Comes the bingo question:
Hey Ben,
Got it yesterday and your freedymfest talk was really great. You make it simple and easy to do it. I have one question, how do you built an authority that get your subscibers to sign up for your $97 newsletter?
A good question.
The not-so-short answer is, it took:
- 13.5 years (literally) of giving everything I got to my business before being ready to successfully launch the newsletter
- Thousands of hours of learning/failing/experimenting to get a deep (not just a wide) grasp of my subject
- Specializing (instead of generalizing)
- Developing a distinct personality not based on anyone else (it amuses me how some people now directly copy me, my website, and especially my vernacular/slang/words/attitude, etc — they all miss the point, and are simply shooting their profits in the pinky toe, making a pittance of what they could be)
- Spending over a decade developing a tight bond with my list by not selling them crap and understanding what they really want (and not going by what they *say* they want)
- Strategically positioning myself in the market place
- Understanding (not just reading a book about it or social media post about it) how personal branding really works
- Cutting my teeth on and being grounded in offline, old school direct response (Hint: if you are getting the basics from any self-described “Internet marketers” you could be setting yourself back years, if not decades — to be safe, go old school, study people who were doing this direct marketing thang pre-Internet when it wasn’t dirt cheap to test — like Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, John Carlton, Gary Halbert, Gene Schwartz, Gary Bencivenga, Claude Hopkins, John Caples, Ken McCarthy, Maxwell Sackheim (who?), Bruce Barton (what?), Clayton Makepeace, Paul Hartunian, Robert Collier, Brian Kurtz, Joe Sugarman, Ted Nicholas, Bob Bly, David Garfinkel, Doug D’Anna, David Deutsch, Michael Masterson, Matt Furey… and so on. Many of my email breakthroughs have come from great offline direct marketers/copywriters like them — not purely online/email marketers)
And that’s just for starters.
Notice there is not a single “ninja” tactic or person in the above list?
It’s all based on hard work, patience, and learning your craft deep, not just wide. (Rare virtues today that have gone the way of the typewriter and #2 pencil…)
More:
People get caught up in the “$97” per month.
As if that’s some magical number.
Some continuity should actually be very cheap.
For example, in the golf business we are soon re-launching, we will likely have an upsell continuity that’s less than the price of Netflix each month. It ain’t about “oh I need to do $97 per month!”, it’s about what makes sense for your product and market and overall strategy/goals.
A fun fact:
Some people have continuity that should be much MORE than $97. But, they are simply copying me (and a few even admit it) and stoopidly snatching mediocrity from the jaws of success.
On the other hand:
Others struggle to charge that much and are always wondering why, because they are blindly copying what they *think* my pricing and marketing strategy is. I stress “think” because you can’t reverse engineer me, even if you think you can.
Here’s something for the reverse engineers to think about:
Long ago I learned (from the great Matt Furey who would amusingly admit to doing this many times in his free daily emails when promoting his seminars, etc) the power of purposely doing things “wrong” just to screw with the wannabes and throw the copy-cat losers off balance who can’t formulate a thought without raiding their swipe file or aping someone else’s personality. Frankly, even if you are one of my “Email Players” subscribers, I will never reveal the stuff I do wrong on purpose. (Nor do I teach them stuff I do wrong on purpose, either, so don’t worry about that if you’re a subscriber).
Why?
It goes back to a story Matt Furey once told about the cat and the tiger.
How the cat taught the tiger everything the tiger knew, then the prideful tiger turned on the cat trying to kill it, but the cat never taught the tiger how to climb trees. So when the tiger attacked, the cat easily escaped, laughing at the fact he taught the tiger everything the tiger knows, but did not teach the tiger everything he knows.
By the way:
I’ve done a couple things purposely “wrong” in this email.
Things that, if you did them, are guaranteed to hurt your sales.
(And will hurt mine today, too — but that’s okay, I got no problem sacrificing a few short term sales for long term superior positioning.)
So anyway, that’s that.
Oh, and speaking of old school marketing:
The upcoming November “Email Players” newsletter contains a truly old school (that’s been around for probably thousands of years) non-secret (but so few people do it, it might as well be a secret) way to instantly infuse any business with immediate and potentially huge cash flow.
(Regardless of what you sell or how you sell it.)
In fact, want to know something?
If you have a proven offer and a big and responsive enough list, doing this ONE thing ONE time could pay for several years of your “Email Players” subscription.
Of course, you have to be a subscriber first.
And, so, if you want in, go ye here:
Ben Settle
