Что то со ссылками…

It’s really really good. Well done my friend. Simple, basic, and very clean writing to tells the deal.

As Carlton would say, “this is the ultimate selling form the heels sales letter.”

What can I say, we just love the guy. Still, this has been a brilliant hour reading the entry and comments. Love the snark. Cheers.

Off topic, should the Christmas Tree Shoppe change its name? Those filthy bastards are just crap stores with sometimes-in-sync merchandise. It’s really no different than an Ocean State Job Lot or a Building 19, but you don’t see those guys calling themselves “Easter Bunny Boutique”.

Thanks for the well thought out reply. I’m in the middle of a launch right now (getting a ton of traction on it too) so I can’t go point for point with you, but I appreciate your comment and you make some good points.

I will say that a 30 year brand still isn’t an excuse to sell from your heels.

Weird to me that I’m getting the reasonable comments now. Where were you guys when the angry folks were here? =-)

Another one here who arrived at this page by way of Roger Ebert’s link. So yes, I am one of his club members… steel yourself for the inevitable disagreement!

It would be interesting, I think, to run some kind of poll to see how many prefer your copy, and how many prefer Ebert’s approach. As I implied above, I fall into the latter camp, but am nowhere near certain of being in the majority. Indeed, I rather suspected myself to be in the minority, before reading such a large number of comments above from people who seem to agree with me. I propose such a poll not for any sense of self-justification, but rather simply to sate my curiosity.

I apologize in advance for anything I say below that is a re-hashing of discussions had above. This thread is getting rather long, and while I read about a third of the comments, I admit to having merely skimmed the remaining two thirds or so. I just feel the need to throw in my two cents because… why? Well, that’s probably for the psychologists to figure out!

Anyway. I do understand and sympathize with your contention that while RE may have a 30-year brand to build on, others may not, and that RE’s approach may not work for them. The fact remains, though, that you /did/ choose RE’s pitch to critique, and indeed led said critique by talking about how to structure a pitch that already has “fuel points” 1 and 2 (traffic and credibility) well in hand, and only needs work on point 3 (conversion). Which is to say, to some extent you are basing the whole analysis in the context of the assumption that the person making the pitch does have some brand and customer loyalty built in. It seems a little dinsingenuous to then turn around and claim that you can’t generalize that assumption. No, you’re absolutely right, you can’t. But if you want to talk to people about making a pitch when they don’t have the built-in customer base, and personal (or brand) style that built that base, then I wonder if that might not be easier to approach via a case study of someone who, well, doesn’t have said built-in customer base and style.

That’s (only slightly) tangential to my main point, however, which is this: as someone who very happily paid the $4.99 to join the RE club, I did so not because of any expectation (or desire) that I would get anything more out of it. I did it /absolutely/ to pay RE back for the value that he’s given me over the last decade or so that I’ve been reading him online.

When you propositionally re-structured his pitch, you moved his bullet #9 down into a “PS”… I’m afraid I have a bit of trouble with that, because bullet #9 is the only one I cared about. Numbers 1 through 8, and 10 felt entirely irrelevant.

Indeed (and here’s where my take differs slightly from those I’ve seen in the above responses) all talk about any benefits to me from joining is a little off-putting. Not because of any distaste for marketing-speak per se (that has already been covered above), but because I’m not interested (for now) in anything else he might have to offer. I’m interested in what he alaready is offering, and has proven that he can do well. That has a proven value to me that I know I like, and am happy to pay for. Additional (or exclusive, for whatever definitions of additional and exclusive) content leaves me, at best, skeptical, for the reasons that: 1. It has yet to be demonstrated to me that it’s something RE will be able to do well; and 2. I’ve gotten along just fine without it so far; I’m not convinced I want it anyway.

It is possible that I would have paid for the pitch that was more along the lines of “this site is moving to pay only — if you want to continue seeing the content you’ve been getting so far, you will have to pay $5; the free site will only offer reduced content.” This certainly addresses the concern in my last paragraph, however is distasteful in the extreme; I expect I would feel like I’m being strong-armed. (It is admittedly possible that the right wording could sufficiently mitigate this impression. It’s hard to say, and I reserve judgement for now.) In short, I identify with the desire to keep the site free, not necessarily just for those who don’t see the $5 value in paying, but even to prevent me from feeling coerced into paying, a situation that would be more likely than not to raise my defiance and drive me away entirely.

But then, why would (or rather: did) I pay at all? Because as I stated above, I already feel that I’ve gotten (more than) $5 worth from the site, I appreciate this, and I want to acknowledge it. No more, no less.

In short, I’m not certain that there’s any way RE could have gotten my money /other/ than the way he did. But that way certainly worked! So in a sense this is a rebuttal to your argument above that while some people paid in response to Ebert’s pitch as it stood, he could have gotten even more people to pay by re-structuring it. (e.g.: from your response to Mike: “I also think Roger left a lot of moolah on the table with his ‘from the heels’ approach to selling this.”) Possibly, but in doing so, there’s no guarantee it would have been a net gain; he may have lost some of his existing payers.

And again, I want to underline the point I made earlier that: my contention has little to nothing to do with the precise wording. Yes, there’s a lot of marketing speak in your version, and it may not have sounded exactly like Ebert, but I recognize that it was off-the-cuff; those are issues that can certainly be addressed with a bit of time and effort. My contention is entirely with the re-prioritizing of what benefits are and are not important to the readers of his pitch, and the corresponding emphasis, placement, etc. of those benefits.

Now, to return to my intro, I am utterly unconvinced I’m in the majority here. It would be very interesting to get some kind of idea of how many more people would be likely to respond to your version of the pitch vs. how many would be turned away. (Clearly, there would be some of both; on the balance, what would the benefit be?) Hence my musing about a poll. Although it is possible that this topic (now a week old) has started to go stale, and there are no longer enough hangers-around to make it worthwhile?

Anyway, an interesting take. I appreciate the thought you put into it (and into struggling through my response!). I may be back later to read some of the rest of your blog…

Take care!

@Sushi – thanks for the comment. There’s a whole other post I could write about Ebert’s brand and how it factors into this but it’s outside the scope of a comment. Good point, though.

I don’t mean to knock marketing, but “integrity” is pretty far down the list of things I think of when a marketing plan is brought up. Marketing is the spin rather than the reality. Roger’s the opposite – he has become a renowned and revered voice in journalism, and his words carry weight and import.

Perhaps you don’t see the stark contrast, but I would never have bought into his club with the gimmicky copy you wrote. I want to stress that this is in no way a critique of you or your skills, but rather, it’s antithetical to the notion of Roger’s persona and what he brings to the table.

Maybe what he’s offering is indeed sparse and barely indistinguishable from the free content, but the mere fact that he is Roger Ebert is the selling point here.

Love,
Mr. Sushi

Chris, you seem generally well mannered and courteous. I wish more people behaved so in daily lives, blogs, and comments to blogs.