The 10% Solution – Mastering the Lead
By Michael Masterson

As a copywriter, 90% of your success depends on 10% of the copy you write. Get that 10% right, and you’ll have a golden career. Fail to master that 10%, and you’ll be eating ketchup sandwiches.

The 10% is the 300-500 words that make up the “lead” of your promotion or advertorial.

To begin, I’d like to take a look at one of the most common lead types – the “problem/solution” lead.

Up-and-coming copywriter Penny Thomas does a very effective job of using a problem/solution lead to engage her reader’s interest.

Let’s see what she does, starting with the headline:

This is a “how to” headline. The “how to” in this case explains how the author of the article overcame a big problem the reader of the article might be experiencing himself or – at the very least – is worried about, especially given today’s economy.

Penny does three things to add gripping power to this very classic approach:

1. She uses a rhyming phrase: “From Layoff to Payoff.” Studies show that most readers respond to and remember rhyming phrases.
2. She adds some specificity to the solution: it will come in three steps. Three steps is a judicious choice for the implicit promise here. The reader is willing to read three steps. He may not be willing to read 33.
3. She deepens the promise. The standard promise would be “six-figure copywriter.” She is going after another desire here, a subtler and deeper one, by broaching this promise of personal fulfillment.

I also like the byline. It establishes Penny as both an expert and a role model. Most of the people reading this publication, customers of AWAI, want to become professional freelance copywriters too.

Now let’s take a look at how she handles the lead:

In only nine sentences, Penny has done an awful lot of work here. It’s really very impressive. What she has done is to introduce a problem/solution lead with a story. Rather than state the problem (that many employees today face uncertain futures), she creates a little story in which she is the hero with the problem.

Since it is first of all a story, Penny begins in the middle of the conflict: “Having survived four layoffs, every day at work felt like a gamble. All I could think was, ‘Will I be next?’”

She makes the story more visible by establishing location (an investment banking firm) and time (Christmas, 2002). She raises the stakes by making the problem worsen: the fifth layoff had just taken place.

And then, she suggests the solution: sending away for the AWAI program.

That is exactly what you want to do when you use a problem/solution lead: get the reader to feel the problem as quickly as possible, and then focus on the solution.

Let’s see what Penny does next:

In explaining the solution, Penny discloses that her progress was “slow but steady,” and yet it doesn’t seem that way to the reader. Because she was sparse on those details, the reader feels like Penny’s writing success came very quickly – which is just what the reader wants.

Let’s continue:

Now Penny is doing something else that is rather clever. Now that the reader understands the solution to the problem, he might put the article aside, feeling that he knows what is going to follow. So she creates a little secret by referring to the “WSM” system – the secret she used to succeed. A secret, she says, that is so good she would “guarantee” that it will work for the reader.

By now the reader is fairly well hooked. He wants to read on to find out exactly how Penny achieved the success she has. Thus, the article continues:

In giving the reader an explanation of the “WSM” system, Penny is providing a benefit, one that many readers will feel emotionally obliged to reciprocate.

And she adds to that by providing another benefit: she tells the reader how to solve a related problem (an objection) he might be having.

And finally she ends by repeating the original promise – the solution to the problem: