Terry Dean – an internet marketing “grandfather” – is a 17-year internet marketing veteran.
In this episode, he goes to town on how you can find hidden profit centers in your business, using his 5-step system.
He calls it the “Golden Glove” system. Perhaps because you’ll be buying some golden gloves once you implement everything you learn?
Terry takes broken businesses apart and makes them work again, and that’s what we talk about in this episode.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
Terry’s ‘Golden Glove’ System (a 5-step process that shows you how to find the hidden profits in your business)
Are you merely solving problems or are you solving a desperate problem?
Dan Kennedy’s simple as sticks copywriting formula (Hate writing? This formula will make your life one million times easier.)
Promises. Does your promise stop people in their tracks? If not, you’ve got some work to do.
An overwhelming reason for having this overwhelming element in your marketing (hint: it leads to overwhelming profits)
The #1 thing you can change to boost conversions (it’s not your headline)
Mentioned:
My Marketing Coach (Terry’s main website)
Limitless Mindset (thanks for the review Jonathan!)
Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO
Raw transcript:
Terry: Thing that scarcity it really became important so now I just skip the first few days and most of the times just do a short 48 hour maybe 72 hour special.
John: Hey podcast listener, you’re about to discover insider tips, tricks and secrets to making more sales and converting more prospects into customers with Email Marketing. For more information about the Email Marketing Podcast or the Autoresponder Guy go to dropdeadcopy.com/podcast.
Hey everybody, its John McIntyre here the Autoresponder Guy and it’s time for episode 10 of the Email Marketing Podcast where we talk about the top tips, tricks and secrets to making more sales and growing your revenue with Email Marketing.
Today you’ll be talking to Terry Dean a 17 year internet marketing veteran. Some people call him an internet marketing grandfather. Now Terry is going to talk about his golden glove, his framework for finding hidden profit centers in your business. This episode is less about email marketing tactics and a lot more about understanding marketing strategy. It’s good stuff, it’s very useful, very nitty gritty and after this episode you should have a list of things you can do right away. Now just quickly you might be able to hear a bit of traffic, cars, planes in the background. I’m Thailand and sometimes it’s hard to find a quiet place to record these things so I’m outside a café and in a bit of a busy road. Now to get the show notes for this episode of the Email Marketing podcast go to dropdeadcopy.com/ep10.
Now we have another review. It’s a long one and it’s from Jonathan Roseland from the US who has a website called limitlessmindset. Here it is, email marketing like a boss. If you are like me you dear podcast listener have become wary of business podcasts and internet marketing gurus then this is one podcast that’s worth your time. If you are like me are sick of business podcasts that simply remix tactics you’ve hearing for five years, common sense and simple platitudes then download an episode or two of a 25 minute dose of long-tail information.
In the most recent episode John interviewed a real world class douchebag and email marketing impresario who shared a great tactic of sending people a warning email and eventually removing them from your list if they aren’t opening your emails. I’d like to implement this for my buyer hacking website Limitless Mindset which is linked in the show notes but how do I set this up in AWeber? Thanks and keep up the good work John. Jonathan Roseland, Medellin, Colombia.
Thank you for the review Jon and really appreciate this kind of thing. I love reading them. If you want to leave a review go to dropdeadcopy.com/podcast you can follow the links. Now about that question how would you send people a warning email on AWeber Jonathan I’m not sure if you can even do that on AWeber, I’ve thought about it, I do use AWeber for most of my stuff and I just don’t think AWeber is advanced like that.
Now the real world class douchebag guy I’m assuming you’re meaning Jon McCulloch he uses Office Autopilot which is two to three hundred bucks a month which would probably work for you or you can deal with any of the more advanced programs but as far as I understand you cannot do it with AWeber. However you could manually do it and go in and send people … go in once a month and send an email … you could create a segment of your subscribers who haven’t opened an email say in 30 days and you could send them all an email saying I’m going to unsubscribe you unless you reply to this email or something like that but it would be manual and it would be a pain in the ass.
Anyway, now we’ve got some great guests coming up in the next month or two. One is a special forces soldier turned marketing consultant and he tells a story from Iraq about how he used storytelling to solve battlefield problems. That would be a really cool episode and another upcoming guest is an ecommerce expert and he’s going to lay out an action plan for ecommerce owners who want to use email marketing in their business. He’s experienced a good email marketing campaign, he can boost revenue by 10 to 15 percent so look out for those episodes. Now let’s head over to Terry Dean and his golden glove.
It’s John McIntyre here the Autoresponder guy, I’m here with Terry Dean an internet marketing veteran. How are you doing today Terry?
Terry: I’m doing excellent.
John: Good to hear, good to hear. Sounds like you’re really excited which we’ve just kind of just talked about but you’re excited about what you’re doing. Let’s start off by talking about like who are you and what do you do?
Terry: Well I’m an internet marketing coach I’ve now been online for 17 years. I’ve even been called one of the internet marketing grandfathers of online marketing. David Perdue called me that.
John: Wow, how does that make you feel?
Terry: It makes me feel old because I turned 40 this month also.
John: Happy birthday.
Terry: I don’t feel like a grandfather. What I end up doing now is back in 2006 I started coaching a lot of entrepreneurs one on one with their businesses and that really excites me about the business because one of my real drivers is a curiosity of getting in and basically what I get to do for a living is the same thing I did as a child which is I get to go into business, take them apart and put them back together again but as a child I wasn’t really good at putting them back together but that’s what I get to do every day and that does excite me about the business.
John: Right, and you sound totally excited just in the way you speak you’re like dripping in enthusiasm.
Terry: Well again I love what I do and that’s the beauty of the internet lifestyle is you get to do something that you love.
John: Right absolutely. Okay, I know you do websites, you do email marketing so the idea here is that we talk to experts like yourself about what specifically you do in your own business to build it related to email, related to copywriting that kind of thing. I know you mentioned you want to talk about the golden glove that you used to review websites and emails. Let’s go direct, give us an introduction, what is the golden glove?
Terry: Well the golden glove basically came about because over the 17 years I’ve been online I’ve been to a lot of internet marketing conferences, I’ve done a lot of webinars and at these it was very early on they started to ask me to do what we called hot seats. Okay, a hot seat was they take somebody from the audience put them up on the stage, we’d ask them about their website, we ask them about their business and we’d find … quickly find ways to improve their business and their results.
If you include the hot seats, the webinars that I’ve done these on because I’ve also been a part of memberships sites where we’ve basically ran webinars, multiple webinars per month where we were reviewing the members websites that had improved in their results and also the one on one clients I’ve easily done thousands of website reviews, reviewing their websites, reviewing their emails, reviewing their sales videos and all types of online persuasion.
I basically created the golden glove as a five step system to quickly spot any type of problem that’s in their marketing and find out why their website isn’t converting. I almost call these five different … considered them like conversion cracks on the websites that are leaking out their profits. The other reason I needed to have a nice system like this is during a lot of the hot seats what I like to do is not just be the expert up there saying you need to do this, do this and this I wanted to have a quick system that I could teach the attendees and them take my place and basically I wanted to replace myself there and by giving them these five steps, the golden glove, the five fingers of the hand to fix their website they were able to do most of the reviews and I could sit back and facilitate the discussion at that point.
John: Okay, well let’s get right into it. What’s the first step or point or whatever you call it.
Terry: The first step on the golden glove is the desperate problem, okay? That means that you need to be focusing on a desperate problem and I call it a desperate problem because it’s almost like the need to get away from a hungry bear. You’re travelling in the woods and there’s a hungry bear or a bear protecting its young you’ve got to get out of there. It’s a desperate problem and sometimes people don’t understand it when I call it a desperate problem, they’re like well I … they might say I sell to people who want to learn the guitar, to play the guitar better, that’s not a desperate problem. It is if you’re one of the guitar players, it is if you have to play coming up and you’re scared that you’re going to make a fool of yourself.
John: Right.
Terry: It is a desperate for them, so it might not be a desperate problem for you anymore … when I say a desperate problem this means that it’s a problem that they’re thinking about, something they’re focused on that has their focus. There’s even an old copy writing model, I know Dan Kennedy teaches a copy writing model of problem, agitate, solve. Just with that little three step copywriting model that means problem is the first one, we’re going to cover what the problem is, we’re going to agitate the problem more and then we’re going to solve the problem more. Out of his three steps two of them are based on the problem.
Any type of copy … I always look are you covering the problem, is it a desperate problem that people are really feeling and do you know your audience that that’s a problem and do you talk about that problem there. For example if I tell a story in my email I’m going to talk about the problem that I ran into. I mean I’m sure you’ve written a lot of email stories in your experience and how many times does the problem come up in the story?
John: All the time.
Terry: All the time.
John: Every time.
Terry: Pretty much is every time. If you’re missing the problem you’re missing one of the key elements and that’s true on your website and video sales copy and in emails and I’m surprised how often people miss the problem. They just start making promises and they don’t solve, there’s nothing there to solve.
John: All right, so is there anything a lot of people do in a market where there’s a desperate problem but they’re just not articulating it enough in their copy. How do they solve this problem, their desperate problem where they’re not mailing with the desperate problem?
Terry: What I do in most cases is I go back to the story. A lot of things I do will go back to the story that we have going on in the business so I’ll start looking okay how did you feel before you solved the problem yourself? How do your customers feel? A lot of times if you can’t find it yourself … here’s a really good example for how I found it. In my coaching, since I do one on one coaching I don’t think I was articulating the desperate problem as well as I should have in the beginning so what I did is after some … I had some clients, as I looked through the testimonials they sent me and this phrase jumped out at me and became part of my headline. Okay, one of my clients had said in her testimonial I’ll never feel alone again online.
I immediately grabbed that as one of the problems the fact that we feel alone online. When you’re running an online business it’s lonely. I didn’t realize that until I saw that in her testimonial so that became part of my headline and it works extremely well as part of my headline there and that’s because she articulated part of the desperate problem for me. If you go back in your story and you can’t find it in your own story then look at some of the testimonials you’ve had so far and look if any of them say the problem that you solve.
John: Yeah, I think there’s a really good point there that whatever the problem happens to be that they need to be saying it in their customers’ or their prospects’ words not any other way. It has to be in the words that when the prospect reads that when they subscribe they go wow, this guy gets me, that’s just want I was thinking.
Terry: Exactly and I do … there’s a lot of strategy and we don’t have time here in a quickie version but I go through and do a lot of research online and find the problems also in the customers own words. Things like Amazon reviews, TweetGrid where you can look at what people are saying on Twitter and forums that you could look through to find people talking about the problem. You can find their exact words to use in your copy to cover the desperate problem that way.
John: Absolutely, oh year. Okay, now that we’ve found our desperate problem what’s the forefinger, finger number two?
Terry: Finger number two is to have a unique promise. Okay? A lot of people online we’ll say okay we come up with a big benefit or we come up with a big promise but it needs to be a promise that’s unique in front of a whole bunch of competition. I’ve worked with a lot of sites for example that advertise on AdWords. Well AdWords I would consider probably the most competitive environment in the entire world because if you’re advertising on AdWords you know that you’re not just getting a visitor that’s alone with you, all right?
John: Yeah.
Terry: Basically it’s like being in a room and there’s 10 different sales people side by side and each of you gets to do your presentation because nobody just visits your website. They visit your website, they visit rank number two in AdWords, they visit rank number three, they’re visiting these sites. You’re visiting everybody else so how does your promise stand out from everyone else in the market that’s surrounding you? Here’s what I always like to say, this is the test we put out, does your promise make people stop in their tracks and say how in the world will they do that? That’s what they’ve got to say with your unique promise, how in the world are they going to do that? It can’t just be the same thing that they’ve heard a lot of times.
Since I’m in the internet marketing field that’s one of the big mistakes in our field what most people do in their promise is they just make bigger and bigger promises of this huge amount of money that you’re going to make. I’m not comfortable with that at all plus the fact that it’s not legal to do that in the US. What I have to do is I come up with unique promises, unique variations to talk about in what we’re doing. How do you make a different range … like for example I have a product on … creating a high ticket product that talks about how you can create a high ticket product within the next 48 hours, how to create your own high ticket offer in the next 48 hours.
It doesn’t sound like a big promise or anything like that but it is a unique promise because I’m telling you that you’re not just going to create a $10 product, you’re going to create a five hundred, a thousand dollar product in 48 hours or less. That is a unique promise that other people aren’t talking about now probably somebody is going to copy that and I have to change it but it’s a unique promise that you focus on and does your website have one of those and now we’re going to say does it have it above the fold? Both the start of a problem and a promise needs to be above the fold on a website.
John: Okay.
Terry: Before anybody even has to scroll.
John: Okay, so this applies as well, so websites, emails, anytime you’re writing any sort of copy you have to have this unique promise right?
Terry: You do, it comes in everything that you’re writing and basically you consider these … the five persuasion points. Anytime you’re trying to do any type of persuasion because I found that I use these same points even if I’m dealing with people one on one. If you’re trying to convince your spouse to do what you want you still end up using these five points.
John: Right, yeah totally. Yeah persuasion it kind of never changes it’s always the same thing.
Terry: It is and that’s why I’m glad I spent a lot of time here when I first started … when I first started online I studied a lot of Jay Abraham material and a lot of Gary Hobart materials. I got my focus in on persuasion like the very first coach I hired was John Carlton.
John: Wow.
Terry: You could see I focused on persuasion.
John: Yeah, okay. Moving on I’ve got the things in here, number three looks very similar to number two so let’s go over there. What’s number three?
Terry: Number three is overwhelming proof, okay? Now we’re not going to have just enough proof we’re going to have overwhelming proof. I almost like to think about it as a lawyer going into a court case, would the lawyer going into the court case say we’ll we have enough proof now we’re going to stop doing our research? Not if they’re a very good one. They want to have overwhelming proof for what they’re going to provide, they want to have all the testimonials, they want all the eyewitness accounts, they want a video footage, they want everything they possibly can when they come into their court case, overwhelming proof.
Because up to this point we talked about a desperate problem, it’s hurting. We’ve got a unique promise that stands out from the competition and people are going to say how in the world are you going to do that now you need to have overwhelming proof that proves that you can do the unique promise. When I review websites this is the one they fail most often on.
John: Okay.
Terry: With websites specifically. With emails you insert a few little elements of proof so I haven’t seen as big of a problem here but with overwhelming proof … we even call it … I came up with a term, we call it proof hiding disease that most people have on their websites. What that means is they take their best proof and they hide it on another page somewhere. Okay for example like a really bad page they opt to do it on is they put it on the about page instead of on the sales page.
What kind of proof I’m talking about here? Well obviously things like testimonials but other things also for example they hide on their about page the fact that they’ve been doing this for 17 years, they hide on the about page their own story, their background story which is a form of proof of my own story telling what happened with this. For example with me anytime I don’t tell about delivering pizzas my profits drop, the fact that I delivered pizzas for a living before I came online that’s part of my back story that’s also proof that I know what I’m doing and if I can do this other people can do it because I came at the bottom, that’s where I came in from. What other proof do you have? For proof think about testimonials, case studies, scientific studies …
John: How do you do this?
Terry: How do I do proof?
John: Yeah how do you do proof let’s say that create a high ticket product in 48 hours, how do you give overwhelming proof in that case?
Terry: In that case well first of all we’re hitting the testimonials first because that’s the most important thing then also telling the story and how … in that case I’m actually telling how I’m doing it. I’m telling not just here’s the promise but after you start reading into the copy I tell you how I accomplish that. Here’s how we do this, here’s how you’re going to create this that quickly. In other words I actually give the method that you’re going to create it.
John: Okay.
Terry: Which is one of the ways that you can do for prep is you can tell them how you do it, how this works. If you were selling a software program you could show a demonstration of how it works. An example even on a membership site is most … membership sites that I’ve consulted with will often take a video inside the membership site showing them a tour somewhere in our sales video or on our sales page we’ll actually show them inside the website and all the stuff they’re going to get immediately when they join inside the membership side because that’s a demonstration of what they’re seeing inside the site. Here’s what you’re getting immediately. If you have a software program you show how quickly it works for you, what it does for you.
Anything that you can do to prove your point is a major element. Another example if you have degrees or we call it name spaghetti, all the degrees that you have or awards in your field you bring that to the top. If you’ve been featured on media you bring that in. For example this is a totally separate subject but I did a press release out and I actually did it as a survey to find out what the audience thought about something, sent out a press release about the subject so I could get featured in a lot of media but now I’ve been featured in all the media guess what I do with all that? That becomes proof points to take all the media logos that I showed up on, on my website.
That’s a proof that … just as I’m talking to you I remind myself there’s a couple of sites I haven’t put them on yet so I need to … having proof hiding disease on those sites and bring proof up on those. Always think what’s my overwhelming proof and with websites and email it might just be something quickie Windsor, it might just be your story, it might be one testimonial you tossed in, it might be one scientific study review, it might just be one piece but that proof point is always there, there’s always something in proof. On a website we do overwhelming proof of all the proof that we can bring in on it.
For example I have a friend who has 11,000 testimonials in his business. That’s amazing. He’ll run testimonials down the side of his page plus having it all the way down the side of the page we don’t have 11,000 testimonials in one page, he then has links over that you can see to thousands of testimonials on another page but we don’t just hide all the pages on the system they are everywhere also. All over his sites plus the separate sites for the testimonials, that is overwhelming proof for the site.
John: Right, so you literally cannot miss it.
Terry: You can’t miss it and that’s what you have to say with your website too is you cannot miss the proof that you’re providing. Nobody believes you or your unique promise that you’re offering.
John: You’re reminded me there of … I worked for a company back in Sydney Australia at one stage and they took all their testimonials because they used to get a lot of them about customer service and the products and things like that and they turned it into a hard cover book and they would give it out to customers when they came in to see the office. It was a best seller kind of star, like a hard cover, 300 pages thick just for testimonials and that was such a great idea as far as his proof goes.
Terry: It is I’ve seen multiple small businesses that will have like little proof books in there … just where everybody else has all the magazines and everything else they have a book full of all the testimonials from their clients. I’ve seen a dentist do that and a lawyer do that.
John: Wow. It’s really cool, okay. What’s next, what’s the ring finger of the golden glove?
Terry: That’s going to be your irresistible offer. As you know as a copy writer the biggest change we can make to a website isn’t the headline it’s the offer. That’s the biggest … the biggest result that you’ll have is changing the offer. Sometimes it’s just a small change in price but I mean just that tiniest little change in price point. For example I tested … I had a test because everybody sells these $7 products, I tested $7, 9.95 and $10 a price point $10 wiped the floor with the other two.
John: Wow.
Terry: It just destroyed them. Okay? We’re talking like it beat … this is what is real weird $10 beat 9.95 in that case in that test by double in sales and we’re talking … I used a very low priced product so it was very easy to get a good number of stats in because of the number of sales I could generate.
John: Right, wow.
Terry: When you sell a $10 product you could get a whole lot more stats quicker than when you’re selling a $1000 product.
John: Exactly.
Terry: Okay, because you can get so many sales quickly. We’re talking about the conversion rate I think I was pulling a 26 percent conversation rate on that at the time. It was to my own list though, that wasn’t cold traffic.
John: Okay so you sold that via email?
Terry: Yes and you’re talking about just that little difference in price point changed the results but your irresistible offer what you really want to think about here is something I heard from Ken McCarthy years ago and that was assume that every product you’re selling needs to have a $25,000 value, just assume that it needs to have a $25,000 value. How are you going to build up the value of your product to be worth $25,000 and then sell it at discount? It doesn’t mean that you actually say on every website this has a value of $25,000 it means that in your own mentality, in your own thinking you’re thinking okay how can I make this a $25,000 product?
How can I add in done for you items that make it worth that value? What can I do to my product to make it as awesome as possible? Can I add bonuses that do this? How can I make this an irresistible that they’re just crazy if they don’t take? At times it might be as simple as taking a trial of your product such as on a membership site you’ve seen a lot of websites do $1 to give it a try for the first 30 days or $1 to give it a try for the next 10 days or like the first time I ever sold one of my products on a shipping only offer which I have clients do all the time which I did it for $397 product, it was a course and I said you just pay $15 for shipping today you’ll pay the $397 in 30 days or three payments of later on. We tripled our sales okay.
We had 30 percent of the kits come back, the nice thing is I didn’t really consider that even a refund on our merchant account because they came before they got charged so your merchant account it won’t even say you have a 30 percent refund rate they wouldn’t see the charges. Thirty percent came back but we had three times the sales so the profits were much higher doing a trial version like that and I have clients do that regularly on their systems. I had a client just do that like a month or so ago and he was selling a thousand dollar course and he told me he just sent out one email during the trial and he sold like 21 kits.
John: Wow.
Terry: He made 21,000 from that and the month before … the entire month before he had sold like 10. We’re talking a big jump just in that one day of sales that he was doing this, I think he had like a 48 hour special for that. You can see just the special irresistible offer and test for offers, in some cases it might be break it up into specific payments, works extremely well. Test the offer and if your package isn’t working I’ll look at the different points here, I’ll look at the first three, okay people are doing these right, if they’re doing the first three right and they’re not getting conversion they want then it’s going to be the offer we need to change.
John: Yeah.
Terry: Nice and simple. You see how these points they work with each other and if somebody is not … if their website isn’t converting or their email isn’t converting it’s one of these points, it’s always one of these points.
John: That’s really good information. Garry Halbert talks about that a lot how a good offer will succeed in spite of a bad copywriter or a bad copy and vice versa. You have the world’s best copy but without a good offer that matches the market you could fail completely.
Terry: You could and that’s how important how the offer is in the market. Let’s cover … the fifth point is immediate action or we can call it a reason to act now. Why should they take action now on this offer, what will they lose if they don’t take action now? This works best if there’s some type of scarcity attached. It could be a limited time or a limited number that’s available, one or the other or it could be both. I’ve used both often where we have extra bonus that only first 20 people get and you also have only 48 hours to make the response to get the deal at all. I use both at times or you can use one or the other. Now it works best if you could have the scarcity.
Here’s an interesting thing on email this wasn’t true years ago but it’s been so true the last two years. I used to run these week long specials and they worked really well all week, now I have what I call the heart attack curve if I ran a weeklong special and that is very few sales for the first four days and all the sales come in the last day. People are really motivated by scarcity today to such a point that most of the times I only do like 48 hour specials now when I run a special by email because all the sales are coming in the last 48 hours anyway. I call it a heart attack curve but I did a special like this 5 days long and the first two days I had three sales, okay?
John: Okay.
Terry: We come down to day four we’re at maybe 12 sales, the last day of the special we hit like a hundred and something sales. That’s the heart attack curve because you’re like this offer failed miserably until the last day and that’s when all the sales come in.
John: It’s kind of like you freak out for the first few days, you go something is wrong, what’s going on, it’s not working and then bang.
Terry: Bang, that scarcity when it really became important. Now I just skip the first few days and most of the time just do a short 48 hour maybe 72 hour special. It could be an extra bonus you’re offering, it could be a discount price that you’re offering during this but it’s … I always do a … I don’t do like these big product launches, create a whole bunch of affiliates and everything like that it doesn’t really fit the business model I have. When I release a new product to my list I do it as a product launch to my own list just because I’ll run a discount special during the first period even if I’m selling the product later which I almost always do. I don’t just do products that one off that I sell and then they’re goal because I like to … my goal in business is to have money continually coming in not just big surges.
I’ll usually run some type of discount special at the very beginning saying this price will not be available again on this product when I first launch. Basically it’s a founder’s only price, it’s the immediate action price and we get insane sales during that first period. You do your little lead up with emails then people know about it coming up and then you launch it.
Now let’s take a product where you don’t have that scarcity where it’s … let’s say it’s selling on your website all the time. If you’re an affiliate promoting somebody else’s product you can still use scarcity by throwing in your own bonus for a limited time. Anybody who buys this affiliate product from me within the next 48 hours also gets this special bonus report I created or this special bonus software that I had created for it. Just send me over the receipt or whatever other methods you use online, you could automate it in some cases and you’ll get this special bonus. That’s how you do it as an affiliate also.
Let’s say that you’re now selling something that this is the regular price all the time on the website and it’s … we’ll say it’s a digital product also so you’re not going to run out. Everybody knows you’re not running out of eBooks this week, okay? I saw … even ClickBank has gotten tighter on this in making sure that there’s a scarcity, it has to be a real scarcity, yeah. They’ve gotten tight on it which is a good thing also. What you do in this case so you don’t have a real scarcity, you’re not going to get the same strength of response but what you do in this position is you go back and talk about what they’re going to lose out on if they don’t take action now on this. How is the problem going to get worse in their lives?
You take them right back to that problem, agitating the problem here’s how the problem is going to get worse if you don’t take action today. Here’s how you’re going to miss out on these benefits, here’s how much it’s going to cost you not to take action today. I use that one a lot in the business field because if you don’t get my information and you’re running an online business let’s just say that I’m selling information on we’ll say on pay per view, how to advertise on pay per view and you don’t get my information you’re going to easily waste 10 times the money testing the stuff out for yourself and I give them the product. That’s how you do it in these cases.
John: Okay fantastic, all right so we’ve got five things right there so desperate problem, a unique promise, overwhelming proof, irresistible offer and immediate action.
Terry: Immediate action and if your website or your emails aren’t converting you’re missing one of these points, every single time you’re missing one of them. If you take these five points as a copy writer and you take them and start using them like if a client sends you something to review just run it through this … run it through in your mind these five points first you’ll spot their problems really quickly. That’s the benefit of this because I can teach these to beginners online and they were very quickly spotting peoples’ problems on the websites.
John: Okay.
Terry: It’s a little tougher in the emails because sometimes the sections are a little shorter but on a website it’s very easy to spot these problems even for a beginner. You look for these five problems and what you do is … if it’s your own website it’s a little tougher if it’s your own website or your own email but you take a step back for a couple of days and then come back and review it and say I’m I covering the desperate problem here? Remember desperate problem, unique promise need to be above the fold on a website, they need to be quick. Overwhelming proof needs to be backed up as soon as someone says … basically proof needs to come in pretty quick as soon as someone is saying you know what I don’t know if I believe that which is pretty quick if you didn’t get a unique promise.
John: Yeah.
Terry: Proof comes up early. I remember when I first learned copy from some of the experts the proof sections were much later in the copy. You actually had the models and we followed and proof ended up coming in maybe the fourth or fifth page in a long copy sales letter well you’re dead if you wait that long today to start providing proof. It has to come in much earlier, the people are already saying I don’t know if I believe you. We’re talking a long copy website I’d be saying that the proof needs to be in by the first … into the first page or in the beginning of the second page if you actually printed it out. That’s how quick it’s coming in now and if I can I start throwing in proof in immediately such as … even as a simple as throwing a photo of the author or somebody involved in the project and then a quick statement about who they are and why we should listen to them at the very top of the page, that gets it above the fold.
Same thing in an email it might just be throw in a few insert specifics. This is what we miss, sometimes proof is a lot easier than people think just throw in specifics about your story, exactly when it happened, exact numbers. The old statement we always use you didn’t lose 50 pounds you lost 49 and a half, it’s very specific. Exactly specifically what happened dropping those into your stories in the emails or a form of proof. Nothing should get past your review of the email if it’s not specific.
John: Right, yeah that’s absolutely true. If it’s specific they’re more likely to believe it.
Terry: Exactly that’s part … it’s part of the proof element that you’re specific, you know exactly when this happened, you know the exact numbers it happened with and it comes back to those. These are the five points that … always review everything you do by these five points and you’re going to see much better success. Here’s the funny thing, here’s how you can even use it … I’m throwing in a lot here for the people listening to this.
Take this point … when I go into a new market and I’m examining the competitors I’m seeing what they’re doing I judge the websites of these competitors by these five points too seeing what they’re doing and I will actually sit down with a spreadsheet take well the top five competitors, it might be a little bit more than that, it might be a little bit less than that depending on the market but I’ll take five competitors, examine them all by these five points and have it on my spreadsheet what they did for each main point so I could see what they’re doing and that’s how you analyze competition also.
John: That’s a great idea you get so many ideas that way.
Terry: Again because it’s so quick to judge their site you can judge exactly what they’re doing, seeing what problems they’re focused on, they might have things that you didn’t think of, they might have problems you didn’t think of but now I have a list of all their promises there so I know how to make my promise unique. It again is a strong way to use these five points in everything you do online that’s involved with persuasion.
John: Okay, fantastic. Thanks for sharing all of this Terry, this has been great. Let’s finish up man. How about you tell us a little bit about … where can people find you, what products do you have, give yourself a pluck.
Terry: Well hop on over to mymarketingcoach.com which is my free blog and as soon as you go there register to pick up a free copy of my newsletter. I have a monthly mentor club which is a 29.95 per month newsletter it comes with a print newsletter each month usually 15 to 19 pages that give you step by step system online that’s working today with your advertising, with your marketing to improve your conversation.
In addition the clients in that program also get … each month we have a webinar reviewing one of our clients’ sites using the golden glove system plus some other systems I do to help analyze their market and their marketing. Basically you get to see it in action, see all different types of niches being improved. We have a real problem in internet marketing and that is everyone seems to only talk about internet marketing sites, they don’t talk about sites outside of internet marketing.
John: Yeah.
Terry: Where the majority … money is everywhere else, 99 percent of the money online is in something else other than internet marketing and you get to see those taking place each month on the reviews. Plus we have a discussion board that I often participate in to help with any questions that you might have with marketing. What I want you to do right now is I want you to go to mymarketingcoach.com where I give you a free copy of my newsletter from that club and this free newsletter will teach you the seven ways to double or triple your email profits today using stories.
John: Okay.
Terry: It’ll give you basically seven different ways to create the stories and to create your emails out of it. You get that for free just for going over to mymarketingcoach and signing it up and asking for more information about it.
John: Awesome, cool I’ll have the link over there to mymarketingcoach.com on the show notes on my website there so you can go there you can find where it is. Thank you for coming on the show Terry.
Terry: Thank you.
John: Hey everybody, thanks for listening. If you want to discover more insider tips, tricks and secrets about driving sales with email marketing sign up for daily email tips from the Autoresponder Guy. Go to dropdeadcopy.com/podcast sign up, confirm your email address and I’ll send you daily emails on how to improve your email marketing and make more sales via email. You’ll find out why open rates don’t matter and the seven letter word that underlies all effective marketing and much more.