Mike Palmer Archives - Desert Kite

This is a brontosaurus:

Hello I am Brontosaurus

But let me give you the back story:

Yesterday I saw a question from a struggling copywriter. He says he’s put in the time and effort. But he’s not getting the reward.

He’s not swamped with client work… he’s disappointed by the money he’s making… and he’s not even hearing a kind word or two about a job well done.

This brought to mind a presentation I saw once by billion-dollar copywriter Mike Palmer.

Mike works at Stansberry Research, an Agora imprint. He wrote The End of America VSL, which brought in many millions of simoleons for Stansberry.

So Mike gave this presentation called The Secret Psychology of Becoming a Great Copywriter. The upshot is, there will be times when you feel you suck.

Mike drew a graph to illustrate the natural changes in skill/suck levels. It’s pretty much the brontosaurus up top:

Hello I am Annotated Brontosaurus

Point A is when you get started, full of optimism.

Point B is when you realize it will be harder than you thought.

Point C is the moment of crisis and despair. At this point many people give up.

(I just want to say I am all for giving up. There’s no shame in it if you ask me, and I suspect most people who champion blind perseverance haven’t tried to do much in life. I’ve given up often, and with very few exceptions, I’ve never looked back.)

But if for some reason you don’t give up, then you eventually move to point D. That’s where you improve and rise above your previous level.

This is not a one-time thing, by the way.

It’s happened to me over and over since I started writing copy for money.

For example, last year around this time, I thought I was pretty good at this whole thing. I then joined Dan Ferrari’s coaching group. After getting some feedback from Dan, I realized I still had big things to work on.

A month or two later, deep into a project, the feedback kept pouring in and getting more significant. I thought “Jesus, why do I need this? I’m obviously not meant to write sales copy.”

But I stuck around, finished the project, became better at the craft, and eventually got my rewards.

Like I said, this has happened to me over and over. I expect it will happen again.

Perhaps if you know this, it will make it easier to progress to point D once you hit that hollow, right at the bottom of the brontosaurus’s neck.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps you’ll look up, squint… well, let me stop there.

When I wrote this article and sent it out to my email newsletter subscribers, I ended on a personal note, about giving up. But I limit those things on this public blog. In case you want to get on my email newsletter, where I don’t hold anything back, click here to subscribe.

Once upon a time, I read a thought-provoking article by multimillionaire copywriter, marketer, and investor Mark Ford.

Mark’s article was titled, “Why Every Copywriter Needs a Big Idea”.

As you might know, the BIG IDEA is a very hot and trendy topic in copywriting circles these days. Mark even says the big idea might be the “best direct-marketing technique of them all.”

Woof! So what exactly is it?

Well, let me give you a few examples. There are a couple of “big idea” promotions that almost everyone agrees on —

1. Mike Palmer’s “The end of America” (the growing debt of the US government will lead to catastrophic consequences, buy our investment newsletter to figure out how to protect yourself)

2. Porter Stansberry’s “New railroad” (the rail made fortunes in the 19th century, fiber-optic cables can do it today, buy our investment newsletter to get our stock picks)

Those two promotions most often get hoisted up on the flagpole of the Republic of the Big Idea.

However, explaining what exactly makes a big idea big depends on who you ask. For example, Mark gives the following four-part definition:

A big idea is important, exciting, beneficial, and leads to an inevitable conclusion.

Sounds reasonable.

But when it comes to applying this definition in practice, that’s when things seem to get almost mystical, or as Mark puts it, Yoda-like.

(At one point, Mark even makes a distinction between a “big concept” and a “big idea”. Unravel that for yourself.)

The upshot is that I personally don’t stress about the big idea.

One reason is that I’m not sure what it really means.

Another is that I get the sneaking suspicion that a big idea is simply an idea that worked — which copywriting teachers, gurus, and coaches then retroactively mystify as part of their job.

Finally, I think that the big idea, as illustrated by the examples above, is only NEEDED in markets in the end-stages of sophistication — those markets that are so wary of hearing anything resembling a pitch that they need to be seduced and lulled by a new and surprising approach.

For example, that’s how the financial newsletter market is, like in the examples above.

But those aren’t the kinds of that I often write in.

So instead of stressing about the big idea, I simply look to come up with a hook — a story, a big benefit, a metaphor, a conundrum — to suck the reader in and to get him reading more.

And many times, whether that qualifies as a big idea, a big concept, or merely a sales hook, it’s good enough for me to make sales, even on cold, unfriendly traffic.

So if that’s something you do — running offers to cold traffic — then I hope you have reached an inevitable conclusion by now.

And I hope you want to talk about important and exciting ways to benefit your business.

If so, simply write me an email and we can take it from there, on a new railroad across America.

The secret psychology of giving up

Why I don’t stress about the “big idea”