clayton makepeace - 7 most powerful characteristics of all great sales copy

The 7 Most Powerful Characteristics of ALL Great Sales Copy…

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How to find the best emotional tone for your next promotion

Secrets of web design that generate maximum readership

How to use punctuation to ramp up readership and response

How to beat blank page paralysis every time

And much more!

A while back, Natalie Judd of the Internet Masters Series called to pick my brain about on-line marketing and copywriting. We covered the waterfront together, and I’m betting some of this stuff will put a shekel or two in your pockets in the months ahead… Natalie Judd: Clayton, welcome so much to the Internet Masters Series, and we thank you so much for being here today.

Clayton: It’s my pleasure.

Natalie: Tell me what makes powerful sales copy.

Clayton: Well, most great sales copy has seven features that really distinguish it from run-of-the-mill copy.

The first thing is, great sales copy enters a conversation that your prospect is already having with himself. It begins with headline and the opening copy that addresses something that he’s already thinking about or worried about or afraid of or excited about.

It’s not about you. It’s not about your product. It’s not about what you think. It’s about what he’s interested in and what’s waking him up in the middle of the night.

We have something around here we call “The Forehead-Slap Test.” If I see a headline and I can’t imagine my prospect waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and slapping himself on the forehead and saying, “Oh, my gosh –” and then saying that headline, I know there may be a better way in.

So this conversation he’s having with himself is everything. If you can show him how to make something in his life work faster or easier, to do it cheaper, to do it better, healthier or whatever, now this is something that he’s thinking about because he deals with these things every day. Or if you can eliminate negative emotions that are linked to problems or challenges or obstacles or even just aggravations in his life, you’ve got it.

The second feature of strong copy is that it begins by solving a current problem – not merely

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preventing a future one.

I do a lot of promotions for health products. One of my most exciting products is an oral chelation capsule. It contains EDTA that removes plaque from your arteries.

We have like 1,000 to 1,500 testimonials from people who have lowered their own blood pressure, had doctors cancel open heart surgery, lower their cholesterol and even recovered their sex lives because they improved circulation throughout their bodies with this product.

So what’s our big promise with that product? Should it be, “Never have a heart attack,” or, “How to never have a stroke?” Or would it be stronger to lead with lowering high blood pressure and cholesterol – things that people are dealing with right now that are limiting their life?

If you’re eliminating my high blood pressure right now, today, this is a current problem, I get the benefit immediately. I don’t have to keep taking those blood pressure pills, don’t have to keep paying for the prescriptions. But if, instead, you tell me �0 years from now I won’t have a heart attack if I take this product every day for �0 years, that’s not nearly as strong a motivator.

The third feature is that strong copy goes beyond just talking about the benefits that a product provides to recognizing the dominant resident emotions that the prospect has, either about those benefits or the lack of those benefits in his life.

This is something that we’ve done an awful lot of work with. And we’ve found consistently that when we address those emotions, we get much higher response rates than if we just simply mention a benefit in our copy.

Fourth, great copy fully explores all the benefits the product delivers to the prospect. It leaves nothing out. When I work with young copywriters, one of the first questions they ask me is, “How long do you want this to be?” My answer is, “As long as it takes to explore and dimensionalize every benefit your product delivers and to prove that it delivers those benefits with testimonials and other credibility devices.”

See, what we do is a game of percentages. If one customer in 100 buys our product, typically we can all be very successful. That’s 10 in 1,000. But if by leaving out one benefit, you lose one customer or two customers who otherwise would have bought, you’ve just cut your response rate to nine-tenths of a percent.

If you’re a copywriter, that can get you killed if another copywriter explored those benefits and got the sale.

Fifth, great copy fully dimensionalizes the value of the product.

It’s really important to compare the value of the benefit you deliver to what the problem is costing your prospect.

Take my oral chelation product, for example: A lot of people are paying two or three hundred dollars a month for heart drugs and then they’re getting side effects that cost them another couple of hundred dollars in drugs to treat those side effects. Plus, they’re having to cool their heels in a doctor’s office two or three times a month.


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Well, you know, there’s a real savings there if you can solve this problem for �� cents a day with a simple nutritional supplement. So that comparison was really important in our copy.

Sixth, great sales copy minimizes the price. Last month, for example, I sold a $�5,000.00 product online. I was very careful to minimize that $�5,000.00 price. I broke it down by the number of months that they’ll be receiving the service, the amount of money that the service has made other investors.

By the time you finished reading that copy, it was kind of a no-brainer. You’d have to be a fool not to buy the product because the value of what it delivered was so much greater than the price.

Seventh, great sales copy creates an urgency to buy. It doesn’t do you any good if you absolutely convince the prospect that they need to buy this product if you don’t get the order right now. If you don’t get it immediately, you’re probably never gonna get it.

So including an urgency factor in the sales copy and in your offer is extremely important. And by urgency factor, I mean, for example, something extra they get if they order immediately.

For one client, we added a time clock to their web page and gave prospects ten minutes to make their decision. When the clock reaches zero, that’s it. The offer is over for them.

For another client, we create urgency by giving new customers the top-rated tech stock right now when they order by phone. They can hang up, call their broker, and within minutes, they can own that stock.

Think about ways you can add urgency. Deadlines are great, especially on the web, because you can do a countdown series, counting the days and finally the hours until the offer ends.

Limiting the number of products available under this offer is another way to do it. We do that a lot in the investment market, especially with higher priced products. And, you know, just offering a premium, an extra bonus if they order now.

Natalie: Wow. That’s a really pretty powerful list!

Now, I want to ask you a couple of questions about language, finding the right tone and the use of jargon in sales copy.

Clayton: Well, first of all, as far as tone is concerned, the message that you’re conveying should dictate the tone. I was copy chiefing a very good writer not too long ago. The promotion was about the dangers of Vioxx and how this natural product was a much better way to treat your arthritis.

At the time, some 1�0,000 people had reportedly suffered heart attacks after taking Vioxx. But the copywriter wrote this very scholarly piece with lots of credibility elements, lots of quotes from major organizations and institutions, and gave me the statistics and what the odds were that I’d have a heart attack if I took Vioxx.

So I called the copywriter and I said, “You know what? I want you to rewrite this copy. And I want you to begin with this thought. You just buried your mother because she took Vioxx, a drug

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that the federal government and the pharmaceutical company told you was perfectly safe. I want you to rewrite this copy and make the tone appropriate for the message.”

And on the next draft, the copy had energy out the wazzoo. It was angry. Indignant. Outraged. Because the tone was appropriate for the message, the message had tremendous credibility.

As far as the use of language and jargon in your text, I do a lot of stuff both in the health and in the investment industries. I write under the bylines of doctors and stock market experts – both of whom are famous for their use of jargon.

My rule is that I use just enough jargon to demonstrate that I know what I’m talking about, but not so much that I confuse or disenfranchise a neophyte who’s reading my copy.

Natalie: I think that’s a great rule of thumb and a really good balance. How should copy look on a page? Are there particular rules that you like to follow about the way copy should look or particular fonts or typefaces, sizes, colors, underlined bold, any of those kind of suggestions?

Clayton: Absolutely. The rules are slightly different on the internet than in print. In print, people are used to reading newspapers. Newspapers are typically set in Times Roman face, which is a Serif typeface.

On the web, however, the fact is that the screen you’re looking at is pixilated. It has a lot of little dots on it. And the little flourishes on Serif letters get all messed up and fuzzy-looking.

That’s why most websites use Sans-Serif typefaces. Ariel and Verdana are the two most common faces on the web just because they’re easier for the eye to see.

Then, there’s the contrast question. The human eye likes high contrast – and the highest contrast you can get is black against white. For body copy especially, the text should be black on white.

A lot of people like to get fancy and do maybe a cream background, but anything that you do away from black on white reduces readability. And for goodness sake, try to avoid going with reverse type, which would be a dark background with a lighter type on top. It’s far less readable and many readership studies have documented that.

So on the web, we have Verdana or Arial. We have black type on a white background. I tend to go with 10 or 1� point type in my body text. Verdana’s a bigger face than Arial, so I use 10 point Verdana or 1� point Arial. This is larger than you’ll see on Amazon.com and other websites, but there’s a good reason for that.

We want to reduce eye fatigue, and a lot of our promotional copy is longer and therefore, we go with the much larger typeface than you’re used to seeing on Amazon.com and Yahoo and the other big sites.

Because we use longer copy, we use indented paragraphs and what we call “strings of pearls” to make the page appear more inviting. A string of pearls is where you take a number of benefits that a product offers and you make each one a short three- or four-line indented paragraph that has a graphic device before it, a checkmark, a box, you know, a round bullet, something like that.


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By doing that, you are airing the page out, making it look more inviting.

Remember in the old days, when computer screens were square? I remember my old – my first Macintosh had a little tiny like six inch square screen on it.

Natalie: I think I had that same one. My first computer actually had a green screen.

Clayton: I think all of the monitors back then were square. Today, then tend to be more panoramic. They tend to be a wider format, wider than they are tall. And with that has come web pages and websites that are going 800, 900, 1,000, even 1,�00 pixels in width.

We’ve done surveys and found that almost 100% of the people who read our material have a 1,�00 screen resolution. So we could go that wide if we wanted to with our web pages. But the problem is that the human eye tires going across a long line of text. And so we try to keep, especially in long running copy, the lines of text to �0 to �0 characters roughly.

It’s not hard and fast. Sometimes we’ll go shorter. Sometimes we’ll go slightly longer, but just be sensitive to the length of that line. I’ve got a �� inch monitor in front of me now. If I had to scan all the way across that monitor in order to finish a line of text, my eye would get pretty tired pretty quick.

Natalie: Sure. How about e-mail? Are there any other rules to follow when sending e-mail?

Clayton: We do generally two kinds of e-mails. All of our e-mails are html because that allows us to track our open rates and our click-through rates a little bit more accurately.

But some of our e-mails are contrived to look as though they’re text e-mails. And so those are just basically set up to look like, you know, on your prospect screen like any text e-mail would. But most of the time, we design our e-mails so that they have a border around them.

There’ll be a background around the outside of the e-mail, usually very light. In our case, a blue and white lined screen outside the body of the e-mail. And we do headlines and subhead type faces just like we do in our landing pages in our web pages.

I forgot to mention earlier when we were talking about how the copy should look. We try to break up the running text with subheads every eight, nine or ten paragraphs so the people who scroll quickly through the document will be drawn in by these subheads. And typically those are 1� point bold and in a second color like red.

But as far as e-mails are concerned, it’s really all over the map. If you’re trying to make it look as though you just sat down and typed this up for your customer because – oh, let’s say for urgency sake, some breaking news story on vitamin C, you know, and you wanted to get this to them right away, make it look like a text e-mail.

If trackability isn’t that important to you, for example, if you’re mailing just to your own house file and you really don’t care about tracking open rates, then use a text e-mail.

Natalie: What advice do you have for us about tracking and what are good open rates on various kinds of direct mail and e-mail, sales letters, advertisement?

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Clayton: In direct mail, there are surveys that are done by the Direct Marketing Association that indicate that an average of �0 to 70% of your direct mail gets thrown away unopened. There is no way to know on any given promotion in direct mail what your open rates are unfortunately.

You can guess by looking at the response rates, but you’re not gonna come anywhere near the truth in direct mail. On the internet, the open rates are all over the map. When I send an e-mail to my subscribers of The Total Package, I quite often will get open rates in excess of 70%. These are my friends. We’ve bonded and they read what I send them.

On the other hand, when I do an e-mail to a file that doesn’t know me, I find my open rates can be as low as �0% and sometimes even less.

And of course, the nature of the e-mail has everything to do with it. If an e-mail comes from someone the recipient knows, then the open rate may be higher. If the subject line is strong, intriguing, suggests a benefit, the open rate will be higher. But it really is all over the map.

Natalie: What kinds of things do you suggest that people do for testing and how can people test?

Clayton: On the web?

Natalie: Yes, the web. To get better open rates and to get people on their pages longer.

Clayton: Okay. Wow. That’s a big subject.

Well, a few months ago, a web marketing expert told us we should never use our prospect’s name in a subject line. She said it sent the message that this e-mail was a promotion.

And so I thought, “You know, that does make a lot of sense to me. I think I’ll test it.” So for the next several months, we split our files so that every other recipient had their name in the subject line. “Your new issue of the total package is ready, Fred …” or, “Hey, Fred, have you seen this?” The other half of the file just received unpersonalized subject lines.

And in every case, the personalized subject line outpulled the non-personalized subject line. The differential was not huge, but it was consistent. And so now we tend to use personalization in our subject lines.

When I’m doing e-mails, the body of the e-mail itself will tend to have a headline on it. So after I see the subject line, I open the e-mail and there will be a headline there that will draw me into the copy. I’ve written dozens of issues on headline writing and they’re available at our website in the Archive section.

But it’s basically the same on the web as it is in direct mail. And anything that you read on writing headlines, either having a benefit in the headline or having something topical, entering the conversation prospects having with themselves, etcetera, etcetera, are all very, very important.

Does that answer the question, Natalie?

Natalie: It does. What about punctuation? Do you recommend using proper grammar school


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punctuation that we learned or can we mix it up and break the rules a little bit?

Clayton: Just throw the rules away. Great copy speaks to prospects in a way that they’re used to being spoken to and in the same way that they speak to other people.

So depending on who your market is, you have a very broad range of both word choices and punctuation available to you.

I use punctuation to try to make my copy sound in the prospect’s head the same way it would sound as if I was speaking to him.

What we do is salesmanship in print, right? So I’m writing to my prospect as if I were in the room with him and my word choices, my phraseology, everything is crafted to make him comfortable with me.

One of the best things that you can do is to read your copy aloud. When you’ve got a pretty good draft, just sit in a room by yourself and read it out loud. Imagine that you’re talking to your ideal prospect as you’re reading it.

You’ll find that there are certain areas where words are lost because of lack of emphasis. Or passages that seem a little jumbled. Or places where you stumble over the phrasing. Or sections that just slow the reader down.

Highlight those sections and when you’re done, go back to them and work on them.

Let’s just go through some of the ways that I use punctuation – just some things to think about.

I use commas in my sentences to create pauses. Again, we’re thinking about this printed copy as though it were verbal. A conversation we’re having with our prospect.

I use ellipses in a sentence or a paragraph to air out a longer string of thoughts or progression of thoughts.

I just did an e-mail blast this morning, for example, on China and about how inflation is heating up in China and the effects that would have.

It went something like:

“Yesterday the Chinese government announced that inflation will nearly double …

“Two billion Chinese are now looking for ways to hedge their new-found wealth against inflation …

“Is it any wonder gold prices are soaring?”

I use em-dashes to emphasize a thought within a thought in a sentence. I use colons when I want to really point to the following text in a strong way – like before headlines, in my eyebrow or pre-head copy.

I use caps and italics in text to create emphasis for certain words. In print, you use underlines

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quite often, but on the web, underline means, “This is a link.” And so most people avoid using them on the web. But all cap words and italics serve the same purpose.

I make sure that my use of exclamation points is judicious. I’ll go through my final draft and make sure I don’t end two or three paragraphs in a row with exclamation points. When everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.

In the end, you want your copy to go through variations in pacing and amplitude – where it goes from more intense to less intense so that the next peak can be more dramatic.

Another thing that I do is the comma test. When I see a lot of commas, I take a hard look at the sentence because commas are quite often used to try to repair sentences that were really written upside down.

For example, I could write, “With great bravado, Clayton gave his example.”

Well, that sentence is upside down and that’s why it needed the comma. It should have said, “Clayton gave his example with great bravado.”

Natalie: I see.

Clayton: So that’s a clue that there’s work to be done to make that sentence read more quickly and efficiently.

Natalie: What are some different ways that people can get started? If they’re sitting down and they’re staring at a blank screen or a blank piece of paper, what are some of the ways to get past the blank screen blues?

Clayton: I think the outline’s the best way to do it. It’s really intimidating and daunting when you know that you have to write a fairly long sales copy for a product and you don’t really know where to start.

But again, this is not an exercise in writing. It’s an exercise in selling. And so the first step that I take is I imagine I’m in a room with my prospect and I ask myself, “How would I talk to him about this product? How would I begin the conversation? What would I say next? How would I present the product and the benefits and the offer? How would I do it if there was a live human being sitting there?”

That’s a really good cue to how the copy should flow.

I begin by identifying every product benefit that I can think of. I look at the product. I look at what it does. I look at how it changes people’s lives. I look at how it connects with things that are going on in the world right now or that are in the news right now.

Because if it’s in the news, my prospect’s thinking about it. And if he’s thinking about it, he has feelings about it. So if my product addresses something he’s thinking about, that’s particularly important to me.

The second thing I do then is I ask myself, “How is my prospect likely to feel about each of these


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benefits that my product provides?” And I ask myself, “How does he feel right now about not having those benefits in his life?”

See, what’s happening here is you’re building a matrix. You could even do it on an Excel spreadsheet. In the left column, you have the benefit the product delivers. In the right column, you have the resident emotion that connects with that benefit.

Third, I decide whether I’m going to do a USP or an advertorial approach for my promotion. A USP approach is one where you begin simply by stating the benefit that the product offers.

So if the benefit is that you can have a greener lawn in 30 days, that’s your headline. You just go straight to the direct benefit. USP ads are great when you’re limited in terms of the length of your copy.

Advertorials have much greater readership and generally produce much greater response, but they require longer copy. An advertorial promotion begins with editorial copy on a theme your prospect is thinking about, worried about, excited about, whatever.

You construct your promotion as if it were an editorial report or white paper on that topic. And in my areas, investment and health, there’s a million ways to go with that because there’s always news from one organization or another about the efficacy of some supplement … or China just found out that its inflation rate is gonna almost double in 2006 … or gold prices have taken off … or the federal reserve didn’t raise interest rates yesterday.

The USP lead for a financial newsletter promotion would probably begin by touting the most profitable investment advice in America, then present the track record of the newsletter and say, “Buy this newsletter and you’re gonna double your money next year.”

But the advertorial approach says, “Look, here’s something you’re thinking about that you probably have been wondering where you could get more information about.” And then it goes about establishing our expertise and the value of what we do by giving him practical advice and help that he can use even without buying the product in order to capitalize on this opportunity or solve this problem.

Once you know whether you’re going with a USP or advertorial approach and once you have the outline complete, it’s time to start hanging some meat on the bones. That means research. You’ll identify facts you’ll need to make each point credible – maybe a chart or a picture to drive your point home.

So your outline kind of becomes a research document. You simply drop in the facts or the support material or whatever you need after each sales point so it’ll be there for you when you begin writing.

Now, what you have is a very rough draft. You have a complete sales argument that starts at point A and ends at point B with most, if not all, of the facts that you’ll need in order to complete your copy in the appropriate places.

Now, you don’t have a blank page, do you?

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Natalie: Right.

Clayton: So it’s simply a matter of going through and turning those notes into a conversation that you’re having with your prospect and doing it in the order that you’ve laid out in your outline.

Natalie: I read somewhere that you also said that if a writer’s really struggling with a blank page he could get some external stimulation by going to a bookstore and looking at headlines. Can you talk a little bit about that as well?

Clayton: Sure. I write my headlines last usually, but bookstores are fantastic resources for us. I’ve done a lot of work with Rodale Press. They do Men’s Health and Prevention Magazine. And one day they told me that every month they do 10 to 1� cover panel tests on Prevention.

So if you go to a bookstore in Connecticut, you’re likely to see a different cover on Prevention than you might see just down the street. And certainly you’re likely to see a different cover if you go to Alabama.

They’ve been doing these tests for like �0 years. So when you stand there in front of a magazine rack and look at the fronts of all of those magazines, you’re looking at millions of dollars of research on the hoof. The companies that publish those magazines have spent a fortune and many, many years, in some cases decades, trying to find out what kinds of headlines on their magazine covers produce the greatest sales in the newsstand.

And so a trip to the bookstore can be very informative. I quite often will go and take both a little pocket recorder and a notepad, grab myself a latte, and just stand there and go over the magazine rack very carefully. Then after having done that, I go to the book section.

Now, I’m told that book publishers do much less of this kind of research. But looking, especially at the non-fiction books, and studying their headlines and opening the books and looking at their chapter titles, both of those exercises have yielded a lot of great headline ideas.

Another way if you’re stuck for a headline would be to go to the tabloids – National Enquirer and the Globe. Those guys are past masters at headline writing. Back in ’91, I was asked to write a promotion for Health and Healing, and I did just that. I went to a bookstore after I’d written the copy, and I noticed that a couple of the tabloids used the word forbidden in the headlines on their covers.

And so I went straight home and just wrote “Forbidden Cures: The Cures Doctors, Drug Companies, and the U.S. Medical Industry Don’t Want You To Know About.” We mailed 30 million of those and sold a heck of a lot of subscriptions of Health and Healing.

It’s great. Once you get into this, you’ll always have your feelers out and you’ll be hearing phrases and structures that you can adapt for pretty much any product. Television’s another great place to go, but bookstores are probably the best.

Natalie: I’ve heard that some people keep a swipe file of things that they get in the mail or they keep, for headline ideas. They rip them out as they see one and stick it in a file. Do you recommend doing things like that?


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Clayton: I tell my copy cubs, “Do what works for you.” I have a very visual memory and so I don’t use swipe files. I saw a headline 20 years ago that I still laugh about today.

It was on National Lampoon. There was a picture of this forlorn dog looking at the camera and somebody was holding a gun to his head. The headline was, “Buy this magazine or we shoot the dog.” I can still see that dog’s face.

I tend to have kind of a knack for remembering great phrases and great headlines. But some of my copy cubs, especially the brand new ones, really find swipe files helpful.

The key to me using a swipe file though is to go through and make notes in a separate document on the ideas that you pick up and to study those notes. If you do that, you’re internalizing what you just saw. And your subconscious has an amazing way of feeding that stuff back up to you when you need it.

The term swipe file is a bit unfortunate because too many people are relying on their swipe files rather than on their own creativity to draw new boundaries or to innovate.

And so they tend to end up writing, “They laughed when I sat down to play the piano,” as their headline on pretty much everything they do. “They laughed when I stepped up to the green.” “They laughed when I said I’d cure my own diabetes.”

If I see another “They laughed when …” headline, I think I’ll scream.

So swipe files should be used to study how great copywriters have innovated, how great copywriters have broken the rules rather than seeing them as a new set of rules that we all want to follow or formulas that we want to emulate.

Natalie: What advice do you have for younger copywriters looking to build a successful career today?

Clayton: I think if I was a young copywriter working for an ad agency, the first thing I’d want to do is to get the hell out of that ad agency!

My son-in-law sent me a list of the ten top paying jobs in America yesterday. Copywriter was one of them. It was from one of these employment websites like Monster.com. And it said that copywriters make $9�,000.00 a year on average.

Well, the reason that the average copywriter makes $9�,000.00 a year is because the average copywriter in America is working for a radio station or an ad agency and the philosophy of those organizations is to create creative ads. It’s not to sell their client’s products.

Well, you know, if you’ve ever been to the National Museum of Modern Art, you can throw a glob of mud at the wall and be called creative. So that’s not worth much.

Natalie: Right.

Clayton: What’s worth a lot is learning how to motivate people, how to create action – desire and action in prospects so that they buy your client’s products.

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Because if you can make a client rich, you’re gonna get rich.

Most of those $9�,000 copywriters have never read Caples. They’ve never read Hopkins. They’ve never understood why Ogilvy was so successful.

They don’t understand the most rudimentary things about acquiring or holding human attention or creating desire or moving people to action.

And, of course, the reason for that is the difference between general advertising and direct response. In general advertising, if you run an ad, then everyone says, “Oh, that’s creative,” or they’re all talking about it by the water cooler on Monday morning, you’re a success and you’ll probably get into the advertising hall of fame.

It doesn’t matter if you didn’t sell a single product. Doesn’t matter if your ad actually hurt sales, because nobody knows for sure.

In direct response, on the other hand, two weeks after I do a mailing or �� hours after I do an e-mail blast, I know if I was a genius or an idiot and not only do I know, so does my client.

Natalie: Right.

Clayton: So the number one goal for me would be to get the schooling in how to create sales that’s so readily available today on the web. Of course, I highly recommend my own weekly e-letter. It’s free. But there are others. Bencivenga’s Bullets is outstanding.

Then, read the masters. Read John Caples and Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy and Rosser Reeves.

And then when you’re ready, go out on your own. You can do it part-time at first if you want to. Just take on a local client creating store traffic for him or creating orders for him.

My advice to business owners is to recognize that your sales copy is by far the most important component of success. By a long shot. A better mousetrap will not cause the world to come to your door. Great sales copy will.

Now, maybe you don’t want to be a copywriter for your own products. Maybe you figure that’s something that you can hire somebody else to do. That doesn’t really let you off the hook though.

You’ve got to at least know the difference between strong copy and weak copy, because you’re gonna be asked to put your money behind ad copy that someone else wrote.

If someone comes to you and says, “We want to run this in USA Today tomorrow. It’s gonna cost $�5,000.00,” wouldn’t it be nice to know whether that ad’s going to make you money or not?

Natalie: You bet!

Clayton: You’ve got to understand the difference between a good ad and a bad ad, an ad that’ll generate a measurable response and one that’s likely to go down in flames. And it’s so easy to do because there’s just so much good information out there.

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Natalie: Clayton, I want to thank you so much. This has been a really rich hour for me. I have seven, eight pages of notes here, so I know I’ve taken away a lot and I hope that everyone else has.

Clayton: Anytime, Natalie – I hope it helps.

Copyright © 2009 Clayton Makepeace and The Profit Center – All Rights Reserved www.MakepeaceTotalPackage.com – 800-8�7-09�0 (U.S.) or 8�8-�5�-9�77 (Int’l)