Do NOT Publish This John Carlton Interview
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Since there are a lot of designers in our audience, I wanted to ask you about the role of design and graphics in marketing. How can graphic elements enhance a sales message? How can they get in the way? As a copywriter, do you believe a picture can truly be worth words? Design can be very important, when design is part of the credibility of your marketing, whether online or in the non-digital world. In print advertising, we strive to have our ads look as much like an organic part of the magazine or newspaper as possible, right down to the format and typeface.
Our copy is tailored to solve specific problems, just as regular articles are tailored to address a specific topic. So design in classic direct response has always been minimal. I got a lot of those designers fired, because I could sell with minimal design or no design at all, having some of my letters go straight from a word-processor to finished piece. There were still misspellings intentionally left in the subhead, still bad grammar expertly dropped into the body copy, still poorly positioned photos purposely slapped in with long captions in very small type.
You might not want to sell new cars with home-made ads, but you can sell a ton of used cars by being a fallible human, for example. But copy is still king, no matter what kind of design you use.
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I can overcome too-fancy design with copy. But why struggle, when the best design is so often no obvious design at all? But these campaigns are funded by gazillions of bucks over decades, plus massive support-marketing in other areas. An entrepreneur looking to those companies for inspiration, without having an equal war chest or decades-deep marketing plan, is an idiot.
Your best advertising will always be the simplest way to start an honest human-to-human conversation with your prospect… one at a time. I got him into Elmore Leonard, and we both read the James Bond library multiple times. In fact, he named his son Bond after Understanding buyer motivations may not necessarily include knowing how serial killers operate… but the more insight you have into every facet of how weird folks can be, the better prepared you are for grokking persuasion tactics.
Diving into the reality of the world cannot be cleanly removed from swimming past the murkier parts. Second, great copywriting is all about breaking down problems and explaining solutions.
In fact, great marketing is too — we look at situations prospect pools, competition, history of the niche, etc and deconstruct what has been done, what can be done, and what we actually will do to create a new successful campaign. And detective novels are all about that same process.
Great storytellers understand the world at a deeper level than most folks, and are fearless about exploring life no matter where it takes them. People crave stories, react to stories, and appreciate the truth that can appear from a tale, well-told. Questions or comments about this interview?
5 Things Biz Owners Need to Succeed: John Carlton Interview
Please share them in the comment section below and, you never know… you may just get a response from John himself! Adam Kreitman coaches business owners on how to make their websites more compelling to their prospects.. Please join the conversation! We like long and thoughtful communication. Abrupt comments and gibberish will not be approved. Please, only use your real name, not your business name or keywords.
We rarely allow links in your comment. Finally, please use your favorite personal social media profile for the website field. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. Its all about Bullets! One of the greatest learnings I have learnt from John is how important it is to write punchy bullets. Listen in as he drops a HUGE hint about the way he writes copy!
My plan was to run through many of these questions and have John answer with the first thing that comes to mind. In the call you will see how hard this is!!! Although NLP can be powerful, he thinks that personality and storytelling are your first choice weapons and NLP is way down the list. Videos are sales letters in a different form. The reason this strategy is so effective is because you engage your customers in a multi-sensory level. Use videos correctly Videos can be vital only if we use it in the best way possible.
This means delivering the right kind of sales letter in conjunction with the other basic sales process that always includes text in some way. Start out with text? Move in small steps Where your heading sells the sub heading, your sub heading sells the video, the first few seconds of the video sells the next few seconds of it and so on. Avoid this rookie mistake!
A deadline forces you to finish something. Without deadlines, nothing is ever finished and you are in the mercy of an ambiguous and vague finish line that does not exist. There are novelists who put their books out after a decade. On the other hand, there are very prolific, really good writers who put books out every year because they set deadlines for themselves.
Such is the amazing and rebellious life of John Carlton: An incredible She told me to not even try to become a copywriter. I'd never .. This interview was previously published in the September, issue of Barefoot Writer. John Carlton joins AWAI for an interview on how he's found big success writing edgy copy. I was not invited into the business world and, in fact, I kept getting spit out of the normal corporate world – and that's one . Published: May 19,
John will often do all the research, make an outline in bullets and then go take a nap and tell himself that when he wakes up he will have a headline and that works for him. This process has been used by successful writers. What makes a top copywriter? How can you tell if a person is a top copywriter and not a average one? You MUST learn to write sales copy The lesson here is everyone must learn how to write their own sales copy.
Are you willing to entrust that to some stranger?
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Starting from scratch Looking at it the other way around, you can lose all the technology, all your money but if you know how to sell, you can become successful again. The ability to sell is a skill that can never be taken away from you. People have been selling since the beginning of time.