Jim Edwards and Stew Smith discuss what makes salescopy work best for you. How your sales pages flow is important. Having a hook, a compelling story and a dynamite offer is how it works. You need to remind people that you have the answer to their problems and tell them what you, your products, and service do vs telling them what it actually is. As Jim says, “It is not what it IS, it is what it DOES.”
PLUS Jim gives some examples of the hook, story, offer process. Check it out!
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Jim Edwards: Hey everybody, Jim Edwards here and welcome back to the Sales Copywriting and Content Marketing Hacks Podcast…
I’m your host Jim Edwards on my trusty co-host and Podcast Producer
Mr. Stew Smith…
Welcome, Stew…
Stew Smith: Thank you, Jim.
Jim Edwards: Today we’re going to be talking about sales copy flow.
In the past, we have done all sorts of critiques of people’s funnels, of their sales copy of their opt-in pages, of their sales letters have their high-ticket funnels, of their webinars on all different types of sales copy and funnels.
And one of the biggest things that people mess up on other than trying to sell what it is rather than what it does is the overall flow of the sales copy.
So, we’re going to talk about that for a bit today.
Sure, we’ll riff and have some fun as men do, and it’ll be a good time.
So, just to talk about that one thing.
The biggest snafu that we see people making some sales copy is that they’re just they’re talking about what it is, rather than what it does they lead with features and stuff that nobody really cares about.
Stew Smith: And what does that mean, specifically?
Jim Edwards: Well, it means like, it means Okay, so let’s say you’re selling…
Let’s say you’re selling.
Wind sailing lessons.
Stew Smith: Okay?
Jim Edwards: Okay…
Most people, the headline for their, for their, their, their funnel might be when sailing lessons that literally that would be the first words on their site…
So that’s a feature…
So, then somebody else might say, “Hey, I’m a better marketer than that.”
So, I’m going to put up here, learn to win sale…
Okay, well, that’s not maybe a little bit better, that’s still a feature,
but how that feels that,
“Discover how you can feel the wind in your hair, the ocean at your feet”
“How to how to how to experience true freedom and being at one with wind and sea through wind sailing windsurf.”
Mean to so kind of thing like that…
It’s like, okay, man, it’s almost sounds like I’m on my way to yoga class, right?
So, the just what’s the big payoff of learning how to, Susan says, “learn how to not get beat up by your win sale.”
that’s how we do without getting injured or eaten by jaws nothing will keep you on that win sale board like the thought that there’s a 10-foot shark ready to devour you if you fall off.
Stew Smith: Yeah, or if you see it from your perch position.
Jim Edwards: But that’s something along those lines how to or discover or experience the true joys of wind sailing and windsurfing or whatever they call it windsurfing in one easy lesson without even if you’re afraid of the water or something…
I mean, it’s again, you got to know your Avatar…
What would somebody who wanted to go windsurfing really, really want.
They want to enjoy watersports.
They want to do something that’s good for the environment.
They want to do something fun you can do pretty much anywhere you have water and wind.
What do they want to avoid?
They want to avoid taking forever to learn.
They want to not get injured.
They want to do something that’s fun to do with other people make new friends…
Learn how yoga can make your windsurfing phenomenal.
Yeah, maybe I’ll start doing well, or doing yoga on my paddleboard.
Stew Smith: A lot of people do that.
Jim Edwards: They get real wet looking but
So, don’t know if that’s the greatest example I could ever pulled out of my nether regions in a live setting.
But you see what I’m going at I mean wind surfing lessons is not the same as experienced the ultimate freedom with the wind in your hair, and as you speed over the speed through the water, like a wind surfing Pro, or just something where you’re painting a picture of the emotionally pleasing result that you’re going to get at the end.
That’s why I should just stick with my money examples.
Stew Smith: That’s what it is and what it that’s what it does, right?
That’s that is what that saying means is mean adding some emotion to that headline,
Jim Edwards: right
Stew Smith: Work so you can actually hook somebody!
Jim Edwards: and you can also you can also use a bullet bundle at the top after that where all those things and trying to get in there, environment environmentally friendly and fun.
Something you can do with friends and family throughout the year…
A great new adventure to have while on vacation…
I mean all these different things that you can hit with a bullet bundle…
That’s not what I wanted to talk about!
Well, so we’re going to stop you liking about us…
Stew Smith: You like to surf, you like the sale…
Try wind sailing…
Love it twice as much…
Jim Edwards: That’s right…
Come on down to stews, yoga, and windsurfing Emporium, a former Navy SEAL, will teach you exactly how not to get eaten by sharks!
So, let’s talk about flow.
Now, there are all kinds of stuff that you could talk about when it comes to sales, copy and flow.
But ultimately, it comes back to the hook story offer…
When you have the flow of anything, whether it’s an ad, a blog post, a full-on sales letter, an opt-in funnel, or even a high-ticket funnel or webinar funnel, it all comes down to the flow his hook story offer.
Nobody cares about your offer until they know the story behind it.
Nobody cares about your story until you have hooked them the right way.
Because it’s kind of like just walking up to people and start spouting off about yourself or some story.
They think that you’re either talking to somebody through an earbud in your phone and you’re not talking to them or that you’re deranged.
You need…
You got to have all the parts in their right places.
So, the hook is what you use to stop people can be a picture.
It can be a headline; it can be a question.
It can be a quote, it can be a whole bunch of different things, but it’s to get the right people to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to what you’re doing.
You check in your email right now.
Stew Smith: I’m reading some of the comments.
Jim Edwards: Okay, then the story and engaged the story that you roll the story, people think, oh, the story’s got about me, or the story’s got to be about somebody else.
No, the story can just be a story.
It’s, it’s, it can be a story about you, it can be a story about somebody else.
It can be a story about client success that can be a story about a fictional character.
It can be a story about a product or a service or a software or about it can be a story about anything, and you think about a story doesn’t have to be 15 minutes long or 15 pages long or 15 sentences or 15 words…
The answer is sure.
It can be Any of those things depending on the context, you’re not going to tell a 15-page story in an ad…
But you could say something like, let’s say we were selling yoga and we want to do an ad to drive people to a course, about yoga…
Are you curious about what yoga could do?
to increase your sense of calm.
And well-being?
Just again, throwing that out there?
Okay, and then the store, so that’s the hook…
Are you have you ever been curious about what yoga can do to give you a sense of inner power, inner, inner peace, and calm?
Here’s the story…
I used to think that yoga was total BS, and it was for woo woo people…
But then I took my first class, and my whole life changed…
That’s a story.
Stew Smith: Okay, story.
Jim Edwards: And then the offer is, click here to find out more…
Or find out or discover what I or I’m just trying to think of,
Blick here to find out more is okay…
discover for yourself or what was it click here to find out the big shift that happened for me…
again, it’s not perfect copies never perfect when it first comes out of you just get it down and then you own it…
But right there, that was an example of a hook story offer, I told a story in two sentences that are probably going would probably get somebody excited.
So, it can also be a big long thing…
So, you can make an entire sales letter that’s hook story offer.
An example might be for a piece of software where I do this all the time you got the hook, and then you’ve got the story which can be in the form of a video sales letter can also be in the form of a written sales letter.
And then the offer is your offer stack of all the stuff they’re going to get, which is either all the things and or all the benefits and payoffs of everything that they’re going to get.
Now, once you’ve got that flow, then you can start adding other stuff that people like, what about testimonials?
What about guarantees?
What about all these different things once you’ve got that layout, depending on the situation, then you can start adding testimonials…
Now, where would the testimonials go?
Well, typically, the testimonials are going to go after you have introduced the solution.
So, when you do the first mention of the product, the first part of the offer, then you can say but, this going to help you with this, this, this, this, this and this.
And then…
“But don’t just take my word for it…
Here’s what these people had to say…”
So, in that context, that’s where that would go as opposed…
To let’s say it was a high-ticket funnel where I was just trying to get people to sign up for coaching…
Well, then I want to put those client testimonials early…
In fact, the whole story, instead of a video sales letter, if all I’m trying to do is get a phone call all of those client testimonials or the case studies are going to be the story that I use to make the sale…
So, let’s say Stew had a sales letter where he was trying to sell people into his into his coaching program, his live coaching program that I’m in…
So, he might say, are you ready to take your fitness to the next level?
Are you ready to take your tactical fitness to the next level, like these people have?
And then you have a couple of case studies where somebody like me gets on and says, “Hey, I was 42 years old…
I was 60 pounds overweight…
I had tried a whole bunch of different things and had actually been in great shape early…
In my early in life, and then life, business, and health got in the way…
And so, for about 20 years, I let myself go…
And one day I decided I was going to get into shape…
Now…
Make no mistake, it wasn’t easy.
I could barely walk to the post office box and back about 200 yards from my house.
So that’s exactly what I did…
Every day I walked back and forth from the mailbox.
Then I walked a little further and a little further and a little further.
Gradually the weight started to melt off.
And keep in mind, this long before I’d ever heard of Stew Smith.
So, over the next couple of years, by hook and by crook reading lots of books, working with a couple different people, I was able to lose about 40 pounds, and then I kind of got stuck…
And I realized that if I wanted to really take my fitness to the next level, I was going to need to get some help…
So, I started looking around…
I tried a couple of different people to give me a hand…
And then I found Stew Smith…
But it didn’t make sense for me to work with Stew…
Because Stew was training people to do Army, Navy, Navy SEAL stuff, all this and that wasn’t me…
I was in my mid I was fat and 40 and then less fat and still over 40…
And so, I didn’t do anything for a while I just kept going along and going along…
And then I found an article or not an article by found a post by somebody in a group that was talking about how Stew helped him get ready for a 24-hour challenge, a 24 hour go ruck challenge…
And I saw another person saying how Stew helped him to increase his pull-ups…
I’d already thought I’d always thought of pull-ups as the ultimate example of strength…
And somebody who could do 10 pull-ups was somebody who was in really good shape…
At the time, I could only do eight…
So, I went and looked at Steve’s program again, and I still wasn’t sure about pulling the trigger…
So, my wife at the time was outside working in our garden, I walked out, I said, Honey, this isn’t cheap…
It’s not super expensive…
But I’m thinking about hiring this guy to coach me…
And so, she looked at, and she said, give it a try if you’re going to do what he says, and give it a try…
And so, I went back in the house, and I signed up…
And then I waited, like 15 minutes, and nothing happened…
So, I like got on the phone and called Stew.”
And I said, “Hey, Hey, is this dude, he’s like, yeah, I said, Hey, my name is Jim Edwards, I just signed up for your program…
Am I going to get like an intake form and all that stuff?”
And I started, but the data didn’t, Steve just said, Look, I’m going to send you something over.
And we talked for a couple minutes, and I’ll never forget…
He said, basically, what he said was, just do what I tell you, and I will get you into the shape you want to be in.
And so, I said, Okay,
I’m going to do it.
Now…
Again, it wasn’t an overnight thing…
It was It took a while, and the workouts were hard, and sometimes it was taking a couple hours to go through these workouts…
And so, but gradually what happened over the months as I got better…
And then something amazing happened…
What used to be my whole workout, turned into an easy warmup.
stuff that I used to think was impossible was my warmup.
And the thing that let me know that Stew had really helped me was the fact that when I started with Stew, I could only do eight pull-ups in a row.
My personal best now is 36 in a row.
So if you’re on the fence about working with Stew, all I can tell you from my perspective is the best decision I’ve ever made to get into great shape and the other benefits as far as my self-confidence, my self-image, and just overall outlook on life has been amazing…
So, go ahead.
Don’t wait.
Sign up with Stew now.
I’m Jim Edwards.
Stew Smith: Dam, I’m going to put this on my YouTube channel.
Jim Edwards: If you could get somebody to give even just one person’s
Stew Smith: That was good.
Jim Edwards: Giving, and it’s all true, that’s the thing…
It’s all true…
But if you could get one person to give you a testimonial like that, and that whole flow that I went through there that was all done on purpose, that was practice…
I’m not
practicing that…
But I mean, that
all that stuff, it wasn’t all perfect.
I didn’t jump on it right away.
I tried other stuff.
My wife told me it was okay.
But all those things are part of a pattern that we’ll talk about someday, like for the perfect thing, but I mean,
All he’s got to do is have that headline, that thing, and then talk about, “Hey, here’s who I am and who I help…
Here’s what it’s like to be in the program…
And if this sounds like something you want to do, click here to apply now granted it’s not $1,000 a month, so you might experiment with that just having people just sign up directly.
So, there’s but if you can get that kind of a story a lot of the stuff you might be adding to go with that is talking people out of the sale.
I give him so much extra information.
So that’s the that’s another example of flow where were you figuring out what’s your purpose?
What elements do I need in order to make this work?
But it always comes back to the hook story offer.
There’s always the hook, the story, the offer, and there are other parts, and you might have things in different places, but it’s always hook, story, offer and if you can’t look at it and see hook, story, offer…
You’re wrong!
So anyway, Any thoughts or things or questions or anything?
Stew Smith: No.
I’m a little disappointed though you didn’t bring out the building blocks for this demonstration, but your story of your Stew Smith fitness journey far supersedes any building block demonstration.
Jim Edwards: Where there you go, so that’s where we, we couldn’t
pull it but it’s true.
And I mean, you don’t do enough marketing.
I’m just saying, you don’t you could have I mean, if you take that video and you put up a page, and you take that video, and I’ll rerecord the video for you if you want, but if you had that headline, remember what it was, it was pretty freaking cool…
That headline, that story?
Basically, who is Stew Smith and who does he help and what’s it like to be in the program and if this sounds like if this sounds like you want to go on this journey with us click here.
And that just takes him over to a simple order page.
I guarantee, I guarantee we could that would have the same kind of effect as that.
This thing that you do, as the as I remember when we did that, and you’re like, man, things really taken off when I started doing this same effect, as when you did that.
That post it notes thing.
Stew Smith: So, yeah, post it notes, with a little personalized note.
Right product.
Jim Edwards: Exactly, yeah. So, the flow thing, you got to, you got to understand, like I said, Now I’m just repeating myself, but what’s the purpose of your funnel?
What is the what is the action you want them to take?
And then you start with hook story offer and then figure out what’s the other stuff I got to put in there in order to get them to take that action…
And it always comes back to just different building blocks to increase credibility, explain exactly what you’re going to get when you’re going to get it to remove the risk, or to remove nervousness, that’s usually that’s with your guarantee…
And then like the PS and the stuff at the end to kind of drive them back up if they’re skimming, but that’s, that’s the flow that is the basic flow of everything when it comes to sales copy.
And the other thing though, when we say and let me show my screen, and if you’re not seeing my screen well that’s okay if you’re on the podcast, you can go to the go to the sales, Copywriting Content Marketing Hacks Podcast on Facebook…
When we’re thinking about, this flow of hook, story, offer, which are the basic building blocks of any sales message.
The thing that you got to understand is that over here, all of before you can do that you have to clearly define your Avatar,
You got to know what are the buttons that somebody’s going to, that you can push with somebody specifically around different emotions, that’s going to activate them.
Things around their pain around their desires, around their questions around their roadblocks, their goals,
All these things that then you’ll notice what I do when I know the Avatar have a good real good sense of the Avatar, then we can plug into the scripts that work for all of these things.
If I really know and using the example of Stew and his fitness stuff, if you want to
live longer…
If you want to not get old before your time, if you want to be strong and flexible and able to handle take care of situations mean that’s then it’s almost like
I’m building myself up, and they’re not building myself up, but I’m, it’s like a warmup when you’re defining the Avatar.
It’s like, you get started and then what’s let’s dig deeper and dig deeper and dig deeper.
If you want to know if you and want to have the absolute confidence that you are in the best shape of your life and could handle a tactical or life and death situation better than you can right now.
Then it’s important to start getting into shape, and there’s no you without a day to lose.
I mean, Susan and I say this to each other all the time…
One of the biggest reasons that we work out is because I don’t want to get old and sick.
I want to be old and strong and flexible.
And I am fighting father time every single day.
I want to know that if something happens, like what happened last night, in my house with the burglar alarm going off, thank God it was a false alarm.
But I mean, I know I’m in better shape than I was seven years ago to either have to fight somebody, protect my family or literally pick up a child and run 200 or 300 yards to get away from a situation.
I’m confident that I can handle that.
So, once that Avatar, you can start talking their language and making even better hooks, even better stories, even better offers, even better guarantees than if you don’t know the Avatar.
So, the biggest thing is it all starts with the Avatar.
And then it goes to “Okay, what are you trying to accomplish?”
So, if we were to get what, I’m going to back over here to this screen because this is,
This kind of like thinking this stuff through.
If we look at, I’m going to delete this because really the flow of this it starts with the Avatar, and then it goes to your objective…
Okay?
What do you want them to do?
What is your objective with the funnel, which is then going to dictate how you structure your hook story offer, but it’s still going to be a hook, story, offer.
So that’s an interesting little distinction starts with the Avatar, what do you want them to do?
And then what’s the hook story offer that’s going to and all the pertinent parts that’s going to get you what you want…
So don’t know what we need to talk about on that Stew.
Stew Smith: Well, that was a perfect answer…
And any additional comments for me would take away from that perfection…
So, I am done…
I was in the receive-only mode for that one, and I’m glad I was because that was great.
Jim Edwards: Cool!
Well, if you are,
I’m just saving this.
So that was basically Avatar.
Objective purpose or purpose.
Yep.
And hook story offer.
That’s, that’s, I’m going to play with that.
Now.
Stew Smith: That’s great.
Jim Edwards: A little bit more because that’s a good distinction…
I don’t know if you all thought that.
and Denise says, and don’t try to do your hook story offers use the scripts…
Yes.
And there’s a script for the in a wizard for the Avatar too.
Yes, that makes a great article, by the way.
Do you do you want to see something?
Oh, well, next time next time, I’ll show you the new listicle wizard.
You’re going too nuts over this.
I created the list I created the listicle wizard.
Stew Smith: No, it’s fun.
No, you have a little helper class wizard already right there.
Jim Edwards: There is the dynamic list.
Yeah, list wizard, but I have taken that and it’s like the 62nd tidbit wizard, and the list wizard had a baby.
And it’s amazing, amazing!
So, we’ll go over that next time.
Okay, so appreciate everybody. Hope you have a great day.
If you’re not a member of the sales, copywriting content marketing hacks group on Facebook, you should be because then you could be here live when we do these things and be able to ask questions, give comments, and do all kinds of good stuff with us as opposed to sitting there alone with your phone wishing you could interact with Stew and me because we’re so cool.
You could definitely honestly, I mean, who knows, you might learn you might win a chance to do a hot yoga class with me and stew one day.
We’re at the back of the room now.
So, everybody have a great day, and we will talk to you soon.
Bye, everybody.
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