Last week I sent out an email, “Write 10 books instead of 1,” that got a good number of replies. The curious thing was the replies split neatly into two camps.
One camp was people who liked the core message in the email and felt inspired to start or finish their own book or books.
But the other camp, in fact the majority of people who replied to that email, had nothing to say about the core message.
Instead, this second group replied because of a single word of that email. A single word that was hidden, between two commas, in position 408 in an email of 495 words.
Would you like to know what that word was?
Good, then I’ll tell ya.
That word was inshallah.
Inshallah, as you might know, is a saying used in Muslim societies. It means “God willing.” It expresses both hope for a future event and resignation that the future is not in our control.
But why??? Why would I use this word in the tail end of my email?
Is it because I myself am Muslim?
Is it some kind of incredibly clever personalization based on the reader’s IP address?
Was it a joke or irony?
Readers wanted to know. And from my religious profiling based on these readers’ names, almost all the people who wrote me to ask about inshallah were either Muslim or came from Muslim societies.
I’ll leave the mystery of why I used inshallah hanging in the air. Instead, let me tell you a story that this reminded me of, from legendary marketer Dan Kennedy.
Dan used to travel the country on the Peter Lowe Success Tour, a modern-day speaking circus that featured former U.S. presidents and Superbowl quarterbacks as speakers.
Dan would go up on stage at the end of the night and deliver a rapid-fire comedy routine/sales pitch to sell his Magnetic Marketing program.
I highly recommend tracking down Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech and listening to it. I’ve listened to it multiple times myself.
But one thing I never noticed, in spite of the multiple times listening, is that Dan somewhere mentions that he used to stutter as a kid.
Again, this speech is rapid-fire. It lasts maybe 50 minutes. It contains thousands of words. And among those words, there are a few — maybe a dozen, maybe a half dozen — that refer to the fact that Dan Kennedy stuttered as a kid.
It’s very easy to miss. Like I said, I’ve listened to this speech multiple times and I’ve never caught it.
But there’s a group of people who don’t miss it.
And that’s people who themselves stutter or who have kids who stutter.
Dan said somewhere, in one of his seminars, how he’d regularly finish his speech and try to get out of the room, only to be faced with an audience member, holding a brand new $197 copy of Magnetic Marketing in their hands, and ready to talk about stuttering and how Dan overcame his stutter and how he now performs on stages in front of tens of thousands of people.
That’s something to keep in mind, if you’re missing a word to put into the 408th position in your sales message… or if, like me, you suffered from epileptic seizures as a kid.
All right, moving on.
I got nothing to sell you today. But I do have something to recommend.
Well, I recommended something already, and that’s Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing speech. Dan has said that this speech is the best sales letter he’s ever written.
It’s worth listening to if you want to learn how to write an interesting, indirect, and yet effective sales message.
On the other hand, if you want to learn how to do marketing that gets you really rich — who to target, how to reach them, what offers to create — then I can recommend a book I’m reading right now. It’s also by Dan Kennedy. It’s more relevant now than ever before. You can find it here: