Heard this on a podcast recently. “Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.” Got me thinking about the most powerful persuasion techniques in our copywriting arsenal. Dark side shit. Techniques that can be used to bend minds to your will. Forget using them, many entrepreneurs and copywriters have a strong negative reaction to even learning them.
A while ago we were in this training on Video Sales Letters with Jon Benson. He was talking the way men tend to do. We can be callous sometimes.
“If I’m not manipulating your emotions I’m not doing my job.”
People. Lost. Their s***. In the Slack channel the after the call.
“OMG THIS IS EVIL.”
“I would never manipulate customers that way.”
“This is what’s wrong with marketing today.”
Blabla typical soylennial shit. I immediately understood Benson’s words as male braggadocio and focused on the broader point. All persuasion is manipulation. When I manipulate you for your own benefit, it’s good. When I do it to your detriment, it’s bad.
The sooner you learn to accept human behaviour for what it is and not what you’d like it to be, the sooner you rid yourself of the cognitive dissonance of being a businessman trying to sell without being salesy.
Hard sells exist and they work. Bad people have been using them to do bad things to people for millennia. But the techniques themselves are amoral. They can be used for good. You do yourself and your customer a disservice if you stick your head in the sand and refuse to even learn how and why they work. And then, once you’ve learned the rules and can use them unconsciously, you can choose to break them if you want.
“Better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.”
One way to break the rules of selling is by creating a brand your customers love. For entrepreneurs like Ramit Sethi a sales page is a formality. Many of his customers scroll down to the bottom and click buy without even reading it. So much so they have been adding a Buy button to the top of their pages to save people the hassle of scrolling. How do you create a brand like this? By a well-defined content strategy executed consistently over a long period of time.
Wanna have a brand like Ramit? Dropkick Copy can help you do that.
Well said!
So many things are this way, but so many struggle with how they want it not how it is, because they focus on only half of reality. (mostly the half they don’t like) They make no consideration to the benefit of the other side of the coin, like you said above.
But, if we did that we wouldn’t have anything to offend us and get our panties in a twist, it would just exist.
Thank you 🙏