One afternoon a few years ago, I was sitting by the beach in Barcelona, eating my empanada and trying to mind my own business, when I saw an Indian guy selling beach blankets.
He was talking to a group of women who were interested but not yet decided on buying.
He sweet talked them a little bit.
He answered some questions.
He applied a bit of pressure at the right moments.
Eventually, he convinced them to buy.
He was about to close the sale when the women decided that they wanted another pattern of beach blanket after all.
The guy hung his head.
“No problem,” he seemed to say. And he jogged across the beach for a few hundred yards to get the other pattern from his stash.
He jogged back, handed over the correct blanket, and finally closed the sale.
While I was watching this, all I could think is how much work and skill it had taken for this guy to close this one sale, which probably netted him a profit of a dollar or two.
And it’s just about the same level of work and skill that it would take for a $100 or $1,000 or maybe even $10,000 sale.
Point being, it’s not really what you do that matters so much as who you do it for.
You can have the same skills. Do the same work. Maybe even make the same offer. But find a hungrier market, a richer market, a more invested market, and you will make more money, while having an easier time doing it.
At least that’s my inspirational message for you for today.
This message ties into my 11th Commandment of A-list Copywriters.
11th Commandment? Maybe you thought there were only 10?
Nope. There is an 11th apocryphal A-list commandment, discovered only in 2018, on an audio cassette buried in a clay vessel at the bottom of a flooded cave in western Ethiopia.
If you’d like to find out what that apocryphal 11th commandment is, then make sure you take me up on the offer at the end of my 10 Commandments book.
And if you haven’t got a copy of that book yet, here’s where to go: