Few people are attracted to whiners, complainers, excuse-makers, wimps. Hanging out with a victim is not appealing to most reasonably sane people. Who wants to be around or involved with an emotional cripple? The person in the victim shirt tends to wear out his welcome early. As he should. His thinking, his beliefs, and his behavior are even more repellant to money and wealth than they to other people.
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Acquiring a deep understanding of the target customer should not be short-changed — by anyone writing sales copy, at any time, for any purpose. As I was writing this edition of this book, I was writing copy for a long-time client, the Guthy-Renker Corporation, for their hugely successful Proactiv® brand of acne products. There are three different people to talk to about this — the teen sufferer, the teen's mom, and playing the odds, the adult female sufferer. This had me reading past and current issues of nearly a hundred magazines, including all the teen and preteen magazines, all the mom magazines, and all the women's magazines, having copious online research done for me, doing “conversational research” directly with people in all three groups, and even hiring a dozen freelance readers — teens, parents of teens, and young women — to critique my copy. Also, as I was writing this edition of this book, I began work on copy aimed at highly successful, professional financial and investment advisors, financial planners, and top-performing life insurance and annuities agents, which required a similar investment of time and energy in crawling inside their psyche, tribal language, daily experiences. Freelance writers worth their salt know they must do this sort of thing, and do. The danger for the business owner writing copy for himself and for his own business is ingrained assumption — encouraging shortcutting or altogether neglecting this step. The only sure way to keep your own accumulated but untested opinions and beliefs about your customers from sabotaging your sales letters is to start anew, from scratch, and to engage in getting to know the customers just as if you were arriving to write for them for the first time, with no foreknowledge.
I'll give you an actual example. Pamela Yellen, the CEO of the Prospecting & Marketing Institute, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I were conducting a multiday seminar for her clients — corporate executives and general agents from life insurance companies — about new methods of recruiting agents. Even though the attendees had paid a very high per-person fee to be there, most had traveled great distances, and the subject was of critical importance to them, we both noticed that on breaks, what most of them were talking about was where they were going to go play golf that evening when the seminar let out, the next morning before it started, or the day afterward. Both Pamela and I made note of how important it was to these clients of hers to get out on the golf course. This led to one of the most unusual ads Pamela has ever written and run in her own industry's trade journals, with the headline: “Puts Recruiting on Autopilot So You Can Go Play Golf!” The entire ad is reproduced on the following page, Exhibit #3. As you'll see, it sold the system we devised for insurance agent recruiting, but it did so circuitously, by emphasizing the hidden benefit: you'll get the job done with less time invested, so you can spend more time on the golf course.
I've been a marketing director for nearly ten years. I know quite a bit. My promotions pulled results; bosses and clients loved me. But I was not aware of how much I didn't know! If Dan Kennedy required my next-born child in exchange for the information he has given, I'd pay to have a reversal of my tubal ligation.” — Bridget Campbell Marketing Director, Idaho
People often ask me why I have written so many books and why I keep writing books, and this is the principal reason: it is a key to making attachment to me valuable to others, whether that attachment is directly paid for “cafeteria-style,” by renting me as a speaker, guest coach at mastermind meetings, coauthor, and so on, or is the glue of an ongoing relationship, as it is for me with GKIC and several other companies I have promoted ties to, such as the direct marketing software firm, Infusionsoft.
FINALLY — YOU ARE A SWEEPSTAKES WINNER!
I don’t know about you, but I enter all those darned magazine company sweepstakes. I go for the Reader’s Digest sweepstakes and I buy my weekly lottery tickets — after all, as a character in the movie Let It Ride said, “You could be walking around lucky and not know it.” In a lot of years, though, I have gone winless. The guys with the balloons and the giant-sized check have not shown up at my door. So the headline FINALLY — YOU ARE A SWEEPSTAKES WINNER! got me. I read that letter. And if you send a letter to every one of your customers with that headline on it, every one of them will read it. What should the letter say? Here’s an example, courtesy of the late, great copywriter, my friend Gary Halbert: Dear Valued Customer:
I am writing to tell you that your name was entered into a drawing here at my store and you have won a valuable prize.
As you know, my store, ABC Jewelry, specializes in low-cost, top-quality diamond rings and diamond earrings. Well, guess what? The other day we got in a small shipment of fake diamonds that are made with a new process that makes them look so real they almost fooled me!
Anyway, I don’t want to sell these fakes because they could cause a lot of trouble for the pawnbrokers around town. So I’ve decided to give them away to some of my good customers whose names were selected at random by having my wife, Janet, put all the names in a jar and pull out the winners.
So, you’re one of the winners — and all you’ve got to do is drop in sometime before 5:00 P.M. Friday and you’ll have a 1-karat “diamond” that looks so good it’ll knock your eyes out! Sincerely,
John Jones P.S.: After 5:00 P.M. Friday, I reserve the right to give your prize to someone else. Thank you.
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As an ethical, moral person, you probably think — “hey, I don’t want more than my fair share.” But that reveals belief that wealth is limited. If you believe wealth is unlimited, there’s no such thing as a share of it. Everybody’s share is unlimited. There’s nothing to have a share of. There’s only unlimited. Your fair share is all you can possibly attract. As is anybody and everybody else’s.
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