People love to share content they think others will find useful or make themselves look cool and smart. You only need to look at your Facebook or Twitter feeds and your email inbox full of Fwd:s from your family and friends to confirm that. On the other hand, people are also lazy and busy, so even if they might want to share your content, they probably won't. How do you get them from "won't" to "will"? Try the "Samuel L. Jackson Marketing Hack."
That's what entrepreneur and founder of AppSumo Noah Kagan calls this technique. Essentially:
Most people: 1- Read emails in an email client. 2- Have friends. I’m looking at you Neville (Mr. 5000+ friend everyone) 3- Want to send cool things to their friends. 4- Are lazy mofos, as scientifically stated by Sam Jackson.
To overcome this, you need to make it as easy as possible for lazy people to share your emails or blog posts.
For email, that means adding a "mailto:" link that your readers can easily click to share your email with a friend and having the email written out for them. To do this:
In your emails, add a simple mailto: link so that your readers can easily click and it'll make a new templated email for them to send to a friend.
Take the text you want for your subject and your body and separately drop them into Eric Meyer's handy free URL Encoder.
The mailto link should look like this:
mailto:?subject=<paste encoded subject here>&body=<paste encoded body here>Now you have the email written out for them that says exactly what you want it to say.
All the person has to do is add the recipient's email address and hit send! The same idea applies to asking someone to tweet an article, except that you use this URL for the link: https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=<paste encoded tweet text>.
As Kagan writes: Great marketers know what they want from people, and they go to extreme lengths to make it as easy as possible for someone to give them exactly that.
Excerpted from Kagan's 8 unconventional ways to put yourself into a successful marketer's mindset. Learn more about this technique at OkDork.
Title photo by Joe the Goat Farmer via Flickr
