Your Portable Empire: How to Make Money Anywhere While Doing What You Love

Chapter 9. Interview with Dr.Joe Vitale

To help us fully understand the science and art of copywriting, I interviewed Dr. Joe Vitale. Joe is a best-selling author, movie star, and TV personality. He's also one of the most respected and expensive, copywriters on the planet. His rates for writing a sales page start at over $25,000 and go up fast.

Joe was kind enough to spend an afternoon talking to me about copywriting. We sat in his kitchen, at his estate in Wimberley, Texas, while we recorded the following interview. Since his hourly rate is $2,500, the rest of this chapter is easily worth over five grand. If you use the information wisely, it can be worth much more than that.

Enjoy.

Pat: Let's talk about copywriting. Let's assume that the reader knows nothing at all about copywriting—just totally clean and new on the subject. We need to give them enough information so that they can go from zero (I don't know what copywriting is) to writing a believable, effective, first draft of a sales letter.

Joe: I think the first thing is to define what copywriting is, just in case somebody doesn't know. Copywriting is writing the words that create the sales message. In other words, in an ad, the words on the page are called copy. On a sales page, the words are called copy, and when you write those words you are considered a copywriter.

And of course, the same thing is true on a web site. All the words and all the text on that web site is copy. So, copywriting is the text to persuade somebody to ...