Ben Settle

Plagiarizing on the shoulders of giants

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Nobody called me out on it.

For the past four days, I’ve been sending out plagiarized emails. I would have kept going too, but I ran out of source material to abuse.

So on Saturday, I sent out the email “What I learned from copywriting.” That was plagiarized from James Altucher’s “What I learned from chess.”

On Sunday, I sent out “Stop caring what people think.” That was plagiarized from Jason Leister’s “Just tell me what to do.”

Monday was “Why I didn’t collect my $10.5 million.” That was plagiarized from Mark Ford’s “Why I wasn’t loyal to my broker.”

And yesterday I sent “How to create a selling style people love to read.” That was actually Ben Settle’s “How to create a writing style people love to buy from.”

If you are compulsively curious, track down the originals and then take a look at my plagiarized copies.

Because it’s not just subject line I plagiarized.

I plagiarized the content too. Especially the structure. Even entire sentences.

(By the way, I picked these four writers to plagiarize because 1) they send out more or less daily emails… and 2) they are the only people whose emails I more or less read each day.)

But here’s my point, and perhaps something that will benefit you:

I’ve spent a hundred hours or more hand-copying successful sales letters. I think this practice had some value. It forced me to slow down and actually read the damn things. But I don’t buy into the whole magic of “neural imprinting,” which is supposed to happen when you copy stuff by hand.

Instead, I’ve found plagiarizing to be much more useful.

Plagiarizing does double duty. It first forces me to look at copy critically, and ask, “What is this guy really doing here?”

For example, for the Jason Leister email, I came up with the following skeleton underlying the flesh of his writing:

* where I was before
* how that benefited others, why that was, all the wrong places I was looking
* realization of what will happen if I continue this same way
* what I do now
* what that does NOT mean
* bring it around to you
* analogy to reinforce
* diagnostic question you can ask yourself
* exposing all the reasons and assumptions that kept me where I was
* bigger consequences, or bigger context of this single issue
* inspirational takeaway if you do, and uninspirational takeaway if you don’t

I find this is much more effective than hand copying ads for learning. It seems to sink into my memory better, and it impacts how I write copy weeks and months later.

But that’s only half the exercise.

Because once you “chunk up,” you then have to “chunk down.” You actually write a new piece of copy with the same skeleton.

And that’s what I mean by double duty. Not only does this exercise help me learn… but it also produces a serviceable piece of copy. Often, it produces something better than what I would have written on my own.

With plagiarizing, I’m earning while I’m learning. Which is why, if you’re looking to get better at copywriting, I recommend shameless plagiarism to you too.

You can plagiarize my stuff if you want. Here’s the optin for my daily email newsletter.

How to write slowly

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“In ten hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day.”
— Isaac Asimov

It took me about two hours to finish this post.

I didn’t spend most of that time writing. Instead, I looked over notes for topics I meant to cover but didn’t… I read articles searching for inspiration… I picked up and then put down a book.

The trouble of course was that I had a large block of free time today.

I finished with client work some time earlier… I have a client call later tonight. In between, the only thing I have to do is to write this daily post.

Hence, two hours. To write about 300 words. You might know this as Parkinson’s Law:

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

It’s a problem in my life. And it’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to overbook myself with work — about three times the usual amount — for the coming month.

Because according to marketer Ben Settle, writing lots of words under intense deadline pressure will make you a faster writer. Permanently.

I’ll let you know how it works out. (Although there’s no need to wait for me. It’s something you can try yourself right now.)

Anyways, I’ve long collected copywriters’ advice on how to write faster.

So far, I’ve got direct “how to write fast” tips from Ben Settle (above), Dan Ferrari, David Deutsch, Colin Theriot, and a few others. I’ve also connected some ideas I read from people like Gary Halbert and Gary Bencivenga to the topic of writing faster.

So here’s my offer:

If these tips interest you, sign up for my daily email newsletter. If I share this complete collection of tips, that’s the first place it will go.

The coming brand marketing rapture

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When I first found out about direct response marketing, I felt enlightened.

I’d chuckle when I saw businesses trying to impress with their branding. “Where are the benefits?” I’d ask. “Tell me what’s in it for me!”

I’d shake my head. They obviously hadn’t A/B tested their message.

A big eye-opener came a year or so later (I was still very much a newb). I got sucked in by an ad to plop down $5 for a free + shipping offer:

Frank Kern’s book Convert.

In Convert, Frank revealed the secret to his massive success in Internet marketing. It was precisely that he created a brand around himself… rather than selling nameless benefit-based offers.

So this was brand marketing and direct response marketing… melded together.

Interesting.

And it keeps getting more interesting still.

Because in the past week, I’ve seen two successful direct marketers (Brian Kurtz and Ben Settle) say some pretty apocalyptic stuff. They admitted they don’t track much of what they do… and that, while their marketing should always “pay,” the currency doesn’t have to be sales, clicks, or opens.

In other words, these two masters of direct response seem to be dropping their bread-and-butter… and getting back into the horrible, laughable, ineffective world of brand marketing.

I think more direct response businesses will be making this switch in the years to come.

One reason is that people like Brian and Ben prove it’s possible. Both of them make good money. And they make it seem enjoyable.

But there’s more.

Because in a connected world full of free ways to reach your prospects, it’s hard to know what really created the sale. Was it your slick sales letter? Or was it when the prospect heard you interviewed by his favorite trusted authority?

A big business like Agora can handle both branding and direct response. But many businesses can only do so much. And I suspect some direct response outfits will find their time is better spent creating great offers and making those podcast rounds… rather than tweaking their copy and optimizing their funnels.

And like I said, it might be more enjoyable. Because direct response marketing can get pretty obnoxious, and even bad for your own mental health. I’ll reveal the shocking truth about that is in just a moment, but first…

Let me make it clear I’m not predicting the end of direct response. There will still be straight-up DR businesses… and there will be demand for direct response copywriters.

But I prophesy there will be a rapture. For every two direct response businesses in the field… the one will stay as is… the other will be taken up into brand marketing heaven. And maybe, if you start to prepare now, that business can be yours — assuming that’s what you want.

That’s what I’m trying to do. And that’s why I’m writing posts like this, day after day, for over two years now. They haven’t paid off yet… but maybe they will.

Anyways, if you want to sign up to get my posts by email each day, click here and subscribe to my newsletter.

The “philosopher’s stone” tactic for transmuting dull content into sparkling subject lines

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A few days ago, marketer Ben Settle sent out an email with the subject line:

“Email Players subscriber does hostile takeover of the UK childcare industry market”

The body of this email was mostly a standard testimonial from one of Ben’s customers. This guy said he used Ben’s marketing methods to capture 25% of the nursery owners market in the UK. To which Ben added,

“Smells like a hostile takeover of the market to me.”

And that’s where the “hostile takeover” subject line came from.

I thought this was clever. It brought to mind the philosopher’s stone, the magical artifact that allows you to take a bunch of dull lead and turn it into a few ounces of sparkling gold.

Except what Ben was doing was taking a bunch of solid and dull content… and transmuting it into a sparkling subject line.

All it took was free-associating a dramatic phrase, somewhat connected to the topic. It didn’t even have to be too logically connected.

Maybe that’s something you too can try if you write emails for sales and profit.

But you can use this same technique not just for subject lines.

It works for writing bullets, too. (You just might have to tweak the underlying editorial a bit, to make sure you’re not cheating readers when you hand them the dull lead.)

I bring all this up because I promised yesterday to tell you about a free online repository of 1) good bullets and 2) the underlying content those bullets were distilled and conjured from.

Well, that resource is Ben Settle’s daily emails.

Not all of Ben’s subject lines and emails demonstrate bullet-writing tactics.

But many do. And any young and ambitious student who just got accepted into copywriting Hogwarts would do well to stay up late, under candle light, and study these magical texts.

I’ve done it myself, and I continue to do it.

And I apply many of Ben’s marketing lessons — along with some I discovered myself — in my own daily email newsletter. If you want to get on board that train, it takes off from platform 9 1/2.

The most important “do or die” copywriting skill

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Some time back in the 2000s, Internet marketer Ken McCarthy put on a 3-day seminar titled, Advanced Copywriting for Serious Info Marketers.

This seminar has a kind of cult following in the marketing world today. Some of the most successful copywriters out there — people like Dan Ferrari and Ben Settle — say this is one of the best resources for really understanding what copywriting is all about.

Anyways, during this seminar, Ken asked the participants about the most important “do or die” copywriting skill.

“It’s a mechanical skill,” Ken explained. In other words, he wasn’t talking about secret ways of conducting research… or building desire… or even closing the sale.

All those are important. But there’s a single, mechanical skill that all good-to-great copywriters must master.

If I remember correctly, Ken teased this for over 10 minutes. I won’t do the same, because I feel I’ve teased you enough already. So let me just tell you:

This “do or die” skill is writing bullets.

Bullets? Yes, bullets.

Many sales letters are all bullets. But good bullet-writing skill will also mean you can write great headlines (what is a headline but your best bullet?) and subheads.

​​On an deeper level, being able to write good bullets means you can evoke curiosity in your reader, and focus his attention where you want it to go. That’s something you can use in your body copy too, or even in the structure of your sales letter.

But let’s assume Ken is right, and bullets are where it’s at.

So how do you get great at writing bullets?

Copywriter Gary Halbert had a solution for you:

Find a successful sales letter chock full o’ bullets… then get the book or newsletter or course they were selling… then reverse engineer how the copywriter “twisted” the original content to create the sexy bullet.

Thing is, the golden age of bullet-heavy magalogs has passed. And maybe you’re not keen on going on eBay and hunting for 90’s sales letters and the books they sold.

Fear not.

You can get access to some of the best bullets running today, along with the content that spawned them, for free, and in a pretty entertaining package. I’ll tell you all about it in my email tomorrow.

What, you don’t get my daily emails? Well, if you want ’em, you can sign up here.

Sad Kermit noises in Bejakoland

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Whenever a big tennis tournament finishes, nerdy tennis fans shift in their armchairs and take to their keyboards to post the same sad Kermit meme.

The meme consists of a few pictures of Kermit the frog.

So there’s Kermit looking wistfully out of a rain-streaked window…

Kermit fishing alone on an empty riverbank…

Kermit leaning on a lamppost and staring off into the bleak distance.

I bring this up because I just wrapped up my new book on A-list copywriting commandments. This is something I’ve been working for the past month. And now it’s done.

I’ve asked a friend to read over it and give me final feedback… I’ve ordered a cover for it online… and inshallah, I will publish it in the next few days.

And then what?

I’m grunting those same sad Kermit noises right now. Or if you prefer, I’m looking for ideas for the next one-month project.

Now here’s a quick lesson I want to share with you:

I heard it from Ben Settle. Ben, who makes a play of being contrarian and dismissive, said you should never survey your audience or your customers about the next product you should create.

It’s the old Gary Halbert movie/play argument. Gary would give lectures and he’d ask the audience which they preferred, going to a play or to a movie.

Everybody said they preferred plays.

Bull, Gary would say. And to prove it, he’d ask people to raise their hand if they’d been to a play in the last week.

No hands.

How many had been to a movie?

Many hands.

That’s why Ben, himself a big student of Gary Halbert, says that if you want to ask your list anything, ask them what they bought recently.

I asked this question today of the people subscribed to my email newsletter. We will see what the responses will be.

By the way, I don’t only ask and query my list for ideas. Lots of time I give out ideas, and sometimes even more tangible things, too.

Of course, you have to be on my email newsletter to get any of this. In case you’d like to subscribe right now, click here.

Wiley Jews and subverted cliches

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In 1982, Hollywood movie studios apparently froze in fear. None of their old formulas were working and big budget movies turned into flops.

In fact, the only runaway hit for the first half of the year was a small outside production, which managed to reap $136 million on a budget of just $4 million. It was called Porky’s.

I’d never even heard of Porky’s until a few weeks ago. I decided to watch it today.

It turns out to be a teen sex comedy set in Florida in the 1950s. It hasn’t aged brilliantly.

It’s quaint with its boyish pranks (one boy’s “tallywacker” stuck through a hole in wall of the girls’ locker room shower) and its unabashed objectification of the multitasking gender (a hot female PE teacher, played by a young Kim Catrall, is nicknamed “Lassie” because of her coital howling).

But ok. Product of the times, right?

What seems out of place even for 1982 is the subplot involving one Brian Schwartz. Brian is Jewish. In the 1950s Dixie high school, he sticks out like a lobster on a sand beach.

Spoiler alert: Brian rises above and works his way inside the gang. That’s impressive, considering he drives a Richie Rich Jaguar while all the other boys drive pickup trucks.

But Brian wins their approval by 1) speaking calmly and intelligently to get the other boys out of trouble with the police and by 2) coming up with a devious, multi-stage plan to replace the boys’ dumb plan for the climax of the movie.

Way to explode those stereotypes about Jews. You can’t blame Brian, though. He’s just using his God-given intellectual talents. What you can do is blame the screenwriters for resorting to the cliche of the natural-born Jewish schemer.

And that’s where today’s Porky’s email ties into copywriting:

One easy, almost mechanical way to surprise your readers involves cliches. Of course, not salting your copy with even more cliches. But also not avoiding cliches, either.

Instead, what you can do is subvert a cliche. You can do it at the level of your concepts (Gary Bencivenga: “Get Rich Slowly”). You can do it at the level of an individual sentence (Ben Settle: “Take my advice with a grain of chili pepper”).

However you do it, your reader will think he knows where you’re taking him… but Brian Schwartz doesn’t grow up to become a well-paid Hollywood lawyer.

Sure, you can get sometimes away with a cliche. Porky’s proves that, as do many sales letters and emails. But there’s value in unpredictability. As A-list copywriter Jim Rutz wrote:

“The #1 sin in ad mail is being boring, and over half of it richly deserves its quick death by wastebasket. What is ‘always boring?’ The predictable. You must surprise the reader at the outset and at every turn of the copy.”

How a copywriting tortoise can compete with dozens of hares

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One summer, through no real fault or merit of my own, I lucked into a job as a management consultant.

I was walking down the street and I saw a plaque on the wall with a company’s name.

“I wonder what they do,” I said to myself.

It turned out they built software for banks. So I sent an email to their public-facing email address, saying how I have a background in economics and software development (true enough), and maybe they could use me.

An email came back two minutes later. It was from the CEO of the company. “When could you come into the office to talk?”

He hired me a couple of days later, at what was then a royal sum of money for me, to do work I wasn’t really qualified to do.

Second story:

Last year, a call went out among subscribers to Ben Settle’s print newsletter. A publishing company in the real estate space was looking for “A-list copywriters” to write VSLs.

For more info, interested applicants were to write to the CEO of the company.

I really wanted this job, but it took me about a week to finally write to the guy.

During that week, I’m sure 50 to 100 other would-be “A-list” copywriters wrote in to apply the same job with their best-crafted pitches.

But that’s not what I did.

Instead, I spent that week researching this publishing company, and writing two new leads for their current hot promotion.

I heard back from the CEO as soon as I sent my leads in. He was impressed I’d done that up-front work, and he liked the copy I’d written.

A few days later, he hired me for a big project. He later hired me for a second project. And now, I just got some referrals from him, which resulted in new work.

I’m not telling you either of these stories as specific strategies for winning projects. When it comes to copywriting clients, I’ve never had success with cold emailing. And I don’t recommend just doing free work whenever somebody asks you for it.

The point I want to get across is simply this:

In any collection of 50 smart, hard working, gung-ho hares, I’m unlikely to stand out and win the prize. But in a race involving just me, a slow and lazy tortoise, my odds are much better.

Maybe your totem animal is equally uncompetitive. So instead of working to make yourself into a better competitor, look for ways to make the competition a non-issue.

One last tip:

A good way to make yo’ tortoise self stand out from the crowd is to put out a consistent daily message in your own voice.

For example, I have a daily email newsletter, in which I talk about copywriting, marketing, and Aesop’s fables applied to the business of freelancing. If you’d like to sign up for these emails, just click here and fill out the form that appears.

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.

Being authentic is overrated

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In 1976, David Bowie got accused of supporting fascism. How could anybody say that of Bowie?

After all, a few years earlier, Bowie claimed he was gay. Then he was an alien. Then he became one of the few white singers to perform on Soul Train.

This certainly doesn’t sound like your typical fascist. Why would anybody think different? Well, there is the following quote:

“I believe very strongly in fascism,” Bowie said in a 1976 interview with Playboy magazine. “Rock stars are fascists, too. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.”

People are always telling you, be authentic, be authentic. That’s how you will connect to others. Share your geeky stories. Be vulnerable. Be true to yourself.

And yet there’s David Bowie, who became a huge star by striving to be plastic, artificial, and impossible to pin down. He made up stuff and he lied for his own amusement and profit. He provoked and played the media. Bowie again:

“The only thing that shocks now is an extreme. Like me running my mouth off, jacking myself off. Unless you do that, nobody will pay attention to you. Not for long. You have to hit them on the head.”

And it’s not just Bowie or his rock star spawn like Madonna and Lady Gaga who get away with this. Look at the world of online marketing.

​​Ben Settle has admitted he consciously plays up his crotchety persona online. ​​Matt Stone has an oversexed alter ego he writes under, named Buck Flogging. The greatest copywriter of all time, Ross Manly, is not even a real person.

Fact is, authenticity is overrated. It’s much better to be entertaining, or at least interesting. If you are boring or unpleasant by nature, there’s no need to push that pollution out into the world.

​​Rather than being consistent with your “authentic self,” assume a new, more exciting viewpoint and unflinchingly defend it — for as long as you find it amusing or valuable to do so. ​​As Bowie put it:

“The only way I can be effective as a person is to be this confoundedly arrogant and forthright with my point of view. […] Nothing matters except whatever it is I’m doing at the moment. I can’t keep track of everything I say. I don’t give a shit. I can’t even remember how much I believe and how much I don’t believe. The point is to grow into the person you grow into. I haven’t a clue where I’m gonna be in a year.”

Email newsletter. I have one. Every day I write an email and share ideas that are not consistent with each other. But you might find it interesting anyhow. It’s available here.