Business Psychology | Finch Sells

How to Use ‘Free’ to Your Advantage

Jul 17 2012

There’s a huge difference between marketing a service as ‘free’ and marketing it as ‘premium’ with a free incentive. Never underestimate the negative connotations that ‘free’ has on the anticipated quality of service.

As marketers, we tend to assume that free is always a good thing. And so our landing pages are plastered in free registrations, free bonuses and free instant access.

The worst offending affiliates will explain that something is free before explaining what it actually does. They sell the $0 before the product!

Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.

A lot of items are free in this world.

I could run outside and steal my neighbour’s garbage. That’s free.

I could spend £20 at Pizza Hut and get some free BBQ wings. But will I? Probably not. I don’t like wings.

Unless you establish a real desire to attain what is being offered for free, free does not sell.

So, why do affiliates continue to worship the supposed ‘benefit’ that X costs $0, when the user could barely give a shite about ‘free’. He doesn’t want free. He wants a good deal.

Note: Hey, at least they’re selling it as a benefit rather than a feature. Otherwise we really would be shooting basic psychology in the balls.

Free only becomes a powerful asset in your sales copy after the user has established “what I think X is worth to me“. And not a moment before.

This is where so many get it wrong. They never allow that worth to be established.

You have to establish value to create desire.

Here’s an example for a dating offer I posted on the Stack That Money Forum last week (sign up!)…

Meet the finest men in New York City for just $37/month*
Sign up in the next 15 minutes for an exclusive FREE peek at our men

*Most of our women only pay $37 once. Don’t be surprised if you find the man of your dreams before your trial membership expires. Yep, it sucks for us, but it’s unmissable value for you. This is your last chance to sign up free, so hurry!

Instead of taking the angle that the offer is free and therefore unmissable, it’s much more powerful to ask probing questions of the user’s own valuation system.

To put it more bluntly, here’s the thought sequence that we’re dictating…

The service is not free.
It must be a quality service.
Women are paying $37 to find love in their first 30 days.
Would I pay $37 if it meant finding love?

Most women are going to answer yes to this dream scenario.

Now that we’ve created an anchor where the possibility of finding love is worth at least $37 (in the user’s own head, where all effective anchors reside), we can drop our bombshell.

“Hold on, If I sign up in the ‘next 15 minutes’… I don’t have to pay a penny? But what about all those women paying $37/month?”

We’ve already established $37 as a bargain price. Now we’re hitting our target with a simply unmissable deal (free instant access!) compounded by the scarcity of time.

Act in the next 15 minutes or an exclusive peek at a premium service is gone forever.

There are many affiliate offers that use free incentives to attract sign-ups, and we are more than happy to oblige when it comes to making those incentives our number one selling points.

It’s amateur. We should be embarrassed.

The word ‘free’ should never appear in a landing page headline.

Our role is to establish a desire that is worth much more than any free service can provide.

Once we’ve created that desire, ‘free’ is the sucker punch that seals a knife-edge deal. It should never be the primary selling point.

Remember: Marketing always leads back to selling something – it wouldn’t exist if we only dealt in freebies.

Recommended This Week

If you haven’t downloaded it already, make sure you grab a copy of my freshly brewed Affiliate Marketer’s Survival Kit (add your email below for access). It’s 50 pages of up-to-the-second info on what currently works in affiliate marketing.
Be sure to check out Adsimilis, the official sponsor of Premium Posts Volume 5. Adsimilis is one of the most effective networks in the world for a CPA marketer to sink his teeth in to. They are particularly dominant in the dating vertical, with industry leading payouts. If you are a dating affiliate, you need to be on Adsimilis. Simples.

Grow A Monster Blog By Manipulating This 1 Human Flaw

Jan 04 2012

“Thanks to Google, we can instantly seek out support for the most bizarre idea imaginable. If our initial search fails to turn up the results we want, we don’t give it a second thought, rather we just try out a different query and search again.”
– Justin Owings

This is one of my favourite quotes on the subject of confirmation bias – our tendency to pick and choose facts where they suit us, neglecting anything that goes against our argument. It’s something that should interest all Internet Marketers, and particularly those who run blogs.

I often say that to be successful as an ‘expert’ or a consultant, you don’t need to know everything – just a tiny bit more than your average reader. You can be a successful blogger by validating what your audience already knows. It’s one of our many rational defects that we rarely seek new information, and would much rather find confirmation that our existing views are truthful and valid.

Confirmation bias: The tendency of people to favour information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.

Successful bloggers are brilliant at exploiting this bias. They roll out content that is designed to look informative, but usually only confirms what the reader already knew. The best bloggers will go one step further. They’ll produce content that validates what a reader can only speculate to be true, thus sealing the role of ‘authority in a niche’, as my fellow Internet Marketers like to put it.

Unlike journalists, bloggers do not have to stick rigidly to the confines of fact over fiction. The secret to success lies in how we are perceived. By feeding readers the right blend of useless crap they already knew, and useless crap they always assumed, we can portray ourselves as figures of authority where it isn’t truly deserved. Some of the biggest and most popular blogs in the world rely on steady diets of ‘expert advice’ that serve merely to nail us to our beliefs.

Confirmation bias is a psychological weapon that allows bloggers to gain followers without having any kind of academic link to their chosen topic. By engineering a steady dripfeed of content that satisfies without challenging, any single one of us can become an expert. The old adage that content is king makes sense, but it doesn’t tell the full story.

If you really want to command a following, stick to telling people what they already know. If you want to become the fabled Mr Big Pants ‘authority in a niche’, extend that content to what they also speculate to be true.

One look at my Twitter feed tells me that the Republican primaries are now in full swing. Have you seen the bickering on political blogs?

You’ll find that the most commented sites are those that rally similar minded folk by enforcing their beliefs and serving a rose-tinted slew of facts to support them. If these sites felt a duty to promote a fairer race, they would paint each candidate in a fair and unbiased light. Of course, to do so would be to ask readers to challenge their beliefs. It never happens. People don’t want to be challenged. They want to feel vindicated, that they were right all along.

Once forming an opinion, we would rather live in ignorance than appear to be ‘flip-flopping’. Ordinary bloggers can grow monster followings by latching on to this weakness and appealing to the confirmation bias in us all.

Internet Marketing doesn’t require years of expertise, neither does blogging. It simply requires the articulation of beliefs and opinions in such a way that readers can pursue them as their own. If you do this, you will always have an audience.

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Workaholism: How To Self Destruct Completely

Sep 19 2011

Maintaining a healthy balance between work and home life is something that you can only truly monitor through the reactions of those who have to deal with you every day.

If you’re being asked to repeat your name to your confused children, the alarm bells should be ringing. If your wife reacts violently to the latest admission that you’ll be spending a night in the office, maybe it’s not her that’s being unreasonable.

Maybe workaholism has you by the balls.

These are warning signs and nothing less. Entrepreneurs are often praised with the positive attributes of being passionate, determined and willing to go the extra mile. Our greatest fault is that somewhere in the thick of it, our personal identity becomes so intertwined with the projects we’re working on that to be separated fuels resentment and a shitty attitude towards those who remember the more care-free caricatures we used to be.

It doesn’t matter how many times you explain the stressful nature of your work, it will always seem like a weak argument.

Most people judge stress by the battle for oxygen on a cramped morning commute, or the constant uncertainty of how a moody boss is going to lash out at them.

To see us sitting in our home offices, Spotify blaring to the max, makes it very difficult to understand how we can’t afford ourselves a simple Off switch. The ability to snap and morph in to the infinitely cooler husband, father or friend who reaps the rewards of his split personality’s sheer grit, rather than drowns in the magnitude of how much is yet to be achieved.

This type of in-fighting can prove more than destructive to a small business. Just because your home office is lacking the small red button marked “Self Destruct Completely”, don’t assume the same effect can’t be achieved through negligence and tunnel-vision.

It can, and in my case, it almost has.

One of the buzz words you will often hear mentioned alongside running a business is accountability. Without accountability, it’s impossible to drive a business forward. You won’t find a single entrepreneur in the world who doesn’t advocate the importance of discipline.

Unfortunately, discipline and accountability are double-edged swords.

If you start holding yourself accountable for the failure to realise long term goals, on a short term basis, your private life is going to suffer a body blow as you take this frustration out on everybody else. Not directly, but by allowing the workaholic in you to prosper and grow. It becomes the dominant personality.

It’s a great balancing act to be able to hold yourself accountable for short term failures, while still appreciating that when you work your bollocks off and the lucky break doesn’t materialise, patience is in order.

Self-destruction is almost guaranteed if you can’t differentiate between those elements of blame. The workaholic will grab any opportunity to dominate your life, but it’s an attitude that will never subside – even in the face of great success. It has to be controlled.

You have to hold yourself accountable for keeping the workaholic on a leash, not just exercising it regularly. Anything less and you have a wild untamed beast on your hands. Unfortunately, that beast is yourself.

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