Let’s Do The Twist

FAKE COCAINE:
a legal substitute that fools almost everyone!

All that
bullet referred to was a small part of the literature in the report
or whatever it was in and, I'm not exactly sure who was
responding to that particular bullet who would be reading
literature from a magazine like Entrepreneur. Come
to think of it, maybe it was entrepreneurs... only
just those who were doing (or wanting to do) something illegal.

Had I to
do it over, I probably wouldn't have included such a bullet because
I sure don't think it attracted the target audience we were
hoping to sell. But, this tawdry example does illustrate the
pulling power of a single bullet even if it's buried in a
large ad.

I started
this issue with the words "Let's do the twist!" What I
meant by that is, when you

write bullets, you've got to take the facts about the product
you're trying to sell and present them in a way that "teases"
the reader into wanting the full scoop. Now listen, when I say
"twist" I don't mean distort! Your bullets
need to be 100% truthful but you need to
twist the way you write them so the reader gets a teasing
glimpse of a particular benefit for what you're selling which
makes him hungry for the rest of the story.

Writing
bullets is a real art and I don't have a magic wand that will teach you
how to do it. The only way you'll acquire this skill is
through a lot of practice. However, what
I can give you are examples of how
it's done... and... give you those examples in such a way I
bet it will be very illuminating for you. So then, here's
Gary's attempt to give you a few "aha!" experiences on the art
of writing bullets. The way I'm going to do this is to give you a
number of real life examples taken from an ad for a book.
First, I'll show you what it actually says in the book and then
I'll show you the "teaser bullet" written to correspond to
that section of the book.

What it
says in the book:

"Buyers always
ask how long a property has been on the market, and when they find
out the home has been on the market a long time they smell
blood. What's more, many buyers wonder what's wrong with the
property since it hasn't sold yet. They have second thoughts
about bidding on such a place, figuring if nobody else thinks
the property is worth what the seller is asking, why should
they? As a result, the seller can no longer get the kinds of
offers he would have gotten in the past... if your home has
been on the market for a long time, you may want to consider
taking it off the market for a little while. When you put it
back on, you can honestly answer it's been on the market a
short time..."