IMPORTANT UPDATE
Since this episode aired, we had a chance to work with Mitch Miller. We recognize that the tips he gave in this interview were valuable. However, we feel we’d be doing a disservice if we didn’t mention, we do not endorse or recommend working with him.
Keyword:
Writing Copy Summary
Writing copy is just all about writing words and saying what your market wants to hear according to Mitch Miller. The problem is people make it complicated when it is really simple. In this interview, he talks about writing an effective copy and making thousands of dollars a day with it.
Key Takeaways
- Remove unnecessary words when writing copy.
- Learn from the very best mentors in the world.
- Apps like Wisdom, Adbeat, and Who’s Maling What can be used to know what the market wants.
- The copy writes itself as soon as you figured out what the market wants.
- People should spend 90% on research and the remaining 10% for writing and selling.
- Your headline can be brain dead simple. The problem is most people make it complicated when it really is extremely simple.
- When using bigger words than you’d normally use when speaking to someone, then you are going to start losing.
- Professional kills results. It kills your conversions because you’re not connecting. It shows that you’re not empathetic to your market.
- You’re not speaking to your market when you are writing copy. You’re speaking to one person.
- Speak to one person, know who they are, and keep it simple. Talk to them like you’re talking to an old friend.
- People buy from friends and people they trust.
- Having a lot of money come in makes it really easier to organize your life because having money solves all the problems that not having money creates.
- Getting some momentum
- Standing out as an authority by hyping yourself up
- Be extremely sincere and really care
- Understand how money moves in society
- The more you charge, the more your client has invested, the more seriously they take you.
- Charge as much as the market will bear. Most people just set prices based on what they’re competition is doing and what they feel.
- Test doubling your prices.
- You got to just shut the mind up once it’s time to get to work.
- Put some trust into the process and understand that it’s all right if you fail.
- You have to test to see if your copy is working. The app SumoMe can be used.
- When writing copy, people are looking for a reason not to purchase it
- Run enough traffic and buy enough advertising so that you actually have enough data to make a decision off
- Understand writing copy is all about the words. Say what your market wants to hear.
Resources:
Book by Gary Halbert – The Boron Letters
Tools to grow your site’s traffic – Sumo Me
Writing Copy In A Clear and Concise Way: Transcript
Kamala Chambers:
If you want your audience to feel like you understand them, you get exactly what they’re going through, and you can help them, then, you need to know how to write awesome copy.
We’re talking to a guest today who knows how to do just that. We’re here with Mitch Miller. This guy made over $30,000 in a single day, sitting around in his underwear. He could barely hold a job before. He mastered copywriting and now he’s crushing it.
Well, Mitch Miller, you are just amazing at what you do. I’m really excited to dive in.
So, are you ready to launch? Let’s talk about writing clear and concise copy.
Mitch Miller:
As far as the writing clean and clear copy, one of my mentors, John Carlton, he always hammered into my head. He said, “You write your copy. When you can’t take out any more words without actually losing the structure of what you’re trying to say in the sentence itself, then you know your copy is nearly perfect.”
A lot of people ramble in their copy thus they go often tangent and a lot of people actually make their sentences a lot longer.
For example, the word “that”, rarely ever has to be in any form of sentence in a copy. You’ll find that if you remove those, sentences go a lot smoother and cleaner.
Decoding and learning from the very best in the world are the secrets to writing copy.
If you want to bake a world-class cake, you wouldn’t go to the grocery store and pick up a bunch of ingredients randomly. Then just bring them home and throw them into a bowl randomly. Finally, mix them up, throw them into an oven, and expect the world-class cake to come out of it.
Writing Copy – Best Copywriters
Luis Congdon:
If you’re trying to bake that cake, so to speak, as far as marketing copywriting goes, who are some of your favorites?
Mitch Miller:
Gary Halbert, by far, I’d say one of the best in the world who has ever lived in. He already passed away but he wrote a one-page sales letter that he managed to run or mail over a billion times. He made $57M out of it. He hired 34 full-time women to cash checks.
Gary Halbert, John Carlton, Ben Suarez, and Joe Sugarman are the cream of the crop in writing copy. Everyone learns from them.
Tools to Know What Your Market Wants
Kamala Chambers:
We got on the phone on the other day, you walked us through how to improve our copy and one thing I really appreciated about it was you were able to break down some of those key elements in looking who the audience is and how to speak to them more.
The thing that I’m always asking myself when I’m writing any copy is “What is it that they’re really wanting? What are their struggles right now? What are their pains? What is their passion?” I’m trying to get to those true emotion points.
When you’re trying to discover an audience, what’s the tool that you use to discover who your audience is and what drives them?
Mitch Miller:
It depends on what I’m working on. If it’s a copy for myself, I hire somebody else to look at my copy. We just have too many blind spots to do our own copy.
One of my specialties is I writing my copy to the best of my ability and then hiring out somebody comparable to me. He actually goes through it and goes through my blind spots in my marketing but when I’m writing copy for other people, I’ll do crazy things. If it’s consumer-based, I’ll go door-to-door and see what works and talk to people. Also, I’ll do online surveys and dig deep into forms.
Moreover, I’ll use certain apps like Wisdom, which is on Facebook. It’s a free app to get a lot of cyclographics on your market. I’ll use Adbeat to find out what all your competitors are doing or what successful ads they’re running on Google and then you can see what market’s obviously responding to. Who’s Mailing What is an amazing resource that I use to find old and proven sales letters from my market in the past? They’re already winners so they’ve already done the research on what the market wants, the pains, and the frustrations but that’s everything.
The copy writes itself as soon as you figured out what the market wants. – Mitch Miller
Most people spend 90% on the writing of the copy and 10% on researching what they’re market really wants when they should probably reverse that and spend 90% on the research and then the last 10%, for writing and selling.
Writing Copy – Connecting With Your Audience through Simple Copy
Kamala Chambers:
90% on the researching and then I just love this other piece that you brought in. The first thing that you introduced was taking out all the extra words. There’s so much wordiness and people want to over explain things. If a 10 year old couldn’t understand it, then it’s too complicated.
How do you feel about that?
Mitch Miller:
It’s absolutely true. You can have a crazy headline. People think writing copy has to be all hyped and go over the edge. Sometimes, you can do that and sometimes, it’s fun.
I have a sales letter for my copywriting where it’s all about my story of how I transformed but that’s the crazy hype. I said, “I couldn’t hold a job with Pizza Hut,” “I had a heart attack.” All these crazy things that happened to me could be a sensational headline but if you’re selling a course on how to stop divorce, a simple headline that says “Stop your divorce” would work better than any hype, flashy headline that you can imagine.
Your headline can be brain dead simple. The problem is most people make it complicated when it is extremely simple.
Luis Congdon:
Earlier this month I saw a great Facebook ad. It had a simple headline like “Do you want results like this? Let me show you how,” and then, down below it was a screenshot from Facebook of how much money it spent on Facebook ads, which was a couple thousand dollars and then it showed how much money he had made from those ads. It was something like several hundred thousand dollar worth of $3000-4000 of Facebook ads spent. I just thought, “That’s a great, great ad!” I want to know exactly how he did that and it just reminds me of how much convincing we can do through good copy and a nice image that is attention grabbing and really speaks to your audience.
How many of us wouldn’t want to be able to take a couple thousand and make it into a couple of hundred thousand?!
Mitch Miller:
It’s true. It’s like 1 plus 1 equals 2. Undeniably 2 and I’m interested.
Luis Congdon:
Ever since speaking with you, I’ve been thinking a lot about simplicity of copy and some of the best copy really only has 1 or 2 sentences, a fairly simple image but it’s highly engaged or highly targeted.
Mitch Miller:
And you also speak like a human because most people, when they get into writing copy, they’re all set and get into advertising speaker or writer speak, which is the stupidest thing you’d ever do. You want to speak to people like you would actually speak to them and so you start using bigger words than you’d normally use when speaking to someone. Then, you’re going to start losing.
If you’re selling any kind of marketing service, you could say “Is your stuff not converting? Would you like to fix it? I’ll show you how right now” You can make it so brain dead simple. You can say the word “stuff” because if that’s how you talk to a friend. People get too complicated about it. They try to get all wordy and professional. Professional kills results. It kills your conversions because you’re not connecting. It shows that you’re not empathetic to your market.
When you are writing copy, you’re not speaking to your market but to one person only. Therefore, know who they are and keep it simple. – Mitch Miller
Once you’re done writing your copy, they should be like “I like this person. I feel like I connect with him. I feel like they’re my friend.” People buy from friends and people they trust.
Writing Copy And Mistakes in Running Business
Luis Congdon:
David DeAngelo is one of my favorites in writing copy. When I first came across his work, I was one of those guys that wanted to double my dating and he understood me so well. I read his stuff and I was like “Wow! I feel exactly what he’s talking about and I want to be him.”
I know you went through a quite a transformation and reading your story, you’ve taken a lot of businesses, ran those into the ground, and you really didn’t know what you were doing.
What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve made in learning how to run business, and doing marketing and writing copy?
Mitch Miller:
The biggest thing with the failing of business is,
1. Not sticking to it.
2. Being far behind. I couldn’t do even basic, simple follow up with this person or follow through with this project.
If it really was that bad, I don’t know what it was. To be honest, I still don’t know what that was but I do know that you can’t stay stupid forever especially if you’re trying very hard to get out of being stupid. At least, recognize that I would brainwash myself with endless business books, which frustrated me more because you’ve been studying this stuff for 9 years straight and you’re trying things for 9 years straight on and off with jobs and everything. It’s absolutely miserable and you can’t handle it anymore. Consequently, you quit to it and you just jump over to a business project and then it fails and you get a job again.
Doing that for so long and being in so many industries, as an employee and as a business owner, the accumulation of knowledge plus confidence, and everything snapped. And I said, “No more. I will no longer make anyone else rich. I will no longer disrespect myself and I’ll follow through with the things I’m going to follow through it.” When I did that, everything started flowing to me. The thing is getting momentum.
If you’re broke and trying to get the ship going, it really is difficult and there’s no way around it. Even if you do have the goods, if you can’t get that momentum, it’s really tough.
Now, having a lot of money come in, it’s around 7,000 – 10,000 dollars a day on average right now, makes it really easier to organize your life because having money solves all the problems that not having money creates.
That’s a lot of stress and problems because half the time, we sit there thinking about our problems. If you’re thinking of starting a business, most of the time we’re sitting there and we’re just thinking about our money problems and thinking about your money problems isn’t going to help you at all because whatever you think about, you get more of in this world and so that’s all that’s going to expand in your world.
Getting some momentum and pushing through to the point that we have some decent cash coming in and not worry about bills anymore. That changes everything.
Writing Copy And Gaining People’s Trust by Becoming an Authority
Luis Congdon:
One of the pieces to that question or the reason why I asked you that question and you answered in such a special way because if I’m listening to the show and I’m trying to get my business going, most likely, the first few years at the very least, I’m struggling and I’m failing. It’s very uncommon that somebody gets started in their business and right out the door they’re kicking butt.
Most people see Jeff Walker and Marie Forleo, and they think these people just came out the door and they are crushing it and they’re not.
What I enjoy about your answers, you said there’s an accumulation of failures, little successes and having accumulated a lot of knowledge as well that then finally something snapped inside of me. I think those are the building blocks for confidence.
Mitch Miller:
Yeah. I think you’re a right Luis. It’s really interesting because it’s hard to look back and reflect especially when you’re in the midst of who you are.
To be honest and this might sound negative but it’s not, I’m just getting annoyed thinking that people are actually mostly retarded when it comes to marketing. It’s because they’re not putting their effort into their write. They’re not listening to the right people.
They’re not doing the right things and so having the mindset of being “You know what? I know this. I got this.” And I know this than most people now because I’ve studied the right people and I just connect the right dots in my mind that I know my expertise is helpful and transformational to people. I’m not afraid to share that now. I am not afraid to share it with an authority.
When you start sharing knowledge with authority, people subconsciously trust authority. Then, they want to hire you or recommend you. They buy from people they can trust and people trust authority.
Kamala Chambers:
What do you think helps someone to stand out as an authority through writing their copy?
Mitch Miller:
A lot of it comes down to the writing style and that’s why I say, “Get a hold of anything that you can from Gary Halbert,”because he really is the prince of print.
It’s all sensationalism. It really is all kind of hype as long as you’re saying the right things. You do have to hype yourself up, say that you’re awesome, and say that your products are incredible.
You really do have to say that you are the greatest thing since sliced bread which is why you see Donald Trump on TV all the time, whether you like him or not. He’s always saying, “This is the greatest thing we’ll ever do.” Basically, he comes on the show or any interview and he just brags the whole time.
For instance, Frank Kern, Jeff Walker, and what all these guys are doing is inspiring but they’re making it damn clear that they’re the experts and authority by just pretty much bragging. If someone’s not involved in this whole marketing thing and they see videos from these experts, it really is one big boasting show.
Writing Copy Sincerely and Helping People
Luis Congdon:
As you’re talking, I’m thinking of Gary Vaynerchuck and the UFC. Probably two things that you won’t hear in the same sentence but both announcers from the UFC are constantly saying, “Who’s the best fight we’ve ever seen?” “This is the most amazing fighter!” “This is going to be the most incredible!” And then next week, “This is it! You got to tune in. If you don’t watch this one, you’re failing at life.” It’s always the same boast.
How do you think that people like coaches, can get over that sense of trying to be humble but at the same time boasting because that is important? If you’re an excellent coach, tell people “I’m an excellent coach!”
Mitch Miller:
The way you do it without seeming like a douchebag or seeming like you’re arrogant is to be extremely sincere and really care. If you really do care, you need to get out of your way and understand that people respond to the boasting, to the authority, to someone taking charge and saying, “Let me take you by the hand and show you how this is done. Let me be your coach.”
It’s more of a sincerity thing. If you really do care and you really do want to get results for people, then you need to get the hell out of your own head because by not being confident and not believing yourself fully enough to go fully through, you’re actually cheating all of your possible clients and possible prospects or your audience out of even improving themselves because you’re not putting the best version of yourself out there.
Also, you need to understand how money moves in society. Money moves to excitement, to celebrity, to big thinking, to chaos, excitement, and speed. Money loves speed.
If you want to really help people, the best way to do it is to be really successful because if you have the budget, you don’t have some of the money stresses that stop you from being able to help people.
If you want to help people the most, you really need to charge a lot and I can go on to pricing if you want but I think a lot of coaches need to understand that the more you charge, the more your clients will follow through because if you pay a personal trainer, 5 bucks a session, what are the odds that you could care to follow through? But if you pay him 10 grand a session, you’re going to do every damn exercise twice over because you paid so much to be there.
So with coaches, the more you charge, the more your client has invested, the more seriously they take you.
A lot of it has to come down to getting out of your own way and really being sincere in helping people. If you really want to get down and help them when you write copy, you have to really get in touch with them and sincerely try to help them. It will come off not as hyped but it will be a very extreme copy.
Writing Copy And Setting Prices
Kamala Chambers:
I think a big piece of that is showing generosity too. When people feel your generosity, people connect with your humanist and they connect with that. They will say, “Wow! This person has so much to give and so much value to offer. Just imagine if I bought their high ticket offer.”
Do you want to talk a little bit about pricing?
Mitch Miller:
Just basically charge as much as the market will bear. Most people just set prices based on what they’re competition is doing and what they feel.
The whole issue with that is you have a lot of beliefs inside of you about what people will pay for things and what the market will bear but that’s not the reality at all. That’s an introspective thing. That’s maybe how you’ve grown up. You may not pay a thousand dollars for a pair of shoes but there are plenty of people who’d pay 5 times that for a pair of shoes. Who are you to say what people won’t pay?
Test doubling your prices and see what happens. And don’t feel guilty about doubling your price. If someone accepts your price, they accept your price. It’s fair for them.
It needs to be high especially with coaching. You have to have high rates because they need to believe you’re the best. If someone is hiring you for coaching, they don’t know enough about what they’re hiring you for in order to make a proper decision.
Moreover, if someone is hiring for marketing coaching, it’s pretty safe to say that they don’t really know marketing or they wouldn’t be hiring a coach. Since they don’t know marketing and they can’t make an accurate decision on how to hire a coach properly because they don’t know the subject enough to even know who to hire, they’re going to go to someone who has most authority or the guy who has the highest price because if they have the money and they respect themselves, then they’re going to go with the higher price guy.
It’s a human instinct to say price equals value especially when you don’t know anything about the subject matter.
If it really isn’t your best interest to keep your prices as high as possible and even for the simple fact that you clients won’t take you seriously if you don’t.
Writing Copy And Shutting the Brain Up and Trusting Yourself
Kamala Chambers:
I love that. And one thing I heard you say before we got on the call is more balls than brains. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
I know you were talking about how mindset is so important with but I love for you to dive in a little bit more about how that affects you if you’re over thinking your process and how that affects copywriting?
Mitch Miller:
You want to train yourself. You want to get the best information and feed yourself with the best information but then you got to shut the mind up once it’s time to get to work.
For instance, if you’re going to a do a direct email campaign or hand out flyers or run some Facebook Ads, once you’ve gotten the best information that you could on getting that campaign set-up, you know that you’re going to pull the trigger. That’s the time you need to shut the brain up because you need to just put some trust into yourself.
You need to put some trust into the process and understand that if you do fail, well, welcome to the club! Everyone fails. If it doesn’t work, all you have to do is look at what didn’t work and then change something up until it does.
“The bigger the balls than brain” basically just means you need to shut your brain up when it’s time to rock and roll. You need to just have guts to just do something and most people are just dipping their toes in the swimming pool and they will say it’s cold. You aren’t going to be a swim champion by dipping your toes in the pool.
I know it’s difficult for people to shut their brains up but you really have to stop thinking so much and just do some stuff.
Writing Copy And Testing Your Copy to Know if it is Working
Kamala Chambers:
I think you’re absolutely right with the more that we can just get the idea that we want to implement and staying on the track with it.
In fact, I see so many of my clients just get pulled off by “I want to do this and that” and if you just find something like “Okay, these are the steps I need to take” and you got to stick with those, that’s how I built my own home, that’s how I wrote book and that’s how I created programs.
Everything I produced is because I find a plan and I stick with it. I see the top experts out there are doing that. I’m so glad you brought up that point. I want to get into a really practical question of, how do you know if your copy isn’t working?
Mitch Miller:
The only one way to know if your copy is working is to test.
If you’re writing a copy for somebody else’s stuff and you’re writing advertising for other people, you got to have it in the contract that they have to test. They have to spend money to be running ads to test out the advertising because there’s a lot of mental masturbation that can happen when you’re writing advertising. You could feel like you are research market and you wrote the best copy in the world and you don’t know how the market is going to react to it. To be honest, one wrong word could kill the whole ad and one right word or phrase could turn it to a million dollar campaign.
There are a couple problems people have. One is they never test anything at all. They write a bunch of things and they’re too scared to put it out there and spend their actual money on it. They’ll spend $2,000 on a course but then they’re afraid to spend $300 on advertising that could actually produce a result.
There’s now a genius little app called SumoMe. You put that on your website. It’s like a little piece of code you put between the head tags of your website. It will show you how many people came to your sales page or what not. It will show you how many red to the bottom. It will show you where they drop off along the way.
If you have 4-5 paragraphs sales letter and you can see that after the 3rd paragraph, half of people are dropping off, then, you’ll know that’s the problem. It’s incredible, you can see exactly where people are not liking your sales message and you can just continually tweak until it’s perfect.
Kamala Chambers:
And how that does work? I know when I go to a sales page I scroll to the bottom and then I’ll scroll back up and start reading. Is it able to track that?
Mitch Miller:
It’s probably not perfect. In copy, most people read the headline first. They scroll down to the very bottom to look at the price and the PS and then they scroll up from there and read down looking for a reason not to buy.
So if you keep in your mind when you’re writing the body of your copy, people are actually just looking for a reason not to purchase it and you’ll be a lot more delicate with what you put in there as well.
I imagine it’s not perfect but what it does is also calculate time on page. It tells you how long someone is sitting there and reading it. So even if they do glance from the top to bottom and then look back up, they probably factor in the time on page and how long people are reading as well.
And this is another thing to the question you asked too. People need to run enough traffic and buy enough advertising so that you actually have enough data to make a decision because the classic problem with new people is they run an ad and then they got maybe 50 people to it and they say “My ads are not working.” However, 50 people aren’t enough to have any statistical variance of whatsoever. Instead, run at least a thousand. People are scared to spend money to test ads especially when you’re starting a business.
It’s tough to come up with that extra money to test but the reality is you have to.
This game isn’t for everyone either. Some of these experts that made it, sometimes they couldn’t even pay their power bill and they’d be in the dark because they’re spending money on advertising. I’m not saying you have to do that.
If you want to do whatever it takes to make this work for you, then you have to be willing to spend money in order to get some test results back to make proper decisions on how to move forward.
Writing Copy is All about Words
Kamala Chambers:
Yeah, we have an episode with a Facebook advertiser who helps people to know what to do in they’re a campaign. This is going to be a really good episode to link with that one.
Are there any closing thoughts that you have for the audience about how to create the most powerful marketing message with your copy?
Mitch Miller:
Copy is all about the words themselves. – Mitch Miller
Please don’t get caught up in Facebook, Tweeter, YouTube, Direct Mail, Flyers, Post Cards. Don’t get caught up in all of those. Those are just vehicles for your message.
The only question you should be asking yourself when deciding on which vehicle to use is “Are my customers there?” “Is my audience on Facebook? Yes? Okay, can I get to them practically through targeting? Yes? Okay, well then, that makes sense. I can craft a sales message for them” “Is my audience on YouTube? No, they’re not. Well then, why the hell would I ever advertise there in the first place?
Understand all of these ways to advertise are just vehicles but it’s the words themselves that matters in writing copy.
So, become a master of writing words that influence people to take out their wallet and pay money and the way you do that is you study the greatest direct response copywriters of all time.
You can Google that phrase and see what comes up. It’s all about what you write and you got to know what your market wants. Do that research, spend the 90% of the time knowing what they want because I guarantee you, there is no boring way for me to tell you that you’ve won a lottery. It’s the same with your market. If you know what they want, then there is no boring way to tell them exactly what they want to hear.
You could scribble it on lipstick, on a napkin and slide it over to them or put it in their mailbox on a rainy day and if it says the right thing, they’re going to buy from you.
Words are how we decode the world. So if you are not writing those words that really connect with people and saying exactly what they want to hear, I don’t care how much you spend on a brochure, I don’t care how beautiful it looks, it isn’t going to sell anything compare to the napkin with lipstick on it and the rain. It’s all about the words.
Kamala Chambers:
We’ve been here with Mitch Miller, talking about writing great copy, marketing yourself, and studying your audience.
