Rich Schefren

The aggressive other meaning of “money loves speed”

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“There is absolutely nothing you can ever do or say that is MORE attractive than escalating quickly. Not teasing her, telling stories or having lots of social proof. Nothing comes close. Fast escalation beats them all.”
— 60 Years of Challenge

Marketing legend Dan Kennedy has a famous saying that “money loves speed.”

For the longest time, I thought that meant working faster, producing more content and offers, and getting paid more. It definitely makes sense given that Dan himself was (probably) the world’s highest paid copywriter for a time. His secret? He wrote faster and more than anybody else.

But maybe that’s not all there is to this saying.

Maybe it’s about making more money through fast product fulfillment and customers service… or through the promise of speedy results or relief from pain… or even through concentration-enhancing drugs like Ritalin.

Well, maybe those are a bit far-fetched.

​​But here’s something that’s almost certainly true. I didn’t think of it myself, but I managed to catch it when two successful marketers (Rich Schefren and Kim Walsh Phillips) mentioned it during a recent interview.

What they said was that ascending customers quickly means you will make more money.

And if you don’t know what I mean by ascending, it is standard direct response stuff: you first sell somebody a $47 newsletter, then a $197 course, then a $4997 yearly subscription service.

And what Rich and Kim were saying, as an interpretation of Dan’s “money loves speed,” is that the faster you do this — all in the same sitting is just great — the more money you will make.

Fast ascension. Not waiting weeks, months, or years to push your customers to the next level of commitment with you.

Which is pretty much the same thing you will hear in the pickup niche, where they talk about “fast escalation” as the end-all technique to attracting women.

Perhaps you find this off-putting. Or too aggressive. Perhaps it’s not for you.

But I think it’s good to at least keep it in the back of your mind. Because money — and women — love speed.

Since you’ve read this far, let’s try some fast ascension:

I write a daily email newsletter about marketing and copywriting. It’s not for everybody. But maybe you will like it. If you’d like to sign up, click here.

“I’ve made a huge mistake”

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I loved the original run of the TV show Arrested Development, in large part because I identified with the no-good character of Gob Bluth.

If you’ve never seen the show, I can’t do it justice here. So let me just say Gob is an irresponsible, childish, struggling stage magician.

He doesn’t think too far ahead and he consistently jumps into problem situations, such as making unintended marriage proposals or voluntarily going to prison. This sets him up for his catchphrase:

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

Like I said, it might not be funny here in this post, but it’s funny in the show. And it’s funny because I, and I guess many other people, know that sinking feeling.

It happens when you’re here on your grassy but dull knoll… looking at that other grassy but sparkling knoll over there.

Your desire builds until it becomes unbearable. So you charge down your grassy knoll and up the other grassy knoll. And once you reach the top, all sweaty and winded, you notice this new grassy knoll is no better, and is probably worse, than where you started.

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

Thing is, this pre-existing condition in the human mind — that anything else must be better than what you’ve currently got — can be exploited for sales.

Don’t take my word for it. It’s an idea that many successful marketers have expressed in slightly different ways.

Todd Brown advises not selling improvement on what your prospect already has, but a new solution.

Rich Schefren’s koan for this is, “Different is better than better.”

And Dan Kenendy says, “Sell escape, and not improvement.”

But doesn’t that mean setting your prospect up for a huge mistake? It certainly can. But if you are more forward-thinking than Gob Bluth, then you will water and prune your grassy knoll… so when your prospect arrives, all sweaty and winded, he will see the grass truly is greener there.

And now for something completely different:

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From good-looking and talented to star in one easy step

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In 1969, Robert Redford was a good-looking, talented, accomplished actor. But he was not an A-list celebrity. “Throw a stick at Malibu,” said a Hollywood insider, “and you’ll hit six of him.”

And yet, after a single movie (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), Redford became the biggest star in Hollywood — not just for 1969, but for the entire coming decade.

In 2009 (or thereabouts), Rich Schefren was a successful and respected online entrepreneur and business coach. But he was not the no. 1 name in the Internet marketing space. He was certainly not getting mainstream attention.

And yet, after writing a single 40-page report (The Internet Business Manifesto), Schefren became a star in his field. Millions of downloads of his report followed, along with hundreds of new clients, and even the attention of big brands like Verizon.

My point is that a single piece of work can make you a breakout success. It can transform you from somebody who is skilled, prepared, and talented… into a star in your industry.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a recipe for you to become an A-list Hollywood celebrity.

I do have a good idea of how Rich achieved such big success with his Internet Business Manifesto. He’s been open with his strategies, and if you start following him online and going through all the content he’s publishing (a good use of your time), you’ll get the idea too.

However, if for some reason you don’t have time… or you hate the idea of following Rich Schefren… you’ll find the gist of Rich’s strategy in Commandment 7 of my upcoming book on valuable ideas handed down by A-list copywriters.

(Rich, by the way, is not an A-list copywriter. He’s just a very successful marketer, and somebody I’m using to illustrate a copywriting technique, which works just as well in the Internet Business Manifesto as it does in a cold traffic sales letter.)

Anyways, I’m making good progress with this little book, and it should be out by the end of this month. If you want to get notified when my book comes out, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter.

A close entrepreneurial shave

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I’ve just had the most homoerotic experience, if not of my life, then certainly of the past 14 years.

I paid a man, much younger than me, to massage, caress, and pinch me. He did his job dutifully for almost exactly a half hour.

I won’t lie to you. I was massively relieved at the end of it. And with the transaction over, I couldn’t wait to get away.

So I handed the young man the equivalent of about $7, wrote my name on the obligatory covid-tracking sheet, and ran the hell out of the barber shop.

It never occurred to me to get a professional shave until today, but I’ll try anything once. And to be honest, I was chuffed with myself for going through this experience.

Only thing is, the shave wasn’t very good.

I realized it once I got home and checked in the mirror. I looked like a disheveled computer science professor I once had — smooth cheek on one side, five o’clock shadow on the other, uneven bits of stubble under my nose, tiny blotches of blood everywhere.

There was nothing left to do but get out the trusty Sensor Excel and do the job right myself.

So why is this relevant to you?

Probably no reason. Except in the unlikely case that you are an entrepreneur, or want to become one, but the thought of hiring people and managing them gives you the runs.

In spite of all the outsourcing porn and the advice about focusing on your most valuable 20%, the fact remains that you are still probably the best person to do many jobs around your business.

Sure, that can be a terrible limiting factor. But some business owners go surprisingly far by being a one-man band.

And in any case, if you hate the idea of recruiting, hiring, training, and keeping employees happy, then you might not have any choice.

​​​If this side of your personality is truly ingrained, then better accept it and figure out how to live with it.

​​As business coach Rich Schefren likes to say, “Put your shaving goals ahead of your massage goals.” No, I got that wrong. “Put your business goals ahead of your personal development goals.” That’s right.

But if you want to do things by yourself, you’ll need to get some good advice. I can’t help you with shaving. But for marketing and copywriting advice, you might like my daily email newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

Two multi-millionaire marketers go into a cigar bar…

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Today I was listening to the newest edition of Steal Our Winners, and Internet marketer Rich Schefren told a quick story.

He said that around 10 years ago, he started writing daily, slice-of-life, Matt Furey-style emails, much like what you’re reading now.

And then, at a cigar bar, he ran into Mark Ford. Mark is a big-name copywriter and one of the main guys behind the direct response juggernaut Agora.

“Look, this is the poor man’s Agora,” Rich said to Mark about those daily emails. (Then, as now, Agora was sending out emails every day, real serious editorial stuff.)

“Actually, I like this better than what we do at Agora,” said Mark. “And let me tell you why.”

The gist of it was, Rich’s slice-of-life emails were sometimes short, sometimes long. Sometimes a paragraph, sometimes a page.

That kept the reader guessing.

The reader could never say, “Oh I don’t have the time to read this now.” That meant each time an email hit him, he couldn’t dismiss it.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom in what Mark Ford said. It makes good sense to keep your reader guessing, and not just about the length of your emails.

I could tell you more.

But in the interest of keeping this post short, well… all I can say is, if you want more, you can sign up to my daily email newsletter.

Tempting your prospect into adultery

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I just read an Atlantic article about why people cheat, even in seemingly happy relationships.

The article describes the case of one Priya, a dutiful woman married to her “dream guy” but cheating with a tattooed truck driver. Priya is torn and miserable about how she is risking it all and how horrified her husband would be if he found out. But she can’t let the affair go.

It seems to me the real reason why people cheat is unknowable, even to those doing the cheating. ​​My theory is that people do these kinds of things from layers upon layers of deep and hidden motivations, which are usually plastered over by a story the cheater tells him or herself (“There’s no more passion in my marriage,” “It just happened”).

But enough about sex. Let’s talk marketing.

Specifically, let’s talk adultery, but within the context of getting people to start cheating on their current solution, and having an affair with your offer instead.

Fact is, if somebody is in a given market, then they have problems and deep motivations that are not being satisfied by the current solution they are using. That’s by definition. If they were perfectly satisfied, they wouldn’t be in your target market.

And there’s a clever way to tell your prospects a story that gets their minds and wallets a-wandering. It’s a combination of something I heard from marketers Stefan Georgi and Rich Schefren. And it’s something I’m writing up in a little book I’m putting together just now.

That book will be out in the next few weeks. If you’d like to get notified when it’s out, so you can read about this little adultery-causing technique, you can sign up for my daily email newsletter.

The beautiful future of text sales letters

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“All train compartments smell vaguely of shit. It gets so you don’t mind it.”
— Ricky Roma, Glengarry Glen Ross

Right now, everybody’s so in love with copy.

In certain circles, this love even goes further, to a certain pride about ugly websites and ugly emails and ugly sales letters. “Who cares? If you’re interesting, if you write well, people will read your message even if it’s written on used toilet paper!”

There are even people who claim they’ve tested this. They claim that ugly, because it stands out, outperforms beautiful.

I can believe this. But here’s the thing:

If everybody’s making an ugly website in the hope of shocking people into handing over their attention… then ugly stops being different.

It gets so you don’t mind it, like Ricky Roma says in the quote above. And at that point, ugly loses its selling power.

I bring this up because I’m listening to an interview right now that Rich Schefren did with a marketer named Sean Vosler.

Rich spends the first five minutes of the interview enthusing about Sean and his work. Rich thinks this is the future of marketing.

He even gets so excited that he pulls up his text messages on screen, to prove how he just had an exchange with Jay Abraham, and how he invited Jay to join this interview. Rich thinks Sean’s stuff is so revolutionary that even Jay needs to see it.

So what exactly is Sean doing?

Well, he is selling a book about copywriting. That’s not unusual. What is unusual is that the book and its sales page are very professionally and beautifully designed (by Sean himself, who has a a background in design).

The point, as Rich puts it, is that “different is better than better.”

And in a world where many marketers are taking pride in making garish-looking sales pages… or sending boring and plain-looking emails (like the ones I send out in my email newsletter)… in that world, a beautiful design like Sean’s looks different. It gets attention. And that’s half the sale.

By the way, this is part of a bigger trend.

Last autumn, I wrote about a similar move to higher production values in VSLs. And now text sales letters seem to be headed in the same direction.

So if you are a marketer or business owner, this beautiful design stuff is something to keep in mind.

And if you are a copywriter, this is something you can bring up to your clients, and make yourself seem well-informed and cutting-edge.

But wait, you might say.

What exactly makes for beautiful design in a marketing context?

I can’t say. I’m not a designer. But if you want to see Sean’s sales page, the one Rich Schefren was so enthusiastic about, here’s the link so you can judge for yourself:

https://bejakovic.com/sean-vosler

When marketing jiggery pokery backfires

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One time, I stopped a girl on the street, and I unsuccessfully tried to run game.

That means I didn’t ask her any questions like other boring guys would do. Instead, I made observational statements.

“You look like you’re from Sweden,” I said.

“No,” the girl said.

“Really. Because with the blonde hair and the dark clothes and that confident attitude… you gave me a definite Nordic vibe.”

She just stared at me.

“Yep, I can imagine you, walking down a street in Stockholm, listening to Ace of Base, ready to board your Viking ship.”

She started to frown. My stupid assumptions were not getting me anywhere. Should I escape to safety and call it a day? I decided on one last desperate play.

“So… where are you from?”

“Oh, I’m from Slovakia,” she said, brightening up. She started to talk. I listened. A few minutes later, I asked her to sit down for an orange juice with me. She said ok.

I’m not saying that game doesn’t work. It definitely does. But sometimes… you don’t need game. And on rare occasions, game can in fact backfire.

Same thing with high-octane marketing.

Late in 2019, I signed up to Agora’s Daily Insider Secrets. That’s the free daily email newsletter for Agora’s newest imprint, which deals with copywriting and marketing.

They sent interesting emails. I read them on occasion, and I wondered what it was leading to.

And then it came.

A 72-hour marathon live stream… with some of the biggest names in the Internet Marketing world, most of whom I had never heard of… sharing tips and tricks to help you make a million dollars, stat.

At this point, I tuned out.

I wasn’t sure what exactly they were selling. I wasn’t curious to find out. All the emails about the live stream I kept getting didn’t change my mind.

Some time later, quite by accident, I did find out what the offer was.

The main part is like a video newsletter. Each month, Rich Schefren interviews several successful marketers, and they spill the rice on what’s working for them right now.

Then there are several bonuses, including a recording of a 12-day training course that Agora gave its new media buyers back in 2018.

I think there’s more stuff too. And you get all of this for some ridiculous price like $50 a year (the standard Agora newsletter subscription rate).

At which point, I said, “Oh, I’m from Croatia,” and I got out my credit card. I don’t know why they didn’t just start off with that charming and seductive offer, instead of the live stream jiggery pokery.

Anyways, having gone through the past two months’ worth of interviews inside… and going through the media buying training now… I can comfortably recommend Steal Our Winners. It’s worth tracking down and checking out.

But you know what?

Most offers out there, particularly in the Internet Marketing and copywriting space, are just awful.

And if you want to keep an eye out on the bad ones, and get an occasional recommendation for the rare good ones, you might like to sign up to my daily email newsletter. You can join it for free by clicking here.

The Son of 4-Hour Work Week

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“There is an inverse relationship between the value of knowledge and what people are willing to pay for it. The most important things in life you’ve probably heard a hundred times before, but you’re not paying attention. When you’re in the right place and you hear it, you have that ‘aha’ moment and everything changes.”
— Mark Ford

In 2007, Tim Ferris published The 4-Hour Work Week.

The book had great kairos. It hit the New York Times Best Seller list, stayed there for four years, and sold over 2 million copies.

And it wasn’t just 4HWW. Around the same time, lots of marketers were telling you how to make good money online by building lots of tiny niche websites… or publishing dozens of crappy ebooks… or in general making some hit-and-run cash grab.

I’m sure you can still find these kinds of offers floating around the Internet. But my feeling is — and I could be wrong — that the zeitgeist has changed.

For a while now, the pendulum has swung in the other direction.

That’s the direction of building a real business, a personal brand, of creating an asset. Like Rich Schefren said recently (I’m paraphrasing):

“Why would you want to have a job that you hate so much you only do it for four hours a week? Why not build a business that you love to work in every day?”

The thing is, markets get saturated. People get bored of hearing the same message, even if it is completely on-the-money.

And my suspicion is, right now, the pendulum of “Build a sustainable business” is at its peak.

I hallucinate the pendulum will come swinging down soon. People will again be ready to hear the message that you can make passive income, and that money-getting can be reduced to an occasional unpleasant chore, much like going to the dentist.

That’s just my prediction. I’m sharing with you for two reasons:

1. If you haven’t been able to buy into the “Build a business you love” mantra, and you feel guilty about it (as I do), then better times might be ahead.

2. Like I said, it’s been over 10 years since The 4-Hour Work Week was published. Since then, there hasn’t been any money-making book that’s hit the mainstream and had the same impact.

In other words, there might be an opportunity here. If you get going on writing something right now, you might have it ready just as the world starts to emerge from its current months-long delirium. ​​

​​You might even become the next Tim Ferriss. ​​Only trouble is, much like Tim Ferriss, you’ll have to work much more than four hours a week to get there.

In other news, I have an email newsletter where I write about marketing and copywriting. Topics like what you just read. So if you want a regular daily diet of such essays, here’s where to go.

Salvation for low self-esteem prospects

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Martin Luther was obsessed with images of the devil’s butt.

Luther was tormented, day after day, by the awareness of his sins and impurities.

He went to confession so often and confessed in such detail that his confessors grew angry.

Had Martin Luther been born today, there’s a good chance he would be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and medicated accordingly.

But because Luther was born in the right environment for his particular kind of crazy, he went on to become one of the most influential persons of the last thousand years.

Point being, a seeming weakness or fault can actually be a tremendous strength — in the right circumstances.

Yesterday, I promised to tell you one way you can convince your prospects that success for them is probable, and not just possible.

This is something I picked up in a talk by Rich Schefren. Rich said that one of the biggest things you have to do as a marketer is increase your prospect’s self-esteem.

And the way to do that is to take something your prospect doesn’t like about himself… and to twist it, so it becomes a potential strength.

“You say you’re obsessed with images of the devil’s butt? That’s actually a good thing. It means you’re on the lookout for moral weakness, which can help you and others from sliding into sin.”

Of course, you’re probably not selling to Martin Luther types.

But with a bit of thinking, you can show your prospect how his procrastination… or shiny-object addiction… or never following through… are just bad manifestations of a good kind of crazy inside him. In slightly different circumstances, the underlying positive characteristics would make him a success.

And how could he change his circumstances in the right way? The path to salvation is quick and easy. It lies in taking you up on your offer.

Here’s an offer that is sure to help you rid yourself of intrusive images of demonic behinds: I write a daily email newsletter. It talks about the fine points of persuasion and copywriting. And if you’d like to keep yourself far from the temptation to slack off in your learning about persuasion and copywriting, then click here to subscribe.