The Secret Behind Million-Dollar Ads
BY DAVID GARFINKEL
Want a little secret to turn
your advertising into an irresistible magnet for customers?
Dale Carnegie knew the secret,
and that's one reason his book
How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold more than
15 million copies. In fact, British Airways recently named it
"The Business Book of the 20th Century."
It's a great book. But if Dale
had titled it "How to Remember People's Names and Curb Your
Incessant Urge to Argue," do you think it would have sold as
well? Probably not. There's great power in good titles.
What you may not realize is
the words "How to Win Friends and Influence People" are not
only the title of the book. Those words were also the headline
of a mail-order ad, which sold the book. The ad ran
successfully for many years and sold hundreds of thousands of
copies.
So what does this have to do
with turning your advertising into an irresistible customer
magnet?
Here's what. Behind the title
and headline is a "secret code" that makes it powerful. Dale
knew it. Great advertising copywriters know it. And now,
you're going to know it, too.
The "secret code" is actually
a generic formula that gets attention and creates desire in
your prospect's mind. Every winning headline has a unique
generic formula hidden inside. Here's the formula in Dale
Carnegie's book title and headline:
How to _____ and _____.
Let's see the formula at work.
Say you are an executive recruiter, and you help companies
find new executives. In reality, your biggest problem is
finding the executive candidates in the first place. So, to
increase your group of candidates, you decide to run an ad in
your local business journal. Here's how you could use this
formula to write a headline for your ad:
How to Get a Better Job and
Make More Money
… and right after reading that
headline, anyone who's even a little interested would want to
read your ad immediately. Then, if your copy (text) is even
halfway decent, you'd get plenty of calls.
Or, let's say you run a
martial arts school. Here's how you could apply the formula in
an advertising headline to get you new students:
How to Stay Fit and Protect
Yourself
Do you see how powerful that
is? You've just zeroed-in on people who are likely to be
interested in learning martial arts.
The brutal reality of
advertising: An ad with a good headline and even mediocre copy
will get you a response and generate sales. But with a poor
headline, even the most brilliant copy will get you little or
no response. Why? Because without a good headline to get their
attention, most people won't read any further.
The good news is, once you
have identified a good headline that works in one industry or
market, you can adapt it (like we did with the Dale Carnegie
headline, above) for your own business. Great headlines work
as subject lines in emails, titles on webpages, and of course
as headlines in print ads and sales letters. Great headlines
will literally transform your sales.
How does this work in today's
economy?
Recently a client asked me to
help him introduce a new service to Internet Service
Providers. (Note: To understand what you are about to read,
you should know that ISPs call their suppliers "backbone
providers.") I wrote a direct mail letter and my client sent
it out to ISPs. Because my client was revealing new
information his prospects hadn't heard before, we used the
following "teaser headline" on the front of the envelope:
What Your Backbone Provider
Isn't Telling You
Was this an entirely original
headline? No. I had seen a similar "teaser headline" on a
successful mailing to promote an investment newsletter:
What Your Broker Isn't Telling
You About High-Tech Stocks
So I merely identified the
"secret code" in the original winning headline, and applied it
to my client's market, ISPs.
The response to the mailing
was overwhelming! Nearly 10% of the entire ISP industry
responded to our letter - and my client has added eight
figures of new annual revenues as a result of the business
that developed.
I'm telling you this not to
brag, but to point out the awesome power of good headlines.
While many people spend hours and hours trying to come up with
"the perfect headline" for their ads, there is an easier way.
Find proven headlines that already work for another business
in another industry, and adapt them to your business.
Then prepare for a flood of
new customers!
Copyright © 2003 David
Garfinkel
David Garfinkel & Jim Edwards are
co-authors of
eBook Secrets Exposed: How to Make MASSIVE Amounts of Money - In Record
Time - With Your Own eBook!
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