The New Rules of Internet Marketing

The process of persuading someone to buy from you is something that needs to be considered by any internet marketer. I have written and sold a book, but I’m not necessarily going to get rich from selling a book so that feels like that first step. I learned this through these podcast interviews. Obviously I endeavor to give out great content and then people take the next little step, which is yes, I’m happy with what Dave’s putting out. The next little step is buying the book and gradually you’re getting them to make bigger and bigger commitments.

For me the book, learn SEO step by step, is the top of my funnel. Really social media is the top of my funnel. That’s the free line for me, so that everything that I give away on social media is free and then when I get them to engage and buy the book, I know that’s the first step to establishing a profitable following.

There are two different groups of people for me, the SEO company and wordpress direct review. There are the people who haven’t bought from me yet and there are the people who have bought from me.

The people who have bought from me have moved further down into the funnel. They buy the book, they’ve become more interested in what I do. They’ve given me an initial early yes, saying yes, I trust you, yes, I’m compelled by what you say, I want to read your book and I want to see if my experience with your book matches my expectation. When experience meets expectation, then they move further down the funnel.

They may buy a set of DVDs like my Renegades of Persuasion for $200 or they may buy another product or a tele seminar I’m doing or something like that for $100 or $200. They may come to one of my live events for which they’re going to pay anything between $1000 and $2000.

Each time they make that purchase, they become more valuable to me and they move further and further down the funnel. They are not just valuable in the sense that they’ve spent more money with me, but valuable in the sense that the deeper they get into my funnel, the more religious they are in their willingness to help me spread my message.

These are my true believers. These are the people who are going to go out and defend me at all costs whether I defend myself or not. These are the people who are going to go out and tell their friends and family to buy this product or service. These are the people who are going to get their colleagues to do it, these are the people who are going to come to my events and be my evangelists. Those people have tremendous value to me and they’re to be protected with great vigor.

It’s funny how you can already start to see the parallels drawn between that and what happens in a cult. You get those few key members who are the ones who are really strong believers and I think Cialdini talked about the idea of looking around to other people to get cues about how you should be responding.

As I start to build this up, I try to help cultivate that and help that propagate that. Here’s one of the biggest fallacies of word of mouth marketing. Everybody says word of mouth marketing is the best marketing I can get. But word of mouth marketing works both directions. If people don’t understand what they should say about you, they’ll say anything about you. My focus is to get as many people as possible who will take my message and repeat it verbatim as I can. I’m constantly telling people what are good things to say. Of course I’m not going out and being that blatant about it, saying, please say this about me.

What I’m saying is, here’s the message I repeat over and over again so that you understand it and then that’s the message you’ll repeat. People parrot what they remember. So we want them to remember these certain things about me.

When you’re looking at building up this group of true believers, you want to give them things they can talk about, so that they can go out and tell people the best and most relevant things that will get those people to jump into the top of your funnel and hopefully dive in deep and grab a book or grab a book and tape set early because they came in with a recommendation.