What follows below is the original email, his selected best response, my comments on that response, and my response.

I’m still plugging away at the tiny house (see the previous update post) but I figured I could post this since it was almost already written.

First, Harlan’s email to the list:

From: Harlan Kilstein

To: Louis

Sent: Mon, June 21, 2010 6:25:12 AM

Subject: Blue Balls and NLP – The Email Contest

Sometimes, I like to share a work in progress with you guys.

This is an email I sent out today to my list.

And I thought I’d have a contest.

The best explanation of what I am doing here wins a free copy of my book – Steal This Book. It’s $197 selling price so start your engines.

Just email me your thoughts by Midnight tonight and I’ll pick a winner.

I share your name publicly tomorrow.

Subject Line: Blue Balls. Not What You Expect.

You are receiving this email because you signed up at The Hypnotic Secret.com

The news out of Rome is shocking.

Italian police have seized 70,000 balls of mozzarella cheese because they turned blue when the packages opened.

The police and the agriculture ministry are investigating the world’s largest case of blue balls.

You see, mozzarella cheese is the pride of Italy.

They serve it on everything for pizza to salads. They probably even have mozzarella gelato.

And it it’s turning blue…

Could it be poison?

But Italians were shocked this weekend to discover their “Italian” mozzarella cheese isn’t really mozzarella.

And it isn’t really Italian either.

Real mozzarella cheese in Italy is made from buffalo milk.

This stuff is not.

And it’s not made in Italy either. It’s imported and re-packaged.

It’s shocking when you realize something you trusted isn’t what you expected.

It’s the same way with The Secret.

THEY CHANGED THE LAW OF ATTRACTION TO MAKE IT GO OVER WITH THE PUBLIC.

Now don’t get me wrong, teaching people about the Law of Attraction is great.

Changing it and diluting it is not.

And when you start changing the ingredients without telling anyone.

You don’t get results. You get blue balls of mozzarella.

What Rhoda Bryne did was re-write the Law of Attraction to fit her image.

She took Esther Hicks out and left her on the editing floor.

And she took out all mention of taking action.

You were left with ask, believe, receive.

Whoops!

What happened to take action? It’s not there anymore!

And that’s why so many people don’t get results with The Secret.

So if you want the real deal, take action now.

Click here to get The Hypnotic Secret.

It’s the real deal.

http://thehypnoticsecret.com/secret/index2

Peace,

Harlan

Here’s the response he chose as the winner (posted here):

Harlan, here’s what you’re doing in the great e-mail you sent out today.

1 – Pattern interrupt: the subject line starts with “Blue Balls,” which interrupts the readers’ patterns when the readers are scanning their e-mail in-box. “Blue balls” is a slang phrase relating to sex, and sex grabs the readers’ attention if the readers understand the phrase. Plus, since you are very religious, a subject line starting with a slang phrase relating to sex surprises me much more than it would if the e-mail were coming from, for example, a sports blogger. So the subject line grabs the readers’ attention and forces them to open the e-mail, regardless of how busy they might be.

2 – Humor, to get the readers on your side: you retell the news story about the tainted cheese in a way that makes the story much funnier, because it’s you, not the regular news stories, that refer to the tainted cheese as “blue balls.” So you reward the readers for reading by giving us readers a good laugh.

3 – Making clear the point of your retelling the cheese story: you highlight, in ways the news agencies did not, how the tainted cheese is fake and how, even if it were not tainted, it would still be disappointing, because it says it is made in Italy but was really made in Germany and calls itself mozzarella although it contains no buffalo milk. So you emphasize how much of a forgery the tainted cheese it.

4 – Metaphor: You use the metaphor of the fake cheese to introduce the important way in which Rhonda Byrne’s book and film The Secret changed the Law of Attraction to make her book and film sell more copies than it would if she had told the truth about the Law of Attraction. And because you related The Secret to the fake cheese, which is also tainted, your readers will infer that The Secret is tainted, too, in its own way.

5 – Problem and agitate: You have revealed a key fact: that The Secret is a fake version of the Law of Attraction, and The Secret cannot teach anyone how to succeed with the Law of Attraction. You have revealed a problem that all readers and viewers of The Secret will encounter. Then you have agitated to make those readers and viewers feel cheated and lied to.

5 – Solution: You present the solution, which is YOUR fine product, The Hypnotic Secret.

6 – “Tell them what to do”: You have revealed that what is missing from The Secret is the necessity to take action. Then you tell your readers to practice the Law of Attraction by taking action to get the REAL guide to implementing the Law of Attraction, and that real guide happens to be your product, The Hypnotic Secret.

Although I bought The Hypnotic Secret as soon as I received your first e-mail about it, today’s e-mail about Blue Balls is so good I want to buy The Hypnotic Secret all over again!

Sincerely,

Lee Marcus

The blog post then goes on to recap and tell you to buy more of Harlan’s stuff.

Here are my comments on the winner’s response:

1. Email isn’t a pattern interrupt unless you have it dinging you every time you get one. The classic pattern interrupt is to ask someone if they smell popcorn in the middle of a conversation. The title is a standard curiosity builder. It’s effective but not NLP.
2. Everything I’ve ever heard says to stay away from humor in your copy. Plus, I didn’t see it as terribly funny either. Interest provoking – very much so. Funny – not so much. Maybe I’m just the wrong demographic.
3. Now that I’m rereading it, I’m not sure what the 3rd point is saying. I think it’s just that he told a story. Not NLP.
4. Metaphor, yes. That’s the big one.
5. True, there’s problem and agitation, but that’s not NLP.
6. (Second 5) Yes, there’s a solution but that’s not NLP either.
7. (6) It’s a call to action. Not subtle or elegant at all and not NLP.

Much of the most valuable feedback I’ve received in my life has been in areas of improvement. I included that in my response but found it curious that the winning response read more like a product testimonial.

My response is here:

Harlan,

I got your email. I’ve read it over and here’s what I think you’re doing:

Your headline provokes curiosity but then has a double meaning not evident until you’ve read the email.

The “Not What You Expect” is a mind read because as soon as the person sees blue balls, they’re thinking that can’t be what it would mean in a more commonly used context. The second meaning is the therapeutic metaphor you use. It’s also an embedded suggestion (not quite a command). There’s also a presupposition that they are expecting something which they will be after reading it.

Your first line is a pacing statement. Hopefully they recall being on your list and if not, now they do.

I’m not sure whether your only hyperlinking the “Secret.com” was intentional or not. If so, it might be to foreshadow “The Secret” to which you later refer.

You then use a current event as a therapeutic metaphor. You also leave out a lot of details that are in the BBC article on it such as the fact that the cheese in question comes from Germany and they suspect it’s a non-toxic bacteria but are testing it to make sure. Leaving those details out (deletion) lets the reader assume the worst – that it might be poison as you suggest or that it was artificially manufactured in some third world country.

Through your metaphor, you’re mapping it onto people’s experience with “The Secret”. Blue balls becomes the “fraud” surrounding “The Secret.” This list probably prides themselves in their belief and use of the secret to everything including their gelato. I never came across mozzarella gelato when I lived in Italy and your readers probably suspect no such thing exists too. But that sets a context where they can think their interest in “The Secret” is normal by comparison. And you’ve set a generalized referential index by talking about Italians which are just a more specific “they” which are really “us” and “me.”

You transition to “The Secret” with the line about something you trusted not being what you expected. You do a time pattern starting in present tense “It’s” and “realize” (also a leading statement) while ending in past tense “trusted” and “expected”. The suggestion is that you now realize you no longer trust the old stuff and need a new paradigm (i.e. your product).

The transition applies to both the metaphor and your point with “The Secret.” The reader doesn’t notice the transition though until you come out and say it’s the same thing. You talk about changing it to go over with the public. That allows the reader to sit there and think, “yeah, they didn’t teach it right.” You don’t say that your reader specifically was one of the people that was deceived which would probably offend their intelligence. And even though they can sit there and think they already knew it wasn’t the whole story, they can also realize that they’re now curious about what your take on it is.

For readers who know the background of “The Secret”, you probably lost them a little in next part. First off, you misspelled Rhonda Byrne. You suggest an unsubstantiated ulterior motive (fit her image?). Esther Hicks was actually in the first version of “The Secret” and the real story is more interesting than the version in the email. She wasn’t left on any editing floor. She didn’t feel congruent with the way it was being mass marketed so they created an “extended version” which was exactly the same as the first except they replaced her with a little more footage from one of the other speakers. At least that was all I could find when I researched the subject before. Private opinions are usually different than what can be found online.

I think your closing could be improved. I see the tie-in between the missing ingredient being action and taking action to buy your product. That part works fine. The gap is that if you just revealed what was missing – action – why do they need to buy your product anymore? They can just go take action. Your readers are probably also familiar with Joe Vitale’s work in writing “The Missing Secret” too. Are they now to think that your hypnosis version is better than his? No doubt your differentiate on your landing page but without further investigation, this sounds like a me-too (or rather the more popular – not-me) spin off from “The Secret.”

We all know people buy emotionally but a leap in logic can throw them off course too. Saying action is the missing ingredient so take action and buy my product that will tell you to take action… well, it isn’t a compelling value proposition. If you’ve just told them “The Secret” is right except for taking action then why would they need to spend more money instead of just taking action in their life?

The words you use in your call to action is to tell them it’s the real deal twice and then click the link. If you use the words “click here”, they should be hyperlinked. Otherwise, it should say “click below”.

Overall, good tie to current events, use of curiosity and metaphor. If you make sure the facts you include are accurate and have a stronger call to action, I bet you’ll increase your conversion rates even higher.

Good idea to have a contest for have your readers evaluate your email (and maybe even have a few click through and buy your product or get on that particular list).

Louis

So what do you think? Was I off base offering points for improvement? Did the winning response offer better content?

A couple of customers of my “Be A Hypnotic Writer” Course have let me know about a few broken links and other errors that I’ve gone back and now fixed. I also created a new, one hour delta meditation audio for kicks.

I emailed everyone the updated info. If you didn’t receive an update, let me know and I’ll check the records.

If you’d like to see the new cover art for the course, go here:

http://kunaki.com/Sales.asp?PID=PX00ZTZ1HH

I’ll still be posting here from time to time though less often due to a new project I’m working on. If you’re interested in sustainable living, I encourage you to check it out:

Austin Tiny House

I’d like to add that your ability to connect with an audience is directly related to connect with yourself and your own experience. Here are some examples of what I mean:

Lately I’ve been making plans to build a tiny house similar to what they make at Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. One issue is the plumbing on something that’s more or less off the grid. After reading a book on humanure, I realized our plan as a society is to separate ourselves from our own waste and transport it off to treatment facilities when your yard or garden is where it really ought to go. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the cycle of life.

In the past year or so, I’ve taken to eating more raw food. Rather than vegan, I’ve headed down the raw-paleo path. As a people, we’ve generally separated ourselves from our food supply and production. Most of what we consume comes out of plastic bags and cardboard boxes instead of from the ground or from an animal. I can tell you, I notice a huge difference when I switch over to processed or cooked (dead) food for a meal or two. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the life cycle.

Over the years, I’ve studied violence. As I’ve mentioned, I was an army medic. I’m also now an instructor candidate with Target Focus Training which teaches how to handle violence by creating injuries in the other guy. Through those experiences, I’ve seen how deluded most of us are about life, death and violence. Most people hope the police show up in time if something ever goes terribly wrong. We’ve separated ourselves from the reality that criminals have no problem using violence to get what they want. We see news about more people killed in our various wars. It seems like most people don’t realize none of those people died peacefully in their sleep. We don’t even get to see flag draped caskets anymore. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the life cycle.

Over the last year, I’ve been using running in Vibram Five Finger Shoes. My muscles had to relearn how to run but once I adjusted, I’ve never had another stress injury. Evidently, the vast majority of foot, ankle, knee, etc problems people attribute to running are actually caused by their expensive footwear. If we went barefoot or nearly barefoot, all that goes away. You were made to experience the world through your feet as well. Imagine if you lived your life with your hands in oven mitts all the time. How much sensory input would your hands miss out on? Locking our feet up in allows us to ignore where we’re going and tromp through life totally unaware. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the life cycle.

Steve Pavlina is the number one personal development blog by most any measure. He recently posted on Intimacy and Label-Free Relationships. We’re separating ourselves from really connecting with other people by our use and dependence on labels. I highly recommend his post to you.

All that’s to say, if you want to connect with your audience, connect with yourself first. It’s not about perfection but progress. It’s all about your effectiveness and ability to impact the world around you.

1. The door was opened by Joe.
2. Joe opened the door.
3. Joe kicked open the door.
4. Joe kicked open the door.

He calls the last line irresistible. Perhaps. From an NLP perspective, the idea here is to use kinesthetic language in 1st position. That’s what they call active voice. The rest of the chapter is another example and narrative of him doing this process with a client.

Chapter 25 is about using language tools.

Joe recommends using a thesaurus to find simpler words.

He also recommends using similies. I’m sure you’ll take to that like a duck to water. I seem to remember hearing somewhere not to mix similes though. That would make you as blind as a baby’s behind and smooth as a bat.

Then there are analogies. One of his examples is a chess analogy: “The strategies in this book will teach you how to checkmate the competition!”

And finally we have quotes. It’s good to set quotes apart visually. Your reader’s eyes are drawn to them. And from the quotes pattern in NLP we know that quotes can also give us an implied endorsement or speak for us… say something we wouldn’t or shouldn’t or that needs more credibility than we could give it ourselves.

“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.“

Chapter 23 is how to get inspiration to write. Joe’s advice is to do it and the inspiration will follow. That’s also in line with what all other writers I’ve heard say. Stephen King talks about that in his book “On Writing” too. I think I remember him saying he writes for an hour a day even on holidays. Many copywriters write for an hour or two first thing when they wake up.

How long you write for is another matter. One famous copywriter, Eugene Schwartz is famous for his 33 minute, 33 second writing sessions that he enforced with a stopwatch. Steve Pavlina says it takes him about 15 minutes to get into a flow state and an article could end up taking him 4 uninterrupted hours to complete.

The take away here is to plan your writing time and then just do it.

He uses one example of Robin Williams in the movie, “Good Will Hunting.” At the end of the movie, Williams tells Matt Damon that it’s not his fault. Of course it almost gets him assaulted too but it’s just a movie, right?

Another example that comes to mind is a Derren Brown’s Subway Amnesia trick. You’ll notice it didn’t work every time and once he didn’t really use repetition. The phrase he’s using is an embedded command… “What STOP, thinking about it now…”

Chapter 21 is “The Inner Game Of Hypnotic Writing.” Of course I don’t recall what each chapter is about before I reread it for this review series so I was excited when I saw Joe mentioning the book series on inner game. That’s how I learned to ski- I read “The Inner Game of Skiing”, watched an instructional DVD on it and then rehearsed in my head. The first day I went skiing for real, I managed to make it safely down a blue-black hill.

Inner game topics also relate closely to NLP modeling. In fact, I created a model of direct response copywriting. It’s free to anyone who opts into my mailing list here.

So I’m expecting big things when I start into this chapter. First Joe talks about the critic voice and the master writer voice and tells us to turn off the critic while writing at the beginning. Sure, no problem. I like to think of them as the researcher, writer and editor but critic and master work fine too.

Then he talks about 3 steps to basically do stream of consciousness writing.

1. Set a goal
2. Be aware of the moment
3. Trust what happens

Uh, really? That’s the inner game of hypnotic writing? Writing in trance? I was hoping for more than that. I’m all for stream of consciousness and sometimes do it that way too. Or maybe it’s just that hypnosis sometimes seems haphazard when measured against an NLP model.

Whatever the case, if you want inner game stuff check out my copywriting model. And feel free to write in stream of consciousness too when you get to the writing stage of the process.

I called a number of debt settlement companies and found that they’re basically all doing the exact same thing.

I called 5 of the largest companies and asked them all what their fees were and what made them better or different than the other companies in their industry. I selected these 5 because they have the largest numbers of International Association of Professional Debt Arbitrators.

Most of them charge 15% and a couple charge a monthly fee on top of that.

When asked what they do better, they all pointed to their size and how much debt they’d settled recently. One had stats on customer satisfaction and another said they exclusively used attorneys for negotiations. I’m not sure whether credit card companies care that they’re talking to an attorney or not. A settlement is a settlement and my understanding is they look at the past history of the account, the person’s ability to pay and what kinds of quotas they need settled.

Another company bragged that they were the most expensive and the Mercedes of the debt settlement industry. When pressed, they didn’t have a good answer as to why they were charging more though.

One company even told me they settle 80% of all the consumer debts that get settled. I clarified to make sure he wasn’t meaning they settle for 20 cents on the dollar. No, he meant they settle 80% of the debts. He said they settled $30 million last month. I said I’d just spoken to a company that claimed to have settled $27 million and so $30 million couldn’t possibly be 80%. He didn’t have a response for that.

How do you become the top 5 companies in an exploding industry without a clear competitive advantage? I supposed there’s so much business out there right now that they’re getting by just fine without one.

One of these days some company is going to come up with something that’s going to obliterate the competition once consumers start shopping around. It’s not always going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.

For now, being able to document a high customer satisfaction and be friendly on the phone make you the clear winner.

PS. If you’re looking for debt settlement services, the company that had the high customer satisfaction rating was also the only company to not try hard sales tactics on me. If I were in the market for debt settlement, I’d call Marty at Freedom Debt Relief. His direct line is 1-800-544-7211 x16277.

This may not exactly be a hypnotic writing topic per se but it’s one that every writer wonders about. Just because people read books doesn’t mean you can turn a sales letter into a book no matter how interesting it is. And then there are plenty of catalog sites that sell just fine with a single paragraph.

I’m a fan of stepping back and looking at the big picture. Each sales letter needs to fit into the larger conversation that may be happening through other media than just the single sales letter. If the person has already read a review about your product elsewhere, they may not need a long sales letter. If I spoke to someone over the phone, I may not need anything at all other than an email address to PayPal them some money.

There are two competing philosphies here. There’s “the more you tell, the more you sell,” competing with the idea that many salespeople talk themselves out of too many sales. Oftentimes silence is golden.

So the real answer is to test. And test against nothing too. If you have 10 paragraphs plus a headline, you ought to test not including each of those paragraphs and not having a headline. The only thing you wouldn’t want to test not having is the order link. Everything else is fair game.

Chapter 19 is a reminder to always write to your reader’s insterest rather than your own. Joe encourages us to consider that our readers will be asking, “So what?”, “Who cares?” and “What’s in it for me?” True that.

When I’d used InstantUpgrade on the rest of my blogs, everything had worked out fine. This blog is my oldest one though and after the most recent upgrade, wouldn’t display the “Edit Posts” page nor the “Export” page. Fortunately I could still backup though I probably wouldn’t know what to do with it if everything crashed.

I think the issue with this blog was that I was still using the first version of InstantUpgrade instead of the new beta version. When I deleted the old one, the new one installed just fine. When I upgraded though, I was still on WP 2.8.2 instead of 2.8.4. I tried it again and got the same result. When I tried it a 3rd time, I manually typed in the version I wanted to upgrade it to and everything finally worked.

I’ve reactivated and upgraded all my plugins and everything seems to be working now for the first time in quite a while. That’s a relief. I noticed I’d let some spam build up and most of them were for pharamcueticals. Hmm. I wonder what happened to all the porn spam. Not that I miss it of course. It was just a surprise to see that the industries have shifted their spamming activities.

The tone of any particular piece of writing comes across as clearly as the nose on your face. Many times that I read a CV that has been written by someone who is fearful, I can tell immediately. The tone of writing comes across very quickly and turns off the reader so quickly that the CV gets rejected almost immediately even though nothing else is actually wrong with the document

You cannot help the way you feel about an event that is going on in your life. Feelings of desperation, despair, loneliness, etc. find a way of getting in to your subconscious mind and this definitely transmits through to the things you say and write about. One of the first things to do to resolve this issue is to understand it in the first place. Once you understand that your feelings definitely transmit into writing, you can start to do something about it

Just the simple fact of understanding that your feelings affect the way you come across in writing can help you get the results that you desire from your writing. For example, if you are at your best first thing in the morning, clearly it makes sense to write then. We all have some degree of flexibility in our schedule and choosing to write at the time when we are at our best and perhaps just planning when we are not so good

Feeling great about yourself is bond to come over in your writing. When you feel the most positive, drop everything (if that is possible for you) and get down to writing that important sales letter, job application, resume, etc. Be aware of your feelings and moods and monitor your writing for positivity. Get someone else to read through your work and make sure that you are projecting the message that you are trying to achieve

Never write when you are feeling tired. If you want to be sure to turn off your reader, make sure you write when tired. You will end up using language that turns the reader off, not on and you may as well not bother in the first place.

The best writers in the world put something of themselves into their writing. They are not scared to give everything of themselves and they connect with their audience as a result. Emotion, particularly strong emotion makes a massive difference for us- if you want to be sure that you connect with your reader, you have to take a little risk sometimes.

Taking risks in a positive way with your writing will produce incredible results. If you cannot connect with your reader, you might as well not bother. Selling yourself through an important document like a CV is so vital to the success of your life that you need to be sure that your language connects with the reader in a positive, emotionally captivating way