orange Beetle Direct response & Copywriting
Founded in 1998 by visionary Alan Forrest Smith, Orange Beetle Direct Response and Copywriting Consulting has built a rich legacy of success. Today, we continue to evolve, offering premium services that deliver higher visibility, response, and craft powerful business storytelling.
Our bespoke consulting services help you achieve measurable business growth. At the same time, Orange Beetle's educational courses and books empower the next generation of copywriters and business owners, providing the tools to elevate careers and boost response rates.
Orange Beetle Visibility, Direct Response and Copywriting Services Today
Orange Beetle continues to work with select premium copywriters and clients. We can craft high-response direct-response copy for your project and help you increase visibility through our highly specialised visibility methodology.
I know you likely have questions about our copywriters, so let me address them upfront.
Every Orange Beetle copywriter is personally handpicked and trained by Alan. Over the past three decades, Alan worked with and mentored some of the world’s top-tier copywriters, and we continue to collaborate with a select few of the best. Every copywriter follows Alan Forrest Smith’s proven methodology, designed to deliver high-response copy that gets results.
When we take on your project, it will be assigned to the most skilled and suitable copywriter for your needs—someone with the expertise to get the job done right.
At Orange Beetle, we stay true to Alan’s visionary founding principles - to produce premium content with real, measurable results. We’re not the cheapest, and we’re not the fastest—because crafting copy that drives results requires time, precision, and mastery.
I look forward to hearing from you
Tamara Forrest-Smith
Storyteller - Ghostwriter - Filmmaker - Author - Business Consultant …
Who Is Alan Forrest Smith
From someone with so many ‘titles’ it can sound confusing so let me tell you a little more to help you understand.
My journey actually began way back in 1985 when I was fired from my last job. Since then I have continued to create my own business space and create some magic results - in many areas - for my clients along the way. Those areas cover direct marketing, copywriting, writing books, storytelling for them and even making films for my clients.
First, a tiny bit about what I have done. This will help you to know a little more about Alan Forrest Smith and my website, OrangeBeetle.com.
Direct Mail: I have created direct response mailers that converted at 47%, 33% and 11%. I have written these for large corporations and new start-ups.
Website Sales: I designed, wrote and helped plan a strategy online that generated over $12 million in just 12 months
Mass Marketing Campaign: I saved a business from failure using a mass visibility direct marketing campaign. The first week increase sales by 223%. This small business went from £1,700 a week to just over £10,000 a week.
Email Conversions: Not only have I written hundreds of thousands of direct response emails I have written emails for clients that generated £84,000, £7,500, £800,000 and over £15, million in sales
Consultant: Advised business on the stock exchange to new start-ups to the UK’s biggest estate agents and well over 600 different company types
Books: Ghostwritten 60-100,000 words books
Films: Written directed and created business films, documentaries and short fiction movies.
AND more …
I once spent 30 minutes in a business. In that time I discovered they were missing 125 new leads daily. I also spent half a day in another business in London where I discovered the exact reason calls weren’t converting. After I fixed it they went from one lead a day to 17 leads per hour.
Anyway, let’s get into a little more about me, Alan Forrest Smith.
Born in 1963 in Scotland. Moved To England in 1970. I got bullied at school for my accent. I was in a punk band that once appeared on the BBC. I got a black belt in Atemi Ju-Jitsu by the age of 16 - that stopped the bullying. Married in 1987. Four kids by 1994. Divorced by 2009. Bankrupt 2010. First met my wife in 2009. Married in 2015. New son at the age of 58 by 2019. New daughter at 60 in 2021. Living a very happy life in Hale, Altrincham, England with my family. I work with selective clients that take their project results very seriously.
One thing I have learnt over three decades plus is everyone in business wants to make money gain recognition or just hit the success that makes them happy. So, the above - it’s easier than you might be thinking, but it’s something I have spent my life doing for clients just like yourself.
I live a good life today. My business life has been interesting with lots of changes, progressions, diversions and for my clients, at times, results that have just been insane.
The headline above for me is just another story in my business life. The answer is simple. Find the target market and give them exactly what they want to hear. Nothing really changes and nothing has really changed in all these years.
Yet, it can be so easy to get wrapped up in the next thing - and there are a lot of next things - when truly focusing on what works is actually - what works.
That means I read a lot, research a lot and find out as much as I can find out about the human condition and how humans (your customers) think and then buy.
Once the answer is found it’s easier to go from ‘No Leads to £300,000 Every Month.’ Or even 2,300% increase. £74,000 in sales. £88,400 sales. £2.4 million. £485,000. 6.4% conversion. 11% conversion. 17 leads per hour. 404 new clients. £250,000 advert. £22,00 saved. £66,00 saved. an extra 125 clients per day. Now, that’s a little about me and my direct response sales.
More About ME - Alan Forrest Smith and Since 1998 - OrangeBeetle.com
Let me share with you where I am today. Then if you like what you read, you can catch up with more of my history about me further down the page.
I am a storyteller, direct response marketing man, business builder, problem solver, writer, filmmaker, director, playwright, screenwriter and author. I am also very busy with two beautiful new children.
OrangeBeetle.com has been my writing and direct response partner in business life now since 1998. Together we continue to evolve and create more. Three years past we adopted film, filmmaking, and TV mediums with a full production crew and studios at hand.
As I type I am finishing a new book, a long screenplay for a new movie and starting production of a commissioned movie. I have also just bought our 6th property in Tbilisi, Georgia that we rent out to ex-pats.
This is where I am right now.
I know this is my about page, but frankly, I don’t want to talk about myself. So here are a few things you probably don’t know about me that might be interesting to you.
This is us in 2023 in Imereti, Republic of Georgia where we also live.
“It was all an accident.”
OrangeBeetle.com - a MORE Concise Accidental History
It began like this.
I had to create my first ‘advert’ in 1979 for my punk band, Clone Youth. It filled the Parish Hall in Warrington and we played a live gig to over 400 happy punks (and I got the girls - singers always do!).
In 1985, I created an advert for my hairdressing business as I had been fired and urgently had to work self-employed. I had been fired for cutting a girl’s hair using broken glass. That was my last ever employment.
By 1989 I had signed a 7-year lease and opened my first brick-and-mortar hairdressing salon. I had to fill it, I created flyers and Ads and the salon eventually filled. I wrote a book about that whole experience called The Salon Punk. By 1994 I had become a master of direct mail and mailed out literally over one million pieces over the next 17 years. I also had become an expert at testing what was working and what wasn’t working in marketing.
My Ads, flyers and campaigns using billboards and more had become almost legendary and annoying in the local community of 125,000. I should say at this point I had a classic car. It was a 1976 VW Super Beetle in 1976 ‘summer of love’ orange that I had bought in 1993.
Not only was my marketing prowess becoming famous in the town it was become admired by many in the industry and outside the industry. I made sure every single client entering my salon knew about my salon, knew why we existed as a business and knew that we loved our clients. Every client regardless of who they are received direct mail at least once every six weeks without fail. I’d had zero training to do this, I did what made sense.
Eventually, I started getting asked to give advice and create letters or other marketing materials, advice and strategies for my salon client’s businesses.
During that period from the mid-90s, I created a direct marketing campaign that sold over a million pounds worth of cars in just 21-days. I generated over £800,000 for a cosmetic company. Sold hundreds of thousands of software for an accountant, and created a campaign that almost emptied the warehouse for a UPVC window company and this was when I was just a hairdresser. This might have been accidental but it was also a proven system I used in my hair salons.
While all of this was taking place my salon was packed, I was building a house, new kids kept arriving and I opened 3 hair salons in the process.
By the late 90s was getting incredibly busy advising and consulting clients in between hair clients and trying to keep my salons busy but it wasn’t paying as well as what would eventually be known as ‘Orange Beetle’ and honestly, I wanted to get off the shop floor from cutting hair as my back was always killing me.
One day I drove to meet a new client named Dave. He was yet another accounting client that had been referred to me. He came out to meet me after hearing the thundering VW engine and proclaimed … Ah, the man with the famous Orange Beetle. It was time to name this new business Orange Beetle it became.
Orange Beetle began its new life officially in 1998 as a consulting direct marketing business. I also wrote a book about that called The Accidental Copywriter.
By 2001 I had become very well known for some huge results delivering direct mail campaigns. It felt as though most of my new campaigns were delivering over a million in sales time and time again for clients. When it wasn’t that high the conversion rates were. One at 47% is a number very hard to beat.
By 2003 the web had really started opening for me and most of my work had now become writing copy and creating the strategies and offers around that copy. I was still doing a lot of other consulting and direct marketing work in the background for every bit of advice I was giving.
In that same period, I started writing for a lot of very well-known marketing greats like Jay Abraham and many, many others.
This led to writing my very first multi-million-pound sales copies for over a dozen different entrepreneurs including share trading, health products, property, cars and the computing industry.
By 2005 I had started to receive phone calls and emails from all over the globe with invites to speak and train others. This took me as far as New Zealand, Australia, Asia, Europe, the USA and many other far-flung or exotic places.
At this stage demand was so high I literally couldn’t take all of my clients so I decided to re-invent and focus Orange Beetle into a highly specialised result-driven service. Smaller campaigns, bigger results and more thinking.
By 2009 after a lengthy, painful and horrible divorce, related to stress and illness that led to a forced bankruptcy I had to relaunch Orange Beetle.
By 2010 Orange Beetle refocused once more on my now famous BREAKTHROUGH services. I understood the mind of any buyers, I understood the internal conversations, and I knew what the eye wanted and their triggers within the mind. The results were astonishing for me and getting my life back on track and also for my clients.
My workload had decreased on purpose with the aim of working with just one or two clients per year. My results have hugely increased.
By 2011 I felt the market had changed dramatically. Clients now knew more than ever but they didn’t have what I call THE EDGE. They couldn’t have a grasp on the finer details of the response. This pushed forward something that I have always done but now the demand had become even greater than ever. So, Orange Beetle – by demand – had started to focus more on MENTORING rather than services.
I was now sharing my three decades of front-line, testing, researching, reading, experiences and hard-won accomplishments and results over a desk and coffee on a one-on-one basis with clients. This is high-end but the results have been mind-blowing.
For example, one script created with a client converts at almost 100% over the phone. Another series of small Ads created with another client created over £300k in sales every single month with his conversions at 49.2% Another client kick-started his website, refined the words, the conversation and his strategies only to build an annual income of $12 million as of writing this letter.
The power of mentoring was delivering results as I had never seen before. I loved it. The clients loved it.
By 2012 Orange Beetle has become a more premium advisory and high-end results-driven mentor. I was now attracting huge corporations that simply wanted to pay for cutting-edge advice rather than hiring an expert. This meant I could be put on a plane, or train or picked up in a car. Delivered to a corporation to listen, review, lecture, train or redirected stuck campaigns. The effect was incredible. One company went on to float on the stock exchange. The UK’s biggest real estate company now had marketing that converted rather than marketing that simply looked good.
I had become recognised and demanded as a premium expert that knew the marketplaces, understood thinking, delivered ideas and gave highly converting campaigns. Orange Beetle had now become a priceless asset for any one person, company, or corporation that wanted more from what they are doing.
Today, Orange Beetle specialises in higher response, higher results, and more edge, through expert mentoring and valuable directions that have literally transformed the fortunes of small and large businesses.
After 21-days of working with one client, they experienced a turnaround of 223.7% increase in takings. Another increased their turnover by just over 90% over a 12-week period. And yet another started his own business and replaced his wage in just under 5-weeks.
Orange Beetle has been around for a long time. The car has gone but the machine has become more and more refined.
Not too long ago I thought about retiring the machine and moving on. I had become distrustful and alienated from so many marketers, especially in the digital arena. I took time out and questioned everything by peeling back the layers and asking more and more questions.
It all comes back to one thing.
Everyone in business deserves to do well and get the dream they set off in their mind. This goes back to even more basics.
The business works or fails?
I also had an awakening moment which was this. Never in my own life history has Orange Beetle become so critically important for a business that really wants to thrive. With so much disinformation and public distrust of companies driven by social search, clients were coming to me with the same issues and it was this.
‘Alan, we have had expert after expert and our results still stink, can you help us’
So today, Orange Beetle is at its most powerful, almost nuclear in its engine offering cutting-edge, breakthrough, current and results-driven mentoring that continues to deliver results after results.
That means for you, not just copy, not just a plan or a simple route but a more bespoke, change as we go, common-sense approach that is currently delivering results as I’ve never seen before (I’d say £300k per month for one client is a good result wouldn’t you?).
Yes, I still write copy at a premium rate if the deal and payment is right but my main focus is getting results for clients and using any means needed through mentoring.
If I had to tell you where Orange Beetle is right now I would say… mentoring results like never before. Maybe that is why one of the biggest haulage companies in the Republic of Georgia recently invited me to present a talk to their highest-level executives on growth and change. The talk is a new talk I created that I call … I AM THE FUTURE.
It would be so easy for me to dismiss this powerful machine yet with over three decades of front-line, business building, a results-driven experience I think it would be a great disservice to the world of business in general especially since the results, transformations and changes I see in my clients business are even more dramatic than ever before.
2023: And of course where OrangeBeetle.com is right now. Yes, the same stuff as in the past but a more evolved machine that now has the ability to offer a full film production service for film and TV ads.
Are you ready to create your future right now?
You know how to contact me.
Contact me here right now at 44 (0)7793069486. Most messengers or text.
Ps - I wanted to add this below as Jay not only was the ONLY inspiration that helped me build my hair salons from 1989 onwards with his ideas in Guerrilla Marketing but we eventually become friends from 2008 onwards when I bumped into him in the USA.
Not only was he the modern-day inventor of marketing but he had some nice things to say of me I wanted to share on this history page. The photo below is when he flew over to visit me in Manchester, U.K. where we ate and talked all night.
JAY CONRAD LEVINSON
"Alan you have a brilliant mind most would die for"