Haha this is hilarious!
Was doing, some err…”TV show swiping” online, when I saw two landing page pop-unders for two different BIG Gooroo clients of ours.
Normally, I just shut those annoying windows before they even load, because they’re noisy and irritating. But since they belonged to my clients, I gave them a second look.
The first, was an autoplaying video which shits me to tears.
The second had a REALLY familiar headline pattern.
Turns out, the headline itself was a near-exact swipe of one I developed for my Email Expert friend Ben Settle.
Now, Ben is an incredible copywriter; one of the best and highest-paid in the industry. He wrote the sales letter for my PPC Domination course, which set an industry sales record in its launch week.
But I’m the God of Traffic and landing pages are MY area of expertise.
Several months ago, I shared with him a landing page technique that I discovered works EXTREMELY well on cold-traffic.
Since he was launching his Email Players newsletter at the time, he asked my help to brainstorm a headline that uses my technique.
We called it Time Continuum Landing Pages…
Because of the way it works.
Essentially, the theory I based it on is to do with linguistic tense. My MSc and PhD topics were both on computational linguistics- knowledge from which I borrow heavily.
The theory:
Things that occurred in the past are EXPIRED and no longer valid. (ie, false). And things that are to happen in the future, eg, conditional statements, “you’re about to”-type statements, are unproven and hard to believe (also false).
But things that are in the present, are currently happening and cannot be disputed (ie, true!).
There’s a lot more to it – and even Ben had difficulty doing it alone…but that is the gist of it.
So the landing page copy we came up with was:
“Simple Email Tips Putting Money In Bank Accounts RIGHT NOW…
“Top email specialist is divulging 24 proven ways to get people reading and buying EVERY TIME you send them email… Use the form below to open it now…”
Although Ben and I both agree that split-testing is a waste of time, Ben tested this headline for MONTHS against everything he could think of, and it ALWAYS out-pulled his new headlnies.
ONLY for cold-traffic though. We had differing theories as to why, but in the end we agreed that Time Continuum is an amazing conversion strategy for cold traffic.
Why I’m laughing now is that the Gooroo Client who swiped the headline pattern had NO CLUE as to why it was working so effectively.
And although they probably increased conversions a little bit, they missed the theory that makes this technique effective.
Their swipe-modified headline still had “promises of future” (false) and didactic instantaneity (ie, the button said “get instant access” instead of making a person FEEL immediacy as we do with ours).
This, I think, is a PERFECT example of what Gooroo Fanboys do to stay just Fanboys instead of business owners.
They swipe and copy away without understanding the intricacies of why things work and when.
Then they wonder why they don’t have the same results as the originator.
Look, if you want to get high converting copy, you have to become so intimate with the field of marketing, that you are a PHILOSOPHER.
In Academia, the highest degree of specialty you can get at university is called a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)…and you can get it in ANY field: computer science, business, linguistics, psychology, medicine…anything.
Because any TRUE expert must be a PHILOSOPHER in their field.
And if you don’t have years to master copywriting, traffic, and all the other components of marketing…well you’re not going to have very good luck in online business.
Unless you HIRE the philosophers…people like the staff of YaghiLabs, each of whom is an expert in some field needed to have success in online business.
[interested_link form=”subscribe_form” document=”18045″]Learn UN-ORTHODOX Marketing & Traffic from Jim, the controversial Ex-Silicon Valley TRAFFIC GOBBLER – Free here …[/interested_link]
Use the link above to unleash all our expertise on YOUR business today.
And quit Swiping around. It’ll be better for all of us. And it’s putting money in bank accounts right now. 😉
~jim