Age Of Insight

The three sweetest sales I made in November

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A few moments before I stood up to write this email, I shut down the cart and disabled the sales page for the Age of Insight live training.

It’s the first time I’m offering a training on the topic of insight, which has been squatting like a demon in my head for the past several years. Now it’s time for people who signed up for Age of Insight to see how I deliver on my promises of:

1. Influencing people without resistance

2. Triggering hope and enthusiasm, which translate into sales

3. Having your ideas and your name spread far and wide by excited audience members and grateful customers

Like I said, I’ve been thinking about insight for years. I’ve been preparing for this presentation for the past month. I’ve been promoting it actively every day for the past two weeks.

And now that the training is live, I will have several all-evening calls to deliver, plus a couple bonus trainings to think up and give, plus a year-long book club to run.

I managed to get the exact number of people to sign up for Age of Insight that I was hoping for. Which is nice.

But as I tried to show you above, it’s taken me quite a bit of work to get here, and it will take quite a bit more work to pay it off.

If I had to describe the flavor of successfully promoting and now delivering Age of Insight, I would have to say it’s a complex and umami-heavy broth.

Compare that to the three sweetest sales I made over the past thirty days.

All were for my Most Valuable Email program.

Three sales might not sound like a lot. And $300, which is what I made in total from these three sales, won’t buy me a fur coat just yet.

On the other hand, all three of these sales came without absolutely any effort on my part, either in promoting or in delivering this program. I haven’t promoted it for over 6 weeks, and the delivery is all automated.

Plus, there’s a bit of sugar on top:

When people go through MVE, they become very likely to buy more trainings from me. So maybe one of these three $100 purchases will turn into a few hundred dollars more down the line.

If that happens, and if you then ask me to describe it as a flavor, I’ll probably have to say it tastes like a raspberry cheesecake.

Anyways, I won’t try to get you to visit my Age of Insight sales page here. All I want to do is to offer you a chance to sign up for my daily emails, where you can see my Most Valuable Email trick in practice, once a week or so. If you are curious, click here to sign up for my daily emails.

The opportunity to become an insight specialist

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Reader Carlo Gargiulo, who joined my Copy Riddles program a few weeks back, writes in to ask (the bold below was in his original message):

First of all, I want to tell you something.

The Copy Riddles exercises are helping me so much.

Just yesterday the head of the copy team I’m on right now read my latest sales letter and said: “It sounds like you didn’t write this sales letter. The sentences are short, concise, and specific. You did a great job.”

I’m now on round 18 and can confirm that this is a really, really important course for anyone who wants to improve their writing skills and become a copywriter who can write ads that convert.

Also, the structure of the course is wonderful.

You study the theory part, then you do the exercises, and then you check if your bullets are in line with the master copywriters… and repeat this round after round until you improve.

Having reached this point, I am undecided whether to buy Age of Insight.

I’ve been asking myself this question for days: will the information within it allow me to expand on the concepts expressed in Copy Riddles? Are the two courses related? Or are they part of two different planets?

Fact:

​​All the people who have signed up so far for my Age of Insight training have bought something from me before.

On the one hand, that means I’m doing something right with the trainings and courses I’m selling. Like Carlo above, the people who have been through my courses get real practical value from them, and want to come back for more.

On the other hand, it also means been I’ve doing a bad job selling the opportunity that is insight marketing, and Carlo’s question shows it.

So let’s see if I can make this opportunity a little clearer and more tempting:

The Age of Insight not a replacement for Copy Riddles, just as insight techniques are not a replacement for clear promises, sexy offers, or unique positioning.

But using insight in your marketing is an opportunity to do something that most marketers not aware of yet, but that a few smart marketers are getting great benefits from. For example:

Rich Schefren – who sold $960,000 worth of coaching services in 2 hours and 15 minutes thanks to a 40-page report built on insight techniques

Travis Sago – who manages to convert 20%-25% of his entire list over time, and who says insight the best way to move people towards a sale

Stefan Georgi – who makes a very small but very important insight technique an integral part of the trillions or perhaps quadrillions of dollars he has made with his copy

And what’s more:

All these guys have taught aspects of insight marketing somewhere, usually in one-off trainings behind closed doors.

I know, because I’ve gotten my hands on those trainings. But while Rich and Travis and Stefan realized that they were on to something powerful, their how-to on insight was partial and limited to their own experiences.

I’ve done a lot more thinking and research on this topic, and collected more examples, and experimented on my own.

​​And I will aim to give you the white-hot core of that inside the Age of Insight live training, so you too can start to consciously use insight techniques in your marketing, and start to get the rewards that come with it.

A while back, I looked up the etymology of the word opportunity.

It comes from the Latin phrase ob portum veniens — coming towards a port, and in reference to wind. In other words, an opportunity is a chance to get into safe harbor, with the wind to your back.

Right now, the wind is blowing favorably. But it will shift soon, because registration for the Age of Insight closes in two days.

When the wind does become favorable again — some day, no guarantees when — the price to dock inside the Age of Insight port will be much higher, perhaps double what it is now.

Meanwhile, the waves, pirates, and sharks behind you will only get bigger and more threatening.

Because while insight techniques are nice to have now — see results above — they will become more and more mandatory as the market inevitably rolls on and matures and more people start using these same techniques consciously.

I am only making the Age of Insight open to people who are signed up to my email newsletter. So if you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity while it’s still early days, here’s the first step to getting into harbor.

Daniel Throssell prompts me to put Gene Schwartz into a bigger context

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In response to my “Age of Insight” email yesterday, Australia’s best and favorite copywriter, Daniel Throssell, writes to ask:

I love how you think about this.

But aren’t your three levels of marketing kinda just expressions of market sophistication — and the different techniques required to make an ad succeed at each level?

You’ve probably heard about market sophistication. It’s an idea from Gene Schwartz’s book Breakthrough Advertising.

Basically, sophistication is a question of how many ads people in your market have seen previously. The more ads, the more sophisticated — and you gotta act accordingly.

At first, a simple promise will do. Then you need a bigger promise. Then you need a mechanism. Then you need a cooler mechanism.

And eventually, people get soooo bored with all your promises and mechanisms. You’re in the last stage of sophistication.

So Daniel is asking whether my “ages of marketing” — the Age of Promise, the Age of Positioning, the Age of Insight — are just a restatement of Gene’s stages of sophistication?

​​​​And is insight just another concept that’s hidden between the densely written lines of Breakthrough Advertising?

As often, my answer is both yes and no.

Yes — because pretty much all of marketing is contained in Breakthrough Advertising. This includes examples of proto-insight and insight-like techniques.

And no — because while pretty much all of marketing is contained in Breakthrough Advertising, there is one thing missing.

As far as I understand, Gene’s sophistication model is about individual markets. The way Gene has it, when a market reaches the ultimate level of sophistication, it eventually dies, and a new market is born out it:

The market for cigarettes dies, but the market for filter cigarettes is born, like a phoenix rising out of the ashtray.

And then the market for filter cigs goes through the same stages of sophistication, from naive to jaded, as the cigarette market went through.

Eventually, the market for filter cigarettes also dies, and yet another new market — the market for flavor in cigarettes — opens up. “Winston tastes like a cigarette should.”

Sounds reasonable, right? Human desires and gullibility are infinite, right?

Well, about that. That’s the one thing that’s missing from Gene’s magnificent Breakthrough Advertising.

Like I said, Gene’s sophistication model is about individual markets.

But it doesn’t account for what happens to both society and to individuals after many such deaths and rebirths.

So what happens? ​​What happens after decades of advertising, after thousands or millions of our personal money spent on cars, cigarettes, detergents, copywriting courses, and book-of-the-month clubs — all of which failed to really deliver on the deepest promises we were hoping they would fulfill?

I’ll tell you.
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What happens is that more and more people become guarded against any kind of advertising — not just bored with the claims in a given market.

What happens is low self-esteem — people start to suspect that there’s something wrong with them, and that even the most credible and amazing new offer can’t help them.

What happens is compulsive aimlessness — as is endemic in the info publishing world — where people still buy on occasion, but they never consume or implement.

That’s when you enter the Age of Insight. And that’s when insight techniques become useful beyond the techniques that Gene talks about in Breakthrough Advertising.

All that’s not to say that promises or mechanisms or positioning are obsolete. You can still sell and influence using just those.

But as Gene says, it’s a matter of statistics. And today, more and more people are becoming jaded, defeatist, or simply indifferent in response to classic advertising and marketing methods.

The good news is that it is possible to reach them — and to open up vast new markets for your offers.

How do you do it? That’s something I talk about on occasion in my daily email newsletter. In case you’d like to read that, and maybe find out how to reach those unreachable people, click here and sign up to get my dailiy emails.