Free headline writing training from elBenbo’s first "defacto" copy chief
Published: Thu, 02/06/20
This first part is about headlines.
And it's a long & intense read.
So best gird up them loins of yours if you dare to read it.
Especially since, it’s not for the casual student, and certainly not for the contemptible new product junkie who doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to think past formulas & swipe files.
Otherwise?
Here is part one, enjoy…
elBENBO: You've been writing sales copy since you were 16. Can you just tell us how you got started in direct marketing, and copywriting, and so good at it?
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Well, through events, and event promotion is a great training for marketing because you can't hide your failures. If you didn't promote an event properly and the doors open and nobody's there, you failed.
So I started promoting dances at my high school. I went to an all boys high school and we wanted more girls. We had a terrible ratio. It was three guys to every one girl coming to our dance. And so I organized a squad of friends and we sat around and made posters and then we delivered them to the all girls' private schools which were in our town. And we flipped that ratio exactly from one to three.
So from misery to euphoria.
We had the right offer to the right person at the right time.
Where I really started to think about words and moving people, literally moving them from wherever they were to seats, was when I started producing concerts in college and I was very, and still am, very into jazz and I couldn't afford anybody that had a name. So I would find people that I thought were great that deserved a big audience and I would promote these concerts.
And the big challenge is nobody's ever heard of any of them. So I had to do, not so much ad writing, but PR and talking with journalists and figuring out what's the hook?
What makes this particular musician so interesting?
Why would anybody want to come to us instead of doing something else on a Friday or a Saturday night?
So thinking about stories and hooks and how to sell people, that started in earnest when I was in college. And then I had a little business when I graduated from college teaching speed reading and study skills to college students, and grad students, and even professors. I had a lady who was the principle of a big public high school in Brooklyn and she was going for a PhD and she came to my class.
So that's where I really started thinking because that's how I was making my living, and I tried many, many different flyers. Flyers were the only advertising method I could afford at the time, and I would post them all over the West side of Manhattan.
And I realized:
"Wow, I better make that headline big so that it's readable from far away. Once they come and read the thing, the very first thing I say to them better be strong."
Then I reasoned out that I better have a few overwhelmingly powerful motivational points in this flyer to get them to pull off the little attachment with my phone number on it and call.
And posting these things made me realize when they call me, I better have something intelligent ready to say to them, and then after I've talked to them on the phone, I better have a good letter to them firming up all the things that I was telling them on phone.
And then I reasoned:
"Well, once they've given me their name and address, I should probably mail to them forever until they die."
And that actually is direct marketing summarized in 10 or 11 steps, and I just accidentally or on purpose discovered all those things, not knowing there was anything called direct marketing.
In fact, it was years later where I stumbled on a book called Mail Order Know-How.
elBENBO: Gene Schwartz?
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: No. Actually though, this is really interesting. This man was this third generation mail order guy and they were the company that hired Gene Schwartz's first job ever as a delivery boy, as a messenger boy because they were sending proofs to printers and picking up proofs, doing all these things that one would do when you're doing a catalog. They had a catalog business, and they hired Gene.
Gene had come from Montana to New York to make his fortune.
His dream was to be a novelist. Right?
So he valued every job he could, which in the pre internet days was a messenger or delivery boy delivering text materials. And he quickly got the picture that there was something really interesting going on, and that's where he began his copywriting career.
So anyway, I found one of his books and I'm reading and I'm like "Wait a minute, there's people that do this on purpose. There's a lot of them. They go to conventions and conferences. They write books."
It was unbelievable to me.
And so I literally spent a year, I bought every single book that I could find, and in the library books, too. Back then I was living in San Francisco, the San Francisco Public Library, and for one year I did nothing but read memoirs of mail order guys and direct marketing guys, direct mail guys, and I just loaded up.
elBENBO: What are some psychological ways of attacking writing a headline?
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: The image that I like to use when I write copy is I'm imagining that my prospect is running away from a pack of wild dogs and around his neck is a necklace of raw pork chops, and these dogs haven't eaten in 10 days.
And my headline has to be good enough that when he runs by it, he's going to stop and go:
“Wow. I wonder what that's about."
That may seem overly dramatic, but the place where I think you have to start is understanding how incredibly distracted and probably overloaded your prospect is. They're flipping pages in a magazine or they're flipping pages in a newspaper or they're flipping pages on the internet, and there's just no reason for them to stop and read anything you have to say.
There's just no reason at all.
And so the headline is the reason why they should stop.
So when you're sitting down to work on your headlines, it pays to have a sense of the enormity. Not to choke or not to panic yourself on how hard it is, but to have a sense of the enormity of what it is you're working on. You're trying to grab somebody's consciousness who's thinking about a million things, maybe rushing here, rushing there, maybe tired, maybe overloaded, maybe whatever. And you're grabbing their attention, and that attention has to be ... This is the thing that I think about when I'm writing copy. That attention has to be maintained seamlessly from the headline through every interaction they have with the letter.
Of course people read letters differently.
Some people will read word for word, some people will skim, some people will skip to the back and read the offer and then go back.
They're going to read it a million different ways.
But wherever they are in their process, every single thing that crosses their retina better be interesting.
elBENBO: Do you have any favorite headlines to study?
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Let me give you a classic one and then I'll give you one of mine.
"Do You Make These Mistakes In English?"
That headline ran unaltered for 40 years selling an English speaking improvement course, correspondence course. A lot of people probably look at that and scratch their head and go "Well, why is that such a good headline?"
It's such a good headline because it ran for 40 years, is one thing.
Headlines burn out. There's very few golden headlines that you just write and they become moneymakers for the rest of your life. That is just a very one in a million thing. It's an ephemeral art. It's almost like jazz. You play an amazing solo, everybody applauds. Well, if you play that same solo three nights in a row, they're going to stop applauding. They want to hear something new.
So when somebody writes a headline like "Do You Make These Mistakes In English?" and it runs for 40 years, that's magnificent. Now we might be thinking "Well, it doesn't sound like a very interesting headline," and it's not, unless you're a guy who's desperately trying to improve his English and is really insecure about his English and is not even sure whether ... He doesn't even know when he's right or when he's wrong.
And here's somebody calling out.
That's what a headline is, it's a guy standing in the street calling out, and to those with whom that call out resonates, that's what you've got a headline that's working. So you always have to look at a headline in the context of the audience. There's really no such thing as a generic, great headline. There's a great headline for an audience.
So I gave you one example.
My first headline, I hope I can recreate this from memory, but my first headline for the first system seminar was "Internet Pioneer Reveals The Existence Of A Secret Internet Marketing Underground." That was my headline, and it was such a good headline that somebody built an entire business off the very last word in that headline, in the same product category.
Now again, if my aunt Gilda were to read that headline, she just couldn't care less.
There's nothing motivating about it at all.
But if a guy who's desperately trying to understand the internet and has this sense that there are people that really know and that he doesn't know, but he'd love to know the guys that do know, hearing that an internet marketing pioneer is going to reveal the existence of a secret internet marketing underground?
Oh my God, it's almost like a feature film.
There's so much drama packed into it.
And that's part of it, too.
I've been thinking a lot about what is impactful and what isn't, and people often talk about storytelling and how you want to get stories into your copy, and I totally agree with that. But I think people aren't talking about this other element, which is part of the design of the story, which is drama.
Is there any drama in your offer?
"Do You Make These Mistakes In English?" is an understated statement, but there's drama in there.
Again, like I said, there's the guy who he's just off the boat and he's very insecure in general. Life is hard for him. He's being held back because his English isn't good. He doesn't even know where to begin. He doesn't know when he's speaking correctly or incorrectly. He's got no guidance at all.
And here's the headline "Do You Make These Mistakes In English?"
Oh, he's going to read that, and embedded in that, there's a promise and there's a delivery on the promise. So there's drama there, and then in my headline I think there's a lot of drama. Secret underground reveals the existence of, it's almost a mini movie. To the extent that you can, you want to get some drama in your headlines. The simple formula is people want things that are going to serve them, a promise in the headline that offers an immediate service to them. In the case of "Do You Make These Mistakes In English?" It's like "We're going to show you some mistakes that you might be making and show you how not to make them. We'll promise delivery." Right?
The next thing that you'd like to get into your headlines if you can is any kind of a news element, and this is very, very, very important.
We are, even before television and the internet and all that stuff, we're news creatures, we're creatures of news. We want to know where the new waterhole is because the old waterhole's getting mucky. And we want to know where there's a bunch of ripe bananas on the trees, and we want to know if there's been any big four footed beasts prowling around at night, and if somebody's figured out a new way to knock them on the head and keep them from eating you up, we want to know about that, too.
So every human being is really tuned to the new, and so anytime you can get the promise ...
New and improved, right?
That's this old formula that people joke about, but you know what?
That's really what people want. Is Tide really new and improved? Is it the same old detergent with another chemical thrown in? But people want that.
And the third element is an appeal to curiosity that you want to create.
As Dan Kennedy says, which is a great way to look at copywriting, is you want to create an itch and then you want to provide the means by which they scratch that itch. So when you're thinking of your headlines, number one, self-interest, an immediate obvious benefit that somebody can get.
Again, going using the two examples I gave:
"Do You Make These Mistakes In English?"
Well, the benefit is "Hey, I'm going to learn something about how to speak English better." In the case of my headline, "Hey, I'm going to learn something about the secret underground guys that really know about all this internet marketing stuff." So offer immediate benefits that serve their self interests. If you can get some newsy elements in there, all the better. The word "reveals" is a news thing because it implies that this thing was never known before and now it's finally being revealed now. And then curiosity, and of course "Do You Make These Mistakes In English?" Wow. That's curiosity.
The existence of a secret internet marketing and underground.
Well, who are these guys?
What are they saying?
What can I learn from them? That's curiosity.
So these are things that you want in your headline.
Now, I had a great life experience I think that helped me with this a lot, and I believe I talked about it at the Titans event that was held in honor of Marty Edelston. I was a sprinter in high school and I ran the hundred yard dash, and the thing that I learned from doing that is when the starting gun goes, you go on full blast. There's no warm up, there's no strategy, there's no "We're going to hold back and then come out later." No, it's go, and it's the same thing with your sales letter.
To use a crude example, your headline is really a two by four.
I mean, it's "Bang."
Not a feather, not a gentle caress, a two by four across the head. It's got to be very powerful, and it's got to be very strong, and you've got to hit first.
So these are things that I think about when I'm thinking about headline writing.
elBENBO: When you went through your three criteria there, I was thinking of this headline Doug D'Anna wrote called:
"Can India Stop China?"
Which unless you're in the investment market, nobody cares. But if you are in the investment world, that question is almost life or death important. He said that was a big winner, and it has the elements you said.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Again, you've got to imagine the mindset. These are the guys that subscribe to investing newsletters. They've been told that China and India are where it's at and that's where you've got to invest now, which raises the logical question of which country are you going to invest in?
It's drama.
It's like a professional wrestling arena.
elBENBO: Like a monster movie.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Exactly, exactly. In this corner we have India, in this corner we have China. Look how beautifully all that power, that dramatic power is condensed in, what is that? Five words? "Can India Stop China?"
elBENBO: Four words.
THE GREAT KEN MCCARTHY: Wow, four words. And here's an important thing, and this comes from the Robert Collier letter book, very important book for everyone to read, and the truest thing ever written about copy. It's not the words, it's the idea behind the words. Right?
So how long should your headline be?
Should it be four words?
Should it be 20 words?
It doesn't matter. What matters is you've got a powerful idea, powerful vision, and then you express that as best as you can with words that you have at your disposal. So he conceived this battle of the titans, which is brilliant.
That's really brilliant. I'm not at all surprised that that works so well.
So ends part 1 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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This is the entire 30-issue run of my old “Crypto Marketing Newsletter” in a book.
This print newsletter ran from early 2010 through mid 2012.
It is also not for sale anywhere else, and less than a few hundred people — give or take — on the planet even possess it at all.
NOTE:
This is a *physical* book that will be shipped at my expense.
Retail value: $810.00 (30-issue run, each issue costed $27)
It’s yours when you buy Ken’s copywriting course via my affiliate link & send me your receipt & shipping address during the sale here:
http://www.EmailPlayers.com/secret-course
Ben Settle