…no need to fix it!

I was reminded of this adage while doing a little background research on Robert Ludlum for yesterday’s post.

As mentioned, I bought the new Jason Bourne novel (“The Bourne Sanction”) and while glancing through the list of other Ludlum novels, I couldn’t help notice that the titles all looked…well, pretty similar.

For example, not just the “Bourne” series but “The Bancroft Strategy”, “The Ambler Warning” and “The Tristan Betrayal”, to name but a few.

In fact, Wikipedia notes that…

“Ludlum has received criticism for for using the same fixed titling pattern “The [Proper Noun] [Noun]” for most of his books.”

As Ludlum was hugely successful and sold something like 290 million books, I’m sure he wasn’t too concerned by such criticism!

And that leads me to my point.

In both popular fiction and copywriting, there are formulae or templates that work.  And by work, I mean produce the results you want. Which is people handing over their hard-earned cash.

And when we’re dealing with an important area like money, then don’t take unnecessary chances.

Ace copywriter John Carlton talks about “Gun to the head copy”.  If you’ve got to get a result, then stick with what’s tried and true and proven to work.

And David Garfinkel’s “Copywriting Templates” course is based on this idea of dissecting winning letters and drawing out the formulae that lie behind the letter.

Now I know that as a copywriter, there is sometimes the temptation to want to be “creative” and do something new.

But always remember that the first priority is to get results.  By all means test new ideas and alternatives but make sure you’ve got something solid that works in the first place.

And, like it or not, certain things just work.

Let me give you an example.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the headline template…

“Who Else Wants (benefit, benefit)…?”

Quite frankly, it’s not one of my favourites.  It’s been widely used in the internet marketing space and I tend to shy away from it.

However, virtually every time I’ve used it or tested it against alternatives, it produces good results.

So, if you’ve got a good thing going, don’t make changes just for the sake of it.

Hey, it was a winning formula for Robert Ludlum for all those years (and millions of books)!