Copywriting

An imminent prediction about a 10x opportunity that solves an urgent problem

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A few days ago, I was chatting to a friend. She said she’s got “thanatophobia.” I looked it up. It means a fear of death.

Then today, I was reading through YouTube comments. “If you don’t like the sound of people whistling,” wrote one of the commenters, “you’ve probably got misophonia.”

I looked that up, too. It’s when a sound irritates you more than it should.

Here’s a third affliction I only just found out about:

Cyberchondria. That’s the condition when you latch on to a newfangled term, found on the Internet, which gives a Greek name to symptoms of being alive.

But let’s change tack for a second.

A while back, copywriter Roy Furr wrote that there are only three types of big ideas for sales letters:

1. Solve an urgent problem
2. Present a 10x opportunity
3. Make an imminent prediction

So let me make an imminent prediction for you:

Rates of cyberchondria will rise dramatically over the next year. Society will become more atomized, isolated, and socially distanced. People will suffer as a result. And they will want answers.

So if you want a 10x opportunity, simply keep an eye out. New terms will pop up to describe bad feelings you’ve sensed but never articulated. These new terms — and the urgent problems behind them — could be your new big idea.

As marketer Rich Schefren says over and over, “That which is most personal, is most general.” And if it has a scientific-sounding name, that certainly helps.

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The $3.9-billion argument for soft, believable persuasion

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Michael Burry, the first guy to figure out how to make money from the subprime mortgage crisis, lost out in a way.

Burry saw the crisis coming. He realized he could make money from it by buying something called a credit default swap. This would pay out big time once crappy mortgage bonds failed.

Burry ran a hedge fund. He invested much of the money in his control in these credit default swaps. But this was a massive opportunity. Burry wanted to invest more. So he tried to raise money for a new fund, which would buy more credit default swaps.

Trouble was, Burry was an awkward guy, and not great at persuading. He shocked people with his predictions of catastrophe. Nobody gave him more money to invest.

Fast forward nine months. Burry’s ideas had spread around the industry. So another investor, John Paulson, attempted the exact same thing Burry had tried to do. From The Big Short:

“Paulson succeeded, by presenting it to investors not as a catastrophe almost certain to happen but as a cheap hedge against the remote possibility of catastrophe.”

This brings up a fundamental rule of persuasion. It’s perhaps the most important rule of them all:

Only tell people something that they are ready to accept.

In some situations, this can mean you don’t start with your biggest promise, your strongest proof, or your most shocking prediction. In the words of Gene Schwartz, the best thinker on this topic:

“The effectiveness of your headline is as much determined by the willingness of your audience to believe what it says, as it is by the promises it makes.”

So did Michael Burry lose out? Depends on your perspective. When it was time to cash in, Burry walked away with an estimated $100 million. John Paulson? $4 billion.

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Major anti-aging breakthrough = great new lead?

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In one of these posts last September, I talked about a new piece anti-aging research. It was something I’d read about in a blog post by Josh Mitteldorf.

Josh’s post described a new study performed at UCLA. Scientists there reversed the epigenetic aging clock — also known as the “death clock.” It was a limited study, but very encouraging.

Well today, Josh Mitteldorf has a new article. It covers something much bigger and more exciting.

A second team of scientists changed a bunch of old rats into younger rats. How much younger? From rat age 80 to rat age 20. And they did it by using just four injections, containing stuff from younger rats’ blood.

Josh Mitteldorf, who is a very smart and measured guy, says this is a major breakthrough that could scale to humans. He’s staking his reputation on it.

If this bubbling spring does turn out to be the fountain of youth, it’s gonna have big consequences. But either way, it’s likely to have some little consequences, too. Such as for example, being a great lead for a direct marketing promotion.

Maybe you think I’m grasping at straws. So let me refer to the current control for Genesis, Green Valley’s telomere supplement. That promo was written by Stefan Georgi and came out last September. It’s still running. And it uses the “death clock” research as its hook.

In other words, this anti-aging research is worth keeping an eye on. So if you want to read Josh Mitteldorf’s post, for yourself or for your copywriting, here’s the link:

https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/05/11/age-reduction-breakthrough/

Doing a bit of selling to somebody else’s posse

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There’s a scene I love in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:

The local marshal is trying to start a posse. The crowd seems undecided and the marshal’s getting really worked up.

Finally, a man from the crowd stands next to the marshal. Is the tide finally turning in the marshal’s favor?

“Here’s what I say,” says the other man. “I say, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends and enemies, meet the future!”

It turns out this guy is a salesman — promoting this shiny new invention called a bicycle.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” says the bewildered marshal.

The bicycle salesman shrugs. “You got the crowd together, so I thought I’d do a bit of selling.”

Well, what worked in the Wild West works still. If you want to do some easy selling, find somebody who has already gathered a crowd.

The good news is, there’s this shiny new invention called a podcast. Usually it’s got a host, who’s gone to a great deal of trouble to assemble his own posse. Strange enough, but a lot of these podcast hosts will let you come on their show… talk yourself silly… and do a bit of selling.

Now odds are, you’ve known all about this for a long time. So why haven’t you done anything about it? Perhaps, you didn’t have a list of podcasts that are a good fit for what you’re selling.

That’s what I want to share with you today. It’s a search engine, specifically for podcasts topics, hosts, and guests.

I just used it to quickly track down a list of two dozen podcasts I could go after. All I did was type in the names of some people in the industry where I sell. And if you want to do the same, here’s the link where you can access this posse search engine:

https://www.listennotes.com/

Positioning remarkable ideas against popular incumbents

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In 2005, Wired magazine published an article titled, “GTD: A New Cult for the Info Age.”

It was about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. This was a productivity system, which Allen first described in a 2001 book of the same name.

The basic premise of GTD was that we are all flooded with more and more distractions and tasks. The old ways of dealing with all this work, such as todo lists or goal-setting, are not enough.

As the Wired article describes, a few frustrated knowledge workers found Allen’s book. They identified themselves with the problems he described. And they adopted and promoted the GTD system with evangelical zeal.

By 2005, GTD had become a kind of cult. But this was still not the high point of Allen’s success. Interest in GTD kept building and spreading in all parts of American society for the rest of the 2000s.

Then, in 2012, a guy named Cal Newport wrote a post on his Study Hacks blog. The title was “Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done: The Problem With David Allen’s Universalism.”

The gist of Newport’s post was that GTD was great — if you’re a secretary or a mid-tier manager. But if you do any kind of creative, thought-intensive work, GTD will fail. In Newport’s words:

“Allen preaches task universalism: when you get down to concrete actions, all work is created equal. I disagree with this idea. Creating real value requires […] a fundamentally different activity than knocking off organizational tasks.”

Newport came out with his own solution to the problem behind GTD. He called it “deep work.”

Interest in deep work rose as interest in GTD declined. According to Google Trends, the two crossed paths, one on the way up, the other on the way down, in 2014. Today, if you check on Amazon, you will find Deep Work has knowledge workers’ attention, not GTD.

I don’t think Cal Newport did this consciously, but he hit upon an ideal way to position Deep Work. And that was in contrast to an existing, popular solution.

This is something smart marketers have been doing for years. I first heard Rich Schefren talk about this. Rich says this is one way he was able to get millions of leads and thousands of high-paying customers.

Rich’s advice is to go out into the marketplace and find a successful offer. Then, figure out how to make that offer a part of the problem — rather than a part of the solution.

You can go out and do that now. And you might have the same success as Rich Schefren or Cal Newport.

But here’s a nuanced point that might help you out even more.

After Cal Newport wrote his anti-GTD blog post, he got over 100 comments on the post. Those comments were very divided. A few said, “You might just be right.” But many more said, “You don’t understand GTD, or you’re not using it correctly.”

This corresponds to the Google Trends info. By 2012, interest in GTD had peaked. But overall, GTD was still very popular.

So if you want to position your product against an incumbent, that’s the moment to strike. Not when the incumbent is at the peak of popularity… but also, not when most people have already moved on. As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

“To truth only a brief celebration is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.”

Nauseating copy editing tricks from an acclaimed Hollywood movie

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Several minutes ago, I finished watching The Big Short. It was nauseating.

The movie is so jerky and fast that I felt like I was riding in a speeding truck on an unpaved mountain road.

For example, in one scene, two characters are in a restaurant. One character is explaining something technical about mortgages.

In the space of about 10 seconds, you can experience: 23 editing cuts… a significant amount of fast-paced dialogue… a laugh track which doesn’t seem to relate to the dialogue… Sweet Child O’ Mine, playing at increasing volume over the dialogue and the laugh track. And this is all shot on handheld camera, to add a documentary, vomit-inducing feel.

This reminded me of a sales letter lead I dissected last autumn.

The sales letter was the Fat Burning Furnace, which I believe was a big Clickbank hit a while back.

The Fat Burning Furnace lead was as fast-paced as that scene from The Big Short:

In about 20 seconds, there were probably a dozen ideas, all of which were disjointed and seemingly spliced together. The lead jumped from claim to secret to promise to objection to problem to identification and then back again.

It didn’t make sense to me. This is not how people talk.

But that’s what people respond to. People watched The Big Short, and they loved it. And they consumed the Fat Burning Furnace VSL, and they paid for the product.

So if you catch yourself writing conversational, smooth-flowing copy, it might be time to make some quick cuts and edits. Keep your prospect’s logical brain reeling, while his lizard brain starts licking its chops. Do this right, and maybe you’ll credit default swap your own way into a million-dollar payday.

Teaching emails that make sales

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I talked to my aunt last night. She’s a kindergarten teacher, and she mentioned that she’s going back to work corralling screaming 5-year-olds.

I haven’t been following the local corona news, so this was a surprise to me.

Sure enough, starting next week, all kids up to grade 4 will be back in classrooms throughout Croatia. “Enough is enough,” frustrated parents must have been saying, and the government eventually caved in.

But here’s the thing that got me wondering:

If spending each day with your kids at home gets tiring for the majority of parents… can you imagine how tiring a teacher’s job must be?

Not one kid… not two… but 25 or more? And not for the next few years until your kids become more independent… but for life, each year the same thing?

And on top of this, teachers don’t even get paid well.

I think it was Matt Furey who first brought this fact up in connection with marketing. He used the fact that teachers don’t make any money to warn against over-teaching in your emails.

Instead, Matt’s advice was to motivate, inspire, and entertain.

I can definitely agree with this. But I would add that teaching can work and it can work well.

The key though is to educate your prospect about his problem, and the specific nuances of why he hasn’t been able to solve it so far.

In other words, don’t tell your prospect HOW to solve his problem… tell him WHY he hasn’t been able to solve it until now.

And then of course, you still have to do some selling. But if you’ve done the teaching bit right… the selling should be easy, because your solution will fit like a hand into your prospect’s problem glove.

I realize I’m contradicting my own advice with the past few sentences. That’s why this email won’t make any money. Not a noble thing, if you ask me. Hopefully, you will be smarter and more disciplined about spilling your teaching — and doing some selling – in your own emails.

One extra step that conjures sales out of thin air

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Three quick stories today about something valuable and important:

The first story is from the Dan Kennedy talk I shared a few days ago.

Dan needed a new closet. A closet salesman gave Dan a rundown of the features and benefits of the available closets.

But Dan didn’t buy. He had the money and he needed the closet, but he wasn’t moved. “It didn’t align with my interests,” he said.

At the same time, Dan’s wedding anniversary was coming up. So Dan says… the closet salesman should have asked about upcoming special occasions. He could have easily sold Dan the new closet as the perfect anniversary present. (Apparently, Mrs. Kennedy loves a good closet, and it would have been convenient for Dan.)

The second story I heard Rich Schefren tell on a Zoom call last week. The interviewer brought up how some businesses are suffering during lockdown. For example, Airbnbs.

At which point, Rich jumped in to say his wife’s Airbnbs  have been thriving. She’s been renting out her largish Airbnb houses to apartment dwellers — from the same town. These folks want more space during quarantine to avoid a 2020 re-enactment of The Shining.

The third story is also from last week and comes from my work with one of my clients. They sell a bunch of ecomm products to a large email list. One of these products are wool balls that are supposed to replace dryer sheets.

The first email was four weeks ago. We sold the wool balls as a reusable, money-saving dryer sheet alternative. That email did ok.

Then last week, we sent out a second email to sell the same wool balls. On average, the second time we run the same offer only does about 60% as well as the first one.

Not this time. This time, the second email did as well as the first email. That’s because instead of leading with dryer sheets, it lead with acne. Didn’t you know? Acne is caused by clogged pores, which happens when you get wax all over your face, like from the pillow case you dry with dryer sheets.

The point of all these stories is that you can conjure up sales out of thin air. Sometimes many such sales. All you have to do is get one thing right. And that one thing is…

​Positioning. Selling what people want… rather than what you have.

But here’s a warning. Positioning requires effort. One whole extra step, beyond what everybody else is doing. Or in Rich Schefren’s words:

“As the marketer, you have to connect the dots for people. You can’t sit on the sidelines hoping that someone else will do it.”

Shooting the literotica arrow into the bullseye of fame and sales

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“I went to the beach on my own. It was a warm and nice day. There was another girl there. She had come from another island because our beach was sunnier and more secluded. We lay there completely naked and sunbathed… dozing off and on, putting sunscreen on. We had silly straw hats on. Mine had a blue ribbon. I lay there… looking out at the landscape, at the sea and the sun. It was kind of funny. Suddenly I saw two figures on the rocks above us.”

That’s a bit of monologue from a movie I just watched called Persona. One of the main characters recounts how she had an impromptu orgy at the beach with three strangers. Post-orgy, she goes home and has sex with her fiance. “It had never been that good,” she says, “before or after.”

“I know this script!” I told myself while watching this. I didn’t know it from this movie or any other. I knew it from a book I read a long time ago called Sperm Wars.

Sperm Wars was a kind of “Selfish Gene” applied to human sexuality. It was all very well researched and very scientific. And it was very popular when it came out. I guess partly because of those interesting scientific insights… but more importantly, because of the format.

Because Sperm Wars wasn’t your typical pop science book. Instead, each chapter started out with a story, setting up the science that was about to go down. The above scene from Persona was something straight out of Sperm Wars. In effect, Sperm Wars allowed you to read literotica, but you could pretend you were learning something enlightening about human biology.

So what’s the point of this?

Well, I’ve been collecting examples and ideas for spicing up ye olde regular content. I gave you one example a few days ago with that medieval warfare blog. I think literotica + [your topic] is another great arrow to keep in your quiver. Like I said, Sperm Wars definitely shot that arrow into the bullseye of fame and sales.

Of course, maybe literotica isn’t your kind of arrow. So give it some thought. Maybe another lurid genre would work better. And maybe you’ll get lucky and come upon a real winner. Something that makes you say, “It had never been that good, before or after.”

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Bringing direct back into direct response

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Today I want to tell you the number one problem my copywriting coach kept pointing out about my sales copy. If you avoid this problem in your own sales letters, your response will skyrocket, particularly if you are selling to cold traffic.

To set it all up, let me tell you a couple personal stories:

Around 2004, my friend got a job in Boston. I went to visit him. We wound up at a house party, standing next to two girls from Harvard.

My friend leaned over to the girls. “Are you guys best friends?” he asked. “Here, let’s find out.”

And then he gave them the “best friends” test. He’d read about it in The Game, the book by Neil Strauss about the pick up artist community.

The “best friends” test is an indirect way to start talking to girls. “Girls will blow you off if you hit on them right away,” the indirect school of pickup says. “So you gotta snake your way into a conversation.”

Sure enough, the best friends test worked. The Harvard birds loved it. We talked to them throughout the evening. “Do you live far away from here?” they asked at the end of the night.

“Very, very close,” my friend answered. But let’s leave that story, and let’s fast-forward about ten years:

I was walking down the street with another friend when I noticed a girl. I ran up and stopped right in front of her.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I was just walking with my friend when I noticed you. I thought you looked very nice and I wanted to meet you.” The girl’s eyes widened. We talked for a few minutes before I asked for her number. Later, she became my girlfriend and we stayed together for a couple of years.

You might call this a direct way to start talking to a girl. “Girls always know if you’re hitting on them,” the direct school of pickup says. “You might as well man up and own it.”

Which brings us to the topic of copywriting, and that lesson from my copywriting coach. He would scroll down through my sales letter, down to about page four, and he’d say, “This is the first place where you’re giving me a really hard, direct claim.”

His advice was that, all throughout the headline and lead, all claims need to be “on the nose.” As in, imagine you’re a boxer. Don’t feint… don’t bob and weave… don’t go for body shots to soften the guy up. Instead, hit him straight “on the nose” with hard, direct claims that he has zero chance of missing or misunderstanding.

I bring all this up because of my post yesterday. Looking back on it, I see I was asking when indirect persuasion makes sense, and when direct persuasion might be better.

But I didn’t express myself well. It sounded like I was questioning the indirect approach. So a few people wrote in to say that indirect persuasion definitely does work and that it’s very powerful.

No doubt. Indirect persuasion works. But so does direct persuasion. Sometimes people need to be told how it is, without vagueness, indirectness, or room to make their own interpretation.

The lead of a sales letter is one such example. At least according to my copywriting coach – but he should know, after all the millions he’s racked up writing sales letters for cold traffic.

What about other situations? I don’t know.

For meeting girls, there are some guidelines when it makes sense to be indirect, and when direct. But in many cases, either approach could work. It’s also a matter of personality and preference.

Maybe it’s the same with direct vs. indirect marketing. But I don’t find that answer satisfying. I’m still hoping for a better model.

So if you have a “best friends” test which tells you when to go indirect in marketing and when direct is better… then hit me up. I’m just standing here, swirling my drink around, hoping somebody cool will talk to me.