Yesterday, I was flying from Girona, Spain to Zagreb, Croatia. It was not a pleasant flight. I tried to distract myself by opening up a valuable marketing book I’ve been reading:
Ice To The Eskimos, or, How To Market A Product Nobody Wants
I’ve been at this book for a couple of weeks already. I’m a very slow reader, which means I’ve just started chapter 5.
“Finally,” I said to myself as I started reading. “Now we’re getting into the sexy stuff, getting new customers!”
But that’s a classic mistake I was making.
Sure, the chapter 5 stuff sounded sexy.
But there were 4 chapters that the author thought were more important to write about before that.
The author of this book is Jon Spoelstra. Spoelstra was a sports marketer who was brought in to boost sales at the New Jersey Nets back in the 1990s.
Here was Spoelstra’s first and most important lesson:
Back in the early 90s, the New Jersey Nets were the worst team in the NBA. They had no stars. They even had no kind of home team advantage — New Jersey residents support the New York Knicks. To top it all off, there was a legitimate curse on the franchise.
The owners brought in Spoelstra to try to turn things around.
They told him to devise a strategy to lure people from Manhattan to buy Nets tickets. After all, Manhattan is so rich and so near, and so full of people hungry for entertainment.
Spoelstra refused.
He called it his Ulysses Method.
Spoelstra plugged up the owners’ ears with wax. He lashed himself to the mast of the Nets ship, so he would not be tempted to heed the siren song that leads to certain ruin, trying to woo customers from a sexy segment of the market where he just. could. not. win.
Instead, Spoelstra focused on unsexy New Jersey. Result:
The Nets went from zero sold-out games the year before Spoelstra was hired, to 35 sold-out games a few years later.
During the same time, the Nets also managed to increase revenue from local sponsorships from $400k per year to more than $7 million per year.
How Spoelstra achieved this is clever and worth knowing, and Spoelstra’s book is worth reading.
But none of it would have mattered much if not for the basic Ulysses Method.
I’m telling you this because I needed being told this myself.
When I first read Spoelstra’s chapter about the Ulysses Method, I impatiently sped through.
“Sure of course makes sense. But not really relevant to me. I am in no danger of chasing after markets where I can’t win.”
A few days passed. With a bit of space and time, I slowly realized Spoelstra’s warning applies very directly to me, and to stuff I’m trying to do now.
So I’m sharing the Ulysses Method with you now, because maybe you can use it as well.
All right, on to my offer to you for today:
If you feel you never learned the fundamentals of copywriting, and you’ve just been winging it based on what you’ve observed others doing, then my Copy Riddles program might be the fix you’re looking for.
Copy Riddles covers the A-Z of copywriting in 20 individual rounds.
Each round covers a specific copywriting topic or technique. The topics and techniques get progressively more sophisticated and rarefied as the 20 rounds go on.
But just like with Spoelstra and his Ulysses Method, the most important stuff is right there in rounds 1 and 2.
Internalize just those two rounds, or have them internalized for you, simply by following the Copy Riddles process, and you will be ahead of 95% of the people who call themselves professional copywriters, including many who make a good living at it.
For more info on Copy Riddles: