In the good old west, the good guys won and the bad… died, often at the hands of fearless upholders of goodness and virtue like John Wayne in True Grit.
Ah, if only all of life was that simple today.
Now it seems that evil is good and evil…has become good.
Even here in the UK to be ‘good’ in the eyes of many teenage gang mates means you have to have committed some degree of mischief to pass into the ranks of the admired, such as shooting someone (London and Manchester have gone crazy lately), or at least robbing or physically attacking someone.
Why is everything backwards? It seems that everywhere we look now, that’s the way it is…
What I Know and Remember About Baseball: Don’t Throw Like a Girl
It’s good to elope with someone else’s wife.
It’s good to rip your bumps off.
It’s good to cheat on your taxes.
It’s good to cheat on exams.
It’s good to sneak home early on Fridays.
And much more besides…
There is also an insidious new way of cheating now being seen in copywriting all over the net. It is important that business owners are aware of how it works.
This article came about after discussing with a friend how one of their clients had hired a copywriter for a natural health product and after a wait of almost three months (the full copy was not yet ready), the headline they were finally presented with read as follows…
“They laughed when I said I was going to try XYZ but when…”
You can guess the rest. I don’t know about you, but I think I would have been pretty upset with that kind of acting.
Granted, the copywriter just took a title from a classic letter from a long time ago (at a time when it ran like a gang bang), but I’m not all that concerned about that kind of copy, even though the client would have been when he saw how poorly your sales letter performed.
No, the type of copy I’m talking about here is incredibly blatant…
To turn this ‘bad’ into good and make it more palatable, it is now sometimes called ‘Shaping’ and it works that way. You put your sweaty palms on a copy of a current sales letter control (the control is simply the current ‘champion’ who goes out and makes more money than everyone else) and ‘Models’ how it’s written…
You model the headline.
You model the cover.
You model the body.
You model the offer.
You model the closure.
You model the bonus.
You basically stick it under the tracing paper and you get…a carbon copy. Actually, true modeling as used by aspiring copywriters doesn’t mean that. It’s really supposed to be a way of getting into the minds of great copywriters through something like the process of osmosis. The form, structure, and processes used to write good copy begin to see into your being in an almost subliminal way. In a way, copywriters have been using this ‘good form of modeling’ for years, hand-copying great sales newsletters, for example, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But here’s the thing…
Instead of using ‘modelling’ as an apprentice would to learn from a master, these people copy large swaths of sales newsletters that have produced stellar results in the past, to replicate and use in different markets.
Cards that have made those who used them millions are being stolen by writers who hope that by passing them off as their own work to unsuspecting business owners in different sectors of the industry, their ‘magic’ will rub off on them too. The hope is that the new market hasn’t seen your ‘modelled’ sales letters before, and therefore doesn’t suspect that the work has been brutally ripped off.
These writers want as little as possible to be changed from the original letter; they are terrified that doing so might weaken the sales power of the control letter. The slightest form of cosmetic ‘disguise’ change is applied to ensure that the original lurks just below the surface, with all its drawing power intact.
Here are a couple of thoughts on what I just told you…
If the original business owner paid a fair amount of money (in some cases over $25,000) to an A-list copywriter for a high-quality sales letter, should someone else get it for free, tailor it a bit, and get paid big bucks to pass it off to an unsuspecting client as their own work?
Is it right that the industry is being infiltrated with a new breed of writer who just swipe and copy their way to the top of the tree and mar the reputation of copywriting as a whole?
How would you feel if you, as a writer, had agonized over a copy for weeks that was later stolen and ‘adapted’ for another niche and received nothing? Also, imagine these ‘modelling’ writers and then lapping up the recognition and fees that should have gone to you as a legitimate original author?
Here’s what legendary copywriter Gene Schwartz has to say about this exact process in his groundbreaking work “Breakthrough Advertising.” Discussing what he calls “The Three Levels of Creativity,” he says he…
“The first, the shallowest, the most widespread and ineffective, is the Word Substitution Technique. Here the copywriter consults a list of tried and true headlines. Then he extracts the original product name and replaces it with his own… Many copywriters get old, tired or afraid. They stop looking for the unique solution to every problem. From this moment on, they start copying instead of creating… But it won’t work. binet mediocrity. The real copywriter must argue With success, you have to top it every time you’re faced with a new product.”
A sincere Amen, Gene, I think!
If you are wondering whether or not this practice actually occurs, I have solid evidence. Here in my office I have a DVD of a well-known international copywriter who boasts at a recent seminar that he regularly ‘swipes’ and models copies of hot checks to produce letters for which he then charges new clients upwards of $10,000. It is a copywriting that the client assumes is 100% original… but it is not.
John Carlton’s letters have been torn up like this (one of the boasts at the seminar) – Imagine the money John Carlton’s clients paid for him to write letters? If you know anything about John Carlton and his ‘dig deep’ philosophy, then you know that he goes the extra mile to produce copy above the B-list copywriters, which is why he gets paid so much by clients.
Is it correct that his cards are drawn, ‘adapted’ and then, in a sense, ‘sold’?
Trust me, it’s a surprise of a seminar. Visit me and you can see for yourself, or send me an email and I’ll tell you where to get it in private.
You might think it’s okay to pull a copy like this as long as the modeled copy works and the client is happy with the results. With that being the case, why didn’t the customer grab a copy of a control and save $10000.00 or more just by customizing it themselves?
Surely that would be cheating or even stealing, right?
Or has evil suddenly mutated to be good again?
Bluntly speaking, writing a new master copy is agony. It literally takes blood, sweat, and tears. Agony, but when it’s done there’s nothing like it.
That’s why John Carlton rocks.
That’s why Clayton Makepeace and Gary Bencivenga and all the greats are great, because they are UNIQUE and time and time again they create an ORIGINAL copy. They sweat and push until it’s time for EUREEKA and they don’t give up until she does.
So, in closing, ask yourself what you want in your copywriter.
Do you want someone who cheats (even if they have a big name) or… someone who sweats blood to give you the freshest, freshest, most up-to-date copy of the block that throws like crazy, and that no one else has because it’s 100% original?
It’s a noon shootout between the true value versus the short cut copy traders that the net seems to be deluging into these days.
Who do you want to win?