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Did I get your attention with my blog post title? Good. I’ll try to accomplish two things with this article. The first thing I’ll discuss is the importance of headlines. The second thing is “how to save 20% on EBay – ends soon.”

Headlines:

Direct response marketing is all about capturing your prospect’s attention, then leading them through your sales funnel, then persuading them to take action. The late Gary Halbert, famous copywriter, used the term “AIDA.” to describe this process.

“A” stands for attention, “I” stands for interest, “D” stands for desire, “A” stands for action.

We won’t cover all the parts in this article. I’ll save that for later articles. Here, we’ll just look at the first “A” — attention, and that would be the headline in written copy. Let’s start by seeing why writing copy that grabs your prospect’s attention is so important.

If you have the greatest product or service in the world and nobody knows, then do you really have the greatest product in the world? If you have the greatest sales funnel in the world that leads people to your greatest product, and you had no traffic or eyeballs, do you have the greatest sales funnel in the world? I think you know the answer to those two questions.

So the first thing that all direct marketers must do is to grab the attention of our readers. We want eyeballs. The best way to do that is to appeal to their human needs. And what might those human needs be? Without going through Abraham Maslow with you, let’s just keep it simple. All humans need health, wealth, and libido in varying degrees.

In the case of my headline — How To Save 20% On Ebay – Ends Soon — I was appealing to the “wealth” category. People want and need to save money in varying degrees. I don’t care if they are a single mother with three kids to support or Warren Buffett … people think about wealth, and they think about wealth in this order:

1. How can I keep the money that I have?
2. How can I make more money?

The fear of losing what you have is much higher than the greed to get more. Want an example, look at the global stock market this past few weeks. People are dumping their stocks, even though most of their holdings are perfectly good, because they fear losing what they have more than wanting to get more money. This human reaction is global.

So back to my headline, I used the appeal of “how can I keep the money that I have” in order to grab my reader’s attention. And it worked. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article.

I also used a specific number – 20%. People like to see numbers even though most people don’t like math. Numbers appeal to people’s tendency to rationalize their emotional decisions. Did you get that?

“People Buy On Emotions And Rationalize With Logic” or numbers.

The emotion is to save money and the rational to read the rest of the copy is “20%.”

All this makes sense, doesn’t it? Good. There is one more thing. The headline said, “Ends Soon.”

That bit of verbiage appeals to the worldwide human belief in a concept called “scarcity.” Let’s talk about that concept for a moment. It’s important.

If you’re familiar with the first story in the Bible, Adam and Eve had it good. They had all the fruit, warmth and companionship that they wanted in the Garden of Eden. Then Adam had to ruin a good thing and got them both kicked out of Eden. All of a sudden, their world of “abundance” became a world of “scarcity.” Not long after, God created marketers, but that is another story. Just know that nothing in the world would consistently sell if their wasn’t this notion of scarcity.

Not convinced? Just look at every public company. All public companies sell products and/or services, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. Do they use scarcity as a market tactic? Of course they do. But what you may not also realize is that they are also subject to the same rules of scarcity … time. All public companies must report there revenue and earnings according to fiscal calendars. They work on the scarcity of time, as do we.

Okay. So after writing all that, how can you save 20% on EBay? Follow along below:

1) Think of something that you would like to buy this holiday season. Either for yourself or as a gift.

A popular gift this year is the Nintendo Wii Fit video game. You can buy this product online at stores like Amazon.com and also Ebay.com. Click here to see what the Nintendo Wii Fit looks like.

If you want this item, shop early because it sold out last year … seriously.

2) Go to www.live.com. This is Microsoft’s search engine like Google.com.

Type in “Nintendo Wii Fit” or whatever else you might like to buy into the search box at live.com. The first listing that appears is a sponsored ad. See the ad below. Click on it.

3) Once you are at EBay, select the item that you would like that has a “Buy It Now” button.

Regular auction items are not eligible.

4) After clicking the “Buy It Now” button, you will be taken to a confirmation page. There you will see how much of a rebate you will get. The rebate ranges from 20% to 30%. The maximum rebate amount is $200.

5) Checkout using Paypal. You will not be eligible for the rebate if you don’t use Paypal.

That’s how you save 20% on Ebay. And it really ends soon. Microsoft, a public company, will go broke if they continue to give away money like they are doing with this special offer.

For the complete details of this program, go read it on the Ebay site.

Have fun!