A hook, as you prolly know, is how you pull people into your marketing message. It’s the core sexy idea in the headline of your ad, or the lead of your sales letter, or the top half of your email.
A few famous hooks:
* “The lazy man’s way” (to riches, to comb your hair)
* “Do you make these mistakes” (in English, in your underpants)
* A picture of a dapper man with an eyepatch [to sell dress shirts, or a parrot]
So how do you write a really great hook?
I don’t know. I wish I did. Consider the following:
For the past few weeks, I’ve been talking, on and off, about creating a $1k+ offer that sells 3-5 times a month.
At some point, I created a 1-page overview of how I have already guided a few people to that outcome, and I started offering that to people on my list, if they reply to say they want it.
Here are the email hooks I’ve used, and the number of people who responded to ask for the 1-pager:
Jan 10. Hook: “Where to buy crack.” Responses: 26.
Jan 11. Hook: “Taking credit for your rock star clients’ results.” Responses: 14.
I then spent some time talking about the promise of a $1k+ offer, without directly offering the 1-pager. I eventually offered the 1-pager again and…
Jan 22. Hook: “You’re probably creating too many products.” Responses: 7.
7 replies for a free and short and valuable PDF? At this point, I figure I’ve pretty much tapped out demand. I still try one more time and…
Jan 23, yesterday. Hook: “Really great price on coaching.” Responses 39, including my own father, an economist, who wrote, “Dear John i really need this paper for the subject I teach on the prices. Kind regards”
In case you’re as bad with numbers as I am, my point is that the responses I got, while making the same offer to my list, day after day, with different hooks, went like this:
Big, small, tiny, BIGGEST.
That’s contrary to all intuition, but that’s the power of a really great hook.
And if I knew how to write one regularly, I would write one regularly.
But my best advice for how to write a really great hook is to write a bunch of hooks, to serve them up to your market, and to let the market surprise you by which ones they love and which ones they treat like blood pudding.
If you want my help coming up with hooks for your daily emails — some good, some meh, some AMAZING — I’ve got a service just for that. For more info: