I consider myself an optimist most of the time, and I want you to think of this blog as more educational and informative than fear mongering. But… You must consider for a second why your doing all this…

Why build a massive following on twitter, facebook, ning, linkedin or whatever your choice tool is… The answer is obvious, but are you aware of the looming danger of *JUST* doing that and not focusing your energy on any other strategies?

Insurance Against Natural Disaster

Yes, storms of life do come by occasionally. Companies are bought out, media agencies tell fibs about you and have your Facebook account deleted, hackers hack servers and delete stuff, Server hard drives die… Things happen that could cause that massive following to slip into oblivion…

Why build your business on someone elses land? Why face the day that some company not even associated with your business, your brand or your online movement tells YOU where to go?

Building an Opt-In List

Yes, email addresses are still an old technology but — Everyone’s still using it. I send about 25 emails per day. Fact is, people are still trusting emails sent to and from friends. Email addresses provided you back them up often are something that you can be building on for the future.

But… You have to educate yourself on spam filters and a whole host of “trusted senders” and other things, but it’s worth it, because social media is not something you can ever really “own”, but a list of email addresses backed up on a CDROM (black variety good for 50 years) are something you CAN backup, hold and own and simply upload to any mail server that you own and send to. Build a loyal network of readership.

If you like my stuff –> Do the honors on the right side… Signup! I’ll send you free stuff and rarely ever advertise.

Dan

What is it that makes some landing pages and websites convert visitors into addicted, crazed and cult like followers and buyers that others seem to miss? What elements cause intellects and scholars to spend their last penny and beg their grandma for an early inheritance to buy, purchase and subscribe like wildfire?

The answer should be no surprise and come as no shock to you. It’s easily found within any great sales copy. Emotion.

Why have I decided to build an entire series of videos on Blip.TV into a colossal university of unrivaled proportions into the most well thought out, organized and spellbinding material ever written and crafted on sales copy and give it away ENTIRELY free?

Several reasons, but the first and most obvious are this. I’m selfish… Honestly I am… I’m doing something I have a passion for, I think once people see material of this quality they’ll join my newsletter and become devout fans that would probably do anything I ask short of jump off a bridge…

AND they’ll eventually thank me for it. For what? Not the ability to write persuasive and captivating copy sure to suck money into their wallets like a jet engine… No… But the sales and wallet expanding, bank account filling sales .

What’s this got to do with Demolishing your competition, you ask?

EVERYTHING! Because, this is the one weapon your competition can slaughter you with.

Even if you have…

• half the traffic of your competitors
• half the opt-in list size or less
• zero of their influence , credibility or trust
• none of their money and investors
• none of their team , knowledge or experience

Good copy rules all those things into oblivion and awful quick! Even my friend Frank Kern and many others would never argue that for all the trinkets in China. You see, copy can convince someone to take you up on your offer even if they’ve never heard of you, your widgets or your website EVER before. It’s the power of the written word and it’s been holding people in a hypnotically powerful buying state since the invention of common language.

Yes, my friends – you should sign up and listen in to our copywriting course.

Daniel "King of Copy" Deyette
Until Next Time

Copywriting Lesson #1 – Your Target Audience

Craft A Mental Picture Of Your Prospect So Clear, You Can Write
Your Letter As If They Think You Know Them.

Not that long ago, I taught copywriting and several other online marketing lessons for huge money per hour. However, I want to give back and also show off some simply amazing strategies pretty much guaranteed to make you lean sideways. Lean – because of a filled wallet.

The first lesson is live on our Blip.TV account. I call it "Copywriting School" .

This first lesson is the most important lesson in copywriting there is. If it’s not properly done, even the experts will look at your site and not be able to find the missing secret sauce problem.

Dan

Being a website copy writer isn’t easy. In fact, it’s probably arguable that it’s harder than direct response. In direct response, a person is alot more than 1 click away from disappearing your copy, where as online in a 10th of a second a person can make their decision and disappear never to be seen again by your website. Choose your words VERY carefully.

For years I not only taught direct response copywriting for the internet audience, but also wrote letters for various clients over the years. I don’t get a lot of requests for it now, but when I do, the old flame ignites like gasoline on a spark!

I don’t have time to write an entire article on copywriting and the advanced strategies (I probably know over 50 top response strategies I could write about).

BUT, I wanted to hint at a resource that I found again that I thought I had lost… One that I should one day rescue from it’s fate on the internet.

Some of the best copy out there is written by freelance copywriters that aren’t well known. Those that don’t make their living promoting themselves and screaming from building tops how special they are. In fact, those are more-often-than-not the bad examples. These folks that work in the background like the wizard behind the curtain are often the most shocking persuasive writers on the planet!

One such institution that hires only the very best copywriters the planet has ever seen is Agora Publishing. Anyone in the internet marketing industry for years knows that name well. They’ve worked with Michael Masterson and other guys like that. They have something like 8,000 letters out there on their websites if you know how to find them… and I’m about to teach you…

Today, i’ll just give you the fish, rather than teaching to fish. Anyone who wants my consulting services will undoubtedly contact me anyway, so here goes.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:isecureonline.com/Reports/&hl=en&filter=0

There ya go, some of the juicest and most persuasive letters on the internet.

If you want to learn how to be a copywriter that sucks money out of people’s wallets like a vacuum cleaner on drugs, that’s the place to start reading.

Quite an amazing thing that probably happens really rarely in history, and what’s even scarier is what caused it.

The Canadian dollar dropped nearly 2 entire cents. Normally I wouldn’t write about this because the fact is, It really only affects some folks and not others. However, it’s a huge thing for those of us constantly transferring tons of money around.

It’s quite historic and interesting that a comment (that seems rather mild to me) was the cause. The Bank Of Canada apparently released a statement that scared a bunch of investors and caused the CDN Dollar to fall.

Bloomberg, Toronto newspapers and a ton of other sources are reporting the significant change in our currency.

Citigroup Inc. exited a money losing trade after the drop in the loonie triggered an automatic stop-loss order, strategists Todd Elmer in New York and Michael Hart in London wrote in a note to clients today. The firm’s bet on the Canadian dollar versus the Australian dollar lost 1.7 percent, partly because of the Bank of Canada policy statement they released.

I don’t normally post about stocks, Forex or trading or the global markets to be honest. It’s not something that I really wish to deal in. On a grand scale, it’s not in my opinion, a very wise way of earning money or raising capital using and leveraging the money of folks who have no idea about you.

However, this is a significant event in how transactions will go and could even affect your conversion rates on your landing pages as you market things online.

Is Bing Better at Search Than Google?

Microsoft would have you think so, and their rightfully biased opinion would also make you believe all kinds of other silly things, but rather than equally be as ignorant, I have to give you some facts. Many other companies and search experts have reviewed MS Bing and compared it to Google. PC World did an overview on the topic, so did SearchEngineLand (one of my favorite reads) and TechCrunch another great read.

Fact is, Google’s extensive testing and involving sociology (study of people in groups) frequently makes their engine the clear winner for years to come. Not because Bing isn’t prettier or cleaner looking. But because Google gives users what they wanted in the first place.

Microsoft still thinks they’re in a PR race, and if they were selling clothing in holywood, the’yd be exactly right.

Widespread adoption + Exposure = Win every time.

However, this is not the holywood clothing industry, but the search industry, where users sub-concious clicks win every time.

It’s quite interesting how many search analysts are saying that if your site doesn’t have links, it’s tough to get more.

I don’t think I have time today to write an entire article about the theory of “the rich get richer” as well written by other really intelligent marketers out there.

It’s a deep topic, but let me put it into insanely simple language. The web… Is a web. An interconnected spider web of interconnecting communities.

Communities that have lots of sites have lots of links and those that dont… dont!

That’s one reason some sites are pretty much doomed to an existince of waiting a very long time for search engines to ever like them. That’s really sad… But the one way to get a slight competitive advantage with this knowledge is to use tools like the Touchgraph Navigator to find sites within your industry. People love that thing, and i’ts really useful for finding partners in a like-minded industry.

The other week, I mentioned using sites that had existing popularity, even at the risk of them not helping your SEO campaign. Let me extend that advice… Because that in itself isn’t unreasonable advice… BUT…

Here’s another juice factor you might not have thought of… Consider looking for sites within your community or industry even if they might not be insanely receptive at first. Think of ways you can get a link from that community even a no follow or a “sponsored” link of some kind to properly introduce yourself.

Dan

I know that probably makes it look a little too simple, but the cold hard facts are there. Someone out there is probably missing some piece of this strategy…

Make sure the market really needs what your selling. If it’s something wishy-washy, something they don’t immediately need or might not want, it might not convert as fast & high as something that is. What’s a starving market? Any solution to a problem that keeps someone up at 3am dreaming of a solution.

Email addresses are like insurance. Rankings drop? PPC Traffic too expensive? Out of marketing dollars? Email addresses almost act like insurance, because you can contact that list of targetted folks over and over again 99% of the time without any extra expenses!  You build trust and an upsell list.

Write a compelling action oriented page. This landing page shoudl have strong credibility, benefits & one or two strong calls to action MAXIMUM prefferably with very little navigation buttons with the exception of privacy policy and terms & conditions etc. Those two calls to action might be opt-in and sale or just sale/opt-in. It should be educational and informative.

Test all kinds of traffic to it like classifieds, pay per click, content network, facebook, sponsored tweets etc to see which vertical converts best that you can easily repeat.

Always use Google Analytics. It’s also like insurance, but better than just that. You can analyze where conversions came from, what sources etc. You can find out if your product sells better in one geographic region than another, or one keyword better than another, or one website/traffic source better than another. You can discover which press releases worked and ones that didn’t. INSANELY important.

Repeat what works every time. Once you know what regions are profitable, relaunch to them. Same with keywords, you can become so focused it’s like a laser locked beam targetting only what works. That way you’re always trading a dollar for five dollars.

Try new copy, new benefits and new angles. Is it the price that needs adjustment? The guarantee? The promise? the offer? A certain question not being answered, the ORDER of the benefits listed on the page? You bet it can all make a difference. Whether you adjust and wait for results or you use a sophisticated system like Google’s Website Optimizer, you should be ALWAYS testing. No matter what.

Until Next Time,
Daniel J Deyette

Nothing could be sweeter than the sense of achievement and emotional high you get from creating a top converting landing page.  Yet, so few of us ever get the opportunity to see it with our own eyes. I don’t pretend to know all the answers to the secret serum that makes up the perfect converting page, but I do know one of them very very well.

"An Overnight Success, 20 Years Later…" Dan Kennedy – Ultimate No BS Business Book

No one figures this stuff out overnight, there honestly and genuinely is ZERO overnight success stories that are 100% true. Behind every one of them is the blood, sweat, tears and war wounds of unbridaled testing.

There’s many things you can add that will create an instant boost that should be on every landing page. Those generally go without saying like :

• Credibility Builders (UPS logo/SecureSafe, Merchant logos, Visa/MC Logos, Guarantees)
• Big Juicy Benefits
• Opt-in Box for future emailing and communication
• Strong call to action (buy/subscribe/purchase)
• STRONG proof (like a courtroom lawyer you must PROVE what you say.)
• Educational supporting material

But Beyond all that, let me tell you some secrets about the mental mindset of the online buyer, where their heart is at and how to get inside their head. This is really a wonderful way of increasing sales.

First off, your prospects or website visitors have questions that aren’t being answered on your product purchase page. That’s a genuine fact you must accept. Last week, I was looking to buy some answering machine software for my computer that answers the phone in my office because my current one was on the fritz. I was looking for something that would run on Windows 7 (or at least Vista) so the first thing I looked for on every landing page was "Vista Supported.." or similar.

I was also looking for answering machines that could email me to let me know someone had called. I’m often on the road, or out of town and I can’t be near my physical land line, but I having a land line because it’s cheaper than always talking on my cell phone. I was looking for some very simple features that are on 80% of the answering machine softwares out there, but could you believe how hard it was to find it?

A few days later I found myself looking for ram for my wife’s laptop. All I wanted to know was how much shipping would cost and how long it would take to get here. Would YOU type in your entire address/phone/etc and credit card just to find out you didn’t like how much it cost to ship? Or perhaps that it would take 17 days from Brazil? Nope, me neither!

ANSWER Every Question Prospects Might Ask…

Here’s some ideas to get your brains going on questions you might answer for the prospect.

Software

• Does it install quickly?
• How long does it take to setup?
• Can i download it right away or is it shipped?
• What version of windows does it support?
  and… will it run on windows 98? How about windows 7?
• Mac or PC? Big file or small file?

Physically shipped products

• How big is it?  (Yes in inches/feet etc..)
• How long will it take to get here?
• How much is shipping?
• Is it recyclable?
• How much is it and why is it that much?
• why so cheap?
• why so expensive?
• Can it be made smaller or bigger and if so why not?
• Is there a manual/dvd/cd/video?
• What else does it come with?

Ebooks/Electronic Downloads

• Who else has used this? What kind of results did THEY get?
• How will I get it? (Email/Browser download/shipping)
• What do you promise me about this?
• How many pages is it?
• Is there any support?
• How do I get ahold of you if I don’t like it!?
• What can you promise me that no one else can?
• Why are you charging that much?
• Why are you charging that little? (Xmas, Thanksgiving, Kid’s birthday whatever – Dunno why but people need a reason for a sale when the price is juicy)
• What other proof is there?
• Why did you write this? Why’d you make the product?
• What else does this strategy work on?
• Is there an affiliate program?
• Can I get a physically printed version?

There is a huge pile more I didn’t think of or that can’t even be thought of except by the consumer themselves. In sales, it’s called objection handling, however in the online marketing world, there’s no way to handle what you’ll never hear. Customers don’t very often email with why they didn’t buy (those that do are the precious few and you SHOULD listen to most of them). How do you KNOW there’s objections or questions still remaining unsolved?

How to Test for 90% of Buyer Challenges

Believe it or not, most people who don’t buy have two main strong reasons for not buying. One, they had an unanswered quesiton and they’re perfectly willing to find somewhere else on the web that will answer that question for them. Two, they’re just not sure about you.. Who you are, whether you’ll deliver it and your credibility.

How do you know what’s on their mind? I’ll show you!

Add FAQ and About Us pages to the bottom of your web pages — ESPECIALLY those pages that sell something. If you’re busy, don’t even bother taking the time to write anything on those pages!! What? Why would you do that? — Because it’s for tracking purposes. If you look in your StatCounter, Google Analytics or whatever your favorite stats program is, you’ll be able to tell what percentage of people who landed in this page went to About Us or FAQ or just simply left.

If you’ve got more than 10% of your visitors clicking on FAQ
…You’re not answering all their questions and you need to keep thinking up ways to answer anything someone could ever ask.

If you’ve got more than 10% clicking on About Us
…You’re not doing a good job of addressing credibility and proof and who you are on your sales page. Fix that!

Isn’t that awesome! I hope that helps increase your sales dramatically too.

Until Next Time
Daniel J Deyette

As TechCrunch is reporting, that Geocities, a famous 15 year old site where it’s members could build free websites is scheduled to be shut down on October 26th 2009, almost in time for Halloween.

It’s sad, my first ever website was hosted on Geocities, and fond memories exist there. It’s like watching a building in your home town getting demolished. Like watching them bulldoze a favorite park or an old high school hang out.

Users have been compiling all kinds of tribute pages to mark the death of such a monumental site.

It’s a sad day in the history of such a cool service. I think Yahoo’s making a huge mistake from several business fronts. Free websites are still a big business on the web for ad supported revenue, and with the domain age, amount of sites hosted and other reasons, Geocities certainly stands to cost YHOO more than it will gain by pulling the plug. There’s absolutely no question of that.

Say it’s in the name of progress, Go ahead, but it’s a sad day for the internet. I invite your comments as per usual, but seriously, I hold my hat close to my heart over this. It’s quite emotional to see such a cool old friend go…

Daniel J Deyette