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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A rapid stream ran by the writer’s boyhood home. The stream turned a wooden wheel and the wheel ran a mill. Under that primitive method, all but a fraction of the streams potentiality went to waste.

Then someone applied scientific methods to that stream — put in a turbine and dynamos. Now, with no more water, no more power, it runs a large manufacturing plant.

We think of that stream when we see wasted advertising power. And we see it everywhere — hundreds of examples. Enormous potentialities — millions of circulation — used to turn a mill wheel. While others use that same power with manifold effect.

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My wife and I are shopping for a new home. We’re quite excited as one house has caught our eye, and we’re making an offer on it as I type this.

With the excitement comes a bit of trepidation, however, since we know we’ll have to start packing, making moving preparations and, of course, go furniture shopping in order to fill some of the “extra space.” (Our new home is double the size of our current one.)

This reminds of the last time I went shopping for furniture when I bought my previous house. Why? Because something strange occurred that reminded me of the power of applying pressure in copywriting.

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Gary: I want you to imagine that an ad was written by me. I mean it was just a brilliant ad… a brilliant headline… a brilliant copy. It just flowed, etc. and it was about knitting machines.

Now, I am guessing that most of the people on this call do not knit very often unless Rosie Greer is on the call. I do not think you knit very often and it would not make any difference how much skill I used to write that letter but let’s take another scenario.

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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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