Tag: case studies

5 Elements of Social Proof to Explode Your Business

There are many things that I do on a daily basis that almost are not worth my time – things like maintaining a free blog or submitting free articles or posting on forums or even updating my Twitter status.

None of those things directly make me as much money as landing a new joint venture, as writing a sales letter, sending out emails or running a webinar course.

Why do I do them? Because they demonstrate social proof. If someone is thinking about buying from me and they look me up, they'll find hundreds of articles, hundreds of blog posts, and thousands of forum posts.

What will I find when I look you up? Will I find lots of social proof or will I find negative social proof? I'll find a lot of good things about you if you follow these 5 steps.

Element #1: Blog Comment Scarcity Or Blog Responses

You probably do have a blog, right? If I go to it, will I find it's being constantly updated or it has not been updated in the last several years? Are there lots of posts or only 1 or 2? And out of those posts, are lots of people commenting? I decided very early on that when I created my blog, I wanted to have lots and lots of comments.

Otherwise, it would look like I was talking and no one was listening.

When I make blog posts and I get dozens, if not hundreds, of comments for every post, everyone can see how much of an authority I am. When you have the same thing, people can see how much of an authority you are. I got a lot of comments on my blog at first by limiting posts to only 10 comments.

I told people that if I got 10 comments on my blog, then I look at either the post content, otherwise I would stop.

Eventually, I escalated this to saying after I had 10 comments, I would close comments completely and now I have this at 100 comments per post and that's how and why you should have blog comment scarcity and blog responses.

Send traffic to your list, to your latest blog post, but have some kind of deal either that you will turn off comments or stop writing unless you get a certain number of responses because people read but they don't like to respond.

Element #2: Price Scarcity

How do you show that what you're offering has lots and lots of value but still get people to buy when you are first launching it and don't have a huge list? If you're entering a new niche or at first building a list, offer your product at a low price but set a deadline for when you will increase that price and then actually increase it.

This way, if people are buying your product for $20 but you are about to increase it to $50, people realize that the regular prize is $50. Don't run a discount because that will anger your early adopters, but this way, you will reward your fast action-takers and early adaptors by letting them buy low, and then once you have a proven selling record and you have testimonials, now you can increase the price at the time and date you said you would.

Element #3: Webinar Replay Scarcity

Are you starting to see a pattern where I'm talking about social proof?

People can be trained to give you a certain reaction. When you make a blog post, you train them to leave comments. When you are increasing the price, you train them to buy. The same should be true for your live instructions. When I run a webinar, I want the maximum number of people to show up live. When somebody shows up live, they're kind of a captive audience.

They can't fast-forward, they're usually not multicasting and they're sure as heck can't pause your presentation either. It's as close to real life as possible.

That's why you shouldn't always offer a replay of your webinar. Maybe you're not going to offer any kind of replay of your webinar or you're going to offer a replay only available for the next 48 hours or even you're only going to offer a replay inside of your paid membership site.

Either of these 3 strategies will motivate people to attend your webinars live and even if they don't believe you now, they will believe you after you stick to your guns and do what you said you will time and time again.

Element #4: Testimonial Follow-Up

The number one problem I see with sales letters is a lack of proof – why should I buy from you, why should I trust you if you can't show me anyone else who has benefitted from your training? That's why the easiest form of social proof is the testimonial.

Ask your buyers what they thought of the product they just bought from you. What I like to do is add this message as an autoresponder follow-up in my autoresponder sequence. This means that when someone buys from me and joins my list after 7 days, which is enough time to look at whatever product they just bought, I will ask them what they thought of it and have them directly reply to me and then I will use their testimonial on my sales letter.

It's important though to ask not for a testimonial but for an honest review, good or bad.

Element #5: Feedback Survey

I told you a little bit about getting testimonials and training people not just to read your emails but reply to them as well. I use this in many of my pre-launches when I ask people things like "do you want to see this product, do you want to see me explain programming?"

And then the next day, I will tell people how many responses I got. This does many things. First of all, it shows everyone that there is a high demand for what I am about to offer and it makes people part of the process. It makes them know that they have an interactive role in my marketing. When they respond to me, their "yes" answer goes into the total number of yesses I receive over email.

If you take any of those 5 elements of social proof, blog responses, price scarcity, replay scarcity, testimonial follow-ups, or feedback surveys, you should notice a slight increase in sales, a slight increase in response, and a slight increase in popularity.

Are you using any of these 5 elements yet? And which one?

If you're not using any of the 5, which one do you plan on using within the next week? Please leave me a blog comment below with your speedy response.