DUPLICATING YOUR AD SETS

they want to learn how to do is play their favorite song or at least a part of their favorite song.

This gets us into a discussion on what’s known as “splintering” your offer. We’ve been dancing around this one for a bit here, but it’s important for you to understand the basic principles of the hook before this particular concept.

So let’s say you sell ten different guitar lesson courses. One of those digital products is “How to learn how to play rock guitar.” In that course, you have seven different lessons, the most popular of which is your lesson on how to play hundreds of some of the most popular rock guitar riffs in rock history. Inside that lesson there are five really killer rock guitar licks that all your students love. Those licks are: Iron Man by Black Sabbath, Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin, Bad Moon Rising by Credence Clearwater Revival, Day Tripper by the Beatles, and Enter Sandman by Metallica.

When you are trying to figure out an offer to put in front of cold traffic, the idea behind “splintering” is that you find an easily consumable, highly actionable, highly valuable, and popular chunk or piece of your main product, then “splinter” that chunk off to use as your offer to entice people to engage with you. And I’m willing to bet that you already have something like this in your product portfolio right now.

Marketers are somewhat reluctant to do this because they think they are giving away their best stuff and then people will be disappointed when they actually buy. Don’t fall into that trap. The idea is to give away your best stuff, but just make it incomplete so they want more.

You could argue that “learn to play guitar” is a hook, as it is specific to a group of people interested in playing an instrument. It actually could be used as a hook. It’s just not specific enough to be a great hook. If you use that as your hook, you might fall into the trap that we fell into in the how-to-flip-houses-in-five-simple-steps example we used above.

For one of our customers, we had them make a video where they taught the prospect to play three repeatable riffs that can be played in any rock guitar solo. The video is long, clocking in at over tenminutes, but he gives highly actionable advice on how to play a specific type of guitar ref. The hook at the end of the video simply tells them to take the next step, which is to purchase the entire course on how to solo like a rock star. In this case, our “lead magnet” is actually an “ungated” piece of content (meaning you don’t have to give your name or email address to get the content), which to some marketers is extremely contrarian. However, because the call to action at the end of the video is to purchase the course as the logical next step, this ad does extremely well. The video in the ad simply demonstrates that they can help the prospect by actually helping them and then simply leads them down the path to the logical next step, namely purchasing more of what they just showed them how to do.

BUILD YOUR FIRST DIGITAL PRODUCT

This is one that probably appeals to people in both the digital product business as well as the information product business. The end result of this hook is the building of a digital product, but in a broader sense, this hook is targeted to people who want to start their own business. The reasons for starting your own business are varied, the biggest of which is the desire to leave a job or “escape the 9 to 5,” as it were.

In that vein, the hook could potentially be “start your own business and leave your dead end job,” which is a good basic hook that’s been used thousands of times for thousands of products. But for our purposes it falls short because it lacks super specificity. When it comes to creating a hook, as we’ve said before, the more specific you are, the more you will effectively attract your ideal customers.

In this case, a “build your first digital product” hook is far more effective because it triggers curiosity, creates awareness that in order to start a business one does not need to build physical products, and even makes your prospect curious of the possibility. They all of a sudden go from “I can’t start my own business because I can’t think of a physical product to sell” to “I can build a digital product and go into business for myself? What is that exactly?” This hook creates