It's Tax Day in the United States, and for some reason that makes me think of the Circus.

It has been very exciting around my household, because just a few weeks ago we were able to attend a local circus. Now, this is not one of those giant Ringling Brothers circuses with three rings. This is a small traveling circus that goes around from town to town in Texas, but has all the big stuff.

They have elephants, high wire acts, trapezes, and all the things you would expect at a circus, it’s just smaller than the giant circus that comes to town. By the way, it’s cheaper too, which is really great, because the big circus has gotten incredibly expensive.

Small circuses are perfect for three year olds, because there’s only so much circus a three year old can really absorb. So, last Sunday we went to the local circus, which happened to be in town. I was just knocked over by the amount of marketing that I saw there.

It reminded me that internet marketing is really just a very small and tiny example of the larger topic of marketing, which is all around us everywhere as a giant multibillion dollar industry.

I thought I’d talk a little bit about a couple of things that I saw at the circus that reminded me about things that you should do in your internet marketing to maximize your conversions. There was one particular example I wanted to discuss and it’s shown in the picture.

The intermission at the circus was a 15 minute delay that was completely unnecessary — it was simply another marketing situation. The intermission happened in the middle of the circus for no good reason just to give you an opportunity to buy stuff. But, that’s not really what I wanted to talk about here.

During the intermission the big center ring announcer came out and announced that there were going to be special peanuts that were going to be for sale only during the intermission.  Not only that, but after the 15 minute intermission the peanuts would no longer be available anywhere inside of the circus, or anywhere at all for that matter.

Completely artificially the ringmaster was able to set up this sense of urgency in his marketing of the peanuts.

He had these guys come out with boxes of peanuts down around the center ring and all during the 15 minutes he talked about how the peanuts would soon be gone. He even did a countdown in the final minutes,  whipping these people under the tent into a frenzy to go buy these peanuts.

It was interesting, because I didn’t really want peanuts. I had already gotten popcorn and Zachary had a snow cone, we didn’t need any more junk.

But I could feel myself asking if I should go ahead and buy the peanuts because after all they weren’t going to be available soon. He had established a sense of urgency so well that I actually caught myself being drawn in by the peanut panic.

The second thing he did was he announced that in each bag of peanuts was the potential to win these amazing huge balloons. He had clowns around the arena holding these big bunches of giant colorful helium balloons. Not the little balloons that you normally buy in the grocery store, these were monster circus sized balloons. Some of the bags of peanuts contained a magic ticket that you could trade in for one of these balloons.

Of course, kids were going crazy getting their moms and dads to buy these peanuts. This has two effects. One, of course it had the normal bonus effect that you normally get in internet marketing.   If you want someone to buy something you offer them a bonus and it increases the chances that they’ll buy.

The second effect it had that I thought was very interesting.  Because there was uncertainty in getting the bonus, that caused people to buy more peanuts. I saw several people buying two, three, four bags of peanuts trying to get one of these tickets to win.

Now, that’s not a tactic that we often use in internet marketing, but I sometimes see it used when people are trying to run contests on their blogs and they give people multiple ways to get entries. Tweet my blog post, leave a comment, give me a backlink, and so forth. The more you do, the greater chance you can win — kind of like the peanuts.

So, it turns out everything you need to know about internet marketing can be learned at the circus.

Or maybe just Internet Marketing is a Circus.

Either way, here is the bottom line:

Number one, you should always try to create some sort of sense of urgency with your products. Now, I don’t recommend that you create a false sense of urgency. In the case of the peanuts these guys had decided they were only going to mess with selling peanuts for 15 minutes and that created a sense of urgency.

In your case you might choose to decide that you’re only going to fiddle with offering a certain bonus or doing some certain thing around your product for a limited time and then you’re going to raise the price. Urgency sells.

Of course, the second thing is offer a bonus. People want to feel good about the things that they buy, they want to feel like they got a deal, and one way you can make them feel that way is by offering a bonus.

I’m Mark Mason from MasonWorld.com where we teach you how to build successful internet businesses one night at a time. Thank you.