A “swipe” file is a collection of promotions — mailed by successful marketers — that you have saved.
“A good swipe file is better than a college education,” says my old direct-marketing “professor,” master copywriter Milt Pierce.
Want to be a better and more efficient copywriter? Join our free email newsletter and learn from the best. Our writers have years of experience and have helped thousands with their useful writing tips and advice.
A “swipe” file is a collection of promotions — mailed by successful marketers — that you have saved.
“A good swipe file is better than a college education,” says my old direct-marketing “professor,” master copywriter Milt Pierce.
There are pretty much only two kinds of prospects in a marketer’s universe: (1) casual copy scanners, and (2) inveterate readers.
Hand a sales letter to a dozen people, and you’ll see what I mean. Some of them — the inveterate readers — will read the headline and every page of the copy.
On any given day, I go down to my cave at 7:00 a.m. and do not emerge until 6:00 p.m. When I do, my wife goes through a litany of everything she accomplished in that time. Then she asks: “And what did you do all day?”
My answer: “Nine pages.” (more…)
In all forms of expression, summarizing is lethal. But that’s what many copywriters do. At the end of a sales letter, they methodically recount all the important points they just made. What happens is that the energy of the copy is dissipated, the blood drained off.
A much better approach is to take a single strong element of the sales argument and present it in detail. This has a much greater emotional impact on the reader. And it often conveys some of the rest of the whole — even without talking about it.
(more…)
When writing or reviewing long marketing copy, you’ve got to get to the point where you find yourself thinking, “Yes! This is good! This is really, really good!”
I call it the Eureka Moment. (more…)
In marketing copy, “need to know” info is the facts your prospect has to hear to help him make the decision to buy your product.
But it’s often the “want to know” info that has more pulling power. By that I’m talking about things your prospect has an emotional interest in. (more…)
There are dozens of tricks you can learn about business writing and, in particular, about writing a good memo. Here’s the one that I believe is the most important: Before you begin to write, ask yourself, “What is the single most important idea I want my reader to walk away with?” (more…)
A contentious issue among language enthusiasts is the use of the split infinitive. Before reviewing the arguments of the two sides, let’s look at a few examples: (more…)
For 30 years, I’ve been having the same conversation with my partners. The subject is: What do our customers want from us — doom or zoom?
In today’s essay, I pass along a bit of brilliance from Dan Kennedy. It helped me understand why, for example, harping on our lousy economy can be hurtful to your advertising.
After that, I explain why budgeting is no way to save money, where I get some of my best ideas, and why three squares a day might be making you fat. (more…)
Last month, I spent less than one hour adapting a simple one-page sales letter to be e-mailed to 215 people who’d recently done business with one of my clients.
The e-mail was simple. Basically, it said:
“Thank you for your recent purchase. Now I’d like to give you preferential pricing on a product I think can bring you higher value.”
The results? $5,402 in quick sales. That’s $25.13 for every person who received the e-mail.
And that’s just one of the times I’ve done this. (more…)
Depending on your product and your target audience, using improper English in your sales copy may make it work better.
The trick is to really know your prospect. Actually picture him or her in your head. Then pretend you’re having chat with that person while you write. A “conversation” with a retired Midwestern farmer (more…)
In matters of grammar and usage, it’s not always easy to know what’s correct.
In France, a government-run Academy serves as the official authority. Here in America, no single authority has been appointed to give us definitive answers. We must consider various sources, sometimes conflicting, and make our own decisions. (more…)
The year was 1937…
The Great Depression was still taking a heavy toll. Prices and profits were low… international trade was down by two-thirds… millions stood in line for jobs that didn’t exist.
But not everyone was suffering.
A young man by the name of Elmer Wheeler was paid $5,000 for coming up with nine simple words.
You see, at the time, Texaco was looking to sell more motor oil to their customers. Too many people, without giving it a second thought, said “No” when a service station attendant asked “Check your oil today?”
Wheeler suggested replacing “Check your oil today?” with “Is your oil at the proper level today, sir?” (more…)
To promote herself and her business, JL wants to write a book.
But she isn’t quite sure how to get her book into print.
“It feels like getting a book published is challenging,” she writes. “Would it not be easier to self-publish?”
Others have asked me the same question over the years. “What’s better?” an interviewer asked me just the other day. “Self-publishing or traditional publishing?”
It’s the wrong question. (more…)
In this column, I routinely use words that describe aspects of language. But these terms are often misunderstood and confused. Here’s a brief guide, followed by a few tips to improve your writing. (more…)
Mistakes can be a good thing. They teach us what to avoid. The trick, though, is to learn by observing others make them.
With that goal in mind, here’s another roundup of misspellings, misunderstandings, and other misuses — all found via Internet search, but equally frequent in print:
“I just find it as ridiculous as any other hair-brained conspiracy theory.”
Whether hair-brained or hairbrained, it’s wrong. The correct word is harebrained — that is, the brain of a rabbit. It’s true that hare was once spelled hair, but that was 400 years ago. Don’t be harebrained; spell it correctly! (more…)
I was down at our new “getaway” digs over Labor Day. It’s a great place. Just outside of Atlanta and two hours from our North Carolina home.
We bought it a few months ago so we could spend more time with my two older kids and three grandkids. They live in Atlanta, less than an hour away.
My plan for the weekend was that we’d all be tear-assing around the lake on our Sea-Doos. Maybe we’d do a little early-morning fishing. In the evening, we’d grill our catch out on the deck, along with an assortment of steaks, burgers, and weenies.
You know. Typical, normal family stuff.
Instead, I found myself sitting there alone. And I was feeling more than a little alarmed — having come to the realization that I am the patriarch of a family of nerds.
My son-in-law and both sons were spending Friday night in Atlanta, preparing to attend Dragon*Con on Saturday.
Never heard of Dragon*Con? I hadn’t either. Until my just-turned-15-year-old son said he wanted tickets for his birthday.
Dragon*Con is where thousands of nerds dress up like fantasy, horror, superhero, and sci-fi characters — and then geek out over each other.
It was enough to make me want to throw on my leathers, fire up the Harley, cruise over to the nearest biker bar, and drown my sorrows in a gallon or three of Absolut.
Don’t feel sorry for me. I actually enjoyed the solitude. Gave me time to think.
What I was thinking about was the impact our fantasies and beliefs have on us.
I saw a documentary on a related subject the other night. Fascinating stuff. It made the point that we are complicit in every lie we’re ever told. Our desire to believe makes deceiving us easy.
Guess that’s why they’ve sold billions of pills that supposedly make your thingy bigger. Or grow hair on your bald spot. Or burn off that spare tire without exercise.
It must also be why Bernie Madoff was able to fleece so many sophisticated investors for so many years.
This simple fact of human nature is so powerful, it is dangerous. As a marketer, simply knowing it gives you the ability to become a superhero or a supervillain.
Superpowers, as any Dragon*Con attendee can tell you, can be used either for evil or good. Please use this one only for good — to promote products that truly benefit your prospective customers.
And the way to do that is to get inside their heads.
Know Thy Prospect
Libraries of books have been written on the importance of knowing your prospect. Most extol the virtues of understanding demographic facts about them.
They drone on about knowing the sex, age, income level, educational level, etc. of the people you’re asking to buy your product.
And they go further, lecturing on the need to ferret out their hobbies, interests, and buying preferences.
However, few suggest that anchoring your sales message to a commonly held belief can have an explosive impact on your response rate and sales.
Case in point:
In the 1970s, a new industry appeared to provide objective news, analysis, and advice to investors. There was a crying need for it. Until then, this information had been parsed out by Wall Street brokers. And because they sold the investments they were talking about, they had a massive conflict of interest.
In the 1990s, another industry emerged. This time to provide news and advice to people who were interested in alternatives to toxic drugs and life-threatening surgery.
Again, there was a crying need. Until then, health information was largely dispensed by drug companies and mainstream experts who were paid fortunes in kickbacks by the drug companies. Every one of them had a vested interest in convincing consumers to blindly follow their doctors’ orders.
The prospects for both of these huge new industries had one, clear belief in common: You CANNOT trust the establishment. Not with your money and certainly not with your life.
Not surprisingly, copywriters for the investment and health industries who began by looking at mere demographic facts about their prospects produced lukewarm results at best.
But every copywriter who used his headline and lead to connect to the anti-establishment belief his prospects shared hit it out of the park.
Like me, for instance. The “Forbidden Cures” promo I wrote to harness my prospects’ distrust of and disgust with the medical establishment mailed in the tens of millions. And I was paid a king’s ransom in royalties.
Time to put on the old thinking cap…
What fantasies are your prospects engaged in right now? What commonly held beliefs do they swear by?
How can you connect with those beliefs in a way that will produce maximum attention-getting power, readership, and response in your next marketing effort?
Food for thought…
P.S. Ready for a marketing and copywriting master class? At Early to Rise’s Info-Marketing Bootcamp in November, I will be making one of my few public appearances. I’ll tell you everything I’ve learned during my decades in the business — at least, as much as I can in three days. And I’ll be joined on stage by a dozen of the most cutting-edge Internet marketing experts working today. Find out more about Bootcamp here.
———————————————-Highly Recommended —————————————————
We’re betting on your success at our Information Marketing Bootcamp this November. In fact, we’ll “see you and we’ll raise you!”
You see, we’ve put the 12 gurus we’ve invited “on the spot.”
If you don’t learn from them how you could make at least your first $10,000 with your online business by May 2010 … we’re going to give you back your entrance fee. AND we’ll give you another $1,000 for your trouble.
Check out all the details on your “sure thing” here.
—————————————————————————————————————————
If I gave any credibility to what I read in the newspapers or see on talk shows, I’d believe that we are coming out of the Great Recession.
Every day, I hear news about how things are improving. Yet when I look around at the businesses I know, I can count on the fingers of one hand those that are not in trouble.
I am friendly with the owners of half a dozen restaurants in Delray Beach. They tell me sales are down between 30 percent and 70 percent. My brother-in-law is in the retail jewelry business. “It’s a complete disaster,” he says. “Most of the industry will be bankrupt by March,” he predicts.
My friend Mike wholesales furniture. His outlets are down 30 percent to 50 percent. At Joe’s cigar bar, we have plumbers and doctors and brokers — to name just a few trades. They are all crying the blues.
Is it me? Am I hanging out with the wrong people? Am I myopic?
All these hurting businesses mean rising bankruptcies and rising unemployment. And rising unemployment means more bankruptcies.
Yes, the bankers and brokers who have been “bailed out” are doing fine — or so they say. Their numbers are up because they are taking in all these freshly printed dollars. But that doesn’t mean their businesses are getting better. When the Obama administration finally turns off the spigot, we’ll see which of them will be standing. My guess is not many.
I’d like to hear from you. How are your friends and neighbors doing? How are you faring yourself? Let me know at AskMichael@ETRFeedback.com
David Cross copied me on an essay in The New York Times that I had missed.
It was by a woman who had spent 30 years in publishing. She explained how technology has changed the business.
In the beginning, she said, it was “primitive chaos,” with typewritten manuscripts, ringing phones, carbon paper, fountain pens, mimeograph machines, and the smell of cigarette smoke.
Then came electric typewriters, Filofaxes, and copy machines. The antique Royals and carbon paper were trashed.
Then voice mail replaced operators, word processors replaced Wite-Out, and e-mail replaced secretaries.
She ended by asking, “Is the screen the new paper? Will publishing houses go the way of old record stores? Is digital-delivery the new bookstore? Is Google the new library?”
“I can’t answer these questions,” she says. “I am no longer in book publishing”
But in the italics that follow her essay, we learn this about her: Jan Evans, a former book publisher, is now co-founder and CEO of wowOwow.com, a website for women.
If you are in print publishing now, you don’t have long to make the switch. Tomorrow is already here…
Women, and even men nowadays, spend a small fortune on creams and lotions to keep their skin youthful looking.
But there’s something you need to know, says Total Health Breakthroughs Editor Melanie Segala. And you won’t hear it from the billion-dollar skin care industry. Taking care of your skin from the inside with a healthy diet is far more important than using the most expensive anti-aging products.
Vitamin C, for example, helps build collagen, says Melanie. That’s the connective protein that makes up 75 percent of skin. And as you age, you lose collagen. That’s one way you get wrinkles. But you can help replenish lost collagen by eating vitamin C-rich foods. Strawberries, red peppers, citrus fruits, and tomatoes are just a few.
At the same time, you’ll be getting much needed antioxidants that prevent chronic disease. No high-priced skin cream can do all that.
—————————————————————————————————————————
“I’ve been reading your newsletter for a good while now. Not all of it applies to me, but I read it all nonetheless.
“I’ve always been confident in my capabilities and those of my fabulous husband of 7 years…. 18 months ago, we left an uber-cushy expat job in Asia to partner in some new ventures in order to provide a legacy for our three kids, then all under 3.
“It’s tough going — the recession certainly didn’t help — but we’re not going to give up.
“Your nuggets of information and inspiration always seem to say just what we need to hear, to suggest a different way of considering things, of riding out the storm.
“So, thank you.”
Nadine
Adelaide, Australia
———————————————- Highly Recommended —————————————————
E-Mail Trash or Treasure – Bob Bly wrote an e-mail in five minutes. It generated a $7,449 profit in a single week. Here’s what he said…
—————————————————————————————————————————
Old-time copywriters like yours truly enjoy a walk down Memory Lane now and then. We do it for fun, but it can be profitable too.
I’m talking about rereading the best-known direct-marketing ads of the past. Copy written by such luminaries as Gene Schwartz, Claude Hopkins, and John E. Kennedy.
It’s fun to read through these old ads. Looking at them now — with their dated language and primitive graphics — you might think they could never work in today’s hypercompetitive market. (more…)
Every business is in sales.
But not everyone feels comfortable selling.
As someone who writes sales copy for a living, that’s worked out great for me. I get hired to craft the persuasive sales pieces that even crack entrepreneurs are sometimes afraid to touch.
But what do you do when you don’t have the luxury of getting someone else to put together your all-important sales messages?
And what about working with copywriters? Even a seasoned pro will do a better job selling your product when you’ve already worked out some of the details yourself.
Whichever situation you’re in, I have a focusing exercise that can help you generate one solid selling idea after another, even if you’ve never done it before.
Most marketers look at a promotion with straight-line logic. They assume all prospects come into it through the headline. And they’re wrong.
In fact, a well-planned, well-written promotion has five distinct ways to get prospects involved. These “gateways” are spread throughout the promotion. Each one is specifically designed to catch the interest of a different type of prospect and lead them into the sales message.
Your prospect opens your promo and scans it. The headline might catch her interest. But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s the bio piece. Or the sidebars. Or the order device. If the promo is a magalog, maybe it’s the centerfold. (That’s usually where the copywriter has summarized key data or important benefits.)
In my case, I almost always look at the order device first. That gives me a quick look at the offer — what the product costs and what I’ll get for my money.
Direct-response marketing – via both e-mail and standard mail – is a type of advertising designed to get the customer it’s aimed at to take an immediate action. That action could take the form of calling an 800 number, sending in a postcard to renew a subscription, signing up to receive free information, or making a purchase. Unlike “image” advertising, which seeks to build awareness of a brand over time, the results of direct-response marketing are specific, trackable, and quantifiable.
Example (as used by Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby in their best-selling book Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business): “Today, with the power of the Internet behind them, branding and DRM work more closely together … closer than they ever have in the history of advertising. The Internet allows companies to create campaigns that are nearly hybrids of traditional branding and traditional DRM.”
Direct response marketing is one of the most powerful marketing mediums you can use to make sales. If DRM – whether it’s e-mail or mail – is not part of your marketing efforts, you are leaving tons of cash on the table.
“To be at the top of your game,” Michael and MaryEllen say, “You need to continue what you do so well – the kind of marketing that is now working for you – but you must gradually add new arrows to your quiver. You will notive a sudden and substantial improvement in sales and profits if you do.
To learn more about DRM – plus 11 other powerful marketing channels that can transform your business – pick up a copy of Changing the Channel right now.
You hear and use them every day, perhaps without realizing why they’re special. I’m referring to what linguists call blends: new words created via the marriage of two other words.
Familiar words of this type include the computer term bit (binary + digit), brunch (breakfast + lunch), smog (smoke + fog), and Spam – the edible kind (spiced + ham).
They’ve also been called telescope words and centaur words. Lewis Carroll called them “portmanteau words.” That reference is now rather obscure, but back in the day, a portmanteau was a traveling bag that opened into two compartments. Thus, as Carroll defined the term in Through the Looking-Glass: “two meanings packed up into one word.” And, by the way, several of Carroll’s own blended-word coinages are still used, most notably chortle (chuckle + snort).
Decades ago, Time magazine and the gossip columnist Walter Winchell were known for devising new blends, some of which survived while others faded away. Among them: cinemactress, frauditor, genethics, guesstimate, and infanticipating.
If you keep your eyes and ears open, you’ll discover that the list of blend words is surprisingly long: advertorial, camcorder, Chunnel, glasphalt, infomercial, Jazzercise, minicam, pixel, and sitcom, for example. Because new things are constantly being created, and they all need names, the roster will surely continue to grow.
Here are a few more, the origins of which may not be immediately apparent:
[Ed Note: For more than three decades, Don Hauptman was an award-winning independent direct-response copywriter and creative consultant. He is author of The Versatile Freelancer, an e-book recently published by AWAI that shows writers and other creative professionals how to diversify their careers into speaking, consulting, training, and critiquing.]
“Nate,” a freelancer I hired to write an e-book for me, e-mailed the first draft of the manuscript today as an attached Word file. Also attached: his invoice.
Why did you do that, Nate?
I just got your FIRST draft. I haven’t even opened the file, much less reviewed it. And I certainly haven’t given you my comments so you can make the necessary revisions.
Sending an invoice along with the work you did is bad form. It leaves a bad taste in the client’s mouth. He feels the only thing you care about is getting paid, not whether the work is good. But sending an invoice with a first draft – when the project is not yet completed – can really piss off the client, as it did me in this case.
By the way, my agreement with Nate calls for payment upon completion. To me, completion means an acceptable final product. Most publishers and business clients feel that way.
If the term “completion” is too vague for you, apply this rule of thumb: Any ambiguity in the agreement is the fault of the vendor, not the customer.
If Nate expected a check upon submission of a first draft, he should have specified that in writing and had me sign it.
He did not.
[Ed. Note: Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter and the author of more than 70 books. To subscribe to his free e-zine, The Direct Response Letter, and claim your free gift worth $116, click here now.
Bob recently revealed the secrets that could jumpstart your online business, including how to deal with freelancers, in ETR's Internet Cash Generator program. Find out more about it here.]
One of my pet linguistic peeves is the frequent misuse of the adjective proverbial.
Consider this sentence, from a magazine profile of a government whistleblower: “When she grabs hold of something, she is like the proverbial dog with a bone in its teeth.”
But the expression the writer cites is not a proverb; it’s a simile.
A quick Internet search reveals that just about anything has been incorrectly labeled proverbial: “sitting on the fence,” “in the hot seat,” “throwing in one’s hat,” “getting hit by a beer truck,” and even “the first post on a blog.”
Some dictionaries have shamefully capitulated, sanctioning this solecism. The American Heritage Dictionary, for example, gives this as its third definition of proverbial:”Widely referred to, as if [emphasis added] the subject of a proverb; famous.”
As I’ve cautioned in this column, however, dictionaries are not always to be trusted. Many are descriptivist, meaning that they simply reflect how words are commonly used, instead of giving us guidance on how they should be used.
A proverb communicates a truth, principle, or moral lesson in a pointed and pithy style: “Out of sight, out of mind.” “Politics makes strange bedfellows.” And, of course, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
Whether adage, aphorism, apothegm, or axiom, a proverb contains a nugget of wisdom, expressed incisively and memorably. Thus, the word proverbial should be used only in reference to a genuine proverb.
So if you’re ever tempted to say something like “The report went astray, like the proverbial car keys,” ask yourself if what you’re referring to really is a proverb.
[Ed Note: For more than three decades, Don Hauptman was an award-winning independent direct-response copywriter and creative consultant. He is author of The Versatile Freelancer, an e-book recently published by AWAI that shows writers and other creative professionals how to diversify their careers into speaking, consulting, training, and critiquing.]
Over the past few years I’ve made a lot of good friends at the local running store here in Delray Beach. It’s where I buy my Brooks Beast running shoes… I enjoy the training runs and races they sponsor… and I get tons of good advice from them practically every week.
But brother, was I disappointed when I got this e-mail from them last Saturday. Here’s how it read, more or less:
“Special Sunday Event – Several running experts speaking on various topics – $15.”
Ouch!
No specifics. No proof. All summary and generalization.
It’s a weak, weak, weak recipe for disastrous copy. Suppose, instead, their e-mail had looked more like this…
Coming This Sunday, Power Up Your Running to the Next Level!
Specifics… Proof… Details… Facts, figures, names, and places… Oh yes, and that little matter of Benefits!
Now that, I might pay $15 for!
[Ed. Note: Just by applying a few simple but powerful rules to your sales copy, you can grab more attention from prospective customers and motivate them to buy. Now, one marketing legend responsible for over $2 billion in sales can show you the sales copy secrets that could help explode your profits by more than 10,000%. Get all the details here.
And for more of Charlie's thoughts and insights, follow him on Twitter at http://CharlieByrne.BlogSpot.Com.]
Usually, the writer’s mantra is “K.I.S.S.” (Keep It Simple Stupid.)
And most of the time, this rule works just fine.
Yet, we also know that writing – especially the kind of writing we do in sales letters and editorially – is more and more about building relationships. And aren’t relationships complex, built layer upon layer?
Well, maybe there’s a way to reconcile this insight with the rule about simplicity.
First, I’d say that yes, the relationship you build with your readers – from the first paragraph of your sales copy to the last, or through a series of articles or blog posts – does need to grow and evolve. And the process of growth and evolution is never simple.
Still, this doesn’t mean you can just jumble your ideas together. Even rich and layered relationships are united by a few very simple objectives. Maybe even one simple objective, depending on who you talk to. Even in a sales letter that drills home one distinct message, the copy also builds trust, nurtures a sense of urgency, intensifies desire, and so on.
Second, I’d say that you can never discount the power of the passion behind written ideas.
You can’t write well about something you don’t believe in. And you write better about things you believe in strongly. I say this because passion about ideas, it seems to me, is the glue between the “power of one” single-idea insight… and the context of complexity in which it can still be couched.
[Ed. Note: To get more of copywriting expert John Forde's wisdom and insights into marketing (and much more), sign up for his free e-letter, Copywriter's Roundtable, at www.copywritersroundtable.comand get a free report about 15 deadly copy mistakes and how to avoid them.
Powerful, effective writing, whether in ad copy or editorial articles, is just one part of a profitable online business. To get a complete guide to starting and growing a profitable Internet business, check out the Internet Money Club: Independent Learner Edition.]
Every copywriting or marketing project requires copious amounts of creative, right-brain skull sweat, plus plenty of detail-oriented, left-brain elbow grease.
So when I’m fresh and full of mental energy, I focus on the creative tasks associated with the project. And when I’m running a bit low on creative juices, I use my time to handle the left-brain, detail-oriented stuff.
In other words, I approach my copywriting projects modularly and out of order, much like the way they make movies in Hollywood.
If I’m feeling frisky, I’ll work on my theme, my headline, and my opening copy – or maybe on the first two-thirds of my body copy. If I’m feeling sluggish, I may simply outline the project. Or focus on the research, number-crunching, or the charts and tables I’ll need.
Sometimes, if I’m kind of in between, I may rough out the last third of my copy first – the factual product description, premium description, offer, guarantee, and response device. Or, if I’m further along and have a complete draft, I may spend my time on editing what I’ve written.
This is what works best for me – the approach I’ve developed through trial and error during my four decades in this biz. It fits me like a glove.
It may work for you, too. It might make you tons more productive and improve your sales copy (or whatever else you do) by an order of magnitude.
Or, who knows? My way could prove to be the absolute worst way for you to approach your work.
There’s only ONE way to find out. Test. Analyze the results. Improvise with new ways to work that may fit you better. Repeat.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Staying productive is critical to keeping your goals on track. For specific tips, click here.]
Brevity, they say, is the soul of wit. And if that’s true, I admit… sometimes, I can be a little soulless.
See, I was taught to love what the nuns used to call “25 cent words.”
These are the words, they told us, that make you sound smart. That win you respect, jobs, and the girl of your dreams. People who use these words, they said, can walk through walls.
Boy, did they get that wrong.
When I slipped into the world of the written word as a professional, I discovered that a bigger, Latinate vocabulary doesn’t improve the accessibility of your cogitations at all. Rather, it obfuscates it. (Translation: Big words can actually make you sound dumber… simply because you’re tripping over yourself to get your message across.)
Which is why I was thankful when longtime copywriting buddy David Deutsch sent me a copy of “Short Words Are Words of Might” by Gelett Burgess. It’s a 16-page essay that originally appeared in Your Life magazine in 1938.
Here’s a juicy quote that reveals the core idea:
“Short words, you see, come from down deep in us – from our hearts or guts – not from the brain. For they deal for the most part with things that move and sway us, that make us act. … That, I think, is why short words tend to make our thoughts more live and true.”
Or to say it even more briefly, short words have power. That’s true in all kinds of writing, including sales copy. “Never put a policeman in an automobile,” said someone much smarter than yours truly, “when a cop in a car will do.”
[Ed. Note: To get more of copywriting expert John Forde's wisdom and insights into marketing (and much more), sign up for his free e-letter, Copywriter's Roundtable, at www.copywritersroundtable.com. Or send an e-mail to signup@jackforde.com and get a free report about 15 deadly copy mistakes and how to avoid them.
Effective copy is just one element of a successful online business. For a soup-to-nuts guide to starting your own Internet business, check out the Internet Money Club: Independent Learner Edition.
Find out more here.]
Secrets tease, tantalize, and torment us. An offered secret is irresistible – impossible to refuse.
Once our curiosity is engaged, knowledge that someone else knows a secret that we don’t know is like having a stone in our shoe. It gnaws and nags at us. We can’t willingly rest until we’re in on the secret too.
Since offering to reveal a secret appeals to us humans on so many visceral levels, it’s no wonder that many of the most successful direct-response promotions of all time have used it to boost attention and readership. Nor is it any wonder that offering to reveal more secrets in a free report that is delivered along with the product being sold can drive response rates, revenues, and profits through the roof.
So how could YOU use secrets to hit one out of the park the next time you’re at bat?
The way I see it, there are four kinds of secrets…
1. Simple Secrets. If you haven’t done so already, buy a product – any product – from Boardroom or Rodale. Before long, your inbox and mailbox will be stuffed with promotions that tell simple secrets – and offer to give you thousands more secrets when you buy the book or newsletter they’re promoting.
2. Forecasts. If you think about it, predicting a future event in a promotion is kind of like telling your prospect a secret that very few other people know. If you can show him, in your product or premium, how to use this “confidential, privileged information” to solve a problem or get something he wants, your readership and response are likely to soar.
3. Mis/Disinformation. Lies are, by definition, secrets too. When you show your prospect how “the establishment” or, better yet, your competitors are at fault for his difficult situation, you free him from responsibility for it.
4. Conspiracies. These are big, fat, irresistible bundles of secrets that amplify and broaden their power by an order of magnitude. Show your prospect why and how the deck is stacked against him and you create massive credibility for your product by validating his suspicions and creating an excuse for his current predicament.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Good copy is just one element of a successful business. For a step-by-step guide to researching a niche, finding your target market, and then marketing effectively using search engines, e-mail, and more... check out the Internet Money Club: Independent Learner Edition.]