Copywriting

You are a copywriting god… in the making

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Today is June 21, which means that in 10 days, the second issue of my Most Valuable Postcard is going out.

I am preparing to write it by watching a popular Ted talk about classical music… researching the motivations of men who like to go to strip clubs… and revisiting an old Jeff Walker presentation I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Today, I want to share with you a fascinating moment from that presentation. A bit of background:

Some time in the late 2000s, Jeff Walker was offering a business opportunity called Product Launch Manager. The basic idea was:

No list, no product, big money.

HOW???

By managing big companies’ launches using Jeff’s Product Launch Formula.

This was ideal for the most rabid of Jeff’s customers, the people who bought all his products, maybe even consumed those products, but never did anything beyond that.

Now comes the fascinating moment. ​​

At the end of this five-day event, speaking from the stage to a small segment of this group of hyper-responders, who had each agreed to pay $25k to attend, Jeff raised his hands up in the air, lowered his head to his chest, and said in a soft yet penetrating voice:

“You are marketing gods. If you can speak Internet marketing, you are in a separate class from the rest of the people walking the face of the earth.”

Jeff says this set the room on fire.

People jumped up from their chairs. Others started rolling around in the aisles. Still others were tweeting to let the whole world know. “Jeff says we are marketing gods!”

The implied message was that, by paying a lot of money, by attending an event and hearing a bunch of stuff, and finally by getting Jeff’s benediction, these folks had achieved true success.

And who knows, maybe some of them did go on to achieve true success.

After all, Jeff’s program was a step-by-step roadmap for what to do to manage big launches for big clients.

Put one foot in front of the other, while looking at the map, and you will get to your destination, sooner or later.

Still, the thing that struck me was simply the audacity of the claim — marketing gods! — and how much it resonated with people.

I feel it’s something to keep in mind when you are crafting your own promises… and the promises behind those promises.

Anyways, today, being June 21, is also the last day that I will email inviting you to register for my Most Valuable Email presentation, which happens tomorrow at 7pm CET.

At the end of that presentation, I would like to raise my hands, lower my head, and say in a soft and yet penetrating voice:

“You are now copywriting gods… go ye forth and use your new daily email knowledge to line your pockets with many shekels.”

And sure, I will give you a step-by-step roadmap. I will tell you how I write the one kind of email that has been most valuable to me in the history of this newsletter.

This one kind of email has allowed me:

1. To get in the heads of my readers, including some of the most successful and sophisticated direct marketers and copywriters out there…

2. To pump up my own authority, even when I don’t brag about all the successful and sophisticated marketers and copywriters who read my stuff every day…

3. And maybe most importantly, to drastically improve as a copywriter and marketer.

So there is that promise in the air, “… and you can do it too!”

Well, about that:

Attending tomorrow’s presentation, learning all the stuff I will share, and even having my benediction at the end will still only make you something like a copywriting god… in the making.

In other words, it won’t do you a damn bit of good unless you do the moderately hard work of putting one foot in front of the other, and not just once, but many times over.

So the close to this email is not as fire-generating as Jeff’s talk from the stage.

But it is a fact of life, and it might lead you to success sooner, rather than later or never.

Whatever the case may be:

If you would like to get the info inside my Most Valuable Email presentation, you will have to sign up to my newsletter before 7pm CET tomorrow. And once you get my confirmation email, you will have to hit reply, and let me know you’d like to attend, at the last minute, this fearsome email revival meeting.

Front runner emerges in my poll from yesterday

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As I write this it is 8:46am, exactly 11 hours and 56 mins after my email yesterday went out.

In that email, I gave you a choice of three possible presentations (plus one decoy) I was thinking of creating, and asked which one you would like the best.

It’s still salad days for that poll, and voting is close, but a clear front runner has emerged:

The insight marketing presentation.

Now, maybe that’s all due to the awesome interestingness of the topic. After all, how do you get people to experience an epiphany, a shift in thinking?

People are more stubborn than mules. That why the typical advice from smart marketers it not to even try to change people’s minds. It’s supposed to be the hardest thing to do in daily life, and it should be even harder in writing, or remotely, online… and harder still in a selling context.

And yet, it does happen, and it’s quite possible to do it on purpose.

So maybe it is the topic that’s inherently interesting.

But maybe the front runner status of insight has nothing to do with the topic. Maybe it’s all about a simple statistic that’s publicly visible on my website:

I have written 38 emails so far that ended up in the insight marketing category.

On the other hand, I’ve only written 17 emails about advertorials, and just 10 about natural authority (the other two presentation ideas I introduced yesterday.)

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about How to Speak, a slow and sexy presentation given by Patrick Winston, an MIT professor, about giving effective talks.

One of Winston’s bits of insight, gleaned from years of studying effective talks, is that people in general want to be inspired.

There are different ways to brush that dog.

But one reliable way to inspire is to have passion or enthusiasm.

So maybe that’s the real explanation for why the insight presentation is leading the voting right now.

As the numbers above show, it’s simply a topic I am enthusiastic about. And some of that enthusiasm gets reflected back at me by my readers.

“That’s all fine and good,” I hear a copywriter somewhere yelling, “but how do you get enthusiastic on demand? I have to write about a bunch of offers that are not my own, that I would never buy myself, that are dry and underwhelming.”

If you are a copywriter, that is a real problem. There are tricks I’ve used to get enthusiastic on demand, some obvious, some less so. But that’s a topic for a different email.

For now, I just want to say that, if you are a copywriter, and you want to inspire potential clients to hire you, you might want to write about things you yourself are stimulated by. And the problem of enthusiasm will be instantly solved.

Which is one more reason, probably reason #1738, why writing your own email newsletter, about topics you choose to write about, is a borderline brilliant idea if you are looking to sell your services.

This brings me to my Most Valuable Email presentation. It’s coming up on Wednesday.

And it’s about the single most effective, valuable, and personally interesting (to me) email I regularly send out in this newsletter. No, it’s not about the topic of insight, though it is connected to it in some deep and mysterious way.

If you are looking to sell your services, particularly copywriting services, then this type of email might be equally as valuable to you.

So if you’d like to join this presentation live, or if you’d like to at least have a chance to watch the recording during the 7-day replay window, then get on my email newsletter and watch out for my first email.

“Research is the enemy of creativity”

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Yesterday, I mentioned an embarrassingly titled book I bought, “Damn Good Advice (for people with talent!)”

The book is written by a brand marketing guy, George Lois. On the face of it, it’s all about pushing the envelope, thinking outside the box, following your bliss, and other cliches that advertisers who work for prizes, rather than for sales, resort to.

Take for example Lois’s advice no. 50, which says:

“Research is the enemy of creativity, unless it’s your own ‘creative’ research (heh-heh)”

Nonsense, right?

Like direct response giant Gene Schwartz said, copy is assembled, not written. And it is assembled out of diligent, detailed research, deeper and more penetrating than the other guy is willing to do. No research, no sex, at least when it comes to copy that gets real results.

But really what Lois is talking about is the kind of research that’s common in brand advertising:

Focus groups.

Ask people who have no skin in the game, who aren’t being faced with decision whether or not to buy your product, what they think of your ad. “Is it good? Is it bad? Do you like it?”

It’s completely reasonable that research like this won’t give you useful feedback.

Not unless, as Lois says, you get creative.

He tells the story of Aunt Jemima pancake mix.

The makers of Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Quaker Oats, never wanted to create a matching Aunt Jemima syrup, in spite of Lois’s insisting that it would make tremendous $$$ business sense.

So Lois got creative.

He sent out a survey to a bunch of pancake mix consumers, asking a series of questions.

One of the questions was which syrup these people used. There were 10 brands to choose from, among them Aunt Jemima syrup.

And get this:

89 out of 100 pancake eaters selected Aunt Jemima syrup as their preferred choice, even though it was entirely imaginary at that point, just something in Lois’s head.

Result:

The head honchos at Quaker Oats were finally convinced, and put out the syrup. Within a year, just as the survey predicted, Aunt Jemima went on to become the number one brand in the billion-dollar-plus syrup business.

Is this scientific advertising?

Hardly.

Is it a useful idea which could potentially be worth a lot of money to you?

Well, consider this:

Direct marketer Justin Goff recently sent out an email exactly about this topic.

Justin said that he and his pardner Stefan Georgi often poll their audience about what offers to create next.

But they don’t go the focus group route.

“What should our next offer be? Do you like the sound of ‘Copy Accelerator By The Beach’? Would you buy ‘8.F.F.G.M.S.’ if that stood for ‘8-Figure Facebook Group Marketing Secrets’?”

No, none of that.

Instead, Justin and Stefan make a list of a few specific offer ideas. They ask people which one they want best.

This bit of research, Justin says, matches up very well to actual results of how well an offer sells when they do create it.

In this way, a simple creative poll can be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to Justin and Stefan.

So there you go. An idea that you can use, starting today.

Or an idea that I can use, starting right now.

Because there are a few live presentations or trainings that I’ve been thinking of creating. They might be paid, or they might be free. They might be a single lesson, or multiple, depending on the topic.

Based on this limited info, and the short descriptions below, which one would you like the best?

If you would like to vote, sign up to my email list. And when you get my welcome email, tell me your preference among the four choices below. If you vote honestly, you will have the best chance of seeing a training about this topic from me in the near future:

1. A presentation about horror advertorials, the front-end funnel that I’ve used to help clients sell millions of dollars of dog seat belts, door stops, and detergent-replacement balls

2. A presentation about the most valuable email I regularly send to my daily email subscribers — the one type of email I would resort to if I had to stick to only one type for all of time

3. A presentation about creating a feeling of insight in your prospects, as a way of overcoming resistance and driving people to spontaneously want your offer, without you doing any overt selling

4. A presentation about natural authority — the rare, most penetrating, and longest-lasting form of authority, which is not built on either expertise or overt status or association

A damn good bit of advice from an embarrassing book I bought yesterday

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Yesterday, I found myself in the Moco Museum gift shop, thumbing through a book, and looking over my shoulder.

The Moco Museum features street art, pop art, and what I can only call high kitsch.

And after getting through the colorful exhibit, there I was in the gift shop, holding a little white book with a big black title.

The book collects 120 short ideas by George Lois. Lois is a brand advertising guy that the book describes as “America’s master communicator, advertising guru, the original Mad Man, and acclaimed cultural provocateur.”

A little boastful, but nothing too indecent in that.

The problem was that big black title on the cover. It read:

“DAMN GOOD ADVICE (for people with talent!)”

I felt embarrassed being seen buying something like this. But I liked the few of Lois’s bits of advice that I had thumbed to.

And since I have exactly one physical book in my new apartment, I steeled myself and decided to buy “DAMN GOOD ADVICE (for people with talent!)” in spite of the title.

So like a teenager buying condoms for the first time, I looked around, picked an opportune moment, and rushed for the cash register.

“I’d like to buy this,” I mumbled, pushing the book across the counter, not raising my eyes.

The woman just smiled at me knowingly and rang up the book without comment.

And good thing. Because I’m reading the book more this morning, and I’m enjoying it.

Lois gives a brief but interesting perspective on creativity and brand advertising. Much of it is laughable and sacrilegious from the perspective of direct response advertising. But there is still some surprising common ground.

For example, Lois’s advice no. 50 says:

“Research is the enemy of creativity — unless it’s your own ‘creative’ research (heh-heh)”

I raised my eyebrows when I read this headline. But Lois pays it off in a way that is consistent with something a very successful direct response marketer said recently. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow if you like.

For today, I just want to share a much simpler idea, Lois’s advice no. 75:

“What a difference a name makes!”

Lois is talking about the power of good brand names. But his advice no. 75 made me think of chapter 6 of Great Leads, by Mark Ford and John Forde.

One bit of advice from that marketing classic is that, if you have a complex problem to talk about, it can be smart to package it up inside of a name, ideally one that makes instant sense to the reader.

Of course, not only complex, hard-to-describe problems deserve a good name.

Vague symptoms… shadowy enemies… novel mechanisms… and plain old giant promises often become more manageable and real if you just give them the handle of a good name.

Which brings me to the name and the promise of the presentation I will put on next Wednesday.

It’s called the Most Valuable Email.

And it’s about a type of daily email that has been most valuable to me in the history of this newsletter… and that might be equally valuable to you, if you are a copywriter or marketer, and you have your own mailing list, or you want to start one.

The Most Valuable Email presentation will happen on Wed June 22 at 7pm CET. If you’d like to get signed up for it, the first step is to get on my email newsletter before Wednesday. The second step will become obvious once you get my first daily email. No talent required.

Frankly, I’m a little passive aggressive…

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I got an email from a marketer not too long ago, and the subject line read:

“Frankly, I’m a little concerned about you…”

The body of the email was predictable — I’m concerned about you because you might miss out on this amazing offer.

I groaned.

Not just because I recognized this subject line as a yet another marketer abusing Paul Greystone’s “Frankly, I’m puzzled” hook.

But worse than that, I groaned because this came in a daily email from somebody I was curious to hear from, somebody who seemed promising and cool. And here he was, sounding needy, awkward, even a little passive aggressive.

I’ve committed my share of marketing sins, so I’m not here to lob tomatoes at this guy.

I just want to share something with you. Something it took me a while to accept, but which was really rather obvious once it clicked. It’s simply this:

Copy in email marketing is not the same as classic direct response copy.

Obvious, right? Right. But how many times a day, if you are in the marketing and copywriting space, do you get things which are blatantly lifted from old school sales letters and hooks?

Or how many times have you done it yourself, if you write emails for your own business or a client?

My accountant says I’m crazy…
I’m eating steak whether you buy this offer or not…
Our warehouse manager just called me to say we are overstocked!

I’m not saying not to study or use proven direct response classics.

I continue to read classic marketing and copywriting books, and study old sales letters, often for the fourth or fifth time.

I continue to find brilliant ideas in them.

And I continue to work them into my own daily emails, often with great success.

So the way I see it, you’ve got two choices right now. Choice one is to ignore everything I’ve just told you and continue to make profit-crippling email marketing mist—

No, we won’t go down either route of the crossroads close in this email.

But if you want a different, more subtle, more entertaining and less passive aggressive way to use classic direct response ideas in your email marketing… at least if you are a copywriter or marketer, selling yourself first and foremost… then you might like to hear a presentation I will put on next Wednesday at 7pm CET.

I’m calling this presentation the Most Valuable Email. Because that’s what it’s been for me.

If you are a marketer or copywriter, maybe it will be the same for you. But whether you sign up or not, I’m eating stea—

(Professional habits are hard to break.)

But seriously:

To register to watch my Most Valuable Email presentation live, sign up to my email newsletter by next Wednesday. This will give you an opportunity to sign up for the presentation — and who knows, maybe it will inspire you with a few classic direct response ideas as well.

Most Valuable Email… for copywriters

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I’d like to tell you about a type of content, specifically a type of daily email, that has been most valuable for me.

This type of daily email is my go-to whenever I want to stimulate and engage my readers, including the many grizzled, wary, and sophisticated marketers and copywriters on my list.

In this way, this type of email has helped me sell stuff… grow my email list organically… get amazing job referrals… and sometimes even get interesting and cool stuff for free.

This type of email has also been most valuable to me because it builds up immediate and unquestionable authority.

It makes it clear I know what I’m talking about, even if I don’t harp on about the great results I’ve had for clients or the testimonials or endorsements I’ve gotten.

And finally:

This type of email is most valuable because it’s the type of email I personally find most enjoyable to write.

Going back to this type of email over and over has helped me stick with daily emailing for the long term, while making me exponentially better at the actual work of copywriting.

If you’ve been reading my daily emails for a while, you can probably guess the type of email I’m talking about.

But if you cannot guess, or if you would simply like to hear me go into this topic in more detail and tell you how you too can write this type of email yourself, I will do that in a free presentation I’m calling The Most Valuable Email.

You can register for the Most Valuable presentation below. But first a warning:

This type of email has been most valuable to me personally. I can imagine it being equally most valuable for for any other copywriter.

If you are not a copywriter, you might be able to adapt and use this type of email profitably in a different market, for a different type of audience. But that’s something I haven’t thought much about, and so I won’t be talking about it on this presentation.

If that doesn’t turn you off, then here are the details:

The Most Valuable Email presentation will happen live, on Zoom, on Wednesday, Jun 22, 2022, at 7pm Central European Time.

You can sign up for the presentation by clicking the link below. I will then send you a confirmation email with the Zoom link and a public calender invite — which I can never manage to make work, but will try for anyhow.

Also, there will be a recording. I will only send it to you if you express interest and register below. I won’t be sending the recording out to my list in general.

I haven’t yet decided what I will do with this Most Valuable Email training in the future. I might make it available only as a bonus for a paid offer, or I might turn it into a paid offer itself.

One thing is for sure:

I will make the recording available for one week, following the live presentation. Beyond that, I make no guarantees.

So if you want to join me live for this Most Valuable Email training, or if you want to watch the recording during this guaranteed 7-day replay window, sign up to my email newsletter before next Wednesday. You will then get an email from me with the registration details for this presentation.

The six-word email, with examples

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I’m sitting on the couch as I write this, next to the open balcony doors, in my underwear, eyes bleary, hair looking like a lawnmower went over it, in a press to write a personal and yet valuable email to you before.

Before what?

Before it’s time for me to rush out of the house and go pick up my rental car and then drive up the coast for the day. The idea is to give myself a chance to burn in the sun, on a beautiful beach I will visit for the first time in my life.

But what to write about?

Fortunately, I wrote down a concept for today’s email almost two weeks ago:

“The six-word email, with examples”

That concept is based on an idea from Hollywood.

​​Your story should fit into six words, say Hollywood screenwriting . Here are a few examples from Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work, a series from Scott Myers’s Go Into The Story blog:

1. Human Spy on an Alien Planet

2. Loner cop. New partner. Police dog.

3. Infatuated boy. Dream girl. Find condom.

“Fine,” I said to myself when I read this idea. “Let me put it into action and try it out.”

So ​​I made a list of 10 possible email ideas, each just six words. And then, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly sending them out. Example:

1. Emails without offer: stupid. Hence, consulting.

2. Results of my “rape” subject line.

3. What’s working on Substack right now?

And of course today’s email is another example of the six-word email.

Because it’s not that the email has to actually be six words itself. But rather, the core idea should be simple and easy to express, in just six words.

In some of my example emails above, I ran on too long and covered up the core message with too many words.

I won’t make that mistake today.

So let me just say, if you think you have no time to write daily emails, then do what I did.

Make a list of 10 six-word email concepts. Flesh them out a bit in an interesting and insightful way, and then send them out.

And if you say you don’t know how to come up with interesting six-word email concepts… or a way to quickly and easily flesh them out in an interesting and insightful way, then you might like:

A free presentation I will be putting on in the next week. It’s called the Most Valuable Email.

The details of this presentation will come tomorrow. If you’d like to read those details when they come out, or even sign up for my Most Valuable Email presentation, you can do that by getting onto my email newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Drop your phone in the toilet, grab a cup of coffee, and read this whole email word for word

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About two weeks ago, I got a surprise:

Dan Kennedy started sending me emails.

I’m not 100% how this happened. In the past, I’ve signed up for email newsletters on various DK websites.

​​As I’ve written before, I’m a big Dan Kennedy fan and I had high hopes.

But it always turned out the emails were not written by Dan. They were just random pitches for various DK stuff. Each time, I eventually ended up unsubscribing.

And yet, two weeks ago, I suddenly started getting emails from Dan again. And they are great.

I don’t think these new emails are actually written by Dan either, not now, not as emails. It’s probably just old Dan content, repurposed for the email format by some marketing monkey working under Russell Brunson, who has bought up Dan’s entire business.

Still, it’s great stuff, full of humor and valuable ideas. For example, here’s one bit from a recent DK email which caught my eye:

One of the great litmus tests of a newsletter is when yours arrives, are people so excited about it that they drop whatever they’re doing, take their phone and lock it in the trunk of their car, get a cup of coffee, then eagerly sit down to go through it? At least a quick skim to see what’s there and then say, “Tonight, when I have more time, I’m gonna read the whole thing word for word.” Is that how they react?

This caught my eye because last month, I launched my Most Valuable Postcard.

​​MVP is not a newsletter — really, it’s an un-newsletter. It covers tried-and-proven marketing principles rather than new techniques and tactics.

I was wondering how people would react to this approach, and to the format of the postcard. Well, initial reactions are starting to filter in.

One MVP subscriber, who shall remain unnamed, said that in the excitement of receiving her postcard, she ended up dropping her phone into the toilet (the phone survived).

​​Sure, a house is not a home, and a toilet is not a trunk. But it may be even better.

And as for reading the whole postcard word for word, MVP subscriber Jakub Červenka just wrote me to say:

Hey John,

Just wanted to let you know I just got your postcard. I am only half-way through your horror stories, but I am already sure you over-delivered on value.

And I have a feeling that your postcard newsletter thingie is case-in-point study in putting in work up front for your prospects.

I don’t have yet enough money / business big enough to be able to afford you, but you making this whole thing so personal, I cannot think of anyone I’d rather work with once I am launching my funnel in English market..

But in the meantime, I am pre-sold already on any copywriting course you may sell in future.

And my mind is already spinning trying to come up with ways I could use what I am learning from you into my business.

Thank you for inspiration, it is awesome!

Jakub has only read half the postcard so far. That’s hardly word-for-word reading… but as far a testimonial for MVP, I don’t think I could ask for anything better.

Still, I’m still not sure what to do with this project.

Like Jakub says, it’s very personal… but also very unscalable.

If I ever reopen this offer to new subscribers, I might tweak the format, and I will certainly increase the price.

But if that doesn’t turn you away, and you want the chance to lock your phone in your trunk or at least fumble it into the toilet when you get a postcard in the mail from me, you can sign up for my (free) daily email newsletter, so you can get notified if I reopen MVP again.

A shark in blowfish’s clothing

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A few days ago, as research for the next issue of my Most Valuable Postcard, I re-watched an old presentation given by Jeff Walker.

You might know Jeff as a big-time Internet Marketing guru and the inventor of the Product Launch Formula, which has been used by tons of businesses to make tons of money online.

Here’s what got me:

Jeff’s whole aura during this presentation was very gee-shucks, how-did-I-wind-up-here-on-stage.

He had a kind of Woody Allen delivery, constantly correcting himself, backtracking, stammering, stumbling, and apologizing.

His outfit confirmed the impression. Jeff wore a ballooning blue shirt, which looked a size too large for him, and which was crimped at the chest by a microphone.

Of course, you won’t make tens of millions of dollars, which Jeff had already done by the time of this old presentation, by being a naive nincompoop.

But if you look like a naive nincompoop, it can certainly help you out, particularly if you are actually shrewd and calculating at heart. It pays to put on a oversized and poorly fitting blue shirt, and turn yourself into a harmless and goofy blowfish, when you are really a shark underneath.

Anyways, at one point, Jeff said the following about product launches using his PLF:

“I don’t just teach them, I’m pretty good at them. That’s actually self-deprecating. I’m REALLY REALLY good at them.”

This reminded me of a valuable mantra I heard from Chris Voss, the FBI negotiator who wrote the book Never Split the Difference.

“The last impression is the lasting impression,” says Chris.

You can see that in the structure of how Jeff talks about himself and his skills and success.

And if you meditate on this example a bit, you can hit upon a very clever way to sneak giant, even unbelievable claims into people’s heads.

If you’ve been through my Copy Riddles program, you might know what I’m talking about. It’s there in round 6B.

And if you haven’t been through Copy Riddles, you’ll have a chance to do so, starting in a few weeks from now, and to find out about this clever technique.

But Copy Riddles isn’t open yet. And neither is my Most Valuable Postcard. So my only offer for you is to sign up for my email newsletter, and read what I have to write about copywriting and marketing topics.

Of course, I don’t just write about them. I’m pretty good at them. That’s actually self-deprecating. I’m REALLY REALLY good at them. So in case you’d like to get on my newsletter, here’s where to sign up.

Daily email battleship

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One of the most eye-opening and mind-expanding collections of direct response insights I know of is an interview with Michael Fishman.

For context:

During Gary Bencivenga’s farewell seminar, the only person to get up on stage and present, besides the great Gary himself, was Michael Fishman.

Gary was an A-list copywriter.

Michael was an A-list list broker. (A-list list broker broker?)

In other words, while Gary’s expertise was to come up with creative words…

Michael’s expertise was to find creative lists of people to send Gary’s subtle sales letters to.

But what’s that? You say there’s not much to be creative about in choosing lists?

Well, that’s why that interview was so eye-opening and mind-expanding.

Sure, some of Michael’s work was routine. He had to keep a close eye on which lists were interested in related topics… which lists were hot… which lists were made up of recent, eager buyers, spending good money.

But sometimes, list picking was much less routine. Some of Michael’s work involved a real leap of insight and intuition.

For example:

One offer that Michael worked on is Boardroom’s Big Black Book. This was a typical Boardroom book of secrets — what never to eat on a Greyound bus, that kind of thing.

The Big Black Book​​ was many hundreds of pages long, and it was sold through a sales letter filled with fascination bullets.

And yet, get this:

Michael had the idea to promote the Big Black Book to a list of buyers of manifestation audio course, sold on TV through an infomercial.

Totally different products… totally different markets… totally different formats for marketing… totally different everything.

So why did Michael recommend this manifestation list and why did the list end up working?

That’s the crazy thing. Because this list was made up of buyers of a product called Passion, Power, and Profit.

Get it?

​​Big Black Book… Passion, Power, and Profit.

Michael had the insight that some buyers really respond to alliteration in the name of the product. That’s why the BBB offer turned out to be a good fit for the PPP list.

Like I said, eye-opening and mind-expanding.

This brings me to my offer to you for today:

It’s a little game that you and I can play. I call the game Daily Email Battleship.

This is how you play:

Sign up to my email newsletter. When you get my welcome email, hit reply and write me the names of all the daily emails newsletters you are subscribed to.

I’m not talking about just copywriting and marketing. Anything. Magic, manifestation, or medicine. Any topic or person or business is okay, as long as they email, more or less daily.

And then:

1. If you tell me a newsletter I also subscribe to, it’s a direct hit. I will tell you that. So if you write me to say, “I am on Ben Settle’s list,” I will write back and say, “Great, so am I.”

2. But if you tell me a daily email newsletter I don’t subscribe to… I will counter. And I will tell you a newsletter I subscribe to, which you don’t subscribe to.

3. And if I can’t do that, because you are subscribed to more novel and interesting daily email newsletters than I am, then you win.

And as your prize, I will tell you why I am collecting these email newsletters, and what this has to do with the Michael Fishman story above.

This information might be valuable to you. Or it might just feed your curiosity.

In any case, if you’d like to play, the opening shot is yours.