Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 27th, 2010
Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes
(part 5 of 5)
Learning direct response marketing gets you out of person-to-person selling. The only reason to do it is because it lends itself to automation and leverage because you can reach a lot of people with one effort. The internet is the most perfect medium for direct response marketing ever because people can pay on the spot with a few clicks. The internet makes buying deliriously easy for consumers.
The problem is the internet has matured a bit and now the selling environment online has become competitive. There’s no easy or straightforward path to internet riches these days (sorry to burst your bubble), but if you educate yourself about proven direct marketing principles.
Just because the internet is the perfect medium for direct marketing doesn’t mean it’s the best. That’s because the barrier to entry with internet marketing is low so there’s a lot of competition. With direct mail, your costs will be higher but the competition tends to be sparser.
Most of the best copywriter/marketers are also intense students of human nature and salesmanship. We read widely because you really cannot learn to be a great direct marketer at school – you have to teach yourself.
If 
Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 6th, 2009
Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
Persuasion in print is largely structural. When I explain it here it’s going to seem abstract, but when you study good salesletters in the future look at the structure.
There are obvious things of course: headline, subhead, testimonials, and so on… and those are elements and by default some of them occupy specific places in the letter… but these are not what I mean when I say that persuasion is a structural challenge.
When you understand the role structure plays in written persuasion you can then start to deploy persuasive elements intentionally for precise effect at specific points in your copy.
In short, when you understand how structure in copywriting works you start to grasp not only what to write, but where to write it in your letter.
Learning any skill is awkward at first, then it becomes comfortable, and when you become highly skilled it starts to feel natural and even works at an unconscious level.
Salesletters are structured, generally, with a bold headline making a claim or otherwise attempting to capture attention from the target audience: the people most likely to have the problem the product solves, the desire to do something about it, and the means to
