Secrets Of Writing For... Pt 1

Secrets Of Writing For The Financial Markets with Clayton Makepeace, Part 1

Clayton Makepeace is perhaps the most successful copywriter who has ever written promotions in the financial markets, and with his permission we’re delighted to be able to share this interview with him American Writers & Artists Inc (AWAI), on the Secrets of Writing for the Financial Markets.

Even if you aren’t in the financial markets you’re going to get a lot out of this interview because Clayton discusses some of the finer points of what to consider when trying to get bigger winners in any market.

(Need hands-on help developing your own winning copy and marketing campaigns? We generate thousands and thousands of brand new leads for our financial clients every month…. as well as helping them communicate with the ones they’ve already got. Want to talk about it? Please schedule a quick initial chat with us here.)

Here’s what you’ll discover in this interview with Clayton Makepeace:

• The five most effective techniques to boost credibility – and the one mistake to avoid …

• The single-most important thing you MUST have right – or you may as well toss your promotion in the trash …

• How this powerful format transforms colder prospects into eager buyers

• The quickest, easiest way to breathe butt-kicking, response-rocketing life into a dying control …

• The two troubling trends in financial marketing that you need to avoid like the plague …

• And much MORE!

AWAI: Why don’t we start with you telling us a little bit about yourself; your background.

Clayton Makepeace: My father was a Methodist minister. He never made more than $500 a month in his life. We didn’t know we were poor, but we were. Dirt poor. In tenth grade, I found that the one thing that interested me most was writing. My teachers seemed to be amazed at my compositions, and submitted them for publication in the city’s anthology for high school students.

Unfortunately, my mom and dad separated when I was in tenth grade, and I had to drop out of high school in order to help support my mom. My first real job was for $1.60 an hour, running a folding machine on the graveyard shift for a letter shop owned by a national political organization based in Oklahoma.

While the folding machine chugged away through the night, I passed the time reading the organization’s fundraising letters. After a while, I became convinced that I could create far more powerful promotions than the company’s highly paid "experts" were producing. So I talked the owner into letting me try my hand at writing a fund-raising appeal for him. To my surprise, he let me do it – and sure enough, when my appeal letter mailed, it pulled better than the ones he was using at the time.

At the ripe old age of 16, I had become an amateur – read that as "unpaid" – direct mail copywriter. Of course, it didn’t even occur to me that copywriting could earn me a decent living at the time. So when the organization launched its national weekly television program, I talked them into moving me into the Television Division. By the time I was 20, I was writing, producing and directing their nationally syndicated television show. I had an annual budget of about $12 million and generated tens-of-thousands of new leads and donors for the organization.

In 1972, a California organization offered me the princely sum of $8,000 per year to run their television department for them – producing, writing, and directing their quarterly television specials. But I resigned promptly when I discovered that the principals were skimming donations for their personal use.

Then in ’73 and ’74, a recession hit the television and film industry. And although I was still able to pick up some freelance production work, it wasn’t enough to support my family.

Then, in 1975, I found a "Copywriter Wanted" ad for a small direct mail list brokerage in LA that was starting a creative division. I figured it was worth a shot: After all – I had written some direct mail for fundraising and a LOT of scripts for television commercials: How hard could this be?

At the job interview, the owner asked me to write an "audition" package for him – a fund-raising letter, response device and envelope teaser copy. When they read my copy a few days later, they hired me on the spot – for $12,000 a year.

Within a couple of years, I was able to build the agency’s creative billing up to $1 million dollars a year. But when I asked him to pay me the bonus he had promised for reaching the $1 million mark, he not only refused; he fired me on the spot!

So, with no money in the bank, and no other obvious choices, I became a freelance copywriter – and in my first month, I netted $15,000: $3,000 more than my annual salary at the agency!

A few months after leaving the agency, someone showed me a direct mail package that Research Publication was using to sell subscriptions to its Daily News Digest newsletter. Daily News Digest was a semi-monthly collection of political and economic stories and commentary, edited by Phoenix radio personality Johnny Johnson.

Johnny was one of the true pioneers of our industry. At the time, Johnny – along with Bill Bonner at Agora, Howard Ruff at the Ruff Times, Bob Kephart at what is now KCI, Martin Weiss at Weiss Research, and Tom Phillips, at Phillips Publishing – were literally inventing the investment newsletter industry that we know today.

After reading Johnny’s promotion for Daily News Digest, I called him up, introduced myself and told him that his sales letter sucked – BIG time! I told him that I could quadruple his response. But Johnny said that money was too tight and he couldn’t afford to pay me: So, I offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse: "If I don’t beat the living daylights out of your control, pay me nothing,” I said. "If I do, you owe me $800."

Long story short: As I predicted, my package did quadruple Johnny’s response, and I spent the next several years creating successful promotions exclusively for his stable of investment newsletters.

Next came my big break. By 1982, I was earning $1,200 per promotion package and around $100,000 per year. That’s when a fellow from Minnesota asked if I would write a direct mail package promoting his brand new financial newsletter called The Money Advocate. I did; and within about 18 months my sales copy had generated 120,000 paying subscribers.

After a few months of writing for The Money Advocate, I asked my client if he would let me take a whack at the promotions he was sending to his active subscribers. He had been sending monthly promotions to his actives to sell them on investing in rare coins, and was generating about $360,000 in sales per month. The client accepted my offer, and when the dust had settled, my rare coin promotion had multiplied his usual monthly sales – by a factor of ten!

As you can imagine, the client was thrilled with the results and in a panic to retain me exclusively to create rare coin promotions for his file. I demanded a $250,000 annual retainer, plus a $40,000 signing bonus, plus a whopping 5% of sales revenues. He accepted, and within a year, we were selling $16 million worth of rare coins per month. After a while, a friend called to say that my client was cheating his customers – delivering low-quality rare coins at premium-quality prices. I resigned instantly and structured an exclusive marketing arrangement with Jim Blanchard of Blanchard and Company – the second largest rare coin dealer in America.

Over the next four years or so, I was able to quadruple Jim’s revenues to more than $115 million per year. Then, in late 1988, Jim sold the company to a subsidiary of General Electric for tens-of-millions of dollars. I ended my relationship with the firm and returned to freelance copywriting, creating newsletter subscription and book promotions for Phillips Publishing, Boardroom, Rodale Press, and many other financial and health publishers.

In 1991, Phillips Publishing called to ask if I would help them launch a new alternative health newsletter, Dr. Julian Whitaker’s Health & Healing. I agreed, and over the next three years, my promotions were mailed to 90 million prospects, and generated more than two million paying subscribers. As a result of this success, I was retained exclusively by Phillips to provide marketing consultation and to write for Health & Healing as well as the company’s new health and investment newsletters – including letters for Dr. Christiane Northrup, Elaine Garzarelli, the Dolans and many others.

Finally, in 1998, I ended my exclusive with Phillips Publishing to take on a new challenge at Weiss Research. Since then, I have provided marketing and management consulting services and created promotions that quadrupled the number of paying subscribers to Dr. Martin D. Weiss’ Safe Money Report,Undiscovered Stocks, Stocks on the Move and other investment newsletters.

I also help Weiss create new products for sale to active subscribers and have created sales campaigns that generated up to $5 million in revenues in as little as six weeks.

AWAI: Now it sounds like you had a fairly unorthodox transition into this industry. Do you think it’s still possible for somebody who hasn’t gone through college, but is a very talented writer … is it possible for somebody in that situation still to break into this industry and what advice would you give them?

Clayton: Sure! The secret to becoming a great copywriter has nothing to do with what kind of sheepskin you have hanging on the wall.

I’m a high school dropout. I got a GED diploma and about a year-and-a-half of college taking very general courses … certainly nothing on marketing or advertising. But in more than three decades as a professional copywriter, not a single client has ever even asked about my educational background.

What we do is about the numbers. You write a package. It gets printed. And within two weeks, you know if you’re a hero or a putz. If your packages win, no one is going to say, "Well, we know this guy has written all these winning packages, but we’re not going to hire him because he doesn’t have a degree."

If your copy performs, your dance card will be filled regardless of whether you’re a man or a woman … old or young … fat or thin… gay or straight … white, black, brown, or chartreuse, for that matter.

I’ve mentored quite a few beginners over the years – and as far as I know, not a single one of them had a formal education in copy-writing or marketing. Brien Lundin’s copywriting skills have made him a millionaire, and president and CEO of the New Orleans Investment conferences. Carline Anglade-Cole was a marketing director at Phillips Publishing when I began helping her refine her copy skills. Today, Carline is one of the top direct response pros in the alternative health newsletter industry. I also mentored Parris Lampropoulos, Kent Komae, Robert Hutchinson and Brad Petersen early in their careers. All of them are million-dollar copywriters today

So when you ask if a "talented writer" can still break into this business, and my answer is "Sure!" But that’s only half an answer, because in the end, what we do isn’t about writing. Yes, you have to have the basics. You have to have an adequate vocabulary – or at least know how to use a thesaurus. You have to know how to construct a coherent sentence.

But if you want to think about yourself primarily as a "writer," you’re probably in the wrong business. To make it as a direct response copywriter, you must be – first and foremost – a salesman.

Not a single great copywriter I’ve ever met thought of him – or herself as a "writer who sells." Instead, they saw themselves as "salespeople in print.”

It’s a crucial distinction. As I said, I’ve mentored many copywriters over the years, and I just named the ones I’m proudest of. What I failed to tell you is that when it comes to training copywriters, I’ve had far more failures than successes. And one of the most important lessons those failures taught me is this: Great writers often make lousy direct response copywriters. Why? Because the writing gets in the way of the sale. Financial publishers aren’t looking for great literature. Nobody ever intentionally rolled out three million losing packages just because they were enchanted by the prose!

Give me a successful life insurance rep or a used car salesman or any other kind of salesperson who has been in the trenches and excelled – and if he or she can also construct even a semi-decent sentence on paper, I’ll turn him into a multi-millionaire copywriter.

A great salesman doesn’t give a damn about split infinitives or dangling participles. He has no aspirations to write the Great American Novel. To him, Shakespeare is just another brand of fishing tackle.

Whether by heredity or by training, great salesmen are masters of seduction: They select their prospects with care … seize their attention … instantly put them at ease … are attentive – attuned to what the customer is thinking and feeling at every moment …deftly stroke the right emotional erogenous zones with the appropriate intensity and at the right times … cultivate a rising sense of urgency … and then compellingly close the sale in a way that leaves the customer blissfully satisfied and eager to repeat the experience.

So instead of thinking of yourself as a writer, see yourself as a master salesperson who just happens to work with the written word. Everything you do needs to be about selling.

Your headline must sell the reader on reading your deck. Your deck needs to sell the reader on reading your first sentence. And the first sentence – and every sentence thereafter – needs to sell the reader on reading the next paragraph.

Put simply, the greatest copywriters are the greatest persuaders: Our mission is to help prospects see things from our perspective. And it’s an art; not a science.

AWAI: Then what is the role of education and training for beginning copywriters?

Clayton: The first thing a writer needs to be able to do is to differentiate between strong copy and weak copy. You have to make that judgment minute by minute – hundreds of times a day – as you conceptualize your promotion piece, as you write, and as you edit what you write. It sounds simple, I know; but you’d be surprised how few copywriters – or their marketing manager clients, for that matter – really know the difference.

That’s where training comes in – especially early in your career. Direct response copywriting dates back more than 100 years – to the old Montgomery Ward catalogs of the late 1800s. Since then, millions of direct response catalog blurbs, post cards, sales letters, self-mailers, print ads, e-mails, TV spots and radio commercials have been produced. Each of them has elicited some level of measurable response. Many were duds. More were just so-so. A memorable few were dynamite. The point is, because direct response copy generates a measurable response, we know what has worked in the past. And over the years, much of that knowledge has been condensed into sets of "rules" – guideposts for copywriters

Master those rules. Internalize them; make them a part of your DNA. They represent lessons that others have spent billions of dollars to learn. But understand that the one constant in our business is change. Markets mature. Prospects become more sophisticated. Techniques that kick butt in a bull market will likely doom you to failure in a bear market, and vice-versa. What worked a year ago, five years ago, rarely works as well today. As the S.E.C. likes to remind us, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

More than that: Understand that rules are no substitute for personal experience. As you mature as a copywriter, allow what you learn from your own successes and failures to override these rules. If you blindly follow the rules every other copywriter is following, your packages will sound like every other package out there. Creatively breaking the rules that your competitors follow – and doing it in a way that boosts response – is what separates the mediocre copywriter from the pro.

AWAI: I’m going to jump back to the financial industry. When you write for the financial industry, can you give us your basic approach to a package?

Clayton: First and foremost, it’s essential that you understand your prospects’ fears and desires at the deepest possible level. The legendary Bob King – the marketing genius who presided over Phillips Publishing during its period of most explosive growth – referred to these fears and desires as the prospect’s "resident emotions." In the case of investment copywriting, resident emotions are the feelings that a majority of prospects already have about their finances: The fears that wake them up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat – or the waking dreams that have them so excited that they find it difficult to go to sleep in the first place.

When you can put your finger on what your prospects’ most powerful resident emotions are now, you’re half-way there. You can plant a touchstone in your headline and deck structure that immediately gets the prospect on your side, and a mantra that returns to that touchstone throughout the sales letter. They can say, "This guy has the solution to something I’ve been losing sleep over." Or, "This guy can get me something that I want desperately."

The financial newsletter industry and the alternative health newsletter industry – both of which have generated billions of dollars in sales over the years – were both born of the same basic resident emotion: A healthy distrust of the establishment.

Back in the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter was telling the American people that we should lower our expectations for the future. The experts were telling us that the world was about to run out of oil. Economists knew that Washington’s rampant printing of U.S. dollars was killing the value of the dollar – and yet the government was feigning ignorance as to what was causing inflation.

At one point President Carter chastised his chief economic advisor for even using the word "inflation" in public. So in his next speech, the advisor announced, "I’ve been asked not to use the ‘I’ word. So in this speech, I’m going to use the word ‘piano’ instead. And let me tell you: The current piano is one heck of a big problem!"

To the average investor, it felt like the inmates had seized control of the asylum. The value of their money was vanishing before their very eyes, and yet Washington was in denial. As a result, millions of investors lost faith in the government’s ability to create a profitable investment environment. They realized that, if they were to have any hope of surviving inflation – let alone becoming financially independent or enjoying a comfortable retirement – they would have to rebel against the establishment and take control of their own finances.

To do that, they needed a guide to them tell them what Washington and Wall Street wouldn’t. That’s when the pioneers of this industry – Howard Ruff, Harry Schultz, Harry Brown, Bob Kephart, Tom Phillips, Martin Weiss and Bill Bonner – stepped up to the plate. They said, “You’re right to distrust Washington and their puppets in the mainstream financial media. If you wait around for them to make you rich, it will never happen! You’ve got to do it yourself, and I want to help."

Their message was in perfect synch with investors’ primary resident emotion at the time. And as a result, we sold millions of subscriptions to their investment newsletters.

Years later – in 1991 – many Americans had developed similar feelings about the medical industry. Marcus Welby – the caring family doctor – had been replaced by cold, uncaring, greedy medical corporations. Doctors were doling out drugs with horrendous side effects. One drug, Tambocor, killed 100,000 Americans before it could be withdrawn from the market – more than were killed in the entire Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the medical industry was stubbornly ignoring breakthrough studies suggesting that simple lifestyle changes and good nutrition could often do what drugs couldn’t.

As a result, millions of Americans were becoming increasingly distrustful of the medical establishment. They were thinking, "My health is too important to trust to strangers. I think they’re taking advantage of me to get to my money. I think they’d be willing to poison me with toxic drugs, cut anything off of me, or even cut a hole right through me just to get at my wallet! I’ve got to get my own solution. And I need a dependable guide."

It was in this environment that a vice president at Phillips introduced me to Dr. Julian Whitaker at his offices in Irvine, California. At the time, Dr. Whitaker had written a couple of relatively obscure paperback books about reversing heart disease and a few columns for the local paper in which he railed against the medical establishment for its refusal to even evaluate promising alternate ways of treating America’s #1 killer.

After talking to the doctor for an hour or so, I returned to my hotel room, laid out what I believed would be an ideal newsletter for folks who were fed up with the establishment and ready to take control of their own health. Then, sitting by the hotel pool, I wrote a direct mail package to launch that newsletter.

At the time, nobody had successfully promoted an alternative health newsletter in America. The only successful letters in the field were mainstream letters, published by Harvard, Berkley, Tufts and the Mayo Clinic. And none of them asked for cash with the order. All of them were "bill-me" offers, and all of them were cheap – just $19 or $29 per year.

Now here I was, writing a promotion for a new newsletter … from a virtually unknown doctor … that was in the unproven alternative health field … that cost 33% more than letters published by some of America’s most respected medical institutions … AND that required the customer to pay up-front

When I submitted the copy, there was so little enthusiasm for it at Phillips that almost no one bothered to even look at it. The VP and I proceeded to push it through graphics, printing and mailing with only minor alterations to my first draft.

A few days later, my phone rang. Orders were pouring in. Phillips’ telemarketers were swamped: Customers were cooling their heels on "hold" for fifteen, even twenty minutes just to place their orders. The mailroom was stacked to the ceiling with Business Reply Envelopes, each one stuffed with money.

When the dust had settled, my launch package for Health & Healing had generated an eye-popping, unheard-of 4% response. That was more than EIGHT TIMES the response levels Phillips had ever seen on its mainstream health letters!

Soon, we were rolling out with 3 million … 5 million … up to six million pieces per month. No matter what list we tested – health names, investment names, catalog buyers, book buyers, even expires that were so old we had to clean the lists before using them – everything worked!

In the next three years, we sold more than two million subscriptions to Health & Healing at an average unit of sale of about $57 – more than $100 million in all!

But even that was just the beginning. Those subscribers enabled Phillips to build a vitamin business, which, I understand, now generates hundreds-of-millions of dollars in sales each year. And Health & Healing created an entire industry, as Phillips’ competitors launched health newsletters and vitamin companies of their own.

That’s the kind of magic that can happen when your copy connects with your prospects’ resident emotions!

AWAI: Do you have any rituals that you use for generating ideas for hitting those nerves?

Clayton: My first mental step is kind of a Zen thing: BE THE PROSPECT.

The single-most important thing that any investment copywriter can do is open a brokerage account and put a significant amount of money into it – money it would hurt you to lose. Then, go through the bewildering experience of researching the stocks you’re going to invest that money in. Then, put that money into the best stocks you can find. All of it.

Suddenly, you’ll begin experiencing the daily news and the daily ups and downs of the stock market in a distinctly personal, tangible way. You’re thrilled by every advance, crushed by every decline, and disappointed when your stocks go nowhere. And you’ll experience the agony of reluctantly selling a losing stock and turning a paper loss into a real loss.

For more clues that reveal how your prospects are feeling, expose yourself to the same media input that they’re getting. They’re getting their perception of the markets – and therefore, the emotions they have about them – from CNBC, CNN and Fox News. They’re reading the Wall Street Journal,Investor’s Business Daily, Barron’s and the business section of the New York Times.

Connecting with these news stories also helps in another way. It tends to make your packages more topical – more connected with the day’s news. And that can be a powerful advantage. Imagine your prospect, sitting there with a package you wrote about making money in a rising-interest-rate environment. Meanwhile on TV, they’re announcing the latest hike in the Fed Funds Rate hike. In effect, you’re putting the financial media to work for you!

Another way to get a good read on your prospect’s resident emotions is to go to sites like Gallup.com, Zogby.com, Harrispollonline.com and some of the other polling sites online. The answers to the political, economic and investment questions they’re getting right now can give you great insight into what investors are feeling. I also recommend that my clients poll their own subscribers and even send polls to rented investor lists – especially when they’re struggling to get a new control.

From time to time, the newsletter industry hits hard times – usually when investors are preoccupied with other things, and response just drops by thirty or forty percent. Promotions that were generating 100% return on investment suddenly begin coming in at 70% or even 60% of cost – even on "A" lists. It happened during the O.J. Simpson trial. It happened when Reagan was first elected, and later on, when he was shot. It happened when Princess Diana was killed. And it happened in the build up to the Gulf War, both of them. Usually, these slumps in response only last a few weeks.

But in 2004, it began happening in March, with bad news corning out of Iraq and as terror threats increased in the run-up to the presidential elections. Those are the times that try copywriters’ souls. Your only defense at a time like that is to clearly understand how your prospects are feeling. Figure out why they’re not reading their mail. And polling is a powerful way to do that.

AWAI: That’s very good advice and it’s advice I hadn’t heard before. On to my next question, in the financial industry, is there a typical prospect and if there is, how would you describe them?

Clayton: First, you’re talking to guys: Predominantly, to older, white Republican guys. Last time I looked, our average prospect was around 65 years old. But that doesn’t mean he has the same psychographic profile as a 65-year-old did when I started writing. Today’s 65-year-olds were teenagers in the 1950s … 20-somethings in the 1960s … and 30-somethings in the 1970s. And today, they’re far more hip, sophisticated and involved than their parents were at the same age.

Many of them are active or retired small business owners with substantial net worth. At The Money Show – which derives its attendees primarily from investment newsletter subscription lists – the average attendee has a net worth of around a million dollars. But that’s not necessarily liquid, investable wealth. They tend to have a big chunk of their net worth tied up in the family home, and possibly, in a business as well. So the average prospect may only have $100,000 to $200,000 to actually invest, and many of your prospects have substantially less.

Another key to understanding our prospects is that they are not merely casual readers who are content with the variety of views that are soft-pedaled by anonymous reporters in the big investment websites and magazines. They’re looking for emphatic, confident leadership: A more personal relationship with an investment advisor who has a strongly held world-view and investment philosophy that’s in synch with their own, and who offers clear, unhedged advice.

AWAI: Is there a particular tone or voice that reaches that market best?

Clayton: The tone of voice that you use and also the format of the package you design should always connect with the emotion you’re trying to convey. The investment publishing industry uses two kinds of packages: 1) Fear packages that connect with something the prospect is already fearful of and that offer a solution, and 2) Greed packages that connect with something that the prospect wants and offers to give it to him.

I do nearly all of the promotions for Weiss Research, the publisher of Safe Money Report. A couple of years ago, Dr. Weiss was the first to discover accounting irregularities at major corporations. He simply crunched the numbers and discovered hundreds of companies where stated earnings didn’t add up with the revenues and costs.

Now, put yourself into your prospect’s shoes: You’re an investor, trying to buy value stocks – shares with favorable price/earnings ratios – and you suddenly discover that the companies behind your stocks are lying to you about half of that ratio – their earnings!

These guys are swindling you. They’re telling you they have earnings way up here, but really they’re way down there … In short, they tricked you into buying stocks that were ridiculously overpriced. Even worse: You know that when the companies behind your stocks are eventually forced to restate their earnings, share prices are going to tumble and you’re going to get your head handed to you.

Now I ask you: What is the appropriate emotional response to that piece of news? Any investor worth his salt would be livid! Incensed! Outraged! Any other reaction would seem oddly detached and out of place. So the tone of our package was outrage.

But evoking emotion alone isn’t enough to make a sale. You also have to offer an outlet to the prospect – a way to directly address, and in this case, salve his outrage. So we also offered the solution: A free report entitled The Weiss Corporate Earnings Blacklist that allowed investors to make sure none of the companies behind their stocks were likely to be cooking the books.

Sometimes a little bit of humor also works. A few months ago, we found a bunch of billionaire corporate executives who had been out on tour, essentially telling investors, "Buy my company’s stock!" Meanwhile they were dumping hundreds-of-millions of dollars of their own companies’ shares! My idea was to run pictures of these crooks – Bill Gates and others – above a headline that read, "Two-faced, Lying S.O.B.s!"

In the investment newsletter industry, packages with a passive or scholarly tone almost always fail. And for a simple reason: Intellect alone doesn’t sell. Emotion does. You can use an intellectual argument to trigger an emotion, but if you go in on a purely intellectual basis and you have this cold, stilted, tone, you’re not going to trigger the emotions necessary to make a sale.

Look. There is always something your prospect feels he needs much more than the newsletter you’re trying to sell him. Maybe he’s in dire need of a new house, a new car or a new suit of clothes. Maybe it’s a bigger contribution to his own IRA. Or maybe it’s a vacation, a romantic night out with his wife to help their marriage, or a gift for the kids or grandkids.

As a copywriter, your job is to convince the prospect that buying your newsletter is the single best thing he could do with his money now. You can do that negatively – by convincing him that without you, he faces the specter of massive losses. Or, you can do it positively, by convincing him that his small investment in your newsletter will help him realize his dreams of a richer life now, a more secure future and a more comfortable, more exciting retirement. Both approaches conjure powerful emotions – and those compelling emotions are what it takes to make the sale.

Now: read Part 2 of this interview with Clayton Makepeace here.

This article was first published in The Total Package. To sign-up to receive your own FREE subscription to The Total Package go to www.makepeacetotalpackage.com