There are two ads referenced in this commentary. This is the second one (last couple of paragraphs).
Another Rodale piece– this time, they got impatient selling individual books about the various parts of men’s lives… and decided to just lump everything together in one gargantuan volume.
So I have to cover better sex… weight loss… earning more money… attaining six pack abs quickly… how to “read women”… be a top-dog Alpha male at work… the whole shebang.
It’s much like the Boardroom “Book of Secrets”, targeted specifically to younger guys. The bullets read like a breakdown of every known nightmare a young man could ever face in this society,.- going bald, losing it sexually, flabbing out, getting overlooked at work, and generally losing it all at the very time you really want it all.
The tightrope you walk with this kind of pitch to avoid making the reader become hopeless over his situation, while offering easy/fast/simple solutions that are his for the asking. Because there’s a certain despondency that overwhelms people when life starts treating them badly. For the target market here, these are guys who probably had the world on a string only a few years ago… until they realized they weren’t supermen, immune to the ravages of time and sloth and lack of ambition.
But how easy can the answer be? Do you believe you can quickly and easily and simply lose all the weight you want… without ever feeling hungry? It’s easy to make the claim. Harder to make that claim believable. Harder still to make the claim so real and urgent that you MUST have the book at any cost.
This piece mailed for awhile, and then met with the fate of most controls. The copy was edited and emasculated by committee until there was precious little of the “balls to the wall” attitude I originally put in there. And you can’t convince most guys to change their lives with a book by using polite language.
Better is the following example– a piece selling an entire library of instructional videos. This client never resists mailing the kind of copy I truly want to send out there.
Very short letter, but did extremely well This is a great example of something that truly IS a “staggering” deal… of honest value… aimed right at the broiling sweet spot of the target audience. When you have this kind of over-the-top offer, you don’t always need a lot of copy to convince your prospect.
Just let him know it’s available, and what the details are… and then stand out of his way.
Click here to see the “Entire Library Of Fighting Videos” ad.
(It will open in a new window or tab, so you can toggle between the ad and Carlton’s commentary below.)
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