MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

I’ve combined some of the things I learnt from Matt Furey with my own approach to writing, and the result is a winning combination that I use to write emails that actually make money.

For me, writing an email is a 4-step process – it’s a system that you can use and build on.

4 Step Process to Email Copywriting

1. Current or Evergreen?

First, you have to strategically decide whether it’s an evergreen email or a current email.

An evergreen email is the type of email that you can put in your autoresponder and you can keep it running repeatedly year after year or once every 4-5 months, depending on the subject and on your sequence.

In other words, you can keep it there forever.

A current email means that you write emails as a reaction to what is happening in the world right now. It usually a news-related item, for example oil prices going up, summer, the Dark Knight Returns, or back-to-school.

If you decide to write a current email, use the USA Today secret and put in little facts to get your reader’s attention.

However, to put it another way – it’s long-term profit vs. short term gain, because something evergreen isn’t affected by circumstance and is an eternal issue that won’t go away. However, it’s with current emails that you’re able to make more money in the short run because that’s directly relevant to the person reading your email.

I don’t know what the magic ratio should be - 50% evergreen and 50% current so that your work as an email copywriter is reduced because there’s more evergreen content? Or, should you focus on bringing in short term gain because email is so flexible that you can write one in 2 hours? That ratio is up to you to determine.

Either way, always decide whether your email is evergreen or current.

The people who are really good with evergreen emails are the seduction gurus who do it for topics they believe are evergreen in their niche market– people like John Alanis or Ross Jeffries. David DeAngelo (Double your Dating), for example, has a 100email autoresponder sequence, every day except weekends for about 3 months, and then it repeats – and he has a 20M dollar business!

If you want to do the same, you can send the same emails – but preferably after a long time. Chances are, people won’t remember after 6 months.

2. Determine the Strategy

It sounds very big, but there are actually just 3 components: List, Story, Offer.

1. Which list am I emailing? Because this determines your customer avatar, and what resonates with the people on each list is different.

2. What’s the story I want to share? Did my friend share with me an amazing technique that I want to introduce? Or how I used a particular technique to do overcome something?

3. What’s the offer, and what product am I selling to this list?

You just need one sentence for each of the above: you don’t need to be very elaborate because emails aren’t meant to be elaborate – they’re meant to be simple and to the heart.

Matt Furey says the “3 C”s of email marketing are to be Clear, to be Concise, and to be Colloquial.

By concise, I don’t necessarily mean short –just don’t repeat yourself. With email length, it works 2 ways – David DeAngelo’s emails go on and on, and at the same time Matt Furey says the recommended length is about 500 words. It doesn’t have to be short because 500 words does give you a bit of room.

Here’s the thing – to be successful in email marketing, you must write the way your grandmother would write email, in a way similar to how she’d ramble to you. The more you replicate that formula and the more you write like a friend, the more sales you’ll make because you’ve developed that connection.

This is because when people go into their email, their mindset is to open an email from a friend. If you write something ‘salesy’, they’ll most likely find it a turn off and they’ll immediately switch off.

3. Write down the Bones

At this point, I start writing the emails. ‘Writing down the Bones’ is a strategy employed by one of the top creative writing teachers of all time, Natalie Goldberg. She said that there are 2 persons residing in you – the writer and the editor – and they’re always at odds.

That means when the writer writes something, the editor immediately says, ‘Hey, that sentence looks funny…why don’t you improve this structure?’ So, initially, you have to cast the editor aside, and write.

To do this, I give my self a time-line –usually exactly half an hour. I don’t care how long it is; there’s some sort of structure, but I just continue to write whether the sentence seems weird or it’s not flowing.

Why? Because that is most probably the most authentic thing you can get because it’s heart to heart.

As Matt Furey says, Talk-Write Write-Talk. It’s heart to heart communication, so it can only work when you write out of your stream of consciousness. You write from your subconscious to touch the other person’s subconscious.

Usually, in the first draft, you’ll have the story. You may not have all the psychological triggers and you may only have a bit of the offer, but it is really all about the story (because grandmothers like telling stories). The more stories you tell, the more things you sell.

Even if initially your story is ill formed, just make sure to spend that half-hour writing. No second thoughts, no going back – just keep moving forward.

4. Edit

I usually spend one hour editing the foundation of my email and cleaning it up here and there.

I use psychological triggers – things like scarcity, anticipation, curiosity, etc. I’ve also assembled my copywriter’s toolbox which contains transition words and phrases, power words, electrifying your ads, colloquialisms, idioms etc.

I regularly use Magic Transitions (from Ted Nicholas) and the new Clayton Makepeace free report, ‘The #1 Way to Electrify Your Ads’, which you can use to make your email more ‘warm’ by using clichés, colloquialisms, and figures of speech.

And voilà - that’s how you write an email using my simple 4 step process.

Additional tips:

• Collect subject lines – when you see a good subject lines, copy and paste it into your collection. I’ve seen really cool subject lines, like “Headless man found in Topless Bar”, or Dr Dave drinks his own urine to lose weight – I mean, that would make you open that email! Even things like real life, like people’s Skype messages can make for eye-catching lines – one of our programmers wrote “hackers have CSS designers too”. You can so easily use this as a template and adapt it to your needs e.g., ‘serial killers have friends too’, etc.
• When it comes to trying to understand your market and figure out the psychological triggers in relation to the subject you’re writing about, it’s useful to go to Amazon and find a book related to what you’re writing about. If you look at the chapter break downs / headlines, it’s pretty much all the psychological triggers there because they’ll cover topic by topic what the reader is looking for.
• The top bullet swipe files are not in copywriting books, but 2 general books that you most likely have heard of before: the first is ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie. The second is ‘How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling’ by Frank Bettger, with the table of contents by direct mail master copywriter Victor O. Schwab. The contents are all essentially bullet point templates for you to swipe.

Hellooo, it’s called Social Media

Social media is turning marketing and public relations upside down. The rules of the game are changing and shifting, and amidst all of this wonderful, innovation-driven chaos, many get into social media without keeping a focus on the “social” in social media.

How many times have you gotten onboard a social media website, went on an “adding friends” wild spree, starting sending links to these new so-called friends and wished for the best? I don’t know about you but I’ve had several attempts with different social media sites. Many failed, and some succeeded.

Don’t Just Add, Interact

Don’t succumb to laziness and evil shortcut-ish temptations. Social media is a long-term effort which requires patience.

Come up with goals that can easily be broken down into small, very achievable steps. For example, everyday, genuinely make 3 or 5 acquaintances.

Adding many “friends” alone and immediately sending content to them in hopes of getting them to vote for it is not the right approach.

1. Add a few people at a time - preferably like-minded people and power users.
2. Interact with them, and make it a daily goal.
3. Meanwhile, keep in touch with those you’ve already added.
4. Maintain your focus on power users and
5. Turn acquaintances into friends.

Using a spreadsheet will be helpful to keep track of who are new/old acquaintances and friends.

Keep It Human

I graduated university with a major in Knowledge Management and before joining MindValley, that is pretty much what I used to focus on during my previous professional working life.

From my experience, when Knowledge Management initiatives fail, they mostly do because of too much focus on a techno-centric view.

There is a related and important lesson here.

Social media sites provide innovative technologies which merely act as enablers for communication and social interaction, so ultimately it’s not really about the technology. I repeat, communication technologies are merely enablers. They don’t and won’t replace common patterns of human psychology which exist in the real world and which are also behind successful and healthy social media efforts. Don’t fall for a techno-centric view.

Keep it human.

Google just launched Knol and the whole world is wondering whether every SEO expert and affiliate marketer out there is going to start writing Knol’s instead of Wikipedia articles.

Why?
* For SEO Juice
* For making money

Well, my first analysis indicates that this might be indeed happen.  Here 5 Knols that were featured on Knol’s home page and they are already ranking on the first page of Google.

Tooth Pain - Google Rank #3
Vomiting in infants and children - Google Rank #3

How to Backpack - Google Rank #4
Toilet Clogs - Google Rank #4
First Ironman Triathlon - Google Rank #7

When are you going to write your first Knol?  I am guessing that the Squidoo affiliate army is going to jump on this in a second and I will be writing my first Knol very shortly and let you know how it goes! 

This is the question posed by www.seroundtable.com in their latest blog post. 

While the survey just launched, I have long been predicting that Small Businesses have no future in AdWords.  The future looks does not look very bright for small businesses as I outlined in my free report The Coming AdWords War.

Share your thoughts on the SE Round Table blog and find out if small businesses are being priced out of AdWords.  Click here to vote and view the results

Rand from www.SEOmoz.com, just wrote an excellent blog post on optimizing your blog posts for SEO.  You can read the post here:

Headsmacking Tip #3: Run Your Blog Post Titles Through Keyword Research Before You Hit Publish

I have to agree with Rand that this is very important and I was just doing exactly what Rand was writing about.  However, I would also say that one has to be very careful doing so.

The upside, you get your blog post on the first page of Google.  I just did that with four posts in a row!

* AdWords Book #8
* AdWords Help #7
* AdWords Conversion #8
* AdWords Miracle #4

For each of the above results are on the first page of Google since they are highly optimized blog posts.  So, that is great.  However, there is a downside.  The last 4 blog post titles have probably been the most boring titles in a long time.   They are not exciting and won’t grab the readers attention. 

Generally, what I like to do is to write a few blog post focused on our readers and our community and only once in a while write hard core SEO posts.  In this case I have been writing more SEO posts to get into top position for AdWords related words since our launch of www.AdWordsSystemExposed9.com and www.TheComingAdWordsWar.com.

However, you have to be careful and can’t go overboard so I will probably rest for a while and focus on more quality blog posts.  However, in the future you know… if the title is not sexy and attention grabbing… then I am probably writing for SEO.