IN ONLY SIX MONTHS, that formerly desperate man bought a $385,000 house with half down, and became a millionaire in less than a year. He also bought a vacation house, put away enough to cover his kids’ college educations, easily stopped his bad habits, and attained complete personal and financial freedom… all accomplished automatically, without effort or willpower!
That’s the back envelope copy from a direct mail sales letter written by one Jeff Paul.
Jeff was a student and protege of Dan Kennedy, and this sales letter is actually selling Dan’s Psycho Cybernetics program.
I’m sharing this copy with you for two reasons:
First, because I want to point you to Info Marketing Blog. It’s got a few decades’ worth of brilliant direct response ads, and smart and interesting commentary. And if you need proof of that, the guy who runs Info Marketing Blog, Lawrence Bernstein, was called out as a valuable resource during Gary Bencivenga’s farewell seminar by Gary Bencivenga himself.
Second, there’s a masterful marketing and copywriting lesson in those two sentences of copy above. It’s right there at the end:
“… automatically, without effort or willpower!”
When I look outside at the people I know… and when I look inside, at my own feelings and frustrations… I find this is what we all really really want, deep down.
Peace. No effort. Definitely no struggle, and no demands on our willpower. No opportunity for it to go wrong. Instead, all done automatically, by some mechanism outside of us.
That’s why smart marketers like Dan Kennedy and Jeff Paul, and millions of others like them, make those promises.
And if you want to sell, in big numbers, at high prices, you should make these promises too.
Only be careful those desires you stimulate in your sales copy don’t seep into your own subconscious.
Because in my experience, life is all about effort, about exerting your willpower, about getting things done yourself instead of sitting around and wishing they could be done automatically.
How exactly do you reconcile selling something to people that you wouldn’t consume yourself? It seems a little like going down to the elementary school each day to sell drugs to kids, while being religious about never allowing that filth near your own family.
I don’t have a good way to reconcile these things for you. But facts are facts. And if you want to see some market-tested facts, here’s Jeff Paul’s complete sales letter. It’s worth reading. So much so that I’ll even talk about it tomorrow.
Sign up for my email newsletter if you want to read that when it comes out. And here’s the link to the sales letter if you want to get a head start.
https://infomarketingblog.com/wordpress/jeff-pauls-greatest-story-selling-ad/