Category: Marketing Systems

From the desk of Razvan Rogoz,

In my last article, I’ve explained what I’ve learned from my failures. In this one, I’m doing the opposite – explaining what my victories taught me. To be honest, this is a lot harder, because a lot of things happened in very specific circumstances and I do not know if they would happen otherwise. So for all intents and purposes, I’m sticking to universal, evergreen principles.

Principle #1 – Networking matters

No matter if you are a copywriter or a product developer or a marketer, you need other people. It is too slow and sometimes too hard to do everything yourself. Building a list of 10000 people may take you two years but if you find someone who has such a huge list and you offer a win – win deal, you can build it in three months.

My progress in life is tied to a large degree by what people I meet and what value I can create to them. While you can get your first $1000 or even $10.000 alone, eventually, you need partners or advisors or mentors. Even if the people you meet don’t help you directly, a good piece of advice provided at the right time can do wonders.

Everything you do and learn is just a means to an end.

The end is serving others.

The better you serve by creating value, the more money you’ll make. If you serve the marketplace, the better you’ll create value for them, the more will buy. If you serve someone like a boss, the more money you make for him, the more he’ll pay you (or will have to pay you if he doesn’t want you to leave).

The best marketers I know, people earning seven figure per year, real seven figures, not fake PayPal screenshots are master networkers. They go to every possible internet marketing conference. They invite the people they know to dinner, often, building a relationship and usually receiving great advice. They’ve made a process out of this, constantly improving their network.

Principle #2 – Systemize

From time to time I get rare moments of inspiration like “go to the gym you dumbass’. So I go. One day, two days, three days. Then I step and I sit on my ass for another six months until I get another moment of inspiration.

This is how most people live their life. They do take good decisions but these are short lived and rare in between. And as you know, eating salad only once is not useful, if the rest of the week you’re eating burgers. Walking 10.000 steps a day and then sitting on a chair every day is not going to keep you fit and healthy.  Working for a full day and then not working for two weeks won’t win you any awards.

Almost everything that’s worthwhile doing must be done on a recurring basis. You must work almost daily. You should read daily. You must shower daily. You must go to the gym daily. You must clean your house weekly. You must cut your hair monthly and so on. Nothing is a one time event. Everything is part of a process that repeats itself.

And this is how I structured my life, based on rituals that I need to repeat. Some things are daily. Others are weekly. Yet, my entire life is built on repeatable tasks. I know that reading one book won’t make a big difference. I know that reading one hour a day for one year it’s going to make a huge one.

So it is with marketing. You must email your customers on a periodic basis, post on your blog, create products. Let’s focus a bit on the products. There is a thing called product cycle. For example, you know that the iPhone is launched every year in September. This means that Apple develops a new iPhone within 12 months. That’s a ritual, a system for them. You’re not going to see them break for this and I think they stuck with this system since the very first one.

So you must have with your own products. Set a development cycle. It can be three months. Every three months, launch a new product. It doesn’t matter if you are making a killing with your existing one. Divert 20% of your resources to the new one and keep innovating, keep finding better ways to produce value.

Any great success is built by having a cycle that you repeat again and again. You can improve this cycle, you can tweak it but in essence it must be a wheel that spins until you reach the destination. Forget about Eureka moments. Real life looks more like a marathon than a sprint.

Principle #3 – Progress is better than perfection

I hate the concept of perfect. It’s never perfect. The last 10%, to get from 90% to 10% usually takes more effort and time than the first 90%. For me, good enough is good enough. I’m aiming at that sweet spot where my effort has the highest ROI as opposed to spending considerable more effort to have an incremental improvement.

Let’s say that it takes you 20 hours to write a good sales letter and 100 hours to write a great sales letter. If that 0.5% increase in conversion accounts for tens of thousands of dollars in extra profits, sure, invest the time. But if it doesn’t, if the difference is too small to make a dent, then just settle with what’s good enough.

The “good enough” rule is generally 80%. This means that if you achieve a “score” of 80% on something, you can use it. Of course, you get better results by getting to 100% but here’s the kicker, investing that time that you’d invest on the last 20% can get you another 80% on another goal. So would you rather have two 80% quality goals accomplished or a 100% quality one? In most cases, the first solution is better.

Principle #4 – Taking decisions based on emotional estimations

You meet a beautiful girl. You go on a date. You kiss. You go home and daydream about her. You see the two of you having children and living together. You plan your entire life with her.

That’s emotional estimation. It’s imagining how something will turn out based on your emotions, your hope and not on facts. It’s making a sale and then thinking you’ll make sales every day or starting a project and planning what you’ll do with all the money that will come in.

Emotional estimation is generally not harmful. I do day dream too, even if it makes no sense. It’s what makes us human. Problem starts when you start making decisions based on your daydreams – in the above case, buying a wedding ring and giving up on your job so you can spend more time with her. Or in the case of online marketing, seeing a minor success and then investing all your money into one method, just because you’re excited that something works, without having statistically significant results.

Emotional estimation is also working with someone for a short time, seeing some good results or ideas and then offering a full time job.

The idea here is that you can’t use hope as a way to measure your future. Yes, things may turn out fine but they may also turn out quite bad. Just because you fantasize about a certain outcome happening, this doesn’t mean that your current circumstances will lead there. Even if the chance is 50 – 50, this means that in the long term, you’ll lose for every time you’ve won.

True visionaries see a future that doesn’t exist and act on that. Yet, they are not day dreaming. It’s a difference. I can day dream all I want that tomorrow I’ll win $1.000.000 but it won’t happen. I can though see a future where I have that one million and work towards. One is highly improbable. The other one is simply a goal.

The worst thing about emotional estimation is not about the positives that may happen but rather, the negatives. It is thinking that the past equals the future and that if something bad happened, it will keep happening. It’s losing 20% from your stock portfolio’s value and selling everything fearing that’s going to drop even more or writing a sales letter, not making any sales and giving up on the market because it is not good or because online marketing doesn’t work.

That’s emotional estimation of the worst kind – where you take fear based decisions just because something didn’t went accordingly to the plan. Use data, real data to validate your decisions. Look at how the world really is and then plan what to do next. In most cases, both unfounded optimism and pessimism end up false. While many people say “what you fear almost never happens”, I can also say “what you hope almost never happens”. The only thing that does happen is what you work towards. Causality drives the world, not your or my emotions.

Principle #5 – Use Metrics To Your Advantage

Almost everything in life can be measured and quantified. Everything from your heartbeats to how often you breath to how many unique visitors you get to your website to your hourly real revenue.

Metrics serve two purposes. The first one is to help you see long term progression. It’s hard to say if you’ve grown or not unless you measure it. A runner knows that he’s doing better because he can run now in average six miles instead of just four. A marketer knows that his sales letter is better because he sells 2.4 customers per 100 instead of just 1.8. So metrics are very effective at providing a snapshot of your progression in time.

The second one is that metrics are perfect for setting goals. It’s one thing to say “earn a lot of money” and another to say “make 49 sales of our $997 product”. Metric based goals are the most pure kind and the most effective because progress can always be tracked. It’s hard to track a goal like “be happy”, but it’s easy to track a goal like “dance 30 minutes every day” is easy.

While it’s hard to reduce the complex experience of living to numbers, I believe that whatever you want to improve you can reduce to a numeric value or a binary one (yes / no). If you want to wake up earlier, you can track your wake up time and variations (either as an absolute value or based on your wake up hour). If you want to work more, you can track how many hours you invest.

If you want to track your fitness, you can use something like Fitocracy to measure your efforts through points. You can even add a secondary metric, as it is rare for a single number to tell the entire story. For example, if you measure your business only by revenue but not by expenses, you can earn $100.000 per month and have a $50.000 net loss with $150k in expenses. So you need a second or even a third metric.

For a very good explanation of how to set effective goals using metrics, please read or listen to “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. As a bonus, you’ll also learn about the brilliant theory of constraints, which would be point number six.

There are many more things I can add here because if you are perceptive enough, you can learn from almost every victory and failure you have, no matter how big or small. However, for now keep in mind these six and try to implement them in your own life and business.

Are you interested in discovering how I can help your business or how we can apply these concepts to your own venture? Then let’s have a talk. For a limited time, I’m giving away complementary 30 minute calls. In these sessions, we’ll discuss ways in which we can maximize your customer value, boost your conversion, achieve more sales and increase any other relevant metrics in your business.

Please use the link below to get started:

Click Here For Your Complimentary 30 Minute Call!

Best regards,
Razvan Rogoz
The Business & Self-Improvement Copywriter

Click Here For Your Complimentary 30 Minute Call!

Hello,

Experience taught me that the worst thing to do when starting a copywriting project is to write. Two things can happen. You either have to rewrite everything because nothing is actually a market match or you end up not making sales, which will lead to you rewriting everything. It’s either wasted time or wasted time and wasted traffic.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that you should fall into a paralysis of analysis and delay writing as much as possible. No. It’s just that without getting clear on what you’re trying to transmit, the letter is likely to fail. The letter may fail even if you get clear on these things, that’s true, but you’ll have a far better chance of succeeding.

The first question is “should we be selling this?”.

This is not a joke. At least in 1 out of 3 cases, the answer is no. Many times the product solves a need that nobody has. Other times, the competition is offering something cheaper and better. Yet, other times, the idea is good but the execution is awful.

When you are the product creator, it is easy to lose perspective on the bigger picture. You are in love with your work. You know how much time you’ve invested in it. You believe it is the best thing in the world. Everyone around you is proud of you.

Yet, this doesn’t mean anything if your market is not interested. If you ask ten copywriters and all ten tell you “your product doesn’t solve a problem in the marketplace”, then you should go back to the drawing board.

If you are solving a problem but the mechanism is flawed, then keep the vision but change the approach. There are many ways to solve the same problem and in the end, you’re not selling the feature, you’re selling the benefit. When someone buys a drill, he’s not buying a piece of metal. He’s buying the hole that the metal is going to make. So discard the way you are making that hole and still sell the outcome.

A word of warning though – if your product is not something for which people would pay for (because the need isn’t there or there are far easier ways to accomplish it), then I suggest you give up on the idea and get back to product development.

The second question is “who is my buyer here?”.

This is a trick question. The buyer is generally the person that pays for the product. If you are selling a guide on how a student can ace his SAT exams, then your buyer persona is the student, right?

Well, not really. It is the parents, as they are paying for the course and they are making the buying decision. The student is the end user but he’s not going to Google online about courses and pay for it from his allowance money.

In the executive coaching field, many people think that the customer is the C-level executive that is receiving the service. No. The HR department usually employs executive coaches and they are the ones who need to be persuaded. It is very rare that you need to sell to the end-user but rather, to the purchasing middleman.

This is especially true in the B2B field where you have buyers, influencers, gatekeepers and users and you need to appeal to all of them. The buyer may be the CFO who cares first about the cost and the ROI. The influencers may be other CFOs who have bought similar products or the CEO. The influencer may not take the decision but he is very important in the buying process. The influencer may also be the end user. If the CFO goes to the manager who benefits from the product and asks for his opinion, then what he says will matter quite a lot towards the final buying decision. Finally, gatekeepers are those that guard access to the buyer, like secretaries who may delete your direct mail package.

Once you’ve determined the real buyer (hint: about 70% of all buying decision in the household are made by the woman, even when the products don’t benefit her directly), you must get clear on who is your buyer persona.

Your buyer persona is a fictional character that represents your marketplace. Think of a character in a movie or a book. The more you understand this character, the easier it will be for you to sell.

Yet, here’s where you are most likely to fail. Most people create complex buyer persona’s and they make sense but these personas are rarely anchored in reality. You see, your buyer persona is nothing more than a representation of your REAL prospect. It is someone to whom you’re writing that is as close as possible to your real marketplace. So if you build a market persona that is not accurate from the desires, beliefs, fears and behaviors perspectives, you’ll not make sales. It’s as easy as that.

My approach is to base my buyer’s persona on someone I know. I find someone that needs my product and is interested in my product and then I try to sell to her directly. If my product is a weight loss course, then I go to the gym and I find someone out of shape who is really struggling without making any effort. I observe this person. I try and talk with her. I try to really understand what’s going in her mind and soul. Many times, I befriend her in the most sincere way. This gives me a buyer persona as close to reality as possible. I sell to a real human being, not to an imaginary fictional character.

The third question is “why should anyone buy my product?”

This is what I call the “stress test”. I’m trying to see my product from a critical perspective and come up with every good reason someone would pay (or would not pay) money for it. The purpose is not to discourage myself but rather, to make a preliminary list of benefits and of objections.

The key goal here is to come up with the POD (point of differentiation) benefits. These are the ways your product is different from the competition, different in a manner that has value to your marketplace. Answering “because it is good” is not the right way to do this. Instead, you must really dive deep into the features and benefits of your product to come up with what makes it special. For example, did you know that a selling point for MacBooks is that the screen is perfectly balanced? This means you can raise it with one hand. It doesn’t seem a big deal but many people noticed this and praised this attention to detail in their reviews.

At the same time, you must come up with every reason why they wouldn’t buy it too. This can be because nobody knows you, the price, entrenched competition, slow delivery or whatever else you may come up with. You should do this in order to proactively solve these problems (or at least the most important ones).

My mindset here is simple. If you can sell to the most skeptical prospect, someone who doesn’t want to have to do with you, then selling to a normal, average one will be a walk in the park. Always prepare for the worst, even if in practice it will be a lot easier.

I won’t blame you if you skip this question. I do this sometimes too. I want my product to work. I want to believe in the best outcome. However, life showed me that what happens has little to do with what I expect to happen and it is better to stress test your ideas early, with a small investment, than late when you’ve put it all in.

The fourth question is “what is my hook?”

In all honesty, this is something you’ll spend a few hours on after you start writing your letter. Yet, you should think about your hook before starting because everything you write will aim to match it.

A hook is the central point of interest in your copy. It can be a story or an event. It is practically the story. In a movie, the hook is the reason why the movie is interesting. The difference between good and great copywriting is the quality of your hook. John Carlton is one of the best copywriters in the world but what makes him special is coming with some quite brilliant hooks. In one of his sales letter, he told the story of a one legged golf player. This hook brilliantly connected to a balancing technique golfers can use and the product that teaches this. In another he tells this story of a average looking guy working as a bodyguard for metal rock-bands. It was a promo about a self-defense video set and how this guy could take down people two times his size.

For investment products, the 2008 crisis was a good hook. The BitCoin bubble is again a good hook. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is because it is not a formula, but rather a concept. But no matter how you see it, your hook will be the central idea that will make someone want to read your promotion. To determine if you have a good hook, ask yourself this …

“If my story would be standalone, in other words, not selling a product, would it still be interesting and captivate my reader? Could I still entertain my reader with a good story even if I don’t connect it to a product?”

If this is the case, you have a good hook. If your hook is your product, then you need to go back to the drawing board.

The fifth question is “how am I’m going to test this?”

I’ve seen many people writing a sales letter and then not sending any traffic to it. Now while having a sales letter is better than no sales letter, you must remember that it works only with traffic. You can’t expect people to find your site by default. You must drive them there.

When you ask yourself this upfront, you must also come with some viable mediums. For example, let’s say that you are writing an advertorial in the investment field. If you research the websites that allows you to promote your advertorial, then you can understand the tone and the type of audience found there. This allows you to write your advertorial in a way that matches where it is placed.

This is generally an advanced strategy but the highest leverage in online marketing is matching your copy with your traffic type. Facebook leads reply better to some approaches while Google PPC responds to others. While you don’t need to worry too much at this moment, at least ask yourself what mediums you’re going to use.

Before ending, keep in mind that once you answer these questions, you should write. Don’t wait, don’t procrastinate. If the idea makes sense and if you get clear on what you’re selling to whom, don’t wait until inspiration strikes. Writing a sales letter has little to do with creativity and everything to do with your marketplace. Write your first draft. You don’t need to post it online, just get it done. Then write your second. Third. Show it to other people. Ask if they’d buy. Read it aloud. Make constant progress towards your goal.

Usually the first copy I write is not that good. There are many good ideas but nothing flows together. Only at draft 2 or even draft 3 my copy starts to make sense and to resemble a conversation.

Are you interested in discovering how I can help your business or how we can apply these concepts to your own venture? Then let’s have a talk. For a limited time, I’m giving away complementary 30 minute calls. In these sessions, we’ll discuss ways in which we can maximize your customer value, boost your conversion, achieve more sales and increase any other relevant metrics in your business.

Please use the link below to get started:

Click Here For Your Complimentary 30 Minute Call!

Best regards,
Razvan Rogoz
The Business & Self-Improvement Copywriter

Click Here For Your Complimentary 30 Minute Call!