Michael Jordan Archives

I’ll tell you about the biggest secret in a second. But I feel I should sneak up on it a little, so it has more impact.

So let me ask you:

Have you ever heard of Leroy Smith? The former pro basketball player, with the story in his past?

Smith attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte from 1981 to 1985, and he played for the UNC team.

After that, Smith turned pro and played for various prestigious basketball teams, including Hemel & Watford Royals, the Westchester Golden Apples, and Kumagai Gumi Bruins.

Yes, those are all real basketball teams. I did not make them up.

In many instances, Smith led these no-name, fourth-tier teams that nobody cares about in various important categories, including scoring, rebounds, and blocked shots.

No? None of this sounds familiar? You haven’t heard of Smith or his accomplishments?

Honestly I’m not surprised.

Really the only reason anybody today has heard of Smith, and that includes me, is that back in 1978, Smith got picked for his high school varsity team over his childhood friend Michael Jordan.

Smith and Jordan were both 15 at the time. But Smith already stood at 6’7, or 201 cm, while Jordan was only 5’10, or 180cm.

When Michael Jordan was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, Smith was there in the audience. Jordan said of Smith, “He’s not any bigger, his game is about the same.”

Meanwhile, Jordan became Jordan. It helped that he had a rhinoceros-sized chip on his shoulder.

“It all started when Coach Herring cut me,” Jordan said. “It was embarrassing, not making that team.”

Jordan spent his sophomore year working hard on basketball. He became more skilled and confident. More importantly, he developed the habits of obsessive self-improvement and discipline and training.

These habits, combined with a growth spurt that saw him add another 8 inches in height, landed Jordan not just on the high school varsity team… not just on the college basketball team… not just in the pros… but made him into the greatest basketball player of all time.

“Business,” I hear you saying, “talk business, Bejako! Michael Jordan is all well and good, but don’t you realize my time is money…”

Fine. Let me hurry my analogy along. I’d like to present to you an idea I heard from marketer Travis Sago:

“The biggest secret to building a big audience is knowing how to monetize a small one.”

Travis’s point is that if every visitor you could drive to your sales page was worth a thousand bucks to you… would you really have a traffic problem?

Would you have any trouble buying traffic?

Would it be hard to get other people as affiliates for your offer?

Would you need to get motivated to write and send another email, knowing that 10 or 12 people – “only 10 or 12 people!” — will click through to your sales page?

I doubt it.

Maybe a thousand bucks per visitor to your sales page sounds ambitious or even unrealistic.

Fine. But if you’re constantly looking for new traffic, or if you think that more traffic will solve all your problems, then I bet you have some room to develop the habit of obsessive list monetization.

Figure out how to monetize your current list better… and not only will it become way easier to kick off that audience growth spurt… but when the growth spurt happens, you’ll have a shot at a Michael Jordan-like career, instead of a Leroy Smith-like career.

And on that note, I’d like to remind you of my ongoing hand-raiser campaign. Here are the details on that, from my email yesterday:

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I’ve set aside time over the next month to help two business owners to quickly churn up new offers using their catalogue of existing products. The ultimate goal here is to:

* Create something new and exciting for your audience, without creating entirely new products

* Develop a new asset for yourself — a new offer you can reissue in the future with little tweaks or maybe without any tweaks

* Bring in new buyers who might then buy other stuff from you, or get deeper into your world

* Do a bit of work and make back a good deal of money as a result

If you want a specific example:

Last week, I sent three emails over two days in what I called my Shangri-La MVE event. Those three emails ended up selling 22 copies of a $297 course that I had already promoted hundreds of times over the past couple years. $6.5k or so when all the money comes in, and all it took in terms of work was a couple of hours of repackaging content I already had.

I’ve run other such promo events, ranging anywhere from 1-14 days. Some were complete duds, and brought in less money than this Shangri-La event. But others brought in more, well into the 5-figures.

Your specific numbers?

It will depend on how big your list is, the relationship you have with the people on there, and of course your offers.

But with my second pair of eagle eyes scanning over all your assets… and my experience running not only my own “reissue events” but also coaching a couple dozen copywriters who worked on these kinds of promos for clients… you will be more likely to come out of this with a result you can be happy with.

Like I said, I’m talking to a few business owners about this already.

If you’re interested in this offer in principle, hit reply and let me know a bit about your list (size, how often you write, etc.) and your back catalogue of previous hits.

I will be promoting this offer until this Thursday. I want to talk to everyone who’s interested and find the two people I think I am best qualified to help… and then we’ll kick things off.

Last night I went to see Air, the new Ben Affleck movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan.

Air is a typical rousing Hollywood stuff — a scrappy underdog does what it takes to win. It was fun to watch, but as the movie neared its emotional climax, I started to feel a kind of gnawing in my stomach.

I kept thinking, “This is it? This is what life is all about?”

A bunch of overworked, overweight, aging people in an office, hollering and high-fiving each other and gazing knowingly into each others’ eyes after their one triumph — getting a 21-year-old basketball player to agree to wear one kind of shoe instead of another kind of shoe?

But the movie is set in the 1980s. Maybe it reflects the corporate ideals of that era.

Anyways, let’s get back on track:

At the start of the movie, a convenience store clerk chats with the main character, played by Matt Damon. The clerk obviously knows a lot about basketball, and is sure Jordan won’t turn into anything big. The Matt Damon character is the only one who believes.

By the end of the movie, thanks to Matt Damon’s dogged believing, Nike signs Jordan in spite of impossible odds. Jordan immediately becomes a huge star. Nike goes on to sell a hundred million pairs of Air Jordans in the first year alone.

Matt Damon goes back to the convenience store and chats up the clerk again. The clerk nods his head. “I always knew Jordan would be a big thing,” he says.

“We all knew,” the Matt Damon character chuckles as he walks out the store.

As I’m sure you already knew, human memory is fallible. We forget, misremember, and flat-out make up stuff if it suits us and matches our sense of self.

You might think this only happens over the span of months or years, like it did with that convenience store clerk in Air.

But maybe you saw — and failed to remember — a new scientific study that went viral earlier this month. Scientists managed to show that people misremember stuff that happened as recently as half a second ago. And if the scientists stretched it out just a bit longer before asking — two seconds, three seconds — people’s memory became still worse and more inaccurate.

So my point for you, specifically for how you deal with yourself, is to write stuff down. Because you sure as hell won’t remember it.

And my point for you, specifically for how you deal with your prospects, is to keep reminding them, nudging them, and telling them the same thing you told them a million times before.

You rarely have people’s full attention. And even when you do have their full attention, they forget. Even if you just told them a second ago.

The only way your prospects are sure not to forget, and to maybe do what you want, is if you remind them today, tomorrow, the day after, and so on, hundreds of millions of Air Jordans into the future.

Which brings me to the group coaching I am planning. I first wrote about it yesterday. Now that I mention it, I’m sure you remember.

This planned group coaching is about email copywriting for daily emails — so you can remind your prospects of your offer over and over, in a way that they actually enjoy.

If you’re interested in this coaching, the first step is to get onto my email list. Click here to do that.