All posts by Ryan Healy

Sales Letter Surgery

Yesterday I finished a rewrite of a financial sales letter that didn’t pull quite as well as expected. The original version was 3,143 words. The new version is 5,422 words — a 72% increase. Today I finished expanding a fundraising letter from two pages to four. At first, we thought we’d keep it to two […]

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Big Hitters Still Strike Out

A client hired me to write two different financial packages to be tested to his list. I came up with the most compelling hooks I could… worked on each letter for 3+ weeks… put as much into the letters as I could… and then turned them in. The client loved them. Even the people in […]

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The Biology of Risk-Taking

Have you ever wondered what causes booms and busts? Or why some people are naturally better at risk-taking than others? In the new book The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, John Coates examines these questions and the biology that affects our appetite for risk. Coates’s lab is a New York trading floor where individual traders […]

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Is It Going to Work? And How Can I Make It Better?

I recently retained a patent attorney to help me with a product idea. I hired him for two reasons. First, I needed him to do a patent search for me. I had done some searching on my own and couldn’t find any similar products or patents. But I needed his expertise to determine whether other […]

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Mark Twain’s Biggest Writing Failure

If ever there was an American literary giant, Mark Twain was it. He was somehow larger than life — loved for both his stories and his outsized wit and personality. Yet did you know that one of the books Twain wrote was a flop? It’s true. His autobiography was a failure by most objective standards. […]

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