EP 81 - Diane Boerstler - Hypnotic Copywriting for Amazon Part 3 

Hypnotic Copywriting for Amazon Part 3

This is part three of a three-part series with Diane Boerstler. On this episode, she talks more about writing hypnotic copies and how she differentiates me-too products. Here are more golden nuggets from today’s episode:

• How Diane started with NLP.

• The most common mistakes most people do in their sales copy.

• What is a hypnotic anchor and how can it generate more sales for your business.

So join us on another episode with Diane and learn amazing copywriting techniques.

02:46 (What is the hypno copy idea? Diane answers this important question.)

06:48 (Diane offers 10x guarantee and 365 days of unlimited edits to her customers.)

12:58 (Diane answer the question - is there a standard mistake that most people do in their sales copy?)

16:45 (Diane shares her words of wisdom to Awesomers.)

Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey.

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Steve: You are listening to podcast episode number 81 on the Awesomers podcast series. All you have to do is hop on over to Awesomers.com/81 and you can find all of the little details and show notes and even a transcript of today's episode and give you a quick way to search through some of the amazing things that are shared by our special guests and of course today our special guest is Diane Boerstler. This is part three of our three-part series with Diane and it's really a great time to you know catch some really gold nuggets and I have to tell you at the end she really drops a key, very important gold nugget about branding and about strategy that you will not want to miss. It is one of our very clear deliverables. There's so many things that we talked about in these episodes and often the clues are may be more nuanced or subtle but I'm hoping that the patterns really are something that you start to pick up on and that you'll see over and over as we talk about these things. How they apply to you. But today Diane just drops it right on out for you and you're going to be able to see that in today's episode. You're not going to want to miss it. I have to tell you that I am thrilled that you're here. I'm so glad you've joined us. I am glad that you subscribed. I'm glad that you shared this and I'm glad you left us a five-star review and if that hasn't happened, if any of those things hasn't happened, I'm projecting my will upon you. See if this hypnotic copywriting strategies are working for me after three episodes. I should be learning something. Get over and leave a review. Thanks guys. Let's get into today's episode right now.

02:46 (What is the hypno copy idea? Diane answers this important question.)

Steve: Let's talk about the hypno copy idea. So this is hypno, short for hypnotic. What is NLP short for?

Diane: Neuro-linguistic Programming.

Steve: Okay. Neuro-linguistic Programming. Nice.

Diane: Yes, so what I did was I went first and became a master practitioner in neuro-linguistic programming because I became obsessed, absolutely obsessed with why some people are successful and some people are not and when I say obsessed I mean I read everything by Tony Robbins and everybody else for about 1972 up until I think this was like nine years ago. And I still continue to do that. I have mindset reading and practices I do every single day. I became obsessed with this and I learn about this thing called neuro-linguistic programming where you can go in and change people's belief patterns. Some people call it like a belief engineering right. You might call it belief engineering. So then I started thinking, I kind of put on my sales hat because I'd always been good at selling things and said, “Well, how can I use this in sales?” And then I found that the sales copy was a real thing and I was really excited about that. So I started using NLP and then discovered Joe Vitale who taught conversational hypnosis and so I started just integrating that into sales copies so that it's more of a therapeutic personal sales copy. So it's really talking to a therapist or talking to your best friend at a bar rather than just hardcore selling right. So you're not pushing this down somebody's throat. It's like, it's you know, I understand you. Is this what you really need? Let me show you how this is going to transform your life and then you know then you can do that call to action in the close.

Steve: So that's fascinating. Now is most of the work that you do for like Amazon listings or is it for sales pages or how does that work?

Diane: Right now, so fifty percent of my work... Actually, there's a funny story behind that.  If you don’t mind me talking about that. So I was about, I was about ten percent Amazon sales copy long long time ago and I was ninety percent other projects. So you know sales pages, webinar. Actually webinars, I do webinars all the time, now in live webinars. Video sales letters, try not to use the acronyms. You know emails high converting emails, things like that and anything that sales copy. I sent brick-and-mortar stuff, some of you know regular snail mail stuff, that kind of stuff. And so it was ten - ninety. Ten percent Amazon and eCom and ninety percent everything else. I was what you call and it'll be copyrighted but I was more of it was a generalist so I did everything. There was a client who I had who I still have actually who actually adore his name. He’s Will and Will came to me and said, “Diane, I need help beyond just copy this time. Like I'm selling on Amazon I'm not doing so well. My wife's really pregnant. She's about to have her baby and she really wants to stay home. My heart is breaking. I don't know how to pull this off so I want to know what you're thinking. I can't really afford much but you know what can we do here?” And so I worked with him so that his wife gets to him with their first child and as opposed to just getting and helping in his business so I wrote him Amazon copy and I helped him scale. I gave him some guidance which I wasn't doing formally back then. I just knew how to do it you know and and it turned out it wasn't just that we brought his wife home. We brought him home as well as in a couple of months. And I was actually hooked because coming from my background, I just could not imagine being able to do that in a couple month period as a parent. So I shifted it to about 50% E-commerce and Amazon and about 50% other. The reason still 50% other is because I have so many clients that had previous to that who are in finance and you know medical and just across the board, people who are in brick-and-mortar you know mom-and-pop type shops that kind of thing. And I didn't want to just abandon them. You know and I also had seen 50 percent because I can't outsource. I don't outsource anything. I just refused to do it because you know when you're working with me, you're working with an expert and you expect to get what you're what you're expecting, what you paid for right. So if I just go outsource to somebody else, I don't see how that's… I know a lot of people who do that. That's almost everybody you know who does that. I kind of have to limit myself on the number of people I can take.

Steve: Sure. You have your own capacity, constraints.

06:48 (Diane offers 10x guarantee and 365 days of unlimited edits to her customers.)

Diane:  Plus we offer a 10x guarantee and 365 days and unlimited edits which probably sounds crazy.  I mean in fact I've had copywriters completely light me up at conferences because they're so upset that we offer a 10x guarantee and we offer 365 days of unlimited edit and it's because most offers two edits and most offer no guarantee or you know a revision guarantee, where they'll revise it twice and then that's kind of what you get. And so but our whole thing isn't about get paid write copy, it's about you know get paid for your success and so that's you know, that's also something else that you know that kind of ties into that NLP and hypnosis. Not only did I study special education for a while I also got my counselor certification so I just kind of come from that point of thinking you know if I was a parent and I had X amount of dollars, you know what would I really need to feel secure to know that someone's going to be there to really help my family? Not that they're just a freelancer because I'm not just a freelancer. I’m more of a strategist.

Steve: Yes, I like that. Just the fact that there's any kind of post sale conversation you know with or without regard to a specific guarantee or unlimited edits for the the year or whatever it was. You know, just the idea that you can call somebody at later and go, “Hey, do you think it's working?” Or vice versa, you know.

Diane: Yes, absolutely and so and what I do when people do that, so we're ninety-seven percent successful in the first hit right? The average sales copywriter is fifty percent successful beating what you know, beating the original right. Let's just call it that. We’re ninety-seven percent successful on Amazon and the other three percent, what we do is we ask them for their stats right. “Please send me a business report. Send me your keyword reports.” Let's take a look at what's going on and we really deep dive the analysis. So let's say, is the title is it getting clicked? What's our percentages for sessions? Where are we looking at? And if if it goes to the point where we really can't figure it out, I actually have to split the account so I split test for people for free. If it's not working after like the first round or two, because I want to be able to deep dive into what hours during the day it isn't working, what day isn't working. You know is this because it’s seasonal? Because like we really want to be able to figure that out and then if we need to completely reposition the product in the market, we can do that too. And we have done that many times where someone comes in they're like, “Well, this is my customer base and we're like, “Okay this is your customer base and all the multiple customer bases right.” And we'll look at the product again after running it for a couple of days and again this is only 3% of products. 97% just fly through and people come back to order more and they're super happy and they leave on vacation and they you know, they just buy more so with the 3 percent we're really concerned mostly about what's really going on. Is it images? Is it the price point? Is it that they need to completely shift the market right? Is it that they need to actually do more advertising? Is it too unknown as a product so people are searching for it.  That's why search volume is huge too. So I mean there's any number of things we can do but really we're both strategist and analysts and because I have that background in statistics. I can take a look at any type of statistics you're getting from Amazon or any other type of you know split testing software, not the Amazon split testing obviously. But I can look at that and pinpoint exactly what's going wrong. And then say, “Okay, well we're going to tweak this one thing.” And so for example we had someone who had a supplement and they were at about 9%. We got in a 26% goal because they did a platinum split testing optimization package. It was 45% but 45% and 26%, in my mind is still conversion rate, it's still a big gap right. So we went through the analyze the data we ran two more split tests to make sure you had the right thing you got into 72.1% conversion, I think. So sometimes you just have to run it and get the data first when it's in your product to see what's going on. And then you can go and re-optimize it.

Steve: Yes, that's amazing.

Diane: There are people who are turning into sales who hit their listing. But you know even as a statistician, I think that's a huge. That's a huge number 72 plus percent is huge.

Steve: Yes, it's insane. I mean obviously being able to achieve that on any kind of basis for whatever length in time is extraordinary. And  frankly going from 19 to 25 is also pretty good. So let's not kid ourselves.

Diane: Yes, but it's not good enough for me like I have to be able to justify that people are going to make 10 times the revenue.

Steve: I love that. Yes, 10x.

Diane: For me, it’s not enough of a justification. So like for example, we had a sales page right. So most sales pages convert at like 0.05%. We go to the sales page converting to seven percent on in, it was a regular oil, organic oregano oil right. So we got it converting and I was like I still don't feel like this is going to pay them back fast enough and so we reckon, looked it again and took a different hypnotic approach. Did a nested loop story at the beginning and was you know more like problem, problem, problem, instead like the stereotypical E-commerce page sales agency. And we actually got it to 13% conversions in cold traffic.

Steve: Cold traffic, amazing.

Diane: Cold traffic. That is my a piece de resistance obviously. 30% in Amazon, that’s not cold traffic. They’re using editor search engine, they're expecting to look for something. Nailing somebody from Facebook over to a cult just to the sales page not even taking in through an opt-in, not doing that you know changing from the social minds of the buyers mindset and getting like a quiz or whatever and getting them to 13% conversions on a sales page for the product.

Steve; That is extraordinary for sure.

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Steve: Let me ask you this, Diane as we run against the clock. I'm curious if there's a common symptom or you know kind of a standard mistake that people are making whether you know regardless of where they're putting their copy, whether it's Amazon or E-commerce or somewhere else. Is there something common that they're doing that you would you know tell them to stop doing or…

12:58 (Diane answer the question - is there a standard mistake that most people do in their sales copy?)

Diane: Yes, besides mindset. So the biggest thing is see I see people doing in E-commerce is they're trying to help people understand their product when people don't buy until you understand them first. So when the customer or the potential customer lands on your page you need to make sure that you're saying words. We call them you know hot-button words that tell you, that the show them that they’re understood and then you talk about your products. Okay, so don't talk about your products until you talk to them. People are me first people okay so make sure that you go through and you can easily figure out what they really want right. So you can figure out how they're going to acknowledge which word specifically. What they're going to allow them to acknowledge so that you that they know that you understand them and you can do that by looking at your competitors reviews and more useful on products that are identical and similar to yours and also products that solve the same problem. So for example, you know you're you're selling a diet supplement, a fat loss supplement and then you go over to an ab roller and you go over to a cellulite cream right. Look at those reviews. Look for repeating words. Those are transwords. Those are words that your customer base is going to use so make sure to include those in there and make sure that you're focusing on understanding the problem first and then move that into the transformation your product provides right. One of the other problems that really actually drives me crazy is people are focusing far too much on keywords. So I see these keyword step E-commerce, they’re focusing keywords first. It's not that keywords are not important okay. But if you string together a bunch of keywords without being persuasive and convincing, how many people are going to buy your product?

Steve: Yes, just bots, just bots.

Diane: And they don't have any money and those bots don't pay to keep your lights on. That is absolutely correct. The tip I love to give sellers who are really keyword focused is do the keywords last right. The highest converting listing you possibly can and put a bracket that says key it bracket around the word keyword everywhere you want to put in the keyword. And don't even look at your keywords because your brain can only manage so much. Inserting keywords is actually on the left hand side of the brain, it's logical where as creating high converting copy is more on the right-hand side of the brain with a little bit of left side. So your brain can't do that at the same time. So forget about the keywords and you can insert them later right. The highest converting you possibly can and then go back there and insert the keywords.

Steve: Fascinating.

Diane: Yes, I’ll put in a little secret. So you know and then the biggest thing again I'm just going to say it like you can't do anything, I shouldn't say you can't do anything, cuz you can do anything. You're going to have a much easier time succeeding if you work on your mindset first. I wish somebody would have told me that. I was not raised by mindset focused parents. I was raised by hard-working parents and they worked their tails off and it's only since doing the mindset thing and being able to shift beliefs, you know use NLP and also EFT and  just really acknowledging you have these blocks, that is the biggest thing. The difference between successful entrepreneurs who have those seven figure businesses, eight figure businesses and those who are kind of stuck at that “okay I made enough to pay the bills but I still have 50% on my credit cards” and you know high debt to income ratio and my kids are still eating macaroni and cheese or anything, no offense. My kids love macaroni and cheese. But that's a difference between you know the lifestyle you want to have and the lifestyle you have to live underneath.

Steve: Yes, that's very wise words and suddenly I do have a craving for macaroni and cheese, I'm not going to lie. So Diane, any final words of wisdom for the Awesomers out there listening? Of course, we're going to have the links how to get in touch with you and some of that free training that you alluded to earlier? Thank you for that. That's very generous but any final words of wisdom you care to share with the folks out there?

16:45 (Diane shares her words of wisdom to Awesomers.)

Diane: Yes, there's one thing I always want to share and that's the biggest problem you have on Amazon right now are me-too products. Okay so you can't help but have a me-too product for the most part in Amazon. Now I want to give you one little tip if it's okay? If I have a couple of minutes. There’s this thing I love to do, it's called a hypnotic anchor. So when people go and they look at your listing, their brain is compartmentalizing all of this information into almost as a comparison, like almost like it's like pictures side by side with other products right. So when you're out there looking, you're saying, “Okay, this product, it'll transform your life this way. It has this benefit and features.” Right, then you go to the next part and say the same thing but if you have products that are identical to other products, it's often difficult to get I should say frequently difficult to position those so that your product is the top seller even if it looks and is identical to other products. I do this on a daily basis. What you can do is you can create what's called a hypnotic anchor. Have you heard me talk about this before, Steve?

Steve: No, this is new. I'm a bated breath over here, waiting.

Diane: So a hypnotic anchor right. So just kind of a back story. A while back Hoover, the vacuum company was really getting their buns kicked by every vacuum manufacturer in fact on the market. Even they run like I think it's called CVC. I remember there's like a shopping network, maybe the only vacuum on there but their sales were really suffering. So what they did was they sat down and they wrote out all problems their competitors product had and how their products solved the problem. And they thought that'll be great right. The customers were still seeing that everywhere else. Everybody else was still claiming, we can solve the problem. We're going to suck up dust, we're going to suck up hair right. So what they did was they went through and they created what I like to call hypnotic anchor that potential customers can't find anywhere else and that's something basically that sticks tightly to your prospects’ brain as they continually search for the right vacuum or the right product or even the right solution right if they're not even knowing what type of product they needed, they might as well be searching for a solution. And it's also something you can suggest that the spouses can use and I know as a spouse, the spouses can justify the purchase. So because, I mean obviously people always buy from emotion they just found magic. Their sales skyrocketed and what they did was they just made one change and that change was differentiation. And they created this hypnotic anchor and I think it was called vortex technology right. So they took their biggest, they look at their biggest benefit. It’s that okay, you know we don't lose suction. We suck up everything and it's like a vortex when it comes up. So they created vortex technology. We've done the same thing with, sorry pardon me, me-too products constantly. So for example, I like to give an ear buds example because it's one we did years ago that's still really thriving. We took the fact that people wanted comfort and the people wanted molding right with this me-too product, there were a hundred and twenty six versions of the same earbuds selling on Amazon. Great, this looks like fun to me and they're panicked and I'm like this is awesome. I can't wait to do this because I'm going to show how this really works. And we created a comfort foam technology right and so all we did was say that our earbuds have specialized foam that molds within your ear that makes it super comfortable, they don't slip out, they don't slip out when you're exercising. It’s comfortable technology. Those people are still clients. They now launched like seventeen more kinds of earphones, earbuds, speakers right. But that right there took their sales from I mean that position from having this little product that did hardly anything as me-too product to doing over one hundred thousand dollars and sales a month. If there's one thing you can do, If you look at your competitors, you've already looked at your customers, you can show them that you understand them and you look at your competitors doing like this, my products are the same. It's not. It's not the same in the mind of a customer if you use a hypnotic anchor. And if you differentiate, you can't just say words like premium right and powerful, potent, pure, all that fun stuff power words. But you have to differentiate using a hypnotic anchor if you’re in the me-too products. So that's my biggest thing as I really want to see more sellers thrive on Amazon and E-commerce sites. You can use those hypnotic anchors. It's just basically coining a technology and then justifying that technology which is really a feature, how the benefits and transformation that features provide is better than anything else that your competitors can provide. So that when you're out looking at your competitors after they go to yours, they can't find that comforts, you know the comfort technology or anything like that and they come right back. So it’s three more listings and we've measured this and we've actually surveyed people in the comments back. Nobody has comfort technology.

Steve: It's classic branding. Very, very smart.

Diane: It’s branding and differentiation.

Steve: You're quite right. You know in the land of millions of products, there are going to be some overlaps so you better find a way to differentiate and this is a good way.

Diane: Absolutely.

Steve: Diane, this has been excellent. Thank you so much for the valuable tidbits and the gold nuggets that you've laid out there and sharing your story. We really appreciate having you on today.

Diane: Absolutely, my pleasure. And I just want to remind people one last thing. You really can email experts with questions about anything. We are out there to help you so please if you're going to do anything and you feel stuck, please reach out to somebody so you don't stay stuck. That’s all I gotta say about that.

Steve: I love it. Thank you again, Diane. We'll catch up to you on the other side.

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Steve: Boy, what an instructive episode this has been. Diane laying on some really value packed ideas and exact strategies, something you can implement right away. And I have to tell you that you know her concept of differentiating is really, really smart. We've done this with products for years and years. Or we would make something and then we would say, you know, whatever the finish on it was. In some cases, we had furniture or flooring and they had a particular kind of finish. Well we made the finish our own brand, our own technology as she referred to. And then we brand it around that so that people couldn't get this particular technology, this particular special finish without getting our product. And that's again a key point of differentiation. I'm so thankful that she shared that with everybody today and that's just another example of you know the kind of person she is. Remember that she's got some free training and free resources that we're going to share on the Awesomers.com podcast episode 80. All you have to do is go to Awesomers.com/81 and you'll find today's show notes and details and the promise links for any of those bonuses. And again this is the third in our three-part series with Diane. So again, I'm always thankful to have you listening. It really means a lot that you take the time out and I hope that you know the efforts that we're putting into producing this and making this for you are something that is having a nice impact in your life. Thank you very much.

Well we've done it again everybody. We have another episode of the Awesomers podcast ready for the world. Thank you for joining us and we hope that you've enjoyed our program today. Now is a good time to take a moment to subscribe, like and share this podcast. Heck you can even leave a review if you wanted. Awesomers around you will appreciate your help. It's only with your participation and sharing that we'll be able to achieve our goals. Our success is literally in your hands. Thank you again for joining us. We are at your service. Find out more about me, Steve Simonson, our guest, team and all the other Awesomers involved at Awesomers.com. Thank you again.