiodes actually had names. The main character was Number 6. You never met Number 1, and he hired a new Number 2 to run things every week.

You didn't know who was good or bad.
If you tried to escape, a giant weather balloon chased you.

Six is a very important number because that's the minimum number of blog posts or follow-ups you need. You know how your prospects need to see your message 7 times on average before they buy? They see your page, that's the first time, then get on your list and get 6 more follow-ups, that makes 7 total.

If all you need is 6 things to tell your subscribers, that's not very hard at all. Think of 6 tips off the top of your head, schedule them as blog posts a couple of weeks apart, you've got a few months of content... you don't have to blow your wad with just one post.

Got a post-sale list to fill? Think of 6 skills they should have learned from your book, and which page number they should be on, then quickly write those 6 e-mails (no longer than 2/3rds of a page each), saying... flip to this page and do this and this. Here's something extra you might not have thought about just from reading the book.

Or, even easier. Share 6 URLs on your niche with them. Go to Digg.com and type in your keyword, or even look at your own bookmarks and figure out what applies the most... make sure to stick the call-to-action to buy your product in every e-mail.

If you schedule those follow-ups about one week apart, you can just about make it to the end of the refund period AND make it seem like you keep "checking up" on your customers to see if they're ok. Plus it's a chance to upsell them to another time-saving solution they need...

That's what I'm scheduling for the follow-up content for WordPress Crusher... 6 really awesome resources for WordPress plugin developers, I send a quick e-mail and add my two cents in there. Like, did you know that item #3 on this guy's blog post could also be used for this... I bet he didn't think of that. ("He didn't think of that" e-mails and tips are my favorite kind.)

I consider The Prisoner to be one of my favorite TV shows of all time... it was like if "Lost" had aired in the 1960s and was British.

Example of a typical plot: The Village finds Number 12 (guest star), an agent who looks extremely similar to Number 6 (main character). Number 2 (who runs the village) tells Number 12 that his job is to replace Number 6... so that Number 6 comes home and finds Number 12 eating his food, using his shower and so on, so that he will doubt his identity, crack under the pressure, and reveal everything.

Number 12 doesn't do a very good job. Number 6 challenges Number 12 to a fencing match, a soccer game, and so on but Number 6 wins them all. Then... plot twist... it turns out that Number 12 (the infiltrator) is actually the real Number 6! They've already brainwashed him into thinking he is Number 12, on a mission to become Number 6. The "real" Number 6 is really Number 12, and he's working for the baddies trying to brainwash Number 6! Confused yet? Me too... and I love it!

There's another lesson to be learned here. As crazy and creative as this show is, you could really only create two types of episodes for it: one of Number 6's latest attempt to escape, and the Village's latest attempt to brainwash Number 6.

If you think of writing e-mails, sales letters, blog posts, solo ads, and so on, with this "categorized" thinking... it's a lot easier to come up with ideas. I probably shouldn't give this away as a blog post, but here are my categories to come up with content... it's called RAT GUM:

• Rant: Go on a tangent about something that makes you happy or angry.
• Affiliate Review: Review someone else's product.
• Tutorial: Explain how to perform a step-by-step task.

• Guest Survey: Ask your readers what they think about something.
• User Feedback: Spin a new blog post based on one of your commenter's suggestions.
• Monthly Summary: Talk about what you did this month.

I based those categories off of the 65 posts I already have on RobertPlank.com. Now, when it comes time to write that next blog post, it's a lot easier to say... I want to write this kind of post, and THEN think of the idea, than think about the idea from nothingness.

Just as I'm sure when Patrick McGoohan wrote an episode of The Prisoner (he wrote most of them), he first thought about what type of episode he was going to write, before writing it.

Exactly the same as the writers on "Lost" do now... pick a character, decide if it'll be flashback or flashforward, then write. Even in the current episodes where they have changed up the format of the show BIG TIME, they still have to categorize before they do anything.

Just like WordPress Crusher shows you 7 different types of plugins you can create in 20% or less time than it would normally take. If that wasn't enough, gives you real life working WordPress plugins created from those fill-in-the-blank WordPress plugin templates... that do everything from import articles and RSS, give prizes for comments, automate the ten comment rule... and so on...

Be seeing you... make sure to comment below. Do you have a different type of blog post that doesn't fit into the RAT GUM formula?

What about you? What are your thoughts on this subject?