Doing the work changed me.  Three month ago, when I started this blog – I knew a lot less about  marketing or business.  And – I’ve never undertaken such an in-depth course of self-study.

Where I’m at now.

These few months have been awesome.  I rewrote sales pages for the great guys over at Global Garden Friends.  And wrote a sales video script for them.

Then, I helped this guy, an antique photo restoration master, bring his skills and knowledge to the world via an information product.  Check out the sales page – I wrote it after interviewing the site’s creator – Dan West.

Beyond that, two good friends of mine are in the process of writing ebooks and setting up blogs around their areas of expertise.  The first is a cybersecurity guru – and he’s going to be publishing a great DIY guide to securing your data.  Reading and editing the drafts of that book inspired me to change ALL my passwords, update all my programs, and start getting serious about securing my data.  Paranoia is contagious.  More on this as the book gets closer to completion and we start putting together our marketing for it.

The second ebook is from a good friend involved in the Fine Wine Investment Community.  It’s a great guide to that lightly regulated investment market.  Just reading the draft of it before writing the sales copy taught me tons.  More on that as we get closer to launching it.

Finally, I helped this girl get more than 500 responses to her in-depth fitness survey.  So much of writing sales copy transferred over to writing survey requests.  Getting people to take their time and fill out a survey may even be more difficult than getting them to hand over their money.  Maria wants to more narrowly tailor her video-blogging to her viewer’s needs, desires, and habits in 2012.  Definitely check out Fitness Reloaded, it’s a great site about fitness minimalism.

Beyond the work I’ve been doing, I’ve read more than 15 books on marketing, creativity, and business in the last three months.  It’s true that the only education is self-education.

Where I’m going in 2012.

I’m in the process of putting together a large direct mail campaign.  I’ll definitely be doing a long post on the intricacies of split-testing, creating compelling envelopes, and writing a good long-form sales letter.  This project has been taking up a lot of my time at the moment.  It will be very interesting to work in snail-mail instead of online – I’m excited for the challenge and I think I’ll learn a lot.

Then – I can’t wait to put together the marketing campaign for the two eBooks mentioned above.  In my humble opinion, both books have the potential to add enormous amounts of value to their niche – and it will be fun writing the copy, reaching out to affiliates, and setting up the overall marketing campaign.

Finally, a very old and great friend of mine is a Division I Baseball Coach.  The guy has an absurd amount of knowledge about pitching and he’s putting together an extremely exciting product – but I promised him I’d keep mum.  I’ll write more as the product develops and we begin the marketing campaign.

All in all – this has been the three most educational months of my life.  Win or lose the contest, this blog is here to stay and I can’t wait to keep learning, building, and writing in 2012.  My sincerest thanks to Michael Ellsburg for lighting a fire under me.  And thanks to Tim Ferriss for publishing that great post.  Here’s to an awesome 2012.

I’ve been busy lately, soliciting copywriting work.  And today is going to be the first in a series of posts where I reflect on what I’ve learned while working on various projects.  I’ll still be writing book reviews, but I’m also going to experiment with posts like this.

So my first gig was gardening.  A garden supply company that created this innovative new plant cage needed sales pages written for their site.

After doing a bit of research on gardening and your average gardening customer, I was ready to begin writing the copy.  Global Garden Friends had great product descriptions and lists of features, etc.  This was an excellent starting point.  But…

Sales copy can’t just list features.  It’s tempting to just describe the product and leave it at that.  But if you do that – you’re shooting yourself in the foot.  It’s not enough.  There is this mistaken belief that people “will get it” and they will easily infer the benefits they’ll get from your product if you just tell them the features.  Doesn’t work.

Customers don’t care what your product does, they only care what it will do for them. 

So you must figure out what problem your product solves or what benefit it bestows on your customer.  And once you figure out what that benefit is – you must distill it down into a simple sentence.  And that’s your overarching theme.  For example – my theme on the project was:  “Making order out of chaos in your garden.”  The product helps you take control of your garden.  That’s the benefit.  After you come up with the theme, everything gets easier.

Then, writing the sales pages became all about tying the features to the benefits.  I had to make it painfully obvious what the feature did, and how that “helps you make order out of chaos in your garden.”  This doesn’t mean to treat your customer’s like children.  They’re not dumb.  But they are busy.  If you want them to hand you their hard-earned money, you better make it very obvious what benefit they will get in return.  That’s why you need to go beyond just listing features.  That’s why you need to tell stories, inspire emotion, and show your customers how you’ll solve their problem.

Take Away from this work:

1. Boil down the purpose of the product to a single sentence (what’s the benefit? What problem does this product solve?)
2. Familiarize myself with the market, wander around the same places that the customers wander around.
3. Don’t just write copy that summarizes the features of the product – combine your “product purpose” with the features to show the customer all the ways your product will solve their problems.

Check out the copy I wrote over at Global Garden Friends and if you garden, definitely pick up their products – they rock.

In primary school, there was a contest called “Read to Succeed.”  It was a competition, done quarterly, to see who could spend the most time reading.  The school board’s attempt to drag kids away from TV and video games.  Whoever clocked the most hours reading got two all-day admission tickets to the local amusement park.

To make a long story short, I spent hours reading the tale of Captain Nemo, sitting in my comfortable red bean bag and snacking on pop tarts.

I lost though.  No tickets for me.

Some terrible girl read EVERY Goosebumps book and Sweet Valley High Book in my elementary school’s library.  I was mad – but I justified losing because I imagined the girl lied, or didn’t go ride bikes with her friends, or her parents didn’t let her watch TV or something weird like that.  As soon as the contest ended – I went back to TV and video games.

Fast forward to high school.  I didn’t do my homework.  Didn’t study for tests.  And generally goofed off in class.  A real model student I was.  That marking period – I got a C in Trigonometry AND a C in physics.  To middle class families with aspirations of college for their kids – getting a C in a class is like killing a puppy.  So I got grounded.  No friends.  No computer (AIM).  No video games.  My parents hadn’t seen me pick up a book in years outside of the assignments I half-assed – so books were allowed.

The day after I started doing my time – a relative sent a box of books to the house.  Total coincidence.  They were cheap thrillers and bodice-ripping novels.  I read them all.   Obsessively.  Probably 25 books in 3 months.  Not good books.  But I was hooked.  Since my junior year of high school – I haven’t been an obsessive video gamer – I’ve been an obsessive reader.

But I’m wrong.  Damaged.  Not performing to my maximum potential.  I normally go through books at an absurd clip.  Three or four per month on top of school/work.  And double or triple that during school holidays.

I followed the “Read to Succeed” system.  Quantity over quality all day long.  So I’d remember snippets and fragments from every book I read – but nothing systematic.  Nothing long term.  I’d be able to expound (to the annoyance of my current girlfriend/friends) about current book endlessly.   But a week or two later,  somebody would ask me a question about the old book and I’d forgotten some point that I’d been pontificating on the week before.  I never really thought about it because I’d already be engrossed in the new, shiny book and would simply steer the conversation towards the topic that caught my ever-wavering attention.  How I squandered my time.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.      - Bruce Lee

Now, I see the wisdom here.  Until recently, I had a superficial knowledge of many books.  But writing this blog has forced me to take copious notes.  To write in the margins.  To endlessly use the Kindle for PC highlighting function and to review those notes.  The books I’ve written about are imprinted on my mind deeper than the other books I’ve read.

But I’ve only started to understand this principle and reading The Accidental Creative has cemented the idea in my mind.  In reality – the book should be called “How to Not be the Accidental Creative” because it’s about creating habits, systems, and practices to be creative constantly.

First, a few myths about creative work must be dispelled.  Creative work isn’t like manufacturing or sales.  You can’t take simply take a look at productivity and time and come to a conclusion about creative work.  Working (as a creative) like a factory worker or salesman is a foolish.

Great creative work requires a far different structure or mindset than other types of work.  You need time to decompress.  Time to think deeply and do nothing but think.  Imagine a construction foreman seeing his framer sit on a cooler and contemplate the very idea of framing.  That foreman would be pissed.  And most (bad) managers of creative would be too.  Those managers want their employees to churn out ideas rapidly and constantly.  This is the road to ruin – treat creative like regular works and they’ll churn out the same mediocre stuff until they burn out.

So (successful) creative work is different.  I get it.  But what’s the best way to go about it?  That’s the meat, bone, and gristle of the book.  I won’t talk about every single practice the book describes and recommends but just the ones I found especially useful (as an aside – I will be applying EACH of the practices to my own life and you should pick up the book and do the same).

Your CIRCLE

You can choose your friends.  Seems like common sense but many folks don’t realize it.  They’re stuck with friends based on geography, or school, or work.  The internet makes it so easy to develop friendships with people who share your interests, drive, and motivations.  In fact, the first sentence of this paragraph was inspired by a conversation I had with a friend that I couldn’t have made if I was born 50 years ago.  We didn’t go to the same school.  We grew up thousands of miles apart.  We only met via a conference, organized and advertised over the internet, based on our shared interests.

So cultivate a circle of friends beyond those given to you.  Bounce ideas off them.  Be inspired by them.  And work and keep in touch with them.

Pruning the Branches

This is the toughest for me and is the impetus for this post’s title.  I read a lot.  Blogs, books, articles, and papers.  A lot of good stuff.  But it’s not good because I read so much that I don’t have the mental energy to internalize the information contained within.  So Henry advocates pruning your information overload.  Similar to the ideas advocated by Tim Ferriss and Nicholas Taleb – you need to take control of the information and stimuli that pass through your eyeballs and ears.  Consuming every bit of pop culture, every blog post, and every book that captures your fancy is counterproductive for doing the best work you can.  This is something I need to work on.

Writing this blog helps big time – in my short life thus far – I’ve never read more than a book or two on the same subject.  I’ve got exceptional generalist knowledge – and I don’t regret my previous reading habits because they’ve formed the foundation for any specific knowledge I consciously develop.  But I also recognize that it’s the path to nowhere.  Reading six books on marketing (and that’s only scratching the surface) has changed the way I think and made me smarter than I was before.  But just reading a whole bunch of books in one domain isn’t enough – you must remember the information you read and that’s the next important practice the book advocates.

Remember – reading (too much) makes you dumb.

Taking Notes

Treat books as a conversation, not a monologue.  This is HUGE.  My “reading training” has encouraged me to take notes for recall.  You’ve gotta remember the text to pass the exam.  And this sort of note-taking is useful but it’s only half of effective note-taking.  It’s important to remember what you’ve read – knowledge forgotten is no knowledge at all.  But to really learn from books and get sharper – you must treat the book as a conversation.

You must write down your thoughts, reactions, comparisons, analogies, and impact the book is having on you as you go.  In essence, this is a form of active listening.  It’s the key to wrestling with a book and letting it add value to your mind and life.  The author advocates following a study plan – and thinking of your current work while reading the books.  Think about what the book says and how it relates to your work – what sort of stuff can you steal from the book to make your work better and help you achieve what you want.  Beyond that – jot down your emotional reactions to what the author says (especially if the book is controversial). And finally – try and make parallel connections:  “this reminds of …” etc.

So now you have good notes.  Reaction notes and notes for recall.  The next step is key.  You need to review those notes regularly.  While the act of taking notes helps recall, the only way to internalize those ideas is to review.  I’m contemplating using an online flashcard program to keep my notes fresh in my mind.  Makes constant review easy.  A few posts ago – I started reviewing the notes I prepared for my previous blog posts and it made the process so much more useful and easy.  But creating a systematic process for doing this review is key and can’t be neglected.  I’ll do a post on my note review and recall system when I’ve figured out the best way for me.

Idea Time

This guy taught me about the importance of taking time each day to sit alone.  With just pad and paper.  Thinking and writing down ideas.  Henry recommends the same thing although he only recommends doing it weekly.  I don’t think it’s enough.  Since I’ve started to jot down random ideas, my mind has grown sharper, my thinking clearer, and my work more and more creative.  At first, it seems pointless.  It’s not concrete and it (often) doesn’t bear fruit immediately.  But overtime – it strengthens the idea muscle and makes you smarter and more creative.  Do it.

The Man with the Plan Gets the Gold, and the Man with the Gold Rules the World

The overall takeaway from this book is simple.  To be spontaneously creative – you must plan.  If you drift along in your life without a plan – letting anything and everything enter your mind, letting things distract you, and never giving yourself quiet, contemplative time – you’ll never accomplish anything great.  It’s hard though.  The distractions are so delicious.  TV.  Web surfing.  Following Pop Culture.  These things ask nothing of you and in return give you NOTHING.

Hard-headed business folks take heed.  The more creative you are – the better results you’ll get.  This book shows you how to create a framework, an environment, and habits to be more creative on a daily basis.  Ignore it at your peril.

I’ve loved Amazon like I loved no other website.  You know those Apple fanboys?  I’m not one.  But I am the first official Amazon.com fanboy.  (Trademark should be arriving at the government office soon).

But this ain’t a paean to the glory that is Jeff Bezo’s site.  That would be weird.  I just finished reading Pow! Right Between the Eyes:  Profiting from the Power of Surprise and learned how Amazon turned me into a fanatic.

What We Can Learn About Surprise from Amazon.com

I buy pens online.  As I’m going to buy my favorite brand of pens on Amazon – there is a new box next to the OneClick box.  It’s filled with a reduced price… if I agree to get them shipped on a regular basis.  Genius – I could get a discount on buying boxes of pens if I agree to let Amazon ship them to me on a subscription basis.  I started laughing and was delighted that Amazon solved this seemingly intractable problem for your average consumer – I can never find a damn pen when I need one.  Okay – so what’s the point of this story – Amazon just got me even more hooked with a brilliant little surprise.  That sort of work is exactly what Andy Nulman is talking about in the book.

It’s the little things – unexpected things that matter in business (and life).  And Amazon is the master of it.  They have a basic platform – an online store.  Then they start expanding and gobbling up stuff.  And adding more and more features.  Amazon Prime – they create a massive infrastructure that solves the biggest problem with online shopping – no instant gratification.  Sure the stuff you buy doesn’t instantly materialize in your living room – but knowing it will be there in two days sure gets more people to buy.

Next they start selling instant movies and books via the kindle.  They’re starting the magical teleportation process of information media.  Brilliant.

Then they start giving movies away for free to Amazon Prime Customers – Jesus Christ.  The delightful surprises don’t ever end for Amazon.  And if they keep it up – they’re going to be the only place people go to buy things.

Surprise – The Constant Expansion of the boundaries of delightful extremes.  Every time Amazon does some crazy stuff to make people’s shopping lives easier – they’re pushing that boundary.  And Amazon does stuff that nobody else does – which creates absurd amount of astonishment, joy, and loyalty in their customers.  They’re the best at creating goodwill for their customers.  I’m not the only Amazon fanatic out in the world – and if you think about it, they’re just a store.  But all those little surprises add up and turn shoppers into customers and customers into true believers.

More On Surprise as a Marketing Concept

Surprise needs to be post-dictable.  Not Pre-dictable.  Ever seen an M. Night Shymalan movie?  If it wasn’t the Sixth Sense – it probably sucked.  But that first movie was a great example of surprise.  A twist.  Looking back on it – it makes perfect sense, but you never saw it coming.  That’s post-dictable and that’s great surprise.  Let’s take it back to the Amazon Pens example.  People buy pens and (most of them) are perishable commodities.  It’s a pain in the ass to constantly re-order them.  But until Amazon – only big companies who had accounts with office suppliers could get regular shipments of pens.  Amazon brought it to the masses.  You don’t expect it.  They didn’t announce it.  But when you see it, you’re delighted.

Alright – enough talk about Amazon.  Let’s talk about dead American Military Strategists.  Enter John Boyd.

Big Balls and John Boyd

John Boyd was a fighter pilot before he became the grand swami of American military strategy in the late 20^th century.  He combined the prickly personality (and genius) of Steve Jobs with a desire to kill as many of America’s enemies as possible.  Terrifying.

He gets his start in the military at the tail end of World War II and ends up flying fighter jets against the North Koreans and Chinese in the 50’s.  And then he sits and watches as bomber pilots take over the Air Force.  He’s unhappy.  Those guys didn’t understand anything except putting tons of high explosives on the ground.  Inefficient and those big bombers are (practically) defenseless as they lumber towards the target.

By this point, Air Force folks either love or (more likely) hate Boyd.  So he gathers together a group of his closest colleagues and forms the “Fighter Mafia.”  The Mafia’s goal:  to disrupt the order of the Air Force and teach those dumb bomber generals something about warfighting.  So Boyd goes back to school – and learns as much as possible.  He studies everything under the sun:  combat tactics, systems theory, fluid dynamics, philosophy, physics, epistemology and all sorts of other eclectic stuff.  And he comes up with new designs for the probably the best fighter planes in the history of aerial combat:  the F-16 and F-18.  And he proceeds to jam it down the throat of the Air Force Bureaucracy.

During this time – he comes up with his theory of Energy Manueverability.  And the OODA loop.  Which is what we’re really interested in here.  OODA:

Observe

Orient

Decide

Act

His thesis is simple:  anybody who can move through these steps in an adversarial environment and disrupt their opponent from moving through the steps will win.  How does this apply to marketing you ask?  Simple – Surprise is the way to disrupt your potential customer’s OODA loop.  I know we’ve already talked about the high cost of interruption marketing with Seth Godin but let’s delve a bit deeper.

Most people live boring lives.  They constantly move through the OODA loop in their daily life and they don’t even realize it.  It’s automatic.  But what happens when they Observe something they’ve never seen before?  Throws their whole loop out of balance. Makes them stop.  Makes them try and figure out how to orient.  And it expands their mind because they’re learning how to cope with a new situation.

Okay – so we’re disrupting.  That’s good but there is an important caveat.  It must be a DELIGHTFUL surprise.  This is where Mr. Boyd’s influence ends.  He wasn’t trying to throw multicolored tulips at his North Korean foes.  But I take something really valuable from his ideas.  And Andy Nulman understands this (even if he doesn’t know his intellectual forefather).

So how do you disrupt somebody’s loop?  That’s what this book is devoted to and there are some great tips.  It’s gotta be ballsy.  BIG BALLS are more important than marketing budgets.  And look – OODA, those first two letters sorta look like big ole balls too huh.

Swagger, confidence, craziness – whatever it is – you need it.  If you don’t have it, find somebody who does and put them in charge of your marketing.  Make sure they’re not like Boyd though – he wasn’t the most charming man who ever lived.  Find big ballsy folks that love making others happy.  Think Mother Theresa bred with a Chicago Mercantile Exchange coffee bean trader.  We’ll call him Daddy Chad.  Daddy Chad will turn your customers into cult-members if you let him.

Definitely a strong buy recommendation on this book – read it, absorb it, and use it.  If you’ve read the book, I’d love to hear what you think about it.  Drop a comment.

P.S. For more on Boyd, pick up Robert Coram’s biography.  It’s awesome.  I didn’t even get a choice to talk about his famous nickname “40-second Boyd.”  And no.  His wife didn’t come up with it either.

“Billy Boy – better performance with German Engineering”

That’s the advert for a new brand of German condoms coming to the U.S.  As I sat down to write this post, that advertisement interrupts my Pandora stream.  Perfect example of interruption marketing.  And Seth Godin sets out to destroy it in this book Permission Marketing.

His thesis is simple – the world is a drowning in annoying, intrusive, and unwelcome advertisements and if marketers want to sell – they must cut through the clutter.  So far, we’ve seen Dan Kennedy discuss the power of direct response marketing and take pot-shots at traditional brand awareness marketing.  Seth Godin ups the ante – he claims he can do better than direct response marketing.  His solution:  Permission Marketing.

Permission Marketing is getting prospective customers to raise their hand and volunteer to hear your message.  No more mass-mailing cold prospects to close a sale.  And after you have their permission to market to them, you’ve already started cutting through the clutter that Godin saw in 1999 and that getting worse today.  By seeking the customer’s permission – they will automatically pay far more attention to what you’re saying.  So you’ve got their attention, what’s the next step?

You need to deliver a series of messages that are:

Anticipated

Personal

Relevant

If you can send messages to your customers like this, then eventually, after you’ve built up a lot of trust, you can begin turning them into paying customers.  If the messages create value for your customers, they’ll be more than happy to pay you for a new product down the line.  It’s amazing how prophetic Godin was, this is the way tons of online marketing is done these days.  Email opt-in pages are the norm for most sites, even when they don’t have a product to offer yet.

Do Business Like a Small-Town Shopkeeper…

You’ve seen westerns.  Remember the owner/operator of the general store?  He was upright, trustworthy, focused on the customer, and always got pushed around by the outlaws rolling through town.  The internet has necessitated the revival, rebirth, and reformation of this mindset.  That small-town shopkeeper had a personal relationship with most of his customers and if you harness the power of permission marketing and the internet – you can also.  And there isn’t an excuse not to.

Your job is a little more difficult than the small-town shopkeeper’s though.  He knew his customers because they were his neighbors; your customers aren’t your neighbors.  So how do you get to know them?  As you provide value to them, solicit feedback and ask them for more data about themselves.  But you must be upfront with them about the data collection and trickery isn’t just unethical, it’s not profitable.  And as you collect more data, you use it to tailor your product offerings to your customers.  Just like the shop-keeper knew to order two extra bottles of whiskey around Easter for the McCoy’s, you must understand your customers to create a disproportionate amount of value for them.

This is an important mental model for any business owner or marketer.  If you can capture that sort of customer service/customer knowledge that a small-town shopkeeper has – you’ll build insane customer loyalty and you’ll get paid to create tons of value for them.

. . .But Be Afraid Like an Arabian Concubine

Scheherazade was in a bad spot.  Her number came up and she had to marry this mad Arab dictator.  But she wasn’t going to be able to hang out in the French Riviera and buy shoes for years until her husband was overthrown – she had one night to live.  After making love to his new wife – the dictator had her killed the next day.

But Scheherazade wasn’t your average beautiful dark-eyed Arab woman.  She had a plan.  After they made love on their wedding night – she began telling him a tale.  The story was plotted masterfully, was personal and relevant to the dictator, and (most importantly) it didn’t end that night.  Scheherazade pleads exhaustion (the king was a virile guy or liked to think he was) and tells him she will finish the story tomorrow.  Surprise, surprise – the story doesn’t end after the next night either.  So goes the 1001 nights.

To become a great permission marketer, you’ve must have Scheherazade’s paranoia and fear of losing her customer.  Granted – you’re not going to get beheaded if they don’t like your story but your customers are your lifeblood – your most vital asset.  Make sure you tell them stories that educate them, are relevant and personal to them, and that don’t quite give the whole picture.  You want them coming back for more.

On a first date, you don’t tell the girl across the table every one of your deep dark secrets – that’s a quick way to never see her again.  Same is true with permission marketing, you must be interesting, informative and useful but mysterious too.  If you pique your customer’s curiosity – they’ll continue to come back for more.  This gives you a better chance at upping the permission they give you.

Why Read This Book From 1999?

It describes a marketing revolution.  A really great book shows you patterns in the world that you had no idea existed before.  This is one of those books.  Beyond that, it gives plenty of tips and a guide to running a Permission marketing campaign which was very useful.  Definitely read this book – it’s a game changer.  I’d love to hear what you think about Permission Marketing.  Have you successfully used it in your business?  Did you modify any of Godin’s strategies?  Let me know.

We’re all pack animals.  And that’s fine.  We wouldn’t be standing astride the Earth if we weren’t.  Society, civilization, technology:  each is a product of humanity’s pack animal nature.   But there is a time and place for following the pack and there is a time when you need to go at it alone.

Let’s say you’re running a start-up trying to compete with entrenched competitors.  It doesn’t matter what business you’re in.  You could be the third carpet cleaner in town or a new search engine.   A friend of mine recently suggested switching over to the search engine Duck Duck Go .

This company has a great story – it was bootstrapped by one guy out in Pennsylvania and it was recently funded by Union Square Ventures.  Check out their website, especially the about page.   The key here is they differentiate themselves.  The site doesn’t retain your search data.  It blocks spam (filtering websites that are just adverts).  Instead of trying to beat Google at their own game – which is its famous search algorithim and its absurd amount of users – Duck Duck Go changed the game.  Google is BIG BROTHER, Duck Duck Go is the powerful search engine that protects your privacy.  If the site sold itself by claiming “we have a better search algorithim than Google,” do you think Union Square Ventures would have cared?  More importantly, do you think users would have cared enough to try it?

Here’s the lesson.  Even if you do have a better product – you’ll still lose if it’s only better at doing what your competitor already does.  If you’re not first, create a new category that you will be first in and market accordingly.  Be different and win.

2.  If You’re in Second Place – Own Second Place, it May Still be Profitable

Let’s say you’re in the same business, and you’ve failed to create a new category you can lead at.  All hope isn’t lost.  Acknowledge your inferiority and figure out a way to turn it around on the leader.

If you don’t copy and if you acknowledge your second-place nature then you can still carve out a profitable niche for yourself.  The authors tell the tale of Avis.  Hertz was the dominant force in the car rental industry and Avis was losing money year after year.  It was marketing itself as the best car-rental company and the consumer wasn’t buying it.  So what did they do – they started an ad campaign that said “Avis is number two in rent-a-cars.  So why go with us?  We work harder.”  Very smart.  After they acknowledged their position, and stopped trying to claim something that wasn’t true in their customer’s minds, they started making boatloads of cash.  Let’s take a look at why this strategy worked.

1. They acknowledge their lower position.  It’s a damaging admission – and that makes them appear trustworthy to the customer.  Everything positive you say in an advertisement is viewed skeptically by customers.  Of course they would say that.  But customers automatically accept negative assertions.  Why would they lie to make themselves look worse?
2. They turn that perceived disadvantage into an advantage.  So what if we’re in second, it makes us hungry.  We’re going to work harder for you because we don’t have the luxury of being a leader.  What impression does the reader of that advertisement get?  Avis is trustworthy and hardworking, why would I not go with them.  They probably didn’t poach the customers that blindly went with Hertz, but they definitely took customers on the fence.

This is very useful for those who can’t figure out how differentiate themselves from the current category leaders.  If you’re in such a similar business that you’re struggling to create a new category you can be first in – try accepting second place, turning it into an advantage, and profiting.

3.  Don’t Be Afraid to Sacrifice Your Queen

If you try to be all things to all people – you’re nothing.  If you’re willing to sacrifice some potential customers to hone in on the most valuable customers, you’re thinking the right way.

When playing chess, I’m never afraid to sacrifice my Queen if I know I can crush the other guy quickly.  In fact, that sacrifice is often the key to winning.  Marketing isn’t any different.  Sacrifice some of your broad appeal and get deep fanatical appeal, and you’ve captured your market segment.  The non-fanatics will follow.  And if they don’t, the fanatics are still paying you.  But you won’t get a fanatic with tempered, lukewarm advertising.  All you’ll get is a few tepid customers.  Don’t make that mistake.

Generalist companies tend to be weak.  They do a hundred things well but nothing great.  And then you’ve got a hundred companies that do one thing great stealing all of their customers.  I think it’s just basic psychology.  Nobody believes one person can do everything well.  Same is true for companies.  Even if those companies have massive, separate departments that are compartmentalized, the impression on the customer’s mind is that this is a company that does a whole lot of things pretty well but not great.  Nobody is impressed when you do a merely good job.  Winning life-time commitment requires doing one thing so well that customers can’t help coming back to you.

Don’t be afraid to sacrifice a queen to take a king.

4.  You are Your Message

So you’ve sacrificed your queen.  Good.  Now make sure your message is focused and tight.  If your message isn’t focused, you’ve just given up your best piece for nothing.  How do you make sure your message is focused?  Own one word or phrase in your customer’s mind.  Don’t be known as the company that stores data, creates software, runs seminars, and sells hardware.  Do one thing exceptionally well.  That’s your message.  The rest is noise.

Devote all your resources to that message.  You live and die by that message.  It’s everything to your business, it’s what drives customers to you.  It’s what motivates you and your employees to do such an amazing job that customers love you. Figure out what your message is, and I bet it’s directly tied into the one thing your company does exceptionally well.  Do this and when customers think of the word you’ve captured in their mind, they’ll only think of you.

If your name becomes a verb, that’s the best sign that your message is imprinted on your customer’s mind.  An old but good example is Xerox.  It’s the name of a company that does copies.  But everyone above the age of forty doesn’t say “make me a copy of this” they say “Xerox this.”  That’s a strong and focused message.  That’s owning a word.

If you can own a chunk of your customer’s mind, they’ll think of you when they have the problem you’re the best at solving.

Closing Thoughts

This book is very general, and not particularly focused on direct-response marketing.  But it’s a must read.  The authors use massive companies for examples, but that doesn’t make the message any less important for smaller operations.  If you’ve read the book, I’d love to hear what you thought – especially what you learned from it.  Leave a comment.

That’s what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal – Mario Puzo, The Godfather

I almost bought something from a catalogue.  Not an online catalogue – a snail mail catalogue.  I can’t remember its name but it was selling Ernest Hemingway brand shoes.   

Until I read the Adweek Copywriting Handbook, I had no idea why I almost bought those $150 shoes without trying them on.  I remember being drawn along the length of the copy, reading about Hemingway’s worldwide adventures, his macho personality, and how both were embodied in the shoes.  I probably would have bought them – if I had any clue how to order something from the catalogue. 

The ad was genius.  It had great copy, great pictures, and a story to tell.  Joe Sugarman teaches you how to do all of it.  And the key to writing great copy is personality.  Without it you have nothing, with it you can do remarkable things.

If you’ve ever worked in an office, try to think back to how it made you feel.  Even if you work with great people, there was always a vague disquiet, something was off in your mind.  Maybe you hated having to be there.  Maybe you hated the work.  But I’d bet that the thing you hated the most was hiding your personality.  You wanted to tell a joke – but you were afraid it might offend someone or that you’d get in trouble.  Maybe you wanted write your emails as a person, and not write sentences devoid of life.  Being impersonal is stressful, it’s frustrating, and office culture encourages it via fear.    

Think of every great person you’ve had the privilege of knowing – did they hold no strong opinions?  Did they constantly tiptoe around things?  Did they fear showing who they really were?  I doubt it.  What does this have to do with copywriting? When you write, you try to convince your reader to buy or take an action. I’m definitely persuaded better by a strong personality combined with solid, logical reasons than impersonal communications with infallible justification and logic.  Personality sells.  

Bad advertising exudes impersonality.  It’s terrible.  You never end up reading it.

Sugarman teaches you how to write copy that reaches out and captures your customer’s attention.  By being a real.  It’s ironic that his book champions this message but lacks the same personality as Dan Kennedy’s book, but it’s still valuable.

He starts with an overview of the copywriting process.  Much of this overlapped with the sections of the Ultimate Marketing Letter that discussed the art of writing good copy.  But Sugarman’s book is more focused.  He spends 90% of the book on writing, while Kennedy gives a great overview of an entire direct response campaign.  Sugarman goes deeper.  He talks about the elements of effective copy.  He talks about the psychological triggers that should be used in convincing customers to buy.  And he gives examples of good and bad copy.  The good ones reek of personality.

The farmer who wanted to sell premium ruby red grapefruits via mail.  He didn’t write an advertisement describing their size, freshness, and taste.  He told a story – how he discovered these rare types of grapefruit on the farm – how he picks and harvests them – how he tests them for quality – and then he discusses all their great qualities.  And throughout the whole thing – his personality shines through.  He writes like a hardworking, salt of the earth, Texas farmer and its damn effective. 

I loved the mission-focused intent of the entire book.  If you’re in the business of selling via print (no matter the medium) you need to do two big things. 

1. Write compelling stuff.
2. Get people to read that stuff.

Everything else is bullshit.

And the key to getting people to read your materials is getting them to start.  All of the initial copy elements (the headline, paragraph headings, the typeface, etc.) are designed to get the reader started.  The purpose: get them to read the first sentence.  Then get them to read the second sentence.  Before long – they’re sliding down the slippery slope towards your offer. 

Aside from the elements of effective copy, he also talks about the psychological principles that should be at work in your copy.  Funny enough – every one of those elements fit neatly into Robert Cialdini’s categories in Influence.  I didn’t find Sugarman’s theoretical explanations very useful, but it was valuable to see more examples of how those principles play out in practice in copy. 

The final section of the book is most valuable.  It’s got twelve examples of good/bad copy.  I thought it was useful watching where certain writers went awry.  But this section would have been better if it just included twelve examples of effective advertisements.  I hate teaching by showing the opposite of good writing – seeing bad examples enforces bad habits.  And imitating the greats is the way to go.  Imitating the chumps is a recipe for disaster. 

Overall, the book was useful but much more difficult to read through than the previous two books I’ve reviewed.   Mainly because much of the material overlapped.   But overall I recommend giving it a read.

Building Empires (and Profits) on the Cheap

Here’s a secret for you: most advertising you see is useless.  Big budget Superbowl ads, “brand awareness,” and billboards exist for two major reasons – vanity and advertising budgets that need to be spent. This advertising isn’t quantifiable, testable, and it’s not cheap.  It works for Coca-Cola but it won’t work for small businesses.

Enter Dan Kennedy and The Ultimate Sales Letter – a how-to guide to direct response marketing.  It’s a simple idea – you send informational and persuasive materials to prospects with instructions on how to buy your product.  It’s cheaper than buying network advertising or billboards and you can directly measure your success rate in acquiring customers.  Great companies have been and will be built on a great product and a great direct response marketing campaign.  But it’s a competitive market and there is an art and science to writing effective sales letters.

That’s why this book is so valuable.

Since You Can’t Invade Your Customer’s Dreams Like DiCaprio – Get ‘Em While They’re Awake with Words

The book describes the Kennedy method for writing sales letters.  It’s a checklist format and (tellingly) the first steps are about getting into the minds of your customers.  Before you put pen to paper, you need to put your mind into the thoughts of your customers.  As Robert Collier says, you need to “enter the conversation already occurring in your customer’s head.”  So Kennedy proscribes imagining what keeps your customers up at night, what frustrates them, and what their desires are, etc.  He doesn’t come out and say it, but you need to build an initial avatar to sell to.

The avatar is one of the most useful mental models for marketers and entrepreneurs.  You create a fictitious, ideal customer that your product/service is for and you develop your marketing around this person.

Let’s say I’m going to start up a skateboarding apparel company.  I know what separates my work from the competitors, I’ve produced a small initial order, and now I’m ready to sell.

My avatar is Timmy Jones, a 15-year old boy from the suburbs of Portland, Oregon.  He splits his time playing video games and skateboarding with his friends (when his over-protective mother lets him go out).  He’s an average student but he thinks his future isn’t necessarily in a traditional career – he wants to make it to the X-Games or at least work there.  He’s uncertain about his social status at high school, he hangs with the skater crowd and he’s pretty popular with them, but the coolest girls only pay a little attention to him.  There’s an avatar – and now you imagine writing your online sales page or email to him.  You sell Timmy on why he should buy your clothes.

Bad marketing screams impersonality.  To sell via print, you must reach out, have a conversation, and enter your customer’s brain.  Creating a concrete avatar helps you write to a person and increases the probability that they will pay you to solve a problem.  Kennedy gives a ton of useful guidelines and strategies for getting into the customer’s mind, how they will relate to your product, and how to build rapport with them.  Following his steps helps to flesh out your avatar.

All First Drafts Are Shit. – Hemingway

After you’ve determined your customer’s mindset and taken all the logistical considerations Kennedy discusses, you’re ready to write.  This is where Kennedy as the prose teacher comes in.

Good writing is re-writing.  So many would-be writers are discouraged because school teaches them to fear mistakes and to be overly concerned with writing a good first draft.  Here’s the secret, from Ernest’s mouth to your brain: they’re all shit.

Kennedy admits that he’s never written a one-draft copy letter, even when he was starting off in the business.  The re-writing process needs to be multi-layered.  I’d never thought of this but it’s part of Kennedy’s genius that he advocates going over your first draft a number of times with different goals in mind.

First, rewrite for strategy, focusing on your big-picture message.

Then rewrite for style – make sure it sounds good.

Then re-write for passion – you must capture your customer’s imagination and get them excited.

Then finally rewrite for clarity – they need to understand your offer.

This method is so effective because if you try to rewrite for all things at once, you’ll do each poorly.  I’ll be applying this many-layered rewriting strategy to all my writing going forward.

Something else nobody tells you in school:  all good writing is formulaic.  I’m a law student, and we take a year-long course in legal writing.  During the first semester, our professor never gave us any good examples of legal writing and in fact placed a soft ban on seeking out good legal prose relating to our medium (the legal memorandum).  Consequently, I learned very little.

Second semester rolls around, and on the first day of class – our new professor supplies us with what he considers the pinnacle of legal brief writing: a brief filed with the Supreme Court, written by a top advocate.  Some of my classmates skimmed it or ignored it in favor of reading our theoretical legal writing textbook, but I went in the opposite direction.  I read the 70 page brief in depth and examined it for structure and phrasing.

Never opened the textbook.

Though I didn’t know the phrase at the time, I wrote out key phrases and ways to link my ideas, creating my very own legal “crib sheet.”  When it came time to write, I copied the structure and phrasing of this esteemed advocate and wrote the brief like a pro.

The point is:  when you’re learning anything new, copying from the masters is the quickest path to competence.  And Kennedy supplies the raw materials necessary to develop this competence throughout the book.  As I continue along my journey – I’m going to periodically post examples and breakdowns of the good copywriting and what I learned from it.

This coincides exactly with Michael Ellsburg’s advice in The Education of Millionaires and whose guest post on the Four-Hour Work Week Blog inspired me to get off my ass and start this blog.  He gives a list of great online-marketing copywriters to follow, emulate, and crib good ideas from.

Be Boring and Die 

Beyond copywriting, this is a valuable life lesson.  You wanna get the girl/job/customer of your dreams?  If you do what everybody else is doing … good luck.

Kennedy talks about how to tell stories, write for emotion, discuss the effects of the product rather than the product and gives a list of tools/phrases one can use to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Useful stuff and not just for direct response marketing purposes.

Closing Thoughts

Buy this book.  It’s a how-to guide to running direct response marketing campaigns.  Although its focus is on snail-mail campaigns, writing good copy is writing good copy.  Also, the section with specific advice on running email or online direct response campaigns is excellent.

This is a book of principles. No matter what format, learning the principles is the key to crushing it.  Buy the book, practice its steps, apply it and you’ll be making more money.

I hate going to malls. I always get hustled.  Two weeks ago, I was in a fancy mall in North Jersey and I’m walking along, minding my own business when this pretty girl says “hello” to me.  She’s standing in front of a kiosk, hawking something or other.

“This sea salt will make your skin softer than it’s ever been before.”  Slight foreign accent, dark hair, dark eyes.  I’m in trouble.

“I’m not interested.” A lie.

“Let me put some in your hands, I’ll show you.”  That lilt again.  I’m caving.

She puts the salt in my hands, tells me to rub them together and a moment later the salt is falling on the floor but my hands seem softer.

“Very soft right.”  She says.

“Yes…but I’m not interested.”

“Good for your mother, or your girlfriend?”

I walked away with fifty dollars’ worth of sea salt.  With a smile on my face.  How did it happen.  According to Robert Cialdini, I just met a stellar “compliance professional.”  She made me like her (her beauty and sweet disposition), she gave me a free sample, and she told me very clearly what the product would do for me.  Sales at its best.

I have to recommend Robert Cialdini’s Influence.  I picked it as the first book to read on my quest to become a damn good copywriter and free myself from the higher-ed – industrial complex and it was a great beginning.

Cialdini takes the evolutionary psychology and applies it to the marketplace and synthesizes all the available information well.  I wish I had more professors like him – he could have easily simply done a survey of all the experimental materials in the field, summarize each, and be done with it.  That would have been the safe, get tenure, bore undergrads, and collect a paycheck until retirement approach but the book is so much more than that.  He left the safe confines of his university because he wanted to see how sales folks and marketers put these ideas into practice.  He snuck into sales trainee programs, watched car salesmen at work, and eavesdropped on fund-raising telemarketers.  The insights from these experiences really make the book and it’s why the book has sold more than a million copies.  Boring textbooks never come that close.

In essence, Cialdini examines a bunch of heuristics, or mental models, that we use on a daily basis and explains why those models make sense most of the time.  These models evolved over long periods of time and it’s very difficult to ignore these reactions because they’re part of our evolutionary heritage. We’re all animals.  Then he shows how those mental models can be exploited by sophisticated marketers.  The two that got me with my sea salt were “liking – the friendly thief” and “reciprocity – give and take . . . take.”  I’m not going to summarize each of them, but if you haven’t read the book, you definitely need to check it out because each chapter is worth in-depth study.

I’ve read some psychology books and blogs, so not much of the general principles were news to me – but the way it was organized gave me a solid framework to move forward with.  I thought the sections on the various defenses to these sales tactics were useful but they displayed a bit of hostility towards those who use them.  Cialdini is always careful to hedge his criticism – he’s out to protect people from exploiters and conmen so this is a valid goal.  But in terms of actual marketing, the strategies are very useful.

Definitely a strong buy/read/re-read recommendation and I’m excited to see how these ideas play out in the more copywriting specific books that I’ll be reading next.  This post is rather short because I didn’t learn a whole lot of new information but I’ll be referencing Cialdini’s models in my later posts as I describe how the masters of writing good copy apply them.  Maybe I’ll even discover some new models in their work that Cialdini didn’t describe.  What do you think?  Have you read Cialdini and seen examples of his models in the sales world?  Let me know.

I’m 23.  Until recently I drank deep gulps of society’s kool-aid.  I played the credential game with the best of them –  College.  Corporate Work.  Graduate School.  The whole thing.  If I hadn’t left my comfort zone – I’d be still on this path.  Problem is:  if you do what everybody else is doing – you get what everybody else gets. I want more.  And the only way to get it is to create massive value in the world.  This is my story of escape.

Michael Ellsberg.  Until I saw his Thiel Fellows Presentation and read his post on Tim Ferriss’ blog, I was taking a scatter-brained approach to learning the skills necessary to live the life I wanted.   Every beginner needs concrete steps to follow – and he supplied them.

I’m teaching myself copy-writing and direct response marketing.  In the beginning, I’ll write posts that describe what I learned from major texts in the field and reviews of those books.  As I hustle up business for myself, I’ll be posting case studies of the campaigns I work on and run.  Also, I’ll write about the process of hunting down work.  I hope you follow along and learn something with me.