Health Articles

1. Health Articles by:
Dr. Al Sears
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2. Dr. Sears Reveals the Challenges of Writing for the
Exercise Industry … And How to Overcome Them
Dr. Al Sears runs a successful medical practice, as well as a health and
wellness business. Among his most successful programs is PACE, a patented
exercise program. We asked him to share his experience with successfully
promoting PACE through direct-response marketing.
CI: Why don’t you start by giving us a little background information
on your PACE exercise program.
Dr. Sears: PACE has been around for about five years. We started promoting
it with my own patients. We wrote a couple of free reports about it that we
would give out. And we used those reports as premiums to market my
newsletter and my e-letter service. Then the PACE book came out just last
year.
PACE has become our number one selling product. We‟ve never had another
book or nutritional product that sold like PACE does. And it‟s got legs. It is
very sustainable. It continues to sell well. We‟ve sold over a million dollars‟
worth of these books.
It‟s also led to several ancillary products. We‟ve marketed a PACE DVD and
two audio CDs. Then we had a similar idea about exercising above your
current aerobic capacity. It‟s kind of an outcropping of PACE, and it‟s turned
out to be our second-best-selling product. We are now doing a PACE video
and working on the second edition of the PACE book and a few more audios.
We‟ve marketed several bundled packages that include PACE, and we now
have Dr. Mercola and several other outside vendors selling PACE. PACE sales
have grown on Amazon relatively organically, which we think is because of
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3. the basic idea of the book. It is selling more and more on Amazon with
virtually no copy.
CI: What have been the most successful techniques for promoting
and selling the PACE program?
Dr. Sears: To the exercise files that we‟ve been able to sell it to, the rules
are mostly the same: Good copy is good copy. The thing that was
particularly successful with PACE was to make the idea appear very
contrarian from the beginning. The approach is: “Everything you thought
you knew about exercise turns out to be wrong.”
That has been the concept behind several of our promos. The most
successful promo that we‟ve had so far has the headline “Are Your Lungs
Dying?” It carries through with the supposition that your lungs shrink with
age. All the way through it is this contrarian focus – that what we have
accepted as scientific knowledge of exercise was incomplete and mistaken in
many important ways.
The contrarian nature of the idea seems to drive the promos. When we try a
promo that‟s based on the more typical benefit-driven approach, it does less
well. Our next-best-selling headline, for instance, was “Throw Away Your
Jogging Shoes.” The lead was focused on how everybody has been wrong
about this important aspect of exercise. It used that surprising and
contrarian you-thought-you-knew-but-I‟m-here-to-tell-you-different kind of
approach.
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4. CI: What have been some of the unique challenges of writing a
successful promo for the exercise industry?
Dr Sears: The first unique challenge is the obvious one – that nobody really
wants to exercise. You‟re trying to sell them something they don‟t want to
do, so you have to use what Michael Masterson the Principle of
Transparency. You can‟t focus on the fact that you‟re selling them an
exercise program. You have to see through that to the eventual benefit of
the exercise program.
So you tell them what it‟s going to do for them – not that they‟re going to
have to buy a book and actually read it and then actually work at the
exercises. You tell them things like: it‟s only 10 minutes a day, it‟s easy, it‟s
fast, it‟s fun, and you don‟t have to do the grueling exercise.
The principle obstacle is the nature of what you‟re selling. You‟re selling
exercise, and people would just as soon skip it. The way we got around that
was to beat up on exercise. As a matter of fact, we never call our program
exercise.
The term PACE, when I originally conceived it, was Progressively Accelerated
Cardiopulmonary Exercise. But then I started thinking, “How many people
are going to say „Hey, what I really need is a new exercise program‟?” So we
called it Exertion instead of Exercise. And when we write about it, we use the
word exercise when we‟re beating up on the other guy. When we say, “You
know, you don‟t really need an hour of exercise” or “Exercise is grueling” or
“Exercise is a waste of your time” or “You don‟t really need to go out and
pound the pavement.” We associate exercise with all the negatives – with
the injuries and the boredom and the basic feeling among most people that
they‟d really rather be doing something else.
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5. CI: So taking the contrarian point of view was how you overcame
that initial objection.
Dr. Sears: Yes. Part of the contrarian point of view is that you don‟t really
need long-duration exercise – that shorter exercise works better. That‟s one
of the reasons for the success of PACE. You‟re selling an idea that they
already want. They would like to believe that they can get the benefit of
exercise without spending an hour a day in the gym. And, of course, it‟s
easier to sell something that people already want rather than to try to create
that want.
CI: Let’s switch gears a bit and focus on the copywriter. As
somebody who hires copywriters, what do you think is the most
valuable trait a copywriter can have when writing for the exercise
industry?
Dr. Sears: In general, flexibility, rather than experience, is surprisingly
important. Many times, I work with a writer and they want to write what
they want to write. I want them to write what I want them to write, and that
often means they lose future work with me. I expect that I can tell them
what I want them to say and that they‟ll try to understand what I want and
do it to the best of their ability. Not to say, “Well, he wanted this, but I
really think it should be this,” and then do it their way. It‟s partly a matter of
ego, but when you‟re writing for someone else, you have to force yourself
away from what you want to write. What you want to write doesn‟t matter.
You have to fully accept the role of writing for someone else, and write what
they want in the way they want it. Your job is to figure out what they want
and provide it.
You would think that goes without saying, but it‟s surprising how often that
becomes a make or break issue with a writer. If they do it the way I want it,
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6. we are probably going to give them more work. If they don‟t, if they resist,
we‟re probably going to find somebody else.
Keep in mind that our approach is very contrarian. We pick out the things
about exercise that we know to be true but convention doesn‟t … and we
focus on that. So if a writer is bringing along the baggage of what they
believe to be true, what they‟ve written about before, or what they read
about somewhere else, it‟s almost always going to contradict what we want
to say. It‟s unlikely they‟re going to know or believe our point of view. They
have to be willing to shift into what our experience and our specialized
knowledge has taught us that no one else knows. Often, they want to tone it
down, and I think that‟s a big mistake when you‟re writing copy to sell
something. What works best in our industry, in most cases, is a very
focused, single point of view that is contrarian and considered by most to be
extreme.
CI: What do you like copywriters to understand about your
audience?
Dr. Sears: Our audience can be broken into two broad groups. One group is
those who are familiar with us. That would include the people who subscribe
to my newsletter, get my e-zine, get my e-letters, and/or have read my
books. The other group is those who don‟t know about me yet – and we
have to talk to them differently.
It‟s a matter of preaching to the choir. When someone has already bought
even one of my books, they usually become a convert. That means we can
be more direct in approaching them with a new product, either an
information product or a nutritional product. It‟s important to tell them that
this is my recommendation – and you only need to tell them a little bit of the
why.
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7. But when we‟re going to an outside file and they don‟t know me, we can‟t
just say, “Dr. Sears thinks you should do this.” Instead, we have to use a
more indirect approach. You have to hook them and captivate them before
you even let them know in the copy that there‟s a product available.
I suppose that‟s true for other industries as well, but I know it‟s true for the
healthcare industry. When the promo is going to people who know me, you
can just start right away with the benefits of the offer. You can go with
problem/solution, which is the basic structure for most direct-marketing
sales in healthcare.
But when it‟s going to people who don‟t know me, the direct method doesn‟t
work at all. You need to do something like start with a story – maybe a
testimonial from a patient. Or you can make a prediction – another indirect
technique, where you don‟t mention the offer until after you‟ve got them
interested.
CI: It’s important for our readers to understand the difference
between writing to the front-end and to the back-end.
Dr. Sears: It‟s like night and day. We‟ll have a promotion that does $25,000
to our house file, and when we send it to an outside file it will do less than
$1,000. We‟ve been analyzing why certain promotions that were such big
hits to our file failed so miserably to an outside file. We looked for common
patterns – and what we found was that the promos that failed with an
outside list used a direct sales approach. One of those promos started
something like this: “I went to the rain forest and I found a product that I
brought back for you that I want to tell you about.” When you put that to a
file that‟s not familiar with you, they know right away that you‟re selling
something. It‟s too direct, and they are offended … because you haven‟t yet
hooked them.
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8. So we converted that to “American doctor treks to the Amazon and finds
medicine‟s Holy Grail.” And then we told the story of being there in the
jungle, the jungle noises. And how my friend from the University of Peru
pointed at something and said, “There it is, see that bush,” and I put the
nuts in my hand. The reader didn‟t yet know that there was something for
sale, but we got them interested. And then, when we got to the offer, it was
the same as it was in the first version of the promo. We didn‟t change that
part. The price and everything else was the same.
We‟ve had that same experience with several of our information and
supplement products. And we‟ve had the same thing with PACE. We can sell
PACE – the PACE book – to our file by saying, “I‟ve got a great program for
you and I want you to try it out” very early on in the lead. But that doesn‟t
work to an outside file. We have to hook them first. So we do that by saying,
“Do you like going to the gym for an hour? Do you like all that sweating?
What if you found out that none of it is necessary?”
Then we say that we did a study on twins, and found that the twin who did
six minutes of exercise a day lost more fat and built more muscle that the
twin who did 45 minutes of exercise a day. And then we talk about the
physiological reactions that occur with exercise, about how you store energy.
You get them enthralled and interested in that before you let them know
that there‟s a book available.
Like you say, there‟s a big difference between a back-end proposition and
prospecting to a front-end file.
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9. CI: Are there changes or trends affecting your industry that
copywriters should be aware of?
Dr. Sears: The trend is that it‟s getting harder to give headlines impact by
pumping up the claim. I mean, how much more can we get from what is now
ubiquitous out there. You know, “Cure cancer with delicious juice” or “Beat
heart disease for less than a penny a day.” Headlines have become so
dramatic and so exaggerated that you can‟t trump them. You can‟t say it
more powerfully or louder and make it work anymore. Ten years ago, you
could. It‟s different now.
You have to have not a louder or more sensational claim, but a more unique
one. We‟ve know for some time that uniqueness sells in headlines. It‟s one
of the four U‟s. My concept of uniqueness has evolved now to be even more
specifically unique to me and my knowledge and my contact with my
customers. You‟ve got to think of a way of connecting with them that only
you can do. Whatever your product is, whatever your expertise is, you‟ve
got to get that through as something that‟s ultra-specific to you. You‟re the
only person who could tell them this. You are the only person who could say
that. You are the only source that they can use for this particular
information.
Then you don‟t need all that hyperbole.
CI: So the unique selling proposition is growing in importance?
Dr. Sears: Yes. And it‟s changed from being just unique, because too many
people out there are already doing that. Now you have to take it a step
beyond making the benefits of your product seem unique. You have to make
it unique to you, connect it to something that only you can provide.
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10. Unique has a new connotation. In the age of Internet marketing, you‟ve got
to think of how you can differentiate your unique claim from everyone else‟s
attempts to make their claims unique. In our case, it‟s “Dr. Sears‟ [product
name]” or “Dr. Sears discovers …” It‟s something that‟s unique to your story,
your travels, your experience, your knowledge that has to be brought
forward immediately in the headline and in the lead.
CI: What other tips do you have for our readers today?
Dr. Sears: There‟s no substitute for knowing your product. The best
copywriting ideas seem to come out of a complete and thorough
understanding of what you are trying to sell. There‟s no substitute for doing
the work and researching the product.
Find out how you can earn a doctor‟s income (without years of study and the
long hours) by becoming a health copywriter.
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