This morning, my floating guardian angel, Fred Beyer, wrote me a new message.
Over the years, Fred has repeatedly appeared out of the ether and pointed out harmful glitches and technical muckups in my marketing that were costing me thousands of dollars in lost sales.
But this morning, Fred wasn’t pointing out a technical issue. Instead he sent me a warning about my copy, specifically about a potentially harmful testimonial for my Copy Riddles program. He wrote:
===
There’s a testimonial on your sales page that mentions the initial $300 you charged for Copy Riddles.
“Probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”
I’ve come across this before myself and I’ve always felt kind of cheated when I found out the training was now significantly more expensive.
There’s an inner voice that goes: “Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”
Obviously You’re the expert.
I just wanted to share, in case this little testimonial drowned in the hubbub of running your biz.
===
Fred raises a good point.
That “best 300 bucks ever” is a kind of anti-anchoring. It goes against the smart marketing practice of pegging your price to a drastically higher sum, and then lopping off zeros to your prospect’s relief and joy.
Perhaps the thing to do would be to take that “300 bucks” testimonial down.
But I never miss an opportunity to flirt with sales prevention. So rather than take that testimonial down, I will actually highlight it. Here’s the full version, which came from Robert Smith, who runs his own CRO agency. Robert wrote:
===
I’ve spent close to 150k on copy courses and mentors.
John Bejakovic’s Bullet Copy course is probably the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent.
One word: “source”. He shows you source material — pre twist — and then re-twists it, so you know how the twist works.
Just send him an email and ask him to enroll you in it.
If, after lesson one, you don’t immediately say, “this is the best 300 bucks I’ve ever spent”, then send an email to rob@robertsmithmedia.com and I’ll send you a refund (then, write your name down in my book of “copywriters I’ll never hire.”)
===
Robert went through Copy Riddles back in 2021. And yes, the course has gone up in price since.
I first sold Copy Riddles at a low price and I gradually pushed the price up — this made it psychologically easier to sell something of my own.
In the meantime, my own status has grown, the endorsements for Copy Riddles have poured in, and today I can and do sell this course for $1,000.
But that’s about me me me. What about you you you? How is it possibly fair to you that I’m charging $1,000 for Copy Riddles today, when I charged just $300 for it a couple years ago?
First of all, $1,000 is still a fair price and then some.
If you actually go through this course and apply what it teaches in a real marketing endeavor, then the info inside can be worth tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars to you over your career.
You might think that’s exaggeration. But it’s just the nature of copywriting and marketing. Good selling skills, multiplied over a large enough audience, can create a lot of wealth, and quickly.
Second, a high, achievable, but uncomfortable price actually makes it more likely you will profit from the course.
I don’t believe the old chestnut, “If they pay, they pay attention.” I know many people who pay, and still never do anything with what they paid for.
But I do believe that if you pay a lot of money, and that makes nervous, you will push yourself out of your comfort zone and find ways to justify the uncomfortable price to yourself.
If you ask me for proof, I can give you myself as an example.
Some five years ago, I joined the coaching group of A-list copywriter Dan Ferrari. Over the course of about six months, I paid Dan multiple tens of thousands of dollars for this coaching.
This wasn’t money I could easily spare. In fact, I was eating away my savings, because I was paying Dan more than I was making. Each month, when it was time to make a new multi-thousand payment to Dan, I literally had cold sweat on my forehead and electric shocks down my spine.
I’ve written before about my experiences with this coaching:
Dan gave me valuable and practical marketing and copywriting ideas. But the real value was the price I was paying him. It made me so uncomfortable that I worked much harder to apply the ideas Dan gave me, to hustle and make do, simply because I had to.
Result:
In the month after I was done with Dan’s coaching, the floodgates opened. I started making the kind of money I had never made with copywriting before. Within the first two months at this new level, I had fully paid off the tens of thousands of dollars I had paid to Dan.
So to answer the question that was rumbling in Fred’s mind, and that may be rumbling in yours…
“Sure it was worth 300, but is it worth 1000?”
The answer is, it really depends.
Copy Riddles consists of 20 rounds. Each round covers a key copywriting concept.
If you don’t bother to go through all of the rounds, or if you don’t bother to apply them anywhere where they can possibly make you money, then Copy Riddles won’t be worth $1,000 to you, or any fraction of that.
On the other hand, if you go through each of these 20 rounds earnestly… if you do the daily exercises I give you… and if you apply the lessons in your own business or in your clients’ businesses, there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be worth $1,000 to you, and much, much, much more.
So Robert’s possibly harmful testimonial stays up. In case you’d like to see it in its native environment, or get started with Copy Riddles right now, here’s the link: