The second way of getting a “wow” from your audience when you announce your course is to make a brand new promise.

And obviously, it needs to be incredibly attractive promise to them to get that “wow”.

Now the reality is that today, all the big promises have been made.

Get rich, lose weight, meet your ideal partner, get more clients.

No one is going to go “wow” if you just repeat one of these old, worn-out promises unless they've been living under a rock for the last few decades.

So there needs to be a (truthful) twist on the promise.

One way to do that is with a “without clause”.

That's where you enhance the promise by removing something they don't want that normally comes with it.

Lose weight without diets. More clients without endless posting on social media.

It has to be true of course. You have to be able to deliver on that promise.

But if you can it can be very powerful…

…provided they've not heard the exact same promise before.

In some markets a simple “without clause” will sound brand new. In others – like marketing for example – it's probably already been done countless times.

Getting more clients even if you hate marketing, if you have no time, if you're an introvert…all done many times before.

So it's trickier in mature markets. But not impossible.

I've been around the block more than a few times, but Jon Buchan's big promise of teaching you to write cold emails so engaging and charming that people would enjoy and appreciate getting them was new to me. And I did indeed go “wow” and buy the course.

Another way of getting a wow from your promise is to pick a smaller but highly unusual promise.

I bought a course a while back on being 10x more productive with my writing.

That's not a big end-result promise like more clients. But in a mature market where there are lots of people who know that being 10x more productive with their writing will bring them big results, it works.

Another course I bought recently was on running mini-workshops. The promise was to teach you how to set up and sell a lot of places on low-cost live online workshops which would eventually lead to more high value clients.

It was an unusual offer I'd not seen before and to convince me to buy they needed to convince me that mini workshops would be easier to sell than something high ticket…but could lead fairly quickly to those mini workshop attendees buying something bigger.

They did.

That's the trick with a smaller but highly unusual promise. By definition it's something no one else is offering. But to get a wow you need to show people how it can give them something big in terms of end results.

That sudden “hang on, I've never considered this before but blimey, this could absolutely get me what I want” realisation is amazingly powerful and a big driver of sales.

It needs you to think through “what can I promise that's different, but that leads to a big result (and that I can prove leads to that result)”.

It needs a bit of creativity. But it can really pay off.