Back in 2017, I signed up to Ben Settle’s $97/month Email Players newsletter. Only years later did I think to ask myself the $6,953 question:
What did it?
What put me into that hypnotic trance and got me to finally pull out my credit card and pay Ben, after I’d read hundreds of previous Ben Settle emails, without taking action?
After spending an hour digging through my email archives, I found it.
It turned out to be an email in which Ben talked about a Dan Kennedy idea, using a bunch of Dan Kennedy examples and Dan Kennedy arguments.
Because that email ended up sucking me into Ben’s world and getting me to hand over an estimated $6,953 to Ben, I’ve studied it in detail. I’ve found many interesting things inside. Let me tell you about just one of them.
In spite of being a rehash of Dan Kennedy content, Ben’s email starts out like this:
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Recently, I made a special trip to my office to retrieve all my Dan Kennedy NO BS Marketing newsletters.
The first issue I ever got was the September 2002 issue (front page has a picture of a dwarf stuck in a airplane toilet…) I’d just started learning copywriting a handful of months earlier. And, I remember the “back page” of that particular issue having a profound effect on my mindset at the time — and has through all these years, as it’s kept me healthily paranoid and uncomfortable no matter how good things get.
I just re-read it, and everything he said was true then, and is even more true now.
What was that back page about, exactly?
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To the uninformed (as I was for many years), this opening might look like a classic example of throat clearing — of the rambling first two reels of “Lost Horizon” that should simply be burned.”Get to the action already!”
Of course, Ben isn’t simply rambling on or clearing his throat. He is performing a bit of persuasion magic. Specifically, he is setting the frame.
I won’t spell out what frame Ben is setting. I think it’s obvious enough.
I will just point out this setting the frame stuff applies equally to daily email as to any other communication you might be performing.
For example, here’s a frame, albeit a different frame from the one Ben was setting, in a sales bullet by A-list copywriter Jim Rutz:
* Incredible but legal: How you can easily pay Mom’s medical bills with her money and deduct them from your taxes. (page 77)
Once again, I believe the frame is obvious. But if you want a spelled-out explanation of that particular frame, you can find it in point 6 of round 20A of my Copy Riddles.
As I said yesterday, Copy Riddles might look to the uninitiated like it’s only about writing sales bullets.
But with a bit of thinking — or without it, and simply with a bit of practice — Copy Riddles is really an education in effective communication.
In case effective communicating is what yer after, you can find out more about Copy Riddles at the link below: