10 lessons from my CopyHour promo

I finished my CopyHour promo last night. I can say it was a success.

I made a healthy number of sales and made good money. No, it’s not “buy a chateau in France” kind of money. But if I could do this every week, honestly I would.

I made a list for myself of 10 lessons learned from this promo. Maybe these lessons won’t speak to you at all. Or maybe you’ll find one interesting or valuable point inside. Here goes:

1. I was worried that there would be nobody left to buy. I mean it’s CopyHour. The program has been around for 12 years and 3,000+ people have bought so far. Plus, there’s a lot of overlap between Derek’s list and mine… plus, Justin Goff promoted CopyHour a couple months ago.

“Surely everybody knows CopyHour and has either bought or has decided not to buy…”

But I was wrong. There were people for whom CopyHour was genuinely new. And there were others who were swayed by my bonuses (more on those below).

2. As has happened before when I’ve promoted affiliate offers, people wrote in thanking me for turning them on to a good product or service they hadn’t heard of before. This is a strange phenomenon known as “people are happy to be sold as long as you sell them stuff with their best interest in mind, and you communicate that.”

3. I officially ended the promo with more subscribers on my list than I started with, in spite of sending 10 emails over 3 1/2 days. I’m ascribing that to the following…

4. The event felt lively. In fact it always feels lively when I’m promoting something I haven’t promoted before… when sales are coming in… when sales are coming in from people I had never heard from before, but who turn out to have been reading my emails for a year or more… when I’m pushing out lots of emails quickly… and when even people who are not interested in buying are writing in to comment on the event and the emails.

5. It feels great to promote a solid proven offer that really helps people. And when it feels great, I’m much more ready to work.

6. It feels really nice to promote an offer where I don’t have to do any delivery after the fact. I’m planning to take most of the day off today after I finish this email.

7. Bonuses: The fact that they added up to what CopyHour cost, and even a bit more, made it feel like buy-one-get-one-free to people. Some bought because of that, and wrote in to say so.

9. A few people wrote in to say they were persuaded to buy by a specific bonus among the five I offered. Lesson learned: Keep creating content, keep putting out offers, and even if those offers don’t become evergreen sellers like my Simple Money Emails program, they can still have value.

10. It’s often easier to write 10 emails than to write 1.

I had been really struggling writing emails the past couple days/weeks before promoting CopyHour.

I’ve been looking to make some significant changes in the way I run this newsletter and the kinds of offers I promote.

The result has been a lot of baggage in my head and feeling inhibited when I write and second-guessing myself. Promoting a solid affiliate offer and simply being able to write fun emails cleared that from my head, at least for this week.

All that’s to say:

If you bought CopyHour, thanks again for buying. I hope you will do the work and get the promised results.

And whether or not you bought, I hope my emails over the past few days were still entertaining and maybe even valuable.

I’ll be back tomorrow with something new. I have no idea what yet. But now, it’s time to go have coffee and go for a walk.