I remembered a little story today. I heard it just once, 3+ years ago, but it’s stuck with me ever since.
Marketer Caleb O’Dowd was talking about copywriter Clayton Makepeace.
Caleb said that Clayton was a step above the A-list copywriters — that he was an alchemist.
Caleb never knew Clayton personally. But here’s the little story Caleb told, which has stuck with me for years:
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When Clayton first came up on my radar I was living in Costa Rica. I had a spare room in my home and I would print out — there were several magalogs that I would print out of his — and I would tape them to the wall one page on top of the other on top of the other. I spent, not weeks, not months, I spent years doing that.
I lived there for a year and a half. By the time it was done I had to repaint the paint on the on the wall for the for the guy who owned the apartment because it was just tape pulling all the paint off the wall. But I studied him for years. There is years’ worth of mentorship and coaching and and education to be had in reverse engineering Clayton Makepeace packages.
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For reference, when Caleb was pasting his spare bedroom with Clayton Makepeace wallpaper, he was already a massively successful marketer.
Caleb had worked and mentored under Gary Halbert, and he had already sold a lot of stuff and made a lot of money.
And yet, Caleb obsessively studied Clayton Makepeace’s packages — because those packages were getting such good results in markets that Caleb was already in, and because of the audience insights that were available in Clayton’s copy.
I thought of this little story this morning, when looking over the results of the 3-question survey I ran yesterday.
I found one interesting thread in the survey results that I hadn’t thought of, a problem several people listed as their “single biggest challenge.”
I won’t tell you what that interesting thread is.
But if you were good enough to fill out my survey yesterday, I appreciate your help. Maybe the wallpaper story above connects in your mind to what you wrote in the survey and means something to you.
And if you haven’t yet filled out my little survey, you can do it now. Maybe simply filling out survey will make the above story more meaningful to you.
I will read, appreciate, and consider every response and bit of feedback I get. If you’d be good enough to give me yours, here’s where to go: