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Module One:

PSYCHOLOGY &
MARKETING
How to Make Anybody Do Anything You Want (And Love It) While
Learning More Than Literally Every Marketing Graduate On The Planet
In A Single Afternoon Of Reading
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The Most Useful Superpower In The

Universe

If you’re like me you’ve spent a really ridiculous amount of time drunkenly discussing
the age-old question, “If you could have just one superpower, what would it be?”
The reason the question is so interesting is because it forces you to pick one great
superhuman skill, which immediately gets you thinking…
Which ONE THING would be the most all-around useful thing?
Superhuman strength would be pretty cool, but how useful is it really to be able to lift
really heavy things?
What about flying? I mean, it would definitely be a convenient (and cheap) way to travel
and you could probably pack stadiums full of people to do areal shows, which could
make you rich, but being able to fly doesn’t really help anybody or allow you to do much
of anything except save on airline tickets.
Of course, there’s invisibility (pervs), laser eyes, impenetrable skin, and the list goes on.
No matter what, it’s difficult to find that ONE superpower that is the most useful one in
any given situation.
Well, after a lot of thought and consideration, I’ve finally settled on what I think is the
most useful superpower in the universe…

The Ability to Make Anybody do ANYTHING You Want

This trumps all other superpowers.
It doesn’t matter what anybody else is capable of if I can make them do whatever in the
hell I want them to do.
Flying?
Superhuman strength?
Invisibility?
I rule the roost if I have the power of persuasion – at that point, they are nothing but my
little balls of putty, to mold into any shape I please.

I’m Pulling The Strings.

And, the cool thing about this “superpower” is that it’s real…and I already have it…and
you can have it too, because it’s a learnable skill.
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You don’t have to fall into a vat of nuclear waste or get bitten by a gnarly insect or
anything!
Even better – I’m going to teach you this skill throughout this book.
This skill allows people like me to write a few words down on paper and generate tens
of millions of dollars in my PJs…

Sometimes Piss Drunk

If God hit the “reset” button right now, sucked me up into the clouds, and said I could
start everything all over again at 20 years of age, but I had to choose between two
“starter pack” options…
A) $1 MILLION in my bank account and a Swiss Army Knife

B) $0, an averaged sized dick, and the ability to write good copy
… I’d choose option B.
Why?
Because no matter what city I ended up in, all it would take me is writing a couple of
letters to bring in a non-stop flow of cash.

I Bet You Think I’m Full Of Shit.

But let me learn you something – this isn’t anything new.
I’m not different.
I’m not innovative.
I’m just copy-catting the hell out of guys who are either dead or old enough to be my
grandpappy.
Guys like the legendary Gary Halbert (who’s super dead).
He wrote this boring letter in the early 70s…
Dear Mr. Macdonald,
Did you know that your family name was recorded with a coat-of-arms in ancient
heraldic archives more than seven centuries ago?
My husband and I discovered this while doing some research for some friends of
ours who have the same last name as you do. We’ve had an artist recreate the
coat-of-arms exactly as described in the ancient records. This drawing, along
with other information about the name, has been printed up into an attractive
one-page report.
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The bottom half of the report tells the story of the very old and distinguished
family name of Macdonald. It tells what the name means, its origin, the original
family motto, its place in history and about famous people who share it. The top
half has a large, beautiful reproduction of an artist’s drawing of the earliest known
coat-of-arms for the name of Macdonald. This entire report is documented,
authentic and printed on parchment-like paper suitable for framing.
The report so delighted our friends that we have had a few extra copies made in
order to share this information with other people of the same name.
Framed, these reports make distinctive wall decorations and they are great gifts
for relatives. It should be remembered that we have not traced anyone’s
individual family tree but have researched back through several centuries to find
out about the earliest people named Macdonald.
All we are asking for them is enough to cover the added expenses of having the
extra copies printed and mailed. (See below.) If you are interested, please let us
know right away as our supply is pretty slim. Just verify that we have your correct
name and address and send the correct amount in cash or check for the number
of reports you want. We’ll send them promptly by return mail.
Sincerely,
Nancy L. Halbert
P.S. If you are ordering only one report, send two dollars ($2.00). Additional
reports ordered at the same time and sent to the same address are one dollar
each. Please make checks payable to me, Nancy L. Halbert.

I bet you think that letter’s not anything special.

I bet you think, “Hey, I could write a letter like that.” And you’re right, you can.
In fact, pretty much anybody reading this can write a letter like that, which is why this is
going to be the best and most profitable book you’ve ever read in your life.
Want to know how much ol’ Gary made for this simple little letter?
$90 MILLION smackaroos.
In fact, at one point he had to hire a staff of 40 employees whose job was to just deposit
the checks that came in the mail.
And, I’ll tell you right now – in a condensed nutshell – exactly why this letter made so
much damn money.
You see, when Gary Halbert (known as the greatest living copywriter in the world, when
he was alive that is) wrote this letter he did it in the dark because he couldn’t pay his
electric bills.
He also did it in the same room as a seething wife who wasn’t too happy about her
dead-beat husband sucking up all their money with another one of his stupid schemes.
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It was in that moment he had a eureka moment.

After years of reading all the big books on copywriting and about sending promotions to
people through the mail, all telling him to put his message in bulky brightly colored
envelopes with “teaser messages” on the outside shouting for people to “Open now!
Special discount on whatever bullshit you don’t want!” he realized something…
…people throw that crap away as soon as they get it.
So, he asked himself, “How can I make sure they don’t throw my letters away?”
The answer was deceptively simple – send it in a plain white envelope with a first class
stamp with an actual return address on the outside, and actual typed-up words.
Then, write the letter as if it was casually from a friend.
Boom – Gary was a multi-multi-millionaire with a single letter and the letter mailed out to
over 600 million people (to Macdonald and McCanless and McPhearson, and pretty
much any other Irish and Scottish last name variation you can think of).

Get A Load Of This Letter Written For The Wall Street Journal Around
1975
Dear Reader,
On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men
graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young
men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and
both – as young college graduates are – were filled with ambitious dreams for the
future.
Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion.
They were still very much alike. Both were happily married. Both had three
children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern
manufacturing company after graduation and were still there.
But there was a difference. One of the men was manager of a small department
of the company. The other was its president.
What Made The Difference?
Have you ever wondered, as I have, what makes this kind of difference in
people’s lives? It isn’t a native intelligence or talent or dedication. It isn’t that one
person wants success and the other doesn’t.
The difference lies in what each person knows and how he or she makes use of
that knowledge.
And that is why I am writing to you and to people ike you about The Wall Street
Journal. For that is the whole purpose of The Journal: to give its readers
knowledge – knowledge that they can use in business.
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A Publication Unlike Any Other

You see, The Wall Street Journal is a unique publication. It’s the country’s only
national business daily. Each business day, it is put together by the world’s
largest staff of business-news experts.
Each business day, The Journal’s pages include a broad range of information of
interest and significance to business-minded people, no matter where it comes
from. Not just stocks and finance, but anything and everything in the whole, fast-
moving world of business…The Wall Street Journal gives you all the business
news you need – when you need it.
Knowledge is Power
Right now, I am looking at page one of The Journal, the best-read front page in
America. It combines all the important news of the day with in-depth feature
reporting. Every phase of business news is covered. I see articles on new
inflation, wholesale prices, car prices, tax incentives for industries to major
developments in Washington, and elsewhere.
The Journal is also the single best source for news and statistics about your
money. In the Money & Investing section there are helpful charts, easy-to-scan
market quotations, plus “Abreast of the Market”, “Heard on the Street” and “Your
Money Matters,” three of America’s most influential and carefully read investment
columns.
If you have never read The Wall Street Journal, you cannot imagine how useful it
can be to you.
A Money-Saving Subscription
Put our statements to the proof of subscribing for the next 13 weeks for just $44.
This is among the shortest subscription terms we offer- and a perfect way to get
acquainted with The Journal.
Or you may prefer to take advantage of our better buy – one year for $149. You
save over $40 off the cover price of The Journal.
Simply fill out the enclosed order card and mail it in the postage-paid envelope
provided. And here’s The Journal’s guarantee: should The Journal not measure
up to your expectations, you may cancel this arrangement at any point and
receive a refund for the undelivered portion of your subscription.
If you feel as we do that this is a fair and reasonable proposition, then you will
want to find out without delay if The Wall Street Journal can do for you what it is
doing for millions of readers. So please mail the enclosed order card now, and
we will start serving you immediately.
About those two college classmates I mention at the beginning of this letter: they
were graduated from college together and together got started in the business
world. So what made their lives in business different?
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Knowledge. Useful knowledge. And its application.

An Investment in Success
I cannot promise you that success will be instantly yours if you start reading The
Wall Street journal. But, I can guarantee that you will find The Journal always
interesting, always reliable, and always useful.
Sincerely,
[SIGNATURE]
P.S. It’s important to note that The Journal’s subscription price may be tax
deductible. Ask your tax advisor.

This letter is the single most profitable piece of marketing in marketing history.
It mailed out between 1975 and 2003 and, during that time, it pulled in just short of 3
BILLION bucks.
The guy who wrote this letter would never have had to work another day in his life if he
didn’t want to.
Why?
Because – just like me – copywriters charge handsome base fees (I charge around
$10,000 typically to write a single letter) plus a percentage of the royalties.
So, let’s say he was on the low end with a 3% royalty agreement…he’d pull in
$90,000,000 (that’s a lot of zeroes).
Oh hey! That’s also the amount of money Gary Halbert made for his single letter, almost
over the same time-span.
Seeing a trend here?
Being a successful screenwriter or a fiction novelist can take years and years of
constant rejection and penniless white-knuckle living before there is even a glimmer of
success and even then the likelihood is that it will NEVER happen.
Yet, dumbasses like me can write a SINGLE letter and…

Make More Money Than Any New York Times Best-Selling Novelist
Does For An ENTIRE Year of Book Sales
And that’s been the case for nearly 100 years (and it hasn’t changed…and it’s not going
to change).
Drop me in a random city without a penny in my pocket and I’ll write money out of thin-
air, and you can too.
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If you’re reading this right now and thinking to yourself, “I’ve been duped! I can write
simple letters like that too, where’s my millions!?”
Don’t get your panties in a twist…

All Shall Be Revealed

You see, it’s NOT the writing that makes these people successful (most probably
couldn’t pen the next great American novel, and many of them are ADHD-afflicted
dropouts like me who snoozed through most of their English classes).
It’s the SUPERPOWER they have.
They have developed the single most useful skill in the universe – they have the ability
to make anybody do what they want.
Because they understand the basic principles of persuasion and why people take the
specific actions they do.
They simply translated that knowledge into the written medium.
Because, like me, they probably don’t like people, are lazy as hell, and hate putting on
pants.
But, that skill translates into many other mediums as well.

If You Want To…

 Pickup chicks (or get those dudes drooling over you)

 Get a job anywhere doing anything

 Sell literally anything in any environment

 Make people like and respect you

 Get promoted

 Get a raise
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 …and pretty much get your way

…then PERSUASION is how you do it.
It doesn’t matter whether you write it or say it, it’s the same thing –

Knowing How To Push The Right Buttons…

…and pull the right levers on your fellow “human-bots” that makes them do what you
want them to do.
Are you having a moral crisis right now?
Don’t worry – you’ll figure out some way to justify using this unfair advantage – this
superpower – on your fellow man.
In fact, as you’ll find out in the next chapter, you’re ALREADY a sneaky, manipulative
dirtbag with all the people you love the most already, and you’re completely fine with.
If it makes you feel better, I say what Agora Financial says to their new training
recruits…
“It’s EEM – Ethical Emotional Manipulation”.
Before we move on, I just want to drill the value of this superpower a little deeper into
your skull…

This “Superpower” Has NEVER Changed and it WILL NEVER Change

Aside from making anybody do what you want…
…separating yourself from 99% of the slack-jawed yokels out there slugging it out in the
deplorable cesspool that is the middle of life…
…And tacking a bunch of zeroes onto whatever number is currently in your bank
account…
…It’s important that you understand that this skill has not changed since the dawn of
time and will never change (unless we become robots).

Humans Are Humans

You and your mushy pink brain is the same one your ancestors had 300,000 years ago.
It’s the same one the people who created the first agricultural settlements had 10,000
years ago.
It’s the same brain the citizens of the world’s first developed cities had 8,000 years ago.
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And, for all that time, people who had the superpower I’m about to teach you (either
naturally or through learning) have been using their abilities to…

Exploit The Brain And All It’s Predictable Patterns

Short little angry dudes like Napoleon.
Sly little broke dudes like Casanova.
Skinny, untalented butt-ugly low-class want-to-be painters have used this skill to
become dictators (Hitler anybody?)
Men have risen to power and wealth from obscurity using these principals the same
5,000 years ago as the first direct response copywriters did over 100 years ago, making
their millions with nothing but a typewriter and the local post office.
These same principals have not changed an ounce in our new hyper-connected digital
world, either.
The same letters those guys wrote 100 years ago pull multi-millions of dollars in online,
just easier and in less time.
Martin Luther – the man who nailed 95-bullet points to a Cathedral door (called The 95
Theses) essentially used his ability to write persuasively to start a new faction of
Christianity and topple the monopoly of Catholic rule all the way back in the 1400s.
Werner Von Braun – a Nazi rocket scientist who defected to the American side right
before Germany fell – just wanted to put people in outer space.
But, the American government didn’t trust him. So, he wrote a letter that got the
attention of Walt Disney, who then put Von Braun on prime-time TV to explain how he
can use a rocket to put man in space.
So persuasive was his “sales letter” and his “video sales letter” that the American public
was thrown into a fervor to go into space.
The American government had no choice but to hire him… and without him, we would
not have landed on the moon.
Understand this – all he did was write a persuasive letter.
Whether it’s Caesar using these principals to seduce the masses…
….Or some lazy unwashed dropout with bad posture drinking beer with whores and
vagrants in Thailand using this superpower to make tens of thousands a month (me, if
you didn’t know)…
The superpower is the SAME.

Nothing Has Changed Because People’s Brains Haven’t Changed

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Unless Elon Musk follows through on his promise to develop a robotic neural lace that
installs on our brains and essentially makes us robots, then it doesn’t’ matter how great
our computers get…
…How fast our Internet becomes…
…Or how many news articles spell the doom and gloom of the human race because of
our ever shortening Internet-addicted attention spans…
What I teach you will WORK every single damn time, predictably like clockwork.
And, hey, if Elon Musk does create a neural-lace brain thingy, I’ll be first in line.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
Alright – let’s get you armed with your new superpower.
You’re in for one hell of a ride you lucky bastard.

The Secret to Being a Self-Aware

Superhuman in a World of Pre-
Programmed Roomba Bots
If you think you’re a special little snowflake filled with original thoughts and emotions…
…Who is in control of your life.
…Who makes well-informed rational decisions.
…Who is original and one-of-a-kind while being distinguished from those around you.
…Who is smart enough not to get scammed by petty bullshit.
…Who doesn’t do things like “judge a book by its cover”.
…Who has the capacity to experience real true lasting love.
…Who generally feels in control of your actions and decisions then…boy do I have
news for you.

You Ain’t Any Of Those Things, Buttercup

You are a pathetically predictable biological machine with clearly visible, well-
documented triggers that people like me can pull anytime we want you to take a specific
action.
Oh… I know… I know.
That can’t possibly be true.
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You’re a human being, goddamnit – you’re not stupid, you know when you’re being
“had”, you’re above all that petty crap, you’re smart, your life has meaning, and you’re in
control.
Your brain recoils in horror that anyone would suggest you’re nothing more than a heap
of chemical reactions loosely put together over millions of years of evolution all
designed to drive you toward making nearly every decision in your life based on the
following three things…
1. Feeding
2. Fucking
3. Reproducing
And – hey – I’m right there with you in the same boat.
But the difference between you and I (and other “persuasion artists” or “salesmen” or
“copywriters” or “marketers” whatever label you want to put on it) is that we are
successful because…

The Best Salesmen See Life As It Literally is, Not How We WISH It To
Be
The reason why this is the most useful superpower in the universe is that, those who
know how to sell ANYTHING (whether it be themselves, a product, or an idea)
understand the reality of how people in this world operate.
You see, the vast majority of the people out there go through life never truly having a
clue of why they do the things that they do.
I liken them to Roombas…
That little vacuum that just wanders around the kitchen floor.
It hits a wall and then immediately turns around until it bumps into another wall and so
the process repeats itself over and over again.
That right there is the majority of your fellow man – and the whole time they are living in
a dream world where they think they make informed decisions and take rational, logical
actions (HINT: they don’t, neither do you, and neither do I).
Where the superpower really kicks in is when you thrust yourself out of this mindless
Roomba existence and look at yourself from the third person and recognize…

“I Am Feeling This Way Because…I Am Taking This Action

Because…”
When you do this, suddenly you are separated from the vast majority of other people.
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It’s like you’re a robot that has suddenly become self-aware, you “woke up” and you see
your fellow Roomba bots bouncing off the walls like morons, and suddenly you know
WHY they’re doing it.
There is no conceivable way to quantify the ADVANTAGE this gives you in every aspect
of your life.
From your romantic relationships to your business relationships to selling to making
money…to whatever.
But, the problem for many people is that they don’t want to accept this reality.
The idea that we are not special snowflakes and that we are, in fact, highly predictable,
fallible lumps of flesh with a pre-programmed set of actions that go on like clockwork, is
terrifying to most people.
They don’t want to think about it.

They’re In The Matrix, My Friend.

And, right now I’m about to give you the red pill….even if I have to shove it down your
throat.
NOTE: My goal for this book is to give you things you need RIGHT NOW to be
successful as a copywriter, or really any aspect of life that requires persuasion skills
(which is any part of life where you’re not sitting alone on your couch). The things
discussed in this module are incredibly widespread and dense, however, I’m trying to
boil it down to its most useful. If you want to learn more, I’ll recommend a series of
books that will deepen your understanding of these principals at the end.

Rule One:
You’ve Never Made A Rational Decision In Your Life
Everyone – unless they have literal brain damage – buys based on emotion FIRST,
then they rationalize that decision later with logic.
If you’re a healthy functioning adult, every decision you’ve ever made in your life
(including the decision to buy this book) was made emotionally.
Now, if you ARE in fact a healthy functioning adult, your pre-frontal cortex is doing hula-
hoops right now recalling your reason for buying this book (and other purchases you’ve
made in the past) and you’re rationalizing it.
You want to make more money, easier.
You want more clients, faster.
You want to work from home (or anywhere in the world with a laptop).
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I promised you the knowledge of how to do these things, and – rationally – you
purchased this course because of those logical reasons.
You had a desire, I promised a solution to that desire.
But, as you’re about to find out, it wasn’t logic that made you buy this book.
It was your desire to…
Satisfy Your Emotions
You FELT the desire to make money.
You FELT the time and freedom that you may have if you learn these skills.
You FELT the lifestyle that you could live.
Although you rationalized these things logically, telling yourself that you made the
decision to buy this book for practical reasons.
The real reason you took the action in that moment was to satisfy those feelings – those
desires…those primal urges.
Some of you may have envisioned yourself shoving it in the face of your asshole boss,
as you walked out of the office that last time, to jet off to Bali and make six figures
writing pool-side at a five star resort.
You may have grinned at the thought of all your old co-workers still stuck there at that
dead-end job, liking your beach-side Facebook posts from their depressing cubicles.
Perhaps you thought about the things you could buy with the money you made.
The things you could do.
Regardless, it was not a rational, calculated reason you bought this book – you were
compelled to buy it in order to satisfy deeply felt emotions.
Every great artist of persuasion knows to appeal to emotion for this very reason, and to
stray away from appealing to logic and intellect alone.
Robert Collier, in his book from 1930, had this to say…
To get action, you need to arouse emotion on the part of your reader. You
may convince his intellect that the thing you want him to do is right and is
for his best advantage, but until you arouse in him an urgent desire to do
it, until you make him feel that whatever effort it requires is of no account
compared with the satisfaction it will bring him, your letter is lacking in its
most important essential. It may have everything else, but if it lacks that
faculty of arousing the right feeling, you might as well throw it away. It will
never make you money
 P a g e | 16

Why is it a tabloid newspaper will outsell a clean, well-edited sheet by ten

to one? Why? Because its appeal is to the sob sister, to the emotions.
Why is it that a fire-spouting revivalist, preaching hell and damnation, can
crowd huge amphitheaters while your ordinary clergyman preaches to
empty pews? Emotion!
The religion that brings masses of converts, that sweeps whole cities, is
not an appeal to the intellect – but to the emotions!

Knowing this simple fact – that people buy emotionally first, and justify it later with logic,
will allow you to generate absurd amounts of money and get damn near anything you
want in this life.
Let’s take a gander at…

“The Pepsi Challenge”

This was a marketing campaign Pepsi came up with in the 80s.
It was pretty simple, really. Pepsi company reps hung out in public places and looked
for volunteers. Then, they sat the volunteers down, put a blindfold on them, and had
them sip two different colas.
Then, they asked a simple question, “Which one tastes better?”
The results were conclusive.
Even though the majority of the volunteers stated Coke was their favorite soda, those
same volunteers overwhelmingly chose Pepsi when it came to taste alone.
Now, I’m not a soda guy and I try to stay away from the stuff, but I know that –
statistically – the majority of people will say they prefer Coke to Pepsi (maybe that’s not
true for you, but let’s just go off the statistical majority here).
The BIG question is – if Pepsi literally has a better product, in that the majority of people
prefer it to Coke based on taste, then why the hell did Coke continue to outsell Pepsi no
matter what?
Even After they released their infamous failed “New Coke” product, which generated
over 400,000 letters of complaint and caused market share to decline, they were STILL
leading over Pepsi.
What’s going on here?
Pepsi has a superior product.
They PROVED they have a superior product.
This lead to what researchers dubbed
 P a g e | 17

The Pepsi Paradox

What started out as a marketing campaign turned into decades of research funded by
grants and carried out by smart looking people in lab coats.
Throughout these controlled gold-standard double-blind studies, the result of the “Pepsi
challenge” always yielded the same, predictable result – the majority chose Pepsi over
Coke based on taste.
But, the curious thing is, when the blindfolds were removed and they saw the familiar
Coke symbol on the red can, and they sipped the sodas again… suddenly Coke tasted
better.
Logically, Pepsi tastes better. Logically they have a better product.
But what Coke has is more associated emotion.
And this brings us to a tried and true fact of selling –

People Who Try To Use Logic To Sell, Won’t Sell Shit

Let’s look at Pepsi’s advertising campaign for what it REALLY is – an attempt to use
logic to sell their product.
“Hey guys, statistically the majority of people like our product instead of Coke, which
logically means we have a better product and because we have just factually proven our
product as superior to Coke, you should buy ours instead!”
But, what does Coke do?
They don’t talk logic.
No siree bob, Coke puts their BRAND first.
When you drink Coke, you’re sharing an experience – friendship, family.
During Christmas they became iconic for their adorable polar bears giving everybody
the Holiday tingles (which if you think about it kind of crazy – what the hell do polar
bears have to do with Christmas or the quality of their product? Nothing…we are not
rational creatures).
Where Coke used emotion to sell their product, Pepsi tried to use logic – but people
don’t make decisions based on logic, they make decisions based on how they feel, then
in order to convince themselves that the decision they made is the RIGHT decision,
they rationalize all the reasons the purchase was good and beneficial to whatever their
perceived bottom line is (usually a made-up one).
Perhaps the most telling proof of this is when they performed the Pepsi challenge with
participants who had damage to their ventromedial pre-frontal cortex (an area important
for emotion).
 P a g e | 18

The participants chose Pepsi when blindfolded and still chose Pepsi when they could
see the branded cans, because the decision had emotion removed.
In other words, you would need to be brain damaged to escape the reality of emotional
decision making.
This first rule is vital because it explains why so many people with really great products
that are often superior both in quality and cost to competing products simply fall flat and
fail….
Because the people marketing those products attempt to do so using logic.
And don’t we wish that life was this way? That it was LOGICAL?
Don’t we all wish we could hang a sign up and casually explain why X is better than
Z…and people would just put two and two together to make a logical decision?
Don’t we wish that simply doing a good job at work gets you promoted?
Rather than the fact that, it isn’t how good you are at a job that gets you promoted, but
how much people like you (despite your skill set).
The thing is that many of us (who are still in the Roomba stage) will think that our
decisions are based off logic while the other guy’s isn’t.
The fact is, we’re all in the same boat.
And that’s helpful, because if you can recognize the emotional, primal reasons you
make decisions…you can figure out how to arouse it in your target audience.
So, if you really want to sell something or persuade somebody to do anything, you have
to appeal to people’s….

Greed, Lust, Vanity, Envy, Pride, Fear…

I mean, really, if you want to know how to sell to somebody, look up the seven deadly
sins.
And read the Ten Commandments.
That girl isn’t buying a new outfit because she genuinely needs new clothes, she’s
buying it so people will make comments about how beautiful she is and how great she
dresses (vanity).
Maybe Bob really does want to make money online.
Maybe he’s really stuck in a job he hates, and wants to better himself.
At least, that’s what he tells himself.
Admitting that he’s greedy and wants that arrogant next-door neighbor to eat shit when
he sees Bob cruise up in his brand-new Lambo and to shove his new success in the
 P a g e | 19

faces of every single family member that doubted him over the years would make Bob
seem like a bad person.

Massage The Base, Animal Emotions And Desires

Stroke them, and fuel them with some kind of solution that satisfies these base
emotions.
This is how to REALLY sell a product.
The greedy guy gets what he is greedy for.
The person with a fear of missing out on an opportunity gets access to it.
The guy that wants girls to suck his dick at the drop of a hat gets the information he
needs.
The girl that wants to be obsessed over and catered to gets her ego stroked….yup, for
just $19.99.
These are also the keys to selling yourself and making people like you.
Appeal to people’s vanity by complementing them.
Appeal to their greed by giving them something.
Appeal to people’s pride by telling the they’re right.
Get that girl to go somewhere with you by appealing to her fear of missing out.
Get that guy to invest in your product by doing the same.
The list goes on and on.

The Worst Negotiators Use Logic

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio conducted a series of studies that backs this up.
He came to the conclusion that negotiation professionals who foolishly think they can
build a case for their side using reason are doomed to be poor negotiators.
The real factors behind every decision is emotional (and selfishly, so).
That’s why one of the greatest salesmen of the last 100 years – Dale Carnegie – was
successful.
His entire timeless book How to Win Friends and Influence People can basically be
boiled down to this – encourage people to talk about themselves and act like you’re
really interested, this will make them like you and buy your stuff.
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In other words, trying to logically explain to them why they should buy from you is leaps
and bounds less effective than simply making them the center of attention and letting
them talk about themselves.
Not rational is it?
Why should someone want to buy from you, simply because they like the way you treat
them? Rather than buying because they really, genuinely need the product or service?
Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman notes that a full 95% of all our
purchase decisions are based solely on our initial emotional reaction.
This rule is why, whenever I hear someone say…

“I Don’t Want To Be Tacky Or ‘Salsey’, I Just Want To Rely On The

Strength Of My Product”
I give them a hearty “good luck”, walk away, and know without a shadow of a doubt that
they will waste their money and time and end up nothing but a failure.
People who get up on their moral high-horse and think they’re too good to get down in
the shit with rest of us and sell themselves or their products/services in the way that is
PROVEN TO WORK are doomed to failure and mediocrity.
And listen, if you’re one of the people reading this right now and still thinking you can
survive in this racket we call life with any sort of advantage WITHOUT “lowering”
yourself to emotionally manipulating other people, you’ll want to stick around for Rule
#3.
Because you’ve been manipulating everyone around you your entire life, you’re just
lying to yourself about it like a blind hypocrite.
If you want the “superpower” that is the ability to persuade people to do anything you
want, you have to be AWARE of – not only other people’s predictable susceptibility
towards emotional manipulation – but also that YOU are susceptible to it.
Even the most grizzled, battle-hardened, Spock-like rational man in this world will
devolve to the level of a chimp-like laboratory animal, pushing buttons and solving
puzzles to get half a carrot – you just have to appeal to the right selfish emotion and
convince them the carrot is the solution to their desires and problems.

Rule Two
You Are a Helpless, Pre-programmed Humanoid
Carrying Out The Decisions Your Subconscious
Makes
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This is where things get a little spooky.

But it’s worth talking about because if you can understand the lack of control you, me,
and everybody else around you truly has in our decision making capabilities (from what
to eat in the morning to how we form our opinions) then you will have a greater ability to
look at yourself from the third person…
This lets you have more patience with people in general, and a greater ability to “read
minds”.
Right now I’m going to throw you for a bit of a loop.
In the last “Rule” I basically went to great length to explain that people don’t buy based
on logic, but emotion instead.
Well….that’s kind of true and kind of not true.
No, I’m not contradicting myself, I’m just going a little deeper into the subject at hand.
You see, when people make a decision to buy something (whether that be you or a
product) these decisions are made first by the subconscious.
This is spooky because it’s a little unsettling how many decisions you make in life truly
aren’t even up to you (the “you” that you consciously see yourself as), but is instead up
to a mechanism you have no real conscious control of.
Basically, your subconscious (or “intuitive” mind if you want to call it that) decides to buy
something first, then – a full several seconds later – that decision that has ALREADY
been made (without your conscious consent) floats to the surface of your emotional
brain, then your conscious mind begins to search for rational reasons to justify the
decision.
That is how we maintain the illusion that our conscious “logical” mind is in control, when
the reality is much different.
Before I progress, it’s important for me to note, that you have…
Three Brains Inside Your Skull
Forgoing all the scientific gobbledygook, I’ll just use the pop terms of…
 Lizard brain
 Mammalian brain
 Pre-frontal cortex (okay that last one was actually a scientific term).
You see, nature builds on top of itself.
If you can imagine some primitive man coming along and building a house out of clay.
Then some stone-aged man coming along and building a granite house on top of the
clay one.
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Then modern man coming by and building a modern sky-scraper using the granite
castle as a foundation, then that’s kind of how your brain evolved.
Your “reptilian brain” is that clay house – it was there first.
This is the brain that is purely reactive based on stimulus without really thinking.
This brain is responsible for the “Shit!….what’s that sound? Freeze? Run? Fight?”
responses.
And yes, your reptilian brain is pretty much the same as that lizard hanging on your
window (we have a lot of them here in Thailand).
This part of your brain is the oldest because it evolved about 250 million years ago. It is
essentially your brain stem.
The best way to think about this brain is self-preservation – it keeps an eye out for
enemies (or, in modern life, cars crossing the street or strange behavior of people
around you that do not fit the normal pattern of behavior you’re used to).
Next up we have your mammalian brain (that stone castle), which evolved about 50
million years ago.
This is essentially the same as any other mammal that you can imagine…like dolphins.
This brain is also referred to as your emotional brain. This is where we house what is
“real”, “true”, and important to us.
Next up we have that sky-scraper, the newest part of our brain called the “cortex” and
this is arguably what makes you human.
It’s what separates man from animal and makes you a “logical” human being.
This is also the smallest part of your brain coming into play about 40,000 years ago and
is STILL evolving.
This is also your…

Conscious Mind
This area of your brain is so new it doesn’t even start to develop until age three and
doesn’t fully develop until you’re around 20 years of age.
So, let’s look at this in terms of percentage.
A staggering…

92% Of Your Brain Is Subconscious

In other words, it is made up of a series of outside stimuli and experiences that have
seeped into you over the years and heavily influences your behavior, but you are largely
unaware of it.
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Only 8% of your brain is the conscious mind.

It develops nearly 20 years into your lifespan and it’s actually pretty weak.
This is the part of your brain that is in CONSTANT battle with the rest of your mind.
For example, your reptilian brain may be telling you that the sweet, salty 600 calorie
snack is what you need to survive because it has the largest amount of calories (payoff)
for the least amount of work.
Your mammalian brain is telling you how good you will emotionally feel when you eat it.
And yet your mammalian brain is actually telling you how bad you feel when you eat it.
Your pre-frontal cortex is over there saying, “Come on guys…. I need to lose weight, the
doctor told me I have to cut that crap out.”
MOST of the time your cortex loses the battle.
Yet, where the cortex comes in AFTER it fails to keep you from eating that 600-calorie
snack, is in making you rationalize the decision in order to make you FEEL better about
the guilt.
“It’s fine, I will just workout extra hard tomorrow”
Or…
“It’s cheat day, I’ve been doing good all week.”
Or..
“I’ll just skip lunch tomorrow to make up for the extra calories.”
In other words, your reptile brain said “eat it for survival” your mammalian brain said “It’ll
make you feel good” your cortex failed the first round, but when your mammalian brain
said “I feel bad” your Cortex popped in to rationalize the decision.
Your brain is WEIRD.
This is why…

Most Of Our Decisions Are Illogical

For example, spending your hard-earned money on a lottery ticket instead of saving it.
Even though, logically, the odds of you winning are slim to none, your reptilian brain
sees a big payoff for very little work and your mammalian brain can predict how
emotionally good you will feel about it.
Yet, at the same time, your mammalian brain will feel bad if it loses…so your cortex will
come in to rationalize the decision.
But, let’s also look at the long-term impact of this on our lives.
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Because the cortex takes so long to develop, there are many feelings and “pet peeves”
you have into old age that you may not even be able to explain (but that you try to
rationalize).
Let’s imagine for a moment that a little girl was hugged by her father only when she was
crying or upset.
Later on in life, perhaps when she’s 25 and gets a promotion at work, her new boyfriend
gives her a big hug in celebration….
But for some reason she feels sad.
She wonders why, when she is having one of the best and most important days in her
life, she feels so sad and like crying now that her boyfriend – whom she loves – is
hugging her.
It’s because her subconscious came to associate hugging with crying. Just like a dog
associates “sit” with “treat”.

Why The Hell Do We Do The Things We Do?

Why does one person hate the color red while another goes out of their way to buy
clothes and products with a red color?
How many times in your life have you found yourself angry, frustrated, or sickened by
something that doesn’t seem to bother anybody else and you have no real logical
concrete reason to feel that way?
For many of us, the majority of our lives and our decisions are made based on “gut”
feeling.
Yet we somehow have the gall to consider ourselves logical creatures at the same time.
In reality, we are made-up of decades of sensory experience that has seeped into our
subconscious minds that heavily influences the majority of our behavior.
These decisions are made by our subconscious minds before we even become aware
of it.
The rest of the time, we’re just simply trying to rationalize WHY we did what we did,
because our cortex can’t stand not having a reason WHY we just did that thing – that’s
it’s job, assign a “why” to the actions the rest of your brain already made.
And here’s where it gets really kooky.
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
concluded through a series of studies that…

Your Decisions Happen Seven Seconds Before You Actually Become

Aware That You Have “Decided” To Do Something
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In the study, participants were able to freely decide whether they wanted to press a
button with their right hand or left hand.
There was one condition, though – they had to REMEMBER the moment they decided
to use their left or right hand.
The researchers then used brain scans to see if they could predict which hand the
participants would choose BEFORE they were consciously aware of it.
The results?
The researchers were able to predict the decision a full seven seconds before the
participants were actually aware of their own decisions.
John-Dylan Haynes, one of the neuroscientists involved in the study, concluded, “Your
decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time your consciousness kicks
in, most of the work has already been done.”
What are the implications of this?
Well…without getting too “woo woo” with you, the implication is that…

You Truly Have No Free Will

And that no decision you make was actually made by the “conscious you” (the “you” that
you perceive yourself as), but is instead made by the unconscious you, that you are not
even aware of or in control of.
In other words, it’s an automated response that you are fooled by your cortex into
thinking you had control of.
To illustrate just how automated our decisions really are, let’s talk turkey for a moment.

I Bet You Think You’re Better Than A Turkey

But… are you really?
There was a study outlined in the book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr.
Robert Cialdini (which you should definitely read), which involves mother turkeys who
are typically loving, nurturing, and protective of their offspring.
The thing is, that all of this mothering behavior is based on one specific trigger – the
“cheep-cheep” sound the baby turkey chicks make.
If they make this sound, the mother responds.
If they don’t, the mother ignores them (sometimes she’ll even kill it).
The mortal enemy of the turkey is the polecat.
One glimpse of the polecat and the turkey will typically fly into a violent, protective rage.
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So, animal behaviorists decided to see what would happen if they took a fake stuffed
polecat (which typically prompted the turkey to fly into a fit of violent pecking and
clawing) and put a recorder inside with the “cheep-cheep” sound of baby turkey chicks.
The result?
Even though the image of the polecat had not changed, the turkey’s maternal instincts
were immediately triggered and she began coddling the polecat as if it were her own
turkey offspring.
In other words, these auto-pilot “triggers” were manipulated.

The Researchers Hacked A Living Turkey

The thing is – you and I are just as easily “hacked”.
In his book, Dr. Cialdini calls this a “Click-whiirrr” response, as if the play button was just
pressed on an old tape player.
CLICK…whhiirrr and the action occurs just as it should, pre-recorded, playing out as
predicted.
Later in this chapter, I’ll lay down some of these easy human triggers, but for now it
goes back to what we already talked about – base human emotions of greed, pride,
envy, lust, vanity, fear, and more.
These base human emotions are easily triggered and they exist mostly in your
subconscious.
And, your response to these triggers are not in your control (for the most part).
Your brain – like your heart for example – exists on its own.
You no more “will” it to operate a particular way as you can force your heart to beat or
your lungs to desire to breath air.
But…

Let’s Take A Quick Break Here For A Moment

Depending on who you are this could be fascinating to you, depressing, or it could make
you irrationally angry.
So, why am I telling you these things?
After all, this book is how to develop the superpower of persuasion and use it to make a
shit ton of money.
We’re not here to talk about the depressing notion that free will doesn’t exist, that you
may have little to no control over your decisions, and that everything is (probably)
pointless.
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Look – the reason it’s important to at least study these things (instead of either ignoring
them or pretending they don’t exist) is because, if you shed light on these realities, then
you finally DO have some notion of control - over yourself, over your reality, and over
other people.
When that angry motorist gets in your face and starts screaming at you for cutting him
off and you begin to feel your blood boil (as your reptilian brain is telling you this person
is too close to your space and you should get rid of them for your own safety), you can
recognize what is happening.
That person isn’t angry at YOU, that person is angry at decades of sensory experiences
that have culminated in their subconscious, just to be irrationally triggered at that prime
moment when you unwittingly cut them off in traffic.
And your response to it is just as triggered….unless you can watch yourself having this
reaction and then stop it before it gets out of hand.
By simply being AWARE of these things you have more control over your life than the
vast majority of people who let their emotions rule them without knowing why…
People who generally walk through life only REACTING to their environment, instead of
understanding it and thus exercising a certain degree of control of it.
Whether or not free will exists doesn’t really matter to me.
Most of you (including myself) will – despite whatever evidence that arises – tell
ourselves we have control, because if we don’t we will fall apart and so will our society.
As psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler found out through several
studies in 2002, people who believe they have free will are more likely to examine their
performance while working…
Show up on time for work…
Not cheat…
And generally do all the things that we believe are “morally” correct (such as bringing a
wallet stuffed with cash to the police station even though you could take it and nobody
would be the wiser).

The Belief In Free Will Is Important

My goal for this section is simply to CHALLENGE you…
To break down your ego for a moment…
To disrupt that thing that says “I’m an important, individual person” – and show you that
we as humans are not as smart or complex (or individual) as we’d like to make
ourselves out to be.
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And the knowledge of this is what gives you the superpower of persuasion.
You’re still a Roomba – bouncing around the walls out of habit – but now you’re a
Roomba that is self-aware… you know WHY you’re bouncing around the walls, and
when you know why, you have a greater degree of control.
But look, if this whole silly mess about “subconscious decisions” and the idea that
maybe free will doesn’t even exist is bothering you, I’d like to end Rule #2 with one of
my favorite quotes…
“Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s going to
die….come watch TV.” – Morty from Rick and Morty.

Rule Three:
You’re ALREADY A Selfish, Manipulative Asshole
One of the things you’ll notice about expert copywriters, competent salesmen, or even
history’s greatest leaders – basically anybody well-versed in the art of persuasion – is
that we’re all a little apathetic and cynical towards life in general.
Even the most charismatic leaders or those motivation junkies that pack out seminars
(who are also using the same persuasion principals) will talk about their craft in a kind
of, “Yeah, if you say this, people do that” matter-of-fact way.
Hell, even Tony Robbins lays his craft out on the line like that.
The reason for this goes back to what I mentioned earlier – the greatest salesmen see
life for what it literally is, not what they wish it would be.
And, to be able to persuade people to buy anything, even with knowing all the principals
we talked about so far in this chapter, none if it will work unless they’re actually willing to
manipulate another person into a sale.
And this, my friend, is where most people fall flat.

People HATE Feeling Like A “Salesman” Because People HATE Being

Sold To.
It’s a fact of life.
People have a natural resistance to someone trying to pitch them.
In fact, they resent it (later in this book I will teach you how to sell to people by
overcoming their natural resistance to being sold to).
Not only that, when you lay out the rules and tactics for effective selling, people
naturally start to feel a little “slimy” about it.
 P a g e | 29

They recognize that they are essentially manipulating their fellow man on purpose and
they are doing so to benefit themselves (to make money, essentially), which goes
against the morals that they’ve been taught.
When we hear the term “manipulation” we think about psychopaths – heartless people
with no sympathy, who coerce others for their own benefit, despite whatever damage it
may do to the other person.
Now, I’ve attended a lot of talks and have read a lot of books from master copywriters
and other people versed in the art of persuasion, and I’ve seen all the different ways
they like to overcome the essential objection their audience has to the reality that, in
order to apply these principals, they will have to manipulate the emotions of another
person.
The common way these speakers and writers like to rationalize the manipulation
process to their audience is by stating some variation of…
“If you think about it, you’re making their life better off by selling them something that is
going to help them”
Or
“You’ll be doing them a disservice if you don’t sell them your product/service, because if
you could have made their lives better, but didn’t, who’s really in the wrong?”
This is all well and nice, but this goes against my desire – both for myself and others –
to recognize things as they literally are rather than sugar coating them in some way.
In order to do that, I’d like to phrase this a little differently.

Everybody Manipulates Each Other For Their Own Selfish Gain ALL
THE TIME And This Is A GOOD Thing.
Everyone likes to think they aren’t manipulative, even when they clearly do it on a daily
basis.
Let’s take a boyfriend and girlfriend on a lazy Sunday morning.
The girl tells her boyfriend she wants to go out for brunch at a new spot that just opened
up 30 minutes away.
The boyfriend doesn’t want to go – he wants to sit around the house, enjoy his Sunday,
and play some video games.
What the girlfriend does next, in order to get her way, is nothing short of pure, selfish
manipulation.
She will use every principal of persuasion she can to get her way.
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She may lay on the charm (appealing to vanity), tell him about the delicious food and
the atmosphere (fear of missing out), she may say she’s going to go by herself with her
girlfriend and this other guy named Timmy who’s just a “friend” (fear of loss, guilt), she
may tell him how much she’d appreciate it and how great she’ll think he is if he takes
her (appeal to pride), and more.
And, when she and her boyfriend are out spending $30 for overpriced eggs an hour
later, the probability is that she will not even consider –for a moment – that she has
been manipulative for nobody else’s gain but her own…completely selfish.
And perhaps, if she does half-way admit that she manipulated him, it wasn’t because
she was selfish…it was for his own good (he needed to get out of the house and enjoy
the day with his girlfriend, it’s “good for him”).

You’ve Been Manipulating People Since You Were A Child

Crying, being “cute”, doing whatever you could do that seemed the best course of action
to get your way.
A child will cry and scream to manipulate their parents into giving them a cookie.
The parents may offer a cookie to manipulate their child into cleaning their room.
At work, we’ll give compliments or tell jokes to manipulate people into liking us (because
if they like us, we’re more likely to get ahead).
If you’re persuasive, if you’re influential, you are manipulative.
That means some of the greatest people in history – the ones we look up to – were also
the greatest manipulators.
Martin Luther King manipulated to get his way – a purely selfish desire to have the world
change in order to benefit himself and those in his community.
Ghandi wasn’t much different.
Of course, we don’t look at it that way.
But if we strip away all the flowery language…that’s exactly what he did.
He wanted a better life for himself and his family therefor he figured out a manipulative
way to obtain that goal.
The more people he got on board with this goal, the more effective he would be in
achieving his goal.
Often the only way to solve a problem is to persuade someone to our “side of things”
and that involves emotionally manipulating them.
Manipulation as a tool is neither good nor evil… but it is necessary.
 P a g e | 31

No matter how you choose to rationalize your manipulation, the fact is you do it every
day in every single social interaction you participate in.
You can manipulate somebody into eating cake and playing video games with you… or
you could manipulate somebody into eating a healthy vegetarian dinner and hitting the
gym with you.
It’s manipulation just the same.
The loving Christian is manipulating people when he tries to witness to sinners using
bible verses…even going so far as to use fear (burning in hell) as coercion and greed
(eternal life and riches) as reason or to use “acceptance” to attempt to integrate in with
the group-think.

What Makes You A Helpless Little Roomba Is Not Realizing You Are
Manipulative
What gives you superpowers is realizing you are manipulative – and so is everybody
else around you.
So…don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Like it or not, you’re in the game.
If you want an advantage, embrace your manipulative nature and use it as a tool to get
ahead and protect yourself (justify it morally however you see fit).
Otherwise, be used by the game – chewed up and spit out by those who see life as it is
and play accordingly within the confines of the rules.

Our Society Falls Apart Without Manipulation

In looking out for our own self-interest, we are essentially looking out for other’s self-
interest.
In my opinion, even when you help other people you are being selfish.
It feels good to help other people – it elevates you, and it even provides social
accolades (“Oh, what a great person they are for helping”) and I believe that we
wouldn’t help people as willingly if it weren’t for the rewards we get personally.
“Selfless” acts often come with very beneficial rewards for the person who acted
selflessly, even when they shun the spotlight, the “feel-good” stimulation they chased
was selfish in and of itself.
Put another way, nobody has to know you’re shooting heroin up in a dank basement…
the fact is you’re doing it because it feels good.
Nobody has to know you gave $30,000 to charity…but you still did it because it made
you feel good.
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Both are selfish pursuits, one just happens to have beneficial run-off.
Self-preservation dictates that we help other people.
Helping other people ensures that we ourselves are more likely to be helped later, it is a
long-standing evolutionary advantage to be “selfless” and contribute to the group.
So, even contribution to the group – no matter which way you cut it – is in and of itself a
survival mechanism for self-preservation.
A little jaded?
Sure… but if helping people makes you feel good, who cares?
There are far worse things you could be doing in the pursuit of making yourself feel
good, than actions which provide you an advantage, while also helping other people.

Let’s Look At The Book You’re Reading

I’m spending a lot of personal time to write this.
I genuinely want this book to help you.
I want you to use what you learn and make money and get out of whatever situation
you’re unhappy with by having the advantage that persuasion gives you.
I also want this book to be high quality – I don’t want to give you a piece of shit product.
But, I also sold this book to you, and I did so by appealing to your emotions using my
persuasion copywriting abilities.
The benefit to me is that I get money (A LOT of it).
And, this is a gift that keeps on giving…because the more people I help, the more
money I make. And, the more money I make, the more I can help people.
I get to keep my mother – who worked her whole life with arthritic hands – in a comfy
house with a nice little garden with the money I get from this book (which, just a few
years ago, is something I thought I’d never be able to do for my mother).
The money from this book gives me more time and freedom…time I can use to answer
people’s questions, coach them, and help them out more personally.
You see, we’re all just providing a service to each other the best way we know how.
We’re manipulating each other into taking advantage of those services for our own
selfish benefits.
It just so happens that the best way to get the most out of the services you provide, is to
make those services better appeal to the selfish nature of the one you’re selling them to.
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So when we talk about persuading people to buy something, we first need to realize that
the thing you’re selling needs to actually…

Be Valuable!
Then, you need to appeal to all those selfish emotions they have and tell them how your
product/services solves it.
Yet people will think, “I feel bad… I feel manipulative… I feel selfish.”
That person is buying because they’re selfish.
You’re selling because you’re selfish.
Welcome to the global economy.
Selfish is okay.
Manipulation is okay.
Be nice to yourself and stop feeling bad about it.
Be pragmatic about it, observe yourself from the third-person for a week, and see that
nearly everything you do is a persuasion game…trying to bring people on your side to
accomplish some goal.
And, sure, there are some straight-up assholes out there in the world who want to sell
you shit products and manipulate you in ways that does not benefit you but ONLY
benefits them.
But that’s a small percentage of people, because people who sell shit products are
chastised by society, end up in jail, or their business just plain fails when people catch
on.
So, you manipulative asshole – be proud yourself and get REALLY good at what you
do, because it’s going to make you a lot of money, and it’s going to help a whole hell
of a lot of people.

Learn These Six Simple Things And Get

Whatever You Want Whenever You Want
It
These six principals are nothing new.
They were more or less explained originally in Claude Hopkins’ breakthrough book
“Scientific Advertising” and reinforced decades later in Robert Cialdini’s (Regents’
 P a g e | 34

Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State) book “Influence: The
Psychology of Persuasion”.
You should of course read both of these books as they are fascinating.
However, the principals themselves are not rocket science and I think we can easily
breeze through them here so you can use them immediately in the copy you write both
for yourself and your clients.

1. Reciprocity
If you do something for somebody with no expectation of being returned a favor, they
are more likely to do something for you.
I think that’s the “moral high note” way to look at it, but I look at it for what it is…

Putting People In Debt

You see, unless you’re a stone-cold sociopath (or you have literal brain damage) you
are conditioned as a social species to contribute to “the tribe” as it were, and so when
someone gives you something you immediately feel in their debt.
This feeling is so utterly uncomfortable – on a psychological level – for MOST people
that they will do anything they possibly can to get this “weight off their shoulders” by
doing something that “clears” that debt.
In fact, what you give somebody does not even need to be large or very significant.
In Cialdini’s book he talks about the Hare Krishna religious group (I call it a cult) that
used to hang out at airports and try to pass out literature, convert people and – of
course – get donations.
This entire organization was small and seemingly insignificant with not much money to
do much of anything.
For years, they went around asking for money to not much avail, until one of the leaders
in their organization had the brilliant idea to offer something to people first….

A Simple Yellow Flower

Members of the group would approach strangers and hand them the flower.
Taken aback, the stranger would ask, “How much?” and of course the group member
would say, “It’s yours…free… I just wanted to give it to you” of course then the member
would passively mention that any donation the person feels they want to give would be
appreciated.
So strong was the psychological burden of this “debt” and so powerful was the need to
unload that debt by reciprocating, they would receive some kind of donation the
overwhelming majority of the time.
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The result is that the Hare Krishna cult on a world-wide level gained millions and
millions for their cause, allowing them to expand, build buildings, and market
themselves further.
Cialdini observed that many of these people who received the flower (a Daisy I believe it
was) would simply throw it in the first trash can they saw.
And, every once in awhile, cult members would roam around the airport and pick the
flowers out of the trash, and offer them to new people.
Of course, over time, airports banned these people and, even before that, folks would
do everything they could to avoid being handed a flower (after they began catching on
to the scheme).
Why did they go out of their way to AVOID rather than just REFUSE?
Because being handed a flower – no matter how much they hated these people – made
them feel FORCED to reciprocate.
In order to avoid the psychological pain and burden of this, people would walk ten
minutes out of their way just to avoid it.
You see, the law of reciprocity works even if the person being provided the “free”
thing…

Hates Your Guts!

A certain coffee chain used this law by mailing loyal customers a free drink coupon to
try any new seasonal coffee blend they had coming out.
These customers would walk in, grab their “free” 16-ounce drink, and typically buy
something to go along with it, such as a $3 pastry.
Why?
Because – to them – it felt wrong to just go grab something for free and not somehow
reciprocate.
Sales sky-rocketed. They made more money giving things away for “free” than they did
charging for them.
Over the years I’ve talked to many, many people who scoff at this law and say they’re
above it.
People love to think more of themselves as simple little machines that are easily
manipulated (and this is their downfall).
Even if you don’t “fall” for this in certain situations, you will in another and you will
regularly your entire life.
In sales pages, reciprocity is often used by giving away “free” and valuable information.
 P a g e | 36

Such as “Three Steps To Get Yourself Out Of Debt”. The information is valuable and
useful so the prospect feels as though they received some kind of value, so they need
to pay some money for it even though it was “free”.
That’s why in online marketing the practice is always to give out plenty of free and
valuable information.
Novice marketers – or laymen – will scoff at this and say you’re giving too much out for
free without charging.
But because of the rule of reciprocity, you make significantly more back in return.
People HATE being in debt and will do anything they can to “square the account”,
especially when it comes to having received a gift, no matter how small or seemingly
insignificant it really is.

2. Commitment/Consistency
Another silly psychological quark of mankind is our undying need to be consistent.
We cannot STAND to be inconsistent.
If we did something in the past, we are likely to behave in the future the same way in
order to remain consistent with our past actions.
And we often do it for no other real reason than to ensure we are consistent.
You see, one of our deepest human needs is that of identity – of “knowing’ who we are.
We want to feel as though we have a set of principles that we are…

Moral And Honorable People

This really comes down to the psychological need to feel as though we are the SAME
person all the time.
So important is this need, that we will remember our past behaviors incorrectly in order
to reflect our current views, simply because we want to be the SAME person all the time
(even though we’re not, realistically).
For this reason, people will often stick with decisions they’ve made – even if those
decisions are detrimental to them – simply because they made the decision before and
feel the need to commit to it and stay consistent with it.
This is a reason people stay in obviously bad relationships, for example.
And, they will fool themselves into believing that obvious detrimental situations or wrong
choices (obvious to third parties anyway) are right and good and beneficial, simply
because they want to remain consistent with their original decision.
Argue With Anybody And See This In Action
 P a g e | 37

Even in the face of overwhelming facts that prove the other party logically wrong in
every way, rather than change their mind or concede failure, they will walk away
determined to find some THING that helps them rationalize and justify their original
opinion, for no other reason than they made it, now they have to stick with it (in simple
terms anyway).
One example (and I’m heavily paraphrasing) in Cialdini’s book centers around his
attendance to a “meditation group” which really just turned out to be a kind of cult.
At the end, the leaders were promising what many religious-oriented groups do such as
peace of mind, tranquility, enlightenment, everlasting life, and so on….for a price tag.
Well, at one point Cialdini’s friend blurted out to one of the leaders a rebuttal to what he
was saying, and the leader found himself unable to answer the question and conceded
that he would have to “get back to that with an answer later” as it involved some
thought.
Well, Cialdini and his friend thought, after that, nobody in the group would sign up for
this expensive training they were selling.
So, imagine their surprise when MOST of the people signed up after.
Even the leaders of the event admitted to being surprised.
And when asked why those people – even after the embarrassing Q&A session –
signed up, the general consensus was that they had already made the decision to be
happy, and that the decision was based around what this group was teaching.
If they let themselves think TOO HARD about the situation, they may change their mind,
which would affect their happiness level.
In other words, they did everything they possibly could to simply be consistent with the
original decision they had made, despite it being an obviously flawed decision.
In marketing we know that small decisions lead to big decisions because of this
principal.
If somebody pays $1 for a piece of information, they’re likely to stay consistent with their
first action by paying $5, then $100, then $500 to the same person for the same type of
information down the road.
And, just to wrap this up as the reason “why” we do this on an evolutionary level, the
consensus seems to be that, the more “consistent” we are with our past decisions, the
more predictable we are, which allows people to easily read us over time and know how
to treat us, which helps build the “tribe” as it were (civilization itself).

3. Social Proof
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There are a lot of “social experiment” videos online that like to play around with social
proof.
For example, there’s one where a man in a suit falls down in a public space and a
bunch of people rush to help him.
Then, they dress the same man up as a homeless person and when he falls down
nobody comes to help him.
Or the one where a hot white girl is blatantly stealing a bike (and nobody seems to care,
and one guy even helps) and then a black teenager starts to steal the bike and a crowd
of people immediately surround him and call the police.
These videos like to play around with deep-seeded stereotypes and prejudices.
And almost everyone who sees these videos – wanting to consider themselves good,
moral, and upstanding citizens – will say…

“I’d never do that!”

I remember reading an article about a woman who was trapped in a burning vehicle, in
a gas station of all places, and a crowd of people just sat there and watched as she
screamed, many of them taking out their phones to film the thing.
It took the actions of one brave young man to rush over and pull her out of the car in the
nick of time.
And everybody who read that article must have thought that they, too, would be the
knight in shining armor.
Surely they are not that selfish, vapid, and cowardly!
I hear the same comments from people just about every time one of these videos or
stories pops up, usually followed by “what is the world coming to.”
But the reason this phenomenon happens at all is because of social proof.
Humans are evolutionarily and socially conditioned to take hints from each other.
If we hear a woman screaming in the darkness of the night, directly below our window
we may think to ourselves, “Is that some drunk college girl with her friends, screaming
out into the night on her way back from last call? Or is that a girl in visible distress?”
If we hear the scream again, we may think to call the police… but then again we may
assume somebody else has already called the police.
If we hear the scream a third time, we may open up our window or step out on our
balcony to see if anybody else is doing the same thing… if they aren’t, maybe you think
they know something you don’t.
And so the thinking goes.
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So heavily do we as humans wait to take action or make decisions until we first observe
the actions of others, that you can quite literally MAKE people do stupid shit that makes
no sense.
For example, walking into an elevator and, instead of facing the door, facing the back of
the elevator.
Numerous experiments have shown that, when someone walks onto an elevator with
two other people, and those two people turn around to face the back, the unsuspecting
guinea pig in the experiment will almost always turn around with them, without even
blurting out…

“Why The Hell Are You Weirdos Turned Around In The Elevator Like
This?!”
The reason is because they think the other people in the elevator must know something
they don’t.
Another experiment showed a girl waiting in a lobby.
Everybody else in the lobby were actors who were instructed to stand up from their
seats every time a bell rang.
The first time it happened, the unknowing subject in the experiment looked a little
freaked out – why did all these strangers stand when a bell went off?
The second time it happened, she looked as if she felt guilty – like she was doing
something wrong.
The third time it happened, she stood up with everybody else.
After awhile, the crowd of paid actors in the lobby began thinning out until this girl was
the only one left and still, without questioning why, every time the bell rang she stood
up…even when nobody was there.
So, when someone is burning alive in a car, we automatically tend to look at the next
guy – is he going to run over there? What about the person on my left? No?
This causes nobody to take action because the people around them are not taking
action.
We all like to think we’re edgy non-conformists who wouldn’t do things just because
other people are doing them, or who would be a hero rushing into the flames to save
someone screaming for help while all those cowards stood by filming on their phones..
but all those people doing that are…

JUST LIKE YOU.

We are all slaves to the same mechanism of “social proof”.
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And there is a very good evolutionary reason for this – if everybody else is running one
direction, you better bet your ass it would be safer to assume you should ALSO run
(instead of trying to figure out WHY they’re running).
More often than not, it’s because something big and bad is coming.
We look to “the herd” for cues on how we ourselves should act because it is what
protected us for hundreds of thousands of years when we were running around with our
dicks out, throwing pointy sticks at things for dinner.
Did you know that your natural reaction to vomit when you either see or smell someone
else vomiting is part of this social proof?
If you’re sitting around in a circle and someone begins violently vomiting after they just
ate those yummy looking berries they found on the ground, chances are they are
vomiting because the berries are poison.
So, your body automatically starts wanting to vomit too because – chances are – you
just ate the same thing they ate.
So, how do we use social proof in marketing?
By talking about how many products you’ve already sold, how many happy customers
you already have, by providing lots and lots of glowing testimonials and five-star
reviews, using case studies, reviews, and so on.

4. Authority
There’s a famous experiment that was conducted by Psychologist Stanley Milgram, in
which subjects were put in a room while a man in a lab coat (the authority figure) told
them they would be turning a knob that would administer electric shocks to another
participant in a viewing room.
On the knob were about 10 numbers, each time they went a number higher, the shocks
got worse.
The man in the lab coat would then tell them to turn the knob to 1, to start.
They would witness the man in the other room go “ow!” and look a little uncomfortable,
Maybe he’d laugh a little and say “That hurt!”.
Yet, as the authority figure told the subject to keep going up in numbers those “little
shocks” turned violent.
The man in the other room began…

Crying Out In Excruciating Pain!

…Begging, pleading for the experiment to stop.
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Yelling and screaming for somebody to come and get him, to please unhook him from
the machine, to please let him out.
The researchers wanted to see how far these subjects would go with this knob. How
many would go all the way to 10?
The answer is that the overwhelming majority of participants turned the knob all the way
to 10, even when they could visibly see the shocks that it was giving the other man.
By level 10… he was laying on the ground, silent, twitching slightly, whimpering and
crying for the pain to end, and still the overwhelming majority chose to shock them that
one last time, at the highest voltage.
Now, in the experiment itself, the man in the other room hooked up to “the machine”
was just an actor (a really good one) and the knob the participants were turning actually
did nothing.
And, they weren’t mean, heartless people either, many of them…

Pleaded With The Man In The White Coat To Let The Stop!
They would shake and cry and say “please don’t make me do it” before turning the knob
one level higher.
It was observed that strong, square-jawed, broad-shouldered, confident men would walk
into that room, and by the end of the experiment they were crying and bawling like
babies at the pain they had just inflicted on this poor, poor nameless bastard in the
other room.
So… why did they do it?
For one single reason….

The Man In The Lab Coat Told Them To

And the man in the lab coat? He was an actor too…
That is how strong our instinct is to follow authority, even if the authority isn’t
ACTUALLY there, but is instead only perceived by looks or even just countenance.
A man who “seems to know what he’s talking about” can get just as many people to
blindly follow him as the man who actually knows what he’s talking about.
On an evolutionary level, this is also important.
People with authority are often older than us, which means they’re wiser than us.
Listening to that authority is often incredibly helpful and useful.
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And yet, most of you reading this now, know how easily those with ulterior motives and
sociopathic tendencies can exploit people’s natural affinity to trust those who are in
positions of authority.
When we use authority in selling, we’re doing so with proof.
We’re explaining the reasons, the facts, the figures, the data to back up our claims, or
we’re citing our client’s long, illustrious career, the millions of sales he’s brought in, all
the people’s he’s helped, all the places he’s taught at, and so on.
Authority is important to getting someone to trust your promises and the product/service
being offered.
It’s also POWERFUL to a fault.

5. Liking
Everything is easier in life when people like you and that’s no different when it comes to
selling something.
Common sense would tell you that people don’t want to buy things from someone they
don’t like.
And who do people like the most? Well…

People Like People Who Remind Them Of Themselves

There’s a saying, “opposites attract” which is a load of absolute horseshit.
Walk into any lunch hall – whether it be at your local high school or a break room at
your local corporate overlord’s office buildings – and watch how well opposites attract.
What you will find are clusters of people who share similar interests, dress similarly,
look similarly in physical stature, wear their hair similarly, are a similar age, gesture
identically, tell the same jokes, and generally look and act like little cardboard cutouts of
each other.
In fact, if you’re like nearly everyone else on the planet, the first thing you do when you
walk into any unfamiliar situation with unfamiliar people is…

Try To Find Somebody That Looks Like You

You scan everyone until you find certain identifying marks that tell you that person is
similar to you in some way (same style of clothing, mannerisms, hair, body language,
and so on) and you will go and talk to them first.
This is why it’s so vital that you do research on your target market.
You want to understand who they are and to put yourself in their shoes.
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You don’t just want to understand what they want and what they desire, but also how
they talk, how they might dress, the TV shows they watch, how they spend a Sunday
afternoon, what kind of food they like, whether or not they have a family, where they
might live, the job they might have, and so on.
And then you want to make them LIKE and TRUST you by sharing their values and
talking to them in a way that makes you sound like them.
The closer you can “mirror” your audience in the way that you write to them, the more
they’re going to like you, and the more they like you the more they’re going to trust you,
and the more they trust you the more likely they are to buy from you.

6. Scarcity
The more rare and scarce something is – and the harder it is to obtain – the more value
we assign to it naturally.
Something that is readily and easily available for any Tom, Dick, and Harry that wants it
is not something we assign any meaningful value to.
In other words…

Abundance Doesn’t Sell

Rarity and scarcity does.
There was a really good study that illustrated this fact, conducted back in 1975 and
outlined in detail within Cialdini’s book.
The study asked people to essentially rate chocolate chip cookies.
First, they put ten cookies in one jar and two of the same cookies in another jar.
The cookies from the two-cookie jar received higher ratings… even though the cookies
were exactly the same.
Simply because there were less of those cookies, the participants in the study
automatically considered them better tasting.
In this same study, researchers found that if they showed a jar with a lot of cookies, and
then the cookies in that jar rapidly emptied and went to other participants to the point
that there were only a few cookies left, those few cookies left in the jar received even
higher ratings than the cookies in the jar where the number did not change.
Scarcity it seems, not only puts things in more demand…

It Makes Them More Delicious!

There’s another story of a man who would frequently buy cars, repair them by “flipping”
them and then sell them for a higher price.
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In order to unload these cars quickly, the man applied the principal of scarcity.
He would put an ad out that the car was available and, inevitably, he’d get some calls
from interested prospects.
Instead of, for example, scheduling three appointments to see the car each at different
times (one at 1PM, one at 2PM, and one at 3PM) this very smart man would…

Schedule All The Interviews At The Same Time!

The first person that arrived, would be taken to see the car.
And of course, this individual would then begin trying to negotiate prices, believing he
had all the time in the world to make his decision.
Then, another person would pull up…and then another.
The car seller would then excuse himself and walk over to those who were waiting, and
say…
“Hey, I’ll be right with you, as soon as I’m finished showing this gentleman the car.”
Suddenly there was competition… and not just competition, there was scarcity.

There Were Three People And Just ONE Car

All the time that the first man thought he had to make a decision and haggle with price
suddenly flew out the window.
Now he was under pressure to beat the other people to the sale.
Whenever this first man would start trying to haggle for price, the car seller would say…
“I don’t think I can go that low. I think I should show these other gentleman waiting to
see the car now and see if they can match the price I advertised.”
This tactic proved so effective, not only was the man able to flip his cars and sell them
at record speed (pretty much the day after he put out the advertisements) he had a list
of people who were always wanting to see the next cars he had flipped, because
perhaps they missed out on the one before while they were waiting.
Now, many marketers out there will use this tactic falsely.
Let’s say the product is a digital download, of which there are no “copies”, but they’ll say
“only 200 copies left!” anyway, and the tactic works.
I don’t believe in lying about scarcity, but I do believe in manufacturing it, just like that
car salesman did.
For example, if the product is available online, I may say that I won’t keep the product
online for long and I’m only going to give a certain amount of people access (actually
giving a specific number of people who get access is not necessary).
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Or, I may say that the current price is a promotional price and that I can’t promise that it
won’t go up soon.
In fact, the price could go up in the next ten minutes, if you leave this page now and
come back, you could be paying 50% more than you are now.
All of this is true.
I often stop selling a product after a certain amount of people buy.
Or, I may raise the prices of my products, especially if they’re selling well and I see that
people are willing to pay it.
For physical products – that actually require manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping
– you can quite honestly say that you don’t know how long supplies are going to last
and, when they run out, it’s going to take X time for more to become available.
You can even name a certain amount of those products that are manufactured at a time
– and there are only 150 left.
After that people will have to go on a waiting list until the next manufacturing cycle.
You could say that your 30-day money back guarantee only applies to the first 100
people that purchase (or simply list that this guarantee will not be available soon).
No matter what, it is a REQUIREMENT that you inject some kind of scarcity into the
close of your sales page.
No matter what kind of page you’re writing, no matter what kind of product or service it
is, you must find a way to inject some kind of scarcity into the situation to create a
pressure of urgency.
This also ensures that less people will return the product because it is “more delicious”.
They feel like they got their hands on some kind of fleeting thing, why would they give it
up after that?

Read This And You’ll Know More Than

90% of Marketing Graduates On The
Planet…And Make More Money Than
They EVER Will!
Regardless of who you are – even if you think you don’t have a marketing bone in your
body – I’m going to make you a ridiculous promise right now…
 P a g e | 46

I Will Teach You More About Marketing In This Short Section Than
Four Years Of University Could Teach You (Or Two Years At An
Agency Could Teach You)
How?
Because I’m going to cut out the horseshit and get straight into what works and what
doesn’t (and why).
Let’s start with…

The Two Main Schools of Marketing

General “Creative” Marketing

Also known as “brand awareness” marketing or mass marketing…some people might
call it “above the line” I just prefer to refer to it a scam.
When most (laymen) think of marketing, this is what they think of – endless billboards,
print ads, 30 second TV commercials…etc.
All of them with some new witty slogan or some catchy jingle, maybe some tits and ass
dropped in there for good measure…or some polar bears drinking Coke.
And that’s what we think marketing is!
Perhaps if you’re like me you loved the show Mad Men and may think that marketing is
a bunch of tortured artistic souls with drinking problems huddled around a fancy
Manhattan office late at night trying to come up with taglines and design pretty
pictures….
…Until they can finally publish that novel or became the next Avant garde painter.
Sure, this is marketing, but…

It’s Pretty Much A Giant Scam

And god do people hate it when I say that.
You wouldn’t believe the endless cut-throat shouting matches I’ve had with people in
the creative advertising world who tell me that the shit they do TOTALLY isn’t a scam
and that it ACTUALLY matters!
And, it’s easy to see why people think this kind of advertising really works.
After all, if you’re plastering your logo with your new tagline all over town and putting
your commercial on during primetime…
And people are talking about how witty your new commercial is….
Then it must be making sales, right?
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Herein lies the problem –

How Do You KNOW It’s Making Sales?
It’s like John Wanamaker – a dead guy who was one of the pioneers of marketing -
said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know
which half.”
So let’s say I’m a car dealership like Nissan and a fancy ad agency came up to me and
said that my advertising was boring…that all I was doing was telling people how great
my car was and offering them price deals and encouraging them to go to store for a test
drive.

Stupid, Stupid, STUPID!

That’s what the creative ad agency would say.
They make me a promise that they’re going to shake up my ad campaigns, really get
people talking.
They’ve got a great idea that’s going to be a smash hit and if I give them a bunch of
money they’ll create endless TV commercials and billboards that the world will love!
Well…I’m hooked.
My car ads ARE kind of boring, so I say – sure let’s do it!
The first commercial they create is REALLY entertaining.
It shows some kid’s room. A toy dinosaur has an action-figure GI Joe in his mouth.
Then ROCK music starts playing and the GI Joe comes alive!
Next thing you know, he’s running across the hard-wood floor to a kick-ass red Nissan
Sports Car (that looks like an RC car).
The GI Joe hops in, checks his sexy face out in the mirror, and drives out of the
room…on a mission.
He’s searching for something, the rock music is blaring, and he’s got binoculars.
He blazes past the house cat. The rock music is PUMPING.
The next thing you know, he slides into what looks like a little girl’s room, tires
screeching (man this guy is badass, right?!).
He crashes into a little toy tea-time table… he doesn’t give a rat’s ass.
The GI Joe steps out of the car, and from the top of the doll house appears a …

Sexy Barby!
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And damn if she isn’t impressed with the red Nissan sports car the GI Joe just drove up
in.
She comes down from the top of the doll house, dressed scantily clad in a shiny dress,
and hops in GI Joe’s fiery red Nissan.
They speed off.
And, just as they do, Ken steps out from the doll house, looking sad.
That cool GI Joe son of a bitch with the awesome red convertible Nissan just took off
with his trophy Barbie bitch!
Then, at the end of the commercial, we see a close-up of the Nissan logo with the
words…”Enjoy The Ride.”

So CREATIVE, Right?
The advertising industry seems to agree.
The Wall Street Journal calls the commercial campaign the most successful TV
commercial of the year!
Magazines call the ads the best of the year as well – article after article.
The people who wrote the campaign (the copywriters) and the art directors appear on
Oprah.
There’s even talk that a TV series will be made about the characters in the ads.
Then, the head honchos of that marketing agency get inducted into the Advertising
Hall of Fame.
When they step on stage, the rock song from the commercial campaign starts playing
and they receive a standing ovation!
People are NUTS for this campaign.
They’re stoked.
These people are GODS of advertising!

But What About The Sales?

Now, this campaign I mentioned is an ACTUAL campaign.
Just Google “Nissan commercial Barbie and Ken” and you’ll get plenty of video results.
This was done by a BIG, hot-shot advertising agency.
And they really did get all that attention and win all those awards.
But for anybody that wished to look at the sales figures….
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The first month of the campaign…

Nissan Sales Fell 2.7% Over The Previous Year

The next month they fell 10.2%.
Meanwhile, their biggest competitor (Toyota) is running the same old boring ads
featuring big rebates, encouraging people to buy a Toyota today and get a $1,000
rebate…and their sales are BOOMING.
The salesmen at Nissan dealerships all over the country – that need to put food on the
table for their families – are complaining because these advertisements with the toys
don’t explain ANYTHING about the car…they’re not encouraging anybody to actually go
buy the damn thing!
Yet, according to the advertising INDUSTRY, this campaign was the most successful of
the year.
Why?
Because general “brand awareness” mass marketing agencies are more interested in
impressing themselves and winning awards (given to them by other advertisers) than
they are…

Making Actual Sales For Their Clients

In fact, for them, sales are not even a pre-requisite for success.
This industry has come up with a wheelbarrow full of buzz-terms they like to throw
around to distract from the fact that they don’t know whether or not their advertising is
successful.
My two favorite are…
 “Brand Awareness” – If your sales tank after they create a campaign, but
newspaper articles are talking about it and they’re winning awards, then don’t’
worry – because “brand awareness” – people know about it, so the results will
come. This brings to my next favorite…

 “Long-term strategy” – Not seeing results in a month? 2 months? 6 months?

Don’t worry, it will happen eventually there is a bunch of “science” that shows
that brand awareness strategies are more effective over the long-term…when
exactly that is they can’t say, but if you keep paying them money to keep running
ads, then at some undetermined point in the future you will see results…that’s for
SURE.
The only time these agencies seem to really take responsibility for the “results” of their
campaigns are when sales jump up the next quarter.
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Then, it’s because of THEIR advertising.

But even then…how can you prove it?
If anybody reading remembers that big Old Spice campaign that first appeared during (I
think) the 2010 Superbowl with the over-the-top shirtless black guy in the towel saying…

“I’m The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”

Many people tout this as a HUGE success.
I mean…sales dropped 7% after the commercial, but with a little voo-doo we can see
that “overall bodywash sales” spiked over 100%.
Okay, so let’s just roll with that.
So, this campaign got a ton of attention online, it made a lot of people laugh, people
were quoting the commercial, it won plenty of industry awards.
So, of course the marketing company is going to brag that this particular campaign
worked.
The issue is…what worked?
Did the commercial bring in the money, or was it the social media marketing campaign
the day after with the actual actor from commercial replying to questions on Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube?
Was it the aggressive YouTube campaign?
Or…was it the lowered prices of bodywash that were touted in stores during the height
of the promotion?
Realistically, it’s impossible to say.
All they know is that, before the campaign sales were X and after the campaign – some
months later – sales were Y.
But Here’s Why Even Successful Brand Awareness Style Campaigns Are
Silly…Even When They Seem To Work
Imagine someone going to the casino every day and playing roulette.
That’s the game where someone spins a wheel, you throw a white ball in there, and
when the wheel stops spinning it lands on any one of 37 slots.
The person playing bets money on which slot the ball is going to fall on.
Pretty fucking stupid, right?
But that is what creative brand-awareness style marketing is, except the agencies aren’t
using their own money, they’re using their clients’ money.
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Sometimes they’re going to win and get a big payoff.

Most of the time they’re not.
And whether or not they win or lose, has no real concrete, predictable, scalable
methodology behind it.
It’s just… throw the ball in there and hope it falls on the number.
And, when they get a big payoff…

Does That Make Playing The Game Any Less Stupid?

And what’s even more moronic is that these agencies will say they have a “system” for
this game, they’ve cracked the Roulette-wheel code…that somehow their campaigns
aren’t all up to chance.
Maybe they crunched the numbers and found the ball falls on #26 sixty percent more
than the other numbers.
Of course, when it fails, they will have the big, hairy balls to say something to the affect
of…
“Listen, you may have lost all your money, but people SAW me at the table
playing…and I had a shirt with your logo on, so it will pay off over time. Now people
know about you.”
Do you know what the head-honcho of that big fancy marketing agency said in an
interview, when he was confronted about the fact that Nissan’s dealerships were
complaining about the dropping sales after his Gi-Joe, Barby, RC Car Toy Story-type
campaign?
“That’s Car Dealers. They’re Forever Bitching About Something. There Are
Always People That Like To Damn Things That Are New.”
Basically – fuck the client for thinking that sales should be more important for a
marketing campaign than awards.
Fuck the car dealerships who need to stay in business.
Fuck the salesmen on the floor for trying to provide for their families.
To break this down, the bulk of those who adhere to the “creative mass marketing” ideal
are more interested in entertaining themselves, in winning awards that other advertisers
give to them, and with impressing their (clueless) clients, than they are with actually
making sales.
Ask yourself…

What Is The Point Of Marketing?

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Why would any business on the planet pay money for advertising?
Is it to entertain people?
Is it to get “people talking”?
Or…is it ultimately to get sales…
Not 1 year from now…
Not 5 months from now…but RIGHT NOW.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think you can call any marketing campaign a success
because you won some awards and people were “entertained” by it.
If it didn’t verifiably make SALES – in that the client spent $1 and made at least $1.10
back, then it is a FAILURE.
Which brings me to – what I consider – the better school of marketing…

Direct Response Marketing

Before I start off this section with MY two-cents on the subject, I’d like to quote – in full –
from David Ogilvy about the difference between direct response and creative brand
awareness marketing.
He is one of the greatest marketing legends who ever lived.
“In the advertising community today there are two worlds. Your world of direct
response advertising and their world – the world of general advertising.

These two worlds are on a collision course.

You direct response people know what kind of advertising works and what
doesn’t work. You know to a dollar. The general advertising people don’t know.
You know that two-minute commercials on television are more effective – more
cost effective – than ten second commercials or 30 second commercials.
You know that fringe time on television sells more than prime time.
In print advertising you know that long copy sells more than short copy.
You know that headlines and copy about the product and its benefits sell more
than cute headlines and poetic copy.

You know to a dollar.

The general advertisers and their agencies know almost nothing for sure
because they cannot measure the results of their advertising.
They worship at the alter of creativity. Which really means “originality” the
most dangerous word in the lexicon of advertising.
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They opine 30 second commercials are more cost-effective than two minute
commercials. You know they’re wrong.
In print advertising they opine that short copy sells more than long copy. You
know they’re wrong.
They indulge in entertainment. You know they’re wrong.

You know to a dollar – they don’t.

Why don’t you tell them? Why don’t you save them from their follies?
For two reasons – first because you’re impressed by the fact that they’re so big
and so well paid and so well publicized.
You’re even perhaps impressed for their reputation for creativity (whatever that
may mean).
Second – you never meet them. You inhabit different worlds. The chasm
between direct response advertising and general advertising is wide.
On your side of the chasm I see knowledge and reality.
On the other side of the chasm I see ignorance.

You are the professionals.

You have more to teach them than they have to teach you.
You have it in your power to rescue the advertising business from its manifold
lunacies.
When I was 25 I took a correspondence course in direct mail. I bought it out of
my own pocket from a corporation in Chicago.
Direct response is my first love. And, later it became…

My secret weapon.
When I started Ogilvy & Mather in New York, nobody had heard of us. But we
were airborne within six months and grew at record speed.
How did we achieve that?
By using my secret weapon – direct mail.
Every four weeks I sent personalized mailings to our new business prospects.
I was always amazed to discover how many of our clients had been attracted to
Ogilvy and Mather by those mailings.
That was how we grew.
Whenever I look at an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper I can tell at a
glance whether or not the writer has had any direct response experience.
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If he writes short copy or literary copy it is obvious that he has never had the
disciplines of writing direct response.
If he has had that discipline he wouldn’t make those mistakes.
Nobody should be allowed to create general advertising until he has served his
apprenticeship in direct response.
That experience will keep his feet on the ground for the rest of his life.
You know the trouble of many copywriters and general agencies is that
they don’t really think in terms of selling.
They’ve never written direct response. They’ve never tasted blood.
Until recently direct response was the Cinderella of the advertising world. Then
came the computer and the credit card and direct marketing exploded.
You guys are coming into your own.
Your opportunities are colossal.
As a rule, no agency should show a campaign to a client unless it has first been
vetted by a direct response expert.
Ladies and gentlemen I envy you. Your timing is perfect. You’ve come into the
direct response business at the right moment in history. You’re onto a good thing.
For 40 years I’ve been a voice crying in the wilderness trying to get my fellow
advertising practitioners to take direct response seriously.
Today my first love has come into its own.
You face a golden future.”

This kind of “welcome” video which was made by Ogilvy sometime in the early to mid-
80s (I’m not exactly sure) is just as applicable today as it was then.
If he was alive today and making the same video, he’d be talking about our ability to
easily (and cheaply) run Facebook ads, Google ads, Twitter ads, Instagram ads, and
more.
And track every single click and how many of those clicks turned into sales.
He’d be talking about our ability to maintain relationships with our customers and clients
through email (rather than direct mail – a far more cumbersome process).
Internet advertising IS direct response advertising and it makes it easier to do on a
scale we’ve never seen before.
Somebody with $50 and the ability to write good copy can write themselves into
$30,000 a month in a matter of days.
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But, before I get into that, I want to talk a little about the history of direct response,
because the tendency is to think that it’s only online…which really discredits 100-plus
years of its history.
The simple fact of the matter is that direct response marketing is more effective than
brand awareness marketing for the following reasons…
 We can track the sales and therefor PROVE what is working and what isn’t
(anything else is just an “educated guess” at best)

 Rather than entertaining the prospect, it persuades them to take an action

(imagine that!)

 Sales are immediate and lasts months, years, and even decades – there is no
guessing whether or not something is working, you’ll know within hours or a few
days max.

 Results are based on money-in-versus-money-out sales – PERIOD. Did you

spend $100 on a campaign? Did $99 come back? Then it failed – back to the
drawing board. No excuses about it. No “brand awareness” about it. No “long
term strategy” about it.
And the thing is, the principals of this kind of marketing and the rules involved have not
changed in over 100 years.
“Creative” brand awareness marketers will tell you they HAVE changed.
They’ll tell you people have shorter attention spans now than ever, so you need to write
less – not more.
They’ll say that pictures of your product sell better than words about your product.
They’ll tell you that people don’t want to watch a 45-minute long infomercial...

But They’re Wrong And The Numbers PROVE It

And how do we know? We know because we can TRACK everything we do and
PROVE it.
We can create a witty TV commercial that lasts 30 seconds and pit it against one that
last 30 minutes and, judging by which one gets more sales, we’ll know which one
worked better (HINT: The 30 minute commercial that emphasizes *benefits* over
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creativity worked better during fringe time than the 30-second commercial during prime-
time).

So What Makes An Advertisement “Direct Response”?

It’s so laughably simple to make any advertisement into a “direct response”
advertisement, you’ll be shocked at why anybody would run a campaign that didn’t
include this “one simple trick”.
Want to know what it is? The big, secret, multi-multi-million dollar trick?
Here it is…

Include A Call To Action!

So…what does that mean and what does that look like?
Recently (at the time of this writing) information came out that Brad Pitt and Angelina
Jolie had split up.
Shortly after, Norwegian Airlines came out with a “creative” campaign.
The advertisement with a red background and white print simply stated…

Brad is Single
Los Angeles. From/one way, incl taxes.
€169
Oh how delightfully witty and creative!
It got picked up by The Telegraph and a few other international news agencies and of
course, that means it was “successful” because, you know, people are talking about it
(just like that Nissan campaign).
But, here’s the real question…wouldn’t you like to know for SURE whether or not this ad
was successful?
Now, one could of course say, “We could look and see if there were a spike in flights
booked to California from where the ad was shown.”
Sure…but was it THIS ad, the articles that were written about it, maybe a billboard that
caused the spike (or drop)…which ad was it?
Or…coincidentally, did simply more people decide to book a flight to California during
that time?
I, personally, find it hard to believe that anybody looked at “Brad is Single” and thought
“That’s a great reason to buy a flight RIGHT NOW!” After all, if that were the case…
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You Would Be a Mentally Ill Stalker

What do people REALLY care about when they’re booking a flight to
California…probably the price, right?
Maybe a special deal that’s only around for a limited time?
But, as I’ve explained (hopefully clearly and in detail) these agencies don’t give a shit
about doing the common sense things that sell, they just want to be thought of as
creative and win awards.
But, what if I were to test MY idea – an ad for a flight to California that advertises a
special limited time price, lower than usual, but you have to book NOW within the next
72 hours to get this amazing deal.
Then, test this ad AGAINST this “Brad is Single” campaign and see which one does
better?
How would we do that?

All We Have To Do Is Put Some Kind Of “Call To Action”

So why not put the following…
Brad Is Sinlge Again
Book Your Flight to California Now For Only $172 (10% Less Than Usual).
Offer Ends On [DATE]
Click Or Call To Get This Special, Never Before Seen Price.
www.NorwegianAirlines.com/bradissingle
1.800.666.bradissingle
Anybody that visits that particular website is there for one reason –they saw the ad.
Anybody that calls that number is calling it for one reason – they saw the ad.
Every flight booked through that page or that number is a “sale” that was made
DIRECTLY from that advertisement.
Suddenly, a campaign you could only “guess” was being successful can be easily
tracked.
And, I could run my idea next to their idea and see which one got more bookings (mine
would by the way).

Do You See How Simple That Is?

You could do this with damn-near anything.
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Want to see if your billboard campaign is actually worth the money?

Don’t just send them to your main website or ask them to call your primary number,
send them to a special “microsite” made specifically for that campaign.
Or, setup a new, inexpensive number only for that campaign.
Or advertise a BIG voucher code that you can track.
It’s so ridiculously easy to turn nearly any advertising campaign into one that requires a
direct response, it’s a marvel as to why anyone would spend money on advertising they
can’t track for sure.
If you can tell exactly what is working and what isn’t working and why….isn’t that
infinitely smarter than throwing “shit out there and seeing what sticks”?
Unless you’re a big, giant, international brand like Coca-Cola (which 99.9% of
businesses aren’t) you have no need to throw money out on “creative
advertising”.
If you’re just about any business out there – you want to get results.
You need to fuel your bottom line.
You need money in the bank and sales and for someone to PROVE to you that the
money you spent made you more back in return.
The best way to do this is through direct response advertising…whether you’re sending
out a direct mail campaign, doing an infomercial, sending people to an online sales
page, doing email, or doing a print advertisement.
And by simply understanding that benefits beats creativity and call-to-action beats out
“throwing it into the ether and hoping sales go up next quarter” you now know more than
every bright-eyed bushy-tailed marketing graduate on the planet.
And you know more than copywriters in creative agencies.
In fact, you know more than that rich bozo who ran that Nissan advertisement we talked
about earlier.
And I’ll make you a promise, just as Ogilvy did. By the time you’re finished with this
course, you’ll know better than them

DOWN TO THE DOLLAR

Now, let’s look very quickly at what 100 years of history has taught us about…

What’s PROVEN To Work

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Imagine for a moment – if you will – that you went up to a car salesman and instead of
him telling you about the benefits of the car, he sat you down in a chair, wheeled out a
portable stage, and started putting on a magic show.
Perhaps he pulls a red Nissan out of a hat, or makes one disappear.
Perhaps he saws a red Nissan in half and pulls the two pieces apart, just to reveal that
the Nissan actually had no damage to it whatsoever.
Maybe he trots out a line of half-naked Victoria’s Secret models and has them start
rubbing themselves all over the car and moaning, “Oh my god, it’s soooo good.”
Maybe he tells you about a beautiful story in which a red Nissan convertible saved a
family full of clown midgets from a stampede of angry captured circus elephants.
Maybe you’d be impressed.
Maybe if you were a guy you’d pop a big, fat boner for the models.
Maybe you’d shed a tear at his sob story.
But what would happen if another salesman came up to you and asked you simple
questions such as….are you married?.
..do you have a children?
....how far is your drive to work?
....What car do you currently own and how long have you owned it?
....What are you looking for in a vehicle, are you wanting to do some off-road driving, go
into the mountains, head to the beach, or just stay in the city?
While Mr. Song-and-Dance is putting on the show, this guy is actually asking you
questions relevant your end decision.
Then, he’ll bring you to a car that fits your lifestyle and explain the benefits as they
relate to your goals directly.
Which one of these two people would you be more likely to buy from?
I think the overwhelming majority of us would agree that the second salesman is the
one that we would be more likely to buy from (or even listen to in the first place).
Yet, as was demonstrated earlier in this chapter, creative agencies think that the first
salesman is the most likely to generate a sale using his methods.
And, in fact, when the second salesman comes by to make the actual sale, the first one
may say he did a great job because it was his “razzle dazzle” performance that created
the “brand awareness” necessary to allow the other salesman to make the sale “easier”.
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You think that’s insane? So do I, but that is the basis of the philosophy that is creative
advertising and “brand awareness” style campaigns.
But, because we can PROVE our work here in the direct response advertising world,
copywriters over the last 100 years have learned that there are some undeniable truths.
In fact…

There Are Rules And Laws That Cannot Be Broken

To attempt to break them in the name of “originality” (the most dangerous word in the
lexicon of advertising, as Ogilvy put it) is to lead to certain failure.
And people will try to tell you (people who either don’t know or who work in creative
agencies…which is one in the same) that today’s hyper-connected “Internet of things”
world in which we have shorter attention spans than goldfish, makes things different
from a hundred years ago.

It’s Not True

In the last ten years that we’ve had smart phones, do you really think that your brain has
somehow evolved past where it was 100 years ago?
What about from 1,000….10,000….100,000 years ago?
Nope.
Sure, the way you react to the world has changed.
Sure, the medium in which you consume information has changed.
But what works hasn’t.
And smart marketers like me and the even smarter people I’ve worked for and the even
smarter people I’ve read… have tested and re-tested and split-tested and tested again,
and what worked a hundred years ago STILL works better than anything else today.
Let’s wrap this chapter up with a few proven truths that most idiot copywriters running
around the parapets of monolithic creative agencies like headless chickens either don’t
know (or are refusing to acknowledge)…

Showcasing Benefits Sells Better Than Witty Slogans

What was the biggest difference between the two imaginary salesmen I outlined earlier?
One was creative, the other showcased benefits to the prospect according to his or her
needs.
Claude Hopkins, author of the nearly 100-year-old Bible of advertising Scientific
Advertising (it’s free on Kindle, you should read it DIRECTLY after you finish my
course), got a desperate client way back in the early 1900s by the name of Schlitz Beer.
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At that time Schlitz was number eight WAY behind all the other beer companies. They
were desperate to boost their standing in the beer world.
Also at that time, all the beer companies were advertising more or less in the exact
same way.
They were harping about how “pure” their beer was.
In fact, some took out full-page ads with a picture of their beer bottle with just the word
“PURE” next to it.
But that didn’t mean anything to the people seeing the ads because all the beer
companies operated in the same way.
They were all just screaming about how pure they were – what the hell does that even
mean? Do you know? I sure don’t.
You see Claude Hopkins didn’t want to sell anything that he did not truly understand.
So…

He Requested a Tour Of The Company’s Brewery

On the tour he was shown plate-glass rooms where beer was dripping over pipes.
He asked why they did this and was told that those rooms were filled with filtered air, so
the beer could be cooled without impurities.
Next, he was brought to a series of huge expensive filters filled with white-wood pulp
that provided a superior filtering process.
The manufacturer explained that they cleaned every pump and pipe twice daily to
ensure purity.
He also explained how each bottle was sterilized not once or twice, but FOUR times
before being filled with beer.
Next, Hopkins was shown the 4,000 foot deep artesian well dug to provide the cleanest
and purest water available, even though the brewery sat right on the shore of Lake
Michigan (at the time Lake Michigan wasn’t a polluted mess and could realistically have
been used as a clean water source).
Finally, Hopkins was brought to the laboratory and shown the mother yeast cell that was
a product of over 1,200 experiments to bring out the robust, signature flavor of the beer.
And, he was told all the yeast used in making Schlitz beer was developed from that
single, original yeast seal.
Finally, Hopkins turned to his guide amazed and exclaimed, “My god! Why don’t you tell
people in your advertising about all these steps you’re taking to brew your beer?”
The Schlitz people told him, “All companies brew their beer about the same way.”
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Hopkins replied…

“Yes, But The First One To Tell The Public About This Process Will
Gain A Big Advantage”
QUICK SIDE NOTE: Businesses are never good at advertising, no matter
how big they are. They are often too close to their product to see the
“angles” needed in order to sell it in a unique way. More times than I can
count, I have been researching a client, pulling out my hair trying to find
some unique selling point, just to have them off-handedly mention a
GOLDEN NUGGET of information that they thought was nothing special.
Happens all the time.
Back to story.
So, Hopkins sat down and wrote the following ad, very plainly and very simply laying out
the process he witnessed, because he knew something very important - explaining the
literal benefits to the prospect would be more valuable than any witty bullshit he
could come up with.
The ad was worded thusly…
PERFECTION OF 50 YEARS
Back of each glass of Schlitz Beer there is an experience of fifty years.
In 1848, in a hut, Joseph Schlitz began brewing. Not beer like the Schlitz beer of
today; but it was honest. It was the best beer an American had ever brewed.
This great brewery today has new methods. A half century has taught us
perfection. But our principals are 50 years old; our aims are unaltered. Schlitz
beer is still brewed, without regard to expense, according to the best that we
know.
We send experts to bohemia to select for us the best hops in the world.
An owner of the business selects the barley, and buys only the best that grows.
A partner in our concern supervises every stage of the breweing.
Cleanliness is not carried to greater extremes in any kitchen than here.
Purity is made imperative.
All beer is cooled in plate glass rooms, in filtered air.
Then the beer is filtered.
Then it is sterilized, after being bottled and scaled.
We agebeer for months in refrigerating rooms before it goes out.
Otherwise Schlitz beer would cause biliousness, as common beer does.
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Ask for beer, and you get the beer that best suits your dealer. He may care more
for his profit than your health.
Ask for Schlitz, and you get the best beer that the world ever knew.

Pretty simple, right? I bet you could write something like that in your sleep.
And yet this simple idea to just lay out the benefits (with a bit of subtle hype) brought
Schlitz from number eight, to the number one best-selling beer in America in just six
months.
And there it remained for decades.

Nothing Has Changed.

In many of the advertisements thrust out by creative agencies today, I’m often not even
clear on what kind of product is actually being offered.
Recently there was a commercial with a dog jumping on a trampoline… apparently that
was supposed to get me interested in shopping at a certain department store.
From what I gather, the store sells neither dogs nor trampolines.
Claims are tossed around like tits and confetti on Mardi Gras, but never explained.
Slogans are whipped up after days of serious discussion, that don’t explain what – if any
– benefit the product has to the people who you actually want to buy the damned thing.
Because direct response copywriters can prove what works, we know that over the last
100 years of advertising – benefits reign king.
Concentrate on the benefits the product has for the target prospect.

Incentives Work Better Than Promises

In general advertising there’s a lot of promises being thrown around – you’ll smell
better….look better…feel better…fuck better…..whatever better, I PROMISE. This is
TOTALLY TRUE and you’ll LOVE IT IF YOU JUST BUY IT!
That’s all well and good and there is nothing wrong with making promises or guarantees
(if you intend to keep them), but that’s not going to push me over the edge to actually
reach out and grab what you’re offering… I need incentive.
And what are incentives? It’s pretty simple really….
 Try it for 30…60…90 days (whatever works for you or the client) and if you don’t
like it I’ll give you your money back, no questions asked.

 If it doesn’t work, I’ll pay you DOUBLE your money back.

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 I’ll give you X% off your first purchase

 Here’s a free sample

 Buy right now and I’ll give you $XXX worth of bonuses for FREE

 Give me your email, phone number, and address and I’ll give you a FREE
ground-breaking report
Those are just a few examples. If we were traveling across a bridge in Medieval times
and an angry looking guy in a suit of armor said we can’t pass because we don’t have
the right papers… we may offer the angry mug an “incentive” to allow us to pass….
In other words, incentives are bribes. And bribes work.

Ugly and Simple Sells Better

Creative agencies will put almost all their emphases on images and beauty and very
little emphases on the words that actually sell something.
In fact, the copy will be just a “background” of the images – an accessory.
This is so absurd it blows my mind every time I see it.
People always talk about how others judge a book by its cover (usually saying they
shouldn’t do it). I don’t think that’s exactly true – I think they judge it by its title.

A Better Title Will Sell More Books Than A Prettier Cover

Look at the title of Dale Carnegie’s famous book…How to Win Friends and Influence
People
Put that shit in black text on a plain-white background and make that the cover of the
book – it will sell.
Why? Because like we talked about earlier it simply laid out the benefits the reader will
get by reading it.
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If you look at how creative agencies run print ads, for example, they’ll take out full-page
(or even two-page ads) that show a gorgeous picture of the product, but say barely
anything about it.
They’ll do the same thing with display ads online.
But direct response copywriters will come in and take out a full-page ad and not show a
SINGLE picture of the product, we’ll fill the whole thing up with boring black-and-white
text, and guess what?
We’ll sell more of that product.
In fact, while general agencies are doing picture ads on Facebook, my ads perform ten
times better and they’re just REALLY long text (sometimes over 1,000 words with NO
picture).
This would give a agency designer a heart attack – “Look how boring and bland it is!”
they will exclaim.

Fools!
The most insane thing to me about creative agencies is how copywriters take a
backseat to designers… as if designers know how to sell anything (they don’t).
It’s all about “How can we fit the copy into the design?” and if the copy doesn’t fit the
design, they go back to the writer and tell them to trim it down, until it becomes
meaningless.
Designers, to me, are meaningless – they play a small, supplementary role.
My goal is to minimize imagery and maximize the literal words that will sell the damn
thing.
To go back to cars, look at how most of the print advertisements these days market cars
– just on looks.
They talk about how sleek it is, how nice the interior feels and looks.
They do this in maybe one clever sentence and show a BIG page of how the car looks.
Who cares?
Look at what David Ogilvy did – for example – with Rolls-Royce.
Instead of talking about how beautiful the car is and showing a bunch of pictures of it,
he wrote a big article and put a picture of the Rolls Royce off to the left hand-side.
The emphasis was on the article.
It started out like this…
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“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from
the electric clock”
What makes Rolls-Royce the best car in the world? “There is really no magic
about it – it is merely patient attention to detail,” says an eminent Rolls-Royce
engineer.

Ogilvy goes on to create a number list with 19 benefits. For example….

1. Every Rolls-Royce engine is run for seven hours at full throttle before installation,
and each car is test-driven for hundreds of miles over varying road surfaces.
2. The Rolls-Royce is designed as an owner-driven car. It is eighteen inches shorter
than the largest domestic cars.
3. The finished car spends a week in the final test-shop being fined-tuned. Here it is
subjected to 98 separate ordeals. For example, the engineers use a stethoscope
to listen for axle-whine.

Any agency designer would look at all these words and go insane arguing how images
of the car should be put front and center, and maybe they had room enough to keep the
slogan, “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise comes from the electric clock”.
Let’s use another, more modern example.
For online marketers, the most effective way to sell a single product is to use what’s
called a…

Video Sales Letter (VSL)

When these video sales letters first started being used by really smart online marketers
(before they all but replaced long-form on-page copy) all they consisted of was some
guy’s voice reading from a script.
And, the only imagery on the video was simply the exact words he was reading – just
black and white Powerpoint slides, with him reading the exact words on screen.
Well, these videos proved to beat-out on-page copy every time, sometimes by 300% or
more.
But all they really were, was the exact wording that would be in the on-page copy, and
read out-loud on a video with no imagery or anything.

And They Were UGLY

They looked ugly and they sounded ugly.
So, of course, over the last seven to eight years many marketers – including billion-
dollar international publishing companies who built their entire empire from direct-
response marketing like Agora and Boardroom – tested higher production quality on
these videos.
For example – paying actors to stand in front of the camera and give the pitch.
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Or, paying somebody to create fancy animated motion-graphics.

Or, adding music and stock footage and more.
Or, just shortening it from the typical 30-to-60 minute length, to 10 minutes…5
minutes… or less.
Guess what?
That boring, ugly-as-sin, amateur-looking Powerpoint-style video…

Out-Performed and Out-Sold EVERYTHING Else!

Period. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Before these VSLs replaced the long-form sales pages online (which were just
extensions of direct-mail sales pages prior to the Internet), there were long, scrawling,
badly-designed 25-to-40-page long online letters.
God they were ugly (they’re not extinct, either, they are still used and are still effective).
Well, of course, designers came along and tore their hair out about how ugly they were,
and tried to “fix” them.
They shortened the copy, made it prettier… and sales tanked.
Same is true for direct mail, print advertising, TV, whatever – simple and ugly sells
better.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again –

Advertising Is Salesmanship Amplified

The way people sell things person-to-person is using a combination of words and
demonstration and many MORE words than demonstration.
Although the visual may play a part, it is secondary to the words being spoken.
To swap that out as if visual sells and words don’t is insane.
I remember a desperate client came to me once who wanted to sell his Real Estate
investment course.
It was a “mid-ticket” online course that costed $500.
A creative agency had approached him and talked up how they were going to make him
so much money.
Well the guy who had created the course had written a sales page for it.
I read the copy for the sales page and it was just REALLY bad…no wonder it wasn’t
working.
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But what was this creative agency’s answer to why the sales page wasn’t working? It
wasn’t to re-write it.
No, in their minds, the reason the sales page wasn’t converting was because…

“It Wasn’t Designed Well Enough”

So they charged this guy something like $7,000 to re-design the sales page and put a
bunch of pretty ads up on Facebook (that work is so click-button simple, the price point
was nothing short of robbery).
The ads were equally bad.
They had a picture of some silhouetted guy in a business suit, with something like a
house in the background, and the wording was, “Passive wealth through property
investment.”
Uh…okay?

What The Hell Does That Mean?

A month goes by – and by the way this guy is paying for these Facebook ads – and not
a single sale.
So he’s about $10,000 in the hole.
The process this creative agency went by was ass-backwards.
It took me a single afternoon to re-write the sales page (and just put it on a white
background).
Then I wrote a few Facebook ads that explained the course benefits and why they
should click on the link. The ads were LONG text (no picture).
The guy had sold 10 people within five days.
He ramped up the advertising from there, and started pulling in over $40,000 a month
(not bad).
And that creative ad agency?
I shall not name them.
But they have been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post, CNN, the owner (not the
employees) is a multi-millionaire who is constantly Snap-chatting his expensive condo in
Miami and all the expensive meals he eats and all the yacht trips he takes…all before
the age of 25.
His agency is really good at selling one thing….lies.
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Putting Lipstick On A Pig Doesn’t Make People More Interested In

Kissing It.
Dressing up a bad salesman in a $4,000 suit and putting a bikini-clad supermodel to
either side of him, isn’t going to boost his ability to sell shit.

Long-form is Better Than Short-Form

Usually a two-minute commercial beats a 30 second commercial.
Typically a 30 minute VSL converts more than a 10 minute VSL.
Usually a 6,000 to 12,000-word sales page will convert better than a 1,000 to 2,000
word sales page.
This is the only “rule” I believe has exceptions based on product and where the prospect
is at during the sales funnel.
However, the fact of the matter is that no matter what copy you’re writing, for any
product, and in any medium, it will typically be significantly longer than anything a
creative agency will recommend for any given campaign.
Because we emphasize words and pitch over images and design, the amount of copy
for any campaign will be longer than our creative counterparts, which means it will be
“long copy” and longer will sell better than those other campaigns.

How People Use Your Copy To Sell

Millions of Dollars Worth of Products
So far we’ve gone through the differences between creative agency copywriters and
direct response copywriters.
I think it’s important to go through one last step before we get into the actual process of
writing copy and that’s understanding what you will be writing copy for and how people
typically use it to sell millions of dollars worth of products and services.
If you don’t understand this at an elementary level then you’re writing copy in the dark.
You will be much more effective if you can look at your client’s marketing process and
see where your copy is fitting in for the big picture.
Unfortunately, this is not a book about the actual mechanism of an effective marketing
campaign.
You need to keep fresh on these subjects and ask lots of questions from your clients.
A modern copywriter can no longer just be somebody that writes copy – they have to
have a solid understanding of how marketing is done (that didn’t used to be the case).
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This will also come in handy in helping guide your client.

Although it is not a requirement that you understand the in-depth mechanisms of
various kinds of marketing processes, the more you understand about it, the more
indispensable you make yourself.
Because, once you can give guidance on how and where your copy should be
displayed and in what point of their funnel it should go, you establish yourself as an
authority in the space.
I will say that, as you work with clients and simply ask them to show you what they’re
doing and how they’re doing it, you will begin to learn organically.
Personally, I have helped head-up people’s campaigns, but I’ve found that – if I’m doing
marketing – I’m really only doing it for myself and my own products/ventures (this book
and the way you came to buy this book is a prime example of that).
Although I can do it for my clients I 99.9% of the time choose not to. I write the words
that sell. I’ll leave the busy work up to their team and I will only give them guidance on
what they should do with my copy, where they should put it, and what their team should
do.
I will also write the ads for Facebook, Adwords, and give guidance on how display ads
should be designed. I also write “supplementary” copy for emails as well (but I include
this in my charge).
They can build the pages, target the ads, buy the media, monitor it all, and all that good
stuff. I am the copy guy.
When it comes down to it – that’s all busy work best-left to office monkeys.
At the end of the day…

Nothing Is Selling Without Your Words

And if you look at any construction project, you’ll see that no single company is building
it.
There’s a company that moves the earth…a company that lays the foundation… …one
that draws the blueprints…lays the wiring…puts in the
plumbing…landscapes…paints…installsthe carpet.
No one company does it all. Everybody has their specialty and their own individual jobs
to do.
However, all those companies – although they may not have the “master” level of
knowledge to do all those other tasks – at least has a fundamental understanding of
how they work and where their expertise fits into the BIG picture of the finished house.
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They also have an understanding of the role the other people play – those who came
before them, that will be working with them, and who will come after them.
So that’s what we’re aiming for.
You’re a copywriter.
You don’t need to do all that other stuff (and you shouldn’t, as far as I’m concerned).
But, you should at least understand it from a bird’s-eye view.
Let’s start out with the realm in which you will be writing most of your copy.

Online Marketing
All marketing “funnels” share similar characteristics….
1. Create an offer
2. Generate targeted traffic to that offer
3. Convert that traffic into sales
4. Stay in contact with that audience over time to sell them new things later (they
build big email lists of buyers, then send those buyers to offers…usually to a
sales page that YOU write).
Let’s look at the most common ways your clients will be doing that in the online world.

The PPC Campaign to a Lead Capture to a Nurture to a Sales Page

PPC stands for “pay per click” and it’s basically any advertisement you see online.
For this example, let’s take the two most recognizable “PPC platforms” out there –
Facebook and Google ads (the kind that show up as “sponsored search results”).
Let’s use an example project.
I’ll go with a perfectly balanced dog food. Let’s call it “Super Science Fido Fix”.
Let’s assume your client is starting from scratch. They just created this product and
have never sold it before, anywhere.
So, they hire you to write a sales page (let’s say for this example they ONLY hired you
to write the sales page).
The sales page in this process will be the last place their prospect goes.
They want to eventually get their prospect to go to that sales page and for that sales
page to convince the prospect to buy the product.
So, the first and most logical step is to create a “PPC campaign”.
On Google, they will create an ad that targets keywords like, “best diet for dogs”.
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So, every time somebody types that into google their ad comes up “Click here to find
out the best diet for dogs!”
On Facebook, they may create an ad that’s a little longer, “Do you want the best for
your dog? Did you know all other dog foods have X, Y, and Z junk in them and it’s bad
for A, B, C reasons? We have solved this problem, click here to see how…” and they
may include a picture of their product or a dog eating food or a cute puppy or whatever.
Once they click that ad, it leads to what is called a “squeeze page” (or a “capture page”
or “lead page” depending on who you’re talking to).
The goal of this page is to capture the prospect’s information (namely their email).
Any online marketing funnel wants to capture the email of a prospect. Because, if they
don’t buy NOW, they may buy later. If you have their email, you can email them later
and try to get them to buy.
There are typically two industry standards for this, but both involve a very simple, short
page that typically has nothing more than a headline (perhaps a short video included)
and a few bullet points.
The first standard is this…
They prospect goes to the squeeze page and the headline says something like…

Find out Why These Top Leading Pet Food Brands Are
Destroying Your Dog’s Health And What to Do About it.
Fill in Your Name and Email Below to Get This FREE life-
Saving Report.
Don’t Cut Years Off Your Dog’s Life, This Report Will Make
Sure Your Furry Friend Lives a Long, Healthy Life to The
End.
Below that will typically be a few bullet points of what the prospect will learn in this free
report and perhaps a short video as well.
The goal for this standard is to simply have the prospect provide their email.
Then, to email that prospect the report (which is informative, but also provides a call-to-
action to go to the sales page that you wrote).
It will also start them on a string of “nurturing emails” which will then try to provide more
value over the next few days/weeks with a final couple of emails issuing a call-to-action
to the sales page.
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The client may choose to have it where, when the prospect clicks “Submit” they are
automatically emailed the free report, but then they are also re-routed to the sales page
after they click “Submit” in hopes that they buy right away but not later.
Tests show sometimes this works better, sometimes it doesn’t.
IMPORTANT NOTE: As a copywriter, you could literally write the content
for this entire process. You could write the PPC ads, you could write the
free report (this is called “ghostwriting” and it’s typically considered an
“informational product” or a “whitepaper” or a “case study” whenever you
see people asking for that type of work, ask them, “Is this the primary
product? Or is this a free opt-in incentive?”). You could write the landing
page copy. You could write all the follow-up emails AND you could write
the sales page. Often times you can upsell yourself (if you want to) with
someone who is asking you to write a sales page, you can ask them about
the rest of their funnel….do they have the informational product written?
The ads? The squeeze page? The emails? Oh – you’ll do that too!
Regardless, the goal of this funnel is to capture information and repeatedly try to get
those prospects to turn into buyers by….going where?
Your sales page of course.

PPC Campaign To A Webinar

This is becoming more and more popular and it’s pretty much the same concept as
above. But, the way it works is the PPC campaign leads to a call-to-action squeeze
page to sign up for a webinar (like an online seminar).
It says “you’ll learn X, Y, Z” it’ll change your life blah blah blah (this is best for
informational products, but I’ve seen it work for software as well, for example).
The person has to enter their email to sign up for the webinar (which could start an hour
from now or a few days from now).
Then, they are sent emails reminding them when the webinar is starting…
 Email One: Webinar is in just two days, here’s some more information on what
we’ll be talking about…
 Email Two: Webinar is tomorrow, get excited because we’re also going to talk
about…
 Email Three: Webinar starts in 12 hours…
 Email Four: Webinar starts in 1 hours
 Email Five: Webinar starting now!
 Email Six: You missed the webinar? Here’s a replay!
These webinars can be live, although these days they usually aren’t.
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There is software out there that allows people to create a webinar and then have it run
every hour, on the hour, 24 hours a day for example.
Yet the webinar itself IS the sales page. So, if you were the copywriter for this you
would be essentially writing a VSL (video sales letter).

Email Campaign To An Established List Or Rented List

Now some clients will be somewhat established over a few years (these are your IDEAL
CLIENTS ones that have a big list of prospects/buyers and have a proven, well-
established business).
Let’s use the example of a health supplement. This health supplement gives you energy
and makes you feel younger.
Let’s say this company has been in business for five years.
They may have built up an email list of both buyers and people who have “opted in” to
receive a free sample.
Let’s say that list is 500,000 people strong.
The first method of advertising for them would be to send the offer (your sales page) out
to their already big email list.
Or, let’s say, that your client is rather new, but they want to start with email marketing,
they may enter into what’s called a “joint venture” (JV for short).
This means that they find some other business that has a BIG email list of people who
previously purchased a product that is similar to the one your client is offering.
They will “rent” the list and have their offer sent out on that list. Again, the offer leads to
YOUR sales page.
You should always ask your clients whether or not they already have a list (and how big
it is).

Offline Marketing
Most of the clients you’re going to get are going to be spending the bulk of their time
and money with online marketing because that is the fastest, easiest, and most effective
way of doing promotions (also the cheapest with the least hassle).
There is no printing involved or shipping and handling and so on.
But that, of course, does not mean that direct mail is dead. Far from it. The best
companies have a combination of the two, but the smaller companies (and individuals)
will start online first and expand through direct mail later (if at all).

But What Does That Really Mean?

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Everything online is simply an extension of nearly a century of offline advertising. The

methodologies are not just similar, they are exactly the same.
For example, advertisers would find a list of people. In the example of dog food, let’s
say they found a list of people who were already subscribed to pet-related magazines
and who had purchased pet-related products in the past.
Then, they would send a sales page to them and they would call a number or send in
the order for the product (that’s your sales page by the way).
Or, they may send out a letter that offers a free incentive (such as a free report) and the
report itself, although informational, would sell them on the main product.
Or, they would put out advertisements in Newspapers, TV, radio and so on (like we do
with PPC online) which either had a call-to-action to order, or that offered a free
incentive (so they could collect interested prospects’ mailing addresses), and sell to
them later or over time.
There’s a possibility you could be asked to write a sales page for direct mail, but if a
company is going to use direct mail, chances are they’ll take a sales page you wrote for
their online efforts and simply adapt it to be mailed out physically.
They may ask you to write a magazine-style sales page (again, same thing is done
online where you write an “informational blog article” which is really a sales page for a
product – again, all these methods just transferred online).
In this case, the client would take out a one page, two page, or more (sometimes ten
pages) advertisement in popular magazines that their target market reads, and you
would write what is essentially an “article” (it’s really a sales page, but you get the idea).
I’m not going to put a lot of emphasis on this, though. You will likely not be asked to
write this FIRST with any client, and very few clients will have you write these.
If you write a good sales page that is working online, they will likely simply print that
page out, adapt a little with their in-house team, and send it out as a letter, or re-write it
a bit to become one of those advertisements.
Now you’re armed with the knowledge of why people do what they do and what
“triggers” them to take action and you know more than every single marketing
graduate on the planet.
Let’s get to writing!

Time For Module Two…