The
other day a clerk asked me what wonderful thing happened that
day. Isn't that the best opening line?
I told
him I was proud of some writing I had done that day. He
said, "When your book becomes a bestseller will you give me
$5.00?"
"Sure,"
I said. "Then you will have to buy my book. And, are you going to wait
until it’s a bestseller?"
Sorry dear
readers that I can't offer you a chance to win a million dollars, as magazines do, if you buy my
book, Don’t Tell Mommy, but Ed Mahan isn't behind The
Publishers Clearinghouse anymore. And, rats, I never won't their sweepstakes
either.
Have you ever read through, glanced at, or skipped
to the last page of one of those get-rich-quick schemes prevalent on the
Internet?
Make $8,000 a week they say. A Million a year.
Okay, their hype looks good. They have testimonials,
bank receipts, a professional-looking website. You read, you scroll and scroll,
and read, and read. Heavens, their copy goes on forever. “People do not want a
lot of copy,” say marketing experts. “People
do not like to read large blocks of print,” say the ad people. Yet these people
are long-winded, and it must work for they are still on the Internet. Is there
some reasoning that if there are many, many, many words the product has value?
Finally at long last you come to the bottom page.
Maybe the price is there, maybe not. Maybe you will get some CDs, or a
download, maybe not.
Do any of these sites actually tell you HOW-TO earn
all that money? Or are they trying to get you to send out more of those ads so
they can rake in the $29.99 or $299.00, or whatever, and then they tell you
how-to send out more ads like the one you just read.
Just wondering…
I’m old school. I believe in selling the steak
rather than the sizzle.
This was before your time, but there was a person on
the radio, and later on television, named Arthur Godfrey who had a reputation for
promoting only ads that he believed in, and it worked. People trusted him and
bought the products he endorsed. (He endorsed
cigarettes until convinced they caused cancer, he then joined the anti-cigarette campaign.)
As you can see I’m not a marketing person. The trouble
is if people don’t know your product is available they can’t buy it.
Ah, there’s the rub.
P.S. A perfect copy, but not the real thing. This looks like Bear and Obi Kitty Kenobi when Obi was a kitten.
