Emotional triggers

What you want to do is drive headlines and formulas and things through emotional triggers. That's very important that you do this and you understand this. One of these emotional triggers is fear. That is a classic headline formula and certainly works today in this environment.
 
Fear
 
There is fear everywhere. More than likely a private lending headline right now is going to invoke some sort of fear - fear of losing more in their stock portfolios, fear of getting 2% returns on their CDs and not being able to retire.  So fear is clearly going to be one of the things you're going to invoke as part of this emotional response.
 
Guilt

You can probably use guilt to a certain extent. It's a little bit harder in this context. You could say, "You should have taken your money out of the stock market" or something of that nature. You'd have to think about this one a little bit more, it's a little bit difficult.
 
Flattery

Again, some of these are not real strong in terms of private lending. Greed, anger, salvation - again these probably don't fit very well. Certainly fear does. There is absolutely fear everywhere and it's certainly in the headlines you should be playing to that.
 
Questions
You can use simple headline formulas like questions. Questions are good headlines. Ask a question. "Do you want this, or don't you want that, or what if this happened?"
 
You can use questions in your headline. Those are pretty easy.
 
You can use statements. "Just Imagine Getting 9-12% on Your Returns." Again, that's a statement and a pretty powerful one.
 
The classic of classic headline formulas is a "how to" headline. You can do, "How to improve Your Return to 12%."  I'll let you guys come up with some, but the how to formula works very well.

News
 
The other thing that works very well, which is a very interesting way of creating headlines, is to use news.  There's obviously a lot of news going on.  You can use some sort of tidbit in the news.  In a recent interview with Fed Chairman Bernanke. He said the market is going to be down another 20% or he said it could go down 20%. You could put that in your headline.
 
Fed Chairman Bernanke Says the Market is Going Down 20%. Do You Want a Way to Protect Your Investment Returns?
 
Maybe there's a headline that incorporates timely news. It's a very powerful way of attracting the attention. If you can do that - really takes a lot of skill actually - it's very intriguing and can be very effective.
 
So if you can, figure out a way to get news into your headlines, particularly current news or news that everybody's aware of.   Don't do something that's obscure. If you could, do something that pretty much everybody's aware of.
 
Swipe file
 
The other thing I would recommend everybody does as a fundamental skill is create a swipe file. A swipe file is every time you see a headline, no matter what it is, even if doesn't have anything to do with real estate, if you think it's a good headline tear it out, rip it out, whatever you do, grab it, or print it. Keep that in a box or folder somewhere on your desk.
 
When you sit down a couple of months later to do a headline for a new postcard, you would go to your swipe file. Maybe you have 20 to 50 pieces of paper there. One of those headlines might be easily converted to something very interesting in terms of private lending and this realm.
 
Keep a swipe file that you can use and it will help you as time goes by. Keep it somewhere near your desk and keep everything. Collect stuff. As time goes by you can build that up and it becomes very helpful. It's a lot easier to simply steal somebody else's headline and convert it a little bit and modify it a little bit.