Review: the MindValley Way to Ecommerce Success - Tactical Advantages
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The e-book itself is divided into 40 tactics, or eight sections made up of five tactics each. Like a good college course, later tactics build on the ones that come earlier. Since the whole focus of the book is e-commerce, it starts with a section on creating products that sell well online. The ideal product to sell online, it seems, is information – whether that’s learning how to meditate, or play the guitar, or run a successful online business. If you’re not sure whether the product or service you want to offer online will do well, MindValley includes an eight-item checklist in this section to help.
I’d like to point out that if you’re a total beginner – if you’re just beginning to think that you’d like to try an online business – then you don’t want to work just from this e-book. While it does tell you that you need to sell something you can be passionate about, it won’t tell you what that is, of course; you’ll have to figure that out for yourself. Also, if you’ve never attempted to construct a series of lessons to teach something, you won’t get much guidance here. This is a shame, since many of the e-book’s examples and case studies focus on entrepreneurs who sell study courses that can be obtained online.
That caveat out of the way, there’s a lot to like about the information and the way it is delivered. MindValley sticks to the tried-and-true formula of “tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them.” In other words, each tactic introduces the topic, goes into detail, then summarizes, usually with checklists to divide the information into manageable chunks, and concrete examples to illustrate the points.
I found it interesting that a number of classic sales tips carry over into ecommerce, perhaps with even more urgency in that setting. MindValley devotes an entire tactic to “designing guarantees that eliminate buyer doubt.” Unless I’m terribly mistaken, designing bold guarantees that reassure your buyers is a technique that dates all the way back to Dale Carnegie.
The section that covers “Setting Up Your Site for Success” will be helpful to anyone creating a website focused on selling. Indeed, focus is a major theme here, with the KISS principle ruling, as it should. Here, too, we see that the e-book’s focus is on ecommerce sites; for example, MindValley advises against using Google’s AdSense on your site if you’re selling a product. The tactic on writing sales copy in this section was very comprehensive and detailed, literally taking you step by step through the process. The tactic covering psychological triggers will probably be familiar to experienced salespeople, but I found it useful to see MindValley’s explanations of how they work in an online context.
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