Action Seminar 2 Copy Court: Sample Copy Critique

In the second Action Seminar, John Carlton, Harlan Kilstein, David Deutsch, Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero, Colin Chung and other copywriters critiqued copy submitted by members of the audience.

For more information about the Action Seminar, go to http://www.actionseminar.com/

This is a sample of the critiques they did:

The reason we stay with the first screen page or so is that if you can’t get your reader past the first screen page you are dead in the water. OK? So most of my critiques that I do it’s either on the first page of copy, it is on the first screen page of the website, because I don’t care how brilliant you have it on the third screen page…if you are not getting people there it doesn’t matter. Does that make sense?

OK. So that has changed. There was a self-launching video that is one of my biggest pet peeves. If you’re searching on a phone, which most people are doing, and you start launching a video, I can’t wait to click away. So that’s one of my things. I know there are other people who have other things to say.

The self-launching video…that was an excellent comment. The other thing is the layout. It’s really…

Back it down, Robert, so we get the full first screen.

No, no, up. Lot of wasted space.

One thing you can’t see is that she had a light blue headline on there, and I can’t remember exactly what it said…free…free video on how to make bows. That’s not the exact wording, but it is in light blue type, and what happens is you miss the headline, which could be stronger, because the eye is drawn immediately toward the video, the picture of her face, because the eyes like to go to human faces first. You would miss whatever wonderful hook you have in the headline, which we can’t see here, so…

So, a lot of people don’t think about design in copy, and I like a rule “design is part of the word “designate””. That’s designate 1 to 2 fonts, 1 to 2 colors, 2 to 2 sizes. And if you scroll down to the bottom. Could you do that for me? Yeah, see, what have we got? Red, blue, purple, another kind of blue, big, small, exclamation points, exclamation points, exclamation points. You’re never that excited. But, design is really important. So just 1 to 2 can make it look much more professional.

And, another thing is examples of the bows that people are actually going to make. There’s no picture there, we have no idea what kind of bow we get to make.