The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 53 Degrees – 8:19 a.m.
If you spend too much time as a copywriter, a few things begin to shift in terms of how you see the world.
First of all, you develop a keen interest in and awareness of what everyone else around you is thinking and feeling.
And secondly, you begin to view everything in terms of what actions, thoughts, attitudes, moods etc. are produced or influenced everything you do or say.
After awhile, this just becomes the way you move through the world.
When I’m doing something like the Lead Lab (or selling much of anything!) this way of seeing things tends to be pretty valuable.
So when someone like me comes across an expert’s website where they offer a free consultation for prospective clients, all types of warning bells and loud sirens go off in my head.
Why?
Because I know what’s about to happen in the brain of the prospect you are trying to attract with that “free consultation.”
“The mind is a filtering mechanism. It receives more data than it can process at any one time. To avoid being overloaded, it has mechanisms to sort and process new information… To process new information efficiently, the mind wants to disregard or file away as much as it can as quickly as it can. If it recognizes something as a version of something it already knows, it “files” it quickly in that category. So if your copy looks like “advertising,” it will file it mentally in the junk mail slot and ignore it. To prevent your prospect’s brain from doing that, the copywriter must write copy that is fresh and different and in some way unexpected. Above all, it must not sound like something the prospect has read before.” -Bill Bonner (paraphrased) From Architecture of Persuasion By Michael Masterson
When your brain hits something it “already knows,” it moves into another state – a much less engaged state because it has encountered something that can be ignored.
Bill Bonner is a very clear individual, but I’ll make it even more blunt:
Offer a “free consultation” at your own risk.
Do SOMETHING to wrap that function (giving your prospect a complimentary taste of what you offer) in a wrapper that is UNLIKE what their mind already knows and/or expects.