069: The Big Gaping Hole in Your Evil Internet Marketing Business: Do You Practice What You Preach, Is It Okay to Be a Recommender and Do You Need to Fake It Till You Make It?

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show, Episode 69 the big gaping hole in your evil internet marketing business. Do you practice what you preach? Is it okay to be a recommender, and do you need to fake it till you make it? Welcome back to the Robert Plank show. We're gonna talk today about making money on the internet. That means, if you have a website thinking about having a website looking to make some money or more money from your website, or do it easier or faster with better tools, you've come to the right place. Any action is better than no action. It's easier to edit crap than air time sorts out imposters from those who are truthful, it's pretty easy to find any kind of web page out there that promises that if you just click a button, then you'll get a million dollars put into your bank account. I mean, I know that the first couple of web pages that even got me in internet marketing claimed things like this, and I'm sure that it's only a matter of time before you see some web pages or sales letters are called making huge, ridiculous claims like this. You might know what I'm talking about. You see a web page saying, Well, I've got my secret system, I've got the special software. All I've got to do is run the software once, get 100 grand. Run the software twice, get 200 grand. It seems kind of silly. It seems kind of ridiculous, and it is. And I've seen it to the point where someone shows a screenshot with a million dollars, and funny how it's exactly a flat $1 million it's not 99996, it's not 1 million. And, you know, $7 it's exactly a flat 1 million. There's no no rounding, there's no commission. It's just a flat million dollars. I'm like, okay, that's kind of strange. And then the rest of the screenshot they're showing me is all blurred out, so I'm thinking, All right, so you doctor the results and blurred out your doctoring in order to get something that looks like it's a million dollars. So it seems kind of sketchy for me, but time sorts out imposters from those who are truthful, meaning that if someone has an actual money making website, if it's making enough money to be worth their while, then they are going to run paid advertisements to that. They are going to be sending traffic to that they're going to be changing and tweaking that web page over time. Because if they have a web page it's making them 10 grand a month, and they make one little tweak to get it to 20 grand a month. Well, then that was worth their while. And so one thing I want to tell you, as we're kicking this call off today, is that if you're on my list, and you should be, and you can join my list by going to Robert plank.com you should look at the things I do in my business, podcasting consistently, blogging consistently. What my sales letters look like. Most of my sales letters, such as the ones that paper template.com, income machine.com, look very similar to each other, but you'll notice that I'll make little tests and tweaks and things, and I'll do different things in my marketing. Like, you know, for a six month span of time, live webinars might be a really hot thing to do, so I'll do a bunch of live webinars during that time, then for another stretch of time, then it might be that short YouTube videos are what brings in the sales. So I'll do more of that. And that's the attitude you should be into as well. Is that you're, for lack of better term, an internet marketing scientist, and you need to try out different experiments, even for fun. And if something works, keep repeating that thing more than once, because that is an easy way to boost your income. But you have to be making some income to boost an income that's already there, which means that you have to have a sales letter online and a product for sale. At least one sales letter, at least one product. You can get a full course on how to get that set up at income machine calm. But if you look at many of my web pages, some of them have been around at this point for 1015, years, and the my attitude with that is that if I have a website that's making me at least some amount of money, I'm gonna keep it online. And I was even thinking just the other day about, well, I feel bad because some of my older products are just kind of lying around. And I'm not really teaching how to program PHP code anymore. I'm more I'm all showing like WordPress plugins, teaching membership sites. And I was about to take inventory of my old sites and start deleting them, but then just this morning, a $97 sale came in for a product I created literally 10 years ago. So I thought, Okay, well, the product still works. It still sells a little bit. It still at least pays its own hosting bill and brings me in traffic. Gets me buyers and subscribers. So it's not even worth the time or effort to go and delete things off the internet just to make less money get less traffic. If that makes sense, people aren't going to pay for ads, or they're not going to pay to keep a site going forever if that site isn't making money. And you might think, or you might say, well, you know what? Someone could make a website, and they might just be getting bored with it, so that's why they delete it, maybe. But if it's making even a few $1,000 it's worth it for them just to let it sit there and do its thing. We're gonna talk about that today, because there are, there are those evil marketers, so to speak up there. But I think a lot of email marketers are well intentioned get a bad rap, and they do a lot of things that you can absorb in your business just because you see someone's web pages and sales letter. And you might not agree with how pushy or how over the top or how crazy that sales letter is, but that doesn't mean you can't look at it and ask yourself, What makes you pay so much attention to this person's website, even if it's someone you hate, even if it's some internet marketing you hate, if you find yourself going back to that web page 510 times in a row, ask yourself and figure out, well, what pieces of that are getting You excited or at least curious, and what items off that sales letter can you absorb in your own business? Or I mean, many times I've bought products just to see what upsells they had after buying just because just that part alone was worth the cost of buying their product. What ways is your marketing talking you out of a sale from someone? Because some ways are okay, right? Because, I mean, when we do our marketing, you definitely want to put a little bit, I mean, not like, super transparent, um, literally everything about your life on display. But you want to be somewhat true to your personality, which means that, I mean, in my case, I get kind of excited. I like to be a little in your face. So instead of fighting that, I use that. And I mean, you want to polarize your people. You do. You want to polarize the people out there who find you. You want to repel some people and attract others. You don't have to apologize, and I'll explain why in this call the next few minutes. So polarizing is good, right? Attracting some people and repelling others, that you get your crowd of people, the only thing you want to avoid is the situation where you repel the serious buyers, but you only attract the tire kickers, because that hurt you in the long term. Now, what is the goal? If you have a website that you want to make money on, if you're a successful or a wannabe internet marketer, what's your goal? Well, your goal is long term money. And you might say, Oh no, you don't understand. My goal is to put out something new and it changed the world and become the next Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, well, it's a lot easier to change the world, so to speak, if you have money to do that. So your best bet is to make money on your own and then use that money towards whatever dream you have in the future. And it's totally fine if, for example, you want to become some kind of a startup company and get bought out for millions of dollars. Well, guess what? If you look at companies that got bought out, like, I think Instagram was bought by Facebook for one or, I think, a billion dollars, and the reason for that was because Instagram had a huge list of users and buyers who would log into their site every single day. So the best way to get either noticed or get a big following or change the world or whatever, is to help yourself first and to build a huge list and make some money. And even if you don't want to get, you know, venture capital funding or whatever you want, to just build a website and sell it. The best way to get a high price for a website you're looking to sell is to prove that it gets a lot of traffic and that it makes a lot of monthly income on its own. Your long term goal needs to be income, but not just any income, because, well, you don't want to just be a scammer and rip people off because then that hurts your profits down the line. But, I mean, it's kind of hard to explain, but one thing that these so called Evil marketers get right is that they're after money. They don't let, they don't let morals get in the way, which sounds really bad. So we don't want to go as crazy as that, as these scammy sales letters. What we want to say, Well, my goal is long term income, meaning that, well, I want to, I

Robert Plank 9:18 want to make a sales letter, and I didn't want to sell something for maybe $97 it has $1,000 worth of value so that it's it almost sells itself. It's easy to sell, and I can find something that easy, that sells on its own without a lot of work. That way, you can create more things like that. So I want to provide value, and therefore make something that's easy to sell that way. I can make more of that, and that's some long term income, and the majority of our sales come from repeat buyers, people on our list who found us because maybe they were looking to create a sales letter, then they found our paper template plug in, which is part of our income. Machine, course. So they bought it at paper template comm. Then they said, All right, well, I've got my sales letter, but what I also need to do is build a list and have a follow up sequence, and maybe even have a membership site. So then they upgrade, they up, they get up, sold in the members area to the entire income machine, course. Then they, you know, they, in the future might say, well, I also want to run webinars, so they join our webinar Crusher, course. But you get what I'm saying here is that the goal, if your goal is to change the world, great, but make money first. And don't misunderstand me when I say make money. I don't mean be a scammer. I mean, make money now, so you can also make money later, because you, you've proven that when people buy from you, they might make even more money than they paid as a result. Now let me list seven real, non made up scenarios that I've just I made a list a few minutes ago of just kind of things that made me scratch my head and don't think I'm being a complainer, but I mean, let me know if you either seen something like this, or if you have maybe made this mistake by emailing me at Roberts, at Robert plank.com, these are the seven scenarios I got an email from someone that said, well, a great way to increase The conversions on a sales letter is to have a live chat kind of pop up, right? And you've seen these on some websites, like, I think, um, I think, like, my my cell phone company does this or something. But like, you go to a web page sometimes and there's a little box saying, I'm a live chat person. Can I help you? And you can actually chat with not a fake robot, by the real person. And so this email said, Well, the best way to increase your conversions to add a live chat box to your sales letter. I thought, Okay, let me check this out. I click on a link and I see a sales letter selling a plug in to add a live chat box to your site. But do you know what was missing from this sales letter for a live chat plugin. I didn't see a live chat plugin on the page itself, and I just thought, oh, huh. I mean, the big reason I clicked was not just to see what you're selling me, but to kind of try it out a little bit. I don't really have a full blown demo of like the back end, but at least show me what you're talking about with a live chat plug in what it appears like to me as someone browsing a web page, and so I closed the web page pretty quickly. And I, honestly, I couldn't tell you if I would have bought this live chat plug in, if, if the demo was on the website. I honestly can't tell you if the live chat plug in would have talked me out of a sale, because, you know, maybe I would have looked at it and said, Well, I don't like the look, or I don't like the features, but I would just immediately irked a little bit because there, there just wasn't a live chat box on the sales letter selling a live chat plugin. So, I mean, I'll kind of withhold judgment and just tell you the rest of these scenarios. So years ago, I got another email on my inbox. And also keep this in mind, the majority of the things I buy from, at least at the time we're recording this podcast, are from when an email message comes in and I click on it. Every now and then, I'll go and look on my own, I'll do a Google search, and maybe even more often than that, I'll see an ad on social media, on Facebook that'll click on, but still, the majority of the things they buy are from links clicked on email. Just think about that. Anyway, I clicked on a link for a course on copywriting creating, like persuasive web page things like that. And there were a bunch of interviews with all these really smart guys, all these really old time copywriters. And I thought, awesome, like, there's so much combined knowledge in here. But then there was a little bullet point somewhere in the sales letter that said, well, by the end of week two, or month two, I think then you'll start to have an idea about how to begin your sales letter. I'm thinking, what like? Okay, I'm excited, because I want to know how to make a money making web page, but then I got to wait two months just to even get started. So that's something to keep in mind. And that's a real common question. Now I think about it with a lot of our courses, as people ask, well, how much work am I going to have to put into this? And you might think, well, if I say my course is 100 hours and 1000 pages, people will love that could be so much stuff. It's like, Yeah, but the average person does not want to do work. And there's probably a sweet spot somewhere in there of someone buying something where you can say, well, there's all this stuff. There's a massive package. But then you also don't have to go through it in a short amount of time. But then also, there's people who are just self defeated. So take that with a grain of salt. If you have customers saying that they won't buy a few because the price is too high or they don't like it. There's so much stuff in it that just might be them. But think about that a course on copywriting that told me I had to wait at least two months or the end. Of the month two. So even on month three, and I'm I still don't have anything tangible, so just right there, right there, turned me off, and I closed the tap, never to return, not saying that they didn't make sales, but at least that's the reason why they lost me as a buyer. Next I years ago, I sold, and I still do, but I sold one of the first WordPress plugins that allowed you to use WordPress as a sales letter. So WordPress is using about a quarter of all new websites, and it's a blogging platform where you can just click around and edit a web page as easily as a Word document. And then this was a plug in that allowed you to make your WordPress blog look like that plain white piece of paper, look and feel that somehow makes more sales than anything else, at least every time we split test it. So I got so many responses from people who were kind of outraged, even that the sales letter that I had that was selling the WordPress plugin to turn WordPress into a sales letter itself was not on WordPress. And I mean, it seems simple now that I'm saying it, but as the product creator, I was too close to it, and I didn't realize it. Number Four scenario is, I've seen a few, and this happens every now and then someone selling an alternate webinar service, an alternate way to do a live streaming online event, but they weren't using the service to sell it. They were using GoToWebinar, which is probably the most widely used webinar platform, but they're using good webinar to pitch their own webinar platform. And I mean, I guess technically, there's nothing wrong with that, but it makes me think that, well, their little alternate webinar service is just a toy. It's just a little, a little tidbit, a little hobby. And then when they themselves want to use webinars for serious business, they don't even use their own tool. They use GoToWebinar. I've seen someone selling an alternate landing page plugin, kind of like paper template, but then they were using Lead Pages, or they were using paper template to sell their own landing page plugin. And so that seems kind of weird, right? Kind of along the same lines like, Well, why don't you yourself use it, and even just for this one web page. I mean, go ahead and use paper template for your other web pages, but why don't you use the actual thing that you're that you're selling on this web page? I saw a blog post about WordPress security telling people not to use the username admin as your wordpress login. If you don't, if that goes over your head, don't worry about it. But if you do know what that you do know what that means, when you go to log into the back end the dashboard of your WordPress site, you type in a username and a password, and a lot of people have the username, A, D, M, I n as the username and then their own password. So this particular blog was making a point that, well, you can go and type in something special in a WordPress site and see if the username admin is is in use, and then now you're halfway there, because now you only have to figure out the password, not the username, plus the password. So this blog post saying, don't use admin as your username. And I went to the back end of their site, and I type in admin, and it said that's a username. So I thought, well, that's kind of weird. Now I don't really trust their security advice anymore. And finally, a guy was selling a podcast course. I searched his name, didn't have a podcast. Another guy sold a WordPress course. I searched his name, and he had one episode that he had put out five years prior. So I think, Well, okay, maybe you, maybe you do teach others to podcast. And, I mean, the only way to really know was to buy the course. But I'm already turned off a little bit because it looks like he's not a master. I was expecting one thing and I got another. I was expecting that this guy maybe podcast is consistently at least five or 10 episodes and at least something this year. But it just, it just seemed kind of weird that, well, you're you just put out this course on podcasting, but you didn't even have five or 10 minutes anytime this year to update your own podcast.

Robert Plank 19:18 So enough doom and gloom when you get the point. It almost seems like I'm making the same point over and over. I just keep seeing these offers, and I just there's a little bit of a gaping hole in their offer, in their business, and everything looks okay. But if I do a little bit of research, if I Google their name, if I search their name on iTunes, if they're selling me a course on article writing, and I search article sites for their name, I see nothing that's kind of weird. They're selling a course on traffic. I do an alexa.com search of their website, and I see the traffic just sucks, or the traffic spikes real quick and then drop. 10 to nothing. I think, I don't know, that's kind of weird. I see a course about selling on Amazon. So I go to Amazon, search their name, and there's no books or just one or two that were published 10 years ago. And it just, it kind of, I don't know, leaves me with a weird feeling. Now, does that mean that you have to 100% practice what you preach? Well, the answer is no, okay, and having that line of thoughts can really drive you crazy and but you need to be doing a little bit of something. So let me give you a six part checklist about what you can do to fill in those gaps and to just avoid avoid losing sales when someone does a little bit of research on you. But before we do, let me announce the marketer over the week. He's a really, really, really famous guy. I think he's like a college professor for a university in Arizona. His name is Dr Robert Cialdini, and his book is called influence. So just go to amazon.com and search the book name influence, because don't try to spell his last name. It's C, I, a, l, D, I, N, I, and I mean the best. And I think there's even a YouTube video with this guy that explains these six things. And what this guy realized is that if you're trying to influence someone get rapport, whatever, there are six components, reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof and commitment, consistency. Reciprocity means I give you something now you're you feel like you owe me something back. So this means that if you give a lot of good content or have a free gift. When someone signs up for your list now you've given them something. Now they feel like the skills has been tipped a little bit, and now they owe you at least to listen to what you have to say. Scarcity means that the information that you have is not widely available, like something proprietary or only 200 copies left. This expires in seven days. That's why that works. That's one of those influence principles, liking is if someone likes you, or if you remind them of themselves, right? If you have a similar background or story to them, or you look like them, or have the same haircut, or the same ideas, principles, values, whatever authority. That's self explanatory, right? That means that you have you actually know what you're talking about, and this is what we're talking about, where, if you sell a course on how to get published on Amazon, you better have some books on Amazon that we have, that authority, part social proof, mostly testimonials, or that other people have good things to say about you, and then commitment consistency, which means that if you can get someone to make little baby steps, then they're more likely to get to the goal that you have, which is buying from you. And that means that if you get your subscribers trains to click on links in your emails and go to your websites, that's a baby step. You get them trained to get on a webinar with you and stay on it. Those are baby steps towards the goal of getting them to buy things from you that will help their lives and help their business. Robert Cialdini, influence, reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof and commitment, consistency. Keep that in mind as we wind down today's call. Now the quick checklist for you to fill in the gaps is, first of all, what is your background? What does someone find when they do a quick research on you? Meaning, Google search, Amazon, search, iTunes, search, article, Search, YouTube, search, Alexa, search, things like that. What actually comes up if you google search your own name, if you're selling a book writing, course, you better have a book still in print. You sell an article, course, you better have some articles. And since you're gonna do that anyway, why not do something impressive? Meaning, what if you had 100 books, or you had 100 articles. Now that's something that, instead of trying to hide your lack of a background, you can put that right on the sales letter, and you don't have to do a lot of selling. I mean, I mean, heck, if you had a sales letter saying, I want, I want to show you how to to publish a book. Well, you could either talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and try to convince someone, or what if you had a video saying, here's a here's my web browser, I can open up the New York Times, and here's the current day and time, and I'm gonna think of an idea for a new book. And here's me outlining the book, here's me making the book, and then here's the book online, and let me open up new york times again. And only one day has passed, but now the book's online, and now the book sold 10,000 copies. That would be something really impressive, and they could then do their little background search on you and verify that same thing number two on the checklist, testimonials. This is the social proof part of it, but we want to be avoidant of negative social proof, which is. What we'll get to in a minute. But a lot of people are are low on confidence, and they think they need to have tons and tons of testimonials in order to make some sales. You don't have to have that. That's an important little component, but it's a nice to have, not a must have. Now, what we like to do is, and, I mean, I think, I mean, depending on what you're listening to this, I'm sure that income machine calm still has testimonials. So these are, in our case, little blue boxes that are are distinctly separate from the rest of the sales letter, and show someone's picture and website and have them explain to us what they think of backup creator, income machine, paper template, our stuff, someone else saying good things about us, and what we do is have their website listed. Now this is important, not a link, but just the text of their.com domain name underneath their sales letter. So someone really wants to look up these other people, they can put in the address in their address bar, but it's not a link off site. It's not easy to lose traffic that way. What I recommend you do is every, not often, but every year, a couple years, go down your own sales letter and look at the testimonials you have. And if your testimonials have someone's website mentioned, check out that website and just make sure that it's still online, and that if it's a if you're selling a tool that goes on a website, that they still use that tool. So I noticed that I sold a pop up plug in called Action pop up. And a lot of the testimonials, people and people would still use the pop up plug in, but the actual websites that they had in the testimonials, the pop ups would come and go, and sometimes they would stop using pop ups altogether for a while. So I'd have to go out there every year or so and just look at everyone who had good things to say about action pop up. Well, should I mention their website, or should I just take a screenshot of their site with the pop up on it that way, even if their site goes down or they stop using pop ups for a few months, then I can still show what it looks like on their site. I still have that social proof so testimonials go through and see if the websites are still there, and if not, remove the URL and ask your list for some fresh testimonials, and give priority to the newer reviews of your products, where you can actually brag about someone's website that is still online now, number three bottlenecks again, this is what this is all about. You go down your sales letter and find the places where you lose people, or where parts of your just where there's like, huge chunks of text, or where there's scary things like, I mean, let's say you had a long sales letter and cruise from right along, scrolling down, scrolling down, and there's a two hour video right in the middle. That's probably a place where you lose people. And in copywriting, we want to have a thing called a greased slide or a bucket brigade. But I mean, same idea, you want people to start at the top of your sales letter, and some of them might scroll to the very bottom and look at the price first and then go back up. But I mean, some people do that. Some people don't. But after that part of it, you want them to look at your headline, which leads into the sub headline, which leads into the next paragraph, and down and down and down and down. And by by going down in this way, you have the best chance of making a sale, because, if you think about it, it allows the Robert Cialdini stuff to take effect, right? Because, well, there's the commitment consistency. They kept scrolling down, scrolling down, and kept reading. They put a lot of time into viewing your offer and because they actually experienced everything in the order that you wanted them to then when you mentioned the authority. So they listened to you. If you showed a little bit of a vulnerability for the liking,

Robert Plank 28:57 that took effect as well. If you had some social proof and had some testimonials in there that worked and on and on. And if you delivered value in that sales letter, well, now you've helped them a little bit. So now there's the reciprocity. All these things can take effect. And where you lose people is where there is the scary stuff. We had a well, we still do have a sales letter called webinar Crusher, which is a course on how to run webinars. And it used to say at one point something like, if you have three weeks of time, you can run a webinar. And that's where we lost people. I installed a thing called a heat map plug in, and people would scroll down, scroll down, scroll down, and leave the web page right at that point. So what did I do? I changed it to 20 minutes, because the first module, a webinar Crusher, showed how to do a quick 20 minute webinar. So both things are true, right? If you have 20 minutes, you can run a webinar. If you have three weeks, you can run a webinar. But which one sounds more appealing and less scary? 20 minutes? Obviously. So look for those bottlenecks. Number four, negative social proof. Don't have your testimonials or the reporting of what others do talk even more people out of a sale. By that, I mean, I've seen web pages that say, or they try to, they try to combine scarcity and social proof by saying, I'm only gonna sell 100 copies of these. And that's totally fine to do. What happens if I come back a month later and it still says only 100 copies left? Or what if it says only 100 copies and it's crossed out only 96 copies remaining? I think, Geez, in a month you only sold four copies. Now there's nothing wrong with saying only 100 copies, right? And then a couple months later, if it's down to 50, well, then you can put the counter in there. But if you have something and you say, I'm only going to sell 100 copies, there are 96 remaining. I think no one wants it. Why would I even want to look at what this is? If it's a piece of crap, no one wants it. Number five, beware of victim copywriting. Don't say things like I suffered for 20 years creating this because you don't have to, if there's just too many red flags in that, right? It tells me that the only reason I should buy from you is because you felt pain, and you're gonna attract the buyers who only delight in your pain, the old ones who feel like the ones who feel happy from ripping you off. You should attract people who have more of an abundance mindset, which means that you can sell a course for 1000 bucks that shows them how to make 100,000 bucks. So now everybody wins. It's not like because they paid you 100 bucks, someone else had to lose 100 bucks. It's not a zero sum game. Don't say things like, well, this course is 5000 pages or 500 hours, because no one cares as much as you do how much you worked or suffered, and now you're talking out of a sale. Because I'm thinking, I don't have time to go through your 5000 pages. Or if it took you 20 years, is it going to take me 30 years? So I'm already thinking in terms of those numbers, so beware of victim copywriting. And then finally, look at the gray areas, because I think that you should go a little outside your comfort zone, but it's a matter of how much of your personality you want to let do it. This means that, if you run a live webinar, how okay with you? How okay are you, I should say, with not having a replay, how okay are you with selling something and only selling 100 copies? How okay are you with selling something and saying I'm gonna close the doors on this in 10 days? And that's not to say that you have to have fake scarcity or you have to have a countdown timer, but if you think about it, there's nothing wrong with launching something new and limiting the number of copies or limiting the date it is sold, shutting it down, and that way you can deal with the customers and a month later, opening it back up. And in fact, many times you'll push the people over the edge, who are just barely on the fence, to mix my metaphors here, but they're just about to buy, and that little bit of scarcity gets them to buy. So you want to have some amount of unpredictability and some urgency to a point it is a booster in your business, in your conversion rates or sales letters. It's a booster, but don't let it become a crutch. So what are the big lessons we can get out of today's session? Don't overthink what you're doing and but you should put your best foot forward, meaning that you don't have to go out of your way to tell people how much you suffered or how much work they're gonna have to do. You can dress it up just like how in corporate America, if you ever reply to a job, you would create a resume. That was completely true, but it was putting your best foot forward and explaining things in the way that made you look the best. If that makes sense, you don't have to be a master with 20 or 50 years experience, but don't leave yourself vulnerable to research and meaning, if someone searches your name, what are they going to find? And I mean, what this, this scenario makes me think of is, um, well, let's say that. Let's say that your first first book took 20 years to make, but then your next couple books took two days to make. I wouldn't mention the 20 years too much, and maybe, like a little bit to establish the problem, but I don't know, like, I didn't really trust someone who takes 20 years to make one book. But if you can just show me. I mean, who cares about the past? Show me now. Show me. You knocking these out and making a bunch of sales of them. That's more exciting than the past, even though, for you, the struggle might have been more exciting, although we look at Robert Cialdini, that gives us a little bit of a liking, right? Because if they can relate to things like writer's block, that's where that plays into it. But we don't want the liking to overcome the authority and to overcome the social proof component, if that makes. Sense. Lesson number three, be very careful with distracting things on a web page. I'm talking about if you have live action video on a web page, or a video that's too long now I'm going to be distracted by the the reflection off off the sweat on your forehead, or if your videos too slick and it's got like, 3d stuff and green screen, I'm more interested in how you did the green screen video event in the course that you're selling demos, especially with software, more often than not, distract from the sales or listing all these features and all these things that are exciting to you, but now I can't even really figure out what the heck I'm buying. So less is more, and many times when I've been split testing, often pages and sales, but especially often pages, the more I removed from the page, the better it converted. As counter intuitive as that sounds, we always think that by adding more persuasive language will convert more people, but usually it's that we kind of had them ready to go, but then we said something on the web page that then talked them out of it, or opened up a new line of questioning, and then they got distracted and didn't buy from us right then. And finally, I think the biggest one is a concept called, because I can what does this mean? It means that you're your own boss. You're making your own business, your own products, sales, letters, membership sites, and you're free to say whatever the heck you want, right? And you might think, yeah, but I don't want to turn off buyers or alienate buyers. Well, there, that's the key, right? There, right? Because you can say whatever you want, and the only consequence is, then when your customers vote with their wallets. So what if you sold something for 1000 bucks, and then a month later you said, you know this thing, everyone bought, now it's free. And then you sold something else, 4000 bucks. Oh, you know what? This everyone bought now that's free. I wouldn't really recommend doing that, because you're gonna lose your long term buyers. But having an opinion, that's a whole other thing. And we talked earlier about polarization. So I don't want you to support customer bullying, which means that you might sell something for $7 and someone yells at you on your help desk because it's not $1 or it's not free. So even though you might feel bad for that one person, you can't let one person ruin it for all of your other future customers. So keep that in mind is that if you're ever worried about expressing an opinion or things like that, or, you know, talking about, I know that a lot of up and comers share their the amount of income they're making or things like that, and that's fine, and the only thing to worry about is not necessarily, if you'll get yelled at, because, I mean, no matter what you do, someone's not gonna like what you say. I mean, that's just inevitable, but

Robert Plank 37:48 you that the result is that someone's gonna vote with their wallets, right? And that hopefully the scenario for there is not all the knuckleheads who weren't gonna buy from you anyway, who were just loud aren't gonna buy from you. But then by having an opinion, by having something to say, by giving someone else a moment of clarity about their business or about whatever niche you're in, if those if that gets those people to buy. But it's totally great for you to have a blog, have a podcast, have sales letters, and otherwise you're just gonna drive yourself crazy worrying if something that you say is going to offend somebody, if that makes sense. And my attitude is that there's really no point in fighting your own personal true nature. So if you are naturally a nervous person, well then embrace that and tell people you know how nervous you used to be about publishing the book, or how, despite your nervousness, you have 20 books out there, and they make they have people coming in every day. Or what if you, you know, taught somebody how to be an affiliate marketer, and you said, Well, I'm nervous, so that means that I can't sell face to face, but despite that, I make all this money. So embrace your true nature, for better or for worse, evil marketers are out there, but they're not as evil as you think, and you can't discount what they do, because many times you're gonna find yourself buying from some of those evil internet marketers, even out of morbid curiosity. So why not look at those triggers, those hot buttons that cause you to buy from them, and then apply those to your own white hat type of marketing. Robert Cialdini get his book called influence and remember reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof and commitment, consistency. You should have all of those components, but you can't let one overtake all of the others, because if there's just too much liking, then I relate it to you. But I'm not convinced you can help me. If there's too much authority, I'm convinced you can help me, but I don't really like you because you're a huge jerk who's really out of touch in your ivory tower. Bucha. Go through the process someone else might go through or will go through by googling yourself or searching for yourself on these different sites to make sure that if you sell a course on blank there is some sufficient proof outside of your website that you actually do what you say you do, not saying you have to have 100 years experience in book publishing, but at least have a book for sale, if your course is selling books, and on your web page, go through and find the bottlenecks. Are there any points where you feel like you're losing people, where your testimonials work against you, where your videos work against you? And just remove a few things here and there to see if that boosts your conversion, sales, money, all that stuff that was Robert Plank Show episode 69 the big gaping hole in your evil internet marketing business. Do you practice what you preach? Is it okay to be a recommender, and do you need to fake it till you make it? Subscribe to our show at Robert Plank show.com forward, slash, iTunes, by our course at income machine, calm and check out everything I'm doing at Robert plank.com that's r, O, B, E, R, T, P, l, a, n, k.com. Don't be a stranger. Talk to you soon and find out you.