Brittany Lynch: Hey, hey everyone. Brittany Lynch here and today I have some really exciting content for you. I've arranged an interview with someone who I've known my entire life, my brother Conor Lynch. He happens to be a very, very talented copywriter. He's written copy not only for myself but for Russel Brunsen, for Tim Castleman, for Alex Jefferies and all sorts of other top level internet marketers and then some in other niches ranging from real estate to beauty to investing. He's really worked in all sorts of different niches when it comes to writing high level copy that really, really converts. He has a lot of experience in this niche. He's been doing it for a very long time. The reason why I wanted to get him on today's call was because I really believe that copywriting is the most underrated skill that people need to learn in order to be successful online. I see that a lot of people invest time in learning how to send traffic. They invest time in creating their information product or sourcing their physical product, but they don't ever invest time in learning how to get good copywriting skills. I really believe that at the end of the day, copywriting is the most important thing that directly impacts your success online. Hopefully you're all going to get a lot of great knowledge out of this call not only on how to write a sales letter, but how to write copy. That's going to extend into all areas of your business and hopefully give you a really high return. This interview will probably last about 30 to 40 minutes. It's all content, no fluff. Again, we're going to be talking about the only 18-part sales letter outline you'll ever need. He's going to be breaking down every single aspect of what goes into a sales letter and then giving an example at the end. Con, with that said, are you there and why don't you take it away? Conor Lynch: Absolutely. Thanks for that glowing introduction Brittany. One of the things you're saying there, copywriting is an incredibly important skill that a lot of people don't have. I think one of the reasons that people don't invest as much time into it as they invest in learning the latest Facebook traffic hack or how to do re-targeting or those sorts of things, is that it seems a little bit mystical or a little bit, a specialized skill that you either have or you don't have. I know that people, they sit down to write a sales letter, maybe for the first time, and they're staring at the blank page and it's intimidating and they wonder, what do I need to say? What do I write next? It gets overwhelming to the point they don't end up investing in that skill. They don't end up learning it. It's just something that they never end up developing. Brittany Lynch: Yeah and I guess that's why a lot of copywriters also have swipe files, because I find that staring at an empty screen is really difficult and it is very scary and overwhelming. A swipe file is basically just a folder of material that can give you inspiration. It's basically taking other people's headlines, other people's bullet points, or different elements of the copy that you're going to be using and putting it into a file folder so that when you do sit down and write copy, you can have what's called swipe to look at to give you inspiration to really plug it in and use it as a template to write your own material. Conor Lynch: Yeah that's so true. For the most part, the great copywriters don't really write anything completely from scratch. In some cases they do, they write portions of a letter from scratch but for the most part they're either using templates or outlines that they've devised for themselves or they're using that in combination with a swipe file. This is copywriters at every letter. From people like me, to copywriters like my mentor who he earns $20,000 or $30,000 to write a letter but he still starts most of the time with another letter to use as the structure and as the basis for that. With this outline, what I've set out to do is put together a template that anyone can use in most niches to structure your sales letter and break it down into parts. When you're sitting down to write it, you don't have to wonder, what comes next? You'll just have to look at this and it'll become obvious what you put next. Brittany Lynch: That's awesome. [crosstalk 00:04:44] a lot of value out of that. Conor Lynch: Yeah, so that's what we're going to dive into today. Why don't we get started? Brittany Lynch: Sounds good, let's do it. Conor Lynch: The other thing I should quickly mention is when we get to the end of the presentation after I've gone through all the different parts, I am going to show you an example of a letter that I wrote. This one is one that I wrote for Tim [Castlemen 00:05:05]. I'll show you how the different parts work in action, so to speak. For now, we're just going to quickly go through the presentation and I'll show you all the different parts and why they're so important. Brittany Lynch: Sounds good. Conor Lynch: At the very top of the letter we have the headline section. I call it shock and awe. The reason I call it that is because with your headline, your entire objection is to grab the reader's attention. They've just landed on your page whether it's from an advertisement on Facebook or Google, in Google search results. It could be from an email from an affiliate or from your own list. It doesn't matter how they got there, you need to get them to stay there. That's what the headline does. The way that I structure this is with a 3 part formula. The first is with a question or lead-in to the headline, which I call the pre-headline. It's purpose is to agitate the problem that the person has, to make them think about are they struggling with losing weight or they struggling with making money online, or whatever it happens to be. I want to put them in a head space where they're thinking about that problem. Next, the headline itself. It delivers the big idea of your letter, what's called the hook. This is the thing that grabs the attention of people reading and forces them to continue reading through the rest of the letter. The hook needs to achieve 2 things. It needs to speak to benefits that the person will receive if they continue reading the letter, and they take the right action, and it needs to arouse a lot of curiosity because the number one reason that people keep reading something is to find out what happens next. The more mysterious that can be, the more likely they are to keep reading. The most effective hooks tend to be the ones that do the best job of arousing curiosity. Finally, I have a sub-headline which adds more benefits or qualifies the whole main promise of the letter by saying, you can do this without, you can lose weight without an expensive gym membership or restrictive diets, or those sorts of things. Again, I'll show you an example of how that works shortly but that is my basic formula for the headline section. Brittany Lynch: So pre-headline, headline, and then sub-headlines. There's almost 3 headlines that go into that. Conor Lynch: Yeah and sometimes there will be multiple sub-headlines but the really important thing to get right ... Sometimes there won't be any sub-headlines at all but the most important ones are the pre-headline and the headline. Brittany Lynch: I actually find that it's easier to write with 3 headlines because sometimes, before when I was only writing with 1 headline I would get overwhelmed, like is this the right thing to be including here? With 3 headlines you're covering your bases a little bit more and making a more compelling sales argument. Conor Lynch: Absolutely, absolutely. It allows you to cover a lot more ground without trying to jam it into 1 sentence. You can still have that 1 main call out line that acts as the hook but then once people read that, you have the supporting stuff that keeps them interested. The next section of the letter is what I call raise the curtain. This is the opening of your letter. What you want to do here is make a bold promise of what results or what benefits the reader will experience if they continue reading that letter. Basically what you're trying to do is raise the stakes for them so that if they stop reading the letter, they feel like they will have missed out on something pretty profound, something that they can't afford to not miss, or they can't afford to- Brittany Lynch: For example, in the weight loss niche, would a bold promise be, lose 10 pounds? Can you give an example? I know you're going to show a sales page later but in the weight loss niche, what would be an example of making a bold promise? Conor Lynch: For example, you might say something that ties in with the hook. There's a really successful weight loss letter right now by a guy named Tyler [Branlet 00:09:17] and it's basically about flexibility and this little stretching exercise you can do before your workout to double your calorie burn. You might say something like, "In the next 5 minutes, you're going to discover 5 simple stretches you can do in 2 minutes before your workout that will see you losing between 15 and 75% more calories over the course of your exercise routine." Brittany Lynch: That's definitely a big promise. Conor Lynch: Yeah, that's a bold promise. I think, for his letter it was almost something exactly like that. Brittany Lynch: Cool, okay. Conor Lynch: You want to raise the stakes in some way. If there is an urgency or scarcity factor with your letter, it's sometimes useful to introduce it right there at the top. For example if this is a short time offer and the sales page is only going to be there for a little while, let's say you're promoting an event or something like that, then you should mention that there because it gives the people a strong reason to keep reading. Especially in the early part of the letter, before you really have your teeth into the reader, you want to give as many reasons as possible for them to keep reading and to keep paying attention. Basically you just want to give them a reason to read. The next section I called pointing out the trap. This is basically about agitating the problem again, that they have. In the weight loss niche it's that they've struggled to lose weight. In the make money online space it's that they haven't been able to figure out this internet marketing game. In any particular niche there's it's own problem set. What you want to do is you want to agitate it in a very particular way. You want to be able to bring up the problem, speak to the symptoms of that problem, but you want to do it in the context of describing it as a trap that they've fallen into. You want to describe the consequences of them falling into that trap but you want to make it pretty clear that it's not their faults, it's a trap that's been laid out for them, ideally there's a trap set out by some common enemy. For example, in the diabetes space the common enemy is the pharmaceutical companies. If you can say that you've fallen into this trap laid by the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry, then it takes the problem and allows them to start thinking of it as something that isn't permanent and isn't something that they're going to have to be stuck with for the rest of their lives. It allows them to start thinking of potential solutions. That's the head space you want them in. Brittany Lynch: Yeah so that's the really important thing is your sales letter is trying to put them in a certain head space, right? That head space, you're building the most optimal head space throughout the sales letter to get them to a place where they're ready to buy at the end. Conor Lynch: Absolutely. The next thing that I do is called granting forgiveness. This is really, really quite important because, I'll speak to this more later but there are 3 basic objections that are the most common objections for any sale. One, it's too expensive. Two, I don't have enough time for this. Three, I don't think that I can make this work. People in general have confidence issues. Almost everyone, myself included, have at various points, confidence issues that keep you from doing things. If they read your letter and think, "Hey, I don't know if I'm actually capable of doing this," then it doesn't matter if it's $1 and it doesn't matter if it takes only a minute to do it. If they don't think they can pull it off, they're not going to buy your product. That's what this section's really about. You're granting forgiveness. You're telling them it's not their fault that they've been stuck in this trap. The trap was laid out for them by someone else, or just by circumstance, and they fell into it, but it's not their fault. It's not because they don't have the skills or the talent. It's not because they don't have the drive. It's not because they don't want it bad enough. This is the important part. You set up one fatal mistake that they weren't aware that they were making, that they probably never heard of this particular mistake before, and you tell them this is the reason that you fell into the trap but again, it is not your fault. Brittany Lynch: Conor, maybe we could speak to- Conor Lynch: The next thing- Brittany Lynch: Before we move on, every good niche, every niche really does have all these elements already. There's always a common enemy in every niche. We're not really suggesting you to make up a fake enemy or to make up a fake fatal mistake. These are all truths that exist in that niche already and we're just agitating them, right? Conor Lynch: Yeah. I'll speak of it more about some examples of fatal mistakes because that's a whole section of it. Before we get to that, the first thing that you do, before you reveal what the mistake is, you do this section that I call the promised land. Basically what you do is you tell them once you figure out what this mistake is, and I'm going to tell you in just a few seconds, once you put it to bed and solve it, all the problems you've been experiencing will become these wonderful benefits and your life will be so much better. If it's in the weight loss space it's the fat will melt away. You'll suddenly be more confident in your own skin. You'll be able to go to the beach and show off that new beach body and not wear a t-shirt into the water and these sorts of things. Basically, you'll have escaped from the trap. What you're doing with this is you're arousing desire. You're making them really want that solution without knowing necessarily what it is. The reason you haven't revealed it so far is again, because curiosity forces people to keep reading. If they don't know what it is that you're talking about, they build it up in their own minds. That allows you to let their own desire for a solution do most of the selling for you instead of you trying to arm twist a sale out of someone. Brittany Lynch: That's important. You want them to sell themselves. Conor Lynch: Yeah. That's the thing, they say that 90% of hypnosis is self-hypnosis, people hypnotizing basically themselves and the hypnotist basically guides you through that. If you're not open to it, you won't be hypnotized. The same thing- Brittany Lynch: If I ... Go ahead, Con. Conor Lynch: I was just going to say it's the same thing in selling. People want to be sold on some level. They're resistant to aggressive selling, but they want to sell themselves. They're very good at selling themselves. If you can lay out this structure that allows them to do that to them self, then they will be the one doing the selling. Your letter just allows them to do that to them self. Brittany Lynch: Yeah and you guys can probably think of a real life example where you've sold yourself as well. I know I can. Frequently when I find something that I really want to buy and I'm trying to justify it in my head, I'll start selling it to whoever I'm with. I'm like, these are the reasons why it's going to be so great. This is why I really think I should get it. You can probably see a real life example of that, that you've experienced if you reflect on that. Conor Lynch: Yeah I can definitely think of a lot of examples. The fatal error, the fatal mistake ... This is where you actually reveal the secret cause of all their problems. The most important thing here is that it can't be something that they've ever heard of before. If you're in some make money niche whether it's real estate investing or building a home business or building an online business or whatever, you can't say that the secret reason that you aren't rich is because you don't work hard enough because that's something they've already heard and that's not the mistake that they want to hear. They want to hear that it's some- Brittany Lynch: Loop hole. Conor Lynch: Some loop hole. Something that has been working against them this entire time. The most effective fatal errors are ones that are quirky. With the Venus factor, which is a very, very successful weight loss VSL they're basically saying it's this one hormone. For some reason it's escaping me right now, the name of it. They say it's this one hormone and if you keep it in balance, at the right levels, then it's very, very easy to lose weight but if you eat the wrong foods and it's not in balance, then it's pretty much impossible to lose weight. People watching the VSL are thinking, "Hey this is why I've never had success losing weight because my levels of this one hormone have not been in balance, so it was impossible. It's not my fault." Then they forgive themselves and they're open to your solution. Brittany Lynch: That's really interesting because it's a women's weight loss product right? I feel like women are constantly being told in society that it's something to do with their hormones that's causing them to act a certain way or to be in a the situation that they're in, so they're kind of playing into that. Conor Lynch: Absolutely. That Tyler [Bramont 00:19:31] one that I was mentioning before, about these stretches, it was basically saying that the big fatal error is that a lot of, it's a men's weight loss thing, is that you're not flexible enough. If you're not doing the exercises in the gym properly and because of that, you're not actually burning as many calories as you should be. Your fatal error was you didn't do the stretching before so because of that, all of your exercise was not nearly as effective as it could be so you were shooting yourself in the foot. Most people have never heard that and so consequently they're like, wow that's sort of surprising, I've never thought of that- Brittany Lynch: He created his own unique selling proposition through that. Conor Lynch: Yeah. That's how that works. The other thing that you're doing here is when you lay out the fatal error, your ideal solution is always in the context of whatever that fatal error is. With the Venus Factor, the Venus Factor is all about optimizing that one hormone to effectively lose weight. With Tyler [Bramont's 00:20:41] offer, it's all about doing these weird stretches that you can do quickly before your workout that only take a few minutes that radically improves your calorie loss, or calorie burn. Whatever your fatal error is, it's matched with the ideal solution that counters that fatal error, reverses it, and allows them to escape the trap. Does that make sense? Brittany Lynch: Yeah it makes a lot of sense. Again, we'll be showing an example of a sales page at the end of the call that Con will highlight all of the 18 steps in the sales letter so you can really see it in action. Conor Lynch: Absolutely. The other thing that you're doing this section, and this a higher level copywriting thing is, you're pre-selling and qualifying. What pre-selling is, is for someone to be in a position to buy something from you, there's a number of things that they need to believe are true. For example, if you're selling a solution to this fatal mistake, they need to believe that fatal mistake is a real thing that they've fallen into. They need to believe they can actually reverse that problem. They need to believe that your solution does reverse that problem, and those sorts of things. Whenever I sit down to write a letter, I come up with a list of pre-sale points that I need to persuade someone about in order for them to be in a head space to buy. Then throughout the course of the letter I try to persuade on as many of those points as possible. This fatal error section is one of the points where I heavily focus on doing that. The next section is called the magic weapon. The magic weapon is basically your unique silver bullet solution that comes in, saves the day, reverse the fatal error, and allows you to finally achieve the results that you always wanted. Again, it needs to be a totally unique solution. It needs to be something that they haven't really tried before because again, going back to the weight loss niche, if you come in and say, "My solution is eat less and lose more," that's what people have been told their entire lives and they've probably tried to do that and they probably had diets fail and they've probably gone to the gym for 2 weeks before and then stop going. I know because I've done that before. If you tell them that's a solution, you've immediately lost them because they don't want a weapon, they want the magic weapon. The one that will take them from here to wherever they want to go, back to that promised land as quickly as possible with as little work as possible and by a completely different route than they've ever heard of before. It has to fit the pre-positioned ideal solution to that fatal error. When you set up that fatal error, this magic weapon has to be positioned as a direct solution to that error. Once you have them believing that the reason they're not rich or skinny or dating the man or women of their dreams is because of some fatal error, once you have them believing that, you need them to believe that this is the perfect solution to that specific error. If they just have this, they can fix that and then have the life that they've always wanted. Does that make sense? Brittany Lynch: Yeah it does, absolutely. Conor Lynch: Perfect. Again, this is another section where I do a lot of pre-selling. Supporting the idea that this is the real solution to the problem you've always faced, that not just the general idea of the solution but your offer in particular is the perfect solution. That's an important thing. Brittany Lynch: You're constantly pre-selling and qualifying the lead of who this is right for and who it's not right for, throughout the letter? Conor Lynch: Yes absolutely that's very important. Brittany Lynch: Yeah it's really important and one thing I want to just mention, it might sound overwhelming again that there's a lot of intricacies that go into a sales letter, and to some degree there really are and that's why we're breaking it down into the 19 steps, but this is why copywriters typically have some sort of template that they use so that once they've worked out their perfect formula, they use that again and again so they're not staring at a blank page and they're getting started quicker. Hopefully these 18 steps will help you in that sense. Conor Lynch: Absolutely. The next section is what I call slaying the dragon. This section is where you talk about all the results that you achieve with the magic weapon. Initially you'll be talking about the results that you personally have achieved with it or if you're not the central figure in the letter, whoever the central figure is that achieved results. This is the part where you tell the story of those results. You substantiate it with proof. This is one of the most important things. Proof elements. Gary Bencivenga who's widely regarded as the greatest living copywriter, has said that you should always organize your letter around your proof elements because when you make claims about something, people are going to be skeptical especially in niches that are heavily marketed to which will be, I would say 99% of the niches that you guys are involved in. Whether it's internet marketing or real estate investing or weight loss or dating, or another health related niche. All of these niches are heavily, heavily marketed to. When you say that you've achieved certain results, people want to see that that's true. This is where you include your proof elements and show that yes I did in fact lose 20 pounds, or I did in fact make money online, or I did in fact find the girl of my dreams and now we're getting married. Whatever it happens to be, this is where you substantiate it with actual proof. When people see that proof, they believe, okay I believe that you achieved those results and now I'm more likely to believe that I can achieve those results. That's very important. The other thing you want to do here is when you're talking about the results, you extend them into benefits. It's not just, I lost 20 pounds, but what did that do for my life? Did it make you more confident? Did it mean that I have fewer health issues, I was more mobile, I have more energy throughout the day? You start extending the consequences of achieving those results, arousing more desire in the mind of the person reading. That's what's really going to convert. Brittany Lynch: I know some people who are watching this are probably thinking, "What if I don't have results from my product yet?" I guess what I would say to that is, Conor's going over the outline for the perfect sales letter right now, all 18 steps. You want to try to use as many of them as you can. If you don't have results, try to reach out to people who can give you some results. It's not the end of the world if you don't have them but definitely results are one of the more important things of a sales letter. Conor Lynch: Yeah that's a good point. Actually in the sales letter example I'm going to show, the next section isn't included because Tim at the time ... I'll quickly explain it. The next section's called toy soldiers and it's where you talk about the other people who've used your system and achieved results. I know for some of you who are listening, it's likely you haven't released the offer yet so you don't necessarily have testimonials. The letter that I wrote for Tim, it was a new system that he'd just created and he didn't have testimonials either so that section's not included but the letter still converted. If you don't have every section, that's fine. That's absolutely fine. It's better if you do have every section because each section builds on the sale, but even if parts are missing, it's a very resilient structure so it will still convert people. The importance of this section is establishes what's called transferability. It's one thing if you or the main figure from your letter achieved results. It's something entirely different if lots of other people were able to achieve those results. If you're able to say, "I achieved these results with the system when I used it myself. Then I found clients and they paid me a whole whack of money and they learned how to do it themselves too. Then I've released it now as this information product. Now hundreds of people tried it and achieved the same results." People are going to see that and say, "Oh wow, lots of people are able to use this magic weapon. It's not just one guy with special super powers. This is helping hundreds of people lose weight or hundreds of people make money or hundreds of people find their love one or become healthier," or whatever it happens to be. That allows them to believe that they can do it too. Again, as I said at the beginning. One of the chief objections that people have is I don't think I can do this. In this section you're filling it with testimonials, results claims, and proof elements from people. If you can show, in the weight loss niche the gold standard here is before and after pictures of people who have bought the offer or who have coached with you. In the dating niche it might be pictures of couples who've come together because of your work. In the make money online space it'd be testimonials coupled with earnings proofs, those sorts of things. That's where you want to stock this particular section with. Throughout it all, you're speaking to the results these people are achieving. You're extending those into benefits by discussing how that effected their lives and changed their entire outlook on life and those sorts of things and you're arousing a lot more desire. The next section is called humble pie. Humble pie is basically the section of the letter where you tell them, despite all these amazing results that I achieved and that I achieved for people who've worked with me before and tried this system, I am not a super hero. There's nothing special about me. I don't have magical making money powers or magical weight loss powers or magical dating powers. I'm a regular guy. You reveal the weaknesses that you have so in fact, you don't even want to say that you're average. You want to say, in fact I'm below average. I have always sucked at talking to women but with this system, I managed to achieve success. I was actually totally hopeless so if you're even marginally, even if you're around average, you will be able to achieve results with this system. The reason you're doing that is because if they perceive you as some exceptional character who was able to achieve these results through some unique characteristic of your personality, then it'll give them a reason to say, "Well, maybe I won't be able to do it." If they see you as just a regular person who was able to achieve these results, then they'll look at it and they'll say, "Hey, this guy doesn't seem to crazy. He doesn't seem too much like superman. Maybe I can do it too." Then the most important thing is if you can say, the only thing that sets you apart and the other people who've achieved success for this system from a prospect, the only thing that makes you guys different is that the people who achieved results set aside doubt and tried this out. If you can say that, then you make it so that in the mind of the prospect, all they have to do is put their skepticism to bed for 5 minutes, pull the trigger on buying your offer, and if they do that, they can have all these results and all these benefits as well. The next section is called the product and this is where you introduce the offer itself. You connect it with the idea of the magic weapon and you basically are describing how your product is the exact magic weapon they've been looking for to fix the fatal error that they've just discovered so they can slay the dragon and achieve all the results they've always wanted. You're summing that all up, again, in this section. You show them how it's the key to, again getting to that promised land that they always wanted to be in. Then you list the future bullets, which is basically what they're getting in the offer. The more bullets that you can include, the better because it'll make the offer seem more substantial. You don't want to write boring bullets. What I mean by that is you don't want to just write off a list of emotional-less features. You want to talk about features and then extend them into benefits. It could be something like, you'll discover this unique stretch that extends your range of motion by 20% so that you can properly do exercise X, Y, and Z that will mean that you burn a lot more fat when you're at the gym. Something like that. It starts with a feature that's just very, very simple and very, very specific, and then it is extended into the benefit that you receive from that. The other thing that you want to do with your bullets is you want to be very curiosity happy. You don't want to be on the nose. You want to leave people wondering exactly what the technique is that you're talking about. Sometimes one of the tricks that I do is I'll, if I have a really boring feature bullet, I'll give it a made-up name and I'll say, for example, "I'll teach you the peacock technique of doing this, that, or the other thing." You don't really say what the peacock technique is, so people are wondering, "Wow, that's pretty cool. This guy's peacock technique, I've never heard of that." It could be that they've actually already heard of the technique, but it's never been dolled up for them like that so this makes it a lot more interesting. This is when we're coming into the close of the letter. If you guys have never heard of price anchors before, basically these rely on a psychological principle that people don't judge prices objectively. They don't hear $100 and think, "That is expensive," or, "That is cheap," or that is any specific thought about it. They always judge a price relative to other numbers that they've just seen. This is something that real estate agents will do is they'll show a series of expensive houses, probably the most expensive over-priced ones in the entire neighborhood to a perspective buyer, and then they'll take them to a normally priced one, one that's in the regular range of potential prices, and then all of the sudden even though these houses are not necessarily a great deal, they're just an average deal, the potential buyers will think, "Hey look at the prices for this much space and this backyard. This looks amazing." The only reason they think that is because they've just seen the most expensive 2 or 3 places in the entire city. That's a trick that real estate agents actually do. If you're buying a house anytime soon or thinking of doing that, keep an eye out for your real estate agent and see if they pull that trick on you. In your sales letters you can do functionally the same thing. Go ahead Brit. Brittany Lynch: Yeah I was just going to say if you watch old keynote presentations that Steve Job does for introducing new Apple products, he does a really good job of that. Just search of YouTube and you can kind of see it in action there. Conor Lynch: Yeah, perfect. There's a lot of different anchors you can use. I'm just going to cover some of them today. If you focus on these ones, you're fine. These are the main ones I use. The first one that I do is the value of the results you're going to achieve. You can do that by ... This is easier to do in money related niches because you can say, if you can speak to 6 figures of passive income, or if you're writing a letter for a financial newsletter and you talk about a 15% return or a 20% return over the next year and then you put some numbers to that, then you get people thinking, "Oh this could be worth $10,000 to me," or, "This could be worth $100,000 to me," or whatever, so that number is in their head. Then the other one I like to do is the cost of alternative solutions. If you can say, "Yes, you can achieve these results by hiring a personal trainer and a nutritionist, but you're probably going to end up spending between the 2 of them 10 grand, plus the cost of gym memberships, plus all this and all that," and that's, "Whereas today, you can get the same solution for," and it's obviously much lower priced. If you put that higher ticket number in their head, then all of the sudden they're thinking, "You know what? Compared to that, this is actually a pretty good deal." The other thing you can do is anchor the price of an offer versus itself by offering a special discount and saying, "Normally, this is for sale for $197 but today you only have to invest $47." People do respond to that. It can be somewhat overused technique but I still believe that it works so special offers are effective. The one thing I would say to that is that a lot of people will say, "This is a special offer. Normally it's priced at," let's use the same example, "$197, and now at $47," but it was never actually priced at $197 and it never will be priced at $197. That's, in my mind, somewhat unethical. If you are going to use a special offer format, you should actually, if you say, "In 5 days we're going to raise the price," in 5 days you really should raise the price. I know Brit you do that in your business. Brittany Lynch: Yeah absolutely I think that's important because otherwise you always lose credibility to your audience. When you lose credibility you lose trust. If you don't trust, it's going to be really difficult to make a sale in the future. Conor Lynch: Well it's stupid too because you most often see these sorts of special offer positioning with offers that are on the very front end. They'll be a $17 offer, a $27 offer, and the whole purpose of an offer like that is to get people onto your buyers list so that you can sell them other stuff down the road. If you lose all your trust by using sketchy positioning and you suddenly have no credibility after selling this first thing to them, then you've really shot yourself in the foot for anything else of value that you might want to sell to them. Brittany Lynch: Yeah, definitely. Conor Lynch: That takes you to the first call to action. Buy now. After the positioning, ask them for the buy. Then after that, I deal with objections. Every offer has different kinds of objections. When I sit down before I write a letter I always list them out. What are the reasons that people wouldn't buy this or would be hesitant of buying this? I list those out and in this section I confront them each individually. The 2 big ones, other than the one we talked about before which is, do I really believe I can do this, are time and money. On a higher ticket offer, obviously money is the bigger question. On a lower ticket offer, time tends to be a bigger question because sometimes people will see something that will be $7 and they can definitely afford it. That's not the question. The question is, "Am I going to have time in my busy day and in my busy life to implement this thing? Let's say it's going to take me 12 hours or 24 hours." Then they'll really spending a lot more of their time than their money with you by investing in this, theoretically. That becomes a major objection for them. That, especially for lower priced offers, is something you're going to want to spend a lot of time dealing with the time objection. You can do that in a few ways. One by minimizing the time expenditure that they're going to have to do or you can point out that they're already going to be spending this time, just more with less effect and with fewer results by doing something else. Anyway that you can make it seem like you're actually saving them time versus consuming more of it, you are going to do better with your offer. Again, yeah the other big objection is can this really work for me? You should be trying to deal with that throughout the whole course of the letter and I sort of pointed out how that works but I always like to touch on it again in the objection section and just directly call it out. Throughout the objections, I like to have more proof elements whether those are testimonials or results proofs or what have you. If you have a scarcity element to the letter, or to your offer, this is where I would introduce it. I like to again, introduce it in that raise the curtain section because that gives a strong reason for them to start reading. Here I introduce it to give them a stronger reason to buy. If you have a limited quantity of something available, for example if it's a personal coaching offer and obviously you only have a limited amount of time, then that's pretty legitimate. If there's some bonus that's only available for the first however many people, that's a pretty legitimate scarcity offer. You want to tell them how quickly it's selling out and basically get them thinking, "Well if I don't act now, then this is not going to be available." What you do want to do is, if you're selling say an e-book, say, "We're only selling 1,000 copies of this e-book for $7." Well, that's probably not true and most people can see through that these days. I really would not use fake scarcity but if there's a real scarcity element to your offer then definitely deploy that at this stage. Anything to add to that Brit? Brittany Lynch: I think that makes a lot of sense. Again, you really want to make sure that you're being genuine. I think it's really important to have some element of scarcity because it really does increase your conversions but I think you've got to make sure it's genuine. It could even just be changing of the bonus, maybe the first 100 buyers get this one specific bonus and after that's gone you remove the bonus. Usually taking things away from the offer is the easiest natural scarcity to do. Conor Lynch: Yeah, yeah doing something like that is pretty legitimate. That's just work you have to do in the offer level before you sit down to write the letter to make sure you have something that is scarce that you can highlight. Brittany Lynch: Yeah and actually to your point Conor in terms of writing of the letter, going through the offer, I really suggest go through and write down these 18 points and create a checklist or your own template out of what Conor's going over and you can, before you start to write the letter, fill in the sections and then just plug it into your sales letter. Conor Lynch: That's the easiest way to do it. Actually, I typically have a separate sub-headline for each broad section of the letter. I do that for 2 reasons. One, because I will not ever sit down and write from start to finish. I will usually write particular sections first. There's not necessarily any rhyme or reason to the flow of how it comes out, so I may write the guarantee first or I may write the, I usually write the headline section first actually. After the headline I may write the future bullets. Then I might write the fatal error section. Then I might write the raising the curtain. You can really write it in any order and if you know, for example if you have 7 of these sections already in your head exactly what you would write, I would just write those first. Get them down on paper. It doesn't matter if they're section 1-7 or if they're section 1, 5, 8, in completely random order. Just because the most important thing is to get them down on the page. This particular way of doing it allows you to not necessarily focus on writing a whole letter, but writing 18 discreet sections. The next major bit is if there's an urgency factor. If there's some time limitation on the offer. If it's ending soon. These are another reason to get people to take action right now and buy. This is usually most effective with an upcoming price increase, provided it's a real price increase, or with an event that has a specific date. If you're selling a live event, webinar event, something like that, then urgency is very, very effective. If you have a real price increase coming up, but again you don't want to say, "This price is going up 300%," and then never actually increase that price because if you don't, as we said before, you're sacrificing credibility. The last major section of this part is called risk reversal. This is basically your guarantee. With this you want to tell them, there's no risk in you taking action today because if you don't achieve the results that we're promising, if you don't go through this and get value out of it, all you have to do is, for example send an email with the subject line refund and we'll process you right away with no questions asked. Guarantees are very common these days so what you want to focus on is making them really feel like they're not going to face any hassles around getting the refund because people are always afraid of having to deal with an unscrupulous seller who makes them wait 2 weeks to process the refund or gives a lot of push back or those sorts of things. Obviously it's okay to ask someone what the problem was with your offer that caused them to do the refund, so that you can improve it for next time or so you can just learn more about your customers. In general, you don't want to get a reputation for tough to get refunds from. Brittany Lynch: That's actually a really important thing is if you offer a refund policy, issue the refund promptly. Conor Lynch: Yeah, yeah, so that's pretty important. The other thing I like to do and this is something that's counter intuitive is you would think that a shorter refund period would have less refunds than a longer period but actually the opposite is true. What I've found, and what I think most people have found is the longer refund periods, excuse me, actually have fewer refunds. The reason that is is when you look at when refunds happen, they either happen immediately after purchase, because people buy something they're like, "You know what? I looked into it. It's not actually what I thought it was going to be," or, "I made a mistake," and they get a refund pretty much right away, within the first 3 or 4 days or towards the end of the refund period they will get a refund just because they know that the end of the refund period is coming and it's their last chance to take action. It's basically an urgency factor working against you instead of for you. The longer the refund period is, the more likely they are to completely forget about the refund period and never take action. If you offer a 90 day guarantee or a 60 day guarantee versus a 30 day guarantee, it does 2 things. One, it will actually reduce your refunds. Two, it will make the refund, or the guarantee offer appear more generous which will be better for your conversion. Then you ask for the purchase again and then there's one last section, what I call the fork in the road. In this section you take them back to the trap. You remind them of all the terrible things they're experiencing because they're stuck in the trap. But then you say, "You don't have to be stuck in that trap." You take them back to the promised land. "You could have this wonderful life of being skinny or being good with women or having no financial worries," or whatever it happens to be. Then you put the decision in their hands. You say, "At this point, all you need to do is take this 1 tiny step. If you do, you're going to be on the road to the promised land. If you don't, you're going to be stuck on the path you're on and you know the consequences of that so it's your call." Then you ask for the buy the last time and that is basically that. Brittany Lynch: Yeah, that's an awesome overview of really everything that goes into a great sales page. Again, I would definitely suggest trying to put that into some sort of template for yourself or a checklist or something. I know Con's going to show an example of a sales letter where he put most of this into action. Again to reiterate, you don't have to use all 18 steps. If you can, that's great, but sometimes you can't. Conor's going to speak to that again on this letter. Yeah go ahead Con. Conor Lynch: Cool. Yeah again, you don't always end up using all of the different steps. This one, the headline formula does basically use this model, the exact model I use. I start with the pre-head, which is, agitating a problem, are you hitting a wall with your Kindle business? I talk about an odd twist of fate that revealed the secret to publishing multiple Kindle best sellers in under 8 hours. That speaks to the benefit, multiple Kindle best sellers under 8 hours. It creates a certain amount of curiosity around the business, twist of fate, how did he publish Kindle best sellers in under 8 hours? That's a pretty interesting thing. It grabs people's attention and takes them into the letter. Then the sub-headline, we build around that mystery and speak to another benefit. How did one recovering Kindle outsourcer pay off his truck in 2 months with just 2 books? Tim actually did do that. We have this wonderful proof element which was his last, I think it was a 6 or $7,000 payment on his truck that was right at the top of the letter. Here, in the raising the curtain section we've got this promise here, over the next 5 minutes we're going to short circuit your Kindle failures so by the time you're done reading, and then we talk about all the promises, you'll be on your way to publishing your first best seller. I really escalate the promise by saying yes, I said best seller, not an average one, not a lame one, but something that actually gets to the top of the charts in your particular niche. Then I talk about the trap that people are in. You're not killing a Kindle, you're one of the 50% never published, or you published a book and you have zero sales, this agitates the problem. The one section that I don't have here, because I kind of dug right into the fatal error, is I didn't put in a section where I take them from the trap to the promised land. If I were to go back and rewrite this letter, I would probably do that but in this case, I didn't. We skip that section and go straight into the big mistake. The big mistake was for a long time he'd just done outsourcing books. He achieved moderate results with them but ultimately he kept hitting a sales peak and he didn't ever actually have a huge breakthrough until he stopped doing that. Then I talk about the magic weapon, which was basically writing a book from scratch and stuff, using this creative checklist that allows you to write full length books really, really quickly. That was his magic weapon. Then we get to this slaying the dragon section, you won't believe what happened next. This is again, where I talk about all of the results. This is literally just a block of results. I finished the entire 40 page book in 4 hours and he had a proof element showing the book size. Showing his star rating on Amazon, showing he got really, really good reviews. We even showed some of the reviews themselves to show that even though it was only written in 8 hours, it still produced quality work. We showed proof of how many copies he sold, we showed proof of how much he earned. Then we showed that it wasn't a fluke, so we actually did it again. This is important because one of the things that people might have thought if he just wrote one best seller is maybe you can't repeat this. This showed that there was some repeatability to his whole formula. We speak to that here. Like I said, in this particular letter, he didn't have testimonials from anyone who had used it yet so the toy soldier section wasn't included. If he releases his product again, I know he's got testimonials from people who have used it and have had success, so we would include those. For now, we'll skip that and go straight to the humble pie section. This stuff I said, system doesn't require any super-human writing skills. It talks about how he never considered himself a strong writer. Every one of his books was outsourced. It basically just talks about how he was actually quite weak at writing but he used this system, still achieved results, and that's basically the exact humble pie formula that you want to be using. We introduce the product. We have a bunch of these feature bullets. Let me see if I can find a good one to read. Yeah so for example, the weird secret sauce cheat code method for taking the [inaudible 00:58:04] ideas and effortlessly transforming them into a 5 star book. This doesn't really reveal much about what the feature actually is, what exactly you'll be learning, but it creates a lot of curiosity around the secret sauce method. That's why it's an effective bullet. Any questions so far? Brittany Lynch: No, this is really helpful. I think the audience is going to find this really helpful, just seeing all the bullets here and seeing the 18 steps put into the sales letter. A good exercise that actually maybe give to you guys is a way to develop your copy skills would be to go look at some of the best selling click bait product, sales letters and go through it and try to identify the different 18 steps in these sales letters. Again, not all sales letters use all 18 steps but it is a really helpful exercise so you can see the different ways that copywriters use these different elements to create the best selling environment. That's a good little exercise to help you practice your copywriting skills. Again, the other thing I would say is try to create your own template. I know Con, you probably wrote this sales letter from a template yourself that you had created. Create your own template. Using templates is a really great way to get started in terms of not staring at a blank page. Create a swipe file. That's another really good piece of advice that I could give for copywriting is when you see a sales page that is compelling and has you wanting to buy, take the elements that you think were done the most effective whether it's the headline, create a headlining swipe file, or a bullet swipe file. This is going to help you when you're writing sales copy. You can do the same for email. Email's probably one of those things that most of you do. You have some sort of mailing list. You probably write email copy more often than sales copy so you can do the same thing. You can do a subject swipe file, or something along those lines. There's a lot of different ways you can improve your copy skills but I think that this was a really, really good start because these 18 steps, while Conor designed them for a sales letter for an information product, it's really just an overview how to sell period. Even if you're writing copy for a physical product on Amazon, maybe you're not going to go into as much detail, and it's not going to be as long of a copy, but you can definitely use the elements that were taught today and use it for t-shirt selling or physical products too. Would you agree Con? Conor Lynch: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that you can't really minimize the importance of that. Brittany Lynch: Yeah, absolutely. Cool, so yeah. I think that this has been really good and thanks for showing us Con. Conor Lynch: Yeah no worries. I love talking about copywriting, I love teaching copywriting it's what I spend most of my time doing. It really is a powerful skill and it's something that will give you a lot more confidence in every aspect of your marketing whether that's putting together a Facebook ad or putting together your first sales page or putting together a new sales page for an offer that's not converting as well as you thought it would. It just gives you so much perspective on how people think and how people buy and it'll make you 10 times the marketer that you are today, wherever you're at today I know that there's room for improvement. I invest quite a bit in mentorship, I know you do too Brittany. There's always room for improvement but I love teaching this stuff. Brittany Lynch: Yeah copywriting's definitely, I believe, the most important skill that you can learn because it's good for any business. It helps you position your offers better and think through your sales funnels better and just see everything, the big picture a little bit better. Again, I hope you enjoyed this interview and the content on this call. I found it really helpful just to see it all in action and Con I think you did a really great job. There's some really good stuff in there. With that said, again thank you so much for being here and guys I hope you have a great day.important skill that you can learn because it's good for any business. It helps you position your offers better and think through your sales funnels better and just see everything, the big picture a little bit better. Again, I hope you enjoyed this interview and the content on this call. I found it really helpful just to see it all in action and Con I think you did a really great job. There's some really good stuff in there. With that said, again thank you so much for being here and guys I hope you have a great day.important skill that you can learn because it's good for any business. It helps you position your offers better and think through your sales funnels better and just see everything, the big picture a little bit better. Again, I hope you enjoyed this interview and the content on this call. I found it really helpful just to see it all in action and Con I think you did a really great job. There's some really good stuff in there. With that said, again thank you so much for being here and guys I hope you have a great day.