Split testing is testing version A versus version B. That’s about all you could do before the age of computers and the internet. You ran two different ads in similar periodicals to see which one did better. Of course back then, there were way to many variables to give you perfect results if it got close.

Now, one of the most perfect split testing operations is Google AdWords. Not only can you rotate A vs B, but you can test A vs B vs C… as far out as you care to write copy for.

So what’s multivariate testing? If you’re only writing a headline and two lines of copy, you can probably do without it. On the other hand, if you have much more than that, you need to know which headlines work best with which leads with which calls to action. If you introduce multiple variations for every variable you want to test, the possible combinations are practically impossible to sort out.

Even so, sorting out and pre-planning is what Taguchi testing is all about. Think of Taguchi testing as advanced split testing with many different combinations pre-planned. It was originally designed to test factory production lines.

What Taguchi can’t tell you is what relationship all of the variables have to each other outside those preplanned combinations. So essentially, it’s split testing with more versions.

For a tangible example, consider the following:

You have an email you’d like to test. You want to test 3 different headlines, greetings, opening paragraphs, body copy and closing. That’s 3 to the 5th power or 243 variations. If you had just two versions of 15 different variables, you’re talking over 32,000 total variations. Are you really going to try to split test that? No, that’s not possible. Taguchi testing would try to pick several of the best ones and split test them. Multivariate testing would test them all until it found the best combinations.

If you’d like more detail about why multivariate testing kicks butt over split or Taguchi testing, check out the white paper below. It was written by a Google Authorized Consultant who uses Google’s solution, Google Website Optimizer.

http://sitetuners.com/taguchi-method.html

If you realize how much better multivariate testing is, how can you take advantage of it? Here are some of the different solutions so far:

• Google Website Optimizer: a free solution. It’s great if you can write code or pay someone to.
• MuVar or now TestiVar: a former product of James Brausch. It’s written in php so you also need to know code. It’s a one time fee for the software and you can install it on as many websites as you have. The reason it’s better than Google’s solution is that it “watches” the results and over time favors the winning combinations. If you give it some time, you’ll end up with a fully optimized website. Otherwise, you have to have someone constantly setting up tests and analyzing the results.
• ConversionMultiplier.com: These guys SAY they multivariate test email and web pages but they don’t have enough info on their website (which doesn’t look like they optimized it either) to know. There’s no 3rd party credibility so I can’t say whether they could deliver or how they work.
• Vertster.com: These guys look reputable from their website. Unfortunately, they only do Taguchi testing. The good thing though is that it looks like it only requires a small amount of coding (good if you know how) and then it’s an easy user interface.
• Optimost.com: They also look like a reputable company. They do full multivariate testing. They require someone to do coding and ongoing technical support.
• Sitespect.com: This looks like the easiest solution out there so far. They don’t require you to make any changes to your website but instead act as a filter for your site. When people go to your site, they intercept the traffic and send out the variations you wanted to test. Of course you have ongoing fees to support it but unless something easier comes along, it’s probably well worth it depending on your business.

All of these solutions required some amount of coding at one time or another. Personally, I’ve been challenged with MuVar because I’m not a programmer and realize that to get the most out of it (and be able to test the nuances of NLP language patterns in different formats), I probably need to go learn CSS.

What is NO ONE doing? Easy, multivariate software for marketing people… your typical business owner can barely manage a website IF there’s no coding involved. They aren’t going to figure out Google Website Optimizer or any of these other solutions aside from maybe Sitespect if they can afford it.

What would be the ideal solution? Drag and drop interface. You click, highlight and insert different variables to test. You can test depending on different sources of traffic. Your test results automatically favor the winners and let you know when those winners have been decided with a certain degree of certainty.

There needs to be one click installation or a technical support rep available to walk you through it (needs to be even easier than installing WordPress). And it ought to have the option of being a web app so you can log in from anywhere and add more variables.

There aren’t many companies out there positioned to take advantage of this. Partially that’s because the market has been driven by IT department purchases. That’s changing now as web tools become more accessible to marketers. As marketers start driving software infrastructure purchases, they’re going to start asking for essential modern marketing tools like multivariate testing.

And what about email? I don’t know of anyone multivariate testing email. Conversion Multiplier claims to but their website has no proof so maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.

Here’s how an email multivariate testing program could work:

Instead of the typical split testing approach (testing 2 or more emails on a small percentage of your list), a multivariate tester could return results in real time.

Typically, you’re wanting to measure a number of different actions: bounce rate (or if the servers think it’s spam), open rate, click through rate, unsubscribe rate, and purchases once they click through. Almost no one measures customer longevity but that would be a good metric too.

What if you multivariate test by trickling out emails to a percentage of your list? Your email program would send out versions generated from your different variables and rank them according to however you weighted the different action metrics. The whole setup would need to be an easy interface, drag and drop, and point and click too.

If you had optimizing capabilities (the program favored winners), you could send it once and be done. By the time you were halfway through the list, the program would be sending out only a few different variations that were all close winners.

How do you think that would affect your conversion rates or future copywriting? It would change everything.

And if the barrier between programmers and marketers were removed… everyone would be doing this and we’d all be seeing much better marketing messages.

Any company out there want to make this happen? We’re all waiting.

These have been my experiences so far:

• I’ve followed his blog(s) for approaching 2 years.
• I proofread his first two books and was one of only two people who actually proofed all of the first book. I opted not to do the third because I got tired of correcting the same grammar mistakes over and over AND I’d already read all those blog posts AND I’d finally created a solid product at that point.
• I’ve purchased most of his products.
• I’d considered going to Costa Rica to model him (his personal blog said he’s moving so I doubt that’s a possibility).
• I’d participated in his intern/contractor program on 3 different occasions. The first time, I did every task for about five weeks and then the autoresponder ran out of emails/I quit doing them because there weren’t any new tasks. My two ghost written blog articles were published on his blog.

The thing that gets me about James’ business is that he refuses to communicate with his customers. I can appreciate his motivation to do the most immediately profitable thing. But as one of his most loyal customers I’m really frustrated with my experience.

Some grievances I have (only because I have no other way to contact his business):

• On two occasions, I wasn’t paid for my contractor work.
• His Life Management 101 product was an absolute waste of money. I don’t need to pay for a half hour audio telling me not to watch TV.
• His DVD creation product was mostly a waste of money too. It’s a video version of the instructions you can get for free from Kunaki. Robert Phillips has a more thorough video for half the price if you want help via video. I’d pass on his cover creation product though. If you want to learn to do covers, get my graphic design product coming out soon. The rest of the info is available via Kunaki.
• James has been fairly incindiary to his customers and even peers online. He had a couple of posts back in the day accusing one of his students of lying and stealing one of his products. If you went and read the accused person’s blog it seemed like the story didn’t line up as he’d actually purchased the product in question and had gotten permission IN PERSON to do what he did. It seems like if James hadn’t sequestered himself and refused to communicate with anyone, that could have been avoided.
• I personally got flamed by James’ blog once too for saying something regarding TV. When I read the post response to my comment I thought who in the world would have said watching TV was okay. I went back to the comments they referenced and realized they must have meant me even though I said nothing of the sort. I realized it wasn’t James that wrote that so I wrote a tongue in cheek response saying his contractor in India was overreacting to what my contractor in India said.
• His business’ posts have become 80% junk since diegonorte.com started. They’re obviously written as filler. Most aren’t even worth the time it takes to scan and figure out they’re junk. The fact that he obviously isn’t concerned his business is cranking out junk concerns me as a business practice.
• A couple of times, his franchise system didn’t give me another viable task. I clicked through to the next task and it wanted me to critique and article for example. But there was no article. Another time, it wanted me to comment on something like 20 blogs. I combed through the list of 100+ urls given and found that most of them either 1) weren’t blogs, 2) weren’t in English or 3) hadn’t been posted to in several months. There was literally no way for me to complete the task or to tell them I couldn’t.
• I purchased MuVar 2009 but it didn’t include complete directions. Some features mentioned in the sales letter I got via email weren’t even mentioned. I really don’t like learning from video for most things but what I’ve heard is those videos are the exact same ones as for the prior version of MuVar. I think the software must work, I just don’t know how to do it. I did spend 2 full days trying to set up one page. After the video instructions way didn’t work, I tried everything else I could imagine with nothing to show for it.
• I must have subscribed to a trial version of James’ newsletter last year. I recall receiving a couple of issues and thinking they weren’t worth $25. It was mostly his MuVar testing results which I’d already seen elsewhere. I only received a couple of issues so I forgot about it. Turns out that right around Thanksgiving I get an unexpected $300 charge for subscribing to his newsletter. I might be mistaken but it seems that I subscribed to a one year trial but only got 2-3 months of it. I sent an email to get a refund but never heard back. No doubt they don’t offer refunds and I don’t want to argue with PayPal at this point. I just got the first issue in the mail so I’ll check that out before I do anything else.
• His business offered a Christmas special. I missed it last year so I made sure to check it out this year. It was supposed to be most of his products on sale plus a free trial of his Ranking Factors software. I plugged my url into Ranking Factors and it didn’t work. Great. Thanks. I checked out the rest and the only actual discount was on his email customer service – did I mention that? If you want customer service, you have to pay for it. I was intending to wait until Jan to start working on MuVar again and pay the $25 for them to help me work my $50 MuVar product. Hopefully I don’t have to explain the ethical problem I have with that but it’d still be worth it monetarily to get MuVar working. The customer service option was only $1 so I figured why not. The form only allowed something like 62 characters so I did my best to explain my MuVar delimma. Here’s the response I got back yesterday:

Thank you for the opportunity to serve you.

You asked the following question:

I can’t get MuVar 2009 to work. Not enough space to explain.

It wasn’t presented in the form of a question or it wasn’t gramatically
correct so we first had our team reword your request into a gramatically
correct question format.  Here is what we were able to reword it to:

How can I get MuVar 2009 to work without enough space on my server?

Here is our response:

MuVar 2009 doesn’t take very much space at all on your server.  The script
files are less than 100K.

MuVar does store data about all of your visitors and sales but even the
most modest hosting plan should be able to handle tens of thousands of
visitors and hundreds of sales.

With hundreds of sales, you can easily upgrade to a most robust hosting plan.

MuVar 2009 is extremely simple to use.  It is sold on a CD with all of the
script files and step-by-step videos showing every step of installation
and setup.  Most people are able to install MuVar 2009 in less than an
hour the first time.  After the first time, 10 or 15 minutes is much more
typical.  There is nothing complicated at all about installation or
configuration.

It’s really that simple.

We also offer an email consultation service and a monthly coaching service
if you ever have any specific questions.  Training is never an issue with
any Diego Norte product including MuVar 2009.

I hope this answer helps.  Please contact us at this URL if you have any
other questions:

http://www.DiegoNorte.com/prd/1002/

Sarina Hendrickson
Nashville, Tenessee, USA Office
http://www.DiegoNorte.com

If you missed that, they not only didn’t answer my question, but reworded my question into a ridiculous question and answered that instead. All I can say is I’m really glad I didn’t shell out $25 for that.

I’d wanted to invest in James’ franchise system now that I’ve gotten a grip on how to create some unique products. I’m not going to though because my experience with it as a user has been so poor. Even so, I’m still interested in seeing how his latest experiment with homepages goes. And even after all that, I still took advantage of his 24 hour special yesterday to add another 10K publishers to my article marketing database.

I have really mixed feelings about Diego Norte. On the one hand, I really admire the hands-off systems style business James has built. I gather he’s now a multi-millionaire because of it.  On the other hand, I think half of what his business is churning out is junk and damaging to the relationship his business should be trying to cultivate with its customers. I agree it’s good to be profitable but not at the cost of cheating people out of money and spreading ill will. That doesn’t seem like it’d be profitable long term.

I’d normally avoid saying anything negative about anyone in particular. James just doesn’t have any other way to give feedback except product purchase. I guess the only feedback he wants is product purchases through MuVar. I’m pretty sure the flaw in that thinking though is that MuVar doesn’t measure repeat purchases and lifetime customer value.

Any comments? I don’t want this to be a rail against James post but I’d like to hear any thoughts regarding business systems, product creation, profitability, longevity, etc.

As chair, I took a large role in the marketing as you can imagine. Our typical attendance over the past few years has been 80-100 people. Most of those conference lost a substantial amount of money. We budgeted for 125. People were saying we were too optimistic and needed to make plans for what to do if fewer people showed up.

I put NLP marketing to the test… and we ended up with 202 paid registrations. I credit much of that to the quality of the speakers, the offer we created and that we focused on creating a good value for people. Of course people wouldn’t have known about all that without the marketing.

You might be surprised to know we had no budget for marketing. We’re a non-profit. We were supposed to break even for the conference when it was all said and done. So far, we’ve made a profit and will have more money coming in from audio recordings we’ll be offering our members. Our biggest problem now is what to do with the extra money so we can bring it back down to break even.

This event consumed most of my time the past couple of months. I should be done with all the final wrap ups in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on a model for graphic design. I’m actually meeting with my exemplar for the last look at the model to make sure it’s all an accurate representation of what she does. It includes everything from project planning and management to what she actually does to make it look good. I’ve learned a lot about it myself.

I’m also going to be working on a model of using violence to save your life. I realize it’s not marketing but I’ve had an interest in self defense for years. I’ve found a couple of fighting systems that are principle rather than technique based so I can model them. The trick to this one will be connecting kinesthetic knowledge through hearing. I think as long as it’s anchored to movements the listener is already familiar with, it will work. One idea I’ve been wondering about is whether “muscle memory” is simply subconscious knowledge.

I’m thinking of doing another business skill after that. I haven’t settled on one in particular so if you have any preferences, let me know – either comment or email me.

That’s all for now.

Louis

PS. If you’re wondering how I got so many links to my prior post, I submitted it to a bunch of blog carnivals. I’ll do that again for the next post with more universal appeal.

In writing the first draft of my copywriting model acquisition instructions, I realized a way that Flow applies to marketing. First, an example:

In Toastmasters, we just launched our fiscal year. One of my positions allows me to create and promote incentives and competitions for members to be recognized. During the discussions that proceeded the adoption of one in particular, there was a lot of back and forth over the rules.

The point I was trying to make was that we had to make it fair or people wouldn’t do it. One competition in particular, Toastmaster of the Year, was tricky because we were trying to decide how we would choose the winner. The first idea was that all the criteria would count equally and receive a single point talley. I knew that wouldn’t work because one criteria is attending a weekly meeting while another one is mentoring a new club (a six month committment).

We ended up deciding to keep the judging subjective. Several experienced Toastmasters will have to subjectively weight all the criteria against each other and pick a relative winner.

Flow experiences are the intersection of skills and challenges. If your skills are high and the challenge is low, you’re bored. If your skills are low and the challenge is high, you’re anxious. Flow is the happy medium between the two extremes where high skill and high challenge intersect.

For a challenge to be legitimate, the rules must be established and easy enough for people to navigate. If you think about any sporting event, that’s what allows it to be recognized as a challenge. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of guys fighting over a ball without a point. And if you don’t know the rules, that’s probably what it looks like to you.

The reason I mentioned the Toastmaster example is that the rules have to not only be clear but they have to be fair. No one is going to play a game where their reasonable efforts won’t be fairly recognized. It’s impossible to get into a flow state that way because the challenge isn’t well defined.

The marketing application is that your message will be most effective when it helps create a flow experience for your prospect. Your ideal customer will be one who is at the skill level to recognize the solution to a challenge your product offers. Said another way… people buy when your product helps them overcome a challenge. And the particular challenge will be determined by their current skills.

No doubt there are all sorts of other applications to things like customer service as well.

When I just checked Amazon, they have used copies of Flow for $2.60.

I’ve got a club and a district officer role this time around and it all came down at the same time. When I told one of our new club officers that, she asked why anyone would want to do that. Everyone has their reasons for joining Toastmasters (a communication and leadership organization if you didn’t know). Serving in a leadership capacity is a totally different level though. It wasn’t until I got into district leadership that I started taking the program seriously and speaking regularly.

My reason for the "extra" involvement is that after all the different organizations I’ve been a part of… churches, corporations, the army, the public school system, soccer teams… I consider Toastmasters to be one of the best. It gives people the opportunity to improve themselves. You don’t have to have a set of beliefs or be coerced into anything. You show up… you’re challenged… you have fun… you get better.  If anything promotes world peace, it’s empowering people to act on their own beliefs.

If you’re a copywriter or anyone who wants low risk practice in persuasion, I can’t recommend Toastmasters more highly. You can write your speech and get immediate feedback from an audience.

On to profiles… Ryan Healy wrote on how to know if you have the traits of a freelance copywriter. It’s good stuff. As I’ve been working on an NLP model for copywriters, I’ve noticed a few things. One is that there’s almost NO consistent trait among copywriters other than having a creative process that consists of researching, writing and editing. Beyond that, everyone’s an individual.

So while the grandmasters of copywriting enjoy describing what makes a great copywriter, what they’re probably really saying is what they believe makes them a good copywriter. Every master in any field will write about what unique traits they have. The truth is that there are lots of good copywriters out there who don’t fit any mold.

And then if you consider yourself an entrepreneur first, there’s even more variety there. Somehow most of those guys keep pounding out bad ads year after year and still make money. Of course they’d make more if they improved their marketing skills but just about everyone knows a story like that.

One consistent across almost all organizations and professions is value and influence. Where are you providing value and how are you influencing others to convey that value?

“There’s so much stuff out there on being a freelance copywriter, where do I start?”

Here’s what I wrote back:

To go into business as a freelance copywriter, you need two main skills… the ability to write copy AND the ability to market yourself. They’re actually not the same thing although being able to write better copy helps with marketing.

If I were starting from scratch and wanted to take the shortest route, I would learn the structure and then study actual letters so you know what you’re looking at. For structure, I recommend Dan Kennedy’s book, The Ultimate Sales Letter. It’s not exhaustive but you’ll learn all you need to start.

Then use Google to find good letters. Look for swipe files. Look at samples at top copywriter’s websites. I know I listed a few in my course. When you find those letters, type them out manually. Most people (myself included) wrote them out longhand on paper but I’ve heard typing is just as good. Keep those letters so you’ll have a place to look for ideas when you’re writing.

Bob Bly has a large amount of structure and business advice for copywriters on his website. Look under Portfolio, Methodology, and For Writers Only.

If there’s a particular niche of writing ability or NLP you want to explore further, I listed almost all the resources I know at http://www.louisrburns.com/getting-started-in-copywriting-and-nlp/.

For marketing yourself there’s a nearly infinite number of places you could market yourself. Some low hanging fruit is evidently brick and mortar businesses who realize they need an online presence but don’t know how to do it. If you know how to set them up with a basic website (or especially a WordPress blog), you can make decent money as a marketing consultant.

You can be merely an adequate copywriter for that niche. If you don’t know how to install WordPress they have all the directions you need on the site. Make sure you go to the one where you download and host your own. The other one they host and get credit for your traffic.

I haven’t gotten it, but Ryan Healy just released a product on marketing yourself. If I were trying to market myself as a freelance copywriter, I would get it. Google his blog and you’ll find it. [EDIT: Go here - http://www.ryanhealy.com/copywriting-business-answers/]

If you want to get really good, you’ll eventually need a coach. Shop around and read what other people say.

The time frame really depends on how fast you get your ability and confidence up to speed. I imagine if you learned what to look for (and you know more than most because of your NLP training) and start copying out letters – 1 letter per day 3x each, you’d be better than most folks within a month. I probably only copied 10 different letters to be honest. You might try copying different elements of letters all together… like copying several headlines, leads, closes, etc so you can compare them.

Another consideration is that more and more copywriters are moving toward building information businesses. As much money as copywriters make, the folks they write for make a lot more plus they can outsource the operations. You can’t really outsource copywriting so you’ll always be tied to it.

Also, funny that you should ask because my current project is using NLP modeling to create a model of a freelance copywriter. I’ve been dissecting over 500 pages of interviews with 60+ different copywriters. I’m at least a few weeks away from launch.

I’ll probably offer it for $100 with a short (not more than a few days) special offer for $35 when I first release it. Watch my blog if you’re interested. Creating models is the info publishing business I’m moving into.

Hope that helps.

[EDIT: Once you get started with some knowledge, the best teacher is live testing. The easiest thing is to split test pay per click ads. Graduate to multivariate testing your own product. If you don't want to create your own product, sign up as a Clickbank affiliate and write a better letter to test. At least that's what I would do.]

If you Google “getting started copywriting” you’ll see over 200,000 results. Most of the advice I’ve seen and followed boils down to a few steps:

1. Study the masters
2. Copy out successful letters
3. Build a swipe file
4. Practice on low risk jobs
5. Build your portfolio
6. Specialize in a market
7. Get bigger clients

What I want to point out is that your path depends greatly on your end goal. Do you want to be a corporate copywriter? Freelance? Or how about run your own business?

Personally, I started out following the above steps before I finally accepted the fact that many of the most successful copywriters write for themselves. Even the top copywriters that still write for clients also have their own products, services, coaching programs, seminars, etc. That’s where the real money and real freedom are.

If you’ve managed to stick to the steps long enough to become a half decent copywriter, branching out into your own business won’t be a terrible shock. Selling is the hardest part of any business and you already have a leg up. Plus, if you go after information products online, you’ve chopped your learning curve down again. And you won’t have to go looking for step 4. You can do your own stuff.

If you follow the career path of many copywriters, the steps that follow after the six above are:

1. Charge your clients more
2. Get more clients
3. Get burned out
4. Have an existential crisis
5. Get fed up and start your own business

Why not start at step 4 in the first list and jump to step 5 in the second? Anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

I wanted to elaborate on step 1 in the first list for copywriting and NLP. That was the original question… how to get started.

I read the original guys like Hopkins, Caples and Ogilvy. I don’t recommend anyone start with that unless you want to be a corporate copywriter. For direct response copywriters and entrepreneurs, I recommend you study some of the guys who are doing it well online already. Specifically, I recommend (not affiliate links):

• Michel Fortin – has a great online presence and community
• Clayton Makepeace – master of melding copywriting and existing business (aka profit sharing and royalties)
• Ben Settle – a great resource to go for learning about swiping
• Michael Senoff – an amazing resource for free seminars, interviews and ads on a multitude of business topics. It’s a great place to find ideas.
• Dan Kennedy – he has a number of good books on the basics. I’m looking at a copy of The Ultimate Sales Letter on my shelf. You can see the 2nd edition free on Google Books.
• Google “internet business ” and visit the top results. If they’re private business guys with blogs, they obviously know what they’re doing. Richard Lee, Cybercashology and Terry Dean come to mind.
• [EDIT 5/23/09]I used to recommend James Brausch for his straightforward business formula that went something like “Product + Traffic + Copywriting = $$$.” He’s since sold off his blog and business and the new owners ran it into the ground with poor products and service. Terry Dean has a highly recommended beginner’s guide.

For NLP, it really depends on what you want to do with it. There’s a ton of general info online. Here’s what I recommend:

• If you want a solid general overview, get a book like Introducing NLP by O’Connor and Seymour.
• If you want to learn how to do NLP, you have 2 main options: take a practitioner course or read the original books by Bandler and Grinder and find someone to practice with. The first method would probably be easier although I’ve taken the second.
• [EDIT 10/20/08: Richard Bandler has a new book out, "Get The Life You Want" that has most of his NLP patterns. Each chapter is a background story and the pattern laid out step by step. I highly recommend it as a pattern reference.]
• [EDIT 5/23/09: It now appears that NOTNLP may have streamlined many if not all the patterns of NLP. If you're wanting to do NLP in person, I recommend you check it out.]
• If you want to learn to do Therapeutic Metaphors, learn the vocabulary of NLP first and then get David Gordon’s book on it. Some of it will be lost on you if you don’t know the basics.
• If you want to learn modeling,  get Gordon’s book on it. [UPDATE: Steve Bauer has a more comprehensive list on modeling approaches listed in a recent post . It includes Gordon's book.]
• If you run across something you’re not familiar with look it up in the Encyclopedia of NLP .
• If you want to learn it for personal motivation, get Tony Robbin’s materials.
• If you want to be entertained and awed by it, look for Derren Brown on YouTube. “The Heist ” and “Subliminal Advertising ” are especially eye opening.
• If you want to learn it for a face to face sales context, get Kenrick Cleveland’s materials. I haven’t studied his materials beyond his blog but Harlan Kilstein highly recommends him.
• If you want to learn if for a seduction context, get the Speed Seduction materials.
• If you want to have it done on you without worrying about learning it, get some Paraliminals or visit a hypnotherapist or NLP practitioner. I created a similar product you can download free called Passionate Heart.

And finally, if you want to learn NLP for a copywriting context, get my course. The only thing even like it is Harlan’s $1000 DVDs. Even then, a couple people have commented that my course is easier to understand than his. It’s way less expensive too.

You can get the first lesson free here: http://hypnoticwriter.org .

I’d been wondering what to raise the price of my course to and commented on the article. Evidently Fred Gleeck has a model that info products should be worth 10X what the price is. That next question is how to determine the value.

If you have a product like Glypius or MuVar, the value comes as a return on your investment in your own business. You pay 300 Euros and make way more than that in increased conversions.

The example Bob gave in his reply comment was:

Louis: in the case of an information product, the marketer must explicitly make the case for the value he claims in the copy. For instance, let’s say you are selling an e-book of forms for consultants. To pay a lawyer or expert to create each form would cost the prospect at least $200 per form, and there are 50 forms in the book. Therefore, buying the collection of ready-made forms can save the customer $10,000, allowing you to claim a value of 10K for your product. Would I charge $1,000? Probably not. But you could charge $97.

The reason you probably wouldn’t want to try charging $1,000 is because the value of those forms would be specific to a particular individual’s deal. That’s what attorney’s and real estate agents charge for… knowing how to appropriately fill in the blanks and customize language.

I searched online for other pricing information and it was mostly academic. I’m guessing everyone else is just pricing according to what everyone else is charging.

Here’s how it relates to us:

I’ve already mentioned that by this time next week, I’ll have raised the price of my "Be a Hypnotic Writer" course. Currently it’s $10 per lesson for a total of $110 (first one’s free). I think that price grossly undervalues the information I’m including in the course. People tend to form an impression of the value based on the price.

Since a lot of this is based on the personal study I’ve done, I’ll low ball that and say my time is worth $50/hr. You couldn’t get a good direct response copywriter to work for that much so I’m being conservative. Most of the materials I reviewed, I acquired second hand or borrowed so I’ll estimate the cost.

If I’m using the 10X figure, here are the things I need to include:

• Harlan’s NLP Copywriting Certification Seminar ($1000)
• Accommodations (I opted to stay in a hostel), airfare, copies of the DVDs, expenses to attend the seminar ($550)
• Completing the certification process (20 hours = $1000)
• Several source material books on NLP ($50 + 20 hours including 5 I read completely and 10+ I’ve skimmed speed reading = $1050)
• A few Richard Bandler seminars (36 hours worth = $1800)
• NLP Practitioner (22 CDs) and Master Practitioner Courses ($2000 each plus 15 hours study invested = $4750)

Let me be clear that I’m not an NLP Practitioner. I’ve only reviewed the course materials to make sure this course really does include everything there is to know about NLP copywriting thus far. I am an NLP Certified Copywriter although that only accounts for about half of what I’ve learned about NLP so far.

The total is $10,150. That’s not including the time I’ve spent preparing the course. That’s also not including the time I took to learn copywriting before I began studying NLP or internet marketing. That’s also not taking into account that you probably can’t get Harlan’s DVDs anywhere and there’s not another course out there that teaches this material. Not only that, but it includes exercises so that you actually assimilate the material, not just read it.

By that standard, I should be charging about $1000 for the course. I may at some future date. In the meantime I’m going to raise the price to a one time payment of $300. It will come with a 30 day money back guarantee of course. I’ll still keep it on a weekly delivery autoresponder unless I add a physical product as well. I feel like people will be more likely to read the lessons and do the exercises if they have a deadline for the next lesson. That will also cut back on the number of folks who buy, download your entire product and then immediately ask for a refund. If someone hasn’t figured out if they’re going to use it by the 4th lesson, I don’t want to keep sending it to them.

If you want to figure a price based on your profit due to increase in conversion, no doubt the price would be even higher.

If you want to compare it to other regular copywriting courses, the price should be much higher too. Not many full blown courses go for less than $1000.

If you want to compare it to hiring an NLP certified copywriter, it would be much higher. The average copywriter charges around $3,500 for a letter while the average A List copywriter charges $10,000 or more. Through this course, you’ll develop persuasive copywriting skills that even some of those copywriters don’t know about.

Until next Sunday, May 18th, you can get it for $10 a lesson. It’s such a steal that I almost feel embarrassed about letting anyone have it at that price. It’s my way of saying thanks to my early subscribers and testers.

I haven’t seen too much hype about NLP Copywriting being the holy grail of copywriting. Jon McCulloch posted today about how it’s just another tool for copywriters. I don’t know that anyone is arguing that point.

Copywriters worth their salt will tell you these are the most important elements of a promotion:

1. The list
2. The offer
3. The copywriting

These aren’t percentage contributions either as I saw one marketer teaching. This is a situation where if you miss on #1, it doesn’t matter how good the other two are. You can nail #1 but if you miss #2 you still don’t have a very successful promotion.

Conversely, you can do a terrible job of #3 but still have a moderate success if you got the first two down. Obviously you’d want to do well on all three to optimize your chances for success.

That said, NLP Copywriting is about optimizing the effectiveness of #3. It can’t rescue a promotion that missed on the first two elements.

The other point I wanted to add to the discussion is on testing.

James Brausch does as much testing as anyone else out there. Through using his multivariate testing software, he turned the visitor value of one of his sites from $5 to now $31.35 . And that’s without deliberately testing any NLP. [FYI: Visitor Value means for every unique visitor to that site, the average payoff is over $30]

James also posted a good and brief explanation of the different types of testing (including Taguchi). Split testing is better than nothing but why would you do it when you can get results so much faster these days?

As an aside, I’ve participated as a subject in several double blind studies and they’re not usually as blind as people would like to think. There are ALWAYS incentives at work that people tend not to take into account.

It would be ridiculous for an entrepreneur to spend time trying to set up a double blind study. In a medical setting, double blind means neither the doctor nor the subject knows which medication is being dosed and tested. But believe me, sometimes you KNOW which one is the placebo.

Why would an entrepreneur want to set up a situation where the winning variables were in a black box (double blind) that they had to sort through after the fact? James’ software, MuVar, automatically sorts it out for you and selects the best ones to display.

The point of all of this is the overall approach I’ve intended to take with this blog:

NLP Copywriting is simply another variable to multivariate test while you’re improving your copywriting.

There’s no perfect sales letter. There’s no magic pill persuasion technique. There’s only a point of diminishing returns where it becomes more profitable to either focus more energy on increasing traffic or create a new offer.

If there is a holy grail of copywriting, it’s multivariate testing.

The writer then commented that since most people won’t ever know, that fellow "magicians" should sit back and enjoy the show rather than point out how it was done. The blog isn’t open to comments or trackbacks so I won’t bother naming names.

If we were all in the business of entertaining audiences, I’d completely agree. Even if we were all copywriters and wanted to keep our best persuasive tactics to ourselves, I might still be inclined to agree. Fact is, my goal here is to teach NLP Copywriting to as many entrepreneurs as want to learn.

I’ve posted on these themes before. The first was When to give away the farm in information products . I followed that up recently with Death of the Layman .

Then there’s seeming inherent contradiction in having a blog on NLP advertising but then getting upset when someone else teaches on it too. The writer didn’t link to anything so I’m only assuming what he’s talking about. Harlan Kilstein is the most vocal anti-obvious proponent I’m guessing.

As far as being too obvious goes, you just have to test it. Every market is different. What worked yesterday won’t work as well tomorrow. Richard Bandler (or was it John LeValle?) said that you don’t know how far you can push until you’ve been kicked out of someone’s office. So test and push and balance that with the core values of your business. See what happens. Maybe Harlan will rip pages out of your book on YouTube.

One of the presuppositions of NLP is that there is no failure, only feedback. I hope the writer of the post above doesn’t feel like I’m picking on him as a person. We’ve never met. I’m sure if we did, there’d be some interesting conversation to be had. He probably realizes the not-so-secret tactic of gaining interest by stirring up controversy… not that that was my original intention. Maybe we can start a running feud… like a wizards’ duel.

And in the spirit of exposing secrets (and lobbing another lightning bolt), another thing I noticed on the writer’s product page was that he makes the statement that he’s assuming all the readers already know NLP. If that were a valid assumption, why would you still be obvious about your uses of it? It seems like you’d want to write a more subtle letter to fellow magicians. I actually shared a few comments on that sales letter in a previous post .

If you’d like to learn more about being an NLP Copywriting magician (or watch more detailed critiques of uses of NLP in copy), watch for my upcoming video.