The Secret to Writing So People Respond

Good morning. All right, we are in my dining room. All different view Today, journal number seven from 1997. This is September to November and we have a little series going on My Life applying My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins. It's great to reread it.

I probably reread it like I said, maybe once a year or, or more. But I'm looking through and there's, it's fun right now to see the beginnings of where different ideas that I have applied. Like this is one of the books that, this is one of the earliest ones that I read. It was written in 1927 and I think I was introduced to this in 1992 or three. And I see now how it all seeped in, you know, and what.

It's funny. So in, in the book Claude, there's a couple of great quotes that, that were impactful on me. So he was saying advertising to many is mere ad writing language. Language and style are considered important. They are not fine writing is effective in any way.

It is a detriment. And so it's interesting because he's saying it suggests an effort to sell. And every effort to sell creates corresponding resistance. Salesmanship in print is exactly the same as salesmanship in person. Style is a handicap.

Anything that that takes attention from the subject reduces the impression. So that's why I learned very early on that one of the best things that you could master is the ability to communicate conversationally, just like you would if you were talking to someone in person. And that's why the best, especially now emails that seem like you're speaking one person to, to one person in the way that you would speak to somebody if you were faced with them, you know, meeting them in person. I would say to people, imagine that you ran in to someone in Starbucks, you know, could you imagine yourself saying what you're writing in your ad or in your email to them one on one. Now that is a good test.

Like read your things out loud and just see where you would stumble. Or you know, and there's many, there's different ways that we write when we're focused on writing that are very different than if we were talking to somebody. Now this is a great follow on thought is that the only way to sell is in some way to seem to offer super service. It may be offered in a crude way. The majority of advertising successes have been accomplished in crude ways.

They struck a human chord in a human way. They seemed to offer wanted service. So I think back on the things that I did like the things that prevail in marketing and advertising, especially in real estate, which was at the time, the main focus that I had is that advertising. When people start thinking about it, their number one thing that they're thinking is trying to make it about them and trying to position themselves as a superstar. Like, I'm the top agent in the neighborhood.

Look at everything I've done. Choose me, look at my branding, look at my cool logo. All of those things which are very sort of promotional in nature, trying to position somebody as a star when what. What Claude Hopkins is saying is that you would be better off positioning yourself as a super servant. Now, that's an interesting approach, right?

Like, I think about all of the things that I have had the biggest success with have not been about making it about me or making it about my client, but about offering valuable service to the people that we're trying to attract. So for thinking about somebody, the very first real thing that I did for my real estate business was creating a guide to Halton Hills real estate prices, which gave people the valuable service of answering the question that they were trying to solve is, what do you get for your money? What do you. What are. How much does do houses in Georgetown cost?

Because this was before the Internet. There was no valuable way, no easy way to get that information. So people had to drive out to Georgetown or they had to look through the real estate publications to see what the prices seem to be in Georgetown. But when I gave them this, I even positioned it as like having the teacher's edition of your algebra book and showed it where you can see all of the different things to see what you actually get for your money. And then as we've evolved that instead of trying to convince people to do something, we think about what are the things that would be the most valuable that we could do for them.

So rather than trying to sell somebody on working with us, we might offer the valuable service of doing daily tours of homes. So when we say to people, listen, we do. Whenever you're ready. Here's. Here's three ways we can help you.

First of all, we do daily tours of homes at 10 o' clock and 2 o'. Clock. Now, that sounds like a. It's a valuable thing that's happening that they're not feeling like they have to impose on you. They're not asking you to go out of your way.

You're doing this. The proposition is, I've already boiled the kettle. Basically, you know, when you look at the way we interact with people, nobody wants anybody to go out of their way. For them. Nobody wants to trigger that reciprocity, indebtedness that if, you know, feeling obligated to do something.

But if you, you know, mostly when people say, would you like a cup of tea? If they're they most likely to say, are you having one? Because if you're having one, I'll have one. But don't boil the kettle just for me. And it's that same kind of thing.

When we position something as where we do daily tours of homes at 10 o' clock and 2 o', clock, it feels like it's already happening. It's a valuable thing. If you want to go and look at some beach condos, that's great, hop on one of the tours. Now, 99% of the time it's a private tour with just us, right? But you're setting up those times that at 10 o' clock and 2 o' clock it would be super valuable.

Valuable for you to do those. We've done the same thing with e-bikes. We would run, you know, always thinking valuable service first. Not trying to convince somebody to buy an e-bike, but to offer them an e-bike catalog that shows all of the options, all of the prices, all of the things. It's a valuable resource for somebody who is looking to buy an e-bike, same way somebody looking to buy a home or somebody looking to renovate their bathroom.

By offering the bathroom vanity catalog, we know that somebody is in there. Now when we offer the next step to people, it's never about hey, choose us or give your money to us or over other people. We're just offering valuable service. So if you download a e-bike catalog, we might in a very personal, short, personal expecting reply way offer the valuable service of inviting you to a demo day. So if you download the catalog and then we email you and say, hi John, we're doing e-bike demos this Saturday at the bike shop.

Would you like to join us? Short, personal, expecting reply it doesn't sound like or feel like marketing or advertising. It feels like one person offering a valuable service to one other person and anticipating their reply. So I've used that approach in so many ways. Like on the real estate side we would offer a valuable service instead of the self serving message that most real estate lenders shout is get pre-approved.

You got to get pre-approved. You got. Because it's in their best interest to. They don't want to waste their time on people that aren't approved. But the reality is that people are reluctant for that.

Anytime your approval is up in question, that's going to be a, there's going to be a reluctance around that. So instead of positioning it as something that you need to do to prove that you're worthy to me we would offer a valuable service of a free home loan report. And we would say to people, we monitor hundreds of different loan programs all around the country to find the very best zero down loans, low interest loans, lowest payment loans, lowest total cost loans. And we put all our findings together in a custom home loan report. Now that sounds like something that's available and it sounds like I'm going to have options.

You know, a pre-approval sounds like I'm going to, if I'm the banker, I'm going to have you stand on the other side of the desk and twirl around and I'm going to look you up and down and I'm going to approve of you for a mortgage. But what a home loan report sounds like is I am going to get on the other side of the desk with you and together we're going to look at all of these loan options and you're going to get to select alone for you.

That sounds much more likely to be a rejection free process and that people would be, would be, they'd feel happy to have that kind of valuable information. So whenever you can talk to people like you would talk to them one person at a time and only offer valuable service to them. Not convincing language, not trying to put your interests ahead of theirs, just focus on being helpful, hospitable and conversational in the way that you approach people and it can't help but work out for you.

Every idea that I've had, every dollar that I've made over the last 30 years has gone through my brain, through my pen, onto a piece of paper in my journal before it went out into the real world. And if I can turn people onto that activity as a driver for what to do, what to think about, what to ask yourself to draw out, what the next most valuable action is for you and how to find the most profitable things that you can install in your business. I'm all for it. So this Friday at 1pm I'm going to do for the first time a 50 minute profit finder workshop. And you're going to join me live on Zoom and we're going to go through a 50 minute exercise.

Bring your pen, bring a notebook or piece of paper and I'm going to guide you through a thinking process that will help you identify where the lowest hanging fruit is in your business. And maybe some fruit that you didn't even know was there. But I'm going to show you where to look for it. So it's free. It's for you.

It's Friday at 1pm this Friday. Just watch.

Just go to 50minuteprofitfinder.com and I'll get you all the details and hopefully you can join us then. Friday 1:00pm.