About 18 months ago, I took up an ancient copywriting ritual.
Each day, I started devoting exactly 20 minutes to writing out an old, successful ad by hand.
This tedious strategy was first advocated by Gary Halbert, who claimed the process will neurally imprint good copywriting into anyone who actually does the work. I’m not sure about the neural imprinting, but this practice has paid dividends for me, by forcing me to read good promos more carefully, and by exposing me to ads I would never have read otherwise.
Right now, I am making my way through a magalog by Gary Bencivenga, which he wrote for Rodale back in the early 90’s.
The offer they were selling was a new book, a massive collection of 1,800 alternative health recipes, called New Choices in Natural Healing.
It offered natural cures such as “Beat PMS — with nutrition!” and “Fight yeast infections — with yogurt!” This offer probably killed it back when Gary B.’s promotion ran. But I’m not sure whether such a general alternative-health book could be profitable today.
The trouble is that much of that information is free online on popular, well-established health sites. As a result, all of Gary’s fascinating bullets are just a quick Google search away from being unmasked.
So does this mean that paid info products in the health space are on their way to the graveyard?
I’m banking on the opposite being true.
I’m currently writing a starter guide for using essential oils. When that’s done and published, I’m planning on putting together a related video course in the aromatherapy niche.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I’m not concerned that there will be demand for either of these info products when they comes out (it helps that I have an engaged email list of people who are interested in the topic).
The fact is, science keeps advancing every day, and most of us have trouble keeping up with the new research.
New alternative medicine approaches keep appearing, and it’s hard to tell what’s legit and what’s not.
This opens up the door to anybody who is willing to filter out the garbage, synthesize all the good knowledge, and package it up in a better, more entertaining way than you can find for free online.
And that’s why I think paid health info products may never die.
John Bejakovic
P.S. When it comes time to putting together the video course I mentioned, I’m planning to take another piece of advice from Gary Halbert, and to write the sales letter before designing the course.
After all, what better way to come up with a great course than to make it sales-worthy?
I mention this because I also do copywriting for clients in the health space. For anyone who’s interested, here’s how to contact me: