John Carlton

Sweet inconsistency in copywriting education

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“The most important thing — you can know every copywriting technique in the book, you can read every book — the most important thing is to understand your audience.”
– Parris Lampropoulos

At the start of this year, I got a job to rewrite a VSL for an upsell of a successful offer.

A bit of background:

The offer was in the real estate investing space. It basically showed newbie investors how to get their leads for free using a secret resource.

​​Once people bought the frontend offer, they were shown the upsell. The upsell was about how to hire virtual assistants to automate much of the work involved in the frontend offer… so you can make more money in less time.

The question was how to position this upsell VSL.

My copywriting coach at the time said something like, “This training is the quickest way to become a millionaire real estate investor.”

That might be true. But my feeling was, for this audience, it was not believable. Most of these people had never even completed their first deal. Lots of them were retirees, or people who just wanted to quit their crap jobs and spend more time at home.

If these folks heard “You can be a millionaire,” my gut feeling was they would say, “No, that’s not me.”

And so I wrote that VSL around the promise of, “Get your first deal faster by doing less.” And that positioning turned out to be a winner. It beat out the control by 50%.

Here’s why I bring up this story from my client annals:

Copywriting wisdom is full of sweet inconsistency. Many top copywriters will tell you to make the biggest promise you can — and they will show you million-dollar ads to back up their case. Here’s a famous one from John Carlton:

“Amazing Secret Discovered By One-Legged Golfer Adds 50 Yards To Your Drives, Eliminates Hooks And Slices… And Can Slash Up To 10 Strokes From Your Game Almost Overnight”

But then you have other top copywriters, who will tell you the opposite — to make modest but believable promises. They will also show you successful ads to back up their case. Here’s one from Gary Bencivenga:

“Get Rich Slowly”

So who’s right? The “biggers” or the “modests”?

Neither, of course. Instead, it’s Parris who’s right.

As he says in the quote above, you’ve got to know your audience. Some audiences will believe any promise, so the larger it is, the better for you. Other audiences won’t. So make the biggest promise you can — as long as you’re sure your audience will find it believable.

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A lesson in reality for lazy copywriters

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I blame my parents. They gave me a pleasant and carefree childhood. How selfish of them.

Had they been more forward-thinking, they would have put me to work early — washing dishes after dinner, taking out the trash for my allowance, maybe even a part-time job at the local shoe-shine stand.

As it is, I never had to work until after puberty had had its way with me and then left me alone. By that time, it was too late.

I grew up lazy.

In spite of my best adult efforts to become fluent in “work,” I find that whenever I try to speak that language, I have a heavy accent and the whole thing seems unnatural.

But this email is not about me. This email is about you. Because if you’re looking to become a successful copywriter, it will take work. As Victor Schwab wrote,

“My personal nomination for a heraldic shield for the advertising business would be an obese briefcase, rampant on a field of copy paper.”

Schwab advised young ad men to pack their briefcases full of client papers and take them home for extra work, after work. Because more than talent, more than knowledge of marketing and persuasion, success at copywriting requires work.

Perhaps that thought horrifies you. So let me leave you with something more positive, this from copywriter John Carlton:

Think of yourself as being in a movie — you may not have total control over everything, but you have a lot MORE control than you naturally believe you have.

Write your script the way you want, and then go for it.

Accept reality, but never accept your own lame excuses for not making things happen with as much input from you as you could muster.

The point being, if you don’t like working long hours, you can certainly organize your life in time to avoid that.

If you want to get paid better, you can get there too, and more quickly than you think.

And if, say, you hate working for clients, there are plenty of ways to make a good living today by writing for yourself.

Sure you have to work. That’s reality. But even if you never grow to love work, you can make your life much more like you want than you imagine right now.

By the way, if you want to work at reading a message like this from me, each day, you can subscribe to my daily email newsletter.

Avoiding the Facebook ban hammer through Personal Power

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This summer, one of my clients ran into some trouble with a Facebook ads campaign.

The product they were advertising was a plastic ball, filled with ceramic beads, which you’re supposed to throw into the washing machine and use instead of detergent.

I was in charge of writing the advertorial, so I wrote a first-person confessional with the headline:

“How I wash blood stains out of my clothes WITHOUT laundry detergent”

Facebook didn’t have a problem with my blood-stained headline. They also didn’t have a problem with the questionable product (I still don’t understand how or if it works). But they did have an issue with little things like:

* The use of words like “magic,” “crazy,” and “trick”

* Specific claims such as “it saves me hundreds on laundry detergent”

* Before-and-after pictures of clothes washed with this breakthrough technology…​​

In short, Facebook didn’t like anything that gave this ad the unpleasant but familiar odor of an old-school infomercial.

But wait a minute.

Maybe that comparison is not really fair.

Because right now, I’m hand-copying a very old and very successful infomercial.

It’s for Tony Robbins’s Personal Power tapes.

This infomercial looks like a segment from 60 Minutes. It opens with Tony and Fran Tarkenton, a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback, boarding a helicopter, and then flying around Southern California.

Once they land, Tony and Fran go inside a fancy house, smile and nod at each other, and chat about the good results people are getting from Personal Power.

The rest of the infomercial is punctuated by lots of testimonials, most of which are saying, “This system works really well, and it’s helped me.”

When you get the chance to buy the tapes, there’s no massive price anchoring, and there’s no “But wait, there’s more!”

If all this is starting to bore you, that’s kind of the point.

Because this infomercial was pretty classy, really not sensationalistic, and would have fit in perfectly into a Facebook advertising campaign today.

(And like I said, this infomercial was immensely effective. It helped launch Guthy-Renker Corporation, which at that time was just an experiment between a couple of guys, and now has revenues of over $2 billion a year.)

The point of all this?

Maybe these Facebook compliance requirements don’t have to hamstring sales…

Maybe direct response copywriters have just gotten into too much of a Gary Halbert and John Carlton groove…

And maybe there are plenty of other effective ways to sell stuff without !!! and crazy/amazing/jaw-dropping before-and-after.

Or maybe not.

But if you get the Facebook ban hammer, it’s something to keep in mind, and maybe something to comfort yourself with.

Anyways, if you need help with writing Facebook-compliant advertorials that still make sales, you might get some ideas here:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/