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The Traffic Secrets 2 Controversy
By Michael | July 19, 2008
There’s been some interesting banter among marketers and copywriters in a few online forums lately. It seems that the Traffic Secrets 2 course has pulled an amazing conversion rate but without using a world-class sales letter like the first Traffic Secrets course did.
Turns out that the creator of both courses, John Reese writes all of his own copy for every one of his products. The exception was the first Traffic Secrets course that John chose to hire a copywriter named Michel Fortin. John Reese hired Fortin to write the sales letter because John had a number of delays to clear up in order to launch Traffic Secrets 1 on time.
Fortin’s challenge was to help sell a then $997 home study course on traffic generating strategies and he did just that. He crafted a killer sales letter that pulled in over 1 million dollars in sales in the first 24 hours alone. That’s one of many reasons why Michel Fortin is still considered one of the top copywriters in the world today.
This time, Traffic Secrets 2 was a combination home study and ongoing web-based training. And it was being offered for under $400 – which made it affordable for a larger potential customer base.
Once again, there were a number of delays for getting Traffic Secrets 2 launched. But instead of hiring a copywriter again, John opted to “whip together” a sales letter for TS2 in about 5 hours.
To his credit, John is pretty good at writing copy already. Some of his affiliate emails are in my swipe file because they are classic soft-selling and value building at its finest.
But 5 hours is a drop in the bucket to research, write, edit, proof, and polish an online sales letter. So the sales letter was less than perfect at launch time. And John got publicly roasted for it in some of the online forums.
Despite using an “imperfect sales letter”, Traffic Secrets 2 pulled a 10% conversion rate – great by anyone’s scorecard.
How was that possible? Isn’t copy the most important part?
Not exactly.
Here’s where some of my copywriting colleagues start making plans to have me tarred and feathered.
Long before I ever even heard of copywriting, I owned a massage therapy center. I’d put out marketing that would routinely pull 3-5% response rate even with novice mistakes like my business name as a headline. I have a few pieces in my collection from that center that pulled as high as 15% and were not well written.
How did I pull off such respectable rates?
I was making a great offer to a well-targeted audience. Frequently that audience was people who were already clients of the center.
Back to TS2. John made a great offer — strong enough that I didn’t bother to read the sales letter initially. I already own TS1 and know how much he over-delivered on it.
Personally, generating more traffic to my info product sites is a big concern of mine. If I can double my targeted traffic to some of my sites, then it should – in theory – double the sales they produce each month for me.
Professionally, my clients often ask me for advice on getting more targeted traffic to the sales letters that I write for them.
In other words, it’s important for me to stay current on what works for online traffic generation. So I bought the course without even bothering to read the full sales letter because I was already sold on it’s merit.
Here’s the main point: Having a killer offer plus targeted prospects is most of the battle. And if the prospects are already sold on your product, then it’s even easier to make the sale.
The majority of the buyers were presold as either TS1 owners… presold by the affiliates talking about John’s accomplishments/merit… or presold by the “sample” videos that were offered in the 2 weeks prior to the actual product launch.
Strong sales copy is the 3rd most important factor but John did so well on the 1st two conversion affecting factors that the copy wasn’t as important to get a high conversion rate.
I would have loved to see John roll out another killer sales letter — written by him or someone else. Mostly to see him hit even higher sales records but it didn’t happen that way.
That’s life. Hindsight is always 20-20 but it doesn’t add numbers to your bank account.
At the end of the day, if John is happy with the sales numbers that’s what matters the most.
Lesson learned: Get your offer down cold and make it a tremendous offer. Everything else frequently will fall into place from there.
Until next time,
Mike
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