How to sell stuff you haven't made yet

I haven't ranted about bad marketing here for a while, partly because I've been busy learning how to do good marketing. (My definition of bad marketing: Marketing that is clueless about what the customer actually wants, mainly because it doesn't care what they want.)

I've done several different courses from several different people, but the one that has really stood out is Clay Collins' "Interactive Offer". (It's actually saved me a lot of money. When you start poking round in the marketing field, you tend to get a lot of offers from people practicing what they preach, that is, trying to sell you stuff. For several months now I've been looking at those offers and thinking, "Yeah, that would be really good. But I don't need to buy this, because Clay's course will teach me that.")

Clay's thing is very 21st-century. You build a relationship with a group of people, and ask them what their problems are and what would help them solve those problems. And then you presell them a solution. And after that, you make the thing, because at that point you know it's going to succeed.

It's basically distributed patronage. In the 18th century, you had to find one rich person to pay you to make things. In the 21st century, you can find a whole lot of people who have a relatively small amount of money each, and make them things they want.

It's also the complete opposite of the kind of advertising and marketing I hate, where someone has a product that they want to sell, and they will interrupt you and try to sell it to you regardless of whether you need it or want it.

So, it's a brilliant concept, and Clay has used it to launch his last several products and got it down to a system, which he explains really well. (He's a nice guy, as well, which helps.) I'm very happy with my purchase.

I got in on the ground floor, the very first time he offered it. He's now created a whole lot of excellent material for us (asking us what we wanted at several points in the process, of course), and he's relaunching it all under a new name: The Presell Formula. (That's an affiliate link, but I'm not just recommending it to make some money. This is genuinely good stuff.)

What really sold me on the course was that Clay's free preview material for it was about three times as useful as the average marketing guru's paid course. And for this new version of the course, he's doing the same again: great preview material that you can actually use, even if you never buy the course.

Here's the link again: The Presell Formula. Go and take a look, sign up for his videos and enjoy his enthusiasm.

Quality advertising and marketing

It's been a while since I ranted about advertising and marketing (or anything else, but those are among my favourite rant topics).

I just saw this piece of quality work today:

[Name of publication] enjoys an influential and affluent readership and seeks to maintain that profile by those brands it represents.

If you would like to know more about our rates and availability, please feel free to make an enquiry our team we will do thier best to assist your in achieving your campaign goals.

Sign me up.

And on marketing, I've noticed a few annoyances lately.

First was Healtheries' decision to stop decaffeinating their green tea. Their website still assured consumers that all Healtheries green tea was caffeine free, but this was no longer the case if you checked the label in the shop. When I emailed them about it, I got an informative reply, very quickly, from a real human being (not a marketing droid) who explained:

The reasons we have moved away from decaffeination are:

1) Being a health food company we were keen to produce a product as
close to un-processed as possible, the decaffeination process adds
additional processing and uses chemicals to strip out the caffeine

2) The cost to decaffeinate the tea is quite substantial, by removing
this cost we have been able to pass this on to our consumers making us
more competitively priced

3) A side effect of removing caffeine is that this can also remove some
of the antioxidants in the tea, we wanted to maximize the antioxidants
naturally found in green tea.

If you would like to remove the caffeine, research has shown us that if
you brew a tea bag for approx 2 mins and throw out the first cup of tea
the second cup you brew with the same tea bag will have over 80% of the
caffeine removed (as caffeine is the first thing released out of the tea
bag).

All of which is well and fine, but nobody else in the NZ market decaffeinates their green tea either, so the consumer is left without choice (and Healtheries have removed what was, to many people including me, an important point of difference). The brewing for two minutes thing didn't work for me, I noticed a bitter taste and was getting edgy on it. I've now switched over to (non-Healtheries) rooibos tea instead, which is supposed to have, if anything, even more antioxidants, which is regarded as a good thing.

I now discover, searching Healtheries' site, that their chai teas are decaf - when did that happen? I could swear I'd checked the packets and they weren't.

Not bad marketing, as such, but their business decision is odd (and inconvenient) to me from an overall market perspective, and their consumer communication could use some work. Good marks for their response to me, but as far as I can tell they didn't follow my suggestion to put the explanation on their website (it's not in their FAQ). I had to check the new packets to find out they weren't decaffeinated any more, and I completely missed the fact that the chai, which is my favourite, is decaf (perhaps it wasn't to start with and now is?).

On the other hand, some companies still practice the good old "marketing through outright lies" approach. I had a minor example in the supermarket recently. A woman was there with one of those little demo tables they use for new foods, demonstrating a new breed of apple next to the fruit section. I'm always up for some new fruit (fruit is my treat, instead of sweets or chocolate), so even though she had only one rather browning segment of apple on offer I gave it a try. "It's really sweet and juicy," she told me. Well, it wasn't particularly, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt because it had obviously been sitting for a while, and bought a couple.

In fact, this is one of the least sweet and least juicy breeds of apple I have ever encountered. I wish I could remember its name so I could warn you off it. It has yellow skin, anyhow, and its marketers lie about it.

And then there's the iCON fan. We have one of these. In fact, we've had three, because the first two burned out. They were the size recommended for a bathroom, which is where we have it, but they were clearly underpowered, so last time I got the larger one.

They're supposed to be quiet. They're not. They're very noisy, in my opinion. They're also advertised as "surprisingly low cost". What with the cost of the fan, the cost of the initial installation (in a house which is a little tricky, admittedly), and the cost of having the first two removed and replaced when they failed, I have spent well in excess of $1000. Still, at last we have a fan that removes the damp from the bathroom, which I suppose is something.

The Y People begins

I've started a new novel, The Y People, over on my City of Masks blog. It's a YA piece about four young people with mysterious powers.

My plan is:

1. Write it on the blog. Get comments if I can, but I'm not holding my breath.
2. Use Lulu's new affiliate in NZ to get proof copies printed for a few of the Usual Suspects to read. This will give me a chance to practice with Adobe InDesign for layout, as well.
3. Revise it in line with the feedback and release it as an ebook (on Smashwords) and POD.

Because I won't need to do an actual print run, the time it will take to break even will be significantly reduced. City of Masks is still in the red, because I did a print run of 50 to give to people, send to the National Library and sell in NZ, and NZ sales have been, to say the least, slow.

In fact, all sales of City of Masks have been slow, despite the fact that everyone who reads it likes it, because I can't be bothered to relentlessly promote it. That's not nearly as much fun as writing is, and the additional happiness from selling a few more copies isn't worth the extra effort to me at the moment. I'm pouring most of my promotional efforts into my hypnotherapy practice, and that isn't exactly going stratospheric yet either.

Marketing is a lot of work, at least by the non-Baboon's Backside method.

The Baboon's Backside approach to marketing

You know what bothers me? The kind of marketing that is like a baboon's backside. You know, the kind that says, "Woo! I'm so extreme, you can't take your eyes off me, can you? Huh? Huh? You want some of this? You do, don't you?"

And what bothers me most about it is that it's generally more successful than the kind I prefer, which is, "Here is something that you might like to be aware of, as it is good and useful for people in a particular set of circumstances, viz, these circumstances here. If those are your circumstances, consider this product as something that might meet your needs."

I love living in the 21st century, but unfortunately my sense of a good ad is straight out of the Victorian era.

That's all. Just a complaint, no solution offered.

Publicity Officer

Well, I'm now the Publicity Officer for the NZ Association of Professional Hypnotherapists.

I've been thinking about offering to do that for a while, so I approached the secretary at the NZ Hypnotherapy Federation conference this weekend just gone. (Good conference, by the way.)

I said, "Would the NZAPH like a publicity officer?"

She shook my hand and said, "Welcome, publicity officer."

She then took me to the president, who literally embraced me. Apparently it's been difficult to get anyone to do anything lately, so he was delighted to get a volunteer.

My colleague just down the road, who has been the newsletter editor, also took the opportunity to offload that job onto me, which is fine.

I really want to improve the positive profile of hypnotherapy in public consciousness, so here's my opportunity.

Life Leverage: my new nonfiction project

Over at Hypno NZ I've just announced Life Leverage: Simple techniques to improve your health and wellbeing.

The project is a book-and-CD combo, with the hypnotherapy tracks on the CD supporting the changes that the book talks about making.

I've created a mailing list where you can sign up for updates on this and my other hypnotherapy-related projects, such as audio recordings and videos. The idea is to assess demand so that I can decide what kind of a print-and-distribution model to adopt.

If health is a topic that interests you, please take a look. I try to stay on the scientific end of the health advice spectrum and make sure that my recommendations are well supported, but at the same time treat human beings as human beings and not squishy machines.

Brand tags

Just came across this interesting experiment.

It's a website where people are asked to type in the one thing they most associate with particular brands.

A lot of major brands have a real perception issue. Try searching for the brands that are "evil", for example.

Free press releases

I spent quite a bit of Friday submitting press releases to a number of sites, a process which is often more fiddly than it needs to be. A couple of the sites I simply couldn't get to work at all; their CAPTCHA tech was faulty or the forms wouldn't post.

The easiest to submit to is NZ's own Scoop; you just email the editor, rather than having to register and fill out an online form which asks for the same information as all the other websites, but in a different order.

Here's Scoop's version of my press release about City of Masks. They changed the headline from "Book Promotion, New Style: Novelist Makes Maximum Use of Internet Technology" to the more clickbaiting, if slightly deceptive, "Renaissance Hits the Internet".

Anyway, for your reference and mine here is my collection of sites tagged "freepressreleases" at Del.icio.us.

Incidentally, I also found a nice site which you can use to submit a web page to multiple social bookmarking sites: Haliboo.

You can put a button like this on your site:



(That's functional, by the way - when you click it it will submit this site. It'll submit whatever the URL showing in the browser is, so if you want to bookmark this particular post rather than my whole blog, click the post's permalink first. That's the title of the post, for those unfamiliar with how Blogger does things.)

Marketing and Advertising Books

Marketing and advertising are topics on my mind recently. I have a small hypnotherapy practice that I'd like to turn into a larger one, and a self-published book about to come out.

This involves a bit of a mental shift for me, since for years I've despised marketing and advertising. What I'm discovering is that marketing and advertising people are not all empty-headed, annoying liars after all; it's just 99% of them giving the rest a bad name.

I've got some books from the library to help me, and here are some brief reviews.

Promoting Your Podcast: The Ultimate Guide to Building an Audience of Raving Fans by Jason Van Orden is one of those rare "how-to" books that is almost pure gold from beginning to end - the over-the-top claim in the subtitle is not entirely unjustified. It's packed with useful tips and knowledge, step-by-step instructions and ideas. Of course, because it's a printed book and podcasting is an online medium, even though it was published in 2006 it's already becoming a little out of date - a few of the sites he mentions have changed or disappeared, and I'm sure more will do so as time goes on. But apart from the specific guidance for how to use particular sites, there is also a lot of good advice on podcasting per se, which will remain relevant for a long time. I'm podcasting my novel City of Masks as a promotional tool, and wouldn't be doing so anything like as effectively if I hadn't read this book.

Pair that up with What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting: Real-Life Advice from 101 People Who Successfully Leverage the Power of the Blogosphere by Ted Demopoulos. Again, packed with good stuff - Demopoulos interviewed over a hundred people who are using blogs for business, and there's some excellent advice here (along with a little bit that you can probably take with grains of salt). It's led me to start yet another blog, Living Skillfully, on my hypnotherapy website, with the aim of increasing traffic and connecting more directly with my potential clients (as well as sharing useful tips, ideas and news about mind-body work, health and self-improvement, naturally). He covers business uses for blogs and podcasts, planning, making money and promoting and tracking your stats.

One tip I picked up from both these books: use Feedburner. It's a free service that provides all kinds of tracking and additional promotion resources for your blog or podcast feed.

I dipped into The Design of Things to Come: How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products, but it's written by marketing academics - which is to say, a lot of it is empty of actual meaning when translated into English, and much of the rest is unsupported guesswork.

Simultaneously confirming my prejudices about the advertising industry and helping me with practical ways to get people to know about my products and services is Madscam by George Parker, an advertising creative who has no time for the "big dumb agencies" which hang out on Madison Avenue, wasting the money of large corporates. His blogs Adscam and AdHurl, at a casual glance, are just vulgar abuse being heaped on advertising agencies, but his book is a lot more useful. Not only does it (amusingly) give examples of what big corporates and their ad agencies do wrong, but it tells you how to do it right, how to plan and implement an advertising strategy that will be cost-effective and will help you build your business. I'm looking forward to putting the advice into practice.

Kickoff

I realized this week that I'd been stalling on launching seriously into starting my hypnotherapy practice. Now that I have my diploma I can start, even without waiting for my Association membership, which should come through in a couple of weeks. (The exam went well, I can't see them turning me down; they're not grim-faced guardians of the portals, they were very friendly, though professional.)

So during the week I designed a little flyer, and today I got it printed out 20 times (6 flyers to a page) and got a paper trimmer, cut them up, and went for a walk around the block distributing them.

I carefully avoided the letterboxes with "No Circulars" signs; I have one myself, and it infuriates me when people ignore it; I would never give business to someone who did so. REAL ESTATE AGENTS, I'M LOOKING AT YOU.

Ahem.

Anyway, I'm out there now, and it will be interesting to see what happens. Helen reckons that for her massage therapy business that's the most effective thing to do, walk round and put some flyers in letterboxes.