Jo Cameron

If you’re cold and selfish, there’s always hope for you as a copywriter

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There’s an email in my inbox right now from a successful copywriter. In a nutshell, the email says,

“Don’t take Advil if you’re a marketer. It’ll blunt your empathy!”

(Apparently, Advil reduces not only physical pain, but transferred emotional pain, too.)

This is a common trope in the marketing world. “Empathy! Empathy! How else can you connect with your audience?”

But you don’t need empathy to be a good marketer. Case in point: Sociopaths, who have zero empathy, are very good at all kinds of persuasion, including marketing.

(In fact, I suspect some of the marketers who most vocally preach empathy are themselves sociopaths. If you don’t believe me, check out the Salty Droid blog.)

So if you don’t need empathy, then what?

All you need is something called “theory of mind.” That’s the understanding that other people have unique selves, unique ambitions, unique current thoughts, and unique information.

Once you accept this fact, you just have to truffle out where your prospect’s mind is at the moment. You can get there with cold-hearted, robotic research.

No empathy required.

But what if you do have empathy? Does that make you a better marketer? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it just makes you useless.

A while back I read an article about Jo Cameron, a nurse from Scotland. Cameron has a happy-go-lucky disposition and literally never feels pain, including empathetic pain.

Speaking about Cameron, a professor from Yale had this to say:

“Empathy can actually get in the way — if you are in terrible pain and I feel so much empathy for you that, being with you, I feel it, too, I may decide to stay home… [Jo Cameron is] my dream girl. She doesn’t feel the pain of others, so she doesn’t feel empathy per se. But she cares for others.”

So if you’re cold and selfish, there’s hope for you as a marketer. It might even be an advantage, as long as you care. At least about making the sale.

All you have to do is learn how to do research, like I mentioned above. This is something I might cover in more detail in my email newsletter. The way to sign up for it is here.

She-Wolwerine is alive and well — in Scotland

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Jo Cameron, a 71-year-old woman from Scotland, can claim to be the female version of the X-Man Wolverine.

And just in case you think I’m pulling your adamantium leg, consider the following:

For starters, grandma Cameron feels no pain.

In fact, there were times when she smelled the sizzling of her own flesh before noticing she had put her hand on the burning stove.

The weird thing is that people who don’t feel pain typically don’t live very long — their unfelt injuries pile up and kill them before they get to their 30’s.

Not so for X-Cameron.

That’s because she also seems to have a superior healing ability. Her mauled and scorched flesh heals quickly, usually without a scar. That’s how she could reach age 71, in spite of constantly taking stove damage.

On top of this, the woman never feels any fear, anxiety, or depression. She even has several unique genetic mutations that scientists have never seen before.

And here’s the crazy thing. ​​It turns out this She-Wolverine didn’t even realize she had any superpowers until a few months ago. She thought she wasn’t unique in any way.

And that ties into the plot of today’s issue of my daily email serial:

You too might have resources that you don’t appreciate.

​​Here’s another example to get you thinking:

Some 20 years ago, pioneering Internet marketer Joe Vitale had an email list of around 800 names. Up till then, he hadn’t done anything with this list.

But at some point, Joe got a hankerin’ to buy a BMW Z3.

And he set his mind on paying the $40,000 price tag by hustling up new money, instead of tapping into savings.

So he looked over his assets…

And he noticed the unused email list.

And he decided to create an online course, delivered entirely through email, which he would pitch hard to this list.

The price of the course?

$1,500.

Long story short, 20-odd people bought Joe’s email-only course. He got his Z3. And it was all financed by an otherwise inactive list.

Now, you might not have an unused email list sitting around.

But you probably have at least some other resources — whether it’s real-life connections, a Facebook audience, or skills that you can trade and barter.

And if you do create some kind of an offer, and you need ideas on how to promote it successfully to an email list, then young mutant, head over to the following page:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/