If they are not DEAD, long text salesletters are at least no longer in vogue.

While old-school marketers teach you how to write long-text salesletters, you are completely missing the boat. WHY? Because they don’t even work anymore!

The world is changing so fast that nobody even cares to read them! People simply scroll down to see the price and then close your page and leave forever! You don’t even have a chance to build the value of your product.

My buddy Mike did a comprehensive study of 213 top converting products from ClickBank and Plimus.

And you know what? 90% of them use video salesletters in their marketing!

Still need proof? Just go to ClickBank’s Marketplace and look at how the top gravity products are being marketed!

See?!

While you’re still using old-school methods, other marketers are killing it in the new era of multimedia marketing!

So, if you want to be the best, you gotta learn from the best.

Once you can grasp the secret of this new-school method, simply take a poor converting product and give it new life by replacing the old-school marketing approach with your own video salesletter and then drive traffic directly to the product order form! Mike shows you exactly how to do it!

Video Salesletter Guru is the first real “game changer” for marketers & affiliates that I’ve seen in a long time!

It’s a no-brainer to get in on this right now. Don’t wait and miss out, because the biggest profits are going to go to the people who start TODAY.

It’s common knowledge that “free” is the most powerful word—and the most irresistible offer—in direct marketing.

But can you guess the second-most powerful word or phrase—and the second most irresistible offer?

It’s “one dollar”.

Experienced direct marketers know that, at times, charging a dollar (or a penny) for something can be more effective and pull even better than the free offer. The old pros call this technique “the magic of a dollar”.

Here is a great example of the magic of a dollar at work. It involves a company selling an accounting software package.

It was a good program, and the USP (unique selling proposition) was that the software was “modifiable”: It was build on a popular database, so a user proficient in the database could modify program features, functions, and screens to fit his specific business. But direct mail packages selling the software barely broke even.

The software was priced as follows:

General ledger–$79.

Accounts payable–$49.

Accounts receivable–$49

Inventory control–$39.

Payroll–$39.

The total price for the complete package: $255.

One day, the company decided to test a new mailing. The outer envelope shows the pricing as follows:

Accounts payable–$1.

Accounts receivable–$1.

Inventory control–$1.

Payroll–$1.

This time, direct mail recipients paid attention. After all, who sells software for $1?

The Johnson Box of the letter repeated the pricing, but filled in the missing detail:

“Accounts payable–$1.

“Accounts receivable–$1

“Inventory control–$1.

“Payroll–$1.

…when you buy general ledger for $251!”

Notice that the price of the complete software system is the same: $255 total. The offer is just a change in semantics (both system prices are $255). But the new offer attracts attention by seeming to offer software at $1 a module.

Could you buy just accounts payable for $1? Yes and no. Yes, you could buy it. But it wouldn’t work, because the other modules all require general ledger to function!

“I hate the idea of this test,” the creator of the software complained. “It seems like a cheap gimmick.”

But he didn’t hate the results: The “$1 a module” offer outpulled the “straight” offer by 10:1 in gross revenue generated. Mailing costs were identical, because the same package was used for both mailings, with only minor modifications to the copy for the $1 offer.

A variation of the magic of a dollar offer is the magic of a penny offer. Here, something is offered for a penny. In direct mail, this is particularly effective when you glue a real penny to the top of page one of the letter—a real attention-getter.

You can use the magic of a penny for any offer where there is either a free premium, free trial, or free evaluation or estimate.

In your letter, you say a variation of the following:

“The [premium, trial, evaluation, or estimate] costs only a penny. And we’ve even enclosed the penny for you!”

Yes, it’s a gimmick, but it works.

Free, of course, is the industry standard offer. It’s easy to use, applicable in almost any situation, and almost always effective.

But the magic of a dollar or the magic of a penny can sometimes do even better. I suspect the reason is its rarity: Because dollar and penny offers are much less common than free offers, they stand out and get more attention.

That’s just a theory, but I have seen enough tests to know that dollar and penny offers can in fact work. Try it. You may like it.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.