While we didn’t have any spirits, we did try their gourmet burgers. They were good, without a doubt. But the one thing that stood out was their “bottomless steak fries” that you get with every burger. Indeed, any sandwich, I believe.

Why is this important?

Well, not only is it a great benefit, even a USP of sorts, but it’s steak fries, not normal fries you get everywhere else.

That ups the value for sure, but I noticed something else. Something extremely clever on their part.

See, when they brought our burgers and steak fries to our table, I noticed they didn’t give you a huge amount of fries to start out. It wasn’t a particular tiny portion either, but it was far less fries that you’d likely get at any other eating establishment.

Except—you didn’t worry about it, because you could have as many as you want. It was bottomless!

I know what you’re probably thinking. Yeah, so?

Think for a moment what happens at any other restaurant who serves a lot of fries, but DOESN’T have the bottomless thing happening. They wouldn’t give you as few fries as Red Robin did, because you’d say, “Hey, they’re ripping us off. This is all we get?”

So they pile them on and give you a good amount, much of what you don’t end up finishing. That’s a lot of wasted fries when you add up the number of patrons served over any length of time.

Now look at the Red Robin model. They give you a smaller portion, but you don’t mind because you know you can always ask for more. But the thing is, most people don’t.

Most people’s eyes are bigger than their stomachs, and a smaller portion of fries is just fine in the end, especially with half-pound burgers!

Sure, there are some who want more, and they’ll get it. But Red Robin is doing two important things here:

1. They’re cutting costs, which in this day and age for many restaurants is crucial to stay in business, with oil and food and delivery prices being what they are.

 

2. They’re presenting this cost-cutting as a huge benefit. Who else offers bottomless steak fries?

It’s a huge value builder, and best of all, they don’t even need to deliver in most cases. In fact, I’ll wager they have to cook far less fries than most thriving burger restaurants, because of their model.

Absolutely brilliant! They’re perceived as adding more, but in actuality they deliver less. And this isn’t a shady or sleazy strategy of any kind. Their patrons really can have as much steak fries as they want. It’s just that what they think they want is often different from what they actually want, or in this case, can eat. I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.

Now I know they aren’t the only ones doing some variation of this. Not by a long shot.

But it’s a good lesson. And it’s not just for restaurants.

A marketer I know once told me he offered a product with a limited bonus. The bonus was a free consultation with him on the phone. He sold out the bonuses, and you know how many people took him up on it?

Zero.

But that bonus still had both a real-world and perceived value. The fact that nobody took him up on the bonus didn’t make it any less valuable.

Perhaps there are some opportunities in your business to beef up your offer and USP by going the extra mile. Even if you don’t have to!

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Watch the video!

I think it’s safe to say that I’ve outdone even myself in the “overdelivery” department, if I may be so bold.

Add to that the brass guarantee and the ridiculously low registration fee, and you’ll understand why you’ll want to sign up quick. This is no false scarcity tactic.

I REALLY can only handle a limited number of participants, because I can only handle so much one-on-one coaching.

I’ll likely raise the price in a few days as the class fills to capacity, then I’ll have to shut off entry
permanently.

Now even if this class is not for you, you may still get a kick out of watching the video. I had many hours of pulling my hair out in frustration with the stupid green screen and my inferior lighting skills.

But after more than a dozen test takes, I finally nailed it. (Those video folks sure know their stuff!)

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And this one is short, sweet, and to the point…

I walk you through the simple process of why your customers stop buying from you, and more importantly, what you can do to get them back in droves!

This strategy works for just about any business. It’s the difference between just “getting by” going after new customers, new traffic, and really raking in the profits by getting your customers to buy from you more often (and spend more money each time they buy!)

It’s really a win/win for both you and your customers, because it’s an opportunity for you to provide even more value to them.

The bottom line is this strategy really works.

You can watch it now here:

http://www.askjohnritz.com/video2

I highly recommend you take 19 minutes and watch this video right now. It could be worth a huge pay increase for you!

And…the next video will be completely different from these two. Stay tuned, as that video is going to take things in a completely different direction. More to come!

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Because your competitors probably are (or will be soon).

They are nothing new by themselves. But some of the ways these old-school tactics and strategies are being adapted for online selling are making some marketers a killing!

(I know, because they work for me. This isn’t some “hearsay” third-party knowledge I’m passing along!)

Now those marketers aren’t talking about it, but I am.

I’ve created a pure content video to talk about some of these traditionally offline methods, and how just a handful of them can shoot your sales skyward and rekindle stalled marketing campaigns.

There’s nothing for sale here. I do have an Interactive Coaching Class coming up, but it’s definitely not for everyone.

In the meantime, enjoy this video (and a few more to come over the next few days), plus a few bonuses and goodies.

If you want to get on the priority list and grab the PowerPoint slides for the video, it’s entirely up to you.

But there’s nothing you need to do to watch this 30-minute video of pure meat except to click the link below:

http://www.AskJohnRitz.com

That’s it! Enjoy, and please do let me know your feedback.

I want to hear what it is that YOU want to know more about to turn your business from “yeah, ok, I’m getting by” to “Oh, yeah, baby! This is what I’m talking about!”

I think you know what I mean. In the meantime, enjoy this complimentary video on me!

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Some of them even offer shameless bribes to get you there. (Why? If they’re blog is so great, why do they need to bribe you??)

Well, I definitely need to bribe you hardcore to go to my blog. Because it sucks. And here’s why…

For starters, some people add to their blog every day. Some even post more than once a day.

Me? I post when I want to. When I have time. I won’t tell you about what I had for breakfast or my take on the funniest YouTube vid of the week..

Some bloggers are hip to the latest trends and tactics.

Me? Yeah, I might or might not be hip to them, but I won’t tell you about them until I’ve vetted them myself. Sometimes that can take a while. Sorry.

The top bloggers do really cool viral stuff that’s designed to get EVERYONE talking about their latest post.

Yeah, that’s nice. Good for them!

Some of them even go against the grain to post controversial stuff, for the same reasons. They want trackbacks and syndication and a partridge in a pear tree!

Look, I read those blogs too. But I don’t think it would bring you any extra value to parade their stuff around like it’s the second coming. You’ve already read it. If I can add to it, ok. Maybe. If not, then it’s best to let those folks have the last word.

Unfortunately there’s a sadder breed that use blogs to personally attack other people and/or businesses, thinking because they control their site, they’re untouchable. Sad.

You’ll never get that from me here. I will NEVER attack someone on my blog. There’s much more positive things to talk about.

So yeah, my blog kinda sucks.

But those who read it email me all the time. They call me on the phone. They participate in the discussion. These are the people I want to associate with.

And I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

So maybe my sucky blog isn’t so bad. Or maybe it is.

Ah, but that’s not up to me. It’s up to you. The power is in YOUR hands.

And here’s to hoping I become less of a “suck” factory over time, and more of a delivery of value!

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There are so many topics worth sharing, so I decided to start with a very timely lesson we discussed in the copywriting panel.

First, a little bit about the panel. The copywriting panel was made up of many many top notch copywriters, specializing in different niches and areas of expertise. We had “Million Dollar” Mike Morgan, Jay White, Karl Barndt, Vin Montello, Rachel Rofe, Andy and Shawn Catsimanes, Mike Humphreys, and many others (I was there too).

The attendees had the opportunity to ask questions about copywriting, conversions, and anything related, and boy, did they deliver!

The panel was supposed to run an hour, but when Mike Morgan said we’d be there until every last question was answered, we knew we were in for a long haul! In fact, it ended up running just shy of 2 1/2 hours! But it was time well-spent for all.

In any case, it was a nice diverse bunch of pros dishing out advice and hard-won lessons. I’ll have to grab the recording when it’s available, because I wish I had someone out in the audience taking notes for me!

One of the questions was one of those open-ended questions about copywriting. How do you write a salesletter? Or how do you decide what to put in the copy? Something like that.

I mean, we could have spent the whole 2 and a half hours discussing that one topic, and we’d have barely scratched the surface. There was lots of good advice given. I don’t recall all of it, which is why I want that recording. But I do remember what I said, because it was a very timely question for me.

You see, a few days before the event, I was sitting in a friend of mine’s office discussing his marketing. He asked me about putting up a website, and whether we could put up a page that had an order button to accept credit cards.

Well, yes, I told him. But what are you going to tell them before you ask for the sale?

He hadn’t thought that far, but he was more concerned with the credit card “order-taker-thingy,” as he put it.

So I said to him, “Look. Imagine you’re calling a potential client on the phone. Would you just call him up and say, ‘Hey, I have a great deal for you, and all I need is your credit card info?’ I think they’d hang up in your face, right?”

He laughed and nodded.

“No,” I continued. “You’d talk to him one-on-one, telling him all about your product or service first, the many benefits he’ll get from it, and how your product will solve a problem he has, etc.”

In short, you’d give your pitch and close him on the deal before you moved to taking his order.

I mean, that seems straight forward when you talk about selling something on the phone or face-to-face, but not everyone thinks that way when it comes to a website. A direct response website (or any printed ad, for that matter) is just salesmanship in print, right?

So I told him (and the crowd at jvAlert Live) about a little trick I picked up from John Carlton to get a decent first draft of your salesletter.

Basically, it comes down to giving your pitch on the phone or in person and recording it. Then have that recording transcribed. Take out all the “umms” and “ahhs,” edit it and polish it up, and you have the makings of a good first draft.

You want to tell your story. You want to discuss the big benefits and overcome objections. You want to sell them using emotion and back it up with logic. You want to have tons of proof to back up all your claims. This is something any good salesman (or saleswoman) will know how to do readily enough. It’s no different in print.

Remember you are talking to one person at a time. Just like a face-to-face meeting.

John actually explains it much better than I can, but that’s essentially it in a nutshell.

Now when you look at it that way, suddenly writing sales copy isn’t so daunting anymore, is it? I’m not saying you’re going to have world-class copy. But I’ll wager you’ll have something far more personable and effective than 99% of the “hype zone” copy you see floating around the net.

And remember, that was just one topic we discussed. And I still need to get that recording!

But I’ll have more to write about straight from jvAlert Live in the days ahead.

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The full title of the book is “Impact: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions, and Make a Difference in a Noisy World“.

Pretty cool stuff to know in this day and age, right?

I put a little research together for Ken, as I was helping him with his coaching copy.

Did you know conservative estimates now place the number of ad impressions we get each and every day at over 10,000?

And that number is only going to continue to grow.

But Ken’s giving away the farm with all the bonuses he’s piled on for everyone who buys his book (while they last), including educational resources, software, marketing products, even seminar tickets!

You can get all the details here.

He’s launching to 4.4 MILLION people today, so if you have trouble with the web site, hang in there.

I noticed some slowdown earlier, but it appears to be a little better now.

I was gonna pick up his book anyways, but with everything he’s piled on it makes sense to grab his book SOONER rather than later.

If I were you, I’d get your own copy right now!

If you don’t know Ken, he’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. He was Sterling Valentine’s personal mentor, as he took Sterling from zero to six figures in less than 90 days!

He’s definitely one to listen to.

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Now I’m not going to talk about marketing your products and services through forums. Not exactly. It’s been discussed many times before by people a lot smarter than me. But I will talk about something that anyone who chooses to sell through a forum outlet will want to know.

I recently gave some tips on a well-known marketing forum in response to the post of a forum owner. He wanted to know how to get his forum posts ranked higher in the search engines (SEs), and thus wanted more relevant traffic through his own forum.

An understandable goal.

He got some good advice, including getting backlinks to many of the individual posts on his forum.

But what WASN’T mentioned was HOW to get some of those backlinks. Aside from linking to forum threads from your own sites, how do you get other people to link to them? Because that’s what you really need to be successful.

So I offered some tips based on what has worked for me. I run many forums outside the marketing niches, including one for the telecom/call center niche. So let’s take that one as an example.

But the bottom line is, if you run a forum, you need to get topics that people outside the forum will link to on their own.

The usual viral topics will often work: controversy, funny, incredibly useful, you know the drill.

Even if you have to pay people to regularly post content (or do it yourself).

A good way to get started is to see which threads people are linking to on similar forums.

You need to do this with all the major SE’s, not just Google, because Google keeps many of it’s backlinks hidden from their search results.

So let’s take my telecom forum as an example. I might start at Google and do a search on all of my keywords (and add the word “forum” or “discussion board” to the search). That’ll get me a list of competing forums.

I might search for:

• call center forum
• telecommunications forum
• telecom discussion board

Stuff like that.

Then I’ll visit the ones with the greater rankings, since they’re usually the ones that have been vetted and stood the test of time (most forums don’t last very long). Then I’ll make a list of all the forums that look promising and have lots of REGULAR content (i.e. both old and new, CONSISTENTLY).

Finally, I’ll go to the advance search in Google and check the backlinks leading into each of these. Like I said, Google doesn’t reveal as many backlinks as, say, Yahoo does, so you’ll need to hit up Yahoo and MSN, at a minimum, in addition to Google.

Now you’ll have a sense of what kinds of threads in your industry generate external backlinks. You want more threads like those in your own forum, and you need to be able to spread the word about them.

I’ll talk more about this again but I thought this may help some of you who either have forums or are considering starting one. Not only do I own several forums, I’m a moderator in a few that you probably already visit.

And even if you don’t own a forum, those same tactics can get more external links to YOUR threads and postings on any forum you visit. The trick is to post something people will want to link to.

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Since then as you probably know, I’ve been connecting with lots of people for networking and friendship purposes.

It’s a great way to build relationships and get in contact with other like-minded business folks, any one of who could be the missing link in a future (or present) project of yours.

So if you haven’t done so, I suggest you start looking at your own clients and associates and begin hooking up with them on Facebook as well.

I’m not talking about a “personal social” setup similar to MySpace and other sites. After all, you can set up your Facebook profile to be as professional-looking as you like.

I see some big things ahead for Facebook, BUT…

There’s another phenomenon that’s been around for a bit, but lately seems to be taking the online world by storm.

I’m talking about Twitter.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s sort of a “mini-blog” you can publish in real-time, as you go about
doing things in your business and life in general.

In fact, Twitter originally started as a platform to text messages from your mobile phone to let the world at large know what you were doing at any given moment.

I know it sounds kind of silly at first glance. In fact, I originally thought so too. But after seeing what some of my friends and colleagues were doing with it, I can tell that it has the power to be a tremendous business and marketing tool.

Unlike where your email subscribers and clients get your email messages (which have to hurdle their way through spam filters and other obstacles), in Twitter your friends and associates can choose to “follow” what you’re doing and get targeted messages delivered to the device of their choosing. No more spam filters.

You can also follow what other marketers are doing as they post links to videos and other resources in real-time.

In fact, you can even link Twitter and Facebook together (just do a search on Facebook for “Twitter” for the Facebook application that let’s you do that.. or go here).

And like Facebook, Twitter doesn’t cost a nickel to join or use.

So if you’re not on Twitter, I’d check it out. If you want to see what I’m up to in my day-to-day activities and get information I don’t make available anywhere else, you can connect with me here.

Just click on the “Follow” button under my picture.

And if you or anyone you know would like to connect with me on Facebook as well, you can do so here.

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