No tits to pull, no hay to pitch, Just punch a hole in the son-of-a-bitch. Don’t write essays. Tell your reader what your product will do for him or her, and tell it with specifics. Write your copy in the form of a story, as in the advertisement which carried the headline, ‘The amazing story of a Zippo that worked after being taken from the belly of a fish.’ One of the most famous advertisements ever written was by John Caples for International Correspondence School, under the headline ‘They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano – But When I Started to Play …’. I advise you to avoid analogies. Gallup has found that they are widely misunderstood. If you are writing copy for a face cream and say, ‘Just as plants require moisture, so too does your skin’ readers don’t complete the equation. If you show a Rembrandt and say, Just as this Rembrandt portrait is a masterpiece, so too is our product,’ readers think you are selling the Rembrandt. Stay away from superlatives like ‘Our product is the best in the world.’ Gallup calls this Brag and Boast. It convinces nobody. If you include a testimonial in your copy, you make it more credible. Readers find the endorsements of fellow consumers more persuasive than the puffery of anonymous copywriters. Says James Webb Young, one of the best copywriters in history, ‘Every type of advertiser has the same problem: to be believed. The mail-order man knows nothing so potent for this purpose as the testimonial, yet the general advertiser seldom uses it.’