In this video, we’re going to be talking about Selling Digital Gizmos & Widgets. 
        Everybody out there wants a magical push button solution that’s going to solve all their problems for them, it’s going to make their life easier and better. You know what? A lot of people think that selling gizmos and widgets and solutions that people can just click a button and see something happen. They think that selling that kind of stuff is easier or that it can even be sold the same way that you would sell information. 
        Let me tell you something, it’s totally different. There’s a whole set of other things that you need to contend with when you're selling digital gizmos and widgets. That’s what we’re gonna talk about in this video.
        People absolutely love a magical push button solution to their life problems. We’re talking about selling software here. When it comes to digital information products and we start getting into push button solutions on the web, we’re talking about software. Whether it’s downloadable to your desktop or usable while you're logged into a website, the common denominator is that the product contains a button or something that people click and then it creates an action or it creates a response. Somebody clicks a button or a link or something and it does something on the web. 
        A lot of people think that software is just video games, or that software is just business tools. There’s all kinds of software out there. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. Ideally, what you want to learn is how to sell these sorts of push button solution. 
        Your push button solution might be a WordPress plugin, it might be a WordPress theme, or it might be a software as a service type of solution where people log into your website and now when they’re logged in they can use the tools that you have to create something, create a file, a piece of code, generate something that then they can take away from that site and go use to solve a problem in their life, to provide enjoyment, or what have you.
        Let’s talk about that. Speaking of enjoyment, let’s talk about the pleasure principle. When selling widgets, when selling gizmos, when selling software, we need to really, really focus on The Pleasure Principle. Let’s talk about how it applies.
        We can make all kinds of pie charts that study human behavior, but at the end of the day people buy things to either increase pleasure or decrease pain. We’ve talked about this in prior videos. This isn’t like rocket science. At the end of the day, no matter where we categorize their reason for purchasing and what kind of statistics or chart we make, we can basically narrow it down to whatever specific reason that they bought for, it falls into either the category of increasing pleasure or decreasing pain. Knowing that, especially when it comes to selling widgets and software tools, is really important. It’s very powerful.
        Maybe they find a frequent task in their daily life as complicated, or it’s tedious. They associate pain with that task. It’s tough to do, it’s time consuming, I hate doing it. Well, your tool has to relieve that feeling. 
        Maybe they see it as a way to bring them joy or pleasure into their everyday life. Maybe that’s what your tool can accomplish for them. Entertainment and pastime tools like video games, and media for example, like videos. They make very powerful income generators and they can be sold digitally as widgets and things like that. 
        You can create a game and you can sell it and people will buy it. If you make it addictive enough like some of these people that are building digital farms and things like that on Facebook and what have you, it becomes a very, very powerful tool. Look at all of these video game apps, things like Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, whatever other kind of bird you can think of. People download these—there’s millions, even billions of downloads for these apps. There’s advertisements that are being rolled on these apps. 
        They’re not making tons of money on the download price, but they’re advertising and it leads to other purchases of video games, maybe desktop video games and things like that. Maybe your product or your widget doesn’t necessarily solve a problem but it rather provides entertainment.
        Greed factor, also known as the Jones Effect as a lot of influence here. People are inherently afraid that they might be missing out on something when it comes to the pleasure principle. They might be missing out on pleasure that others are having in their absence because they simply didn’t have the necessary information. Or, they might be going through some unneeded extra pain or extra tedious work that their other friends and stuff aren’t going through because again, they’re missing out on some sort of information.
        This is how you can use the pleasure principle to your advantage. You need to show them how the lives of their peers are either less stressful or more happy as a result of your gizmo. If you can narrow that down, if you can really put your finger on that, then you're going to get people to buy. 
        Identifying With The Need Or The Challenge is another very, very important part of selling gizmos.
        Necessity is the mother of invention; we all know that. Throughout history, humans have created tools to simplify and enhance their lives. I guess somebody at one point or another in history, they got tired of messing up their hand and getting cut up and bleeding from banging pieces of wood into other pieces of wood and they invented a hammer. Again, necessity. I'm sure that it went through stages. The invention of the hammer probably went through stages. 
        The important part to remember there is that the fact that something needed to be clobbered, something needed to be hammered is what gave rise to the creation of that solution, to simplify the process. Necessity is the mother of invention. Why this is important for you is because when you can identify with that need or that challenge, then it becomes a lot easier for you to sell the solution. 
        Sometimes, people have to be told that they need something and then they have to be shown the reason why. Back in the day, selling things wasn’t about selling and convincing people, it was about educating them. 
        “Hey dude, you know this thing exists.” People would go to the store, they’d go to a sales man with a problem. They’d say “Oh my god, I keep spilling things in my house and I don't know what to do.” Have you ever heard of Bounty, the quicker picker upper? “No, what’s that?” Oh, let me show you, come on over, follow me. Selling used to be about educating. It’s not like that anymore.
        The things that we’re selling, technology is evolving so fast. People don’t even know that something they need exists. Sometimes you gotta tell them that.
        The prospect must be able to picture themselves using the item in order to consider buying it. Remember, this is a widget. This is not a luxury kind of a thing. The point I'm making is it’s not a status symbol, they’re not trying to buy your widget or your gizmo as a status symbol. They’re buying it because it’s got to be practical, it’s got to serve a purpose. If it does serve a purpose, then they’re not going to be able to envision themselves using it because they can’t really see the need and you failed, you failed to sell them. 
        Now is always the best time to buy the item. I see people failing at this all the time when they’re selling widgets. Let me tell you something. You can always find a reason to tell them to buy something. The weather, hey it’s warm out right now, you should buy this because it’s warm. Hey it’s cold out right now, you should buy this because it’s cold. Okay, I'm making the extreme example and I’ll explain why. 
        How about the market? Hey, the market needs this right now, your people are requiring this. How about the industry? Hey, the industry is making changes, we’re moving over to this format and you're using the old format. The economy, hey you know everybody’s trying to find money right now, so check out this little gizmo that’s going to make it easier to make money. Whatever.
        The reason I point out the weather here is because it’s trivial. Everybody, no matter where they are in the world, is dealing with weather. When I was a kid, my father owned a grocery store. In the grocery store, there was a salesman that came and he was selling an awning. He wants to know if my father wanted to buy an awning for the front of the store. It was expensive at the time. I remember it was a big decision.
        My dad didn’t speak English very well, I was the little kid there translating. I remember the salesman stressing how important the weather was right now. If you buy this right now, because of the changing weather right now, the awning is really going to grip the frame and it’s going to look much better. 
        As I grew up, I was thinking what the hell the weather? He can use that line anytime of year. He can say you know what, because it’s warm out right now your awning is really going to grip. You know because it’s cold out right now, your awning is really going to take the form of the frame. It doesn’t matter. 
        You got to find that thing in your industry, in your niche, in your particular market that is going to be applicable no matter where they are on the planet or what time of day they’re looking at your offer, why is today the best time to buy? You got to find it and you got to point it out to them.
        Back in the day, selling was all about educating. The prospect didn’t know that the product even existed. You know what? In many cases today, we have that same problem because things are evolving so fast. Wow, I didn’t even know that software tool existed. Sometime I get an idea for a WordPress plugin, I go to the WordPress repository, I do a search for it, it already existed. Wow, I can’t believe someone already had this product.
        If your technology is brand new, meaning it doesn’t exist, never has existed at all, then they need to understand the need. If it’s not, then they need to understand its worth or its value. If your technology is just something that makes something else better, it expands on a tool they already have, or it just makes a process easier, faster, more enjoyable, then they need to understand its value. We’re going to points out that value with benefits.
        If the technology is brand new, meaning you literally invented this new technology or this new gizmo, this new widget, it’s unlike anything that has ever existed before, then they need to identify and understand the need. At the end of the day, what you need to realize is that identifying with the need or the challenge is critical in the prospect’s mind if you want to sell to them.
        Demonstrating While Subliminally Selling. That’s another one that’s really, really important when selling gizmos and widgets, not as much as if you were selling information. 
        It all comes down to the tool in action. What can it do? Can it do what you told them it could do on the sales page? How well does it do what you claimed it would do? It comes down to a demo, you got to show it to them. If I said look, this software tool is going to pull traffic to your website and make you money, then all I need to do to close this sale is demonstrate that action. 
        If I could say hey, remember I told you that it was going to pull traffic and make you sales? Let me show you, watch. Look at my screen. Here I am, the software, I'm turning it on. Look at it, it’s going to Facebook, look at it, it’s pulling people, look at it they’re buying. If you can accomplish those things in a demonstration with a widget, with your tool, then boom they’re closed. You’ve proven to them that it does what you said, you’ve established trust. Did that coincide with the need? Did they have the need like we were talking about in the prior slide?
        How fast did it do it? Timer challenges. They work great. Speed is important. You’ve got to point out the tedious old way first, then you got to show them how fast your tool does what you said it was going to do. These things are so powerful, we see them all the time in TV, we see them in 30 second commercials, we see them in 15 second commercials, it’s amazing how this works. 
        Sometimes you’ll see for example let’s say a detergent commercial or something like that. They’ll have some of the detergent in a glass, they’ll have two jars for example. One has a detergent, one doesn’t. They’ll take a dirty shirt, they’ll dip it in, and then they’ll take it out. Then, they’ll take another one, they’ll dip it in, they’ll take it out. You don’t know what’s in either one of the jars, but that little demonstration where it says hey look, this is the way the other one works, this is the way other one works. Look, ours is cleaner. That’s it, they move on. 
        A very, very simple demo that only takes a couple of seconds can be very, very powerful when you're actually trying to demonstrate or help the prospect envision themselves using the tool and how it can help them. 
        How good are your tool’s results? Compare them side by side like a laundry detergent, that’s exactly what I was just mentioning. If you can point out that your results are better than other results, you don’t necessarily have to mention who the other ones are. You can say our competitors. Again, this would apply if your gizmo or tool is something that expands or enhances, something that already exists. 
        A tool that literally improves their lives by making a process faster, better, more enjoyable than this particular type of demonstration will subliminally sell your customer in a way that no other way can. 
        During the demonstration, it’s important that you preempt, meaning you hit head on or attack before they come up, or that you overcome questions and objections with your demo process. You're looking for the gasp factor, meaning when they’re watching your presentation, they got to go wow. You're trying to wow them, you want to make them gasp. You need to overcome challenges and things that they didn’t even know could be overcome. Maybe they’ve just been dealing with issues.
        You know what’s funny is I watched a demonstration on an infomercial recently where the product removes stains from rugs, stains that have been there for years and years. They show it by moving a piece of furniture and they show the difference in how clean and lighter color the carpet is beneath the piece of furniture as opposed to the traffic area. Then, they take this device and they rub it across both and it instantly just kind of makes them both the same. It made me go wow. These kinds of demonstrations are subliminally selling. They’re demonstrating to people hey, you need this, you didn’t even know you need this but now you know because we showed you the need and here you go.
        Here’s the other thing when you're demonstrating something, when you're actually showing them the tool in action. Make it risk free. Show them how just one feature alone is going to save them X amount of time, and how just one feature alone is going to save them X amount of dollars. You can literally say that, you can say hey look, this one feature alone is going to save you hours and hours because look at all the other methods we used to use. We used to have to clean our rugs using brushes and scrubbers. You're demonstrating the painful way. 
        Am I reminding you of some sort of a TV commercial or an infomercial or something that sells a cleaning product? Because this is what works, this is what happens. When somebody’s watching this and they’re justifying, they’re saying wow yeah, that makes sense. That feature is going to save me a bunch of time. And, it’s going to save me money because I don’t have to buy multiple cleaning products. 
        Just do the math for them, literally. Say look, if you were to add the brush, the cleaner, the time, this would cost you this amount of money. But with our tool, that’s not going to happen. You’re subliminally selling while demonstrating what the features are for the product or the tool or the software. 
        Presenting Features Versus Benefits. This is important and a lot of people screw this up.
        A feature is something that your product has or does. It’s a small component of the whole thing. That’s a feature. A benefit is the advantage that the user will derive from that specific feature. 
        You may think that talking about all your products’ features is what’s important in your demonstration video, but it’s not. Remember, we’ve mentioned this time and time again. People tend to buy on emotion. I will grant you this, software, gizmos, that kind of thing, it’s kind of logic based. At the end of the day, someone that wasn’t specifically looking for your tool, someone that didn’t specifically have the need or didn’t know the need, they’re going to buy more on emotion aren’t they?
        A benefit is an advantage that they’re going to derive from the feature. If you point out the benefit of that specific feature when you mention the feature, that’s how you're going to grab that guy. I don’t just tell them hey look, this little button here is going to allow your computer to do XYZ this amount of time faster because it uses this amount of gigahertz and it uses this flux capacitor thingy that nobody’s ever had, and that’s why it’s awesome. 
        That’s awesome, that’s great, but how is that benefiting me? How am I going to take advantage of that? Here’s how you're going to benefit it now. You know how you normally used to spend 40 hours a week in front of your computer? Well because you're using this tool and doing this faster because it uses the flux capacitor, now you're going to be able to do everything you used to do and more in half the time. You're going to have an additional 20 hours to spend with your family, to go vacationing, to go to the pool, to take your little kids out christmas shopping, to do this, to do that. You're going to love it. You’re going to love all this free time. As a matter of fact, you're not going to know what to do with yourself with all this free time. 
        The free time is the benefit. That is what’s going to close the deal there because they can see themselves in that. They can see themselves doing those things much clearer in their mind than they could see themselves using that speed flux capacitor thing that you invented. Get that through your skull. It’s not all about the features. It might be amazing to you, but to people it’s about the benefits.
        Every feature should be justified by a benefit. You got to justify it by a benefit. We didn’t just put all these features in here because we wanted to, we did them because we wanted you to have time. We wanted you to have money. We wanted you to be able to do this faster. We wanted you to enjoy it more. People are going to buy on emotion not on logic. Benefits trigger emotion, while features trigger logic. 
        If you're just hitting them with features, buy, they’re going to be like oh wow, lots of call features. Yeah you're going to make some sales, people that were specifically looking for those features, but that’s not the average people. You're missing the mass marketing of your products potential because you're focusing on features, because you're the product creator and that’s why very often, more often than not, I recommend that the product creator not be the person that writes the sales copy because they think everything is important to talk about and it’s not. What’s important to talk about is what’s going to trigger emotion, what benefits. 
        A copywriter knows how to do this. A copywriter can look at your product and pull out wow yeah, this is going to be good. They’re going to pull out the parts of your product that they need to specialize in. And then you might say okay, just make a list of everything that my product is. You shouldn’t do that either.
        A powerful headline, let’s talk about that. A headline of a sales page for your gizmo typically should include the product’s biggest benefit within the headline itself to grab the viewer’s attention and trigger a specific feeling. What if you had a simple tool to plug into your website that could give you 10 hours back per week to spend with your family? What a great heading would that be, right? This is what I mean by putting the biggest benefit of the thing that you're releasing. Put that in the headline, find a way to work it into the headline so you can trigger a feeling with the headline. Remember, it’s feelings that sell.
        You can never have too much proof. That’s the next thing that I would do. If you just told them about this big benefit that they’re going to get, you got to prove it. I tell people hey, when you're selling gizmo, software, your most startling proof should be right in the form of an image right on the deck of your page. If you’ve got some proof of what you just told them, show it to them. Show them the image of the proof, don’t go into a demo video right here. You can, but I would go with the image of the proof and I’d do the demo video a little bit further down the page. Again, it all depends on the type of page. Is it a hybrid page? We’re gonna talk about page types in another video. It’s important that you give them proof. You can never have too much proof, people love proof.
        Bullets, that’s another way to actually point out features. But be careful, bullets below the deck and within the copy can be used to point out additional features and benefits that you didn’t cover in the demo video and in the actual sales video. Remember, too many checklists are over bearing. I recently had this happen to me when somebody submitted a sales page for me to review. 
        They said hey Omar, this is my product. They had literally hundreds of tick marks on their page. They had the type of product that can be used in all these different situations and could be applied to all these different types of loans. They went and they were mentioning, they literally rattled off this list. It looked like some sort of a copy pasted spread sheet that they put on their sales page. 
        I looked at that, I'm like oh my god that’s terrible. Why? They put too many features on their page. Now, what happens is I'm getting the feeling of oh man, what if I miss something? What if I don’t read all of this and I miss something in that big, long, 200 list thing? Now, I'm creating a whole different set of feelings that are associated with fear. I’ve made my sales page overbearing by trying to put every single feature in it. You don’t have to. 
        As a matter of fact when you don’t and you just focus on the triggers, the things that really are going to make people sell, what’s going to happen is when they get in, after they’ve made the purchase, they try to justify it with logic because they’ve bought on emotion, they justify with logic. Now, inside, they’re seeing all these additional features that they never even knew existed. Now, it becomes logical. Wow, I didn’t even know I had this. Oh, it does that too. Oh my goodness, look at all this. I’ve just made sense to keep this, there’s no possible way that I can consider refunding this. 
        Again, very important to know overdo it in the front. Focus on the most important ones, make sure you throw that biggest feature of yours into the headline, but again don’t be overbearing with checklists and trying to tell them everything about your product.
        Upsell them. Upsell Them Into A Solution For Their Fear.
        Did you know that literally the number one reason that people don’t buy something is almost always out of fear? It stems from fear. You can make it sharp, we can try to justify, you can say oh no Omar. Look, at the end of the day, if we’re going to make a list of all the different reasons, we can attribute the main cause of not buying is fear. 
        They’re simply afraid to make a bad decision, they’re afraid to make a mistake. They’re afraid that if they buy this, they will have some sort of irreparable damage. It’s just like oh god, what if I buy this then it doesn’t do what it says? what if I buy this and then I can’t get my money back? What if I buy this and I'm not happy? They’re afraid of what might or might not happen when they take the action.
        Even after making something risk free for the user, they’re going to have inhibitions and apprehensions about the transaction more so than the item itself. Remember, if you just proved to them the two really, really important things when it comes down to selling widgets and gizmos which are there’s a need, and number two this solves that need, it solves that problem, it does, I prove to you that you have the need and I prove to you that this solves a need. 
        You would think okay, that’s it, I’ve done that, I should have 100% conversion rate. Every single person that sees this will buy. Why don’t they? For a couple of reasons. Sometimes it’s not targeted traffic, there’s a lot of things we can put on our pie chart discussion. A lot of it has to do with the fear, the fear of the transaction. 
        It’s a good tool, maybe I could use it. Maybe there’s a need that I didn’t know about, but you know what? I wasn’t planning on buying this today. What if I buy this and it goes wrong? What if I buy this and I don’t like it? In many cases, even though you’ve proven that they need it and you’ve proven that it’s going to help them, they still won’t buy because they fear the transaction.
        Point out the security in buying from you. Point out how good it’s going to be of an experience to buy from you. Point out that you're selling through Paypal which is the most trusted seller. Point out that they can download no matter what. Whether it’s 3 in the morning, point out that they can contact your support team if they need help. Point out that you’ve had all these happy customers and that they’re not the only one. Point out all the things that have to do with the transaction. 
        That’s another mistake that people make, they think about okay well if people didn’t buy, it’s because they just don’t like my product. No. That’s not true. People don’t buy at certain places because they fear the transaction or they don’t like the seller. There’s a bunch of different reasons. I can buy my bounty paper towel from any number of stores, but I choose one in particular on habit. Why? Because it’s closer by, because I like other things they sell, because there’s a hundred reasons that we can probably point out. 
        That’s the key. You want to point out the transaction things that are going to go smoothly when they buy from you because it’s not always just the fear of your product isn’t what they needed.
        Sell them an extended or lifetime warranty. Sell them a solution to their fear. What if this thing breaks? It looks good in the video and he does a good demo, but what if I have a problem? What if in my particular situation it doesn’t work? Okay, at the checkout say hey you know what, check this out. In order to really give you that calmness, that serenity, that really good strong sense of security when you buy from us, we’re going to allow you to buy an extended warranty for an additional 3 years. We’ll give you more technical support, we’ll give you this and this, you're literally selling them a solution to their fear. 
        People do this all the time in electronic stores. How many times have you bought something and at the checkout counter they say would you like to buy the additional year of warranty? You're like hold on a second, what do you mean? Then it all of a sudden makes you think, wow yeah. Then they say listen, why not? Why wouldn't you protect your investment? You're buying something that you obviously made a decision that you need, why wouldn’t you protect that investment right now by buying the additional warranty? It’s only $25. 
        You literally remove their inhibition and their fear by selling them something else. Sell them an extension to the technical support so that they can feel safer about their product purchase decision.
        Sell them resell rights so that they can be assured to make their money back on the investment. If you think about it, resell rights is really just like being an affiliate. You can even point that out that you’re going to make it risk free for them once they get inside. You're going to show them exactly how they’re going to be able to make their money back from their purchase within X amount of time. You can give them the resell rights to make money from selling them the ability to continue selling your product for full profit instead of 50%. You can literally sell away their fears. 
        This is very possible to do. If you give it some thought, you're gonna see that there’s a whole bunch of ways that you can do this. You can sell them a developer license or a multi site license, or a multi user license. If they’re thinking oh man what if I get this but what if I need to put it on multiple sites, what if my particular situation is different than the average customer? What if I have a question? What if I want to let my wife use it as well as my friends from work? What if I can’t and they have a license key and all that. 
        They have all these inhibitions, sell them a developer license, give them the option, sell them a multi site license. It doesn’t cost you any more to produce these things. You're just charging them more money and saying okay, you can now go and do this. As a matter of fact, here is a little document that says I said you can now go and do this. You're selling them permission, you're selling them a solution to their fear. 
        You're telling them hey, if you do this, you're going to improve the ROI because now you're insulating your purchase, now you're guaranteeing yourself a way to make money back from the product launch sooner than you would if you had to guarantee that the product does what I said it’s going to do that you're afraid that it might not do. You can literally upsell them into a solution to their fear which we know for a fact is the main reason that they won’t buy.
        Remember, people don’t always know that they need something. That’s the big challenge with selling gizmos and widgets on impulse. You have to make sure that you get that need across and you let them know hey look, this technology, I bet you didn’t even know that you needed this. I bet you didn’t even know that the solution existed, obviously because you didn’t even know you needed it. 
        If you can identify the need and demonstrate the solution, you're going to be in a position to succeed. Remember to always justify a feature with a benefit. There’s a big difference between features and benefits, you should always justify a feature with a benefit so that people can actually relate. They can actually take a feeling and attach it to something that your tool does. Always justify a feature with a benefit so that people can relate an actual feeling with something that your tool does.
        I hope you enjoyed this video, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.