Stories

“My chief asset consisted of a cat who licked stamps”

by

A few days ago, a reader of this newsletter wrote in with a problem.

He’s an expert in his field. But he feels sick telling his mess-to-success, rags-to-riches origin story. He hates hyping it up and repeating it over and over, even though it’s all true.

I can understand. So here’s an alternative. Take a look at the following background story from Dan Kennedy:

I often tell the story, when I went through a divorce and went broke I started over in info-marketing and my chief asset consisted of a cat who licked stamps.

My wife abandoned the cat and left the cat behind. We quickly came to an agreement that, if it was going to get fed, it had to do something other than hiss, and snarl, and scratch, and bite, which were unattractive attributes of this little monster.

We arrived at a working relationship where it sat on the coffee table, I sat facing the TV at night stuffing my envelopes and getting my mail ready. It sat facing me, and I took the strip of stamps and held it out and the cat licked them and then I did all my stamps.

I kept a little bowl of water there so the cat could, you know… I’m sure all that glue … but they’ve got nine lives! All the glue probably didn’t kill it, its personality probably did.

That’s the end of Dan’s story. In the presentation he gave, he moves on and talks marketing.

So what’s my point in bringing up this story?

You might think it’s humor. And yes, humor is a big part of the story above. If you can be funny like Dan, you are that much ahead of the rest of us.

But there’s something else to Dan’s story. Because it’s certainly not rags-to-riches, is it?

No, something else is going on. I’ll spell it out in my email tomorrow (click here if you wanna get it), and I’ll tell you how it’s relevant for your sales copy… or for your in-person, nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes origin story. Whether you are funny or not.

My unflattering email critique to my earlier self

by

[I gave myself a harsh email critique recently. It’s for an email I wrote exactly two years ago, which gets a “C” at best. If you want to see why, here’s the original email in bold, along with my comments in brackets:]

SUBJECT: The email that broke the camel’s back

[I’ve found that “play on a popular phrase” rarely works as a subject line, at least to my personal newsletter list. So I would say, force yourself to come up with 10 new subject lines, and use the best of those. But if you insist on the subject line above, then make it more specific and intriguing. Something like, “The sticky sweet email that broke this camel’s back.”]

A while back, I subscribed to the Farnam Street email newsletter.

I’d seen a headline in the New York Times about Shane Parrish, the guy who writes Farnam Street. The headline read:

“How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter”

Interesting.

So I subscribed, without knowing too much about what the content I would be getting.

[Only people who really love you will read past this opening. Everybody else will leave. As James Altucher says, you have to bleed in the first line. Options:

– “How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter.” Lead off with this and then explain what it’s all about.

– “And that’s when I unsubscribed.” Lead off with the end of the story (below) and then work your way back to explain how it all went wrong.

– Make it into a metaphor. “I only dated the Farnam Street newsletter for a few weeks. In that short time, we had several nasty fights…”]

The first email arrived with a ton of links to important, helpful articles on the Farnam Street blog. I scanned through, but I didn’t read anything.

A second email hit me a few days later, with more helpful content.

Then a third.

And a fourth.

There was nothing wrong with any of these emails. And the content was apparently good — after all, Shane Parrish got a feature written about him in the New York Times.

But none of it clicked with me. It was too earnest, too virtuous, too positive.

[Ideally, make this section more concrete. Give examples of specific emails, and make each example funny or stupid. If you can’t do that for any reason… then make this section shorter. Your copy should never be both abstract and long, which is what’s happening here.]

Finally, I got an email with the headline “Introducing your new favorite holiday tradition” (it was around Christmastime).

I opened it up. It was about a “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” to exchange books and then spend the evening reading them together with friends and family.

That’s when I unsubscribed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no beef with Farnam Street or their email newsletter. I personally didn’t find the content interesting. On the other hand, a lot of other people obviously get a lot out of the same emails that I unsubscribed from.

[This is a missed opportunity to be a bit funny. You can make fun of the Icelanders and their nerdy tradition… of Shane Parrish and his virtue signalling… or of yourself and your cold Grinch heart, two sizes too small.]

I only bring up my experience with Farnam Street emails to illustrate a point:

It wasn’t that last email that made me unsubscribe.

That was just the straw, or the email, that broke the camel’s back.

All the previous emails had already primed me to open up the “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” email and say to myself, “Oh, hell no.”

This is something to remember in case you do a lot of email marketing.

It’s very hard to assign blame (or praise) to an individual email.

Odds are, it’s the entire email sequence that’s driving readers away — or winning them over.

[This point is worthwhile. But it could be developed further. An easy way to do this would be with another, positive example. “I was on Ben Settle’s list in two separate bursts, for 3 years in total, before I subscribed to his paid newsletter. The last email I read before I subscribed had the subject, “The Myth of Security”… but you can be sure it wasn’t that email alone that made me subscribe. It was those 3 years of cumulative reading.”]

Of course, there are things (unvirtuous and unearnest things) you can do to stack things in your favor early on in the relationship, while you still have your reader’s attention and good will.

If you’d like to find out what some of those unvirtuous ways are, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info or to sign up to get a free copy (once it’s out), here’s where to go:

[A couple of points to wrap this up for you and for myself both:

1. Even though this email is weak from a copywriting standpoint, that’s ok. Sometimes these daily emails come out a little undercooked, other times they are dry and flavorless. But the more you write, the more of them turn out fine.

But even if not, so what? A weak daily email still has value. It strengthens your relationship with your list… it cements the central idea in your mind… and it can form fodder for your future emails, two years down the line. So keep writing, or if you haven’t started yet, then start.

2. When you tease something at the end of your email, make sure you write down what you had in mind for the payoff. I’d like to know now what info I was teasing back then… but two years later, I have no idea any more. Time to head over to Farnam Street and see what advice Shane has about improving my failing memory.]

A quick disgusting story

by

I had something disgusting happen to me yesterday.

I was having breakfast, my usual fare of testosterone yogurt, steel-cut oatmeal, and a few frozen raspberries and blackcurrants.

So I sat down in my usual breakfast armchair and took hold of the oatmeal bowl. On the underside of the bowl, though, I felt something dry and hard.

“EW!!!”

It turned out to be a dead, flattened, and desiccated insect of some sort, perhaps a cockroach. I instinctively shook it off my hand and stared after it in disgust.

How the hell did it get under my yogurt bowl? And where did it come from in the first place?

I zoomed in over the cockroach corpse. And as my eyes adjusted, so did my brain. It wasn’t really a dead insect. Instead, it was just the dried calyx from a cherry tomato that I had eaten last night. But in that split second, my overactive and anxious brain had convincingly transformed it into something much grosser, more frightening, and more unpleasant.

I don’t have a particular point in telling you this story except to illustrate one thing:

You’ll often hear that good copy is based around a story. And you’ll see many people take this advice to heart.

“I had some yogurt this morning,” they will start. “Yogurt is my favorite breakfast food and this morning was no different. The end.”

(I’m exaggerating, but I think you get the idea.)

Yes, that’s a story, but it’s not very good. And it doesn’t really have a place in sales copy. Because sales copy requires stories that are dramatic, or that evoke strong emotions – fear, surprise, or even disgust.

So keep that in mind in case you’re writing some copy of your own. And in case you want help writing dramatic stories, you can find more of my disgusting advice here:

https://bejakovic.com/advertorials/

Silent stories run deep

by

Yesterday, I walked into an unfamiliar room and got naked.

I took a warm shower, tiptoed over to a large, clam-like apparatus, and climbed in.

I closed the clam shell behind myself.

All around me was warm, salty water and complete darkness and silence.

I was in an isolation (or sensory deprivation) tank.

For the next hour or so, I lay there in the darkness, waiting for the visions to start.

At least, that’s what I’d read would happen. I got this idea from Paddy Chayefsky’s novel Altered States, in which a scientist starts experimenting with sensory deprivation and psychedelic drugs, and winds up transforming into an ape-like creature who runs amok in Central Park.

The story in the book is less kooky than this quick summary makes it sound.

And kooky or not, this story was enough to make “sensory deprivation” something I very much wanted to try.

Which is a lesson to keep in mind if you are trying to convince people of anything — particularly anything unusual, or something they might not know they want.

Just consider:

Had I read a sales letter, an advertorial, or a blog post with a headline like, “How to induce safe, drug-free hallucinations,” odds are the message would have just bounced off me.

In the best case, it might have gotten me interested, but it would have caused all sorts of objections and doubts to pop up as well.

But a story, in an obscure novel from 40 years ago, was enough to get me to seek out a “float” halfway around the world, without inquiring about the price, safety, or effectiveness of this experience.

And this all happened without even a call to action. Speaking of which:

If you are selling something to an “unaware” audience, and you want to try a story-based approach in your sales emails, then you might find some valuable pointers here:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/