Personal Change

Techno party inspiration

by

So I went to an elite techno party last night. I’m not a fan of techno or a fan of parties, but it was illuminating.

A techno party, I found out, is a bunch of white people, wearing sunglasses at night, stiffly feeling the beat, and furiously stomping the ground.

There was a local DJ who got things moving, and then the main act came on. The crowd — maybe around a thousand people — went wild. Since I am not a part of the techno world and I can’t understand the music at all, I found that incredible. And that’s what I want to share with you today.

Most people — myself included, and perhaps you too — can’t really fathom how many human beings there are in the world right now. The fact is, whatever you do, however bizarre, there are people out there in every city of the world who will gladly line up, give you their money, and defer to your authority for a while.

Of course, I’m not just talking about techno or music. This same thing happens in marketing or any other business too.

People are looking for entertainment… for an authority… for somebody with a unique voice. That can be you.

I’m not saying it will be easy or immediate. But right now, all around the world, there are people who would love to became a part of your audience — if only you start writing, creating, or producing something.

Speaking of which:

I’ve got a daily email newsletter. It’s mainly about persuasion and marketing. Sometimes about techno. In case you’d like to try it out and see if it’s the kind of thing you want in your life for a few minutes each day, here’s where to sign up.

A lesson in reality for lazy copywriters

by

I blame my parents. They gave me a pleasant and carefree childhood. How selfish of them.

Had they been more forward-thinking, they would have put me to work early — washing dishes after dinner, taking out the trash for my allowance, maybe even a part-time job at the local shoe-shine stand.

As it is, I never had to work until after puberty had had its way with me and then left me alone. By that time, it was too late.

I grew up lazy.

In spite of my best adult efforts to become fluent in “work,” I find that whenever I try to speak that language, I have a heavy accent and the whole thing seems unnatural.

But this email is not about me. This email is about you. Because if you’re looking to become a successful copywriter, it will take work. As Victor Schwab wrote,

“My personal nomination for a heraldic shield for the advertising business would be an obese briefcase, rampant on a field of copy paper.”

Schwab advised young ad men to pack their briefcases full of client papers and take them home for extra work, after work. Because more than talent, more than knowledge of marketing and persuasion, success at copywriting requires work.

Perhaps that thought horrifies you. So let me leave you with something more positive, this from copywriter John Carlton:

Think of yourself as being in a movie — you may not have total control over everything, but you have a lot MORE control than you naturally believe you have.

Write your script the way you want, and then go for it.

Accept reality, but never accept your own lame excuses for not making things happen with as much input from you as you could muster.

The point being, if you don’t like working long hours, you can certainly organize your life in time to avoid that.

If you want to get paid better, you can get there too, and more quickly than you think.

And if, say, you hate working for clients, there are plenty of ways to make a good living today by writing for yourself.

Sure you have to work. That’s reality. But even if you never grow to love work, you can make your life much more like you want than you imagine right now.

By the way, if you want to work at reading a message like this from me, each day, you can subscribe to my daily email newsletter.

Star Wars on Earth or elsewhere

by

“It’s Star Wars on Earth!”

That’s what Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer said after reading a May 1983 article in California Magazine. The article described a special flight school for the Navy’s best pilots.

Bruckheimer knew he had to make a movie out of it. So he bought the rights to the magazine article — title, “Top Guns.” He got two screenwriters who loved flying to drop the final ‘s’ and start developing it into a script.

A couple days ago, I sent out an email with a Top Gun theme. That made me track down and rewatch a fantastic documentary I saw once on YouTube about the making of Top Gun.

The documentary is called Danger Zone. It’s got interviews with the film’s producers… the editors… the stars… the cameramen… the special effects guys… even Giorgio Moroder, the Oscar-winning composer who wrote and produced the iconic songs.

But it’s not just my boyish love of Top Gun that makes this documentary so interesting.

For one thing, it shows how complex it is to produce an hour and a half of seamless entertainment… how many specialists are involved… how much thinking lies behind seemingly simple parts… how many layers of subtlety go into even a jockish, commercial, fantasy flick.

But that’s not the biggest lesson I got from it all.

The biggest lesson — and what I want share with you tonight — is the role of chance and obstacles in the final result.

I won’t retell all the “this can’t possibly work” stories from the making of Top Gun. Watch the documentary for that. But if you’re interested in doing any kind of complex, creative work, the lesson is timeless:

Things will break. There will be deviations from your original plan. You will run into obstacles that threaten the very project.

That’s all normal. Expect it. Accept it. And with a bit of luck and good timing, the final result you produce will be stronger for it — Star Wars, in whatever market or niche you’re in.

Finally, here’s a blockbuster recommendation:

Sign up for my email newsletter. It’s free, and I share stories and ideas related to writing and marketing, much like what you’ve just read.

“He could never defeat the second-guessing”

by

Imagine for just a moment you are an MMA fighter, stepping into the octagon. The door locks behind you. Across from you is a guy who has been trained to kick your head clean off your shoulders.

Suddenly, the ref waves you both on. Your opponent starts to charge towards you, ready to kill.

And then, instead of feeling your own killer instinct taking over, you hear a voice in your head that says, “Oh God. I can’t do this. I shouldn’t be here. Everybody’s gonna see I shouldn’t be here.”

I’ve read various copywriters say they feel like a fraud or an impostor. You might think this fear is unique to this sensitive, snowflakey profession. But no. Even much tougher people get struck by the same panic.

For example, I watched a short clip today in which Chael Sonnen and Uriah Hall, two of the world’s best mixed martial artists, talk about self-doubt and lack of confidence.

Sonnen, the more experienced of the two, has this to say:

“One of the huge things I realized is that everybody’s going through it. I used to think there’s something wrong with me. I used to be really embarrassed about it. And I talked to Randy Couture [a legendary MMA fighter] about it. And Randy said that the one thing he learned is, he could never defeat it. He could never defeat the second-guessing or the negative voice in his head. And he just learned, I just gotta compete with it.”​

Here’s my point:​​

It’s worthwhile looking at your inner demons now and then, and putting in some work to cast them out. Maybe you will be successful in your exorcism one day. But don’t count on it.

The good news is, it’s possible to be plenty successful even with a lot of self-doubt. Others have done it before you. You can too.

You just have to accept that the “I can’t do this” demon will probably continue to sit on your shoulder, whispering panic-inducing thoughts to you, while you act regardless.

“Yes, you’re right,” you can tell him. “I can’t do this. Just give me a second. I need to punch this guy in the face.”

Here’s another demon you might hear whispering to you:

At first you think he’s saying, “Email newsletter.” So you lean in closer.

The demon says, “A new email each day, about persuasion and marketing.”

You lean in still closer. Suddenly, the demon grabs you by the ear. “Sign up here,” he whispers.

How to build up immunity to writing huge amounts of copy

by

June 22, 1941, exactly 79 years ago, saw the start of the largest military operation in history, code name Barbarossa. 3 million Third Reich soldiers and 600,000 Third Reich horses headed east and invaded Russia.

In spite of all that man and horse, it didn’t work out well for the Germans.

No surprise there. Just another instance of the most famous of the classic blunders of history:

“Never get involved in a land war in Asia.”

That line comes from a scene in The Princess Bride (book or movie), in which the Dread Pirate Roberts wins a deadly battle of wits.

He wins because he has spent the past few years building up an immunity to iocaine pwder, a colorless, odorless, instantly dissolving poison.

Which brings me to the inspirational pitch I want to make to you today:

It’s incredible what you can get used to, if you only start small enough and then build up.

Take for example, writing.

I started writing emails regularly about three years ago, At first, I did it only twice a week, and for another of my sites.

I then bumped up the frequency to three times a week. And then every day.

As of today, I’ve written 500+ emails for this list alone, and that’s in addition to hundreds (or thousands) of other emails I’ve written for clients, including several daily email lists I’ve worked on and continue to work on.

I would never have been able to put out this amount of content each day when I first started. But over the course of a few years, I slowly built up an immunity to it.

And so can you. If you get started now. And if you’re motivated enough to survive the deadly battle of wits that is the freelance copywriting marketplace.

But maybe you’re confused. I’ve referred several times to emails but this is a blog post. But it started out as an email, and as part of my daily email newsletter. If you’re interested, you can sign up for it here.

Second hand news: My 10 direct response fundamentals that work almost any time

by

Do direct response prospects still respond to “How to” headlines?

Or is it better to strip off the “How to” and give them a command?

I decided to test this out. The results were instructive, but not in the way you might expect.

Anyways, ​​I don’t have a live sales letter running, but I do have several large email lists that I can send A/B-split emails to.

So I prepared one email with a “How to” subject line and identical “How to” CTA text. The other subject line and CTA were the same, except if you imagine a pitbull came and ripped the “How to” part to shreds.

Result?

The “How to” variant had marginally lower open rates… marginally lower clickthrough rates… and marginally higher total sales.

In other words, a total testing washout. I repeated the test a couple days in a row, and same crabstick.

You might not be surprised. In fact, you might think this is a perfect example of testing “whispers” — irrelevant details that don’t really move the sales needle.

I agree. The only reason I tested this is because I was told, on very good authority by a very successful copywriter, that “How to” headlines, much like a love affair between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, are a nostalgic throwback to the 70s. In other words, second hand news.

Maybe you think I’m wasting your time, but there’s a bigger point here.

After doing this copywriting stuff for a while, after reading a bunch of books, watching a bunch of courses, talking to other copywriters, and most importantly, writing copy and seeing the results of actual campaigns, I’ve come to a couple conclusions.

First, top copywriters really do produce better copy and get better results. But much of the specific copywriting advice out there — “Don’t use ‘How to’ headlines in today’s market” — is really unproven intuition or personal preference.

My other conclusion is that there are just a few direct response fundamentals that really matter, and that really work in almost any context. I wrote down 10 of them. (It was hard to get to 10.)

When in doubt, I will go back to these 10 ideas. If you want, I’m sharing them with you below. You’re unlikely to find something surprising or new here. But you might find a good reminder — and that’s really what the point is. Anyways, here’s the list:

1. Markets are problems. Address problems.

2. Curiosity works to get people’s attention, and to keep people’s attention.

3. Start where the reader is. Positioning is probably the most important decision you can make.

4. Accept that you don’t have the reader’s full attention and that the channel is noisy. Adjust your marketing and your copy for this.

5. What you say is more important than how you say it.

6. Concrete beats abstract. Stories beat sermons.

7. It’s a numbers game. The best you can do is make an educated guess. Or better yet, several educated guesses.

8. Your copy can probably use more drama than it currently has.

9. New sells real well. New product. New mechanism. New understanding.

10. Give people a way to justify making this purchase. Justifications can be proof… or another dimension of benefits… or a risk-free offer.

I’m back. Just to tell you one last instructive thing. I write a daily email newsletter. If you want to read more of what I write as it comes out, then one option is to subscribe to that newsletter. If you want, here’s where to sign up.

Inspiration for would-be New Professors

by

Last Thursday morning, I read an article about a man who set an unusual world record.

Between December 2018 and August 2019, he traveled around the world by boat one-and-a-half times.

And in each of the world’s five oceans, including at Antarctica and somewhere close to the North Pole, he visited the deepest underwater point, in what are called “hadal” regions.

In order to become the first person to do this, Victor Vescovo, for that is the man’s name, had to build a custom-made submarine.

He had to retrofit a big ole ship, which he had bought from the U.S. Navy.

He had to hire a crew of engineers, scientists and support staff, all there to help him in his record-setting quest.

The whole enterprise cost a little less than $48 million, which Vescovo, who made that much and more in private equity, paid himself.

But don’t think this was a foolish waste of a rich man’s money.

According to the article, the U.S Navy has showed interest in buying Vescovo’s innovative submarine + blueprints, for a little over what Vescovo himself paid to develop and test it.

In other words, there’s a good chance that Vescovo will have somebody else foot the bill for his unique and quirky passion project of the past several years.

I don’t know about you, but this sounds pretty romantic to me. It’s the kind of life I would like to live.

Not that I’m interested in exploring ocean depths, or managing a big crew, or setting world records.

But I like the idea of having a sailboat of one, sailing to an unexplored island when the mood strikes me, writing up what I’ve learned along the way, and having others pay me to live this life.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a real sailboat or real islands.

It could just be an unusual topic I get interested in and start researching. Kind of like being a tenured professor, but without the years of clawing up the academic hierarchy.

So why am I telling you this?

No reason. Odds are, you don’t share this same dream.

But on the small chance that you do, then I want to tell you there’s hope.

I was talking to fellow copywriter Will Ward about this idea today.

And Will pointed me to the blog of Gretchen McCulloch, someone who is very much living a life like this. Gretchen has even written up a series of posts about how she became one of The New Professors (my term, not hers), and perhaps, how you can too.

I’m reading these blog posts right now. It’s good for inspiration and maybe a bit of guidance. If you want to read them too and be inspired, here’s where to get started:

https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/189045267597/part-i-what-is-a-weird-internet-career

A less painful path to sales and success

by

“According to family tradition, my great-grandfather used to say about the mules on his farm, ‘To get their attention you have to hit them between the eyes with a two-by-four. When you have their attention, they can see what they ought to do.'”
— Jim Camp, No

Jim Camp was a top-tier negotiation coach. One of the pillars of his negotiation system was to help the other side get a crystal-clear vision of the problem, and of the pain of that problem.

​​But people don’t usually respond to the two-by-four, Camp said. You don’t want the vision of the pain to be so extreme that people become blinded.

Travis Sago is a successful online marketer. One metaphor Travis uses is called “hell island.”

​​In a nutshell, your prospects are currently on hell island. You can help them get to heaven island. You want to make that clear to them, says Travis. But you don’t want to “burn hell island down.”

That can be hard to accept. Our brains love consistency. If a little bit is good… then a lot is even better, right?

Not necessarily. At least that’s what the two shrewd dogs above are saying.

I bring this up because of my post yesterday. I was writing how one way to get motivated is to focus on all the things you will lose if you don’t succeed… and to make that vision bloody and raw.

I’ve tried this with some of my own projects. It didn’t work for me. I created a fearful and bloody vision of failure. I still quit when the going got uncertain.

So let me wrap up with one last quote for today, this one by Mark Ford:

“Human beings are designed to get better through practice. Everything we ever learn to do – from walking to talking to writing concertos – gets better through practice. […] Practice doesn’t make perfect. That’s a foolish idea. Practice makes better. And better is where all the enjoyment is in learning.”

So that’s the final thought I want to leave you with. Perhaps success is not about inhuman levels of motivation. Or about having sufficient passion.

​​Perhaps success is simply about choosing a field where you don’t mind getting better. Where the daily work is something you find enjoyable enough — or at least, not too repulsive — so you can continue to get better at it day after day.

I hope this idea will be useful to you as you navigate your career or business. But don’t worry, I won’t go on with this froufrou self-actualization stuff. Tomorrow, we will get back on track with hardcore, practical, direct response sleight-of-hand.

In case you want to get tomorrow’s email as it comes out, here’s where to subscribe to my newsletter.

Scientists and Tony Robbins agree but I don’t

by

I read some interesting scientific research just now:

People often prefer to hear really bad news rather than somewhat bad news. So for example, “You’ve got a shattered patella” can sound better than the objectively less bad, “You’ve got a trick knee.”

The reason?

Supposedly, it’s certainty. When things get really bad, you’ve got your back against the wall. You’re committed, and you’ll do whatever it takes to make things better. Surgery, rehab, rest, whatever.

On the other hand, when things are only somewhat bad… they’re likely to stay that way. And deep down, you know it.

I also watched a video today in which two Internet marketing gurus — Frank Kern and John Reese — “spontaneously” drop by Tony Robbins’s house. Frank and John want to know why so few of their customers take any action after buying IM products, and what can be done to get more people to succeed.

And Tony Robbins tells them basically the same thing that scientific research said:

The best way get motivated is not to imagine the positive outcome and how swabulous it will be. Instead, it’s more powerful to really imagine all the bad things — the despair and the pain and the self-blame — that will bubble up if you fail to achieve that outcome.

So there you go. A scientifically proven, Tony Robbins-endorsed technique to achieve master levels of motivation.

You can try it right now. Either on yourself, or on a sales prospect. Simply take the red door marked “Failure” and paint it really, really black.

If it works, great.

If it doesn’t, don’t worry. It didn’t work for me either. So in my email tomorrow, I’ll talk about some other viewpoints on this matter, and why the advice above does not always work. If you want to get that email, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

Worrying about unpredictable disasters at 3am at night

by

I was lying awake in bed at 3am last night as thunderous winds pummeled my window.

Hurricane-level gusts tumbled down the mountain that stands above the house I’m staying in. When they hit the shutters, it sounded like a kid with very full lungs blowing a whistle.

I couldn’t sleep from the noise. The only thing I could think to do is turn on the lights and start researching this wind, which in Croatian is called bura.

So let me tell you a couple interesting bura facts:

In 2012, a particularly bad bura made the Adriatic sea freeze. The bura ripped trees from the soil and threw fish out of the water. Waves got as big as 7 meters.

Many islands in Croatia are completely barren on their landward side. The reason is the bura, which strips away soil and covers everything in a salty mist.

To slow down the onslaughts of bura, most towns on the eastern Adriatic have narrow, labyrinth-like streets. In some towns, houses have stone roofs, because the bura rips tiles away. In Trieste, they sometimes stretch chains or ropes around town to help people steady themselves when the bura hits.

But let me wrap this up:

Not long ago, I read a book that compared fortune to a natural disaster. That book used a flood as metaphor, but I think a bura would work too. When it hits, nothing stands in its way. Trees are ripped up. Buildings are ruined. Fish go flying.

I used to think it made no sense to worry about unpredictable events. But the natural disaster metaphor changed my mind.

Because when the weather is more or less calm, you can put a stone roof on your house. Or install some ropes to steady yourself. Or even think about the layout of your town.

Maybe this is getting too poetic. My point is simply that there are things under your control, even in the face of fickle fortune. You can build up your skills, your assets, and your relationships. This is the best insurance to help you survive a disaster… and maybe even come out ahead when the wind dies down.

On the topic of building up your skills:

If you want some help building up your copywriting skills, my daily email newsletter can be a help. You can subscribe to it by clicking here.