This is an important question for those of you who write words for a living.
It doesn’t matter where the words end up, in a blog post, sales letter, video or audio.
The words still need to encourage the reader or listener to take some action.
But first, they need to produce some emotion in the third party, or there will be no action.
When it comes to the decision to take action, what comes first, the emotion or the logic?
Most of us would like to believe that we take action because we made a logical decision.
Those at the top of the tree with respect to writing successful sales letters would disagree 100%.
They will tell you that stimulating emotion first makes the difference.
Scientists will tell you that humans make decisions based on emotions then justify the decision with logic, not the other way round.
That must be difficult to do with some products.
I have trouble getting emotional about air freshener.
Sometimes the link between the ads on the television and the product on offer seems extremely flimsy.
However, I know of at least one marketer who uses creating emotional responses in his emails to sell his products and 99% of the time, the email does not relate to the product on offer.
Despite that, he makes a good full-time living from his emails.
Not only that, but he is so open about what he does that he’ll tell you exactly what he does and how he does it.
To get a masterclass on stimulating an emotional response in your readers and converting that to income, go here: https://go.wm-tips.com/asal.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Did you just scroll here to see what was on offer rather than read the email above?
I could never join the ranks of vegans or vegetarians because I enjoy a good steak, roast lamb or roast pork.
I enjoy all the different types of meat available in a civilised first-world society.
I understand that there are other countries where such things are either difficult to get or are too expensive, so this email is not aimed at them.
This email is aimed at those who think they have to force everybody to cease eating meat and become vegetarian at the minimum or vegan preferably.
When humans began to eat meat, the beginnings of civilisation began because it freed them to do more than spend every day gathering sufficient food to survive.
Meaning that meat was the food that our current world was built on.
The militant vegans and vegetarians don’t understand that vegetarians and vegans are prey to predators.
They are predators, not vegetarians, regardless of their beliefs, because they have forward-facing eyes like all the other predators.
They can choose to forswear the eating of meat, and that’s fine and their choice, but that doesn’t mean they have any right to attempt to force any other person to join them.
It doesn’t give them the right to abuse the rest of us because we choose not to join them.
I hope they’ll enjoy mixing it with the zebras on the Serengeti plains.
Watch out for the lions.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. You can write a short report or low-content book and sell it repeatedly.
People are short on time and don’t want to read long books.
They want to read books that deal with one problem and provide no more than three possible solutions.
They’ll buy several of these books rather than one extensive cover everything tome.
That’s great for you because you can knock out one of these books in a day, including topic research and uploading it to Kindle shorts.
If you use Frase to help you out, you could do two a day with ease.
I’ll talk more about Frase in another email, but for now, this is where you discover more about writing these short reports or low-content books.
I mentioned in yesterday’s email that you can write an article in 30 minutes or less.
I also mentioned that you could and probably should repurpose that article to give you more web properties to attract visitors.
Today I’ll give you some ideas about how to repurpose your content.
You can export directly to PDF if you write your articles in Word, Pages, or most other desktop writing tools.
Failing that, you can use the print function to print to a PDF.
There are also many free tools or websites that allow you to create a PDF from anything you have done.
Make sure you have links to your main site in the footer of your document.
You can break up your document into short paragraphs and paste them into PowerPoint, Keynote, or another slide creating tool on your desktop or online.
Create a voice-over file at Amazon Polly, or you could read it yourself.
Create a video from your slideshow and audio.
Break out the audio to an audio-only file.
Create a Tweet summary or a highlight of the article.
Make a Facebook post of a summary.
Now you have seven pieces of content to post to as many sites as you can find, or you can contract several people on Fiverr to post them for you.
For your seven pieces of content, you should be able to get 70 to 100 postings.
That might cost you around $35 on Fiverr.
You can do all the posting yourself and save that money, and you should if you are starting out and not making any income yet, but once you begin getting sales, those are the things to outsource.
You can do other things, but that’s a great start.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. The 4-hour work-week is not possible until you have a decent email list and don’t have to be concerned about where you’re going to get the traffic or sales.
Before then, though, you’ll need to focus on building up your email list of buyers.
To do that, you’ll need to have a good landing page, an offer that’s valuable to your visitors, and a low-cost front end product.
A checklist for a niche is a good lead magnet followed by a low-cost product related to the checklist, usually by giving more details on how to use the checklist.
Your follow-up emails give added information about how the checklist helps and the benefits of the additional information.
The best free platform to integrate the email list, the landing page, the sales page, the product delivery, and the tracking is at LeadsLeap.
The product for sale cost $100, which had the buying power of around $1.2k in today’s dollars.
In a matter of weeks, the sales reached 18,321 orders which is a smidge over $1.8 million, the equivalent of over $13 million today.
Remember that these sales had to come in by mail accompanied by a cheque or mail order.
These were no impulse buys such as we see online, the sales letter was probably read over and over before the decision to post the money to the Franklin Mint was made.
Now that’s a powerful sales letter.
Remarkably, it did so with just one page of copy — nine short paragraphs comprising 394 words.
This is a sales page that you should have in your swipe file because there are some potent phrases included that you can use today.
The trouble is that you are unlikely to find this particular sales letter anywhere online, except in two places.
The link in the email I got this morning and the members’ area of
Since you are probably not on the other email list and this is valuable information for any aspiring marketer, such as yourself, this email is the only place you’ll find the link.
I’ll make the sales letter available to everyone in the substack readership for a limited time, but I will put it behind the subscribers-only wall in a day or so.
It would pay you to read it now because delaying may mean you neglect to get back to it before it gets hidden.
When you are trying to get any page ranked, you’ll need to have at least one link to it, or the Google bot won’t find it.
That single link could be in your sitemap, or you could paste it into the Google Webmaster tools.
I found that one of the most effective ways to get the Google bot racing across the web to my latest page is to send an email to one of my Gmail accounts with the link in it.
Other places you can insert it to get the attention of the bot fast is
on a page in a blogger blog,
on a page in a Google site,
in a pdf uploaded to drive,
in a spreadsheet in Google sheets,
a page in Google docs,
a description with a YouTube video.
These are all places that the Google bot watches closely for new data, and anew link is new data.
I call this jiggling the web.
I relate it to a spider web where the struggles of a trapped insect attract the host spider’s attention.
The slightest jiggle gets attention fast and a rapid reaction.
But if you poke the spider with a stick, they’ll run away and hide.
It appears to me that the Google bot pays more attention to jiggles than direct pokes.
That single link won’t often rank your site very highly, but you will be on their list of places to visit.
Then, when they find your link to the same page in multiple other places, you’ll begin to get some traction and ranking points.
Reply if that does or doesn’t make sense.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. You may have read about link diversity.
This is the art of not limiting your anchor text to a few keywords.
The problem is that it can become difficult to think up new and different words or phrases for the anchor.
Sure, you can use the href, as I do in my emails, but that’s not suitable for a blog post, mostly.
You can use click here or just click, but that can look ugly as well.
So I’m sharing a web page I stole years ago with a massive list of anchor text ideas.
The website is now defunct, which means this may be the only copy in existence.
Grab it and use it because it’ll help your ranking efforts.
They could be yours or something you sell as an affiliate, but that is your only job.
It’s the customers’ job to put the information or software into action.
About 80% – 90% of your customers won’t do that, but that is not your problem.
It’s theirs, and it is not your job to push them into taking any action.
Most training and software sold in the I.M. space has some nuggets of helpful information in there because it’s not all crap.
But if the buyer doesn’t implement what they learned and perhaps modify the process to suit themselves and their target market through testing, they probably won’t get the benefit they sought.
That does not mean the product was no good.
It does mean that the customer didn’t put any effort into making it work for them.
As long as you’ve sold a product that will do what you’ve claimed on the sales page, then you’ve completed your part of the transaction honourably and ethically.
What the customer does next is on them and not your responsibility.
Happy selling.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Are you tired of building backlinks and not getting visitors who take action on your web pages?
There is another way to get targeted visitors to your website.
There are hundreds of ways, but I’ll only talk about one in this instance.
You can take advantage of this platform with free tools, but it’s often faster to use a paid tool.
For 24 hours only, you can access the training for free.
Only via this link, no signup or credit card required.
One of my wife’s work colleagues used to call work and say she had sore eyes.
She couldn’t see herself turning up for work that day.
It’s sort of an OK excuse.
She was a courier and had to drive all day.
Another excellent excuse is that Brendan was late today because he had a headwind as he walked there.
Or perhaps Leo was late, but it’s my fault because I told him not to set his alarm. It wakes us up.
Stupid stories with no relevance to business other than we all make up stories to cover for the truth.
One sales trainer used to say that excuses were usually reasons stuffed with a lie.
When making a presentation, a salesperson’s job is to uncover the real reason the prospect doesn’t buy.
I remember being in the buyer’s position on several occasions and being highly resistant to a sales pitch.
I knew what the salesperson was doing, and I wasn’t buying.
My wife, who was with me both times, would have bought on the spot and struggled with my attitude, but I didn’t relent.
The reasons for not buying were financial in one case, and the other was that I sold a similar product, and it would have been stupid to make that purchase.
In neither case did the salesperson dig deep enough to get the real reason.
Online though, you don’t know what reason your visitor has for not buying.
That means that you need to think hard about what you’re offering and what possible reasons the visitor could have for not buying.
Then in your sales letter or video, you need to cover those reasons and eliminate them in the visitors’ minds.
The better you do that, the better your sales will be.
Regards, Brent.
P.S. Making a living online requires you to have certain things in place.
You’ll need a product to sell,
a group of people to sell to,
a way to collect payment,
a way to get your offer in front of those people.
There are hundreds of ways to fulfil those requirements, both free and paid, so there is no excuse not to have them in place.
If you don’t have most of that in place now, there is a free way to get started that has almost everything you need.
It has:-
An email autoresponder.
A page builder.
A tracking system.
A funnel builder.
A form builder.
A way to deliver some products.
All you need outside of that is a way to get paid.
I suspect that any payment system you can use in your country will work with some fudging.
