Michael Masterson - Great Leads: The Six Easiest Ways to Start Any Sales Message

Table of Contents

Introduction

An Amazingly Powerful Strategy for Direct Response Success

The Rule of One One Big Idea

The Simple Question That Can Double Your Success

Direct or Indirect?

The Easiest Type of Sales Lead Youll Ever Write Or Your Money Back 5

Double Your Sales With This Next Kind of Lead

Still Cant Find Your Hook? Try This Time-Tested Solution

The Magic of the Velvet Pouch

You Wont Read This Anywhere Else But Here: The Proclamation Lead 9

The Tale of the $2 Billion Sales Letter

How to Make This System Work for You

Great Leads

The Six Easiest Ways to Start Any Sales Message

Michael Masterson & John Forde

Published by:

American Writers & Artists Inc.

245 NE 4th Avenue, Suite 102

Delray Beach, FL 33483

Phone: 561-278-5557

Fax: 561-278-5929

Website: www.awaionline.com

2011 Michael Masterson and John Forde. All rights reserved.

Protected by copyright laws of the United States and international treaties.

No part of this publication in whole or in part may be copied, duplicated, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission from the publisher.

Copyright and other intellectual property laws protect these materials and any unauthorized reproduction or retransmission will constitute an infringement of copyright law.

Federal law provides severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or exhibition of copyrighted materials.

Penalties for criminal and statutory copyright infringement are set forth at 18 U.S.C. 2319.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9821500-3-0

ISBN-10: 0-9821500-3-2

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To our fathers Francis P. Ford and George S. Forde, Jr. who taught us to make that first step count.

Acknowledgements

No book becomes a reality through the work of just the authors. This is particularly true with Great Leads: The Six Easiest Ways to Start Any Sales Message . We gratefully acknowledge the inspiration and help of the following people. This book would never have been published without you.

Katie Yeakle and the entire AWAI team were a constant resource for ideas and assistance. Thank you for always being there for us.

Many thanks to the people responsible for the heavy lifting of getting this from concept into print: Will Newman, Lorie Drozdenko, Jill Perri, and Nan Hughes for editing, designing, and critiquing.

Thank you to all the copywriters whose work we studied and drew upon. There were literally hundreds, so we cant thank you personally. But, that doesnt lessen our gratitude for your contribution.

Thank you to the historic giants on whose shoulders we stand: marketers and copywriters like Eugene Schwartz, Claude Hopkins, Max Sackheim, John Caples, and David Ogilvy. They were our early inspirations for this book, as well as for our careers.

And finally, special thanks to Bill Bonner for his early and continued guidance in both of our careers.

And, for giving us the final push to turn this book into a reality.

Introduction

An Amazingly Powerful Strategy for Direct Response Success

If you are a copywriter intent on improving your skills, dont read this book Memorize it.

This book reveals in detail a very powerful strategy for writing breakthrough copy. It will change the way you think about sales copy. It will change the way you write sales copy. It will make you a far more skilled and successful copywriter.

And, it does this by giving you a tool you can use to beat controls by a factor of two-to-ten.

Learn this strategy and you will never have to worry about writing a dud. All your promotions will perform extremely well because your prospects will read them with a high level of interest and excitement.

Although just a few years old, this strategy is already responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in sales for the businesses we consult with. And, promotions using this strategy are getting even better profits as we learn more about how it works and how to employ it.

What you are about to learn is entirely new. Although we have been studying the craft of copywriting for a combined 60 years, the idea behind this strategy was hatched in 2007, tested with our clients between then and 2010, and is only now being made available to the public.

If you learn this strategy and it can easily be learned you can expect certain immediate benefits: You will start producing stronger, more compelling copy

The results of your efforts will improve and your clients (or employer) will notice The demand for your writing will skyrocket

As a result, you will earn more money perhaps multiples of what you are earning now If that werent enough, you will also:

Waste almost no time figuring out how to begin your sales copy Write virtually every ad or promotion with confidence knowing that your copy will work You should be able to read this book in a single day. It will be an exciting first read because you will

be discovering new ideas that boost the quality and effectiveness of your copy.

By this time tomorrow, you will be able to put some of the techniques to work. But, we recommend you reread the book several times during the next few weeks. With each reading, new secrets will be opened up for you.

This strategy becomes more powerful as you become more adept at using it. In the hands of a Master Copywriter, it becomes a magic wand, doubling and tripling the power of your copy every time you use it.

In the next few years, dozens of self-styled copywriting gurus will be teaching this strategy as if it were their own. This has already happened with other copywriting techniques weve introduced to the industry. There is no reason why it wont happen again.

By keeping this book as a personal resource, you wont have to worry about forgetting any of the details. Everything you need to understand this strategy and put it into action is contained in the following pages. And, since it is coming from two of the three people who invented and refined it, you are getting it undiluted straight from the source.

How Did We Come Up With This Crazy Idea?

When we were new to copywriting, we read everything we could find on the subject and attended dozens of seminars. Most of the experts back then had a similar pedagogical approach. They taught the craft of copywriting by providing their students with dozens or even hundreds of rules. Rules such as: Always write in the second person.

Never have a headline that is more than seven words.

Use red or black headlines but never blue or green.

Always give away a premium.

Always provide a money-back guarantee.

Fill your copy with proven power words such as now and free.

These rules often were accompanied by statistical proof of their effectiveness. One guru in particular would astound his audience with rules and statistics like the following: Using an envelope teaser will increase response rates by 25%.

Positioning an information product as a club will boost returns by 37%.

Manila envelopes jack up response rates by 15%.

And so on ad nauseum.

We were always suspicious of that sort of advice. If copywriting could be learned by following a set of static rules, then it would be easy to learn and there would be thousands of super-successful copywriters out there happily plying their trade.