A Gary Halbert Tip

Hey Prashant,

Have a look here:

For Copywriters | Ryan McGrath

Cool tip. : )

This is an incredible resource for those who want to study copywriting and marketing:

Free Marketing Interviews |Business Marketing Seminars | Internet Strategy Secrets and Information

I honestly believe he wrote this as a joke.

When you copy something out you take so long you don't really have a flow and therefore you certainly don't become attuned to the author.

Practically the whole English speaking world had to copy out entire tracts of Shakespeare. Actually non- English speaking countries do this also.

Yet it doesn't make anyone a Shakespeare or even remotely like a Shakespeare for the reason I gave.

And people have been copying his stuff out by hand for 400 years.

You are only looking at 6 or 7 words, then writing them down, then look at the next 6 or 7, then writing them down etc until the end.

You will be lucky to do 6 or 7 I was being generous.

If you have a newspaper next to you then copy out any 5 paragraphs from an article and you will see you have no train of thought whatsoever.

I'm writing this to save you time.

Just read whatever ads he recommends and you will get a feel for it as you will be reading in real time obviously.

Want to be a horror writer? Read James Herbert or Stephen King or someone esle. See what style suits. No writing course ever tells you to copy it out by hand because that is plain stupid.

Won't help one jot.

Dan

So Terry Dean was joking too?

Secrets to writing Million Dollar Sales Letters

And read Peter Lowe's testimonial on this Ted Nicholas site:

How I Sold $400 Million Worth of Products and Services

Just two examples. There are tons more.

Actually, here's one more, and this is the clincher from the great man himself, Ted Nicholas (Marketing Secret #26):

http://www.tednicholas.com/87/87_Marketing_Secrets.pdf

So Halbert and Nicholas were both joking. What do they know?

Back in December a study was published in the journal Human Brain Mapping titled: Neural Correlates of Creative Writing: An fMRI Study.

The researchers wanted to see what areas of the brain lit up during the creative writing process. As controls they had each subject read a passage and copy a different passage by hand.

The results showed that reading and copying by hand activated the same brain areas, EXCEPT that copying by hand also lit up the left rolandic operculum. This area is associated with sentence level syntactic encoding. It was also activated when the subjects were asked to produce original writing samples.

So the brain pays extra close attention to syntax both when writing and copying.

Just a quick stop in to give you some Halbert food for thought...this is reposted from the Seeds Of Wisdom forum...
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Let me share with you a radical belief given to me by Gary Halbert in a biker's bar in Barberton, OH. I thought at the time, Gary was full of sh*t, and I held to that opinion for many years...however, it turns out, if you think about it and can get out of the way of your brainwashed beliefs from a 140 years of marketing BS...

as Gary said, “Your enemy in sales is not your competition, it is your prospect. You are at war with your potential customer, and once they surrender their money, they become your prisoner of war.”

I might add that both Gary and myself had more than one cool refreshing beverage in us...as he was waiting his turn at the pool table. I just laughed at him and said Bull Sh*T.
*********************
Now we both had a background in sales, in fact, he helped me get a job at a local mail order company but his very RADICAL thinking about competition and the prospect...well, I pretty much ignored it for decades.

BUT, I think there is something to it. The BATTLE you fight in your copy is between your words and their wallet. You WIN only after they surrender their money to it.

WAR is, of course, an oft used metaphor in marketing, from Jay Conrad Levinson's GUERRILLA MARKETING to adaptations of Sun Tsu's ART OR WAR IN MARKETING.

Maybe Gary was right...if you are open minded and don't have a box you need to think outside of.

The battlefields of world history have taught us many lessons, at the cost of millions of lives. Keep that in mind when you start to take you and your copywriting too seriously.

But the elements of combat, strategic, tactical and operational elements are not unlike those of copy.

Today's warfare is very different from many wars of history, in that, there is no clear cut goal, no exit strategy...no way to declare victory.

In your copy, VICTORY happens when your opponent waves the white flag and gives you what you demand from them.

So, another way of looking at your copy...and then using your knowledge to fill in the blanks could be

Purpose or Intent VICTORY
Intelligence
Strategy
Tactical
Operational including Support.

Thinking of your potential customer as the ENEMY, is radical thinking, even for Sir Gary...but, consider he WON many victories on the battlefield of copywriting...and well, gulp, maybe he wasn't as full of sh*t as I thought.

Quick survey...how many of you have studied Sun Tsu and ART OF WAR? And how many of you are familiar with Lt. Col. John Boyd?

gjabiz

PS. Gary's concept of your customer as a prisoner of war, well, when you see many affiliates of the big name IM guru's touting their captor's stuff...maybe there is some room for thinking along these lines? Put your prisoner to work for you and extract even more moolah from THEIR efforts...hmmmm.

That's write. We develop any skill by imitating others. If you do sit down and copy ads that you like, you program that stile of writing into your subconscious mind, and it begins to influence the way you write. For that matter, whatever you read will also influence your writing style, however the first thing any copywriting program will tell you to do is to sit down and copy down on paper the ads that you like, and more importantly those that have proven to be effective.

In addition, while human traits and interests might not have changed much throughout time, the way people buy and the best way to write copy does change in relation to different cycles of the product you are selling, how familiar are people with it. An item that seemed like a breakthrough 25 years ago is not a breakthrough today, so obviously the copy would change to match the appeal it has for the target audience.

I posted this in another thread, but this one is about the exact same thing so I'll say the exact same thing.

Do you think learning to play a song someone else wrote will help you get better at writing your own songs?

Do you think looking at other performances of a role will help an actor give their own best performance in that role?

Do you think that learning to paint with the techniques of the old masters will help you become a better painter no matter what your own style?

The answer in those contexts, as well as this one is, "yes, obviously". But what's also obvious is that it's not the SOLE COMPONENT to those ends. It's just part of the path, and even then, certainly not a required stepping stone.

I don't read other people's sales letters to study. But that's not to say I don;t read a massive amount about other topics specifically relevant to my work. For me, I'd rather learn WHY something worked, and think of a way to implement it, than simply learning solely to mimic someone else's schtick.

But ymmvaat.