Two years ago, a Canadian bloodhound by the name of Ludivine successfully completed a half marathon.
He was let out in the morning to pee. He saw a mass of runners about to start up. And he decided to join in.
Despite a lack of proper warmup and even with a couple of detours (one to investigate a dead rabbit, one to deal with a herd of cows), Ludivine managed to complete the race. In fact, he was at the top of the pack, and came in seventh. The organizers rewarded him with a finisher medal before his embarrassed owner came to pick him up.
So why am I bringing this up?
Because it’s funny and interesting. And if you are selling information products, then you’ve got to have novel ideas to pique readers’ interest. In other words, benefits alone won’t do it.
So for example, today I had my first paid webinar for my aromatherapy website.
Basically I went on YouTube and talked for an hour about how to use essential oils safely.
When I was promoting this event, I could have come out with benefits blazing: this webinar will teach you safe use, where to buy quality oils, how to dilute them to avoid skin reactions.
Instead, I wrote a bunch of bullets like the following:
What zebra stripes can teach you about diluting essential oils safely. An English mathematician cracked the code of how zebras get their stripes some 70 years ago. Surprisingly, this has a bearing on everyday essential oil safety that we’ll cover in Part I of the webinar.
Does this approach really work? Well, people signed up for the webinar, and in bigger numbers than I expected.
Would the same approach work for you? I’m not sure. But if you want to find out more about how I write these kind of copy — whether in the form of bullets or emails or blog posts — you might like my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. The book is not out yet, but if you want to get a free copy when I finish it, here’s where to go: