Make Cash Online

I thought it was about time that I sat down and did another post on copywriting. Like I mentioned in the previous post I did, my copywriting post is by far the most popular with Google. That’s not to say that it gets a lot of traffic, but it seems to be viewed as a good thing with Google. When I run a site: command at G for my site, it actually comes up first. Usually your root site will come up, but not in this case. Here is the Copywriting, Persuasion and Active Verbs post.

What is Copywriting?

Take notice that the word is writing and not righting. We’re not talking about intellectual property rights here. Copywriting is the ability to write persuasively. Fundamentally it is your ability to use words to sell things. This is very important for marketing. If you’re trying to make cash online with Adsense than you really don’t need to know how to do any of this stuff. The goal of Adsense is to let someone else click and that’s how you get your money.

You can make cash with Adsense, but I’m yet to be convinced it is the best route to go. You have to accept the fact that the page people click through too is selling something. If the business that buys the ads are continuously doing it, than they’re turning a profit. I find this quite annoying because you’re getting squeezed.

When you step away from Adsense and try to make cash from home with affiliate marketing, the game changes. You don’t have to write useful content anymore. It’s bullshit. Google can’t tell whether you’re writing quality informative content or if you’re writing persuasively to sell something. The SEO value is still there, but you’re putting yourself into the position of turning more profit.

Pull on their Emotions, not their Sensibilities

The problem with being a webmaster is that we’re really desensitized to marketing. Well, if you’re an Adsense type of guy, you might not, but I’m pretty desensitized to it. What we end up thinking is that logic will inevitably win them over. And I know I make that mistake. My current sales letter for the new product I’m testing out is sort of on the logical side. It’s converting now at about 1:150. It’s not anywhere near where I want it to be, but not a total bomb.

You’re going to get people to buy on a logical level, but emotional has a bigger impact. It just hits you differently. You feel it deep down in your stomach and it hits you differently.

Let’s say that you’re going to sell a career to someone. You can say that you’ll make $50k/year. You’ll get full medical, dental and a beefed pension. You’ll get plenty of unemployed people that would want that. But that is logical and it’s a little different. Most customers aren’t like that though. Staying in their comfort zone is a lot easier and they’re more likely to do it.

Let’s say that you were going to sell a career to someone that already had a career. They get similar benefits and pay, so how would you sell this new career now? The logical approach isn’t going to sell this person, so you have to reach and think on an emotional level. What are some of the emotionally good things that this person would be doing in this career. If it was a job with the police force than they’d be hunting down criminals, kicking in doors, shooting, etc. It would be an adrenalin pumping type experience.

You have to bring that to your niche because that is what sells. There is a very good saying in copywriting that goes along the lines of “you’ll buy for emotional reasons and rationalize it later”. What that means is that you’ll pull out your credit card for the adrenalin pumping experience, but you’ll later rationalize it in a calm state as a secure job, with good benefits, etc.

There is another aspect of copywriting that I should of went into first…

Benefits and Features

This is about the biggest breakdown for most people trying to sell. Customers buy for the benefits, not for the features. If you want to make cash online you have to sell the benefits to people.

Let’s say I’m an average car owner. I don’t know much about cars, but I know I need winter tires. Telling me that you have 15 inch studded tires, doesn’t tell me shit. That doesn’t help me.  As an average stupid car owner, I really don’t know why I need to know the inches of the tire. Most people aren’t going to know that they have 14 or 15 inch rims and need a specific sized tire.

You may think that studded tires is a benefit, but it really is a feature. The benefit of studded tires is that you can stop on a dime while driving on ice. Don’t ever assume that the person you’re selling to is going to make that connection. If your customer has to figure something out, they’re probably not going to buy. Even if they do figure out that benefit they’re not necessarily going to buy because you don’t really get the same emotional response that way.

Make sure you spell this out to your customer. Just keep it simple and say it. You don’t have to leave out the feature, but if you’re going to list the feature you should at least say the benefit too. “Studded tires will allow you to stop on a dime while driving on ice.” Bam, Done!

But you also have to know who your customer is. Depending on your customer a feature could be a benefit. If you’re selling computers to high tech computer geeks, telling them that the computer is “really really fast” isn’t going to help them. Saying a “3.5 GHz Dual Core Processor” would be a benefit to them because that’s a fuckin’ powerful computer.

There are still benefits to be sold though. I keep thinking of people that build up cars for racing. Like street racing. It’s like the amateur person, but they know a lot about cars. They know a lot, but the benefit you’re selling is speed. It doesn’t matter if they’re buying nitro or if you have a new way of keeping the engine cooler. They want speed. They want to drive around at 150mph and kill themselves. Give them what they want.

Conceptual or Tangible Selling

There was a great video of Eben Pagan that I saw. Eben Pagan is the David Deangelo guy. He got famous because of his Double Your Dating brand. He was in that whole Pick up Artist, Getting Laid, etc sort of niche, but it actually launched him into marketing and things like that. When I first heard of him (David Deangelo) I heard that he was a brilliant marketer and that’s what he is.

This is a really good video. Just take note that the guy asking the question is a fuckin’ idiot and I don’t think he’s even listening half the time. He doesn’t even answer the questions directly.

Eben makes the good copywriting point here because you have to sell something tangible. People aren’t going to buy conceptual ideas. You have to dig deep into the mind of a potential customer and figure out that exact emotional trigger and tangibly hit it. In a later post, I’m going to go into what the emotional triggers, so for now I’ll just leave them out. But let’s look at a few examples. Which one is more exciting to you.

“Financial Security” or “$100,000 in Cash”

Definitely the cash. I think we all want financial security, but it is only a concept. It’s not tangible or anything along those lines. The way it is thrown around today it is literally a cliche. What is financial security? When you boil it right down to the root of it, it’s just money. Selling money to people is a good place to start because GREED is one of the emotional triggers. I said I wouldn’t get into the triggers, but that’s one to illustrate the point.

“Be An Amazing Investor” or “Earn $1000 A Week in the Stock Market With No Risk”

It should be obvious which one is going to sell. We all want to be amazing investors, but just because you say it doesn’t mean that I’m going to feel it and want to buy it. It is the tangible that I can see. Making a $1000 a week, with no risk. Fuck, sign me up now.

“How to be a Good Hockey Player” or “Discover the Triple Deke the Scores Every Time”

This is hockey reference and since I’m Canadian, you guys might not get it. A deke is when you stick handle in such a way where you can trick the goalie score. It’s used in penalty shots and shootouts.  Being a good hockey player is abstract.  If I wanted to know how to be a good hockey player, I would be looking for specific things. I want to know how to skate faster or score more goals.

This is a very big part of copywriting. If you want to make cash online you have to understand the difference between the conceptual idea and the tangible. The reason that conceptual is such a problem is because people think they’re clever when they use it. Financial Security sounds like a good idea. Who doesn’t want to have financial security? It sounds nice, but you’re not here to sound nice. If you’re copywriting your goal is to make sales, ie: make cash. You’re not here to wow the reader. Only wow them to sale.

Financial Security doesn’t get my engine revving. Making fifty grand on autopilot every year gets me all revved up.

Grab Attention

If you haven’t already noticed, sales letters really fuckin’ long. But if you want to make cash online copywriting than you need to understand that they work. A big rule of copywriting is to make sure that you make it nice and easy. You want to make sure that the reader doesn’t have to work. It seems sort of counter intuitive to have a long sales letter because the prospect has to work hard to read.

You have to get their attention and hold it. This is sometimes difficult. Don’t expect to sit down one day and start writing persuasive copy. It’s something that you’re going work at, test out, come back to later and edit. The product I’m testing out now is currently on it’s 4th copy to convert at 1:150. It can take up to 8 rough copies before you get somewhere with it.

The headline is the most important thing to grab attention because they’re not reading if you don’t get their attention. Here’s a way of looking at it. I come to a page and there is a lot of fucking text to read. Why should I? Your headline should be able to answer the question. It has to contain the most powerful benefit you’re selling to me because that is the only way I’m going to even try and read this monster letter.

But you also need those powerful subheadings throughout the letter too because we have to face the facts. Not everyone is going to read the letter word for word. They’re going to skim through it and see what they like (or don’t like). You need those headings to suck them into the copy.

It is a big part of copywriting. You’d be surprised how many people just tweak the headline at the top of the page and their conversion rate doubles. The reason is probably because their copy isn’t that bad. It’s probably pretty persuasive, but their headline wasn’t sucking them in to read the persuasive copy. That is how a simple change in the headline can help you make cash and make a lot more it.

Persuasion is a Soft Science

I come from the realm of hard science. That is the subjects of physics and chemistry. The answers are exact and to the point. Gravity is 9.8m/s on Earth and nothing changes that. Persuasion is a branch of psychology and that is a soft science. There is no exact or necessarily a right way of doing things. Somethings work and others don’t. Sometimes going against the rules can help you make cash, while following the rules can lead to failure. It’s one of those odd things because we’re playing with psychology.

When you see the link for Christine Taylor’s tight ass, do you want to click? Are those 4 words persuasive for you? What about Casey Cartwright ass? For me, it is less persuasive than tight ass, but it’s not a science.

Even though I brought in those links, which was for more of a SEO experiment then anything, the point is that you have to test things out. You have to play with. You have to throw things out there and see what happens. You still have to hit up those emotional points, but identifying them is difficult. Think of it this way, how can you identify these emotional points if you couldn’t even identify them in yourself?  You have to understand the fears, goals, desires, wants, hates, etc in your current prospects and it can be hard to figure this out. Often people aren’t willing to share things with you.

Here is an example: making cash. Investing to make cash you would assume that the prospect would be interested in money and making it. Certainly they are, but is that the big emotional trigger?

When I think of investing in the stock market, the idea of making cash from my investments sounds awesome. It is an exciting feeling, but I can also think of another powerful feeling. One that is a lot more powerful. The feeling is losing my money. If I take 10 grand and invest into a company lose it all. Holy fuck. That scares the crap out of me. I know there is a lot of people out there that feel the same way.

The fear of loss can often be more powerful feeling then gaining something. As a copywriter you should be thinking about those things because you never really know what a person wants. They might not even be interested in gaining money, more then they want to not lose money.

SEO Copywriting

This has been a hot topic in copywriting that many people have been discussing. We all understand that SEO is very important. It is by far the most important thing (on page) that you can do to get traffic from search engines. The real debate comes from the perspective of persuasion. Does SEO copywriting diminish your ability to be persuasive? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer and I’m guessing that a lot of copywriters don’t have an answer.

SEO is important and Persuasion is important. I suppose the copywriter has to find a balance. I’m going to say that balance to should fall toward persuasion since that is the most important thing. You  have to make sure that you’re able to sell and if you can work the keyword in normal conversation then you should be fine.

But let’s make no mistake, links play the bigger role in search traffic. I have a site that ranks for niche name remedies and I don’t even have the term remedies on the page. In fact I show up in the top ten when you search “niche name remedies” in quotes. It’s like Google doesn’t even give a fuck anymore about that type of query.

So How do you learn Copywriting?

I guess this is the question that will help you make cash online. I don’t know if there is necessarily a method to explain this. I fall under the category of learn by doing. And I suspect this is the best way for all people to go. You can read and read all day, but all you’re reading is ideas on persuasion and putting them into practice is a little different. Everything needs to be changed to your potential customers and that is can be tough.

It’s something that will require your attention and it will evolve over time. If you play with it, you can learn. You see what is working and what isn’t. And it really is the best way to go, at least for me. I’m currently have a bunch of copywriting books to finish reading and I’m currently on the second book (Cash Copy). The thing is that it always takes many edits and changes to your sales letter to make it work the best. And even when it is going good you still tweak it to try and get a little more out of it.

You build a sales letter for something. Grab something off of Amazon and try to be persuasive. You don’t necessarily have to write a long letter. The length of the letter is typically designed to meet how much you’re selling it for. Selling light bulbs for $1.50 isn’t going to require a huge sales letter.

Just build that sales letter for something and drive traffic to it. Remember to focus benefits over features like I mentioned above. Start learning and reading as much as you can on the subject and apply it. Seriously hang out at copywriting forums. All the douchebags hang out in the internet marketing forums, but copywriter forums are much different. You can learn a lot just by reading the threads. Read the critique requests. This is where you get to see a sales letter and watch professionals dissect it.

This is a really good skill to learn. If you want to make cash online or even make cash anywhere, you have to know how to be persuasive to sell the product. This skill can take you a lot of places. You can do a lot with it. I know that businesses like to work with people that can write persuasively.