Tag: Copywriting
Read a Sales Letter Aloud
Are you still participating in the daily video challenge?
If you missed out on it, the task is you just record one video every day. It could be a live-action video, it could be a Camtasia video. It could be just 5 minutes if you want it to.
Many many months ago, my friend Steven Schwartzman paid for someone to create a YouTube video out of his site... all he did was record a Camtasia video reading the sales letter for a few minutes.
Due to the rules of the Daily Video Challenge, you're not allowed to do that.
On the plane ride back from Austin, Texas in April... returning from the Warrior Event... I copied a few peoples' WSO sales letters by hand and it works like MAGIC!
Record a Camtasia video of you reading a sales letter aloud... a sales letter of either a competitor's product, or a product in a similar niche to yours.
It will also help with your speaking skills. At one point, recorded a PowerPoint Camtasia presentation for Kevin Riley's Recipe for Post Product Launch.
Guess what that means?
- I now have a web-based video presentation that I loaded into an autoresponder series. I'm using Ben Prater's method of sending out regular follow-ups to reduce refunds.
- I also have an audio product. Camtasia allows you to export just the audio of a presentation into an MP3. I separated the audo into two folders because audio CDs only hold 74 minutes of audio.
- I can easily produce the Camtasia files as a DVD if I want to.
I used it as an incentive for people to purchase from me as an affiliate. If it brought me in enough profits, it would justify buying resale rights... but it didn't, so I didn't buy the rights. That's a heck of a lot better strategy than simply blindly buying up rights.
When you buy up resale rights, you can stick in your own upsells, and create your OWN affiliate program...
In our Daily Seminar membership, we're buying up the best resale rights possible to teach you the basics... while the content we create ourselves, focuses on the more advanced stuff.
Hint: This month in the seminar, I'll be posting a very special paid version of the Daily Video Challenge, with actual step by step tasks for you to work on the entire month.
Leave your ten comments for me and Merry Christmas!
Ten Testimonial Rule
If you've been following my blog at all then you've probably heard of the ten comment rule... any time I make a post, I ask for 10 comments from my readers... or I'll stop posting forever.
I just applied that to my marketing to gather testimonials for a product.
Nope, I didn't offer a bribe for testimonials, I didn't give away free copies in exchange for a testimonial. (Good way to make sure you never hear from those people again.)
I simply said: I need ten testimonials from SOMEONE... any of my current customers... for version 1.0, and I'll release version 2.0 to EVERYONE.
I Had My Ten Testimonials Within 48 Hours!
It's tougher to get ten people to do work, even if it's 30 seconds of work (writing a testimonial), than it is to get them to pay you money.
I brought in ten sales of Action PopUp no sweat, just by mentioning it in a blog post. I wanted reviews, not sales.
The only thing I needed to do was: end my blog post with a clear call-to-action (what action I wanted you to take), and my goal (what had to happen for the challenge to end).
It's Not Difficult, But So Many People Miss That Point
You have a blog with zero comments on every entry, end the blog post with a reason you want people to leave a comment. End with a question. Give people benefits about why they should leave a comment... what's in it for them?
Use your blog to build a list and send those people to new posts when you write them.
I'll see marketers add a FeedBurner chicklet to their blog, so they've built up their RSS subscribers... but they can't e-mail them... gross! The only contact they have with these people is when they add to the blog.
Now you can't tell your readers... check out this post one last time if you haven't left a comment yet.
You can't follow-up and market to RSS subscribers the way you would to an e-mail list.
To be honest, if I didn't get my 10 testimonials by today, I would have asked my list again... I would have hit the weekday crowd instead of the weekend crowd. I would have put up a talking head video begging someone... anyone... to leave me a review.
With every blog post you should be "selling" some action that benefits you at the end. Leave a comment under the blog entry, or visit the URL I'm talking about. One of those two.
If You Don't Think You Can Get Ten Testimonials...
Try a "five testimonial" rule. You only need five testimonials to release the next chapter, update the next version, launch the next product... whatever the goal is.
Have a clear call-to-action... don't say, "Testimonial please." Say, "What was the one thing you liked the most about it? On what URL did you set it up? What was the one stumbling block that ALMOST didn't get you to buy and how did you overcome it?"
Interview your customers one on one via e-mail and use their responses to piece together a testimonial. After I got my 10 testimonials I went back through all my e-mails, blog comments, and forum posts and pieced together an additional 7 testimonials for a total of 17 testimonials on that page.
Oh yeah, I released Action PopUp 2.0 to all version 1.0 buyers so you can add popups to WordPress blogs with just a few clicks... thanks for the testimonials I needed. Even Michel Fortin posted that blog entry to Twitter.
Was that ten testimonial rule a waste of time? No one needs a call-to-action at the end of every blog post, right? I bet your blog is chock full of zero-comment entries with no call-to-action in sight... am I totally right or am I just a jerk?
Please, answer me below because if I don't get ten comments under this entry... I'm moving this whole site into a paid blog. 😉
Is Your Photo on Every Sales Letter?
Earlier this week I realized I had been doing something very stupid... leaving my photo OFF of my sales letter!
Seriously, you already go to the trouble of adding your photo to Facebook and MySpace...
Why Aren't You Doing the Same Thing on Your Sales Letter?
I noticed this when I attended my first internet marketing luncheon. It was just a warrior lunchtime get together in New Jersey (I flew down from California to New York City for the weekend just to attend).
Immediately I recognized Mike Ambrosio and said hello to him... because his photo is on all of his sales letters! I also recognized Mike Merz, and of course when Mike Filsaime showed up, he was surrounded by so many groupies, no one could go talk to him. (So many Mikes.)
So... I knew who three people were, but the other 50-ish people were total strangers.
At the Warrior Event in Austin this April: I recognized Willie Crawford (his picture is EVERYWHERE) and Dr. Ron Capps the NicheProf, Marlon Sanders and Jason Fladlien... but again, that was about it!
Even some of the speakers were people I'd heard of... I'd read their sites, responded to them in forums, but didn't recognize them.
For that reason, I went through all of my sales letters this week and added my kisser to them.
On some sales letters I was able to do an "align=right" and place it to the right of the text, but sometimes I just gave up, centered that image, and placed it below my signature line at the bottom of the page.
Can You Please Do the Same on Your Sales Letter?
I'm not saying adding your photo will get you recognized instantly at real-world seminars. At the very least it will remind your potential customers reading that sales letter, that you're a real person.
You don't have to be wearing a suit or a hawaiian shirt... any picture will do.
- If it's a family photo, crop the image so it only shows you -- that way your kids aren't appearing on your sales letter.
- If you look like crap, crop the image even more so it only shows your head.
- If you think you're ugly, resize the photo of you down to 100x100 pixels.
- If you don't even have a digital camera, find a friend with a camera phone.
You have every reason to post your photo on a sales letter. Stop procrastinating and just do it.
Please comment below and tell me when you finally realized you needed to have your photo on your sales letters.
If you don't have your photo on there yet, add your photo to your sales page and post the URL here for all of us to look at.
Fast Food Copywriting
Late last night I launched a special report called Fast Food Copywriting.
That product is something that started out as a blog COMMENT just a few days ago. I didn't even mean for it to be a complete blog post.
One of our discussions meandered into copywriting, and I typed up a quick response to quickly go over my personal formula for writing quick sales copy that's good enough to get the job done. Nothing fancy.
After the blog comment ended up being a couple of pages, I said to myself: "I'll just make this a blog post." I saved it to my drafts.
I came back to the draft later and edited it some more. Even when I said what I wanted to say with as few words as possible, it ended up being several pages long.
I moved it to a Word document, made the page margins as thin as I could and the font size as small (but still readable) as I could... and I thought, heck, maybe I should sell this thing as its own report.
The offer has been live for about 9 hours and sold 50 copies -- about 750 bucks. Not bad for a few hours of "smart" (not hard) work.
Update: After 48 hours I now have 104 sales
which comes to around $1400 after fees.
What does this tell me about infoproduct creation?
- The best products I have ever made were answers (solutions) to real live questions (problems). This does like a "duh" point but I know that the very best books and reports I made started out as replies on forums or blog posts... then got carried away... then I said, it would be criminal for this info to get buried in a forum after a couple of days.
- Keep your "sexy" information private and your boring information public. Perfect example: I gave away some WordPress SEO advice yesterday but saved the copywriting info for a paid report. Setting up blogs and sites are fun, but people get more excited about things that are going to make them money NOW and improve THEIR lives.
- Have a backend. I have always been kind of a crappy marketer when it came to marketing my e-books... but not in 2008! I made sure to plug-in an affiliate program just before launching. I embedded the affiliate code in the e-book so that the call-to-action at the end is for the reader to promote the book as an affiliate.
Since Fast Food Copywriting is my only copywriting product, I don't have any upsells to push into so we'll see how the perpetual affiliate program idea works out.
Speaking of upsells, I have been working on my product funnel and tweaked the sales letters for Black Hat PHP, Lightning PHP, Impact PHP and Push Button PHP so that they all on their own upsell to PHP in a Box, a package containing all those products in one. It's a pretty sweet setup.
Income so far for this month: From my PayPal daily sales report anyway... $9,807.46 $10,377.58 with 547 585 sales. After fees that's $9,300 $9,700. (I find it funny that the money I pay in PayPal fees is approaching the amount I pay for rent.)
Add Clickbank and day job income and I've broken $12,000 $12,500 for this month.
I have 8 Warrior Special Offers running at the moment.
If you want to get your hands on the special report and find out the step-by-step method I use to become a copywriting machine and pump out these cash-sucking sales letters... check out Fast Food Copywriting.
In the meantime, could you do me a favor and comment on this entry and tell me:
Are you giving away the farm by dishing out too much free information, or are you saving "the good stuff" for paying customers?
Have you ever written a forum reply, blog post, or free report and said to yourself... "I should charge for this!" Please, tell me the story of how it came to be and share the URL where the product is selling now.
