No need to confess all your sins or virtues in a sales letter

When I was a kid I got convinced that if I swallow a piece of chewing gum, it will get stuck in my appendix where it will fester until it causes an explosion that kills me.

For years, I was careful to chew gum only in the front of my mouth, to minimize risk. And then one day I accidentally swallowed a piece of gum. After hours of tense waiting — no explosion.

My point is that it’s easy to convince yourself that there are some things that you simply must or must not do — without any basis in reality.

Let me give you a copywriting example.

​​Last week I delivered a VSL to a client. He just got back to me to say he thinks it’s great. But he had a question. The course the VSL is selling contains more techniques than the single technique the VSL focuses on. Shouldn’t we change this?

It’s a valid question. In fact, earlier in my copywriting career, I would have believed it’s one of those “musts”: “If it’s in the product, I must talk about it in the sales copy.”

The thing is, in this specific case (a real estate investing product), people don’t really want a complicated, full-blown system. They want an opportunity — some concrete, sexy thing that sounds easy to implement, and that feels like a secret to help them get around the usual ways of doing things.

Which leads me to a bit of wisdom I heard from A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos:

“Does it hurt my case, help my case, or is it neutral?”

That’s what Parris asks about every line, fact, and argument in his sales letters. If something hurts his case, or is neutral, it gets kicked out. Because there’s no need to confess all your sins or all your virtues in a sales letter. Nobody asked — and there will be no explosion if you don’t do it.

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