The cover of Gary Halbert’s Killer Orgasms! book has a photo of Gary’s topless girlfriend.
I took that photo, censored it with a thick black bar over the nipples, and put it into the sales letter to my bullets course, now called Copy Riddles.
There are a couple reasons for that:
One is that this book was instrumental to Copy Riddles coming into being.
Killer Orgasms! was the first place where I found the “source text” behind bullets, so I could see how A-list copywriters like Gary do the magic they do.
But that’s not the only reason I have the photo in there.
Because sex sells, right? If you associate sex with your offer, it makes people buy more?
Maybe… or maybe not.
It might actually backfire.
Like I wrote yesterday, our attitudes towards other people are mixed.
In a situation of fear and danger, we love nothing more than to be in the middle of the herd. There’s safety in numbers.
But in a situation of attraction and mating, we hope to seduce by being exceptional. We hope to be seen as the maverick, roving the hillsides alone. Others are just meddling competition in this case.
At least that’s what some scientists hypothesized back in 2009. So they ran some experiments. And they showed this common-sense logic to be true.
They found that, sure, sex can make your offer sell better… if your offer is about standing out.
But sex can hurt your sales if your offer involves a strong appeal to community and belonging.
Which was relevant to me.
Because I initially planned to sell Copy Riddles with a stronger appeal of support, community, etc. I wound up minimizing that, and amping up the exceptionalism talk:
“Discover how you can OWN bullets more quickly than you would ever believe… and set yourself apart from the masses of other marketers and copywriters.”
But who knows? Maybe all this jiggering won’t do anything.
Or maybe it will even hurt. After all, if a female reader sees this same topless photo and the surrounding “set yourself apart” copy, it might be a turnoff rather than motivating.
But whether I suffer or not, the underlying idea is worth keeping in mind:
Your prospects’ frame of mind influences whether they want to belong or to be unique. And perhaps, this can influence your sales.
We will see what it does in my case. Because as of today, I am reopening Copy Riddles.
The first round kicked off in March. I’ve had very positive feedback about it. I’ll write more about that over the next few days. (Signup will be open until this Sunday.)
In the meantime, if you’d like to check out the Copy Riddles sales page for yourself, here’s the link: