Business Ideas

To freelance copywriters who can’t promote themselves

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Smartasses always say that if you’re a freelance copywriter worth a rusty nickel, you should be able to write and sell yourself.

Stupid, I think.

For one thing, it ignores the value of having an outside perspective. In fact, outside perspective is one of the main reasons to ever work with a freelancer, rather than do it in house. This holds for businesses. It holds for freelance copywriters too.

The above claim also ignores the facts of life. Such as the fact that the type of person who is likely to become a freelance copywriter is as afraid of self-promotion as a cat is afraid of water.

When you put those two together, you get the following:

You can be just great at marketing and copywriting overall… but terrible at applying that same knowledge to promoting yourself.

Case in point:

I read an email today from a marketer I follow and like very much. He has great content and a unique perspective and style.

But here’s the self-marketing mental block:

At the end of his email, he writes, “Can I ask for a tiny favor? Would you share this with one other person?”

From the side, it’s easy to point out problems with this.

It sounds needy. And why ask for a favor, when you can do a favor?

People refer stuff because they want to feel important, smart, and appreciated. So why not say something like,

“Do you know somebody who would benefit from reading what you just read? Why not be that cool friend, and forward them this email?”

As Claude Hopkins once wrote, “offer a privilege, not an inducement… appear as a benefactor, not as a salesman.”

Do you know anyone who might benefit from reading this? Then be a cool friend, and let them know about my email newsletter.

Hard-work positioning

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Three quick positioning stories for good night:

In 1960, Crest toothpaste had a 10% share of the market.

Not bad, but not great either. After all, Crest at that time was the only toothpaste with fluoride, which helped prevent cavities. But nobody cared, or nobody believed Procter & Gamble.

So P&G approached the American Dental Association. They showed the dentists a bunch of science. Crest was suddenly “the only toothpaste with the endorsement of the ADA.”
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​​Within two years, sales of Crest tripled. And Crest became the no. 1 toothpaste brand in The Land of The Fruit Stripe Gum.

Story two I won’t tell in detail. Because if you’ve been in marketing for a bit, you’ve probably heard how Tom Monaghan used smart positioning to create a billion-dollar brand out of a bad product.

The bad product was a low-quality pizza. The smart positioning was to say, “Delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free.” The brand was Domino’s.

Third and final story, also about pizza:

John Schnatter started out making pizza in an oversized closet. The pizza was good and John’s chain grew to 1000 locations across the country. But you ain’t seen nothing yet…

Because in a meeting with positioning guru Jack Trout, Schnatter mentioned offhandedly how he used Dino’s sauce.

“Dino’s sauce?” asked Trout. “But Dino only sells to mom-and-pop shops. He doesn’t sell to chains.”

Trout called up the Dino in question to confirm. It was true.

So Trout said, that’s your story. Papa John’s new positioning became, “Better ingredients, better pizza.” The company grew five-fold in the years following the positioning change.

There’s a common positioning strategy hidden in each of those stories. You probably see it. But in case you don’t, then you might like to get on my daily email newsletter. That’s where I share these kinds of stories — but I also spell out the hard-work lessons hidden within.

Cash buyers list

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In the real estate investing space, one common strategy is called wholesaling:

You find a property that looks vacant, with overgrown grass out front, and maybe with notices piling up on the front door.

You somehow track down the owner, who is often living out of state, and thinks this house is a nuisance. So you make him an offer to buy.

If he agrees, you get the property under contract. This means you have the right to buy it.

And then what?

Then you go to your “cash buyers list” — your list of other real estate investors.

You explain the deal you have. And you find an investor who is willing to buy this property from you for more money than what the contract says you have to pay. You then keep the difference.

Yesterday, I talked about going to other industries to find unique ideas that work well. And the first thing that popped into my mind is the cash buyers list.

That’s because I heard a very successful real estate investor talking about it recently. He said that most investors are short-sighted. They only treat their cash buyers list as just that, a list of people who have cash to buy a wholesale contract.

But a cash buyers list, this investor said, is so much more powerful. According to him, it’s actually the no. 1 asset in real estate investing.

Your cash buyers list can provide you with everything you need. More deals… learning and training opportunities… talent if you’re hiring… partnerships if you want ’em… solutions for when you’re in trouble. Whatever you need, tap into your cash buyers list, and results will follow.

So I got to thinking what a cash buyers list would look like outside the real estate space. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much creativity to map real estate investing to the online business world.

The online business world also has dilapidated, vacant properties… it has easy ways to fix those properties and flip them once they’re more valuable… and it also has a range of people who might want to get involved in this process at various stages.

Maybe that sounds abstract. Maybe this will be more concrete:

Over the past five and some years, I’ve learned a lot about copywriting and online marketing. But I’ve mostly used that knowledge to make other people money.

So I had a vision. It involved finding blogs or websites that have something to them — traffic, proof, content — but that are under-performing.

I imagined taking control of such online properties and using everything I’ve learned about direct marketing and copywriting to get them to perform. Then either sitting on that property and collecting rent… or selling it to somebody who wants it, for enough money, and moving on to the next thing.

This sounds great to me. But here’s the trouble:

Doing all this can take a lot of money, time, and work.

I am not interested in supplying all of that myself. That’s why I am starting my own “cash buyers list.”

So here’s my offer to you for tonight:

If you are interested in buying a profitable online business down the line…

Or if you are interested in putting down money ahead of time for a fix-and-flip blog or online store, so you can take a part of the profits it might one day generate…

Or if you have some unique skill — media buying, design, research, technology — and you want to shoulder some of the work of finding and sprucing up various online fixer-uppers…

Then I’d like to talk to you. I mean for real, on the phone or on Skype or Zoom. I want to find out what you’re looking for, and how I can help you get there. Write me an email and we can go from there.

I’ve forgotten dozens of unique and phenomenally effective ideas

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“All great advancements in businesses come from outside the box, not inside the box. I get to do it. What I get to do as a consultant, I get to go over and work with industry A. And because everybody’s myopic, while I’m over there I notice something that’s phenomenally effective. Hardly anybody else outside their business is doing it but could be doing it. I borrow it from industry A and I take it over and I teach it to industry B. And while I’m over there, I notice something they’re doing that hardly anybody else is doing but could be doing. So I borrow it from industry B and I take it back and I teach it to industry A. It’s a disreputable way to make a living, but I’m a high school graduate.”
– Dan Kennedy

A couple weeks ago, I wrote how copywriting has given me a great business education. It’s allowed me to look behind the curtain at dozens of successful enterprises.

Unfortunately, unlike Dan Kennedy, I am much more than a high school graduate. In the 25 years I spent in the school system, I became an expert in passing tests. It never occurred to me to think of how I could apply what I was learning to real life.

This short-sighted behavior has followed me around like a hungry dog. Example:

Since I started writing copy for money, I’ve worked in dozens of different industries. Like I said, it’s been a great education. But I never did anything with the phenomenally effective things that were unique in each industry. I never even wrote them down. And I’m sure I’ve forgotten most of them.

So I’m telling you now, to keep you from wasting opportunities like I did:

Start a list right now. When you come across a good idea in a specific industry, put it on your list. And think about how you could use it in other places.

I started such a list just a few days ago.

​​I kicked my list off with a few profitable things I’ve seen in ecommerce and real estate, two industries I’ve been writing a lot for. And — better never than late – I’ve already got a good business idea out of it. If you like, I will tell you all about it in my post tomorrow.

Or you can get that same post, ahead of time, if you are subscribed to my email newsletter. Here’s the optin page.

Blackjack positioning

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Al Ries and Jack Trout invented the term positioning. They then wrote a book with that title. In it, they say positioning is a hook in your prospect’s brain from which you can hang your product.

Fine. That’s once you’ve got an established position.

But how do you get that hook in your prospect’s brain? Throwing a clothes hanger at somebody’s head will only make it bounce off.

What you need instead is a spear. Something with a very small, very sharp point, which can pierce your prospect’s thick defenses (his skull) and lodge in the soft gray matter inside.

When people talk about positioning, they often talk about taking control of a part of the market. “We want to be the Apple of dog nail clippers.” Meaning, we only want a sliver of that market that’s willing to spend like crazy.

That’s one way to do positioning.

This is the flip side. Instead of thinking about cutting down your market… think about cutting down your product and its functionality.

Once upon a time, Perry Marshall was an experienced and successful online marketer. But that’s a floppy, blunt object, incapable of piercing any skull.

So Perry dropped all his copywriting knowledge… funnel building knowledge… positioning knowledge… and became “The AdWords Guy.” At least to people who had never heard of him before. His business exploded, way beyond his previous success.

Because it can be easier to sell a fragment of the thing rather than the whole. At the same price. Or even for more.

Many people rebel at this. No wonder. Our minds work additively. If you have A plus B plus C, then that’s at least as much as A alone, right?

Not in positioning.

Positioning math is more like blackjack. You know how the game goes. You keep getting cards, trying to get as close as possible to 21. But if you ever go over, you’re BUST. You lose.

Same thing with positioning. Keep adding ideas to your position, and you’re BUST. You lose. And you don’t need to go over 21 ideas either.

So swallow your pride — or fight your client’s pride. The dealer will offer to deal you more cards. Wave him off. One, sharp, deadly idea. No more.

And now a confession:

I used to have a daily email newsletter on copywriting, marketing, and persuasion. No more. From now on, it’s a newsletter on positioning. For today only. Click here to subscribe.

Intuition pump

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Let me share a fictional story I just read in an anarchist copywriter ezine:

One morning in a certain November, a man named John Bejakovic walked out onto his driveway and down to the mailbox.

All around, the street was empty, as it had been for days. His neighbors, like most people around the world, were in a panic, and stayed out of the open as much as possible.

Each night, experts on the teletron warned of unusual bursts of cosmic gamma rays. The experts said these gamma rays could cause serious DNA damage. And while some people seemed to handle the gamma rays just fine, others suffered for weeks with strange symptoms. Still others died.

John opened his mailbox. Among the usual junk mail — magalogs from Boardroom and Phillips Publishing — he saw a thin white envelope. He recognized it immediately. It was an occasional newsletter John was subscribed to, written and published by an expert in persuasive communication.

As always, on the top of the white envelope, in large black letters, there was a “teaser.” This week, it read:

“AN HONEST MISTAKE?”

John walked back inside, magalogs under his arm. He tossed the magalogs into the trash, sat down on the couch, and ripped open the envelope.

“I’ve been warning you all year long,” the newsletter started. “The world is finally starting to realize that the Great Gamma Ray Hysteria is nothing more than a seasonal flareup of space radiation. The question is, how did we get here?”

The newsletter then went into a bunch of reasoned arguments. John scratched his head, and scanned over the remaining pages. Expert opinion… statistics… data. Not only was this whole gamma ray thing not real, the newsletter argued, it was purposefully fabricated.

“Yawn,” John said out loud, even though nobody was in the room with him. “How could an expert in persuasive communication write something like this?”

John tossed the newsletter aside, and grabbed an issue of the New Yorker from the coffee table. He was in the middle of an article about philosopher Daniel Dennett. The article picked up:

“Arguments, Dennett found, rarely shift intuitions; it’s through stories that we revise our sense of what’s natural. (He calls such stories ‘intuition pumps.’) In 1978, he published a short story called ‘Where Am I?,’ in which a philosopher, also named Daniel Dennett, is asked to volunteer for a dangerous mission to disarm an experimental nuclear warhead.”

“Now that’s what I’m talking about!” John said, slapping the page. He rushed to his writing desk and got out a piece of paper. “I’ll show him,” he said out loud, even though there was nobody else in that room either.

Hey it’s me again. I mostly wanted to share this fictional story because the main character has the same name as me. What are the odds?

But the story gets increasingly pornographic after this point, so I won’t bother reprinting it verbatim.

The gist of the action is that the guy started to write a letter to the persuasion expert. He wanted to complain about the boring newsletter. But he ripped the letter up because he realized he was making the same mistake of trying to make his point through argument.

So instead, he wrote a short story about unicorns, and about an evil wizard who poisons their meadow. He published his story in Teen Vogue, where it went viral, and wound up being read verbatim on the Dr. Oz teletron show.

What nobody realized is that the story was just an exercise — a trojan horse to make the same point about the gamma rays, but in a more persuasive way.

And after the story was read on Dr. Oz, people around the world had a mass change of heart and started walking out onto the streets again. And you can imagine how that went, with all the surging gamma radiation raining down from heaven.

Anyways, like I said, a fictional story. But I had to share it just because of the coincidence of the name. And who knows, maybe you can draw some value out of it.

Speaking of newsletters, I’ve also got one. It’s email, not paper, and it arrives every day, not only occasionally. Here’s the optin.

The George Costanza method of client seduction

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There’s an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza, the fat short bald loser who is always making up exciting careers for himself to impress women, realizes that everything he has done in life has lead to failure.

Desperate, George takes another tack.

He goes bizarro. He does the opposite of whatever he would normally do.

George starts by ordering the opposite lunch from what he normally gets. He then notices an attractive woman looking at him from across the restaurant.

Bizarro George decided to get up and go talk to her — because normal George never would.

“Excuse me,” George says to the woman, “I couldn’t help but notice you were looking in my direction.”

“Oh yes I was,” the woman explains. “You just ordered the exact same lunch as me.”

George takes a deep breath.

“My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.”

The woman turns to face him fully, her eyes sparkling and a smile spreading across her face. “I’m Victoria. Hiii…”

Chris Haddad said in a recent interview that if you are a freelance copywriter, then you should be constantly going on Facebook, bragging about how great you are, and sharing all of your successes and testimonials.

That’s one approach. It can definitely work.

But there’s another approach. It’s when you seek to not impress. Instead, you give clients reasons why you are not a good match for them. You refuse to talk about your experience and successes, or at least you put it off as long as possible.

This is nothing more than a page out of Jim Camp’s negotiation system. You’re looking for a no. More importantly, you are eliminating any neediness that’s typical when freelancers talk to clients.

Very likely, this approach is not right for you.

But if you find that the typical advice of confidence and bragging has lead you to failure over and over… then this bizarro George approach is worth a shot. Because it can work, and not on just on TV.

Here’s another thing that is very likely not right for you:

My daily email newsletter. Very few people subscribe to it. Even fewer read it.

How to make $75 million with an email newsletter

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News broke today that Morning Brew was acquired by Business Insider.

Morning Brew, as you might know, is a daily email newsletter started a few years ago. The insight behind it was to take business news — a boring topic, thanks for nothing, Wall Street Journal — and make it more millennial-friendly.

Well it worked. Business Insider paid $75 million for a controlling stake in Morning Brew. Not bad for an email newsletter.

I bring this up for reasons one and two.

Reason one is that it fits my post from yesterday. That’s where I suggested that if you take a dry but useful topic and sexy it up, you can become a star. Or in the case of Morning Brew, you can earn yourself a $75 million buyout in about five years’ time.

Reason two has to do with my current romp through NLP axioms. The axiom I have in mind is,

“The past does not equal the future.”

In other words, even if a shadow has trailed you all your life — I mean a phobia, or some limiting belief, or just “how you are” — that doesn’t mean you cannot change, and change quickly.

That, in theory, is what NLP is all about. Of course, there are also other ways to effect change quickly.

For example, a few months ago I listened to an interview with Alex Lieberman, the founder of Morning Brew. Lieberman said how he can’t see any reason to sell his company.

Well, $75 million later, he found a reason.

“The past does not equal the future.”

Human brains love patterns and trends. But that’s not how the world works much of the time. Things can stay the same, day after day after day, and then suddenly — your tomorrow can be different.

Speaking of a different tomorrow:

I have a daily email newsletter. Its current valuation is -$39.17, which is what I’ve paid for the software to send the emails.

The insight behind my newsletter is to take the boring topics of marketing and copywriting and sexy them up. If you’d like to get on this rocket ship before it shoots to the moon, click here to subscribe.

Beware “win-win-win”

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The hair stands up on the back of my neck whenever I hear the phrase “win-win-win.” And I’ve hearing it more and more often.

“It’s a real win-win-win situation…”​​

I guess that’s how markets evolve. First we had “win-win,” as in, “win-win negotiation.” Once that became old hat, marketers had to crank it up — hence the rise of “win-win-win.”

The reason I am wary of this phrase is because I’ve read Jim Camp’s negotiation book Start with No. And one of Camp’s big enemies is win-win. That’s just a clever name, Camp says, for fear- and compromise-based negotiation.

According to Camp, win-win negotiation is not principled… it’s not in your best interest… and if somebody is pushing it on you, you’re about to get flayed alive.

But maybe you think this is crazy. Maybe you think that “win-win” is great, and that “win-win-win” is even better. So here’s a quote by one very famous and successful copywriter, John Carlton:

Nearly every biz transaction is an inherently hostile situation.

Behind the smiles and back-slapping and promises of “working for the common good” between, say, a freelancer (or consultant) and a client…

… the freelancer actually wants to do as little work as possible for the maximum possible money…

… while the client wants to bleed every ounce of productivity from the writer for the least outlay of cash.

John uses the terms “veiled teeth-baring” and “primal snarling dance” to describe the reality of business interactions.

That’s certainly one way to do it. But I don’t think it’s the only way.

And if you want to know how to handle business situations in a way that’s neither snarling nor based in fear, then Camp’s book is worth a read. Or two. Or three.

Or you can just subscribe to my daily email newsletter. I’m no Jim Camp. But I’ve read his stuff, and it’s near to my heart. And while my newsletter is mainly about marketing and persuasions, sometimes I also write about the business of copy.

Maybe that doesn’t appeal to you. But in the odd case that it does, you can subscribe to get my emails by clicking here.

Challenging the “easy” norm in direct response marketing

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“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”
— Apocryphal Ernest Shackleton ad

I had a miserable hike up a mountain yesterday.

Right at the start, I had to scramble up steep boulders. I was soon out of breath. Then the wind picked up, and whipped my ears until my head hurt. Then the fog rolled in, and it got cold and damp. Large frost crystals appeared on the occasional plants. And yet I, along with a growing mass of other people around me, trudged up in silence to the top of the mountain.

At the top, all that waited for me was a tiny and steamy hut, where they served hot tea. It was great, and totally worth it.

My point being:

A good number of human beings want a chance to prove themselves, to test their strength, even to suffer in order to achieve some goal.

And yet direct response marketing is all about making things easy and push-button, and appealing to the greedy sloth in people.

Is there space for a little noble sado-masochism in the slothful world of marketing?

Maybe.

​​I remember reading how marketer Sean D’Souza accidentally made his article-writing course much harder than he first intended it to be. I forget the details, but he mistakenly told his course attendants to write much more, in a much shorter period of time, than what was reasonable.

People taking the course suffered… lost sleep… got tense and nervous.

​​And when it was all over, they raved about the course, and became evangelists for it. Sean now has a waiting list for the course, which he markets as being famously difficult.

Direct marketing industry norms say that you have to provide easier, cheaper, faster solutions. But as marketer Dan Kennedy says, norms reinforce average.

​​So maybe, if you are looking for a market position that gets you above-average results, then promising your clients and customers struggle, expense, and many weeks and months of it, well, maybe it’s not a crazy idea to try.

Speaking of which:

Men (and women) wanted to subscribe to my daily email newsletter. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours spent reading the emails I send each day. Marketing lessons doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success. If interested, apply here.