Struggling to sell your book or course? Why defining a specific result may be the solution
When readers buy a book or a course what they really want are results. Here are 3 ways to define results that make your product…
A way to make your offer so compelling people rave about it
When readers buy a book, a course, or a report, what they really want is a result, not more information. I show you three ways to define results that make what you create irresistible.
In Union, Connecticut, there is a little diner with an out-sized reputation.
It’s been written about in national publications such as The New Yorker and Time Magazine. Even celebrities such as Bill Murray have been known to visit. But why?
The restaurant doesn’t have a massive advertising budget, nor does it offer live entertainment. The food is typical diner food. So what’s the draw? What brings free publicity and customers from miles around is something rather ordinary. Books. The walls are full of them.
This restaurant, called Traveler Food And Books, gives away these volumes to each person who orders food. When people talk about the restaurant, it’s the books they talk about, not the food.
You could say the books are its unique advantage.
When we create information products, we can also build a powerful advantage by doing something few people dare to do — offer specific results. People are drawn to products that provide specific results because they know what they’re getting. They can almost taste it.
Specific results for an information product are about as motivating as specific goals
They have to be so clear that you know when you’ve crossed the finish line. Numbers help. You can count the time it takes to reach the goal — five minutes, three days, or one hour. Other quantities work too. How about learning the top three features of a complex software out of hundreds. You can even use numbers like writing an 800-word article in 60 minutes.
Why are specific results so useful in information products?
People don’t like to buy something vague; they want an info product to be as concrete as an iPhone or a 4k television. It’s easier to consider purchasing a book that shows me how to use three filters that make my photos look more professional in five minutes than to buy a book that only offers to show me how to make my photos look nicer.
When I was selling a coaching package for $3,000, I was asked by one person, “What will I get for my money?” I tried to explain the benefits, but my program was too vague — overcome procrastination. More specific would have been, by the end of the program, you’ll have a three-month plan, and you’ll stick to it until it’s complete.
Here are some other examples of vague results that were improved:
Vague: Improve your SAT essay score.
Specific: Write a 400-word SAT essay in 25 minutes.
Vague: Complete your first 5k race.
Specific: Go from non-runner to finishing a 5k in 12 weeks.
Vague: Learn to be a life coach
Specific: Learn a four-part coaching model in 30 days
How do you find a specific result to deliver?
One way to find a result you can deliver is to look at your past experience. What results are you now able to get? What results did your clients get with your help?
For example, one copywriter I know taught a workshop on how to write sales pages. The workshop was three days long, and by the end of the workshop, participants had about 90% of a sales page complete.
So he retooled the workshop so everyone would complete the sales page in three days. His experience showed him that with a few tweaks, he could take them all the way to done by the end of the workshop. So that became his promise to participants.
Discovering a need is another route to finding a result
Back in 2005, I taught high school students how to maximize their score on the SAT Essay (an essay on a college entrance exam in the US). A researcher at MIT discovered that students who wrote 400 words or more got the highest score 90% of the time. So I designed my course to get students to write high quality, 400-word essays in the 25 minutes they were given. Of course, you won’t always find a specific result or a particular need. What do you do then?
When all else fails, try the Discontented Amazon Customer Approach
That’s where you find top-selling books in your category and go straight to the one and two-star reviews looking for complaints. These customers are often annoyed or angry, but sometimes you hear the same complaints over and over, which lets you know what results they desperately want.
For example, when I was looking at poor reviews from books on creating online courses, I found the same complaint repeated time and again — a lack of specifics on how to actually create a course. That may sound obvious, but I had no idea that these books weren’t providing actual nuts and bolts. I only found that by reading the reviews. So guess what I’ll include in my course — specific steps on how to build a course starting from scratch.
But what if you’re in a field in which no one promises results?
If there’s one area in which people are afraid to promise results, it’s when it comes to visual arts. It’s commonly believed that the ability to draw, for example, is a talent that only some people can possess. However, one cartoonist and marketer named Sean D’Souza created a course that regularly turns out fantastic artists who started out not believing they could draw at all.
What results does he promise?
He takes average people with no artistic background and no confidence in their ability to draw and has them creating professional quality cartoons in 6 months. And judging by the hundreds of testimonials with before and after drawings, it’s easy to see that he gets these results with his students.
However, even when people realize the power of offering results, they often make a crucial error
They assume money is the result. For one thing, it’s usually illegal to promise financial gain. For another, it’s rarely the defining result. I once bought a costly course on writing articles. I was never promised this skill would help me make money.
I was told that by the end of the course, I would be able to finish every article I started and do so in 90-minutes to an hour. Since I had a digital graveyard of dead articles that might never be completed, I was quite happy to pay for that result.
Summary
Specific results are motivating. They make people want your product because they can imagine accomplishing the goal.
People have a harder time saying yes to vague offers. But when you offer specific results, they are more than willing to pay for them.
You can find a specific result by looking at past results you’ve achieved or helped others achieve, by discovering a particular need or by finding unhappy Amazon customers.
If I’m ever in Connecticut, you can bet that I will visit Traveler Food And Books just like Bill Murray did.
I haven’t even checked out the reviews on the food. I know that I want to have the unique experience of being in a restaurant filled with books.
And if you want customers to beat a path to your door, offer them a specific result. That way, when they need a product or service like yours, they will look for you above all others.