August 2008

Picture this: you open up your retail store for the day. As you walk behind the counter of your fire extinguisher store, the door flies open and a young man runs through the door with his hair on fire. Whoa!

He’s screaming and lurching around the store. He’s running up-and-down the aisles. He’s flailing about trying to keep the flames under control.

You calmly walk up to him and begin your schtick: “Hi there, I’m Bob for Mega Fire Extinguishers. We here at Mega Corporation create some of the world’s finest fire retardants. We’ve spent over 50 years with hundreds of the world’s best chemical engineers coming up with a solution that can douse a fire in less than 5 seconds. If you’ll come with me, I’ll give you a short 15-minute presentation on the features and benefits of our products.”

Wait a second. This guy’s hair is on fire.

He’s not a curious bystander with his hands in his pockets looking for entertainment.

It’s a fairly accurate guess that this young man isn’t interested in your company, your scientists or your presentation. He has one very specific needs: getting the flames on his head put out. Right now.

It is laughable to think a scenario like this would even exist, but it is happening every moment on the web.

Folks stumble into websites and instead of being greeted by a solution to their problems, they are taken on a boredom’s greatest journey that highlights everything big the solution to that ball of fire on their skull.

When someone arrives at your site, ask the question: why is their hair on fire? Let this question set the stage for how you a person experiences your site.

• Did their hard drive just crash and they need it restored before an important meeting tomorrow morning?
• Did their boss just ask them to upload a file to a client who has a deadline at 5pm and it is 4:30pm?
• Did their laser printer go on the fritz right as the team was leaving for a trade show?

Take a look at your webpage from the perspective of the person who just ran into your store and is looking for help.

Bottom line: How do we get them what they need with as little hassle as possible?

Chris Guillebeau has an amazing blog. Go, read, sign up for updates, enjoy.

Last week, he launched his ebook, “Unconventional Guide to Discount Airfare.” He talks about the process, his pricing, the response he’s had and what he did wrong in this post.

Chris, fair warning: I’m one of those internet marketing guys that is obsessed with understanding the price-value formula and how to maximize profits from selling information. I’ve been doing this since 1997 and have made a few dollars from getting the formula right.

Chris, here are a few things I’d do differently:

• Your title sucks. I didn’t even finish the title before I was lulled into a daze. Where is the punch? the fire?

  We need to grab folks by their neck and get their attention.

  Great titles do two things: they make an amazing promise and they spark our interest in a way that has our brain creating a fictional narrative. That’s human hacking at it’s finest.

  You want people to read the title and immediately see themselves in a plane flying to Rome. That resonates to people’s emotional core.

  Here’s my quick attempt at a title. The huge, amazing promise: “See how I’ve flown to 83 countries on 5 continents in the last two year for less than the payments you are making on that 2005 Toyota Camry in your garage.”

  And a possible sub-title that fires those story-telling brain cells, “And I’ll show you how you can travel to every country you’ve ever wanted to visit, for less money than you can imagine and without making any of the mistakes I’ve made.”

• Your price sucks. I understand why you went for $24.97. It’s that comfortable price in your gut. But you are doing a big disservice to yourself and your project at that price point.

  With that $24.97 price point, you squarely anchor yourself as “just another travel guide”. Bah, how boring. I can get a sandwich and fries at any joint in town.

  The anchoring problem is amplified because folks are great at comparing apples-to-apples. People go down to Borders and snag a book for $14.95. People’s brain know how much books are. You’re selling a book and that’s the mental reference people have.

  The human hack we used to kill this problem: de-anchor people’s brains and sell apples-to-oranges. How?

  Books sell for $15. We all agree on this.

  Question: what does a travel kit with an ebook, audio and video sell for? Ah, no immediate answer, right? Bingo, that’s where we insert the wedge.

  Our brain has no baseline for the value of that object (”the kit”) and we are given the flexibility to push the price all around the gameboard.

  Bundle it with a 30-minute audio of you reading the book. Or an hour of equally interesting thoughts you’ve had during your travels. What are we up to now? $49?

  Bundle it with an hour of video sitting in front of a Buddhist template talking about some of your experiences and the things you’ve learned. Where are we now? $97?

  Find a software developer and have travel tracking software created and added to the kit. Can we push it up to $197?

  Another brain hack is this: by increasing the cost the perceived value immediately goes up for the product. Humans automatically will increase their value attribution for an object that has a higher monetary cost. A $80,000 car simply must be better.

  The mental dialogue goes like this: “$197?! Holy cow, if this guy is selling his travel kit at that level, it must be good!”

  When I launched my first ebook, “Software Secrets — Exposed!”, I was going to launch at $49. The night before, I moved the price up to $97 and added some bonuses.

  Because I made the decision to increase my perceived value simply through price and bonuses, I’ve made a small fortune in the last few years.

• And don’t forget this: you aren’t just selling information. You are selling access to Chris Guillebeau. You are opening your kimono for folks willing to pay.

  You are selling Chris to fans of his blog. Raving fans want more of Chris and don’t mind paying a few more dollars to get that.

  You aren’t just selling to the traveling crowd surfing the web. Don’t forget this.

  Don’t worry about offending price sensitive folks anyway. They tend to be the people who are constantly emailing you with problem after problem. And are the ones who are first to ask for refunds.

• And don’t forget the most powerful hack in all of this: you think you are selling information, but you are really selling a dream.

  Who doesn’t want to travel the world, see Paris and London and Hong Kong?

  Dream selling is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world.

  Do you think late night informercials are really selling information on how to sell real estate? Heck no, they are selling people on the idea that they can own a yacht and a mansion and live the “lifestyle”.

• “I will also be providing free updates for life to all buyers.”

  No, no, no. One of the biggest errors is to offer anything for a lifetime. This will always catch up with you.

  It paints you into a corner you can’t get out of. What if you want to offer a 2009 guide?

  If you feel compelled to do this, give away a year of updates. (Now that you’ve already sold the product, you can still do this by grandfathering existing buyers. You can actually make an event out of the situation: “Lifetime updates to this guide if you buy in the next 3 days. After that, you’ll pay for yearly updates.”)

  That ability to create new editions will be a windfall for you. The moment you push your email’s send button to tell buyers they can now buy next year’s edition will put tens of thousands of dollars into your bank account. Why kill that goose?

  In fact, instead of giving anything away, you should be creating a membership club and plugging your raving fans into a recurring monthly program for $9/month or $19/month.

  Sell the dream, sell the dream, sell the dream. You have one of the best dreams anybody is selling these days.

A couple other bits:

• Nuke the sample. Your guide is best sold through the sales page. I’ve rarely been sold based on a sample. I want to be sold on the dream.
• On extending the length: don’t do it. Make it a selling point that you’ve edited it down to 29-pages. Celebrate the fact that folks will get zero fluff, all meat. People don’t have time for fluff, and remind them of that.

Chris, good luck man. I just got back from staying in Amsterdam for three months, and love the idea of working from anywhere on Earth!

I’m going to miss book stores.

I know that eventually the bean counters will win. They love to fiddle with numbers. Eventually, they will determine that enough folks have digital book readers and too much money is spent on printing and shipping books to stores.

They’ll convince the brass that it doesn’t make sense any more. “Look at Amazon, heck, they don’t need a storefront. We don’t even need a warehouse, we’ll just zap books to people.”

When that day comes, the day that the final big book retailer closes its front doors, I’ll work my way up to the front of the line.

I may sob a little to see a place where I had so many good moments get closed down. I’ll think about the all the time I spent browsing the shelves, waiting for a book to catch my eye and then become immersed in a topic I didn’t expect to be interested in.

I’ll miss the magazine rack. I never had enough time to really dig into all the magazines I wanted to look at. It ran the gamut too. I’d look at design magazine. Business magazines. Tech magazines. Popular Science. Popular Mechanics. Maxim. Make.

I’ll miss hanging out in the coffeeshop. I loved to get an ice coffee and tap away at my laptop. I’d never be able to resist the temptation to get up and find a book or magazine to look at while I was suppose to be working. But it’s okay, bookstores are just dead old dinosaurs now.

The new generations won’t really get it. They get the Internet. Instant information at your fingertips. Need a question answered? Tap, tap, tap. Answer revealed, problem solved.

But they won’t feel the magic of being surrounded by thousands of books. Authors who have spent months or years pecking away at their computers to give us something we can hold in our hands and enjoy. No more.

I suppose books will always be around. The Library of Congress will keep a War and Peace tucked away for future generations to stare in amazement at. And books in their digital form will continue to be written.

It’ll be a sad day. I know it’s coming. So I’m going to enjoy my day today in Borders.

What is the most important thing that you get from people who visit your site?

If you answered “make a sale”, you are incorrect.

If you answered “read an article”, you are incorrect.

What you really want is the ability to cultivate a relationship with your visitors. You can’t do unless you can establish a channel to communicate with.

Let’s say you are at the Gizator Millineum Conference and meet Jacob, who owns a video conferencing installation company. Jacob is an awesome dude and think his system can help your company, so you decide to talk more in the future. You leave the conference without his email address or phone number.

Hard to build a relationship without being able to talk with each other, isn’t it?

Ask for a phone number. Ask for an email address. Ask for a cell phone number that you can send SMSes to. Ask for a mailing address.

If you aren’t asking, you don’t have the opportunity to build. Even if you don’t plan on starting the conversation today, ask anyway. You might be glad you did when you do start.

“Value attribution” is the magic factor or variable or weight that makes your business win or wither. I didn’t make up the phrase, but I really like it.

Value attribution is the act that the mind goes through in assigning some kind of weight to everything we encounter on a daily basis.

We then use this weight in deciding whether we marry Sally or Edna, and whether should live in a two-story condo or a farm with five acres, and whether we drive a BWM or a Ford pickup.

Some people might call it “trust” or “loyalty” or “likeability”, but really, it is all about our brain assigning a high or low number to every human or book or idea we encounter.

Let’s see what that means if we use a 1 to 10 scale…

• Your kitty, Grumpy — we’ll give him a pretty high value attribution, a 10.
• Your English leather sofa — reasonably high value attribution, after all, it is your property, a 7.
• Your neighborhood — you feel some connection to it, so let’s give it a 5.
• The car you passed 20 minutes ago: zero.
• The car you passed 20 minutes ago that was being driven by Bono — ah, value attribution: 8. (Let’s assume you like Bono.)
• The hilarious TV ad you are broadcasting next week — your goal is to have folks assign it a value attribution of anything over zero.

I’ve looked through many phrases to describe how our brains put value on everything in our lives, but the phrase “value attribution” feels most accurate.

When we can find ways to pump up the “value attribution” for our company or our products, we win.

When we do things that deflate our “value attribution”, our company slowly marches toward death.

We’ll talk a lot more about this in the future, I just want to get the concept out into the open.

I love QVC. When you flip it on, you are watching years of refining how to hack humans into desiring a hairbrush or a dehumidifier and quickly parting you and your money so you can possess that item.

A few techniques I noted that they use:

• Attractive hosts. Humans like to look at other attractive humans.
• Units sold/left. Social proof that the current item is in demand by the tribe.
• Time left in offer. Appeals to the brain’s sense of loss.
• Guest experts. We are willing to defer to our tribal chiefs to guide us. If they say we need Australian toothpaste, then we must need Australian toothpaste.

But wait, there’s more…

• “Imagine using this at your next Christmas party…” This super-powerful technique tricks the human mind into playing a mental movie with you and that Italian cookie jar at the center. What are your guests saying? How does it make you feel?
• Strong Guarantee. You don’t see them pitching an item and then saying, “You bought it, you own it.” The mind wants options.
• Order over the phone or through the web QVC doesn’t force you to use their preferred ordering method. They find options that fit with what people are comfortable using.

But if you order now…

• “New Today!” Mmm… you can be the first person on the block showing off your new in-pool go-kart.
• Millions of product use ideas. QVC doesn’t spend 20 minutes showing you a frying pan. They show you 20 minutes of the pan in action. If you want to sell the sizzle, create a visual image they can grab onto. Trigger hopping.
• People having fun using product. Have you ever seen people having so much fun using a measuring tape? I haven’t, but the enthusiasm is contagious.

Don’t wait, only a few more are left!

• Call in testimonials. More social proof that people are buying and enjoying the product.
• You see the item in action. At Wal-mart, you aren’t going to see that juicer in action, but on QVC you do. This makes it easier for us to create a mental narrative in situations with us using the item.
• They teach us, for free! We learn stuff! QVC is teaching us unique ways to use the item. This promotes QVC as an expert and someone we can trust and rely on.
• That hairbrush comes in 8 colors! We love options! It removes barriers. We can visualize that turquoise hairbrush in our turquoise bathroom.

Only a few minutes left to order, call now!

• Using stories. How often do you hear the host or guest say, “Let me tell you a story.” Humans love stories.
• Using 2 people. QVC uses two people, often a host and guest, so that things unfold in a conversational way. Host asks questions, guest answers them. We are drawn in.

The iPhone AppStore is a big fat mess. On news that Apple has created a cash cow for themselves, they may want to look at funneling some of that cash at fixing the AppStore’s usability nightmare.

1. The rating system is out of control. Can you review an app you haven’t used? If not, then all of the “the price is too high, so I’m not buying the app” reviews should be deleted. (Oh, and they rate the app with 1 star.) Apple, you can tell who owns an application. Use it.
2. Developers are incrementally updating their software. Great, right? Except that when a developer fixes a problem, there are still a couple hundreds reviews berating the application. How do I know which review applies to which update?
3. People are using the rating’s area to make comments about application problems or functionality they’d like to see added. Apple needs to add a separate comments area. Developers love this kind of feedback.
4. Not all reviews are created equal. Some reviews are useless: “This app sux.” Others obviously took some effort to create. Good reviews should carry more weight in the system. How do they do that? Allow people to rate reviews too. Let the bad reviews sink.

What do you think about the current state of the AppStore?

The human mind makes a leap each time it is shown a product or service that is expensive.

It puts a high value on that object. Whomp.

Watch: when you hear about a $124 hamburger, what is your brain’s first reaction? Is it something like, “Ok, there must be something special about that cow patty.”

And there is. A market won’t allow an item to exist if it doesn’t have strong value for it’s high cost.

The upside is that this allows you to sell your stuff at a premium.

The formula works the other way, too. Slice-and-dice your prices and you could de-value what your offer.

People sit down and read a book for several hours.

Movies get about an hour and a half of your attention.

A magazine will get 45 minutes.

Sitcoms get 30 minutes.

Telemarketers might get 5 minutes.

Web pages get 90 seconds.

Email gets 10 seconds.

SMS gets 5 seconds.

IM gets 2 seconds.

Twitter will get a second of your attention.

If you shipping out fat webpages or fat email, you’ve failed to realize that people are on diets and will simply tune you out.

(I promise: those aren’t my feet. But it does make you wonder if hobbits are real!)