(dramatic music)
- Let's talk about why 95% of sales copy is crap.
Why they don't make you money.
You have some of the marketing materials?
Give it to me.
Yes.
(audience laughing)
(laughing)
Perfect timing to review these.
No, I'm not gonna do it yet.
So, let me ask you, why is 95%
of the sales copy crap out there?
Take a guess.
Come on, tell me, why?
- [Audience member] Too many words.
- Too many words, okay.
- [Audience member] Dan didn't write it.
- Dan didn't write it, okay.
- [Audience member] Too complex.
- Too complex, yes.
- [Audience member] It's boring to read.
- It's boring to read.
- [Audience member] It doesn't use the same language--
- Doesn't use the same, okay, good, yes, good.
- [Audience member] It's a product pusher,
not talking about the method.
- Okay, product pusher, yes.
- [Audience member] Doesn't give their clients' criteria.
- Very nice, very close, very close.
- [Audience member] Tell doesn't sell.
- It tells, doesn't sell, yes.
- [Audience member] It's not consistent.
- Not consistent, yes.
- [Audience member] It's all cookie cutter.
- Cookie cutter, yes.
Very close, I think that--
- [Audience member] Not targeted.
- Not targeted, yes, also.
So a lot of these, what you're hearing,
these are very common copywriting mistakes.
I would say the biggest one is
most people that talk about too much, me, me, me.
I've been in business for 15 years,
I've don't all of these things.
Here's why we are so good.
Here's what work we do.
Who gives a fuck.
Write this down.
Your customers don't care about you.
They don't care about you at all.
So when you start with that, right there,
you've lost them.
Right there, you lost them.
Yes?
- [Audience member] But your own website does that.
- Yes, which one?
- [Audience member] All of them.
- Not all of them.
Not all of them.
You look at my website, you mean danlok.com?
- [Audience member] I was looking at a number of--
- A number of, which one?
- [Audience member] Well, like the danlok.com
and some of the other ones that you--
- Okay, actually, why don't we pull it up,
maybe later, after we go through this
and you can take a look
and see if I actually followed the principles I talk about.
So most entrepreneurs,
they write in a way that,
it's about the ego, versus getting into
the client's ego, focusing on their needs,
focusing on their problems.
What are they looking for?
So I think there are two issues.
Now, copy is not the kind of writing that you
learn in school.
Copy's not the kind of writing you learn in what?
- [Audience] In school.
- Forget what you learned in school.
Forget being academically correct,
forget about any of that stuff.
Forget what you learned in school.
Not talking about that.
Copy is the spoken language.
It's the what?
- Spoken language. - Yeah, in written form.
It means that you should write the way you--
- [Audience member] Speak.
- Yeah, write the way you speak.
You write the way you speak.
So sometimes it means it is not proper English
and that's okay.
You want it to be conversational.
You want it to be what?
Conversational.
So I think why 95% of sales copy is crap, two issues.
Number one is what I call a cheap copywriting mindset.
So most entrepreneurs, again, they think of in terms of,
well, why pay for something new?
We'll just use what we have,
then we'll build a website and spend thousands of dollars
building a website, but they wouldn't take the time
and look at what are the words we're using?
What are we communicating?
What's our message?
They will work on everything else,
it's like you build a beautiful home,
but you try to save money in furniture.
Does that make sense?
That's an issue.
And you forget that the brochure was written
by your teenage nephew back when the company
was started eight years ago.
You use the same stuff.
Most of the time, same with everybody else
in your industry, same as everybody else.
And you will think, if they're using that kind of
brochure, or they're using that kind of marketing
material, it must, it must what?
- [Audience member] Work.
- It must work.
But if you actually sit down with them,
does it work?
Most of the time they have no clue.
They do not know if it works or not.
They do not, it's the blind leading the blind.
They do not know if it works or not.
The second issue is what I call the controlling
copywriting mindset.
Assume that your customer knows as much as you do.
Assume that they know that that's what it is,
or the product or the feature,
you assume as much, nobody knows your
business better than you, yes?
So don't assume the customers know.
And don't assume your customer cares about you.
They don't.
Absolutely, they do not.
They've got their own lives to worry about.
And most importantly, that you are not your customer.
You are not your customer.
Repeat after me.
You are not your--
- [Audience member] Customer.
- Customer, you are not your customer.
You are not your customer.
So if you look at that and you look
at your own, how many of you have a website right now?
Yes, and you work with your webmaster
and you tell your webmaster,
"I want it like this and I want it like that,
"and I want it to say certain things.
"I want my company about me, it's about that,
"and da, da, da, da."
Hmm, yes.
- [Audience member] What do you when you're working
with a client and you know these things
and you tell them about these things
and they're like, "No, no, no, we have to put
"this complicated language in there,
"or we have to talk about ourselves."
- Very good question.
- [Audience member] What do you do?
- And by the way, anytime you have questions,
what do you do?
- [Audience] Ask.
- Yeah, just ask, just that one, tiny directive.
So when you work with a client,
you've got to understand, what is your client
paying you for?
- [Audience member] Um...
- Are they just paying for design,
or are they paying for results?
- [Audience member] Results.
- If they're paying for a result and sometimes
you get resistance.
You know, I believe in a certain way
and you believe in a certain way,
you know what, let's not argue,
let's test this?
Let's run it.
It's very easy in outgoing analytics.
We'll test the page.
If your page is converting 10,
my convertings, I just want what's best for you.
If your page is converting at 20%,
my page is converting at 10%, use your page.
But if mine is converting at 20
and yours is converting at 10,
use mine, you'll make twice as much money.
- [Audience member] So just create two versions?
- Yeah.
Yeah, so then you can do it that way
because that's what, see, when you have
their best interest at heart,
you can argue with them, it's okay.
The customer is not always right.
How many realize that?
Yeah, sometimes they're fucking idiots.
(audience laughing)
They're not always right.
They are not always right.
Just because they give you money,
doesn't make them right.
It doesn't.
And just because they give you money,
it doesn't mean they know what they hell they're doing.
Chances are they don't know what they're doing.
And that's okay, but that's where your expertise comes in.
If you know your stuff,
you have chops, you know what you're talking about,
that's okay, you will tell them.
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