The Internet Changed Everything… Except Why People Actually Buy

Good morning, it's Tickle Trunk Monday. This is an exciting day. I was thinking about yesterday when I was writing or recording about the old school tools that we used. Like, I was thinking about the things. There was no, no digital things.

It was all, you know, we would use print ads, we would have recorded messages, we would send people direct mail, we would then talk to them on the phone. That was the same thing. But I realized then, or I realized in thinking about it, that we were actually building funnels back then, but there was no Internet. The psychology of the staged attention that we were trying to garner was, I think, the big win. And as I think about it now, it was actually, I think we had more immersive attention back then because there were less distractions, there were less options.

The cadence of the frequency of like options. We're so used to TikTok, you know, we're just this little scroll away from something new, some new dopamine things. But when you're looking through a magazine where you're looking through a home magazine, there's only, you know, 30 or 40 pages of the things. Not much to distract you from that. And when you can do a pattern interrupt with these direct response looking ads, you can gather people's attention.

And so I found in my little Julie Matthews file, if you remember, Julie was like my little prototype lab here in Winter Haven. And so everything I was developing for Realtors, I was doing right here in Winter Haven. And I found this is an ad that we were running for the USDA government, you know, zero down program. And it was, you know, very interesting, right? Like this is 1996 that we were running this.

But imagine you're looking through the homes magazine and all the other ads look like all the other ads. And then you see something like this free recorded message reveals how to use free money from the federal government to save thousands when you buy your first home. Before you even think of buying your first home, you want to get a copy of this free home study course and learn insider secrets that could save you thousands of dollars. And then all the here's what you'll learn. And I had this great little chassis of an ad.

I've used this chassis and still do to this day to have the book that we that you're offering and then some call outs for the book, right? How to use free money from the federal government to save thousands when you buy a home. Why saving for a down payment doesn't work and what to do about it. How to buy a home with absolutely none of your Own cash. So all of these things would have people call and listen to a recorded message where we would tell them a little bit about the program.

But then when they left their name and their info we would send them. I found the actual words for the book that we would send them that had explanation all about the how the USDA works. We'd put pictures of homes in there and walk them through exactly how they could get this $150,000 home with zero down payment. And when we would send that along with it we would include things like these order forms where you could fax this in and get a free market Watch newsletter that gave you updates of all the new homes that came on the market. Now remember this was a time when there was no other way to access real estate information than through a realtor.

This is pre realtor.com pre Zillow, pre Internet. Really this was the state of the art. So you were giving people an experience of what they, of what they really want. And then we would also send little letters to renters with pictures, actual pictures of homes that were eligible for this program. So here was this little one page and I laugh because it's 9-4-1997, so 30 years ago now.

But the letter was. Dear Mr. Jones, I'm writing you because I want you to stop paying rent and buy a home instead. I know that you're probably paying at least $450 a month in rent and you could be living in a house like the one in the picture for about the same money or even less. I can show you how to use free money from the federal government to save thousands when you buy a home and how you can buy a house like the one in the picture with zero down payment and monthly payments between 420 and and $550. If you call 1-800 right now, you'll hear a 24 hour recorded message that explains exactly how I can do this call right now.

There's no obligation and you'll be glad you called Julie now man, I get like it's such an interesting thing to me to go through and see these things like right now this attaching what you do to some type of government program or some kind of secret information that's going to advantage people and putting it together for them in a way that you can offer it to them as information. And it's not just real estate. I mean this, we're so real estate heavy on the examples because this was immersively my world. This is where I learned all of the things that I've transformed, referred to, to other things. But I've used this thinking to do the same thing with reverse mortgages, with Social Security, with Medicare, with any of the things that there's government stuff attached to.

We've used it in even the most ridiculously esoteric ways. I've used it with a client who helps people who are scrap metal dealers, who. There's a special IC disc program. I have no idea what any of those words mean, but I was able to take this chassis and apply that thinking that there's government money that people are missing out on because they don't know the secret, they don't know the information, but they can get it by just going to this website now or at this point, calling and listening to that recorded message. So this, learning the mechanics of this is really an important thing.

And even though now there's way less friction for people to get information now, you don't, you know, they had to really want this enough that they would call and listen to a recorded message where we could get a couple of minutes of their attention enough that they would leave their information. Then we could mail them a booklet and a package that maybe we get 30 minutes of their attention. And then offering them the next step, that every week we can update them on new homes that qualify for this program or new things to educate and motivate people. It's such a durable chassis. And nothing's changed about the psychology of how we do it now.

It's just that we can run lead ads that instantly show up on people's feed. They can click one button, the form is already filled in, they don't have to listen to anything. We automatically get their email. It's sent to them. Very little friction, but lots of competition.

So you have to really be valuable, providing valuable information for people. So that's it for the tickle trunk today. Be fun for you to start, you know, packing up and keeping things in your own little tickle trunk so you can have some exciting memories 30 years from now. Every idea that I've had, every dollar that I've made over the last 30 years has gone through my brain, through my pen, onto a piece of paper in my journal before it went out into the real world. And I, if I can turn people on to that activity as a driver for what to do, what to think about, what to ask yourself to draw out, what the next most valuable action is for you, and how to find the most profitable things that you can install in your business, I'm all for it.

So this Friday at 1:00pm, I'm going to do, for the first time, a 50 minute profit finder workshop. And you're going to join me live on Zoom. And we're going to go through a 50 minute exercise. Bring your pen, bring a notebook or piece of paper, and I'm going to guide you through a thinking process that will help you identify where the lowest hanging fruit is in your business. And maybe some fruit that you didn't even know was there, but I'm going to show you where to look for it.

So it's free. It's for you. It's Friday at 1pm this Friday, just watch. Go to. What did we call the website, Josh?

Just go to 50 minutes profitfinder.com and I'll get you all the details and hopefully you can join us then. Friday 1:00pm.