Posts by Clayton Makepeace
Can You Keep a Secret?
Since offering to reveal a secret appeals to us humans on so many visceral levels, it’s no wonder that many of the most successful direct-response promotions of all time have used it to boost attention and readership. Nor is it any wonder that offering to reveal more secrets in a free report that is delivered along with the product being sold can drive response rates, revenues, and profits through the roof.
So how could YOU use secrets to hit one out of the park the next time you’re at bat?
Is Your Copy a Welcome Interruption?
When we marketers and copywriters approach a prospect with a direct-mail piece, an e-mail blast, a print ad – or any other kind of sales promotion, for that matter – we are interrupting his life. The simple act of putting sales copy before a prospect brings him to a fork in his road – forcing him to make a decision to either (1) read or (2) not read our message. And every time his eye moves from one sentence to the next… from one paragraph to the next… or from one page to the next… he reaches yet another fork in the road – and gets to decide whether he’s going to keep reading our message or abandon it.
Read MoreQuestion Marks in Copy
Now some folks will tell you that beginning sales copy with a question is bad form. After all – any question you ask could be answered in a way that is not helpful to your objectives. And your sales letter could wind up in the trash.
Read MoreOverthinking: The Copywriter’s Worst Enemy
By the time I met Wilma, she had studied literally thousands of pages of courses, books, and e-zine articles about copywriting. She had all the fundamentals down cold. She could recite Hopkins, Caples, Masterson, and Makepeace verbatim. But when I gave her her first paid assignment, she froze like a deer in the high beams of an oncoming Peterbilt.
Read MoreSpeedwriting 101
Back in The Day, copywriting was a leisurely business – almost a pastoral pursuit. The client’s marketing folks got you on the phone, described the product, told you what they’d tried before and how it’d worked… what they’d been learning and thinking lately… and you brainstormed the themes you might use for a new promo.
Read MoreA Guilty Glance Inside Your Prospect’s Bedroom
Right now, our prospective customers are experiencing some of the most intense and contradictory emotions they’ve had in their entire lives. The saner ones blame their financial problems on decisions made by the White House, Congress, the Treasury, and the Fed for the last couple of decades. Others – those with a more tenuous grip on reality – blame “those greedy bankers” for having the unmitigated gall to actually approve every loan and credit card application they ever submitted.
Read MoreHow to Outsell Your Competition by Treating Your Customers Like Kings
Ask any soft-offer marketer and he’ll tell you: Promotions that create unrealistic expectations for the product invariably result in lower pay-up on the back end. Hard-offer marketers know that over-the-top promises result in much higher cancellation rates and much lower response to secondary sales and renewals.
Read MoreA Powerful Persuasion Strategy
Over the years, I’ve tried to teach lots of folks to write sales copy. Not all of them have gone on to be stellar successes.
One of my most spectacular failures had a PhD in English Lit. Another was a crackerjack newspaper reporter. Still another had penned a best-seller and now wanted to try her hand at copywriting.
Read MoreHow to Kill a Great Company in One Easy Lesson
Back in the 1980s, I agreed to help the owner of a small company grow his business. Within three years, it was the largest company in its industry.
By combining five key marketing strategies with kick-butt sales copy, we were attracting between 5,000 and 10,000 new customers every month. By 1988, we had more than 120,000 paying customers. Sales revenues and profits quadrupled.
Read MoreThe Simple Secret That Turns Good Copy Into GREAT Copy
In the 37-plus years since I created my first direct-response sales copy, I’ve written considerably more than a thousand direct-response ads, television spots, and mail pieces. And over the years, as I studied the results of those efforts, my approach to strategizing and creating sales promotions began to evolve. Today, my work process is very…
Read MoreLickety-Splittedness: How to Write Better Sales Copy, Faster
If you’ve ever felt like the Earth cooled in less time than it takes you to crank out a respectable first draft of your sales copy, listen up. I’m going to tell you about some of the things I do to tear through the process.
Here are six little tricks that help me a lot…
Read More6 Steps to Getting Your Phone to Ring Off the Hook With New Clients
New copywriters write me all the time, asking how to get a high-paying gig. A desperate few just want to know how to get any assignment.
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