A couple weeks ago I was in Tirana, Albania. I got to talking with one of the locals and it turned out he works in a boiler room.
“We do forex,” he explained. “We invest their money for them. Actually, we just take their money.” He shrugged. “Which country are you from?”
“Croatia,” I said.
“Ah. We don’t have any clients there. But Germany, Italy, France, Poland, Hungary — yes. I manage the sales team for the Hungarian market. It’s a very good market.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You have a team here of Hungarian forex sales people?”
“No no, all Albanians,” he said. “They learn a few phrases in Hungarian, the rest is in English. But it’s ok. These lawyers and doctors we call all speak good English.”
“Greed is universal,” I said to myself. “But how do you know who to call? How do you get their number?”
He looked at me like I’m an idiot. “They see an ad on the Internet. They click. They fill out the form with their info. Then one of our sales guys calls them. Then they give us all their money.”
Now I’m not an expert on boiler room tactics. But from what I know, it sounds like the same stuff that worked in 1972 works still in 2022. It’s just that the base of operations shifted from Chicago and Jersey City to other, less regulated locations like Tirana.
But the same system continues to work.
Of course, you don’t have to be a scammer. This basic funnel works even if you’re selling a legit, high-ticket offer, which can genuinely benefit your customers or clients. The sales system doesn’t care what you’re selling.
And equally as of course, this is not the only way to sell.
For example, the type of daily emails I write. Very hot right now. Many businesses want to do something similar. The promise is that you can build a relationship with your marketplace… without hard-selling… and instead, based on trust, influence, and personality.
Which is all true. But it ain’t new.
It goes back to Matt Furey… who probably got it from Dan Kennedy, who was sending weekly faxes, very similar in tone and content to what you’re reading now, but 20 and 30 years ago.
And if you asked Dan — if you could get him on the fax — I’m sure he would say that what he was doing then wasn’t new either. Somebody in the 70s and 50s and probably 1920s was probably doing the same long-form, personality-infused, frequent-contact marketing — just in a slightly different format.
So my point for you is that there’s a lot of value in knowing the history of your industry. Don’t be a scammer — I’m not advising that. But there’s almost nothing new under the sun, and it pays to know what came before you.
Which brings me to my offer, in case you didn’t take me up on it yesterday.
It’s to get a free copy of my Niche Expert Cold Emails training.
Because in my early days of working as a freelance copywriter, I hit upon two cold emails that got me client work.
Both of them were different from other cold email techniques out there. But I doubt they were truly new.
Had I been a better student, I probably would have found these ideas sooner, instead of having to wait to discover them on my own.
Whatever. You can do better than I did. Take advantage of my experience instead of fumbling around in the dark. Especially now that it’s free — well, free in money terms. For the full details: