Copywriting

More on people’s deepest secrets, fears, and desires

by

INTERVIEWER: I think finding something that helps you find fulfillment and happiness is important. And if that happens to be heroin, and you got it under control… maybe it’s okay.

MATTHEW: I do, but then it’s the money thing. It’s a lot of money.

INTERVIEWER: How much do you spend? How much do you spend a week?

MATTHEW: A month, probably $1,500. So I could have a nice apartment.

That’s from an interview with Matthew, a functional heroin addict. Matthew says he smokes heroin, every day, all day. And yet he has a job, and he does it well, and nobody knows.

The interview with Matthew is part of a YouTube channel called Soft White Underbelly.

I discovered Soft White Underbelly a few weeks ago. It features hundreds or maybe thousands of in-depth interviews with drug addicts, homeless people, child abuse victims, prostitutes, escorts, inbred Appalachian families, gang members, a high-level mob boss, a strychnine-drinking Pentecostal preacher, a conman who ran real-estate frauds totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, and various others on the outside of what you might call mainstream society.

I won’t lie — I got sucked into this channel because of purely prurient curiosity about the lives of escorts and prostitutes and even a male gigolo.

I’m not sure what my persuasion and influence takeaway for you is today. Except that, in my experience, being interested and curious is like a superpower in almost any field.

You achieve focus by being interested. And you achieve interest, if you don’t have it already, by seeing details.

I talked yesterday about how there are primal urges that motivate all people — except these are secrets most of us will never share with others. Often, we can’t even face up to them on our own, in the dead of night, as we’re falling asleep, with the covers pulled up to our eyeballs.

But the people who are interviewed on Soft White Underbelly are incredibly open about the most shocking, intimate, painful, and humiliating things in their lives.

Maybe some of these stories aren’t true. But I bet many of them are. And they’re very revealing.

Yes, these are extreme stories of people coping with bad life situations and bad life choices.

But like I said yesterday, the human experience is similar among all of us. And a person doesn’t need to have extreme abuse or trauma or misfortune to fall into the same patterns of thought and behavior as the people on Soft White Underbelly.

So if you pay attention to the details of their stories… it might be useful both to understand others better, and to understand yourself better.

Or who knows, maybe I’m just trying to justify my own prurient fascination.

In case you want to decide for yourself, let me recommend a SFU interview to start with.
​
​​It’s with a black-hat hacker, who started in the 1980s by phreaking phones and early ATMs, then graduated to more lucrative and high-scale tech exploits ($10M for hacking the DirectTV receiver), and culminated about 10 years ago with… well, I won’t spoil it.

If you’re interested, the full interview is below. But before you watch it, if you want more ideas on understanding yourself and other people better — both for profit and for curiosity’s sake — then sign up to my email newsletter.

How to get adoring customers who trip over each other to thank you for all the help and meaning you’ve given their lives

by

“Dearly beloved, when Rupert here was a student at Clifton High School, none of us, myself, his teachers, his classmates, dreamt that he would amount to a hill of beans. But we were wrong! And you Rupert, you were right. And that’s why tonight, before the entire nation, we’d like to apologize to you personally and to beg your forgiveness for all the things we did to you. And we’d like to thank you personally, all of us, for the meaning you’ve given to our lives.”
— The King of Comedy

Last week, I got a good question from Fahir, one of the people going through my Copy Riddles program right now. Fahir wrote (edited slightly):

“A lot of goo-roo’s talk about knowing your prospect’s deepest fears. How can we know that about our prospects? Of course, there’s research, but these are things people will not share with anyone and in most cases, they don’t know what is their fear.”

Fahir is right. It’s a genuine problem.

​​Much of the stuff that really motivates people — the image of the impregnable bunker, the bloody revenge, the panties getting thrown on the stage — is stuff your market will never admit. Even to themselves.

I told Fahir and the other folks going through Copy Riddles three different ways of getting around this problem.

Today I want to tell you one more way. It’s very powerful. It’s also very simple. Don’t let that fool you.

Because it’s just to look inwards.

We human beings are wonderfully unique in our fingerprints, the lines of our face, the letter-by-letter code of our DNA.

But we’re also wonderfully similar. As marketer Rich Schefren likes to say, what’s most personal is most general.

So if you find something funny, if you find something interesting, or if you find something frightening, ask yourself why. What’s the essence of it?

The people in your market might not have the exact sense of humor or interests or paranoia that you have.

​​But if you look a little deeper, you’ll find something like that King of Comedy quote above — something that most people can relate to on a primal level.

The bigger point being, you have many resources inside you already to help you succeed. Stories, emotions, natural human reactions.

You just have to spot them, strip them down to their underwear, and then put a slightly new outfit on them, one that’s appropriate the sales letter or sales email at hand.

Just do that, and people in your market will respond. What’s more, they will thank you, personally, all of them, for the help, compassion, and meaning you you’ve given to their lives.

If you want to know more about those resources you have hidden inside you:

I write a daily email newsletter all about that stuff. I also talk about how you can apply it to your own writing, money-making, and personal development. If you want to read that, sign up to my newsletter here.

The two kinds of people

by

In a recent opinion piece for the Washington Post, journalist David Goodhart explains his idea that the world is divided between “somewhere” people and “anywhere” people.

​​Anywhere people, Goodhart writes,

“tend to be educated and mobile; they value openness, autonomy and individual self-realization. They tend to have careers rather than jobs and “achieved identities” based on academic and professional success.”

By contrast, somewhere people are

“more rooted and less well-educated; they tend to value security, familiarity and group attachments (national or local). Their sense of themselves is more likely to come from the place they come from and the local ways of life they are attached to, which means that they are more likely to be discomforted by rapid social change.”

So I want you to ask yourself. How do you feel right now?

Did you mentally put yourself into one of those categories in the past moment?

​​Did you think of other people who fit one of these two categories?

​​Did you maybe have a moment of insight, as if to say, “Wow, i never thought of it that way… but this could explain a lot.”

I’ve written before about the power of creating a syndrome or a disease as a way to get people to feel a moment of insight.

The classic example — the one marketer Rich Schefren likes to use — is ADHD.

​​Maybe you’ve gone through life, distracted and flaky, starting but never finishing projects, jumping from one thing to the next. You’re dissatisfied, but you can’t put your finger on what the problem really is.

And then somebody comes and tells you there’s a syndrome — a collection of symptoms — that has a medical name. Maybe this person also points out you have a few others symptoms, once you didn’t even notice, but which can be explained by this new diagnosis.

Suddenly, you feel enlightened. You have a new handle on the problems in your life. Hope swells up inside of you. Maybe all these different bad issues can be solved, you think, and at once!

So that’s one way to create insight. A new syndrome.

An extension, which can be equally as powerful, is to create a partition. To categorize, not just one group of people, but everybody, as either A or B.

That’s what’s going on with the somewhere people or anywhere people above. In more marketingy circles, there’s Rich Schefren’s partition of the world into business owners and opportunity seekers… or Andre Chaperon’s distinction between marketers who are chefs, and those who are merely cooks.

Maybe you haven’t heard me talk about insight before, so you’re wondering what the good of all this is. I’ll explain that in full detail in an upcoming book, all about the use of insight in marketing.

​​But if you want the situation in a nut — insight is a powerful feeling, just like desire. And just like desire, it can stimulate action.

Of course, just because something feels insightful, that doesn’t make it true.

I recently wrote about how I don’t believe in that biggest and most popular partition of the world — between introverts and extroverts. I feel the same about this somewhere/anywhere partition, even more so.

My point being, partitions, syndromes, and insight are powerful techniques of influence. We are all susceptible to them.

Well, almost all of us.

One large part of the population is what I call “insight-unaware” people. These people can be manipulated at will by techniques of insight. But a small part of the population is what I call “insight-aware.” And those people…

… those people often enjoy other essays I write. If that’s you, then sign up to my email newsletter.

“Don’t have the right mindset” to learn the craft

by

A few days ago, a long-time reader wrote to me. He first signed up for my email newsletter in 2019. I hadn’t heard from him in a while, so I asked him how his copywriting career is going.

​​He replied:

“As for the copywriting part, I’m still doubting myself because I’ve come to believe I don’t have the right mindset to learn the craft. I’m not disciplined enough and get easily distracted… And most of all, I lack confidence, because I still believe not being a native is an impediment to writing in English. The good news is: I’ve decided not to give up :-)”

As Mark Ford wrote recently, if you have what it takes, success should be a lay-up.

​​In my experience as a copywriter, that means all you have to do is take on small jobs at small pay to start, deliver on those jobs, continue to develop your skills, and increase the scale of jobs you take on and the money you’re paid for them.

Simple, right?

Well, as the Good Book says, broad is the way that leads to destruction. There are many swamps, quicksand pits, walls of brambles, and patches of stinging nettle and poison ivy that can show up in your way.

The first of these, as my long-time reader wrote above, is being afraid to even get started.

​​But there are others that come up also, even once you’re well on the path. I’ve come across some of them myself, and I’ve seen and heard other copywriters who had or have runins with some of these traps.

A few people have written to ask me about my Copy Zone offer, about succeeding in the business of copywriting. It’s behind schedule, and one reason is that I wanted to address the most common and the most dangerous of these quicksand pits and traps.

Because the best advice in the world is only a part of the story — one path that worked for somebody once, because they didn’t get stuck in the same traps that you might get stuck in.

But let me leave you with something concrete and maybe useful:

In my experience, action >>> mindset. It’s much easier and more effective to change your behavior than to change the way you think and feel.

That’s not a call to “just do it.”

​​Well, ideally, yes — just do it. But if you can’t force yourself to just do it, in spite of repeated tries, then just do something. Create some sort of change in your behavior, whatever that may be. You might just create a real change in your life — and even in your beliefs.

But actually, there’s something else also, which trumps changes in behavior… just as much as changes in behavior trump changes in mindset. But this email is running long, so I’ll save that for another time, or perhaps another place.

In the meantime, if you’d like to sign up for my email newsletter, you can do so here.

Copywriting defense into offense

by

“This is my job, Eddy.”

“You think so? Hm. See, I don’t think so. I think it’s your problem.”

A few emails ago, I referred to the movie The Color of Money. I want to do it again today because there’s a scene that illustrates a powerful copywriting technique — or really, more of an attitude that can turn your copy from a loser to a winner.

It’s right there in that bit of dialogue up top.

In case you haven’t been reading my emails carefully — shame, shame — here’s what this dialogue is about.

Fast Eddie Felson is a former pool shark. He comes across a young and very talented pool shark, Vincent Lauria. Eddie tries to convince Vincent to go on the road together and make a lot of money.

But Vincent isn’t convinced. He has a steady thing going, working at the local Toys R Us. That’s his job.

You already know what Eddie says to Vincent to convince him.

But consider what Eddie doesn’t say.

He doesn’t say, “Oh, come on, Vincent! Please come with me? Please?”

He also doesn’t say, “Can’t you just take unpaid leave for a few weeks? The job will still be here waiting for you.”

Which brings me to that attitude I talked about. ​It’s something I learned from copywriter Dan Ferrari.

​​Dan likes to say there are moments in sales copy to turn defense into offense. To take something that’s basically a problem, a risk, a liability… and to turn it into an asset.

That’s what Fast Eddie did in that scene above. Steady pay and decent work at Toys R Us? That’s not your job. That’s your problem.

But maybe that short clip doesn’t really illustrate how to use this in copy. So let me leave you an with example from one of Dan’s sales letters.

The sales letter sold an anti-aging supplement.

​​The problem was that most people who took this supplement had vague and weak results to report – “I feel better overall.”

​​That’s something you, as the copywriter, could be defensive about. But here’s how Dan goes on the offense with it:

Practically everyone over the age of 50 describes the rejuvenation they experience the same way: “I feel better overall.”

It sounds vague…

Yet if you’re getting older, you know EXACTLY what they mean.

It’s that top-to-bottom, all-over feeling of being in your prime again… and not headed downhill fast.

Of being healthy from head to toe, inside and out.

Of having a body that works wonderfully… instead of struggling to “get by.”

How to be seen as a more credible source of solutions and advice

by

Today, YouTube served me with up a recent interview that PBS did with Garry Kasparov.

Kasparov was World Chess Champion for 20 years and then an opposition leader in Russia.

“Unfortunately,” the interviewer said in his opening move to Kasparov, “you turned out to be right. Back in 2015, you wrote a book called ‘Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped.'”

The interviewer took a breath after reading out that title. He went on:

“Now that we see what he’s doing, what should our response be?”

Given Kasparov’s book, this might seem like a reasonable question to ask.

And that’s just the point I want to make to you today. There’s something important hiding inside that question.

In the words of Mark Ford and John Forde from Great Leads… the fact that you understand what’s wrong can help make you seem like a more credible source for solutions, too.

The fact is, just because Kasparov wrote a book critical of Putin gives him no special insight on how to stop the raging war in Ukraine. The two are about as related as knowing that “heavy turbulence makes for unpleasant flights” and knowing how to land a jumbo jet.

And yet, it doesn’t matter. The human instinct to jump from one to the other. Because when we’ve got trouble, it’s natural to look outside ourselves for the solution. And at those times, we are willing to accept a lot of things as qualifications and authority.

The takeaway for you is clear:

Don’t build a better mousetrap.

Instead, write a book. Educate your prospect about the dangerous breeding habits and expansionary intent of the eastern harvest mouse. “The eastern harvest mouse is coming,” your book should say. “And it must be stopped.”

Ok, let’s get to the business end of this post:

If you want more advice on building credibility with your audience, you might get value from my email newsletter. That’s where I regularly write about reasons that credibility fails. You can sign up for it here.

A watermelon-headed politician walks into a flat-earther’s house…

by

I’d like to tell you a story but first I have to give you a bit of background. Our story has two characters:

First, there’s Pericles, a famous statesman in ancient Athens.

Pericles led the Athenians at the start of their war against the Spartans. He was also well-known for having a watermelon-sized head. That’s why statues most often show him wearing a helmet.

Second, we have Anaxagoras, a philosopher who came from Asia and settled in Athens.

Anaxagoras brought with him the spirit of scientific inquiry, which wasn’t common in Athens before. He also happened to be a flat-earther.

Now, on to the story:

When Pericles the Athenian was a young man, he studied philosophy with Anaxagoras.

Later, Pericles became a powerful man. When he needed to make important political decisions, he still consulted his wise old teacher.

But as Pericles sailed the seas, leading the Greeks in battle, Anaxagoras grew older and poorer. There aren’t many drachmas to be made in explaining rainbows or what the moon is made of.

In time, Anaxagoras became so poor he could no longer afford even a bit of cheese and wine. So one day, he did the only philosophical thing:

He covered his head with a robe, and determined to starve himself to death.

When Pericles heard about this, he rushed to Anaxagoras’s house.

He started begging his old teacher to live. He lamented his own hopeless future if he should lose so valuable an advisor.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

Then Anaxagoras yanked the robe off his head, looked at Pericles, and said, “Pericles, those who want to use a lamp supply it with oil.”

So that’s the story.

I don’t know about you, but when I first read it, it made me laugh.

And because I like to kill a good joke, I asked myself why I found this story funny.

Was it the idea of an old man starving himself to death?

Not really funny.

Was it the lamp analogy at the end?

Not so funny either.

I realized it was the robe.

​​Anaxagoras put it on his head and then pulled it off. It made him seem like a petulant child. It was such a contrast to the image of a sage and self-possessed philosopher.

So there you go:

Seemingly irrelevant details give all the color to a story. They can create suspense. Enjoyment. Or, of course, humor.

But perhaps I didn’t kill enough jokes for you today.

If so, then subscribe to my email newsletter, so I can kill another joke for you tomorrow.

And then, then take a listen to the 2 minute and 45 second clip below. It’s a recording of a young Woody Allen, delivering a standup routine in the 1960s.

Then listen to it again. And notice all the detail — seemingly irrelevant, but really, just what makes the skit funny. it might be something you can use in your own writing.

​​Here’s the video:

Skunk email with a great and valuable reward

by

This email won’t be easy or pleasant to get through.

​​In fact it will take work and it might make you feel queasy along the way. But if you can manage it to the end, the rewards will be great.

Let me start by telling you I’m re-reading Claude Hopkins’s My Life in Advertising. And one story I missed before is this bit from Hopkins’s childhood:

One of the products which father advertised was Vinegar Bitters. I afterward learned its history.

A vinegar-maker spoiled a batch through some queer fermentation. Thus he produced a product weird in its offensiveness.

The people of those days believed that medicine must be horrible to be effective.

We had oils and ointments “for man or beast” which would make either wild. We used “snake oil” and “skunk oil,” presumably because of their names.

Unless the cure was worse than the disease, no one would respect it.

Today we assume that every offer must be fast, easy, and cheap.

But human nature changes like glass flows — so slowly that we will never see it happen.

And a part of the human brain still believes, like it did in Hopkins’s day, that the cure must be worse than the disease. At least along some dimension.

So if your offer is fast and easy, make sure it’s not cheap.

Or if your offer really is all of fast, easy, and cheap… then at least throw a skunk or a snake into it somewhere.

In other words, turn your prospect into a hero. Tell him a story:

He’s somebody who’s willing to do what’s offensive to others… somebody who can swallow what would turn most men or beasts wild. ​​No, it won’t be easy or pleasant. But if he can manage it to the end, the rewards will be great.

Last thing:

Maybe you’d like to know I have an email newsletter. It’s cheap and easy, but it’s very slow. You can sign up for it here.

Marketers are from Mars, prospects are from—?

by

John Gray catches a lot of flak for his 1992 best-seller, Men are from Mars, Women are from Wenus.

But I’ve personally gotten a lot of use out of this short idea from Gray’s book:

“The most frequently expressed complaint women have about men is that men don’t listen. Either a man completely ignores her when she speaks to him, or he listens for a few beats, assesses what is bothering her, and then proudly puts on his Mr. Fix-It cap and offers her a solution to make her feel better. He is confused when she doesn’t appreciate this gesture of love. No matter how many times she tells him that he’s not listening, he doesn’t get it and keeps doing the same thing. She wants empathy, but he thinks she wants solutions.”

The thing is, it’s not just men who prematurely jump to solutions. And it’s not just women who will ignore offered solutions, even when they are perfectly good.

We are all like this, much of the time.

When we are frustrated, most of us hate having suggestions tossed at us. “Don’t you think I’ve thought of that? It would never work in my case! Why don’t you just listen for a second?”

I know I’ve reacted like this, at least internally, while keeping up a stoic front. And I’ve seen plenty of other guys — some of them manly, practical-minded men – nervously shrugging off good solutions to their ongoing problems.

The question to me is why? Why do women and men both choose not solve problems for which there are good solutions?

I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this.

My conclusion is this isn’t a trivial human quirk, or like Gray says, just a hysterical cry for a bit of empathy.

Instead, my feeling is it goes back to fundamental human needs, like those I talked about yesterday.

Specifically, the need for uniqueness… and the need for meaning.

​​It might not seem very rational from the outside, but it makes perfect sense from the inside:

People will hold on to their problems just so they can keep feeling unique. “I might not have much… but I’ve got trouble like nobody’s ever seen.”

Or they will cling to pain and failure, even when there’s an easy way out. Because if there really is an easy way out, then what was the purpose of all that suffering they’ve experienced in the past?

In other words:

You might be selling your prospect a shiny new chrome pipe. And your prospect might desperately need it — the old pipe is rusted out and the basement is filling up with water. But what you don’t realize is that installing that new pipe might undermine the very foundations of your prospect’s house.

So that’s the problem that you face.

It’s tricky.

And it’s definitely unique.

But don’t worry. I won’t irritate you with any pigheaded suggestions for how you can solve this problem. At least I won’t do it here.

I’ll save that for an upcoming paid product. Maybe I will call it Marketers Are From Mars, Prospects Are From— but where exactly? I still have to work that part out. In case you want to get notified when this mansplaining guide comes out, sign up for my email newsletter.

I’m sorry Ms. Jackson

by

This one right here goes out to all the email copywriters… the business owners who write their own emails… maybe even those with a YouTube channel.

Here’s the story:​​

A few weeks ago, a music industry insider named Ted Gioia made a big splash by writing an article with the title:

“Is Old Music Killing New Music?”

Gioia had a bunch of stats and anecdotes to prove that old music — stuff that came out 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago — is crowding out the new music being produced today.

Gioia has his theory for why this is.

Basically, he says, record company execs just wants to get a piece of the American pie to take their bite out. So they keep giving people tried-and-true stuff. They’re not willing to take risks.

It’s short-term thinking, Gioia says. Because ironically, the execs are making themselves irrelevant in the process. But one way or another, the fact remains, in Gioia’s words:

“Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact.”

In my own uninformed yet subjective opinion, this is part of a bigger trend.

It’s not only music that’s getting old. I think it’s movies also, and perhaps other pop culture too.

This matters for marketers.

Because from what I’ve seen writing approximately a billion sales emails… pop culture always gets a great response.

Pop culture references turns you into a magician who can abracadabra a sales point… get people to enjoy it… and maybe even get them to buy.

So what exactly am I telling you?

Well, it’s the same thing that some 40 years ago, A-list copywriter Gene Schwartz said:

“If a movie does a hundred million dollars or more, especially a movie that does two hundred or three hundred million dollars or more, I would go to it two or three times.”

This is a good idea today just as it was in Gene’s time.

Go see blockbusters. But make sure you see the same ones that Gene was talking about, like Lethal Weapon and Home Alone and Pulp Fiction.

In other words, don’t take risks with any of this new stuff. Give people the tried-and-true. And keep doing it. Forever. Forever-ever. For-EVER-ever.

“Whoa there Bejako,” you say. ​”You’ve been handing out a lot of careless and maybe even harmful advice lately.”

Oh yeah, like what?​

“Well, like ​first you said to bet on the Bengals for the Super Bowl. We know how that turned out. Then a couple days ago you almost got me sucked into QAnon.”

That was an honest mistake.
​
“Whatever. The point is, now you’re telling me to pander to my audience with references to Fleetwood Mac and Kill Bill. But isn’t this the same short-term thinking as those record company execs? Won’t I be making myself irrelevant in the process?”

I don’t know. You might be right. I might be wrong. So all I can say is:

I’m sorry dear reader. I am for real. Never meant to send you bad advice. I apologize a trillion times.

But I’ll do more than apologize.

I’ll tell you how to avoid pandering and talk about pop culture your audience isn’t familiar with, without taking much of a risk. That’s in my email tomorrow. I hope you’ll read it. You and your mama.