Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
January 8, 2009
Issue #58
In this issue:
- Why persuasion is the most valuable skill you could ever acquire …
- How to seduce prospects without ever explicitly naming a single benefit …
- How acknowledging and validating your prospect’s core beliefs and values gives you an almost unfair advantage in sales copy …
- How to use rhetoric to bypass prospects’ brains entirely – making it virtually impossible for them to refuse the impulse to order NOW …
- And MUCH MORE!
Dear Business-Builder,
Whether you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, marketing pro or copywriter, this issue is going to be extremely valuable to you.
We’re continuing last week’s ramblings on persuasion: Without a doubt, the most valuable skill any human being could possibly develop – and I am not talking about just in copywriting or sales either.
Persuasion makes the world go around:
- Persuasion is at the heart of every government system you can name. In democracies, politicians gain power by persuading perpetually gullible citizens to vote for them. Once elected, the peoples’ representatives debate each new bill before it becomes law, each side attempting to persuade the other.
Even in monarchies and dictatorships, domestic tranquility – and in many cases, the very survival of the regime – is assured as the masses are persuaded that the monarch was divinely appointed … that the dictator is the nation’s destiny … or at the very least, to abide by the law of the land (often at the point of a gun).
- The world’s legal systems operate almost entirely on persuasion. Trials are little more than contests between two sets of attorneys to determine which will better persuade the judge or jury of its point of view.
As the OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson trials graphically demonstrated to many, the guilt or innocence of the accused can be irrelevant: If you have the most persuasive lawyer, you win: You can get away with the sickest behavior imaginable – even murder. On the other hand, if your lawyer is less than persuasive, you can be as innocent as a lamb and as pure as the driven snow – and still wind up on Death Row.
- Every religious movement owes its existence to its abilities to persuade converts that its holy script – and therefore its precepts and doctrines – is authentic, accurate and reliable (and by extension, that contradictory ones are frauds).
- In our personal lives, many (if not most) of our marriages and life partnerships are rooted in persuasion. Whether by passive seduction or aggressive pursuit, one of us persuaded the other to commit to an exclusive long-term relationship.
- Raising children is a Herculean two-way exercise in the art of persuasion. Parents use every persuasion strategy at their command to produce desired behaviors and discourage undesirable ones – and kids are past masters at figuring out what needs to be said or done to persuade Mom and Dad to give them their way.
- And of course, persuasion is an essential component in every business success story. Every day, banks and investors are persuaded to bankroll new businesses … quality employees are persuaded to join their teams … workers are persuaded to perform in productive ways …
… New customers persuaded to make their first purchases … existing customers are persuaded to make new purchases … unions and vendors are persuaded to accept companies’ terms … and executives persuade other businesses to enter into alliances and joint ventures and to concede to mergers and acquisitions.
Heck: One of the greatest business empires of all time began with a simple act of persuasion. Microsoft was born when Bill Gates persuaded IBM to pay him a royalty on every copy of MS-DOS software installed on its machines!
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
January 5, 2009
Issue #51
How to Crawl Inside Your Prospect’s Skin
and Find Emotional Hot Buttons
that Virtually Guarantee
Maximum Attention-Getting Power
and Readership for Every Promotion You Create
Dear Business-Builder,
At our Power Marketing Summit, an attendee remarked on how ethnically diverse my staff and closest friends are.
“Is that by design?” she asked?
The question caught me completely off-guard. I honestly hadn’t thought about it before.
But yeah, now that I do think of it … Carline – my cherished friend – is half Haitian. My ex-wife is Hispanic, which (unless my math is off) makes my older kids exactly one-half Hispanic.
… And yep, I’m whiter than rice: Half English and half French. Nothing more than a boring old flat-assed, white-bread honky who really, really looks idiotic trying to dance.
“No,” I assured her. “No design. It just kind of worked out that way.”
I had to smile to myself, though: “Dad must be tumbling in his tomb.”
See, my dear old dad was a racist – and proud of it.
Not merely a lukewarm, garden-variety racist, mind you: In the 60s, Dad was actually a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
January 1, 2009
Welcome, Business-Builder!
Last week we spent some time with my good buddy, and copywriter extraordinaire – Kent Komae.
And without further fanfare, let’s go ahead and jump right in … (more…)
Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
December 29, 2008
Issue #57
Three Powerful Persuasion Strategies And How to Use Each One To Rocket Your Response
In this issue:
- How to structure a logical argument that will have your prospects ready, willing and even eager to buy …
- The astonishing response-rocketing power of the “scientific demonstration” – and how I used it to sell more than $7 million-worth of products in a single DM package…
- 8 Ways to turn ordinary testimonials into profit-pulling powerhouses…
- And MUCH MORE!
Dear Business-Builder,
Over the years, I’ve tried to teach lots of folks to write sales copy – and (have I mentioned this before?) not all of them have gone on to be stellar successes.
One of my most spectacular failures had a Ph.D. in English Lit. Another was a crackerjack newspaper reporter. Still another had penned a best-seller and now wanted to try her hand at writing sales copy.
All three of these guys and gals were great word-jugglers. But as direct response copywriters, every one of them was hopeless. Not one of them could have written a winning sales letter if you’d held a .44 magnum to his or her highly educated head.
Looking back, though, it wasn’t their fault that they couldn’t “get” it. It was mine.
I should have been flogged for hiring these “great writers” in the first place.
See, I didn’t need great writers. I needed great salespeople – experts in the art and science of persuasion – who could also write.
They didn’t have to be Shakespeares, Longfellows or Hemmingways. They just needed to have a knack for helping others see things their way … and for persuading others to take a particular action – i.e. to look at their headlines, read their sales messages and for god’s sake, to order the doggoned product!
Put simply, I needed PERSUADERS.
So much is written today about the technical, nuts-and bolts aspects of writing great sales copy: How to structure a headline. How to use power words. How to find the right tone. How to write a fascination. How to close with conviction.
Too little, in my opinion, is written about how to be persuasive. And I mean to remedy that.
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
December 25, 2008
Issue #30
Part One
Welcome, Business-Builder!
Nothing does my heart more good than to see a young copywriter take root and blossom. And of all the copy cubs I’ve worked with over the years, NOBODY has blossomed bigger or better than Kent Komae has!
Kent’s hard-selling direct mail packages are legendary in the health supplement industry. His fabled controls for Sun Chlorella, Healthy Directions, Health Resources and many other major mailers have made Kent one of the top two or three choices for supplement companies looking to grow – FAST.
I first hooked up with Kent back in the 1990s – when he was an eager younger writer, looking to make a name for himself (and, of course some truly obscene royalties). I hired him to help me on several health promotions for a favorite client – and on his very first draft, it was clear to me that this guy had what it takes!
Since then, Kent has gone on to fame, fortune and a jamb-packed dance card as one of the half-dozen or so most in-demand copywriters in the alternative health industry. I’m proud to count him as one of my closest friends.
A few days ago, Kent took time out of his insane schedule to talk copy with me – here: Listen in …
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