If you’re an entrepreneur, CEO, public speaker, author, or information marketer, you owe it to yourself, your business, and your lifestyle to take a closer look at the revenue-generating potential of teleseminars – even if you’ve never listened to one.

One of the most profitable teleseminars I’ve ever conducted took place on the evening of December 4, 2008. It was a “Preview Call” to help find buyers for my Teleseminar Secrets training series.

More than 255 prospective customers ended up making a $2,500 purchase. 

If you’re counting, that’s over $637,500.

How can you achieve results like these with your own teleseminars? (Or with practically any other form of promotional communication?)

One of the best sales-making techniques I’ve found is called the AIDA Formula. It’s been proven to work for over 100 years, and involves only four simple steps.

The four steps are simple to remember: First, you grab your prospect’s Attention (A) about your offer. Second, you elicit their Interest (I) about your offer. Third, you amplify their Desire (D) to purchase your offer. And fourth, you influence them to take Action(A) with their wallet.

Easy, right?

Unfortunately, many marketers don’t understand exactly how to implement this powerful technique.

I’ve observed dozens of veteran marketers make the mistake of moving too fast to the second half of the AIDA Formula – the Desire and Action part. And that often results in losing the sale (and the prospect) for life!

This mistake is easy to avoid. Here’s how…

Picture the AIDA process as an inverted triangle, like the one you see here:

As you can see, the inverted triangle has four sections. Each section (from the top down) becomes smaller, representing the percentage of prospects you’re likely to influence at that point in the AIDA process.

The section at the top (Attention) is the largest, because getting a prospect’s Attention is easier than eliciting his Interest to continue watching, listening, or reading more about your offer.

The second section (Interest) is larger than the third section (Desire), because it is easier to elicit a prospect’s Interest in your offer than to amplify his Desire to buy.

And the third section (Desire) is larger than the fourth and final section (Action), because it’s easier to amplify a Desire to buy than to influence Action.

A problem arises when the marketer makes the mistake of expecting one promotional communication - such as one e-mail message, one teleseminar, or one direct-mail letter – to do all the heavy lifting and capture the sale.

It IS possible to do that. A powerful sales letter, for instance, can grab a prospective customer’s attention and move him through the entire four parts of the triangle to take action. However, it can be easier to convert even your most skeptical prospects into buyers just by splitting the AIDA inverted triangle in two parts instead of four: Attention-Interest and Desire-Action.

Let’s use a teleseminar as our example. (But this technique works with practically any marketing medium.)

Teleseminars work wonders in grabbing Attention and eliciting Interest from prospects to learn more about your offer. But it takes a website to amplify their Desire and influence Action.

Remember the teleseminar I told you about earlier? I was able to get more than 255 people to make a $2,500 purchase. Yet, if you listen to the call, you’ll notice that its purpose was to simply grab Attention and elicit Interest from my listeners.

Where Desire and Action came in is when I referred the 1,600+ listeners to my website TeleseminarSecrets.com. It was at the website that most of the promotional heavy lifting was done. We included video testimonials, frequently asked questions, success stories, irresistible bonus gifts, and a solid money-back guarantee.

The people who visited my site after the teleseminar were already Interested in what I was offering. My site just amplified their Desire and got them to take Action – and become customers.

[Ed. Note: Alex Mandossian knows a thing or two about marketing. He has generated over $233 million in sales for his clients. And in the past three years, he increased his own revenues from $1.5 million to $5 million. You can get Alex's advice and practical marketing tips for info-publishers, small-business owners, and entrepreneurs for free at http://www.AlexMandossianToday.com

Interested in making between $50,000 and $5 million - starting this year? Find out how to do so right here.]

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I often enjoy cold pizza “the morning after” more than the piping hot version the night before.

What does the joy of devouring day-old pizza have to do with your success as an info-marketing entrepreneur?

Two things, actually…

1. Principle centered content never gets stale, it only gets better with age.

You can return to it again and again to see it with new eyes on YouTube, hear it with new ears on a teleseminar, or visualize it with a new mind when reading a blog post or an e-mail message like this one.

2. Deep diving into familiar content doesn’t breed contempt, it breeds more success!

Your one and only path to mastering anything is through the path of familiarity. 

If you are an info marketer, the only way your prospects can acknowledge you as a trusted advisor on a topic they are unfamiliar with… is to first acknowledge you as a trusted advisor on a topic they are familiar with.

That makes a lot of sense, right?

As the French novelist Marcel Proust once said: “The true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” (That quote will remain framed and hung up on my home-office wall as long as I’m breathing.)

I know you won’t yet find a definition for “content diving” in Wikipedia or any online dictionary. Yet I also know that when your readers, listeners,orviewers decide to dive deep into your info-marketing content, you have already arrived in their minds as their trusted advisor.

How can you use content diving to make yourself more successful? Visit www.EarlytoRise.com right now. See the box on the upper-right of the home page? It says “Search” next to an empty white field.

That’s the content diving tool I want you to utilize more often when you visit Early to Rise (and any other site or blog that can help you achieve success more quickly).

Put your fingers on your keyboard and type a few keyword phrases into that Search box (just like you do at Google) to discover the hidden treasure you’ve been missing.

I can practically guarantee that you’ll accelerate your learning on the topics you’re interested in a lot faster and better, and with less effort.

[Ed. Note: Make sure you apply your new content diving skills to marketing master Alex Mandossian's blog here. And let us know which websites offer you the best and most useful content right here.]

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Let’s say you’re trying to decide where to dine tonight – and you’re in the mood for Mexican food.

Your spouse says, “I heard about a new place the other day. Supposedly, it has handmade tortillas and chiles rellenos that are to die for. The only problem is, it’s about a 30-minute drive from here.”

You’re hungry right now. So your spouse offers another option: “There’s our old standby, Don’s Tex Mex. It’s right down the street. But, as you know, the food’s only average.”

You’re torn between your growling belly… and a desire for those handmade tortillas.

And then your spouse pipes up again, “I just remembered that restaurant we went to last month. Remember how good the salsa was? But… it’s about 45 minutes away.”

Suddenly, the 30-minute drive to the new place with the handmade tortillas doesn’t seem so bad.

It happens all the time – where the introduction of a third option suddenly makes one of your earlier options look better. It sounds irrational. And it is. But it’s such a common phenomenon, it even has a name. It’s called the “decoy effect.”

Marketers often take advantage of the decoy effect. Consider the following scenario…

You’re at the movies, and you’re thirsty. So you go to the concession counter to get a soda. The small size is $3.00. The large size is an outrageous $5.00. But then the person behind the counter points out that it is only 50 cents more than the medium size. Suddenly, the large size seems like a better deal.

That’s the decoy effect.

In his New York Times best-seller, Predictably Irrational - The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Dan Ariely describes an interesting study he conducted with students at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. The study was based on a clever bit of “decoy-effect” pricing in an ad he found for a subscription to Economist magazine:

Offer A: Internet-only subscription for $59

Offer B: Print-only subscription for $125

Offer C: Print-and-Internet subscription for $125

“I read these offers one at a time,” writes Ariely. “The first offer seemed reasonable. The second option seemed a bit expensive, but still reasonable. But then I read the third option: a print and Internet subscription for $125. I read it twice before my eye ran back to the previous options.”

At this point, Ariely asked himself the same question you may have asked yourself when presented with a similar Good-Better-Best pricing model: “Who would want to choose the ‘Better’ option [print delivery only - Offer B] when both the ‘Good’ [Internet delivery only - Offer A] and ‘Better’ options could be purchased at the same $125 price [Offer C]?”

Good question.

In my own marketing experience, I’ve found that the decoy offer – Offer B in this Good-Better-Best pricing model – influences my prospects to have a strong bias toward Offer C (the “Best” option). 

When Ariely presented a group of 100 MIT students with the three subscription options from the Economist ad, the same thing happened. Though some selected Offer A, most went with Offer C. None of them selected Offer B, the decoy.

So he wondered what would happen if he removed Offer B. After all, since no one had selected it, it shouldn’t make any difference, right?

Not exactly…

When he presented another group of 100 MIT students with just two options – Offer A [Internet-only for $59] and Offer C [the Internet-print combo for $125], 68 of them chose Offer A and only 32 chose Offer C. Which makes the “decoy-removed” version of the ad far less profitable than the one the Economist actually ran.

I’ve split-tested the traditional “Good-Better-Best” model against the decoy model myself.  

In the traditional model, Good = $X, Better = $Y, Best [Good + Better] = $Z.

But over and over again, the winning model looked like this: Good = $X, Better = $Y, Best [Good + Better] = $Y.

How can you use the decoy effect to make your offers stronger, more appealing, and more profitable? Start testing today.

[Ed. Note: Alex Mandossian knows a thing or two about marketing. He has generated over $233 million in sales for his clients. And in the past three years, he increased his own revenues from $1.5 million to $5 million. You can get Alex's advice and practical marketing tips for info-publishers, small-business owners, and entrepreneurs for free at AlexMandossianToday.com.

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