Copywriting

A simple way to deal with reactance on the sales page

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A few weeks ago, I was walking through a little park at exactly 11:21am.

I know it was exactly 11:21am because I saw an unusual scene, so I checked the time and wrote it down.

Three local drunks were sitting at a table in the shade. Two empty beer bottles and two empty brandy bottles were in front of each of them.

And now came the time to get the next round.

One of the drunks got up, started collecting the empty bottles, and grumbled, “I’m the oldest one here! And I have to go?” And he did. But he kept mumbling to himself about the injustice of it all.

So at 11:21am, these guys were already four drinks in, and getting a fifth and eighth.

That was the unusual part.

But the elder drunk’s reaction was very usual. “I don’t want to! Why should I?” That’s something we all say every day in some form.

Psychologists call this reactance. It’s as fundamental a human instinct as breathing or wanting to sit when we see a chair.

Reactance says that when we have barriers erected against us, when we lose a freedom, when we’re commanded or manipulated into doing something, we rebel. Fire rises up from our bellies.

If we have no other option, like when the stupid boss tells us to do something, we do what we’re told grudgingly.

But when we have a choice, like on the sales page, we cross our arms, dig our heels in, and say defiantly, “No! I don’t want to! What are you gonna do about it?”

The good news is that there are lots of things you can do to get around reactance in sales talk and sales copy.

I recently wrote about a pretty standard one, which is the reason why. Because people don’t really want control… they want the feeling of control. And sometimes, a reason why is all that’s needed to give them that feeling.

“You gotta get the next round today… because Jerry got it yesterday… and I will get it tomorrow.”

That can work.

But there are other, and much more powerful ways to deal with reactance. In fact, I’m writing a book about one of them now. And if you want to hear more about it, well, you will find it in future issues of my email newsletter.

The truth about bad breath

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Once upon a time, the mighty Persian king Darab took a wife from Greece.

Her name was Nahid.

Nahid was beautiful and the daughter of the king of Greece, Filqus.

One night, while Darab and Nahid lay in the same bed, Nahid turned towards Darab and exhaled in her sleep.

“My God,” said Darab to himself, “the stench!”

The next day, Darab asked his court physicians to see what could be done about his wife’s bad breath.

They gave her an herb, sekander. It fixed Nahid’s halitosis.

But it was too late. Darab’s fire for Nahid had cooled. So he shipped her back to Greece to her father, even though she was already well pregnant.

Filqus, Nahid’s father, was embarrassed by the whole situation. And rather than admit his daughter had been rejected by the king of Persia, he thought it sounded better to simply claim that he, Filqus, had gotten his daughter pregnant.

Nahid eventually gave birth to a baby boy. She gave him the name Sekander, I guess to remind her of her shame and lost love.

When Filqus died, Sekander became king of Greece. He put together an army, invaded Persia, conquered all who opposed him, and wound up on the Persian throne, which was really his by right, since he was the secret son of the Persian king.

If you’re wondering what the hell you just read, it’s how the Persians, back in the 10th century, told the story of Alexander the Great.

I’m sharing this with you for two reasons:

1. Because it shows the lengths of unlogic we will go to to protect our pride and ego.

2. Because contrary to what you might have heard, modern advertising did not invent bad breath.

What it did do however, is make people sensitive to the idea they themselves have bad breath… and the consequences this could have.

So starting in the 1920s, women were told that nobody would want them if they were hali-toxic (“Often a bridesmaid… never a bride”).

And men were told that bad breath would get them canned (“Employers prefer fastidious people… halitoxics not wanted”).

Meanwhile, the sales of Listerine mouthwash kept going up and up and up. In 1921, when Listerine was promoted mainly to dentists, sales stood at $100k per year. In 1927, after ads warning of halitosis had blanketed the country, $4 million worth of Listerine was sold. That’s equivalent to about $62 million in today’s money.

So my point for you is:

Much good advertising works like this.

It’s not enough to only speak to the very few who are aware of their problem and looking for a solution.

Entire vast, untapped markets are out there, full of potential prospects… people who aren’t aware of the problem, or what that problem really means for them.

Speaking of which:

Are you plagued by uncertainty and doubt? It might be because of work trouble. Specifically, a lack of new marketing and copywriting ideas you can implement every day. Clients and customers prefer marketers with new ideas… bores not wanted. In case you’d like a fix for that serious problem, here’s where to go.

Dark psychological things hidden behind conspiracies

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“This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.

“Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices — the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized — are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.”

So says Edward Snowden.

He’s the former NSA drone who exposed a bunch of inside NSA data. He had to flee America and is now living in exile in Russia.

I thought Snowden’s idea above was interesting. But if Snowden is right, then it makes me wonder…

Why do people believe in conspiracy theories, but ignore conspiracy practices?

I came up with a few possible answers. They might be useful to you if you are in the business of persuading:

1. Our brains prefer neat, human-sized explanations.

​​Conspiracy theories give us this. Conspiracy practices don’t — they are a mess of individual actors, institutions, and changing mass behavior.

2. Conspiracy theories are black and white, while conspiracy practices are not.

​​Conspiracy theories allow us to focus our blame on something alien and evil. Conspiracy practices often mesh with our deeply held beliefs and commitments, like paying off our mortgage, voting for the party we believe in, and taking the medication our doctor tells us to take.

3. We get habituated to anything.

​​There is value in something new and different (conspiracy theories) over what we already have and know (conspiracy practices).

4. Conspiracy theories give us hope.

​​Because conspiracy theories are new, because they are run by a few people, because they are external, we believe they are opposable. We even hope that one good fight can be enough. Things are much more murky with conspiracy practices.

5. Conspiracy theories often involve added drama.

Examples: pedophilia, satanists, Hollywood stars, billionaires, midnight rituals. And we like drama. On the other hand, conspiracy practices are mundane.

6. There is official pushback on conspiracy theories…

… but there is no official pushback on conspiracy practices. In other words, conspiracy theories trigger reactance, and conspiracy practices do not.

When you add all this up, it’s no wonder direct response copywriters figured out long ago that unfamiliar, hidden conspiracies, run by a few bad actors, can get crazy attention and drive a lot of sales.

That’s why I cover conspiracies in round 3 of Copy Riddles, which is all about that essential copy ingredient, intrigue.

But like I tried to show above, standard copywriting tactics like conspiracies go deeper. They tap into more fundamental human needs and desires.

And the best copywriters know this, and use it to their advantage.

So that’s why Copy Riddles has another round, which I called “Dark psychological things.” It teaches you how A-list copywriters tap into things like mistrust and outrage and desire for the “Inner Ring” to drive sales.

As I’ve mentioned over the past few days, Copy Riddles is open right now. But it will close tomorrow night (Sunday) at midnight PST.

Why exactly that time?

Because that’s when the official Copy Riddles midnight ritual kicks off… and I have to be there in time to meet the brothers and sisters of my Inner Ring.

More seriously, if you are interested in a higher level of copywriting chops, here’s where you can find out about Copy Riddles before it closes:

https://copyriddles.com/

Some snob tells me how to write better

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A few days ago, I came across a list of 36 rules for writing well. The list was put together by Italian novelist Umberto Eco, best known for a book that became a 1986 movie starring Sean Connery.

(Roger Ebert: “If the story had been able to really involve us, there would have been quite a movie here.”)

If I sound a little bitter, it’s because Umberto Eco is directly attacking me and my writing with his stupid rules. Here are a few of them:

1. Avoid alliterations, even if they’re manna for morons.

13. Don’t be repetitious; don’t repeat the same thing twice; repeating is superfluous (redundancy means the useless explanation of something the reader has already understood).

17. Don’t write one-word sentences. Ever.

22. Do you really need rhetorical questions?

30. Do not change paragraph when unneeded.
Not too often.
Anyway.

I’ve covered many of Eco’s rules in this newsletter. Except my advice was to do the things Eco warns against.

I guess the difference is that Umberto Eco has snobbish taste on his side, while I have numbers. Because things like alliteration work to get people’s attention, and even to make sales.

If you don’t believe me, look at the curious case of The Big Black Book.

This was a book of consumer tips that sold like crazy, through a sales letter, to a list of infomercial buyers of an audio cassette program on reprogramming your subconscious.

What?

Why did people who bought a bunch of tapes… by watching TV… about reprogramming your subconscious… want to buy a book, on an entirely unrelated topic, sold through a different format?

Easy.

Because that audio tape program was called Passion, Power, and Profit. Get it?

Passion, Power, Profit… Big Black Book.

Crazy as it seems, these buyers bought mostly on the strength of alliteration in the product name.

Same thing with words.

Umberto Eco’s rules don’t mention amazing, secret, or magic, when used as an adjective. But based on his other rules, I bet he would think those words are cheap, overused, and ineffective.

Wrong again. Those words have been used in direct response marketing for a hundred years plus. And they show no sign of wearing out.

In fact, words like amazing and secret are used so often, and with so much power, that I put them in a list of 20 such magic words.

It’s part of round 14 of Copy Riddles. That’s my program about bullets and copywriting. The promise is that in just 8 weeks, Copy Riddles gets A-list copywriting skills into your head, through a combination of exercises and demonstration.

The deadline to join this run of Copy Riddles is this Sunday at 12 midnight PST. 2 days from now. Coming up soon.

So if you want skills that pay the bills… or complete command of copywriting… this might be worth a look:

https://copyriddles.com/

Parents and frenemies in stories of fear and shame

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When I was 23, I had this accident. It was quite serious.

I was gripping a dull butter knife. In a moment of anger, I decided to stab the knife into the wall.

Stupid.

Because the wall was fine. The knife was fine. But I was not.

There was a lot of blood. I wound up in the ER. And my right ring and pinky fingers would no longer obey when I told my hand to close.

A few weeks later, I had to get surgery to fix those two fingers, if they could be fixed.

And I remember when I got back from the hospital.

I was living in something like a crack house, with four other college guys, including one who was actually dealing drugs.

So I locked myself in my room, which was empty of furniture except for the mattress on the floor.

I was still groggy and confused from the general anesthesia.

I had this giant plastic-and-wire contraption on my right arm to keep my fingers and hand in place.

And panic came over me. I was alone out here, I realized. My closest family was thousands of miles away. I felt vulnerable and in pain, a step away from death.

My point in telling you this personal anecdote:

Human beings have twin drives. To preserve face… and to preserve body.

Preserving face is about avoiding shame and humiliation.

Preserving body is about getting free from pain and fear, like in my story above.

Now I’ve recently been looking at stories I’ve written in sales copy. And I noticed something in each type of situation:

It makes the story more powerful to either bring in an audience (face threatened) or to make the hero isolated (body threatened).

When I think back on my post-surgery panic, the biggest thing that sticks out is the loneliness and isolation of it.

Because we have a weird relation to other people.

Sometimes others are good. Sometimes they are bad.

I felt especially vulnerable because I was alone curled up in my empty crack house bedroom after a three-hour surgery. It would have been great to have somebody there.

​​But had I been in a situation where I had done something shameful… the last thing I would want is an audience to witness it.

So that’s my takeaway for you for today.

If you’re telling stories, you can can selectively bring in an audience… or take out a community. Do it right, so it matches your primary emotion, and you will get people more motivated than they would be otherwise.

But community or the lack of it can also influence the attractiveness of your offer. That’s something very intriguing I learned only recently… which I will talk about in my newsletter email tomorrow.

In case you want to read that when I send it out, you can sign up for my newsletter here.

Constant scarcity loses to recent scarcity

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Yesterday, a copywriter who reads my email newsletter wrote me with a job offer.

The offer sounds great. I’m planning to get on a call with the copywriter and the COO of the company to talk about it, hopefully later today.

It took over two years of everyday mailing to get to this point.

For the longest time, nobody read my newsletter. But gradually, a few people found me, and then a few more.

And now, even though I still have a small list, opportunities are coming my way out of unexpected corners.

I’m telling you about this for two reasons:

First, if you’re getting started in any kind of service business, then writing daily emails is a great way to get in front of high-quality, high-paying clients, very slowly.

Maybe you can do it faster than I did, if you work hard on growing your list and if you push your services in your emails. Both things I never did much of.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m telling you about this, and the real point of today’s post.

Several copywriting influencers claim you should reach out to your email list whenever you’re looking for work. They advise saying something like:

“I just wrapped up a big project… I currently have an opening in my schedule… if you’re interested, reply and we can talk.”

I always had a bad feeling about this advice.

I’m sure it works, if you have a big enough reputation and a big enough list.

But if you have a small enough list or a small enough reputation… then the message above smells of need, at least to me.

​​I figured there must be a better way.

My suspicions were confirmed when I read Bob Cialdini’s book Pre-suasion. Cialdini cites laboratory research showing that constant scarcity is less motivating than recent scarcity. From the research:

If there are always a few cookies in a jar, you want them more than if there are a lot of cookies. But…

You don’t want them nearly as much as when there were always a lot of cookies… and now suddenly there are only a few.

“Pfff, lab persuasion!” you might say. “What does that have to do with the real world?”

I don’t know. Let’s find out.

As I mentioned at the start, I have a new job offer. That’s in addition to my ongoing clients in the ecommerce space… plus a real estate business I’ve recently joined… plus my own books and courses, which I’m building up and selling.

And like I said, new opportunities are popping up, more and more often, as my little newsletter picks up steam.

In other words, I’m really not looking for more work. But I am still open to it.

So if you would like to work with me in some form… before I get so entangled in other projects that it becomes impossible to say yes to anything new… then get on my newsletter, get in touch with me, and we can talk.

The power of the fake diagnosis

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“Please spit in the cup,” the nurse said. “And now we take the test strip and wait a few seconds. Oh… you see how the color changed? I’m afraid that means you’re positive for TAA deficiency.”

Back in 1988, a bunch of undergrads at Williams College got tested for Thioamine Acetylase (TAA) deficiency.

TAA is a pancreatic enzyme, the undergrads were told. People who don’t have enough of it can experience mild but irritating pancreatic disorders.

Turns out TAA doesn’t really exist. The point of the charade was to see how the undergrads would react to the fake diagnosis. Because next they were given a questionnaire.

The questionnaire had a list of common symptoms of TAA deficiency (“headache, diarrhea, backache, …”).

It also had a list of common risk factors contributing to TAA deficiency (“taking aspirin or Tylenol, getting less than seven hours of sleep, skipping a meal, …”).

Perhaps you can see where this is going:

The deficiency group of students noticed 50% more symptoms in their life… and 20% more risk factors … than the control group did. (The control was people who didn’t have the test strip change color.)

But as I said, in reality, both groups had the same levels of TAA coursing through their bodies — zero.

The authors of this study call this “confirmatory search.”

It’s the underlying mechanism by which our brains get infected by medical student syndrome… personality tests… and horoscopes.

We look for proof, we ignore disproof.

My point is there is power inside these made-up diseases, syndromes, and categories. Even when they don’t explain anything. And even when people who get a diagnosis are not given any way out.

So imagine what would happen if you actually diagnose a real and troubling condition for people… point out the symptoms and risk factors so they can convince themselves… and then give them a solution that can fix it.

It might make you immune to empty lobby syndrome… for the rest of your life.

If that’s something you currently suffer from, and if you experience the anxiety and lack of cash flow it brings, I have a solution for you. It’s the ideas and suggestions I share inside my email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Hitchcock sales structure

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The exciting climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest goes like this:

Eva Marie Saint is about to fall off a cliff.

Cary Grant is reaching down to try to keep her from falling.

“I can’t,” she says.

“Yes you can,” he says.

And then one of the evil guy’s henchmen comes and starts to crush Cary’s fingers underfoot. But Cary needs those fingers to hold on to the cliff, and to keep himself and Eva from death below.

Like I said, that’s the climax.

But don’t worry.

It all turns out fine. The police arrive and shoot the evil henchman, who falls off the cliff. The main bad guy is caught. The secret microfilm is safe. And some time later, Cary and Eva, who made it off the cliff and got married in the meantime, head back east by train to start a new life together. The end.

Pretty usual Hollywood, right?

Right. The only unusual thing is the speed:

That entire anti-climactic sequence, from the moment Cary gets his fingers crushed to the train ride home, takes a total of 43 seconds.

​​43 seconds!

For reference, North By Northwest is a movie that lasts 2 hours and 16 minutes.

Of the total, 2 hours, 14 minutes, and 17 seconds goes to building up tension and misery.

The last 43 seconds goes to relieving it.

And yet people watch. And more relevant for us, they buy.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve previously had the task of selling many generic, unremarkable, sometimes suspect physical products. To boot, these products often sold at 3-4 times the price you could find on Amazon.

How can you possibly sell millions of dollars of a commodity at three times the price that anybody can get, just by shopping as they always do?

In my case, the answer was stories. Full of tension and misery. That’s how the bulk of the sales message went.

And when you thought things were bad, an evil henchman came to make it all worse.

The relief of all that tension, in the form of talking about the product, was really an afterthought. Not quite at Hitchcock levels, but still.

So that’s my takeaway for you.

Don’t sell overpriced crap.

​​But even if you sell something great, it probably makes sense to talk less about it than you want to. Instead, focus more of your prospect’s time and attention on that “I can’t/Yes you can” drama.

And in case you want more storytelling and selling ideas:

You might like my email newsletter.

A new way to approach copywriting

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I recently started keeping track of every article I click on mindlessly, purely because of an intriguing headline. Here are a few:

* After Years Of Conflict And Instability, Iraq Is Opening Up To Tourism

* A Writing Tip I Learned At Oxford

* A New Way To Approach Wayback Machine

* The New Credible Science Of Longevity Versus The Old Anti-Aging Snake Oil

* Nikola Tesla Invention From 100 Years Ago Suddenly Makes More Sense Today

So I record those headlines, and then I ask myself, Why? Why did I click on this?

If you’re in the business of marketing, I’d like to suggest this new habit to you too.

But why?

Because, as Gary Halbert said, you have to steep yourself in what’s working now. If you’re clicking it, others are clicking it. Pay attention, and you’ll find out what’s working now, both in terms of format (“A New Way To Approach X”) as well as in terms of topics (“Wayback Machine”).

But Gary also said something else. He said you have to ground yourself in the fundamentals of marketing.

That’s why asking why is useful.

Human psychology changes very slowly, if at all, from what I can see. And if you ask yourself why, you’ll get back to a few fundamental answers, over and over and over. And then you can make your own formats, for your own topics, and still have people clicking and reading.

By the way, human psychology changes so slowly that there are some ads that ran a hundred years ago, which could still run successfully today.

If you want to see an example, I’ll share one tomorrow in my email newsletter. And if you want to get on that newsletter so you get to see that ad, here’s where to go.

The hidden religion of persuasion

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“Well… I need to tell you all something. And it’s the most important thing I could ever say to you. In a little while, you’ll know for certain that I’m putting my very life on the line, and the safety of my family, by sharing this with you. So I hope that buys me at least a few minutes of your precious time.”

So starts out the video by one Altiyan Childs.

Childs was the 2010 winner of Australian X Factor. He came back to relevance last month because he released a YouTube video, lasting five (5) hours, which was shot in what looks to be his bedroom.

In the video, Childs exposes the hidden religion that all stars, celebrities, and people in power belong to, and are bound by an oath never to reveal.

How does Childs know?

Because he himself belonged. But he is now publicly renouncing this evil religion (he found another religion, Christianity, following a near-death car crash) and warning the rest of the world of the danger we’re all in.

The video got about a million views on YouTube in the first few weeks while it was still up.

That’s actually not a crazy number. I saw a similar video, with a similar expose, featuring a similar level of celebrity, pop up last year and get almost 20 million views in a few months’ time.

And I guess even this 20 million is peanuts to the overall popularity of the belief that some kind of evil cabal controls world affairs.

I think there are many marketing and persuasion lessons that can be sucked out of that need and out of Altiyan Childs’s video. Today I just want to focus on one.

Because what really underlies the popularity of such beliefs? Here’s my own secret revelation:

Such beliefs put our messy lives into an order-creating context.

Take a bunch of seemingly random and unconnected facts… draw surprising connections between them… and then place them inside of a bigger frame that gives the whole picture a simple and clear meaning…

… and this creates the feeling of insight.

And this feeling, as I’ve written before, might just be the most powerful and secret persuasion tool that the powers that be don’t want you to know about.

My point is that if you take those three steps outlined above, you can sell not only Christianity… but you can also sell supplements, coaching programs, and financial newsletters.

That’s a big claim.

And I can’t blame you if you’re still skeptical.

All I can say is, I’m putting my very life on the line to dig in further to bring you the full facts on this.

Once the facts are revealed, you will be able to see the truth and make up your own mind.

In the meantime, I hope this buys me a few email opens of your precious attention. You can sign up for my newsletter here. Because I will be back with this topic soon, assuming that the powers that be don’t get to me first.