How I Use “The Video Sales Letter” To Generate Millions of Dollars in Sales Every Year

Marketing Tip #106

FOR MY KIDS: “Why Do Well In School?”

Ben’s Internet Marketing Workshop

Get rid of your “Marketing Department”

Most companies have marketing division, a product development division and a customer service division. Most companies think of these as three separate and distinct functions.

Very often the product development people never talk to the marketing people and the marketing people never talk to the product development people. Meanwhile, the customer service people have almost no stature in the company and are thought of mainly as clerks.

There are also administrative people who do things like accounting and make sure the elevators work and that everyone has a computer and a desk. The administrative people often have little idea what the company even does, much less have any sense of the marketing strategy.

What a catastrophic mistake this is.

Marketing should never be a “division” or “department” within a company.

Instead, the entire company should be about marketing. Everyone in the company should be involved in marketing. A receptionist is not a low-wage worker; he or she is one of your most important marketers. Your receptionist and those who answer the phones are the voice of your company to your customers and clients.

Your accounting people are not bean counters, but should be integrally involved in making your marketing more efficient. Everyone in every company should understand that their paychecks come from one and only one source: customers.

Without customers, without sales, there are no paychecks.

Everyone in every company should be thinking all the time about how to create happy experiences for customers. Everyone in the company should be first and foremost a marketer.

The Chairman of the company should think of almost nothing else but marketing. The product development people should think of marketing first when they develop their products. What good is it to develop a great product or provide a great service that no one wants?

All products must be developed with the market for the product at the forefront. “Do our prospects and customers want this thing we’re making?” is the question the product development people must always ask.

Meanwhile, the finance people, the accountants and the lawyers should not ask, “How can we make our lives easier?” Instead they should ask, “How can we make it easier for people to do business with us? Do we really need to require our customers to fill out all these forms when they buy? do we really need to require our customers to sign long agreements that no one reads? Do we really did these awful disclaimers in tiny print on our order forms?”

The janitor is not a janitor. A janitor is a key marketing person, whose job is to make sure the place looks neat and clean — like a company people will want to do business with.

No matter what business you are in, your company should be a marketing company first — because marketing by definition means “creating happy customers and clients.”

Making cars, windows or widgits is not the mission of your business. “Finding and nurturing happy customers” is the true mission of all business. Solving your customer’s problem is your mission. Supplying what your customer wants is your mission. Making great and wonderful widgits is just the means to that end.

So now we’ve dispensed with the need to come up with a mission statement for your company. The mission statement for every business should be: “We are dedicated to creating wonderful experiences for our customers.” In other words . . .

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Happy Improved Marketing,

Ben Hart

The #1 Secret of My Online Business Success

The #1 Mistake by Writers of Sales Letters

Facts, reasons, logical arguments, fascinating details and a great story all help you sell.

The fastest way to guarantee your letter is thrown in the trash is to use the typical empty hype-words amateur writers use all the time in their sales letters.

You know these words well — words like “amazing,” “incredible, “awesome,” the “best ever,” “blockbuster,” “colossal,” and the “greatest.”

With compelling facts, reasons and a good story to tell, there’s no reason to use these kinds of meaningless hype words. But these hype words are used so often that not only are they not attention-getting in the least, they have actually become trigger words that cause a reflex action in readers to stop reading immediately.

Most amateur sales letter writers think raising the volume and screaming at the reader is the best way to make sure the reader is listening — when actually it’s the surest way to cause your prospect to tune out.

Good copywriting does not imitate the approach of street corner huckster.

The best salesmen are those who have a knack for selling without his customers even realizing they are being sold. The instant your prospect sees that she is being sold something, the truth detector machinery in the brain goes on full alert and your reader becomes a super skeptic.

Who are you more likely to hire to do a job?

The fellow who is trying to sell you hard, the fellow who seems desperate for work? Or the fellow who does not need the job because he has plenty of business already, the fellow who must clear a spot in his schedule for you because his services are in such demand?

When Stephen King writes, does he use a lot of hype to generate reader interest? Does he scream at the reader? Does he say, “Okay reader, now get ready for the scary part, because this is going to be really, really scary”?

No, he simply tells the story. Readers are pulled along by the fascinating details, the mystery, the intrigue, the suspense and the storyline. This is how Stephen King gets people to stay up all night reading one of his 600-page books.

Great writers know how to hold the attention of readers without the empty hype. Study Stephen King, and how he holds your attention. You will then . . .

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Happy Improved Marketing,

Ben Hart

Why I love Google AdWords

I’m having a lot of fun with Google Adwords, an incredibly powerful engine for generating leads and testing messages and themes. And it does not require a lot of money if you proceed cautiously and correctly.

I’ve become a bit of a Google AdWords junky.

I’ll summarize how it works. You’ll have to try it for yourself and do a lot of tinkering with this tool before you will begin to understand how to make it work for you.

You can waste a lot of money if you aren’t very careful.

So here’s how it works.

People go to the internet to find information about subjects or to find products. What they do is type “keywords” and phrases into Google or their browser. They then wait a few seconds and see what pops up in the search listing.

Google is the world’s most popular search engine. Almost everyone uses Google for their searches. And Google powers the searches for many other lesser search engines as well, including AOL, Ask Jeeves, EarthLink, Hot Bot and others.

What Google does is allow you to bid on keywords and phrases. The keywords you’ve selected and bid on are then linked by Google to mini-ads Google allows you to create (in Google’s format) for display on searches of the keywords and phrases you’ve selected for your ads. Your ads are linked to your website, or the website you’ve created for the product you are selling. There are some important tricks to making Google AdWords work.

Trick #1

Select narrow key words and phrases that describe exactly what you are selling. If your key words are too . . .

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Happy Improved Marketing,

Ben Hart

Marketing is not selling

Marketing is not sales.

Sales is an element of marketing. But if your marketing is done right, you should never need to make another sales call again. You’ll just be taking in orders and shipping product. Or you’ll just be accepting the jobs you want to do. No more scrambling for work. No more wondering how the bills for next month will be paid.

Marketing is not really selling at all. Marketing is the process of putting bait in the water to attract leads, and then putting your leads into a sifting and sorting system that will allow you to identify your most likely customers. You then keep putting yourself and your product in front of your most qualified leads until they want to buy. You give your leads great information in the form of newsletters and emails that will keep them interested, not heavy-handed sales pitches, but valuable free information all the time that they look forward to receiving. This, in summary, is how your transform yourself from being an annoying pest into a welcome guest in your prospect’s home. That’s marketing, not sales.

Yes, sales are the end result of all your marketing. Certainly you can’t make a penny until a sale is made. The sale is everything in business. The sale is the one and only goal of all business. But you are no longer a salesman. You are a marketer. And there’s a world of difference.

Good marketers are rich. Salesmen are almost all poor and struggling, like Willie Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Not a happy story. You don’t want to be Willie Loman. You want to be Bill Gates, Ross Perot or Donald Trump.

These men are marketers. These men don’t make sales calls. And neither should you. Even if you are in a sales position — say, selling cars or selling houses — never think of yourself as a salesman. The great salesmen are really marketers. They aren’t pounding the pavement and making cold calls. Marketing is working smart. Selling is working stupid.

Be a marketer, not a salesman. Study marketing. Live and breathe marketing. And your life will be so much more pleasant and lucrative. Marketing is your strategy. Marketing is your roadmap. Marketing is your system. Marketing is all that goes into laying the groundwork and establishing the preconditions that end in a sale.

To read the rest of this article (and a whole lot more), you must be a member of my Inner Circle Roundtable for $1.

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Happy Improved Marketing,

Ben Hart

What we can learn about marketing from the Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead might be the most profitable rock band in history even though it has never had a #1 single or a #1 album.

Despite the death of its leader Jerry Garcia in 1995, Grateful Dead Productions continues to generate about $60 million a year in sales and licensing fees. Pretty good for a group that no longer exists.

Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead were among the greatest niche marketers in history. They never pursued the top spot on the pop charts—or any ranking on the pop charts. Instead, they dedicated themselves to pursuing a distinct style of music and cultivating a face-to-face relationship with their fans, building a loyal, even fanatical community of hundreds of thousands of Dead Heads by feeding this community exactly what it wanted, never deviating from its brand, for more than 35 years.

The Grateful Dead built its following by playing an average of more than 80 concerts a year for nearly four decades. As the years and decades rolled on, the Grateful Dead’s following never waned, but actually strengthened. In the early 1990s, until Garcia’s death in 1995, the Grateful Dead were probably the only band that could sell out major professional football stadiums on consecutive nights with no mass-market advertising.

Except for the fact that I am a follower of the Dead, I might never have known when the Grateful Dead was coming to Washington, D.C. because they did no mass-market advertising. But every summer when the Dead came into town, the 70,000 seats at RFK stadium would be sold out for both nights instantly, as soon as the tickets went on sale.

Unlike other rock bands, the Dead would allow the Dead Heads to record their concerts and even sell the bootleg copies. In fact, a special area was set up at every concert specifically for the bootleggers, complete with sound equipment, so the recordings would be of decent quality.

Why would the band allow this?

They allowed it because a bootleg copy of a concert was free advertising for the band. The Dead believed there were no better marketers of the band than their fans. So why not let them record the concerts and distribute the tapes even if the band did not re-ceive one cent from the sale of the tapes and CDs?

The Dead also made a decision to own every aspect of its band so it would have complete control over the production and marketing of its products. It did not want its product corrupted by traditional promoters and the big name recording labels. It put a ceiling on ticket prices, cracked down on scalpers, and did not mind at all if its hippie Dead Head fans made a few bucks by making their own Grateful Dead tie-dye shirts and products, even though not licensed by the band. It did not matter to the band that it made nothing on the “counterfeit” Grateful Dead T-shirts. The band just figured it was more free advertising.

Most importantly, the Dead made a decision to focus on its live concerts instead of recording records—because they were committed to spending face time with their fans. The Grateful Dead delivered more free concerts than any major rock band in history.

In so doing, they created a devoted community of hundreds of thousands of Dead Heads who followed them from concert to concert. You were not considered a Dead Head unless you had attended at least 100 Grateful Dead concerts.

There was also a kind of vague philosophy connecting the band and its Dead Head following. Their philosophy was intensely non-political and non-doctrinaire and went something like this: everyone should love each other or at least be nice to each other; and if more people listened to music (presumably the Dead), the world would be a much happier, less angry, more peaceful place. Kind of a naive philosophy perhaps, but it certainly worked for its fans.

Jerry Garcia and the Dead did not care one wit about being at the top of the pop music charts. They cared about staying true to their unique style of folk rock music that had a touch of bluegrass and jazz underscored by a driving beat behind every song. They cared about their fans and giving their fans one song after another that had the unmistakable Grateful Dead beat and lengthy Jerry Garcia electric guitar riffs. And they turned their fans into a community.

As a result, the other bands, even the Beatles and Rolling Stones, have pretty well faded away. Young kids today don’t lis-ten to the Beatles or the Stones much. But the Grateful Dead brand remains strong. You’ll see 14-year-old kids today wearing Grateful Dead tie-dye T-shirts because they think the Dead are “cool.”

Harley Davidson motorcycles also follows this basic strategy, perhaps more consciously than the Dead. Harley-Davidson motorcycles are distinctly American road machines. They are big, noisy, and ride rough. They appeal to those who have a side to them that wish they could be like “Easy Rider,” those who love the freedom of the road, who like to dress in black leather, who want to look like a Hells Angel—at least for a weekend. The Harley appeals a lot to former Vietnam War veterans.

On Memorial Day Weekend, we see 250,000 Harleys roar into Washington, D.C. as part of the annual “Rolling Thunder” event, aimed at honoring those who died in Vietnam, but also providing an opportunity for Harley riders to get together and party. Harley riders all feel themselves to be members of a community of fellow Harley riders.

You would never consider showing up to “Rolling Thunder” (or a Hells Angels rally) riding a Yamaha.

All of us niche target marketers can learn important lessons on how to create a unique brand and a loyal following by studying the Grateful Dead and Harley-Davidson. Their approach was not to be all things to all people. It was not to try to broaden their audience. It was to stay narrow and to drill deep—to focus all attention on their most dedicated enthusiasts, to never take their following for granted, to keep feeding their customers more of what they want . . . and to ignore everyone else.

The Grateful Dead and Harley-Davidson . . .

To read the rest of this article (and a whole lot more), you must be a member of my Inner Circle Roundtable for $1.

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Happy Improved Marketing,

Ben Hart