Joe Vitale
Hypnotic Writing & Marketing
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Dr. Joe Vitale is known as “The World’s First Hypnotic Marketer“
Hypnotic, because the writing style he uses grabs you, sucks you into it’s mesmerizing pull… and forces you to read every word that lays in front of you.
As a marketer, he knows how to create a message that pierces through all the competing messages & is the one that get’s taken action on.
He has developed a proven formula for “tuning in” to the subconscious minds of the reader which lead him to write 2 of his books… “Hypnotic Writing” & “Buying Trances“ which are the subject of this interview.
He is also the author of several other best selling books including Zero limits, The attractor factor, Life’s missing instruction manual, There’s a customer born every minute & Spiritual marketing just to name a few!
You may have also seen him as one of the experts included on Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret” which sold over 21 million copies & re sparked the huge Law of Attraction movement which followed.
Joe is also a successful musician, he is just about to release his 4th album.
In this interview I grill Joe on how we can get more leads & clients by writing hypnotically. Joe reveals…
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Transcript
Joey Bushnell: Hello, welcome to The Online Marketing Show. I’m your host, Joey Bushnell. Today I’m joined by a very special guest, Joe Vitale. Joe thank you very much for coming on the show.
Joe Vitale: My pleasure.
Joseph Bushnell: Thank you. As I’m sure you already know, Joe was one of the stars of “The Secret” which was a massive internet sensation within the personal development/self help industry. But he’s also an incredible marketer, actor and musician. He’s the author of a lot of books on personal development and marketing. In this call we are going to be talking about one of his books called “Hypnotic Writing”.
So Joe, first of all, could you let me know how you got into marketing and copywriting?
Joe Vitale: Well, I was interested in writing ever since I was a kid. I wanted to write fiction, I wanted to write novels, I did write a play that was produced and I also write articles. I came across the Robert Collier letter book which is a very famous life changing book on writing sales letters and I was, no pun intended, hypnotized. That began a turning point for me I began to learn everything about copywriting because I was fascinated by it also because I had come out with a book in 1984 and I needed to promote it.
Copywriting taught me the power of the written word. It taught me another way of persuading. So this became my first real endeavor learning how to be a hypnotic copywriter which changed my life and influenced everything I have done afterwards including being in movies.
Joseph Bushnell: What inspired you to write the book “Hypnotic Writing”?
Joe Vitale: I wrote another book called “Unlimited Selling Power” and it was talking about using hypnosis techniques in personal one on one face to face selling. I got the idea that this can be applied to the written word.
I started to develop the idea of writing a book called “Hypnotic writing” and it would explain how to use techniques that are actually used in hypnosis by medical hypnotists and even stage hypnotists. You can use these techniques in the written word so you can use them in sales letters, news releases, emails or websites. I was fascinated by it so I wrote the book “Hypnotic Writing” sparked by another book that made me think about this on my own.
Joseph Bushnell: When you use the term “hypnotic writing” does that mean that you are saying people are quite captivated or fascinated by the writing or do you mean that they literally go in to a trance when they are reading it?
Joe Vitale: It’s both, I want the writing to be so engaging that they are riveted to it. I was rereading my own book “Hypnotic Writing” before this call because I wrote it a long time ago and I needed to brush up on it. So I’m flipping through it and I’m thinking “My god this is absolutely riveting writing.” It’s full of stories, techniques, quotes, dialogue, it’s written extremely well and there’s plenty of examples. It is an example of holding somebody’s attention through the written word.
So the first level of hypnotic writing is you want them to read your words because the competition for all kinds of writing is fierce and over whelming the amount of distractions that we have. So you need to write something that will hold peoples attention.
On the second level yes, you literally put them in to a trance. But it’s not the kind of hypnosis trance where people think you’re eyes are closed and you’ve gone to sleep or half awake and in some sort of stage of mental alertness but you’re not totally there. It’s what is called a waking trance.
In hypnosis one of the scientific terms is waking trance and your eyes are open and you are focused but you are in a trance because most other things are not coming in to your awareness and you are not paying attention to them. Most people know about a waking trance because they might have driven their car for a long period down the highway and at some point came to and realized they weren’t really aware for the last 7 miles and they might even have passed their exit. They were in a waking trance, their eyes were open and their subconscious was taking over and protecting them and keeping them driving but they weren’t really entirely awake.
So with hypnotic writing the first level is hold their attention and the second level is put them in a waking trance so virtually nothing else is going to bring them out of it.
Joseph Bushnell: So lets talk about some of the techniques that you actually discuss in the book itself. You mention building mental images and pictures in peoples minds. So how do you use writing or just the written word to do that?
Joe Vitale: Well it’s easier than what most people think but most people don’t do it. The first thing to keep in mind is that people think in terms of stories and they think in terms of images. There is a lot of scientific evidence to explain this. The easy way to keep this in mind is when you communicate with people do it in the form of a story. That’s how they are going to remember things. They like stories they don’t just want to hear a line of facts you want to tell a story abut how you learned something, how you did something and how somebody can do something because of your product or service.
The second level of this is you want to give a lot of detail be sure to give colors, be sure to engage all of the different senses. Talk about how something feels, how it looks, how something moves if it does move use as much sensory data as you can while telling an interesting story. This is a way to engage the mind in a way that is going to old it. It will be less interested in wondering off if you tell a story, use detail and bring in the sensory awareness that they have in their body and mind.
Joseph Bushnell: Why should we be using intimacy in our hypnotic writing?
Joe Vitale: You need to use intimacy because so many people don’t feel connected. You have to remember a basic rule of psychology and that is people buy from people they know, like and respect. That is key you want to build a relationship. Most people write corporate writing. It’s very detached, passive and there aren’t any sensory details there’s no real story. It’s all about them it’s all “We” language. People don’t relate to that so they don’t know who you are they can’t feel that they know you, they can’t feel that they like you or respect you.
The intimacy factor is when you are writing to one person, even if 1million and something people end up reading that writing, they’ll feel like you wrote it to each one of them. I’ve had people come up to may and say “I’ve read your book “The Attractor Factor” and I felt like you wrote it to me” and i’ll say “Yes I did write it to you” because when I was writing it I was writing to one person. I was communicating on a very intimate level, it’s Joe talking to the reader.
But if 1 million people pick it up they pick it up individually and when they start reading it they feel like I was intimate with them like I touched their heart or their soul. Which is wonderful for sales and persuasion because they now feel that they know me, like me and respect me. Then when I say go and buy my book or go and listen to my music they are more inclined to do it there is a relationship there.
Joseph Bushnell: You talk in the book about there being 2 main causes of action, what are they and how do we infuse that in to our writing?
Joe Vitale: I know that one cause of action is just to ask people to take the action you want. This sounds so simplistic and it should be obvious but I can’t tell you how many ads, emails and letters I receive and I’ll get interested and I’ll look and there is no call to action. They don’t tell me to make a phone call, or go to a website, fill out an order form, or send in my PayPal and buy their product. There is nothing and this is self sabotage, which is a whole other subject for another conversation, but asking for the order is one of the key things to do in order to get people to actually buy your product or service.
Joseph Bushnell: What are the 4 P’s of hypnotic writing?
Joe Vitale: There’s a lot of different formulas and steps in my book that I talk about but I did talk about a persuasion formula that has always worked. It’s problem, promise, proof and price.
What I mean by that is start with a headline that taps their problem. So if you have got shoes that help them in a particular way you might want to begin with a headline that says “Do your feet hurt?” or “Got foot problems?”. So you hit them with the very problem they have. The second step is to promise a solution. That could be the equivalent of “new shoes relieve heel spur pain”.
So you get their attention by calling out the problem so they can relate to it. If they have the problem they are going to take notice of that. Then you have a promise of a solution to the problem and the 3rd P is proof. Where is your evidence that these shoes are going to relieve the pain so you always have to give proof. Then the 4th one is price, you have to tell them how much it costs. Hopefully you do that with perspective so in other words if the shoes cost $50 you might want to say “How much does it cost if you continue to have foot problems or need to have a foot operation?”. compared to thousands you pay for an operation you only pay $50 and the price now seems justified. So remember problem, promise, proof and price.
Joseph Bushnell: You also mention that repetition is very hypnotic, why is that?
Joe Vitale: It’s a proven principle in hypnosis that the human mind needs to be told something several times before it actually absorbs it, remembers it and acts on it. A good example is if anyone has seen the traditional hypnotist, anywhere in a stage hypnosis show or in a movie, you almost always here them say “You are getting sleepy” more than once. They don’t just say “You are getting sleepy” and let it go at that they’ll say “You are getting sleepy” and they might say a few things or do a countdown and say “You are getting sleepy”. They repeat it. Why are they repeating it? because they want the message to be absorbed by your mind. So I say when you are writing sales letters or web copy whatever it may be you repeat the key message and you repeat your call to action.
Now you don’t just list “Buy Hypnotic Writing, Buy Hypnotic Writing, Buy Hypnotic Writing” mindlessly. What you do is throughout your sales letter you tell a story and within the story it might say “Buy Hypnotic Writing”. Then you might tell another story or you might give some facts, figures or even some endorsements from people who have read the book and love it then you might say “Buy Hypnotic Writing”. In other words it’s repeated but not in a boring and mundane way. It’s weaved within the actual email, website or whatever it is that you are writing.
Joseph Bushnell: You’ve got a chapter in your book titled “Making our writing walk, talk and breath”. How do we do this?
Joe Vitale: I’ll tell you the simplest thing you can do, and this would transform everybody’s writing, is turn passive writing in to active writing and this is transformative. When I said earlier that hypnotic writing has influenced everything I’ve done right down to me being in movies and now a musician, I’ve got my 4th album coming out, and the songs I’m writing are being influenced by this hypnotic writing.
So what am I dong here? the number one thing I’m doing is turning the passive writing in to active writing. Passive writing is saying something like “The man came through the door”. Active writing would be much more forceful and vivid, something like “Joe kicked in the door and ran through it”. The first one says the same thing the guy came through the door but the first one is boring. The man came through the door – so what? there is no vividness there, there is no action there, there’s nothing we can hang out hat on. There is nothing we can see in our mind.
But in the second one where “Joe kicked i the door and ran through it” now we can see it, feel it, we can absorb it and we will remember it. The first one is more passive the next one is more active.
When you write your material whatever it happens to be you want to write in an active style. You want things to be happening you want somebody to be doing something. I might say “Joey read hypnotic writing and then transformed his website by rewriting all of them i active style writing”. This is going in the direction of making your writing more engaging, memorable and more hypnotic.
Joseph Bushnell: What is an embedded command and how can we use them in our writing?
Joe Vitale: An embedded command is a little bit like what I’ve been doing right on this very phone call. In other words you are telling a story, writing your sales letter or web copy and within it you make a suggestion for somebody to buy something or to do whatever it is you want them to do.
I just mentioned I am a musician I’ve got 3 albums out and the 4th one is being recorded right now it’s being mixed and mastered and will be out in august. What I might be doing to embed a command is to say something like “My 4th music CD will be coming out in august. When you go to the website at thehealingsong.com you can learn all about it, but let me tell you how it was mixed in Los Angeles just last week.” That’s a line or two but within it I said “…when you go to thehealingsong.com…” that is the embedded command. I didn’t tell you to go there I didn’t say directly to go there but I stuck it within the paragraph.
When you’re reading the paragraph about Joe’s music that one is slid in under your conscious radar. I did the same thing in this conversation. You’re asking me questions about hypnotic writing and I mentioned when we were talking about repetition I said something like “Go get hypnotic writing”. Throughout my conversation here I’ve been slipping in little commands about going to get Hypnotic Writing. When I couldn’t fully answer your question about the 2 levels of taking action I said It’s in my book. I’m slipping in little commands for you to go and get Hypnotic Writing. This is how you in at least one way embed commands.
Joseph Bushnell: You also have a follow on book from Hypnotic Writing called “Buying Trances”, so what is a buying trance?
Joe Vitale: I love the book “Buying Trances” because it’s like the advanced course in “Hypnotic Writing”. In fact I think it’s the new psychology of sales and marketing which is the sub title to the book.
“Buying Trances” is coming from the idea that everybody is already in a trance. They are in a trance that is consuming their own self interest. We can’t blame them we’re all humans we are interested in what we are interested in individually. So they are in their trance and you have to take them out of their trance and bring them in to your trance. How do you do that? that’s what “Buying Trances” is all about.
“Hypnotic Writing” is in one way the beginners course in how to understand buying trances, how to communicate through a persons trance and how to get them in to your trance so they buy form you. But “Buying Trances” takes it to the next level. I’m very proud of that book and I don’t get to talk about it enough because “Buying Trances” is really where everybody is already at. They’re in a trance but they’re not necessarily in a trance paying attention to you, you want to take them in to your trance.
Joseph Bushnell: Where can our listeners go to get your books both “Hypnotic Writing”, “Buying Trances” and any other books that they might like to find?
Joe Vitale: Well I’ve written a lot of books, the best thing to do is go to Amazon, you can search online “Hypnotic Writing”, “Buying Trances” and my business books like “There’s a customer born every minute” and all the other ones I’ve written. Amazon sells them, they are available for the kindle is people prefer that. They are in hardcover and paperback. My own personal website in case you want to go and see what else i’m up to is www.joevitale.com
Joseph Bushnell: Do you have a newsletter that people can sign up to?
Joe Vitale: Yes if they go to my website Joevitale.com they can sign up there. My new book “Attract Money Now” is free, they will get that when they sign up. I’ll stay in regular contact with them and do my best to entertain and educate with hypnotic emails.
Joseph Bushnell: Fantastic. That’s the end of the show today, thank you for tuning in. Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Joe Vitale: You’re welcome thank you.
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