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.
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Stuff to check out:
Jason’s Info Product WebinarOne 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 associated with it because one of the strongest appeals is instant gratification. There are very few things that are more persuasive than instant results, right? And then it also starts to attack the objections. because the number one reason somebody won’t buy something is because they don’t believe either you or they don’t believe they will get the value out of what you promise. So we do all that economically in a single headline. Now, if we can add proof to it, even better, right? And sometimes the proof itself, I noticed is the whole headline. So you know, the old school headline, like, you know, 65 miles an hour, the loudest sound is the clicking of the ticking of the clock, right?
Rob Marsh: Yep, yep.
Jason Fladlien: The structure of that is that’s a proof headline. If you have compelling enough proof, then that should be your whole headline. And that’s how you should run with it. And so if you don’t have proof, A, you shouldn’t be writing a sales letter, period. I mean, why sell a product that hasn’t proven itself? That’s stupid. It’s like, hey, let’s cut down this tree with a blunt axe, right? Or a butter knife. Let’s cut down the tree with a butter knife. I’m going to be the strongest person in the world. I’m going to work. But there’s proof, and then there’s an insane amount of proof, or proof is the unique mechanism, if you will. If you have this unique amount of proof and you don’t articulate it immediately because you’re following some formula that doesn’t include that, then you’re limiting your capabilities. But at the same time, if your proof is so dang good, you don’t want those other things to get in the way of it. then you don’t need to make a claim. You don’t need to handle an objection because you can just use the strongest dominant appeal of what that offer is. If I could look at any offer and say, okay, I could write a headline one of these four ways, all four of those cover every context and then I’m just guessing. After a while, I get better at guessing. I think for this particular offer, this type of headline is going to be the one that works the best. I didn’t have a formula. I had like four options at each step of the process, and I could pick and choose and apply them based on what I thought made sense. The other thing too, Rob, that people weren’t aware of in 2008, I mean, they still pretend like this doesn’t exist. I could change a headline in two seconds. If it didn’t work, I clickety-clack, clickety-clack, and it’s changed. Again, the old dogs of copywriting from years past, they were going to write an ad, it was six weeks before they could do anything about it. So a lot of people were using these old paradigms in these new emerging markets.
Rob Marsh: So as your business developed then, obviously you were doing all of these digital products. You were also writing copy when it made sense for other people. And what was the balance there? And when did you, because, and I’m making some assumptions here just from hearing you speak, but at some point you basically built an agency and went in with your clients, you know, webinars and all kinds of different marketing materials. So how did that all come together?
Jason Fladlien: Well, what was cool is, you know, it’s so funny, like. It’s hard to make a lot of money just purely as a copywriter, it’s incredibly there’s an upper limit. Yeah, time really is like a Clayton Makepiece can sometimes break through it, that type of talent and still be like a pure copywriter with royalties and arrangements. But those are so incredibly rare. There’s something Gary Benzavinga said that I really liked. I had a client once and he bought the Only 500 seminar or whatever it was that Benzavinga did. It was a $5,000 product. He bought it and he shipped it to me because I was writing copy for him. He bought it just so I could study it. I’m studying it. I was doing this stuff already without even realizing it. Gary Benzavinga tells this story. He was working with a client on an anti-aging product. And he goes to the client and says, Hey, listen, if we had a bonus, uh, where I, we went out and found like 50 women that were like 50 years old, but looked like they were 25. We interviewed them and we created a bonus around them. This could increase the copy. And Benzavinga was given this as an example of, Hey, if you don’t have the necessary ingredients to sell the thing, don’t just say I’m a copyright or I can’t do anything about it. Right. Like, your job is to make the client money. While copywriting is the primary way you do that, if you can give yourself an unfair advantage, why wouldn’t you? And so most copywriters only rely on the copy. I’m just trying to stack the deck as much in my favor as possible. And so when I can write copy for myself, I can control more elements. When I partner with people, what we’re trying to do is I’m trying to find clients with proof that’s underutilized because all I got to do is pull the proof out and that’s it. But what I also discovered is if I can take copy and speak it, Not just write it. That’s an extra skill. There’s no doubt about it. But the return on that skill is so much more valuable than just putting it in a written word. And so I started to notice this, that if I could take copywriting concepts, develop them into presentations, then I could make a tremendous amount more money. And if also copy generally doesn’t add value, it sells something that adds value. So if I could churn copy and blend it into something that was simultaneously valuable as an advertisement, make the ad valuable in and of itself, regardless of whether they bought it or not, then I could have the opportunity to grow and create a brand. and then have the opportunity also to sell all at the same time, which, you know, that’s what I wanted to do. And so the webinar was the best vehicle for that because I could train for 45 minutes. Then I could sell for the remainder of the time and it’s a hybrid model. It’s not pure advertising. Nobody likes advertising. It’s not pure content because that doesn’t really make money very effectively. It’s a blend of content and advertising. By putting those two things together, that’s how I really started to crush it. Webinars were the thing that I found most often for the type of business I ran. There was nothing that could make more money and that’s even true to this very day. But because Rob, I love to work in all kinds of environments. I love to learn how to sell and communicate in all different atmospheres for myself, for clients, as partners, as a publisher, as a spokesperson, I’ve done it all. Each one of those slightly different versions of copy allows me then to infuse that in all of my copy. And that way, I don’t, there’s, There’s a million copywriters that are better than me because they focus on just the copy. I recognize that copy is an element in the whole campaign. I try to get good at all of the elements of the campaign, good enough. Then when you combine them together, it’s multiplicative.
Rob Marsh: That’s actually a really interesting takeaway. I doubt there are a million copywriters better than you, but there might be a couple of hundred, maybe a couple of thousand. But the idea of solving problems as opposed to writing copy is huge. It’s something that we’ve taught for years. But for whatever reasons, I think the same thing is true of designers. Designers get into design because they like to make things look nice. They’re not really there, most of them. This is not categorically true, but they’re not really there because, hey, I’m a designer because I want to make people buy stuff. And I think a lot of writers maybe approach it the same way. It’s like, yeah, I’m really good at writing. And so I’m just going to write good stuff as opposed to I’m here to sell. And I really appreciate your approach here where it’s if I can get good at every step of the process. Now, yeah, I’m a copywriter, but I’m a problem solver. I’m a revenue generator. I’m a sales, you know, system for your business.
Jason Fladlien: I mean, like, it’s good practice to read all your copy after you write it. And we’ve all been told to do that. Read it out loud. Read it to somebody else. Have somebody else read it to you. But it’s like, if I take that same time and just figure out how to add a new bonus to the offer, I’ll probably convert better. My copy won’t be as clean. I didn’t run it through Grammarly. I didn’t try to get it down to a third grade level because that would take another 50 hours, right? I went out there and said, how do I make a better guarantee? And so we use double your money back guarantees. Very rare thing that almost nobody uses in this business. I spend more time on how do I make a better than money back guarantee than how do we use power words in certain verbs in our copy to you know, grease the chute, if you will. All of those are cool things that a lot of copywriters are really good at that I’m not very good at. I’m not even necessarily very good at making sure there’s a tremendous amount of benefits, like, you know, a Eugene Schwartz style copy where, you know, there’s a benefit every three words, right? Like, I probably use too many features and not enough benefits because I’m speed writing that part of the copy. I’m good enough at it. But I’m then saying, how do we make a guarantee that’s better than money back guarantee? How do we do a dramatic demonstration in the copy itself so people can’t forget about it? How do we be different than the last 15 letters that they’ve read? And I find that those are better leverage points to create higher converting copy than most of the mechanics that are related to the copy itself. I’ll give you another one, Rob. It’s better to write two sales letters selling the same product than to try to make one sales letter sell the whole product. So it’s like, I can write a sales letter that focuses purely on the positive aspect of it, and then I could write another sales letter that sells to the negative aspect of it. And why not? It doesn’t cost any more if you’re the one writing it. It’s let me hit this angle for this audience and let me hit this other angle for this other audience, as opposed to trying to write the one sales letter that rules all like, you know, the ring from Lord of the Rings. There’s so much more flexibility than I think people recognize. And so these are some of the principles that were very revolutionary in my day when I was writing copy that I was able to take, run with, develop, you know, some of the most powerful marketing campaigns in our industry that we’ve ever seen as a result of that.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re known for having the highest ever collecting webinar. Is it 50 million?
Jason Fladlien: No, it’s higher than that. 57.9 million, yeah. Yeah, and that’s a great example too, Rob, is if I wanna cook a good meal, I want the best ingredients. And so before we launched that product, the first thing that I did was I got a beta test of clients to run through the system. and then had them agree that I could document all of the results and share them with anybody whenever I wanted to. And we got the results captured in a third party system that there was no funny business that you could do to it. So it was completely authentic. And then when I rolled that campaign out and go, here was our 18 beta tests. I’ll show you all of them. I’m not going to handpick them. I’m going to show you everything, the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s all going on right now. If you want to know exactly how well the system is performing, here you go. It’s right there in front of you. Right now, that was intentionally set up like, by the way, Rob, if it didn’t work. then we don’t launch. We save a lot of time and headache, right? If it kind of worked so-so, we adjust it. We go back and we do a beta test again and we adjust it. But in that case, it worked right away and it worked better than I anticipated it working, so we immediately rushed it out to the market. And now the market is seeing the story unfold in real time. And what’s more exciting than being part of history being made and buying to be part of that history being made? Those were the results of me learning these dynamics. Now, copy’s at the center of it, because how do you communicate your value in a way that your audience can understand that and know that it’s right for them? That’s copy. But it’s so much more organic in this day and age than it ever has been in the past. Now, the purest copy education you could ever learn still comes from the old greats. I think more about Claude Hopkins, and how he would solve a problem than I do with any modern marketer that you can name. But that’s for high level strategy. It’s very little of it is then directly translatable into something that you could like, you know, specifically implement, because you read it over here, you got to do some critical thinking, which is very rare in this day and age.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, all too rare. So let’s talk a little bit about webinars. You’re known as the best webinar guy out there. I know people pay tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars just to get you to write the webinar or present their webinar for them. You’ve got this down. And we’re in a time, you know, the last two years where a lot of people are saying webinars just don’t perform the way they used to. And there’s a little bit of truth to that. But I also know there are webinars out there that are performing just fine. So let’s talk through this. Like for anybody who’s out there writing webinars, selling through webinars, and it’s not going as well as it used to, what do we need to be doing differently?
Jason Fladlien: First, let’s understand where the sentiment comes from. Anything, eventually somebody’s going to say it’s dead. Blank is dead.
Rob Marsh: Email’s dead. Marketing’s dead. Facebook’s dead.
Jason Fladlien: AI will be dead. Here’s what they mean. Here’s what they want. They want to be able to do it half-assed and get a good result. And every new emerging media, if you get there on the trend, then that happens. So like in the old infomercial days, like I heard John Carlton always tell this story, like at first it was free because people had dead air time. So you could do anything and it would make you money. And then there was this golden era where you didn’t have to produce it and you didn’t have to spend hundreds of thousand dollars on infomercials, any of that stuff, right? And it all worked. And so, When people say webinars are dead, what they mean is you can no longer show up, half-ass it, not have a good webinar, follow some old-school script where you’re useful but incomplete, you do some of that stupid nonsense, right? That won’t work because there’s too much supply. There’s too many webinars out there for people to pick from, and so therefore, they’re going to be choosier on the webinars that they want to go with. So no longer can you sleepwalk through a webinar and expect it to do very well. However, all the biggest names in the industry still use webinars. All of the biggest impacts, a webinar is at the center of it. And it’s just a pure fact. I mean, it’s like, But so you have to do it properly, which means you have to be better at it than you used to be. Now, if you’re better at it than you used to be, you’re going to make more money than you used to be able to make, because it’s easier to reach people on the Internet than it ever was before. If you have a good offer, you can scale it 10 times as much. You know, Rob, I’m running an event right now. I didn’t realize I double booked. So I had to sneak out here. And this is a $35,000 per person event. And my business partner is on stage right now interviewing Sean Clark, who’s the CEO of High Level. High Level is a billion dollar valuated company that started six years ago. And so my business partner is downstairs, interviewing a billion dollar company. That was unheard of 10 years ago. You couldn’t come out and make a billion dollar valuation in six years. So if you do it right, the prize is bigger than ever, but you have to be more technically effective with it than you used to be able to. The good news is it’s the same amount of work. It’s always the same amount of work as it ever was. It’s just people don’t ever want to do the work because it’s tough at first and it’s challenging at first. A webinar is very hard to do initially because you have to be A, a good public speaker, which scares the bejesus out of most people. B, you have to be a good coach. So regardless of whether you sell or not, you have to know how to educate and train. And not a lot of people can do that. And then C, you have to know how to sell. which is a separate and distinct skill from everything else. And then D, this is less a problem now, but you’ve got to have the technical stuff all in place. You’ve got to have some sort of funnel with a reg page, a thank you page, an order checkout page, a sequence of emails that go out that glue the whole thing together. So there’s a lot of moving parts in a webinar. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so profitable is because it orchestrates all of these things together in a very beautiful way. So it’s tough. There’s no doubt about it. A webinar is a very hard thing to do. So here’s what most people need to do that they don’t like to hear from me. But this is how I did it. And it’s still true in 2025. First webinar I ever did was not to sell anything to anybody. In fact, the first webinar I ever did is I went to my email list, and these were clients. Most of them had bought these $7, $10, $12 e-books from me. I said, hey, I’m going to create a new product, but I’m going to do it live on a webinar because I want to test out this technology. I’ve never done a webinar before. If you show up, I’ll give you the product for free. If you don’t show up, then you’ll have to buy the product from me later. So 17 people come, that’s it. A measly 17 people, but hey, if you change 17 people’s lives, that’s pretty good actually. So I got on and I trained for like four and a half hours. So now I have four and a half hours of webinar experience under my belt in a low risk, no risk environment. There was no risk. Worst case scenario, people got a free product. Whoops, right? And they liked it. Good. I go back to my audience and say, hey, listen, you didn’t show up. I’m gonna sell this product for 27 bucks or whatever. I’ll give you a second chance. Buy it for $17 for the next 48 hours. And then it converted like crazy. It blew my mind that the thing that the people wouldn’t show up to for free the day before they now are willing to pay for. The conversion rate was really high on that. But here’s what’s cool. I’ve now got a really positive experience in a low-risk environment of doing a webinar. So the next time I do a webinar is I say, hey, listen, I got this training that I do on this. It was copywriting, believe it or not. I had published a book called Three Hour Ad. And the premise was you can write good enough copy in three hours or less from start to finish. That was the whole hook.
Rob Marsh: I like it. I’m ready to buy.
Jason Fladlien: Yeah, and it was a 12-step process, basically. So I said, you know, these are the five types of headlines that I write. These are the five types of leads that I choose from. These are the five types of bullet points, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. So I said, hey, listen, you guys like this product. Many of you bought it and thought it was a really good product. I’m going to teach you the same thing that’s in that $17 e-book, but instead of doing it in an e-book, I’m going to do it over a series of webinars. 12 webinars, one per step seemed very logical to me. If you want to buy, it’s $197. I’m going to take a small audience through it. And I sold that thing out. And by the way, up until that time, Rob, I had never sold anything for more than $47. This is a big ticket for me back then. And so I trained for 12 weeks, one hour, two hours per week. So by the time that that course was finished, I had been now 24 hours on webinars, plus the four hours from the previous training, 28 hours of webinar experience in a single month. Okay. I’m good at training and people like it. And I’ve gotten the technical stuff down. So the next thing that I do is I say, hey, listen, that class went really well. So let me do a webinar to sell the next series of webinars because it’s very logical. Hey, did you like this one webinar we did? Yeah, it was awesome. Want to do it 12 more times or eight more times or nine more times or however many more times? Yes, of course. Sell it for 200 bucks. And so that was the next thing that I did. But see this gradual stair-step approach? Rob, most people want to go out there and they want to do the whiz-bang fancy sales pitch to cold audience webinar from day one. That’s like fighting the black belt in your first day in karate. That’s insane. You ain’t ready for that yet. And so no wonder they inevitably fail. Get your reps in first. Use webinars. Use portions of the webinars. And then once you get positive results from that, add in the next layers on top of that, and you’ll get there faster doing it that way, actually. And so by the time I was now selling, using webinars to sell things that were not other webinars, I had probably put in 40 real-world hours with real people in real environments on webinars before I ever even took the step of what most people want to jump to immediately.
Rob Marsh: When you sit down to write a webinar, what are the first steps? What are the things you’re lining up? And I should mention, you’ve got an entire book on this, one too many. Everybody who uses webinars to sell or writes them for clients ought to have it on their shelf. It walks through templates and all kinds of the stuff that you’re talking about here. But what are the things that you’re like, okay, I’ve got to have this stuff in front of me. And first thing I’m starting with is, is it offer, is it headline, is it promises, is it call to action? Where do you go?
Jason Fladlien: 80% of the time it starts with the offer. So the first slide I usually will write is what I call the call to action slide. And it goes like this. If I had only one slide to sell, what would that slide look like? And so that slide lists every single deliverable that they get. It lists the guarantee. If there’s a guarantee, it lists the price. It lists the call to action. If I have a really cool proof element that I could put on that slide as well, I do that. And now I know everything that I have. And that’s the one slide. So then I say, OK, each deliverable now that needs its own slide. So then I start building out those slides as well. And typically a deliverable will use you need about three to four slides to really sell each deliverable. So. Let’s say, for example, one of the products that I sell on a webinar is how to create info products. So I do a webinar.
Rob Marsh: It’s a really good webinar, by the way. Anybody should get on your list and look for that product because the way you stack the offer, in my opinion, is top notch. I mean, you’re the best at it, for sure. Thank you.
Jason Fladlien: Yeah, so it’s for a product we call Product E-Class, and it’s only 500 bucks. It’s a great lead gen of paid clients. It’s a mid-ticket offer, and we can convert very high on that webinar. One of the deliverables for Product D-Class, there’s a lot of them. Let me think of the one that would be the best as an example there, because God, I do some really fancy stuff with these offers that is a little bit advanced, but I’ll give you a really basic one. One of them is like 101 product ideas. One of the reasons we include that as a deliverable is because years ago on a webinar, I would get the objection, well, Jason, what if I don’t know what to create an info product on? And instead of just, you know, saying, Hey, well, you’re going to be able to find out young buck, right? It was like, I just give them a bonus. You’re going to create an info product on one of these. And so I have a deliverable that not only has these really good, uh, different types of products that are like winners that you could easily twist into your own unique version. I then show you how to take those, combine those together and create even new things that are in demand. And it gives you such a high degree of confidence that no matter what, you’re going to have a killer product idea. And so that’s a deliverable. And so I will write out two or three or so slides that will sell the value of that. Here’s what it is. Here’s why it’s awesome. Here’s what life will be like once you use this. That’s typically the formula, right? Then I try to eliminate as much of that as I possibly can, so maybe I get it down to one or two slides. Then do I have proof that can show how cool it is? In that case, I have an animated GIF of me scrolling through the product and they say, wow, I want that. You build out a deliverable like that. Another deliverable I do, this is a conditional bonus, is a really powerful way of making an offer. is I say, hey, you know, my consulting time, by the way, is $3,500 an hour. That’s not a made up price anchor. That’s like people. Far more people pay me that than I can even take on at this point, right? My calendar is fully booked for the time I allow for that as a consult, consulting. One of the bonuses I offer for Product D class is a half an hour of consulting with me. That’s a legit retail value of $1,750 on a $500 product. It’s stupid. It doesn’t make any sense. Now, here’s the catch. It’s conditional. And I let them know it’s conditional. I say, once you use these strategies and you sell $10,000 of an info product, then you get to book a call with me. I’m happy to do that half hour. Rob, worst case scenario, I get another testimonial that I can use in my marketing, right? But that’s a great bonus. So I know that that’s one of the deliverables. So I’m going to write a couple of slides around that deliverable. And then I have another bonus where I give them three resale rights to products that I’ve already created. And that kills the objection. What’s the objection? What if I don’t have a product by the time I take your class? Well, you’ll have three. Yeah, they’re not yours, but you still have them. And so that you when you start adding these up for a $500 product, it’s stupid. It’s like only an idiot wouldn’t buy it at that price point, right? So that’s where we start. So I build out those offers, I all of those slides, and I might have 15 or 20 or 30 slides just on the deliverables. I also do a better than money back guarantee. So I basically say, hey, listen, all you have to do is document your progress twice a day for 60 days straight. And if you don’t make twice your money back on this course, I will pay you twice your money back. So I have to build that out over a couple of slides. And yeah, this is just completely insane at this point in time.
But now I have my offer, my whole offer section, that’s all built out. And that’s where I will start on a webinar. And then what’s cool is when I create the content section, which is what I’ll create next, a big part of that is how do I set up the offer? Like, what are things that I can do to then get people excited about what this offer is? Now, everything I just talked about was deliverables as bonuses. Those are free stuff. The actual thing that they get is they get, I think it’s six or eight weeks of training recorded one one session per week, where we focus on strategy. So I have eight different ways that I can make money with with info products, eight unique separate models, and they get all eight of those models, or all six of them, I think it’s six at this point. So that’s the core offer. And that I’m like, how do I set that up? How do I use what’s in the content to set up what’s in the offer? And so that’s when I’ll create the content next. What I try to do, Rob, there is I have a paradigm shift. The number one thing I think about in a webinar, in the content portion of it, is what’s the biggest excuse that would stop somebody from doing this? And how do I destroy that excuse so they no longer have it? And so with info products, the biggest excuse they have is I’m never going to get it done. It’s going to take too long. It’s going to be too hard. I’m not an expert. I’m not qualified in order to do it. I don’t know how to drive traffic to it. It’s impossible. I mean, that’s the attitude coming in. They’re like, God, I want it. I wish I had it. I would be so happy. Oh, my God, my world be so good. But this is the excuse.
Rob Marsh: Well, and there’s probably a bunch of people who have tried it and failed because it’s not the easiest thing to do. Right. So yeah.
Jason Fladlien: So my paradigm on that webinar is you’re going to create a product in one sitting. That solves one problem with one solution, and you’re going to sell it at a stupid low price. That’s it. So you will get it done. Is it perfect? Hell, no, it’s not perfect. Are you going to retire from it? Nope, you’re not going to retire from it. But look at all of these amazing things that you can do. So one of the examples I give in that webinar is I show, hey, here’s a book on Amazon. It’s like 270 pages that I read that I bought and I read and it’s like 10 bucks. I said, now, let me let me tell you, there was one page in that book that changed everything for me. And I show that page in the book. I said, Now, let me ask you a question, because that page had like a four step process. If I took that one page, and then took each step and only wrote a page per step, and then wrote one page for the introduction and one page for the conclusion. The result is a six-page e-book. And we sold it for half the price of a 354-page regular book. So regular books, 10 bucks on Amazon, 354 pages. My model would take that same book, make it six pages, sell it for five bucks. And then I asked the audience a question, what do you think people would prefer? The six-page $5 book or the 350-page $10 book?
Rob Marsh: Yeah, I mean, almost everybody wants to start at least with the six page intro, right?
Jason Fladlien: What’s easier to sell? Six pages or 350 pages? What’s easier to create? What’s easier to call out to people? Because the 350 pages is a broad mass market appeal. The six pages, as you can point it at some very narrow audience very specifically and cut through the noise, right? Now, this takes about 15 minutes to explain, because this is a concept that I want to make sure everybody in the world can understand 100 percent. clarity and certainty. So I got to create content around that. So a majority of that webinar is proving that one point. This is where less is more. This is where the right type of research, knowing how to shape and communicate products in a specific fashion designed to sell them in this context. This is how anybody who knows this strategy can be successful with it. And you don’t have to be an expert, and you don’t have to take six months, and you don’t have to do all these complicated things, and you’re gonna sell it incredibly cheaply because you’re new. And people can believe that. People can understand that. People can accept that. And then you’ve got to remember, now here’s the transition to the pitch. Once you do this, then you can take all these other models that I know about info products. Because I can show you 100, because I’ve sold over $100 million worth of them. I can show you all the other strategies. But you’ve got to start with the first brick. And then you can add the bricks to it. And then you get this bonus. And you get that bonus. And you get this bonus. And you get that bonus. And you get a double your money back guarantee. And people are like, if I’m ever even thinking about doing anything in the info product space, I’d be a complete moron if I didn’t buy this offer. And that’s how the whole thing is kind of structured. And then once you have the content, then you write the intro and you write the transition for it. Those are the, yeah, I write the intro last because how do I know what to introduce until I’ve created it? And then the transition is what’s the easiest way to shift them from learning something to wanting to own the thing that you’re selling them. And so then those are the, uh, the other two pieces we connect together.
Rob Marsh: So I’m going to try to link to that webinar in the show notes for this episode. I’ve watched it a couple of times. Like I said, I think the way you stack everything there is just so good. It’s a masterclass on webinars, which then you also have, you know, you do the same thing with webinars and you’ve got several products where you do the same kind of thing. So I’ll definitely link to it because, again, I think a lot of copywriters could learn a lot about webinars just watching it. And of course, they probably ought to buy the product, too. especially if they want their own digital products. I want to ask you about AI and how AI is changing what we’re doing, particularly with webinars in the sales space. Or is it changing? Is it something that you’re paying attention to? What are you doing differently now that AI is becoming a big part of marketing, really?
Jason Fladlien: Yeah, I’m very nervous on how people are using AI in their webinars right now. Because if you ask it, write a webinar like Jason Fladlin, it’ll get about 70% of it right. 20% of it, it will deviate in a non important way. And then 10% of it, it will be disastrous if you implement it, okay? I just got back from France, Rob. We went there for 21 days. We rented a Peugeot, which is like, you know, some European vehicle. And over in Europe, you don’t know if a car takes diesel or it takes gas. Like, you just don’t know, right? And to make matters worse, I’ve driven Teslas for 10 years, so I was telling my wife, I’m like, I haven’t pumped gas in a decade. I was nervous because I hadn’t pumped gas before and now we’re in a foreign country. And she said, I know, I’ll just ask Chad GPT. And Chad GPT tells her that this Peugeot takes diesel. And I go, I know it doesn’t because I opened it up and I showed her, see, this thing takes gas. And if we would have listened to stupid Chad GPT, we would have put diesel in a gas vehicle. And same thing with chess right now. If you try to have ChatGPT play chess, it will make up rules that don’t exist, and it will move pieces that don’t exist. So a lot of people are thinking, cheap bastards that they are, hey, I’m not going to buy Jason’s stuff. I’m just going to use ChatGPT. that will lose you more money than paying right now for what I’m doing. So now here’s how we’ve been able to help clients use AI to write better webinars. It’s not a widespread approach. It’s a scattershot narrow approach.
So we only train it on my material. We don’t allow it to deviate from my material. And we do it at a hyper-granular level. So we teach it a technique that might take up five slides. And so it’s a lot of preparation. To create a little GPT or a little agent on the thing, that outputs may be something that adds two minutes to your webinar, but we know then with absolute certainty that it’s doing things right, because we make its scope so very small that it can’t deviate outside of that scope. And as of now, that’s the only way that we can control the quality of the output. And so what I did, Rob, and this has taken me about 40 hours now, I sat down and created, fill in the blanks, for all of these micro slices of a webinar. I went through all of my best webinars and anytime I saw any technique that I use that could be fill in the blanks, I could create a structure around it, I wrote the structure. Then we created three examples and three different niches on how to apply the structure and then train the AI on that. And then now the AI for that one technique or that one tactic can do it incredibly well, better than most human beings can do it, with rare exception, and faster, of course. And that’s what we’re doing it. So if you actually dissect a webinar and you try to reconstruct it, there might be 86, 96, 106 different little GPTs that you could build it around. And that’s how we’re doing it. Because damn it, there’s too much money not to do it right. And so I’ll give you I’ll give you an example. I’m doing this at the top of my head. So I might get this slightly wrong. But one of the intros that I create in webinars goes along this way. Well, maybe I maybe I have a fill in the blank that I can show you here. Yeah, let me just pull up one. I’m sure I could find one. I’ll give you an example. Because what I’m learning now is, the more I can give people the things that they can use with the least amount of ways that they could screw it up.
Rob Marsh: That’s just, that’s just offer 101, right? Like, how do I make this easy for you to get the result you need?
Jason Fladlien: Yeah, but it’s like, God, yeah, if I let them kind of even think for themselves, like even my clients until they get to a certain point, man, it just doesn’t. They kind of mess it up a lot of times. So let me let me find one of these intros. I’ll give you an example, OK? And this is the fill in the blanks. So this is a good way to start a webinar. You say to them, I stand today before you with a tall task, a challenge, a great duty that I feel obligated to do my absolute best at. Now, if I can meet this challenge, then I will insert accomplishment here and insert another accomplishment here. Plus, I’ll finally be able to put an end to your insert problem here and insert other problem here. So you can insert specific results here. My goal here today, my job, my duty then is to present to you the very best insert type of information on insert topics so you can insert benefits here and so I can insert your own benefits as a presenter. I come to you today with a message more timely than ever, more important than ever, more impactful than ever, yet a message that is more neglected and overlooked than ever and a message most people are unfairly resistant to even though it holds the key to insert solution that they desperately desire here.
That’s a GPT that we can put in place that if people follow, we’ll give them the first three minutes of their webinar, maybe, or two, or four. But it comes from an intro that I’ve done very successfully in a webinar in the past, where if you just listen to the hook of it, I stand today before you with a tall task, a challenge, a great duty that I feel obligated to do my absolute best at. It’s dramatic immediately. There’s poetry. And there’s meter and there’s rhythm on how the words are delivered, which is kind of important, right? And then, you know, I start to add these things. And if I can meet this challenge, then I will be able to say that I blah, blah, blah. And I will be able to feel proud about how I was able to help you. And it’s like, oh my God, now it’s your selfish best interest. So a lot of people, when they do a webinar, they screw it up. They never tell the audience why they’re doing the webinar. It’s insane to me, Rob, right? Because if you don’t speak it out loud, then at least subconsciously there’s going to be resistance.
What’s the catch? What’s the angle? Why is this guy, out of the goodness of his own heart, training me? So many webinars miss that. So there’s a lot of ways you can address that. The best way is selfishness. Hey, I’m doing this webinar because it’s gonna make me a bunch of money. There’s not a better reason why that I’ve ever found than that, right? Oh, yeah, you’re gonna benefit too, but this is selfish for me. But you don’t care because it’s so good for you that it doesn’t matter, right? And so like, I baked that in so people could have a reason why for it. Here’s how it benefits me as a presenter, not just here’s how it benefits you as an attendee. I address an objection immediately in the beginning of the webinar, which is always important, because I say in this one, I say, yet a message that is more neglected and overlooked than ever, a message most people are unfairly resistant toward. I’m already bringing up their excuse. Now, a lot of people that do webinars are afraid to do that. But what I found is if you can immediately as fast as possible, put them in the state of like, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get through to you because you cling to your problem as if it has value, right? The better you and the quicker you can do that, the better you’re likely to sell to somebody. The more direct you can be about the reasons why they won’t buy from you at the end, the more they will end up buying from you at the end. And so we dig that in there. Yeah, so that’s how that works. But again, that’s two or three minutes of a webinar. Now, I’ll give you another one. So this is during the pain section of the introduction of the webinar, because immediately in the first three minutes, I like to challenge all of their misconceptions.
So here’s a piece of copy that we’re putting into AI that will do that. It goes like this. Before diving in, let’s clear up some misconceptions that keep insert audience with problem. Misconception number one, insert excuse. Tell why it’s not a valid excuse. Then say, we’ll discuss more of this later. That’s an open loop, right? Misconception number two, put the excuse in there, explain. and why it’s not a valid excuse, and then say, once I show you the specifics, this will completely change the game for you. That’s a second open loop, right? Then misconception number three, put that excuse in there, explain why it’s not a valid excuse, and then say, by focusing on what I’ll show you, then this will become insert benefit here, instead of disadvantage that you currently think it is. Now, we’ve opened three loops, we’ve addressed the problem, we promised a solution to it, we haven’t told what that solution is. And AI will be really good at knowing what the excuses are. Now, here’s how we are using it currently. We say, give me 12 excuses or 15 or 20 excuses that this audience might have. And then we manually pick the three or four that we think are the legitimate actual excuses. So instead of me having to really think hard about the excuses, I get a pick of 20. This is no different than how I rate bullet points, Rob, and most copywriters. All right, 200 bullet points or 50 bullet points, and then I’ll throw away 30 or 40 of them and I’ll keep five or 10 that are really good. Or maybe I’ll combine a couple together. So it’s like, you know, give me 27 excuses that people that are in this specific niche might have, and then I will pick the three or four or five. out of it, and that’s how we’re using that. And then again, that’s another two minutes of the webinar. Here’s what people want, Rob, and it almost never works. They want to feed a script in, they want AI to spit out the whole webinar for them.
Rob Marsh: And they would have the AI deliver it if they could as well.
Jason Fladlien: And that would be very sad. Or happy for me, because I will make a sale that you will lose, but sad for you, it’s not there yet. Could it be there one day? I don’t know. I do know it’s not there yet. But if I can get it to give me two minutes here, two minutes here, two minutes here, two minutes there, and that cuts my writing time in half, and I can outsource some of this now that I was having trouble outsourcing it with before, that’s where the win is for now. And that’s how we’re using AI. And to me, that’s very exciting. It’s also exciting too, because my clients, they don’t have a lot of confidence in themselves. Most of them don’t. So if a robot tells them it’s okay, then all of a sudden they can move forward with it. So that’s the other way we’re using AI. Well, the AI… Permission. Yeah, it’s permission, right? It’s psychological. It’s not actual, right?
Rob Marsh: Same reason people get certifications. It’s literally permission to do the thing that you probably already know how to do.
Jason Fladlien: They can blame the bot if it doesn’t work instead of themselves. Right. Exactly.
Rob Marsh: Exactly. Well, Jason, we’re out of time. And at three thousand dollars an hour, I’m not sure I can pull you away from your other clients. You know, keep talking about all this stuff. I just want to encourage anybody who’s been listening and intrigued by what you’ve shared to jump on your list. You write about all of this stuff almost daily. Maybe it’s daily. It shows up in my inbox a lot. So And beyond that, you even talk about things like your personal operating system, the prosperity algorithms and other stuff so they can learn from you. But where’s the number one place that they should be going to connect with you and where you’re sharing with your audience right now?
Jason Fladlien: Yeah, we’re building Instagram. So, I did all this stuff without any social media. So, follow me on Instagram. It’s just at Jason Fladlien and definitely get the book One to Many. It’s on Amazon.
Rob Marsh: Yeah, fantastic book. I’ve got it on the shelf behind me and every time I sit down to work on a webinar, I pull it out. There’s just so much good information in there that I’m sure I’m screwing up that extra 30% like the AI is, but it’s worth having.
Jason Fladlien: It’s better to have a webinar out there than no webinar at all, right? Exactly.
Rob Marsh: Thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it, Jason.
Jason Fladlien: All right, thanks, Rob.
Rob Marsh: Thanks Jason Fladlin for walking through webinars and creating digital products, as well as sharing his process for learning copywriting. If you listened to the throwback episode with Jason Rutkowski that we published last month at the end of December 2024, you probably picked up on some similarities between how both Jasons broke down the elements of copy into reusable blocks that could be pieced together like a Lego model. Having 10 to 12 go-to headline formulas and another 10 hooks that you can reuse and blocks for guarantees and calls to action and proof elements, authority building, overcoming objections. When you have all of these, assembling a sales page or a sales email or a webinar becomes so much easier. You just take one block and mix it with the next. And the very best way to get all of those is to read copy, break it down into its components, and create your own swipe file of copy blocks. That takes a lot of work. You heard Jason Fladlin say that it took him about eight months of constant work. But once you know them, they’re always there at your fingertips to use on every new assignment that you take on. This is something that I’ve been thinking about working on myself. I’ve got several folders full of these kinds of examples, but adding some structured swipe file study time to my own day may help me improve even more, and I invite you to do that as well.
I mentioned that we would like to link to a couple of Jason’s webinars in the show notes for this episode of the podcast. I’ve done that, but links change from time to time. So hopefully these will still be working if you listen a few weeks or even a few months after today’s episode goes live. Those webinars, those sales pages are really worth watching and checking out and even studying, even if you have no intention of buying the products that Jason mentions. Jason is a master seller. You’re going to learn from watching him or listening to what he has to say. But more than that, notice at what point in the webinar you go from, I’m just watching this to learn to, actually, maybe I should buy this product. Because if you understand how Jason makes this happen, you’re going to be a better copywriter. So check out those links in the show notes, then set aside some time to watch the webinars. I’m not an affiliate for any of these programs. I’m simply sharing because when you see someone selling this effectively, it’s worth paying extra attention to.
One more thing, Jason’s book called One to Many is an easy way to learn the basic format for webinars that actually work. He shares some of those copy blocks that I mentioned a couple of moments ago in the book. So you can be sure to check that out as well. It’s also linked in the show notes.
