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Catherine left a comment to my last post - If Long Sales Pages Work, Why Do You Hate Them So Much? and there was a part of it I want to highlight -

You download a free ebook and invest some time reading it - then you get halfway through and realize that it’s nothing more than a sales pitch for an expensive product.

Now, I feel cheated when that happens, because the author is wasting my time. But, I guess some people don’t.

My initial thought-response to this was that obviously those marketers who provide a genuinely helpful resource for 90% of the content and sell their more expensive product for 10% of the content should do fine. You earn the right to pitch your product after delivering so much value before this.

Some books, blogs and email newsletters seem to have the ratio a bit screwed up and you feel the pitch way too early and way too often, yet this can work still - so what is with that?

The Push Button Solution

The average consumer when looking to solve a problem wants the following in a solution -

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Some of you are not going to agree with this, but it’s the truth.

Raise your hand if you are put off by those long form landing sales pages you see that are used to sell online?

Yep, it seems a lot of you stuck your hand up.

Let me ask you another question -

If you were selling something online would you use the best known tools available to promote or would you prefer to sell using what you considered acceptable?

It’s okay to deliberately choose not to use something to uphold your principles or because you don’t want to be seen as doing something in the past you have not approved of or disliked when others use.

However, you need to be clear about your goals. Are you willing to make fewer sales and less money, potentially even kill an entire project because of these principles?

Why Do You Hate It So Much?

Every single time I’ve sent out a link to a product that uses a long sales page or landing page inevitably a few people leave comments complaining about the use of such ‘annoying’ pages.

The last post to this blog prior to the one you are reading now reviewing the Desperate Buyers Only book linked to a long sales page.

A few people noted in comments to the review that they don’t like products that use such sales pages. I expect these people didn’t buy. According to my stats at least 19 people have purchased because of the review (so far). Whether that’s a good result or not is subjective, but I’m always happy when I sell over $1400 from one blog article.

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I have to hand it to Edmund Loh and Vince Tan for coming up with a slightly different spin on the traditional namesqueeze page for their new Internet marketing newsletter launch - IMGuerilla.com.

If you are not familiar with the namesqueeze, it’s a very common technique in the Internet marketing world for capturing (squeezing) the contact details of people who show a predisposition for what you offer and/or in exchange for information about a topic. You can read my more in-depth explanation of a namesqueeze page here - What Is A Namesqueeze?.

David DeAngelo’s (or really Eben Pagan’s) namesqueeze page at DoubleYourDating.com is considered the de-facto benchmark for a successful namesqueeze. It’s been tested and tested and tested and performs amazingly well, so well that there are hundreds of copy-cats (me included) who replicate David’s techniques. You shouldn’t just copy it blindly, although I expect you will still do okay if you do - it’s that powerful (elegantly simple is more like it).

That being said, the namesqueeze is undoubtedly becoming boring and stale, especially in the Internet marketing niche - it’s everywhere. Which is why when I went and had a look at what Edmund and Vince had come up with that I actually stopped and read the page from start to finish.

These two Asian Internet marketers have used a comic strip instead of copy (well they used a little copy) to capture opt-ins to their squeeze page, and I think they have done a great job. It’s interesting, entertaining and best of all - stands out from the crowd as different and hopefully sets the tone for a unique newsletter launch too.

Here’s a quick sample…

You can read the whole comic at http://IMGuerilla.com/.

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Read previous articles in this series:

• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 1: Build Your Preeminence
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 2: Communication Channels
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 3: Technology
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 4: Content and Pricing
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 5: Triggers

With your basic understanding of triggers now in place from part five of this series, lets take a look at how you implement a prelaunch and then a launch for your membership site.

During prelaunch and launch you use the marketing channels and relationships you have established to build buzz about the content you are about to release (or really, the offer you are about to make), using the technology you set up to deliver the content and communicate with potential customers.

If you did your hard work leading up to this stage much of what you are about to do will be reasonably routine, it’s almost “paint by numbers” easy, but I doubt there is ever any launch that goes according to plan, mine certainly didn’t, so you must prepare for the unexpected and be ready to react to any situation that is thrown at you.

Launch Vs. Prelaunch - What is the Difference?

There is not much difference in terms of the overall strategy for your prelaunch vs. your launch, which is to build buzz and convince people to join your membership site, however what you communicate to people and what you are attempting to achieve during each phase is subtly different.

I consider the “prelaunch” everything you do leading up to the launch day and “launch” being the actual day you release your membership site (you take on paying members) and the days following it. Your prelaunch is designed to pre-sell your membership site, where your launch is designed to sell it. That may sound very similar, but the psychology is slightly different.

The Prelaunch

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Read previous articles in this series:

• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 1: Build Your Preeminence
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 2: Communication Channels
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 3: Technology
• How To Launch A Membership Site - Part 4: Content and Pricing

I’d like to tell you that your hard work is done, but really you have only just laid the foundation for a successful membership site and now the real work begins. Everything you learned so far in this series - building and demonstrating preeminence, finding ways to market, bringing together the right technology components, deciding on the content you will provide and how much you charge - all come together during the prelaunch and launch phase. This is the make or break time for your membership site - it’s the money time.

Triggers

Before discussing what you do during the prelaunch and launch phases in the next article I want to briefly relate to you some of the major triggers you are attempting to elicit in people. It’s these triggers that create the right conditions for people to feel comfortable making the decision to join your membership site - in fact they should feel an overwhelming compulsion to join if you use these triggers well.

Note that many of these elements are going to feel like you are “tricking” people, that you are attempting to force them into a decision that isn’t necessarily in their best interest by manipulating their emotions. Guess what - it’s true!

I don’t want to jump into a deep philosophical debate over the current state of our capitalist driven, self-serving, environmentally destructive, self-esteem crushing society in this article, but I can’t lie to you - everything you are about to learn is designed to make people desire something they don’t need (in most circumstances anyway).

Marketing is a social science - it’s the study of human behavior - and everything you are learning in this series relates to human behavior. Remember that marketing and these triggers are not inherently wrong, they are simply understandings we have come to as a result of testing. It’s what the knowledge is used for that the potential for abuse arises.

The problem is - and this is where the agitation many people feel towards marketing arises from - that we use our understanding of human behavior to manipulate people into making purchasing decisions for things they don’t need, purely in the interest of profit. It’s a self destructive formula that we feel the negative effects of every day, no person is immune to it and most of the problems in western society are at least somewhat related to it.

It’s not my job to present alternatives to these methods and frankly, I don’t have any good answers anyway. I personally make the decision every day to be a marketer and use these triggers when I run my business and I don’t think I could argue that anything I sell or recommend are necessities in life. I offer “wants”, not “needs”, chances are you do too.

What I can say to you is when you use these triggers that you attempt to be as “honest” as you can, which is the philosophy I apply. Don’t say anything you can’t back up, don’t make promises you can’t keep and use your own internal compass as a guide.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at these triggers.

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