• The five most effective techniques to boost credibility – and the one mistake to avoid …
• The single-most important thing you MUST have right – or you may as well toss your promotion in the trash …
• How this powerful format transforms colder prospects into eager buyers …
• The quickest, easiest way to breathe butt-kicking, response-rocketing life into a dying control …
• The two troubling trends in financial marketing that you need to avoid like the plague …
• How to succeed big as a copywriter – with these two important attributes …
• And much MORE!

AWAI: In your opinion, what’s the most important part of a financial promotion? You may have just stated it … it needs to be alive with emotion. Are there any other elements critical to its success?

Clayton: I think anyone who has done any testing at all would agree that the headline and deck copy and the first few paragraphs of the main sales copy have a greater impact on response than any other part of a sales promotion. On countless occasions, I’ve taken a package that was pulling at, say, 120% of cost, tested new headline and deck copy and pushed response up to 150% or 170% of cost.

That’s why every time one of my packages mail, I include anywhere from two to four new headlines to test along with the control.

Second, there’s the offer. I generally like to test pricing at least once every 12 to 18 months. If you have the time, testing premiums – particularly the fast-response and/or phone-in bonus is also a great way to boost response.

Also – never forget that your return on investment in the mail is composed of not one, but two vital elements: 1) Your response rate – the percentage of your prospects who actually buy, and 2) Your average unit of sale – the percentage of your prospects who opt for a two-year or even a three-year offer. After I’ve tested everything I can think of to boost response, I like to look at the higher-dollar offer and test things – pricing, premium line-up, etc. – to add a few extra dollars to each sale.

Third, I like to test formats. Time after time, I’ve found that a package that’s doing “just OK” as a bookalog will suddenly come to life as a tabloid. And almost invariably, I find that changing the format of a dying control gives it new life. When I get my way, I like to test new formats on the very first roll-out of a new control. If it’s a 24-page report-style self-mailer, I spin off a 6 X 9 component package version … a bookalog … a tabloid … or sometimes, even a scaled down #10 First Class version.

Finally, although I never test this, credibility is right up here as one of the most important parts of each package. Everyone we mail to sees hundreds of newsletter promotions per year from scores of advisors. It’s important to position your advisor as not only being a credible voice in this sea of self-serving hype, but also head and shoulders above the carnival barkers out there. So, beginning right on the front cover, I make a huge effort to include credibility elements – track record statements, testimonials, etc. – throughout the piece.

AWAI: How do you go about developing credibility in your packages?

Clayton: I like to do it in a number of ways. Right on page one, I like to list the accurate forecasts or the profitable investments that we’ve already nailed on the wall. You can tell somebody that the man who predicted the Tech Wreck of 2000 now predicts – fill in the blank – you’ve got some credibility right off the bat.

I like to also weave that into the early copy and expand on it with actual examples of either accurate economic or market forecasts or very profitable investment recommendations. The more specific the better: Give them the date of the buy, the date of the sell, and the profit amount.

Another, more subtle way to add credibility is by including a spot within the piece where the advisor can show some humility and really connect with the prospect. I write very high-energy packages. But I also like to create “islands of calm” in the package where the advisor connects to the reader on a personal level. Maybe he admits a minor mistake he made in the past … talks a little bit about his background … his family … his feelings about current events … how he got started. Do it right, and the reader comes away feeling like your editor is his friend. "He wouldn’t be lying to me about this,” says your prospect, “He’s a good guy.”

A third way to add credibility is to add specificity to your arguments in the text. Most investment newsletter promotions begin by discussing current dangers and opportunities. The more specific you can be, the more data you can provide to dimensionalize the opportunity or danger, the more credible it will be to the reader.

Beginning copywriters often make the mistake of making flat statements without any backup. They’re just assuming that the prospect will just accept what they say at face value and start nodding his head. But if they don’t, you can lose the sale. You can’t make these flat statements and then walk away from them. You lose traction when you do that.

Another credibility booster is to include testimonials and endorsements throughout the copy – both in the running text and prominently featured in sidebars. These fall into four categories:

First, there are testimonials from subscribers who testify about how much money your editor has made him or saved him. My advice to clients is to actively pursue testimonials from subscribers. Every time the newsletter closes out a winning trade, mail a testimonial request to your database. I’ve found that offering a prize or a series of prizes for the best testimonials produces the best results.

Second, there’s the detailed narrative, told by your editor, of how he spotted a major profit opportunity for investors. Weaker than a testimonial, but because of its specificity, still very effective.

Third, there’s the media mention that reads like an endorsement. I’m fortunate to be working with Dr. Martin Weiss, who has been praised in many articles by the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Forbes, and just about every other financial publication you can name. In every promotion, I excerpt these positive comments for use in sidebars.

Fourth, there’s the implied endorsement. The very fact that your editor has appeared on CNBC or quoted in The Wall Street Journal implies that he must be credible. Dig for these nuggets and use them aggressively.

I urge my clients to place a high value on public relations. The goal is to get your client quoted in the media, and to get him in front of the cameras as often as possible. You get two benefits. You can use these appearances and mentions as credibility in your mail packages, of course. Plus, the fact that your prospect has seen your editor in the papers or on TV further paves the way for you. The money you spend doing this pays dividends in greater response, revenues and profits.

I also think the way you write the guarantee is crucial to the credibility of your offer. Guarantees are much more than just “risk relief.” If it is written compellingly, the guarantee proves that the editor is absolutely convinced that the prospect will be delighted with his service.

To drive this home, I like to put a dollar amount in the guarantee: “If within 12 months, I haven’t earned you or saved you at least $5000 – 50 TIMES the price of your subscription – just let me know. I’ll rush you a full refund and everything I’ve sent you in the meantime is free!” The prospect comes away thinking, “Wow, this guy really believes in what he’s telling me. It must be incredible stuff.”

AWAI: What kind of resources do you use as you as you write a package?

Clayton: I rely heavily on my clients to provide research that backs up the editor’s views. Ultimately I’m writing in the voice of the guru. The copy must accurately represent his views. And his views are based on data that he is using. I ask to see that data.

A lot of writers will get a general topic and do their own research and kind of run off in that direction. I like to challenge my clients, when they tell me it’s an absolute lock that interest rates are going to rise, I challenge them, and I get them into a debate on it. And it’s wonderful because they’ll start trying to sell you on their view of the world. Essentially, they’re starting the copywriting process for you!

Dan Rosenthal is a legend in our business. He loves to let his clients write their own headlines. He just gets them talking, and within minutes not only has he reaped salient copy points, he’s identified at least one or two headline possibilities.

To augment information provided by the client, I also use the Internet very heavily. I get news stories, data, charts and other valuable material to add credibility to my theme. I have a brokerage account at Fidelity Online and they make detailed stock reports available free of charge. Those reports are a great way to get all the fundamentals on a company in a quick five or six page report.

One of the standbys of our industry is the “Sexy Stock” package – a package in which you introduce a company with an incredibly exciting story behind it. Maybe it’s a cure for cancer, or the best drug since penicillin, or a fuel cell company about to hit the big time. When I latch onto a stock like that, I simply open my browser, log onto Fidelity.com and download all the analysts’ reports on the stock. Using those reports, I’m able to tell a prospect that the company has no debt, that the valuation of the company is 50% lower than the valuation of the average S&P stock, and find many other ways to dimensionalize what a great company this really is.

And of course, The New York Times is absolutely essential. I subscribe online. First thing every morning, I spend an hour or two reading all of the latest business news. A lot of good ideas for new packages come out of The New York Times. It’s really a rich resource. And of course, I also scan all the other business news sites. Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, CNN, and so forth.

AWAI: What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from writing in the financial industry?

Clayton: I’ve learned that the most crucial moment in the writing process has nothing to do with writing. It has to do with establishing what you’re going to write about. And that involves building a bridge between what your prospects want and how your product meshes with those pre-perceived needs. If you get that right, the rest is child’s play. But if you get it horribly wrong, all the effort you put into your copy will be wasted.

Ironically, the editor and/or the marketing manager who hired you can be the biggest obstacles to doing this. Most newsletter gurus tend to focus on what they have to sell – not on what the market wants to buy. And most publishers are more attuned to the whims of their editors than they are to the resident emotions that are dominant in the marketplace.

Be prepared to fight ferociously for the ideas you believe in. If you lose the fight, be prepared to politely walk away from the assignment. There’s nothing more miserable than having to sweat bullets writing copy on a theme you feel is doomed to fail.

At times, your clients may hate you for standing your ground. But ultimately, your value to a publisher is based on your success rate. Each package you write costs the publisher somewhere around $100,000 just to test. If half of your packages become controls, your average control costs the publisher $200,000 up-front, plus any ongoing royalties. If one-fourth of your packages hit the big-time, you’re up to $400,000 for a single control.

Naturally, publishers look for writers who give them controls at the lowest possible cost.

So if you accept package themes you don’t believe in and end up giving the publisher a series of duds, you’ll find it more and more difficult to get assignments from that publisher. Even worse: This is a small, incestuous industry. Publishers meet every year to compare notes on copywriters. And they e-mail and phone each other constantly. Get a rep for losing packages and you’re sunk.

AWAI: Now you’ve been in the financial industry for quite a long time, and I imagine you’ve seen many changes. What’s the most important change that you’ve seen?

Clayton: Well, some of the changes are cyclical. It’s like wearing a 20-year-old tie: You know that sooner or later, it’ll come back in style again.

Take forecast packages, for example: Packages in which the guru presents seven, or 14 or 21 predictions for the economy and the investment markets for the next 12, 18 or 24 months.

They were really hot in the early 80s, but they fell out of vogue. But within the last six months, I’ve seen a whole raft of forecast packages out there, and my intelligence tells me some of them are working again.

Then, there’s the political angle. In the old days, most investment newsletter promotions had a strong political component to them. Editors were either conservative Republicans or hair-on-fire Libertarians and infused a great deal of political rhetoric into their promotions. They were more than just stock-pickers. They were crusaders for a more honest monetary system, more honest markets. They moralized about rising federal deficits and the debasing of the U.S. dollar. Today, we’ve lost a lot of that. Today’s gurus lack that moral compass and the advocacy that it spurs them to. Although politics are inextricably linked to economics, you’d be hard-pressed to find these kinds of packages today.

The biggest recent change has been the moronic profit claims I’m seeing on many packages today. In the old days, investment promotions tended to lead with the guru’s world view, on an opportunity in a particular investment area like gold, foreign stocks or zero-coupon bonds, or on the superiority of a specific investment approach. Today, most of the packages I see begin with truly outrageous profit promises: “Turn $10,000 into $1.5 million in 12 months or less!” And unfortunately, these packages seem to be working to some degree.

I hate to admit it, but I may be somewhat responsible for triggering this trend. Over the past few years, one of my clients recommended investments that actually jumped as much as 860% in just a few months. The gains were documented inside out, upside down and backwards. Heck he even has subscribers’ brokerage statements as proof that these kinds of gains were actually realized! So naturally, my packages shouted those victories from the rooftops, and we mailed tens-of-millions of those packages between 2000 and 2003. Now, however, many advisors are mailing packages containing misleading and patently false profit claims. Mark my words: The regulators are watching. And if this trend doesn’t end soon – if this industry doesn’t regulate itself – there will be regulatory hell to pay.

Another troubling trend: Several advisors are making deals with the devil – soliciting funds from publicly traded companies in return for touting their stocks in direct mail promotions for their newsletters. On the surface, these packages appear to be objective analyses of these stocks. It’s only when you read the fine print that you discover that the advisor is anything but objective: He has been bought and paid for by the company he’s promoting. That stinks.

Package formats have also changed radically since I began. Back in the 1970s, newsletters were sold in #10 packages with an eight-page sales letter. Then along came Howard Ruff with a two-color, mini self-mailer that started the copy right on page one. That was a real breakthrough. Later, in 1983 or ‘84, Ted Kikoler and I started doing magalogs – four-color 16-page self-mailers – to sell attendance to the New Orleans Investment Conference. And within a year or so, we started seeing magalogs pop up all over the place as financial newsletter promotions. Today, all of us are searching for the next great breakthrough in mail package design.

In the meantime, many publishers have returned to their roots: Simple, two color, shorter-copy packages – like Agora does for Taipan and some of their other newsletters. Design is basic – almost primitive – and that makes their packages look more topical. They feel more urgent because they don’t look like you spent six months designing them. Plus, they’re cheaper to design and to print.

AWAI: You mentioned several different formats that you can use for a financial promotion. How does your approach differ depending on the format you’re using?

Clayton: Essentially, my formats are driven by the nature of my message. If my message is topical-based on fast-breaking, current news events – I default to simple-looking packages: Two-color special report format pieces, #10 component packages, and sometimes a 6 X 9. These kinds of packages send a clear message, “This stuff is HOT!”

On the other hand, if the package theme is more evergreen, not keying off of short-term news events, I prefer packages that appear to have intrinsic value: Magalogs and bookalogs, for example.

A magalog looks like a magazine and may even display a newsstand price on the page one masthead – $4.95 or something like that. Bookalogs – typically 5×8 booklets containing 48 to 64 pages plus cover – also appear to have value.

These formats work because prospects find it more difficult to throw away something that appears to have value. If someone sends you a $5 bill – or a book or magazine that looks like it’s worth five bucks – you don’t cavalierly toss it in the trash. I created the very first magalogs for Boardroom and Weiss Research – and they boosted response rates appreciably. Much of this increase came from the fact that our doubling date – the date at which half of your response is typically received – jumped from the traditional 14 days to 18 or even 21 days. So more prospects were hanging on to these pieces and eventually ordering the product.

Another factor in choosing my format has to do with the length of the sales copy. If you’re mailing primarily to “A” lists and have a simple message, you can sometimes get away with a cheap and dirty #10 component package. But if you’re looking to elicit a response from less responsive rented files, long copy is still king.

To sell colder prospects, you need space for credibility boosters … to present the premiums in the most compelling way possible … to fully develop your selling arguments and overcome objections. In these cases, tabloids, 24-page and 32-page magalogs and special report formats work great. So do bookalogs. They let me break long copy into bite-sized chapters: Chapter I – Why rising interest rates are inevitable. Chapter 2 – Stocks that will be hurt the worst by rising interest rates. Chapter 3 – How to find stocks that double or triple when interest rates rise – your premium sell. And then in chapter 4, you’re actually getting into your offer.

Making sure you have plenty of room to sell the heck out of your premiums is absolutely crucial. One of the major innovations that Gary Bencivenga introduced to the industry was his insistence that premiums – not the product itself – are the strongest selling tool in any investment newsletter promotion. His logic was faultless: When you’re selling a financial newsletter, you can’t tell your prospect precisely what’s going to be in the newsletter next month – let alone during the 12 or 24 months of their subscription. And so early on, Gary introduced the idea of creating a free special report containing specific, tangible, useable advice and information, and writing the package around it. That was a huge leap forward for our entire industry.

AWAI: You’ve mentioned a few times in our interview the importance of the graphic artist and the design of a package. How much do you interact with the graphic artist on a project?

Clayton: I insist on controlling the entire graphics process. I supervise the designer through three, four or more graphics drafts – and when I’m pleased with the layout, I show it to the client. I then filter any comments the client may have and pass along only the ones I agree with to the designer.

There’s just too much at stake to leave this to chance – or to people who don’t understand the finer points of graphic design. The design of your package has only two purposes: 1) To grab the prospect’s attention, and 2) To present the copy in a way that makes it easy to read.

No graphics school teaches this. That’s why so many ads are beautiful, artsy-fartsy and completely unreadable. Graphic artists go to school for years to learn how to make things look pretty. They love white space and nine point sans serif type and fully justified columns and graphic images that are meaningless but that take up space and make the page look nice.

All those things are deadly enemies of successful direct mail copy. I have two or three designers who understand this. They’ve created hundreds of sales promotions for me over the years, and have been a big part of my success.

Also, I insist that my designer actually reads my copy before he begins laying it out. If I even suspect that he hasn’t read this thing, he’s going to get a phone call from me.

AWAI: What do you think is the most important attribute that a copywriter can have that will help them succeed?

Clayton: First, you have to be a self-starter. When you first begin with a new package, the amount of work ahead of you can be quite daunting. It’s very easy to put it off for a day, then another day, and so on. Even the best copywriters fall prey to the siren song of procrastination. That’s why so many of them take three to six months to produce a first draft. Part of that is because they have other packages in the pipeline, but I’m convinced that a lot of it also has to do with the fact that there’s so much to think about when you start writing a new package, it’s easier to just to put it off.

Well, there’s something to be said for sleeping on it. But you’ll have plenty of time for that after you begin writing. My best ideas come to me when I’m writing – whether I feel like it or not. It takes discipline to do that. It’s not always easy to do. But if you plan to write more than three or four long-copy packages per year, it’s essential to get started.

Here’s another thing: You have to have thick skin. Like a rhino.

You fought for a package theme you believe in. You spent countless hours reading everything the guru has ever written. You spent hundreds more hours writing, rewriting and editing your copy – tweaking, massaging, sweating blood over every jot and tittle.

Then you hand it in – and the client, who has spent exactly 30 minutes reading your draft … zero time writing copy himself … and who hired you because you’re the pro … wants you to make “just a few minor changes” in your copy.

After nearly four decades in this business, it’s still all I can do to resist reaching through the phone and strangling the bearer of the bad news. But that’s just my first reaction. I keep my mouth shut, take a moment to cool down, and then think carefully about the critique.

Maybe he is just a preening middle manager who has never invested a dime … never subscribed to an investment newsletter … never even bought anything through the mail … and couldn’t identify great copy if you held a gun to his head.

Or, maybe he’s right – at least on some level.

Either way, you have to have the composure and the self-confidence to take an objective, non-defensive new look at your copy and objectively decide whether to accept the critique or fight like hell.

Thick skin comes in handy at other times, too. Like when you win all your battles, get your way at every step – and your package bombs. I’ve had a copywriter call me in tears after a package failed to become a control. When I answered the phone, the writer just uttered two tearful words to me: “I suck!”

It’s dangerous to allow your failures or your successes to define you. You have to understand that failures occur for a multitude of reasons, many of them out of your control. You also have to understand that some of the projects you have the most faith in will ultimately fail. And when that happens, you must find the fortitude to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, learn what you can from the failure, and then find the positive mental attitude you’ll need to move on to the next project.

When it comes to qualities you need in order to produce winning copy, the answers are very different. You need to be a voracious reader before you can be an effective writer. You need to be personally connected to, interested in, and excited about the subject at hand. You need to have a visceral understanding of your prospect’s greatest fears and desires.

You need to love doing research, and finding little nuggets that others have missed. You need the knack for keeping things simple, and making even complex subjects easy to grasp. You need the capacity to focus and maintain clarity of vision as you move through the copy. You need strong organizational skills in order to move through your arguments in a way the casual reader can easily follow. You need a comprehensive working knowledge of how the economy and the investment markets work, and a mastery of the technical terms and jargon that let you speak to your prospect on their level.

You need the creative capacity to make even the most boring data a thrill to read about – and to turn negatives into positives and to overcome the prospect’s unstated objections in a compelling way. You need to love debate for the sheer sport of it – and for the fun of winning with cogent arguments. You need a healthy ego that forces you to do your dead level best whether or not anybody else notices. You need to be sensitive to that sinking feeling that hits you when reading weak copy – and that little tingle inside that tells you when your copy is spot-on. And you need a nose for the jugular – the instinct that tells you the one thing that needs to be said in order to persuade your prospect to do your bidding.

AWAI: What advice would you give to a copywriter who wants to break into the financial market?

Clayton: Read … Get on lots of mailing lists. If you know a publisher or someone who works for a publisher, get on their lists. You’ll start getting a lot of direct mail as the list is rented to other publishers. Read everything you get. Take notes of the techniques that have the greatest impact for you. Especially take notice of promotions you think you can improve on.

Then, write. Write, write, write!

If you don’t have a client, pick one and write a kick-butt package for him. When you’re done, show your package to the publisher. If you’re good, he’ll probably mail it and pay you a fat royalty. If you’re not, you’ll learn valuable lessons from the experience.

I don’t know a lot of publishers who would turn down a writer who walked in the door and said, “Look, I can kick the living daylights out of what you’re mailing right now, and if I don’t do it, don’t pay me.”

But if you think you can do it, get him to agree to the highest royalty rate possible, right up-front. My $50-per-thousand royalty rate only seems high. Fifty bucks a thousand is less than one-tenth of the cost of printing and mailing a typical promotion package. Your royalty is nothing to a publisher unless you beat his control – and even then, the extra money your control-beater gives him dwarfs what he’ll pay you.

There are other ways to break in, of course. You can run ads in vendor directories published by the DMA and NEPA. You can haunt the halls of investment shows and publisher’s conferences and button-hole every publisher who crosses your path. It’s easy to spot them; they all have badges. You can call a copywriter’s agent and convince him to represent you. You can write a package promoting your work and Federal Express it to every financial newsletter publisher in the Oxbridge Directory, then follow up by phone.

Remember: You’re a selling machine. And the most important thing you’ll ever sell is yourself. So hop to it!

AWAI: What do you think a copywriter should know before entering the financial industry?

Clayton: Million-dollar paydays don’t magically happen just because you’ve decided to become a freelance copywriter. It took me more than 20 years to break the $1 million-a-year barrier, and another five or six years before I broke through $2 million in annual income. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get to $100,000, $200,000 or even $300,000 per year in a reasonable amount of time.

Carline Anglade-Cole springs to mind. Carline is a wonderful human being and she’s got more energy than any two-year-old I ever saw. She knew some people in the industry and in her first year as a freelancer, she made six figures. Her second year she made more. In the last couple of years, her copywriting income has been enough to pay cash for her daughter’s college tuition, pay cash for a new Corvette for her husband, pay cash for a fancy in-ground swimming pool, travel the world, and buy a brand new house for her mom.

So stick with it. If you like the idea of making a ton of money at home in your underwear, you couldn’t have chosen a better profession.

AWAI: Do you have any books or television shows that you recommend to students who want to specialize in financial copy?

Clayton: Early on, I read The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises – an introduction to Austrian economics that really helps you understand the big picture: How the economy works. The Incredible Bread Machine is also a great expose on how taxes impact consumer demand and the earnings of companies you’ll be writing about.

For insights into investment strategies, read anything by Peter Lynch or Warren Buffet – the greatest investor of all time. Get familiar with the terms. You’ll want to speak to your prospects in a vernacular they’re familiar with and you’ll have to be using some stock market terminology and economic terminology. Who knows? Someday, you might need to know what “capacity utilization” means and why over 86% is considered to be the flashpoint for inflation.

On the writing side, read anything you can get your hands on by Gene Schwartz, Rosser Reeves, and Bob Stone. Although they were not exclusively financial newsletter marketers, a lot of what they have to say has application in our industry.

As far as television is concerned, I try to watch Kudlow & Kramer nightly on CNBC. And FOX has a bunch of great programs – “Forbes on Fox” … “Bulls & Bears” … and “Cashin’ In,” for example. Two of my favorites are Neil Cavuto’s nightly “Your World” and Saturday’s “Cavuto On Business.” For schedule times, just check FOXNews.com.

AWAI: Thank you for your time today, Clayton.

Clayton: My pleasure.

This interview was conducted by AWAI for its outstanding book, Secrets of Writing for the Financial Markets. If you’re serious about sharpening your ad copy, point your browser to www.awaionline.com NOW!

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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Fellow Business-Builder,

Last week I was in Tampa on a training program that a client of mine was hosting.  Not only was I there to begin thinking through the marketing campaigns we will be using, I was also there to start fulfilling a dream of mine.

As I alluded to last week, marketing to the affluent is a particular interest of mine. 

Combine that with a niche that I personally think will be big in the coming years (luxury fractional vacation homes) … and I was glad to go through the program and be certified as a consultant for the leading fractional real estate company in the world.

What is important for you to understand …

This is a niche that I have been passionately researching for some time now. 

I have a grand plan here in both the marketing side, and the developer side. 

And I want to be the best of the best in this new niche.

Today, I want to go through a plan of attack I will be using to lead the field in this niche, and share with you the exact blueprint that you, as well, can copy into your own business and lead your industry.

(1) You have to claim the spot … you can’t wait for others to appoint you “the best”. 

One of the most common mistakes I see people making when trying to position their business is the lack of assertiveness.  You cannot sit back and watch as others take the title; it is completely in YOUR hands to claim it. 

Find your unique area that differentiates and further niches your focus, then plaster that all over your marketing campaigns.  If you take the factional business I am talking about here … luxury waterfront properties will be my main focus. 

The properties I help market and convert/develop to fractionals will be $1.5 million + properties that are located on the water. 

The focus begins in a lake area that I am near to, and hosts hundreds of properties that fit this profile.  I have a website name that says both luxury and waterfront in it.  The copy and graphics will support the theme and give the exact image that highly-affluent buyers are looking for.

What about you?  Do you have tightly defined niches that you could be focusing on?  Especially ones that you have seen a higher quality of client come from? 

An easy way to start this process is to create a niche Web presence and start marketing that to test the niche and the response you get. Once you have proven it to be a winner … move all your marketing efforts to the new niche.

(2) You need to build scarcity into your business model. Everyone wants things they can’t have … and your area of expertise is no different. 

Offering free downloads are a great tool for generating quality leads, but offering free consulting or coaching time is setting your prospects up to expect this from you. 

You know this as well as I do … people do not appreciate free.

They don’t value it.  They get used to it.  And they are highly reluctant to pay for it if they have had a taste of free. 

In a market like mine, the free part comes in to the lead generation side and the initial feasibility analysis.

BUT, if we decide that their home is a good candidate for my services … there is a significant fee to set it up properly.  And the affluent buyers, who I will deal with, realize that expertise comes with a price. 

They wouldn’t let someone into their multi-million dollar beachfront home if they didn’t see a significant level of expertise.

The wording of your website and marketing materials needs to emphasise your credibility, your experience in the field, your accreditations if appropriate, and how they should expect to work with you. 

Are you setting up their expectations in advance so there are no surprises and they realize you are a professional and your time is valuable? 

How could you reposition your offerings (maybe your bundles if you sell smaller ticket items) so the value goes up and their perceptions of your expertise shifts and becomes much more prominent?

(3) Start from the end and work forward.  Figure out the exact lifestyle you want this business to give you.  Know what your days will be like, what your income will be, where you will spend your vacations with family, how you will spend and invest your money, and exactly what this new lifestyle will feel like.

In the fractional business, there are a lot of different pieces that must all come together seamlessly to the end client. 

It needs professional management companies involved, concierge companies, proficient developers, and a serious eye for fine detail (not to forget all the marketing that needs to be done to get the affluent buyers in the project!). 

There is no possible way one person, even one company, can do all of this. 

Trying to do so is setting yourself up for failure. 

So I need to have a team put together of professionals.  Each of them excellent at their own specialty. 

Knowing this up front, and putting significant amount of time, initially, in the right team, ensures I get the lifestyle I want once everyone is in place to do their part.

Scrambling at the last minute is very evident to your buyers, and will quickly turn them off.

(4) Make them qualify.  The best form of client filtering I use is two-step marketing. 

For me, it works exceptionally well with leads generated offline and then brought online. 

One single ad I wrote for a lead generation campaign ran untouched in the same newspaper for two years. 

Every time it ran, it generated me 30-50 QUALITY leads.  Those leads ended up buying 250% more than leads from other sources. 

They bought frequently, and at higher price points. 

In order to get the package I offered on the campaign, they had to go through a couple of simple steps, which filtered out the tire-kickers from the serious ones. 

Years later they continue to buy. 

So find that tightly-defined perfect client you want, find out how to get in front of them, put together a really strong package for them, and make them go through a few steps to get it. 

If you have done it right, the type of person you get will be of a much higher quality than any others.

(5) Charge more than anyone else.  I am a big believer in avoiding price competition.

There is always something else you can be better at than the lowest price. 

Seems to be a no-win battle always trying to undercut the others. 

Which is why bundling products, or selling them through membership-type models is always my first choice for commodity-type sales (much like the Million Dollar Lobster story I have shared here before). 

Find ways to position your services, your bundles, and your backend offerings at the top of your niche. 

First, those who are your ideal buyers will always wonder what you are doing that makes you the best (the highest price immediately makes consumers think there is something better … it’s basic psychology).

(6) Focus on the wow factor – both with what you sell, and how you deliver it. 

Honestly, when was the last time you were wowed by a company you bought from?  In the past month?  In the past year?  It is so rare these days that we have all become used to expecting little … and getting just what we expected.

I am making it my personal mission in the coming year to create wow campaigns with every order through my main business.

Plus, the fractional business I am discussing here just screams out to me “PLEASE WOW ME!.” 

The types of buyers I will be dealing with expect wow factors built in. 

When you are the one person to give them something extra with the transaction … they won’t forget. 

When you think of how many times you have been wowed lately … doesn’t take long to think about it… does it? 

This is a BIG reason why the Lobster Brothers have done so well (from a $9 product to a million dollar+ business in nine months … by wowing their buyers).

Do just one extra thing for your buyers … and watch what happens.  It can be a hand-written thank you card with a small gift certificate to something completely unrelated to your business.

If you sell higher-ticket items, include a very well done gift basket.  There are thousands of promotional product companies out there you can deal with for wow gifts. 

Find one that makes the right impressions … and include it with every purchase for the next two months.  Then let me know what happens!

Many of these points are not exactly highly-advanced. 

Anyone can and should be able to implement one or all of them in their business.  You may even be tempted to dismiss them because they are relatively simple.

There is no magic software that will make you a million overnight here.

No secrets that were discovered in 500 BC, now being released to the public. 

BUT … before you dismiss this and click away to another blog or article: have you actually DONE one or all of the above? 

Having these tools at your disposal will do more for your business than any magic pill that is being hyped up on the internet. 

If you don’t have the basics down, the advanced tools are completely useless. 

Once you have all of the above implemented into your business model, THEN you can and should be looking deeper into the specific advanced skills you want to use. 

Trying to skip over the basic steps means your entire model is flawed … you know that … so make sure you do it right.

I would love to hear your ideas.

To your success,

Troy White
Editor, Small Business Mastery
Supplement to THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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A Final Note:

If you have specific subjects you would like addressed, or have any comments on what you have seen here, please submit a comment below and I will see how I can help.

"Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”

–Napoleon Hill

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As copywriters and marketers, the more we understand about the basic functioning of the human brain — how it “sees” the world around it, how it processes, stores, and retrieves information — the easier it is for us to harness our own creative intelligence, while successfully influencing the minds of others.

The mind, at its most fundamental level, thinks in pictures — it sees and then stores information, even the most complex of information, as simple picture-symbols. This holds true whether the brain is taking in information through the eyes, or any of the other senses — hearing, smell, taste, or touch.

Try this experiment: Ask a friend to describe a violin. After searching for words to describe it, observe how he or she will invariably draw pictures (symbols) of it with their hands.

Consider this: The United States of America is a vast and complex notion. The concept of America incorporates such concepts as “liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness” for most Americans.

However, as complex as the actual physical phenomena of the USA is, all it takes is the sight of the Star Spangled Banner, a scowling poster of Uncle Sam, or hearing a patriotic song at a sporting event for our brains to visualize the USA in all its glory.

Symbols, and words (symbols in their own right) cause our minds to involuntarily form thoughts, and invariably, images. And those thoughts and images trigger emotional responses within us whether we want them to or not.

Simple words, symbols, and even gestures can be used to instantly trigger images in another person’s mind. If you doubt this, give someone the finger next time you’re out in traffic, and watch how quickly the other person reacts. Their response is predictable. Not because your middle digit is in itself terribly threatening, but because of the images that are involuntarily and automatically invoked by that symbol.

As a copywriter, your job is to combine powerful word symbols that generate similarly predictable visualizations in your prospect’s minds. The more vivid those visualizations are, the more real the mind perceives them to be.

Why your prospect’s nervous system
can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality …

Recent research conducted at Stanford University has verified what master persuaders have known for centuries: That mentally picturing doing an action in our mind’s eye causes our nervous system to react as if we were actually doing the action being imagined. At a rational level, we know what’s real and what’s not. But emotionally, we react involuntarily to imagined stimuli as if it were real.

Merely thinking about getting up in front of a group and delivering an important speech … asking a key client for a crucial order … or asking an attractive member of the opposite sex out on a date can cause us to break out in a cold sweat, because our functional brains literally cannot tell the difference between an imagined visualization and the real thing.

This is because our senses do not perfectly record the things we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. When we look at an object, what we see is not a perfect picture of that object. What we are seeing is our brain’s reassembled image of that object.

The object is broken down into manageable data bytes (information relating to the object’s size, shape, color, etc.) and sent to the brain in the form of electrical impulses, where an image of the object is then reassembled.

Our brains process an imagined visualization in much the same way, reconstructing it from past experiences both real and imagined, and distorting it through the filters of our pre-existing biases and beliefs.

A particular person’s response to a given symbol is predicated on the background of that person, and the context in which he or she originally imprinted its meaning.

For many people in the Western world a swastika is a symbol of horror, fear, and death. In India it is a symbol of good luck (The word “svastika” in Sanskrit, actually means “to be well”). Similarly, the Stars and Stripes is a symbol of freedom for Americans, and a symbol of tyranny for many in the Muslim world.

These are stark contrasts, but more subtle ones exist between various demographic and ideological cross sections of the economy.

This is big medicine, because the more tightly your copy aligns with your target market’s pre-existing beliefs and biases, the easier it is to generate the desired visualizations, and corresponding response. The symbolism communicated in your copy is therefore situational in nature, meaning it is relevant to a given audience.

How symbolic archetypes are used in
mass influence and persuasion …

Certain symbols are universal however, found in all times, and in all parts of the world. Psychology pioneer Carl Jung called these universal symbols “archetypes,” and believed that our brains come pre-wired to respond predictably to certain universal symbols, regardless of our situation.

Jung’s archetypes have proven to be particularly powerful tools in mass media communications, because they strike a chord in nearly everyone who encounters them. Many of them are story characters. The monster movie blockbuster Star Wars is based on Jungian archetypes.

Luke Skywalker is the archetypal hero, engaged in a dangerous mission to rescue Princess Leia, who is the archetypal maiden.

As the maiden, Leia represents purity, innocence, and naiveté. But as the story progresses, she discovers the powers of the force, and becomes an equal partner with Luke, who turns out to be her brother. In so doing, she becomes the anima (The female aspect present in the collective unconscious in men, often personified as a young girl, spontaneous, emotional, and intuitive).

Standing between them is Darth Vader, the archetypal shadow (The "dark side" of the ego, and the evil that we are all capable of) who in the end turns out to be their father.

Guiding Luke on his mission are Obi-Wan Kenobi and, later, Yoda, the Archetypal animus (The male aspect present in the collective unconscious in women, often personified as a wise old man, logical, rational, and argumentative.) They teach Luke about the force, which is analogous to what Jung called the collective unconscious.

The movie’s story line parallels the evolution of consciousness from duality to unity … as one by one the various characters realize they are in fact part of the same whole.

Archetypes are timeless, but their expression changes over time. For example, look at the way people in different demographic groups are imprinted differently when it comes to the concept of animus and anima.

The symbols “man” and “women”, or “husband” and “wife”, trigger very different visualizations for those who grew up in the 60s than for those who grew up in the 90s. The anima in man, and the animus in women are today, much more pronounced.

In the sixties, higher education, and its associated emphasis on logic and thinking, was only considered important for men. The nurturing roles of housekeeping and childcare were the primary responsibilities of women.

Today, women who compete aggressively in the workforce, and who are hard-nosed and analytical, are admired and respected — as are men who nurture the children, and get in touch with their feelings while doing the dishes and vacuuming the rug.

Imagine what kind of a lead balloon this bit of killer copy from 1924 would be today …

Edna’s case was really a pathetic one. Like every woman, her primary ambition was to marry. Most of the girls in her set were married — or about to be. Yet no one possessed more charm or grace or loveliness than she.

And as her birthdays crept gradually toward that tragic thirty mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever.

She was often a bridesmaid but never a bride.

Gradually over time, the self-concept of both men and women has changed, and every demographic group visualizes these particular symbols differently, because they were imprinted differently. The social mask of a woman in her 50s is very different from a woman in her twenties, not only because of the biological difference in age.

The word “woman” literally has two different meanings for these two women, because it symbolizes different things.

How to do the Vulcan mind meld
with your target prospects
to see what they see, and feel what they feel …

Here’s a powerful little exercise to wrap up today’s issue. The next bit of copy you write, do this. Plot a demographic timeline for your target prospect …

Take a piece of paper and divide it into three sections. In the top row at the left-hand side of the page, list your prospect’s average age (or age range, 45 to 55, for example). In the middle-top row, list the current year. Leave the right column blank for your observations. Next, map the two corollaries back to your prospect’s childhood. Your chart will then look like this.

Now, start thinking about what it must have been like to be 10 years old in 1972 … 20 years old in 1982 … 30 years old in 1992 … and so on. What memories is your prospect likely to have that may color his or her perception of the various symbols that are explicit and implicit in your copy?

At what point in your prospect’s life did he or she imprint these various symbols, and what were the prevailing social norms concerning them at that time?

Write your observations down in the right-hand column, and then close your eyes, and try to relive those experiences, as though you were your prospect. I guarantee this will put you in much closer touch with your prospect, and help you to zero in on just the right symbolism to use in your copy.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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All other things being equal, the bigger your list, the more money you will make. That’s great news for marketers and list owners who have thousands, tens-of-thousands, and even hundreds-of-thousands of subscribers.

But what if you are just getting started and don’t have a big list? Can you still make money with a small list?

The answer to that question is a resounding yes.

In fact, I personally experienced this when I first started marketing online. In one month, I was able to generate over $15,000 in sales with a list of only about 1,200 subscribers. And I built another small list (about 5,000 subscribers) that was able to generate six figures yearly.

You see, there is another key factor that determines how much money you can make with a list, other than its size. And that is the responsiveness of the list. Usually, in Internet marketing, responsiveness refers to how many people are opening your e-mails, clicking on your links, and taking action on what you want them to do (subscribing to your newsletter, for example, or making a purchase). The more people who do these things, the more “responsive” your list is.

Many things factor into building a responsive list - but one of the best ways to increase its responsiveness is by developing a personal relationship with your subscribers.

The easier you make it for them to know, like, and trust you, the more likely they will be to open your e-mails, click on your links, and purchase the products you are selling or recommending.

So, in today’s digital world, how, exactly, do you develop a relationship with the people on your list?

Here are three specific things you can start doing right away to help create a bond with the users on the other end of your websites and e-mails and, thus, increase the responsiveness (and profitability) of your list.

• First, get personal.

Whenever you are writing copy for your website or an e-mail that you’ll be sending to your list, write it as if you were having a conversation with your reader, face to face. And look for ways to incorporate your personal story and your own personality into the copy.

I make my websites and e-letters personal by keeping my readers updated on where I am and what I’m doing. I also share information about my background (such as the fact that I’m a Penn State grad - Go Lions!), as well as my opinions on current news and events.

A good format is to start your e-mails with a quick personal update, then go into your content or sales message. And the “About” page on your website is a great place to share personal background information.

(Keep in mind that Early to Rise started out as a personal e-letter from Michael Masterson to a few of his colleagues.)

• Second, put a face to the name.

Be sure to have at least one photo of yourself on your website. Your readers want to know that there is a real person at the other end. A good example is the way Alex Green uses a photo of himself with his two kids on his Spiritual Wealth website and at the bottom of each issue of his newsletter. A really effective “personal touch.”

• Third, use video.

Having video on your website is one of the best ways to connect with visitors (other than meeting them in person and shaking their hands). Soon enough, online video will be the rule, not the exception - because it’s not as expensive or as difficult as it used to be.

One tool to try is the Flip - an inexpensive camera you can use to record video and upload it to your website with the click of a button. You can see an example of how I use video, as well as the two other tactics discussed above, on my website.

All three of these simple strategies can help you and your website stand out in a cold and crowded digital world. By taking advantage of them, you’ll quickly discover that while it’s true that “the money is in the list,” there is more money in your relationship with the people on that list.

Contributed by Brian Edmondson
Guest Contributor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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Clayton is preparing for the AWAI Fast Track to Copywriting Success Bootcamp occurring later this week.  And in keeping with the spirit of that event we thought you’d enjoy this interview he did with the AWAI team a short while ago.

For regular issues of The Total Package, you know Clayton has interviewed top copywriters and marketing pros like Gary Bencivenga, Arthur Johnson, Parris Lampropoulos, Carline Anglade-Cole and others.

But occasionally the tables get turned and Clayton gets put in the hot seat. Like in the interview below conducted by American Writers & Artists Inc., on the Secrets of Writing for the Financial Markets.

And even if you don’t write in the financial markets you’re going to get a lot out of this issue because Clayton discusses some of the finer points of what to consider when trying to get bigger winners in any market.

Like, why understanding that copywriting ‘rules’ are no substitute for personal experience and more.

So grab a cup of Joe, sit back and enjoy – this one’s a beaut!

– Wendy

AWAI: Why don’t we start with you telling us a little bit about yourself; your background.

Clayton Makepeace: My father was a Methodist minister. He never made more than $500 a month in his life. We didn’t know we were poor, but we were. Dirt poor. In tenth grade, I found that the one thing that interested me most was writing. My teachers seemed to be amazed at my compositions, and submitted them for publication in the city’s anthology for high school students.

Unfortunately, my mom and dad separated when I was in tenth grade, and I had to drop out of high school in order to help support my mom. My first real job was for $1.60 an hour, running a folding machine on the graveyard shift for a letter shop owned by a national political organization based in Oklahoma.

While the folding machine chugged away through the night, I passed the time reading the organization’s fundraising letters. After a while, I became convinced that I could create far more powerful promotions than the company’s highly paid "experts" were producing. So I talked the owner into letting me try my hand at writing a fund-raising appeal for him. To my surprise, he let me do it – and sure enough, when my appeal letter mailed, it pulled better than the ones he was using at the time.

At the ripe old age of 16, I had become an amateur – read that as "unpaid" – direct mail copywriter. Of course, it didn’t even occur to me that copywriting could earn me a decent living at the time. So when the organization launched its national weekly television program, I talked them into moving me into the Television Division. By the time I was 20, I was writing, producing and directing their nationally syndicated television show. I had an annual budget of about $12 million and generated tens-of-thousands of new leads and donors for the organization.

In 1972, a California organization offered me the princely sum of $8,000 per year to run their television department for them – producing, writing, and directing their quarterly television specials. But I resigned promptly when I discovered that the principals were skimming donations for their personal use.

Then in ‘73 and ‘74, a recession hit the television and film industry. And although I was still able to pick up some freelance production work, it wasn’t enough to support my family.

Then, in 1975, I found a "Copywriter Wanted" ad for a small direct mail list brokerage in LA that was starting a creative division. I figured it was worth a shot: After all – I had written some direct mail for fundraising and a LOT of scripts for television commercials: How hard could this be?

At the job interview, the owner asked me to write an "audition" package for him – a fund-raising letter, response device and envelope teaser copy. When they read my copy a few days later, they hired me on the spot – for $12,000 a year.

Within a couple of years, I was able to build the agency’s creative billing up to $1 million dollars a year. But when I asked him to pay me the bonus he had promised for reaching the $1 million mark, he not only refused; he fired me on the spot!

So, with no money in the bank, and no other obvious choices, I became a freelance copywriter – and in my first month, I netted $15,000: $3,000 more than my annual salary at the agency!

A few months after leaving the agency, someone showed me a direct mail package that Research Publication was using to sell subscriptions to its Daily News Digest newsletter. Daily News Digest was a semi-monthly collection of political and economic stories and commentary, edited by Phoenix radio personality Johnny Johnson.

Johnny was one of the true pioneers of our industry. At the time, Johnny – along with Bill Bonner at Agora, Howard Ruff at the Ruff Times, Bob Kephart at what is now KCI, Martin Weiss at Weiss Research, and Tom Phillips, at Phillips Publishing – were literally inventing the investment newsletter industry that we know today.

After reading Johnny’s promotion for Daily News Digest, I called him up, introduced myself and told him that his sales letter sucked – BIG time! I told him that I could quadruple his response. But Johnny said that money was too tight and he couldn’t afford to pay me: So, I offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse: "If I don’t beat the living daylights out of your control, pay me nothing,” I said. "If I do, you owe me $800."

Long story short: As I predicted, my package did quadruple Johnny’s response, and I spent the next several years creating successful promotions exclusively for his stable of investment newsletters.

Next came my big break. By 1982, I was earning $1,200 per promotion package and around $100,000 per year. That’s when a fellow from Minnesota asked if I would write a direct mail package promoting his brand new financial newsletter called The Money Advocate. I did; and within about 18 months my sales copy had generated 120,000 paying subscribers.

After a few months of writing for The Money Advocate, I asked my client if he would let me take a whack at the promotions he was sending to his active subscribers. He had been sending monthly promotions to his actives to sell them on investing in rare coins, and was generating about $360,000 in sales per month. The client accepted my offer, and when the dust had settled, my rare coin promotion had multiplied his usual monthly sales – by a factor of ten!

As you can imagine, the client was thrilled with the results and in a panic to retain me exclusively to create rare coin promotions for his file. I demanded a $250,000 annual retainer, plus a $40,000 signing bonus, plus a whopping 5% of sales revenues. He accepted, and within a year, we were selling $16 million worth of rare coins per month. After a while, a friend called to say that my client was cheating his customers – delivering low-quality rare coins at premium-quality prices. I resigned instantly and structured an exclusive marketing arrangement with Jim Blanchard of Blanchard and Company – the second largest rare coin dealer in America.

Over the next four years or so, I was able to quadruple Jim’s revenues to more than $115 million per year. Then, in late 1988, Jim sold the company to a subsidiary of General Electric for tens-of-millions of dollars. I ended my relationship with the firm and returned to freelance copywriting, creating newsletter subscription and book promotions for Phillips Publishing, Boardroom, Rodale Press, and many other financial and health publishers.

In 1991, Phillips Publishing called to ask if I would help them launch a new alternative health newsletter, Dr. Julian Whitaker’s Health & Healing. I agreed, and over the next three years, my promotions were mailed to 90 million prospects, and generated more than two million paying subscribers. As a result of this success, I was retained exclusively by Phillips to provide marketing consultation and to write for Health & Healing as well as the company’s new health and investment newsletters – including letters for Dr. Christiane Northrup, Elaine Garzarelli, the Dolans and many others.

Finally, in 1998, I ended my exclusive with Phillips Publishing to take on a new challenge at Weiss Research. Since then, I have provided marketing and management consulting services and created promotions that quadrupled the number of paying subscribers to Dr. Martin D. Weiss’ Safe Money Report, Undiscovered Stocks, Stocks on the Move and other investment newsletters.

I also help Weiss create new products for sale to active subscribers and have created sales campaigns that generated up to $5 million in revenues in as little as six weeks.

AWAI: Now it sounds like you had a fairly unorthodox transition into this industry. Do you think it’s still possible for somebody who hasn’t gone through college, but is a very talented writer … is it possible for somebody in that situation still to break into this industry and what advice would you give them?

Clayton: Sure! The secret to becoming a great copywriter has nothing to do with what kind of sheepskin you have hanging on the wall.

I’m a high school dropout. I got a GED diploma and about a year-and-a-half of college taking very general courses … certainly nothing on marketing or advertising. But in more than three decades as a professional copywriter, not a single client has ever even asked about my educational background.

What we do is about the numbers. You write a package. It gets printed. And within two weeks, you know if you’re a hero or a putz. If your packages win, no one is going to say, "Well, we know this guy has written all these winning packages, but we’re not going to hire him because he doesn’t have a degree."

If your copy performs, your dance card will be filled regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman … old or young … fat or thin… gay or straight … white, black, brown, or chartreuse, for that matter.

I’ve mentored quite a few beginners over the years – and as far as I know, not a single one of them had a formal education in copy-writing or marketing. Brien Lundin’s copywriting skills have made him a millionaire, and president and CEO of the New Orleans Investment conferences. Carline Anglade-Cole was a marketing director at Phillips Publishing when I began helping her refine her copy skills. Today, Carline is one of the top direct response pros in the alternative health newsletter industry. I also mentored Parris Lampropoulos, Kent Komae, Robert Hutchinson and Brad Petersen early in their careers. All of them are million-dollar copywriters today.

So when you ask if a "talented writer" can still break into this business, and my answer is "Sure!" But that’s only half an answer, because in the end, what we do isn’t about writing. Yes, you have to have the basics. You have to have an adequate vocabulary – or at least know how to use a thesaurus. You have to know how to construct a coherent sentence.

But if you want to think about yourself primarily as a "writer," you’re probably in the wrong business. To make it as a direct response copywriter, you must be – first and foremost – a salesman.

Not a single great copywriter I’ve ever met thought of him – or herself as a "writer who sells." Instead, they saw themselves as "salespeople in print.”

It’s a crucial distinction. As I said, I’ve mentored many copywriters over the years, and I just named the ones I’m proudest of. What I failed to tell you is that when it comes to training copywriters, I’ve had far more failures than successes. And one of the most important lessons those failures taught me is this: Great writers often make lousy direct response copywriters. Why? Because the writing gets in the way of the sale. Financial publishers aren’t looking for great literature. Nobody ever intentionally rolled out three million losing packages just because they were enchanted by the prose!

Give me a successful life insurance rep or a used car salesman or any other kind of salesperson who has been in the trenches and excelled – and if he or she can also construct even a semi-decent sentence on paper, I’ll turn him into a multi-millionaire copywriter.

A great salesman doesn’t give a damn about split infinitives or dangling participles. He has no aspirations to write the Great American Novel. To him, Shakespeare is just another brand of fishing tackle.

Whether by heredity or by training, great salesmen are masters of seduction: They select their prospects with care … seize their attention … instantly put them at ease … are attentive – attuned to what the customer is thinking and feeling at every moment …deftly stroke the right emotional erogenous zones with the appropriate intensity and at the right times … cultivate a rising sense of urgency … and then compellingly close the sale in a way that leaves the customer blissfully satisfied and eager to repeat the experience.

So instead of thinking of yourself as a writer, see yourself as a master salesperson who just happens to work with the written word. Everything you do needs to be about selling.

Your headline must sell the reader on reading your deck. Your deck needs to sell the reader on reading your first sentence. And the first sentence – and every sentence thereafter – needs to sell the reader on reading the next paragraph.

Put simply, the greatest copywriters are the greatest persuaders: Our mission is to help prospects see things from our perspective. And it’s an art; not a science.

AWAI: Then what is the role of education and training for beginning copywriters?

Clayton: The first thing a writer needs to be able to do is to differentiate between strong copy and weak copy. You have to make that judgment minute by minute – hundreds of times a day – as you conceptualize your promotion piece, as you write, and as you edit what you write. It sounds simple, I know; but you’d be surprised how few copywriters – or their marketing manager clients, for that matter – really know the difference.

That’s where training comes in – especially early in your career. Direct response copywriting dates back more than 100 years – to the old Montgomery Ward catalogs of the late 1800s. Since then, millions of direct response catalog blurbs, post cards, sales letters, self-mailers, print ads, e-mails, TV spots and radio commercials have been produced. Each of them has elicited some level of measurable response. Many were duds. More were just so-so. A memorable few were dynamite. The point is, because direct response copy generates a measurable response, we know what has worked in the past. And over the years, much of that knowledge has been condensed into sets of "rules" – guideposts for copywriters.

Master those rules. Internalize them; make them a part of your DNA. They represent lessons that others have spent billions of dollars to learn. But understand that the one constant in our business is change. Markets mature. Prospects become more sophisticated. Techniques that kick butt in a bull market will likely doom you to failure in a bear market, and vice-versa. What worked a year ago, five years ago, rarely works as well today. As the S.E.C. likes to remind us, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

More than that: Understand that rules are no substitute for personal experience. As you mature as a copywriter, allow what you learn from your own successes and failures to override these rules. If you blindly follow the rules every other copywriter is following, your packages will sound like every other package out there. Creatively breaking the rules that your competitors follow – and doing it in a way that boosts response – is what separates the mediocre copywriter from the pro.

AWAI: I’m going to jump back to the financial industry. When you write for the financial industry, can you give us your basic approach to a package?

Clayton: First and foremost, it’s essential that you understand your prospects’ fears and desires at the deepest possible level. The legendary Bob King – the marketing genius who presided over Phillips Publishing during its period of most explosive growth – referred to these fears and desires as the prospect’s "resident emotions." In the case of investment copywriting, resident emotions are the feelings that a majority of prospects already have about their finances: The fears that wake them up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat – or the waking dreams that have them so excited that they find it difficult to go to sleep in the first place.

When you can put your finger on what your prospects’ most powerful resident emotions are now, you’re half-way there. You can plant a touchstone in your headline and deck structure that immediately gets the prospect on your side, and a mantra that returns to that touchstone throughout the sales letter. They can say, "This guy has the solution to something I’ve been losing sleep over." Or, "This guy can get me something that I want desperately."

The financial newsletter industry and the alternative health newsletter industry – both of which have generated billions of dollars in sales over the years – were both born of the same basic resident emotion: A healthy distrust of the establishment.

Back in the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter was telling the American people that we should lower our expectations for the future. The experts were telling us that the world was about to run out of oil. Economists knew that Washington’s rampant printing of U.S. dollars was killing the value of the dollar – and yet the government was feigning ignorance as to what was causing inflation.

At one point President Carter chastised his chief economic advisor for even using the word "inflation" in public. So in his next speech, the advisor announced, "I’ve been asked not to use the ‘I’ word. So in this speech, I’m going to use the word ‘piano’ instead. And let me tell you: The current piano is one heck of a big problem!"

To the average investor, it felt like the inmates had seized control of the asylum. The value of their money was vanishing before their very eyes, and yet Washington was in denial. As a result, millions of investors lost faith in the government’s ability to create a profitable investment environment. They realized that, if they were to have any hope of surviving inflation – let alone becoming financially independent or enjoying a comfortable retirement – they would have to rebel against the establishment and take control of their own finances.

To do that, they needed a guide to them tell them what Washington and Wall Street wouldn’t. That’s when the pioneers of this industry – Howard Ruff, Harry Schultz, Harry Brown, Bob Kephart, Tom Phillips, Martin Weiss and Bill Bonner - stepped up to the plate. They said, “You’re right to distrust Washington and their puppets in the mainstream financial media. If you wait around for them to make you rich, it will never happen! You’ve got to do it yourself, and I want to help."

Their message was in perfect synch with investors’ primary resident emotion at the time. And as a result, we sold millions of subscriptions to their investment newsletters.

Years later – in 1991 – many Americans had developed similar feelings about the medical industry. Marcus Welby – the caring family doctor – had been replaced by cold, uncaring, greedy medical corporations. Doctors were doling out drugs with horrendous side effects. One drug, Tambocor, killed 100,000 Americans before it could be withdrawn from the market - more than were killed in the entire Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the medical industry was stubbornly ignoring breakthrough studies suggesting that simple lifestyle changes and good nutrition could often do what drugs couldn’t.

As a result, millions of Americans were becoming increasingly distrustful of the medical establishment. They were thinking, "My health is too important to trust to strangers. I think they’re taking advantage of me to get to my money. I think they’d be willing to poison me with toxic drugs, cut anything off of me, or even cut a hole right through me just to get at my wallet! I’ve got to get my own solution. And I need a dependable guide."

It was in this environment that a vice president at Phillips introduced me to Dr. Julian Whitaker at his offices in Irvine, California. At the time, Dr. Whitaker had written a couple of relatively obscure paperback books about reversing heart disease and a few columns for the local paper in which he railed against the medical establishment for its refusal to even evaluate promising alternate ways of treating America’s #1 killer.

After talking to the doctor for an hour or so, I returned to my hotel room, laid out what I believed would be an ideal newsletter for folks who were fed up with the establishment and ready to take control of their own health. Then, sitting by the hotel pool, I wrote a direct mail package to launch that newsletter.

At the time, nobody had successfully promoted an alternative health newsletter in America. The only successful letters in the field were mainstream letters, published by Harvard, Berkley, Tufts and the Mayo Clinic. And none of them asked for cash with the order. All of them were "bill-me" offers, and all of them were cheap – just $19 or $29 per year.

Now here I was, writing a promotion for a new newsletter … from a virtually unknown doctor … that was in the unproven alternative health field … that cost 33% more than letters published by some of America’s most respected medical institutions … AND that required the customer to pay up-front

When I submitted the copy, there was so little enthusiasm for it at Phillips that almost no one bothered to even look at it. The VP and I proceeded to push it through graphics, printing and mailing with only minor alterations to my first draft.

A few days later, my phone rang. Orders were pouring in. Phillips’ telemarketers were swamped: Customers were cooling their heels on "hold" for fifteen, even twenty minutes just to place their orders. The mailroom was stacked to the ceiling with Business Reply Envelopes, each one stuffed with money.

When the dust had settled, my launch package for Health & Healing had generated an eye-popping, unheard-of 4% response. That was more than EIGHT TIMES the response levels Phillips had ever seen on its mainstream health letters!

Soon, we were rolling out with 3 million … 5 million … up to six million pieces per month. No matter what list we tested – health names, investment names, catalog buyers, book buyers, even expires that were so old we had to clean the lists before using them – everything worked!

In the next three years, we sold more than two million subscriptions to Health & Healing at an average unit of sale of about $57 – more than $100 million in all!

But even that was just the beginning. Those subscribers enabled Phillips to build a vitamin business, which, I understand, now generates hundreds-of-millions of dollars in sales each year. And Health & Healing created an entire industry, as Phillips’ competitors launched health newsletters and vitamin companies of their own.

That’s the kind of magic that can happen when your copy connects with your prospects’ resident emotions!

AWAI: Do you have any rituals that you use for generating ideas for hitting those nerves?

Clayton: My first mental step is kind of a Zen thing: BE THE PROSPECT.

The single-most important thing that any investment copywriter can do is open a brokerage account and put a significant amount of money into it – money it would hurt you to lose. Then, go through the bewildering experience of researching the stocks you’re going to invest that money in. Then, put that money into the best stocks you can find. All of it.

Suddenly, you’ll begin experiencing the daily news and the daily ups and downs of the stock market in a distinctly personal, tangible way. You’re thrilled by every advance, crushed by every decline, and disappointed when your stocks go nowhere. And you’ll experience the agony of reluctantly selling a losing stock and turning a paper loss into a real loss.

For more clues that reveal how your prospects are feeling, expose yourself to the same media input that they’re getting. They’re getting their perception of the markets – and therefore, the emotions they have about them – from CNBC, CNN and Fox News. They’re reading the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Barron’s and the business section of the New York Times.

Connecting with these news stories also helps in another way. It tends to make your packages more topical - more connected with the day’s news. And that can be a powerful advantage. Imagine your prospect, sitting there with a package you wrote about making money in a rising-interest-rate environment. Meanwhile on TV, they’re announcing the latest hike in the Fed Funds Rate hike. In effect, you’re putting the financial media to work for you!

Another way to get a good read on your prospect’s resident emotions is to go to sites like Gallup.com, Zogby.com, Harrispollonline.com and some of the other polling sites online. The answers to the political, economic and investment questions they’re getting right now can give you great insight into what investors are feeling. I also recommend that my clients poll their own subscribers and even send polls to rented investor lists – especially when they’re struggling to get a new control.

From time to time, the newsletter industry hits hard times – usually when investors are preoccupied with other things, and response just drops by thirty or forty percent. Promotions that were generating 100% return on investment suddenly begin coming in at 70% or even 60% of cost – even on "A" lists. It happened during the O.J. Simpson trial. It happened when Reagan was first elected, and later on, when he was shot. It happened when Princess Diana was killed. And it happened in the build up to the Gulf War, both of them. Usually, these slumps in response only last a few weeks.

But in 2004, it began happening in March, with bad news corning out of Iraq and as terror threats increased in the run-up to the presidential elections. Those are the times that try copywriters’ souls. Your only defense at a time like that is to clearly understand how your prospects are feeling. Figure out why they’re not reading their mail. And polling is a powerful way to do that.

AWAI: That’s very good advice and it’s advice I hadn’t heard before. On to my next question, in the financial industry, is there a typical prospect and if there is, how would you describe them?

Clayton: First, you’re talking to guys: Predominantly, to older, white Republican guys. Last time I looked, our average prospect was around 65 years old. But that doesn’t mean he has the same psychographic profile as a 65-year-old did when I started writing. Today’s 65-year-olds were teenagers in the 1950s … 20-somethings in the 1960s … and 30-somethings in the 1970s. And today, they’re far more hip, sophisticated and involved than their parents were at the same age.

Many of them are active or retired small business owners with substantial net worth. At The Money Show – which derives its attendees primarily from investment newsletter subscription lists – the average attendee has a net worth of around a million dollars. But that’s not necessarily liquid, investible wealth. They tend to have a big chunk of their net worth tied up in the family home, and possibly, in a business as well. So the average prospect may only have $100,000 to $200,000 to actually invest, and many of your prospects have substantially less.

Another key to understanding our prospects is that they are not merely casual readers who are content with the variety of views that are soft-pedaled by anonymous reporters in the big investment websites and magazines. They’re looking for emphatic, confident leadership: A more personal relationship with an investment advisor who has a strongly held world-view and investment philosophy that’s in synch with their own, and who offers clear, unhedged advice.

AWAI: Is there a particular tone or voice that reaches that market best?

Clayton: The tone of voice that you use and also the format of the package you design should always connect with the emotion you’re trying to convey. The investment publishing industry uses two kinds of packages: 1) Fear packages that connect with something the prospect is already fearful of and that offer a solution, and 2) Greed packages that connect with something that the prospect wants and offers to give it to him.

I do nearly all of the promotions for Weiss Research, the publisher of Safe Money Report. A couple of years ago, Dr. Weiss was the first to discover accounting irregularities at major corporations. He simply crunched the numbers and discovered hundreds of companies where stated earnings didn’t add up with the revenues and costs.

Now, put yourself into your prospect’s shoes: You’re an investor, trying to buy value stocks – shares with favorable price/earnings ratios – and you suddenly discover that the companies behind your stocks are lying to you about half of that ratio – their earnings!

These guys are swindling you. They’re telling you they have earnings way up here, but really they’re way down there … In short, they tricked you into buying stocks that were ridiculously overpriced. Even worse: You know that when the companies behind your stocks are eventually forced to restate their earnings, share prices are going to tumble and you’re going to get your head handed to you.

Now I ask you: What is the appropriate emotional response to that piece of news? Any investor worth his salt would be livid! Incensed! Outraged! Any other reaction would seem oddly detached and out of place. So the tone of our package was outrage.

But evoking emotion alone isn’t enough to make a sale. You also have to offer an outlet to the prospect – a way to directly address, and in this case, salve his outrage. So we also offered the solution: A free report entitled The Weiss Corporate Earnings Blacklist that allowed investors to make sure none of the companies behind their stocks were likely to be cooking the books.

Sometimes a little bit of humor also works. A few months ago, we found a bunch of billionaire corporate executives who had been out on tour, essentially telling investors, "Buy my company’s stock!" Meanwhile they were dumping hundreds-of-millions of dollars of their own companies’ shares! My idea was to run pictures of these crooks – Bill Gates and others – above a headline that read, "Two-faced, Lying S.O.B.s!"

In the investment newsletter industry, packages with a passive or scholarly tone almost always fail. And for a simple reason: Intellect alone doesn’t sell. Emotion does. You can use an intellectual argument to trigger an emotion, but if you go in on a purely intellectual basis and you have this cold, stilted, tone, you’re not going to trigger the emotions necessary to make a sale.

Look. There is always something your prospect feels he needs much more than the newsletter you’re trying to sell him. Maybe he’s in dire need of a new house, a new car or a new suit of clothes. Maybe it’s a bigger contribution to his own IRA. Or maybe it’s a vacation, a romantic night out with his wife to help their marriage, or a gift for the kids or grandkids.

As a copywriter, your job is to convince the prospect that buying your newsletter is the single best thing he could do with his money now. You can do that negatively – by convincing him that without you, he faces the specter of massive losses. Or, you can do it positively, by convincing him that his small investment in your newsletter will help him realize his dreams of a richer life now, a more secure future and a more comfortable, more exciting retirement. Both approaches conjure powerful emotions – and those compelling emotions are what it takes to make the sale.

Stay tuned for part two of
Secrets of Writing for the Financial Market.

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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Here’s my proprietary secret for cranking out multi-million-dollar sales copy in less time than most writers take to plan their strategy …

Dear Business-Builder,

I predict that if you put this idea to work, this will turn out to be one of the most helpful issues of The Total Package ever.

Why? Because if you write any kind sales copy, I’m going to show you how to get your first draft done in a fraction of the time it’s taking you now – so you can spend much, MUCH more time sharpening and polishing your prose before you show it to your client.

One of the questions we get asked a lot around here is:

“Where do I start? I’ve got a copy of the control and the competition’s best promos. I’ve got reams of research – all these facts about the product and the problem it solves. And I’ve got tons more stuff I’m thinking about from copy courses I’ve taken, books I’ve read and actual experiences I’ve had writing copy.

“At this point, my brain’s a mess – teeming with hundreds of disconnected, even contradictory facts, figures, rules and ideas. I’ve got an unyielding deadline staring me in the face. And that blank screen is scaring me half to death!”

Well, the fact is, there are as many ways of getting started as there are copywriters. More, actually – because each copywriter may begin each project differently.

I offer one of my favorite ways to get a jackrabbit start in Beat the Blank Page Blues – with the process for organizing your research into a rough draft and even step-by-step outlines for everything from short print ads to long tabloid copy.

Since that strategy is fairly clinical, let’s call it “the left-brain approach.”

Recently, I used an entirely different approach. Since it requires a little imagination, we’ll call it (you guessed it!) “The right-brain approach.”

Here’s the skinny on the prospect, product and offer …

Client: Weiss Research

Promotion: Web page – copy will be recycled in an e-mail campaign to customer file.

Copy length: No limits – typically 12 to 20 pages or 12 pt. Times New Roman single-space in Word.

Prospect: 65-year-old male investor. Average net worth: $1.5 million. Politically and financially conservative. Subscribes to 2.5 investment newsletters on average. Twenty percent have purchased an investment product from my client. The balance are subscribers to his free-e-zine only.

Product: International ETF Trader. Issues “buy” and “sell” signals for ETFs that own foreign stock market indexes

Normal one-year price: $2,190

Discount: 55% off if they join before March 31

Net one-year price: $995

One-year savings: $1,195

Normal two-year price: $4,380

Discount: 59%

Net two-year price: $1,795

Two-year savings: $2,585

Premium: Global ETFs, Global Profits report

Value: $149

Risk relief: Full refund within 60 days, pro-rated refund for the rest of membership period

Testimonials: New product — none available

Order modes: Online and toll-free telephone

First Draft Deadline: 72 hours

So, to get started, I began by internalizing the research package the client sent me – storing it away in my subconscious (the “filing cabinet” of the human brain).

Then, I slept on it for a night.

Next morning, I did what I’ve recommended many times in these pages: I closed my eyes, leaned back in my chair, visualized my typical prospect, imagined myself bumping into him on the street, and proceeded to have an imaginary conversation with him.

Here’s how my side of that conversation went …

Hey, Fred – you old profit hound, you! How’s it going? Make any money last year?

Your portfolio’s up 15% in a year? Wow. The S&P 500 was only up 13%. Not many professional money managers ever beat the market averages – that’s great!

So your $100,000 portfolio is now worth $115,000? You made a 12-month, $15,000 gain? Congrats!

Me? Well, promise you won’t hate me, but I’m up 130%.

Yeah, I guess that’s right: About eight times more.

Yes, it was a $130,000 gain. Enough to turn my $100,000 portfolio into $230,000 in a year.

Yeah. I know. Lucky.

What? Leverage? NO WAY! No, you know me: I never mess around with anything risky. I didn’t invest on margin. No, no futures. No options. No leverage at all.

How did I do it?

Oh. Well, last year I noticed that the U.S. stock market was only the 56th most profitable in the world. And since 55 other world stock markets were leaving ours in the dust, I figured that riding the slowest horse in the race isn’t exactly the smartest way to win.

So I sold most of my U.S. stocks and moved my money into some of those foreign stock markets.

Emerging countries, mostly. China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, Brazil and a few others.

What? Difficult? Complicated? Used to be. Not now.

They’ve got these new things called exchange traded funds – ETFs for short. They’re like mutual funds but without all the fees and trading restrictions, and they own all of the stocks traded on a country’s stock market. They’re as easy to buy and sell as any U.S. stock.

Yeah. If you own the China ETF and the China stock market goes up 130%, you get a 130% gain.

I know – sounds too good to be true. Thing is, it is true – and it’s happening right now. Lots of world stock markets are jumping like crazy. The S&P only rose 13% last year — but Mexico’s stock market was up 48.6% … Indonesia was up 55.3% … Russia was up 71% … China was up 131%  … and you won’t believe this, but Vietnam was actually up 144.5%.

That’s right – you could have more than doubled your money in a single year. You could have just bought the ETF on the Shanghai exchange and then sit on your hands for a year. You’d have raked in a 131% gain.

Why are these stock markets so hot? Simple: These countries’ economies are growing a heckuvalot faster than ours.

Our GDP only grew 3.4% last year – but Singapore’s economy exploded by a mind-blowing 7.7% — more than TWO TIMES FASTER.

And China’s economy has been growing about 10% per year for more than a decade — THREE TIMES FASTER than ours!

No, of course it won’t go on forever. But it doesn’t look like it’s going to end anytime soon, either. See, so far, most of the gains in these foreign markets were caused by foreign investors like me buying into them. Now, though, there’s a “critical mass” thing happening.

Half the world’s population – three billion souls – live in these emerging countries. Now that they’re leaving the farm for jobs in the cities, they have money to save, invest and spend.

They’re entering the middle class and buying everything that moves. TVs, computers, cell phones, MP3 players, refrigerators, microwaves – all the stuff we take for granted. And as they do, they’re driving earnings at hundreds of domestic companies through the roof. And you know what happens when earnings skyrocket: Stock prices skyrocket, too!

Plus, all those new wage-earners are just now beginning to save and invest – bidding up the price of the stocks listed on their local stock exchanges.

So most analysts expect that investing in those exchanges will be even more profitable from here on out.

How do I know which of the one-hundred or so country ETFs out there are likely to make me the most money? Simple: I joined a service that does it for me.
International ETF Trader.

Yeah. They use a trading system that outperformed the S&P 500 by more than six to one for more than 16 years to find the markets that look like they’re going to lead the pack.

Then, they tell me what to buy, what to pay, even how to place my trade online or with a broker.

And when they figure it’s time to sell, I get an e-mail telling me to take my profits. Easy as pie.

Yeah, I know – there’s a lot of hype and hucksters out there. But the company behind IET has been around for 35 years. Heck. Even Hulbert has given this trading approach its top rating.

Expensive? Yeah, kind of. It’s $2,500 a year. But heck I made ten times more than that on my very first trade. And besides – they’ve got this special available for new members who join before March 31 – it’s only $995 per year.

Right. That’s less than $2.73 a day – less than the price of a gallon of gas. You could easily make ten times that much on your very first trade – the rest is gravy.

Best part is, if you’re not happy with your profits, you can cancel and get your membership fee refunded.

No, joining is easy, too. Here’s the membership website. Or, if you’d rather join by phone, here’s the number to call.

Yep, you can do all this with the brokerage account you already have.

They guide you to the foreign stock markets that are beating U.S. stocks by up to ten to one.

The give you buy and sell signals for each trade so you can do it quick and easy either online or with your broker.

If you join now, you can save up to $2,585 off the regular membership fee.

It’s easy to earn more than your membership fee on your very first trade – after that, it’s all gravy.

And you’re in control – you can cancel anytime for a full refund.

You’re right: It really is a no-brainer. But if you’re serious about joining, you’d better do it quick. On April Fool’s Day, the membership fee goes back up to $2,500 a year.

Sure. The website is X and the phone number is y.

You’re welcome, Fred! Next time I see you, let me know what you think. I’ll bet you’ll be tickled pink.

Ok – see ya!

 … And so, when I finished my little imaginary conversation, I had a sturdy skeleton to flesh out. I had my most compelling sales arguments down pat, and a tight, logical outline for presenting those facts.

All that was left to do was to hang a little meat on the bones – which I did, in about eight hours of writing time — and delivered a strong first draft long before my 72-hour deadline expired.

Now, I know how you love swipe files, so just point your browser HERE to see the final version of the copy.

Oh – and three more things you should know:

First, every fact, figure and claim in this copy is fully documented using reliable third-party data. No stretches, no exaggerations. The story itself is so compelling, it stands on its own.

Second, this page – and a dozen or so e-mails we carved out of it generated more than $2.8 million in sales in just a few weeks, and …

Third, the trades recommended by International ETF Trader are already making our customers more money than they could have made with the S&P index all last year – and it’s just getting started.

Now, that’s what I call a Win, win, WIN!!!

My client made millions … I made hundreds-of-thousands … and our customers are laughing all the way to the bank.

Don’t you just love it when a good plan comes together?

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

P.S. I was going to suggest that the headline should be “One miserable little prick every six months” – but thought better of it, as most people would think the letter was about a woman who only dated losers.

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I am at a client event in Tampa this week and want to share some exciting news with you.  The event I am at is for a very unique niche that targets the affluent buyers that you should be targeting.  Why?  Because they are the fastest demographic to recover from this economic mess we are all in.   The trainers at the event are consistently sharing their success stories in the affluent market, and the rapid growth in demand they are seeing right now. 

According to Pam Danzinger, the leading publication for affluent marketing, “At Parisian luxury fashion brand Hermes, best-known for its leather bags that start at US$7,000, sales are up 10%, while demand for Coach’s ubiquitous US$325 handbags has slumped. High-end New York City apartments may have seen their values plunge, but at Fifteen Central Park West, billed as the ultimate Manhattan luxury building, at least eight condos are reported to have sold for nearly 40% above what their owners paid for them in 2007.  Now you’ve got to spell luxury with a ‘V’ and the ‘V’ is for value, and value doesn’t mean cheap."  They want an experience, and are willing to pay for it”

One of the ways you can get your more affluent clients buying again is to give them what they want … a unique experience that no one else is giving them.  What follows is aproven model for getting your affluent buyers buying again.

Even if you aren’t targeting a certain part of your business offerings to the affluent (which I think you should be), this STILL applies to you!

At times like this, your customers NEED to hear a calm, reassuring voice telling them there is a future ahead, and you are there for them no matter what they need.

Rather than someone telling them how the sky is falling and every one of us is doomed to financial destruction (which the media gladly does 24/7), they want someone to help them feel at ease.

Announcing your Emergency Customer Update
and Appreciation Events

These are mini-events (preferably live, if you can) … designed to show them your stance on the economy and how it impacts your industry.

This is also designed to help you get closer to your clients, at a time where everyone else is slashing their marketing expenditures and burying their head in the sand, waiting for it to pass over.

The more you are in front of them now, the more trust they will have in you, and the more value they will see in buying from you when they open their wallets again.

These can be breakfast meetings, luncheons, dinners or teleseminars … the point is to get out there and in front of those who buy from you.

Step 1: Target your audience:

• Figure out if you want all your clients to be invited, or a smaller, more targeted group.  (Now is the perfect time to go through your list and find the perfect clients you want to continue working with - and not work so hard on the others.)
• Do some research with them to find out where they are at, how scared they feel, and what type of information would be the most help to them right now.
• Get controversial.  Build a story that you will share with them at the meetings.  Think through the stance you will take on the market, on the economy, on people’s mindset, and anything you can think of that may help them understand your point of view as we move into the unknown months ahead. Think about what Clayton did with his Imbeciles article – major controversy – and major kudos for him for being the one to say what most people were thinking.
• Create an executive summary or market/business update that you can hand out at your meeting.
• Make sure all the applicable players are involved. Everyone within your company should be there.  Partners, suppliers, customers, etc.
• Ask your clients to invite their friends and associates.

Step 2: Meeting Venue and Ambiance Setting (the marketing theme you want to use):

• Find a nice, clean, professional venue to hold your event at. Do not go overboard or too lavish here.  If you have a nice office boardroom, use that. 

  If you are holding an evening event, you may want to bring in wine professionals and have a tasting event, or professional sushi chefs to show them how easy it is to make simple at-home sushi rolls. 

  (If you are doing wine tasting or are offering drinks, do your event first, then the drinking … hecklers come out of the woodwork when alcohol is added.)

• Design them to be smaller, more intimate, and more personal.  In order to show them you honestly do care about them, do not pack them in with 200 others.

Step 3: Strategically invite the groups of people you would like all in the same room at the same time:

• If you have no choice but to do a teleseminar, tell those you are inviting that it is a small group of people that will be on the line. They have been chosen to be part of the panel to discuss ____(your topic)_____. The last thing you want is a line full of people … you want intimate discussions with your best, most coveted clients.
• Preferably, place personal calls to each person you want to invite. (Remember, small groups of eight people will not take a lot of phone calls to fill.)
• Tell them the intentions behind the meeting (value added content, market updates, and strategies for them to weather the storm).
• Invite your most affluent clients as well – try and have them in each group.
• E-mail them – but personal e-mails … no mailing services.
• Even send FedEx packages, if your products and services justify it.

Step 4: Wow them at the meeting:

• Show them the historical facts behind recessions.  Help them understand what a recession is, and what happens during the typical cycle.  (Sounds basic? Most people do not know this … be the one to help them understand.)
• Hand them your market-update sheet or package.
• Make sure they get great content, great food, and great company.  You can even bring in an outside speaker to talk about related areas of interest.
• Do NOT pitch them anything here. This is not the time or place to be selling anything … now is the time to show pure value and content.
• Have respect for everyone there – start and finish right on time.
• Give them a gift … something simple yet memorable.  Put together your own quotes book of your favorite inspirational quotes and have them printed up by a print on demand supplier.  Have your company information in the book and a catchy title for the cover.  It costs you next to nothing, but it will have a lasting impact on them.  (You can even have their names custom-printed on the cover.  Print on demand is very inexpensive these days.)
• Educate them about what you have planned for the next 6–12 months in your business.  And tell them you will send them monthly updates as part of this session. (Make sure they understand the information shared is private and not to be shared.)
• Make sure all of your people are in attendance, dressed professionally and prepared for the meeting.

Start putting one or two of these on a week, and watch what kind of a response you get.

This may sound unusual … but that is the point. 

No one else, especially your competition, is doing this.

Show them how much you care about them and their future right now and they will respond in kind when they feel more confident in the economy.

They may feel helpless about the economic conditions out there, but you can help them see the upside, and give them specific strategies for the challenging times ahead.

Never forget …

… During recessions, many businesses fail …

… But it is also the time when absolute riches can be made in any industry, if you position yourself correctly with your existing clients.

Find a few ways to make these lessons work for your business…

To your success,

Troy White
Editor, Small Business Mastery
Supplement to THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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A Final Note:

If you have specific subjects you would like addressed, or have any comments on what you have seen here, please submit a comment below and I will see how I can help.

"Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”

–Napoleon Hill

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Marketing with live online Web-events can be one of the very best ways to expand your business …

The model I’m going to show you here is a powerful lead-generation engine that empowers you to grow your prospect and customer lists at warp speed.

It’s a product-creation engine that allows you to use other people’s creativity and energy to dramatically reduce the amount of work and time required to get new products into your sales pipeline.

It’s a powerful revenue generator that frees you to sell high-ticket, high-margin products much more easily and cost effectively than you otherwise could.

Plus it’s also the perfect vehicle for building precious rapport and relationship with your list and thereby inspiring increased frequency of purchase, and so much more.

And what is that model?

A themed-series of training events with quality partners, delivering quality content and powerful offers, of course.

Look at the leverage:

A HIGH PROFIT teleseminar or webinar series is a co-mingling of assets: Your own assets … and the assets of others … coming together in such a way as to create leverage for all parties involved.

Time … talent … money … products … customers … prospects … software … service provider relationships … employees … contract workers. All of these things have unrealized value that can be realized through these events.

The first thing to do is to make a list of vendors that interact with your market. Think about all of the things your customers buy before, during, and after they buy whatever it is you’re selling … and you’ll quickly come up with a long list of potential partners who can bring additional assets to the table. I’ll show you how to vet and contact those partners in a moment.

Now, think about how you can leverage your own assets by temporally combining them with the assets of a select group of joint-venture partners who interact with your target audience in a way that benefits everyone? By everyone, I mean you, your potential partners, and your mutual customers and prospects.

Consider how you can use technology to further leverage your assets and the collective assets of your partners? In other words, what technologies can you use to create leverage, making your venture as profitable as it can possibly be?

And finally, give some thought to how you can create psychological leverage with your events as well. By this I mean – how can you take your basic marketing message, and deliver it in a context that amplifies its selling power?

One such series of events I put together was called 9 Bootstrap Money Makers for Lightning FAST Profits. I was tapping into a very powerful desire in the marketplace. Money. What kind of money?  Immediate money.  Anything new about that? No. But it had a hook …

It was a series of nine calls, featuring rags-to-riches entrepreneurs facing a challenge. And the challenge was this: What would you do now if your assets were stripped … your lists and products destroyed … and your notoriety erased? And all you had were your wits, living expenses for one month, and $1,000 in seed capital to get back on your feet? What would you do?

So your first task in the planning stages is to come up with a powerful theme for your series. Something dramatic and intriguing that’s going to immediately peak people’s interest.

Here’s another example of a great hook — Internet Marketer of the Year. This was a series put on by Russell Brunson a couple of years back.

Russell made a competition out of it. The theme was basically this: Let’s see which marketing guru can give away the best money-making information, as voted by the event attendees, and we’ll crown that person “Internet Marketer of The Year.” Brilliant! 

These BIG IDEAS are in and of themselves “ASSETS”
that you as a series organizer bring to the table …

They are ready-made promotional opportunities for your partners.  So one of your most important tasks when planning your event is to create and develop a winning theme. You’ll know it when you find it because you’ll be instantly energized to carry your project forward.

Next, you’ll want to create a partner short list. You need to narrow down the list of potential partners based on the assets they’re likely to be able to bring to the table.

Before you approach anybody, you need to make a determination as to whether they’re going to be a good partner for you. And it’s a numbers game.

Depending on what you’re selling, there may be hundreds, maybe even thousands of potential businesses you could partner with to create your series. You need to narrow that list down. I no longer do this myself. I have a member of my staff scouring the Internet five days a week looking for potentially suitable partners.

I give her a list of criteria to look for: Sells marketing related stuff $200 to $500 in price … aggressively collects e-mail addresses on their site … Alexa ranking on at least one of their sites below 150,000 … and so on.

I also had her spend several days reading the websites of every partner we’ve ever done a successful joint-venture training event with in the past, to get a feeling for what I’m looking for.

She maintains a spreadsheet that lists the name of the company … who endorses them, the front person … the name of their newsletter … the URL of their squeeze page … a list of their products ranging between $200 and $500 … what these products are … what they do … who they’re for … the sales page URLs and Alexa rankings.

And then I come along once or twice a week and I look at the new entries she’s made. In just a few minutes I can evaluate the data and move the best contacts onto a short list. She then sends an introductory e-mail out to each short-listed partner that explains in detail what we’re up to.

Networking at live seminars and trade conferences also works well. I don’t care for traveling, so I don’t go to many of these events, but the few that I have gone to have been very productive for me.

Social networking seems to be a great way to make connections. I’m not a big fan of social networking, but I have used Twitter to make introductions, and I see other people using a wide range of different social networking platforms, apparently successfully.

Personally, I find good old-fashioned e-mail to be very effective, especially if you’ve already got a little traction in the marketplace. The more exposure you’ve got, the more likely a potential partner is going to recognize your name and respond.

PR is important. At the very least, write articles and submit them to the major article directories so that when they type your name into a search engine, lots of stuff comes up.

If you’re shy on notoriety, make up for it by personalizing the invites to a greater degree. Prove to the person you’re courting that you’ve done your homework on them. Do these things … and create a powerful promotional theme that you can pitch. You’ll get a response.

And you don’t need a bunch of
big shots with massive lists either …

Remember, your series is getting a personal endorsement from each partner. Make sure your marketing for the event is strong, only approach partners who have a real relationship with their lists, and work closely with your partners to create events that sell … and you can do great even with small lists of 2, 3, 4,000 people.

Here’s the revenue model I used for 9 Bootstrap Moneymakers for Lightning FAST Profits …

It was a nine-week series, one call per week. Before the first call in the series, each one of my nine partners promoted it to their list. To attend the calls was free. All you had to do to attend was opt in to my list.

As soon as somebody opted in to the list, they were presented with a sales page making a deeply-discounted, time-limited offer on the recordings and transcripts of all of the calls, $77 for digital download, $127 for the material shipped on CDs.

So with this model you are collecting leads that you can sell to again and again, each one worth $5, $10, $20 or more depending on your skill at selling to them. And on top of that you’re collecting money immediately for a product that has not even been created yet.

It gets even better …

On each call, your partners each sell a mid-to-high-ticket product, ideally in the $200-$500 range. Don’t bother selling low-ticket products at these events. I mean think about it …

If you’re selling a $500 product, and you’ve got 200 people on your call, and you sell just 15% of those people, that’s what, $15,000? But if you’re selling a low-ticket product for say $97, and you’ve got 200 people on the call, that means you have to sell almost 150 units to get your $15,000? You need a 75% close ratio to get there. Not going to happen.

So we’ve got this rush of sales of the recordings and transcripts at the beginning of the series. Each week you’re earning affiliate commissions from partner sales at the end of the calls. Plus you’re making a steady stream of recording and transcript sales each week while you’re inviting people to the calls. And you’re making deadline-driven sales of your partner products as well.

And then, at the end of the series, you’ve got another rush of recording and transcript sales because the price is going way up when the series is over. Then, you can rip the best calls out of the series and sell those individually as lower ticket front-end self-liquidating offers.

So it’s a very powerful model. Will you give it a try?

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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And why not? Simply by changing what you say or how you say it you can double, triple or quadruple your profit.

I have been writing copy for about 50 years now – and keep hoping that if I keep trying long enough I might begin to get it right more often.

So like you I’m always looking to see what I can learn from people. 

The person I have learned most from in the past three years – this is not oily flattery, but the truth – is Clayton.  I base this on research. The other day I reviewed all the files I have downloaded or copied in the last three years.

I discovered that I had 2½ times as many of Clayton’s ideas as anybody else’s. 

Why? Because I have never seen anybody analyze more perceptively or beguilingly the infinite number of details you must attend to if you want to make people buy or reply. But is that all there is to success?

Actually, no. The first thing is to concentrate on what makes the most difference – not what you like or find most interesting or congenial. But most people don’t. Mark Twain had a good joke about it: “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.”

Creative is fun. We all like playing with words and pictures – and with today’s whiz-bang technology you can make videos and do podcasts and all that groovy stuff.

The devil is, though, that good creative is damned hard to do. Most of us professional scribes can tell you that one way or another long copy works better than short. But knowing that is useless if you do not know how to write long copy. It is very, very hard, no matter how many people tell you their magic system will do it all for you. 

“A gifted product is mightier than the gifted pen”
– David Ogilvy

As a writer I’d love to think creative is the most important element in success. But it isn’t.

So if you sometimes wonder why despite all your studies you are not doing too well it may be because you have got your priorities upside down. 

In my experience most marketers have.  They will spend 10 times as much time looking at creative elements as examining other things which may be more boring but are infinitely more important. 

First and most important, by a very long chalk, comes what you deliver and how well people relate to it.

By that I mean the quality of your product or service and its positioning. Improving what you sell or altering the way people perceive it will have more impact on your results than anything.               

That includes every aspect of that product and service – such as how it is delivered.  Dell became the leaders in their field as a result of a number of things, one of which was selling directly.  Another, offering people a tailor-made computer.

Ogilvy & Mather, with whom I worked for a number of years, were very hot on research because David Ogilvy’s background included a spell with Gallup Research.  They discovered that the positioning of what you offer was the most important element in advertising. 

What is positioning? I think it is your character or personality. I often quote the former Chairman of J Walter Thompson, Dr John Treasure, who described it by saying: “Why do I love one woman rather than another?  It is not just a matter of physical attributes.”

Or take a couple of examples from a totally different field to the one you usually read about here, booze. 

Which booze do you prefer?

Jack Daniel’s Whiskey is hugely successful largely because of its positioning. I bet you couldn’t tell it from other whiskeys by taste alone.

But it is distilled in a quaint little town in Tennessee by down-to-earth folks who are clearly as honest as the day is long.  They would never sell you or make a lousy whiskey.

In England the largest selling beer is Stella, which originates in Belgium.  When it was originally launched it had what might politely be called a nothing positioning. They could have played on the Belgian heritage – Belgium is famous for its beers – but they played on nothing. 

The original ad was “there is a terrific draught (or draft) in here.” It’s just a play on words.  There was no real thinking behind it.  The beer was then re-launched with an appeal based upon its strength.  It was slightly stronger than other lagers.  This did not make that much headway.  Then it was launched again with the proposition “reassuringly expensive” and that has been its proposition ever since.

Higher price implies higher quality.

Before we get to the creative bit we love there are a few other things you should consider. The most important is the element that makes direct marketing, and particularly on-line marketing, so powerful. That is the ability to test, measure and research what is happening as a result of what you are doing or what you plan to do. 

I have lost count of the number of times people have come to me bent upon doing something without the faintest idea of whether it is likely to work or not in advance, or the faintest idea afterwards whether it did work or not.

The blessings conferred by Google

I would say Google Analytics is the most powerful weapon marketers have been given since the advent of the coded coupon in newspapers.

I am still astounded that so many people are conducting marketing on the Internet without taking advantage of the extraordinary facilities offered by Google, which you all know about.

There are many people who are more qualified to talk about this than I am so I will shut up, except to say how astounded I have been over the years by one simple thing that could be done – yet most people do not bother to do. 

I once had a job which involved me going around the world to Ogilvy & Mather offices stirring up trouble, giving advice, talking to clients, making presentations and commenting on creative work.  Time and time again I would be shown a piece of work and asked why it had failed; and time and time again I would say “have you rung the people who received it to find out?” Almost invariably the answer was “no.”

Simply asking people whether they received something or recall receiving it, whether they understood it and what they thought it said and why they did not reply is so laughably simple and yet so important that I am astounded so few people bother with it. 

The next most important thing is targeting.  About 28 years ago I wrote in my book Commonsense Direct Marketing that even the worst message sent to the right people will do better than the most brilliant message sent to the wrong people.  Gary Halbert put it rather well when he used to say the most important advantage in marketing if you were running a hamburger joint was to have a starving crowd. 

The next most important thing generally speaking is the incentive, because what I give you is going to be far more important than any bullshit I can come out with. Sometimes deciding not to have an incentive can be important.  When I worked for the Franklin Mint during their glory days they repeatedly tested incentives - and they never worked.  They went against the positioning of the Franklin Mint which was a sort of rarefied upmarket approach.

Which brings me full circle – to the thing that everybody likes to spend their time on, yet which is so difficult to achieve: Better creative. As I said at the start, you’ll get better advice on that here from Clayton and his friends than just about anywhere I can think of.

But remember, it is NOT the key to success you may imagine

What are you supposed to take away from this?

Get your priorities right.  Most people don’t.  Most people like to concentrate on what they enjoy most – the creative bit.  It is important – but by no means the most important element. Often the least important.

Contributed by Drayton Bird, Hon. F IDM
Guest Contributor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

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Great job spitballin’ new headlines and decks last week, everyone! 

Right up front, let me remind you that the single strongest human desire is not for air, or food, or water or even sex; but the desire to change someone else’s copy.  So you’ll forgive me if I alter your timeless prose slightly below …

Nizom’s head idea cut straight to the chase:  “An obscure 17-cent stock staring down the barrel of a sales explosion of up to 7,100%? You have to be kidding!”  See how adding the sales growth story to the existing headline gets the greed glands going?  A great start!

Emmette Massey’s “The Health Care Shock Heard Around the World” is a solid attention-getter.  Its only weakness is that it doesn’t communicate that this is about a huge investment opportunity.  Investors who aren’t also health info consumers might not stop to take a look.

Roy Furr’s headline, “Diabetes Profits” is a stopper for sure – but I’m concerned that it might send the message that we’re going to profiteer from other people’s misfortune.  Roy, is there a way to turn this around so it’s clear that the profits are from easing diabetes suffering?  That said, the deck copy that follows is excellent.

John Babin’s “Baby 17-Cent Stock to Grow Into 17-Foot Money Monster” leaves me a bit confused; trying to figure out what a “17-Foot money monster” might look like.  Solid deck copy, though, John! :)

Matthew’s idea, “When This 17-Cents-A-Share Company Puts Eli Lilly, And Other Big Names Out Of The $74.2 Billion-A-Year Insulin Business … Will Your Portfolio Take A Hit?” sends a powerful message.  My challenge:  Can you find a way to say it with half as many words?

And Deb Day, Eric, Jamie, Sam, Serrac and Sid ALL offered great ideas that would strengthen the body copy of the sales letter.

And the three winners of our $197 Grand Prize are …

1. William Konupek for his entry:

“Man lives after being shot
5 times in one day!”

It doesn’t call out the audience or get my greed glands going, but it is VERY clever and a sure-fire attention-getter.  I can see it working with a solid deck that immediately makes it clear that this is about an investment.  Besides; I figure it deserves a prize because it made me chuckle.

2. Debra for her headline:

“Diabetes Breakthrough has Investors
Dancing in the Streets
– and Patients Joining Them!”

It’s fun and intriguing – and her deck copy gives enough detail to convince me to keep reading.

3. Tom Bell for his entry …

If You’re Diabetic, Listen.
If You’re An Investor, Cheer!

Tom, this headline works.  Of our three winners, it’s my hands-down favorite.  However, your deck copy reads more like the opening copy of a sales letter – how would you shorten and punch up the deck to make it read faster?

So congrats, Tom, Debra and William – Steal These Secrets Volumes I and II are yours!  Just e-mail Martha at Feedback@MakepeaceTotalPackage.com and she’ll hook you up!

Yours for Bigger Winners, More Often,

Clayton Makepeace
Publisher & Editor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE

P.S. I was going to suggest that the headline should be “One miserable little prick every six months” – but thought better of it, as most people would think the letter was about a woman who only dated losers.

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