Most obvious way ever invented for coaches to get swamped with more clients
Published: Sun, 06/05/16
Enjoy…
BEN SETTLE: Let's say somebody is an affiliate marketer, selling somebody else's product. How could they use Deadline Funnel for that?
JACK BORN: I used to do to be a top affiliate for a completely different type of software product many years ago. It's something that may not be completely new, but I still want to share it. The idea is that I used this software product ... it was called Post Affiliate Pro and it's for affiliate tracking. I no longer recommend it. I think that there's a better solution out there called iDevAffiliate, but I don't want to get off track.
At the time I was promoting this software called Post Affiliate Pro, and I was their number one affiliate. The way that I did it was really simple. What I did was I was a client of theirs and I realized, you know what, there's something missing from this software. There was a template that I felt would have been much better if it was built into the software itself, and so what I did was I built it.
Now, for someone who's listening to this who thinks, "Well, I can't do that," yeah, you can. You just go to Fiverr. If you need something techwise, you can go to Fiverr or you can go to Upwork. There's different ways you can do it and it's really cheap, and it doesn't have to be a huge deal. For 20 to 50 bucks, you can get someone to do this. The point is that I created additional value, and I also recorded some video, some video trainings on how to use the software. I bundled this together and I wrote a blog post, and I gave all the pros and cons of Post Affiliate Pro versus this other software, so I compared it.
I gave a really great comparison, and at the end I said, "Look, I recommend Post Affiliate Pro for the reasons that I told you. Now, it's not perfect, but what I found was that it was missing this template for XYZ." I forget what it was, but this specific template, "and so I created, and I also created a whole bunch of training videos because I found some other shortcuts and hacks that really make it even better. I also recorded how I set up the software, which just makes it a whole lot easier for you.
Now, you can buy Post Affiliate Pro by going to their website, and here's their link, or you can buy it through me. It'll cost you the same, but if you buy it through me and send me your receipt, then my system will automatically send you those bonuses. All you have to do is click here, and I'll just get a little affiliate commission and I'll send you the extra stuff." It's pretty simple, a pretty simple concept, but it worked like gangbusters.
Now, back when I wrote this blog post, Google was a lot friendlier to affiliate marketing. At the time I was driving traffic from Google directly to this page, but this was a really high-value page. It was what today would be called an epic blog post, so it was a really long blog post that covered the ins and outs, the pros and the cons. It really did a very, very good job, and then at the end I gave full disclosure of, "You can buy it here or you can buy it through my affiliate link." That's the whole process.
Now, what you can do is that, as an affiliate, you can do everything that I just explained. The only difference is, rather than letting people buy any old time that they want, what you do is you just treat the other person's product that you're promoting as your own product, and what you would do is you don't say that it's your product, but my point is that you give it a deadline.
You say, "Look, if you buy during this specific period, I'll give you these extra bonuses, these things that I created." Maybe you created a checklist or maybe you added some training videos. There's a whole bunch of different things that you can add on as additional value to make it worthwhile for someone to want to buy through your affiliate link, rather than tricking them into clicking something and then they buy without even knowing it.
When I did this promotion, I had people emailing me and saying, "Did you get my receipt yet? When can you send over the bonuses?" They wanted to make sure that I got my affiliate commission, and I knew exactly who was buying through me and I was building up my own list at the same time. I was being completely transparent, and people wanted to buy through my affiliate commission.
You can do all of this, and all you have to do is put the deadline on the page, using something like ... well, scratch that. Using Deadline Funnel, you can set it up so that it's completely authentic, so that each person who's coming through your sales funnel will actually be given their own specific deadline to take action and get those valuable bonuses that you're offering.
BEN SETTLE: I'm just thinking out loud here. Let's say it's a holiday weekend. Let's say it's Fourth of July weekend here in the States, Independence Day weekend, and they want to make some quick cash. You can just find any affiliate product that you believe in, that you want to sell, hook it up like you just said, and you could probably make some pretty ... a good payday pretty easily.
JACK BORN: Absolutely, and here's another tip. A lot of affiliates don't know this, but even with large corporations that have an affiliate network, you can go to the affiliate manager or the product owner and you can negotiate a special deal, especially if you've been previously making sales for them. It's a lot easier to get them to agree to this if you've been already making some sales, but a lot of folks will do this even if you haven't made sales yet, if you can show them what you're planning on doing.
What you could do is you could negotiate a special deal, and you set a deadline. Even if you don't have a bonus, you can offer a special deal for a very specific period of time to people who are on your list or who are visiting your website, and so that's a way for you to very quickly promote someone else's product and have a special offer, but make sure that it's only for a specific period of time.
BEN SETTLE: Again I'm just thinking out loud here, just for people who ... because I know the kind of people who are going to be reading this interview. Let's say a coach or consultant, how could they use something like Deadline Funnel? What are some ideas for them?
JACK BORN: Okay, so first of all I would say a coach or consultant should have Deadline Funnel in their bag of tricks so that they can increase the conversions for their clients, because the very first thing that you want to be able to do is to get great results for your clients. With Deadline Funnel, one of the things that we did was we set up one of our pricing tiers so that if you are a coach or especially a consultant, you can sign up for our top tier and you can set up subaccounts.
In other words, you don't have to go tell your client, "Hey, go buy Deadline Funnel." You can just say, "Look, if you hire me, I have access to certain tools and resources that I'll use in making your funnel convert better or getting you more sales," and so you can have a subaccount under Deadline Funnel that you just set up for your client and then you manage their account. That's one thing, but you were really asking in terms of how could a coach or a consultant use Deadline Funnel.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah, but that was cool too. Yeah, go ahead.
JACK BORN: How you could use Deadline Funnel if you're a coach or a consultant, so first of all, one of the things that I think that you could do is that you come up with a package. One of the things that I think that people who sell their time and sell their services don't do enough is they don't come up with a package of their products and services and give it a name. I think that even though you're ultimately selling your time and you're selling really an outcome, it's really important to be able to come up with a package name and show, okay, when you buy the startup package you get this, you get this and you get this and so many hours of my time, so many meetings per month, et cetera. If you move up to the pro package, you get this and this and this, and be more creative with the plan names.
The point is that, rather than just showing up like everyone else does and saying, "Hey, Ben, let's talk about your business, you tell me what you need and I'll tell you what the price is," you sound a whole lot more professional if you have packages. Then people are looking at these packages and then deciding between Option A and Option B or Option C, rather than comparing you versus someone else, necessarily.
Once you do that, it's not that much more difficult to have promotions with deadlines for those packages, and that could be something that you do, like you said, an Independence Day package, so if you wanted to do it just a few times a year. Just like having a special discount or a special offer for your catalog of digital products that you sell, you could do the same thing for these packages of services that you offer. Or you can make it part of your funnel, where a certain package normally costs $5,000, but because you're on this webinar, you can get access to it for just $2,500. You can definitely package up your services, give it a price point and then discount it, and then of course you want to put a deadline on it.
BEN SETTLE: Nice. If somebody was putting an event on, for example, like let's take my ex-copywriting apprentice. Had she used Deadline Funnel to promote her event, I bet she would have got a lot more seats filled up.
JACK BORN: I think that you're right, and so the other thing that Jon Benson did ... I'll just tell this story real quick. Jon Benson told me that when he uses technology, he likes to try to come up with creative uses for it. One of the creative things that he did was he actually took the Deadline Funnel code, specifically the countdown image that goes in the emails, and he gave it to his affiliates to use. They were using it in their emails to promote his thing, but that's sort of a tangent. To promote a live event, a live event is really easy because, whether it's a virtual event or it's an offline event like she was putting on, there's a specific day, so there definitely is a deadline for the actual event.
What I've found is that, especially if you're trying to get people from outside of a close geographic area to sign up, if there's travel involved, there's a certain window where it's a lot harder. As you get closer and closer to the event, it becomes a lot harder to sell the event, because it's not necessarily the cost of the event. It's the cost of the travel, because the airline ticket cost for a lot of people becomes prohibitive, and they decide not to do it.
One of the things that you can do with an event is that you can have certain bonuses or price discounts if they register during some sort of early-bird special, and that way you fill up as many seats as you can early on. The best thing, of course, would be to sell out early and have people on a waiting list, like we did for Ocean’s Four.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah. Yeah, that would be ideal. I've got a zinger for you here. Let me see if I can't make all your hair fall out on this one. What about multilevel marketers? Can they use Deadline Funnel?
JACK BORN: I haven't been in the multilevel marketing business for a long time, so I'd have to think about how you would use it. Give me a little bit more specifics. Are they sending people to their own website, or ...
BEN SETTLE: Yeah. You know, I was just thinking, it's probably the exact same way as the affiliate way of doing it, right?
JACK BORN: Yeah, so how did people do that? How did people participate in MLM businesses online? Do they have their own website these days, or how does that work?
BEN SETTLE: Well, that's the ideal way to do it. We'd be talking to a more sophisticated person than the person that uses the replicated site, but yeah. Let's say they're selling health supplements for their MLM. Now, hopefully they're building their own list anyway, right? Assuming they're doing that, would it work just the same as the affiliate marketing strategy?
JACK BORN: Yeah, absolutely. Just like you said, ideally you want to have a mechanism to get people into your funnel and onto your email list, for reasons that we don't cover here. It's a really good idea to build your list, so when you do that, it becomes really simple to add people into Deadline Funnel. Now, I should mention that Deadline Funnel works in hand-in-hand with email marketing, I mean hand-in-glove, perfectly. However, you don't have to use Deadline Funnel with email. If you're just sending people to your page and you want to have a countdown timer on the page, you can do that.
Some of the other things that I'll mention about Deadline Funnel that I think are cool, one of the things that I try to bring to the table and I think I do a good job of is, because I'm the same type of person that I'm selling to, someone who's a direct-response marketer, I think about creative ways to use the technology. It's not just about the technology, it's understanding the psychology behind what works in direct-response marketing, and then working backwards from there and thinking, "Okay, how would I actually do that with technology, and then how could I share that with my Deadline Funnel clients?"
As an example, I guess about a year ago, I was thinking about how, when people go through a live product launch, what typically happens ... and I think this happens every single time ... is that when the launch starts, you're not giving emails that mention anything at all about the deadline. There's no pages where there's the countdown timer or any of that, but it's towards the end of a launch that they start talking about the deadlines, and that this is going away and the cart's going to close.
That really makes sense, because some people are motivated by the social proof and the promises. Some people just believe you. They've been on your list, they've bought your stuff, and they don't need to hear about the deadlines. They're going to buy it just because it's available, and they trust you and they believe in you, so as soon as they can, they're buying it. However, there's a lot of other folks that they're either busy or they're trying to make up their mind, and they're debating and they're procrastinating, and it's that deadline that really gets them to take action, but it's the timing.
I see a lot of folks make the mistake where I opt in for their offer and then right away they're hitting me with, "Hey, there's only ten minutes left to make this decision." I think that's really too fast. It's coming on too strong. I know in your newsletters ... and I love reading your newsletters ... you talk a lot about the similarities between sort of the pickup artist world or the dating, romance world, and really the mistakes that a lot of guys make with chasing after women rather than positioning yourself from a position of strength and not being needy, right?
BEN SETTLE: Yes.
JACK BORN: I think in the very same way, there's a lesson to be learned there that if you come across hitting people over the head with the deadline right away, it can backfire on you. What I teach my Deadline Funnel clients is that it's really about the timing that makes it so powerful. You really want it to show up at the end of your promotion.
With all that in mind, here's what we did for the technology. In Deadline Funnel, we made it very, very easy to set it up where you can say, "I want to hide the countdown across all these different pages until there’s 48 hours left or 72 hours left." You choose when you want it to show up, and then boom, across multiple different pages, including your checkout pages, wherever you want to have it, the countdown shows up.
Imagine this. If there's a five-day sequence that someone's going through and it's an automated, evergreen sequence ... they're hearing about the proof, they're hearing about the case studies, they're hearing about the social proof, additional videos and blog posts and PDFs ... some people are buying right off the bat. If someone hasn't bought, then maybe on day three or day four and certainly on day five, the last day, your emails start talking about the deadline.
When they click on the link, boom, all of those pages where you had all of the videos and the case studies and the PDF downloads, you've got the sales page and the checkout page, all of a sudden the timers appear across all those different pages. It looks like your tech team went and installed all those timers, because of course now that you're talking about the deadline, it makes sense to have the timers on the page. It's that type of thinking about how things operate when it's done live, where everyone has the same deadline, and trying to figure out, "Okay, how can we simulate that so that it's real and genuine but also automated, when it's run evergreen?"
BEN SETTLE: Man, I was just thinking. Now, for people like me who sell continuity by month, I start talking about the next month's deadline usually halfway through the month. I don't do it, obviously, like 30 days in advance. I could actually use this on my sales page and have it say, "Until the next issue, you have this amount of time," basically.
JACK BORN: Yeah, absolutely.
BEN SETTLE: Yeah. That's amazing. That's really cool. All right, man. Well, I'm not going to try any more gotcha questions. Thank you for doing this. This has got my brain on fire with possibilities, and I know it has for others reading it.
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