It's Monday -- that means it's time to open up the mailbox and answer YOUR questions!

It’s Monday — that means it’s time to open up the mailbox and answer YOUR questions!

Hey there, Rainmaker. I want to talk to you briefly about how someone influenced ME, and use it as a way to share what I think is a really interesting marketing lesson.

This is an unconventional Mailbox Monday issue. It’s based on something I got via email, but it’s not a question, like I’d normally use as the topic for a Monday issue.

However, if you DO have a question you’d like for me to answer in an upcoming issue of Mailbox Monday, let me know. Send your question to [email protected] and I’ll answer your question soon…

Here’s the email I got…

SUBJECT: An article featuring Roy Furr

Hi Roy,

Just wanted to let you know we mentioned your work in our new post: Advanced Copywriting Tips: 5 Mental Mistakes That Can Doom Your PPC Ads.

It was just published here: http://epicpresence.com/advanced-copywriting-tips/

Feel free to share the article on your website or on social media, and keep up the good work!

Best,

Nikki Tuting | Content Administrator

EPIC PRESENCE

Intelligent Internet Marketing

Before we get into this, I have a to make one comment, as a way of protecting the Breakthrough Marketing Secrets and Roy Furr “brands…”

Aside from a very short interaction with the folks at Epic Presence, I don’t know them or their work. They could be incredible, awesome marketers. Or not. I don’t know. My reason for sharing their email (with link) is to share my thoughts on this particular marketing strategy, that worked on me.

If you’re interested, definitely check them out. I just don’t know enough about them to make a recommendation one way or another.

So, with the dumb disclaimer out of the way (I really do think disclaimers are pretty dumb, even as I see the need for them)…

Let’s dive into this email, the strategy behind it, and how you can use it in your business.

How to get on the radar of almost anyone you could hope for!

Okay, this is pretty cool. I learned this strategy back when I had a podcast for a bit, featuring some incredible marketers.

The one drive that almost invariably gets people’s attention…

Especially people who are successful, in high places…

Is EGO and RECOGNITION.

Trust me. This works on pretty much everybody. Man, woman, child. Liberal or conservative. Rich, poor. Any nationality or ethnicity.

Make what you’re saying about the person you’re talking or writing to, and they’re interested.

They’ll at least give you the time of day, to keep going.

So much communication out there is NOT about you, that when someone does start talking about you, it’s like a beam of light shining down from heaven, breaking through on a cloudy day.

So, when I used to invite folks like Brian Kurtz and others to talk to me on my podcast, I’d send an email saying, “Can we feature you?”

You can see in the email above, they definitely used this tactic. The subject of the email was, “An article featuring Roy Furr.”

How could I NOT open this?! And the moment I saw it, too!

So, if the first hurdle of making a sale is to get the prospect’s attention, they just cleared that hurdle easily.

Here’s the next place they could have screwed up, but didn’t…

Now, if you JUST apply the previous tactic, you WILL raise skepticism and an objection. As a podcaster, I’d always have to deal with this, and overcome it AFTER the email was opened.

But in this case, they overcame it before the email, so the process was super-smooth.

The objection? “Yeah, but how much work is this going to be?”

How did they overcome this? They made all my work past-tense. In other words, the article featuring me was ALREADY DONE! They’d quoted off the Breakthrough Marketing Secrets website. This email was simply to let me know about it.

In my case, with the podcasts, I had to lay out in the email how little effort it would take for them to be involved. But here, they did one better. They offered me the ability to exert NO effort to fulfill on the promise of the subject line.

At this point, I’m pretty satisfied.

They thought that something I considered worthy of writing was worthy of their share. And, they’d shared it.

They had my attention, and my interest. I was predisposed to being receptive to whatever came next at that point.

Then, they made the next step totally easy and pressure-free for me…

Rather than coming to me with a sense of obligation or entitlement to me taking action to promote them, they were very soft and friendly in their request.

(Too few people are — the amount of off-the-mark requests that I get DAILY is ridiculous.)

They said, “Feel free to share the article on your website or on social media, and keep up the good work!”

At this point, at the end of this email, there is ZERO obligation they’re attempting to put on me.

They’ve simply extended me the courtesy of letting me know they’ve shared my comments through their site.

And that if I want to let others know about this, I can. They plant a specific idea if I feel the need for reciprocity, but they’re not pushy or brash.

This is flawless execution, for a few reasons…

— They’ve done something nice for me, without prompting, setting up the desire for reciprocity…

— In doing so, they fed my ego’s need for recognition…

— They were nice, non-obligatory, and did not have an entitlement attitude — which if they’d done the opposite would have been a quick way for me to write them off…

— And they offered a specific action I could take to return the favor, without expectation…

All-in-all, this left me with a very good impression of them… And so…

Instead of sharing on social media, I decided to do one better!

Their article, with an admittedly tiny reference to one of my articles, is getting an entire article being written about it.

So they link to me, and me back to them.

This helps both of us. It shares our audiences back and forth.

And it gives us both fodder for having a better conversation with our readers.

And it’s all done in a way that builds good feelings.

This is a very legitimate, positive, and sustainable strategy for leveraging all the drives and motivators I’ve talked about here (and way better than crap exploitative tactics like so many internet marketers use). Yes, you’re seeing tactical implementation of this, but the strategy and thinking behind the tactics is what makes it work so well for the long run.

Okay, here’s how to apply this in your business…

So, you have someone you want to connect with. And you don’t want to come across as a jerk, a slimy salesperson, a needy nobody, or any other alliterative appellation that they don’t want in their lives.

How about finding a way that you can feature them in the best possible light, to an ideal audience… A book, a podcast, an interview, an article, etc.

Find out what you can do to take as much of the work out of it for them as possible, all the way up to them doing NO work at all, as shown above…

And connect with them on this basis, rather than any other way you could approach them.

Then, just do it. Preferably, with quite a few different ideal people.

Not EVERY one will yield the ideal result (whatever that is — getting clients, getting links to your blog, whatever). But some will. And for some, they will yield much better than you could expect!

For example…

If it weren’t for me interviewing Brian Kurtz for my now-discontinued podcast a long, long time ago…

I probably would never had been selected as his copywriter for Titans of Direct Response, and experienced all that has come from that.

I think you can call this a breakthrough strategy!

Yours for bigger breakthroughs,

Roy Furr

Editor, Breakthrough Marketing Secrets

P.S. — If you’re curious about the copywriting survey I put out last week, why I’m doing it, and how to use surveys to create total breakthroughs in your business… There’s a book I can’t recommend strongly enough. The book is Ask by Ryan Levesque (who I met at Titans), and I’ll talk about it more soon. But in the mean time, Ryan has let me give away a handful of free copies (max 50) to Breakthrough Marketing Secrets readers. You have to pay shipping, but it’s still an incredible bargain. After all, he lays out a process he’s used to generate over $100 million in sales in the last few years… A process you can use to either start a million-dollar business from scratch, or multiply profits in your going business.

Here’s the link Ryan gave me, for you to get the free book.