Exp 3 - Copywriting - There's No Better Way to Boost Conversions

[Ryuzaki]

The entire game can be summed up like this:

You have a product to sell. This can be a physical product, a service offering, or even simply content you want eyeballs on.​

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You advertise to sell the product. You perform social media marketing, search engine optimization for organic exposure, you craft visual creatives for display ads, you write native editorials, etc.​

The cardinal sin most everyone commits is to create the best product possible... and then doing nearly zero marketing. "It's so damn good! If you build it, people will come, right? Marketing is sleazy anyways, it's manipulative! I want people to like my product because it's good, not because I convinced them it's good."

You know which two groups are the most guilty of this idiocy ever? Programmers and musicians. Think about them and you'll understand the entire conundrum of the first cardinal sin.

The second cardinal sin, if you get past the first one, is to have the most piss poor sales copy the world has ever seen.

And that's what we're here to talk about today: sales copy and the art of writing it, which is called Copywriting. I put it in green because when you get it right, that's what your bank account will look like.

What is Copywriting?

Copywriting is the act of creating the most persuasive sales copy possible in relation to the specific product or service.​

There's a LOT of information packed into that one sentence. We're going to deconstruct it, unpack it, unravel it, and explain not only why the best products fail, but why the best products succeed. This isn't going to be some old school 1950's Madison Avenue talk either. We're going to translate it to the current digital age.

Let's start with an example just to set the tone. Let's pretend you're at some kind of expo and two vendors are re-selling a brand new product from an unknown company. Take a guess who's going to get the most sales here, and justify to yourself why this is the case. Let's look at their poster boards hung up to get your attention.

Exhibit A:

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Welcome to Computer Innovations, Incorporated's newest desktop computer:​

• 27-inch Retina 5k display with 5120 by 2880 resolution
• 3.4 GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 (Turbo Boost to 3.8 GHz)
• 8 GB of 2400 MHz DDR4 RAM, configurable up to 32 GB
• 1 TB Fusion Drive with Radeon Pro 570 graphics card with 4 GB of VRAM

Inquire within about financing options.​

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Exhibit B:

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We risked EVERYTHING to smuggle this back from the future! Cyborgs, Aliens, and even Dinosaurs (yes, Jurassic Park was a mistake) couldn't stop us from bringing the next evolution in computing to your home office. All. New. Everything. Neatly seated inside the monitor. Forget cable messes, forget not being a part of the cutting edge. Truly, is there anything this beast can't compute? Find out just how far we pushed it, just ask us for our exclusive stress testing results.​

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Who's making the bacon? Who's getting the sales? If you answered Exhibit B, you are correct, but why? These are the things we'll talk about in-depth below.

But I won't leave you completely hanging. Just some of the reasons B Team is slaying it while A Team are twiddling their thumbs has to do with appealing to intellect versus emotion, creating an adventure, dynamic imagery, fear of missing out on a sense of belonging and superiority, a specific call to action, promoting benefits over features, and more.

Let's take a quick field trip before we move to the next section. Head to the BuSo Marketplace and sort the threads by number of views and replies. Open a few of the top threads and a few of the bottom threads, and guess what will become very apparent about who knows what about copywriting.

Let me tell you the biggest problem you'll find that I see everywhere, including our marketplace. The worst try to sell you on their features, because they have a solipsistic point of view. They only see the game from their side of the table and think the superiority of their product is enough to convince the potential customer. The reality is the customer doesn't give a shit about that. They want to know what you can do for them, not how it's done. What are the benefits?

I'm giving away too much to my competitors already. Moving on...

 

[Ryuzaki]

The goal of copywriting is simple. We want to get the most people to take a specific action as possible.

That action will change depending on what part of the marketing funnel you're working on (you do remember Day 6, right, and AIDA [Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action]?) That's great news, because that means you can apply the principles of copywriting to nearly every bit of work you do that's public facing.

But guess what? You'll never convince someone to do something they don't already want to do. That's why we take cold leads and warm them. That's why we pitch to hot leads. Hell, that's why we collect leads in the first place.

We can't convince them to do something against their self-interest? Well, what is their self-interest? Why do they do what they do? What do they hope to get out of it? And how can we push those buttons to urge the action we want? That's what we'll cover in this section.

Let me state again, and it's been stated elsewhere in the Crash Course before. If you think this is sleazy, that's fine. Some sleazy people do take it that far. But remember, you're selling what someone already wants, and you better believe that your product is THE BEST SOLUTION to their problem (or you'll suck at selling it). If your solution is the best then there is no moral conundrum. You are connecting people in need to the best solution on the market. You're a freaking hero. There is no shame in this game if you're not selling snake oil.

So why are people even attracted to your product?

Why People Do What They Do

There are three main keys to this whole game:

1. What people want
2. How they feel about what they want
3. Why they ultimately take action on what they want

Looking back at our previous example, if you read that and thought something like "People want the computer that solves their computing needs, they're enthusiastic about it being faster and not bogging, and they take action when they encounter the best affordable solution," you couldn't be further from the truth.

The way we learn about this in psychology is through Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

That breaks it down pretty good, but you'll never find a better list of what people ACTUALLY want, down to the nitty gritty, than is listed by Drew Eric Whitman is his classic Ca$hvertising book:

The Life-Force 8​

1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension
2. Enjoyment of food and beverages
3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger
4. Sexual companionship
5. Comfortable living conditions
6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses
7. Care and protection of loved ones
8. Social approval

Every single thing we do is tied to these fundamental biological urges. We mask it real good though. As Sigmund Freud (most important figure to marketing, period) once pointed out, some of us even build careers out of fulfilling socially unacceptable means of appeasing these eight items (called sublimation). And nobody likes to be broken down to a robotic, deterministic, reductionistic set of impulses. That's where the true art of copywriting comes into play.

So first and foremost, forget everything you think you know. It ALL boils down to those 8 life-force motivators. Period. Think about it for a few minutes and you can tie every single action we take back to those. They are the strongest urges for living beings, and that's what you want to target in your copy with a few other hurdles to overcome.

What People Want From Their Engagement

Now, although we do what we do because of the above impulses, that's not necessarily what we WANT out of our purchases and engagements. This is HUGELY important, because a majority of your marketing funnel lives in the "want's" and not the "why's."

We know why we take action, but what do we want out of it?

• To be informed and fulfill our curiosity and quest for knowledge.
• To have a clean and organized home, environment, body, and mind.
• To achieve everything efficiently (least energy), quickly (least time), and cheaply (least money), and dependably (most quality).
• To express or find our authenticity, beauty, style, and generosity.
• To make a social, material, or financial profit.

These 'wants' are always in play and are how the Life-Force 8 gets expressed in daily life as we make choices in the infinite sea of action.

And it always plays out as: Tension -> Desire -> Action

Guess which parts of that trinity copywriting engages? "Okay" copywriting gets to the core of one of them. "Acceptable" copywriting attacks two of them. The most successful will poke and prod all three, lighting the person's entire being on fire, making a purchase inevitable for hot leads and very likely for warm leads.

Copywriting is, without a doubt, a purely psychological tactic. If you want to pull it off, you need to know why people are looking into products like yours. You need to understand the problem they're trying to solve. You can't just throw all 8 Life-Force impulses and the "why's" at the wall and hope for the best or you'll come off as a schmuck. This is why you need to do your Market Research (Day 3) so you know not only who your demographic is but what stage of life they're in, because stages of life are dominated by specific life impulses, as are types of purchases.

That's up to you to figure out. What I'm going to talk about next is some tactics you can use to "get at" these 8 impulses and "why" reasons for action.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Like I said before, you need to know who your demographic is, what their current life stage needs are, and which life-force impulses are pulling the strongest. Because...

Copywriting Tactics to Deploy

What you don't want to do is overwhelm the mind and nervous system. You want to light them up, but if you go too far, the coils will overheat and you'll red line their gauges and they'll walk away. The main thing you want in every single piece of copywriting is FOCUS.

FOCUS is the name of the game. Find the main impulse and nail that bitch to the wall. If it tries to squirm away to the left or right then you can corner it with a piece of bait by simply mentioning another "why," but don't dig deep on it. It's just bait to keep them on the hook while you slowly reel them in.

What am I saying here? I'm saying that you better know the customer's mind state inside and out. They're goal is to NOT purchase, even when they want to, because letting go of money means they're losing financial power. And guess what? Fear of loss is more powerful than the other gains they'll be getting. So you have to sew up every single exit point they'll come up with along the journey, or you'll lose them.

Since I said Fear of Loss is the strongest, let's start there. Here's a list of just some of the copywriting tactics and angles you can use. But remember, focus on one, and you don't get to choose which, you need to determine which is the most appropriate based on the impulse and the reason for coming to you or paying attention to you advertisement.

If you study this enough you'll start to see these tactics at play everywhere. And then you'll start to spot the ones I left out for the sake of brevity. There's a solid 20 really good tactics you'll find if you take this seriously.

The Fear Factor
People are most afraid. It's the strongest motivator. But not are they mostly afraid, they're most afraid of moving backwards and losing progress. They're secondarily most afraid of missing out on a chance at progress.

Goal: Open up the fear and have it wash over them. The entire gun industry works on this principle. The customer as a self-defense conscious being fears losing his life or belongings or as a hunter fears missing out on a big prey, which means losing out on food and social prestige.​

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Solution: Your product better have the potential to completely solve the problem that causes the fear or you'll lose the sale. It doesn't have to solve it by itself, it can still require an operator, but otherwise, by golly, it better patch the problem completely. And remember, we're also talking about the fear of missing out, so don't feel like you can't put a very limited time bonus offer or slight discount (be wary of discounts!) on with a timer ticking down in their minds to create pressure. One type of fear will dredge up all others, so exploit them all.​

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Energize the main fear and start answering the surrounding fears they didn't know existed, which serves to point them out too. By the end, the answer seems obvious... buy your product.

The Celebrity Endorsement
Some items sell themselves. You can't get around buying them, so the game becomes convincing the customer to buy yours instead of Joe Schmo's. This tactic isn't strictly about Celebrities, I just came up with that name so you'd know what I'm talking about. The tactic is in CREDIBILITY.

Goal: Why is yours better? Because ____ said so. Show it prominently.​

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Solution: Oprah talked about your book on her show and you put the big O star on the cover. Tony Robbins wrote the forward to it so you mention that on the cover. You have testimonials from Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt on the back cover. You have a list of reviews from some nobody HuffPo contributor, and an intern at the NY Times, etc. You don't mention who said it specifically, just that each newspaper and publishing house mentioned it. Then you hire some moron has-been A-list movie star to feature in your commercial. You get the picture here. You get credibility by associating with names people trust or recognize.​

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If your toilet paper is good enough for my hero's precious butt, then it's good enough for mine!

Alter Their Reality
This is kind of sick. Politicians do it all the time. It works miracles. Your product offers one of many solutions to a fairly important problem. Make that problem seem menacing and make your solution seem not only superior but the only logical, sensible answer.

Goal: Reinforce the problem. Amplify your solution. Undermine your competitors. Expose your customer's and your competitor's weaknesses. Play up your strengths. Isolate the customer mentally by wholly taking up their cognitive power. Override all objections. Saturate their beliefs and inoculate them against anything else and then re-order the beliefs so the ones that trigger the sale take precedence.​

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Solution: Have you seen your dog itching lately? Our flea collars can fix that, but you've likely waited till it got bad enough to worry about. I bet you're starting to have some weird minor health issues (like we all do), like strange aches occasionally, blurry vision some days, bit of vertigo. Did you know our flea collars can also kill ticks? All of your health problems are pre-indicators to exposure to lime disease, which is actually a cluster of illnesses doctor's don't yet understand. Only our collars kill fleas and also have a proprietary medicine to stop tick reproduction and larva development. Your symptoms can stop in time if you stop your exposure to lime disease. Listen to these horror stories by other users... (We just went from 'my dog itches' to 'you might die.')​

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There's better examples here but you get the point. It's not a bait and switch so much as a logical extrapolation.

Freeze & Adopt Their Ego
You know who's the master at this? Apple. This tactic is about understanding the potential customer's ego, freezing it, escalating it to a desirable conclusion, and adopting it as your own egoic identification. This opens up a ton of Life-Force 8's, but really speaks to Enjoyment, Social Approval, and Superiority.

Goal: Follow the trends, identify what's desirable in fashion and behavior, uncover why that's the fact, and create a superman out of it. Every single young adult book is written around this principle. Some low self-esteem poor kid suddenly is thrusted into the center of global attention, gets the girl and admiration of all like him, gets access to the coolest shit to help his adventure along, solves some puzzles, and becomes the literal savior of mankind (Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Ready Player One, Maze Runner). This is what Apple does very subtly. To associate with you is to be the best version of themselves they can be.​

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Solution: This is easier to do than many realize. Look at Matthew McConaughey's "Ford Lincoln Mercury" commercials. They don't even show the damn car. They show this smooth talking, well dressed, handsome A-list celebrity talking about philosophy (hitting the Life-Force 8) and then show some helicopter-view shot of the car driving along some nightlife city street or mountainside road. Same with the "most interesting man alive" commercials.​

For something as dumb as a car or a type of whiskey, you can get a bunch of morons thinking that they can tap dance on top of tables and then walk off with two girls on each arm.

The Bandwagon Effect
This one is all about social approval. Humans have three ways they think of themselves: Groups they want to belong to, groups they do belong to, and groups they want to separate from as much as possible. This is why in politics everyone different than you is a nazi, racist, socialist, commie, rapist, etc. It's all a crock of shit but it sells!

Goal: If you go after this direct, you'll be so obvious to anyone with a room temperature IQ. You have to get at this tangentially through an indirect route and let the customer come to the conclusion on their own.​

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Solution: "Nine out of 10 doctors agree!" You can do this with micro-copy (we'll get to that later) or you can do it with long diatribes. It doesn't matter, but it has to be subtle. "America's favorite supermarket." You want to pull them towards the group they want to be in while showing them the group they do belong is already agrees while the group they're supposed to dislike hates it. "There's a reason we've done thousands of installations of our new, ground-breaking home security system in the Hollywood Hills, and why millions of hard working Americans are trusting us to secure their families... Find out why low down rotten thieves hate us so much today."​

Make it appear as if their tribe is already on board, and they'll come on board.

The Guru Tactic
This one is so easy in certain verticals. What you want to do here is sell benefits HARD, but not direct benefits. These benefits come in the future, because your product is a means to an end. Get Rich Quick! 5 Steps to Flat Abs! Google Hates This New SEO Tactic! Seduce the Man of Your Dreams! Tarot Card Readings! If you fall for this kind of crap after reading this, you deserve it. It's for the real dummies.

Goal: Basically, if you sell a process, a guide, a course, or a product that serves as a process, you need to sell the benefits as hard as possible. It's very much like the Ego tactic with a lot more pressure tactics, because this one is so easy to see through that only the most gullible go for it. The key is that the benefits can only be obtained through your product, which is coming directly out of your own brain. It simply can't be had anywhere else. Your funnel has to be huge with the goal of indoctrinating people into your cult of personality.​

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Solution: Think about how gurus do this. You learn about them on blogs, forums, podcasts, and videos. They're everywhere because it's a numbers game. You segment your 200,000 member list by testing them with low priced offers. If they bounce at any level they get a cheaper, time exclusive offer. If they don't bounce then they get upsold on the next expensive offer. Before you know it, you have 10 people paying $250,000 each for your hands-on training where you fly out to each for 3 days, on top of the million you made on the $15 to $100 side offers. Every piece of promotional material shows the benefits of your solution (usually faked proofs and fake testimonials from your friends), but never the solution, it's a mystery pot of secret sauce only you know the recipe to.​

The game here is complete dependency on buying into your secrets, that will then lead to the customer's wildest dreams or relieve their scariest fears. Whenever you see a character out there who types paragraphs but at the end never ends up says a single thing, you're at the top of the guru funnel. People try it here regularly and fail and move on to dumber pastures. There's someone actively trying it as I type this.

That's enough of that. This is an introductory effort, after all. If that stuff piqued your interest, you can get out there and find more or ask about it here in the thread where we can all chime in. Critiquing current ad campaigns might be fun. If you see one you like, post it here and let's tear it apart.

 

[Ryuzaki]

The tactical methods I gave above are broad and give you the lay of the land but don't actually tell you how to get the job done on the landing page, in the full-page magazine ad, in the Adwords ad, etc. Let's look at just some of the ways you can convince people that they want to take the next step.

Principles of Persuasion

Robert Caldini is a social psychologist who laid out six "Cues of Influence." They are:

Cues of Influence:​

1. Comparison
2. Liking
3. Authority
4. Reciprocation
5. Commitment / Consistency
6. Scarcity

Let's talk about each of those and even more that you can tack on to help you persuade your audience that you are the RIGHT solution for them.

Comparison & Liking & Reciprocity
I just rewatched the movie Boiler Room for the millionth time. These guys work in a chop shop selling stocks to cold leads that they didn't even gather. To get the job done, they play any character and say anything necessary to persuade the person on the other end of the phone.

At one point, the main character asks this guy while he's stuttering about not wanting to buy any stocks "Say, are you married?" And the mark says "Yes, I've been married for 10 years." The salesman says, "Oh yeah very nice, me too. We're coming up on our 8th year. Do you have any kids?" The mark says, "Yes, I have 2 beautiful daughters." The main character then replies, "That's great. I also have two daughters but we're trying for a little boy now."

Do you see what's happening there? Our sleazy crook is slowly becoming just like the mark. They are two peas in a pod, both family men and proud fathers. Of course the crook is single with no kids. But he's transforming into your peer, a regular member of your cohort. He might as well be your neighbor.

That same comparison can be created based on people who give you testimonials. They are just like the potential customer with the same pain points and motivators, but now they found the solution (your product).

Now, not only are you a similar bloke like your mark, but they're starting to warm up to you. You keep chopping it up with them, making them laugh, asking them about themselves, letting THEM do the talking... now you've hit the point where they like you. It's a lot easier to get someone's money when you're not a stranger, and better yet when they actively have a positive opinion of you (or think they do in that moment...)

You can dive into Comparison and Liking even deeper by striking at the Reciprocity principle. This is why websites use list magnets and give out freebies in their email sequences. It's why you get free samples, special discounts, all of that. If someone gives you something free of charge, you're going to feel slightly obligated to engage them further. "Thanks for coming into our veterinary clinic, here's a free dog treat and flea collar for your beloved pup. Come back soon!"

Authority & Familiarity
We already talked about this. It's why people get fake doctors on commercials. It's why they get celebrity endorsements. It's why you see "As Seen In" lists of logos on websites. It's why you see a Better Bureau Business seal of approval image on sites. Anything to suck authority from another source by association.

It's also why you see tons and tons of free information on the web. It's all a part of the marketing funnel to slowly be seen over and over again while trying to convince people you're an authority. A large part of that is Familiarity. This refers to the repeated exposure you want to subject people to. The more they see you, the more they remember, and then you become what is recalled in association with a topic, even if you suck in relation to it. And the mind uses that as a shortcut to determine who is authoritative. That's what retargeting pixels are for, it's what billboards are for, and what TV commercials are for. You see some companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi pumping out the dumbest ads because it doesn't matter. They just need you to remember them constantly.

Commitment & Consistency
This refers to two things: You and Them. You want to box people in like the "Alter Their Reality" tactic above by forcing them to be consistent to their own beliefs. I go to Taco Bell and they always ask me flat out, "Would you like to donate $1 to the Boys & Girls Club" and I always say no, because they failed to even try. If they took the time to say "Would you commit a single dollar to advancing our local community's children's extracurricular activities, which has the benefit of lowering crime and increasing our cities annual revenues?" they'd get a lot more yes's, because every one says they're committed to those things and have to say yes to stay consistent with themselves.

What it also means is that you need to stay consistent. Every time someone encounters your promotional material, it needs to provide the same quality of engagement, branding experience, and reward. Because you're committed to that level of consistency, when you offer a product for sale, you barely have to sell it at that point due to all of the principles of persuasions mentioned thus far. For them to stay consistent with you and how much they take from you, like you, and want to be like you, they will want to commit to a purchase.

Scarcity
I love scarcity. It kills it with "means to an end" products or services, which aren't always guru related. You can come at this in several ways. Two of the most successful are time restrictions on bonuses or discounts or for the service as a whole. It looks like this: "Buy within the next 4 hours and get 2 for the price of 1." or "The best tier is only available to the first three buyers, the second tier has a limit of 5 buyers. The third is unlimited." And each tier has different prices and benefits. Any time you see a sales lander with a clock literally ticking down near the "buy now" button, you're being hit with scarcity and most of the time it's absolutely fake. If you make it real though, it's unbelievably powerful, especially if you can leverage it into testimonials and other principles.

Rhetorical Questions
These are questions that have a loaded answer. The goal is to move the mind away from "no" and towards "yes" even if it has nothing to do with your product. "Don't you wish we could achieve world peace? (yes!) Don't you wish there'd be no more wars where young men have to die and mothers grieve? (screw that, of course!) Well you can achieve that level of peace in your own home with our new Wonder Zapper 5000. With the new Wonder Zapper 5000, these pesky mosquitos can never wage war on you again. Your peace depends on it."

Evidence
Nothing plugs holes in the leaky dam of your sales copy like evidence further down the line. This is why tobacco companies bribe research companies to run shoddy experiments and then fudge numbers and interpret them in their favor. But the evidence doesn't have to support your product itself. It can support benefits related to your product. Let's say you sell a Quit Smoking hypnosis class. "A meta-study states that 95% of smokers who quit smoking have full lung repair within 6 months. Another study states that hypnotic smoking cessation can be achieved in as little as 8 sessions, and sticks completely with an additional 2 follow-up reinforcement sessions at 6 months and 12 months." Provide evidence. Dates, numbers, facts. It's very persuasive.

Heuristics
Heuristics are mental shortcuts that we all take non-stop, not because we're lazy but because the mind is bombarded with so much information to process. Sometimes we have to jump to conclusions. This is what generalizations are for, for instance. There's several that you see used all the time. Have you ever seen a ridiculously long sales lander? Well... Length-Implies-Strength. Have you ever seen someone go along with the crowd even though they have no clue what they're talking about? Well... Consensus-Implies-Correctness. There are tons of mental hueristics out there for you to investigate and exploit in your sales copy.

The above are just a handful of principles of persuasion out there. You likely have an arsenal you use in your daily life. Some people have some that are completely stupid, like thinking being louder in an argument means you're winning. One that does work is ridicule and getting on-lookers laughing. There's so many. Find them and use them!

 

[Ryuzaki]

Let's get past trying to push the buttons of the Life-Force 8 and being persuasive while you do it.

What I want to talk about now are text-based tricks you can use that help tear down more walls. Your main tactics and principles mentioned above are built convince customers that you can tear down their main walls for them.

But there's other walls involved in making the conversion. Some of those are sheer laziness, lack of time, lack of energy, lack of intelligence, lack of money, etc. You can jump past all of these so you don't block out any potential customer. One of the main things we'll focus on is Speed & Simplicity.

Speed and simplicity helps you strike at the emotional center of your potential buyer and stops them from engaging the logical centers of their brain, where resistances creep out. It also overcomes a host of other problems mentioned above like time, energy, reading comprehension levels, and being bombarded with tons of other attention-grabbing media.

Again, the following is just a sampling of tactics developed over the decades by copywriters. I can't list them all and I'm not sure anyone ever has. But here's the ones you should absolutely be employing in every piece you write.

• Simplicity - Use the easiest to understand arguments possible.
• Use Simple Words - Don't bust out the thesaurus. Speak in everyday language.
• Keep Sentences Short - They are easier to digest and faster to read.
• Use Short Paragraphs - They create artificial length and faster progress through it.
• Use Personal Pronouns - Use I, Me, Yours, Mine, You, versus Them, They.
• Use Scarcity When Possible - Always limit supplies, time, discounts, or bonuses.
• Ask Questions - Rhetorical questions engage the reader and lead to answers.
• Quote Authorities - Add quotes in your copy to siphon credibility.
• Be Specific - Don't say vague stuff. Explain with specific information. Leave no holes.
• Tell Micro Stories - Use bait and hook to keep the text flowing and the reader moving.
• Delay Answers - If you ask a question, withhold the answer while making it clear you will answer.
• Focus on Benefits - Always push benefits more than features.
• Put the Biggest Benefit in Your Title - Get straight to it to ensnare the most readers possible
• Headlines Should Fit the Four Factors - Always build around self-interest, being quick & easy, news, and curiosity.
• Use Formatting to Grab Attention - All caps, bold, italics, underlines, reverse backgrounds, etc.
• Understand Typography - Read studies about what fonts work best online as well as line heights and line widths.

Here's a visual break so you don't lose your place. The stuff I'm telling you about here are simple things you can do in any sales copy. There's always space for it to some degree. Here's some more:

• Sell One Product at a Time - Don't make your job harder. Focus the customer on one product.
• Get a Professional Design - If you don't respect your customer enough for that, forget the sale.
• Use Social Proof - Show social share counts, show "As Seen In," have testimonials.
• Choose Images Carefully - Use faces, watch out for eye directions, control the flow of the page.
• Go Heavy on Visual Adjectives - Imagine your face when your empty, barren plate gets covered by our huge, cheese-stretching, pepperoni-slathered, greasy slice of Italian pizza!
• Have a Unique Selling Proposition - There has to be a unique reason to buy what you're selling.
• Always Have a Call to Action - Direct the reader to take the action you want. "Smash that like button!"
• Demonstrate the Product - With pictures or video, show your product being used successfully.
• Coupon Codes - Up your price and always offer the coupon code. Fake generosity and deals.
• Offer Guarantees - Give warranties, X days to get your money back, etc.
• Use Color Psychology - Choose the right colors that elicit the right emotions at the right times.

The above are the most common (because they're successful) methods of boosting the success of your copywriting. Of course, how you employ them matters as much as simply getting them in there.

No Friction at Checkout!
It should go without saying, that since copywriting is all about persuasion partially through removing resistance, your checkout procedure should be as simple as possible. You should be able to be contacted through a form or email address shown and better yet a phone number. Your address should be visible if you have a physical store (and even if not to boost authority). You should have the fewest fields to fill out in any order or shipping form. You should accept as many of the most common payment processors as you can. Don't add friction right at the end when the customer is in your hands!

How it Plays Out
Your sales copy needs to have a sequence to it that basically goes like this:

1) Attention: You grab their attention with a killer headline that boasts the key benefit somehow.​

2) Interest: You create interest through asking questions, leaving hanging threads, telling stories, sharing quotes, etc.​

3) Desire: You build desire by concluding stories, answering questions, and re-emphasizing benefits.​

4) Proof: You show proof of your claims by showing picture evidence of the result of your product, showing demonstrations of the product at work, having social proof and testimonials.​

5) Action: You direct the reader to take the specific action you want.​

That looks a lot like AIDA... hmmm. That must mean that even a single piece of sales copy takes you through its own version of the entire funnel. That is correct.

Now Listen!
You may be reading all this psychology mumbo jumbo and thinking it doesn't apply to you. It does. I just got done saying that every step of every funnel is a microcosm version of the full funnel. Think about this.

If you're trying to share posts on Facebook guess what matters? The headline and the featured image and how you craft them. That's your copywriting to sell your product, which is probably just to land on your page and load a ton of CPM ads for you. Trying to do PPC text ads on the SERPs? The headline and description and URL is your copywriting AND the product at that stage. The conversion is getting the click. Same with your Title Tag and Meta Description for organic SEO in the SERPs. Trying to make sales on Amazon Associates? Commission Junction? Shareasale? Your business card. Your Twitter profile. All of this applies to ALL OF IT.

We have a few more things to cover mainly because I want you to know it exists so you know what to ask about in this thread or which books to buy or things to search for on Google.

Power Words
Power words are nouns and adjectives selected specifically because they're loaded with so much extra impact than their synonyms. These words conjure up imagery and meaning out of the brain because they get associated with people's deepest hopes, fears, anger, and desires.

Here's a paragraph that is weak and flaccid:

"The main character was just like any of us, and responded similarly. The scariest part was when he fell victim to the villain, yet succeeded in his escape."​

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Now here's the exact same paragraph that takes out this boring language and injects some power phrasing:

"The lead player might as well have been you or me, because we'd have done the same. The true terror arose when he became captive under the tyranny of the cruel master. The lead's (or should I say our) cunning strength assured his victory and subsequent survival."​

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If you search or find books on this topic, you'll find lists of 20, 100, 500, and even thousands of power words you can start using. These people basically busted out a thesaurus or used their mind to compile the lists. That's all you need to do.

Just think like this... Why say enhance when you can say energize or boost. Why talk about challenges and difficulties (negative, pessimistic connotations) when you can talk about overcoming odds and aligning with destiny (positive, empowering connotations). Why talk about deleted or minimized when you can talk about banned or ghosted. Why be frozen in fear when you can be paralyzed with terror. That didn't make you feel good, it made you feel blissful.

Emotion is persuasive and these kind of words conjure up all kinds of mental movies in your audience that you can't even predict. And you don't need to know the contents of these movies. You just need to know that you're stirring up their strongest dreams, nightmares, traumas, hopes, and aspirations and associating them with your product or absence of your product.

You should use this kind of language in long-form copy and micro copy like in headlines and calls to action.

Pricing Psychology
A HUGE conversion rate tweaker is price. I don't mean undercharging or overcharging (though either of those can imply a lot about your product too). I'm not talking about figuring out what your price should be in general. I'm talking after all of that, what should your EXACT price be, down to the penny?

We've all seen the games. Gas stations charging $3.99 and 9/10ths of a penny, just to drop it the price from the having a 4 in the front down to a 3. We've seen stores inflate prices in order to offer a fake discount. I'm not talking about those tricks either. Let's look at some psychological hacks for to set your price that go much deeper than that.

The Number of Syllables & Math
If your price takes mentally longer to say in the mind or out loud or to deal with mathematically, then it FEELS like a bigger price. Think about the difference between $12.97 and $12.99. One is a higher price but feels lower because it's less tedious to multiply or subtract and it's quicker to say. Try it. "Twelve Ninety Seven" has five syllables. "Twelve Ninety Nine" has four. If I want three of that product I can say $13 times 3 is $36 minus 3 cents is $35.97 total. Or I can confuse myself by saying $13 times 3 is $36 minus 3 times 3 cents less than the dollar equals $36 minus 9 cents, wait was that right?

Charm Pricing
Even numbers are static. They're solid. They don't move. Odd numbers are dynamic and full of possibility. This is called Charm Pricing. Let me state that this one depends on what you're charging ballpark. A cheap price should use charm pricing when possible. $8.99 might be cheaper, but it's likely to get you less sales than $7.99 or even $9.99. Try to get the lead number down to an odd number, but make sure you split test differences like $34 versus $37 versus $39 too. Try tricks like leaving off the cents altogether, especially on recurring costs.

Prestige Pricing
For lifestyle items or expensive items, go for rounded numbers. That doesn't mean you should ignore using odd numbers up front or anywhere else in the number. But round off to the nearest 10, 100, or 1000. Know your demographic though! Apple will still sell an iMac at $1399 at the base model because they know their customer base is stretching their budget to get what is basically a lifestyle product. But a jewelry company might have a ring or necklace they'll price at $100 instead of $99 due to the demographic and their relationship to money. Another example would be expensive cars. The overall price might be $250,000, but the monthly payments might look like $799.99 per month. You can segment your demographic and still target both with your pricing on the same product.

Style Your Prices in Smaller Text
Make your benefits huge. Words like SALE! and DISCOUNT should be big. The price itself should be physically smaller, because things that are smaller feel cheaper on the wallet. They have less of a mental impact. Don't do the thing where you don't list a price at all. That's just wasting your time with wishy washy leads, unless you're catering to the rich with a lifestyle product. Then it's worth caressing the lead.

Price Anchoring
A classic trick is having an anchor price that influences the perception of the core price. Say that you only intend to have two tiers of a product, the cheap and the expensive. It's worth your time to offer a third one closer to the expensive that offers around the same features you should get for a price right up the middle. The example everyone uses is graphic design. You can offer the Web only option for $69, the Print only option at $119, or the Web & Print double package for $135. Now anyone who wants the Print only option is going to buy the double package just in case, because what's another $15 bucks. And nobody who can afford the double package is going to say "what's another $16," thanks to mental rounding, moving from charm to prestige pricing.

Bundle & Fragment Prices
If you sell multiples of the same item all at once or with a subscription, you can get away from showing larger prices by showing the "per item" or "per month" price. If one item is $19, don't say "Buy three for $57" and don't say "get six months for $114." Just say "buy three at $19 each" and "get six months at $19 per month." Keep it lower by separating the shipping prices, too.

Hide the Dollar Sign & Comma
Remember that we all fear loss far more than we appreciate gain. So either hide the dollar sign and comma altogether or make it much smaller than the numbers in the price. Instead of saying "$3,000" you can say "3000" or "$3000." This serves to reduce the pain of the purchase.

There are plenty more psychological price hacks. Find them and use them! Here's a fantastic post by Nick Kolenda to get you started.

Formatting Calls to Action
This is such a big topic that I'm going to keep it short, but you should know about it. Like pricing, this can change your revenue in a huge way, largely because the sale is already made. It can extremely fluctuate your conversion rates too, especially when you have free trials and things like that where you're just capturing leads.

The three things you want to deal with here is the shape, color, and text of a call to action. The CTA is an explicit command to the reader like Buy Now, Sign Up, Start Your Free Trial Today, etc. You want to play with your colors not only in terms of color psychology but in analogous colors that pop and harmonize too. The shape and positioning (especially if you use buttons) can be game changers.

When it comes to formatting CTA's, you're looking at power words, implications of word choice, design principles, user friction, color psychology, and pricing psychology. It's where you have to put it all together. And what you should do, without question, is split test. Then split test the winner, and again, until you stop seeing gains.

Writing Headlines
I'm leaving this one up to you but pointing it out. Entire tomes can be written about headlines, which include your blog posts title tag, your PPC ad titles, your YouTube titles, and more. Headlines are everywhere and on the internet the click is half the battle, and for some it's the full battle. You'll learn about what kind of words to start your headline off with, whether to use questions or not, using symbols like parentheses and brackets, starting off with odd numbers, and much more. Learn about this! Maybe some kind soul will write a post about it here.

Conclusion
And that's the end of the copywriting expansion pack! As always, the goal was to introduce you to a topic and give you more than enough to get started and open up some obvious leads for you to continue your education on your own. The DSCC isn't about spoon feeding or telling you what to do. It's about telling you how to think about what you should do. The rest is up to you. But armed with even the basics of copywriting, you should be able to boost your conversions significantly if you understand your demographic. Split test everything when possible.

 

[Marx_Melencio]

[SNIP]Who's making the bacon? Who's getting the sales? If you answered Exhibit B, you are correct [ ... ][/SNIP]

Generally, this for me makes sense. But I'd argue that this all shakes out to how you understand your ideal customer profile.
• What I'm saying is, technical features work much better for a certain crowd than benefits, i.e. Many if not most Deep Learning engineers know what they need in a machine. So they want to know tech specs, verifiable comparative data and not benefits;
• Yes. If correctly written and designed in ways that appeal to them, then benefits can grab the attention of many of them. Though a lot would likely want to get technical details immediately afterwards; and
• It's really quick and easy to do the first thing wrong though ...

My point is, profoundly knowing your ideal customer profile is step 0 in copywriting. Cheers!