This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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What's up, hello, greetings. It is Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School. Today, I've got a all new classroom episode for you. Gonna talk today about the three elements of every strong offer. What are those elements?
Well, I shall tell you shortly, and then we will talk about them. But first, a quick announcement, or not really an announcement, just something that I noticed. I read this article, Facebook's bug bounty caught a data stealing spree. And it reminded me of this episode we did long ago, episode 766, a really fun story. We called it Vigil Anti Hacker.
Vigil Anti Hacker logs $110,000 profit. And that was a guy who entered the world of bug bounties when he was a high school student, and then went on to do it in college and later made a lot of money. And I had no idea until then that this was an industry of companies that pay coders, you know, good hackers, white hat hackers, they're called, to go and discover vulnerabilities in their code that could be very harmful, could release a lot of personal data, et cetera. I'm sure you're familiar with all the different stories about how, you know, all your personal information is out there these days because of various hacks and such. Anyway, that was episode 766.
And the story I just read was Facebook's bug bounty, you know, caught a data stealing spree. It was all about how somebody discovered that there was this, you know, huge breach essentially. And the whole point of this anecdote is that in 2019, I read Facebook awarded $2.2 million in bounties to researchers in more than 60 countries, double the 1.1 million the company paid out in 2018. So if you're a programmer or would be coder, if you're just good at kind of poking around somewhere, this could be something for you to check out. Episode 766, and I'll also link up that article in today's show notes.
Okay, so in recent classroom episodes, we have looked at all kinds of topics, different side hustle ideas where they come from, how to decide between them. Couple weeks ago, we began building our roadmap to launch. Last week, we looked at the first part of a series on branding. This episode, as mentioned, is called three elements of every profitable offer. Those elements are the promise, the pitch, and the price.
And you can think of it like this. The promise is how your hustle will change someone's life. The pitch is why they should purchase or sign up now. And the price, how they can purchase or sign up, like what do they actually need to do? And we can also call this a call to action or CTA, not to make it complicated, the price, the call to action, the CTA, but all kind of the same thing.
Now, why are we talking about offers? Again, just wanna kind of drill this in. We've talked about it previously. It's because consumers respond to offers, not just like, here's my product, here's my service. We respond to offers.
And even if you're selling to companies, like in a B2B model, there's still a person at the company making that decision. There is still a human element. So don't wait to think about these elements, the promise, the pitch, and the price. I actually recommend you think about them at the outset, right at the beginning of going from idea to action. So let's delve further into each one.
The promise should change your customer's life on some measurable level. Go big, keep your attention focused on the benefit customers will receive from it. And then craft that into a short statement that attracts attention and makes that benefit to customers immediately clear. So what is the promise of Citosle School? It is a free, short podcast that brings you daily ideas for making extra money.
Or you could change those words around a bit and say it's a short daily podcast that brings you free ideas for making extra money. The point is, hopefully you understand in a few words what it is about, what the cost is. It's free, what the benefit to you is. Now that's the promise. As for the pitch, the pitch should provide everything that somebody needs to know, at least a potential prospect, without getting bogged down in a bunch of irrelevant details.
A key part of the pitch is timeliness or urgency. Because your offer is great, let's just assume your offer is great, your offer is great, but great isn't good enough. Because why should they take action right now? Why should they not be like, oh, that looks pretty cool. I'll come back later and buy it.
And by later, I mean never. So why should they take action right now? It could be because supplies are limited. It could be because this is new and you wanna get in early. It could be because if they buy now, they'll get something special.
There are rewards, there are incentives, there is exclusivity, there is scarcity. All of these triggers are potential ammunition for your pitch. Now, even if it is a B2B offer, let's go back to that and say you're selling to a business, what's my pitch? How can I use one of these elements there? Well, you can try an approach like this.
Maybe the pitch is to give your business a powerful advantage and you can say nobody else has this yet. In your industry, you can be the first one to have this and therefore you'll have a powerful advantage. Alternatively, you can flip that statement and suggest that their competition is buying it. You can say their competition is buying it, you don't wanna be left behind, right? Like the person or the company that you're competing against, they already have access to this, they're ahead of you, you don't wanna be left behind, right?
So one of those triggers is basically first mover advantage and the other one is fear or scarcity, which are both very effective. Now lastly, the price or the call to action tells prospects not only how much it costs, but also what they need to do. So we'll look at that one more after the break. When I say thank you to our sponsor for making all of this series completely free to you. Shout out to the sponsor and then more about price.
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All right, we are back, and by the way, I appreciate the sponsors and I also appreciate you. Just wanna say how much fun it is to make this program for you. Here in 2020, episode 1150, I had no idea when I started that I was gonna keep doing this several years on. It was an experiment and the reason it has endured is just because of our incredible listeners, our community. So thank you for being part of that.
That's not a sponsor message, that's just, hey, thanks, you're awesome. Okay, so the call to action, the price/call to action, I'm gonna call it that from now on, CTA. The call to action should tell prospective customers or clients exactly what they need to do. Should be a little bit of a nudge here. An example of a call to action could be like a click this button, call this number, sign up here, register today, et cetera.
It should be really easy and obvious, okay? And when you're thinking about your call to action, when you're writing it, you wanna lead with benefits, like we've already talked about, like the promise, what is the ultimate promise. And then you want to back them up with features, okay? So your benefits go first. Your features, that's all the cool stuff that you wanna list first when you're writing your offer.
Oh, it does this, it does this, it's got this special thing. There's a place for that, but it's not primary. It's usually at this point where you're like call to action, hey, go here and register because, you know, here's all the cool stuff that you're going to get or here's what you'll be able to do with this product, here's how it's gonna change your life and so on. And then when you're writing that call to action, you know, use this imperative tense, you know, go do this, click this button, as I said, write it as if you're talking to a single person. Hopefully you're gonna have more than one customer, but you always want to speak directly to a single customer.
Use some action words like now and today, like now, do this now, do this today, you know, we're waiting for you, we're ready, come on. Even if the offer will never change, even if it will never sell out, just using some active language can work a little bit toward creating that sense of perceived urgency. And I also wanna encourage you to kind of be self-critical, like not in life because, you know, actually a big part of my therapy is working on not being self-critical, but in terms of your side hustle, in terms of your messaging, it is good to be critical. Consider your offer, read through everything that your potential customers will see with a skeptical eye and ask yourself like if I was on the other side of this, if someone was kind of, you know, presenting me with this, what would my objection be? Like what would I be concerned about?
And then, you know, find a way to counter that objection throughout the offer. Oh, I'm worried it might not help me. Well, here's a testimonial from someone who is just like you and they were worried about the same thing, but it turned out being, you know, the best decision they ever made in their life, you know, aside from meeting their partner, maybe including that. And last but not least, do everything you can to make it easy, turn yes into the default answer. The promise, the pitch, the price, every offer needs to have one or at least every profitable, successful offer.
Now, each classroom feature also includes an assignment. Your assignment today is, do you know what the promise, the pitch and the price is for your idea, the one that you're working on in particular this year? And if you do, that's great. Well, first of all, if you don't, then that's your assignment. What is the promise?
What is the pitch? What's the price? If you've got that already, if you're like, yep, I'm actually like ahead of the game, the bonus assignment is how can you improve something from each one? How can you make a small tweak, a small but significant tweak? And my suggestion here is, if you can only improve one of those things, if you're like, promise, pitch, price, what do I do?
Work on the promise. Okay, that's the most important one, needs to be simple and powerful. [Music]
All right, that's it for today. You can read notes for this and every classroom episode this year at sidehustleschool.com/classroom. It is, by the way, a free daily podcast with ideas to help you make more money, create more security and freedom for yourself.
That's our promise. This has been episode 11.50. I'm so glad you're out there, as mentioned. Much more is on the way. My name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is, once again, Side Hustle School.
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from the Onward Project.
