Secret #23
Put Lipstick On The Pig

“Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.”

Howard Gossage

How do you make bad or underperforming copy pop? Sometimes you can’t, and it’s easier to start over. Sometimes you’ll work on something, pour your blood, sweat, and tears into it, and it just plain sucks. Sometimes it’s best to walk away from it.

However, sometimes you can put lipstick on a pig and turn it into a beauty queen.

Here’s what to do if your copy isn’t working: ask yourself a series of questions. You want to see whether or not you’ve missed something that is causing one or more areas of your copy to underperform.

Look at the headline.

• Do you have a headline? You’d be surprised how many people don’t have a headline. Why in the world would anybody not have a headline? It is the first thing somebody sees on your page. It can also be the first words that come out of your mouth in a video sales letter. You’d be surprised how many people don’t have anything even remotely resembling a headline.
• Is your headline about you or your audience? Once I had a headline about how I went from trailer trash to piles of cash. I thought it was an amazing headline. It fell flat on its face! But when I changed it to how to gain a positively unfair advantage in business and life, then my sales took off by over 500 percent.
• Is there a big, bold benefit or promise? You can always create a headline that causes people to stop what they’re doing. A great example is saying something like, “Sex!” Or, “Emergency!” The problem is that it makes the wrong people stop. So they stop and read it, and then they get pissed off because it has nothing to do with them (or sex). So is there a bold benefit or promise in your headline that’s going to attract the right people to stop and pay attention?

Is the offer clear?

• Does the buyer understand what they will get? Is it crystal clear? “You’re going to get this, this, this, this, this and this.”
• How do they get it? Is it delivered digitally? Does it come overnight? Is it a physical product? Is it an electronic product? Is it coaching? What is it?
• When do they get it? Do they get it instantly? Do they get it tomorrow? Do they get it next week? Do they get it once a month for the next 12 months? Is it on-demand?
• How much does it cost? If they can’t tell how much it is fairly easily by reading your message, you turn people off, because they feel like you’re hiding something.

Is there a clear reason to buy now?

Is there a clear reason for them to buy right now? You can have the greatest offer in the world, but if there’s no urgency to buy now, then they won’t. Traditionally, these are the three ways to get people to buy now:

• Bonuses. Stack on added value to your fantastic offer if they buy right now.
• Time deadline. People often use this with large product launches. They set the deadline and shut down the offer on that Friday. The problem comes in when, next Tuesday, they tell you their buddy emailed them, “Hey, please can you open this up just for my people for 24 hours?” The person thought, “Well, that’s not fair. So I have to open it up for everybody for 24 hours. So in case you missed it, or in case you waited, you have 24 hours again.” If you do that, you just blew your integrity.
• Limited quantities. This is a double-edged sword. You have a high performing offer, but when you run out of limited quantities, that’s when people see if you have any integrity. If you magically add more quantities, and the offer keeps going, the people who bought realize you lied.

When I launched my first big product about how to create your own multimedia info products, I learned a valuable lesson about time deadlines. In 2003, I was one of the first people in the world to show people how to create content and burn it to CD or deliver it over the web. It was cutting edge, with screen capture video and full motion video. I made enough money from that promotion to pay off my house.

When the time deadline came that I promised to stop selling the product, I was bummed out. My wife asked, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I’ve got a perfect offer and a great product. And I can never sell it again.” To keep my integrity, I had to respect the time deadline and never sell the product again.

I learned my lesson. When I came out with my next big product, I did not use time deadlines or limited quantities. Instead, I used the fear of losing out, which is a much better reason for them to buy now. That product ended up making around five million dollars because I wasn’t stupid enough to depend on the time deadline. It takes a little more skill to come up with, but if you can incorporate the fear of losing out into your copy, then you do much better.

How do you use this technique? You use what’s called future pacing . “Hey, if you don’t buy this, here’s what’s going to happen: You won’t be able to do this or have that. You won’t have the ability to (whatever).” And if you lay on three, four, or five reasons why waiting will result in their lunch eaten by a competitor or be stuck where they are, you don’t have to depend on things like time deadlines and limited quantities. You can do a lot better for a lot longer.

Is there an emotional driver in the copy?

Do you have an emotion to grab people right at the beginning of your copy? It can be fear, desire, curiosity, pain, pleasure, satisfaction, or dissatisfaction (when you talk about problems).

There has to be emotion infused into your copy. You create it by circumstances they either want to get rid of or want to create. Your copy either drives them towards something they want or helps them to move away from something they don’t like. They’re moving toward something they want or running away from something they hate. But there has to be an emotional component in the copy.

So, if your copy’s not performing, you need to look at it and say, “Is there something here that grabs people emotionally other than the promise to make money?” And nine times out of ten, from my experience, people buy out of dissatisfaction with their current circumstances.

People may be driven, or at least somewhat motivated by, what they want, but what gets people to act is dissatisfaction. Because, if things are good enough, people will sit on the crappy couch, eating Cheetos, watching a TV that is sort of tuned in, because, until it hurts enough to make a change, people don’t change.

So remember that. Nine times out of ten, people buy out of dissatisfaction with current circumstances. It creates the drive to buy now, rather than put it off.

Do your bullets suck?

Are your bullets curiosity drivers, or are they boring, bland, and read like a technical manual? We’ve done an entire secret on bullets and the proper bullet formula (see Secret #9). So the question is, are you featuring features, or are you highlighting benefits and payoffs? Bullets are what build the desire and curiosity that drive people to take action, enter their credit card information (especially online), and buy from you.

What about the price?

Is the price too high relative to what others are charging? Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t charge a premium price as long as your offer justifies charging a premium price. On the flip side, is your price too low, creating the perception that you’re too cheap?

Think about it. For example, if you had a course on how to do options trading focused on a biz-op, work-at-home market for $97, you might do very well. You have a very different price than if you focus on a group of experienced investors looking to branch out into an options or futures market. If they saw your product was $97, they would laugh and think it wasn’t even worth their time. They’d think it was way too cheap and wasn’t worth anything. So your price can be too high, but it can also be too low. How do you find out? Test.

When you look at your price, ask if the value is there. Does it feel like a great deal? Does it feel like, “Wow! This offer is amazing. I need to buy this before they raise the price or change their minds.”

There’s a concept called selling dollars for dimes that I learned from a man named Marlon Sanders. In the prospect’s mind, your offer combined with your bonuses must be worth ten times what you charge. That seems to be the magic number.

Now, whether it needs to be ten-to-one or twenty-to-one or five-to-one or thirteen-to-one isn’t the issue. Your offer must feel like you’re selling dollars for dimes. Think of it this way: If somebody offered, “I will sell you as many dollars as you want for just 10 cents apiece. How many do you want?” Your answer is, “As many as I can get.” That’s the feeling you want people to have.

If your sales price is $97, you want to give a thousand dollars in demonstrable value. That’s selling dollars for dimes. If you’re charging a thousand dollars, then you want somebody to feel they’re getting ten thousand dollars’ worth of value.

Now, like I said, it’s not always ten-to-one. But it has to feel like this is a fantastic, authentic, real deal. So if your copy’s not performing, it may be the price, or the perceived value, that’s not where it needs to be.

Are you using the right graphics and colors?

Do your graphics add to the message? Do you have any graphics? If you do, do they raise the emotion, distract people, or make people feel bad when they look at your copy even if they don’t know why?

Be careful with your colors. Do your colors match, or does it look like a psychedelic acid trip? Is the website so ugly it makes you want to smack its mama? You are better off with a site that’s plain and conservative than you are with one that’s crazy and assaults people’s eyeballs.

You do want to use graphics appropriately. Each major point or idea in your sales copy should have an accompanying graphic.

What about proof?

It could be that people don’t believe you. Do you offer proof, especially around your claims? Any time you make a claim, you need to have something to back it up. It could be a testimonial, a case study, some statistics, or an expert endorsement. Whenever people could think, “Mm, I’m not sure about that,” or “I doubt that,” or some smart aleck in the back of a room screams, “Prove it!” that’s when you need to have some sort of third-party validation that what you’re doing works and is accurate.

Your proof could be screenshots, before and after pictures with weight loss, or photographs of bank statements, checks, and closing statements. But you need to be careful that you can genuinely substantiate these kinds of authentication. The FTC loves to come after these claims.

As a side note, if you’re in investing, weight loss, or anything that involves people’s health or their money, you need to be doubly cautious about any claims you make and use the right disclaimers. Any pictures or testimonials you use must be 100 percent rock solid. You don’t want to run into a situation where you can’t substantiate it because you haven’t kept good records.

These are several of the ways to put lipstick on a pig. While they aren’t all the ways, they’re a darn good start.

Summary:

• If your copy is not performing, try putting some lipstick on it. That means going through this list to ensure you haven’t missed anything.
• #1 thing to test is your headline (assuming you have one) to see how that affects conversion.
• Make sure your offer is very clear and they know what they’re getting.
• Try selling dollars to dimes to see if you can improve the performance of your copy.