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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My 50-​​page report last week cre­ated quite a stir. Some peo­ple who did not read it may have mis­un­der­stood my point. How­ever, I’m not going to make another blog post ded­i­cated to the grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of online audio or video. (I prob­a­bly will, but I’ll save it for another time.)

But to sum­ma­rize, while saleslet­ters in prin­ci­ple are not dying — I’ve cho­sen “Death of the Saleslet­ter” as a title to get peo­ple to read the report, among other things — and long copy is here to stay, the deliv­ery mech­a­nism is indeed slowly being replaced. (Granted, we still have a way to go, yet.)

By the same token, a cer­tain type of saleslet­ter is indeed dying.

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