a "killer" lesson from the robert collier letter book

Hey all you copywriting nerds. I was reading though the "robert collier letter book" just a few minutes ago and, one of the sections in the book immediately caught my attention.

He's talking about tested different opening paragraphs and, how he stumbled into an opener that pulled in more sales than any other he'd written before.

it goes a little like this....

"You've heard the story, I know, of the proud fisherman who was trying to impress a couple of guides with his fishing tale.

'I had a big tarp [a fish] on the line, he was explaing, 'when along came an enormous shark, opened his mouth and just swallwed that tarp whole. Boy, did i have a time landing that shark.'

'Hmm', grunted one of the guides, 'where I come from, we bait with sharks'

Then the letter-writer segues into how no matter how good of a product you say you have... someone is always gonna come along and have a bigger-badder-better one than you do.

I thought it was a great lesson because as copywriters we have to be good at writing stories. It hypnotizes people and moves then further down the page until they're "foaming-at-the-mouth" to buy whatever its you're selling.

Chiao,
Branden