Here you’ll find my notes on marketing. I’ll be forever updating this article. I hope you’ll find something useful here.

Market with the end in mind. Let’s say you’ve created a course. Don’t talk too much about the features of the course, ie. how they will get access to the material, how many hours of video you’ve created, the different topics, etc. Explain how their life will change with your course. So, it’s not about the features of your course (you) – it’s about how they will get better (them).

People buy from people they like. You have to be likeable. How? People like those who are willing to sacrifice themselves to give to other people. ‘I don’t do this for money. I care for people like you’. Let’s say you’ve just started a new business. Be honest. ‘Listen, you’re my first client. I may not have results to show but you’ll have my full attention.” With my product/service I want to change _____ (put whatever you do here) and I want to start with you”.

A confused mind doesn’t buy. You need to be assertive when you explain what your product/service does. If you’re not sure whether this will work for them, they will sense it and they simply won’t buy. Show you believe in your product. Give a 100% refund guarantee. There will be those who will take advantage of your refund policy but who cares? This is something you lose in order to get more. In any case, if someone took advantage of your refund policy and enjoyed the benefits of your product without paying. Still, you’ve done something good for them. They may recommend your product to someone else. They’ll be grateful to you. A few times, authors and creators deliberately upload their books and resources on torrent sites to create buzz and brand awareness.

People don’t like inconsistency. You have to be congruent with your message. I went to a cardiologist the other day. He was smoking in his practice. How can I get advice from a doctor who smokes in his office? That really put me off even if the person is a great doctor. Would you recommend that doctor to your friend? That’s the thing… Tai Lopez,

Another example. Warren Buffett doesn’t invest in IT companies. He only invests in companies which he understands. Look at his company’s website http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/. It’s probably the ugliest website but it probably makes Buffett more money than a fancy website! Why? Because he reinforces his message which is “I invest each and every penny of my company’s stakeholders into the best investments so they make more money. I don’t waste your money on making my website more beautiful.”

Look at your social media profiles. Let’s say you’re a lawyer who’s looking for clients on LinkedIn. Your profile should be complete, full of connections, the right professional profile photos, etc. What do I get if I google your name? Is all information I can find about you consistent out there?

People have a curiosity tendency. Does your product/service make people curious to try it? Is it something that they haven’t heard of? They have tried a keto diet, a paleo diet, an Atkins diet but it didn’t’ work. Offer a new opportunity, a new way which gives hope that this time they’ll get what they want if they buy your product. Be careful here though. Don’t fool people into buying something useless. If you think you have the solution for them, throw some curiosity. Research shows that what keeps people in romance is a certain level of curiosity. Of course, you wouldn’t be with someone who is totally unpredictable but a slight mystery is what keeps people together.

Reciprocity – fairness tendency. People tend to reciprocate something good you did for them. Use this ratio: Give 3 for one thing you ask. Look at Russell Branson or other authors. They send you their book for free. Then they ask you to pay for the postage. You think…mmm, well, since these guys are giving away their book it’s fair to pay for the postage.

Association bias. Look at restaurants. Why do you think they put photos of celebrities who dined in their restaurant? Association bias. However, don’t only include celebrities. Include ordinary people because one might say… mmm it worked for a celebrity because a celebrity is like this and they have money and fame and… Your prospective clients want to associate themselves with ordinary people like them who bought your product and achieved their goal. The more testimonials and showcases you have on your website, the better (that’s social proof). But don’t think association bias only in terms of people. Throw in any type of objects/ideas to which your audience relates to.

I run a marketing agency (assetmanagementmarketing.com) which helps financial planners get more clients. I’ve researched a lot of advisor websites and I noticed that those who target conservative Americans have a US flag all around their website and pictures.

Availability Bias. Use the simplest words ever to explain what you sell. If it’s confusing, if it takes long to understand how this can help them solve their problem, they won’t buy. The same on social media marketing. From my experience creating content for financial planners, the best performing posts were the ones who were easily digestible. I was often amazed by the popularity of simple posts which I initially thought they would be the worst performing ones! A note here. Don’t be afraid to try stuff in marketing. Your intuition will often prove wrong. Test, test, test. Also, check what others do. What works for them?

Social currency. People share stuff because that makes them look like “insiders” to their friends (social currency). People will do everything to show that they have access to insider information.

Seth Godin notes

Whereas hard work is different. Hard work is the emotional labor of confronting risk; the emotional labor of finding generosity when you don’t feel like it; the emotional risk of seeing nuance where there isn’t a lot of nuance.

Whereas people who are willing to do the hard work who are toiling with no obvious applause; who are doing something that doesn’t make the crowd happy in the short run; who are confronting things that feel risky because they understand that over time, they’re not risky, they’re actually generous and useful.

But there are two pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. One pot of gold is you did something worth doing. The other one is the extra hour at the end of the day is no longer necessary, because you’ve built an asset.

What you are is someone who’s creating value merely by the thing you’ve produced, not because someone’s got a stop watch and measuring how many hours you’re working.

Freelancers have a long work problem, which is that if you do work where I can find a substitute, the only way to move up is to work more hours. And that sucks because it ends up being a race to the bottom. Then you’re on Fiverr bidding $10 for a day’s labor. But some freelancers do great. Why do those freelancers do great? Number one, they have better clients. Better clients challenge you do to better work. Better clients do take your better work and run with it. Better clients put you in front of better work. So if you’re frustrated as a freelancer, begin by getting better clients. The way you get better clients is by turning down lesser clients, so that you are freed up enough to do the hard work necessary to be appealing to be a better client. If you have a lousy client, fire them. Even if it means you’ll be doing nothing, so that you can go back to looking for better clients.

But then the other thing, which is really important to understand, and it’s not just businesses. It’s human beings in their daily life as well. Price is a story. It is not an absolute number. So a Tiffany’s ring, $6,000. If you buy it brand new, walk six blocks down to the diamond district on Seventh Avenue in New York, you can sell that brand new Tiffany’s ring that you paid $6,000 for for $1,000. Where’d the other money go, right? It’s not used. Where the other money went is the person who bought it at Tiffany’s was paying for the privilege of buying it at Tiffany’s. When I think about the market for, in this case speaking, there are tons of people who can give a very good speech, but they are not famous. As a result, the person who hires them cannot go to the people who they work with and say, “Great news! We hired Jimmy Bluestein.” Because they would say, “Who’s Jimmy Bluestein?”

So what’s actually happening when they hire you to give a speech is they’re hiring the story of they had enough money to pay Tim Ferriss’ current high price to get Tim Ferriss to come on a plane and be in the room. There’s a lot of value in selling that product because it’s a signaling strategy, and it’s worthwhile. So if you’re Milton Glaser and someone wants Milton Glaser to make their logo for them, Milton would say it’s $250,000. You say, that’s crazy. I can hire some kind on Fiverr for $12. You might even get the same logo. But what you wouldn’t get is the ability to say to the Board of Directors, “We got Milton Glaser to make the logo.” So the hard work here of building a career as a freelancer, where you’re going to get paid fairly, is doing the hard work to get better clients, and then having the guts to turn down people who don’t value your reputation when they want to hire you. That’s my rant about pricing.

There’s a group of people who need me, who need my voice, who need the change I want to make. If I can find that group, the smallest viable audience, and delight them, they will engage with me, and they will tell the others.

It’s a great example. Here’s the thing. Your problem isn’t greed. Your problem isn’t that you are trying for more and more and more. Your problem is fear. The fear of someone saying you’re not as good as you say you are. The fear of once you’ve narrowed it down to the 500 people, to be rejected by those people is really hurtful, because there’s no one left. That’s all there is. Living with that fear is the hard work of the professional.

The statement, “we do this,” and being clear about what this is and why is totally different than the freelancer who says, “What do you need?” Because what do you need works great if you’re the local handyman. But it stops working great if suddenly there are a thousand local handymen and everyone’s a click away.

Because let’s look at dog food. The price of dog food has gone, just in the last 10 years, from $2 or $3 a pound, which is the stuff at the supermarket, to $45 a pound, which is the keto dog food that I bought on a lark for my dog the other day. Now, I get that a grownup adult might be hooked on this whole keto thinking, but as far as I can tell, even though the price of dog food has gone up by a factor of 20, dogs are not any happier than they used to be. So it’s not that you’re trying to make the dog happy; you’re trying to make the dog owner happy. The dog owner is happier spending more money. Not all dog owners. Just the dog owners who are happier by spending more money. That’s who the product is for.

And so what we think about when we are not building a public utility, when we are an entrepreneur who is going to the marketplace with an innovation, is we need to please a small group of people. One of the signals that is available to us is price. The signal says if you are looking for the lowest price and everything that comes with that, we are not those people. On the other hand, if you are looking for a fair price and everything that comes with that, the customer service, the attention to detail, the fit and finish, the voluntary constraints, we’re that. Type four letters into DuckDuckGo or Google, n-o-m-a, just four letters. noma fills the screen right? Where did noma come from? Well, if you want to open the world’s most famous new restaurant, Copenhagen is not a smart place to do it.

Making the rule that you’re only going to serve food that you harvested from within 100 kilometers, not very smart either, particularly if you need to charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars to do so. But they voluntarily accepted all of those constraints, knowing that they only needed to blow the socks off 10,000 people. If 10,000 people walked away from that experience thrilled to pieces, then they would become famous to the family. They would become noteworthy enough that people would fly there to engage with them. If they had opened noma and said it’s $18, so that forgives us for cutting this corner and this corner and this corner, you never would have heard of noma.

“We’re not saying ‘We made this. Please come buy it.’ We’re saying, “We see you. We see who you are and what you believe.’ And we assert, right here, right now, we assert that if you’re the kind of person that believes this and is looking for this, we promise that if you engage with your time and money with us, you will get that.”

When I think about what did Apple promise when you pay extra for a smartphone that is demonstrably not better than the alternative that another company makes? How do they get you to wait in line? Well, what they’re saying is, “For people who in some small way define their status among their peers by the device that they use, who will get pleasure out of being able to demonstrate to their peers that they have the resources to get the latest one, we have the latest one. Get in line if you want one.”

Here’s my best take on it. As soon as you can adopt the posture that you are needed to do a generous act that someone in worse shape than you is drowning and that you have something to offer them, it shifts from a selfish act that is shameful to a generous act that is making a difference. So it requires us not to be selfish people. It’s not double-talk. Once we realize that there actually is somebody who would miss us if we were gone, then we can get out of our head and realize we are not doing this to get in the light or to hide from the light. We are doing this because someone else needs us. So the big shift is to stop thinking of prospects. Stop thinking about people you are marketing to or at, and instead say, “Where are my students? Where are the people who are enrolled in this journey who I have a chance to teach?”

Because if I’m a teacher and the student is coming along for the ride, I don’t have to yell. I don’t have to interrupt. I don’t have to hit kids with a ruler. All I need to do is take them to where they said they wanted to go. That fits into the person I think most of us would like to be, which is the teacher we would remember years later, the person who turned on a light for someone who didn’t have a light.