Next Week Only – Free Live Training from John Carlton and Colin Chung

At Copy Chief Live 2017

You’ve heard of the legendary John Carlton, right?

One of Gary Halbert’s original “road dogs” who’s known as the “most ripped off copywriter” on the planet?

The brains behind the one legged golfer ad and “gun to the head” copywriting?

Of course you have.

So you’ll be interested to know that next week ONLY John’s offering training that normally costs $708 for absolutely FREE! Zilch. Nada. Cero.

The training will teach you 3 vitally important skills:

– How to Discover Your Unique “Copy DNA”… and never run out of ad ideas ever again…
– The Simple “Fill-in-the-Blank” Sentence… that turns your elevator pitch into instant sales!
– 3 Steps Every Close Needs… that turns almost any prospect into a customer-for-life…

>>>Find out more about this incredible free training

John will be presenting each lesson.

You’ll then get individual, personalized coaching from one of his most successful students of all time – Colin Chung.

Colin’s copy has generated over $25 million in financial newsletters, health supplements and business growth.

His clients include big hitters like Newsmax, Agora Financial, Weiss Research, Brian Tracy, Mike Koenigs, Integrative Nutrition, Dr. Al Sears, and more.

As a mentor, he charges $8,500 for training that’s taken multiple copywriters to the six figures per year level.

And he’s willing to give you his time and attention personnally for FREE!

Before I hit publish, I checked their info page and there’s still 21 spots left.

Unless you’ve booked a skiiing trip for next week and can’t cancel, I’d hot foot it over to the registration page to book your seat pronto before they’re all gone.

Nobody knows when John will make an offer like this again (if ever).

So if you’d love to get coaching from two truly A-List copywriters who’ve helped numerous fellow wordsmiths to boost their earnings to six figures and make millions for their clients in sales, reserve your place RIGHT NOW!

>>>Book your slot for FREE coaching from A-Listers John Carlton and Colin Chung

Earnings disclaimer – If you decide to signup for the full Simple Writing System Coaching Program yours truly will get commission.

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Onboarding Process for Copywriting Clients – Set the Ground Rules from Day One

When working with a new client it’s wise to set some ground rules.

Outlining how you work will establish yourself as the adult in the room. It will also avoid mission creep and “just touching base” emails gobbling up your time.

Clients like boundaries too.

If they’ve never worked with a copywriter before (or been burned too many times), they’ll eagerly grab your hand when you offer to guide them through the field of landmines they see stretched before them.

Here’s my process:

1. After I receive your email I’ll send you a questionnaire to identify the scope of the project and how I can help
2. I’ll conduct background research into your business based
3. We schedule a call to discuss your project
4. I’ll send you a proposal
5. If the proposal is accepted, I’ll email you an agreement to digitally sign
6. I’ll send you an invoice for the project
7. I’ll conduct market research into your product, competitors, customers and positioning
8. I’ll send you an outline for your project
9. Once approved, I’ll draft the copy
10. The copy is proofed
11. Copy is delivered
12. Based on your feedback, further editing is conducted to get a final version.
13. We publish the copy and track the results using analytics and heat maps
14. If conversions are below what we needed for the project to be profitable, I’ll work on changes to improve the conversion rate
15. Upon project completion I’ll send you a questionnaire for feedback

Feel free to copy this into your FAQ page or email it to a new client as part of your onboarding process.

Trust me. It will save you a lot of time and hassle down the road.

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Copy Chief Radio Appearance – The YouTube Remarketing Generator

How much are you paying for clicks these days? A dollar? Two dollars? Even higher?

How about your cost per lead? If you’re paying less than $3-5 you’re doing better than marketing heavyweights like Russel Brunson.

The fact is that millions of marketers have entered the marketplace over the last couple of years. And click costs are getting so high that you need a minimum order value of $100 just to break even, let alone make a profit.

Well, I’m here to change all that.

I developed a strategy I’ve called the “YouTube Remarketing Generator”.

It works like this:

1. A prospect Googles “how to solve X problem”
2. If they visit YouTube in the next 15 mins you show them a video related to X problem
3. If they watch for 30 seconds they go into a remarketing list
4. You can retarget them in Google Display for half the normal price

Using this strategy, I’m getting clicks from people trying to solve health problems for just £0.35 ($0.45). That’s half what you’d normally pay on both Google and Facebook.

Even better is that these are clicks from people ACTIVELY trying to solve a problem. They’re what Gary Halbert called “hungry buyers”. So you can expect to get higher conversions and profits from every click.

I break down the entire strategy on Copy Chief Radio with Kevin Rogers.

I’ve also written a report that explains how to implement my YouTube Remarketing Generator strategy step-by-step.

Joe Public has to hand over his email details to get a copy.

However, as you’re one of the savvy people who’s subscribed to the Copywriter’s Crucible already, a mere click on the image below will suffice:

 

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Copy Chief Live 2017 Takeaways

7 Webinar Copywriting Tips – Sell Through Education Instead of Hype

Webinars can be a powerful a way to sell to B2C markets that aren’t yet over exposed

In our marketing bubble, webinars have been the #1 way to sell high ticket items for years. Yet in most markets, their selling power is largely untapped.

B2B folks seem convinced anyway.

A B2B Content Marketing Trends survey placed webinars as the second most effective way to sell, after live events and ahead of videos, blogs and case studies.

Why are they so effective?

• Webinars instantly position you as an expert
• People unfamiliar with webinars don’t feel they’re being sold to
• They can convert leads into sales within 24-48 hours
• They’re highly measurable and can be automated for consistent ROI

Webinars are common in B2B, whereas in B2C they’re still fresh and underutilized.

Let’s say you’re selling a natural health blood sugar balancing supplement. Just imagine how powerful a 40 minute webinar could be at educating people on the causes of high cholesterol, what foods to eat and how to naturally balance their ratio and reduce their risk of heart disease?

A lot of people would rather sit through a presentation that resolves something that’s bugging them than wade through 5,000 words of copy.

Webinars are only effective if you keep people’s attention

The challenge is overcoming the million distractions threatening to pull users a way. Your presentation has to go beyond plain vanilla advice if it’s going to keep people from flicking through Instagram, chatting on Facebook or checking their email. As always, harnessing emotion, intrigue and building tension are the keys to success.

Here are 7 webinar copywriting tips to help you keep viewers engaged and buying at the end:

1. Tell a Story

Stories engage at a deeper emotional level than a straight pitch. It’s how we’ve been wired since cavemen times. Share the background to devising your product or solution. Talk about the struggles, the failures and the Eureka breakthrough that led to your product.

2. Give Them an Easy Win

Give viewers a tactic they can implement almost immediately. This will give them an instant sense of advancing from where they are now. It will also make it easier for them to FEEL what they can gain from your product.

3. Frame the Price

Before you reveal the price, establish the costs of not taking action. Explain how much time and money they’re wasting without your solution. While they could try and figure it out for themselves or buy a cheaper alternative, explain how this will cost them more in the long run.

4. Crush Objections

In every sales letter, VSL and webinar, crushing objections is vital to clinching the sale. Write out a list of  reasons why someone might not buy and then address every one in a clear, objective manner. Then by the end they’ll have no excuses and will only see positives from having your solution in their life.

5. Lead Them Up a Staircase

Imagine your webinar is a staircase. At the start your viewer is at the bottom, struggling with a problem that’s preventing them from advancing in their career or life. Over the course of the webinar your job is to jump them up the steps by revealing what they can do to achieve the salvation that awaits at the top.

6. Track and Optimize

The beauty of webinars is the ability to track and improve their performance. Your goal is to get average order value (AOV) above your cost to acquire customers (CAC). Once you’ve done that then you can open the money hose and potentially scale to six or seven figures.

7. Test Live then Automate

Doing webinars LIVE is the best way to test and perfect your pitch. The interaction, unscripted vibe of live webinars naturally creates greater trust and engagement with your viewers. Just calling out their names and reading their comments has been found to increase sales. Then when you have a winning formula you can switch to automation for a consistent pipeline of sales.

Ready to Grow Your Business with Webinars?

Recently I completed Joel Erway’s Webinar Accelerator Program. Joel gets paid up to $40,000 to write webinars for elite marketers like Russell Brunson. And for them it’s money well spent. Russell generated $10 million from his webinars last year alone.

At $1,997 (it will soon go up to $2,997), Joel’s Webinar Accelerator ain’t cheap.

However, webinars are arguably the best way to sell right now. They’ve got huge potential in under served B2C markets. And you may make your money back on your first webinar project.

So whether you take Joel’s course or figure it out on your own, writing webinars is a high ticket copywriting service to add to your arsenal.

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Live Event Networking Tips for Copywriters to Make Connections in an Extrovert’s World

Just Add Hustle Podcast Interview – 4 Career Crashing Mistakes for Copywriters to Avoid

If you’ve ever wanted to hear my dulcet tones, your lucky day has arrived.

I sat down with Crucible reader and natural health copywriter Paul Buzan (who has the envied position of being one of Parris Lampropoulos’ copy cubs) to share my sage advice on how aspiring copywriters can avoid some of my near career ending blunders, on the madcap journey to where I am now.

This isn’t a podcast where I talk about crushing it. About writing million dollar VSLs (true story), meeting copywriting masters like Mr Drayton Bird or jetting around the world working on a laptop (well, maybe a little bit).

No sirree.

This is a warts and all, no filter confession on what can happen when you launch a copywriting business with no experience, no clients and no portfolio (like I did). And what career crashing speed bumps you can hit on the way.

What you’ll discover:

• What happened when I got sued by a celebrity TV chef (and learned an expensive lesson on the difference between food poisoning and a shellfish virus).
• How my misadventure into “black hat” SEO led me running into trouble with a collective of hackers (and how I resolved it without having my website hacked into oblivion).
• Why you should never guess who your target customer is and how to find out who they really are (following this advice will put you ahead of 90% of copywriters)
• The books I recommend you read multiple times. Why? Because they offer a better education than many of the $970 Facebook promoted courses out there. Times change. But the underlying principles of high converting copy stay the same.

>>>Listen to my Just Add Hustle Podcast interview on career crashing mistakes for copywriters to avoid

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Use Toll Free Numbers to Build a ‘Red Hot’ List of Prospects at Low Cost

A survey by the Direct Marketing Association found that 83% of people prefer to listen to a 24 hour free recorded message than speak to a live sales person.

Click costs are outta control.

On Facebook they’ve rocketed from a reasonable $0.27 at the end of 2016 to a budget busting $1.72 today. And with 2 million advertisers (and rising) all fighting over that sweet Facebook traffic, the costs are only going one way amigo. And that is UP.

Google stopped being profitable (in most markets) years ago.

Traffic from Outbrain, RevContent and their brethren may be cheaper. But it has the precision targeting of a garden sprinkler.

So what can you do?

You can focus on customer lifetime value and backend sales. And treat the initial sale as a ‘break even’ on your ad spend.

Or…

You can switch to channels few dare to mess with.

I’m talking about offline my friend. And using a tactic that gets grizzled veterans nodding approvingly and young bucks shrugging their shoulders, mistakenly thinking it went out of fashion with the fax machine.

Hire a ‘robot’ to talk to your customers (in a good way)

Through services like Telecenter you can setup your own Toll Free (Free Phone if you’re one of my UK countrymen) number.

You can then can record a message to convince prospects to leave their name and address for further info (i.e. your sales letter).

It costs a measly $40/month for this number to then generate leads around the clock. And if done right, it can be higher converting and cheaper than running an online paid ad campaign.

Here’s the strategy…

Say, you’re selling a supplement for joint pain. You’d run a small ad in newspapers (using low cost ‘remnant advertising’) saying something like:

Free Report – Repairs and Lubricates Your Joints to Take the Pain Away. Toll Free: (123) 456789.

People with joint pain are typically over 50 and still get most of their information from newspapers. They also trust printed coms a lot more than all the ‘fake news’ awash online.

And unless they’re sat at their computer, you’ll have their complete attention as they can’t be Liking or Tweeting when their phone is glued to their ear.

What to say in your recorded message

There’s no perfect length to a recorded message. As with a sales letter, you need to say whatever is necessary to get them to take the action you want – which in this case is to leave their name and address.

In the message simply:

1. Introduce yourself, your credentials and the reason why you created this message (never say you’re a doctor, unless you actually are one. Faking that you’re a qualified professional can get you in seriously hot water).
2. Discuss their pain, such as unscrewing a jar, getting dressed in the morning or feeling like a prisoner in their own home.
3. How wear and tear is the likely cause of their joint pain and how widespread joint pain is.
4. Give 3 lifestyle habits that may be making their pain worse (build the tension and raise the stakes for why they need help).
5. Tell them how your report shares the latest breakthrough research into joint pain and how best to relieve it.
6. Provide some proof with a stat from a study in your report, such as how X herb helped reduce joint pain for 8 out of 10 people.
7. Ask them to share their name and address and their biggest challenge of overcoming their joint pain (you’re getting pure old market research and lead generation rolled into one).

What results can you expect?

With a toll free number, you should be aiming for at least 50% leaving their name and address. Trevor Toecracker Crook typically gets an 80% response to his recorded messages

Then when they get your sales letter with a handwritten post it note (in BLUE ink) on the front saying “Barry, thanks for requesting my free report. Call me if you need advice, Matt” do you think they’re going to read it?

You can bet the farm on it.

And their trust in you is going to be at ‘best friends’ level compared to all the snake oil salesmen they find online, with their unrealistic claims, suspiciously positive testimonials and ‘grinning couple’ stock photos.

If you can get a good rate on your ad costs (remember to use remnant advertising), getting leads this way could also work out WAY more profitable than buying a list from a list broker.

Because you see, bought lists can be of questionable value.

And when you’re sending letters to people who don’t know who you are or ‘when the heck’ did they give you permission to write to them, what do you think they’ll do with your letter?

It’s going straight into the ‘B’ pile compadre. Into the trash.

Hear from the masters on ‘Free Recorded Messages’

You can listen to marketing wizards Dean Jackson and Joe Polish discussing the Free Recorded Messages strategy in their “I Love Marketing Podcast”, and how they use it to generate qualified, red hot leads around the clock.

If you decide to try out this old school yet time proven tactic, let me know how you get on.

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7 Tactics Drayton Bird Told Me that Most Marketers Don’t Know About

Tactic # 4 – Always have a caption below an image

It’s unbelievable.

But the sad reality is that a lot of marketers don’t study.

They create campaigns based on intuition, creativity and hope, instead of studying classic ads from the last fifty years to see how selling in print is really done. Ask a crowd of ad agency folks if they’ve read Caples, Hopkins and Schwartz and you may as well be listing Renaissance poets.

Last week I had the fortune to be in the presence of a direct marketing legend. A real life Mad Man. A godfather of direct response copywriters, with tales that make Roger Sterling’s exploits seem tame. I am, of course, talking about Mr Drayton Bird.

For two days I was immersed in hardcore direct response training at Mr Bird’s swansong: the ‘Last Hurrah’ seminar. My pen rarely left the paper as I feverishly took down notes faster than lightning strikes the tree, not wishing to miss a single off the cuff comment that could explode response rates for my clients (and justify my rising fees).

My pen rarely left the paper as I feverishly took down notes faster than lightning strikes the tree, not wishing to miss a single off the cuff comment that could explode response rates for my clients (and justify higher fees).

Throwing gold nuggets like it’s spare change

Sharing the podium with Mr Bird was Trevor ‘Toecracker’ Crook. His no fluff, spit and sawdust attitude didn’t disappoint. And he threw golden nuggets into the air like they were spare change, with all of us lunging to grab and embed them into our notebooks (I believe just one of his nuggets will help me write more convincing proposals and double my fees at the same time).

Drayton Bird will soon be publishing the videos from his two-day seminar as a course. So I’m not about to share all my notes here and spoil the surprise.

However, I will share 7 moreish takeaways:

1. Have a case study or real life story at the heart of your promotion
2. Your competition is not other marketers. It is Spectator and Cosmo journalists. You need to raise your writing to that level to earn attention
3. Add incentives that are low cost but high perceived value (e.g. cruise ships make their income from drinks sales and excursions, they can afford to give the room away practically for free)
4. Always have captions below images
5. Cartoons for attention. Photos for conviction
6. Don’t accept ‘No’ as the reason. Dig down to find out why they aren’t buying.
7. Ask them to take the action you want at least 3 times

These are just seven tactics that can ramp up your response rates and moolah. I literally wrote down over 10 pages of notes (front and back) that I’ll be referring to every time I write a VSL or sales letter to try and inject some Drayton Bird magic into my copy.

I’ll post a link to the course when it goes live.

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Will I See You at Drayton Bird’s Last Hurrah?

“Drayton Bird knows more about Direct Marketing than anyone in the world … His talks are highly instructive and hilariously funny” – David Ogilvy

Drayton Bird is an original Mad Man.

In a career spanning nearly six decades, Drayton Bird has sold everything, from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig, for brands including American Express, Procter & Gamble, Deutsche Post (me too), IBM and Microsoft

His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, has been the UK’s best-selling book on direct response marketing since the early 80s.

He’s won countless awards and accolades from the best minds in direct response marketing, including Ogilvy, Schwartz and Bencivenga.

And this week it all comes to an end (speaking wise, anyway) because he is giving his last ever seminar aboard the S.S. Great Britain this Weds and Thurs.

I’ll be there in my best shirt, polished shoes and notebook ready. Will I see you there?

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