1. PROVE IT MOFO! - Gary Bencivenga's most closely guarded secret.
   
   Shower your prospect with as much proof as you can. Give them self-tests, give them something they can use so they can see for themselves. Show them how other people (who are just like the prospect) have succeeded. Show the research. Pile on a stupendous amount of testimonials. Force the reader to scroll through a WALL of screenshots of happy customers. Show the droves of people who have all benefitted in the past... and invite the reader to join.
2. Contrarian - Say the opposite of what everyone else is saying in the market, or say the opposite of what the prospect tells themselves. Startle the reader and make them go, "Wait a minute.. WHAT?"
   
   Examples: Why copywriting is low-value skill. 10 reasons drinking water is bad for you. Don't EVER sleep 8 hours a night. This angle is mainly about showing how popular advice is too superficial to hit the mark, and the easy addition the prospect needs to finally solve their problem once and for all (hint: it's the thing you're selling).
3. Obliterate Their Biggest Objection - If you know your target market's biggest objection then show them (without demeaning the reader or blaming them) how that objection is purely fictional. Show them all the ways in which that objection is simply not true and it's merely a fiction that's holding them back. Make your argument so overwhelming the prospect will feel kind of sheepish about having this objection in the first place.
4. Impending DOOM - Issue a warning about something hidden, big and dangerous that the prospect isn't aware of. Expose this lurking danger and use as much proof as you can to show that this prowling stalker is real, dangerous and coming for them. If you can make it innocent looking at the same time - while showing how lethal it is- then perfect!
5. Nail-Biting Curiosity - Tease the living daylights out of the benefits, the mechanism of the problem and/or the mechanism of the solution. Pull the prospect through a rollercoaster ride of insinuation and leave them DYING to know what you're talking about. Of course the ONLY place they'll ever find the answer is on your sales page/VSL/landing page/email list/etc. Think: Be explicit and specific about the benefits but tease the mechanisms.

Probably the strongest angle because if it's new, then it also offers hope that THIS TIME the prospect will find the solution to their problems.

• Weird?
• Insider Knowledge
• Secrets
• Cabals
• Conspiracy finally revealed
• Knowledge or techniques from secret societies
• Clandestine meetings
• Knowledge from mega corporations 
• Upgrades
• Unexpected gains/consequences?
• First of it's kind?
• One of a kind?
• Last of its kind?
• Does it relate to something the reader already knows but with a 'twist'?
• Accidental discovery?
• Discovered by an ancient culture - now verified by science?
• Scientific Breakthrough
• New mechanism/new and improved way to solve a known problem
• System or technique that's unknown - to the reader?

Halbert Exposed: How "The Prince of Print" systematically abused his unpaid interns for years

• breakthroughs
• updates
• lawsuits
• celebrity mentions
• sex
• scandals
• Conspiracies
• Subterfuge
• Corporate misconduct
• drugs
• drama
• fighting
• politics

• Are they about to make a mistake?
• Will a small and insignificant effect end up affecting the reader in some major way? (sneaky angle)
• Can you ask so many probing and highly technical questions about the topic the reader loses all faith in their own ability?
• Are they making a huge mistake - without knowing it?
• Is a popular trend insanely harmful
• Does it challenge a popular belief?
• Is there certain loss by following the crowd?
• Is the crowd always wrong?
• Is their favorite guru/celebrity/idol deadly wrong about something?
• Does it directly challenge something the reader hold near and dear? AKA are you slaughtering their sacred cow?
• Can you raise a red flag or give an easy test to show how much danger the prospect faces?
• Is there a self-test that shows someone is about to lose/commit a fatal flaw/die slowly without noticing
• Signs of impending doom
• Betrayal
• Conspiracies
• Does the prospect have a certain harmful identity/type of personality/traits (narcissism/sociopathy/beta-male/genetic defects)
• Signs the prospect is DEALING WITH a certain harmful identity/type of personality/traits (narcissism/sociopathy/beta-male/genetic defects)

• Can you show why the prospect is a winner, while everyone else is a loser?
• Prospect having untapped potential inside them (This is BIG with beginners and people who struggle)
• Has "The system" failed them/conspired against them/ignored them/mistreated them/belittled them
• Insider knowledge (Wall Street Insider Reveals The Trading Signal Hedge Fund Managers Hoped You'd Never Find Out About)
• Hard won experiences
• Show they never needed to do a certain thing to begin with ("Why crunches never built six-pack abs")
• Used to be hidden behind paywalls
• Only available to a select few
• Actual secrets
• Conspiracies
• Corporate misconduct
• Government misconduct
• The left it out to destroy us
• The right is out to destroy us
• The East is out to destroy us
• The West is out to destroy us
• China/Russia/India/America/Africa is coming for our jobs/women/health/money/bicycles/pension savings
• Inside scoop
• Industry secrets/practices
• Little known fact?

The following techniques are all fleshed out significantly in Breakthrough Advertising.

1. Show the product in action
2. Show how it affects the prospect over time AKA Future Pacing
3. Show experts approving
4. Show the product itself
5. Show envy/status/others reacting to you, or reacting to you owning the product
6. Compare and contrast with competition
7. Analogies/metaphors

• Do you have a genuinely unique mechanism of solution?
• Can you tease your mechanism like crazy until the reader is dying to know what it is?
• Highlight something everyone in your industry does - but no one talks about (the reader obviously cannot know about this)

• Can you break the law in some way?
• Can you "break the law" legally?
• Is your product so XXX it should be illegal
• Is your product so XXX it actually IS illegal (The soft drink "prime" has so many artificial vitamins it's been banned in the EU so now children are importing the illegal stuff from America)

• Is there an honest piece of information, that's highly relevant to your prospect that you can simply GIVE THEM to signal that you're an authority?

• Is there something completely politically incorrect/outrageous you can say about the topic that will ensure people will take a look
• Can you issue a WARNING! (do this more than once and your prospects WILL burn you)

• Extend the benefit/consequence in time - what's the **final** outcome? Focus on that.
• Can you use the slippery slope fallacy to frame the topic?
• Does an insignificant effect end up affecting the reader in some major way? (sneaky angle)
• What can you compare the topic to favorably?
• What can you contrast the topic with favorably?
• What is the overarching theme?
• Can you zoom aaaaaall the way out and give an overview?
• Can you zoom in, real close, and reveal just a snippet?
• Can you show how higher order effects (the benefit of getting the benefit) will touch the reader's life in some significant way?
• Can you just blow the higher order effects out of proportion and show that overwhelming picture?
• What is the final outcome? Can you guide/future pace the reader from the beginning to the end and take them on a journey?

The legend of direct response Clayton Makepeace discovered 16 dominant emotions that seemed to always get prospects riled up. This is his list of emotions that he'd always turn to in order to boost response.

When you're working on an angle, focus on one of these emotions and really drive home the point.

1. Anger
2. Betrayal
3. Revenge
4. Fear
5. Frustration
6. Greed
7. Happiness
8. Hope
9. Love/Caring
10. Passion
11. Relaxation
12. Sadness
13. Security
14. Shame
15. Powerlessness
16. Urgency

Living direct response legend Bob Bly uses these 4 metrics to gauge the strength of his headlines. Incidentally you can use them as a yard stick for how much "punch" there is to your angle as well.

Are you presenting your information in a way that scores at least 3 out of 4 on the following criteria?

• Urgent
• Ultra-specific
• Useful
• Unique

"All benefits are connected"
-David Deutsch

Higher-Order Effects
"Your customer doesn't want to get rich. They want to be able to have absolute freedom in all areas of their lives and fulfill their childhood dreams of all the material stuff to see if it will bring them happiness."
-Nick Verge

In short: No benefit is ever isolated.

This is the idea that every outcome affects something else, which affects something else, which affects...

This means even small initial changes in your prospect's life can ripple throughout their existence.

To highlight the true ramifications of your claims, features and benefits extend the "benefit of the benefit" to higher orders and show how the prospect's entire life is affected.

Think:

1. As a consequence of taking action X, what Y's will happen?
2. When considering *all* the Y's that could happen, what Z's will happen as a consequence of those Y's?
3. When considering *all* the Z's that could happen, what Q's will happen as a consequence of those Z's?
4. etc...

The Connection Of Benefits
Not only do benefits have benefits (like described above) but affecting one area of a prospect's life tends to improve other areas at the same time.

Example:
Improving your health, will improve your relationships as well as your ability to make more money. As you make more money you can make more conscious choices and then further improve your health and relationships. As your relationships improve you get better support, which helps your mental health, which then again feeds back into your ability to make more money and be a better partner.

"All benefits are connected"
-David Deutsch

Wealth <--> Health <--> Family/Relationships <--> Wealth (etc)

When you consider both the higher-order benefits of your product as well as how everything is connected you can often find a surprising and effective angle.

Consider whether the "personality" of your target market is...

• Competitive and impatient
• Spontaneous and emotional
• Methodical and analytical
• Humanistic and caring 

...and change the language you use to fit their personality accordingly. 

The same angle on government fraud can be phrased as a social issue, as a proof-backed piece of almost-journalism, as an emotional outpouring as well as a chance to benefit...

...all from changing the language you use to present it.

The Parris Lampropoulos "7X" Method
The Parris Lampropoulos approach to beefing up your creative process is simple, easy to remember and only reserved for those who actually well and truly care about writing KICK ASS copy:

"Get 7 times as many ideas as you need and write 7 times as many bullets as you need, and use only the best ones."

That's the trick. If you want to write ONE good subject line for your email, write 7, sharpen them all, take a critical look at each and every one of them - then pick the best one.

The Gary Bencivenga "7X" Method
Parris got his 7X idea from Bencivenga. And it's the SAME idea, except Gary's method says: "Collect enough research to write 7 promos and you'll have enough to write ONE good promo".

In Other Words:
If you're "Writer's Blocked" it's simply because you need to do more research and you need to put more shitty ideas on the page and select the best idea that crops up from all your creative work.

Sorry to go all "Ben Settle" on you, but this IS the most effective solution ever found. If you're stuck: Know more and do more.

Log into your favorite AI and use a prompt like this:

<beginning of prompt>

Make a list of all combinatorial options from these two lists.

Pick one item from each list at a time and combine it with one item from the other lists. 

Seed = [list your products features here (separate each feature with a comma)] 

Bait = [News, Sleaze, Terror, Suspicion, Greed, Hope, Break The Law, Trust, Time Warping]

<end prompt>

Then run the command and the AI will give you an overview of every possible way you can frame your feature using the tactics from this road map.

Skim the list and consider which of them you could use.

First off: An angle is the emotionally compelling way in which you choose to present a piece of information.

An angle is not a bullet, a headline or such. An angle is an idea, or a very certain view you take to make your writing irresistible to your reader.

Creating angles is the FUNDAMENTAL skill of marketing because the human brain is a pattern recognition machine. We see patterns in everything and we tune out the well-known and notice the new and interesting.

Due to the categorical imperative you must be unique because any ad that looks like something people have seen before gets labeled 'uninteresting'.

People will even reject proven methods if they think they've seen them before, simply by virtue of not being new.

Think of it like this: Your prospect's life isn't perfect and pain free right now. In your prospect's belief system, that must mean that everything they've encountered so far has failed to give them their perfect and pain free life. This means that NEW information and NEW products might offer them the hope that this time, they'll have found the magic solution that will set their life right.

Furthermore:

The overwhelming amount of notifications and pull on your prospect's attention means that we MUST pull the reader in immediately if we are to have any chance of getting read.

Any advertising you write has to be more interesting than: Sex, pizza, games and Netflix.

Because that's what your prospect's attention is drawn towards.

To make matters worse:

Advertising usually intrudes on people's lives, so hook the reader as soon as possible and turn yourself into a welcome guest.

The angle is not a headline or a finished bullet

The angle is there to give you ideas for a sales email, a FB ad, a sales bullet, a VSL, an advertorial, even for a headline. 

Angles are there so make sure that whatever you write has enough emotional pull to avoid wasting your advertising budget.

1. When you write stronger headlines you'll get more people reading your ads. More readers means more sales
2. You'll put out FB ads that convert better. That tends to be REALLY good for your future job opportunities and paygrade.
3. Selling information products like books, courses and coaching often relies on writing powerful fascinations to do the selling for you. When you know how to come up with 300 bullets, you can simply choose the 25 best ones and put them in your sales letter. Then sit back and watch the sales come rolling in.
4. Better overall creativity. No writer's block. Just copy that converts.
5. When you become an Angle Jedi you'll impress the FUCK out of clients and colleagues with your sharp marketing wit. You'll find yourself in brainstorming sessions where everybody else have found 5 angles, you'll be the one who found 50.
6. Stronger body copy. When you know how to come up with a good angle you can actually say the same thing to your prospects over and over again, - without them getting tired of hearing it. They won't even notice because the same information is framed in different ways. And when it comes to persuasion - It's awfully hard to beat sheer repetition.
7. More effective agitation copy. With a strong angle your reader will deeply feel how his reputation, income, status, confidence, future and self-esteem is on the line unless he pays attention. All with a few choice words from you.

1. Choose what to focus on by choosing from your product's features and linking that feature to certain benefits (the bait)
2. Choose how you're going to present those benefits (the emotion)
3. Tweak the way you'll communicate it (the language)

How To Manipulate Brain Chemistry To Make Your Words Primally Irresistible
Put in very simple terms, you can hijack the brain's reward seeking mechanism by combining two things:

1. Highlighting a benefit to the reader
2. Spiking the benefit with curiosity

The curiosity is what releases dopamine. And dopamine is what drives motivation. So getting people intensely curious about your copy will motivate them to open and read it.

In a nutshell that's because curiosity implies that you're presenting something new, which gives the prospect hope that THIS TIME the prospect will have come across a solution that will give them what they want (which ties back to the benefit you're promising).

Which means:

At the heart of making any piece of information endlessly interesting to people, you need reframe what you're saying in a way that tickles the prospect's self-interest and curiosity.

So, hook with curiosity first and foremost to start the slippery slope. Just remember that curiosity alone doesn't sell; That shit's called clickbait and you don't want to be like that. :)

WARNING: If there is no compelling emotion to your angle, the prospect will never care. Always frame your copy in a way that your reader resonates with. AKA "You got to know your market"

The first step to coming up with an angle for your promo is to choose which part of the thing you're selling to focus on.

For products this is the list of features. For info products/coaching/training this is the information the client will get access to. You can choose between product features, the way it's delivered, the experience you've tailored, the support the client gets, the guarantee, how the information was found, how the product was made and so on.

Basically every potential selling point for your product can be used to come up with an angle.

The only thing you need to in order to start generating angles is to choose the features that your prospect cares about the most.

Once you've chosen a handful of important features you can either go to step 1.2 or to step 1.3 and expand on why those features are beneficial to your prospect.

Once you have a basic idea of the major benefit you want to emphasize, go to step 2 below.

That step will guide you to a PILE of reframing techniques where you can easily choose the angle you feel your prospect would react the most favorably to.

Kyle Milligan “The $7.1 Million Man” from Agora popularized an INSANELY powerful copywriting framework called NESB, which stands for:

1. New/Unique
2. Easy/Everyone
3. Safe/Predictable
4. Big/Fast

The idea being that in order to raise conversions whatever you communicate in your copy needs to touch on one those four emotional subtexts.

When coming up with an angle, look at whatever feature you've chosen and ask yourself:

• How is this new, breakthrough, special, scarce or unique compared to what the prospect already knows or what the prospect has access to?
• How is this easy to use? Simple to apply that everyone could do it?
• How are the results proven, tested, safe and predictable? Does anything about your chosen feature basically guarantee a positive outcome?
• How does the prospect's life change as a consequence of having this feature? How quickly can they see results?

Once you have a list of several features, where you have outlined how every feature affects the prospect in some way related to NESB you should have a range of angles that you can start working with.

These 16 basic human desires were proven by Steven Reiss to exist across all cultures - which means they're basic to humanity and not driven by a certain nation's culture. As a first attempt you can lean on these to find an angle that has a good chance of resonating emotionally.

You can use these 16 basic desires as a replacement for the Agora approach outlined above. So, choose the feature you're writing about and consider how that feature affects one of the 16 basic human desires from the list below. That gives you a LOT of potential angles to work with.

The Basic Human Desires

1. Acceptance - to be appreciated
2. curiosity and knowledge
3. eating
4. family and relatedness
5. honor (adhere to the values of a well-defined group)
6. idealism, values, principles and ethics (social justice)
7. independence and self reliance
8. order, structure and organization
9. physical activity and health
10. power and influence, exerting your will
11. romance and idealized love
12. saving and accumulating resources
13. social contact and affiliation
14. status and prestige, social significance
15. tranquility and stability, security and protection
16. vengeance

The Painful Counterparts

1. Dismissal/rejection (acceptance)
2. Ignorance
3. Starvation
4. Isolation - Humanity will move on without your contribution/genes (family)
5. Disgrace
6. Cynicism - Insignificant work/contributions
7. Slavery and dependence
8. Chaos
9. Lethargy
10. Weakness and powerlessness
11. Dispassion and rejection
12. Poverty and scarcity
13. Isolation
14. Obscurity
15. Insecurity and overwhelm
16. Injustice (being a doormat)

Check out section 1 above. Once you have the basic seed outlined (Step 1) you simply look for ways to frame that information.

If you:

• Are struggling to find a kick-ass idea for a sales letter/VSL
• Have lost momentum and your brainstorming session has ground to a halt
  

…then go to section 1 “59+ Ways To Come Up With A Sharp Angle”

---

If you:

• Need LOTS of angles for ads
• Are stuck trying to find anything good
• Feel your angle needs a bit more “oomph”
  

… then go to section 2 “Sharpening Your Angle And Overcoming Creative Roadblocks”

---

If you are:

• New to copywriting
• Struggling to find ANYTHING to write about
• Having a hard time figuring out how to make a particular piece of copy interesting…

Then go to section 3: “The Essentials Of A Powerful Angle”

1. Select a few features from the product you're selling (if you're selling information then use valuable insights as features) - Choose the ones that you think matter the most to your prospect (Not the ones YOU think are the coolest :D )
2. For every feature separately: List out how that feature affects one of the 16 basic human desires (see Step 1.3 below)
3. Skim the section on powerful reframing methods and select how to present your feature for the strongest impact

To show how to use the process outlined in this document I've shown two examples below on how to turn a frightfully boring feature into something that's way more enticing.

Take note of the angle; not the final copy.

The point is to see how to turn a feature (such as collapsible text) into something that feels worth reading about.

### The Examples ###

Feature (choosing the bait): This road map has collapsible text

Emotion (loading the hook): Organization and power

First Potential Reframing - Organization: Ease of navigation means you can quickly find the exact information you need - even under tight deadlines. A first draft headline using this idea becomes:

Unusual Copywriting Guide Lets You Easily Crank Out Hard-Hitting Angles - Even Under Intense Time Pressure

Second Potential Reframing - Power: Ease of navigation means you can find powerful angles for any kind of copy - quickly. A first draft headline using this idea becomes:

Become An Irreplaceable Copywriter When You Know How To Turn ANY Piece Of Copy Into A Money Magnet In As Little One Minute

###

Again: Take note of the angle; not the final copy.

The angle is there to give you ideas for a sales email, a FB ad, a bullet, a VSL, an advertorial, even for a headline. Angles are there so make sure that whatever you write has enough emotional pull to avoid wasting your advertising budget.