MERCVRE

Just hit 11k followers, so figured it’s high time I introduce myself again🕵️ I’m Mercure. That’s not my real name. I’m a Copywriter. I spent 5 years working in-house at one of the largest direct response companies in Europe, before moving on to focus on my own freelancing career. My account is anonymous and will likely stay that way. Because who I actually am doesn't really matter. What matters is the Big idea behind all of this. See, I share what I know about Copywriting, but probably not in a way you’ve seen before. Most people associate Copywriting will loud, catchy, headlines. And while that's a popular expression of Copy, I’m more interested in what’s underneath. The psychology, the philosophy, the linguistics. See, I have written a lot of Copy in regulated markets. Markets where you can't just show up shouting big claims. To still write winners, I had to find new ways of writing claim-less Copy. That's where I found storytelling, world building, and how to install ideas in your readers without ever saying them. I call this Quiet Persuasion. And I've written a book about it, which has already been qualified as a marketing classic by its readers. Now the Quiet approach isn’t for everyone. It usually takes more work. It requires more research, to know your audience better than they know themselves. If you can't outclaim your competition, you've got to out-think them. You have to be patient when the internet rewards immediate impact. But here’s what it gives you. You learn to see what most people overlook. You understand human psychology at a level that influences your whole life. It’s a master key that opens doors you didn’t know existed. And if you're curious about what Quiet Copy looks like... ...I built my entire funnel as an immersive detective investigation, where the goal is to find ME. I disappeared, and I've left behind me scattered pages of the manuscript of Quiet Persuasion, that might lead you to me. If you’re curious, start here: mercurecopy.com/case-file-2543… See you around. Merc

A mentee of mine wrote an ad last week that crushed it. His client was thrilled. But instead of being happy, he felt like a fraud. Why? Because he used Claude to write it. So to him, the win wasn’t really his. The praise belonged to Claude. I hear this a lot lately, and it always comes from the same place. School taught us that the effort is the point. You suffer over an essay, you show your hard work, and the grade rewards your struggle. Do it the hard way or it doesn’t count, in a sense. So now people drag that rule into their careers, and it hurts them. They feel guilty when the work comes easy, like they cheated, like taking the shortcut makes the result worth less. But your client doesn’t care how much you suffered. No one does. The ad worked. It made money. That’s the scoreboard, and there’s no column on it for how hard you tried or how much of it came from you. And I told my mentee this. YOU used Claude. YOU chose the angle. YOU read what came out and knew which parts to cut, which to keep, which to rewrite. Then YOU looked at the final thing and made the call that it was good enough to put your client’s money behind. YOU did all of this. And THAT judgment deserves praise. So if you still feel that kind of guilt, if you still hear that little voice saying it doesn’t count unless it hurt… DROP IT. It’s a leftover from your school days, and it’s 100% not serving you. The market pays for results. It doesn’t ask how you get them.

AI is not killing your Copywriting career. But you know what might? Your reaction to it. Because if you start thinking Copywriting is dead now that a machine can do it, you’ll either quit or waste your time and energy being bitter, while everyone else gets to work. Think about it, we’ve seen it happen before. When digital cameras came out, a lot of photographers thought it was over for them. Everything that made their craft hard to break into, like having limited takes because of film, working in the darkroom, and all the rest, a machine could do. Plenty got bitter, and some even quit. And sure, that technical part lost its value. But the photographers who stayed, they found out the core of the craft mattered more than before. Having an eye, taste, knowing what’s worth shooting in the first place. Because once anyone could grab a camera and hit burst mode to fire off thousands of shots hoping one is good enough, it turns out the real skill was in knowing which one to keep. If anything, digital cameras lowered the barrier to entry while narrowing down what the skill was really about, at the same time. The new tool buried some careers and launched others. Look around today, teens in third world countries are making insane shots with just their smartphone, creating crazy visual effects with nothing but scraps. So you can be angry that the technical stuff got easy, and act like some kind of elitist who complains “the craft is not what it used to be…” Or you can focus on the part that still pays, the part that was always the core of the job: understanding your buyer, spotting angles and opportunities, knowing what “good” looks like. I mean, how do you think the OG Copywriters would react to AI? They would LAUGH at us for complaining. These guys took their asses to actual libraries to do research, they traveled just to talk to a few customers, and managed entire teams just to do stuff you can do by hitting a few buttons. Give them a fraction of the amazing tools we have today, and they wouldn’t be writing sad little posts about the death of Copywriting. They’d be outworking every one of us, grinning the whole time.

Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents, and I bet you can’t name three of them. Everybody knows the lightbulb, some people know the phonograph, and that’s usually it. So what could possibly be in the other thousand? Well, mostly junk. There’s concrete furniture in there, a talking doll so creepy it made kids cry, an electric pen... The most famous inventor in history spent his whole life churning out stuff nobody wanted. And before you think Edison is some special case, look at some other greats. After Picasso’s death, his relatives found over 45,000 unsold works in his estate. Bach and Mozart left behind piles and piles of music that nobody plays. This pattern was so consistent that a researcher named Dean Simonton studied it across scientists, composers, and inventors. And since the pattern was consistent, he gave it a name: The equal odds rule. It goes like this: The more you produce, the more great work you produce. But your ratio of hits to misses never improves. Not with experience, not with fame, not EVER. Which means even the best guys cannot skip bad ideas. Twenty years in, Edison was still cranking out duds at the same rate as when he began. The only reason his hits piled up is because everything piled up. Now, that’s bad news if you’re a perfectionist, but it’s great news for everybody else. Because if the ratio is fixed, the only thing you can play with is volume. More drafts, more posts, more ads, more shots. A bad idea doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. They’re part of the process. And the sooner you make peace with this, the more you’ll roll the dice, and the more good ideas you’ll find, and the more money you’ll make.

I’ve been out of good ideas for well over a year. And in that time I still posted here every single day, and wrote every ad and email my clients paid me for. Both of these are true at the same time, because people misunderstand where good ideas come from. They think you either have them or you don’t. So they sit down and wait for a brilliant idea to show up, and when nothing great shows up, they conclude they’re just not “an idea person.” But brilliant ideas never show up. They get BUILT, and the raw material is always a bad idea. Every piece I’ve written started as something either flat, or weird, or too obvious, or just plain stupid. But instead of disqualifying it, I still wrote it down and started working with it, like clay. I turn it around, push on it, cut a piece here, add one there. Sometimes I leave it aside for another day. And something happens EVERY TIME. The idea improves a little, to the point where it’s actually good. When it doesn’t, the improved version always leads me to a new angle I couldn’t see before. It’s like walking. From where you stand right now, you can only see so far. But take a few steps and the view changes. New paths appear. Take a few more, and there’s more again. Ideas work the same way. Each idea is a vantage point, and you can’t see what the next one hides until you’ve walked there. Sitting still and waiting for the brilliant idea is like waiting to see the entire road from your doorstep. So the people who “always have ideas” are not gifted. They just walk more. They produce enough bad ideas to keep moving to new vantage points, and from time to time, one of those points shows them something good. Which means the recipe is two ingredients, and neither is talent. Volume, first. The more ideas you work through, the more ground you cover. And second, the willingness to work with a bad idea instead of being embarrassed by it. That one is harder than it sounds, because a bad idea on your timeline feels like proof you’re a fraud. It’s actually the opposite. One bad idea is the clay, and the writers who refuse to touch it are the ones stuck at the doorstep, not getting anywhere. Me, I’d rather look like a fool with clay on my hands.

@MominKhanx @Hope_Feltcopy You can get your copy here: mercurecopy.com/nlsbi-field-re…

@Hope_Feltcopy @MercureCopy where can you point me to that direction

My favorite writing advice fits in two words: write simply. You’ve heard it before, but I bet you haven’t heard the best argument for it. It comes from a Nobel Prize physicist, of all people. Richard Feynman was asked one day to teach one of his topics to first-year students. He worked on it for days, then gave up. Everyone expected him to say “the topic is too advanced, you can’t explain this to freshmen.” Instead he said, “it means we don't understand it enough.” He couldn’t explain it simply, so he concluded that HE didn’t understand it. One of the smartest men of his century, with a Nobel Prize in this field. And that’s the big secret behind the advice: If you can’t say it in simple words, you don’t get it yet. Because simple words have nowhere to hide. When your thinking is unclear, a simple sentence shows it to everyone, starting with you. On the other hand, complicated writing gives you cover. Big words and long sentences can make any shaky idea look solid. And it can fool you too. That’s why so much writing out there is complicated: the writers are hiding. And in Copy, this costs you serious money. Because if your reader doesn’t understand at the speed he scrolls… if your writing starts to feel like work… He’s gone, along with his money. So when your writing comes out complicated, go understand your idea better. And the simple sentences will come out on their own.

Can confirm that this book is amazing! Been loving your tweets and knew it was time to take the dive and buy it.

Around 3,000 years ago, a soldier delivered a sealed letter to his general. Inside was the order for his own death. The story behind that letter contains one of the best persuasion lessons I know. The soldier’s name was Uriah, and his bad luck was having a beautiful wife. One evening, while Uriah was off fighting the king’s war, King David was walking on his palace roof. He looked down over the city, and there she was, bathing. Kings take what they want, so he sent for her that same night. A few weeks later, a message reached the palace: “I’m pregnant.” Which was a serious problem, because her husband had been at the front for months, and people can count. So David went for the clean exit. He recalled Uriah from the front under some fake pretext, asked him a few polite questions about the war, then sent him off with a smile: “Go home now, soldier, and rest with your wife.” You can see the plan. If they spend one night together, the timeline fixes itself, the baby becomes Uriah’s, and nobody asks questions. Except Uriah didn’t go home. “My brothers are sleeping in open fields,” he said. “How could I go home to eat and drink and lie with my wife?” So instead of his own bed, he slept at the palace gate with the servants. David wasn’t done though. The next night he invited Uriah to dinner and got him properly drunk, figuring the wine would do the trick. But Uriah slept at the gate again. So now the king was stuck, because the man was too loyal to be tricked. And a king who can’t fix a problem one way will fix it another. That’s how David came to write a letter to his general: “Put Uriah where the fighting is fiercest, on the front lines. Then pull back from him, so that he will be struck down and die.” He sealed it, and gave it to Uriah to carry. The plan worked. Uriah fell in battle, David married the widow, and the palace moved on like nothing happened. A perfect crime. Nobody said a word either. Because what would you even do? Accuse the king? Men had lost their heads for far less. But one man decided the king would hear about it. A prophet named Nathan. Now put yourself in Nathan’s sandals for a minute, because his problem is the same one you face every time you write Copy… He had to change the mind of a man whose guard was all the way up, who had every reason to deny everything, and who could end the conversation whenever he pleased. Your reader holds the same power, minus the crown: his guard is up, excuses are ready, and closing the tab costs him nothing. Nathan knew that going in with an accusation would get him killed before the second sentence. So he walked into the throne room and did something strange instead. He asked the king to judge a case. “There were two men in a city,” he said. “One rich, one poor. The rich man had flocks and herds beyond counting. The poor man had nothing but one little lamb he had raised. It grew up with him and his children. It ate from his plate, drank from his cup, and slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. One day, a traveler came to visit the rich man. And instead of taking one sheep from his own enormous flock to feed his guest... he took the poor man’s lamb, killed it, and served it for dinner.” David didn’t even let him finish. He rose up, furious: “As surely as God lives, the man who did this deserves to die!” And Nathan looked at him and said: “You are that man.” The king fell back into his chair. He could have denied everything, executed the prophet on the spot, and buried the affair with him. Instead, he just sat there. Because he had just been sentenced by his own mouth, there was nothing left to say but “I have sinned.” How great is that? A direct accusation would have gotten Nathan executed on the spot. But a story about a lamb brought down the king in under a minute. So why do stories hold this kind of power? The first reason is that you can’t argue with a story. Every claim you make wakes up a little lawyer in the other person’s head, and his only job is to object. Tell a guilty man “you did something terrible” and the lawyer jumps up with a denial. Tell a reader “this product will change your life” and the lawyer mutters “yeah, sure.” He can’t help it, because every claim he’s ever heard came from someone who wanted something from him, so objecting is just what he does. But a story gives the lawyer nothing to work with, so while he waits for a claim to fight, the message walks in unchallenged. Getting in is only half the job though, which brings us to the second reason, and it’s the most important one… A story doesn’t tell you what to conclude. It lets you conclude. Notice that Nathan never said the rich man was a monster. He never said stealing was wrong, and he never asked for a punishment. David supplied every bit of that himself. He heard the case, saw the injustice, and passed the sentence out loud... before learning he was the defendant. And that’s exactly why he couldn’t fight it. The verdict wasn’t Nathan’s opinion, it was HIS. Because people scrutinize the conclusions you push on them, but the ones they reach on their own, they defend like family. You do this too, whether you realize it or not. The books and movies that changed you did it without ever stating their point, while every lecture that told you what to think didn’t do anything. It’s just how we’re built. And if a story can make a king confess to a crime, it can sell whatever you’ve got.

Letting people reach their own conclusions, instead of pushing yours on them, is the heart of how I approach persuasion. My book Quiet Persuasion covers it in depth, including a section called “Making the desire theirs.” If you sell anything, it’ll change how you write. Check it out here: mercurecopy.com/nlsbi-field-re…

Your buyer will never enjoy your product as much as he enjoys the weeks of wanting it. Sounds like an insult to your product, but it’s just how desire works. The reward system fires hardest during anticipation, when you’re still imagining, looking forward, thinking “when it arrives, I’ll finally…” THAT is the peak. And your product only has to live up to it. If you’re skeptical, think of a recent online order you made. You probably tracked the package every day, and once you got it, you left the box unopened for a little while. Well it’s the same mechanism. Now, why does this matter for your Copy? Because it means the enjoyment doesn’t start at delivery. It starts on your page. Reading about the product IS part of consuming the product, the same way smelling a meal is part of eating it. So write like it. Let your reader taste the result while he’s still scrolling. Put him inside the daily life he’s about to have, and the problem he’s about to lose. If the wanting already feels this good, imagine what he’ll pay to keep it going…

@MercureCopy This kind of post is why I snapped up Quiet Persuasion. You should too.

@steveeunpu Thank you Steve!

Want to make your prices feel smaller, your offer feel like a no-brainer, and your buyer feel smart? Study restaurant menus. They’re designed by professionals whose only job is getting you to spend more without feeling it. And their best tricks belong in your Copy 🧵

People don’t know what anything is worth. So they decide based on what’s nearby, how it’s framed, and what the purchase says about them. That’s exactly what my book Quiet Persuasion is about. How buyers decide what something is worth, and how to use this honestly in your Copy to sell more, at a higher price, without feeling dirty about it. Check it out here: mercurecopy.com/nlsbi-field-re…

Diners have 30+ dishes. High-end places have 6. That’s no accident. Because too many options feels like work to your brain. Give people a long list and they either freeze, fall back on the safest thing they know, or take forever to decide and enjoy it less afterward. But the short menu does something more interesting than avoiding all that. It SAYS something. 6 dishes says “we do a few things and we do them REALLY well.” 30+ dishes says “we don’t know what you want, please find something.” Your offer sends the same message. You think you’re giving them options by having 5 packages, but you’re just making it harder for them to pick one. Every choice you remove says “I know exactly who this is for and what they need.” And that confidence sells, on its own, before any argument. Focus on one product. One path. One clear next step. Now, all these tricks work because of one thing…