How The Simple Addition Of Real Personality Can Bind Customers To You Forever

"Making The Sale" Lesson #2:

How The Simple Addition Of Real Personality

Can Bind Customers To You Forever.

From: John Carlton "The most ripped-off and respected copywriter alive."
Howdy...

This lesson in advanced, "take no prisoners" style marketing may be the most powerful wealth-accumulation tactic you ever learn.

It's simple, and it's basic: Your number one weapon in advertising, especially on-line, will always be superior salesmanship.

This is the mostly-overlooked art of figuring out what your prospect desperately desires... earning his trust and establishing your credibility... and delivering your sales message in a way that nails his "passionate sweet spot of need."

This should be common sense for all marketers... and yet it will be your secret weapon.
Because most of your competition will forever ignore the fundamentals of good salesmanship, or screw it up (since they've never bothered to pay attention to the lessons).

It's relatively easy to create an ad that gets a prospect to say "Hey, that sounds like a great product". But that doesn't mean they will become a customer.

No. You want your prospect to say -- after experiencing your sales pitch -- "Wow! How do I get one of those?"

All buying decisions are made in an emotional part of your prospect's brain. He may explain his purchase in rational terms, giving you reasons why he considered it a great deal.

But getting someone to take money out of their wallet to pay for something is a much more complex process.

You don't have to understand the biology or chemistry that goes on... but you DO have to realize that closing any deal requires a little skill.

It's not difficult. But it's not something most people naturally learn to do.

There are a few key secrets to salesmanship that -- once you master them -- will guarantee that EVERY sales pitch you create is empowered to close the deal.

That's how fortunes are made.

However, most marketers "sell from their heels"... meaning, they blow it when it comes down to asking for money. They mumble and stumble and often just blurt out the price, without helping the prospect position this purchase in his mind.

The marketing graveyard is crammed with great products that failed because the advertising didn't elicit that all-important desire to buy RIGHT NOW.

However, when you master the basics of great salesmanship, you can persuade a prospect to desperately desire a product he didn't even know existed before he came across your ad.
Whatever results you're getting will instantly be multiplied many times, as soon as you apply the secrets of great salesmanship.

Now, I was not a "born salesman."
I had to learn the hard way, making embarrassing mistakes, blowing deals right and left... and going to outrageous extremes to find world-class salesmen who would teach me their tricks.
I’m going to share one of those killer tricks with you now. A proven multiplier of sales to use on your web pages and emails is...

Personality!

A good, solid sales page will bring you orders. Add some personality to your sales message, however... and sales go through the roof.

I recently wrote a short note for a client who was emailing to his "inactive list", trying to stir something up. I insisted that the client personalize each note with the prospect’s name.

Here is how the letter starts out to, say, Bob Jones:

Dear Bob,
Just now, I was sitting at my desk going through some stuff, and I had a sudden thought. So I called out to my long-suffering secretary...
"Hey Barb! What the heck happened to Bob Jones?"
As far as we know, Bob, you’re still alive and kicking. But we haven’t heard from you...

Now, let’s dwell on this opening for a second. Most advertisers -- if they had the sense to email inactive former customers at all -- would have adopted a holier-than-thou tone that reads like the warning label on a bottle of medicine:

Dear Mr. Smith,
It has come to our attention that your account has become inactive blah blah blah...
Yeah, I wonder why that customer stopped paying attention.

Now go back to what I did.
I created a scene, complete with some drama and script and -- very important-excellent use of the guy’s name.

It’s lighthearted, yet still brutally-effective salesmanship. It also doesn’t go on and on.
Just a brief, personalized little dash of slang-driven personality.

Now here’s the kicker:
If you can inject some personality into your emails and web pages and letters... you’ll be light years ahead of the competition.

The client above took the leash off me years ago, and I have created a personality in his copy that keep readership at astonishingly high levels.

He’s a funny guy anyway, but he’s not a writer, and has never attempted to translate his own personality to his marketing. So he pays me a fortune to do it for him.

When people on his list get an email or letter from him the response is not "Oh, yuck, another sales pitch", but...

"Hey! Let’s see what outrageous storyhe’s got to tell me today."
Personality works. It will multiply your sales.

People are inundated with SPAM and boring websites and bad radio, TV and print ads all day long.

It's good salesmanship to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect. Most people live lives of quiet desperation. They don't get to do anything interesting, go anywhere interesting, or hang out with interesting people.

Yawn.

So that's your opening: Be the ONE thing he reads today that really gets his blood moving.
Be the one marketer who says something worthwhile and exciting... and your customers will reward you handsomely.

This gives you the opportunity to become the "go to" guy in your niche -- the dude who knows what he's talking about, and talks about it in interesting ways.

People don't want to deal with anonymous corporations, or marketers who sound like they have a bug up their butt.

Trust is a hard thing to manufacture -- but it's a heck of a lot easier when you allow your prospect to see that he's dealing with someone who shares his passions, understands his situation, and communicates without nonsense.

People like to deal with people.
Especially people who have a little personality. Think of the emails you get each day -- there are surely some people in your world whose emails you open immediately, happy to see them in your inbox.

And probably, it's because you enjoy reading email from those people. They have something to say, and you enjoy hearing from them.

This is personality in action.

That’s it for this lesson.

Don't forget to jump back over to www.SimpleWritingSystem.com/blog/.
There's a lot more specific info -- including tactics you can use -- waiting for you. And it's the place where you'll learn how and when you can immerse yourself in my Simple Writing System.
Stay frosty...
John Carlton

How A Small Bit Of Market Research CanSave Your Butt,And Reveal The HottestTarget Audiences You'll Ever Find

Simple Writing System Basics

"Making The Sale"

Lesson #1

How A Small Bit Of Market Research CanSave Your Butt,

And Reveal The HottestTarget Audiences You'll Ever Find.

From: John Carlton "The most ripped-off and respected copywriter alive."

Howdy...

Does your current Website suck?

Don't despair. You still might do OK?

How? Read on...

To begin, I want to reveal a rather embarrassing little secret shared by all top copywriters:
A poorly written ad sent to the right market... will do better than abrilliantly-written ad sent to the wrong market.

Seems simple, right? Don’t try to sell ice to Eskimos, but do offer ice water in a desert.
And yet, I see countless entrepreneurs make this very same mistake repeatedly.

Take, for example, the story of a guy I met while doing "Hot Seat" consultations at a Dan Kennedy seminar.

This dude had posted a gorgeous-looking Website and -- after several months of attempting to corner his market... was chagrined to get not a single blessed sale.

"What’d you pay to get the site up?" I asked, innocently.
"Ten grand," he said, without blushing. "But that included getting the product produced."

This guy was walking around like a wounded gazelle in hyena town. He was a one-man charity system for art directors, designers, web hosts and manufacturers.

Don’t be this guy. He had violated the most basic fundamental in business: Do the simple stuff first.
As it turns out, I know something about the market he was after. In fact, I know a LOT about that market.

And you know what?

It didn’t matter how good the deal was on his Website.

It didn’t matter how efficiently the site could capture visitors, or how easy it was to buy using the online ordering system.

It didn’t matter how gloriously wonderful the product was.

And it wouldn’t have made a difference if God himself descended upon earth and wrote this guy’s sales copy.

None of this was relevant.

Because there was no market there.

This guy spent ten thousand dollars to find out something he could have discovered for FREE.
And it would have taken him all of about an hour too... instead of the months he spent creating the product, writing the copy, and wrangling with the website technology.

It's called... (drum roll, please)...

Market Research.
I cover a lot of ground in the Market Research section of my Simple Writing System for a darn good reason. It's the FOUNDATION of everything else you do to bring in money.

But here's something you can use right now:
Do not create the actual product until AFTER you get a pulse from your intended market.

How do you do this? Here are just a few of the simple ways I can share with you:

(1) Go to Google AdWords. You can "test" most online markets without even signing up for the service.

It’s easy, too. The system will automatically reveal to you how many hits certain words and phrases within your target market were registered. It will also suggest other words and phrases, based on what is actually getting the big numbers.

This is free market research. Just figure out what a prospect might put into a search engine in order to be in your target audience... and see if the action justifies your foray into this market.

If the words and phrases you come up with are not among the most used, Google will tell you, and help you find the better ones.

And... if your AdWords best efforts come up with pitiful results... then you are fishing in an empty pond.

Time to move on.

(2) Get your hands on a copy of the SRDS. (That’s "Standard Rates and Data Service".) These are the phonebook-sized catalogs of all the mailing lists available to rent, and all the magazines that take ads.

Even if your business is strictly web-based, this is the book that -- once you take a few minutes to understand it -- will heap massive wealth and rewards on your head.

Because this is the book that instantly tells you which markets are hot, and which are not.
What’s more, if you’re too cheap to buy the service (sign up at www.srds.com and they will send you a brand new updated version quarterly), you can check the SRDS out for FREE at your local library. It’s in the resource department.

They’re not hiding it.

You don’t even need a recent one, in most cases. If your prospective market has existed for a while, you can get your answer from even a years-old SRDS.

Cuz all you need, at this basic stage, is a thumbs up or thumbs down on how "hot" the market you're targeting is.

There’s either a mob of cash-rich people who actively buy stuff in the market you’re considering... or there aren’t.

That’s all you’re looking for right now.

In this guy’s case, he had decided to go after what he thought was a huge untapped part of an existing market. He didn’t "need" to research it -- heck, his own common sense told him he on was the right track.

See, everybody was already marketing to the men in this market.

So he decided to go after... another big drum roll... the women.

Genius!

Except for the inconvenient detail that there WEREN’T any women in this market.
I checked it out myself, once I got back to the office. The SRDS had the goods on over a dozen magazines that catered to this niche.

The subscriber numbers were huge... that’s why the guy wanted to go after the market... but they were also 97% male. This detail is plainly revealed in the statistics of each entry.

Just as telling, the available lists of direct response names had a premium of $12/thousand for male names. Female names were dirt cheap to rent.

This is a blindingly obvious hint: The men in this market are the ones who buy. The women barely exist.

Bang! Slam the SRDS shut, scratch the whole idea of going to that market.

Research job is complete. Even if you had to take a bus across town to the library, your total time expenditure has been minimal.

And you’re not out any serious money, except for bus fare and lunch.

Of course...
... if your research had revealed that your target market was a profit-rich riot of unmet needs (with scant competition and lots of low-hanging fruit)...

... then you've just identified a niche you can go after with the throttle wide open.
This is how fortunes are made... and kept from being lost.

This mini-lesson is just a "taste" of what's in store for you when you allow me to show ALL the tactics, secrets, strategies and inside unfair advantages I've mastered in 25 years as a top copywriter and marketing consultant.