How to Craft Cash-Creating Climactic Copy

Have you ever picked up a book off the shelf at a local book­store, read the front and back cov­ers, opened it up and, after read­ing a few pages, just couldn’t put it down?

Do you remem­ber, after buy­ing the book, how you flipped each page with an almost excru­ci­at­ing curios­ity because the story was so tan­ta­liz­ing, you became increas­ingly riv­eted to the book with each sub­se­quent chapter?

Copy is, or should be, the same.

Look at it this way: good copy makes a good case. But great copy tells a good story. They say that a great copy­writer is also a great sales­per­son. But all great copy­writ­ers and all great sales­peo­ple also have one thing in common…

… They are also great sto­ry­tellers.

The closer your copy reads like a story, keep­ing the reader inter­ested and engaged, hang­ing on to every word, the greater your chances she will read your copy from top to bot­tom. From the head­line until, of course, the thank you page after she buys.

Your story should tickle the reader’s curios­ity, pull her deeper into the copy, even mes­mer­ize her — as if she’s in a trance-​​like state, com­pletely engrossed in your story.

Each new idea intro­duced should build on the other, pulling the reader fur­ther and deeper into the saleslet­ter. Each para­graph and each word crescen­dos and pre­pares you, step-​​by-​​step, for the cli­mac­tic twist in the story’s plot.

The cli­max, of course, is the offer.

And the plot, in copy­writ­ing, is called the “appeal.”

Your appeal is the major con­cept or sto­ry­line that will appeal to your tar­get audi­ence. It’s pos­si­bly a core ben­e­fit, result or key topic that cre­ates the foun­da­tion upon which your entire “story” is built. It’s one pow­er­ful idea on which your entire copy will hinge.

The appeal you choose to present your offer with is crit­i­cal to the offer’s suc­cess — hope­fully the offer is good, but get­ting there is the job of the appeal.

The con­cept of the “greased chute” is where you keep the reader hang­ing on to every word you write — up until they buy, as if they are slid­ing down a well-​​greased slide.

They sim­ply can’t leave. They’re glued to your copy. They have to keep reading.

Copy is telling a good story that involves the reader so they can see in their mind’s eye the ben­e­fits of your offer, as if they owned your prod­uct already. The appeal is the foun­da­tion, if you will, you choose to build your story on.

It could be your USP, your unique sell­ing propo­si­tion. I pre­fer to call it a unique sell­ing posi­tion. Because it’s tan­ta­mount to what copy­writer John Carl­ton calls your “hook.”

A good hook grabs your read­ers “by the eyeballs.”

It could be some major advan­tage, claim, promise, or ben­e­fit. In copy­writ­ing, some peo­ple call it “the big idea.” But the best one I found often con­sists of some totally unex­pected, incred­i­ble, shock­ing, almost unbe­liev­able, or even sur­real idea.

John Carl­ton says that the best hooks are often what he calls “the incon­gru­ent jux­ta­po­si­tion of seem­ingly unre­lated ideas, facts, or events.”

(If you want some exam­ples, then sub­scribe to the National Enquirer. They con­tain some of the best eyeball-​​grabbing hooks, espe­cially on the front-​​page head­lines. Or check out this awe­some arti­cle by Dorian Greer from Seduc​ingTh​e​Buyer​.com.)

Here’s an exam­ple ripped from my own experience.

A stock trader once asked me to write the copy for his how-​​to stock trad­ing infor­ma­tion prod­uct. Sure, the pro­gram was great. But in terms of sal­a­bil­ity and posi­tion­ing, there was noth­ing new, fancy, or unique about it. So I had to dig. Dig real deep.

After gath­er­ing some pre­lim­i­nary infor­ma­tion about the author, I dis­cov­ered that the story behind the cre­ation of his how-​​to prod­uct was rather interesting.

After find­ing a tumor lodged on his brain and under­go­ing life-​​saving surgery to remove it, doc­tors told him he could no longer work in his old 9-​​to-​​5 job, and so he decided to plunge into trad­ing full-​​time to replace his income. (He only dab­bled in it up to that point.)

Over time, he tried dif­fer­ent things and later dis­cov­ered a unique for­mula to prof­itably trade the mar­kets. He then honed his method and started to make a killing. That’s when friends and fam­ily took notice, and began ask­ing him to teach them his method.

Things started to snow­ball. Every­one asked him about his tech­nique. But as time went on and the pop­u­lar­ity of his pro­gram grew, he real­ized that teach­ing his method was start­ing to take its toll. It felt a lot like work, which went against his doc­tors’ wishes.

So to save time and effort, and obvi­ously for health rea­sons, he cre­ated a pro­gram that taught his strat­egy to aspir­ing traders who bugged him to reveal his bag of tricks.

It was a fas­ci­nat­ing story! A story I needed to tell.

Well, the hook I came up with was to use his surgery as the piv­otal moment that changed his life. Here’s how I worded it. The pre­head­line said: “As if the surgery ‘jogged’ some­thing in his brain…” And then, the head­line said:

“After hav­ing a golfball-​​sized tumor removed from his brain and forced out of a job, 57-​​year-​​old stock trader acci­den­tally stum­bles onto magic for­mula that con­sis­tently humil­i­ates even some of the most respected Wall Street stock trad­ing gurus…”

But if that’s too off-​​the-​​wall for you, here’s a sim­pler example…

Ray McNally, a pro­gram­mer and a friend of mine, offers a neat soft­ware pro­gram that com­ple­ments an affil­i­ate marketer’s efforts by help­ing them cap­ture the names and email addresses of traf­fic they gen­er­ate to a web­site they’re an affil­i­ate of.

The gist of the pro­gram is that it sets up an optin page — a door­way page that, before the affiliate’s gen­er­ated traf­fic is sent to the site being pro­moted (and then gone for­ever), cap­tures their name and email addresses for poten­tial follow-​​up.

Why? Because if you pro­mote an affil­i­ate pro­gram, then once they click on your affil­i­ate link, they’re gone. But you, as an affil­i­ate, have worked hard or spent money on gen­er­at­ing that traf­fic. You own that traf­fic. So why not cap­ture it in the process?

If they didn’t end up buy­ing that affil­i­ate prod­uct, no prob­lem. That list can now be followed-​​up with, offered spe­cial incen­tives or even mon­e­tized in other ways!

What has that got to do with copy?

Orig­i­nally, Ray had one of those hack­neyed head­lines: “Dis­cover how to explode your income… Blah, blah, blah.” Bland. Hypey. Bor­ing. Just plain yuck.

After talk­ing with Ray, I said: “Ray, your USP is not made up of the ben­e­fits your soft­ware offers. Your hook is that top affil­i­ates use your ‘secret weapon’ to stop giv­ing away their hard-​​earned traf­fic and dri­ving them into black holes! So, why not cap­i­tal­ize on it?”

Con­se­quently, the hook I told him to use was this abil­ity affil­i­ates gain with his soft­ware to catch the traf­fic they gen­er­ate, and how to make far more money with affil­i­ate pro­mo­tions by mon­e­tiz­ing them before they blindly drive vis­i­tors off into the ether.

The result? Affil​i​atePage​Cre​ator​.com. (The link leads to an archived page as this was a few years ago.) Check the head­line out and you’ll under­stand what I mean.

Also, you’ll notice another strat­egy I used. Before I explain it to you…

A great way to learn how to write mouth-​​watering copy is to read fic­tion. Take a pop­u­lar book and read it through once. Then go back, read it again, but this time take notes. List the nuances, twists, and sto­ry­lines that grabbed you. And why.

In other words, try to look beyond the story. Pin­point where cer­tain char­ac­ters, ideas, and plot twists were intro­duced in spe­cific loca­tions of the book. And see how they relate to the whole plot. Also, pay atten­tion to the flow and the intensity.

Is there a crescendo? Are there small val­leys along the way until you reach the summit?

What do I mean by “small val­leys?” Copy should build on the reader’s intrin­sic curios­ity. But it needs to do so mul­ti­ple times through­out. In fact, incor­po­rate what copy­writer David Garfinkel once told me are called “nested loops.”

A nested loop is an NLP (i.e., neuro-​​linguistic pro­gram­ming) term. It means, you start by intro­duc­ing an idea (you “open the loop”), but before you com­plete it you intro­duce another idea, until later where you fin­ish the idea and “close the loop.”

And guess what? Peo­ple will read every sin­gle word, they will do so more intently and intensely, and they will remem­ber more what is being said within the loop.

Within the nested loop is there­fore a great place to insert a key idea, a crit­i­cal point, or an impor­tant ben­e­fit you want to drive home and peo­ple to remember.

Why are “nested loops” so powerful?

In 1927, Bluma Zeigar­nik, one of the early con­trib­u­tors to Gestalt Psy­chol­ogy, noticed some­thing pecu­liar after observ­ing restau­rant wait­ers and wait­resses, who seemed to mem­o­rize their cus­tomers’ orders and for­get them once the food was served.

In other words, the incom­plete task cre­ated a cer­tain ten­sion, a cer­tain dis­com­fort or uneasi­ness, that caused the brain to “hook” onto the unfin­ished task until it was done.

So Zeigar­nik con­cluded that peo­ple remem­ber unfin­ished tasks bet­ter than they do fin­ished ones. And the rea­son is, humans have an intrin­sic need for clo­sure. We get a cer­tain feel­ing of dis­con­cert­ed­ness when some­thing is left unfinished.

Called the “Zeigar­nik Effect,” the ten­sion it cre­ates not only forces us to remem­ber inter­rupted tasks, but also pushes our curios­ity to an almost excru­ci­at­ing level.

As a result, we pas­sion­ately attempt to relieve the ten­sion cre­ated by incom­plete tasks, and often go to great lengths to do so. In copy­writ­ing par­tic­u­larly, this ten­sion forces us to read, and to read more intently, des­per­ately search­ing for the rest of the information.

For exam­ple, have you ever watched the news, where they begin with the following:

“Tonight, Hol­ly­wood super­star escapes blaz­ing fire while film­ing her new mega-​​budget movie. More on that later. But first…”

That story aroused your curios­ity, so you remain glued to your TV set until they air it — often, at the end of the show! Now, did they do this inten­tion­ally? Of course. They forced you to watch the entire show — and, of course, all of the com­mer­cials in between.

Look at all the TV shows that keep you hang­ing with each show to the next. (Look at the hit show “24” as a per­fect exam­ple.) Even com­mer­cials use this strat­egy bril­liantly. (Remem­ber the “Taster’s Choice” soap-​​opera-​​like series?)

Keep in mind, once you close the loop, you release the ten­sion and your audience’s con­cen­tra­tion goes down. That’s why you want to use mul­ti­ple nested loops through­out the copy. Because after the cli­max, you stand a great chance to lose your reader.

(Take the show “Dal­las” in the 80’s with the famous “Who Shot J.R.?” plot. After the show’s cul­mi­na­tion when they finally revealed who did it, rat­ings dropped dramatically.)

There­fore, insert mul­ti­ple nested loops to not only keep the reader read­ing but also to build on the reader’s level of con­cen­tra­tion until the very end. I often include dou­ble and even triple nested loops, i.e., loops inside other loops, within my copy.

That way, you can keep them hang­ing until to every word until the very end…

… Until, that is, they buy your product!

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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