Gary Halbert advised all would-be marketing millionaires to take out a classified ad that reads:
“Housewives wanted to address envelopes at home. You must have a typewriter or good handwriting. Call 000-0000.”
That’s good advice still, whether you are a DM marketer, looking for that first-person experience of what getting sprayed by a firehose of response feels like… or a freelancer searching for insights on what the world is like on the other side of the looking glass, when you send in your own job application.
Last Friday, I sent out an email with the subject line,
“Wanted: Competent human to do some monkey work”
In that email, I made a job offer.
In spite of trying to make the job sound as unattractive as I could, I got two dozen applications, mostly from people who were clearly overqualified, but who applied nonetheless.
After looking over all the applications, I ended up hiring somebody yesterday. And I can tell you this:
The content of this guy’s application was largely irrelevant.
The price he quoted me was more relevant, but still secondary.
What really made me hire him is that I had interacted with him a hundred times before. He has bought a bunch of my offers — Most Valuable Email, Most Valuable Postcard, Copy Riddles, which he has gone through twice. He has participated in QA calls, contests, and masterminds I put on, and has given me testimonials before.
In other words, I already knew this guy well, as well as I know anybody from my list.
My point isn’t that you should buy any and all offers I put out, though you certainly should do that.
My point is simply that my brain, and from what I’ve seen, everybody else’s brain, is constantly looking for shortcuts.
The fact is, I don’t know that guy I hired will 100% do a perfect job, or a better job than the dozen or so people who offered to do the same job for less money.
It doesn’t matter.
I had to make a decision. And I was looking for easy ways to do that. You could say I was clutching at straws.
And that’s how most people make most decisions — largely irrationally, just trying to put the unpleasant task behind them. Which can work in your favor — if you put a bit of thought into how to give your prospects mental shortcuts, and how to make their decision process easier and less unpleasant.
Anyways, getting back to Gary Halbert. Gary advised people to take out that classified job ad because “Spectators Can Never Understand What It Is To Be A Player!” Gary explained in more detail:
“You know what the hardest thing it is for a caring teacher like me to do? I’ll tell you… it’s not to explain something to my audience. That’s relatively easy. No, my friend, the real challenge is to make my message real to that audience.”
Which fittingly enough is one of the core ideas behind my Most Valuable Email training. The MVE trick is all about making your email real to your audience — and to yourself.
In case you’d like to get the Most Valuable Email, and maybe interact with me in some way over it, then take a look here: