Michael Senoff

The best argument against money-back guarantees on the Internet

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I was just listening to an interview with Vic Conant, the president of Nightingale-Conant.

As you might know, Nightingale-Conant is a big info publishing company. For decades, they dominated the self-help and sales audiotape market, with lots of big-name gurus on their roster. Their original guru was Earl Nightingale, who influenced Dan Kennedy and everyone on down.

One question posed to Conant was about the most profitable idea he’s used to market his products online or offline. Here’s what Conant replied:

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It’s been this ‘open accounts’ idea. When we advertise, we typically say, “Try this product for 30 days on ‘open account,’ or at our risk for free, basically. We’ll send it out to you, you try it, and we have the risk on our side.”

My dad came up with that idea back in about 1978. We were asking at that time for people to send in $50 and we’d send them the product. And that just wasn’t working to a great degree. We tried this and it worked very well and because of that our business exploded.

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The interviewer, Michael Senoff, asked a clarifying question:

“When someone orders, do they put a credit card down, but it’s not charged until 30 days later?”

Conant shook his head. “No. Typically it’s nothing. Just strictly bill-me-later.”

I thought this was very interesting. Because I don’t offer money-back guarantees on my expensive courses, like Copy Riddles.

​​I certainly don’t give them away for free for 30 days and then work to collect my money.

So should I start? For that… let’s go on with the interview.

Michael Senoff asked the obvious followup question. “They responded well, but how is it on the side of your collections? What percentage have you found you have to go chase money?”

Vic Conant replied:

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We have a very sophisticated collection effort, but it’s basically using guilt. And we’re very sophisticated in picking lists.

In direct marketing, in mail, you pick a list and you test that list. And if you test a list that returns all the products or doesn’t pay, then you don’t use that list any more.

So we tend to use very strong lists like Business Week subscribers, or people that don’t have time to screw around.

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So there you go. That’s the best argument I’ve heard against money-back guarantees on the Internet, at least the way business is typically done.

On the Internet, you’re not testing in slowly to very strong lists of buyers.

Instead, most businesses, including mine, have an open-door policy. Pretty much anybody can find my website, join my list, have the opportunity to buy. There’s no way to know if that’s a serious business owner with no time to screw around… or an unserious opportunity seeker with all the time in the world for screwing both me and himself around.

But still.

If you’re anything like me, your ears perked up at that original question, “most profitable idea,” and Conant’s reply “open account.”

I thought for a bit. Is there any way to do something like that on the Internet?

I realized I already am doing it.

Really, that’s the point of free daily emails such as these.

​​My courses such as Copy Riddles are very expensive.

​​The point of my free daily emails is to demonstrate — expertise, trustworthiness, valuable or interesting ideas. That’s the open account. And then, once you feel comfortable, you have the opportunity to buy into the next level.

I realize that might take a while, maybe much longer than 30 days. That’s okay. I have time, and I have additional arguments and email ideas. Here’s one I will close with today, from automotive copywriter Kevin Cochrane, who bought into Copy Riddles a while back:

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Copy Riddles was a measuring stick for me as a copywriter. John charted a course through the persuasion pathways that separate the pros from the posers. The structure is clear. The examples tie direct response history to present applications. The exercises offered a practical way to test and implement the lessons.
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I write for the automotive retail space, which is watered down by legal teams, compliance guidelines, and plenty of regulation. The course has helped me plunk the guts of what makes a solid bullet into more and more of my work.​​

If you’re hemming and hawing about whether to join, read a week’s worth of John’s daily newsletter as a trial run. You’ll know what to do after. (Hint: the paid stuff in Copy Riddles is even better somehow.) This is the kind of course you’ll refer back to again and again.

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For when you’re ready:

https://bejakovic.com/cr/

Guy rebuffs my attempt at cross-promotion

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A report from the trenches:

I’m working on growing my health email newsletter, which I launched a few months ago.

One part of what I’m doing is reaching out to other newsletters to offer to cross-promote. I’ve been contacting newsletters of a similar size to mine, who share some common elements with mine:

– sent out weekly
– news-related
– “proven” — make an emphasis on providing references or sources
– is made up of actual paragraphs of text that people read, rather than just a collection of links

I’ve had a few people take me up on my cross-promotion offer. But one guy, whose weekly newsletter is for people who want to “stay on top of the current issues and that like to read more than just bulletpoints,” was not interested in my offer. He wrote me to say:

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I don’t think this partnership would work out, basically because I’ve done it before and the clicks were very, very low. Also, I don’t think there’s a great overlap in the content of our two newsletters.

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As Dan Kennedy might say about that first reason, if we all stopped doing something if the first time was a fail, the human race would soon die out. There’d be no more babies born.

But what about that other reason? About content overlap?

It’s very sensible to only sell competitive duck herding products to competitive duck herding enthusiasts.

But most offers are not that one-dimensional.

The “world’s greatest list broker,” Michael Fishman, was once tasked with finding new lists to promote an investment newsletter.

Michael suggested a list of buyers of a product called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. The publisher of the investment newsletter said, “We’ve tried golf lists before, they don’t work for us.”

Michael said, “No problem. It’s not a golf list. Think about who would buy a book called Big Money Pro Golf Secrets. I don’t care if it’s Big Money Pro Flower Secrets. Anybody who would respond to that language is somebody whose door we want to knock on.”

Point being, if you have something that’s not as narrow in appeal as duck herding, there are many dimensions along which you can expand your market, beyond the obvious topic or content or promise of what you’re selling. ​

​ By the way, Michael Fishman is somebody worth listening to. I’ve read and watched and listened to everything I could find online by the guy. I make a habit of occasionally searching the Internet to see if anything new has cropped up.

If you want a place to start, here’s a great interview that Michael Fishman did with Michael Senoff of Hard to Find Seminars:

https://www.hardtofindseminars.com/Michael_Fishman_Interview.htm

10 tiny marketing projects you could complete in a week

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A guy named Ben Stokes just published a free tool to help you build a one-item online store. I’m letting you know this for two reasons:

1) Maybe you want to build a simple store for a product you have in mind. In that case, you can try Ben’s free store builder instead of paying for Shopify or fussing with WordPress.

2) Ben also has a unique blog at tinyprojects.dev. He does a tiny new programming project each week. He tracks what he did and how it went. The one-item store builder is Ben’s most recent entry.

All of which got me thinking:

​Somebody could make a similar site about marketing. Just pick a tiny project you could complete in under a week. Do it. Write up how it went, what you learned, and show off the results.

You’d learn something. You’d build a portfolio. You’d make connections. Maybe you’d even make some money.

I at least would love to read it. I really hope somebody will do this — maybe that somebody will be you.

So to help you get started, here are 10 possible tiny marketing projects I came up with just now.

​​I’m not saying these projects are great. But they don’t have to be a success in order to be a success, if you’re hepp to what I mean. Here’s the list:

#1. Get booked on a podcast
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​Make an inventory of your skills, interests, and experiences. Go on listennotes.com and search for podcasts that might be interested in hearing what you have to say.

​​Send the podcast hosts an email explaining what valuable info you can share with their audience. If you have zero upon zero valuable experience or skills, then find a travel blog and talk about where you live. Any place can become interesting with a bit of research.

#2. Promote an affiliate product
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​Go on Clickbank. Pick a top 15 Clickbank offer. Find a subniche you could promote it to (eg. weight loss for people with PTSD).

​​Create a tiny lead magnet that answers a specific, curiosity-inducing question in 4 paragraphs max. Create a landing page offering this lead magnet as a PDF.

​​Write a soap opera sequence for people who sign up, promoting the affiliate product. Create 3 Facebook ads and run $5 worth of Facebook traffic to your page each day for 3 days.

#3. Work on getting a story to the front page of Reddit
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​Search the Internet for a sufficiently shareable/outrageous/inflammatory story that hasn’t blown up yet. Or use your own content. Figure out which subreddits might go for it. Put it out there. Go on Fiverr and pay for 5 people $5 to upvote it using a bunch of different accounts, and try to make it reach the front page.

#4. Publish a Kindle book out of repurposed materials

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​Blog posts you’ve written, articles, emails, your personal diary, letters to your mom, or your high school term papers. Whatever you’ve got. Put it together. Figure out a hot title. Research how to make a Kindle book. Create a cover using Canva. Write an Amazon listing for it. Publish it on Amazon KDP.

#5. Start a blog where each week, you post a profile of a different successful marketer

​​Dig around on the Internet and collect info on this marketer. Then reach out to the marketer, explain what you’re doing, and ask one or two in-depth questions to make your piece unique and more than just a rehash what’s out there. If you don’t hear back, that’s content too. ​​Write it all up. Link to the marketer’s offers and his site.

​​ If you don’t know any successful marketers, here’s a random list to get you started: Michael Senoff, Brian Kurtz, Todd Brown, Matt Furey, Hollis Carter.

#6. Same as #1 but with guest posts

​​This can be better if you’re starting out and you can’t claim to be any kind of expert, or even pretend-expert. Simply make it your goal to get somebody somewhere to accept your guest post.

​​Look at a bunch of blogs or sites. Select the most promising ones according to your own interests and how good/accessible they look. Come up with a headline or two or three, and write the blog owner an email pitching your post. Do it over and over for a week, or until you get a yes.

#7. Create a micro dropshipping site

​​Go on Amazon and dig around for ecommerce products. Look for a product that 1) has 200+ reviews, 2) makes you say, I can’t believe this is a thing and 3) sells for under $20. Then go on Ali Express and find the closest thing to it. Create a one-product store with Ben Stokes’s one product store builder. Connect it to your Ali Express supplier and make it ready to do business.

#8. Create a personal ad for your own service business

​​Find Gary Halbert’s personal ad. Model it to describe your ideal client, and to promote yourself as a copywriter or whatever it is that you want to do.

​​If you think your ad is great and you’ve got a bunch of money, buy some space in the Los Angeles Times and run it, just like Gary did. ​​If you’re not confident about your ad or you ain’t got money, put your ad in a Google Doc. Make it publicly visible. Link to it from Facebook and post it in Facebook groups, while sharing your learning lessons from the exercise.

#9. Recreate the Significant Objects project

​​Go to a local thrift shop, antiques store, or flea market. Buy 5 quirky objects, all under $5. Then go on Reddit and search around in various subreddits (r/relationships, r/letsnotmeet, r/askreddit) for personal stories that went viral or got lots of upvotes.

​​Figure out a way to tie some of those stories up with your thrift store products. Retell the story in a tight, condensed version, tie in your product, and make this into an eBay listing for the product.

#10. Create a blog about about tiny marketing projects that you complete in under a week

​​Make a list of 10 projects you will tackle over the coming 10 weeks. Write up a week 0 post about your motivation, the steps you took to create the actual blog, and hint at the first project you will handle the following week. ​​Then send me a link to it, and I will be your first reader.

​​And if you’re strapped for cash, just write up the initial post in a Google Doc and send me that. I’ll pay the $10.17 for registering the tinyprojects.marketing domain for you, and I’ll let you use my hosting for the blog itself until you make your first $1k online.

7 low-key marketers who are worth your attention

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Below you will find a list of 7 un-famous men.

Odds are, you won’t know all of them, or maybe even most of them.

At least that’s how it was for me, for a good number of years into my copywriting and marketing career.

Which is odd, because all of these guys are very successful, either as copywriters or marketers or both.

The thing is, most of them don’t do a lot of self-promotion. But I believe they are worth your attention. And that’s why I advise you to track down everything they may have put out into the public sphere, whether paid or not.

​​Anyways, here goes:

#1. Travis Sago

I’ve mentioned this guy multiple times in my emails. He started out as an affiliate marketer 15 years ago, then became one of the leading Clickbank sellers in the “Get him back” space, and today earns millions of dollars by teaching other marketers his clever and very simple techniques.

#2. Dan Ferrari

I’d first heard of Dan as a success story for the Copy Hour course. Since then, Dan went on to be one of the top copywriters at the Motley Fool, and when that wasn’t enough, he started his own marketing agency providing marketing and copywriting to some of the biggest names in the health and financial spaces.

#3. Michael Senoff

Michael doesn’t fit 100% in this list, because he still does a reasonable amount of self-promotion. But as a marketer from a pre-Facebook generation, he might not have crossed your radar yet. My main reason for putting him in this list is that his site is an incredible rabbit hole into other very successful copywriters and marketers you have probably never heard about (it’s through Michael that I first heard of Travis Sago).

#4. Ted Nicholas

Ted Nicholas is supposed to be the most successful direct marketer in history, responsible for $6 billion in sales — more than even Jay Abraham. But he did all of this a generation or two ago, and while he has written several books about his strategies, they don’t get the same adulation that other copywriting classics (eg. Joe Sugarman’s books) get today. Still, do you think he might teach you a thing or two?

#5. Parris Lampropoulos

One of the most successful copywriters of the past several decades and somebody I’ve written about frequently, Parris mostly focuses on his work and doesn’t do almost any self-promotion. But if you search around, you can find a few podcast interviews he’s done — and each is packed with really A-list copywriting secrets.

#6. Million Dollar Mike Morgan

Mike is another very successful copywriter, who has a public online footprint that might even be smaller than Parris has. But if you search around, you might find an offer Million Dollar Mike is running right now (I think it’s still up), where he’s sharing some of his biggest insights and secrets in exchange for a donation to a good cause.

#7. Mark Ford

Mark Ford has written a dozen books about copywriting and marketing, plus he started and ran one of the biggest business and self-improvement blogs on the Internet (Early To Rise). Oh, and he helped Agora become a billion-dollar company. So why is he on this list? Well, because in my experience, in spite of all that Mark Ford has done and all the great info he has shared, many people still don’t know who he is.

That’s all I got for today.

But if you have more questions on how to become a successful copywriter or marketer, you might look here:

https://bejakovic.com/upwork-book-notification-list/