Have you heard of Brian Keith Voiles? Probably not, but if you have eyes you’ve seen his ad campaigns and you probably even bought products that he created ad campaigns for.

Would you like to have the formula he gets paid $12,500 to put into use for Fortune 500 Companies?  Are you curious as to how this formula is used to influence your buying decisions?

Well then, today’s your lucky day, isn’t it? You’ll notice this formula whenever you read a sales letter or an ad. Remember that the key to writing a sales letter is that the job of every paragraph is to make the reader want to read the next paragraph.  Now that you know this you may catch yourself thinking of this when you hypnotically continue to watch an infomercial or read an enticing offer.

This is the secret skeleton used to write the most successful ads that grab your attention and motivate you to give out those credit card digits.

1. ATTENTION – Write a headline that GRABS your reader. Fear or curiosity are good places to start. For example: “Ex-Truck Driver Makes $21,815 a Month Doing What You’re Not”

2. INTEREST – List the benefits of your product or service. Acknowledge their problem while showing you have the solution. Show that you’ve been where they are and you can help them.

3. CREDIBILITY – Mention referrals and references of how others have benefited from your product or service.

4. PROVE – Show testimonials with full names and cities or countries. Offer a risk-free guarantee.

5. BELIEVABLE – Give your full contact information. Make it easy for them to buy with no hassles. Let them know why they should trust you.

6. SCARCITY – Have limited offers, special time sensitive sales, discounts on a few products in limited quantity.

7. ACTION – Ask for the sale. Make it simple.

8. WARN – Let them know the pain they’ll experience if they don’t use your product. i.e. If you’re selling a wrinkle cream let them know how dry their face will be and how much deeper their wrinkles will get without your product – if that’s true. Don’t lie.

9. NOW – Tell them why they should buy right now.

That’s it. Now you’ve got the skeleton that the best copywriters in the world use.  If you’re a marketer this won’t be gold, it will be platinum.

If you’re a consumer, this is a platinum shield to help you take a deep breath and question if you REALLY need that product or service before parting with your hard earned cash.  Read the formula a few times and you’ll start to notice it in the structure of commercials, the language of print advertising and the content of major marketing pitches that effectively get you to buy whatever they’re sellin’.

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The secret to getting rich quick is to not spend your hard earned money and valuable time on schemes that experts are selling you to teach you how to get rich quick.  The truth is that if they were rich from their actions they wouldn’t be wasting their time on stages and teleseminars pitching you on how they altruistically want to teach you to do it too.

I once worked for someone with a very profitable infomercial on “easy 1,2,3″ real estate transactions.  Yes, he did get rich by engaging in similar transactions.  But, he was making more in a day selling products, services and courses on how to do it than he made in a year of doing real estate transactions.

Beyond that, his customer service phones rang of the hook with thousands of daily calls from unhappy customers who couldn’t figure out why the system wouldn’t work for them.  As long as he had 20 success stories for the infomercial and handfuls of others, most of whom had previous real estate experience, he could prove that it worked while 98% of his customers failed.

I’m not going to throw every money making opportunity into this category, but we can bet that at least 95% of them are not what they seem.  In some cases the people pimping their expertise really believe that their students can learn to be incredibly successful.

Unfortunately, the results beg to differ.  For instance, how many millions of people bought products from Tony Robbins versus how many reached their pinnacle of success through following the simple and easy program?

In the personal development field there is a term called “shelf help.”  If you have any books, tapes or CDs lining your shelves with promises to make you lose weight, make money, improve your health or make your relationships better then you’re a consumer of shelf help.

Though I’ve cleaned out my shelf help collection, I still have some too.  I even created and sold some and believe you can get good information from self help material though it’s dangerous thinking one book, course or seminar is going to fix your life.  Then again, I don’t believe anyone’s life is broken in the first place.  We’re just warped by marketing to think that we aren’t good enough and buying products and services will make us whole again.

There are some benefits to these products in some cases, but in the majority of them there is a major flaw.  Usually there is a formula or prescription of what to do to for you to become thin, rich and fabulous with no future problems in your life.  The thing is that there isn’t one formula that’s duplicatable.  The other thing is that things don’t make people happy so even rich and thin people have problems, especially if their happiness is tied to material wealth rather than inner peace.

Your best bet is to pick up some tips here and there that work for you and allow you to create your life in the fashion you’d like.  Every successful person got to where they are with many unplanned, unexpected and helpful people and circumstances.  Since no two people live the exact same lives, it is impossible to replicate another person’s results no matter how well you model their actions and attitudes.

This is not to say that thinking positively and taking strategic action can’t be beneficial.  You just can’t know whether or not they are contributing to your perceived successes and failures.  When you hang out with upwardly mobile fun people who like you there is a higher chance that you’ll bump into better opportunites in life, but there are no guarantees.

Which leads to another funny topic; how our brains make meaning out of everything.  For instance if you watch the Secret movie and something good happens you’ll attribute it to that and if bad things happen you’ll think you’re not doing the Secret steps right.  Suffice it to say that you aren’t the problem, but believing that the Secret works and you don’t is a big problem.  We’ll dive deeper into that fun one in another post.

You have to create your own happiness.  One way to get there faster is to love your life as it is while still doing smart things that make you happy.  Once you stop believing there is a happier and better life beyond the one you’re living you’ll really be on your way.  In realizing the possible hypocrisy of recommending a book in this post, I will say that listening to the CDs of Byron Katie’s Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life helped me to realize this fact.

You’ll be astounded at how quickly you’ll get rich over time when you save and invest your time and money rather than wasting it on get rich quick programs.  Life is a marathon, not a sprint.  Think long term and enjoy today.