Selling the Golden Dream: Part II

How to Make It BIG as an A-List Financial Copywriter 

Dear  ,  

In Selling the Golden Dream: Part I, I talked about breaking into the financial copywriting business, in which you are selling investment newsletters and trading advisories.  I talked about the kind of money you could make, and a few of the techniques I used to make it BIG as a financial copywriter. 

• The MacGyver Technique
• The Cookie and the Dog
• The Wizard of Oz   

I also explained that selling investment advice is like walking your reader down the Yellow Brick Road to meet the Wizard, who, of course, is going to make them rich. 

If you missed that message, you can find it here.  It will bring you up to speed as to what we are talking about here. 

In today’s message, I would like to show you how to take your reader down the Yellow Brick Road.  I will give you an example from one of my most successful email promotions.  That way you’ll see the effectiveness of my Million-Dollar Copywriting Formula at work. 

Let’s begin with step one, your headline. 

STEP ONE  

Your headline is the most important part of this guided journey.  It’s the critical first step that ensures your reader walks down the path with you.  

That step can be a news headline, benefit headline, curiosity headline--it can be any of them and all of them. 

Whichever you choose, it must be written with investing knowledge and selling knowledge behind it--otherwise it will lie there flat.   Your reader, or Dorothy, if you will, will have no reason to join you on the Yellow Brick Road.

Here’s a headline I wrote years ago that generated $250,000 in sales for a trading letter the first time it went out.

The headline:  $6 Canadian Oil Stock to Hit $12 by Friday: Buy Now. 

Who wouldn’t want to know that? 

That really goes back to my premise of selling the golden dream. 

A reader sees that and they can almost picture in their mind’s eye what it would feel like to turn $5,000 into $10,000 in just a few days.  Of course, nobody buys until they first believe. 

Please keep that in mind: Nobody buys unless they first believe. 

So every single step you want them to take after that first step MUST be believable and support all the reasons why this stock will deliver these returns. 

So the rest of the promotion must not only prove the headline but also prove that the Wizard is the right guy to make you the money.  

This brings me to…

 STEP TWO.  The proof that keeps them reading. 

Let's take a look at the subhead and the headline together. 

Before I go on, it’s important that you know there is a lot going on in this subheading.  It begins to give the reader some background on the stock and a guarantee, which begins to lend credibility to the Wizard. 

This particular promotion was an upsell piece.  

The Wizard’s readers already subscribe to his $99-a-year advisory.  We are now going to ask them to pay $699 for a quarterly subscription to this more profitable advisory. 

So it's not as if these people are coming in from the cold.  They are, if you will, practically friends with the Wizard.  So your selling style will be different than if you had no relationship with them. 

Regardless, your headline, subheading, and body copy are all important steps that you must follow to guide your reader down the Yellow Brick Road to the order form. 

Let’s take a look at how the body copy continues to lead your reader to the Wizard. 

As you can see, there’s a lot of power-packed knowledge in those few paragraphs.  Each one took the next step in leading the reader to achieving their golden dream. 

Before we move on, let’s talk about this subhead for a moment, “A Double in the Next 14 Days--Guaranteed.”

Again, we are offering the golden dream--another nugget to keep them reading. If you’ve seen my work before, then you’ve seen how I drop these nuggets in the copy. 

As I mentioned in Part I of this series, I call the approach “the cookie and the dog.”   You just drop a cookie on the floor and the dog will come running for it.  Drop a cookie every three feet and your dog will eat one and move on to the next one.  

It’s not really magic. Because you know your dog is hungry for it.  The same is why you place these cookies, or nuggets if you prefer, in your copy.  To continue to take your reader down the page to the order form. 

Remember when I said earlier that nobody buys unless they first believe?   

I can’t just say to the reader they will double their money in 14 days--I have to prove it. The only way to do that is with facts.  Here is how the promotion continues… 

1. Over the past decade, this company has quietly acquired the drilling rights to more than 6 million acres in Argentina, Peru, and Colombia—countries whose combined oil reserves are equal to half of Venezuela’s reserves.
   
    
2. In addition (and unlike our OPEC suppliers), Argentina, Peru, and Colombia all have stable democratic governments that are friendly with the United States—a huge plus in the world today.
   
    
3. What’s more, this company’s quarterly revenue is exploding twice as fast as the big oil companies’—at an amazing 373% year over year! So it’s no surprise the stock is up a shocking 478% over the past 12 months.
   
    
4. PLUS, with analysts now estimating the company’s sales growth to exceed 710% for the current quarter, you could easily expect a double in the next 14 days as the pension funds and oil and energy funds realign their holdings to improve their second-quarter performance.