Ray Edwards Copywriting & Marketing Interview Transcript

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BEN: Ray, welcome to the call and how are you doing?

RAY: I am doing very well, thank you Ben, and it’s an honor to be on the call with you.

BEN: Well I’m honored to have you on the call. I’ve been wanting to interview you for a while now.

RAY: Well I know we always seem to have engaging and intellectually-stimulating conversation so… I’ve been looking forward to this every since you asked me if I’d be I’d be willing to do it.

BEN: I’ll tell you what, the first question that I wanted to ask you—because you do a lot of coaching, and you work with a lot of different copywriters and that sort of thing—when you look at what people are doing right now—especially your people, and anyone else for that matter—what’s the biggest mistake that you see copywriters making right now?

RAY: There are several. But the one that’s at the top of the list every time I’m asked this question is always the same: That is not writing to the reader. And I know that sounds silly. You think, “Well, who else are you writing to?” But what I have discovered—at least in my experience—is that most copywriters don’t take the time to really understand the psychology of the prospect or potential customer that they’re writing to. And so their copy either tends to be from the viewpoint of the company or the person or the product that they’re writing about… rather than written from the viewpoint of the intended reader. Presumably people who are listening to this interview are copywriters or work with copywriters who are writing in order to sell something—either an idea or a product or a service. And what you have to do is what Robert Collier said. He said that you must joint the conversation that’s already taking place in the mind of the reader. And I know Ben, you’re a fanatical student of Eugene Schwartz, as I am. And Gene said that you cannot through your copy create desire. You can only channel desire that already exists. And so, the mistake that I see people make is they don’t take the time to find out what the desires of their audience really are. And if they did, once you’ve figured that out, writing the copy is very easy. Because you know exactly what to say, because you know what’s on the reader’s mind. So that’s easy to say and a lot of people do say it, and if I asked probably 100 copywriters, “Do you actually get to know what the reader is thinking and what their mindset is like?” They would nod their head and say yes, but the truth is they didn’t spend the time doing the homework. Because it takes time, and it takes work.

And then there’s a couple of other things that are pretty common. One is writing copy that sounds like “copy.” Because most copywriters are kind of copywriting geeks. Right? We love to read great copy. And when we do, we kind of get a sense of the rhythm and how it feels when it’s rolling off our tongue or mentally in our mind we’re reading it. And so we try to write often so that it sounds like good copy. And usually the results are pretty disastrous because the reader doesn’t want to read copy. The minute they feel like they are reading copy they’re out of there. They want to feel like they’re reading something that’s worth giving up their time to read. It’s one of the things that I love about your copy is I always enjoy reading it and I always feel like I learned something when I read copy that you’ve written.

BEN: Well, thank you.

RAY: Well you’re welcome. I don’t give empty compliments and I mean every word of it. I read not too long ago you shared a piece of copy you wrote for a martial arts school and I just in reading it, it read smooth—smooth like honey. (Laughter) And I felt like I learned. I got something. I got some value out of reading it. So I think that’s important as well—not writing copy that sounds like copy. But let people feel like they got some value from reading it. And the best way to do that by the way is actually give them some value. So that takes a little more time.

And then the next mistake is not taking the time to know the product. And you notice that comes third in the list. But it’s very important. Just to go back to Eugene Schwartz—he wrote a lot of copy for book promotions. And he would read that book that he was writing for three or four times. And he would underline and make notes and he dictated his working notes and he would often have 70, 80, 90 pages of notes before he actually writing his copy. And I would venture say most copywriters working today—especially in the online copywriting world is specifically what I’m talking about—don’t take that kind of time with their product. I just finished a project for Tim Kerber and Ryan Lee—the guys who released the Membership Site Bootcamp product—which was a home study course and a coaching program all about how to make money with membership sites. And they sent me the product in advance of course of me writing the copy. And I took about 100 pages of notes before I wrote a single word of copy. I went through all the DVD’s and the screen capture videos and so forth—meticulously looking for those little gems that were contained inside the program. So I think you need to do that with any project you’re working on. And it paid off—I mean they have a great product and they had Jeff Walker involved helping them set up their product launch. So I’m certainly not trying to take any credit that’s not due me. But I know that that copy in that promotion brought in 1.7 million dollars in six days. So I feel like all that meticulous work paid off.

And then the final thing that I see that’s a really common mistake that copywriters make these days is not understanding marketing and strategy. Thinking that you’re just a copywriter. “I’m just the words guy.” I had a client recently—we were talking about a project. He said, “Well, I’ve talked to a lot of copywriters before I got to you and what frustrated me is I would say can you give me an opinion on what you think of our strategy, and what you think of our launch…” and he said, “almost every time they would tell me, I’m just the guy that writes the words. I’m a copywriter. I’m not a strategist and I’m not a web designer.” And I think it’s a mistake not to have a little bit of broader knowledge. And I know that you take great pains to educate yourself and learn about things. I know you recently spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of PR from the top expert in that field and I think every copywriter ought to follow that model and learn and deepen and widen your knowledge base.

BEN: It was funny how you put that in those order—that the actual writing I think you put it as number three. I think that’s so true and I was earlier talking to Doug D’Anna last week—and for people who don’t know him, he’s pretty up there with the direct mail world—he’s definitely a heavy hitter.

RAY: Yeah, he’s a superstar.

BEN: And one of the things that he said—I read this on Ken McCarthy’s blog actually—but it was so profound I wrote this down and I just taped it in front of my desk, because I don’t ever want to forget this. And that was, “copywriting is not building a bridge from your product to your prospect. It’s building a bridge from your prospect to your product.” And what you were saying—get in their heads first and then worry about the product and then all that. But man, I just don’t think people get that yet. I didn’t even really completely get it either until somewhat recently. But I just thought that was important when you talked about that.

RAY: Well, it is so important and I say most of us if we’re honest—I’ve had the fortune to work with some really great companies and marketers and have some fun assignments and I’ve done well. However, I can look back and I can point to projects that I worked on where for one reason or another sometimes it was completely my fault, sometimes it wasn’t. In the past, I didn’t get to implement all those elements—you know, really taking the time to do the research or I didn’t have enough access to the product ahead of time. I think the project always suffers in those cases. I look back and think, “Boy, we could have done so much better.” So it’s what makes successful copy easy if you take the time to know the prospect, and as you just were quoting Doug and said, you need to build a bridge from the prospect to the product. If you can do that, then writing winning copy really is so easy. And if you don’t do it that way—if you do it the way most people do it the other way around, you start with the product—then you’re just throwing a bunch of techniques at them.

BEN: Yeah.

RAY: Kind of like you’re doing copywriting kung-fu. You know, find that pivot point so you can throw them to the mat. And that’ll get you some sales. But it’ll also mean you have higher refund rates and it just makes the whole thing look a whole lot like work.

BEN: And when you mention rates a lot of times people don’t bring that into the equation. If you cut your refunds in half it’s almost like adding profits.

RAY: Yeah! Absolutely.

BEN: That along—just telling the truth and starting with what they really want and not bs’ing them. That’s extremely helpful. I hope everyone listening to this really takes that to heart. Now, what ways do you use when you get what people like to call “writers block” or you just can’t think of what to say. How do you handle that?

RAY: I’ve got three answers for that question. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about. Because I don’t believe there is such a thing as writers block. I think there’s writers excuse.

BEN: (Laughter) Yeah…

RAY: Writing is work. Even for those of us who love to write it’s still work. I think it was Gary Halbert I heard talking about the fact that—did you ever get on an airplane and the pilot said, “Well, we’re not going to go today because I’ve got ‘pilots block.’” No! The pilot sits down at the flight deck and he does what he needs to do. So my first answer is just sit down and write. If I was writing it as a set of directions on a tube of writers block cream it would be, “Apply liberal amounts to backside of chair. And type.” And I say that frivolously, but it really does come down to figuring out for you how can you avoid or eliminate your resistance to writing. Because that’s what happens. We get resistance pops up and we find reasons not to write.

Have you ever had this experience: You sit down to write and it’s one of those days where you feel like you’re not sure exactly where to start. Or maybe you think you are—but suddenly something pops into your head and you remember, “Oh my gosh! I need to return that DVD to Blockbuster!” Or, “I need to check and see about that airline ticket that I was supposed to book.” Or, “I need to vacuum the living room…”

BEN: Right…

RAY: It seems like there’s always something that pops up that you need to do. And for me one of the favorite ways that my subconscious mind like to play the game of resistance with me is I’ll sit down to write and I’ll start thinking, “You know what would really write well is if I had a nice hot cup of tea before I start. So I think I’ll go make some tea and then I’ll get back to writing.” And that is a form of resistance. There’s a whole lot to be said on this subject. But there is a book that I really recommend that every writer take time to read and you need to read it more than once. And the title is a little confusing. It’s called, “The War Of Art.” Most people will have a moment of dyslexia and think I mean, “Oh, he means ‘The Art Of War’.” But no, this is the “War Of Art.” And it’s written by Steven Pressfield. And the “War Of Art” is for any artist—and writers in particular—and it’s all about what keeps people from doing what they love. What are the internal road blocks to creativity. What causes writers block, for instance. And the subtitle of the book is, “Breakthrough The Blocks And Win Your Inner Creative Battles.” It’s a short book. And you can read it in an afternoon—you know, one of those afternoons when you don’t feel like writing.

BEN: (Laughter) Okay…

RAY: And I think you’ll find it very helpful. So, the second thing I would say is recognize that writers block is just a state—it’s a mental or emotional state. And if you’ve studied Tony Robbin’s material at all you know that Tony teaches there are three ways to change your emotional state. And they are focus, physiology, and language—or meaning. So focus is what we pay attention to—what we’re thinking about. So if I sit down and I feel like I’ve got writers block, what usually happens is I start focusing on, “Oh… why can’t I write? I don’t know what I can’t write. I really should write. But I’m not writing and so why is that? I guess I could do other things. Boy I wish I didn’t have this writers block…” And this whole inner dialogue starts up and I’m focusing on what? The problem. I’m focusing on why I can’t write. And your subconscious is a wonderful device—if you ask it a question it will give you an answer. So if you start thinking about, “Well why can’t I write?” Then your brain starts coughing up answers, “Well you can’t write because you’re lazy!” “You can’t write because you’re an idiot!” “You can’t write because it’s cloudy.” “You can’t write because it’s sunny.” “You can’t write because you feel bad.” “You can’t write because you feel too good—you should go play golf.”

BEN: Oh boy…

RAY: So your brain just pops all these answers out. So how do you change your focus when it comes to writing? I suggest that you do it by reading either copy that you’ve already written on this project… or getting out your notes or the product itself and just start making some notes. Don’t try to write copy. But focus on the project in some way. Another way to do it is what Gene Schwartz used to do which is used the timer method. Just decide that, “Okay, I’ve got writers block, and I don’t have to write a darn thing. But here’s what I’m gong to do. I’m going to start my timer…” Just a little digital timer—I used to have a kitchen table that I carried around with me. But recently I got an i-Phone and it has the most beautiful little timer application.

BEN: High tech Eugene Schwartz style.

RAY: Exactly. 21st century Eugene Schwartz copywriting technique. But set that timer for 33 minutes. And start it going and sit down with your legal pad or your computer or however you write… I use a computer… and here’s the only rule: You can’t get up. And you can’t online, you can’t check email or anything like that. It’s just you and the computer and your word processor. Or you and the pen and your pad of paper. And you can have on the screen in front of you the copy as you’ve worked on it so far. Or the outline of the copy or what have you. And so that’s the only rule—you can’t get up for that 33 minutes. And what will happen is you’ll start to get bored and you’ll realize, “Well, I can’t do anything, so I might as well look at this copy.” And you start looking at the copy and the timer is ticking away. And you start reading some of the copy and you realize, “Oh, I misspelled that word. I’ll fix that.” And so you fix it. And now your hands are on the keyboard and you notice, “Well that sentence looks a little clunky. I’ll just change that around a little bit—I’m not actually writing or anything. But I’ll change it around.” And the next thing you know, usually, 9 times out of 10, you’ll start writing just because of that. And then when the 33 minutes is up you get up and take at least a five minute break before you start your next writing session—or not writing session whatever the case may be. But that’s a way to change your focus.

Physiology just means change the way you use your body. If you’re sitting at your chair all slumped over and slouched and breathing shallow… kind of moaning and you got your head in your hands. I know this sounds silly… but sit up straight, put a big smile on your face, have correct typing posture or writing posture… and maybe even put on some music—I recommend putting on music that doesn’t have lyrics, because lyrics can be distracting—but whatever works for you. Stephen King writes with rock and roll blaring in his ears. But do some things with your body. And if that doesn’t do the trick for you, then get up and go take a 20 minute walk or a run. But don’t get distracted. Don’t walk to Star Bucks for instance. Or to Barnes & Noble—two of the favorite distractions of writers everywhere. Just walk around the block or down the street and back—but do something to get the blood pumping and your breathing changed and then sit down and sit up in a state—in a physical state, just imagine, “Well how do I sit when I’m writing like a crazy person? I just can’t stop the writing. It’s just flying out of my fingertips like those lightning bolts from the emperor’s fingers in the Star Wars movies…” You know, “How would I sit if I were in that state?” And just change the way you’re using your body and that will change your emotional state. Because what did your mom tell you when you were little and you kind of moping around the house and you were bored… what would she say? “Do something!” And you’d say, “I don’t feel like doing anything.” And she’d say, “Well I’ll give you something to do—how about you vacuum the living room?” And then suddenly you could figure out, “Hey, I got things I could do! I could go ride my skateboard, my bicycle…” But your mom knew a secret and the secret is “motion equals emotion.” So moving in a different way will change your emotional state and being blocked is nothing more than a state. It’s not real, I promise you it’s not real.

And the final thing is language or meaning. And so what that means things in themselves—events that happen in our lives—I don’t believe have any real meaning other than what we give to them. Because think of it this way: Have you ever done anything Ben, been involved in any activity that was supposed to be fun—maybe it was a recreational activity or sport or you’re going to a movie or whatever—but you had miserable time. Is it possible to have that happen?

BEN: Oh yeah.

RAY: Okay, and so is it possible on a different day to be engaged in something that’s supposed to be miserable and yet you find some way to enjoy it? Now is that possible?

BEN: Yes… that’s definitely possible.

RAY: So my question is, if we can do something that supposed to be fun and it turns out being miserable, why would we ever do that? Because obviously the external things didn’t change. Golfers know all of this. (Laughs) Because golf is supposed to be fun.

BEN: Right… they’re frustrated, throwing their clubs everywhere… “Arrrgghh this is miserable!”

RAY: So why are you doing that is the question. And it’s how you interpret the meaning of what just happened. You sliced or hooked or wiffed the ball. Then you get angry. Why? “Because that means I’m stupid! How could I be so stupid?!” Well is that the meaning… or if you change the meaning or the language, and you say, “Well, what if I wasn’t stupid? What if it just means that I need more practice? Or I need to relax more? Or what if it means it’s just an off day and I’m just going to laugh about this and have some fun.” And we say about many things, “Well I’ll laugh about this later.” And when something bad happens we’ll say, “We’ll laugh about this later…” But why wait? Laugh about it now. And I know it sounds stupid. And again it sounds elementary and like what does this have to do with writing? But if you are languaging the event to yourself as well, “I’m stuck… I can’t write….” then I guarantee you’ll continue to be stuck and you can’t write. But if you change the meaning and say, “Well, it’s not that I can’t write. It’s just that I need to change my state.” Just by making that statement you have begun to shift your state. And so that leads to what kind of things could you do—practical things, thanks Ray for all the theory, but what can I do to get writing? Here’s my secret trick. Just prime the pump. Sit in front of your computer and if nothing else, start typing out the copyright notice. Type out the page numbers. Type out—if you can’t think of a headline type, “Some Great Headline Goes Here.” And then hit the return key and move on to the first paragraph and type, “This is where I’ll type the lead some day when I’m actually ready to do some writing.”

BEN: (Laughter) Okay…

RAY: As stupid as that sounds, I guarantee it works every time. And my trick that I use if I ever sit down and feel a little bit stuck, is I do the things that I’ve already talked about. I focus on, “Okay, how am I going to change my state?” That’s my focus statement. I sit up straight, I take a deep breath. And I just typing the order—the offer rather—the order area is what I call it when I’m writing copy. A lot of people call it the offer, I call it the order area. It’s that box at the bottom of the copy that says, “Yes Ray! I definitely want to learn how to turn words into wealth and learn to write copy that sucks people in and pulls their credit magically out of their wallet…” or whatever the super hyperbolic things are that we’re going to write in our order area. And I just start writing it and sometimes I’ll do it in a joking way just like that. But once it starts to flow, then it comes easily. And I believe it’s just a process of priming the pump and getting things moving. So those are some thoughts on how to break through the mythological beast that some of us call writers block.

BEN: I think a lot of that—actually all of it—makes just perfect sense. I know I’ve done that too where I couldn’t think of anything so, “I’m just going to indent the paragraphs of every page.”

RAY: Yeah!

BEN: And that’s all I’m going to do the whole day. And then yeah right… five minutes later you’re off to the races. It does sound almost like, “This can’t be real.” But it is real and I bet you 90% of people who have this problem—or 100% of them—could just start doing little things.

RAY: Yep.

BEN: And I did want note something… I think I got you at a good time because didn’t you just come back from walking on coals at a Tony Robbins seminar? Because you’re really on fire here with this Tony Robbins thing here—it was really good information by the way.

RAY: (Laughter) Yeah… I did come back from his unlimited power weekend and I did the fire walk. Which is—if you ever have the opportunity to do this—I’ve been a Tony Robbins fan since the first time I saw that infomercial on late night TV back in the ’90’s.
And I ordered the tapes back then. And so I’ve been a listener and a student of his I guess since that time. One of the goals that I had on my list of goals every year since the 90’s has been, “Well I’m going to go walk on fire…” since that’s the signature thing that he does. He leads people across a 12 feet of flaming coals about 1800 degrees. And the idea is—and Tony explains it all at the actual seminar—and say, “I can teach anybody to do this.” The significance is it’s not about walking on fire… it’s about breaking through limitations and realizing that so often in life things we think are impossible are really not even difficult. And this is just a really visceral way of proving that to you—not just an idea—because most people would say, “Yeah I knew that. I know that already.” But if you want to put it to the test, you put them in front of those coals and say, “Why don’t you stroll across this barefoot?” Then the theory meets reality and often the reaction become something different. So it was really a seminal moment for me… and it’s funny because I didn’t worry about it. I know so many people that done it I wasn’t worried about it. Although many people at the seminar were.

BEN: I can imagine.

RAY: I wasn’t until I stepped up right in front of bed of coals and I could sort of smell that burning charcoal…

BEN: Burning feet…

RAY: And I thought, “Hmmm. At this stage in my life is it a good idea to possibly burn my feet off?”

BEN: (Laughter) Well, you are a writer technically as long as you can sit down… as long as he’s not having you sit in the hot coals… I guess you’re okay.

RAY: (Laughter) Good point.

BEN: “Here take a seat in the hot coal Ray, let’s see how much you…” That is interesting. I remember reading about that when I first read his book, “Unlimited Power.” And I thought, “Now that is really cool that people can do that.” Because I never would have thought in a millions years it was possible.

RAY: I saw thousands of people do it. Both before and after I did it. There was over 4,000 people at this event.

BEN: Wow… man… they’re really packing it in.

RAY: I think we had something like 30 lanes of coals so that we could get it done in an evening. It was pretty exciting and pretty eye opening. And so yeah, you did catch me at a good time. I have been fired up ever since. It’s funny I’m a walking testimonial. “Yes I’ve walked on fire… I’ve lost 10 pounds since I left the seminar.”

BEN: Fired up—no pun intended…

RAY: (Laughter) Exactly.

BEN: Was there someone there stoking the flames up… “C’mon guys…”

RAY: It was pretty funny, actually it was the first day of the seminar and it was on everybody’s minds because it’s a four day event. And you actually do the fire walk the first evening.

BEN: Oh wow… so there’s no build up to this.

RAY: And I thought about it and thought, “Wow… seems like you’d save that to the end.” But then I realized, there were a lot of people who were really worried about this. So I think that it’s two fold. First of all, the reason they did it on the first day is so that you won’t worry about it all weekend and miss the content of the seminar.

BEN: Yeah, that makes sense.

RAY: And then secondly, after you do it, it’s funny a lot of people they came in to the arena before the thing started where you could tell they were kind of tentative like, “What did I get myself into here… am I going to like become a member of a cult…?”

BEN: Were they locking the doors when you guys walked in?

RAY: Yeah exactly… so I think that the other part of it is once you do it you’re so open to possibility. And you’re so exciting and you have a bond with people. Because the next morning it’s funny people kind of crept into the arena the first day… sort of looking around the corner like, “I wonder what’s going on in there?” And then the second day people are strutting in like Captain Kirk… “Yeah I’m a fire walker. How ’bout you?”

BEN: Yeah that’s pretty interesting that’s for sure. One day I’m going to have to make it to one of these things just so I can say I walked on coals, too and say, “Ray, I know what you’re talking about now.” But another question I wanted to ask you about—a lot of people use opt-in pages or “squeeze” pages. And I know a lot of the clients that you work for use opt-in squeeze pages. So what I wanted to know were what’s some of your best tips on how to create them?

RAY: Well, this is a topic that is worthy of continuous attention on the part of anybody who’s marketing online. Because the game changes continuously. I believe wholeheartedly that almost every site that you will use to sell anything needs to have an opt-in page. And we’re talking about forced opt-in or squeeze page here. For those who may not know—it’s simply one of those pages that requires you to give up your name and at least your email address before you get to see any real information. And the rather unflattering term “squeeze page” means they’re literally squeezing your contact information out of you so they can continue to market to you in sequential fashion. And that’s the value of it. Because if you can market to someone over and over again… obviously that’s a lot better than just hoping they come to your page one time and make a buying decision and then if they don’t you’ve lost them forever. It’s better to be able to go back to them and market again and again. Plus, people who opt-in, you know something about them: they’re interested enough that they’re raising their hand and saying, “Oh sure I know you’re going to market to me. Go ahead, I don’t mind. I’d like to hear more.” So that’s the kind of people we want to be talking to. So the question becomes how do I get higher opt-in rates? Because it’s much more difficult now then it was even a year ago to get people to actually opt-in. This technique has been used so much and people are so skeptical they’re guarded against spam, they’re told by their ISP, “don’t give out your email address”… so for a lot of reason it’s just become more difficult. So it used to be you could put a little form on your page that said, “Get my free ezine!” and people would just put their name and email address in and you’re off to the races. Well, that doesn’t work so well anymore. Because people got hip to that and they realized, “Wow… I’m getting like 150 free ezines… and I can’t read them all. And my inbox if full.” So they stopped doing that. So then it became, “Well, I’ll offer a special report to people who will opt-in.” And it might be—like if I have a weight loss site—it might be “Get my 21 foods you should never eat if you want to lose weight and keep it off report. It’s 10 pages and it spells out all these things you’re probably eating right now that you shouldn’t eat.” Or something like that. So that was a bribe to get people to opt-in and that worked pretty well. And it still works okay. But if all you’re doing is you’re offering a sort of a mediocre special report, what you’ll discover is your opt-in rates will hover somewhere between 5 and 10 percent if you’ve got good qualified traffic. So in other words 5-10 people who come to your site will actually sign up to your email list. Now, if you do a better job of either writing the copy or you have a better bribe, or interestingly enough, if your traffic is targeted enough you can basically offer nothing in some cases and get an opt-in rate of 25% or better. For instance, if you go to—here comes my completely transparent ploy to get you to opt-in to my list…

BEN: Please do…

RAY: Or you know what, just so you know I’m honest—whatever you do, don’t opt-in to this list okay? Just look at it… but whatever you do don’t opt-in.

BEN: Well if it’s one of yours I hope people do opt-in actually.

RAY: (Laughter) Well of course I do, too.

BEN: Just for the learning experience alone I think it’s a good idea.

RAY: If you go to rayedwardscopy.com, that’s my opt-in page for my copywriter for hire site. You’ll notice if you read it, I’m not really offering a report or a video or anything. My opt-in rate right now for this page is about 38%. And this is what I offer: “Inside you’ll discover…” and I’ve got some bullet points: “Why your website doesn’t make as much profit as it should (and how to fix this)… The single “Four-Letter Word” that increases sales every time… The “Sneaky Leak” that drains your profits…” etc etc. All those refer to things that are in my sales letter. So basically what I’m saying here is “Here’s some bullet points from my sales letter… and you give me your email address, I’ll actually let you read my sales letter.”

BEN: You’re very kind, Ray. (Laughter)

RAY: Well I try to be a generous man. I’m getting a 38% rate on this page, so…

BEN: That’s pretty good.

RAY: Now some people would say, “Well how can that possibly be?” Well, because the traffic that comes to this page is a very specific kind of traffic. They’re people that know who I am, they know I’m a copywriter, they know I write from some top names, and they’re interested in having me write copy for them. So this very targeted to the traffic that comes to this page. And that’s why it works.

Now, another technique that is working extremely well right now—we’re talking 80-90% opt-in rate—is a technique that’s being used by someone who’s name may not know. His name is Eben Pagan. And Eben is the genius behind a little online business called doubleyourdating.com. And that site for those who are not familiar with it has been ripped off and copied a lot because of the opt-in page that they use. In fact if you just got to doubleyourdating.com and you look at it, you’ll immediately say, “Well yeah, this looks like every other opt-in page on the Internet.” Well here’s the true story: every other page on the Internet looks like this page. This is the one they all copied. And the truth is this is not the highest converting web page that Eben has in operation today. He—by the way, with this web page that you’re looking at, if you’re looking at doubleyourdating.com, Eben built a $20 million a year business working out of his apartment. $20 million a year. But this is not his best converting web page or opt-in page. And to see an example of his best converting opt-in page you can go to—and I’ll give you two different options for this—I think it’s getaltitude.com. Or you can go to rayedwards.com/altitude. And the second one is my blatant affiliate link for the program that he’s selling at this site. But if you go to rayedwards.com/altitude you’ll be taken to a page with a ten question business quiz to find out how well your business stacks up when it comes to marketing, hiring, growing and making big profits. So you should do this by the way. You should go through and answer all the questions—they’re multiple choice. And get your analysis—but even more to the point, if you will do this, Eben will give you on the back end—you have to go all the way through the process—on the back end, you don’t have to buy anything, he’ll give you the software to create an opt-in page for yourself.

BEN: Oh, so that’s worth it just to do that.

RAY: Oh absolutely. Because then you can just take that software and build your own quiz for your own market. So if you have a product that’s about how to rebuild carburetors in your spare time for fun and profit, then you can have “Take this free 10 question quiz about how your knowledge stacks up against other people who build carburetors.” Or whatever the topic is you can see how it would apply to your own business. And the software will build the page for you and it’s push-button easy. And these pages that use this quiz, people want to get their analysis. So the opt-in rates on these pages are crazy. They’re 80 or 90% or better.

BEN: That’s a great idea. You know who else does something like that, but he doesn’t do it with the Internet, just talking about quizzes, is Bill Glazier. At least at the time when I heard this he said you could get around the fax laws. You’re not sending them an ad… you’re sending them a quiz. To get the quiz they gotta fax it back to you. But the whole point of just having a quiz on there to make people try to explain how smart they are… it’s powerful.

RAY: Well sure… it’s like those ads for the correspondence school that taught you how to draw—did you ever see those?

BEN: Oh yeah…

RAY: “Can you draw Sparky?” And you know all these people are drawing these funny little pictures of this turtle or I think they used a pirate for a while. That was like your test to see if you had an aptitude to be an artist. And if you did, they would give the privilege of buying their art course.

BEN: (Laughter) Sounds like a good way to sell a copywriter course. “Here, right a headline and… okay that’s good enough. I’m going to give you the privilege of my sales letter…”

RAY: Funny you should mention that because I have a live online copy course that I teach in tele-class format and so when we re-open that in the near future, I’m going to be testing a quiz-type opt-in page for that course. Because I’ve just seen the results that this approach gets. And it’s scary powerful.

BEN: Plus, they give you the software. How could you not at least try it now at this point?

RAY: Yeah and I’ve got a couple friends who are using it and there were features they wanted to have added to it—and I don’t want to get too techno geeky here—but I guess it’s written in a language called “Perl.” Which is a scripting language used online. And what that means is you could have any perl programmer add or modify it for you to make it do different things if you wanted to—like automatically email the results back to your people. So you go to guru.com or elance.com and find a programmer and say, “Look, here’s this script, and I’d like it to do the following additional things.” And they can do that for you very inexpensively.

BEN: Nice… that’s really extremely good advice right there. Man we should be charging for this. This is…

RAY: Then lets! By all means! (Laughter)

BEN: (Laughter) I’m going to have to edit all this out. This is crazy.

RAY: Tell you what—instead of doing that, do this: Give my PayPal address and I promise you I’ll send you your part.

BEN: Well, you know you’ve been giving good information when people actually offer to do that. Which I’m sure has happened to you. “Are you sure you want to give all this away? Here let me send you something—what’s your PayPay?”

RAY: Yeah… it’s weird when that happens. And I’ve had it happen occasionally.

BEN: Do you ever tell them them, “Well as a matter of fact…” (Laughter)

RAY: (Laughter) I’ve been tempted but I’ve never actually taken anyone’s money in that situation.

BEN: Neither have I.

RAY: But there’s always a first time.

BEN: How many zeroes are they willing to put on…

RAY: Exactly… it all depends on the size of the number I think (Laughter)

BEN: You know one of the things that I know that a lot of people are—at least people who study this stuff—are probably very much in awe of, and I know I am—is when the clients you work for—I’m on a lot of their lists and things—and before they do their launches or I guess this is during the process… they do this really, really good pre-sellng. And you almost just want this thing—whatever it is they’re selling—you almost can’t wait for the dang sales letter to come out so you can buy it. What are some ways you guys do that? What are some tips for people who want to learn how to do that?

RAY: Well, what we’re talking about what’s typically called the product launch. Specifically it happens in all kinds of marketing, but it really got honed into a science when Jeff Walker developed a product that teaches how to do this kind of thing called “The Product Launch Formula.” And I was one of the first people to buy his home study course because I was fascinated by it. At the time Jeff had been working with some big name marketers. Jeff was unknown at that point, but he was working people like John Reese and Frank Kern and helping them strategize these big product launches. And what really made Jeff famous if you will, was that he was the strategic mind behind the launch of John Reese’s “Traffic Secrets” home study course which brought in a million dollars in a single day. And of course there was more of the story—there was pre-seling before that. And so Jeff finally codified his knowledge about this and put it into a system. So that’s what we’re talking about. It’s doing product launches. There’s a discreet set of steps that you take when you’re doing that. And it really overall is about telling a story to the perspective audience about this product that’s going to be coming out. For more on the subject of story telling in marketing, you should get a book by Seth Godin called “All Marketers Are Liars.”

BEN: Okay.

RAY: And the subtitle is “The Power Of Telling Authentic Stories In A Low Trust World.”
It’s really a brilliant book on marketing. And so Jeff sort of systematized this way of unfolding the story about a product. Building a buzz and working prospects for the product into a lather… so just like you described—by the time the sales letter is made live, often what will happen is marketers will even put up a countdown page and it’ll go, “The product will be available on this and such a day and this and such a time.” And when you get close it will just be a count down clock—27 hours, 13 minutes, 33 seconds to launch. And literally when it clicks over to zero and the sales page goes live, a flood of orders will come through. And we just went through this with the launch of “Membership Site Bootcamp” and that product was pretty expensive. It was over a thousand dollars—$1500 if I remember correctly. And we did almost $2 million—well, $1.7 million.

BEN: That’s close…

RAY: It’s close. It’s a lot of money I know that. And in just six days by the time the product came out there was a huge demand for it. So how do you do that? Well it started by first getting to know what the market wanted. So I can’t give you the whole formula on this call because Jeff took a bunch of DVD’s and audios—hours and hours of material to teach it all. But sort of the condensed version is you begin by finding out what the market wants and finding out what language they use to describe it. And then you start building awareness of the fact that you are aware of these wants and desires on the part of the audience, and that you have a potential way to fill those needs. And so in the case of the Membership Site Bootcamp, the guys started up a blog where they were talking about, “Hey, we just did this workshop where we had a lot of membership site owners—many of them million dollar earners or better with membership sites—and we taught a whole bunch of the inside secrets about how you run a membership site and how you do it profitably and how you get the content for it and all of this stuff that they were saying in their blog posts and their emails were things that in their surveys of their existing list—they knew what people wanted to learn and so then they began leaking the fact, “Well, we’re going to turn the videos into DVD’s that explain how to do all this. And we’re going to make that available as a home study course.” And the blog was interactive. Now people started posting and asking questions.

BEN: Ah-ha…

RAY: Exactly… and it begins to become interactive and so the discussion grows and some of it’s favorable and some of it’s not and that’s exciting—people like watching that. They did a contest where you could win a free copy, there were some sneaking out some advance spy photos of what the product looks like. One of the key things to do nowadays is you really have to provide some real content to people before you try to sell them something. So Tim and Ryan did a series of videos that really taught a lot of the principals of building good membership sites. And there was nothing for sale in those videos and they were free. And you didn’t even have to opt-in. Now you could opt-in if you wanted to be notified of the next video and lots of people chose to do that. So those people who opted-in then have raised their hands and said, “I am really interested in this. I know you’re going to try and sell me something and I want to know more about it.” So those people got a constant flow of emails updating on when the next video would be available, what’s some of the common questions were right now, here’s the blog if you want to go make comments. And then there’s a whole series of principals that you invoke during a product launch and mostly based on the principals that Dr. Robert Cialdini spelled out in his book, “Influence.” Which is all about the science and the psychology of how were are influenced by advertisers and marketers to do things. And some of those principals include the principal of liking—which is we tend to like people we think are like us. The principal of commitment and consistency—once I’ve committed to doing something—if I wear the little lapel pin for breast cancer awareness for instance, and you come up and ask me, “Hey would you be willing to make a donation to breast cancer research?” then I’m likely to say yes, because I made a commitment by putting that pin on and I want to be consistent with my identity. And so that’s a social principal that’s used a lot in launches.

Social proof is another psychological principal that gets used during a product launch cycle. When you see—like when Jeff Walker launched his “Product Launch Formula” product, he did a conference call and he had—let’s see, I think John Reese, Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern… can’t remember if Armand Morin was on the call… basically ever top A-Level online marketer was on that call discussing the product launch product with Jeff. And the social proof involved there was, “Well gosh, if he can get all these big named ‘gurus’ to participate in a call like this, he must really know what he’s talking about.” So that is social proof. And you can also look at things like testimonials as being social proof. The blog itself with those hundreds of posts that were on it—that’s another form of social proof. Because look at all these people are posting about this product—it must be something really good or why would they be so interested in it. So you really bring all of these psychological factors—get the book by Cialdini and you can learn more about that. Or get Jeff’s product at theproductlaunchformula.com. And Jeff’s a friend of mine so I think you should buy his product it’s really great. There’s just a handful of these home study courses that if you were to ask me, “Which ones could you absolutely not do without?” Well, I buy all of them… (Laughter)… apparently I can’t do without any of them. But if you really said, “Well you can only have three, which three would it be?” This would be the first one I would buy.

BEN: I remember doing a joint venture with John Anghelache and he was using a lot of those principals—because he has the course—and it was great. I never got that kind of response before.

RAY: And the thing is people think, “Well, in Internet marketing world people have seen all these ‘tricks’ before and won’t fall for them.” Well, first of all even though people who are in to Internet marketing scene know all the “tricks” they still buy. Because of these psychological triggers. So that’s interesting in itself. But here’s the real news bulletin and that is that the Internet marketing world is 1/100th of 1% of the potential number of customers that are out there that you could be talking to. So in all other markets, this stuff works 100 times better than any other marketing you can think of. And so I just really—I don’t know if you can tell—but I’m a passionate believer in this. And the cool thing is that Jeff gives you all these templates in his course you can literally take—he gives you permission—you can take the emails and the sequences of email communication during a launch and do a search and replace—change out his product name for your product name. And as long as you’re not competing with him obviously—and you can send those same emails to your list and it will work like magic. So you don’t even have to be an expert on it. You get the course and just kind of follow the template approach and it’ll work like crazy.

I mean you literally if you do it it’ll blow your mind the kind of money that you could make. I have a client who’s also a student of mine who’s a veterinary doctor and I wrote some copy for an eBook he had written about holistic pet medicine. Doc Andrew is a client of mine and he was in a coaching program I was doing. And I remember when he asked me we got the conversions up on his eBook—he was really happy about that—he said, “Now what do I do?” I said, “Now you create an information product—you make some videos and DVD’s and you sell that and it’s more than the cost of eBooks so you make more profit.” Andrew’s one of those guys who’s interesting in that he does what you tell him to do.

BEN: There you go.

RAY: Uh, yeah! He did it. And he called me back and said, “Now what do I do?” And I said, well, you go to theproductlaunchformula.com and you get Jeff Walker’s course and you follow it to the letter. And he did. Now think about this: here’s a guy who created a little information market in a weird little niche. You know homeopathic dog and cat medicine. And his first day when he did his launch he did $44,550. And he started no list. And no JV partners. He just followed the steps and that’s what happened. And in that first month I think he ended up doing $100,000. And he created an ongoing income stream of about $7,000 a month and last time I talked to him he told me he was up to about $15,000 a month. So I definitely believe—learn the principals of copywriting and learn the principals of marketing—there’s a book by Jay Abraham called “Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You Got”—it’s like a great primer on some of Jay’s best ideas. You can get it for $25 on amazon. And then get The Product Launch Formula. That would be my advice if you were starting from scratch and really serious about this. Those would be the things that I would do.

BEN: That’s really good and only one of them is really expensive, the other, the book, $25—jeez.

RAY: Yeah and you know what, here’s the thing. Is $1,000 a lot to pay for a home study course? You bet it is. On the one hand. But on the other hand, I look at the money I’ve made because I invested in that course…

BEN: It’s peanuts.

RAY: It’s peanuts! If I said to you, “You give me $1,000, and I’ll give you back $100,000.” Would you take that deal? The person who wouldn’t take that deal would be a big loser.

BEN: Well they’d be crazy.

RAY: And that’s personally for me, the only product launch that—well I’ve done two. I did one little miniature launch over Super Bowl weekend because my wife wanted a new Honda automobile and I didn’t want to go into debt for it so I said, “Well, I’ll see if I can do this launch thing and we’ll see what happens.” And so I sent out three emails total. Starting on Saturday before Super Bowl Sunday and by Monday morning I had over $20,000 in my PayPal account. And then the second launch that I did has been responsible for about $100,000 in my income this year. Indirectly it’s a lot more than that. But I won’t even count that because maybe for some people that seems like stretching it. But that’s because of the Product Launch Formula.

BEN: We didn’t really plan this but do you have an affiliate link—because you sold that so well on this call. (Laughter) I’d like you to get some credit for it. I mean my gosh, that’s the best sales pitch I’ve seen for it yet.

RAY: (Laughter) Yeah, Jeff’s main site is productlaunchformula.com. And if you go the—T-H-E—productlaunchformula.com then that’s actually my affiliate link.

BEN: Okay good, because I mean that was a pretty superb pitch, man—I mean you got me all hot and bothered by it now.

RAY: I want people to have it whether I get an affiliate commission or not. So if you think, “Wow Ray, I really appreciate you telling me about that and sharing your experience about it…” then use theproductlaunchformula.com. If on the other hand you think, “Well the heck with you, Ray. I’m not giving you an commission.” It won’t change your price any, but you can go to the plain old url and I won’t get a dime.

BEN: I think you also just gave us a pretty good affiliate marketing tip—just add the word “the” to the url and nobody will be the wiser anyway.

RAY: Dude, let me tell you something. If I can give you one piece of advice if you have any way to make affiliate recommendations to people at all, here’s what you do: you join the affiliate program, you go to godaddy.com, and for seven or eight bucks you register the domain name and they have a thing called “domain forwarding” which the actual technical term is really redirect. But godaddy calls it forwarding. And you just go into your control panel and you type in your affiliate link or you paste in your affiliate link and you click on it and then you just give people the url. You don’t have to say, “Well go to theproductlaunchformula.com/?…” and all that junk. You just give the URL and you can do that for any affiliate program that you’re part of and I do that when I’m at a conference or something and people ask me about a program like 1shoppingcart.com. And I’ll say, “Well, yeah, let me tell you about it and I use it…” and I’ll give them the facts about it and they’ll say, “Well do you have an affiliate link?” And I’ll say, “Sure, just write this down—’newmarketingautomation.com’.” That’s my affiliate link for 1shoppingcart. So it’s a really handy way to be able to give out your affiliate link. Definitely I would recommend using it, it’s made me a lot of money.

BEN: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been doing that with everything now and it’s so simple. If you can buy a domain name…

RAY: Yep.

BEN: There you go.

RAY: Set it and forget it.

BEN: Right there are two nice, fat affiliate marketing tips. And we didn’t even plan to talk about it. That’s good.

RAY: It’s bonus material.

BEN: Yeah… I’m serious, we’re going to put a price tag on this interview… (Laughter)… just kidding… Now this kind of leads into the next question I was going to ask you. List building. What’s some good list building tips for people just starting out—they have no idea what to do, maybe they just can’t get the product launch thing right now—what would you tell them?

RAY: Okay, I have two list building tips. One is—well I have more than that, but I have two that I’ll give you for this interview, and if you just focus on these two you’ll build your list. One is have a squeeze page. Period! Just have a squeeze page. You can’t help but a list if you have a squeeze page.

BEN: Okay.

RAY: And by the way, use aweber.com. That’s the best way to manage your online email lists.

BEN: And it’s not “theaweber.com”? (Laughter)

RAY: (Laughter) No if you want my affiliate link, “raysautoresoonder.com”. Although I probably should try to register “theaweber”.

BEN: Well you just gave me that idea—put “the” on there. That’s pretty smart, I like that.

RAY: So yeah, it’s the best way to manage your online mailing list and they have great deliverability rates and it’s easy to use and it’s very powerful—I won’t make this into a pitch for aweber but it’s what I use and what I recommend. So have a squeeze page. The second thing—and this is really the most powerful list building tactic I know—it’s called, are you ready for this?

BEN: Okay.

RAY: The joint venture. So here’s the deal. People hear that term and they get turned off by it. And they’re like, “I’ve heard joint ventures and I’m tired of hearing about that.” But look, the way that I’ve built the majority of my list has been very simple. It’s been other people who have a list sending people to my site. Jeff Walker is one of my very best—well at this point he’s my best joint venture partner. Period. And that came about because I have a relationship and a friendship with Jeff. And he said, “Hey, listen when you do your program I want to mail for it.” I didn’t ask him. He offered to do it. And so, how does that come about? Well it comes about by relationships. Now, what if you don’t know Jeff Walker? You don’t have to. My second best joint venture partners is somebody whose name you would not know. And that person actually is somebody that I asked to mail more me. And I said, “Look. I’ve got this program that I’m selling and the price is X and if you somebody buys because you referred them you get 50% of that amount, would you be interested in promoting that?” And he said yes. And so he sent an email for me. So how do you do this if you don’t know people, you don’t go to conferences, you don’t know any “gurus” and you don’t have to. Remember Dr. Andrew didn’t know anybody, he didn’t have any kind of a list and he was not even in the marketing market. He’s in the pet market. So how did he do it? This is what I told him and this is what I would tell anybody else: Go on clickbank and look for products that are targeted toward your prospects. So Dr. Andrew went online and went to clickbank and some other places, and he looked up people who are selling stuff to pet owners. And I told him to find the contact information on their website, or in the whois database—which you can look up who owns a particular website, and often it’ll have the phone number on there—and I said don’t email them, call them on the phone. And just say, “Hi, my name’s Dr. Andrew Jones, I have a product that is about homeopathic pet remedies, and I noticed that you have a site that’s all about pets. And you have lots of pet owners that probably subscribe to your email newsletter. And here’s the deal: if you will send an email introducing me to your subscribers, any of them who buy I’ll give you a 50% commission.” And not all of them, but many of them, said yes.

BEN: And had he just tried to send an email off that probably that wouldn’t have been as effective, right?

RAY: Absolutely. Because that’s just what everybody does because it’s so easy, right? You sit there and email and you don’t take any risk and you don’t risk somebody saying no to you.

BEN: Slamming the phone down, “Who the hell are you? Get out of here!”

RAY: Right, and he got a few of those. Now here’s the thing. He went his first week—I may not have these numbers exact right but they’re pretty close to accurate—in his first week he went from having zero people on his list to having over 3,000 people on his list. So all it takes is asking. Now you say, “Well what if I don’t have a product? What if I’m just starting out by having a little newsletter about my area of expertise?” Like if you’re a web designer, or you’re busy or you don’t have a box of stuff to sell? What what do you do? Well, you have a little newsletter with web design tips and you call up other people that you either know or get to know because you looked up their contact information on their website and you called them. And by the way, here’s how you have that conversation—I would call you up and say, “Ben, I noticed you got this great website all about copywriting at bensettle.com. I really love reading your site. I enjoy the free swipe file resource you gave the other day, that was really awesome.” Now how would you feel if you got a phone call like that?

BEN: Well yeah, it’s not like he’s asking you for something right off the bat. You’re saying, “Hey, this is great.” And even if they ended the call at that point, they’re going to feel kinda stupid to hang up on you I would think.

RAY: Yeah, and so after you’ve talked a little bit about the site that you love, then you can say, “Okay, so Ben here’s the reason I’m calling you. I like your site as you know and I have a site as well. And I would like to build up my subscriber list and I’m building my business…” just be honest about it. “And here’s what I’m proposing: I’m wondering if you’d be willing to look at some of my material, and if it looks like it’d be a good fit for your audience, would you be willing to give me a link, or send the mailing out to your list and recommend that they take a look at my newsletter?” And some people will say yes, some will people will say no. There’s a saying in the sales business, when you go and make sale call after sales call, and you’re kind of getting discouraged maybe because people are telling you no. There’s a saying called, “Some will, some won’t, so what? NEXT!”

BEN: I like that. That’s good.

RAY: And it’s really what it’s about. And then the third way of doing it is a little bit easier for a lot of folks, and that is look for ezines or Internet newsletters, email magazines—that’s why they’re called ezines—that take classified ads. And it’s easy to know. How is it easy to know? Read the ezine and if there’s a classified ad in there they take them. And then just call them up and sometimes you can’t, sometimes you can’t find the phone number and in that case just email them. But generally I would say call them up and say, “I notice you take classified ads and I have an ezine as well an I wonder if we could do an ad swap. I’ll put your ad in my ezine and you put my ad in yours. Would you be willing to do that?” Most of the time they’ll say yes.

BEN: What if theirs is way bigger than yours, is that going to be…?

RAY: Yeah, that’s a good point. If they ask how many people you have, you say, “Well I have 100.” And they say, “Well I have 100,000 so that doesn’t quite seem fair.” Then you could say one of two things, “Okay, I understand that. I’ll call you back when my list is bigger.” Or, “Well, would you be willing to send an email to just part of your list for me?”

BEN: Now that’s a good idea.

RAY: And sometimes they’ll say, sometimes they’ll say no. But a lot of people will do it for you even if you have a small list. Why? Because it doesn’t cost them anything. And let’s say you only have 1,000 people on your list. And they get 100 subscribers. Well, if all they traded was a space on their list and they didn’t spend any money and they got 100 new subscribers… did they lose anything? No.

BEN: This is very interesting. So what you’re saying is your greatest list building device is not the keyboard, it’s the telephone.

RAY: Absolutely.

BEN: That is really…

RAY: And look, some people are very sensitive about it and will say, “No, I’m not going to have you stealing my prospects. I’ve got a bigger list than you do…” Okay, no problem, have a great day and move on to somebody else because I guarantee you there are other people out there who are willing to do it. I mean I haven’t been publishing a regular ezine now for a while, but I’m getting ready to start doing it again. And I’ll just say publicly right now that I’m going to have at least one ad space in that ezine. And I will do promos for people like this and I’m not going to get too picky about how big your list is. If it’s totally inappropriate—mine’s a copywriting and marketing ezine, and if yours is about gambling then that might not be a good fit. But if your is about web design or web conversion tactics or other marketing related or copywriting related topics that my list might be interested in, then I’m not really going to get too picky. Maybe my list is ten times bigger than yours, but as long as I feel like I’m doing a quality job, and I kind of like your approach, and you seem to be a professional and I believe you’re going to honor our agreement, then I’ll have no problem doing it. So my point is just saying, just ask enough people and enough people will say yes. And think of it like this: If you could in online forums for instance, and you could certainly do this at marketing conferences if you go somewhere like Big Seminar which is, if you’re into the Internet marketing world I definitely recommend that’s the one you probably want to start with because of the networking opportunities. By the way, that’s available at bigseminar.com or newbigseminar.com. Now not thebigseminar.com… newbigseminar.com.

BEN: Can I just ask you something real quick with the phone? Something you said earlier about social proof, if you’re calling someone up and you say, “So and so already did this for me…”

RAY: Oh absolutely, yeah.

BEN: So that just adds another layer of their chances of saying yes.

RAY: Interestingly enough, I’ve got a membership site that’s going to be launching about copywriting. And so I’ll do this publicly, I’ve got some leverage on you, Ben. I’m looking for a handful of people I consider to be top notch copywriters to be on my board of expert faculty for this site—which will be great promotion for them, and positioning for them and you’ll be in good company with other top copywriters that I’m talking to like Michel Fortin or some people call him Michael Fortin.

BEN: Yeah, how do you pronounce his name… I don’t ever want to butcher that.

RAY: The correct pronunciation in his native Canada is Michel.

BEN: Okay, I guess that would be the way to do it.

RAY: He often calls himself Michael on interviews and tele-seminars just because people in America have a really tough time figuring that whole thing out. But here’s the bottom line—this is where I get my pronunciation: his wife Sylvie calls him Michel.

BEN: Well there you go…

RAY: So to me that’s the word of authority right there. So anyway the question I was going to ask you Ben, is would you be willing to serve on my board of experts?

BEN: Absolutely. That’s a no-brainer.

RAY: Outstanding. And so look what I just did. I said, “Well by the way, I’m also planning to have Michel Fortin on there and other top copywriters as well.” I actually haven’t started that campaign of enlisting those people yet so I can’t give you other names. But recently I did a series of interviews with other top copywriters which is ongoing. And so what I did was, for instance, when I sent an email to Bob Bly, I said, “Hey, by the way, Daniel Levis has done an interview with me, and Michel Fortin has done an interview with me. And I’ve got an interview coming up with Brian Keith Voiles and I really though I’d love to have your name on the list as well… would you be willing to do it?”

BEN: There you go… you just added so much more persuasion to that. It’s almost how can I say no?

RAY: Right. And then guess what? Now the next person I call I get to say, “… Brian Keith Voiles, Michel Fortin, Bob Bly…” and it becomes easier still. So that’s definitely a technique I recommend using. It is powerful. And it’s powerful because of the principal of social proof. The illustration of social proof that I think if I remember correct Cialdini gives in the book, is they did an experiment where they had smoke coming out of a doorway on a busy street. And in some instances when they performed this experiment, they had paid actors whose jobs it was to walk by and ignore smoke. And it was amazing because when they did that everybody else ignored the smoke too. But when they had the actor just stop and look at the smoke, other people stopped and wanted to call the authorities. So what do we do when we’re in a crowd, and something’s happening, and we’re trying to figure out what are reaction should be? We look around to see what everybody else is doing, don’t we?

BEN: Yeah, absolutely. And a perfect example of that—and I hate to use this as an example—but recently some lady was brutally hurt and raped in a hallway and people were just watching, nobody would do anything. And all it would take is one person to jump the guy or something.

RAY: Or one person to just step up and then other people take their cue from that behavior. So the power of social proof is almost frightening. It’s why large scale movements work. In fact, cults use the technique of social proof.

BEN: That’s the only way you’re going to drink poisoned Kool-Aid.

RAY: Exactly. There was a disturbing but very interesting special about that tragedy on PBS not too long ago. The things that a cult leader is able to get people to do really using nothing more than that one principal is frightening. So my advice is use it in a ethical way and be careful and… “only use your powers for good.”

BEN: It sounds almost like a comic book, but it’s true and someone who teaches this is Ken McCarthy teaches that and the way he worded it to me recently was very interesting. It’s like having power. I mean, you have power when you know persuasion. And it’s a tool—you can use it to do good or you can use it for bad which is the same as coming up to someone on the street and putting a gun to their back and stealing their money.

RAY: Yes, absolutely. It’s so true. It makes me think of uncle Ben in the Spiderman movies saying to Peter Parker, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

BEN: It’s a good message.

RAY: Yes it is.

BEN: That was interesting. We’re going off on these neat little tangents. So that’s your list building…”

RAY: Yes, I mean there’s other ways to build lists. You could use pay per click advertising. There’s more advanced strategies. You can use tele-seminars to build your list. But honestly, when you’re getting started, these are two simplest things you can do: have a squeeze page, and then do these joint ventures where you just call people and in the simplest form you just ask for a swap. You say, you promote my list and I’ll promote your list. And I was going to say that you can do this online in forums or if you go to seminars, find people who are your level—if you have a list right now that only has 500 people on it, you can find 10 other people like you who have lists of 500 people. Well, guess what? Now you have a big master list of 5,000 people. Could you guys cross promote one another and share those subscribers? Because if somebody on my list subscribes to your list, I haven’t lost anything.

BEN: No… not at all. As long as I don’t screw them over or anything,

RAY: Right, as long as you don’t screw them over and make them sour on me or as long as you’re not like a carbon copy of me. And you’re not. And something and you and Ryan Healy and John Angel and I have in common is we have a abundance mentality and we actually know one another and freely share information and ideas even though we’re all copywriters. Some people would say, “Well you guys compete.”

BEN: Well yeah, they could be listening to this call and saying, “Are you guys nuts?”

RAY: And the truth is, there is so much abundance in the world, and these ideas are going to be used differently by you than they are by me or by John or by anybody else. So there’s room for everybody to play and everybody to succeed. And so when you get people together like I was just suggesting—you know ten people who have a small list—organize… you be the organizer of it. Guess what? Those people want to build their list just as much as you do. And if you’re the organizer of it, then it’ll happen. If you wait for someone else to do it it probably won’t. But if you put you go the Warrior Forum and say, “Hey look, I’m starting out, I’ve got a list of 500 people, who wants to get together with me and let’s do a little co-op group where we can help build one another’s list and we can take up to ten people and we’ll do cross mailings and I’ll organize it and make sure everybody gets their mailing done…” And if you can do that, the you could conceivably have a list of 2, 3, 4 thousand people in pretty short order.

BEN: Wow… anyone listening to this—my gosh, man—that is amazing. That is really, really good advice. I never even thought of that before. Are you sure you don’t want to charge for this? (Laughter) You know I wanted to kind of go on the same theme here of building lists, one of your blog posts—and I thought this was really good, because I don’t think enough people talk about this… and when you do hear about it it’s because you paid to hear about it so you don’t really hear it in the echo chambers—you were talking about offline methods to build email lists. And could you talk about that a little bit?

RAY: Well, it’s a great question because so many marketers ignore this whole concept of using offline marketing to build online lists. And it’s absolutely ludicrous and fool-hearty to not pay attention to these techniques. While a huge portion of the world is online—it’s true, and I’m certainly not denigrating online marketing—what is often overlooked is that the one of the biggest challenges we have online building a large email list—having a list of people you can email to is really the foundation of an online marketing business. But it’s harder than it ever has been to build lists online. Because everybody it seems offers a free ezine or some kind of special report that you can download… so it’s just harder to get the opt-in. People are more skeptical—we’ve talked about this already. And so, what do you do? What’s the best way to build an email list? Because I can assure you that email marketing is just as important now as it ever has been. Even more so these days. And it still works—regardless of what people say about deliverability rates and so forth—you can still make money sending emails. So I’ve got three favorite ways that I recommend that people build their online lists. But using offline media. Like radio, which is at the top of my list. It’s overlooked, it’s inexpensive and it can be very effective for building an online email list. And if you’re going to use radio, you just need to make sure that you use the right kind of ad copy—direct response copy. No feel-good, institutionalized copy. I recommend that you have a very direct offer. You can make the same offer by the way that you could make on your squeeze page—you can say, “I’ve got a report that spells out the 7 overlooked ways you can use google to build your business. If you’d like to know more about those 7 ways are you can get my free report right now by going to freegooglreport.com” That’s not a real url by the way. It probably is…

BEN: It sure sounds good.

RAY: It probably is a real one, but I just made it up off the top of my head. But it’s not one of mine. But the point is you just want to direct them to a page where the only option they have is to opt-in and it ties in directly to the offer that they head on the radio. The sqeeze page is still the technique that you’re using to build that list. But you’re just using a different way to drive people there. And it has an added benefit, Ben, because these are fresh people. Often the people who respond to this kind of radio have not seen all of the online marketing techniques that you and I and our listener take for granted. So this is a fresh group of people and that means they’re going to be more responsive. So you need to treat them with more respect obviously. As you would anyone that you’re starting a new relationship with because that’s what this is—it’s a marketing relationship. But if you do that you’ll find that these will be some of the best prospects you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s almost without fail an email list that you’ve built by driving traffic from offline methods will be the most responsive email list you will ever have.

So the second way to do it, is using direct mail. And in fact, I’m very particular about this—I recommend you use post cards. Because post cards are cheap and they have an added benefit. That is this is naked mail. That’s what my good friend and mentor Alex Mandossian: naked mail. Because everybody sees it reads it, right? Anybody who is interested in the offer that you’re making, will make a mental note or maybe a physical note of whatever the url that you give on the postcard is driving people online and list. So one thing I definitely recommend, we talked about this already, is using dedicated urls or web addresses to make affiliate offers. Especially in radio and direct mail and this kind of offer and advertising. You don’t want to give people anything complicated to remember. So you need to have just a domain name. And if you have to create a new domain name for each campaign you’re going to do, so? Why would you not do that? It’s $8 for crying out loud.

BEN: When you do the post cards do you go through United Postal Service site or do you do you actually do them by hand or how do you handle that?

RAY: Well, there are different ways to do it. There are companies that will let you upload a bulk list and you can pay them, they have great designs and so forth. I have to admit to being sometimes a lazy marketer and I really recommend the US postal service site.

BEN: Yeah because you can go right in through their interface and they just handle it.

RAY: Absolutely—you go right through their interface, you upload your list, which you just have in an excel spreadsheet. So here’s a tip right now: if you have an online marketing business, try this. You will thank me for this. Figure out an offer that you can make to your list and set up a special page with that offer on it. Give it a new domain name—you know, myspecialoffer.com, whatever it is—and go to the US postal service site. You can go to your shopping cart software if you use 1shoppingcart—just download your list of prospects and look for the ones that you actually have a street address for. And upload that list to the US postal service site and send them a post card. It’s dirt cheap and send them to your special offer page and see what happens. You’ll be shocked. I guarantee you’ll be shocked. And then you might say, “Okay I’ve already got those people on a list. So how does this help me build a list?” Well, you can use the SRDS—which you can get from your library, it’s kind of spendy if you’re just starting out, and you might not want to buy it because a subscription is a little on the upper end—but you can go to the library and look at the SRDS and find a place where you can buy or rent lists of people who are interested in the kind of thing that you’re selling. Whatever that thing may be. And so you rent a list and send those people a post card. And you really just want to get them to opt-in to your email list because those are going to be your very best prospects.

And then finally, another way that you can build your online list using offline marketing—and this one is going to require a little bit more of an investment, so it really depends on the offer that you’re making—what’s the price point of the thing you’re selling. For instance, if you’re in the real estate business or if you’re selling how-to information to the real estate market, that’s a market where the beginning, the entry level home study courses, are a $1,000. So it’s a market that you have a little bit of mark-up and you can afford to spend more to acquire a customer. If you can squeeze your opt-in message into seven words or less—and that really is the rule of thumb—then I would consider using outdoor advertising. You may know this as the billboard. And I’ve bought a lot of billboard advertising back when I was in the radio business because if you’ve noticed, some of the best customers of the billboard industry are radio stations. And the reason is—this is just a little side not about billboards—I believe the best use of a billboard is when you can say something like, “Exit Here.” If you’re on the interstate and you have a Cracker Barrel restaurant, you have the Cracker Barrel logo up there, and you have a little arrow that points to the exit that says, “Exit Now”—that’s an effective use of a billboard. Or if you have a car dealership obviously it works the same way. Radio stations have a unique factor about them in that the point of purchase is right there in the car. You just punch the push button or the seat button. So for radio stations it makes sense to use billboards. Now a days where we’ve reached a point where I believe it makes sense for Internet marketers if—now listen carefully to me—if you know your numbers. If you know your metrics. How much is the average lifetime value of a customer to your business? What will they spend with you in a lifetime? What can you afford to spend to acquire a lead if you know that your average customer is going to spend $1,000 over the course of the first 12 months then it makes total sense to spend $100 to acquire that customer. If on the other hand your average customer is going to spend $60 in the course of 12 months, you might want to re-think that position. So outdoor advertising can be bought at bargain-basement rates to fill up their unused billboard space each month—and trust me, they have unused billboard space. You ever seen the billboards along the side of the road that will say something like, “Do people read billboards? You just did.” Well, guess what? That’s a billboard they didn’t sell. So any time you see unused billboards, here’s the thing to do: they almost always have the name of the outdoor advertising company either on the billboard itself in the content area of the board with the phone number, or there will be a little plaguer down there at the bottom, and a lot of them will say “Lamar.” Because Lamar Advertising is the kingpin of the billboard advertising industry. So just figure out who owns that particular billboard, and then call and say you’re interested in buying the unsold space that they have or do they have any other unsold space. And they’ll try to hit you with big prices, you just have to stick to your guns and say no, I’m not willing to pay that. I need the best deal you can offer me. And this is a time that it’s okay to play the poor mouth game. Just say, “Hey, I’m just a small entrepreneur, I don’t have a lot of cash. But if you’d rather make $500 from your board this month as opposed to making nothing from it, we should talk.” And if you can fit your message into seven words or less, and you can make a killer deal on a billboard, then I would recommend that you try it. Just make sure that it’s a billboard that people are actually going to read. If it’s in the warehouse district and nobody ever reads it then it might not be a good buy. So you got to use a little bit of common sense, and a little bit of experimentation. So obviously that’s a little bit more of a financial outlay then some of these other methods that we’ve mentioned. So you need to really know your numbers, know your metrics and do a little bit of wheeling and dealing with the billboard company. But it can be done. Your message needs to be something simple like, “Make Money From Home. Find Out How At MakeMoneyFromHome.com.” Now that domain is probably taken but you get the idea.

In all three cases, the commonality is we’re still driving people to a squeeze page, we’re still making an irresistible offer on the squeeze page. It’s just that we’re going to a different pool of prospects to drive to the squeeze page. And they’ll be better prospects. Your opt-in rates won’t be as high. But the ones who opt-in will be much better prospects for you.

BEN: Now I just wanted to go back to the radio for a second, because I know you used to work in that radio industry. And is it true that with AM radio especially, aren’t people who listen to already kind of conditioned for direct response, aren’t they?

RAY: Yeah, that’s a really good question. The AM radio listeners definitely that’s where I would start. Talk radio, news radio stations—those people are first of all not listening to music, they’re listening to talking all the time by choice. And they have been conditioned to hear direct response ads—that’s both the good thing and the bad thing. They respond to them, but also they’re a little more used to the direct response radio ads. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your copy is really. What it’s really about is how appealing is the offer? Right now there is a huge opportunity in real estate call short selling. We don’t need to go into all that right now. But it’s a big buzz word for people who are in the real estate investing market and they want to know more about it. So if you had a special report that you could offer on—, you know, “The 7 Secrets To Successful Short Selling”—you could say “download our special report right now absolutely free…” and by the way there’s no spam filters on radio, so you can use the word “free” all you want to, and I recommend you use it liberally—”just go to shortsellingsecrets.com right now…” And make sure you repeat that url at least three times in that radio ad. Those are the radio ads that irritate us, right? But we all remember the number to call if we want to get “Hooked On Phonics” don’t we?

BEN: What is is… freecreditreport.com… ?

RAY: (Singing the jingle) free credit report dot com.

BEN: You can’t forget it.

RAY: By the way, that’s brilliant if you want to really ingrain your url into peoples’ minds, use a jingle like that. The more annoying the better. Because people will remember.

BEN: And that really does work. Because I looked it up not long ago and I didn’t know any other one to go to but that because I heard it.

RAY: There’s a carpet company in the midwest—Empire—and I can tell you what their phone number is.

BEN: They have a great offer, too. I mean their offer is second to none. I remember being a little kid and it’s been the same offer for like 25 years—probably longer. And just kicks butt.

RAY: It’s just proof that it works. You’ve got to give a little bit of thought to what your offer is and how you phrase it. And using a jingle is good. We learn by using rhythm and rhyme. How did you learn your ABC’s?

BEN: It was a song.

RAY: It was a song exactly. So and it’s not as expensive as you might think to get a jingle made. You can just go online and there are tons of entrepreneurial musicians who will make a jingle for you for dirt cheap.

BEN: I’m just thinking of the Empire Today jingle—588…

RAY: 2300… Empire…

BEN: They really did that masterfully.

RAY: And we all know how to make a big mac. Two all beef paddies, special sauce, lettuce, cheese onions on a sesame seed bun.

BEN: And they used to have even more jingles I think 20 years ago.

RAY: Yeah, absolutely. At Burger King how do they like you to have it? Have it your way. It works.

BEN: A lot of us actually look down on that—well, not all of us necessarily—but a lot of people are told to look down on that. But it can work. It can be very effective.

RAY: Well, here’s the key. Making a jingle for the purposes of so-called branding I’m not sure is going to be profitable for the average small to medium sized entrepreneur. But making a jingle that is a direct response device… is something totally different. Now, there’s a little bit more of an advanced discussion when we’re talking about things like Alka-Seltzer, McDonads and so forth. But Empire—what is their direct device? It’s their phone number. They want you to call. So they took the actual call to action and made that into the jingle that gets ingrained in your mind that you cannot forget even if you want to. And if you want to teach your kids how to read in a better way than they can learn in the average classroom, we all know that you call “1-800-ABCDEFG.” If we want to order flowers, we know we call 1-800-flowers. And so those are not songs, but they’re memorable and they are the direct response device. That’s the key.

BEN: And what do you wipe your nose with—a Kleenex. Even though it’s a tissue.

RAY: Right, exactly.

BEN: That is really something that I know very, very, very few people are out there doing that sort of thing. That’s very good advice. Let me move onto the next one here. This is one that I’m especially interesting because a couple months you actually showed me a little plugin for Wordpress that kind of helped me optimize my blog. And I was like, “Whoa! That really worked.” I want to know what other kind of SEO tricks you have your sleeve. Especially for people who are using Wordpress.

RAY: Well, I’m glad you asked about that because it is so easy to do. And I am not an SEO expert. I don’t know anything about SEO. I don’t claim to know about it. Except I’m a huge believer in finding leveraged knowledge. If I can find an easy way to do something that’s hard to do, then I’m all over that. And the greatest single SEO trick that I know is get a Wordpress blog. Because Wordpress is already optimized in a way that google absolutely loves. I mean Wordpress blogs are like “google candy.” For some reason—I don’t pretend to understand why, I must know it works, I don’t care why—to add to that you can use a couple tricks in the way you title your posts in Wordpress. Now would you say that “squeeze page” is a pretty competitive term in google? The answer is yes, it is a competitive term. And so I decided to do an experiment with this and I use a little Wordpress called “Optimal Title.” Optimal Title.

BEN: That’s the one I think you told me about.

RAY: Yes. And all it does is it reformats the titles of your blog posts in a way that puts the key words—or the title of the post—before the name of the blog itself. Wordpress actually does it the other way around in it’s natural state when you install it. So Optimal Title changes that. And the key is you gotta make sure you put your key words into your title. So I wrote a post not too long ago called, “Do Squeeze Pages Still Work For List Building?” And what led me to do it was I noticed a lot of people were debating whether squeeze pages still work. And I thought, “I bet that’s pretty hard to rank for.” So I wrote a post and made the title of my post, “Do Squeeze Pages Still Work For List Building?” And if you got to google at the time that we’re recording this interview—now if you don’t continue to support these posts by making other posts about the same subject, I’ll give you this disclaimer, then your ranking will fall off over time. But every once if you just post something else about squeeze pages so that google believes that your site is still relevant to that topic, you can get the result that I got. And if you go to google right now at the time we’re recording this, and you type the question into google, “do squeeze pages work”—see I’m not even using the exact phrase in my title which is a trick that people use to make you believe that they’re google rankings than they really are. I just typed in the nature question that people might type into google. They just work. You click “search” and if you will look at your results… on my screen it shows that my site is number two.

BEN: Not bad.

RAY: And somebody has re-syndicated my article and it looks like I’m also number three. I don’t think I show up anymore on the first page. So it’s not bad at all. And all I did was use the key words in the title and I used this little plugin called “Optimal Title.” Now since you and I had that conversation, I have also commissioned one of my graphic artists and designers to make a new Wordpress theme based on the theme that I use on my blog because a lot of people wrote to me and said, “Hey, I really like the way your blog looks. Can I get that theme somewhere?” And so Corey Miller is my designer and I had him design a theme that you can actually download for free if you go to rayedwards.com and just type in the search box on my site “direct response wordpress theme” it’ll take you to the post where you can download this theme for free. There’s not opt-in or anything like that require—just download it for free. And the reason I’m telling you to do this is, if you use this theme, I had Corey build in the features of Optimal Title into the theme. You don’t even have to download the plugin, just use this theme and it’s already optimized to get you these kinds of results. So then all you have to do is install your Wordpress blog—which for most people if you have a c-panel hosting account, I don’t mean to get all geeked out on your here. But most hosting accounts have c-panel. If you go into your c-panel you’ll find a little button that’s called “fantastico” and if you click on that, it’ll install Wordpress on your site for you in about ten seconds. And then you just upload this theme that I’m giving away for free and so your site will look really cool, plus if you just put your key words into the title of each of post it’ll be optimized for google. And I guarantee you’ll start ranking on the terms for your keywords really quickly. You don’t have to do anything else—just post to your blog using this theme that I had designed and you’ll get really good rankings.

BEN: So that’s true “SEO for dummies” right there.

RAY: It really is. And this is all I know. I’m good friends with Brad Callen who’s like the SEO guy and he’s got the software “SEO Elite” and he’s got “Keyword Elite” and I’ve done a lot of work for him—copywriting and making videos for him and so forth—and so I’ve picked up a few things from him. But it’s funny because he even sent me an email not long ago that said, “Hey, I see your rankings are really doing well. I guess you started using SEO Elite, huh?” And I kind of weasled around that because really I’ve just been using this Wordpress and these plugins. By the way I can tell you that his products are fantastic and I should be using them. If I did then I would be ranking a lot better but I’m sometimes a little lazy about these things.

BEN: Well, one thing at a time.

RAY: Yeah, exactly.

BEN: Now this is kind of on a different note here, right now video’s all the rage. You gotta have video on your website—or some people will say that, and some people are dead set against it, “No way, I’m a purist and I’m never going to screw around with that video or audio…” or whatever. But to you, why is it important for people to at least thinking about it even if they’re not open to it right now. Shouldn’t they at least be thinking about using video on their websites. What are your thoughts on that?

RAY: I think they should stop thinking about it and start doing it. The reason is pretty simple. Simplest reason I can think of is you’ll get more response, you’ll get more sales, you’ll get more opt-ins. I’ve proven on my own sites and I’ve seen it proven on the sites of my clients and colleagues that I work with. Why is that so? I think it’s because people in today’s world are used to or accustomed to sites that are interactive, engaging, moving, talking… grabbing their attention. Rich Schefren just published a report called “The Attention Age Doctrine” and it’s all about how the real commodity online is these days that you’ve got to get hold of people’s attention. Because there’s so many different things crying for their attention. I just got an iPhone. And I’ve got on my iPhone I’ve got the Internet, I’ve got chat, I’ve got YouTube that I can watch videos right here on my phone. I’ve got some of my favorite TV shows that I’ve downloaded through iTunes so I could watch them on this trip I just took a few days ago. And that’s all on my phone. And it’s not just iPhone, it’s other phones as well. So that’s how video has become. People are intimidated by it. They thing it’s really difficult to do video on their website but it’s not. If you have a Macintosh computer—and I realize not everybody does—you are set because you can get a little program called Videocue Pro and you can make videos that you can post on your blog or on your website with the click of a button using the built-in webcam. You can have little titles on them and special effects. It’ll rendered in whatever format you need it rendered for in your website and it’s just push-button easy. Now, you say, “Well gosh, I don’t have a Mac. So what do I do?”

BEN: Get one!

RAY: Well that would be a good start.

BEN: I recommend everyone gets a Mac.

RAY: Yeah, I do too. But there are those people who for one reason or another decide or are not able to.

BEN: Can you just repeat the name of that software again?

RAY: Videocue Pro. I’m going to find this url for you because I love this software and it’s made me a lot of money because I’ve done affiliate promotions using nothing but Videocue Pro and posting to my blog.

BEN: Is it a higher end piece of software?

RAY: That’s the beautiful part. It’s cheap. It is the lite version is $39.99 and the Video Pro version—which is what I recommend you get—is $89.99.

BEN: That’s it?

RAY: Yeah, and the reason that I recommend the Videocue Pro—by the way you can find it at varasoftware.com.

BEN: You can edit it on that and everything?

RAY: You can edit, it’s got a built-in title function. It will support multiple web cams so you can have different angles. It’s got a full screen built-in tele-prompter, it’s got chroma key which means you can hang green piece of fabric behind you and chance the background to whatever you want it to be. It’s got motion editing controls, you can have different tracks—it’s just unbelievable. And you can get a free trial. But this is for the Mac so you gotta have a Mac if you want it to work for you. But I use it a lot and I really recommend it. It’s cheap. Then if you don’t have a Mac, what do you do then? Vlogit is the PC equivalent. It’s not quite as cool as Videocue Pro. But it does basically the same thing and it’s $29.

BEN: When you were talking about video, I recently was talking to Ken McCarthy about this exact same subject because he’s really big on video—he’s got a whole blog around it and everything. He said, “Look, here’s what it comes down to. Even though TV, computers… are all relatively new inventions, somehow were all screen watching creatures. And for whatever reason it’s in our nervous system—maybe it’s because when we were hunters two or three thousand years ago you had to be attuned to everything moving around. But whatever the reason is if you see something moving versus something not moving, you’re always going to go look at the thing moving. So I just thought that was an interesting way of putting it.

RAY: That’s a great insight. I hadn’t thought of that before but that makes total sense to me. Here’s the bottom line: you put video on your site, you’ll get more conversions. As long as you don’t do horrible video… it works. Let’s say that you’re one of these people that feels like you got a face made for radio. First of all, I think that people love seeing real people on their screen. So I think even if you believe you’re not necessarily TV material, you’re probably wrong. But, you can use screen capture video using software like Camtasia for instance—and I’ve used that extensively as well. In fact, if you go to webcopywritingexplained.com, that’s my site, and be warned because when you go there I will blatantly try to sell you stuff.

BEN: Is that for Mac, too, that software?

RAY: Well, no. Unfortunately. There is one for Mac but it is nowhere near as good. There’s a piece of software called ishowu and it’s sort of like Camtasia for the Mac but it’s just nowhere near as good. So here’s what I recommend you do: go buy parallels which is the software that you run on your Mac that allows you to run Windows on your Mac. And then buy a license for Windows and then buy Camtasia. Yes, you heard right. I spent all that money so that I could run PC program on my Mac.

BEN: You could probably get a used computer anyway pretty cheap for Windows.

RAY: It’s true and I actually have a Windows laptop with Camtasia. But I wanted to be able to make Camtasias when I’m traveling and I get an idea and need to do something quick. And so by getting parallels—parallels are about $80 and a license fro Windows is I think $200, and then $300 for Camtasia.

BEN: But one good video and I’m sure it pays for itself ten time.

RAY: Exactly. So I make my Camtasias actually on my Macintosh. And when you got to webcopywritingexplained.com you’ll see that my opt-in page basically consists of a video where I teach some material and then I say, “If you want the rest of the videos, you need to opt-in.” So my opt-in rate for that page is just under 50%—it’s like 48.7%.

BEN: That’s pretty good, too.

RAY: Uh… yes! So and then audio is like the no-brainer. If you can’t or don’t want to or don’t have the time to do video you definitely should do audio. It’s so easy to do, there’s lots of different ways to do it. I use audiogenerator which is a monthly service, and some people are like, “Gosh, I don’t want to pay $30 a month…” well, okay, then go get a job.

BEN: There’s software out there you can buy just one time.

RAY: There is and of course the challenge with that is you’ve got to be a little more technically oriented and then if there’s problems with your server, etc. Look, here’s the bottom line: I’m a pretty technical guy. I could do all that stuff myself. I have, I did. But I started using audiogenerator and I realized, gosh, this is so easy, I like this a lot better. I can call in and record messages, I can record messages with the microphone on my computer and upload them, it’s got a testimonial generation system. In fact, if you got to rayedwards.com/feedback anytime I meet somebody like at an event that may say, “Wow… I really enjoyed your talk… could I give you a testimonial?” I say you sure can, go to rayedwards.com/feedback. That’s how I collect testimonials. You can record audio testimonials, you can upload your picture there, I have dozens and dozens of testimonials collected through that site that I haven’t even put up online yet. It’s like an automatic testimonial collection machine for you. And in fact I have reserved a domain name now called raystestimonials.com. Which I’m going to start using for that.

BEN: You can actually call in your audio and just record it right over the phone?

RAY: Oh yeah, right.

BEN: So let’s say you were at a seminar, and someone wanted to give you a testimonial, you could just dial the number on your cell phone and have them talk into that?

RAY: Absolutely and I have done that very thing.

BEN: Because then you know you got it.

RAY: Yeah, if it’s somebody let’s say, Ben, you’re at an event and you meet somebody and they say, “I’ll give you a testimonial because blah blah blah blah…” and some big guru—definitely you flip out your cell phone, dial the number and say, “Could you say what you just said into the phone please?” If you got a little mp3 player—and I’ve done this, too—you can just have them say the testimonial into that thing. Upload your mp3 to audiogenerator and then the beauty of it is you just cut and paste the code and boom—the audio is on your page.

BEN: I know we’re not really talking about seminars, but are they kind of weary of someone bringing in the recording device?

RAY: No, as long as you don’t set it on the table and turn it on and start recording. People will ask you not to do that but, I carry mine with me everywhere I go just in case there’s a chance to get a testimonial or sometimes I’ll get to talking with somebody and we’ll start bouncing ideas off one another and one of us will say, “I wish we were recording this, this is an interview or a product…” then I will say, “Well, it just so happens I have here in my pocket a recording studio.”

BEN: Now you could call their cell phone and have it three way into the audio… and actually do live tele-seminar or something you’re learning… ?

RAY: Yeah, and I’ve done that. I’ve done that same thing as well. So audiogenerator. And this is not an affiliate link but it’s just audiogenerator.com. Now if you wanted to put a few coins in my tip jar, then you could go to newaudiomarketing.com. That’s totally up to you. I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.

BEN: You’ve been giving a heck of a lot of value here. You kind of answered the next question—I wanted to ask it to you anyway just so we could go on this video a little more because it’s not—a lot of people are talking about and doing it, and I know there’s people teaching it—but some people are kind of intimidated by it. Just real quick, what are some ways you can do the video as far as… YouTube or… ?

RAY: Okay, I see… well, there’s a couple of different ways. To make the video, I would used either Videocue Pro for the Macintosh or vlogit for the PC. There are other applications, so if you’ve got something else you’re comfortable with fine. But these two programs were made for the purpose of making little videos you could post on the web. So I would use those to make the video and then you can upload the video to YouTube or Google Video—that would be my two choices. And the reason you would do that is simply this: they host your video and take care of all the bandwidth.

BEN: And Google Video doesn’t put a limit on the time like YouTube, right?

RAY: Right, YouTube puts a little bit of a time which is probably a good thing because most people should not be making a video that’s over ten minutes long. I mean that’s just the bottom line. Most people getting started with this, if you’re going to do an opt-in message for your opt-in page it should be 60 seconds or so.

BEN: I hate to go back on this technical stuff, but I’m very intrigued by this. When you said you put it on the little camera that goes right into the computer, you hook it right into that? Can you take that off and go outside or does that have to be attached… ?

RAY: I’m just talking about like with my Mac Book, there’s a little camera built into the computer. Now you can use any webcam or you could use—oh this is so cool, I’m glad you asked this question—just use your camcorder or your digital camera. And then drop your video into the program when you get back to your computer. How cool is that?

BEN: That is very cool.

RAY: Oh yes it is.

BEN: Really yeah, you gotta be able to spend a little money but c’mon—if you’re in business it’s worth it.

RAY: Yeah. Exactly. And if you don’t want to buy one of those applications, but you have a webcam and/or a camcorder—which everybody does these days—then your Macintosh comes with iMovie which you can make sophisticated movies, and it’s free and it’s a really great program. And your Windows machine comes with I think it’s Microsoft MovieMaker. And it’s kind of the same thing. You’ve already got the stuff probably to do this and that’s how you get started. Later on if you want to get more advanced you can buy an hd camera and all that stuff. But for what we’re talking about, what I just mentioned is good enough. And you can use YouTube or Google Video to host your video—and that way you don’t have to worry about the bandwidth—or you can use instantvideogenerator and that’s not an affiliate link, it’s at videogenerator.com, or newvideomarketing.com. And I use that like for my launch of my copywriting course. I have a bunch of videos on the sales page—video testimonials—and I wanted to make sure that my server was not going to be bogged down trying to run all that video. So I ran it through videogenerator and it’s great. It works just fantastically well. Other people are using YouTube or Google Video to do that. And I don’t have a problem with that, other than the fact that I kind of don’t like their branding on my stuff.

BEN: Right… the big “you tube.”

RAY: Right. But again, there’s nothing wrong with it and there’s an added benefit when you use YouTube because they have that “share this video” button. Which might get you some traffic, I don’t know how much. But it’s just not that hard to do and it can be very inexpensive if you have a webcam and you have either a Microsoft Windows machine or a Macintosh, you’re in business.

BEN: So if you were going to use a video in an actual sales letter—I’ve been seeing thes