Q&A act-shun time.
“Chester” (not his real name) writes:
“the first chapter of your book turned out to be a sales letter for the book. if you promise a chapter of a book then give a chapter of the book not a sales letter. you are marked as spam. peace.”
And you, my friend, are officially marked as an idiot.
After all:
1. I don’t have any books that fit that description (Where the first chapter is a sales letter). So you obviously have me confused with someone else.
2. If you’re going to mark someone as spam, just do it.
No need to drama queen about it.
Next question…
Website reader Ronnie asks:
“What do you think about the offer? I’ve heard you mention it before on how good marketing works only on proven good offers. How do craft a good offer?”
Let’s put it this way.
The late (great) direct mail guy Dick Benson once said:
“Nobody spends enough time on their offers”
And, he’s right.
None of us do.
(Yes, I need to spend more time on my offers.)
The offer is as much as 40% of the power of your ad.
So how do you craft a good one?
One way to do it is to do a thorough analysis of your market, find out what problem, pain, or desire they think about at night and when waking up in the morning, then craft your offer around solving that.
There are many other ways to do it.
But, that’s always worked for me.
Neeeeeext question:
“When you run a ‘special’ or whatever you want to call it…(i.e. not email players) what kind of sales response rate do you typically get…for instance…when last you had the Copywriting Grab Bag available. Just curious compared to how I did with something recently…”
It’s all over the map.
And, comparing my results to yours is pointless.
There are too many variables at play.
Like price point.
Marketplace demand.
Your positioning with your list.
(Huge intangible, factor.)
And even if something similar has been sold to the same people recently.
Example:
I recently mailed for Scott Haines’ “Shortcut Copywriting” product.
We did way better than he was expecting.
(And, way better than I was expecting, too.)
But, at the same time, the Halbert brothers had just mailed for the same product a week prior. And, I know at least a couple people who bought from their mailings who said, had they not seen them run it before mine, would have bought from me.
(Especially considering the bonuses I offered.)
Do you think that affected my sales response?
Of course it did.
Anyway, point is this:
My sales response is 1000% irrelevant to anyone else but me. And, yours are 1000% irrelevant to anyone but you. So comparing your sales response to mine (or anyone else’s) is pointless.
That’s why I don’t care about other peoples’ response.
What I care about is mine.
And, how I can do better next time.
And finally, last question:
“Do you still see value in ezine articles? If so, what do you use them for?”
I haven’t written any in a few years.
Reason why is not because I don’t think they work, but because I hate “padding” my writing to fit a minimum number of words.
Take the main ezine site I used to use.
(And got a lot of great, targeted traffic from).
Back in 2011 they ended up increasing their minimum word count to protect themselves from Google’s slapping of article farm sites.
I certainly can’t blame them for that.
But, it’s biased against people who write tight copy.
For example:
I can “say” more in 150 words than a lot of ezine writers can in 500. So unless they go back to short (250 words) minimum word counts (and even then, I had to pad a bit), I’m probably not going to dip back into the ezine game.
I’m not saying anyone else shouldn’t.
I’m just saying I won’t.
(I know one guy who gets tons of traffic in an obscure niche by writing 600 word articles — so it obviously still works.)
I’d rather use other ways to get traffic.
All right, time to wrap up:
The next “Email Players” issue mails soon.
Amongst other cool email ideas, it shows you a bunch of old school headline templates (created by one of the greatest space ad guys you probably never heard of decades ago) that are easily adapted and used as email subject lines today.
But time is short, my little droogie.
Subscribe here in time while you can:
Ben Settle
