Continuity Programs

Income at will

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Tonight, as this email goes out, I will be finishing up the third and final call of the Age of Insight core training.

That done, I still have a few bonuses to deliver.

But pretty soon, I will be finished with everything I promised as part of this offer.

I will have the recordings of all the trainings. With a bit of polishing and tweaking, these will turn into assets I can sell down the line.

I will also have a better and deeper relationship with the group of people who went through Age of Insight, most of whom have bought stuff from me before.

​​If these people got insights from this course, if they got good ideas, if they got value they can use to make themselves more successful, odds are good they will want to come back for more in the future.

A few days ago, Dan Kennedy wrote:

If you’re in a position that at almost any time you can come up with an offer that your customers, clients, patients, donors, followers, or fans list will like, then you have the ability to create income at will.

This position should be a big priority for people to get themselves into. Because in harsh reality, this is actually the only financial security there is. Because one way or another, what you already have can be wiped out. So the only real financial security you ever have is being in the income-at-will position and able to replace disappeared wealth.

I got started with income-at-will very hesitantly last year.

After sitting on the idea of my Copy Riddles program for a few months, I finally got up the nerve to presell it. I then delivered it over the course of a month, while creating it day-for-day.

Then came Influential Emails, also last year. I had the idea for that training one morning. By the afternoon, I had a sales page up and an email went out to drive traffic to that sales page. Again, I presold this training. I delivered it over the next few weeks, and made a nice sum of money as a result.

Next was the Most Valuable Postcard. I sat on that idea for a while, but when I did decide to do it, up went a minimalist sales page. Later that day, a few hours after my one and only email about this offer, I had filled the quota I wanted for this experiment.

Then there was the Most Valuable Email this past September. And then Age of Insight last month. And that brings me to today, and my new offer.

It’s no secret that the reason I’ve been able to create income at will has been this very email newsletter.

I have done precious little to promote myself other than writing a daily email.

I have also done precious little to sell my offers other than writing a daily email.

I’m not telling you anything new here. You probably know the value of email marketing. But the question is not whether you know it.

​​The question is whether you yourself are in that desirable position, where you can write some emails and create income at will.

Enter my new offer.

My new offer is a coaching program, focused specifically on email copy and email marketing. It will kick off in January.

The primary goal for this coaching program is not to make you into the Michelangelo of email copywriters.

The primary goal is to make this coaching program pay for itself, and for much more.

The main mechanism to do that is getting you to send out consistent, interesting, influential daily emails, which you can tack an offer onto whenever you want.

In case you’re interested, the first pre-requisite is to be on my email list. You can sign up for that here.

The future of continuity offers for publishing businesses

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I have this friend who makes a lot of money but leads a very isolated and dull life. As a result, he spends much of his money on ridiculous, overpriced purchases.

For example, a while ago, he bought a $2,000 Japanese smart toilet. He had it shipped from Japan and installed in his house in Baltimore.

This morning, I thought of my friend and his foot-massaging, storybook-reading, life-coaching toilet. I imagined him going to his master bathroom… using his smart toilet for its core functionality… and attempting to flush. But instead of hearing the satisfying rush of water, a soothing female voice would say:

“Thank you for using SmartAsshin! Your subscription to the Flusshi® function has now expired. To renew your Flusshi® subscription, please visit smartasshin.com.”

That might sound ridiculous. But it’s not entirely out of the realm of the possible.

A couple days ago, I read that BMW has been trying out subscriptions for things like heated car seats.

The idea is that each new BMW comes fully equipped with all the extras. But in order to activate any of the extras, you have to pay. Monthly.

As the folks at BMW argue it, this system actually makes a lot of sense.

It allows people to try out functionality before committing.

It allows buyers to upgrade their car as they can afford to do it.

Plus it makes the resale value of the car greater. The functionality of the car no longer depends on the choices of the initial buyer.

Of course, BMW buyers don’t see it that way. They are furious, and there is a lot of backlash. I guess see it as a variation of my scenario above, with the Japanese smart toilet.

And now to get deadly serious.

Smart marketers, in particular smart direct marketers, have long known:

Continuity offers are where it’s at.

Of course, BMW story shows it ain’t so simple. Put a part of your usual service behind a paywall, and you can face indifference, or perhaps backlash.

It will be interesting to see what happens with BMW and their heated seats by the month.

Meanwhile, if you have a business… and your offer is not inherently a subscription like a streaming service or a newsletter… then it’s past time to start thinking how to integrate subscriptions into your offers.

And if you are looking for ideas for how to do it, without triggering a backlash, then check out the article below.

It comes from Simon Owens, somebody I’ve written about before. Owens publishes a Substack newsletter, covering media and publishing businesses.

In the article below, he talks about three subscription models he has seen. None of them involves hiding more of your content behind a paywall.

Of course, you don’t have to check out Owens’s article.

You can also just stay put.

In time, I will probably take Owens’s ideas… pad them out with a few other good things I find… and repackage them into a product, which I will offer to you later. Perhaps inside some kind of continuity offer.

But in case you don’t want to wait for that, you can do some of that work yourself right now. Here’s the link:

https://simonowens.substack.com/p/thinking-outside-the-box-with-paid

What’s working on Substack right now

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I’m currently subscribed to 27 Substack newsletters. Not all of those mail me anything regularly. But the ones that do have largely become my source of news, randomly interesting articles, and pop culture contact.

Since I write an email newsletter myself, every day, which you are reading right now, I’m very curious about the Substack phenomenon.

Could this be an opportunity for me? Should I start a persuasion-themed Substack newsletter?

Should I reposition myself as a Substack marketing expert?

Should I simply start publishing serialized fantasy literotica, inspired by Greek and Roman history, under some flowery pseudonym, and host it on Substack?

More on all those questions in a future email.

For today, I just want to share a bit of what’s working on Substack right now.

I recently signed up to Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter. That’s where Simon publishes his analysis of the media and publishing industry, including digital formats like Substack.

Owens’s most recent article says that across the media landscape, companies are struggling to corral new paid subscribers.

It’s not just Netflix, which I wrote about a few days ago. Other traditional and online publishers, from The Atlantic to Quartz, have either reached the limits to the growth of paid subscribers, or are actually seeing their paid subscriber numbers shrinking.

But as Owens says, “the longer you spend in publishing, the more you realize everything is cyclical.”

And so it seems the trend today in various publishing businesses is to loosen up the content behind paywalls… rely less on paid subscribers… and rely more on…

Ads.

Guess who’s back? Ads are back.

You’ve probably seen ads if you are signed up to any big-name email newsletter like The Morning Brew. The Morning Brew was bought a couple of years ago, for $75 million, on the strength of its advertising reach alone.

The Morning Brew has millions of subscribers. But even smaller newsletters, like Josh Spector’s For The Interested, which I wrote about recently, is making a healthy $48k per year, just by showing ads to a fairly small audience of 18k subscribers.

And what about Substack?

​​Well, Owens’s newsletter is hosted on Substack. And since the guy analyzes what’s working in media right now, you might conclude his own Substack might be a clue to what to do.

Owens does have a subscription option, but it’s only to be able to ask him questions. There is no content that is hidden behind the subscription. ​​

On the other hand, you can buy a 200-word ad in his weekly newsletter for $400.

Owens’s newsletter has fewer than 5k subscribers. Is $400 a lot of money just to reach some fraction of 5k people?

Apparently not, because the ad slot was filled in each of Owens’s recent issues. And perhaps it genuinely pays for the advertisers — Owens says that of his 5k subscribers, many are executives at big name media outlets or tech companies.

So what’s the point of all this?

No point. I’m just trying to give you a different perspective on how you can make money, even if you’re a hardcore direct response business, with a classic-themed daily email like this one.

The world is always changing. Exciting opportunities are popping up all the time. And the only thing that’s constant is the demand for ancient-Greece-themed fantasy literotica.

In other news:

I am not opening up my own daily emails to advertising, at least not yet. But if you’d like to read more articles like this one, and maybe see how I make money from my daily email newsletter, without ads and without a subscription, then you can sign up here.

Dude… you gotta read this email

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This morning I was idling on the Internet when I saw a clip of an MMA fight between all-time great Fedor Emelianenko and all-time loudmouth Chael Sonnen.

In the clip, Sonnen managed to get Emelianenko on the ground. Sonnen then did some fancy/silly move to get himself in trouble, with Emelianenko on top, raining punches down on Sonnen’s head.

But what really had me transfixed was looking at the ad on Sonnen’s shorts. It read:

DUDE WIPES

Dude wipes? It turns out to be a real thing. Disposable wet wipes for men, in masculine black packaging.

My first impression was that calling your intimate hygiene product “wipes” is already emasculating, and defeats all the manly branding.

But apparently I’m wrong. DUDE Wipes is a successful business. As proof:

They have many offers on their site beyond just wipes (DUDE bidet)…

They have endorsement deals with pro sports figures (pro golfer: “On the golf course and off it, I’m taking it to the hole with DUDE Wipes”)…

And on Amazon, various bundles of DUDE wipes have tens of thousands of reviews, almost all five-star, though with some caveats (“The wife is always reluctant to have them in the guest bath when we have company because of the, as she puts it, sophomoric name and black package”).

This brought to mind my long-simmering idea to create a business by taking a consumable product and applying it to an affinity or identity group.

The usual order in much of direct response is to take a niche and then figure out, what could we sell to them? What could we create and sell at a high-enough markup and with repeating revenue for long enough to make it worthwhile?

This system clearly works.

But the other way works also, and maybe even better. As Claude Hopkins put it, “It is a well-known fact that the greatest profits are made on great volume and small profit.”

So the idea is to take a consumable product which is a known seller to a mass audience, and brand it for a specific affinity or identity group.

I’ve already seen this done with coffee for Reformed Christians. That brand was called Reformed Roasters, and within two months of being launched, it was making $40k/month.

So why not a line of fine cheeses for militant atheists?

Or air fresheners for QAnon nuts?

Or dog food for dogs of heavy metal heads?

Maybe you say any of these ideas is arbitrary, and much more likely to fail than to work.

I’m sure you’re right. To make this work, you will need good marketing to get your Sunni Soda off the ground.

But if you have capital to invest, I happen to know a good marketer. And if you’re looking for a partner to help you create the next Pepsodent or Palmolive soap — for dudes — then sign up for my email list and then we can talk.

The opportunity of the lucrative lead gen business

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Today I’d like to suggest you are not really in the business you think you are in. Or at least you shouldn’t be. Here’s what I mean:

A few days ago, I flew Turkish Airlines. I was pleased to see they offer free WiFi on board. Well, free in exchange for signing up for their frequent flyer program, Miles&Smiles.

Miles&Smiles. No doubt.

Because I found out today that frequent flyer programs are really the heart of how airlines make money.

For example, Delta’s frequent flyer program is worth $26 billion, according to an estimate last year by the Financial Times. At the time of that estimate, all of Delta as a company was worth $19 billion.

Did you catch that math? Let me break it down, step by step.

Delta is not really in the business of getting you from Tulsa to Truth or Consequences. That part of Delta — planes, stewardesses, Bloody Mary’s — was worth -$7 billion last year. Yes, negative seven billion dollars.

Delta’s real business is doing lead gen for banks. Delta manufactures points. It sells these points to banks. The banks then use the points as incentives to get you to use their credit cards. That business is worth $26 billion.

Of course, Delta is not unique in this. Other large airlines work the same way. And it’s not just airlines either.

AAA and AARP offer low-cost membership programs in exchange for some nice perks and services. But how they really make money is lead gen for other industries. AARP was even started by an insurance company.

You could make the case that magazine and newspaper subscriptions are more of the same.

My point for you — well, I told you my point right at the start. So instead of beating a dead horse to water, let me just announce my new frequent reader loyalty program.

It’s called Insights&More.

Insights&More will offer rare behind-the-scenes footage of me, sitting in a cavernous Airbnb in Istanbul and writing this email.

It will also offer points, which you can trade in for mentorship, coaching, or sales funnel optimizations.

And finally, Insights&More will include free access to our suite of virtual lounges. Eat all the virtual croissants you like, and mingle with other classy and influential people who read these emails regularly.

Applications to become an inaugural member of Insights&More are being accepted now. Simply follow the instructions here and then let our customer service team know why you think you’d be a good candidate.

Oh. One last thing.

If you happen to own a bank or other large institution that profits from the hope and movement of human beings, get in touch. I have a business proposal I’d like to run by you. It could be beneficial for us both.

Welcome your prospect to the Hotel California

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Two days ago, on a dark desert side road, I checked into the Hotel California.

That’s not what it’s really called. But that’s what it makes me think of, whenever I step outside my room.

The place in question is a 10-storey complex with five or six apartments on each floor. My guess it has a 10% occupancy rate.

There is staff floating about without ever seeming to do anything. They don’t speak English, and they don’t seem interested in dealing with guests.

There’s also a tiny pool and a basic gym on the top floor.

And as a curiosity, the sides of the building are open. In other words, as you climb the stairs, you first see a normal hotel… and then the walls disappear to give you a direct view to the city below.

For me, it all has a surreal feel. That’s why I liken it to the Hotel California. You know, in the Eagles song. “You can check out any time you want… but you can never leave.”

Because this place is convenient enough, but nothing spectacular. And yet, some small barriers to actually leaving, such as the grave-digger staff, might keep me here for eternity.

So what’s my point?

I’m not sure. Perhaps only a reference to an eye-opening insight from Gary Bencivenga, who was called the “world’s greatest copywriter.”

Gary said that wealth is an income stream. In more detail:

“You don’t build great wealth by merely creating a great product for a hungry crowd… not even a great product for a hungry crowd and a great piece of copy to sell it.

“No, you build great wealth by creating a product for a hungry crowd, plus a built-in way to keep that hungry crowd frozen in place and buying from you again and again whenever they’re hungry. In other words, you want a marketing system that rewards you with substantial income right away, and then — much more important — rewards you repeatedly with an automatic back-end revenue stream.”

And speaking from personal experience — as a buyer rather than seller:

It’s not that hard to get your prospect to check in and never leave.

Of course, he might resist at first at the possibility of having to pay forever.

But a sexy front-end offer and urgent copy will often get him over that hurdle, at least for a one-night’s trial.

And later, all you really need is something like my Hotel California to keep your customer frozen in place. A product or service that’s nothing spectacular, but is convenient enough… and some small barriers to actually leaving.

And now for the coda of the song:

“Relax”, said the night man. “We are programmed to receive.” You can sign up for my email newsletter any time you like… and you can also leave whenever you find you don’t want to receive it any more.

Planning out your offers: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday

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Last summer, I was talking to copywriter Dan Ferrari about joining his coaching group.

“Where do you see yourself in 18 months?” Dan asked. I told Dan then what I will tell you now:

I have no idea. 6 months is kind of my horizon. I can’t see much in life beyond that.

Over the years, I’ve tried making long-term goals. But when the long-term rolls around, it always turns out that either 1) my goals were stupid or 2) I changed in the meantime.

That’s why I now feel that projecting more than a few steps into the future is a waste of time.

In fact, you might call it mental masturbation. That’s the term marketer Travis Sago uses to describe “jam tomorrow” plans — not plans for yourself, but for your customers.

I alluded to Travis yesterday. He makes millions in profits each year, and he’s got some unorthodox ways of doing it. For example, the way he plans out his offers.

Most businesses only focus on their current offer. If they’re smart, they think one offer beyond that. If they’re really smart, they think two offers beyond.

But not Travis. Travis says this “smart” way of planning your offers — two offers ahead — is infinitely better than not having any plan. The problem is, it’s hard to guess what people actually want ahead of time.

So Travis advises looking two offers back.

First, figure out who the clients are you want to work with long-term. Then work backwards to figure out what offers you’d need to sell those clients…. so the final, big offer you really want them to take becomes a-no brainer for them.

This might sound like a trivial shift in thinking. But Travis claims this “two offers back” strategy brings in huge results in his business and in the businesses he advises. It means 50% conversions or higher on the back end… and more importantly, it means Travis’s seminars and continuity programs, all of which cost multiple thousands of dollars, always sell out.

But maybe you’re not convinced. Maybe this still sounds vague. Maybe an example would help.

If so, write in and let me know. I’m applying Travis’s “two offers back” approach to a business idea I currently have. If there’s enough interest, I’ll go ahead and share my personal example in a future email.