“Oh what the f—”
I arrived to the airport today around 8:45am to be faced with a giant, hideous snake, made up of people and luggage, starting at the check-in counters, folding in on itself a dozen times, and finally stretching its tail some hundred yards into the depths of the terminal.
I immediately made my way for the “last call” line. Even that took almost 45 minutes before I finally made it to the check-in counter.
I handed my id to the woman behind the counter. She wasn’t interested.
“I need proof of your booking,” she said.
“What?”
“I need to see proof that you’ve bought a ticket.”
“The proof’s there in the computer,” I said. I helpfully pointed to her computer monitor for her.
She flipped it around so I could see. It showed a booting-up window. It was frozen.
“The computers aren’t working,” she said. “I need proof that you’ve bought a ticket.”
Maybe you’ve heard. There was some giant IT crash all around the world today. America. Australia. Europe. Hospitals. Banks. Airlines.
I produced proof of booking in the end.
And in return, I got a flimsy piece of paper, written out by hand, with my name on it and the code for the flight. That was my boarding pass today.
I won’t go into the details of all my adventures today.
Suffice to say, the situation was a huge mess, everywhere, all at once.
As I stood there at the airport, in a crowd of thousands of people, all of us burdened with luggage, all confused, all indecisive and yet unhappy to stay where we were, I thought that this was a little sampler of what Porter Stansberry has been predicting for 15 years or more.
“End of America.” Total social collapse. A world in which things stop working, and we’re suddenly exposed and helpless.
I don’t know if Stansberry’s predictions will ever come true.
But I do know that predictions like that always get attention.
Fear works. So does greed, if you can tie it into the fear, and make a claim like copywriter Gary Halbert once did:
“How You Can Profit From The Coming Stock Market Crash And Financial Blood-Bath That Is Going To Be Caused By Cash-Rich Drug Dealers And Other Criminal Scum!”
The thing is, fear and greed can be good at getting buyers. But they might not be very good at getting repeat buyers, the buyers who actually build a direct response business.
There has to be something more.
And to find out what that something more is, today I’ll invite you to read an essay that has been ringing in my head for years.
This essay explains why the “End of America” sales letter was such a huge success, when hundreds of similar sales messages, all making the same predictions and claims, didn’t even come close.
And this analysis comes from a man who should know, because he got the sales numbers of all these hundreds of sales letters, and he got the copy to compare. Plus, he’s a master copywriter himself, who has coached and guided dozens of other master copywriters.
If you’re interested in copywriting, at all, then this essay is worth a read: