What if you're marketing to a small professional market?

Hair sheet should either

look like it came out of the professional journal that they all read. Say, you're
marketing to rocket scientists. Okay? And there is a real publication called Rocket
Scientist Monthly.

Maybe you want to make it look without using their name, but everything else looks
right like it came from Rocket Science Monthly. Same size page, if it's on slick
paper, slick paper, same typestyle, same everything. Or you create a phony
publication that is Rocket Science Annual Journal, or Who's Who of Rocket Science
Journal. And now you just make it up from scratch, but you make it look like it was
a page out of something. Again, I wouldn't recommend putting a Wall Street Journal
on it, but, you know, if you want to play this really straight, and and you can use
a general public, like, you want a newspaper tear sheet, and you want to play it
really straight, then you actually go pay pay to run it in the dickiest, cheapest
newspaper you can find.

And now you can actually reprint it as it ran. And off off in the small town news
you'll find a small town newspaper that won't make you put paid advertisement above
it. So now you can run it just the way it ran. Next thing we can enclose, lift
notes. Yeah.

You want a tear sheet question? Yeah. That's about the regulatory. Yes. Oh, yeah.

There's regulatory problems with all of this. And you will find you will find a
legal disclaimer on page 1 of your manual. Okay? And we don't have time to practice
law. Okay?

Maybe end of day q and a or something. But, yeah, there's regulatory problems with
all of this. That pretty much anything that works is it starts from the idea that
anything that works really well, it's illegal. And, then the issue is, are the, you
know, the shades of gray and all of that. Lift notes.

Interesting thing to test always if you have a control, if you have a piece that
works. What happens if we add a lift note to it? Cheap, easy to do, often will give
you a bump. One one variable to test. The first type of lift note is is really a
true lift note.

It is designed to be the first thing they read. It's typically an odd size smaller
piece of paper than the full page, but it doesn't have to be. And it can be it from
a testimonial. It can be from an endorser in the marketplace. It can be from a
celebrity.

It can be from your spouse. It can be from your dog signed with a paw print. The
the the what it can be is endless. But its job is predominantly to compel them to
read everything that's included in the package. Lift notes are best used when
you're sending it with a long sales letter, 8 page, 12 page, 16 page, or longer,
because now you may have a challenge of getting them to read it and the lift note
can often, do that.

I'll show you some examples again when we get into the exhibits. The, the other
variation of this is a is a little note that is actually designed to be read last,
not first. And these are often they come from the circulation business, the
subscription business. You are most familiar with them folded over with on the
outside of it. Read this only if you're still undecided.

Read this only if you've decided not to respond. Reader's Digest has used one for
years. It says, no, don't say no. Please say maybe. And and and then you open it
up, and it's a final, you know, desperate pitch, you know, to get you to respond to
the offer.

Some packages will have one of each. Some will have multiple lift notes. You can
also do lift notes, on Post it notes. Small and oversized Post it notes that are
actually attached to the piece. You can do lift notes that are stapled to the first
page of the letter, etcetera, etcetera.

Photographs. And here here, I'm not necessarily talking about photographs in the
piece. I'm talking about separate, fallout, loose photograph. Either one that looks
like a postcard or one that looks like a photo. Often, you will see these done
where, it's a square, it looks like a photograph.

It's not, it's been printed, but it looks like a photograph. And then on the back,
often in blue ink, simulating handwriting, will be a little message. Here I am
sitting at the kitchen table in my underwear, just like I told you, making $4,000 a
day. You can to Jeff. And a photograph of him in polka dot underwear sitting at the
kitchen table.

Alright? Again, what is the job of this piece? It is to get them to read the main
sales letter. All of these little peripheral items, the job is to get them to read
the full message, to get them to sit still for the whole sales presentation. It
could be a photograph of, you next to a car.

It could be a great before and after picture isolated by itself, etcetera,

etcetera. Phony checks. A staple in direct response. You've all gotten window
envelope mailings where the check shows. You've gotten them with the checks
attached, where they don't show through the window, but they're used as part of the
piece.

Do they work? Yes. Are they worn out? No. Any number of successful controls,
continue to use them.

But be very clear on what you're trying to accomplish with it. Is it a grabber
attached to the letter to get them to read the letter? If it's a separate piece,
then its job probably is to get them to read the whole letter. So so something said
on the front and or the back of the check must again serve the same kind of purpose
as a lift note. It really should be viewed as another way to do a lift note that
will get read.

Testimonial inserts. Hard to overdo. It's impossible to overdo the use of

testimonials. And if there is one consistent flaw in all of the stuff that is sent
to me to critique, it's either the absence of or the, insufficient quantity of or
the under use of testimonials. You cannot overdo this.

And so you want to use all the good ones you got, and use them in as many different
ways as you can think of. We now start to see more and more teaser envelope
controls, where there's testimonials and pictures on the outside of the envelope. I
think that's smart. If you want a loose piece to fall out of your mailing, either a
note from a testimonial or a trifold with a bunch of pictures and testimonials in
it, a fold out with testimonials, a brochure with test where you can't beat
testimonials. When in doubt, use more.

Yes. What is the startup? Well, if it's a startup business, it doesn't have any.
Well, you can make them up. However however, well, I figured I might as well give
you the, you know, the however, I do not recommend that, At least not officially.

No as, I often counsel clients, no amount of money in the world is worth even 1
night in a small bank square room, with a cellmate named Brutus. And and that's a
quick way to get there. If you don't have them, you've got to create the first
thing you gotta know is that anything you do without them, the response will be
severely diminished. So if you are going through a period of agony where you don't
have them and are waiting to get them, you've got to know that your numbers do not
reflect what real numbers will be. Somewhere between double or better is a pretty
good rule of thumb, and in all probability, you're gonna go through a period of
time where you lose money on your sales, on your customer acquisition until such
time as you have testimonial ammunition to work with.

Having said that, that obviously begs trying to fix the problem some other way than
waiting a year, and marketing during that year. All kinds of ways to do it
depending on the business you're in. In many cases, like in television, when we're
taking a new product to an infomercial, we'll get a group of you, a user group
together and manufacture the testimonials. Skincare product, you know, it's got a
is ideal because it's got like a 2 week or 3 week effectiveness. So you can or diet
product.

You can run a cattle call ad in a newspaper, bring in a bunch of people who will
use the product for free, keep them in a control group, coach them, make sure they
get good results, have them use the thing for 2 weeks. Now, you got a group of
testimonials. You can so you can give your thing to people for free, get it used,
create testimonials. You can, run with, industry if you're in an industry, if
you're in a niche market, you can start out with without users, but with industry
endorsers, other experts, who are known in the industry, who will say this is the
greatest thing since sliced bread. You can fuzzy testimonials.

If you have them from some other place. Let's say, or or in the information
business, it's very common to have them from a seminar, but now not have them for
the new product. You can use the seminar testimonials either as is, and make the
case that the seminar is now in the product, or you can, with their permission, alt
alter the testimonial to make it vaguer. So instead of saying as a result of
Harry's seminar, it's as a result of Harry's methods or as a result of Harry's
teaching or is which is now generic enough to encompass the product. You can, going
from one niche to the next, some like in some cases, there's licensees here of
Joe's where they've used Joe's testimonials initially for in a niche where they
weren't and just dropped the niche out.

So they're all carpet cleaners talking about the carpet cleaning marketing system.
They're now just not identified as carpet cleaners, and the word carpet cleaning is
taken out of the testimonial. And they're talking about a marketing system, and
they're not identified what kind of business they are. And the person in pest
control assumes their pest control people, because he's a pest control person and
he got a pitch for pest control people. All of that is second rate compared to
really good real tech.

So you fix it as quick as you can. As soon as you get one good one, you feature the
one good one, and you start lopping off the worst of the makeshift ones. Right? Is
that yes? You have a follow-up question.

Well, it we want it not to matter. That's the question. Because some will follow
directions. Some won't. So if you do a open and read this last, or open and read
this only after you've read my entire letter or some variation of that, the guts
have to not matter.

So the guts have to do 2 things. They they have to stand alone in whatever message
they're delivering, and they have to stimulate readership of the main thing just as
if it had not been read. K? Now to your other question, which is if first of all,
I'm not surprised that the 37%, and, and so, you know, congratulations, but it is
not surprising. Now if you want to bump it more, the thing to test is more
testimonials every which way you can so there's quantity and then there's means of
delivering them.

So in your case, if you're using 15 now, try 30. You you you may see a bump. Okay?
If you're sending them all out in print, try getting 10 8, 10 really good ones on
an audiotape, and send an audiotape. If that gives you a bump, get 8 or 10 really
good ones on a videotape, next to this with their new car, and and and showing the
cars and the kid and the dog getting in the minivan and while they're giving their
testimonial, and send out the videotape.

And see what that does. Send a book of testimonials with 200 of them in there.
Bound as a book. On and on. Well, we're talking about the car business, you know.

They got high transaction value. In fact, you know, close to license to steal. Not
not anymore. But basically, you're probably gonna get you're probably gonna keep
bumping it the more of it that you do. And you may be able to justify fairly
expensive stuff like videotapes.

Obviously, you can do video, you can do priority delivery, you can do multi step
sequences, you know, you can do a lot. Testimonials make great postcards. One great
testimonial story per postcard, send them a postcard every day for 10 days. I mean,
you've got all sorts of options. Put in an eavesdrop line that they can call and
hear current test on and on and on and on.

You cannot overuse these things. And if you're gonna have something fall out loose
in a mailing campaign, it's hard to go wrong with test testimonials. Yes, sir.
Yeah. Well, it's better than saying than not saying Arizona.

The more information you provide about a testimonial, the better. I'm gonna show
you some examples, you know, this afternoon. But the one thing you never wanna do
is do them blind, right, where it's initials. That's the lower you might as well
not do them at all. Right?

And the more you identify them, the better. And if you have a if you have a
celebrity who's not a known celebrity, it could be, like, my kind of celebrity
where it's I call us famous people that nobody's ever heard of. Right? I mean,
we're famous with, you know, within our customer base. But the general public,
nobody's gonna be asking me for autographs when we take our break, our lunch break.

You know, I mean, I could safely go walk through them all and, you know, I don't
get mom. But I may have more value to you if you identify me as author of such and
such a book. Right? Or, popular speaker who shares programs with. So if you got a
testimonial from the 3rd astronaut to walk on the moon, how many people can name
who he was?

This is like this is this is as bad as the Jay Leno on the street deal where nobody
knows anything. Well, but it's a but see, so so his name has no value to you.
Right? Because nobody knows who the hell he is. So you've gotta put whatever his
name is, because I don't know who he is either.

You know, Al Rabinowitz, 3rd 3rd astronaut to walk on the moon. Say, so if you're
gonna use him to sell water filters, just put his name in his pictures, and then,
you know, now, if you've got his picture in his spacesuit, that helps. And if you
identify him, that helps some more. So testimonials have to be identified to have
value. Yes, sir.

What's the most effective way to get your customer to give you a slam dunk
testimony? 1st and foremost, have a really happy customer. It's hard to get great
testimonials out of it's not impossible, by the way, but it's difficult. So it
helps to have, you know, people who are genuinely thrilled. Right?
And then the best way is to be very straight with them about what you're trying to
accomplish. And in 9 out of 10 cases, you're gonna have to help them write it or
write it for them. So you are gonna have to interview them on the phone, download
it, write it, send it for approval. You're gonna have to rewrite what they write.
In some cases, they'll say, just write down what you want, let me see it.

But you're gonna have to be actively involved in the process. Now you will get it's
a function of volume too. Like, I I know in your business, you're dealing with very
small numbers. So it's it's gonna be fairly rare for you to get a really great one
where they did it all on their own. You didn't have to ask for it.

It's unsolicited and it's usable the way you got it. Some of us who are doing
sizable volume, I'd say 10% of the ones that come in unsolicited, I can use the way
they came. They're they're well written. They have specifics in them. They all the
things we're going to talk about that makes a good testimonial, they got.

And so, it's a function of numbers. I get enough I can use without having to get on
the phone and without, you know. But if I had to, I'd be calling them and I'd be
grinding them out. There was one up here, and then we need to move over. Was it
yes.

Well, if you got if you got something that takes a long time before people get
results from it, you've got 2 options. You're only gonna get your testimonials from
people who've had it for a long time, or you you could actually got 3 options. You
need to jerry rig something into the product or the service that gets that gives
them some short term value, some experience that they can comment on, or you've got
to, get all the kind of testimonials that have nothing to do with the core value of
the product. That the customer service was good, the thing came assembled,
everything else has come to me in pieces. I didn't have to put it together.

I was amazed how easy it was. I thought it was gonna be hard to use. You you've got
to get testimonials for everything but the actual outcome. K? And then you're still
gonna need the outcome testimonials, but at least you can get your quantity that
way.

Okay? I'm gonna try and get through this list before we break real quick. Where
were we? Testimonial answers. Article reprints.

In some cases, as good as testimonials. In some cases, better. Certainly, if an

article has appeared about you or your product or your service in a very credible
publication or one you can make credible by the way you explain what it is, then
having that reprint, can be very useful as a component part of a mailing. Audio
tapes and video tapes. Audio, very useful.

Cheap. Not in the same price range as doing color brochures. Best benefits, length.
Think how much you can say in 6:60 minutes. The most you can pack into a shell, by
the way, is 92.

People probably will not read 92 minutes worth of stuff, but they will listen to 92
minutes worth of stuff. Secondly, they can't skim. You control the order in which
they get the information. 3rd, you can dramatize it. Voice inflection, multiple
voices, interviews, testimonials in their own voices, music sound effects,
etcetera.

Everybody's got an audio player in their car. A lot of people listen to them as
they drive around. There's pass along effect. And in many cases, buyers tell us
they listen to them repetitively. Videos.
More expensive, obviously, highly effective. For presentation of testimonials,
presentation of demonstrations. In many cases, if you do a video brochure, a tip
I'll give you is it should be shot it should be done like an infomercial even if
you're not gonna air it. Keep in mind that when people watch a videotape, where do
they watch it? On TV.

So TV should look like TV. It shouldn't be a pitch. Core, just bland, dry,
straight. It should look like a show. So the same decisions we make in infomercials
you make about video brochures.

Format. Should it have a set? Should it have a host? Should it look like a news
program? Good news.

You're not as scrutinized in video brochures as you are in infomercials we are on

TV. So you can do stuff we can't do anymore. Like, you can make it really look like
a news program. We can't do that anymore. Sure.

Yeah. Now there's some automatic you have to sell people on watching the the video.
There's some automatic, compliance with either audio or video because there's a
reluctance to chuck it. And and there's a curiosity factor what's on it. There's a
perceived value.

So there's some automatic compliance. But beyond that, sure, you're saying lift
note, what's on the label, all the same things that would apply to any other tool,
Long form tool apply to a video. And, yes, you want to sell them on watching it if
you can. Books. Yeah.

As here's the answer to that, that how long should the video be? That's the same
question as how long should the sales letter be. Right? The same question is how
long should the book be? Not long ago, I I had to go through licensing for my
harness racing driving test.

And they still have the same idiot question they had on the test 30 years ago,
which is how long should a head pole be? Now, head poles thing goes from the
harness to the nose of the horse to keep his head straight. Well, horses' necks
have different lengths. So how long should the head pull be? The answer is long
enough to reach from the hang to the nose.

Right? You can't quite so the job how long enough to do the job. That's the answer.
And so if you can do a great presentation in 8 minutes, then by all means do an 8
minute video. But if you can do a great presentation and you can effectively use 60
minutes, do 60 minutes.

A lot of video people tell us anything longer than 11 minutes. They're not gonna
well, that's the same crap as nobody's gonna read a 16 page sales letter. People
will sit still for an enormous amount of presentation if it is of interest to them
and if it's not boring. Years ago, we had a sales process, where before they could
buy, they had to they had to sign an affidavit that they had listened to all 6 90
minute audiotapes and watched 6 hours of video. And they couldn't buy before they
did all that.

And they had to sign an affidavit that they had did it. And, did they do it? You
bet. In massive numbers. So the answer is long enough to do the job.

Books. One of the best users of books as marketing tools, if you wanna look for a
model, is, a high level financial planning guy by the name of Barry Kaye. You will
see his, ads in, Investors Business Daily, the airline magazines, some of the
financial magazines. In many markets in the country, he has affiliates, and so
you'll see the ads for their free seminars in the newspaper. Answer them, get the
books.

You can also buy them in the bookstores. It would behoove you to get one of his
books if this interests you, and read it because he does a marvelous job of doing a
book that has the patina, the appearance of information value, but fundamentally,
is nothing but a 300 page sales letter. And and that's exactly what they are
supposed to be. Why would you do this? Well, two reasons.

1, to get it read, and because it has some inherent credibility. If you make sure
it looks like a book, smells like a book, in every way, shape, and form, appears to
be a book that you would buy in the bookstore, which he has done marvelously. Now
again, to use this type of tool, you have to have a certain level of transaction
value and all of that to support the cost, because you're probably talking about a
tool in the $3 or so range, to achieve the bookstore look. A step down from that is
the booklet, that may or may not be perfect bound, but is more like, more like the
how to make $4,000 a day little yellow book that we use in the JPDK business. How
many of you have that?

Okay. Many of you. It's pure sales letter. I don't yeah. There's maybe one page of
useful information, but but the rest of it is, but the rest of it is pure sales.

It's simply a disguised sales letter, just as an infomercial as a disguised sales

presentation. These things work because they get read by people who would not read
it if it was handed to them as a sales letter, and because it has some level of
inherent credibility. Should they be part of your direct mail scheme? Probably.
When you write them, all of the same copywriting things we're gonna talk about that
has to do with creating good copy apply to them just as it does to a sales letter.

Coupons and certificates as enclosures. Often, it makes sense, if you have a

spectacular guarantee, for example, you may want to enclose a separate guarantee
certificate to emphasize that guarantee. If you've got a really great bonus gift,
you may wanna use a separate coupon or certificate that is a loose piece that does
nothing but present the bonus gift. And so those can be effective as parts of your
direct mail package. And last, of course, you want some kind of order form or
response form, in almost every instance as part of your direct mail package.

In some cases, you may be just driving them to a phone number and only giving them
one way to respond. We are increasingly, even in lead generation ads, giving them
options of response. They can call the phone number, hear the recorded message, or
they can fax in their business card, or, I I I prefer giving options whenever I
can. Those are now there's, again, a zillion other things you can put in direct
mail packages, but there's your short list. That's the list you ought to work off
of, in 90% of the cases.

And for most of you, you would never need to go beyond this list in order to
continually, run your business. Let's start to talk about copy. Let me give you the
short list of, of formulas, to write to formula. They're not necessarily in order
here, so I'm not going to talk about them in order. The the 3 main copy formulas
skip the first line for a second, we'll come back to that.

The 3 main copy formulas that you can live off of are, are problem, agitate, solve.
That means and, again, when we go through exhibits this afternoon, you're gonna see
these things, and I'll point them out to you over and over and over again. Problem,
agitate, solve is you state a problem that is of, burning, interest to the group to
whom you are writing to. You, rip them up into an emotional fervor about the
problem. And then, just about the time that, that they are suicidal about the
severity and horror of this problem, you reveal the magic, a solution to the
problem.
That's the formula. This is nothing new. It's like sales 101, and the best copy is
built on sales 101. That is the way every burglar alarm has been sold since the
beginning of time. Most insurance has been sold this way, face to face.

It's a very, very reliable formula that does not seem to wear out even when it is
used with the same customers repetitively. And so you you you can live off of it
for a long, long time. Basic befores and afters. A simple before and after story. I
was fat, now I'm thin.

I was broke, now I'm rich. I was dumb, now I'm smart. You know, Richard Pryor's
joke about the perfect before and after is, I I I used to be a poor black guy who
lived on the wrong side of the tracks, now I'm a rich white guy. That's as that's
as that's as dramatic a before and after as you can possibly hear. And and just as
dramatic before and after pictures work, dramatic before and after word pictures
work.

How many here have watched the Robinson infomercials that, you know, over the years
off and on? Oh, less than I would have thought. Got it. I want to do that. Gotta
pay attention to those things, because they're great direct you know, it's the
hardest arena to make direct response work is television.

So what works there will work even better anywhere else. And, Tony tells the having
to wash the dishes in the bathtub story because I was so poor, I lived in a
apartment that didn't have a sink. Now here's my helicopter and my castle. It's
before and after. It's fundamental, and so you you you you could pretty much make a
living with that format.

Last one, sales 101, is the AIDA formula. If you've ever taken a sales training
seminar, you've been taught it. The the first step is, of course, commanding their
attention, and there are various ways and some ways to do that. Then you have to
build their interest in what it is that you have to offer. You have to create
specific, desire, present an offer, and you have to close for, action.

One other formula I call your attention to, how many of you watched the, Kevin,
Trudeau infomercials? Any of them? Okay. Good. Good thing to watch.

Kevin's a great pitch person. And if you will pay close attention to them, you will
see that, Kevin is living off of the same formula in every single show. And, and
and here here it is. He encapsulates a very simple promise, something everybody
understands like 30 seconds. He will then give an example of that promise
happening.

He will then restate the same promise virtually, word for word, as he said it the
first time. He will then either have a testimonial or he will tell a testimonial
story. Barbara Smith and him. And he will then state the same promise again,
exactly as he said it the first two times. A a good show to watch is is the one
where he is not the host, but is the pitch person.

It's the one you'll see this most glaringly, where they sell make a mega memory.
And you won't just see it on TV. You'll hear it on the radio too, because it's a
radio infomercial as well. A nice formula. Good simple formula.

You could use it throughout a sales letter, just as effectively as it is used on

TV. Effectively as it is used on TV. One of the things you wanna do we're gonna
talk about headlines and subheads at some length in a few minutes, but because, you
gotta use a lot of these. 16 page sales letter, if you've got 4 subheads a page,
you need 64 headlines. And these are, critically important.

So if you're gonna write fast, you've got to reduce these to formula. You cannot be
sitting around thinking up headlines from scratch. There is not that much time on
planet Earth. So you've got to reduce this to formula, and you've got to get it
down to x number of things that you use over and over and over again. So your most
important swipe file is the headline swipe file, and ultimately, you want to take
the headlines that you see repeatedly and that you know that work, and that you
believe in, and you want to turn them into a fill in the blank thing that you can
use over and over again.

So they all laugh when I sat down at the piano until I started to play becomes they
all laughed when blank until I blank. And now, you can use that over and over and
over again, and you ought to have a fairly reliable little list of 20 or 30 or 40
or 50 of those that you can keep using over and over and over again. It'll speed
your copywriting maybe faster than any other single thing that you can do. I've got
200 personally that I use, and many of them came out of the list in the Victor
Schwab book. We'll talk about Reese Resources a little later for for those of you
that don't have that list of the 100 greatest headlines.

But, like, the cable's headline belongs on everybody's list, that they all laugh
list. And we go through the exhibits. I'll show you and it's a how a lot of people
are using it and are using it over and over again and are using it successfully. If
you wanna write copy fast, you need that little bank of 50 to a 100 to 200 headlock
fill in the blank headlines that you can keep using for your headlines and your
subheads over and over and over again. You don't wanna be thinking them up from
scratch And as quickly as possible, you don't even want to have to be sifting
through a swipe file looking at actual examples.

You just want the fill in the blank formulas on a couple sheets of paper that you
can go down and, that one will work. Fill in the blank, move on to the next one.
That speeds the process enormously. Internal repetition, it's an important
copywriting technique, particularly when you do long form copy. You wanna drive
home the same fundamental message over and over and over again.

And so it's important when you start out to write a piece, whether it's an ad or a
letter, whatever. To figure out what the core message is. What the 3 or 4 sentence
thing is that they must get in order for them to buy from you and then that's what
you want to hammer home over and over and over again through the piece to the point
that you believe you are being unnecessarily redundant. For example, if you're
gonna emphasize the guarantee, I'll show you examples in the exhibits that you have
where the there's like 2 pages devoted to the guarantee. Well, how can you fill 2
pages talking about a guarantee?

You fill 2 pages talking about a guarantee by saying the same thing over and over
again 56 times. That's how you fill 2 pages talking about a guarantee, and that is
what is necessary to drive home that point so people get it. To drive home that
point, so people get it. So you gotta pick what your core message is and drive it
home. Another good formula is to, what I call, flip the pitch.

So that you lead with the premium, and the product becomes the secondary issue
rather than the premium being the secondary issue. And in fact, if you have a
control, if you have an ad or a piece that works, direct mail campaign that works
right now, and it's a good control for you, and you wanna see if you can bump it,
flip it. Just take that piece and flip the pitch. Take what is now the primary
product you're selling that you're spending 70 or 80% of your time talking about,
and the premiums, the bonuses that you spend in 20 or 30% of your time talking
about, and flip the emphasis. Talk about all the bonuses first, and give them 70%
of the time, and talk about the product last, and give it a third of the time.

Right? And you could say virtually the same. You don't have to write new copy.
Pretty much all you gotta do is switch it, and expand 1 and shorten the other.
Right?

Often, you'll get a bump or if you've got one that's been working but is fading,
this is a way without having to create a lot of new stuff to buy some more time in
the marketplace. Or if you're doing a sequence, it's a way to get variety in the
sequence. Early in the sequence, it can be product first, premium second. Later in
the sequence, it can be premium first, product second. Right?

It's a very reliable formula. You see it most often in the newsletter business.
When you look for models, and I think most of the ones I'll show you are from that
business, where the emphasis is all on the 16 bonuses you get when you subscribe.
And, oh, by the way, you also get a newsletter. But it but it's not relegated to
that industry.

It works in any business. You can move this idea. Yeah. Arty? Yeah.

So I was gonna ask that if I'm a lead generation consumer, the brand is a one page,
ad, does that work to get a deal to default and flip the account as well? Well, you
don't have a flip to do between product and premium. Well No. But if you if you
were to, like, think to imply that the will It's entirely different process than
what I've just described to you. You're you're talking about you're talking about
moving copy around, and the answer to your question is no.

Normally, that ad has been built on a particular sequence of events, and just
cutting and pasting is not necessarily gonna give you an effective ad. It's really
a very different process. Last very reliable format or form formula that I'll give
you is have the entire letter, the entire pitch made by the testimonial. Now, it's
important if you have something that's working to make sure that all of the
elements stay in the testimonial story. And in, in answer to your question earlier,
here's one where you've gotta write it for the testimonial.

Because they're not gonna write a 16 page sales letter in their voice. But you can,
if you've got a real champion, using their story and get it approved for them. Make
sure you put all the elements in that are working in your other ad, but the whole
thing now is delivered in his voice based on his story instead of first person from
you. Yes. One person from start to finish.

That's right. Yes. 1 this is one long 8 page testimonial, k, where they are
actually delivering the whole pitch, in in lead generation ads. It's a fair fairly
reliable thing to do after you've been in a market for a while with a first person
ad from you, is to start telling the same story from one ad features one
testimonial, one champion, and it's his story. And it goes right on to make the
free report offer and call the phone number and all of the same things you would do
if you were doing it first person.

You'll find examples in PowerPoints, if you have PowerPoints. Let's see. Okay. Next
issue is making people believe your copy. The biggest thing I can tell you quickly
about this is is that the credibility things that used to make people believe copy
are still necessary, but but not enough.

And in fact, not the driving force. Today's, marketplace, today's society is
totally moving around based on believability, not credibility. And and and the
difference, is is most easily demonstrated, by by by talking about our president.
Everybody knows he's not credible, but a large segment of the population buys what
he sells them when he gets face to face and pitches them. He's a very believable
pitch person.

He's not a very credible pitch person, but he's a very believable pitch person. And
so, things like, we've been in business since 1903, which 10 years ago had enormous
power. Today, are just a necessity to include if you've got it, but they are not
gonna buy you believability. All of your believability is gonna come from the stuff
on the left side of your page, how you say what you say, your real people
testimonials, the single most important thing you can do, little picky details,
visual demonstration, those kinds of proofs. I'm gonna skip the next page because
we talked about it some.

One of the believability issues you have to confront, if you go 2 pages over, is
how to make your discounting believable. For the most part, most of us are going to
be discounting. When we structure an offer and make a pitch, typically, we're gonna
build value. Then we're gonna discount from a value which we have claimed exists
whether it does or not. In order to do that, we've got to make the discounting
believable.

In a retail environment, that issue is real simple. Walmart sticks a sign up on the
counter that says retail price, $100. Walmart price, $42. Got it. Right?

It's not that simple for us. And everybody understands Walmart's supposed to
discount their discounter. So nobody questions why are they doing this? But in most
of our businesses, the question occurs, why are you doing this? If this thing is
really a $500 doohickey, why are you selling it to me for a 198?

It can't be just because I'm a nice guy. So you need justification whenever you do
a discount. And when you do a discount without justification, you undermine the
believability of your entire pitch. Understand that anytime they don't believe one
part of what you do, they now do not believe any part of what you do. Sometimes,
that will not prevent them from buying.

Sometimes, people want what you hold out in front of them so badly, they'll buy
even though they don't believe you. But it's not an ideal way to go through life
selling. So we want them to believe us. And if we don't justify our price drops in
a believable manner, then we will undermine their belief in everything that we have
to say. So, here are the here are the typical reasons why.

Some story of savings you got that you can now pass on to your consumer. Our volume
this year quadrupled. So we're buying stuff in better quantities, so we can sell it
to you for life. We found a diamond mine, nobody else knew existed. And we're
getting diamonds at their cheap prices because we got slave labor from Kathy Lee,
and we go and dig them out of here.

You know, our our stuff's made by slaves in caves. I mean, that's, you know, so we
can sell a few for less. But you gotta have a reason. So we have a blank, so we can
pass these savings on to you. That's the formula, and you gotta fill in the blank
for whatever reason, so we can pass these savings on to you.

Moving sale, you know, works good if you're moving. Fire sale works good if you've
had a fire. Flood sale works good if you've had a flood. Or there's been a flood,
like, close to you. You can discount as a incentive or reward for fast response.

People kind of understand that. They're used to that. Sometimes you tell the whole
story, sometimes you don't have to. If you tell the whole story, it's, you know,
the magazines do it from time to time. Instead of having to mail you 16 renewal
notices, if you'll subscribe now and save us all the trouble of mailing you all
those pieces, well, okay.

So you can also use that as a justification to give away a free gift, by the way.
You can sell damaged goods. Success Motivation Institute for years has has their
last follow-up on the franchisee prospect they can't close has been calling up and
selling a damaged franchise. This is the end of side 1. Fast forward the tape to
the end and turn the cassette over for side 2.