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If you’re the kind of people who hate (or too afraid) to sell, you’ll be happy to find out that hard selling is not the only way you can make some moola. In the next few days, I’ll be talking about a few ways you can sell without actually selling… and I’ll be delving deep into those techniques.
Today is about my favorite stealth marketing technique - education.
Give and you shall receive
If you can educate, then you can skip selling. Eben Pagan (he is the guy behind doubleyourdating.com) once recommended that you give away your best stuff… free, to build value first. That means you educate your readers with the best things you know so that they are so overwhelmed by the value you’re giving that they’ll think, “If this is the stuff he’s giving for free, what is the stuff he’s selling?”
Another marketing guru, who unfortunately I’ve forgotten his name, once said in a marketing seminar to give away powerful but incomplete information to your readers.
Easy enough right? Give and you shall receive.
This is the rule of reciprocity. If you give someone something, with no strings attached, the receiver feels a need to reciprocate. To test this theory, Robert Cialdini conducted a study among hotel guests.
Instead of encouraging guests to reuse their towel by donating part of the savings to a charity (which doesn’t work, by the way), he stated that “a donation had already been made on behalf its guest” and ask guest to reciprocate.
Guess what? The reciprocation-based message got 45% more response. Let’s pause for a second. I want you to really appreciate just how much of a difference this technique is making.
That means if you normally have 100 people joining your list, you now have 145. If you make $1000 a month, it’s now $1450. It’s a big difference for 0 extra work.
You only have to reverse the sequence - by giving first before asking for money.
Authority
This is another one of the advantages of educating. When you educate, you’re the teacher. The guru. And you build authority on the subject matter.
And when an authority say something, people follow.
If you would like to learn more about authority, check out my post on building authority.
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