TJ53 – How To Learn Copywriting by Selling Rave Lights and Partying All Night ~ Neville Medhora


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Nov 04 2014 45 mins  

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As Neville Medhora discovered in a drunken blur one night pushing rave lights, getting your email list to buy your stuff requires more than just selling.

You need to find the right way to get them to open your emails, read what you have to say, and decide they need your product to make their lives and businesses better.

The art and science of copywriting has a huge effect on what you get. When you discover how to learn copywriting and apply the formulas savvy marketers have been using for centuries to sell more stuff, your business will prosper. In this episode Neville Medhora reveals how.

FREE BONUS: Download the techniques Neville Medhora used to get 120 more sales just by changing his email copy, plus 7 world’s best copywriting resources.

OUR GUEST:

Neville Medhora first discovered the power of copy applying copywriting principles to his own business. He noticed when he sent out emails or wrote content for a page according to proper copywriting techniques, his products “magically” sold better. But it wasn’t “magic” at all. Neville had learned and applied the science and psychology of selling.

Neville has applied his persuasive copywriting skills to is own businesses as well as to App Sumo for whom he is the chief copywriter. Neville also teaches others how to learn copywriting via his site KopywritingKourse.com.

He is a fan of people who are self made and those that make the world a better place to live. He is a musician at heart and plays several instruments: guitar, bass guitar, doumbek, piano, drums and a little bit of harmonica.

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Neville Medhora Story Of How To Learn Copywriting

A QUICK PREVIEW OF THE PODCAST:

Here are some of the highlights from episode 53 of the Traffic Jam Podcast…

  • Kopywriting with a K?
  • Neville’s First Copywriting Success.
  • The Gary Halbert Letters.
  • The Right Approach For Your Audience.
  • Repositioning.
  • Getting Email Frequency Right.
  • Neville’s Most Effective Emails Ever.
  • Educational Copy vs. Sales Copy.
  • Guest Posting Done The Right Way.

TWEETABLE MOMENTS:

If you enjoy this episode of Traffic Jam, please share it using the social media buttons you see on this page, or click to tweet this Neville Medhora quote from the show:

You can also download Neville’s quote as exclusive illustrated artwork along with more special episode bonuses: Click Here To Download.


“It shouldn’t be called sales copy as sales is just a part of what you are trying to do.” ~ @NevMed
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What’s up? Welcome back listener! This is episode#53 of the Traffic Jam podcast, I am your host James Reynolds and this of course is the podcast show where we teach you how to get more traffic and build a profitable audience online.

Today on the show, we’re joined my Neville Medhora who’s the chief copywriting sumo of AppsSumo. We’ll be sharing among other things the story about 120 more sales from a single email where previously dedicated people to. What did he change? Well pretty much the only thing was his email copy. He’ll tell you that story and more on this episode.

But before we get to Neville, go and grab the bonus that comes along with this episode and you get those by going to TrafficJamCast.com/53 to get all of the bonuses that come with this week and on this link we include a downloadable MP3, a full transcript of today’s training, plus a pdf resource guide with links to seven of the very best-ever Gary Halbert letters.

James: So welcome back listener! This is episode #53 of Traffic Jam and joining me right here is Neville Medhora. Neville, how are you?

Neville: Hey, James. How is it going? I am quite well.

James: Awesome! Great to have you here and I want to ask you about your spelling to begin with, you are a copywriter but you spell copywriting with a K, have you ever found that your bad spelling has kind of held you back in your profession at all?

Neville: You’re like 10% of the people who are like you can’t even spell copywriting, you must not know anything, but those people are really stupid so they don’t really know anything. It is Kopywritingcourse.com but it is spelled with a K instead of a C and the whole thing was, I remember when I first started copywriting, it was mainly about writing words on a page and that was great for 50 years ago because that was really all that you can do then on certain levels of TV and radio and now, remember we have YouTube, we have the internet – we have so many different mediums that you can transfer information from my brain to your brain that words is just one part of it. Right? So right now we are communicating via audio, we could also be communicating via video, we could also be text messaging, which in this situation, would be like the worst medium ever. So right now, I would say copywriting in the normal sense for us to be talking right now would be a bad medium and audio is better at the moment. So instead of copywriting, because it is different, it’s not just about copy it’s everything- you might write a script and have it through a video, you might have it go to an audio, you might just write it as text that’s why we call it Kopywriting with a K., it’s just different.

James: Nice! Personal branding. Good stuff!

Neville: I didn’t it intend it to be, I just wanted it to sound different than the regular copywriting, it just sounds boring to me also.

James: Yeah, well talking of non-boring and interesting, you’ve got a pretty outrageous story with finding success in copywriting that seem to involve rave lights, lots of alcohol and about 120 sales in 2 hours, if it is safe to share, would you mind sharing that story with our listeners?

Neville: Yeah, I originally did not want to share this because I normally love sharing stuff but sometimes when something works really well, you’re just like – maybe I should just shut the hell up and keep this quiet for a while. So I used to own a business called the House of Rave and with light ups and glow lights so I sell light ups and glow lights online. I was a drop shipper so it was like all my business paid my bills and savings and everything like that and my friends were like how many past customers you have and at that time it was like 7500 people that had emails and these people had already bought from me so I think your audience is pretty advanced and they know that if someone already bought something from you, that’s a really hot lead because they already have given you money, they are already like you etc. etc. and so I thought okay, if I send out an email list of my products to 7500 people, I would totally be killing it, right? So I signed up for an email service, I think it was vertical response way back in the day, that’s what I used and it cost $80 a month and I was like, all this time and all this money, and actually on my site you can download this and all the stuff I use, and I sent out these beautiful emails and I spent so much time, I was so proud of them. And the end result was on my first one, I made a grand total of I think less than $40. Meanwhile it cost me $80 to get the email service so I went in the hole $40 and the thing is, people clicked on my emails a lot, the click through rates were sky high. But here is the thing, no one bought a damn thing. So I kind of put it aside and said well, people are clicking, they are interested, it just keeps my brand name alive, blah, blah, blah and for years I basically sent out email newsletters that did nothing, they made no money. I did all these coupons, all sort of shit on there and nothing ever worked! Then, I started studying copywriting, and I feel like there should probably be a trumpet playing

James: We can add one, we can add one in the post production for you.

Neville: A lot of people probably know Gary Halbert, so one of my friends said, hey look, buy a $20 print cartridge and print out these things called the Gary Halbert letters. So I begrudgingly printed them out and there was like hundreds of pages so I was like, Ugh, this better be worth it. The first night, I stayed up until like 6am to read about this stuff, the second night, I stayed up until 6am again and I was just so enthralled with these letters because I felt like I was being taught the message from the gods. Like this is the reason that everything that I had ever sold that did not sell, this is why it did not sell and here’s how I can change it. and I remember being just so happy and pissed off at the same time that I was just learning this when I was 25 or 26 years old and so I basically started going on a tear just learning about copywriting and as most people get enthralled you just get obsessed with it for a while. James, you travel a lot so you probably see Sky Mall in the planes all the time. If you go through Sky Mall and read every single thing, and then think, how would I change this? There is like a doggy pool float. It’s like, how would I change the copy for this? And I would literally like make drawings in Sky Mall and rewrite copy while I was on the plane and I don’t know, I just found that fun. And I would look at any of the advertisements on the magazines that people left on the seats and say, well, that’s a stupid advertisement and they should do this to make people buy, etc. etc. so basically coming back to the rave company now, I’m kind of becoming a copy expert and with the help of a friend, I rewrite these email newsletters. So same 7500 people, I never made more than $40 on any of those things which is ridiculous and I made a promo for these things called finger lights which are like little lights you put on your fingers and I have actually sold it, they were like $.95 for a pack when I was selling them that was the sale price and I actually sold them at this price before and no one really bought them. So then, instead of just saying hey, finger lights are $1.95, I was like, wait a second, I pick up the phone for the customer support for this, so many people call and ask me about things that most people don’t know about. For example, I thought these finger lights were for wigged out wavers on drugs on parties that were just like waving around on the air or something like that. And that’s what I thought, but then I realized, people were calling me to ask me what kind of batteries do they take and I was like, why are you buying this? And they were like, oh, my kid gets afraid of monsters under his bed at night so I put one of these on his finger and he has like a little flashlight, he can check the monster. I was like, well that is kind of weird. And I never really thought anything about it. And then I had a plumbing company buy like 50 pairs of them and I was like, what is this like? Acme plumbing? What is your company, oh yeah, well obviously they work like under sinks and stuff and at really very odd places so even if you have a headlamp it is still very difficult to see stuff around corners so we give them these little finger lights and you know, they are so cheap that they can get damaged and whatever no one really cares. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. One parent said he had one child that was autistic and he would kind of like wave them and watch it and it would actually calm him down. And so there are all these other uses for this single product! And so I wrote about that, and if you go to Kopywriting.com there is a blog there, there is actually a thing on there that says how I downloaded and got 210 orders, you download that for free and it actually shows you the actual scripts that I used and you can see that on there and I sent that email on a Friday night, which is historically like the worst day to send anything to sell something. I went to a party and I was a little bit tipsy and I checked my phone and there was like all these order notifications, pages and pages of it, and I was like, what’s wrong with my phone? What’s going on? And when I checked, sure enough, in my account there was like thousands and thousands of dollars deposited in the last hour or two and I got a hundred and twenty orders within two hours and I made a lot of profit. And I remember thinking like every single newsletter I made before got maybe 2 people buying and because there is a coupon and they did not buy much, very low profit, all of a sudden make thousands of dollars and this email had no pictures, no nothing. It had one link on it that said buy now and the only difference between this newsletter and the other ones was this was completely copy, the other ones were all pictures and flash and flair but no explanation of why people should buy. And that was like where I was like okay, maybe there is really something big going on with this copywriting stuff and from then, I have never looked back. Like from then, the whole structure of that business changed. It moved from primarily making money from SEO and traffic from the web to just email sales. And then from there, a career was born.

James: And the rest is history, which I am sure we’ll get to over the course of the rest of the conversation. But what was it specifically about those two different approaches that you believe had such drastically different outcomes because you still had the same email set, you still had a blank sheet of paper or a blank email with a bunch of text on it, what are the qualities in that second email that just outshone the previous very much?

Neville: It goes back to the psychology of the human brain and what makes people do things. So for example, I have a bottle of water over here and I want you James to start drinking more water so I tell you James you should drink more water. That’s not a very convincing statement, right? That’s just like a mom nagging at you and that would not work really well. Now, what if I said, hey James, do you actually work out ever?

James: Yeah, yeah, I work out. Yeah.

Neville: You go to the gym and lift weights like that right?

James: I do. Less frequently than I should, but I do. Yeah.

Neville: So you know how people say like your body is 70% water etc. etc. I will spare you the science of it right now but basically the way protein and amino acid works is they have to be really well hydrated with H20 like if you like look at its chemistry, that is how it works. Have you ever noticed if you see those big body builder guys, they carry like those comically large jugs of water, have you ever seen that?

James: Yeah.

Neville: They have those big blue office water cooler kind of things, it looks like a smaller version of those. And you are like, why are they drinking this comically large amount of water? And the reason is those big bodybuilder guys know that when you drink a lot more water and you are ultra-hydrated and not just hydrated, your muscles grow at a 30% faster rate with a regular work out meaning every time that you go to the gym and you are not ultra-hydrated, you don’t get 30% of those gains which is kind of silly, that’s just like paying $100 for something and someone just taking $30 away and you’d be like, hey, what happened? I want that. So that’s exactly what happened. So basically, I just got to convince you to drink a little bit more water when you go to the gym, right? I can tell you just drink an extra liter more of water and you’ll see 30% more results from the exact same work out you do no matter what you do and that would be a convincing argument, right?

James: Totally, yeah. And I guess going back to your original example and what you described about that second email, you were starting to understand better what people’s motivation before you just start people giving this things to play around at raves and make themselves look pretty fluorescent lights, the plumber who wants to see around the corners, you’ve got the mother who bought it for her child who’s scared at night, you’re understanding then what people wanted them for and I guess that’s quite critical, right?

Neville: That’s a concept called repositioning and I have actually done a couple of my products where they went from making just a few thousand to over a hundred thousand very quickly just by repositioning. It is unreal! And we are repositioning something like for 16 year old ravers and those people had no money to plumbing companies and stuff like that who do have a lot of money. There’s a lot of money that can be made just by repositioning these products.

James: Yeah, so now of course rolling a little bit ahead, you’re the App Sumo which is the not quite daily deal site for entrepreneurs. You guys send a lot of emails, right? I mean frequency’s due to the nature of the business is pretty constant. What have you learned about sort of email frequencies ending and other stuff that might be good to share with our listeners?

Neville: Yeah, so Noah was building App Sumo originally with 50 thousand subscribed and I was learning about this copy and I was like, dude you’ve got to try this copy stuff. So me and him we used to work in my apartment all the time together and I was like, let me send out an email and it used to just be like my house of rave thing like a simple email and pictures and stuff like that and then I wrote this three page long email and we’re both very nervous about it and it came out and it turned out that was App Sumo’s first day that they made over $10,000 in profit. And from there we did it again and again and again and then I became part of the company and all that stuff and a big growth base of about 750,000 people as a result of writing all the emails. And what I learned about frequency was that it doesn’t really matter and that’s a cop out answer so I will tell you exactly what it is. The email frequency depends on how much people like you. So let’s say you just met me and I asked to borrow your car. And you’re like, um, okay, um okay sure. And then the next week I rent out my apartment on a B&B and I am like, hey James, can I come stay for like a week, and oh, I want to stay for free. You’d be like, man, I just met this guy and he’s already asked for my car, he’s kind of a leech already, right? He always wants something for himself. And so marketing people who send emails for themselves, aka sales emails, people get tired of those if you send them often. Yes they will. But if you send them emails that they actually like and learn from, then they do not get tired from them. So even when we used to send out every single day, we did not see any decrease in participation. What we do notice is that if you send out about three times a week that tends to be like the sweet spot because it takes some people about two to three days to open their email and so three times a week seem to be a sweet spot but I have sent out much more. In fact this week I did a series where I sent out every single day of the week and I had my highest opens and highest click through rates by the end because people were so enthralled by the series. They can’t wait to see what was next.

James: I guess it’s all about being the guy or the girl who when someone is on the other end of the telephone or the other end of the computer that people want to pick up the phone to or open an email to. Like they are expecting and wanting to get that –

Neville: There was a certain time where a lot of people used to see my emails and they’d be like, people just read your emails because they are so wacky and funny and I am like, no, no, no, no, no. the funniness has nothing to do with them. Actually a lot of them are very serious, what there is is they’re educational stuff. Okay, so let’s say I’m sending a course about SEO and most people would say, okay, this is a course about SEO which normally cost $199, today we’re selling it for $69 and there you go. Like that is the whole email. Now a small percentage of the people would say, okay, that’s cool. I’ll buy it, whatever. But a large percentage of the people would just be like, okay, this is a sales email, I got nothing out of that, unsubscribe, who cares. What we would do is we would explain to people why SEO worked and we’d actually give them lessons and examples so we’d actually show examples from our own statistics from our own AppSumo Stores, from our own SEO stories and from house of rave and real statistics. So people would read this posts where 80% really good information and then 20% sales. That’s like the magic ratio- 80% really good information and then 20% selling them on something. And so as long as we kept doing that to date, people who are getting 80% of the information and all these awesome stuff they could use, 20% of it was sales and they were absolutely fine with that.

James: What are your top 3 most effective emails that you’ve sent for AppSumo?

Neville: Top three most effective, actually some of my own courses. That sounds a bit overconfident –

James: There you go, that’s coincidence, right?

Neville: Yeah, because I made them so I know the most about them. So here was a really big splash. So for house of rave what happened is I would document this for my personal blog and people would ask the same question over and over, maybe like, how did you find this business idea? How did you send the supplier to send your stuff for you? It would be the same like top 3 questions over and over and over. And so people told me, why don’t you make a course out of it? My very first online was about how house of rave started. And originally I thought that people were asking how to make a drop shipping businesses possible. That’s what I thought they wanted. And so that’s what I gave them. I gave them this course, it was probably 10-12 videos or something like that and it just showed how it worked for me, like how everything worked out, customer support, and things like that as people were very curious about these very mundane things about the business. And so I sold that on my blog and it did reasonably well. And then we tested it through App Sumo. We sent some test emails and it didn’t do all that great and I was confused like how come this audience loved it but this one doesn’t. and then when I realized I called some people up and they’re like honestly I don’t want to start a drop shipping business, I just have never seen a business before. And I was like, what do you mean you’ve never seen a business? And they’re just like everyone around me seem to have factory jobs. No one has a business so I have never seen what a business looks like. And that’s when I realized oh, I am in a lucky position where I live in the city and I have group of friends that everyone’s an entrepreneur so I get to see the ins and outs of everyone’s business all the time. Most people have never even seen inside of someone’s business. So I changed the position of that course from starting a drop shipping business to see behind the scenes of a news business and the news business is what Tim Farris calls a business that pays you both. So a lot of people just want to see what that thing looks like, a lot of people have questions like do you need a content management system or use salesforce.com to keep track of all your customer inquiries? I was like whoa, it’s just a Gmail account and my phone number. It’s not that hard, and then they would say, well how do you send the orders over? Do you have to have a customer shipping order? I was like, I literally copy and paste the orders from my system to my drop shipper’s system. That’s it. And I would show them how to do that and it would totally blow their minds like wow, this is that simple? I had no idea. And people immediately go off and start a business because they realize that if I can do it, then they definitely can do it. So I remember the point that we’re talking about but I think we’re done with that.

James: Man that’s awesome! The original question was what were the most effective emails that you ever sent for AppSumo so getting back on point I think you were getting to it with that story right?

Neville: The thing is that course did really well because what we found was that of the 500,000 people or so at that time at the AppSumo email list? It was mainly made up of professionals so they’re designers, graphic designers, a lot of them were entrepreneurs. But most of them were wantrepreneurs; someone who wants to start a business but they just haven’t really started it. and so a lot of these people have never seen anyone’s business and we found out this is the case. So I positioned the copy to say that look if you’ve never seen inside a business, this is full open kimono Kate Blanchett stuff. You get to see names, customer email addresses and I am going to make sure this is legal for me to show you but I am going to open up and just show you screenshots and videos of exactly what I do to bring in orders and send them out. And because I wrote that in the email copy, people were really, really excited to see that. People were very excited and the product just completely crushed it. That was one of the top three kind of things, I can tell you another one if you like. This is interesting for a copywriting.

James: Yeah, let’s go for it.

Neville: So a lot of people humor is a big part of the absolute emails. Not true! It is still about information and so I actually got robbed sometime in June 2012. I had a really nice apartment on the ground floor and I kept all my windows open all the time. And I have a lot of expensive stuff in there and I came home one day and everything was just like moved around and I thought a friend had played a prank on me or something. All my computers were gone! And it took me a while to realize like someone stole my computers. It didn’t hit me, and when it did, I have never been robbed before personally and I never really knew what it felt like, it is really weird to say this but it felt like extraordinarily violated. That sounds like a weird word but I felt very violated. And I immediately went to the AppSumo office, demanded to use someone’s computer and changed all my passwords, I called the police, I was just going crazy in my head like every time I walk in my place, I will check every single room and see if someone was there and I always close my windows like basically living there kind of suck after that and I was writing a piece of copy about this thing called prey, I am not affiliated in it in anyway but it is highly suggested that you put on your mac computers or actually any computer as it works on everything. It’s just a tiny little program that no one will know you ever have on your computer but suppose someone stole my iMac that I am currently using right now. I can track down my iMac with scarily precision accuracy that it’s ridiculous. It logs all the keystrokes and it takes pictures of whoever is using the computer and it tells you basically what mac address, their ip address their location and all that kind of stuff and you can get all that stuff remotely through the internet and so I did not have any tracking software on my Macs and I always dream of this day where I could like find these people and beat them up or something like that and it was a very emotional thing and I wrote that in the story for Prey. First I was going to write Prey is great for if your get your stuff stolen, blah blah, instead I was like I was going to tell the story about how deep this is when my computer got stolen from me and how it felt, you know how violated it felt. And that was one of the best deals we ever did; we even gave away the product for free but they also had a paid version if you had more than three devices and it still was an amazing, amazing deal and I can’t tell you the amount of outpouring sympathy people had. There was hey, I was robbed from my place and it was the same thing. I never thought it would be a big deal and it was so violating we eventually had to move and blah, blah, blah and it was in a deeply emotionally resonating story for people that also happen to sell a product to solve that solution and that was one of the best deals so that was the email that completely crushed it and it wasn’t because of clever copywriting it was people meeting people. People resonate with that.

James: Yeah you just in fact reminded me to send an email tomorrow morning that I have got to promote a webinar. I mean I’ve sent a ton of emails but there was one that really resonated with my audience where I just literally told the story of how I got in to doing SEO which is what I do and the struggles that I face before with a previous business I was running doing just regular branding marketing and having to run after customers from the struggles that I face then going from month to month trying to find the leaf flow and then when I found search and got people to find us how much easier it was and I tell the whole story quite emotionally from my point of view. Now if there is one email that I have written that has gotten a better response than every single thing else because I guess writing with emotion and telling a story that engages people and hey that happens to mention something that might help people at the end of it and it converts really well.

Neville: Anything that is emotional usually does really, really well and also when you cut to the real root of the problem that you are trying to solve, that also for sure helps. Like when people buy a Mercedes, they are not buying it because it is a really great car. It is because they want to appear a certain way to other people. They want to look rich or they want to be able to be the person that can afford that and really that’s the real reason you buy rather than a Kia. And so whenever you cut to the real root of it, oftentimes, you get much, much, much better results.

James: Now we mentioned a few things, we spoke about understanding the audience, understanding their motivations and speaking with passion and telling a story. What else makes a difference between a good piece of copy and a great piece of copy?

Neville: I think what you can actually justify would be so one you have to be really believing in your product and so many products at AppSumo where I will be trying to write the copy and I will be trying to check the product and also it is just like not that great, it is real hard to like lie to my teeth through someone and use a lot of credibility. The other thing is, not so much as emotion but also how much are you teaching them in that sales copy, like I hate it when people call it sales copy because it should be called like educational copy or something. It should not be called sales copy as sales is just a part of what you are trying to do. So every time I put out a sales page I put up this auto responder class I did recently and one of the things, I was like to read the sales page. I want people to be woaw, you’ve got to check out this page, you’ll learn a ton about auto responders. But it also happens to be a page where you are selling something. And so I gave them all these case studies and numbers like the actual numbers certain emails did. We just flat out gave them email sequences and things like that. That’s the difference between a really good piece of copy and a really excellent piece of copy. We hired three copywriters for AppSumo to replace me and they all kind of sucked. I am not saying they sucked because their writing sucked, but they would always just try to sell the product. That was the problem. They would just try to say that this is the best product ever, it is so cool, you should totally buy it and this is like totally unbelievable! Give me a real reason. Give me some experience and a lot of these guys didn’t have that experience unfortunately and so their copywriting couldn’t be all that great. They just did not provide much educational value. So a piece of copy that I could not stop reading that’s a totally good copy. And especially if in the end I learned something totally new, I’m like wow, that’s good stuff. That’s why I look for educational stuff.

James: Let’s move things on a little bit sort of copywriting techniques and talk a bit about traffic per se, I think you are a big fan of guest posts, right? What is it about that traffic strategy that you like so much?

Neville: So guest posting you are talking about your email list, right? The funny thing is for example I had a guy named Sam Park and his company is called hustle card which I was flown in for and spoke at and it was really fascinating because he’s a kid, he’s like 25 and he bought a conference. I did not even know you could buy a conference. I didn’t know and it was big. There was this guy in San Francisco that ran a conference for 50 people called hustle con and Sam took it. Within 2 months threw the thing, he had all these amazing speakers that he did not even pay and got them all. And he had a 400-person and in the end Sam made in the range of 40 thousand in profit in two months which for a 25 year old is pretty respectable. And I was just like, how the hell did you do that? That’s just really amazing! And I was like, could you write about it and just send that to me? And the reason I like his guest post or anyone’s guest post is because I only have so many experiences I can give you and I can talk about copies and drop shipping blah, blah, blah, but there is only so much I can give you. Sam had something totally new and it was outside of my realm. I had never thrown a conference before for people so did not know how to do it and I had never thrown a conference and earned forty thousand dollars so I did not know how to do it. so I brought him in and said, you know what? I want to know your secrets. Give me the email auto responder you used, show me how you set up the payments, how did you get the speakers? There was a guy who sold his company for $900 million. This guy flew down to Toronto to speak at Hustle con and he did not even know Sam. How did you get this guy to come out there like he’s not motivated by money? What did you do? And so Sam told all these secrets and the tricks of the trade that he did so for example, here is an interesting thing. He got all the speakers to speak not by telling them, hey, you get to speak at a conference. These are like big time speakers and they don’t give a shit about that. These are small potatoes for them. He said, these are 400 people who want to start businesses. These are like bloggers and stuff and they want to spread the message about hustling and if we want to like show them that your company is all about hustling and getting out there and doing stuff and when you position it like that, the speakers are way more likely to come out and talk because it was like helping the world and not just because they are getting some money and something like that which none of them even got. So Sam basically gave us the scripts for that and when he sent that email out for me, it got crazy high click through rates and got shared like crazy, it was unreal. It was one of my top posts and I did not even write it and he was very happy to write it because he got hundreds and hundreds of sign-ups on his webpage, he got all these people hitting him up. He basically got a bunch of benefit from it because I promoted it for him and I got a bunch of benefit because I shared his knowledge with my audience. And so guest posting is really good but it has to be something juicy and not to be about someone talking about the same crap like oh here’s another thing about copy that you probably already know. Having guest posts about things that I would personally love to hear because I have never heard them before.

James: Yeah, it’s a nice spin to it because everyone normally thinks about guest posting as reaching out to other people’s audiences and getting opportunities –

Neville: No, don’t believe that shit!

James: Exactly!

Neville: Don’t do that because that is so stupid like why would I want to promote your website? That’s not what I want. You know what? I told Sam he is going to put a lot of effort and give away all the secrets. I am going to promote this kid so I copied something that Steve Chiu did even on Facebook. I took a picture of Sam and I put the title of the post and I posted on his Facebook. I did all the promotion for him, I did not expect as I never asked Sam to say like hey, promote this to your audience or can you tweet this. That is shitty! Like he is giving you all of his secrets and now you want him to promote for you? Like how selfish is that? That’s not how it works. No, no, no. I think if you do guest posting, you tell someone, look I am going to do all I can to get the most clicks to the most traffic. I want people to sign up through an email list. If you do that, you’ll earn a reputation as like people talk. I am telling you, people talk and Sam goes around telling everyone like the guest post just totally killed it. I guest posted somewhere else and the person did not get me the traffic and so people tell other people like that wherever I heard someone else and they know that I am going to take care of them, they know that I am going to do my best to give the maximum amount of exposure for them and not for me but at the same time it ends up really well for me as well.

James: Yeah. And I guess the flip side of it is that you have not told him to go and promote it but I am sure he has, I am sure he’s been talking about it a fair bit himself, right? I’m sure you’ve acquired links and traffic from other places because he really wants people to find that piece of content on your site.

Neville: Well, that piece of content is so good that people started sharing it a lot. You could tell with the stats that this is a very highly shared thing and so it gets promoted through this avenue and I am not telling Sam but instead I was telling him, why don’t you get all your stuff, spend two days doing all this thing and then send all your traffic to me? That’s not a fair trade idea.

James: Yeah it’s the douchebag way of doing it, right? But I guess so many people –

Neville: Yeah, which means that if you think you really care about people then people love to do guest post because they get a lot out of you. Whenever I do guest post, I only hope that the other person will promote it and then when they’re like, can you send a tweet or an email to your own list directing to my post? I’m like, no! Why would I do that? That’s stupid.

James: Yeah, no fair exchange. Well, anyway Neville, I think we should get close to wrapping it up, we’ve packed a lot of content in there for 30-35 minutes. I want people to go off and find out more about you so where should we direct people to as a result of listening in to this?

Neville: I have two things and no matter where you sign up it will go to the same email list. I must say I have a really cool email list and this is my opinion but also a lot of people tell me this on a daily basis and I have the only email list they’d read which is actually really, really good and so you go to kopywritingcourse.com or you go to nevblog.com. Nevblog is my personal thing where I talk about my personal life, Kopywritingcourse is where I talk about copy and I just kind of started this blog like very, very recently actually and it has taken off at a shocking pace so check it out there is a lot of good stuff if you ever want to see anything on there, write to me, I read all my emails and I will do whatever you want on the blog to get you more traffic and all that kind of stuff. It’s good stuff. Kopywritingcourse.com.

James: Awesome! Well thanks Neville, I will make sure that the links to those two places nevblog and kopywritingcourse in the show notes for episode#53.

Neville: Oh, on the right side of the kopywritingcourse it says download the little email pdf how I started my 120 orders email thing, it actually has all the pictures of the old newsletters I sent out which probably look a lot of newsletters you know and love, and then I show the redone copy and people have literally copy and pasted that and it completely transformed their business. They went from doing what I was doing to then they’re like okay, this copywriting stuff works. So just grab that for your own personal reference, it is very, very helpful.

James: Cool! There you go, the links to those, if you can’t remember those just go TrafficJamCast.com/53 for both those resources and a bunch of other stuff mentioned by Neville will of course be included in the show notes so Neville, once again thanks for coming on, it’s been a blast and I look forward to doing it all again sometime soon.

Neville: Oh, thanks James!

So there you have it that was Neville Medhora with KopyWritingKourse.com and of course copywriting and course with a K so head on over there for more on Neville. Thank you for listening in to episode#53. I will of course be back next week with another episode of the Traffic Jam podcast, so remember to subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio and you’ll do that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. And of course, when you subscribe you’re the first to get these episodes as soon as they are released. For a direct link for all of the bonuses that come with the episode including downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show plus the bonus copywriting training to the seven Gary Halbert letters every marketer ought to read, go to TrafficJamCast.com/53 where of course you can also join in for the discussion on this episode.

We end this week’s show with what’s probably the most famous track by the band Rage Against the Machine. The track is called Killing in the Name, it’s from 1991 and of course it is a track chosen by our guest on episode#53 Neville Medhora. Enjoy and I will see you back here again real soon for episode#54. See you then!

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THE TRAFFIC JAM:

The Traffic Jam track is a musical ‘jam’ chosen by our show guest. Neville Medhora has picked the track Killing In The Name from American rap metal band Rage Against The Machine.

Killing In The Name is from the bands 1992 self titled debut album which reached triple platinum status.

HERE’S WHAT TO DO NEXT:

To help get better results from your copy, I’ve prepared this special episode bonus for you:

“K”opywriting Training

The Kopywriting (with a K) training includes an MP3 and full transcript of the strategy Neville Medhora used to get 120 more sales with just a few simple changes to his email copy.

Also included are some of THE best copywriting resources available on the internet. The Gary Halbert Letters.

Not just any Gary Halbert letters but 7 of the very best, compiled in a point and click guide you can save to your computer for when you get writers block, which I’m sure is regularly. 😉

These letters lay the foundation for Neville Medhora’s outstanding success and they will do the same for you.

Grab the transcript, MP3 and resource guide now, they are available for instant download below:

How To Learn Copywriting Bonus