I’ve got a really fun illustration for you that you are going to love, and it’s going to help you make more sales and improve your copywriting.
Thomas Edison invented one of the greatest inventions ever, and we never talk about it! I think it’s because we fail to understand it’s significance.
The invention is the phonograph, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, but I’m willing to bet that many of us have missed the significance of it. I too had failed to catch its significance until it was recently explained to me.
The Phonograph’s Significance
The phonograph changed the world. Literally.
Until its invention, sound had never been recorded.
Think of how much of your life involves listening to recorded sound. Movies, YouTube videos, Social Media posts, songs, home videos, and so much more.
None of these things existed until Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.
How it Came to Be
Edison was deaf. Or at least almost deaf.
It’s not something that’s well documented, but it’s true. The inventor of the phonograph and many advancements in the telephone’s receiver couldn’t hear.
Alexander Graham Bell had just invented the telephone. But it needed improvements. Famous inventor Thomas Edison went to work perfecting the phone. But as mentioned, he had hearing issues. So he used to bite the device making the noise so he could feel the vibrations and thus understand what was being said.
Through feeling these vibrations, he realized that a needle could be hooked up the device making the noise (in this case a phone) and scratch the vibrations onto a sheet of paper. He theorized that the same needle could be pulled back over that recording to reproduce the sound.
And he was right!
Sound was finally recorded.
What We Can Learn from This
The lesson I want to impart to you actually comes after this.
When testing their new recording, Edison and his team would play the recording to people, and ask what they heard. For the record, it was a recording of someone saying, “Mary had a little lamb.” When they would play this for the audience, no one understood what sounds were being made. It was unrecognizable.
To be fair to them, no one had ever heard a voice recording before.
However, when the experimenters would say to the listeners, “I’m going to play a recording of someone talking. I want you to tell me what you hear them saying.” The audience members could always tell you what the person on the recording had said.
Preframing
The reason the audience members could tell what had been said in the second example is that those conducting the experiment had pre-framed the audience, letting them know what to expect.
For you, as a writer, you can increase the likelihood of your audience feeling how you want them to feel, or taking the action you want them to take, by using this strategy in your copywriting.
I did it at the beginning of this email. I said I had a training you would love and that it would improve your copywriting. That was me telling you what type of reaction you should have to what follows, which makes you more likely to have it.
When you write, use pre-framing to help you improve your copywriting.