I used to teach mar­ket­ing and sell­ing part-​​time at a local col­lege. One day, one of my stu­dents made me real­ize some­thing important.

Dur­ing my lec­ture, he offered an exam­ple to illus­trate his under­stand­ing of a con­cept I was teach­ing. While it was gen­eral in nature, I real­ized how beau­ti­fully his exam­ple applied to copy. Par­tic­u­larly web copy.

In fact, his point was so well made because he drove it home using the very idea he was illustrating.

But before I explain it to you, let me put the story in con­text so you can understand.

In my Per­sonal Sell­ing class, we were dis­cussing the nat­ural human incli­na­tion to illog­i­cally and uncon­sciously assume that there is a par­al­lel between a part and its whole — even when the two are totally unre­lated or irrel­e­vant to each other.

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One of the most ven­er­a­ble and com­mon ele­ments of good saleslet­ters, fol­low­ing the head­line, is the post­script or “P.S.” at the end.

The end of every great sales let­ter should be capped with a strong P.S. We are often told that the P.S. is the sec­ond most read part of a saleslet­ter, because after read­ing the head­line many peo­ple tend to scroll or jump to the bottom.

It’s like the “sec­ond head­line,” so to speak.

This is par­tic­u­larly true when we know that most peo­ple tend to read the head­line or the “Dear Friend” salu­ta­tion, then turn to the clos­ing of the let­ter to see who signed it or who is it from. Partly out of curios­ity. Partly to jus­tify read­ing it in the first place.

Includ­ing a P.S. in your copy may not always be nec­es­sary. I’ve seen some great, proven saleslet­ters that did not have any post­scripts at all. But if you do include one, don’t add it just for the sake of adding one. Make sure it does the job.

In fact, you shouldn’t use a P.S. the way it’s sup­posed to be used…

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I’ve had the plea­sure of meet­ing Rus­sell Brun­son at var­i­ous sem­i­nars. Rus­sell is not only an Inter­net mar­keter, he’s also a bright guy.

And recently, he’s proven my assess­ment to be true.

When he told me I was nom­i­nated as part of his Mar­keter of The Year 2006 Awards, in the copy­writ­ing cat­e­gory, at first I was some­what ret­i­cent. But when I saw the list of those I’m up against, need­less to say, I was stunned.

Nom­i­nees include the likes of Dan Kennedy, Yanik Sil­ver, Armand Morin, Mike Fil­saime, Mark Joyner, Rich Schefren, Perry Mar­shall, Shawn Casey, Joel Comm, Ryan Deiss, and a ton of others!

But here’s Russell’s brilliance.

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Video is said to be Web 2.0’s killer app. But is it video itself? Not really. It’s inter­ac­tiv­ity. Video engages all the senses. Ample split-​​tests show that the more you engage the user’s senses, the greater the response.

When I used to teach pro­fes­sional sell­ing in col­lege, we used a text­book called “Per­sonal Sell­ing: An Inter­ac­tive Approach,” by Ronald Marks, Ph.D.

In it, Dr. Marks makes the case that using audio­vi­sual aids in face-​​to-​​face sales pre­sen­ta­tions can increase a person’s sales effec­tive­ness. (And remem­ber, this book was writ­ten in the 80s, before lap­tops became popular.)

That’s not break­ing news, I admit. But here’s what I’ve found fas­ci­nat­ing. The author states that multimedia-​​generated sales pre­sen­ta­tions — with a mix of text, graph­ics, pho­tos, ani­ma­tion and sound — cap­ture atten­tion and arouse inter­est more effec­tively since they appeal to all the senses.

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