Came a curious question yesterday, in response to my email with the subject line, “How I manipulated you, and how I might do it again.” Reader Jan wrote:
Hi John,
I’ve been reading your emails for a while now and I really enjoy them.
I’d love to know what’s your stance on actively mentioning downsides and what a certain offer is NOT/whom it’s NOT for in order to disqualify the wrong buyers.
This email sounds like you’re not really a fan of it, which surprises me a bit. Maybe I misunderstood something about it.
I would appreciate it a lot if you could clarify that.
At first I found myself flummoxed.
After all, this question came in response to an email in which I actively gave a potential buyer reasons why my Copy Riddles program might not be right for him.
But then my slow, tortoise-like brain struggled forward a few inches. And I remembered the “disqualification” I gave to the potential buyer in yesterday’s email.
I said that Copy Riddles is not for anyone who’s not willing to “poke, prod, jolt, shock, creep out, and unsettle people.” Because my claim is that copywriting is about:
1) Stripping out details that don’t help your case (ie. not telling the whole truth), and
2) Using reliable ways to get people more amped up than they would be normally.
So is this in flagrant conflict with the practice of actively mentioning downsides or disqualifying the wrong buyers?
Maybe. Or maybe it’s more subtle than that.
Now, I hate to do what I’m about to do to you.
But get ready for a bit of hard teaching, because I don’t know how else to deal with this question right now.
During my Most Valuable Email presentation last week, I talked about what I call frontloading. I used a Ben Settle email to illustrate:
And it contains the exact same methods I used to land high-paying clients who could have easily afforded to hire better and more seasoned writers. But, using my sneaky ways, they not only hired me… they hired only me (often multiple times, plus referring me to their friends), without doing the usual client-copywriter dance around price, without jumping through hoops to sell myself, and without even showing them my portfolio, in most cases.
I used this info during good and bad economic times.
In fact, I got more high paying clients during the bad times (2008-2010) than the good times.
I cannot guarantee you will have the same results.
And the methodology doesn’t work overnight.
But, that’s how it worked out in my case, and this book shows you what I did.
Frontloading is when you make a powerful, extreme promise. Then you qualify your promise. But the big, extreme, initial promise still keeps ringing in your prospect’s head.
Ben is a past master at this, as you can see in the snippet above.
Sure, he actively mentions some downsides to make his offers sound legit. But he does it after he’s thourougly amped up his readers with an irresistible promise, which might sound too good to be true — were it not for those downsides.
And by the way:
I’m not in any way criticizing Ben. All I’m saying is, he’s a serious student of direct response copywriting… and he knows what works.
And what works is what I tried to explain, perhaps clumsily, in my email yesterday:
1. Controlling your reader’s attention, and
2. Arousing his emotions in an almost unnatural way
Of course, you can do this to rope in people who are a bad fit for your offers. That’s dumb if you ask me.
You can also do it to turn good prospects into buyers. That’s smart, and it’s what Ben does every day.
And now:
I have an amazing offer for you… a new way to own A-list copywriting skills more quickly than you would ever believe.
Some of the smartest and most successful marketers of all time, Ben Settle among them, have endorsed the approach that this offer is built on.
But the thing is, my offer does cost money.
And it’s gonna require work. Every weekday. For 8 weeks straight.
And it might even make your head hurt a bit once or twice.
But if none of those downsides turn you off, you might be a good prospect for my offer. It’s called Copy Riddles. To take me up on it: