Your No-Stress Method

for Getting Clients

Transcript:
Prospecting to Get Leads

Speaker: Bob Bly

Bob: Welcome. This session is on prospecting, getting leads, and I'm Bob
Bly. A long time participant in AWAI and a speaker at the AWAI Boot Camp
and a long time presenter of AWAI training programs.

Today’s program is on getting sales leads. By that, we mean you are a

freelance copywriter. You’ve been either doing it awhile or short time or
you're thinking of starting, and you want to get clients.

So, to get clients, you need to get people who inquire about your freelance
copywriting services, who call or email you and say, “Hey, we need a
freelance copywriter, Robert or Sheryl or whoever. Could you tell us more
about your services?”

But people, especially when you're just starting out, don’t call you for that,
or not enough, in enough volume to give you a fulltime business. So, you
have to make those calls happen. And we call that prospecting or lead
generation. So, in this presentation, I'm going to show you not every way

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there is to generate leads. There are many and everybody has their own
preferreds.

But, I'll show you the ones that I have used and like the best, and the
reason I know that is two-fold. Number one, because I personally use them,
I know for a fact they work. I don’t have to guess or rely on someone else’s
word for it. And number two, I have access to the results so I can tell you
exactly how well a particular promotion worked or didn’t work.

When I started my freelance copywriting career as a complete newbie, we

didn’t use that word then but we do now, in 1982, January, February 1982, I
had no clients, no one knew who I was, and no one was calling me.

So, I've got a list of ad agencies. Why ad agencies instead of marketers?

Simply because I was living at the time in Manhattan, not too far from
literally the street named Madison Avenue, and Madison Avenue both then
and now is the huge concentration of advertising agencies. So, I said let me
start with ad agencies because they're a short drive away or a bus ride away
or a subway ride away.

Since I wanted to write for B2B clients, because my background was as a

corporate marketing writer for industrial manufacturers and hi-tech
manufacturers, I figured let me start with that. Also, I had an engineering
degree, so that made a logical niche for me.

So, what I did is I got a prospecting directory of ad agencies and I looked up

the agencies and it listed their clients and I made a list of 500 ad agencies in
New York City mostly, maybe a few in Jersey or Connecticut that had

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industrial clients that did B2B advertising. I had the name of the Creative
Director and I mailed 500 copies of a one-page sales letter with a reply card
to these people.

I waited and the next day I checked my mailbox, nothing came back. The
next day after that, and I began to panic. I said, “Gee, I just quit my job and
I don’t think I'm going to be able to do this.”

Then, the post office called and said, “We have some stuff for you.” And
when I went down to pick it up, they had a bundle of 35 reply cards. Of the
mailing of 500, 35 people had filled in and mailed the reply card saying they
had some interest in my freelance copywriting services, which was a 7%
response.

From those 35 people, I closed a total of $39,000 worth of assignments.

That actually was about my income in my first year of freelance copywriting
in 1982. It may sound paltry to you now but again keep in mind this was
1982.

The previous year in 1981, I had, again, I was a recent college graduate. I
was 25 years old, I'm trying to think 24, something around there, in my 20s.
I had been making in my corporate job, and it was fairly well-paying, not top
executive, I'd been making around 27,000. So, my goal had been make as
much or more freelancing as I did at my salary job. I didn’t do much better
than that but I did do that.

So, given that the sales letter costs me $500. I mailed 500 of them, each
with first class postage and printing, cost me about $1 each at most to mail.

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So, for a $500 investment and a $39,000 in sales, that’s an ROI of 7,700%.
That taught me that direct mail worked then, and each year even though I
don’t need the business anymore, I still do a small mailing of direct mail just
to make sure that it still works so I can say first hand, yes this still works.
And I can tell you, yes, this still works. Direct mail can still get a solid, quick,
tangible response. And is still one of the best ways to get inquiries about
your freelance copywriting services.

Now, I wrote a very, what I would call artless letter. Interestingly, I wasn’t
from a direct response company. I had never written a sales letter before
and my corporate marketing jobs, I wrote tradeshow exhibits, I wrote scripts
for what we called industrial films; now we would call them marketing videos
and they were longer then than they are now. Industrial films were 5, 10, 12
minutes long. I wrote lots of sales brochures -- colored, high quality printed
sales brochures but no direct mail.

So, I sat down and I said, “Let me just write the letter that I think would
work.” And as again my only two qualifications, I was just a couple of years
out of college, was that I had an engineering degree, which is an advantage
to these potential clients that were industrial manufacturers, and that I did
have some experience as a corporate ad manager, which I had just quit.

So, again, artlessly, I just wrote a headline how an engineer and former ad
manager can help you write better ads and brochures, because at that point
mainly what I was going to offer to write for them was trade general ads and
sales brochures, which is mainly what I had done in my corporate job.

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Then, so I had their attention, then I seeded the problem for many people,
industrial advertising is a difficult chore and elaborated. I positioned my
service as a solution. That’s where I can help as a freelance industrial
copywriter who is also a graduate engineer. I know how to write clear,
technically accurate copy, et cetera. Then, I gave proof that I was the right
person for the job. I proved that I was the solution. Here are my
qualifications, and then two paragraphs of that.

And then, I asked for action. I didn’t ask for an assignment but I said, “I’d
like to work with you. You should call me when you need something. And if
you don’t have something right now,” which is the chance that when my
letter landed on their desk that they would have an assignment ready to
farm out, was thin.

But, these were people who regularly needed to produce promotions. So, the
chances were good they would need someone, whether me or someone else
to write something for them if not today, next week, next month, the next
two months. So, I said, “If you don’t have an immediate need. I’d be
delighted to send you a complete information kit on my copywriting
services.” I told them what's in it and then what to do. Complete and mail
the enclosed reply card, and it's yours at no cost.

This again, to that list of adding these Creative Directors generated a 7%

response which is what launched me in business. So, direct mail then and
today is a very effective way to generate sales leads for professional services
in general and freelance copywriting services in particular, and I highly
recommend you test it.

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This was the reply card. I do think even though today we have the Internet
as a response medium. You can give someone the URL to your website or
the contact page on your website or an inquiry form on your website. You
should still have a reply card, either place stamp here or in this case,
business reply mail. You should have a reply card where the person can, you
can either prepopulate it with their name and address or you can let them fill
it in and then they check a box that is one of three boxes, either yes, send
me the information kit which 9 out 10 of the people who responded did. Give
me a call, I have an immediate need, which may be 10% did. And then one
or two of them checked the third box that said we're not interested right
now but come back to us.

So, the first is the soft offer, free information; the second is the hard offer,
let’s talk; and the third is what we call a deferred offer, not interested right
now, let’s try it later. And so, this worked very well. And I would suggest you
have at least the hard and soft offer. Most people don’t use a deferred offer
but it does work. And interestingly, someone who checks the deferred offer
is actually, even though they're saying not right now, can be a very good
lead because they do have an immediate need and they took the time to tell
you not now but later. So again, a reply card should be in it even in this
Internet digital marketing age.

This is a sales letter that another copywriter, Pete Alexion, used and he
specializes in agricultural copywriting, and this was his letter, and it featured
not just an information kit on his copywriting services, but a report on how
to increase the ROI from their agricultural marketing campaign.

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He sold not his services, but he sold what we call selling the offer. The offer
is this free report. He is not trying to get you to hire him. He just says if
you're interested in improving your advertising results, this report can help
you. Contact me and I'll give you a copy. And of course, logically, anyone or
some people, not anyone, but some people , who want to improve their
marketing results, are in the agricultural national association of marketers,
agricultural marketers or something, that’s what it stands for, who want to
improve their agricultural marketing results may need a copywriter. And he
got 6.12% response or hire whenever he mailed this letter.

So again, another example of someone, not me, but using the same style
letter I do with a twist, not about his services but about his report to
generate leads. And this was very successful for him. I know because I
spoke to him about it.

Now, you don’t have to use a letter. I think the letter is the best method but
I have tested a postcard, and I tested it mainly to let you know whether it
works or not. But, postcards and trifold mailers are an alternative to letter
packages. Again, I prefer for selling a professional service, the letter. But,
especially if you're going to offer a free report like Peter did. Your offer is
that free report.

A postcard will work, and here is one I have mailed with success offering a
free report I have on business to business marketing. You notice the card is
not about my service. It's all about the report. Again, we are not selling the
product or service, we are selling the offer, and the offer is a free eBook.
And this works very well. And here is the reverse side.

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Again, look at it. We don’t sell me. We don’t talk about what I do. We don’t
say hire me. We totally sell the offer or as people call it today the lead
magnet. The free content that we're giving away to generate leads.

Now, what's interesting is some copywriters have brochures that they offer.
I had an information kit, but a lot of them back in the day and some of them
today have just brochures they made about their services. Rich Armstrong,
who I have known for almost around four decades, we got started on this
business together, he had a little brochure to begin with but he wrote the
heading of it, the cover of it.

So, it sounds not like a sales brochure about his service but in four minutes,
a helpful article, six questions to ask before you hire a freelance copywriter.
And so by offering this in his marketing, people wanted to get that. They're
not necessarily the first to say, “Well, I really want you Richard.” But to say,
“Yes, we use freelance copywriters, I wonder what the six questions are.
This will help me a better buyer of copywriting service.” So, that’s another
approach.

I gave away an information kit on my service. Peter gave away a pure

report. Richard gave away a sales brochure on his service but disguised it
and wrote it like it was content rather than sales copy, and it worked very
well for him for a number of years.

Now, I mentioned that I used an information kit and that’s what I use today.
I recommend that most copywriters use that rather than a brochure. An
information kit is a package of material giving the prospect more information
about your copywriting services.

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Now, you might say, “Why would I need that? I want people who are
interested in hiring me.” But again, they may not have a need today. And if
they don’t have a need today, remember, of the people who responded to
my mailing, 9 out of 10 had a future need possibly and only 1 out of 10
actually had a need the day that they got my sales letter.

So, if someone doesn’t have an immediate need and there's no other offer,
then call me to discuss the project, you're not going to hear from them. But
if you say like I did, “Hey, you might have a need coming up, send for my
free information kit.” You'll hear from them. I got the 10% that had
something but I also heard from the 90% that didn’t. So, I got a much
higher overall response rate, and a lot of those people who requested the
information kit and said I may have a need, $39,000 worth of assignments
came from that.

So, that makes sense to do it but you have to have something tangible. You
could just say ask for more information but that’s not strong enough. It's
better to have something tangible like a report, a handbook or in this case,
the best is the information kit, which is a multi-component package telling
people about your freelance copywriting services.

So, mine begins with a four-page cover letter, and you see the top of the
first page here. Remember, everyone getting this kit has asked for it. So, if
you start by acknowledging, “Hey, you asked for this.” That way they know
it's not a cold direct mail solicitation but it's some information that they
requested.

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And when I would send this in print back in the day before the Internet and
the digital marketing era, we made these kits purely paper, I would stamp
the outer envelope that I mailed it in, a 9 x 12 envelope with a red rubber
stamp that said, “Here is the information you requested.” That way, they're
going to read it and open it.

And it says, “Thanks for your interest in my copywriting services,” and then
it begins. Now, maybe you asked for this information kit out of curiosity.
Some folks do especially those who never hired a freelance copywriter
before, but more likely you need a good direct response copywriter and it
goes on from there.

So, my first item on the kit begins with a cover letter. Now, what do you
need in your information kit today for freelance copywriting services? Well, a
lot of copywriters just have it available as a PDF and that’s okay, but it really
is better if you have both the PDF and a hardcopy version available.

The PDF, you can get to the prospect instantly but the hardcopy gives you a
second shot. In other words, you could tell someone, “I'll email you the PDF
right away and I'll put a kit in the mail to you.” That way they get the PDF
and maybe they look at it and maybe they don’t but three days later with a
thud, a tangible physical package lands on their desk and it may have more
things than just in the usual kit. Like in my case I wrote a book on
copywriting so if someone was a very qualified prospect, I gave them a
book. If someone is a qualified prospect and you gave a talk at the local ad
club about copywriting and you had it videotaped, you can include a DVD of
that talk.

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So, you can give them that what we call the thud factor with a paper kit, and
the immediacy with the PDF. Does it have a strong sales letter at the front? I
like to begin my kit or any product or service, not just copywriting with a
letter like you saw. There’s no cover. It's just a letter that right off the bat. I
think it's more engaging. Some people do like to put a cover, this is
copywriting information kit, and you can do that.

There should be and there's a typo there, are there any articles written
about you? Has the trade press done a profile of you? One of the advertising
magazines had done a big interview with Richard Armstrong and so along
with his brochure he mailed a photocopy reprint of that article.

Include also in your kit helpful how to marketing articles by you. Now, if
you’ve written a book like I have and some other copywriters have like Pam
Foster is another example, I like putting in a page that’s a color image of the
book cover. If the client is really a good prospect, not every client gets this,
you might consider enclosing a book when you mail the physical paper
information kit.

You definitely should have a list of your clients on a sheet of paper and
should definitely have, and you should say client’s experience. Because let’s
say you're a newbie, you may not have many clients at that point but
therefore your page might say, “Here’s my clients/experience.”

So, you can have one company you wrote for. You don’t have to mention
that it was your brother-in-law’s company. At the beginning, you don’t have
a lot so you want to make it look like more of a lot. Maybe you did do a
freelance assignment for somebody, you list them. Maybe you did something

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that was volunteer for your church or local animal shelter. You can list them.
You can say it. You don’t have to say that you weren’t paid for it.

And then, if you have three jobs, I had worked for Coke Engineering, I had
worked for Westinghouse. Maybe you worked for General Electric. That’s
your experience. So, you’ll have a list of five or six places where you’ve done
this kind of work.

A testimonial sheet is good. At the beginning, you might not have many or
any, but you should start gathering testimonials from satisfied clients. And
when you have three to four or five, put them on a one-page sheet on your
PDF document.

I would have a separate one page bio of you, people want to know who you
are, know more about you. You can have an FAQ page in your information
kit. I don’t but I don’t have one on my website.

I like to include a response form where people at the end of the kit that
says, “Hey, fill this form out if you're interested in maybe getting a quote
from me on writing a project and send it back to me,” and that will increase
conversion of people getting the kit to making an inquiry and asking for an
estimate on a project and a number of those, percent of those will become
clients.

You can incorporate samples of your work in the kit. I send them separately.
What I choose to do if I'm going to email someone my kit, I attach a PDF of
the kit to the email I send them and then I post my samples, my portfolio on
my website and then I put on links that I take out of that from two or three

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or four of my samples. I say, “Click on these links and you can see samples,”
and that’s how I do it.

Again, if you’ve got a streaming video or audio, you can send the link to it of
one of your talks or presentations, or if you have an audio CD hardcopy or
DVD of a talk you gave or a seminar or speech, you can include that in the
physical package.

So, here you can see is my testimonial sheet, nothing fancy. Literally just
typed and then printed on two sides of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of my letter head.

Now, what happened is, The Writer magazine did a profile of me at one
point. I didn’t do anything to make this happen. They contacted me. You
could be more proactive and suggest someone in the media, business media
or your community paper that you might be an interesting subject for them,
and if you can get one of those, you can put that in your information kit
because it adds credibility since it was published in a third party publication,
not by you but by a legitimate media outlet, magazine or newspaper or what
have you and it adds credibility.

This is an article by me and I would write articles for the Trade Press and in
fact after doing the direct mail letter, we looked at where I sent out 500 and
I got 35 inquiries and $39,000 worth of projects. The next marketing I did
was I began writing articles for what we call the Trade Press marketing
magazines.

And that’s another thing that I did right upfront early in my career and I
kept doing and never stopped, and I still do it today. Today, this is a big

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area of marketing. People call it content marketing but then we called it PR
or publicity.

So, I wrote articles originally like the one you see here, the 12 Most
Common Direct Mail Mistakes and How to Avoid Them; this one was written
it looks like in 1987. I can tell you that I got an inquiry for my services about
four weeks ago from someone who found this article on my website and
said, “I really like this article. It really outlines what works in direct mail and
you sound like you know what you're talking about.” Which is one of the
purposes of writing content like articles and books that you come across as
an expert and people see this article and see me as a copywriter who
specializes in direct mail and knows it, and most copywriters don’t do that,
and so they hired me.

Again, back in the day, they appeared primarily in trade journals. This was a
magazine called, I believe, Direct Marketing magazine. One of the ones I
wrote articles for.

Now, I also became a member of the Newsletter Publishers Association,

which later renamed SIPA, Specialized Information Publishers Association,
because a lot of my work then and still a lot today is writing marketing to
sell subscriptions to business newsletters, health newsletters, investment
newsletters.

And when the Internet started to become as prominent in marketing

newsletters as direct mail was and now today both are used, I wrote an
article for the organization newsletter, not a major trade journal but a small
newsletter on Seven Steps to Selling More Newsletter Subscriptions Online. I

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printed that on a piece of my letterhead as you can see here, and that was
useful promotion for me.

Here’s one I did. I continued writing. Here’s one I did for DM News, and I
wrote for them for a long time. What's interesting is they were offering,
most trade journals don’t pay when a vendor or a service provider writes an
article for them because they know you're doing it to promote yourself and
for the publicity. But, DM News actually paid their columnists $300 or $400
per article, and they offered that to me.

I said, “I don’t want cash from you but I'll take something else,” which I'll
explain what I did in a minute. But here, they were actually going to pay for
it.

Now, if you were at content, you deliver these articles, the next logical thing
is why not deliver it as talks, speeches, lectures, whatever you want to call
them, seminars, workshops. Do public speaking to audiences, to business
audiences that sitting in the audience, the people are your potential clients.

And so why, if you can do articles, like this article went to DM News which at
the time had a circulation I think of 30,000 or 40,000 readers, so
theoretically I'm reaching 30,000 or 40,000 readers with this content. When
I go to speak, I spoke at this newsletter publisher SIPA meeting, you see
me, this was actually a direct marketing day, so that’s another marketing
conference. At this conference, I think instead of 30,000 or 40,000 people, I
was reaching may be 60 or 80 or 100.

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Why would you do that? It's so few. But the thing is that even though
there's fewer people the contact is closer. The closer your proximity to the
prospect and as close as you get is networking face to face, and the second
closest you get as a speaker at an event like you see here, the better, the
more engaged they get with you, and the more you build your credibility and
your star rises in their eyes.

So, speaking is a very effective way to get clients. Speaking works in two
ways. One is the cumulative effect, which is the second bullet here. That if
you keep writing these articles and you keep speaking at these events,
people get to know you and you establish a reputation as an expert service
provider or practitioner or in our case at AWAI as an expert
marketer/copywriter and people hire you.

I also had the 1:1 ratio. I like the cumulative effect but I said I expect that
everytime I speak, I will get at minimum from that speaking engagement
one new client and assignment or I considered it a disappointment. And I
usually did get that.

You see, speaking works in two ways. You have the cumulative effect and
you can get immediate clients from it, and it builds your reputation. It
establishes your reputation as an expert in your field.

Now, instead of articles or speeches, another thing people do and we saw

that with Peter, the farmer’s writer but agricultural copywriter, he offered a
special report. And today, a lot of people will offer them and they call them
white papers.

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So, Gordon Graham is known as the white paper guy and he is the
copywriter who specializes in white papers. So, he offers to generate leads,
a white paper, that you see here called How to Pick the Perfect Flavor for
your Next White Paper.

Now, his is what I call a strategic white paper or lead magnet because not
only does it get response because people want it but it helps him set up the
sale. His argument in this white paper is that there's three different types of
white papers and it helps the prospect determine which type do they want to
hire Gordon for. And so it actually furthers his sales process.

Michael Stelzner who is now the publisher of Social Media Examiner but
originally was a white paper writer along with Gordon and me, did a white
paper called How to Write a White Paper. We call it the white paper on
whitepapers, which was good, but it wasn’t as strategic as Gordon’s, which
had a more specific sales objective but it worked very well.

There is Gordon’s website. You could see that he has a book. He went
further. He wrote a book on white papers, White Paper for Dummies, and he
is very well-positioned in that field. These are all his marketing techniques.
His white paper guy website. He is branding as the white paper guy, the fact
that he is a book author, the fact that he offers a free white paper and many
other things.

Now, I also offer prospects free special reports, not just information kits but
special reports.

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Now, I do something that some of these other guys don’t. I put a price on
the front cover on the upper right corner of the front cover, a price of the
report. And the reason is people value stuff you give them free whether it's
an item or a content like a report or a DVD if it has a retail price on it.

So, people look at this and say it's worth $29. But, I go a step further than
most people. I think that’s a good technique and you should do it. But, I also
take these reports and I put them on a shopping cart on my website bly.com
and I don’t actively promote them but they're there to buy if you want them
and I do sell them.

So therefore, if someone says, “Oh, this is just a marketing gimmick. You

can slap the price on there, you don’t sell them.” I can say yes I do and send
them a link to a page where I sell them. So, I add credibility. I make the
value I claim believable.

Now, like Gordon, I write books. He has written one, I have written many,
and books are my favorite self-promotion. I realize they're not for everybody
because a lot of people don’t want to write a book, there's other reasons.
But, I started early. I become a freelance copywriter in 1982. I had started
as a corporate copywriter at Westinghouse in 1979.

So, when I had 5, 6 years experience, I guess 5 years experience in 1984, I

wrote the Copywriter’s Handbook, and that really helped establish my
relationship and leapfrogged my career and really accelerated my success. It
made an enormous difference.

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One of them is that my publisher, I said, “Let send some galleys out for
advance blurbs to put on the cover,” and they wanted a list of the people I
knew. So, I gave them a list of eight or nine people in knew in the business.
And then I said, “Why don't you send one to David Ogilvy,” who was then
the premier living copywriter in the world at Ogilvy and Mather, I didn’t
know him and they did it, and shockingly he’s such a gracious guy. He got it,
read it, said he liked it, and gave me this blurb, which says, “I don’t know a
single copywriter whose work would not be improved by reading this book
and that includes me.” And that really made my star rise in freelance
copywriting. So, writing a book was immediately useful to me.

Now, I write other books and continue to write books since really the early
80s I've done it. I'm a very active book writer. Most copywriters are not,
some of them were. The late Herschell Gordon Lewis was a very prolific
author of copywriting and marketing books. There are other people, Seth
Godin, consultant and speaker is a prolific author. David Meerman Scott, the
marketing speaker.

So, there are guys that do it. Ben Settle has a lot of Kindle books on Amazon
and create space books. My books are with traditional publishers.

So, I wrote this book, the Business to Business Direct Marketing book. To
show you the value, I wrote this book on Business to Business Direct
Marketing, and the publisher sent my box, you get author’s copies. They
give you like 10 copies free.

The day I got the box, I got a call from a guy at IBM and says, “We want to
have a speaker at a marketing conference that we're having,” they paid a

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pretty decent fee and he said, “But why you? I know plenty of other
people?”

So, instead of being this sort of a dancing monkey and saying, “Well, I'm
better. I do this. I do that.” I said, “I don’t know that you should hire me or
not, but I tell you what, give me your address, I'll put my new book in a
FedEx to you. If you like it, hire me. If you don’t, don’t.”

I FedExed it to him and they hired me for the conference. And this was like a
$40 to $50 book at the time. It's a big hard cover. They bought like I think
300 or 400 copies of the book for this big conference. I autographed them.
Sat there a long time.

And then my best day in freelance copywriting came a few weeks later when
they sent me a contract to do copywriting for them the next year for, I think
it was around $75,000. That mainly all came because I had this book, that’s
why I got that.

So, I continued as I said doing my content marketing. I wrote for Business

Marketing magazine at first and then when they disappeared, Direct
Marketing magazine from Hope Communications, and then they slimmed
down and I went to DM News and then they got rid of the long columns, and
now I'm at Target Marketing and I'll do it as long as someone will have me. I
love doing it and there's many reasons to do it.

But the two is it positions you as an expert in your field as a freelance

copywriter whether you're in direct marketing or TV marketing or whatever
you do, digital marketing and that brings you business. That’s the

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advantage, and also, you learn by doing it and plus you can use reprints of
the articles as long as you retain the first rights to them as marketing
literature to sell your own services.

Now, I wrote articles but a lot of other copywriters back then ran ads in
these publications. They didn’t write for them but they paid for ads and this
was a guy, Russ Phelps, "Warning. Don’t hire any copywriter until you read
my free eye opening report." Again, offering useful free content, seven steps
to killer ad copy. He used an ad.

Steve Wechsler is a friend of mine, a colleague of mine and I consider him a

friend. Runs this ad constantly in every issue in the back of Target Marketing
magazine. He would not do it if he wasn’t making money with it. He uses an
ad in a print magazine.

Now, I write regularly a column for now Target Marketing magazine. So,
what I did is to produce that tool that I showed you on the postcard, that
lead magnet, the business to business marketing handbook.

I just took the articles. I retained the reprint rights to them when I wrote for
Target Marketing and put them together in a PDF special report and it just
grew and grew because as the years went on and I wrote columns, I would
just add each new column. Now, it's like 150 pages.

Of course, I put a price on the cover $49 to create the perceived value.

Now, what I do is I don’t run full page print ads for these. I find that in the
digital era a very effective alternative is to run ads in most of these

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marketing magazines, and most business trade, professional, scientific
magazines. The print magazines have supplemental eNewsletters that their
subscribers also get that are sometimes weekly, sometimes three times a
week, some of them like Target Marketing daily.

So, I find that in these -- I run this ad occasionally and I pay for it in Target
Marketing’s eNewsletter. It comes out Monday through Friday, every day,
five days a week. You can't buy just one issue. You have to buy the whole
week. So, the whole week costs me $1000.

The first time I ran this, I had over 100 people click on the link in the ad.
You see where it is there. To download the free eBook. Which means I was
paying $10 per inquiry. Which if you know lead generation, is a really low
cost per inquiry, so this worked very well.

Then, when they clicked, they went to this landing page. You notice it's not
the homepage of my website. It's a page specifically designed for getting
them to download the book. It's all about the free guide to make them want
to have it.

But then in the right, you see where you can choose, you can click the first
box when you submit the form to me and just say, “Yes, I want the free
handbook,” but you can also check the second box and say, “I want your
copywriting information kit,” and then you're telling me you're not just
collecting free stuff, you might have a need for copywriting services and
you're a better lead.

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Some people will then click the third box that says, “Yes, we want you to get
in touch with us and give us an estimate for an actual copywriting project.”
They're the best leads.

So, you design a page like this so you're not just giving away free downloads
because we're not in the business to giveaway free information but you're
converting those clicks to your ad into qualified prospects and leads.

I didn’t send the traffic to the main page of website. This is the homepage,
but notice how I have designed the main page of my website. Many people
don’t realize that when you put a call to action on your website, some kind
of box where you click and do something, the sweet spot for that, the place
you will get the most clicks on it is the upper right corner of the home page.

So you see, I have this on my homepage, the upper right corner and I make
it stand out because the page is mainly blue, white and black. But the call to
action in that sweet spot is yellow and actually looks like a post it note and it
has a red pin in it.

Before I put that up, I just had blank field of blue there and we didn’t get
many calls or inquiries on the site, and now we get on average one every
day of the year after putting that up. That makes a huge difference.

Here’s a strategy for getting leads doing, remember, we talked about

prospecting, for generating sales leads for your website. First, put up a
prominent call to action on the sweet spot in the upper right corner. You can
have other ones. You notice towards the left as you scroll down, there's
another one. It says, “Free DM ROI calculator.” This is a little software tool

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on the site, very simple, that calculates direct mail response rate. That
captures leads also. But the best one is on the upper right corner. That’s the
prominent one.

First, you need to put that up on your website because if you drive traffic to
your home page and you don’t have that, the traffic, people are not going to
opt in and submit their email address and their name and their company
information, so you're not going to get a lead, and you want leads. That’s
what we're talking about prospecting and lead generation.

You'll notice, though, where it says in the right SEO, I cannot go in this
presentation how to do search engine optimization but you want to get more
traffic your site, one of the ways is to optimize it for search engines on the
key words or keyword phrases that are important to you.

For me, it's direct response copywriter. And so, I optimized my site for that
and you'll notice that on the search results page of Google, for most
computers most of the time, it's so well optimized that I come up on the first
page of the SERP, the search engine results page or the first screen of the
SERP.

That’s important because the people, the vendors who are on the first screen
of the SERP get 80% of the traffic on that keyword search. So, if you can do
that, it's a huge advantage. Again, to optimize for the -- I cannot tell you
how to optimize in this short presentation -- but notice the term is direct
response copywriter.

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So, if you go to the second paragraph, I say direct response copywriting.
The third paragraph that begins that’s why it says, “Freelance direct
response copywriter.”

The fourth paragraph that begins with the 30-year track record says, “Direct
response copywriting in it.” Every paragraph just about says that so that one
of the things you have to do if you want to optimize the keywords. Another
is to have a lot of content on your subject, in my case direct marketing and
direct response copywriting on your website, which I do.

Then, when they click on that need great copy click here now, they're taken
to a form which is like a digital version of the reply card in my direct mail
package where they can make an inquiry and they can choose the first box,
find out more about Bob’s copywriting services or if they have an immediate
need, request a cost estimate or they can click both. Then they fill in this
form and that’s how we get leads.

Now, you notice I have a lot of fields they can fill in but you should indicate
with an asterisk, which ones are mandatory and make as few mandatory as
possible.

So, I need the person’s name and their phone number and their email
address and their company for them to be a qualified lead, but I don’t need
much else.

If you felt you had to have their, for whatever reason, their zip code, then
you would make that a mandatory field. That’s up to you.

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Press releases, public relations, also a good way to generate leads. When
the recession, not the recent recession but the recession of the early 90s,
1991 came up, I realized this was going to be a concern to a lot of
marketers. So, I sat down and wrote a special report, 14 Winning Methods
to Sell Any Product Or Service in a Down Economy. This was just at the
dawn of the digital age and I was not on the web. So, I did it as a print. I
actually made a booklet.

To cover my cost because it cost money to print the booklet and mail it out,
I charged $9 each. I didn’t give it away for free. Not something I would
recommend today. Today, I’d give it away for free but I charged $9 and we
sent this press release out to about a couple of hundred, 200 or 300
marketing, business and advertising magazines and business editors at
some major newspapers. We got about 18 articles written about it including
the Los Angeles Times Business section, and sold over 3,500 booklets.

We didn’t do it to sell booklets. We made it to promote me as an expert but

we covered our cost and then some. We took in over $30,000 worth in sales.

Here’s another one. I don’t do a lot of press releases but I do them

occasionally, and I did it to promote, in this case, that widget you see on the
bottom left, I did a press release on the availability of that free tool. This
wasn’t as big shakes as the recession booklet but when I sent it out, within
like a week, a small business newsletter, the direct response letter or
something like that, I forgot the name of it, did like a one paragraph item on
it, included the link, and we got over, in a week, we got 80 people opting in
to use the tool.

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Here’s another one that I did. I will not go into this now. This was a little
more whimsical and I wanted to get coverage more in my local market.

This press release about me opening a cemetery, which was a gag for Giga
Pets, or what do they call them, Tamagotchi. I forgot what they call them.
Those little pocket devices that had children had as electronic pets. Got me a
full page article on the front page of the Sunday feature section. It was
either the Star Ledger or the New Jersey Herald. I forget which one. So, this
got me a lot of publicity.

There you have it. My favorite self-promotions for freelance copywriters.

Mine are the one page sales letter in a #10 envelope with the BRC. Yes, you
can do postcards but I am a fan of the one page sales letter.

Small print ads in trade magazines are very effective. If the trade magazine
will take a small ad like a twelfth of the page or they’ll have classified ads in
the back or one inch display ads in the back of the book like Target
Marketing if you look at it has ads in the back. Those are effective and even
better because in those trade magazines, small ads like the one I showed
you in their digital edition or their supplemental weekly or daily eNewsletter
pull even better.

I think you should offer, have and offer a very powerfully written, strong,
copywriting information kit. I think you should not just offer the copywriting
information kit because that’s a strong offer. But, if you offer that plus a free
special report like Peter on agricultural marketing or like Gordon Graham on
how to write a great white paper or how to know what kind of white paper
you need or like mine, the business to business marketing handbook, you'll

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do much better offering both the kit and the free white paper special report
which we today call a lead magnet than either one alone.

You will build your reputation and get noticed speaking at association, at
professional meetings, where the audience is marketers. As I said, not only
does it build your reputation over time, but also you will get hired directly
from the meetings. It happened to me all the time. It gets you noticed in the
field.

Writing articles for trade publications, I've done it continually since the early
1980s, never letting up, and I found it to be immensely profitable and that
too, if you're looking for the easiest way to establish your reputation as an
expert in your field, which in your case is freelance copywriting or some of
you might be marketing consultants or you might be a marketer for
ophthalmologist or chiropractors, and you would write it for chiropractic
magazine or an eye doctor magazine, how to market or manage an eye
doctor practice, the easiest quickest way to establish your reputation as an
expert is to write articles for trade publications that your prospects read.

More powerful than that or as powerful but I’d say more is if you want to
really position yourself as an expert, write a book. Yes, you could publish the
book as a Kindle eBook or even Kindle allows you to also make a paperback
version that people can buy on Amazon using the create space service.

But, much more impressive and better is to write a book for an actual, real,
mainstream publishing house and not self-publishing because the public or,
in this case, your market, they know anybody can self-publish or create

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space a Kindle eBook but not anybody can get a book published by McGraw
Hill or John Wiley & Sons, so that’s much more impressive.

Yes, there are many other things you can do that are not here. I do some of
them. I don’t do all of them. But, these are my favorite go-to strategies.

I want to thank you for your attention and I suggest after this presentation,
if you do one thing within 24 to 48 hours, and you should pick one of these
methods, right an article for a trade magazine. Send out some postcards or
letters. Put it to work right away and see the results.

Thank you and I turn it back to you guys.

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