Copywriting

An easy way to produce content without being creative or original

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I’m entering hour 72 of running various levels of high fever which means one thing:

My mind is empty and not in good shape to write my daily email.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” I thought to myself, “if there were some easy way to create content that doesn’t require coming up with a new email idea?” Of course, I respect your time, dear reader, so whatever this easy way is, the result would still have to be interesting and valuable.

So there I was, burning feverishly, when almost by accident, I came across a blog post by Colin Theriot.

You might know Colin as the creator of the popular Cult of Copy Facebook group. What you might not know is that Colin regularly publishes articles on his site, and they are often interesting and motivational.

Well, today, Colin wrote something that was perfect for me.

It’s a way of producing content that doesn’t require you to say anything new or original, but still builds a good relationship with your audience, and gives them value, too. In fact, it’s probably the easiest way to create content. And yet, some big name influencers out there have created giant brands by doing this one thing alone.

Colin’s post explains it nicely and simply, and even gives you a 7-step checklist for how to produce this kind of innovation-free content. I think it’s worth looking at. If you want to give it a peek, here’s the link:

https://cultofcopy.com/creation-and-innovation-are-not-the-only-way-to-provide-value/

Blood-sucking Transylvanian copywriting secrets

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For the past week, I’ve been reading a book called The Land Beyond The Forest.

It was written in the late 19th century by a Scottish woman named Emily Gerard, who lived for a good part of her life in Transylvania (a section of today’s Romania). This book was one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published about 10 years after Gerard’s book.

Anyways, I came across the following passage in the book, which has a lot of value if you’re a copywriter — or just trying to craft sticky messages. Gerard’s writing is in italics and indented, my comments in regular font:

“As in Italy, the recitatore (story-teller), called here provestitore, holds an important place among the Roumanians.”

People love a good story, and they always will. That’s why you should use stories in copy whenever you can.

“The stories recited usually belong to the class of ogre and fairy tale, and would seem rather adapted to a nursery audience than to a circle of full-grown men and women.”

Parris Lampropoulos once said we all believe in magic. It can be overt like these Romanian peasants and their fairy tales… but it’s true even of nerdy and rational 21st century science buffs.

“Sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose, these stories oftenest set forth the adventures of some prince subjected to the cruel persecutions of a giant or sorcerer. The hero has usually a series of tasks allotted to him, or difficulties to be overcome, before he is permitted to enjoy his father’s throne in peace and lead home the beautiful princess to whom he is attached.”

A perfect 2-sentence summary of the hero’s journey, which is one good template you can use to tell a compelling story in copy.

“The tasks dealt out to him must be three at least, sometimes six, seven, nine, or twelve; but never more than this last number, which indeed is quite sufficient for the endurance even of a fairy prince.”

Same thing in copywriting. When you’re giving proof, arguments, or examples, it’s common and effective to give three of the bunch. Plus, if you swap out “task” and put in “bonus” or “premium,” you get the structure of a good offer.

“When the tasks are nine or twelve in number they are then grouped together in batches of three, each batch being finished off with some stereotyped phrase, such as, ‘But our hero’s trials were not yet over by any means, and much remains still to be told.'”

“But wait, there’s more!” Some phrases are so valuable that they keep surfacing across cultures, across media, and across centuries.

“As a matter of course, these trials must always be arranged crescendo, advancing in horror and difficulty towards the end.”

This reminds me of something I heard in a video by copywriter Kyle Milligan. Kyle quoted Agora Fiancial chief Joe Schriefer, who apparently says, “The magic show must always get better!” In other words, the proof must improve, and the results too.

And that, young Nosferatu, is the quote I wanted to share with you.

You probably know this already, but there are predictable ways to get into people’s heads and influence them. Direct marketing copywriters have figured out many of these tricks for themselves.

​​But if you look around, there are other disciplines, or even folk traditions, that can give you good ideas for how to craft sticky, influential messages. And this passage from Gerard’s blood-sucking Transylvanian book is just one good example of that.

Kanye shows you how to win the sticky message victory

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Last Sunday, Kanye West appeared alongside Reverend Martin Short at the 18,600 seat Lakewood Megachurch in Houston, Texas.

Kanye was there to give testimony. He announced the arrogance and cockiness that people know him for is now in the service of God.

At one point, Reverend Short asked Kanye to speak about worshiping fame and money. To which Kanye replied,

“It’s like the Devil stole all the good producers, all the good musicians, all the good artists, all the good designers, all the good business people, and said, ‘You gotta come over and work for me.’ And now the trend, the shift, is going to change. Jesus has won the victory.”

Did you catch that?

Did you see how Kanye instinctively crafted a sticky message?

Rather than talking about vanity, and fame, and riches, all of which are abstract concepts that the mind can’t really latch onto, Kanye wrapped them all up in a single, crystal-clear, memorable character:

The Devil.

Which brings to mind an action-packed and high-value talk I heard by a guy named Fred Catona. Catona, who called himself the “father of direct response radio advertising,” was a high school gym teacher who first made a small fortune by selling Philly cheesesteaks by direct mail.

​​Somewhere along the way, Catona figured out the power of radio for driving traffic to his cheesesteak business. He then launched a little agency to help grow other businesses through direct response-style radio ads.

Catona’s giant breakthrough came around 1995. A guy named Jay Walker called Catona up, and asked for his help in launching a little startup in the travel space.

​​Catona took the job on. He hired the cheapest relevant celebrity he could find (an out-of-work William Shatner), and started running radio ads. 18 months later, thanks in large part to Catona’s radio ads, that little travel startup had a valuation of $20 billion. It’s still around. It’s called Priceline.

Anyways, Catona once gave a talk about his experiences and the lessons he’s learned from his massive radio campaigns. One thing he said is that you should always ask yourself, “Who is your enemy and what does he do?” Your enemy doesn’t have to be a competitor. It can simply be a way of doing business or living life, like Kanye illustrated in his testimony above.

Anyways, Catona unfortunately died a few years ago. But his talk is worth listening to. And even though it was part of Brian Kurtz’s $2,000 Titans of Direct Response, you can watch it for free once you get a copy of Brian’s Overdeliver book.

​​The book is apparently on sale now, and you can get it for $10 and with free shipping. And along with the Fred Catona talk, it’s got about $1,213 worth of other bonuses, including some rare direct marketing gems you can’t find anywhere else. In case you want to find out more, here’s where to go:

https://overdeliverbook.com/

The inspirational and brutal truth about copywriting

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I’m a tad exhausted and with good reason.

I’ve just handed in the VSL I’ve been working on for the past month.

It’s been a huge pile of work. In fact, an amazingly huge pile. Contributed in part by the fact it’s also the first project I’ve done while working with my copywriting coach, a copywriter himself, and somebody who’s much more successful (and better at writing copy) than I am. All of which is making me reminisce…

Specifically, to a moment about a year after I started writing copy.

At that point, I had read a couple of copywriting books. I had raised my rates to respectable levels. And I had done some small- and medium -sized projects for various clients, mostly with positive feedback (“Wow this looks great”) and even with some positive results (“We used your copy and it made 30% more sales than what we were using before”). And I remember thinking to myself then,

“Well, that’s it. I’ve arrived. I’ve read those two books. I’m making decent money. I have good feedback and results. And I guess I’ve mastered all there is to know about this copywriting thing.”

Well, it’s now about three years later. And I’m amazed by how complex and complicated copywriting really is.

When you read copy, that’s not obvious.

It seems simple or even simplistic. And if you have any pretensions to being a writer, you think to yourself, “Pff, I could do this myself easy.”

What you don’t see is all the hidden high-level work that goes into choosing exactly those arguments, presented in that order. You also don’t see all the hidden low-level work, polishing each sentence, and possibly each word, in a 30- or 50- or 80-page promo. In other words, what you don’t see are the hundreds of other permutations of this exact sales letter that existed either on paper or in the copywriter’s head.

Now depending on how you look at it, that can either be inspirational or brutal.

Brutal, because the fact is, copywriting continues to require a lot of work. As you get better, you just see different things (and more of them) that can be improved.

Inspirational, because if you’re looking for a craft that you can really work on for years to come, then this is it. Plus, it apparently pays royalties as well.

Master this 2-bit magic trick for a conversion boost

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I got a marketing email today with the subject line:

“Add THIS To Your Coffee For A Memory Boost”

The email explains: “It’s not sugar or cream, and it’s not anything that will affect the taste… But it’s clinically shown to improve your memory starting in just 1 hour.”

​​Hmmm… interesting.

Almost as interesting as a Penn and Teller magic trick I watched involving a disappearing chicken. Penn announces he will make the chicken disappear from its cage through the use of misdirection. “That’s a magical term,” Penn informs you, “a term of art. It’s a curating of attention… giving the audience a story they can tell themselves that lets them not really know they were distracted.”

Penn keeps explaining how he’s going to fool you as he lowers a velvet cloth over the soon-to-be-disappeared chicken. And then suddenly, a man in a gorilla suit jumps out from backstage, banging some cymbals. Meanwhile, Teller, the quiet half of the duo, sneaks behind the cage, takes the chicken out, and walks off.

Eventually, the commotion settles down. ​​

“How many of you saw the gorilla?” Penn asks the audience. Everybody raises their hand.

“And how many of you saw Teller take the chicken out?” Almost all hands go up again.

“Now, how many of you saw him sneak the gorilla into the cage?” Penn asks. And he strips away the velvet cloth to show the gorilla struggling in the cage, right where the chicken was only a few seconds ago.

Pretty impressive. But getting back to marketing… What is this non-sugar, non-cream coffee additive that will boost your memory in just one hour?

Well, if you click on the link, and have the patience to watch the VSL, you’ll find out it’s a run-of-the-mill supplement, specifically, a capsule containing some standard herbs that are supposed to make an old and tired mind sharper. It’s not in any way connected to coffee, though I guess you can plop it into your coffee, much like you could plop a pair of keys into your coffee so you don’t forget them.

Maybe you see my point.

​​Misdirection is a clever magic trick to use in copy. It works well to get attention, and probably, to increase sales as well. But be careful.

​​Unlike with a magic show, people won’t be pleased to be fooled like with the coffee/supplement example. Your misdirection should be subtle and, unlike in the marketing email I got, at least a little plausible. Nobody likes to feel like a gullible ass, and they probably won’t give you a second chance.

How is your vagal tone?

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“Well I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?”
– Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

Gary Halbert once wrote that if you’re in the marketing business, you always have to do two things:

1) Keep the fundamentals in mind
2) Keep an eye out for what’s working right now

Well, right now, one specific health offer seems to be working like crazy. I’m assuming this because I’ve gotten dozens of emails promoting this offer over the past two months.

Many of these emails came from various Agora health brands (the offer in question also seems to come from an Agora brand). Others came from 3rd party newsletters that I suppose are affiliates. And I’ve even seen email drops in Newsmax promoting this offer.

I’m listening to the VSL right now, and two things stick out as possible reasons why this offer is doing so well at the moment.

First, it has a unique “problem mechanism” (that’s a term that I first heard from top-flight copywriter Stefan Georgi). In this case, the problem mechanism is “low vagal tone,” which as the VSL will tell you, will do everything from shriveling your nuts to corroding your cells and even burning out your brain. Do you have a health problem right now? Maybe it’s time to get your vagal tone checked.

But how do you check your vagal tone? Well, the VSL has an answer for you. It’s even got a solution in case you find that your vagal tone is low.

And that’s the second possible reason why this VSL seems to be killing it right now. The “solution mechanism” (your run of the mill, Gene Schwartz mechanism) is not a pill, not a supplement, and not even a newsletter. instead, it’s a special sound, or as the VSL says, a “healing frequency discovered between 85-255 Hz.”

Maybe that’s the secret chord that David played to increase the vagal tone. Anyways, if you’re in the marketing business, and you’d like to see this offer that’s working so well right now, here’s the link:

https://pro.donovanhealth.com/p/OV6SSSPKG1I/EOV6VB48/

Dainty copy killer

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“Good afternoon?” the man asked me with a faint smile.

The normally busy cafe was empty except for one table. As soon as I walked in, the people around this one table stopped talking to each other and turned to face me.

There were five women and the one man with the smile. He seemed to be in charge. He repeated his greeting, which was really a question.

“Good afternoon?”

I looked around. There were plates of food laid out. No music was playing. The lights were dim.

“Is there a private event going on?” I asked. He nodded.

So I excused myself and stepped out of the cafe back into the rain. And then, on the door, I saw a dainty sign on a piece of A5 paper:

“Cafe Lav is closed to the public until 9pm today.”

A nice, clear message. But who has time to read all the notices, warnings, announcements, and advertisements out there?

Nobody.

And maybe that can be a lesson to all the copywriters out there. You might spend days and weeks and even months crafting your message perfectly. But if it doesn’t catch your prospect’s eye, he won’t read it, regardless of how good your copy is.

So how do you catch somebody’s eye graphically? I’m hardly an expert on direct response design, but here are some tips I’ve picked up along the way:

1. Don’t put crucial information in the pre-headline (aka “eyebrow”) because people will read that part of the headline complex last, if they read it at all

2. Don’t use reverse type (white letters on black background) unless you want to hide the message (“This is a paid advertisement”)

3. Don’t use highlights other than yellow

4. Use arrows, circles, and “handwritten” notes to draw attention to important elements

5. Use photos of faces looking at the viewer to draw attention

6. Use photos of faces looking in the direction of an important element you want to draw attention to (eg. an offer or headline)

7. Don’t be afraid to make your headline enormous even at the expense of cutting down body copy

Maybe this last one would have helped at Cafe Lav today. Or maybe they should have just locked the door.

Anyways, if you have other direct response tips, please send them my way. After a long layoff, I’m getting back in the groove of working on my own offers, and that means I act as designer as well as copywriter.

Breakthrough con artistry

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If you start sniffing around the copywriting cafeteria, you will soon discover that many top copywriting chefs revere one specific book. ​​It’s an old book, originally published 53 years ago. It wasn’t republished for many years, so resourceful people stole this book from public libraries, while less resourceful people bought used copies on eBay. This eventually drove the price for a single copy up to $600 or more.

It must be pretty amazing to be worth so much money, right?

Well, once you start reading this book, odds are good you will soon be frustrated. That’s because the book, while written by a top-level copywriter who knew how to write simply and clearly in sales letters, is complex and complicated and hard to read and contains new and unfamiliar ideas. But this last bit is why so many expert copywriters revere this one particular book.

The book in question was written by the great Eugene Schwartz, and is called Breakthrough Advertising. The reason it’s so revered is that, in the first 3 chapters alone, it gives an unrivaled explanation of how marketing evolves in different markets, and how businesses, marketers, and copywriters can use this to their profit.

The gist is that you always want to differentiate yourself. Of course, that summary is a little too general to be useful. If you want more detail, you have two options.

Option one is to get a copy of Breakthrough Advertising yourself and to push through it, or through the first three chapters at least. The book is available now for the ridiculously low price of $125, and if you really do read it and apply what it teaches, it will be well worth your money and brain power.

Option two is free and will only take 3 minutes and 4 seconds of your life. It might even make you laugh. I’m talking about a new Key & Peele video that a friend just sent me, titled (entitled?) “You Can’t Con a Con Artist If You’re Also a Con Artist.”

​​This short sketch is not nearly as detailed of a guide as Breakthrough Advertising, but it presents many of the same ideas, in a condensed, entertaining package. If you want to give it a looksee, and try to unravel the marketing messages hidden within, here is the link:

Yet another clickbait subject line

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“I was furious…”

“Did you get a chance to see this?”

“I almost forgot to tell you!”

I’ve seen an uptick recently in flat-out clickbait subject lines like these. And by “clickbait,” I mean subject lines that have little (or nothing) to do with the actual content of the email. They are simply tacked on as an afterthought, and could work just as well with any other content.

But what’s the problem? The more the merrier, right? People can’t read your message unless they click on it, and if a subject line gets them to click, then it’s done its job.

Perhaps. But like salt, curiosity rarely makes a filling meal on its own. That’s not my conclusion. Instead, it comes from one of the greatest copywriters of the last century, John Caples, who wrote about headlines:

“Avoid headlines that merely provoke curiosity. Curiosity combined with news or self-interest is an excellent aid to the pulling power of your headline, but curiosity by itself is seldom enough. This fundamental rule is violated more often than any other.”

And then then we get to the very other extreme. You might call this “the fewer the merrier.” It’s an idea promoted by the likes of marketing expert Travis Sago, who has made himself and his clients millions of dollars, often solely through email. Travis advises that you “write your subject lines like you have to pay for every open.”

So what to do? Who’s right?

Well, I think there’s actually no single right answer. There might be situations where clickbait headlines (“Whoa!”) make sense and make sales. Cold emails to businesses might be one example. Personally, I don’t like these kinds of subject lines, but that’s just a matter of artisanal pride.

I also think that if you’re looking to play the long game with your marketing, meaning you want an ongoing relationship with your readers, then it makes sense not to piss those readers off. Will they click on your email and feel like they’ve been scammed into reading something irrelevant? Then maybe it’s time to consider making your subject line less clickbaity, more transparent, and more specific.

Don’t play it again, Sam

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“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” says Rick while looking into his glass, “she walks into mine.”

Rick’s piano player Sam is there in the back of the darkened room, softly rolling out some hokey-pokey tune.

“What’s that you’re playing?” Ricks asks him.

“Just a little something of my own,” says Sam over his shoulder.

“Well stop it,” Rick tells him. “You know what I wanna hear. You played it for her, you can play it for me.”

Sam stops playing. He turns around carefully. “Oh, I don’t think I can remember.”

“If she can stand it, I can,” barks Rick. “PLAY IT!”

You probably recognize this as one of the most dramatic of all the scenes from all the films in all the Hollywood. It’s from Casablanca, and it’s one of a couple of scenes that gets close to using the famous line “Play it again, Sam,” which doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the movie.

To my mind, this scene is a great illustration of 1) an important point about writing and 2) something more.

The writing bit is something that I read in a New Yorker article about big-name playwright, director, and screenwriter David Mamet. Mamet has written movies like “Glengarry Glenn Ross” (“Always be closing”) as well as The Spanish Prisoner, Wag the Dog, Ronin, and a bunch more. Anyways, here’s the Mamet quote I read today:

“The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always what does the protagonist want… Do we see the protagonist’s wishes fulfilled or absolutely frustrated? That’s the structure of drama… People only speak to get something… They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it’s just coincidence, because what they’re trying to do is accomplish an objective.”

You can definitely see the protagonist’s “absolutely frustrated” wishes in the Casablanca scene. A few indirect words, mostly about what song to play, reveal the desperate psychological setup of Rick’s character in that moment.

You want to show, not tell. And you want to make the dialog about what the protagonist wants, whether he’s getting it or not.

That covers the first half of the Mamet quote above.

But like I said, there’s something more in that Casablanca scene and in that Mamet quote. It has to do with a really fundamental truth about human psychology. And it’s very useful to know if you are ever looking to influence people, or to understand them better.

But I can’t talk about this second thing today. Because I have a rule, “One post, one topic.” However, read my post tomorrow, and I’ll tell you all about this fundamental truth about the human mind, and how it fits into the Casablanca scene above.