Sinister Secrets of an Ex Million-Dollar Copywriter – Part 3

I wish the reason for the delay in updates was sexier.  Maybe we can pretend I was just trying some of that guru “scarcity” mojo, right?

The mundane truth: after a week of rain and flooding and an enjoyably lengthy visit with the in-laws in Illinois, I’m finally back and feeling up to continuing this series.

The problem is that I still consider this to be “leisure” writing when I really need to change that whole mentality, don’t I?  Shame on me.

Anyways…

In service of becoming a better copywriter and marketer, I’ve been discussing the informational currency we call “SECRETS” – WHY we love to discover them, and WHAT makes them so valuable to us in the first place.

Hopefully, Part 1 and Part 2 have piqued your interest in creating your own secrets and getting people to pay you cash to reveal them.  (Note: You should probably read those articles before this one, because I’m going to pick right up where I left off.)

Last time in Part 2, I discussed the first way I know that people place value in secrets:

1. A valuable secret represents a hidden “truth” while implying that reality as we know it is somehow inaccurate or incomplete.

(For a complete discussion of this factor, see Part 2.)

Now, I repeat that first factor here, because the second one we’ll discuss today ties directly into it.

2. The larger the number of people affected by the belief of the current “lie”, the more valuable the secret “truth” becomes.

To continue using the examples we used in Part 2, a secret commuter shortcut that can save you 5 minutes a day has a very limited value because it only is of interest to the people who drive that particular route to work.

Compare that to an old favorite of the information marketing industry: an incredible money-making secret that can turn bums into billionaires has a drastically higher value than the time-saving shortcut.

So many people dream that such a thing would be possible (no matter how much evidence exists otherwise).  And because of that, so many more lives would change if such a secret were revealed.

Generally speaking, the more people who are affected, the higher the value of any given piece of secret information.

Note: There are exceptions – there are certain kinds of secrets that can be very valuable even though they affect only one person.  Blackmail is one way you can profit from that kind of secret.   (That’s a joke, y’all.)

But generally speaking, in the business of information marketing, the most profit comes from secrets that have mass appeal.

The secrets of making money, health and beauty, losing weight… etc.

You’ll notice that these are things that people are ENVIOUS and COVETOUS about.  The poor, overweight, and ugly CANNOT escape the rich, trim, and beautiful.  We’re surrounded by them in the media that saturates modern life.

Even though by definition, there are many more “average” folks than the “elite”, the “elite” are so much more heavily represented as the standard.  This creates a very strange effect.

The average Joe and Jane begin to assume that since they are bombarded by examples of richer, fitter, prettier and happier people, that they are forced to face a conclusion.

Average people must come to grips with the fact that they simply are not as good as the people they see in magazines and on television, and they NEVER WILL BE.

Harsh, right?  But it’s okay because even though people are forced to FACE this every day, we all quickly submit to a much more comfortable delusion.

We lie to ourselves and tell us that since those TV idols can’t actually be BETTER than us, we choose to believe that they get what they get by luck, or because they simply know some SECRET at navigating life that we don’t.

And that belief is OH so seductive.  And canny marketers have used it for hundreds of years.  It’s an effective tool, because quite literally, it works like a wedge that is driven deeper into all of us through repeated consistent exposure.

This belief in the “secrets of the successful” widens the gulf between US and THEM wider and wider, leaving a gulf that all us lesser-thans and the unenlightened will throw their money into again and again.

Another thing to note is that when I say that this factor makes a secret valuable, I mean to us as marketers – a secret with a mass effect will be more valuable than one that can only affect a few.

But to the person who believes in the secret, it’s a much more intimate experience.  A consumer isn’t going to buy into a secret diet solution just because it will help so many lose weight.

They only care about themselves, but most people have such sheltered internal lives that they experience these emotions in isolation.  Let me try and explain what I mean.

Think of how many products have testimonials from people who “have tried everything else but nothing else worked!”

Consider that such a statement was designed by marketers to appeal to the most people possible.  Now think about what it would mean if EVERYONE actually FEELS that way.  Does that mean NOTHING is ever working as advertised?

I think this reveals again the very powerful delusion that the experience of others is somehow different than our own.  “Someone” can subtly become “everyone” in our own minds.  As in, “someone is skinner than me and happy, therefore everyone who is skinnier than me is happier than me.”

That by itself is a dangerous idea, but what’s even worse is that it tends to isolate us even more and make us believe our problems are our own and much less common than they really are.

It sounds really, really dumb when you state it as plainly as I have here, but we ALL fall victim to these unconscious generalizations in our own lives.

One of the reasons we think secrets are valuable at all is because we believe that there IS ANY SECRET AT ALL.  Today’s exercise is to think about that.  Do you believe that there are these kinds of secrets that separate the haves and have-nots of the world?

Do you believe that if everyone had identical information, we’d ALL be rich and sexy?  Now whether you believe there is or not, consider what is actually valuable at all – the hypothetical “secret” information, or the BELIEF in such a thing?

Learn how to use that tool effectively – that BELIEF in the POWER of SECRETS – and you can sell anything to anyone.

Seriously.

The truth is, you can stand on a soapbox and say “I too was a poor fat idiot just like you, but then I learned THE SECRET!”

Tons of people who hear you will think “Finally!  Someone who knows how I PRIVATELY FEEL INSIDE!  I knew it wasn’t ME!  I must know this SECRET!”

But the truth is, that crowd is full of poor fat idiots, and every single one if them thinks they are a unique snowflake instead of just one iota in a blizzard of poor fat idiots.

The only “secret” the poor fat idiot on the soapbox really knows is that the rest of them sure love to know a secret.  It may not change any lives, but it does make the odd clever chimpanzee a living.

That’s it for this time.  I went a little off track there, but I’ll try to bring it back. 

I have one more of these factors that I’ve discovered to create valuable secrets, and we’ll discuss that one in the next (and hopefully last) article in this already lengthy series.

Until next time,
Colin Theriot

P.S. I know that I did get a little… harsh in this article, but I did say these were “SINISTER” secrets.  It can be uncomfortable to think about some of this stuff.

But believe me when I tell you that good copywriting is very VERY much about understanding and taking advantage of WEAKNESS inherent in the human mind.

That doesn’t mean marketing is evil.  If you deliver a good product that leaves better than you found them, you should sleep well at night no matter how manipulative you’ve been.

For those of you who don’t have such problems, I’ll say that your customers don’t actually care about being made BETTER by your secrets.  They just want to be SATISFIED, and satisfaction is a belief you can manipulate just as easily as you can create “secrets” from nothing.

But that’s an article for another time.

P.P.S. If you hated this article, please leave a comment.  Try and explain why.