Copywriting

Converting ecommerce buyers to info buyers with a hot new claim

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Yesterday, I sent a surprisingly profitable email to a list I manage. Most of what follows about this is conjecture and hearsay, but it might prove valuable to you anyhow.

First, a bit of background:

The email list in question is made up of buyers of various household gizmos and as-seen-on-TV doodads.

Reusable paper towels made out of bamboo fibers…

“Bioceramic” orbs to do away with laundry detergent…

Anti-mosquito sonic bracelets.

When I imagine the kinds of people who buy this stuff, the phrase “magic button” appears before my eyes.

In other words, these are people who want their problems solved for them… and who are willing to pay a premium to get the solution in the form of a physical product.

That’s why I haven’t had much success promoting information products to this list. Clickbank bestsellers? Not interested. In fact, I’d all but given up on info products — until yesterday.

Yesterday, I didn’t really have a good offer to promote. So I went on Clickbank, searched among the “green products” category, and selected the best seller, an information product about “reconditioning” dead batteries.

I sent this out to my list, not expecting much. But like I said, it did business. In fact, out of the dozens of affiliate offers I’ve tested out, this came out second or third.

What made these “magic button” buyers plop down good money to get information? In other words, what convinced them to pay, not for a done-for-you solution, but for just blueprints to a solution?

Of course, my email talked about the money a typical family could save by reconditioning car batteries. But it did one better.

It also claimed that, with this battery resurrection knowledge, you could actually make money. You could get free, worn-out batteries, recondition them, and then put them up on Ebay for a nice profit.

So here’s where the conjecture part starts:

I feel that, thanks to the current moment of uncertainty and lost jobs and lots of people sitting at home, bizopp or make money online offers are not just blowing up… but are going mainstream.

This is supported by things I’m hearing from people who publish real estate investing products. They all say their businesses are growing like never before.

Like I said, conjecture and hearsay. But if you are a copywriter, or a business owner, it might be worthwhile taking the claim that your offer helps people make money — and bolting it on to your other, standard, proven claims.

If I’m right, and God knows that happens a good 50% of the time, then this bizopp appeal will work even in mainstream, magic-button markets. Markets that would never have responded to make money offers or paid for information, only a few months ago.

Speaking of which:

Have you heard about my email newsletter? I send out daily emails. Things to help you get better at copywriting and marketing. And to make money. You can sign up for the newsletter here.

A bad sign when writing copy

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I heard somebody say once — I can’t remember who or where — be like Mickey, not like Bugs.

Mickey is bland, nice, boring. Bugs Bunny is exciting, clever, fun.

But Mickey was the start and foundation of a multi-billion dollar empire. Bugs was not.

So be like Mickey.

I have to remind myself, and pretty often, that whenever I am particularly pleased with a piece of copy, it’s a bad sign.

There’s even a phrase that old-school writers used to describe this. They said you should kill your darlings.

This is especially true when it comes to sales copy. Whether you’re writing a sales letter to cold traffic… or a sales email to existing customers… in copywriting, clever is the opposite of good.

Simple appeals simply stated are likely to make you the most sales. Getting your message simpler is where your cleverness should be applied. And if you have any cleverness left over, then use it to find ways to surprise your readers, while still keeping your message simple.

Of course, sometimes I break my own rules. If you want to watch me fail in writing simple messages while discussing what I learn in my day job as a sales copywriter, then sign up for my daily email newsletter.

Half a mil (and then some) for a single copywriting project

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In 1997, while the stock market was in the middle of a nice bull run, direct response publisher Boardroom ran a promo. It was written by an A-list copywriter, Eric Betuel. It promised readers information on how to protect themselves and profit from “big money shocks.”

A year later, the mood had started to change. The market was overheating and all that dot-com money was going crazy. So Boardroom ran the same promo with another cover, talking about how to protect yourself and profit from the “coming worldwide money panic.”

Then in the spring of 2000, Nasdaq hit its peak and then quickly dropped 20%. Boardroom ran the same promo again. The new cover talked about the “coming stock market panic.”

Over the course of 5 years, this Boardroom promo mailed over 12 million times. Going at 5 cents per mailing, that means Betuel earned over $600,000 for this piece of copy. Not bad for a one-time project, along with a few new headlines about the unseen dangers lurking beyond the horizon.

Another A-list copywriter, Gary Bencivenga, once said there are two parts to copywriting: 1) opening the sale, and 2) closing the sale.

If history is any guide, opening the sale is the more fickle part of this equation. You might have to toss lots of different bait in the water. Much of it might not get a bite. But once that marlin is lured in and hooked, the same proven and almost automated process will work to pull the big beast out.

A close entrepreneurial shave

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I’ve just had the most homoerotic experience, if not of my life, then certainly of the past 14 years.

I paid a man, much younger than me, to massage, caress, and pinch me. He did his job dutifully for almost exactly a half hour.

I won’t lie to you. I was massively relieved at the end of it. And with the transaction over, I couldn’t wait to get away.

So I handed the young man the equivalent of about $7, wrote my name on the obligatory covid-tracking sheet, and ran the hell out of the barber shop.

It never occurred to me to get a professional shave until today, but I’ll try anything once. And to be honest, I was chuffed with myself for going through this experience.

Only thing is, the shave wasn’t very good.

I realized it once I got home and checked in the mirror. I looked like a disheveled computer science professor I once had — smooth cheek on one side, five o’clock shadow on the other, uneven bits of stubble under my nose, tiny blotches of blood everywhere.

There was nothing left to do but get out the trusty Sensor Excel and do the job right myself.

So why is this relevant to you?

Probably no reason. Except in the unlikely case that you are an entrepreneur, or want to become one, but the thought of hiring people and managing them gives you the runs.

In spite of all the outsourcing porn and the advice about focusing on your most valuable 20%, the fact remains that you are still probably the best person to do many jobs around your business.

Sure, that can be a terrible limiting factor. But some business owners go surprisingly far by being a one-man band.

And in any case, if you hate the idea of recruiting, hiring, training, and keeping employees happy, then you might not have any choice.

​​​If this side of your personality is truly ingrained, then better accept it and figure out how to live with it.

​​As business coach Rich Schefren likes to say, “Put your shaving goals ahead of your massage goals.” No, I got that wrong. “Put your business goals ahead of your personal development goals.” That’s right.

But if you want to do things by yourself, you’ll need to get some good advice. I can’t help you with shaving. But for marketing and copywriting advice, you might like my daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Launching offers for the coming crisis

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In Columbus, Ohio, judges have relocated eviction hearings from the courthouse to the city’s convention center. The justice system needs space — more people than usual are about to be thrown out onto the street.

And no wonder.

Corona-era eviction bans are expiring in many places, and federal aid ended last month. As a result, more than 30% of American households expect to miss their rent payments in August.

Come September, 20 million renters will be at risk of evictions. And even if they aren’t evicted, this will cause mass problems further up the food chain.

Small landlords, who are counting on that rent money, will be at risk of defaulting on their mortgages.

When that happens, expect the Grim Banker to swoop in with his scythe, and to heartlessly start cutting down both landlords and renters.

I’m not telling you this to paint an ever-bleaker picture of the current crisis.

Instead, I do it to illustrate a copywriting technique I talked about last week.

That technique is having an occasion to your copy.

Over the past few days, I’ve talked to two business owners. Both guys have popular websites offering info on real estate investing. And both recently launched new entry-level products. Neither product did great.

One reason I can imagine for the many shrugs that met these offers is that neither product had any occasion. In other words, the marketing for the products didn’t answer the question, “Why am I seeing this offer now?”

The thing is, if you’re in the real estate space, there is an incredibly powerful story you can tell right now to answer that question.

That story has high stakes (millions of homeowners betrayed by the system, trillions of dollars up in the air)…

… it’s got villains everybody can rail against (the Grim Banker above, and his minion, the incompetent government bureaucrat)…

… and it’s got an unlikely hero — your prospect — who gets the call, and who rises to the challenge of making himself mounds of money while helping his fellow citizen.

Of course, maybe you are not in the real estate space. In that case, the current moment might not offer such a clear-cut occasion to hitch your sales copy to. But if you look a bit, there’s almost certain to be a reason somewhere in the current mess, and probably a good reason, to give occasion to your specific offer.

I’ll certainly be on the lookout for such occasions, whether for real estate or for other businesses my clients are in. If you want to get updates as I write more about these topics, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.

Two multi-millionaire marketers go into a cigar bar…

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Today I was listening to the newest edition of Steal Our Winners, and Internet marketer Rich Schefren told a quick story.

He said that around 10 years ago, he started writing daily, slice-of-life, Matt Furey-style emails, much like what you’re reading now.

And then, at a cigar bar, he ran into Mark Ford. Mark is a big-name copywriter and one of the main guys behind the direct response juggernaut Agora.

“Look, this is the poor man’s Agora,” Rich said to Mark about those daily emails. (Then, as now, Agora was sending out emails every day, real serious editorial stuff.)

“Actually, I like this better than what we do at Agora,” said Mark. “And let me tell you why.”

The gist of it was, Rich’s slice-of-life emails were sometimes short, sometimes long. Sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a page.

That kept the reader guessing.

The reader could never say, “Oh I don’t have the time to read this now.” That meant each time an email hit him, he couldn’t dismiss it.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in what Mark Ford said. It makes good sense to keep your reader guessing, and not just about the length of your emails.

I could tell you more.

But in the interest of keeping this post short, well… all I can say is, if you want more, you can sign up to my daily email newsletter.

Don’t rape your audience

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Today’s post is on the subject of email marketing, a rather milquetoast topic. The hook, though, is jarring — rape.

I didn’t think of that hook. Instead, it comes from William Goldman, somebody I’ve mentioned often in these emails.

Goldman was first a successful novelist and later a successful Hollywood screenwriter and then again a successful novelist.

Along the way, he also wrote a non-fiction book called Adventures in the Screen Trade. I’m reading it now. It’s a combination of memoir and an insider’s look into Hollywood, specifically as it was in the 60s and 70s of the last century.

Somewhere in the Adventures book, Goldman talks about the most important part of a screenplay — the beginning. And it’s here that he writes the following:

“In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.”

Specifically, Goldman is contrasting movie writing to TV writing. At the beginning of a movie, Goldman says, you have some time. You can seduce. Things are different in TV land — you gotta be aggressive, right in the first few seconds. Otherwise the viewer will simply change the channel.

I had never thought about this difference. But it makes sense. And it makes me think of…

Sales copy, which is definitely on the TV end of the seduction/rape spectrum. Just think of some famous opening lines of blockbuster VSLs:

“Talk dirty to me”

“We’re going to have to amputate your leg”

What about email copy? Much of it also opens up in the same aggressive way. Here are a few opening lines I just dug up from recent sales emails in my inbox:

“MaryAnne couldn’t take it anymore:”

“In 1981, a dirty magazine published an article that had the potential to make its readers filthy rich.”

I always assumed this is just the way good copy is — VSLs or emails or whatever. Of course, that’s not true.

When I actually look at some of my favorite newsletters (and even some successful sales letters), they don’t have an immediate and aggressive grabber. Instead, they build up and work their way into their point — without rambling, but without aggression either.

The difference comes down to the relationship you have with your list. Some businesses, including some businesses I’ve worked for, have little to no relationship with their list. Each email they send out is like a random infomercial popping up on TV — if it doesn’t capture attention right away, it never will.

But some businesses have a great relationship with their list. They can afford to take the time to light the candles and sip the wine and stare seductively at their reader across the table. In fact, if they didn’t, things would seem off.

Is it possible to go from one style of email marketing to the other?

I believe so. In my experience, people tend to mirror your own emotions and behavior. That means you’ll have to take the first step if you want things to change. Rather than waiting for your list to have a better relationship with you… start seducing, and stop trying to rape.

Now that we’ve warmed up the conversation:

I also have a daily email newsletter. You can subscribe for it here. And if you do subscribe, I promise to… well, I won’t go there.

Doing free work for potential clients

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Perhaps I’m stupid. Or just naive.

I just spent an hour doing free work for a potential client. He hasn’t paid me anything. He might never pay me anything.

And yet, I watched his current VSL (troubled, to be generous). I then wrote up a nice document with the problems I saw and what I would do instead.

This made me think of one hot summer evening three years ago. I couldn’t sleep. So I snuck out of the bedroom (my girlfriend at the time was sleeping, the heat didn’t bother her). In the living room, I put on a Perry Marshall webinar.

The topic of the webinar was “discovery contracts.” The gist of it was this:

Instead of talking to potential clients to see if you are a good fit to work together… instead of spending time analyzing their situation with nothing in return… instead of coming up with valuable recommendations they can get implemented elsewhere…

… you can do a “discovery contract.”

In a nutshell, as they say, you can do all the stuff I just listed, but charge your potential client for it, up front. You say something like:

“I’ve stopped doing discovery calls with potential clients, but here’s what I can do. I’ll dive into your current copy/product/whatever, and give you my best recommendation of how to proceed, presented in a neat document. You can then go ahead and find the best person to implement those recommendations for you, or you can hire me. I charge my hourly/daily/whatever rate for this kind of discovery project. If you decide to hire me after I finish, I’ll subtract that rate out of my final fee.”

Sounds great, right?

But like I said, I’ve never done anything like this. Maybe it’s stupid. But I have no regrets (not yet).

I’ve had lots of good experiences doing some free work up front for potential clients. And I talk with new clients rarely enough these days that, even if they stiff me out of an hour of work, it’s not the end of the whirl.

But maybe you’re not in the same situation as I am. Maybe you’re constantly talking to potential new clients. Maybe some of them take advantage of you. Or maybe you’re just tired of all the wasted time.

In that case, it might be time to try a discovery contract. You’ll weed out the tire kickers. You might get paid. And the clients who do go for it will likely respect you more.

If you want more free articles like this (you tire kicker, you), you might like my daily email newsletter. Click here to subscribe.

Sorry to see you go

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Here’s a Days-Of-Thunder-sized personal confession:

I cant “read” marketing.

I find it too boring. As soon as I suspect an email or a web page or an article is trying to sell me something, a switch gets flipped in my head, my eyes get watery, and I start to gloss over the text in hope of escape.

This is definitely a problem, since I make my living writing sales copy, the exact kind of stuff I can’t stomach reading.

So I’ve found ways of working around this.

For example, one of the main benefits I get from hand-copying ads is that it simply forces me to carefully read those ads.

For a while, I was also having success by seeking out trends for a “3-minute DR news” feature for my email newsletter. That helped me actually pay attention to other marketers’ ads, even if I had no interest in what they were selling or preaching.

As part of this, I subscribed to dozens of email newsletters. But over time, I unsubscribed from almost all of them.

I did the same just now with copywriter Abbey Woodcock’s newsletter.

All I know about Abbey is that 1) she was one of Parris Lampropoulos’s copy cubs, so she’s gotta know about copywriting and 2) she has some kind of program helping newbie freelancers get started.

Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen in Abbey’s emails, she doesn’t talk too much about 1. But she talks aplenty about 2.

So I unsubscribed. But then, I saw an interesting thing on Abbey’s unsubscribe page.

It’s something I haven’t seen anybody else do. Here’s what happens:

When you click unsubscribe in Abbey’s email, you get taken to her site to confirm. “Yes, I really do want to unsubscribe.” Once you click that, you are taken to one final page.

“Sorry to see you go,” the page says.

And then directly below, it goes on: “Here are some other resources that might be a better fit,” followed by two affiliate links (Copy Chief and something called Effic Planning System).

I thought this was great because 1) it could be genuinely helpful to somebody who wasn’t a fit for Abbey’s stuff and 2) it could make some money for Abbey from an otherwise useless ex-lead.

This illustrates a principle I first heard Ben Settle talk about. (I guess he learned it from Dan Kennedy.)

That principle is to always seek out unused capacity.

Abbey’s unsubscribe page is just one small and clear example of this.

But if you have any kind of business — yes, even as a newbie freelancer — you might have unused capacity that you could profitably exploit.

Take for example these blog posts. For most of the time I’ve been writing them, I simply ended each post without including any kind of call to action.

Unused capacity.

So I started including a CTA each and every time. Something simple. Along the lines of,

I’ve got an email newsletter about marketing and persuasion. If you like what you just read, you might like that too. In case you want to give it a try, click here to subscribe.

Enemies, enemies, enemies

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Famed A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga once wrote a promotion called Lies, Lies, Lies. It was about all the scheming swindlers — the lawyers, the politicians, the IRS — working to rip off small investors.

Speaking about this promo in an interview with Clayton Makepeace, Gary said the following:

“Instead of the usual “I’m trying to sell you something,” which sort of sets up immediately in the reader’s mind a you-versus-me mentality, I found a way to shift gears by saying, “it’s you and me against these other guys.” And if you can create an enemy in your copy, that’s what happens. You set up a three-point discussion and you come around from your side of the desk to be on the reader’s side of the desk and then it’s you and the reader against the enemy that you’re railing against.”

Then and now, creating an enemy = power.

But what if you’re a peace-loving hobbit who only has good will, even towards orcs and trolls? Well, in that case, young Frodo, you have to start thinking outside the box.

To help you out, here are 10 categories you can look to for potential enemies, along with a couple of examples I just made up from the copywriting and marketing space.

By the way, I’m not telling you to go out and make war against these specific enemies. Nor am I saying these are enemies of mine. Just use these examples to get your ideas jogging around your head.

Anyways, here are 10 rocks under which you can find gruesome and evergreen enemies, enemies, enemies:

1. Industry insiders. Examples: Successful copywriters boasting about their fees and selling their “secrets.” Copywriting coaches who haven’t written a word of copy in years.

2. Snake oil salesmen. Examples: No-name marketers who have only sold copywriting courses by tricking those less experienced than themselves. Newbies who regurgitate what they’ve read but never tried writing copy themselves.

3. Government institutions. Examples: The FTC, which makes regulations to keep the little marketer down but allows big corporations to get away with murder. The FDA, which will suppress promising products, because it is in the pay of secret interests.

4. Big corporations. Examples: Facebook and Google, who will gladly take your money and sell you fake clicks. Amazon, which will take your successful product and make a clone of it.

5. Price points: Examples: Ridiculously high prices (eg. $10k) for a couple of videos. Ridiculously low prices (a free guide on how to achieve a 7-figure income).

6. Customers and prospects. Examples: Freebie seekers. Serial refunders.

7. Ways of doing business. Examples: Copy hype backed up by low-quality products. Maximizing one-time sales at the cost of long-term business.

8. Ways of leveling up. Examples: Hand-copying old ads. Writing ads for nonexistent products.

9. Ways of working. Examples: Working for an hourly wage. Not working for an hourly wage and getting paid peanuts.

10. Received wisdom. Examples: Making big promises in your headlines. Writing your body copy in choppy sentences…

… with each sentence fragment on its own line.

Still not enough enemies? Come and join my daily email newsletter. I sometimes rail against my enemies there, but these rants are reserved for my subscribers.