Persuasion

How to sell UFOs to skeptical, jaded audiences

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Last Friday, a British Airways pilot spotted something strange through her cockpit window.

She was flying from Montreal to London, and as her plane neared the coast of Ireland, she saw a bright light approach her plane — before seeing it veer off at great speed to the north.

“Astronomical, it was like Mach 2,” said a second pilot about how fast this mysterious light was.

To this day, nobody knows what this strange thing was.

Maybe, just maybe, it was a UFO. After all,

“UFOs spotted off Irish coast under investigation”

was the headline this story ran with, and it’s the headline that caught my attention this morning, so I can report on it to you now.

But here’s the thing.

I’ve written before how I like to haunt tabloid websites and sex forums and conspiracy theory Facebook groups.

That’s not how I found this particular story, however.

I actually came across it on Hacker News.

This is a news website where serious and professional nerds go to do intellectual battle with each other, submitting serious and professional stories (mainly about programming and business), and showing off their intelligence by writing comments that illustrate how nobody can make a fool of them.

And yet, the above story, flimsy UFOs and all, made the front page of Hacker News, alongside articles about new programming languages and $8 billion company exits.

What explains the success of this clickbaity story?

Well, I believe it was a combination of two things.

The first clearly being the curiosity-evoking power of UFOs.

But you have to remember that this story bubbled up among an audience of very left-brained, logical, skeptical engineers and computer programmers.

So there’s a second, more subtle, but equally crucial element that allowed this story to go viral.

And it’s something that can be used to sell as well as to simply draw clicks.

In fact, if you’re in a crowded, jaded marketplace such as weight-loss supplements, this second element is absolutely crucial.

I’ll discuss this second element in full detail in my upcoming book on email marketing for health products.

This book is not out yet, but if you want to get a free copy when I do finish it, you can sing up here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails

Jim Camp and the desert kite

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Somewhere in the Middle East, there’s an area called the Black Desert.

Apparently, it’s a horrible place, dry and barren and inhospitable to life.

The Bedouins who knew this area best even called it Bilad esh-Shaytan — the Land of Satan. (It rather sounds like Mordor.)

Anyways, deep inside the Black Desert, there are these strange formations:

Low walls, made up of loose stones, which stretch out for miles at a time.

They were first discovered about a hundred years ago, by aviators flying overhead, who named them “desert kites.”

An ancient sales funnel in the Black Desert

For a long time, nobody knew who made these desert kites, or when, or why.

Scientists now believe they were used for hunting large herds of gazelles and antelopes.

The gazelle herds would come upon these walls.

And unsuspectingly, they’d keep walking along.

And walking.

And walking.

And eventually, they would fall into a man-made enclosure, where the locals would have their grisly way with them.

So what’s the point of all this?

Well, let me explain it with an anecdote from negotiation expert Jim Camp:

“According to family tradition, my great-grandfather used to say about one of the mules on his farm, ‘To get his attention you have to hit him between the eyes with a two-by-four. When you have his attention, he can see what he ought to do.'”

Jim Camp taught people how to win negotiations.

And one of the pillars of his approach was the idea that you have to create a vision of pain in your adversary’s mind in order to get a real decision or action out of them.

The trouble, however — according to Camp — is that people are not mules.

Meaning you can’t just blind them with the pain, the way his grandfather would do to the mule with the two-by-four.

Instead, you have to guide them along gently, allowing them a little bit of emotional respite, while still using pain to move them along to your intended destination.

So to sum up:

Yes, people aren’t mules.

But they might just be gazelles.

And in that case, your sales copy becomes a desert kite built out of your target audience’s pain, gradually leading them where you want them to go.

If you want to see how this can be done in practice with email, specifically for the grisly goal of selling health products, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails

The one-word fix for rock-solid negotiation mindsets

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Continuing from yesterday’s discussion of negotiating lessons from Bridget Jones’ Diary:

I promised that a single word can transform a self-serving (and therefore ineffective) mission-and-purpose statement (ie. negotiation goal) into one that is rock-solid.

Let’s quickly revisit the 3 options from the scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary that illustrates this situation.

The scene: Hugh Grant’s character tries to win Bridget back.

Original version:

“I want to get Bridget back because if I can’t make it with her, I can’t make it with anyone.”

Not good, because completely self-serving and without regard to what Bridget wants. Sure enough, Bridget rejects this offer in the actual movie.

Second, a Jim Camp-style version:

“I want to help Bridget see and decide that she will be happy in a new relationship with me, because I am a changed man.”

Better, but in my opinion, still focused too tightly on the goal of winning the negotiation (ie. winning Bridget back).

Like I wrote yesterday, it’s too easy to transfer the first kind of mission-and-purpose statement into this second version, by pretending to care about what the other side wants.

So what’s the fix for this?

Simple.

Use the word “whether”:

“I want to help Bridget see and decide whether she will be happy in a new relationship with me, now that I am a changed man.”

It seems like a small change, but the effects in mindset — and how you negotiate — can be dramatic. (At least, they were whenever I took this attitude in various negotiations.)

Suddenly, you are not focused on trying to get to your pre-determined goal.

Instead, you are calmly and patiently working with the adversary to reach a solution that will last.

Does this work in real life to actually achieve your desired outcome?

Sometimes.

Sometimes not.

It depends on what Bridget (or your adversary) really wants, and how vividly you create the vision of her being happy and of yourself as a changed man.

And yes, there is a real chance that even if you do everything right, the negotiation will still fall through. Bridget might decide that she doesn’t believe you, that she’s been hurt too many times, that she in fact loves someone else now.

Nonetheless, by genuinely allowing yourself the chance to be rejected, you increase your chances of success as well, by negotiating with less neediness and more focus on what the other side wants.

Now of course, this whole discussion ignores the cruel realities of male-female relations, and the fact that many women find selfish and pushy men attractive.

But still, taking this attitude in negotiations — whether romantic or business — is likely to attract the best partners into your life, and to create negotiated solutions that last for the long term.

A failed coup for Hugh

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I was just on the English seaside, and, along with a few friends, I decided to revisit an English classic:

Bridget Jones’ Diary.

One scene sticks out.

Daniel Cleaver (played by Hugh Grant) is talking to his ex-girlfriend, Bridget Jones (played by Renée Zellweger).

Daniel is a bit of a cad — he cheated on Bridget and left her for another woman.

Now he’s back.

And after getting into a fight with Bridget’s new beau, he tries to win Bridget over with the infinitely romantic line:

“If I can’t make it with you, I can’t make it with anyone.”

To which Bridget bites her lip and says,

“Mm… that’s not a good enough offer for me.”

“Let me tell you what I want from this negotiation…”

I’m just re-reading Jim Camp’s Start with No.

Camp makes a big deal about negotiators having a “mission and purpose” statement, defined and written out for every negotiation, regardless of how small or informal.

So for example, in the case above, Daniel Cleaver apparently wrote out the following mission and purpose before heading over to Bridget’s:

“I want to get Bridget back because if I can’t make it with her, I can’t make it with anyone.”

“Wrong!” says Camp.

Daniel has made a classic negotiating mistake: he set his mission and purpose in his own world.

That won’t work. You can’t focus on what you want because your ultimate goal is to get the other person to make a decision. And you can only influence her indirectly.

That’s why you have to make your mission and purpose set in her world — not yours.

Daniel wants Bridget to take him back. So Camp would advise Daniel to change his mission and purpose to something like:

“I want to help Bridget see and decide that she will be happy in a new relationship with me, because I am a changed man.”

Better, right? He now has a fighting chance.

But here’s the trouble.

I feel that this second type of mission and purpose statement still doesn’t go far enough.

I feel like it’s too easy to change the first type of M&P into the second type:

I want something -> I want to help my adversary see and decide that what I want is also the best for them

This kind of lame mission and purpose can create all sorts of problems.

For example, not trying to understand your adversary as well as you should.

Or not building enough vision in her mind.

Or even getting needy.

All three of these are cardinal sins in the Jim Camp system of negotiation. So I’m surprised he didn’t think of them when talking about the mission and purpose statement.

The good news is it’s easy to fix this mission & purpose problem. In fact, the fix requires just one word.

Even though this fix is simple, the effects on how you negotiate — and how you’re perceived by the adversary — can be enormous.

But I’m still tired from my trip. So I’ll cover all this, including the magic M&P word, in full detail tomorrow.

You should always judge a book by its cover

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Former Smiths frontman Morrissey has a very polarizing public persona.

Unsurprisingly, he also has immensely devoted fans who have followed him for 30 years plus.

I read a Billboard Magazine interview with Morrissey today. It struck me how this interview is full to the gills of things anyone can copy to have a more dramatic public persona — and therefore a more devoted following.

Here are a few Morrissey lessons:

1. Agree and amplify

What’s the best way to respond when somebody accuses of you of something ugly? Agree and amplify the nasty fact, with humor and without bitterness or trying too hard.

BILLBOARD: “Feb. 20 marked the 30th anniversary of the release of the first Smiths album. How did you mark the occasion?”

MORRISSEY: “Is it only 30 years? It feels like 60.”

2. Use visual, colorful language

People’s brains work in pictures. So use visual language to make a point, and mix in surprising expressions and metaphors. (The good news is that this doesn’t have to be spontaneous. You can collect striking phrases, plan them ahead of time, and pull them out as needed.)

BILLBOARD: “It’s been reported that you’re now working on a novel. Is that true? If so, what are you writing about?”

MORRISSEY: “I can’t christen the baby until I at least see its head. It’s bad form, somehow.”

3. Surprise by inverting

Surprise shocks people into paying attention, and into remembering you. One way to surprise is simply to defy expectations. For example, when people expect you to be serious, be lighthearted. Focus on the trivial and irrelevant instead of the heavy and serious.

BILLBOARD: “In 2013, you endured a series of unfortunate maladies that forced you to cancel many tour dates. Are you still ill?”

MORRISSEY: “Well, I’m expected to see Easter. It was a bad year. I was in hospitals so frequently that the doctors were sick to death of me, and there’s nothing more ageing than lying in a hospital bed, trying to recover from hospital food. If your illness doesn’t kill you then the hospital food sees you off. That’s what it’s there for. Anyway, it was my time to go to pieces. Much overdue.”

4. Surprise by genuineness and sincerity

If you make a career of being tricky and irreverent, that becomes your norm. You can then surprise people further by taking a serious, no-nonsense stance on an issue — particularly one you find meaningful.

BILLBOARD: “You likened eating animals to pedophilia, a comparison some may find … extreme. Care to defend your point of view?”

MORRISSEY: “I don’t need to defend my own point of view. When you eat an animal you subject it to spiritual and physical rape, you eats its breasts … its rump … you cut off its genitals … whichever way you care to look at it, eating animals is violence at its most extreme.”

5. Have high standards

If something doesn’t meet your standards, you can simply ignore it. Another option is to dismiss it or mock it.

BILLBOARD: “Prince recently revealed that he’s an exceptional ping-pong player. What surprising, secret talent do you have?”

MORRISSEY: “I’m an exceptional ping-pong player.”

6. … And go back to surprising by inverting

Inverting the expected into the unexpected is a deep well you can go back to over and over.

BILLBOARD: “Lastly, what’s one piece of advice you wish someone had given you in 1984?”

MORRISSEY: “You should always judge a book by its cover.”

Mother Theresa’s emotional manipulation advice

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“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
— Mother Theresa

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in the early years of my copywriting education came from Andre Chaperon’s Autoresponder Madness.

It didn’t have to do with autoresponders. It didn’t have to do with email. In fact, it was (and is) completely applicable to any kind of sales copywriting, and more broadly, to any kind of mass persuasion.

So what was the lesson?

It was how to understand your prospects on a deep level, and how develop empathy for the people you’re writing to.

I won’t give away Andre’s exact tactics for doing this, but his general approach is simply a ton of research. All of which culminates in a customer avatar.

This is not a demographic description. Instead, it’s a detailed story about a specific person who is facing the problems that you’re looking to solve.

I’ve found that creating such an avatar isn’t just a matter of getting better insight into the audience. There seems to be some kind of chemical switch in the brain that gets flipped when I’m writing to a specific person with a name and a face — versus to a vague, shapeless, and nameless mass.

It’s something I’ve also heard A-list copywriter David Deutsch describe as the “Hey Mitch” method. In other words, when David is writing copy, he (either literally or in his mind) says “Hey Mitch, here’s how to…” and then he goes into his sales pitch.

This process of calling out a specific name has the effect of exposing fine sounding but unconvincing phrases, which seemed fine just a minute ago. And it replaces them with natural words and ideas which are relevant to your audience.

Anyways, this name/face/avatar concreteness isn’t just for hypnotizing yourself into writing better copy.

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath tell a story of hospital staff who were subtly manipulated into caring about improving workflow. This is normally not a topic that staff would be enthusiastic about, but in this case they were shown a video from the perspective of a patient — coming into the hospital, being laid down on a gurney, waiting around, etc.

This concrete illustration got the hospital staff much more responsive and committed to helping improve the situation than if they had been barraged by statistics or facts about nameless patients.

This idea is summed up nicely in the quote by Mother Theresa up top (which I also first read in Made to Stick).

To wrap up: Concreteness, and looking at the individual, is powerful persuasion stuff on multiple levels. It helps you empathize with your audience, and therefore makes you more persuasive. At the same time, the same principle of being specific and concrete makes your audience more receptive to your ideas — again making you more persuasive.

The right way to respond when you hear “no”

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“The easy part of playing negotiation is knowing when not to flinch”

Once upon a time, I threw a party and met a girl who came with some of my friends.

Throughout the evening, I circled around, talking to my various guests.

And each time I came across the girl, I could sense a growing interest from her side.  Which was great, because I was interested in her as well.

At some point, the party moved to a nearby club, where I found myself dancing with the girl. We started kissing, and eventually, I said, “Let’s get out of here.”

“Ok.”

So we got our coats and were about to walk out of the club. Just as we were at the door, she took a step back, furrowed up her eyebrows, and said: “Don’t think for a minute you’re taking me back to your place tonight.”

Thanks to being tired and a bit buzzed, I didn’t flinch at this. Instead, I looked her in the eye and said, “No problem. We’ll go to your place instead.”

She thought about this for a moment, and concluded that it was perfectly satisfactory. So we went to her place, and spent the first of many nights together.

I’ve just started re-reading Jim Camp’s “No: The Only Negotiating System You Need for Work and Home.” And here’s a relevant passage I just came across:

“If you’re a parent, you know that every child hears ‘no’ as the start of a negotiation, not the end of it. As adults, however, we’ve been conditioned and trained to fear the word.” 

I think that learning not to over-react to hearing “no” is not just good negotiation, but also one of the fundamentals of persuasion.

And just so we’re clear: I’m not talking about being pushy, insensitive, or “not taking ‘no’ for an answer”.

Instead, I’m talking about managing your own internal, emotional state, and keeping your sights on your goal in spite of the decoys being launched in front of you.

A clever persuasion tactic from a 1970s racist lackey

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Here’s a bit of movie trivia:

Woody Allen has won the Academy Award for best original screenplay three times. Twice, he did it alone. Once, in collaboration with Marshall Brickman.

Francis Ford Coppola has also won the same award three times, as have Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Each of them has shared at least one of those awards.

Only one guy has ever won the Academy Award for the best screenplay three times, working entirely by himself.

That guy is Paddy Chayefsky.

Right now, I’m rewatching my favorite Paddy Chayefsky Academy-Award-winning movie. It’s called Network, and it deals with the network TV business in the 1970s.

Halfway through the movie, Diana Christiansen, a heartless new breed of TV exec, meets with a representative of the Communist Party of the United States, Laureen Hobbs, in order to discuss making a program based on live recordings of acts of political terrorism. This is how the introduction goes:

Diana Christensen: Hi. I’m Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.

Laureen Hobbs: I’m Laureen Hobbs, a badass commie nigger.

Diana Christensen: Sounds like the basis of a firm friendship.

Clever, right?

“Allow me to disarm you with my honesty”

This introduction does a few things well. For one thing, Diana agrees with what Laureen already believes (the Marxist idea of “class for itself”). At the same time, the introduction is entirely and brutally honest, almost self-dismissing. It’s also very different from what is expected, immediately stirring curiosity and buying a bit of time.

This kind of strategy is what negotiation coach Jim Camp called a “negative stripline.” A negative stripline is when you go fully negative on some sensitive point, to the extent that the other side feels a bit bad and wants to reel you back in towards more middle ground.

So how can you use negative striplining in marketing?

Well, if you’re sending out cold emails to prospect for new customers, you could try opening with something like:

“Hello, my name is John Bejakovic and all I really want is some of your money. However, since I don’t have the skills to rob you, I have to offer you something you’d value in exchange. In my case, the only thing I know well is sales copywriting.”

If you’re selling an ebook about aromatherapy (as I plan to do soon), you could start off the sales letter by saying:

“There’s been a lot of hype about essential oils, and most of it has zero basis in reality. In fact, essential oils have on occasion hurt people who tried using them. And yet, there are cases when essential oils are not completely worthless, and can even be used safely.”

If you’re selling a probiotic:

“The human gut is enormously complex. Scientists know only a little about the myriad interactions between gut bacteria, other species of gut bacteria, and our own bodies. Odds are, they won’t have a good idea about it for another 100 years, and there’s no way to make any firm recommendations right now. However, if you want to self-experiment as a way of fixing your digestive issues, then this probiotic might be worth a look. Here’s why.”

I’ve never written anything this extreme for any of my clients. I don’t know if it would work. But if you want me to write something brutally honest (and possibly disarming) for your business, here’s where to go.

6 ways to stir up curiosity (cont.)

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Onwards and upwards. Continuing from my post yesterday, here are 3 more ways to create and amplify curiosity:

4 Flaunt the velvet pouch

When it comes to copywriting, the method of the velvet pouch is possibly the sexiest, most effective, and most profitable way to create curiosity. It certainly seems to be very prevalent on the Internet today, particularly in long-form sales letters and VSLs.

In many ways, the velvet pouch idea is a combination of several of the techniques from yesterday’s post. But I also feel like this method is tapping into human psychology on some unique, fundamental level, and that’s why I decided to include it on its own.

I found out about the velvet pouch technique from Michael Masterson’s and John Forde’s Great Leads. Here is the relevant section from the book, which is talking about lesson from a door-to-door salesman named Harry:

After gaining admittance to the apartment, Harry would start his pitch about the quality of our cookware, taking out the pots and pans individually from the case. But they were each encased in plush, royal blue velvet pouches. As Harry described the features and benefits of the cookware, he would gently massage the pots, first from outside over the velvet pouches, and then by slipping his hands inside them but still keeping them hidden from the prospect.

“Just keep your eye on the customer,” he told me. “In the beginning they’ll be looking at you. But as you go on, you’ll notice that they will shift their focus to the pots and pans. That lets you know they are getting interested. Keep hitting them with the benefits while they stare at what you’re doing. And never, ever tkae the pots out until you know they have the prospects’ full attention.”

Masterson and Forde use this story to kick off their chapter on what they call the secret lead. In other words, the velvet pouch is all about the mystery and intrigue that builds up when a secret is hovering around in the air.

In some ways, this is similar to a combination of the open loop and the teasing from yesterday. But like I said, there also seems to be a fundamental human hunger for secrets, even if they aren’t clearly associated with any benefits. I think that also explains why “secret” and “mystery” are marketing power words that can in many ways make a headline on their own.

By the way, I think trying to disqualify yourself (or what you’re offering) can sometimes work in the same way as a secret. Once something is taken off the table, people suddenly become more intrigued by it. That’s why I think the start of my post from two days ago is in some ways also a secret lead:

Fair warning: the following post contains some sexual, politically incorrect references. It might offend some people.

It’s ok to click away. But if you insist on reading, here goes:

5 Be different

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6 Be new/Share news

The new kid on the block

When Gary Halbert died, Gary Bencivenga wrote a post explaining why Gary H.’s newsletters were so interesting. The number one thing, according to Gary B.?

1. Gary shared news. Sometimes he was the news, sometimes it was a dramatic turn of events in his tumultuous life, but often enough, he shared news of a technique or strategy that would make your response and profits soar. You couldn’t afford to miss even one of these gems, so you had to open every issue.

Many times, being new is sufficient unto itself, even if there’s no implied benefit, and not even anything clearly different. Novelty seems to directly tap into human psychology. Remember being in elementary school when a new kid appeared in class? Like in the photo above, that new kid was automatically interesting, at least for a while.

About number 5 above…

I tried to be different with the “be different” section above, so I didn’t expand on it at all. Maybe I should have just left it at that, because being different can be pretty straightforward. Still, here are a few examples:

First off, there’s the picture from yesterday’s post: “WORLD’S ONLY FEATURE DANCER WITH 3 BOOBS.” Is it a benefit? Hardly. A secret? Not at all. Just morbid fascination and curiosity with something different.

Second, there’s the story I started with two days ago, about a guy named Yad sleeping with a girl only a few hours after meeting her — just because he was different enough from other guys to make her very curious.

Finally, a copywriting example from my own essential oils list. At one point, I was promoting an online video series about longevity. The promise of the series was “How to live to a happy and healthy old age.”

That’s a fine benefit, but everyone is already pushing the same. So I simply switched it around to be different. I retold an ancient Greek myth about a Trojan prince who gets eternal life but not eternal youth, and how it turns out to be a curse rather than a blessing. The subject line for this inspiring email: “How to reach a frail and unhappy old age.” It worked pretty well.

6 ways to stir up (and blow up) curiosity

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Local business successfully employs curiosity

No time to dilly-dally today. Straight into the meat of this post, which is about how to create and amplify curiosity:

1 Use an open loop

I know of a fantastic way to stir up curiosity. It works particularly well with skeptical prospects, because it can be go completely under the radar.

But before I talk more about that, let me tell you about a guy named Andre Chaperon. Andre is famous in the copywriting world for a course called Autoresponder Madness, which teaches people how to write successful, story-based autoresponder sequences.

Some big Internet publishing companies, such as Mindvalley and Velocity House, have based much of their sales funnels on Andre’s teachings in Autoresponder Madness.

(Andre’s email methodology was the first I was exposed to when I started to learn about email marketing. I thought it was great then, and I think it’s great still — only surpassed, or rather complemented by,  the stuff that Ben Settle teaches.)

Anyways, one clever trick that Andre uses throughout his email copy, and that he teaches people in Autoresponder Madness, is called the “open loop.” You just saw an example of it four paragraphs back. It’s when you announce something intriguing, and then you completely drop it to talk about other things.

In my example above, the effect was probably not great, because you knew the suspense would be relieved after only a few paragraphs. But Andre frequently uses it across emails that will be sent days or even weeks apart.

Of course, the open loop is a standard technique in any story-telling medium. An extreme example is a cliffhanger in old comics or TV shows (more on this at the end of this post).

2 Tease/Intensify

Do you know why teasing is so great? It’s simply this: it will make your readers itch with curiosity, to the point where they’ll do anything to get the answer from you. And the thing about teasing is that it’s simple to do. Many people have used even without knowing anything about persuasion.

I’ll tell you all about how to do it, in just a second. Or maybe two. All right, here goes:

Teasing, by my definition, is simply dragging things out without actually giving anything away. The section above is one example.

You might find my teasing above annoying and transparent. But teasing can and should be part of good copy, both to build up anticipation and to “intensify” whatever is being talked about.

Here’s a less hokey example from my post yesterday:

But I believe there is another big pillar of influence that Cialdini left out. It’s in the story above. My guess is that it also drives about 90% of Internet traffic today. And according to famous copywriter Gary Halbert, it might even be the #1 reason that people buy stuff from advertisements.

I’m not really giving anything away here. I’m just restating and intesifying the benefits, and buying a bit of time in the process.

3 Tighten the knowledge gap

Here’s a puzzle for you. Why would a headline such as:

“Battery technology may emerge as a trillion-dollar threat to credit markets”

stir up more curiosity than a headline such as:

“Battery technology may emerge as a huge threat to other sectors”

After all, the second headline actually withholds much more information (Which sectors? How huge?) than the first. Shouldn’t that cause more curiosity as well?

The answer to this lies in the concept of a “knowledge gap,” a term I first read in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. A knowledge gap is what ultimately creates curiosity — it’s the bit of knowledge we don’t have and we want to have so we can complete the picture.

The thing is, if the amount of information that’s withheld is too great, you don’t create curiosity. You create indifference. That’s what’s going on in the second headline above.

The way to create curiosity is to tighten the knowledge gap as much as possible without giving the farm away. Some well-known copywriter (Ben Settle? David Deutsch?) talked about good bullet points as giving away nine-tenths of what you need to know, but keeping that last bit so people have to buy your product to find out. That’s the right attitude to have with the knowledge gap.

Tightening the knowledge gap isn’t just about combatting general disinterest. It can also be used to hook skeptical, jaded prospects. Compare a subject line such as:

“The forbidden food you should be eating”

(which, by the way, is a real subject line from an email I got yesterday, and did not open) to a more specific subject line:

“The forbidden breakfast food you should be eating after workouts”

To me, it seems that the second subject line (which I just made up) might get me to wonder, “which breakfast food” and “why after workouts,” which might be enough to overcome my skepticism of reading yet another sensationalist health blog post.

4 Flaunt the velvet pouch

This blog post has run on longer than expected. And I’m getting sleepy. I’ll pick it all up tomorrow — starting with the secret of the velvet pouch.

“Until tomorrow — same time — same channel!”