The big secret to writing copy that converts (Neil Patel and Eric Siu)

O'Neil, how much of your own copy do you write percentage-wise?

Be honest. That's a good question.

Blog post or sales copy? Everything.

Sales copy, zero. Okay, I have arguments with my team because they'll write my sales copy for my webinars and they want me to go and record and they'll make me say stuff that I don't want, so I won't say it and they just get mad and I'm like, screw you. I'm like, I'd rather not have the sales than me saying something that'll convert people and just— I just can't say stuff that I like, you're going to do well, you're going to get so much more traffic. It's not me. I don't like making promises. For blog posts, I have a guy named David Zhang who comes up with the topic ideas and then I also chime in on the topic ideas. I will then, if I'm on a plane or if I'm out and about, I will either voice transcript all the stuff that I want in the article or I'll just type it out. I can write roughly 2,000-word blog posts in 30 to 45 minutes. The sentences will all be messed up. The structure will be broken. The grammar sucks. And then I have an editor named Laura who goes in and fixes it. She then schedules it. David then goes in and fact-checks it again. Double, who's in the audience, makes sure that we're linking out to all the sources that we cited. The images are all there. They're not stolen. Don't want to get sued. And then it gets published. And then it goes to our promotion team who focus on promoting the content. Actually, all they do is just schedule on LinkedIn, Twitter, and all that because we already have followers.

But yeah. Question, when are coupons too much? For example, using them too much on ecommerce and does it cheapen your brand? I don't like doing coupons personally. I mean, anytime I've helped an ecommerce site in the past, I mean, I've used them really sparingly. I do think they cheapen the brand, but also they're helpful in drumming up sales. I mean, I should probably pull up Omar here from ties.com since he has an ecommerce site. with a great domain name. He can probably speak more to it. Neil, what do you think?

Let's look at coupon and discounts together because they're pretty much essentially the same thing, right? Sales, coupons, and discounts. And I'm talking about mass discounts, not like 5%. You're talking about 15%, 20%, you know, all the way up to like 30%, 40% for bundles and all this stuff. I've seen a lot of data from this. I've worked with companies like the Amazons, the Overstocks of the world, the eBays, and a lot of other smaller ecommerce as well as people who are providing the ecommerce platforms and other people on them. And all the data we've analyzed, we've run a ton of A/B tests on this. When you run coupons and discounts, you have a lot of people who look forward to them on a monthly basis because they know you're going to run them, so they don't buy as much and they wait for those times. But total revenue is typically higher when you run them versus not having them at all. So yes, you lose some people, But in total, your revenue is going to be higher when you have all the discounts, coupons, and stuff. But it does cheapen the brand to some extent. If you just care for revenue, it will go up. Now does profit? That varies based on how much of a discount you're offering and your business and your margins.

Final question before we open it up to the entire audience. So this is for you, Neil. What was your process for getting good at sales copywriting? How did you practice that skill initially before you were able to craft High-converting webinars, sales pages, etc.?

So I'm terrible at writing. I did extremely well in math, physics, chemistry, etc. in school. I did terrible in English. I don't read books that often. I read a lot of online copy, but I don't read books as often as I should. I suck at writing, but I've learned one thing about sales, and I learned this from a guy named Frank Kern who's amazing at selling. He's like, Neil, you don't have to be smooth. You don't have to be the best writer. You just have to answer people's objections. See, when you don't buy, you don't buy for a reason. Oh, it's too expensive, or it doesn't solve this problem, or I don't need this yet. Whatever it is, people have a reason on why they're not buying. You go compile a list of all the main reasons people in your space aren't buying. You can go survey them from SurveyMonkey or whatever it is. You go ask people what they're looking for, what issues they have when they're buying any product or service in the space. And you go write copy that just answers the objections. By answering them, people have less doubts, you get more sales. It really is that simple. It's not about having the best copy, it's about answering the objections. And secondly, creating a funnel for all the people who don't convert. For example, someone doesn't read at all, they may leave. Okay, what am I going to email them as a follow-up based on if they're on the site for, or on your webinar for 30 minutes because they watch a good portion? Okay, someone was there for 1 minute and they left. That means they didn't hear anything. So I should send them an email saying, hey John, why'd you leave? Is something wrong? Well, there's a new webinar that's coming up in the next week. Click here to register for it, right? You have to figure out the sequences and the reasons people aren't buying or why they left. Come up with the logic for it and just answer them all in your copy or your email sequence and your sales will go through the roof. That's the key to selling online.

Yeah, and from a tactical perspective, I mean, I was— last week I was at a conference. AppSumo, I mean, you know, they're doing $10 million a year now or close to it. And they're— I mean, they just have a massive email list. We're talking over a million people now. And I talked to the guy that wrote the initial emails. His name's Neville Medhora, so he's really good at copywriting. And, you know, we actually did a short interview, like a video interview on copywriting. And, you know, tactically, I mean, if you're looking to get better at copywriting, There's a book that he recommends that's really good. It's called The Boron Letters from Gary Halpert. So Gary Halpert was a really good copywriter, great marketer that wrote that book from jail, from prison because he got in trouble for marketing too aggressively, right? So he's writing all these notes to like his kids about like lessons in life and all that. But the way it's formatted, everything you need to know about copywriting, it's a great example. You can go to amazon.com, pick it up and learn to get some more sales.