Business Ideas

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.”

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.

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.

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/

A marketing executive, two brothers, and a $35 million business

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Kay Kamen ripped the lining out of his coat and spread the money across the table.

“If you hire me,” he said, “all this money is yours. I don’t know how much business you’re doing right now, but I guarantee you that much, plus 50% of everything I do over that amount.”

At the other side of the table, the two brothers grew silent. They retreated to the window to quickly consider Kamen’s offer.

The offer was good and they could definitely use the money. Their business, while popular with customers, was strapped for cash. And it being 1932 and the height of the Great Depression, things weren’t looking up.

So they turned around to shake Kamen’s hand and accept his offer. Only one problem:

Kamen had fallen asleep while Roy and Walt Disney were conferring at the window.

This is a true story of how Disney the company survived and thrived.

Fact is, Disney was struggling in 1932. Cartoons are all right, but the costs are high, the risks are significant, and when you don’t have a new cartoon, you don’t eat.

That’s where Kay Kamen stepped in.

He was the owner of a marketing firm in Kansas City, and he had the idea of licensing Disney characters for merchandise. Roy And Walt were open to Kamen’s idea. They invited him to visit them in California.

So Kamen withdrew his entire life savings, sewed them into the lining of his coat, and got on a train to Los Angeles. He was so afraid somebody would steal his coat that he didn’t sleep for the 48 hours it took to make the trip. That’s why he dozed off during the meeting.

But the deal got done. A year later, there were 40 licenses for Mickey Mouse products.

Two years later, and Kamen was selling $35 million worth of Disney soap, hairbrushes, candy, baseball cards, and of course, watches. Keep in mind this was Great Depression dollars. The merchandise became a much more lucrative and stable source of income than the cartoons themselves.

The marketing lesson of this story is clear:

If Kay Kamen hadn’t created the merchandising machine for Disney in 1932, there’s a good chance none of us would know the Disney brand today.

The problem is most businesses — pre-Kamen Disney included — only focus on their current offer. They struggle and they wonder why. It’s because many front-end offers are not profitable.

That’s why it’s much better to plan a business a couple offers in advance. The first thing you sell to your customer… and then the thing after that… and then the thing after that.

That’s what Kay Kamen did for Disney. But here’s the thing:

There’s another way of planning out your offers that might be even better than this “two steps ahead” method.

In fact, according to a marketer who pulls in multiple millions of dollars of profits each year, this other method is much more reliable, and therefore much more lucrative. But my email today is already running long like a train from KC to LA — so I’ll tell you all about this other method tomorrow.

Stop asking your clients for referrals

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Stop asking your clients for referrals. At least until you’ve read through this article.

You’ve probably heard the Ben Franklin book-borrowing story:

Franklin had a political opponent he wanted to win over. But he didn’t want to butter the opponent up with flattery of tenderize him with gifts. Instead, Franklin used another tactic. He asked his opponent for a favor — the loan of a rare and curious book.

The opponent obliged. Ben Franklin returned the book a week later, with a note expressing his strong “sense of the favour.” After that, Franklin’s opponent opened up. The two eventually became great friends.

What does this have to do with referrals?

Well, as Franklin put it, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another.” it’s a matter of consistency, that fundamental human need. If I do you a favor, I have to justify it to myself somehow, and that will affect how I act in the future.

But it goes in the other direction, too. And that’s the connection to referrals.

If you ask a client for a referral — and he doesn’t oblige, for whatever reason — then he has to justify that decision to himself. And like Franklin says, “He that has once done you an unkindness will be more ready to do you another.”

Of course, not every book you borrow will make you a new friend… and not every referral you fail to get will lose you an old client.

But I want to raise the possibility that asking for a referral in a haphazard way can have its drawbacks.

“Just go ahead and ask, it can’t hurt.” Maybe. Or maybe it can.

So does that mean you should get paralyzed with fear and avoid referral marketing?

No. But it might make sense to have a smart system that works.

Such as the systems you can find in the following video. I’ve linked to it before, but I’ll do it again. It’s a recording from a Jay Abraham seminar where various clients of Jay’s shared 93 referral getting-strategies that actually worked for them.

Some of these methods are simple and obvious. Some are involved and very clever. But they’re all worth knowing about if you want more referrals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_13FI1zE94k

A return to Mad Men-era Ulcer Gulch?

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There’s a scene from Mad Men that’s stuck with me for years:

Grey-haired Roger Sterling, the senior partner of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency, is on the phone with his wife.

“I am drinking my milk,” he reassures her. And sure enough, he’s got a half-full glass of milk in front of him. He then tops it up with vodka and drinks it down.

The vodka was there because it feels good. The milk, on the other hand, was supposed to treat ulcers. Turns out, ulcers were considered a badge of success on Madison Avenue, because all the high-ranking executives like Roger had them.

In fact, around the middle of the 20th century, Madison Avenue was popularly known as “Ulcer Gulch.” Which made me think of something I heard in an interview with marketer Rich Schefren. Says Rich:

“Most entrepreneurs make the mistake of putting their self-growth goals ahead of their business success.”

This made my long, furry ears perk up. It sounded like Rich was advocating a return to Ulcer Gulch. But no.

What Rich was really saying (as he explained a bit later in the interview) is that you need a business that you can do now, as you are. In other words, you shouldn’t wait to become a different person before you can start a successful business.

This sounds right to me. What business success I’ve had – my copywriting career, those Amazon bestsellers I mentioned a few days ago, a few recent partnerships — used the skills, experiences, and mindset I already had. And that was good enough.

On the other hand, whenever I’ve tried to start some kind of venture that sounded great on paper, but was more than a step removed from where I was currently, I always failed. That’s happened more times than I can count.

So what does this mean for you? Probably nothing. But perhaps, you can get out a pen and a piece of paper, pour yourself a glass of cold vodka-milk, and start listing ideas for services or products you can offer to the world right now — without mastering a new field, becoming a better public speaker, or getting more motivated.

​​Putting these kinds of restrictions on your idea generation can stir up creativity. And who knows, you might hit upon something that leads to real business success, without the ulcers.

My little-known history as an Amazon ebook hack

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A-list copywriter Bob Bly just sent out an email about the National Emergency Library. I’d heard of this initiative but I didn’t bother to look it up until now.

Turns out, the Internet Archive is scanning books and making them freely available online during the corona situation. That’s the National Emergency Library. To which Mary Rasenberger, director of the Authors Guild, said (and I quote from Bob’s email):

“[It is] no different than any other piracy sites. If you can get anything that you want that’s on Internet Archives for free, why are you going to buy an ebook.”

I don’t know about you, but to me this sounds like the old argument about sex and marriage. Why buy the cow, when there’s an app that hooks you up with free milk, even at 3am.

And yet… plenty of people are still getting married these days. How come? Riddle me that, Mary.

But seriously, here’s a little-known fact about me:

For about a year of my life, I eked a meager living by writing ebooks and selling them through Amazon Kindle publishing. (Don’t search for the books because they were all published under pseudonyms.)

I actually sold thousands of copies of these books — but it didn’t mean much. Kindle ebooks sell for a couple of bucks each.

Thing is, had I known as much about marketing back then as I do now, I wouldn’t have failed or given up on my Kindle publishing dreams.

That’s because selling books on Amazon (or really, on any outside platform) is not a good way to make money. It is, however, a fantastic way to get highly qualified leads who have tried a glass of your milk, and who want more.

That means you can get these folks over to your site and sell them more milk — maybe at a higher price than what Amazon encourages you to charge.

Why stop there though?

If somebody likes you and knows you and trusts you, why limit your offer to a carton or two of milk?

Instead, take your new-found customer by the hand to the back of your property… open the barn door… and introduce her to your gorgeous cow. It might be just the bovine your customer has been looking for all her life.

In other words, if the National Emergency Library, the National Milk Authority, or any other pirate institution starts giving away samples of your money-maker for free, it might not be the end of the world. It might even be the start of something great. As multi-millionaire marketer Joe Sugarman once said:

“Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized a problem & turned it into an opportunity.”

Sharing news about new in five minutes or less

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There are two things I want to share with you today. One is news, the other is new. Let’s start with news:

I read an article today about how the media failed to predict the corona situation — and that’s why their initial reporting was so complacent.

To which I made the Scooby Doo “huh?” noise. Because from what I’ve seen over the years, the media doesn’t do prediction, at least not seriously. Instead, the media reports on the status quo.

Before the corona situation exploded, the status quo was complacency. Now, the status quo is panic, and the media is reporting accordingly. When the pandemic begins to wane and it’s time for things to go back to normal, the media message will likely be obliviousness that anything bad ever happened.

Which brings up this distinction between news and new. I first heard it from computer scientist Alan Kay. Says Alan,

“News is stuff that’s incremental to what we already know. This is why you can tell the news in five minutes. ‘Hey, a train just crashed.’ We all know what that means. […] New is by definition not like what we already know. There’s no news about new. There’s nothing you can tell somebody in five minutes about what new is.”

So I got two takeaways for you:

First, I’m not sure if it’s possible to do a good job predicting the future. Perhaps, among enough people, a few just get lucky.

But, if it is possible, then like Alan Kay says above, it’s unlikely you’ll find the future on the evening news, on Facebook, or on Vox.

But really, we’re here to talk about marketing.

So the other thing I want to tell you is how this news vs. new business can make you money. This is something I heard from marketer Todd Brown.

I didn’t know who Todd Brown was until recently. Apparently, he’s a big name in the IM space, and he’s worked with Jay Abraham, Clayton Makepeace, and Rich Schefren.

Todd’s message was that, whenever you’re positioning a new offer, you should never present it as an incremental improvement over the status quo (ie. news). Instead, always look for a way to present your offer as something entirely new and different — a marketplace of one.

“But hold on,” you might say. “Your offer should be something new… and yet there is no way to share news about new. So how do you convince prospects to buy in?”

That’s a good question. And it’s something I’m trying to answer in my new book on the use of insight in marketing. I’m making good progress on this book, and I hope to finish it in the next six to seven years (just kidding, hopefully another month or so).

If you’d like to get notified when it comes out, sign up for my daily email newsletter and you will get more emails from me about it.