I once listened to an unusual Mixergy interview.
Andrew Warner, the guy who runs Mixergy, typically interviews successful entrepreneurs for his show.
This time however, his guest was Neil Strauss.
AKA Style.
AKA the guy who wrote The Game, the book that exposed the underground pick up community and made it a mainstream phenomenon.
The strange thing was that Andrew, who had probably interviewed hundreds of people up to then, was nervous during this interview with Neil.
Neil, who is a very experienced interviewer himself on top of being a high-performing pick up artist, had this advice for Andrew:
“If you’re ever feeling nervous, call it out.”
Neil was saying that, in business as well as socially, you always want to beat someone to their objection.
If you raise the objection before it occurs to your adversary, then the objection loses its force.
This relates to what I was talking about yesterday. It was about Joe Karbo’s price argument in his famous ad “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.” Joe wrote something like:
“I’m going to ask you to send me 10 dollars for something that’ll cost me no more than 50 cents. And I’ll try to make it so irresistible that you’d be a darned fool not to do it. After all, why should you care if I make $9.50 profit if I can show you how to make a lot more?”
That first bit, about the 50 cents, serves multiple purposes.
One of them is to raise a possible objection.
Try to imagine the ad without it:
You tell the prospect how you’ll ask him to send you $10, and that he’ll be a darned fool not to do it, because this information is worth way more than $10.
Maybe the guy will buy it. But maybe he’ll also say,
“Sounds good, but why $10 exactly? And how much are you making off this? It sounds fishy.”
So that first sentence, about the 50 cents, makes a small but significant difference — it diffuses the objection before it arises in the prospect’s mind.
And this isn’t the only reason to use this argument.
It’s not even the main reason, in my opinion.
I’ll talk about why tomorrow.
For now, if you want more copywriting advice, you might like my upcoming book. It deals with email marketing for the health space, including writing the actual copy. You can find out more about it here: