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, âDear 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 Iâm sending this to you. âMy name is _______. I am in a jam and need to make $10,000 before the end of the month.
âThere 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.â He goes on to explain that. âTwo, I made some bad decisions with money a while back and Iâm currently very tight with moneyââin other words, broke. âThree, Iâm 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.â 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, âI 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.â Then he goes on to say, âI will give you 50 percent of all the profits.â
One of his postscripts says, âIf 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.â
My question to you is, is this a hypnotic letter?
To me, this is not a hypnotic letter. In fact, itâs a terrible letter. I sent his $20 back because he says heâs broke. The only reason I didnât burn this is that I needed his address on the back of the second letter so I could send the money back.
Why isnât it a hypnotic letter? He got my attention, which is one of the key ingredients for writing good copy. He FedExed it to meâ$20, very eye-catching. It begins well: âI 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 weeksâ Thatâs good. Heâs speaking to me, but from there, itâs all about him.
The first statement said he wants to buy a motorcycle. I donât care if he needs a motorcycle. He wants to buy it because he made a promise to a friend. I donât care that he made a promise to a friend. The second one is, heâs made bad decisions about money. Heâs broke. I donât care about that. I might care if he told me it in different terms, but a lot of people are broke. Heâs telling me heâs broke, and he wants to do something thatâs off the wall. Third is, heâs on vacation. I donât care if heâs on vacation. He wants to make use of his vacation time and make some money. Then heâs asking me to do a mailing to my list and heâs claiming heâs a marketing specialist.
Whereâs the proof that heâs a marketing specialist? This is doubtful. Iâm thinking this guy doesnât know what heâs 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 itâs 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 youâre writing in a riveting way. This is where hypnotic copywriting comes in.
In this book, Iâm going to reveal, for the first time ever, my own system for writing hypnotic copy. Iâve written a lot of books, but Iâve never revealed how I personally sit down and write.
I donât 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, âWhat would you write about in your autobiography?â and he said, âI donât think Iâve done anything.â
He dismissed his life, his career, and everything that he had done, so he decided he wasnât 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 didnât 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 writersâ school. I filled out the form and sent it in, and one of their representatives came to my house. He said, âWouldnât it be great to be able to write like Rod Serling?â
âYeah,â I said, âthat would be greatâto write like Rod Serling.â
âNo, no,â he said. âYou donât want to write like Rod Serling. You want to write like Joe Vitale.â
Thatâs what I want you to do: gather different methods and fine-tune what youâre 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? Iâm 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 youâre thinking right now? If you start by thinking, âI want to be able to write website copy that gets a 25 percent response,â what would be better than that? An obvious answer might be something that gets a 35 percent response. Iâm asking you to stretch. Iâm asking you to think really bigâbigger than youâve 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. Thatâs a woman who thinks big.
In 1925, ad man Bruce Barton wrote a fundraising letter that got a 100 percent response. Is that good? Thatâs 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 donât 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.
Whatâs your intention for this book? Maybe itâs 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 doesnât influence you alone: you want to have a goal that influences other people. JosĂ© Silva, creator of the Silva Mind Control Method, said, âYou want to state a goal or an intention that helps at least two other people besides you.â
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, itâs 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, youâll learn how I write copy, and youâll learn my twenty-one-point checklist for reviewing copy. Youâll be looking at copy very differentlyâyour own and everybody elseâs.
From time to time, somebody will say, âI hate sellingâ or âI hate marketing.â 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.
Iâm known as an Internet marketer; some say Iâm one of the pioneers of Internet marketing. I more or less fell into it, because I didnât go in as a marketing person. I went in as a person who shared his excitement for products that he fell in love with. Thatâs basically what I do. This is what I think marketing really is.
Itâs like seeing a movie that youâre really excited about it, and you go and tell your friends. Youâre marketing that movie, youâre 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 youâre excited about. Why are you excited about it? Who is it for? Share your enthusiasm with that target audience; thatâs when the sales take place. Other people will say, âThat was smart marketing.â In your mind, youâll know: âI was just sharing something I love.â
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, âIâm busy, not right now.â 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, âCan I be an affiliate for this?â 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, âI didnât know about all of this different stuff thatâs happening, and Iâm an Internet person. I live on the Internet; I should know this, but I donât. If I donât know this, my list probably doesnât either.â
I sent out another email the next day saying, âLook, 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 Iâm sending another letter out right now.â
I got sales, but this was not a marketing strategy. It was not something Joe did by premeditation. I did not think, âWhat is the best way to market this book? What is the best way to write the sales letter?â I thought, âI want to tell my list about this.â 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...