How info marketers selling boring offers can be the rockstars of their niches

Onwards & upwards to part 3 of my interview with Vance Morris. This one is all about how info marketers can potentially charge a pretty penny for even otherwise boring or commodity-type books, newsletters, eBooks, or anything else informational. Hit it, Vance… === elBENBO: Now comes my shamefully greedy & selfish question: How can info marketers and info publishers like me Disnify & explode our businesses? VANCE MORRIS: I'm a big believer of, "You always got to be in front of people." And so what I always recommend to people that produce monthly content is to send people every six months, every 12 months a binder and have a place for you to shove all that stuff. I've got newsletters, I've got stacks of them here, stacks of them there. And the one person that I do subscribe to that sends me a binder well, it's right in front of me on my desk because that's where I filed the stuff. So it keeps your brand, or your business in front of your customer or your prospect all the time. And if it's not on their desk, it's on their bookshelf. And they'll remember, "Oh, well, If I need something on this subject, I know it's in this guy's binder.” And what's the binder cost? Nothing, two bucks. And it just keeps the newsletter or the content or whatever it is you're selling in front of people. elBENBO: And I suppose that binder could be personalized. VANCE MORRIS: Yeah, I would take the time to design it. I mean, if you're selling a high-end a newsletter or high-end content, that somebody is paying you four or $5,000 a month for. Pony up and invest in a leather binder. That's got nice gold embossed lettering on it. I mean, you can certainly afford it. And that's only about 20 bucks. elBENBO: My business partner in Learnistic Troy is big on this. He tries to send each new member a personal video. He literally shoots them a personalized welcome video. Only takes him a few minutes but people absolutely love it, and no one else is doing it. VANCE MORRIS: That's the key thing. Even if people know you're doing it, they're not going to copy it. In order to provide these experiences and to provide these Disney moments and these wow moments, you do have to charge a premium because a lot of my competitors won't do it because they can't afford to do it. They can't afford to give a great experience. I mean, carpet cleaning is carpet cleaning is carpet cleaning, business consulting is business consulting, everybody is a commodity, it doesn't matter what the hell you do. There isn't anything that's not a commodity out there. The only thing that differentiates the commodities is the experience or the personality that is provided. elBENBO: It’s just an inner game thing then? You ask, “How do I take the video or the PDF and make it exciting, outstanding?” I always think of this interview I read of Joe Girard. He was the Guinness Book of World Record holder of car sales for many years. There’s nobody else his customers would buy from. Even if they didn’t like Chevy cars he sold, they bought him. He brings you in, introduces you to the mechanic, “This is so and so, head of service. You ever have a problem, you call him. You can’t get a hold him, then you call me personally. I will always make sure you’re taken care of.” Little gestures like that, and he had lines of people wanting to buy cars from him. VANCE MORRIS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, look at Disney. Disney charges premium Primo prices, right? Compared to your local fair, that shows up over 4th of July weekend, and you got the scummy looking guys that really shouldn't be around children running rides, and they probably have no idea how they worked, and you pay $20 for an all you can ride ticket and you get what you get and you're probably going to forget about it. But with Disney charging $130 now for a one day ticket, they still have rides, that's what they got, but they've created an experience around it. And more importantly, it's the memories. I mean, Disney is all about creating the memories. Well, and this completely ties into what we were talking about before, where you want to control the conversation that people are having about you and Disney does it very well: "Oh, you'll never guess what happened at Disney, we had a water leak in the room and then all of a sudden in the middle of the night the army of valet guys showed up, they packed up all our luggage. They moved us across the hall, they gave us free breakfast and free nights stay 15 fast passes. And everybody was happy." I mean, Disney is giving fast passes away, they don't call it don't cost them anything. But man, are they a sought after item! Because great service is your get out of jail free card, it's get to the front of the line. Disney hands a few of those front-of-the-line passes out and people were like, "Wow, thank you." They didn't even give any money away. Now they are going to talk about their trip, "Yeah, I mean, it was horrible start. The pipe broke." And it could have... If you're at the holiday Inn, pipe breaks so they'll be like, “We’ll send a plumber over here in the morning." elBENBO: That's something I've noticed even in my own business over the years, especially with all the slow mailing and all that. I mean, even right now, FedEx is up and down with COVID. I'm not saying I want bad things to happen. But when it does happen when you look at it from a service point of view, it's an opportunity to make a better relationship and ultimately get a lot more repeat business. VANCE MORRIS: I teach what I call “profitable service recovery.” How do you make money when something goes wrong? And so many people just fall flat here, or they think that they're satisfying the customer. You go to the auto repair shop and they fix your car and you're driving away and three miles down the road the car breaks down again. So you got to get it towed and you go back to the car repair shop and you complained to the guy and the guy is like, "Well, I'm sorry I fixed this, but maybe it might be this." And then he charges you again. Now to me that's sucky service, you're not taking ownership of your work. But say the guy just said: ”Okay, well, I'm sorry, let me see what happened. I'll fix it for free or refix it." Not that he shouldn't have fixed it first, fixed it right the first time, but I'll fix it for free this time. I won't charge you. All right, but I still have some costs my time, my aggravation why should your customer, have expense or either in time or money because of your screw up? So you have to think about it, "Okay, what else when I screwed up, when I didn't fix that car right, what other expenses did my client or did my customer incur?" Whether it be just time, "Okay, great, how can we compensate them for the time?" What if they had to go get a rental car for another day? Okay, can you help them out there. Time off from work that they may have lost because the car is moving around. I mean, there's all these things that are going in the background that you can't just say, "Oh yeah, I'll give you, give you that for free." All right, well that's nice and these days it's almost expected. But to show up and say: “Oh man, I'm really sorry, we should've caught that. Here's a loaner car from our personal fleet, please use that as often as possible. I know you missed that important lunch meeting, here's a gift card to Applebee's there's one across the street, please go have lunch on us. And we're going to make sure that your car is a priority, while you're at lunch, we'll get your car in, we'll get it fixed. And when you're done with lunch, you can come over and get now in which auto repair shop would you go to?” elBENBO: I hire Kia Arian for all my covers. For elBenbo Press she goes, "Ben, this is your ninth cover with me. I think you've earned the buy eight get one free loyalty card.” Totally unexpected, not necessary at all, but makes a huge impact like that. VANCE MORRIS: I don't know if they're still around, but there are companies out there that peruse all the newspapers and they find a business article about a company, they call you up and they say, "Hey, would you like a framed matted nice for wood with the brass thing. Copy of your articles so that it's to be hung in your office. elBENBO: Designers could do that with their artwork for their clients: “Here’s a framed cover, whatever it is, for your wall, enjoy!” Talking about commodities: I remember hearing you say when Disney puts Goofy on a mug or something otherwise mundane, they can charge 10 times more for it because now it becomes something completely different. And if you sell books or information, I've been thinking of actually selling signed issues of Email Players for an extra fee or a signed copy of my books. I don't like doing that, it’s a pain in the ass actually having it sent to me then sending it back to the printer or the customers, but I know people want it, they ask for it sometimes, and I will simply charge a premium. And so why not? It could be worth something, as a collectible some day, who knows. VANCE MORRIS: It’s worth something to that person. === So ends this 3rd of a 4-part interview with Vance Morris. While you wait for part 4: If you’d like to partake of Vance Morris’s course (taught live to certain members of my horde last year and recorded) about how to grow your business using his techniques… you can get it at a huge $700.00 discount off the listed price, if you get it via my affiliate link below before tomorrow, Sunday January 9, at midnight EST. Plus, you’ll also get something else: A free copy of my next blatantly pretentious & super expensive book when it’s ready. The book’s subject: How to use the design-side of your business to help amp up your business’ longterm sales, build a ridiculously powerful & influential brand, and whip up a “berserker-like” horde of excited customers who can’t wait to buy and consume your offers. More: The book also goes deep into how I use design with World-building in my companies. I wrote about World-Building in my elBenbo Press book from a publishing perspective. But this new book teaches it purely from a design point of view. In fact, true story: I recently had a conversation with Kia Arian — one of the only designers the great Dan Kennedy allows anywhere near his own direct response projects, if that tells you something — about this topic. Kia does nearly all of my business’ designs. i.e., she’s been closely watching how I go about my World-Building in “real time.” And here’s what she said about how I do the design side of World-Building: “Honestly Ben, in the whole world, you're talking about the 1% who can think at this level. Very few people can operate at this level. Now that doesn't mean that they can't, some people, they just haven't seen it. They just haven't been introduced to it.” But the World-Building info is just one aspect of my upcoming book. It goes deep into my 20 years experience combining design with direct response marketing to grow my business, my brand, and my influence — all starting completely from scratch. After the book launches it will sell for at least a few hundred dollars. Maybe closer to $1,000 or perhaps even well over $1,000. I am still working out the pricing & logistics. But if you buy Vance’s course from my affiliate link below by tomorrow's Sunday 1/9 at midnight EST deadline, I will ship you this book when it’s ready later this year as a bonus. NOTE: It could be several months before the book is ready. So don’t expect it any time soon. All right, here’s the link: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/vance]( Ben Settle This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2021 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA