Copywriting Dean

Last month Ryan Healy asked me if I’d like to share an .mp3 Interview Ken McArthy did with Drayton Bird and Bob Bly. (I am one of thousands who have huge respect for those 3 names.)

You can find out more about it and download the MP3 interview here (opt-in required).

I wanted to give the interview a listen before I promoted it on the blog – not so much to make sure it was quality (I knew it would be) – but so that I could give you an idea of what was in it.

Unfortunately I never found time in my schedule to do it. BUMMER for all of us, as I highly recommend visiting the site and downloading the MP3 while it’s still available. (The event the promotion was intended for has already past, so it may not be available much longer.)

So I want to apologize to you for not giving you the heads up on this awesome opportunity.

And because I have a ton of respect for Ryan, I wanted to take the opportunity to promote him and his work in general. His blog is top notch and has been for years. I’ve bought products simply based on Ryan’s recommendation, even without reading the sales letter – and have never been let down.

I highly recommend his business growth strategies blog and suggest checking out his new site at the Copywriting Code.

If you want to start a successful online business, here’s what you need to do…

Create A Product
3 Quick Ways To Judge Your New Product Idea

Create A Squeeze Page
Should You Use A Squeeze Page?
7 Steps To A Successful Squeeze Page
Ballooning Squeeze Page Conversions With Winning Audio Scripts

Send Traffic To The Squeeze Page
Clixsense – Penny Traffic That Converts
A VERY Telling Conversion Story On Twitter

Send Subscribers To An Awesome Sales Letter On Launch Day

Stephen Dean’s Copywriting Services

Check out these 4 products I’ve personally checked out and love…

• Productivity Engineering
• Internet Business Box
• The Secrets of a 10% Conversion Rate!
• Make Money “One Bite At A Time”

All 4 of them are worth at least double the asking price, so I decided to see if I could highlight them here.

Each product owner gave me permission to do so, and even decided to give me a commission for any sales I send their way. Cool!

If you purchase one and are not happy with it, you probably shouldn’t trust my opinion again. It’s with that understanding that I highly recommend these products.

Many copywriters advise that you keep a swipe file. Meaning that you keep a collection of high quality advertisements to study and get ideas from when writing your own copy.

There are ways to collect an awesome set of offline advertisments… and one way is to BUY products from successful offline mailers. But frankly I’ve never gone this route.

I primarily write copy online and I look for online copy to put in my swipe file.

In the past when I found copy I liked I’d bookmark it or add it to my favorites. This worked OK… until the site disappeared, the offer was taken down or the copy changed.

Then I tried saving the webpage with the copy to my computer. This works OK still. But it can be messy with all the extra files attached to the webpage. Especially if all I want to keep is a headline.

So now I’ve discovered my favorite method for keeping a collection of swiped ads.

Windows Vista, Windows 7 and some versions of Windows XP have a “Snipping Tool” that allows you to highlight a portion of your screen and save it as an image.

Now it’s easy and painless to save a simple headline. Take for example this quick swipe of the headline from my Copywriting Services page. (Which of course was based on a swiped headline

I’ve set up a folder on my PC’s “Desktop” called appropriately, “Swipe File.” And another folder inside there is named “Headlines.” I save all swiped headlines in here.

Then when it’s time to look at successful headlines, I can open up any image inside this folder. Windows opens the image inside of it’s photo viewer and allows me to hit “Next” over and over again browsing my swiped headlines.

Fantastic! So much cleaner than paper or saved web pages.

Of course, most of the images you are creating involve copyrighted material. So you shouldn’t be sharing or selling your swipe file with anyone.

But creating a swipe file this way for your personal use is no problem. (At least that’s what I believe. I’m no lawyer, so do your own research.)

In any case, you have permission to swipe any of my sales copy for your personal use in this way.

And if you’re looking for more copy to swipe, you might start here:

Productivity Engineering

Good luck hunting and swiping!

Recently I discovered a traffic source that can send thousands of visitors to your site for a penny each.

It’s from a site called ClixSense. And that’s an affiliate link, because I highly recommend this service.

Penny traffic is known for being POOR QUALITY and can kill a conversion rate. But because it’s so cheap it can still be profitable.

For $12 (which included a $2 processing fee) I sent around 1000 visitors to a squeeze page. The squeeze page wasn’t too polished, although it did contain 6 of the 7 traits of a successful squeeze.

Even with a mediocre squeeze page I got 28 opt-ins. That’s 43 cents per targeted lead.

If you have a $100 product that converts at 1%, then each visitor is worth $1. If it only costs you 43 cents to get a visitor, then you’re profiting 57 cents per visitor.

If I add the 7th element of a successful squeeze page and polish it up a bit, I believe I could easily double the squeeze page’s conversion rate. That’d bring the cost per targeted lead to 20-some cents. Very nice!

I highly recommend giving ClixSense at least one shot. I ran my ad 3 times and noticed the subsequent visitor-buys got me repeat visitors that didn’t convert. In future tests I’ll be looking for a way to avoid this repeat traffic and I’ll share my results.

And a hint on setting up your campaign.

ClixSense allows you to narrow down the traffic you’ll receive in to a smaller demographic.

If your market’s customer base is heavily female or male, then make sure your ad only is displayed to that gender.

You can choose to only display your ad to premium members, meaning people who have paid money, and that’s a very good idea.

And you can also restrict the ad to English speaking countries, which can help for obvious reasons.

Give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

The thing about having fun while doing an interview over the phone is you sometimes give up TOO much information.

The other day I got to talk to Robert Plank on Skype about how I optimize my blog for profit. We talked for 30 minutes and had such a great conversation about blogging… that many times I forgot that Robert was recording the call!

We shared our favorite strategies, favorite plugins, our favorite marketers, and more. I came at it from a copywriter’s perspective, which is something you probably haven’t seen before. (So let me know what you think)

In the future, only people who join my email list will get access to this interview. And while I hope you have signed up to receive announcements, I am going to let you access the recording today with no restrictions.

Here it is: http://www.copywritingdean.com/robertplank

Hope you enjoy it, and don’t forget to check out Robert Plank’s blog. He set a goal to make $30,000.00 for the month of February and he’s almost there. I’m sure he’ll let you know if he makes it at the blog.

Remember when I had Click2Mail send me a test postcard for ad campaign? I wrote about it here: Sending Postcards To Advertise Your Product Or Services.

Well it finally showed up yesterday. It took a LONG time…

…because of user error. My fault. I accidentally picked “standard mail” instead of “first class.” Instead of 4-5 days it took 9-15. (And I saved a whopping 11 cents!)

So that’s one mistake I noticed. The other is the graphics program I used to create the postcard.

Microsoft Paint just isn’t going to work! I saved the image I made in paint as a .jpg file, which looked fine until it showed up on a printed postcard. There’s too much noise surrounding the words… as a result of Paint not saving the .jpg at a high enough quality.

It’s possible that Paint might be able to work if I save it with another image format. But whatever…

Instead I’m going with Gimp. This is a free software program that acts a lot like Adobe Photoshop (a great program, but very expensive).

Gimp will be able to make a high quality screenshot and fix my postcard.

One more note. I took the advice to keep all of my content an inch up from the bottom in case the post office put a sticker on the bottom. The postcard did not get a sticker. In fact, I think the “sticker” was printed on the card.

However, I don’t want to risk it unless I need the extra space. So I’ll continue to heed that advice for a while.

I just checked the mail and it didn’t come today, but it’ll get here soon.

The order was fulfilled on Saturday, and I’m not sure where it’s mailing from… but it shouldn’t be longer than a few days. What am I waiting for?

I sent a postcard to myself via Click2Mail.com. I wanted to make sure the card looks presentable before I start sending it out to a select group of individuals.

The postcard advertises a special deal I’m offering to certain people for my copywriting services. And Click2Mail.com seems to be a great place to print and mail my offer at an affordable rate.

Here are the steps I took to get my first postcard in the mail.

1) I created a free account at Click2Mail.com. It’s simple to do, just like signing up for any other free account online.

2) I browsed around and found “Postcard” under the “Create A New Mailing” category.

3) Then I picked the 5X8 space saver postcard that can ship in yellow. Michel Fortin told me that oversized yellow postcards worked best in his experience. So this is as close as I could find.

4) I found this post at copywritingboard.com that gave me a ton of ideas on how to design the postcard and craft my offer. Using Postcards To Market Your Services

My biggest takeaways were to keep it simple… a headline and bullets outlining the offer. And make sure the offer is on both sides. I also remembered to keep my contact info away from the bottom of the card so that it doesn’t get covered by any sort of sticker the post office might place on it.

5) I found it difficult to design the postcard on Click2Mail.com’s website. Instead I used a combination of OpenOffice.org’s Writer software and Microsoft Paint. Both are free (well, Paint comes with windows).

I used Writer to design the postcard (which is mostly words, no pictures). Then I pressed “print screen” on my keyboard to take a screenshot of the postcard in Writer. Then I opened Paint and pasted it in. I selected the area I wanted for the postcard, cropped it (under “Image” in the menubar), and used “Save As” to save the image as a .jpg file.

I did this for both the front and the back of the postcard. Both .jpg files that could then be uploaded to Click2Mail.com and positioned on the front and back of the postcard.

6) From there Click2Mail.com walks you through the mailing process. First you select recipients (which was just me for the test run), proof the post card to make sure everything looks right, then pay for the mailing.

It’s quite affordable. Around 49 cents per postcard with the options I selected above. That’s barely more than the price of a stamp!

I’m very happy with the process so far. If you check me out on Twitter (StephenPDean), I’ll make sure to let you know how the post card looks when it arrives.

If you send out your own postcards, let me know!