Proven Strategies Can Kill Your Business

In John Reese’s Mar­ket­ing Secrets Forum, a forum in which I am the senior mod­er­a­tor, mem­ber John Jarowski posted a really impor­tant ques­tion. He asked, and I’m para­phras­ing John for the sake of brevity:

“When a new strat­egy is taught by some ‘guru’, every­body seems to copy it with­out tweak­ing it. This dilutes their effec­tive­ness and puts me off tremen­dously. I would think that using any ‘new’ mar­ket­ing strat­egy is a lot less effec­tive once it gets diluted by lazy mar­keters who want to do cookie cut­ter style marketing.”

I agree. And let me tell you why this is true, and share with you impor­tant tips on how to avoid this.

First, a case in point. When I wrote John Reese’s famous million-​​dollar Traf­fic Secrets copy, and for­mat­ted it using copy, col­ors and tested con­ver­sion strate­gies, I started teach­ing these tech­niques (some openly, some to my coach­ing clients only).

The prob­lem is, either you started see­ing Reese-​​like saleslet­ters pop­ping up all over the place, or a ton of peo­ple would be ask­ing me to redo their saleslet­ter ask­ing for the same thing. “I want a John Reese let­ter,” they’d exclaim. They did so, partly because they (erro­neously) believed it would bring them the same amount of sales, and partly because they knew that this style has been tested and proven to sell.

(Keep in mind that the sales copy, on the day of the launch, had very lit­tle to do with the suc­cess of Traf­fic Secrets. It had more to do with John Reese’s bril­liance, and John’s appli­ca­tion of Jeff Walker’s prod­uct launch for­mula, which was still unknown at the time.)

The unfor­tu­nate con­se­quence is, every­one started to copy the style, the col­ors, the head­line, etc with their sales copy. And this led to another prob­lem: peo­ple start get­ting desen­si­tized. That style used to be the high­est con­vert­ing saleslet­ter for­mat online. Now, it’s gone down a lot. Why? Because every­one sees the same thing. They hit a web­site with a blue back­ground and red head­line, and imme­di­ately think “Salesletter!”

And then they leave.

I think there’s a lot of power in learn­ing from what mar­ket­ing experts teach. But when they teach it, doing so sup­poses that the tech­niques work like gang­busters because the author is teach­ing from expe­ri­ence. This then becomes the spring­board for their pro­lif­er­a­tion — and even­tual dilu­tion — as peo­ple tend to copy the techniques.

How­ever, since what “gurus” teach is mostly from their own suc­cess and their own expe­ri­ence, shouldn’t that tell you some­thing? You bet.

I’m not against experts and gurus and suc­cess­ful mar­keters teach­ing what helped them in their suc­cess. That’s the basis of pretty much the entire infor­ma­tion mar­ket­ing indus­try. But why do peo­ple have to wait until the tech­niques are taught to start apply­ing them?

My best tip on this is this: don’t wait until “the course comes out,” and every­one buys it and starts to copy it. Fol­low what my friend Armand Morin teaches as the bet­ter mar­ket­ing strategy…

OBSERVE.

When John launched Traf­fic Secrets, a few jeal­ous peo­ple were whin­ing and com­plain­ing about John’s suc­cess. Whether it was the price, the strat­egy, the saleslet­ter or the launch itself, they were not happy — and, among oth­ers, resorted to the idea that it would never work for them, and that it would only work with John because “he’s a guru,” with a lot of money, a lot of part­ners, a lot of affil­i­ates, a lot of whatever.

But instead of bitch­ing about it, why couldn’t they sim­ply stop, pause and observe how John did it? If they only paid atten­tion to how John Reese cre­ated one of the most suc­cess­ful prod­uct launches on the Inter­net, they could have learned a thing or two about how to make money — rather than com­plained about it.

So be obser­vant. Watch peo­ple around you. Check out other mar­keters and how they sell, even with non-​​marketing prod­ucts. See how they suc­cess­fully roll out cam­paigns, launch prod­ucts, adver­tise, write copy, etc. Don’t wait until they come out with a course on “how they did it.” If you can (and you can if you open your eyes a bit more), you can observe and learn before every­one else does the same thing after the mar­keter sells a course on how she did it.

For exam­ple, when John came out with Traf­fic Secrets, even before Jeff Walker launched his Prod­uct Launch For­mula, peo­ple should have watched John, observed what he did, taken a ton of notes, and tried it them­selves before every­one else and their neigh­bor did. (But you, on the other hand, shouldn’t stop there. You should do one extra thing, and I’ll come back to this shortly.)

Armand told me (and many of his audi­ences when he speaks) that his best prod­uct ideas and mar­ket­ing tac­tics come from sim­ply observ­ing what kind of ques­tions peo­ple ask, espe­cially at sem­i­nars. He’d lis­ten to what kind of prob­lems they had and what kind of solu­tions they wished for. Even when some­one asked a speaker at a sem­i­nar, “How do you do this?” Armand would think to him­self, “Ah, there’s a poten­tial prod­uct idea right there.”

You should do the same.

(Armand wasn’t the only one, by the way. When I worked with Corey Rudl, I learned that he taught this tech­nique as well. In the early pre-​​Car-​​Secrets days, Corey used to go on the car and auto­mo­tive forums a lot… not to post nec­es­sar­ily, but to surf the forums to see what was being asked and what peo­ple were look­ing for. His first kit car prod­ucts, then Car Secrets Revealed book and then Mar­ket­ing Tips course, became the even­tual result.)

Sure, the rule is to learn what other peo­ple want, and then give it to them. And this applies to all mar­ket­ing, all mar­ket­ing strate­gies and all indus­tries — not just Inter­net mar­ket­ing. Sim­ply observe and see what other peo­ple are doing as well. If they’re suc­cess­ful, then take notes. And then try them out yourself.

My own forum (and now my blog) was cre­ated for this rea­son (among many oth­ers). It’s a fer­tile ground for get­ting ideas for my own copy­writ­ing prod­ucts and mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Blogs are just as help­ful, too. Peo­ple read, com­ment, ask, etc.

But don’t just stick to forums and blogs. While mail­ing lists are fan­tas­tic sources for mar­ket research (and you should def­i­nitely have your own), you should join other people’s lists, too. Watch what they’re doing. Read what they’re say­ing. See what they’re sell­ing. And learn how they’re sell­ing it.

In fact, buy other peo­ple prod­ucts (not just their “how to” prod­ucts but other prod­ucts that have noth­ing to do with mar­ket­ing or infor­ma­tion). And watch how they work. See how they fol­low up and upsell you. “Read between the lines,” so to speak.

In short, be a sponge.

Now here’s the extra step I men­tioned ear­lier. Sec­ondly, if you’re going to “copy suc­cess” (rather than “cre­ate medi­oc­rity,” as the adage goes), then try to be a lit­tle more cre­ative. This is where you shouldn’t be lazy. Apply what you learn in a unique way. You don’t have to be entirely unique. Per­haps just do it a bit dif­fer­ently. Rather than becom­ing a cookie-​​cutter mar­keter your­self, add a unique twist. Or apply it in a dif­fer­ent way.

Granted, peo­ple are lazy. That’s not the prob­lem. What hap­pens is that, while peo­ple learn from other experts because they are lazy, they become even lazier. They want to learn new suc­cess­ful strate­gies, not so much to do what is suc­cess­ful but to stop them from (you guessed it) work­ing hard.

Dupli­cat­ing suc­cess should stop you from guess­ing. (And to me, guess­ing is work­ing harder.) But it shouldn’t stop you from work­ing smarter. In other words, sure you can save your­self a lot of has­sle by copy­ing the gurus. But that doesn’t mean no work. It’s the false sense of secu­rity peo­ple get when they buy such courses, think­ing that, if they copy oth­ers’ suc­cesses, they don’t have to do any work.

And therein lies the prob­lem: peo­ple tend to wimp out or become too lazy. They expect overnight riches. That, in itself, is not the prob­lem. The prob­lem is that they expect overnight riches with­out any work.

I believe you can work less by copy­ing suc­cess because you save the guess­work and gain a solid base to work from. But it doesn’t mean you stop work­ing alto­gether. It does requires a bit of effort, a bit of brain power, a bit of cre­ativ­ity, a bit of differentiation.

And that’s my biggest qualm.

Peo­ple should work smarter, not harder. But because any ounce of work seems hard to them, they tend to resort to buy­ing courses with the sole aim of dupli­cat­ing proven strate­gies to the let­ter. When too many peo­ple do this, it causes the even­tual dilu­tion of the strategy.

Being lazy will never change. But if you want a leg up on your com­pe­ti­tion, if you want to increase your chances of suc­cess with an already skep­ti­cal, cyn­i­cal mar­ket­place (such as Inter­net mar­ket­ing), then observe what’s going on around you instead. Learn from other people’s suc­cess before they teach about their suc­cess. And then, whether you apply what you observe or what you learn from their “how to” courses, try to make it unique.

Don’t dupli­cate. Differentiate.

About the Author

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