“A good swipe file is better than a college education,” says my old direct-marketing “professor,” master copywriter Milt Pierce.

The swipe file provides inspiration and ideas that you may be able to use in your own promotions. With a swipe file, you can overcome writer’s block and write copy better and faster.

Lots of copywriters keep swipe files of promotions in their industry. Milt, however, always preferred using promotions for products other than the ones he was writing about. If, for example, a client who was selling insurance asked him to create a direct-mail package, he would look in his swipe file for ideas — but not in the section where he filed insurance packages.

Why?

The reason is simple. “If you create an insurance package that looks like every other insurance package, you’re just being a copycat,” says Milt. “However, if you check through other types of packages, you’re likely to come up with an original approach.”

A good example is a recent ad I saw for a Stauer watch.

The ad shows a photo of the watch. The headline above it reads:

“We Apologize That It Loses 1 Second Every 20 Million Years.”

The style and approach seem to be inspired by David Ogilvy’s famous Rolls-Royce ad. The headline for that ad was:

“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

If the Stauer ad were for a car, it would seem derivative. But by adapting Ogilvy’s fact-based approach to a watch, the copywriter created something new.

It’s an approach not typically used for watches… so it supports Milt’s claim that applying ideas used in one industry to another can have interesting and effective results.

One interesting footnote to the story…

David Ogilvy has been accused of stealing his Rolls-Royce headline from another copywriter. I have also heard that he found the fact about the Rolls-Royce clock in an automotive trade journal. Others now say he took it from an ad for another car: the Pierce-Arrow. And the Pierce-Arrow headline, published years before Ogilvy’s Rolls ad, is remarkably similar:

“The only sound one can hear in the new Pierce-Arrows is the ticking of the electric clock.”

Today that ad is forgotten — but Ogilvy’s is one of the classics.

The best results I’ve seen from using swipe files have come from the cross-pollination of ideas between industries.

For instance, I was looking for ideas to sell trading software.

I started with my file of options trading promotions. Nothing. So I flipped through my other swipe files. In my health swipe file, I came across a promotion for a vision supplement.

The headline: “Why bilberry and lutein don’t work.”

I knocked off the headline — and tripled my client’s previous response rate.

My headline: “Why most trading software doesn’t work… and never will.”

A non-profit organization sent a free paperback book to potential donors. The “book” was actually a promotion written to solicit donations, and it did gangbusters.

A major financial publisher copied the format (now known as a “bookalog”) to sell an investment newsletter. Their book, titled “The Plague of the Black Debt,” was one of the most successful promotions of all time.

When you swipe from another industry instead of your own, you steer clear of copycatting charges — and you are credited as brilliantly original when your ad works.

P.S. Using a swipe file is just one of the “tricks of the trade” I teach in the Internet Cash Generator program. It’s a top-to-bottom guide to starting and growing your own part-time-work / full-time-income Internet business. Find out more about here.

[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: www.bly.com/reports.]

———————————————Highly Recommended ——————————————–

A Few Hundred Bucks a Week – Everybody wants to make millions online. But would you settle for $200 to $400 a week? You set up your business once. Then it’s fully automated. You look in your bank account, and the money is there. That’s a car payment… your rent or mortgage… whatever you want, taken care of. Read on to find out more…

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.

The rest — the scanners — will quickly flip through, reading only the heads and subheads.

Before the invention of sidebars, we rarely gave scanners much that would draw their eyes into our sales letters. But sidebars turned scanners into readers. And because only readers respond to an offer, they dramatically increased our chances of making the sale.

My point — and I do have one — is…

Great sidebars turn scanners into readers — AND responders.

Notice I said “great sidebars.” Unfortunately, a lot of the sidebars I see are not great. They look like what they are: afterthoughts. Or, worse, “leftovers” from an earlier draft.

Instead of sleepwalking through your sidebars, try writing your running copy first. Then read each paragraph, thinking, “What kind of sidebar could I use to drive this point home in the most powerful manner possible?”

Do that and, suddenly, every sidebar becomes more focused. So does your entire sales message.

Then, after you’ve written a sidebar, ask yourself, “How can I make sure this is not a dead end? What can I do to help this sidebar drive the reader back into the copy? Or, better yet, to my order device?”

Most of the promotions I see would probably pull 10 percent to 30 percent better if the writer had followed this advice.

20 Kinds of Sidebars and How to Use Them

That said, let’s take a look at the kinds of sidebars that give you the best chances of turning scanners into readers…

Readership Sidebars are designed to sell the prospect on reading your text. They generally fall into one of three categories…

• Tables of contents: A listing of the valuable information revealed inside the promotion enlists the prospect’s self-interest.

• Pull-quotes: These boxes put an intriguing proposition… or a compelling benefit… up in lights. I often include a photo of the ersatz author of the piece for added attention-getting power.

• Teasers and page-turners: Inserted at the bottom of a right-hand page, these little gems “sell” the reader on turning the page by hinting at the valuable information on the next spread.

Biography Sidebars are really a kind of a “credibility device.” They’re used to eliminate any doubt that the titular author of the piece knows what he’s talking about. They attempt to lift your expert — and, therefore, your sales message — head and shoulders above the competition. They often take the form of a…

• Curriculum vitae: A true biography of the expert — his education, accomplishments, awards, books, and so on.

• Case history: A narrative of an experience the expert has had that demonstrates his wisdom, experience, and/or prestige in his industry.

Proof Element Sidebars are used to present facts, figures, and other evidence that prove the truth of statements made in your text. I use them in three ways…

• To document the enormity of the problem or opportunity: When I’m trying to evoke concern over heart disease, for example, I might include a chart showing how many Americans will suffer a heart attack this year.

In a financial package, I might use this kind of sidebar to document a claim that 80 percent of all mutual funds don’t keep up with the S&P 500. Or I might use a table listing the advisor’s most profitable trades. Or maybe a line chart showing soaring global demand for oil and plummeting supplies.

• To demonstrate the wisdom of the expert’s approach: This kind of sidebar might be a chart or graph comparing the profits the expert has earned to another indicator — the S&P 500, for example. Or, it might compare the blood pressure of people who take a particular supplement with those who don’t.

Benefit Sidebars are really just like ads within your ad. Each one draws out one of the compelling benefits the product offers. More important, each one is presented in a way that connects with the prospect’s feelings about:

• Avoiding or resolving a problem: With this approach, I typically put my prospect’s negative feelings about the subject at hand into words… validate how he feels… and empathize with him. Then I show him how my product will resolve those feelings.

• Easing a fear: “Fear relief” sidebars appear around the middle of my sales message — after I’ve done everything I can to bring every concern or frustration my prospect has about the subject at hand bubbling to the surface. Once I’ve done that, I use these sidebars to show him how my product will free him from those negative emotions.

• Fulfilling a strong, long-held personal desire: If my main theme is a positive one — focused on one or more benefits that will bring tremendous value to my prospect’s life — I use these “fulfillment” sidebars to prove that my product will, indeed, deliver.

Credibility Sidebars are invaluable tools for convincing your prospect that your expert’s view (no matter how radical) is valued by other experts, and that your product will produce the promised benefit.

• Customer testimonials: These can take the form of straight testimonials or narrative testimonials. They can appear singly to add impact to a spread or be clumped together. I like to do both.

• Expert testimonials: Praise from peers and other experts whose names are known — or whose titles are impressive and/or connect them with respected institutions — establish the authority and credibility of your expert.

• Media mentions and appearances: These demonstrate that your expert is important enough to have been noticed, quoted, or invited to appear on major media outlets. At best, they’ll say something about him that reads like an endorsement. But the simple fact that he regularly appears on CNBC or “Nightline” or is quoted in The Wall Street Journal makes him worth listening to.

Sales-Closing Sidebars generally appear in the final third of the sales message. They are designed to remove the final roadblocks between the prospect and your response device. I use seven of these kinds of sidebars in just about every promotion I write…

• Pull-quotes: To allow the author to look the prospect in the eye and deliver a compelling benefit or horrifying alternative and ask for the sale.

• Premium ads: To ramp up the perceived value of the free gifts the prospect will receive. Usually, these ads are a series of bullets on the most valuable information in each premium.

• Product ads: To fully lay out the value the product will bring to the prospect’s life. These are typically written in much the same way as a premium ad.

• Value sidebars: To demonstrate how mind-blowingly cheap the product is relative to other things the prospect buys. These sidebars are designed to make not ordering feel like the dumbest thing he could possibly do.

• Risk relief sidebars: “Risk relief” is just a fancy-schmancy way of saying “guarantee.” But I make my guarantees go beyond simply saying, “If you hate it, I’ll refund your money.” I use my guarantees to reiterate the benefits I’m promising… to have my expert sign a contract with the prospect, promising that he’ll deliver… and to demonstrate his “money-where-his-mouth-is” confidence that the product will perform as advertised.

• Contact devices: Actually, these should appear on every spread and contain a toll-free number the prospect can call to order. I also like to break them out in sidebars to drive my prospect to my response device or to his telephone.

• Action devices: Often imbedded in other sidebars, they urge the prospect to order now — either by calling a toll-free number or turning to the order form.

Lots to think about!

Now, here’s your assignment: Grab a pile of promotions and plop down on the sofa. Look at each sidebar and ask yourself, “Why did the writer include this? What kind of sidebar is it? What does it accomplish? Does it focus his main theme or serve to diffuse it?”

More important, read the running copy and ask yourself, “What other kinds of proof element, credibility, and other sidebars could have done a better job of making the sale?”

By the time you’re done, you’ll be twice the copywriter or marketer you are now.

[Ed. Note: Ready for more tips from the master? At ETR's Info-Marketing Bootcamp, Clayton Makepeace joined a dozen other experts in Internet marketing, social media, and business building. If you couldn't make it to see their presentations in person, you can still benefit from the secrets they revealed from the stage. We recorded every single minute of Bootcamp on video. And those recordings are available for order now.]

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The Greatest Dirty Little Secret of the Internet

To make money as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to constantly scour the earth for high-quality, in-demand products.

You could create new ones. But that can be expensive. Time-consuming. And after all the work… you might wind up with nothing.

But a few of the Internet’s top marketers have found a way around this problem. They don’t spend time (or money) on products that may or may not sell. Instead, they pluck moneymakers from a reserve of pre-made products and sales promotions.

A martial arts expert from Florida has turned this strategy into a small fortune. He estimates that one “pre-made product” made over $20,000 in one month… Another has gone on to pull in over $332,250.

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My answer: “Nine pages.”

I admit that this is an unsatisfactory answer. It pretty much kills her attempt at conversation. It’s worse, though, if she asks the question in front of a new acquaintance. Then the answer sounds very close to: “I sat around all day in my recliner, crumpled up pieces of paper into balls and shot them at the wastebasket, took a nap with the dog… Oh, and I managed to type a pitiful, pathetic-sounding nine pages.”

It sounds like that because it was that.

“Good grief,” the new acquaintance thinks, “the poor thing is unemployed.”

I watched the classic Hitchcock movie “North by Northwest” the other night. Halfway through the climactic chase and fight-to-the-death scene played out on Mt. Rushmore, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are clinging by their fingers to the rocks, dodging gunfire, when she asks him why his two wives divorced him. He, an ad man by trade and only an accidental spy, drolly replies, “They found me and my life too dull and boring.”

Dull and boring. Sounds like me and my life. Unless you are the one birthing those nine pages, I think it’s impossible to find the doing of it interesting.

Writing is one of those things that’s interesting only to the writer. That’s why there are lots of TV shows about firemen, cops, trial lawyers, even people sitting around in a coffee shop and talking about going on dates with firemen and lawyers. But there are hardly any shows about writers. Yes, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was sort of about comedy writers. And in “Newhart,” in addition to being an innkeeper, Bob’s character wrote how-to books. But at the end of the day, the fireman, the tree trimmer, the bartender, and the cab driver have stories to tell about what happened during their day. The writer has nine pages.

The other night on CNBC, they had a show on start-up entrepreneurs. They spent a full 15 minutes at a cupcake shop. They showed the making of the batter, the elaborate, artistic icing, the packing and wrapping of the boxes. They showed customers coming in, the little bell above the door dingling, and the ooh-ing and aah-ing over the cupcakes.

Imagine them coming and filming me producing my nine pages. I don’t think so. Even my dog is uninterested. She comes down now and then, confirms that I’m at my desk, steals a crumpled ball of paper to chew on, and leaves. Watching squirrels in the yard is much more interesting than watching me write. I don’t blame her. I prefer watching the squirrels too.

But…

Last month, eight pages of marketing copy I wrote brought in about $300,000 for a client, making me a nice 3 percent royalty of $9,000 on top of my original fee. How many cupcakes do you have to sell, do you suppose, to put $300,000 in the cash register? Or even $9,000?

Of course, the rewards of my profession are just as private as the work itself. You can take people to see your cupcake shop. You can’t take them on a tour of your royalty checks.

Believe it or not, this really bothers a lot of copywriters — the inability of anybody but themselves and, to some degree, their clients to appreciate what they do.

Professional speaking (something else I’ve done for 30 years) is quite different. You get immediate, direct feedback from your audience — laughter, applause, a standing ovation, requests for your autographs, and a stampede to the back of the room to buy your book or program or whatever else you’re selling.

Speakers get picked up at airports in limousines. Copywriters do not. Basically, copywriting is about nothing but the writing. There’s nothing else to it. So you’d damn well better derive great satisfaction from the doing and the done.

An artist or photographer will have his work framed and hung. No one’s going to frame your neon green postcard with the 700 words of immortal copy you wrote about the revolution in vacuum cleaner technology. Certainly not your spouse. When you write a book, there is, ultimately, a book. And that will find its way to a shelf at Barnes & Noble. Not your sales letter. Writing copy is almost always a personal, private, unheralded, uncelebrated thing.

I actually prefer the solitary confinement and anonymity that is mine as a copywriter. That preference fosters productivity. (Usually, to be serious, I put out more than nine pages in a day.) But a lot of people who move to this from a normal workplace feel separation anxiety. They long for socialization, human contact, busyness around them. For this reason, some can be found trying to write at a little table in Starbucks.

Most copywriters I’ve known, though, are content to withdraw from society for days or weeks on end. For us, the nine pages is enough. We are not “people who need people.” That can be disconcerting to others — but, mostly, we won’t notice.

[Ed. Note: Dan Kennedy shared his million-dollar insights with American Writers & Artists Inc. members at the 2009 FastTrack to Success Copywriting Bootcamp and Job Fair.

If you couldn't make it, you're in luck. They recorded every word of Dan's presentations (and those of all the other expert presenters), and included them in this year's AWAI Bootcamp Home-Study program. And for a limited time, AWAI is offering ETR readers a special 50% savings! You can read about it here.]

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“But I’m not a writer” - As an Internet entrepreneur, you have to learn to recognize effective sales copy — if not write it yourself.

Why? Because mediocre copy brings in mediocre response rates. And mediocre response rates can shrink your business to the point of bankruptcy over time.

You can learn how to write or recognize great copy very quickly by having master copywriters John Forde and ETR’s own Charlie Byrne as your teachers? Read more…

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.

Latest News

• In ETR, you get everything you need to help you become healthier, wealthier, and wiser. Well, almost everything. We don’t get into investing as much as we’d like to. There just isn’t enough space! But our sister publication, Investor’s Daily Edge, is all about on-target analyses of the markets and advice that will help you make sound investment choices. Check it out today.

“Thanks so much!”

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San Antonio, TX

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I call it the Eureka Moment.

It’s the moment when you are so sold by the copy that you want to buy the product — even though you already have it. Even though you may have created it!

The Eureka Moment may seem like a high bar to set. But I have to tell you… I’ve never seen a breakthrough package that didn’t have one.

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“I would certainly recommend it to others.”

“Before I came to ETR’s Info-Marketing Bootcamp, I’d been a student of marketing for many years and had used many of the principles taught there successfully in the past. So I was on the edge, waffling as to whether or not to come, thinking that much of what I would hear would be redundant.

“It was a difficult decision, but in the end I decided to come. I knew from prior experience that I would hear maybe one or two nuggets of wisdom that might make a big difference to me in the future.

“The speakers blew me away. As I expected, I had heard much of the content before. But in each and every presentation there were a couple of nuggets that were very valuable to me.

“It was a good decision to come, and I’m glad I did. I would certainly recommend it to others.”

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Incline Village, NV

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It’s Almost Too Late! – You might have been waiting until the last minute to decide whether to come to our Info-Marketing Bootcamp. Well, guess what? It is the last minute. This could be the event that finally makes your dream come true. It’s time to make a decision today…

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.

Put your finger on the latter and you’ve got an extra edge when formulating your pitch.

On the copywriter’s side of the fence, however, it occurs to me there’s another dynamic to consider. It’s the difference between “need to tell” and “want to tell” information.

It goes like this…

“Need to tell” describes what you can’t leave out. Because without it, the sales message just ain’t compelling enough to seal the deal.

So what’s “want to tell?”

It’s the stuff you WANT to jam into the copy somewhere… but might not need to. The jokes and puns, the clever subheads and lengthy anecdotes, the trivia — the extras that satisfy the writer’s ego, but don’t do much for the reader.

Dumping a gut full of “want to tell” copy onto the page can be cathartic.

It can make you feel smart. It can make you sound funny or witty. But it’s no way to sell.

How do you know when you’re “over-telling?”

Grab a red pen (or put your finger on your delete key) and go back over the copy, reading it aloud. Study it visually on the page too. Are there places where you hear or see yourself making the same points over and over again?

How about your proof? Usually, three strong proof sections will do the trick. Much more than that and you’re just showing off.

And take a look at what you’re promising. Offers that give the prospect lots of things can be fine. Just make sure you’re not over-compensating by throwing in the kitchen sink. At some point, it can make your product seem cheap rather than valuable.

Look, too, for personal anecdotes, inside jokes, and passages jammed full of exclamation points or florid, hyped-up descriptions. Copy can be aggressive and exciting and still work well. Sometimes extremely well. But not when there’s nothing substantial under the fluff.

The bottom line is this: You know when you’re working hard to get something into the copy because you “just like it” instead of knowing the copy will fail if that particular bit isn’t included.

Arm yourself with Hemingway’s principle: “When in doubt, cut it out.”

P.S. Writing a sales letter is a creative process — to a point. But, the letters that bring in the best results must have certain elements. And they must follow a certain structure to keep the reader engaged. The good news is that writing sales letters is a skill anybody can learn. Find out just how easy it is here.

And be sure to sign up for my weekly “Copywriter’s Roundtable” e-letter. It’s one of the longest running letters for marketers and copywriters (online since 2001)… one of the best, according to top copywriter Bob Bly. And it’s free. You can sign up here, where you’ll also get a free report: http://copywritersroundtable.com

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Don’t let yourself come up with three or four (or a dozen) ideas. Just stick with that one. Write only what you need to convey that idea, and discard everything else.

If all the other things you want to say are important, you can save them for other memos. By sticking to one idea, your message will be much more powerful. People can’t usually remember more than one big idea at a time, anyway. So anything extra you put in will be lost.

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• “It is even possible to legally download textbooks free, thanks to some new sites and services.”
• “This is a chance to constructively harness the idealism of thousands of Americans…”
• “In New York, if a lethal agent is detected, the city plans to immediately distribute drugs to counter the bug.”
• “On several occasions, Israelis have managed to temporarily suppress violence.”

For centuries, language purists insisted that an infinitive must never be split. Then came the reaction: Permissivists denounced the prohibition as a “superstition.”

A few writers on language take a middle position. I’m in this camp. The split-infinitive taboo is a convention of the language, so let’s respect it — unless the result sounds awkward. All the above examples could be rephrased to avoid the splits. On the other hand, rephrasing would be difficult or impossible with this sort of sentence: “Analysts expect the stock price to more than triple next year.”

But clumsy sentences can also be created by splitting the infinitive. I found this example in a concert program: “Sousa marches often seem to not particularly relate to their titles.”

Recently, an eloquent case for nonsplitting was made by a reader (Richard Palumbo) in a letter to The New York Times Book Review: “Split infinitives are like putting an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a speeding train that must stop to clear the tracks before picking up speed again. We lose the thrust and impact when we separate preposition and verb…”

That makes sense to me. So my advice is simple. Follow the rule unless a good reason exists to break it. I sometimes wonder if anything would have been lost if the Star Trek mission had been “to go boldly where no man has gone before.”

[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 published by AWAI that shows writers and other creative professionals how to diversify their careers into speaking, consulting, training, and critiquing.]

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We want your feedback! Let us know your thoughts on today’s issue. Email us at: AskETR@ETRFeedback.com

• Do they want more news about how bad the economy is? Or how clumsy and/or corrupt the government is when it tries to “help”? Or how completely out of tune media celebrities are?

• Or do they want promises of wealth and health and happiness? Packaged in a pretty little pill?

We have this conversation almost every time we launch a new information product. When brainstorming advertising leads, ideas are offered from both camps, doom and zoom, and the debate ensues.

This is an old debate because it represents two very natural human interests:

• the fascination we feel when we are discovering something new and shocking
• the pleasure we feel when we imagine ourselves having something we want

One part of the heart wants to be surprised and intrigued and shocked by bad news. The other part wants to be bathed in dreams of self-satisfaction.

But since we respond to both gloom and zoom when reading, browsing the Internet, or watching videos, this either-or debate is a false one. The best advertising campaigns have always contained both elements.

Still, when creating a package or promotion you have to choose one dominant emotion to appeal to. Should it be doom or zoom?

I’ve always recommended more zoom than doom to my clients. And looking back on the hundreds of packages I’ve mentored, I feel pretty sure that was correct.

I also warned my clients that too much zoom was bad too. For two reasons:

• You have an obligation to tell the truth about the world as you see it.
• You don’t want to pander to unrealistic hopes.

So what is the right formula for any given advertisement at any given time?

There is none. You have to figure it out each time anew.

But I’ve recently read something on this subject that knocked me off my chair. It was a very simple statement that Dan Kennedy made in an e-mail to me after we met in Delray Beach last month.

He said, “Buying is essentially an act of optimism.”

And I thought, “Damn! That’s exactly right. That is exactly why you need more zoom than doom in a winning advertising package. In fact, that’s essentially the reason why buying stuff is so much fun. It’s not the possessing part that gives us pleasure. It is the feeling of optimism we have once we have made the decision to buy.”

I know what you are thinking: “I knew that when I was eight years old. And here I thought Michael was supposed to be smart. What’s wrong with him? Is he having a stroke?”

Maybe. But I think I understand what I always understood in a deeper way now. I understand that for everybody — even people who can’t get enough doom and gloom in their lives — when they buy something they are always buying a promise of zoom.

How does this apply to what ETR is doing?

Let’s see.

For about three years, we have been living through a Great Recession. The U.S. economy is as bad as it’s been in 80 years. When things are this tough, it is easy to assume that your customers want you to talk about the trouble we are in. They want to know that you understand their plight.

I’ve been drawn into this idea. When I sit down to brainstorm a new marketing campaign, I say to myself, “I have to start by understanding the customer’s primary thoughts, feelings, and desires.”

And so I’ve tended to favor leads that harped on our troubling times. I know from experience that too much gloom depresses response. But I’ve allowed it because I felt like doing anything else would be wrong somehow. “We have to keep telling them how bad things are,” I’d say to the marketing team. “How right we were in predicting the various collapses, and how much worse things are still going to get.”

Dan’s simple declaration shocked me back into reality. Yes, the recession has created new thoughts and feelings in our customers. But the desires — the fundamental desires for zoom — are still the same.

I discovered years ago that if you want to sell a product that helps people deal with pain or sickness, the worst thing you can do is dwell on the problem. Anyone who might want to buy your product is very aware of the pain and fear. You don’t have to remind him of it. A single word — cancer, for example — is enough to stimulate all the gloomy feelings he has.

“If you want to help people with health problems, you have to bring them new hope,” I’ve been telling my clients in the health publishing business. New hope means genuinely new solutions. Not solutions they have already tried and given up on. The purpose of any health publication is to discover new products, and the job of any advertiser for such a service is to stir up hope by documenting reasons why the product in question is new and different.

Thus the ratio of gloom versus zoom is about 1:9 in health-related products. For investment-oriented products it might be 2:8 or 3:7.

“Any advertising campaign that deals with a problem must present a persuasive solution,” I wrote to a client recently.

In a book John Forde and I are working on right now about writing great leads, we say, “The secret to problem/solution leads is to state the problem as concisely as possible and dwell on the solution.”

That is true in every market.

Whether your customer is buying health services, investment advice, grass-fed beef, or perfume, he doesn’t want to be reminded of what a mess the world is. He wants a solution — and that solution has to come in the form of the product you are selling him.

Thanks to Dan’s very smart insight, I’m reviewing all the copy my clients are using to make sure they are solution-heavy and problem-light. A quick survey of the most successful campaigns this year convinced me that this was the right tack.

As I said, you probably know this already. And you are probably shaking your head and moving me to your D list for “dumb.” But just in case you needed — as I did — a lesson in the obvious, now you have it.

P.S. Every year, I share insights I’ve gained throughout the year (and the rest of my career) during my keynote address at ETR’s Info-Marketing Bootcamp. It’s off-the-cuff advice for all the entrepreneurs like you in the audience. And it’s the perfect way to kick off the event, which features a dozen other experts at getting into the nitty-gritty of search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, social media, copywriting, paid search advertising, and more. See what Bootcamp’s all about here.

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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.

And that’s just today. We’ve got a great rest-of-the-week lined up for you. Our expert contributors will be revealing some of the most important lessons they’ve learned.

Alex Green will inspire you with an essay about the only thing that really matters. Follow his advice and you’ll be able to say “I’ve led a good life” when you look back.

Clayton Makepeace, a featured speaker at this year’s Bootcamp, will explain the “generation gap” that affects marketing success. As he says, some fundamental things about selling will always be true. But you can’t use the same tactics today that you did in decades past. Or even a couple of years ago.

Success mentor Brian Tracy will show you how to overcome the bottlenecks that are keeping you from achieving your most important goals. What’s stopping you? It could be right in front of your nose.

And master copywriter John Forde will explain the difference between “need to tell” and “want to tell” in your advertising copy. This is essential reading for all business owners, marketers, and salespeople. (Which means everybody.) John will also help you “redline” the unnecessary cute and clever passages from your promotions.

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What MBA Students Have That You Don’t (Until Now…) - An unconventional course has appeared in the curriculum at Columbia University’s prestigious business school… at the London Business School… and at the Haas Business School at the University of California at Berkeley. Says student Brandon Peele, “I attribute 80% of my $120K MBA price tag to this one class. It changed my life in profound ways.” Now you can get all the life-changing benefits of this program… from your home… for less than a thousandth of the tuition.

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