A couple days ago, I got an email with the subject line, “Your Future Mentee.” I sighed, hung my head, and clicked to open the email. It read:
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I am a 25 year old entrepreneur who dropped out of medical school to pursue my dream of starting a business in the e-commerce industry.
I have been dropshipping for the past 2.5 years and have done over half a million in revenue so far. I recently came across “advertorials” and it instantly grabbed my attention.
After a bunch of research on Youtube I realized I could barely find technical videos showing exactly how to create advertorials for e-commerce/dropshipping stores.
Through browsing many videos on Youtube, I came across an interview you did on the “Chase Diamond Email Marketing” channel and the information you provided in the short 18 minutes helped me a ton.
I am extremely eager to start testing products on Facebook through advertorials and I was hoping you could guide me through the process a bit. I promise to not take too much of your time.
Please let me know if you have any availability for a brief zoom call so I can further introduce myself. I can also gladly communicate through email if that is easier for you.
Looking forward to your reply!
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Oh boy. Where to start? How about a free course on advertorials:
Between 2018 and 2021, I wrote dozens of five-page advertorials. These advertorials sold tens of millions of dollars of random ecomm products to cold Facebook and YouTube traffic. Supplements, shoe insoles, portable smoothie blenders.
After I got in the groove, it took me about a week to write each advertorial. A week might seem like a long time to write five pages, but four days of that went to research.
Research is something that apparently nobody else is willing to do.
In fact, in that Chase Dimond podcast episode, I mocked other advertorials that were running and not making sales. I know they weren’t making sales because my clients and I tested them. They weren’t making sales because were so clearly unbelievable — because the copywriter pulled them out of his head instead of doing research.
And so the first lesson of my free advertorial course is to thoroughly research anybody you are attempting to sell.
That lesson might seem obvious to you. But it certainly wasn’t obvious to my would-be future mentee.
For example, had my future mentee wanted to have a good chance to persuade me to become his mentor, he could have done some research on me first.
He could have searched on my website and read a few of the 1,400+ earlier emails I have written.
He could have found out I sell courses, and not for cheap, and I am therefore not likely to give away specific how-to information for free.
He could have found out I also offer a coaching program, and I don’t mentor new people unless they meet very specific criteria, and pay me a good deal of money to boot.
He could have found out that I have a sizeable and growing email list, that my days are eaten up by writing my daily emails, by creating new offers, by responding to paying customers, by delivering paid coaching, on top of my other projects, which I hint at from time to time.
In other words, with adequate research, this guy could have figured out that I am a terrible prospect for a “future mentee” whose big selling point is that he promises not to take too much of my time.
You might think I’m picking on a poor guy who is asking for help. That’s not my intent. I’m just trying to illustrate the shallowness of the persuasion that most people, including marketers, engage in by default.
And if you want a suitcase to float on as the Titanic sinks and all the other mice struggle in the cold water around you… then as the first step, do more work, and in particular, do more research than others are doing.
At this point, you might be worried that this is the end of my free course in advertorials.
But wait. There’s more.
Had my future mentee done a tiny bit more research, he would have come across my Copy Riddles program.
He would have found I currently offer a free bonus to go with Copy Riddles. That bonus is called Storytelling for Sales. It’s based on my experience writing all those advertorials.
Storytelling for Sales not a long training, and it is not an A-Z of ecommerce advertorial writing.
But along with Step 1: Research™, this Step 2: Storytelling for Sales covers 95% of what made my advertorials so effective, and of how I spent my time writing them.
Like I said, Storytelling for Sales is currently a free bonus for Copy Riddles.
But I will take it down at the end of this week, along with the other free bonus, Copywriting Portfolio Secrets. My plan is to flesh these bonuses out and turn them into paid upsells for Copy Riddles.
Don’t buy Copy Riddles just for the Storytelling for Sales free bonus.
But if you decide you want to get Copy Riddles, you have until Saturday Jan 21 at 12 midnight PST to get Storytelling for Sales and Copywriting Portfolio Secrets as free bonuses.
After then, Copy Riddles will remain available, but the free bonuses will disappear.
To get the whole package: