Self-Conscious Sales: Building A Sales System To Help People
Yesterday, I talked about how you can find a product or service to offer when you find the thing that makes a person self-conscious. That might sound a bit like an evil-marketer’s technique, but it can be used to fill a real need in the market. In this article I’ll talk you through how you can create a sales system based on this need.
Fulfilling A Need
Imagine you’re talking to someone. They are self-conscious because they bumped into someone who was more attractive than they were. They’ll probably tell you something like, “Julia had great hair” or “Tom has put on loads of weight since joining the gym.”
You recognise in that brief statement that your target person is self-conscious about something. Now, you could write a $5 ebook about how to get better hair or put on muscle. That’s thinking like every other person on the internet when it comes to making money.
Let’s look deeper.
Why is this person self-conscious?
It’s because the person they’re talking about has triggered their self-conscious brain mechanism. They think they don’t measure up in some way.
That’s a real need that you can think of to address – and not in $5 e-book form.
Let’s take this a lot further, and assume we’ve got a guy and a girl who are more self-conscious than they’d like to be about their looks. (I know, this is hard to imagine.) How can you address their need?
- $5 ebook telling them to get better hair, join a gym, whatever.
That’s the easy route. It’s also the most competitive route. You don’t really want to do that unless you really can’t find another idea. Here are some other ideas:
- Be a gym affiliate. Be a suntan affiliate. Be an [insert-here] affiliate. There are a ton of these, the only limit is your imagination.
- Find a product that you can sell them as your (Outside of white-label protein powder and stupid soap stuff, there are a ton of options that nobody thinks of.)
- Give them a service. (I can’t think of an example here – but people still manage to sell “custom work out routines” on the internet, so there have to be great ideas here. Send people a “health and beauty” package once a month or something.)
- Work on sales with a local company.
There are a ton of ideas and my simple examples aren’t really going to be all that illustrative. You get the idea. Let’s move on.
Find The Secret Idea
Like I said above, a person is not going to tell you what their deepest concerns are. Nobody is going to say, “I’m jealous of X because they are better than me.”
Hopefully, you can get to the bottom of why a person is self-conscious. Then, you follow the above and address the root cause by finding a product.
There might be a product at this point. Say you’re an affiliate for at-home sunbeds. You’ve got to make the connection between your product and their underlying need.
The best way to do this is to follow the Big Idea advice from Ogilvy. You’ve got to find an angle that nobody has thought of.
This is an extended process, but it’ll pay off massively.
In terms of the subject of this article, a self-conscious person, to do this, you use the root cause of a person’s self-conscious behaviour. Remember you’ve already dug deeper than the other internet marketers. I’ve seen a million articles that do something like this with their headline:
Want to gain a hundred pounds of solid muscle in three days?
Now ask yourself: Is that headline actually addressing a root cause?
Let me tell you something: Most guys don’t want to gain a hundred pounds of muscle in three days. They want to get rid of their insecurity. They are self-conscious about the fact that guys are bigger, stronger or better looking than them. That is why they buy protein powder.
The millions of headlines that all do the same thing both miss the point and they all merge into one.
A headline like the below is better:
“Are you the weakest guy in your class?”
Hell, if you’re going for the athletic guys who are more likely to buy protein powder anyway, why not try something like this:
“You are not the strongest guy in your gym, are you?”
You’re immediately speaking to a person who is self-conscious with that headline. (As with all these examples, these aren’t great because I’m making them up on the spot. Your job is to put the work in and find something better.)
You’ve gotten their attention.
Going Further: Solving The Self-Conscious Unpleasantness
So, you’ve gotten a person’s attention. That’s the hardest part, because you won’t ever get 80% of people’s attention. There’s one problem though: You have to now solve the problem.
We’ve got a guy who wants to look better than the other guys at the gym. We’ve got a product that’ll help him. Use this template to see what comes next.
What we need to do is build some interest. This can be in the form of a lead-in which evokes all the elements of what they’re self-conscious about. It could be a guy picking up weights and warming up with another person’s heaviest lift. It could be about a girl who has to hide her belly fat on hot days, and wouldn’t it be great to wear prettier clothes?
Whatever it is, you build interest.
Then you qualify yourself. You too had the problem. If you don’t have the problem, don’t worry! We’ve all been self-conscious about something before. Use those emotions to channel what it must feel like.
Then, you simply put problem with solution with your features and benefits.
Your reader is self-conscious about their appearance. Your product makes their appearance better. This leads to more confidence, which leads to better appearance and it’s a happy cycle.
Sign off with a call to action which describes a person’s life where they’ll have the same trigger but an entirely new reaction.
A guy sees a Thor-lookalike walking down the road, but there’s only one strongest guy on the street, and that’s him.
A girl sees another girl in a pretty dress, but she’s happy because she’s wearing the same thing; in a better colour and a whole size down!
That’s all folks.
Final Thoughts
As always, the usual disclaimers apply. You need a product that’ll help a person. You need to refrain from promising miracles in your features/benefits/promises section.
Finally, the worst thing you can do is use this knowledge to be a bad guy about it. I was reading earlier on in the week about a guy I’d Googled who tried the internet spam marketing route. The kicker: He’d scammed some people ten years ago and they’d never forgotten it, and to this day they still post stuff about him pretending to have the cure to various ailments years on.
Don’t get caught in this trap. There are plenty of opportunities to help self-conscious people solve their problems in an honest way. You don’t have to jump into shady areas, so don’t. Take your time, build real solutions and the results will follow.