For some reason, many people seem fascinated by the obscure origins of this newsletter.
“How did you get started? What was your initial motive? Is it true that you were once a Pinterest star?”
If none of that interests you, I can’t say I blame you.
But if you are curious, here’s my origin story, in all its Peter Parker awkwardness:
1. In 2015, with my savings dwindling and with the thought of going back to an office job being absolutely repulsive to me, I anointed myself a “direct response copywriter” and started selling myself as such to anybody who had $5 to spend.
2. I soon decided to focus on email copywriting, because my Spidey-sense told me this would be a “thing.”
3. After a couple months and a dozen random clients, a suspicion started to creep into my mind. “Maybe I should learn a little bit about email copywriting if I’m going to be selling it?”
4. So I signed up to Ben Settle’s email list, because frankly there was not all that much free and ongoing information at the time about email besides Ben.
Each of Ben’s emails seemed to follow the same format: a teasing promise, maybe dressed up with some pop-culture reference, and a link to sign up to Ben’s $97/month Email Players print newsletter.
5. For years, I didn’t sign up to Email Players, though I was tempted by Ben’s teasing. At first, I didn’t sign up because why pay $97 a month for a newsletter?
“I never pay for information,” I told myself. Instead of paying, I preferred to go on working for years without getting any improvement in my results.
Later, when that changed, I still didn’t sign up for Email Players because of Ben’s policy of telling people not to sign up unless they are fit to be an Email Player, and his threats that if you ever sign up and quit, you can never come back.
6. Eventually, in 2017, Ben’s teasing and mind games wore me down. I signed up to Email Players. (I also finally read the free issue of Email Players that Ben gives away on his site, and which I had gotten years earlier, when I signed up to his list.)
7. I started using some things Ben teaches in my client work, and I got good results. But I was still struggling personally to make consistent good money as a copywriter because client work was unreliable.
8. Ben started selling a new course which was called something like Client Cash Machine, all about how to get clients. I bought it, rationalizing the $297 price by saying that if I got a bit of extra client work as a result, it would pay for the course.
9. A few weeks later, Ben’s client-getting course arrived. I opened it with trembling fingers. It was a flash drive with the audio version, and a printed-out transcript.
10. An hour or so after that, I had gone through the course. It said, in a nutshell, “Start an email list and write it daily.” Disappointing. I knew that already. It was all over Ben’s emails for free, and I had hoped Ben would tell me something exciting and new.
11. Still, some time later, I followed Ben’s advice and finally started an email list, with the distant future goal of getting clients, and with the immediate goal of fooling around in my own sandbox each day, putting into practice things I was learning from books and courses, and demonstrating my growing skills to anybody who would bear witness.
12. Ta-da! A successful personal brand, authority in the field, and a 6-figure-a-year income, just from writing one daily email, or actually more like writing 3,000 daily emails.
THE END.
I’m telling you this riveting story because I’m putting on a training this Thursday. It’s called 3rd Conversion. It’s about getting your buyers to consume and digest the information you sell.
If you read my story above carefully, it can give you lots of clues about effective strategies to increase consumption and digestion.
If you want me to spell out actual lessons, you can get that on Thursday’s training.
This 3rd Conversion training can be useful to you if you’re after long-term customers and fans… rather than one-off transactions with buyers who hand you a bit of money once and then never benefit from what you sold ’em… never buy from you again… never build up your brand by writing up an email like I’ve just written about Ben Settle.
And in case you’re wondering:
My training on Thursday won’t just be about rehashing Ben Settle’s strategies, and using Ben as a good example of effective consumption and digestion techniques. Because Ben can also serve as a cautionary tale.
Like I’ve written before, I ended up unsubscribing from Ben’s Email Players after a few years — even with Ben’s threats of never being allowed back in. The reason again was consumption and digestion. I felt Ben’s newsletter had simply become a chore to read, so I took my money and my custom elsewhere.
The 3rd Conversion training will happen this Thursday at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. There will be a recording which I will send out after the call, though if you can make it live, you and I both are sure to benefit more from it.
If you’d like to sign up for 3rd Conversion now, here’s where to go: