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okay so say you have a promo you want to mark it up and you want to actually get something out of active reading i actually get a lot of people asking me like how do you markup promos how do you learn something from marketing on promos what is active or close reading i'm going to tell you first thing you want to do is either read on a pdf or some sort of surface that allows you to make comments or notes things that allow you to engage with the text i personally prefer printing out promos and writing with a pen the first thing that you want to do and which is actually probably the last thing that you're going to end up doing as you're marking up a promo is you want to reverse engineer what the actual ordinary idea of a promo is you want to look for whatever the big idea of a promo is the big promise the big claim the argument the emotionally resonant argument that the promo is trying to make then you want to try to find out what the original like actual real investment thesis or underlying idea of the promo is so for example if you are looking at a promo and the big idea is about claiming what are called freedom checks you want to read the promo and you want to note down what the big idea is at the very top and you want to write down the original idea which is something like you can get dividend payments from master limited partnerships or other dividend-paying royalty stocks the second thing that you want to do is you want to identify the lead type there's a book called great leads written by michael masterson and john ford highly recommend that you read that this notion of the lead type is also very attached to the customer awareness spectrum and i'll have another lesson about each individual lead type as well because you should know all these more or less like the back of your hand but for now here are what the different lead types are there are story leads secret leads benefit or promise leads proclamation leads problem solution leads and direct offer driven or invitation leads every single one of those has different structures and different tropes that they follow so it's important when you're reading a promo to understand what kind of lead it is so that you can understand how this promo is structured differently or the same as other promos that you've read the third thing that you want to be looking for is any coupling between claims and proof so for example if a promo says water is wet you want to look for some sort of corresponding piece of evidence or copy that corroborates that claim major kinds of proof that you'll often see in copy is social proof which typically comes in the form of testimonials or endorsements you'll have academic proof that comes from scholarly sources academic journals big institutional reports things of that nature you'll have mainstream media proof you know stuff that comes from newspapers and television broadcasts you'll have celebrity proof or examples of famous people or people out in the public who have done what is being promised in the sales letter itself then you can have historical proof stuff that comes from books analogies to things that have happened in the past and then you have a type of proof that really is more or less logical deduction an if this then that or this happened because x y and z reasons it's just a corroboration of a claim that kind of proof is typically useful when it comes to proving an idea that doesn't have any sort of corroborating evidence out there in the world like for example your typical syllogisms like all bachelors are single because of the definition of word bachelor the fourth thing that you want to be looking for are what are called dimensionalizations now dimensionalization is one of the most important things that any copywriter can learn or know and it's important in any sort of sales package for dimensionalization to take place dimensionalization really just means finding some way to reframe or re-articulate or drive home a point that a piece of copy is trying to make for example if you have a piece of proof that shows somebody turning a hundred dollars into a thousand dollars it would make sense to dimensionalize that by saying that this person has 10x their money and you can further dimensionalize that by showing that the same result would have turned a thousand dollars into ten thousand dollars and then you can take that and dimensionalize that a step further by saying what you could buy or what you could accomplish with that sort of money in your life the copywriter david deutsch says that there are nine kinds of dimensionalization there's emotion where you drive home any feelings of love or grief or sadness or greed or anger or fear there's personality dimensionalization where the writer or guru of the copy emphasizes how they feel about a particular point there's a mentalization involving credibility or believability ways of driving points home that corroborate or emphasize the believability of a point there's sensory dimensionalization stuff involving you know sense of sight smell touch things like that there's dimensionalization that emphasizes interest or fascination or curiosity you can dimensionalize a point by bringing in some news article or something that's out there in the world that has just happened there's numerical dimensionalization which is the example that i just gave turning percentages into dollar amounts or turning dollar amounts into percentages but another way to numerically dimensionalize is to turn some figure into something more comprehensible for example if you see a geological survey that identifies several billion barrels of oil in a particular basin you just take that number of barrels multiply it by the current dollar value of a barrel of oil and all of a sudden you have a numerical value attached to that quantity one of the examples that david deutsch likes to give is that there's 2 353 people who die every single day from heart disease which is the equivalent of five 747 jumbo jets crashing into the ocean every day another way to dimensionalize is to reframe or to change perspective of what you're talking about like for example if you're selling a beauty cream you can say something like your friends will accuse you of having a facelift and another way to dimensionalize is to come up with some sort of historical analogy or to come up with some sort of event in history that you can compare what you're talking about too for example if you're talking about something that financial industry somebody cornering the market for example you can compare it to the onion king who cornered the market in onions and it's not since the onion king cornered the market in onions that somebody has so dramatically affected the options market in america by the way that's a real story and it's one of the reasons why futures traders are banned from trading futures on onions in particular and practically no other commodity so that's dimensionalization it's important to pay attention to how copy dimensionalizes things because you want to internalize all the different patterns and structures and different ways of dimensionalizing something so that you can apply that to your own work there's no point in copy that should not be dimensionalized or broken down or driven home in some way you want to make sure that what you're saying is communicated to the reader effectively and reading a marking of copy is one way of learning how to do that the other thing that you want to pay attention to are pivot points or places where we moved on to a different section of the copy in another video i'm going to break down the different sections of copy like the ingredients that go into a sales letter but really the easiest way to do this is to look for the subheads and then try to understand what that section following that subhead does in the context of the larger sales letter like for example is it part of the lead is it the credibility section is it a proof section is it a section that is designed to create an enemy is it a section that explains a mechanism or a catalyst is it the pivot to the offer is it a summary of the offer is it a close these are all things that you want to mark up so you can see very clearly how a piece of copy transitions from one section to another the sixth thing that you want to pay attention to when you're marking up copy is the offer a good offer is one that is always framed or articulated to the reader as being better than others an offer always needs to appear irresistible or to have desirable benefits that are articulated for a reader and an offer needs to be effectively a no-brainer for the reader and so what you want to do when you're reading the offer section which is typically the latter half or the last 15 pages of a sales letter you want to be looking for what the copy is doing to make you feel those three things in the financial space the offers typically involve a lead report a few bonus reports the newsletter itself but it can also include a number of other things like for example a text messaging service to alert you of new trades or a money clip to hold all the money that you're going to make from using the service effectively there's all sorts of creative ways to build an offer we're going to have a lesson on building offers sometime in the future and so it's important for you to look at the latter half of sales letters and understand what is it that makes this offer strong and to write it down in the sales letter that you're annotating another thing that you want to note when you're reviewing copy is any design choices that have been made by the copywriter or by the designer like for example are the charts clear do they communicate or evoke an emotion is the promo using a specific color palette to affect certain emotional responses was there anything that you found distracting or attractive or compelling keep in mind that in direct response ugly is typically better than beautiful ugly is more eye-catching and more attention-grabbing and we are in both the idea and attention business the big tendency in graphic design and art is to make design invisible to make any designed element seem very frictionless but direct response is not that way for that reason i highly recommend everybody start getting used to using comic sans font and one of the other things that you want to note down if you can if you have access to this information is data about how this promo was marketed or how it performed or what it did in the world what traffic drivers led you to that particular promo what the order form looks like is it on the page is it on the next page behind the fold you effectively want to understand the context in which this particular promo that you're reading was delivered unto you you can't always do that but if you can get a hold of that information i highly recommend you take note of it and that's it that's how you annotate and closely read a piece of sales copy those are all the things that you want to pay attention to as you're going through a promo and all the things that you want to be marking up along the way so let's get started [Applause] oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you