Lifetime Lessons from Claude Hopkins

<img src="https://copywriterspodcast.com/images/banner/copywriterspodcast168.jpg" /> <br />We’re back with another show in our Old Masters series. A return visit for the ideas of Claude Hopkins, but completely different material since last time, when we pulled out some key points from his book Scientific Advertising.<br /> As I said before, and it’s worth repeating,<br /> When I first started learning how to write copy, everybody told me “read Scientific Advertising.” It’s a book written in the first part of the 20th century, over 100 years ago, by Claude Hopkins, who many consider the father of direct-response copywriting.<br /> I did read the book. I read it again. In fact, I read it 15 times.<br /> But for today’s show, on the advice of my friend and previous Copywriters Podcast guest Don Hauptman, I looked into an excellent book from long ago called “Masters of Advertising Copy.” <br /> The book has 25 chapters, and each is written by a different copywriter. I knew we had to start with the one by Claude Hopkins. His chapter is humbly titled, “Some Lessons I Have Learned In Advertising.” But to give you an idea of how eternal every single one of Claude Hopkins’s lesson is, I couldn’t find one that is not in active use today.<br /> Five lifetime lessons from Claude Hopkins<br /> 1. Demonstration and samples<br /> Sampling and demonstration, which are different forms of the same thing, make up the best way to sell anything.<br /> Features by themselves usually don’t sell. Features + benefits work some of the time. But demonstration, where the customer gets to sample the product personally, usually works best of all — because people know from direct experience what they’re getting and what the benefits will be.<br /> 2. Free gift and curiosity<br /> You can get people interested by offering a free gift, and you’ll do even better if the gift is a mystery until they get it.<br /> People always like to feel they’re getting “the better end of the deal.” This is a proven way to operationalize that desire on the part