Gary Bencivenga – Retirement Legacy

Available on DVDs for the First and Only Time …
“Gary Bencivenga’s
7 Master Secrets
of Wealth Creation
for Marketers and Copywriters”

“I will never be able to share these seven secrets in
the Bullets, for reasons you’ll understand in a moment.

“But as my retirement legacy,
I will share all seven with you …
if you can meet the
four qualifications spelled out in this letter.”

• Now available via DVDs and expanded, illustrated transcript for the first and only time—my never-to-be-repeated “Reveal-Everything-at-Once” Seminar.
• Only 2,000 sets available.
• Tightly restricted and limited distribution … you must be able to meet the four criteria spelled out below (no exceptions).
• Reveals every secret I’ve ever learned about how to boost your advertising response and become independently wealthy as a copywriter or marketer.
• Based on more than $1 billion and 40 years’ worth of scientific direct response tests.
• Includes everything revealed at my one-time-only Retirement Seminar, hailed as “historic” … “phenomenal” … “life-changing” by industry leaders … plus much more material that’s been added to make this the ultimate “Master’s Program” on breakthrough marketing and copywriting.
• Featuring scores of the greatest direct response ads of all time to illustrate every principle … plus “Gary Bencivenga’s Greatest Hits”—my all-time best ads, sales letters, magalogs, bookalogs, and more that you can use to guide your own marketing and copywriting.
• Guaranteed to be worth 50 times its cost … or you pay nothing.
• Free bonus if you respond now—”Da Bomb!” … probably the most powerful tool ever discovered for systematically boosting your response in every promotion you’ll ever run.

 

Dear Marketing Top Gun: I am looking for an elite group of men and women determined to be among the most successful and highest-earning copywriters and marketers in the world.I am retiring now and want to share with this select group of stars and future stars what I believe is a priceless legacy—my seven master secrets of wealth creation for copywriters and marketers.The truth is, I can never reveal these seven master secrets in the Bullets.Why not?

From the start, I promised to keep the Bullets short and fast, like bullets.

But teaching these seven master secrets takes more time.

For example, my #1 master strategy, The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®, has eight parts. It takes about two hours to teach and another two hours to bring you to mastery.

Anyone can master this, and once you do, your ability to boost response on demand soars. You immediately take a giant leap forward in your ability to write copy with the hand of a master … and evaluate it with the eye of a jeweler.

But the unavoidable problem is, it does take four hours to acquire mastery of the eight steps and how to string them together, mainly because you must first unlearnseveral things you’ve been taught as gospel about how to generate maximum response.

You see, almost all copywriters and marketers today are using the same old-fashioned techniques. But the world has changed, and the consumers you’re trying to influence have grown increasingly immune to these conventional headlines and approaches. In today’s overmarketed, overhyped world, the “same old” techniques for generating response may occasionally work, but not nearly as well as they used to. This is why most direct marketers are seeing their response rates decline every year. And this will inevitably continue, as consumers grow increasingly immune to an ever-rising flood of these same tired, overworked approaches. You need something new that works better.

And that is why the advanced secrets I teach are so much more effective. They show you how to clearly and dramatically stand out from the clutter and trigger maximum response in any medium, for any product or service.

 

Record-Shattering Ads
to Serve as Your Examples

The other reason I’ll never teach these secrets in the Bullets is because they require lots of real-life examples of the advertisements that are shattering response records in every field in which they’ve been applied.

All this takes a seminar to deliver … the very seminar that I have called my one-time-only, “Reveal-Everything-at-Once Retirement Seminar,” which I gave recently to 100 of the world’s top copywriters and marketers.

This treasure trove of knowledge is based on more than and 40 years’ worth of scientific advertising tests. It’s nothing less than my legacy to the most ambitious and dedicated men and women in direct marketing today.

When I gave this seminar training live, I promised the 100 attendees that I’d create a free set of DVDs for them. To my embarrassment, it took me many more months than I ever imagined to produce them, mainly because I wanted to enhance the program by including a deluxe illustrated transcript featuring scores of ads and visuals as well as additional response-boosting information—everything I could possibly teach about how to improve your advertising results.

Finally it’s all done. And, in addition to the 100 sets I’ve produced for the seminar attendees, I’ve run off an additional 2,000 sets of both the DVDs and illustrated transcript. These are theonly 2,000 sets that will ever be available anywhere at any price, and after these 2,000 sets are gone, they will be gone forever.

But please don’t feel pressured into buying immediately just because only 2,000 sets will ever be made available. Candidly, this supply will last for at least several years. That’s because I am not looking to trigger a fast wave of mass “panic buying” from lots of people, which would inevitably include many less-than-qualified candidates.

My aim—expressed in the value, scope, and extraordinary content of this DVD course—is just the reverse. And that is to restrict distribution to a tiny slice of the copywriting and direct marketing community—exclusively the most ambitious stars and future stars who are hell-bent on being among the richest, most in-demand, most consistently successful Top-Guns on the planet. And that, by definition, is a very small, elite universe.

The only reason to act now—and this is important—is so that you can start putting these breakthrough wealth-building, career-advancing copywriting and marketing techniques to work immediately, allowing you to experience complete financial security and independence much sooner than you could ever achieve otherwise.

No matter what, you must meet four rigorous criteria to qualify—no exceptions.

More about that later. First let me tell you about the DVD course itself…

 

“Always Be Thorough”

One of the principles I teach is that champions are always thorough in their preparations, and this certainly holds true for copywriters and marketers.

In that spirit, and because this course represents a significant investment, I’m going to be quite thorough here and give you a complete description of everything this training will teach you. Let’s start with …

 

Four Words to Live By

The seminar that is the basis of this course was held in what is probably the most elegant meeting room in New York City, the glittering penthouse of the St. Regis Hotel.

Why did I hold it there, when I could have hosted it anywhere and saved considerable expense?

The reason relates to my four-word approach to everything I teach about life, about marketing, copywriting, and acquiring whatever you want in life.

Those four words I urge you to live by are, Why not the best?

Why not the best—in the copy you write, the products you market, the results you trigger, the reputation you build, the fees and royalties you command, the wealth you accumulate, and all the perks you’ll get to enjoy? After all, why should the best in life be reserved for others and not you? Why should you ever settle for anything less than a big life, a life full of major achievements, exceptional wealth and income, and a reputation as one of the most respected stars in your chosen line of work?

The truth is, there are only two things you need to experience such success.

The first is knowledge of how to achieve it, and the second is thededication to acquire and apply that knowledge.

And that is the opportunity represented by this DVD course. If you supply the dedication, I will give you the knowledge.

As you can read in the beige boxes sprinkled throughout this piece, the secrets I reveal in this DVD course have created so many blockbuster campaigns and breakthrough products for so many clients that I truly believe that these clients have gone overboard in their praise about what I’ve done for them.

I honestly don’t believe there’s a “world’s best copywriter,” any more than there is a “world’s best actor” or “world’s best centerfielder.” In each case, you can make a good argument for any of several outstanding practitioners. But I do confess to being enough of a copywriter to gratefully accept (and run like a burglar with!)their over-the-top praise.

The truth is, it’s really not me they’re praising, but the creative techniques I’ve developed for triggering extraordinary results. That’s what they love, the results, especially the consistency of breakthrough results I’ve always been able to give them.

And anyone who uses the same techniques can achieve the same results. This is why, before the seminar, the legendary Prince of Print, Gary Halbert, wrote in his newsletter …

“There is no seminar on earth I can think of that would be more worth attending than the one going to be given by Gary Bencivenga. You can be certain, barring some sort of tragedy, every sane marketing genius in the world will be there to sit at his feet and learn from him … We’ll all be busy taking notes and learning from one of the handful of true living legends of copywriting and marketing …

“You know, as you walk through life, you cannot help but be aware of all the corrupt businessmen, thieves, sex offenders, crooked politicians, warlords, murderers, greedy religious leaders, lying CEOs, and just plain jerks. But, every once in a while on this path through life, you come across ‘a Gary Bencivenga,’ A Person Who Restores Your Faith In The Decency Of Mankind!”

 

A much faster way to become “a serious, big-money copywriter…”
—Gary Halbert

As you’ll see on the DVDs, on the second day, toward the end of the seminar, Gary Halbert took the mike and told the audience how appreciative all in attendance should be for the astonishing amount and quality of the information that had been presented. He said that it amazed and inspired even him.

Later he summed up in an unsolicited written testimonial the impact this seminar could have on your own life—and the speed of your success—in this way…

“You can get along very nicely by just learning to be an average copywriter. However, if you want to be a serious big-money copywriter, the info given in Gary Bencivenga’s seminar will take 15 to 25 years off your learning curve.”

Indeed, afterward, the seminar was immediately hailed as “historic” … “phenomenal” … “life-changing” … and a host of other superlatives by these very superstars who attended, including Ken McCarthy, Brian Kurtz, John Carlton, Richard Stanton-Jones, Peter Stone, David Deutsch, and other top marketers and copywriters.

You can read their comments about me and these secrets here, as well as on the Internet. But you will not find anything on the Internet revealing the techniques themselves, as all who attended were sworn to secrecy at the seminar … just as you will be if you order the DVDs and illustrated transcript.

Again, more about this later. What I want to emphasize here is this—with these techniques, I guarantee that you will achieve unprecedented consistencyin your ability to produce breakthrough copy, generate record-setting response, chalk up an impressive array of control ads and direct mail packages, be in hotter demand than you’ve ever enjoyed, and launch blockbuster new products at a success rate you’ve never experienced. And that’s true whether you write the copy yourself or retain others to do it for you.

 

But You Must First Qualify . . . .

If you qualify to receive this training and agree not to share it, as I’ll explain below, I will guarantee you an effortless learning experience that you will look back on as a turning point in your life, when your knowledge of your craft comes together as never before … when you see a new universe of opportunity with a new, inner vision … when your ability to convert your marketing knowledge into major wealth takes a quantum leap … when you know in your heart that your future financial independence is secure because of the life-changing knowledge you have just acquired.

So settle back for a few minutes and read my rather thorough explanation of what is so different about what I teach … and the difference it will make in your own success.

 

Master Secret #1:
The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®—
The Never-Before-Published Formula
Based on More Than Worth
of Scientific Testing

Just about 40 years ago, I broke into direct marketing working with two Hall of Fame legends, John Caples at BBDO and, later, David Ogilvy at Ogilvy & Mather.

With these two masters as my guiding lights, and others in the decades since, I have never escaped the direct marketing copy department.

As a result, for 40 years, I have written and methodically supervised well over $1 billion worth of scientific direct marketing for many of the smartest and most successful direct marketers in America. And even though I am retiring now, I still stay in touch and share advice with these top marketers, always keeping a weather eye on their latest test results.

This 1 billion+ worth of testing has revealed, clear as day, eight critical factors so influential, I call them the eight overwhelmingly dominant factors of generating maximum response.

I’ve woven all eight into what I callThe Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®, which makes it very easy to apply each of the eight critical factors in your every marketing message.

Never before revealed, until this seminar, to anyone except my clients, this Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®is, in my view, the most consistently successful proprietary formula ever devised for creating breakthrough advertising … boosting response, traffic, and revenue … and gaining an overwhelming advantage against your competitors—be they other copywriters, products, or services.

The eight elements of The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation® are like puppet strings, and once you know how to pull on each, you can make the marketplace move to any melody you want to play.

 

It Took Me 10 Years and Millions of Dollars in Testing to Piece This Puzzle Together

Actually, it took me the first 10 years of my career and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of testing to put the pieces of this puzzle together.

In those young and heady days, I and my partners were wildly “test happy.” We liked to test everything that could possibly—even remotely—influence response. That included all the usual suspects, such as headlines, designs, prices, premiums, offers, and so on. But we also ran quite a few “oddball” tests that most direct response ad agencies would never even think of trying, including some very unusual headlines and approaches to the writing of body copy.

To our surprise, we discovered that certain of these headlines and body copy treatments were mysterious anomalies—they “shouldn’t” have worked very well at all according to conventional direct response wisdom. Yet every time I and my partners created headlines and layouts built around these “inexplicably powerful” factors, response would soar.

After more years of further testing, it all came together and made perfect sense, at least once you know The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation® and how the eight factors reinforce one another and make the whole so much more powerful than any one part in boosting response.

The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation® works for any product, in any market, for any piece of advertising you’ll ever run. It’s so reliable, it will let you know with almost unerring precision—even before you test!—how strong your advertising message is going to be.

If your message is weak in any of the eight key areas, you will know it instantly—just by reading your ad and seeing if each required element is present or not. That’s how easy it is. This means you can now know exactly where and how any piece of copy needs to be strengthened to crank it up to maximum pulling power.

As I say, it took me a long 10 years of trial and error to piece this formula together, and then the next 20 years to refine it.

 

I Was Just an Average Copywriter
for the First 10 Years of My Career

I mention this because, for the first 10 years of my career, if truth be told, I was really just an average copywriter. But, once I based my copywriting and marketing on the Gibraltar foundation of The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®, I became almost unbeatable, winning about 85 percent of the time, usually against the best copywriting competition in America. (And you needn’t take my word for this … as you can tell from the supporting comments in the boxes of this letter.)

There are some major marketers for whom I’ve never lost a split-run test, even when tested repeatedly against several of the best copywriters in the world.

To put this in perspective, one of my ablest competitors over the years, the superstar copywriter Doug D’Anna, has written …

“If a copywriter beats the control one out of four times, you’ve got a really good copywriter. If he beats it two out of four times, you’ve got a great copywriter. If he beats it seven out of eight times, you’ve got Gary Bencivenga.” I’ve often been asked how I’ve been able to win so consistently. Until now, I’ve never revealed the secret. Why should I, when I’ve had to compete for royalties against the fastest guns in the West, East, North, and South?

I wish I could say it’s my writing talent. But, as you can tell from my plain, graceless sentences, I write with none of David Ogilvy’s eloquence, nor Gene Schwartz’s emotional fire, nor Gary Halbert’s drama, nor Ted Nicholas’ infectious optimism, nor John Caples’ storytelling magic.

But that’s the liberating, “common-man” beauty of The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®. You don’t need to be a great writer to create blockbuster winners. That’s because …

 

The Real Secret to Creating
Blockbuster Advertising Consistently Is . . .

… knowing exactly what to say to your target market to trigger breakthrough response. It is not how eloquently, cleverly, emotionally, or creatively you say it, although those qualities do help make your ad more enjoyable and appealing to read. But for triggering response, those qualities are vastly overrated.

The most critical factor by far in being able to generate record-breaking response is knowing exactly what to say.

It’s the same as in personal selling. You don’t need a silver tongue to be a selling superstar, either in person or in print. In fact, the great majority of the highest-paid superstars of selling in every field are not the best-looking, smoothest-talking, or most creative people you’ll ever encounter. They are surprisingly ordinary souls who know how to do two things exceedingly well—

1. They know how to establish rapport and build trust with their prospects.
2. They know exactly what to say to elicit a “yes” response far more frequently than their peers.

In short, they know what to say to very effectively open the sale and then to close it. And that is precisely what The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®teaches you to do in your own market, regardless of what product or service you sell.

Best of all, The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation® grows directly out of my own personal philosophy of how to succeed at anything in life, which is …

 

Master Secret #2:
The “Make-It-Easy” Approach
to Breakthrough Marketing

I don’t believe in hard. Nobody sticks with hard very long. I believe that those who’ve achieved incredibly difficult feats, such as Lance Armstrong, have found ways to make the extremely difficult a lot easier. And that separates them from—and allows them to outperform—those who never find ways to make the difficult easier.

Do you ever find marketing and copywriting hard? If so, you’re not alone. Marketing can be a brutally tough way to earn your living, if you don’t know a few simple secrets of how to make it much easier.

Believe me, I know. For roughly the first 10 or 11 years in this business, I found copywriting and marketing not just hard, but agonizingly, tortuously difficult. Sometimes my frustration made me depressed and brought me close to tears.

In my early years as a copywriter, working for Madison Avenue direct response ad agencies, many a late night would find me trying to stare down a blank page in a battle of wills.

I was always the first to blink. I could produce nothing, not even a first line of copy. Picasso once said that all art is merely the artist’s reaction to the first line he paints on the canvas. But I couldn’t even get my first line!

I smoked cigarettes back then, and I’d light up one after another. I’d curse my deadline. Curse my fate. Curse the stupid product I was trying to sell. Rearrange my desk drawer. Make a phone call. Read a magazine. Grab a snack. Wonder what else I could be doing at that moment and, for that matter, with my whole life. This would go on for hours, sometimes days, until my copy chief would inquire, “What the #%*! is taking you so long?”

In time, mercifully, I developed my Make-It-Easy System for marketing and copywriting, which I also reveal in the DVDs and expanded, illustrated transcript of The Bencivenga Seminar.

I learned, during these years, to look at every aspect of successful, breakthrough marketing and ask, how can I make this process easier?

In fact, that’s how I came up with The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®.

It happened when, at age 30, I was appointed copy chief at Callas, Powell, Rosenthal & Bloch, then a highly respected direct response New York ad agency owned by copywriting legend Dan Rosenthal.

I suddenly found myself in charge of an elite, fast-growing copy department and had to teach others the art and science of creating breakthrough direct marketing.

I quickly concluded that I couldn’t teach an art—it’s too subjective and intuitive.

I realized I had to turn the teaching of marketing and copywriting into a science, a repeatable set of principles that, if followed, can be counted on to yield the same predictable result of breakthrough response.

So I systematized the process and, most important, made everything about successful copywriting as easy as I could possibly make it … so that even a wet-behind-the-ears kid just out of college could quickly learn the system and start creating breakthrough control packages virtually out of the gate.

This is exactly what happened with my staff. With just one regular weekly class of training in this method, every single writer in our copy department was soon belting home runs …

• They often crushed by 50 percent, 75 percent, sometimes even 100–200 percent or more the former control packages of our new clients. Most of these clients had been in direct marketing for years and were astonished at the results our approach yielded, usually on our first try.
• Once instructed, my young tigers were also able to dramatically boost response rates and rejuvenate long-running control packages and space ads for our existing clients.
• Likewise, they were able to get fledgling entrepreneurs off to a flying start, launching new products so successfully that, in a few cases, these entrepreneurs went on to build direct marketing empires that made them fabulously wealthy.

No, We Didn’t Win Every Time

Sometimes a client came to us with a new product that, after testing, proved to have little marketplace appeal. We learned that when a new product is so flawed that few people want it, even the most brilliant advertising won’t sell it.

But with long-established products, where the only variable was the pulling power of our advertising, we almost never lost.

All thanks to a system of proven success factors made easy to apply and use.

And that’s how I’ve always approached copywriting and marketing—how can we make it easier?

 

For Example, in the DVDs and Expanded Transcript
of The Bencivenga Seminar, I Teach You . . .

• The #1 easiest way to get a 50 to 100 percent boost in your results immediately.
• The easiest way to persuade your best prospects to desire your product intensely—so much so that they’ll never truly feel satisfied with anyone else’s similar product.
• The easiest way to beat out even the most ferocious competition in your marketplace, even when their marketing is brilliant, their budget huge, and their copy so persuasive, it could have been written by Claude Hopkins himself.
• The easiest way to control the process of persuasion rather than merely guess at it. You’ll learn that persuasion, like music, comes down to a few simple notes. Master them, and you can play an infinite variety of melodies that are music to your prospects’ ears.
• The easiest way to apply the secrets of Warren Buffett, America’s smartest investor, to the process of marketing and wind up far richer. Very few marketers have ever thought of this.
• Where virtually all of your competitors’ ads are weakest, and the easiest way to exploit this near-universal vulnerability to your great advantage.
• The easiest way to come up with powerful premiums to help sell a main product. (So effective, you’ll find that prospects will often buy your main product just to get your free premium.)
• One of the easiest (and smartest) things I’ve ever done in my life that dramatically improved my ability to turn out control ads at will.
• The easiest way to beat—indeed, forever banish—procrastination, perhaps the #1 occupational hazard of copywriters and marketers with too many projects on their plates.
• A simple technique that will let you gauge, with almost mathematical precision, how your ad is going to perform when it hits the marketplace. And you can do this completely on your own, without any focus group, survey, or any other means. It is something you can do in five minutes at your desk all by yourself—anywhere, anytime—and know instantly how your headline or entire ad is going to perform.
• And finally, the easiest way to be a master of persuasion—the simple, 12-word sentence that will make you one of the most persuasive people on the planet, no matter what field you’re in. This is the “master secret” of perhaps the most persuasive man of the 20th century (and an adviser to six presidents). You’ll see how to apply his 12-word secret of persuasion to marketing … and greatly increase your response on any project.

 

Master Secret #3:
“The Blockbuster New Product” Secret

As you can see, I have tried through my whole career to take what’s difficult about marketing, break it down, and make it a lot easier.

Now, one of the most difficult challenges in marketing, perhaps the hardest but also the most financially rewarding, is launching a successful new product.

Some experts say that, on average, only one out of seven new products succeeds. So the odds are normally overwhelmingly against you. But if you beat those odds, you can experience the marketing equivalent of hitting the lottery.

I have found a way to dramatically increase your odds of success in launching new products that can make you or your company much wealthier.

This astonishingly effective, easy-to-use, and truly secret strategy is different from anything ever written in direct marketing. Until this seminar, this strategy has never been revealed publicly anywhere on the planet or published in any book. And everyone at the seminar—as with all the information I shared—was sworn to secrecy never to publicize it.

As you’ll fully appreciate when I give you this strategy, you will want to preserve it—just as I do!—for just the few of us who know about it. That’s the enormous competitive advantage this strategy bestows upon anyone who knows it.

I learned this secret from the legendary Joseph Segel, the mega-millionaire founder of The Franklin Mint, when he and I worked together on one of his projects.

If you are planning to launch a new product and try this secret just once, you will be blown away by the difference it makes in response, often 100–300 percent or more.

What’s so beautiful about this little secret is that it is equally powerful and reliable no matter what you want to sell—books, newsletters, golf clubs, videos, music club memberships, collectible plates, financial advice, e-books, land in Arizona, anything. This one secret is worth many times the price of this whole program, and I guarantee you’ve never heard it from anyone else, ever, no matter how many books you’ve read or seminars you’ve attended.

With this one strategy:

• You will raise the odds of a blockbuster success severalfold. With any new product, you can never be guaranteed success, but this strategy raises your odds to the max.
• You will dissolve price resistance and may even be able to double or even triple your original price point because your product will create such white-hot demand from the core of your market.
• You will create intense desire for your new product and yours alone. In other words, once you introduce your product this way, your market will never again be satisfied with your competitors’ products. Buyers will seek your product out specifically, demanding exactly the unique features you described in your advertising.
• You can easily lock in many years of repeat business from these same customers—converting their loyalty into self-renewing rivers of revenue that enrich you for decades. Your loyal customers will become the best annuity and “retirement plan” you’ll ever have.
• Not only will you likely achieve a blockbuster success, but once you do, your new product will be relatively immune to knockoffs.

I know, you may be thinking that any product can be knocked off. Not so! Certainly not if you launch your product the way I describe. Do it this way and you will build a moat around your new product that can’t be breached by those slick knockoff artists who slither through the weeds, waiting for a chance to cash in on other people’s hard-won success. (I really dislike knockoff artists, and this strategy foils them as surely as a mama lioness guarding her cubs. Yet it has nothing to do with lawyers or legal roadblocks.)

Please understand, I’m not talking here about the “USP,” the well-known principle of the “unique selling proposition” first formulated by the great Rosser Reeves and popularized by Jay Abraham. No, this goes beyond the “USP” and is much more powerful.

It’s an advertising strategy so important—and so unknown—that if you follow it, it will literally change your whole approach to marketing for the rest of your life and make an enormous difference in your success and personal wealth. So priceless is this strategy that you must agree in writing never to publish or reprint it anywhere, as I’ll explain below.

 

Master Secret #4:
“Wealth Is an Income Stream”

Speaking of building wealth with new products …

What’s the easiest and surest way to get rich in our business, as either a marketer or a copywriter?

Commit these five words to memory:“Wealth is an income stream.”

This applies to both marketers and copywriters. Let me start with marketers.

The smartest marketers I’ve ever worked with—Tom Phillips (Phillips Publishing) … Marty Edelston and Brian Kurtz (Boardroom) … Allie Ash and Walter Pearce (KCI) … among many others—all know and practice this principle. If you’re not applying it yourself to build your wealth, you should write it on your palm with a permanent red-ink marker and read it daily: Wealth is an income stream.

These smart marketers know that you don’t build great wealth by merely creating a great product for a hungry crowd … not even a great product for a hungry crowd and a great piece of copy to sell it.

No, you build great wealth by creating a product for a hungry crowd, plus a built-in way to keep that hungry crowd frozen in place and buying from you again and again whenever they’re hungry. In other words, you want a marketing system that rewards you with substantial income right away, and then—much more important—rewards you repeatedly with an automatic back-end revenue stream.

That’s how you leverage your wealth in direct marketing.

For example, if you have information to sell, you might choose to sell it either in the form of book, a special report, a newsletter, or perhaps even a membership site. How do you choose?

Well, if you apply the “Wealth is an income stream” principle, you’d know the answer immediately.

You would certainly not choose a book or special report. A newsletter or a membership site would be a far superior way to build your wealth.

Why?

When you successfully sell a book or report, you’ve got a product. But when you successfully sell a newsletter or membership site, you’ve got a business.

With the book or report, you make a onetime sale and it’s over and done. To make more money, you have to write a new book or report, on a new topic, start a whole new selling process, get a whole new “yes” or “no” decision from your customers, many of whom may not care for the topic of your second book or report.

But with a newsletter or membership site, your first sale leads automatically to years of repeat sales. That’s because a high percentage of your first-time buyers will renew their subscriptions automatically each year. So, with that first sale, you’ve locked in an automatic, self-renewing revenue stream, an annuity, that will keep pouring money into your pockets for many years to come without having to create a whole new product and marketing campaign.

Result: You’ll grow a lot richer, much more easily, and have an extremely valuable, thriving business you can someday sell, instead of a pile of outdated books or reports collecting dust in inventory.

Books and reports do have their place, especially in establishing your credibility … or as introductions to other back-end businesses. But they’re a very hard way to build wealth by themselves.

As you’ll come to fully appreciate with the DVDs and expanded, illustrated transcript of The Bencivenga Seminar, wealth is not just a onetime infusion of money. Real wealth is knowing that you’ve secured a healthy flow of money that keeps pouring into your life, this year, next year, and the year after that. That’s real wealth because it bestows an ongoing river of revenue as well as the priceless security of feeling rich all the time.

Now let’s take this a step further.

Even better than a newsletter is a newsletter that itself leads to further ancillary sales. A good example would be a health newsletter that brings in lots of money year after year from subscriptions … and that also persuades people to buy your own proprietary vitamins and supplements. Now you have automatic revenue streams triggering lots of subsidiary automatic revenue steams, and you can keep the process going indefinitely.

In The Bencivenga Seminar DVDs and expanded transcript, I show how any marketer can use the mighty leverage of this principle to grow much richer.

 

And That Certainly Includes Copywriters!

If you’re a copywriter, how can you apply the “Wealth is an income stream”principle to build your own wealth?

The best way I know is to help your clients multiply their wealth and have an arrangement that lets you share in that growing wealth.

At the encouragement of my friend Jay Abraham, this is what I started doing about 20 years ago and why I am able to now retire while I’m still young and healthy enough to enjoy it.

For more than 20 years now, ever since I became known for consistently producing breakthrough direct mail packages, my phone has never stopped ringing and my schedule has been booked for years in advance by clients willing and, in some cases eager, to share the extra profits my copy would create for them.

So, until my recent retirement, my standard, nonnegotiable charge for more than 20 years has been a $25,000 upfront, nonrefundable advance against future royalties of five cents for each direct mail package mailed.

 

The Real Money for Copywriters
Is in Royalties and Other Performance-Based
Compensation Agreements

When I started quoting (nervously, at first!) my -fee-plus-royalties rate for writing a direct mail package, my copywriter friends thought I’d gone mad. Back in the 1980s, creative fees were much lower than today and freelancers worked on a flat-fee basis. Several of my fellow copywriters called me to ask, “How can you charge?”

Their question showed how little they understood about wealth building. First, the up-front fee that bowled them over was just to screen out the dreamers, tire-kickers, and time-wasters among potential clients. The real money was always in the royalties—and still is today.

Moreover, for major mailers whose revenues depend so heavily on a successful direct mail package, neither the  nor the royalties were ever a deterrent if I could consistently deliver success, which I and they both knew I could, mainly due to the unique power I demonstrated with The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®, which yields such remarkably consistent success.

Now, if you do the math, you’ll see that five cents per piece mailed adds up quickly. If a client mails, say, five million pieces in a year, you’ve just made  that year from just that one piece of copy, and the meter starts rolling anew next year and the year after that and so on.

As long as your copy keeps working, you keep receiving royalty checks like clockwork, just as you would if you were an author with a best-selling novel or a rock star with a hit song.

If you’ve written a really compelling piece of copy for a mass-market product, and your client mails 50 million pieces in a year, you’ve just made  from that single piece of copy for just that year, from just one client.

In the DVDs and expanded transcript of The Bencivenga Seminar, you’ll see that one of our liveliest discussions was about royalties and how copywriters can better help their clients get rich and share in those riches themselves.

In the audience were most of the highest-paid royalty copywriters in the world … as well as the advertisers who pay the highest royalties.

Leading this private closed-door discussion, I revealed the best ways I’ve found to set up royalty arrangements … how to know which clients will honor their agreements to pay you and which ones will likely try to wriggle out … how you can prevent other writers from horning in on your royalties (by knocking off your copy) … what royalties other writers are charging … whether you can ask some of your clients but not others to pay royalties … and many related questions.

Toward this end, at the seminar, we all discussed whole new ways of partnering between marketers and copywriters that can help both sides become a lot more productive and wealthy in today’s new marketing environment.

For example, the direct mail royalties I’ve earned over the years have all been on a five-cents-per-piece-mailed agreement. But that doesn’t work for Internet marketing, because there are no direct mail packages mailed!

In our pull-no-punches session between mega-successful copywriters and advertisers who pay copywriters the world’s highest royalties and fees, we hit upon what I think does work to everyone’s advantage better than anything before.

In fact, with a direct marketing product in which I’m still a partner, this is exactly the formula I’ve now adopted myself, and so have many who came to the seminar. Best of all, the advertisers love it, as it perfectly aligns both the copywriter’s and the advertiser’s incentive to maximize revenue for both. In fact, it makes advertisers thrilled to shower copywriters with wealth … because in the process, they make much, much more.

Finally, we also discussed a fascinating and highly creative variety of creative compensation plans—some of which I’ve frankly never thought of—that other copywriters are using.

If you’re a copywriter, these compensation ideas will give you enormous flexibility and motivation to review—and greatly enhance—your own fee structure. Even if you’re not ready at this moment to change your fee structure, perhaps because you want to get a few more control packages under your belt, these discussions will give you an easy-to-follow roadmap for maximizing your income and wealth in your copywriting career.

And what if you’re a marketer? You can profit greatly from this information as well, because you’ll see how some of the world’s most successful entrepreneursincentivize their copywriters to become obsessed with making them more money, to “dream, live, and breathe” about new ways to make their marketing break the bank with additional profits for you.

 

If You’re a Copywriter, Hear Me Out! You’ll Never Get Rich on Flat Fees!

If you’re a copywriter, no matter what your present compensation arrangement may be, please heed my words: You’ll never get rich on flat fees! You must find a way to share in the wealth you create for your clients, or you may reach your own golden years with much less gold in your pocket and a nagging regret that you helped make others much richer, but never yourself.

In the seminar DVDs and expanded transcript, you’ll also discover …

• How I converted my flat-fee clients into fee-plus-royalties clients.
• Whether or not you should have a contract or a letter of agreement with your clients before you agree to work on royalties.
• The most important advice a great attorney once gave me about who to trust and who to not trust when you’re to be paid via royalties. This can save you a tremendous amount of time and wasted effort as well as a great deal of heartache in avoiding those people who are destined to cheat you if you go into a royalty agreement with them.
• Should you have lawyers—both yours and your client’s—negotiate your contract? Or might these “dueling pit bulls” often cause more ill will and blown deals than their possible “protection” is worth?
• The best defense against being cheated in a performance-based agreement is to do this …
• Compensation deals you should walk away from … and why.
• Perhaps the greatest marketing model ever created for marketing your product and generating an endless river of revenue from it.
• My proven checklist of ways that marketers, copywriters, and designers can make a lot more money.
• Why you must start compounding your wealth now … and not put it off to the future. You’ll see why, no matter what you’re making, at least 10 percent of your gross annual income must be yours to salt away before you pay any bills or spend it. Anyone can and should save at least 10 percent of gross income. Pay yourself first … and you’ll discover to your delight that every dollar you save now will in time give birth (through the power of compounding) to lots of new “baby dollars.” And then, like a proud grandparent, you’ll happily watch those dollars spawn lots more “baby dollars” and so on—countless generations of new dollars to be born within your lifetime once you get this doubling-and-redoubling process started.In other words, every $1,000 or $10,000 you save now will double, then double again, then double again, and keep on doubling—if you start now and give the process enough time to work its magic. Compound interest is such a mighty force in building wealth that Albert Einstein once called it “the eighth wonder of the world.” I show how and why every copywriter and marketer needs to start doing it immediately—and automatically (don’t even think twice about it!)—to retire much richer.

 

Negotiating Tips for Copywriters and Marketers

Speaking of your compensation, I also share with you …

• How copywriters (and designers, too) can be more successful when negotiating with clients.
• How clients can get maximum value and better work for every dollar they pay to freelancers.
• A pearl of bargaining wisdom from the tough-as-nails negotiator George Meany, the former head of the AFL-CIO union. Here is his never-fail advice for anyone who wants to avoid being taken advantage of in any negotiation.
• Why, if you are a freelancer, you must never let one client become more than 50 percent of your income.
• Why I have always found it most successful—and highly recommend this to you—to have a consistent pricing policy for all clients. Most important of all—never let your pricing be hammered down by the toughest negotiators! Do so, and you will be rewarding the penny-pinching hagglers and punishing your best-paying clients. When you teach your clients how to hammer you down on price by rewarding such behavior, you will never see an end to their haggling. And it will cost you dearly.
• Why, if you’re a copywriter, designer, or other freelancer, you should beware of this common technique used by clients to get a better price from you. It works with devastating effectiveness in getting you to lower your prices, unless you’re prepared!
• Why, paradoxically, by yielding on your price, you will often ruin your chances of signing up a new client.
• How I persuaded my clients to be comfortable in allowing me to work simultaneously for their competitors. This is a very sensitive subject, and you may not think it’s even possible for a client to want you to work for his or her competitors. But if you approach it this way, both you and your clients will wind up being much bigger winners.
• The best copywriter’s broker that I know in the business. If you are a new or up-and-coming copywriter and want to break into the big time working for America’s most generous royalty-paying advertisers, this is the man who can pull the strings for you and introduce you to the biggest and most lucrative clients in the world. I’ve known him for more than 30 years, and he’s helped many a copywriter and designer become rich. I tell you who this man is and how to get in touch with him. (With him and the other professionals I recommend from my “million-dollar Rolodex,” I have no financial interest whatsoever in any of their activities, so I can be totally unbiased in making these recommendations.)
• For example, in the DVD course I also name the consultants, designers, list brokers, and career-advancing resources that I most highly recommend.

 

Can You Imagine Yourself Making
 . . . or More . . .
from a Single Piece of Copy?

We’re still talking here about Master Secret #4, “Wealth Is an Income Stream.”

OK, here’s an idea that can generate more money for you every year than you may ever have thought possible.

This idea came to me once when I wanted to set a really big goal for myself. How could I earn a million dollars from just one piece of copy?

I know that sounds impossible, just as it did to me when I first came up with this notion. As I show in the DVD course, that is the usual knee-jerk reaction most of us have when we stretch for a really big goal. It’s our habitual, “limited-mind-set” thinking.

But as I also teach in this DVD course, you must learn to ignore this automatic knee-jerk, self-limiting reaction and instead say firmly to your subconscious mind, “Not so fast! Let’s imagine that I really have to come up with a way to do this … that someone is holding a loaded gun to my head and will soon pull the trigger if I don’t come up with some way to achieve this admittedly outlandish goal. Under those stark conditions—I must do it or die!—what could I possibly come up with?”

When I took that attitude, I did come up with something …

I realized, “What if I could sell the same piece of copy for $1,000 to 1,000 different people? There is my million dollars for a single piece of copy!”

Now that is perfectly achievable, because in every field there are people in every community who need good advertising—be they real estate agents, stock brokers, financial planners, hardware store owners, chiropractors, dry cleaning store managers, you name it. And there are tens of thousands of these people in communities across America.

In other words, you can create a marketing template, like a software program, for a given industry … sell it to many different people in that same industry … and make a small fortune.

Let’s say you develop a highly successful program for insurance agents. You can then sell it, say, for $5,000 to other agents. If you do that in each of 1,000 communities, you’ve just made yourself $5 million for a single piece of copy. The leverage is tremendous. What’s more, you can also offer annual updates and new campaigns to keep this river of revenue pouring into your bank account like a perpetually flooding Mississippi River.

Once a local insurance broker tries your campaign and discovers, “Gee, you really do bring in great leads for me,” he or she will want to spend another $5,000 with you next year to update it. And if you build up to 1,000 people paying you $5,000 a year, you have a $5 million renewable yearly income, just from updating a few good pieces of copy.

Now if that seems so far out of reach as to be unbelievable to you, that’s your knee-jerk, “limited mind-set” doing its thing. If it makes you feel better, just to get started with the unlimited marketing mind-set that I teach, OK, go ahead and scale that $5 million number back to $1 million, if that’s what it takes to get you started thinking bigger about your income.

Once you see how easily you can flex your income-generating muscles, you can then set the bigger goals I recommend. And I show you how to do this with zero fear of failure, by making failure a perfectly acceptable outcome. I know, this turns the usual approach to “goal setting”—with all its attendant deadlines and high-pressure self talk—merrily on its head. And that’s precisely why you will now be empowered to start achieving outrageously successful goals as never before. I teach how to achieve these spectacular goals with zero pressure and fear of failure by making your attempt itself an exciting, nothing-to-lose, no-big-deal adventure. As you’ll see for yourself the first time you try it in the way that I teach, this go-for-it, nothing-to-lose, no-deadlines-or-pressure- on-yourself mindset magically dissipates your subconscious resistance … and, paradoxically, all but ensures your success.

Now, getting back to this idea of marketing templates, what I’m teaching here is not theory. Creating these marketing templates that you can resell over and over is such a lucrative way to build wealth that several copywriters at the seminar are already doing this in local markets. Best of all, it’s even easier to do on the Internet than in traditional direct mail, as I explain in the DVDs and expanded transcript of the seminar.

I even show you the advertisement that I wrote in one field to make this happen. It attracted so much business from all across the country, I could barely put my phone down before it rang again with more people wanting to take me up on it. You’ll receive a copy of this ad … as well as my “greatest hits”—a collection of my strongest-pulling ads of all time.

 

Other Ways to Get
All the New Business You Can Handle

After I spent the first 10 years of my career working in America’s top direct response ad agencies and learning at the feet of masters like David Ogilvy and John Caples, I decided to go out on my own as a freelancer. I was so nervous at first, because I had a mortgage and a family, including a medically involved daughter. Ihad to succeed.

Because I was blessed with great advice from legendary advertising masters in my early years, succeed I did. Soon after I launched my freelance copywriting business, I found myself booked up six months in advance.

But that wasn’t enough security for me, so I tried some of the other new business secrets that had been shared with me by the most successful freelance consultants of that time.

They worked like a dream, and soon I was booked for two years in advance. I never looked back … or had to worry about finances again. For virtually all my remaining 30 years as a freelancer, I had a waiting list of clients that stretched out to two years. Actually, the waiting list could have stretched even longer, but I wouldn’t even maintain a waiting list beyond two years, as I felt this would be impractical and could be perceived as condescending to the good people who wanted to hire me. I never wanted to come across as arrogant, because I never liked it when people acted that way toward me.

In the DVD course, I describe how I managed to build a permanent waiting list of clients eager to hire me. Put these secrets into practice, and you’ll never want for new clients. They will be lining up outside your door, ringing your phone off the hook, and spreading your name around the industry as one of the hottest freelancers to call.

For example, I tell you about the priceless advice that I received from legendary direct marketer Dick Benson, a consultant who was always in red-hot demand from clients throughout America. When I first went freelance myself, Benson told me how I could have all the clients I could handle, and his advice proved right on target. In all my years of copywriting, this has been the #1 way that I (and other successful writers I’ve known) have attracted as many clients as we can accept.

I also answer one of the most common of all questions from copywriters just starting out: “How do I get started attracting clients when I don’t have any clients to begin with?” I address this difficult question and again pour out all my secrets for making this process much easier to land your first high-paying clients.

I also share …

• A technique so powerful in attracting clients that it makes them want only you and no one else.
• How to sell without selling. Do you feel uncomfortable about selling your services? Most of us writers do, sometimes because we are introverts and sometimes because we don’t want to seem too pushy. It’s just not us.But here’s how to set things up so that your client sells himself or herself on your services. This is an ingenious technique that works like a charm in virtually any situation. I learned this secret from the man hailed as “America’s greatest salesman,” and it’s so powerful because when your client (instead of you) sells himself on your services, he or she stays sold. I give you a word-for-word example of exactly what to say, just as this great salesman demonstrated once on TV. You’ll see how easy it is … how it removes all selling pressure … and how it almost magically induces your clients to talk themselves into the sale. This is truly amazing and is the most valuable closing secret you can ever know. Apply it and watch your closing ratio soar.
• The triumph of the tortoise. How any copywriter can work his or her way up the ladder of important assignments—slowly but surely. Works with virtually any client, in any industry.
• The simple key to getting clients to offer you bigger and better assignments.
• The easiest way to become a hero to clients. Do this and they will always remember, be grateful, and start offering you bigger and better assignments.
• The more you do this, the more quickly your prospects will want to jump on whatever you offer.
• How to build your reputation as a copywriting star by beating up on the weakest competition in the marketplace. Think about it—if you’re starting out, why pick fights with the toughest heavyweights in the division? If you do, you’ll likely earn a reputation as a loser, which you can’t afford. But if you start out by beating up lots of weaklings instead, you’ll build a reputation as a winner—and demand for your services will rise. Here’s how to do it.
• Never act hungry! For example, if you give speeches at industry conferences, are you impressing potential clients … or shooting yourself in the foot by coming across as a hungry writer beating the bushes for new business? My unequivocal advice on this.
• Why you should never compete on price. Clients don’t want cheap. They want what works. They know full well that copy that bombs is terribly expensive and disheartening, regardless of what the copywriter charged. They want what’s good, and they know that high quality doesn’t come cheap. Here’s how you can confidently make this psychology a part of your presentations and proposals … enjoy stronger pricing power to earn higher fees … and often completely eliminate price resistance before it comes up. The boost that these secrets will give to your self-confidence and ability to charge more will, all by itself, pay for this DVD course many times over.
• Negotiating tactics for shy copywriters. Follow these principles, and you’ll be one of the best negotiators in the business without ever seeming aggressive or pushy.
• Negotiating tricks that clients use against copywriters to get a better deal. Your only defense is to be prepared, as these tricks have seduced even the most in-demand writers into lowering their fees.
• Why your current negotiating skills may be chasing away potential clients! Have you failed to “close the sale” on potential copywriting assignments and couldn’t figure out why? This is likely the reason, and I tell you how to cure the problem instantly.
• How to write proposals that almost always land the job. During my career I have been known for writing proposals that almost always persuade the prospective client to sign on the dotted line and send me a big check. Here are the secrets I used.
• Put this in your proposal, and believe me, your prospective clients will start to fall in love with you as soon as they read it.
• Then, add a section like this. Put this unusual, unorthodox copy in your proposals and, just as it happened for me, do not be surprised if you win almost every assignment you’re up for. This one little section in my proposals proved irresistible to almost all my potential new clients, and I almost never failed to win the assignment.
• The easiest way to establish a good “chemistry” with prospective clients so that they immediately feel, “This is someone we want to work with.”
• How to get the time you need to do the job right and not be pressured into deadlines that are too tight.
• What to do if you find yourself having agreed to a schedule that’s utterly impossible to meet. Do this and your client will respect you all the more.
• A surprising rule of thumb that I have found amazingly accurate in determining exactly how long a job will take, no matter what the job is. I learned this from one of the world’s top computer consultants, but it works in estimating the time needed for any project in any field. Try this and you will see for yourself. It takes a split second to calculate—right off the top of your head!—and is mystifying in its precision.
• Apply this secret, and you will come to consistently beat the vast majority of other copywriters competing against you. You will also have all the new clients you can handle as a happy side benefit.
• “Tell me, what do you do for a living?” If you’re a copywriter, whenever someone asks you what you do for a living, never say that you are a copywriter or that you write direct mail. Say this instead and be prepared for them to want to hire you immediately, no matter what business they’re in. This is a remarkably easy and effective way to build your copywriting practice and make your networking (at industry gatherings, social events, etc.) pay off as never before.

 

I Passionately Believe That
Copywriters, Designers,
and Marketers Deserve to Be Rich

Everything I’ve just mentioned is under the banner of Master Secret #4, “Wealth Is an Income Stream.”

It’s a major part of my DVD course because I believe passionately that copywriters, designers, and marketers deserve to be rich. And why not, if you’re triggering lots of wealth for the clients you serve?

Selling is the highest-paid profession in the world, and if you know how to do it masterfully, as I teach, you deserve to be rich and certainly will be if you play your cards as I show you.

The key—your foundation for having enormous value in any marketplace—is knowing how to be a superstar salesperson in print.

Remember, as a copywriter, designer, or marketer, you are in effect a “salesperson” with the magical ability to knock on a thousand doors—or a million, or 10 million—at once and deliver a masterful sales presentation to all those prospects at the same time. Thanks to this “multiplier” effect of advertising, which can put your message in front of unlimited numbers of people all at once, you can close an unlimited number of sales all at once. So your leverage here in building wealth rapidly is enormous.

But everything depends on knowing how to sell skillfully. In the DVD course, I share the most effective techniques I’ve ever learned to sell like a master in our overmarketed world.

These are secrets you don’t normally find in advertising books or courses. That’s because throughout my career I’ve been blessed to work with several of the greatest selling masters in the country. These are superstar salespeople who are masters of persuasion not in advertising but in personal selling. I’ve loved learning from these selling giants, because every time I’d learn a new secret from them, I’d usually be able to figure out a way to apply it in some way to boost the response of my direct marketing copy. Apply them yourself, as I show you, and the results will delight you.

Let’s start with the best way I’ve ever found to open the sale and get past the “automatic rejection response” that is now second nature to your prospects, caused by overwhelming advertising clutter …

 

Master Secret #5:
“The Cracker Jack Secret”

Over the last 12 years, this one secret has made more money for my clients and me than anything in all the best advertising books put together. It works for any product or service and is the most potent factor behind the biggest direct marketing creative breakthroughs of the past 50 years, but especially of the last 12 years, as the tsunami of clutter has swamped our prospects’ lives. And it works even better online.

I won’t give too much of it away here, but I will tell you why I named it “The Cracker Jack Secret.”

Have you ever noticed that nobody, in the entire history of the world, has ever thrown away a Cracker Jack box without first getting their fingers sticky, rummaging inside to dig out their prize?

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, no Cracker Jack box has ever been thrown away unopened!

What does this have to do with you?

Well, if you send out direct mail or email, what’s your biggest problem?

Exactly!

Thanks to clutter, right now, perhaps 95–99 percent of your prospects are throwing your messages away unopened.

So let’s connect the dots …

Up to 99 percent of your prospects throw your marketing materials away unopened. Yet nobody in the history of the world has ever thrown away an unopened Cracker Jack box.

Catch my drift?

Are you beginning to see that one of the biggest mistakes you can possibly make in marketing is to fail to put a valuable surprise inside every marketing piece you send out … and let your prospects know there’s a valuable surprise inside?

If you start applying the psychology of “The Cracker Jack Secret,” as I show you in the DVD course, your improvement in results will blow you away. You will make your envelopes and email almost irresistible to open. Just as with the Cracker Jack box, many of your prospects won’t be able to throw your mail away, because they’ve first got to find that little surprise gift inside.

And I don’t mean a gimmicky plastic trinket. The surprise you include in your direct mail package, space ad, or email can be anything your market values, especially a highly prized piece of information … and especially something that demonstrates what you’re selling and why it is so desirable.

What have tens of millions of dollars’ worth of our tests shown about the best way to harness this powerhouse secret? I reveal all in the DVD course.

As you’ll see, I’ve taken this principle to extremes most marketers can’t even imagine until they see my samples. The results, uniformly, have been off-the-charts explosive.

I seldom use the word “always” in advertising, as there are usually exceptions to any rule. But I have yet to find an exception to the response-boosting power of “The Cracker Jack Secret.” I always use it in some way for my clients. For any clients who weren’t using this secret before, it has always enabled me to smash their previous control.

 

Lots More Secrets of
Salesmanship in Advertising …
from America’s Superstars of Selling

Once you know how to use “The Cracker Jack Secret” to stand out from the clutter, bypass the “automatic rejection response,” and capture your prospect’s attention and interest, I show you lots of other techniques of brilliant salesmanship for converting that interest into powerful desire to buy your product or service. For example …

• The Secret of the Wise Old Salesman. This wise old salesman was one of Merrill Lynch’s most successful and richest stockbrokers. He had a simple technique he used to “bag the elephant,” i.e., attract very wealthy accounts. The best part is, anyone can use this strategy and it works extremely effectively online.
• The five universal objections to every sale and how to counter each.These five most common objections are the five “exits” through which most of your prospects are escaping right now. By anticipating them in your sales pitch, you effectively seal off these five escape routes and dramatically raise your closing ratio.
• A formula for persuasion that is so powerful, you can merely “fill in the blanks” and easily come up with blockbuster ad after blockbuster ad.For example, you’ll see my simple formula for making price resistance melt like a cup of ice cream left in the summer sun.Hint: A great salesman once told me that price is a funny thing. When a qualified prospect says, “It’s too expensive,” what he or she is really saying is this…
• The best way to overcome a “killer” objection that people may raise with your product or service.

 

Perhaps the Greatest Secret Ever Discovered
for Making Anyone Say “Yes”

One of my favorite examples of applying the secrets of master salespeople to direct marketing is this next one. I genuinely believe it’s nothing less than the greatest secret of seducing anyone into saying “yes.” It was first described by one of the greatest super-salesmen of all time, who worked in life insurance, an extremely difficult field.

Nobody ever wants to sit still for a pitch from a life insurance agent. That’s why before this salesman discovered this secret, he was doing so poorly that he was about to quit the business. But after he discovered this amazing little secret, he did so well that he shattered his company’s sales records.

The best part is, this secret works with stunning effectiveness (maybe even more so) for direct marketers. In fact, any marketer who fails to use this strategy is at a severe disadvantage to those who do. It literally transforms your presentation and offer into something that almost anyone is irresistibly tempted to say “yes” to.

 

Psychological “Hot Buttons” That
Trigger Intense Desire and Immediate Action

OK, just to make sure we’re still on focus, I’m still talking here about my best ideas for applying salesmanship in advertising.

Now, when working with several of America’s best salespeople, I discovered that they shared a striking characteristic. They all knew certain principles ofstreet-smart psychology that enabled them to influence others with exceptional effectiveness. One of them described these secrets as “psychological hot buttons,” because once you know them, getting people to do what you want can often be as easy as pressing their “hot buttons.”

Just one example—people desperately want to be consistent in their behavior … and you’ll learn how to use this universal desire to motivate people to desire what you offer as never before.

You’ll also discover how to unleash the normally overlooked power of the “Zeigarnik Effect.” The Zeigarnik Effect is named after the Russian psychologist who discovered that there is an almost irresistible drive within most people tofinish incomplete tasks, sometimes against all reason and even when it makes no sense to complete the task. You’ll see how you can use this in your continuity programs to keep people buying more products from you.

You’ll also see why fear of loss is a much stronger motivator than desire for gain … and how to use this fascinating bit of psychology to sell much more of whatever you offer.

And here’s another psychological hot button I show you how to press. You may recognize this from your own experience. Let’s say you’re looking to buy a new home. You find one you like and are leaning towards making an offer, but you’re in no hurry, because you’re negotiating and resolved not to appear too eager. But then you get wind there’s another buyer in the picture, a couple coming back to inspect the home for a third time. What happens? You suddenly want that home more than you ever wanted it before, and you immediately plan to raise your offer!

What happened? Competition for the object you want drives your desire much higher. Such is human nature, and I show you exactly how to exploit this secret to greatly intensify your prospects’ desire for anything you want to sell.

Shamelessly manipulative? Perhaps. But it works like crazy, as do the other psychological hot buttons I share.

In my own defense, I hasten to add that not all these techniques smack of manipulation. Some of them do, yes, so I urge you to use them ethically, as your prospects won’t even be aware of the powerful “hidden persuaders” you are secretly wielding.

But other techniques are among the noblest and most straightforward tactics you could ever imagine, and they can work wonders for you, too.

Take candor, for example. Yes,candor! It is so rare in advertising that when prospects encounter it, they’re so taken aback that they quickly lower their guard. Consider what David Ogilvy said about this seldom-used powerhouse of persuasion …

“The antique dealer who points out a scratch before he lets me buy his chair always wins my trust for life.”

Isn’t that a delightful insight? And doesn’t it reflect such a refreshingly honest and open way to do business? Imagine that you are considering the purchase of an expensive antique chair and encounter a dealer who points out a blemish you didn’t notice. I’m sure his candor would work its magic with you, too, exactly as it did for Ogilvy. And just as surely, candor will work its magic with your customers, if you use it correctly. I’ll show you several superb examples of how to use candor—to freely admit a minor flaw—to greatly increase the credibility and pulling power of your copy.

If you are someone devoted, as I am, to selling truthfully, this is one of the most important tools in your selling arsenal.

There are other useful techniques I’ll share, as well. For example …

 

When Your Creativity Fails and
All Seems Lost, Create an Enemy!

This is a little-known copywriting trick that works beautifully in markets that are highly competitive, and most of the obvious benefits, headlines, offers, and other approaches have already been used many times and have saturated the market. This “create an enemy” technique opens up a whole new way to sell with surprising vigor and effectiveness. When your creativity is tired and it is hard to get any traction in your copy because everything else has been said so often, this strategy will save your life and often give you a monster breakthrough.

There’s more …

• A technique for using “reverse psychology” that makes your prospects suspect that your product is even better than you are claiming.
• How to use controversy, news, and “playing against type” to inject great readership interest in any ad you run.
• How to use “the contrast principle” of modern psychology to enhance the perception of your product’s value as never before—just as a magician can make you see what he wants you to see.
• Why I so strongly recommend buying the products you love. Indulge yourself! When you do it as I show you, you will become an expert in “buyer’s enthusiasm,” and thus much more skillful at instilling this feeling in others.
• When your offer is “too good to be true.” If you were walking in New York City and saw a man on a street corner offering to give away $20 bills, chances are you’d be leery of accepting his money. You’d figure,“There’s got to be a catch, so I’m just going to ignore him.” Well, whenyour offer sounds too good to be true, many of your prospects are reacting in the same way. In all such situations, these nine words work like magicin making people drop their skepticism and decide, “OK, let me give it a try.”
• If you are losing the battle, switch the battlefield. This is another priceless technique when your message is fatiguing or your product is uninspiring. In effect, by changing the main benefit of what you are selling, you’ll give your product a new lease on life.

 

And while we’re still on the subject of salesmanship in advertising, let’s move on to …

 

Master Secret #6:
“How to Be a Master Closer”

On Wall Street … or on Madison Avenue … or in direct marketing circles, if you know how to sell, and especially how to close, you are golden.

In good times, when companies are flush, you will be showered with money, perks, and trinkets. In some Wall Street firms, for example, year-end bonuses for top salespeople run into the tens of millions of dollars.

In hard times, if you know how to sell, when layoffs force others to hit the cold pavement, you will be coddled and protected—because you have the most highly prized skill in the business universe, the ability to sell, to generate cash flow, the lifeblood of any business.

Among all salespeople, no one is held in higher esteem than the stars known as closers. Calling you a “closer” is the highest accolade your admiring colleagues can pay you. It means that no matter what your prospects may throw at you in a presentation, you know how to roll with the punches and bring home the order a high percentage of the time. When stakes are highest and a company must win an account, they send in their star closer.

That can be you, either in personal selling or in direct marketing, when you apply the secrets I teach in the DVD course. I have studied the techniques used by master closers in all fields and have figured out how to apply their methods to the direct marketing process.

In this part of the course, for example, I share my whole bag of tricks for closing the sale, including “The Secret of the Apothecary Scale” … “Advanced Secrets of Risk Reversal” … “The Secret of Best Sellers in Any Product Category” … “The Takeaway Principle” … “How to Make Offers Your Prospects Can’t Refuse (Without Resorting to Lucca Brazzi)” … and much more.

 

Master Secret #7:
“The Manifestation Secret”

This is the final and most important part of the entire DVD course. That’s because there are certain secrets that greatly empower your success in all walks of life, including marketing. Chief among these is the ability to manifest your desires.

Everything in the universe is governed by laws, and this is true of how to harness your own mind to manifest almost whatever you want, including outrageous success in your marketing and copywriting.

This is so important because every great achievement in life—whether a magnificent bridge, a towering skyscraper, the attainment of your own financial independence, or the launch of a blockbuster product—all have one thing in common. They all begin in the mind.

When you fully understand this, and how to harness your mind’s phenomenal power to manifest your dreams, your life will change in positive ways you cannot even imagine.

For one, you will realize that you possess a power similar to that of the pilot who sits comfortably at the controls of a mighty jet airplane. Once you know how to “use your controls” in smarter, effortless ways, you can experience a whole new level of propulsion to get wherever you want to go in life.

I’ve lived a blessed life. I’ve worked with many clients who’ve remained my business partners and friends for decades, and we’ve spawned tremendously successful businesses. My clients, my family members, and my friends have sometimes commented on how “lucky” I seem to be, how often circumstances seem to break my way to make our joint ventures successful. Some even consider me their lucky charm.

Well, the secret will now be out. It is not luck, at least not the way most people think about “luck.”

When you want things to start breaking your way, when you want the universe to conspire to assist you and shower you with good fortune, I’ve found what I feel certain is the key, and I share this with you in the seminar.

Learning about this whole area of how to manifest your desires is critically important to your mastery as a marketer.

Why?

Because as a marketer, this is your stock in trade—the intensification and fulfillment of desire!

To help others realize their desires, it is of incalculable benefit to become a master of the laws of desire yourself. These are among the most important secrets I reveal in the DVD course. For example …

What every copywriter and marketer should know about desires and how to amplify them into white-hot motivation to buy.Based on a lifetime of testing hundreds of different products and services, I’ll give you a collection of never-before-published insights that will allow you to turn up the desire in your prospects as easily as turning up the heat on your kitchen stove.
A little insight that will save you untold money and anguish in avoiding marketing failures.
How your prospects’ desires inevitably evolve from “quantity” into “quality.” Once you understand this little-known rule of how people behave, you’ll possess a priceless marketing tool, as it will enable you to raise your prices and profit margins handsomely by creating more deluxe and specialized versions of your hottest-selling products and services.
Your easiest way—and biggest opportunity—to spot the next gigantic profit opportunity within your market. Follow this advice and you can be a “new product hero” again and again. This is the most reliable way I could ever give you to launch your next monster hit.
How to harness people’s desires gracefully, discreetly, and subtly—so that you do not come across as being overtly manipulative. (Otherwise, your prospect, like a wary fish, will spot the hook and refuse to bite.)
Surprisingly powerful ways you can use revenge in your copy.Revenge is one of the most motivating of all human emotions. Deep inside of every one of us, we all remember people who doubted us and what we could achieve. That is why one of the richest satisfactions we can experience in life is to prove our earlier doubters wrong, to reverse their hurtful comments, if only in our own minds and self-image. I’ve found a way you can harness this universal emotion for almost any product or service.
The “Emotional Before-and-After Comparison.” With this technique, you show the empathy you feel for your prospect by comparing his or her emotional state both with and without your product.

A short demonstration, using this DVD course as an example …

Let’s say you’re a copywriter. I imagine there must have been times in your career, perhaps even now, when you wonder how good you really are and if you can sustain, let alone multiply, your current income. Even the best of us have not been above worrying, “What if I skid into an extended slump and don’t turn out any winners for a long time? What will happen to my income?”

Perhaps you’re even facing a new assignment right now that is so challenging, you have no idea of how you’re going to beat the client’s strong control. Each morning when you wake up and think about it, you want to go back to sleep. You loathe the idea of failing, yet you have no idea what to write that will electrify your audience, and this makes you anxious. You particularly dread the thought of getting one of those awful, awkward phone calls from your client, telling you that your package has just lost out to someone else’s. Or, more likely in such cases, you get no phone call at all, because your client just didn’t feel comfortable breaking the bad news to you. Will this client ever call again? Will others? You wonder about these things and if thesystematic creation of winning advertising copy could somehow be easier … and your future income a lot more secure.

Well, it most definitely can. Imagine, thanks to the secrets of consistentmarketing success that you will learn in this DVD course, that such thoughts need never again shadow you like hounds in the night. Imagine how much better it would feel to have the confidence that grows only from knowledge—the knowledge of how to automatically stack the odds of winning in your favor on each and every assignment. No, that doesn’t mean that you will win every time. Nobody does.

But it does mean that you can succeed in our profession far more consistentlyand thus enjoy a high, ongoing level of demand for your work, and thus a whole new sense of security and confidence about your income. You can know thatinevitably you will win your fair share of tests.

Moreover, on those inevitable occasions when you don’t win, you will not embarrass yourself, because your copy invariably makes a respectable showing and, often enough, puts you in the winner’s circle.

And that means that you will have taken much of the risk out of your clients’ decision to hire you, because you will consistently come in at or near the top, and that’s all that clients will ever ask of you. Building a reputation as a consistent producer of winning copy leads in short order to being offered more assignments than you can handle from an ever-widening circle of clients, all of which gives you great financial security.

Remember, you don’t have to beat other copywriters all the time or by great lengths to win enough of these contests to be among the best in our business. If you cross the finish line first by just a nose ahead of your competition, you’ll still be declared the winner. And this DVD course will give you scores of ways to gain a huge running start against any copywriter who doesn’t know these techniques. If anything can give you the security and rich financial rewards of being a more frequent, consistent winner in this business, this DVD course will do it for you.

 

How to Manifest Your Own Desires

Now let’s talk about fulfilling your most strongly held desires, both in marketing and your whole life.

When I was young, I studied with several authentic, famous Zen masters at the Zen Center in New York City. These cheerful, wise monks were famous for helping others to see and act with clarity of mind and effectiveness in action.

As one of these Zen masters might say, if you’re going to hit a target, you must first have a target.

This means that with any activity you enter into, you want to have in your mind—before you begin that activity—a clear, vivid picture of the success you want to experience. This will help you so much in realizing the success you desire.

Obvious, yes?

However, all too often we just plunge ahead without even envisioning the outrageously successful outcome we’d love to achieve. And if you don’t picture it … if you don’t have such outrageous success as your clear, highly specific target, how can you expect to hit it?

What you see is what you’ll hit! And if all you see is a muddled, vague outcome, you’re going to experience a muddled, mediocre result.

This applies to your success in copywriting, marketing, and everything else in your life.

Here’s an example I give in the DVD course …

Imagine going into an airport and saying to the ticket agent, “I want to go someplace great. I want to experience a wonderful journey.”

That’s terrific, but the ticket agent can’t help you unless you say specificallywhere you want to go. If you say, “No, I’m having trouble choosing. There are so many possible destinations that I can’t decide yet. But I do really want it to be something great …”

Think that way, and you’re not going to get anywhere.

If, on the other hand, you say, “I want to go to San Francisco,” then the ticket agent can give you a ticket to San Francisco. You can board the plane, take action to follow your plan, and in a short time, you’ll arrive in San Francisco.

It’s the same way in life. If you want to arrive at a terrific destination, you must first have one. It all starts with a clear vision of what you want, of something that really excites you.

In this part of the DVD course, I teach you how to live the life you’ve always wanted—a big life filled with outsized success, achievement, excitement and so much natural, unforced motivation that you wake up every morning eager to jump out of bed, thrilled to be alive, and on fire with the excitement of achieving your biggest dreams, dreams that are worthy of you!

This is the part of the course that is dearest to my heart, as these are the secrets, gleaned from many years of studying with masters of manifestation, that have transformed my own life into one of great personal happiness, attainment, the thrill of being alive—and seeing my greatest desires unfold before my eyes every single day. And it all starts with having a target before you can hit it!

 

But What If You Have No Clear Idea Right Now
of What You’d Like to Experience in Life?

As I show in the course, then you must make discovering your passion your first big goal, your first major destination. Imagine seeing yourself feeling so happy because you have finally discovered what you want to do, where you’d like to do it, and with whom you’d like to do it. Let that be your first destination, and once you arrive there, plan your next destination. As one master puts it, “Go as far as you can see. Then you’ll see further.”

In other words, whether you are fairly sure of what you’d like to achieve in your life … or you are not … the process works the same way.

 

And What Is That Manifestation Process?

In the DVD course, I give you the elegantly simple and extraordinarily effective four-part secret I was taught for achieving outrageous success at anything you want to do in life—including becoming a star copywriter, marketing executive or entrepreneur or accumulating significant wealth.

With this simple four-part technique, there is no question that you will become, for the first time in your life, a true master of desire, someone who is capable of manifesting your heart’s desire in virtually every area of life—spiritual, health, family, wealth, career, every area that is important to you.

And it will take you very little conscious effort, because you will be harnessing the mighty, untapped power of your subconscious mind to make your dreams come true with an ease and certainty you have never experienced.

As you’ll see, what I teach you here is radically different from what most others recommend about setting and achieving goals, and it is a critically important difference that will make gigantic gains in achievement and productivity so much easier for you. For the first time, you will free yourself up to set and achieve much bigger goals without any worry whatsoever that you may miss them.

You’ll also discover how the thrilling pursuit of a spectacular goal will, all by itself, add indescribable zest and sparkle to your life. Using this master technique that I teach you will take all the fear, anxiety, and pressure off you to reach for something spectacular in your life. You will have absolutely nothing to lose, and this will enable your subconscious mind to participate to its fullest extent. I have been a student of the subconscious mind—and harnessing its vast potential—for more than 40 years. I’ve studied scores of gurus, interviewed many in person, read the best books in the field, and tried the techniques they teach.

What I give you is the easiest and most powerful way I’ve ever found to program the “software” of your mind so that you will automatically be in high achievement mode. I assure you, this will change your life in ways you cannot even imagine now, and not just in your copywriting and marketing ability, but in every area of your life.

And it’s all automatic, except for the simple four-step instructions for setting up this new “mental software program” for harnessing your subconscious to achieve great things.

As soon as you set it up and hit the “play” button of your mind, it runs automatically. You will likely discover that you are suddenly much luckier than you ever have been in your life, effortlessly coming upon insights, networking contacts, and mutual acquaintances that help you in scores of amazing ways you could have never consciously orchestrated. All because you have learned how to fly—by letting your conscious mind be the pilot and your subconsciousmind be your mighty jet engine.

So get ready to set and achieve big, thrilling goals that are worthy of you, of your biggest dreams, that electrify you and have the power to give you the big, exciting life you have always wanted for yourself.

 

Street-Smart Copywriting Secrets

There you have them—the 7 master secrets of wealth creation for copywriters and marketers.

But I have many other secrets I’ve picked up along the way that don’t fit into the seven neat categories I’ve just described. And I want to share these with you too.

For example, during the early years of my career, I was blessed to work with an all-star array of some of the greatest copy chiefs, creative directors, clients, and agency heads who have ever lived, including David Ogilvy … John Caples … Ted Nicholas … Len Reiss (the successor to Vic Schwab at Schwab & Beatty) … Joe Segel (founder of the Franklin Mint) … the legendary Dan Rosenthal … and a host of lesser-known master craftsmen who taught me their most prized tricks and scientifically proven techniques for boosting response.

I own every good book ever published on direct marketing, and I have never seen most of these secrets printed anywhere, as they were handed down verbally by copy chiefs and creative directors to those working under them, including me. In the course, I pass them on to you, and you will gain a great edge over any writers who don’t know them. For example …

• The five-word strategy that has shattered response records whenever it has been used. I know of no instance where copy that uses this strategy failed to smash the previous control. I consider it the greatest “stealth” marketing technique ever discovered.
• The 9 habits of super-successful copywriters and marketers.
• The miracle of 1 percent weekly improvement and how to use it to become a star, even a superstar in our business. So easy, yet so powerful, it’s a wonder so few people do it. But therein lies your opportunity.
• My “Three-Hour-a-Day” Rule: Why you can achieve almost anything if you can throw three solid hours at your highest-priority project every day. Are you weary of meetings that go nowhere and the hundred little interruptions that nibble away your time like a school of piranhas? Here is the #1 antidote—a ruthless dedication to putting at least three hours a day into your top project and letting all other activities take second priority to that. Here’s how to do it.
• The “Instant Litmus Test for Headlines.” Here’s how to find out in literally a matter of seconds—and without communicating with anyone else in any way— whether your headline is going to be a big winner or an embarrassing flop. This is a proprietary method that has never been revealed before in any book, course, or seminar. Yet it is one of the most valuable techniques you will ever possess. It will prove of inestimable worth to you because it easily and reliably prevents creative failures and produces breakthrough successes instead.
• How to harness the law of karma to create blockbuster ads that help people become healthy and wealthy … and thus guarantee that life’s blessings flow right back to you in ever-greater abundance.
• The biggest mistake that almost all marketers—even the savvy ones—are making with their ezines. Correct this, and watch your opt-ins soar.
• The very first thing you should do when considering a new assignment.Taking this step dramatically increases your “winning percentage.”
• An ingenious technique that is a godsend whenever you must create an ad for a product you have no natural enthusiasm for.
• How to write a blockbuster advertisement even when your product is weak. If you use this clever technique, you will not go wrong. It gives you tremendous flexibility on any writing assignment, even when your product is mediocre.
• The surest way you’ll ever find to double and sometimes even triple your odds of winning in any contest against other copywriters, even the best.
• An ingenious strategy for differentiating “commodity” products or services. If you sell a product or service that’s pretty much the same as everyone else’s, you are doomed to reap the same mediocre results, unless you apply this technique, which repositions everything in your favor.Example: I show you a case history so successful that it brought in 900 million customers to the company that used it, even though it sells the same “commodity” product as all its competitors.
• How to make your copy flow like silk in the breeze—secrets of making your long copy more readable and enticing.
• How you can legally get top celebrities in almost any field to appear in your advertising, without needing their permission and without even paying a nickel in endorsement fees, now or ever. This is a priceless tip on how to have your ads benefit from the words, names, and even photographs of the most respected celebrities in your field—e.g., Tiger Woods if you sell golf clubs—for no endorsement fee and without even asking their permission. And it’s perfectly lawful, as you’ll see.
• How to intentionally “weaken” your claim and in so doing drive your response higher. How is this possible? Take a peek at this startling, counterintuitive secret, which I have seen work over and over again in scientifically tested campaigns. Numerous examples provided.
• This word is so powerful in headlines (not “free” or “new”) that I cannot recall a single instance when it did not beat the control.
• Reliable “template” headlines where you can fill in the blanks and, in most cases, wind up with a very powerful ad, no matter what you are selling.
• The Great Fisherman’s Secret: The true story of a master fisherman—perhaps the best rod-and-reel fisherman on the East Coast—and what he can teach you about how to attract and catch many more prospects.
• The Breakthrough Secret—If you try this, you’ll give your direct mail package its best chance to be a blockbuster, one with “long legs” that runs for years and is a geyser of profits because your marketplace will have never seen anything like it before.
• The Cross-Fertilization Secret: How you can more easily create new winners in your own field, even against tough competition, by introducing successful elements from other fields, such as winning ad formulas, concepts, headlines, or offers, and transferring all that dynamite into your campaign. This is one of the easiest ways to come up with winning ideas.
• Gene Schwartz’s secret for coming up with irresistible bullets.
• A headline formula that works like catnip in making your prospects respond in higher percentages than you have ever experienced.
• “The Trojan Horse Welcome Package”—a never-before-revealed copywriting strategy so successful that if I were still actively copywriting, I would never share it (because it is too good to give to any competitor). This has never failed, in my experience, to beat former controls, even those that were very strong.
• If you apply this simple technique, you will love your headlines—and your market will go wild for them.
• How to make your counsel indispensable to your employer or clients. During hard times, when staff jobs and outside vendors are cut, your position and income will remain safe and secure if your counsel is indispensable. Here’s how to make it so.
• A simple change you can make in any space ad headline that will almost always trigger a higher response.
• Why, if you are a freelancer or consultant, you should never put your signature on an ad for a flawed product.
• The best single rule to remember if you are managing a creative department. This will get more and better work out of your staff than any other secret you’ll ever read.
• On average, this type of headline will win three out of every four times when tested against other headlines. Use it and stack the odds in your favor by three to one. (This priceless tip, given to me by a master copy chief, has never appeared in any book.)
• Three easy ways to begin your body copy that will immediately pull your prospects right into your story. They instantly make any product or service more appealing and your copy more engaging.
• One of the most powerful opening paragraphs you will ever read and how you can steal its magic for anything you write. For maximum power,use this paragraph exactly word for word, and watch your results rise.
• Freeze! When your prospects are tempted to stop reading your advertisement, perhaps to put it aside for another time, this copy freezes them in place and virtually forces them to keep reading.
• The best-seller secret. How your headlines, body copy, and premium titles can be vastly improved by stealing ideas from best-seller lists.
• A quiet, unobtrusive, “innocent-looking” headline formula that often beats other headlines by several hundred percent. When I first discovered this headline formula, the results were unbelievable to me. Yet, I have used it again and again in my career to create blockbuster advertisements. Only problem: It looks so tame and lackluster, your client may not even want to test it.
• The “Lifesaver” Headline: At those times when you simply cannot sum up your product’s many benefits into a concise headline, this headline formula will save your life. It makes it very easy to combine a host of product benefits, “laundry list” fashion, yet is remarkably effective in triggering high response. A “must-have” tool in your copywriter’s tool kit.
• This template makes writing killer headlines so easy, you can practically do it in your sleep.
• The first time I saw this headline, I almost fell on the floor. That is how deadly effective it is.
• Another headline so powerful, it caused a president of the United States to lose the election of his life. It also teaches a great lesson in persuasiveness no matter what you are trying to sell.

 

Write Brilliant Copy While You Sleep???

• The best copywriter productivity secrets I’ve ever learned and how to use them to easily double or triple your production—working fewer hours than you do now. Example: How to gain six to eight extra hours of productivity daily—by writing while you sleep. When you wake up, great copy pours out of you like a computer dump, so fast you can hardly write or type fast enough to keep up. And it’s so easy because your subconscious does all the “work” while you sleep like a baby. Just be sure you do this just before you fall asleep.
• Another unusual productivity tip (a secret I learned from Deepak Chopra): How regularity of schedule vastly increases your productivity. I didn’t believe this at first, but the difference it’s made in my productivity has been staggering.
• Did you see the movie Patton, starring George C. Scott? Perhaps you remember his fast and furious drive through Sicily, when his motto was“attack, attack, attack!” If so, you have an excellent idea of how any copywriter should tackle any assignment immediately rather than sitting on it for weeks. I tell you exactly what I mean, and it will make such a difference in the speed, quality, and results of your work … which can’t help but leverage your income, as you’ll see.
• Never-fail way to eliminate writer’s block. Ideas will gush from you like water from a busted faucet.
• A step-by-step, play-by-play guide to writing copy for any product. If you organize your assignments this way, you are almost guaranteed to write copy that consistently pulls higher response. I’ve seen this work again and again for every level of writer; no matter how good or accomplished they are before, they immediately advance to a higher level with this one simple process.
• Why you must learn to write like a crazed arsonist, lighting fires of desire—then change your mental wardrobe and edit like a Supreme Court justice. Why this combination of fiery writing and detached, critical editing will bring your advertising to a whole new level of responsiveness. But there’s one key you must know to bring this off easily, and it has to do with how you separate these two functions on your schedule. (Never try to do them at the same time!)
• How to write brilliant copy and headlines for any product, even when you have no feeling for it. This simple psychological trick is something you must master if you want to be a top copywriting professional who can write breakthrough ads for any product, even when you have no natural enthusiasm for it.
• The most productive ways for a copywriter and designer to work together on an assignment.
• How you can accomplish so much more by breaking your copywriting into these five small steps. I guarantee that your writing will flow much easier and be vastly improved, because you’ll now be focusing on just one small step at a time—and doing it superbly—like a jeweler cutting one little facet at a time.

 

Great News for Any Marketer
or Department Head
Who Must Evaluate Copy

If you have to evaluate or approve copy in any way, I’ll bet you can relate to this …

You’ve just finished reading a piece of copy and you know that something bothers you about it, but you just can’t put your finger on what that is, let alone how to improve it. Believe me, I know the feeling.

For a good portion of my career, I was a copy chief who had to turn out consistently excellent copy from a bullpen of wildly different copywriters, some of them young cubs … some of them grizzled veterans … some in-house … others on freelance … and all of them with their own writing styles and differing opinions on what makes a good piece of copy.

At first, I found it exasperating—impossible!—to coax a harmonious symphony of excellence from this orchestra of mavericks. But necessity—and a brilliant teacher named Dan Rosenthal—taught me how … using something called “The Crit System.”

“Crit” is short for “critique,” and since leaving Dan’s company about 30 years ago, I’ve refined my own version of the “Crit System.” No matter what your product or service, this gives you nothing less than a reliable, easy-to-use, utterly dependable quality control system for the consistent production of superb copy and design from everyone who works for you.

In other words, this is a simple system that anyone can use—you don’t have to be a copywriter. It takes the production of blockbuster advertising out of the realm of the mysterious, unpredictable, inconsistent, and elusive … and turns it instead into a predictable, controllable repeatable process, just like any other function in a successful business, such as manufacturing.

Let’s face it—if you want to run, say, a top-flight restaurant, you can’t make the production of great meals a sometime, hit-or-miss proposition depending on which chef is in the kitchen on any given night. Every meal for every patron—no matter which chefs are manning the stoves—must be consistently excellent, and this is not a process you can leave to chance.

It’s no different in the production of great copy that makes you rich. You want a reliable process for its production, regardless of who’s in your creative kitchen, so that you are not vulnerable to the vagaries of different writers, all of whom have their good days and bad days and often have too many deadlines to cope with at once. This can lead to a temptation to rush your job and not take the time to do it right.

I show you exactly how to counter such problems by putting in place a reliable copywriter quality control system. I guarantee it will change your fortunes in direct marketing so dramatically, you’ll never want to live without it again.

With this system in place …

• You will quickly and easily learn to ask four simple questions of any copy you’re considering and know exactly where it’s strong and where it’s weak. No more guesswork.
• You will give every writer and designer who works for you a consistent standard of excellence to live up to. And when they don’t, it will be visible for all to see.
• Even more important, you will command much higher respect—and better performance—from every writer and designer who works for you.They will know, based on your high standards and insightful evaluations, that you possess a jeweler’s eye for response-generating advertising and design … and that you will settle for nothing less.Believe me, just the fact that they know that you know what great copy and design look like will motivate them to give it to you rather than yield to temptation to take quick-and-dirty shortcuts.This is why, whether in copywriting or home renovation, the most knowledgeable clients get the best workmanship—because they know what to look for and insist on it. If you don’t, you can easily be taken advantage of.
• Because the process is so easy to apply, you’ll give everyone who works with you, from the receptionist to the CEO, opportunities to improve your marketing. You’ll be able to involve everyone in your organization in one of your company’s most critical functions—continually improving the strength and responsiveness of your marketing. You’ll have an easy way to have lots of “eyes” watching—and improving—your marketing, month in and month out.
• As a result, you’ll invariably boost your response, sometimes by as much as 50 to 100 percent, when you put this quality control process in place. First, you’ll pick up lots of “1 percenters”—little improvements that make the copy flow more smoothly, read better, present the offer more powerfully, and so on.But you’ll also catch whopper mistakes that would spell disaster if unnoticed. What’s more, you’ll trigger occasional breakthrough concepts—monster “grand-slam home runs” that make all the difference in your profits.

 

How Will You Fare in Our
“Pick-the-Winner” Contest?

While viewing the seminar, you will have an opportunity to match wits against many of the brightest lights in direct marketing and see if you can pick the winners from our pairs of split-run tests. You will also benefit from the analysis of the results—why certain headlines and formats performed so much better than others, all of which gives you yet more confidential intelligence for improving your own results.

 

A Superstar Jam Session

With so many marketing stars and superstars in attendance, it would have been a shame not to pick their brains. I’m so glad I did! At the end of the seminar, as I passed around the mike, these giants of the direct marketing world contributed their best insights for boosting response. Just a few quick examples:

From Gary Halbert: A simple change in your offer that, based on his tests, normally triples your response, believe it or not. I was delighted that Gary shared this, because I have found that most marketers, copywriters, and designers focus great attention on headlines and formats (as they should). But they often inexplicably neglect testing bold new offers. Yet that’s where you’ll uncover some of your biggest breakthroughs, as this insight from Gary Halbert illustrates.

From Jenny Thompson: A little-known online research technique that is free and vastly superior to focus groups in finding out what your market wants, how your market talks, and how to come up with products that they will devour eagerly.

From Michael Fishman: Michael is considered by many, including me, to be the world’s greatest list broker. He has been the list wizard behind many of my most successful mailings, as well as giant winners for some of the most savvy marketers in direct marketing. At the seminar, Michael shared his best inside secrets for turning modest winners into colossal hits by knowing how to uncover lots more lists that you’d normally overlook. He also points out the biggest mistakes people make when renting mailing lists, as well as numerous ways to avoid getting ripped off.

From Ken McCarthy: The most powerful technique of all for making sure that your client does not play games with your royalties or other performance-based compensation. You’ll hear Ken’s brilliant strategy for making sure you always get paid what you deserve from your clients. He shows how the ideal position to be in is like that of an electric utility. In other words, you serve your clients well, but if they do not pay their “light bill” (your well-earned share of the profits), you are in the position to “turn off their lights” (i.e., pull the plug on their online traffic, because it’s under your control). Ken and others explain how this works. This gives you tremendous power to prevent your client from fooling around with your justly deserved royalties and other forms of compensation. I explain how you can accomplish the same thing with offline advertising, such as direct mail and space ads.

 

All Key Principles Illustrated
by Breakthrough Control Ads

To bring everything I’ve described in this long letter vividly to life, each secret is illustrated by examples of my own work (most of it available nowhere else) and from a wide array of the most successful control ads and direct mail packages of all time.

Just a few examples:

• One of the most powerful ads in the history of direct response advertising. It beat all other tests created by top copywriters over a 40-year span, a feat unmatched even to this day. How you can apply its secrets to boosting your response. Remarkably, this ad’s headline and the psychology it harnesses are as powerful today as ever and can be used by any advertiser. (Not long ago, I recycled it to convert a mediocre ad for a mail order book into an instant best seller.)
• The letter that changed my life and raised me from mediocrity to success in direct response copywriting.
• The best ad I have ever written to attract new business for an ad agency or copywriter.
• The great marketing secret you can learn from Tom Monaghan, the college student who created Domino’s Pizza and became one of the richest men in the world. His success was founded on one simple marketing principle. Based on this secret, Monaghan’s advertising was so successful, that Domino’s went on to capture, on average, 25 to 30 percent of the market share of all pizza sold in the 50 major metropolitan markets in the United States.
• The advertising strategy recommended above all others by Claude Hopkins (the Aristotle of advertising) and an ad campaign that powerfully illustrates this secret.
• A headline I wrote 30 years ago that is still the control today. It can work for just about any product in any market.
• The 25-word headline that sold more high-priced cruise trips than any other ad in history. It, too, uses a simple but remarkably powerful principle that any ad can harness to boost response. Works universally to build desire and increase response, because it’s built on a universal human trait.
• The ad that took David Ogilvy 22 years to write. But once written, it propelled his ad agency into the stratosphere. The good news: Now that Ogilvy has provided this model, any business can use it as a template to explode its growth.
• My direct mail package that beat Boardroom’s best by 133 percent.
• How a happy accident created one of the most successful ads of all time. How you can methodically capture this “lightning in a bottle.”
• An ad with a five-word headline, written by an amateur advertiser, that’s one of the greatest gems of persuasion in the history of copywriting. So successful, he reported that half the country seemed to respond to it.
• My ad that broke all records for response for a financial newsletter publisher.
• Other great ads that have it all—examples of powerful advertisements that combine many or all of the techniques presented at the seminar to generate awesome power and response. These are among the greatest direct response ads ever written.For example, you’ll see one ad that triggered these documented results, as quoted by the company’s advertising director:
  “With these 130 words of copy, no more, no less, monthly sales, according to Wooten’s annual published reports, jumped from $50 million to $60 million, then to $100 million, then to $150 million, $200 million, and up and up and up … We are not only producing and selling at factory capacity, we are enlarging the plant to meet consumer demands.”
• The 21-word ad that has been one of the most successful ads in the history of direct marketing. It is a model of economy and a perfect example for you to follow. Rarely have I seen such a strong, concise nugget of pure selling power as this classic ad—and just 21 words! But, man, oh, man, do those 21 words sell like crazy, igniting a fierce desire to buy.
• A space ad that designers hate, because it’s densely packed with 6,540 words—all on a single page! And, believe it or not, it didn’t even have a coupon, just an offer buried deep in those 6,540 words. Yet this ad was so strong, it pulled a mind-boggling 10,000 responses from a single insertion in one newspaper.

 

And Speaking of Designers . . .

• How you can achieve increases in response of anywhere from 50 percent to 500 percent, purely on the basis of improved design elements alone.Here are the most powerful, scientifically proven direct response design secrets of all time, based on hundreds of split-run tests.
• Why designers should “draw with their heads, not with their hands!”This little gem of advice explains why so much design in advertising looks so boringly similar.
• How a typesetting accident resulted in an 86 percent boost in response.
• How type and layout can increase readership and response by several hundred percent.
• Commonly used design elements that kill response, making your copy less readable and driving readers away in droves.
• The right way to write and design magalogs, bookalogs, ezines, issue-logs, and other direct mail formats for maximum response.
• The secret “ABA Rule” that automatically gives your direct response advertising a higher readership and response.
• Surprise finding—why killer bullets on your outer envelope or cover of your magalog may be depressing your response. Be sure you read this warning before you put another bullet or teaser on your outer envelope or magalog.
• Why you must never force your readers’ eyes to fight against “reading gravity.” What this means and the many hard-and-fast rules that flow from this principle if you want highest response in your advertising.
• David Ogilvy’s classic formula for designing an ad.
• Did you know that photos always outpull illustrations, because photos have more realism and credibility? And to have your photos be exceptionally effective in boosting response, be sure to do this.
• The unforgivable mortal sin that even good direct response designers frequently commit in coupons and order forms. Avoid this “hidden disaster” at all costs.
• Why brochures, even when done well, will often depress your response.Why you are often better off without a brochure.
• Easiest way to get a 500 percent increase in your advertising’s readership. In David Ogilvy’s tests, he found you can easily get a 500 percent increase in readership of your ad just by doing this. Anyone can do it, in any market, and it costs not one cent extra when you advertise!
• “Gary’s Greatest Hits.” You’ll also receive complete copies of my most successful advertisements. Every one exemplifies how to execute the principles embodied in The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation®.

 

The Legacy I Want to Leave …
and What It Can Mean to You …

Even by my standards, this has been a long letter. So let’s wrap up …

As I’ve said, I want to leave a special legacy to those motivated to be stars in our business, just as I have been motivated my whole career to be the best I can be, to live a large life instead of a small one, to create insatiable demand for my services, to sell with integrity, to achieve my dreams of financial security, and to build an excellent reputation to be proud of.

I have succeeded in these goals and would like to show you how to do the same.

I want to leave a legacy and, in a way, I’d love you to be part of it. Here’s what I mean …

My goal is to have it known throughout the direct response industry—today, in six months, in five years, in 10 years, and perhaps even in 50 years—that those who have taken The Bencivenga DVD Course training consistently rank among the most respected and successful masters of the marketing world.

Should you take this training, I want to have you be recognized as someone who possesses these state-of-the-art selling techniques and is conversant with their use … that you inspire well-founded confidence in direct marketers who will be more inclined to hire you because you know what they want you to know … that you understand, for example, the critical elements of The Bencivenga Persuasion Equation® and how to manipulate each to trigger maximum response … that you know what is meant when major players talk about Proof Element Marketing® and the secrets of making it work … that you know how a “Crit System” works and are comfortable with it … that you know the advanced fine points of marketing, copywriting, and design that this program teaches.

 

The Two Factors You Must Have
to Be a Star in Copywriting or Marketing

I’ve hired many a copywriter in my day and have observed their progress. Invariably, those who rise to the top in both reputation and earning power are those who possess (1) superior knowledge of their craft and (2) superior dedication to succeed. Both are absolutely necessary.

I stand ready to give you the first—the superior knowledge. But the dedication can come only from you.

Are you motivated enough to invest, say, just a fraction of what legions of wet-behind-the-ears college freshmen are willing to invest in their education?

Here’s what I mean …

Counting all costs, an incoming freshman at Harvard or Yale must fork over more than $50,000 for the first year alone, and again for every year thereafter, for as long as he or she remains a student. Yet every year, so many high school seniors apply to Harvard that the school must reject more than 90 out of every 100.

Do you have as much motivation as one of the tens of thousands of high school seniors who apply to Harvard each year?

Fortunately, the cost for this unique training is nowhere near $50,000. It’s just a fraction of that, and it comes with a guarantee that Harvard would never dream of offering. It’s guaranteed to be worth 50 times its cost, or you’ll pay nothing.

OK, let me get specific …

 

The Four Qualifications You Must Meet

1. You must be willing to invest in yourself. The Bencivenga DVD Coursetraining costs $5,000. This is the same price paid by those who attended the seminar, and the cost will never be less, ever.

Neither are there any exceptions to this price. I say this because those who attended the seminar, as well as those who have expressed interest in purchasing the DVDs and expanded, illustrated transcript, include many of my longtime friends and business associates. I cannot show favoritism to some and not to others, so the cost of $5,000 is universal—for everyone—without exception.

2. You must be a star or future star. As I say, there will be no exceptions to the $5,000 investment, and this is also true for the few struggling copywriters and marketers who’ve written me with hard-luck stories, looking for a price break.

Not only will there be no price break, but if you’re in desperate financial straits and have to hock your car or sell your firstborn, I strongly prefer that you do not purchase this program. I’m not looking to inherit anyone’s financial desperation.

If this is your situation, I wish you well, but this is not the purchase for you, at least not now. If you desire this program so strongly that you simply must have it, but you lack the funds, my best advice is to save up for it. Please don’t go into debt. Rather, let ownership of this course become a fierce career goal for you. Remind yourself of this goal daily, keep working and saving toward it, and soon the course will be yours. I know you can make that happen if you set your mind to it, and that will be just the beginning of great achievements in store for you with the help of this course.

As I mentioned earlier, I have created enough sets (2,000) and established a high enough price within a very small market, that the supply will last for several years. I assure you, there will be a set waiting for you—ready to rocket you to the highest levels of copywriting and marketing success—if you are ambitious and determined enough to start saving up for it now.

Also, please understand that this is not a business opportunities and get-rich-quick schemes are for the benefit of the sellers, not the hopeful buyers, and it’s not what I’m about.

What I’m offering here is something quite different and special …

Available to just 2,000 ambitious copywriters and marketers, this is the ultimate training if you see yourself as a star, superstar, or future star of direct marketing … if you want to take your knowledge to a whole new level … and if you want to learn the most powerful secrets I’ve ever discovered from more than $1 billion and 40 years’ worth of testing to …

• Boost response higher virtually on demand, for almost any product or service.
• Systematically and consistently beat existing control packages—be a Top Gun respected throughout the industry and feared by other copywriters.
• Launch blockbuster new products.
• Turn those blockbuster products into rivers of ongoing revenue year in and year out.
• Know how to build substantial wealth for yourself, your clients, and your partners, with royalties and other revenue-sharing arrangements and strategies.
• Manifest your most passionately held desires in every area of your life and career, as a true “alchemist of desire,” someone capable of turning desires into manifested fulfillment for yourself and for others.

In all these areas, this seminar will indeed be life-changing. If that’s what you are looking for, I invite you to join our elite circle.

3. You must keep what you learn confidential. You must agree in writing never to publish, resell, or distribute the information you learn in The Bencivenga DVD Course in any way, shape, or form. This is because you will be learning copyrighted proprietary formulas and trade secrets that are for your own use and benefit but not for resale or redistribution in any way.

In fact, on the advice of Jay Abraham (a friend who’s conducted many seminars himself) … and some of the best legal minds who know how to protect intellectual property, you technically will not own any of the materials you receive. Your $5,000 entitles you to lease these materials indefinitely, provided you do not try to sell or distribute the information in any way. If you do, we will revoke your license and move to confiscate the illegally sold material from whomever purchased it from you.

This protects my intellectual property, and it also protects the investment you’re making, as these materials will never be allowed to be sold more cheaply on eBay or any other source nor be widely available anywhere.

4. You must pay by check and in full. For my whole career, I’ve run a two-person business, just myself and my loving wife, Pauline. We have no staff, no secretary, no administrative help of any kind. All this has given us a life of great freedom to travel when and where we please. And, as a result, we like to keep things simple—no merchant accounts, credit card orders, and the like. If you want this program, you must:

Print out, fill out, and sign the order form at the link at the bottom of this letter.
Make out a check for $5,000 to our company, Accountable Advertising, Inc.
Send, via FedEx, your signed order form and check to the address shown.

As soon as your check clears, we will FedEx The Bencivenga DVD Course to you.

 

Wiring Instructions

If you prefer to wire funds, which can be especially helpful in international transactions, please send an email requesting wiring instructions to my wife Pauline (you’ll find her email address at the top of the Reply Form). She’ll write back and tell you how to proceed—it’s very easy.