Copywriting

The beginnings of empire: How Agora made its first sales

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You look out your window, past your gardener, who is busily pruning the lemon, cherry, and fig trees… amidst the splendor of gardenias, hibiscus, and hollyhocks.

The sky is clear blue. The sea is a deeper blue, sparkling with sunlight.

A gentle breeze comes drifting in from the ocean, clean and refreshing, as your maid brings breakfast in bed.

For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven.

But this paradise is real. And affordable. In fact, it costs only half as much to live this dream lifestyle… as it would to stay in your own home!

What you’ve just read is the opening of the International Living sales letter.

Bill Bonner — the founder of Agora, a $1B+ publishing company — used this sales letter to launch his first newsletter over thirty years ago. The letter supposedly brought in $3 for every $1 of advertising spend. Today, it still continues to bring in new paying readers.

I bring it up to illustrate a powerful marketing truth, which I first heard from another famous copywriter, Dan Kennedy:

Sell escape, not improvement

Bonner wasn’t selling people on eking out more from their meager social security. He was selling them escape, to heaven, with nothing more than what they already had. Well, with nothing more but a subscription to International Living.

You too can do the same. ​​Selling people a lighter shade of drab is hard work. Selling them a bright and exciting new color, well, that’s the kind of approach that can help you start a billion-dollar empire.

Speaking of escape:

Imagine checking your email every day, and among the dozens of boring, pushy, or irrelevant messages from God-knows-who, you see it.

It’s a daily email, one that I sent you. It talks about marketing and persuasion, but mostly, it’s a way to escape for a few moments.

For a moment, you think you have died and gone to heaven. But this paradise is real, and surprisingly affordable. In fact, it’s free. You can sign up to make this dream a reality by clicking here.

Tempting your prospect into adultery

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I just read an Atlantic article about why people cheat, even in seemingly happy relationships.

The article describes the case of one Priya, a dutiful woman married to her “dream guy” but cheating with a tattooed truck driver. Priya is torn and miserable about how she is risking it all and how horrified her husband would be if he found out. But she can’t let the affair go.

It seems to me the real reason why people cheat is unknowable, even to those doing the cheating. ​​My theory is that people do these kinds of things from layers upon layers of deep and hidden motivations, which are usually plastered over by a story the cheater tells him or herself (“There’s no more passion in my marriage,” “It just happened”).

But enough about sex. Let’s talk marketing.

Specifically, let’s talk adultery, but within the context of getting people to start cheating on their current solution, and having an affair with your offer instead.

Fact is, if somebody is in a given market, then they have problems and deep motivations that are not being satisfied by the current solution they are using. That’s by definition. If they were perfectly satisfied, they wouldn’t be in your target market.

And there’s a clever way to tell your prospects a story that gets their minds and wallets a-wandering. It’s a combination of something I heard from marketers Stefan Georgi and Rich Schefren. And it’s something I’m writing up in a little book I’m putting together just now.

That book will be out in the next few weeks. If you’d like to get notified when it’s out, so you can read about this little adultery-causing technique, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter.

What boomers and Tik Tokers crave the most

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A while back, I was listening to a coaching call by top-level copywriter Dan Ferrari. And one of the guys on the call — it might have been copywriter Mike Abramov, I’m not sure — was writing a sales promo for some Agora health affiliate.

You might know how these Agora health promos look: a miracle discovery in the jungles of a remote Pacific island… an FDA conspiracy to suppress a powerful natural cure… long-lost scientific gold uncovered again by accident.

Anyways, the Agora copywriter in question said the following insightful thing:

“People are just really bored, and the one email each day with the curiosity-teasing clickbait is the highlight of their day.”

This ties into something Kevin Rogers of Copy Chief wrote in an email several months. Kevin was talking about the shift from selling to entertaining, and how this is indispensable today as direct response markets shift from the boomer generation to whatever generation comes after the boomers (gen X?).

Kevin says, it’s just as important for a copywriter today to study Quentin Tarantino as to study Claude Hopkins.

I agree. And more people becoming aware of it. But as the Agora copywriter above commented, this is not just if you’re selling to millennials or gen X or whatever Tik Tok-enabled crowd today.

In today’s market, whatever and whoever you sell to, odds are, your prospects are bored. And the sales copy you send them — emails, FB ads, advertorials, long-form sales letters — should be the entertaining highlight of their dreary days. Entertain first, and you might have a chance to sell, too.

And if you yourself need an occasional cure from being bored, I write a daily email newsletter than can help with that. Or it might not. But if you want to give it a try, and see if amuses you to read, you can sign up for a test here.

The grandmaster of marketing secrets fesses up

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A few weeks back, I wrote a post about the trouble with marketing “secrets.”

​​It’s not that packaging things up as a secret doesn’t work. It does. It works great, and that’s why so many marketers use secrets as a crutch.

Today, I want to warn you about secrets again, but from the other side. Not a warning to you as a copywriter peddling secrets… but to you as a prospect getting sucked in by the promise of secret copywriting knowledge.

And to do that, I want to share a quote I heard in a speech given by an A-list copywriter who might be called the grandmaster of marketing secrets. I’m talking about Mark Ford, who, along with Bill Bonner, was one of the key people who made Agora the direct marketing behemoth it is today.

In case you don’t know, Agora is a conglomerate of a bunch of smaller publishing companies. Much of what Agora does is sell secrets — in the finance, health, and most recently, make money online markets. From what I understand, the selling of secrets at Agora all started with Mark Ford, who literally wrote the book on selling secrets (Great Leads, along with John Forde).

So Mark Ford and Bill Bonner were talking about the psychology underlying what they do… and they concluded the following:

“There is an inverse relationship between the value of knowledge and what people are willing to pay for it. The most important things in life you’ve probably heard a hundred times before, but you’re not paying attention. When you’re in the right place and you hear it, you have that ‘aha’ moment and everything changes.”

In other words, these two guys, who have collectively made hundreds of millions of dollars selling secrets, concluded that secrets aren’t worth that much.

So what am I saying?

Nothing. Draw your own conclusions. But perhaps Mark Ford’s confession above is something to remember the next time you hear an alluring promise of “insider knowledge” and “7-figure copywriting secrets.”

Speaking of alluring promises:

I write a daily email newsletter. It’s full of non-secret, highly valuable information. If you’d like to sign up for it, here’s the link.

Jab, jab, right hook — for sales copy

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Gary Vaynerchuck has this famed marketing idea of “jab, jab, jab, right hook.”

The idea is to give value a bunch of times (the jabs) before making any kind of ask from your audience (the right hook).

I don’t subscribe to this way of splitting up value and sales.

But I do think this “jab, jab, right hook” approach can make sense in straight-up sales copy.

Fact is, when you get in the ring with your prospect, his defenses will be strong. If you try to hit him right on the nose with your most powerful claim right away, he’s just going to duck and weave and keep his guard up.

So what do you do instead?

Well, this ties into the discussion of gradualization from my post yesterday.

In a peanutshell, you jab your prospect first with a bunch of softer, less powerful, but more believable claims. Let me give you an example:

“How Doctors Stay Well While Treating Sick People All Day Long”

That was the headline of a successful magalog written by Parris Lampropoulos.

What do you think this headline is about?

Odds are, you think of clever ways that doctors avoid getting the common cold.

And that’s pretty much how the copy leads off. Here’s a breakdown of the beliefs and claims that Parris cycles through in a few paragraphs:

1. The official line is that doctors don’t get sick because they wash their hands all the time

2. But it’s not true! Studies show that three out of four doctors don’t wash their hands between patients, and over 2 million patients get sick in doctors’ offices

3. The truth is that doctors actually rely on herbs, folk remedies, and non-standard cures to keep from catching infections

5. And doctors also use these “forbidden treatments” to lower their cholesterol, get rid of pains, and prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s

Whoa! Did you catch that?

We started out talking about clever ways doctors use to keep from getting the common cold. Now we’re talking about preventing cancer and Alzheimer’s.

And over the next couple pages, it gets more extreme.

Parris shows you how there are proven but non-standard treatments, not just to prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s, but actually to cure these killer diseases.

For this audience, that’s the right hook. It takes an A-list copywriter like Parris to hold off on this knockout punch long enough that he can be sure to land it, plum on the nose.

In the words of Gene Schwartz, who first wrote about this process:

“This fact — that your most powerful claim does not always make your most powerful headline — is a paradox that many copy writers still cannot accept. Mail order advertisers, however, have a simple way of proving it. When a power-claim headline doesn’t work — for reasons either of Awareness or Sophistication — they immediately split it against a second head, with far fewer claims but far more likely to be believed. Then they build a belief bridge from this second headline, to the same exact claims they featured in the first, but now anticipated by careful preparation every step of the way.”

Screenwriting & copywriting: “If the structure is unsound, forget it”

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One of my favorite screenwriters of all time is William Goldman, the guy behind The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.

Writing about his craft, Goldman made the claim that “screenplays are structure.” He explained in more detail:

“Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure, it’s nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have terrific characters spouting just swell talk to each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it.”

Same thing in copywriting.

You can have all the nifty dialog and terrific characters you want, but if your arguments are out of order, or if you introduce a claim that doesn’t belong, you’re a dead duck.

Maybe you think I’m exaggerating. So here’s a relevant quote from one of the great A-list copywriters of the last century:

“If you violate your prospect’s established beliefs in the slightest degree — either in content or direction — then nothing you promise him, no matter how appealing, can save your ad.”

Ahe A-list copywriter behind this thought is Gene Schwartz. In his book Breakthrough Advertising, Gene wrote that the structure of your ad should be a bridge of belief between the facts your prospect currently accepts, and the final facts you want him to accept. Gene called this process of bridge building “gradualization.”

So how does this look in practice?

Well, in Breakthrough Advertising, Gene gave a line-by-line breakdown of gradualization in a famous ad (“Why haven’t TV owners been told these facts?”).

But that ad is kind of old. So I’ll give you a more recent example.

Except, it’s getting late. It’s time for me to quickly re-watch the swordfighting scene from The Princess Bride, and then get to bed. I’ll share that gradualization example with you, and all its structural wonder, in my email tomorrow.

What, you don’t get my email newsletter but you want tomorrow’s email? No problem. Sign up here.

A small, cosmetic copy change to keep clients happy

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“This is the best copy you’ve written for us. Really excited to test this out.”

A couple years ago, I started writing a bunch of advertorials for a client who does dropshipping.

Every few weeks, these guys would launch a new product. I’d write the advertorial and the Facebook ads that would drive hapless moms and grandmas to my advertorial horror story.

The first advertorial I wrote for this client did well, and beat the copy they were using.

So they had me write a few more. Some of these offers did well. Some not.

But overall, my approach to writing advertorials during this time was much the same in each case. The client was satisfied enough, but never made any special comments on the copy.

But then I changed something up.

At the time, I was re-reading Joe Sugarman’s Adweek book. And somewhere around the middle of that book, Joe suggests a small, almost cosmetic change you can make to your copy to get readers hooked on reading more.

So I started making this change in my advertorial copy. It took all of 5 minutes after the copy was done.

Did it make a difference?

Well, the client was happy. That quote above, about the best copy, was what he said after I delivered the gussied-up advertorial.

As for sales, the offer ran successfully on cold Facebook traffic for a few months.

The advertorial still does well for us as a back-end product, and converts at around 6% on email traffic.

I’ve been making this same change with all the advertorials I’ve written since. I can’t be sure what it’s doing for sales, but I suspect it helps a bit. And as long as it doesn’t hurt, but it keeps my client happier, that’s a win in itself.

So what is this small, cosmetic change?

Like I said, you can find it in Joe Sugarman’s book.

But if you don’t want to go hunting for it there, you’ll also be able to find it in my upcoming book on wisdom handed down by A-list copywriters.

If you want to get notified when this book is out and available, sign up for my daily email newsletter, where I write about persuasion, marketing, and copywriting lessons won on my own skin.

Don’t be a dumb bunny — get this copywriting knowledge now

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Getting to the top of any field these days takes an almost obscene amount of dedication.

Take for example A-list copywriter Jim Rutz.

At one point, Rutz was one of the most in-demand copywriters in the world.

In the early days, he was so good he worked on royalties only — he was confident he could beat any control, so higher royalties made more sense than charging fees.

Later, the line of clients who wanted Rutz stretched out the door and down the hill. So Rutz also added up-front fees to his royalties. At one point, these up-front fees reached $100,000 for a single promotion.

But like I said, it took an unholy amount of dedication for Rutz to become this dominant.

Apparently, he didn’t have much of a social life or sex life. His clever attempts at finding a mail-order bride fell through.

His home life was unusual too. When Boardroom VP Brian Kurtz visited Rutz’s home, he found stacks of direct response promotions lying around. Rutz used these promotions as furniture. It seems his whole life was largely about direct response.

I definitely don’t have this level of dedication. Perhaps you don’t either. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can learn from Jim Rutz nonetheless.

For example, I always remember this Jim Rutz commandment:

“You must surprise the reader at the outset and at every turn of the copy. This takes time and toil.”

Sure, you wanna surprise the reader at the outset. Have a paradoxical headline. Or a bizarre subject line. Makes sense.

But what about at every turn of the copy?

​​Well, let me give you an example of that. Here’s a quick paragraph from a sidebar in a Jim Rutz magalog. ​​If you want to get better at surprising your readers, read this, once, twice, and maybe even print it out to form the beginning of your new nightstand:

“The ultimate nightmare: Being trapped in extreme pain, day after day. GREAT NEWS: Some doctors have learned in the past ten years how to block almost any degree of pain. But you have to know what kind of treatment to ask for… or how to get a physician who specializes in pain management… or where to find an accredited pain management facility. It’s all on page 127. Don’t be a dumb bunny and wait until you get hit by a cement truck. Get this knowledge now.”

Speaking of knowledge:

I have a daily email newsletter. There isn’t always copywriting knowledge inside. But sometimes there is. You can subscribe here.

The occasion of A-list copywriting

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Like Hollywood celebs, A-list copywriters come and go.

Gene Schwartz… Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos…

That’s only natural. People age and the market demands new stars.

But what’s not natural is to have a modern-day A-list copywriter introduce a new insight about copywriting.

After all, pretty much all wisdom we have about copywriting was written down around the time that Marlon Brando was screaming “Stella” and redefining what it means to be an actor.

And yet, these new breakthroughs sometimes happen. Case in point:

Dan Ferrari and his “occasions.”

I’ve written about Dan aplenty in these emails. But the short version of his bio is that he was a top copywriter at the Motley Fool, starting around 2013…

Before going out on his own and becoming an even more successful freelance copywriter.

So let me tell you about one new bit of copywriting wisdom I heard from Dan Ferrari. This happened on a call he did with Kevin Rogers of Copy Chief.

Dan was breaking down his “Genesis” promo. This sales letter beat the previous control by over 300%.

(And if you read my email from yesterday about the fickleness of “beating a control,” let me add that the client in this case was Green Valley Natural Products, which hires the best copywriters and is actually owned by an A-list copywriter, Lee Euler. In other words, that previous copy must have been at least decent.)

Anyways, while talking about this promo, Dan made a small comment, something along the lines of:

“I always look for an occasion or an event to tie my copy into.”

This was something I’ve never heard anyone else talk about. It was entirely new, at least to me. And it took me a while to find out what Dan meant by this.

I guess this occasion stuff came natural to him because of his background in writing financial copy.

All financial promos are sensitive to news and current events, because markets are sensitive to news and current events.

But Dan’s insight was that other markets are the same too.

Your prospects also want to know what the occasion is of your writing.

Are you selling a completely new invention that nobody’s heard of until now? And if not, why are they only hearing from you now, and not five years ago?

This is a question you have to answer for your readers. You have to create an “occasion” for your sales letter.

It might seem like a trivial thing to focus on, but it can make the difference between A-list copywriting and everything else.

For more info on A-lister copywriting tactics, you might like my daily email newsletter.

The bad (and the good) of beating a control

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BAM!

On April 6, 2019, bad boy MMA fighter Conor McGregor stepped inside a Dublin pub.

McGregor owns a brand of whiskey. So he offered to buy a round of his Proper No. 12 to all the pub patrons.

One old guy said, no thanks.

So McGregor, who at one point held two MMA belts and also fought boxing legend Floyd Mayweather, socked the old man right in the ear. The old man absorbed the jab gamely. But he quietly turned away, clearly ceding to McGregor’s physical dominance.

The infuriating thing is that none of the mainstream news media reported a fact I know deep in my heart:

This old man was the standing boxing champ of that local Dublin pub.

He won the title back in 1989, against another local drunkard named Ciaran. Since then, nobody has dared to challenge the old man’s reign. Except Conor McGregor.

Here’s where I’m going with this:

McGregor winning that pub fight was much like a copywriter beating a long-standing control. (A control, as you probably know, is your best ad, the one that’s been running successfully for a long time, and outperforming all competition.)

Maybe you see the similarity. If you beat a control, it’s impossible to say what that really means.

Maybe your new copy really is a highly trained fighting machine. Maybe it could beat all competition, even on a world stage filled with killers.

But… maybe, just maybe, you sucker punched an old man who was teetering on a bar stool after his third pint. Maybe the old copy was so outdated, so weak, and so ready for change that even a finger tap would have done it.

Nobody can tell for sure.

Which might be bad if you’re looking for copywriting “truth.”

But it’s certainly great if you’re a copywriter looking to make a name for yourself. So go out and start brawling. Get yourself a control, even if it means pushing over some tipsy, harmless geezer.

Last thing:

I have an daily email newsletter. Much of the content is me pushing over long-standing but tired claims like “he won a control, therefore he must be great” and replacing them with something more interesting.

If you’d like to sign up for my emails so you can see me terrorizing these bits of conventional wisdom, here’s where to go.