A couple years ago – pre-Cap’n Covid, of course – I was telling “Email Players” subscriber and the “founding father” of online advertising & email marketing as we all know it Ken McCarthy about why — barring a death in the family, and even that may not happen… — I refused to do any plane traveling.

There is a burnout aspect to it after the last few years.

But, more than that, I find airports only slightly less depressing than casinos.

Last time I flew was in October 2018, when speaking at AWAI’s copywriting bootcamp and then the great Brian Kurtz’s master class right after that, and it was intolerable.

Not just from the crowds.

But, the utter insanitary conditions of even so-called “clean” airports.

I hear tell COVID has made places be cleaner, but who knows.

Anyway, Ken’s response (with his permission) is below.

It’s quite the lesson in and of itself for business people:

I’ll tell you, not only are they depressing, they are literally sickening – as are air flights and hotel rooms and restaurant food.

I can drive to Kennedy (LONG but doable) and I’m going to shoot for a place to stay with OPEN windows ideally where I can make some of my own meals.

I always found travel a little rough, but now that I’ve looked into the matter in depth I realize that when we go out into “the world” we might as well be crawling through a sewer.

In terms of toxins that are in the air, in synthetic carpets, chemical cleaners, air “fresheners” that are literally neurotoxins and on and on it goes. It’s quite a lot to process. Human beings aren’t built for it and in takes a toll.

You are right on the money to be living by the ocean and NOT traveling

And I can go into a lot more gruesome detail!

Some people depending on genetics, constitution, overall health – various factors – are a lot more impacted than others, but bottom line all these places – airports, airplanes, hotel rooms are absolutely ghetto-sewer shit.

It’s kind of a joke that we look at them as “luxuries”

Cap’n Covid or no Cap’n Covid:

This is why I can’t stomach even the mere brain fart of being a digital nomad. I just don’t see what’s so exciting, thrilling, fun, and great about traveling from one petri dish to another full of human stench, terrible hygiene, communicable diseases, boogers, farts, screaming kids, nosey travelers, long lines for terrible food, sticky bathroom floors, overachieving (and overreaching) TSA agents, being forced to breathe my own CO2, and other assorted horrors that airports & even hotels offer.

This why I’m far more content being a Baggins than a Took.

Adventures don’t just make one late for dinner.

They can make you toss that dinner, too…

All right, enough warm fuzzy feelings for the traveler’s soul.

It’s not all doom & gloom.

Because if you know what you’re doing, you can use plain, simple emails to make sales anywhere — at home, in an airport unfit for human habitation, or even in a dirty hostel in the middle of nowhere occupying the same dwelling with 5 total strangers all sharing the same bar of soap with a pubic hair stuck to it.

That includes to get clients, too.

A topic the entire upcoming May “Email Players” issue is about.

To learn how to write such emails, go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

A reader asks:

Hey, Ben.

After binge-reading your email newsletter few days ago,

something makes me curious.

You write long story email,

why don’t you write a blog post just like your email

and promote your post through your email newsletter?

The short answer:

I do it the way I do it because I like getting paid.

I find this question fascinating in the same way I would find it fascinating if someone asked me, “Ben how come you don’t use MySpace?” In fact, I thought this silly idea of writing teaser emails to send people to long blog posts which then link to an offer, being more profitable than simply putting the content in the emails with a link directly to an offer died off years ago.

But, apparently not.

About 10 years ago I would sometimes get challenged on this.

And you know what happened?

Every single person I know who tested it who actually knew what they were doing with email found their sales were not just better, but exponentially better… simply putting the content in the email instead of trying to screw around sending them to a blog post to generate comments or for SEO, etc.

That’s not to say not to use blogs.

I certainly do – for purely list-building purposes.

But, not when I want to make direct sales, except in rare circumstances.

Anyway, do with this info what you will.

Take it to heart.

Ignore it.

Or even SPURN it, for all I care.

But if you want to see the exact methodology Yours Crotchety uses, go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

In my last book “elBenbo Press” I proudly declared two things:

1. Social media is stupid

2. I’d never write a book on the subject

Yet, barely a month after it launched, I wrote a 400+ page book (called “Social Lair”) about social media (launching on Monday) and am soon going to be launching a social media platform by the same name (“SocialLair”) with “Email Players” subscriber Troy Broussard.

Strange days indeed…

Anyway, there are many reasons for my “about face” on the subject.

One of the main reasons:

Email is great for daily communication.

But there is a limit to how many you can send in a single day without getting into the territory of eroding relationships with even your what I call “Berserker” customers who hang on every word you say and write.

That limit is different for every business.

But a limit there is.

And if you doubt this then go ahead and send 50 emails per day for a month straight and let me know how it goes in the long run with your sales, attrition, engagement, and delivery rates.

Thus, social media.

It’s the one thing I liked using it for:

Dozens of daily impromptu communications.

Sometimes short, sometimes long.

Sometimes selling something, sometimes not.

Sometimes leading to other things I am up to, sometimes mere brain farts.

But the customer has full control to see it or not, there is a social element that can create “feeding frenzy”-like engagement & sales if used correctly with email (what my new Social Lair book launching next week teaches, amongst other things), and it lets you do what I call “list laundering” – which I will also talk more about next week, and that is what has led to my list being probably the single most responsive list in my niche for reasons I won’t go into here.

The problem with social media is everything else:

The privacy butchering.

The creepy line crossings & outright whoring out of your data.

The manipulation of hormones, news, and information.

The anti-small business rules.

The incessant de-platforming & thought policing.

The not being able to export an audience into a list.

And so on, and so forth.

All things our upcoming social media platform does NOT engage in, incidentally.

If anything, it’s capitalist bliss and a way businesses can potentially make fortunes in their own protected “walled garden” platform where your thoughts aren’t policed, where your data is yours and yours alone, and where it’s created — by design — to get maximum engagement and sales if you know what you’re doing.

Anyway, more about that platform in the coming weeks.

For now, I want to talk about my Social Lair book launching in a couple days.

The best way to use social media is in conjunction with email.

And, specifically, in the way I teach in the book.

Until then, to learn the email side of things, go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

I often talk about how not selling to shallow thinking types.

To help “demystify” the subject, here are 13 examples of shallow thinking:

1. Slave to marketing metrics at the expense of (or even outright ignoring the existence of) all the intangibles in a business that are just as important

2. Prioritizing the selling of offers over the building of a business

3. Relying completely on social media

4. Setting goals that are outcome dependent (i.e., make X sales by Y date) vs goals that are not outcome dependent (write & send 1 email each day for the next 30 days)

5. Building a list instead of an audience

6. Think having a funnel is the same as having a business

7. Selling offers that don’t logically link to other offers

8. Assuming they can only inexpensively get leads & traffic by being on social media

9. Relying on one merchant account — especially Stripe or PayPal — and not at least making plans for more

10. Having 50% or more of their income tied up in ONE offer or client, and isn’t at least in the process of working to change that

11. Thinking marketing or copywriting is more important to sales than status

12. Selling the “thing” they offer before selling themselves

13. Making transactions at the expense of relationships

These are just a few examples of shallow thinking.

And if you happen to fall into more than one of the above I suggest changing that, fast, if you want to not only be able to compete in, but conquer in your market, industry, product category in the coming months, years, and decades.

It’s also mandatory to not do the 13 things above to use Email Players.

The newsletter simply won’t work for shallow thinkers.

Which is why they never last long, and why I try to turn them away.

They are much better off buying elsewhere.

Otherwise, here’s the link:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Once upon a time I saw a perfect example that shows the importance of owning, creating, and/or controlling your own media empire in a New York Times article.

It was about a 15-year old snot nose who had 1.2 million Instagram subscribers, pulled in some $10k per month with it, and he was full of piss & vinegar (who wouldn’t be?), ready to conquer and pillage.

But then… Instagram shut him down without warning.

The reason:

Violating rules, etc.

His entire business gone — with the push of some button somewhere.

And of course, like a lot of influencer types, he could not replicate his massive success, because he was simply all intelligence and no wisdom.

The worst part for him though:

“A lot of my friends think I’ve become depressed, and I think that’s right,” Rowan said. “I’ve been feeling insecure about a lot of things, like how I look and act and talk. I talk a lot less than I used to. I’m a lot less confident. Losing my account is the main reason I feel like this. With @ Zuccccccccccc, it felt like I had a purpose and was doing something that benefited a lot of people, and now I kind of just feel — I feel lost.”

Such is the spooky fate of being high on intelligence but low on wisdom.

I also daresay it’s the fate of many-a-business in the not-too-distant future. Especially anyone naive enough to rely completely on a platform they don’t own or at least control and export their audience/list from.

And it all starts with having strong email game.

From there, you can apply it to other media.

(Social media, mobile apps, whatever it is).

To learn my email ways go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

“Daly is the ‘asshole god’ of this virtual world, and his word is law.”

— Walton
Black Mirror
“USS McCallister”

I can’t say I’m a Black Mirror fanboy, but the show definitely has its moments. Including a few of the best scripted single TV show episodes I’ve ever seen.

One of which is titled:

“USS McCallister”

It’s about the CTO of a tech-entertainment company who nobody likes or respects and even finds creepy when working at his company in the day. But at night he is in his own private cinematic cyber universe — based on a TV show he watched as a child — as the commander of a starship exploring new worlds, with his “crew” being the digitally cloned consciousnesses of the people who treat him like crap and ignore him in the real world.

In this world he is “god.”

He can control matter itself, and does so in horrific ways to keep everyone subordinate.

And what he says is the way it is. Anyone who disobeys him is, for all intents and purposes, condemned to a hell of Daly’s own creation that is a bit disturbing to watch.

This is a power that he abuses, of course.

And, he suffers the consequences of that abuse.

Reason I bring this up today is because, while having your own media platforms doesn’t give you the power to bend reality, it can give you a lot more power over your fate, and the fate of those you serve and sell to, than you might think.

Some medias give you more power than others.

Like, for example, social media has rules you have to follow. Same with mobile apps or even email and a website (which your host can always shut down).

But a media you sell via the postal system, for example, has no rules I can think of, as long as you are not doing anything illegal. You can “say” whatever you want in a print newsletter or book, for example, and other offline media you own. In the US you are even protected by the First Amendment to do so.

Point is, each media available to businesses is different.

With their own pros & cons, their own reach, and their own profit potentials.

And the real power is NOT in controlling and mastering just one media, but stacking and combining as many as you can, in as many ways as you can, selling with them in all the means for doing so as you can.

Which brings your non-god-like narrator & pal to the point:

About learning to think like a multi-channel, multi-media platform marketing publisher, and not just an “internet marketer” or a “copywriter” or a “coach” or accountant, attorney, or whatever the thing is that someone does in their business.

It’s the difference between thinking like a publisher and not just a “writer.”

An agency owner and not just a “copywriter.”

A restaurant chain owner and not just a “chef.”

A network owner and not just a “Youtube influencer.”

And so on, and so forth.

It’s a state of mind.

And in my opinion, it begins with tight email game.

Then, stacking other medias on that, all working together.

To learn the email side, go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

An opinion, that also happens to be a fact…

I believe Zack Snyder is the most hated director in Hollywood. He’s like the “Trump” of moviemakers. And I fully admit to a borderline jealousy of his ability to create Berserker-like fans & enemies alike.

Here are 10 reasons why:

1. He is equally hated and loved, with no lukewarm reactions to him or his work from those who know who he is and watch his movies

2. His fans are all labeled as “toxic” even though his gaslighting haters are 10xs more so

3. His fans are constantly shamed, marginalized, and mocked to the point many hide the fact they are fans of Snyder at all just so they don’t have to deal with it

4. Many blame him for all that’s wrong with movies

5. His name and Mission not only resurrected a movie (the infamous “Snydercut”) that was supposedly DOA and considered a mere fanboy pipe dream… but he was given $70 million of additional money to fix it up, even though its preceeding movie (Batman v Superman) movie flopped at the box office

6. He basically pulled off a miracle getting his Snydercut released at all, even as everyone (including some of his diehard fans who gave up in despair) said it’d never happen, and even outright laughed at & mocked those who said it would

7. His fans are so devoted they fully intend to make sure a sequel gets made even with Snyder playing coy and acting like it won’t — even while his haters almost pray it never happens

8. Everything he says gets him hated more by his haters (they even found reasons to hate him after raising a few hundred thousand dollars for a suicide awareness cause) and loved more by his diehard fans

9. Many of his haters have admitted they couldn’t resist watching the movie — which only helped it with whatever success it got, i.e., the movie profited from his haters (who became unwitting members of Snyder’s marketing department for it) as much as it did the fans

10. He simply does not compromise, and goes for what he wants no matter what anyone says or thinks — all of which attracts his fans to him like a magnet, while making his haters go even more bonkers seething at the moon

Which brings me to the punchline:

The Snydercut is a magnificent example of Sixth-generation marketing warfare.

Snyder’s fans & haters were/are at WAR with each other in a way where Snyder has financially benefited in ways he never could have otherwise. Even though he did not ask to be paid to finish his cut and release it, it will almost certainly translate into many future deals he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, plus getting him and his brand all new fans who will see his future movies.

And it’s all because his fans made it not just a Mission but a VIRTUE to war on his behalf.

They were willing — and probably unwitting — soldiers in his war.

And it all played out on the 6G marketing warfare battlefield.

Thus the April “Email Players” issue.

It’s all about what I have dubbed Sixth-generation marketing warfare.

It’s also admittedly light on “how to” info.

Instead it is almost all strategy & big concepts about 6G marketing warfare, which I believe can potentially take nearly any business from 4-figures to 5-figures, 5-figures to 6-figures, and 6-figures to 7-figures and beyond over time, assuming a business has the right amount of work ethic, patience, and discernment.

Without those attributes it will do your business zero good.

I say this to warn away the goo-roo fanboys and new product junkies.

The deadline is tomorrow – 3/31/21.

If you want it, I do not recommend procrastinating.

If you’re a current subscriber who wants it and whose credit card is expiring or you’re waiting for a new one, get your shyt together my friend and figure it out.

Either way:

This issue will have ramifications on everything else I teach for a long time.

Here’s the link:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

This will sound like copywriting heresy.

But if I don’t profane the false goo-roo gods sometimes, life ain’t much fun.

Here’s the story:

I recently finished my yearly read-through of the late, great brilliant copywriter Eugene Schwartz’s book “Breakthrough Advertising.” It is by far one of the single most valuable copywriting books I possess. There is very little in it I disagree with, and even those disagreements have to do with the times he lived in and nothing else. A time which I describe as Third-generation marketing warfare on page 12 of the upcoming April Email Players issue, whereas I believe we now compete in the theater of Sixth-generation marketing warfare, with many of the old “weapons” still necessary, but not nearly as important or powerful as they were then.

Take the almighty headline.

Old GS says it’s 90% of your ad in the book.

Get that wrong, and nothing else matters.

And at the time, he was absolutely right.

Today?

It’s different.

Headlines are about as important to your overall advertising now as swords used by world class swashbucklers in 17th century sea battles were then – when it was the canons that did the most damage – with the swords being used afterwards to secure the ship and clean out the survivors.

Which brings us back to 6G marketing warfare.

The headline is still extremely important.

But you can win many copywriting battles with a crap headline or even none at all if you use the heavy artillery that wins the day in the current business and marketing world. The only thing a better headline will do you for now is help you win a single battle against someone whose ads you happen to go head to head against, but not even come close to winning the war.

Enter the April “Email Players” issue.

It’s all about Sixth-generation marketing warfare.

And it is, in many ways, the most valuable content I’ve ever written.

Certainly it’s been more valuable to my business than anything else I’ve written about. Whether it will be to anyone else I can’t say. Especially since, it’s actually quite low on “how to” info, and is mostly just an intro to something I have yet to see anyone else write about in my industry, but that I’ll be writing a lot about in the months and years ahead, applying it to various different aspects of business, marketing, email, copywriting, launching products, list building, and everything else I like to talk about and implement in my own businesses — in both the info publishing and software spaces.

But a warning to the goo-roo fanboy chasing hacks & tricks.

There are zero of either in Email Players.

And that’s especially true in this upcoming April issue.

It’s exclusively big & dramatic concepts combined with pure strategy — both of which will take a lot of thought, work, and patience to implement. However, I truly believe those who take it to heart, who read it multiple times, and, most important of all, doggedly APPLY the info over the coming months, years, and decades will see that patience and work rewarded in ways mere money cannot measure.

For now, I will just say this:

For the longest time, I’ve treated business as WAR & not merely business.

And if this issue does nothing but impart that on its readers I’ve done my job.

But the deadline to subscribe is in just 2 short days.

That means if you want in, you can’t procrastinate.

And if you’re a current subscriber whose credit card is expiring or you need a new one because of some low life hacker, put it on whatever card you use to pay for your phone and other entertainment bills then switch it later if need be.

You gotta get your shyt together to stay subscribed.

This is the One Email Players Issue to rule them all.

And its “fingerprints” will be on all future issues henceforth.

Here’s the link:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Let me tell you a story.

Specifically, about comicbook creator Robert Kirkland who is the writer & creator of the ghoulish & popular comicbook & TV show “The Walking Dead.” When he first wanted to break into Image Comics with the Walking Dead he knew it would not be accepted at face value. The reasons for this were many, and if you want the full story simply watch “The Image Revolution” on Amazon Prime. But needless to say, in order to get his story accepted and his comics made he had to outright lie, deceive, and entrap.

Here’s how:

He did not say what his story was REALLY about.

He told a bald-faced lie saying The Walking Dead zombies were actually an alien invasion. And that his stories would contain lots of hidden Easter Eggs teasing it for a while before the readers would discover it.

Apparently, this was a big turn on at Image.

And, so, his comics were made and the rest is history.

But, what is not common knowledge about that history is, eventually he was asked about when these aliens were going to finally show up (which, if you read the comics or watch the TV show, you know are not there, and never have been).

To which he answered something like:

(Paraphrasing)

“Oh that? I was just saying that so you’d give them a chance.”

Anyway, here’s why I tell this story:

It’s a great example of what I call Sixth-generation marketing warfare.

And that concept is what the entire April “Email Players” issue is about – what it is, what it means, and how you can start using it in your business. No, I’m not saying you have to lie or deceive. Nor should you. In fact, the best Sixth-generation marketing warfare is totally transparent and easily observed even by your competition. But, there are come things you’ll have to do that may make you uncomfortable.

And so it goes.

Listen, there are no tricks or hacks in this issue.

And there is no “how to” info to celebrate.

It’s pure strategy.

Strategy, I believe, will make or break businesses in the years ahead.

Here’s the link to subscribe by the looming 3/31/21 deadline:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle