Gary Bencivenga

Email coaching for sale

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When doctors go on strike, patient deaths either stay the same or go down. Such was the conclusion of a 2008 literature review by four professors of public health at Emory University.

The scientists looked at the results of five doctors’ strikes from 1976 to 2003.

​​They found that in the absence of doctors, deaths never went up, but often went down.

You can interpret that how you will. I know how I will interpret it, and it’s to tell you that when copywriters go on strike, sales either stay the same or go up.

Well, of course not every time. But in many situations, getting tricky with your messaging, optimizing for the sophistication of your market, or being clever and indirect actually harms rather than helps your sales.

One of the most successful of all copywriters, Gary Bencivenga, summed it up as the “duck for sale principle.” Gary wrote:

“If you are trying to sell a duck, don’t beat about the bush with a headline such as, ‘Announcing a special opportunity to buy a white-feathered flying object.’ You’ll get much better results with, ‘DUCK FOR SALE.'”

If you would like my guidance and help writing emails, which don’t need to be complicated or take a lot of time to get you results, I will soon have email copywriting coaching for sale. The only way to join it is to be on my email list first. You can sign up for that here.

Maybe this email will finally melt away your resistance

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I was talking to a girl a few days ago, and she was complaining about an annoying guy who had hounded her at a club.

The guy stopped her on the way out of the bathroom. Then he came up to her at the bar. Later he sidled up to her on the dance floor.

“Why are some guys annoying like that?” she asked me.

I shrugged. “Because it works.”

My ex-girlfriend once told me her perspective on why she decided to go out with me. I’d gotten her phone number once, during a brief interaction. And then, for about 6 weeks, I texted her every few days. Each time, she had some reason not to meet. She never said no flat out, so I kept texting her. “You were very persistent,” she mused later.

“Yeah sure,” you might say, “but there’s a big difference between being persistent and hounding somebody in an annoying way.”

Maybe so. But based on what I’ve seen, that’s a line that’s often drawn after the fact — after somebody decides either to give you a hard “no” or to take you up on your offer.

In the second case, the person who took you up on your offer will often say that it was your persistence that really won them over, that they found most attractive.

I took a break just now to check Google Analytics. Right now, as I write this, somebody’s on the third and final page of my Copy Riddles sales letter, and two more people are on the first page.

I don’t know if any of these people will decide to buy in the next few minutes. But I have noticed a trend.

I usually promote my existing offers in one-week stretches. For example, last week it was my Most Valuable Email, this week Copy Riddles.

Early in those week-long stretches, I get some sales. But I’ve noticed it takes a few days to get the wheel rolling, to get momentum built up, to get sales coming in unexpectedly and at odd hours and in bunches.

Today is day six of my Copy Riddles promo period. I’ll see if my theory about sales bunching up will be borne out.

In any case, the basic idea stands. As copywriter Gary Bencivenga said once, persistence melts away resistance.

Incidentally, this is something that ties into the very first big a-ha moment I got while following the road that eventually led me to creating Copy Riddles. In case you’d like to read more about that a-ha moment, you can find it on the sales page bwlo, which I’ve shared previously many times, and which I will continue to share:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

One thing Bencivenga got right

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If you go on YouTube right now, you can see how magic is done at the very highest level — I mean really see it, the trick behind the trick.

Frankly, it will seem preposterous.

A few weeks ago, a friend (hi Marci) clued me into an old but mind-opening video. The video shows one of the greatest magicians of all time, Tony Slydini, performing his “paper balls over head” trick on the Dick Cavett Show.

The unique thing is that this trick is done so it’s completely transparent to the audience. The audience can see all parts of Slydini’s trick in action. And it doesn’t seem like any trick at all.

But there’s a volunteer on stage, who Slydini focuses on.

The volunteer is determined to spot how Slydini makes a bunch of paper balls disappear. And yet, as the crowd laughs louder and louder with each new disappearing paper ball — it’s so obvious to be stupid — the poor guy on stage can’t ever spot the trick.

The volunteer goes from smiling and confident and sure of his own eyes at the start of the trick, to walking off the stage just a few minutes later, staring at the ground and shaking his head a little. “WTF just happened?”

What happened is misdirection.

I’m reading a book about misdirection right now. It’s called Leading With Your Head. The book gives specifics about movement and position and cues for actual stage magicians. But at the heart of it all, the book tells you, misdirection is not distraction. It is focused attention.

Copywriters do misdirection, too. Well, not all copywriters. Copywriters at the very highest level.

For example, I’ve spotted misdirection multiple times in Gary Bencivenga’s “Job Interviews” ad. That ad came pretty late in Gary’s career, after he had been writing sales copy for several decades. I didn’t find any examples of misdirection in Gary’s earlier sales letters, even if they were successful. It seems it took a while for him to get it right.

And in case you’re wondering:

You won’t spot the misdirection by looking at Gary’s ad. That’s like being the guy on stage during the “paper balls over head” trick. The Great Bencivenga will focus your attention where he wants you to look, and you will miss his sleight of hand.

But you can see how Gary’s magic works if you can find the book Gary was selling through that interviews ad. This brings up an important point.

I enjoy watching magic, and I enjoy being fooled by magicians. I enjoy it so much that I don’t want to find out how the trick is done, not really. I won’t ever perform magic, so why ruin the show for myself?

Maybe you feel something similar about sales letters. That might sound preposterous, but it’s very possible.

When you read a sales letter like Gary’s interviews ad — you’re likely to be amazed, astounded, to wonder at the impossible promises he is making you, which somehow still seem credible.

How is he doing it? Could Gary’s promises really be real? It’s possible to enjoy racking your brain over this in a bit of pleasurable uncertainty, as you try to resolve the mysteries Gary is setting out before you.

But once you see the actual “secrets” behind Gary’s copywriting tricks, the illusion vanishes like a cloud of smoke. And gone along with it is that enjoyable sense of wonder, of possible impossibility.

The only reason you might want to ruin the show for yourself is that you yourself want to perform sales magic — writing actual copy, which focuses people’s attention where you want it to go, all the way down to the order form where they put in their credit card information, and the big red button that says, “Buy NOW.”

It’s your decision. Amazed spectator shaking his head in wonder… or sly and knowing performer, controlling attention and doing magic.

If you decide you want the second, you can find Gary’s copy misdirection revealed inside Copy Riddles, specifically rounds 2, 6, and 17. For that show, step right up:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Serves me right for soliciting wishes

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Last month, I sent out an email about a training I want to put together, on how copywriters can create their own offers. I’m still planning to put that training together, and I will have it out later this month.

Anyways, in that email, I asked for input. What’s your current situation… what’s holding you back from creating your own offer… what questions would you wish that I answer if I put this training together.

I got some good responses. But one reader got greedy. He decided to treat me like the genie of the lamp, and he wished the forbidden wish:

“Tell me how to create an offer that’s guaranteed to be irresistible!”

Upon hearing this, I bounced around like an angry djinn, exploding into a million little exasperated stars. “That’s like wishing for more wishes! ‘Guaranteed’? ‘Irresistible’? It cannot be done!”

But then I rematerialized into my human form. I scratched my blue genie head, pulled on my genie beard, and thought for a moment. I reached back into my ancient genie memory, spanning thousands of years, thousands of copywriting books, and thousands of sales campaigns.

I realized there is a way that’s almost guaranteed to produce irresistible offers.

​​At least, I found there’s a common element to all the offers I’ve created which ended up successful. On the flip side, I also found this element was lacking in all the offers which fizzled.

I won’t spell out what this magical element is — not here. It’s something I will reserve for my Mystical Cave of Secrets, aka that training about offers I will put on later this month.

But I can give you an idea of what this element is, using my most successful offer to date, Copy Riddles. If you pay close attention to what I’m about to say, you can figure out what I have in mind.

Here goes:

Copy Riddles is built around a simple bit of advice by the legendary, multimillionaire copywriter Gary Halbert.

Gary’s bit of advice has been endorsed by A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos. Parris said that if you follow Gary’s bit of advice, you’ll learn to write copy and make lots of money. And Parris should know — because he himself followed Gary’s advice, applied it, and made lots of money.

Parris isn’t the only one. Marketer Ben Settle also admitted that he followed Gary’s advice and profited as a result.

And another Gary — Gary Bencivenga, who has been called America’s greatest living copywriter, said he managed to beat a control by Gene Schwartz as a result of following this same approach that Gary Halbert advised, though he arrived at it independently of Gary Halbert.

And what is that bit of advice?

It’s​​ simply to look at sales bullets from successful sales letters, and to compare those bullets to the source in the book or the course or whatever that the sales letter was selling. That’s how you can spot the “twists” that top copywriters use to turn sand into glass, water into wine, lead into gold.

So that’s what I did.

I tracked down both the source material, and the bullets that sold that source material. But not just any bullets. Bullets written by A-list copywriters — including the two Gary’s, including Parris, including many more like David Deutsch and John Carlton — who were all competing against each other in the biggest big-money arenas of sales copywriting and direct marketing.

And then, rather than just creating a how-to course based on the tricks and tactics that I saw these A-list copywriters using in their sales bullets, I created a fun, immersive, exercise-based experience that I summed up in the title of the course, Copy Riddles.

Result? Here’s marketer Chew Zhi Wei, who went through Copy Riddles a while back:

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By the way just wanted to thank you for such an amazing course. This might be one of the most valuable courses that I have ever have the privilege to attend. So much so that I even feel that you’re underselling how much value you’re actually gifting away. Thank you so very very much.

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Is it clear now how to make an almost irresistible offer? I hope it is. And if not, you can find it discussed in more detail in rounds 6-12 of Copy Riddles, with round 11 being particularly relevant.

If you’re curious about all that, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/cr

Why I’ve just sent you the only Times New Roman newsletter you are likely to read today

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This past Wednesday, I found myself mystified by an article titled The Reaction Economy. It was written by a William Davies — “a sociologist and political economist” — in the London Review of Books.

Davies was complaining about Twitter, and how he is trying to wean himself off it, and how his brain screams to set the record straight whenever it sees idiotic conservative tweets. But Davies is a disciplined person, so he didn’t give in to the urge and get back on Twitter. Instead, he went and wrote a 6,276-word article in the LRB about it.

As I read this, I found myself mystified why I was reading it at all. I mean, what was fresh here? Some guy saying he wants to use social media less? Or a liberal airing his lungs about conservative trolls? Or an online pundit shaking his finger and warning me, as I nod along in silence, that social media is designed to provoke outrage?

And yet, there I was, reading, paragraph after long paragraph. I asked myself why. One small part was the good headline, The Reaction Economy. That sucked me in initially. But what kept me going had nothing to do with the actual content, which was neither new nor insightful.

I realized that the real reason I was reading was that the article was hosted on the LRB website. Beyond that, it was the formatting — 10-line paragraphs, drop capitals, Times New Roman font.

Copywriter Gary Bencivenga once told a story of how his ad agency rushed an ad into the New York Times. In the rush, the NYT typesetters set the ad with a sans-serif font. Gary’s agency complained, and the Times offered to run the ad the next week, for free, with the correct serif font. This was not a proper A/B split test. Still, the serif ad ended up pulling 80% more sales than the sans-serif ad the week earlier.

Is there really sales magic to serif font? Probably not. But we use cues all the time to decide on value, and to guide our decisions. I’ve written before how I find myself unable to spend more than 20 seconds reading a 700-word blog entry or email newsletter, but that I’m happy to read a four-volume book of 1,900 pages for more than a year.

Quality of content is a part of it, but only a part. The fact is, I use cues all the time to evaluate that quality, and I rely on past habits to determine what deserves my attention or not.

So my point for you is is, why stack the odds against yourself? Why give your reader subtle cues that your writing is skimmable, disposable, low-value fluff? The bigger principle, which I’ve seen proven in different areas of life, is: Assume people are already acting how you want them to act. Very often, they will end up doing just that.

Since you’ve read this far, I assume you must be a reader. So I will remind you that, for the next three days, until February 27th, I am opening the doors to my Insights & More Book Club. After that, I will close off the club to new members. We will start reading the next book on March 1st, and it makes no sense to have people join mid-way. The only way to join is to be signed up to my email newsletter first. If you like, you can do that here.

Do your customers really want a relationship with you?

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I talked about the legendary copywriter Gary Bencivenga yesterday.

​​Gary wrote sales letters that brought in millions of dollars for big publishing companies. He rarely if ever lost a split-run test, even when competing against the highest level, against other top-of-the-pile copywriters.

​​I’ve been going through Gary’s farewell seminar for the fourth time. I’m finding all kinds of nuggets of gold that I had missed before.

For example:
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At one point during his farewell seminar, Gary mentions in a slightly exasperated tone the idea of “relationship marketing.” And he says:

“I buy an aspirin because I have a headache, not because I want a relationship with my druggist.”

Maybe you’re ready to pick this statement apart. And I’m sure you can. I’m sure you can do a good job proving that Gary’s statement isn’t true, not most of the time, not with all people, and that it doesn’t apply to your particular situation or to the way the whole market has changed since Gary was in his heyday.

That’s fine.

​​I don’t have a dog or a cat in this fight. I’m just here to share Gary’s idea with you, and maybe give you something new to think about.​​

But if you think a bit, and realize that maybe your customers aren’t primarily interested in buying from you because you are you, because they want to imagine you’re their friend and they like your sense of humor and they feel good about obeying your commands, then what are you left with?

Well, you can always talk about your offer.

​​Or about your customers’ problems.

​​Or about convincing proof that your offer will solve your customers’ problems.

Or simply about your customer’s deep hidden desires, about his identity, and how your offer naturally reinforces that. ​​

If this is what you want to do, and you want to do it well, then you can learn to do it with my Copy Riddles program.

It teaches you to write copy by showing you how A-list copywriters have done it, starting with a dry source text, and ending with a sexy and sparkling sales letter that netted millions or tens of millions of dollars. Often, without the slightest shred of personality or relationship.

And yes, among the A-list copywriters that Copy Riddles looks at is Gary Bencivenga himself. ​​If you’d like to find out more, take a look at the page below:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Newsflash: Gary Bencivenga endorses the Copy Riddles approach

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I went for my morning walk just now, and I was listening to the Gary Bencivenga seminar on my headphones.

If you don’t know Gary, he is an A-list copywriter whose star shines brightest on the Copywriters Walk of Fame.

Gary’s sales letters mailed out tens of millions of times. They made him and his clients millions of dollars.

Before he retired, Gary was better at this than anyone.

An executive at Rodale Press, a big direct response publisher, said that Gary never lost a split-run test when going up against other top copywriters. An executive at Phillips publishing, another major direct response company, said that Gary had more winners than anybody else.

When Gary decided to retire, he put on a $5k/person farewell seminar where he shared all his best secrets. I’ve listened to the recordings of this seminar from beginning to end three times so far.

And yet, the following amazing story never managed to pierce that ball of lead that sits on my shoulders. Not until today.

Gary was talking about the first time he had to compete against the legendary copywriter Gene Schwartz, and try to beat a control that Gene had written for Rodale.

“I didn’t want to be overly influenced or depressed,” said Gary. So he didn’t look at Gene’s copy before starting his own.

After Gary finished his first draft, he decided to finally take a look at Gene’s stuff.

“I was so depressed,” Gary said. Gene’s copy was so much stronger.

But remember what that Rodale exec said? Gary never lost a split-run test for Rodale, not even against the great Gene Schwartz.

Here’s what Gary ended up doing:

I said, the only way I’m going to have a way of competing with Gene is if I figure out what he’s done to get these bullets.

​​So wherever his bullets came from, I would read the same page. I would learn from him just by mimicking what he had done.

So I said, “This bullet that he came up with came from chapter 3, page 4. What is the original source of this?”

And he taught me so much, just by studying his copy and by looking at the product itself.

I was able to beat him, but it was really his package too in a way, because I learned the technique.

Here’s a confession that’s not secret:

​​This approach to learning the technique of copywriting is what lies at the heart of my Copy Riddles program. I got the idea for that from another legendary copywriter, Gary Halbert.

And now, that same Copy Riddles approach has been endorsed by three big names — Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and Ben Settle — all of whom have said publicly that this is the way they learned copywriting technique.

You can follow this approach yourself, right now, for free. Just like Gary did.

First, find a collection of winning sales letters written by a-list copywriters.

Second, get the product they were selling. You might have to stalk Amazon, eBay, used book sites, and online repositories.

Third, when you get both the sales letter and the out-of-print book in your possession, go bullet by bullet, and tease out how the A-list copywriter turned lead into gold.

Of course, you can also take a shortcut. You can take advantage of the fact that I’ve already done all this work for you, and that I’ve packaged it up in a fast, fun, mostly-done-for-you ride I’ve called Copy Riddles. To find out more about that:

https://bejakovic.com/cr-3/

“Unsubscribe please”

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Last night, following my “Buy my 10 Commandments book” email, a reader replied:

“Unsubscribe please”

I’ll admit it. This irritated me. I figured my reader was just too dumb to know how you unsubscribe from an email newsletter.

But then I had a hopeful thought.

Maybe my reader just wanted to show her displeasure at my grossly self-promotional, zero-value email?

When I checked ActiveCampaign, it turned out I was right. My reader had found the unsubscribe link and unsubscribed on her own. But as she was walking out the door, she just had to let me know about it.

This isn’t the only parting shot an unsubscribing reader has taken at me.

Last January, during a launch I was running, a troll wrote me and suggested I read up on copywriting fundamentals before promoting any more offers of my own.

To which, I wrote a newsletter email about his helpful suggestion.

The troll replied to that newsletter email in an offended tone.

So I wrote a second newsletter email about his offended tone.

At which point, the troll unsubscribed. In the “reason why” field you get when you unsubscribe, he wrote:

“You’re simply too dumb to be helped.I tried twice & you can’t tell the difference between a troll & someone with advice. Good luck. You’ll need it.”

I’m telling you all this because enemies are good for business. They’re so good that if you don’t have them, you have to make them up. Here’s America’s greatest living copywriter, Gary Bencivenga, on the matter:

“And if you can create an enemy in your copy, that’s what happens. You set up a three-point discussion and you come around from your side of the desk to be on the reader’s side of the desk and then it’s you and the reader against the enemy that you’re railing against.”

The trouble is, my emails are usually so placid and polite that I’ve been suffocating any potential enemies in the womb.

In that whole span from the guy back in January to the woman last night, I’ve gotten zero even mildly criminal replies to any of my emails.

I don’t know if it’s too late. I hope not.

There’s a theory that Gotham City is so full of wacky costumed villains simply because Batman is there. The villains watch the evening news, and see other criminals scrapping with Batman. They want a challenge also, and so they congregate on Gotham.

I’ll see whether writing about the “unsub plz” lady or the “you’re too dumb to be helped” troll will bring out any latent Scarecrows or Penguins on my list.

If they do come out, I’ll be sure to write an email and let you know about it.

In the meantime, let me promote something. That’s like lighting up the Bat-Signal in the night sky for making blood boil among wacky villains.

My offer for you today is my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters.

This little book features a commandment by Gary Bencivenga. Gary’s commandment is not about enemies. It’s both more fundamental and more powerful than that.

If you’d like to read it, here’s where to go…

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

… and I’ll be back tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel. ​​

Nobel Prize-winner shows just how right I, John Bejakovic, was

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Trust me for a moment or two while I tell you about the following interesting people:

On October 3, 1918, a man named Grover Bougher sent a letter to his brother George, a Private in the American Expeditionary Force.

Two days later, Grover was killed in a train wreck.

Grover’s letter was returned unopened the following April, with a note from the Command P.O. that George had also been killed, fighting the war in France.

Neither brother ever learned of the other’s death.

But life goes on. Eventually, Grover’s widow, Lulu Belle Lomax, met and married a man named Vernon Smith.

Smith loved children, including Lulu’s two daughters by Grover Bougher. And while Lulu had often said she would never have any more children, Vernon’s love for her two daughters changed her mind.

​​The result was Vernon Lomax Smith, born on January 1, 1927.

Fast forward to 2002:

Vernon Lomax Smith is awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Well, actually he shares the prize with Daniel Kahneman. Like Kahneman, Smith did work in behavioral and experimental economics, so the Nobel committee thought it okay to split the prize among the two of them.

Fast forward even more, to 2022:

Vernon Smith, now aged 95, has taken part in an interesting experiment. Except, he is not the investigator. He is part of the experiment itself. The experiment runs as follows.

Smith and a lesser-known coauthor (one without a Nobel Prize) submit a paper for publication.

Will the paper be accepted for publication? How will Smith’s name influence those odds?

Result:

If Smith’s Nobel Prize-winning name is revealed to peer reviewers, they are more likely to accept the paper for publication.

If Smith’s name is hidden to peer reviewers, the reviewers are less likely to the accept for publication.

Common sense, right?

Except, what was not common sense, what was not obvious, and what was in fact shocking to the scientists who conducted this experiment, was the size of the effect of revealing Vernon Smith’s name to peer reviewers.

If Smith’s name was revealed to peer reviewers, they were 6x more likely to accept the paper than otherwise.

Same paper. Same quality of ideas inside. 6x difference in response.

6x!

Yesterday, I, John Bejakovic, wrote an email advising you to give your prospects mental shortcuts to make their decision-making easier.

One of the most valuable of such shortcuts is, as I have long trumpeted, to sell people, and not ideas.

Ideas are vague, hard to grasp, and hard to judge.

People, on the other hand, sell much better. How much better?

Well, thanks to Vernon Smith, we now have the answer:

​​6x better.

Like I said, this is something I have known for a long time. But I still need to remind myself of it often.

For example, I have lately been promoting my Most Valuable Email training.

I’ve given you all sorts of idea-y reasons why you might want to buy this training and learn the “Most Valuable Email trick” inside.

What I haven’t done yet is tell you maybe the most important reason.

While I have used this MVE trick heavily – more heavily than anyone I know of — I did not invent it.

In fact, I have seen some very smart and successful marketers, including Gary Bencivenga, Parris Lampropoulos, and Mark Ford reach for this trick it in non-email content.

It’s much rarer to see this trick being used in emails — outside my own — though I have spotted Daniel Throssell using this trick on occasion.

So many names.

So many people.

So many reasons to buy my Most Valuable Email training.

In case you are interested:

https://bejakovic.com/mve/

The sales secret of Man on Wire

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Last night, in a desperate hunt for a movie to watch, I turned to the Rotten Tomatoes 100% Club. That’s a list of some 370 movies that have had uniformly positive reviews — a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.

This led me to Man On Wire, a 2008 documentary about a man named Philippe Petit. In case you haven’t seen this movie, the gist is:

Petit was a tightrope walker. And obsessive.

Back in 1968, when he was just 18 years old, Petit hit upon the idea of walking on a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center.

Problem:

The towers hadn’t been built yet. So Petit spent the next six years scheming, practicing, and waiting in preparation for his audacious August 7, 1974 walk between The South and North Towers, which lasted 45 minutes.

But here’s a question that maybe immediately pops into your head, as it did into mine when I heard about this stunt:

How exactly do you stretch a wire across the two towers? The wire weighed 200 kilograms, or about 450 lbs. Petit was doing his setup clandestinely, in the middle of the night, while hiding from security guards, so helicopters and cranes were out of the question.

So what the hell do you do?
​​
​​You can’t just hoist the wire up from the ground — it’s a 400 meter drop (over 1,300 feet). You can’t just toss the heavy wire across the 40 meters (130 feet) that separate the corners of the two towers.

A hint comes early in the movie.

You see a silhouette of a man packing things into a bag. It’s supposed to represent Petit.

Along with other unrecognizable equipment, the silhouette gives away something familiar — an arrow.

The fact is, one of Petit’s henchmen shot an arrow with a bow from one tower to the another. And that arrow had a fishing line attached to the end of it.

They used that first fishing line to pull across a slightly sturdier string.

Then they used that string to pull across a strong rope.

And finally, they used the rope to pull across the actual wire, which like I said, weighed as much as an adult melon-headed whale.

Maybe see where I’m going with this.

Because when I saw this in the movie, a lightbulb went off in my head.

“I know this technique!” I shouted in the darkness.

But not from tightrope walking. I know this technique from sales. I first read about it in one of Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullets. Gary called it one of the “the most powerful master strategies I ever learned.”

You can find the explanation of this sales technique below. But not just that.

You can also find lots of inspiring personal stuff about Gary at the page below. Such as for example, that for a long time, Gary was such a bad copywriter that he considered giving up and becoming a mailman. He even went to the post office to pick up a job application.

The only reason Gary stuck with copywriting, the only reason he persevered and eventually became so successful, the only reason we know of him today, was that he was told at the post office that they are not hiring at the moment, and when they do start hiring again, thousands of prior applicants will be ahead of Gary in line.

So Gary stuck with copywriting and marketing.
​​
And one of the biggest things that Gary learned in the years that followed, and used in all his copy and marketing, from his sales letters to his olive oil business, was this “Man On Wire” sales technique. In case you are interested:

http://marketingbullets.com/bullet-15/