Insight Marketing

Story-writing tropes and worldbuilding emails

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I want to share two things with you today that can help you with writing, particularly with the structure of your stories.

Thing one:

I’m rewatching the Matrix. In one of the opening scenes, a drive-by character says to Neo, “Hallelujah! You’re my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ.”

Of course, he’s just exaggerating. But there are a ton of parallels between the character of Neo in the Matrix and Jesus in the gospels. You probably knew this already, but I’m a little thick about these things, and I take stories too literally.

Anyways, I’m talking about a trope known as “the chosen one.” Besides The Matrix and the New Testament, you can find it in such pop culture sources as the first Dune book, the “Homer the Great” episode of the Simpsons, and even Kung Fu Panda. I found all this out thanks to a useful site I discovered today, called movietropes.org.

Don’t let the name turn you off — it’s not just movies but all kinds of media. A bunch of nerd volunteers break down tons of different tropes, give lots of examples, and link it all together in a wiki. Like I said, might be useful if you write.

Thing two:

A few months back, I wrote an email about the value of “worldbuilding.” Some people wrote in to ask if I had any more resources to share on that topic. I did not. But I do now.

Right now, Andre Chaperon is sending out a sequence of emails titled “Worldbuilding.”

It’s not specifically about inventing made-up marketing worlds. Rather, it’s about how to package up everything you do into a cohesive experience for your prospects. And that’s really the structure behind what worldbuilding, in the more fantastical sense, is all about.

I’m not sure if you can still get on this email sequence because it’s already in progress, and it’s a one-time thing. But if you want to learn about worldbuilding, it might be worth following the white rabbit over to Andre’s tinylittlebusinesses.com and taking the red pill once it’s offered to you.

All right, here’s a third and final resource you might like. Or you might not. It’s my daily email newsletter, where I write about persuasion, copywriting, and story structure. The door to get into that fantastical world is here.

Opening the impossible sale

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A few days ago, after reading a terrible article in The New Yorker, I decided to stop drinking coffee. At least for the next month.

It’s not a giant sacrifice. I was never a coffee snob, and coffee doesn’t do much for my flat-lining productivity.

But I do enjoy getting up in the morning, brewing some cheap coffee on the stove, and then thinning it to hell with cow milk. It’s a small pleasure, but in my life, that means a lot.

Even so, no coffee for the next month. That article spoiled it for me. It told the history of coffee, and it explained how the powers-that-be tricked society into getting addicted to coffee for their own evil ends.

To paraphrase Dave Chappelle, “And all these years, I thought I liked coffee because it’s delicious. Turns out, I got no say in the matter.”

Besides The New Yorker, I’m also reading a book called The Catalyst. The first chapter is all about reactance, which is what happened with me and coffee and that article. But the book gives another and better example of it:

Apparently, back in the 90s, the state of Florida ran one of the rare successful anti-smoking campaigns targeting teens. The ads didn’t tell teens about the harms of smoking. They didn’t tell teens to stop.

​​All the campaign did was highlight the devious ways the tobacco industry used to manipulate kids into getting hooked. As the campaign ran, teen smoking rates dropped by something like a million percent. Eventually, tobacco companies sued the state to get the campaign to stop.

Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” Something similar happens in persuasion and marketing and sales. The opposite of making the sale is usually not objections. It’s simply indifference.

Of course, the best way to deal with indifferent, ambivalent prospects is to never face them. Selling those kinds of people is almost impossible. At least that’s what I thought until I read that stuff about reactance.

People want to have a feeling of control and agency in their lives. If they feel that’s been violated, they get very motivated to change. Even to the point of doing the exact opposite of what they were doing up to now.

​​That’s reactance.

I’d still rather not face indifferent prospects. But if I do have to face them, I know what I’ll do to open the sale. I’ll simply show them how choosing the status quo is not actually their decision, but the work of some puppet master behind the scenes.

Maybe you can try the same. If you so choose, of course.

Finally, here’s some facts that are not designed to persuade you in any way. I write a daily email newsletter. It deals with topics like the one you’ve just read about. The way to get it is here. And I in no way encourage you to sign up for it.

Shorthand and shortcut in direct response copywriting

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Imagine the year is 1999. You are a dentist named Kurt, living in a small town in Pennsylvania.

One beautiful Saturday morning in May, you walk out to your mailbox, and you find a letter. You open it up to see a big headline that reads:

“There’s a new railroad across America”

“And it’s making some people very rich…”

Pretty intriguing, right? So you start to read.

The letter tells you how railroads made huge fortunes in the 19th century. But bankers were afraid to invest, so it was small, independent investors who connected America by rail — and got filthy-as-Johnny-Rotten rich in the process.

Finally, the letter explains what it’s selling:

A few companies are laying down a fiber-optic network to connect America by Internet in the 21st century, much like the railroad connected it in the 19th century. People who invest in the right companies have the chance to get rich like 19th-century railroad barons. Do you want to be among these shrewd investors?

Plenty of people did, back in 1999, when Porter Stansberry sent them this letter to launch his newsletter.

But imagine if Porter had written a slightly different letter. Instead of talking about a railroad, imagine he had used the headline:

“There’s a new goldmine in America”

“And it’s making some people very rich…”

This is pretty similar to the original. Another metaphor. Would it work just as well?

It’s unlikely. Here’s a relevant quote by one Linda Berger, a law professsor at UNLV:

“A reader who is asked to interpret a novel metaphor will be engaged in the creation of meaning, while the reader who is confronted with a conventional metaphor will do nothing more than retrieve an abstract metaphoric category.”

Stansberry’s “railroad” is a metaphor for an investing opportunity. Odds are, you’ve never seen this metaphor before.

A “goldmine” is also a metaphor for an investing opportunity. Odds are, you’ve seen that plenty of times before.

And that’s the difference Berger is talking about.

When you give people a novel metaphor, they start turning it around in their brains. They map aspects of the metaphor to their situation. So “railroad” becomes “Internet”… “tracks” become “fiber-optic cable”… “independent 19th-century investor” becomes “me.”

But what if you give a reader a conventional metaphor like “goldmine”? If Berger is right, and I suspect she is, then the reader says, “Oh, they must mean this is a big investment opportunity.” And if that turns your reader on, then he continues to read.

In other words, a novel metaphor is a shortcut between where your reader currently is… and where you want him to go mentally.

A conventional metaphor is shorthand. It can be useful to quickly express a concept in a few words. But it’s not gonna create any new insight.

Remember my post from yesterday? It turns out both Gary Bencivenga and Mark Ford were right. Cliches have their uses, and their limitations. And now you know why — and when to use shorthand, and when to create mental shortcuts.

Speaking of shortcuts, I write a daily email newsletter about persuasion. The way to sign up for it is here.

Cliches: Shooting fish in a barrel? Or yourself in the foot?

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Here’s a tough nut to crack:

Gary Bencivenga was a collossus of direct response copywriting. His sales letters made his clients hundreds of millions of dollars. On the topic of cliches, Gary had the following to say:

“I love clichés, and you should too! They are clichés precisely because everyone already believes them, so using them gives your copy greater credibility.”

Now here is a second quote, this one by Mark Ford. Mark is also an expert copywriter and a very successful marketer. Among his other ventures, Mark helped grow Agora from an $8-million-a-year company to a billion-dollar company. About cliches, Mark once wrote:

“Although everyone can relate to these expressions, they’ve been said so frequently that they’ve been stripped of their power. They no longer communicate profound ideas. And they don’t inspire people intellectually. And that’s why cliches are killers in direct mail. They make your copy seem obvious and predictable. […] Remember, as a copywriter, you’ve always got to keep your prospect from getting ahead of you. If he can anticipate what you’re going to say, he’ll assume he knows what’s coming — and you’ll lose him.”

So who’s right?

The most successful direct response copywriter of all time?

Or the direct response marketer who has overseen more promotions than probably anybody else?

Not to beat a dead horse… but like most things in the universe, the question of cliches is not simple or one-sided. Cliches have their place. But they also have their limitations.

I know that’s clear as mud. So I’ll give you the latest research on what cliches can do — and cannot do — in my email tomorrow. If you want to get that info before anybody else, click here and subscribe to 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.

Limitless persuasion value inside this blog post

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The first time Eddie Morra sees the magic pill, he is sitting in a bar, across from his ex brother-in-law.

“You know how we only use 20% of our brain?” the brother-in-law says as he points to the pill. “This lets you access the other 80%.”

The brother-in-law used to deal drugs. Now, he promotes this secret new nootropic, which gives users a superhuman IQ. He’s offering a sample to Eddie for free.

But Eddie shrugs. He doesn’t want the magic pill.

“Don’t be ungrateful,” says the brother-in-law. “Do you know how much this costs? $800. A pop.”

So Eddie takes a second look. And he scoops up the pill and puts it in his jacket.

The above is a scene from the 2011 movie Limitless. And it illustrates a sad fact of a persuader’s life. Many times, people won’t listen to you. Even when you clearly lay out the benefits your offer will provide them.

So it makes sense to do what Eddie’s brother-in-law did. Present a good offer… and then tell people the value of what they are looking at.

But let me tell you something even more valuable. This isn’t just a useful trick to grow the number of prospects who take up your offer.

Nope. This is also an instance of a fundamental pattern of persuasion.

Persuading people is often a two-step process. Show AND tell. Story AND lesson. Benefits AND the benefits of those benefits.

Phew. Do you know how much value I’ve just given you? Such much value. You could even say… limitless.

I’m not sure I can keep delivering value at this break-neck rate. So if you want to see me fail, click here and subscribe to my daily newsletter.

Positioning remarkable ideas against popular incumbents

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In 2005, Wired magazine published an article titled, “GTD: A New Cult for the Info Age.”

It was about David Allen’s Getting Things Done. This was a productivity system, which Allen first described in a 2001 book of the same name.

The basic premise of GTD was that we are all flooded with more and more distractions and tasks. The old ways of dealing with all this work, such as todo lists or goal-setting, are not enough.

As the Wired article describes, a few frustrated knowledge workers found Allen’s book. They identified themselves with the problems he described. And they adopted and promoted the GTD system with evangelical zeal.

By 2005, GTD had become a kind of cult. But this was still not the high point of Allen’s success. Interest in GTD kept building and spreading in all parts of American society for the rest of the 2000s.

Then, in 2012, a guy named Cal Newport wrote a post on his Study Hacks blog. The title was “Getting (Unremarkable) Things Done: The Problem With David Allen’s Universalism.”

The gist of Newport’s post was that GTD was great — if you’re a secretary or a mid-tier manager. But if you do any kind of creative, thought-intensive work, GTD will fail. In Newport’s words:

“Allen preaches task universalism: when you get down to concrete actions, all work is created equal. I disagree with this idea. Creating real value requires […] a fundamentally different activity than knocking off organizational tasks.”

Newport came out with his own solution to the problem behind GTD. He called it “deep work.”

Interest in deep work rose as interest in GTD declined. According to Google Trends, the two crossed paths, one on the way up, the other on the way down, in 2014. Today, if you check on Amazon, you will find Deep Work has knowledge workers’ attention, not GTD.

I don’t think Cal Newport did this consciously, but he hit upon an ideal way to position Deep Work. And that was in contrast to an existing, popular solution.

This is something smart marketers have been doing for years. I first heard Rich Schefren talk about this. Rich says this is one way he was able to get millions of leads and thousands of high-paying customers.

Rich’s advice is to go out into the marketplace and find a successful offer. Then, figure out how to make that offer a part of the problem — rather than a part of the solution.

You can go out and do that now. And you might have the same success as Rich Schefren or Cal Newport.

But here’s a nuanced point that might help you out even more.

After Cal Newport wrote his anti-GTD blog post, he got over 100 comments on the post. Those comments were very divided. A few said, “You might just be right.” But many more said, “You don’t understand GTD, or you’re not using it correctly.”

This corresponds to the Google Trends info. By 2012, interest in GTD had peaked. But overall, GTD was still very popular.

So if you want to position your product against an incumbent, that’s the moment to strike. Not when the incumbent is at the peak of popularity… but also, not when most people have already moved on. As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

“To truth only a brief celebration is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.”

Teaching emails that make sales

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I talked to my aunt last night. She’s a kindergarten teacher, and she mentioned that she’s going back to work corralling screaming 5-year-olds.

I haven’t been following the local corona news, so this was a surprise to me.

Sure enough, starting next week, all kids up to grade 4 will be back in classrooms throughout Croatia. “Enough is enough,” frustrated parents must have been saying, and the government eventually caved in.

But here’s the thing that got me wondering:

If spending each day with your kids at home gets tiring for the majority of parents… can you imagine how tiring a teacher’s job must be?

Not one kid… not two… but 25 or more? And not for the next few years until your kids become more independent… but for life, each year the same thing?

And on top of this, teachers don’t even get paid well.

I think it was Matt Furey who first brought this fact up in connection with marketing. He used the fact that teachers don’t make any money to warn against over-teaching in your emails.

Instead, Matt’s advice was to motivate, inspire, and entertain.

I can definitely agree with this. But I would add that teaching can work and it can work well.

The key though is to educate your prospect about his problem, and the specific nuances of why he hasn’t been able to solve it so far.

In other words, don’t tell your prospect HOW to solve his problem… tell him WHY he hasn’t been able to solve it until now.

And then of course, you still have to do some selling. But if you’ve done the teaching bit right… the selling should be easy, because your solution will fit like a hand into your prospect’s problem glove.

I realize I’m contradicting my own advice with the past few sentences. That’s why this email won’t make any money. Not a noble thing, if you ask me. Hopefully, you will be smarter and more disciplined about spilling your teaching — and doing some selling – in your own emails.

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.”

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.