Master Class: Copywriting
Taught by Dane Maxwell of Zanee
Master Class: Copywriting
Master Class Toolbox
Dane Maxwell’s Mixergy Interview (MP3 format)
Checklist Dane used in the course
Classic sales letters 1 (ZIP format)
Classic sales letters 2 (ZIP format)
Transcript
called Mixergy.com, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built
their businesses. And one of the most popular interviewees is Dane Maxwell.
People got excited by his story of how he bootstrapped his company building
web apps and other products, mostly for the real estate business. And they
were especially interested in how he was able to grow his business using
copywriting.
And so I invited him here to teach copywriting. And the reason that I
invited him here is because we’re used to thinking a certain way. We’re
used to thinking that to grow our business we need this or that. And, well,
here’s some of the things that we’re used to believing, that we need an
army of programmers to grow our business and he’s shown that he doesn’t
need it. He doesn’t have an army of developers sitting in his office and
you don’t either.
And you’re going to see throughout this program that you can grow your
business without changing your business model, without begging for
mountains of investment money, without trying to find a way to grow a giant
ad budget. With persuasive communication, you’re going to be able to grow
your business. And I know it because, as I said, Dane talked about how he
did it in his interview. He gave his financials. He talked about how he’s
doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in his bootstrap business, in
revenue.
But it’s not just him, you’re going to be able to do this as other
entrepreneurs do it, right up to, even guys like Steve Jobs. In fact, let’s
take a look at how Steve Jobs uses two techniques that you’re going to
learn and be able to employ, right after we’re done with this program. Let
me bring up the video of Steve Jobs and play [??].
Jobs’ recording: “Tremendous breath, what should we price it at?
Well, if you listen to the pundits, we’re going to price it under $1,000,
which is code for $999. When we set out to develop the iPad, we not only
had very ambitious technical goals, and user interface goals, but we had a
very aggressive price goal. Because we want to put this in the hands of
lots of people. And, just like we were able to meet or exceed our technical
goals, we have met our cost goals. And I am thrilled to announce to you
that the iPad pricing starts not at $999, but at just $499, [Cheering in
background of video] $499. At $499, a lot of people can afford an iPad.”
Andrew: And there are two specific techniques that Dane is going to teach
you that Steve Jobs used in that video and then, as I said, you’ll be able
to use right after we’re done. And beyond that, Dane is going to teach you
multiple techniques that you can use immediately. My belief is, my
expectation is that you’re going to be able to use multiple techniques
within minutes of finishing this program and you’re going to start to see
results within days. But I also know that if you can just take one idea and
use it in your business, that it will have a measurable impact on your
site, on your business, and on your ability to grow it with the tools that you have.
So with that introduction, here’s Dane. Dane will be presenting this and he
actually has a unique way of presenting his ideas. And, let me pass the
privileges onto you so that you can completely control this presentation.
And now, there we go.
Dane: What I’m going to do is, I’m going bring you a little prop[??]. And
what I’ve been up to the past few weeks is putting together a copywriting
checklist for all of you to print out, and kind of use as a framework for
your copywriting. So, instead of sitting through a PowerPoint and not
really having an action guide at the end of it, I actually wanted to create
an action guide for you. I actually wanted to go through the actual guide
itself so you’re really comfortable with it, so you can get started
implementing. You’re all going to get a PDF of this within minutes of the
webinar finishing.
This is the copywriting checklist and right now I’m calling it, “How to
Sell the Crap out of Great Products and Services.” And I got a short bio
about myself and I’m going to skip through this but, just so you know in a
nutshell, 30 days out of college I was scammed for about $12,000 buying a
website for sale. And actually used the [??] that’s how I launched with
$12,000. I graduated without any debt from flipping websites. The last
website I ever bought for [??] grand. It was [??] me. I was embarrassed and
humiliated. I moved home in my parent’s basement and started working out of
a toy closet. I built a business with real value with clients who I can
friends, who I can [??] flatly ask for money for and they’re glad to pay
me.
That was kind of my entrepreneurial journey. It sparked for me. I built my
business without venture capital and without [??]. Let me zoom the screen
in here, so you can see this a little bit better.
Andrew: OK. While you are doing that, it looks like as you are scrolling
your screen, we lose your connection a little bit. If you can scroll it and
then talk, it will be easier for us to hear.
Dane: Great. OK. I built my business without venture capital partners and
I was able to do it because copywriting. That is the skill I want to share
with you now. When creating a new marketing website or better yet, editing
an existing website you already have. Make sure you have each of these
items for maximum sales power. Let’s turn the page and get to implementing.
The first item on your checklist is the instant clarity headline. There are
countless ways you can write a headline. I’m going to give you one formula
today. One formula that works very well. That formula is the end result the
customer wants in a specific period of time while addressing the
objections. How is my audio coming through so far, Andrew?
Andrew: Yes. Really well when you’re not scrolling. Dane: OK. Perfect. This is the formula. The real strict example for me or
my business, I help real estate companies recruit agents into their
company. For that business, one of the examples that I use in my business
is, ‘Recruit two top-producing agents’; that’s the end result the customer
wants. ‘Each week’ and that’s a specific period of time. ‘Without cold
calling or rejection’; those are the objections that brokers tell me why
they don’t recruit.
“Why don’t you like to recruit?” “Well, I don’t like cold calling or I
don’t like rejection.” You see I’ve tied all three of those into this
headline. ‘Recruit two top-producing agents each week without cold calling
or rejection.’ The rules for this headline, you don’t need all three, all
the time. If you only use the first item which is just the end result that
the customer wants from the formula, your headlines OK. In fact, it’ll
probably be light years better than most of the headlines on the internet.
If you use the first and second item which is the end result and the time
frame, your headlines even better. Now, if you use all three items, the end
result plus the time frame plus objections in the formula, then you’ve got
a really great instant clarity headline. Where the customer can come to
your website and instantly have clarity about as to what your business is
going to do for them.
Now, there are countless examples on how to do this. The first is, ‘Hot,
fresh pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or it’s free.” This is
Domino’s. This really illustrates something pretty fascinating. That is
that a single headline can build a $1 billion business. I think Domino’s is
a $1 billion company. The neat thing about Domino’s is the guy is a college
dropout.
He understood the power of a good headline. Hot, fresh pizza, that’s the
end result the customer wants. Delivered to your door in 30 minutes, that’s
the specific period of time. Or it’s free, is the objection or even a
guarantee.
Andrew: By the way, Dane, I’m sorry to interrupt you. As we were talking
about this program and you showed me this doc as you were working on it, I
kept doing Google searches on Domino’s Pizza and 30 minutes. A surprising
thing kept popping up. People kept expecting that the 30 minute guarantee
still existed. That this idea, this headline stuck with them so much they
weren’t even sure if it was gone. It’s been since the ’80s that Domino’s
ran that headline you’re talking about there. According to Wikipedia.
Dane: It’s fascinating. When this came out, people were so blown away by
it they actually called Domino’s when they weren’t even hungry just to see
if it would come in 30 minutes. This is the headline. Another example,
realtors use this all the time. That example is, ‘Your home sold in 90 days
or I’ll buy it.’ You can see there is a link example but I’m not going
click to it now. I don’t want any lag to slow my talking down. We will show you some examples.
For here, ‘Your home sold in 90 days’ that’s the end result that a home
seller wants. ‘Or I’ll buy it” is a guarantee or addressing the objections.
So ‘Your home sold’; what the customer wants. ‘In 90 days’; a specific
period of time. ‘Or I’ll buy it’. Even for the copywriting course that you
guys have signed up here.
Andrew used the same formula. ‘In one hour’; which is a specific period of
time. ‘Learn the copywriting system that will double your conversion’;
which is the end result you guys all want. You guys all want to learn the
copywriting system to double your conversion, to help sales, increase
interaction on your knee catcher pages and things like that.
Andrew: Let’s test the lag. How do you feel about clicking that example and
as soon as you do let me know and we’ll ask the audience if they can see
the page?
All right I can see it on my screen. Can you guys see it on your screen
right now? If you can we’ll be able to show even more examples as we
continue.
Yeah Justin is saying, “Fine”. Lenny can see it. Thanks, Lenny. Sam can see
it.
Yeah they can see it so throughout we will be able to show more examples. I
knew exactly the line formula you were going to teach in this program and I
only give myself a small amount of time to write the copy.
I said I’m going to use the formula you’re going to teach to test it out,
to prove that it works and also to speed up my time in writing this. It’s
really agonizing to write sales copy.
I know how powerful it can be and that’s encouraging but it also feels
like, “Well if I get it wrong I’ve missed a big opportunity.” Anyway I used
your formula so people can see exactly the in one hour learn the simple
copy writing system to double your conversions.
Dane: We even added the addressing the objections here in parentheses.
Even if you struggle with writing or have a limited budget.
Andrew, you said you had found these out when people submit kind of a
survey so we address your objections here as well.
Andrew: That’s right.
Dane: So that’s the instant headline [??]
Andrew: By the way, why do you emphasize the word clarity? Why do we need
instant clarity in the headline?Dane: Well my gut reaction is that clarity trumps [??]
Andrew: I’m sorry. Let’s wait for the scrolling to finish and can you
repeat what you just said?
Dane: Yeah. Clarity trumps persuasion. Also when you’re trying to get
people to take action, if they are not taking action it’s usually because
they are not clear and you’re not clear.
From a leadership perspective in general if people are not taking enough
action it’s usually because you haven’t done enough clarity. That’s why
clarity precedes action on the internet.
Andrew: OK.
Dane: What this headline does, the clarity headline, is it tells the
customer in seconds what your product will do for them not what it is.
That’s important because it forces the product creator to think about the
customer and not about your product.
Remember you’re not in the product business you’re in the end result
business. This is very liberating for some people if you had an idea that’s
failed.
It’s not about your product it’s about what you’re going to do for that end
customer so there is probably not a multitude of other ways to accomplish
that end result with a different product. If you think about the end result
of the customer that’s how I want you to think about your headline.
Remember the purpose of the headline is one thing. It’s to get your
customer to read the second line. If your customer reads the headline and
they don’t read the second line your headline has failed.
Remember to be clear and not cleaver. It’s easy to be cute and cleaver.
It’s difficult to be clear. Be clear not clever because clever does strong
persuasions.
The best headlines beyond this one formula . . . there’s tons of ways to
write a headline and this is just one of the best simple ways to get
started. I want you to know the best headlines stop, they jerk your
attention. They have greed, curiosity and unexpected surprises within them.
When you are writing your headline write to the individual. Sit down and
write to one person just like you talk to one person.
Do not write to the masses it’s not like you’re broadcasting. If you had a
gun to your head and the trigger was pulled if your target customer didn’t
clearly understand your headline would you keep it?Again it’s not about your product it’s about your customer. That’s the
first of 10 items we have on this checklist for copywriting called the,
“Instant Clarity Headline”.
Andrew anything before I move on?
Andrew: Actually two things and I’ve got examples from the audience. They
sent in their websites and I’d like to see your feedback on each of these
topics for the different websites I’ve selected.
First Sam in the audience is asking, “Can the time period be too
optimistic? Is it better to have a fantastic, impressive time period or a
realistic and less impressive one?”
Dane: Well you kind of want to border on the line of somewhere between
the two. I typically stick . . . I’m pretty conservative with mine.
Obviously the more outrageous can be the better. If you just want to think
of an example think about the four-hour workweek.
When you hear that you’re, “That’s not possible.” It totally gets you to
stop. It can be either or.
Andrew: OK. If anyone else has any questions on this section put it in the
chat box. And, Dane, people sent in their websites asking for feedback. I
wanted to send you their list of website and you said, ‘No, Andrew,
challenge me to give them feedback in real time.’ So, here I am with a real
time challenge. One of the websites that was submitted to us is a site
called gcexpediting.com. That’s g like george, c like capital,
expediting.com. It looks like you are going over to that website right now.
It’s time to say, ‘Thank you, keep submitting those questions.’ So, for
headlines specifically, what do you think of this website? And what advice
do you give gcexpediting?
Dane: Well, I am wondering if gcexpediting has a landing page. It looks
like they are targeting, it’s not clear to me what business you are in as
soon as I come to this website. First, there’s no real headline telling me
what you guys are going to do for me. I see, property owners, let us help
you get your construction project done right. Architects, engineers,
expediting services. We focus on customer service, what does that mean? You
are kind of being, I want to say, cute and clever but you are being (?)
instead of concrete. Contractors, save time and money, with our expediting
services.
That one may be a little bit better, but if I were to click on one, lets
just see how you are going to handle a specific party. And this is one of
those interesting things, where if you are targeting multiple groups, you
want to have different pages like this. And this one looks quite a bit
better. If I’m a property owner thinking about doing construction work
within the five boroughs of New York City, dealing with the Department of
Buildings and all the other relevant city organizations can be overwhelming leg GCX guide you through the permitting process and deal with the city on
your behalf. That’s great.
Andrew: Okay, so, you think that is a good headline. Not too long?
Dane: No, I think it’s not too long. Because it’s not wordy, it’s very
clear. I don’t think there are very many wasted words.
Andrew: OK. Someone in the audience is asking if you could specifically
look at his website. Related to the headline. It’s excessups.com E-X-C-E-SS-U-P-S dot com. And, guys, we are going to try to limit it to one sample
per idea. So that we can go through all ten ideas in a reasonable amount of
time.
Dane: Now, you are selling e-commerce product here. With Excess UPS.
Andrew: That’s power back-up systems.
Dane: Power back-ups, refurbished abc-ups, and new abc-ups battery backups. Well, I would encourage you to tell me specifically what can I get
from this. And what period of time, maybe, would it take to show up at my
office, or my delivery. And what are the typical objections in the back-up
industry space. Do back-ups fail a lot and you have to get them repaired?
What are the common objections that customers have?
I would actually try to get the clarity headline right here up on this. And
I would probably do it in a 20 point font. You’d say, ‘How to get battery
back-ups that never fail without any of the hassles of dealing with
whatever it is that you are talking about. And, that’s how I would approach
this. Other than that, I don’t know anything about back-ups and copy
writing is really 95% research. And, so, you really want to research what
those things are. And I would definitely apply the instant clarity headline
to this particular example.
Andrew: Okay, all right, let’s go on to the second one. And I do see that
some people want their sites evaluated. I know that we’ll have some time
after we go through the ten big ideas. To look at specific examples, too.
Dane: And maybe we can do all the examples instead of just going through
slide examples. The two people that I evaluated your sites, could you let
me know if that was helpful? If I provided any value for you there. So, I
can let you know if you either need to do something different in the next
few websites we review. I definitely want to help. So, let me nail you to
familiar sites. The next thing on the, let me slow down.
The next thing on this checklist is to declare the problem. So, you’ve got
my attention with the instant clarity headline. Now, you need to declare,
what’s my problem. So you need to tell me what my problem is. And this is
why the situation is rough right now, without your solution. And the
formula for this is, there’s a couple, three different ways you can do this. But, really, the formula, explain the current problem, using your
customers words.
So, this is really, really important. Declaring the problem is something
that I don’t see very many people doing, and it needs to be done because it
just completes the circle when you present your solution. And what it does
is, when you declare the problem, it gets the customer to nod their head in
agreement. It invites them to read the next line and it lets’ the customer
know that you understand them and the deepest human desire is to be
understood.
There is no deeper human desire. It’s not to be loved. It’s not to be
missed. It’s to be understood. If you have a family, you go to for
Christmas and they drive you crazy. You probably love them but maybe they
drive you crazy because you really don’t feel understood by them. It’s
because the deepest human desire is to be understood and leverage that
desire. Also, describing the problem, it creates empathy because it lets
them know that you can relate to them and empathy is the most powerful
sales tool. And most important of declaring the problem is that it sets up
your solution to be presented into the whole gap that you created by just
defining the problems.
So here’s some examples on how to do it. And let’s go to SendGrid.com. You
see SendGrid, these guys know what they’re doing. And here on the website,
you see right here, below the headline, declaring the problem. On average,
20% of legitimate e-mail never reaches the inbox. Then it goes on to say
SendGrid solves this problem by replacing (?) infrastructure. So they’re
declaring the problem and they’re saying how they solve it.
But right now, we’re just focusing on declaring the problem and just so you
guys know, I’m a customer of SendGrid the software company, and when I came
to this website, they got me instantly. I signed up in like 30 seconds when
I came to this website because they understood my problem of companies
saying I didn’t get my log in email, I didn’t get my forgot password email.
Andrew: I’ve gotten that with these courses and it’s so painful. Somebody
paid for a course and they don’t end up getting access to it. Not because I
didn’t send it out, not because they didn’t pay, not for any legitimate
reason, but because legitimate email doesn’t hit the inbox. And when I saw
that, I felt yeah, these guys really understand one of the big pain points
that I have. I manually then e-mail out links to these courses from my
gmail account because it’s such a painful problem but of course it doesn’t
scale.
Dane: All right. So that’s SendGrid declaring a problem and the next one
is Earn1K.com. (?) for safety. And here you see, earn your first $1,000 and
more starting with this free tool. And that’s kind of the first of the end
event, the end result the customer wants. But the second thing, declaring
the problem, here it is. I can’t free lance, I don’t even have an idea.
Immediately following the headline, you’re going to see the most persuasive type of marketing site. They all follow this. They declare the problem and
that’s exactly what you need to do.
Andrew: By the way, how does he know that? How does he know that that’s an
objection that people have? How does he know that he’s phrasing it in the
way that they would phrase it themselves?
Dane: Surveys. Asking people via surveys like you did when you signed up.
What are your challenges and what are struggles or what are your
frustrations when it comes to writing copy? What’s keeping you from
starting your own online business? What’s keeping you from starting a
freelance business and I imagine they say, I can’t free lance. I don’t even
have an idea.
Andrew: I see Jessie in the audience here is an Earn1K member and Jessie
said I had no idea that’s how he did it. I had no idea that’s what was
working on me.
Dane: Awesome. Well I hope you guys are going to have a lot more (?) as
we go through this. For DoubleForDating, which is a $20 million per year
information marketing e-course stuff for guys to double their dating with
women and if you go to this link, you’ll get this PDF. You can click on
this link and save it but as you see here, if you scroll down.
Andrew: Let’s wait for the scroll before you talk to make sure that we can
get it clearly out to everyone.
Dane: How long, do you know?
Andrew: Yeah, I can see it on one of my screens. There we go. I see them on
both now.
Dane: OK. Perfect. Well, look at these (?) the problem (?) is question.
Do you get nervous when you think it might be time to approach a woman? Or
maybe you’re out on a date and you’d like to kiss a woman but you don’t
want to screw up your chances by making a mistake. Have you ever felt
insecure because you’re not tall, handsome, young, rich, etc.? You feel
like attractive women wouldn’t be interested (?).
Andrew: Let’s hold out there for a second. In fact, it looks like the audio
is a little bit off, as (?) is saying. Let me read it out just to make sure
we have that we have it clearly out for people. You were reading his points
and it’s do you get nervous when you think it might be time to approach a
woman? Or maybe you’re out on a date and you’d like to kiss a woman but you
don’t want to screw up your chances by making a mistake? And he’s talked
about this. He pulls out these statements directly from the problems that
guys have and he uses their problems to explain to them their problems and
to show that he understands as part of his copy. I was going to say what he
was going to do next, but I’m going to let you say that when we get to that
section. Dane: Sure. This is another example [??] declaring the problem actually
is . . . let’s view this in full screen mode. You see that declaring the
problem is universal to any industry [??].
We’ve done it with freelancing, now we’ve done it with dating. I won’t go
to the next example in the interest of time but we will briefly mention.
If you click on this link it will take you to a video about Hipmunk.
Hipmunk is a flight search website that basically doesn’t suck and that’s
exactly how they market it.
I used it instantly after I watched the video. This video starts off with a
problem. You need to visit your honey across the world then you’ll have to
hunt through dozens of crappy flight search sites that drain your energy.
OK. You need to declare the problem right at the beginning of the video.
For 37 singles at base camp if you go to the home page for 37 singles . . .
I actually do want to show this one.
Let me know when you can see this Andrew.
Andrew: OK. It’s coming up, and it looks like it’s on the screen right now.
Dane: All right. If you see this, it starts off with a headline.
“Base Camp is a project management tool you wish you had on your last
project.”
It was very successful they don’t need my advice but I wouldn’t personally
use that headline. What they did I though really well is declared the
problem right below it.
“Are you still managing projects with email?”
“Are you still using excel for your to-do lists?”
They are sitting there declaring the problem right there. You see that
even the big amazing reputable company like 37 singles that everybody
idolizes are still declaring problems.
Andrew: Nicolas in the audience is asking, “Is what you are describing
called Yes Escalation?” Is that what you’re describing?
You’re trying to get people to say yes in their minds multiple times to
warm them up?
Dane: No.
Andrew: No OK.Dane: Maybe that’s one element of this but Yes Escalation is kind of at a
close where you are, “So you want to grow your business?”
“Yes.” You get five more customers.
“You know you need to be on Facebook.”
“Yes.” You probably need my product. You’ve said yes three times so you
probably want to say yes the fourth.
I think that’s what he’s talking about but this is really more just you’re
declaring the problem so that they agree with you and they know you’re
about to present the solution. That’s what we’re doing when we declare the
problem.
Andrew: Got you OK.
Dane: Some mind set tricks for declaring the problem is if you can
describe your customer’s current problem better than they can they will
unconsciously assume that you have the solution. OK. If you can describe
your customer’s current problem better than they can they will
unconsciously assume you have the solution.
If you’re not solving a clear problem it’s really a struggle to get people
to pay. The position you want to be in is you want to be selling insulin to
a diabetic not sugar cookies.
One reason from a broader perspective, one reason products fail is they
aren’t solving a problem someone has. If your product is nice to have not
must have you don’t have much power.
Here’s a real big shift I’ve just started to realize in my life in the last
two weeks because a friend was explaining this to me. If you’re selling an
aspirational purchase instead of an “I got this problem and I’m going to do
it with or without your product” purchase you’re in risky territory.
For example think of the NordicTrack verse Basecamp HQ. NordicTrack people
buy to start doing something like working out.
For project management people are going to do project management with or
without Basecamp. Aspirational purchases usually don’t last long. How many
people do you know still working on NordicTracks?
The vast majority of unsuccessful products you see are usually aspirational
in nature. If you aren’t able to declare a real clear problem then your
product could be more aspirational then you probably would want it to be.
That’s two. Shall we go on to three, Andrew?Andrew: Let’s take a look at one of the sites that was submitted before and
again you didn’t want to see it so I’ll give it to you right now and reveal
it with everyone else. Lets’ look at United iPhone Repair.
I specifically picked a bootstrap company. We had a few funded companies
here who submitted their websites, but I wanted to see how bootstrappers
would use these ideas.
Let me ask you to click on the click here button. He’s getting people to
click that button and he’s not sure about the page afterwards.
How does copy and specifically how does copy relate to declaring the
problem?
Dane: Well, I won’t watch the video. It’s four minutes and 48 seconds.
Andrew: What about the text?
Dane: Yes he has home based iPhone repair business in action. Let me
scroll. I’m . . .
Andrew: You’re not declaring a problem. OK. There are two problems that you
can declare, I think, here.
Dane: Mm-hmm.
Andrew: The first is that when a person’s iPhone is broken they don’t want
to have to send it in for a week and wait for it to come back. They are
teaching people how to create businesses where they repair iPhones, which
is interesting. OK. I wanted to make sure that you got that.
Dane: Thank you. Right. So, that’s the problem that people have. And so
if you’re trying to sell an at-home business, you really want to sell the
person on what problem they would be solving for other people. So that they
really get it now, and in their head they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I get it. I
see that I could be solving this problem.’ And so you really want to take
someone through the instant clarity headline and (?) the problem.
Right here on this side, I don’t see anything that really speaks to me from
an instant clarity headline. Especially from a home-based business
perspective. You could have a lot of fun with this. How a 21-year-old
college student makes $3000 a month repairing iPhones on the side without
any business skills, experience, and without even ever knowing how to
repair an iPhone in the first place. It’s something along those lines.
And then you really want to declare the problem, and I don’t know how that
problem would work right now. But I know that you would be solving the
problem for the people that need their iPhone replaced, so you declare that
problem. And you could declare their problem. Say, if you wanted to make
some part time money, what are your options? Work at McDonald’s? Go apply for a job? Well, by the time you fill out an application and go through the
interview process, you could already have your first iPhone repaired and
600 bucks in your pocket.
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Dane: So, that’s how I would approach this.
Andrew: OK. All right. Let’s look at the next one. And, of course, if
anyone has any questions keep typing them into the chat room. The questions
that are on your mind are probably the same ones that other people are
wondering. So, keep bringing them on.
Dane: All right. Let me know if I helped with that website. Whoever
person that was with that one. I can’t see names because I’m on the
presentation mode right now. But the third item . . .
Andrew: Daniel saying, ‘Awesome, thanks!!’ He’s saying, ‘Yes, it was
great.’ So, thanks, Daniel. Thanks for the feedback.
Dane: Yeah. Thank you, Daniel. So, third, you want to present your
solution. So, you’ve done the instant clarity headline, you’ve declared the
problem. Now it’s time to present your solution. And the formula for this
is product name helps you do task. Say good bye to frustration or problem,
and hello to benefit. And then follow up with you get top three features
plus benefits for each feature.
So, here’s how this would work as a strict example. Paperless typeline
helps take your real estate transactions and related documents online. And
that’s product name helps you do task, which is what people are looking to
do. And say good to frustration and hello to benefits. Say good bye to
filing cabinets which people hate filing cabinets, and hello to happy
mobile agents. Which is hello to benefits.
And then below that you want to put the top three features plus the
benefits for each feature. So these were email, scan, fax, or directly
upload contracts; and that’s a feature. And then view them from any
computer, any browser, anywhere. That’s the benefit. The next one. Get an
items needed checklist for transaction; that’s the feature. To stay
organized; that’s the benefit. Securely send contracts via email to
clients, to the lender, or to the title company when they ask for it;
that’s the feature. And travel without the paper briefcase; that’s the
benefit.
So this is how you want to present your features. And the rule for this,
try and go ahead and fit your product into this description for a good
practice exercise. Regardless of what you’re selling. Even if you don’t
have a product or service to sell yet, pick a product and just try it out.
And, two, keep it to the top three features and benefits for this when
you’re presenting your solution. And it should be painful to pick your top
three features and benefits. You might be like, ‘Aw, why not ten? Or 11?’ Well, just do the top three and . . .
Andrew: So, how do you do it? How do you know which top three benefits to
pick?
Dane: You ask your customers what are their favorite features.
Andrew: I see.
Dane: If it was an eBook, what was your favorite part of the book? If
it’s consulting, what was your favorite part of our session? If it’s
selling UPS battery back ups, go on and say what was your favorite of
ordering through us, what was the favorite part of your experience with us?
And you would use those. You’ve got to be talking to your customers to get
these things. If you try and pick what you think is best, that might work
but you’re more likely to fall on your face here. Was that a helpful
answer, Andrew?
Andrew: It was, yes.
Dane: OK. If you sell consulting, place your product name with your
consulting package. So you don’t need to be selling software to use this
presentation. I want you guys to know that of all the check list items on
this copywriting guide, this, present your solution, was the personally
hardest for me to crystallize down into an actionable template.
There are countless ways to present a product. This is one that works well
for me. What this does, when you present your solution, is it forces you to
create a 30 second elevator pitch for your product, so if you want to go
out and raise venture capital, which I’m not particularly a fan of myself,
I feel like I have another job with bosses, and I want to be my own boss.
If you do want venture capital because you do want to grow the next
Groupon, for example, doing something like this will force you to create a
30 second elevator pitch for your product so that if a venture capitalists
happen to be by you, in 30 seconds you can explain exactly what your
product does, how it helps them, what frustration it gets rid of, what
benefit gives them, and then the top three things that your product does.
What will also happen is that the customer is going to unconsciously trust
and bond with you because you are clear. When you read this, you’re not,
‘OK, so what business are they in? What are they doing? What’s their
company plan?’ You know exactly what I’m talking about. That’s what you
want to do. Also, it gives the customer info to say, ‘Hey, I want to know
more about this.’ or it tells them that this is not for them.
Let’s face it, not every customer is your customer, and you want them to
figure that out on their own as quickly as possible. Let’s talk about
examples of how to do it. Your survey tool. Your survey tool, their
headline, product name helps you do tasks. Survey tool helps you quickly create and distribute surveys with just a few clicks. This is actually
their headline, but this is how I would present the solution, and I would
probably do a little bit of a different headline here.
This is how you would present your solution from Survey tools example. They
have their top four features or method down here, like customer
satisfaction, (?) service, get employee feedback, tracking studies. Those
aren’t verbatim, but they’re close enough. You can see that they have a
full product tour somewhere else. This is all about presenting the nuts and
bolts of your solution. If we go to the next one, Harvest. Harvest is a
great example because they use, what I think of as, a triple benefit
headline or tri-ading.
For some reason, we love threes. If we tell a joke, it’s usually the first
guy goes in the bar, the second guy goes in the bar, the third guy goes in
the bar, then the punch line. When you’re selling headlines, triples work
really well. Here you see that Harvest is doing a great job by presenting
their solution. Easily tracked times, send invoices and run your business.
Those are the three things that they do really well. They even have the top
three features at the top: simple time tracking, fast online
invoicing, and powerful reports. They’re presenting their solution, what it
does, and the benefits that it gives them.
Let go back and gather my thoughts on this one. The next one is the Harvest
products web page. I wanted to show this one as well, because you can see
that they keep the top three benefits and features in bold, and then each
of those top features has three top features and benefits to themselves.
Let me actually show that so it doesn’t sound gibberish. On this product
tour page, you see the three. Simple time tracking is bolded, fast online
invoicing is bolded, powerful reports is bolded. These are the top three.
Of course, they do estimates and expenses and security and privacy, but top
three are bolded. If you go to the right hand side, there are three
features and benefits: simple to use, simple to access, simple to deploy.
They have this for each one of their top three features. Their top three
features all have top three benefits. I found this to be a great example. I
know Harvest is kicking ass because I heard them on Mixergy. So these guys
know what they’re doing.
Andrew: Do you have (?) up still?
Dane: I think I can pull it up.
Andrew: There it is. Earlier you talked about how they explained the
problem that their customers are having. In the second sentence they talked
about their solution, and then underneath the main image, they had their
own solution. Deliverability has its own little logo. That’s the way they
showed their solution. I noticed that this is a pretty common layout. The
landing page template are specifically designed this way so that in the
bottom section you can show your solutions and even have a couple of icons to highlight and describe them.
Dane: Exactly. (?) does it really well because they describe the problem
and then they say, product name solves this problem by replacing the (?)
softer, improve deliver ability, actionable email metrics, and API’s all in
a completely scalable solution. Now as a software and service owner I would
know that I would want to sign up for this program just based on this
paragraph, (?) did a really great job with that paragraph. They are able to
do that because they are solving a really focused, simple problem. In a
neat trend for software companies I see is API’s for API’s. A company is
their own API, like (?) for people to use, it’s a neat little trend now.
Mind set tricks for presenting your solution is use the language that you
hear from your customers when they describe how they use your product. So
for Paperless Pipeline for example, which is my Real Estate Transaction
Management Go Paperless Solution, when I first started out marketing this,
I was marketing, hey you can work paperless because that’s how I thought of
it and I didn’t really know any better, but work paperless became, show up
to closing without paper.
It also became travel without your paper brief case, after I had been
working with clients and listening to their feedback overtime, I was able
to change work paperless to show up to closing without paper. Show up to
closing without paper is really nice because very few agents can do that
and this agent that did, she said, “I could show up to closing without
paper” and I was like, “Well, how does that feel?” She says, “I just feel
awesome because I walk in there and I see the other agent with their
briefcase full of paper and I chuckle to myself, sucker.”
Andrew: So you’re not surveying brokers, you’re actually talking to them
and then making note of the big problems that their having and how your
products solve those problems and that’s what your using in your
copywriting?
Dane: Yes.
Andrew: OK.
Dane: I do both. I do surveys and I talk to my customers. The problem
with surveys is you’re never going to get the third or fourth layer deep
behind what the person’s saying. So, if you say, “What’s the main
benefits?”
They’re like, “Man, I don’t have to have my briefcase anymore.”
If I was on the phone with them, I would be like, “Tell me more about that?
When was the last time that happened?”
“Oh, well I was at closing, I was able to show up at closing without
paper.””Tell me how that felt. How did it feel?”
“Oh man, it felt amazing.”
“Were you able to use it anywhere else?”
“No.”
“When you showed up at closing what happened?” I can dig in deeper and
deeper and deeper. Surveys are great but the telephone is even better
because you can dig in really three, four or five layers deep. Does that
help?
Andrew: Yeah. It does.
Dane: Then you want to think of your solution and first in terms of the
benefits not the features. Remember that every feature, well every feature
I design is to give the client a benefit. Not to give them a feature. I’m
not in the features business. I’m in the benefits business. So that’s
presenting your solution. With that said, should we move on to borrow
credibility?
Andrew: Let’s take a look actually at zoho.com someone who created one of
their pages submitted it to use for your feedback. They created a bitly
link for you to go directly to their page. It’s bitly/zohoquizmaker and
that will take you to the zoho.com page and we’ll check it out right now.
Dane: All right. Take quizzes. Take Zo Ho challenge the best free online
quiz maker.
Andrew: Nicholas is saying he’s good, he’s congratulating me on having you
here. Thank you.
Dane: Thank you.
Andrew: Thanks for that feedback. OK. The page loaded.
Dane: Zo Ho challenge helps you create self grading quizzes, assign them
to candidates, assess their performance, and analyze results. Say goodbye
to paper based testing, create (?) electronic (?) with Zo Ho challenge quiz
maker for your classroom or your employees today.
Andrew: I picked him because his page, I picked him for this section
because he has a lot of features on the bottom. In fact, you said earlier
limit to three, it looks like he has a lot of features and he highlighted
many of them. What do you think of the way he’s explaining the solution?
Dane: Well, that makes me a little bit worried that I said only three now
because you don’t really want to limit. If your products doing more than three, tell more of them. If your product’s puzzle or picture is not
complete with just three features, then tell a few more. When I’m talking
about presenting your solution, I’m talking about presenting it above the
fold so they can see your solution being presented. I see the instant
clarity headline that he declared the problem, and I see you presented your
solution all above the fold and then they can get everything else they want
as the click around the site.
Andrew: Debbie’s saying, “Should this page list more benefits than
features?” Right now, we’re seeing features like, reuse quizzes, randomize
questions, and options. How do you feel about that?
Dane: (?)
Andrew: Sorry. Let’s wait for the page to finish scrolling. OK.
Dane: Yeah. Sorry. I was saying, I think she should probably help teach
this course.
Andrew: All right. Let’s move on to the next point I want to keep this on
track so we can end it with enough time for you to take some questions from
people. We’re on number 4.
Dane: Number 4, real quick I know we’re evaluating presenting the
solution, I think they’ve done a fairly good job presenting the solution
here. (?) quizzes, (?) ZoHo Challenge I’m not totally clear on, this is
really cute and clever, but it’s not clear. Like you go to (?) and it’s email delivery simplified. You come to ZoHo Challenge you want to say,
create quizzes in 30 seconds.
What is it that you’re doing here? I wasn’t sure what you were doing until
I got down to this line here and that’s not a place where you want to be.
Features, when you’re presenting your solution re-use quizzes so that you
can save time instead of copying/pasting new quizzes all day long. Put it
in benefits after features, be more clear in the headline and that’s my
feedback for this page.
Andrew: OK.
Dane: I didn’t leave that loop open. All right. Number 4, borrow
credibility.
Andrew: Sorry. Let’s wait for it to scroll and can you repeat that please.
Dane: Borrow credibility. This is where you can tie your company to
trusted symbols and famous authorities. Remember, I hope everyone is
flipping out excited because you’re going to be able to get this PDF so you
can have it on your own. That’s why we didn’t want to do PowerPoint so I’m
actually walking you through the product that you are actually buying when
you signed up for this course. 4) is Borrow Credibility. This is where you tie your company to trusted
symbols and famous authorities. This is really kind of sneaky, ninja
powerful stuff. This is where you put the biggest brands all over your
marketing pages even if they don’t use your product.
I kind of feel like 37 Signals might of set the stage with this because
they would put Kellogg’s, and Hershey’s, and whatever all the companies are
that use Face Camp. Then you started seeing it pop up over every other
software page. That’s a little bit about what this is. It’s more than that.
So, let’s go to Survey Tools pricing page here and so you how you can do
this. Let me know when this page is loaded.
Andrew: Loaded.
Dane: All right. So here you see, I see how much can a good survey do for
you? Then below it you see Domino’s Pizza, Aclaim Games, and Pogo all
increase their revenues and make customers happier by learning what they
really wanted. Notice what they’re doing here. They do not say that
Domino’s Pizza, Aclaim, and Pogo use surveytool.com. They’re saying that
Domino’s Pizza, Aclaim, and Pogo use surveys to increase their revenues and
make customers happy. You can do this kind of stuff yourself, even if
you’re just getting started.
Andrew: That’s interesting, it looks like Justin in the audience is saying,
he did that with his site. Right. So you’re saying if our product is to new
to borrow credibility from our customers, we can still show credibility by
saying, “Look, these people you admire, use the brand category that we’re
entering. These people who you admire, Domino’s Pizza use surveys and if
they use surveys maybe you can use the same tools they have, but at the
very least you should understand you should use surveys too, and we got a
great tool that you should consider.”
Dane: Yeah. If you’re selling a To Do List Manager. It’s fairly well
known that just about every billionaire uses To Do Lists. So you can list
Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, and — I don’t know if Charlie Munger is a
billionaire, Charlie Munger is Warren Buffet’s right hand man and Michael
Eisner from Disney they all use To Do Lists to stay productive. You could
have their faces and photos and you could have their stuff all over there.
Of course, if you really want to verify if they use a To Do List, but I’m
guessing that they do, so that’s one event. You can take this anywhere.
Andrew: I’m looking at the chat box and Thomas in the chat box is saying,
“How do they even know that they really use surveys?” You showed me before
we got started that we checked this to make sure that we knew what we were
talking about and right here on the home page that you just clicked over
to, people can see that what surveytool.com did was they found a case study
where Domino’s Pizza talked about how they used surveys, and Survey Tool is
showing a case study, they’re citing the source, they’re not saying they’re
the source, they’re showing it.Dane: If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you see a link to Ann
Arbor’s News Paper Magazine, so you know watch CNN, watch CNBC, watch New
York Times and then you see Domino’s Pizza, taste study shows up there.
That’s how they found this. Just Google search around for your concept. If
you’re selling a concept like surveys, it’s really pretty easy to find.
Whatever concept you’re selling, there’s probably already a big brand doing
that similar concept somewhere and you can put that on your page.
Andrew: Thomas is saying, “Is it legal to copy that information?” They’re
not copying it, they’re just reporting it as a case study and then they’re
linking to it as far as I’ve been able to see.
Dane: Yeah. This is not illegal because (?) scroll the page (?) it may
have lagged a little, but see hear they’re citing the source with a link to
the original article. They’re not trying to make it their own and it
doesn’t need to be your own to be powerful. They’re just citing a source
like every single PhD does when they write books. They have plenty of
sources they include and then they just site them. That’s what they’re
doing here.
Andrew: OK. I know you have another example ready to go there.
Dane: Yep. The next one is you can use quotes from famous people. If you
click on this link you’ll see a video, it’s a 30 minute video I used to
sell my recruiting website software that helps companies really effectively
recruit real estate agents using the Internet. At the beginning of the
video I wanted to add a lot of authority and credibility to my cause.
So I used a quote by Charles Darwin who, everybody should know who Charles
Darwin is, but here’s this quote, “It’s not the strongest of the species
that survives nor the smartest, but the ones that are most adaptable to
change.” Then I go on in the video and say, “That has me worried because
brokers are not adapting to the changes on the Internet.”
Now in the very first part of the video this is amazing, it creates
tremendous authority, it creates credibility, and also sets the stage for
me to present a solution that will help them change. If I was to just go
out and say, “Hey, you know what? You’re going to be in trouble if you
don’t adapt to changes on the Internet.” Versus using Charles Darwin, they
can’t argue with Charles Darwin. It’s like accepted as fact when I say it
from Charles Darwin, but when I say it from my own lips then it’s not as
powerful. It’s much more than just adding credibility, it’s actually also
letting a third party state my point for me so I don’t have too. Any
thoughts there, Andrew?
Andrew: No. I’m eager to see the next page, which I know is the one I use
to sell this course.
Dane: Right. So, if we go to the copywriting page and I’ll wait for it to load.
Andrew: I’ll let you know when it’s coming. When it’s done, it’s still
coming up, all right, it’s there.
Dane: So here you see, learn the copywriting system that Dane uses to
sell to clients like Remax, (?), Century 21, and Coldwell Banker. He’s got
it right by the Call to Action button, which is great. This is how you
added it to the course, which you guys all signed up for.
Andrew: You know what you helped me do and studying this has helped me do,
is figure out how can I add credibility, or how can I show credibility to a
course that I haven’t even created. When I created that landing page, there
was no course yet. I couldn’t say, that these major brands took the course
or sent their people to the course, but I still wanted to show that idea
was credible and that there are good logos that I could associate with
those ideas, how do I do it?
So, instead of saying these are the people that took the course, I’d say,
these are the people who Dane has used to sell to, using the ideas that
you’re going to learn. I’ve learned there are lots of different ways to do
this and I shouldn’t feel just because a product is new that I’m locked out
of this major selling point, which is credibility.
Dane: Exactly. You can do this no matter what your position is, it’s only
your imagination.
Andrew: We have one more from the audience for this topic.
Dane: Before we do, just a random idea to get your juices flowing. I just
made this up on the fly, but if you’re selling an e-course on anything
that’s going to help someone do something that hopefully benefits them, but
a quote by Benjamin Franklin and include his photo below your Buy button
and one of his quotes I always remember is, “An investment knowledge always
pays the best dividends.” You have Benjamin Franklin, you have his photo,
you have it by the Buy button, now the person’s really going to feel like
they are disagreeing with Benjamin Franklin by not buying your product, in
a way.
Andrew: OK. All right. Let’s take a look at bidsketch.com, B-I-D-S-K-E-T-CH.
Dane: It looks like they’re following a really good tried and true
formula here. I don’t see any credibility indicators above the fold. You
want to add those. You’ve got quite a bit of space here, which you could
squeeze this up and then you could squeeze the rest of this up and then you
could add the credibility indicators below these for (??) managing your
clients, automate your proposal process, better communicate for online
sharing, increase profits and win more proposals. Andrew: Logos of maybe some of the agencies that have used Bidsketch or
some of the companies that have worked with it.
Dane: Yep. The Bidsketch customers are sending proposals to companies.
You could even use the companies that are receiving your proposals.
Andrew: Right.
Dane: There’s so many interesting ways to do this.
Andrew: I’ve noticed when a new company gets funded if it needs to have
credibility indicators if it needs to have some logos on their site, they
go back to their investors and say, “Can you please give access to our
program to all of your portfolio companies and the ones that actually use
it send us their logo?”
“For the ones we sign up let us use their logo.” It seems they instantly
day one have them and I used to think you had to wait years in order to get
those.
OK. While you go back to the document Sonny (??) in the audience is saying,
“Will this apply to direct mail and that brings up email and other
channels”.
Do these techniques apply to beyond landing pages and beyond home pages?
Dane: Absolutely. The Sears brothers were kind of the inventors of split
testing, I believe. They were back in the 1800s, I think.
I don’t know my dates. There are probably a few historians that could call
me out on being incorrect here. I know that Sears set the stage for the
mail order catalogues to split test.
If you’re sending a mail order catalogue, you would use the respected
brands and authorities of that product in your catalogue to help sell their
product. It would have worked in the 1900s just like it would have today.
Andrew: OK. Wow we’re really behind schedule so I’m going to try to not ask
too many questions so you can move on here with the next one. What’s number
five?
Dane: Yeah, let’s limit customer examples to the very end so we can to
all the content for everyone’s time sake.
Andrew: OK.
Dane: We’ll do examples at the end. Five, social proof. This is different
than borrowing credibility. In social proof you want to show people are
actually using your stuff and signing up.37 Signals are famous for this. Basecamp HQ they have, “Millions of people
use Basecamp.”
(??). I use it on my products. “Join the crowd with a number of files
stored in the company’s registered.” On the aweber.com order page I’ll pull
this up.
On the right-hand side, while I’m filling out my credit card it shows on
the right-hand side who is joining AWeber. John one minute ago. Rita three
minutes ago.
Alex five minutes ago. Marissa eight minutes ago. As I’m signing up I’m,
“Man people are really signing up and using this product”.
You want to add social proof to your site and show the statistics behind
it.
Andrew: Can you show your website? When we did a dry run of this, there’s
something really interesting about the way you did it that I think is worth
pointing out to people.
Dane: OK.
Andrew: Let’s take a look at that site. Here goes pipeline.com. I’ll tell
you when it comes up. It’s still loading and now I see it OK.
Dane: Here you see, “Join the crowd. 75 offices use PipeLine. 600,000
contracts submitted. 42,000 deals closed.”
This always intimidated me to have this on the site because I thought I had
to have some sort of live feed pulling in. Finally I just said, screw it.
It’s just HTML and every once in a while, once every couple months we all
get in and see the new numbers. Upload these numbers and publish this page
to the website that’s all we’re doing to show our numbers.
You can do it easily.
Andrew: OK. I wanted to point one other thing out but that’s before you
move away from this page so leave it on here please for a moment.
That’s really reassuring because when you show me AWeber and I see how
automated their system is where it can tell me three minutes ago that
somebody joined, that feels like a great idea but I’m a little concerned
that maybe I couldn’t do that.
I couldn’t develop it into the site fast enough. Maybe I don’t have people
every three minutes joining. I like this idea because everyone has numbers
of customers. Everyone has social proof like this that they could highlight
and it’s easy to add.The other thing I want to point out if anyone has been noticing the
headlines change on this page or maybe don’t match up with what you showed
earlier. They keep changing because you’re using AB testing constantly.
One of the issues we had is we were planning out this course we’d go to a
webpage, we’d see an element we wanted to highlight and then we’d come back
and it was gone. People use AB testing nonstop.
I’ll let you go back and while that page is loading somebody earlier asked,
“What do you use for AB testing?” Maybe now is a quick time to just mention
that resource.
Dane: visualwebsiteoptimizer.com.
Andrew: OK. If they wanted to do AB testing the way you do and test out
some of your ideas that is a good site to use. OK.
Dane: If you want to look more into these examples when you get it into
PDF you can, we’ll just stick with those two for the sake of time. Some
rules here, never stop selling social proof. Let social proof bleed into
everything you do to make a sale. You never stop selling and if you see
you’re on the sign up page for base camp, this is the page, when you sign
up for base camp, they’re still selling you on social proof, right here on
the right-hand side, 7,000 users, 1,000’s sign-up every week. Even on the
sign-up page so, never stop selling your social proof.
Andrew: OK. I’ll leave out the user website so you can move on to the next
one.
Dane: All right. Six is testimonials. This is proof that your product
works in your customers own words. You have the power of credibility where
you’re tying your company to image (?) brands. You have social proof where
people are actually signing up and using the product, and you got
testimonials, which is proof that your product works in your customers own
words. The formula for testimonials is, the specific end result are
benefits that the customer got in a specific period of time, plus the
accompanied feeling they have with the person’s name along with their stats
about their business or company.
Now the strict examples of this on Paperless Pipeline is, this is a
testimonial, “The specific end result is I’ve saved $200 per month in file
folder savings” that’s a specific benefit. “It took three days to get
implemented” that’s the specific time frame. “I recruited my first agent in
a month as a result” which is another benefit within a time frame. “I can
now be home with my baby son and review files” which is sort of an
accompanied feeling, “And the freedom feels incredible” again with the
accompanied feeling followed by the broker’s name plus their stats in the
top ten Remax in the world of 200 agents.(?) you do the testimonials. Now real important rules, don’t use
testimonials word for word as folks tell you or send them in. Reorder the
biggest benefit to be at the top of the testimonial, bold it and then put
the rest of the testimonial below it. You can see an excellent example of
putting the biggest benefit in action on this page here, let me know when
this loads.
Andrew: This one’s taking awhile . . . I see it now, OK.
Dane: You see all these, this is selling some sort of chiropractic
marketing system and the biggest benefit, first day up and running, you see
the new patient bolded, “Reactivated two patients who hadn’t been in since
2005” bolded. “This program is tremendous” biggest benefit here bolded. So
this is an excellent example and I’ve included the link in the PDF, you see
how great testimonials work. Now for me testimonials on websites are not
nearly powerful as an e-mail.
So here’s a marketing tip: I’ll send an e-mail out with one person’s
testimonial and a sign up link to users who have not bought yet. So if
you’re using premium based software and you got a 10% buy and 90% who
don’t, you got 90% of the people you can drip out a testimonial to them of
a customer who decided to buy your product. This would be reason number
6,372 do to (?) generation on your websites.
Andrew: Yeah. I keep seeing the power of (?) and that’s something people
kept asking about before we started the course, they said, “Make sure to
mention how these ideas work in an email.” I thought that was innovative
how you take a testimonial that someone sent you, you rearrange it and get
their OK on it and you rearrange it the way you described it on there and
then what you do is just email out to your users and you say, “Here, it’s
not me telling you why you should buy this product, here’s an actual user
like you who’s given me this feedback.” That’s incredibly powerful and I
didn’t know that you did that.
Dane: You can do it without being pushy too. You push the testimonial out
and you’re like if you’re still kind of . . . and then below testimonial,
you’re like if you’re still at all interested in benefiting from our
product, click here to try it out. Now you’re not being pushy when you send
those out and you can really do it with a lot of class.
I found folks are more likely to read testimonials than just one
testimonial by itself. One testimonial at a time and they’re scattered all
throughout your sales page. If testimonials are all stacked among five or
ten testimonials all in one section, people will gloss over it. You see
testimonials and people are like, “Oh, here’s what they are going to try
and sell me.” So, scatter them and surprise them throughout the site. If
people have no idea who the person is on the testimonial, it doesn’t really
have nearly as much of an impact, so you better make it damn good with
benefits.Remember to find some authoritative or related fact on them. For example,
one of my testimonials is, “Here’s why the number one Agent in Texas is
excited,” and then I follow with the testimonial. If it wasn’t the number
one agent in Texas, you could say, “Here’s why a multiple, $1 million
producer is excited,” and it’s pretty easy to be a multiple, $1 million
producer, you just sell like 20 homes in your lifetime and you’re a
multiple $1 million producer.
You can be creative with this, it doesn’t have to be number one like here,
but then you would follow with testimonial all that. You could put directly
below their names something like, “This person is the head of the
Associated Realtors” or “This person is a $500,000 project manager with a
budget of $500,000.” So they can have some sort of real table fact on there
if the name means nothing to the person.
Fifth, spread testimonials out all over your website. You could put a
testimonial for every feature. On the sign-up page, below the click to
register button. Never stop selling your testimonials. Every single page
should have testimonial on it.
For Huddle, the examples here, there are three testimonials. Just a few
seconds to load, Andrew. Let me know.
Andrew: Yes. It’s still not coming in on one of my screens. I’m watching it
on two screens to make sure that everything is coming in OK. All right.
Yes. I don’t see the main image, but I do see everything else.
Dane: OK. Here’s the testimonials. They don’t even have a headline up
top. Huddle has three testimonials on the top here. Notice the
testimonials: Huddle allows our basketball team to coach smarter. We have
used other systems out there, Huddle is the most user-friendly. This
testimonial is talking about Huddle being the most user-friendly.
The next testimonial is: Each time I have called the support team,
they have answered on the first or second ring. Their staff is
knowledgeable and answered my question. That was probably another
frustration that people have with competing products in this industry. This
testimonial is on the benefits of support.
This testimonial: From DVD theme protection to unlimited coaching
stations. This is probably another question. Coaches are like, “Well, how
many coaching stations can I have for this software?” So they include that.
These are not all three testimonials saying the same thing. “Oh, Huddle’s
amazing. Huddles highly recommended. I would recommend Huddle to my
friends.”
Those don’t really say anything. You want it to have a specific benefit.
These testimonials are very strategic and they are very different. This is
very purposeful stuff here. This is not done on accident by any means.The next is Paperless Pipeline. I have to scroll up and down a lot, so I’m
not going to show that.
Andrew: Let’s take just a moment. All right, there it loaded. OK.
Dane: Paperless Pipeline, you can see that on your own time. You’ll see
six or seven testimonials. They are all spread throughout the site. Every
single testimonial is touting a different benefit. One testimonial is like,
“This was so easy to get started.” Another testimonial is like, “This is so
much time savings.” Another testimonial is, “This has so much cost
savings.” Another testimonial is like, “This is so good for recruiting.”
I have all these testimonials saying a specific different thing with
objections that people have about this niche of software. You can see that
on your own time. I’m clicking that link. I had a real click study. I had a
237% increase in my conversions by adding a testimonial to the bottom of a
recapture page. Here you see, the lead capture page: Does your contact
database do this? I’ll scroll down to the bottom. Let me know when it
queues, Andrew.
Andrew: OK. It’s there.
Dane: You see here: See why the number one agent in Texas is excited.
I’m doing pre-marketing for a product that doesn’t even exist yet. You see
here join the free and private early launch. Remember, I always say, “Start
your marketing before your product is finished. Everybody and their mom,
built their product and then they finally started marketing.
I’m always marketing before I even create the product. Here, this is a page
on [cuts out]. You can see the whole page when you get this PDF report.
I’ve got this, “See why the number one agent in Texas is excited.” The
number one agent is a friend of mine through some email marketing messages
that I sent him. We just started talking one day. I called him up and I
showed him this and I told him about the concept and the said, “You know
what? Most agents don’t get over the hump to-do things. This reminder
system just might be the ticket to their success. I am excited to be one of
the first to use this.”
You see? He’s not actually a testimonial of someone using the product.
Andrew: Yes. He’s saying he’s excited to be one of the first people to use
it.
Dane: Yes. Right.
Andrew: Which I thought was very clever. I keep hearing, especially in the
lean start-up movement that you need to market first and then build your
product. You build your product based on the feedback you’re getting from
marketing. It’s easier to adjust your marketing than it is to scrap your
product and redo it. I didn’t know how using test elements like quotes without fudging them. Here, I can see a very clear way to do it.
You get someone who is not trying the product or not claiming to love the
product, yet it is just like the person who is looking at the planning,
excited to try it. Yes. OK. I see now you are scrolling down to the next
point.
Dane: All right, so, number 7 of 10 is a clear call to take action. I
didn’t just do 10 checklist items because I thought it was a cute number.
It just turned out to be 10. This is number seven; clear call to take
action. Tell the customer to do something, such as asking for money,
without guilt. Just from a mindset perspective, if you have a product and
you really think your product will benefit that customer, you are doing a
disservice to the world if you don’t do everything in your power to get
their money so you can help them solve their problem.
So your ability to not ask for money, if you have those hiccups, is
actually hurting the world because you’re not able to get more customers
that you can solve the problems for. So really, ask for money without
guilt. It’s such an important thing.
And the rules for this is for freemium software, make your call to action
the end result of what your customer wants to do, OK? This is real easy
change that a lot of you guys can make, and I saw a lot of your call-toaction buttons, need a lot of work on the two, three, or four that I looked
out.
So instead of the call to action, create an account, or register for free,
for split testing software. You might have your button say ‘Create an A/B
split test.’ This will replace the register button. So you fill out the
firm, and then it wouldn’t say ‘Create account,’ it would say, ‘Create my
first A/B split test’ at the bottom.
For transaction management software, you might have it say, ‘Create a
transaction,’ instead of ‘Create an account.’
For project management, you might say, ‘Create a trial project,’ as opposed
to ‘Register for an account.’ It works really well; it’s worked for my
tests.
And an extra buy button – ‘Add to cart’ seems to be the best, and it seems
to test the best for most marketers. Also, and I think the reason ‘Add to
cart’ works so well, is because it’s so common among like really reputable
companies like Amazon. And usually, if you can leverage the same color as
their ‘Add to cart’ button and send some of the same text from Amazon, you
really lend yourself a lot of borrowed credibility.
Another call to action could be extremely descriptive, such as just a blue
link that says, ‘Click here to create your recruiting system and start
recruiting agents,’ as opposed to ‘Click here to get started;’ you would just say this.
Some examples here is vertical response, if you’ll see on their call-toaction page, if you click over that you’ll see they have the nice, ‘Try it
Free’ button. Let me know when you see that, Andrew.
Andrew: It’s taking me a while.
Dane: See that?
Andrew: Yeah, I see it up on my screen.
Dane: I’ll show just that one, and maybe there’s one that’s pretty good.
Andrew: That was a very clear call to action.
Dane: Yep. ‘Try it Free.’ BaseCamp HQ, you can see theirs if you click on
that link. Paperless [??], you’ll see my ‘Try it out’ button, big and
green. A ‘Try it out’ test is far over on ‘Create an account.’ ‘Try it out’
works so well.
Here’s a link to back pain and inversion tables, and this is a sales page
that sells back pain inversion tables. And instead of scrolling through the
entire page, you get to [TD]. I thought I’d show you this call to action
here. Two things to note on this call to action: there’s an ‘Add to
cart’ button; there’s a blue link; there’s a ‘To order by phone,’ with a
person’s name that’s, like, ready to talk to you.
But then there’s also, ‘How to reserve your HBI Premium Inversion Table.’
Step 1: Select your country. Step 2: Click ‘Add to cart.’ The more
descriptive you can be in telling your customer how to order, the less
anxiety they will have, and the more likely your conversions will go up.
Now this could be because back pain inversion tables would be for a market
for 40- to 50-year-olds, and they need a few more instructions. But you are
not insulting anyone’s intelligence by adding further instructions on how
to order. The people that don’t need the instructions will skip over it;
and the people that it will use it.
I mean, think about how obvious it could be for some of to just ‘Select a
country,’ and then click, ‘Add to cart,’ but they still added those steps.
Andrew: Here, let me – I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Dane: Well, you first.
Andrew: Sorry, I’m just looking at some of the questions here as they’re
coming in, and since you’re talking about the different elements of this
sales process, Thomas in the audience was asking about, ‘What happens if
you don’t have a fixed price, or if you’re testing multiple prices? How do you show them in that top section of the form?’
Dane: Split testing software?
Andrew: So you split test it, and you show the price up on top, and adjust
the price. I’ll show you what I’ve been doing, and it’s based on one of the
past interviews that I did on Mixergy. This was with Will Schroeder, and he
said, ‘Break up the process into two steps. The first step is, have people
either ‘Add to cart’ or ‘Sign up,’ or whatever you want to call it. And the
second step is where they see the price and decide whether to buy it.’
And the reason he said it is, he said, ‘You want to know whether people are
not buying because they’re not interested in the product, or not buying
because the price isn’t right for them.’ And if you break it up, you can do
that. And also, if you break it up, you can test pricing without
influencing the rest of the process. So I’ll leave it out there as the
second option for Thomas. And if you guys have seen my forms, you now know
why I do it. I do it because of the interviews and what I’ve learned in my
past interviews.
Dane: Awesome, very good.
Andrew: Cool. And it looks like both those answers were good for Thomas.
Thanks for the feedback, Thomas.
Dane: Step 8 of 10 is: Reverse all risk. And here’s where you
think, you’re thinking guarantees (but it’s not just guarantees). What
you’re really doing is you’re reducing fear. To look like a fool is one of
the biggest fears we humans have. By purchasing a product that turns out to
suck, a person thinks they will look like a fool. So when people buy
products, they do not just consider themselves, they wonder what their
friends, their neighbors, their co-workers, and their family will think of
them while they are pulling out their credit card.
You go buy that nice sports car, you’re not just thinking about yourself.
You buy this product to improve your business, you’re not just thinking
about yourself, you’re thinking about maybe how your friends might envy you
as your business grows. Know that people do not just consider themselves
when they pull out their card and you want to reverse all risk so you can
reduce these fears.
The formula for this in a nutshell is if you don’t love product name, call
or email us and we’ll refund every penny immediately. Some rules for this
is the more outrageous your guarantee the better. Not just a refund, but
double your money back. I use the double your money back guarantee and I’ve
never had anyone ask for double their money back. You don’t just say double
your money back if you’re not happy. You would say, if this product doesn’t
add $10,000 to you business within 12 months and you follow our action
steps, we’ll give double your money back.People will not ask for double their money back. It just doesn’t happen. So
use it. The numbers behind refunds is that less than 5% of people will ask
for a refund. It’s far less than 5%, I’ve had maybe three people in my
entire life of hundreds and hundreds of clients ask for a refund and it
wasn’t a double your money refund. They just wanted their money back, they
didn’t even want double. The less than 5% refund, if at all and guarantees
so, if less than 5% refund and guarantees can double or triple your sales
and this is a fairly consistent metric across any industry. Just do the
math, it’s very well worth it to add guarantees.
You know what? A good guarantee can sometimes sell the product alone with
nothing else. So you try to make your guarantee sell the product all by
itself and you know the bonus tip? You can tie the guarantee to the result
or the main benefit itself for the [club] or the thing that protects your
car. Their guarantee was amazing and their company exploded their club.
We’ll pay $500 towards your car insurance if your car gets stolen. Now
that’s an amazing guarantee, right, Andrew?
Andrew: Yeah. I remember that one.
Dane: Domino’s, their company was really with the pizza. Hot, fresh pizza
delivered or it was free. A solid guarantee can sometimes sell a company
all by itself. So challenge yourself to really try to write that kind of a
guarantee. For example, on the book, “Round Table”, you can see all the (?)
that’s kind of important to see (?) and Andrew let’s . . .
Andrew: (?) is still taking time, okay it looks like you’re scrolling,
right? I’ll let you know when it stops scrolling too . . . and still
scrolling. So, is this your website?
Dane: Yep.
Andrew: While it’s still working, okay there it goes, I was going to ask:
what is it? What is the product?
Dane: The product is a monthly interview, just like yours, Andrew, except
I do one interview a month and I charge $55 a month for one interview.
Andrew: You charge $55 a month for one interview?
Dane: Yep.
Andrew: That’s impressive. OK.
Dane: So this is the guarantee, rock, solid double your money back
guarantee; if after 12 months you don’t get at least one idea that adds
$10,000 to your company, I will write you a check for double your money
back no questions asked. I’ve never offered a double your money back
guarantee before, and I wouldn’t offer this ridiculous guarantee if I
wasn’t a 100% confident in what it will do for you. Your worse case scenario is to double your money. Your best case scenario is to 20x return
on your money. This is a no brainier.
Andrew: Wow. OK. You actually mail CDs to people?
Dane: Yep.
Andrew: So you can even make a better than money back guarantee by saying,
keep the CDs and I’ll give you your money back and that’s still better than
a money back guarantee, but you decided to go even further.
Dane: (?) add what you said, that’s a great idea.
Andrew: Thanks. Let’s take a look at some of the other examples that are
still scrolling up on my screen here.
Dane: (?)
Andrew: Let’s just take a moment, now go for it.
Dane: Thank you. So for (?).com (?) said he did not use this guarantee,
but through a friend of a friend actually, David Saint, who works with
Andrew was going to start working with Andrew Warner hopefully, I hope I’m
allowed to say that Andrew?
Andrew: Yep.
Dane: So, he tried to get (?) to use the guarantee, you’ll make a $1,000
on the side or I’ll be your first client. That is probably one of my
favorite guarantees that I’ve heard in a long time. Because if I was really
nervous about not being able to do this and this amazing guy who was a Wall
Street, Forbes, published author or whatever said this to me, it would be
enough to push me, just the guarantee alone.
Andrew: One of his customers, Jesse again in the chat-room, he’s saying (?)
used this same guarantee as the one Dane just showed. Jesse, did he use the
double your money back guarantee or did he just use the one that David
asked him to try. Let me know. Oh, the double, so for [inaudible] did use
the ‘I’ll double your money back guarantee,’ almost word for word he used
it, okay. [inaudible] now is a blogger for the New York Times and he also
is, as you were saying, a New York Times bestselling author and Wall Street
Journal best selling author. [inaudible] using those credibility indicators
with him too.
Dane: Exactly and so you see, it’s not just [inaudible]. The best people
in the world use this stuff, and so here’s a guarantee that sold tens of
millions of [inaudible) self published book on self improvement. This
guarantee is amazing. Here it is. Try this book or product, 100% my risk.
If it doesn’t immediately solve every problem you’re now facing, free your
mind from worry forever, and let you walk two inches taller, then send it back and every penny of your purchase will be returned.
Andrew: So if I’m not so happy or walk two inches taller, I get a refund.
Dane: Yep.
Andrew: All right.
Dane: Eugene Schwartz [SP] wrote this. Eugene Schwartz wrote this and his
guarantees bordered on outrageous and, of course, he had outrageous sales
as a result. Another guarantee [inaudible].
Andrew: That is why I’m willing to lift all of the risk off of your
shoulders and put it firmly onto mine with an ironclad 60 day money back
guarantee [inaudible] product and then [inaudible] pricing paid, you can
just see a really standard 30 day money back guarantee.
Dane: Uh-huh. Moving on to price anchoring.
Andrew: I love this one. This one is one I’ve been using ever since you
showed it to me and it’s been incredible.
Dane: So price anchoring is where you make your price seem like a
bargain. This is what Steve Jobs did at the beginning of his video. He said
tablets cost a thousand dollars, bam, line through it. I passed five
hundred. If you had just came and said $500 for the iPad, ‘oh, I’m going to
pay a couple hundred bucks more for an iPad that’s just basically a bigger
iPhone?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s basically better than a tablet, but half the
price.’ Think about if Steve Jobs had compared it, ‘Look it’s just an
iPhone but it’s a little bigger,’ versus tablet, thousand to five hundred,
very strategic what he did there. So Robert Cialdini, look him up if you
don’t know who he is. He wrote a book called “Psychology, The Influence of
Persuasion”.
Andrew: “Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion”, I think.
Dane: He’s a world renowned psychologist and one of his principles is
called the Contrast Principle, and basically the Contrast Principle is
this, if you put your hand in warm water, then you put your hand in cold
water, the cold water feels much colder than if you just put your hand in
the cold water to begin with. It also affects the way you perceive the
difference between two things when they are presented one after another, so
for instance, you pick up a light two pound weight, then you pick up a ten
pound weight, the ten pound weight will feel much heavier than if you just
picked up the ten pound weight alone and the same principle works with
pricing.
So here’s a number of ways how to do it. You can link or tie your products
price back to a physical product in a similar category. You can say ‘look,
if you did this by yourself without my product, this is probably what it would cost you. If you hire me, one on one, what you’d have to pay,’ and
here’s an example of the three above. Do you want me to show this example
or not?
Andrew: Yeah. Let’s take a look at that. I think these concrete examples
really help. While that’s loading, I’ll tell you one of the first times
that I used this was Noah and I were trying the minimum viable product to
see if action videos made sense for the audience and the way that I offered
it, we offered it for just $14 bucks.
We just wanted to see if people would pay anything for it, and the way that
I used anchoring there was, I said ‘I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars
on people in the past who didn’t work out, so of course I’m willing to try
this $14 product,’ and that anchoring of the higher pricing, comparing it
to the lower price, I know that it worked because we got more sales for
that than we ever expected and as a result, I see Noah’s jumping into that
business, so I’ve tried it. It’s so easy. It’s just one line and it
reframed the whole price.
Dane: What was that line again, Andrew?
Andrew: I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on hiring the wrong people
in the past, so of course I’m willing to pay $14 for this product.
Essentially that’s what it was, $14 to know how to hire the right people
and get them started properly.
Dane: Does this screen show up for you?
Andrew: It is. Yeah, I see it here with your highlight.
Dane: All right. So let’s do a quick comparison. Last time I checked, the
Nordic Track would set you back over a thousand dollars and almost everyone
I know who bought one uses it as a clothes rack within a few weeks anyway,
or you could easily pay $50 to $75 bucks per month for a gym membership
you’ll probably go to a few times, but they were $500 per year. So this is
the physical product comparison.
This is if you have to do it on your own or without my product, what it
would cost you, or you could hire a personal trainer like myself to work
with you. This is if you had to hire me one on one. I currently charge a
minimum of $50 for an hour of personal training. Normally my clients work
out three times a week with me, so that’s $600 per month. This way, I
figure at the bare bones minimum, you’re getting hundreds and hundreds of
dollars worth of my expertise training at your disposal in my program,
we’re not going to charge you anywhere near the [??] minimum hourly rate,
oh what a generous guy. After total investment for the entire Get Fit While
You Sit program for just $29.95.
That’s less than one month’s membership to any gym without the hassles.
You’ll never have to search for a parking space, wait for someone to get off the machine you want, change clothes, shower etcetera. Plus [??] give
you a lifetime guarantee, that’s right, I’ll tell you about that in a
moment. So this is price anchoring at its best.
Andrew: So it’s no longer $29.95 for this product, it’s what a bargain
compared to the $1000 Nordic Track, which is kind of a clothing rack
anyway, or it’s compared to the hundreds or dollars you pay for personal
one-on-one training, or to the gym that you’ll never use, really well done
anchoring.
Dane: Right and [??] creator imagine [??] pay someone to do that on their
own, [??] probably on your page. So there’s also the dollar amount you gain
by buying this you’re going to get $10,000 more it makes $55 a month audio
serious that I do well worth it.
You can do one additional deal that will bring you if you buy, whatever it
is you’re selling, you lose X dollars by not buying this, and you can just
use X dollars [??] this will be the phantom money that you gain. So that
the money that you gain is actually money that you lose by not taking
action is kind of how that would work. And then also your time is worth X
dollars per hour.
Let’s say, Andrew, your time is worth $500 per hour when you’re really
productive, you take three hours per month that’s $1500 you’re going to be
saving when you work with my coaching program, my products, my services or
whatever.
So it’s real easy to sell 100, 200 bucks a month. For my recruiting
website, I price anchor, their time is worth $250, $500 bucks an hour so if
they just save one hour a month they’ve paid for the product alone and that
doesn’t include any of the benefits they get.
Andrew: So I’ve actually interviewed web app makers, who’ve told me that,
of course the $50 a month that they charge for their software, their web
based software isn’t that much for businesses. Businesses are used to
paying $50, and they’ll tell me, if a business saves just one deal, they’ll
make thousands of dollars which will make the $50 seem insignificant and
they explain this as a reason why they charge, and why they think others
should charge.
But I never see it on their sales pages, I never see it on their homepages,
they just kind of expect the customer to come to that conclusion on his
own. And I wonder if they’d be willing to test that out. I wonder if they’d
be willing to take some copywriting techniques and apply them to their
business the way that they would take some programming techniques and try
them out.
Dane: One of the funny things about doing this copy writing courses, I
realized how many things I’m missing in my various different products. So I
would say, oh man, you really need price anchoring, and I’m like, well, crap I’m not even doing it over here.
So I’m actually going to use the same techniques in my business right after
I get done teaching it. And I’m definitely going to be using price
anchoring on [??] Pipeline.
I do it a little bit with testimonials, but I definitely want to just talk
about different situational things. Like, you have to drive to the office
to go get a piece of paperwork, or you have to leave you family if there’s
snow in the driveway, you have to shovel. All to give an agent piece of
paperwork and you could have just logged into the pipeline.
Now how much time did you even save there. Yes, I definitely need to do
more price anchoring on my [??] products. But I do a couple of them, like
the more you stack, certainly doesn’t hurt anything. Now don’t worry about
your page being too long. The longer the copy, typically if it’s clear, the
more stuff you’re going to sell. Do you think that the highest paid
copywriter [??] the last one here…
Andrew: Actually, before you go into that one, Matt Morales asked earlier,
will the guaranteed or the better than money back guarantee that you
described earlier. Would that apply to his company which is a B2B company,
it’s actually called SpeakerText.com? So do these ideas apply and how about
that one specifically the double your money back guarantee, or the better
than money back guarantee, would that apply to a business to business web
site?
Dane: Yes, absolutely. For SpeakerText, what’s the frustration people
have with their transcriptions. If you’ve used other transcription services
before, what has sucked about them. Find out what that is, and then turn
that into a guarantee. And then make your guarantee if more than 5% of
words have an error, we’ll refund the cost, so you’re guaranteed nearly
perfect work, something like that.
Andrew: You know what I’ve seen work for me when people come to me for
business-to-business offers.
Dane: This is a really good website by the way.
Andrew: It is a really well done landing page. For me it’s not so much
double your money back guarantee because their prices are pretty small
compared to what the benefits that I get, it’s the effort that’s and issue
and often what they’ll do is they’ll say, Andrew, if you’re not happy with
this I will personally go into your website and strip out my code and add
my competitor’s code back the way that you like it.
And that kind of thing always works for me because I know what I have is
money when it comes to this stuff. How much is two bucks a minute for a
transcription? That’s not much at all. But what I don’t have is time and I
don’t have the ability to go in and figure out how to undo what we just did together. And when they offer that, that is incredibly helpful.
Dane: That’s amazing. I love that. That’s a really good example.
Andrew: And Antonio in the audience is saying, “Business [??] works because
you still are selling to people.” So all of these techniques still will
work because they apply to people. OK. Finally, you were going into your
tenth point, which is Frequently Asked Questions.
Dane: Which is one of the most important parts of a sales [??]. You can
boost your conversions by as much as 85% with an FAQ. The rules for this
are to ask the good questions that create a sale. Even extreme questions
like, “Why should I trust you?” or, “What’s in it for you?” they are good
questions to ask because if you see those on a site, people are going to
read them. They are questions that people will stop and read.
Also consider questions that may address some pessimists. Ask and answer
question that you yourself are afraid to answer. An example would be, “Why
should I pick you over the competition?” Not only do you want to write this
out and answer it for yourself so you’re just more confident and clear
about where you fit in against your competition, but it also helps you from
a confidence standpoint as well. It helps your customers decide.
So what an FAQ does is it addresses distrust, it also acknowledges concerns
and then by that, eliminates objections, and it’s also that you are
speaking their language. It is highly empathetic. We have plenty of
examples here for you. If you go to the Swoopbowl [sp?] [??].
Andrew: Just wait for the page to finish scrolling. Sorry, it looks like
it’s working. There it is.
Dane: OK. So Swoopbowl manual, they are selling an eBook on how to win on
Swoopbowl. He is a good friend of mine, so he shares all of his split tests
with me. Swoopbowl is of course closed down now so the business isn’t worth
anything, but he was never trying to make it be [??]. This was all just a
playground for him to test and measure conversions. So when he added and
FAQ, it increased his conversions from 85% by adding a FAQ right below the
‘Buy’ button.
So right below the ‘Buy’ button it says “Answers to Common Questions about
the Swoopbowl Manual.” The questions were gathered as e-mails over time
that people would send in and he took the most popular questions like, “Can
you guarantee I’ll win every auction of Swoopbowl if I buy your eBook?” or,
“If you’re so good at winning on Swoopbowl, how come you’re telling us
everything you know? Why don’t you just keep winning all by yourself?”
He answered these questions and his sales went from three people out of
every hundred that came to his website would buy, after he added his FAQ,
five of every hundred people that came to his website would buy an e-book
simply by adding this FAQ to his site. For another example, for the book “A Round Table,” that $55 a month thing, I am testing a free CD offer with
some pay-per-click they come to this page and they can get a free CD for
$4.95 shipping and handling.
I ask the questions on the page like, “Why are you giving away this CD
free? What’s in it for you?” And I also ask the question, “Who are you and
why should I trust you?” because I get a lot of costumers that have never
heard of me before that land on this site from pay-per-click, so these are
the questions they are probably going to have on their minds. That is why I
ask them.
Andrew: That is the language you use, by the way? You actually say, “Who
are you and why should I trust you?” as one of the frequently asked
questions that you answer?
Dane: Yes.
Andrew: I like how conversational it is.
Dane: And they say, “Why are you giving a CD away for free? What’s in it
for you?” And I said, “You know what. It’s real simple. I don’t want to
prosper unless you prosper first. Take this CD and get great results with
it. I’m sure you are going to be happy and I know if you’re happy with this
CD you would probably like to learn from other great [??], so I’ll continue
to send you more amazing interviews one time per month so you can continue
to benefit, but only after you’ve seen how amazing this is and only after
you’ve prospered first.
Andrew: By the way, Dane, I’m looking at one comment here in the chat board
from someone who says that he is, “…upset that he came in late. This is
awesome.” I would read you his name but he did something that people who
come in late often do, his first name is A, his second name is B, and he
must have just typed in A@B.com as the e-mail address so that he could just
jump in.
But he is saying his name is Alvin. Hey Alvin. It’s good to see you. Excuse
me Alvin, if I called you out on what you did to jump into the course.
Thanks for coming in, and of course we are going to have a full recording
of this. I know a lot of people prefer to listen to the recording and to
have it to go through at their own time with the document that Dane is
going through here with you, so don’t worry. You are going to have
everything here.
Dane, I am really eager for people to see this because I fought you on
this. I said, “Dane, are you just trying to get 10 points here?” I
shouldn’t even admit this because a lot of what you use has helped me and I
still was skeptical and wanted to improve. I can’t wait for you to show
what the Frequently Asked Questions look like on a site because this isn’t
Frequently Asked Questions like the way you might add to a web app. This is
a little bit different.Dane: Do you want me to show you that page?
Andrew: Yeah. Let me see maybe one of yours or one of the examples. I bet
you were going to I just got a little excited the way that Alvin did.
Let’s give it a moment . . . and it’s up.
Dane: Just from a product creation standpoint if none of you guys has
started a business this is the easiest business in the world to start. It’s
also the most lifestyle free-based business. You interview a business one
time a month and sell it to other business owners in that same category.
This is how to recruit two talent agents a month without cold calling and
rejecting. This is my instant clarity headline.
“Afford broker’s shares for a step-by-step system and a free interview.”
The CD says you’re paying just 4.95 shipping and handling.
Then I sell the course and then you have the cart button over here. I’ll
scroll down. Let me know when you see this.
Andrew: Yep there it is.
Dane: (??)
Andrew: Let’s take a moment; sorry it looks like its still coming in. Now
we got it. OK.
Dane: OK. “How long does it take for my CD to arrive? Give us seven days
we are a smaller operation, not FedEx” with a smiley face. Here you say
they’re not even saying, “I’m this big impressive company. I’m just human
and am trying to help you.”
The next one, “Why are you giving this away free? “Why not charge more?”
“What’s in it for you?”
First, because I know if you love this interview, you’ll probably want to
learn some more brokers’ secrets. (??)”
Second, everyone (??) service called the Broker Roundtable where you can
broker your (??) and retain a profit. If you’re happy with this free CD
then I’d like to send you more (??) brokers have learned from.
Each month I give you a successful (??) each month. That way you can
continue to get mentored by the best brokers in the country.
I ask a question. What’s in it for you? Brokers come to this page and they
sign up. They buy. The next question, Who are you? Why should I trust you?(??)
Andrew: We’re starting to lose the audio a little bit. Basically you’re
showing the questions that they would probably ask and you’re answering
them in really casual ways so that it sounds like a real human. Not causal
but in a real human way.
You’re not making it sound like a big corporation that’s answering this
stuff. OK. It’s right under the submit button and it’s interesting because
I have noticed this a lot and I have used it but for some reason I still
didn’t pay attention to the fact that it’s under submit buttons.
Do you have time to look at maybe one more at Huddle?
Dane: Let’s let them look at Huddle on their own because it’s much better
to look with the SitePoint one.
Andrew: OK.
Dane: When you go to Huddle the first question on their sign up page is
great. Huddle charges an annual fee for their product and their first
question is, “Why should I pay an annual fee as opposed to paying up front
and just owning the system?”
I’m guessing Huddle selling this coaching software and they got this 55-
year-old used to paying for software one time. So they’re, “Man why do I
have to pay an annual fee every year as opposed to paying up front for the
system”.
They address that question right at the time right below the sign up page.
This is my favorite execute question ever.
Here is the SitePoint design business tip.
Andrew: OK. It’s still loading up on my screen. I wonder if we opened up so
many pages that it’s taking a lot longer for each new page to come up.
The reason that we are doing it is because people kept telling me over and
over, “Andrew we want to see examples. We want to know that these ideas
work for other sites and we also want to see how they work for other
sites.”
OK. As I was talking the page popped up and here it is.
Dane: This is my favorite thing in the world. Actually when I first got
started on the internet I wanted to start a web design business it was the
only thing I was really confident I could do.
Now I don’t have to do anything I just hire everything out and I understand
I just have to do marketing. At the time I wanted to do web design business so I actually bought this book back in the day.
Here it is it’s it web design business. This guy has a $10 million a year
web design business and he tells you how he built it and runs it like a
business.
It’s $247. (??) 17, 18 and they don’t have a lot of money. $247 is a lot of
money in this market but they are not shy about charging this amount.
Look at this over on the right-hand side. This execute question is
brilliant. $247 is it really worth it?
And right below it the answer, “Absolutely consider that landing just one
new client will pay for the kit four times over”.
Andrew: They’re anchoring within the frequently asked questions.
Dane: Exactly. It is a beautiful, beautiful question. I saw that and was,
“Yeah man it seems like a lot of money”. I was, “Wait, duh, no it’s not.
It’s totally fair.”
It kind of goes back to way back in the day us humans had to be told how to
value information.
What is $100 is actually less than $1 and we were just told that the lower
the dollar bill the higher the value from the time we were growing up. That
is what we would assume it was.
We were taught to value that dollar at that point and a $100 at that point.
Well, the same works with information. You’re told how to value stuff.
Andrew: Daniel in the audience is saying that the examples have been
awesome so far. I agree. It really helps to actually see the techniques
used on websites. And I’ll tell you, Daniel, what you’re going to see after
this, is as you look at other people’s sales pages you’re going to start to
notice these elements and you are going to laugh. The way that I did right
here with the frequently asked questions and the anchoring as the answer.
You’re going to start to see this and you are going to understand what’s
going on there and you are going to know what you want to bring back to
your website. So try it and let me know.
Dane: One of the things beyond the end, for implementing this
checklist…
Andrew: Let’s wait for the checklist to scroll up on the screen too. I’ll
tell you when I see it up on my screen. And it looks like, on one screen I
can see that you’ve highlighted, on the other one it’s still coming out a
little bit slow. And there it is, okay, so now I see the highlighted end
section. Dane: Okay, so the end, implementing the spec list. Here’s what I want
you to do. Open up a Google document and then follow along this checklist.
And create a sales letter for your product. Without any of your website
design in mind. Just follow along the checklist and put it all flowing down
into one single Google document. Plug it into your web design later. So,
when people actually try to write copy with their website design in mind.
It kind of stifles their salesmanship.
Andrew: So, just write it all flowing down one Google doc. Alright, did you
do the instant clarity headline, did you declare the problem, did you
present your solution, did you borrow credibility, did you do social proof,
did you add testimonials, did you do price anchoring, did you add risk
reversals, did you do an FAQ.
Just flow it all down on one page. Then, plug it into your website design
later so you can edit it there. That’s how you want to do it. And, then,
review your current marketing materials and sales pitches against this
checklist. Correct or add anything that’s missing. And that’s all I have to
say for the ending.
Dane: As some of you have seen this, I’ve scrolled it up. I didn’t want
you to see it until the end. I’m kind of excited about this and I’m kind of
hesitant to do it.
Andrew: This was, actually, you’re talking about the last section. Here’s
what happened. After the interview with Dane people emailed him and asked
for feedback and asked for help and, Dane, you were very good to actually
respond to, I think, every single person who has email I forwarded you
responded. These were heart-felt emails. A lot of them asked you for
feedback and help and I felt terrible, terrible sending it to you because I
know you’ve got a business to run. And at the same time I said, ‘I see what
they need, I see what they are looking for from you.’
Dane: I can’t say to somebody in my audience, you know, bugger off.
Saying he’s too busy, that he doesn’t want to. I know that you are going to
get a lot of feedback from people that are asking for help. And we try to
find a way to reduce it and this is the way that we came up with. So that
people who really needed it can do it, but, you can also get back and do
your business.
Andrew: And I should also say, Dane, you’re doing this, to the people in
the audience, Dane’s doing this for free. Because he believes in the
copywriting techniques that he’s using. He believes that you need to use
this. He knows that if you do use these ideas, it’s going to help you. He’s
not doing this because he is in the copywriting business. So, just keep
that in mind as you e-mail him afterwards for help and to ask for help.
He’s there because he’s an entrepreneur using it. I want to say, Dane, that
I want to be really fair with your time. So we came up with a way to do
that. Dane: Right, so like Andrew said, I put this check list together, all
three. This has all been kind of unconscious for me. With that said, the
hiring, if you wanted help, one-on-one help, this you would pay for. Buy I
do want to offer the one-on-one help. If you would want help implementing
this checklist, you could hire me personally to help you and space is
severely limited, because I have my own business to run. Some of you have
probably already read this, but, I’ll say it again, you know, I just love
helping entrepreneurs. It’s deeply fulfilling to me and that’s why I’m
here.
Andrew: So, how this one-on-one help is going to work, you get two 30-
minute one-on-one sessions with me Dane Maxwell, to personally help get
started and implement this checklist. You also get a different perspective
on your product or business, which is also nice.
Dane: Session 1, you don’t have to start with an empty blank page alone.
Let me help you get started. And I’ll help you get started with each
individual item on the checklist. We’ll get you instant clarity headline
started, we’ll get your block problems declarations started. We’ll get your
credibility borrowing, we’ll get the writing of your solution. We’ll get
that all started for you. So you’ve got something to work with and once
your juices are flowing in each area of the checklist. You’ll be able to
rocket through it on your own.
Andrew: And session 2 will be a few days or a week after session 1. When
you’ve completed that checklist we’ll visit again to revise, edit, and
finish your sales page. This is one of the reasons for using Google doc.
It’s great because we can share it and collaborate back and forth on that.
I’d just like to include a few thought, like, who’s going to be a good fit.
Tech start-ups, they really need this.
Guys who are engineers, who really don’t understand marketing, are really
missing a lot of money, and a lot of sales, and a lot of added impact to
the world of their products. Because they could be getting more people to
sign up. But they just understand more of the basic principles of good
salesmanship and marketing on a website. There is a tech start up really
need this, and as people currently anything online, if you are currently
selling anything online this would be helpful for you. I also think that if
anyone ever wants to make a living online, it’s also good to go through
with.
If you don’t have a product to sell, I’ll help you follow this check list
of already existing products you can learn. If you guys have a family
memorable or an uncle or aunt, or brother or sister that has some sort of
business or web site. Like a photographer, or something that we could do
this for. Then you go through this check list, and this has worked for a
photographer as easily for a software company.
What I want you to do is to work from this check list from the ground up
and learn it. So whenever you’re starting a new project or looking at a web site, you will instantly go, “Oh man they’re totally missing credibility
here.” Once you know it by your ABCs. That’s when you really start to get
greater with it.
The cost for the program, if you just want to know all the cost and all the
details, I set up an e-mail address, Workwithdane@gmail.com. If you just email workwithdane@gmail.com, you will get a reply with pricing, how to
purchase and how to schedule your times. I don’t have all the payment fees
or anything. I’m just asking that you send it to a PayPal address when you
e-mail address when you e-mail to that. Because I don’t want to turn it
into a business.
I don’t want to be a full time copy writer, but I do want to further help
those folks that do want to have more results on their websites. One last
time if you like to hire me for one-on-one help, just email
workwithdane@gmail.com. You will get a reply with pricing, how to purchase
and how to schedule your times.
Andrew: It all comes in soon, because you are using Google auto-responder,
I’m imagining, is that right?
Dane: Yes.
Andrew: They don’t even have to wait for you to finish this session to get
that information. Frankly I would email just out of curiosity, I would like
to see how much Dane charges and what the experience is like. I will take
questions from the audience in a moment. But first, Dane, thank you so
much.
I wonder if it comes through the hours that you put into this. We’ve had
four sessions putting this together. Guys, I see the questions. I will take
them in a moment. We’ve spent four sessions that we’ve spent putting this
together. You had time on your own, where you put this course together, we
met in person to walk through this. If you’ve seeing a lot of these
techniques is directly applicable to your needs, it’s because Dane looked
over the feedback that you gave him after the interview. It’s because we
looked at the questions that you had before hand.
When you take something on, you just obsessed, I told you last night I felt
terrible, because I know you got a business to run. I said, “Dane now is
focused on this,” I felt bad about all the time you put into this, but I
also felt extremely grateful. I’ve seen my copy writing improve because it
is, people saw the landing page. People saw the landing page that they used
to buy this, and they said, “Andrew where who did you hire? How did you
learn to do this?” I said, “Well, I had an advance copy of this course. I
knew what Dane was going to teach, and I said, I’ve got to force myself to
try all these techniques and that’s why it works” Thank you so much.
Dane: Anytime, I love doing this stuff. Andrew: I could see in the radiance, here before we get to the questions. I
could see Matt from SpeakerText said, “Can I watch this again later?” He
was here before we even started and he watched this thing from start to
finish. Yes, of course you can. He’s also saying, “I want to share some of
this with our employees.” That’s a great idea. Show it to people who are
going to interview and implement this. Give it to people who are new to the
company and let them understand that selling is a new part of the ethics of
the business, and that’s part of what you do. Of course, there is no limit
on who in the company you can share this. I hope you share it with as many
people as possible.
Now I will take questions, but let me ask you guys, this question. You saw
the video, with Steve Jobs in the beginning, where he talked about the iPad
pricing. Dane explained the reason Steve Jobs showed the price of a
$1,000.00 for a laptop and a $1,000.00 that people expect him to charge for
this new device before he told everyone that his price was $499.00. That’s
because he was anchoring them. What do you think the second technique was
we saw from Steve Jobs in that one minute click? In this case, it’s kind of
good that you guys can’t see each other answer, before you answer. Type
that in.
Dane, can I show you one website that somebody submitted beforehand just to
get your feedback on it?
Dane: Um-hmm.
Andrew: Okay. How about we take a look at a site called habitmix .com, HA-B-I-T-M-I-X .com. How about one technique from all the ten that you
describe that the owner of this site can use to improve conversions?
Dane: It is interesting with a product like this, it kind of goes into
aspiration purchase territory. Where I don’t personally create daily check
list and I don’t use software to do it. I just wake up in the morning and
write a notepad on it, but with that said there are a certain number of
people out there that do want this, so the first thing that I would be
curious on is who is your best customer for this.
If you present this idea to 100 people, 100 random people, or if you just
walked up to 100 random people and asked, do you keep a daily checklist? If
so, why not and I’d be curious what their answer is and then I would
include that answer on the site so you can apply to that larger percentage
of people that aren’t currently doing that checklist type things.
Andrew: That’s a good point.
Dane: So your target customer for this is probably someone who is really,
I want to say maybe anal retentive about their productivity. So here you
have know your daily life, know your life to grow your life daily
checklist. Success one day at a time. Want to lose weight? Grow your
finances? Organize time? Improve your family life? The first step to managing your life is getting the facts. Having this daily checklist can
help. Of course they have testimonials all down the page, which are great.
Andrew: And those testimonials actually are the kind that you would put
together. They’re showing what Confucius said about creating habit. They’re
getting testimonials from Aristotle so it’s testimonials for the idea more
than for the product.
Dane: So you’re borrowing credibility. Perfect.
Andrew: I thought your point about the problem is a good one. What’s the
problem that’s so critical that they need to come in and solve it? If you
had that and you said it in my words I’d be interested in using it. If you
said, you know you’re writing down your to-do list on multiple pages and
you don’t get it done because you don’t have the top of mind, that would be
interesting, or if they said, you don’t know what your track record is in
achieving your to-do list, which is why you’re not pushing yourself to get
more of them crossed off, that might be another one. That’s a great point.
Dane: This is kind of actually what evolved to do the product for me
personally. I just moved into a new house and I was pulling up some
checklists that I had like 4 years ago, or to-do lists on this notepad and
I was looking at things I was doing a year ago and it was like designing
websites, emailing clients. All this stuff was on my to-do list.
My to-do list now is like create marketing, do Webinar, all this marketing,
do lead gen. It was all revenue generation today. Like close on existing
clients who haven’t paid. So my habits have evolved over time because the
amount of money you make is directly related to the skill you have so you
need to develop skills like marketing and lead gen if you want to have
higher income.
You don’t develop skills to become a better web designer. You’re going to
get more referrals, but you don’t actually grow your business like that, so
you want the skill. What I’m thinking is, I’m looking at this and I would
love to see how my habits evolve over time and I would also like to see
every month a trend of what my habits were and where I missed and where I
could be missing the mark.
If this does something like that and I don’t know it, I’d like to know it
here. What I’d also like to see in this habit mix is how 5 minutes a day
can give you more clarity, more certainty, more direction and more
productivity with your life. Something like that on the sideline, know your
life to grow your life daily checklist. Daily checklist is like such [??]
feature. Not benefit at all.
What’s the end result of HabitMix? When people sign up to HabitMix what’s
the end result that they want? If we go back to the Instant Clarity
headline it’s the end result the customer wants in a specific period of
time while you address objections. OK, so what’s the end result if they have a daily checklist?
So they can feel productive at the end of the day? So they know that they
got everything done? So they know they didn’t waste a day? What is the end
result that a customer wants to sign up to that? That’s what your headline
should be. The end result that they want in just 5 minutes a day without
any of the things that usually prevent people from doing a daily checklist.
Andrew: Right. Sam Holley is saying awesome. I think he’s quoting you here
in the chat. All right. Final one. Do you have time for it Dane?
Dane: I have all the time in the world for this.
Andrew: All right. Let’s look at ratetourguides.com. This is from Thomas.
He’s been very patient. He’s been wanting us to take a look at his website
throughout and I promised him that if he can wait we would come back to it
at the end. And the page is loading for people who are just listening to
the Mp3. Usually people do listen just to the Mp3 and they try to visualize
what we’re talking about. If you are, tell me how this works for you as an
mp3. Of course, I try to package an mp3 with everything that I do because I
know some people like to put it on their iPod, on their Android device, on
their Noon, on all kinds of things.
Dane: Greattourgides.com?
Andrew: Greattourguides.com, yeah. Someone said that some of these programs
are like auto university. In his car, he’s learning.
Dane: Beautiful, my car, if you opened the center of the dashboard, there
is like 40 different CDs from different businesses beginner speech.
Andrew: It looks like his site is taking a little bit of time to load up.
He said that when he saw your Google search results when you were googling
for a site he was fourth from the top. Let’s take a look, Thomas, it looks
like it’s loading up. Thomas, one of the reasons it’s probably taking so
long is because we’ve opened so many pages. I see them all here, Dana, on
your screen.
Okay, here we go. Now we see it. We have four panels on the screen, with
images on each panel, and words like, Lisbon Aquarium on top of one. Lisbon
monument is on another and so on. So, what’s your feedback for Thomas,
who’s been so patient?
Dane: Actually, you know, the ten items on the checklist, I had four more
items, like, define peoples alternative options, and third party
credibility, stating your problem for you. So, it was actually more then
ten items but we had to keep it to ten. And, you see we still went over by
a lot. So, one of these things with the tour-guide thing is you probably
want to determine the alternative options. What else can they do if they
don’t use your site? Let’s say that they want to leave your site, what else could they do?
Andrew: You can roll over the pictures that I described earlier, there are
15 more. Let’s see, and then they open up. If you click it, we won’t be
able to see it. If it’s a video, we won’t. Okay, so what about a headline
on that homepage, James, what does it say?
Dane: Going back to seven, clear call to action, what is it that you’re
wanting the person to do when they come to greattourguides.com. Bob, in the
audience is saying, ‘It’s a little confusing, it’s hard to see what the
purpose is.’ And I’m sure, when you see a homepage with a clever headline,
or no headline like this, it’s really hard to figure out what we’re
supposed to do and what the product is. So, we’re now on one of the pages
from the site, but back when you were on the homepage I didn’t know what
the product was. I didn’t realize what this was, I guess it’s a travel
agency that you’re offering?
Andrew: Right, you want to follow the checklist. I think you want to, I
don’t think scrap your entire site, but maybe just create a landing page
for your home page. Because you want to start with the instant clarity
headline. What’s the end result the customer wants? They want a lifechanging tour that will stay with their mind and heart forever. And they
want to do it with a reputable tour guide. And, they want to be able to set
it all up in less then ten minutes.
Dane: Actually, I take it back. He’s now explaining that it’s a video
advertising service. So, that’s really not coming through with the website.
Try to come up with a way to use the headline technique that Dane taught
you to explain what the product is. Make it very clear on the homepage.
Discover exotic locations from the first person point of view. That makes
sense, actually, if that was a little bit better. But, I think, I still
wouldn’t know what the product is. And I still wouldn’t know how it would
impact my life.
Andrew: Yeah, I would just go back to the gun to your head thing, if you
had a gun to the back of your head, and if that thing were to be pulled and
your life was over, if your customer didn’t completely understand what it
is you are about and what problem you solve and what you can do for them.
Would you keep this site up?
Dane: I mean….
Andrew: Uh-huh? No go ahead.
Dane: I was just going to call out Nima, because I think Nima2 in the
chat had some feedback, ah, there it is. I see it’s the question from
before. So, I think you’re feedback was great. A clear headline that
explains what the product is very specifically. And, a call to action that
lets them know what they are supposed to do. So, those are two great
techniques. Who is the person that is buying these video guides? Who is the person you
are talking to? What is the problem that they have? They want more people
to come to their tour company, they want more what? What is the problem,
what is your solution? Do a Google doc and put the text in the page for
whether their company a [?]. And follow the checklist. That’s exactly what
I would do, if you were hiring me one-on-one, that’s exactly what I would
do. I would pull out the checklist and be like, ‘Alright what’s your
instant clarity headline. What are you doing to let in customers?’ And I
would go on to declare the problem. I don’t much of that here, the
advertising hotels, advertise restaurants, advertise studios. Advertise
hotels is nice. Many websites offer outdated pictures. People still get
disoriented upon arrival. But our video tour showing that first person
point of view will have guests oriented upon their visit.
Andrew: OK, that’s the first thing where I’m like, OK, I’m starting to get
a handle on what you’re doing. But you’re varying it too far down the page.
Last one, mokabla.com . . . And Thomas is saying thanks.
Dane: You’re welcome.
Andrew: I’ve got to say, too, before we go onto this website, Thomas. I
benefited a lot from talking to Dane about my headline. I used the headline
formula that he gave specifically, and it works and it got results, many
more than I expected. But it was kind of cool, Dane. After you saw it, you
said, ‘Hey, let’s see if we can make it even better.’ And we went back and
forth by text messaging a little bit to have someone else who understands
this same mindset, who has an understanding of what works.
To have that kind of person to bounce ideas off of is extremely helpful. It
made me come up with ideas that I didn’t think of. I think the specific
page that you showed here within this course was the one that you created
with me and we were AB testing it. It’s extremely helpful. If you could sit
down, Thomas, either with Dane or with someone else who’s gone through this
and just brainstorm some ideas, you’re going to come up with ideas and a
way of looking at this that couldn’t on your own.
They say you shouldn’t be a single founder. Well, I think for the same
benefits that you get from having a co-founder of a business, you would
have from having that back and forth about an idea within the business. So
all that’s to say, think of somebody that you could try this out with and
brainstorm with.
We’re now on mokabla.com. Take it away. I hope I didn’t talk so much that I
lost you, Dane. Did I?
Dane: Mm-mm, no.
Andrew: OK. Good. Now that we’ve got this checklist, how do we start applying it to Mokabla and Mokabla’s . . . actually, I’ll let you take it.
Dane: It’s a pretty interesting concept. I completely get it, so the
clarity is there. I can’t picture the last time I was trying to compare
something, so I’d like to see a little bit more of a picture painted about
the problem that I have, if I’m going to compare something.
Mokabla helps you compare two things in a flash. Well, compare two things
to do what? So I can make a better decision? That was my first thought. So
why am I comparing two things? This is a classic example of . . . this is
not an instant clarity headline, but it’s sort of [??]. If you’re talking
about what the product is, it helps you compare two things in a flash, but
you’re not talking about the end result that I get as a customer. So you
really want to follow the instant clarity headline here and try a few
examples.
[??] are difficult. Even the best copywriters in the world will agonize for
days and write a hundred headlines to come up with the one that they will
end up using. I wonder how many headlines you’ve written here and I wonder
if you could really get to: What’s the end result that Mokaba gets me?
What time period can I get it in? And what objections can you address?
Because you could do this really great.
Mokabla helps you take the pain out of decisions by comparing two products
in seconds without having to browse between tens of hundreds of sites.
Andrew: If that was your headline, I was like, ‘Oh, Dane, I did totally get
what you were talking about.’
Dane: Is that helpful?
Andrew: Yeah. I couldn’t put my finger on what the problem was or what we
could do to improve this because, you’re right, the headline is pretty
clear and this is a very clear, clean site with a clear call to action. But
there was something missing, something that would keep me from using it.
And when you said, ‘Hey, I don’t know what the problem is that I’m having
that this site’s going to solve,’ that clarified what was going on with me.
If this page called out a pain that I’ve been suffering and said it in my
words, I’d go in there and I’d be much more likely to be an active member.
Bob is saying that a frequently asked question section at the bottom could
help, and Nima [SP] is saying thank you, thank you to Dave, actually. So I
guess there’s some feedback here in the comments for people, a way to help
each other.
Dane: (?)
Andrew: I’m sorry, go ahead.
Dane: In Casa FAQ . . .Andrew: They do? Okay. I can’t see it.
Dane: That was helpful. So what is this thing? If I actually have to read
that question, what is this thing, maybe you didn’t do a good enough job
explaining it but it still helpful to have it too. When I first came to the
site, if you come up to the site [??] helps you compare two things in a
flash. Then I see Posterous v. WordPress a few second later…five, four…
[??] v. Groupon and then it goes again five second later iTunes v.
Rhapsody.
I was reading the headline and I’m like compare two things and then it had
an example, [??]. But it wasn’t until Ustring v. Justin.tv rotated to iOS
v. Android that I was like oh, okay, I see what they’re doing here. So if
your headline has the end result the customer wants in a specific period of
time without having to browse ten different sites and then on the right
hand side. You have a headline that’s kind of on the left here and then on
the right hand side you’re going to have started comparing and then you
have CrazyEgg and Posterous and WordPress and they’re all right here and
they’re not rotating and I can see the headline.
And then I see really four or five common comparisons and then I see you’re
describing the problem under that and then I see something about maybe I’m
not comparing things right now but the next time I have a decision I might
want to remember you so I then maybe want to enter my email address for the
next time I might be considering trying to compare something. Because once
I’ve compared something I don’t need [??] any more but I’d want to continue
to remember it. I guess that’s my feedback and in a nutshell. Andrew, how
do you feel about what I just said?
Andrew: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I agree. I agree. This is a good
product and it could use a little bit of copywriting help. The thing is
everyone is going to get the document you put together. We’ll make it into
a PDF and I’ll make sure that everyone who is signed up and is listening to
my voice right now or is listening to it later on in the recorded version,
they will have that document that you created. In that document they’ll
have the checklist with examples with specific formulas that they can use
and they can just go through the checklist and say which of these ten can I
apply right away?
Dane: Let’s talk about [??] another second because what you’re doing
here, [??] compare anything but as I’m starting to research it more I see
that the community is actually doing the comparisons or the ratings
somehow. So the success of this company is going to be very dependent on
your small minority of people that are actually going to be comparing
different things. So you really want to pull out all the stops you can to
polarize people to want to compare products.
You need to have a clear mission about why you’re doing this. Why are we
here? It’s got to be something that evil companies have terrible products, don’t deserve our business, we don’t want another person to waste another
minute of their energy on a terrible product. This company exposes the
losers and makes the winners transparent. You want to really get your users
behind a movement because [??] needs to be a movement to using only quality
products and passionate people that are sure to help you because you just
don’t want evil companies getting their business. That’s it.
Andrew: All right. Dane, thank you again. I’m going to go right now and
edit this program so that we can put it up for people as quickly as
possible. Thanks for all the feedback. Antonio, Neema, Tobin, Bob…I’m not
going to go through all the names but I will just say thank you to all of
you. At the end of this you now know exactly what you need to do. It’s
right at the bottom of the document that Dane is sending out. Dane, thank
you for putting on this program.
Dane: You’re welcome. Cool.
(In his interview, Dane recommended that you copy the sales letters by hand. Antonio, who was in the live class, put together these two collections to make it easier for you to read and copy them.)