Okay, I want to implement my ideas. What else, besides the AIDA method, should I know to write texts and create meanings?

# Question

dmitriizabirov asked a good question: "Okay, I want to implement my ideas. What else, besides the AIDA method, should I know to write texts and create meanings?"

# Answer

1. AIDA isn't about meanings. It's a method for attracting attention and converting it into action, but if there's nothing to attract attention to, then AIDA doesn't work.

2. Therefore, you first need to create meaning.

3. Meaning is simple. From the text's perspective, meaning is a plain promise addressing the hidden or explicit problems and aspirations of your target audience.

4. For example, if you have financial problems, any promise to earn or receive money will be meaningful to you.

Even if it's blatant info-business, the rational part of you will recognize the nonsense and express doubt, but the irrational (reptilian) part will inevitably react with, "What if this time...".

Therefore, any sale is an attempt to shift a person from a rational state to an affective, irrational one where "I know it's harmful, but when I really want it, it's okay!"

Every time smart people try to argue with me, appealing to their critical thinking, I find it amusing because they don't understand. Once a person is made a fool, no rational part, critical thinking, or prefrontal cortex works, and the person starts behaving like a monkey (as repeatedly warned by Robert Sapolsky).

If you don't believe it, read esteemed Nobel laureates like Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller, or even Dr. Robert Cialdini, and a plethora of literature on triggers and other tricks.

5. Thus, any person can be defined by a set of their pains, desires, fears, fantasies, 90% of which are poorly understood by them but are well known in the narrow professional circles of marketers, political technologists, media experts, as well as directors, writers, and game designers.

6. In the same way, using these triggers triggers a person's reaction in the form of spontaneous focus on the bait, which is hooked. Then AIDA works, aiming to create an unresolved gestalt or, simply put, fixation on an idea, which at its core contains a promise, generating affective states like "faith" and "hope".

7. These irrational states are significantly stronger than ANY arguments of common sense, and if FOMO or Skinner mechanics are added to this, "common sense and critical thinking" go into a lethargic sleep. This is how the injection of meaning (idea) occurs, which behaves exactly like a computer virus. The promise penetrates and places a payload: certain motives, fears, hopes, and most importantly, recommendations on how to perceive the world, whom to vote for, how to behave. For example, to buy.

8. As you can see, the mechanism is simple and practically boils down to simple copywriting, the ability to create managing texts. These are texts that you want to read, read, and then read again. These are texts with abnormally high retention.

9. The good news is that all this has long been dismantled, and there are tons of courses and books on how to write any texts (in the USA this market is 1000 times larger than in the rest of the world combined), as the USA is the champion in creating meanings – just think of Hollywood.

10. The bad news is that no more than 0.0001% of all texts work at best, and anomalies or hits are extremely rare. That is, there are A LOT of people who know HOW and can write. But no one can predict hits.

11. An even worse piece of news for those who believe that with courses and AI onboard, they can write texts like at least an average professional writer. Oops! What a cruel disappointment. Therefore, it's easy to talk about tricks, technologies, and approaches. But it's impossible to teach how to write bestsellers.

That's why the myth of the "secret secret" lives on and will continue to live.