For most of us, sales copy is the one thing that will make a huge difference to our revenues. You can have a great product, you can have traffic and a great looking site, but if your sales copy doesn’t convert visitors into customers, you’re throwing money away – every visit. So it makes sense that anything that can help us to achieve more sales with good copy is definitely a good thing!

Here’s the problem: most of us aren’t very good copyrwriters. There are lots of reasons for that. So some marketers turn to other people to write the copy for them. And that costs. If you get someone to do it for $500 you got a bargain. If you’re launching a serious product it might cost you thousands. That’s why I’m interested to see whether this $97 video course lives up to its own sales copy, which is very persuasive. Then again, it wouldn’t be much of an advert if their own copy was no good, would it!

Hot Copy Flowchart

HotCopy Downloads!

The whole product is massive. Some of the individual videos are 179 mb  in size – and that’s when they’re zipped!

It will take me a little while to go through the whole course, but I’m especially interested because I have a couple of product launches coming up in a week or so. I’ll be seeing how this course can help me with those.

Once I’ve finished the whole course I’ll update this post with a full review, warts and all.

I should disclose here that one of the course marketers is a personal friend, but we know each other well enough that he’ll expect me to say what I think of this course, bad or good. If it’s bad, I’ll tell you and of course it’s good I’ll be very happy to tell you that too.

UPDATE 3rd November 2009: Although the rest of this review is later than I expected it to be (see this post for why), here it is.

First, the good points. It’s a great course. There’s some really good copywriting information in it and some ways of thinking about things that really work. John Hostler clearly knows his stuff and this course is comprehensive.

BUT – and for me it’s a big but – there is one thing that I just don’t like. I don’t like the way John sounds, or speaks. His style of delivery is not for me. In fact I’d go so far as to say that it irritates me. He’s long-winded and babbles on. If he did in his copy what he does when he speaks, I don’t think he’d sell all that much.

In fact the only way I could force myself to go through the whole thing was to finish this review. Now Jon’s style might work very well for some people. It could just be me who finds it hard to listen to, but I have to tell it like it is. I found him a bit boring.

The content, on the other hand, was great – I can’t deny that. And if I’m given a choice of great style with no content, or great content and a grating style, I’ll choose the great content any day. That is, after all, the whole point of having the course.

Now let me nail my colors to the mast – I’ve bought resell rights to the Hot Chunk Copy course because I think it’s good enough to be worth selling. At the end of the day, great content is going to win, no matter what you think of the style of the presenter. Information – content – is still king.

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For Free?

Sure, who doesn’t. Where will you get it?

You could just write it yourself, of course. That’s what many of us do, with varying degrees of success. Let me suggest another way that might give you some inspiration.

Steal a headline from a magazine.

Ok, I’m not actually suggesting that you really steal a headline, but you can certainly allow a good one to inspire you. Magazines and newspapers have some amazing headlines. They have to do, to get people’s attention and make them buy.

Just think about the last time you stood in line at the supermarket checkout. Did you scan the magazines? If you did, I bet 1 or 2 made you want to know more, didn’t they? Have you ever picked one up to keep reading and see what the whole story was about?

That copywriter just earned his pay. He got you to take action.

You’ll see some excellent examples of headlines and if you study them you’ll begin to see a formula. You can use that formula, or pattern, for your own headlines in almost any niche you care to imagine. One thing really killer headlines always do is use keywords effectively. Just scan a few titles and you’ll see what I mean. You can get more information on keyword selection by clicking the link.

What if you can’t afford to buy dozens of magazines to study? You can’t very well spend all day in the checkout queue, can you? Your local newsstand vendor may be unhappy if you stand there reading without buying, too.

I recently addressed this question in a comment I made on another blog. I realized my comment may be of use to my visitors so I’m repeating it here.

…surprisingly, using print magazines as a source of inspiration for headlines is still not widely known.

It’s very surprising considering that most of us will read a magazine or newspaper at least a few times every month – even if it’s only while we stand in line at the supermarket checkout desk!

Magazines have been honing their skills in headline creation for a long time and frankly they do a better job than a lot of the so-called gurus out there.

I agree with you completely. They are a good source for your swipe file. You don’t even have to buy the magazines. Many dentists and doctors get rid of older magazines every so often and they’re happy for somebody to take them away.

Just because a magazine is a few months old doesn’t mean the headline is no good. In fact, if you collect them over a period of time you’ll see the same formula used over and over again.

As some people say, ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’.

The copywriters who work for magazines and newspapers are real experts – let them help you write your headlines.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of money on buying magazines you should be able to get a good selection free from your local doctor’s office. Just ask!

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How would you like some of the best copywriters around to help you out? I certainly would.

That’s why I was delighted to find this blog post over on John Ritskowitz’s blog today. It has a single great tip and even though it could potentially help my competition, I’m really pleased to share it here with you.

Take a look at his blog entry here.

Frankly, this is something that I had never thought of. It’s brilliant in its simplicity.

I’m not a salesman – I’m more of an educator, but my brother is a very good face to face salesman so I’m going to ask him to go through this exercise for me for a couple of my products to see what we come up with.

Sometimes you can pick up good ideas for nothing. When you do, I think it’s a good idea to jump on them and test them out as fast as you can. Why don’t you try the technique John talks about in his blog on your next salespage?

Oh, one other thing: his comments on that post are already shaping up to offer even more advice so I’d definitely recommend taking a look.

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That’s why I’ve decided to use Wednesday to do all my planning. Since it’s a quiet time of the week with fewer sales, fewer customer service issues, fewer distractions, it makes sense to use that quiet time to plan what’s happening for the following week.

After all, as they say in the cliche, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So good planning is important and so is finding the time to do it right.

It does seem strange to me that Wednesday is so universally quiet (perhaps not universally, but certainly everywhere I have contact with). It’s almost like a day that’s been designed for a bit of catch-up and forward planning.

Do you plan your week ahead? I’m thinking now especially of people who may be part time in internet marketing and have a day job. It’s hard to find time sometimes, but I’ll bet you could slot in a couple of hours more easily on a Wednesday than most of the rest of the week.

What should you plan? Well, something I would strongly recommend is article submissions. Writing quality articles and submitting them regularly is an activity that will continue to bring you traffic long after you’ve written the article. Why not plan a sequence of articles for the following month?

You could write one or two articles every Wednesday. Over time you’ll see traffic coming from the articles. You should see which one does best and then examine it carefully to see what makes it better than the others. Learn from what you do by taking the time to analyze the results.

When is a good time to analyze results? When you have some quiet time – Wednesday sounds like a good day.

It’s a good time, too, to see what emails you’ve been sent with new offers. You’re bound to get a batch of them early in the week as people look to make a sale to you. There’s a lot of good instruction in those emails.

Pull out the ones that having wanting to click on the links to look for more information. Those are the ones that have obviously worked. If you study their style, you’ll start to see a pattern after a while and if you adopt some of the techniques you notice you might find your own sales pitches picking up more customers. If you haven’t yet got a list to pitch to you’ll still learn valuable techniques for motivating people to click on a link.

And that is worth its weight in gold.

Wednesday is a quiet day, but you can get so much out of it I think you’ll find it becomes your favorite day.

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He makes an interesting point about storing up a few posts in advance of when you need them, just in case you can’t get to your regular schedule for some reason.

I’ve seen that same advice in a number of places on the web and I’ve never really put it to use. I’ve always preferred to post organically, but with a growing number of blogs and websites to maintain, I think I really should put the good advice to some practical use.

The interesting question is whether that will improve the quality of any posts, since when you’re on a roll and writing well you could churn out quite a few articles all with better readability. Especially compared to days when you’re off your game.

As most internet marketers know, fresh content, regularly updated is a boon to doing well with the search engines. But just like a supermarket that keeps a stock of product in the back, ready to roll out as soon as a shelf is empty, there are no penalties for having the content ready ahead of time!

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