Salesmanship in Print: Michel Fortin’s Simple System

In this Copywriting Quick-Start interview, master copywriter Michel Fortin shares how he went from a shy, struggling salesman to one of the top online copywriters in the world. He talks about how learning real-world selling skills, understanding people, and writing with passion can completely change your copy. You’ll learn why stories sell better than facts, how to connect deeply with your reader, and simple ways to make your copy more believable, human, and powerful. It’s a must-listen for any beginner who wants to write copy that truly gets results.

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Million Dollar Marketing Tips from David and Michael:

• Learn to sell first. Great copywriters are great salespeople — copy is just “salesmanship in print.”
• Face rejection early. Like Michel did in sales, learn from rejection so you can connect better with people.
• Get excited about your product. You can’t sell well unless you feel real enthusiasm for what you’re offering.
• Know your reader. Research who they are, what they feel, and what keeps them up at night.
• Write to one person. Create a “perfect prospect” — give them a name, age, job, hobbies — and write just for them.
• Tell stories. People remember and believe stories more than claims or facts.
• Use testimonials the right way. Turn them into “before and after” case studies that show real results.
• Make your guarantee strong. Remove risk and tell it as a story that builds trust.
• Test everything. Colors, headlines, and layout changes can boost response — don’t guess, test.
• Connect emotionally. Think about your reader’s life, problems, and dreams — make them feel understood.

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Interview Transcript:

David:            This is David Deutsch for Copy Quick-Start. I am going to start by introducing Michel Fortin.

Michel is a direct-response copywriter with an amazing knack for turning out a seemingly endless stream of easy-to-read, high-energy, imminently- persuasive copy. I’ve always been just absolutely in awe at the output of what he turns out. Not only that, but it’s really good.

Gary Halbert called him the best sales letter writer on the Internet. Top marketers clamber to get him to write their copy because he gets results. And not just in one industry; he’s written in hundreds. He’s written for hundreds of diverse businesses in many different industries.

One of his sales letters sold $1.08 million online the first day. Another of his letters sold $1.04 million, but that took three weeks.

The ability to write great copy doesn’t always coincide with the ability to help others write great copy, but it does in Michel’s case. He’s also a much sought-after teacher of copywriting; he’s helped thousands take their ability to write interesting, persuasive sales copy to the next level.

Michel, I wanted to start by asking you to talk a little bit about your background, particularly your sales background. I’ve always been fascinated by the connection between the ability to sell and knowing about salesmanship and the ability to write good copy.

I know in your case you have had some amazing sales experience including a stint as a top insurance salesman. I wanted to know a little bit about how you may feel that that helped you in your copywriting and what others can do to get that kind of sales ability even if they’re not sales people.

Michel:           Thank you so much for such a great introduction. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to follow that, but hopefully I can.

Let me just go back a little bit just so you can understand why I went into sales. A lot of people will go into sales and either be good at it, or they’ll train and become good at it.

In my particular case, I guess you can say that I grew up with this tremendous fear of rejection. I grew up with an abusive father and I had a hard time trying to meet people. In fact I was very shy, much like the people on the call tonight.

What I decided to do was I went into sales in order to fight those fears head on. I thought, “What better way is there to fight the fear of rejection than the field of sales, where you’re going to be rejected all the time?”

When I first went into sales I was terrible at it. In fact, I jumped so hard into the sales industry, I went commission only. In the first year I declared bankruptcy because I was making loans upon loans just to survive.

One day I discovered this thing called copywriting. What I decided to do is rather than prospect for my clients by knocking on doors and getting doors slammed in my face, which is what I hated and I still do to this day, I decided to write lead-generation sales letters. In those days I was an insurance salesman for a Fortune 500 company and I decided to write lead-generation sales letters.

Well, lo and behold, people would call me to book appointments with me. I no longer had to be rejected. In fact, my letters would help me to qualify people so when I did my presentations I pretty much had the sale done.

So I became a bankrupt – I couldn’t even sell – person to becoming the top insurance salesperson for this Fortune 500 company. It was great.

Then later on I went into sales in various industries and learned to perfect my techniques. I also have applied a lot of the copy techniques that I’ve learned throughout the process – I’ve learned from all the greats like most of the top copywriters do – but I learned to apply the salesmanship, the sales skills that I learned, in copywriting. That’s because in copywriting, that’s really all it is. It’s really salesmanship in print, and that’s been around since John E. Kennedy said it in 1905.

The idea is I was first a salesman, and I was an absolute failure, and I’ve learned to get out of it with this thing called copy.

David:            That’s interesting. So you actually went into sales because you wanted to face that rejection.

Michel:           Yeah.

David:            Hmm. That’s amazing that you would just do that so intentionally like that.

Michel:           Yeah, and this is how I discovered the power of being able to use the written word to persuade people to allow you to do the sales presentation with them.

Of course, eventually I became a marketing consultant and copywriter for a lot of the companies I worked for and it just transpired from there. I became known today as a copywriter but it was really because of the sales industry.

David:            Getting back to salesmanship, how do you feel that helped you with copywriting and salesmanship in print? What did you learn from salesmanship that you apply to copy? When you write copy, do you think of yourself as a salesman and that you’re selling, and you apply sales skills?

Michel:           Oh, yeah, absolutely! We are all born with the same common disease. It’s called being a human being. It all comes down to psychology. It all comes down to understanding people and it all comes down to connecting with people.

When you sell, there are various processes you’ve learned in sales training. I was not only a salesperson, I became a sales manager and then I later became a sales trainer.

I learned that a lot of things we apply in sales – how we prospect for a client, how we qualify that person, how we ask specific questions, how we start with a good story, how we qualify the sales process by asking trial closes all the way to building desire and building value, all the way to closing the sale – the thing is that in copywriting we do exactly the same thing. It’s just in a written format.

Now there are so many variances. There are so many different ways of applying that, of course. We’ve got short copy, we’ve got long copy, now today on the Internet we’ve got video copy and audio copy, but it really all

comes down to that process of getting that connection with the person you’re speaking with and to get them to understand exactly what Ziglar said a long time ago.

Zig Ziglar is a very famous sales trainer and he said, “Salesmanship is the transference of enthusiasm that you have for your product from yourself into the heart and mind of your prospect.”

Copywriting is no different. It’s just the written form.

David:            You write for so many different people. You write just so much copy. How do you get yourself enthused? Is there a process you use to get yourself excited and keep yourself excited?

Michel:           Well, oftentimes I become a client, or I was a client of a product or of a specific person who created the product or a similar product in the past. So I have this enthusiasm. Hopefully I have this enthusiasm already there. That is one thing.

The second thing is when I first started out, understand that when I first started as a copywriter I specifically focused on a niche. I was in the cosmetic surgery industry and it was an industry I had a passion for, a love for.

It was an industry that I worked many years in and when I became a freelance copywriter, because I was employed at first, I diverted myself into other fields that were similar such as cosmetic dentistry,

chiropractic, and so on and so forth. The idea was that I had this passion for people feeling good about themselves. I was able to get them to feel that way with my copy.

Then later on when I went on the internet and became known as “The Copywriter on the Internet,” the same thing happened. For example, we write information products or even software or digital products that help to improve the lives of the people we’re selling to.

Brian Keith Voiles, another famous copywriter, says that when a person hits on a website or opens up a direct-mail package, we have to understand that we are a blessing in their life at that moment in time. If you think like that, if you write copy with that passion, you will be able to transfer that enthusiasm that you have for your product or service into the minds and hearts of your prospects.

David:            That’s great! That’s beyond you being enthusiastic about the product. In a way, that’s you being enthusiastic about the prospect.

Michel:           Exactly. Whenever Zig Ziglar started out in sales, he was selling pots and pans from door to door.

David:            Right.

Michel:           He told his trainees that whenever they were learning the craft, the first thing Zig Ziglar would tell them is, “Go out and buy a set for yourself. Try it out yourself.” Get to understand what it feels like to be in the shoes of your prospect. Become passionate about what you’re selling.

I do believe that sometimes as a copywriter for hire, we do tend to prostitute ourselves sometimes to an extent where we have to sort of get ourselves enthused and jazzed up about a product we may not necessarily be all jazzed up about.

Here’s this key thing for me. My love is people. My love is helping out people. If I can find ways that a particular product or service can help improve the lives of those people, that’s what helps me. That’s what drives me to write great copy, because I can put down in words something that I know is going to benefit them.

Every copywriter out there is going to have some good days and bad days. It’s the same thing with me, but the idea is to think about the person. The more you think about the person, the more you will tend to write passionately and you’ll see it from a different perspective.

Sometimes we try too much to write copy too much from the perspective of the product, the product benefits, or the product creator or business owner. Sometimes that can be hard if we do, for example, have a bad day.

If you can, disassociate yourself. Take ten steps back and look at it from the perspective of the

user. How can that person benefit from this product?

I mean, truly, think about it this way. Ken Blanchard once said that before you walk a mile in someone’s shoes, you must first take off your own.

That’s sometimes hard. You have to take away all of your preconceived notions and all of your prejudices. If you had a good day or a bad day, you have to put that aside and sort of take yourself into the zone of the client. The more you do, the better you’re going to write copy.

I think the one way that you can do that is research. Research is probably the number one thing that you can do and write copy. It’s the number one tip that I can actually give on the call tonight.

If you want to know how to write better copy, if you want to conquer writer’s block, just research your market more. Try to find out more about your market. Who are they? What keeps them up at night? What gets them to wake up in the morning and gets them going?

The more you research your market, the more you’re going to create that passion. You’re going to find that passion somehow because you know they will be helped by this product or service.

David:            How do you find those things? Do you go out and talk to people? Do you read stuff? Do you have a certain process that you go through?

Michel:           Oh, yeah. Copywriters are in a sort of catch-22 situation where they have to write for the client who is the business owner, and you have to write the copy for the client who buys the product. So you’re sort of stuck in between.

I try to get information from the business owner, of course. Then, as much as I possibly can, I want to do research on behalf of the prospect. I want to do some research to the point where if I have permission, and I try to get permission as much as I possibly can, I call them.

Sometimes what I do, and this is a little trick that I’m going to share on the call tonight, is I call up some of their best clients, their most recent clients. I record the call, just like the call tonight, and I get them to talk a little bit about what their experiences are with the product or service.

Sometimes I will just do some prodding, some pauses where I just let them fill in the gaps themselves. I pluck some passions from them. I may not necessarily be that passionate but I let them sell me on the product. Not the business owner, but the actual client using the product or service.

Sometimes I will outright ask them, “You tell me,” or “You sell me on this product that you just bought. You tell me what were your experiences with it. What was the kind of result you have had? How did that change your life?”

When I record those conversations, sometimes I get the best sales pitches ever! I get those calls transcribed and I practically have my copy written for me.

David:            Wow, what a great idea, and what a great way to get copy written, too. It really comes from people who use the product and are enthused about the product.

Michel:           That’s the most important thing. When I teach copywriting to a lot of my copywriting students in my coaching program, there’s one thing that I feel people tend to think – especially online – is that it’s a faceless medium.

We tend to think en masse. We tend to think in numbers, we tend to think in conversion rates, in hits to a website, in clickthroughs, sales, visitor values, and all of that.

Those are all important; I’m not saying that’s not important. What I’m saying is that your market is not made up of a whole bunch of what my wife tends to call these, the world of Internet marketing tends to think of their audience as “a bunch of nameless, faceless wallets.”

They’re not a bunch of data. They are actual human beings. Learn about them, because the more you get to learn about them, the more you get to learn about who your market specifically is.

Very often what I do in my business, but also what I do when I teach my junior copywriters or I teach my students, is to create a perfect prospect profile. Create a buyer persona. Who is your perfect prospect? Who would be the perfect prospect? Give that person a name. Joanne. John.

Whatever.

What’s their age? What kind of job do they have? What kind of family do they have? Where do they live? What kinds of hobbies are they into, and so on and so forth. What kinds of websites do they visit? What kinds of games do they play? What kind of music do they listen to?

You really get to understand who your perfect prospect is. The more you get to learn about who they are, the more you really tap into that visceral “oomph” in the middle of their gut that really gets them to buy a product or gets them to be interested in a product or be excited about a product. That will translate into your copy as well.

David:            How do you translate that into the copy? You find out who they are, you know who they are and you know a lot about them. How do you express that in the copy in a way that helps them and helps motivate them?

Michel:           We’re talking about practical ways to do it, and there’s a number one thing I’ve found out in all my learning of copy – I’ve been doing this close to 20 to 25 years now.

First of all, I’ve found that all great copywriters have one common denominator, which is that they’re great salespeople. That’s what I thought for a long time, which is why I’m a big proponent of the sales training and why I’m a big proponent of – if you want to learn how to write copy, you should not learn how to write copy first. You should learn how to sell first.

It’s not about all of those copywriting books. Yes, those are important, but put those aside. Go out and learn selling. Either sell yourself, or buy books on selling or courses on selling.

Here’s what I’ve found. There’s an even more common denominator that all great copywriters and all great salespeople are also all great storytellers. That’s the key. That’s where you can talk about the passion, talk about the product and how it can improve and benefit and change people’s lives.

There are three major reasons for this. One, people can relate to stories better than to just a bunch of words. Secondly, people don’t think in direct terms. They think in related terms.

I’ll give you a little short story. When I was teaching college – part of my career was actually teaching marketing and e-commerce at a local college – when I was talking about copy and the power of stories and the power of analogies and the power of metaphors, one student came up to me and said, “Mr. Fortin, what’s the difference between this chair and this table?”

I said, “One’s to sit on and one is to write on.” He said, “Nope, that’s not the difference.”

I didn’t get what he was trying to tell me.

He said, “Listen, you’re trying to tell me what one is and what the other is. You have to tell me what the difference is. You’re basically relating the difference by explaining the two individual things. No, the difference is their function. That’s the difference.”

I still didn’t get what he meant, but he said, “What’s the difference between a tennis ball and a soccer ball?”

I said, “One is yellow and the other is black and white.”

“No, the difference is color. You’re relating that difference by describing their individual colors.”

That’s the point. The mind doesn’t think in direct terms, we think in related terms. That’s why it’s so powerful to use analogies and stories and metaphors, because the mind can refer back to something it can understand and relate to.

I’ll give you another example. There was a public service announcement during summer camp just not too long ago. They were telling kids who were taking school buses into the middle of the woods here in Canada in my local area, and they were talking about what happens if you see a bear. They say to stay away from the bear about 100 feet. That’s about three school buses away from the bear. Kids can relate to that, “Oh, three school buses is the distance.”

The mind thinks in related terms. That’s my point. That’s why stories are so important.

The third reason out of those mentioned earlier is that when you convey a certain benefit of a product, if you just communicate that it sounds self- serving. It sounds like you’re making a claim; you’re making a promise. It sounds like you’re biased.

However, when you tell it in the form of a story it becomes a little bit more objective. It’s not necessarily that it is, but it’s perceived as such. People tend to grasp it at a more internal level when you tell them the benefits of a product or service in the form of a story.

For example, tell them the story of how you came about creating the product or how some people enjoyed the benefits of the product. That’s why I’m a big fan of case studies rather than the testimonial, because the testimonial is just one way. It’s self-serving.

If you describe the case study, the story of how the person was before they tried your product and how they are now after they have tried your product, they have something to compare it to. They have the before-and- after picture, so to speak.

So tell a story. That’s how I find that passion.

David:            Yeah, and I can see the passion you have for it as you talk about it. It’s something that so many people have said on these calls, they’ve talked about the importance of story.

I think that’s such a key to great copywriting; even good copywriting. It’s the ability to transcend, “This is the product, this is…” and saying things about it in bullets and just tell a story about someone who used the product or someone whose life was changed.

There are so many ways to approach stories. You could tell a story about someone who uses the product, you can tell a story about how the product was developed in the first place.

Michel:           Yeah. For example, one of the best infomercials that I see on TV are where they actually sample the product. They actually put it into a demonstration of some sort.

How can you do that with the written word? Now, of course with the Internet we have the beauty of video and audio and multimedia to do all of that stuff for us. But let’s just stick with the written word. How do you do that with the written word?

Do you actually put up a whole bunch of numbers and describe how a clinical trial did this or a certain test did that?

No, you don’t do that. You talk about a story of someone who did this and this was the result. How much more believable is that? Plus it’s easier not only for the mind to absorb, but there’s the energy and the passion behind

it when the person lives the benefits of the product. There’s an experience there.

I think that the best benefits out there, when you describe it in the copy, are the experiential benefits. That’s because of the fact that you cannot show an example like you would on TV. You can describe it in words that people almost live the benefit. The more you do that, the more they’re going to be willing to buy.

David:            So the story is actually a way of demonstrating the product like they do on those infomercials. You make your own demonstration by telling the story.

Michel:           Exactly.

David:            That’s great.

Okay, I want to go a little bit from the macro view of copywriting to the micro view, because I know you’re such a student of copywriting.

You’ve done so many tests, you’ve investigated so many things, you know what works, what doesn’t work, what depresses response, what raises response. You’ve taken all of that stuff and you’ve put it on your membership site for people to be able to access.

I want to ask about a couple of things that I promised I would talk about on the signup page for your call.

Michel:           Okay.

David:            One of the things that I wanted to ask about was in terms of color, which I thought was interesting. Now this gets us totally away from words or story, but just the idea that you can use color to boost readership. You said at one point, somewhere, that you can almost double response by the correct use of color.

Michel:           Yeah, one of the things we have to understand is that copy is just words on paper. That’s absolutely the most important way to write copy is to think about the words. When it comes to conversion rates and when it comes to response, some things help to elicit response more than others that are not related to the words themselves.

I’m a fanatical tester, as you just mentioned, David. I test constantly, constantly. Not only that, I write for a lot of the top marketers and top copywriters out there who are fanatical testers themselves, so I’m privy to a lot of their test results.

It’s the same thing, for example, when you receive a piece of mail. Let’s say you receive a piece of mail and you open it up and it’s a sales letter. The sales letter itself is probably just pieces of white paper with black ink on it, but what got you to open up that piece of mail was something else.

Maybe it was in a plain number ten envelope with a handwritten note on it. Maybe there was a written note inside. Maybe there was a particular Post- it note with a different color on it. A different kind of grabber was added to it. Maybe it was lumpy mail, some letter with a pin and a dollar bill attached to it, as Gary Halbert was very famous for.

Those are things that you can do with direct mail, but how can you do that online? How can you do that with just written words? Well, the idea is that there are different things that you can do that grab people’s attention.

In terms of color, I’ve tested different colors. Now I’m not going to be speculating on why one color outpulls another because we can find out data from a whole bunch of things but to try to theorize on why one thing happens and why one doesn’t is really hard. First of all, markets are different, products are different, sales copy is different from every product to every product.

What I’ve found in the majority of cases is that the light blue, for example, as a background, or pink copy in a centered table that’s oh, let’s say about 600-700 pixels wide, tends to pull the best.

Now my theory, and again I don’t want to theorize in the sense that I’m saying this is actually true, but my personal theory is that it looks like a letter that you would put on some kind of desktop yourself.

I’ve tested different colors. I’ve tested backgrounds. When I’m talking about backgrounds I’m not talking about the background of the actual copy itself. That would be simply black on white, which has been proven to be the one that pulls the most. But around that, in the background, basically what surrounds what looks like a piece of paper if you actually put it on that, that would be the color I’m talking about. Those are the colors I’ve tested. There’s black, there’s dark blue, reds, burgundies, you name it. Light blue seems to pull the best out of all the colors I’ve tested. This seems to be going right now.

Split tests tend to change from time to time. I can tell you that sometimes I have tested different colors and they seem to be pretty consistent, then I don’t test for a while and then I test again and I see, “Oh! There’s a change.” People prefer gray, or people prefer a burgundy color, or whatever the case is.

What seems to pull the most is the blue. Now this is about the background color. Again, maybe it’s because it helps people to focus on the center of the page and it draws the eyes into the copy. It creates eye gravity.

That’s the same reason I apply color in my copy. Now that said, there’s a difference between going wily-nily with different types of colors in your copy because then it becomes just one big cartoon. You don’t want that, but what I’ve noticed is that – here’s the thing. People never read anything online. In fact, people when they hit any type of website tend to skim, scan and scroll. When’s the last time that you have read, David, a sales letter from top to bottom the moment you hit it?

David:            Virtually never.

Michel:           Exactly. You will tend to scroll up and down. So if you use copy that was all the same – let’s say you’ve only used words and there was no difference in terms of the letters, size, color, or whatever the case is – you’ll tend to scroll up and down and everything will just look like one big blur. Nothing will grab your attention.

Think about this. Have you ever bought a newspaper with no headlines? Of course not, because if you have just a whole bunch of copy in a newspaper you’ll probably just skim it very quickly and still not be able to read one single column. Headlines in newspapers draw people’s eyes into the actual column or into the actual article in the newspaper.

That’s the same thing with sales copy. Sales copy has a headline, which is probably the most important part of the copy, but it also has subheads throughout the copy. What I have found is that by making them just a tad different color – sometimes red, sometimes blue, but anything other than black – it helps to drive the eyes into the copy. It helps to create eye gravity.

That’s just my little response to the color issue. Is there one particular color that outpulls any other? Well, besides the light blue I can’t really tell because everything is different.

The idea is to be different, to make your headlines stand out, to make your background different so that it drives the eyes and it causes people to stop scanning and to start reading the copy.

David:            So that’s the trick, really, to get them to stop scrolling and scanning and skimming and actually start reading your copy.

Michel:           Yes.

David:            Because no one is going to buy just from scrolling, scanning, and skimming. They have to start reading and respond to that.

Michel:           Yes. Here’s something I’ve been teaching for a long time and I think that people on the call should write down.

There are three facts about people who read online. 1) People never read anything at first. 2) People do not believe anything at first. 3) People do not do anything at first.

I call your job the Three Ps. You’ve got to Pull them in, Prove your case, and Push them to act.

Pulling them in is part of that eye gravity. It’s about getting them to stop scanning your copy and scrolling up and down and just skimming it, and to start reading.

Then proving your case is getting them to believe you. Credibility is number one, especially online where you’re just an electronic site. You’re not some kind of brick-and-mortar store where they can actually touch, taste, feel, or smell a product.

Lastly, it’s to get them to do something. It’s to push them to act, to actually tell them and take them by the hand and say, “Do this. Click here. Order this product today. Here’s why.”

If you do those three things you’ll be way ahead of a lot of copy out there.

David:            And if you leave one of them out, the whole thing falls apart.

Michel:           Precisely.

David:            If you don’t pull them in you’re lost. If you don’t prove your case you’ll never be able to push them to act. If you don’t push them to act, even if you pulled them in and proved your case, it’s not going to do any good.

Michel:           Exactly.

David:            What are some other grabbers that pull readers into the copy? Are there words? Are there certain kinds of headlines that you find are working?

Michel:           Well, sure. There are different things you can do specifically with online copy, that can help people to stop doing what they’re doing.

In today’s world we have not only a browser window, but when we’re going on our computer we also have instant messengers and we’ve got email running in the background. We’ve got things outside the computer. The phone may be ringing, the kids in the background are screaming, the dog is barking.

So there are things that you can add to a sales letter online that will get people to stop doing what they’re doing and focus on the actual copy.

Multimedia is number one, and that’s what you’re going to see a lot more of. You’re probably seeing a lot of that right now, David. You’ll see a lot of video, a lot of audio, especially video and audio that starts automatically the moment you hit the sales letter.

Despite what a lot of people are saying – some people will say, “Oh, it’s annoying,” or “Oh, I don’t buy anything…” or whatever the case is – the proof is in the pudding.

Results show that if you put video and audio on a sales page, and specifically if you put audio and video that automatically starts the moment people hit the sales letter, the higher your response will be. In fact, in some cases that I tested, sales literally tripled just by adding multimedia to a sales page.

Those are the kinds of grabbers we’re talking about. It grabs people’s attention. For example, in the direct mail piece you put a dollar bill or something lumpy that gets their attention such as a Post-it note or a list note.

With online sales letters you can add video, audio, but you can also add pictures. You can add pictures in or around the headlines. It’s just like a newspaper article.

Use something that actually gets people to be curious about the article, or in this case the sales letter. They become curious about what exactly this is all about. Maybe you use some kind of picture that reflects a benefit of the product. Maybe you use a picture of a client enjoying a benefit of the product or service.

We talked about different colors, but different words also are important grabbers. I think that the one thing that I learned the most in my learning about copy, in my own experience, is that different words mean different things to different people.

I’ll give you an example. Does a real estate agent sell houses? Of course not. A real estate agent sells homes.

Does a dentist create beautiful teeth? No, a dentist creates beautiful smiles.

That’s the power of using different words, especially words that create and evoke vivid mental imagery. The more you use that, especially if you use that in ways that grab people’s attention, the more people are going to be pulled into the copy.

For example, I was reading a sales letter for some kind of information product on how to conquer a niche. It was talking about the competition, and instead of saying how to surpass the competition, the headline said how to zoom by your competition. Words like that create some sense that people are actually doing the zooming. They’re actually doing whatever the headline is suggesting and implying.

Those are grabbers. They’re things that will actually get people to start reading.

There are other things you can do online, of course. Some of them are popup windows. Of course some of them can be annoying. There’s a way to do it tastefully.

I’m not a big fan of annoying the reader because I’m thinking like I said at the beginning of our conversation that you’re a blessing in that person’s life. You don’t want to become an annoyance. There are ways to do that professionally and painlessly.

There are popup windows and there are what we call popovers. There are even sometimes animated types of headlines. I’ve seen a lot of great responses with headlines that are actually animated. Sometimes you have pictures that will actually work as a headline, and so on and so forth.

There are so many different little creative ways that you can work in your copy. A lot of people on this call will say, “Oh, do I have to do all of that stuff?” You don’t. The most important part of your copy is your copy. Think about it that way.

However, there are things you can test afterwards where you can actually see what kind of response you get because you have done things to your copy that will help people to stop scanning your copy. You’ll get a higher response, and you’ll probably say, “Okay, I’ve tried this. Now I want to try that.”

What I do when I test copy, I first split test the copy itself, especially the headline. Then afterwards I start split tests on grabbers and ways to get people to stop scanning and start reading.

David:            You mentioned a couple of things like video and audio and popups and popovers. Is that stuff hard to do? Do you have to go hire a web person to do it? Are there easy ways to do that stuff?

Michel:           Oh, yeah. First of all I am assuming, and I might be wrong, that people on the call have at least some very basic knowledge of HTML. There are ways to change the appearance of your HTML using specific types of code.

David:            I sort of doubt that they do, Michel. I certainly don’t have a base knowledge in that. I sort of know what HTML is, but I would never tamper with it.

Michel:           Exactly, and I tend to say that if you don’t know HTML, maybe you should learn it a bit, but that’s not your priority. Your priority is writing copy. You’re not a designer. You are better off outsourcing it to somebody.

One of the benefits to my clients when they hire me is that I not only write copy, I also do a lot of what I call the copy designing. I actually help to design the copy and the layout.

It’s not so much because I’m a designer; if they have a typesetter or they’re sending it to a printer for direct mail pieces or to a web designer who will design a website, I will provide suggestions on layout and colors and all of that stuff. That’s because I have all this testing knowledge in my background and my experience.

I myself tend to avoid that as much as I can. When I write a sales piece I’ll have a designer work with me or I’ll work with the designer the client has hired in order to get the piece to the most optimal level possible. However, I outsource it and I highly recommend that people on the call do that if they’re not versed in HTML and all of that stuff.

If you can get a little bit of knowledge, at least you can interact with the designing team or the designer so you can show them what you want. That’s because you have a better understanding of things that will, for example, get people’s attention so they’ll start reading the copy, and so on.

A web designer is very often not a great marketer. They design some very beautiful and very flashy websites out there that do squat. I’ve worked with website owners who have hired designers and have paid thousands and thousands of dollars.

I literally tell them, “You could have spent just a fraction of that on the design and spent most of that on a great copywriter and you would have had a tremendous bump in sales.” It has happened in some cases.

Design is important, and design elements help to improve response but keep that in mind. It helps to improve response. The key, though, is to focus on the response first and foremost, which is your copy.

David:            Right. So they don’t have to go out and learn how to program HTML and design websites, but we do need to get smart about that so that once the copy is working to a certain extent we can start recommending the addition of stuff. We know what we are talking about when we say, “I want you to do this.”

Michel:  Yeah. There is simple stuff that you can do. The quickest way is to go to a website like www.iStockphoto.com or www.iStockvideo.com. They sell for pennies on the dollar – it’s really, really cheap – royalty-free stock photos, stock graphics, stock clipart, and of course, stock video.

Let’s say you’re starting some kind of new software for salespeople and you want a video of someone typing into their computer and you see this arrow going up in the background and a guy or gal jumps for joy and says, “Yes! I just made a sale!” Whatever the case is, there are tons of videos like that on www.iStockvideo.com.

You can start as simply as that, and it would be just enough to grab people’s attention when they hit a website. Again, just come back down to the fundamentals, which is the copy.

David:            Okay. Your ads have a lot of testimonials and I’d like you to talk a little bit about how you get testimonials, and how you make sure that you talk about the right kind and wrong kind of testimonials.

Michel:           Right. As I mentioned at the beginning of this call, I gave a tip to the callers on how to grab testimonials. The best way to do that is to interview yourself. If you want to do it yourself or if you have staff that can do it, although it might be better if you do it yourself because then you can answer the questions.

When you’re interacting with your client, the person who has hired you to write the copy, you’ll get some of your questions answered. However, your best questions are answered by the people who actually enjoy the products or services of your client.

You have at your disposal one of the best tools in copywriting ever, and it’s called the telephone. Just pick it up. Call those clients up and say, “My name is Michel Fortin and I’m helping out with the marketing of ABC Corporation and I’m just calling around to clients who actually bought the product or service and I just want to get a feeling of what your experience was with it. Was it good or bad, and why? Why did you choose that product? Why did you choose that product at that particular point in time?

Why did you not choose maybe a competitor’s product? Was there something that got you to buy the product?”

Ask, “What was your situation before you used the product?” That way you get a good baseline. Then after that say, “Well, what are the experiences after?”

In fact, what I have found are the best testimonials out there have three major components.

They are:

1. Quantifiable
2. Measurable
3. Time-Bound

Let me explain what that means. Quantifiable means that the testimonial that just says how great a product is is good; but the more specific the testimonial, the more believable it is.

At the same time, there is a way to actually define the testimonial in terms of an objective standpoint rather than a subjective standpoint. It’s not just an emotional attachment to the product.

Of course they can say, “Oh, this product is great!” but if they say, “This product is great because it helped me to vacuum up my carpets in a fraction of the time that it used to take to vacuum my carpets with my old vacuum cleaner,” then that’s sort of quantifiable.

You could say, “Well, I used to vacuum my house and it took me about an hour and a half. Now with this new vacuum from ABC Corporation I can now do it in just less than 17 minutes.”

Now there are two things there. One is it’s quantifiable, but it’s also measurable. There’s the before and the after. One was an hour and a half, and now it takes only 17 minutes. It’s also time-bound because there’s an element of time there.

Let me give you another example. Let’s say you were selling an information product on how to make money. If I tell you, “Oh, yes, David Deutsch’s product helped me to make a thousand dollars,” first of all that’s quantifiable and that’s okay because it’s better than just saying, “Oh, yes, David Deutsch’s product helped me make money.” That’s very bland. It’s very vague, and it’s really hard to believe. However if I say it helped me make a thousand dollars, that’s quantifiable.

That’s good, but it still means nothing, especially if for example the person who’s giving the testimonial is a millionaire. A thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket for them. It can buy a lot of gas, especially these days.

If you add some kind of measurable baseline against which it can be compared, like say for example, “I was dead broke. In fact I was buying product after product and nothing out there helped me make money. A lot of it was just filled with empty claims, and I was about to throw in the towel. Then I bought David Deutsch’s product and it helped me make a thousand dollars. I was dead broke and it helped me make a thousand dollars.”

Now it’s measurable and that’s more powerful. But it would be even more powerful if I give it a time frame because with just that alone, it could be that I made a thousand dollars in two years, which is a long time.

So if I say, “It helped me make a thousand dollars in just under two weeks. I was dead broke and after buying David Deutsch’s product it helped me to make a thousand dollars in just under two weeks,” or whatever the case is.

Now it’s quantifiable, it’s measurable, and it’s time-bound. Those are the three classic elements I look for when I interview my clients to get testimonials from them, or that I look for or pull out of testimonials that the client may already have. Those are the testimonials I tend to put up front the most.

I tend to convert my testimonials into case studies because case studies are much more powerful. When I first started out as a copywriter I focused primarily on the cosmetic surgery industry. One of the most important elements – in fact it was the element upon which the cosmetic surgery industry hinged upon – was the before-and-after picture.

David:            Right.

Michel:           It was a before-and-after picture of someone having a hair transplant or a face lift; whatever the case was. In copy, you can do that with testimonials by writing it. If you have testimonials already, go back to those clients. Try to find out how they were before they bought the product. Get them into the story. Get them into the element of the story. Tell them a story.

Tell them a story of how a person was before they bought the product and how they are now. Then you put it in the form of a case study rather than a testimonial. The case study is going to be ten times more powerful, ten times more believable, and it will increase response.

Just to finalize the answer to this question, there are other things you can add to a testimonial. Again, audio and video are much more powerful because it’s impossible to fake an audio or a video, and people actually hear it at the same time.

I tell people, “Don’t just put it on video. Put it on video beside the transcript of the video, so people can absorb the testimonials in various modalities, whether they’re visual or auditory.”

At the same time, put in a picture. If you don’t have video, put a picture of the person. Sometimes in my testimonials I will put a graphic signature of the person. The more you do that, the more believable it is because it shows that it comes from a real person. It’s not something that’s made up.

David:            I like the graphic signature.

So you’re really talking about a context for testimonials. In other words, it’s not just a testimonial about “This did this for me and it’s great,” but there’s a whole time context and a whole “Who is this person?” When it gets really good it becomes like a case study, as you say.

Michel:           Right. Exactly. I’d rather have someone who, rather than give me a testimonial about who I am as a person or who I am as a copywriter or who I am as a business owner, I’d rather them actually use my product and tell me and relate to me exactly what their experiences with the product. Those are much more powerful testimonials.

On top of that, keep in mind that a testimonial that’s woven into the copy from the story is not going to be jumped over like most testimonials are. Sometimes we read copy and we can sense that there’s a group of testimonials all clumped together in the middle of the copy.

First of all, people will skip, skim, and scroll. But let’s say they read the copy. If they do read the copy, how often do they actually read the testimonials on top of that? Not as often. It’s probably much less often than they read the actual copy itself.

Rather than doing that, if you put them in the form of a case study and in the form of a story that’s interwoven into the copy – it’s part of the copy, it’s part of the story, it’s part of the process of getting people to have that enthusiasm for that product. You’re going to get people who are going to read your copy more and you’re going to also be much more credible.

David:            There’s something else that’s in every ad virtually, in the testimonials, and that’s guarantees. I know you talk a lot about that, that there’s so much potential for making the guarantee be more than just “Oh, you get your money back in 30 days if you’re not satisfied.”

Michel:           Absolutely.

David:            Can you talk a little bit about what people can do with guarantees to really add power to their copy?

Michel:           Well, it’s the same thing with the testimonial and the same thing with any claim or any benefit. Make it quantifiable, measurable, and time-bound.

Most people say, “Oh, money back within 30 days,” or whatever. Yes, there’s an element of time there, of course, but it’s pretty bland. It’s really like every other guarantee out there.

The idea is to make your guarantee – if you can make it into a story, again the element of a story – so that people can understand that you’re removing all of the risk for them. You’re truly making it hard to resist.

You’re making it absolutely impossible for them to fail. They’re not only getting their money back, they maybe get an extra bonus. They maybe get double their money back. Maybe they get to try it for a whole year.

I ran copy for some guys and gals out there who sold products and gave a lifetime guarantee. If someone buys the product and it’s a couple of years from now and they don’t like the color of the book, if they don’t like the picture of the person who created the book, or the software, or any kind of product that I’m running copy for, they’ll return it for a full money-back guarantee. The idea is to remove the risk as much as you possibly can.

The 30-day guarantee is typical. I say this. Sometimes not mentioning any guarantee, in some cases and in some industries where guarantees are so overdone and so overhyped, might even pull better. You don’t know.

That’s the power of testing.

What I’m saying is do something different. Go out there and be different. Be unique. Find that different way to remove that risk from your clients’ minds and hearts. You can do that by removing the guarantee, making the strength of your offer and the strength of your confidence in your product or service to be the guarantee in itself.

If you read a lot of copy from Matt Furey, a very famous copywriter as well as a trainer and bodybuilder, he writes a lot of copy in the bodybuilding industry and a lot of his copy doesn’t have any guarantees whatsoever.

On the opposite end you can test stronger guarantees, guarantees that are told in the form of a story. Sometimes what I do when I talk about a guarantee is I will actually demonstrate how to take advantage of the guarantee by talking about the story. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you’re selling a home study course on DVD and I’ll say, “Mr. Prospect, take hold of your financial future today. Claim your copy of ‘How to Make Money on the Internet DVD System’ and I’ll ship it to you. You should receive it by UPS within the next four days, depending on where you are.”

“ When you get the box, open it up. It will be in a brown box; sit down on the floor and just rip it open. Inside you’ll see a beautiful binder with 200 pages and you’ll see a four-DVD set.”

“ What I want you to do is go quickly to that number one DVD, take it out of the case, plop it into your DVD player and start watching it. Then I want you to go through the second one, and then the third one, and then the fourth one.”

“ I want you to start implementing. Take action! Do everything we tell you to do in those DVDs and if within 90 days you don’t get X benefit [and be very specific about that] I want you to put it all back into that same box you received and ship it back to me at my cost. I will refund your money without any questions asked. How’s that?”

See, what I just did is I told a story. Not only that, I make them feel what it is to receive the product, enjoy the product, and start getting the result of the product.

In fact, I tell them what to expect literally, not just the benefits up in the air. I’m telling them, “This is exactly what you should get when you get DVD number one, and number two, and if you don’t get that I don’t want you to keep it. I really want you to send it back. In fact, what I’m prepared to do is in the box itself will be a bonus DVD and I want you to keep that as my gift. I’m saying thank you for all of the trouble you went through to buy this product and we part as friends. How is that?”

David:            I don’t even know what you’re selling and I want it!

Michel:           That’s the point is to get people to understand. This is something that I’m asked a lot: “Michel, what is the number one mistake that copywriters make?”

I’ve actually blogged about this on my blog, I’ve talked about this in my articles, and it’s about the fact that people are not emotional enough. I don’t mean emotional in terms of hype. There’s a difference between being emotional and being hyper; use hyperbole.

What I mean is to understand and to get into the minds and hearts of the readers and to tell a story, so that they understand how much of a blessing the product or service is.

So what I decided to do is revise that mistake. What I found is that the lack of connection is often the biggest mistake that copywriters make. Some people call it the appeal. It might be having a better appeal in your copy.

Some people say it’s the content, there’s a lack of content. You’re just copy; it’s all hype, hype, hype and sell, sell, sell.

I think there’s a great balance between those three elements: copy, content, and the connection, connecting with your audience. What I’ve found in almost – and of course this is speculation or guessing from all of the copy I’ve seen – but about 90% of the copy I’ve seen fails because they did not connect with the reader properly.

The product is great, the business owner did a great job describing the product, the business owner did a good job of even explaining the benefits of the product, but people didn’t get it. There was no connection there.

A very good way to overcome that again is going back to the market. The number one thing is your market and doing market research. If you do market research, the better your copy will be, the higher your response will be, and so on.

David:            Tell me a little bit about what you mean when you say connect. Do you mean that just by knowing about your prospect, knowing what they want, you connect with their needs? You connect with where they are, and you write copy that expresses that in a way that they feel, “Wow! This person knows me; where I’m at and where I want to be.”

Michel:           Yeah! It’s a day in the life of your prospect. There’s something that is taught in sales training. I think it was Brian Tracey who talked a lot about it. There’s an accounting term called “gap analysis” and that is just a different version of the whole problem/agitate/solve that we’ve heard in copywriting, especially from people like Dan Kennedy. You talk about a problem, you agitate the problem and you blow it up, then you solve it.

Gap analysis is something that is taught in sales training as well and I like to use it in copy. What gap analysis is, is that there’s a gap between where you prospect currently is right now and where they want to be.

The more they understand that they’re the gap – you see, a lot of people don’t understand that gap, they don’t get it – and you have to really make them understand that there is a gap.

The only way to do that is to connect with them, to get them to understand that you know where they’re at right now. You begin to feel that as if you were them, speaking to them right now, and they get the idea that, “Oh, this guy understands me! He or she gets me!”

Then you tell them that and talk about the future, where they want to be. I’m not just talking about the benefits, I’m talking about the experience of the benefits.

What you do is you widen that gap. You make it wider. You blow up the problem. You either make it more urgent, more real, more vivid, more concrete, or you make the solution less obtainable. It’s further away, more impossible.

What you do when you solve it is you become like an oasis in a dried-up desert. You become like that glass of water that they’ve been itching to drink.

Gap analysis is something that requires you to get to know your prospect more, so that when you talk about where they are now and where they want to be – not where you believe they should be – but if you truly know your prospect, what their desires and feelings are and what is going on in their life, the problems they suffer and so on and so forth, then you will be able to widen the gap later on and then be able to solve it. You become the bridge.

Here’s another way to look at it. I use acronyms a lot in my copy, in my teaching, and in my own copywriting experience because it helps me to remember stuff. I talk about my OATH formula. OATH means, is your prospect ready to take an oath? What I mean by OATH is this: is your market Oblivious? Apathetic? Thinking? or Hurting?

I’ll start with Oblivious. What it means is this. Are they oblivious about the problem? Not just the solution, but are they oblivious about the problem itself? Do they actually know that they’re suffering from a particular problem?

In that case, when you write your copy you will need to educate them on the problem. You need to educate them that they are currently suffering from a particular problem.

The second thing is Apathetic. They know they have a problem but they just don’t care. So now you have to make them care. You have to make them understand the urgency, the importance, why they should do something. That’s “reasons-why” copy; the art of reasons-why copy.

David:            Yes.

Michel:           The third is Thinking. They know they have a problem, they know that they need a solution, and they’re thinking about it. They’re probably shopping around. Maybe they’re not necessarily interested in getting it done now, or whatever the case is.

Now you have to talk about why your solution is better than anything else out there. Why should they take advantage of the offer today? Maybe you can use some scarcity comments in your offer, in your copy.

Of course, then the final one is Hurting. They’re desperate, they’re hurting. They want it now. Now you have to mold your copy so that it fits the prospect’s specific want and need; what makes your offer at that particular time better than anything else out there.

That’s the OATH formula. Oblivious; Apathetic; Thinking; Hurting.

The more oblivious they are, the longer the copy will need to be. The more desperate and hurting they are, the shorter the copy will be. Why?

Because you don’t have to educate them so much on the problem and on the solution. In this case you just have to sell them on your solution.

If they are oblivious, now you really have to take some time to talk about the problem and how bad the problem is. Why is it urgent that they solve that problem today.

I hope that answers your question, David.

David:            Yes, it does very much, and that’s a great little formula, that OATH formula. It’s a great thing to think about.

Michel, I just want to say thank you for being here and sharing everything with us.

Michel:           My pleasure.

David:            I hope everything goes well with your back, with your mother, and everything. Gosh, you have a lot of stuff going on in your life. Great talking with you. Thank you again, everyone, for being on the call, and we’ll talk again next week.

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