A true story, I mean, analogy:
A couple weeks ago, I was walking around town when a freak thunderstorm set in. I was only about a couple hundred yards from my apartment, but there was no braving this.
First, hurricane winds picked up, then a torrential downpour, finally large hailstones started beating down.
Along with a few dozen other people, I huddled in the metro station tunnel while the gods wore out their fury.
“Good thing I closed all the windows at home,” I chuckled to myself, as ominous music swelled in the background.
I got home and sure enough—
In the middle of the living room, a ficus ginseng plant, which banker and email-writing career coach Tom Grundy had sent me last year, was lying toppled over on the floor. Soil from the plant was all over the room.
“How did this happen?” I asked, possibly out loud. I walked around the apartment and came across a large puddle. One of the bedrooms was entirely flooded, including the mattress, which had soaked through.
It turns out that the window in that room was shut, but it wasn’t shut tightly enough. The furious wind blew it open, and then the rain and hail flew in, flooding the room, soaking through the mattress, and knocking over the plant in the living room and tossing the soil everywhere.
(The plant survived, by the way. It’s looking at me right now.)
I’m about to try to spin this story of emergency and disaster into a copywriting lesson, if you can handle one of those.
Last night, I hosted one of the Q&A calls for Copy Riddles, as part of the last-ever live cohort I will run of that program.
Several skilled copywriters and marketers submitted their bullets for the weekly CR bullet contest, including the following:
“How you could double your child’s IQ with this doctor-recommended breakfast switch. Page 17”
It’s a great bullet. It’s got a big promise I imagine most parents would respond to… a simple and intriguing mechanism… and proof in that phrase “doctor-recommended.”
There’s only one niggling thing, and it’s that, to my mind at least, the reader could read this and say, “Oh, great to know such a doctor-recommended breakfast switch exists! I’ll ask my pediatrician about it the next time I take the little monster in to see him.”
In other words, there’s a small, minor, minuscule chance, however unlikely, that the reader can be sold entirely on the promise of this bullet… and still won’t buy.
And that’s my analogy for you.
“You gotta close off all the windows and doors of escape for your sale” — maybe you’ve heard that advice before.
I know I did, but it didn’t really sink in for a long time.
In any case, knowing it is not enough, because really you have to know your audience as well, and keep learning about them, and keep shutting off all their paths to escape, including new ones that pop up.
Otherwise, even a seemingly shut window (bear with me here) can blow open unexpectedly, and then you have the sales equivalent of a mess in the living room and water all over the place and a mattress that’s been soaked through.
In other words, you have a lost sale, with good work put in and nothing to show for it. So it makes sense to double-check and triple-check the windows and doors of sales escape, using everything you know already and are learning about your skeptical, guarded, and inert prospects.
All right, analogy over. As for my offer:
While this is the last-ever live cohort for Copy Riddles, this program remains alive as an evergreen training.
Several of the people currently going through it have been through it three or more times already, on their own.
I also have it from a reputable source that Copy Riddles, even without the Q&A calls, is the best way to gain the money-making skill of writing sales bullets, short of being one of Parris Lampropoulos’s copy cubs. (I heard this from Vasilis Apostolou, formerly a copywriter at Agora, and now one of Parris’s copy cubs.)
If you’d like to find out more about Copy Riddles: