The 2 Hour Sales Letter ($70).

The 7 Deadly Copy Sins ($35).

Tapping Michel Fortin’s Brain Vol. 1 ($35).

Tapping Michel Fortin’s Brain Vol. 2 ($35).

My Personal Sales Page Template ($20).

These are just some of the copywriting products I’ve had for sales over the past couple of years.

Whenever someone comes to me to learn about copywriting (including my family members), these are the tools I point them to.

Until 2pm tomorrow you can get all of these products (and a few more) for $19.95 TOTAL. Not $19.95 each, but $19.95 TOTAL.

To read more about it, click here: http://www.stephensblog.com/wso/24hour.htm

At the top and bottom of the page, you’ll find an order link. I’ll manually send you the access information shortly after your purchase.

This offer will be taken down at 2pm tomorrow.

If you want to discover if you’re guilty of committing this Copy Sin, click the link below to watch my free copywriting video.

Click here ->> http://www.stephensblog.com/7copysins

One of my favorite bloggers and Internet Marketing types is Robert Plank.

This guy is a productivity machine. He’s constantly writing articles, making videos, creating products and more… all while holding a full time day job. Ya, even though his online income vastly surpasses the income from his job… he still works there full time.

For February he’s set a goal of earning $30,000.00. Because February only has 28 days, that’s more than a $1000.00 a day… and so far I believe he’s on track to do it. Nice job Robert!

And oh yeah, he’s 23.

A while back Robert wrote a post detailing how he makes thousands of dollars essentially just writing articles.

The idea is to write an article a day, package them in to an ebook and sell them. Sound simple? Well, that’s just the beginning.

He also gives a great suggestion for cashing in on the ebook before you’ve finished all the articles… AND a great way to add scarcity and urgency to your offer.

I’m going to try it out and see how it goes.

I might post my first article tomorrow, or I might post something else. We’ll see

If you want to try it with me, leave a comment and we can encourage each other.

Maybe Zazzu? Lowell Rieger? Or maybe Tony when he gets back from his self imposed information abstinence.

Once when I was a little boy trying on shoes at the mall, the sales lady slipped a shoe on my foot and asked me to tie the laces.

I was pretty young. And very happy that I had learned to tie laces. So I tied them proudly, but apparently not well enough. The lady looked at me and said…

“I said TIE your shoes not go through the ACT of tying them.”

She then undid my laces and retied them extremely tight. (Later after we bought the shoes and left the store, I had to untie the tight laces to let circulation back in to my feet.)

Now, the point of this story isn’t to point out what a witch this woman was for mouthing off to a little boy learning to tie his shoes (or maybe it is… …

…but instead to apply her mean spirited line to the P.S.’s I see these days. Hopefully in a more encouraging way.

It seems when people write their own copy they always add a P.S., probably because they’ve seen others doing it. But they don’t apply effective strategies.

They don’t write a P.S., they go through the ACT of writing a P.S. Which results in valuable real estate being completely wasted.

I’ve written a couple posts on effective strategies for P.S.’s in the past: Here and here.

Read them and use them. But here’s another.

A hidden treasure in your P.S.

The P.S. can sometimes be a great place to reveal for the first time an extra bonus, sales argument or clarification.

An Extra Bonus

You can use a P.S. to thank the visitor for reading the entire letter, and offer a special bonus for buying now. For someone who has read the letter from top to bottom, this might help to push them over the edge and buy.

For someone who has skipped to the bottom of the sales letter, maybe searching for the price, they’ll not only see the extra bonus… they’ll also see you thanking them for reading the entire letter, which might encourage them to actually do so.

Also, since you thanked them for reading the entire letter (which they haven’t done yet), they might feel like they just “gamed the system” and discovered an extra bonus. To reward themselves for being so clever, they may feel an OBLIGATION to buy.

Sales Argument

Sometimes an additional sales argument may fit well in to your first P.S.

My best example of this would be a “Breaking News” type message. If current events have given the customer an extra reason to buy, say that…

“Breaking News: Just last week Gold went up in price by $40! Now may be the perfect time to invest before the gold soars in value.”

Clarification

A while back I wrote sales copy for a product that was guaranteed to make the user cash if they followed the instructions. I didn’t want to make this claim up front, I was afraid guaranteed cash was too unbelievable.

Instead I started off the letter by saying 13 of 14 test subjects made more than $200 from using the product. A seeming admission that 1 person had not made money actually gave the claim credibility.

But the truth was, all 14 people DID make money.

So in the P.S., I made a confession.

“There’s something I need to tell you that I couldn’t reveal earlier. I had said only 13 of 14 people made more than $200 with this product.

“What I didn’t tell you was that the 14th person made $180 using this product with just 3 hours work.

“I was afraid that if I told you this product had a 100% success rate, you wouldn’t believe me. But now that I’ve explained why it works, I’m confident you’re ready to hear that YES, this product does work for everyone.”

This could be the final proof that really puts the reader over the edge and forces them to push the order button.

…

Now that you have three more tools for writing an effective P.S., please do it! Write a P.S. that would make me proud.

If you want, copy and paste your P.S. in to a comment to this post and I’ll critique it.

Good luck!

Rebecca Dean, aka Miss Copy, got married in December.

She just posted about it at her blog. Please congratulate her and feel free to check out her wedding photos.

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.

The other day James Brausch asked via Twitter:

Someone tell me why I should twitter in addition to blogging at JamesBrausch.com | 23 days ago from web

Good question. Here’s why I twitter…

List Building

In some ways, twitter is just another way to keep in contact with your visitors/customers.

There’s postal mail, phone, email, RSS… and now social media outlets like Twitter.

But Twitter might currently be enjoying this advantage that other’s dont: It’s very easy to get new followers. Because Twitter is new people seem to follow anyone for any reason. Maybe that’ll change the way that it changed a bit with email… but for now that seems to be the case.

Once you’ve got followers you’ve got an audience.

It’s considered bad etiquette to ONLY use twitter to promote blogs, websites and products… but it’s certainly acceptable to do so in between socializing and providing value. (Similar to a blog.)

But there’s more to Twitter than just a way to stay in contact with your customers…

The Party Down The Street…

First, let me give credit to Perry Belcher for describing social media as a big party (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn1cspHx7DU).

And that makes it a big distinction from your blog.

Your blog is your house, Twitter is the party down the street.

Now, if you’re popular enough, you may never have to leave your house. You can have the parties at your house (your blog).

But I think stepping outside every now and then is a good thing. And for a few reasons.

1) Replies

A reply is when someone puts an “@” in front of your username inside of a tweet. Usually this is put at the beginning of a tweet, but it can be placed anywhere (although twitter might not spot it).

Here’s how replies can be so valuable.

On your blog, people can leave comments. But the only people who see your comments are other visitors to your site.

That’s not the case with twitter. When someone replies to your tweet, ALL of their followers see it. (Almost like they just sent an email to their list about YOU.)

2) Retweets (RT)

On a blog, you may be able to set up a plugin where people can forward a blog entry to a friend’s email address. Or if the person really wants to take action, they can make a post on their blog linking to your post.

In my opinion, both of these are limited compared to the retweet (RT).

A RT is when someone likes what you say in a tweet, so they send the tweet to their followers with “RT @YourUserName” at the beginning of the message.

It’s extremely easy for someone to RT (especially with software like http://www.tweetdeck that does it for you with 2 clicks).

And once it’s done, your message (and your username) has been sent to all of the followers of the person who made the retweet. It’s viral!

Replies and RTs Equal Social Proof And More Followers

Just like at a party, there are people on Twitter who it seems like everyone wants to talk to. They’re the popular folks that people tend to crowd around.

Of the people I follow, MattBacak, PerryBelcher and barefoot_exec seem to be the most “popular.” I can tell because they’re constantly sending @replies back to the people talking to them.

If I didn’t know who any of these people were, this would be great social proof. Just like I’d be attracted to the center of a party, I’d be attracted to their tweets, sites, products and so forth.

I also check out who they’re replying too. This is probably the main way I find new people to follow.

And it works the other way around. Immediately after Matt Bacak sent me an @stephenpdean, Mark Joyner began following me. Sweet!

Matt lent me some of his social proof and I got a cool new follower.

Viral Tweets And Matt Bacak’s $100 Contest

The replies and RT features of Twitter allow things to easily go viral. That’s just the nature of them…

…and Matt Bacak proved that last night.

He sent out a tweet offering $100 to the first person who could guess what he sold out of his wagon when he was 9 years old…

…the guesses came fast and furious. Over 2000 guesses came in that ALL started with (@MattBacak).

That means over 2000 people broadcasted a tweet to THEIR followers starting with @MattBacak…

Tens of thousands may have had @MattBacak appear on their computer screens because of one viral tweet.

Not only that, but Matt also said the tweet for his contest reached the 4th most ReTweeted message on twitter that night.

That’s even more exposure! And probably a lot of new followers. (It looks like Matt added over 5,000 new followers this week alone.)

Of course, new followers by itself is not enough when it comes to business. The questions needs to be asked…

Is Twitter A Profitable Business Tool?

I think so.

However I think this question is still being explored.

I know that Frank Kern has been testing Twitter-only launches.

Michel Fortin has been testing limited launches on Twitter.

And it looks like they’ve gotten results they were pleased with. But I don’t think this question will be concretely answered until the Twitter community matures and it is embraced by the masses.

For me, I’m a copywriter. And most copywriters know that the best way to get new clients is to go to a seminar and socialize.

People get to know you and then they want to work with you.

Social media platforms, like Twitter, may end up providing that same social setting.

It’s worked for me so far. I’ve only been on Twitter a short while but it has already translated in to a few projects.

In Closing

Twitter is still finding it’s place. People are still exploring ways to use it and benefit from it… just like they’re doing with the Internet.

Will it end up being an essential business tool like many people think it will (@garyvee included)? I’m not sure.

But I am sure I’m going to stick around to find out.

The other day I asked you to leave a comment if you had a blog. 15 of you said you did. Awesome!

I use Google Reader as my RSS feed. I recently deleted all of my rss subscriptions because there were simply too many!

But now I’ve started over.

I’ve added all 15 of you to my RSS reader. So know that I’ll be watching the next time you post! Looking forward to what you guys have for me.

I just noticed Perry Belcher created a site based on his order button… a button he says is the most tested order button in Internet history. Check it out…

The Belcher Button

Now compare that to Eric Graham’s Ultimate Submit Button.

The Ultimate Submit Button

Can you see the similarities? What are the differences?

Ok, so we got a few questions. Thanks Tony and Ron!

I’ll be sending both of you guys “The 2 Hour Sales Letter,” “7 Copy Sins,” “Digital Scarcity,” “Tapping Michel Fortin’s Brain,” “Tapping Michel Fortin’s Brain 2,” and a series of videos on increasing email sign-ups from your blog.

Let’s start with the first question…

“Let’s say i want to have a video on my page instead of lots of copy- would you advise this, and would you script it any differently?”

My opinion is to have a bit of both. Because I skim copy when I read it, I’m not a big fan of video-only (because you can’t skim it).

But that’s only my opinion, because I don’t have data on video-only sales pages.

A master copywriter who is a big fan of video-only sales pages is Dr. Harlan Kilstein. Follow him on Twitter and you’ll likely learn more about it: http://twitter.com/drkilstein

“Are there any shortcuts to learning (Muvar 2009)?”

For some stupid reason I haven’t purchased Muvar 2009 yet. I have several copies of 2007 and 2008 so I’ve been using these.

So I don’t know the difference between ‘09 and ‘08. I’ve heard the training videos didn’t change from ‘08 to ‘09, which has left some people confused.

That said, I’m pretty dang good at using ‘08.

Probably the best thing you can do when learning the software is to get familiar with the files inside that “data” folder and how to modify them.

James advises against doing this for an understandable reason. But there are times when I want to have that option. For example, if the variable version is larger than a certain number of kilobytes, Muvar can’t save it via the admin section. You must upload the content via FTP.

“Glyphius is I suspect a good basis for learning copywriting but I still need to ensure that the flow between the paragraphs are natural. It tends to push me into stringing together sentences that don’t sound right when read aloud. Have you any tips for using it?”

Simple, if it sounds awkward throw it out. Don’t sacrifice readability for a higher score, it won’t work.

“OK now for the big one I have tried to raise the price for a product but found the drop in sales meant I was losing money. Obviously I am about to drop them again blaming the credit squeeze and currency variations. Is this a good idea or should I just drop them without a hint of reason to stop people thinking I was desperate for sales.”

I wouldn’t use the credit squeeze as a reason for lowering your prices. That does imply that less people are buying your product… and that’s not good social proof.

Instead give a positive reason. Come up with a reason for a special sale, special offer, anything. Is your birthday coming up? There’s your reason. Anything can work.

But, do you have a lot of repeat visitors to your sales page? Are people going to notice you drop or raise your prices? You may not have to mention it at all.

And I’d recommend testing your prices using Muvar. Put several different price points in there, make sure you give the proper credit to each sale, and see which price is the most profitable.