# Copywriting that Converts: How to Sell Without Selling Your Soul – Joanna Wiebe – MicroConf 2013

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hytwh-vFjpY
Duration: 50 min
Language: English
Words: 10356
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Hytwh-vFjpY

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[0:00] [Music]

[0:07] [Music] I'm gonna open up with two quotes but boats are kind of boring but the two pieces of information that come from pretty good sources so we want to talk about them so I know we're all Micra preneur e's and we're not necessarily looking into like growing a lot but we still don't want our businesses to close down necessarily and I think a lot of us do want our businesses to grow of course what we learn a lot is that of course businesses fail one of the key reasons is because of lack of sales I don't think that will surprise anybody here that selling is one of the biggest

[0:44] problems once you've built your product how do you get people to actually buy it and why is it hard to sell it and why are we maybe making it hard to sell our own awesome products then you look at other people and real people out there who are trying to build and market their own products and there tends to be this kind of mentality right that when you're selling it's evil you know there's this blood sucking salesman how do I write copy I get this question lot then W is I don't know who that actually is but I did a webinar for Unbounce recently we took a lot of questions from

[1:18] people lots of people registered for it was awesome but this question kept coming up not obviously always with blood sucking is the term but people don't want to be a Salesman they want to build an awesome product and they want it to be in a lot of people's hands and they want a lot of installs and you know everybody's really excited about it and then they get acquired or something like that and but there's all this like stuff in between like how do you actually get your product in people's hands sure it's awesome but how do you actually get it there without becoming a blood sucking

[1:47] salesman as if the only way to sell is to be a blood sucking salesman when I don't know that it has to be true so today we're going to talk about copywriting that's what I do but how to sell on your website without selling your soul kind of a big deal and of something that we want to always avoid and I myself with copy hackers I have my own business I help businesses but and that's what we do at copy hackers but also trying to grow my business and run my business at copy hackers and so I run up against this problem all the time how

[2:19] do I sell my ebooks how do I move my courses without feeling like I'm also you know a blood sucking salesman right I don't want to be that nobody wants to feel that way we want to make the money that comes out of it thank goodness for that but do we have to like do ugly things to sell do we have to go to bad places in order to move products and I'm here to say that that's not actually something that you should have to do we've managed to do a pretty good job at copy hackers I think a lot of people hopefully have encountered copy hackers in some way

[2:50] whether you've heard about it mixergy we've done lots of interviews or you've read the books or something like that it's important to us to keep growing our business by selling - and we've we've come across a lot of cool tactics to do that where we've helped clients and we've helped ourselves with these tactics in order we're gonna talk about them today I just want it to be clear why I'm like the right person to talk about this today like why should you even listen to me and we do copywriting ebooks when it comes down to it and that might sound like not that much but in

[3:21] sound like not that much it's also something you really have to work you have to be doing something right to get people to buy your ebooks when everybody else around you is giving the stuff away for free some of the stuff like it's not the same stuff they're given away but but people are doing this right and you have to be able to move your product and actually get credit cards to hand it over to your the credit card numbers hand it over to I'm the right person to help you understand that today because this is all that we do at copy hackers and then we live it in growing the copy

[3:50] hackers business is what Lance has also here from copy hackers - and this is all that we do so hopefully hopefully by the end of this I don't expect that anybody's going to walk out of here today and say Joanna sold me on the idea of being a Salesman that was awesome because we've all built up this idea a lot of us have there may be some maybe I should ask right now are there some people out there who are like gung-ho salespeople you're one yes of course you are a couple of them right a very very small percentage at the back very cool but the rest does anybody else you know

[4:21] kind of fit in with what he was saying about this idea of being a blood sucking salesman or way off nobody feels salesmen are skeezy nobody feels that was a couple haha well there's a sales conference going on here right now to actually so we get this idea though that selling is all these ugly things right it's it's it's something that I think part of the problem is there's a few problems obviously and we're not going to we're just gonna scratch the surface but but one of the things is that you don't have to I think we can come at it from a position of kind of snobbery right we

[4:53] can look at sales people and say they come they don't have you don't have to have an education you don't have to go to a fancy college to be a salesperson there's nothing fancy about it and in fact a lot of the most popular salespeople that we know in the world are not you know the Dale Carnegie's of time is passed but more of these like skeezy kind of no offense Frank Kern types where I don't know if anybody's familiar with freeing Kermit if you are that may be a reason that you don't believe in selling you don't have to have an education your mom didn't want

[5:21] you to grow up and become a salesperson you don't go around bragging about oh I sold all these you might break vote your bank account but not about the work that went into actually selling right going through you we think it's disgraceful we think it's like for losers one of the biggest things that startups seem to think is that if you have an awesome product it sells itself right and we hear that again and again you'll sell itself it should sell itself people should start talking about it but but we have to connect so many dots in there for people it's not just here's product here's user done right there's all of

[5:55] these points that come in there even just to get people to know about it that's one part of selling but I'm not going to talk about that part of selling which is really the marketing side of it we're gonna talk about how to break through this idea of selling as the skeezy scam a spammy terrible ugly dirty thing and turn it into something where we can actually come around hopefully to the idea of trying a few of the tactics I'm going to show you today tactics that we use with our clients that copy hackers that we've used with other clients in the past with Intuit with

[6:23] conversion rate experts with British Telecom AVG all of these big groups that we've used to help them increase their conversion rate that's what we're talking about here but I want to talk a little bit before we get into those tactics about some sales strategies and why we might think kind of ugly and why we turn away from selling a lot of the time that's something like this right this tactic is an evil you know drug dealer this the first one's always free right this is how people bad people get you into their products into their product being drugs and this is this bad case we don't want

[6:57] to drug dealers the more people you get to join the more you'll earn it's a pyramid scheme right we're all very grossed out by those very ugly salespeople we don't ever want to be anything like the drug dealer we don't want to be anybody in the pyramid scheme we don't want to be a tobacco person someone who's trying to sell cigarettes with this idea of hooking them young and we let that negative stuff get in our head I think so much even if we're not consciously thinking it we're not sitting down saying oh I really have to try hard not to go with the hook young

[7:24] tactic but we're just busy thinking like I don't want to be I'd rather risk having no conversions on my site than risk coming off as a scuzzy salesperson but of course I'm sure everybody already picked up on this as I was going through those these are the exact same strategies that people are using to market and sell their products constantly right big big brands are going after the idea of hooking people young obviously some of them we may not all be huge fans uh but Disney McDonald's are making a pretty good job out of cooking them young the whole idea of a Ivy League education is something

[7:59] that's sold to us right sold to us when we're young by our parents and by other people who have gone through that right we're constantly being sold things we're constantly buying things we just act like it's ugly even though we're always in the middle of it who isn't in this room guilty of the first one's always free right of the free trial just get them in the door get them hooked and then we can try to do something to like get more money out of them later it's not a bad strategy it's not a bad thing the more you people you get to join the more you learn and we've got like drew

[8:35] Dropbox and Groupon as examples here right and the list goes on right well beyond this almost every deal site out there and then some is doing this so so what can we take away from the fact that there's these ugly people using the exact same tactics that not ugly people are using to sell their product it really comes down to the fact that I really this is this talk isn't going to convince you of this but hopefully it'll plant the seed in you and it comes time for you to write your own copy or to to write your own emails that are selling that selling itself isn't evil right the things the

[9:09] act of selling is an evil taking money from people isn't evil it's not dirty we may think it is but it's not and we have to put ourselves out there and get past that idea and do the uncomfortable act of selling so it comes down to selling not being evil but rather the thing that you're selling and how you're selling it is the part that's evil so as long as you're not selling drugs I don't know what everybody in this room is doing but as long as you're not going there you should be in like a pretty good position and we can talk a bit about how you can

[9:41] go about selling your product now we're gonna talk about some kind of higher level strategies things that you should be doing and then get down into the copywriting of it when you're putting your words down on the page what words should you be trying to use more often than not to make that happen so we're gonna talk about the how now I wanna before I get into those exact strategies and tactics and everything that comes with it a lot of times when I'm giving presentations or webinars whatever it might be people want to know well just tell me about the test results just tell me about the thing that you did that got

[10:19] that big lip so that I can go do it on my site all the time all the time and I'm going into this presentation knowing that I'm talking people who are like focused on data and numbers on this kind of stuff and I can't just come up here and say like hey guys do this because I said too but I have to like help you understand that it's been proven before but copy hackers we just don't there's a position you take when you're in testing and we do a lot of testing at copy hackers that's where but the focus of what we do wants to got the copy written

[10:49] now let's go test it um I would we would never be someone to say here's a test we ran on this site now you should go take what we did and apply it here so we're not going to come at this presentation that way today I'm showing you now is that we do run lots of tests with lots of different people where we get big winners and although you can't necessarily apply exactly what they've done to your own site because you have your own product you have your own market you have all the different situations that are going everything that's happening in your world is probably different from what's

[11:21] happening for app design vault where we got a 51% pay lift off their homepage or where we Beach way we got micro conversion increase at four hundred fifty three percent you're very different I'm sure that a rehab center so you don't want to see the exact thing where we did this we got that but I want you to know that this everything you're about to hear is based on something real on real tests that have been done over the decade that Rob was talking about over all this time that we're still doing we're running a big actually huge test right now it's happening as we speak and so all of this feeds into the

[11:55] things that we're going to talk about when it comes to selling now it doesn't have to be crazy there's no big massive like toolbox of things that you have to be doing you have to do all of it in fact if there were that would be really overwhelming and we still wouldn't do it anyway but there are some obvious things that you can start with home just go get a little water okay let's talk through them one at a time first one is a big one and we were talking a bit about this last night if you were at that session last night the idea of giving your product away leading

[12:32] with free stop leading with free if this is all if you want to sell if you want your business to be around and be bigger next year then you should probably be doing these things if you want to sell stop leading with free stop leading with free that's what we did on the app design vault I just showed that on the last screen we took off he was leading with free I'd know if every smellier with app design vault but we took off he was leading with free everywhere we took it down really subordinated it and of course we got more paid conversions no big surprise there because we were

[13:03] leading with paid and he didn't see any negative impact on you know signups for his newsletter and things like that he still got a lot of people in and they were paying with paying him because he wasn't asking them not to pay him when people want something free if you have something free on your site they will look for it they will go over hot coals to find it you don't have to worry about them not being able to find it they'll get it so you don't have to lead with it what you do have to do is have the guts the belief in your own product to say

[13:34] we're going to sell this thing just like Jason was saying right we're going to sell this and we're going to charge twice as much as we think we would pay for it we're gonna put it out there we're gonna try to make some money off it and get some installs today we're not gonna lead with free we're gonna lead with a paid product email like a growth hacker who who is actively emailing by actively I mean like you're going out and you're sending regular emails where you're trying to sell things to people still a good no it's a pretty good number that's actually pretty awesome probably because Patrick Patrick's been

[14:08] putting it down everybody's throat right but it's very true email not like someone who's just experimenting with emailing or who just wants to make friends emailing but you know like someone who wants to grow their business because hopefully you want to grow your business for all the good reasons I come with growing your business and now when we're talking about emailing there's two two parts that right we have follow-up emails or transactional emails that we have our customers people who actually buy our products to download them and then this is other side of emailing where you're collecting email addresses from leads so we are a lot of people doing

[14:43] that collecting email addresses for leads yeah and then following up with those people as well so if you're not doing that if you're not collecting those email addresses and I strongly recommend that you do that so we grow our business at copy hackers the other people absolutely we do - we do follow-up emails with those people who have already purchased from us and we try to in a lot of cases aggressively sell in those and I know that the very idea of aggressively selling can be like a major it's a scary right and people don't do it for all the reasons we listed before you don't want to feel

[15:16] skeezy scammy all that kind of stuff but when we aggressively sell we find that one sure we get a decent number of unsubscribes which is perfectly fine because they're not willing to buy from us anyway so please if you don't want to buy my stuff you're welcome to leave that's absolutely fine if I can't convince you please leave my list unsubscribes are good and we rarely think about that when we're talking about email marketing about you know trying to get people who don't want to buy it off your list they don't belong on your list anyway because you're just going to be working hard to keep them

[15:48] happy by giving them all your stuff again for free you're not in business to do nothing and to make no money so we want to aggressively sell in our emails which means setting up these drip campaigns and life cycle emails and really aggressively promoting our products in them to new people this is if you want to sell then driving those emails to long-form sales pages who's familiar with what along from sales pages who likes long-form sales pages the lace landing on them like no but okay a handful just probably for the purposes of like trying to like dissect what they're doing nobody really likes long-form sales pages when you're the

[16:28] customer landing on it when you're the business and I'm gonna go further with that because you might say well do oh no then if my customers don't like why would I do it well from the business perspective again and again and again we see them convert like crazy and for those who are using long-form sales pages I assume you're not using them because you think they're really pretty or you think people are gonna really like them you're using them because they work really well at converting people so using those long-form sales pages and by the way if customers didn't like them we wouldn't see people buying from them so it's

[17:02] really kind of unfortunate when business owners or startups go at a sales page at the idea of a sales page and act like I'm not going to do this because I would never buy from a page like this and that's obviously you're not your own customer you may fit in to the same demographics you may have a same segment as your target customer but we all know we're not our own customer so kind of projecting and limiting your sales based on what you may or may not like as an individual person isn't what a growth hacker would do and probably not what you should do if you're trying to

[17:33] increase your sales using long-form sales pages the best way to use them if you're seeing them not working for you the best way to use them is from email so if you already have that list of people who are using or who've signed up to hear from you you're dripping content out to them they like your content hopefully then you're ready for a sell and you drive those people to long-form sales pages that's where they work the best sometimes for PPC like really long tail keywords they can work pretty well but that's tricky that's just like a side note if using it you have a question

[18:08] sure I should have had an example but they're so big that you were like any like JPEG that I would take it would just look like a little column down the middle of the page um long-form sales pages are those really long are you one room eats Teddy's list know that LT doesn't know or meets Eddie um everybody else who is it was very familiar than with long-form sales pages the really long pages write short copy is short short copy you can go on the page you can arrive on a website most of our websites today most of the websites that people land on for us are short copy

[18:43] where I can go there I see a headline there might be an explainer video little buttons and testimonials a couple of things they try to drive me I can look anywhere I want to on the page and I can click wherever I want to a long-form sales page is a sales page it's designed to sell not to let people do whatever they feel like doing today they come to your page and it looks like page there's an outline the text lines goes across it's built on this whole idea of them or on the tradition of direct response letters these letters that used to work really well before they actually still

[19:15] do work and a lot of big companies like Intuit I mentioned still use them to move units so but they really are just they generally tell a story or they educate you in some way to pull you in to the page and then once they've got you in there it's not a bait-and-switch or anything like that but once they've got you interested in their content then you can come through and start selling and they work really well in comparison to short copy largely because they don't talk about your product or your solution for the first you know half of it the first half of it is all about talking

[19:48] about what the prospect wants to hear about what they're going through what their pains are reading a story reading a special report reading something that's interesting and isn't just trying to sell them so compare that kind of page to a short copy page or these little websites where the home page you go to it and it has a button like above the fold and marketers keep telling us unfortunately even as we tried them to get them not to that you should put your button above the fold you're asking people on a short copy page to be ready to buy really quickly or be ready to do

[20:19] something you want them to do really quickly on a long-form sales page the lot of their power is that they just let you keep reading and going through it yes people read and go through the page until you sell them on clicking something and then and only then are you asked to interact with the the long-form sales page versus a shortage I hope that gives a little bit of an overview of it they're very very very good to test with and then testing to increase conversion is the next one we talked a lot about testing and Lance a copy hackers is very big on testings been doing it for a very

[20:53] long time Lance tests to learn a lot and I think that's hugely important then he's young and I'm the gang because I like to test to see more money come in I like to test I don't like to see button color tests not the last days either but if you're testing something you should be testing things on your page that are more likely to actually increase your conversion like for real like not letting yourself get off the hook with just testing a button color because you saw that it works over on which test one or something but actually testing things that are real that your visitors are

[21:23] actually interested in and that of course takes knowing but but testing towards the goal of actually making more money if you want to sell it your stuff and finally this idea of not looking at marketing is an experiment and I unfortunately hear this a lot from startups and we work with a lot of startups and I have a lot of people writing to me which is awesome but but I hear these I hear about these bad habits that people have are these ideas that you have that marketing well we'll just see we'll just try this and see what happens right but you're actually putting a lot of resources in a

[21:54] lot of cases into trying marketing and not really aggressively trying to get something out of your efforts you're just like oh we'll do an email campaign and see what happens instead of like saying well we want to sell with this email campaign how can we get from the point of having these email addresses here these people that we can talk to to the point of having a good number of them a very large number of them sign up for a product we're willing to lose some of them along the way too because we might get a little aggressive here but that's stop that's where you don't look at market news experiment but

[22:26] as a way to get towards the sale now those are like five quick things and they're obvious and they're kind of level whatever things we can talk more about the Kuna if you want to I'm not saying you have to do all five of them you can't do all five of them you can't if I if you walked out if you're doing all five of them you wouldn't do it it's too much work do one thing one of these things only only one of these things for the next six months and do it until you're bored of it do it till you're sick of it do it till you can't believe

[22:54] that people haven't picked up on the fact that all you do is drive emails to long-form sales pages you're still going to do your other tactics of course but if you want to start increasing your sales soon you have to do something in most cases you'll probably have to do something different from what you're doing today and these aren't gonna be small passive changes there are other things you can do like great things like redesigning your pricing table and things like that but that's one aggressive selling that's just working to help people make decisions faster we're talking about going for the sale and getting to that point of actually

[23:27] making some more money and that is simply just making one of these things your thing like you're the guy who always does X make that your thing for six months see if it works so I recommendation now let's get into the actual things that I like get lots of questions about all the time the actual ways when you're sitting down and you're ready to write your page you have your page maybe have your site in front of you right now or you're working on it are you thinking about writing it what do you like do like how do you how do you actually like write to get the sale

[24:01] because it's not just here's the sale there are the sales here coming the sales we have to actually go through some certain tactics in order to get more people to buy our stuff those copywriting things actual things you can do and again I'm never gonna give you a script of always do this because this always works cuz I just don't believe that those exist I've been doing a long time and I do not believe those exist but there are certain things that you can do all over your site all over your pages to help get more people to do what you want them to do big one big obvious

[24:33] tactic on your site right now I'm willing to bet if you have a site right now the word we is present in at least one place I would say probably in lots of places this is pretty obvious but the word you is far more power full two-year visitors than the word we they don't care about you they care about themselves and that's like straight from sure everybody's taking the appszoom Oh copywriting course and it's one that Neville says they're a lot right people don't care about you they only care about themselves and that's that's the basis of how we go about creating marketing messages or sales

[25:07] messages so what I recommend you do if you have a website right now is you go through your site and make this an exercise look at all instances where you say we I our mine or your brand name in there like 37signals blank that kind of thing go through that and just strike them that's that's part one of this exercise you're not allowed to use the word we' anywhere on your site it's done it's gone forget about the word it's done you have to then so if you go through and strike that a really powerful thing and this is what Apple does actually they go back and I don't

[25:41] know if this is exact process don't get me wrong there but they could take instead of just saying something like choose the best project management software out there it's you should choose the best project management software out there and we've seen this working like little tweets and stuff like you should follow me because that was like some big win or that was talked about a while ago but the core the essence of that is instead of just saying passively oh twos and feels like a call to action tasks that you should choose put you should in front of it you may think that's silly you may think I'm

[26:10] the exception to the rule Joanna that will work for me but you can test it and see so test adding in the word you in your most important messages including your headline things like that the only case where this may not be the best thing to do could be in your call to action coffee like your button copy where you might instead of saying like you you'd put that in your in the first person you could test this to and say something like give me my download or get me or get this for me or whatever it is but if you're going to don't necessarily use you and your

[26:42] call-to-action that's one case where you could put it in the first person for them but that's just kind of a side note other than that one don't have the word we on there to replace or pop in the word you wherever you can the even if Clause does anybody familiar with the e and if claws and even no probably not okay because it's like a copyrighted thing um so even if is where you want to when you're writing a headline sorry when you're writing a headline or something that you're trying to get someone's attention with and of course if you're familiar with many copywriting strategies one of the big ones is Aida

[27:16] right you follow this process where the first thing you're trying to do is get people's attention now this is a good tool a good tactic when you're writing your headlines so the idea here is to put together two things that people wouldn't really believe are you you know something about your visitor and anxiety they have about themselves and their capacity to do what they could do with your product so in the case of copy hackers we could say learn to write high converting coffee even if you can barely spell your name right even if you hate marketing those kinds of things that small clause is interesting enough to a

[27:53] lot of people to get their attention and keep them reading this is an example right right high converting copy in two minutes or less we just said that second one gets your iPhone screen fixed today even if it's smashed to smithereens right it's a formula it might seem silly but trust me it's probably better than a lot of the headlines that you're already seeing out there or using and it's going to captivate people in a way that you know when we say get their attention you don't really often know how to get someone's attention with the headline this is a way to get their attention with a headline and get them to read the

[28:28] next line of copy which leads us closer to this create a gap of curiosity so that's another tactic to get people really it's close to the even if thing it's it's a point where I mean people are intrigued by not knowing the whole story yet which is why we have novels that go with the full length and people read all of them because they don't know the whole story yet and they want to get to the end it's built into us it's built into us thanks to storytelling that brought us to the point where we are today we are interested in completing thoughts or in figuring out the

[29:00] challenge so if you introduce something that feels a little strange people are kind of interesting where you're not putting all the pieces together for them right away you can do a lot more with your copy than if you weren't to use this tactic so an example is if you've landed on a headline on a page and the headline was this it's possible that you'd want to read on to hear more about that because it doesn't quite fit with you right you're a little curious your wife is more in love with your business than with you some people might be offended by it it's true some people

[29:35] might not want to hear that but the point is to get them to read more on your page you don't to give away everything in the headline you just have to pull them in with your headline another thing there's only one thing you need to do to double your business now if you landed on a credible looking site not a scammy looking site a credible looking site they're selling some software you know about and it says there's only one thing you need to do to double your business you'd be likely as a human being who likes to have information pulled together for them and have the whole

[30:04] story come together to keep reading on this page and that's part of your job if you're trying to get people interested in buying stuff from you is to get them deeper in your page so you can actually stand a chance to sell into them also for subject lines for your emails this is a really great way to get opens it's not vague it's just the beginning of what could be an interesting email campaign the world is against you is another strategy that you can take it's where you don't actually use the phrase world's against you but people are have this belief that that life would be

[30:40] better if only that thing didn't happen to me I'd be further ahead in my life if only that had happened where there are forces acting against us and sitting here as rational people we don't like to admit that or believe that but when we're trying to sell something to people tapping into this concern that they have that they're alone in the world and if they hadn't bought that house in 2007 just before because they were pressured by everybody to buy houses because the housing market was so awesome if they hadn't done that today they'd have all the cash they need to grow their thriving business this this the sense

[31:12] that the world is against you is pretty powerful you don't use this phrase necessarily on the screen the world is against you but have that in your head you're writing a page or an email especially an email and you can go a long way with it right so you could say something like hey you can't be expected to grow sales every month I mean not with so many hats to wear right and people would be like yeah that's true I'm kind of a victim of my certain sizes and they don't like to think it was always victims but I do have a lot to do I do have a lot I can't be expected to

[31:44] grow that quickly that would resonate with some people as long as you know about your audience you can choose the right message to tailor for them but it's really tapping into this idea that yeah that the world is against you and here's the solution that's here to help you and you're aligning yourself with the solution and aligning both of you against the world great word pictures is one more that's just a matter of simply instead of using like boring words when you're phrasing something especially in copy the stickiest messages are words are comprised of words that are raw and interesting and create word pictures that put something in her head that's

[32:24] where analogies can go a long way rather than just saying something kind of boring where it's easy to overlook so these two side by side we might be more likely to write on a homepage headline find out how to speak to your website's visitors if your tool was about helping people communicate better with their visitors but the thing that might create a better word picture that we could all be pretty skeptical about because it might sound kind of but decode the secret language of your website's visitors actually put something in their heads right decoding a secret language is very different than finding out how to speak I don't even know what that

[33:01] looks like what is finding out how to speak it actually feels like kind of like painful work versus decoding the secret language could be a cool little challenge right and it could be fun to do if we're a group of people who like decoding it plus we can we know what decoding looks like we know what secrets are versus this kind of vague idea of finding out how to do something which is kind of boring be 3d and this is never mind you won't get the reference maybe you I don't know but it's kind of stupid but being 3d is all about asking the same positioning the same

[33:36] message exactly the exact same message in three different ways close to each other this is to help people kind of build up that momentum of yes you may have heard a lot about momentum of yes where people you want people to agree with you when they're reading your coffee being 3d is about saying the same thing those three ways and getting them to agree with you all the way all all the way through it so does the stress of your student loan wake you at night does your student loan stress give you deep intense headaches is your student alone one of the biggest worries in your life

[34:07] those things are all saying exactly the same thing there's nothing different outside of the way that we're messing it and the potential pain that could come out of it but they're all talking about do you have student loan stress and what's it doing to you it's really what it comes down to but by phrasing it those ways you're really drawing people in to what you're trying to tell them instead of just finishing it one way this rule of 3d or being 3d can go a really long way when you're repositioning your offer when you're asking questions position it three different ways all in close proximity and you're more likely we've seen at

[34:40] least especially on long-form sales pages to do really good things with your conversion rate so that's really what it comes down to for your tactics now the various ways that you can use these rows kind of talking about them during it during the previous discussion but ways to use it all right so if you're going to talk about this gap of curiosity you could use that in a headline for a blog post you could go use that in your next headline for your next blog post and be done with it right use and see how it works out for you the even if Clause can go a long way around a button so if you

[35:13] have like a get started now button you may want to put some introductory text around it just above the button to drive home at that point right about you know this strangeness and pulling those two ideas together could be a good place to use even if the body copy your body copy on your page definitely should be replacing all Wiis with you headline same thing right this this being 3d idea you could do it really well in the headline word pictures work well in sub heads and the world is against you it's not your fault could also work really well in a headline so those are some ways you

[35:48] could go out today and use everything that we talked about in this presentation for that now a final one that is different from copywriting but is a great way to sell and we know this from copy hackers we've sold a lot of books thankfully with a lot of help from a lot of great people but this goes one of the best definitely the best things that we've ever done has been when we first when we first started copy hackers we wrote this big book I wrote this really really big 250 page book and I sent it out to some beta readers and Jason and Justin I don't know where you

[36:25] are in here but it back there right I send it out to them and they're like I would never read this much there's so much in this book it was really really big to 150 pages it's an e-book you're expected to read it on a screen or print it out and they just said like it's good stuff but I would never read it so we broke it up into the four ebooks that are now like the foundation of copy hackers today just good and then of course we still wanted them to work together as four books that you read together because they were meant to be

[36:54] that and we bundled it and was no question and I'm sure maybe if you have any products you can bundle go and bundle them because it's hands down no questions asked it sells like crazy on our site and of course on appSumo no things like that the idea that you could I mean just in contrast to seeing four individual pieces versus one big bundle people are very very likely obviously to go for that one big value bundle you don't call it a value bundle but the idea of getting lots of things for one price in one small package has gone a long way for us so it could be an

[37:27] opportunity for you and further to the note about like about writing an e-book and started that we have an information product business and that's what we do I reason we keep doing copy hackers and not just I've been a side from the obvious reasons that we really love doing it and people are thankfully pretty receptive to it information products if you're trying to start a software solution or you're already a consultant and you want to get out of Saltine which I know like everybody that is based on everyone we've talked to so far if you're already consulting putting down what you know in on the page and

[38:05] selling it as an e-book again not giving it away for free people will devalue it if you give it away for free but putting it down and making it into an information product we've done this with copy Agra's and we're able to use what we're doing with selling the book to help fund and finance our our software that we're working on actually right now so as a side note if you guys do have something that you can sell I would strongly recommend this separate talk unto itself but I would strongly recommend they view it a way to sell what you know to help finance getting you out of the consulting world and

[38:37] hopefully all of this will bring you to a point of understanding that selling isn't evil it's not ugly in fact one of our friends that send with us recently said this to me and I thought it was shocking enough to have to share that selling is is really fun and it can be when you start to see the results in your bank account in particular so that's it thanks guys so one of the things that I struggle with in when I'm sending emails is that yeah I really want people to click you come through and so what I end up doing a lot is trying to send them to really

[39:15] good content but I'm not can you give me an example of how you're sending people to a long-form sales page in an agreeable way from an email well agreeable is always the challenge right yeah I think I think I'm kidding but I think it's really true agreeable is a bit of the challenge you can if you're writing long-form if you're writing emails that are designed to sell you shouldn't be starting with the idea of selling we know that's the end goal that's the link at the bottom of the email we've got all this space to get there so if you start with the idea of telling them a story giving them

[39:50] valuable information a personal story and doesn't it be so personal right you know what I mean but a story that they would care about doing that in the email sending those kinds of emails where you tell people about depending on who your audience is so who's your audience like who would you say is your audience what type of people I've got a lot of like real estate investors and other service providers real estate space yeah right so if you're talking a bit about those things that matter to them or if you're leading into an interview at some point that you're going to sell whatever might be

[40:18] but you start almost always with telling a story that reveals something that's really interesting to them maybe you're really transparent with your data or something like that but getting to the point of actually getting them to click really means pulling them in with your copy so you have to be willing to write and believe that people are going to read it not write endlessly but write things that are interesting to people and then get to the point obviously where you're trying to tie it in and and and asking them to go to the sales page know where they're going and then write the call-to-action to get them there and

[40:51] that's simplifying it right but but to do it in an agreeable way if you want to if you're really scared of getting unsubscribes or something which is reasonable especially for people who work so hard at building a list it might just have a little list right now which is perfectly good there's a gentleman chris brogan who a lot of people are probably familiar with and he starts his sales emails out by saying this is gonna be pitchy right you're gonna get pitched in this one if you don't like it don't read this one today so that might be a way to get past that sense of not being very agreeable or

[41:24] likable when you're kind of when you know you're gonna try to sell them on something today it's a tactic right it's one thing you could try doing he does and it seems and he's really successful so he's probably doing it right I would say others don't do it others are okay with saying here it is this is my information that is really high value and you should be interested in buying this day here's why you should be interested and then going for the sale and if you get unsubscribes oh well right because you're probably going to get sales too and then you have to figure out what each subscriber you have

[41:53] is worth to you and if you can figure out what they're worth to you then you can say well we made $10,000 on an email today we lost 25 people but they were only worth three dollars each to us so we lost 75 bucks we've made $10,000 so it's kind of it's a good you know trade-off right it's good business that makes sense yeah yeah okay

[42:22] on the subject of the long-form sales pages you know it is very counterintuitive that those are to be more effective than the shorter forms and I can just imagine having this conversation with my partner I'm gonna say well we should go long form and I'll say why does guy hurt at this conference he says consider the source I said well I heard it from a copywriter and he'll he'll yeah question that so it is there places that we can look to kind of get feel more comfortable that that is indeed the case to kind of go against our intuition well I would say I start by testing it because it might not

[42:54] always be right for you I only have a hundred visitors a month or a thousand visitors a month so it's hard to test really anything yeah hack the test right like do it do it differently then don't do with Optimizely then right don't do it with a fancy testing tool but but do it with segmenting in you know if you're sending it through your email segment in MailChimp or whatever tool you're using and send one group to that one a one group to that one and see which one performs better it's not a clean scientific test but at least it's better than just saying well no one's can

[43:25] respond to that or everybody's gonna respond to that when you don't actually know does that that help does that even like go towards I was often attender yeah yeah it means you're not gonna get it yeah I would say I mean if you look at there's a space there's a happy space you can go to between the long-form sales page and your short page it's a hybrid sales page and we see a lot of those like 37signals did they're very big you know they talked to I think I assume left people read that post where they tested against their control short copy a hybrid sales page it was a

[44:07] nice-looking sales page that kind of that followed a lot of the rules of long forum but didn't didn't fall into that like really long form like they just they pulled back on things that a designer in particular might not like and and they've performed really well I think it was a thirty seven point five percent increase in signups on that one so you can look to those sorts of data sources or you can also just look to what people who are making are doing some people aren't transparent with the test that they're running but other ones if you can see that people that you like that you follow are using

[44:39] it and you know that they're smart and they're testing a lot again lycra meet Sethi and all these people in the information marketing space Marie Forleo Laura wrote her all these people are using long-form sales pages not because they're easy to write or because they're so lovely to look at they're using them because they work and so that should at least hopefully be enough to get your partner interested in the idea of the experiment of the long-form sales page or a hybrid version of it but we talked about this on copy hackers all the time on the blog so hopefully you can be directed to more resources there if you

[45:11] want to check that out ok cool I have a question about your 3d and the world is against you yeah you can combine these you can combine like crazy yep on the 3d one would you think it would be advisable I have a tagline on my sale site that says your business is mobile your software should be - ok do you advise me using that as the message in the 3d and just having that three times with some copy around it you know saying using this world is against you theme saying hey you're struggling with your scheduling well what do you think about using that is both because in your

[45:50] 3d use that you should have the same message but in three different ways yeah well that's the thing you just I mean people shy away from being repetitive as but you should go toward being repetitive because people might actually get what you're talking about by the third time you say it right so depends what your starter message is now you were talking about a tagline right I hope that's tagline all under my software I always sort of say you know your business is mobile because I have mobile clients yeah and your software should be - yeah so I was thinking about using that tagline it was head of lis

[46:22] and say in a long form yeah or or as part of this 3d concept but my question was you said that the message should be different or the same message in three different ways and I just repeating the same thing well yeah you'd want to rephrase it differently right so the point is to get to a place of driving home the message but doing it the challenge that I have with what you've said just there is that it's it's a little clever from for my taste like because you said it's a tagline or slogan right and it feels a little like like I shy sorry I shy away from

[46:55] copywriting that sounds like marketing that sounds like a copywriter wrote it and that sounds like a copywriter wrote it but if you were to say like what's the point right like what are you trying to say like what are you trying to say like if you what is little blinding your tagline is your business is mobile that's my clients of mobile yeah your software should be too your software should be too it's just a perfectly nice message and I think it's probably something that would be great it's a tagline right is something that you can build your business brand around right but I should put it in my copy then well

[47:25] I would put in raw form in the copy and this is I mean there's so much to the world of covering but but I pulled back from sounding smooth ok and make it kind of like get to your point like if you were just talking and talking and talking about your product if you kept going back to your business as mobile your software should be - I don't think you would right like what would you really say like what do people really say and that's where the best converting copy comes from so start by kind of pulling back getting to the raw point so it's a bad idea to do people always like

[47:58] will you pay to my stuff no I don't I just uh it's think it should be like a little bit more raw ok so it's more of a conversation then yeah something that like someone would actually say yeah if that helps I don't hate just alright last last question ok thanks the challenge we're facing is what about SEO I mean a great copy that converts yeah it's a good question it's not always but it often can be right so um so before I got into the conversion world back when I was still in like creative writer land as an agency writer we cared about SEO first and foremost right so I started

[48:42] out as someone who was focused on SEO writing and then moved into focusing a little more on conversion so everything that I do is still based on you should still have in your headline your keyword phrase right you should still be optimizing the copy that you have on the page doing what you can with it you know following those those basic rules as changing as they are but when it comes down to it for me I think there's lots of so me about but there are lots of ways to get traffic to your site good quality traffic to your site SEO is one of them it's not always that

[49:13] effective it's scary sometimes bla bla bla more important to me is once if you can solve that initial traffic problem and you can then get people to your site the people who come to your site all what I don't care what I what I worry about most is getting those people to feel really really really good about choosing you today feel like you get them all right so SEO for me takes a bit of a back burner it's not off it's not still on the stove but it's just on the back of it and I don't I don't look there first which a lot of SEO people might not like

[49:48] but I think they also get it at the same time right do your best that you can for SEO but not at the expense of and I've had I've worked with really smart SEO managers some of them have said at the expense of converting people that's let's use this try to get these keyword phrases and the best ones haven't said that because I think you can do you can do both in most cases I don't know if that's much of an answer but yeah SEO is still a consideration absolutely big consideration

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