Written by Bob McClain, Web Copywriting Expert

For Part Eight of our Web Copywriting – Using Subliminal Persuasion series, we’re going to talk about the fourth basic element of telling your “story.” This is known as “the Revelation”. The Revelation is where you reveal the secret to success that you are going to share with the select few who buy.

Let’s first review our previous subliminal persuasion posts:

• Part One of this series established who we are trying to sell to by answering a series of in depth questions
• Part Two talked about the power of “Story” and three tools to utilize it in your website copy
• Part Three explained the “iron-clad” guarantee
• Part Four talked about association with certain socio-economic groups
• Part Five looked at persuasion devices, hypnotic commands and involvement devices
• Part Six investigated your “basic message” and your “hook”
• Part Seven looked at the third element of story “conflict”

What is the Revelation?

The revelation is where first, you must convince your reader that you are just like them and that there was nothing special about you that led to your success. This is important because if you don’t tell them your story so they feel like you understand them and ARE ON THEIR SIDE, they will not listen to you.

Then they need to be convinced that it was either luck that you stumbled on the “secrets”, had them imparted to you by a benevolent expert, or you simply “developed” the secrets through years of trying and failing.

And now you are going to share these secrets of success with them because they “deserve” it.

What is the ultimate purpose of the Revelation?

The biggest mistake people make when they are writing copy is to try and cover more than one outcome. Every extra outcome you target weakens the copy and dilute the purpose. You have to pick one major outcome with a strong emotional impact and hammer that one major outcome home.

How do you “sell” the Revelation?

You have to convince your reader that you are just like them, that the “secrets” changed your life and that by giving them the “secrets”, their lives will be changed too.

You have to remember that most Americans believe that they deserve better. While the working poor in the US might be considered to be wealthy in the extreme to people in a third world country, to most low and middle-class people in the US, they see the rich and believe that they got there by luck or were given their wealth and didn’t earn it.

It’s the Fox and the Grapes fable from Aesop. Whether this is true or not, we can use this belief to our advantage. The belief that life should be fair and if it were fair, we’d all be rich too. In other words, we just need that one secret of the wealthy and we’d be wealthy too.

Offer proof

You can’t just expect people to believe you, even if your story “I was poor…our house was so small you could put the key in the front door and break out the back window” (thank you Rodney Dangerfield), resonates with them.

So how do you offer proof? First, you “reveal” a couple of secrets. Tell them some of the more obvious ones that they will believe. Make sure it’s something that they’ve always told themselves about the advantaged.

In other words, pardon the expression, “give them enough rope to hang themselves.”

Next, you bring in the testimonials from the people you’ve helped. A lot of Internet marketers will do this by giving away free copies of their product to a select group of people who have agreed to give a positive review either in exchange for a free copy or in exchange for being the first affiliates to be able to promote the product.

This is an option for almost any business. You need to find a select group of real people to review your product or service. Present their reviews, show their picture, and give complete information about the reviewer so people are convinced that these are people just like them. Make them real.