I will tell you about the 13 things in a second, but let me first set it up with a story:
Yesterday I listened to an interview with Amy Morin, who has created a publishing empire starting with her 2014 book 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do.
Morin has since written 13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Do… Strong Women Don’t Do… Strong Couples Don’t Do… you get idea.
She has sold hundreds of thousands or millions of copies of her books.
And yet, she said that she never hit bestseller status in the first week after publication.
In fact, the original 13 Things book took a whole year to reach bestseller status.
How did it happen?
A year after Morin published 13 Things, Rush Limbaugh mentioned it on his radio show.
”Today I will talk about 13 things mentally strong people don’t do,” Limbaugh said.
But he never got around to it.
That was Monday.
(Are you starting to guess the 13 things that mentally strong marketers do???)
The next day, Limbaugh mentioned 13 Things again. “Yesterday I didn’t manage to get to it, but today I will talk about 13 things mentally strong people don’t do.”
Again the show ran long, and again Rush didn’t talk about Morin’s book or the 13 things inside it.
This went on for the whole week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday…
(By the way, we are getting really close to the 13 things that mentally strong marketers do. Bear with me.)
Finally, on Friday, Rush managed to list Morin’s list of 13 things mentally strong people don’t do.
But by then, bookstores had already sold out of all copies, and 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do had become a bestseller for the first time.
Point being… should I tell you?
Well, I might as well, instead of saving it for another email. The 13 Things Mentally Strong Marketers Do are:
1. Tease
1. Tease
3. Oh, I don’t know, tease?
4. How about teasing for a change?
5. Tease
6. Tease
7. Yep, still teasing
8. I think you now know where it’s going, and that’s teasing
9. I’ll give you a hint — it’s not giving away the secret. It’s kind of the opposite of that. Can you guess what it is?
10. Tease
11. Just in case it’s not clear: Tease
12. Tease
13. And tease some more!
It’s not easy to tease to its fullest effect. You might get queasy along the way. You might get bored. You might give in to angry readers who tell you to stop teasing already and tell them the secret or sell them the product already.
That’s why it takes a mentally strong marketer to tease to its full power.
And now that I’ve told you that, let me quickly mention I will rerelease my Insight Exposed training, all about my unique and supremely valuable journaling and notetaking system, some time in January.
For today, all I can offer you is my Most Valuable Email.
I released that training some 15 months ago.
I’ve been teasing it mercilessly ever since in these emails.
I always think I’ve gone too far, revealed too much, or tapped out reader curiosity.
And yet people continue to buy. So I will continue to tease Most Valuable Email and what the Most Valuable Email trick might be. In case you want to scratch the itch and find out: