How Earth’s mightiest copywriters think about, write, and create bullets
Published: Fri, 02/07/20
This one is all about the #1 skill:
Bullet writing.
I got one of the single best educations of my life on how to think about, write, and create bullets from Ken.
And a way we go…
elBENBO: What are your insights on writing bullets in ad copy?
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: This is sort of a gruesome metaphor, but it works.
If you've ever seen the old movie Bonnie and Clyde with Faye Dunaway and who's that famous guy? Warren Beatty. It was a movie from the 70s and sort of a breakthrough movie. I mean, now all movies have ultra violence in them, but this was the first time they really portrayed this sort of ultra violent sort of thing in a movie. And at the end of the movie, Bonnie and Clyde, the famous 1930s bank robbers, get caught in an ambush. And everybody's there with their shotguns and their little Thompson sub machine guns and they just riddle the car with bullets and it's done in slow motion and so on and so forth.
If you're going to sell, you want, just as a basic fundamental, you want as many bullets as possible. And I don't mean like a page with long bullet after bullet after bullet after bullet. When I say bullet, I mean a nugget, a phrase, a sentence, an idea, a thought that's so powerful that it alone is enough to do the job.
So you know with the Bonnie and Clyde thing, it really only took one well-placed bullet and the job would've gotten done but they didn't leave it up to chance.
They just riddled the car with bullets because they wanted to...
And that's how you have to kind of envision your sales letter.
It's got to be jam-packed with reason after reason, after reason, after reason, after reason why your product is something that they should take seriously.
I think I started getting really aware of this as I read not only his copy but also his book Breakthrough Advertising and that's Gene Schwartz. And he wouldn't initially even worry about a headline. A lot of his selling was for information products. And the nice thing about a book is if it's any good at all, there's probably 100, 300, 400 "wows" in a good book that can be converted into bullets. He trained his secretary to go through the books with a highlighter and just highlight everything in the book that was interesting, that was unusual, that was surprising, that made her go, "wow," that made her go, "Oh this is interesting" or made her go, "Oh, I'd like to try that."
Everything that jumps out.
It's sort of like an antenna on a bug feeling the environment.
So they would just go through the book and they would pull out every single interesting thing in that book. And then they would turn all those interesting things into mini-headlines. I guess what we could call a bullet is a mini-headline. And they would end up with hundreds of them for every book. And then he looked through them and tried to figure out, okay, of all these many headlines, of all these bullets, what might actually work as a headline?
And very often it would be some obscure thing from page 294 of the book, but it was just an amazing, interesting thing.
And that would make its way to the headline.
But when you do your copy by assembling bullets first, you have material for your headline. You have material for all your subheads, which you clearly need when you're writing long copy. You have material for all your PSs, You have material for your call to action. It creates material for the copy itself. And of course it creates ample material for the sections where you're going to have formal bullets.
Think of yourself as somebody going to war.
Don't want to go to war with this great gun and fire three or four rounds and you're out of bullets. You want to have rounds and rounds and rounds all around you because you need every one. You never know what piece is going to sell somebody in your letter. So you just have to have a barrage. So you can really get that from reading Gene's letters. He was sort of this supercharged guy when it came to bullets everywhere.
elBENBO: When I think of bullets, I think Mel Martin.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Yeah. And Mel Martin was known for fascinations. A fascination is something that somebody reads and it gives them part of the puzzle, but it doesn't give them the whole puzzle. So it sort of creates this incomplete state in their mind that they really want to complete. His greatest one, and this one everyone can relate to, everyone who flies that is. “What never to eat on an airplane.”
That does a lot of things.
It implies that there are foods that you shouldn't eat on an airplane.
You quickly discover that you don't know what those foods are. And then you realize the answer is in this letter. And so you read on. How many words is that, 10 words? It's just a brilliant idea.
So that's an example of a fascination.
Telegraphing where if you the reader want to know what it is, you've got to either keep reading or ask for the free report or buy the trial subscription. Mel was great at that. But everybody can be good at writing fascinations. It's just a matter of practice.
elBENBO: I was rereading an article Denny Hatch wrote about Mel Martin after he died. And he said sometimes Mel would forget to put the price in there, and they would still get inundated with sales.
The price didn't even matter at that point.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: And that's a good model. Everything in your letter to the degree that's possible should be so strong that if you just put that and the price tag on it, some people would buy just based on the headline alone.
elBENBO: In that speech Gene Schwartz gave to Rodale he said nobody could figure out why Mel’s ads pulled so well, and he said something about it having had an implied mechanism.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Gene called his company Instant Improvement. It's just sort of a really important concept in copywriting. People want that. They not only want their problems solved.
They want them solved instantly.
And his feeling was:
My product can't solve all their problems. But there's a whole range of their problems or their curiosities or the potentials they want to achieve that I can solve pretty much.
If somebody doesn't know how bad French fries are, for example, for your health, and you inform them and they stop eating them? They will have an improvement in their health and it'll be pretty much instant. The day they stop eating them all kinds of problems that they have are going to disappear. So there are some things that you can legitimately offer as instant improvement.
But I think that's what he was talking about when he was talking about mechanisms. There's a thing out there that is going to solve this problem for you. And it already exists and you just have to tap into it and your problem will go away.
elBENBO: Here’s a Mel Martin bullet:
“How to refund airline's non-refundable ticket.”
Or “How to know when a slot machine is ready to pay off.”
You have to know, even if you don’t really care about slot machines or if you even fly.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Exactly. It's that create an itch and then offer the means to scratch it.
elBENBO: You recommend getting Cosmo magazine covers to learn bullet writing.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: If you look at Cosmo, a couple of things jump out. Number one, it's sold at the cash register of the supermarket, which is absolutely the most valuable retail space on the planet. Supermarkets do tremendous volume. They know exactly what's selling and what's not selling. And they are not putting Cosmopolitan at the cash register because they want to advance the cause of womanhood.
I mean that thing makes money and that thing makes money because of its headlines.
And if you think of the challenges that Cosmo has, I mean, what do they really have to sell? They have to basically offer the same thing over, every month, over and over and over and over again with different words and different language from different angles.
20 ways to please him tonight.
15... and it's funny how they enumerate these things.
15 places that will drive men wild.
I'm like 15, I didn't know, I can't even think of three.
elBENBO: 15 body parts.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Yeah, exactly. I'm like, my God, even I have to get that. What are they?
Anything that you find instantly captures your imagination and fascinates you. Step back just a bit and go, "Why did this grab me? Why did I stop everything I'm doing and suddenly read this?" You know what else is actually a fertile field for this, thanks to the internet, is all these crazy internet publications.
I mean, they're becoming masters of the fascination.
elBENBO: Click bait, they call it.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Exactly. And it's interesting because everything on the internet is obviously trackable, so it's really obvious to them what headlines are pulling and what headlines aren't pulling. And it's also obvious to the publishers who's writing great headlines and who's not. And the guys that write great headlines get more work and the guys that don't, don't. And it happens pretty fast.
And you know the art of the publicist is a copywriting art too, very much so.
Because what's the deal?
There are these media out there: magazines, newspapers, websites, blogs. And they're getting hit on by publicists all day and night. And who's going to win that battle? The person who's really good at bullets, who's really good at cutting through the mental clutter with something entrancing, something fascinating, something that calls to self-interest.
And where does the strategy to do that come from?
It comes from thinking very carefully about the customer, or in this case, the media person, the prospect's situation. They've got to fill a space. They've got to fill a space with something interesting, something lively. If somebody can give them a freeze-dried interesting story and all they have to do is add water because all the important elements of it have been already laid out, well, they're going to go with that person. If they have to sit there and find the interesting piece in your story, they're never going to run your story. If you, in a crafty way, present your story to them in such a way that it's filled with bells and whistles and filled with natural bullets, they're going to go, "Wow, this is a great story.”
elBENBO: Did you ever read that book, Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday?
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Oh God, yeah. He talks about this kind of stuff. It's great. Because there is a definite connection between publicity and copywriting. They're very similar skills.
Maxwell Sackheim who was one of the great, great direct mail guys and copywriting guys and he helped cook up the idea of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Talk about a pioneer.
I mean this was a guy that invented continuity.
That's a big one.
And in his retirement, his favorite thing to do was to create fake news stories to fool the media and then sort of expose the media for being the uncritical careless reporters that they actually are. He actually did a lot of that. He loved doing that. He'd stage fake news events and have all the reporters come and have some scenario where somebody was doing a press conference for something that wasn't real or never happened. And then when it was all over he'd go, "Ha-ha, got you.”
So ends part 2 of my interview with the great Ken McCarthy.
He’s offering his prestigious “Advanced Copywriting For Serious Info Marketers” course at a gigantic discount for my Horde only, until Sunday, 2/9 at midnight EST. Plus, if you use my affiliate link and send me your receipt & shipping address by that deadline (not after — to be clear, you must send it to me, not just buy the course, BEFORE the deadline), I will send you a copy of:
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Ben Settle