Crititique Plz... So close to walking away.

Full of trite phrases and dramatic exclamations - promises of a "cure" and statements that confuse the disease of depression with the "feelings".

I know a LOT about clinical depression and about both medical and self treatment - and what you have there is a bunch of hooey. A better approach would be to present the book as a personal journey of conquering depression without drugs.

If you had a DIAGNOSED case of depression and "cured" it without medication, that might be an interesting read. A cure of a self-diagnosed disease doesn't work for credibility, though, and you don't seem to mention a professional diagnosis in your sales copy.

I don't mind sticking my oar in since I was one of the copywriters mentioned at the outset, although not named directly.

Rick has it spot on Jonathan. All stuff I've told you before. Proved right again. I did tell you ages ago, last spring was it that this would be a hard sell.

Of course it didn't help too much on supplying you with my original sales copy for this product, you first pretty much butchered the copy to pieces changing out something like 90% of the copy supplied but also patently obvious, you didn't heed any of my advice at the time.

This on the back of receiving your positive review on supplying the sales copy for this product, namely...

"When I received Mark’s copy I was blown away by how persuasive it was and I have no doubt it will convert a hundred times better than what I could have ever come up with.

Mark was very professional and quick to answer all questions I had after receiving the copy.

I will use Mark for any future copy-writing that I use and I couldn’t recommend him highly enough.

Thanks Mark"

- Jonathan USA

***

Now here you are again still suffering low conversion rates. With a sales letter which doesn't resemble anything like that which was supplied to you in the first place. Which raises the question...

Why hire a copywriter, why ask for their advice if upon doing so you first butcher the sales copy supplied to the point it's unrecognizable and second, rewrite it yourself even though you know you have next to no experience in salesmanship-in-print?

Only it seems like an incredibly cock-eyed business approach to take if you ask me. If you'd just done what I suggested to you in the first place you wouldn't now be experiencing this problem.

What can one say? You've basically brought this situation on yourself. If you had listened in the first place to said advice given to you and not changed out almost all the wording in your sales copy, you wouldn't be facing this problem period.

Sincerely,


Mark Andrews

Just a quick question but have you thought of working with a copywriter who actually has experience on this subject?

The reason I ask is that marketing something like this would probably require quite a bit of personal experience to truly understand the problems, benefits and solutions related to the product. You basically need someone who knows how to speak directly to people who are suffering from depression.

Other than that, don't give up!

First of all I wanted to thank everyone for their input; I really appreciate you all taking to time to offer me advice.
The $4.95 price is for a 3 week trial. After the 3 weeks they are charged $39.95. I should have been more clear about this in the copy. With this being said, is this still too low a price point?

Taking a look at the clickbank market place, there are a number of products in this niche. None of them have a gravity of more than 2 however, potentially meaning that this is a particularly difficult niche to market to. The fact that I am on my third copywriter might be another hint. All three are good copywriters as far as I can tell but the offer just isn't converting. There has to be a reason for this. I gave one of my copywriters access to my adwords account and this still didn't improve the conversion ratio. So that is not the problem.

Any thoughts on this?

What I have up here now was just an experiment on my behalf to see how I could do at creating my own copy while I wait for my current copywriter to get back to me with a revision. It looks like I haven't done too well so I might leave it up to the professionals.

Corey Geer: thanks for your indepth response. I can see that you've been through something similar to me. I never suffered from anxiety to a significant degree but I can see how harsh it could be. Depression is such a cruel disease, and I would wish it upon no-one.

It is quite alarming how little some doctors know about these diseases. Some don't even believe them to be a medical issue!

I haven't looked into the anxiety side of things actually. I will definitely look into that avenue. Thanks for that. If it doesn't work however I might have to walk away.

Kay King: when you say it is a bunch of hooey, what do you mean by that?
I was diagnosed with major depression and recovered in about 2 weeks if you can believe that. I didn't state that in the copy because it sounds so unbelievable. My HAM-D was 23 and at the moment sits around 6-7.

Mark: when I received the copy you wrote me I was very happy with it and I still think it was solid. I had it up for the appropriate amount of time (800 clicks if I recall correctly) and it just wasn't converting. I think this is because of the market as you pointed out but I am rather stubborn so I went wanted to give it my all before I walked away. I should have listened to your advice but I couldn't walk away from so much work. I was very impressed with how much time you put into talking me through things and would recommend your services to anyone.

I hope that my posting here is not construed as a challenge to your work. What I have up there at the moment is 100% new.

Jeremy: I put the bullet point up there about helping a loved one beat their depression because I have surveyed the people who go to my site and about a third visit to help a loved one and not themselves. I was trying to show that there are effective ways of doing this and hopefully not lose a third of my prospects.

Thanks for the other advice you gave me, I will definitely look into those changes.

Laurencewins: what did you mean by: "3. I don't know what your actual book is like but if it is anything like the letter, no wonder you can't convert."
I wrote the book to be as concise as possible. I realise that depression is quite a bland subject so I get to the "good stuff" without my readers having to struggle through hundreds of pages of meaningless fluff.

Shadowflux: One of my copywriters used to suffer from depression, and another one has written for a similar product in the past. All three have good references.

Sethczerepak: thanks for the advice on the copy and the resources on the headline.

The $4.95 price point was for a 3 week trial at which point they would be charged $39.95. I should have been a bit more clear about that in the copy. Is this still to low of a price point?

Daniel Scott: What I have done in my book is scour the scientific literature to find all of the scientifically proven ways in which to find relief from depression. None of the ideas are my own in the book. I have taken the scientific literature as a whole, compiled it, compacted it, simplified it and only kept what is sound scientifically.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about depression. Some believe it to be solely psychological and others believe it is solely physical, most believe it to be a mixture of the two. I come from the stand point that depression is CAUSED almost 100% by a physically unhealthy brain. There are 7 reasons I think this and they can be found in my copy if you are interested. Psychology definitely comes into play but it is the result of depression and not the cause.
I tend to shy away from saying it is a “chemical imbalance” which relates to the serotonin hypothesis of depression. There are some glaring holes in this theory – for instance depressed people often have normal levels or serotonin and healthy people often have low levels.

Serotonin definitely does play a part but the literature points more to depression as being the result of high systemic inflammation. There are multiple reasons that I (and many scientists) believe this. Firstly, inducing inflammation results in depression in roughly half of healthy people, secondly, inflammatory markers are almost always elevated in depressed individuals. Finally, many of the methods that people use to treat depression also reduce inflammation, potentially meaning that they result in the relief from depression due to this effect. Interestingly enough, cognitive therapy has been shown to reduce inflammation.

Additionally, the brain is an incredibly complex organ with millions of biochemical reactions going on every minute. We get the raw materials for these reactions from our diet. Things like zinc, magnesium, b vitamins, vitmain D, essential fatty acids etc all need to be present in precise quantities or the brain stops working properly - in the case of depression, this results in poor mood. Often times a number of these are deficient making the situation much worse. It is only a matter of supplementing these and returning them to the natural levels at which point the brain recovers the ability to maintain proper mood. See below for how effective this can be.

There is a condition prevalent in 30-40% of people called fructose malabsorption, in people with FM the prevalence of depression is roughly 10 times that of the normal population. There is good evidence that this is a major cause of depression worldwide. Indeed it was the cause of my depression. In people with fructose malabsorption, the fix is simply removing free fructose from the diet. Within a couple of weeks of doing this, normal mood returns. This is exactly what happened to me. I managed to recover 95% in just over 2 weeks from removing fructose from my diet.

In the scientific literature I found a total of 9 methods to treat depression naturally by working on the brain. 6 of these have been shown in double blind, placebo controlled clinical trials to be just as effective as antidepressants and often more so:

• Ledochowski (2000) found a 65.2% improvement in symptoms from reducing fructose and sorbitol consumption for one month.
• Wirz-Justice (2010) found a 68.8% remission rate after a 5 week intervention of light therapy.
• In Babyak (2000) found a 60.5% remission rate after 4 months of exercise therapy.
• Barragan-Rodriguez (2008) found 58.3% of patients taking magnesium supplements improved significantly after 12 weeks.
• Eby (2006) documents 4 patients who completely remitted after less than a week of magnesium therapy.
• Fava (2005) found a 38% remission rate from st johns wort after 12 weeks.
• Legrand (2007) found an 87.5% remission rate in a small 8 week pilot study on the efficacy of exercise therapy.
• Nowak (2003) found a significant reduction in symptoms after 6 and 12 weeks on zinc supplementation.
• Su (2003) found a 40% reduction in symptoms from 8 weeks on omega 3 supplementation.
• Wells (1998) found significant reductions in symptoms after one month on a high fat diet and an increase in symptoms after a month of a low fat diet.

These are just 10 studies of the over 230 that I cite in my book. I recommend a total of 9 methods in my book, if the depressed person were to follow all 9 at the same time then the odds of them seeing significant improvement within a few weeks is slim. This is not my opinion, this is supported by the scientific literature.

My book reads like a scientific journal article, ie, I make a claim and then back it up with 1-4 references. The reference section is 30 A4 pages long. But hey, what do I know.

Maybe another barrier to making sales lies in people like you, people who have their own ingrained ideas about depression from personal experience but are actually way off the mark. Cognitive dissonance can be a powerful enemy when you’re trying to convince someone of something.

Thanks for the other advice in your post. They are some good points, I will definitely take it on board if I do decide to continue with this project.

Mark: which is it? Is it my inability to generate highly targeted traffic or is it the market?

Yeah sorry mate, I removed that because it did seem a bit inflammatory.

I went a bit over board on that other comment as well. I just didn't take too well to the comment about not being too knowledgeable about something that I have spent so much time on. No hard feelings tho.

I absolutely appreciate you taking the time to give me advice.

What did the ssri article have to do with anything tho? The research that I have looked at says that they are pretty much useless in mild to moderate depression but they can definitely help severe depression.

You are absolutely correct.

At least, in my experience (and the experience of respected psychiatrists I know), SSRIs are only useful for correcting a chemical imbalance.

That is to say, if you are depressed because someone you know died or some other circumstance, that's a cognitive thing. SSRIs won't help that.

However, if you've been depressed your whole life, and it's not going away, then SSRIs will often have a benefit.

The problem is everyone responds differently, so while they work great for some people, other people have horrible side effects or just don't get any better...

Hence the difficulty in pinning down exactly how effective they are in different situations, and why even psychiatrists often take a "best guess" and then work on trial and error to get someone on a good anti depressant.

The article was just to give anyone reading this thread a bit more info on what I was talking about RE: serotonin.

Ultimately, the specifics are largely irrelevant at this point however. You're not selling a solution to depression, you're selling hope. Once they get the product, that's where this stuff kicks in.

If you want to PM me and show me some of the sales letters you're using and tell me a bit about your traffic, I'll let you know if anything sticks out as obvious to me as why it might not be working.

I'd say this is possibly your big sticking point here. You're attacking something VERY personal, and you need to be VERY delicate about how you present the solution. Empathy and feelings are key... not facts and figures.

-Daniel

Looking at it like that, every market has stiff competition. There's "experts" and "professionals" in every field/niche.

It's not about finding an untapped market, it's about doing it better than everyone else.

Also, while there are some real doctors out there who sell products, there are also just as many people who aren't doctors and have never attended a medical class that call themselves doctors. Some get caught, some don't.

Speaking of medical books and frauds, how many times has Kevin Trudaeu been sued again? Claiming you know the cure to the common cold, herpes, cancer and other things usually draws some negative attention.