Travis Sago

The analogy jackpot

by

For the past few days, I’ve been staying in a horrific neighborhood at the edge of town. It’s a mess of oversized private houses, thoroughfares, cars, fast food restaurants, shopping malls, and construction.

Now I’m in Europe at the moment, so this is not identical to your typical American suburb.

But if you don’t like the suburbs where you live, and you either prefer the country or the urban center, then perhaps you will agree with me that the outskirts of town are the worst.

I bring this up because yesterday, I read an article with the title, The Growth Ponzi Scheme. It was written by a guy who is lobbying against suburbs and for something he calls “Strong Towns.”

I’m sure he’s got his own inner reasons why he doesn’t like the suburbs. But his argument in the article is that the suburbs are a typical Ponzi scheme.

They were created with the promise of economic growth.

But the cost of maintaining the suburb (roads, electrical grid, etc.) is much more than the taxes and economic growth that come out.

So the only way to maintain the illusion of growth is to dump still more money into building out the suburbs today, which will require still more money dumped in tomorrow.

In other words, it’s a typical Ponzi scheme. And all of us become suckers when this scam finally comes crashing down.

I found this argument exciting for my own personal reasons.

It felt right enough. Plus it’s such a simple and clear idea to hold in my head. And it’s new! I couldn’t wait to share it with you.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this.

Calling the suburbs a Ponzi scheme is an analogy.

If people haven’t heard an analogy before… if the details fit well enough… and if the overall feel is right… then the result is what marketer Travis Sago calls a braingasm (a breakthrough analogy in its own right).

My point is that persuading by analogy is super powerful. And it doesn’t even have to be “true.”

Yeah, I’m sure the “Strong Towns” guy did his research. I’m sure he’s got numbers to back up his analogy.

Even so, he’s cherry picking just a few details of a very complex situation for his own purposes.

Somebody else, with a different agenda, might give a different analogy instead. He might say that suburbs are like the brick house built by the smartest of the three little pigs.

He might say it’s smart to invest in solid, spacious, and yet connected infrastructure, even if its value is not yet obvious.

But when the Big Bad Wolf of the next pandemic comes knocking at the door… we will see where our friends from Straw City and Backwoods Country come running to.

Whatever. I just made that up. Perhaps you found it convincing. Perhaps not.

No worries in that case. Because that’s my takeaway for you.

Persuading by analogy is like a slot machine. It’s cheap to play a game. In fact, you can mint your own coin with just a bit of thinking.

Of course, the odds of winning any given game are small. But if you keep at it long enough, you will win. And the payout can be huge. A jackpot.

Final point:

If you want to watch me play the analogy slot machine a few more times, you can do that here.

Persuasive vemödalen

by

I’m staying in a beautiful coast town these days so I just went for a walk along the shore. The sun was shining, the trees were doing their thing, and the sea, a few cliffs below where I was walking, was shuffling restlessly from side to side. I got tempted — for just a moment — to take out my phone and take a picture.

“But what’s the point?” I told myself.

Because I realized a long time ago that the only time I think to take a picture is when I come across a scene that looks like pictures I’ve seen before.

“Gee, this looks just like a postcard. Better create another postcard myself!”

If you love to take pictures with your phone, my point is not to razz on you. Instead, I just want to point out, in case you feel like I feel — that so much photography is repetitive and redundant — that there’s a word for this.

The word was coined in 2014 by a guy named John Koenig. ​Koenig called this vague intuition many of us have probably had — he called it vemödalen.

​​So now, when you and I talk to our friends, we can call this feeling by its name and we can communicate it to others. We have a handle on it, and it’s much more real in our minds. (Well, it would be, if we could only remember the word vemödalen and know how to pronounce it.)

Before you start thinking I’m getting sentimental, let me turn things around to hard-core direct marketing. Specifically, something marketer Travis Sago shared once in a podcast, about how he does email marketing:

What’s different and what I found works really well and takes a lot of lifting off the writing is bringing out what symptoms do they have, what symptoms are they seeing or feeling or hearing in their life? What is he saying? What’s happening in their life and starting out with the symptoms.

[…]

I’ll have to admit, some days I’m just brain dead and I’ll just go with the problem. But it’s way more powerful to go with the symptom.

What Travis doesn’t say in this quote is that when he talks about a symptom, he will often focus on a “new” symptom. Not new in the sense that it just popped up… but new in the sense that nobody else has talked about it, and even his prospect might not have a conscious awareness of it.

​​Even better if you can give it a name. Kind of like vemödalen. That’s what Travis does — and he manages to convert something like 25% of his list over time.

But speaking of unnamed symptoms:

Do you know that feeling when you’re nearing the end of a novel, and you start to feel a bittersweet angst, knowing that the characters you’ve made friends with over the past weeks will disappear from your life? I checked, and it’s called lithatonophobia.

The good news is, you never need to feel lithatonophobia at the end of one of my blog posts. Because I write a new email each day with new marketing and copywriting content. And if you’d like to keep that in your life, here’s where you can join my newsletter.

Offer flu

by

Today, I want to quickly warn you about a dangerous pandemic that’s cutting down hundreds or even thousands of bright and eager entrepreneurs. It’s called offer flu, and it was first discovered by marketer Travis Sago.

According to Travis, offer flu starts with the following warning symptoms:

1. You think your whole sales success depends on your reputation (or you think you cannot be successful without a reputation)

2. You can’t make any of your ads work, or you need high-tech webinars, segmentation, or funnels, just to barely turn a profit

3. If you replace your product or your company’s name with your competitor’s, you find your marketplace doesn’t notice or doesn’t “give a crap” (Travis’s words)

The concerning thing is that offer flu is highly contagious. The more people you are exposed to who have offer flu… the more likely you are to contract it yourself. And that’s a terrible thing.

Because in the final, deadly stages of offer flu, you become incapable of saying anything unique. You start spouting out gibberish power words — 7-figure! Blueprint! Inner circle! — and yet you can’t stir any kind of response from the marketplace.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that, for those lucky few who are naturally immune to offer flu, or the even rarer birds who have received both shots of the exclusive offer flu vaccine, life is pleasant and easy.

Travis says that, if you don’t have offer flu, you can even put your offer in a simple Word doc… send this to the right people… and get back an enthusiastic “Hell yeah, I want this!” along with free money in your PayPal account.

If, that is, you don’t have offer flu. So how can you protect yourself from this crippling disease?

The cure, in two words, is “specificity” and “problems.” But if you want the full 2-shot vaccine, I suggest you listen to Travis’s “Natural Offer Flu Cures” course. It’s free, and it’s available in the “Videos” section of his Facebook group, right here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/milliondollaroffermojo

“… I want to think about it”

by

In a private and exclusive Facebook group I am lucky to be a member of, marketer Travis Sago asked the following:

“How do you respond to, ‘I want to think about it?'”

Travis was talking about doing one-on-one sales, rather than persuading the masses.

His question ties in nicely to my post from yesterday. That was about A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga, and the failure he experienced when trying to sell in person.

So ask yourself. How would you respond if a prospect wants time to think about buying whatever you’re selling?

If you know online marketing, you might spike up the urgency.

“Only 72 left in stock!”

“The timer is ticking! Once it runs out, this offer will be taken down!”

“The price will go up after midnight!”

That’s not what Travis recommends. Instead, this is what he says:

“Take all the time you need. What had you considering this at all?”

That’s very clever and nuanced. It sums up, in two sentences, much wisdom that came from negotiation coach Jim Camp. Camp talked about things like going for the no… eliminating your own neediness… and using open-ended questions to get your adversary to paint a vision of his own pain.

Camp’s system was used in big ticket, multi-million dollar negotiations. Travis is using it to sell $5k and $10k and $50k offers. He says this approach has made him millions, and I believe him.

So now you know an effective way to deal with an important objection in one-on-one sales.

But what if you’re doing online mass marketing, or writing sales copy? Can you profit from Travis’s laid-back system? Or would using it be suicide?

After years of slow thinking, I have one or two thoughts on the matter. And maybe, I will share them some time soon, after the timer runs out. If you want to hear what I have to say, you can sign up for my email newsletter.

Why ecommerce list owners should beware high open rates

by

Today, I checked the sales numbers for an email A/B test I sent a couple days ago.

Roughly speaking, subject line A had 50% more opens… 50% more clickthroughs… and 50% fewer sales.

Let me repeat that:

50% more people clicked through the email to the advertorial…

But 50% FEWER people actually got out their credit card and handed over their banking ones and zeros.

And yes, in case you are wondering, the subject line was the only difference among the two email versions, and the numbers were big enough to be statistically significant, whatever that means.

This is a dramatic illustration of something I’ve written about before. And that is, for this particular list of about 50,000 ecommerce buyers, we’ve seen an inverse relationship between opens and sales. I even calculated once that each 1% bump in open rates cost us about $100 in sales. But I’ve never seen crazy inverse numbers like with the email above.

So what’s going on?

Who the hell knows. My guess is that different subject lines 1) select different segments of the market and 2) put prospects into different buying/unbuying moods.

Whatever the case, I think this example is good to keep in mind.

I’m not saying that for your market, you will see the same inverse relationship. But it definitely makes sense to be wary of increasing open rates for the sake of increasing open rates.

So what should you do instead?

I heard a good piece of advice once from marketer Travis Sago. Travis has made a lot of money with his emails and is a bit of an expert on the topic. His advice is to write your subject lines as though you have to pay for each open. Qualify your email prospects. Use market-specific language. Do whatever you can so only those people who are most likely to buy will open, and nobody else.

Speaking of most likely to buy:

If you want more tested and proven email marketing advice, well, it’s not something I write about all that often in my daily email newsletter. But I do write about it on occasion. Plus I write about marketing and influence and persuasion more broadly. In case you are interested, you can sign up to my newsletter here.

A less painful path to sales and success

by

“According to family tradition, my great-grandfather used to say about the mules on his farm, ‘To get their attention you have to hit them between the eyes with a two-by-four. When you have their attention, they can see what they ought to do.'”
— Jim Camp, No

Jim Camp was a top-tier negotiation coach. One of the pillars of his negotiation system was to help the other side get a crystal-clear vision of the problem, and of the pain of that problem.

​​But people don’t usually respond to the two-by-four, Camp said. You don’t want the vision of the pain to be so extreme that people become blinded.

Travis Sago is a successful online marketer. One metaphor Travis uses is called “hell island.”

​​In a nutshell, your prospects are currently on hell island. You can help them get to heaven island. You want to make that clear to them, says Travis. But you don’t want to “burn hell island down.”

That can be hard to accept. Our brains love consistency. If a little bit is good… then a lot is even better, right?

Not necessarily. At least that’s what the two shrewd dogs above are saying.

I bring this up because of my post yesterday. I was writing how one way to get motivated is to focus on all the things you will lose if you don’t succeed… and to make that vision bloody and raw.

I’ve tried this with some of my own projects. It didn’t work for me. I created a fearful and bloody vision of failure. I still quit when the going got uncertain.

So let me wrap up with one last quote for today, this one by Mark Ford:

“Human beings are designed to get better through practice. Everything we ever learn to do – from walking to talking to writing concertos – gets better through practice. […] Practice doesn’t make perfect. That’s a foolish idea. Practice makes better. And better is where all the enjoyment is in learning.”

So that’s the final thought I want to leave you with. Perhaps success is not about inhuman levels of motivation. Or about having sufficient passion.

​​Perhaps success is simply about choosing a field where you don’t mind getting better. Where the daily work is something you find enjoyable enough — or at least, not too repulsive — so you can continue to get better at it day after day.

I hope this idea will be useful to you as you navigate your career or business. But don’t worry, I won’t go on with this froufrou self-actualization stuff. Tomorrow, we will get back on track with hardcore, practical, direct response sleight-of-hand.

In case you want to get tomorrow’s email as it comes out, here’s where to subscribe to my newsletter.

Planning out your offers: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday

by

Last summer, I was talking to copywriter Dan Ferrari about joining his coaching group.

“Where do you see yourself in 18 months?” Dan asked. I told Dan then what I will tell you now:

I have no idea. 6 months is kind of my horizon. I can’t see much in life beyond that.

Over the years, I’ve tried making long-term goals. But when the long-term rolls around, it always turns out that either 1) my goals were stupid or 2) I changed in the meantime.

That’s why I now feel that projecting more than a few steps into the future is a waste of time.

In fact, you might call it mental masturbation. That’s the term marketer Travis Sago uses to describe “jam tomorrow” plans — not plans for yourself, but for your customers.

I alluded to Travis yesterday. He makes millions in profits each year, and he’s got some unorthodox ways of doing it. For example, the way he plans out his offers.

Most businesses only focus on their current offer. If they’re smart, they think one offer beyond that. If they’re really smart, they think two offers beyond.

But not Travis. Travis says this “smart” way of planning your offers — two offers ahead — is infinitely better than not having any plan. The problem is, it’s hard to guess what people actually want ahead of time.

So Travis advises looking two offers back.

First, figure out who the clients are you want to work with long-term. Then work backwards to figure out what offers you’d need to sell those clients…. so the final, big offer you really want them to take becomes a-no brainer for them.

This might sound like a trivial shift in thinking. But Travis claims this “two offers back” strategy brings in huge results in his business and in the businesses he advises. It means 50% conversions or higher on the back end… and more importantly, it means Travis’s seminars and continuity programs, all of which cost multiple thousands of dollars, always sell out.

But maybe you’re not convinced. Maybe this still sounds vague. Maybe an example would help.

If so, write in and let me know. I’m applying Travis’s “two offers back” approach to a business idea I currently have. If there’s enough interest, I’ll go ahead and share my personal example in a future email.

A planet where it rains dollars in the evenings

by

There’s a planet out there called WASP-76b where it rains iron in the evenings.

(I’m not making this up.)

One side of WASP-76b always faces its star. This side is super hot — 2400 degrees Celsius — and iron melts there and rises into the air as vapor.

The other side of WASP-76b is always in the dark. It’s a balmy 1500 Celsius there.

In between the light side and the dark side, there’s a shadow area, or you might call it the evening area, where the iron vapor condenses and comes raining down.

Like I said, I didn’t make any of this up. Scientists reported it in a new paper published in Nature just a few days ago.

But what if I did make it up?

Well, I might be on to something profitable in that case.

Because as Ben Settle said in one of his recent emails, there’s a lot of value in “world building.” That’s what fantasy and sci-fi authors like JRR Tolkien and Frank Herbert do: They invent entire worlds or universes, including made up ecologies, histories, languages, mating rituals.

When done right, these made-up worlds have a coherence of their own… and they suck readers and fans in like magic.

Of course, maybe you’re not interested in writing a fantasy or sci-fi saga. Fear not.

World building also applies to marketing your stuff online.

Ben Settle is actually a good example of this, with his gooroos and Maynard trolls and conemtptible new product junkies — all characters who keep reappering in his emails.

But you know who’s even better at world building?

It’s somebody I call the “Ben Settle of Facebook.”

Much like Ben, this guy has a rabid audience that will pay outsized fees — $2k or $5k or more a month — just to sit at this guru’s feet and learn from him.

Much like Ben, he’s also a student of the classics of copywriting (Gary Bencivenga) and persuasion (Jim Camp).

The only difference is that, while Ben is abrasive and loves to mock and shame, this Facebook world-builder is all smiles and cuddles.

I’ve mentioned him many times in these emails, but in case you don’t know who I’m talking about, his name is Travis Sago.

Travis has a bunch of micro-groups on Facebook and each group is like a miniature part of a bigger story. Each group explains one aspect of Travis’s money-making mythology — things like tapping, the 30 year wealth shortcut, and the mini monopoly. It’s a masterclass in world building… and in making money rain down every evening.

But The Lord of the Rings is pretty lame if you hear me retell it. You have to read it for yourself. Same with Travis Sago. So if you want to see how he builds his worlds in all their detail and complexity, here’s the entry point into his orbit:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/milliondollaroffermojo/

The most valuable persuasion tool?

by

It’s a tense moment.

Carrol Shelby is sitting in the wood-paneled lobby of the great man’s office, waiting to be admitted. While waiting, hat in hand, he sees a curious sight:

A courier brings up a Ferrari-red folder and hands it off to one secretary… who hands it off to a second… who gives it to a third… who then takes it behind closed doors.

Eventually, the last secretary comes back out and faces Carrol Shelby.

“Mr. Ford will see you now.”

This is a scene from the new Ford vs. Ferrari movie, which I went to see last night.

And while the movie has lots of hot shots of sexy race cars, I thought this scene, and the one that follows, were the most interesting, particularly from a persuasion standpoint. Because once Shelby is in front of Henry Ford II, he has to explain himself.

Shelby was put in charge of developing a new racing car for Ford, and winning an important race. He failed miserably.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t fire you right now,” Ford barks at him.

Instead of answering, Carroll Shelby clears his throat. And he starts talking about the red folder he just saw… and how it had to change a half dozen hands before it could land on Henry Ford’s desk.

“The Ford Company is too bureaucratic,” Shelby is effectively telling Ford, “and that’s not how you build winning race cars.”

Ford is not pleased, but he’s listening. And a few moments later, he is convinced.

“We’re not just good at pushing paper here,” Ford says to Shelby. “Go to war. And from now on you report only to me.”

Now of course, this is a scene from a movie. But I think it’s a great illustration of a valuable — perhaps most valuable — persuasion tool.

Fact is, if you’re not having success persuading somebody, whether that’s a sales situation or any other kind of negotiation… then odds are good you’re not using this massive hammer of influence.

Because I heard one very successful marketer, Travis Sago, call this the most valuable persuasion tool he knows and uses to regularly enter new markets, and eventually make million-dollar paydays.

Travis even said he’d would rather have this tool than a cool $2.5 million in the bank — because with clever use of this one tool, he could easily make that money back.

According to big T, this tool is the best way to nudge people from cold and disinterested… to trusting you and being willing to do what you ask.

So what exactly is the magical and powerful persuasion tool?

​​It’s right there, hidden behind the story of Carrol Shelby and the red folder.

In a word, it’s insight.

In several words, it’s giving your customer/prospect/adversary deeper insight into his own problem.

The Carroll Shelby story is one illustration of how to do this. But if you start thinking about this topic, and looking out for this simple idea, I bet you will start to find other ways to force new insight into your audience. ​​And if Travis Sago is right, then your persuasive powers will explode, even if you’ve got little else going for you at the moment.

2 theories about the turkey and its name

by

There are two theories how the turkey got its name:

Theory one says that confused colonizers thought the turkey, originally a native of Mexico, was a type of guinea fowl, which Turkish merchants were already selling in Europe.

Theory two says that the turkey traveled around the world before making its way to England, where it was imported by Middle Eastern poultry peddlers.

Either way, the beast became known as a turkey cock or turkey hen. Eventually we dropped the cock and the hen, got out the cranberry sauce, and the party started.

I bring this up because today is Thanksgiving, and everybody in the marketing space is sending out emails and writing Facebook posts saying, “I’m grateful for you, dear reader.”

Perhaps they really are grateful. Perhaps it’s just the pilgrim bandwagon everybody has to jump on. “You gotta build a relationship with your subscribers!”

Which reminds me of something I read from Travis Sago. Travis is a very successful marketer and one of the very best at building a relationship online with a bunch of people who don’t really know him. Says Travis,

“You don’t make friends by dropping off Encyclopedia Britannica’s at somebody’s house.”

My gut feeling is that you don’t make friends by sending out emails either, as long as their gist is, “I’m so grateful for you, and here’s a coupon for 10% off.”

But what do I know. Maybe I’m all messed up in the head. Maybe I’m just envious, and irritable because I’m dreaming of the pounds and pounds of turkey cock, the ladles of mashed potatoes, the fat slices of pumpkin pie many people will be eating today.

(Where I live it’s unfortunately not a tradition, although I did develop a Thanksgiving tooth during my long life in the US.)

Anyways, if you are celebrating today, happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy your feast. And we will get back to our regular relationship-building program tomorrow.