Copy Chief

The trend for the best modern copywriters

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Hidden Nazi treasure — that’s the gist of a video that’s been circulating around the Internet for the past few months.

​​The video starts off with footage of WWII personalities and tells you about a German-Jewish scientist and doctor, whose research was so valuable that he got a personal hall pass, signed by Adolf Hitler himself, to keep working in Nazi Germany.

If you take a look at this video and you squint just right, you can convince yourself you are watching the History Channel or perhaps a roided up version of a BBC documentary. Of course, that’s not what this video is. Instead, it’s a VSL for an Agora health newsletter.

Here’s a second example to illustrate the point I want to make. It also comes from an Agora imprint, Banyan Hill. It’s a short 3-minute video, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Well, unless you’ve ever seen that viral Purple Mattress video. Or the viral video for Squatty Potty. Or the viral video for Poo-Pouri.

In other words, this Agora imprint hired the Harmon Brothers ad agency (which did all the videos I just mentioned). And the result is an ironic, self-referential, Will Ferrell-inspired ad for a stock picking service.

Will it work to get new customers for Agora?

I don’t know. But the trend is clear in both the Nazi treasure video and the Harmon Bros video. And the trend is that, even for hardcore direct response businesses who sell to cold traffic, entertaining is becoming more important than big promises. In the words of Kevin Rogers of Copy Chief:

“‘Aggressive persuasion’ is dying with the Boomers, but Big Tech will kill you for it first. The best modern copywriters spend more time studying Quentin Tarantino than they do Claude Hopkins.”

Here’s some un-aggressive persuasion:

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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.

What I’ve learned from weeks of heavy promiscuity

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Over the past several weeks, I’ve been highly promiscuous.

Not sexually, thank God.

But with my email address. I’ve been giving it out left and right, up and down, to people who want it and to those who don’t.

Predictably, my inbox is blowing up. And it’s been a mildly enlightening experience.

Because whenever I check now, I have between 5 and 10 new emails, all of which fall into one of two predictable categories. In fact, it’s just how I imagine it is to be a hot girl on Tinder. Desperate or creepy guys are constantly writing you, and they have one of two things to say:

1) “Yo I’ll cook you some romantic shrimp pasta and then we can play jenga and then have the freakiest sex you ever had in a room with a great view.”

That’s in the early stages of the courtship.

When (if?) this heavy-handed benefits play doesn’t work out, it’s time for stage 2:

2) “Yo why you don’t respond to my messages? I thought you said you like shrimp pasta. I’m still free this Friday. I can come pick you up.”

Like I said, this is basically what ALL of the emails I’ve been getting look like.

They either scream heavy-handed benefits (Real subject line: “8 second trick to get the benefits of 4 hours of meditation TONIGHT”)…

Or they are pitching a sale, and are bummed when you don’t respond (Real subject line: “It’s not too late…”).

It’s like all these desperate or creepy email marketers don’t realize I’m a hot girl with lots of options (metaphorically speaking).

Here’s a better approach.

It’s something I read from Kevin Rogers of Copy Chief yesterday. Says Kevin (I’m paraphrasing), let’s face the fact that email marketers and their readers are in an open relationship.

You probably get emails from lots of different people besides me.

I’m not judging, though.

Because to be honest with you, I’ve just sent this exact same email (all right, now it’s a blog post) to several other people besides yourself.

No neediness. No drama. No recrimination.

Open relationship. Keep this in mind and you’re likely to write much better and more effective emails.

Anyways, before I sign off, let me get back to Kevin Rogers.

I don’t have any particular relationship with the guy.

But I thought you might like to know he’s putting on an event called Copy Chief Live.

Basically, it’s a conference that brings together copywriters and big direct response clients (Agora Financial, etc.) who want to hire copywriters.

So if you wanna feel like the hot girl on Tinder, but in real life, then this event might be worth a look. I’d love to go myself, but unfortunately it’s the only time I can’t make it.

In case you want more info before the price goes up later this week, here’s the link:

https://copychief.live