The ABSOLUTE WORST way to create a profitable video sales letter..And a few tricks to do better

I'm sure most of you are aware of the powers of video marketing...It's an extremely powerful method of engaging the psyche of your prospects and getting them to take action.

However, most of you are doing it all wrong. Most people (atleast the videos i've seen as of lately) simply put text on a powerpoint slide and read the text.

Bad idea.

Rule #1 of cognitive psychology is "Non-verbal communication completely dominates verbal communication."

This means, its not what you say that has the greatest impact but it's what you show. it's the visuals that have the most effect on your customers decision making process.

Why do you think E-book covers are so popular???

Look at the following videos. both have very little in terms of spoken word...But I can guarantee if any one of these videos slapped a {Donate now button} or a {Buy product A button} they would've had a pretty good conversion rate.

check it out.


And here's another...


Now, I'm aware that most people (including myself) either dont have the capabilities to film a video of this quality or just aren't interested (Personally, I'm in the latter group).

So here are a few ways I've SHOWN instead of TOLD, and in each case the conversion rate was double digits higher (10% or more) than just plain text power points.

Keep in mind that I do this for big media companies with huge mailing lists so I have the resources to run pretty decent experiments.

So I'm pretty confident that you'll see similar results.

Iconfinder/animations - Yep, it's free, and you can get high quality images for use with your powerpoint slides. Use the powerpoint animation features to bring life to what would be a static and boring image.

For instance, When I do work in the weight loss industry, I commonly make pictures slowly slide down the screen and fade out whenever something sad or negative is mentioned. We've also tested having the pictures slide up the screen, but the results were poor. never the less, be creative with this free images -- you'd be surprised how high your conversion rates can get.

Visual Pattern Interrupt - A visual pattern interrupt is an image that really stands out to the viewer because it appears that it has absolutely no relation to the topic. This works really well because it grabs the users attention.

Remember the first law of copywriting -- Attention/Interest/Desire/Action??? Well visual pattern interrupts are amazing at grabbing attention.

I promoted a dating CPA offer (geared towards men) in the past. The funnel went from 7 search to my landing page, to the offer. When the men landed on my landing page I presented two images, A picture of a sexy stiletto heel that any man would love to see on a women. Then to the right of that, I had a picture of a woman's foot in heels, but the heels were worn and torn and quite frankly the feet were just -- well lets just say they weren't cute at all. (both images had radio buttons above them)

The text on the page went as followed "Which one of these would you love to see YOUR date wearing?" and underneath the images it said "There are many beautiful women who wear heels just like this EVERYDAY, click here to see". As you can imagine, I completely had their attention and that page converted (click through rate) at 63% for 3 months and 1 week before the conversions severely dropped for whatever reason (probably competition).

Distinction Effect - I use this almost every time I create a VSL. Here's how it works and what it does.

We as human beings, tend to make decisions in one of 5 ways (for the nerds out there it's Compensatory, Algorithmic, trial and error, Heuristic, Insight).

The distinction effect deals with heuristic i.e. Cognitive biases. In short, heuristics refer to "rules of thumb" that all human beings naturally acquire through everyday life experiences. For instance, in America, you should look people in the eye when you speak to them, as a rule of thumb.

The distinction effect says, as a rule of thumb, it is not good to purchase the first thing you see -- It's best to compare and contrast offers then choose the one that you FEEL gives you the most benefits.

So at the end of all of our VSL's we show what we call, outlandish pricing tables. Let's say offer A is $495.95 for the complete package + bonuses. offer B is $493.95 for the complete package less the bonus.... to date EVERY test we've run this heuristic, product A has won 99.333% of the time.

There are many many many more ways to use non-verbal language in ways that increase sells.

To be honest, If you were to do anything even remotely rebellious to the "I'll just read plain text from a powerpoint" -- Your numbers should increase.

Here's one thing that surprises most people. Big time companies hire hackers to work on their security team because they are good at finding, exploiting and fixing security holes.

Big time companies also hire savvy marketers because they are good at finding, exploiting and fixing marketing failures and finding ways to transform losing efforts to winners (thus creating more profits).

From my experience, savvy marketers are no different than you... they just take what the masses are doing and they do the opposite -- and mix in a little creativity.

Hope this bit of insight helps.