SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

In this episode, Tom Antion discusses the power of bonuses as a copywriting technique to increase sales. He emphasizes that good bonuses should be valuable enough to sell on their own and shouldn't be something people can get for free, like an email newsletter.
Key Takeaways:
• Bonuses Always Increase Sales: Offering 3-7 bonuses per product (depending on price) is ideal. However, excessive bonuses or overinflated values can appear spammy.
• Types of Effective Bonuses:
o Digital products: Checklists, guides, worksheets, special reports, e-books, templates, case studies.
o Exclusive content: Excerpts of upcoming products, software tutorials, private Facebook groups, webinars, and podcast interviews.
o Third-party contributions: Other people’s products or bonuses with affiliate links for potential additional revenue.
o Consultations: Personal consultations can lead to higher engagement, more referrals, and upsell opportunities.
Antion also mentions his Copywriting 901 course, highlighting the importance of strong sales copy in business success. He encourages listeners to implement these easy bonus strategies to boost conversions.
?? Final Thought: Bonuses are simple to create and implement, making them an easy way to enhance the value of a product and drive sales.

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Episode 973 – Easy Bonuses
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom with episode 973 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about a copywriting technique that absolutely increases sales, no question about it. And that is bonuses. And the title of this episode is Easy Bonuses. These are things that are going to be all digital. Other than one will take a little bit of your time. But I think I got about 16 or 17 of them here for you. Okay, I hope you didn't miss episodes 971 and 972. That was a two part series on the new visual search, where not only can you find things easier, but you can utilize these techniques to make people find your stuff easier. So that's visual search. On episode 971 and 972. And of course, anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. That was 971 or 972. Do them both because the first one leads into the second one. Also pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. I think it's been going on. Let's see how many years now? 32 years, something like that. All right. So I'm just a crazy fanatic and and absolutely committed to helping small business people really thrive online like I've been doing for all these years.

[00:01:59] All right, let's see one other thing about my school. It's the internet marketing training Center of Virginia, IMTCVA.org. It's the only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world. And it's certified to operate by Schev, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's distance learning, and you will not be in debt for the rest of your life, and you'll actually have a usable skill that's in super high demand. So check it out.

[00:02:29] All right. Let's get into bonuses first. A couple little thing about bonuses is your bonuses should be good enough to sell or you have sold them. Your free ezine is not a bonus. It's okay to give people your free ezine if you want as an additional thing, but don't call it a bonus because everybody gets it for free. You want to give a reward for people that buy the main product now. Bonuses always increase sales. Now don't go crazy like they used to do in the old days where you buy a $2 product and you got $10 million supposedly worth of bonuses. No, that's hokey spammy looking. And and just don't do that. 3 to 7 bonuses are fine. Lower price products, three three bonuses, higher price products, up to seven bonuses. But that's enough. Don't go over and don't overinflate their value because you just look spammy. Now, the ones we're talking about today are all digital, except one of them is going to have a little bit of labor involved.

[00:03:35] But I got to tell you, I've been doing it for years and years and years, and it's made me a fortune. So I'll tell you about that one. And another interesting thing about bonuses is some people will buy your whole product to get a unique bonus. So that's one of the things that you can do with a technique with bonuses is to make something where they can't get it anywhere else. Also, if you want more information on bonuses, I did a episode 690, so screwthecommute.com/690. It's definitely worth listening to. All right. So I'm going to go into a list and I'll make comments on some of these. Some are obvious and some will require some comments. But and there are no particular order. Checklists are a good bonus. Let's say your your website's about camping. Well, you could have a checklist a whole big checklist on the things you need to take for camping outings and and give that to people. A guide's simple, you know, travel guides or or if you're pushing a particular area of the world, you know, give them a guide to all you know about it. You know, that that kind of thing. Worksheets. So there's blanks where the people can fill in if it's some type of product that that requires some math. You know, I know I bought a bunch of plans to build sheds from a guy.

[00:04:58] 16,000 of them, you know. And I think there's a bunch of worksheets in there if you want to adjust the size of your shed. As a bonus, special reports. This is one thing you got to be careful of is, is don't call a short book a book because you'll get bad reviews and it'll be over with. So call it a special report or a white paper. But those make great bonuses. Excerpts of upcoming products can be a nice, nice bonus. Now, you wouldn't necessarily sell excerpts. You could, I guess, but it wouldn't fall into the the exact category of something that's good enough to sell. But it's still appreciated. And it does. It's free and it could make people want to buy something later. Here's an interesting one. Other people's bonuses or other people's products. See, you can get other people to contribute a bonus to your product, and maybe even inside the. Their bonus is affiliate links. So if somebody buys something from them, you get paid. See? So it could be another revenue stream for you. But just make sure that it's a real quality bonus. You don't want just some fluff sales letter that makes you look bad. But anyway, other people are happy to contribute and I certainly am one of them. I'll be happy to give you a bonus to to put with your products. Okay. Let's see. I'm going to save the the one that takes a little labor for last so I can talk about audio stuff, video stuff, other ebooks of yours, maybe older ones you could use.

[00:06:34] As a bonus. Here's one that I have on one of my products on how to be a great podcast guest. I have I think it's $1,000 program that shows you how to be a fan, a Fantastic, stupendous, awesome invited back all the time podcast guests, which I have been invited back as many as 13 times on one show. I've been on one of the top shows in the world several times, and they put my interview in their classics and done a thousand interviews myself. And and you're on episode 973 of my podcast that I've been all right, so so I've been around a little bit on what makes a great podcast guest. So on that one. And the reason I mention all that stuff is because on that one, you get a bonus podcast interview where you can I interview you on a pod on the Screw the Commute podcast. That's what you're listening to now and then. You can use that as a demo to get other podcast appearances. And of course, I've coached before we do the interview, I've coached you like crazy and got you to the point where you're going to be great on your interview. All right. So that's that's a podcast interview. A private Facebook group is a common thing you can give away. It doesn't cost you anything to start a private Facebook group. And then you only let people in that buy the product a webinar.

[00:08:03] You can have a pre-recorded webinar that they get more information from case studies of other people that have been successful using your stuff, and you tell the details of it if you have. I've never used this one because I'm not into software. I use software like crazy, but I don't produce any software. But software can be a bonus. Tutorials on how to use software and other things can be a bonus, a great bonus. Templates like fill in the blank templates. One of my students sold lots of these and then started using them as a bonus after they played their course on selling them. So fill in the blank like headlines, fill in the blank how to article Topics and, you know, stuff like that. All right. So I saved the last one because a lot of people just won't do it. They think they're too good to do it, I guess, or they're too lazy to do it. But I have made a fortune with this. And that is, I offer consultations as a bonus. And, you know, not to brag or anything, but I mean, my consultations are thousand an hour with a three hour minimum. Just if you just want a straight consultation and I keep it that high because most people are clueless and they want a particular problem fixed in which I can fix it. But as soon as I look at their stuff, I see they got 40 other problems they don't even realize.

[00:09:30] All right, so and they're going to blame me if the one problem didn't, you know, make them rich, you know. So so I keep my consultations high and I push people into my mentor program, which is a year's worth that gives me time to help fix all our problems and thrive past their problems. But consultations back to that. See, the person that takes you up on a consultation is the most gung ho kind of person, and they're the most likely to not only buy more stuff from you when you do a great job helping them in your consultation, but they're more likely to refer you also. I mean, I've had people buy relatively low priced products that I gave a 30 minute consultation with it, and even though that person couldn't afford me for the bigger stuff, they just raved about me and sent me other clients and they got affiliate commissions over it, you know? So, so giving consultations is great. People are just too darn lazy. They want they don't want to run their business. They want to listen to all these wet behind the ears kids that are telling you, oh, you can just be at the beach and and with your feet up and getting rich, which is funny. It just reminds me of this Instagram thing where this guy took a selfie of himself laying on the in the sand, right? But then when you see the whole picture, he's at a construction site.

[00:11:03] He's not at the beach. He's just laying on sand that they were going to use in the concrete mix. But he shot a close up and acting like he's at the beach. You know, so. So I kind of avoid the beach because I hate when the harpoons whalers go along and throwing harpoons at me when they see me at the beach. So anyway, bonuses. Well, like I said, no study ever has shown that bonuses reduce sales. They always increase sales. And this big list I just gave you easy. Most of them. Just easy as pie to implement. And you'll increase your sales. And this is all part of copywriting 901 comm. It's my copywriting course that really tells you. I mean, it's more extensive than $10,000 courses, and it's only, like, 300 bucks. But that's the number one skill in my entire business career, starting in 1977, long before the internet was around. Is copywriting being able to write the words that get people to do what you want them to do? The bad part is, is you get good at this. A lot of the people that are really good at it, you know, are good at getting you to buy stuff. That's crap. Right? So I don't want you to do that. But if you have a great product and you're great at copywriting, man, that's when you rule the world. All right. So anyway, get those bonuses going and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.