Razvan Rogoz

Author: RazvanRogoz

  • Reason Why In Copywriting And Life

    From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
    Dear friend,

    A key word you need to remember in your life is “reason why”. This defines a reason for doing something, a reason why it is true, a reason to believe it. Now, reason why is very important in copywriting since every claim must be backed up with it. If I say, “we are the best”, then I must add a “reason why” we are the best (won sales award in 2012 or so).

    Most people ignore the idea of reason why. They forget a thing. Your prospect is skeptical and while he is interested in buying, there are several options for him. When it comes to buy, the first consideration is how much he feels this is he going to solve his problem. However, if all appeals are equal, the copy with the best reason why wins.

    Reason why is not just a part of copywriting. It is a part of our own psychology. For example, let’s say that you have a kid and comes to you to ask for $50. He’s not going to say “Please give me $50”. He’ll instead explain why he needs it and then ask it from you.

    This concept, of justifying something, especially a claim, is built into our own language. It is how we operate and we operate this way for a good reason. It works.

    Today, we are covering “reason why” as a self-improvement tool.

    You see, in theory and in practice, you can’t do something without having a reason for it. Every action leads to a reaction. When you do something, you are doing it because you are anticipating the effect.

    So the things that you don’t do, the ones you procrastinate on, are usually the ones that do not have a strong reason why. You know why you should shower or drink water. You need to shower because you’ll feel clean (carrot) and you’ll avoid the humiliation of stinking (stick). You drink water because it makes you feel good and you avoid being thristy.

    The difference between average people and successful ones are the reason why they have in their lives. A person that works 100 hours per week has a strong reason why to do this. A person that spends 40 hours a week watching TV also has a strong reason why.

    So, as you may have guessed, you need to come with a strong reason why for the things you want to be doing and reason why for not doing some things. Let me give you an example. A reason why, actually, several ones, for not smoking is the risk of cancer, addiction, financial investment, the fact that you’ll eventually burn your clothes and so on. The more arguments you have, the less likely you are to do it.

    There are two main types of “reason why”. These are mental and emotional.

    A mental one makes sense but it is mediocre in power. It is like saying “I must complete this blog post because I want to express my thoughts to like minded people”. It works but again, it is not that great. An emotional one is saying “If I write this blog post, I will attract like minded people like before. This will bring new amazing contacts into my life and I will be surrounded by people I like and admire. This will make me very happy”.

    Do you see the difference? It makes me feel something, it engages my emotions and it is stronger than a simple mental one.

    Most of the bad things we do are for bad reason why. When we fight, we have a reason why. However, this is fully emotional. Love is based on reason why, at least romantic love. The reason why is intimacy, being appreciated, sex, closeness and so on. If you want to simply prove this, take away these things or even a few of them from two people and call it love again. It will be not, it will be platonic at best.

    Procrastination is nothing more than not having a strong reason why. Actually, your entire day is a battle between reason why. Do you have a better reason why (emotional) for watching TV or for going to the gym? Do you have a better reason why to spend time with one person vs. another?

    Actually, since most actions do not carry imediate feedback (for example, I may benefit from this blog post six months into the future), having a reason to do it is the only reason why you’re doing it. Why would someone else train six months, one year, several years to get a gold medal at a sport? Because he knows that if he does, at one point, he’ll get the medal (rational). And with that medal, then the recognition, admiration, a lot of open doors, money, self-esteem, pleasure, etc (emotional) will come.

    I wish there were more to human psychology but the essence is this – we do things because of the reasons we do things. Nothing less, nothing more. There are actual considerations to take like competence, self-image, etc but when you put these asides, it comes down to answering the question …

    “What is my reason for doing this?” and answering it both on a rational and emotional level. If you can do this, then you can sell, you can sell yourself on a idea, you can get outside of your comfort zone and you can make quantum leaps into your own life. Since growth is nothing more than doing things that you were not doing before and getting good at them, finding a good reason why for doing those things is the first step towards growth.

    That’s about it for today. Let me know what you think. Do you have strong reasons to do what you need to do in your life? Please let me know your thoughts and comments below.

    Best regards,
    Razvan Rogoz

    PS: Feel free to also connect to my FB page. I’m posting almost daily new content there.

  • The Golden Rule Of Marketing (And Persuasion)

    Some of the best rules are also the simplest.

    Like this one – you can’t create desire, you can only channel it. You don’t know how often I’ve met business owners a bit too in love with their products. They were trying to convince others why they need the product when there is not a need for it. I don’t think I need to mention – it doesn’t work this way.

    Top copywriters know this. They know that if a person doesn’t show a preference for a particular desire, then it is not a good prospect. That idea with “selling ice to eskimos”, forget it. People buy what they think they need, even if that “need” is a Porsche 911 or a $2000 TV on credit.

    However, let me make this a bit more specific. I’ve said a preference for a particular desire. I haven’t said a product. We all have a set of desires. Among them are the desire to be loved, the desire for sex, the desire for respect, for variety and adventure and so on. Some are more intense than others in individuals. Also, they tend to oscillate. A few weeks ago my desire for adventure was 9 / 10. Now my desire for safety is 10 / 10.

    Your products met these desires. It is like a desire is a “pain” and your product is the “painkiller”. Right now, I’m trying to quit smoking. There is a strong desire to smoke. If I smoke, then it will met my desire, making it a perfect purchase.

    Several classes of products can met a single desire. For example, when it comes to sex appeal it can be anything from a shirt to cosmetic surgery. When it comes to adventure it can be anything from a game console to hunting in Africa.

    And here it gets complicated again. Different folks based on their background, genetics and environment have different preferences for how to satisfy that desire. A “daredevil” will respond positively to a safari invitation but may not see the value in playing a video game. Even if both solve the need, people have different preferences on solving those needs. On the other hand, a teen may prefer listening to music than going out on a date, and in theory both offer similar payoffs – emotional stimulation.

    The key to writing great copy is to narrow it down to who is this product for and target it through your advertising. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Mercedes targets a different demographic compared to Porsche. Hilton aims to serve other people compared to Holiday Inn.

    Let’s take a simple example. You’re trying to sell me a vacation package and you’re also trying to send to a female friend of mine which is more or less opposite to me.

    In order to buy I would need to know that the travel will be fast. I don’t want to visit churches since I’m an atheist and you would make a huge disconnect there if you would try to pitch me otherwise. I would like a location that is quiet and inspiring. I don’t want to be in a party town since I’m not really feeling comfortable. However, I would enjoy being on a beach and carrying a discussion about philosophy with a beautiful girl and in the evening, talking about life with my future mentor while playing chess. These traits would feel my need for significance, companionship, mental stimulation and fit my introverted nature.

    Now let’s take this female friend with whom I’ve had the pleasure of spending a holiday. The trip would not be that important. It can be by plane, boat, road, she would have fun anyway and make 50 friends by the time she reached the destination. There, she wants as many clubs as possible, to try new foods, shopping and places to have fun. The hotel room is not that relevant as long as it is clean and cozy.

    Do you see the difference? There are many people like me (introverts with over-cognition biases) and many people like her (extroverts with over-kinesthetic biases). If you would try to sell her package to me, maybe you would make 1 in 1000 sales and in reverse. But if you would sell my type of package to a demographic like me, you would sell all of them in minutes – the same to her.

    Yet, very few marketers understand this. For me, a night out means being in a quiet place in a 1:1 or maybe 3 – 4 people in a conversation. More than this overwhelms me as I need to focus and I can’t disconnect with ease. For many other people is loud music and more people than it should be legal in a room.

    And the rule here is simple. If you remember only this from the entire article, then it is enough.

    “As long as I have the available resources or I can get them, the closer you provide me with a mechanism to stimulate my need, to fulfill it that is congruent with my vision, the higher the conversion rate”.

    And the further away you are from what I know I need (not what I really need but my perception of this), the lower the conversion.

    I guess if there would be an unified theory to human persuasion, this would be. In the moment you feel the need and you can get it fulfilled (and believe me, when we have the chance, we borrow, steal, whatever it takes to fulfill it), you act. As simple as that.

    In marketing, you do not try to change people. I repeat this. You do not try to change a person. You leverage existing needs and thoughts.

    How are these thoughts created? How are these biases and preferences? Nature and nurture but that’s beside the point. You’re not going to change decades of programming, 24 hours a day through a marketing campaign. You can just be congruent with that programming.

    That’s about it. Hope you find this useful.

    Take care,
    Razvan

  • The Future Of Advertising – Biofeedback.

    From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
    Dear friend,

    Being the proud of owner of a FitBit Flex, an amazing piece of technology that tracks your movement and sleep patterns (it’s more than a glorified accelerometer since I’ve tried to trick it to track data artificially and I’ve failed), I’ve started to think more and more of passive wearable technology.

    Technology evolved in an interesting way and I’m almost certain that this decade is all about technology we wear on our body (or it is integrated directly) and allows us to automate our life. It’s the next step of evolution. We’ve first had computers then laptops than PDAs. We’ve had fixed line phones, mobile phones, smart phones and now wearable computers running IOS or Android.

    And now we are starting to use technology that requires less and less input from us. Instead of adding a task, we can use Google Now or Siri to simply mention it. Instead of opening the garage door, we have RFID chips that automatically open the door when we come close to it. Instead of entering a password, we use our fingerprint.

    None of these technologies are new. RFID exists for a while now so do fingerprint scanners. But the way it is applied in our day to day life is relatively new.

    In a few years, I envision a future where our voice, gesture and passive devices will direct everything around us. Instead of using a key to open our door, we’ll use an RFID chip in our phone (or better said, NFC) or we’ll enter a keycode. Instead of tracking how much we walk daily, we’ll use smart devices like the FitBit (also Jawbone, Nike Fuel, etc) which will track every movement we take and provide us with huge bases of analytics.

    Because in the end, the FitBit is nothing more than an information gathering device. Yes, it motivates you to exercise or walk more but beyond that, it is a device that tracks your movement and that’s something I find fascinating. Just as Peter Drucker said „you can’t improve what you can’t track”, these devices allows us to optimize our lives, find patterns into what we are doing and take more informed decisions.

    I envision that in five years or less we’ll wear a bracelet that will track everything from our movement to our heart rate, blood sugar, stress levels and maybe even provide us a real time bio-feedback of our health. That’s the future. The 2010 – 2020 decade is not about communication but about analytics – about collecting the seen and the unseen and exporting it into a format that we can all understand.

    In a few years we won’t have to go to the doctor for our yearly check-up because our smart devices will do these for us. They will either collect blood or use some non-invasive method to provide us with a real time bio feedback. We could have a device that based on the nutrients in our blood to suggest what we can eat next, a device that will tell you to relax and take a brake when you are too stressed or a device that could give you some kind of emotional metric regarding other people – giving you a better assessment on whom you should have around and who not.

    Of course, this at an analogical level exists. It’s called journaling. But instead of journaling (and never reading our entries, I’ve journeled almost daily but I’ve never read any of the entries) we’ll get quantitative data. Instead of saying that „that person makes me happy” we’ll have a log that based on proximity and other factors will give a score between 1 and 10 of emotional arousement around another individual.

    Instead of tracking how much water we are drinking (as many of us are, using Android or IOS apps) the app will log this automatically since it will have a direct connection with your organism. Input was first done by typing, on keyboards especially. Then it moved to touching, using touchscreens. Recently, it became popular and rather effective using gestures (like the Galaxy S4) or using voice (Siri on the IOS).

    The next step of evolution is either mentally (we’re not there yet) or a direct connection with your organism through your skin, pulse, blood or any other valid indicator that can show us what we are experiencing directly.

    And this has some interesting applications too from an advertising point of view. I’m almost sure that someone at Google already thought about this. If we are emotionally aroused in a sexual way, our feedback devices (as phone / glass / computer displays) could show us PPC based ads about condoms and hotels. If we are stressed our, about meditation and yoga. If we suffer from a particular problem, let’s say diabetes, it could show us treatments and doctors.

    What better than is there to deliver contextual ads if not the one based on what we are actually feeling, not saying or expressing interest for. An ad for a coffee shop when our organisms show us that we are sleepy or for a cinema when we feel bored.
    The applications are almost limitless. Now we are receiving ads based on behavioral patterns shown by our actual actions. These are accurate but not always spot on. For example, I already use a top notch to-do management program which I’m paying about $40/year for. I was curious about a competitor so I’ve visited their site. Now their banners follow me almost on every site even if I have no interest whatsoever in buying that subscription. Plus, computers are generally shared and it’s not like I’m signing out from my Google account every time someone borrows my phone or computer.

    So even if the algorithm is good, it’s rather hit and miss but it’s the best that can be done at this time. But if Google for example would have an ecosystem of bio-collecting devices (devices, not apps, since a computer program can’t interact directly with our body, only an actual physical system can, an app can only manage and transform the feedback into something useful) it could deliver real time, contextual ads based on our deep, true needs.
    It will be like showing up in a helicopter with a bottle of water for someone who is wondering in the desert lost or having that pizza delivered right in the moment you decide you would like to eat pizza tonight.

    Therefore, a new dawn in marketing and advertising is upon us. Advertising was first about understanding human nature and leveraging this. Now it’s in a crude form about data collection and analysis so predictable trends can be found and leveraged. In the future it will be only about data collection and analysis, at a deep level, from our behavior to our bio-feedback so it will appeal not to our rational mind but to the deepest needs of our psyche and body.

  • Will Copywriting As We Know It Cease To Exist?

    From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
    Dear friend,

    The answer is no.

    Many posts online say that the copywriting is dead. You can find this on forums, blogs and even in books.

    Copywriting is not dead. It is transforming. Yes, sales page formats may tend to change, to adapt to this new economy. Old long sales letters are not as effective as they were years ago because people tend to have a shorter attention span.

    However, for all intents and purposes, they still work. When you are selling, you still need to counter objections, give reason why, build momentum, create desire through the benefits of your product and so on.

    It does not really matter if it’s in a VSL or a 300 word copy or a 3000 word copy. It’s the same principle. Why? Because while the Internet may have changed a lot of things, we haven’t. The only major change is that we are fractionating information, that we are focusing more on small bits than on the big picture.

    This is due to services like Twitter or YouTube. However, we still need to be persuaded and seduced into buying something. Forget consultative selling. Forget selling without selling.

    Sales in essence are the same as they were three decades ago. So if you are wondering if you should use a sales copy, the answer is yes. It works and it will still work for a few years from now on.

    Best regards,
    Razvan Rogoz

  • The #1 Most Overlooked Emotional Appeal

    From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
    Dear friend,

    I don’t know about you, but here in Europe there is a major factor that impacts how people behave, and therefore can be used in sales copy.

    This is what other people will think of them. Europe is a lot more social and conformist in nature (at least parts of it, France would be the opposite) compared to the United States. Here “what other people think of me” ranks high on the list of emotional needs.

    This drove me to the fact that too few people use this in a sales material. Yes, they use appeals like “get a good deal” or “sleep better at night” but way too few people focus on this primordial need to get accepted, to be liked and not to be judged.

    So here’s a piece of advice: in every sales copy you write, focus on the social aspect too. Show how they risk nothing and they gain a lot, socially, by investing in this product and there is no risk of shame or “loss of face” in the process. It is a small tweak but for most people, caring what other people think is just up there close to sex and eating.

    For your success,
    Razvan Rogoz

  • The Three Entrepreneurial Personalities

    From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
    Dear friend,

    I am not only Razvan Rogoz. I have actually three personalities. Now, don’t be scared. I’m not crazy.

    I’ll explain in a second.

    Every entrepreneur or business owner has three personalities. If you don’t believe me, ask Michael Gerber in “The E-Myth Revisited”, one of the best books on system thinking ever wrote.

    • I’m Razvan the technician – writing the copy, writing this article, putting in the work.
    • I’m Razvan the manager – creating plans, updating Basecamp, managing my time, writing goals, allocating resources, finding help and so on.
    • I’m Razvan the entrepreneur – dreaming, finding opportunities, creating systems, looking for ways to grow and evolve.

    Three personalities in one. And what I’ve discovered, what I’ve understood recently is that the more these three personalities are balanced in a manner of 33.3%, 33.3%, 33.3%, the more competent that person will be.

    Some people are technicians by nature. They like to get the work done, whatever that work is and don’t really concern themselves with management or entrepreneurship. Others are managers or entrepreneurs, focusing on order and opportunities. The idea is to balance these three.

    The idea is that if you have three hours available …

    • Use one to plan and keep everything in order.
    • Use one to do your work.
    • Use one to find opportunities for your work to value more in the future.

    In other words – execution, management, vision. 

    Is it easy to keep such a balance in place? No, it’s not. But life is about balance. You can’t go 90% A and zero B if you need both. If you want to be productive you need both work and rest. If you want to grow a successful business you need to be the technician, manager and entrepreneur, all in one package.

    For your profits,
    Razvan Rogoz

  • How To Be Productive While Writing Copy

    From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
    Dear friend,

    Sales copy is not the most productive activity in the world.

    Why?

    Because as copywriters, we want everything to go perfect. We want every word, phrase, paragraph to fit in and look like a piece of modern art.

    And this is the biggest obstacle to writing good copy. Writing good copy is a process of research, putting your thoughts down on paper and refining. It is about approaching every possible way to get into the minds and hearts of the client and only then pick up the best one.

    How do you do that?

    I have three methods.

    The first one is to auto-write. The process of auto-writing is when you set a timer for 30 – 60 minutes and in that time you write without stopping. You don’t edit. You don’t think. You don’t brainstorm. You just write. You pour down everything that comes out knowing that you’ll need it in some form or another later.

    Auto-writing is a very useful process in copywriting, journaling, ghostwriting and possibly every other creative field. It allows you to get some rough gems on paper, gems you would need think about if you would edit every word and punctuation sign.

    The second one is to discuss personally with your prospects. Keyword research, blogs, forums, project briefs, are all useful but only to a point. You may get the general picture about whom you are selling but you are still going to make a lot of assumptions about how that person should behave.

    People are anything but rational (me included) so it may be useful to stop assuming that they’ll buy because of rational reasons or that they are interested in the same aspects of the product as you are. Sometimes, the most counter-intuitive thing out of all, a small benefit, a bullet may actually lead to a sale while other times, pages of benefits may not move him even one inch.

    So find your prospect and carry a normal conversation with him. Try to understand how he thinks, acts, sees the world. Pay him if you need to, just to understand his mindset as close as possible.

    The third method is to use strategic breaks. We are all emotional creatures. Emotions can make us or break us. One bad news and our entire day can be a mess and one good news and you can write the best copy of your life at lighting speeds.

    It is hard to write good copy when you are upset or depressed. It is hired to write good copy when you are uncertain if it will work or not. A good concept from NLP is “beliefs are possibility filters”. In other words, if you believe that it will not work, you are actually restraining yourself from writing copy that may work.

    It seems strange but the only way to access your true potential in any given situation is to believe in it’s certain success, in victory.

    Of course, there are many other ways to be productive while writing copy but these are the main three principles I consider you should follow. They usually eliminate writer’s block and will give you that momentum that you need to get from start to finish.

    For your business success,
    Razvan Rogoz

     

  • Are You Making These Five Copywriting Mistakes?

    From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
    Dear friend,

    There are a lot of posts & courses online on how to make your promotion work. There are countless book on how to write good copy and how to improve your conversion through the process of split-testing.

    What I have almost never found are posts about why a sales letter may fail. You see, copywriting is both an science and an art, exactly in this order. It is based on fixed principles but it is hard to pinpoint them with mathematical precision. There is an amount of guessing inherent in every promotion you write or is written for you.

    Below are the ten reasons why I consider a copywriting promotion usually fails.

    Too many assumptions regarding the customer.

    When you are researching, your main focus should be on the person you are actually selling. This may as a given but you would be surprised how many people ignore this step. They focus on the product, on the market, which are good advice, but they forget that people buy for emotional reasons and justify with logic.

    One good method I’ve been using lately in order to create customer avatars is to pay potential clients to talk with me. I will look for clients who bought a similar product and spend 60 – 120 minutes discussing their buying motivations for $10 – $20 per hour.

    This is a lot more useful than a focus group since there you will hear generally what you want to hear. When you are talking one on one with a customer, he’ll bust almost all your assumptions wide open and explain to you the real reasons why he bought something.

    You will discover that these reasons are far from sophisticated and generally relate to our fundamental human nature – vanity, fear, love.

    The copy is difficult to read.

    I am not saying here about English vs. non-English copywriters. For all intents and purposes, a read-proffer and editor is cheap enough to invest in. Instead, I am suggesting that you format your copy in such a manner that it is as easy to read as possible.

    Use short sentences instead of long ones. Break paragraphs after one or two sentences. Make the design easy to follow with as little distracting elements as possible. Use sub-heads to break up the copy and make it easier to read. Use a font that works for them, Ariel or Tahoma. Use a blueish background image since it’s proven to increase trust.

    All these element taken individually do not account for much but together will increase the readership of your sales copy dramatically.

    The headline does not pull the prospect in.

    The job of the headline is to get the prospect to read the first sentence. The job of the first sentence is to get him to read the second sentence. This process goes on and on until you’ve pulled him into the copy and you’ve started the “desire” process. Until the moment you can present him the benefits that may make him want to buy, you want to build your copy as a slippery slope where the only purpose of every word mentioned there is to get him to read forward.

    The true purpose of any sales letter is to get read, not to sell. The sell should come as a consequence of building enough desire, but if it doesn’t get read, then it’s all for nothing.

    The offer is not attractive enough.

    One of the first thoughts that we have when we want to buy something is “can I get this somewhere else cheaper?” It doesn’t matter if it’s a $200.000 sports car or a $19 eBook, we are always looking for a better deal.

    Most online entrepreneurs act like there is no competition, like their product is the only one on the market and the only solution for any given purpose. The truth is that maybe a small percentage will buy instantly, because this is the first choice they’ve seen but the bulk of your market researched several products before voting with their wallets.

    Acknowledge the competition. Explain how you are superior to them. This may be in terms of price, bonuses, insight, experience, customer support. Don’t simply act as there is no competition as the prospect is far from stupid.

    The objections are not answered.

    Regardless what some people may think, copywriters are not editors. They are sales people in print. This means that we need to think like a sales people and the primary objective in sales is to get over objections.

    In a interaction, there will always be a sale. You can either sale the other person on why your choice is the best one or the other person can sell you why it’s not. A sale is always made.

    When it comes to copywriting, the prospect will bring a lot of objections. These may include but are not limited to:

    • I am special, this will not work for me.
    • I have tried something similar and it failed.
    • It is too expensive.
    • I do not have the time required.
    • I am afraid what my family will think after I purchase this.
    • I do not know if I can handle the challenge of applying everything.
    • I’m not ready to buy now.

    … and so on. There are tens of objections found in every product and market and your job is to answer them, as persuasive as possible. Do not ignore an objection. If you ignore it, it doesn’t mean that it’s not there and every objection ignored is like a huge “STOP” sign your prospect can’t wait to find, stop, and return to his cozy, homeostatic state.

    These are the main obstacles to a sale. There are more, of course, including a bad product (it’s hard to sell a inferior product) but for all intents and purposes, please try to avoid everything I’ve wrote above.

    For more sales,
    Razvan Rogoz

  • The importance of emotional intelligence in mrkt / sales

    From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
    Dear friend,

    What makes a good copywriter?

    To be honest, it is not his ability to write. Yes, words are important. Words are damn important. It’s a vehicle to get your ideas and message across. But there is something more important than that. That is emotional intelligence.

    What do I mean by emotional intelligence? The ability to understand how people function and most importantly, how you function. A copywriter is similar to a hacker. He must break into a system and change something. He must get his attention, resolve his objections, make him desire his products and finally, get the client to take action.

    It’s similar to scanning a port, finding the right password, breaking the firewall, finding the right file to take and eliminating all logs.

    This may offend a lot of copywriters who believe themselves as artists. We are not artists. We are business people. We are no different from the Wall Street broker pitching stocks on the phone or the sales person moving door to door. Yes, we require a bit more sophistication but we are not artists. We do not write to get awards. We write to sell.

    And if you want to become a better copywriter, instead of keep copying sales letters by hand, develop your emotional intelligence. Go out in the world. Experience. Meet your prospect. Meet people who are obsessed with their weight to understand how the weight loss niche works. Meet 24 year old virgins to understand why the dating industry works. Go to a multi-level marketing meeting, sit through it two hours and network to understand how biz op work.

    Copywriting is a skill learnt in the real world. Yes, I also encourage you to read a book or watch a course on copywriting for at least 30 minutes daily but the bulk of your work should be out there, not in front of your office.

    It’s true, you can copy the masters, you can take every technique and strategy and apply it in a principle similar to “monkey sees, monkey does”. And it will actually work. It’s not that hard to sell. But until you understand the underlying principles of human nature, what makes people ticks, how we are these strange and wonderful creatures in the same time, you can’t win it big.

    Agree?

    Leave a comment in the box below.

    Thank you,
    Razvan

  • Why Persuasion Matters.

    From the desk of Razvan Rogoz
    Dear friend,

    Persuasion.

    This simple word will make some people feel sick in their stomach. It has a bad connotation. A really bad one. When you think of persuasion and it’s logical extension – a persuader, you think of someone evil. That salesman who is simply not leaving you alone. Wall Street brokers and so on.

    But persuasion is a part of life. Virtually everything we do is persuasion.

    I have a book next to my bed. It’s called “To sell is human” by Daniel Pink. And this book made me realize something. Like it or not, to succeed in life, you are in the persuasion game.

    If you have children, you have to persuade them to clean their room. If you have a significant other, to be politically correct, you need to persuade that person to act in your best interest. If you are an entrepreneur, you need to persuade your employees to work hard, your investors to put in the money, your banker to give you a loan and of course … your clients to buy from me.

    The thing is that … persuasion is like the air we breathe. We can’t live without it and a world without persuasion is a utopia. We are human beings. Imperfect by nature. We do not want to do what others tell us to do even if it’s in our best interest.

    If we would be rational and goal oriented, like a computer, we would all be rich, good looking and happy. But we are not. We are our biggest enemy. And this is where persuasion comes in (uh, I love this word).

    First we need to persuade ourselves to be our best. This means doing something productive instead of going on the path of least resistance. Second, we need to persuade those around us to act in our best interest. Without persuasion, there would be no love, no romance, no happiness, nothing. Then we need to earn our living, no matter if this means selling stocks by the phone or selling our ideas to someone else.

    It’s our primary skill for surviving in this world. And it’s a skill that should be taught in elementary school next to math and English. The thing now is that persuasion is also dark and evil in nature, like everything else. It can be used for good or for bad. For happiness or for sorrow.

    But that’s a choice, a choice you get to make.

    Because the truth is that everything in this life is a double edged sword. Absolutely everything. And if we were to use only what is good, whatever good may mean, we would starve to death really fast.

    So what’s my call to action?

    Develop your persuasion skills. You can survive without cooking, without math, without even reading. But you can’t survive without persuasion. And even if you decide to go “Walden” style on everyone and spend your next two years in a cabin in the woods, you would still need to persuade yourself. And guess what?

    You are the hardest sell anyone can make.