Today is the last day of the bullets course I’ve been running. We will wrap it up with an important lesson. Let’s start with a bullet by David Deutsch:
“Restore night vision — with a berry. See page 76.”
Which berry? Here’s what it says of page 76 of the book David was selling:
Night Vision
* Eat blueberries when they’re in season. They can help restore night vision.
* You know the old joke about carrots being good for your eyes? Well you’ve never seen a rabbit wearing glasses. Eat two or three carrots a day (raw or cooked) and/or drink a glass of fresh carrot juice. It’s excellent for alleviating night blindness.
* Eat more watercress in salads and/or drink watercress tea.
David’s bullet is an example of the teaser mechanism I wrote about yesterday. But that’s not the point I want to make today.
Instead, look at all that other stuff in the source material.
Why did David choose to focus on the berry? Why didn’t he highlight the proven “Bugs Bunny cure” for night blindness instead? And why didn’t the bullet read,
“Restore night vision — with this delicious tea. See page 76.”
Who the hell knows. But I can take a guess. Let me set up my guess with two facts about two other expert copywriters. First, here’s Gary Bencivenga, writing in the royal “we”:
“When it comes to strong copy, we’ve seen again and again that the most persuasive ads arise from thorough research. We’ve established this general rule — accumulate seven times more information about the product than we can use.”
Second, there’s Parris Lampropoulos. I heard him say in an interview how he also follows Gary’s 7x research rule above. But from what I understand, Parris takes it one step further.
Parris will also write 7x the bullets he can use in his copy. This means that for a magalog with a 100 bullets, Parris will write up to 700 bullets.
So now we get back to those night-vision blueberries.
It’s very possible that David did write up bullet with a “Bugs Bunny cure,” or something like it. But when comparing it with the berry mechanism, he simply thought the berry sounded better.
The fact is, in any decent book or course or other info product, there will be a bunch of problems that are addressed… a bunch of solutions offered… and a bunch of factoids you can twist and highlight about each of these solutions. Each of those can make a new bullet.
You don’t really know which combination will sound the best until you try it out. And you also don’t know which one will work the best once you have it in the actual promo, surrounded by other bullets. Which leads to today’s bullet lesson:
Lesson 11: “Write many more bullets than you need.”
How many more?
That’s up to you. David and Gary and Parris wrote copy where millions of dollars were on the line. In that case, it makes sense they put in 7x extra work.
But what if you’re just starting out? Well, it might make sense even in that case. Here’s a quote by another master of bullets, Gene Schwartz:
“This is what makes success. There’s nothing else in the world that makes success as much as this. I will take the best copywriter in the world who is sloppy and careless, and match him against a good copy cub, and two out of three times, the sloppiness of the great person will be beaten by the carefulness of the other person. […] The person who is the best prepared and the most knowledgeable makes the most money. It’s so simple!”
I can tell you this personal tidbit:
For my lesson yesterday on teaser mechanisms, I wanted to feature three examples. And so I took my own advice, and I dug up 21 examples of teaser bullets, and the source material behind each of them. It took me about three hours of work to do all the research and analysis.
So was it worth it?
I think so. It’s how I could see the (now obvious) lessons I found yesterday.
But like I said, today’s is the end of this bullets course.
This doesn’t mean there are no more bullets lessons out there… or that I’ve stopped researching and writing them up. Quite the opposite.
The fact is, I want to create a new version of this course, which actually gets you practicing these lessons instead of just reading what I write. This new course won’t be free and it might be expensive… well, at least when you compare it to free.
Anyways, I’ll write up an offer page for this in a few days. And I’ll send it out in an email so you can see for yourself — assuming you’ve been eating your carrots — whether it’s something you’re interested in or not.
And if you want to get that email when I send it out, you can subscribe here to my amazing email sending service.