Uh oh.
My post from yesterday gave a bunch of examples of infotainment I plan to put into my upcoming book on essential oils.
But the examples I used were often taken from sales materials, rather than info products themselves.
Is this a giant screw-up on my part?
Let’s see.
Copywriting all-star Gary Bencivenga once said that sales material should be valuable enough to read on its own.
On the other hand, prolific marketer Dan Kennedy embodies the idea that paid products should also sell. (They can sell other products, or at least you as an expert.)
In other words, paid and free content can and should be quite similar. Here are a few other points to think about:
Also, former Boardroom exec Brian Kurtz talked about the kinds of premiums (aka bonuses) that Boardroom would give away with their books. What they found is that when somebody buys something, the best thing is to sell or give them more of the same. So if they are buying a health book, offer them 3 more health books as a bonus.
Finally, supplement marketer Justin Goff does something similar in the world of supplements: simply offer the buyer more bottles of the same supplement as an upsell.
And here’s how this ties back to info products or sales pages (or sales emails) that promote those products:
If somebody is “buying” your free promotional products…
In other words, if they tune in regularly to hear your personality and stories and lame jokes and whatever else you use to spice up your free promotional content, whether that’s emails, or blog posts, or speeches behind a podium….
Then it makes no sense to turn off that tap when you charge them money for an info product.
Of course, the paid product should be valuable and should close some of those loops that the free content opens. But it should continue to be entertaining (and even to sell) in the same way as your free stuff — or you will have some sore and disappointed customers.
And that in a nutshell, is why infotainment examples from sales letters — as well as more direct sales techniques — can go straight behind the paywalled curtain as well.