Comedian Norm MacDonald once started a standup show when a heckler in the audience yelled out:
“Hey, you’re not very funny!”
The crowd, all of whom where there to see Norm, started booing the heckler. One guy yelled, “Toss the asshole out!”
Norm calmed the crowd down. “Now hold on,” he said. He wanted to understand what exactly happened. And he started talking to the heckler.
“So you go, ‘I’m gonna pay money to go see this dude…’ I want to understand what exactly happened. At some point in your life, you thought I was funny.”
The past couple days, I promoted Andrew Kap’s book, 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books. I even gave away a couple free bonuses to people who bought that book.
A lot of people took me up on the offer. They wrote in to say thanks for turning them on to Andrew’s book, and to ask for the bonuses I had promised.
Among all these people was one guy who first wrote me with proof of buying the book and then, before I could reply with the bonuses, wrote me a second message to say:
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I gave back the title, I’m sorry. Didn’t really apply to me. Don’t want to scam you for the bonuses.
Sorry, really like your stuff though.
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It’s standard daily email operating procedure to shame people who refund stuff or who say they can’t get value out of a valuable offer. It’s even common to toss them off your list.
But I thought, good on this guy for realizing eventually this doesn’t apply to him… and even more so for having the decency to write me and say so.
Still, just like Norm, I told myself, I want to understand what exactly happened here.
My email went out at 8:34pm.
My reader read my email and got excited. He bought the book immediately. By 9:00pm, he got the confirmation email from Amazon, forwarded it to me, and asked for the bonuses. Even though, as he realized over the next few minutes, this book or the bonuses or the promises didn’t really apply to him.
How exactly does this happen?
Clearly, the promo nature of my email had something to do with it. The deadline… the disappearing bonuses… the exciting, opportunity-like promises of it all.
But here’s the point, the message from this email:
Those things — deadlines, bonuses, exciting promises — are rooms in the house of persuasion. The house itself is built on a foundation. And that foundation is either stable and strong, or shifting and weak.
The foundation is trust. In my case, trust built up by daily emailing.
That’s how people find out in the first place about offers I create and deadlines I set. That’s how they get excited about the disappearing bonuses I announce and exciting promises I make.
Getting people to trust you like this is nothing mysterious or difficult.
It’s just a matter of consistency.
Like I said, in my case, that’s via daily emails. For years now. And though my offers change, and daily email topics change, and even my own attitudes change, there’s still some consistent core that people can rely on and trust.
You can do the same.
The longer you do it, the better. But it doesn’t have to take years to build up trust. It can be done in months, weeks, days, or sometimes even hours, if you say the right things.
But it all starts with saying something, and then doing so again, in some regular, consistent way.
My introductory offer — the least expensive course I offer — is an introduction to writing daily emails, called Simple Money Emails.
I’ve used the techniques in this course to write quick emails for clients that made lots of money.
But more importantly, I’ve used them for myself to create long-running relationships that lead to trust, engagement, and urgent sales like the above.
If you’d like to find out how you can do something similar, then take a look here: