If you had an information product that you wanted to sell online, how would you do that?
To sell anything online you need a sales page with clear copy and powerful images. But is that enough?
In today’s world, you also need a sales video.
In this episode of how to make money from your content, I share the process I went through to create my sales video for my Book Rapper book summaries. And I’ll show you the two essentials you need to include to create your ultimate product sales video. Best of all, it’s a sales video template you can use to sell anything.
Being able to sell your products and services is crucial.
If you can’t sell your products, creating your content and your products will be a huge waste of time, energy, and effort. Even worse, unless you can earn money from your content, at some point you won’t be able to keep making content – you’ll have to get a job doing something else.
And that’s a huge loss of your creative control, self-expression, and identity as a content creator.
Previously, I compared Patreon and Ko-fi. And I concluded that building a Ko-fi store for my books and products was my best way to make money from my content right now.
The good news is that it only took 5-10 minutes to create a basic sales page. But am I going to sell anything without a sales video?
In his post, 30 Vital Video Marketing Statistics You Need to Know in 2022, Jack Shepherd shares three vital reasons why you need a product sales video.
Video marketing works.
But how do you create a sales video for your products? And most importantly, how do you create a product video that stands out and makes sales happen?
There are two essential things you need to make this happen.
The first thing you need to do is get your head around the idea of selling.
As Dan Pink said so beautifully in his book title, ‘To Sell is Human’. It’s something you do every day regardless of whether you’re in business, or not.
To sell is to offer to help someone else go from where they are to where they want to be.
Your product is the thing that helps them make this shift.
This is the first thing you must highlight to your potential buyers and clients – you must understand where they are at right now and where they would like to be.
When you can state this clearly and accurately you create The Gap.
Whenever I think of The Gap, I always think of my time in London catching the tube.City Transport Info – The famous London “Mind The Gap” Message
You want to ‘mind the gap’. This is the key to your buyer’s motivation.
Unless your buyer is motivated to move from A to B they won’t be buying anything from you. This is your first step – define The Gap.
For Book Rapper, it’s going from being uninformed and making poor decisions that could cost you your business or your career to being informed and making smart decisions that boost your business and build your career.
I talked more about this in the post about Context Shifting – it’s the key for thought leaders to sell their ideas and for you to sell your products.
The sales process then presents three ways to respond to The Gap.
The first way to respond happens when your buyer’s motivation is low. They do nothing. This means their current situation continues as it is – or gets worse.
For instance, they fall further behind and make even worse decisions – “I think we should replace our fleet of cars with horses. We’ll instantly cut our fuel bill to zero.”
The second scenario shows options that are like yours.
For instance, instead of buying the Book Rapper summaries you could buy all the individual books and read all of them. But this would cost you almost ten times more to buy the books and take 6-8 times longer to read them all.
Plus, you have the problem of finding the right books to read.
And the third scenario shows what you are selling in all its glory and why it’s the best option in the entire world and they’d be silly not to take up your fabulous offer.
The big challenge you need to overcome when creating your sales video is the curse of knowledge.
That could be the title of JK Rowling‘s next book: Harry Potter and the Curse of Knowledge.
The curse of knowledge is when you assume what you know other people will know and understand too.
For me, I naturally know you need my Book Rapper summaries to defeat Voldemort and save the wizarding world. But for you, that might not be true.
I see books as a source of great knowledge and opportunity. They’re a way to tap into the best business brains on the planet. But for you, they might remind you of school and the last thing you want in your life is to read more stuff and be reminded of school.
Therefore, the first step in your sales process needs to be to understand where your potential buyers are at right now.
Highlighting this gap is the key to having people motivated to buy your product.
And to highlight this Gap, you must talk about this at three levels. I spoke about this in the earlier post on creating your client value statement.
The first and obvious level – that most people focus on – is the functional level.
With Book Rapper, the functional result is to know more about what’s happening in the world. That’s nice but not very specific. Instead, in your next marketing meeting, you can propose using crowdsourcing as your new strategy and know what you’re talking about.
That’s a practical and functional result.
But there is a deeper level – how is this going to make you feel?
During the pandemic, a lot of people became stressed and anxious because they lost their sense of control and influence over their lives. This is a loss of agency.
Book Rapper is all about boosting your agency – your feeling of being in control and having a choice. It gives you choices because you have a better understanding of what’s going on around you.
The third level at which people buy is their social standing.
You don’t want to be the only one in the marketing meeting who doesn’t know what crowdsourcing is. That would make you feel like an idiot. But worse, you’ll look like an idiot in front of your peers.
In this case, reading Book Rapper could be the difference between being seen as a leader or a loser.
NOTE: In some cases, it might be enough to sell your product based on the functional result, but usually you’ll get better results when you include all three levels of motivation.
Now we have our basic content mapped out, we need a structure or a map to organise them. We’ll talk about this in our next post.
For now, you need to define The Gap – where are your clients at and what do they want instead. And make sure you do this at the three levels at which they buy – functional, emotional and social.
Once you’ve written this down, head over to our next post on the Sales Video Structure.
If you want more on how to make money from your content creation, then check out these three posts:
What’s your best tip for what to include in your ultimate product sales video?
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