Never Run Promotions or Offer Discounts—Plus 4 More Lessons from Spain's Top Copywriter
16 Jan 2025 #miscHe went from unloading cargo trucks to being Spain’s best copywriter.
So far I’ve only been following English-speaking copywriters. I write landing pages for my coding courses in English. That’s why I hadn’t heard of Isra Bravo.
In a podcast interview, he shared his best lessons. You can watch the full interview here in Spanish. I only needed to watch that interview to start following his work.
You don’t need to learn Spanish to watch that interview. Here are my favorite lessons from that interview:
1. Never run promotions or offer discounts
Instead of trying to make more sales by lowering your prices, improve your product and get better at selling. Don’t do what everybody else is doing.
Instead of promotions and discounts, offer a launch price to your existing clients. They’re your best clients since they already bought from you.
2. Good Copy > Good Design
Good copy is more important than an outstanding design.
Isra’s most popular book, “I Write Because I Like to Make Money,” is an example of bad design with a good copy. Its cover doesn’t have bright colors or fancy fonts. It’s full of text with some bold sentences. It’s the type of book cover we would create in Microsoft Word with 0 design skills. But it reads like a good social media post or a persuasive email.
Here’s what it says:
“I write because I like to make money. And I teach thousands of people, who also like making money, how to do it. My name is Isra Bravo and in 2017 I unloaded trucks and was broke, but not anymore…“
Yes, that’s on the book cover. And I only translated the first part for you.
After hearing that and watching the most popular book from the best copywriter in Spain, I started to redesign my website’s homepage to remove visuals and have better copy.
Don’t get better at design. Get better at copywriting.
3. It’s easier to stand out on saturated markets
People are afraid of saturated markets.
YouTube is saturated. LinkedIn is saturated. Instagram is saturated… The whole world is saturated. But Isra teaches that it’s easier to stand out in saturated markets.
To stand out, you have to do what everybody else isn’t doing and make fun of your competitors in your copy.
By day, I’m a software engineer. And if you land on anyone’s coding website, everybody is passionate and codes the whole day for passion, except when they’re sleeping, but they dream about code too.
To stand out in the saturated market of coding, I’m changing my website’s copy to show my failures instead of my achievements—that’s what everybody is doing. Oh, I’m also saying I’m not passionate.
If you offer any kind of “done for you” services, don’t simply put on your website a bunch of logos of the clients you’ve helped. Everybody does the same. Instead, share a quick story of what you did for them.
Stand out by doing a good job, delivering it on time, and changing your copy to be different.
4. Never offer a lower price to new buyers
When you offer lower prices to new buyers, you’re betraying your current clients.
It’s the same feeling when we find out that a recently-hired team member is making a higher salary than us, who have stayed longer at the job and worked harder. Arrggg! We feel cheated and betrayed. Our clients feel the same.
Never offer a lower price than the one your current clients bought at.
5. Never offer too much value for free
People don’t value what they get for free the same way they value what they paid for.
Last year, as a therapy while recovering from burnout, I started to record coding courses. And I heard the advice to give away my course for free in exchange for testimonials. I did it. But I had to nearly chase my friends for a rating and a review. Some of them only logged in and never watched past the first lecture.
Always leave them wanting more in your copy, but never give away too much for free.
Learn to write and you will never starve again. With words, you can sell anything. Just remember, don’t run promotions or offer discounts.