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• Are You a Direct Response Gazillionaire-In-Waiting?

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WARNING:

Twitter can be evil.

Some less-than-scrupulous people can easily take advantage it and wield frightening influence over poor innocent subjects.

On the other hand, use it with responsibility and you perhaps have the most powerful relation-building medium online today.

Why? That’s because Twitter is currently the closest app on Earth that replicates the actual thought patterns of the human mind. You see, the human mind does not really think in blog and article form. It does not think in huge chunks of information.

Instead, it thinks in a stream of consciousness way, random disjointed thought layered upon random disjointed thought.

That is why when you use Twitter, your mind is “tricked” into further receptivity than it normally should have, because it’s now in its most natural environment.

It’s almost like you are communicating telepathically with other people, because you’re able to uncover a 100 different thoughts that are contained in a 100 different tweets.

After all, what’s more intimate than the whispering voices in your head?

If you know how to take advantage of that state of mind, your microblogging can make you rich.

After a few months of testing and tracking what works, I have discovered 3 ways that Twitter can impact your business unlike any other site on Earth. Once you understand the Twitter user’s borderline hypnotic state of mind, these 3 covert techniques can pre-sell prospects on warp speed.

1) Psychic Market Research

Marketers often talk about the Robert Collier concept of entering the conversations in your prospect’s mind. Information marketing genius Porter Stansberry says that our marketing should start where they are.

In other words, the closer you can align yourself to their top-of-the-mind thoughts, the more receptive to your marketing message they become.

However, the problem is that more often than not, you don’t know what they’re really preoccupied with.

What’s worse, you sometimes make harmful guesses and assumptions. The end result is a bomb in your promotions and a dent in your sales, because your offer is not in tandem with what the prospect is thinking and feeling in the first place.

Good news. The whole interface of Twitter is one big web conversation taking place in a meeting of minds.

You see prospects exchanging rapid-fire thoughts, opinions, and random finds. In just one screen, you can read the hopes, dreams, interests, fears and dominant emotions of your niche.

To do this, just use http://search.twitter.com and Monitter, put in your niche keywords and boom–you’ll instantly be transported to the heart of the conversation.

Start your marketing there and see the difference in your response.

2) Network Like a Viking

Vikings have a brutally effective way of making friends, and meeting potential mates.

They sail to random villagers and within minutes, they kill all the inhabitants, pillage all the houses and capture all the maidens.

Why are they so successful?

It’s because they catch people by surprise, and there’s little in the way of resistance.

And in the nearly spam-free waters of Twitter-ville, prospects are more often than not caught by surprise, and there’s really very little resistance and a whole lot of receptivity.

For one, Twitter requires very little investment in expanding the social circle, because you can securely follow and unfollow people at will. As a result, it’s easier to access the market leaders on Twitter because well, other than the investment of clicking a button, they won’t really lose their privacy by accepting you as a friend–unlike email or mobile.

Furthermore, since you’re confined to only 140 characters for your Twitter message, the effort for them to reply back to you is only a sentence and a click away. No relatively complex email writing process.

And because one-liners are lot less threatening than blocks of text, so people instinctively resist the messages less.

Plus, if they do get annoyed, the BLOCK button is only a push away.

Making connections has never been easier, and as long as you’re not blatant with your promotions, you can make friends and influence people literally at the click of a mouse.

So do the Vikings and plunder prospect’s wallets away.

3) Establish Your Place on the Mountain

Gary Vaynerchuk said this in his most recent keynote address for Web 2.0 Expo, “If you give good shit, people will follow”.

This rings true especially for Twitter, because if you can share good stuff on a regular rate, you’ll be perceived as a guru in record speed.

It’s because the Twitter user’s frame of mind is a very conducive one for making yourself larger than life.

Prospects get on Twitter to find out the latest gossip, to chat with their friends, and more importantly–to seek out important summarized information and short inspiration and revelation quotes.

Once you do that, it’s like you are setting off flares in the middle of the night, and your prospects will notice.

As you know, getting prospects through the sales funnel is always a numbers game. The more good content you get out there attached with your name, the more chances you have at converting prospects to customers.

Because Twitter’s push-button easy way of delivering messages instantly with a low investment of 140 characters, you can keep sending out quality stuff over and over again. Indeed, there’s unprecedented opportunities for something to snag or hook the consumer and keep them for life.

And with that newfound authority, you can use it to sell more stuff and make more money from your now pre-sold audience.

So the conclusion?

Twitter is subversive territory.

When you understand how a prospect uses Twitter, getting your marketing message across has never been this unfairly simple.

It is software built on the base of NLP programming. So even if you have not gone for a day of training in your life, Twitter makes the mind easy pickings because it leaves the mind in a vulnerable state.

So use these 3 secrets and profit from them. In fact, let me know if you’ve used them and seen results.

Because I have. Amazing breakthroughs have been happening since I hopped on to the micro-blogging bandwagon.

To see these controversial techniques and other secrets I will not reveal here in action, feel free to follow me on Twitter: Email Copywriter

Watch me closely, emulate me, and apply them to boost response rates in your marketing.

Again, here’s the link to follow me on twitter:Â email copywriting

For me, writing an email is a 4-step process – it’s a system that you can use and build on.

4 Step Process to Email Copywriting

1. Current or Evergreen?

First, you have to strategically decide whether it’s an evergreen email or a current email.

An evergreen email is the type of email that you can put in your autoresponder and you can keep it running repeatedly year after year or once every 4-5 months, depending on the subject and on your sequence.

In other words, you can keep it there forever.

A current email means that you write emails as a reaction to what is happening in the world right now. It usually a news-related item, for example oil prices going up, summer, the Dark Knight Returns, or back-to-school.

If you decide to write a current email, use the USA Today secret and put in little facts to get your reader’s attention.

However, to put it another way – it’s long-term profit vs. short term gain, because something evergreen isn’t affected by circumstance and is an eternal issue that won’t go away. However, it’s with current emails that you’re able to make more money in the short run because that’s directly relevant to the person reading your email.

I don’t know what the magic ratio should be – 50% evergreen and 50% current so that your work as an email copywriter is reduced because there’s more evergreen content? Or, should you focus on bringing in short term gain because email is so flexible that you can write one in 2 hours? That ratio is up to you to determine.

Either way, always decide whether your email is evergreen or current.

The people who are really good with evergreen emails are the seduction gurus who do it for topics they believe are evergreen in their niche market– people like John Alanis or Ross Jeffries. David DeAngelo (Double your Dating), for example, has a 100email autoresponder sequence, every day except weekends for about 3 months, and then it repeats – and he has a 20M dollar business!

If you want to do the same, you can send the same emails – but preferably after a long time. Chances are, people won’t remember after 6 months.

2. Determine the Strategy

It sounds very big, but there are actually just 3 components: List, Story, Offer.

1. Which list am I emailing? Because this determines your customer avatar, and what resonates with the people on each list is different.

2. What’s the story I want to share? Did my friend share with me an amazing technique that I want to introduce? Or how I used a particular technique to do overcome something?

3. What’s the offer, and what product am I selling to this list?

You just need one sentence for each of the above: you don’t need to be very elaborate because emails aren’t meant to be elaborate – they’re meant to be simple and to the heart.

Matt Furey says the “3 C”s of email marketing are to be Clear, to be Concise, and to be Colloquial.

By concise, I don’t necessarily mean short –just don’t repeat yourself. With email length, it works 2 ways – David DeAngelo’s emails go on and on, and at the same time Matt Furey says the recommended length is about 500 words. It doesn’t have to be short because 500 words does give you a bit of room.

Here’s the thing – to be successful in email marketing, you must write the way your grandmother would write email, in a way similar to how she’d ramble to you. The more you replicate that formula and the more you write like a friend, the more sales you’ll make because you’ve developed that connection.

This is because when people go into their email, their mindset is to open an email from a friend. If you write something ‘salesy’, they’ll most likely find it a turn off and they’ll immediately switch off.

3. Write down the Bones

At this point, I start writing the emails. ‘Writing down the Bones’ is a strategy employed by one of the top creative writing teachers of all time, Natalie Goldberg. She said that there are 2 persons residing in you – the writer and the editor – and they’re always at odds.

That means when the writer writes something, the editor immediately says, ‘Hey, that sentence looks funny…why don’t you improve this structure?’ So, initially, you have to cast the editor aside, and write.

To do this, I give my self a time-line –usually exactly half an hour. I don’t care how long it is; there’s some sort of structure, but I just continue to write whether the sentence seems weird or it’s not flowing.

Why? Because that is most probably the most authentic thing you can get because it’s heart to heart.

As Matt Furey says, Talk-Write Write-Talk. It’s heart to heart communication, so it can only work when you write out of your stream of consciousness. You write from your subconscious to touch the other person’s subconscious.

Usually, in the first draft, you’ll have the story. You may not have all the psychological triggers and you may only have a bit of the offer, but it is really all about the story (because grandmothers like telling stories). The more stories you tell, the more things you sell.

Even if initially your story is ill formed, just make sure to spend that half-hour writing. No second thoughts, no going back – just keep moving forward.

4. Edit

I usually spend one hour editing the foundation of my email and cleaning it up here and there.

I use psychological triggers – things like scarcity, anticipation, curiosity, etc. I’ve also assembled my copywriter’s toolbox which contains transition words and phrases, power words, electrifying your ads, colloquialisms, idioms etc.

I regularly use Magic Transitions (from Ted Nicholas) and the new Clayton Makepeace free report, ‘The #1 Way to Electrify Your Ads’, which you can use to make your email more ‘warm’ by using clichés, colloquialisms, and figures of speech.

And voilà – that’s how you write an email using my simple 4 step process.

Additional tips:

• Collect subject lines – when you see a good subject lines, copy and paste it into your collection. I’ve seen really cool subject lines, like “Headless man found in Topless Bar”, or Dr Dave drinks his own urine to lose weight – I mean, that would make you open that email! Even things like real life, like people’s Skype messages can make for eye-catching lines – one of our programmers wrote “hackers have CSS designers too”. You can so easily use this as a template and adapt it to your needs e.g., ‘serial killers have friends too’, etc.
• When it comes to trying to understand your market and figure out the psychological triggers in relation to the subject you’re writing about, it’s useful to go to Amazon and find a book related to what you’re writing about. If you look at the chapter break downs / headlines, it’s pretty much all the psychological triggers there because they’ll cover topic by topic what the reader is looking for.
• The top bullet swipe files are not in copywriting books, but 2 general books that you most likely have heard of before: the first is ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie. The second is ‘How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling’ by Frank Bettger, with the table of contents by direct mail master copywriter Victor O. Schwab. The contents are all essentially bullet point templates for you to swipe.

Paris, a Trojan Prince, kidnapped Helen of Troy who was reputed to be the most beautiful woman who ever lived. When her husband discovered that she was missing, all of Greece took part in the ensuing war. They sieged the huge city of Troy for years, but they couldn’t figure out how to get inside the gates.

We all know necessity is the mother of all invention. After 10 fruitless years, they came up with the Trojan Horse. It was a big wooden horse on wheels, big enough for a bunch of Greek soldiers to hide inside. They pretended to retreat and sail home, acting like they had given up and left.

When the people of Troy opened their city gates and the found the horse, they didn’t know what it was. The Greeks planted a spy to trick them into believing it was a gift, so they brought it in. It was so big that it couldn’t go through the gate so they tore down a piece of the city wall to get it in.

During the night after everyone had fallen asleep, the Greek soldiers came out of the Trojan horse, killed the guards on the walls, and signaled to the other Greeks to come attack Troy. The Greeks could get in now because the walls were torn down. Troy was conquered and the war was won.

How does the Trojan horse apply to marketing?

When the Trojans saw the a huge wooden horse, they brought it in. Why? Because they perceived it as a gift of some value. They took it inside. The Greeks used the Trojan horse to win over the Trojans. I’m not advocating violence, but I am pointing out the genius behind the idea of using the ‘gift’ as a way to get to your prospect’s wallet.

An Introduction to Trojan Horse Marketing

Let me introduce you to a marketing principle called Trojan Horse Marketing. The reality is, when people see a marketing message or a promotion, their walls go up further.

Trojan Horse Marketing is defined as getting your promo message across, past the prospects’ barriers which have been erected to block out those promotional messages to begin with.

Trojan horse marketing works in the real world. Why? Because even if your prospect has strong walls and fortresses, when they see your Trojan horse, they see it as a gift from heaven, and they bring that gift inside the barriers. That’s what Trojan Horse Marketing is about.

It’s about how to position your marketing as a Trojan horse; as a gift; as a welcome distraction from life; as an answer from heaven.

Ask yourself, “Am I a Trojan horse in my marketing?” Down the line, I’ll talk more about how to express Trojan Horse Marketing – in email, in blogs, in different forms of promotions.

It also happens to be the only budget food place I know with a queue that goes down the length of the entire street – people queue up from end to end to eat steak, and it took us about an hour to get in!

Here’s the question: why do they have such a long queue for a budget food place? The obvious answer is, “yes, the food is great”, but beyond the generous portions and pleasant atmosphere, the first thing people talk about isn’t the steak, nor is it the service.

It’s the SIDE DISHES. The potato chips. The French fries. The baked potatoes. My friends have stories of people ordering 15 side dishes to go with a chicken chop, because the side dishes are just that great.

People are raving about the side dishes! Why? Because the French fries had paprika salt sprinkled on top of them, and people queue up for an hour down the length of the street to enter Aston’s grill. No doubt the portions are good, and so is the food, but when people think “Astona’s Grill”, they think paprika fries. Why?

I think this is the answer. First, take your entire customer service process – no matter the field or genre you’re in- and break it down into its components. So, for example, in a steak house, you have the waiters, the menu with French fries and other side dishes.

Next, take the seemingly most insignificant thing, and add a dash of effort to it. When you add a dash of paprika to your fries, it creates a pleasant disruption to your customer’s expectations because they haven’t seen anything like it before. When people eat the paprika fries, the place is elevated in their minds because of the tiny, extra touch. I call this the Paprika Effect.

The main problem is that it takes a bit of effort and a considerable amount of time to add customer delight to your main product items “your big offerings, which are your main course. But, when it come to the small things, the smaller battles, the “low-hanging fruit” as it were, if you tweak the little things first, you will create a domino effect so that by the time you reach the “main course”, you already have a line of fanatical customers.

In the same manner, in the US, everyone goes to Gordon Biersch because of the ‘Gordon Biersch Garlic Fries’. It’s a very similar concept, but it’s funnier because Gordon Biersch is a micro brewery and people go there because of what they’ve done with their fries!

Let’s put it this way. When people go to a grill house, they expect good steak and decent side dishes, simply because they’re mostly paying for good steak. They get satisfied, but they don’t get delighted. Just adding paprika to the chips turns customers into fanatics who want to come back, and knock at your door again.

Joe Girard, the world’s #1 retail person, said something very simple: his strategy was to send out postcards that said, “I like you”. For example, every now and again you could send your customers a postcard that says “I like you”, and with it comes with a small extra bonus. It can something as simple as an audio, but is has to be totally unexpected. I emphasize on “customers” because we know that if you start by giving things free, people don’t normally value it at all.

You can start immediately after they buy – you can turn people into fans right from the beginning and get rid of all the doubts they may have had. It also gets them to consume more of your products, and that in turn makes it more likely that they’ll come back to buy more. When you add that element of customer delight, your business even has the potential to go viral, a formula that Centerpointe has used quite successfully.

You can do it, too. First, you need to create and put in place a proper customer relations system. For example, make sure you have a separate buyers list. Once you have the basics in place, you can start figuring out how to add paprika because if you don’t have proper customer relationships or a proper back end, doing this might not be as effective.

Then, you can think about the various components of your customer relationship. Where can you add paprika? Think about a small thing that other people ignore that you can make great. What tweaks can you make? Instead of a .pdf file, can you send a video file instead? When you do those little things, you create something for your customers to form a long queue about.

After you’ve written your body copy, bullet point and/or headlines, there are three tips in this evaluation process for your bullets or headlines.

Start With ‘S’

1. Specify

Make everything as specific and as targeted as humanly possible.

If you’re talking about a benefit such as boosting sales or increasing effectiveness, give exact figures. Is it a 232% boost in sales? Does it double your sales? If it’s a 433% boost in employee morale, then spell it out.

Be as specific as possible because everything that is vague will lose your readers’ attention.

In your body copy, wherever you find a vague statement, “this will make any employee happy” or this particular technique boosts employee morale, specify how it boosts morale.

Think to yourself, for example, in what specific way does it boost morale? Whether it’s numbers, techniques or mindsets, everything must be specific. As long as your messages vague, they won’t hit as sharply.

2. Spice-up

It has been said that the job of copywriter, or any writer, for that matter, is to make interesting the uninteresting.

There are several ways you can spice up your copy. Put in a power word, like…

• Astonishing
• Amazing
• Astounding
• Announcing
• Revealing
• Powerful
• Vital
• Confidential
• Genuine
• Successful
• Breakthrough
• Humiliate

Another way is to make it a secret. Matt Furey does this very well.

Or, you can also find a buzzword to use,the “hamster wheel approach to increasing productivity”, for example. It may be something that’s not really in the copy, but you can suddenly pack it in, making it attention-grabbing and more interesting not just for your readers but for yourself as well.

You can also spice up your copy by adding a lot of emotion by using 75 of the most powerful words in the English language. I’ve started compiling and using them liberally in my copy.

Can you guess what the spiciest word is in the English language? It’s Y-O-U.

In all the copy you write, in every bullet and in every headline, include this word as much as you can. If you have read any sales copy, it’s always more about the prospect than it is about the products.

It’s about their wants, their fears, their worries –it’s not about your product at all. When you use the word “you”, you transform a product’s benefit into a benefit that your prospects can bring to life in their minds.

3. Story

Be it a process, mindset or technique, turn everything into a story. Stories draw people in and make you human.

You can tell the story of how you met a certain person who taught you something, and when you practiced and implemented it, your life changed. Squeeze in as many mini-stories as possible into your headlines and body copy.

Use these three techniques – all beginning with the letter “S” –to strengthen your copy and make it more compelling.

What is a Big Idea?

A big idea especially as relevant to our industry involves combining the "knew" and the "new".

‘New’ is something totally unrelated to the industry and ‘knew’ is something existing within the industry. When you combine them, you come up with something innovative which explodes your profits.

They may be ‘big ideas’ in terms of advertising campaigns, products, marketing or sales strategy.

Most people say that you can replicate success by using tried and true methods; many say that copywriting is swiping a few files to replicate success. It works in some cases but if you want to take your success to a whole new level, you need a big idea.

Clayton Marketplace says his biggest winners in terms of his copywriting and his letters were based on big ideas which, in their time, were almost revolutionary in nature. It’s from such big ideas that accelerated growth can happen.

If you follow a predictable route, the growth will be predictable. Predictably high, perhaps, but if you want to go to the next level you need a big idea.

If I had to describe the foundation for big ideas, I’d talk about a monkey sitting at a typewriter. A thousand typing monkeys locked up in a room over a century will be able to produce work the quality of Shakespeare. What I mean is, when it comes to big ideas, it’s all about the numbers. The eureka moment; the ‘aha’ moment is a myth. It’s about quantity not quality.

How do you generate Big Ideas?

You don’t sit there and meditate and suddenly one big idea comes out…No, really. It doesn’t happen like that.

You sit down, and generate 50 ideas. Or 100 ideas. Or even better, 300 ideas. And from there, I bet you that at least one of them will be good enough to explode your business to the next level. That’s the foundation –it’s always a numbers game.

But, how do you generate as many ideas as you can, you’re wondering? There are some who regard themselves gurus who can generate brilliant, problem-solving profit-booming ideas, instantly. However, the rest of us mere mortals need to keep trying and pushing.

This was how, in my previous life, I got hired as a copywriter although I had no prior experience. My boss told me to generate as many ideas as possible for three products. They didn’t have to be good ideas, but I had to come up with as many fresh angles as possible.

Within the space of 3hours, I came up with 300 ideas…and I was hired on the spot.

This is the key:

Be Avant-garde Outside Your Own domain.

This key isn’t just for generating big ideas, but for success in anything –even my success in advertising. In my time in advertising during which I won numerous awards, I attribute my success to this key. What’s interesting is this: this key isn’t from any business book.

It was actually from an author by the name of Edmund White on a commentary on Salon.com. He observed that artists are mostly only avant-garde in their own domains. Although they expose themselves to the finest of their own field, everything else they take in is just like what everyone else is taking in.

For example, as a marketer, if you want to be the best in your field, don’t just study your field, marketing. When you do this, you create an incestuous loop, and you won’t create new ideas because they’re based on something someone else in marketing has done before. Even if you read many direct marketing and entrepreneurial books, you’re still going round the same circle.

But, if you step out of that domain, if you start, in the words of Brian Vaszily, "immersing yourself in genius", where you immerse yourself in the greatest form of human expression and creativity in every single field, good ideas will come out from there.

Imagine that fruit are ideas and the soil is your imagination. The fertilizer then is to make sure that the soil is fertile and produces as much fruit as possible…that fertilizer consists of ideas outside your own domain, outside the realm of marketing.

But, here’s a disclaimer:

The statement says no artist is avant-garde outside his own domain, and this basically means you MUST be an artist to begin with.

This means that in order for this to work, you must master marketing first. Before an outside idea can work, you must know the rules of Internet marketing before you can tap into being avant-garde outside your own domain.

If you are not a master of your own domain, if you are avant-garde outside your domain, everything will crumble because you don’t have the proper foundation to know what’s good or what works in your field.

Most copywriters say that to succeed in your industry, you have to be an expert in your field and in your products because when you know your product inside out, you can express it in new ways. It’s probably part of the secret behind Agora’s success.

There are many ways to tap into generating big ideas, but below are two fairly instant, practical ways to go about doing this. You have to immerse yourself in genius, in music and the arts, in different specialty magazines –you may find some good ideas. This is what I sometimes do. I call it funnel vision in practice.

How to generate a Big Idea

Funnel vision is a concept by Jay Abraham, the basic idea of which is this: if you look outside your own field into another domain, whatever is there –their cliches and norms –take them and apply them to your field and your products will soar. It’s instant innovation, and there are two practical ways to do it.

i. From the Inside, Looking Out

Dan Kennedy says to list down all the norms of your industry –its standard picture poses, usual phraseology, etc. And then, you break and/or twist them, one by one.

ii. From the Outside, Looking In

Take another industry, list their traits and cliches, and apply them in your industry and in every aspect of how you run your business. E.g. if you take the example of an airline where they have free tickets and a check-in counter, think of how you would apply these to your business.

You can generate a lot of ideas using these two techniques. Listing the norms may take you a while, and just by twisting them you already have 20-30 ideas off the bat.

Overnight Test

To illustrate this, I would use the example of somebody sleeping. That’s how simple it is. In advertising, it’s called the overnight test.

A good idea at that time may be the most contemptible of ideas in the morning. You might think it a genius idea when you first come up with it, you might find it amazing, but sleep over it first and see if it’s still a ‘genius idea’ in the morning.

If, in the morning, you are still equally excited about it, it most likely means yes, it is a good idea because it has passed the overnight test.

There are other idea-generating methods, and I’ll continue to share these with you later. In the meantime, I am as usual curious to hear from you h ow the principles I am teaching you are affecting the way you do business. (Don’t forget that other like-minded people are linked to your website when you comment on our blog!)

It’s interesting and eye-opening, almost like a "survival of the fittest" experiment with the best emails rising to the top and the ones not cutting the mark sinking to the bottom (simply because I subscribed to 140 marketing mailing lists).

All 140 marketers proclaim themselves the ‘best expert’, throwing all kinds of free information… and yet there were still only 2 or 3 that really impressed me. Every single time these guys send me an email, I open it.

I’ve tried to reverse-engineer how and why these emails are so amazingly effective at capturing my attention, and even in some cases, my heart. I call this single most powerful concept ‘SOS’: Setting Off Sparks.

Setting Off Sparks

This finds its basis in the analogy of a forest fire, where all it takes is a spark to some dry wood to set alight 1000 acres.

In the same manner, sparks happen in everyday life. It’s like the tipping point from being acquaintances to becoming best friends. It’s the tipping point at which best friends suddenly become lovers, because of that one spark.

This is our role as marketers: to create those moments for the subscribers’ list to become followers, and ultimately, loyal customers.

How do you embed sparks in your emails?

How do you create the conditions for ‘love’ to happen? I’d say there are three different ways to set off sparks.

1. Dazzle them with revelations

What I mean is, don’t just give information: give information that will rock their socks off, shake their world, and change the way they do things. You can accomplish this in 2 ways:

1. Give out brand new information that no-one else has. Failing that (because there’s no such thing as brand new information anyway),
2. Translate old information in new ways. According to Joel Bauer (the best public speaker in the world according to some), when you name something it becomes more real, more credible. You could take some old concepts, string them together, put a label on them, and kaBOOM…it seems like a revelation and looks like something new.

Why give revelations?

Because you can keep giving out information to your list and they won’t appreciate it because there’s a lot of free information available out there. But, when you hand them something that suddenly strikes them deep in the core and changes the way they do something, they will remember you.

And every single email you send thereafter is an open door for you, every word you say has more weight, and every technique you share has more value. That’s how it works.

For example, even I follow the people who’ve dazzled me with revelations. Even if, afterwards, they don’t give me ‘good’ information, I still follow what they’re up to because of that one dazzling revelation.

Eben Pagan, for example, when he said to move the free line and make sure everything you give away is of value and can be monetized.

There’s another guy, Stu McClaren, a JV expert who spoke during the JV portion of Jeff Walker’s product launch workshop. (I subscribed to 140 mailing lists so naturally I’m on his list, too.) I clicked through and his newsletters had a couple of pointers that dazzled me.

I thought to myself, "Wow… I will never look at entrepreneurship the same way again." Because of that, I now follow him and am a fan. Why? Because he dazzled me. It works.

The thing is, you only need to ever dazzle them once and they’ll follow you. BUT, of course, at the same time you always need to remember that it’s a numbers game. You need to keep giving out as much new information as possible because some of it will hit, and some of it won’t. But it’s worth it because once that one idea hits, they’re yours.

Like Victor Hugo said, there’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

2. Touch them with stories

Not just any stories, but your stories.

Touch them with your autobiographical sketches, your snapshots of yourself. Why? Because that story will create identification and empathy between you and your prospects.

For example, again Stu McClaren captured my attention because of his story about his fiance and the trouble they had getting money for their wedding, and that was something I could identify with because, you know, weddings are expensive these days.

There is suddenly a moment of empathy with that guru or with that person, and you start following his story. Now, it’s not so much about the revelations he can give you anymore as much as it is about who he is, to you.

3. Tease them with Cliffhangers

There’s a famous saying in marketing that ‘curiosity killed the cat but made the marketer rich’. As humans, we are always curious to discover new techniques and  strategies, and new ways of doing things.

Mark Joyner describes this as the Zeigarnik effect in his book, Mind Control Marketing, where the use of the Zeigarnik effect keeps people ‘glued in’ to discover what’s going to happen next. It basically says that all human beings have problems with unfinished stories.

Even if they watch a terrible movie, if they’re three-quarters of the way in, they’ll want to finish that movie, they will not walk out of that theater.

Why? Because unfinished stories are torturous to your mind because they cause such a disruption to your thoughts.

So, one of the keys to building adoration is to torture them. You can achieve this by placing a cliffhanger in the subject line or body copy, e.g. "This involves something called the BK effect…find out in the next segment what it is!"

Even CNN does this, by the way. They give you a useless trivia question, and then you stay through the commercial so that you can find out what the answer is.

The most important thing about this point, though, is this: your answer had better be satisfying! Don’t throw something out and build to an anti-climax. If you can give an answer that will blow their minds somewhat, you have a friend for life –a friend who’ll listen to you and when you say ‘open your wallet’, they will.

I always try to say ‘old stuff’ in a new way, because sometimes it’s the only way to be heard in a sea of competitors. In your market, how can you begin to translate your information into dazzling revelations? If you are inspired specifically by the ideas I’ve shared, let me know by posting a comment or just saying hi.

Here are a 3 techniques that will instantly SPICE up your copy.

The Knew/New Method

I came across this in an article written by Sean D’Souza, the author of Psychotactics. “Knew” are existing benefits which people already know about, for example, how to save money, how to double sales, how to do proper marketing, how to write a headline… these are things that you already know. But, the problem with things you already know is that they are boring. Because it’s familiar, you have no curiosity to find out more.

But, when you add “new” to “knew”, you can create intensely powerful headlines because it adds something intriguing. “New” is something that is so totally unrelated to “knew” that it transforms the headline into something curious and intriguing. You always start with the “knew”.

Let me give you an example. e.g. ‘how to write compelling articles’. That is “knew”. You can add a twist by saying that it’s the George Bush method to writing compelling articles. Suddenly, there’s something disruptive because it’s so divergent, and there enters the “new”, which throws in the element of curiosity to the equation.

Simply put, take something familiar and add something strange. This is one of the most powerful headline formulas I know, and it can be used for bullet points as well. I use a lot of this. It transforms your copy in a new and compelling way.

Specific Target Approach

Again, this is from Sean D’Souza. You start out with the target, then you name the benefit you want to accomplish in the headline you are writing. Suppose you are coming up with a headline, lets say as an example, “How to Write Headlines”. If you use that as the headline of your article, it’s a very weak headline.

So, what do you do? One of the things you can do with this approach is inject benefit into the headline. For example, “How to Write Headlines That Draw Money”, where the benefit is “That Draw Money”.

The second thing you could do with this approach is by adding a numerical goal to it: “How a Headline Can Generate a 200% Boost in Profits”. The “200% increase” is the target. Basically, whichever specific target approach you use, the end result delivers what the bullet or headline wants to accomplish.

Remember, make it as specific as you can. Anything that is vague will lose your readers attention. Let me show you some other examples that is strengthened with a specific target. If your topic is on writing body copy, your headline could be “How to Write Body Copy to Attract Joint Venture Partners”. Then comes in the specificity. “3 Ways to Write Body Copy That Attracts Joint Venture Partners.” The headline is strengthened because it talks about something specific, and a targeted result it’s working towards.

National Enquirer Approach

This is one is extremely straightforward, because the name says it all. You go into the National Enquirer, or any tabloid for that matter, and swipe the headlines there. It’s very effective because it’s a very non-traditional way of doing it. It’s a breath of fresh air from the normal, standard Internet marketing-type headlines.

This approach captures people’s attention because it doesn’t follow normal headline formulas, it’s not like “Who Else wants To Earn Millions?”. Don’t get me wrong, although the conventional headline formula still works, it has its place. One of my recent headlines using the National Enquirer method pulled in a much higher conversion rate compared to what we previously had.

Obviously, many Joint Venture Partners (JV’s) were involved and the whole world was promoting it, but there is another reason why everyone promoted it. I had an epiphany recently about the secret behind a launch that makes $10M and above; I’m talking about the eight-figure product launch. I would almost bet that if Frank Kern had called Mass Control "Email Marketing Power" or something, it might not have done as well as it did.

Using Product Launch Formula –using the tactics and implementing the strategies – you can easily get a million dollar launch. If you want to take it to the next level, if you want an 8-figure launch, there must be more to it than the product launch formula. I came up with a principle I believe all 8-figure product launches have in common, although so far very few product launches have hit that mark. I call it the Magic Position.

The Magic Position

Yes, it’s about positioning. Most people already know that you need proper positioning for your products. But, this is different: it’s magic positioning. It is the rocket fuel to your product launch, and it’s crucial that you establish your magic position before you do anything else.

The magic position principle is to position your product to start as close to the finish line as close as you can. You have 100% control over your positioning –you can choose to position as far from the finish line as possible, or you can position it at the finish line itself.