After my first and very successful “I endorse YOU” auction back in December, I haven’t had much luck coming up with an auction offer that really excited my audience. A few of the flops:
#1. An A-Z system for growing your list via newsletter ads, from finding the right newsletters, to getting the lowest rates, to making ~$10 for every new subscriber
#2. The behind-the-scenes info of auctions I’ve been running with partners, plus info on how I’ve gotten each such partner
#3. A penny auction to find out what marketing book I’ve been reading repeatedly this whole year and keeping hidden, because it’s simply too valuable to share publicly
Auction archwizard Travis Sago says that one of the easiest things to auction off is licensing rights to a course, at least if you got a course, and if you got an audience of marketers who want to make money.
Is that right?
I don’t know. My gut feeling is against it but my gut’s failed me many times before. I am willing to put it to the test and find out.
A few days ago, I listened to a podcast about the realities of the book publishing business:
1. Publishers publish a bunch of books, then sell the books to bookstores.
2. If the bookstores cannot sell all the books they bought, they send the books back to the publisher and ask for their money back.
3. In case the publisher is left holding a bunch of books no bookstores wants, they try to recoup at least some of the value. They auction off the books in a kind of fire sale auction to whoever is willing to pay for the lot (or any fraction of the lot).
4. The rest of the books, the ones that cannot be sold via the fire sale auction, are fed into a shredder, chopped up, and then turned into pulp, to recoup at least a few cents on the dollar of value.
With that preamble, lemme ask you:
Would you participate in my fire sale auction?
The offer on auction is the licensing and resell rights my Copy Riddles course, which currently retails for $997.
Would you bid $1 for the right to sell Copy Riddles yourself, forever, and keep every cent of the $997, or whatever you choose to sell it for?
Copy Riddles is the best thing I’ve created. Out of all my courses, books, and trainings, it’s likely to be useful to the greatest number of people. If anything I’ve created outlasts this newsletter, it will be Copy Riddles.
And yet, I haven’t been really selling it.
In part, it’s because I’ve gotten out of the “teach you copywriting” business.
In part, it’s because my list is growing so slowly and the price point of Copy Riddles is so high that it makes little sense for me to promote Copy Riddles regularly, since I have largely tapped out easy demand in my own list.
That said, Copy Riddles has still has brought in ~20k/year over the past few years, which I’ve made by running a creative and exciting promo for just a few days, once a year.
Would you want to sell Copy Riddles yourself? To your own audience or to other people’s audiences?
You’d be free to reposition it, free to repackage it, free to transform it into another format or AI tool or live workshop or audio book, or to break it up into pieces and sell it that way.
Of course, if I were to run this fire sale auction, I’d throw in some bonuses to make the auction offer more unique and exciting and FIRE.
But really, the core offer is Copy Riddles, and your right to sell it in perpetuity and keep all the money.
Would you bid $1 for that?
If you would, hit reply and let me know. Otherwise I’ll start priming my shredder and wood pulper, and try to reclaim at least a few cents of the $997 value.