Death Of The Sales Letter

List building aside, the one thing that’s responsible for making millions of dollars in sales for the gurus is Video Marketing.

It has been over 2 years since Frank Kern used a real sales letter and Ryan Deiss has just announced that in the near future he’s going to change his entire marketing infrastructure to video as well.

Sales letter is dying and video is rapidly taking its place pixel by pixel. But is it enough to have a YouTube account to sell using video? Can you generate enough interest and trust using the same old embedding code we all have been using for the past half a decade?

Video Marketing 2.0

Answer is “No”. You can’t become the best marketer you can be unless you’re different. Using YouTube to host marketing videos is like saying that you’re the best street racing driver while driving ’96 Honda Civic.

Using a YouTube video on a sales letter gives you an impression of flabbiness. It makes you look cheap, unprofessional and it shows that you either don’t have the money to spend on decent video software or you don’t respect yourself enough to notice.

Either way, to get the most out of your sales letter it needs to be:

1. On video
2. Not hosted on YouTube, MetaCafe, Dailymotion, etc.

Video Sales Letter

Although location, design and video quality are important I want to bring your attention to the few qualities no one really talks about that are responsible for creating the real Shock and Awe amongst your prospects.

When you use a free service such as DailyMotion or Vimeo what you get (best case scenario) is just a big transparent “Play” button in the middle of the video screen.

This is not what is going to get your prospects to watch the video, is it? They know that there’s a chance that this video is long and it’s going to take a while to load and that they are risking loosing valuable time which they prefer to spend otherwise.

Headline Trick

That’s why the creative amongst us usually include a call to action in the headline which increases views.

But not many realize that by making your headline longer-you’re losing precious space above the fold, and that’s a potential 80% views loss, because 80% of your visitors, regardless of how good your headline is, won’t scroll down below the fold.

Gurus know that and that’s why they use an image inside the video frame encouraging us to click the “Play” button with curvy, stylish red arrows. This not only dramatically increases video views and sales but also keeps the headline short and snappy so it converts better.

Closing The Sale

Take action graphics aren’t the only thing that gurus use to pump up their video marketing. Another popular technique is redirecting the viewer to an opt in page after the video is over.

I’ve seen this shown by only one guru at a live seminar with a $5,000 entry fee. Here’s why it’s effective: when a person finishes watching a video off your site, say on YouTube, there’s a low chance that he’s actually going to use the link in the description box to visit your website.

Most of the time people just enter the name of the website in Google and use the SERPs to get inside. This robs you of things like affiliate commissions and tracked referrals since they did not use your affiliate link to visit the site.

Official term for this is “Affiliate Funnel Technique” and it’s particularly helpful if you’re practicing the “Video Skinning” technique that was taught by Keith Wellman.

Where Am I Getting?

What I am trying to say is that sales letters are easily recognizable and no one wants to read them.

Video has the highest perceived value and if you’re not using it to market-you’re leaving money on the table.

Death of the sales letter reminds me of the times when Walkmans were replaced by CD players. Some people had hard times saying goodbye to the audio cassettes but they couldn’t stop CDs from taking over the music industry. Same happened to video which was replaced by CD (and later on-DVD) and the same is happening to internet marketing. It’s called progress and there’s no use trying to stop it.

Video Marketing 3.0

And now that I’ve used the big bold headline and bunch of metaphors, I can finally come clean.

This whole rant on video marketing, gurus, cassettes and sales letters is actually a pre-sell for the hot new video marketing software that’s coming out on 01.12.2010. It’s called EasyVideoPlayer and here’s why I think you should add it to your marketing arsenal:

EasyVideoPlayer allows you to:

• Host videos on Amazon S3 fast loading servers
• Embed buy now buttons into the video
• Embed opt in forms into the video
• Scale videos
• Choose from numerous player designs
• Redirect viewers to any site as soon as video’s over
• Allow users to download your videos
• Embed sharing options and more!

Here’s what it’s going to do for you:

• Increase view count of your videos
• Prevent affiliate commission theft
• Gain respect and Create Shock and Awe for your prospects
• Stand out and thus be perceived as ‘better’
• Increase sales
• Increase opt ins
• Make more money using video than ever before!

And all of this is done with a click of a button. You don’t need to hire pesky designers, programmers and coders-everything is done using tools in the EasyVideoPlayer dashboard. This is Video Marketing 3.0!

Price

EasyVideoPlayer is still in the pre-launch phase and it goes live only on the 12^th at 12 PM EST. We won’t know the price until then, but you can watch EVP in action here to see what’s cooking.

P.S: I also recommend signing up for the early bird notification (as I did) to get an early notification of when EasyVideoPlayer becomes available.

Related posts:

1. Are You Ignoring The Most CRUCIAL Part of Your Sales Letter?
2. 7 Sure Fire Headline Formulas That Work
3. 7 Fill-In-The-Blank Headlines With Examples
4. Sneaky Way Of Overcoming Sales Objections
5. SHOCKING video on secret ‘YouTube traffic buying’ technique