buy a house with no money

If “buy a house with no money” was your hook, your actual offer may be a checklist or a cheat sheet of “15 things that you must do in order to flip your first house.” And, oh by the way, one of them is you need money to fund that flip. We’ve got a customer that does exactly that where they present the idea of flipping houses with their hook. In this case, that hook is actually fairly good because it’s part of their business as a solution to help prospects get to whatever that initial goal is.

Part of the reason why “flipping houses” as a hook would work in some cases is because bigger brands have commercialized to the mass market the idea of flipping houses as a way to invest money and make a good return. Because of this TV exposure, people subconsciously associate flipping houses as a known way to make money and achieve freedom. If this sense of awareness wasn’t present, then it would be far more difficult to use “flipping houses” as a hook.

In essence, “flipping houses” has gone mainstream so much so that if you ask anybody on the street what flipping houses actually is, they’d probably know. But if you were to do the same with intermittent fasting, you’d get some interesting reactions to say the least, with most answers sparking intense confusion.

Some of you probably already get it. You understand, or at least you think you understand, what a hook is and perhaps have even written some hooks for your product or service. Hooks are the trickiest thing you’ll do in advertising and it’s a subtle science and art to get good at, so the more examples, the better you’ll understand.

DRIVE 10 YARDS FURTHER

This one is fairly straightforward. What’s the one thing that a golfer really wants? If you asked a hundred golfers what they want most (notice how I didn’t say need most), the chances are pretty good that more than one in five will answer to drive the ball farther. Especially for male golfers, they want to be able to earn the bragging rights. They want to be the big dog who drives the ball off the TV 300 yards, leaving the other players in his foursome shocked in astonishment.

Sure, many high-level golfers might say “how to one putt every green” or “stay more consistent” or even “cure my slice” (all pretty good hooks by the way), but none looms larger than being large off the tee. What “driving the ball farther” has over the other hooks mentioned here is that there is an emotional attachment to driving the ball further. It taps into the male ego, making it emotionally charged as well as an intense desire. If you were to brag about being able to one putt every single hole to your friends, what kind of reaction do you think you would get? Perhaps an “atta boy” or a “good for you,” but the reaction would be pretty lukewarm. Now, if you were to drive 10 yards farther than your buddy, THAT gives you immediate bragging rights. It’s simply far more emotionally charged. What’s even better is that when the hook is paired with a specific end result like “ten yards farther,” we’ve now injected a promise of a specific outcome alongside the emotionally charged desire. When you can combine a hook that speaks to a specific desire that has a defined and measurable outcome, you probably have a pretty darn good hook.

If my hook is “drive the ball ten yards farther,” then my offer could be a video where I show you step by step how to do this using, perhaps, “One simple trick.” Maybe in the video, I show you how to place your hands like this, and then do this. Maybe it’s how to transfer your weight from one side to the other, while still maintaining solid contact. The video is the offer and the hook is how to drive the ball ten yards farther.

Making sure we don’t make the how-to-flip-houses mistake our customer made, the logical next step after showing the prospect how to drive the ball ten yards farther is to sell them a paid program on how to improve your golf game. Perhaps the hook of that paid program is “How to take 10 strokes off your golf game in less then 30 days.” The hook and the offer lead directly into the next logical step, namely to purchase a paid program that delivers on not necessarily what they want, but on what they need.