Several years ago, I was at a bar with a friend and we started talking to two Welsh sisters.
After a few minutes, one of the sisters stopped and turned to me. “Wait a minute,” she asked, “how old are you?
I had just turned 36 and I told her so.
“No way! I would have said you are 26, not 36!”
I shrugged it off. But it was cowin’ lush of her to say. However, if she had instead told me,
“Pack it in! You are so much older than you look!”
… even though the content is basically the same, I probably wouldn’t have been as pleased. And I guess it’s not just me. Case in point:
In Victor Schwab’s How to Write a Good Advertisement, Vic goes over 100 successful headlines. One of these is,
“For The Woman Who Is Older Than She Looks”
This, says Vic, stopped thousands of women and got them to read the ad.
On the other hand, the more straightforward (though equivalent) “For The Woman Who Looks Younger Than She Is” didn’t perform nearly as well.
And there’s a fundamental rule of copywriting embedded in that short example. In case you don’t see it yet, let me give you a few more examples:
“71-Year-Old Man Has Sexual Congress Five Times a Day!”
“The Unique World of Gay Rodeo”
“Get Rich Slowly”
Of course, each of these headlines has multiple things going on. But I think you’ll agree they also have something in common.
I’ll spell this out another day in another post. (If you have a guess and you want to see if it’s what I have in mind, write me and I can confirm it for you.)
For now, if you have a business, and you want to be more successful with it by ramping up your sales copy, then you might get some value from the following: