Episode 130: How to find the BEST virtual worker for the job – with Bill Guthrie

Episode 130: How to Find the Best Virtual Worker for the Job – with Bill Guthrie

Mike: Hi there everyone! Welcome to Episode 130 of the Mike from Maine Show, the place where we do daily interviews with successful online entrepreneurs. This is your host, Mike Thomas. And today on the show, I’ve got Bill Guthrie on to talk about his Free The Boss Outsourcing Product. And we’re gonna go through all the different functions that it has but essentially it’s a way for you to find virtual workers without having to comb through all the different sites. For example, you might want to get some graphics done and you’ll know specifically where you can go and where you can look to get these done. We’ll also gonna get into Bill’s internet marketing journey, where he started and how he got to where he is today. Here’s Bill Guthrie.

Mike: We are here today with Bill Guthrie. Bill, welcome to the show.
Bill: Hi! Mike, thanks for having me. I appreciate the invitation to come on.

Mike: You’re very welcome. Let’s get right into it and why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in this whole internet marketing journey.

Bill: Sure. Well, the short story is this. I’m gonna be 40 here pretty soon and so for the last 20 plus years, I have done mostly sales and marketing work. And the nature of sales is that you work really hard, you do all your prospecting, hopefully you close some deals, you get paid, you get good sum of money and then, it gets back down and you gotta work again, work again and there’s constantly this pipeline. I’m very much used to that. And I’ve been married for 15 years now. My wife is used to that and the ups and downs of that. Well, there is always this time at the beginning of every year in January, when no one’s spending money. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. No one’s spending money in January, and so it’s a soft year. And so, January every year, I would sit back and say, I’m sick of this. I’m tired of this up and down, I’m tired of this kind of stuff, I hate my boss, I – you know, I don’t even like those guys I go to lunch with up at work. What can I do to be independent?

Mike: Sure.

Bill: I always had this entrepreneur spirit and so, I think a lot like your listeners, I started you know, at some point and started typing in the Google, how do I make money online and things like that. Okay so, this was you know, probably 10-12 years ago. I was financially at a low point. I was you know, very depressed, not knowing what to do. And so, I started – you know, I started like I’ll do these surveys. I will make money that way. I’ll this other thing and I’ll make money this way. And you know, when I would pour a little bit of money in, I tried something out, it wouldn’t work, I’d get pissed off and I would you know, leave it alone. At about that point, business – my regular job, would have picked up enough to where I’m just you know, forget that, that never happened, you go back in. And it would be like that for years. And so, for several years I considered myself a student of you know, what was going on online. In online marketing, I had read a tremendous amount of stuff. I love to read. I’m a big consumer of information but I’ve never really done anything successfully. And it kinda went on and on like that for a lot of years. So, I started sites, I’ve done SEO, I did all many other. In the mean time – this maybe a little longer than you wanted but in the mean time, I got this job working at a digital agency and this really – I don’t think I could do what I’m doing today without having that job and it really straightens the idea that you are in my opinion a collection of your experiences. Go look at you jobs, it’s a series of dead ends. Well, like try to figure out you know, what you’re learning at your job and see you know, maybe you’re not at all occasions. But for me, it was very fortunate. I was doing business development for digital agency. So, I was surrounded by people whose job was to think about how to bring impact online, how to convert prospects online, how to build websites, how to you know, really kind of – I was getting immersed in direct marketing language and strategies. And so, that was really awesome for me. And so, I have this decision. I was like okay, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna – I’m a writer, I have my degree in English, I love to write and I’m gonna write private label rights articles. And I’m just gonna go for sure, you know. So, again for me the idea, a lot of it – the manushya and the mundane activities of SEO and just kinda like getting your pages found and ranked have always been you know, not something I really wanna do. You know, I just don’t really like it and you can definitely outsource that stuff and – but even now, just in the last few years as we know, it’s getting harder and harder to get found online in those traditional you know, just you know like you know, all in title SEO kind of tricks. So anyways, I started to – I was like okay well, I’m gonna start writing PLR articles and you know, put them out there. Well, as my brain often works I said, ‘Well, what should I write about? What are the topics that are out there?’. And I started making this little list of topics and what I did was I wasn’t doing any writing. I was putting together this big list and I just started going from one key to another and I would research over here. And I would find something interesting and I’ll add it to my list and I realize the list was kinda becoming this consuming thing, I wasn’t doing any writing and at the end of the day after – I mean, probably a hundred hours of work over – I was on business trips, I was working in the airports, in the hotels at night and I put this thing together. And ultimately, I came up with this big excel spreadsheet and I said well, maybe I have something here, maybe other people are curious about you know, words and niches out there.

Mike: Sure.

Bill: The shortened of this is so I put up this list. I had success when I became a product creator. I started looking for ways to help people solve problems. One of the things I’ve learned in my sales background is to successfully sell, you have to be empathetic to your market. You’ve gotta un – not sympathetic, but empathetic. You have to understand their problems. So, I would say this: if you have folks here on your show that had challenges succeeding challenges doing something, I would look at those challenges, analyze what the challenge is and try to figure out a solution for that challenge that you can then sell to other people just like your solving. And that was where I got started and that’s where my success has gone ever since.

Mike: Wait, wait, wait. I wanna know what happened with that list that you spent a hundred hours on.

Bill: Okay, so. I put up together in an excel file and I had grabbed this I don’t know, $27 ClickBank product about – various things. You know, various ways to make money and all this other kind of stuff and actually by a guy named Johnny Andrews, who has been around I think for several years. And anyways, I just remembered reading a part of that where it stated about how you can sell your products on the Warrior Forum. You can just sell those things. And I was like, that’s what I’ll do. So, I spend like it was 40 bucks and I have the John Doe you know, warrior room – I don’t know. But all in total, I spent $100 in putting this thing up there. I had the worst sales letter that you ever can imagine. I was just looking in other sales latter, didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t take the time to say maybe I should really kinda look into copywriting. But it was beautiful because in a way, I was removing all these barriers from myself and say I don’t care if it sucks, whatever. I’m just gonna put it out there. So, I put this thing up there and I released it on a Sunday night at 8pm.

Mike: You remember it, like the first time you released it.

Bill: Exactly. And I woke up the next day and I have made like $300 in sales and I was so excited. I was really excited, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’. I forgot all about the 100 hours and you know, the cost of that time. I forgot about the $100 that I really had invested. And I just said, I just made $200 in profit. It only took me 100 hours to make $200 in profit and I couldn’t believe it. It was the most satisfying income I ever made and then, I woke up the following day. And I was cleared up, I was refreshing, I was from work, I was refreshing that page, oh my gosh I just made another sale. And I woke up the next day and that’s when my life changed. And my clans from Warrior Plus chose what I called Massive Niche List, chose it as the WSO of the day and I didn’t even know what that was. I wasn’t aware what WSO of the day was or anything like that. I was leaving for a business trip to Indianapolis and I just came in my office and checked the – just refreshed my Gmail and it was all transactions.

Mike: Whoah.

Bill: And I went over to PayPal, coz I didn’t know what was going on. And I was actually kinda scared, I was like I’ve done something wrong, I’ve broken the internet, you know. And I had $8000 sitting in there. And it – I mean, I was like get in here, quick. I couldn’t believe it. And ultimately, that thing went on to do very, very well and I’ve actually had some modification of it as I’ve looked to and improved it. And I’m actually still continuing to dig in with that concept but what I’ve really found was that I extract a core of people that – when we think about affiliate marketing or niche marketing, it really start with this idea of well, which niche should I go into. And then, there’s like the five big niches that you could think of. What happens when I wanna go somewhere else? And so again, it wasn’t me being incredibly smart and I think obviously I will concede that there was some jus good fortune in there. But I love the idea of looking at our market place and trying to figure out what will help people. That’s what Free The Boss is which I’m sure we’ll talk about but it is what it is. It’s a way to say how can I help people shrink their time, slim down their activities and bring some impact in a way that this should be very helpful, you know.

Mike: I think one thing that I’ve learned from talking to a lot of product creators and people that have done well is that there’s a big change once you start – you stop trying to take people’s money, you stop trying to trick people into giving you their money and you focus more on providing value and on finding that problem that they have, finding that solution for that problem and then, instead of convincing people to give you money, they’re knocking on your door, trying to actually like force it on you.

Bill: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ll give you another quick example. I don’t wanna go down the list but this is – I mean, I wanna encourage people to think about this and maybe you don’t wake up with 8000 new dollars in your PayPal tomorrow, maybe it’s only $500 or $1000. But the idea of creating something that yours, having ownership of it and then, being smart about how you market it, to me is incredibly impactful. So, in about – I don’t know, it was over a year ago now, I read this headline on Search Engine Land and it was something about Google+. And you know, it’s very much big you know, it’s becoming more significant now but a year ago, Google+ no one you know, it was like oh yeah, there’s this thing that Google started. So, I started doing all this research and I was just starting doing research and research and research. It’s a skill of mine, I like doing research. And I started working on that, so I

was compiling the information, compiling the information and I have decided yet but what I like to do is I’m just gonna put out a report. Now, was this me being smart? No, it was me being thorough, with me looking at what people would need to know about Google+. And I felt like what I’m gonna do is just provide kind of this you know, at least up to date for today a definitive of what Google+ is, what it means and I wanna bring together a lot of great information. And I put that thing out, I put it out as Google+ Manifesto. I put it out there in the market place and it did you know, like $12,000 in about 4 or 5 days.

Mike: How much time did you spend doing that research?
Bill: I mean, probably I spent 15 hours over 2 days. You know —
Mike: It’s much better than that $300 that you spent compiling that original list.

Bill: Exactly. So you know, again I will bring that up as a motivation and hopefully as some incentive and some inspiration to say I didn’t have to be smart, I just have to take some actions and I think a lot of times that people, they just don’t wanna take action. They like to be a student, they don’t wanna you know, they self-up themselves I think and they go out, I’m not that smart, I haven’t had success yet, so I can’t – so how can I possibly be a product creator. Well, don’t tell people how to make $50,000 a month online doing SEO if you never have. I mean, yes. That’s a fat lie. But be helpful and I promise you, people will appreciate help. And people would say yeah for that one, they’re like, thanks for doing the hard work for me. Thanks for going to all these different locations, pulling together all the information, showing me everything I need to know in one simple place and thanks for making it affordable, so that I feel good about spending you know $10 out of a report that would have taken me a bunch of hours to get up to speed on it. So anyway, I mean I like doing that kind of stuff. I have a list of things like that that I wanna do when I kinda go no, I don’t have the time. Of course, I do. Sometimes, I don’t commit to it.

Mike: Now with your most recent product, Free The Boss. I think this kind of goes right along with what you’re saying. Like, it was something where you’re creating something that is gonna solve a pain that maybe you have. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?

Bill: Yeah, Free The Boss. There’s a legitimate story behind it. My kinda sometimes business partner and my friend, Jason Keith – he and I were flying down to the Warrior Live Event in Orlando last August.

Mike: Sure.

Bill: And we were on the plane and I had been pricing – he kind of tasked me with getting the trip together. We were flying – he lives in Oklahoma City, I live in Dallas and we were gonna fly out together, so I had to get the tickets and you know, get them all booked up. Anyways, I have used Kayak and Kayak you know is just – I mean, an aggregator of all these different travel deals that are out there, alright. So, they just basically tapped in. And now, they’re well funded and Kayak’s making an arm and a leg. Well, I’m not well-funded and I you know – I obviously not you know, I’m not making an arm and a leg off of transactions.

Mike: Sure.

Bill: So yeah, obviously kind of do you know, create a solution a bit differently but the end result was – I said, you know why don’t we try to do something like that for outsourcing? Because we were in the midst of team building. We were literally in the midst of trying to find talent and it was painful for us. You know, we go to Odesk. Well okay, I see. We got over here to the southern one. You’d hear them go use this, use this or you know, software guys are better if you get here. You know, it was just so chaotic for us and it was a stop down, like we can’t just go you know, we were not able to do anything. And we were getting our team built and so, I think there’s a way for us to try to aggregate some of this big outsourcing sites, including Fiverr which is in my opinion is not truly an outsourcing site – I mean, there but whatever. They’re definitely not the same as you know, E-Lance. But we put it together and so, again for a very small amount of money, we essentially did a lot of assessment on those sites, looked how they organized it, how are they’re categorizing it and things like that. And we did our best to create a single place that would then tie in with these different sites. So, the other thing as we started to do it that we realized we keep going oh my gosh, you can have anything done. And obviously, we wanted to kind of keep our focus on the needs of the marketers that we organize it in a way to work – and some of my Massive Niche List background came into place of saying of organizing something and saying, well when we think about graphics for example, there’s about 50 different types of graphics that could be done: banner graphics, ad graphics, paper graphics – like something you know, for flyers. You know, and it goes on and on. Obviously, like web design, things like that is kind of a whole different sector. But we organized it in a way where we said, look these are really the activities that are out there. We’re gonna organize them because in way, we want you to see what you can get done. So, it doesn’t have a search feature as much as it’s organized to be able to show you this is what can go get you, this is what you can have done. And then, you can kind of pick in shoes from where you wanna go. You could find you know, you could find talent and you can start to dig in with them. And then, obviously

there’s an opportunity where we put some great trading together. My partner, Jason, at one point had about 20 people working for him, from all over the world. And it was chaotic in some ways, but you know, he short his team down since then. But the point is, he went through and he is very much a processed guy. Well, he had a process and so, there was a part where we helped to train you know, how to negotiate with an outsourcer. Did you know you can negotiate with them? Did you – you know what I mean, how you weed up the junk and you know, really again make a really good use of your time.

Mike: What are the main advantages of using this over like for me, for example, I usually will just go right to Odesk when I need something done. Is there a huge advantage that someone’s gonna have by using this software as opposed to going around and maybe looking around individually?

Bill: Yeah. Well, I mean I think you get to a point where when you go to Odesk and others, they have a search function. They are pretty well-organized. I mean, these people you know, these are big sites. I mean, they’re moving hundreds and millions of dollars in fees you know, a year. So I mean, they’re well-organized. So, it’s definitely not as coming in and saying, we’re smarter than you. We don’t like the way your site is organized. At the end of the day, what we attempted to do again is to be able to say, these are the kinds of activities that are out there. And then, we’re gonna show you that activity and be able to click you on people on Odesk, on E-Lance, on Guru, on IFreeLance, on Fiverr. And then, you can suddenly have these pools of talents in front of you and you can make some decisions, oh wow. You know, instead of just focusing on Odesk and say, I hope I find it here, we’re gonna be able to pretty quickly we’ll have you be able to look at these various sites and you might — what I find is a lot of times there’s some pretty big price discrepancies. You know, from one to the other because you know, Odesk is going to start to have this – the prices are all gonna come up to meet whatever is happening inside of Odesk. And so, to be able to see that in my opinion across some various platform is really helpful.

Mike: Are you partial to any of the platform? Is there one that you go to normally for specific thing or – ?

Bill: No. I take a look at all over the place. I mean, I think that you end up establishing a kind of a relationship for the company. So, I use Odesk a lot. You know, I use Fiverr from time to time. You know, I’ve used E-Lance. You ask enough people will go, well I only use guru.com period. And I go, why? Well, that’s just what I use. You know, I can afford it man. You know, so there’s some of that kind of thing and I think ultimately you know, you get to a point where you go you know, I like the interface. You know, I like the transaction – you know, I like the transaction process. You know, things like that. So you know, I mean I tend to go you know – I’m kind of an Odesk guy myself. I have some good success with them. I’ve used E-Lance. And every now and then, I use Fiverr. I mean, Fiverr to me is – I tend, in some ways, I don’t know – I’m like well, I don’t know who’s doing my work on Fiverr. You know, at the end of the day and maybe I don’t care about that. But I mean, I’ve had some logos done on Fiverr. And I mean, I paid 5 or 10 bucks for you know, a pretty decent logo, I could not have done myself. You know, I feel pretty pleased about that.

Mike: What is something that you wouldn’t outsource?

Bill: I have not outsourced product writing. I haven’t done that. And I know people will do, I know – and they would remain nameless, but I know people that you know, in general I respect and they sell very good products and things like that and they outsource practically all of it. And maybe, I could make more money that way and definitely produce more products that way, but I tend to you know, these are like little kids for me and I don’t want someone else raising my kid. So, I tend to do a lot of my own writing and I mean, that’s the big thing for me. Pretty much, if you look at the rest of the activities, what you don’t wanna outsource is your thinking.

Mike: Yeah.

Bill: But everything else – I mean, like I don’t wanna mess around with websites. It’s slow for me. I don’t love it. So you know, I’ll pay someone to set up a website and set up my membership stuff, coz I don’t wanna mess with it. I’ll pay someone to do graphics. I’ll pay someone to you know, set up every bit of it, so that I could kinda sit down in the plane and drive it as much as possible. But I mean – but I still even myself, Mike, I need to let go even more and more. You know, I know folks who – they basically outsource all their email marketing, every bit of copy. You know, that comes out of them is really not even their words and I tend to – I mean, I’m marvel at that. And I go man, if I did that, I wouldn’t have to do anything. And – but you know, I’ve been working my whole life and there’s a part of me that feels like I have to work. You know, that I think –

Mike: I think you lose something when you outsource too much of your business, like if you’re outsourcing that main connection you have with your audience, over time they’re gonna feel it and they’re gonna understand. They’re not gonna hear, oh this is an email from Bill. He’s writing like this again. Oh, he made that spelling mistake again or he’s talking about his going biking again or whatever. Whatever it is you do, like there’s not gonna be that little thing that’s gonna make you different from all the other emails they’re getting from other people.

Bill: I agree. You know – on that note, I mean you don’t even have to pay an outsourcer if you’re willing just to use swap copy. You know, just use what’s already out there. I mean, coz if you’re gonna outsource it to someone and they’re gonna be speaking for you, you can’t – it’s not like the president’s speech writer who literally follows the president around, hears him in meetings, understands everything that the man has to say and then, he’s able to craft his message. You can’t do that from an outsourcing perspective. I can’t have you know, some gal that’s good in writing, sitting on my shoulder all day and just have me pontificate about everything I think about because at the end of the day you know, it’s just not gonna work. It’s impractical and so, I think you know in that regard, I like doing it. You know, again there’s still things where – these are things that I enjoy. At the end of the day, I’ve been able to trade security that of you know, my job. I’ve been able to trade that kind of somewhat secure income for a life of creativity which is really what I always wanted. You know, I grew up wanting to be a writer. And I didn’t think I was gonna be an email writer. I didn’t think I was going to be you know a somewhat technical writer because I wrote fiction. So, you know and I got English Literature in my background, so the idea that I you know, like I’m gonna get paid to write you know, a 25-page report on Google+, never would have thought that was gonna happen. But in the end of the day, those are gratifying hours for me, you know. And hours I’d rather much spend doing research, compiling stuff and writing it than you know, outsourcing it. Now let me say this, a lot you know – so, Free The Boss as an example, is completely outsourced. So that solution, once we put it in motion, figured out what we needed, we – our outsourcer, it was almost as a weird irony. But out outsourcer is recreating a tool about outsourcing.

Mike: Wait, wait, wait. Which company, which site did you outsource it to?

Bill: These are individual – these are like team members. They are our employees. We had two guys from the Philippines that you know, we were you know 40-hour a week employees that you know, we were paying $300 – you know, one goes $400 a month, the other one is $275 a month. Then, there was an American, kind of like a Project Manager / Personal Assistant, coz she’s a stay-at- home mom, basically. There was you know, a much more hour. But my point is, we haven’t put that together. So I mean, Free The Boss probably cost us a total of 600 bucks, you know. Maybe a little bit more with graphics.

Mike: Yeah.

Bill: But you see my point. So, that is one where you know, it’s not a language issue. It’s not like me being creative. It’s connecting the dots and I said, we don’t wanna do that. We’re gonna let someone else connect the dots for us, so.

Mike: One last question for you, Bill. Is there a one-time offer connected to Free The Boss?

Bill: Yeah, there is. I only know exactly how it worked out because what I like to do and this is one of the things that I have in my mind before we wrap up is I wanna talk to your audience as marketers and not as prospects.

Mike: Sure.

Bill: So, as a marketer, I just want to kinda express this to you coz I thought it was interesting, so we launched Free The Boss last October. And we’ve launched it for five days. And the thing and the problem is, when we do this at times instead of launches, what the hell are you gonna do with it after you close, you know. But you can reorganize but then, that’s a whole other process of you know, re-launching it and a new platform and you know, regrouping everyone and a whole different bunch of affiliates. So, what we’ve done here and I think that you’ll start to see this a little bit is that we just – it’s the same product. I mean, nothing needed to change. We didn’t have any complaints and things like that but initially, what we did is we didn’t have – in October, we did not have a funnel. There was not an upsell. We said, look there’s two opportunities here. You can just get a tool or you can get the tool plus all these videos and these you know, all these you know, basically all these kind of virtual workers, you know these outsourcer videos that will help you to actually work with outsourcers. So, it’s not telling you outsource what to do, I know there’s a whole cottage industry for that. This is very much like how to be the boss, right? How to you know, go about being the boss. And when we did it, we kind of over cornered the wall, we put both of the payment options right there in the sales page. It wasn’t a follow up. And the beauty of that is when you have let’s say, hey you can just have the tool for $9 or you can get the tool and other things for $27 and then we’ll tell you want, 80 something percent of the people took the higher option. It would have not converted to 80% if we put it in the follow up. Does that make sense?

Mike: Yeah.

Bill: So I mean, we were able to sell a lot more and make a lot more for ourselves and our affiliates by doing it that way. This time we’ve done it differently. We’ve gone back into the much more traditional way to do it. We just wanna re-open this thing because we wanted people – as many people to use this as possible. So, we got into a more traditional thing. So, if you click through Mike’s link and definitely by through Mike, if you click through his link, you gotta be able to have the option of getting access, lifetime

access to the tool and it’s – I think the price now is under $10. I’ve had people literally say to me, like some of my friends and other marketers who are kinda pissed off at me for pricing it that low because it is software. I mean, it’s not – you don’t download it, it’s web-based. So, you’re not supposed to be pricing software that low. You know, our expenses are done. We don’t have any additional expenses on it. We’ll check it you know, obviously make sure that all the links are working and everything like that but you know, like we just wanna make it available to people. And so, it’s under $10. When you buy – not if but when, you do have the option to get the training. If you know exactly what to do in the world of sorting through virtual workers and finding outsourcers and negotiating with them and interviewing them in situations like this and negotiating and managing them, then you don’t need it. If you know how to do all that stuff, you don’t need it. If you don’t know how to do it, then I encourage you to pick it up. I definitely encourage people to pick it up. So, there is an upsell opportunity. But it’s not you know, it’s not mandatory obviously.

Mike: I’m really interested in this. Okay, so the first time that you put out the product, you – on the sales page, you had an option for what was it, $10 for just the product or just the software. And then, you are adding another option on the sales page where it was like $27 you said for the — ?

Bill: It looks close to $27. I think that would be fair.

Mike: Okay, for the software and the training. And you said about 80% chose the higher selling version. They wanted the package, is that correct? Am I right there?

Bill: Right, so –

Mike: Okay. Wait, wait, wait. Let me just – I just wanna try to say everything here before. And then, the second time you did it, when you just released it again, now you have it so that it’s there’s only one price point on the sales page. It’s around $10 and then the upsell is gonna be the training. Is that correct?

Bill: Exactly. So in the process, it was basically balanced out. You know, you’re not really – it’s not like, oh I missed this better opportunity you know, in the funnel. It’s not I mean, like it maybe a dollar difference or something like that.

Mike: What have you seen? Did it sell better with the two-price points before or has it sold better with just the one lower price point?

Bill: Well, now we’re talking about launches which is kind of a whole different thing. I mean, it’s converting. It’s the same sales copy and everything like that and it’s converting overall and basically what it did last time.

Mike: Okay.

Bill: The challenge is that you know, there is just – I mean speaking candidly, it’s not getting the traffic that it got last time, because I don’t have a big affiliate contest associated with it. I’m not giving away the funnel in all some super kind of ways. So you know, the affiliates are like yeah, the people who get it and we know that it’s valuable to their list which frankly, it’s valuable to everyone. But I mean, it’s a busier time. So plain and simple, I don’t have as many people promoting it but it’s basically converting at around the same. This is the same logic. I’ve done this a couple of – I’ve done this in another time and the first time I did it, I didn’t have any basis for doing it. I just didn’t want to have to create a funnel. I just – it was lazy in the summer, I find this and look, I never know how to get it and people bitch about these funnels, right? Now, they shouldn’t. You have to find marketers that hadn’t, but be a big boy and realize and learn something. Like, you got – every time I’m buying, I try to learn from my buying experience, so that I can use it. So you know, I personally don’t have any empathy for people who complain about sales funnels. But in that prior case, I just don’t wanna mess around with it. I just wanted to say, look you’re gonna get this or you’re gonna get this, which one do you want? I’m gonna give you both options and traditionally speaking, logic would say that you don’t do that. You never give people more than one option. You give one option at a time. Well, it worked. And I’ve done this every time and it worked very successfully because ultimately, if you wanna buy I’d rather you give $27 that $9, right? It only makes sense. And you see this, where you will see it, you may not realize this is happening, plug-ins and software packages were it’s like okay look, there’s a light version and then there’s like you know, the durable version and then, the industrial version. if you look at those pricing, they want you to pick the middle and the whole thing is designed to pick the middle.

Mike: There’s a decoy, in there usually. Bill: Absolutely.
Mike: Yeah.

Bill: So, right. So, the top one is maybe too expensive for what you just for this sales page. The lower is just what, just for a few bucks more and they get you on the sweet spot. And I mean, so you can do that as a marketer. Well, you wanna figure out how to do that, the balance of that in my opinion, so you don’t feel like you’re screwing over your market place just to make sure there’s a value point and a lot of times when I see what I get frustrated with – and I’ve told some, coz I know a lot of these product creators, I told them that I don’t like it. I don’t like what you’re doing because you’re not providing. What you’re doing is you’re removing value from the lower level in my opinion and I don’t think that’s cool, like give me what I need. So, for Free The Boss, you have everything you need. I mean, you got the whole thing you know, right there and it’s for only $10. If you need some training, then buy the training. If you don’t need it, you don’t need it. So, in a way — you know, the first time I don’t think I tricked anybody but we stacked the value and said, you’re gonna get all these good stuff and it’s this price or you can just get it down her for much less and people just I mean, all I can say I think it was like 75-80% took the higher price, to everyone’s satisfaction.

Mike: I mean, we can do a whole podcast episode on pricing products and how that psychology works and the different ways that people position them to create value and yeah, it’s quite fascinating.

Bill: Yeah, absolutely.

Mike: Bill, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We’re gonna have links to the product in the show notes. If people wanna reach out and get in contact with you, where can they find you at?

Bill: You know, I don’t have any great place. I don’t have some amazing website like Mike does. Talk about lazy, I’m one of the lazy guys in the room. Although I’m really hardworking too. Just connect with me on Facebook, you know. You can find me at The Bill Guthrie, like facebook.com/thebillguthrie. And just send me a note. Let me know that you listened to this and we’ll chat it up.

Mike: Awesome. Thanks again, Bill.

Bill: Thanks, Mike. Have a good one.

Mike: I hope you enjoyed the interview today with Bill. If you’re interested in checking his Free The Boss outsourcing tool, go to mikefrommaine.com/freetheboss. That’s mikefrommaine.com/freetheboss. Thank you for watching and I will see you all on Monday.