Another day, another Airbnb.
Today I am in Warsaw, Poland because it was one of the few places in central Europe that won’t be raining for the next five days. And five days is how much time I have until I go to Gdansk for my first-ever live event to do with marketing and copywriting.
This morning, I woke up, carefully stepped down the circular staircase from the second floor of the apartment to the ground floor, located the inevitable Nespresso machine, popped in a capsule, and made myself a coffee.
And you see where this is going, don’t you?
If you have anything to do with marketing, you should. It’s a basic topic, so basic that I in fact wrote about it in the first month of this newsletter, back in September 2018.
The same marketing model is shared by Nespresso, by King Gillette’s safety razors-and-blades empire, and by info publishers like Agora and Ben Settle. They all promise you almost-irresistible sign-up premiums in order to get you paying for a continuity offer.
You almost certainly know this. Many people have talked about the same. It’s obvious. I won’t belabor the point.
Yesterday, I promised to tell the bigger point behind such models — models which might seem obvious, when somebody else points them out to you.
There’s a document floating around the Internet, legendary marketer Gary Halbert’s “Clicks of the Dial.”
It’s a collection of Gary’s “Most Treasured ‘First-Choice’ Marketing Tactics.”
I read this document once. I even shared a link to it in this newsletter last year.
But I never really got much out of Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” list. I doubt the hundreds or thousands of my readers who downloaded Gary’s “Clicks of the Dial” got much out of it either.
That’s because there’s a big difference between, on the one hand, reading, nodding your head, and saying “hmm good idea”… and, on the other hand, observing, thinking a bit, and writing down your own conclusions.
So my point to you today is to open a new text file on your hard drive. Title it “Clicks of the Dial.” Break it up into three columns to start.
Name one column “traffic.” Name the second “conversion.” Name the third “consumption.”
And then, each time you go for a coffee, or a bagel, or a haircut, observe an obvious business or marketing practice you’re exposed to. Odds are, it’s been proven in hundreds or thousands of different situations. “Chunk up” that practice to make a model out of it. And write it down in your list in the appropriate column.
Gary Halbert’s entire “Clicks of the Dial” list was something like 20 items.
In other words, it won’t take you long to fill up your own “Clicks of the Dial” document to full.
Very soon, you can have a list of core business and marketing strategies, that you can cycle through, and solve pretty much any marketing problem by clicking the dial.
And since you put this list together yourself, based on your own experiences, it will actually mean something to you. Eventually, you might even appear to others to be a marketing jeenius like Gary himself.
As for me, it’s time to go get a brownie. I have a long list of food recommendations for what to eat in Warsaw, but only a limited amount of time and stomach space to do so.
Meanwhile, if you have no more interest in reading anything from me, because you’ve determined to learn all of marketing and copywriting by observation and thinking, there is nothing more I can tell you, except farewell and good luck. On the other hand, if you do want to hear from me every day, with more ideas and occasional inspiration, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter here.