Finesse Your Marketing: From Funnels and Membership Sites to Online Courses and Bestseller Campaigns with Bart Baggett

In this Episode

• [02:18] – How Bart was one of the “older” marketing guys back in 2000.
• [02:42] – Getting in touch with the “inner circle”. If it is in books it’s probably is not the latest coolest stuff.
• [03:58] – There’s a new breed of Internet Marketers doing funnel marketing.
• [05:09] – Using Facebook ads to drive people to chat conversations using ManyChat. Then you can email people directly. From random distraction to speaking with a real human being.
• [08:07] – How using chat through Facebook is a great advantage because it gets opened if people initiate the conversation.
• [09:09] – How people are moving back to face-to-face marketing and getting people on the phone.
• [13:43] – The phone model is not a new model, but people are just so addicted to email.
• [15:59] – Get a person on the phone and they will, trust, and hire you.
• [17:18] – Understanding the business model that you are in. Have a clear core offer to understand how to increase sales.
• [20:45] – Using the call me model without being the one who is answering the phone.
• [21:50] – Lead machine for a product model. If someone consumes 4 or 5 hours of me teaching marketing, they are going to want more. If you don’t have a product to sell, you won’t make any money.
• [24:16] – If you are going to charge $20,000 for consulting, people need to know you by consuming 5 hours of your content. Be the authority in their minds. If they consume your content, they will hire you.
• [27:07] – If people buy something from you, they will open your emails. Ascending into small purchases makes people more likely to move up.
• [31:06] – The Magic Question is an NLP book about how to pick the most empowering questions. Hypnotize yourself with the questions you ask and ask empowering questions.
• [34:10] – Come up with a problem to solve and put it in a small book and by solving the problem they will come back for more. Learn to ask better questions.
• [37:39] – If I position myself with status, authority, knowledge, and give value people will be excited about speaking to me and my team.
• [44:15] – Demonstrations of value and pre-framing potential customers before talking with them.
• [49:36] – If people aren’t investing money, you are not offering something that they feel is an incredible value. People need to know how to frame their offer to solve a big problem.
• [52:52] – An authority funnel is a list building funnel that is designed for events.
• [54:25] – A course is an online course that teaches one thing. A membership site dispenses information on a monthly basis.
• [59:46] – Use a mailing list to get people to download or buy your book in a small timeframe. Offer incentive like a contest to give people a push to help you.

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Transcript

Welcome to Marketing Speak. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer. Today, we have Bart Baggett with us. Bart is a handwriting analysis expert. He’s also been on my other podcast, Get Yourself Optimized, episode number 30. It’s fantastic. It’s all about handwriting analysis and NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It will help you uplevel your psychology and figure yourself out. It’s awesome. Today, we’re going to talk with Bart about marketing, specifically about funnels, about membership sites, online courses, Facebook marketing, becoming a bestselling author, all sorts of really ninja stuff. Bart is going to deliver on all this. He is a marketing expert as well as a handwriting expert. He’s been a TEDx speaker. He’s been running a marketing mastermind for three years now. They meet every two weeks. He’s the author of 10 books, half of them on marketing, half of them on psychology. He’s a seasoned public speaker. He’s also been on the media countless times actually, 1,500 radios and TV appearances. Bart, it’s great to have you on the show.

Stephan, thanks for being here. I hope to over deliver that wonderful introduction with some marketing tips and wisdom that you just can’t find anywhere else.

Awesome. Let’s do it. We were talking before we started recording about Traffic & Conversion Summit and some of the ninja stuff that we were learning there. Let’s talk about some of that ninja stuff because many of our listeners were not at that awesome conference.

It’s very interesting, Ryan Deiss, him and Perry Belcher became friends of mine. I spoke at the big seminar one and Ryan was still in college. He tells a story about how he was in college and about this marketing course. He tells this funny story of me at dinner with him. He’s with these older marketing guys so I guess I’m one of the older marketing guys that was on stage back in the 2000’s. I think I feel like I’ve lost a step because these guys are so brilliant at what they put together in some of these conferences but the point is there’s an insider circle to internet market. It’s an insider’s world and of course, the names change but over the last 20 years, there’s always been 15, 20, 30 guys who are really leading the industry. This podcast is a great way to get in touch with those people. Maybe you’re not friends with them or can’t have a beer with them. They’re doing things that are just not in books. If it’s in the bookstore, it’s probably a little bit outdated.

Or even if it’s at a conference or at some sort of marketing event, it probably is not the latest, coolest stuff. That’s where you go learn from the experts in these masterminds and private gatherings where people are spending a lot of money to be there.

It’s true because I was speaking to the guy that I met there and he’s spending about $400,000 a month on Facebook Ads and he’s like, “Look, I can put 200 people in a room anywhere in the world.” That’s not stuff you’re going to hear from stage to 4,000 people because it’s very proprietary. The point is there are just a lot of really smart people and I’m lucky to get to spend some time with some of them. I spent a lot of money, of course, attending those seminars, attending masterminds, as well as hosting my own. It’s important just to plug into people that are just doing better than you.

There’s a syndicate is what they call it, where Frank Kern, Andy Jenkins, and who are some of the other people in there, John. His name just escaped me.

There’s a new breed. Every five or six years, there’s a new breed of people that are doing funnel marketing. Like Russell Brunson was a kid once and now he’s a top guy. There’s a couple of guys who are doing $30,000, $40,000 a month in funnel webinars, leading people into a funnel coaching program and five years ago, they were bartenders. There’s a whole breed of new things. I guess one thing we could talk about is what is a funnel? Why is it working? Why does it matter? Because it’s not necessarily a new concept but it feels like it’s new because the word is new.

What would be some of the ninja stuff that you learned from some of these masterminds or from Traffic & Conversion Summit, because that is one of those conferences where you do learn stuff that’s not typical? When you’re on stage and you have all your competitors in the audience, you hold back but it seems like there’s less of that at Traffic & Conversion Summit.

Here’s one thing I learned and one thing that I’ll share with you that I hacked. I’ve been watching these webinars for about, maybe six months, and something new is happening. I’ll share that with you after I tell this first story. One of the things that I found really interesting and I know that I share this with our private entrepreneur group in Los Angeles that you belong to is one of the things that is working really well is using Facebook Ads to drive people directly to conversations in the chat feature. It’s funny these days, you didn’t give your phone numbers, you do another contrast because you use WhatsApp. You just get their Facebook and you’re in contact with them almost immediately. And because of that, if you can get people to click on the button that says start a chat with my business, then you can email them directly. There’s a little company called Minichat. I don’t own it, don’t own stock in it. It’s like $10 a month. When we did some tests with this, we were running Facebook Ads for a promotion we were running. We run ads. We get clicks, maybe opt in rate. We get really good opt in rates, 30%, 50% on some promotions. But when they click on the button that’s connected to the Minichat little software, 100% of people are opening the chat with you. Not all of them necessarily engage in a long conversation and sure not all of them buy, but it’s almost like they’re going from an ad, which is just random distraction, to a real human being talking to them. And so although bots start the conversation, basically, our customer service gets back with them within a few hours and you’re having a conversation here. Are you interested? Do you know what you clicked? Did you want to buy something? We definitely have turned some of those just chats, just people clicking on an ad, maybe it cost me $.5, turned them into $3,000 sales. That’s probably one of the takeaways that I thought was the most aha moment at Traffic & Conversion.

Minichat’s a great tool. I use it myself. I’ve been doing Facebook Messenger Ads. I first learned about it actually in a mastermind that the folks from Traffic & Conversion Summit, Digital Marketer they put on called War Room. I went to the War Room in January and wow, they were sharing some ninja stuff. Frank Kern was there presenting, showing how he’s using Minichat and Facebook Messenger Ads, pulling up his admin interface, showing us how the logic tree is set up and everything. It’s really, really cool. Great opportunity. You should definitely look into Facebook Messenger Ads. That’s relatively new. It’s only been since last year. Do you remember when Facebook rolled that out?

No and the thing is Minichat is a third party plug in, so what they did is just make it easier so that you can immediately aggregate that list whether it’s 60 or 6,000 people that message you and then you could broadcast all at once. Because we’ve got about 45,000 people on our house list and it gets harder every year to get those delivered, to get those opened, to get the people from not using their fake email. And so that list, although it has tremendous value, you can upload to Facebook and run ads to them. It just doesn’t have the open rate that it did 10 years ago. Since I’ve been marketing since 1996, I actually have some historical perspective of how hard it is and how easy it is. To think that if they had all 45,000 of those on Instant Messenger and I could just hit a button and put it on their inbox, that would be a fantasy come true. Because if it’s not there, they have to opt in, they have to start the conversation. It’s a great advantage because you’re getting right to where they open it, which 98% of people do read their Facebook messages. If it’s personal, if they initiate it, now obviously, there’s a secret box that people you don’t know send messages and you’re like, “Oh that was a year ago. Sorry dude. I didn’t know you sent a message.”

That’s right.

But that’s the secret. It’s getting them to initiate a conversation.

Right. You can actually have on your website an opt in where they initiate the conversation there. It does not have to be through a Facebook Messenger Ad that you pay for, right?

Yeah. In all our emails, we actually say, “Hey customer service, just hit us up on Facebook.” That link actually pops them into the Minichat structure and then they’re added to the list automatically because most of them will have their Facebook open anyway. You don’t have to be Facebook Ads, you can put it all over your website. It’s just a way to engage. Our customer service, people, when they get on, they start with the Facebook, they start with email, and of course, they start with anything else, if the customer calls, etc. But one of the big things I’ve noticed is that unlike 2001, 2005, people are moving back to face to face marketing, meaning they’re trying to get people on the phone. They’re going back to the old school way of selling which sounds like a step backwards, but I really don’t think it is. I think there’s so much confusion and distraction. If you can get on the phone with the prospect and you can get your people on the phone, they love it. You’re real to them. You’re a real human being. Like you and I are real because they listen to our podcast but we’re not still not as real as calling our office and actually talking to us. I still get this, “Oh my God, this is you?” I’m like, “Dude, it’s just me. What’s the big deal?” But then I forget that if I called Tony Robbins’ office and he answered the phone, I would just be like, “Whoa, I didn’t expect to get you.” Because in their mind, I’m their Tony Robbins. I don’t see that without any humility. I understand his success and his reach but in my niche, which is in India, in NLP, I’ve published 20 years worth of information on this particular field. If they were to call my office and get me, they will be like, “Whoa.” Now, they didn’t get my staff but it’s so real and connected. Yesterday I picked up the phone and this woman had been to my seminar 10 years ago, she’s so pleased she spoke with me. She couldn’t wait to invest another $2,000 or $3,000 and she hadn’t invested anything in 10 years just because I had this real conversation with her. Getting back to that one on one conversation, this real personal marketing, I think is really why the appointment funnel and why that’s working so well compared to just trying to push out products and $7 products, they don’t change lives. A $7 Clickbank product is not necessarily going to solve your deepest issues.

Let’s talk about the appointment funnel but before we do, let’s wrap up this conversation on Minichat and using a bot to man your Facebook Messenger so that you don’t have to be there 24/7 answering everybody’s customer service queries on Facebook. Minichat, it’s a very inexpensive monthly fee, under $20 a month. You can set up decision trees where they can type different things and then they get different responses back. That’s how the bot works. You could say, “Type get started if you want to get started on working together on SEO consulting with Stephan.” And then they type get started and it gives them an auto reply back and maybe that is an invite to attend my next upcoming webinar with a link or maybe it’s to get a free ebook or go through some checklist, or worksheet, or whatever. All of that decision tree can be loaded in and then handled for you and things that are more open ended questions like, “Hey, I’m wondering how much it costs to work with you and if you have availability and so forth.” Then, a customer service person can actually man that. What am I leaving out that we need to leave folks with so that they know what action to take?

The decision tree is great. I like to even say, “Hey, this is a bot. We’ve got 10 customized questions but we need to sleep too. If you just type your question, we’ll get back with you as soon as possible. We have agents in India, in America, etc.” I like to be very authentic about, “Hey, we’re just going to respond to you the best we can but someone will get back to you.” And someone will get back to them instantly because we have agents around the world. But I think they like that. They don’t like to be tricked so I don’t like to let them know it’s a fake bot. I know I have a membership to Sound Card and their bot is pretty interactive and so you almost think that they’re answering your question because it all pulls to their FAQ. But it doesn’t feel like it’s inauthentic. It’s very robust but I think the point is not to automate the conversation. The point is to get them from just browsing, to engaging, and then as soon as they engage with a real person, now, you get them on the phone and you actually say, “Hey, how can I help you? How can I serve you?”

Right. Trying to negotiate with people or close a deal over email is a colossal mistake, a rookie mistake a lot of people make trying to negotiate the price or find out what are the blockers in the decision making process through email interaction, it’s not going to bear fruit. How do we get somebody on the phone, because people tend to want to just do it by messages? It seems weird that these days, you can’t just pick up the phone and call people out of the blue. They want to be texted in advanced like, “Hey, do you have a couple of minutes? Can I call you?” It’s so weird to me. How did we get to that point? I don’t know. What do you recommend for getting people on the phone and having meaningful interactions?

It’s interesting because I was watching television and I realized that these infomercials, which we found so annoying since the 80’s, vacuum cleaners, get the free disk for $20, the old woman in the wheelchair. They don’t do internet stuff. They call to action. They do have websites now because they have to but on the website, it’s a call to action. It’s call now. Get two widgets for $20. This model is not a new model. People that have been making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on TV and infomercial ads have been using this for years. It’s not a new model but I think what happened is we got away from it because everyone’s so addicted to emails. For example, in a vertical niche that we really dominate which is forensic handwriting experts, which I’ll give you a brief explanation of that. Stephan, if one of your brothers died or your mother died and there was a will, and all of a sudden, a will showed up and said, “Oh my God, Stephan gets nothing and Stephan’s sister gets everything.” That’s when they need a handwriting expert to come in and testify. This is all over the world, by the way. This is not just here. We have students in Africa and everything else. Very tight niche. You don’t even know you need it until you’re in deep crap and then you’re like, “Christ, I’m losing all my estate. Who do I call?” In this industry, there are probably 2,000 people. It’s a very small industry. We started marketing this industry in the late 90’s. Everybody essentially had an hourly fee, an hourly structure, and then when the web starts coming around, everybody had the email form, email me, email me, email me. And so, we just said, “Let’s just disrupt the whole industry.” We took off all the email forms. We created a flat rate and we said, “Flat rate. Here’s your fee. No surprises. Call me if you’re interested.” We basically get them on the phone. Once we get them on the phone, they don’t call the second person. Occasionally, they’ll check around prices but everyone else’s website was email, give me your details, blah, blah, blah. It was such a delay. When people are hungry, they want to eat. That one little niche has been going 15 years. We changed that industry and the other competitors still don’t know. This is stupid. The secret is you have to pick up the phone. They’ll wait four to five hours to talk to somebody in this situation where they’re really in a painful situation. That’s one of those things where it’s clearly a call me model. Let me back up a little bit. One thing I really discovered recently is a lot of my clients, especially all over the world, they’re confused on what business they’re in. Meaning, they know they’re in the business of serving people whether SEO consultant or whether you’re a forensic handwriting expert, they know what service they get but they don’t know what business model is best. Because it’s very easy to get confused with a TED talk, writing a book, making a webinar, selling an online course, or doing consulting. That business that I just described, if you’re a forensic handwriting expert, let’s say you’re an attorney, you’re in the call me model, like call me and hire me. And so all the website stuff should be like “Look, you want some advice, boom! Here’s 20 minute consultation. Totally free.” Once you get them on the phone, they’re going to like and trust you. They’re going to want to hire you. Most people don’t know. Even though the prices are listed for forensics, they don’t know that when they pick up the phone, they’re going to spend $1,500 today. They don’t know that. They could go find someone else that charges $200 an hour but that guy could milk them for 20 hours. They don’t know. I’ve seen people milk them for $6,000. What I’m saying is if you’re just a little bit different, but if you understand the model you’re in, that model, all people in that industry are the call me and hire me. They don’t have to do selling. We know people that are making $300,000 a year in that niche. They don’t do the selling. Their staff does the selling. They say, “Stephan is very important. Once you hire him, once you put a retainer, you can talk to him.” That’s just how it is. The same thing with me like, “Okay, you want to talk to Bart, put some money down.” In that particular model, it’s a call me model but I think one of the challenges that I’ve seen with my mastermind group is they are trying to write books, are trying to write speeches, maybe they’re trying to sell from stage. All these are different models and if they don’t really have their core offer clear, they don’t know why Minichat may increase their sales. That conversation we had about Minichat, Stephan, that only applies to people that are paying for Facebook Ads right now and that have some contracts. If you never bought a Facebook Ad, that whole conversation doesn’t really land because you don’t realize, “Oh my God, I’m spending $500 on Facebook. If I did Minichat, I could 100 conversations versus 2.” That’s the difference. It all goes down to metrics and conversions. You can’t really have that if you haven’t been in the game. One of the things I’ve seen about specially in the speaker, author, coaching market, is they’re reluctant to really get in the game and spend $100 a day on Facebook Ads. You and I have but you and I have fairly big businesses and a pretty deep level of internet marketing experience. But you are a super deep compared to me. You talk languages, algorithms, and SEO stuff that even I’m like, “Whoa, slow down my friend. You made me feel like I can’t even spell.” And then I remember that because I’m the marketing guy to my people.

Very cool. This is great level setting. Makes it much more relevant to our listeners like, “Oh okay, if I’m in the consulting business, I’m in the coaching business. If I’m a service provider, a lawyer, a dentist, an accountant, it doesn’t matter, I can leverage Facebook because everybody is on Facebook. I just need to know the right approach. I need to get people on the phone. The way I get them on the phone will differ depending on what my business is and how much time I have available and what kind of internal resources I have to leverage such as assistance and call centers and so forth. But I need to get people on the phone.” You mentioned a couple of magic words earlier, appointment funnel, which I think we need to dive into because most people just have a contact us form and that’s a huge mistake where they click on contact us and it says put in your name, put in your email, and put in a message and then submit.

Don’t tell people that. All my competitors are still doing that and so don’t let them know that that’s a bum, idiot move. If my competitors are listening, you should keep that contact form on there. You should keep it. Just add it everywhere because that’s going to work. But for the rest of you, it’s stupid. Here’s the thing, if you’re a newbie, meaning that you’re new, you’re doing under $100,000, you may have to answer the phone yourself. That’s fine. But once you get the habit of what to say and how to do that, you just write the script and you hire somebody. I understand the phases of business but if you have to do that first, you don’t have an ad that’s making the phone ring, then you can’t hire anybody. So really, it’s an appointment funnel but really, it’s a call me or hire me model. It’s a little bit, let’s just use the word business model first because my dentist is the same way. She has 14 people working for her. She is the bomb, right? She will be like, “Yeah, $6,000.” “What about hourly?” “No, $6,000, as long as it takes.” She’s so great at what she does. But you’re never going to talk to her when you call her office. She’s in the call me model even though she’s probably doing $1 million, $1.5 million a year. You can have that call me, hire me model service accountant chiropractor but you don’t have to answer the phone. Don’t get bummed out thinking that you have to answer the phone and do everything. It’s all delegatable. But if you can’t answer the phone and make that sell, you can’t possibly train somebody. That’s the point. For example, a lot of coaches, life coaches, especially in the new rage, they struggle so much because they don’t know the right business model. And then they get sold this big package of build this funnel, or write a book, or you just got to learn how to give speeches, you’re going to be millionaires. All that is the wrong business model for a coach. If you’re a life coach, you can do coaching one on one. You can do it in small groups. I’m a marketing consultant. I consult one on one and I’m marketing groups of 1 on 55 and then I get paid accordingly. I’m still doing one on one and I’m very clear. In that marketing package, I’m a hire me model. We’re not going to necessarily do it. If you go into the product model like we’ve got a product called Perpetual Lead Machine, which actually I’m just going to give your listeners. I was thinking about what gift to give them. I think I’m just going to put that and give them a $300 gift. Is that alright, Stephan?

Oh my gosh.

Is that too generous?

That’s amazing.

Because you were like, “Give them the $17 Facebook for Marketing.” Nah, just give them the $300 one. I’ll tell you why I’ll do that. Because I know that if somebody consumes four or five hours of me teaching them marketing, they’re going to think I’m the bomb. They’re going to be like, “That guy is brilliant. I never thought of that, holy cow.” Since I don’t really make tons of money in the information products of the marketing, their lead generations, I don’t mind giving it away, especially to you, you and your friends. It’s not a big deal. But the thing is one of the pieces of the puzzle that makes it easy for you to decide whether you’re in the appointment funnel, sort of like the call me model, or you’re in the product model, or maybe you’re in the authority model, is how much time they can consume your genius before they ever talk to you. Let me repeat that. In order for you to really figure out what business model you should be investing time in and what activities, like for TED talk for example, I’ve done a TEDx talk, that’s really great when you’re on the verge of authority, but if you don’t have a coaching package, you don’t have a one on one rate, you don’t have any products to sell, it’s just a status symbol. It doesn’t really make you money. That’s the thing. I wouldn’t push my clients to go get a TED talk or be on CNN unless they have this other stuff figured out. And so that’s the big key. For me, I want to make sure that they have an appointment, they’ve got a service, they’ve got the right price and they’re making $100,000 to $300,000 a year, and then it’s time to make some products because then you could say, “Hey, we’re going to do a webinar. You’ve heard of webinars.” Here’s the funny thing. I was in the back end of one of the webinar. I think it was still a seminar. By the way, he’s great, Jeff is great, all the guys are great. But I got to look at all the seminars people had published. I was very disappointed because I only had 200 or 250 people at this webinar. I’m like I’m terrible. Frank Kern has 1,000 blah, blah, blah. Everybody else that published seminars had like three and seven people. We’re talking about pages and pages of 3, 15, 12, 8 people. I’m like, “Oh, wow. I’m way above average.” My point is all these were sold, you got to have a webinar but no one could show up because they didn’t have any marketing. My point is this, is if you’re going to charge $20,000 for a consulting, then you can’t just have them call you and spend 15 minutes on the phone and give you $20,000. However, you can if you do the following. If they’ve consumed three or four hours of content, they’ve read your book, they’ve watched you on YouTube, they followed you so they have like a five hour conversation with you, it was one way of course, because you were talking in the recording. But now, they know you. They know, like, and trust you because they’ve consumed content. You can definitely do a one hour webinar but it’s challenging. I know you charge those kind of fees, Stephan, you’ve got the biggest book on Amazon SEO. I bought your course recently. You’ve got this course. After consuming other content, if I call your office and want your help, I’m already sold because you’re the authority in my mind. That’s when you transition from the call me, hire me model into the products and authority model, is when you feel like they just consumed you, they’ll hire you. That’s sort of my rant on the business models.

That’s great. That goes back to having a funnel where you have an ascension model for folks to take it up a level and work with you at a higher price point as they get to know you, like you, trust you, and get more value out of you.

The ascension model, I think Ryan Deiss coined the term ascension but essentially, you can build the email list of people that don’t care about you and they think that you’re a spammer but they’ve opted in and bought something. But if you’re going to send them into spending $1, or $7, or $20, they become 10 times more likely to open and engage with you. Especially if that $10 purchase is profoundly good. Like for example, we’ve got a promotion. I’ve got a book called The Magic Question. It’s been a bestseller the moment I launched it almost two years ago. If you go to bartbagget.com, you can even download it for free on the home page. I didn’t say it’s free. It’s like, “Oh I can get it for free. Cool.” But you can also go to Amazon and buy it for $3. But why would I give it for free? Because it’s very, very high value. People read it. They consume it. They listen to the audible and they go, “Holy cow, that is fascinating. This guy is genius.” I just wrote a really good book, Stephan. When people read it, they go, “That’s amazing. I want to use it. I have got questions.” It’s something that’s tangible. Now, they like me, they trust me, and they’re more likely to open an email. That’s free but if those same people that downloaded the book for free and they consumed it, which is rare because most won’t consume it, but let’s say they buy $17 and they go, “You know what, I’m going to download this meditation CD called Unstoppable Confidence.” If they buy that CD, but even if they never listen to it, they are more likely to engage and open because of the guilt and the justification of I’ve spent money with this guy, he must be good. It’s the opposite of the sour grape steering from psychology. If they’ve invested money, they have to justify it by continuing to like you. It’s like on a date with you. I can’t believe you went out with that guy. “Well yeah, he’s actually quite smart.” They’re going to defend you. Yeah I dated him because he’s very intelligent. It’s hard to do that. So you’re like, “Let me just try the good qualities about…” By getting them to ascend into at least small purchases, they’re more likely to go up. This has been the business model for 8, or 10, 15, 20 years. What’s interesting is you don’t have to move them through those $7 and $10 purchases. The attrition of your email list and the time it takes is really overwhelming. If you do have a $17, $5,000, $10,000 product and you can put a great one hour webinar, and you can get them on the phone, they’ll spend $10,000 with you because they have an hour of relationship building and in someone on the phone they trust. And so, you’re combining both. The foundation of relationship with the actual human being of someone talking. That’s a price point. Maybe you want to mention this because you know this as well. It’s interesting if you’re selling something beneath $1,000, you can usually sell that without a phone call and without a sales team. But if you get over $1,000, it becomes exponentially harder for people to part with the $1,000. You have to translate it to your market. If you’re in India or some other country, it’s roughly whatever that is. But have you found that to be true and accurate or is your number a little bit different as far as how much you can sell through email and through a buy button without ever speaking to them?

Yup. That’s true. I try and keep my price points for my offers that are through webinars to be under $1,000 because if I have to charge more than that for whatever the product or service, I need to get them on a call and that doesn’t scale as well.

It doesn’t scale as well if you’re in the model of doing products. But if you want to have a sales team, which I don’t really want to, that’s another business model. If you want to have a sales team, yeah, you can do $30,000, $50,000, $80,000 a month but you got to get them on the phone. Ted McGrath is a pretty good internet marketing guy. I watched him sell a $2,000 product on a webinar but he included tickets to a seminar with the perceived value of $1,000 each. Perry Belcher did the same thing. Perry Belcher made millions of dollars before he sold his company because he always had his friends give away tickets, $1,000 ticket for a seminar. Everyone in the room was free but nobody knew that. Everybody is like, “Hey, $1,000 ticket. I got to go. I got to go.” To get someone to consume three days of a seminar, that’s a heck of an investment. Even if  it’s $0, [00:29:56] does the same thing, $700, $800 tickets which are really a great seminar, you can almost get them for free or $100. The perceived value is $8,000, or $9,000, or $12,000, sure you can get a $1,000 or $2,000 dollar webinar. But having a live event will up that to maybe $2,000 but I’m on the same page with you. It’s really hard to get people to invest more than $2,000 without talking to a human.

Yeah. Let’s circle back to this appointment funnel and differentiate for our listeners a contact us form with name, email, and message, and then the submit button. All four of those things are so bad and wrong it’s not even funny. Even just the submit button. The worst languaging you could possibly use on a button is to say submit. Anyways, let’s talk about what would an appointment funnel look like, what would be the experience for a visitor to your website when they want to contact you, when they want to set up an appointment? I can share my example but I want to give you a chance to talk about it first. Actually, before we jump into that, can you tell our listeners what the heck is The Magic Question?

I can’t answer the question. The Magic Question is a book and it’s based on a single idea that I wrote in my first book back in 2001 called The Success Secrets of the Rich & Happy. You’ve heard Tony Robbins talk about the quality of your life is the quality of your questions. What I did is I synthesized this idea and said, “You know, people hear that. That’s great. Tony Robbins says that.” But they never showed you how. What I did is I gave the actual NLP slicing of how you pick the most empowering question so you can double your income, improve relationships, get a better job, get an income. Your specific question. Your question might be how do I add up my income. Your question this week might be how do I double my podcast subscribers. That’s a very well worded question and so the book itself goes into the NLP strategies of what words, what hypnotic language patterns are good because you’re basically hypnotising yourself with the questions you ask. If you ask why am I so ugly, why am I broke, why won’t girls go out with me, you’re going to get an answer. The answer is because you’re ugly, you’re fat, you’re stupid, and you’re an idiot. Your unconscious mind doesn’t need to be answering unempowering question. You need to ask good questions. The question itself is not a singular but it gives you the structure of how you can ask a different question every week, and from your questions, your life unfolds.

Very powerful. In fact, I used that idea to get into a $10,000 seminar called Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery, which I actually ended up speaking at two different times after that. But the first time, I wanted to go for free and I asked a more empowering question. Instead of how can I afford this, I’m going through divorce and my business hasn’t sold yet. This was back in 2009. How can I afford this $10,000 seminar? That’s a very disempowering question like you described. Instead, I came up with how can I get into Business Mastery for free? Within a day, I had the answer to that question. I had somebody else buy me a ticket. In exchange, I did a training for them on site. I kept saying no to this guy for years like, “Hey, come to Indianapolis to our offices and do a training of my team on SEO.” That money would’ve gone into my company coffers and I was a minority shareholder of my own company because I was going through divorce and everything. I wouldn’t have seen any of that money so I kept telling him no. But I called him up and I said, “Hey, I got a deal for you. I’ll come and do that training free. Just buy me a ticket to Business Mastery.” He’s like, “Done.”

That’s great. I think some of us have stumbled upon this but I gave it structure. I made it a particular book. The funny thing is there’s just one technique among hundreds that me and Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer and everybody teaches. But by synthesizing it into one single idea, it’s digestible. You can read it on a plane. It makes sense and it gives people a taste. If Bart teaches this, what else could I learn from him? One of the strategies is that if you can come up with a small problem to solve and put that problem in a small, little, 60 paged book, and people like it and they go, “Wow. He really solved a problem.” You will have such loyal fans because you’ve actually given them, and Robert Cialdini talks about the law of reciprocity. You’ve given them something of value, you’ve helped them solve a small problem, and they’ll come back and ask for bigger things. Because trust me, my whole career is not built on letting people fix their self thought. But our transformational self is about people turning their entire life around building businesses that matter, having life that matters, and living their dreams. That’s a bigger problem to solve but you can’t promise that. Heard of a book called Live Your Dreams, yeah right. Ask a better question. I bet you can have more love tomorrow. They can believe that. It’s a very small gradient and then you pull them into the bigger picture. You can promise me that I can be number one on Google but I don’t really believe you, but I would believe that you could probably move me from number eight to number seven. That’s a smaller belief. I’m just using SEO because you’re an expert in that. By the way, I know you can get me number one on Google but I don’t know if I want to pay your massive million dollar fees.

I can get you number one in Google for Bart Baggett. There you go.

You’re amazing. You’re amazing. I think I’ve already achieved that. Unless he’s that banjo player Bart Baggett. Darn him.

It’s funny.  You know Frank Kern calls this results in advance where you give them something awesome for free, teach them the f chord and then you have your online course that teaches the whole rest of how to play the guitar and they’re so happy, they’ve gotten this accomplishment. They’re on a high and so signing up for your whole online course is a no brainer for them.

That’s a great segway to your original question. You opened the loop, let me close it. You talked about appointment funnels and my take on that. The reason that people will salivate to have 30 minutes of your time, which is basically a conversation, an appointment, is because you’ve given them value in advance. That’s how I’m trying this conversation together. When people look at the website that says call me and hire me, that’s sort of like picking a girl’s phone number out of the phonebook. Not that we have phonebooks anymore. But if someone just said, “Look, here’s a pretty girl’s phone number.” You’re like, “Okay, I want to call her but she doesn’t want a call from me. She doesn’t know me. There’s all these reasons because there’s no value in advance. There’s no preferring in this conversation. That’s why you just can’t call up random people and get dates. Same thing with business people so why would somebody really, really want to spend 30 minutes with me or you and at the end of that go, “You know what, here’s $10,000. You’re exactly what I’m looking for.” The opposite is what if you and I start calling our list and say, “Hey man, my name is Bart. Do you want to invest in some money?” That’s so awkward. Would you ever do that to your customers? Let’s say a prospect, “Hey, I’m Stephan. You know what? We’ll run a sale this week. I really need the money.” Your entire value proposition is upside down its head and they’re going to be repelled from you like the creepy guy in the bar that’s following you around. That guy, you don’t have any traction for. The philosophy of traction really works well if you overlay it in the philosophy of sales and marketing. If you position yourself with status, authority, and knowledge, you give value, people are going to feel very, very excited about speaking with you or your team and appreciative, especially within the 30 minutes you can outline. In my strategy session, I can nail down their business model. I can say, “You should stop doing this bunch of stuff. This is your business model. This is your offer and this is how much we’re charging.” That’s something that could take years on their own to figure out, just because I’ve been marketing for 25 years. That’s a lot of value. If they want to work with me, I’m thrilled to talk to them about it. If they don’t, you know what? Good luck for you. Here’s some more products. You should read some books. I’m so glad to make your acquaintance and I’m off. No big deal. There’s no desperation. I think that’s how all appointments funnel should be done. When they finally get to you, they should be pre framed that you have knowledge, you’re an expert, you could help them, and that they respect you. Because if they don’t, you’re like the front desk girl they’re trying to get past. That all comes with either a webinar, a book, some kind of online video, some kind of indoctrination sequence where they respect you. When people put on their website just email me or hey, I’m sitting by the phone waiting on you, come hire me, that just reeks of desperation. If you can reframe the words, phrases, and this funnel process of getting to know you, of status and authority, and then like, “Wow, hope I can get a hold of them.” That changes the game completely. When they do talk to you, you’re more like to get respected and hopefully work with them if we’re a good fit.

You make them jump through some hoops. You make them earn that call by doing some pre work, some homework ahead of time. You also give them the opportunity to get value in advance of that call through YouTube videos, webinars, ebooks, all sorts of things like that. You don’t just have of simple three or four item form for them to fill out like, “If you go to my site, you’ll get a questionnaire you’ll have to answer. It’s a two staged questionnaire. It’s all powered by Infusionsoft. If you don’t complete part two, so you fill out part one, you can actually go check out this funnel on my site. Go to stephanspencer.com, you’ll see it. You answer the questions that talks about this is the opportunity to get consulting from Stephan. Here’s the process on how we work. Fill out this form.” And then they fill it out, it’s not onerous, it’s not overwhelming but then there’s another step, a whole bunch of other questions. I want to know things like what’s their budget and what’s their biggest challenge, what sort of value would they unlock by working with somebody such as myself on SEO? That is on the step two. If they do not answer those questions, they skip over that, then it starts harassing them via email like, “Hey, you didn’t finish the questionnaire. Can you keep going and finish that up?” That’s all built into the system in Infusionsoft. Is that a pretty typical appointment funnel? Do you have something different on your site?

I think yours is much more complex. Let me lay down a couple of rules, I think, if you’re going to do it in a funnel, is that if you don’t have enough people that you’re talking to, you want to lower the barrier so you don’t make it so complicated. Also, all the stuff we just talked about is pretty complicated for a typical coach, healer, consultant. Those are complicated things in Infusionsoft. You and I can pull that off. The bottom line is this. The easier it is to get a hold of you, the less they value your time. You have to put some chunks of investment in getting there. Most make $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a month in revenue, these people that are doing appointment funnels, they have an application process, which is essentially what you did. You have an application. If you fit the criteria, I’ll give it to you. But the mistake people make, if you’ve ever met a life coach or anything, first of all, they don’t make a lot of money because they’re not good at marketing, not because they don’t have value in the market place. They believe that free strategy sessions don’t work and then free consultations don’t work. That’s what they believe. But, essentially, a strategy session is not the demonstration of value portion of the sales process. The demonstration of value should have come before they get to the application or the appointment page. That’s the difference. For example, if someone wants to hire me as an attorney, there are videos there that go into massive detail how to hire, five mistakes to hire. They consume value. They’ve seen this big banner that says Bart’s been on CNN, Lara King Live, Ashleigh Banfield, and Today show. They already had the value demonstrated before they get to the point of picking up the phone. If you are doing free strategy sessions for your business, or your coaching, or anything, and they don’t have any perceived value before they get on the phone, it’s going to be a disaster because then you have to spend the whole time demonstrating value and no time discussing how you can serve them. The problem is people do the free strategy session or the free consult and they try and do demonstration of value in that time frame and that’s not when it should occur. For you, you probably have too many people that wanted your time so you have to put up hoops so that you’re only talking to the most valuable prospects. I think that’s perfect for you. But for someone that doesn’t, they have to create some kind of demonstration of value, then get them to the phone call. What I like to have them do is whether it’s free or not because money and time are both interchangeable in my mind. In fact you know this, Stephan, because we belong to an entrepreneur club and everybody wants our advice because we’re the two marketing gurus. What I do with my buddies there, because we can’t just be jerks like, you’re paying me right. You’ve got this problem, right? I know you do. You’re not going to admit it but I know. Here’s what I’ll say, “I’d love to meet with you. I’m going to give you a couple of videos.” This is my course. If you’ll watch these two hours of training, I will absolutely sit down with you and just spill my guts for you because you’re a friend of mine. Stephan, you know how many people have actually consumed those videos and followed up with me?

Two. Maybe zero.

Zero, because they didn’t want to consume the content because they wanted this fast track for free to my brain. But the people that did, webinar, they’re always very gracious. They’re nice. By the way, I don’t care if they hire me or not. I love new friends. But I like new friends that come to the table and respect me and they’re pre framed to understand what I have to give them. And so, that’s just the pre frame. It’s all about that demonstration of value before you sit down because I can help these people. I got more than 25 years of experience. Let’s say book promotion, that kind of stuff. I’m an expert in book promotion, I can send them a couple of hours of stuff that really covers the basics and then come to me and say, “Look, I watched all your stuff. How do I do this? What headline? What day?” I can answer those questions in 30 minutes and we part as friends. I don’t need to make money on my buddy promoting one book, but I really am insulted if they’re not going to invest the time. If they don’t invest the time, they should invest the money.

I love it.

You’re going to use that, aren’t you? I know you are.

I might.

That’s the whole point. You got to pre frame that your time has value. The other reason that this appointment funnel fails in some people’s business model is they don’t have the ability to make the appointment actually have value. You can’t name it a sales call. Say, “Stephan, I’ll tell you what. For $500, you’re going to pay me and I’m going to give you a sales call. Cool huh?” That would never work. That’s insane, right?

Yup.

Same thing. If a strategy call seems like a sales call, it doesn’t matter. But Stephan, if I can tell you on how to be the best seller in 3 days blueprint in 30 minutes, would that be of value to you?

Yeah.

Here’s the blueprint. In 30 minutes. I have a couple of questions. Ask you what this is. I don’t want you to tell me about your book. I don’t care what’s inside the covers but I have a couple of questions. Great. You know what, I normally charge $500, because you found the applications, great. At the end of that call, Stephan, I’m going to ask you if it’s okay to talk about the other programs I have. If I provided value for you, I’ll give me five minutes of some other ways we can work together. Would that be alright?

Yup.

If I demonstrate whatever it is I promised in the blueprint, then I have permission to say, “Here are some other things.” Quite frankly, a lot of people I get on the phone with, Stephan, I don’t want to work with them. I say, “You know what, you’re not ready. You’re not ready to write a book. You’re not ready to TED talk. Why not you go do this? Here are a couple of programs. Here’s a mastermind. This is a couple of hundred bucks a month. You can get on those calls. You can get your service together. You can get your coaching program together. You can outline your book. Spend six months there. But don’t give me $10,000 because I don’t know what you’re selling yet and you’ve never been on the phone selling this thing so we don’t know if it’s going to work.” Does that make sense? It’s a really fair assessment of each other to know if it’s a relationship. It’s like a first date. You’re married so you don’t know what dating is like anymore. You probably forgot that. You’re so happy.

I am happy.

He’s so happy. He’s got a great wife. Everything is great. What I’m saying is dating is like you want to go to phone. You want to make sure they’re not crazy. And then you want to get a dinner but not really dinner. You want to go to coffee. You just want to mitigate your risk that you’re not sitting there going, “Oh my God, I’ve got three hours with this person. They’re an idiot.” They don’t want to do that with you. You don’t want to do that to them. That’s the beauty that you want. To wrap it all up, the reason the appointment model is so useful and people are finding great success with it is you can test an appointment ad, you can test a little webinar, or sort of a free lead magnet, and you can get them to a page saying, “Hey, would you like to have a meeting with me?” You can do all that in a very short time. We’ve launched funnels in three, four weeks with people. With very short, four, five minute videos, they close them on $5,000 sales. If they don’t close them, you know that it’s a dog and nobody cares. Nobody cares about the thing. But if you’re going to go write a book or home study course, that’s months and months of work. How long did it take you to put your latest SEO course, which I bought by the way when it was on sale because I love a good deal? How long did it take you to put that together?

The keyword course?

Yeah.

Probably about three weeks, four weeks.

You’re fast, by the way. You’re fast and you have good people there. For most people, it’s 4, 5, 6 months, in some cases but that’s just the course. What if no one bought it? Now, you built the whole course. You’ve uploaded. You bought and no one bought it. You can do an appointment funnel and say, “Hey, here’s a strategy session on what’s the right funnel. Here’s a strategy session on your best SEO.” What’s your strategy session on getting your life design, strategy session on your relationship, whatever that is? If nobody is interested, you’ve wasted 10 days and a few hundred dollars of Facebook Ads. You have talked to 10 people and they go, “I love talking to you but I’m not interested at all in that thing.” It’s a great way to figure out what your offer is because you’re talking to humans but spending ads on keywords and sales letters and doing all of this, it takes me a month or two to write a sales letter because I write long, long Dan Kennedy type sales letters. I’m a great copywriter but it’s exhausting. What if nobody wants the product? I’ve done this my whole life and I’ve stopped doing it in the last 10 years. I’m like, “Stop it. Don’t write a product until you know people like it.” Does that make sense? I have a great advantage because I do seminars around the world so I can ask the audience if they’re interested. I can type up an order form and say, “Hey, we’re going to do this course called Prism. It’s a life design and it’s a certification course. You’re going to be a life design coach and see if you like it.” People raise their hand. They go back. They put a deposit down and say, “Yeah, I want that course.” I’ve raised my hand and said I got this great course and nobody cared. I’m not making that course. We don’t want to make courses they don’t want. The appointment funnel is great because you can talk to humans, get them on the phone, find out where the buttons are and not their buttons. You don’t want to sell them something. You want to provide incredible service. If they’re not investing money, it means that you’re not offering something that they feel is incredibly valuable. I talked to somebody saying, “I just kind of have a problem asking for money.” It’s not about asking for money. It’s like are you going to provide great service? Because if you’ve got something that they really, really need, they will beg you to hire you. But you have to frame it in a way that they know that you’re going to solve their problem or they trust you and then of course, you have to be able to deliver. You have some self confidence issues there with people that are just starting out in business but I think the biggest issue is people just don’t know how to frame their offer to solve a really big problem because people will pay you to solve a big problem.

Let me just drop a resource here for our listeners that will help them with that very issue. You mentioned Dan Kennedy. He’s one of the marketing legends, copywriter, direct marketer, just an amazing, amazing marketer. That episode where I interviewed him and talked to him about copywriting is a classic episode. That’s on Marketing Speak here. It’s episode number 61 so listeners, definitely check out that episode. Since I’m plugging other episodes of this podcast, I’m going to mention one more that is relevant to this whole conversation that we’re talking about here, appointment funnels, appointment setting, and the whole application process. That is the episode 87 with Nick Cownie. It’s just a very recent episode. It is an amazing episode going through next approach to having an insights call, and a solutions call, and moving them through that funnel in a very genius way. Definitely check out those two episodes. Bart, we need to move onto one or two more topics I wanted to cover before we ran out of time, which we’re rapidly doing. I think with we’re good with appointment funnels. Was there one last thing that you needed to say to wrap that up?

I’ll put a link to the upcoming webinar that I’m doing. I think the page we’re going to use is bartbaggett.com/marketingspeak. I’ll put a link for the perpetual link machine. When I launched that, I think you saw my speech. It really was $1,000. It was no lie. It’s a really good course. It was a life seminar. I’m going to give it as a gift. The other piece in appointment funnel is that if you don’t use appointment funnel using a product funnel, or you’re using an authority funnel, really, if you’re selling products, you don’t need a human being. You don’t need that stuff but it’s really one or the other. Once you get both of them going, now you really got a business and you can scale to a million or five million a year. For most people, if you’re doing under $300,000 a year, you should figure out an appointment funnel because you can double and triple your leads in a couple of months. Super easy and we can help you do that.

Awesome. There are two types of funnel for this early stage in the process where they’re just a new lead. In addition to the appointment funnel, there is the product funnel and the authority funnel. The product funnel, what you just described. It’s where people are going to end up buying your products, your online courses and membership sites and so forth. What about the authority funnel? What is that?

I think authority funnel is a combination. If you have just the funnel speak and there’s a lot of words out there, they would be just a list building funnel, meaning, I’m just adding you to my list. Whether I sell you something on the thank you page, it’s a list building funnel. That’s not designed necessarily to get you into a phone call. In that list building, you’ll probably upgrade to an appointment, a product funnel. The authority funnel is when you’re not driving people to appointments or necessarily your products. You’re driving them to events or you’re driving them to bestselling books. You’re basically building this really long term relationship with them because you have so much content. If you’ve got years and years of content, yes, you’re building sort of an authority funnel. Throughout that, you’re probably doing some appointments and some products. That’s the last thing you should worry about. Once you’re a bestselling author and a TED speaker, and you’ve got a million people on your list, then you worry about that.

Yup, got it. Okay. Let’s move onto another topic. That was awesome. Let’s talk about the difference between an online course and a membership site. Should somebody do one or the other or both?

Two things. Let’s define that. An online course is a course that you spend money. In 1975, you would’ve got a box of cassette tapes and videotapes, you said, “This is excellent.” That’s what a course is. Now, instead of shipping you a box of cassette tapes or VHS tapes, you just get a password and you get all the consumption online. But it is a one idea thing. Does that make sense? Like, okay, we have a course called How to Analyze Handwriting? It’s the basic course. It’s all online. For $3,000 or $100,000, depending on what level, you can learn this amazing skill without ever talking to a human. That’s an online course. The membership is different because a membership gives you either access to a human, access to a community, but the information is dispensed on a monthly or weekly basis. From the business model, they’re very different. But from the end consumer, it’s basically two versions of the same benefit. Let’s take guitar playing since I actually picked up playing guitar last year. You said the f chord earlier and I got to tell you I hate the f chord. I am mad at the f chord. It’s the hardest chord I’ve tried to figure out. I’m telling my teachers. The guitar, here’s a course on playing guitar and here’s a membership site. I hired a tutor on Skype. I’m basically paying a weekly membership fee to have him one on one. But if he wanted to expand that and say, “You know what, I’m going to have six students at a time.” That would pretty much be a group coaching call but also a membership site. That’s still he’s trading his time. If he were to record all the sessions he’s done with me in the last year and just put up those videos and release those videos every week with never talking to a student, that’s a membership site. It’s just the same benefit. I want to learn guitar. Do I want a live person to coach? Do I want to consume content as a course? Do I want a membership where I can go and be part of a community? That’s the definition. The benefit is multiple depending on your business model. Here’s the cool news. If you could figure out how to do all of those, you’d have three times as much revenue because some people like courses, some people like personal tutoring or coaching, and some people like membership courses. It’s both ways. What’s great about membership courses is you get residual income and as long as those price points are reasonable, people don’t cancel. I can give you some price points and some people that we probably know but Stephan, have you had an experience on membership sites and what price points really stick and what price points people freak out and cancel their credit card?

My price point that I’ve been offering over this last five months is $97. The attrition has been pretty small so far but it’s still early days. Yeah, $97 a month. The value is massive. They’ve been getting a course pretty much every month since I’ve started at the beginning of the year. They’ve been getting weekly jam sessions with one of my SEO specialists who’s very good and a monthly group call with me.

They’re getting a ton of value. If they’re into that thing, it is so great just to have a resource because I don’t always need an hour of your advice every month. Let’s just assume I was in the SEO thing. You don’t. My clients don’t need an hour of my advice every month. Some might never even look at their marketing, they never even look at whatever they’re learning, but they love having the replays. They love calling in and talking to other students. They love getting excited by people in other countries that are into what they’re into, whether it’s crafts, or arts and crafts, or building trailers, or shopping for guitars. There’s a community for everything. I think that’s the benefit of a membership site but it scales nicely. We’ve had a membership site and you guys will be like, “I can’t believe you pay for this.” We’ve had a membership site for handwriting analysis, silver membership for almost 13 years. Every month, there’s a one hour call. People upload their handwriting and me or one of my faculty members analyzes their writing. We have like 2,000 members paying $7 or $17 a month and on those calls, we have about 12 to 20 people show up. I don’t understand, Stephan, why would only 12 to 25 people show up if 2,000 people are paying? The reason is it’s only $7. It’s like going to the gym. They’re going to do that. They’re fascinated by this. They’re going to learn how to play the guitar one day. They’re going to learn to lose weight. They’re going to learn how to analyze handwriting and that replay is always there. They get emails. They can download it to their phone. There’s still value even though they’re not participating. But I think if that price was $47, I think they would cancel because it’s too high for the level of engagement. You, on the other hand have a business opportunity where people are absolutely committed. They’re doing this. We have a mastermind call which is under $200 a month. They’re all committed to being speakers, authors, coaches. Even if they don’t have any questions, they’re not giving up on that dream. The recordings are there. The transcripts are there. There’s a lot of value. Our attrition rate is really low in both of those but for different reasons. One is that they get value and it’s a really low price point so it’s not going to kill them to spend $7. The other one is a couple of hundred bucks, they get the transcripts and they really don’t want to give up on their dream. If you can have something that really gives them a return on investment and provides a community, you’ve got a really good residual income for yourself, more importantly for bringing a lot of value to your clients.

Yeah. I love residual income. That recurring revenue is pretty awesome. Last question. If we could encapsulate in just a couple of minutes, How to Get 63 Authentic Amazon Reviews in 3 Days or Less, which is actually the title of one of your books, what would be the knowledge bombs that you would drop here on how to do that?

First of all, the book is $3. Go buy it on Amazon. It’s simple. Do it. Here’s the thing. Amazon goes by per hour sales and per hour downloads. If you have a mailing list, Facebook filing, or anything about family and friends and you can entice them to download or purchase the book within a small time frame, I’d say one or two days, but if you really want to get isolated from noon to [1:00]PM. If you had all of your friends buy from noon to [1:00]PM, you would be a bestseller on Amazon because no one can get their friends to do it. Here’s the ugly little secret. Your friends don’t care about your book. Your mom doesn’t care about your book. Nobody cares about your book but you and it’s a stupid idea to begin with. Forget about your friends and family because they’ll tell you they’re going to buy it but they won’t. Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you offer a contest? Why don’t you offer incentive? Why don’t you offer tickets to Disneyland? Something they care about because they want to help you but they need that little push of a contest, a win, a flight to Vegas. They need something to make them go it’s worth to be spending two minutes to click this button. Because it ain’t the $3. In fact, most of the stuff in the Amazon, the book goes into this, is you’re giving away the book on the promotion anyway. It’s a free download. What we did, this is a book a couple of years old but it still works. Give away Amazon Kindles, at the time they were $400, they’re $100. We’d give away 10 of them now. Somebody would literally get an Amazon Kindle from me and there’s like, “Oh my God, I’ve never won anything.” All they did was download a book. But that promotion on that day going to my email list on my Facebook page launched it to number one and every book I’ve launched since 2014.

Very cool. How do you get the actually reviews then? You get the best seller status by getting a lot of copies sold in a short time window but how do you get the reviews without breaking their Amazon rules?

It never breaks the rules. In fact, they market my book. They love my book. Because if people leave reviews, you take the reviews, print them off, cut them with scissors, and get a fishbowl and pick the review out and that’s who gets the price.

Ah.

They don’t get it for downloading. They can only get it if they leave a review and review is the most critical component to being a bestseller because those stay there forever. I got 160 reviews on my last book. The Magic Question. Maybe it was 140, the day it came out. I’ve seen books by Tim Ferriss that don’t have 160 reviews in the first month. JP Sears. He’s got a YouTube of million people, had six reviews two days after his book came out. Not because JP Sears didn’t have a brilliant book, his following doesn’t care about his book. But if he would’ve offered a trip to LA to do yoga with him, he’d have 150 reviews because somebody would’ve gotten two tickets to LA to do yoga. What I’m saying is not against the policy. It’s just about motivating your tribe who already like you to leave a review so they can be part of the contest. It’s totally legal. You just have to incentivize your tribe to take action on that day.

It can’t be to leave a five star review. It has to be just any review and then you get to be in to win, basically.

You don’t ask them for five-star review. The problem is if someone left a one star review and they won, they would feel like a schmuck. They’re not going to leave a one star review. They will just not because they have the opportunity to win but you don’t ask them a five-star. You ask for legitimate reviews. If you got 100 five-star review, Amazon would probably kick your book off anyway because they think it’s crap. Nobody gets five stars in everything. I mean, all mine are five stars.

That’s awesome. “I’m kind of a big deal.”

If you go to Amazon, just Google my name, you’ll see all the books but I don’t get your name and email if you buy stuff on Amazon. Do that, buy all of them, but really, you want to come to my site so I get your name and email so I can have a relationship with you. That’s what the big game is. If I can have a relationship with people around the world, then they get to know, like, and trust me. If I can provide a service, then we can be friends and business partners.

Awesome. Thank you so much. This was information packed. Lots of knowledge bombs were dropped. Love it. Now, we’ll turn some of this amazing content into a checklist for you, the listener, to go download off of marketingspeak.com. Work through that checklist and implement some of these great ideas, some of this great content. If you’re passively listening like, “Wow. That was really good stuff.” And you don’t implement anything, you are making a huge mistake. Also, again that website that Bart shared, bartbaggett.com/marketingspeak to get that amazing gift of his $300 offer of the perpetual lead machine. Thank you, Bart. This was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. I’m sure our listeners did too. Thanks for joining us.

You’re a great host. I appreciate you having me on your shows. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody. Thanks for listening.

Thanks everybody. We’ll catch you on the next episode of Marketing Speak. This is your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

Important Links:

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

☑ Use Facebook messenger ads and MiniChat to start direct conversations, emails, and possible conversions.

☑ Be authentic and have meaningful interactions with people by getting them on the phone for a more personal engagement.

☑ Understand what my business model is and have a clear core offer to know what to focus on when running ads.

☑ Write a script and hire someone to answer calls and use it. This is having a call me or hire me appointment funnel instead of just a contact me page.

☑ Have a product to sell before giving away tons of free content if I want to make money. The more information people consume, the more they will pay for my products.

☑ Get people to buy my products with a low price point, and they will be more likely to buy my higher priced items in the future. Start small and ascend up.

☑ Sell products under $1000 online, but to sell higher priced products, I need to be of more value by being available to my clients whenever they need me.

☑ Learn how to ask empowering questions by using NLP and hypnotizing myself into getting what I want. I can learn more from Bart’s The Magic Question Book.

☑ Use the concept of “results in advance” by teaching something awesome for free and then once people like that I can sell them other awesome stuff.

☑ Create a demonstration of value and make people invest in trying to get a hold of me, because the easier it is to get a hold of me the less value they will place on my time.

About Bart Baggett