“Use this trick to explode your audience”.
Thus read the subject header in my inbox.
And I thought: what complete hogwash. (and yes: I unsubscribed)
For one thing, what’s this ‘explode your audience’ thing?
Why would you want to explode your audience?
Sounds pretty messy to me.
Sure, I get it: it’s a figure of speech.
But that figure of speech was being used to create hype, and make false promises.
Because while there are things you can do that make your audience grow big, and fast too, it’s going to be hard work no matter what you do.
It’ll take time, and lots of it, and you’ll probably have to invest money too.
SEO, design, crafty copywriting… you don’t get an ‘exploding audience’ for free.
Just won’t happen.
And yet, marketers will jump at every opportunity to try and fob off yet another push-button, never-been-this-easy, fully-automated-business-building-machine widget or course.
It’s what made some poor ill-advised guy come to me a few years go, when I still did copywriting.
He wanted to invest $1000 with me, which he thought would get him a website, copy, traffic, and sales.
He earnestly thought that for 1K you can build an automated money machine.
I tried to explain that if a thousand dollars is enough to build a turnkey business, I’d spend my days doing nothing but that, but the logic escaped him.
No, he’d been told by some scuzzy marketer that this stuff really works – just hire someone to set it all up, and money will come to you, automatically. Total cost: $1k. Haha.
Of course, you’re not that gullible.
But, the marketing industry has spent about 100 years becoming really very good at selling stuff, and you don’t even need to be gullible to be taken in.
Not if the seller knows what he’s doing – and if he is lacking in the ethics department.
After all, the biggest cons in history happened to some really smart people.
Psychology is behind it: the smarter and more experienced we are, the easier it is to think that we won’t fall for a con.
And it’s exactly that confidence that a con artist preys upon.
That’s why it’s called ‘con’ – short for confidence..
Confidence is what sells, and it’s the ethics of the seller that determines whether or not a buyer gets conned, or gets something truly valuable instead.
And to me, the kind of marketer who uses hype and manipulation and the promise of mountains of money or insanely fast audience growth or whatever, is no better than Bernie Madoff or someone who tries to sell the Brooklyn Bridge (which a man George C. Parker did many many times. True fact).
So be on the lookout for things that seem too good to be true – they usually are.
Why this advice today?
Because I want you to know that when someone wants to sell you something with the pure, ethical intention of making your life better or solving your problems, they’ll do it in such a way that you won’t feel manipulated.
A good and ethical seller will give you all the options, realistic expectations, and, most importantly:
An ethical seller will give you the autonomy to make your own decision, instead of forcing you into the decision that they want you to make.
Bonus?
If you do exactly that same thing, you’ll never have to be salesy, and you won’t have to manipulate or push people.
Instead, you’ll become someone that people want to buy from, which means you won’t need to sell unto people: they’ll enroll themselves.
How to do that is what I teach in Sales for Nice People, should you be ready to step up your game and convert more buyers.
