Here’s an interview I did on Copywriting and Health and Fitness Marketing with Anthony Coyne focused on how small business owners and businesses in the health and fitness industries can get more clients from writing better copy and creating effective lead generation systems. This info can be applied to just about any type of small business.

Anthony, who are you and what do you do?

Basically Chris, I am a professional copywriter and marketing consultant.  I have a company called Ultimate Marketing Solutions.  Basically, I help small to medium sized business increase their potential as well as find clients and things like that.

What is an effective method of lead generation for a fitness business ?

One of the things that we have been successful with is what they call a two-step method, or the two-step system.  What it is is you have an ad, it could be a newspaper ad, a postcard, a sales letter, or even a flyer, and what that does is; it’s a very, very short ad that just catches the reader’s attention.  There is very little information in there and generally, it has a 1-800 number, which goes to a recorded message.  What the person would do is they would call in for a free report and then the free report would elaborate more on the actual sales message.  Did that make sense?

Yeah, does the free report have to be a hard copy, or can it be a – what kind of free report should this be?

Normally we suggest that you use an actual report.  It has higher perceived value to the client and that way.  What you’re doing is your taking them to the next step because once someone has the physical product they’re like, “Yeah, this guy knows what he’s talking about”.

Doesn’t that increase advertising costs?

It will increase your advertising costs, but the thing that you want to look at when you’re looking at lead generation is what’s your cost of acquisition for a client, how much is it costing you to get that client.  When you look at that, and when you look at the life time value of a customer, you find that the increase in the advertising costs are very, very minimal, especially when you’re talking about a large package, we’re not talking about personal training, we’re talking about a large package which is several thousand dollars.

Can I use the two-step method online?

Absolutely, and initially, you do want to take you’re clients online using a two-step method.  The best way to do that is to include a website as opposed to using a 1-800 number.  Just a quick note on the 1-800 number, most people get a better response using a 1-800 number and a recorded message as opposed to a live message or a live person.  People don’t really want to call and talk to someone.  They just want the information.  A great company to use is TapLive, a very inexpensive — you’re looking at about $100.00 to set up and then it’s $30.00 a month and when you look at the cost of acquisition, it’s pretty cheap. That’s TapLive, it’s www.taplive.com.

Okay, what you do is instead of having a 1-800 number, you can send them to a website, and what they’ll do is they’ll have what they call a name squeezer, a name capture page where they’ll enter their first name and their primary e-mail address.  It’s important that you get their primary e-mail address as opposed to just any e-mail address because you want to make sure that you are corresponding to the right e-mail address.  Then what you can do is you can have either a downloadable e-book for your report, an MP3 download, you could even start using video.  The great thing about bringing them online is you can now use e-mail marketing where you’re reducing your costs and you’re on the list.  The great thing is, is it’s an auto-responder, and it’s an automatic system.  That’s the brilliance of the two-step method.  It’s an automatic system.  You don’t have to continually be there to update it, the ad does the work for itself, the website does the work for itself, and the free report does the salesmanship for you.

How can you get someone’s primary e-mail as opposed to just getting their regular e-mail?  Instead of getting some junk e-mail they use.

What you do is, you actually offer them, — you notify them that you’re going to be providing a downloadable link.  The download link will come in the e-mail.  That way you’re pretty sure you’re getting the primary e-mail address, because the ones that are after the free report, or whatever you are giving away, they’re not going to send it to a junk e-mail.

Can you tell us a little more about auto-responders and how they work?

What an auto-responder is, is it’s an automatic system where you load up your sales message or — it’s normally a combination of content and the sales message, and then at a predetermined time they’ll actually send out automatically to a recipient.  The great thing is, it’s automatic, and you can just run it continually as long as you are always updating the content and things like that.  Normally the best people that we recommend is Aweber; that’s www.aweber.com.  The other one is oneshoppingcart.  Those are the two that we normally recommend simply because they have the highest deliverability rate in the industry.

Can you load up a month’s worth of newsletters in these things?

Absolutely, as long as you are providing content, you’ll find that your list, the people on your list, will be happy to hear from you.  The greatest thing you can do is put your personality into your e-mails.  If you put personality into your e-mails, people look forward to actually reading the e-mails.

Should the e-mail be promotions for stuff or should they be content rich?  Should there be a balance?  What kind of system would you use for sending out e-mails to people, and how often should you send them out?

There are different schools of thought on this, a lot of people say that I should just provide content and occasionally a sales pitch.  Then there is another school of thought where you just pitch them.  If they know that they are just going to get a sales pitch, then they’ll either delete the e-mail or they’ll read it.  A lot of times, we will send out an e-mail once a day once they sign up.  The thing is that once someone signs up to receive the information from you, they’re hungry for that information.  If you are very lackadaisical, meaning that you send it out every one, two, three weeks or the seldom hear from you, a lot of times they think it’s spam because they forgot that they signed up.  So, I normally recommend every day or every other day in the beginning and then once they’ve bought something from you, I’d move them from that list and move them to a different list because you know that they’re a buyer, and if they don’t buy, probably e-mail them once a week, maybe once every fortnight.

Can that be automatic?  After they become a buyer, can they automatically be transferred to the different list?

Yes, it depends on what they’re actually buying, like if they buy something from you online, what they do is, is when they hit the download links, you just ask them to re-enter their e-mail address and that’s a very easy way to send them to that list.  Does that make sense, what I just said Chris?

A little bit, could you explain that a little bit more?

Okay, let’s say for example that you have a lead for a sales page in your e-mail, they go to the sales page, they decide to buy.  When they get to the auto-page or when they get to the download page, what you do is, you just ask them for their e-mail address, their primary e-mail address, and their first name again, and what that does, is it goes to a different auto-responder series.  So now, they are on your buyers list.  What you’ll do is, you’ll provide them with — if you have a different product, you provide them with a different product, or if you have an affiliate product, you can provide them with the affiliate product.  You just keep on upgrading them as they, over time, they buy something then they buy something more, you just upgrade them until you — they get to your number one package.

Can the auto-responders put people’s first name in the e-mails?

It can be done, but it’s normally easier if they actually put it in.  Simply because people are very wary when they go online that they don’t want their e-mail or their information stolen  So, by asking them to put it in, they feel as though they have some control over it whereas if they actually see their name there, then it can be a bit daunty.

Let me ask you about the newsletters going out to the people.  Should they be personalized and have that persons name in the newsletter?

If you can put the first name in the newsletter, it’s better for you simply because personalization increases response up to 30%.  The other advantage of having it personalized is that it’s going to get past the spam filters and your deliverability is going to be higher which is probably the most important thing to consider when you’re actually dealing with e-mail marketing.  The other thing you want to keep in mind is that when you’re dealing with spam filters — a lot of companies have what they call Spam Assassin, and you want to run that through — you want to run your e-mail and newsletter through Spam Assassin just to make sure that it’s going to get through and it’s not going to end up in a junk folder.  Stuff like: Free, etc, is going to end up there.

What can you do in a subject line to get e-mail open?  Is there anything you can put in the subject line to kind of help with that, to kind of separate yourself from the spammers and to create interest in people to make them want to open the e-mail?

Well, as long as you’re not talking about certain enlargement or Viagra and such — but no, what you want to do is to create curiosity and that becomes really important and it’s pretty much like the headline for your ad or whatever.  One of the things you want to do is, as a marketer, is you want to be on several different lists.  What I mean by that is, you want to watch what the big guy is doing, see what they’re doing and then you can actually imitate what they’re doing.  I have a whole list of different e-mails that I keep from some of the really good marketers online and I’ll go through and I’ll just have a look and I’ll see what the subject line was, did I open it, did I  not open it, and see if it’s appropriate for my market.

Now it sounds kind of daunting, creating an e-mail to go out to somebody every day, every other day, or even every week.  Is there a way that trainers can write their e-mails quickly and efficiently?  Is there some kind of method they should use or anything?

The easiest way is to continually write.  If you’re doing it every so often, then the brain tends to get rusty.  If you have good content, looking for good content online is one way that you could actually do it; there are different article sites that you can actually get the information from, public label rights, which you can actually use to get information from.  What public label rights are, is basically you have a license to either give away the information or resell the information.  You can use that for content.  As long as it’s good content and it’s relevant to your market.

Can you explain the basics of a good ad, a good sales copy, and that kind of stuff?

There’s basically five concepts.  The first one is you want to command attention.  Number two, is you want to show people the advantage of using your product or service.  Number three is you want to prove that what you are advertising has that advantage.  Number four, you want to persuade people to grasp that advantage, and most importantly, you want to, number five, make a call to action.  Basically get your client or your prospect to do something.  You could do that, set up for a free report, pick up the phone and call you — what I’ll do Chris, is I’ll elaborate on a few of those.

The number one thing is the headline.  The most important thing about the headline is that you have to entice the reader to start reading the copy of the ad or newsletter.  The only way that your ad is going to work is if you’re copy gets read.  Your headline has to attract instantaneous and immediate attention.  Basically, you want to stop people in their tracks.  For example, if you had a flyer put up somewhere, you want your headline to really attract the attention.  For a personal trainer for example, someone who wants to lose weight, someone who has a health problem, you want to target it to those people.  You don’t want to — the one thing that I find, is people try and they want to talk to everyone all at once rather than singling someone out or singling out a target market.  Women, for example, when they go after women, they have a better chance of attracting their target market instead of saying, “Lose weight now”, if that makes sense.

One of the other things you want to do with the headline is, for example, if you offer a guarantee, put it in your headline.  Let people know it’s guaranteed.  Don’t put it all the way down at the bottom where they may not read it.  If you are offering a guarantee, I believe every personal trainer out there should offer a guarantee; it’s what they call Risk Reversal, it just — normally it would tip that person over the edge.  When you take away the risk, they are like, “Well, what do I have to lose”, it’s guaranteed after all.

Then you have the –

Can I ask you a few questions about headlines?  If someone has a unique selling proposition, their USP, should that be their headline, or should their headline kind of convey the message of their USP?  How are those two tied in?

The USP is really important if you have USP.  What USP is, “Why should I go with you as opposed to your competition?”  If you can tie it into your headline, definitely tie it in.  If you’re dealing with strength and conditioning and such, you want to make sure that it talks about strength and conditioning, either increasing power, increasing speed; you want to make sure you have the benefit in there as well.  Obliterate the competition, eliminate the competition, is what you want to do.  Just one thing, there is a great resource, if you type in 100 greatest headlines into Google; you’ll get the hundred greatest headlines of all time.  It’s a great place to go and get inspiration.

Let me ask you a question, are there any formulas — I understand there are formulas that people can use for headlines, would you want to elaborate on any of those?

Probably the easiest formula, the formula that I follow the most, is what they call Swiping, and that is taking a proven headline and then replacing the words to meet my market.  I’ll explain that a little bit.  How to win friends and influence people was a proven headline.  How to lose weight and feel confident could be a very simple headline off the top of my head.  By using that, you’re going to find that it’s proven and it’s tested, so therefore, somebody else has already done the hard work for you.  That is the main formula that I will use.  Another formula that I will use, I’ll try to put three benefits into the headline and such.

What about secrets or confessions or like, sometimes there’s like a little underdog story in the headline?  There is a classic one — My friends started laughing, I sat down at the piano when I started to play; or something like that.  Are there any other kinds of formulas for headlines that you really like?

There’s basically, that’s an old John Caples headline, and that is sort of, what I meant about swiping.  I have thousands and thousands of headlines that I will actually go through and have a look and see which ones are appropriate for the market.  For example, I’m just trying to think of one, a great place you could go if you’re looking for others, is a place called OHP Direct, it’s for the golf market, but can easily be translated into the personal training market.  It’s actually; most of the ads on that site are by John Carlton who they say is the most ripped-off copywriter on the internet.  Did that answer your question Chris?

Can you tell us about some of the different formulas for headlines — you just did “How to win friends and influence people,” that’s kind of what I want — how to — that’s one formula, is there any others you want to talk about?

Well, one of them is, “Who else?” The funny thing about “Who else?”  is, everybody laughs about it on the internet simply because so many people have used it.  There is a reason why so many people have used it, that’s because it works.  The newest headline was, “Who wants to look like a movie star”?

Actually, I just met a trainer a few days ago and his most effect ad yet was, “Who else wants to lose 15 pounds in 28 days” and he got a huge response off that.

Because it’s easy, it makes it painless; it’s got the big promise.  You want to make sure you have a big promise and then you want to make sure that you can deliver on it.  You want to make sure that you’re being as outrageous as you possibly can without twisting the limits of truth, is the way that I would put it.  I’ll respond in a minute how you want to make sure that you are backing everything up.  For example, you’ve got, “How a hard luck golfer accidentally discovered the amazing secret of consistently smacking 300 plus yard drives with stunning pinpoint accuracy.”  You could change that to, “How a professional trainer discovered the amazing secret of consistently exercising, losing weight, without craving foods”, this is straight off the top of my head, but you get the idea of how, by changing the words, you can actually get it to work.

Let me ask you a quick question regarding headlines.  My search engine guy for my personal training business wants me to have the name of my city and then personal trainer as my headline.  So I have to actually put my marketing headline under that.  How much do you feel something like that takes away from making people want to read the rest of the ad?  I know from a search engine standpoint it’s best to have, say “Los Angeles Personal Trainer” or whatever at the top, but I know that’s not really going to capture people’s attention.  Is there any way to work around that, any kind of ideas?  Should you just put the marketing headline right under that one real big, or what would you suggest?  I know it’s kind of a little off topic, but –

No, actually it’s a pretty good question, Chris.  What I would do, is I would use pre-head.  What a pre-head is, is it’s just a little bit of copy at the top that would say, “Attention — what’s your target market?”  Is it women or –?

It’s women age thirty to fifty who want to look better, they don’t really care much about feeling better, but they basically just want to look better and they have five to twenty pounds to lose and they want to be more attractive to the opposite sex, and they make over $30,000.00 a year.  That is basically my target audience.

Well, what you could probably do is, “Attention women of Orange County” and then I would actually bring in whichever headline you will end up using.  I wouldn’t use a very elaborative one, simply because unless people are used to reading direct response, they like the simple headlines.  “Who else would like to lose 10 to 15 pounds in four to six weeks guaranteed?”  What it is going to do is, it’s going to get the persons attention, and the great thing is, is you are looking at your target market.  For example, if you are on the web or if you’ve got — you’re sending direct response, there is no point, like if I’m on the web and I come across your webpage, I’m in Canada, that’s not good for me.  I am not your target market, I’m not a good — Addressing your target market right away, what you’ve done is, these people can now put their hands up and say, “Okay, I’m interested, talk to me.”  Make sense?

Yeah, perfectly.  When you say a ‘pre-head’ — can you explain what a pre-head is?  Do you mean an actual headline that’s in smaller font than the search engine one or what?  I’m a little confused on that.

The search engine is– it doesn’t care about the size of your text.  The spotters will actually read the text.  What it’s looking at, what a pre-head is, is normally, from memory, it’s about a twelve-point font, between twelve and fourteen point font.  Normally it is italicized; where your headline would normally be in like a twenty-four point font.  So it’s a little bit smaller, it’s just a lead in to your headline.

Do you think people will typically read that pre-head before the headline, or do you think a lot of people jump straight to the bigger headline and the bigger font?

Normally they are going to jump straight to the bigger headline with the bigger font, especially if they are looking quickly.  Another of the things you want to make sure with your headline is you want to make sure that it flows.  If it doesn’t flow, people will not read it.  For example, if you stop at any point, you know that there is a problem with your headline.  That is one of the biggest things we see with copies, is that people try to hard and they just make it difficult to read.  If people don’t read your ad right away, they’ll either throw it in the garbage if it’s paper, or they’ll click away.

Going back to some of the basics of a good ad.  You want to have a proven sales pitch; you want to say something that gets your readers attention, that’s the importance of the headline.  You want to tell the reader why they should be interested, you want to tell the reader why they should believe what your saying is true, you want to prove that it’s true.  A great way to do that is a very easy way to use testimonials.  You want your testimonials to be short and to the point.  You don’t want long-winded testimonials and if possible, you want to provide what that testimonial has done.  What I mean by that, for example, is, if the client lost ten pounds in three weeks, you want the testimonial to say, “Ten pounds in three weeks.”  You always want to be asking your clients for testimonials and there’s no problem actually re-writing the testimonial for your client by saying, “Look, I needed it for a specific use,” send it back to them, get their approval and then you can use it and that’s a great way to actually improve your conversion rate.

Another great way is if you have before and after photos, especially in the fitness industry.  It just blows people away when they see someone who was extremely overweight and then looking a lot slimmer.  You want to itemize and describe all the benefits of your products.  For example, if you’re using bullets, you want to make sure that if there’s a feature in there, what the feature is, and then you want the benefit.

Finally, you want to make sure that you have a call to action.  If it’s a product online, you want to show them exactly how to order.  If you put a phone number in there, you say, “Call the number below” if might work, people aren’t — let’s just say sometimes they’re a little bit lazy, if you put, call my number, you want to put the number in there right away.  A lot of people lose sales simply because the phone number isn’t right there.  You may have to scroll down, it may be on the back of a page, it could’ve fallen off.

Another thing you want to make sure you do when you’re writing the ad, you’re writing to only one person.  You’re not writing to a whole group of people, that way you can address that person’s issue.   You want to have in your minds eye who your target market is, you want to picture it as if they’re sitting across from you and you are actually giving them the sales pitch.

Let me ask you a question regarding that.  Say a trainer has two different ideal client profiles, one is men aged forty to sixty who want to feel better, who make over $250.000.00 a year, who own their own business, have a family and at least two kids and feeling better is the most important thing.  Then you have women aged twenty to forty-five who want to look better, they want to lose that last five pounds or something.  You have two different client profiles.  Should you have separate landing pages and sales copies for each of those client profiles?  They should actually be in separate copies, is that correct?

I would have separate advertisements for both because they are two totally different target markets and what appeals to one, will not necessarily appeal to the other.  It’s a great question, Chris, because a lot of people, they’ll put up one website and say, “I’m not getting any traffic” or “It’s not converting well.”  The biggest problem is, is they’re trying to be too many things to too many people.  You want to make sure that you’re reaching you’re target market.  You want to make sure that your headline is crafted to just go after that market.  There’s no point having “Lose 50 pounds” or “Lose 20 pounds” if you’re talking to a bunch of college athelets who don’t have weight problems and want to increase speed.  So, the trainer can help both of them, but he’s lost them with one of his ads.  Does that make sense?

Yes, it makes perfect sense.  Should the ad — can we talk a little about how the ad should be written?  Should it be written logically or emotionally or– I see a lot of trainers and their sales copy is very dull and boring.  It doesn’t get me charged up when I read it, yet if I go to read like a Dan Kennedy sales copy or Yanik Silver or — I want to buy the thing right away.  Even if it’s thousands of dollars, and a lot of times they end up doing that.  Can you talk about how — the language of that stuff?

Well, it’s a great point.  It’s a basic formula; it’s basically attention, interest, desire, and action.  You want to make sure that you get the persons attention and you can do that with the headline.  You want to create an interest.  Normally you’re looking at solving a problem.  People want to buy solutions and results.  Nobody buys a drill to buy a drill, they buy a drill because they want a help.  A lot of times people want to lose weight, they want to increase speed.  Whatever the solution is, that’s what you want to sell.  You want to make sure that you are selling hard.  A lot of copy — people who sell from the back of their sheet, they say, “Well, I really don’t want to offend anybody” or “I don’t want to upset anybody.”  If you’re not creating any emotion, then you’re not going to sell.  There’s an old saying when we say, “Either change the channel or turn up the volume,”  and what the means is, because I’m looking at only going after my target market, for example, when you’re talking about the women, “I don’t want to talk to any men because his wife has a problem.”  I want to make sure I’m only talking to my target market.  By doing that, you create the emotion.  You create the desire.  That is what they call the ‘Grease slide” you want to start them off at the beginning and you want to just let them slip all the way down where they don’t have a choice except to pick up the phone, order, or whatever.

Let me ask you a quick question.  On a website, say a trainer has several landing pages, one for the men, one for the women or whatever different client profiles he has, should he have maybe on his home page a button for each?  You know, men go here, women go here, and if he did something like that, would that lower his conversion rate?  Does that turn people away to have to — every time they click, does that bring down the percentage?  How would you deal with something like that?

It depends on how you’re driving your traffic.  If you’re driving it from, take for example, Google ads or whatever, it would go to the specific page.  If, for example, you’re doing a two-step method, the web page would be for the women or for whoever the target market is.  The home page is what they call a ‘Portal site’.  That’s not really a problem as long as that’s not where people are always ending up.

If you’re looking at search engine optimization then you want to make sure that you’re optimizing the landing page that is adequate for the market you’re looking for.  The worst thing you could do, for example, is have a paperclip campaign and it’s women’s weight loss, and it goes to your portal site and it’s got three or four different choices.  People will get confused and when they get confused, they’ll click away and they won’t buy.  You always want to look at how you’re driving traffic to the site.

It’s a great question because a lot of people will put up a website and they’re not looking at where they’re getting their traffic from.  It’s the first question we always ask is, “How are you getting your traffic” are they being lead there through affiliates and things like that, paperclip search engine optimization.

Basically, I just went through the different ones where you’ve got your attention, you’ve got the interest, you’ve created the desire, and then you have the action.  I’ll just go over a couple of little things that I’ve noticed with a lot of copies that makes it hard to read.  One thing that you want to do, is you want to read your copy out loud so you can see where it doesn’t flow and where it needs smoothing out.  Another great way to do it is to actually have a ten or twelve year old read it and anywhere that they stop, just put a mark, because what’s happening is — you want to have your copy at a grade five reading level.  The reason is, is that you want to make it easy to read, easy to flow, so that you are hitting your whole target market.  It’s fine to use nickel tones and things like that, but not when you’re trying to create emotion.  It’s to do with the part of the brain that actually makes the emotional decision and that’s one of the reasons that you target that.  When you edit your copy, you want to take it and you don’t want to use any unnecessary repetitious — you want to use short sentences, short paragraphs and you want to use every day English, meaning conversational.  A lot of the great copies are not grammatically correct which drives English teachers crazy, but it works.  The other thing you want to use is a generally supply of sub-heads and that will make the copy look interesting.  There is what they call a ‘Double readership part’ where you’ll start with your headline, or your subject, and all this stuff should actually flow so that if someone was scanning the page, they’d go to the headline, the sub-head, the other sub-heads, and normally they’d look at the price or the last piece.

Your first piece wants to be your strongest piece.  If you have a great testimonial, it’s a great place to put a testimonial.  If you have a very strong guarantee, you want to put it in the first piece, if you offer a lot of bonuses, you want to put that in your first piece, and then go down from there.

Perfect, so — How can I make sure my ads stand out from everybody else?

The main way is to use your USP.  What makes you different from your competition?  If you’re not doing that, then it’s not gonna get read; because why would I read your ad when it’s dull and boring, whereas your competitions may be exciting because it tells you why they’re different.  If you offer great ways — if you offer a guarantee, make sure that it’s big and bold, don’t put it way down where no one sees it.  You want to make sure that it’s big and bold and people know, “Hey, if I try this and it doesn’t work, I can get my money back.”

What is the best mailing list to choose?

The best mailing list to chose is actually your own.  I find that a lot of the companies and business that I deal with don’t have their own mailing lists or they very, very, rarely mail to their own list.  A great question to ask yourself is when was the last time I mailed my own list?  Do I have the physical addresses of all my clients so I can actually start sending the off line promotions?”  A lot of people may just have the e-mail addresses whereas you also want the physical mailing address.  If you don’t have the physical mailing address, a great way to do it is to send them an e-mail saying, “I have a free report I want to send you.  Its hard copy or it’s CD or its DVD that I want to send you.  Can I please have your mailing address?”  That’s a great way to get a mailing address for your own list.

How do I choose a mailing list?

Basically, there are two different types of mailing lists.  You’ve got a compiled list and you have a response list.  What a compiled list basically is, it’s just a bunch of data, — not a bunch of data, its data that’s taken, and it’s compiled.  It could be a geographic area and stuff like that.  The best place to get a compiled list is from InfoUSA.  The other type of list is the response list and that’s basically somebody who has responded either they subscribe to a magazine or they’ve purchased something before.  The other thing is they could be mail-order buyers, something like that.  Out of the two lists, the best type of list is a response list.  Simply because you already know that, they’re a buyer or they’ve already taken an action.  A compiled list is a lot cheaper, but you’re not necessarily going to get the best response from it.  When you are looking at the quality of the list, you want to look at the recentness.  How long ago did they actually act on something, did they subscribe, things like that, when was if compiled, the frequency, have they bought more than once if they’re a buyer, are they subscribed to more than one magazine, if they’re a buyer, a dollar amount of what they actually spend.  That’s a great way when you’ve got a high priced product.  You can actually go and find out the information and find out – if I have a $200.00 product, there’s no point sending it to a list of people that have only bought $20.00 products.  You want someone, for example, that bought it for $150.00 or something like that.  Geographic area is very important, a lot of people will forget about geographic area especially if you’re looking at personal training on a one-on-one basis.  Probably one of the best list brokers out there is NameFinders — www.namefinders.com.  The great thing about the list broker is, is that it doesn’t cost you anything.  They get a commission from the person that owns the mailing list.  Does that make sense?

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see in direct response ads or copy?

Probably the biggest mistake is people being creative, meaning they want to re-invent the wheel, rather than using their USP.  They’re going to make their ad look different than everyone else.  A great way to make sure that you are not making the mistakes is to swipe a letter, a proven letter, and change it, but just change it subtly.  For example, take something from the golf market that you know has been proven and then bring it over into the personal training industry.

Another big mistake is that the copy doesn’t flow.  That is probably the biggest problem that I see, simply because – you want to make sure that you get the reader from the top of the page to the bottom of the page.  And if they are stopping and starting and your story’s not making sense, then they’re going to click away or they’re going to throw your ad in the trash.  Not grabbing your reader’s attention is another big one, simply because, if you don’t have an attention-grabbing headline, it’s like, — you don’t wan to stop the reader from their every day life, you want to enter the conversation or interrupt the conversation that’s already going on in their head.  Another big mistake is basically failing to test.  We test everything, we test the headline, one headline versus the other to see if that improves response rate.  If you’re doing small scale mailing, it’s sort of difficult to test, but let’s say, for example, that you’re doing a mailing for 10,000 people, what I would do in the beginning is I would take my letter up and I would just mail it to 500 people and see what sort of response rate I get.  That way I know if the letter has a good conversion rate.  I’m not spending a lot of money by sending it to 10,000 people all at once and having it bomb.  That’ s why a lot of people say that advertising or direct response or mailings don’t work; simply because they’ll send out a crappy letter and it just doesn’t poll well.  So, by testing, you’ll actually be allowed to see how it performs and then you can change the headline if you wanted to just on price.  There’s a lot of different things, actually, that you can use for testing.

Now the key to all this is “Do it.”  If you use the testing method and you start on a small scale, there is no way that you can fail, simply because you are using proven methods that have been around for centuries.  That’s basically it Chris.

Anthony Coyne is a professional copywriter and marketing consultant.  His company is Ultimate Marketing Solutions and you can find him at www.ultimatemarketingsolutions.com .

This has been a health and personal training marketing interview by site owner Chris McCombs, who is a fitness marketing expert and specializes in fitness business internet markeing and how to get personal training referrals