One of the most pop­u­lar threads on my now defunct dis­cus­sion forum for copy­writ­ers was one started by my friend Dean Jack­son.

If you don’t know Dean Jack­son, he is a Toron­ton­ian, a real estate mogul, an infor­ma­tion mar­ket­ing mil­lion­aire (author of many pro­grams, includ­ing the highly suc­cess­ful “Stop Your Divorce!”), and a darn-​​fine copywriter.

This post was extremely pop­u­lar for a num­ber of reasons.

In it, Dean shared his quick-​​and-​​dirty for­mula for writ­ing saleslet­ters really fast. Of course, I’m a big fan of Robert Plank’s Speed Copy Secrets. But this for­mula is a great short­cut if you want to write a bare­bones saleslet­ter in less than an hour.

Above all, the idea behind this for­mula is to get you to start writ­ing. Too many mar­keters and copy­writ­ers get stuck at the begin­ning, such as at the head­line, and they fail to get any trac­tion. They often blame it on “writer’s block.”

Accord­ing to Dean, this for­mula has helped him write sev­eral million-​​dollar saleslet­ters for him­self and oth­ers. With his gra­cious per­mis­sion, I’m reprint­ing it here on this blog, along with some of my own edi­to­r­ial com­ments and tips…

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“When we think of fail­ure, fail­ure will be ours. If we remain unde­cided, noth­ing will ever change. All we need to do is to want to achieve some­thing great, and then sim­ply to do it. Never think of fail­ure, for what we think will come about.“
–Mahar­ishi Mahesh Yogi

What’s true suc­cess? What’s real, authen­tic, ful­fill­ing suc­cess? Is it achieve­ment? Is it made of goals, effi­ciency, and dead­lines? Is it the kind that says, “The level of one’s suc­cess is mea­sured by the depth of one’s wal­let”? I’ve asked myself that deeply intrigu­ing ques­tion for many years.

In fact, I used to be a go-​​getting, goal-​​setting, efficiency-​​minded, try-​​to-​​get-​​as-​​many-​​things-​​done-​​as-​​possible type of per­son; the type that never seems to have enough time for any­thing. And I do mean “used to be,” since one day the answer to that million-​​dollar ques­tion became as clear as crystal.

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My apolo­gies for the webi­nar being cut inad­ver­tently short. I was giv­ing out so much con­tent that I lost track of time. The soft­ware mer­ci­lessly booted me out in the mid­dle of my presentation.

This pre­sen­ta­tion was “off the cuff” and meant purely as a way to give you as much great con­tent as I pos­si­bly could. I wasn’t look­ing at my watch. (Judg­ing from the emails I received, you weren’t, either. And I’m glad!)

But I want to stick to my promise.

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I love read­ers’ ques­tions. And some­times, the same ques­tions keep com­ing up that I decide on post­ing a blan­ket answer on this blog to cover them.

I do this as a way to cre­ate con­tent for this blog, help my read­ers find the answers they’re look­ing for, and save me time from not hav­ing to answer the same ques­tions over and over again.

Prob­lem is, many peo­ple never find the blog post that answers their ques­tion, par­tic­u­larly if it’s old and sit­ting deep in the archives. And many peo­ple don’t take the time to search for it, because it’s work and it’s sim­ply eas­ier to con­tact my staff for the answer.

I thought about cre­at­ing a fre­quently asked ques­tions (FAQ) page. But I wanted a brain-​​dead easy solu­tion to be able to do this in a snap (much like post­ing to this blog), and offer more to my readers.

But also, I wanted one that would opti­mize my page for the search engines (where spe­cific key­words are included in the titles and ques­tions), and be easy enough for me to sim­ply answer ques­tions as I go along.

Finally, I found one…

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Some peo­ple have asked me quite a few ques­tions in the com­ments sec­tion of my last arti­cle, “How to Write Carrot-​​Wielding Copy.” And some of these ques­tions were immensely valuable.

I could have answered them within the com­ments sec­tion. But because I believe my answers might be help­ful to a lot of peo­ple, and that the com­ments may be over­looked by many, instead I decided to do in a sep­a­rate post.

Here it is:

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