Abbey Woodcock

Unethically creating demand

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Earlier this year, NY Times reporter Aaron Krolik went on a site called cheaterboard.com. And he wrote this nasty post about himself:

“Aaron Krolik is a complete loser. Will do ANYTHING for attention. ANYTHING.”

The post included an ugly selfie of Krolik and a caption that read BUSTED.

Cheaterboard is a site that allows burned men and women to out their cheating exes. Except… is there more to it than that?

Within a few days, Krolik’s post had spread to a bunch of other sites, like bustedcheaters.com and worsthomewrecker.com. Similar concept to Cheaterboard.

Soon, these posts made it to the top of Google Images when you searched for Krolik’s name. Bing helpfully suggested “loser” when you started typing “Aaron Krolik.”

In a nutshell, Krolik had successfully ruined his own “cool guy” reputation.

Now was time to fix it. So Krolik contacted 247removal.com, a company specializing in cleaning up online slander.

It was easy to find them because they ran ads on sites like Cheaterbaord.

​​For a paltry fee of $750 per individual post (typically adding up to thousands of dollars to cover a bunch of sites), 247removal offered to scrub “Aaron Krolik is a complete loser” from the world.

Let me pause here and ask you…

Do you suspect any foul play here?

Krolik did. In fact, that’s why he went through the experiment of slandering himself.

It turned out that hundreds of online slander sites, and dozens of reputation management firms, all boiled down to a few people. Specifically, a programmer in India and a man and woman in Dayton, Ohio.

They would encourage and spread the slander (or who knows, maybe you really did cheat on your wife)… and then for fees up to $20,000, they would take it down.

Unlike my usual posts, this is not a business idea I’m recommending.

Although there is a kernel here that can be useful and even not so unethical.

And that’s the practice of serving a specific customer, rather than selling a specific product. So put Cheaterboard out of your mind for a second, and consider these examples instead:

Example 1: Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager. He secretly sold buttons that said something like, “Elvis sux!”

Why slander his own star? Because some people didn’t want to buy any Elvis… but they sure needed to buy something.

Example 2: Copywriter Abbey Woodcock has a clever page that you hit once you unsubscribe from her email list.

​​”Sorry it didn’t work out,” it says, “but here are a few resources that might be a better fit you.” And then, Abbey puts in a bunch of affiliate links to other copywriting programs.

Example 3 is apparently standard practice in the newsletter industry:

If you have a company with a bunch of different gurus and newsletters inside it… what do you do when a subscriber fails to renew? Of course.

You offer them any of the other newsletters to subscribe to. Maybe they didn’t like that first guy. But they’re clearly interested in the promise of getting rich with financial advice… so maybe they will like guy #2.

So that’s my advice to you. Once you identify demand, think beyond the product or products you offer.

And if there is no demand… then sometimes you can create it, ethically. But this post is getting long already, so I’ll leave that topic for another day. If you want to read that when it comes out, you can sign up for my email newsletter.

Sorry to see you go

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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.

Social proof concentration and when not to use it

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It all happened within three or four days. Ben Settle, Brian Kurtz, Abbey Woodcock, Kevin Rogers, and David Deutsch all emailed about the same topic:

Reclusive A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos was finally offering a training. He would reveal his best-kept, most profitable secrets to raise funds for his cousin’s cancer treatment.

The first email I got on the topic, I thought, this is interesting — but I’ve already got plenty of copywriting trainings as is. Second email, I thought, another email about that same thing. Third email, maybe I should get this. Fourth email, I better get this now while I still can.

This experience was an illustration of a persuasion principle I read about in a book called The Catalyst. The principle is called concentration.

In a nutshell, all instances of social proof are not the same. If you can get a bunch of people to independently recommend your thing, and they do it in real quick succession, it’s much more powerful than having it all spread out. If it’s spread out, then your prospect can forget about each individual piece of social proof, or rationalize it away. If it’s concentrated, he cannot.

This idea might might or might not be useful if you’re writing a piece of direct response copy. (You’ll have to think about it and make up your own mind.)

But if you’re interested in persuasion more broadly, then the principle of concentration definitely has immediate application. If you’re marshaling an army of lieutenants who will all fight for your cause, it makes sense to focus their attack on one specific point, at one specific time.

But here’s a question to leave you thinking:

Concentration clearly worked on me and got me to pay Parris some $300 for his very valuable training.

But are there situations where concentrating your message might be a less efficient use of your resources?

​​I personally think so. If you agree with me, and you can name some specific situations, I’d love to hear from you. Write in and let me know.

4 lessons from the ongoing Parris bonanza

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Earlier today, I contributed $297 to help a guy named Taki beat cancer.

I’ve never met Taki. I have no special connection to him. I’m also not naturally the type to contribute to charitable causes. So what gives?

Well, as the GoFundMe page says,

“If you donate $297 or more, Parris Lampropoulos will send you a thank-you gift. Just email him your donation receipt.”

Let me explain what this is all about.

1. Name recognition

I’d first heard of Parris Lampropoulos through an interview on Clayton Makepeace’s site.

Clayton is (or was?) a super successful copywriter.

And he regularly interviewed other super successful copywriters, including Parris.

After reading the interview, I was curious to see whether Parris had a blog, or a newsletter, or a book, or a copywriting course…

And he didn’t. He seemed to be a secretive, off-line kind of guy. A shame, I thought, and I filed the name Parris Lampropoulus away for later.

That’s an important point — I knew the name. Because then…

2. Touch-point barrage

About a week ago, it started to trickle in.

First, I read an email from Ben Settle.

Parris Lampropoulus is finally making available his copywriting wisdom! And for ridiculously cheap! And all in an effort to help his cousin Taki beat cancer!

Ben was the first, but certainly not the last, to make this announcement.

Over the next few days, I saw David Garfinkel, Brian Kurtz, Abbey Woodcock, David Deutsch, and probably somebody else I’m forgetting also promoting Parris’s offer. Here’s why this barrage mattered:

3. Sell to buyers

After I first heard of the Parris offer, I got excited. I then told myself to cool off.

“You’ve got enough copywriting books and courses to last you the next five years,” I said to myself. “Why buy more?”

But the thing is, over the past year or two, I’ve started freely spending money on good information. And I’ve found I never regret it.

In other words, I always get more out of the info I bought than what I paid for it. Maybe through winning new client work, or through being able to charge more, or through some mysterious opportunities opening up.

So in many ways, I was an ideal prospect for this offer. And when I got a second reminder about Parris’s offer — and a third, and a fourth, all from independent quarters — my initial resistance wore down quickly.

And there was one last thing that helped.

4. The charitable opportunity

Some people probably took up Parris on his offer specifically because they wanted to help Taki. But like I said, I’m not the type to contribute to charitable causes (yet — maybe this first experience will be a crack in the floodgates).

Still, the charitable offer did help to convince me to pony up $297. I realized this when I considered the alternative.

If this had simply been a new course launch, I probably would have held off.

A part of why is urgency — Parris will take this offer down once the funding goal is reached, and that probably wouldn’t have been true with a regular course.

But another part of it is the fire sale element of all this.

People rush to a fire sale because they feel they must be getting a steal. Because they think they are taking advantage of somebody else’s time of need.

I’m not proud of it, but I realize that, somewhere not very deep down, there was an element of this in my motivation to seize this opportunity.

So there you have it.

My analysis of an easy, enjoyable $297 sale, or rather purchase.

I think Gary Halbert once wrote that, if you want to do direct mail, you should buy stuff through mail, and allow yourself to enjoy the process. That way, you can understand what the process is like for one of your customers — to have doubts, to make the decision, to be excited about the purchase.

That’s what I did today. Besides, of course, helping a guy named Taki and getting a valuable and rare item for my copywriting library.

Anyways, if you’re selling something online, I believe you should be able to use any of the four points above to sell a little more of whatever it is you’re selling.

And if you’re interested in taking Parris up on his offer, before the fundraising target is met, here’s the link to the page that describes everything you get:

http://o.copychief.com/parris-lampropoulos