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One thing I’ve discovered in several years of online activity is that selling is not one of my strengths. I’ve known this for a long time, of course. One of my first jobs as a high school student was working in a local stereo shop trying to sell Commodore computers (this was in the early 80s). People would come in and say they wanted to buy a computer to store their recipes and such. I’d tell them to get a set of index cards, it would be a lot less hassle and take up a lot less space. Didn’t take long for the store owners to give me the boot! I ended up working at a grocery store packing bags and stocking shelves. All because I wasn’t able to sell.

Selling is an art. I’m not sure it’s something you can teach. Either you have it — the ability to persuade someone to buy — or you don’t. A good salesperson is a good salesperson, it doesn’t really matter what they’re selling.

Most geeks are not good salespeople. Something about telling it like it is, being focused on features, and generally not being deceptive about things. (Am I being cynical here?) As many of us discovered during our early dating years, there is such a thing as too much honesty, especially too quickly. Selling is lot like dating, I think: you want to attract the other party’s interest without revealing too much of yourself too early. There’s a real balancing act there.

That’s why finding a partner who can sell is something you’ll want to do if you really want to succeed. Because the people who really succeed have the human angle figured out.

That’s what I think, anyhow….

As I write this, there is a particular frenzy today among Internet marketers as Product Launch Formula 2 launches. I refer to this frenzy as the firstborn child bonus technique.

Buy Through My Link And Get My Firstborn Child As A Bonus!

The firstborn child bonus technique is a technique used most often by Internet marketers trying to sell to other Internet marketers. When a big product launches, there are so many IMers clamoring to sell it that more than a few resort to the FCB technique in order to be heard above the din.

The premise of FCB is simple, and the heading above pretty much says it all: as additional incentive, I will send you a bonus if you buy product X through my affiliate link. It may not in fact be the firstborn child, it may only be the youngest child or even a niece of nephew — the size of the bonus depends entirely on the size of the affiliate commission.

Thus when products are launched that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, the bonuses offered by top-name Internet marketers can be quite astounding: piles of books and software, free telephone consultations, promotion of your own products to their lists, etc. The purported prices of these bonuses can literally add up into the thousands themselves, though of course it’s unlikely that someone would actually buy all of those products at the listed prices. Still, it makes for an impressive offer.

It’s extremely hard for the little guy to compete with the big guys on these kinds of offerings. You’re probably better off focusing your energies on other things while the top cats fight it out among themselves.

One of the axioms of Internet marketing is that “the money is in the list“. Gathering a list of potential customers and contacting them on a regular basis is a tried-and-true method for generating sales. That’s why building a mailing list is so important.

The standard way to build a list is via a squeeze page. At its simplest, a squeeze page is just a web page with some text and a subscription form. The text entices visitors to enter their name and email address in order to gain access to a newsletter, course, or some other free offering.

Building a squeeze page is not hard for the typical geek, of course: it’s just HTML, after all, and there’s no fancy coding required — and the geek literally just paste sin the subscription form provided by the mailing list provider (geeks may be tempted to manage mailing lists on their own, but it’s not a wise use of their time). No, creating the page isn’t the hard part, it’s what’s on the page that’s hard.

Imagine someone approaching you on the street and asking for your name and phone number. Would you give it to them? Unlikely unless they do something to build some trust and you feel you’re going to benefit from revealing your personal information to a third party. And yet, that’s exactly what a squeeze page is doing — asking someone for personal information (be sure to have an explicit privacy policy, by the way) in exchange for…

For what, exactly? No one’s going to sign up for your list unless they’re getting back in return. The geek knows this, of course, and so they’ll list all the benefits of joining the list right there on the squeeze page. “This course will teach you…“, “Learn about…“, “Become a better…” are typical ways of expressing how a visitor will benefit from joining the list. (The key word here being benefits, of course, and not features — something not all geeks realize.)

Here’s the real squeeze page secret, though. Forget about listing the benefits of joining your list, it’s almost irrelevant. Instead, offer a freebie download — an “ethical bribe” so to speak — and promote its benefits. Make joining your list (which still needs to be mentioned somewhere) a side benefit, but not the focus of the squeeze page. The squeeze page is all about the freebie.

Why a freebie? Because it’s immediate gratification. Because it feels like they get more from giving up precious personal information. Because it gives you opportunities for further selling (embedded links in documents, banners in software, etc.). Because it works.

As a geek you can easily create your own freebies, too. If you like to write, create a special report. Or a video. Or, and this is something that really only the geeks can do, write some software to give away.

That’s the squeeze page secret: give them a freebie. It’s amazing what people will do to get something for free — giving a name and email address doesn’t seem that hard when they’re getting an ebook or software in return. Professional Internet marketers know this — and now so do you.

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