‘The Ultimate Direct Response Marketing Weapon’ – Daniel Levis’ Latest Article

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Read Daniel Levis’ latest article titled “The Ultimate Direct Response Marketing Weapon”. [Article Reprint]

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The Ultimate Direct Response Marketing Weapon

In this special interview issue:

* And much more!

Dear Web Business Builder,

Put the power of full motion video and audio together with the trackability, economy, and interactivity of the Net, and you’ve got a force to be reckoned with. One by one the barriers to using sophisticated infomercials to persuade people online are toppling, and it’s high time we all sat up and took notice.

That’s why I’ve invited Ken Calhoun, owner of Day Trading University to join me here today at Web Marketing Advisor. Ken is an absolute past master when it comes to the fine art of creating stunning video infomercials to enhance the selling power of any website.

Take five and listen in …

Daniel Levis: Ken, recently you sent me a nice little note raving about one of my products. And I have to confess I didn’t know who you were at the time. But I was blown away when I googled your name and discovered the tremendous success you’ve accomplished with your day trading university website and your other sites.

And I couldn’t help but notice that almost all of your sites had a video clip on it. And when I watched the videos, I was mesmerized. These videos were incredibly polished and they used just about every time proven direct response principal I’ve ever seen.

My immediate impression was: this is the way of the future, and this guy’s got it down to a freakin’ science. I have to know more about this. And my Web Marketing Advisor members have to know more about this too. So thank you very much for agreeing to let me pick your brain for the inside scoop on creating powerful, direct response infomercials on the web. Welcome.

Ken Calhoun: Well, I’m very glad to be here Daniel. And it’s certainly a wave of the future. And one of the things that you’ll find about in interviewing me is I like to be very direct. I know some of the tele-seminars tend to ramble. I welcome the toughest questions and I give you the shortest, most effective answer possible.

And I think you’re right, direct response video on the web is definitely the wave of the future. And I’ve been using video on the web since the year 2000 back when we had to use real media streams to sell my trading related products. And it’s definitely the best and fastest way possible to achieve breakthroughs in conversion and higher sales.

Daniel Levis: Well, why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your marketing story, your sales sites and your successes? Give us your background. Give us some context for this conversation.

Ken Calhoun: Yeah, absolutely. After I graduated from UCLA and Cal State Long Beach, I became a Statistician and Quality Engineer for Rockwell International, McDonald Douglas and Ford Motor Company back in the eighties. And I was a TQM, Total Quality Management Team Facilitator.

I went from there into sales training. I got tired of the Dilbert cubicle life and I moved to Hawaii where I lived for ten years. And I was the number two sales trainer in the state with over a hundred and forty clients. So I’ve got a strong background in sales and quantitative statistics, which is helpful when it comes to things like setting up sales conversion matrices and so forth and web design. So that’s my background.

And then I taught college MBA and did some consulting. And from there started online with Day Trading University because at the time back in the late nineties that was a very popular topic. And I made a fortune with that and have been expanding ever since into new markets.

Daniel Levis: It seems to be such a common thread. So many people in the direct marketing business and the Internet marketing business have sales backgrounds. With Internet infomercials though, this seems to be a new development that marketers and copywriters or scriptwriters as they are known in the infomercial biz can capitalize on.

Ken Calhoun: Uh-huh.

Daniel Levis: What do you see as being the major developments coming up in this area that copywriters and marketers need to know about? And tell us a little bit about how scriptwriters are compensated and whether It’s as lucrative as copywriting.

Ken Calhoun: Well, that’s a great question. I know from working on Internet infomercials and developing some of the top selling ones for my own industry one of the keys that I think most marketers and copywriters would be well advised to start doing is watching some of the top selling infomercials.

If you go to the site, www.jwgreensheet.com, it has the top rated infomercials in terms of sales conversions. So that’s important to know because only an estimated one out of twenty infomercials is successful. So you need to know which ones are pulling the best. This is a kind of swipe file approach.

You need to then go watch those infomercials and manually transcribe and study those. It’s the only TV I watch other than DVD’s of old shows that I like. And I jot down phrases from the best selling infomercials, and study them to see what grabs my attention. And then I work that into the script and the copy for Internet infomercials, which I then produce. And as with any script writing process it’s very laborious. You have to take time to identify your USP and your marketing hooks and the sequence and the timing of when to introduce certain sales elements into the pitch. It’s a very involved process.

I’m not familiar with scriptwriters’ compensation. From what I understand it’s anywhere from ten to thirty thousand dollars for scripting a thirty minute or twenty-seven and a half minute offline direct television infomercial.

With Internet copywriting, typically they’ll take a percentage of gross sales in addition to an upfront fee for writing the copy. So it’s an emerging market for copywriters and marketers and certainly a lot of green field out there in terms of doing it right and making a lot of money at it.

Daniel Levis: I’m really excited about seeing this move forward. A big question I think that’s going to be on a lot of people’s minds is what’s the difference between long copy sales writers and Internet video infomercials? How are they different? And how are they the same?

Ken Calhoun: That’s a very good question. When we take a look at the technology of video infomercials we have to remind ourselves it’s in service of the pitch. It’s in-service of and not a replacement for your sales process. So with long copy where we have maybe a prehead or a credentializing block of copy at the top. Then you have your headline, your subhead and then your deck copy or your main body copy that then goes through your long copy sales process. We need to accomplish the same type of salesmanship in print but this is salesmanship in video with infomercials.

So what I like to do is I will first create my long copy sales letter. Then I will take what I put in that long copy sales letter and distill it for the small screen. Many of my letters are as long as a hundred and forty-eight pages in length. And they sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of my info products. So they work very well. Obviously, I’m not going to do a thirty minute web commercial online because people aren’t patient enough to watch that as they would be on a television while sitting on a couch.

So what I need to do is then condense the long copy sales letter and that’s where one of the key differences is- we put the same elements in, such as a pre-head, your headline, your subhead, your bullets, your credentializing copy, your call to action, your grabbers, your callouts, sidebar elements; all of that goes into the script for an Internet infomercial, but it’s in a condensed version.

And in terms of timing I’ve used anywhere from as short as say five to seven minute Internet infomercials to as long as twenty minutes. But that’s the top end. You can see one for one of my best selling products at www.tradingvideos.com.

That video helped produce nearly a half million in sales for us in less than eighteen months.

Write your long copy sales letter as you normally would. Then condense that into a script for your Internet infomercial, which you can deliver yourself, or hire professional talent to do it.

Or use a hybrid. I will have people read some of the elements and I will combine that with what I say and then have a strong call to action at the end that closes with a time limited offer and all of the rest of it.

With an Internet infomercial your key is to keep building an excitement level throughout the five, ten, fifteen twenty minutes of the Internet infomercial to where they get to the end of the video they’re at a fever pitch and they say wow I’ve got to buy this now. And of course you want to put in some type of urgency factor.

You can’t really do the “for the next seventeen minutes only” as people do on television infomercials, so you have to support that with the text copy in which the infomercial is embedded. I typically use a quantity limit.

I’ll have a price that’s only good for the next three hundred and fifty units sold and I update that with a countdown over the course of several weeks until we’re out of those three fifty.

And then I really do raise the price and repeat that. So people are trained to purchase the product because they have a genuine time urgency or quantity urgency. And I really do raise the price forever. I don’t go back. People need to respect your urgency and you need to be honest and believable and credible with that. So I do that and it produces absolutely phenomenal sales.

So those are some of the things that people should give some thought to as they’re looking at adding video.

Daniel Levis: So let me see if I’ve got this straight. We’re not talking about replacing long copy with video. We’re talking about adding video to long copy, is that right? Is that the idea?

Ken Calhoun: Right, because people respond to different stimuli. Some people like to read. Some people like to watch video. There are kinesthetic, auditory and visual learners, and it’s important to address as many different types of learning. And this fits in well with that whole web 2.0 theory of having more interactivity or more personalized experience online.

Certainly having a pitchman or woman or combination and adding that video as a choice element to the pitch is important. So that if they want to read they can read. If they want to skim and scroll they can do that. Or if they want to watch and listen they can do that as well.

So yeah it’s important to realize that — I would never just have a page that has a video and that’s it and an order button at the bottom. It has to be embedded into a long copy sales letter. It’s just a way to beef things up. I always like to look at ways to kick the competitors to the curb or out of the competition. And so adding video gives me a whole new area in which I can out compete for my customers’ dollars and attention.

Having multiple ways to engage the prospect, as anyone who’s done direct face-to-face selling knows is absolutely critical. You need to have product samples. You need to match and mirror and so forth and speak the language of the prospect at the speed in which the prospect speaks. Adapting as much of that as possible to Internet salesmanship and video and print is essential.

Daniel Levis: Here’s the million-dollar question I think for anybody listening to this. Have you done any spilt testing where you took a long copy web page and just added video, then run those two against each other in an A/B split? What kind of results did you get?

Ken Calhoun: Great question. Let me give everybody a quick and handy way to split test because I think most people’s eyes glaze over when they hear the phrase because they don’t know how. Here’s how. And I used to show this to people at my marketing seminars. You don’t need to go buy a script. You don’t need to become a PHP coder. You don’t need to go install things on a UNIX server and blah, blah, blah.

All you need to do is get two similar sounding domain names for the same product and have different order links on each one. So you might have loseweightnow.com versus losingtheweightnow.com. And on one you put the video and on the other you don’t. And of course you have different order links on each one so you can see which one converts best. And maybe put those on Google and on MSN ad center and run them at the same frequency, the same timeframes and see sales conversion differences.

In my own actual experience, and this was over many years, I have a minimum of eighteen percent outpull with video versus the non-video version.

So I will never have a product online without some kind of video either in production or on the site. A minimum eighteen percent outpull with video and as high as 53% for one of my products. So it’s absolutely critical, and I’ve never yet in my life not sold with video and had it not outpull the non-video version. The key is and this is really important for everyone to understand.

Remember when Web Audio came out how crappy sounding a lot of the amateurish audio is out there? Or when people figured out they need to start putting their photos of themselves on their websites?

Well, there’s a trick to that. If you have amateurish audio, video, or even images that are incongruous with what the prospect expects to see, it can actually kill your response.

Daniel Levis: Sure.

Ken Calhoun: You don’t want to have an amateurish u-tube or Google video looking video on your website. That will probably hurt conversion; all other things being equal.

Daniel Levis: I think there’s a lot to be said for that. And it’s not just video. I mean it’s everything right down to the actual look and feel of the copy itself.

Ken Calhoun: Uh-huh.

Daniel Levis: If it looks incongruent with what the prospect expects from a reputable vendor, and I see this every single day on the Internet, it’s definitely bad for conversion. Same with e-book covers. If you have a bad e-book cover you might as well have no e-book cover.

Ken Calhoun: And most of them are bad too by the way, which just blows me away. Why would you put something out there that looks like that is my gut reaction when I see a lot of info products. I mean, unless it looks professional well what’s the point. And what that means by the way to people is, you need to work really hard and buy a lot of books and study.

I work eighteen-hour days. I make millions. There is no magic bullet or magic software answer to this. So many people are lazy. If you want to be world class you’ve got to work your butt off. And that’s fine, that’s the way it should be. Those of us who do work hard reap the rewards.

Daniel Levis: Now here’s a question that copywriters and marketing strategists are going to definitely grapple with. In helping a customer to enter this brave new world, there are a lot of hurdles — a lot of technical hurdles, a lot of cost hurdles. I mean how difficult is it to create a stunning, kick ass, highly professional video?

Ken Calhoun: It’s hard. I’m not going to say well that’s the best part. It’s easy just go buy this affiliate link mentioned software and it makes it easy. No-no, that’s not the answer. The answer is if you want to succeed in life, work hard.

I’m a big fan of Brian Tracy — I’m a huge fan of Brian Tracy and I love his forty plus rule in which he says your success is determined not by the first forty hours you work — I’m paraphrasing here, but by all of the hours beyond the first forty that you work.

I’m a workaholic. I love what I do. I love the money I make. I love the difference it makes in my customers’ lives. So it’s a lot of work. There are plenty of DVD tutorials out there on the various software programs that you can buy. And you have to educate yourself and take the time to learn it. And it’s an investment in yourself and in your customers and in your business that can pay dividends and will for many years if you have the metal and the work ethic to work hard.

So many people I see on forums, they whine a lot but they don’t say well hey I worked seventy, eighty hours a week for two years and I’m still not successful. I don’t hear that a lot. I hear a lot of people saying well I bought this program that promised me the world and golly gosh it didn’t work.

I’m sure the world class copywriters like the John Carlton’s and Clayton Makepeace’s and Michael Fortin’s and Dan Kennedy’s of the world when they sit down and they write a control and you look at their controls you can tell the amount of work and perspiration and genuine sweat and expertise that went into it. And it’s one of my personal kind of soapbox’s is that there are a lot of people out there that expect wealth without work and that’s not the way the world works folks. You need to work really hard at it. And it’s worth it.

I mean I can — as somebody who’s been on both sides of it I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich and rich is a lot better. But the price is you need to educate yourself and learn from the best. Go deep into learning from the best and work very hard by reading, studying, practicing, and continually testing until you make it. And that’s really where success is; it is on the other side of a lot of work.

Daniel Levis: Exactly. I agree with you a hundred percent; although, I think the question was more along the lines of, how can you best harness the expertise of other people that have that same work ethic, bringing them together to actually create the video? To shoot the video. To do whatever needs to be done to get it into production.

Ken Calhoun: I do all my own videos start to finish myself. I mean I don’t work with anyone else on that. I’ve taught myself everything from lighting to video shooting to using the non-linear editors. I use Sony Vega and all the different audio and video elements that go into production. So I think the first part of that answer is: even if all you are doing is coordinating the activities of others you still need to have first hand knowledge of what goes into a successful video production.

You still need to teach yourself from start to finish what it takes. And there are plenty of books and videos and tutorials out there that people can get.

And then you’re in a much better position to vend out to other people. You’ll have first hand knowledge from start to finish of what a successful process looks like so that you know the right questions to ask, and the right activities to parse out to other people that you want to work with on developing your own video infomercial.

Daniel Levis: So you need to be an educated consumer in other words?

Ken Calhoun: Yeah, well, an educated producer. I produce everything myself because I don’t like the time delay or the communication burden involved in communicating requirements to others. I would prefer to put in the thirty, forty, fifty hours it takes to produce a five or ten minute video infomercial because of the sales I get. I mean I make so much money I love it.

And the great thing is being able to produce it yourself. You have the pride of workmanship of hey I created that. And hey by the way it’s converting like gangbusters and I’m making a lot of money with it as well. So it’s a great feeling to be able to accomplish that.

Daniel Levis: Well, let’s drill down into that a little more then. What is the process that you go through for developing an Internet infomercial? How do you go from script to the small screen? How do you do your research, your writing, your storyboarding and the video production and whatever else goes into it?

Ken Calhoun: Okay. Yeah, we can go straight through the process. The first thing as I said was to go ahead and this is a good point of comfort for everybody is to go ahead and write your long copy sales letter and print that out. I still like writing everything long hand because I’m more creative that way than sitting in front of a monitor. I do editing on the computer. I like to take my pads of paper out to a local coffee shop or sit in bed and write copy or whatever. But I do it long hand.

Anyway, after you write your long copy sales letter you need to create the script. And one of the keys that you need to think about is what the goal for each element of the script? So for each paragraph I like to break it down. The most important thing is the attention getter or the grabber or the big promise on the front end that you’re going to make to the person who hits your site because you’re only going to have say ten or fifteen seconds to get their attention before they’ll say yeah click interested or not interested.

So you have ten or fifteen seconds to get their attention at most. Just like writing a headline, put most of your work into the intro for your script. Once you’ve created the script and you have your script ready to go I like to do some storyboarding. A lot of what I do is off the computer. My best work and my best sales results come from when I’m not sitting in a chair in front of monitors. I like to be able to look out the window and see the mountains while I think on and develop my products.

Anyway, you create a storyboard of major design elements for what goes into your video infomercial. And a lot of that involves the images that you want to paint. Think about in copy how we want to create compelling, vivid fascinations or bullets that grab the prospects attention and deliver immediate benefit. We need to do that in our video infomercial.

So I like to create visual images of success and that might be for example the stock trader image of him or her in front of a monitor shaking their fist at this guy saying hey I made a lot of money.

Or if you’re going for pain on the front end, you can get lots of royalty free video clips which I use all the time of somebody frustrated and making facial expressions and gestures that suggest losing a lot of money. And you solve that pain or solve that problem by having a visual image of somebody being successful or wealth images of sports cars and dollar bills and bank vaults and all these other wealth imagery elements that you add into the infomercial.

So you create a storyboard that links together those visual images that support your script points. We have the script on the left column of the piece of paper and the visual image on the right column or vice versa if you’re left or right handed. So you can create a storyboard. And so you have each of the design elements mapped out from start to finish.

Then it gets fun. Then you go into video production. And that’s where you can do green screen shoots and you have to use soft boxes which are big lights. You can get them for a couple hundred bucks on eBay. Use a good three-chip camcorder. And again I don’t want peoples’ eyes to glaze over on the technology but just make note 3-CCD is a camcorder that captures better quality color.

And you can get it for six, seven hundred bucks at Best Buy or wherever. Then you’ve got your script. You may want to use a teleprompter or what I’ll do is I’ll just tape the script to the bottom of the camcorder, and I can read it while I’m in front of the camcorder. And then you film each element on your storyboard.

Then take that to your editor, capture the video, put it on a timeline, add your royalty free audio and video clips and then render it out into a format that’s suitable for streaming for the web and you’re set. I can do a whole weeklong course but that’s the overview of the steps that are involved. It’s not really that difficult once you’ve done a couple. And it’s definitely the way that selling will be done on the Internet from now on.

My challenge is to use my copywriting skills to stay there and create Internet infomercials that are even more compelling than those that my competitors can put out which thankfully none of them have done a decent job.

Daniel Levis: It’s still the early days, so anybody still has a tremendous ground floor opportunity to get into this. Let’s say we had copywriters that wanted to write scripts and go to their customers and encourage them to get into this bold, new world, could they create a script and then come to you and either introduce you to the customer or pay you directly to do all of the nuts and bolts.

Ken Calhoun: No, actually I don’t offer any info products in that arena or services, mostly because it’s a competitive advantage. And I’m not going to be a shovel seller in that arena. But there are plenty of providers out there.

There’s one recommendation if I may make for somebody that I have absolutely no financial or other relationship with. His name is Tim Hawthorne. And he’s got to be one of the top, real world infomercial producers. He’s got a DVD that’s only fifty-nine bucks called Anatomy of a Winning Infomercial.

And it’s a highly recommended resource. Visit http://www.hawthorneinfomercialguide.com//Public/HOME/index.cfm. Tim’s guide explains a lot of the process steps behind creating a regular infomercial for TV.

If you’re a copywriter and you’re out there trying to figure out how you can get involved, the main way in which I would position myself where a copywriter for hire would be as someone who can write short scripts.

And then you can also upsell or offer additional tiers of pricing for a longer length script that you write. But that would be one, key service that I would offer in addition to things like storyboarding. You can get as involved as you want into the production process. But it’s absolutely the wave of the future and it creates remarkable sales. I love it. And I’m able to communicate with my customers more directly because I’m talking to them. Another key here for video infomercial is to make sure you have video testimonials embedded as well.

For all of my infomercial videos I always lead them off with or start by having five or six video bites or sound bites of satisfied customers saying hey this is a phenomenal product. Hey I was able to make X number of dollars in X number of weeks with it. I was able to be successful this way. I loved it blah, blah, blah.

You have a specific video testimonial to lead it off because that’s credentializing. With television infomercials you see a lot of success stories and video testimonials as being at least half of the content. That’s an important thing that you might want to work on as a copywriter or marketer in terms of offering a service to get that together for your clients and be able to add value to their business by making that a success story for them as well.

Daniel Levis: Yeah, one of the things that I often do with my clients is work really hard to get the right testimonials to support the various points that are in the running copy, and to mate the two together. Very often you go to a webpage and you see just a blob of testimonials and they don’t really advance the sales process because they don’t relate to the sales argument that’s going on the running copy. And yes you’re right I do notice that most of these infomercials are very heavy on the testimonials.

Ken Calhoun: Yeah. You bring up a good point too. You make your pitch much stronger by organizing the testimonials by benefit area. So that if you’re saying ease of use in your pitch then you support that with three quick video or audio testimonials that speak to that saying hey this was so easy I couldn’t believe it. I was a complete newbie and now I’m a pro and I’m making all this money and blah, blah.

It’s a quick, supporting organized grouping of testimonials that logically follows the sales process so that you build the sales case and overcome — and again anticipate and overcome objections throughout your body copy and the script. And then support that with appropriate video testimonials so that you can close the sale more effectively and boost your conversions.

Daniel Levis: Not only that but actually digging for the great testimonials if you don’t have them because a lot of these clients out there have client bases — customer bases that are not being mined for testimonials.

So that’s another area where whether you’re a scriptwriter or copywriter where you have a tremendous opportunity, because remember folks — people believe their peers way before they believe somebody who’s trying to sell them something.

Ken Calhoun: Right. One thing that I’ve found really helpful is to give people examples of good versus bad testimonials. And point them to a testimonial that is very specific, you know, I was able to make X number of dollars in X number of weeks or whatever. Testimonials with numbers are always more believable and credible than those without. And then say, please don’t send me something that says hey I loved it.

Customers need to be trained. They have no idea. They don’t talk our language unless they’re in sales or direct response. They don’t know that specific testimonials are important. So they think — again if you think of your average friends and family and you were to talk to them on the topic they would think that saying hey I loved the product, it was great, makes for a great testimonial but it doesn’t. That’s a worthless testimonial.

Daniel Levis: So true. And I think it’s an area that a lot of copywriters neglect. How can copywriters as professional people prepare their clients to develop their own Internet infomercials? What should be their role and what kind of a role should a customer expect from a copywriter?

Ken Calhoun: That’s a great question. One thing I’ve advised people to do is create a quick outline or a flow chart of the steps involved in the development process. And also the roles in which people take. One common frustration for many scriptwriters or even copywriters in general is hey I wrote the world’s best sales letter but the customer is complaining because it’s not selling.

But that’s because that sales letter was not part of a well-integrated marketing process that has traffic going to it. And it may be something as basic as not having qualified traffic. So it’s not the copywriter’s fault it’s the product — or it’s a wrong product, wrong message to market match or an incorrectly positioned or incorrectly priced product. So a lot of those common client copywriter relationship pitfalls need to be documented and put as a checklist for client education.

In terms of Internet infomercials and the role in which copywriters can take in helping their clients, what I would advise them to do is to just say hey here is my collaborative role with you. But before even taking on a client you need to assess the viability — you have to assess the viability of their market.

And it’s one of the things that I liked about Clayton’s approach from what I understand of it is that he advocates working more closely with more established people versus just freelancing to everyone and their brother out there who wants a copywriter. And I agree with that because it positions a copywriter for much higher probability of success because they’re working with somebody who has a track record and is well established and can be counted on to do their role as a marketer while you’re doing your role as a copywriter.

And all too often you have a clueless client, right? They want a copywriter to come in and save a product that has no chance of succeeding regardless of the quality of the copy. So when it comes to Internet infomercials the same exact issues are very much true. Copywriters need to talk to their clients and prescreen them to make sure they are people that number one will pay you at least fifty percent upfront and are reliable and trustworthy and credible and so forth. And have good quality products or services that you’re pitching and that you feel comfortable pitching.

And then put together a collaborative process with that client such that you identify your role. So those are some of the considerations that a working copywriter needs to take into account when helping a client to develop their Internet infomercial.

Daniel Levis: Yeah, that’s one of the things that I’ve learned from Clayton. That’s probably the most — there are so many things I’ve learned from Clayton but one of the most important things is that he goes even further than what you describe. I mean you talked about qualifying and understanding that you’re just a copywriter, and if your client doesn’t have qualified targeted traffic, if they don’t have a kick ass product and a kick ass offer, well, their project is not going to succeed no matter how well you write. Even if you write it better than Clayton Makepeace that project isn’t going to succeed.

But he goes one step further. He actually looks for a client that’s malleable and will actually work with the client on the product, on the offer and on the targeting — which goes beyond just qualifying a client that has a brain.

Ken Calhoun: Good point. Yeah, you need to seek out clients that aren’t as stubborn as we are as entrepreneurs sometimes. We always think we have the best product and best process. And the more successful you are as an entrepreneur and a marketer and a product developer the more malleable you are and the more open to intelligent dialog and ideas for improvement.

So yeah I think that’s a great point you bring up. And I agree you need to select clients that are open to trusting your knowledge and experience as a copywriter, and being able to work with them to help improve the entire marketing chain from start to finish.

Daniel Levis: Okay, well we’re just about out of time. Last question for you.

Ken Calhoun: Uh-huh.

Daniel Levis: What are the tips that you would suggest marketers and copywriters in particular start using right now today to prepare themselves for successfully writing and producing Internet infomercials because like it or not it’s coming?

Ken Calhoun: The first thing I would certainly have people do is again look at the successful infomercials on television right now and again to assess which ones are successful which is critical to know. Remember more than 80% of them are not successful. You need to know which ones are. There are ones like Proactive and Total Body Workout, the ones that have Chuck Norris and Bowflex and others that are doing well.

I write out by hand the entire scripts and see which elements are most resonant to me as a prospect, and pay attention to some of the phrases that are common to successful infomercials.

So that’s the first thing in terms of market research is looking at what’s working now. Your swipe file equivalent is looking at those infomercials. Late night and weekends and be sure not to buy everything either. Resist the pitch but look at which ones really make you want to reach for the telephone and order now.

And then start integrating the positive elements into the way in which you write scripts for your clients or for yourself as you produce your Internet infomercials.

And another thing is to look at what’s online. You might want to look at a website called www.livemercial.com and they are the leading producer of landing pages for Internet infomercials. And they do typically very short two to three minute infomercial clips that are taken from the twenty-seven and a half minute regular, long form DRTV spots.

Go to carltonsheets.com and look at one of them. They’ve got a gallery of live mercials that they have; short two to three minutes spots. Study all those and then borrow and adapt the elements that you believe in and that you see from test results are doing best.

Make a lot of money out there in service of your customers’ needs and dominant desires. And be able to convert those sales and those clicks into dollars and make a fortune. It’s a lot of fun.

Daniel Levis: Well, this is fantastic. I’m pumped up about going out there and doing my first online infomercial. I want to thank you very much Ken for stopping by Web Marketing Advisor this afternoon. And I hope we can do this again.

Ken Calhoun: Well, absolutely, glad to be here Daniel. And I wish the best to all of our listeners out there and the parting thought is, the dominant thought is, make sure that you take the time to learn and make it professional so that you differentiate your products from the junkie free video that’s out there on the free video websites.

If your video looks like that it’s probably not going to sell. So you need to take the time to add some sparkle and professional polish to what you’re doing. It doesn’t cost anything other than your time and energy but take the time to do it right.

If your video looks like that it’s probably not going to sell. So you need to take the time to add some sparkle and professional polish to what you’re doing. It doesn’t cost anything other than your time and energy but take the time to do it right.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor,
The Web Marketing Advisorâ„¢
Supplement to The Total Packageâ„¢

P.S. For a limited time, you can now cram your hard drive full of control busting copy at a $100 savings with the Steal These Secrets Swipefile. Stop racking your brain needlessly for creative ideas when you can have a treasure trove of proven winning concepts at your fingertips — guaranteed to open the profit floodgates — or your money back! Check it out!

Daniel Levis is a top marketing consultant & direct response copywriter based in Toronto, Canada and publisher of the world famous copywriting anthology “Masters of Copywriting” featuring the selling wisdom of 44 of the “Top Money” marketing minds of all time, including Clayton Makepeace, Dan Kennedy, Joe Sugarman, John Carlton, Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Richard Armstrong and dozens more! For a FREE excerpt visit http://www.Sellingtohumannature.com

Plus, for a limited time, you can now cram your hard drive full of control busting copy at a $100 savings with the Steal These Secrets Swipefile. Stop racking your brain needlessly for creative ideas when you can have a treasure trove of proven winning concepts at your fingertips — guaranteed to open the profit floodgates — or your money back! Check it out!

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