“It is important that you get clear for yourself that your only access to impacting life is action. The world does not care what you intend, how committed you are, how you feel, or what you think, and certainly, it has no interest in what you want and don’t want.”
— Werner Erhard, founder of est
Last week, after I sent out my Copy Koala Millions™ email, a reader named Lester wrote in with this interesting point:
“The one other thing I remember from Carlton is how in almost all business segments, the customers want easy/painless/low effort results. BUT the body building/fitness guys want the opposite. You have to sell how fucking painful and hard it will be with what you are selling.”
It’s true — 99% of sales copy promises quick/easy/foolproof results, preferably accomplished by an external mechanism, which you activate by pressing a large red button that reads “INSTANT RESULTS HERE.”
But like Lester says, not every market is like that. Bodybuilders for one… maybe also small business owners and entrepreneurs.
For example, yesterday I wrote about Dan Kennedy’s “#1 most powerful personal discipline in all the world.”
Dan promises that this one discipline can make you successful beyond your wildest dreams.
But honestly, I didn’t need that promise to buy what Dan was selling. I became hypnotized as soon as I read the words “powerful personal discipline.” At that point, I was 86% sold already.
That’s why I said yesterday that I don’t need to sell this idea to you either. Because if you feel the twitching of this same drive for overcoming inside you… you probably perked up just because I kept stuffing the terms “self discipline” and “personal discipline” a dozen times in what I wrote yesterday.
The fact is, there’s a very real need inside most people for occasional struggle, suffering, and proving their own worth.
Suffering and struggle might not sell in front-end copy going out to a cold list of people who are already suffering and struggling with a problem.
But it definitely does sell, including in sister markets to direct response. Such as the seminar business, for example.
Werner Erhard, the guy I quoted up top, ran est, the biggest personal development product of the 1970s. est consisted of two weekend-long seminars where people would literally piss themselves because they weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom — in a giant hall filled with hundreds of strangers.
On day two, attendees would go through the “danger process.” From the book Odd Gods:
“A row of the audience at a time would go on stage and be confronted by est staff. One person would ‘bullbait’ all of them, saying and doing things in order to get them to react. Other volunteers would be body catchers for those who fell, a common occurrence.”
Like I said, this went on for two weekends in a row. In other words, people would show up one weekend, get humiliated and brutalized, and come back the next weekend for more. When it was all said and done, people found it transformative, and enthusiastically recommended est to their friends and family.
My point is simply a reminder. We are no longer living in the world of one-off sales letters pitching a book of Chinese medicine secrets. Today, there’s plenty of money to be made by being strict, demanding, and harsh. Yes, even in your sales copy.
… well with one caveat. I’ll get to that in my email tomorrow. Read it or fail.