How even “awful” sales copy can nab you all the sales your diabolical heart desires
Published: Sat, 02/08/20
It talks about how to write copy and build info businesses using copy.
And, yes, do it even if your copy is downright awful.
Giddy-up…
elBENBO: You're huge on positioning. What do you mean by positioning when you teach it?
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Positioning is everything. There are probably several places that somebody can go to for a romantic vacation and they're probably all pretty good or not all of them, but there are many of them. There are thousands of them that would be pretty good. But when you think of going to, romantic spot, let's say in Europe, clearly Paris jumps right out at you as the winner and you have to deconstruct that and sort of think a little bit about that phenomenon.
It's like, I never saw an ad in my life that told me that Paris was a good place to go for a romantic vacation.
It's just, we somehow know it.
What happened?
Well, somewhere along the line, over the centuries, bit by bit, Paris became positioned, maybe even positioned itself unconsciously to a degree, as just the absolute best place to go. Positioning is winning before you even start. Now very few of us have the luxury of having the time and the resources to have ourselves and our products pre-positioned for us the way Paris does, and Paris does not spend any money on, or I don't see them spending money advertising themselves.
Everybody just knows.
So, how does positioning work?
We have limited mental processing ability. I think people's minds are fantastic and expansive and has potential to expand endlessly. However, when we go to buy toothpaste, we just want to buy. We just want to go to the store and grab the toothpaste that we always get. We don't want to sit there and have to think through, okay, toothpaste.
There's 20, especially these days, right?
There's 20 different varieties, thousand different varieties of toothpaste and which one am I going to get today? We just want one. We want the one we want. That's the one that's positioned to our minds as the toothpaste to get.
And so there's basically room in everybody's mind for one thing.
Who's your favorite baseball team?
Well, by definition there's only one for that.
Where's a great place to go in your town for dinner if you want a Chinese food? So positioning is that when people think of the category, you are the one they think of it.
Your ads should not only be working on today's leads and today's sales, they should also be working to position you in the minds of your prospect as being it for that category. And sometimes you actually get to look at the field of new competition.
So for example:
If I was a city and I wanted to get more tourist traffic, one of the tourist statements I'd go after is travel for couples. Romantic weekends. Good business, right? People spend freely and they go out to fancy restaurants and they'd probably go to a show and they're going to stay in a better hotel as opposed to a worse hotel.
So it's a good market segment to go after.
I have to realize right out of the gate that I'm not going to win the most romantic city in the world. Paris has got that. There's not enough money in the world to dislodge them from that. So what I have to do instead is I have to say, okay, I can't win best in the world, but of what best of category can I win? So if you're in Iowa, you could say, "Most Romantic City in Iowa." And, luckily if I ask you what the most romantic city in Iowa is, you probably have no clue. I have no clue. And that's a very good sign because it means that that positioning in the mind of your prospect is not taken.
There's three steps of positioning.
One is realize how absolutely important it is. If my position is the best internet marketing advisor in the world, my competitors can write all the copy they want. When we're going head to head in a sales situation, I'm probably going to win because of my positioning.
So understand what a valuable asset positioning is.
And as we've seen in the internet marketing world, a lot of guys had great positioning and they blew it by misbehavior or whatever, and they threw away a very valuable resource.
Number two, check the terrain.
You want to sell widgets. Who else is selling widgets? Can you legitimately declare that you're the best widget in a world? If you can, my God, jump on that with both feet, grab that territory and then defend it. Because it's very valuable to occupy that. Very often you're going to find there's somebody else who's been selling widgets for 40 years. They're 20,000 times bigger than us. They have more money than us. We're not going to win that positioning battle, but there's always a way to slice and dice it and find a position that you can win.
You can be the fastest delivery, you could be the most friendly service.
You could be the one that provides the most customer education.
There's a million ways that you could position yourself as the number one provider, or the number one product in any category. If you just arrange it to highlight your strengths.
And so going back to this Iowa thing, if you're a city in Iowa, do you want to get more tourist traffic and you've wisely assessed that the romance travel package deal is one of the better signets of the tourist industry. Figure out all the ways... And you discover nobody else has tried to declare themselves a top romantic destination in Iowa. Figure out the 150 ways that you are the most romantic destination in Iowa.
Objectively, there might be places that are more romantic in Iowa.
But if nobody else is going for it.
If no one else is identifying the positioning and working to establish themselves, you can take that prize and keep it. I'm counseling and consulting with a young man right now and he's doing very well in a short time. He informed me about it and I got confirmation that there's a whole world of competitive computer game players. I don't know if you knew that. There's contests, there's teams, there's leagues, million-dollar prizes. I mean this, it's a big deal in Korea where their internet speeds are a hundred times higher.
Hundred.
Not 10.
A hundred times higher than the average American home.
They can fill entire sports arenas with big screen, computer game tournaments. So anyway, this thing’s sort of bubbling underneath the surface, and he's really interested in it.
And I asked him:
“Well, who's the industry expert? Who's the go-to guy when other journalists and reporters want to get a source on this burgeoning new world of high level computer gaming?”
He said, "Well nobody really."
I said, "Well, there you go. If you want to be in this industry and you want to be in it in the most lucrative way possible, you make yourself into that guy. You already know a whole lot about it. Now it's a matter of positioning yourself so that you're identified as the guy who knows the most about it."
So I had him reach out to different business magazines, low level ones at first and pitch them on articles. So he got off, he wrote a whole bunch of articles and now he's got a little body of work.
There's a really bright guy named Elsom Eldridge who wrote a book called, The Obvious Expert, which I totally recommend to everybody, but it's just something really brilliant.
So simple.
So true.
To build your stature, build your structure.
And what's he talking about?
Well, in the case of this guy who's establishing himself as an E-Games Industry Analyst, the leading E-Games Industry Analyst, we're talking about making sure that he's got a lot of articles out there written by him. Making sure that he is using those articles strategically, and making sure that people in the industries read them.
So he's got a whole email outreach campaign so that when he writes an article, he sends a notice of it to people that he's identified.
So he's keeping himself in front of people in the industry. And he is basically converting himself from a nobody, to bit by bit he's now being perceived as the guy who gets the industry at a high level and is writing about it.
So he's working on his positioning and how does that positioning work?
Well, when he was, quote, a nobody, and he tried to get an article placed in a higher level magazine, online magazine, they were like, "Well who are you and why would we even listen to your pitch?" And now they're like, "Oh, you're the guy that does the articles on this."
Positioning.
It's extremely powerful.
Before if people wanted to call one of their top executives and talk to them for an hour, that's never going to happen. All right, but now just got these articles, and he's a journalist and he's a industry analyst and they all take his calls now.
And we did that in a matter of weeks. From zero to hero, literally.
Why did that all work?
Because I was thinking in terms of positioning.
Positioning is that instant concept that people have about you when they're exposed to you or your product.
It's like, oh yeah, this is from, John Smith, it must be crap. Or oh this is from Bill Jones. It must be really good. Because all this other stuff is really good. He's been positioned as someone who stuff is really good versus somebody who's stuff isn't really good.
elBENBO: You don't have to have the best ad out there if you have great positioning.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: No, you really don't. And you always want the best ad you possibly can have. But like I said, if you have worked at, and bit by bit, ticked off all the boxes, and gotten your name out in the right places and get the and positioning, a position that's valuable…
You win the battle before it starts.
We're not talking about adding ad copy, we're not talking about a better headline.
It's a way for people to go, "Oh okay, trustworthy."
Here's the thing, nobody, no client, no prospect has time to do thorough due diligence on everything they buy or really anything they buy. At a certain point, we just have to sort of say, "I'm going to try it and see what happens.”
So ends part 3 of my interview with the great Ken McCarthy.
He’s offering his prestigious “Advanced Copywriting For Serious Info Marketers” course at a gigantic discount for my Horde only, until Sunday, 2/9 at midnight EST. Plus, if you use my affiliate link and send me your receipt & shipping address by that deadline (not after — to be clear, you must send it to me, not just buy the course, BEFORE the deadline), I will send you a copy of:
“Crypto Marketing Secrets”
This is the entire 30-issue run of my old “Crypto Marketing Newsletter” in a book.
This print newsletter ran from early 2010 through mid 2012.
It is also not for sale anywhere else, and less than a couple hundred people — give or take — on the planet even possess it at all.
NOTE:
This is a *physical* book that will be sent by mail at my expense.
Retail value: $810.00 (30-issue run, each issue costed $27)
It’s yours when you buy Ken’s copywriting course via my affiliate link during the sale here:
http://www.EmailPlayers.com/secret-course
Ben Settle