Michel Fortin Interview

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Name: Michel Fortin

Industry: Copywriting

Website: http://www.michelfortin.com/

Michel Fortin’s Bio: A direct response copy­writer and mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant for close to 20 years (on the Inter­net since 1992), Michel Fortin has an uncanny knack for writ­ing persuasively.

His track record speaks for itself. In the last few years alone, he was instru­men­tal in sell­ing over a hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars worth of prod­ucts and ser­vices for a wide vari­ety of clients, stretch­ing hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent and unre­lated industries. Often dubbed as the “Roger Ban­nis­ter of Online Copy” (Ban­nis­ter was the run­ner who broke the four-​​minute mile bar­rier), his most notable suc­cess is one of his saleslet­ters, which sold a $1.08 mil­lion online on the first day.

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns from the seomethod.com and we’re extremely lucky and privileged to have one of the world’s premier copywriters here. He’s had twenty plus years experience. He’s sought out around the world for writing copy for some of the top internet marketers both on and off line. He’s been called ‘disgustingly good’ by the late great Gary Halbert. He’s written copy for John Reese, Yanik Silver, Sean Casey , Stephen Pierce, Mark Joiner, Frank Kern, Jay Abrahams, to name a few. He’s excellent at what he does. He’s extremely passionate about copywriting and I think that’s one of the things that makes him stand out for me. We’re very privileged to have him on the line and I’d like to welcome Michel Fortin.

Michel Fortin: Thanks David. I’m glad to be here.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Now we’ll jump straight into it. This series is coupling a course that is primarily about SEO and I know you’re known for your copy. What I wanted to talk about was how copy relates to SEO, especially on page SEO and that sort of thing. When we talk about SEO it’s all about driving traffic and getting people to your site, and copy is all about converting that traffic once they get there. So to start, I would be interested to find out, you have a few different websites. I’d be interested to find out how you’re driving traffic to your sites.

Michel Fortin: Well, there are several sites I have in several business categories. You’ve got the content sites, that are ad supported, or ad generated and the money is made not so much in buying products but in people clicking on ads. And those I pay specific attention to SEO. But on sales sites where the main thrust of the site is about selling a product or a series of products, the goal is not so much on organic traffic. In fact most of these sites, the traffic is purchased through pay per click advertising. But there is some level of consciousness about making sure there are SEO things that are intact in the page.

Now there are various strategies and we could talk all day long about this and this is your strength. Mine is not SEO per se, I’m not an SEO expert by any stretch. But I do know there are a variety of different things that we do from the copywriting stand point in order to increase the SEO magnetization if you could call it that, of traffic, through for example, better keywords, keywords that are highly searched for, and especially keywords that match and meet a mindset of the people doing the search.

A lot of people can search a lot for one particular product but it doesn’t mean they are targeted. The most important thing I look at when I do some copywriting, especially paying attention to SEO, is not so much that I’m looking for traffic. What I’m looking for is quality. What I try to do is not choose words that are high search in terms of high search volume. I tend to look at long tail or mostly words that fit in a specific phrase that matches and is congruent with the mindset of the traffic.

When they hit my page, they hit my sales site, that frame of mind is so important, my copy needs to be congruent. I split tested it and some of my top clients have split tested this. We have found that when you have copy, especially in a headline, the H1 tag, if the copy matches what they’ve been looking for, if it matches the frame of mind, not just the keywords but the frame of mind of the searcher, not only are you going to increase traffic but you’re going to increase traffic of such high quality that it will convert far more.

David Jenyns: You mentioned that you do a little bit of the SEO. I’m interested to find out about the long form sales copy. I didn’t realize that you do a little bit of what sounds like AdSense play or however you choose to monetize that. With that sort of on page optimization, is that something you’ve learnt how to do yourself, or is that something that you’ve got a system for that you’re outsourcing? How does that work as far as what you’re doing for the SEO for those sites?

Michel Fortin: No, I do that all by myself. I take some of my knowledge from SEO. I do some market research. For example, my beautiful, wonderful wife has a product called Marketing ESP at marketingesp.com and it’s all about keyword research. Not so much for SEO purposes but for discovering the mindset and finding out how people search online. It’s not what they’re searching for, it’s how they’re searching for it.

You know, in copywriting, there is something a brilliant copywriter, a friend by the name of David Garfinkel said, which really does answer this. He says you need to know three things. It applies to SEO as much as it applies to copywriting. He says you want to know who your prospect is, you want to know what their problem is and thirdly, most importantly, you need to know how they’re talking about it. That third question is the one people often ignore.

People sometimes do just a standard keyword research and they say, oh this keyword has been searched for a huge number of times. They think that by increasing the keyword density on their sales page, or whatever the case is, will actually work for them. This is not the case at all. You need to understand how people search. There are keywords out there that are really highly searched. There are big search volumes but it means very little especially when it comes to conversions.

The bottom line is, and I’m referring to my wife’s product because she does a lot of this in terms of her company. She runs a company called Workaholics for Hire and she does a lot of this keyword research for a lot of top gurus. Coming back to what I was saying, she teaches a lot of what I have a philosophy about that I apply to a lot of my content sites. I have my own blog, but I have a lot of blogs out there in different niches.

I do a variety of things. SEO copywriting is key to understanding what kind of words and keywords and key phrases to use. I use tools at my disposal and I do this myself, I don’t outsource it. First of all I use a WordPress platform because we’ve tested it. Here is the beauty of my particular position compared to a lot of people out there. I married someone who has done a lot of testing for a lot of internet marketers. So I’m privileged to have access to this information.

We’ve tested different platforms. We’ve tested from ExpressionEngine, LifeJournal to MoveableType to Blogger and WordPress. WordPress is pretty much the one that beat all of them. What I decided to do was learn all about the plug ins that go into WordPress that help simplify my SEO. All In One SEO is one of them. I use SEO images which actually add an alt tag to my images. There’s another one called SEO Link which links my content internally to other content when it looks for specific keywords. It’s not Java script, it’s actually internal. So it is all hard coded links but it increases the internal linking structure.

There are a few other of these types of plug ins that I have found that help my SEO greatly. There is a key thing to keep in mind. I come up with a good title, when I come up with especially the lead sentences and title. We have in the copywriting community a lot of banter and debates about passive voice versus active voice. In fact there are some studies that came out not too long ago which found that passive voice actually improved SEO. With passive voice the object is at the beginning of the sentence. So it front loads those key words at the beginning.

I also found from a copywriting standpoint that people tend to read and capture those faster because the keywords are at the beginning. This is a standard grammatical rule that everybody lives by. I agree that active voice is important. But the passive voice flips that around and makes it more keyword driven at the beginning of the sentence. For example, if I have a headline that says ‘John Throws the Red Ball,’ that is an active voice. If the keyword and the ones that people search are ‘red ball’ and you want to change that around to passive voice, it is ‘The Red Ball is Thrown by John’.
What I tend to do is, I look at some of my blog posts, some of the sub headlines that are in the posts, the H2, H3, H4 tags. I tend to look at lead sentences, the beginning few words of every paragraph. I tend to do that a lot. I front load those keywords and use passive voice.

It’s also good for copywriting purposes because when people land on a web page, especially if it is a content site, what do the do? Do they read it? No, they don’t. They scan. They skim, scan and scroll. They go up and down the web page looking for a headline or a sub headline that catches their attention. If it catches their attention, they go back and start reading. When you front load those keywords, not only is it good for SEO purposes but it also captures their attention and stops them in their tracks and stops them from scanning. It gets them to start reading.

The added benefit is that some search engines will truncate your description when their search results come up. So you want those keywords to appear at the very beginning as much as possible.

David Jenyns: That’s absolutely perfect. I wanted to do an analysis of your site and actually search some of those keywords and perhaps we can drill down a little bit deeper. I think one of the key things that you hit right there is delivering what it is that people are looking for and by shifting that keyword to the front, it is twofold. You’re getting the SEO benefit, because it is always good to have that keyword front end loaded and also from a usability point of view, as we know when you type in a keyword into Google, that’s going to be bolded on the actual page itself. So that really does draw the reader in and they say, aha, this has got what it is I’m looking for.

We talked al little bit about those content sites and I wanted to start there. I wanted to pit that against how you write. Let’s say you’ve got your main money site and you’re selling a physical product and you’ve got a sales letter that you’re looking to sell that product with. How do you go about optimizing that? Do you do any sort of on page optimization for that sort of thing? Should we be getting SEO in the way of writing good copy? What are your thoughts on that?

Michel Fortin: Well I don’t do that much because as I said, for those sales sites, for those sites that actually sell products I tend to use other tools at my disposal. That is first of all buying my traffic or renting my traffic. What I mean by renting my traffic is using affiliate programs doing JVs and so forth. At the same time I will tend to do other things in the background like landing pages. There is a lot of content and a lot of blogs that are buttressing the sales page. The sales page really is the focus. It might not necessarily be the front loaded page but it’s the actual page that I want to drive all my traffic to.

So I’ll have various landing pages that are optimized for specific keywords for specific searches and specifically for specific market segments. I do a lot of testing and sometimes, for example, I might sell a product. Let’s say I sell a product on the stock market. I may have a landing page that discusses futures and another that discusses forex. I may have an article on futures and an article on forex and have those completely separately optimized for those keywords. I’m not going to have them just come to the same sales page. The sales page itself will have dynamic elements so that it changes or focuses or rewords things so that it changes words to match the mindset of the person coming to that page. This actually increases conversion.

The sales page itself is not optimized per se for traffic. It is just optimized in such a way so that when people land on another page or they’re coming through another doorway page, when they land on the sales page it matches and it is congruent with the mindset. What we’ve found through testing is that the more congruent you are with the language and the key phrases and the mindset of the person who landed on your sales page, the more you’re going to sell.

Here is just a very quick example. If I have a sales page for a stock product and I can mention the word futures, that will change dynamically that will match the landing page from which they come, even though my product may talk about forex and all those other things. That increases sales.

David Jenyns: I think you mentioned some key points there. I very much believe the same as far as the way I build my network of sites. Typically speaking, you’ve got those different feeder sites or the gateway pages as you called them. They’re the ones that optimize, they’re the ones that are driving the traffic, they’re the ones that I do do some on page SEO and some off page SEO. But when it comes to my primary sales site, I typically don’t let on page SEO get in the way of writing good copy. I’m using these other methods to drive the traffic to that page. Once they get there I want to make sure I’m focusing on conversion and having that really solid sales letter to draw the reader in.

Sometimes you see people who muddle it up and try and have these letters that just don’t read right for the user because they’re trying to put the keyword in throughout the copy. I think it ultimately is to their detriment. For that main primary site, you want to make sure you’re focusing on converting that traffic, not overly optimizing it like so many people do.

Michel Fortin: Yes and this is what I primarily do. The copywriting standpoint for getting people to act is more important than copywriting that gets people to visit you. Once you get them to act, then you’re able to work around that. That’s where doorways or feeder sites work.

You can start off with a sales page, buy traffic with pay per click or through some affiliate promotion whatever the case is. Make sure it converts well, make sure you have a well oiled machine, make sure you have a great back end in the sense that when people land on your page, if they don’t buy, there’s a way to capture that traffic, there’s a way to monetize that traffic in some other way. Make sure there is a follow up process whereby you can keep on hammering that traffic and keep the message at the top of their mind and in front of them at all times.

Once you’ve got that machine well oiled, then you can start looking at improving SEO. Keep in mind, and I do want to emphasize this, I don’t pay attention to SEO. I’m not an SEO expert by any stretch. I do SEO more as a hobby for my content sites, but I do pay attention to SEO when it comes to sales copy. The key is not to muddy that page.

The key is you can write a sales page, make sure it converts well but also at the same time there is nothing better than to do a bit of research to find out what kind of keywords people are actually looking for and the frame of mind people are in. Then specifically, creatively choose words that will match that frame of mind, that will match that searchability that people have and incorporate it in a skillful, creative and tasteful way in your copy without muddying the main message.

I always track and measure everything. The moment I include something from an SEO standpoint where I see my conversion going down, I kill that. I would rather have a page that converts than a page that is highly trafficked. Hits mean nothing, sales mean something.

David Jenyns: I think there are plenty of different ways to drive traffic. The main site doesn’t necessarily have to be the one that is dragging the traffic in. The few things that you mentioned were key, were about talking about their language. Effectively by using the keywords that they’re searching for and using words related to that and crafting that into your sales letter it’s almost like that age old thing. You’re meeting that conversation that’s already going on in their mind. You’re talking their language.

If you imagine it’s like someone speaking another language. It’s like when we talk SEO or even internet marketing there is that whole sub culture of words that people outside of out community may not necessarily understand. By putting that in your copy, you’re demonstrating that you understand the person you’re writing to.

I know that’s a big reason why I don’t even focus that on latent semantic indexing. We hear people talk about that, about having these ancillary keywords on topic to do with the topic you try to write about. I think that happens naturally if you understand the market that you’re writing towards. So I don’t get caught up in a lot of that. I’ll do the really basic things of on page optimization and off page optimization. I think you’re doing exactly the same and you may not even realize that you’re doing it. I suppose that just comes from a lot of experience.

Another thing I wanted to touch on which you did mention which I thought was interesting. You do a lot of this yourself. I’m big on outsourcing but I find copy, especially writing with SEO in the back of your mind, I know that is secondary sometimes, but that is extremely hard to outsource. I know copy is your thing, so it’s probably not something you outsource. But have you got any tips on if you think that is something that can be outsourced? Or is copy really something that the primary business owner, the money generator for the business should be focusing on?

Michel Fortin: Well we talk about outsourcing or giving it to somebody who is more inclined to write better copy. This really depends on who knows your market better? You know your market better. You probably are in a better position to write copy yourself but then have a star copywriter go over it and fix it, tweak it.

If you know your product and you know the business inside and out but you know much less about your market, sometimes it’s much better to hire somebody else. They can do all the leg work for you. They can do all the research. They can learn more about your market. They can learn more about what your market is saying, how they’re thinking, what they’re searching for. Here’s the point. The more you match your market, the more your message matches your market, the more your message matches the frame of mind of your market, the way it matches the way they think, the way they ask questions, the better.

There are some wonderful tools out there like Wordtracker which itself has a new question tool that actually tells you not only the keywords but the way people ask those questions. The point is the more you’re focused and fixated on your market, because those are the people who are actually buying your product, the more you’re going to almost naturally, as a byproduct, do some very good SEO copywriting. Why? Because search engines do one thing, and one thing really well. They serve up relevant results that the market wants.

If you focus on your market and you write copy that is focused on your market and have you thinking what they’re looking for and the way they’re looking for it, the more you’re going to naturally get good SEO in your copywriting because of the fact that you’re focused on the one thing that the search engines are looking for as well, which is to serve the market. So I tend to think not only what are the keywords and the key phrases but especially what are people saying, what are they typing into the search engines, exactly in what context?

This gets back to what I was saying, which is to learn how people think. It’s not just knowing who they are and what is their problem, but how are they talking about their problems? For example you may be selling a book on how to relieve your insomnia. Let’s say you have a product that teaches people better sleeping techniques. You might do a search and you might find out that the keyword insomnia is highly searched for and then you include that in your copy thinking that will improve SEO.

That might be ok on the surface. The problem may be that many people may not need a resolution or solution for insomnia. They might be just looking for information. They might be looking for information about what to do if they have insomnia not just how to relieve it. They might be looking for information on insomnia research. They might not necessarily have a cure. They might be looking for the things that cause insomnia.

If you find that people searching for information or products on insomnia, the way they’re searching for insomnia and that particular market, is sleep apnea, or how to feel more energetic when you wake up, how to relieve lethargy, do you feel apathetic and less energy, are you less productive in your work? They are typing in their symptoms.

They are not necessarily problems, especially if they don’t even know about the problem. There is a specific formula acronym that I developed to describe this. It’s called OATH. OATH is an acronym that stands for oblivious, apathetic thinking and hurting. OATH is a formula to determine at what stage of awareness and sophistication is your market at? A lot of people may not necessarily know about insomnia. They might be suffering from the symptoms of it but they’re not necessarily searching for it because they don’t know, they’re oblivious.

So when you do your research and you find out what your market is, it’s not about SEO per se, it’s about looking for a specific market for your product. Writing copy around that, you will naturally fit in SEO somehow some way as a by product. O means oblivious, they’re oblivious about the problem. They don’t even know they have the problem. They might feel lethargic in the morning, they might have trouble thinking and concentrating, they might have a hard time focusing, they might have problems at work, they might have high absenteeism at work or in their relationships. That might be caused by insomnia. They don’t even know.

Obliviousness requires a bit of education in your copy. Then there’s apathetic. That means they know about the problem but they just don’t care. Then there’s thinking. They know they have a problem, they know there’s a solution out there but they’re just thinking about it. They may be shopping around, they may be looking for information. They’re more in an information gathering stage. And then of course hurting, the last stage, is they know they have a problem, they know they want to solve it and they want to solve it now. That’s the lowest hanging fruit.

If we all went after niches that are hurting, we would all be millionaires right now. But that is the point. You need to determine what stage of awareness your market is in now. From that, you can do proper research and find out the kind of keywords people are really searching for in the mindset that they’re at. It’s not so much you look for a keyword, insomnia, and try to increase the SEO around insomnia. That might mean nothing if your product is specifically not searched for in that manner.

David Jenyns: You emphasize matching your copy to what people are searching and then your copy can develop from that and you’re going to get natural SEO. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there. I’ll be interested to see how this all works if we jump onto Google.

I’ve just typed Michel Fortin into the search engine to bring up some results and talk a little bit about the way copywriting is worked into some of your sites. I can see looking on the first page we start of with your michelfortin.com. There’s also a post from your blog, then we’ve got the Success Doctor and you can also see the image search coming up there. I suppose that is a good point to mention. You talked about that plug in for your WordPress blog, the importance of having your alt tags and things like that. That shows relevance and they’re coming up in the universal search now.
Coming down there’s Twitter, Copy Doctor, there’s the copy writer’s blog. So on here it looks like you own quite a few of the positions at number one. Obviously it is your name, but let’s start off at the top one, which is your primary site, your personal site. I want to talk a little bit about the way you write titles and descriptions, because that is definitely big when we talk about on page SEO and the importance of writing those titles. How do you write your titles and your descriptions?

Michel Fortin: I’ve alluded to that earlier on. Sometimes I will focus on writing a title that gets people to start reading a blog post or an article or something I’ve written. Very often there may be a bit of missing information in there so it gets them curious. There’s a bit of intrigue, there’s a bit of newsy aspect to it. I talked about passive voice earlier. I don’t say ‘Michel Fortin’s Copywriting and Marketing Tips’ I say ‘Copywriting and Marketing Tips By Copywriter Michel Fortin’. So copywriting, marketing, tips or copywriter are front loaded.

I have the privilege of having been on the internet for while and I’m known the way I’m known so people actually search for my name. I look at my Google stats and my traffic stats and people keep searching and they find my blog through my own name. What happens is I tend to put those keywords in the front. I may not necessarily be number one for copywriting tips, but that was not my goal anyway. My goal is that when it appears in the search engine, those words hit them. So when they scan the search results, particularly if you’re at the top that’s great, but if you’re not, when people scan, that hits them. That’s what I really want to do.

Look at some of the blog posts, I’ll give you an example of today’s blog post. I just put one this morning. It says ‘Headlines that Pull, Persuade and Propel’ rather than saying ‘How to Write Headlines that Pull and Persuade’ or ‘How to Pull and Propel Readers with Headlines’ Instead I put the word headlines because I know when people look for headline tips they type in the word headline. So I front loaded that keyword. That’s the sort of thing I do.

I want to put a disclaimer out there. I’m not an SEO person at all. However, I do tend to think about how the mind thinks. I always try to focus on putting those few keywords. There’s a really cool study done at a university, published by Jakob Neilsen in his magazine Use IT . He talked about passive voice; front loading those keywords are so important because eye tracking studies have proven when people scan a page, or when they type in words in search engines, they will type in, or look for, or scan for, and stop at, those two first words. The first three or four words maximum, but the first two words are crucial.

If you have Copywriting Tips or if you have Insomnia Cure or Energy Boost, those are important because you are putting those keywords that people are actually looking for. But in my particular titles, in my particular blog posts, I tend to do that, but I also tend to use it in such a way that it drives people into the blog post. For example, if I write a post on five of my best SEO copywriting tips. I’ll say Boost Search Engine Traffic Using These Five Tips…so the boost and the keywords are front loaded but I didn’t mention what the tips are. I said These Five Tips as if you have to go into the article to know what those five tips are.

So I use a bit of curiosity, intrigue, sometimes half-stated truths or half stated statements. I start the idea and then I use…, the elipse so that people are driven into the blog post to read. My major goal is to get people into my blog, into my site. SEO is a sort of afterthought. But it is especially important to get people to interact with me and to buy my stuff.

David Jenyns: As far as it being an afterthought as well, because you’ve been around on the internet for such a long time now and you have got a good following of people who follow what it is you do, I think once you reach a certain point and you get to that critical mass, SEO just kind of happens naturally. It’s good to hear that you do a little bit of thinking as far as the keyword choice goes.
I’ve just entered Michel Fortin into my Market Samurai to have a look to do some keyword analysis and we’re looking at some of the domains and your domains are coming up. I suppose if we look at the main primary one michelfortin.com. I can see quite a few factors that can help it rank quite high.

First there’s the age, it has been around, it has here registered for the last nine years. You’ve got loads of back links. We’re talking in the vicinity of 47,000 back links. The page rank is quite high, a page rank of five. I can see here you’ve done some on page optimization in your title tag. Your url, at least for the keyword Michel Fortin, you’ve got the keyword in the domain name another very important factor. You’ve got descriptions written and headlines. So you’ve ticked all those boxes well.

The way I approach SEO is I use it to kick start a site and get it up to a certain point. Right at the start, if you haven’t got the people searching you out, you want to optimize it so you’re in front of the person, so that when they’re looking for whatever it is you solve, you’re there. Using good copywriting to talk their language to draw them in, you draw them into your site. But like you said, you’ve got people searching out your name, so basically you’ve got a lot of excellent SEO things going on behind the scenes just by nature of you reaching critical mass. Just the back links alone have made your site powerful.

I’ve jumped over to have a look at the site itself now and I’m having a look around. You did talk about some of the different plug ins and this is obviously based on WordPress and I’ve gone view page source and I can see the All In One SEO plug in and I can see you’ve got your descriptions and your keywords written out there. I also saw, using that as well, each of your posts having their own titles and their own descriptions, which again is very good from an SEO point of view. You don’t want to have the same sort of titles and descriptions throughout the whole site.

Looking on the site, you’re ticking all of these boxes, showing that you’re real to Google. You’ve got your privacy, you’ve got your legal, your contact us page down the bottom. All this is increasing your quality score and then you talked a little bit about getting in the mind of the prospect. You’re then writing a post to that person based on the keywords they’re searching and then front end loading that into your post.
So I’d be interested to know how do you do some of that keyword research? You talked about WordTracker. Is that the primary tool you use?

Michel Fortin: Well I use WordTracker, yes, and I use it especially for my other stuff. I don’t use it that much for michelfortin.com. I do use the keyword question tool. This allows me not only to look up keywords and the popularity of certain keywords, but essentially the types of questions people ask, and how that keyword fits to that question. It is how that specific question is asked and how often it is asked. I can actually write a blog post around that question and pretty much give them the answer. That’s one of the tools that I use.

There’s also a WordPress SEO tool, I’m not sure if you know about it, and I’ve just started to dabble with it. I like it a lot. It’s WordTracker SEO blogger. Have you heard of that?

David Jenyns: No, I’m making a note of it.

Michel Fortin: Let me give you the full url. It’s wordtracker.com/academy/5-minute-seo. It’s a plug in that will actually work in your sidebar. It’s especially for Firefox. It will actually look up keywords. You can use it as you’re writing content; it works with you on the fly. It will actually give you some hints as to how searched are these types of keywords in your blog post. You can actually write content and wrap it around those specific results. This enables you to write and build it better.

I’ve just started to dabble with this tool and I like it a lot. The WordTracker keyword question tool is one of my most favourite ones. I use my wife’s methods that she teaches and uses a lot. She talks about, for example, vertical searching versus horizontal searching versus multi dimension searching. Essentially what it means is, you look for a particular keyword or key phrase and then try to figure out the different ways people think about when they’re searching and then extrapolate that to fit different scenarios. That’s called multi dimensional.

For example, if you’re looking for a low carb diet, you might have low carb nutrition, low carb fat loss, low carb weight loss and so on. Then you have all the horizontal stuff like low carb diet Atkins, low carb diet South Beach, low carb diet Oprah Winfrey and so on. Then you can see not only what people are typing in but how they are actually thinking. Then basically you write your content. You do that a bit with copy if you’re actually selling products or services so that it matches the frame of mind.

Let’s say you’re selling a product on diet and your product is a competitor to a particular product and that product is being searched for. Now of course trademark rules aside, I don’t want to go into the legal side of it. You can easily create a blog post or a doorway page that does a comparative something that talks about the other product. You may have found a product that is an alternative solution that links back to your main sales page and so on. I’m not a lawyer, so keep those things in mind.

I’m not going to speak to the legal aspect of those, but there are ways you can do this. Let’s put names aside. Let’s just say diet. There is nutrition, fat loss, weight loss – you’ve got all these different ways people are looking for, and you can write different blog posts for different pages or even different websites that revolve around a specific search frame of mind and you drive them to your main sales page. I’m not an SEO expert, these are just things I have learned myself.

David: You say that a few times, yet looking at your sites, you’ve still got the SEO. While I searched, I was having a look at some of your other sites as well, like thesuccessdoctor.com, and also the Copy Doctor. They’ve got the basics. You’ve ticked the important on page stuff, you’ve got some good off page SEO happening with the inbound links. So as much as you’re not the SEO guy, it still happens.

I think part of that is, once you get really good with what it is you’re doing, SEO does start to happen naturally. What a lot of people try and do, is push or force SEO sometimes when it can just happen naturally. As long as you have those fundamentals in the back of your mind and you’re putting out good content, that’s the real key. Push products that you believe in and provide value to people and then SEO happens naturally. People will link to you and that is just a by product.

What I do with my SEO stuff really it’s just a kick start to get these products in front of the people when they’re looking for them. To shift gear slightly, talking about sales letters, and I know that’s your core expertise, we’re seeing at the moment a little bit of a shift I think in the way sales letters have been written recently. There was the Mass Control 2.0 launch a little while ago where Frank Kern came out and what appeared to be no sales letter. I know you mentioned before the call that you’d written the Mass Control sales letter.

Michel Fortin: No, I’d written the UnderAchiever letter, the UnderAchiever method.

David Jenyns: Sorry. We can see the way things are shifting. It’s almost like once Frank Kern or some of the leading internet marketers start doing things, sometimes you’ll see that flow on effect through to a lot of other internet marketers. We started to see a whole lot of launches happening where they were just doing a video sales letter effectively with hardly any copy and an add to cart button. I’m really keen to get your thoughts on that. There are numerous things we can talk about there.

Michel Fortin: I think I can sum it up with one simple thing. There’s a free report that I’ve written. There’s no strings attached. If you go to my blog, michelfortin.com you can look for the report. You click on the link and you can instantly download. There’s nothing attached to it, there is no opt in page or anything. It’s absolutely free and it is my gift. Just go to Michel Fortin, and on the right hand side bar there is a white paper called The Death of the Sales Letter. I wrote that several years ago. It talks about this shift, this entire change that we’re actually seeing right now on the internet.

A lot of it is the things I believe in myself, but a lot of it are things I have been seeing that I looked at some of the top marketers doing, but at the same time, things I know for a fact because of the testing that I’ve done. I do a lot of testing myself. It boils down to this. The report talks about how the impact of Web 2.0 is changing the landscape of sales letters online. Essentially it means this. When we were in the days of web, it was a unidirectional process. People would put a sales letter online and hopefully the whole message would be digested and acted upon by the market.

It’s now different from putting a sales letter in the mail, If you put a sales letter in the mail and you open up the letter and you read the sales letter and you take action with whatever order form or advice that has been included, that’s no different from just slapping that same sales letter online. With Web 2.0 things have changed. Now the web has become bidirectional. It’s no longer unidirectional. It’s no longer a broadcast medium, it’s more of a conversation cast. Now people have the opportunity to interact with the copy, with the sales message.

I don’t want to give you the whole report. In fact the report goes into great detail and offers some great examples of how we’re seeing all these shifts right now. The point is this. Before it was easy in the offline world, to just take a direct sales letter, that was printed and typed out and slap it online and it’ll work just the same. But today people have very short attention spans.

There is something called the ping factor. The ping factor is, when you’re on line, you’re being pinged by so many different things. You have to read fifty-six different emails that you just downloaded in the last hour. Your friend on instant messenger is asking for your attention. You’ve got two or three calls waiting for you on Skype. You’ve got videos, you’ve got RSS feeds, you’ve got many other things all vying for your attention. Now we’ve got browsers not only that are opened up in single inferences but have multi tabbed browsers. Firefox was actually one of the leaders in this but now pretty much all browsers have multiple tabs. Before it was one browser at a time.

David Jenyns: One other thing as well, which I’ve just noticed. I’ve searched Michel Fortin and again this is a great example of good SEO and it’s just happening naturally. You mentioned The Death of the Sales Letter. If you search in your name it is the second listing on the top of the page.

Michel Fortin: Right. And that particular report actually goes into how the mindset has not shifted from long copy to short copy. A lot of people say well, long copy is dead. That’s not entirely true. When people are in your market and they want to buy your product, they’ll want more information about it, not less. That hasn’t changed. The one thing that we all have in common, that is pretty much the same since the beginning of time is human kind, is emotions. That will never change.

But the way people digest that information changes. What I really say in my report boils down to this. It’s not about giving people less copy, it’s just giving it in a different format. Whether it is an interactive format, whether it is more copy, but less copy in the print style and more copy in the video style, maybe more audio. Maybe now you have testimonials rather than fully typed out testimonials, like in the old days like with web 1.0 and even before then. After that it was testimonials with the picture of the person who is giving the testimonial and their signature at the end with their link. That is because it shows more credibility and shows it is coming from an actual person.

Nowadays you’ve got video testimonials and audio testimonials. I’ve seen sales letters just recently where people are giving their social media profiles. So if you wanted more information about their testimonial, or more information about the product that’s being sold, and you want to contact the person on the social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, Posturous, all these other sites like MySpace, you can.

My point is that copy has not really changed in its essence. It is there to sell, it is salesmanship in print. But that print may not necessarily be in type. It might be in the script for video or audio. It might be also over a period of time rather than all at once, like multiple videos. This is to increase anticipation or to increase the buzz or the viral marketing factor. You see a lot of this with Frank Kern and John Reese and a lot of guys. It might be also in a blog format where you attract people adding their own comments and so on.

You even have testimonials on the fly, dynamic testimonials. You might have what is called reverse opt in. Reverse opt in is something I learned from John Reese. Reverse opt in simply means, rather than giving people a bit of information, tease them, get them to opt in and squeeze them to a sales page, now it’s the complete converse.

Now you give them everything, but then you either space it out over time and you get them to opt in in order to get the rest and to be notified when the rest is available. Or you give them ample information, you give them a lot of information they love, and then you say, hey would you like to have more of this. They opt in and they either get more information after that, or they get to the sales page and the sales pages themselves are no longer just about pitch. You’re seeing more and more of these sales pages becoming more of an editorial style with content, with stories, with actual tips and information that people are looking for on the sales page.

It comes back to what you were saying, David, that was very important. It’s all about fresh content. That content can be served up on a sales page. It doesn’t have to be a blatant sales pitch from the start. It can be information that people are looking for, either in a video or an audio or through a reverse opt in process. The point is, that’s what we’re seeing the shift in. It’s something I believe in. It’s something powerful because that shift has changed so much that when we do product launches, now we’re seeing changes.

I wrote the very first Million Dollars In One Day sales letter for John Reese, the one letter that started it all. But that record has been shattered so many times ever since. A lot of people call me the Roger Bannister of online copywriting. Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile, and after that everybody started breaking it. It was the same idea with me.

After I wrote that sales letter, many other marketers were breaking it. I don’t want to say it’s about copy. I don’t consider myself a great copywriter. I think it’s that people are starting to understand and adapt their style to the market and then making it so when the product launches., it absolutely breaks all records.

You’re seeing now these launches for these products in such a way that we’re making millions and millions of dollars in just one day. That is just to underline what you said. Anyway the report is called The Death of the Sales Letter.

David Jenyns: Yes, definitely worth checking out. You talked about some of the ideas as far as videos and the script that goes with the video effectively being a sales letter. I believe that’s absolutely key, making sure you touch on those same elements. You want to lead with almost like a headline effectively which is something that is going to capture people’s attention for the duration.

You want to lead them in and tell them the story and make sure that you have your offer, your call to action, all these prime points of a sales letter need to be worked into effectively a sales letter video. You talked about some of the different changes that are happening. I know you’re a big split tester.

I was wondering if you’d done any testing or split testing to know how things like video and interactivity in sales letters are affecting the conversion rates.

Michel Fortin: Well, yes they are. That’s the whole premise behind the reason why I wrote that special report or that white paper. I started to see a decline on conversions on the traditional sales letters, and going back up again when we start to include interactive elements like video. Video is an interactive element. People have to touch buttons to start, play, pause, rewind and so on. It’s not only that.

An interesting thing happened a few years ago when I was teaching. I taught marketing management and professional selling at a local college here in Ottawa, Canada. One of the textbooks that I had actually showed some very cool statistics from the University of Missouri. A professor there by the name of Dr Ronald Marks talked about your use of multi media in your sales presentation, this is in the days of face to face selling, not online. They found through actual studies and statistics that if you include multimedia, or if you include interaction in your sales presentation, he had some very cool numbers. I don’t have the numbers exactly, but you increase sales by 120%, you increase comprehension level by 220%, you increase believability and trust by 70%.

That clicked in me, and I said, oh, this is exactly what the web needs. When you read copy online, you’re missing the most important element which is the ability to inspect a product face to face. You can’t touch, taste, smell or see the product in person. You don’t have that ability that you would normally have if you walked into a retail store. So when you write copy you need to write words. I used to teach this in terms of copywriting basically where you need to use words which sort of replace those senses.

But now that we have Web 2.0 and now broadband and all those things make it possible to use video and audio and most people will be able now to watch video and listen to audio and do interactive things online. Now you have the ability to replace all those senses, to engage all those senses that you weren’t otherwise able to with normal, blank, plain copy. So now when you include all those things you’re going to definitely increase conversions. Yes, to answer your question, multimedia and all those elements you’ve talked about do absolutely increase conversion.

David Jenyns: As we shift into that type of sales letter, do you think there’ll ever be a point where people are just selling on video? Or is copy still going to play an important part in selling?

Michel Fortin: Like I said, I don’t think you’re replacing the sales letter with video. It’s that you’re engaging all the senses. You’ll see the sales letters that are often the most productive in terms of sales results, are usually the ones that blend video in the sales letter. You’ll have video in the sales letter, you’ll have audio, you’ll have some kind of interaction aspect. You’ll see these product launches now where they’ll start with the blog and people are commenting and they’re posting videos with actual content on the video. It’s not even a sales pitch. People need to sign up to an opt in page in order to get notified of new videos.

Of course on the day of launch you get this email that says, now the product is available, go and buy it now and very often these product launches are done very skillfully. Jeff Walker is one of the people who is credited for booming this mentality, this skill level in most marketers. Once you launch, you only need a buy now button and people will buy because there is so much anticipation.

The point is never to replace your entire sales letter with the video. It’s not meant to do that. You should use video as either a way to grab people’s attention or to drive them into the sales letter, but you still need the sales letter. You need to make the offer. You need to have written copy to maybe list all the product features and product benefits. You might need to have specific things that you can’t mention on the video. You might need a guarantee, some extra testimonials, and most importantly the order process. The order form needs to be in a written format so people can actually process their order.

What we’re probably seeing is visually shorter sales letters. But they’re not really shorter, it’s just that the copy is now delivered in a different format.

David Jenyns: Perfect. I feel like you’ve dropped so many gold nuggets in our laps. I know you don’t consider yourself a great copywriter but I sure do, and I’m sure there are a lot of other people out there who would agree with me. Thank you very much for your time. I very much appreciate it and I know a lot of people are going to get a lot of benefit out of this. I can’t recommend that report enough if people want to go check it out, they can go to michelfortin.com to find out more. Is that the best place for people to go to find out more?

Michel Fortin: Yes, that’s the best place. And thank you for saying I’m a good copywriter. It’s not so much that I don’t feel as if I a  good, but I always learn. Everything changes every day. If we keep learning and we keep on our toes by learning as much as we possibly can, the faster and more effective we become.

Michelfortin.com is one website. The other which is that little tip on market research is marketingesp.com which is a product by my wife. It’s a good product. It’s not so much about SEO but it is a good product to learn more about the market and how they think. It’s also good to create a product around because a lot of people sell products without knowing if the product is going to sell first. So go to michelfortin.com or marketingesp.com.

David Jenyns: Thanks again.

Michel Fortin: Thanks David.

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