What you get:
"Keep at it until they give in" â Communicate more than competitors and win by persistence.
"Salesmanship in Print" â Is your ad actually selling, or just pleasing your ego?
"How Long is Too Long?" â Prospects will read your copy as long as it's interesting â not one second longer.
"Try an Editorial Style" â Boost response dramatically by making ads look like editorial content.
"Never Sell to a Stranger" â Focus on warm prospects already knocking at your door.
"Bribery Seldom Fails" â How a smart incentive can hijack attention and close sales faster.
"Don't Be Afraid to Get Emotional" â Marketing battles are won with hearts first, minds second.
"Write from You to Me" â Personal, one-to-one communication beats generic marketing every time.
"What's In It For Me?" â Brutal truth: customers don't care about you â only about themselves.
"The Obvious is Always Overlooked" â Why forgetting the basics can quietly kill your marketing.
"Tempted to Change? Resist it" â Why new ideas must be tested ruthlessly before replacing old winners.
"Members Only â Be Exclusive" â How creating a sense of privilege makes people desperate to buy.
"The X-Factor: Words That Paint Pictures" â Why vivid, sensory language multiplies persuasion power.
"Times Change. People Donât." â Why human nature is your most reliable marketing secret weapon.
"Itâs Not Creative If It Doesnât Sell" â The brutal truth ignored by most ad agencies.
"Don't Talk. Act." â 51 Ideas are worthless if you don't implement even one.
"The Three Graces of Direct Marketing" â without these, campaigns fail.
"Why long-term success beats fast money every time" â even when budgets are tight.
"How response devices like coupons or phone numbers boost image and trust" â not just sales.
"Why creativity that doesnât sell is a dangerous, expensive mistake."
"The secrets of successful mail order â and how they apply even online."
"The shocking truth: most marketers don't understand their own customers."
"How small businesses can outsell huge competitors by thinking smarter."
"Why most âbrand-buildingâ is a costly delusion."
"How failing fast and testing wisely made me a millionaire."
"Why databases are more important than your brand name."
"The single question that can predict whether your marketing will succeed."
"Avoid these three fatal errors almost every new direct marketer makes."
"How one man sold thousands of shrunken heads â and why his lessons still matter."
"From kitchen table to empire: the unexpected truth about direct marketing success."
"Why expensive creative awards often correlate with terrible business results."
What will I get when I sign up?
Module 1 - Understanding the Basics of Marketing
Get started with the fundamentals of marketing through the lens of persuasion and copywriting. You will be lead through the power of persuasion in marketing communications, master essential copywriting techniques, and learn from the wisdom of famous copywriters who shaped the industry. This foundational module sets the stage for your direct marketing to finally be a cut above the rest.
Module 2 - Mastering Direct Marketing Principles
Here you'll see the core principles that make direct marketing work. You'll tackle general marketing questions, learn how to write effective copy with the help of the illustrious Drayton Bird, discover the importance of emotion and connecting with your prospect, and understand why testing is crucial to your success. This module builds your strategic foundation.
Module 3 - How to Present
Learn the art of presentation straight from the mouth of one of the greatest in the world - Andy Bounds. You'll understand what direct marketing really is - salesmanship in person. Drastically improve your presentations, discover how to make your campaigns stand out from the competition, and develop the confidence to win clients through deeply compelling pitches.
Module 4 - How Do I Get Started?
Turn theory into practice with immediately effective advice. You'll get answers to common startup questions, learn 20 quick and simple ways to improve your business immediately, gain insights from successful entrepreneurs such as Parris Lampropolous, and understand the psychological schemas and deep emotions that drive customer behaviour.
Module 5 - Helpful Tips and Ploys
This is where you'll get the proven tactics and strategies. You'll learn how to plan an effective direct marketing strategy, discover 102 Helpful Ideas to apply to your campaigns, explore 31 Direct Marketing Ploys that get results, and get your burning questions answered by some of the best in the biz.
Module 6 - Everything You Ever Needed to Know About Direct Marketing
Quite a claim! But you'll gain comprehensive knowledge of direct and digital marketing - from economics to execution. You'll understand the financial aspects of direct marketing, grasp fundamental marketing ideas, and learn real world insight from industry veterans who share straight talk about what actually works in the field.
Module 7 - The Bibles
Study the timeless classics that every marketer should know. This module provides unequalled access to essential texts from marketing legends including Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Eugene Schwartz, and others. These foundational books contain time-honoured, battle-worn, proven principles and techniques that remain deeply relevant today (as we know - times change, people don't). You'll find wisdom from the pioneers who laid the groundwork for modern copywriting, marketing and advertising.
Module 8 - Copywriting - Start from Scratch
Build your copywriting skills from the ground up. You'll learn how to plan media for direct marketing campaigns, study the legendary Gene Schwartz's approach at Rodale, master the art of writing sales letters that actually sell, analyse successful campaigns like Drayton's unrivalled Save the Children letter, and develop your ability to write persuasively. Perfect for those ready to put pen to paper.
Module 9 - Clients and How to Keep Them
Discover what it takes to attract clients and then build lasting relationships. You'll learn psychological triggers that make people buy, master autoresponder strategies, understand customer behaviour patterns, and discover what your customers truly want. Once you've got a client over the line, the most important thing is to keep them - do you have what it takes?Â
Module 10 - Don't Make the Same Mistakes as Everyone Else
Learn from the failures of others to fast-track your success. You'll discover the pitfalls that can ruin your marketing efforts, explore the 7 deadly sins of marketing, identify common business mistakes to avoid, and get hilarious and candid insights from Drayton and others about what really goes wrong in marketing. Save yourself time, money, and frustration by learning what not to do.
Module 11 - Do a Complete Selling Job
Master the entire customer journey from first contact to final sale. You'll understand databases and lists, learn how to use AdWords and psychological triggers effectively, explore the customer experience and "journey mapping", discover how to sharpen your marketing senses, and understand the power of personalisation. Learn how to cover every base in your sales process.
Module 12 - Creative and How to Create It
Develop your creative capabilities and learn to produce work that sells. You'll discover how to get better creative work - whether it's from yourself or from your collaborators. Gain fresh perspectives from those who have failed - so you don't have to. Understand what makes creative work effective, learn how to evaluate your own creative output, and find out how to avoid screwing up your creative efforts. This module balances creativity with commercial effectiveness.
Module 13 - What Makes Great Copy?
Analyse and understand what separates great copy from mediocre writing.Â
- Study detailed ad analysis and commentary
- See powerful demonstrations of copywriting principles in action
- Compare good versus bad examples to extract valuable lessons
- Learn core marketing principles
- Discover how to sell effectively using both words and pictures.
Module 14 - E-mails and Copy
Master the specific skills needed for effective email marketing and business-to-business copy. You'll learn proven techniques for writing emails that get opened and drive action, discover how to truly sell to business audiences, and understand the nuances of digital copywriting that differ from traditional formats.
Module 15 - Bird on...
Exclusive insights from Drayton Bird on marketing's most important topics and figures. You'll hear his perspectives on legendary copywriter John Caples, Claude Hopkins' principles, the art of building swipe files for inspiration, the critical importance of testing, and his take on social media marketing. This module offers Drayton's wisdom distilled from over half a century of experience.Â
Module 16 - Drayton, 67 Years of Nonsense
The collected wisdom from Drayton Bird's keynote presentations. You'll explore marketing basics that never go out of style, understand why customers should choose you over competitors, follow the customer journey from his unique perspective, and learn what truly drives marketing effectiveness. This capstone module brings together insights from a lifetime in marketing.
Throughout the modules you'll be tested on the knowledge you've picked up, and after passing the final exam and submitting an original piece of copy for review - you will receive a certificate of completion.Â
Most of us are lazy â and copywriters are no exception. Many study little, if at all. They think the key is ingenuity and clever ideas. They put their faith in flair and luck. They âpick it upâ as they go along. That is the chief reason why most copy is so bad.
Another is that people donât practice. If you want to write well, write often. Every day. For as long as you can.
Something else makes the problem even worse.
Few of those who commission copy and review it know much about what works, what doesnât and why. So very often itâs the ignorant judging the ignorant.
A very cheap investment
One challenge is tougher than any other.
It is subscription copy. Yet few publishers pay very well for it. They often employ young, inexperienced writers and give them too little time to do jobs.
This is insanity, But it explains why most subscription copy is rubbish â and thus many publications are failing under the onslaught of the internet..
But it is also financial insanity, because copy is probably the cheapest ingredient in your marketing. Improving it costs relatively little, with very high potential return.
But to be honest, the principles that apply to one kind of copy apply to all kinds.
Anyhow, here are some of the people I learned most from â and what they taught me. Maybe you will learn, too.
The trailblazer
I suspect I learned most from John E Powers â possibly the first professional copywriter â who blazed the trail all my other mentors followed.
He flourished in the latter part of the 19th century, making an amazing sum for those days: $100 a day. Multiply by at least 100 to get a present day equivalent â and remember, he paid no tax.
He talked about what a product does for the customer, rather than what it is. He popularised the free trial offer and the money back guarantee. To this day many do not realise the importance of those things.
In an 1897 interview he said, âThe first thing is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whateverâs wrong in the merchantâs business. If the truth isnât tellable, fix it so it is. That is about all there is to it.â
His two chief weapons were honesty and giving reasons for his claims rather than just boasting or repeating the brand name incessantly. He also said to his interviewer, who was from Printerâs Ink, the advertising trade paper, âNever read any of those advertising publications. They ainât worth reading.â
So nothing new there.
To this day many people still imagine advertising can sell bad products. It can â but only once. And to this day many people think unsubstantiated boasting works â look at most car advertising. It doesnât. Not in real life. Not in copy.
And if you donât explain why you are so good, people disbelieve you. These facts are unknown to many marketers, but year after year my partners and I have had considerable success just by applying honesty and reason-why in quite a range of markets.
The most able
Claude Hopkins was perhaps the most able copywriter ever â so good that allegedly by 1917 his boss used to give him a blank cheque every year and let him set his own salary.
From his book Scientific Advertising (1926) â which I assume you have downloaded from one of my sites and read several times â I learned many things, but principally that copy is âsalesmanship in printâ.
Your copy should do what a good salesman would do. A salesman gives every good reason for buying; a salesman forestalls objections; a salesman is not brief. Yet little copy does a complete selling job, and many still imagine brevity works best. It doesnât. Time after time I have seen long copy work better than short on everything from politics to loans to self-improvement.
In my first days in mail order I met some very ingenious copywriters from the US, especially Gene Schwartz, whose copy sold more books by mail than anyone. He taught me the power of having a fury to persuade â I can describe it no better.
Monroe Kane explained why it pays to repeat a good proposition several times in different ways. Gene Griffin taught me that just one extra word in a headline could transform results. Some years later, Joe Sugarman put in my mind the idea that the main purpose of each sentence is to make people read the next one.
John Caples was the master of testing. I re-read his book, Tested Advertising Methods regularly when I was young. I still turn to it and recorded a commentary recently. From it I learned much, but especially â as another wise man, Richard V. Benson, put it, âThere are only two rules in direct marketing. Rule1: Test everything. Rule 2: Refer to rule 1.â
Where Ogilvy and Reeves learned
Two of my other teachers admired Caples. David Ogilvy with whom I worked for some years told me one night over dinner that he and Rosser Reeves agreed that they learned all they knew from Caples.
Many people think the things Caples discovered all those years ago no longer apply.
On this Caples said something well worth noting to a Wall Street Journal interviewer: âTimes change. People donâtâ.
I guarantee that if you go on the internet you will find at least one piece of copy today that is stolen or adapted from Caples, who was writing over 8o years ago
David Ogilvy once told me the secret of success was charm â and often said âthe customer is not a moron: she is your wifeâ. So I try to avoid the usual crass, copywriterâs superlatives and treat the reader like an intelligent person. It works.
When I joined the Board of the Ogilvy Group I noticed something surprising and instructive at my first Board Meeting. David, who knew more than anyone, took most notes. This confirmed my belief that study was the key.
His book, Confessions of An Advertising Man, had a prodigious effect on me in my first big job as a creative director.
I tested many things he mentioned, like using certain words which increase readership. Then, much later when I wrote my own first business book,Commonsense Direct Marketing, I copied him and made it very personal. People are more interested in people than theory.
Reevesâ book Reality in Advertising sold the idea of the USP. I learned you must offer something different and better to succeed; or failing that, if you talk about things others do, but donât mention, you will outsell them. So I spend a lot of time looking for such opportunities. Again, very few copywriters bother.
100 ideas to steal
Vic Schwab was partner in one of the first specialist direct response agencies, back in the â30âs. He wrote a book called How to write a Good Advertisement. I have had the same copy for 49 years. And I still refer to the list of 100 headlines in it when Iâm stuck for ideas.
I cannot honestly recall all the people I have learned from. My favourite client. Victor Ross, former Chairman of The Readersâ Digest, with his colleagues pioneered the use of sweepstakes. They also developed the Yes/No option: make people choose and you get more replies.
John Francis Tighe refined this to Yes/No/Maybe, which works even better. We use this technique constantly â but very few others do.
I tried to learn from another friend â the late Bill Jayme, named by his peers as the best copywriter in the US â how to write witty, surprising copy â but I lack the talent. So I just have to fall back on constructive theft and adaptation.
I learned the importance of that from Murray Raphel, who said, âSearch the world, and steal the best.â
And now itâs your chance to get a steal of a deal âŚ
This is it. Everything. Every video, book, interview, tip and trick.Â
You won't get access like this anywhere else.Â
And all for ÂŁ1619.40.Â
