A few weeks back, I wrote a post about the trouble with marketing “secrets.”
It’s not that packaging things up as a secret doesn’t work. It does. It works great, and that’s why so many marketers use secrets as a crutch.
Today, I want to warn you about secrets again, but from the other side. Not a warning to you as a copywriter peddling secrets… but to you as a prospect getting sucked in by the promise of secret copywriting knowledge.
And to do that, I want to share a quote I heard in a speech given by an A-list copywriter who might be called the grandmaster of marketing secrets. I’m talking about Mark Ford, who, along with Bill Bonner, was one of the key people who made Agora the direct marketing behemoth it is today.
In case you don’t know, Agora is a conglomerate of a bunch of smaller publishing companies. Much of what Agora does is sell secrets — in the finance, health, and most recently, make money online markets. From what I understand, the selling of secrets at Agora all started with Mark Ford, who literally wrote the book on selling secrets (Great Leads, along with John Forde).
So Mark Ford and Bill Bonner were talking about the psychology underlying what they do… and they concluded the following:
“There is an inverse relationship between the value of knowledge and what people are willing to pay for it. The most important things in life you’ve probably heard a hundred times before, but you’re not paying attention. When you’re in the right place and you hear it, you have that ‘aha’ moment and everything changes.”
In other words, these two guys, who have collectively made hundreds of millions of dollars selling secrets, concluded that secrets aren’t worth that much.
So what am I saying?
Nothing. Draw your own conclusions. But perhaps Mark Ford’s confession above is something to remember the next time you hear an alluring promise of “insider knowledge” and “7-figure copywriting secrets.”
Speaking of alluring promises:
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