The man was was not easy to kill. A mystic, prophet, and natural-born hypnotist who appeared at the court of the last Russian czar, and who, in just a short while, gained enormous influence:
Grigori Rasputin.
After a few years of growing nonsense at the court — nonsense caused by Rasputin’s influence — a faction of the Russian royal family had had enough. They schemed and plotted, and decided in secret to have Rasputin killed.
So on December 30, 1916, Rasputin was served poisoned wine and pastries laced with potassium cyanide. He swallowed glass after glass of the wine and wolfed down the pastries.
He groaned a little, but it wasn’t enough to kill the hearty Russian peasant.
Prince Felix Yusupov then emerged from behind a curtain and shot Rasputin with a pistol. More groaning but the beast still seemed to live.
So Rasputin was then stabbed repeatedly, and eventually dragged to the icy Neva river and drowned there. This finally did the job.
Of course, most people don’t put up so much resistance. I believe even one cyanide-laced chocolate chip cookie would be enough to do me in. But for more resistant, stubborn souls, other options exist.
I bring up the grisly story of Rasputin’s death because I’m about to make an inelegant comparison.
For the next few days, I will be promoting my Copy Riddles course. Copy Riddles teaches you copywriting, or really, effective communication, via the mechanism of teaching you sales bullets.
The reason sales bullets are so good for learning copywriting is that they have to pack an entire sales presentation in just a sentence or two. If you happen to write in the most competitive, sophisticated, stubborn, and resistant markets, this produces miracles/monsters of persuasion such as this:
“What 44 percent of all women wish you knew about the easiest way to bring her to an explosive climax every time! (It’s news to a lot of men… see pages 89-93.)”
That’s a bullet by A-list copywriter John Carlton. Carlton wrote this and dozens of bullets like it to promote a boring book about sexual health for direct response publisher Rodale, whose main business was selling how-to guides about tomato gardening.
Result? from Carlton’s files:
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I had to fight tooth and nail to get this piece mailed. At one point I was screaming at upper level veeps. I wish someone had taken a video of that meeting: there’s all these honchos sitting around the conference table, stunned, and there’s my voice hollering from the little speakerphone. (I never travel to client meetings, and have never met any of these people face-to-face.) Priceless.
It took me nearly a month to convince them to mail the piece as I wrote it. I caused such a fuss that I was actually blacklisted — until the results came in. I slaughtered the control. In fact, I’d hit a nerve in the public, and this piece mailed for over 5 years, despite frequent attempts by other top writers to knock it off. Ka-ching.
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Maybe you have no stomach for screaming at your clients or customers, or for writing explosive sales copy that slaughters the control in the easiest way possible every time. That’s fine. Not everybody is competing on the national stage, like Carlton was, or against other top writers.
On more modest stages, it’s enough to reach for just one or two of Carlton’s deadly persuasion weapons — instead of doing the equivalent of poisoning, shooting, stabbing, and then drowning your poor reader.
I told you it’s an inelegant analogy. But what to do — we’re talking about bullets. And as marketer Ken McCarthy put it once, bullets wound.
In any case, if you want access to the entire secret closet of persuasion poisons, knives, pistols, blunderbusses, mace, shuriken, anvils-on-a-frayed-rope, halberds, and brass knuckles, so you can choose a persuasion weapon or two for your particular purpose, here’s where to go: