How to Attract the Right Buyers – And Avoid “Freebie Seekers”

It’s easy to attract “freebie seekers” who will waste your time and never buy anything, but quite a different thing to attract the right kind of people who will actually buy what you offer. So a good offer both attracts the right kinds of prospective buyers and qualifies them – at the same time. Let’s examine this further by way of a true story.

Several years ago, I was approached by a customer of one of my online businesses. His name is Kevin, and on the Internet he’s known now as “Tiki Kev.” We spoke on the phone and Kevin told me that he was virtually broke, was having to shut his shop down and sell all of his best tools. He  didn’t know what to do. I could tell he was rather desperate, and if I didn’t reach out and help him, things were going to go from bad to really bad.

Kevin is a master builder and had decided he wanted to specialize in Tiki Bars and Tiki Huts, something he’s very passionate about. Kevin builds the highest-quality Tiki bar and hut products. Click the link and have a look for yourself, if you’re curious.

Anyway, he told me these custom-built products sell from around $5,000 and up, and he wanted to sell them via his website. He showed me his website, which looked really nice (his wife is an excellent graphic artist). Right away, I realized there were several big show-stoppers standing between Kevin and success.

I told him, “Kevin, I hate to say this, but people just aren’t going to come visit your website and buy a $5,000 anything from you – no matter how good they look.”  I told him I’d think about it and get back with him.

When we talked next, I suggested we start smaller and build our way up to selling the custom Tiki bars and Tiki huts. I told him we needed to write an e-book on how to build a Tiki bar. He went to his shop and started building one of his signature custom Tiki bars and took pictures of the entire process – start to finish. It wasn’t long after that he had the first edition of “How To Build Your Own Tiki Bar.” I went to work on writing a sales page for the product.

A few weeks later, we had the sales page in place and posted the e-book for sale on ClickBank. It took several more weeks of driving Google AdWords pay-per-click traffic to the site and split-testing price points to find the magic price: $19.95. Needless to say, Kevin was not happy about the final price. We both wanted the e-book to sell for $49.95, but it just didn’t sell at that price. However, at $19.95, it began selling great, and we saw the volume rise to over a hundred e-books per month right away.

Meanwhile, I told Kevin that while his website looked good, it was too graphics-heavy and needed a lot more text, because the search engines only cared about text. A few more weeks of SEO work, and we were good to go.

Time passed and I noticed I wasn’t getting any emails from Kevin, so I decided to call him. When I reached him, he sounded really tired. He said, “Man, I’m working like 18 hours a day building bars for people. It looks like I’m going to have to hire some help – I can’t keep up with all the business that’s coming in.”

A few months later, I get a call from Kevin. He’s really excited, “I’m going be on TV! Extreme Home Makeover is having me and my crew on their show!  Can you believe it?”  Well, needless to say, I was very proud of what we had accomplished. They found Kevin’s site due to the SEO optimizations. In fact, search on Google for keywords “tiki hut” or “tiki bar,” and he’s still on page one today.

In Kevin’s case, the $20 e-books turned into “money magnets” for his $5,000 custom-built bars and huts. Let’s examine this case study a little closer, because something very important happened here.

People who wanted a Tiki bar and wondered what it would take to build one themselves bought his e-book and found out just how involved it actually is to do it right. Some e-book customers went on to build their own very nice Tiki bars, using Kevin’s plans.

Another percentage of them realized just how much work and effort goes into building a Tiki bar right, and suddenly had a great appreciation of the VALUE of having it done for them. And who do you suppose they wanted to build their Tiki bar? The guy in those pictures who showed them exactly how it’s done.

This is how you develop a money-magnet to sell something worth thousands of dollars over the Internet. You find something of interest to the prospects, you qualify them with a small purchase (of $7 to $19.95 – no higher), and then you give them all the information you can for how to do it themselves. Once they recognize the time, energy and effort involved, there’s a much greater appreciation for just buying the finished product. Some percentage of the prospects will have the money to just buy the product instead of spending the time and effort to do it themselves.

There are many other types of money magnets, including free trials, free software tools, results calculators, free reports and e-books, free videos, webinars, teleconferences and more.

The key is to figure out what offer you can use to attract the right kind of prospects. It all starts with the right offer and getting the prospects on your list, so you have the opportunity to build a relationship with them, earn their trust and show them how you can help them get what they want.

Author: Rick Braddy is President and CEO of WinningWare, which provides software tools and services for product launches and online marketing. He blogs about those same interests in his award-winning Product Launch and Business Growth Blog. Also check out his free, 22-page report: How to Successfully Launch a Product or Website Online.