Your AdSECRETS Ezine/Newsletter has arrived:

Welcome to AdSECRETS.

 

Here's what we have for this week:

 

1. An article on how to sell 400,000 booklets without spending a penny

on advertising!!!

 

2. A Secret Weapon for All Your Advertising

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How To Sell 400,000 booklets without spending a penny on advertising!!!

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I want to thank all of you who wrote and said they liked the first

issue. I thought I'd share one subscriber's comments with you.

Here's what Paulette Ensign wrote:

 

"I just read through your entire newsletter. WOW! It is faaabulous...professionally, spiritually, intellectually... on all

counts. You really make some excellent points in the discussion about online and offline promotions, ones I had not considered and that, in fact, make perfect sense. And the Gospel According To Nordstrom's story was just wonderful. Thank you for sharing your gifts... I've been thinking about what you wrote allllll week!!! Talk about making an impact! Sheesh :--)"

 

Perhaps some of you know who Paulette is. She is the Queen of Tips Booklets and has sold well over 400,000 (actually over

500,000 as of last time I spoke with her about 4 months ago). Her story is contained in an excellent article on writing booklets.

I've put it on my website

 

http://www.twipress.com

 

in the FREE REPORTS section. As always, be sure to download a copy or print it out because it will only be up for a week or

two.

 

A Secret Weapon for All Your Advertising

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David Ogilvy, in his book Ogilvy On Advertising, wrote:

 

" On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. It follows that unless your headline sells

your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money."

 

John Caples, considered by many to be one of the most knowledgeable people on how to get advertising response, called the

headline "The Most Important Part of an Advertisement" and devoted four chapters of his classic book, "Tested Advertising

Methods," (or more than a fifth of his entire book) to headlines.

 

Many people have echoed the above sentiments about headlines and following their advice will go a long way toward making

your advertising more successful.

 

Now I will explain WHY it is that headlines are so important -- something you won't be reading anywhere else.

 

Headlines go back to the early days of newspapers...about when they started to get big enough and come out often enough that

readers couldn't read everything in the paper.

 

Imagine reading everything in your local Sunday newspaper. No one has the time nor inclination to read everything. So the

newspaper industry invented the headline, a short pithy phrase that advertises what the article is about and attempts to entice the reader into stopping and reading that particular article.

 

That way you can pick out the articles that are of interest to you and that you have time to read -- without having to wade

through a lot of "other stuff" that does not interest you.

 

The better and more enticing the headlines, the more articles get read. And, assuming the quality of the writing extends to the

article, the more articles get read the more subscribers the paper has. The more subscribers the paper has the more successful it

is. The more it can charge for its advertising so it can pay for better and better staff. That's how newspapers grow.

 

When magazines arrived on the scene, they picked this trick up from the newspapers and adopted the headline as a means of

getting people to read their articles. Only, they called it a "title." It serves the same purpose.

 

Where did the newspaper people get the idea? Probably from book publishers. The first books had no titles. That was because

there were so few of them that you knew which was which by just looking at the outside covering. But when books got to be so plentiful and their covers started to look the same, someone (I wonder what his -- or her -- name was?) got the idea of giving the book a title and printing it on the outside. In effect, this is the "headline" for the book.

 

Many books to this day are sold almost entirely by title (i.e., headline).

 

So, what can we learn from all this?

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Simply that the headline flags down the reader and says "hey, this is what this advertisement is all about."

 

We copywriters have developed a kind of science to writing headlines -- given how important they are. And the subject can

cover quite a lot. We'll get into how to write headlines in some future issues. But, for now, the most important thing to keep in

mind is that every ad you write should have a headline. And it should be the best one you can come up with.

 

Whenever I give a seminar on writing advertising copy, I often do an exercise where I take the nearest magazine and go through

the first ten advertisements. For each advertisement I read two headlines, the one that is in the ad and one that I make up on the

spot. Then I ask all the attendees to vote for which one they would rather read. They don't know which is mine and which is the

real one.

 

Then, at the end I reveal which headline is which. In about 90% of the cases my headline gets more readers, sometimes as much as 15 times as many as the original headline!!!

 

Why is this?

 

Well, despite what David Ogilvy, John Caples and all of the other masters of advertising have advised, most ads today are

written with extremely poor headlines. In fact, most ads today are written by poorly trained people who think that advertising is

"entertainment" and "getting the name before the people." Some of their ads don't even have a headline.

 

But, in the sea of advertisements that are each competing for the reader's attention, the ones that succeed are the ones that grab

the reader's attention and get them interested in reading the "rest of the story."

 

That's the job of the headline. Even if you don't know how to write a headline, putting one on your ad is one of the easiest way

to increase the effectiveness of your ad.

 

Spend some time on coming up with a good one. Read books about writing headlines. Start with John Caples' "Tested

Advertising Methods." Read "Ogilvy On Advertising," especially the chapter "Wanted: a renaissance in print advertising."

 

I spend a lot of time working on the headline of any ad or sales letter I am working on. So do most of the really good

copywriters. It's one of the secrets we know to get good results from our advertising.

 

Now you know it too. Put it to good use and you will improve the effectiveness of your advertising, sometimes dramatically.

 

John Caples reported in "Tested Advertising Methods" that he saw one ad sell 19 1/2 times as much product as another and the only difference was the headline.

 

To get you started in writing headlines start a collection of really good ones. Here are a few to get you going:

 

They Laughed When I Sat Down At the Piano, But When I Started to Play!--

 

Do You Make These Mistakes in English?

How To Win Friends and Influence People

"At 60 Miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes

from the electric clock"

 

See what you can learn from the above headlines. Why did they work so well?

 

We'll discuss exactly why in future issues of this newsletter. But until then, take whatever product you are selling and try to

adapt each of the above headlines to it.

 

If you sell computer software, you might come up with:

 

Do You Make These Mistakes When Choosing A Web Authoring Tool?

 

or

 

They Laughed When I Sat Down To Design My Own Web Page, But When They

Saw The Results in Only 30 Minutes!--

 

Give it a try and let me know what you learn from it.

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My Very Best to You,

Carl Galletti

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This list is published by

Carl Galletti

PO Box 3934

Sedona, AZ 86340

(928) 649-2407

FAX: (928) 204-0613

email:

[email protected]

Websites:

http://www.copycoach.com

http://www.twipress.com

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