How a former pizza delivery man earned $96,250 from a single email selling info products/online courses

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Regarded as one of the grandfathers of internet marketing, Terry Dean was previously a pizza delivery man.

Now he helps thousands of entrepreneurs set up profitable internet lifestyle businesses in hundreds of different markets.

After multiple failures in network marketing, he decided to try his hands in online business.

Even though he was already in debt, he went ahead and bought his first PC anyway.

The idea of just sitting down in his room and not having to talk to anyone appealed to him.

His hard work paid off and since 1996, Terry has been creating a full time income online.

In this podcast episode, we’ll discover how Terry managed to not only build a successful online business from nothing… but also how he helped thousands of clients set up profitable internet lifestyle businesses in hundreds of different markets.

Just how good is Terry?

Here’s a review from one of Terry’s clients:

[thrive_testimonial name=”Dr. Michael Beck” company=”DCPracticeTools.com” image=”https://academy.birdsend.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/dr-michael-beck-testi.jpg”]With Terry’s help, my business launched and grew to a six figure business within the first year. The next year it has almost doubled again in income. One of the biggest reasons for this huge success is that I pay Terry a lot of money to pick through every website and sales piece I put together. Nothing goes to print until he sees it first and critiques me[/thrive_testimonial]

For me (Welly) personally, I’ve also had the privilege to be mentored by Terry some time back and I’ve learned some valuable lessons about business building.

Terry has also been featured on these media outlets:

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In this episode you’ll learn:

[01:57] How Terry generated a whopping $96,250 in a single email

[04:02] How to further boost this revenue number

[05:47] How Terry start from delivering pizzas to creating a full-time income online

[13:22] The secret ingredient to make your students’ life easier and boost their results

[14:12] The biggest mistake an online course creator makes

[15:17] How to know the pain points of your target audience directly from the market themselves

[19:22] How Terry managed to sell so many of his courses, and the lessons behind it

[25:20] Why including too many bonuses in your course is not a good idea

[28:17] How to tone down a “hypey” headline promise the right way… and make more sales

[32:25] How to upsell/cross sell your other products/services without upsetting customers

[39:02] The proven formula for quickly boosting the conversion of a website visitor to a customer 

[44:52] How to sell your offers even when you’re just starting out and don’t have any testimonials/case studies yet

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Quote

One of the key takeaways was when Terry mentioned this quote from Glenn Livingston:

Research your market until it changes you as a person.

Glenn Livingston

What this means is that you should know your target audience so well and empathize with them, so that you know exactly their needs, desires, and pains.

When you know these, selling to them becomes so much more natural and easier.

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Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the BirdSend Academy Podcast. This is the show for Online Course Creators who want to build a profitable business by sharing your skills and knowledge with others. This is your host Welly Mulia, if you are not listening on our BirdSend Academy site, go to academy.birdsend.co/1 to see the show notes.

And today, we have a very special guest, his name is Terry Dean. Terry went from delivering pizzas for $8 an hour to creating a full-time income online in 1996. He has been called one of the grandfathers of internet marketing, and was one of the first online marketers to demonstrate the power of email generating a whopping $96,250, with just 1 email to his list in front of a live audience. In the past 20 years, he has personally helped thousands of clients set up profitable internet lifestyles in hundreds of different markets through both his private and group coaching programs. He helps small business entrepreneurs attract high quality clients, spot conversion cracks on their websites and earn a big income from even small email lists.

His motto is “Earn more, work less and enjoy life”. So without further ado, let us welcome Terry to the podcast. Terry thank you for showing up on the podcast, it’s great to have you.

TERRY DEAN (Interviewee): It’s great to be here, and hopefully we can share some secrets to help listeners here earn more, work less and enjoy life.

WELLY MULIA (Interviewer): Great! So, I want to first start with $96,250. Can you tell me and the listeners, what did you sell for $96,250?

TERRY DEAN: Well, that wasn’t one sale, that was multiple people purchasing the product, what I had actually sold at the time was, I put together a product and the product was basically my protégé coaching course that I had done, so previously to this, I had done a group coaching class, which I think originally in the group coaching itself class sold for like $1997. And then I basically took all those recordings from that group coaching class, and I put it together in a physical product in which was a manual and some of the recordings back then we were talking about on CDs, at the time. And then sold that to my email list on that weekend, and the way that went with this was that we would, on Friday, that day, I would send an email, and they would see the sales, we would look at the shopping cart by lunch time, we look at the shopping cart the next day, we look at the shopping cart on Sunday and see the number of sales that came in, and for that product, I had priced it, they were getting the product and they were also getting a license to that product, so they were actually licensing that product so that they can sell it as well, and the price was like… I don’t remember if it was $1995 or $1997, for the over price. And I sold it and I actually ended up with like a refund that also came back, and I subtracted the refund before taking the total.

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WELLY MULIA: Okay, that’s a very great story Terry. The reason I asked this, instead of the usual, who are you and where you are from is because I wanted to let listeners know that from one single email, you can generate that much. And I think this was many years ago, right Terry?

TERRY DEAN: It was, from one email, and the interesting thing was. You see, back then, I didn’t do as many as I was today, so if you actually had me run the same promotion today, I would send a couple of more emails, I would send one on Friday, I would send one on Saturday, and I would probably send several on Sunday for that today, just because we found that… that was kind of an earlier on phase, on how to use the email and use it correctly. And now I know that we can actually send a lot more emails especially run them special, we run multiple emails on the last day, and I always kind of joke with promotions that I do, that when you have a promotion, there is a deadline for it, I always call it “The Heart Attack Curve” and that means that the first couple of days, we don’t give them any sales, you end up complaining and saying hey, this isn’t working, how did I screw up this time? And then you have this huge flood of sales that come in on the last day, but it comes in later. So that’s kind of what I would do today, I would send one on Friday, send one on Saturday, and I would send multiple on Sunday today.

WELLY MULIA: Cool, got it. I think that is also what I am also experiencing that, as well as other people that I talk to, like when you have launched and you have a specific deadline, the last day would always be the highest number of sales, because people want to wait until the last minute.

TERRY DEAN: And it’s not even the last day, it’s like the last 12 hours. There is a lot of times that I have seen the last 12 hours produce over half the sales.

WELLY MULIA: Okay, got it. So, Terry, it is very interesting, from delivering pizzas to now, becoming a coach for other people, coaching other people in their businesses, in different industries. So, how did you go from delivering pizzas to what you are doing now, starting your own lifestyle business, and helping others to do the same thing?

TERRY DEAN: Well, let’s talk about a couple of steps, we are going to move to this pretty quickly. But I first was delivering pizzas and that time, my wife and I had a lot of debt, and we even had like a little section down in our basement for failed marketing companies that I had tried to join and sell. And all these companies told you that, hey you don’t have to sell, just tell your friends about it, and they were lying, because you do have to sell, and I was never good at that. So, that was part of our debts too, and at a time I heard, it was like earlier on the internet, I heard some early report of some people who were succeeding online, and I said to myself, this doesn’t require me to actually talk to people in person, I am not going to need to sell them, I am just going to need to go online, I am going to get all the right stuff, and as an introvert I can hide in my room, nobody has to see me, and I could do this business online. So, I bought my first PC, bought that on another credit card, adding to the credit card debt, went online and I put up an ugly website, it was a very ugly website, like flashing little images all over the website, like really ugly. And whenever the Compu service starts to participate on some of the message boards, and this is funny because Compu service is long gone but you know, whatever is old is new again. And what I was doing on Compu service, pretty much what some clients do in Facebook groups today, it was the exact same thing, going in and participating in group’s Facebook is just more effective than it was back then. But I went out there, and I started having… I would give away a free report, to get people to subscribe to list, and I did that because I saw people talk about that interact mail, that they would put an ad and people would send them their address and they get them on a list and they mail them stuff, so I was doing that by email back then. And the very first things I started selling were, I got licenses to other people’s products and sold those, like cell tub videos, like videos like marketing hands and things like that, that I got licenses to, instead of selling those again, went into debt for those also. And it’s just kind of funny, because I always tell people not to buy products online, don’t be spending a whole bunch going into that, yet that’s what I did. So, don’t do what I did, but that is what I had to do, and I sold those products for a while, and after selling those for a while and starting to get out of debt, and making money online from my list, as my list started growing, I said okay… People started asking me, how was I doing it? How was I selling products online? I said, you know this is going to be something that people want to know. So, I went and created my first product, and one of my first products, I called it “All the secrets dot com” And I don’t know why I didn’t keep that domain name, I let it expire at some point, but I owned “All the secrets dot com” which was a cool domain name. And I created my very first product which was like several, little digital products, like how I was using Compu serve, how I started building the email list, how I wrote Copy, little things like that on this little package that I sold for like $49, it was like $37 or like $49, in that price range, I tested several of them and price points end at $50, because I was thoroughly convinced nobody would ever buy anything over $50 online, and I started selling that, started gaining a lot of sales, that led to me creating another product, which was a series of videos, teaching how to do it, and I got a little more bold, sold that for $197. Then I went and was invited to go speak at a conference now that I was selling my own products, and when I went to those conferences, they asked me to do those challenges, where I would earn money from my email list in front of them, and I did those multiple times at different conferences, and started selling there, and I saw that people were selling a higher ticket product, so I was like I am going to forward and sell something at higher ticket and started selling that, and some of them ran like coaching programs and consulting programs, so I ran a group-based program, I created one of the first membership sites, I think Jonathan might have had one at the time, like a print newsletter, but I had one of the first membership sites in internet marketing which was called Net Breakthroughs, that I created back then, and people joined that site, because it was essentially like an ad diary, I would run ads and in each week I would report on what’s working for me, and what’s not working for me. And people joined it for that specific purpose, just because they wanted to see what was working and what wasn’t working, and I ended up building a lot of members into that program who were paying me $19.95 a month at the time, so they paid $20 a month. And that was a big program for me. And from there, I actually later on got a little burnt out because I wasn’t using systems as well as I should in the business, and I sold off that first business to Christenson, I took some time off of the internet and then I came back and did some group coaching programs and started working with clients directly, because it is kind of interesting that there is not a lot of people that are in that marketing space who work directly with clients, they do their own business, they create their information, products and that’s good, and I do that as well, but I like working with the individuals in all these different markets, because I get to have the fun of putting my hands in all these different market places, like I have a client who sells tennis courses, I have another client that teaches people Spanish, I have another client that teaches continual education in different markets, so I get to be in all these different markets, helping different clients directly, which also means that training that I do gets to be more of a broad mentality, it’s not just something that works in only a marketing space, it’s something that has consistently worked in all these other market places and whatever niche that someone is in. I know what will or will not work for them, just based off… pretty much at this point in time, thousands of tests that I have seen in different client’s markets.

WELLY MULIA: One of the things that I see about your coaching program, because to all the listeners there, I was one of Terry’s students a few years ago. So, one of the things that I noticed about Terry’s coaching program and why I decided to join back then was because, Terry has students in different industries, so not only in making money online, because a lot of times you see coaches out there where they only coach about how to make money online, only in that niche. So for listeners out there, I would suggest that if you are looking for a coach, you want to hire a coach that has been successful in many different industries, so not only as a money making online coaching program and then they only teach about making money online. I know Terry a lot of years ago, I think it was in 2008, I think it was the product. I got to know you from Lee Merchantia, I was in his list and he promoted you, I think the first product that I bought from you was Internet Lifestyle System, that you have a bunch of DVDs as well where you give us, and we can give those to our affiliates and our virtual assistants who do the work for us. Is that correct, about 2008?

TERRY DEAN: Yeah, it was in that time and period, I had a course like that Internet Lifestyle Retirement System, and the big selling point there was the templates, the tools and the training for your team members, yes.

WELLY MULIA: Yeah, I think it was cool, it was one of the first products that I bought that has a system where I can give that training modules to my affiliates as well as my virtual assistants, so that’s very cool Terry, it brings back so many old memories.

TERRY DEAN: And I want to take that as a lesson, a lot of my clients, we always try to work something in the information product, that’s a tool, a template, a T-sheet, a spreadsheet, something that people can actually use, they can take away and use, like one of my courses now; Auto-responder Alchemy, actually comes with like 80 email templates, that’s a big key selling point here, is when you are creating an information product, don’t just think about the information product, think about whether you can have a bonus, that some type of tool that makes it easier for people to get end results.

WELLY MULIA: Yeah, I think this is a very great idea. Having been in this industry for so long, in the info publishing business, online course creation business. What do you think is the number one problem that online course creators or those who want to start an info publishing business face?

TERRY DEAN: There’s quite a few problems that they run into when they are running different products, probably the actual biggest mistake that I see they make is that, they are not really going into the market that they like the customers. Let me describe what I mean by this, a phrase that I like to use a lot is that “you should fall in love with your customers, not to fall in love with your products” because if you fall in love with your product, you are going to make stupid decisions, and the stupid decisions that you are going to make is, you are going to create this product, you are going to put it altogether, and then you are going to try to figure out how to sell it, and I have had many customers come to me, that want me to help them with their business, and it is very difficult to basically sell a product that wasn’t designed with a  specific customer in mind, they will tell me that they want to sell it to everyone, everybody needs this product. The moment you say everyone needs your product, then we know that you haven’t actually done a research on the market, you don’t know your audience, you don’t know who you are selling to. And to add to this, a phrase that I heard from my friend Glenn Livingston, he and I worked together to teach about conversion, a phrase that he likes to use was, “you should research your market until it changes you as a person” and what that means is that you really research your market, you get to know the customers in the market, until you build empathy for the customers in that market, for the desperate problems that they have in their lives and you really get to feel for them, and the struggles that they have went through where you care about the customer. And see, that’s why I am coming back to you falling in love with the customers, instead of falling in love with the products, because if you do that, till you get to know the customer, that means that you’ve looked and you’ve seen what they want, you’ve looked and you’ve spoken to them at some point in time, and you really have a heart for what they want, and you know what it is that motivates them. I will give you examples, I have a friend, who is a copywriter, and he is paid by some of the big companies that pay $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 for the copywriters, and he does some natural health promotions for them. Something that he said he likes to do is, he likes to sit in front of the Walmart pharmacy, just on the little bench they sometimes have in Walmart pharmacy, and just chit-chat with some of the people who are waiting to pick up their drugs, because he really wants to know about the pain points that they have, he wants to know how they think about the different drugs, how they think about the different pain points, and he really wants basically to be able to touch them and know them personally, so that when he writes for them, he can write something that communicates directly to them, so I am going to go back and say that’s the biggest problem people have, is they fall in love with their products, they don’t fall in love with their customers, they don’t know the customer well enough, and they can’t write to that customer, communicate with them.

WELLY MULIA: Yeah, I think it is a very good idea, because you are directly connecting with a target audience that you are trying to write for, so that is a very smart idea.

TERRY DEAN: And see online, you don’t necessarily have to go out to the public and do this, because I know a lot of people like to do things at home, for the audience. You can go into Facebook groups, that I mentioned earlier, and go and see what kinds of questions that people are asking on Facebook groups, get involved in the discussion, ask people there. Once you start building a list, which I am sure your listeners understand the importance of having an email list if you are in your market. So with that, you could email out a simple survey, just asking people, I like to keep the survey really simple sometimes, such as what is the biggest challenge you are facing with X, and X is whatever the subject is, that you can help them with, and just ask people what the big challenge is, matter of fact, I like to put an email early on in my sequence and my customer’s sequence really early, it’s just like a short email, we put in the first week of emails, and it just says in the subject line, I need your help, and it asks the question, what is the biggest challenge you are facing with X, and all you have to do is just hit reply, I read all of the emails that I get, it may take me a few days to get back to you, because I receive a high volume of emails, that’s my simple email that I send out, and I love that email because some people are going to answer it, it’s not going to be a big portion, but some people are going to answer it, and they are going to give you a good feedback, and a lot of times, clients turn those specific people who reply into customers because they reply back, they will start a dialogue, because email doesn’t just have to be a monologue, if you are talking or speaking, but they will start a dialogue, and they will make a sale to that customer, because they will speak directly to the problem they just told them about, and then whatever problem they told them about, they use their language and what they sent them to talk about to them in their emails and in their website copy as well. So meaning there is a lot of things that we can do online, not just in-person contact.

WELLY MULIA: Yeah, love it. That’s exactly what I did. So, for our first email, for people signing up for our lead magnet, or getting into our email list, we also did the same thing, so right on the first email, at the very bottom, we have like a P.S, where we ask them, what is your number one problem with X. So, not a lot of people replied, but when they do, it becomes valuable feedback. I know we touched up on this just a little bit, but what have been some of your best-selling courses for the past 2 decades, and why do you think these sold so well?

TERRY DEAN: I think this is a good question, because it gets to talk about what really works, what is really working, not just what we are thinking theoretically. So, some of my best performing courses were… I already mentioned a couple ones, but I want to mention why they worked so well. That membership site that I created, my very first one was the Net Breakthroughs membership, where people paid $19.95 a month, and that sold really well, because it was that little ad diary that I was just giving somebody something really simple in the membership site that they could come to, there were other little content pieces that that membership included, that ad diary, which was pretty short, it was probably about the length of a normal blog post, like 500 words, maybe a thousand words at most, and I did that once a week, and it was just sharing something I was specifically doing. I gave a little bit longer content pieces, a couple times a month, and then we had a discussion board, where people asked questions, so that’s what people were paying for, and the membership; it sold really well, because people wanted to see what was really working, and the lesson from that is that no matter what market you are in, people want to see what’s working right now, they want to know, not what was working a year ago, two years ago, they want to know what’s working now, and you can use that principle, whatever they are selling is what’s working for you right now, what case studies and things that you are using? And some of the best ways to sell anything, in addition, are case studies and actually talking about what’s working, and I can even mention that back from that membership site, I made a lot of sales on the backend of the membership site, because as I would be talking about something, like if I were talking about this specific type of ad was working or here is what we were doing in our Search Engine Optimization, and here’s how it’s working, here’s the exact stats, I am giving them a case study, and then it was very easy to also sell them another course on that topic, on here is how you go into even more detail, they would buy additional things, and you don’t have to be really selling in a membership site, but you can make a lot of extra money just by putting links of your other products inside the membership sites. Sometimes I always like to see that if somebody has a membership site, you should be earning about the same money that you are earning as the membership site. So if the membership site is earning you $10,000 a month, you should be getting another $10,000 or so a month in backend sales from it. Okay, that’s just something to keep in mind, it might be higher, it might be lower, but that’s just a rule of thumb to look for. So, that sold because people wanted to see what’s working right now, and I was reporting on exactly what was working right now. And another top course was like the Protégé Program, which I mentioned earlier, and that was a group program, at that time I did it as a teleseminar, today if I re-ran an exact same program, I would do it as a webinar series, and all it simply was, was a series of webinars and I have a lot of our clients choose that model as well, where you do like a series of 48 webinars over 48 weeks, and you basically teach a subject and have some type of actual support and help for the members, so that they can ask questions. Let me give that model really easy for people to copy, that is each week, you have like a video train that is about an hour, in that range, you also do a Q and A, which might be like 45 minutes and an hour each week, and then some type of assignment that you give people to do, that they turn in to you, that you can then cover during the Q and A periods. That’s how you run these classes and these type of classes, you can sell, depending on your market, anywhere from $300 in a consumer market like weight loss, up unto a price point like $5,000 to $10,000 in a tight business to business market like chiropractic or something like that.

So that’s what that product was, a top seller now, has been my monthly mentor club print newsletter that I sell, and people really join that because they want specific, detailed, systems that they can follow again, what’s working right now, you can actually say I am kind of copying what I did back with Net Breakthroughs, although I write more content for this, matter of fact I would actually say that site which is successful right now. I actually made a mistake in the site, where the contents are a little bit to the point of being overwhelming, with membership sites, it is not about delivering a huge amount of content, because that could be overwhelming and can actually be a negative. You actually want to think about what you can deliver, what the people specifically want, that’s easy to deliver, and I went a little bit too far in delivering the content in that site. So, I actually tell clients not to copy me, don’t do exactly what I do, you want to deliver a little less content, again very specific, it is not about the volume of content you give, it’s again about doing something specific, what’s working right now, keeping it short and simple, and something that people can follow, not having a bunch of different pieces to it, like in that membership, I had the print newsletter, I also have a webinar, I have the discussion board, so there’s a lot of pieces there, and I could easily have only the print newsletter or just do a little more frequent webinars instead. So, you don’t need to do a ton of content for a membership site, think about what people specifically want.

A final product to mention is the Auto-responder Alchemy that I mentioned earlier, that’s a top selling product right now, because people specifically want those 80 email templates. And here is what makes that product strong and why people like it, and that is, there’s a lot of courses out there teaching how to do email marketing, there is no question about that, there is a lot of good courses out there on teaching email marketing. What I did in that course, was I took a bunch of my emails, I actually went through them and reverse engineered all of my emails, so you have my email and I give you an actual template from my email, on how you can copy it and model it and create yours in a similar style, while including your personality. So, I actually gave against something that people could model and use as a tool and while there is training in that model, which is really good training, people end up buying it and they say they really love the training, but they buy it because they wanted the templates. They wanted that tool to make it easier, and that’s a big lesson for whatever you create, is a lot of times in the marketing space, people tell you to include all these bonuses and you will see a product that has at least 25 bonuses, don’t do that, that’s not what works, what works is to have a couple of really good bonuses and somebody would buy it because they want this bonus T-sheets, they want these bonus templates, they want this bonus tool, that’s why they buy the product and then they get everything else. But it’s not a bunch of bonuses, it’s really good ones that you can almost say they are in one way or another, they are “for you” bonus, that makes something more-easier to accomplish because of the tools you gave them.

WELLY MULIA: Let’s take a look at the internet marketing space, where people are launching internet products like, how to make money online every single day, you will see all these, all of them having the bonus stack up on top of each other, and it just gets ridiculous, when you go to the sales patient to see the product, and they include like 15, 20 different bonuses, and people get overwhelmed, I mean a lot of times, these bonuses don’t even relate to the main product that is being sold. So, I really like what you said about… it is not about the volume, but about how specific, how relevant it is to the product that you are selling and how it is going to help your audience, because if you just include a bunch of bonuses for the sake of stacking up the value, and making it look enticing for the people to buy, and not thinking in terms of the interest of the prospective buyers, then I think people get overwhelmed when they buy all these stuff, then you get a lot of refunds and the sales patient is not doing what he is saying…

TERRY DEAN: Just think about what do you honestly think that when you landed a page that has 25 bonuses, all these bonuses mentioned. The first thought that comes to my mind is, I am not going through all of that, most likely, you are not even going to download all of it, if you do, it goes off to a folder that you will never see again, that you never open up that folder again, because you downloaded all these extra bonuses, because all those are distractions, because somebody buys your info product because there is a specific end result that they want, and you have the course to help them, and then any bonuses, the best bonuses are some type of tool, or something very specific, that’s going to help them get whatever those end results are, don’t do weird bonus stacks, and this is part of my experience of being outside of the marketing field too. The marketing field is weird, compared to a lot of other markets, things are like super-hypey, internet marketing fields, you will see people make headlines that no one actually believes when they hit the headline, they don’t actually believe this is true. And in other markets, we don’t do that, so you get to see the space, the very first thing. One of the things that I tell me clients when I actually review their pages, one of the very first things I will mention is, I don’t believe you. And if my first response when I hit their pages is, I don’t believe you, we are going to change something, if we keep the actual text, we are going to add more proof of top, that proves what they are saying is true, sometimes we will tone it back, this is kind of weird, you probably won’t hear this from most internet marketers, there are times that I would take someone’s sales page, and they might say that you will do such and such, I am going to try to keep and hide the market, you can pretend it was internet marketing, you will earn a 6-figure income. I will take that headline, the very first thing that I want to do to it is I say, you may earn a 6-figure income, or even better I would say, Joe earned a 6-figure income, here is a case study that we can prove here. The reason being is toning it back slightly from you will to you may. First it is much more likely to be legal, because you are not making a promise, it is definitely true. Second of all, it adds that little, subtle, gentle fact that you are telling you the truth, because you can’t promise that they will earn any specific thing, or they will do anything specific, what you can say very honestly is that they might do this or that somebody else did this specific thing, because that would be a fact, that somebody else did it, that you know, that’s a case study and also if I say so and so did it, I can back it up and prove that, I can’t really prove that you can do it directly off, so that’s something that I always think about. I always think about… something I like to say is, we want to have a unique promise, I don’t want to have the biggest unique promise that you can’t prove, that’s a line that I want people to take from this interview, what’s the biggest unique promise that I can prove? I don’t want to have a big, unique promise that you can’t prove, because that hurts your credibility.

WELLY MULIA: Got it. Yeah, I think it is also beneficial to say, since you are mentioning about using someone else as a case study or changing the work from “you will” to “you may”, this also applies to if you are advertising like Facebook ads or Google or YouTube, I mean, they are getting tighter and tighter every day, so I think having headlines like, “you will” will probably get you into trouble.

TERRY DEAN: Actually, Facebook is where I first got the idea to start talking more about this person over here than what you can accomplish, because both Google and Facebook, they are very weary of you making big promises, because let’s be honest, a lot of people talk bad about Google and Facebook, but I think about it from this standard in the U.S, and that is, they don’t want to be liable to what you said. Let’s say that you are a big advertiser and you spend $100,000 on advertising to Facebook. Well, if Facebook gets sued because of what you said, and they lose 10 million dollars, you were not worth it, and in this standard mentality, that’s easy for us to understand, and why would Facebook get sued instead of you? Because Facebook has more money than you, they are a bigger target for a lawyer than you are. So, they are afraid of been liable for what you say, so you, when you look at your page for this type of network, you just say, are they going to be scared of being liable for what I am saying? That I just made a promise that someone would do this, now will they be scared if I say that Joe over here did it, and I back it up with proof? Well, I am not making any promise to anybody at that point in time, they are much happy with it, but I did it for that purpose in the beginning, but then I saw that it didn’t have a conversion, and in some cases it actually improved our conversion when we started doing that kind of thing, and it really surprised me how well it improved the conversion. Also, I love the fact that we can tone back the copy, we can tone back what you would see in internet marketing space, and get more sales, so you can be more ethical, you can be fully 100% honest with your audience and make more sales.

WELLY MULIA: Yeah, that’s a very good one Terry. So, earlier, you mentioned about, inside your membership, you have all these customers there, and then you are giving them trainings and webinars and so on. And you are also cross-selling them or upselling them to your other products, for example if they want to learn more about SEO or maybe something else like social media, then you will have another training on that. How do you make the transition, how do you tell them that this is another training that might be helpful for you, but you have to pay for it? How do you make sure that they don’t get upset because a lot of times people, when they buy the product, they say, hey, isn’t this included as part of the program? Why do I have to pay more money to get this training?

TERRY DEAN: This first goes back to setting the right expectations inside the business and it also comes back to what we just discussed, so you asked the question in a very good order. That is, we just discussed being very ethical, and what we say on our sales page, and being very specific. Again, it comes to people being in internet marketing space and see people promising the world, you will see in internet marketing space, and someone has promised that they are going to make you a millionaire by doing this, or they are going to give you the easy button, and I kind of joke, writing on next month’s newsletter, here is the easy button for making money online, the easy button for making money online is to build a hungry audience. Because once you have the hungry audience, that is the easy button that you can hit your submit button for emails whenever you want, once you have that. But that’s not what they are talking about, when they say having an easy button, they are just like, hit this button and money comes out. If that’s the kind of promises that you are making on the frontend, then I don’t know how you can upsell anything else, because you just already promised the whole world. What you need to do is, think about specifically, what am I promising here? Become more specific, more direct, of exactly what you are promising someone. Again, if we were to take the internet marketing space… Let’s take weight loss, let’s say we are in weight loss, we are going to tell people that we are going to help them… we will sell a product that is a 90-day challenge, and in the 90-day challenge, we are going to show you how to lose weight, you are going to have a community of people on Facebook to help you lose weight, we are going to give you the workout routines to follow, the exact 12-week system that you are going to follow, here’s all the workouts that you are going to follow, here’s the videos that you will watch inside the group. At this point in time, I am now promising you, this is what you are buying, you are getting this system. Now, after you buy this system, we could upsell you on something else, so I told you this is a system, the very first upsell I might offer you is customization of the system for you personally, because that first product, I didn’t tell you that I was going to customize it personally for you, but now, he paid this extra fee and maybe the extra fee is $495. Well, either me or one of my coaches will have you submit this questionnaire of any physical problems you might have, or any things that you like to eat or don’t like to eat, you will send in a full assessment. And then based off of that, I would put together a custom routine, and a custom diet specifically for you, for $495. That makes perfect sense, but now that’s an upsell and now something totally different. Or let’s take another example, I just told you that I had a 90-day challenge to help you lose weight, I could now have inside, a muscle building routine that I am selling as an upsell, because I didn’t promise that I was going to teach you how to build your muscles on the inside of here. Or another example, this actually comes from a client that I do have, they are teaching you a fitness routine, that’s what they are selling on the frontend, the fitness routine that you are going to use to lose weight. We actually run it right after somebody purchases it as their first upsell, we sell them a complete nutrition guide, because we didn’t promise the nutrition guide on the frontend, we did that separately, we tell you this is the exact fitness routine that she runs, that she trains, and she gives a little bit of advice on the product and we talk about that a little bit, but then there is the whole complete diet system that is a separate product here. So, it comes back to setting the right expectations of exactly what you are selling on the frontend, and then you have the other pieces that you can sell on the backend, or if you went back to like I said, the membership that I had, where I did the ad-diaries, where I was talking about things like that, I taught the systems, I shared the case study, here’s exactly what’s working, here’s why it is working, here’s how you can follow along and do an exact same thing I did. But I never promised in that site that I was going to give them a huge, detailed 10-hour trainings on how to do a whole topic or subject, or things of that nature. So, there’s the different pieces, here is a really easy one that you can use, this is the one that just about anybody can use for any membership site. I mentioned earlier how you can do like a group program for like 4 days a week. Well, doing a group-based program works really well in a membership, so let’s say that you have a membership on golf and in this golf membership program… Okay, let’s run Spanish. So, you have this membership program that you are teaching people Spanish, and they get to go in and they get to learn all the different Spanish techniques. Well, here’s two obvious upsells you can have inside your membership sites. The first one is a 4-8-week emersion program where you teach them how to get ready for Spanish really quickly, for a vacation, and not only do they get to call on, but they get to practice Spanish, with the other members on the calls, they get to practice Spanish with you personally on the calls, and that’s the first product that we sell. Maybe we also sell, hey, you are going to have emersion, not only is it an emersion, but you get to come meet me in Costa Rica, we are going to be at this hotel, we are going to do some classroom, and we are going to go out to the market places and we are going to practice all your Spanish right here with me, and we are going to have a fun vacation in Spanish, we are going to sell this for several thousand dollars. So you see how that can fit in also. And you will notice here that I am talking about the membership site and then how can we do something higher ticket, that is also higher touch on the next level, so think about it that way, the membership is one level, the next level is can we do something that is higher ticket and a higher touch.

WELLY MULIA: Okay, got it Terry. What is your formula for quickly boosting the conversion of a website visitor to a customer?

TERRY DEAN: I call it “The Golden Glove”, I give the 5 fingers of the golden glove really quickly. I call it the golden glove, because I want you to think of the 5 fingers on your hand, so you don’t forget them. So, you can just mark these up, just hold up your hands as I say this. Touch your thumb, this is the “Desperate Problem”, then your first finger, this is the “Unique Promise”, then we have “Overwhelming Proof”, “Irresistible Offer” and “A Reason to Act Now”. And these are the 5 pieces that I look for on anybody’s website, to help them improve the conversion, and you can pretty much spot if something is missing, I can spot if something is missing on a website in a few minutes. I always tell people that you can spot what is missing on your site in 15 minutes, but once you get used to it, you start seeing things really quick. Let’s mention them real quick so you can understand them, just the quick version, that is desperate problem means, are you calling out to a specific audience, and do you talk about the desperate problem that they have, so that’s the two pieces to it. Are you calling out to a specific audience, do I know this page is for me when I land there? And are you calling out the problem that I have? And this is usually going to be somewhere above the fold, when I first hit the page, I am going to see you talking about me or my problem right there, the page is about me, it’s not about you, it’s about me and my problem.

That’s the first piece, the second piece is, Unique Promise. I am going to talk about unique promise and overwhelming proof together, because I told you that you, you want to have the strongest unique promise that you can make, that you can backup with proof. Unique promise means, somebody hits your page, and they say, I have not heard that before, that’s what I want them to say, what I don’t want them to say is, I have heard that before. Again, I am marking a little bit of the internet marketing space, but you can visit a lot of internet marketing pages, and the very first thing that comes out of your mouth when you see the headline is, I heard that yesterday, I heard that before. We want a unique promise that somehow stands out, and sometimes it is simply by being very specific of what has happened, or how it worked, or how it’s working, but we have a unique promise that stands out, that’s what you can do for the customer to help them solve that problem. The 3 P’s work together; Problem, Promise, Proof, so the proof is the next piece. How can I prove the big promise that I just made? And these three, I really like to have above, on the website in one way or another, that I am going to have some form of proof and I had a lot of clients test this, where we used to put proof later on, on our pages and we moved them on earlier and earlier, even into videos, we moved the proof earlier and earlier, there’s a lot of clients now, where in their sales videos, I don’t know if many people are doing this, but in their sales videos, we’ll come on, we’ll talk about the problem, we might start with a story, we leave an open loop in the story, which means we start our story but we don’t end it, we leave you with curiosity, and then we move over to testimonials, we would have some video testimonials right there, before we come back and complete our story with you. So, we moved testimonials to like 2 minutes into the video, we start having testimonials and proof that earlier on, even in the video, same thing on the website, this time, we will have the headline and put the testimonial immediately after the headline, on the website. This time, I want the headline to be a testimonial, or a piece of a testimonial. So, Problem, Promise, Proof, we are looking for that early on the website.

Then we have an Irresistible Offer and the reason to act now, those usually aren’t above on the website, they come later. The irresistible offer means, are you making an extremely good offer to people, that is pretty much irresistible. And some ways to think about that is I will just give you an irresistible offer, a lot of times, we will take an offer, and we’ll just tell people that they can try it out for 7 days, like it is a digital product. Hey, try my product out for 7 days for only 1 dollar, pay the other $36 7 days from now, matter of fact, one client was testing this in the market, we tell people, hey I am going to give you a try. I think in this product we said, the product, you can try it out for $1, it’s 21 days in this case, in 21 days, we will bill for you $23 and then 30 more days, it will be another $23, so the product is only priced at $47, but it’s $1 a trial, $23 and $23. And that worked well, and people were doing the $1 trial. And here is what is really funny is, immediately after taking the trial in our very first upsell, we told them they could save $10 right now if they paid it in full, so they could pay $37 instead of $47, like 70% of people took that. So even though we did the $1 a trial to get them in, we got back most of the money immediately for this, so that helped pay for the advertising and everything else like that, but we got them in because of that irresistible offer, so the upsell is the most irresistible thing that we can do, and when you test the website, I will test often the headlines and the offers are one of the strongest things to test. And then the reason to act now, why should someone act now, and just like we mentioned earlier on in this interview, that the best-selling period is like the last 12 hours, when you are doing an email, when it’s just about ready to go over, that’s when most people buy, and so is there any way we can have a deadline in your offer, there is a limited amount of this, there is a limited amount of that. If we can’t do that, the secondary best thing that you can do is that you can mention what they would lose out on if they don’t order now. In fitness, how long will they continue to suffer with whatever problem they’ve gone through, when they finally make the decision to do this, so it’s basically a takeaway, so if you can’t do a very good deadline, but deadlines are better, when you can do them. So, those are the 5 fingers, the Golden Glove that you can use, Desperate Problem, Unique Promise, Overwhelming Proof and Irresistible offer and a reason to act now.

WELLY MULIA: So, what if someone is new and is just starting out, he doesn’t have any testimonial, what do you recommend putting on the sales page or maybe on the website about the product, about the proof because someone is new, they don’t have any case studies or testimonials, what do you suggest?

TERRY DEAN: First of all, if you don’t have as much proof, a way around not having as much proof is to come up with a better irresistible offer. Offer and Proof go together, a good way to illustrate that is, if I sell you a product for $1,000, I am going to have a lot of proof first, if I sell you a product for $1, I might not need much proof, I mean, the only proof I need is you are not going to steal my credit card at that point in time because it’s only a dollar, you don’t even need to promise to refund my dollar, because it’s not worth contacting you for my dollar at that point in time. So, you can make a better offer as a first way to get around this, a better offer, a lower cost offer, something that is a drop-dead simple offer, you don’t need a whole lot of proof if you told me something very specific, and you are selling a product for $10. This is something I really want and you can really do, so proof really comes back to the offer, they go together, so that’s the first thing, the second thing you can do is you can really think about your own story, I really try to push clients to only sell something that they’ve experienced themselves, or they are working as a partner and the partner actually did it. So in other words, this should almost be obvious, but I tell people to only sell something that you’ve accomplished, so again I will make fun of internet marketers who sell how to make a million dollars online products and they have never made a million dollars online, don’t do that, don’t sell that, look back in your history, get out of the internet marketing space, what have you accomplished? Maybe you play club-level tennis and you’ve improved yourself, maybe yourself sucked and you’ve improved it, well, that’s an idea for an offer, how to improve this, because this is something you did, and guess what you get to do now, you get to tell me your story, and your story, by nature includes the Problem, because that’s before, it included the Promise, that’s the after, and it includes Proof, because that’s the story, this is how it worked for you, and you can put a little specifics in your story about how it worked, and that’s the best thing that you can do when you don’t have any other proof and the other form is that you work with your own story, and you tell what you’ve accomplished, and again if you are working with a partner, what your partner accomplished, there’s times where a majority of the copy we write for websites is a story, it is a before and after story, whatever the topic is, you were bad at this and now you are not, you had this problem, now you don’t, you were diabetes type II, and now you are not, that type of thing, that’s the story that you talk about, and that is a very good form of proof.

WELLY MULIA: Yeah, thank you again for coming on the show. Before we wrap up, I have one final question for you. So, if you can only give one advice to people who want to build a successful online course business, what would that be?

TERRY DEAN: If I could give an advice, it would be…

WELLY MULIA: Just one… What would it be?

TERRY DEAN: The one thing that I want you to do is, I want you to choose a market where you can empathize, where you can really love the customers and that you know that people are buying in the market. So, choose the right niche market for you personally, not the niche market for anybody else, but the right niche market for you personally, which means, you love these customers, you have a story to tell, and you can see proof that other people are selling in the market, such as if you look at the click bank, you can see people running ads like you see them run them on Amazon, that’s my best thing to tell you, is to choose the right market for you, don’t do it just because anyone else is, don’t do it to copy someone else’s market.

WELLY MULIA: Good advice. Alright Terry, we have covered quite a few, so I hope that, for listeners out there, this is helpful for you, especially when you are trying to build your online course business or info publishing business, because as I told you just now, Terry has been in this business for a very long time, and he has tons of experience with regards to this area, not only is he successful with his own business, he is also successful with helping other clients in different industries, with their business, so please do your due diligence and I hope this interview is useful for you. So Terry, how could our listeners get in touch with you if they want to learn more about what you do?

TERRY DEAN: They can go over to mymarketingcoach.com, and there I have a free report for you, called “7 Unique Ways to Create Profitable Emails even if you are not a writer”. You will get a copy of that, “I need your help” email as an example there, you will get 64 story shortcuts, I talked a lot about storytelling here, I will give you 64 story shortcuts, to ask you questions, to help you write emails based on storied that a lot of times, you wouldn’t even have thought of yourself, and you can pick that up for free, and you will get a lot of other advice, and I might sight other tools to help you, but again, that’s mymarketingcoach.com, where you can pick up that free report, 7 unique ways to create profitable emails even if you are not a writer.

WELLY MULIA: Alright Terry, thank you again for being on the show and giving us your experience and advice and sharing your skills, we appreciate it.

TERRY DEAN: Thank you.

WELLY MULIA: Again, if you are not listening to this on our BirdSend Academy site, go to academy.birdsend.co/1 to get your show notes.

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Terry’s Golden Glove formula for high conversions 

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