Opportunity doesn’t come in a sales letter

A couple weeks ago, I sent out an email about my history making a living, for a few months at least, by writing and selling $2.99 books on Kindle. To which a reader wrote in and asked:

Every day, I get inundated with ads about ‘building passive income with kindle ebooks.’

​Is this one of those overblown opportunities that resembles a once pristine reef teeming with life that’s now been trampled into oblivion?

​Curious to hear your thoughts, as you’ve actually been in that space.

My answer is something marketer Rich Schefren likes to say, which is that opportunity doesn’t come in a sales letter.

The implied or overt promise for any make-money thing is to get rich in just 78 days or less, and then retire if you want to, so you can start worrying about how to spend all that free time you’ve suddenly saddled yourself with.

It makes sense to sell this promise to people because that’s what we all respond to. But it’s not something you want to buy yourself.

That’s not to say that Kindle publishing has become a dead and fossilized reef, with only a few pale and hungry blobfish still swimming around and trying to eek out a bit of nourishment from it.

It doesn’t even mean that it’s not worth paying for a course to guide you through the technical work of picking a niche, writing up and formatting your first book, getting the cover done, etc.

That information can easily be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars to you, if it saves you time that you would have spent to figure out the same stuff.

Or it​ can be worth infinitely more — if it makes the difference between you getting overwhelmed and giving up on a project and sticking with it and ultimately having success with it.

My bigger point is that if you decide to buy a book, course, membership, mastermind, coaching program, whatever, be mindful of what you’re buying… and figure out how to make that thing pay for itself.

​​Apply the ideas you’re getting exposed to. Work harder. Do things you wouldn’t have normally done.

​​It might not be as sexy and colorful as a pristine reef teeming with life… but it’s a guaranteed opportunity to succeed, in just 78 days, or a few months more.

But back to Rich Schefren. I have a offer for you today:

Last year, I regularly promoted Rich’s Steal Our Winners. That’s where Rich interviews a handful of successful marketers each month, and gets them to share a tactic or idea that is working for them right now. You can think of it as a bunch of opportunities, but not in a sales letter.

Steal Our Winners used to be an attractive offer and an easy sale to make — you could try it out for just $1 for the first month.

But then they changed the offer. The $1 trial disappeared, and was replaced by a lifetime-only subscription. So I stopped promoting Steal Our Winners.

But now, the $1 trial is back. So I’m promoting it again, because I still think Steal Our Winners is a valuable source of new marketing ideas.

The only issue is that the layout of the Steal Our Winners site has changed, and for the worse. It’s been redesigned to become more confusing, more YouTube-like, and less monthly newsletter-like. I personally find that annoying, but maybe it won’t be an issue for you, particularly if you didn’t get used to the old site.

In any case, if you are curious to find out more about Steal Our Winners, or even to try it out for $1, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sow

What’s the best font for making sales?

A couple days ago, I saw a little study titled, “Best Font for Online Reading.”

Spoiler: there’s no clear answer.

One font, Garamond, allowed the fastest reading speed on average.

But that’s just on average. Not every person read fastest with Garamond. Another font, Franklin Gothic, proved to be the fastest font for the most people, though the average reading speed was lower than Garamond.

So is it time to change your sales page font to Garamond? Or Franklin Gothic?

Or maybe even to Open Sans — the font that came in last in terms of reading speed?

There is an argument to be made for having people be able to read your copy faster. If they get through your copy more quickly and easily, they get your sales message more easily, and they make it to the order button faster. And money loves speed, right?

On the other hand, there’s an equal argument to be made for having people read slower. The more time and effort somebody invests with you, the more likely they are to trust you (one of those mental shortcuts we all engage in), and the more likely they are to justify that investment and trust by buying in the end.

So like I said, no clear answer.

But this did bring to mind a story Brian Kurtz likes to tell about a time he hired Gary Bencivenga.

As you probably know, Brian was the VP at direct response publisher Boardroom. And in that role, he hired some of the most famous and most brilliant copywriters of all time, Gary among them.

Anyways, Brian’s story is about two sales packages, one fast, one slow, both written by Gary Bencivenga, both promoting the same product.

To me personally, this story has proven to be the most fundamental and important lesson when it comes to copywriting or running a direct response business.

Brian’s little story won’t tell you what kind of font to use, or what kind of copy to write, fast or slow. But maybe it will make that choice a lot clearer in your mind.

In case you want to read Brian’s valuable sales and copy study, you can find it at the link below. But before you go read that, perhaps you might like to sign up for my slow but trustworthy email newsletter. In any case, here’s Brian’s article:

https://www.briankurtz.net/how-you-sell-is-how-they-will-respond/

I broke the email chain yesterday

This morning, reader Jesús Silva Marcano wrote to say:

Hey John!

Today when I saw that I didn’t have an email from you….

And after waiting a few hours…

I must admit a part of me was a little saddened.

Besides Ben Settle’s emails, yours are the ones I usually look forward to.

They never disappoint.

I hope all is well.

It’s true. I didn’t send out email last night.

I broke a chain going back to July 2020, when I skipped a few days because I was on vacation at the seaside, drinking quite actively, and generally celebrating and feeling high from having made a ton of money the previous few months, my first really big copywriting months.

But nothing exciting like that happened yesterday.

I had an email scheduled. I checked my inbox before I went to bed. But the email still hadn’t arrived.

I checked ActiveCampaign. It said my email was “Pending Review.”

I tried to stop the campaign so I could recreate it and send it again. It wouldn’t allow me. I tried again. No soap.

I contacted ActiveCampaign to ask what’s up.

No response.

I went to bed, figuring it would solve itself.

It didn’t.

This morning, my email from yesterday is still “Pending Review.” I can’t imagine why, because I wasn’t writing about any controversial or flaggable topics. (I do have an email about a certain kind of “gross body enhancement” coming up, but last night’s email waddn’t it.)

Oh well. The world doesn’t end if I don’t send out an email.

​​But it does spin a little faster. So it’s a shame I don’t have something to sell you right now.

In my experience, people today are starved for something — anything — real.

And when your readers witness you making a mistake, in real time, or getting involved in conflict, in real time, or failing to deliver on a public promise like a daily email, that’s more powerful and engaging than even the most personal stories you share.

And if I had, say, a training on writing faster, that would be perfect. I could end this email right here by saying something like:

“But you know what? Let’s talk copywriting. According to my extremely neat timekeeping, 72% of so-called “writing” really goes to editing. And things often don’t get delivered on time, or ever, because they are “Pending Review” by that finnicky, editing part of your brain. So if you don’t want to be at the whim and mercy of your own inner editing demon, if you want to meet all deadlines, if you wanna get projects done more quickly and make more money, then join me for the Faster Writing (and Editing) Workshop here blah blah…”

Well, maybe a little less ham-handed than that, but you get the idea.

If only I had the faster writing offer for sale right now, then the fact that ActiveCampaign is behaving like a lazy consular office processing my visa application… rather than as a for-profit business that has been taking my money for the better part of a decade… well, that would’ve all worked in my favor.

So keep this in mind if you have your own email list. Anything really real in your life, particularly that readers can experience and verify for themselves, makes for the pinnacle of engagement.

As for me, I got nothing. No gain from this ​event. ​Except to tell you that indeed I am ok, in case you were worried. And now that I’ve told you the background of all this, to maybe make a slightly stronger bond with you, so you get excited about getting my next email tomorrow, and decide to sign up for my email newsletter.

Dude… you gotta read this email

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.

Surfin’ and slingin’

A little over a year ago, specifically 381 days ago, I made the prediction that in the future, we would see the following:

Artificial intelligence gets good enough to generate content — TV shows, music, books.

But good enough for what?

Good enough for each of us. Each of us gets a custom stream of entertainment, based on our previous preferences… based on how our eyes dilate… based on whether we keep watching.

Each of us is served with the perfect content, just for us, just for that moment. Familiar enough… with the right amount of surprise to keep us fascinated and perfectly pleased.

I wrote that after seeing a series of AI apps that could generate realistic human faces… cat pictures… even functional music videos.

Well, a year has passed. And damn.

Maybe you saw the announcement three days ago about Dall-E-2.

Dall-E-1 appeared a year ago. It’s an AI thing that generates images from text descriptions. “A baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog” turns into a picture of just that.

Thing is, Dall-E-1 produced stiff, flat, lifeless pictures. I saw it last year. It was interesting but not very impressive.

But Dall-E-2? The one that they just got released three days ago?

It’s creative. Innovative. Even beautiful. The images it produces are understandable and yet surprising. Good enough to keep us, or at least me, fascinated and perfectly pleased.

And it all happened so fast. In one year, the state of the art in AI went from stiff wooden clipart to something bordering on real art or at least high-level graphic design.

My point being:

After the initial rush and push and fear that AI is coming to take your job — if you’re a copywriter, at least — it seems the noise died down. So it is always. We tire of the news, even when it becomes more relevant.

Instead, a complacent attitude set in. “Yeah yeah, AI will never matter for real copywriters. Or at least not any time soon. Human beings want human interaction, personality, warmth, insight.”

The initial AI-will-take-your-copywriting-job discussion came after GPT-3 was released a couple years ago.

But I’m much more impressed by this Dall-E-2. Take a look at the link below and see if you agree. It’s a bunch of Dall-E-2 generated images from cryptic, flowery Twitter bios (such as “surfin’ and slingin'”).

This Dall-E-2 technology does not output text. But when something similar comes for text generation from short prompts…

Well, all I’m saying is, start thinking of how to take your writing skills or your copy-based business… and turn it into something that will still be relevant in a year or maybe just six months from now, when the new update to GPT-3 comes out.

Or don’t.

​​You can also just wait those 6 months, and you will probably be able to ask GPT-4 to answer that question for you — better than you can, leaving you both impressed and a little humiliated at the superior intelligence and insight this thing has.

Anyways, that’s my new prediction.

But maybe I’m just blowing it all out of proportion. If you want to see Dall-E-2 in action for yourself, and see if I’m exaggerating, take a look below.

But before you go, sign up to my email newsletter. I still have six months before the Apocalypse to write you some human-generated content.

Anyways, here’s Dall-E-2:

https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1511861061988892675

The Pope and Anthony Fauci are using this “Millionaire’s Secret” to create products that look, feel, and sell like blockbusters

A few weeks ago, I was listening to an interview that James Altucher did with Peter Diamandis and Tony Robbins. And right as I was about to fall asleep, Tony said:

“Peter was going to go to the Vatican… where, believe it or not, every two years they have this regenerative medicine conference that the Pope actually hosts.”

“Woof,” I said, suddenly wide awake. And I lifted my nose up in the air, like an Irish setter that scents some game in the bushes.

It turns out there really is such an event. It’s called the International Vatican Conference.

The last one, which happened last May, was attended by the Pope himself, along with Anthony Fauci, the CEOs of Moderna and Pfizer, Ray Dalio, Chelsea Clinton, Cindy Crawford, David Sinclair, Deepak Chopra, and of course, aging rock star Steven Perry, the lead guitarist of Aerosmith.

Unfortunately, this latest International Vatican Conference was virtual and not held in real life​. Otherwise, you could write a Dan Ferrari-style lead, and paint the picture of the Pope walking down the soft red carpet in the gilded Hall of the Blessing, exchanging secret handshakes with Chelsea Clinton and wink-wink-nudge-nudging Ray Dalio.

I’m telling you all this for two reasons.

Reason one is that it’s a cool story I hadn’t heard anywhere before or since. If you’re looking for a hook for a VSL, now or in the coming months, I figure you can’t beat the intrigue of the Pope and Anthony Fauci and the CEO of Moderna in an invitation-only, world-shaping event held inside the Vatican.

Reason two is that maybe you don’t have a product to promote. Or your product simply doesn’t fit this Dan Brownish Vatican conference, and you’re struggling to find something equally intriguing.

In either case I would tell you, drop whatever you’re doing right now. And seriously consider creating a new business or at least a new product, built around this Vatican conference.

Because, as master copywriter Gary Bencivenga said once, great products are “those with a clear-cut, built-in, unique superiority supported by powerful proof elements.”

Gary’s advice was that you should create a product around a strong proof element to start, rather than create a product, and then start truffling out proof to support what you got.

Which is great. Only one thing I would add:

If you can additionally make your foundational proof dramatic and intriguing — again, think Dan Brown — well, then you’re really in for the kind of gold haul that would make the Vatican sit up and take notice.

So there you go. That’s my generational-wealth-building idea for you for today.

And when you do create your Vatican-scented regenerative essential oils, or whatever, and it ends up turning you into a multimillionaire, just remember me and send me a small finder’s fee. I’ll be grateful to you. And I’ll use it to take a trip to Rome and visit the Vatican — but just the outside.

Oh, and sign up for my email newsletter. You won’t believe the secrets and intrigue that are hiding inside.

Unusual guarantees, vol. 3

To start, here’s a bit of futuristic auto news:

A few weeks ago, Mercedes introduced its Drive Pilot technology. It’s much like Tesla’s AutoPilot. It drives the car for you at low speeds. But Mercedes announced an important twist.

If you put your Mercedes on Drive Pilot and the car decides to run over somebody, crushing their foot… or severing their spine… or perhaps even killing them… then you will not be legally responsible.

​​Instead, the Mercedes corporation will be responsible.

So what’s new here?

Well I thought about that for a sec.

After all, what Mercedes is offering sounds just like a guarantee. But I realized it’s a special kind of guarantee, not often seen.

After all, the typical guarantee is something like this:

“Buy this Mercedes. If you’re not happy with it, or if it kills someone while you’re behind the steering wheel, you can return the car and get all your money back.”

A more extreme version is the double or triple money-back guarantee:

“Buy this Mercedes. If it kills someone while you’re behind the steering wheel, and you end up in jail for it, and you no longer want your Mercedes, just return it to us, or have your friends who are on the outside return it on your behalf. And we will refund your full buying price, plus we’ll give you an extra ‘We’re so sorry you’re in jail’ compensation, totaling 200% of what you originally paid.”

Maybe when I put it like that the point becomes clear.

The money you get back for a product that fails is often inadequate. Even when it’s all the money you put in, or even when it’s more. Your total cost is still greater, and sometimes it can’t be quantified in terms of money.

Of course, you’re not selling self-driving cars. But this idea can be used even for some modest direct response offers.

Perhaps you’re wondering how.

That’s something I will tell you about, or rather demonstrate, in an email soon. For today, I will just tease you with this:

I think the key is not to promise money in return. The key is to argue that your offer will make your buyer better off, in every way — whether your product works as intended or not.

In case you want more detail than that, the sign up to my email newsletter, and watch out for my upcoming emails.

Marketing to frustrated newlyweds and disgusted divorcees

Last autumn, Reuters published an article about an Iraqi man named Aram Mehdi. Mehdi belongs to the persecuted Kurdish minority in Iraq. And though he grew up Muslim, Mehdi converted from Islam to Zoroastrianism.

He says it’s been a real struggle:

“We cannot even write a comment on a Facebook post as a Zoroastrian. Some people say it’s a taboo to dine with you, ugly animals are better than you. Others say, ‘Just let us know where you are if you dare.'”

Maybe your reaction to this is, “Wow that’s terrible. Poor born-again Iraqi Zoroastrians.”

Or maybe you’re heartless like me. And maybe your reaction was more like, “Seriously guy, you were kind of asking for it. After all, if you are a member of a persecuted minority in a war-torn country… why would you willingly make yourself a member of an even smaller, even more persecuted minority?”

Well, maybe because it’s fundamental human psychology.

Over the past few months, I’ve shared a lot of quotes from Eric Hoffer’s book True Believer. That’s because it’s so full of interesting ideas.

I’m gonna do it again in just a moment. But before you turn me off, I will tell you this idea has real, concrete, maybe even profitable direct marketing implications.

Ok, on to Hoffer and his quote:

“Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows: (a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; (b) all mass movements are interchangeable. One mass movement readily transforms itself into another. A religious movement may develop into a social revolution or a nationalist movement; a social revolution, into militant nationalism or a religious movement; a nationalist movement into a social revolution or a religious movement.”

The starting point of Hoffer’s book is that people who join holy causes are fundamentally frustrated. And they look to the holy cause as a way of escaping their current, flawed selves, and being reborn in some new, cleansing identity.

For that, the actual holy cause doesn’t matter too much. Many potential ones will do.

For example, if for any reason you cannot be reborn as a freedom fighter (Kurdish minority in Iraq)… well, then there’s always some fringe religious movement that’s open to you (Zoroastrian minority in a dominantly Muslim country). And if that doesn’t work, then maybe you can become an anarchist or a communist or a pacifist.

So that’s the interesting psychology idea — or interesting to me at least. Now here’s the related direct marketing advice.

It’s based on the fact that direct response customers are also fundamentally frustrated. They share many traits with Hoffer’s true believers.

And that’s why if you run a DR business, your best prospects are either the newlyweds or the divorced. Either people who recently bought something from your competition for the first time… or people who recently walked away from your competition in disgust, and who claim they will never buy anything like that ever again.

Because those people are still frustrated. And because their holy cause — the product they are buying and identifying with — doesn’t matter all that much.

What does this mean practically?

Well, in the good old days of direct mail, you could actually buy lists of unsubscribers or new buyers.

But even today, with a bit of thought, I believe can apply this to your business.

For example, you might have your own list of fallen subscribers or customers. This might be your most valuable resource – if you sell it to your competition.

And vice versa. Your best leads might come from a joint venture with your competition. Just have them send you their disgusted ex-customers.

More broadly:

If you’re trying to position yourself in the market, you don’t have to be so unique, likeable, or even much of an expert. Just make it clear you are not that other guy — while still promising the same opportunity for blessed escape that the other guy was selling.

By the way, if you really hate Ben Settle, and his email marketing tips, you might like my daily email newsletter about marketing and copywriting. you can sign up for it here.

The Prince of Get Rich Quick

At age 23, David B. was flat broke and was waiting tables to make ends meet. Full of shame and unsatisfied ambition, he made a commitment to himself that by age 28 he would be worth $1M.

And sure enough, by age 27 1/2, David was worth over $1M.

By age 29, he was bringing in $6M a year, living in a mansion overlooking San Diego, and driving a big white Rolls Royce.

How did he do it?

Well, that’s the topic of a 1989 Rolling Stone article about David Bendah, titled The Prince of Get Rich Quick.

I’d never heard of David B. until a few days ago. But back in the 1980s he was apparently a big deal (hence the Rolling Stone story). He started a publishing business that was bringing in tens of millions a year selling get-rich-quick books.

Bendah eventually did land in jail, but that was only when greed got the better of him, and once he moved from selling get-rich info to running a full on envelope-stuffing scheme. (After all, why bother with a product when you can just sell your own marketing?)

The Rolling Stone article on Bendah is eye-opening and has many ideas that can make you rich or save you from losing it all (like Bendah). They are as relevant today as they were in 1989.

I won’t spell out all these many idea. There would be no point. Instead, I’ll give you just one:

“In all of Bendah’s books, the crucial step toward success is getting beyond ego problems, which he interprets as understanding and accepting who you are and what talents you have.”

I think Bendah’s advice is actually spot on. It just needs to be extended a bit further.

In Bendah’s case, his talents were obviously in the promotion of opportunities. And who he was was was a die-hard opportunity seeker in his own right – or at least that’s my interpretation of how he wound up in jail, even after having created a successful, multi-million-dollar business.

Your own talents and your own instinctive drives might be different from Bendah’s. But whatever you have inside you, it’s worth facing it honestly… using it for all it’s worth… but also keeping an eye on it, if it’s something that can get you in trouble.

Anyways, I once bounced around the idea of creating AIDA School — a classroom-style place to learn direct response copywriting.

​​That’s not gonna happen. But maybe one day I will create just the curriculum for AIDA School. And if I do, the David Bendah Rolling Stone article will go in, and will be required reading.

In case you’re curious about learning more about direct response copywriting and my future AIDA school curriculum… then sign up for my email newsletter, where I will talk more about both. And in case you want to read the David Bendah article now:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/david-bendah-the-prince-of-get-rich-quick-52915/

 

Back to the Boardroom era?

Last autumn, I was writing a few sales emails for an SEO agency. So I spent an hour on Google, trying to find stories of people who had been penalized, by Google, for doing shady SEO stuff.

And after an hour, I had little to nothing to show for it.

Not because such stories don’t exist or because people haven’t written about them online.

But because people’s actual stories have been crowded out by billions of SEO-optimized listicles with titles like “10 Google Penalties That May Be Affecting Your Site” and “The Complete list of Google Penalties and How to Recover.” ​​And then there’s worthless Medium, which showed up at no. 2 for a Google search on “Google penalty stories”:

The most insightful stories about Google Penalty – Medium
Read stories about Google Penalty on Medium. Discover smart, unique perspectives on Google Penalty and the topics that matter most to you like SEO, …

Page after page of Google results like this gave me no actual, credible, human info. And I guess it’s not just me that it’s happening to.

A recent article in the New Yorker talked about the growing mass realization that Google search sucks. Partly because Google as a company has decided to go fully evil. Partly because we have all started to rely so much on Google… that the Internet has warped itself to appeal to Google’s tastes and preferences.

The result is page after page of horrible, inhuman fluff, broken up perfectly with H1 and H2 headings, made up of regurgitated and repurposed low-quality information or even flat-out lies.

Which is something you can either be frustrated about…

Or if you’re like me, you might decide to see it as a business opportunity.

The tech nerds on Hacker News can try to come up with a new search engine to beat Google.

But this is a newsletter about marketing. So let me tell you it smells to me like we might be headed back to the days of Boardroom.

The past 15 or so years, coinciding with rise to monopoly of Google, have also seen a rise of personality-based marketing businesses.

Coaches, gurus, and experts of various stripes have been selling information at high prices — not based on the quality or quantity of the info — but based on their own perceived authority, trustworthiness, and the relationship they have built with their audience.

That was the only way you really could charge for information online.

The days of Boardroom — charging $39 for a book of tax-saving or health or consumer tips — without a face you could trust and a guru you could feel is your friend… why pay for that?

After all, it seemed that Google made that kind of information available for free.

Except again, we’re now in an age where there’s so much information, and so much bad information, all available for free, that there might be an opportunity to simply start a business curating good information and selling it online.

So if you’re looking for a side project, new business, or a way to help millions of people navigate their lives better, consider reviving Boardroom.

Bring together valuable, trustworthy information. Charge for it. Build a list. And then do it all over again.

You probably won’t ever be able to charge thousands of dollars for a single book or five-hour video course, the way you can if you are selling based on personality.

​​But you will be able to reach a much bigger pool of people — which creates valuable opportunities of its own.

Or you can watch me do it. I’m planning to take my own advice. I will write up the results in my email newsletter. You can sign up to join it here.