Copy Hackers Conversion Copywriting

Course: Home Pages

Transcript – Week 1 of 10
TIME TRANSCRIPTED AUDIO NOTES
0:01 – The Welcome to the course. I’m Joanna and I will be your copy
Introduction coach as we move through this course, which is based on
an App Design Vault case study – or a project – that I did
for AppDesignVault.com.

Now, I want to let you know a bit about the course and
what you’ll be experiencing.

This is a tactical, practical, hands-on sort of course. It won’t

be a lot of theory. It will be more focused on showing you
what I do and how I do it… so that you can know what to
do and how to do it. We’re going to get hands-on with the
course this week – starting today in this very video – and,
not too far down the road, you’ll be seeing how I do certain
research to find the right message. So prepare to roll up
your sleeves right now. And prepare every tIme you watch
one of these lessons to do some work. There will be NO
week in which you won’t do work – and that’s a good thing
because we want to have action items. That’s the approach
we take at CopyHackers.com – to teach you and then give
you something to do with it… so you don’t walk away with
more knowledge but less action.

Each lesson works like this. You’ll watch the lesson, and
then you’ll use the corresponding worksheets to follow
along with the lesson or to – in most cases – do homework.
There won’t be any real deviations from that approach.

Is this a weekly course? Good question. This course is

designed to be done in such a way where you could
complete it in 10 weeks if you did one lesson every week.
But you won’t always be able to do that, you’ll find. Some
weeks will be more intensive than others, you’ll find –
especially Phase I, where there’s quite a bit of homework
because we’re working through how to find your messages
and how to get everything you need to do Phase II
successfully.

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 Phase II will be something that you might be able to move
through pretty quickly some weeks.

Phase III will be more focused on testing and

experimentation, so you’ll move through that at whatever
pace you choose to move through it.

2:43 Now the question comes up: Do I need to do Phase III?

What if I don’t want to split-test? What if I just want to
take the site, I have, do the copy changes and do a before-
and-after?

Well, I’m not one to tell you there’s any perfect way to do
this. I’m here to show you what I did and give you the
guidance you need to repeat what I did on your site. So
what I did is split-test… and it’s what I would in almost
every case recommend you try to do. Just give it a shot.

That’s what this course is about: learning, trying new

things, and hopefully getting the skills that you need to
take what you learn here, get a big win on your home page
– here’s hoping – and then go do the same sorts of things
on your Plans & Pricing page or on your PPC landing page.
So do you need to split test? No. Is it better if you do? Yes.
Would I like to see the results of your split test? Yes, I
would! So do me a favor – no, I’m kidding. So it wouldn’t
be bad to do a test and share your results with the group.

3:53 Speaking of groups, okay, let’s talk about Office Hours. I

know what’s important to a lot of people when they’re
taking a course like this or learning through an ebook or
any other materials that you may find in a digital format –
that are delivered asynchronously, so not live, not where
there’s an opportunity for a back-and-forth discussion
between the two of us – I know that it can help to have
that person to speak with at some point about what you’re
going through. That’s why I have Office Hours.

Office Hours work like this: Every “phase” comes with an

Office Hours session that you can attend. You’ll see
information when you sign in – or I’ll send you an email –
all about how to sign up for your Office Hours session or
for the right one for you. Each phase comes with its own
session. So you should, in the end, be able to attend 3
different Office Hours. The good news – or great news – is
that, if you miss your session because of time zone
differences or whatever it may be, I’ll be recording all the
Office Hours sessions and posting them.
2 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
 Now, when you’re actually at an Office Hours session, it
works like Office Hours work when you’re in university or
college – and if you haven’t been to either, that’s cool, too.
Here’s how it works. You go to your prof’s office during
their posted office hours with a question, and you’ll work
through it together. Same thing here. You’ll come to the
Office Hours session for the phase you’re in – others will
also be in this session – and we’ll all talk through your
questions together. So all you have to do is let me know in
advance that you’re attending, and, from there, we’ll send
you the sign-in details you need to attend the session.

5:54 One last thing to cover here before you get going on the
beginning of this week of lessons is about the mindset you
should have. Think like a copywriter. You don’t have to be
a copywriter, you don’t have to identify with the title
‘copywriter’, but I want you to think like one. And basically
that comes down to being open to doing smart things that
will help people that you’re driving to your home page
choose you. Choose to stay on your home page. Choose to
look around. Choose to move to the next point that you
want them to. It’s about being okay with helping the user
make decisions. That’ll be important here. So get your
head around that. You’re here as a copywriter to help
move people through what they need to move through…
and what you’re going to persuade them, in a lot of cases,
that they need to move through.

6:52 This course will work hopefully wonders for you if you’re
trying to increase your paid conversions. That’s the goal.
That’s what I did with App Design Vault. That’s what I think
a lot of startups need to do – is focus on those paid
conversions rather than stepping back and focusing on
those free signups that may get them in the door and may
get leads in your database… but then you don’t have a
strategy to monetize any of those. So rather than working
through a course on monetization, better to work through
a course on how to get more people to pay in the first
place – and that’s what this course is for.

Now, if you do want to lead with free – maybe you only

have free – that’s fine. I’m not here to tell you what your
strategy should be... just who this course is best for. If you
are going to go with a free strategy, you can still use
everything we’re going to talk about here; there just may
be some points that are less relevant, such as if we talk
about pricing.

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7:53 So, I’m sure you have loads of questions. Or you’re like,
“Joanna, stop talking. I just want to get into this already!”
Whatever the case, I’m going to back out now and get into
the course that you are ready to take. If you do have
questions that aren’t answered yet, be sure to bring those
to Office Hours and we can talk through them. That’s what
I’m here for.

And I hope you come to see that, although this part of the
course is pre-recorded, there will be that live interaction
that you’ll get, where the answers you need are waiting –
hopefully – in my head and also in the community of
startup founders who are taking this course with you and
attending Office Hours, too. So without further ado, let’s
get into it.

8:35 – “The Okay, let’s talk about the money shot. But before we do
Money that, let’s talk about where I’m recording this – in my
Shot” office. Because this course is about doing the work of
writing your home page copy, I wanted to be – and I will
(most of the time) be – in front of my computer at my desk
where I do the work. So my apologies for the blandness
behind me.

Of course, there’s also this space [gestures to side, where

there is room for images and callouts that will be added to
each video lesson] where I can put things like this
screenshot. That is the Before (Control) page for App
Design Vault, and this is the After (tested as Recipe B) –
that is the creative for the winning test. Throughout this
course, you’ll also see the other recipe – Recipe C – which
was included in the test we ran and which is the shorter
version of Recipe B. So that looks like this [screenshot]. The
Control and Recipe B are the two treatments we’ll be
looking at the most during this course.

Now you may also want to see the “money shot” – the
screenshot of the results we got when we did the split-test.
As you can see, for this home page test, with Variation 1 –
Long New, we got a 51% improvement, which I believe you
already knew going into this course. What you may not
know is that we were driving both the Control and the
recipes or treatments to a Plans & Pricing page that was
already optimized.

So the way we worked with App Design Vault’s

optimization is we kind of worked backward. Knowing
4 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
 where the calls to action on our treatment were going to
land, we wanted to make sure we were driving our creative
– all variations – to the most optimized version of that
landing page, which was Plans & Pricing aka “Gallery”. So
the home page creative that we tested – both versions –
drove to that page. Showing now is the Before and After
(although this was a simultaneous A/B test, not a Before-
and-After test), and you can see that we got a 61% paid
conversion increase on the treatment.

12:05 So, why does this matter? It matters because this is a home
page optimization course – but it’s not worth pretending
that a home page lives in isolation. If it’s the home page of
a larger site, then we know that an experience factors in to
the conversion rate of the home page given that in most
cases the home page is a few steps away from the entry to
the cart and checkout.

So the home page is often difficult to attribute sales to

because of the placement in the conversion funnel. So
when we did the gallery page test, we did it so we’d be
able to say, “Any button that’s driving to this page will be
more likely to lead to a conversion.”

If you’re planning on making Paid Conversions your metric,

you may want to consider optimizing the page that follows
your home page before you optimize your home page
itself. That doesn’t mean you have to. Again, the reason I
did it was because I wanted to avoid worrying that we
were driving all of these variations of the home page to a
suboptimal page and then losing the conversions there –
which would mean it would take even longer for us to
learn if the home page treatments were converting better.

13:24 This is pretty standard practice when you’re optimizing. It’s

usually a good idea to optimize from the part that’s closest
to the funnel – such as the cart and checkout – up the
funnel to the entry page. And that’s essentially the
approach we took.

What you can take away from this is that we increased

paid conversions on the Gallery page by 61% and then on
the home page by 51%. So, all in all, pretty good win!
And when we’re talking about money or the longer-term
implications, it’s useful to look at how much money you
MIGHT make with the new treatment vs the old. So with
the old, we could attribute about $32K per year to the
home page. With the new winning treatment, we can

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 forecast that it’s likely to bring in approximately $44K per
year instead of $32K. Now those are approximate
numbers, and there’s more we could say about those from
a testing perspective – or to anyone who’s just looking at
the numbers and asking questions – but it really comes
down to it.

Every consultancy will tell you the same thing: the numbers
are only as reliable as we can hope them to be. But these
numbers do help paint a picture of what an optimized
home page can mean when it comes to actual bottom-line
revenue or the dollars you’re bringing in.

So there you have it. That’s what this is all based on. Going
into the rest of the course, I want you to be aware of those
things and to use what you’ve seen here to help inform
your creative development, message development and
actual split testing or experimentation.

15:25 – This is the process that I follow. It’s the process I followed
Would I Lie with App Design Vault and that I follow with other clients.
to You, In this week’s lesson, you’re going to see another client
Baby? that I used this process for – Beachway, a treatment
center. So here the process is – it’s pretty simple:
1. Research and discover
2. Write and organize
3. Test

The three parts of it match the three phases of this course.

Phase I is all about doing the research to discover things

we didn’t already know, in most cases.

Phase II is where the actual writing and message

organization comes in.

Phase III is the experimentation or the web testing that we

do.

So, knowing that, you now have what it takes to go

forward and be a copywriter. No, I’m kidding. But you have
what it takes to go forward and complete the rest of this
course knowing that this is the process that I follow all the
time and that you should follow if you’re going to write any
web copy but especially your home page.

16:47 – The Okay, before we get too far into this course, let me tell you
Great about that something that’s probably been holding you
6 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
Messaging back in your own messaging efforts – and that is something
Hoax that I fondly call, “The Great Messaging Hoax”. What is
that?

It is simply this idea that is far too pervasive that holds that
great messages come from your own mind.

Along the same lines, The Great Messaging Hoax is about

people believing that because they created the product or
the offering that they know best what the message should
be. [Shakes head, no.] Terrible. People’ve been lying to
you! It’s not true; it’s not true.

The best messages will never come from inside your head.
They won’t. They won’t. Even the greatest copywriters out
there don’t sit around dreaming up messages. They don’t.
There’s this story about the late Gene Schwartz – one of
the most admired copywriters of all time – that goes like
this: He was about to do the sales ad for a client, and he
sat down with the client and interviewed him. In the first 3
minutes, he got the line that he needed – he knew it was
the winner, he knew it would convert.

But he kept interviewing the guy for the rest of the hour so
the client would feel like this isn’t that easy, etc. So he
finishes the interview and he takes a couple weeks to
submit the ad that he’d written almost immediately after
finishing the interview.

What Gene did there is he went out and listened to what

people were saying – and, in this case, it was the CEO of
the company he was writing the ad for. But nonetheless,
he didn’t look to his own thoughts. He wasn’t sitting there
interviewing himself. He went out and asked people. And
in this particular case, he got the best line quite quickly.

All it took for him was going out and seeking that out –
rather than looking inward, letting himself be overly
creative and all that stuff that we’re led to believe great
messages come from. “You’re either a great writer, or you
suck.” But that’s not actually the case – and that is the lie
that we have to stomp down before we go any further in
this course.

19:49 Now the next question is, well, how did Gene know he
found the right phrase? How did he hear it and know that
it was right? That’s a great question – and it does speak to
the ear that some people develop as they write copy.

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 Definitely. The more you do it – while following the right
process – the better your ear will become. Just like
practicing playing the piano.

That doesn’t mean you have to practice to try to develop

this ear. Rather, a lot of the things that stand out when
you’re listening to an interview or reading through a survey
result or doing other things we’re going to talk about in
this phase are the things that will make great messages.

They stand out not because they’re genius or because

they’re so insightful necessarily; they stand out because
they’re noticeable and they’re obvious and they resonate
in some way. Could be as simple as someone giving an
interesting analogy. These little things that you don’t have
to develop an ear to hear – you just have to be aware of
what you respond to and then use that to help you pull
together the best-converting copy you’ve ever had on your
site.

Don’t worry that you’re not Gene Schwartz. Go out, listen

and be aware as you listen of what hits you and sticks with
you. Don’t overthink it. Take it in, and taking note of the
things that stick to you when you hear them. Then using
that to help drive a hypothesis potentially or the new copy
for your page.

21:52 – VOC A term that’s going to come up a lot in this course is “voice
of customer” or “voice of customer data”. That’s VOC.
Now what does that mean, especially for this course, and
why is it going to be huge for you?

For starters, when I say “VOC data”, I’m referring to all the
information we’ve received in Phase I from leads,
prospects, existing customers, free-to-paid customers, past
customers, users and visitors – and all variations of clients.
We’re gonna call all of the things we hear from those
people, “voice of customer data”. And we’re also going to
refer to all of those people as “customers”. Because if I
have to list off all those titles every time I say anything
about customers, we’re going to burn through time!

Why is VOC data huge for you? Well, you’ll recall when we
were working on The Great Messaging Hoax that messages
don’t come from you. Where do they come from? Voice of
customer data. That will include everything from
UserTesting.com feedback to survey responses to Amazon
review mining – we’ll get into that – everywhere that you
8 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
 can go out and grab data of a kind, whether phrases or info
about these people, all of that info together will be what
we use to create your messages, your messaging hierarchy
and everything involved in creating your home page.

So knowing that, it’s pretty clear that VOC data is going to

be major. In fact, gathering that data is going to be the
focus of the next few weeks.

24:16 – The If VOC data is so important, what do you do if you have no

Customer customers? And further, even if we do have customers,
Dilemma what do we do to get that data?

If you have no customers, that doesn’t mean you can’t go

out and find great messages and learn a lot about the
people who’ll be coming to your site. What I recommend
you do if you have no customers are these four things – I’m
going to list them out for you, so pay attention!

1. Amazon “review mining”. We’re going to show you

how to do this this week.
2. Forum mining. Go through forums frequented by
your prospects – where are they going and where
are they talking? Go to those spots and mine the
data. You don’t have to interact with people; just
go where people are already talking, reading
through what they’re saying and swiping the gems
or figuring out how that might play into your own
messaging. Take info they’re already sharing,
document it and then – when it comes time to
write your copy – determine which parts of that
will help you most.
3. Competitor content audits. We’re going to show
you more about that this week.
4. UserTesting.com. This is going to be your friend. If
you have another similar tool and prefer that,
that’s cool. It’s not about the brand. I use
UserTesting.com ‘cos it’s really easy to set it up,
pretty inexpensive considering that you’re getting
some messages and some of the biggest fixes on
your site out of what those users are saying – so
worth the investment, yes? And also because the
data that you get from these users is really easy to
export in UserTesting.com.

Those are the four things you can do. There’s more out
there, of course, but those are the four things I
recommend you do if you have no customers but need to

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 find your messages.

27:35 But if you do have customers, you may be in better shape

here. But you have to be willing to go out and reach out to
them and ask them things. So if you’re scared of your list or
you’re scared of the people who’ve purchased from you,
you’ll need to get over that because the people who
bought from you or exchanged something – like an email
address – to get something from you, they’ve shown an
interest in your company and what you offer.

Some of them will reject an attempt for you to, say,

interview them – we’ll get into those tactics right away –
and you have to be okay with that. It doesn’t mean they
hate you; it means they don’t want to be interviewed. And
that’s cool.

Do try to keep the end goal in mind when you’re reaching

out for that data.

Now what are some tactics you can do?

You can do all the things that people without customers

do: Amazon.com review mining; forum mining; competitor
content audits; and UserTesting.com. Additionally, you
could do:
1. Interviews with customers, leads and past
customers
2. Surveys – be prepared to do surveys, which we’ll
get into next week
3. Pop-up surveys on your site
4. Larger surveys for site visitors

We’ll show you all of this stuff in the upcoming weeks. We

won’t get into forum mining, but outside of that, we’re
going to show you how to do everything else.

Now I didn’t do everything with App Design Vault. With

App Design Vault, I did everything that you do when you
have customers. I did not do the Amazon book reviews or
the competitor content audits.

However, I do have another case study here that I’ll be

showing you, and that is for a rehabilitation center in
Florida called Beachway. This is a situation where they had
existing customers, but they weren’t the kind of customers
you could call up – there was more sensitivity with their
clients. So in the absence of being able to talk to
10 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
 customers, we had to go out and do Amazon.com reviews
and competitor contents to try to wrangle up those
messages. And that’s exactly what we did. And that’s
something I’m going to show you in this week’s lesson…
starting now.

30:25 – What you’re seeing on the screen should look familiar to

Amazon you because this is also the worksheet that’s included in
Review your files for the week. This is the completed worksheet.
Mining
Yours won’t look quite like this because your columns will
be blank. But I wanted to give you a glimpse of what a
completed worksheet looks like.

The parts in here that you need to worry about are not so
much the actual content you’re seeing – the things that I
swiped for this example – but what you want to look for
when going through Amazon.com book reviews in
particular is broken down into these three columns:
1. Memorable phrases
2. What people want
3. What people are mad about or in pain over

The reason we look to Amazon book reviews for things like

natural language is because we can generally see
something quite interesting revealed in those book
reviews. As soon as we start going through the book
reviews that are on topics similar to what you’re trying to
write about, then you’ll get a much better understanding
of how valuable the words people are putting down in the
reviews are. There’s some pretty valuable content.

Memorable phrases in particular – we’ll see a lot of

analogies and interesting ways of looking at what we’re
solving. [Example showing on screen of swiped language:
“my whole body because an alcohol-processing system”.]
So this is the completed view.

And now let’s go over to Amazon.com and start looking

through some book reviews on different topics.

33:13 Okay, so here we are on Amazon.com. As you can see,

we’re in “Books”, and I’ve entered a search query:
“inventory management”. This is assuming that I’m
working on copy for a product that simplifies inventory
management, which just so happens to be something that
quite a few people have written to me about – it’s
surprising how many people are trying to solve this

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 problem.

You might think, “Well what could a book review tell me

about what I might be thinking about with inventory
management?”

(Remember, we’re not looking for product ideas. We’re

looking for messages we can swipe to write copy for our
existing or about-to-launch product. That said, Amazon
reviews can even help with product development
questions.)

We can start to see that there are quite a few results. We

can narrow them if we want – and I might actually do that
depending on what I see in the first book reviews. We’re
not looking for lit and fiction or art and photography books
necessarily – but rather DIY or professional or career-
oriented inventory management. The people we might be
targeting could, in some cases, be reading or have read the
books we’re checking out. In looking for the books that
they might be interested in, we’re trying to go out and find
what people like them may be saying or thinking about a
subject.

I recommend you look for a book with the most reviews

first. That can really help us as we’re trying to get through.
A book with one review isn’t’ as great. I’ve found that –
once you get into the nitty gritty of review mining – it’s
best to work with the books that have the greatest number
of reviews, from an efficiency perspective alone. Mixed
reviews are great. But remember we’re not trying to
determine the quality of the book; we’re trying to
determine what people are saying about the subject – and
the natural language they’re using.

35:44 So with that in mind, let’s go back up to the top of this list
of results on Amazon.com. The first one has 6 customer
reviews and three-and-a-half stars. The first book review
title is “inventory essentials”, and it’s not useful for me.
[Reads review.] They mention that the writer left “safety
and occupational health” out of the book… so is that
something we should be thinking of when putting together
an inventory management product and messaging it?

That’s fine – but, from a messaging perspective, this review

doesn’t do anything for me. On to the next!

We want to aim to see as many of these as we can in a

12 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
 short period of time – aim for 30 to 50 reviews, and pull
out the best things from those. You only need 1 or 2 real
winners to come out of this exercise to write a headline or
line of copy for your page. [Skips ahead to useful review.]

In this one, the phrase “integrity for your company’s

inventory” could be interesting, so it goes into the
document. Next review, there’s more here about “a
company cannot expect algorithmic, flowchart and/or
computer systems to magically optimize its inventory
process” – now that speaks to an expectation that perhaps
is out there and that we could test as a message. Maybe a
message like that would be valuable for a visitor to read in
order to get a sense for whether your solution is right for
them: “The Only Software That Comes Close to Magically
Improving Your Inventory Process”.

39:05 Now we’re back on the worksheet. You can see we’re
starting to fill it in. I’ve spent about 4 or 5 minutes looking
through reviews on this topic already, and I may not have
the world’s greatest messages ever here; but what I do
have is the beginning of a deeper understanding of what
people in this space are thinking about and looking for. So
if they’re saying what a book has taught them, then let’s
look at that because it teaches us what’s important to
them – what their pain is.

But now I want to move from inventory management to

another topic. I’ve decided to opt for a fun topic after
looking at inventory management for a while – and that
topic is dating. So let’s take a look at some reviews for
dating books. I’m looking at the very first review for this
book, called The Tao of Dating. What I found interesting in
this first review of it was this phrase: “we are wired
differently from other women”. This is a reviewer who felt
empowered by this book. That phrase is a phrase that I
would put down in the worksheet, if I were writing for a
product or solution about dating for ‘different’ women. It
speaks to a belief that people have about themselves – so
in the “What People Want” column in your worksheet, you
could put “women want to be understood as wired
differently or as individuals not part of the herd”.

What I’d also encourage you to do, though, is to take the

language you copy verbatim rather than trying to
summarize it. Also, don’t feel you need to cut the shortest
possible snippet. It’s usually better to have more info when
you’re writing copy; you can always cut copy or info when

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 you have too much of it, but it’s very hard to go out and
flesh ideas out if you didn’t swipe enough in the first place.
Now let’s go back to the worksheet that I completed for
Beachway – just to see what a completed one will include.
Please pay attention to the phrases that I copied and
pasted here. In most cases, they are verbatim – not
changing words and not summarizing.

“Memorable phrases” are things that we normally

wouldn’t make up on our own. We might default to old
clichés, whereas real people who really feel these pains will
often say stickier things. Phrases like, “the worst part is,
people will never know how hard we tried”. That gives an
insight into what a recovering addict feels – and that is
something that you’d normally have to go out and speak to
a recovering addict to learn. And some of the other
messages may not turn into swipable copy, like “alcoholism
is a very complex problem and one that is multifaceted” –
that may not become copy on your home page, but it can
help give you insights into what people believe about their
addictions.

So don’t just look for swipable copy but also things that can
help you paint a picture when it’s time to write your own
copy.

So look for smart little or big phrases taken verbatim that

can help you create better copy, taken from the horse’s
mouth. These can also help you create a persona for your
target audience, should you choose to do that down the
road.

44:21 – A competitor content audit is a tool that we use in the

Competitor copywriting world to go out and see what our competitors
Content are saying. A reason to do one is if you know that your
Audits prospects or site visitors are very, very likely to be looking
at your competitors at some point or if you’re competing
against a competitor that is doing a lot more marketing or
advertising than you and thus shaping what your visitors
will expect to see on a home page for a product in X
industry.

There are a couple of different parts to a content audit.

Remember that this audit is slightly different from what
you might see in a typical content strategy.

I recommend at this point that you open up the file for this
module that is meant for your content audit – the Content
14 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
 Audit Template. As you can see, there are 4 parts to the
audit:
1. The content inventory
2. The content assessment
3. A tone assessment
4. Recommendations

Even if you’re doing a content audit for yourself, I

recommend that you create your own recommendations –
so take all this raw data that you input and turn it into
recommendations.

Additionally, let’s take a look at the page types on the

competition’s site. In this view, we can see that the 3 page
types I audited for Beachway were the home page, the
Programs page and the Alcohol Rehab page. Now why did I
choose these 3 pages? When you’re doing a content audit,
look at pages that are similar to your pages because at the
end of the audit we want to take what we’ve learned and
apply or avoid it on our own site. To keep things clean and
easy, look at focused pages rather than a variety – don’t try
to compare what’s going on on X competitor’s PPC landing
page with Y competitor’s catalogue page. If you want to
look at a PPC landing page, look at the same sort of PPC
landing page across all your competitors.

For you, you’ll be looking at the home page for this course.
You might want to stick with just looking at the home page
for your competitor. In this example, you will see other
page types, though – you’ll see the ones showing here.

It’s also important to document the sites you’re auditing.

And one of those sites should be yours. If you feel you’re
too close to your own site to be objective with your audit,
you may want to ask someone else to do that for you. I
know from experience that trying to teach people to do
content audits is not always that easy – until they start
doing it, and then it makes sense. So if you’re feeling a little
strange about this content audit right now, don’t worry –
once you start doing it, it will make sense. And if you have
someone else audit your site or page for you, it will
eventually make sense to them, too.

If you can see consistencies across your competitors – in

what they say and/or how they’re saying it – from there
you can choose if you’re going to mimic what they’re
saying, if you’re going to swipe what they’re saying or if
you’re going to go in another direction altogether. And that

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 could be a test in itself (i.e., if you decided to go with a
different tone or different approach). So that’s something
to consider. And we’ll see at the end – spoiler alert – that
the result of this content audit and Amazon review mining
was a win for Beachway. We’ll see how that work paid off
on the home page of the client in question here, which is
Beachway.

49:40 So let’s start with the content inventory. Now I’m going to
show you what I did, and I’ll try to explain it in such a way
that you’ll be able to go and do a content inventory on
your site. And you’ll also see the reason that these pages
are laid out as they are.

Now let’s look at the content inventory for the home page
of Beachway. Before we look at how we audited those
pages, let’s look at the control page for the page we
audited. Now we can’t look at the live version of this page
that we audited for Beachway because – another spoiler
alert – this page is no longer live. It’s a different page
thanks to the test we ran on it. But this is what the hero
section on the home page looked like for Beachway. [Show
slide with headline “Your addiction ends here”.]

And now when we look at the beginning of the content

inventory, we can see that among the fields we want to fill
in are:
 First impressions
 Key benefits messaged, in the order of their
messaging hierarchy (so we’d want to look at the
prominence of the messages here – and it doesn’t
always have to be a message; sometimes it could
be a phone number, such as if a phone number is
very prominent, or if there’s a very prominent
photo – as in it’s the first thing you look at – of a
happy couple holding hands, that could be
perceived as a message); however most of the
time we will just look for messages that are written
down as actual copy on the page… and that will be
filled in on the “key benefits messaged” area
 From there, we look for click triggers and other
reasons to believe; a few examples are here and,
as we move through this course, you’ll see more
examples of click triggers and reasons to believe
 Then social proof – again, we’ll look at that later in
this course
 And then finally anything else that we can’t

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 anticipate

So a lot of building out your content audit is about

preparing to go back sometimes when you discover
something new. You’ll see that as you go through various
sites. Don’t look at this table as something very rigid, as if
you have no alternatives and nothing else you can do; if
you find that you don’t have anything to put under “Click
triggers and reasons to believe” but there’s something else
– like a really great or beautiful demo or that they’re using
a squeeze page, or whatever it might be that you’re finding
across your competitors’ sites – especially if more than one
of them is doing it – be sure to put it here.

The point of your content audit is to assess content on the

page and to document it. This way, you can see if there’s
anything that you may want to do similarly or differently.

Don’t feel that you have to fill in every field here or that
there’s no room to add another row on a new topic.

52:58 Now, in comparison, let’s look at what happens further in

the template that you’re working on. What does it look like
to have a completed version of the pages that you should
be thinking of when you’re going through and doing your
content audit?

Now, this is how you’d want to fill this inventory out.

Put in the name of the website at the top of each column.

If you have four websites you’re auditing, put a new
column in. It can also be helpful to put the URL in as well so
you can keep track of it – especially as we’re looking at
pages beyond the home page, like an overview or category
page. Things where you wouldn’t always know how to get
back to that page if you needed to; just document it. That
can be helpful.

And now, as you can see, the rows that we have to fill out
here are exactly the same as the rows we fill out for our
own home page. So, again, we want to look at things the
same way. So grab your first impressions of your
competitor, and fill it in here – and be real. It can help to
look at it from 1) a new user’s perspective or 2) your
average visitor’s perspective. At the same time, it’s hard to
put yourself in those shoes.

In trying to take inventory of the content, we don’t want to

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 get too deep in assessing the content yet… so be careful of
being editorial with your inventory. Try to avoid an
editorial perspective and stay as objective as possible while
still aiming to get to a point of documenting these
impressions clearly and in a meaningful way so that when
you go back and review in order to assess the content, you
can learn from it. You’ll have the best materials to work
with – the best sort of inventory you could possibly have.

55:14 Now as you move through the key benefits and the order
they’re messaged it, you may start to see that similar
things rise to the surface. Once you’re done working on the
third competitor that you’re assessing, you could start to
see, “Oh, okay, these messages are coming through again
and again.”

And where the messages come through in a messaging

hierarchy – high vs low – can say something, too.

For example, we can see here that the topmost message

that Behavioral Health of the Palm Beaches (a recovery
center) put on their home page was around “recovery
successes [stories]”. Right at the top of the page. Now, let’s
compare that to the other two – to see where recovery
stories or success stories or those sorts of social proof rank.
[Looks.] As we can see, there is no clear indication than
either of the two others we’re auditing here speak to
stories of success. So what we might take away from that is
a couple of things – and we’re not assessing yet, but let’s
start to think of how we’ll use this info.

Either Behavioral Health of the Palm Beaches has a great

deal of success stories and wants to share that, or they’ve
seen in their research that people need to read recovery
stories. Or they just don’t have other ways to persuade
people to come, so they rely heavily on social proof. We
have to start to think through what might be going on
there when we’re comparing it to the others:
Transformations and Palm. We’re seeing that those guys
don’t emphasize people who’ve successfully completed
treatment; we don’t see those prominently on the home
pages - at least not above the fold or close. Why is that?
What might info like that about your competitors mean for
you when you’re putting your new home page together? If
you were Beachway in this case and you saw that one
competitor focused heavily on success stories and two
others didn’t, what would you do with that? Perhaps that
would seed a test for you. Perhaps you would then lead
18 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
 with social proof as one of your recipes when you’re doing
your home page test.

57:35 Now what we can see in common among all three of these
in their messaging hierarchy is mention of what treatment
will cost or how to afford it.

“Financial assistance” is the second-most prominent

message on Behavioral Health’s home page. At
Transformations, we see that “most insurance accepted” is
right up there at the top as well – so that seems to be an
important message for the first two competitors. What
about Palm? They say “luxury”, “healing”, “guaranteed”,
“affordable” and “safe and effective”. So we can see that
the message “Affordable Drug Rehab and Alcohol Detox
Treatment” is high – it may not be messaging ways to
finance treatment, but it is messaging about how much
you’re going to be spending there. It’s a pricing or
affordability message.

In terms of rank of that pricing message, we’re looking

across the competitors audited at second, second and
fourth. What might info like that mean for you when
you’re considering your messaging hierarchy? Do you at
that point have reason to believe that there may be
something to messaging about financial assistance?

Perhaps you already knew that – and if you did, great, it’s
validated. But if you didn’t, now you can look in your
survey results and other places to attempt to triangulate
the data a bit to see. What can we get out of such a
triangulation exercise? We could see that messaging
affordability and insurance – or other ways to get financial
assistance – is the right message to go with prominently or
high in the messaging hierarchy.

59:19 Let’s switch from the content inventory side of things to

look at the types of content or media that are available –
which is a much different sort of content inventory than
you’ve already done.

So I’m looking now at the Types of Content Available slide

for Beachway’s site. On it, we can see that what the goal of
this part of the exercise is to see the types of content – or
media – that people are putting on their home pages.

The types of content are listed here: video demo or

explainer video; downloadable PDFs; live chat;

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 downloadable PPTs; photo gallery; interactive tools; user
reviews; reviews from authorities; case studies; blog. They
will vary based on your competition’s site.

You should keep in mind that, as you go through other

sites and compare the types of content on their home page
or throughout their site, you may find that the list you first
assessed against – the list included in the worksheet or
template for this week – is not an exhaustive list. It may fail
to incorporate X type of content, such as a comparison
chart or Facebook content or case studies – things like that
that aren’t in this content type list. That’s okay if
everything isn’t covered here immediately! If you go over
to your competitor’s site and find a different content type
that you didn’t originally consider, you can add a new line
item; you won’t have to go back to the other sites to see if
it’s there because you’ll know that it wasn’t there (or you
would have already added it to the list). And that’s fine.

Now, the other columns on here are meant to help us

understand 1) if the content is on the page, 2) the quality
of the content and 3) why it appears there (in your
approximation).

So what I do here – this is a completed content for multiple

pages on a site – but if you’re only going to do an audit on
home pages, then you could eliminate the column on this
table marked “Page(s) It Appears On” and just know that
you’re only looking at home page content. That could
really clean this table up for you.

1:02:15 Let’s compare that completed content inventory to this for

Behavioural Health. We can see again here that, at a
glance, with only a total of 5 “N/A”s – which was clearly
filled with a lot of N/As – then, at least at a surface level,
Behavioural Health has more content types available for
their users than Beachway does. What’s the point in that?
Why do we need to know what these sites have available?
Why, when we look at Transformational, do we need to
know that they have almost no rich content available for
their visitors? Why do we need to know that Palm has
quite a few types of content? What can we do with that
information?

I’m going to put that question out to you.

But start by taking a moment to ask yourself:

20 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com

 How can it help me to know that content types my
competitors are or are not using?

Well, I hope that was enough time – and I’m sure that you
didn’t actually need any time to come up with the answer.
If you did, that’s fine – no judgments! Let me tell you why I
think it’s important to know the types of content your
competitors are offering their visitors.

It really comes down to focusing on users and giving them

what they need – which is a big part of converting people.
Giving them the information they need in the manner in
which they need to receive it. So having multiple ways to
access great content – versus just text on the page – may
be better for a range of user types as well as for the sales
cycle that your lead normally goes through.

So consider downloadable PDFs as one content type, which

we can see here on the form. Downloadable PDFs are good
for sharing with others. So you should ask yourself as
you’re putting your home page together, “Do my prospects
need to talk to someone else about my product before
they purchase it? Is there something I can put in a
downloadable PDF that they can then save, refer to
whenever they need to, print it or share it as they need
to?”

If so, a printable or sharable doc could really help them –

and bring you closer to converting them. It’s actually
usually a simple piece to create, if you take what you have
on your site in some form or you take content you already
have available and turn it into a downloadable PDF – with
information to bring them back to your site, so they don’t
just take the content and run. That can go a long way
toward your conversion increasing.

1:05:31 Let’s get to the completed content assessment. Of course,

your page in your worksheet is just an empty page with a
bullet on it, but we want you to fill it in. So how?

Your content assessment is about going back over all the

content you’ve just documented and basically assessing it.
It can be good if you hand this part off to somebody else to
get an objective view – which can also be hard, though,
given that they weren’t involved in the collection of the
data. But that was the reason you handed it off to them!
Because they’re objective.

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 For me, I do the content assessment myself after having
gone through and done the inventory and audit. And if that
causes problems, I have yet to see any negative impact.
Nonetheless, what I recommend is that you go through
and do the assessment yourself this time. That means
going back and looking at the things that stand out that
you can learn from. Not just the little things. Not just the
minutia. The real stuff – the stuff that’s great to know and
that can really help you as you’re going through and pulling
together content for your own home page.

Here, an overall statement for the content that we audited

is that the sites with the strongest messages and best
impressions were Behavioural Health and Palm. So in
saying that BH and Palm are the two sites that we’d most
be impressed by – that means that Beachway and
Transformational weren’t – that’s important. Can you say
that your site was one of the best in your audit? Be honest.
There may be cases and times where your competitors are
all horrible or you’re in a space – like online party supplies
or something – where there’s a lot of room to improve.

Now, below you can read the bullets below [on screen].
Based on what we’ve already discussed, you could see how
I’d come to these sorts of conclusions.

What I’d like to point out is this part in the red bar: voices
and faces of real people are very powerful. That’s a note
that is important to pay attention to if I were to go and
write the Beachway site after looking at this or for giving
creative direction. Knowing that hearing from people and
seeing their faces associated with their stories is a
powerful, influential sort of message, that could help me
know that it may be worth investing in photos – going out,
tracking down three people who’ve used my solution and
are happy with it, getting a photo from them and asking for
a really meaningful testimonial. Just three could do the
trick on your home page, if you were to find something like
I found here – which is that faces of real people feel very
powerful.

1:09:19 Now, the tone assessment.

For this, you may notice that this looks a lot like the
inventory table that you filled out before – and you’re
right. But a tone inventory would end up looking like
you’ve pulled in actual words that were used or snippets of
text that were used on the page and that best indicated or
22 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
 that were best representative of the tone of the page.

But here, in this assessment, we want to go through the

copy tone and say, “Of these four guys stacked against
each other, what was their tone like?”

And if you’ve ever wondered how to create your own tone,

this can go a long way – because you may find that nobody
else really has a strong tone or that everyone else has the
same tone, things like that. Or that one guy has a really
strong tone, but the rest of the people don’t – and how is
that guy doing? Is his site performing better than your site?

Just wanting a tone is not a reason to go and work actively

at creating a tone. We want to know what others are doing
and use that to feed a strategy around a certain type of
tone for your copy.

Now the questions that we want to answer are:

1. How would you characterize the tone?
2. Based on the tone, whom does the site seem
targeted at? This can go a long way to helping you
understand where your site has been, whom
you’ve been targeting and what you’ve sounded
like versus what you want. Maybe you’ll find that
your tone is spot-on when it comes to the answer
to this question around who is this right for? But
maybe you’ll actually find that it’s different from
what you expected or different from what you
were aiming for. Maybe it sounds too snooty or
too casual for your audience.
3. Does the copy tone match the visual design and/or
site experience? This is an important Q. It really
comes down to you noticing any obvious
disconnects.
4. Is the tone engaging? The reason to have a
noticeable tone – of course, you should almost
never ‘notice’ the tone – is to engage. It’s not to
show off. It’s not to seem cool in comparison to
someone who seems boring. It’s to help people
engage with your messages so they’re more likely
to like you, like your business, like the opportunity
to work with you – those sorts of things. It’s about
getting a bit more emotional with them without
having to tell an emotional story. It’s how you say
the words; it’s how it feels.

There’s no right or wrong answer here. It’s just about what

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 you can put in each of these little boxes on the worksheet
to help you get a good sense for the types of tone or the
way it sounds when you read the copy.

In this case, we found that the tone for two sites –

Behavioural Health and Palm Partners – was engaging.
These sites also happen to be, we already saw, the sites
with the best content on them, according to this
assessment.

1:13:09 Finally, once you’ve gone through all of that, it’s time to
pull together some recommendations you can actually use
on your site.

You can see the tone recommendations here. It’s a simple

bullet list you can easily refer to; if you were to work with
someone else on your copy or if someone else were to
review your copy, they’d understand the goal of your tone.

As we can see here, a recommendation – one of many here

– is this: “In order to bring the page’s tone in line with a
need to get real, emotional and personal, we recommend
you bring the language down to a personal, readable
level.” We also want to talk about why we might want to
take a certain tone. So if you wanted to be negative with
your tone, you should say why that is; if you want to be
positive or hopeful, you should say why that is here.

Now let’s skip ahead to Content Recommendations. So this

is another list of recommendations based on what we’ve
already seen in the audit.

Finally, let’s go to Messages Worth Swiping. That’s where,

if you’ve noted any messages along the way that are
particularly powerful or felt like they were, you would
shortlist those here.

1:14:32 So that is how you complete a content audit. It took about

40 minutes to get there to explain it – and it may take a
couple of hours to do one.

To keep it simple, I would recommend that you start out by

just looking at home pages. The reason that you might
want to look at other pages is because your competitors
may put interesting messages or types of content on pages
outside of their home pages; can you, in finding that
information, then possibly swipe it and use it on your
home page – and see if that helps seed better copy or
24 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com
 create a better page?

1:15:20 – You’ve seen how to do an Amazon review.

Winning on
Beachway You’ve seen how to do a competitor content audit.

Now I’ve told you why those things are important, but you
haven’t seen evidence as to why those are truly important.
In fact, I’ve told you that I didn’t use them for App Design
Vault – not at any point during that optimization. So why
should you use them?

There’s a reason – a good reason.

I’m going to show you now what I did with the data I got
from Amazon reviews and the competitor content audit for
Beachway.

We ran a test after I pulled in that data and put together

new copy for that hero section. This is the before. [Shows
screenshot.] Take a look at it in all its home page glory.

We tested that against a couple variations. One of those

variations was based on a hypothesis that speaking to the
way people feel or the emotional experience of going to
rehab or considering going to rehab – if we were to speak
to that feeling, it might convert better than the control,
which didn’t.

Another variation was to incorporate a testimonial, which

was based on the idea discussed earlier of success stories
or stories of hope to drive people to want to come to
Beachway.

And the third was a tone shift, and it was about taking
something that I found when I was doing the Amazon
review, turning it into a home page headline and making
the copy that followed it speak in that same sort of tone.

So let’s see the winner. Here is the creative for the winner.
[Shows screenshot.] That was the tone shift variation: “If
you think you need rehab, you do.” What did that line and
the tone of the copy that followed it do?

Well, take a look! [Screenshot of testing platform

dashboard.] We saw an increase in calls of 453% - so this
was a pretty good win. Chance to beat original was 100%.
For every 300 visitors, the Control converted 8 of them; for

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 approximately 300 visitors (271, actually), the winning
treatment converted 40 of them. We went from a
conversion rate of 2.67%, which is perfectly fine, to a
conversion rate of 14.76%, which is perfectly better.

Now why you need to care about this is because, one, I

used Amazon review mining and competitor content audits
– that’s what I used to get here. I interviewed the people
involved at Beachway and I did those two things alone –
because I wasn’t able to speak to any clients, who were
understandably sensitive about their experience. I got the
information I needed and was able to pull from the
Amazon reviews the exact phrase, “If you think you need
rehab, you do”, which someone wrote in a review. I
captured it. I went through the Amazon review when I was
writing the home page, and I came up with these
hypotheses – and I saw that the tone of that line alone was
so different from the tone I was seeing on all these other
sites. If I was to go back to a competitor content audit, or if
you were to rewind this, you might then see that the tone
on a lot of the competitor sites was very bland or overly
professional or very wordy – they were all saying the same
thing in a way that was soft but very empty.

So the hypothesis here was let’s just get down the point
and just say it. We said it. And that was the result: a 453%
lift.

The point is that you should do the Amazon review, do the

content audit – take them seriously – and you could have
really killer results.

1:20:23 – K, well, that’s the beginning of this course. Congratulations

Your on almost completing this first part.
Homework
Next week, we’re going to be getting into what you should
do for VOC research if you already have custoemrs. So
we’re going to get more into how to conduct a phone
interview, how to survey your list, what questions to ask
them, where those questions come from – and all that
great stuff.

So, without further ado, let’s check out what your

assignment is for the first week…:

Complete an Amazon review and a competitor

content audit.

26 Transcript of Conversion Copywriting Course – Week 1 – CopyHackers.com

Additional Notes:

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