a conversation with michel fortin, copywriternatsegal.com/doneforyou/michelfortininterview.pdf ·...

NATHAN SEGAL

Creator of the First Sales Letter to Earn Over $1,000,000 in Sales in 24 Hours Online

A Conversation with Michel Fortin, Copywriter

A Conversation with Michel Fortin,

Copywriter

Creator of the First Sales Letter to Earn Over $1,000,000 in Sales

in 24 Hours Online

By Nathan Segal

A Conversation with Michel Fortin, Copywriter 2

Copyright and Disclaimers

All rights reserved. The book A Conversation with Michel Fortin, Copywriter is Copyright © Nathan Segal, 2016.

No part of this book or the various image components contained herein may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any other means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written consent of the publisher/copyright holder.

This book is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regards to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher has made every effort possible to make sure that the information contained herein is truthful and accurate.

If there is any doubt about the veracity of the information contained in this book, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

The reader is advised to consult with an appropriately qualified professional before making a business decision. Due to the rapidly changing state of technology, the publisher/copyright holder does not accept any responsibility for any liabilities resulting from the decisions made by the purchasers of this book.

Questions? Write to me or call Tel. (408) 844-4851

mailto:[email protected]

3 A Conversation with Michel Fortin, Copywriter

Contents

COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMERS .......................................................... 2

ABOUT MICHEL FORTIN ........................................................................ 4

MICHEL FORTIN INTERVIEW ............................................................... 6

ABOUT THIS BOOK ................................................................................ 33

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ............................................................................ 34


About Michel Fortin

A direct response copywriter and marketing consultant for close to 30 years (online since 1992), Michel Fortin has an uncanny knack for writing persuasively.

He knows how to “grab readers by the eyeballs,” boost response to record rates, and transform floundering businesses into moneymaking machines. 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.

Dubbed as the “Roger Bannister of Online Copy,” his most notable success is a salesletter that sold over a million dollars online on its first day — a first of its kind, and a feat repeated many times since then by him and many others.

Michel can help take your business to the next level. His proven, battle-tested, scientifically measured strategies can significantly fire up your sales, fatten your bottom-line, plug costly leaks sucking your business dry, and excavate hidden profit goldmines tucked away in your business — regardless of the industry or economy.

Born with a minor physical disability and a mild form of Asperger’s Syndrome, he was abused by an alcoholic, mentally-ill father. As a result, Michel lived a secluded childhood fighting an overwhelming fear of rejection. One day, he decided to fight that fear head-on by diving into the world of sales.

Naturally, the lack of any commissions and a young family to support drove him penniless, so he declared bankruptcy. His unique ability to write persuasively fueled his desire to succeed, so Michel began to write salesletters in order to attract qualified clients to him — not the other way around — so he no longer had to face rejection.


That small experiment was the pivotal moment in his career that would forever change his life. He went from a poor, bankrupt insurance salesperson to becoming the top sales producer for a Fortune 500 Canadian company, winning many awards and sales contests.

He’s also an best-selling author, in-demand public speaker, and highly sought-after consultant. Michel often speaks at conferences, bootcamps, and seminars around the globe — some charging as much as $5,000 a seat to attend.

He has shared the stage with the likes of: Jay Abraham, Harv Ecker, Mark Victor Hansen (co-creator of the “Chicken Soup for The Soul”), Joe Vitale and John Assaraf (co-authors of “The Secret”), John Carlton, Gary Halbert, Jay Conrad Levinson (author of “Guerilla Marketing”), Dan Kennedy, and too many others to list here.

On a personal note, he’s also an experienced drummer and plays occasionally around town. He’s also a competitive powerlifter and shares his weightloss journey on his fitness blog.


Michel Fortin Interview Nathan: Good morning everyone, my name is Nathan Segal of the Legends of Online Marketing and with me today is Michel Fortin.

Michel is the CEO of workaholics4hire.com, an outsourced customer support and help desk management firm. As a copywriter and consultant for close to 30 years he was instrumental in selling over $100,000,000 worth of products and services for a wide variety of clients. His most notable success is a sales letter that sold over $1,000,000 online on launch day. Today Michel is a best-selling author, in-demand public speaker, and highly sought after marketing consultant. He is also an experienced rock drummer and record-breaking competitive power lifter. That’s quite the resume.

Michel: Thank you *laughs*

Nathan: You’re welcome! I’m looking at it and I’m going “Wow!” I have to say I’m impressed.

Michel: Thank you.

Nathan: But I also know you from over the years. We’re not strangers to each other and it's not like this is just a cold interview. We've gone back and forth over the years. I became aware of you through workaholics4hire and talking with Sylvie in years past and so on… I would imagine you wound up assuming the role …

Michel: Yes.

Nathan: Can you tell me a bit about what happened there?

Michel: Well, it’s kind of a, long story short, I was a copywriter all my life. That’s what I did was in business when I started my business back in, 1992/1993? I became officially incorporated in ‘97 and eventually I needed help with my own customer support services and I hired Sylvie’s company at that time, I think it was backing in 2004, which is actually the year that I wrote the sales letter for John Reese. Traffic Secrets, that's the

https://workaholics4hire.com/


sales letter and it was over $1,000,000 in one day. And my business took off.

Nathan: I would think so.

Michel: Right! I hired Sylvie to do my customer support and we soon realized that we were sharing a lot of the same customers. I was doing a lot of the Internet marketing, consulting, and copywriting work with the same customers that were hiring her for customer support.

Then we got married and just before she passed away, we sort of merged our companies together and now what we do is staff websites. I can hire copywriters all the way to customs or personnel to handle custom companies or online company's customer support services to support. We do the gamut of project management, project facilitation, copywriting, web design, WordPress designs and also training courses. That's how the company is today and this is what I am mostly focused on.

Nathan: Right, so it's copywriting not so much anymore then.

Michel: Oh, I do copywriting. The agency has germinated its own entity and Success Doctor still exists but its run by Andy Katzmanus, my right-hand person and it's his baby more or less now.

I do write copy but I am very selective; I write only copy for clients that I really want to work for. I do that only once in a while so it's not like I'm deadline driven all the time. I remember in the good old days, my Lord, two or three sales letters a week sometimes. It was crazy.

Nathan: *whistles* Holy. That’s insane.

Michel: And we’re talking sales letters that were 20 - 40 pages. So, there were a couple of sleepless nights back then, so but today, I do maybe one sales letter a month.

Nathan: Wow.

Michel: I do a lot of my own copy but I also do a lot of copy for clients that I have very close relationships with. I also train a lot. I do a lot of


copy with junior copywriters where I will critique work with their copy or train them so they can go on their own and do their own copy with clients as well.

This is sort of this side thing that I do that is still going to be with me. I mean, I’m going to be a copywriter until the day I die. But the focus now is staffing websites, which is the company Sylvie put together that became the one company that I'm now CEO of.

Nathan: When you talked about the million-dollar sales letter, I found that interesting because I’m well aware of that million-dollar day with John Reese. I didn't know that you were the person behind it, so it was like closing the gap on that one.

Michel: There they you go, thank you.

Nathan: You’re welcome. I’ve been aware of this for years but I thought John Reese was the one that put it together. It didn't occur to me that he had been working with somebody else to produce copy.

Michel: Yeah, a lot of people will call me, and I hate to call myself a good copywriter, but there are a lot of guys out there that do much better work. I think John Reese is actually a fantastic copywriter. I learned so much from working with him. I think he hired me because he was so busy trying to put the product together and the launching of a marketing campaign for launch day, that he just decided to outsource the copy, the sales letter itself to me. I remember that sales letter was 75 pages long. It was quite a bit cluttered. And… go ahead?

Nathan: Sorry, it was just a quick thing, but I'm one of John Reese's customers up on Traffic Secrets back in the day.

Michel: Right, right.

Nathan: So it's kind of funny that we’re having this conversation.

Michel: And you know, the irony of all that is that I wrote John Reese’s Traffic Secrets letter and I was on a tight deadline. I wrote his Traffic


Secrets sales letter at a copywriting seminar put together by Yanik Silver. *laughs*

I was in the audience listening to the copywriting knowhow being taught while I was writing the sales letter for John Reese that later became my magnum opus.

I was also referred to as the Roger Bannister of online copy. A lot of people referred me to that because I broke the “4-minute mile” so to speak in a sense; after I did that sales letter.

The fact the record was broken many, many, many, times by other copywriters that are so much better than I am, Frank Kern for one and so many others. So basically, it was sort of the thing that defined me. A lot of people remembered me as the first, but by no means I'm the only.

There are guys who did so much more than that, but I think that copywriting is something that's in your lifeblood so I'm glad that John Reese gave me that opportunity.

Nathan: Yeah, that sounds amazing. I mean it is funny like when you said Frank Kern, I was thinking Frank Kern and Stompernet and all that.

Michel: Yup, exactly.

Nathan: As a copywriter what do you like the most about it, or what have you liked the most about it?

Michel: The part about copyrighting which is the hardest to master is that writing copy is salesmanship; it's basically selling. If you can have a good opener, a good story, and closing well, you’re going to get people to buy your product.

I think what’s really hard is having that match between your audience and the message. Very often it's the number one failure of most copyists to have the right message to market matches. I hear people often say having the right message at the right time to the right people, and I think that trying to find that match, that connection, getting the connection with the audience is probably the hardest part, but it’s also the most fun.


A lot of people say, “Michel, when you write copy, what do you spend most time on? Do you write the headline first? Do you write the offer? Do you try to get bullet points?”

You know, I spend most of my time doing market research. I love reading, and I love reading about my customers, what keeps them up at night. What they love, not only the product, or maybe about what they’re looking to solve in their lives. Some of their hot buttons that can be easily pressed. All those things that are important about the customer and I want to make a connection.

Telling a good story is fine. You want to be a story seller, not a storyteller. But to be able to do that you need to have a great connection with your audience and the only way to know your audience as best as possible is to do market research.

I would literally have a month to write a sales letter and I would spend the first three weeks just doing market research. 80% of my time is spent on knowing as much as I possibly can for my market. So that is the most fun but at the same time, it’s the hardest process, the hardest point of copywriting, good copywriting.

A lot of people come to me and they say, “Why did my copy fail?” Oftentimes, it's because they missed that connection. Copywriting is about knowing what to say and how you say it. And I was big on the “how” because I love telling. Give me a message, give me a good message, and I can turn it around and make it look snazzy, and have, make it good sounding, positive sounding, hitting all the right buttons and all that stuff. But if it’s not the right message, you can have the best copy in the world, you can best snazziest sales letter in the world, you can have all the bells and whistles in the world, but if there is no connection there with your audience, you will have the lowest conversion rate possible – or you will have a high conversion rate but you will have a lot of refunds because people will feel that you didn’t connect with them properly. So knowing that “what” first. The “what” is probably the most important.

I’ve done rewrites of sales letters, where it would be a completely different idea, completely different angle that I would use a focal point in


my copy. Rather than just rewriting bits and pieces I would rewrite the whole thing. And this is what happened with John Reese. The first sales letter I wrote I had to rewrite three days before launch date because he didn’t like the angle.

Nathan: Wow.

Michel: Yeah, he didn’t like the angle. I mean, of course some big parts were reusable, but the whole story line he didn’t like. So, I did not sleep for three days. I remember that day like it was yesterday, August 16, 2004, I literally stayed up for three days rewriting that sales letter, and it became the success that it was, and that's why the “what” is so important not “how.” The “how” is nice…if you don’t have a good “what”, the “how” comes next. But if you don't have a good “what”, it doesn't matter how well you write, it doesn’t mean anything.

Nathan: I find most interesting what you said about the market research and you said you spent a lot of time on that. Where do you go to find this information?

Michel: Well, first of all, I have a questionnaire that I get to my clients and my clients will fill it out based on what they feel is what their market is and that's very often not really the case, right. You have to dig a little deeper.

Sometimes there’s a gem hidden in your market that you have to dig for and oftentimes I'll get a good questionnaire filled out by my clients and I'll get a lot of great information but to me that's just a starting point. And I’m gonna give you and your audience a major tip. One of the best ways I’ve had my market research done and also where I find that gem, is by using the phone. Doing things like this. Interviewing actual, happy clients of my clients, recording the conversation, getting them to explain to me… getting them to sell me on the product or service. And even before that, let them explain to me how their lives were before they bought the product, and how it became, how they benefitted from the product. And I’ll try to poke and prod their emotions a little bit. I’ll try to press and prod, I wanted to them to get excited; I want to get them to sell me on the idea.


You know what, when you see a really good movie and you’re trying to tell them about this movie that you just saw, you’re trying to decide and they’re just piling it on: “Oh, it was so great!” Well, that’s what I want from my clients. I want to record that conversation; I transcribe it and I nearly have a good portion of my copy written for me because that's what I wanted. That’s that “oomph” I was looking for and I take a lot of that transcription and I put it in the copy, and I usually have the best “what” possible because I have it directly from the “horse’s mouth,” so to speak.

Nathan: That is brilliant. I really like that.

Michel: Thank you.

Nathan: Oh, you're welcome. It is actually one of the reasons why I love doing interviews, because it's asking questions to get people excited like yourself, and sometimes interviews go all over the place. the whole purpose is to bring to light really useful stuff that people can act on right away.

Michel: Right, right. And you know the thing is, I sometimes write copy and I do market research. And it bombs, or its okay, but I know it could be better. I go back to the market research and dig a little further. And here’s just a final little underline on that.

A lot of people say, “Michel, what happens when you have writers block?” They’ll say, “I’m staring at a blank screen or a blank piece of paper and I don’t know what to write.” Oftentimes it's because you don't have enough ideas and it’s because you didn’t do enough research. Go back to market research go ask more questions, probe further. Because the more you dig, the more you dig, the more you dig, the more ideas will come out and jump out at you and you’ll say, “Oh, maybe I should do my sales letter on this angle that this person told me after I interviewed this person two or three times already.”

Sometimes it's a back-and-forth. I get a questionnaire filled out with my clients, and I'll always ask clarifying questions. I'll send it back and say, “What exactly did you mean at this particular point?” Or, “Can you give me examples of this other point?” Or, “Can you give me three of your topmost ABCs of whatever you're talking about on this particular point?”,


and then basically have 12 more. I’ll prod them for more information, and because a lot of times when people send me questionnaires, responses to questionnaires, it's like clearing the throat type of information. It’s, ugh, it’s just things that come to your mind, at the top of your mind, at that moment but it's very often not, you know it's… it's… it's just skin deep, you want to go further in you want to go in and get that gem, right?

Nathan: Right.

Michel: And this is what happens. One of my best pieces of copy is this thing that I wrote almost at the last minute because I finally had somebody who gave me this, this thing, that this person didn’t think would be at an important point. And when he said, “Oh, maybe this point here is not important.” But it was crucial. I told him “Oh, that’s the important point!” So I wrote the sales letter on that, and it gave me a 12% conversion rate.

As opposed to 3% because of that one idea that came about after 3 to 4 times of asking questions and getting more clarification. So bottom line is, get more research. If you have writers block that's because you don't know enough about your market because when you do more market research you can, you get a gazillion more ideas. When you do a lot of research, a lot of ideas will come out of that. And when you start writing copy, it will be like a domino effect; your sales letter will come right out of you, practically because of that.

Nathan: Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s something that I'd never actually considered; the idea of interviewing the person. I keep thinking as you were talking about those opening questions, like when you send out the questionnaire, what kinds of opening questions are you asking?

Michel: Well, the questionnaire itself is based on knowing more about the product, knowing more about the client, meaning the company, the client. Knowing more about the client’s clients, and from that I also want to know four major things. And with the four major things, we all know them: demographics, psychographics, demographics – geographics, I mean, and technographics.

Meaning: Demographics are qualities and characteristics about the person. So, age, sex, marital status, job, industry, basically just these defining


ideas, no not ideas, but for defining qualities of the predominant market. Very often, you'll find that most of the people in your market fall within a particular predominant category. Sometimes they’re a little diverse but you'll find one that sticks out the most. And then you can develop what we call a “buyer persona.” So you are basically creating a person whom you are actually writing for.

When I write a sales letter, it’s like having that one person in front of my mind. Sometimes I'll put it on my screen, I have a dual screen at home and I’ll have that dual screen help me write the copy because I realize, “Okay, I know this person might be interested in this. Or this person might be interested in that, or not interested in this.” And so I write the copy based on that.

Psychographics are basically interests. You know, the associations they belong to, the activities they do, and so on and so forth. It's more the psychology behind, the psychological characteristics of that market. And the other two are just Geographic’s such as where are they located, where do they buy? Are they mobile driven versus online driven? Website, desktop driven.

Which relates more to the techno graphics. I found that when I write copy, for an older audience, I always feel like they're more desktop driven than mobile driven. When I'm writing for a younger audience a lot of them will buy from their cell phones, their tablet. So that's important to know. But it's mostly the demographics and the psychographics that are so important.

Because the more you know about your market, you can develop a “buyer persona” or what they are likely to call the “Perfect Prospect Profile.” You can write your letter as if you're writing for that one single person. Of course, everybody that reads it will feel like that letter will be to them, but when you're writing your letter, you feel like you're writing to that one individual. And you’re more conversational, more personable, and you get that connection that I was talking about earlier, that’s so important in copy.

Nathan: Yeah, yeah. I’m kind of curious. It’s like that, you've said you’ve got the two different audiences. You’ve got the ones that are more desktop driven and then you have the mobile audience. And when you're writing


for a mobile audience I would imagine you would have to change your copy quite a bit, because you’re dealing with the small screen, so you wouldn’t be able to write as much. Is that correct?

Michel: That’s correct. Very often, and this depends on the marketing strategy, if you're writing an actual sales letter copy, it would always be better to write it a for tablet or for desktop. Mobile, it is best to capture their information first and try to drive them into something they could actually read from. However it also depends on the product. There is a formula that I use, that I developed, to remind me of the sophistication of the market. And I didn’t create this. This is something that Eugene Schwartz put together in his book, “Breakthrough Advertising.”

Nathan: Mmm, I never read that, I wanted to.

Michel: He talks about the level of sophistication of your market. I call it the level of awareness of your market. If you get an idea of where they're at, but it's really based on the level of suspicion about the problem and solution your offer and I call it oaths. Is your market ready to take an oath is something I like to dig into when I actually do market research. Where are they in their stage of awareness? Now here’s what OATH means. And the way to think about it is how prepared is your market to take an OATH.

O.A.T.H. – Oblivious, Apathetic, Thinking, and Hurting. So Oblivious, they are Oblivious about the problem. They don’t even know that they are suffering from the problems. So now you need a long copy of this case, right. You need long copy because you educate them about the problem. You need to educate them on how they are suffering from this problem. It’s not at the top of their mind at this point. In fact, some of them don't even realize they're having a problem and this is where you need to use a lot of education to do that and you need long copy to do that.

So naturally, on a mobile device, that might be a bit hard, so that's where you probably will write a lot of content, such as articles, and get them interested in knowing more and then getting them to sign up. And once they are educated enough, then you can use tighter, smaller copy that will be able to take them from a browser to a buyer.


The next step is Apathetic. You know they have a problem, they know the problem, but they just don't care.

That's where you need to write copy that gets them more interested in getting the problem solved. You have to make the problem more concrete, more real, more urgent, more important to get solved so they actually do care about the problem.

So now you use a little less education. Your copy might be not as much, but it’s still long enough because then you still need to light that fire under their asses, right?

Then the third, the third step is Thinking. So now they know about the problem, they care about it, but they're not sure how they are going to solve it. Now, you have to talk about why your solution is better than anything else, including indirect competitors. Meaning, other solutions that might provide the same benefits but are completely different. So where your copy is now going to be focused. Again, it’s going to be even smaller, but now you have to talk about why you are the best. Why is your solution better than any other solution out there?

And then finally the H is the audience that everybody wants. *laughs* A Hurting audience. The lowest hanging fruit.

Nathan: Yup.

Michel: So basically, if they're really, really Hurting, you can have a sales letter with just a “buy now” button and go, just click on that and buy, right? *laughs* But those are the people that will probably buy more, especially on mobile devices, if they know what they want, they know they have a problem, they know they want to solve it, maybe a little bit of research, they have only done the thinking, so now they just want to buy it, so that is copy that is going to be tight, short, sweet, to the point, get them moving, bam!

So that defined not just the devices - I use the devices because it's the aspect of marketing nowadays, but it's also about the length of copy. I know a lot of people ask me, “Michel, short copy or long copy?” I asked them “O.,A., or T., H.?” *laughs* You know?


Nathan: Yeah!

Michel: Are they Oblivious? Are they Apathetic? Are they Thinking, or are they Hurting? The more Oblivious they are, the longer the copy. The more Hurting they are, the shorter the copy. That will define how long your copy will be because then you don't have to educate them as much. All you have to do is make them an offer and they will buy. That is the formula that I use. And I use it to this day, after writing copy for 30 years.

Nathan: That’s really cool. I mean, how did you get into copywriting in the first place?

Michel: Oh, wow. Okay. Well. *laughs*

Nathan: I know you have to go back in time, but still.

Michel: Well here’s the strange part. People who know me know that, A) I was born into an abusive alcoholic family. My father was that diagnosed with Korsakoff's disease, and it's a disease - an illness, a mental illness, that is brought about by alcoholism. Something to do with the fact that your liver doesn't process certain vitamins because it is processing alcohol so much, that it degenerates certain brain cells and it leads to this disease which is one of the reasons why he was abusive.

At the same time and I just recently found out in the last decade or so, that I suffer from a mild form of Asperger's, which is a form of Autism. And with that combined - now I look back and I realize why. I had this amazing fear of rejection. I hated knocking on doors and getting doors slammed in my face, so when I was 19 years old I met my first wife and I became an instant father. I mean, she had a daughter. She was two years old at the time and at the marriage, she was three.

I was 20 years old, so I was a brand-new father. Brand-new husband. You know, rent to pay. Car payments, because I decided to get a job in sales. And that’s the point. I wanted to fight this fear of rejection and no better way there is to fight a fear of rejection than to dive right into sales, right? I was gonna get rejected all the time, so that would be the best way to fight that fear, but it still didn't work. I remember crawling into a corner almost


every day, hating to go out there, knocking on doors, picking up the phone; I had been rejected.

And I did so miserably, I failed so miserably, that I had to declare bankruptcy at the very young age of 21 years old.

Nathan: Wow.

Michel: I was living off multiple, multiple credit cards just to pay the rent. Pay for food. And I realized that I have to do something. So I decided to, and this is was the idea that came up because, at the insurance firm, they were getting us to write letters to people for this specific charitable event that we were a member of, and I remember thinking, “Hmm, this is interesting, how about if I write a sales letter to get people to contact me, to book an appointment with me, so I can do an insurance presentation?”

And so that’s what I did. I wrote a sales letter, that would get people to book an appointment with me. It wasn’t any more than that. But then I got calls. And the moment I got a phone call from somebody. I didn’t have to pick up the phone and call somebody cold. Or I didn’t have to knock on a door. I would get a call from people booking an appointment with me so I can do a needs assessment. Then I went from a bankrupt insurance salesperson to the number one salesperson for this Fortune 500 Company for eight months in a row.

Nathan: Wow.

Michel: So that's where I discovered, “Hmm, there’s something to this copywriting thing!”

So that's how I became a copywriter. And then, after the insurance business, I decided to go into my own as a marketing consultant, as a copywriter, and at first I specialized in cosmetic surgeons. In fact, my first company was called “The Success Doctor” because I helped doctors become successful. Most of my clients were hair transplant doctors, face lifts, cosmetic dentists, and so on and so forth. But then it expanded, and I actually had my first website back in 1995. I officially registered successdoctor.com in ’97, and the rest is history.


Nathan: This is really cool. I mean, I found myself doing a bit of a lateral move all while you were talking about it because I suddenly realized that I just created a sales letter of my own a few days ago but not a sales letter in the usual way. I did a video sales letter and I didn't even realize that that's what I'd done.

What had happened was, I know this therapist who does, he’s a coach, he does NLP if you're familiar with that?

Michel: Yes.

Nathan: Neurolinguistic…okay, yeah, so he helped me with a major problem, a big problem, and essentially solved it for me. 57 years worth of bullying, and what he did is he took me through a process that dissolved the emotional link to the trauma, and all of a sudden it vanished from my life.

Michel: Right.

Nathan: And, so I wound up interviewing him, and we got a fair bit of an audience for it. But I also had a video about bullying and I said to him, which is been getting about 7000 hits on YouTube, and I said to him, “Hey, Hamish. What would you think about me doing, like if I did an update to the video, by putting in just a tiny bit of copy in it?”

And people started contacting me just from three lines a copy. And then I said to him, “Hey, what about doing a video?” Well I did it to a couple of days ago, and I just had my first of call for it this morning. 30 views on YouTube. And I just suddenly realized just as we were talking, “Oh my god, I just did a video sales letter.”

Michel: Right? *laughs*

Nathan: And is so I’m kind of curious to whether you've gotten into doing video yourself.

Michel: Ooh, oh yeah absolutely! Oh yeah.

Nathan: Cool!


Michel: I mean, I’m not sure if you know this, but I predicted video sales letters back in 2004 after John Reese, I wrote a report called “The Death of the Sales Letter.”

Nathan: I remember, well, there have been several things like that. You're the originator of that whole thing?

Michel: Yeah, yeah, I wrote “The Death of the Sales Letter” back in 2004, at the end of 2004. And If you go to https://workaholics4hire.com/the-death-of-the-salesletter/ that’s the actual report, you can download it as a PDF, absolutely free. That was the report that I put out at that time, and what I talked about was, that video sales letters will explode and literally it did. And so, I've done a lot of that, and there are so many different ways of doing that.

Of course, there’s the questionnaire. The explanation videos with the actual writing, where you see drawings being done while you're talking. There's also PowerPoint based sales letters which is the simplest way to do it which is almost a transcription of you talking. There are talking heads sales letters and a fourth is like movement based videos where you have to see people moving, talking. Almost like a movie, like a show.

And this is all, it was not new to me, because when I wrote copy for cosmetic surgeons or hair transplant surgeons back in 1990, 91, 92, I produced infomercials, late-night infomercials for hair transplant surgeons. And so, I just applied what I learned back then to video sales copy today, although at the very beginning it was common to just have PowerPoint based presentations.

And PowerPoint would have clipart and some photos. Nowadays, we see videos being done with actual moving people and action shots and all that which is phenomenal, but it all comes back down to the same fundamental processes. This is the formula that we all use in marketing that's been around for hundreds of years, but is called AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Get their Attention. Get them to be interested in your whatever you're talking about. Raise the level of desire and get them to take Action. And it's the same thing that applies to video. As long as you follow that, you can have videos that have stories, you can have videos

https://workaholics4hire.com/the-death-of-the-salesletter/

https://workaholics4hire.com/the-death-of-the-salesletter/


that go for the jugular, you’ve got videos that are more subdued. Doesn’t matter. As long as you have that AIDA formula done properly.

You know video sales copy is no different than a written sales letter. And the reason why, the reason why I wrote about this, is just because it just makes sense to me that the Internet was prone or poised for video sales letters, simply because, when we write an actual sales letter, it's something you fold, put in the mail, and when the person receives it, they open it up and they read on a piece of paper.

That makes sense.

Radio is auditory. But they have infomercials on the radio. Many times, during a night. Or on Sundays. You listen to infomercials. I remember when I did some of that too; I actually wrote copy for a hair transplant surgeon that was voiced by Howard Stern, on the Howard Stern show. *laughs* Believe it or not. I’m going back many years here.

At any rate, that made sense to me. Then all of a sudden, we had TV with infomercials. So now it's so important to have visuals because, in my day, when I was writing copy or when I was producing infomercials for hair transplant surgeons, we had to see the hair transplant. We had to see how natural it looked to have a full, thick head of hair, so on and so forth.

Visual sales letters were important with the Internet. When the Internet first started out, I remember my first computer was a RadioShack 64K computer on a 300 Baud modem dialing up on a on a textline browser that it took forever to download a simple line of text, right? Well, it made sense to write a sales letter for the Internet, back in the old days of AOL and Compuserve because it was just text.

Now we have broadband. We have video. I mean, why use long copy sales letters on a medium that is capable of running multimedia?

We can run a gamut of those things. So, and here's the final point, is I've done enough research. I found that sales presentations that engaged the viewer increase sales by almost 200% based on studies that were done. I think it was at the University Missouri.


If you have just a sales letter that people can read, that's one thing, but if you can hear it, and if you can also do something like using the mouse, that’s being interactive.

In my book via “The Death of the Sales Letter,” I talk about interactive sales letters, which we also see nowadays. We see a lot of that through moving text, through clicking, so people are answering questions, so that copy that's more customized for your audience or for your reader at that point, or even the sale, what they call “the sales funnel”, that’s just basically a long copy sales letter, but that’s to find that way, where you click on certain things, you subscribe to certain things, you get specific tailored messages for your specific market. That's just the process of writing long copy, but spread out over a period of time. That’s sort of what I meant by “The Death of the Sales Letter.” I didn't say that the sales letter itself was dead; I just said that the long scrolling sales letter was dying.

And it’s still around. It still works well, and I don’t think that it’s completely gone. But you'll see more and more of the videos. More and more of the step-by-step funnelized type of sales copy. Interactive sales copy where people can use the mouse and be part of the sales process. And so, that's sort of “Hmm…” and I do that a lot. I do a lot of video sales copy. I do a lot of copy now for auto-responder campaigns all the way down to educating the customer on how to consume the product, to everything in between.

Nathan: Wow. It’s funny because I was thinking about this earlier and I was going to ask you about the sales letter because there's a long form as you've said. And I was thinking about, well, what about these sales letters, starting to introducing graphic elements into it, I was going to say, “Well, how do you feel about that?” And then you told me. What I’m really curious about is the interactivity. I don't quite know what you mean by that and I'm wondering if you can describe it a bit?

Michel: Well, I just mentioned it. If you are a part of a funnel. If I send you – you’re part of the mailing list, and you’re at the top of the funnel…

Nathan: Yeah.


Michel: You need to subscribe, you need to click on something, you need to tell me what you're more interested in. And that will lead to another, and lead to another, so that when you finally are … you're confronted with the sales message, the sales message is tailored, but you are interactive in that process.

I've also seen, especially with large corporations where they use sales letters based on what you click on, the resulting sales message they gave you is tailored to you. Tailored on, based on, what kind of likes and dislikes that you tell them along the way. That’s the attractiveness, but my final point is, an interactive sales letter is also the one when you click on it, it opens up content on-the-fly. Now we see a lot of these one-page websites; especially WordPress driven themes.

Nathan: Sure.

Michel: Elegant themes in the DIV. And in the DIV, there is a menu bar at the top. When you click on that, you’re not going to another page. It just jumps on the page on where that content is talked about that, but it also opens up on-the-fly, so basically you’re getting information that you specifically are requesting.

The problem with sales letters is you're writing a long copy, especially when it’s long copy, long scrolling copy, you have to cover all your bases, because you might have people that are interested in A. And you might have some people who are interested in B. And then you might have people who are interested in C.

Well, if I was in a sales situation, face-to-face with you, I could ask you questions so that once you answered all my questions I can tailor the presentation as much to you. How can you do that with a sales letter? Well you can't. Well, now you can with interactive sales letters, where you basically, people are telling the website what they're mostly interested in, information-wise.

Nathan: I think I'm starting to get it because well one of the things that has happened, that I've seen a number times, mostly coming from Frank Kern, is that he'll send some sort of thing and say, “Hey, I am doing an


upcoming webinar, and before I do the webinar, I want to know what you are thinking.”

Michel: Yup.

Nathan: And there is this survey that goes on, and I wind up doing this survey, and that's what you're doing, that's what you’re talking about.

Michel: And not only that, a lot of times we use the product launch formula from Jeff Walker where you've got the three videos. You know that one video comes out, “Subscribe to my newsletter and I'll tell you when video number two comes out.” And the week after video two comes up and then, “I’ll tell you when video number three comes out.” And video number three comes out, and throughout that process is the launch of the actual sales letter. Well, throughout that process, rather than a long scrolling sales letter, it's interactive, because you’re taking the person by the hand, step-by-step through, what would've been a long sales letter; now you're taking them through multiple videos.

Maybe an information campaign, maybe emails in the middle, like if after between video number one and video number two, you might send them two or three emails, these little pieces of information on education, about the problem, about the solution, or getting them more anticipated about what’s coming up and launching on X date.

That’s all part, I mean we look at this as a marketing campaign, but it’s just one long sales letter. That would have been one long sales letter years ago. now it's done through a process. That’s what’s interactive.

Nathan: Yeah. I see on the side here somebody made a comment that said, “Webinars are dead.” And I'm thinking “I doubt that very much.” But it would be interesting to hear your take on it, because webinars are, can be another form of the sales letter correct?

Michel: I’m seeing more and more webinars being done because a lot of people hate going to seminars. One of the things that I’ve noticed in the last two years is more webinars being done to replace seminars. Now I'm seeing a bit of a resurgence in seminars too, but you look at it this way, would you spend $2000 on a ticket and maybe a couple hundred bucks on


a hotel room, and definitely a few hundred bucks on an airplane ride, when you can just sit at home and watch a webinar?

Now that being said, the webinar as a teaching platform versus a sales platform, those are two different things. As a teaching platform, it's definitely taking off. If you go to any web camps, they talk about webinars all the time. I go to a web camp here in Ottawa and there are companies like Udemy.com and there are so many others. There is Learn 360 where it’s like a classroom environment and it's online, but it's just a webinar, but also the webinar as a sales process. It's no different because you’re giving out information. It’s no different than someone being on stage and at the very end of their presentation, you make an offer.

There are marketers doing strictly webinars to sell their products and services and are making a fortune from it. So to say that they’re dead, I don't think so. I think they will evolve. I believe that webinars being done with just a talking head or with just simple PowerPoint presentations, that’s going to evolve with interaction.

Again, there’s that interactivity, where you ask your audience to answer questions along the way, do homework during the process, visit certain websites, or something to split the screen so you can actually see people. What they call picture-in-picture presentations.

Nathan: Right.

Michel: What I’m saying is we’ll see more and more of that because I think that the webinar as a standalone is a one-way communication process and it might not stay that way for very long.

I think it will evolve because we crave that human interaction. And short of going to a seminar, the more we can engage the senses, the more we can interact with the audience, the better the conversion rate from the webinar.

Nathan: It’s interesting because you mentioned Udemy as we've been talking, and I’ve been wondering about what your thoughts are about that because I'm on Udemy. I haven't had much success with it, but I know some people who have done very well.

https://www.udemy.com/

http://marketing.learn360.com/


Michel: Yeah.

Nathan: One of the things that comes to mind is one of the functions that they give you in Udemy is where you can set up an introductory lecture. And you can also set other lectures to be free to the user as a way of reeling them in. I was just wondering what your thoughts are about it?

Michel: When I started with Udemy; I was looking at it as a platform to deliver courses. Now I look at it as an entry point. It's just a touch point. It’s just a point of contact. I have a lot of courses, and a lot of these courses are either small courses and sometimes full complete courses.

What I get them in the course to do, is go to my website, subscribe to my mailing list, and I'll notify you when other stuff comes available or download this tool that will help you with this particular course that you are getting on Udemy. Udemy has changed, so I’m not sure how the rules apply, but I know that I did that whenever I was with Udemy, where I would offer something, where you have to go to the website. And when they do, I’ve captured them.

Since they changed things around, I haven’t looked into it, especially since Sylvie passed away. But I know that now, if I were to use it, I would use it as a point of entry, and then take people to my own website, my own real estate, to my own funnel, and then sell them more of my products, my services, and my training program there.

That is what I would use. And any other teaching platform. Because to me, a teaching platform is no different than social media. It's just an entry-point for your funnel.

Nathan: That is so brilliant, I never thought about that way. I know that one of the things you can do on Udemy are free courses as well as paid.

Michel: Right.

Nathan: So, if you were using it as an entry point to a funnel, would you make it a free course or an inexpensive course?


Michel: It all depends on what you are trying to achieve, what’s your goal. Because if you just want traffic, free is fine. But I would like an audience that’s a little bit more qualified. If they're ready, if they're willing and prepared to pay a few bucks on Udemy, they’re probably willing to pay a few bucks with me. So what I did, is I offered a course where a third of the course was free, but you had to subscribe to get the rest of the course.

In the course itself, they would have to come to my website, download whatever or subscribe to whatever. But now they’ve paid for the course – an actual paying client. So once they have tried my thing, I know they’ve already paid money. So a little bit more targeted, so it depends on what you're trying to achieve. Again, do you want just to build a list, or do you want to build a list of clients? It depends on your ultimate goal.

Nathan: Yeah, that’s interesting, there are so many different ways we can look at this thing. I mean, wow. Sitting here has been rather inspiring, listening to you. I had no idea what we were going to talk about or where we were going to go.

Michel: Oh, you’re welcome.

Nathan: Yeah, it’s just been amazing because one thing is really clear to me, and I hope you would be okay with this, for the future, but it would be nice if we could do some targeted Blabs to do with some of the things that you actually do now, that could be of use to this this type of audience and to also to what I'm doing with this this membership site.

Michel: Sure!

Nathan: Would you be into that?

Michel: Absolutely, yeah.

Nathan: Yeah. What’s been happening, and I’m, it sounds kind of silly perhaps but I just keep experiencing these periods of joy when I talk to these marketers and realizing that there's so much more that could be happening than just what this membership thing is about. And just going, “Wait a second we could go into this, we could talk about this, and we could talk about this, and to do these live things.” But also to create a


bigger audience, in a bigger region to say, “Hey we can do a course on this, what you think?”

And, so I mean it would be really cool to brainstorm that kind of thing between the two of us and because I am sure with where you are with workaholics4hire, you're getting different people asking about things that they would really like to see. And perhaps this is a good time to transition into that and just kind of talk about what's happening in terms of that marketplace because, I mean I see other sites like that out there like FlexJobs for example. It seems to be a different animal from workaholics4hire, or maybe it's not. I don't know, but I’d like to know more.

Michel: Well, workaholics4hire, the company that Sylvie and I put together was partly a job board, but it's not really a job board in the sense that we don't post jobs from people, we do research and we call jobs from other sites and put it on ours, just to get people interested, to get people to raise their hand and telling us what they're looking for, which then gives us an idea. That was one thing.

The other thing was we would have jobs given to us by clients, where people would want to have specific things done. Again, like I said earlier at the beginning of the podcast, we staff websites, so whether it's customer support, technical support, all the way to writing copy, designing the site, and so on and so forth, we have been able to match people with jobs.

But that evolved over time where now workaholicsforhire.com is mostly a support service. We still provide a lot of project management and nowadays we provide a lot of project facilitation.

What is project facilitation versus project management? Well, before, people would hire us. They would pay us money, we would hire the staff, train a staff, get them to do things, and then have a cut because we’re managing everything. Well nowadays, there’s so many different parts of this machine and plus a lot of people have this idea.

What we found is a lot of people have their preferred staff, their preferred companies to use, their preferred suppliers, so what we decided to do is, “why don't you just hire us to manage things for you, but you will pay


people directly so you skip the middleman, you don’t have to pass a margin on top of that? You just pay a project management fee, a project facilitation fee?”

So basically, we create a project, they will hire and pay, and we can get people for them, but they will deal directly with the contractors. We just make sure that the contractors deliver on time, on quality and on budget. And we get a fee to manage that.

That’s part of the business, but like I said, just to do to make sure I don't lose sight of what I was trying to say, is because support is indeed our biggest client. We have multiple clients that hire us to answer presales questions, to answer technical questions, to do troubleshooting, from trying to save my clients grief from refunds and returns, because a lot of the time people ask for a refund, and it might be because of something very silly like they didn’t get their password in time or something like that.

We deal with thousands of these every day. We deal with over 28 long-term recurring clients, and we do about 100 of these project management and adhoc clients, so we have a core staff that takes care of that. They manage the helpdesk, we reply to tickets, and we do it 24/7 with North American staff. We’re not in the Philippines, we’re not in India or anything like that. We have English-speaking people as their native language, and we also have people doing technical support, working with software.

Right now, the biggest market is apps. We do a lot of apps, and work with technical support for apps, and what we do is we escalate on a tier 1, tier 2, or tier 3 basis.

We are the first point of contact for our customers. When we want to have something that needs more attention, more technical expertise, then we escalate it to staff within our company that can handle it or staff that the client has, or their in-house staff. They have their own programmers, and so and so forth, that we can sort of manage things.

If you go to workaholics4hire.com now, the front end is basically a sales letter for customer support, because that's our main clientele. That’s our service, but we provide, projects, location, all that stuff.


Nathan: That’s very interesting. It is not what I expected you to say about it. When I first contacted workaholics4hire many years ago, it was more of a job board from what I remember. And every now and then I would get an email from you about different things that would be out there, different opportunities and so on. But I don't get many emails, and I remember thinking “Things have changed, obviously.” But I just didn't know how. Going forward with workaholics4hire what do you see as the long-range? You did mention apps, so I was thinking will that’s probably it but maybe more than that.

Michel: Well, I’ll give you an example. One of our biggest clients is [email protected] and he was recently on an ABC reality TV show called My Dad Is Better Than Yours. He did it with Sean T., the guy from Beach Body. The P90X people, right? And he has several apps, and most of them are just recipes. His book was called The Wild Diet and it's his own unique take on the whole Paleo side of things.

So for him we offer a lot of customer support. Especially since he was on that show, we got bombarded with 5000 tickets a day. People asking questions, and we answer the bulk of them, but we do escalate a lot of them because they are very specific individualized questions for Abel’s clients.

At the same time Abel sells a lot of products and a lot of them are apps and specially recipes for different occasions, like Christmas cooking, The Wild Diet Way.

I'm just giving you some examples, but if you go to fatburningman.com, he also has a number one podcast on iTunes. And, if you go to fatburningman.com, you'll see there are multiple products and services that he offers, and there’s even a membership site, called Fat Burning Tribe. We manage all of that. We manage custom support, and to answer your question, we were talking about apps, and a lot of people now are incorporating apps in their business, either as a product that you can sell with, or as a tool to open up the sales funnel.

http://fatburningman.com/


Again, just to get people to be invited in, then have them buy more products and services, especially subscription based membership websites, that will get them higher ticket items and with bigger profit margins.

Not just Abel, but I have several clients just like that.

Nathan: Wow. I know that we could easily go for a lot longer than the time it was set out for tonight, and I know I’m going to have to draw it to a close pretty soon, but it’s been quite an amazing journey, sitting here with you, talking with you, learning with you…

Michel: Thank you.

Nathan: Yeah, you’re welcome, my pleasure. So for people who are listening, what are the best ways for them to get in contact with you?

Michel: Workaholics4hire.com is the best way but I'm also on Facebook. Facebook.com/workaholics4hire. They can also reach me on Twitter at twitter.com/work4hire and I'm very much available and accessible, so if you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer them.

Nathan: That would be awesome. I really appreciate you taking the time to join me this morning. Sorry about the timeframe mix-up. We got that sorted.

Michel: *laughs* That’s okay.

Nathan: So for those of you who are listening my name is Nathan Segal of The Legends of Online Marketing. With me today is I guess it's “Michael” Fortin. I never know with names like yours, and I am very sensitive to pronunciations. I like to make sure that I do it right because sometimes I don't.

Michel: Well is strangely enough, and I talked about this on my blog, or any minute webinars like this one, my name is Michel, but my French-speaking-only mother called me “Michael” as a nickname, so when you say Michael, I'm used to it.

Nathan: Okay I stand corrected.

https://workaholics4hire.com/

https://www.facebook.com/workaholics4hire

https://twitter.com/work4hire


Michel: So Michael Fortin is fine.

Nathan: Michael Fortin. And that's what I'll call you from now on.

Michel: Thanks Nathan.

Nathan: I really appreciate you joining me.

Michel: You’re very welcome.

Nathan: Okay thank you.

Michel: Bye-bye now.

Nathan: Bye-bye


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About the Author My name is Nathan Segal and I am the creator of Done for You Publishing, a full-service writing, editing, and publishing business. At Done for You Publishing, I take writers from zero to published author, using the process of interviews. The result is a book written in hours, rather than weeks or months.

Prior to that, I worked as a Freelance Writer for 17 years. In that time, I wrote over 1,000 articles and published eight books.

My articles have been published in many magazines including: CE Tips (Consumer Electronics), Computer Graphics World, Database Journal, Mac Design, Photoshop User, Rangefinder, Smart Computing, The Computer Paper, Streaming Media World, HTML Goodies, Windows Expert, CIO, Future Shop Online, Visual Convergence, PIX, Publish, Mactoday. The Corel Corporation, Common Ground, Monday, Computer Courseware International (CCI) and WebReference.com.

I worked as an Associate Editor at WebReference.com for 5 years, managing and editing the work of a team of technical software writers and programmers from all over the world.

I have written eight books, mostly about computer graphics and photography. The titles are: Fundamentals of 3D Graphics, The Photoshop Companion, How to Speed up Your Computer: In 30 Minutes or Less, Professional Photographic MS Word Templates, The Corel PHOTO-PAINT X3/X4 Insider, How To Position Yourself As An Expert In Any Industry, Secrets of Profitable Freelance Writing and Life After Bullying.

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