Consider the following classified ad, which ran thousands of times across the US:
“BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY: For an honest, reliable businessman with $20,000 to invest for a large return. References exchanged.”
Now ask yourself…
How does this classified ad make you feel? Take a moment right now to look inside yourself:
Are you suspicious and wary?
Or are you excited, and eager to know more?
Or are you perhaps disappointed, because this business opportunity doesn’t apply to you for some reason?
Perhaps you don’t have $20k to invest? Perhaps you don’t think of yourself as a businessman? Perhaps… you suspect you are not fully honest?
Like I mentioned a few days ago, I’m reading a book called The Big Con. It’s about conmen, working complex, months-long schemes some 100 years ago, who took their rich marks for millions of dollars in today’s money.
One way that these “big con” grifters would rope in their marks was by running the above classified ad in local newspapers.
If you dig into the 17 words of the ad above, you will find a surprising amount of deep psychology.
Today, I want to focus on just one of those words. That’s the word honest. From The Big Con:
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But the mark must also have what grifters term “larceny in his veins” — in other words, he must want something for nothing, or be willing to participate in an unscrupulous deal.
If the mark were completely aware of this character weakness, he would not be so easy to trim. But, like almost everyone else, the mark thinks of himself as an “honest man.” He may be hardly aware, or even totally unaware, of this trait which leads to his financial ruin. “My boy,” said old John Henry Strosnider sagely, “look carefully at an honest man when he tells the tale himself about his honesty. He makes the best kind of mark…”
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I’m not sure what my point is by telling you this. I found it fascinating on some level, and I wanted to share it.
Perhaps you can consider it a public service announcement, warning you to take heed if anybody ever appeals to your inherent honesty.
Or perhaps it’s simply to soothe your conscience a bit, and to tell you that if you suspect you are not as honest as you might be, then in fact you’re probably more honest than the norm.
Whatever the case, it’s worth paying attention to business opportunity ads, whether “legit” or entirely fraudulent, like the ad above.
That’s because business opportunity ads appeal to some of the most powerful human drivers, and often get responses like no other copy ever could.
I experienced this first-hand a few years ago, when I first started looking at old business opportunity ads, and when, as a lark, I started introducing some business opportunity language into my own emails.
In particular, I once sent an email in which I claimed to have a new business opportunity, and I invited responses from people who wanted to know more.
I got swamped by replies.
I never followed up on these replies, for reasons of my own. But the demand for that offer is there, and it’s very real.
What’s more, taking advantage of this demand does not require any dishonesty, but would genuinely help business owners who are currently in distress.
Maybe this all sounds fairly abstract. If so, you can find the business opportunity I am talking about described in full detail in the swipe file that goes with my Most Valuable Email course — specifically, MVE #12.
If you actually apply the idea in MVE #12, it could be worth much more to you than the price I charge for the Most Valuable Email training. And you might find other valuable business ideas in that swipe file. As reader Illya Shapovalov, who bought MVE last month, wrote me to say:
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By the way, I printed out the MVE swipe file. Almost every day, I sit down to study and analyze it a bit. But every time, I just get sucked into the content itself! 😂 Learned a bunch of new stuff without even intending to do so. Thanks for that too.
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Here’s your opportunity to to invest for a large return, references exchanged: