One of my copywriting clients has a marketing conundrum:
He sells an app that helps real estate investors track down info on vacant houses. He charges $49 a month for the app. It’s a good product and customers love it. But it’s too practical and too unsexy to sell to people who just click over from YouTube or Facebook.
So what to do?
I had an idea. I told him to create a course on getting hot seller leads… price it at 10x the cost of the app… and put it up for sale on his site.
It doesn’t matter if anybody buys the course. What matters is that he can now legitimately say, “Here’s how to get my premium $497 course on getting hot leads for FREE.” The answer, of course, is that the prospect has to sign up for a trial of the app.
This is not my idea, by the way. It’s been in use in one form or another since prehistoric times, when some Neanderthal started selling a newsletter on mammoth-hunting strategies. But I thought of it because I once saw a Frank Kern VSL that did this exact same thing.
Frank was selling a $397 membership program for consultants and clients. That’s a tough sell to cold traffic.
What wasn’t a tough sell was getting somebody to accept a FREE gift of Frank’s $4k course on getting clients. Of course, the way to get this FREE gift was with a risk-free trial of the $397 membership course.
My point is this:
If you’re in the business of selling a broccoli-of-the-month subscription program, give away a FREE 10-layer chocolate cake to get people to sign up.
You can even offer crazy bribes if you’re giving your broccoli away.
For example, I write a daily email newsletter. It’s totally free to sign up for it. But if you sign up for it here, and you reply to the welcome email and refer to this blog post, I’ll give you a FREE half-hour consult on any topic you may want — such as writing horror-story advertorials… daily emails that bring in the bacon for ecommerce businesses… or getting started as a copywriter and marketer.