I’m a bit stressed as I write this. It’s Saturday morning. Tomorrow and Monday I’m going on a mini-vacation. Also on Monday, I have a deadline for the advertorial I promised to deliver to my first client/partner in years.
The advertorial that’s due Monday is, err, 75% of the way done?
I have a bunch of research, a bunch of notes, and a bunch of very rough AI drafts. Still, I’m far from having something I can give to the client. And I have today to finish it.
In moments like this, I ask myself, “Why do I do this to myself?”
And the answer comes, “Because I would never get anything done otherwise.”
I have long had this theory that everybody who succeeds in direct marketing is an opportunity seeker at heart.
Opportunity seeker = somebody who chases bright shiny objects, much like a bee that flits from flower to flower.
I think the business owners and the copywriters and everybody else who somehow makes it in direct marketing are first and foremost opportunity seekers, meaning that they get sucked in by marketing that promises you hot new riches now, even if you have no time or money to invest and cannot count past 5.
I myself am a veteran opportunity seeker.
It started in high school when I responded to a direct response ad in the back of a newspaper, which promised a lucrative and enjoyable new career (forestry service), without any qualifications, presumably even without finishing high school.
I have since spent tens of thousands of dollars buying various stuff that promises to be a hot new opportunity.
You might think I’d know better by now. I don’t know better.
Anyways, here’s my point for you:
If, like me, you are an opportunity seeker, then make it work for you. Take the psychological levers that you know can be pulled to make you act, and pull them yourself.
At the heart of every opportunity pitch are three words:
1. NEW
2. OPPORTUNITY
3. NOW
The NOW is why this opportunity wasn’t available yesterday, and why it won’t be available tomorrow. It’s enforced in opportunity marketing via scarcity and, more typically, urgency.
You can enforce NOW on yourself in the same way, by setting deadlines for yourself, like I did with that advertorial I told you about.
(Of course, for a self-imposed deadline to be meaningful, you need some kind of public accountability, like clients or customers who are expecting stuff to be delivered.)
The OPPORTUNITY part boils down to the idea of SOMETHING FOR NOTHING.
The fact is, we will all have to work in some way until the day we die. Even if you make all the money in the world, you will still have to invest and manage and secure that money.
But nobody wants to hear that. I certainly don’t.
So I embark on projects that promise to be bolt-on opportunities, things I can work on for a bit, get up to speed, and then simply profit from for the rest of my life, without sacrificing anything I’ve already got. Of course, it never really works out that way, but so what? It gets me moving.
And the NEW, of course.
If you’re an opportunity seeker like me, the familiar and old hat becomes invisible to you quickly.
This is where the danger lies, because the familiar and old hat is really what works, while something genuinely new is very likely to fail, or at least to fail when you try to set it up.
The way I deal with this is to introduce novelty WITHIN familiar and old-hat structures. Such as for example, daily emailing.
I’ve been doing this daily email every day for almost 8 years now.
Commitment and discipline, right? No. Novelty.
I never know what I’m gonna write about. It kind of stresses me out and excites me each morning. Today’s idea came (of course) during the shower.
So there you go:
1. Look at the marketing that’s working on getting you to move.
2. Figure out what done it.
3. Then apply it yourself in some way, to achieve whatever success you want to achieve in life.
Are you an opportunity seeker like me?
Do you want novelty? Do you want something for nothing? Do you want a reason to do it now?
If so, then daily emails might be for you. Like I told you, they work for me.
There’s public accountability. There’s the excitement of something new each day. And there’s something for nothing in the form of all the collateral content that gets produced, which you can feed into courses, books, paid newsletters, templates, apps, IP, which you can sell forever, without ever touching it again!
If you wanna get started with daily emails, today, I got a hot new opportunity for you: