Category Archives for Cool Resources

SFM Ep17: 12 Real-World Ways I’m Increasing Revenue For My New Business

In this episode I’ll take you behind-the-scenes of my new business. I’ll show you the challenges I’m facing, and 12 REAL-WORLD solutions to those challenges (and some exciting results already). This new episode is extremely actionable so make sure you’re taking notes.

Here’s what we’ll cover…Continue reading

Where To Find Successful Ads To Copy

A blog subscriber recently emailed me in response to my article I wrote about learning about direct marketing without ever reading a book.

In that article I talked about how you should be reading and handwriting successful direct response ads, but I never actually told you how to do it!

So now I’m going to.

What I’ve found is the absolute best way to do this is to simply find the top companies in the niche you want to get into, and buy a product from them.

For example I went and bought a bottle of multivitamins from Julian Whitaker from Health & Healing. A few other companies in the health niche are Agora and Healthy Directions.

I know one for the financial niche is The Oxford Club. One from self improvement is Nightengale Conent or Centerpointe (which, if you want to start meditating, is the absolute BEST way to do it).

Once you buy a product, they’ll start sending you direct mail all the time. The best part is, these are multimillion dollar companies spending tens of thousands of dollars on copywriters so what you’re seeing in the mail are usually very powerful.

All you have to do once they start coming is to simply look for duplicates. If you get the same thing twice in a row – it’s a winner.

Another thing you can do is look through the past 6 months or so of a few magazines. If you find an ad that’s been used consistently…it’s working and is a good one to be copied.

A Few Resources To Bookmark

Another good resource is www.HardToFindAds.com, which contains dozens or even hundreds of ads you can copy for free – I think their is a paid membership as well.

Clayton Makepeace also has a swipe file section on his website at .

Ryan Healy is nice enough to give us a few ad copy samples to swipe.

**They all open new windows**

So feel free to head on over to those websites, print out some of the ads, and start rewriting.

Another Option If You Hate Writing

I’ll be honest, I don’t hand-write ads as much as I should. I absolutely hate handwriting. I still do once in awhile, but not nearly as much as I should.

One thing I like doing though is going very slowly through an ad and simply going line by line, trying to figure out WHY that line is in there.

Does it create credibility, proof, trust, etc.?

Is it necessary to lead into another sentence?

Does it provide necessary information you need to know to either expand on a concept they already talked about or set up the framework for a new topic?

Etc. etc.

Or, you could simply type the ads out. But if you do it – again do it line by line. The major factor in handwriting (I believe) that makes it so powerful is that since you’re doing it slowly, you get to think about each and every line. That’s why I do what I just told you.

So if you’re going to type…just type slow.

So those are a bunch of different ways to get started re-writing very successful ads and learn from the masters. If you have any other resources I didn’t mention here, just comment below and let the rest of us benefit from your knowledge!