The Secret To Writing Truly Hypnotic Copy

At the age of 14 I discovered Derren Brown, a magician/hypnotist from the UK. After watching some of the fantastic things he was claiming to do with hypnosis, I turned to Google to find out more on the subject.
What I read absolutely fascinated me. I spent hours and hours learning about hypnosis and what it could do. It turned out a lot of what Derren Brown was doing wasn’t real… but that didn’t stop me from falling in love with hypnosis.
Very quickly I started playing around with creating my own hypnotic scripts and tapes. I would sit in my bedroom, reading scripts that I found online to help me better myself. I put together entire hypnotic tapes to help me do better in school, to alter my perception of time, to sleep better at night, to learn music easier, and many other things.
I’d play these tapes through my headphones over and over again. Some Saturdays I would sit in my room and trance out nearly all day! I was hooked – and I was hooked bad.
It wasn’t until I had graduated high school and started taking psychology classes in college that I learned how all this really worked. I would sit and have long drawn-out discussions with my social psychology professor about hypnosis and NLP. He even led me to a group of people who would get together once a week to practice with each other. I never knew there was such a huge community for this sort of thing!
It felt like I had found my mecca. The trouble was, I still had no REAL training. Everything I had learned was based on personal experimentation and what I read in books and online. That was great… but I needed more.
Shortly after college, I moved to Chicago on a whim (I’m known to do things like that) and discovered the Leidecker Institute (now the Alternative Practitioner Academy). Art Leidecker, once named Hypnotist of the Year, started this school to teach people like me how to become professional hypnotists. It was through his training that I really blossomed into what I would become.
I went on to use this training to become one of Chicago’s busiest hypnotists. I won’t really get into what client work was like here, that’s not what this article was about, but let’s just say that when people came to my office, they left different.
Over a period of about a year, I started reworking my business model. I wanted to spend more time relaxing and less time working, which brought me to start selling information products. I knew how to sell my services in person, that was easy. I can talk anyone into a quick trance and, in essence, command them to use my services. Selling online was going to be difficult though. I couldn’t use all my tricks that I had picked up over the years.
I picked up books on copywriting all over the place. Books from Bob Bly, David Ogilvy, Joe Sugarman, and many others. I started using their techniques to sell my product. It didn’t do terribly… but I wanted a lot more. I wanted to almost completely replace my income.
It wasn’t until I figured out a few different ways to integrate my hypnotic techniques into writing that I really blasted off. These are in fact the same techniques that I use to help all my clients now.
Now, these can be a bit confusing, so I’ll bring them down to the lowest level I can while still making the techniques usable. The good news for you is, you don’t have to go through years of learning like I did to take advantage of these techniques.
Hypnotic Induction
Firstly, you need to induce a trance. Without this, nothing else is possible.
Generally this can be done by grabbing the prospects attention. The great Milton Erickson was known to do this by pulling a bike squeeker out of his desk and squeeking it. While he had the subjects complete attention, he would give his commands, and they would instantly be entranced.
You don’t really have the luxury of confusing your prospects, so let’s put that idea aside. You need to get their attention with a big claim, question, or suggestion. This has to be huge, almost unbelievable. It needs to get the gears in their mind turning.
Once this has happened…
Deepen The Trance
You’ll usually see this done by making equally large statements in the first paragraph or sub-heading. This really gets the mind working. At this point their entire focus is on your words, which is exactly what you want.
This lets you embed commands, make suggestions, and all sorts of other cool things.
Let’s talk about….
Embedded Commands
Embedded commands are simple and to the point commands that you give your reader that are hidden in the text. Your subconscious mind will pick up on every nuance in your copy, so you don’t need to worry about bolding these or italicizing.
You want to get these to the subconscious without alerting the conscious mind. A few examples could be…
1. As you read this entire letter from beginning to end, you’ll start to notice a few things.
2. When you buy product XYZ today, you’re going to get…
3. Have you ever noticed that when you paid attention to what the author is saying, all your attention flows into one place?
See what I mean? These would all be very powerful once the reader was in a trance state. If they weren’t… they’d be useless.
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I wish you the best of luck in all your ventures!