2009 September 24 | Tech News

Because you can. In this post, I’m going to take you behind the scenes of a strategy Laura Roeder showed me to pull in 294 comments on my post and eventually attract more than 30 consulting clients.

It uses all of the copywriting techniques and psychological triggers that we promote here at Copyblogger, but it combines them in a unique way that generates a lot of buzz.

Here’s why that’s important:

Why buzz is essential for selling anything

Have you ever hesitated to buy something because you didn’t see anyone else interested in it? You were genuinely interested in the product — you just didn’t want to be first?

We all do it. It’s a well-documented phenomenon that psychologists like Robert Cialdini call social proof.

The question is: how do you deal with it, if you’re trying to sell something?

If you’ve watched any of our product launches here at Copyblogger, you’ve probably noticed that they generate a lot of buzz. People are talking about them on Twitter, course members write about them on their blogs, and many of the influential bloggers in our niche help us promote the course. Altogether, it’s a huge amount of buzz.

And it’s far from accidental. We prepare for weeks or even months before the launch date in order to make sure everyone is buzzing about the product all at one time. We want to give prospective customers as much social proof as possible, so that they can feel comfortable with buying it.

Except . . . what if you don’t have a big blog like Copyblogger? What if you’re just getting started, and you have hardly any readers at all?

Is it still possible to create buzz?

Yes.

Creating fans out of thin air

A few months ago, I noticed a lot of buzz on Twitter related to a video from Laura Roeder about creating fans out of thin air.

After speaking on a panel at South by Southwest, working with celebrities like Brea Grant from NBC’s Heroes, and creating some stellar results for small businesses of all kinds, Laura is quickly becoming a preeminent social media expert, and her video lays out one of the best strategies for generating buzz that I’ve seen.

Here’s how it works:

Hold a competition where the winner gets a free sample of your product or service
Build buzz with social media (Twitter, Facebook, your blog, etc.)
Use that buzz as social proof, convincing folks that didn’t win to pay you for your product or service

The only problem with her approach is that it’s a little simplistic. You can tell Laura is targeting business owners who are inexperienced with social media, and she’s trying to make it as easy as possible. Instead of using a blog to showcase the competition, she shows you how to create a simple website with Google.

But can this strategy work just as well for bloggers?

You bet. Let me show you how I modified it to take advantage of the powerful social proof from comments.

How I launched a consulting service here at Copyblogger

Imagine this.

A reader stops by your blog and sees that you are giving away 20-30 free consultations. All they have to do to have a chance to be chosen is leave a comment with their biggest frustration. So, they take a few minutes to jot one down.

Later, they see that there are 100s of other comments, and they’re not surprised when they don’t win. The demand is enormous!

But then what happens? A few days later, you announce that you were absolutely overwhelmed with the response, but you’re willing to do a limited number of additional consultations for $95 each. The first people to email you get them.

How do you think your reader is going to feel?

Sure, some of them might hold back because they figure they’ve already lost their chance. Others will have no interest in your services, so they’ll go on their merry way. But after seeing all of those comments, none of them will doubt that your services are in demand.

The social proof in the form of comments helps people see the value in the offer you’re making.

It may seem a bit sneaky, but it works. I’m spilling my secrets here, because the above scenario is exactly what I did to launch my consulting services here at Copyblogger, and I’ve been booked solid ever since. The demand was so high that I had several people offering double or even triple the normal rate if I would move them to the head of the line.

The key, of course, is to offer true value. But beyond that, there are plenty of people offering great value in obscurity.

Don’t be one of them.

It’s the power of social proof that makes the difference, and you don’t need a huge blog to harness it. Here’s how to launch a product or service from your blog, even if your audience is still fairly small:

How to launch a product or service from your blog

Step 1: Watch Laura’s video about Creating Fans Out Of Thin Air. It’s the foundation for this approach.

Step 2: Write a post announcing that you’re giving away a limited number of free samples of your product or service to readers who leave a comment describing their biggest frustration with a certain topic. If your audience is small, don’t do 20-30 free consultations like I did. Start with 5 or 10.

Step 3: Use the competition to create lots of buzz on Twitter. Get all of your friends to tweet about it. Also, ask the winners to tweet a testimonial for you, helping you create even more buzz.

Step 4: Offer a special deal on your product or service to everyone who didn’t win. I didn’t even follow this step, and I was still overwhelmed with clients.

Step 5: Write another post on your blog pointing to all of the comments on your first post and telling everyone how you’re overwhelmed with entries, so you decided to go ahead and put the product up for sale.

That’s it.

I used this process to launch a consulting service, but really, you can use it for anything. In fact, Laura has several more videos about how anyone can harness the power of social media to help get customers talking about their business.

Click here to check them out. If you’re interested in learning how all of this social media hoopla converts into money, I really think they’ll help you.

On Monday, Laura is following up with a post about how she helped Brea Grant (Daphne from NBC’s Heroes) use social media to build her career. I think you’ll get a lot out of it, but don’t forget to sign up for the other videos as well.

About the Author: Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger and Cofounder of Partnering Profits. Get more from Jon on twitter.

24Sep

Save $100 On Copywriting Success Summit 2009 (Plus a Generous Gift)

Copywriting No Comments

Copywriting Success Summit

So last year I screwed up.

I was one of the presenters at Copywriting Success Summit in 2008, and did a bit about using social media to build a freelance copywriting business.

It was such a broad topic, and I tried to cram it all in within a limited time frame. So naturally it ended up an overview instead of a drill-down discussion of the nuts and bolts of using social media to build a lucrative copywriting enterprise.

That presentation ended up becoming Freelance X Factor… over 4 hours of instruction and a 35-page workbook that helps put the ideas into action.

Get Freelance X Factor for Free

Everyone who jumps on a spot in Copywriting Success Summit gets Freelance X Factor for free. And you can save $100 off the admission price to the Summit until October 1, 2009… so moving fast will make your wallet happy.

Like I said, Freelance X Factor is a full-blown explanation of how to use social media to build a lucrative freelance copywriting business. And that means without spending cash on advertising, and without caving in to the natural demands of clients who want to pay you way less than you’re worth.

But don’t listen to me. It’s clear I’ve got an obvious motive here.

Listen to Chris Johnson, a guy who took our course and in the same week landed a $20,000 gig:

Thanks for making “The Freelance X Factor.” I studied it, and learned what it is that persuades clients to choose me.

I listened right before I went into a big appointment with a client, and was able to stand my ground and get–by far–my biggest deal ever, a $20,000 contract that paid up front! I didn’t have to deal with competition or negotiation because my client understood the benefit of acting fast, so they couldn’t wait to get started.

You can lift exact phrases from Brian and Sonia any time from the audio. When you can persuade a client that your marketing is working on them, it’s all it takes for you to persuade them to use you to market to others.

Buy this course. Nothing that Brian’s ever done has been a disappointment. This might be the best value of all of the stuff he’s put out there.

Chris Johnson

Chris later told Sonia that he had a $55,000 month, simply by repeating the stuff we said in Freelance X Factor to his prospective clients. I couldn’t be happier with that, seriously… because stories like this are why I distract myself from other projects to teach in the first place.

Look, Copywriting Success Summit plus Freelance X Factor will get you where you want to be. Check it out and simply email us your confirmation when you decide to get on board… and I’ll make sure you get full access to Freelance X Factor right away.

Check out the Copywriting Success Summit here and save $100 if you claim your spot before October 1, 2009.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes, creator of the innovative Thesis Theme for WordPress. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

24Sep

Moon’s damp patch finally located

News, Science, Uncategorized No Comments

When India launched its first unmanned lunar probe last year, it hoped to make a splash. It appears to have achieved that in a very literal sense: the impact of the probe’s collision threw up soil samples that have offered the most compelling proof yet that there is indeed water on the moon.

Don’t pack those swimming trunks yet though: the “water” is in the form of molecules of both water and hydroxyl (which is HO rather than H20) which interact with dust and rock molecules at the very surface of the moon. In other words, what’s been discovered is closer to damp soil than a puddle.

The presence of the molecules has been confirmed from data gathered by a NASA instrument on the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Carle Pieters (pictured), a professor of geological sciences at Brown University has led a team analyzing the data and has written a paper on the findings.

The researchers are still trying to figure out how the water got there and where it is going. One theory is that hydrogen-rich solar winds collided with oxygen rich soil.

The scientists believe the proportion of water in the soil could be somewhere between 770 and 1000 water molecules per million. If correct, that would mean there’s the equivalent of a 32 oz bottle of water in every ton of soil. That’s a lot of soil, but then again there’s a lot of moon.

While some enthusiasts hope that water on the moon means there’s a chance that little green men could be thriving there, NASA has more practical matters in mind. It says water would be a vital part of any permanent base on the moon and estimates that given the vast cost of lunar missions, it effectively costs $50,000 for each bottle of water taken up in a shuttle.

The findings raise new questions about lunar material brought back by the early Apollo missions. While minute amounts of water were found in some rocks, leaks in the boxes they were stored in meant it was impossible to discount the possibility that they had been contaminated on Earth.

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24Sep

It’s Party Time! – Windows 7 Launch Party Video – Remixed

Humor, Microsoft, Uncategorized No Comments

As I’m sure most of you saw a little bit earlier, the video encouraging people to host a Windows 7 launch party was probably the most boring thing to ever come out of Redmond. But thanks to Cabel Sasser, founder of Mac software maker Panic Inc., the video just became much, much more interesting. Check it out!

[Via Mashable]

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24Sep

RT @schill New Y! Search Performance tricks: CSS rotate, Data URIs, code blocking and lazy loading. http://bit.ly/2nweFJ

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Dion Almaer

RT @schill New Y! Search Performance tricks: CSS rotate, Data URIs, code blocking and lazy loading. http://developer.yahoo.net/blog...

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24Sep

Microsoft scared of security of plugins. Uninstall silverlight now! :) http://bit.ly/CrqSj #doublestandards

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Dion Almaer

Microsoft scared of security of plugins. Uninstall silverlight now! :) http://blogs.zdnet.com/microso... #doublestandards

Thursday from Twitter - Comment - Like

24Sep

The Moon in the News: Surgery, Water, and Colonization

NASA, News, Science, Uncategorized, moon, space No Comments

A map of the moon from 1647

By Natania Barron
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

We have ever been fascinated by the moon, hanging there, silvery in the sky, so mysterious and changing. I’ve often wondered what people really thought when they saw the moon up there, before telescopes and science, and how truly amazing it must have been.

Well, if you think that we know everything there is about the moon today, you’re mistaken. Yesterday, two separate moon articles got my attention, both written from very different approaches.

The first article concerned a medical study conducted to deduce whether or not the moon affected surgery outcomes. My first thought: “No, this is not a message from the 15th century.” While I’ve heard that more women give birth during the full moon, I never thought that surgery might differ depending on the phase of the moon; but apparently, enough people were concerned about the relationship between the moon and medicine that an extensive study was put together.

What did they find? Well, not surprisingly, the data suggests that the moon has little to no impact at all on the doctor’s performance. The biggest indicator is, in fact, various times of day and certain parts of the year where doctors and their staffs may be coping with various changes in their hospitals, or are simply tired. According to the article, “…doctors and other hospital personnel may be more tired at the end of a work week or later in the day. And in early July and August, new residents enter teaching hospitals.”

However, don’t throw the towel in on this moon myth just yet. While surgery outcomes may not have as much of an impact, there is still an unexplained link between emergency room visits and the full moon, in both human and animal instances:

…a study of nearly 12,000 emergency room visits for pets revealed the risk of such emergencies, ranging from cardiac arrest to trauma, was more than 20 percent greater for cats and dogs on days surrounding full moons compared with other days.

Now, how about buying some real estate on the moon? It’s not as unlikely as you might think since the announcement yesterday that space scientists have found strong evidence that water exists on the moon. According to one of the US space teams conducting lunar studies, a thin layer of water coating the surface has been detected in some areas.

My favorite bit of the article:

…proponents of human space travel hope this discovery could put pressure on the White House to follow through with the George W. Bush administration’s plans to return to the moon by 2020 and to construct Earth’s first off-world colony there.

Space rocks! And 2020? That’s just a little more than ten years away. As soon as I read about colonizing the moon, my brain went into sci-fi fangirl mode, and I began imagining all the possibilities. I’m sure the NASA folks are doing the same thing, especially considering their current budgetary woes. This might just be their saving grace.

So, have you had any weird/unexplained/geeky experiences with the moon? Do you support moon colonization? It looks like there’s room for debate.

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