Right now, I’m looking at a pair of ugly, orange, bug-like sunglasses that are lying on my desk.
I’ve only worn them a few times in my life.
Each time, people made fun of me for how stupid I looked.
The glasses in question are called BluBlockers, and they are the brainchild of one Joe Sugarman.
Joe is a big-time direct marketer. He initially made lots of money in the 1970s selling electronic gadgets such as digital watches, pocket calculators, and programmable thermostats.
But none of it compared to BluBlockers, which became a $300 million bug-eyed behemoth.
And it all started with a single ad that Joe wrote, which ran under the headline “Vision Breakthrough.”
This ad offers (at least) two big lessons if you are writing advertorials today.
The first is curiosity.
Joe keeps going on about how incredible it is to look at the world through the BluBlockers.
Everything seems sharper.
Clearer.
More vibrant.
Of course, he can describe it all he wants. You’ll never know what it’s like to actually wear these hideous things until you put them on.
And that, according to Joe himself, was one of the main reasons why people bought the BluBlockers initially.
This curiosity approach is something I’ve tried in several recent advertorials for physical products. One was for a way for women to create boob cleavage even if they are flat-chested. The other was for an all-natural, all-effective way to wash clothes without detergent (“I don’t know how it gets clothes this clean, but it works”).
The other lesson I drew from Joe’s “Vision Breakthrough” ad is both more practical and more broadly applicable than simple curiosity.
I won’t spell out what it is here.
But I will include it in an upcoming report on advertorials I am preparing.
For now, you might be interested in another kind of secret.
Such as how to write simple 3-sentence applications that win you $150/hr jobs on Upwork.
You can find the answer to that in my Upwork book, which is still available on Amazon.
But come tomorrow, it will go underground, only to reappear later, in much the same form, but off Amazon, and at a much higher price.
In case you want to grab this book while it’s still cheap and available, here’s where to go: