What Is A Video Sales Letter? (VSL)

so what is a vsl should you have one should you have more than one i'm going to tell you all about today i'm john benson the billion dollar copy coach and this is sales copy secrets [Music] i'm going to start with a really good reason to listen to me today when it comes to video sales letters i actually created them i am known as the godfather of the vsl i created the first vsl in 2005 and i did that for my second book the every other day diet and went on to write truth about abs

that was the second vsl the first book was mine the second book was mike geary's they went on to sell a lot of a lot of copies i'll put it that way millions of dollars and vsos just took off from there and i became known as the guy to go to created an actual framework for vsls that has done over a billion dollars in sales for the people who follow it if you want to know more about that framework it is below nowvsll.com is what it's called now it's gone through many different name iterations 3x

bsl accelerator but it is now vsl.com check it out so what is a vsl it's not what you may think it is a lot of people think of esl is just taking a sales page and plopping it into a slide creator like powerpoint or keynote now that is an aspect of it there are obviously slides in a vsl in case you don't know a vsl is a basically a sales page in slide format but it's more than that it's a sales page designed from the very start to all but force your prospect to read every

single word of your sales letter or at least listen to every single word of your sales letter or both ideally until they hit stop until they exit the page now you may think well they do that anyway with a written sales page no they don't we've done heat map studies showing that on a traditional sales page a written sales page your user will scroll all the time they only read about twelve to fourteen percent of a given sales page that's it so imagine if you could take that twelve to fourteen percent and bump it to

fifty percent or a hundred percent if they watch your entire vsl that's the power of a video sales editor now there's a lot more technique stuff that we're going to talk about today what makes a video sales letter and we're going to talk about what a video sales there is not so you can avoid that before i do that i want to talk about one of the most interesting aspects of a vsl and that is the hypnotic effect a vsl can create so when you see slides going by you and there's maybe 10 to 15

words on a slide sometimes i use only one or two words on a slide that's going to create a very strong hypnotic effect so that's going to keep someone psychologically more interested and attached to watching what's going by and listening than a traditional sales page can it's kind of the exact opposite of what you're watching here just me and a talking head with a clear background i mean this is a very busy thing that you're watching on a video sells it i'm going to show you a clip here and as you can see the slides

going by i mean they're going by pretty fast right and they can go by with 15 20 words on a slide but they're going by relatively fast and i'm speaking these words as they're going by that's all a video sales letter really is now there are many different ways you can do this you can do just slides which is what a lot of multi-million we're talking six seven eight nine figure no kidding nine-figure vsls are all slides there's many that are just all slides like a few graphics here and there when the product comes up

no talking head no animation no fancy stuff at all and then my buddy craig clemens for example he's a great vsl author and for his company golden hippo they produce their vsos with quite a bit of production at the start but end up on you guessed it just slides because slides really do work extremely well so you don't have to have a big budget to do this it's one of the reasons i like vsls all you need is a 40 microphone and access to powerpoint or keynote or even there's free now free slide making online

tools just google it and that's it okay you absolutely can do this and we're going to go over a couple of things that you should not do in other words what a vsl is not first of all it's not a traditional sales letter in any stretch of means it requires a different type of pacing to start with and what i mean by pacing is the rhythm of the words the rhythm that you see or hear on the page as you can hear me talking i'm going to outline there is a rhythm going on and you

can hear it if i really accentuate it right the rhythm for a sales page differs slightly than the rhythm for a vsl again it's because we want to induce a hypnotic effect so it really helps when you start with templates that we provide for example in now vsl that have already got that rhythm built into it so you don't have to worry about having to create this stuff on your own but in case you want to in you're intrigued by it you want a rhythm that's going to create a an effect that feels like you're

leading the customer to the next slide and leading stuff sounds a lot like this that's really all it is there's some other cool tricks to pacing that you want to check out but that's basically one of the differences between a sales page and a vsl a sales page would sound a little odd like that now people can do that they'll type and they'll type you know they'll type a sentence or a phrase and they'll type dot dot another phrase dot dot dot that's what they're doing they're acting they're actually engaging you in pacing and that's

a way to do that on a traditional sales page now the pattern interrupts on a video sales letter are much more frequent they are they are they happen almost all the time but they definitely happen at the start now what is a pattern interrupt a pattern interrupt is an nlp neuro-linguistic programming term that just simply is essentially you scratching the disk of your brain okay picture your brain on one of those old cd disks you know people used to listen to back in the back and then back in the 2000s oh gosh so long ago

right but yeah they would you just take a take think about taking a knife and scratching that disc well that could never play the same way again right well sort of the same way only there's no permanent damage done when you do a pattern interrupt you scratch the person's brain they're expecting something when they hit a video and you say something or show something or do something completely out of the ordinary you make a non-sequitur statement for example like one of the most famous is my my infamous hi my name is john and this is

a magic jacket this magic jacket helped me lose 75 pounds well so they don't know if this jacket is like some sort of a weighted vest or does it like hold in body heat and so you lose water it actually has nothing to do with that and i even say that look it's not what you think i'll tell you more in a moment that's a pattern interrupt so i've opened a loop with that pattern interrupt an open loop another nlp term means that i've just i've stated something and i have not finished the thought that's

another difference between sales letters and video sales letters video sales letters allow for a lot more of this open loop stuff and when you open loops like when i say for example i'm going to tell you all about open loops but first well that's an open loop okay first and then i tell you something else your brain is going well wait i'm going to hang on for that second part that whole open loop thing right that's what an open loop is and you can do a lot more of those in bsls than you can in

sales pages they're much more effective because again in sales pages you can scroll past all that stuff so nowhere near as effective now the voice is going to play an obviously big role right i mean you know that at some point oh gosh i got to do my own voice over not necessarily i do a lot of voiceovers or did a lot of voiceovers for vsls in fact a lot of vsls you hear have my voice on them i did radio a little bit in college so i'm a little trained in it and i just

have that kind of like on a radio voice but you don't need my kind of voice to do a video sales letter at all some of the most successful vsos were done but hiring really inexpensive voice over actors that are doing this for a couple hundred bucks don't let that slow you down if you don't like the sound of your voice okay you want a voice that sounds relatable though so even though my voice has that you know radio guy voice i'm not speaking in a radio guy voice when i'm doing this i'm speaking in

a relating voice and that's another thing that makes vsl so powerful is you can emotively connect with your prospect to a much greater degree than just words on a page because as you're speaking the words you can change how the person is perceiving the words i'm gonna give you a quick example let's say that i say um i love you okay i don't know you but i love you those are three the words that just you know usually people love to hear that unless it's an awkward relationship right then you don't want to hear it

but let's say that you did but if i said the same thing and i went yeah i love you you that's has a totally different meaning to it right so as the narrator either you or a professional you can change what's on the screen dynamically and evoke different levels of emotion different levels of connection building different levels of rapport or connection with your prospect that's really cool another thing you want to do is you want to create more frequent tie downs in a vsl what's a tie down a tie down is just a reminder of

what you just covered because again on a sales page people can scroll up if they're reading like a teaching segment they can go i didn't catch that last part let me scroll up and read it again so you just want to do reminders a lot so if i'm teaching somebody something let's say it's in weight loss which i write a lot in and it's i'm teaching them about metabolic flexibility and i could say well think of it this way and i give an analogy and i then define it then i say there was a study

done on it and then i get to the end i go okay what did we learn about metabolic flexibility well it's this there's studies on it and here's how you want to apply it so i just tie it all back down before i go on to the next point that's very important to do in a video sales letter and by the way do it in a webinar as well lastly you can do a lot more calls to actions in video sales editors than you do in sales pages sales pages you can just have literally one

button at the very bottom as a call to action and a few tech lines of text to draw people to that button where in a video sales center you want to say continually after you do the pitch look below this video right now click the button today and you can do different levels different styles rather of those pattern interrupts but you do want to do it frequently i was the guy that created the magic buy button which is now built into a lot of video applications which is where at a certain time in a video

sales letter they don't see anything but the video and then everything pops underneath it like when i say look below this video right now and all you know the javascript triggers and drops everything underneath the the video that is a very cool things to this very day send someone just to a video there's nothing on the page there's no links to buy anything and then experiment with different times to draw that call to action those scripts are all over the internet and you know video players like wistia they have it built in there's other ones

that have it built in vitalytics have it has it built in but you want to check out a player that has it built in so you can say okay at this time in the vsl drop all the buy button and then you can have like a little miniature sales page underneath it another benefit of a vsl over a sales page you can actually have both so in other words you could have a sales page right now have the vsl version of it above it and then have the whole sales page drop down underneath it if

you really want to these are all things that you should test as a marketer to see which thing converts the best for you videos are obviously a very visual medium but vsls don't have to be words that go by on slides really that can be just about it but if you want to spruce it up a little bit you can try doodle art at the start that was a big thing about five or six years ago you could try animation you can try live video at the start we've experimented with that now but what i

do is i take about a thousand to 1500 words of the start of a vsl if i want to play with this and then i'll put stock video footage over top of it and then this is very important all the words are still on the screen this is a major mistake i see video sales that are guys that are just starting out make they'll put stock video or they put themselves talking and they don't put the words on the screen not having words on the screen like a closed caption is cutting off anyone that's deaf

it's also cutting off anyone that's got their their video muted which is a lot of people these days especially on smartphones have you ever noticed when you go to play like a youtube video on your smartphone there's no volume right at least some of the times there's no volume it's going to make you tap something to unmute it and people get distracted so make sure you've got the text on the page the other thing is that creates that hypnotic flow again we want people to read and listen when you read and listen your retention rate

goes drastically higher 68 percent higher than if you just read or just listen so that's another reason bsls works so well so lastly let's talk about length everyone says hey how long should my vsl be most of my successful bsls are well over 50 minutes long there's a lot of via cells out there that are an hour and a half long i'm not suggesting that you have to go that long but the traditional formula that i created the five-step vsl formula that's in now vsl for example those tend to be about 55 minutes long just

by default now you can trim that down to 45 minutes and play around with that and if you have a product line you can cut that down to about 30 minutes but we've tested this for well the last nine years and over the last nine years we've rarely seen a video under 30 minutes convert well unless it's a lead magnet or a call to action for example that doesn't require any money like a call to action to book a call a strategy call then the 20 minute vs work great or if it's a seven dollar

product then you can do a five minute vsl but for normal price products anything under nine a thousand bucks you want to shoot for that 45 minute range the most important thing is not the length it's the interest if your vsl isn't interesting it doesn't matter how long or short it is people aren't going to watch it now our tick tock culture today has pretty much ruined the ability of people to look at video outside of these very short very you know banal videos that are being produced today but vsls are not videos that's what

i want to leave you with a vsl may have video in the name but it's really not a video in the way that a lot of people especially gen z people are thinking about video this is not something you watch for entertainment this is not something you watch for a quick minute you know five second fix of something this is a selling vehicle and it's the best-selling vehicle out there in my personal opinion and even if it doesn't sell as well as a traditional text based sales page you should have both and i'll tell you

why tech space sells pages even when they do convert better which sometimes they do you have to test rarely if ever are outperformed on upsells when it comes to video sales letters upsell vsls absolutely crush it and i highly suggest if you sell anything after your initial sale that's an upsell that you do that through a video sales letter all right i hope you enjoyed my overview on what a video sales letter is and how you should use one and obviously you can use more than one you should use more than one if you want

more information look below right now and go to checkoutnowvsl.com also love for you to like subscribe share this video if you found it interesting i'm john benson the billion dollar copy coach i'll see you next time thanks