Business Ideas

A close entrepreneurial shave

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I’ve just had the most homoerotic experience, if not of my life, then certainly of the past 14 years.

I paid a man, much younger than me, to massage, caress, and pinch me. He did his job dutifully for almost exactly a half hour.

I won’t lie to you. I was massively relieved at the end of it. And with the transaction over, I couldn’t wait to get away.

So I handed the young man the equivalent of about $7, wrote my name on the obligatory covid-tracking sheet, and ran the hell out of the barber shop.

It never occurred to me to get a professional shave until today, but I’ll try anything once. And to be honest, I was chuffed with myself for going through this experience.

Only thing is, the shave wasn’t very good.

I realized it once I got home and checked in the mirror. I looked like a disheveled computer science professor I once had — smooth cheek on one side, five o’clock shadow on the other, uneven bits of stubble under my nose, tiny blotches of blood everywhere.

There was nothing left to do but get out the trusty Sensor Excel and do the job right myself.

So why is this relevant to you?

Probably no reason. Except in the unlikely case that you are an entrepreneur, or want to become one, but the thought of hiring people and managing them gives you the runs.

In spite of all the outsourcing porn and the advice about focusing on your most valuable 20%, the fact remains that you are still probably the best person to do many jobs around your business.

Sure, that can be a terrible limiting factor. But some business owners go surprisingly far by being a one-man band.

And in any case, if you hate the idea of recruiting, hiring, training, and keeping employees happy, then you might not have any choice.

​​​If this side of your personality is truly ingrained, then better accept it and figure out how to live with it.

​​As business coach Rich Schefren likes to say, “Put your shaving goals ahead of your massage goals.” No, I got that wrong. “Put your business goals ahead of your personal development goals.” That’s right.

But if you want to do things by yourself, you’ll need to get some good advice. I can’t help you with shaving. But for marketing and copywriting advice, you might like my daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Sorry to see you go

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Here’s a Days-Of-Thunder-sized personal confession:

I cant “read” marketing.

I find it too boring. As soon as I suspect an email or a web page or an article is trying to sell me something, a switch gets flipped in my head, my eyes get watery, and I start to gloss over the text in hope of escape.

This is definitely a problem, since I make my living writing sales copy, the exact kind of stuff I can’t stomach reading.

So I’ve found ways of working around this.

For example, one of the main benefits I get from hand-copying ads is that it simply forces me to carefully read those ads.

For a while, I was also having success by seeking out trends for a “3-minute DR news” feature for my email newsletter. That helped me actually pay attention to other marketers’ ads, even if I had no interest in what they were selling or preaching.

As part of this, I subscribed to dozens of email newsletters. But over time, I unsubscribed from almost all of them.

I did the same just now with copywriter Abbey Woodcock’s newsletter.

All I know about Abbey is that 1) she was one of Parris Lampropoulos’s copy cubs, so she’s gotta know about copywriting and 2) she has some kind of program helping newbie freelancers get started.

Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen in Abbey’s emails, she doesn’t talk too much about 1. But she talks aplenty about 2.

So I unsubscribed. But then, I saw an interesting thing on Abbey’s unsubscribe page.

It’s something I haven’t seen anybody else do. Here’s what happens:

When you click unsubscribe in Abbey’s email, you get taken to her site to confirm. “Yes, I really do want to unsubscribe.” Once you click that, you are taken to one final page.

“Sorry to see you go,” the page says.

And then directly below, it goes on: “Here are some other resources that might be a better fit,” followed by two affiliate links (Copy Chief and something called Effic Planning System).

I thought this was great because 1) it could be genuinely helpful to somebody who wasn’t a fit for Abbey’s stuff and 2) it could make some money for Abbey from an otherwise useless ex-lead.

This illustrates a principle I first heard Ben Settle talk about. (I guess he learned it from Dan Kennedy.)

That principle is to always seek out unused capacity.

Abbey’s unsubscribe page is just one small and clear example of this.

But if you have any kind of business — yes, even as a newbie freelancer — you might have unused capacity that you could profitably exploit.

Take for example these blog posts. For most of the time I’ve been writing them, I simply ended each post without including any kind of call to action.

Unused capacity.

So I started including a CTA each and every time. Something simple. Along the lines of,

I’ve got an email newsletter about marketing and persuasion. If you like what you just read, you might like that too. In case you want to give it a try, click here to subscribe.

Being authentic is overrated

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In 1976, David Bowie got accused of supporting fascism. How could anybody say that of Bowie?

After all, a few years earlier, Bowie claimed he was gay. Then he was an alien. Then he became one of the few white singers to perform on Soul Train.

This certainly doesn’t sound like your typical fascist. Why would anybody think different? Well, there is the following quote:

“I believe very strongly in fascism,” Bowie said in a 1976 interview with Playboy magazine. “Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.”

People are always telling you, be authentic, be authentic. That’s how you will connect to others. Share your geeky stories. Be vulnerable. Be true to yourself.

And yet there’s David Bowie, who became a huge star by striving to be plastic, artificial, and impossible to pin down. He made up stuff and he lied for his own amusement and profit. He provoked and played the media. Bowie again:

“The only thing that shocks now is an extreme. Like me running my mouth off, jacking myself off. Unless you do that, nobody will pay attention to you. Not for long. You have to hit them on the head.”

And it’s not just Bowie or his rock star spawn like Madonna and Lady Gaga who get away with this. Look at the world of online marketing.

​​Ben Settle has admitted he consciously plays up his crotchety persona online. ​​Matt Stone has an oversexed alter ego he writes under, named Buck Flogging. The greatest copywriter of all time, Ross Manly, is not even a real person.

Fact is, authenticity is overrated. It’s much better to be entertaining, or at least interesting. If you are boring or unpleasant by nature, there’s no need to push that pollution out into the world.

​​Rather than being consistent with your “authentic self,” assume a new, more exciting viewpoint and unflinchingly defend it — for as long as you find it amusing or valuable to do so. ​​As Bowie put it:

“The only way I can be effective as a person is to be this confoundedly arrogant and forthright with my point of view. […] Nothing matters except whatever it is I’m doing at the moment. I can’t keep track of everything I say. I don’t give a shit. I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe. The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t a clue where I’m gonna be in a year.”

Email newsletter. I have one. Every day I write an email and share ideas that are not consistent with each other. But you might find it interesting anyhow. It’s available here.

10 tiny marketing projects you could complete in a week

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A guy named Ben Stokes just published a free tool to help you build a one-item online store. I’m letting you know this for two reasons:

1) Maybe you want to build a simple store for a product you have in mind. In that case, you can try Ben’s free store builder instead of paying for Shopify or fussing with WordPress.

2) Ben also has a unique blog at tinyprojects.dev. He does a tiny new programming project each week. He tracks what he did and how it went. The one-item store builder is Ben’s most recent entry.

All of which got me thinking:

​Somebody could make a similar site about marketing. Just pick a tiny project you could complete in under a week. Do it. Write up how it went, what you learned, and show off the results.

You’d learn something. You’d build a portfolio. You’d make connections. Maybe you’d even make some money.

I at least would love to read it. I really hope somebody will do this — maybe that somebody will be you.

So to help you get started, here are 10 possible tiny marketing projects I came up with just now.

​​I’m not saying these projects are great. But they don’t have to be a success in order to be a success, if you’re hepp to what I mean. Here’s the list:

#1. Get booked on a podcast
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​Make an inventory of your skills, interests, and experiences. Go on listennotes.com and search for podcasts that might be interested in hearing what you have to say.

​​Send the podcast hosts an email explaining what valuable info you can share with their audience. If you have zero upon zero valuable experience or skills, then find a travel blog and talk about where you live. Any place can become interesting with a bit of research.

#2. Promote an affiliate product
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​Go on Clickbank. Pick a top 15 Clickbank offer. Find a subniche you could promote it to (eg. weight loss for people with PTSD).

​​Create a tiny lead magnet that answers a specific, curiosity-inducing question in 4 paragraphs max. Create a landing page offering this lead magnet as a PDF.

​​Write a soap opera sequence for people who sign up, promoting the affiliate product. Create 3 Facebook ads and run $5 worth of Facebook traffic to your page each day for 3 days.

#3. Work on getting a story to the front page of Reddit
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​Search the Internet for a sufficiently shareable/outrageous/inflammatory story that hasn’t blown up yet. Or use your own content. Figure out which subreddits might go for it. Put it out there. Go on Fiverr and pay for 5 people $5 to upvote it using a bunch of different accounts, and try to make it reach the front page.

#4. Publish a Kindle book out of repurposed materials

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​Blog posts you’ve written, articles, emails, your personal diary, letters to your mom, or your high school term papers. Whatever you’ve got. Put it together. Figure out a hot title. Research how to make a Kindle book. Create a cover using Canva. Write an Amazon listing for it. Publish it on Amazon KDP.

#5. Start a blog where each week, you post a profile of a different successful marketer

​​Dig around on the Internet and collect info on this marketer. Then reach out to the marketer, explain what you’re doing, and ask one or two in-depth questions to make your piece unique and more than just a rehash what’s out there. If you don’t hear back, that’s content too. ​​Write it all up. Link to the marketer’s offers and his site.

​​ If you don’t know any successful marketers, here’s a random list to get you started: Michael Senoff, Brian Kurtz, Todd Brown, Matt Furey, Hollis Carter.

#6. Same as #1 but with guest posts

​​This can be better if you’re starting out and you can’t claim to be any kind of expert, or even pretend-expert. Simply make it your goal to get somebody somewhere to accept your guest post.

​​Look at a bunch of blogs or sites. Select the most promising ones according to your own interests and how good/accessible they look. Come up with a headline or two or three, and write the blog owner an email pitching your post. Do it over and over for a week, or until you get a yes.

#7. Create a micro dropshipping site

​​Go on Amazon and dig around for ecommerce products. Look for a product that 1) has 200+ reviews, 2) makes you say, I can’t believe this is a thing and 3) sells for under $20. Then go on Ali Express and find the closest thing to it. Create a one-product store with Ben Stokes’s one product store builder. Connect it to your Ali Express supplier and make it ready to do business.

#8. Create a personal ad for your own service business

​​Find Gary Halbert’s personal ad. Model it to describe your ideal client, and to promote yourself as a copywriter or whatever it is that you want to do.

​​If you think your ad is great and you’ve got a bunch of money, buy some space in the Los Angeles Times and run it, just like Gary did. ​​If you’re not confident about your ad or you ain’t got money, put your ad in a Google Doc. Make it publicly visible. Link to it from Facebook and post it in Facebook groups, while sharing your learning lessons from the exercise.

#9. Recreate the Significant Objects project

​​Go to a local thrift shop, antiques store, or flea market. Buy 5 quirky objects, all under $5. Then go on Reddit and search around in various subreddits (r/relationships, r/letsnotmeet, r/askreddit) for personal stories that went viral or got lots of upvotes.

​​Figure out a way to tie some of those stories up with your thrift store products. Retell the story in a tight, condensed version, tie in your product, and make this into an eBay listing for the product.

#10. Create a blog about about tiny marketing projects that you complete in under a week

​​Make a list of 10 projects you will tackle over the coming 10 weeks. Write up a week 0 post about your motivation, the steps you took to create the actual blog, and hint at the first project you will handle the following week. ​​Then send me a link to it, and I will be your first reader.

​​And if you’re strapped for cash, just write up the initial post in a Google Doc and send me that. I’ll pay the $10.17 for registering the tinyprojects.marketing domain for you, and I’ll let you use my hosting for the blog itself until you make your first $1k online.

Expert advice on how to start an email magazine

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In 2015, Alex Lieberman started sending a daily email to 45 friends and classmates at the University of Michigan. Each email was empty except for a PDF attachment. The PDF was made from an ugly Word doc template, and contained a fun-to-read summary of the top business news for that day.

Alex managed to make this daily email into a profitable business. That sounds pretty attractive to me, because I’ve been thinking about starting a new project.

What I’d love is to start a magazine, but magazines are dying or dead. Websites aren’t magazines either — there’s no real engagement or loyalty.

I realized that the closest thing today to my fantasy magazine is simply an email newsletter. But newsletter is an overloaded term. So let’s call it an email magazine.

Since I’m thinking about this, I wanted to do some learning from people who have been successful doing the same. Alex Lieberman, who I mentioned above, is definitely among them.

Since that PDF-based start in 2015, Alex moved his content fully into the email. He also grew his subscriber list from 45 people to over a million today. He doesn’t call his business a magazine, but he does accept ads, for which big corporations pay upward of $50k for a one-shot placement.

As of 2019, Alex’s daily newsletter, called Morning Brew, is making $13 million a year in ad revenue.

So I tracked down a detail-rich interview with Alex Lieberman. I think it could be valuable to you whether you want the details on how Alex built up Morning Brew… whether you too want to start an “email magazine”… or even if you want to grow an email list for a more grimy direct response business.

The good stuff in the interview starts after minute 22. I’ve linked to it below:

A current case of whale fall

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On May 17, I wrote about whale fall. That’s my term for how little businesses or even individuals can carve out a unique position for themselves in the marketplace, by feeding off the carcass of a dead or declining whale.

Today, I want to share a quick news bite with you regarding this:

Hey, a new email provider, is out there right now looking to replace the likes of Google’s Gmail.

“Gmail has basically frozen all innovation in email for a good decade,” said David Heinemeier Hansson, one of the guys behind Hey.

(Heinemeier Hansson is well-known in nerd circles, because he is one of the developers and co-founders of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp, and because he is an all-around loud guy.)

So Hey is reimagining email. Each new sender first has to get your consent, or they become ignored. Tracking pixels are automatically blocked. Hey doesn’t have an inbox, but it does have something called an “Imbox.”

As of now, you can only get on the waiting list for a Hey email account. And you have to write a haiku to do it. (I’m not kidding.) Once you are on the waiting list, if your haiku is approved, you then get the chance to pay Heinemeier Hansson $99 for a year of Hey email.

Pretty outrageous, right?

And yet, there is apparently a line of people, wrapping twice around the Internet, who have submitted their haikus and who are holding their $99 in hand, ready to hand it over.

I personally don’t think Hey will succeed long-term, at least as it currently stands. But I bring this story up for two reasons:

1. Even if Hey is not successful, it might have an impact on how promotional emails are handled.

There were already rumblings last summer that Apple was doing some anti-marketing email moves. Now, other tech whales might get in on it. If you are in marketing, it’s good to keep half an eye on these things so you don’t get blindsided.

2. The number one ideal of any whale is to get larger and to absorb more. Along the way, whales get sloppy. So if your primary concern is freedom rather than size, then you can follow your instincts and even make a good business out of it.

That’s the essence of whale fall, and that’s what Hey illustrates, even before it’s launched.

In other news, I just read that Google is facing a $5 billion lawsuit for tracking Chrome users in incognito mode. Maybe it’s time to reimagine how people access their porn? For the right person or small business, it could be a brand new whale fall opportunity.

In still other news, did you get that initial email I sent on May 17 about whale fall? If not, maybe it’s because you’re not subscribed to my email newsletter. Or you’ve got Hey, and you didn’t give your consent to receive my daily emails. In the second case, there’s not much I can do. But if the first case is the problem, here’s how to get on my newsletter list.

Inspiration for would-be New Professors

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Last Thursday morning, I read an article about a man who set an unusual world record.

Between December 2018 and August 2019, he traveled around the world by boat one-and-a-half times.

And in each of the world’s five oceans, including at Antarctica and somewhere close to the North Pole, he visited the deepest underwater point, in what are called “hadal” regions.

In order to become the first person to do this, Victor Vescovo, for that is the man’s name, had to build a custom-made submarine.

He had to retrofit a big ole ship, which he had bought from the U.S. Navy.

He had to hire a crew of engineers, scientists and support staff, all there to help him in his record-setting quest.

The whole enterprise cost a little less than $48 million, which Vescovo, who made that much and more in private equity, paid himself.

But don’t think this was a foolish waste of a rich man’s money.

According to the article, the U.S Navy has showed interest in buying Vescovo’s innovative submarine + blueprints, for a little over what Vescovo himself paid to develop and test it.

In other words, there’s a good chance that Vescovo will have somebody else foot the bill for his unique and quirky passion project of the past several years.

I don’t know about you, but this sounds pretty romantic to me. It’s the kind of life I would like to live.

Not that I’m interested in exploring ocean depths, or managing a big crew, or setting world records.

But I like the idea of having a sailboat of one, sailing to an unexplored island when the mood strikes me, writing up what I’ve learned along the way, and having others pay me to live this life.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a real sailboat or real islands.

It could just be an unusual topic I get interested in and start researching. Kind of like being a tenured professor, but without the years of clawing up the academic hierarchy.

So why am I telling you this?

No reason. Odds are, you don’t share this same dream.

But on the small chance that you do, then I want to tell you there’s hope.

I was talking to fellow copywriter Will Ward about this idea today.

And Will pointed me to the blog of Gretchen McCulloch, someone who is very much living a life like this. Gretchen has even written up a series of posts about how she became one of The New Professors (my term, not hers), and perhaps, how you can too.

I’m reading these blog posts right now. It’s good for inspiration and maybe a bit of guidance. If you want to read them too and be inspired, here’s where to get started:

https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/189045267597/part-i-what-is-a-weird-internet-career

The “Attractionist” lure for weak negotiators

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My sophomore year in college, I had a girlfriend who loved me so well she ran off to live in Japan.

I bought a plane ticket to visit her during Christmas vacation. But I was careless with my travel arrangements. I booked my flight for the day before the final exam of one of my computer science classes.

The ticket was nonrefundable. And expensive.

My only option was to go talk to the professor. Maybe I could convince him to let me take the exam early.

As I said, this was a computer science class.

The professor teaching it was a beady-eyed automaton who thought in C code and expressed himself with the preciseness of a computer printout. At one point, there was an entire website, created by current and former students, dedicated to the man’s inhuman, Terminator-like nature.

I mustered all my courage and showed up to his office one day.

He was in there, wearing the same short-sleeve button-up shirt he always wore. It had seen so many washes that it had become faded and paper-thin. His nipples regularly poked through during lectures in the cold engineering building.

“Professor Terminator?” I said from the door to his office.

He swiveled around in his chair and focused on me with his cold and fishy gaze.

I explained my nonrefundable ticket predicament. Would there be any chance to take the exam early? Or late? Or anything?

Without saying a word, he swiveled back towards his computer and started typing and clicking. He pulled up the course syllabus.

“The syllabus clearly states the final is scheduled for December 6!” He faced me again. Through his expressionless mask, I sensed he was furious that I would approach him with such a disturbing and illogical request.

I explained that in that case, I would have to miss the final and probably fail the class. He threw up his arms — how was this his problem?

So I tucked my tail between my legs, thanked him for his time, and left. My heart was beating at around 200 BPM. I felt defeated and ashamed.

Throughout my life, I’ve had a few wins like this. They made me think this is how negotiations and sales always go. And I wanted no part of it.

I bet there are a bunch of people out there just like me. Because if you look around, you will see a growing number of copywriting and marketing gurus catering exactly to weak and feckless negotiators.

I call these gurus “Attractionists”. They promise that you can create your freelance copywriting business without ever needing to sell. All you need to do is “attract leads by giving value,” “be human,” “know your worth.”

I’m sure people can get to the point where they are so in demand that they never have to negotiate. But my feeling is, you’re unlikely to jump from zero to total success, and completely bypass the phase where you need to do some selling. As Mark Ford wrote in Ready Fire Aim:

“To be a truly effective entrepreneur, you must become your business’s first and foremost expert at selling. There is only one way to do this: Invest most of your time, attention, and energy in the selling process. The ratio of time, creativity, and money spent on selling as opposed to other aspects of business should be something like 80/20, with 80 percent going towards selling and only 20 percent toward everything else.”

Now here are some good news:

As you go through life, you don’t have to be in hopeless negotiation situations like I was above, where your only hope is for the other side to take pity on you.

You don’t have to be powerless.

And you don’t have to be afraid of facing disagreement or having a conflict of interests with the other side.

Negotiation, persuasion, and yes, sales, can all be learned. I’ve done it. And I’m an anti-natural.

If you too are naturally reluctant to negotiate or sell, then I recommend Jim Camp’s book Start with No. For one thing, it’s an effective system, particularly if you are looking for long-term success rather than quick “wins”. For another, being accommodating and non-confrontational by nature can actually be an asset to you if you use this system.

One final point. Once you learn the basics of how to negotiate, you can choose to make it less of a daily concern in your specific business. But in my opinion, it makes sense to do that from a position of power, and not out of fear.

Anyways, if you want to check out Jim Camp’s book, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/start-with-no

“Meanwhile, back at the copywriting ranch…”

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“The longer [the evangelist] can hold interest, the more people he can convince — and the greater will be the number who will inevitably walk forward and ‘hit the sawdust trail.’ The less able he is to hold interest for a sufficient time, the greater will be the number who will inevitably walk out.”
Victor Schwab, How to Write a Good Advertisement

The most memorable lesson I learned from my former copywriting coach had to do with keeping the reader’s interest. It was most memorable because it made so much sense. And yet, it went against all my instincts for how I normally write.

It’s actually a well-known writing trick.

I’ve come across the same idea in an episode of Every Frame a Painting, the YouTube video essay series. The episode in question actually revealed behind-the-scenes secrets — the underlying structure that made each essay so interesting.

Among other tricks, there was something called “Meanwhile, back at the ranch.” In a nutshell, each episode would have multiple story lines. When one story reached a peak of interest, it would cut out.

“Meanwhile, back at the ranch…”

… and another story line would pick up. When that reached a new level of interest, it would cut out again, to switch to another story line. And so on.

This might seem silly simple when I lay it out like this. After all, that’s pretty much how every soap opera and TV show works.

But like I said, it’s not how most people write. At least that’s not how I naturally write. I usually want to express my point in a logical, linear — and boring — order.

Which brings me back to my former copywriting coach. He likened the structure of a sales message to a spiral that winds around the linear, logical skeleton of the points you need to make. The reader should never know for sure what you’re going to say next.

If you do create that winding spiral, you will keep your prospect interested. And like Vic Schwab wrote above, the longer you can keep your prospect interested, the greater the chance he will walk the sawdust trail. That means more conversions made… and more shekels in your collection box.

No collection box here at the moment. But if you want more of this kind of evangelical content, here’s where to sign up for my email newsletter.

The hottest girl on an empty beach and other ways to sidestep competition

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I went for a walk this morning next to the sea, and I saw the most amazing girl.

Let me set this up by saying the tourist season hasn’t started yet. The town I’m in is empty except for the locals. There were a few people walking dogs in the morning, but there was nobody, absolutely nobody, on the beach.

Except her.

The early morning sun lit her up from the side. She was in a bikini, standing in the water up to her ankles. She seemed to be testing out the temperature and questioning her resolve to dive in.

I walked by, spellbound. A man coming towards me seemed equally absorbed — he was staring and his jaw was hanging open.

Now if you asked me what this girl looked like, I’d have to say she was between 15 and 35 years of age. She had hair on her head. She was not visibly obese.

Beyond that, I can’t say much. For one thing, I couldn’t see her all that well. For another, I was so blinded by the fact that she was the one and only girl for a mile up and down the beach, and probably, in the entire town.

The point of this is the value of being in a marketplace of one.

Of course, one way to be in that lucky position is to find a group of people who aren’t being served by anybody else — the equivalent of an empty beach town before the season starts. That definitely works, but there might be drawbacks. There’s a good chance your prospects will be slack-jawed oglers. And there will be inevitable competition as the season heats up.

But there’s an alternative. It allows you to create a marketplace of one for yourself, even in the face of ostensible “competition.”

I’ve talked about this already a few times. It’s a trick known as helping your prospects experience a moment of insight.

There’s a lot more to be said about this topic. So I won’t do that here. But I am putting together a book about it. If you want to get notified when it comes out, click here and subscribe to my email newsletter.