This book would not have been possible if it weren’t for the valuable lessons I learned from my mentor and friend, Mark Joyner. I owe a debt of gratitude to him for more things than I could possibly sum up here.
Mark was the first person I had ever seen use the editorial style of direct-response copywriting online. His approach to copywriting, where he wrapped his sales pitch in the cushions of an editorial piece, has become the copywriting model that I employ almost exclusively. It was Mark who taught me that writing sales copy for the web is distinctly different from writing sales copy for the offline (brick-and-mortar) world. Mark also taught me the significance of the prospect’s frame of mind when it comes to selling (and it became the basis of my book Frame-of-Mind Marketing: How to Convert Your Online Prospects into Customers). Mark also introduced me to many of the psychological devices that I use in writing web copy, which have produced the signature model of web copywriting with which I’m identified today.
• The Zeigarnik effect. Although this principle has become widely used among marketers in recent years, Mark was the pioneer at successfully applying it to web copy and Internet marketing—along with the “linear path” methodology, which is part of his “Source of the Nile” theory.
• Cognitive dissonance. To my knowledge, this concept had never been mentioned in a marketing book prior to Mark’s inclusion of it in his marketing course titled 1001 Killer Internet Marketing Tactics. Although other marketers may have previously used the cognitive dissonance technique, as well as the Zeigarnik effect, no one has ever identified the tandem concepts in relation to business and marketing or established their scientific validity the way Mark has.
Finally, the bulk of the e-mail strategies I discuss in Chapter 4 are owed in no small part to the research spearheaded by Mark at Aesop. For these reasons and more, I consider him the honorary coauthor of this book.
My goal is to bring what I’ve learned to you.
Maria Veloso
January 2013