How One Big Idea Trumps Lots of Small Ones

Issue #2182

• WEALTHY: How can this lawyer get out of debt? (Michael Masterson)
• HEALTHY: A 60-day plan to the body of your dreams (Craig Ballantyne)
• WISE: Michael Masterson on good writing

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

• The "golden thread" that can make your sales copy stronger (John Forde)
• 4 guidelines for calling a prospective customer (Ilise Benun)
• It’s Fun to Know… about global warming and cheese
• Add "fatuous" to your vocabulary

== Highly Recommended ==

Imagine Knowing of a Casino Where the Dealer Tipped His Hand Before You Made Your Move and Didn’t Care How Many Times You Beat Him.

When would you stop going there?

This is nothing to do with games of chance, but I hope your answer to that question would be a resounding, “NEVER!!” Assuming you’re sane that is… Well, that is a virtually PERFECT analogy of the power of the insider signal!

It’s often said, “The Stock Market is just a big casino”. And it’s true. But the important omission in that statement (to keep the masses out!) is the dealer in this casino tips his hand to the select few… the insiders.

Such powerful knowledge could make YOU very rich indeed… Click here to learn more…

Dear Michael Masterson: "I have barely enough to get to the next paycheck."

"I have read, again and again, all of your books. I would say Automatic Wealth contains your best tips and strategies in one place. I recommend it to everyone I know constantly.

"I want to get on the road to wealth. However, I made some decisions early in life that put me into serious debt. I am 35 years old. I graduated from law school three years ago with $150,000 in student loan debt, and I have accumulated $15,000 in credit card debt. Because of the glut of lawyers out there, I struggled to find work and ended up being a prosecutor, which I have been for the past two years. I make $40,000 per year.

"Since I work for a state agency, I cannot ‘freelance’ as a lawyer on the side to increase my income. In addition, after paying my bills, I have barely enough to get to the next paycheck, much less put a few thousand into starting a side business. What plan of action should I take?"

- T. Anderson

Orlando, FL

Dear T. Anderson,

Here’s my advice:

1. Make getting out of debt and creating wealth (two parts of the same thing) your number one goal. You don’t have a choice at this point. You got yourself into a hole. You have to dig yourself out of it. The good news is that it won’t take very long - just a year or two at most.

2. Recognize that your salary is amazingly low. It’s approximately what people get their first year out of law school. I don’t know why you had so much trouble finding a job and then why it paid so poorly, but it doesn’t matter. You can make a change. You have to find another job - out of the public sector and probably in a better-paying locale. If you are smart and ambitious, you will succeed - even it takes 1,000 hours to find that better job.

3. Develop a legal specialty. Specialists get paid more than generalists. Legal specialists earn $300 to $700 an hour. You are being paid $20 an hour. It’s crazy! In deciding on a specialty, look for areas that are growing. Right now, there’s a lot of work for lawyers in real estate because of bankruptcies and pending bankruptcies. As the baby boomers age, all sorts of estate and retirement planning work will develop.

4. I presume the prohibition against working on the side is against legal work only. I can’t imagine they could prohibit you from taking a weekend job as a waiter. Do whatever you have to do to bring in extra money. Work the extra hours until you’ve paid back that credit card debt.

5. Meanwhile, make sure you are paying as little as possible on your credit card debt. If it is higher than five or six percent, shop around for a better rate.

6. Stop using all your credit cards but one, and keep that on a tight leash.

7. Invest some small percentage of your time and income (Brian Tracy recommends three percent) in your future education. To be successful as a lawyer, businessperson, or freelance professional, you need to improve your writing, speaking, and analytical thinking skills. Find programs that will help you do that, and you’ll become better at everything you do.

8. Establish specific goals. Use ETR’s own goal setting-program … and stick with it.

Don’t despair. Don’t get down on yourself. I was in more debt than you when I started on the road to wealth. You will be fine.

- Michael Masterson

[Ed. Note: Have a question for Michael Masterson? Write to him at AskMichael@ETRfeedback.com.]

"What’s good writing? A single strong message, clearly expressed."

Michael Masterson

How One Big Idea Trumps Lots of Small Ones

By John Forde

It happens every year.

Michael Masterson, Bill Bonner, and I meet in a French country chateau. We drink wine. And we stay up late, playing guitars. During the day, we run an intensive, four-day, bootcamp for a small number of copywriters - some with years of experience, others with just months.

We rehash lots of fundamentals. We even come up with a few new breakthrough discoveries. But over and over, in the classic writing samples we look at and in the new copy our workshops produce, one thing is always abundantly clear: The tighter and more isolated the core idea, the more powerful the result. Without exception.

Think about it.

When you have a great conversation… read a great book… or see a great documentary… what grabs you? Is it the litany of small details? Or the "golden thread" that unites them? More often, for most of us, it’s the latter. And the more you "get" the core idea behind a story, a speech, a revelation… the more memorable that one core message becomes.

This is just as true in sales copy. One message, well developed, just has more impact than ads - short or long - that are overloaded with competing ideas.

Don’t believe me?

100 Headlines That Prove The Point

For this article, I decided to go looking for strong ads that featured single secrets, single solutions, and single ideas… to see if that list was as long as or longer than one showing a much wider reaching, more thinly spread approach.

First I looked in a digital "swipe" file I have on my desktop - over 200 snapshots of winning direct-mail and print ads. Some old, some new. Overwhelmingly, the theory proved true.

But I had picked up a lot of these sample ads randomly. Would the theory hold up if I went to a more recognized resource?

Maybe you’ve heard of Victor Schwab. Advertising Age calls Schwab the "greatest mail-order copywriter of all time" and a pioneer in advertising research. Nobody, arguably, has been a more devoted tester of headlines, layouts, offers, and copy appeals than Schwab. He was also one of the first copywriters to lay down a persuasion "formula" for sales copy, in 1941. And his classic book How to Write a Good Advertisement, is a must-read staple on the bookshelves of ardent marketers everywhere.

One of the things you can find in Schwab’s book is a list of what he called the "top 100 headlines."

It made no sense for me to scan Schwab’s list for single-idea-driven examples. They were the majority, by far. Instead, I looked for headlines that looked more like the multiple-idea type. And get this - out of his list of 100 headlines, only 10 were NOT clearly single-idea based.

Something else: Even those 10 multiple-idea ads still clearly had an implied "golden thread" that bound the whole thing together.

Take a look. And remember, this is the list of headlines that DON’T appear at first to fit the single-idea theme we’re talking about…

• "Do You Make These Mistakes In English?"
• "Five Familiar Skin Troubles - Which Do You Want to Overcome?"
• "Have You These Symptoms of Nerve Exhaustion?"
• "161 New Ways to a Man’s Heart - in This Fascinating Book for Cooks"
• "Do You Do Any of These 10 Embarrassing Things?"
• "Six Types of Investors - Which Group Are You In?"
• "The Crimes We Commit Against Our Stomachs"
• "Little Leaks That Keep Men Poor"
• "67 Reasons Why It Would Have Paid You to Answer Our Ad a Few Months Ago"
• "Free Book - Tells You 12 Secrets of Better Lawn Care"

Would they have worked even better if each focused on only one thing - rather than a list of things - right there in the headline? Maybe. But notice that even though they don’t, each clearly points toward a single, overarching theme. Meanwhile, out of the 90 single-idea headlines, just take a look at how instantly clear and engaging these examples are…

• "The Secret of Making People Like You"
• "Is the Life of a Child Worth $1 to You?"
• "To Men Who Want to Quit Work Someday"
• "Are You Ever Tongue-Tied at a Party?"
• "How a New Discovery Made a Plain Girl Beautiful"
• "Who Else Wants a Screen Star Figure?"
• "You Can Laugh at Money Worries - If You Follow This Simple Plan"
• "When Doctors Feel Rotten, This Is What They Do"
• "How I Improved My Memory in One Evening"
• "Discover the Fortune That Lies Hidden in Your Salary"
• "How I Made a Fortune With a ‘Fool Idea’"
• "Have You a ‘Worry’ Stock?"

Here’s an added benefit: Starting off in the headline with just one, simple idea makes writing the rest of the sales letter easier.

How so?

Finding the core idea, of course, is the hard part. It has to be precise, not scattershot. You have to know your audience and know them well. Or you risk missing your target completely. But home in on the right promise, the right hook, the right singular theme at the start… and writing the sales copy that supports it suddenly gets easier.

You know where you’re headed. You know which tangents to look out for. And you know, too, when you’re ready to wrap up your pitch… because you’ll know when you’ve said all you need to say.

I think back to my own promos and it’s true. Those that worked best were the most focused on one message. Those that flopped were those that wandered. I’ll bet the same is true for you.

[Ed. John Forde, a published writer and a direct-mail copywriter since 1992, is the editor of the free weekly e-zine, The Copywriter's Roundtable. He is on the Board of Experts of our new Internet business-building program, which gives you an all-inclusive, A-to-Z blueprint for starting your own powerhouse Internet business - from learning how to pick a product and set up a website to discovering copywriting secrets from the masters, techniques to help you create an e-mail list, the best ways to market your product, and more. Our hotlist has first access to the 250 spots we've opened up for this breakthrough program, but keep reading ETR to take immediate action when and if we have any spots left.]

== Highly Recommended ==

Are YOU Ready to Snatch YOUR Share From This $300 BILLION Cash-Pile Looking for a Home?

"They " thought they’d keep it all for themselves, but "they " were wrong…

Retire NOW by getting revenge… on Wall Street!

Here’s how the "mercenaries" ruthlessly cream off fat lump sums and monthly checks for doing NOTHING but following simple instructions…

The Dos and Don’ts of Cold Calling

By Ilise Benun

Many people seem to have an abject fear of calling prospective customers, employers, or partners on the phone. The reality is, however, that if you do make cold calls, you could reach someone who really needs your services… and you may even get the job. But it all starts with a phone call. So here are some guidelines to follow:

• Do leave a voice mail message if you don’t get through. That way, your target will be familiar with you the next time you call. It’s also important to know that people will associate the sound of your voice with any follow-up e-mail messages you send, so they will seem more personal. Don’t leave too many voice mail messages, of course, but two or three over the course of a month isn’t excessive.
• Do give your phone number at the beginning and the end of your message. That way, if your target wants to write it down, they don’t have to wait until the end - or listen again - in order to get it.

   

• Don’t leave a long message. Respect your target’s time, say what you need to say, and then hang up.
• Do leave your website address in case your target wants to check you out before they call you back or before you call again.

[Ed. Note: Networking expert Ilise Benun is the author of Stop Pushing Me Around. Get more networking strategies with Ilise's free e-newsletter, Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.]

Revisit Your Fitness Goals Now

By Craig Ballantyne

There are less than three months left in the year, but you can still accomplish big things by December 31.

If you haven’t hit all the fitness goals you set for yourself on January 1, don’t worry. I haven’t hit all mine yet either. Here are just some of the things I intend to do before the end of ‘07…

1. Weigh 195 lbs by gaining 15 pounds of muscle (almost there!)
2. Practice one hour of a martial art each week

    

3. Train with "Strongman" equipment once per week

    

Research shows that people who write down their goals succeed far more than people who don’t. It’s that simple. Write them down, review them, and keep them at the forefront of your thoughts. That way, you’ll always be working toward them.

And here’s the best news of all. A deadline, such as having less than three months left to accomplish your 2007 fitness goals, is often the best motivator. So re-visit your 2007 fitness goals today and chart a 60-day plan to achieve them. You can still make incredible progress before the end of the year!

[Ed. Note: Fitness expert Craig Ballantyne is the creator of the Turbulence Training for Fat Loss system. If you want a free online source of information, motivation, and social support to help you improve your health, lose weight, and get fit, sign up for ETR's free natural health e-letter.]

It’s Fun to Know: Global Warming and Cheese

The extent to which global warming is a problem may be a hotly debated topic, but cheesemakers around the world agree that the phenomenon is affecting their industry. Turns out that changes in temperature are changing the type of plants that are growing in the pastures where the cheesemakers’ cows feed. Species that thrive in colder climates are dying out and intruders from the south are moving in. This change in the cows’ diet affects a cheese’s unique flavor.

Cheese gourmets savor cheeses much like oenophiles savor fine wines, and farmers are worried that their customers will reject the slight change in taste.

(Source: NPR)

== Highly Recommended==

Give Yourself a Nice Pay Raise - And A Three Day Weekend, Every Weekend

By the end of this week, you can give yourself a pay raise. How does an extra $20/hr sound… and schedule a few days vacation while you’re at it!

After a month or two, how about another raise… to $2,000 a week.

It’s happening everywhere. Ordinary people — including folks who never finished school — starting their own businesses… and making side incomes in the neighborhood of $40,000… $60,000… even $100,000 or more a year.

They’re living the American Dream. Now it’s time for you to start living it too. Click here to continue…

- Charlie Byrne

Word to the Wise: Fatuous

"Fatuous" (FACH-oo-us) - from the Latin for "idiotic" - means inanely foolish and unintelligent.

Example (as used in the Irish Times): "Publishers persist in the fatuous belief that a little hocus-pocus in the front flap blurb will so dazzle readers that they’ll be too dazed to notice the quality of what’s on the pages inside."

[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]

Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007