I know what you’re thinking… ethical?? Will that even work?

YES. And I’m about to tell you why Max Simon’s new concept of “Tribal Marketing” will actually work far better than any other short-term, shortcut, flavor-of-the-month marketing strategy that we often see come and go.

But first, a quick intro of who Max Simon is.

A couple weeks ago, Max Simon from GetSelfCentered.com came all the way over to Malaysia to hang out with me, Mike, and the whole MindValley crew.

Let’s just say we had a lot of fun

And not to mention a lot of shared learnings. The people at my office loved him.

It was a great experience. You see, Max, who’s a great entrepreneur, marketer, and personal growth junkie, taught us this awesome concept that he calls “Tribal Marketing“.

So I thought I’d share this video of Max’s training to MindValley so you can learn EXACTLY what he taught us.

He’s a pretty cool kid, as you’ll see in the video below. It’s 30 minutes long, but Max shares with us his amazing secrets to Tribal Marketing. Be patient, let it load and let me know what you think.

Tribal Marketing by Max Simon

Click here to view the embedded video.

BTW, It’s a YouTube playlist and should run seamlessly. However, if you run into any problems, you can also click next to view videos 2, 3 and 4. Alternatively if the playlist does not work at all for you — check below. I’ve posted individual videos

What to look out for in this video:

• Why mass marketing is dead and how tribes have formed in its place
• Top 5 outdated fears that still control many marketers (and how these mistakes actually hold them back from having a LOYAL and RESPONSIVE following)
• 7 qualities you should (and CAN) attract so you won’t ever again worry about squeezing dimes out of your following cause they’ll be more than happy to throw dollars at you

BTW, Oh, and if you’re not familiar with Max, he’s well known for his Public Displays of Meditation, his Enlightened Entrepreneur Experience seminars, and for his work with the Chopra Center for Wellbeing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

WARNING:

Twitter can be evil.

Some less-than-scrupulous people can easily take advantage it and wield frightening influence over poor innocent subjects.

On the other hand, use it with responsibility and you perhaps have the most powerful relation-building medium online today.

Why? That’s because Twitter is currently the closest app on Earth that replicates the actual thought patterns of the human mind. You see, the human mind does not really think in blog and article form. It does not think in huge chunks of information.

Instead, it thinks in a stream of consciousness way, random disjointed thought layered upon random disjointed thought.

That is why when you use Twitter, your mind is “tricked” into further receptivity than it normally should have, because it’s now in its most natural environment.

It’s almost like you are communicating telepathically with other people, because you’re able to uncover a 100 different thoughts that are contained in a 100 different tweets.

After all, what’s more intimate than the whispering voices in your head?

If you know how to take advantage of that state of mind, your microblogging can make you rich.

After a few months of testing and tracking what works, I have discovered 3 ways that Twitter can impact your business unlike any other site on Earth. Once you understand the Twitter user’s borderline hypnotic state of mind, these 3 covert techniques can pre-sell prospects on warp speed.

1) Psychic Market Research

Marketers often talk about the Robert Collier concept of entering the conversations in your prospect’s mind. Information marketing genius Porter Stansberry says that our marketing should start where they are.

In other words, the closer you can align yourself to their top-of-the-mind thoughts, the more receptive to your marketing message they become.

However, the problem is that more often than not, you don’t know what they’re really preoccupied with.

What’s worse, you sometimes make harmful guesses and assumptions. The end result is a bomb in your promotions and a dent in your sales, because your offer is not in tandem with what the prospect is thinking and feeling in the first place.

Good news. The whole interface of Twitter is one big web conversation taking place in a meeting of minds.

You see prospects exchanging rapid-fire thoughts, opinions, and random finds. In just one screen, you can read the hopes, dreams, interests, fears and dominant emotions of your niche.

To do this, just use http://search.twitter.com and Monitter, put in your niche keywords and boom–you’ll instantly be transported to the heart of the conversation.

Start your marketing there and see the difference in your response.

2) Network Like a Viking

Vikings have a brutally effective way of making friends, and meeting potential mates.

They sail to random villagers and within minutes, they kill all the inhabitants, pillage all the houses and capture all the maidens.

Why are they so successful?

It’s because they catch people by surprise, and there’s little in the way of resistance.

And in the nearly spam-free waters of Twitter-ville, prospects are more often than not caught by surprise, and there’s really very little resistance and a whole lot of receptivity.

For one, Twitter requires very little investment in expanding the social circle, because you can securely follow and unfollow people at will. As a result, it’s easier to access the market leaders on Twitter because well, other than the investment of clicking a button, they won’t really lose their privacy by accepting you as a friend–unlike email or mobile.

Furthermore, since you’re confined to only 140 characters for your Twitter message, the effort for them to reply back to you is only a sentence and a click away. No relatively complex email writing process.

And because one-liners are lot less threatening than blocks of text, so people instinctively resist the messages less.

Plus, if they do get annoyed, the BLOCK button is only a push away.

Making connections has never been easier, and as long as you’re not blatant with your promotions, you can make friends and influence people literally at the click of a mouse.

So do the Vikings and plunder prospect’s wallets away.

3) Establish Your Place on the Mountain

Gary Vaynerchuk said this in his most recent keynote address for Web 2.0 Expo, “If you give good shit, people will follow”.

This rings true especially for Twitter, because if you can share good stuff on a regular rate, you’ll be perceived as a guru in record speed.

It’s because the Twitter user’s frame of mind is a very conducive one for making yourself larger than life.

Prospects get on Twitter to find out the latest gossip, to chat with their friends, and more importantly–to seek out important summarized information and short inspiration and revelation quotes.

Once you do that, it’s like you are setting off flares in the middle of the night, and your prospects will notice.

As you know, getting prospects through the sales funnel is always a numbers game. The more good content you get out there attached with your name, the more chances you have at converting prospects to customers.

Because Twitter’s push-button easy way of delivering messages instantly with a low investment of 140 characters, you can keep sending out quality stuff over and over again. Indeed, there’s unprecedented opportunities for something to snag or hook the consumer and keep them for life.

And with that newfound authority, you can use it to sell more stuff and make more money from your now pre-sold audience.

So the conclusion?

Twitter is subversive territory.

When you understand how a prospect uses Twitter, getting your marketing message across has never been this unfairly simple.

It is software built on the base of NLP programming. So even if you have not gone for a day of training in your life, Twitter makes the mind easy pickings because it leaves the mind in a vulnerable state.

So use these 3 secrets and profit from them. In fact, let me know if you’ve used them and seen results.

Because I have. Amazing breakthroughs have been happening since I hopped on to the micro-blogging bandwagon.

To see these controversial techniques and other secrets I will not reveal here in action, feel free to follow me on Twitter: Email Copywriter

Watch me closely, emulate me, and apply them to boost response rates in your marketing.

Again, here’s the link to follow me on twitter:Â email copywriting

You might be wondering how Brad Antin and I ended up talking business.

Did I walk up to him and say, "Hi, I’m Mike, I actually plan to be your biggest competitor, could you please tell me your secret?" Not quite.

Because all of us have a very different mindset, and that’s the one crucial difference that differentiates us from the rest.

I believe in a world of abundance. I think there’s enough for everybody, so I’m not competing with them.

I approached them because we are in the same market and together we can help each other become vastly more successful. That’s the attitude I have, and that’s the attitude they share.

This market is enormous, the demand is almost insatiable and we’re only 2 tiny fish. If we can work together to help each other rise, that’s great.

So, I told them, we operate in the same market as you –spiritual and personal growth, we have similar businesses and similar sized lists, let’s figure out how we can work together.

Brad Antin immediately said he’d love to promote one of our products to their list, which is great because they have one of the single most responsive lists on the Internet.

I approached him like that, and I flattered him. I told him, you know what? I’m your biggest fan. I’ve bought your product just to figure out how you guys do business because I’m floored, what you have done is phenomenal, and we’re not anywhere close. I’d love to talk to you for 5-10mins and learn more about what you guys do.

That’s how I approached him –it was flattery and a mindset of abundance. But I didn’t lie –he knows that we’re in the same market, and he also has the mindset of doing cross promotions and helping each other grow our businesses.

Partnerships are some of the best ways to grow and improve your business.

My question to you is –is there someone in your market whom you can work together with? Is there someone doing better than you are? How are you going to approach them and work together towards a more successful future for both your businesses?

Brad Antin gave me 2 key insights. First, he told me: CUSTOMER DELIGHT.

Customer Delight

If people are raving about you, they’ll buy from you again.

The equation is that simple. And, how do you get a lot of referrals? Same equation. If people love you, they’ll keep buying from you, and they’ll want to share it.

How do we get people to love us –to love our products and services more? That’s a question we need to start asking ourselves way more than we used to.

We have a list of 11 items integrated into our core MindValley DNA, and customer delight seems to carry a lot more weight than we’ve ever realized.

On the front end, we have as much as Centerpointe does. Compared to them, however, we still seem like tiny amateurs… BUT, we can quickly and easily close that gap. When we get to that crucial point of customer delight, people will buy from us, repeatedly.

They told me the formula, and it’s very simple, too: do something unexpected. And then do it a few more times.

When people buy a product from you and you deliver the product that you’d told them they’d get –great. You’ve done what they expected. That doesn’t build customer enthusiasm. You have to go above and beyond their expectations.

However, hearing this from Brad Antin is very different from experiencing what customer delight is really about.

Good advice is too easy to ignore if you just read about it on a blog post, but because the results from Centerpointe are remarkable, I decided to purchase the Centerpointe product to find out exactly what I would experience.

I bought their product, they shipped it to Malaysia, and it was exactly what was advertised. It didn’t really look much more than the $180 product it was. I thought to myself, ok –why do people love them so much? I found out why, 2 weeks later…

Because, 2 weeks later, I got a book in the mail from FedEx, shipped all the way from the States. I thought to myself, “Wow!” I mean boy, was I happy! I mean it –I really was, because who ever in my life, after I’ve bought something, thought to just send me a book 2 weeks later?

Not one company, except Centerpointe, has ever done that in my entire life. It’s memorable. It got me to know them…because it was just awesome and it made me feel great. I love them.

Now, as if that wasn’t enough, 2 weeks AFTER that, they sent me another envelope and this time, I get a bonus product. It’s a CD, and they say, “Here you go, we think this will help you.” At this point I was floored, and I felt like anything they wanted me to buy I would, because I just love them.

That’s how you want ALL your customers to feel.

To improvise on Alex Mandossian’s advice, I’d say the formula is “Give –give –give –unexpectedly –then ask.” The unexpected giving is crucial because if you say, “give me $10 and I’ll give you my product”, it won’t work. An equal exchange won’t delight and it won’t build an enthusiast.

It’s pretty easy and, obvious. When you delight your customers, they begin to love you and they become your fan. When you offer your them your next product after you’ve already won their hearts and minds, they’re going to buy your stuff. Why? Because they don’t know the other stuff on the market, it seems risky and unknown compared to yours.

There’s still more from my discussions on Centerpointe’s strategies with Brad Antin.

In the meantime, I just want to drive home the fact that we all need to get to where these guys are. In what ways do you think you can start to delight your customers? Let’s figure out customer delight, because based on how well Centerpointe’s doing, it’s worth it.

He works with Bill Harris, and after listening to both these guys, this is the first of a series of posts in which I’m going to share some key points and interesting things these guys are doing with Centerpointe.

Our partner, Larry Benet "The Connector", was nice enough to introduce me, so I had several conversations with Brad Antin.

Allow me to share Centerpointe’s statistics again. Though you’ve likely heard them before, it’s worth repeating before dissecting some of their numbers with you.

In 2007, their total sales were over $17M, and that is just from the main products they sell. There’s much to learn from them because $17M is VERY good. Throughout our discourse, some very powerful data points came to light.

50% of Centerpointe’s sales come from referrals. I will bet you that today, on any of our websites, I suspect, from gut instinct, that our figures are far below where these guys are.

A referral sale is a sale that’s generated from a friend’s referral, via word of mouth. It means someone picked up a phone and told their friend, "I’ve been trying out this new Holosync® stuff, it’s amazing! You have to give it a shot because it’s helping me have a stress free life, I’m enjoying myself more… I’ve found a Miracle cure, you have to give it a try." 

That’s what a referral is. And Centerpointe is getting half of their business from people passing it on.

When you break it down, that means they generate $8.5M worth of sales because of word of mouth marketing (WOMM). That’s a tremendous amount, by any standard.

If your remember, they sell their front end product for $180. Their average lifetime value per customer (CLV) is $800. This means that they are getting $620 on the back end. That’s another large figure.

They do a promotion twice a year, where they send a letter to their back end –their existing customers – almost like a mini launch to their own list. Their back end promotions bring in between $4M to $-5M per year.

In addition to that, they have set up a specific follow-up sequence for every customer. This sequence includes upsells that they get in the mail, based on which of Centerpointe’s 12 custom made levels the customer is at… (You can buy from them 12 times…that is cool)!

When you dissect this picture and do the math, you start to see that if you take away the back end and the referrals, you end up with $1.5M.

Ask yourself, how can you improve your business in order to get these kinds of results? Do you have enough back end products to increase your customer life-time value?

John Reese is inviting you to become his friend. Jack Humphrey thinks it’s a great idea.

It’s a nice marketing stunt, and I’m sure John has a well thought-out plan for the likely 5000 people who add him, but that’s all it is: a stunt. The long term value is not pending for most of us (John will probably pull a miracle out of it).

For the rest of us: You might be my friend on Facebook or MySpace or Friendster, but if we’ve shared no significant interaction together (dinner, solving your problem, you solving one of mine, a roof shared during a trip, etc), then that stat isn’t worth much. To me or to you.

And no, meeting for 12 minutes doesn’t count either.

So the question, then, is not how many friends you have, but how many significant interactions you have with customers, prospects, partners, and colleagues. How can you share 1 more today?

(Pic)

John Reese is inviting you to become his friend. Jack Humphrey thinks it’s a great idea.

It’s a nice marketing stunt, and I’m sure John has a well thought-out plan for the likely 5000 people who add him, but that’s all it is: a stunt. The long term value is not pending for most of us (John will probably pull a miracle out of it).

For the rest of us: You might be my friend on Facebook or MySpace or Friendster, but if we’ve shared no significant interaction together (dinner, solving your problem, you solving one of mine, a roof shared during a trip, etc), then that stat isn’t worth much. To me or to you.

And no, meeting for 12 minutes doesn’t count either.

So the question, then, is not how many friends you have, but how many significant interactions you have with customers, prospects, partners, and colleagues. How can you share 1 more today?

(Pic)

Set up a form on a web page asking specific questions related to your product. Let’s say you offer a pop-up software product. You might ask:

1) How has your conversion rate increased since using our software? (Please be as specific as comfortably possible)

This will get specific case-study like data that is much more powerful than a generic endorsement. “Sign-ups increased 75%!” is much better and more convincing in sales copy than “I got more signups!”

2) Would you recommend -Software Name- to someone else?

This leads your customers to giving you a direct endorsement

3) What do you think about -Software Name- and other YourCompany software products?

This is more open ended so that your customers can share anything on their mind.

4) Is there anything you don’t like or that we can improve for our next update?

This question will help you cover objections you hadn’t yet thought of or missed out in previous marketing efforts. You will also know exactly what needs to be improved.

Now, how to get customers to your form? Simple; just ask them and offer a gift to those who fill it out. The gift could be a free private webinar, exclusive access to your latest ideas, or whatever – just make it something worth their time. If your product has really helped them, they’ll be happy to help you.

Easy.

First off, let me get this off my chest: there’s more to social proof that just testimonials!

Ok, now, here’s a little illumination before we get down and dirty.

The most powerful force in marketing is buzz (which is why should consider a prelaunch process for every product you release). How exactly is buzz built? I’ve broadly defined buzz as the emergence of a common topic among the collective conversations humans are having with each other at a given point in time.

When you and I learn that Harry and Sally are talking about the same product launch as us, and then hear about another pair, and another… we become a part of the Buzz.

Almost all buzz is good buzz.

Now ask yourself, when you are about to make a decision (literally at the brink of it), what question is in your head? What are you thinking about?

What can seal the decision for you?

I would suggest that one of the most powerful influences would be hearing from someone else very similar to you that has already made the purchase and can thus share the same good results hopefully that you are looking for.

That’s social proof.

That’s seeing someone else making (or already made) the same decision you’re about to make.

That’s something to be a part of.

Social proof appeals to our natural, very basic instinct to be a part of something; a pack, a group, or a larger social unit. We’re hard wired to desire this – it’s pure, beautiful human nature.

Don’t believe me? What do you do before you buy something? Look for reviews or others’ opinions. Bam. Social Proof.

And you can use this nugget to help people find their justification for buying your product.

Kinds of Social Proof

Implied celebrity endorsement

This one should be handled with care, but can help when done right. Let’s say you’re marketing skating shoes, and you sell the same kind Tony Hawk (celebrity skate boarder) uses. Somewhere in your scheme you could mention "the same shoes used by Tony Hawk."

This shows the buyer that the product is good enough for Tony Hawk. If it’s good enough for the stars in your niche, it’s probably good enough for the hobbyist.

Testimonial case study

Do your testimonials explain specific results? Instead of using a 3-sentence endorsement, what if you studied a client and then showed exactly what they employed from your product, why it worked, and how they could build on it?

This becomes much more than the "Product X rocks and you should buy it!" or "I used Product Z and saw a 10% boost!" The 2nd option isn’t bad, but the specificity and thoroughness of a case study may be just what the doctor ordered.

A 2nd form of this is the before/after/after model. Ask a client how they were doing before your product, how things improved immediately after, and then long term benefits. For example:

I was making 10 sales a week before buying Magic Marketing. Two weeks after purchasing I was already up to 18 sales a week and now, 8 weeks after purchasing my average week sees 23 sales! My sales more than doubled from Magic Marketing and I’m still learning more!

This highlights immediate and long term improvements, which will speak to a wider audience.

Normal testimonial

(Might as well mention it.) You should pepper all sales materials with the positive feedback your customers have given you.

Quantity-related social proof

Not many people think of this one, but it can take your life from Good to Super Sweet.

The idea is to have a visual representation of the quantity being sold, or to have a limit in the quantity available. As a side note, be sure to justify a limited quantity, especially if it is a digital product.

A few ways to do this:

• Show an image of the physical products or a screenshot of a report showing unit number (something like that)
• Tell your audience the site will go down once you’ve sold out
• Decrease the number available at the last minute (figure out a reason why)
• Use a countdown for products available
• Limited quantity bonuses

These items, especially the limited quantity bonus, give you a reason to email your list:

Just so you know, the first 100 that included the bonus have already sold out, so you better get moving and purchase!

All these quantity displays show that others are buying, proving to the lead that other people are making the plunge and they are not alone.

Blog Comments

If you run a blog around your product or blog, make comments easy to find. You could even highlight some of them or use them as testimonials. If you run a blog, remember that people almost always scroll down right away to see comments – immediately looking for social proof that the post is worthwhile.

Different ways to collect and show social proof

Host a call and let users message in questions that you then answer on the call

1. Ask your customers for stories of extremely awesome conquest (really great outcomes), then send them out and challenge others to send in their own reports. This not only gives social proof, but also encourages consumption.
2. If you send out an email blast to your list and get questions, you can use those questions as social proof in future emails ("so and so asked this great question… here’s the answer")
3. Casually show the number of times something was downloaded, or a post was viewed, number of people watching, etc

For the record…

Yes, you can overdo it. Once it becomes unbelievable you are then only hurting yourself. Finding the balance is key.

How To Place Testimonials & Other Forms of Social Proof

Key point: when someone looks through testimonials (or whatever social proof) they are trying to find a testimonial by "themselves" or someone like them.  They’re looking for the easiest touch point to relate to, so the most influential social proof are the ones from their same peer group.

Or, they may be looking for proof that something works. To help give your benefit or feature list more IMPACT, follow it with a testimonial attesting to the result. If I’ve got a tool with a key automation feature, right after listing it I’d throw down a testimonial from someone who saved a boat load of time.

Another example would be putting a testimonial in your sign-up form from someone who loved your free lessons.

Place your testimonials so they are directly related to the minute context of that part of your sales message.

What if you don’t currently have a community?

If you’re launching a new product, don’t have yet have a community, or have weak testimonials, how do you collect & show social proof?

CREATE IT.

Use the number of opt-ins, number of times people Google a key niche-related search term, or something else to create a peer group on the fly.

Your audience’s common interest in your niche is enough to mold a community out of it. You just have to get a little creative (gasp!).

Highlighting the existence of this peer group will act as social proof and build further buzz around your product.

Let’s Wrap it up Here

When you’re crafting your social proof remember these key points:

• Social proof is most effective when given by someone similar to the reader; similar "situation," similar interests, and reaching a similar desired outcome.
• Social proof is more than testimonials
• People want to be a part of a group and that group/community is inherent social proof that other people are doing or purchasing something the target wants

Ramit runs a great blog with some excellent content and a wicked sense of humor. But I was most impressed with a little conversion trick he’s running on his blog.

When someone comments on a post they are taken to a page that invites them to signup to Ramit’s mailing list and to visit his discussion forum. The copy and look of this page all make it seem like Ramit is rewarding the visitor for the comment and granting access to private, top-secret info. Check out the screen shot below.

Why do like this idea?

The visitors who comment on a post are usually ones that are most interested in your content. They are, in other words, “hot leads”. But with most blogs, these visitors will often move on and never revisit unless they’re hooked up to your RSS feed. But RSS feeds are not enough.

To keep your visitors coming back, why not offer them a newsletter subscription or an invitation to join a forum.

Ramit does this and improves upon the idea by using the sense of ‘exclusivity’ to make the visitor feel that they earned the right to access the forum and subscribe to Ramit’s newsletter due to the time they spent commenting. I bet this aura of exclusivity boosts the value of his forum and newsletter in the visitor’s mind and should lead to more returning visitors.

Ramit’s Blog is here. (make a comment!)