This past January, I wrote an email about my “5-year rule.” Before starting any new project, I simply ask myself:
“Would I be ok working on this for the next five years?”
If my answer is, “No way!” or “Really, I want to do this for a year or max two and get out,” then I don’t allow myself to even start.
To which, I got the following response from a reader:
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Where were you two years ago with this advice John?! Really – you’re late to my party!!!
Seriously, thanks for this. I remember your earlier email about this and it made sense then, and it makes just as much sense now.
Is it ridiculous to say that I still don’t really know what I would like to be doing in five years? Sigh.
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Like I told this reader, I wouldn’t stress about it — I feel most folks, myself included, don’t really know what they want. But we do know pretty well what we don’t want.
That’s why massively successful opportunity offers are so often really not about the promise, but about implied escape:
* Lazy Man’s Way to Riches [DON’T WANNA WORK, EVEN IF IT’S TO GET RICH]
* Four Hour Workweek [DON’T WANNA WORK]
* 7 Steps To Freedom [REALLY JUST DON’T WANNA WORK OR HAVE PEOPLE TELL ME WHAT TO DO]
So there you go. If you’re searching for your prospects’ deepest desire, maybe it’s just to escape. If so, it makes sense to call it out, or even put it in your product name.
But maybe escape is not your prospects’ deepest desire. Maybe it’s something else. In which case, I got some good news, some bad news for you.
The bad news is, as with escape above, your prospects are rarely ever going to tell you their deepest desires straight out. The fact is, they probably don’t know themselves. At least not consciously. And if they do know, they won’t admit it when you ask them.
The good news is, there aren’t all that many of these fundamental desires to go around. So you can just make a list of them, and then test them out against each other with your audience, and see which one gets a best response. For example, by putting different ones in your subject line.
If you want a list of deepest desires I myself assembled, you can find that in round 19 of my Copy Riddles program. I call this list the Dirty Dozen.
I didn’t pull this list out of thin air or my deep understanding of human nature — my understanding ain’t that deep.
Instead, I pulled the Dirty Dozen together by looking at what top copywriters were really doing in their copy — beyond just selling the main promise and showing the proof for it. Sometimes — not always, but often — there were other, hidden, emotional appeals in there. Deep stuff, dark stuff, dirty stuff, which I ended up putting into that list.
Anyways, maybe I’ll go ahead and take my own advice. And if you’d like to do the same, you can find the Dirty Dozen, and much more stuff that nobody’s ever told you about, inside my Copy Riddles program here: