097: Buy Now Buttons & Low Hanging Fruit: Increase Online Sales Using Launch Scarcity in Your Digital Offers, Landing Pages, and Sales Letters (with Real Case Studies)

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show, Episode 97 Buy Now buttons and low hanging fruit. Increase your online sales using launch scarcity in your digital offers, landing pages and sales letters with real case studies.

Robert Plank 0:21 Welcome back to the Robert Plank show. We talk about making money on this podcast, along with everything that goes with that. If we're talking about WordPress, webinars, membership sites, time management, mindset, all of those subjects. And my question for you today, no matter what you're selling online, why is offering a 50% discount, a really bad idea with your online business. And you might be thinking, Well, that's pretty much the only marketing tactic I have. And a lot of people outside of the internet marketing niche, people in you know, voiceovers, plastic surgery, dog training, whatever, who don't know some of these marketing techniques and tactics, the only thing they really have in the toolbox is this thing called a 50% discount. And the reason why they do it is because, well, when you go to the store, you go to your target, you go to your Walmart all the time, they say, well, the price is marked down. The price is discounted. And that's great if your target or your Walmart, and you're selling on volume, and you don't really have a lot of control of how it is you differentiate yourself, right? I mean Target, Walmart, maybe targets a little bit classier, a little bit cleaner, but I mean pretty much you're gonna go to, if you go to Target or WalMart, your decision to go to that is pretty much based on what's near you, right? And if you're gonna go buy a t shirt or something, what's the difference between Target and Walmart? Maybe a couple of pennies on the price. So a lot of people look at what's happening in, you know, retail or offline, and they think, what I have to do is, I have to take my $1,000 membership course and slash the price and say it's 500 bucks. Or I have to take my $100 piece of software slash the price. Now it's 50 bucks. Now I don't like doing this, because, well, what if somebody bought my course for 1000 bucks yesterday and today I go and slash the price. That person must feel pretty bad. And then my next thought is, when I see somebody offer a 50% off discount, I now think, Okay, well now that product they're offering must not be selling, right? Because if it's selling all day long for 1000 bucks a pop, wouldn't they increase the price or or even if they they didn't, if they've been selling every single day, even one copy a day, even one copy a week of that $1,000 course, then why would they let somebody have buy it last week, but then now they just slash the price. So it makes me think all these different thoughts I don't want to think and maybe start thinking about not just that, but how you are training your customers, and what's going to happen about this whole 50% discount thing is it's, it's sort of like drug. It's sort of like crack. I've never been a crackhead or anything like that. But I imagine the first time that you offered this 50% discount, what happens you get a bunch of sales, feels pretty good. Well, then what happens in a month, you say, oh, I need, I need to increase my numbers this month. Let me do another little discount, another flood of sales, but not quite the same amount that happened the first time. And then it's a really slippery slope, because then what happens is, maybe every month, or a couple times a month, you start offering this discount, and then what's happened? Well, if people are seeing this enough times over and over again, then they'll, in fact, wait around for that discount before buying anything. So it's a really bad idea. And I mean, I know that when I first got started and I went to go

Robert Plank 3:42 buy domain names.com, names, such as that double agent domains.com I would wait around for, or I hunt around for this thing called a coupon code. You could buy a.com name for, I think, $10 and if you found the right code somewhere, you could bump it down to $8 so I missed out, and I would actually not buy some domain names because I was hunting around for that coupon code to save those $2 they had me trained to wait or hunt around for a coupon code. So I'm not saying that you can't have a low ticket or cheap items, but think about the strategy, the reason why you would want to do that, the reason why you'd want to sell a $7 $10 $20 $50 product is to build a big list of buyers, right? And you can make some money off of that, but that's that's the gambit you're playing. If you're pricing something that's super duper low, you're trying to collect all the buyers in that in that niche, in that space, those people looking for that specific solution. So that's the reason to be cheap to build a list, okay? And just when I see this whole 50% discount thing, it sort of pisses me off, because it's really lazy, and there are a lot of things that you can be doing. I mean, a 50% discount is the last tool. You should be using if you're completely desperate, and there's so many better things that you could do. I mean, for example, come up with a better headline, get some other affiliates to promote you, close the offer is probably the easiest, the most no brainer thing that you can do if you're looking for a flood of sales. Well, you should be training your buyers, your customers, you repeat customers. To do is not wait until you lower the price out of desperation, but they should be trained to buy right now before you close the offer. So we do this all the time. We will launch a new product, but we'll only have it open for a week or two, or we'll go back to an existing product we have, and we'll close it down for a while. Why? I mean, I could list all kinds of reasons for you, but the reason is because I can, because I want to, because many times we'll see a web page and we'll see, okay, well, they have a course like podcast crusher.com they have a course like dropship ceo.com or income machine, calm. And I want to buy that, but you know what? It can wait till later, but then an email comes in saying the price is about to or the offer is about to close, or the price is about to jump up. Now, for some reason you need it and and again, it's a slippery slope here, because a lot of people, a lot of marketers, look for shortcuts. Now a big, big example is one that, like the oldest, literally, the oldest trick in the book with marketing, this thing people would do even as far back as the 1990s so like, you know, decades ago, people would put a little thing of code on their website with tomorrow's date, right? So if you're, if you were on a web page on January 1, it would say warning this offer closes at midnight on January 2. But then what would happen is you'd go, come back to that web page on January 2, and it would say, warning this offer closes on january 3, right? And so it didn't matter what day you visited that web page, it would always say the next day at midnight is when that offer is closed. And so that right there, that is a line that I won't cross, where you keep on moving the goal post, basically. But one thing I will do is I will say, Okay, well, we have this course on webinars called webinar crusher.com and you know what? We've decided that if today's January 1, then on January, January 5, we're going to close that offer. And so on January 1, we say warning. Better getting now we're gonna close it on January, January 5, January 2 warning. We're gonna close on January 5, and then on January 5 we actually close it. And if someone comes to us on January 6, seventh, eighth, if they come to us at January or fifth, 10 minutes after midnight, saying, Oh, I missed it. Can I get in? It's so very tempting to say, well, here's the button, don't tell anybody. But now, what have we done? We have trained people that our deadline doesn't matter, and then if they miss the deadline, then they can go and message us and and get in for free. And so it's so dang counterintuitive to be a jerk, you feel bad, except for what I know is that just from experience and from all the years that we've been doing things like this, is that when somebody messages me after we, you know, run a little promotion and we close an offer down, things like that, so if someone messages me, I know that they've hit that web page, 456, times they've seen the offer. It's not like they've missed out on it. And even though I feel bad or I feel like I'm turning away sales by closing the offer, now, they sure as heck are not going to make that mistake again. And we've done this with in a couple different ways. You've closed down, and I have 12 things list for you today, by the way, but we've closed down offers completely. That's the easiest thing to do, because you can close something down for a few months, you know, in three, four months from now, open it back up, maybe for a little while. But just adding, just saying, I'm going to close it on this exact date, helps you so much. It does so many things just to get all those fence sitters off the fence. And what always happens with this kind of thing? Let's say that you do, like, a five day or, you know, six day promotion for something like this, and you say on say Monday, it's gonna close on Friday, or it's gonna close on Saturday. You know what happens? You get a bunch of sales on Monday, a little bit of a trickle of sales on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but on Friday, or, like, right before that deadline, that hour before the deadline is when all your final sales come in. And so whenever someone talks about things like a product launch or stuff like that, I mean, out of all the little you know things you could do, just the fact that you're closing an offer down just makes you so many extra sales, especially if people are looking at an offer, everything resonates with them. Everything hits on the right buttons, but then they just can't make a decision. Well, now this helps to make the decision, but a couple things were packed in there right close. Say you're on a closing offer down. Really, close it down, and then stick to your guns. And so this is what's on my mind today, because we just did this with our podcast Crusher two course we say, All right, it's going to end on this date and time we close it down. Now it's closed down. One. Now, one way I feel a little bit like a hypocrite today is because, well, I messed up the button. So this is like the one of the 111, times in history where we're actually extending the deadline by 48 hours, because I did mess up the button a little bit. But once the real dead, I mean, it's all set up on a deadline. Once that date lapses, the page will be closed. And by the way, if you get our landing page plugin at paper template.com this is built in. You can have a landing page sales letter, whatever you want to call it, and have a button on the bottom for someone to buy, and then you can say that after X date and time, the button will go away. So we've done this by closing down the offer itself. We've done this by increasing the price. So we've done things like we say, well, this course, as when we first come out with it, is 197, after a couple days, goes out to 297, goes up to 397, goes up to 497, goes up to 997. And we have people buy at every place along the way, and we have people buy who could have bought at 197. Who could have bought it 397? We have people who wait too long and buy for full price because, well, we laid out those terms, and there are no exceptions, kind of like in school, like in college, did you ever have one of those really mean teachers who, like locked the door? You know, once class started, or if it was a day where you had a test or a final, they would lock the door so that if you were even a minute late, locked out, get an F in the class. So you sure as heck we're not late. Because you know that even if the doors lock, knocking on the door, nobody's gonna let you in. You're sure as heck aren't going to be late next time. So I mean, it's one of those things where, I mean, I know that it's awkward and you might be feeling like like you're being a jerk, but this is your business. And think about that phrase, because I can you can price your stuff at whatever you want. You can have whatever upsells you want, any kind of scarcity you want. The line that I personally won't cross is the line where you're lying, the line where you keep, you know, extending the deadline every single day in perpetuity. In this one case, I kind of messed up. Other than that, I say x is going to happen on X date and time and X time zone, and we're going to do it all right. So the court of the day is from Robin Sharma, and that's the fears we don't face become our limits. The fears we don't face become our limits. And with that said, the thought of today is, don't have just a traffic course. Don't have just an AdSense course. So I want you to think about an offer and I but I don't want to be a one of those stereotypical copywriters and throw out terms like an offer and a hook without actually like explaining it, without actually like saying how you can apply it. And the thing that I want you to think about two questions, okay, when someone buys whatever from you, and I'm just gonna say, if someone buys a course from you, right? And maybe you have a service whatever, but let's say somebody buys a course from you about, I don't know, playing the guitar. So I just have two questions about that. Question one, I buy your guitar course, what do I get tonight? What do I get immediately after I buy your course? Or what do I get in the first hour after, right after I buy, I buy, 8pm What do I have in my hand by 9pm not just knowledge, not just potential. What did I actually build? Question two is what will I have built with you after 30 days? So I buy your guitar. Course, I get, I figure out, you know, something, I can play my first song within the first hour, maybe by in 30 days. Maybe I have the equivalent of going to a music teacher for a year or for six months, or I achieve some kind of an expert status. Or I've, you know, played some kind of a song on guitar. But think about those two questions, what do I get from you tonight? What do I get from you in 30 days? So I sell a resell membership site courses. We sell training on webinars, on podcasting, on Amazon, FBA publishing a book, and they all have these things built in. I thought about, what do you have as soon as you buy the course, and what have you created after 30 days? So think about that, if you're if the thing you're selling your course is just how to how to use WordPress, how to use a computer, how to use Microsoft Excel, well, what do I get right away, what cool tool, what one button, solution, and then after 30 days, what will I have done? I mean, maybe you can, you get so good at Excel, you could have done your taxes, or you can run payroll in your business, or you've already run your first webinar, or your membership site is online, or you have your first member of your membership site. Whatever it is that that promises what you've done with the thing is way more powerful than what the thing is. I think that all, all copywriting comes down to that. I mean features versus benefits. Features mean well that those are the like what like, the things that describe what it is, right? It's 10 hours of video. But benefits are what I've actually done with. Those videos that you've given me, or that software or those tools. So we're talking about the low hanging fruit today, and already, we've already talked about, well, if you, if you're looking for the low hanging fruit, don't cut the price, uh, close down the offer of whatever it is you're selling, so that you get less sales at the price you want, and you end up total with more money and a list of buyers and subscribers that are trained to take your offers seriously, as opposed to just waiting for the discount. So 12 things today. Number one, add a buy button to a web page, even if you don't have time for anything else. Our course for that is income machine calm, even if you are so pressed for time you don't have time for anything. Well, if you don't have a product for sale, then that, then that nothing else matters, right? So if you're super duper pressed for time, get our income machine, course, get a.com name, get web hosting, install WordPress and paper template, get a PayPal business account, if you don't have one already, and set up a web page with nothing on it except for a button where someone can pay you money, and then go to a web page where where they can then collect that thing that they bought from you. And in our income machine course, we show you how to do this thing called buying resale rights. So you can go to some of these websites and buy the rights to existing videos on playing guitar, on WordPress, on learning language, and then just toss them onto a download page. And even if doing that only gets you one $100 sale, that's that makes you further along than you were before. Now you're $100 richer than you were before. So with if you have nothing else, nothing matters. Nothing else matters until you have a button on a web page. Now, number two, think in terms of an offer. So like we said, having a PDF document or solving a problem or teaching people, by the way, I would rather be instead of using the word teach or work or learn, use words like discover, or I'm gonna reveal this to you, because that sounds like more fun. But the point is, with an offer, don't just sell videos or PDFs, create a package or a solution, and not just a product. So for me, if I'm thinking about an offer, or if I'm thinking about even a 100 or $200 membership, course, I think in terms of four modules, so four milestones of 60 to 90 minutes each four modules plus three bonuses. So what else can you throw in to make something complete? And so, for example, when we put out a course about WordPress, we threw in a WordPress landing page plugin. When we put out our course about membership sites, we include it as a bonus, the the membership software that we include with that. When we sell our webinar Crusher course, we include GoToWebinar with that. When we sell our make a product course and how to get a book published on Amazon, we include the checklists and all the all the forms and templates and things like that for creating a book when we sold our graphic dashboard course, which explains how to use an online tool called Pixlr to replace Photoshop, we include all of our book cover, CD, affiliate, Banner templates to make it all point and click. It's not just training on how to use this thing called Pixlr, but it's also the templates and things like that as well. So what else can you throw in to make it complete? I used to have, I still sell a course called sales page tactics, and it's basically a bunch of PHP scripts or plugins to grab attention on a sales letter. But I also figured, well, for a bonus, I should add in a landing page template. For a bonus, I should add in some kind of copywriting training. So what else can you throw in to make it complete that way? It's an offer, a package, a solution, not just a product number three, a hook. So it's one thing to say, Okay, well, here's some benefits, here's some extra bonuses and stuff like that. Here's a bunch of bullet points. But I see people so far in love with their own product that they have to tell you about it for three to five hours. I don't have three to five hours. I have three to five minutes. Even better, how about 30 seconds. So we're looking for a hook out of all the things that you you explain and try to, you know, pump up and, you know, do all this convincing language, if you can just narrow it down to the one sentence, the one coolest thing about it, the one differentiator, the one thing that gets people to sit up and listen and Take notice, that is the hook you're looking for. So what the example that comes to mind with this one is we have a product called plug in dashboard. So what you do is you have a website, right? A WordPress site, a point and click Site, and you can install these things called plugins. You can have a plug in to make your cycle faster, to make it rank better in the search engine. Applications, to add a message board, to add a pop up, all kinds of cool things. But there's so many plugins, it's hard to keep track, and many of us always reuse the same plugins over and over again. We build a site and we use the same theme or design we're used to. We use the same plugins to customize the, you know, the design and things like that, we use the same membership plug in, for example, the same backup plug in, the same security plug in. So plug and dashboard allows you to just put this one plug in on there, check a few boxes and save tons of time installing your other plug ins. And that was kind of a cool hook. What we realized is what people really wanted to do was, in a sense, clone their site. And I guess, dang it. Now I have to explain this. So basically, we have a site or a product called backup creator, right? And you can click a button back up your whole website. That means your design, your plugins, your files, your your posts, your pages, your content, your comments, your your members, all that stuff, copy a site. But we noticed that some people were asking for the ability to just copy the plugins, right? So maybe they have they build a site in a certain way, and they use the same 30 plugins, and they don't want to copy all of the site, right? They don't want to copy the members and the the posts and all that stuff, but they do want to copy the plugins we realized for this plugin dashboard product of ours,

Robert Plank 21:26 and we made it so that you can go to site A, click a button, and then grab something and copy it to site B, and it will just instantly move over all those 30 plugins, turn them back on, update them, all that cool stuff. So you can say, I've got all these plugins, but instead of having to write them all down and list them all down, I can just copy the plugins from one site to another, not a backup, not cloning, not an exact copy, just copying the plugins. So plugin dashboard, when we want to sell this to a WordPress crowd, they already know about WordPress. They already know about WordPress sites. They already know about plugins, and if we present this in a webinar kind of environment, we'll show that. But the hook is, you set up a site a certain way, and you can now click a button, click a button, and now all 30 plugins are copied right over. Kind of a weird thing, kind of a weird use for it, and we didn't really realize that was a popular usage for this plug in dashboard product, until we put it out there and then to WordPress crowd it takes just 10 seconds to explain. So think about that. Think about the one button, one click solution that you can explain in 30 seconds or one sentence. Number four, basic copywriting. So benefits are what you can do with something, and features are what the thing is. So if I were to tell you the one thing, the one little piece of advice to actually jazz up and sex up and do a better job of marketing your stuff, is you look at your web page, your landing page, and if you're talking about what your offer itself is, or what your product itself is, that's that's a good detail to mention, but I'm telling you the the language and the parts of your web page that are going to get the most attention, that are going to get people the most excited to buy, is not the logical elements, It's the emotional elements they might check and they might instead, I did a put this near the bottom of a web page. They might check on certain bullet points to make sure that certain things are included with your offer. But I'm just telling you the eye catching the eyeball catching stuff, the things that convince people to buy are the benefits are what you can do with it, instead of just features, which is what it is. And the second most important statement I could make to you about making more sales with your landing pages, on having this thing called Copy rating is to go in the order of attention, interest, desire, action. Attention means, why are you on this web page? And what's something big and dramatic that you can say to me to make me real, like to make me realize I'm in the right place, and oh yeah, I had that problem too. Then in the interest phase, we explain, kind of what problem are we solving, and we make sure that we we add agitate the problem that's in front of us, and they get worse and and kind of relate to all the alternatives they've tried, all the problems they've had, all the problems they will have with their the path they're going. And then we transition into where we introduce our offer. And this is what you could call the the desire phase, or the How to phase. You list the components of an offer. And to make it simple, I always think again in terms of a course with four modules and three bonuses. And now we are just listing, in order the pieces of our offer. And finally, the action phase, or call to action, or we say, you know, here's all the stuff in one place. Here's all what it is all worth. Here is the price drop down, and there's a money back guarantee if you don't like it. Now, here's the button to go ahead click and buy. And many times, if a sales letter sucks, it's that they either spends too much time on one of those phases, or one of those phases is missing, or the sales letter is out of order, right? Because they introduced the offer before explaining the problem, or they they asked to buy and keep talking so attention, interest, desire, action. That is the order that your web page, your landing page should be, whether it's a super long sales letter or a short one, I'm telling you, explain the problem, make the problem worse, introduce the solution, and then tell them to go and buy it. You can't mess up with that formula number five, the deadline. So take a little bit of a risk in your business. Don't just keep doing things the way you've been doing, and don't fall back on the safeties and the crutches. So I know that for some people listening, if when I say close down an offer and really mean it, and have that that offer closed for a couple of months, I know that you might be kind of resisting me, but I'm telling you, try it. I'm telling you go all in this week and take a little bit of a risk and choose which which offer you have you're gonna close down and say, on Friday at this time, at this time zone, it is closed email every day, going up to it, close it down. And you know, what, if someone yells at you because they want to pay you money and they can't, I think that that is a good problem to have. And I'm not saying that to be kind of, you know, stuck up or full of myself or whatever, but I mean, the first few times I did this, the first few times I I closed down an offer, I got some death threats. One guy told me he was gonna drop me down a mine shaft. And so it's, it kind of is a weird thing. But after doing this a few times, it really, it really, just woke up my list, I had a list of subscribers that would kind of wander in. Maybe they'd buy something for, you know, $5 $10 but I'm telling you, the way to sell products for 100 200 1000 $2,000 is to have some kind of a deadline where you close the offer. And, I mean, I'm just telling you, having a deadline like this is is the best thing you can do, because if you drop the price, then it trains people to wait for the discount. If you increase the price of your product. I do that sometimes, but then it's hard. You can't go back, right? So if you jump from 100 bucks, 200 bucks, now you're selling a $200 product. And then if you do things like, you say, Well, I'm going to only sell 10 copies, and then I'm going to close the offer down. Then I look at it and say, Oh, you haven't even sold 10 copies. And that's kind of a catch 22 there. If you say, I'm going to sell X number of seats before closing something down. Because if you say, Well, you might think, Okay, well, I'm going to say only 10 seats. Because people are going to say only 10, I better jump on it. But then I see you haven't even sold 10 then you say, Okay, well, I'm going to say only 100 seats will sell, and I look at that as a buyer, and say, Okay, well, I still don't care, because I know you're never going to get to 100 seats sold, right? So either way, it's tough to win. But if you say, I'm going to close this down this time of date, no matter what now, I mean, it's tough to mess up with that right now. I don't it now the amount of sales it's made is not a factor. I just know that if I wait until Saturday, I won't be able to get in at all next a countdown clock. So this is another one of those real quick eye catching things. This is also built into our paper template plug in. You have an offer, it's going to expire. It's one thing to say it closes Friday at 5pm It's another thing to say that and then see just below it, only two days, eight hours, five minutes, two seconds remaining, and then it's ticking away, ticking away, just adding a countdown clock to your web page to count down until that deadline where the offer is closed that you meant to, you meant to close, and you will stick to your guns on that. That is pretty powerful. Now number seven, explain reasons not to wait. So even if you you add a deadline, add a countdown clock, or if you're not technically savvy enough for that, either way, explain reasons why they shouldn't wait on this. And that could just be that, you know, if they don't buy your course and put it into action, they're gonna get the same results they've already gotten. And that's kind of a harsh thing to say, but maybe you can find a nicer way to say that. Maybe you can say, imagine if your competitors get on this before you do. You know. Imagine if you look back a year ago today, and you wonder, if you'd started today, what how far along you'd be? Little things like that. Just explain what would happen if they do wait. Explain what happened if they miss out on this. What would they miss out on versus buying your offer, buying your course, getting the results that you show them now number eight follow. Up another easy thing to do if you know how, but most of your competitors don't do it, just send multiple emails or make multiple posts on your Facebook page explaining why they should buy now, the key word in this is campaign. Right? You want to have a campaign where every day you do something to remind and motivate and send people back to that offer you have that's going to close. And you know what? Too. Outside of internet marketing, a lot of you would make sales, even if you just reminded people about some URL, some course you have, even if it's a little bit out of date, even if there's no scarcity, even just reminding somebody, some of you guys have such untapped list that just sending a reminder email would make you some extra sales. Number nine, another thing that I do this when I remember, but I don't always do it, and so it's called the waiting list. And so the case study with this one is dropship CEO, this is our course about selling on Amazon, and the price of the course is $247 and a lot of people say, I don't know if I can swing $247 and then what happens we, uh, we close the offer down, and now suddenly they they want to pay us $247

Robert Plank 31:17 and they can't. And I do feel bad about it, but I also don't want them to train or get trained, that if the door is locked by the professor at test time, that anyone can just sneak on it. And so what we do is we have a web page, right? We have a web page that says, you know, here's the headline, here's all the stuff. The bottom, there's the button to pay and buy. And after the offers closed, we normally just, you know, remove it on a timer again. This is built in with paper template, and you can say that there's the button on there. But if the offer is closed, if it's past the deadline, it's replaced with big, giant red lettering saying closed. And what you can do, and what I do when I remember, and what I do with our profit or our sorry, dropship CEO course, is I put an email opt in form, a newsletter, sign up form on the bottom of that web page, and it says, Fill in the form below to get on the waiting list. And then, you know what? A few months later, once the offer is open, something kind of, there's a little bit of a thing called commitment and consistency that happens, because they are probably already a subscriber of mine. They probably already are on my list, but they signed up again in a different sub list of mine. And there's just something to if you went there and you saw the offer, you didn't buy, you went there, you saw the offer past deadline. Now you wish you could buy it. Now you go in and fill in your name and email address. Now you kind of already committed to like, Okay, well now, now, once it opens up, I'm gonna get it and and we've got a lot of repeat buyers, a lot of people who finally bought our course months later at full price, by the way, because they missed out, they took our offer seriously. We and we weren't nasty about it. We just said, Okay, well, we said this, and we don't want to lie. You want to tell the truth. So here was the deadline. The deadline passed. Offers closed, but when the offer opens back up, man, they jump right in there. So don't just close an offer. Add an opt in form. And you can get an opt in form by signing up at double agent, autoresponder.com, and this way they can just enter their details. And now you have a way to contact them when the offer opens back up, and you can kind of get an eyeballs look of okay, well, when my offers are closed, am I losing any money? Because all these people want it well, if so, then maybe consider opening it back up in a little while. Don't open it right back up the very next week. Why? Because we don't want to train people that we can close offers and then if they miss out, just wait a week. It's back open. It opens back up months later, when we have something new to say, we have some new bonus or feature, we have some new marketing hook and by the way, as we're getting towards the tail end of this list of 12 things, the reason why I gave you 12 different ways to use the low hanging fruit in your online business is because you can do just one of these every month, right? If you don't have a buy button right now, that's what you do this month. Or if you do, maybe add a buy button that's also a payment plan. Then from month to go through and make sure that you're offering a real offer and not just a product, you go and maybe add a bonus or two. Then on month three, go back and look at that web page to discover the hook, to discover the thing you're going to mention over and over again that gets people to boom by just by saying that one sentence that now you don't have to talk about it for two hours, just for one minute. Then from month four, go through and make sure that you have a lot of benefits, what you can do with that thing, instead of just features, what it is. Dollars. Then on month five, you can promote and say, Okay, well, we're going to close the offer right now. And there you go, after that's closed there, then you can't buy. And then maybe in a month or two, open it back up, and then this time, maybe leave it open a little longer, but at figure out how to add a countdown clock. And you know what, too. I bet you that you could even go and do a Google search. And you can probably search like free countdown clock JavaScript, and you could probably grab us there's well, you could probably grab something for free and just toss it onto a web page, probably pretty easily. Then we can go for month seven, and this time around, explain the reasons why something like someone shouldn't wait. And not just that the price will increase or the offer will close, but what will happen emotionally, as far as missed opportunities, things that they won't have, or things that others will have that they won't next for month eight, create a follow up email campaign, and this time around, make sure to hit them hard and remind them every single day for a week to go and buy. And then when you close at that time around, add a waiting list, so that way the next time you open up that course, they are ready and rearing to go. So now on the home stretch number 10, multiple levels of urgency. So as we're talking about things like closing an offer, right? And not allowing people to buy from us after Wednesday for a couple of months, well, let's think about we can take things away throughout the week. For example, think about how cool this would be. What if you said I put out some new course on on how to, I don't know how to learn a new language, right? And it's $97 and you say, well, it's $97 or there's also on this web page. And by the way, if you have multiple payment options, put them side by side, not one on top of the other. I mean, a little tiny tweak, it'll make a huge difference. The point is, we can have a web page on the left side, say, Pay. Click on this link, and you can join for $97 to the right you say, or you can join on the payment plan for just $19.95 every 30 days for five payments. So a payment today, payment next month, next month, once all five payments are made. So that's kind of kind of a cool little price point. I've I had a lot of fun playing around with the price at 100 bucks or five times 20 bucks. But then we could say, Well, today's Monday, and that's what the offer is, but on and also it comes with all this stuff, uh, course, bonuses and a free coaching call. But if you don't buy today, if you wait till Tuesday after uh afternoon, Eastern Time, then there will be no coaching call. There will be no coaching bonus. So now you're motivated to get it right now, today, and if they wait and they want to see if you're really serious, they see on Tuesday, now there's no more coaching bonus. So now they're like, oh shoot, when I wait things get bad, then we can say on Wednesday that we're going to remove some other bonus, right? So maybe it came with an extra template, an extra video. Well, now that bonus is gone. Then on Thursday we say, well, now we're going to remove the payment plan. So now, so on Thursday, all you'll be able to do is just join at $97 and then you can even say, on Friday, we're gonna increase the price to $197

Robert Plank 38:29 we're gonna double the price. And then on Monday, we're gonna completely close the offer. So you can see how, as time goes on, even every day, there's get one more motivator to go there and and to join and and that gives you an excuse, a reason to keep on following up with your subscribers. And I know that a lot of you out there are afraid of emailing your subscribers more than once a week. Well, you don't want to email them with the same old tired thing. You want to have some excuse to talk to them. So multiple levels of urgency, bump the price, remove a bonus, remove the payment plan, do something every day until you close it, so that people really get their butts in gear. Because, as I said, with this whole deadline stuff, a bunch of sales come in. When you first announce the deadline, there's a trickle, trickle, and in that last hour before the deadline, all those people who've been stressing out all week refreshing that web page, they go and they join because they don't want to miss out. And then another handful want to get in. Another handful really, really want to get in, like, an hour a day after the deadline. And we want to train them to jump on it, and next time along they will. But I think that having these multiple levels, having disappearing bonuses, disappearing payment plan, increased price gets gets people to to get the button gear, but not wait until the very, very end of the promotion, and also not get to the point where they now miss out because they. Until everything was gone. Now, number 11, price training, and that's what all today has been about. Stick to your guns with that deadline. I'm telling you. It's painful at first, but then people who actually buy at full price, at the price you set months later. So stick to your guns and train your customers to take your deadlines seriously, and you should take your deadline seriously too. If you say it's gonna close Friday at 5pm that is what you stick to. That doesn't mean you have to close an offer and keep it closed forever, but keep it closed long enough where, where there's some pain there, and then open it up when you feel like it, not because you're being mean or harsh or whatever, just because those are the rules that you are allowed to set. As a website owner, a product owner, a business owner, you can do whatever you want. If you owned a convenience store and you said it's only open from 12 noon to 3pm on a weekday, you could do that because that is, I mean, that's your decision, right? And the only reason why you wouldn't do something like that is because if that led to to less sales in the future, right? But I'm telling you actually having real deadlines on stuff will instead lead to you having increased sales in the future. And now, finally, the number 12 and final thing is evergreen content. So when you have this thing called a product launch, or a mini launch, or micro launch or whatever, the big thing is have a deadline and follow up via email. Also, Facebook is good too. But when you're having this thing called a launch sequence, you want to toss in as much as many different kind of kind of things to make it interesting, to make people pay attention. So this is the week where, if you want to record a quick five minute video, if you want to create a podcast episode about the offer you're promoting this month or this week, if you want to go back to an old webinar pitch or make a new webinar pitch and record it and put it on a web page. The a big thing that you should be doing, I mean, make blog posts and send people that that then link to your web page. You want to be kind of hitting them in different areas. But one thing that's so super duper important about, especially webinars and podcasts and things like that, is make it evergreen. Here's what I mean is, don't, don't say the the current year you're recording something. Don't talk about if it's your birthday or if it's holidays or stuff like that. Because if I listen to that even six months from now, even though it's all still current, good information, if you mention a year that's even a year or two old. Now I'm thinking, I don't know now. I mean, this was recorded years ago. I'm not sure if it's relevant. It still is relevant, but just by you saying an exact date, it it just devalues the information for some weird reason, and it makes so you can't use those in your marketing. A few months later, when you reopen these offers. So pitch, webinars, podcast episodes, PDF reports, which could just, I mean, should just be a transcript of the podcast, blog posts, all those marketing materials, relaunch them later. So we've listed 12 different things and ways you can market your business by using the low hanging fruit and not one of those things was a boring 50% discount that hurts you in the long term. Number one, add a buy button. Number two, off. Number three, hook. Number four, benefits. Number five, deadline. Number six, countdown clock. Number seven, reasons not to wait. Number eight, follow up. Number nine, waiting list. Number 10, multiple levels of urgency. Number 11, price training and number 12. Evergreen content. The sponsor for today is income machine.com and our I guess our second sponsor is also podcast crusher.com if you want to have a podcast just like this one, and have fun doing it and either go with the model where you make some quick episodes, or you have other people make the content for you and promote you so that you can rise in the rankings. It's all explained at podcast crusher.com so go there right now before we close the offer. If we happen to have a deadline on that, because that is a technique we use, use it sparingly. But instead of, you know, cutting or dropping your price give people better reasons to buy. So podcast, crusher.com income machine.com webinar crusher.com and go to Robert plank.com to subscribe for updates. And Robert plank.com/itunes and please subscribe to the podcast itself. Rate and review us if you haven't already, it helps us rise in the rankings. Gives us reason to record more episodes. To Robert plank.com and I'll talk to you very, very soon. Don't do the 50% discount. Instead, use that low hanging fruit. You.