1 What Is Hypnotic Writing?
I got a FedEx package recently, and I want to read the letter that came with it. First of all, it came by FedEx, so that was pretty attention-getting in itself. There was a $20 bill attached to it, which was pretty attention-getting too.
It began, āDear Joe Vitale: I have an offer that I would like to share with only you that will make you a stack of those $20 bills in one to two weeks. Before I go on, let me explain why Iām sending this to you. āMy name is _______. I am in a jam and need to make $10,000 before the end of the month.
āThere are three reasons why I need this. One, to keep a promise to a close friend. I told a close friend that I would have a motorcycle before he gets back from his deployment in the desert.ā He goes on to explain that. āTwo, I made some bad decisions with money a while back and Iām currently very tight with moneyāāin other words, broke. āThree, Iām on vacation from the thirteenth of this month till the twenty-ninth and I would like to be able to do something over that time period. I would at least like to be able to visit my grandparents in Fort Worth and have enough money to enjoy it.ā He tells me where he lives. He goes on to say that he wants to create a joint venture with me.
On the second page, he describes himself as a marketing specialist. He says he wants me to send out a mailing to my list looking for people who want his services. He says, āI will charge a retainer fee up front anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000, depending on how much of a profit I think I could make for their business: anywhere from 5 to 50 percent of the profits generated. The retainer will be paid off on the back-end profits.ā Then he goes on to say, āI will give you 50 percent of all the profits.ā
One of his postscripts says, āIf you are wondering why there is a $20 bill attached to the top of this letter, it is because I hope to be sending you a large stack of them in the next several weeks.ā
My question to you is, is this a hypnotic letter?
To me, this is not a hypnotic letter. In fact, itās a terrible letter. I sent his $20 back because he says heās broke. The only reason I didnāt burn this is that I needed his address on the back of the second letter so I could send the money back.
Why isnāt it a hypnotic letter? He got my attention, which is one of the key ingredients for writing good copy. He FedExed it to meā$20, very eye-catching. It begins well: āI have an offer that I would like to share with only you that will make you a stack of those $20 bills in one to two weeksā Thatās good. Heās speaking to me, but from there, itās all about him.
The first statement said he wants to buy a motorcycle. I donāt care if he needs a motorcycle. He wants to buy it because he made a promise to a friend. I donāt care that he made a promise to a friend. The second one is, heās made bad decisions about money. Heās broke. I donāt care about that. I might care if he told me it in different terms, but a lot of people are broke. Heās telling me heās broke, and he wants to do something thatās off the wall. Third is, heās on vacation. I donāt care if heās on vacation. He wants to make use of his vacation time and make some money. Then heās asking me to do a mailing to my list and heās claiming heās a marketing specialist.
Whereās the proof that heās a marketing specialist? This is doubtful. Iām thinking this guy doesnāt know what heās talking about. Then he wants to charge people on my list $5,000 to $25,000 to do marketing, which is what I do. Why would I send my people to him and let him get half of the money, which all should go to me? None of this makes sense.
Of course, his postscript is pretty good. But itās powerless at that point, because he lost me with this self-serving stuff.
Now there are terrible letters out there all over the place. I want to tell you how to write your sales letters, your web copy, and anything else that youāre writing in a riveting way. This is where hypnotic copywriting comes in.
In this book, Iām going to reveal, for the first time ever, my own system for writing hypnotic copy. Iāve written a lot of books, but Iāve never revealed how I personally sit down and write.
I donāt want you to become a Joe Vitale clone and start writing the way Joe writes. But I want you to take on some of these elements, and I want you to learn this formula that I use, and then adapt it for yourself. When I was a teenager, I met Rod Serling, of The Twilight Zone. That was a turning point in my life, and it was disappointing. I thought Rod Serling was going to be a god, a superhuman. He wrote incredible material for The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery; he was a brilliant scriptwriter, a hypnotic storyteller. But he was a little runt of a guy, chain-smoking, very human.
I asked him, āWhat would you write about in your autobiography?ā and he said, āI donāt think Iāve done anything.ā
He dismissed his life, his career, and everything that he had done, so he decided he wasnāt going to write his autobiography. Of course, when he died, somebody wrote a biography of him, so his life was worth writing about, but he didnāt think so. I thought, if he can do this and succeed at being a writer, then I can too, and that was a turning point for me.
When I was a teenager back in Ohio, I saw an ad for a famous writersā school. I filled out the form and sent it in, and one of their representatives came to my house. He said, āWouldnāt it be great to be able to write like Rod Serling?ā
āYeah,ā I said, āthat would be greatāto write like Rod Serling.ā
āNo, no,ā he said. āYou donāt want to write like Rod Serling. You want to write like Joe Vitale.ā
Thatās what I want you to do: gather different methods and fine-tune what youāre already doing. Try on my own method of writing copy and then make it your own.
I love to set an intention for just about everything that I do, and I would invite you to set an intention for what you want to achieve with this book. What do you want to receive? What do you want to experience? What do you want to learn? Where do you want to be mentally?
Where do you want to be physically? Iām going to invite you to write this down now.
1. What do you want to achieve with this book?
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2. What would be better than what youāre thinking right now? If you start by thinking, āI want to be able to write website copy that gets a 25 percent response,ā what would be better than that? An obvious answer might be something that gets a 35 percent response. Iām asking you to stretch. Iām asking you to think really bigābigger than youāve ever thought before.
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Once I read about a woman who has six children, thirty-five grandchildren, seventy-five great grandchildren, and ten great, great grandchildren. She jumped from an airplane to celebrate her ninety-third birthday. Thatās a woman who thinks big.
In 1925, ad man Bruce Barton wrote a fundraising letter that got a 100 percent response. Is that good? Thatās miraculous.
There is a hospital in India, the Aravind Eye Hospital. It started with eleven beds; it is now the largest eye care facility in the world. They see over 1.4 million patients and perform over 200,000 sight-restoring surgeries each year. Two-thirds of their patients donāt have to pay a penny. Those who do pay, pay around $75. That was thinking big. The man who started it had what was probably considered an impossible dream. But now it is a reality: the largest eye care center in the world.
Whatās your intention for this book? Maybe itās to learn how to write sales letters, but maybe you can enlarge that and make it much more powerful, even earthshaking.
I am encouraging you to write down your mission, your goal. What is your intention? What do you intend to learn from this book?
I have found that if you want to really make a difference, if you want to achieve goals that are impossible or majestic or miraculous, have a goal that doesnāt influence you alone: you want to have a goal that influences other people. JosĆ© Silva, creator of the Silva Mind Control Method, said, āYou want to state a goal or an intention that helps at least two other people besides you.ā
If you follow this advice, one magical thing that happens is that it gets you out of your ego. I have found that as soon as you step out of your ego, you get more power from the universe itself. As soon as you have a goal that influences many other people, you have a lot of support from what might be called the invisible.
From the psychological standpoint, you also escape self-sabotage. If you want to have a goal that influences you alone, itās easy to sabotage your own efforts. Some part of you knows that this is only for you. The guy who wrote the letter I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter sabotaged his own efforts just by the way he wrote it. Something in him was communicating that it was only about him.
In this book, youāll learn how I write copy, and youāll learn my twenty-one-point checklist for reviewing copy. Youāll be looking at copy very differentlyāyour own and everybody elseās.
From time to time, somebody will say, āI hate sellingā or āI hate marketing.ā If I probe a little bit to ask them why, I tend to find that they have a mindset saying that it needs to be done in a particular way.
Iām known as an Internet marketer; some say Iām one of the pioneers of Internet marketing. I more or less fell into it, because I didnāt go in as a marketing person. I went in as a person who shared his excitement for products that he fell in love with. Thatās basically what I do. This is what I think marketing really is.
Itās like seeing a movie that youāre really excited about it, and you go and tell your friends. Youāre marketing that movie, youāre selling them on that movie, but it never occurs to you.
Forget all about copywriting. Forget all about marketing. Come from sharing your excitement for your mission. Share what youāre excited about. Why are you excited about it? Who is it for? Share your enthusiasm with that target audience; thatās when the sales take place. Other people will say, āThat was smart marketing.ā In your mind, youāll know: āI was just sharing something I love.ā
That is one of my secrets to writing the kind of copy I write. I get excited about something. I sit down. I write out my excitement, and I share it. There was a fellow named Mike Mograbi, who had a book called 378 Internet Marketing Predictions. He wrote to me several times asking me to review it. I kept saying, āIām busy, not right now.ā He was very polite but persistent.
I finally looked at his book. It was in two volumes. I was blown away. I was in awe, excited, enthused about it. Within two hours of finishing his book, I wrote to him and asked, āCan I be an affiliate for this?ā He wrote immediately back and set it up for me. Fifteen minutes after that, I wrote a quick sales letter telling people how excited I was about this book, and I sent out the letter.
The next day, I was still on a rush from the book. I kept looking at it and thought, āI didnāt know about all of this different stuff thatās happening, and Iām an Internet person. I live on the Internet; I should know this, but I donāt. If I donāt know this, my list probably doesnāt either.ā
I sent out another email the next day saying, āLook, I hope you understand how serious I am about this. You may have deleted the letter from yesterday, but these two volumes are so important that Iām sending another letter out right now.ā
I got sales, but this was not a marketing strategy. It was not something Joe did by premeditation. I did not think, āWhat is the best way to market this book? What is the best way to write the sales letter?ā I thought, āI want to tell my list about this.ā Then I set up a teleseminar with this guy. Of course I sent out an email about that.
Do you see the key ingredient? I...