Time to walk away from rags-to-riches origin stories?

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According to legend, Arthur was an orphan and just a boy when he was sent to fetch a sword for a knight to use in a jousting tournament. Arthur rushed home. But there was nobody there — they were all at the jousting. What to do?

Arthur rode to a churchyard where a sword stood stuck in an anvil, on top of a large stone. He pulled the sword out with ease.

​​But this was no ordinary sword. It was the famous sword in the stone. By pulling it out, without knowing what he did, Arthur became rightful king of England.

It’s a good origin story — good enough to be retold for a thousand years. And in some forms, it continues to be retold today.

For example, it seems like every guru who sells through direct response comes with a rags-to-riches story that mimics the “sword in the stone” legend.

“I was deep in debt… I was living in a trailer home… I couldn’t turn to anyone for help… and then I stumbled upon copywriting/binary options/real estate investing.”

Everybody uses stories like this. So they must work, right?

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen reasons why it might be good NOT to have a rags-to-riches story for a guru. Such as…

It might lower prospects’ self-esteem instead of raising it…

It might sound like boilerplate that bores or sets off readers…

It might attract opportunity seekers who will refund and complain when they’re not able to pull the sword out of its DVD case.

I doubt anybody’s ever tested whether an against-all-odds origin story really helps sales. It’s just something everybody uses… because everybody else uses it.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t use it, too. I’m not even saying you should spend time or money to test it. I just want to suggest that, when everybody starts doing something, it’s time to question that thing. As Dan Kennedy once said:

“Industry norms? Forget them. They reinforce ‘average.’ It’s a norm because it’s ‘normal,” which gets you ‘average’ results. So, if you want to be average, fine. Pay attention to the way everybody does stuff and the way they’ve always done stuff. Don’t try to figure out how to walk away from it.”

“WILL YOU BE LEFT BEHIND?”

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In a moment of idleness today I clicked on an email from Stansberry Research. It took me to a VSL with a big headline that reads:

“WILL YOU BE LEFT BEHIND?”

Behind the video, there is a shadowy photo of what looks like people being corralled into a concentration camp. And then Porter Stansberry starts to speak in a monotone voice:

“In regular places all across America, the lights are going out. And no, I don’t mean streetlights.”

I didn’t watch past the first few minutes. I am not in the Stansberry target audience, and it didn’t much move me. But something similar did move me a while back.

A while back, copywriter Dan Ferrari sent out an email with the subject line “If you want to be a poor, no-name copywriter, don’t read this.” It was about the consolidation Dan saw in the direct response industry. Here’s a part of that email:

“If you’re a copywriter that can produce actual results in that cold traffic, consolidated arena, you’ll have it made. If not, you’re going to be one of the writers fighting for the scraps.”

Really, this is very similar to the Stansberry promotion. It’s a prediction about the future, with the overarching message:

“Some will get left behind, while others will thrive — and it’s your choice which group you end up in.”

I don’t bring this up to talk about the future — of copywriters or of pensioners. Instead, I bring it up to talk about inspiration.

I used to think I cannot write inspirational copy.

After all, I’m such a cold, unenthusiastic fish. How can I possibly motivate others when I can’t even motivate myself?

But then I realized inspirational copy has its own predictable templates. Some are familiar — Frodo goes to Mordor and keeps pushing when the ring gets real heavy.

But there are other inspirational templates as well.

The way to find them is simply to watch your own cold heart. If it starts to twitch with a bit of life, you might have just read something inspirational. So take note of it, and see how you were influenced.

That’s how I singled out that Dan Ferrari email, which reincarnated into the Stansberry promo. And which, if you’re a student of copywriting who’s always looking to improve, you can find here:

https://orders.stansberryresearch.com/?cid=MKT421756&eid=MKT460923

One extra step that conjures sales out of thin air

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Three quick stories today about something valuable and important:

The first story is from the Dan Kennedy talk I shared a few days ago.

Dan needed a new closet. A closet salesman gave Dan a rundown of the features and benefits of the available closets.

But Dan didn’t buy. He had the money and he needed the closet, but he wasn’t moved. “It didn’t align with my interests,” he said.

At the same time, Dan’s wedding anniversary was coming up. So Dan says… the closet salesman should have asked about upcoming special occasions. He could have easily sold Dan the new closet as the perfect anniversary present. (Apparently, Mrs. Kennedy loves a good closet, and it would have been convenient for Dan.)

The second story I heard Rich Schefren tell on a Zoom call last week. The interviewer brought up how some businesses are suffering during lockdown. For example, Airbnbs.

At which point, Rich jumped in to say his wife’s Airbnbs  have been thriving. She’s been renting out her largish Airbnb houses to apartment dwellers — from the same town. These folks want more space during quarantine to avoid a 2020 re-enactment of The Shining.

The third story is also from last week and comes from my work with one of my clients. They sell a bunch of ecomm products to a large email list. One of these products are wool balls that are supposed to replace dryer sheets.

The first email was four weeks ago. We sold the wool balls as a reusable, money-saving dryer sheet alternative. That email did ok.

Then last week, we sent out a second email to sell the same wool balls. On average, the second time we run the same offer only does about 60% as well as the first one.

Not this time. This time, the second email did as well as the first email. That’s because instead of leading with dryer sheets, it lead with acne. Didn’t you know? Acne is caused by clogged pores, which happens when you get wax all over your face, like from the pillow case you dry with dryer sheets.

The point of all these stories is that you can conjure up sales out of thin air. Sometimes many such sales. All you have to do is get one thing right. And that one thing is…

​Positioning. Selling what people want… rather than what you have.

But here’s a warning. Positioning requires effort. One whole extra step, beyond what everybody else is doing. Or in Rich Schefren’s words:

“As the marketer, you have to connect the dots for people. You can’t sit on the sidelines hoping that someone else will do it.”

Shooting the literotica arrow into the bullseye of fame and sales

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“I went to the beach on my own. It was a warm and nice day. There was another girl there. She had come from another island because our beach was sunnier and more secluded. We lay there completely naked and sunbathed… dozing off and on, putting sunscreen on. We had silly straw hats on. Mine had a blue ribbon. I lay there… looking out at the landscape, at the sea and the sun. It was kind of funny. Suddenly I saw two figures on the rocks above us.”

That’s a bit of monologue from a movie I just watched called Persona. One of the main characters recounts how she had an impromptu orgy at the beach with three strangers. Post-orgy, she goes home and has sex with her fiance. “It had never been that good,” she says, “before or after.”

“I know this script!” I told myself while watching this. I didn’t know it from this movie or any other. I knew it from a book I read a long time ago called Sperm Wars.

Sperm Wars was a kind of “Selfish Gene” applied to human sexuality. It was all very well researched and very scientific. And it was very popular when it came out. I guess partly because of those interesting scientific insights… but more importantly, because of the format.

Because Sperm Wars wasn’t your typical pop science book. Instead, each chapter started out with a story, setting up the science that was about to go down. The above scene from Persona was something straight out of Sperm Wars. In effect, Sperm Wars allowed you to read literotica, but you could pretend you were learning something enlightening about human biology.

So what’s the point of this?

Well, I’ve been collecting examples and ideas for spicing up ye olde regular content. I gave you one example a few days ago with that medieval warfare blog. I think literotica + [your topic] is another great arrow to keep in your quiver. Like I said, Sperm Wars definitely shot that arrow into the bullseye of fame and sales.

Of course, maybe literotica isn’t your kind of arrow. So give it some thought. Maybe another lurid genre would work better. And maybe you’ll get lucky and come upon a real winner. Something that makes you say, “It had never been that good, before or after.”

Looking for more lurid content like this? I write a daily email newsletter. Click here in case you want to sign up for it.

Bringing direct back into direct response

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Today I want to tell you the number one problem my copywriting coach kept pointing out about my sales copy. If you avoid this problem in your own sales letters, your response will skyrocket, particularly if you are selling to cold traffic.

To set it all up, let me tell you a couple personal stories:

Around 2004, my friend got a job in Boston. I went to visit him. We wound up at a house party, standing next to two girls from Harvard.

My friend leaned over to the girls. “Are you guys best friends?” he asked. “Here, let’s find out.”

And then he gave them the “best friends” test. He’d read about it in The Game, the book by Neil Strauss about the pick up artist community.

The “best friends” test is an indirect way to start talking to girls. “Girls will blow you off if you hit on them right away,” the indirect school of pickup says. “So you gotta snake your way into a conversation.”

Sure enough, the best friends test worked. The Harvard birds loved it. We talked to them throughout the evening. “Do you live far away from here?” they asked at the end of the night.

“Very, very close,” my friend answered. But let’s leave that story, and let’s fast-forward about ten years:

I was walking down the street with another friend when I noticed a girl. I ran up and stopped right in front of her.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I was just walking with my friend when I noticed you. I thought you looked very nice and I wanted to meet you.” The girl’s eyes widened. We talked for a few minutes before I asked for her number. Later, she became my girlfriend and we stayed together for a couple of years.

You might call this a direct way to start talking to a girl. “Girls always know if you’re hitting on them,” the direct school of pickup says. “You might as well man up and own it.”

Which brings us to the topic of copywriting, and that lesson from my copywriting coach. He would scroll down through my sales letter, down to about page four, and he’d say, “This is the first place where you’re giving me a really hard, direct claim.”

His advice was that, all throughout the headline and lead, all claims need to be “on the nose.” As in, imagine you’re a boxer. Don’t feint… don’t bob and weave… don’t go for body shots to soften the guy up. Instead, hit him straight “on the nose” with hard, direct claims that he has zero chance of missing or misunderstanding.

I bring all this up because of my post yesterday. Looking back on it, I see I was asking when indirect persuasion makes sense, and when direct persuasion might be better.

But I didn’t express myself well. It sounded like I was questioning the indirect approach. So a few people wrote in to say that indirect persuasion definitely does work and that it’s very powerful.

No doubt. Indirect persuasion works. But so does direct persuasion. Sometimes people need to be told how it is, without vagueness, indirectness, or room to make their own interpretation.

The lead of a sales letter is one such example. At least according to my copywriting coach – but he should know, after all the millions he’s racked up writing sales letters for cold traffic.

What about other situations? I don’t know.

For meeting girls, there are some guidelines when it makes sense to be indirect, and when direct. But in many cases, either approach could work. It’s also a matter of personality and preference.

Maybe it’s the same with direct vs. indirect marketing. But I don’t find that answer satisfying. I’m still hoping for a better model.

So if you have a “best friends” test which tells you when to go indirect in marketing and when direct is better… then hit me up. I’m just standing here, swirling my drink around, hoping somebody cool will talk to me.

Who wins the fight: guiding people from within or nudging them from without?

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“All those chimps who get trained in American Sign Language — one of the first words they master is ‘tickle’ and one of the first sentences is ‘tickle me.” In college, I worked with one of those chimps. He’d do the ‘tickle me’ sequence correctly, and you’d tickle him like mad — chimps curl up and cover their ribs and make this fast, soundless, breathy giggle when they’re being tickled. Stop, he sits up, catches his breath, mops his brow because of how it’s all just too much. Then he gets a gleamy look in his eye and it’s, ‘Tickle me,’ all over again.”
— Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

In chapter 16 of his Zebras book, Robert Sapolsky attacks the question of why we can’t tickle ourselves. It’s not as trivial as it seems.

According to Sapolsky, pleasure requires an element of surprise and lack of control. Like the chimp story above shows, getting tickled is a kind of pleasure. But you can’t tickle yourself — because you can’t surprise yourself and you’re always in full control.

I thought of this because I’ve been beating my head against a related question lately. Let me set it up with a quote from Oren Klaff’s Flip the Script:

“Make people feel like the idea is coming from them and they will place more value on it, believe it more deeply, adopt it more quickly, and remember it more easily.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I’m writing a book right now on this topic, which I call insight marketing. The problem is, I’m not sure it’s true. At least not all the time.

Here’s my reasoning:

If Klaff is 100% right, then what’s the purpose of coaches, hypnotists, and inspirational speakers? Those people earn their bread by standing around and planting ideas in others’ heads. For most people who hire hypnotists, coaches, and inspirational speakers, the effect wouldn’t be the same if they simply had those ideas themselves.

Another example:

When I was a kid, I would ask my grandfather to tell me a story each night. He only knew one story, Little Red Riding Hood. It didn’t matter. I loved hearing it over and over, even though I knew it by heart. Why didn’t I just play it in my own head?

Let me make it clear I don’t have good answers to these questions. In fact, I am hoping you can help me out.

My guess is that there are situations where coming to a realization yourself is more powerful… while in other situations, having an idea come from outside is better. But what determines which side of the mountain you end up on? At this point, I don’t know.

So if you have any theories about this, or if you can point me to some research on the matter, please write me and let me know. I’ll be grateful to you, and the science of insight marketing will take a step forward thanks to your contribution.

How to make your dry expertise sexy and shareable

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A few days ago, I saw a tantalizing clickbait headline, which read,

“Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?”

I clicked and landed on a blog post, which took me for a spin. It turns out there was no PTSD way back when. But that doesn’t matter as much as what I read at the top of the post.

At the top of the post, the author, one Brett Deveraux, gave a recap of the first year of his blog. He started in May 2019. He’s written several dozen posts since then, mostly on ancient military history.

But get this… Deveraux’s blog has had 650,000 visits so far. The number of monthly visitors keeps growing. Each post gets dozens of comments. And Deveraux’s even got 93 Patreon subscribers.

Just in case I am not making the astoudingness of this perfectly clear:

This is an academic historian. Writing on things like PTSD in the Roman army. Who will soon get a million eyeballs on his blog. And who, if he were just a tad better at marketing, could pull in thousands of dollars from his hobby site each month.

Doesn’t this sound like 2010? Is the long tail still alive and well? Does Google have a crush on Brett Devereaux for some reason?

Here’s my theory.

The most popular content on Deveraux’s site, by far, is a series of posts analyzing the siege of Gondor. (Lord of the Rings movie 2, in case you’re too cool.)

In other words, Deveraux used a popular movie to illustrate his arcane knowledge. Knowledge which would otherwise be completely indigestible to the vast majority of people.

This reminded me of another popular content creator I’ve been harping on about. I’m talking about movie editor Tony Zhou. Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting on YouTube has the exact same structure as Deveraux’s blog. An expert in a specialized field, using fun pop culture to illustrate the basics of his craft.

As a result of this pop culture + expert mashup, Zhou and Deveraux had their content massively shared. For Zhou, it was through YouTube and on sites like Reddit. For Deveraux, it seems the nerds at Hacker News really like his stuff.

That’s how both Zhou and Deveraux got all that traffic and engagement.

So what’s the point of all this?

Well, I would like to suggest that this is a model you too could use. If you have any kind of dry, industry-specific knowledge nobody seems to care about, then pair it up with sexy pop culture illustrations. Show a clip from a movie. Then explain what really happened there, seen through the lens of your unique wisdom.

And write me a year after you publish your first post or video. Let me know how many millions of views you’ve had in the meantime. And if you need help monetizing your site at that point… well, that’s where my own dry expertise comes in.

Captain Midnight: a perfect direct response prospect

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On April 26 1986, millions of homes on the eastern half of the US were tuning in to the spy drama The Falcon and the Snowman.

It was being broadcast on HBO, but not for long. Soon after midnight on the 27th, the picture flickered and changed. The SMPTE color bars appeared along with a message:

GOODEVENING HBO
FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT
$12.95/MONTH ?
NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]

This weird interruption only lasted 4 1/2 minutes, but it had big consequences.

The next day, network news picked up the story. People around the country got to jabbering about the unfairness of HBO’s prices. HBO was furious, and they put pressure on the FCC to catch Captain Midnight, whoever he was.

Several months and an investigative manhunt later, that’s just what happened.

In July of that year, Captain Midnight was arrested and exposed as a 25-year-old electrical engineer named John MacDougall. He lived in Ocala, Florida. He had a part-time job there at the Central Florida Teleport satellite uplink station.

But what was MacDougall’s motivation for this stunt?

Was he a modern-day Robin Hood?

Had he been planning this for months?

Turns out, MacDougall had a satellite dish installation business. He’d been doing real well for a few years. But then, HBO (and other paid cable channels) started giving satellite dish owners the shaft. Instead of getting HBO for free, satellite dish owners now had to pay $500 for a decoder box plus $12.95 a month.

So people stopped buying satellite dishes. MacDougall’s business tanked. He was miffed. And so, while monitoring the satellite uplink of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, he made an impulsive decision.

He pulled up the character generator and typed up the above message. Once Pee-wee’s Big Adventure finished, he pointed the giant 30-foot dish straight at the Galaxy 1 satellite. And he jammed Transponder 23, which carried the eastern feed of HBO.

“I had no animus and I had no malice in my heart,” said MacDougall. “It was the act of a frustrated individual who was trying to get his point across to people who didn’t seem to listen.”

I thought this story was interesting. Almost as interesting as Richard Armstrong’s How to Talk Anybody into Anything. That’s the little book Richard wrote about 44 points he learned by studying con artists. Point 3 is about how con artists choose their marks:

“Look for intelligent, emotional & impulsive people”

That’s good to remember and easy to forget. Because when you’re writing direct response copy, you might feel like you have people’s inner motivations at the tips of your fingers. You might feel you can manipulate them into doing what you want. You might even feel your prospects are gullible nincompoops.

But they are not. At least if they are good prospects, like Richard Armstrong says. In order to sell big with direct marketing, you want to write to people like Captain Midnight. Intelligent, frustrated, lacking a feeling of control.

“The customer is not a moron,” said David Ogilvy. “She’s your wife.” But let me finish the story of Captain Midnight.

In the following months, HBO devised a system to identify unauthorized uplink transmissions. Congress passed a new law, which made satellite hijacking a felony. But MacDougall was charged under the old law, with just a misdemeanor, and got away with a $5,000 fine.

He still lives and works in Ocala, FL, where he continues to make an excellent prospect for bizop offers. As for his legacy, MacDougall says,

“I do not regret trying to get the message out to corporate America about unfair pricing and restrictive trade practices. That was the impetus for doing what I did; that’s the reason I jammed HBO; that’s the reason I sent them a polite message.”

Blare your sales message loudly at your readers

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I took a walk through town today and I heard a busker chirping on a flute.

My brain immediately started playing the Chinese dance from the Nutcracker. That’s not the tune the busker was playing. But it didn’t matter, because that’s how our brains work.

Our brains get influenced all the time by random sounds, words, and touches. Most of the time, we’re not even aware this is happening. Take a look at Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. It gives lots of examples of decisions that were swayed, often in big ways, by an unnoticed detail in the environment.

Of course, this has consequences if you’re writing copy. For example, one classic bit of advice is to edit your first draft heavily. Make it as tight as possible. Follow William Zinsser, who wrote:

“Most adverbs are unnecessary. You will clutter your sentence and annoy the reader if you choose a verb that has a specific meaning and then add an adverb that carries the same meaning. Don’t tell us that the radio blared loudly; ‘blare’ connotes loudness.”

“Blare” does connote loudness. But maybe “loudly” triggers the brain in a way that “blare” does not. Words redundant in meaning might not be redundant in effect.

So should you stop editing your copy? No. The fewer words you can get your point across in, the better.

But don’t be a slave to the advice of people like William Zinsser. Use your own taste and emotional response to make the call whether a word stays in or not.

John Caples once gave an example of how an ad improved with a bit of redundancy. The original ad read, “Most of these articles are exclusive with this store.” The improved ad read, “Most of these articles are exclusive with this store — cannot be obtained elsewhere.”

The point Caples was making is that more words can help you explain your meaning better. That includes emotional meaning too. Because you don’t know for sure which hook will finally catch your fish, or which word will prime your prospect into buying.

Want more info on editing your copy? It’s one of the topics I cover in my daily email newsletter. If you’re interested, click here to subscribe.

Dan Kennedy and enlightening tone-deaf marketing

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Have you noticed the rise of the term “tone deaf”?

I thought I had. So I gave it a check just now on Google Trends. Turns out my suspicions were correct: the use of “tone deaf” has shot up three-fold in the past three weeks.

It’s an ugly epithet. Unsurprisingly, businesses are tripping over each other not to sound tone-deaf and instead, to sing a sweet-sounding corona-themed lullaby to soothe their stressed customers. The lullaby is titled, “During these uncertain times.”

But let me stop with these tone-deaf jokes, and let me give you something useful:

I’ve got this theory that predicting the future is really hard. That’s why I’ve ignored any advice coming out in the past month about how to prepare for the “new normal.” That doesn’t mean all this advice is bad — I’m sure some of it is spot on — but I’m not smart enough to figure out who’s right and who’s just very persuasive.

There is an alternative though. There have been plagues before and there have been economic collapses.

So if somebody came out with a bunch of advice, say, during the 2008 economic crisis… and this person survived this crisis and emerged from it better off… then this advice might be worth listening to.

And that’s what I’ve got for you today. It’s a talk given some 11 years ago by Dan Kennedy. I listened to it yesterday and it was one of the most enlightening marketing talks I’ve heard in a long while — and not just during these uncertain times.

Only thing is, if you’re easily offended by tone-deaf marketing, you’ll definitively want to skip this talk. In fact, Dan Kennedy says at the start that, out of the thousands of talks he’s given in his life, this was the only time he got a complaint letter ahead of the talk itself, and not just after.

So consider yourself warned. If you’re still up for it, here’s where to go:

https://mikecapuzzi.com/dan-kennedy-presentation/