11 Psychological Motivators To Maximize Sales

Every once in a while, you want the deck to be leaned a little bit in your favor. That's the entire reason that we're here, right? Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we're going to be listening to somebody that you may or may not know by the name of Yannick Silver. Yannick Silver is very well known in, in these circles, and back in 2008, he presented a very special presentation just for Magnetic Marketing members that we're giving to you today for free on the podcast. Today we're going to be learning about the 11 psychological motivators to maximize your sales. Now, here's the thing about all 11 of these. You're going to recognize some of these as things that are stated all of the time in our ecosystem right now. So as you listen, pay attention to which have you heard before, which have become rules throughout the entire marketing world, and what can you apply in your business. Let's jump in with 11 psychological motivators to maximize sales. With Yannick Silver.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became a obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

I'm sure most of you know this man, but for those of you who don't, Yanik Silver truly leads the ultimate internet lifestyle of fun, freedom, and financial independence funded by the internet. Starting from his one-bedroom apartment and with just $1,800 invested, Yanik has personally sold over $12 million online and counting with his wife Missy, his only employee. It's difficult to pin down Janek in between bungee jumping, running with the bulls, Baja racing, zero-g flights, drinking at the bar last night. And that's why I'm so excited to have him share his all-new presentation on how to use psychological hot buttons to maximize sales. Come on, Janek.

Thanks, Christy. All right. Hey, guys. Morning. I think Glaser does this to me on purpose, puts me up in the morning. All right. I love it. Standing room only. Cool. I don't know who's speaking next door, but I'm sure they suck. You guys are in the right spot. All right. So I'm going to talk about 11 hidden psychological motivators to maximize sales. And we're going to have some fun today. And anyone that wants to touch the monkey later is more than welcome to. All right. So as Christy said, I live the ultimate internet lifestyle. You kind of have me up here as a token internet dude. That's Missy and I in Australia with the koala bear. And basically, I look sort of like this, haggard after a 24-hour flight, went straight to the zoo. Ari's over here. He lives in Australia. And the little koala bears, we learned, sleep 23 hours a day, and I thought that was awesome. And of course, being the jackass I am, you don't see in that photo, right after that, I'm like, "Rawr!" and reach over and scare Missy. So that's me bungee jumping 440 feet. There's me Baja racing. My wife and I in Italy, where we spent more in about 10 days than I spent in my first 6 weeks backpacking through Europe. And there's Missy with the lamb in New Zealand. If you ever see a wedding photo of us. She's way more happy in that photo than in our wedding photo. It's a good-looking lamb. Of course, once again, being the jackass that I am, that night I had to have lamb chops. I mean, I can't help it. They're tasty. They're tasty little creatures. Anyway, so that's about enough about me. I make As Christy said, we do a lot on the internet, but really what I've always hung my hat on is the psychological hot buttons and motivators. And I am a total, I call myself a computer dunce, so nothing I do is internet-related, computer, techie-related stuff. It's really about psychology. It's all been about marketing, direct response marketing. And the psychology is the stuff that fascinates me and I love it. So that's what I've experimented a lot with. If you don't have this book called Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, go get it. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Cialdini, C-I-A-L-I-N something. You know, look it up on Amazon, they're smart. Alright, so motivator number 1 is stories. You know, it's been since ancient times, and now I have little kids, and now my little dude, Zach, he won't let us go to bed, he won't let himself go to bed, he's like, "Book! Book! Read book!" We're like, "Alright." So, you know, tell me a bedtime story. And stories have this awesome way We all got this marketing sort of force field up. It's like, don't give me any crap, I can see through all your bullshit. But stories, it's like, right underneath there. That's why, you know, why has the greatest-selling books of all time— well, I guess Harry Potter eclipsed it, but the Bible, parables, stories, the Koran, all that stuff— everything is based on stories because it's a really great way of getting people interested. I mean, look at you know, we were at the bar last night, if we're hanging out, and I'm like, dude, I gotta tell you this story. You can't believe what happened to me last night. And you guys will be like, alright, yeah, what happened? And you get this like slight hypnotic bit to you. So anyway, stories. I'm gonna give you a most successful sales letter of all time according to Denny Hatch from Who's Mailing What? was the Two Young Men letter. Those of you that have been into direct mail and direct marketing for a while have heard of this letter. Essentially, it's a story about two young men who started off in the exact same position. They went to the same college. They had the same sort of family. They show up at this company meeting, I think, or reunion. One of them is mid-level, and the other one is the company's president. The difference is one of them read the Wall Street Journal. It doesn't even come out and explicitly say they read the Wall Street Journal. That's how powerful stories are, that this thing has been mailed forever and made tons of money for the Wall Street Journal. So I like to use stories in my emails. I like to use stuff like, I stumbled across something unusual recently. You know, that word stumbled, right? It's kind of like, oh, you know, Yannick just sort of woke up and sort of bumbled his way into something, which probably half the time would be correct. But, you know, that one word, and I'm big into, actually, words have a real psychological component to them too. Not like, you know, the dumb words like "and" and "the" or whatever, but "stumbled" has something to say. You know, all words that mean something have this unique component to them. Anyway, so here's another story. Last month I was sitting on a plane on my way to speak at a conference, and instead of catching up on my reading, I struck up a conversation with my neighbor. So that's a great way of opening into what did I talk about with my neighbor. And of course I talked to him about how to make money on the internet, and he's really interested, and blah blah blah, and that got, you know, underneath people's radar. So this is the full version of that other email, and it talks about the story of I stumbled across something unusual, and I met this guy named John Harishran, he had this thing called the Power Pause. I'm like, no, I don't want to read this, but I was going on my honeymoon, so I took some more reading with me, and Usually gets a laugh out of people. And so I've been using that email for a long time to just keep selling his product. So that's very powerful. Motivator number 2, reason why. If I was gonna hang my hat on anything that pretty much, you know, you have to say here's the silver bullet, here's what's gonna work absolutely every time, I think it would be reason why. And there's a, for those of you that read the book Influence, Psychology of Persuasion that I talked about, by the way, I've read that book 9 times, that's how frickin' awesome that book is. And so he talks about this Harvard experiment, this social psychologist who has this experiment where she gets people to butt in front of line at the Xerox machine, at the copy machine. And the first thing that they say is, "Excuse me, you know, can I get in front of you because I have to make, because I'm in a rush." And that's like 94% of the time they let people get in front of them. And then they came back and did it another way without a reason, it was like 60-some percent. And they're like, aha, it's the reason. And then they came back and said, excuse me, can I get in front of you, for no reason, just said because. And that was like 93% of the time instead of 94% of the time. So that magic word, because, it's like that little trigger in our heads. I have a 2.5-year-old, so he's not quite there yet, but pretty soon everything's going to be why. Right now everything's no, no, no. But pretty soon it's going to be why. And, you know, "Why is the sky blue, Daddy? Why is this?" And people want to know the reason why you're doing something. Maxwell Sackheim, who's one of my absolute favorite mail-order guys— How many know who Maxwell Sackheim is? All right, a small group of you guys. Find out who that dude is. He started the Book of the Month Club. He had this ad that ran for 40 years with the headline, "Do you make these mistakes in English?" Really smart direct response marketer, mail-order marketer.. And not only because he was born on my birthday do I like him, but he was damn smart. So he used to say this: whenever you make a claim or special offer in your advertising, come up with an honest reason why. He ran an ad one time when he was totally retired, he was just fooling around. He ran an ad talking about what he called a junior estate or something like that, a real estate. He ran a real estate ad Used a lot of these triggers that we'll talk about. It was all curiosity-based. There's no photo. It was like, there's a damaging admission in there that we'll talk about. He talked about that this place needed to be fixed up. And he got like hundreds of people seeing this thing. And he talked about the reason why the price was so low, because, you know, it backs to a certain plot where it's not actually ideal, but the way that it's positioned, or the walls that we have put up, it's not that noisy. So pretty, pretty amazing guy. Go check him out. And, you know, people just want to be, they want to be mysterious about what they do in business. If they have a sale, we don't think that you're such a nice guy or gal. There's a reason behind it. And when you can get to some reasons— here, I'll show you some cool stuff in a little bit of sales that I've done. This is an old ad that I ran for my dad's business, totally using reason why. And this sells a fetal Doppler So I used to sell medical equipment, and we'd sell medical equipment with these long, long-form copy that my dad, who's a Russian immigrant, would say, "Nobody's gonna read all this." I'm like, "Come on, Dad, let's just try it. Let's run it." And this ad got like 1,080-some percent return, where literally doctors would be faxing in their credit cards, they'd be faxing this back, and it did awesome. And the reason why is the big premise for this. Most of you can't probably read this, but it says How can we offer you this new fetal Doppler for only $447? And I assume not many of you guys are OB-GYNs in the room, so that's actually a really awesome price on a fetal Doppler, which checks a baby's heartbeat. And then it talks about the reason that we do this is because the manufacturer has given us this great deal, and instead of us keeping all the money, we want to pass it along to you so that we'll get in the habit of buying this Doppler and buy more stuff from us. And that's the reason why we're doing it. And, you know, like I said, we ran this ad forever. I don't know if they still run it anymore, but they kept running it for years and years, all based on reason why. Here's an ad I wrote for a cosmetic surgeon, one of my clients at one point. And you can do something like this. This is so easy. Like, just create 7 reasons why, you know, more people use whatever, whatever your business is. You know, it doesn't matter. You can come up with 5, 7, 9 reasons pretty much in your sleep. And it's like the more reasons that you come up with, the more people are like, "Oh, okay, now I've satisfied my rational, logical side that I'm making a smart decision." All right, so here's some of the reason why stuff that I've done. I've done— everyone's heard of the scratch and dent sales, and that's been around in the Robert Collier letter book forever. Another resource, go get that one if you don't have that one, Robert Collier Letter Book. Scratch and Dent, there's a picture, you know, me up to my waist in all kinds of boxes, and I called it the Save Yannick's Marriage Sale. Because Missy was actually pretty pissed off that our back room looked like this. And so there's me being like, I don't see what the problem is. And so we got rid of all that stuff and more. And so that was fun. Actually, in the Robert Collier Letter Book, he talks about Scratch and Dent Sale. Where it worked so well that he's like having guys in the back start kicking boxes and start denting them so that it would go out looking a little messed up. I am not afraid to exploit my children. Here's when Zach was born. This is the Baby Z Sale. And so we ran a sale, you know, a reason why. So what's the reason why we ran the sales? For Zach's Zach's birth. It was a 48-hour sale. We did, I don't know, $50,000 or something. And of course the running joke that I told my wife, I'm like, you know, just 19 more kids, we're at a million bucks. I think I found that funnier than she did. We did have another one though. We had baby Zoe, another Baby Z sale, and that one, baby Zoe kicked Zach's ass, $57,000 during her sale. So we sent out these little invitations to our clients that looked like a baby announcement. You can do some fun stuff. I think that was our actual birth announcement, and then we sent that to our customers as well. You know, any reason's good for a sale. We had the Yannick Get Organized sale, and this is my organizer, so I actually snapped a photo. You know, I like proof, as much proof as possible, so that's my organizer working and organizing my my back room. This is our old house. But, uh, bubble hockey. That was all I wanted as a kid. And then I knew I was successful if I had that in my house. I've arrived. Anyway, there's an arcade in here. I don't know if they have bubble hockey, but I'll kick your ass in bubble hockey. Anyone that wants to challenge me? Alright, specificity. 99.25% pure. Does anyone know what that is? Ivory soap, exactly. If they said 100% pure, we wouldn't say Ivory soap today. We'd be like, you know, it's on any number of other dumb brands. But 99.25% pure, makes you wonder though what that other 0.75% is, but who knows. Anyway, people are just skeptical of advertising. We talked about that shield that comes up, and if you give us, you know, a real specific fact, a real specific something, You're either lying or you're telling the truth. And, you know, it takes a little more digging, a little more research to get into it. So, 8 Minute Abs, perfect, great example of using specificity that just skyrocketed this product. And it was all based on the name, 8 Minute Abs, right? It wasn't 10 Minute Abs. 8 minutes is very specific. Of course, in, you know, There's Something About Mary, that crazy hitchhiker, he's like, "I got this great idea." I don't even know what I'm talking about. I'm gonna do 7-minute abs. Anyway, here's another good one. I won't make you guys raise your hand who has this book. But this is freaking awesome. This woman, Laura Korn, does a great job of not only curiosity, what we'll talk about in a little bit, all these psychological hot buttons that kind of build on each other. You know, you don't have to use them just in seclusion. Get all synergistic, and that's where they get even better. So if you've ever seen this book, it uses curiosity as well as specificity because you actually have to rip out each night. It's pretty cool. So you can't browse it in the bookstore like a regular book. It's just a little teaser on, you know, for his eyes only, for her eyes only, and it talks about what it is. And it's also one of my favorite books because it's like a how-to— hi there. Come join us. So it's also what I call a fish product because it's a done-for-them, silver platter kind of product. Because it's literally like, here's all the ingredients you need for one of these great nights of sex. Saran Wrap, whipped cream, aluminum foil, and it gives you like a whole litany of items. So anyway, won't go into it. This is a— thought it was pretty cool— LifeLock. And for specificity, the dude, he's like, okay, here's my Social Security number and this is my exact number. You know, all these things, they also jump off and build on one another. So this is also a high level of proof, credibility. I mean, anyone that's willing to put his Social Security number out there, which most of us think is really insecure, I thought it was pretty powerful. Alright, here's a headline that I wrote back in the day. Unfortunately, I'm not 27 years old anymore. '27-year-old Maryland man reveals his proven system for creating instant internet profits from a simple 2-page website even if you hate computers. The amazing story of how a completely different approach to internet marketing took me from zero to making $51,351.94 in just 6.5 short months working from home and why I'm convinced nearly anyone can copy what I'm doing.' 5 big specifics in that headline: 27-year-old, Maryland man, 2-page website, the dollar amount, so I didn't say, you know, $51,000 plus, and I said 6.5 months. So, you know, get those specifics, dig in for that research, and it's very powerful. Motivator number 4, telling the truth. All right, us as marketers have an issue with this sometimes, and it's— I don't know what the deal is, but if you actually told the truth in most cases, It's A, completely disarming, because most people think that us as marketers are supposed to deceive and try and convince people in some way to buy. And you can give a damaging admission, because not, you know, all our products are great, but there's something wrong with our product that we can talk about. You know, whatever it is, you know, for Ivory soap, whatever that 3/4% that isn't pure, you could talk about that. Whatever it is, there's some sort of damaging admission. Like I talked about Maxwell Sackheim when he Adrian Wilson wrote that ad for the real estate, for the piece of property, and he said it's a real fixer-upper, it needs some attention, and that's why it's such a bargain. And that's why he had so many people in there. It wasn't like the typical real estate ad, you know, cozy, quaint cottage, overlooking blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I don't know where the real estate guys, they probably have a book that's created with all these adjectives. And, you know, if you tell the truth, it's disarming. So here's an example. This copywriter from the turn of the century named John E. Powers. How many have heard of John E. Powers?

Wow.

All right, like one person. All right, go find out who that guy is. So I love studying all the old people way in the back. I once did a presentation— sorry for a little tangent— I once did a presentation where I'm talking about the greats of direct marketing and all these old people. And it was like Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, John Caples, John E. Powers, Robert Collier, and like, I put Dan Kennedy on there. And Dan's like, "Thanks, everybody else is dead." Anyway, so here's the ad that he wrote. This is literally the ad at the turn of the century. It said, "We are bankrupt. We owe $125,000 more than we can pay.", and this announcement will bring our creditors down on our necks. But if you come and buy tomorrow, we shall have the money to meet them. If not, we go to the wall. Right? How truthful can you be? We're about to go out of business. Come buy some shit. And it sold a lot of stuff. It helped us save that company, actually. We wrote another ad. We have a lot of rotten raincoats that we want to get rid of. Truth in advertising, ladies and gentlemen. Here's one of my favorite ads. This is the way it starts off, by a guy named Joe Carbo, Lazy Man's Ways to Riches. And he says, I used to work hard, you know, the 18-hour days. And then he says, with a little luck, this ad should earn me $50,000, maybe $100,000. And what's more, I'm going to ask you to send me $10 for something that cost me no more than 50 cents. And I'm going to try and make it so irresistible you'd be a darn fool not to do it. Ad ran everywhere. Guy made a fortune with this thing. And with that damaging emission, just telling the truth. So we've tried to do that. This is for my new business called Maverick Business Adventures. Who's heard of that? Yeah! Maverick Business Adventures. Look that up. We take entrepreneurs, CEOs on these cool once-in-a-lifetime trips. And combine it with business, bring in these cool business celebrities. We brought Jesse James for the last trip. I see Gerald. He's a member. All right. And then we also do a charity giving back portion. Anyway, so this one guy, he had no idea who I am or what we're all about. And some of you know who Chet Roland is. He's a member. So this guy, I don't know if you can see the photo, but we call him the elder statesman of our group. You know, a little a little older, and he's a really successful guy. Anyway, so this guy is a philanthropist, international resort developer, you know, he's talking about these huge deals, and the first guy he meets is Chet. Anyone that knows Chet, big old Versace glasses, you know, very big guy, he has a dating system for men, and so that's the first guy he meets. So Jim's testimonial is, I really didn't expect to enjoy myself. I thought I might even end up flying home early because I've done that before. So I put that in there. I thought that's great. So think about the damaging admission in your own business. There's something that it— even though we try and do businesses, you know, make ourselves the best possible product service, there's something that is screwed up, but it can be turned into a positive spin, into a positive benefit. So think about that. Curiosity. Acquiring minds want to know. I love curiosity, but, you know, caveat has to go with curiosity. It can't just be pure curiosity because then there's really no, there's no benefit to it. I think it's got to be double stacked. So curious something with the benefit-oriented. So it's perfect for bullet points, and when you're thinking about bullet points, so, you know, there's a bullet point that Boardroom used to run all the time, which was "Never to eat on an airplane." I mean, how can you not want to know what that is? So use curiosity a lot. Here's a couple quick examples. This is from a direct mail piece from Nightingale-Conant, and it's a story about this business executive, and he meets this random guy, and the guy writes out a check, pushed it to him, and he turned away, disappeared as quickly as he came. It was a check for $500,000 signed by dot dot dot, continued on the inside. So you kind of keep that cliffhanger. Try and use that in some way. Get people moving on to the next step in your process. Mr. X is a great thing to use pretty much anywhere that you can. This mysterious Mr. X. I've used Dr. X before. Even more mysterious is Dr. X. So for the cosmetic surgeon business, we did an interview with Dr. X, this mysterious renegade who turned practice on its ear. So you can use that. Authority, motivator number 5. 4 out of 5 dentists recommend it. You know, why? Have you seen, I don't see them much anymore, but the commercial is like, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV." And the dude's in a white coat and everything, he's all doctored up. The only reason they do that is because of that implied authority. Get someone in a uniform, get someone in a doctor's coat, it's like all of a sudden there's a major amount of credibility and authority that takes place. And so you can tap into authority. There's some sort of experts in whatever business that you're in, tap into them for testimonials. So here's a couple quick examples of that. Authority can come by way of implied endorsement from other places. So this is my friend Drew's site before he sold it. His alter ego was Stephanie. This is a bridal site. And it says, "As seen on." It was like about AOL, Google, blah, blah, blah, Yahoo. These are all the places he was advertising. I thought that was awesome. This is on our Maverick Business Adventures site. This is— actually, we have a lot more places now, but these are all the places that either I've been featured or Maverick's been featured. So use that for credibility, for building authority, if you can do that. Here's an ad by one of my former clients, Dr. Kotler, great marketer in Beverly Hills, facial cosmetic surgeon. And, you know, look, just pay attention to this one. It's a little hard to see, it's small, but she's a nurse, and according to Dan, nurses have the highest credibility factor of anyone, beyond doctors even. And so she's a nurse, and it tells her age, you know, specifics. You know, this is how these things can stack on one another. So it says that she's 62 years old, and it's a testimonial from her, so it's a great authority builder. Alright, here's another way that you can use authority. Use facts from agencies that are really smarter than you. And have credibility. So when I sell medical equipment, I put in these things for— where's Nathan? He would know this. Where's Dr. Wei? Anyway, Dr. Wei is here. He's a rheumatologist, so he would know all this stuff. Anyway, I put up these facts. This is when we're trying to sell this bone densiometry equipment for primary care doctors. And so I put in facts from the National Osteoporosis Foundation. It was like Fact, blah, blah, blah. Fact, blah, blah, blah. And you know, you can use that as authority. Very powerful. Use celebrities for authority. This is what we do for Maverick. I'm actually getting to meet Branson again next month, which is gonna be freaking awesome. I signed up. I'm on his— I'm number 144 on this, his crazy space flight. So we use Branson in our advertising because It's really targeted for entrepreneurs that are sort of like, you know, possibly want to be mini-Bransons or really adventurous. So I have a picture of Branson and then I have a quote that he used. And then I have— this is from a recent business session, the first trip that we did. We had Jesse James, the West Coast Choppers Monster Garage guy. So we put that on the site. So all of this gives you implied authority. Alright, scarcity. This is a big one. This is another really, really big one that you want to use, but you want to use it properly. I forgot to mention something at the beginning. It's kind of like the Force, you know, you don't want to step over to the dark side and use all these things for evil because it can be manipulative, but you want to use it for good. You want to be a good Jedi Knight, alright? So scarcity is one of those that can very easily be used for evil, and it's got to be done right. We're more motivated by fear of loss than actually like trying to gain something. It's pretty amazing. This is one of those— I always like to step back whenever I buy something, and I'm like, okay, what just happened? Why did I whip out my wallet, and how'd they get my money? And so think about what are the hot buttons and motivators that work on you. Like scarcity is one of those that totally works on me all the time. That's why when I was like, I don't know, whenever Cabbage Patch Kids came out when I was like 13 or something, I never played with dolls in my life, but I'm like, I want one of those. Because they're just so hard to get. I don't even know why I wanted it, but I just wanted it. Tickle Me Elmo. S2000, when that first came out, that was my first really cool sports car. Honda, little two-seater roadster. And I like looked everywhere for this thing. And I wanted silver with a red interior, which is even scarcer to find. So I finally found one. I had to drive it like 900 miles to get home. And so I had the choice at that time between like an SLK, which was available everywhere, and an S2000, 2000, which was available nowhere. So I was, of course, you know, wanted that one. So think about what motivates you. And like I said, this still totally works on me all the time. That's why I have an Aston Martin, because, you know, it's pretty much pretty rare and you don't see very many of them. And so that's what I wanted. Is there an Aston Martin fan here? Is that a woo? Anyway, using deadlines Nothing better than deadlines, right? We sometimes, as smart marketers, we forget the basics, and the basics will get us pretty much everywhere we need to go. If you don't have a deadline, typically there's no action. So have that deadline. Limited numbers, if you can do it in a way that actually makes sense. A qualification process. So using takeaway stuff, making them essentially try and qualify and sell you on why they should give you money. It works really well. So this is a picture of a line right after Prohibition was lifted, right? So nobody could get liquor for a long, long time, super scarce. Boom! Open up, there's a line. Everybody wants it. Here's one of my favorites, sticking on the liquor theme. This is a guy that I had speak at, actually last week, at my Underground Seminar. And this is an ad that he didn't let me show, so we're going to show it here. This is what got me. And it uses reason why, it talks about this fire at Silver Oak, their facilities at their warehouse, at their vineyard, and that they weren't sure if any of the 2001 vintage was even going to be around. But they found out that some of these were available, and then they have these really huge bottles, like, you know, it goes by Magnum, then double Magnum, and goes bigger, and all the way up to, he had a 6-liter available, which I think is an imperial, or a jerrycan, or whatever the hell those things are called. But so anyway, super scarce, right? It said one available at this size, at the 6-liter size. Anyone want to venture to guess which one I bought? So we got a big, huge bottle. Actually, my cellar just got completed, so I'm excited. That's one of the centerpieces, is this huge— it literally is like that big, a 6-liter bottle of Silver Oak. So probably pop that open for maybe my birthday this year. Anyway, scarcity, there's another example of that. Here's another scarcity example in the info business. This is a guy called Andrew Harper's Hideaway Report, and it's limited to 20,000 subscribers. That's the scarcity model. And the guy has gone on— actually, Andrew Harper is a totally fake name, and they have a great little shtick to it, so you should check it out, just see what they're doing. But they built an entire travel business around it, around this one newsletter, based on the scarcity of it. We've done this before, where there's a pop-up. This is on one of our sites, and literally pops up 30 seconds after someone gets to the site, and it's a little countdown timer. It's like, you know, congratulations, you got this discount. And it's like, 9:58, 9:57, 9:56. They're like, "Oh my God, I gotta order!" It doubled our response. You know, like I said, use this for good or use this for evil. Anytime something is sold out, it typically makes people want it even more. And so, this is not like, we don't put up a sold out even though something's not sold out. Typically, a lot of our stuff, this is the underground DVDs, I think, and typically those go really fast. We make only a limited edition of them. And so we put out this thing, you know, sold out, currently unavailable. So use that. We'll talk about social proof in a minute. Use that social proof of seeing people seeing the thing that sold out, plus along with the scarcity. You know, like I said, all these things build on one another. And here we are, social proof. Perfect. Have you ever had your mom say to you, If your friends are going to jump off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge too? Right? Well, my mom used to say that to me, and I'd be like, I don't know, maybe? And you know, the crazy thing is, you probably would if all your friends are jumping off a bridge. You'd be like, okay! Real quick digression. So I was in Ios in Greece. And we're— this just reminded me of the cliff jumping, the jumping off a bridge thing. So we're up there on this little cliff. We kept going higher and higher, and I went with the locals, and all of a sudden we end up on this little spot of land that's like that, that wide. And, and I watched them jump off. I'm like, oh, and of course I jump off because they did it. So, you know, social proof is a major, major factor. It's really powerful, especially when you're in situations that you don't know exactly what the proper thing to do, what the proper etiquette is, so you look around. You know, these are all built-in shortcuts to us because we can't sit down and analyze every single situation. So if everybody's running this way, you know, for some reason, there's probably a big monster that way. So there's some reason that everybody's running. So social proof can come in a lot of ways. You know, you've seen the tip jars. Why do bartenders or the dudes playing piano or whoever, why do they stick some dollars in there originally? It's because you don't want to be the only jackass who thinks that you're going to tip them. You want to think that, "Oh yeah, everybody's tipping this guy. That's the right thing to do." Here's a little photo of everyone pointing up. Another side story. We did a video scavenger hunt for my birthday last year, and it's very fun. You should look it up. And we divided up into a couple teams, and we had all these silly dumb tasks, and you had to videotape them, and then we come back home and watch them. And then, you know, like dumb stuff like, I don't know, breakdance in the middle of the street, do cartwheels down the road, eat off somebody's plate. Bonus points if you eat off their plate twice. Eat off a stranger's plate. That was a good one. Anyway, one of the others was, uh, look, point up and see for— you get bonus points for every single person you can get to do that. And as you got more and more people doing it, they're all like, you know, they're all trying to check out what you're looking at. So do that, that's fun. Here's a poster of Can't Buy Me Love. Anyone remember that really bad movie? Patrick Dempsey before he was Dr. whatever he is, Dr. Cool, Dr. McDreamy or whatever he is. So that was a perfect example of social proof, right? He paid the hottest chick in school to pretend like she was going out with him, and then he was super cool. That's basically what I did with all my friends in this room. So we pay them to make me look cool. That's why I bought drinks last night. Why is McDonald's, right, billions and billions served? They used to use specificity, actually, it was like 10 billion served, 20 billion served, and then they just served way too many cheeseburgers. But billions and billions, they're like, "Oh, okay, billions and billions are eating this, can't be that bad." Why do you see lines outside of bars? Do that on purpose to try and make, create that social proof that this is the hot club to go to. And then you go in there and it's— nobody's in there. But they got a big line out front. So you can use this in a lot of different ways. So we've used it where we've put up photos of really excited people at our seminars giving standing ovations, right? So that's the social proof. You can use this, obviously testimonials are a huge way of using social proof. You cannot use testimonials enough. Use these in multiple ways. Just a little internet tip for you guys, it's really going the way of multimedia now, I think it's even more powerful. It used to just be written testimonials, and then audio, and now if you can get video testimonials, way, way, way more powerful. So use that. And here's a cool little example. So we had, you can see how many testimonials we got for this one program, and it's got, you know, pages that you can click on, and it's like, wow, amazing. You'll see social proof at work on blogs. Why do blogs who get the most comments keep getting the most comments? Because, you know, it's just like, oh, well, that's the thing to do. I need to make a comment here, and it's like up to 1,000 comments. So you'll see on my blog, internetlifestyle.com, you can go check that out, and you'll check out The posts that get a lot of comments, they keep getting a lot of comments because that's the thing to do. Here's a testimonial from one of our courses. I like to use video and written testimonials as much as possible together. Very powerful stuff. Use the contrast principle. Glaser, who got out of the menswear business, but he would never try and sell you a tie first. It would always be, you know, let me sell you this total suit, which is, I don't know, $1,000 or whatever, and then I'm gonna sell you the $50 tie because the tie now all of a sudden looks really cheap compared to the $1,000 I just spent. That's why when we buy cars, they don't, you know, get you for the rustproofing and the LoJack and everything before you go in. It's after, well, you know, you just spent $50,000 on a car, obviously you want the $1,500 blah blah blah and the $2,000 BS blah blah blah and the $3,000 extended warranty BS blah blah blah. And you know, that's easy. It's a contrast principle at work. Compare apples to oranges. I'll show you that in just a moment. Using upsells is a great way of using contrast. Let me talk about those in just a moment. This is one of my favorite sites. It's demotivators.com. Has anyone seen that site? Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's like the opposite of Successorys. And so I sent Bill this big old poster of the pyramids. And it says, "Achievement! Anything is possible as long as you have a, just an unlimited supply of free labor," or something like that. So, I thought that was great. I love the way you guys have that in your office. Anyway, so these guys— so here's the contrast principle at work. These guys have a book, and go check it out, the copy on the site is pretty damn funny. They have a book, they have one edition that's $1,500, that's this one, in the humidor. It's called the Chairman Edition. It's like numbered, hand-signed by the author. And it's in this great humidor. Then they have the executive edition, which is like, I don't know, $100 maybe? And then they got the manager edition, which is the cheap version. So by having this big old one, the $1,500 one, it makes the $100 one look way cheaper, and it obviously makes the other one look even cheaper. So I would, you know, I didn't tell you this, but sometimes some marketers will create fake programs and fake things that are really just designed to sell against and create this contrast principle and make you think that whatever they're actually wanting to sell is even cheaper. So I didn't tell you that, but you can use that as you may. Remember, good side of the Force, dark side of the Force. I'm just here as your conduit. Think of me as Obi-Wan. All right. Here's how we use the contrast principle. You can use this a lot in a downsell, and this is a great way of using it online. So, all right, they go to your page. They're gonna check out whatever you got. Okay. They back out of the page. "Too much money." Boom! This pop-up comes up. It's like, "Hey, wait a second. How about I make you a deal?" And so this is talking about we had a physical version of this product, public domain product, and now this pop-up is like, "Hey, you know, why don't you just get the digital version for half the price?" And this works really well. So, you know, it's "No thanks. I'll pass." Or, "It's a deal. I'll take it." So it talks about, you know, and it gives, you know, once again, built, you know, use all these hot buttons on top of each other. So there's a reason why, right? Listen, I'm going to make you a special deal on a downloadable digital-only version. This way I won't have to ship anything or pay fulfillment, so I can pass along my savings to you. That's my reason why for the discount. Whenever you give a discount or some sort of special deal, make that reason why, going back to our trigger number 2. Here's answering objections, and that's another hot button that that we don't have time to cover, but that's— you gotta think of people's objections. You know, this isn't a copywriting lecture, but that's one of the big things is, "All right, now the objection becomes, 'Oh crap, I don't know how to download stuff,' and, you know, 'I'm not technical.'" And it says, "Don't worry, downloading is totally a snap, and I'm a techno dunce," or what am I? "I'm no techno whiz, and I've had no problem. Everything works on both Mac and PC." And you'll still get absolutely everything, so covering that objection, "Do I still get everything?" And so, real simple. Alright, here's the apples to oranges principle. This is a great way of doing comparisons. I'll read this to you because you probably can't read that far. Alright, so this is for a product called Get Fit While You Sit. It's a little fitness ebook that I created with my personal trainer back in 2001. Still sells every single month, which which is kind of funny because I've never touched it in 7 years. And so actually my first idea was I saw this, I saw this stat, like, you know, some exponential amount of people sitting in traffic now. I'm like, hey Jeff, let's do this program where people work out in their cars while they're sitting in traffic. He's like, no. If, you know, if you want to get getting sued as all these people rear-end each other. I'm like, "Okay, well, let's do a thing where people sit at their computers and work out and watch TV when they work out." So actually, this is another marketing principle, but I created the sales letter first for what I wanted the product to be, and then I'm like, "Here, go figure out what kind of exercises we need to do to make this work." Anyway, so apples to oranges comparison. Here's a great one. "Okay, Jeff, so what's the cost for this incredible program?" Let's do a quick comparison. Last time I checked, the NordicTrack would set you back over $1,000. And almost everyone I know who bought one uses it as a clothes rack within a few weeks anyway. Or you could easily pay $50 to $75 per month. So first look, $1,000 for NordicTrack, right? So we stuck it all the way up here. Or you could easily pay $50 to $75 per month for gym membership you'll probably get to a few times. That's over $300 per year. Do not make people do math. Notice I added up for people, so now we're at $300, right? Or you could have a personal trainer like myself to work out with you. I currently charge a minimum of $50 per hour for personal training. Normally my clients work out 3 times per week with me, so that's $600 per month. Notice I added it up for them and made the amount higher. Once again, contrast. That's— this way I figure bare-bones minimum, you're getting hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of my expertise and training at your disposal. Inside the new program. I'm not gonna charge you anywhere near that amount or even my minimum hourly rate. In fact, your total investment for the entire Get Fit While You Sit program is just $29.95. That's less than one month's membership to any gym without the hassles. So notice where we took it, right? $1,000, $300, $600, and now it's $29.95. Wow! That's a friggin' bargain for an ebook. Now notice I didn't say, you know, I didn't start comparing it to like Denise Austin's latest, I don't know, Bun Buster workout crazy program or DVD or whatever. I don't want a fair comparison. I don't want apples-to-apples comparison. I want the apples-to-oranges comparison. You get to make the rules. You get to decide what you compare whatever to. So, you know, whatever you guys are selling, make it an unfair comparison and make that value way up there. Alright, here's a quick example of an upsell. This is another great way of using the contrast principle. So somebody just purchased from you, they got their credit card out, that is the absolute best time. Who's selling anything right now? Should be everyone probably, right? Alright, if you guys are not using upsells, You don't use upsells in your business, please star that, do something with it. I don't know, write yourself a note, cut off a pinky, something to remind yourself to use upsells in your business and use multiple upsells. This is the contrast principle at work for upsells. I've just purchased, right? This is that instant sales letters. People go to this. There's a couple different ways of doing it. We do it as an intermediary page. They click to order and they jump over to this page. It's like special deal. You know, give you a special deal if you're ordering today. And so, you know, reason why, not a very good reason why, but a pretty weak reason why. You could say, because you're ordering blah, blah, blah today, here's a special that you're, you know, a special offer. And we say, here's the gold version of Instant Sales Letters, and it's just $15 more. Notice I didn't say what your total amount is going to be. It's selling originally, it's like a $40 product. Then we add this $15 upsell, and I said it's only $15 more, so it seems small, we get 66% of people take me up on that one. Right? And I don't have a slide for the next one, but the next one is they go over to the order page, and once again, is an upsell opportunity for something else. And it says, you know, for only, I don't know, $37 more or something, you can get this. And it's something like, I think about 20 to 25% of people go for an additional upsell. So all of a sudden my average transaction value has bumped way up. And you can keep doing this. I have friends that will run through multiple, multiple upsells and just keep hiking up their transaction. It also runs into something we'll talk about in just a moment called commitment and consistency. So like I said, all these kind of jump on one another. Reciprocation. This is really powerful and it can be used against you a lot of times when you don't even know it. And there's the experiment that Cialdini talks about in that book, Influence: Psychology of Persuasion, is somebody walking in a room and just, he had two Cokes, two cans of soda, and gave the other guy in the experiment a can of soda. He didn't ask for it, he just gave it to him. And the experiment was over, but then the real experiment took place and that was they wanted to see how many tickets this guy could sell to this charity thing that they were doing. And it was like exponentially higher for anyone who had been given the coke, not even asked for it, nothing, right? So that power of reciprocation is very, very high. And, you know, so quid pro quo, we've all seen probably Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal's like, Quit pro quo, Clarice. And he keeps asking for information. Anyway, that was a horrible Hannibal Lecter impression. Free samples. Why do people hang out in the grocery stores giving you cheese and fruits and all kinds of stuff? It's been proven that you will buy not only more of that particular product, but more overall when you get a free sample of something. It's that feeling of being in debt. Charities use this a lot. Where, well, they'll, their best, their control mailing pieces, typically a lot of them, they found that the best thing that they could do is just send out a free gift with their mail piece. You know, with no, you didn't ask for it, nothing. It's just those little dumb little labels, those return labels. Have you all gotten those from charities? Those have been their best thing for the most part. It creates a reciprocation. Alright, so here's a couple examples. Here's an ad I wrote for my uncle, who used to own a deli. And some of you will recognize that as an old Gary Halbert headline that I ripped off. So, "Local deli owner swears under oath that his matzo ball soup does not contain any illegal addictive ingredients." This had a picture of my Uncle Jacob, like, with a pot of matzo ball soup. Anyway, so it talks about, you know, what's inside the matzo ball soup. So there's, you know, an element of curiosity. You know, like I said, all these build on one another. So there's an element of curiosity, talking about what's inside, and it says, you know, there's only 5 ingredients in any matzo ball, but it's the right combination that makes them so good. And then it goes on and says, "I won't use club soda because that makes them into little hard balls." And so, a special offer to prove how good it is, is it says that he's decided the best way to prove that there are really no illegal ingredients in his best-selling matzo ball soup is by giving away a free cup of soup, no strings attached. And you don't need to try anything else, though you might be tempted by the homemade desserts, blah, blah, blah. So if you'd like to try a free cup of matzo ball soup, "just be one of the first 100 people to come down to Hoffberg's with this article in your hand." So building that reciprocation, pretty powerful. Use that any way you want. I've used this a lot of times is where we, you know, reciprocation can take many forms. You know, a lot of times when we're trying to capture some sort of contact information to follow up on people, name, email, whatever, full contact details, It's that reciprocation. It's that creating a big enough incentive. So this is for a little wine project that I was fooling around with, and I just created this little ebook on collectible wine secrets. I pulled it together in like 10 minutes, and so that was my incentive, the reciprocation for taking the survey. All right. Commitment and consistency. What kind of person do you want to be known as? A flip-flopper or a person who's consistent with what you believe in or consistent with your actions? And there's a high level of us wanting to be consistent. So this is one of those other times that can trip you up. Like in Charlie Dean's book, he talks about, you know, just very— you know, just these little, little tweaks. It's like you've all heard of the, you know, the vacuum salesman or whoever who just tries to get his foot foot in the door, right? As soon as you get that little opening, it can lead to way bigger things. So in Cialdini's book, he talks about these canvassers that would come around, and they had these little tiny just signs, like, like that big, little, right? And said, "Drive carefully." That was it. And, and they're like, "Would you put that, you know, would you accept this and put this in your house, put it on your window?" And, you know, of course most people are like, "Yeah, sure." Sure, you know, that seems harmless, right? Everybody wants everybody else to drive carefully. So a couple weeks later, another canvasser comes by and who is a different person, and they have the big, huge, ugly sign, hand-painted, that says "Drive Carefully," right? And significantly more people would put that in their yard It's a total eyesore. Significantly more people did that because— who had the little card in their window because they want to be consistent with their own image that they now created themselves that they, you know, care about the community and want people to drive carefully. So it's like, you know, little stuff. So you got to know about this stuff. Also, the more public, the more powerful your commitment and consistency is. So, you know, if you just get somebody to say internally, "Whatever, I'm gonna buy," or "I'm gonna lose weight," or whatever action you want to change. It's nowhere near as good as if you can get someone to do it written, or even more powerful is a public declaration. So I've used this before for the Maverick Business Adventures company that I started. I've had that idea for like 2 years because I'm into, as Christy told you in the intro, all this stuff.. And I wanted to create a business that, you know, basically around people like me that I wanted to hang out with that are into these adventures as well and loved entrepreneurship and want to hang out with business celebrities and also want to give back to young entrepreneurs. And so I've had that idea for like 2 years, just sitting in my idea journal. I'm like, screw it, I'm going to do this. And the only way I know that I'm going to make myself do it is I posted on my blog, I posted my entire business plan via mind map. I sent out an email to my entire list, you know, like 100,000 people. I'm like, hold me accountable to this. I'm making a public declaration that by January '08, we're going to run our first trip. I had no freaking clue how I was going to run this trip, what I was going to do, how I was going to get the right team in place, what celebrity I was going to get. But, you know, you make that public declaration. It's very, very powerful. And now I don't want to look like an idiot. And so I went ahead and did it, and it's awesome. Anyway, this also steps into what I wrote here is a buyer is a buyer is a buyer is a buyer. It seems almost counterintuitive, but as soon as somebody buys something, they're way more likely— you want to present them an offer almost right away. That's why the upsells work right away. That's why stuff on a thank you page works really well. Bounce back offers inside packaging. Once they've gone in there, you know, they've internalized, I'm no longer just a prospect, but now I'm a customer. And it works even better if they're a repeat customer, so they'll keep buying from you. So you want to do whatever you can to get that prospect into a customer, into a repeat customer. That builds commitment consistency. Jay Abraham talked about this, of these little tiny steps. So getting people, just getting them to take action, that's the biggest hurdle most times. Is getting people to take action in some sort of meaningful way. It's, it's like getting over that one little hurdle. And so he talks about this coin company he worked with where they made absolutely zero money on this $23 set of coins, and they sold that to 30,000 people. From that, 3,000 people bought an additional $1,000 worth of coins. Another, within 6 months, they sold those 3,000 another $3,000 to $5,000 in coins. Then he went on to repeat buyers and got 150 to 200 of them to purchased $10,000 in coins. So from that original $30,000 buyer who spent $23, you know, just a little amount of money, he was able to bring in over $7 million in sales. So how can I use this? Once again, think, create, ask yourself the questions. How can I use this? All along the lines with these psychological hot buttons, keep thinking, how can I apply this to my own business? Here's a couple websites that use commitment and consistency well. Is, it's actually, you know, just little, little steps, right? It doesn't have to be the entire, you know, let's say your sales process is getting people through, you know, filling out a form, talking to a rep, whatever the whole sales process is. There's typically a long part of it. Just get people to do a small portion of it, and then that builds. So here it's just getting them to put in their first name, last name, check if I got any found money. Okay, here's for foreclosure listings. So the first thing that they do is they start searching. As soon as you get them engaged, especially on the web, this is easier, get them engaged in some way, they're gonna be committed to continuing the process. One of my friends, Evan Pagan, has this great process where literally he doesn't ask for your name or email or anything like that. He just spoke at my last Underground. He will get people to start filling out a quiz. It was like an entrepreneurial quiz on something. And in order to get the results back of what it meant, you got to give us your name and email address, right? And it's got a huge amount of people that will opt in because they're already committed, and it's a consistent thing. So that's what I got for you guys.

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