43 Important Lessons from My Life in Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins

Platitudes and generalities make no more impression than water on a duck.

I would add, a list of IMPORTANT ideas from the the early days of advertising gurus. Quack, quack.

How does this help anyone?

GordonJ

Great post! All great information. That said, these two points stood out most to me:

13. The "free" offer cheapens a product.
14. There is a certain resistance when we ask people to afterward pay for a product which came to them first as a gift.

These two are SO true.

I teach price-based marketing and value-based marketing to authors who are trying to sell their books. You need to use different tactics and different language for each type of clientele. If you are telling someone what you're selling is truly valuable, then offering it free of charge for a certain amount of time can really backfire. It's a contradiction.

In terms of books, you can offer "sneak a peek" portions of the book free of charge, to entice people to buy the whole thing. But never offer the entire book for free if it's a value sell. Only offer a price sell that way.

Same concepts apply to all types of products. I just speak about books here because that is my niche.