Copywriting

Who wins the fight: guiding people from within or nudging them from without?

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“All those chimps who get trained in American Sign Language — one of the first words they master is ‘tickle’ and one of the first sentences is ‘tickle me.” In college, I worked with one of those chimps. He’d do the ‘tickle me’ sequence correctly, and you’d tickle him like mad — chimps curl up and cover their ribs and make this fast, soundless, breathy giggle when they’re being tickled. Stop, he sits up, catches his breath, mops his brow because of how it’s all just too much. Then he gets a gleamy look in his eye and it’s, ‘Tickle me,’ all over again.”
— Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

In chapter 16 of his Zebras book, Robert Sapolsky attacks the question of why we can’t tickle ourselves. It’s not as trivial as it seems.

According to Sapolsky, pleasure requires an element of surprise and lack of control. Like the chimp story above shows, getting tickled is a kind of pleasure. But you can’t tickle yourself — because you can’t surprise yourself and you’re always in full control.

I thought of this because I’ve been beating my head against a related question lately. Let me set it up with a quote from Oren Klaff’s Flip the Script:

“Make people feel like the idea is coming from them and they will place more value on it, believe it more deeply, adopt it more quickly, and remember it more easily.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I’m writing a book right now on this topic, which I call insight marketing. The problem is, I’m not sure it’s true. At least not all the time.

Here’s my reasoning:

If Klaff is 100% right, then what’s the purpose of coaches, hypnotists, and inspirational speakers? Those people earn their bread by standing around and planting ideas in others’ heads. For most people who hire hypnotists, coaches, and inspirational speakers, the effect wouldn’t be the same if they simply had those ideas themselves.

Another example:

When I was a kid, I would ask my grandfather to tell me a story each night. He only knew one story, Little Red Riding Hood. It didn’t matter. I loved hearing it over and over, even though I knew it by heart. Why didn’t I just play it in my own head?

Let me make it clear I don’t have good answers to these questions. In fact, I am hoping you can help me out.

My guess is that there are situations where coming to a realization yourself is more powerful… while in other situations, having an idea come from outside is better. But what determines which side of the mountain you end up on? At this point, I don’t know.

So if you have any theories about this, or if you can point me to some research on the matter, please write me and let me know. I’ll be grateful to you, and the science of insight marketing will take a step forward thanks to your contribution.

How to make your dry expertise sexy and shareable

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A few days ago, I saw a tantalizing clickbait headline, which read,

“Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?”

I clicked and landed on a blog post, which took me for a spin. It turns out there was no PTSD way back when. But that doesn’t matter as much as what I read at the top of the post.

At the top of the post, the author, one Brett Deveraux, gave a recap of the first year of his blog. He started in May 2019. He’s written several dozen posts since then, mostly on ancient military history.

But get this… Deveraux’s blog has had 650,000 visits so far. The number of monthly visitors keeps growing. Each post gets dozens of comments. And Deveraux’s even got 93 Patreon subscribers.

Just in case I am not making the astoudingness of this perfectly clear:

This is an academic historian. Writing on things like PTSD in the Roman army. Who will soon get a million eyeballs on his blog. And who, if he were just a tad better at marketing, could pull in thousands of dollars from his hobby site each month.

Doesn’t this sound like 2010? Is the long tail still alive and well? Does Google have a crush on Brett Devereaux for some reason?

Here’s my theory.

The most popular content on Deveraux’s site, by far, is a series of posts analyzing the siege of Gondor. (Lord of the Rings movie 2, in case you’re too cool.)

In other words, Deveraux used a popular movie to illustrate his arcane knowledge. Knowledge which would otherwise be completely indigestible to the vast majority of people.

This reminded me of another popular content creator I’ve been harping on about. I’m talking about movie editor Tony Zhou. Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting on YouTube has the exact same structure as Deveraux’s blog. An expert in a specialized field, using fun pop culture to illustrate the basics of his craft.

As a result of this pop culture + expert mashup, Zhou and Deveraux had their content massively shared. For Zhou, it was through YouTube and on sites like Reddit. For Deveraux, it seems the nerds at Hacker News really like his stuff.

That’s how both Zhou and Deveraux got all that traffic and engagement.

So what’s the point of all this?

Well, I would like to suggest that this is a model you too could use. If you have any kind of dry, industry-specific knowledge nobody seems to care about, then pair it up with sexy pop culture illustrations. Show a clip from a movie. Then explain what really happened there, seen through the lens of your unique wisdom.

And write me a year after you publish your first post or video. Let me know how many millions of views you’ve had in the meantime. And if you need help monetizing your site at that point… well, that’s where my own dry expertise comes in.

Blare your sales message loudly at your readers

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I took a walk through town today and I heard a busker chirping on a flute.

My brain immediately started playing the Chinese dance from the Nutcracker. That’s not the tune the busker was playing. But it didn’t matter, because that’s how our brains work.

Our brains get influenced all the time by random sounds, words, and touches. Most of the time, we’re not even aware this is happening. Take a look at Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. It gives lots of examples of decisions that were swayed, often in big ways, by an unnoticed detail in the environment.

Of course, this has consequences if you’re writing copy. For example, one classic bit of advice is to edit your first draft heavily. Make it as tight as possible. Follow William Zinsser, who wrote:

“Most adverbs are unnecessary. You will clutter your sentence and annoy the reader if you choose a verb that has a specific meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning. Don’t tell us that the radio blared loudly; ‘blare’ connotes loudness.”

“Blare” does connote loudness. But maybe “loudly” triggers the brain in a way that “blare” does not. Words redundant in meaning might not be redundant in effect.

So should you stop editing your copy? No. The fewer words you can get your point across in, the better.

But don’t be a slave to the advice of people like William Zinsser. Use your own taste and emotional response to make the call whether a word stays in or not.

John Caples once gave an example of how an ad improved with a bit of redundancy. The original ad read, “Most of these articles are exclusive with this store.” The improved ad read, “Most of these articles are exclusive with this store — cannot be obtained elsewhere.”

The point Caples was making is that more words can help you explain your meaning better. That includes emotional meaning too. Because you don’t know for sure which hook will finally catch your fish, or which word will prime your prospect into buying.

Want more info on editing your copy? It’s one of the topics I cover in my daily email newsletter. If you’re interested, click here to subscribe.

Stop asking your clients for referrals

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Stop asking your clients for referrals. At least until you’ve read through this article.

You’ve probably heard the Ben Franklin book-borrowing story:

Franklin had a political opponent he wanted to win over. But he didn’t want to butter the opponent up with flattery of tenderize him with gifts. Instead, Franklin used another tactic. He asked his opponent for a favor — the loan of a rare and curious book.

The opponent obliged. Ben Franklin returned the book a week later, with a note expressing his strong “sense of the favour.” After that, Franklin’s opponent opened up. The two eventually became great friends.

What does this have to do with referrals?

Well, as Franklin put it, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another.” it’s a matter of consistency, that fundamental human need. If I do you a favor, I have to justify it to myself somehow, and that will affect how I act in the future.

But it goes in the other direction, too. And that’s the connection to referrals.

If you ask a client for a referral — and he doesn’t oblige, for whatever reason — then he has to justify that decision to himself. And like Franklin says, “He that has once done you an unkindness will be more ready to do you another.”

Of course, not every book you borrow will make you a new friend… and not every referral you fail to get will lose you an old client.

But I want to raise the possibility that asking for a referral in a haphazard way can have its drawbacks.

“Just go ahead and ask, it can’t hurt.” Maybe. Or maybe it can.

So does that mean you should get paralyzed with fear and avoid referral marketing?

No. But it might make sense to have a smart system that works.

Such as the systems you can find in the following video. I’ve linked to it before, but I’ll do it again. It’s a recording from a Jay Abraham seminar where various clients of Jay’s shared 93 referral getting-strategies that actually worked for them.

Some of these methods are simple and obvious. Some are involved and very clever. But they’re all worth knowing about if you want more referrals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_13FI1zE94k

The only currency your reader cares about

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Don’t let the socialists hear about this one:

Back in 1832, a horse-and-man organization called the Equitable Labor Exchange issued a unique currency.

This currency looked much like your everyday money (with numbers and signatures and familiar font and color)…

It also functioned much like money (you could use it to pay at local London shops, several theaters, and even a tollgate)…

But unlike money, which is an abstract, bodyless entity, each unit of this currency represented something hard and definite:

One hour of labor.

This time-currency was conceived by one Robert Owen, a do-gooding factory owner who wanted to unleash prosperity and happiness on 19th-century Britain.

The start of Owen’s plan looked promising. Within 17 weeks, the Equitable Labor Exchange had deposits worth 440,000 work hours.

But ultimately, the project turned out to be a failure. The system was rewarding inefficiency. The Equitable Labor Exchange and its time-money disappeared a few years later.

Still, Robert Owen was on to a good idea, at least for copywriting.

Because even though we all assume copywriting prospects are moved by money, the same problem exists today:

Money remains an abstract, shapeless, bodyless entity.

Fortunately, money can buy you lots of shapeful, concrete things. And so you can convince readers of the value of what you’re selling, not by repeating numbers with a dollar sign in front of them… but by converting money into what it does:

So $0.24 becomes a romantic dinner over a bowl of Maruchan instant ramen…

$12.99 becomes a year’s worth of fun and insight, reading Modern Cat magazine…

And $19.84 becomes 10 gallons of gasoline, which by my back-of-the-envelope math, is enough to power a chainsaw long enough to cut down 280 oak trees. That’s a small forest!

Maybe I’m not tempting you with these dumb examples. But I think you get the point.

As long as you do your research, so you know what your prospect really values and wants, you can figure out a way to translate ugly, meaningless cyphers into that other currency your reader actually cares about.

And that can mean more money for you — and everything else that money can buy.

An easy guiding principle to creating vision in your prospects

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Once upon a time, somewhere in America, there lived a very successful life insurance salesman.

He couldn’t speak, and he was bound to a wheelchair.

And yet, when it came to selling life insurance, the man was tremendous.

He used a marker and a little dry-erase board to communicate. Patiently, he would write his questions on the board, and then he’d hand it over to his prospects. His most effective question, the one that flipped the switch and lit up his prospects’ brains, was:

“If we lose you, where will your family live?”

I read this story in Jim Camp’s Start with No. Camp used it to illustrate the power of painting a vision of the prospect’s pain. “No vision,” Camp used to say, “no decision.”

Of course, in written copy, it’s not always the best choice to start asking questions. The dynamic is different than when you have a real person sitting across from you. But the same principle applies.

Create vision in your prospects.

There are lots of tricks and techniques for doing it. But there’s one easy guiding principle that lords above them all:

Create a vision in yourself first.

Your prospects will pick up on it, however you choose to communicate, and they will make the decision — the one you’d like for them to make.

Sharing news about new in five minutes or less

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There are two things I want to share with you today. One is news, the other is new. Let’s start with news:

I read an article today about how the media failed to predict the corona situation — and that’s why their initial reporting was so complacent.

To which I made the Scooby Doo “huh?” noise. Because from what I’ve seen over the years, the media doesn’t do prediction, at least not seriously. Instead, the media reports on the status quo.

Before the corona situation exploded, the status quo was complacency. Now, the status quo is panic, and the media is reporting accordingly. When the pandemic begins to wane and it’s time for things to go back to normal, the media message will likely be obliviousness that anything bad ever happened.

Which brings up this distinction between news and new. I first heard it from computer scientist Alan Kay. Says Alan,

“News is stuff that’s incremental to what we already know. This is why you can tell the news in five minutes. ‘Hey, a train just crashed.’ We all know what that means. […] New is by definition not like what we already know. There’s no news about new. There’s nothing you can tell somebody in five minutes about what new is.”

So I got two takeaways for you:

First, I’m not sure if it’s possible to do a good job predicting the future. Perhaps, among enough people, a few just get lucky.

But, if it is possible, then like Alan Kay says above, it’s unlikely you’ll find the future on the evening news, on Facebook, or on Vox.

But really, we’re here to talk about marketing.

So the other thing I want to tell you is how this news vs. new business can make you money. This is something I heard from marketer Todd Brown.

I didn’t know who Todd Brown was until recently. Apparently, he’s a big name in the IM space, and he’s worked with Jay Abraham, Clayton Makepeace, and Rich Schefren.

Todd’s message was that, whenever you’re positioning a new offer, you should never present it as an incremental improvement over the status quo (ie. news). Instead, always look for a way to present your offer as something entirely new and different — a marketplace of one.

“But hold on,” you might say. “Your offer should be something new… and yet there is no way to share news about new. So how do you convince prospects to buy in?”

That’s a good question. And it’s something I’m trying to answer in my new book on the use of insight in marketing. I’m making good progress on this book, and I hope to finish it in the next six to seven years (just kidding, hopefully another month or so).

If you’d like to get notified when it comes out, sign up for my daily email newsletter and you will get more emails from me about it.

The persuasion moral of the cock and the jewel

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Let’s start with a short story:

“A COCK, scratching for food for himself and his hens, found a precious stone and exclaimed: ‘If your owner had found thee, and not I, he would have taken thee up, and have set thee in thy first estate; but I have found thee for no purpose. I would rather have one barleycorn than all the jewels in the world.'”

If the old English puts you off, I can understand. And I’m sorry. Please don’t keep reading in that case.

If you’re still with me, what would you say is the moral of this story? Think about it, and we will get back to it in a second.

Meanwhile, let me tell you this is one of Aesop’s fables.

Aesop’s fables have been used for thousands of years to give pithy illustrations to situations we’ve all experienced but we don’t have a good and short name for. Like sour grapes. Or the boy who cried wolf. Two more of Aesop’s fables. I bet you know what those two mean.

But what about the cock and the jewel above? To start to answer that, let me first share a quote with you from a book I’m reading about analogies, written by one John Pollack, and titled Shortcut:

“The degree to which an analogy is or is not ‘accurate’ in a given circumstance is irrelevant, it is the feelings and ideas they evoke that makes them so powerful.”

Fact is, we humans love stories and analogies and fables so much that we are really not too critical about them. We accept the implied meaning and we take it for granted.

Of course, that’s good news for persuaders, influencers, and manipulators of all stripes. As one magician of persuasion, Gary Bencivenga, wrote a while ago:

“This process of transferring the qualities of one thing into another takes place instantly, bypassing critical analysis and resistance. All you do is compare A to B in an effective way and voila! your point is made instantly without disagreement.”

There’s good science behind why this is so, but I won’t go into that now, because I am so concerned with the cock and the jewel.

What does this fable really mean?

The best I can do is to point you to an article titled “The Moral of the Story.”

It was written a couple years ago by an actual poet named Anthony Madrid. If the mention of poetry scares you, as it scares me, then I want you to take a deep breath and relax. Because Anthony Madrid’s articles are all easy to read and fun, and they are mind-opening if you’re interested in language.

​​So here’s “The Moral of the Story,” which explains the moral of the “Cock and the Jewel,” or rather, the half dozen contradictory morals that have been scratched up over the centuries:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/11/21/the-moral-of-the-story/

Gratuitous fun to make readers beg for buttermilk

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For the first 20 or 30 years of my life, I had this serious mental defect where I couldn’t enjoy a good bangemup action movie.

“So unrealistic,” I snuffled. “So predictable.” That’s how I wasted decades of my life.

Thank God I’ve grown up. Because I just watched and enjoyed True Lies, James Cameron’s 1994 action comedy, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as super spy/boring suburban dad Harry Tasker, and Jamie Lee Curtis as his stodgy/talented wife Helen.

The initial reason I watched True Lies was the following famous line, delivered by a used car salesman who’s trying to seduce Helen… and who is unwittingly confiding to Harry about it:

“And she’s got the most incredible body, too, and a pair of titties that make you wanna stand up and beg for buttermilk. Ass like a ten year old boy!”

Which modern Hollywood screenplay would dare have that?

But even beyond the risky dialogue, I was surprised by how fun this movie is. I guess that’s the only word to describe it. For example, as the movie goes on, you get to see:

– an old man sitting on a public toilet, calmly reading a newspaper, during the first shootout between Harry and the bad guy

– Harry riding a horse into an elevator, and an aristocratic couple in the elevator getting whipped in the face by the horse’s tail

– Tia Carrere (the evil seductress in the movie) rushing to grab her purse before the bad guys drop a box with a nuclear warhead onto it

– a pelican landing on a teetering van full of terrorists and sending it crashing off the bridge

– Harry saving the day flying a military jet, perfectly landing the plane, and then accidentally bumping a cop car

The point is that all these details are what I call “gratuitous fun.”

They weren’t in any way central to the action of the movie… and even the comedic part of the plot could have done without them.

They were just pure, unnecessary fun that made the movie sparkle a bit more. And I guess they helped it become the success that it was, netting almost $400 million in 1994 dollars.

I think the message is clear:

This year, surprise your readers with some gratuitous fun in your online content, in your sales messages, and even your one-to-one business communication. People love James Cameron’s movies. They will love your stuff, too. In fact, you’ll make them wanna stand up and beg for buttermilk. Whatever that means.

A primate’s copywriting epiphany

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Many, many Aprils ago, I read a book titled A Primate’s Memoir. The author was one Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist who studies baboons.

Based on the title, I assumed the book was going to be the made-up diary of a baboon. After reading the first 50 pages, I realized I was wrong. The book was not a made-up diary, but real, and the primate was not a baboon, but Sapolsky.

I’ve had a soft spot for Robert Sapolsky and his humor ever since, and I’ve continued to read his books. Right now, I’m also watching his excellent series of lectures on YouTube about evolution and behavior. And today, while watching these lectures, I learned something new to me:

95% of human DNA doesn’t code for any kind of protein. In other words, only 5% of DNA actually has any kind of productive output. The rest of our DNA — 95% of it — simply controls when that productive 5% of DNA gets turned on and how.

And now let me tell you a second story, this one about copywriting:

A few months back, I got hired to write an upsell VSL. There was already a control in place, which was doing ok, but the company wanted to see if I could do better.

“No problem,” I said to myself. “This control doesn’t really emphasize consistency or urgency, and it does very little to sell this particular solution.”

In short, I wrote the new VSL. And in spite of all my consistency, urgency, and selling, the new VSL did no better than the control.

But then the CEO of the company noticed a tiny detail. “We forgot to include the headline you sent us.”

Keep in mind, this was a VSL. People aren’t reading, they’re watching and listening. The headline was just a bit of copy above the video itself. I wasn’t hopeful it would make any kind of difference.

And yet, two days ago, I got an email from the CEO, letting me know that my headline + VSL are in fact beating the control by 50%. Which is definitely nice, especially since there are royalties in play here.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder what I’m doing with my time. I spent two weeks working on that VSL copy… and it had no effect on its own. It was only when that headline was included that the copy actually seemed to get activated.

You can see now why this made me think of Robert Sapolsky, and the 95% of DNA that does nothing but activate or deactivate the “payload” DNA.

As copywriters, we spend so much time agonizing over structure… sales arguments… consistency, urgency, and all the other Cialdini buzzwords…

And yet, 95% of the time, all that stuff doesn’t even get activated. The offer is a bust, or we chose the wrong headline, or there’s something wrong with the design, or we sent the promotion out a week too early or too late.

I’m not sure what my point is, except to share this epiphany with you, and reassure you that if your copy underperforms, it probably had nothing to do with the copy itself. (95% certainty at least.) And also, to advise you to put yourself in a position, as soon as you can, where you can run different pieces of copy frequently — more often than every few weeks, or God forbid, every few months.