Last night while watch­ing TV, my wife and I had an inter­est­ing debate on the whole “The Secret” phe­nom­ena. And we came to the very same conclusions.

I believe in the law of attrac­tion. I also like the premise behind the book, which is largely influ­enced by Wally Wat­tles’ 1910 book, The Sci­ence of Get­ting Rich.

But with all the “new-​​wage” gurus out there giv­ing it a bad rap, the law of attrac­tion is get­ting an unde­served rep­u­ta­tion. Some peo­ple even call it the “flaw of attrac­tion.” How­ever, the real flaw isn’t with the secret in itself, as some suggested.

It’s with how some peo­ple have bas­tardized it for their own self­ish greed.

Here’s the problem…

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A dis­grun­tled, aspir­ing copy­writer wrote me demand­ing clar­i­fi­ca­tions. He believes most copy­writ­ers lie and exag­ger­ate their claims of wealth. Let’s call him “Chuck.”

I under­stand where Chuck is com­ing from. Because I’ve been where he is. So I responded, not because I wanted to acqui­esce to his demands but because I wanted to give him hope, ideas, and, dare I say it, a million-​​dollar education.

He says he will be ask­ing other copy­writ­ers the same ques­tion, and even threat­ened (although, that may be too harsh of a word) to pub­lish my reply. I’ve decided to take the lead myself, and pub­lish it here.

For all I know, this copy­writer may be gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion to cre­ate his own prod­uct. Who knows? If he is, I must say that his strat­egy is bril­liant. A tad decep­tive, but bril­liant. Regard­less, if he does cre­ate a prod­uct out of this, good for him!

But I’m reprint­ing the con­ver­sa­tion here not just to take the lead but also because I believe it will help a lot of other strug­gling copy­writ­ers out there. Also, I’m open­ing myself a lit­tle more than usual. I guess you can say that I’m expos­ing the real “Michel Fortin.”

My answer might sur­prise you…

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Michel Fortin: No, I think if you want to look at opti­mism in the best way is to look at it as an edu­ca­tional process. Learn­ing is part of it… sit­ting down with peo­ple, talk­ing with them, spend­ing time with them, read­ing books, spend­ing your time on learn­ing as much as you pos­si­bly can.

You will be able to go down the right road. Fast or slow doesn’t mat­ter and that’s not opti­mism. That’s just being. That’s just fol­low­ing your con­science. That’s just being a real­ist. It’s not being a pes­simist. It’s not being opti­mist. It’s prob­a­bly an opti­mal point of look­ing at it, an opti­mal point or way to look at things, but it’s not nec­es­sar­ily optimistic.

Ralph Zuran­ski: Do you think it takes courage to pur­sue new ideas?

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Here are the work­sheets to use when apply­ing Michel Fortin’s G.O.A.L. method. You can sim­ply use the tables below as a model to guide you. You can use them on a sheet of paper, in your jour­nal, or on your computer.

But if you do pre­fer the print­able ver­sion, you can down­load this book in dig­i­tal PDF for­mat by click­ing here. Most browsers have the PDF plug-​​in already installed.

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“I prac­ticed the art of get­ting more things done rather than get­ting the really impor­tant things done well.“
– Alec MacKenzie

“We can no more afford to spend major time on minor things than we can to spend minor time on major things.“
– Jim Rohn

Now is the time to set your GOALs. Your “guides” are goals that will most likely stem from your per­sonal val­ues because, hav­ing gone through the process so far, you will have a pretty good idea of what kind of goals you truly want. Take a new sheet of paper and write at the top the words “My Guides.” Then, write down what you want to be, do, or have.

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I’m up for a challenge.

Just recently, my friend and SEO blog­ging expert Andy Beard posted an arti­cle about an inter­est­ing case study.

After sim­ply reword­ing the head­line of a blog post, John Wes­ley lit­er­ally mul­ti­plied his traf­fic to one of his blog posts by 10 times.

With the same post!

In other words, noth­ing was changed except for the head­line. The arti­cle was exactly the same, word for word. But by chang­ing the head­line slightly, the blog post drew a ton of traf­fic, par­tic­u­larly from social net­work­ing sites.

Well, now’s your chance to have me do the same thing for you — and learn a thing or two, too. Here’s how. Let me rewire one of your own head­lines for max­i­mum sell­ing power. But there’s a catch…

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Take­away sell­ing, for the unini­ti­ated, is a way to limit the sup­ply of a prod­uct or ser­vice in some way to increase scarcity of an offer. Because it’s a proven fact that scarcity sells.

It’s that age­less law of sup­ply and demand. The less the sup­ply is, the greater the demand will be.

Peo­ple don’t know how much they want some­thing until it’s about to be taken away from them. As Jim Rohn once said, “With­out a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.”

Why? Because pro­cras­ti­na­tion is the biggest killer of sales — par­tic­u­larly online where the chances of a prospect stay­ing on or return­ing to a web­site (in order to think about buy­ing), in today’s click-​​happy world, are just as scarce.

It’s like walk­ing into a depart­ment store and you see a shirt you’re inter­ested in. Since there’s none in your size, you ask the sales clerrk if one is avail­able. The clerk goes into the back­room and emerges a few moments later, say­ing, “I found one in your size…

“… But it’s the only one we have left in stock.”

Now, how much more do you want that shirt?

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