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A New Way to Think about Social Proof

February 1st, 2008 by Mike W. Read more about Creating Trust Online, Online Community

I was just read­ing one of the free ebooks from Jeff Walker’s Prod­uct Launch For­mula. It’s about build­ing and using social proof in your sales efforts.

This prob­a­bly isn’t new to most of you, but one idea stuck out.

What if you’re new to the mar­ket or launch­ing a new prod­uct and don’t yet have tes­ti­mo­ni­als (the most com­mon way to show social proof)?

How do you show social proof then?

Instead of using tes­ti­mo­ni­als, you must work to actu­ally cre­ate that com­mu­nity around the product.

The key ques­tion, then, is what can you do to build a com­mu­nity from the ground up and make customers/leads feel a part of some­thing big­ger?

If you’re launch­ing some­thing new, this must be molded into your strategy.

One sta­tis­tic you might use is the num­ber of peo­ple opted into your mail­ing list or signed up for a free trial so far, that day, per minute, etc.

Or, how many peo­ple in your mar­ket search for a com­mon search-term in Google? Share it with the user in their con­fir­ma­tion email.

Cre­ate a peer group on the fly and lever­age it to appeal to our nat­ural desire to be a part of something.

The peo­ple buy­ing your prod­uct or in your mar­ket are inher­ently in a com­mu­nity based around their desire for said prod­uct or market.

How can you mag­nify that sense of com­mu­nity and use it to your advantage?

Here’s an exam­ple from an email recently sent out by Frank Kern

—————————–
PEOPLE ARE OFFICIALLY FREAKING OUT NOW
————————————————————

In the past 20 days, 46,024 new peo­ple have
joined this wait­ing list for Mass Control.

And as you know, this is the sec­ond time I’ve taught the
class.

The first time I taught it was back in Octo­ber and it was a “test run”.

Only 50 peo­ple could attend …and it sold out in
20 minutes.

Wanna know how big the wait­ing list for that one was?

——————————
ONLY 785 PEOPLE
——————————

There was no launch and no affiliates.

And I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1. It’s even more PROOF that Mass Con­trol works.
It’s PROOF that you DON’T need a giant list for a huge payday.

At that time, the class cost $2,997 …and there was no pay­ment
plan. (It’s only $1997 now *with* a pay­ment plan.)

But it still sold out in 20 minutes.

That’s almost $150,000.00 in 20 min­utes …from an inter­est list
of 785 people.

(I’m pretty sure just about any­one can gen­er­ate an inter­est list
of 785 people.)

Frank Kern’s exag­ger­at­ing of course.…

46 thou­sand peo­ple are not really “wait­ing in line” to buy the prod­uct. Those are sub­scribers. But it doesn’t mat­ter. The num­ber he shares auto­mat­i­cally estab­lishes social proof in your eyes. Inter­net mar­keters use this tac­tic all the time and it works.

By the way…Mass Con­trol Mar­ket­ing is a great prod­uct. I highly rec­om­mend Frank’s Free Videos and the course itself. We’ll be pur­chas­ing when it launches tomorrow.

Pre­vi­ous Post on Frank Kern hereÂ

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About the Author

Mike W. Mike is an internet marketer at MindValley responsible for running marketing tests, designing product launches, and leading an eCommerce project.

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4 Responses to “A New Way to Think about Social Proof”

  1. A New Way to Think about Social Proof - Affordable Website Marketing - Just another website promotion and online advertising weblog about seo and search engine marketing

    […] Orig­i­nal post by Mike W. and posted by Alfred Moya […]

  2. Social Proof Continued: When I say Social Proof, I don’t just mean "Testimonial"

    […] Social Proof Con­tin­ued: When I say Social Proof, I don’t just mean “Tes­ti­mo­nial” Feb­ru­ary 14th, 2008 by Mike W. Read more about Copy­writ­ing, Cre­at­ing Trust Online Fol­low­ing this thought on social proof, I’ve been pon­der­ing it fur­ther and came up with a micro guide that may just change the way you think about the topic. […]

  3. Insurnfes

    Hello my friends!
    The inter­est­ing name of a site — blog.mindvalleylabs.com
    I today 3 hours
    has spent to the Inter­net So I have found your site :)
    The inter­est­ing site but does not suf­fice sev­eral sec­tions!
    How­ever this sec­tion is very nec­es­sary!
    Best wishes for you!
    For­give I is drunk :) )

  4. Pypepeste

    In most cases a product’s rat­ing went down, expand­ing the range between high­est and low­est rated.Unlike Kasper­sky, Syman­tec pro­vides Nor­ton users with lit­tle expla­na­tion of its fea­tures or set­tings, either in the con­fig­u­ra­tion set­tings or on its tech­ni­cal sup­port sec­tion. Also we don’t like Norton’s depen­dency on Inter­net Explorer to explain Help items or ser­vices pro­vided by Syman­tec (win­dows pop up in IE even when Fire­fox is your default browser), or that fee-based ser­vices have once again crept into the tech­ni­cal sup­port sec­tion. Hav­ing improved a lot
    last year in Symantec’s flag­ship antivirus prod­uct, it makes sense we’d see more mod­est enhance­ments for this year’s Nor­ton AntiVirus 2008. While Nor­ton
    AntiVirus.

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