One week ago, last Friday to be exact, I wrote an email about the “quiet eye,” in which I said:
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One problem I’ve seen over and over is that people ask themselves the question, “How can I sell what I have?”
Instead of asking yourself, “How can I sell what I have,” ask yourself, “What do they want to buy?” Keep that question trained in your mind for longer than is natural. Do some research. Don’t jump ahead to what you’d like to happen, which is for people to buy what you are selling.
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Then this past Wednesday, just two days ago, marketing legend Dan Kennedy wrote an email about constructing offers, in which he said:
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Too many business owners focus on their product first. They think, “I’ve got all these thermoses, how do I sell them?” But the truth is, you should never start with the product. You start with the customer. Who’s most likely to buy your thermos? What are their desires, their needs, their pain points?
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Dan Kennedy, the marketing master who has influenced generations of marketers both online and offline… saying the same thing as I said a few days earlier… using much the same rhetoric?
Could it be that Dan, who famously has no cell phone and a “no Internet” policy in his home, secretly gets his assistant in Phoenix to print out and fax him my emails each week… so he can read them in his Disney-memorabilia-filled basement with a few days’ delay, and be inspired and reminded of great marketing and persuasion ideas?
I’ll let you decide.
But I can tell you something like this has happened to me a few times already.
People I learned from and think of as authorities in the field — people like Dan — end up writing the same thing as I do, a short time after I write about it in an email, sometimes using much the same language.
That’s an inevitable consequence of producing an abundance of ideas by writing daily.
All that’s to say, if you don’t yet write, start.
And if you do write occasionally, then start writing more often.
Keep it up, and you will soon be writing words that others, even legends in the field, will be repeating and discussing next week and next month and next year, whether they actively copied you or not.
And of course, along the way, there’s other benefits to writing. Like building a devoted audience. And making sales, too.
And speaking of sales, you might be interested in my Simple Money Emails program.
It will show you how to write daily emails that make sales.
I’ll give away a part of the secret, because it’s not much of a secret at all. Simple Money Emails teaches you to write emails that 1) say something interesting at the start and 2) that transition into an offer.
You probably could have guessed that much.
What you might not guess is the central, most valuable idea inside Simple Money Emails, one which I repeat over and over throughout the program — a kind of litmus test for choosing which “something interesting” to open up the email with and which ones to discard.
This litmus test is actually something I learned from Dan Kennedy, and I credit him for it inside Simple Money Emails.
Because even though Dan doesn’t read or write emails (with the possible exception of my own), he long ago mastered the kind of story- and news- and pop culture-based sales messaging that works well in emails.
If you’d like to master it too, the following guide can help you get there: