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by Kim Miller

I know that hol­i­day par­ties and shop­ping are on your mind right now, but this is an impor­tant oppor­tu­nity for you and your busi­ness that you won’t want to miss.

For 2-days ONLY, one of the men­tors who has helped our busi­ness reach a phe­nom­e­nal 225% growth this year, Ali Brown, is hold­ing a spe­cial Hol­i­day Sale on her award win­ning prod­ucts for busi­ness and per­sonal suc­cess. [Read more…]

Marketing + Good Product Line = One Tired Entrepreneur

by Kim Miller

We are at the tail end of a seven week mar­ket­ing cam­paign that included direct mail and weekly emails pro­mot­ing hol­i­day spe­cials and new prod­ucts. And our busiest weeks aren’t even here yet. [Read more…]

You Need To Know Your Market To Make Money With Videos — More Great Stuff From Julie Clark

by Kim Miller

Last week I dis­cussed the first take­away I got from Julie Clark’s pre­sen­ta­tion at Ali Brown’s SHINE event in Novem­ber — how you don’t have to be a video­g­ra­pher to pro­duce a spe­cial inter­est video. Today I’m going to talk about another take­away and it is one of the key aspects you need to con­sider FIRST in order to make money sell­ing your videos [Read more…]

Testimonial Videos — 5 Ways To Make Them Powerful

Tes­ti­mo­ni­als from happy cus­tomers on your site is very impor­tant and pow­er­ful. Video tes­ti­mo­ni­als are even that much more pow­er­ful and pro­mote reg­u­lar and long-term rec­om­men­da­tions that will deliver you sig­nif­i­cant busi­ness benefits.

Not all tes­ti­mo­ni­als are cre­ated equally. Here are some key items to keep in mind when you are col­lect­ing your tes­ti­mo­nial videos.

1) Use real cus­tomers that have had a great expe­ri­ence with your prod­uct or ser­vice. You’ve seen ads where they (say) paid actor, not an actual cus­tomer. While deliv­ery is impor­tant, don’t worry if it doesn’t sound scripted or pro­fes­sional. You want your tes­ti­mo­ni­als to be from real peo­ple and believable.

2) Be a direc­tor. Coach them to make sure they give you a per­sua­sive tes­ti­mo­nial. Since they prob­a­bly will not be that com­fort­able in front of the cam­era, giv­ing them some direc­tion as to the mes­sage you want them to deliver will be very helpful.

3) Have them give specifics not gen­er­al­i­ties about why to do busi­ness with you or buy your prod­uct. Con­sider these two state­ments. “I really liked work­ing with XYZ.” “Before I hired XYZ book­keep­ing ser­vices, I spent hours on my own books and strug­gled with learn­ing the soft­ware. Now all I need to do is look at my monthly reports and because I freed up 20 hours a month from book­keep­ing, my sales have increased by 20%.” Which one per­suades and informs you more?

4) Col­lect as many tes­ti­mo­ni­als as you can and only post the most pow­er­ful ones. And don’t stop col­lect­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als and updat­ing them.

5) Be hon­est and upfront with your cus­tomers as to why you want them to give you a tes­ti­mo­nial and that it will be on your web­site. Hav­ing them sign a sim­ple model release is a good idea. Make sure they state their name and where they are from. You don’t have to state the exact city or town if they do not wish; you can have them state the area of their county, state or the coun­try. If they are rep­re­sent­ing a busi­ness that is endors­ing you, have them state the busi­ness name also.

A recent Niel­son Com­pany report states, “The rec­om­men­da­tion of some­one else remains the most trusted source of infor­ma­tion when con­sumers decide which prod­ucts and ser­vices to buy.” 78% of respon­dents said they trusted – either com­pletely or some­what – the rec­om­men­da­tion of other con­sumers. Video just enhances this rec­om­men­da­tion. Don’t for­get to add this key mar­ket­ing tool on your website.

The Secret To YouTube Success

Are you post­ing and or host­ing your busi­ness video clips on YouTube or any other pop­u­lar video host­ing site? You should! When asked, many of our cus­tomers say they found us through YouTube. But there are tricks to using YouTube suc­cess­fully and our friend Doc Yankee’s lit­tle Mojo Video is a must-watch. Here it is from his site — docsmarketingmojo.com.

What Is The Most Important Step In Selling Your Videos?

I often get ques­tions from skep­ti­cal peo­ple who ask, “can you really make money pro­duc­ing and sell­ing spe­cial inter­est videos?” This photo of today’s batch of cus­tomer orders speaks for itself.

We just had a great cou­ple of days of sales. This photo rep­re­sents orders that came in pri­mar­ily over the inter­net while we were work­ing, eat­ing, sleep­ing, going out over the week­end and gen­er­ally doing what we felt like. ShipmentsOct13For us, this is the start of the Christ­mas buy­ing sea­son and it is only the mid­dle of Octo­ber, so we are excited.

What caused this burst of sales?

One word — Mar­ket­ing! We just did an email blitz to our cus­tomer list, fol­lowed a mail­ing of a brochure and sales let­ter. The point to take away from that is that we did a two-prong approach; email and good old fash­ioned USPS mail. We also mailed a press release to over 150 newspapers.

I got my mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence in direct mail mar­ket­ing, start­ing over 30 years ago, and I can­not overem­pha­size that direct mail still works when done prop­erly, and it works well. I love the inter­net but I advise you not to get so enam­ored with the web that you neglect other avenues to mar­ket your goods. There are many ways to mar­ket your prod­uct and most busi­nesses only use 2 or 3 of the ones at their dis­posal. If you expand your mar­ket­ing efforts, you expand your poten­tial to make sales. Yes, there is a higher cost to direct mail, but the way we cal­cu­lated it, we only need a 2–3% response rate to have this mail­ing be profitable.

For heaven’s sake, don’t just build a web­site and expect peo­ple to find you. That say­ing “If you build it, they will come” is absolutely not true and can be dan­ger­ous to your finan­cial health. You have to mar­ket and mar­ket well. If you don’t know how, then find some­one who does. If you haven’t done so already, sign up for access to our How To Sell Your Videos Secrets by click­ing on the link to the right of this post. There is some good mar­ket­ing advice in there for any busi­ness owner.

Some of these boxes in the photo con­tain orders worth well over $100. The aver­age order size is around $45. It is com­posed of DVDs which we pro­duced, books, and a new line of greet­ing cards. As I’ve advised read­ers in the past, it pays to diver­sify your prod­uct line. If you only have one or two items to sell, you greatly reduce the chances that you will make a sale. The deeper your prod­uct line within your niche, the more likely you will make a first sale and then get repeat sales of addi­tional related items.

I learned a few things from this mail­ing. First, we offered a one-day, 2-for-1 sale on a pop­u­lar DVD we pro­duced. I don’t know if it is the econ­omy or that this pro­mo­tion focused them on the prod­uct, but I was amazed at how many peo­ple took advan­tage of that sale. This is a DVD we’ve been mar­ket­ing to this same list for over four years. We’ve sold over 5,000 of them but this pro­mo­tion seemed to catch people’s attention.

I sus­pect it is the econ­omy, and peo­ple are stock­ing up for Christ­mas gifts at bar­gain prices. At this time you should be aware that peo­ple are still watch­ing every penny, so price your prod­ucts care­fully. Coupons, dis­counts, bun­dles, pre­mi­ums… they all work and are good incen­tives for peo­ple to buy now.

Another les­son I re-learned is to fol­low up. One of our envelopes came back marked unde­liv­er­able. I just knew that this poten­tial cus­tomer would want to know about this new prod­uct so I phoned them. Turns out I had a bad mail­ing address, and indeed they wanted the prod­uct. She bought over $200 over the phone, sight unseen, and promises she’ll buy more.

These sales are from just one of my web stores. I have over half a dozen of them. If I focus my mar­ket­ing efforts on all of them like this, and keep the pres­sure up, just imag­ine how that will affect our bot­tom line. And guess what… I plan to do just that.

How to Motivate People to Buy

by Brian Clark (http://www.copyblogger.com/author/Brian)

If you’re in busi­ness, someone’s got to buy some­thing for you to make money.

At least last time I checked.

(Twit­ter, call me).

For the rest of you, this arti­cle should help you get more peo­ple to buy something.

Sick of Hear­ing that Peo­ple Buy Because of Emotion?

Well then… that would be a strong emo­tional response to a log­i­cal asser­tion, no?

But I hear you. Over and over you’re told that peo­ple buy accord­ing to emo­tion, and it seems not to make sense when it comes down to sell­ing your stuff.

Maybe that’s because you’re think­ing about emo­tion in the con­text of feel­ings rather than motivation.

And that would def­i­nitely be con­fus­ing, because it’s not feel­ings you’re after. In fact, pro­vok­ing feel­ings can kill the sale instead of prompt­ing it.
Noth­ing More Than Feel­ings… (Fail)

Feel­ings are mag­ni­fied, messy, and often mis­un­der­stood forms of emo­tion, and that makes play­ing with them poten­tially dan­ger­ous. What we’re try­ing to do is moti­vate peo­ple to do some­thing very spe­cific (buy)… not get them to weep, fly into a rage, or jump for joy.

This may be why so many peo­ple doubt that we make pur­chase deci­sions via emo­tion. We don’t always detect a strong feel­ing when we reach for our wal­lets, so we must be act­ing from a purely log­i­cal stand­point, right?

Not likely. You sim­ply jus­tify your exist­ing desire to pur­chase with logic. You’ve already decided you want it. It’s still pos­si­ble to talk your­self out of it, but the moti­va­tion to buy was put in place while your log­i­cal brain was mak­ing other plans.

In fact, any time we are moti­vated to do any­thing, emo­tion is pulling the strings. It’s just usu­ally an emo­tional response lower than what we think of as a feel­ing, so we expe­ri­ence our moti­va­tions as mostly rational.

But it’s emo­tion that moves us to act. In fact, the Latin root for the word emo­tion mean “to move,” because emo­tions moti­vate what we do. Psy­chol­o­gists will tell you that moti­va­tions are fairly sim­ple and straight­for­ward, while feel­ings can be quite com­pli­cated (we even lie to our­selves about them).

So, when it comes to get­ting some­one to buy, you’re def­i­nitely invok­ing emo­tion. But by under­stand­ing emo­tional response in terms of moti­va­tion rather than feel­ings, you’ll have a bet­ter idea on how to craft your copy.

More Than a Feel­ing: Motivation

So, again… the goal is not to get some­one to nec­es­sar­ily feel. Your goal is to get some­one to want, and to act on that want. If that seems like a sub­tle dif­fer­ence (since desire can often be a very tan­gi­ble emo­tion), well at least now you accept that emo­tion is dri­ving the train.

In terms of moti­va­tion, psy­chol­o­gists know that emo­tions result in one of three basic cat­e­gories of respon­sive motivation:

Approach

When approach moti­va­tion kicks in, you want to expe­ri­ence or dis­cover more of some­thing. Approach moti­va­tion involves pos­i­tive desire, and the per­ceived value of what you move toward always increases.

Approach moti­va­tion makes sell­ing high qual­ity desir­able prod­ucts easy, whether it be an iPhone or black gran­ite kitchen coun­ter­tops. But it can also be used to sell desir­able out­comes, rang­ing from the Obama cam­paign for empow­ered change, to get rich quick and get skinny now prod­ucts of dubi­ous effectiveness.

Avoid

You want to play upon avoid moti­va­tion when your prospect wants to get away from some­thing of low value. Avoid moti­va­tion deems some­thing unwor­thy of atten­tion, and an incon­ve­nience or annoy­ance that should be ignored or eliminated.

Peo­ple want to avoid pay­ing too much on their elec­tric bill more than any desire for fea­tures of the juice com­ing through the wires, unless you’re using alter­na­tive energy sources, in which case many will do busi­ness with you to avoid adverse envi­ron­men­tal impact. Most char­i­ties play on avoid­ance emo­tions to lessen the impact of poverty, dis­ease, and nat­ural dis­as­ters. Rather than tak­ing a beauty approach, Clear­asil plays on moti­va­tions to avoid the stigma of acne.

Attack

With attack moti­va­tion, peo­ple want to devalue, insult, crit­i­cize, or destroy some­thing. When some­one is emo­tion­ally moti­vated to elim­i­nate some­thing (rather than sim­ply avoid it), attack moti­va­tion is the way to go.

Think about ad cam­paigns for weed killer and bug spray (Raid kills bugs dead!). Like­wise, we’ve seen more than our share of large-scale cam­paigns designed to erad­i­cate var­i­ous com­pli­cated prob­lems by wag­ing war against them – the war on crime, drugs, ter­ror, etc.

What’s My Motivation?

Using the three basic cat­e­gories of emo­tional moti­va­tion, you should be able to craft the right kind of story to get peo­ple to take action. The prob­lem comes when you’re not clear which moti­va­tions you’re actu­ally play­ing to.

For exam­ple, it’s rare that an attack against your com­peti­tor will work on the basis of attack moti­va­tion, but com­par­a­tive adver­tis­ing (Pepsi chal­lenge, Mac Guy and PC guy) can work if you invoke enough approach moti­va­tion due to the expressed ben­e­fits and dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion. On the other hand, neg­a­tive polit­i­cal ads work on inde­pen­dents not by trig­ger­ing attack moti­va­tion, but instead by prompt­ing avoid­ance… the unde­cided voter doesn’t want to make the wrong choice.

Think­ing in terms of moti­va­tion makes sell­ing with emo­tion a lit­tle less mys­te­ri­ous. And spend­ing the time to truly know who your prospects are makes moti­va­tion crys­tal clear.

Copy­blog­ger was founded in Jan­u­ary of 2006 by Brian Clark. Brian is a new media writer/producer, entre­pre­neur, and recov­er­ing attorney.

Have you sub­scribed yet? :-)

The Power Of The Testimonial

A few days ago I received a pleas­ant sur­prise in my email. Jay Michael, who man­ages the http://InTheViewFinder.blogspot.com blog, sent me a DM (for those of you not on Twit­ter yet that’s Twit­ter lingo for Direct Mes­sage). He informed me that he had writ­ten a post about my Make Money Sell­ing Your Videos DVD.

What a pleas­ant sur­prise! I sus­pect Jay found my site via my video on YouTube and upon research­ing, I see he signed up on my mail­ing list for my newslet­ters and updates. Jay is a fel­low Spe­cial Inter­est Video pro­ducer, and who, like me, sells his videos on the inter­net. He has pro­duced a DVD series on Mas­ter­ing Movie Edit Pro 14 Plus and a recent one on UFOs (a topic I find interesting).

Thanks, Jay! Things like that are golden. In mar­ket­ing there is noth­ing more valu­able than a totally unso­licited tes­ti­mo­nial from a per­son who knows what he is speak­ing of, espe­cially if it appears in print or, as in this case, on a pro­fes­sional blog. It is also nice to get con­nected with like-minded video professionals.

You can read the arti­cle here at http://InTheViewFinder.blogspot.com. Also for those of you on Twit­ter, give him a fol­low at http://Twitter.com/AspyRider.

I try to do the same thing for oth­ers when I find their prod­ucts or ser­vices of par­tic­u­lar value. Some­times I won­der if they rec­og­nize the poten­tial of using those tes­ti­mo­ni­als in their future mar­ket­ing efforts. Equally valu­able, if not more so, are crit­i­cal com­ments that they could use to improve their prod­uct, ser­vice or their image in the marketplace.

I hope you will be mind­ful of the power of both get­ting and giv­ing tes­ti­mo­ni­als. If you get pos­i­tive com­ments from your cus­tomers, by all means ask their per­mis­sion to use them and then take full advan­tage of them on your web­site, print mate­ri­als, direct mail, blog… any­place cur­rent and poten­tial cus­tomers will see them.

There are many ways to col­lect tes­ti­mo­ni­als. I have a very pop­u­lar guest­book on one of my sites where peo­ple write glow­ing reviews of my father’s book, A Land Remem­bered, which I sell on that site. You can see it here: http://patricksmithonline.com/guestbook.html This page is one of the most pop­u­lar pages on the site because peo­ple like to read what oth­ers have said.

Another way is sim­ply to ask for a tes­ti­mo­nial. Don’t be shy about ask­ing sat­is­fied cus­tomers to give you a few sen­tences about why they like your prod­uct. I find that most peo­ple are flat­tered when you ask them.

You should also have a con­tact form on your web­site where peo­ple can eas­ily send com­ments or ask ques­tions. This also serves to let them know that you are reach­able, not walled up inside cor­po­rate walls. Peo­ple like to deal with people.

Now, here is a good exam­ple of walk­ing the walk. If you have bought my DVDs, been to my web­site at http://howtosellyourvideos.com or read read other entries in this blog and found use­ful infor­ma­tion, how about drop­ping me a tes­ti­mo­nial to that effect. It doesn’t have to be a the­sis — it can be as short as a sen­tence. You can even leave me a com­ment to that effect right here after you read this.

Thanks, and best wishes for your business.

Are You Twittering?

For years I have fol­lowed and learned from one of the big­gies in inter­net mar­ket­ing, Joel Comm. He has really got­ten on the social media band­wagon and on his lat­est site he is teach­ing about Twit­ter. Now I admit I am a total Twit­ter new­bie but that is about to change. I recently pur­chased his book, Twit­ter Power, and with that pur­chase I was enrolled in a 4 week Social Media Boot­camp start­ing next week. Yes­ter­day he Tweeted about me and my How­ToSel­lY­ourVideos web­site to his 13,500 fol­low­ers. How about that for some huge exposure!

You want in on this lat­est phe­nom­e­non… and a chance to win an iPod Touch?  Join Twit­ter, then go herehttp://twitterpower.com/win/ and fol­low Joel.

Be sure to fol­low me on Twit­ter as I take this jour­ney. Let’s all Twit­ter our way to success!

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook: Powerful Tools for Your Marketing Arsenal

It took a while, but I think I am finally get­ting it…why these new social net­work sites can be so pow­er­ful and impor­tant in your mar­ket­ing efforts.

My wife is way ahead of me on this. She started by attend­ing a ses­sion offered at a video con­fer­ence we went to last year on the sub­ject of social net­work­ing. There she learned about LinkedIn. Although I had heard of social net­work­ing sites, I never saw a way to incor­po­rate them into our mar­ket­ing efforts. Late in 2008 things started to fall into place …

First my wife got us on Face­book and we joined up with fel­low video­g­ra­phers we had met at the WEVA Expo in August. About this time we started to get sales on one of our new prod­uct lines and noticed that the traf­fic had come from YouTube. I’m big on web stats and am always mon­i­tor­ing where my web­site vis­i­tors come from, and so I started see­ing a trend. Then I started to notice how many peo­ple came into my web­sites  from a gui­tar forum I par­tic­i­pate in because they fol­low the links I pro­vide in my sig­na­ture file, even though none of my sites have any­thing to do with gui­tars (I wish they did). I don’t know if these peo­ple buy or not, but it is gen­er­at­ing a lot of addi­tional traffic.

What social net­work­ing has done is take your local Cham­ber of Com­merce mix­ers, neigh­bor­hood par­ties, water­cooler con­ver­sa­tions, clubs and pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions and made com­mu­ni­ca­tion inter­na­tional and instan­ta­neous! And the beauty is that they are free. You can now find like-minded peo­ple who want to con­nect with you about any topic out there, and if you can­not find an exist­ing group for a topic you can eas­ily cre­ate your own. I have sev­eral now and you may be inter­ested in join­ing my Spe­cial Inter­est Video group on Face­book. This means that tar­get­ing your mar­ket is much eas­ier and more eco­nom­i­cal in social media than it is in any other tech­nol­ogy I can think of.

More­over, social net­work­ing pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity for mar­keters to get close to their clients and cus­tomers so much so that they can even com­mu­ni­cate directly with them. Dell and sev­eral other major cor­po­ra­tions have cre­ated Face­book groups and allow direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion with cus­tomers, and we’ll see this trend esca­late. It is also very pow­er­ful in estab­lish­ing cred­i­bil­ity and trust­wor­thi­ness. Peo­ple want to buy from some­one they can see and ask ques­tions of. Like it or not, this is cur­rently a wave that is too big to ignore.

Now I am just start­ing on the Twit­ter band­wagon and I admit, I am a total new­bie at this. Stay tuned for more about that jour­ney and as I learn how it can help me in my busi­ness, I’ll share that infor­ma­tion with you.


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