 Hey welcome back to the channel. So in this video I'm going to talk about five deadly copywriting mistakes that are killing your sales and killing your engagement. This was actually an issue in my Friday Fire Weekly newsletter. It goes out obviously every Friday and got a really good response rate. So I wanted to put this in a video format as well since I know that everybody's on my email list. Now real quick if you're new here my name is Sean. On this channel I talk about how to make money from writing online. If you want more content around that just hit the like and subscribe button so you don't miss any of my future videos. So if you are new I like to keep things pretty formal and pretty relaxed. I'm going to hop into my screen. I'm going to go over each of these mistakes and show you how to avoid making these mistakes and also how to fix them to make your copy stronger and generate more sales and get more engagement. Now as I go through these just keep in mind I've made every one of these mistakes. I'm not just telling you not to make these mistakes. I've gone through and made them and seen the effect. So once I fix them my sales improved and engagement went way up. Audience grew at a much faster pace as well. So I've been seeing these memes everywhere. These little miss there's a little miss for everything but little miss doesn't learn from her mistakes is on theme for today. So I thought why not have some fun. I'm a guy. Let's use some Mr. Memes here. So I put Mr. the mistake for each of these and each of the mistakes are after the word Mr. So had a bit of fun writing this. Let's get into the first one. The first mistake is Mr. Unbelievable. Not having writing or copywriting that's believable. So almost every newbie myself included goes through this phase of trying to make claims as big as they can be. So they think the bigger the claim is the more convinced someone is going to be to buy or to take a certain action with them. And that is not true at all. You have to back up that claim and you also have to get people to believe two things. You have to get them to believe your claim itself and they have to believe in their ability to achieve your claims. So in the business space I see stuff like this all the time right I'll double your business. I'm on a hundred X your leads and sales. I'm going to supercharge your skyrocket your profits. A lot of beginners when I see that type of stuff I know beginners are using that language and that just tells me that person is a beginner not very good at marketing. So another example if you tell a 400 pound dude he's going to lose 200 pounds in 30 days. If he takes your workout program there is almost a zero percent chance that he buys because number one he doesn't believe your claim and number two he's not going to believe in his ability to alert to lose 200 pounds in 30 days. So those are the two beliefs someone must have and it must be believable with your claim and their ability in themselves to achieve what you say in your claim. So of course we want to we want to back up our claims with proof but let's say we go from saying you're going to lose 200 pounds in a month to losing 10 pounds in a month while eating bacon which is the ketogenic diet I actually did this exact thing here. That's a lot more believable a lot more doable and so try making your claims smaller and more doable instead of trying to pump it up all the time like going for something like this. So that's mistake number one is making your claims and you're writing too unbelievable. We want to make it smaller more doable so that people believe in your claim and in their ability to do it. Second mistake is being Mr. Lecturing Dad. So I used to get in trouble a lot as a kid. I would always get grounded and scolded and lectured for all types of different things. I wouldn't listen to my parents. I'd go out at night after my curfew. I'd go to places I wasn't supposed to go and they would always when I would come home they would give me a talking to right. I was I'm the oldest kid in my family so I got the strictest. So they would always scold me hey you're going to be grounded for three weeks if you do this again and that didn't get me to stop it actually got me to do it more because I didn't want them telling me what to do. So I was like I'm not listening to you. I'm going to go out and do it again. So I thought rebellious is probably partly because I'm a bad kid and it made me want to do the thing that they were scolding me for more and more. And so this is what happens when you are writing copy and you're creating content. If you have that lecturing scolding tone and pointing finger tone you are going to make people more resistant. No one's going to want to listen to you because you're telling them what to do you're scolding them you're lecturing them and people don't like to be lectured and scolded very similar to how I was as a kid and very similar probably to you. I'm assuming you don't like to be told what to do either. So unless you're someone like a celebrity or a high ranking politician where you have an enormous amount of respect coming your way people are not going to listen to you it's going to make them more resistant if you try to lecture and scold. So there's a couple people I can think of that can get away with this because they're very good at doing this the right way then settle is one Chris Orzakowski is another guy. So they use this lecturing dad tone sometimes but they do it in a way that's cheeky and funny and entertaining. So if you are not experienced I don't recommend I see this a lot it's very common people lecturing and hey don't do this or do this instead or you must do this that's lecturing that's the lecturing tone. So avoid doing that unless you're in a position of power because what it does is it repels more than attracts people. So if you want to attract more people then make sure that you are not using this lecturing dad tone not making this mistake. Now the way that you fix this is I like to just think of having I like to drink I have beers I have whiskey and I like to think of myself sitting at the bar with a good friend if I'm having a brew with them and I'm just chatting with them how would I explain what I'm trying to say to them how would I tell them a story how would I convince them to buy a product that I've been using and getting good results with that's the type of tone that I take not lecturing my friend or I'm not going to sit down and lecture him on something I'm going to explain to him or tell him a story in a certain way or convince him in a certain way to buy a product by using a certain tone so take that friend at the bar tone or stance versus the lecturing parent stance and you're going to attract a lot more people who are receptive to your message that's mistake number two is using lecturing dad tone number three is mr confusion so we were with I was with my wife and her friend and her her friend's new boyfriend yesterday we're having drinks and he asked me what I do for work and I told him I teach people how to write online what about you so I have different answers depending on who asks but that's the answer I had at the time for someone who is not also in business so he said it was cool I gave him some details on my email list and my youtube channel and then I asked him what he does and he went into it I had no idea what he was talking about so he was saying stuff like well basically I do this essentially I do this and he was using phrases and words I've never heard of before using like industry specific terms and so I was just super confused and I was just I was doing that the entire time so nice guy right he was really excited about it but I really didn't understand a single word or a phrase of what he said I don't know what he does still so all my wife and I could do with smile and not which brings me to the mistake number three is that confusion is the killer of sales and engagement a confused person is never going to buy they're not going to engage and they likely won't be back again they're not going to come back if you're confusing them or making them feel stupid so if the reader can't understand what you're saying nothing else matters they're definitely not going to buy they're not going to engage you're not going to be back so don't try to be clever don't try to be cute don't try to be smart using big words that no one else knows make sure that you are clear above everything else make sure that your message is easily understood can you see how much easier it is to understand this I teach people how to write online versus going in a five-minute conversation not really saying much of anything right we want to make sure that they can understand our message confusion is going to kill all sales all engagement so clarity should be your number one priority the way that I like to improve and fix this is just imagine I'm explaining this message to someone young to someone who's maybe in fifth grade that helps me to make it clear and simple to understand mistake number four is mr never gets to the point so you might have a friend like this I have a friend from college who loves to tell stories but takes forever to get to the point and whenever he starts talking people roll their eyes and like okay I guess we're gonna sit here for 10 minutes now because he spends in an eternity talking about details that are not relevant to the story so let's say he goes to dinner and something happens while he's eating food at dinner he might talk about the entire sequence leading up to him getting to dinner so he might talk about walking down the street and seeing the lady in workout gear or a man in workout gear or seeing a pitbull run down the street or seeing a guy smoking a cigarette so he gives you all these details that are not relevant to the story at all and I can't remember who came up with this term but they call it throat clearing where you take forever to get to the actual point the actual meat of the story so you need to get to the point and fast because you will lose people I don't remember where I read this but it said the human attention span is less than a goldfish which is six seconds or less so you have a very very small window to get someone's attention so if you are writing copy and creating content people aren't going to be as forgiving this is my friend so we'll just sit there and listen to him and roll our eyes and laugh about it but if someone doesn't really know you too well and they're reading your copy and reading your content or they're a completely cold prospect and you're trying to get their attention you are going to lose them and they're never going to be back so I tried to get to the meat as quickly as possible if you want to see examples of this go to my LinkedIn profile and you can see exactly how I structure my posts and how I post every day I don't want to waste time sharing details that are not relevant to the reader I don't want to spend time clearing my throat I try to capture attention right away and I keep it throughout because we only have a couple seconds before we lose them possibly forever so do the same thing don't waste your audience's time by sharing all these irrelevant details get to the point to the meat of why they're there and keep it relevant on what they want to the point of the story so that's mistake number four mr never gets to the point make sure that you're getting to the point quickly and immediately mistake number five is mr generic I talk about this a lot to my clients and students but this is a mistake that I made quite often and still makes from time to time but this is not being specific enough so instead of being specific we're being generic so here's an example what sounds better I'll help you make more money online that's generic right everyone says that who's in the make money online space or I'll help you make an extra 5k a month writing simple fifth grade emails for other businesses which one is more specific this one is generic and this one is super specific and here's a simple way to test this right we want specificity in our copy and messaging but the way that I test this is I ask myself can I draw this out easily if I can't or if there's too many ways to draw this out then it's not specific enough so if we take this for example I'll help you make more money online we might be able to draw that out but there's a million different ways we can draw that out as opposed to this there's just one way to mainly draw this out right a guy sitting at home he's typing on his computer you can see you can draw like some cash spitting out right but the idea is going to be the same every time because this is specific so option b it's you can tell this is more specific because we can draw this out and there's not a million different ways to do so option a there's so many different ways we can do this this is way too generic way too broad so if I'm wondering if I'm specific enough or not I ask myself can I draw this out so one in doubt draw it out or ask yourself can I draw this out and if there's too many ways or you can't think of a specific way to draw it out then you probably have to go a little more specific okay so those are the five deadly copywriting mistakes that are killing your sales and engagement let's go through them one more time number one is being unbelievable number two is being mech mr lecturing dad mr three is being mr confusion number four is being mr never gets to the point and number five is being mr generic and I gave you fixes for all of these mistakes here so that's going to wrap this up if you enjoyed this make sure that you get on my email list to get the next friday fire issue you can go to shawn anthony dot co you're going to get a free course it's called the one k a day offer buffet which breaks down my business model and how to replicate it for yourself and you will also start to get these weekly friday fire newsletter issues every friday at 12 p.m pacific so again shawn anthony dot co you're going to get a free course and all the future friday fire newsletters and yeah if you enjoyed this please give it a like comment down below if you have any questions and i'll see you in the next video take it easy