Since releas­ing my spe­cial report, The Death of The Saleslet­ter, there has been a lot of com­mo­tion and con­fu­sion cre­ated over what it means and how it’s affect­ing copy­writ­ing on the Internet.

Is it the death of long copy? Are copy­writ­ers a dying breed? Will video replace text? The answer to all of these is def­i­nitely “No.” And I’ve writ­ten a few blog posts since then to clar­ify, but there’s still some mis­un­der­stand­ing going around.

Well, I’ve decided to clear the air once and for all, and I’m doing it on a very spe­cial tele­sem­i­nar on which I was recently invited to be a guest speaker. And I’m doing it with none other than top copy­writer Clay­ton Makepeace.

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When I cri­tique, edit or rewrite sales copy, I dis­cover that many clients com­mit com­mon errors. Granted, not all of them are writ­ers. But most of them fail to drive cus­tomer actions not because they lack writ­ing skills but because they fail to look at their copy from their read­ers’ perspective.

Although unin­ten­tional, they’re so involved with their busi­ness or prod­uct that they tend to for­get their prospects. They tend to explain things in ways that only they under­stand. They tend to for­get the num­ber one ele­ment in copy­writ­ing. And no, it’s not the copy. It’s not the offer, either. It’s…

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Michel: Yeah, doc­tors all ****. The ques­tion is what are those pills? Actu­ally I can rep those weights 30 times and there is such a pill, but I didn’t get it from a Hait­ian woman. But I was just illus­trat­ing the cor­rect­ness that, that peo­ple have lost the art of storytelling.

Gary: Well you just kept me riv­eted there, well, when­ever you were telling me that. And that’s, it’s sort of what John Carl­ton says. If you were to sell some­thing don’t think about sell­ing it in a busi­ness room or some­thing. Think about meet­ing your friend at a bar some­where, just shoot­ing the breeze, and, and, there’s a prod­uct that you have that you’re so excited about, what would you say to that per­son? Would you, you know, use this third per­son high falutin’ cor­po­rate speak or would you be per­son­able and tell sto­ries about it?

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