Roadmap to success comes with caveats

A highly accomplished friend of mine recently suggested that I look at several of the very popular women coaches who have rapidly built multimillion-dollar businesses in the past few years. Since this very good friend is in fact a highly regarded presentation and business coach, I decided to follow up on her suggestion.

I viewed several presentations and accessed two products in the $500 to $700 range. I was not impressed with the content of either package, judging both of them to be pretty pedantic. I was, however, highly impressed with their packaging and social media marketing. (Incidentally, I will not publically disclose the presenters names since I am not endorsing them and wish to avoid any public dispute with their audience. I will however, disclose their names upon request via email.)

First, let”™s address their content. In social media, we constantly talk about the importance of excellent content and how it is responsible for list building, successful webinars and inbound marketing. In fact, a recent webinar I attended by Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger ”“ one of the most successful online blogs, attributed his remarkable success to content marketing.

The basic question all of these products attempt to address is: What do you need to do to successfully build your business online? Simply put, here are the basic steps:

Ӣ You need to determine your target audience.

Ӣ You need to be able to reach them.

Ӣ You need to provide them with excellent content.

Ӣ You need to entice them to buy your product or service.

Ӣ You need to somehow remain in front of them.

The content of the two products I accessed appear to (at least) reasonably address these issues and identify several pain points, benefits and solutions. However, they are also fairly expensive. A third product whose landing page I will discuss shortly, costs $1,000 (actually $997). Can it help a business? Probably, but so can far less costly programs. The difference between these programs to a large degree is their marketing.

Without going into too much detail concerning this landing page (whose analysis would be much longer than the page itself), I will merely focus on several of its key features. (Note: a landing page is any page in which people are manually or automatically directed to. It is designed for some specific purpose ”“ usually to make a sale or complete a sign-up form.)

The top of this landing page contained a short, well-made video that automatically started once I landed on the page. (I hate videos that automatically start once you land on a page, but studies show that they are far more effective than pages that rely on viewers to manually start a video.)

Examination of key terms in the page revealed the following emotional phrases.

”¢ “”¦ for effortlessly creating 6-figure launches” ”“ The implication being that it”™s easy to create an extremely profitable launch. It is not. It rarely happens and takes a lot of planning and work. In fact, every successful product release requires a lot of work.

”¢ “My step-by-step formula to convert 100 percent of exactly the RIGHT PEOPLE into your offering.” ”“ First of all, I don”™t know how you can do 100 percent of anything. How do you even define who the right people are? I assume this implies that you have accurately identified your target market.

”¢ “The most heavily guarded secrets”¦” ”“ Which we will receive for $1,000. Obviously, they have limited security.

”¢ “I”™ll show you how you can fill your call ”“ EVEN WITH PEOPLE WHO HAVE NEVER HEARD OF YOU BEFORE.” ”“ This excites me. It certainly sounds a lot better than: “Make sure to ask all your social media friends and acquaintances to promote my product.”

As I said, semantics laden with emotion can be extremely persuasive and these landing pages are replete with many similar phrases that I could also have selected. Not surprisingly, these phrases and follow-up text comprise the majority of the landing page, the remainder consisting of testimonials and the product offer itself, which is actually the smallest landing page component.

My purpose in this article is not to disparage these moderate-to-expensive products. Some of them are certainly worthwhile and can greatly help a business, the $2,000 product I use being one of them. However, an increasing number of these “be successful/be your own boss/earn a six figure income” products are merely repackaged content that is beautifully presented in a limited-time manner through email and social media to elicit an emotional response. They are correct from one perspective, however: They do help the presenter generate a 6-figure launch. Look carefully before you jump and make sure there”™s a 100 percent return guarantee.

Bruce Newman is the vice president at The Productivity Institute L.L.C. in Carmel. He is also a social media strategist and the designer of a new service, wwWebevents.com. Follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and the Productivity Institute blog. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.