What Are We Trying to Achieve With Video?

If you use Twitter, there's a good chance that you've come across HootSuite.  I think it's brilliant - not only can you see your own tweets, the tweets of people you're following, your direct messages and the tweets in which you've been mentioned all clearly laid out on a single screen, but you can schedule your tweets, all of which saves a lot of time and trouble.  What's more, the basic version (which I use) is free.  So I have no hesitation in recommending it.

However, HootSuite has now introduced something called "Hootlet with AutoSchedule".  When I arrived at HootSuite today, there was an introductory video to promote this.  Now, we're constantly being told by the gurus to use video whenever we can, particularly on our sales pages.  Video, so they say, is a more dynamic, more impacting way of getting our message across.  Well, perhaps their videos are . . . but I would seriously debate that this applies to all videos.  HootSuite's video is a case in point.  I watched it - and was no wiser at the end than when it started.  First of all, it was accompanied by loud music with lyrics.  It's very hard, I find, to read what's on the screen when there are lyrics being belted into your ear.

So I watched it again with the sound turned off and read the five statements that came up, which were:

• instant sharing while you browse
• so you can focus on content
• autoschedule for optimal impact
• let autoschedule do the thinking
• easy optimised scheduling

Ermm . . . yes . . . and how does this autoscheduling differ from the autoscheduling that is already available on HootSuite?  Instant sharing - OK, useful but not original - it's something you can get elsewhere.  So your unique selling point is . . . what?

For content, I think we can mark the video around 3 out of 10.  But there's more!  The video is 52 seconds long and is full - and I mean full - of animated graphics which moved so fast that I really couldn't see what they were meant to be showing.  Then I saw that there was a full screen option.  So I watched it yet again.  But the picture quality was so poor that, together with the speed at which it all moved, it was quite impossible to follow.  And all the rushing around made me feel quite giddy!

There's a lesson to be learned here for anyone who thinks that any video is better than no video at all.  If you're producing a video, the rules of good copywriting still apply - particularly the need for a unique selling point.   And if you're trying to demonstrate how something works, don't do so at a speed that makes it impossible to understand.  If you're going to use graphics, make sure they're clear because otherwise the whole thing just looks amateurish.  And finally, if you don't have a commentary and are going to use a music background, don't use something which will prevent viewers from concentrating on what is being presented in the video itself.

Underneath the HootSuite video there was a link to "find out more".  Perhaps the idea was that this would compensate for the lack of clarity - but I suspect there are others who, like me, didn't bother to click it because the video completely failed to grab our attention.

What do We Have to do to Get People to Read Our Sales Letters?

I've been thinking about what it is that makes us read things . . . or, more specifically, what makes me read things.  I am at the moment reading a novel which is incredibly badly written - jam packed with cliches, the characters cardboard cut-outs, and a few real howlers (such as a shape being described as "an eight sided octagon" - presumably to distinguish it from an eight-sided square!).  But what is truly amazing is not how badly written it is, but the fact that I'm over three-quarters of the way through it.  So, why?  Why am I wasting my time when there are so many better books around.  And the answer is simple . . . it's an extremely good story-line and I want to know what happens.

Now, whether this is transferrable to the 'genre' of sales letters is debatable - but something tells me that, even if you're not an expert writer, it should be possible to hold the reader's interest for something that is, after all, a great deal shorter than a 500 page novel.  However, I'm all too well aware that I very rarely read my way through a long sales letter.  Either I lose interest halfway through or else I cut to the chase and scroll to the bottom to find out how much it is.  So my first rule of sales letter writing is: It's Got to be Short!

And, let's face it, most sales letters seem to be remarkably repetitive.  I may not have the most retentive memory in the world, but I can remember things from one paragraph to the next and if I'm told the same thing three times in quick succession, I'm going to stop reading.  Again, to give this novel its due (and, no, I'm not going to tell you its title!), it doesn't veer away from the action.  The author keeps the story line going . . . his eye is firmly on the ball, if not on his grammar.

OK, so a letter needs to be short, concise and to the point.  What else can we learn from this novel?  Well, because it's so badly written, it tends to be quite funny in places (I laughed out loud at the octagon).  And a bit of humour never comes amiss, I think.  I was looking, this morning, at an internet marketing website, and there was an article with the fairly dreary title of "The growth and evolution of the performance marketing industry".  What drew me to read the article, though, was the accompanying graphic.  At first glance, it looked exactly like the London Underground map.  But on closer inspection, the names of stations had been replaced with 'Social Media', 'Blog', 'Google', 'Newsletters', 'Adsense', 'Photosharing' and other keywords relevant to internet marketing.  I thought it was clever and amusing - and, as a result, I read the article.

Now, internet guru Jo Han Mok says "When you’re writing headlines, don’t attempt to be cute This is not the place for humour."  And, obviously, that's true.  You've only got a limited number of words for your headline and they've got to be hard-hitting.  But if you can write the actual letter in a witty way, the reader will enjoy it and will, for the moment, lose sight of the fact that you're trying to sell something . . . and thus (we hope) will be much more likely to read to the end.

Perhaps it's just about expressing why you love the product you're selling and letting the reader share in your enjoyment.  But please don't think I'm advocating great long screeds about how you've made X number of dollars and bought Y number of houses and Z number of cars.  I don't know about you, but when someone starts bragging about his earnings, I lose interest.  Because, as it always says at the bottom of the letter in very, very small type, the fact that he made zillions is no guarantee that I'll make any money at all.  I don't want to know what it's done for him - I want to know what it can do for me.

So . . . that's my ideal sales letter . . . short, concise, witty, readable and focussed on the buyer and not the seller.  And I suppose the fact that it's really quite difficult to produce such a letter is why so many people employ professional copywriters.  However, those of you who know my high opinion of Armand Morin, will not be surprised if, at this point, I mention his new WordPress Sales Letter Plugin which, I first mentioned here on June 7th.  If you can't afford a copywriter this, to my mind, is the next best thing.  And, even if you can, this is a whole lot cheaper!  The great thing about it is that it comes with built-in ideas for headlines, introductions, closing statements and so on which can be modified according to your needs.  So you don't have to worry about the actual construction of the piece because it offers the bones of the letter and all you have to do is to flesh out with a little humour and a lot of enthusiasm!

Now We Can All Write Brilliant Sales Letters!

For anyone who's ever struggled to write a sales letter (or been horrified at what professional copywriters charge) Armand Morin's new WP Salesletter will seem like a godsend.  Because not only does this amazing plug-in make writing a letter easy but it comes with built in, ready-written ideas for headlines, introductions, closing statements and so on which you can modify according to your needs.  And, of course, since all these ideas are crafted by experts, your chances of good conversion rates are very high.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm an enormous fan of Armand Morin but, even so, watching the video he's made about WP Salesletter, my jaw dropped in amazement at its simplicity and its power.  And, as Armand points out, because it's a plug-in rather than a theme, you don't have to change the whole look of your website in order to write a sales letter.

At only $77 for a multi site licence with lifetime updates, I think this is amazing value, particularly when you compare it with what you might have to pay a professional copywriter for a single letter.  

Let's Cut to the Chase!

An article about the English language in the online version of the Times Literary Supplement has started me thinking (not for the first time) about the way we use language.  I am, I freely admit, a bit of a pedant on this subject.  After all, the purpose of language is to communicate and if the person listening to us or reading what we have written doesn't understand what we are trying to say then we have failed.

I was reading a book of short stories the other day.  The second paragraph of one of these read "But as I let the street suck my blood while I still have blood to suck we are not on terms and a glimpse is better than no terms at all until I stand all drained of psychic energy from nothing not even a glimpse, glimpses being untimable in a live long day of a full irregular masculine time-table and walk away quickly as if none of it mattered to unnumb my limbs while I still have limbs to unnumb all the way to the small flat in the square block in the big lonely city."  Do you have any idea what that means?  Because I don't!  The author lost me way before the end of this 96-word sentence.  I cut my losses and turned to the next story.

It's the same with sales copy.  If I go to a website because I'm interested in whatever it is that's being sold and I'm confronted by a sales letter that rambles on about all sorts of other things that I'm not interested in - the writer's house in Florida, his yacht, his glamorous holidays - then I don't read to the end.

As anyone who's read some of my previous posts here will know, I'm a great fan of Armand Morin.  If I go to his website to find out about the FAST (Facebook Ad Secret Training) system, there are no long screeds about how wonderful Armand is or how much money he's made but, rather, a powerpoint presentation that begins "Let me ask you a question . . . What if I told you there were 9 secret methods to advertise on Facebook which no one is telling you about?"  This, to my mind, is great copywriting.  My natural response is to want to find out about these methods.  I'm hooked within seconds.  As another marketing guru, Matt Bacak, has said "People love secrets".  Mention that you know a secret and everyone else will want to know it, too!

Recently I've heard several people say that the day of the long sales letter is past.  Well, hooray!  I'm too busy to waste time reading something that I'm not really interested in.  And, if you've read this far, then hopefully I'm practising what I preach!!

To Assume Makes an Ass of U and Me

In the past two or three weeks I seem to have received quite a number of emails and pieces of literature in the post that try to tell me what I think, like, do or want to do.  And it annoys me.  These people are assuming that they know me . . . and they're getting it wrong.

For example, I got an email a few days ago from an internet marketer.  It began: "I bet you take at least one family summer vacation each year, right?" Well, actually, no.  And it went on "But if you're like most ultra busy parents - you probably aren't really going out of your way to create real-world entrepreneurial activities and lessons and unique family bonding?"  Well, I may be ultra busy but I'm not a parent.   So wrong again.  

Now, it so happens that I both like and respect this marketer and I have bought courses from him in the past.  But, if I didn't, I suspect that this sort of thing would lead me to wonder about the quality of what he was selling . . . after all, if he can get so much wrong in a single email, how reliable would his teaching be?

Admittedly, he was promoting "a special event for highly successful entrepreneurs and their families" and he went on to say: "If you have kids (or grand kids, nieces, nephews, etc) ages 6-18 this it a great way to let them get a taste for business".  But what puzzles me is why, with all his experience, he didn't start off with the "If you have kids . . ." bit.  That way he would have avoided alienating people who might assume that he wasn't a very good marketer and would have avoided the risk of upsetting anyone who had lost a child, who had no contact with his or her children as a result of divorce, or who desperately wanted children but was unable to do so.

Writing good copy is not just about capturing the reader's attention and persuading them to buy something.  It's also about being honest and being sensitive to the reader's feelings.  So I believe that it is counterproductive to assume anything about the people who receive our emails.  All we really know about them is that they gave us their names and email addresses via our opt in pages because they wanted something we were offering.  We don't know anything else about them.  And if we imply that we do - and get it wrong - we're in danger of losing them.

We need to be sensitive.  Implying that someone is a parent when they're not could cause distress.  Similarly the phrase "I bet you take at least one family summer vacation each year" could be hurtful.  Although some people do, indeed, take one or two holidays a year, there are still some who can't afford it.  And when we consider that a lot of people who start dabbling in internet marketing do so because they have lost their jobs or because the're having difficulty making ends meet, the assumption that everyone can afford holidays implies that the writer is out of touch with his readers.  Years ago, when I was working in a psychiatric hospital, we used to have a meeting of all the patients on the ward every morning.  One day, one of the women mentioned that she hadn't had a holiday for several years because she couldn't afford it.  To which one of the other patients (a very well-heeled and rather haughty woman) said in an amazed tone of voice "Can't afford a holiday?  I've never heard of that.  I have friends who go to Majorca three or four times a year."  All these years later, I still remember the distress of the first patient.