Transcription
What's going on, everyone? I wanted to share the rule of one with you that I learned from Michael Masterson. And if you haven't heard of Michael Masterson, he's uh, the the chief growth uh, strategist at Agora Publishing. Which, to my knowledge, is the biggest information seller on the market. They do over a billion dollars a year in revenue, and he is the person who created their entire acquisition machine, which is teams and teams of hundreds of copywriters who generate demand through compelling words.
I think there's something really magical about that because he not only has been able to do it himself and hit home run after home run out of the home run offer, but he's been able to duplicate it in other people and create and get people who've never sold a thing to writing copy that generates 20 million, 40 million, 80 million plus just from a single letter or message.
In his book, *Great Leads*, the first concept that he introduces is arguably the most important, and he calls it the rule of one. I've been—it was so important to me that I wrote it down, and I have it right in front of my computer because it applies to almost everything, but especially to communication and sales messages.
So, whenever he said the common thing that most copywriters do, or most business owners who are trying to make an offer uh, to be compelling to a marketplace, what they do is they just stack as many different great things inside as they possibly can and then say, "Well, if that one doesn't work, one of them will work, so I'm just going to throw them all in." He said that's the recipe for—he calls it toss salad copy—which is just you just jumble everything together and you hope, you know, it's throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.
But the reality is, the most compelling messages—and he reviewed the top 100 offers of all time—since they worked there, 91 of them all centered on a single concept. And so, if you think about what that means, it means that you're looking for the one big idea, the one compelling message that has to be easy to understand, easy to believe, and interesting or unique. And so, he said those are the three elements of a one big idea.
And so, when you're thinking about the sales messaging—and this has been really just—I've been—I've been putting this at the forefront of my mind—is that when you're writing copy for a for an advertisement or you're writing copy for a landing page, the sub-bullets should only be bullets that reinforce the singular message or the singular argument, right? They should be stories; they should be uh, arguments; they should be facts that are presented solely to reinforce the singular concept, right?
And so, if I said, you know, "Hey, there's uh, six ways—six ways to to to, you know, wake up early or something like that"—or six morning strategies—if each one of them was kind of different, that's like—it's—it's a tossed salad. Whereas if I wanted to center it around one big benefit or one core topic, now the six topics that I have underneath of it are gonna still be sub-points of the major one rather than uh, you know, 15 crazy headline ideas, right?
And so, for me, that has been incredibly powerful. And if you look at—if if you have advertised before and you look at the best converting advertisements that you've ever had, you will probably see that similar trend where the ones that do best are the simplest, the most direct, and the clearest to understand.
Now, the issue is when you only have to pick one, it forces you to be incredibly uh, tactful on your selection because you're only going to pick one. And so, I think what that ends up doing is it forces us as marketers to really think, "Is this the—is this the best idea? Is this the most centralized, focused concept that I can point as the tip of my spear of my communication message?" Right?
And so, uh, a lot of these things around like any kind of unique selling proposition—that's going to be the rule of one, right? You don't want to have 19 selling propositions; you want to have one core one that everyone can immediately understand, is is counterintuitive, and uh, is believable, right? And so, when you put all three of those things together, then you have a message that's compelling, and people will take one step towards you.
And so, um, I have now, like I said, I wrote that at the top of my computer as I've been writing copy and keeping this a top of mind because I can guarantee you that even since I started doing this, just even reading the book, I've gotten the—the copy that I've been putting out has been so much better and more targeted and crisper because there's one central idea I'm trying to convince the reader or prospect of, and then—and then the sales message that follows is actually very transparent and simple to write. The hard part is figuring out what that one idea is going to be, but if you're going to think about one thing, then that would be the one to focus on.
So, anyways, I hope that was valuable for you. I share this stuff as it comes to me in my in my journey of marketing and sales, and so I hope you enjoy this. Like, subscribe, all that kind of stuff, and I'll see you next video. Bye. [Music] [Music] [Applause]