Do you write webinars? Sell with webinars? Work for clients who use webinars? If so, this interview is for you. Jason Fladlien is the copywriter behind the highest selling webinars in history. I asked him about whether webinars are still working today and the answer is part of this 432nd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. We also talked about how to be a better copywriter, how to create information products and a lot more. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.

Stuff to check out:

Jason’s Info Product Webinar

One to Many (Jason’s book)

Jason’s website

The Copywriter Club Facebook Group

The Copywriter Underground

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  A few years ago I attended several mastermind events hosted by one of my mentors, Brian Kurtz. The were fantastic events. Each of these events featured several speakers sharing the strategies they use to succeed in whatever they were doing. One guest might share direct mail packages they used to sellout their services while another speaker might share copywriting techniques and yet another would walk through how to set up a research survey then share how they determine which answers are worth paying attention to and which answers could be ignored. I always walked away from these events buzzing with ideas to try. 

At one of these events, Brian invited Jason Fladlien to speak. Jason is pretty well known in the online world as the expert who created the highest-ever selling webinar… he sold something like 60 million dollars worth of services on a single webinar.  He has personally written hundreds of webinars that have sold millions of dollars in courses, services, products and more. I used what Jason taught at that event to write our best-ever selling webinar.

So it makes sense that Jason has been on my list of future potential guests for a long time. And we were finally able to get an interview with Jason. We definitely talked about webinars and what it takes to make them work—especially today when we’re hearing that webinars don’t work as well as they used to. Jason does a pretty good job of busting that myth.

But that’s not all. Jason shares how he created his very first information product. It’s not as easy to do today as it was when Jason first started, but if you want to sell courses and other products, what Jason shares in this episode will definitely help you get started. I don’t think its an exageration to call this episode a masterclass in creating and selling your own products. There are a lot of copywriting insights here as well.

But before we get to all that, this episode is brought to you by The Copywriter Underground. I’ve spent the last week rebuilding our content vault and adding a lot of additional training to it. New workshops include how to add a VIP day to your services, how to create a new offer, how to get more done, how to do research, how to develop your own frameworks, how to conduct discovery calls, how to get more referrals, how to build an email list, how to create a launch sequence and dozens more. The more we add the more I think we really need to raise the price because there is a crazy amount of helpful templates, workshops, and even monthly coaching in The Underground. You can learn more at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu.

And now, my interview with Jason Fladlien…

Unfortunately, as we started recording this interview, we had some technical difficulties and we lost the first five, six minutes of the interview where Jason introduces himself and talks a little bit about how he got started as a copywriter and how he created an information product from scratch and started selling it for, I think, $7. He was originally creating content for just a couple of dollars per article when he started out and needed to learn copywriting in order to sell his services. So we’re going to join the interview as I ask Jason how he became a copywriter, how he got good at the process of writing and where that took his business.

Jason Fladlien: Yeah, I mean, because back then all the copywriters that tell you how to write copy, they would give you this very long convoluted process that involved a tremendous amount of research, which I get. If you’re going to write for Agora back then when they were printing stuff and putting it in the mail, and there was lots of money on the line, you should do that. But we are at this cross section of the new internet where I found very quickly, and this is what changed my life, is I didn’t have to have to write world-class copy. I had to have an interesting offer that I could just write very quick, formulaic copy around, and that’s what I did. I create a lot of info products because that’s where I created that first one and it sold well, Rob. It was like, let me just repeat the process. Let me create these cheap little ebooks, $7, $17, $27, make them very simple, solve problems because I could publish them fast. All of them needed a sales letter. So let me come up with a formula to write these sales letters. 

So here’s what I did. It was brilliant. I went and I found every good sales letter I could find and categorize them. I said, okay, what kind of headlines do they all use? Can I fit them in a category? Turns out 80% of them could fit into one of four categories of a headline. So when I sat to write it, Headline, I wrote one of four headlines. That was it. Leads, there were about five ways I saw repetitively that were used to open up a sales letter. Great. Bullet points, I found there were about five different structures of bullet points that I could use when I wrote bullet points. Guarantees, so I isolated these key variables and then I found the structure. I didn’t copy it. Here’s a lead as old as time, Rob. I’m sure you’re familiar with this. If you’re looking to X, Y, and Z, then this will be the most interesting letter that you’ll ever read. Here’s why. Halbert made that very popular. To this day, people will still use that as a lead. The important thing isn’t the words that are used, it’s the structure behind it. If-then statement, it’s the linking of the two. It’s calling out something very exciting that’s in their mind right now that they’re so desperate for, and then dramatizing it to say, to open up the idea that you have a solution for it. And that’s a good strong lead. So it was less the specific words, which is what a lot of copywriters are focusing on. It was more the structure underneath it. I isolated that, and then I would assemble them together like blocks. And that’s how I wrote a lot of my copy. And what was really cool, Rob, is along the way, you become unconscious about this. So I could recite phrases by memory after a while of doing it enough. 

Guarantees that I would use over and over again after a while and I really got good at it was like Whether it’s 29 minutes from now or 29 days from now on a 30-day guarantee, right? If you want your money back you get every penny. So the word penny was used because it diminished the cost associated with it. If you said dollar… dollar seemed bigger than penny, right? You get every penny promptly and quietly returned to you. So I was like, okay, no fuss. So I could memorize these because I would use them so often and then I can think and copy. And I didn’t have to like create so much as pull it out with a swipe file inside of my head and stitch them and assemble them together. And that was a game changer for me. And so then people would want me to write copy for them because they would read the copy I wrote for myself. And they say, can you do for me what you just did for yourself? And I’m like, if the, if the, Jack’s big enough. Of course I can. That’s how I really got to copy.

Rob Marsh: How long did that process take? In my head, I’m seeing copywriters who buy the book, a book, and they’re like, oh, here’s the formula in the book. I’m just going to apply that across the board. And it usually doesn’t work because they’re not thinking there yet.

Jason Fladlien: It only works if the context fits the formula. That’s the challenge, right? So like, you know, and I still remember most of this today, even though this is now 16 years ago. The most tried and true headline that you could always use is how to do insert something incredible. In certain specific time without big things that normally would get in the way. So that structure, it’s still one of the best ways to write a headline to this very day. How to do something they desperately desire in a certain specific amount of time without normal obstacles that would prevent or stop them from getting the thing that they want. That covers like all the bases. Now, you could dress that up, you could play with it, but at the end, what does it have? It has a promise in the headline, it has a timeframe as