Summary: This is the second time I have interviewed John Carlton and I am really pleased with the information John generously revealed. We covered off the topic of long versus short and video versus text once and for all! John Carlton Interview Summary notes: Q: Is John the greatest living copywriter? John refuses to be called the worldâs greatest living copywriter. He would rather that he was referred to as the most ripped off and respected writer online. John also thinks that the highest form of praise is to see people mimicking his work, and following him and really keeping an eye out for everything he does. Q: What is your most ripped off ad? The one legged golfer ad was one of the most famous things heâs written. Itâs been recycled and reused countless times since he first wrote it about fifteen years ago. It became a very powerful example of how to do a âhookâ. He spent more than a decade perfecting his craft and has now spent another decade teaching people what he learned. John feels most rewarded when he sees people come up with good ideas as a result of his teaching. 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! John hops on the âHot Seat' On my last post I asked âWhatâs the biggest question you would like to ask John Carlton?â and got hundreds of replies. 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!!!) Q: Whatâs more important, injecting character, storytelling, or learning the ways of the NLP ninja? John says storytelling and personality are way up the list of important things and go together because itâs hard to have a good personality without telling stories. Although NLP can be powerful, he thinks that personality and storytelling are your first choice weapons and NLP is way down the list. Q: What are your thoughts on long sales letters versus videos? Videos are sales letters in a different form. If you asked the question, âhow long will it take me to get my point across?â If you can deliver the hook, make them listen to you and get them to give you their money, whether itâs a long or short letter or a long or short video, it doesnât matter as long as you accomplish your goal which is to make that sale. The proven winner? Whatâs been proven to be most effective now is a combination of a video and written text at the bottom. The reason this strategy is so effective is because you engage your customers in a multi-sensory level. The goal is..... Bottom line is whether you use videos or sales letters, you have to be able to make your audience in an âactive stateâ and moved enough for you to make the sale. 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? Youâre always going to start out with text, on emails for example, itâs always faster and easier to send a text email with a URL for people to go to instead of them waiting for your video or audio to load before they can understand your message and weâre almost certain that very few will stay waiting long enough. Q: What tips do you have when it comes to writing squeeze pages? Every step of the way in a sales process and in any kind of human interaction where you are trying to influence the behavior, so try to cut your sales process into little chunks of progressive pitches that get peopleâs attraction incrementally. 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. On squeeze pages,
