Eugene Schwartz Copywriting Swipe File

I Write With My Ears (by Eugene Schwartz)

This article hails from the pre-politically correct era of exclusive male pronouns.

It’s succinct and still amazingly insightful in 2015 because we face the same problems ad writers of fifty years ago did, namely: “what to say,” “how to say it” and “where and how to start.” The boldings and italics are mine.

“I Write With My Ears”

by Gene Schwartz

Copywriting is the simplest of all possible jobs. It consists solely of turning items into ads, of making the physical verbal, of constructing an emotional holograph of the product so convincing that people will part with their good money to share it. [Read more…] about I Write With My Ears (by Eugene Schwartz)

Persuasion Patterns

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How’d this junk mail writer amass one of the largest modern art collections in America?

Working just 4 hours a day from his oak desk, he sold over a billion dollars worth of products in every conceivable market.

These 8 Persuasion Patterns are keys to understanding how he did it.

Persuasion Pattern #1:
The Try-Before-You-Buy Proposition

There’s nothing subtle about this since it’s the backbone of just about every ad Gene Schwartz wrote.

“Prove it to yourself entirely at our risk.”
“Read it cover to cover entirely at our risk.”
“Read this book from cover to cover. Then decide whether you want to keep it.”

The try-before-you-buy proposition or the risk-free-trial-offer works like a charm in home study course marketing today, just as it did for book advertising decades ago. Other marketers’ vocabulary is worth noting here, like Joe Sugarman’s “satisfaction conviction,” as well as “risk reversal,” popularized by Jay Abraham. They mean essentially the same thing, yet the differences are subtle though important.

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Doctor Reports New “Miracle” Diet Cures Arthritis

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Here’s a Gene Schwartz ad published in 1981 for Giraud W. Campbell’s A Doctor’s Proven New Home Cure for Arthritis.

From the marketer’s vantage point, the arthritis market is an evergreen one and Schwartz’s take on it (and everything) is valuable.

Haven’t seen this one before last week.

The book also gets close to 5 stars on Amazon with 10 reviews.

$50 Million In Sales From This Self-Published Book

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How do you sell $50 million of a single, self-published book?

First, you float an offer.

Then, you wait for the market to to tell you you’ve got a winner.

Once you have that winner, you pull out all the stops and sell it every way you can: direct mail, space, Internet and TV.

That’s exactly what Gene Schwartz did in these pre-Internet days and the result was a $50 million take by the time the offer ran dry.

The book was Dr. Stephen T. Chang’s “The Book of Internal Exercises.”

And the space ad above was condensed from a package that mailed over 100 million times, from the early 1980’s all the way into the 1990’s.

(Click on the image to download the PDF and get a feel for the copy that compelled such astronomical sales.)

Recession Beater #7: The Coming Business Opportunity Explosion

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Almost everyone is interested in making more money.

If you can legitimately show others how to make more money, you’ll never want for money yourself.

This is especially so in recessionary times.

George Haylings slept in his car while pyramiding his classified advertising profits during the Great Depression.

Joe Karbo and Ernest Weckesser wrote breakthrough biz-op ads which ran in the Wall Street Journal at the height of the 1970’s recession. Such ads never appeared in The Journal before. Boardroom launched its business development classic, I-Power, [Read more…] about Recession Beater #7: The Coming Business Opportunity Explosion