I’m busy preparing for tonight’s Core Promise Workshop and A&Q call, so I will just share with you something interesting I read a few days ago, in an email by copywriter Mike Samuels.
Mike used to the the head copywriter at Clients on Demand, a big company that works with coaches to get them lients, I mean, clients.
Part of Mike’s job was to advise coaches on copy and offers.
You learn a lot by having to coach hundreds of people, all of whom are making one of three or four basic promises (“get rich, “get thin,” “get laid”), and all of whom are trying to compete with thousands of other people making the same promise.
How do you stand out? How do you say something different? How do you persuade people to go with you and not with one of the thousands of others? Says Mike:
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The offers that worked best were the ones when we really dove into the mechanism to find something unique.
Often, it wouldn’t be the main part of the program.
It might have been something small the coach did.
In a fitness offer, maybe it was actually a mindset practice that we focused on.
For a dating coach, it could have been a confidence ritual that became the mechanism.
In the business coaching space, we might’ve dropped all talk of funnels, social media and ads, and instead spoke to the coach’s background in construction, and how they built their business methodologies around that.
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I have seen smart marketers use “tiny mechanisms” before, meaning they only refer to a tiny part of the offer, in order to sell hugely successful offers.
I have snuck the same “tiny mechanism” idea into some of my own stuff as well.
But I’ve never heard somebody call it out until Mike did. I wanted to pass it on to you, so you can use it in your own marketing, positioning, and offers.
Of course, f you want to stand out with a generic, familiar promise, a tiny mechanism is not the only way to do that.
There are dozens of techniques to do so, which might be more or less appropriate for your specific case.
Oh, if only somebody would catalogue all these techniques?
And then present them in a way that gets you practicing them?
So as to stimulate your thinking about how you promote your own offers?
Yes, I am leading you on. Yes, this is exactly what my Copy Riddles program is about.
Copy Riddles is positioned around a tiny mechanism, the fact that I organized the lessons as riddles, to get you thinking and practicing real copywriting rather than just skimming the content.
In case you would like to create a huge offer, and present it effectively, Copy Riddles can help you do that. For more info: