As I write this it is 8:46am, exactly 11 hours and 56 mins after my email yesterday went out.
In that email, I gave you a choice of three possible presentations (plus one decoy) I was thinking of creating, and asked which one you would like the best.
It’s still salad days for that poll, and voting is close, but a clear front runner has emerged:
The insight marketing presentation.
Now, maybe that’s all due to the awesome interestingness of the topic. After all, how do you get people to experience an epiphany, a shift in thinking?
People are more stubborn than mules. That why the typical advice from smart marketers it not to even try to change people’s minds. It’s supposed to be the hardest thing to do in daily life, and it should be even harder in writing, or remotely, online… and harder still in a selling context.
And yet, it does happen, and it’s quite possible to do it on purpose.
So maybe it is the topic that’s inherently interesting.
But maybe the front runner status of insight has nothing to do with the topic. Maybe it’s all about a simple statistic that’s publicly visible on my website:
I have written 38 emails so far that ended up in the insight marketing category.
On the other hand, I’ve only written 17 emails about advertorials, and just 10 about natural authority (the other two presentation ideas I introduced yesterday.)
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about How to Speak, a slow and sexy presentation given by Patrick Winston, an MIT professor, about giving effective talks.
One of Winston’s bits of insight, gleaned from years of studying effective talks, is that people in general want to be inspired.
There are different ways to brush that dog.
But one reliable way to inspire is to have passion or enthusiasm.
So maybe that’s the real explanation for why the insight presentation is leading the voting right now.
As the numbers above show, it’s simply a topic I am enthusiastic about. And some of that enthusiasm gets reflected back at me by my readers.
“That’s all fine and good,” I hear a copywriter somewhere yelling, “but how do you get enthusiastic on demand? I have to write about a bunch of offers that are not my own, that I would never buy myself, that are dry and underwhelming.”
If you are a copywriter, that is a real problem. There are tricks I’ve used to get enthusiastic on demand, some obvious, some less so. But that’s a topic for a different email.
For now, I just want to say that, if you are a copywriter, and you want to inspire potential clients to hire you, you might want to write about things you yourself are stimulated by. And the problem of enthusiasm will be instantly solved.
Which is one more reason, probably reason #1738, why writing your own email newsletter, about topics you choose to write about, is a borderline brilliant idea if you are looking to sell your services.
This brings me to my Most Valuable Email presentation. It’s coming up on Wednesday.
And it’s about the single most effective, valuable, and personally interesting (to me) email I regularly send out in this newsletter. No, it’s not about the topic of insight, though it is connected to it in some deep and mysterious way.
If you are looking to sell your services, particularly copywriting services, then this type of email might be equally as valuable to you.
So if you’d like to join this presentation live, or if you’d like to at least have a chance to watch the recording during the 7-day replay window, then get on my email newsletter and watch out for my first email.