Assemble hook, meat and call to action

Where it sits. It is for use on top of the basic paid-advertising method, not instead of it. The pages on that method include SOP 34 — Front-load the opening seconds, SOP 35 — Choose the first paid platform and SOP 39 — Write what an ad says, who says it, and when.

1. The parts, and why you make them separately

Every ad here is cut into its parts: the hook, the meat (the body of the ad), and the call to action. Making a lot of whole ads at once turns out to be much harder than making ads in parts. So ad creation is broken into chunks and run like an assembly line:

1. Make fifty hooks.
2. Record three to five well-thought-out scripts to match the hooks — the meats.
3. Record one to three versions of the call to action.

Made this way, the ads won more often, and the finding was that nobody was really creating ads at all. They were assembling them.

The time it takes. An hour or two to write the hooks, maybe an hour to record the three to five meats, and five minutes to record a few calls to action. The rest of the time goes on preparation.

What it produces. 50 hooks × 3 to 5 meats × 1 to 3 calls to action = 150 to 750 ads, every week. The arithmetic holds at both ends: 50 × 3 × 1 is 150, and 50 × 5 × 3 is 750.

The side benefit. With that many ads running, nobody can work out which of yours are the top performers. So the method is a good offense and also a defense against copycats.

2. Where the preparation time goes

Ads are made in research, not on the day you film — the same way visible abs are made in the kitchen and not the gym. Ninety percent of the work of advertising is getting ready to film, not the filming. Split the preparation time like this:

Part	Share of preparation time
Hooks	80%
Meat	20%
Calls to action	~0% (roughly none)

The reason for the split: if someone does not make it through the hook, nothing else matters. So eighty percent of the time goes there.

Hook writing comes in two chunks:

1. Hooks from your previous winners. These are the bread-and-butter ads you make every week. The five places to look are in section 3.
2. Experimental hooks that carry your ads into new markets. These are expansion hooks, written by level of awareness on SOP 118 — Write hooks for each level of awareness.

3. The five places to find winning hooks

These are the places to look for hooks that convert, in order. The last one is the last place to look.

1. Winning hooks from your previous ads. Past winners, reused. Over time you build a stable of winners to use and reuse, and one good hook can give you a surprising amount of runway. If it is your first time running ads, skip this one.
2. Winning hooks from your free content. Take hooks that work on one platform or advertising method and use them on another. These are said to have the highest likelihood of converting. Pull them from long videos, short videos, tweets, emails and so on: look at content that performed well, cut the hook off the front, and put it on an ad whose subject may or may not match the piece it was taken from. Running a whole post as an ad is SOP 38 — Turn the best organic post into an ad.
3. Winning hooks from other people's ads. Save every ad you like and write down the hook it uses. If it is broad enough to work as a hook for your ads, use it. Keep the saved ads together, for instance in one album on your phone.
4. Winning hooks from other people's free content. Look for content in your space with a huge number of views. Take the hook and try it.
5. The platforms' own ad libraries. The upside is that you can see an enormous number of ads from any business you want. The downside is that you will struggle to tell which ones perform well enough to be worth modeling; most people do not know what they are doing. A big ad library is a good place for ideas rather than a source of guaranteed winners. When you want inspiration there, look at companies you know run strong paid ads and see what hooks they use. Winning hooks in one industry often work in others.

A shorter list of the same places differs in order and in content: your prior best ads; other top ads from different industries (marked as the richest place to look); your past top short content; other people's best short content; and saving your favorite ads to review on writing day. See section 7.

4. The meat

Usually three to five meats per weekly recording session is more than enough. The formats to pick from are SOP 120 — Use the five ad meat formats.

5. The call to action

5.1 Clear beats clever

If the ad got them interested, the audience has huge motivation for a very short time. Use it: tell them exactly what to do next, and spell the action out: press the button, ring the number, reply "yes", visit the website, scan the code. Many ads still do not do this. The audience can only know what to do if you tell them.

SOP 31 — Write at the right reading level, section 5, applies the same clear-not-clever rule to the call to action.

5.2 Show it as well as say it

To take it up a level, show them as well as tell them. Keep the step quick and easy, and demonstrate what following it looks like: show what happens when they click the button, show where they will fill in their details, walk through the next steps and the click on submit on your site, or the call to your number. It seems obvious and basic, but almost no one does it, and it is said to work well.

When they click and get exactly what they expected, they are more likely to follow through. The ad and the next step then match. A stronger way to show the steps, it is said: put each screen on a digital board and swipe through them live.

Beyond those basics, the usual tactics apply — urgency, scarcity, guarantees and bonuses. They get even more people to act, here and anywhere else you tell your audience to do something.

5.3 What a good call to action shows or tells

Part	What it covers	Example wording, one ad
What to do	The action	Take this offer by…
How to do it	The mechanics	…tapping the button at the bottom of your screen…
When to do it	The deadline	…before it runs out…
What they get	The reward	…and you get $1000 of free things…
What happens next (optional)	The step after	…sent straight to your inbox

The last part matters more with lead magnets and sales processes that take several steps. On video, add a demonstration: show what happens at each step.

Counted another way, the same parts make five items: what and how merged into one, and the demonstration as the fifth.

5.4 How many, and how to test them

Make one to three calls to action per recording session. They come last, mostly because they have to make sense for the ad, and also because they take the least effort. They still matter: if you do not tell anyone to act, significantly fewer people act. Put the other way, more people do what you want more often when you tell them to.

• Once you know your offer, test only a few.
• Once you have one that follows the fundamentals above, it will work well enough.
• To find out which one works, run three identical hook-and-meat combinations to the same audience, changing only the call to action. For a 14-day free trial, you might end the same ad three ways: start free on the next page; grab your free 14-day trial on the next page; get started free on the next page.
• Once you have one or two that work, mostly stick with them.

6. Keep it going, and scale it

New customers enter your market every day, and you owe them the highest-converting ad you have, so they buy and you can help them. Do not get bored of repeating yourself: for them it is still the first time.

At the start you will not know which ads will hit, so make a lot of variations; they reach many different segments of your market. Over time, a few ads will outperform the rest by a wide margin. When you find them, double down: reuse the same hooks to make even more winners. That is what lets you scale. Then repeat the whole cycle to find another winner.

The weekly ad day, as set up for one business. Give one day a week to advertising — Friday in the case given. Find your best ads. Cut them into hook, meat and call to action. Remix them into fifty more hooks and three to five variations on the meat. That is 150 ads a week, and it takes a business from five ads a month to 600 a month. The arithmetic uses the low end: fifty hooks on three meats is 150, and four such weeks is 600.

What comes after. Once you have winners, the next step is remixing and remaking them. That cannot be done without winners, so start here. Remixing a proven ad is SOP 113 — Remix and remake a proven ad.

7. What this page does not decide for you

• Where other businesses' ads rank as a source of hooks. The five places in section 3 put the platforms' ad libraries last, the last place to look, and other people's ads third. The shorter list there puts other top ads from different industries second and marks them as the richest place to look. Read the first way, you look there only after your own winners and your own content, and at the ad libraries only after everything else. Read the second way, you look there right after your own best ads. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• How many hooks per body. Here, fifty hooks go across three to five meats, so each body carries many hooks. SOP 34 — Front-load the opening seconds, section 3, records more value pieces and fewer hooks, about three hooks for every body against ten or more here (its own table gives the numbers). The first ratio costs more hook writing and less recording; the second costs more recording and less hook writing. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• How many things to test at once. SOP 41, sections 2 and 7, sets one test per week per platform. This page puts 150 to 750 ads out each week, with hooks, meats and calls to action varied together, and tests the call to action by changing it alone. The first learns one thing a week, cleanly; the second finds winners among many ads at once. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• Which place to find hooks is likeliest to work. Here, hooks from your free content have the highest likelihood of converting, and an ad library makes it hard to tell which ads perform. SOP 157, section 4, ranks past ad winners likeliest, content winners second, and an ad running a month or two in a library as probably a winner. The first puts your content's hooks into ads sooner; the second reuses what has already converted as an ad. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• How long an ad runs before you call it a winner or a loser. Not established on this page.

8. The checklist

Step	What you do
1	Set one day a week for advertising
2	Spend 80% of preparation on hooks, 20% on meat, roughly none on calls to action
3	Write 50 hooks: from your previous winners (skip if this is your first time), your free content, other people's ads, other people's free content, and ad libraries last
4	Add expansion hooks by level of awareness when you need a broader audience (SOP 118)
5	Record 3 to 5 meats (SOP 120)
6	Record 1 to 3 calls to action: what, how, when, what they get, what happens next (optional); show it as well as say it
7	Assemble: 50 × 3 to 5 × 1 to 3 is 150 to 750 ads a week
8	Test calls to action by changing only the call to action; mostly keep the one or two that work
9	Double down on the few ads that win; reuse their hooks
10	Repeat to find another winner

9. What this page does not cover

The five levels of awareness and the hooks for each are SOP 118. The formats for the meat are SOP 120. What a hook is made of is SOP 121 — Write a hook. How to divide hook effort between proven and new ideas, and how many hooks to record per piece, are SOP 122 — Split hook effort seventy, twenty, ten.

Budgets, bidding and the cost of an ad day are not covered on this page.