I talked to a successful copywriter today and he taught me a valuable lesson about headlines and leads.
Maybe you won’t think it’s a tremendous insight…
But I bet if you look for this idea in the next five sales letters you come across, four will be missing it.
Anyways, let me illustrate it with a movie analogy.
Specifically, a scene from the 2010 masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels, starring Jack Black as the modern-day Gulliver.
Old Gul is shipwrecked in Lilliput. He wakes up tied up on the beach by many tiny ropes, put in place by the diminutive Lilliputians.
Gulliver starts to break loose and struggles to his feet.
But the Lilliputian army, which is surrounding him, won’t have any of it.
They start throwing some tiny Lilliputian hooks into Jack Black’s underwear, and they soon send him toppling back down the to the ground, ass first into a tiny Lilliputian soldier who’s about to die gloriously for his country.
Keep this powerful image in mind.
And then start thinking about headlines.
Your headline gets your prospect down to the ground, just like Gulliver at the start of the scene.
But soon, your prospect starts to get restless and wants to get up and break free.
And so your responsibility, according to the very successful copywriter I talked to today, is to toss in enough tiny little hooks to pull the reader back into his seat, and to keep him reading.
That’s how you bring the mighty Gulliver back down to the ground, where you can have easy access to his ear, so you can complete your presentation and close the sale.
And I heard a similar idea just now from one of Hollywood’s most successful producers, Brian Grazer.
He’s the guy who produced Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind and (closest to my own heart) Arrested Development.
Brian was asked how he figures out which ideas are good and which ones are not.
“You should be able to come up with a fascinating and new bit of information you can deliver in just 5 seconds,” Brian effectively said (I’m paraphrasing). “And then, just in case they’ve heard something like it before, you should have a fascinating followup to suck them in even more.”
I think this is a great illustration of perhaps the fundamental rule of successful copywriting practice. And that is:
Keep raising the stakes. Keep putting in more effort than everybody else is putting in. And eventually, you will start to see Brobdingnagian results.
Maybe you won’t think it’s a tremendous insight…
But I bet if you look for this idea in the next five sales letters you come across, four will be missing it.
Anyways, let me illustrate it with a movie analogy.
Specifically, a scene from the 2010 masterpiece Gulliver’s Travels, starring Jack Black as the modern-day Gulliver.
Old Gul is shipwrecked in Lilliput. He wakes up tied up on the beach by many tiny ropes, put in place by the diminutive Lilliputians.
Gulliver starts to break loose and struggles to his feet.
But the Lilliputian army, which is surrounding him, won’t have any of it.
They start throwing some tiny Lilliputian hooks into Jack Black’s underwear, and they soon send him toppling back down the to the ground, ass first into a tiny Lilliputian soldier who’s about to die gloriously for his country.
Keep this powerful image in mind.
And then start thinking about headlines.
Your headline gets your prospect down to the ground, just like Gulliver at the start of the scene.
But soon, your prospect starts to get restless and wants to get up and break free.
And so your responsibility, according to the very successful copywriter I talked to today, is to toss in enough tiny little hooks to pull the reader back into his seat, and to keep him reading.
That’s how you bring the mighty Gulliver back down to the ground, where you can have easy access to his ear, so you can complete your presentation and close the sale.
And I heard a similar idea just now from one of Hollywood’s most successful producers, Brian Grazer.
He’s the guy who produced Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind and (closest to my own heart) Arrested Development.
Brian was asked how he figures out which ideas are good and which ones are not.
“You should be able to come up with a fascinating and new bit of information you can deliver in just 5 seconds,” Brian effectively said (I’m paraphrasing). “And then, just in case they’ve heard something like it before, you should have a fascinating followup to suck them in even more.”
I think this is a great illustration of perhaps the fundamental rule of successful copywriting practice. And that is:
Keep raising the stakes. Keep putting in more effort than everybody else is putting in. And eventually, you will start to see Brobdingnagian results.