For the past several weeks I’ve been milking content ideas from a recent interview I heard with A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. And I ain’t done yet. Here’s another valuable story from the same:
Once upon a time, while Parris was still getting his copy sea legs, he apprenticed under Clayton Makepeace.
Parris would write some copy. He’d submit it to Clayton. Clayton would fix it up, and the submit it to the client.
The clever thing Parris did was to ask Clayton for the final drafts. He’d go through and compare what Clayton had changed to the original he (Parris) had submitted.
As Parris got better and better through this process, there were fewer and fewer changes.
Until one time, there was only one change.
It was in a bit of copy that Parris had written about part-time jobs for people during retirement. One of these jobs was to be a mystery shopper. And it could earn you as much as $50,000 a year.
Pretty good, right?
Yes. Good. But then Clayton made it great, by adding a few words along the lines of:
“Imagine, $50,000 a year — just for going shopping!”
Parris said that Clayton was a natural-born persuader. And one powerful thing he did instinctively was help people “grasp the advantage.”
That’s a term from Vic Schwab’s book, How to Write a Good Advertisement. Schwab said you first show people an advantage… them you prove it… and then you help them grasp it.
You can do this grasping part in a bunch of different ways.
Clayton’s example above is of the form, “You’re doing X anyways, so why not get Y benefit?”
But there are many others. I spelled out a few of them to my email subscribers.
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