One morn­ing, you go into your mail­box and dis­cover there’s an enve­lope wait­ing for you from an unknown source. You bring the pack­age into your liv­ing room, tear open the enve­lope, pull out what’s inside, put on your read­ing glasses, unfold the let­ter, and begin to read the contents.

After com­plet­ing all of these steps, you then quickly glance at the let­ter to decide if the let­ter is worth reading.

If not, you throw it in the garbage.

But if the enve­lope looks like junk mail, there’s copy on the enve­lope and it screams “hype,” or the printed address label just says “dear occu­pant” as the addressee, chances are you won’t even think about open­ing it and you’ll just throw it away.

How­ever, let’s say the enve­lope works, curios­ity takes over, and the let­ter does get opened at this point. Once unfolded, though, if it looks like some kind of sales pitch at first glance, not even a sin­gle word will likely be read. So into the round file it goes!

Your web­site is the enve­lope. What does it say about you?

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I first taught this tech­nique in 1998. While there have been tons of improve­ments since then, today I still see copy on so many web­sites, sales let­ters, or emails using a lan­guage that only the per­son who wrote them understands.

The bot­tom line is, most mar­keters and copy­writ­ers still seem to ignore the most impor­tant part of their sales copy…

… Their readers.

Abra­ham Maslow once com­mented, “If all you have is a ham­mer, every­thing looks like a nail.” Abra­ham Maslow may have been a psy­chol­o­gist, but he prob­a­bly knew more about copy­writ­ing and par­tic­u­larly sell­ing than what most peo­ple cared to admit.

Even now, most of the copy I cri­tique dis­obey this impor­tant rule the most. Their sales mes­sage doesn’t com­mu­ni­cate with their read­ers, par­tic­u­larly at their level. Now, I’m not talk­ing about a socioe­co­nomic or edu­ca­tional level. I’m talk­ing about the level at which they under­stand and, above all, make buy­ing decisions.

They fail to use what I call “upwords.” It’s an acronym that means…

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So, if you’re fol­low­ing the com­mand­ments, you should now have a unique name, pos­si­bly a tagline, and estab­lished your­self as the first or leader in your unique cat­e­gory. What about the ser­vice or prod­uct you offer? Do you offer an extra­or­di­nary prod­uct or ser­vice, or do you offer an ordi­nary one?

Even if the ser­vice you pro­vide is cus­tom­ary, tra­di­tional, and prob­a­bly offered by your com­pe­ti­tion, you should make it appear unique just as well.

Remem­ber that per­cep­tion is more pow­er­ful than truth. You don’t need to empha­size that your prod­uct or ser­vice is unique, bet­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion, or even the best for that mat­ter. Doing so by declar­ing that it is can some­times be worse than not say­ing any­thing at all, and the rea­son for that is that it makes your self-​​serving claim appear sus­pect or exaggerated.

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I know that the yel­low pages’ peo­ple will hate me for this, but your yel­low pages’ ad, although an essen­tial part of your entire mar­ket­ing machine, doesn’t have to be of a large size, in color, promi­nently dis­played, or tied-​​in with other gim­micks that the yel­low pages sales­peo­ple have to offer. While nec­es­sary, the yel­low pages should only be used as sup­port systems.

The con­cept of this entire book is to teach you that cre­at­ing top-​​of-​​mind aware­ness (not “insti­tu­tional” adver­tis­ing) should be your main mar­ket­ing goal. When peo­ple have seen your ad, heard about you, or have a need for your ser­vices at any par­tic­u­lar time, your con­tact infor­ma­tion may or may not be avail­able to them at that par­tic­u­lar moment. There­fore, you want the yel­low pages to back you up and not use them as a full-​​blown mar­ket­ing medium.

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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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Some peo­ple have asked me to give a few tips and tricks they can start using right away to apply some of the strate­gies I wrote about in my “Death of the Saleslet­ter” report, with­out resort­ing to audio or video, or fancy scripts.

Aside from the var­i­ous tech­nol­ogy you can start apply­ing to make your sales expe­ri­ence more dynamic, there are some very sim­ple things you can do to your saleslet­ter, right now, to improve its read­er­ship. And ulti­mately, its response.

It’s easy, it’s fast, and it’s proven to increase results.

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Thought is the cre­ative power or the impelling force which causes the cre­ative power to act. Think­ing in a cer­tain way will bring riches to you, but you must not rely upon thought alone, pay­ing no atten­tion to per­sonal action. That is the rock upon which many oth­er­wise sci­en­tific thinkers meet ship­wreck — the fail­ure to con­nect thought with per­sonal action.

We have not yet reached the stage of devel­op­ment, even sup­pos­ing such a stage to be pos­si­ble, in which a per­son can cre­ate directly from form­less sub­stance with­out nature’s processes or the work of human hands. A per­son must not only think, but his per­sonal action must sup­ple­ment his thought.

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