Copywriting doesn’t have to be intimidating. Anyone can learn to write influence copy if they have the right tools and strategies. Tune in to learn the biggest concepts of influential writing and how you can use them to become a more effective and influential writer in your own business.
[00:00] In this episode, Igor covers the two big concepts of influential copywriting that completely changed the game for him and helped him become an incredible storyteller.
[00:43] Do you like Igor’s AI-generated voice?
- Leave your feedback at igor.top/voice.
[02:00] Key to effective storytelling:
- You always have to start your storytelling with a purpose in mind.
- You want to do it in a way that doesn’t necessarily hurt conversions. So in other words, you don’t just tell a story for the sake of telling a story.
[02:28] How to use writing in general to influence people?
- When I say influence, I don’t mean manipulating them in a dirty way. I mean more like helping them connect with you and want to do business with you and to be friends with you and to become partners with you in many different ways.
[02:47] Start with an end goal?
- You always have to ask yourself, what is my end goal with this story? Is it just to elicit trust? Is it to promote any kind of product? Is it to sell an idea? Because sometimes it really comes down to that.
- Is it to excite them about an upcoming thing I’m going to be promoting? Because there is power in building up excitement and not necessarily pushing something right away.
- You have to figure out the story you can tell that helps advance the idea that makes sense for people.
[04:57] Invoke some type of emotion in your readers:
- Something you can tell that would trigger a feeling of some kind that further elicits action from people.
- I can tell you just from studying that market and listening to copywriters who do a lot of work in that market, that envy is one of them.
- You want to tell a story maybe about how you felt humiliated because you kept losing to your buddies. Or you can tell a story about how you won finally, how you keep winning consistently, or how you taught the technique to somebody who started winning.
[05:48] Take inspiration from testimonials:
- Go into the sales page of that golfing product you want to promote and you pull up a testimonial, and the testimonial is a story in itself.
- Most affiliates don’t even take the time to really study the sales material that they’re provided by the vendor, the webinars, and the sales pages, because those are full of stories. And those stories have already been pre-selected to have an incredible effect.
[06:16] The purpose of storytelling:
- The way to select a personal story would be based on the end goal of whatever it is that you’re promoting and trying to plant these ideas because stories are really not there to sell products.
- Stories are there to promote ideas, to sell ideas because behind every product that you will be promoting, there’s going to be one primary idea, also known as a unique mechanism.
[06:50] The concept of unique mechanism:
- Any kind of bestselling offer in any market has some sort of unique mechanism.
- The primary mechanism of the list-building lifestyle is the list because the list is what enables you to have the freedom to have the leverage, to have multiple streams of income, and to have the ability to send instant traffic to an affiliate offer.
- The storytelling that I will be doing for the sake of the list-building lifestyle will always be revolving around my list as it is its unique mechanism.
- I didn’t have a list of my own, I would be going out there seeking out stories of people with lists and I would be really promoting those stories, really promoting the concept of list building.
[07:46] Here’s what you should NOT do and why?
- If you just tell the story that really pushes the product, the thing that’s going to happen is people will feel pressured.
- People will feel like you’re trying to impose the product on them.
[08:02] Do this instead:
- But if you tell a story that sells a concept or an idea, what that will do is people will think that buying the product is their idea, even though you gently nudge them towards it.
- The story is only there to trigger a desire and to bridge the gap between where the people are and where your product is.
- So the story will be recognizable and relatable to the right people at the same time. What you will accomplish is you will not come across as a sales-y pushy type of person.
- Instead, you’ll be just the guy who told the story and they’ll continue to tune in because everybody loves them.
[08:53] How to write an effective story?
- Starts off with a story of two people, one of whom is really going hard on free traffic for six months and gets no results, which of course, the person is really showing my own experience, when I was doing the free traffic stuff and was seeing absolutely no results.
- And the other story tells of a person who goes into paid traffic, invests more upfront, but very quickly becomes successful.
- Once again showing kind of projecting my experience as soon as I made the switch from chasing free traffic to moving into paid traffic and building my list. And so it just instantly bypasses these defenses for people.
[09:32] Igor’s tips for beginner storytellers:
- I don’t expect you to become a master storyteller by tomorrow. But I do want you to be bold when you tell stories because you have a lot of value in your lifetime.
- You will find the most value in the stories that tell of the kind of nasty crap that happened to you. And those stories, you shouldn’t hide them from people. You should really embrace them.
- Once you get the hang of storytelling, you don’t even have to be a great storyteller. And you don’t have to live a very exciting life because this is how life works. Stories will happen to you.
[11:36] Recycle your stories:
- Stories are multidimensional because you can use the same story and you can tell it in a different way to sell a different idea or a different concept.
- Take the same story and twist it, and tell it for different purposes to highlight a different concept, a different idea from this story.
- Retell the same story, only highlight a different part of it to sell a different idea.
[14:16] Best place to find stories:
- There’s a great place for stories where you can literally find millions of them called Reddit.
- It’s like one giant website for communities. Whatever interest you have, you can just search for whatever term at the top, and then you’ll be presented with a list of communities for it.
- The other feature of Reddit that you will find extremely useful as a storyteller is people upvote things on Reddit. So you will see the things that resonate the most to have lots of upvotes.
[16:41] Igor’s book on email marketing:
- Visit www.igorsbook.com to learn more.