My business – in fact every business that sells directly to its customers – is dependent for its success on its ability to (1) attract prospective customers, (2) convert them into paid customers, and (3) optimize the dollars they spend on our products and services in the future.
It’s as simple as that. The challenging part is motivating them to take those three steps. Knowing how to do it is called marketing. And the first rule of marketing is to remember that the only way to effectively get your prospect to do what you want them to do – i.e., become a customer and then become a better and better customer – is to design your entreaties so that they offer significant value to the prospect.
This applies not only to business but to social relationships, too. It is such an obvious truth that you’d think it doesn’t need to be said. And yet, time and again, I find myself subject to a sales pitch for one thing or another by someone who believes that the way to motivate me is to tell me how good the deal will be good for him.
Here’s an example…
At the end of last year, I received a note via a social media platform from a young man that wanted me to employ him as some sort of junior copywriter. There was something about the way he pitched me on the idea that seemed so naïve that my response was to feel kindly towards him – as if he had a mental disability that I could correct with a brief response. Or two. Or three.
His last effort came earlier this month. I smiled when I read it. I hope it will put a smile on your face, as well.
From P, 12/27/25: Hey Mark – If I ask you for a Copywriting job under you, can I get it? You are my teacher’s teacher. I learn from Sean and he from you. So can I get a Copywriting job under your guidance?
My Response: Sorry, P. I don’t have time to provide individual mentoring. If you are learning from Sean or taking a copywriting course from AWAI, you are indirectly learning from me.
From P: But I can get indirect mentoring just working under you. And according to Google, you’re 76. I don’t think I’ll ever get an opportunity to work and learn under you if you don’t accept my proposal now.
From P, 3/6/26: Hey… have you reconsidered?
My Response: No, but I am impressed by your persistence!
From P, 7/26/26: Will I get an opportunity now?
My Response: Here’s one free lesson you should memorize: You can’t persuade people to do anything by telling them how doing what you want them to do will improve your life and implying that they would be lucky for the opportunity to give you some of their time.
From P: Hey, thank you. But I don’t want to persuade you. When I was in school I read your book, and at that time it just jumped over my head. I don’t have anything to persuade you. There must be many even better than me. But the amount of hunger I can bring will be unbeatable. You can test me. But yeah, Mark, thanks for giving me a lesson.
And then…
From P: Hey, you mentioned on a podcast that you’ve taught five copywriters. Maybe I will be the 6th one please?
It’s late at night as I’m writing this, and I don’t have access to the original essays and lessons for AWAI’s copywriting course where I first laid out the marketing rule about the importance of selling to the customer’s needs, not your own. But I found one later piece, in which I referred to it as the “Secret of Transparency,” plus two pieces about the same general idea by other writers (one of whom was a mentee of mine).
Here they are…
1. Mark Morgan Ford, “The Most Powerful Copywriting Secret: Mastering Indirect Leads to Boost Sales and Persuasion” (MarkFord.net, June 2025)
This is my own later restatement of the idea, on my own site. The core claim: “The most important thing you can do to persuade anyone of anything is to begin your conversation with them by scrupulously NOT selling it… The way to write great copy – i.e., to be a great salesperson – is to let the prospects sell themselves.” The piece breaks down the six types of sales leads from Great Leads (the book I wrote with John Forde) and argues that the indirect ones work precisely because they never trigger the reader’s instinct that someone is trying to benefit at their expense.
2. Jason Leister, “Michael Masterson’s Secrets About Writing Copy” (Early to Rise, Dec. 2011)
Leister, a longtime student of mine, works through what he learned from my “Big Idea” and my book The Architecture of Persuasion, where I compare copywriting to seduction: “Seduction isn’t about forcing your wants onto someone else.” He ends on what he takes as the real lesson – that copywriting isn’t fundamentally about writing, or even about selling. “It’s about developing an emotional connection with your reader…. Secure the relationship and you create a situation that makes selling possible.” In other words, the moment you’re visibly selling for your own sake, you’ve broken the relationship that makes the sale possible at all.
3. Paul Hollingshead, “Is Your Marketing Copy Breaking This Cardinal Rule?” (Early to Rise, Feb. 2008)
Hollingshead opens with a line from Gene Schwartz – that the product itself never sells, only what it does for the buyer sells. He walks through a draft he’d reviewed from a competent-but-unremarkable copywriter and diagnoses exactly where it went wrong: The writer spent too much time describing the product – what it is, how it works – instead of the reader’s transformation. He calls this “the cardinal rule of copywriting: Keep the product invisible,” and credits me with naming it the “Secret of Transparency” – the idea that you make the product transparent by putting all the weight on the benefit to the reader, not on the product or the person selling it. As he puts it: “Your prospect doesn’t want another book, manual, or gadget.”
Three Quick Bites
The Cynical Coverage of Conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln
Navy sailors working on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincon in support of Operation Epic Fury, Feb. 28, 2026
Multiple reports describe attempts by sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln to kill themselves by jumping off the side of the ship, which had been deployed at the time for more than 260 days, at least 40 of them in a battle situation. The story went viral on mainstream media, with the implication that it was just one more indication that Trump is in over his head in the Mideast. In this article, a former sailor sets the record straight.
COVID Origin Debate? Dept. of Justice Is Guilty as Charged!
The US Dept. of Justice announced in a press release that David M. Morens, a former senior NIAID official, pleaded guilty to engineering the false narrative that the COVID-19 virus was not manufactured in a bioweapons lab in China. The facts have been piling up for five years now, and yet few people are even interested in learning about what might turn out to be the greatest mass murder since the Holocaust. Read more here.
Did AOC Just Admit That the Woke Movement Went Too Far?
Did you see the clip of AOC dismissing some of the crazy things she was saying in the early 2020s as “Woke 1.0”? That’s a good thing, Freddie deBoer says in a recent essay, because even if the motivation is political, it brings the social justice debate back towards the center. “The absurdities of the peak woke era were indeed many and were indeed corrosive,” he writes. “Some of them were just absurd; some were more actively destructive. As time passes, more and more people are invested in letting the excesses fall into the mists of history.” Read more here.
Economics
Readers Write re “Socialism’s Remarkable Record of Never Working” in the Aug. 18 issue
From JP: “I’m a college student living in Florida. I was born in Cuba and came to the US (legally) when I was 18. My knowledge of Socialism – different from so many people in America – is firsthand. Firsthand. I thought your recent essay about Socialism was great. I hope that most Americans wake up before it’s too late.”
From JS: “I have a theory that Empathy and Compassion play a major role in this issue. You point this out early in your piece when you say, ‘I got the usual pushback from people who think of me as a crusty old reactionary, incapable of opening my heart and mind to new and better ideas.’
“What does your heart or a beautiful idea have to do with Reality? Does it just need to FEEL good to be right? Let’s take just one issue. Health Care for all! What a beautiful idea, and you and I would be 100% for this as we do not want one person to go without medical assistance. BUT! We both know that this idea is impractical and cannot be implemented. The left says, ‘That doesn’t mean it should not be pursued as it’s a great idea.’ And you and I are called out for not having a heart.”
From RB: “Mark, you wrote, ‘Socialism appeals most to people who think they understand how wealth should be distributed but have never had to create it. People who have never signed the front of a check instead of the back.’ Well put! May I quote you on this?”
My Response: Please do!
Worth Considering
Postscript: Playing Games While Sprinting Down the Street
There’s no way the idea for this was not conceived in drunkenness.
