Here’s a Days-Of-Thunder-sized personal confession:
I cant “read” marketing.
I find it too boring. As soon as I suspect an email or a web page or an article is trying to sell me something, a switch gets flipped in my head, my eyes get watery, and I start to gloss over the text in hope of escape.
This is definitely a problem, since I make my living writing sales copy, the exact kind of stuff I can’t stomach reading.
So I’ve found ways of working around this.
For example, one of the main benefits I get from hand-copying ads is that it simply forces me to carefully read those ads.
For a while, I was also having success by seeking out trends for a “3-minute DR news” feature for my email newsletter. That helped me actually pay attention to other marketers’ ads, even if I had no interest in what they were selling or preaching.
As part of this, I subscribed to dozens of email newsletters. But over time, I unsubscribed from almost all of them.
I did the same just now with copywriter Abbey Woodcock’s newsletter.
All I know about Abbey is that 1) she was one of Parris Lampropoulos’s copy cubs, so she’s gotta know about copywriting and 2) she has some kind of program helping newbie freelancers get started.
Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen in Abbey’s emails, she doesn’t talk too much about 1. But she talks aplenty about 2.
So I unsubscribed. But then, I saw an interesting thing on Abbey’s unsubscribe page.
It’s something I haven’t seen anybody else do. Here’s what happens:
When you click unsubscribe in Abbey’s email, you get taken to her site to confirm. “Yes, I really do want to unsubscribe.” Once you click that, you are taken to one final page.
“Sorry to see you go,” the page says.
And then directly below, it goes on: “Here are some other resources that might be a better fit,” followed by two affiliate links (Copy Chief and something called Effic Planning System).
I thought this was great because 1) it could be genuinely helpful to somebody who wasn’t a fit for Abbey’s stuff and 2) it could make some money for Abbey from an otherwise useless ex-lead.
This illustrates a principle I first heard Ben Settle talk about. (I guess he learned it from Dan Kennedy.)
That principle is to always seek out unused capacity.
Abbey’s unsubscribe page is just one small and clear example of this.
But if you have any kind of business — yes, even as a newbie freelancer — you might have unused capacity that you could profitably exploit.
Take for example these blog posts. For most of the time I’ve been writing them, I simply ended each post without including any kind of call to action.
Unused capacity.
So I started including a CTA each and every time. Something simple. Along the lines of,
I’ve got an email newsletter about marketing and persuasion. If you like what you just read, you might like that too. In case you want to give it a try, click here to subscribe.