I was talking to a girl a few days ago, and she was complaining about an annoying guy who had hounded her at a club.
The guy stopped her on the way out of the bathroom. Then he came up to her at the bar. Later he sidled up to her on the dance floor.
“Why are some guys annoying like that?” she asked me.
I shrugged. “Because it works.”
My ex-girlfriend once told me her perspective on why she decided to go out with me. I’d gotten her phone number once, during a brief interaction. And then, for about 6 weeks, I texted her every few days. Each time, she had some reason not to meet. She never said no flat out, so I kept texting her. “You were very persistent,” she mused later.
“Yeah sure,” you might say, “but there’s a big difference between being persistent and hounding somebody in an annoying way.”
Maybe so. But based on what I’ve seen, that’s a line that’s often drawn after the fact — after somebody decides either to give you a hard “no” or to take you up on your offer.
In the second case, the person who took you up on your offer will often say that it was your persistence that really won them over, that they found most attractive.
I took a break just now to check Google Analytics. Right now, as I write this, somebody’s on the third and final page of my Copy Riddles sales letter, and two more people are on the first page.
I don’t know if any of these people will decide to buy in the next few minutes. But I have noticed a trend.
I usually promote my existing offers in one-week stretches. For example, last week it was my Most Valuable Email, this week Copy Riddles.
Early in those week-long stretches, I get some sales. But I’ve noticed it takes a few days to get the wheel rolling, to get momentum built up, to get sales coming in unexpectedly and at odd hours and in bunches.
Today is day six of my Copy Riddles promo period. I’ll see if my theory about sales bunching up will be borne out.
In any case, the basic idea stands. As copywriter Gary Bencivenga said once, persistence melts away resistance.
Incidentally, this is something that ties into the very first big a-ha moment I got while following the road that eventually led me to creating Copy Riddles. In case you’d like to read more about that a-ha moment, you can find it on the sales page bwlo, which I’ve shared previously many times, and which I will continue to share: