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.
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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 can’t thank you personally.
But, that doesn’t 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, don’t 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 weren’t 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 we’ve introduced to the
industry. There is no reason why it won’t happen again.
By keeping this book as a personal resource, you won’t 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.
But, in fact, there were very few super-successful copywriters.
When we looked carefully at our own successes and failures, we
decided that the problem with rules and techniques was that they tend to
be true only in very specific cases. For every rule that applied to one
situation, there was a different situation to which it did not apply.
We found it was more effective to teach the big things — the
rhetorical ideas that are eternal and profound and universal. It is the big
ideas — not the little ones — that create breakthrough copy.