MarkFord
Justin Goff on the “Chain of Belief”
The first important skill I studied when I began my career in publishing was how to write a sales letter. Back then – in the early ‘80s – there weren’t any expert teachers available. (Today, there are hundreds. Probably thousands.) There were a few great books on brand advertising (Ogilvy on Advertising and Scientific Advertising come to mind), but I wasn’t aware of them. I learned by reading copy, imitating it, and having my work repeatedly torn up by JSN, my marketing-genius-but-nonwriting boss at the time.
My first sales letter made me a millionaire. That gave me the confidence to keep going.
In the mid ‘90s, I began working with BB. He had an entirely different (and more sophisticated) approach to copywriting. I learned from him. And we began what I think was the first school of copywriting in our industry. We spent a year teaching about a dozen smart young people what we knew. In teaching, you often take your learning to another level.
In the late ‘90s, I joined up with former protégés and started AWAI (American Writers & Artists Institute), a business devoted to teaching copywriting to beginners. That, too, was a terrific learning experience. It helped me understand how to explain some complicated concepts clearly, but it also gave me the opportunity to work with some of the best copywriters in the world at that time.
All of this to say that I am still surprised and delighted to be learning new things at this late period of my copywriting career.
Here’s a post from Justin Goff, a copywriting coach whose blog posts are always insightful, based on something he learned from Dan Kennedy, one of the most influential copywriting coaches of our time.
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One of the most profitable copywriting tips I’ve ever learned from Dan Kennedy is called the “chain of belief.” It goes like this… Let’s say you’re selling a course that teaches people how to make money with an ecomm business. And in your sales letter, you have a bunch of promises that if they buy your program, they could make 6-figures a year. That’s a pretty standard promise. However the first step in the “chain of belief” is NOT to convince them that your course could help them do all that…
Your first goal starts much further back. Because before you can convince them that they can make 6-figures with your ecomm course, they have to believe the following… 1. Their current situation isn’t great, and they need a different income source. 2. If they’re going to try a different income source they need to believe that ecomm is the way to go (and not real estate, MLM, or whatever else they’re thinking). 3. And after that, you need to convince them that it’s actually possible to make 6-figures a year (without winning the lottery or inheriting it). All of that stuff comes first in the chain of belief. Because if they don’t believe those three things, then you don’t have a chance at selling them your course. Does that make sense? And here’s the issue – a lot of copywriters skip these steps in the chain of belief. For example, you might assume that your reader knows that it’s possible to make 6-figures a year. That seems pretty normal to you and I. But this would be a big mistake. Cause your average person making $40k a year doesn’t really believe it’s possible to make that much money. He thinks that everyone who makes 6-figures probably hit the lotto, or they had rich grandparents. Seriously. That’s how normal people think. So one of your main jobs is to get your reader to believe it’s possible for a normal person to make that kind of money. And that’s what the “chain of belief” does. It simply shows you what the reader needs to believe in order to buy your product. Cause if you know what they need to believe… Your chance of making that sale goes up tenfold. That’s the power of the “chain of belief.” BTW… big kudos to Dan Kennedy for teaching me this. It’s one of those things I’ve never heard anyone else talk about. But it’s had a big impact on my copy. And made me a lot of money over the years. – Justin
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