The inspirational and brutal truth about copywriting

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I’m a tad exhausted and with good reason.

I’ve just handed in the VSL I’ve been working on for the past month.

It’s been a huge pile of work. In fact, an amazingly huge pile. Contributed in part by the fact it’s also the first project I’ve done while working with my copywriting coach, a copywriter himself, and somebody who’s much more successful (and better at writing copy) than I am. All of which is making me reminisce…

Specifically, to a moment about a year after I started writing copy.

At that point, I had read a couple of copywriting books. I had raised my rates to respectable levels. And I had done some small- and medium -sized projects for various clients, mostly with positive feedback (“Wow this looks great”) and even with some positive results (“We used your copy and it made 30% more sales than what we were using before”). And I remember thinking to myself then,

“Well, that’s it. I’ve arrived. I’ve read those two books. I’m making decent money. I have good feedback and results. And I guess I’ve mastered all there is to know about this copywriting thing.”

Well, it’s now about three years later. And I’m amazed by how complex and complicated copywriting really is.

When you read copy, that’s not obvious.

It seems simple or even simplistic. And if you have any pretensions to being a writer, you think to yourself, “Pff, I could do this myself easy.”

What you don’t see is all the hidden high-level work that goes into choosing exactly those arguments, presented in that order. You also don’t see all the hidden low-level work, polishing each sentence, and possibly each word, in a 30- or 50- or 80-page promo. In other words, what you don’t see are the hundreds of other permutations of this exact sales letter that existed either on paper or in the copywriter’s head.

Now depending on how you look at it, that can either be inspirational or brutal.

Brutal, because the fact is, copywriting continues to require a lot of work. As you get better, you just see different things (and more of them) that can be improved.

Inspirational, because if you’re looking for a craft that you can really work on for years to come, then this is it. Plus, it apparently pays royalties as well.

Nicolas Cage’s shamanic sales secret

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I read today that Nicolas Cage has a hot new movie coming out.

It’s unlike any movie he’s done before.

And frankly, it’s unlike any movie anybody has ever seen.

But can that really be true?

Because it seems like in each movie, Nic Cage is basically playing himself. He screams, makes faces, gets mock-serious. And while the costumes and makeup are different in each movie, the audience is basically coming to see Nic Cage, making a spectacle of himself.

It’s an acting system Cage has described as “Nouveau Shamanic.” And his new movie should take this to the 3rd power. Literally.

The movie is called The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. It will be about Nic Cage, and will star Nic Cage, playing Nic Cage. If that’s confusing to you, here’s a brief description from an article in The Independent:

“In the film, Cage apparently talks to an egotistical Nineties version of himself, who mocks his future self for not being famous, as well as for making too many low-budget films.”

Who will go see this stupid new movie? ​​Probably lots of people will. Maybe even I will, because, over many years and many ridiculous movies, I’ve gotten comfortable with Nic Cage and his antics, and I can look at the guy and feel better about myself.

​​As on the big screen, so on the little screen. What I mean is, the same thing that holds for Hollywood stars is true for any other kind of business too — including online businesses.

The fact is, your customers aren’t really buying the product or service that you’re selling. Your customers could just as well buy one of a number of alternatives, which would probably work as well or better than what you’re selling.

What your customers are actually buying is you. And if you can build up a strong enough fan base, or brand, or “Nouveau Shamanic” spectacle, then you will be able to keep selling people tickets to your show, for many years to come, just because you’re you.

Master this 2-bit magic trick for a conversion boost

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I got a marketing email today with the subject line:

“Add THIS To Your Coffee For A Memory Boost”

The email explains: “It’s not sugar or cream, and it’s not anything that will affect the taste… But it’s clinically shown to improve your memory starting in just 1 hour.”

​​Hmmm… interesting.

Almost as interesting as a Penn and Teller magic trick I watched involving a disappearing chicken. Penn announces he will make the chicken disappear from its cage through the use of misdirection. “That’s a magical term,” Penn informs you, “a term of art. It’s a curating of attention… giving the audience a story they can tell themselves that lets them not really know they were distracted.”

Penn keeps explaining how he’s going to fool you as he lowers a velvet cloth over the soon-to-be-disappeared chicken. And then suddenly, a man in a gorilla suit jumps out from backstage, banging some cymbals. Meanwhile, Teller, the quiet half of the duo, sneaks behind the cage, takes the chicken out, and walks off.

Eventually, the commotion settles down. ​​

“How many of you saw the gorilla?” Penn asks the audience. Everybody raises their hand.

“And how many of you saw Teller take the chicken out?” Almost all hands go up again.

“Now, how many of you saw him sneak the gorilla into the cage?” Penn asks. And he strips away the velvet cloth to show the gorilla struggling in the cage, right where the chicken was only a few seconds ago.

Pretty impressive. But getting back to marketing… What is this non-sugar, non-cream coffee additive that will boost your memory in just one hour?

Well, if you click on the link, and have the patience to watch the VSL, you’ll find out it’s a run-of-the-mill supplement, specifically, a capsule containing some standard herbs that are supposed to make an old and tired mind sharper. It’s not in any way connected to coffee, though I guess you can plop it into your coffee, much like you could plop a pair of keys into your coffee so you don’t forget them.

Maybe you see my point.

​​Misdirection is a clever magic trick to use in copy. It works well to get attention, and probably, to increase sales as well. But be careful.

​​Unlike with a magic show, people won’t be pleased to be fooled like with the coffee/supplement example. Your misdirection should be subtle and, unlike in the marketing email I got, at least a little plausible. Nobody likes to feel like a gullible ass, and they probably won’t give you a second chance.

How is your vagal tone?

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“Well I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?”
– Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

Gary Halbert once wrote that if you’re in the marketing business, you always have to do two things:

1) Keep the fundamentals in mind
2) Keep an eye out for what’s working right now

Well, right now, one specific health offer seems to be working like crazy. I’m assuming this because I’ve gotten dozens of emails promoting this offer over the past two months.

Many of these emails came from various Agora health brands (the offer in question also seems to come from an Agora brand). Others came from 3rd party newsletters that I suppose are affiliates. And I’ve even seen email drops in Newsmax promoting this offer.

I’m listening to the VSL right now, and two things stick out as possible reasons why this offer is doing so well at the moment.

First, it has a unique “problem mechanism” (that’s a term that I first heard from top-flight copywriter Stefan Georgi). In this case, the problem mechanism is “low vagal tone,” which as the VSL will tell you, will do everything from shriveling your nuts to corroding your cells and even burning out your brain. Do you have a health problem right now? Maybe it’s time to get your vagal tone checked.

But how do you check your vagal tone? Well, the VSL has an answer for you. It’s even got a solution in case you find that your vagal tone is low.

And that’s the second possible reason why this VSL seems to be killing it right now. The “solution mechanism” (your run of the mill, Gene Schwartz mechanism) is not a pill, not a supplement, and not even a newsletter. instead, it’s a special sound, or as the VSL says, a “healing frequency discovered between 85-255 Hz.”

Maybe that’s the secret chord that David played to increase the vagal tone. Anyways, if you’re in the marketing business, and you’d like to see this offer that’s working so well right now, here’s the link:

https://pro.donovanhealth.com/p/OV6SSSPKG1I/EOV6VB48/

Dainty copy killer

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“Good afternoon?” the man asked me with a faint smile.

The normally busy cafe was empty except for one table. As soon as I walked in, the people around this one table stopped talking to each other and turned to face me.

There were five women and the one man with the smile. He seemed to be in charge. He repeated his greeting, which was really a question.

“Good afternoon?”

I looked around. There were plates of food laid out. No music was playing. The lights were dim.

“Is there a private event going on?” I asked. He nodded.

So I excused myself and stepped out of the cafe back into the rain. And then, on the door, I saw a dainty sign on a piece of A5 paper:

“Cafe Lav is closed to the public until 9pm today.”

A nice, clear message. But who has time to read all the notices, warnings, announcements, and advertisements out there?

Nobody.

And maybe that can be a lesson to all the copywriters out there. You might spend days and weeks and even months crafting your message perfectly. But if it doesn’t catch your prospect’s eye, he won’t read it, regardless of how good your copy is.

So how do you catch somebody’s eye graphically? I’m hardly an expert on direct response design, but here are some tips I’ve picked up along the way:

1. Don’t put crucial information in the pre-headline (aka “eyebrow”) because people will read that part of the headline complex last, if they read it at all

2. Don’t use reverse type (white letters on black background) unless you want to hide the message (“This is a paid advertisement”)

3. Don’t use highlights other than yellow

4. Use arrows, circles, and “handwritten” notes to draw attention to important elements

5. Use photos of faces looking at the viewer to draw attention

6. Use photos of faces looking in the direction of an important element you want to draw attention to (eg. an offer or headline)

7. Don’t be afraid to make your headline enormous even at the expense of cutting down body copy

Maybe this last one would have helped at Cafe Lav today. Or maybe they should have just locked the door.

Anyways, if you have other direct response tips, please send them my way. After a long layoff, I’m getting back in the groove of working on my own offers, and that means I act as designer as well as copywriter.

Persuasion bleach

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About a week ago, I decided to make some changes to these posts and as the first step, I made a list of possible topics to cover in the future. The list starts with…

a the basics of persuasion
b marketing
c comedy
d magic

… then it keeps going with 20-odd topics and finally concludes with…

w political systems
x physical violence
y cults
z competitive debate

All that is good and wohl. But honestly, I find it exhausting to constantly harp on about influence and persuasion and manipulation of one form or another. It needs a break on occasion, at least once or twice per woman’s cycle.

After all, the world is a big place, filled with sociologists and ballet dancers and urban planners and radiologists. Many of these are smart and good people, even though they’ve never heard of Gary Halbert. What are they all doing?

I don’t know. But I can tell you what a group of volunteers is doing in Kuterevo, Croatia. Kuterevo is in the Lika region of Croatia, which is the wooded, hilly, and deserted center of the country. And you know what you get in wooded, hilly, deserted areas? That’s right, bears.

So if you can find your way to Kuterevo, you can visit the Kuterevo bear sanctuary. This is apparently not a zoo, but a large enclosure, consisting of rescued or orphaned bears, living in pretty much their native habitat, except their basic needs, such as honey pots and picnic baskets, are taken care of. And according to Lonely Planet:

“From spring to late autumn, volunteers will happily take you around the large enclosures, explaining the history of each bear and touching on the wider issues of bear conservation. Your best chance of seeing the bears in an active state is in the couple of hours before sunset.”

So there you go. A bi-weekly dose of completely different content to bleach out the deep stains that persuasion and influence can leave over time. Maybe your brain needed it. Mine certainly did.

How to win an argument by not really trying

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About 20 years ago, when I first read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, I came across a clever aphorism.

“You cannot win an argument,” wrote Carnegie.

That’s stuck with me ever since, even though it goes against my argumentative nature. The fact is, I like to debate and argue and show people how I’m right and how they aren’t. Except, like Carnegie says, you cannot really win. You cannot argue people over to your way of thinking. And even if you do get them to admit that you’re right and they’re wrong, you’ve gained nothing except their hatred.

So most of the time, when I find I’m about to let the debating crow out of its cage, I bite my tongue and I stuff the ugly black bird back where it belongs. I smile. I nod. And I think to myself, “Boy, how wrong you are. But you won’t hear it from me.”

This is an improvement over losing friends and alienating people. But it’s hardly a creative and productive way to deal with new ideas.

There’s gotta be something better, right? Of course. It’s just that I wasn’t clever enough to think of it myself. But I came across this better way to win arguments a couple of days ago, in an interview with billionaire investor Howard Marks.

Marks was asked what early advice helped him become so successful. He said there wasn’t any investing advice that did it. Instead, it was just an attitude, and he’s not sure where he picked it up. He illustrated it by describing how he deals with his longtime business partner:

“Each of us is open to the other’s ideas. When we have an intellectual discussion, neither of us puts a great emphasis on winning. We want to get to the right answer. We have enormous respect for each other, which I think is the key. When he says something, a position different from mine, my first reaction is not, ‘How can I diffuse that? How can I beat that? How can I prove he’s wrong?’ My first reaction is to say, ‘Hey, what can I get from that? What can I take away? Is he right? Maybe he’s right and I was wrong.’ […] I’m a big believer in intellectual humility, which means saying 1) I could be wrong, 2) he could be right.”

I don’t know, Howard. Is this really winning? Of course, I’m all for intellectual humility. But I don’t think it requires saying I could be wrong. And now let me show you some reasons why.

My current love affair with a giant

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Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been listening to a set of ancient inspirational tapes (well, a digitized version).

​​I got them because I watched the original infomercial for the tapes, which came out in 1988, and was sold less by the promises (health, wealth, happiness, and success) than by the testimonials (a lesson for you there). ​​So many of the people in the infomercial said, “I’d tried everything, I was still a failure, until I found this.”

If you’ve been following my emails over the past few weeks, you might know the program in question is Personal Power by Tony Robbins. For years, I’d hallucinated Tony Robbins to be some kind of motivational fluff guru. I imagined he went up on stage, hyped people up, and sent them home. “That’s not how success works,” I told myself.

Turns out I didn’t really know much about Tony Robbins. For example, the man is a giant, or close to one. He had a brain tumor while he was a teenager, which caused his pituitary gland to keep leaking growth hormone. He grew 10 inches in high school and now stands at an impressive 6’7. (The tumor imploded in on itself eventually.)

But more importantly, it turns out Tony Robbins knows what he’s talking about. He’s got some real “success technologies” that others aren’t teaching. Well, I’m sure somebody out there is teaching the same stuff as Tony Robbins, especially after the big man has been in the limelight for 40+ years. But I’ve read a bunch of self-help, how-to-succeed books, and while some of the stuff that TR teaches was familiar to me, some of the key details were new as well.

Most importantly, his “success technologies” work. I can’t say I’ve achieved dramatic increases in health, wealth, or success in the 10 or so days I’ve been listening to the tapes. But by using a couple of the ideas TR teaches, I have been able to motivate myself to do things that I normally struggle to do. I’ve done them consistently, and pretty cheerfully and automatically, instead of grudgingly and haltingly.

So what’s the point of all this? Well, if you too have tried everything, but you still find yourself a failure (no shame there, join the club), then maybe give the digitized version of Personal Power a listen. And even if you don’t care for Tony Robbins and have no interest in his “success technologies,” maybe you will find it heartening to know that there are some good and useful products sold through direct response advertising, and yes, even through infomercials.

Breakthrough con artistry

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If you start sniffing around the copywriting cafeteria, you will soon discover that many top copywriting chefs revere one specific book. ​​It’s an old book, originally published 53 years ago. It wasn’t republished for many years, so resourceful people stole this book from public libraries, while less resourceful people bought used copies on eBay. This eventually drove the price for a single copy up to $600 or more.

It must be pretty amazing to be worth so much money, right?

Well, once you start reading this book, odds are good you will soon be frustrated. That’s because the book, while written by a top-level copywriter who knew how to write simply and clearly in sales letters, is complex and complicated and hard to read and contains new and unfamiliar ideas. But this last bit is why so many expert copywriters revere this one particular book.

The book in question was written by the great Eugene Schwartz, and is called Breakthrough Advertising. The reason it’s so revered is that, in the first 3 chapters alone, it gives an unrivaled explanation of how marketing evolves in different markets, and how businesses, marketers, and copywriters can use this to their profit.

The gist is that you always want to differentiate yourself. Of course, that summary is a little too general to be useful. If you want more detail, you have two options.

Option one is to get a copy of Breakthrough Advertising yourself and to push through it, or through the first three chapters at least. The book is available now for the ridiculously low price of $125, and if you really do read it and apply what it teaches, it will be well worth your money and brain power.

Option two is free and will only take 3 minutes and 4 seconds of your life. It might even make you laugh. I’m talking about a new Key & Peele video that a friend just sent me, titled (entitled?) “You Can’t Con a Con Artist If You’re Also a Con Artist.”

​​This short sketch is not nearly as detailed of a guide as Breakthrough Advertising, but it presents many of the same ideas, in a condensed, entertaining package. If you want to give it a looksee, and try to unravel the marketing messages hidden within, here is the link:

How to make magic more fascinating

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I just watched an impressive magic show that appeared on Britain’s Got Talent.

The magician, a guy named Marc Spelmann, walked up to the judges. He asked one to choose a crayon for a box. He asked another to pick a card from a deck of 52 different animal cards. He asked the third to mix up a Rubik’s cube. And he asked the fourth to circle a random word in a book.

By the way, this might be off topic, but did you know that Siamese cats have an incredible property not seen since the days of 1980s Matchbox cars? It’s true. Here’s what I mean:

Siamese cats actually have heat-sensitive fur. That’s why cooler parts of the cat, like the tail and the ears, are darker that the warmer cat bits, like the belly and the back. It has something to do with a mutated enzyme involved in melanin production. Maybe this means you could color-correct a Siamese using nothing more than a hair dryer and an ice cube.

Anyways, getting back to the magic show. Once each judge had made some kind of random choice, the magician went back on stage and showed a video. The video was recorded two years earlier, and showed the magician’s kid.

In the video, the kid was drawing with the exact color of crayon the first judge chose. She was sleeping with the animal shown on the card chosen by the second judge. She was playing with a Rubik’s cube that had the exact pattern the third judge had just mixed up.

​​And when asked what message she would like to give to the world if her daddy ever made it to BGT, the kid said, “hat,” which was the random word the fourth judge had circled in the book.

Now, I heard about this whole performance by listening to Mike Mandel’s hypnosis podcast. Mike and his business partner Chris discussed the video because they thought it was a great example of using hypnosis-like principles. But where’s the hypnosis?

Well, right after the magician had asked each judge to make a random choice, and right before turning on the video showing his daughter who predicted all those choices, he told a quick story. It turns out his wife couldn’t conceive for 5 years of IVF.

​​Finally, when she did conceive, she was diagnosed with cancer. So while she was pregnant, she had to go through chemotherapy. There wasn’t much hope. “But this is real magic,” the magician says. Both his wife and his baby survived.

And so ends the story. And then the video comes on and you see the kid playing with the crayon etc.

Hypnotists Mike and Chris said that this is a great example of how you can stir up an emotion and link it to a suggestion. The magic show would have been good without this story. But injecting emotion and drama in the middle, even though it had nothing to do with the actual performance, made it over-the-top better.

So maybe keep this in mind. ​​A little bit of gratuitous emotion and drama might be something you too can use to make your message, or offer, or even magic show, more fascinating and more impactful.