Embark on a transformative journey with me as we conquer the Everest of market communication—copywriting. Together with the wisdom of my friend and copywriting guru Ray Edwards, this episode guarantees an armory of tools and strategies to turn your writing hiccups into triumphs. We dissect the seven cardinal sins of copywriting and with each, present an elixir that promises to refine your message, resonate with your audience, and skyrocket your conversions.
Ever wonder why some emails are the gate-crashers of the inbox party while others languish unseen? We'll reveal the alchemy behind irresistible subject lines and the secret sauce of personalization. And it's not just about the open rates—we're dishing out insider tips to craft compelling headlines, engage social media audiences, and optimize your landing pages to perfection. As a sports parent, I've mastered the art of balancing kids' schedules with the adrenaline of marketing success, and I'm sharing these anecdotes to illustrate that effective messaging can indeed be life's game-changer.
But wait, there's more to this episode than tips and tricks—it's a heartfelt call to action for marketers. We hold the key to doors that might lead someone to exactly what they need, and it's our ethical duty to market with integrity. Using the analogy of a lifesaving cure, we explore the gravity of our influence and the potential to touch lives far beyond the reach of our campaigns. Tune in and equip yourself not just with the skills to boost your marketing, but with the awareness that every word can make a profound difference.
Embark on a transformative journey with me as we conquer the Everest of market communication—copywriting. Together with the wisdom of my friend and copywriting guru Ray Edwards, this episode guarantees an armory of tools and strategies to turn your writing hiccups into triumphs. We dissect the seven cardinal sins of copywriting and with each, present an elixir that promises to refine your message, resonate with your audience, and skyrocket your conversions.
Ever wonder why some emails are the gate-crashers of the inbox party while others languish unseen? We'll reveal the alchemy behind irresistible subject lines and the secret sauce of personalization. And it's not just about the open rates—we're dishing out insider tips to craft compelling headlines, engage social media audiences, and optimize your landing pages to perfection. As a sports parent, I've mastered the art of balancing kids' schedules with the adrenaline of marketing success, and I'm sharing these anecdotes to illustrate that effective messaging can indeed be life's game-changer.
But wait, there's more to this episode than tips and tricks—it's a heartfelt call to action for marketers. We hold the key to doors that might lead someone to exactly what they need, and it's our ethical duty to market with integrity. Using the analogy of a lifesaving cure, we explore the gravity of our influence and the potential to touch lives far beyond the reach of our campaigns. Tune in and equip yourself not just with the skills to boost your marketing, but with the awareness that every word can make a profound difference.
Episode two five, nine.
Speaker 2:Late night. Internet marketing.
Speaker 1:This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to talk about the seven most common copywriting problems that are keeping you from selling more today, and I'm gonna tell you exactly what to do to fix them. All this and more, on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Speaker 3:The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Speaker 2:You've been working for somebody else, but you want a business to run yourself. You want to know how to start and where to begin. Can you get out your comfort zone, my friend? Yes, you can do it right when it's late at night. At the end of the day, your dreams burn inside.
Speaker 3:So keep it up and you will find that you're building your business one night at a time, and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, your host, mark Mason.
Speaker 1:Hey, hey, hey. How is everyone doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in Dallas, texas, where it has been absolutely beautiful for the last couple of days, and I have been in baseball crazy mode because my son is playing on the JV team sometimes and the varsity team sometimes and we're going to all those games and it's tournament season and in addition to that, my daughter plays volleyball and I'm just that typical sports parent that you see on TikTok that's dragging around a cooler and an arm load of folding chairs and sometimes I'm freezing and sometimes I've got a sunburn. It's just absolutely nuts around here in Dallas right now and I wouldn't trade it for the world. I tell you what being a parent of happy kids is a fantastic, amazing blessing, and seeing them compete Even when they lose, it's just fantastic. I just love it. I am well and truly blessed.
Speaker 1:But today I want to help you with one of the most common problems that I see, and that's that, quite frankly, your copy stinks. If you've got this problem, if you're trying to sell a thing or you're trying to convert ads on social media, or you've got a sales page or a lead magnet or something that just won't convert. You've got an e-commerce platform and you're not selling enough product. This podcast is for you. I want to help you and I am excited about it. I've got seven things that you can do to improve your copy today and I want to talk to you about those.
Speaker 1:You know this was motivated by something that's going on with a friend of mine, my close friend, ray Edwards, who is the most famous copywriter that I know, and I know a lot of copywriters, but he's written copy for guys like Tony Robbins, people that you've heard of online, like Amy Porterfield. He is a well-known copywriter and he's done business all over the internet, and not just in the online business space or in the self-improvement space, but literally all over the place. And what you may not know about copywriting and one of the things that is just so frustrating about copywriters is he's like a $100,000 guy. I mean, maybe sometimes you could get him to look at your copy for a five-figure check, but typically, if you're a business that wants to use Ray to write your copy, you're writing him a check in the neighborhood of $100,000. That's what great copywriters cost, and so therefore, his clients are usually massive clients. This bothers Ray, because he likes to help regular people like you and me with their copy as well. So he's done things to address this. To get his message about copywriting out, he created a copywriting framework which we've talked about on the podcast before, called the Pastor Framework. He's also written books about how to write copy and so forth, but recently he's introduced a brand new product where you can get access to Ray and maybe, more interestingly, get access to Ray's artificial intelligence copywriting tools, which I've used to write entire sales pages. We'll talk about that more at the end of the podcast. If you want to check that out, you can check it out at latenightimcom. Forward slash ray and you'll see that offer there. It's very interesting and very affordable for people like us.
Speaker 1:But I just want to deliver some massive value to you. So let's go through these seven problems that you may have. I'm going to be a little presumptuous here and say that you probably have with your copy and even if you don't recognize it as a problem, it's certainly going to be an area where you can improve. I'm going to tell you what to do about it and I'm also going to offer you all of this in writing, so you can just listen. You don't even have to take notes, because I've got an amazing PDF that I'm going to offer you at the end of this that you can download at no charge to you, which is super fantastic.
Speaker 1:Okay, problem number one, guys, you don't understand your audience, and I know you think you do, but especially if you're a new marketer, I bet you fall into one of the cases like this. You're either case A, where you haven't thought hard about who your audience actually is, or what I see actually most common is you want to make everyone your audience. That's case B. Your audience is not specific enough. You need to really try to understand your audience so that you can tailor your marketing. For steps two through seven that I'm about to give you. You want to be able to tailor that, and if you don't understand your audience, you can't do that. Now you see, mark, how do I understand my audience? Well, the first thing you can do is really start a conversation with your audience, interface with them on social media, in groups that you can join they don't even have to be your groups and start making a note of what your ideal customer looks like for whatever it is that you're trying to sell, whoever you're trying to reach with your copy, and I'll give you a really good example of this and she, to my knowledge, is never talked about this.
Speaker 1:But Amy Porterfield is one of my favorite online people in the whole world and it's pretty clear to me personally, having a been a member of her community, that she is targeting online business women. That's her target market and they're even in a specific age range. Let's say they're kind of in the 25 to 45 sort of age range. To me, her message is targeted strictly at those people. That's who she's talking to. Does she have a lot of men that follow her? Absolutely, she does. Does she have men that have bought her products? Sure, you're talking to one right now. I mean, she reaches a wide audience. Does she have octogenarians in her audience? Absolutely, and young entrepreneurs that are just starting out, maybe 18, 19 years old that are men? Absolutely, but her target market when she's speaking, she's really speaking to women. She's not overt about it. She's very subtle in the way she positions her message. But she is a voice online for women because she knows, and I think correctly, that women need that voice. Women need a champion in the online space, because the online space for years and years and decades has kind of been a bro hug, bro marketing sort of space. So she sees that niche. It's not something she talks a lot about, but that's my interpretation of her marketing and I think she has done an amazing job of being a beacon for women online, and I love that about Amy Porterfield. I'm a guy with three daughters, so I'm super excited about people like Amy Porterfield that are shining a light for women in any space, particularly in online marketing.
Speaker 1:So you want to talk to whoever your audience is. Imagine who they are and what I like to do, now that we have these amazing AI tools, is start a conversation with chat GPT and ask chat GPT to ask you questions about your ideal market. Like you know, hey, chat GPT, I'm trying to form a picture of my ideal market. Ask me some questions that will help you understand who my ideal customer is. Chat GPT will ask you questions and then what I like to do is take that further and create a bio of a specific person and give that person a name and maybe even give them a stock photo. That that's my person that I'm talking to whenever I do my marketing. That's my recommendation for you is that you do that and with the tool like chat GPT, you don't even need to be good at it. You can let chat GPT be the expert on how to help you define your market.
Speaker 1:So problem number two problem number two is that your headlines just simply aren't compelling. Look, when someone lands on whatever piece of content that you're writing a headline for whether it's a blog post that has affiliate links in it or a landing page You've got a few seconds to grab their attention and your biggest opportunity here is to create curiosity that pulls them down the page and gets them to read more or to talk about the benefits in a way that is compelling and fixes their pain, whatever their pain is. Are you sick and tired of back pain that keeps you awake until three in the morning? This weird ancient recipe can solve your problem right. So that kind of headline addresses the pain and it actually creates some curiosity, like what's a weird ancient recipe? I want to hear more about this that will pull their eyes down the page.
Speaker 1:The action for you on this particular item is to take one of your recent headlines, ask chat GPT to analyze it, to make suggestions, to suggest other headlines and ask yourself is this just a boring headline where I'm talking about the features, or is this a great headline where I'm talking about benefits, or I've created some curiosity. There are lots of other tricks around headlines, like adding numbers to the headlines and things like that, but what I really recommend is you go hmm, I wonder what that is about. If you want to see a kind of an interesting example of this, go to someplace like CNNcom where they are trying to get you to click on ads at the bottom of the page. So if you go to these pages, you'll see that there are these ads down at the bottom and they're very clickbaity and I don't recommend that you go all the way there. But you can kind of see what I'm talking about. They're creating an enormous amount of curiosity, both with the image and with the headline to get you to click. That's the kind of feeling that you want with your headline. So your action is to rewrite your headline again, maybe using the help of chat GPT, to give you lots of ideas and then test a couple. I think that's a really great way to get started in this area.
Speaker 1:Problem number three is that you're not asking for the sale. You know it's one of the first things that Zig Ziglar teaches in closing the sale, you've got to actually ask for the sale, or maybe your call to action is weak and I'll give you an example. Look, I know you have copywriting problems and I know those problems are keeping you from reaching the capability that you have to make money online and do great things and really achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. I don't want that for you. I want you to go right now to late night. I amcom forward slash Ray and check out Ray's new product. It's amazing and it has the potential to solve all your problems. Look, you've got two choices, right. You can keep doing what you've been doing with regard to copywriting and you can have poor calls to action, or you can go right now to late night. I amcom slash Ray and check out this offer. I don't know how long it's going to be there, but if you go there right now, at least you can see what I'm talking about. I want you to pause this audio and go there right now. Go to late night. I amcom forward slash Ray.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you see what I did there, right? I had a very strong call to action. I'm telling you exactly what to do and what I find when I see people writing calls to action, they're more like Well, you know, if you want to check this out, I guess you could, you know? I mean, why not? I mean if you think it might help you and if you think maybe you can, you know, scrape together some extra money, maybe you might check it out. That's a week call to action, right? What we want is something compelling. It's like look, I am sure this is what you need. Go do this now. That's the kind of call to action that I want and I want you to do that and add some urgency to it. Go find one of your calls to action today and include a time-sensitive word like now or today. Click now, check it out now. We don't know how long this offer is going to be in place, and that's almost always true because this offer that actually, I don't know how long Ray's going to have this offer. I told him I thought it was crazy underpriced. But value pricing is a whole another discussion for another episode, all right.
Speaker 1:Problem number four your product descriptions are terrible. So you know, again, when you describe a product, a tendency that most people have that don't have training for copywriting is to talk about the features right. This automobile has 479 screws, right. Who cares that the automobile has 479 screws? What you care about is that those 479 screws secure the frame in such a way that the interior of this car is the most quiet and amazing riding environment that you've ever been in. Have you ever been in a car that's really noisy? And every time you hit a bump it rattles and goes crazy. That's because it doesn't have enough screws. But with our automobile we have a pristine audio environment and you know what you can do with that great audio environment. You can listen to the ballet or you can listen to the red hot chili peppers, and your friends will be stunned and amazed at how nice it is to ride in your luxury vehicle. See, the feature is the screws that keep the car from rattling.
Speaker 1:But nobody wants to buy screws. What they want to buy is an experience, right? They want to feel something, and so your product descriptions need to help people feel something. That's why, when you see a really good product description, you'll notice that the product description is words and the features are a bullet list somewhere later that people are scrolling down to. You want the benefits to be so compelling up front that by the time people get to checking the features they've already decided to buy, and they're checking the features to validate their decision to buy the product.
Speaker 1:Ok, problem number five no one is opening or reading your emails. Ok, see. Problem number two about headlines, because subject lines are basically headlines. We want to create curiosity, we want to make sure that people have a reason to read the email. Here's another thing that I will tell you that my experience is that personalization does help a little bit. So consider personalizing your emails when you send them, and most great email platforms, like the one that I use, which is ConvertKit, which you can check out at latenightimcom, forward slash convert kit Make sure that those features are present and that you're using them. And then the other thing that I would say is open rates are really important. They're important to deliver ability.
Speaker 1:So you should consider segmenting your email list to tailor the opening line of your email to each segment specific interest. So let's say you're creating an email about copywriting and you know that some of your audience are brand new internet marketers that don't have much experience they may not even have a website yet and then some are experienced people who are definitely struggling with sales. You might craft two different headlines to address those two segments, but the content might still be the same. I'm still going to give you these tips, but what gets your curiosity is different. If you're a new marketer, you might look at a subject line about copywriting tips and say copywriting I'm not even to that yet. So you need to kind of think about who it is that's opening your email and considering segmenting that way. Either way, the next email subject line that you write, I want you to do two things. One is I want you to make sure that you consider the headline tips that I gave you above and headline tips. And then, number two, I want you to make sure that it makes sense that the segment that you're sending the email to has the right subject line.
Speaker 1:Okay, problem number six your social media posts don't get any likes or subscribes or love at all. They're just terrible. And I think you know this is a question about engagement, like, are you just spewing stuff at people that they can just scroll past, or are you doing something that you can actually create engagement and comments? And I think the best, easiest way to do this is to ask people questions. If you ask people questions on social media and encourage comments and interaction in the comments. This does two things. One, when people comment on your social media posts, it tells the algorithm that people value the post. They want to see more like that, because they enjoyed it enough or they felt strongly enough about whatever you said to actually engage in the comments. So that's a big signal that the social media platforms have to show that post to more people, or to show your next post to more people. So that's really important. And then the second thing is, of course, when you're writing your social media posts.
Speaker 1:Social media posts are copy and all of these tips apply, especially the headline one. I mean you want to create curiosity and interest and catch people's attention and understand. We're not talking about clickbait here, we're just talking about being an interesting writer, write things that are interesting, that leave something to the imagination, that cause people to stop their scroll and engage with the post. And then, finally, you know you've got the same problem with your blog posts. You're writing these blog posts and readers don't come back for more content, and what's the reason? Now, sometimes this can be a headline issue. We've talked about that a lot and you may be gathering that one of the highest leverage. Things that you can do is get better at writing headlines, and that's absolutely true.
Speaker 1:The other thing I'll tell you here is the opportunity with blog posts is that you have something called subheadings. You have these like chapter markers in blog posts usually, and that does a couple of things. One is it makes the blog post easier to scan, so someone who's looking for a solution to a problem or particular piece of information which is often the case can find what they're looking for and they go wow, this is a really helpful blog post, I'm going to share it. Or this is a really helpful website. I'm going to come back here and look for more. I'm going to subscribe. It also has the same effect with Google. If you block things out with the proper kind of section headings, it helps Google identify chunks of your content that can be used to answer queries and can help you in the rankings.
Speaker 1:And I think another thing that you can do with your blog post to retain readers is include a what you will learn section at the beginning of your article to act as a hook. I actually think of this as setting the hook right. So the headline is some kind of promise about what they're going to get, but its main objective is to get them into the text. So you've kind of hooked them with the headline. Now, if you include a what you will learn section at the beginning of your article, then I think you can set that hook and say, aha, your reader will say what they are looking for is going to be in this article and they'll know that it's worth sticking around and reading. That's going to get your page time up, your time on page, the time from when a person arrives at your page to when they bounce to go do something else or click on another link. That time will go up because people will know that what they're looking for is there. All they need to do is find it, and that's great, because Google will see that signal and it will show your page to more people. So those are your seven tips.
Speaker 1:You want to make sure you understand your audience. You want to make sure your headlines are compelling. You want to make sure your calls to action are strong. Your product descriptions focus on the benefits of what it is that you're selling. Your emails have great subject lines that are targeted to the people that are supposed to be reading them. And your social media posts are engaging and they ask for people's feedback. And, finally, that you make sure that you let readers understand that your blog posts are relevant as soon as you can, because that will help them stick on the page. So that's your seven copywriting tips, but that's not all. I got one more for you, because this is something that I work on all the time, and that problem is your landing pages just aren't converting. So this is your bonus tip.
Speaker 1:Tip number eight we're going to address the problem of landing pages not converting. So I'll tell you many things about landing pages. The first thing is it's really hard, at least in my opinion, to guess what a landing page change is going to do to conversions. You may create what you think is the best landing page you've ever seen and you may find that doesn't convert very well, and then you may change a thing on that landing page that you think is going to make it worse, and it may make it better, or vice versa. I will tell you this is a very difficult thing and the only solution to this is to do some sort of testing. And I'll tell you something about landing pages. Small changes in conversion rates of your landing page can make huge differences in your profitability as a business. So this is worth your time.
Speaker 1:You want to make changes on your landing page one at a time, change one thing at a time and send enough traffic to that page to test. It totally depends on the niche and you can do kind of statistical analysis. But my rule of thumb is you sort of need 100 visitors before you make a decision about whether or not a change made something better or worse. And if you say to me well, mark, I don't have enough visitors to do this kind of testing, I say to you why not spend a few bucks on paid traffic? And that way you can use that to test your landing pages and you can optimize sort of one thing at a time. Start with a headline, make sure it clearly states the benefit and then start working on your copy. And I will tell you that oftentimes simpler copy, especially on Freebie landing page. Less is more. Don't give the reader a lot of time to make a decision. It's a simple landing page. You want them to do one thing with that strong called action that we have talked about above. And there's just not a lot of stuff to read. There's not a long video to go through. I find that simple landing pages often convert better. Often it's the ugliest landing page.
Speaker 1:The other two tips that I'll give you that I've found over the years are regarding landing pages. One is make darn sure that whatever you're doing is optimized for mobile, because more and more people are coming to landing pages on their cell phone and if you design it on your computer and it looks terrible or things are in the wrong order or the call to action is below the page folder, whatever on mobile, your conversions will be destroyed by that. Make sure you're looking at your landing pages on your cell phone. And then, finally, make sure that you add a customer testimonial or a trust badge or something close to the call to action button. That will give you a boost in credibility. Just a simple testimonial can make a huge difference. Put it close to the button.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that is my eight tips, so with seven, with a bonus tip on how you can improve your copy. Today, just take one of those and go fix something, test something, try to make something better and see what happens If you make a habit of that, of improving your copy week to week, month to month, day to day, where you're always trying to make your copy a little better. What you'll find is those changes will accumulate over as you build your business and two things will happen. One is your conversions will improve and two, you'll become a great copywriter. Now, as I promised, if you want to take a shortcut, ray has this amazing offer out there and basically what it includes is access to Ray, access to a community, access to Ray's artificial intelligence copywriting tools and, by the way, these tools are amazing. They're kind of hand specified by Ray and crafted by AI experts specifically for people who are writing copy like us. You get all those things and you can check that out at latenightimcom. Forward slash Ray.
Speaker 1:And I don't expect this is not false scarcity. I don't expect this will last forever, because Ray's gonna fill that thing up and then shut it off because at some point he's going to get more people in there that he can deal with. So if you want to just check it out, even if you don't take advantage of it, just go, take a look. It's pretty cool to see the kinds of things that Ray's doing with copywriting. He's a great guy to follow over at rayedwardscom and, again, you can check out the special offer of his at latenightimcom forward slash Ray.
Speaker 1:Oh and, by the way, I did promise you notes on this session. I've got a nice PDF for you to download over at latenightimcom forward slash copy tips. Again, that's latenightimcom forward slash copy tips. So if you want to check out Ray's stuff, that's latenightimcom forward slash Ray and if you want to check out the notes from this session, that's latenightimcom slash copy tips. Until next week, I hope everything goes your way. I hope it's amazing. I hope your life is amazing. I hope that you choose to see the challenges that come to you as opportunities to go kick some butt and do things that other people just aren't willing to do. That will give you competitive advantage in your marketplace. And I'll see you next week because I'm gonna help you with all of that.
Speaker 3:Ciao, you can do it right when it's late at night, you've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Be sure to visit L-N-I-M-Podcastcom today to leave feedback for Mark, download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time.
Speaker 2:Download your business one night at a time.
Speaker 1:You know, copywriting is a really interesting thing and I you know just marketing in general, but I think copywriting in particular is a really interesting thing. Of all the marketing things, I think copywriting is the most important thing, and I'll tell you why. In order to get really good at copywriting, you need to understand psychology, and psychology is fundamental to marketing. So being a good copywriter makes you a better fundamental marketer, because to write good copy, you need to understand how people think and you need to understand words of persuasion and how to persuade people to do the things that you need them to do in order to take the action that you want them to take. And oftentimes I hear people say, oh, that sounds manipulative. You know I don't want to manipulate people into doing things. You know, if you're doing business correctly, you've got solutions that will help people and you need to persuade them to take advantage of those solutions. I mean, if you're running the kind of business where you're intentionally trying to cheat people, then yeah, sure, okay, marketing's manipulative because you're trying to convince people to get taken advantage of. That's bad, but that's not what 99.99999% of business people are doing. We're trying to create value and we have these offers that have massive value and we need to match buyers with that offer in order to allow people to take advantage of that, allow people to get the benefit of this massive value.
Speaker 1:I often say, like if you had the cure to cancer but nobody wanted it, what would you do? Well, you would market it. You would try to get people convinced to take the cure for cancer, right I mean because it would help them. It would save their lives, literally. And while I know that most of you aren't saving people's lives with your products, some of you, by the way, are in ways that you can help them In ways that you can't even imagine.
Speaker 1:One of my best friends saved people's lives with his podcast. Your reach, maybe, and your impact is probably much more than you think it is. That's also a topic for another day. But if you want to help people, you need to market to them. That's what you need to be doing. If you're not getting better at the marketing that you're doing, not only are you cheating your own company, but you're doing a disservice to the people that you should be helping, because you're not doing a good enough job at informing them of the decision that they could make to make their lives better in whatever way you're able to do that. Just something to think about, ciao.