I’ve just received my copy of a new course on sales copywriting.

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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