“You KNOW the sheik who is holding my husband hostage! You also know he’s not a patient man. God only knows what he’s doing to my husband right now. So I don’t have the time. What I want you to do is call the network affiliate in Morocco and get a camera crew here right away.”
–Eden, Santa Barbara, 1991

You have a movie inside you.

And, like the Poltergeist, it needs to come out.

What form will it take? If you have a business, movies usually take the form of sales pages.

I hope you weren’t expecting Mark Ruffalo.

We don’t read sales pages with as much interest as we watch movies. But we do scan them. We’re optimists at heart. “Maybe this sales page will be the one for me.”

And, if your headlines look as dramatic as a soap opera plot, people might actually read that sales page. And then they might do something about that call to action at the end. We can hope, right?

As the director of your own sales page, you get to create your story, and you get to decide what happens next.

So, you want to direct. Let’s get started.

What I want you to do is call your camera crews in Morocco.

Now, do you have popcorn made? I’ll wait. You like popcorn.

Take a seat on your big, plush director’s couch. There are no director’s chairs for sales pages. Only couches.

Also, turn off the internet. Hit the lights. Close your eyes.

Well, read the rest of this post first, then close your eyes.

Ready to get started? You’re probably not ready. How about a nap first?

Go ahead and take a 10-minute nap. You like naps.

When you wake up, insert the movie of your Clients and press PLAY.

Don’t forget to play your favorite movie soundtrack. Mine is Beaches.

Now that the movie is playing, you’re not thinking about benefits and features and pie charts and problems.

You’re not thinking about what words to use.

All you’re doing is watching the movie in your head.

Bette Midler’s character doesn’t want to make more money in less time.

She wants to become a performer, and part of her wonders whether anyone will ever take her seriously, and even though her mother drives her crazy with the over-managing and stress, she wants fame so much she’s willing to do anything to get it, even put up with her mother, and she doesn’t care if she sings too loud on the boardwalk. She has feelings and she needs to let them out.

Bring the drama! Let it all play out.

As you watch The Client, you’re making director’s notes.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

• What did they want?
• What did they really want, underneath all that?
• How did you know that’s what they wanted?
• What was at stake?
• What happened when they finally got what they wanted?
• Why was that so surprising?
• Why was it so important?
• How difficult was it for them to decide to work with you?
• What came up along the way that made everyone keep watching?
• Where are they now?
• What do you think is possible now that wasn’t possible before?
• What’s something they used to do that they’re no longer doing anymore?
• What are their friends telling them? What are their friends and family noticing?
• What happens next?

When you feel moved by a story, you write differently. You stop worrying so much about whether you’re bragging or whether you’re using the right words.

You’re just watching, taking it all in. You’re starting with those feelings, those images in your mind’s eye of what your clients’ lives look like. Once you know that story, you can tell it in a sales page. You can address the problems, the benefits, the uniqueness, without resorting to awkward questions that spoon-feed the obvious right back to people.

Like sand through the hourglass, so are the sales pages of our lives.

Psst. Can you keep a secret? Then you’ll fit right in with the rest of the Secret Discount Scouts. Secrets! Discounts! Adventure! Just don’t tell anyone. Coming soon…a new product that will take you by the hand up Website Copywriting Mountain. Join today–but quietly. Quietly.

When people have large, expensive failures, they like to say they paid tuition for an integer-followed-by-shameful-number-of-zeroes education.

I like it. While it doesn’t make me feel any better about losing integers followed by zeroes, it does help me to accept the lesson and move on.

People who have lost houses probably tell themselves this.
I tell myself they tell themselves this whenever I think of my own desire to have a house.
It’s a desire that pops up whenever King Kong and the upstairs bowling committee have one of their daily gunny sack races.

But Failure University has gotten enough tuition. They owe me a diploma by now. As long as this website* keeps telling me I should pay cash for a house, I’ll keep on saving and living in this flat.

*Warning: Don’t click there if you’ve just bought a house. You don’t want to know.

But I still want a house. A house! I want it! Right now!

In the spirit of instant gratification, I bought a train.

I’m on a train right now.

It’s my favorite sound on my new white noise machine.

It’s not the kind of train you hear passing through your neighborhood. It’s the kind of train you’re actually on.

I love the feeling of being contained for several hours in a cozy space with plenty of legroom, ice cream, a window, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Whenever I get lonely, I can mosey on down to the dining car. On what other form of public transportation do they let you eat hot dogs and ice cream, family-style, around a big table?

While I have never been able to love yoga the way people who love yoga love yoga, I love the way being on a train feels like yoga.

There is no multitasking on a train. There are no interruptions.

Only a lazy scroll of landscape that patiently waits for you to take it all in before disappearing.  For now, the train has saved me from my manic desire to buy a house so I could be free from King Kong’s clutches.

I like having my freedom, and that includes freedom from banks.

The train helps me hold on to that freedom—in much the way a real train does. Better than a house ever could.

My train and I have become quite attached.

I’m afraid we’ll become too attached. That I won’t be able to relax without bringing it with me.

I’ll need to play the ocean sound at the beach, because the real ocean won’t be relaxing enough. Camping in the woods will require a supplementary campfire sound, because I can’t risk any stray, unexpected coyote howls.

Or what if the real train sound just reminds me of the stomping it’s supposed to eliminate, like how the sweetness of cough syrup never lets you forget the taste of dextromethorphan? Or like the chimichanga I ate before I got the flu, which ruined chimichangas forever?

The train doesn’t think I should worry about things like that.
It’s busy developing my “I’m on a train” muscles. (Mindfulness? Is that what the yoga people call it?)  As long my train keeps me in a moment of complete absorption most of the time, we’ll be fine, I think. Even when it’s not there.

I am here to make sure no one thinks about my clients’ businesses the way I think about houses.

Potentially risky investments probably best avoided. Instead, I want them to think of my clients the way I think of trains. With love and affection and with a fear of ever losing that mindful feeling.

Maybe people think they want a house. But maybe you’re the train. They need to see you can bring them closer to what they really want than what they thought they wanted ever could.

That sounds like a nice kind of tuition to pay. Not at Failure University, but at the one on the other side of town. Starts with S.

Psst. Can you keep a secret? Then you’ll fit right in with the rest of the Secret Discount Scouts. Secrets! Discounts! Adventure! Just don’t tell anyone. Coming soon…a new product that will take you by the hand up Website Copywriting Mountain. Join today–but quietly. Quietly.