The two most powerful words in advertising and how to use them to explode your response fairly easily and consistently.

First, to illustrate these secret words. can you guess which of these two magalog headlines was the big winner for a financial newsletter?

HEADLINE A: (next to a photo of Charles J. Givens):

If you've got 20 minutes a month, I guarantee to work a financial miracle in your life.

(Caption under photo): Charles J. Givens, the self-made $200-millionaire, entrepreneur and best-selling financial author of all time.

HEADLINE B: (same photo and caption): The Millionaire Maker

Subhead: Can he make YOU rich, too?

Avoid triggering sarcastic response

One way to avoid triggering the YEAH, SURE response that many outlandish claims solicit (such as "Get rich quick!" and "Lose weight fast!") is to sandwich your big promise inside an IF ... THEN construction in your headline.

When you say IF (followed by a requirement your prospects have to meet), it seems to magically switch off and bypass their YEAH, SURE alarm and usher you right to the front door to sell.

Surprisingly, it even works when you make the requirement easy to meet.

The winner

And now you know the winner, headline A:

If you've got 20 minutes a month, I guarantee to work a financial miracle in your life.

I know, the promise still seems so big and hard to believe. But that is the power of the IF ... THEN construction. For some reason, it seems to put the universal YEAH, SURE alarm to sleep, like punching in the alarm code when you enter your home.

The formula: a reasonably easy requirement, followed by a strong promise. Think up ways to use this for your own product.

Of course, be sure to pay off in your body copy why and how the benefit can be achieved by such an easy requirement. And if it is not extremely easy, but only moderately easy, that is even better, as it is more believable. Surprisingly, candor is a gloriously effective technique for boosting response.

Anyway, test this IF ... THEN idea sometime soon, measure the results, and you may be startled by how much it outpulls the typical big-promise headline most ads rely on.

Beats Richard Simmons control

The headline was so successful for Givens, his publishers asked me if they could adapt it for another of their products, a weight loss newsletter by Richard Simmons. Against a strong control package that had beaten all comers, they tested this headline, keeping all other elements in the package the same:

(Next to photo of Richard Simmons): If you've got 20 minutes a month, I guarantee a thinner, healthier you.

It worked like a charm and handily beat the previous champ. (BTW, notice the absence of exclamation marks, the overuse of which INCREASES the aroma of hype and a resulting YEAH, SURE response.)

Excerpted with permission from Bencivenga Bullets, [e-mail]

By Gary Biencivenga, editor, Bencivenga Bullets