Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

How Internet Marketing Guru Charles Dickens Can Help You Turn Your "Hard Times" into "Great Expectations"
Yeah, that Charles Dickens. The "Christmas Carol" Charles Dickens. The "Oliver Twist" and "Hard Times" and "Great Expectations" Charles Dickens.

"Ummm... Jeff, you DO realize, don't you, that Charles Dickens died centuries before the Internet even existed? How could he have been an Internet marketing guru?"

Yeah, I know that Dickens never even heard the word Internet. So why do I call him an Internet marketing guru with tips for tough economic times today?

The way he wrote makes a great model for profiting online in difficult economic situations.

Dickens never wrote his novels the way we think of novels today. He wrote them in installments and sold them in installments. Each month he would come out with 32 new pages that picked up where the last installment left off. He also included 16 pages of advertisements in each installment -- but I'll get into that later.

Common working people couldn't afford a guinea for a hard-bound book. (We'll say for the sake of comparing to modern US money that a guinea is equivalent to $60.) But they generally could scrape together a shilling (which would be less than $3 modern US money) for that month's installment.

So, rather than Dickens' novels circulating only among the well-off, they sold like crazy to all income levels. Once someone started the book, they were certainly going to want to continue through all 20 installments.

So Dickens made the same amount per person that he would have if he had packaged it as a complete novel, sold it to many times as many people as would have been able to afford it otherwise, AND profited from selling 320 pages of advertising along the way.

Oh, and if someone with plenty of money and a desire to display Dickens novels in the elegant leather bindings they would have come in at the $60 price, they had the option of sending all 20 installments they had bought back to the publisher. The publisher would pull out just the novel pages from the installments and bind them in an elegant leather binding suitable to impress the living daylights out of anyone who browsed through the owners' library -- at an addition cost, of course.

Clearly, Dickens made lots more money marketing his novels this way than if he had marketed them the traditional manner. But how does this qualify as INTERNET marketing genius?

You can use the same model on the Internet today. Let's say you have a product you can segment into pieces. Let's say it's an info-product or some sort of collection of items that naturally go together.

Instead of going for a one-time, high-ticket transaction for your offer, break it up into individual components. Instead of asking for a one-time price of a couple hundred dollars, charge ten or twenty dollars a month to keep it affordable.

Make sure that each "installment" of your product builds upon the last, so that they'll want to keep going. And as you build your relationship with them over the distribution period of the product, you can advertise, just as Dickens did. You can upsell other, related products, preview other products you're creating, or just throw in unannounced bonuses to build their loyalty.

You can even do like Dickens did with the book-binding offer. When your customers get to the end of the distribution period, you can offer to put the whole series together in an easy-to-use package (complete with some attractive bonuses beyond what they got in the series) for a modest additional cost.

You can also put special emphasis on the next series you plan to offer. By this time, you should have built tremendous credibility with those customers due to the quality they've received over the months. If you offer them something else they need at a monthly price comparable to what they're already used to paying you, it should be a no-brainer for them to sign up for yet another series -- just like they did with Dickens' next novel.

And the beauty of all this in our present Internet age is that you can set something like this up to run automatically with autoresponders or a fulfillment house. Create the content and then set up an autoresponder series to deliver it. Set up the collection of physical products and then turn them over to the fulfillment house.

Then each person who signs up gets their monthly installment delivered to them on a regular basis without you having to send it out manually. People can start at different times and you don't have to worry about when to send what to who; it's all automated for you.

No, Charles Dickens never heard of the Internet. But I think he would have liked it. He actively used staples of today's Internet marketing industry like continuity sales and upsells in a tradition-bound business of 19th century publishing.

Actually, it would be interesting to see how Dickens would function in the 21st-century Internet world. Chances are he'd be adding some pretty interesting wrinkles to marketing today.
Jeff

Labels: business system, marketing

One Stop Web Support Newsletter #76 Posted
The latest issue of my newsletter is now posted. You can see it here:
http://www.onestopwebsupport.com/newsletters/nl-2008-10-05.htm

The main article is:
Driving Visitors to Your Site With Articles -- Part III -- How to write a visitor-attracting article

This week's Q & A is:
Why am I not getting any traffic despite first-page rankings?

If you haven't signed up for my newsletter, you can do so at www.OneStopWebSupport.com/newsletter-signup.htm. And I'll make it worth your while if you do. I'll give you $250 worth of free gifts for signing up!
Jeff

Labels: newsletter