Weekend Favs August 17th

Jeff Walker (00:00): The reason it’s lasted so long is because it’s based on strategies as opposed to one hit wonders as opposed to short-term tactics. It’s rooted in psychology and the way our brains work. And so the formula has been working for coming up on 30 years now, and it’s going to keep on working for another 30, I think for 300.

John Jantsch (00:23): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jeff Walker. He’s the creator of the Product Launch Formula, revolutionized online marketing with a step-by-step process that generated over a billion dollars in launches since pioneering the concept in 1996. His formula has become the gold standard for online entrepreneurial training. He lives in my favorite state of Colorado, way down in the corner of Durango, enjoys Outdoor Adventures and Family. We’re going to talk a little bit about his updated and revised version of his bestselling book Launch, how to Sell Almost Anything Online, build a Business You Love and Live the Life of You. So Jeff, the show.

Jeff Walker (01:07): Thanks, Jen. I’m really happy to be here.

John Jantsch (01:09): Been a long time since you’ve been on the show, but fortunately you and I got to bump into each other recently in Nashville, which is greatly connecting. So for the two people that don’t know, what is PLF?

Jeff Walker (01:21): PLF stands for Product Launch Formula and basically is a process and a system to launch your products online, whether you have an online course, a membership site, coaching program, any type of training like that, it’s also used for art and for books and even for widgets.

John Jantsch (01:43): Awesome. So I always like to ask in a revised book, updated book, you’re in the online space, a lot of stuff changes every day in there. What would you say to somebody who bought the original version? Like what’s new?

Jeff Walker (01:57): Yeah, what really changed? So Product Launch Formula is the reason it’s lasted so long. So as you mentioned earlier, I started developing it in the mid nineties. That was when I did my first launch, was 1997 and developed it, started publishing this as a course in 2005, came out with the first edition of the book in 2014. The reason it’s lasted so long is because it’s based on strategies as opposed to one hit wonders as opposed to short-term tactics. It’s rooted in psychology and the way our brains work. And so the formula has been working for coming up on 30 years now, and it’s going to keep on working for another 30, I think for 300 years. But the online world does change quite a bit. So with that in mind, I revised it and really what I went into deep in the book is social media, which really wasn’t, there was no social media when I started out, and even in 2014, it was definitely a thing, but it wasn’t a thing at the level it is now.

(03:04): And also paid traffic, the ability to, there’s just great ad platforms that there weren’t back in the day. So those are a couple of the really big things. And then one thing that’s really changed is the timing of the sequences. So Product Line Formula is built on sequences, well, it’s built on stories, sequences and mental triggers and the sequences. It used to be there was this pre-launch sequence and that was the star of the show. And then you would actually open up and start taking orders, and that was almost an afterthought, that portion what we call the open cart or the open cart sequence. And that has become the star of the show now. So a lot of the emphasis has shifted from, yes, I’d say it used to be the pre-launch with the open cart being an afterthought, and now the open cart is a full on major sequence.

John Jantsch (03:56): You mentioned when you were describing what it was that you have a lot of pretty big variety of use cases, right? Oh yeah. But somebody might read the word formula and think, oh, there’s one way to do it mean, how do you address that idea?

Jeff Walker (04:12): Yeah, I mean, it’s more, I think that marketing is often, there’s a science and then there’s the art. And within product launch formula, there’s certainly room for the art. And as formulaic as I try to make it because I’m teaching people to do it and the people I’m teaching, some of them are starting from absolute ground zero, have never sold anyone anything, have never done any marketing whatsoever. So I have to assume that’s where we’re starting from. But as you get more experience, there’s all kinds of room for creativity within the formula, the whole idea, it’s about delivering value before the sale. It’s about delivering. One of the ways I like to think about is the value. It’s value before reveal and before you reveal the full extent of what your offer is, you’ve already built great value for people. And then there’s this idea of desire before availability where you’re building up this desire before someone can get it. And if you look at the way, I mean, this is used by big companies, like Apple does this so well, yeah, I mean Hollywood does it. People

John Jantsch (05:24): Waiting around the block for the new thing, right?

Jeff Walker (05:27): Exactly. And that is possible, even if you don’t have a budget like Apple has or the Hollywood studios have or the big gaming companies have, we can absolutely do that by putting together a pre-launch where you walk people through a series of you define a problem that they have, whatever market or niche you’re in, whether it’s quitting smoking or learning meditation or having a better love relationship or building your business or hitting a better tennis serve. It doesn’t matter the people they’re there, they’re in your world because they want something different in their life. And our job is to either still deliver it, is basically to take away pain or deliver pleasure to people, give them more pleasure, take away pain from them. And so they have a series of problems. And if you can solve those problems through your pre-launch and not like the big overarching problem, but if you can start to thin slice some of the things that are keeping them up at night, and you can define those problems really well and then start to solve some of them in the pre-launch, then that just, it builds trust. It builds relationship, but it also builds anticipation that they’re going to want to get whatever the thing is.

John Jantsch (06:52): Would you say that this sort of came about organically, like 1995, I was on 9, 9 2. We were all trying to figure out, Hey, how can I make money on this thing? So you created something and worked. People started asking you, Hey, Jeff, how’d you do that? Would just kind it. Yeah,

Jeff Walker (07:10): That’s exactly it mean. So when I started, I started publishing a newsletter in 1996, and it was about the stock market. And that’s something I had some knowledge on, and I don’t even think I ever told you this, but I started that newsletter, a free newsletter back when there very many free newsletters there. No,

John Jantsch (07:27): We called ’em Easy or something like that, right?

Jeff Walker (07:30): And there weren’t very many, and I think there was probably about zero free ones about the stock market back then. There might’ve been couple. And I actually started publishing that because I needed some to put something on my resume to help me get into grad school. So it’s just by these ridiculous, ridiculous path people started subscribing to that newsletter. And then after I had about six or eight or 900 people, and I’m like, oh, maybe they’ll buy something from me. But at that point, there was no teaching or training about marketing online in 1996. It just didn’t exist. And I had no sales or marketing experience. And furthermore, I thought I had this feeling messed up feeling about marketing and messed up feeling about sales that if I asked them for money for something that they would hate me. And so I decided to romance them, and I gave them a whole bunch of really high quality content, and that gradually led it to the sale. And that one seed of an idea has led all these years later, my students have done a billion dollars in sales. It’s just ridiculous.

John Jantsch (08:38): You mentioned the idea that there is a psychological strategy or psychological component, a lot of this, so you talk a lot about authority and scarcity. Reciprocity. So how do you bake that in a way that doesn’t seem manipulative, but also certainly does the job?

Jeff Walker (08:58): So there’s all these mental triggers, and the pre-launch gives you this amazing time to use those triggers and one of them authority you mentioned, and you absolutely have to lead with authority anytime you’re doing any type of marketing, even if you’re just doing content marketing, if you’re just getting people to try to pay attention to your message out in social, you have to establish some authority or else there’s just no reason for them to pay attention to you. So anytime, any presentation you give of any sort, anywhere, you have to tell people why they should pay attention to you. Now, there’s elegant ways to do this, and there’s clumsy ways to do it, like

John Jantsch (09:41): The picture in front of your jet.

Jeff Walker (09:43): Yeah, right, exactly. I think one of the best ways to do it is to deliver real value and to show up and know what you’re talking about, not have the intro that I just had on this podcast where I was stumbling over myself trying to describe what PLF was. But yeah, so I think authority is a big one you want to lead with, and reciprocity is a mental trigger where if you give something to someone, they want to give something back to you. And when you are giving true value in your pre-launch and it doesn’t cost anything, that’s not manipulative, you’re just giving value. But it does develop reciprocity. So yeah, I mean, I think with a lot, any type of marketing, there’s ways to go to the dark side, and I hope my clients aren’t doing that because I think the reality is if you just show up and you deliver real value, you’ve automatically built up authority and you’ve built up reciprocity and you’ve built up likability. And so yeah, those triggers are built right in all the way through the process.

John Jantsch (10:46): Where I see people, what I was talking about, I’m sure none of your students do this, but we’ve all seen the oh sale ends at midnight every day for the next six months. The sale ends at midnight. And so it’s just manipulative, it’s, it’s not honest and authenticated. It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign, ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters, and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training a