Ben Settle

Several months ago there was a big broo-ha-ha on Twitter when my pal Sean Kaye got fed up with guys cold DM’ing him about how to make an extra $1k per month… and he screenshot and mocked it.

Very amusing post.

And quite brutal too.

He basically mocked guys who sit around stroking their bobble head dolls of Andrew Tate desperately trying to manifest greatness by squirting out cold DM’s on social media and sliding cold into strangers’ DMs like dik pics on grindr. And to do my part to help cure the cold DM bros of their misguided bad marketing habits, I told a story about when Stefania had gotten nailed by a fraudulent chargeback putting her $6,000 in the red overdrawn on her bank account when dealing with a female Facebook life coach.

This was BB (before Ben).

Her back was to the proverbial wall.

And she was just days away from being evicted by her landlord (her own uncle) who could get a lot more money for her apartment than she had been paying in rent. She also couldn’t pay for her utilities, food, and other bills since she had zero income, with even her other family members turning their backs on her.

Not a fun spot to be in.

And here’s what happened:

She was doing the copywriting, online marketing, branding shtick at the time. Specifically, to the female life coach niche. If you know anything about that niche they are basically Money Twitter bros with ovaries in how they approach marketing. And she got into a situation with a sociopath client who scammed her out of thousands of dollars and put her $6,000 overdrawn on her bank account by doing a fraudulent Stripe chargeback.

This happened at probably the absolute worst time too.

Like I mentioned earlier:

Her landlord/uncle was itching for an excuse to get rid of her due to her paying so low of rent (due to family) in Jersey City at a time when all the New Yorkers were flocking over due to being priced out of NY. He could easily rent it for a lot more to the hordes of dumb money coming over from NY, and her lease was in his way.

Even worse:

She couldn’t pay for anything since she didn’t have a real credit card.

Just a debit card attached to the overdrawn account.

i.e., negative money to her name.

That meant she literally couldn’t get food, pay bills, or buy anything, really. Stripe wasn’t having anything to do with it, either, with their decision being final. And so there was no getting even a penny of that money back.

This is the sort of situation financial nightmares for are made of.

Her solution?

Blindly send cold DM’s to randos?

Start an Onlyfans?

Beg her family (who were hostile to her business plans)?

Pray to Quetzalcoatl?

Nope.

But before I explain what she did:

Understand Stefania’s background in business is not online marketing or email or websites or social media or eBooks or anything digital. Her background was working in her mom’s resale shop in Manhattan which is frequented by everyone from street hookers to A-list Hollywood celebrities and those celebrities’ fashion consultants.

A very interesting place.

And so she learned how to sell the good, old fashioned way:

One-on-one talking & interacting with and finding out what people want.

And that’s what she did when overdrawn in the red.

If you were to ask her, she’d tell you she went into almost a haze and doesn’t remember much. She was obviously very scared and freaked out. And who could blame her? But she did what she knew and followed what came naturally to her from working all those years growing up in her mom’s store:

Warm outreach to clients, peers, people she knew.

One-by-one.

No agenda other than to find out how they’re doing.

It only took a few to tell her about a problem she could help with.

And then, boom, clients acquired, back in the black, within a few days.

Nobody wants to hear that of course.

They want the sEcReT cold email or DM turn-of-phrase.

But life doesn’t work that way.

Ironically:

The best advice for those doing cold outreach is not to do it.

It’s actually warm outreach.

Everyone thinks they need to do cold outreach to start or grow a business — which is as big a mistake as direct response marketers and other businesses neglecting their current warm list and only spending time on getting new cold leads and customers. That happens so much it is literally a trope that gets (rightfully) mocked at direct marketing seminars and in direct marketing books, yet people still do it anyway.

Go figure…

None of what is in this email is new.

It’s all very basic salesmanship 101.

But it might as well be new considering how few do it.

Of course, the ideal way has always been to build a warm email list and mail it.

That way if you get in a financial jam with the wolves at the door it can be as simple as:

1. Think of ridiculously valuable offer with looming deadline

2. Email your list

Chances are that’ll do the trick.

If you want to learn my ways of doing email see the paid Email Players Newsletter here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Or, at the very least, effectively frozen in carbonite like Han Solo.

Here’s what I mean:

Over the last couple years especially… several people both from my email list (and most recently on Twitter) have been asking me how to go about morphing their current info publishing business into a business like mine with a print newsletter, selling print books, etc.

And with rare exception I try to warn people away from it.

Here’s why:

The costs are way higher than they were even a few years ago thanks to inflation plus a worldwide paper shortage according to my printer last I checked. Plus, the logistics of shipping & delivery are different and far more expensive than selling purely digital. Currently, I do not heavily promote my elBenbo Press book about my publishing methodology because most people on my list or who follow me on Twitter are not ready for it — as they don’t even have an email list (just a twitter or facebook following). And they really think they can do it just by spanking out tweets all day behind a cartoon avatar, and not do all the hard work of aggressively growing and mailing a legally opted-in to list, and that was not scraped together with a bunch of cold addresses.

Then there’s the writing side of the print newsletter business.

Everyone wants to have written, yet nobody wants to write.

But if you are going to do a print newsletter you gotta write, and learn to love writing (and learn to love deadlines), and make it something you’d do even if you didn’t have to do it. You literally live and die by your writing in any kind of publishing business like I have. Some foolishly think they can “prompt” that sort of thing with tools like fapGPT. But people know fools gold when they see it. Dan Kennedy has long talked about how you can’t even let someone else write in your voice (a human, much less a machine) and get away with it for very long when it comes to a print newsletter.

And, as usual, he’s right.

My boys & ghouls in Email Players would not tolerate me pulling that nonsense.

Something else to think about:

If you are going to be in the print publishing business it helps to think like a publisher and not like a writer or “content creator” or copywriter or digital agency owner or coach or consultant or freelancer or anything else. Otherwise you’re just going to hit a ceiling real fast. I know this because I made that mistake myself for the first 6 or 7 years of publishing a print newsletter during my “one email per day” phase.

It was fun, and very low stress, but not-at-all sustainable.

And it put a definite limit on sales potential.

Whatever the case, here’s my doom n’ gloom opinion:

I think it’s only going to be harder and harder to launch and sustain a print model for the vast majority of marketers and businesses. I’ve spent the last nearly 15 years selling various print subscription offers and have things dialed in pretty good. But without that foundation and without everything in place like I have things now, I almost (not totally — because they should know better) feel sorry for people jumping in the print game thinking it’s going to be easy and fun because maybe I make it look easy and fun each day (?), when for most it will be the exact opposite.

More:

This is why I tell anyone who asks me about it these days I’d go with a digital subscription offer — pdf, mobile app hosted content like we offer at Learnistic or social media hosted (like we offer at SocialLair and you can see in “real time” how it works at our Low Stress Trading site), membership site hosted content, paid videos, paid podcast… anything BUT print or physically-delivered offers. And this is especially the case if you’re milquetoast about growing an email list (a social media following is nice, but it’s not nearly as good or stable or reliable or protected from big tech shenanigans as an email list) and mailing it aggressively each and every day.

You can get away with some laziness & flakiness selling a digital subscription offer.

But not so with a physical newsletter.

Unless, maybe, you have a gigantic following so you can replace churn as fast as it happens.

But even then, churn is another thing that catches people by surprise.

But even that is not as big a deal with digital as it is with physical – as with physical you’re dealing with printing costs, fulfillment costs, shipping costs (going through the roof right now), blown deadlines from vendors you rely on, software glitches, flakey delivery people (getting worse by the month) and the list goes on.

In fact, here is a comment I recently got about this about delivery alone:

“We have just started to sell print newsletter 2 months ago, and now I understand what the pain in the ass all this delivery stuff is.”

He ain’t wrong.

There are a handful of people it actually costs me to send to when you factor in printing, shipping, and fulfillment – unless I charge them shipping, etc, which I have so far resisted doing. But, even by generously paying peoples’ shipping, I still get a few greedy and cheap-minded dinks – most of them in the EU – who think because I offer free shipping then that means I’m supposed to pay their country’s customs/delivery fees, too.

Probably next they will ask me to pay their taxes while I am at it.

The countries that require an “invoice” are especially grating.

I am not going to create a special invoice for every customer in every different country, based on each of their government’s invoicing requirements. People can either fugking copy & paste the receipt the carts sends upon the sale and/or when Email Players bills them each month into a template or cancel their subscription and go haunt someone else.

This is just one of many reasons I am aggressively banning EU countries like it’s a sport.

But it ain’t just the EU getting into the act.

In 10 years — assuming the US is still even a country, which I don’t think it will be — I strongly suspect I will only be selling to the US and a few, select other countries not run by communists. And even in the US I will probably end up banning entire states going by the sheeple-like voting patterns of their people, their openly corrupt bureaucrats that make doing business more trouble than it’s worth, and their growing regulations. I would not be shocked if California, for example, starts sending you a tax bill or claiming nexus just for sending a FedEx package that travels through that state to someone in another state.

People might chuckle or shake their heads at that.

But it’s probably more true than not.

Anyway, it is just not worth the trouble in some cases.

Bottom line?

I recommend go digital, get that dialed in, then toy with print later if you still want to.

My too many sense…

But whichever model you use (print, digital, whatever…) if you want to learn some of my best tricks of the trade for using email to sell with see the paid Email Players newsletter.

Details here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

“An email should be like a woman’s skirt — short enough to get attention, long enough to cover the details”

So I used to quip when giving public talks about email.

It was always guaranteed to trigger at least one overly-fragile sob sister.

But also, it was and still is true.

And I think whether you write a 100 word or 10,000 word email that advice applies. In fact, I still teach that as a general guideline to those new to email until they learn the craft of pithy writing. Especially since people like to go off on tangents about the time aunt Martha made soap in the grove but that has nothing at all to do with whatever they are selling.

But it did not take long to realize longer emails can be a whole lot better.

Especially when I started experimenting with 600, 700, even 900+ word emails.

And the exact opposite happened that I originally thought would:

My sales and engagement usually went up.

Certainly the quality of customer was much higher.

Not every time, in every case, with every promo.

But as long as I was using solid direct response copywriting, writing from the gut, and doing it with intensity and lots of Forward Intent (purposely making it a little harder and taking a little more time than needed, not just going through the motions), they almost always were getting more sales, engagement, replies, forwards to peers/friends, invites to teach on podcasts and speak at events, ideas for whole books and courses coming to me as I was writing them, and the list goes on.

The short ones of 300 – 500 words?

Not so much.

But that was only after I honed my writing over thousands of emails written.

So there is context to that..

Probably the single most overall engaging email (it wasn’t selling anything) I ever wrote was on January 1, 2023 last year — which was a 2,500+ word, 6-page email eulogy for my dog of 15+ years Zoe, who had just passed a few days earlier. Got 100’s of replies, stories shared, relationships strengthened, the list goes on. Not everything can be tracked with a spreadsheet. The long term intangibles have always been far more long term profitable for my business than the short term trackable and measurable stuff.

Nowadays:

I’m hammering out 1,500 – 2,000 word emails without even thinking about it or caring or even looking at the word count unless I just am curious for whatever reason. Many of the 30+ emails I wrote at the tail end of 2023 (to sell the January 2024 150th Email Players issue, which was a 64-page issue to commemorate the event) clocked in at 1,500+ words, and some were closer to 2,000 words or more.

Bottom line:

It all reminds me of something the man universally considered to be the world’s greatest copywriter Gary Bencivenga once said. He was talking about direct mail, but has long proven to be just as true for my business in email:

“Anyone who says long copy doesn’t work is out of their minds”

On that note…

To see my full approach to email marketing see the paid Email Players newsletter here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

In which the writing question is asked:

“Did you ever find yourself lacking motivation at times to write your novels? Or like, what did you do if you were stumped for ideas or just don’t know where a scene should go next”

The answer:

Is explained in gruesome detail in the “Author’s Note” in the forthcoming and completely revised (i.e., I rewrote it from start to finish a few months ago after finishing the screenplay for it, and realizing the screenplay was way better than the novel I wrote in 2013…) version of my first novel Zombie Cop which will be re-published soon.

Until then, here is the author’s note that I hope answers the question above:

Author’s Note:

“Appetite For Punishment”

I have a shameless admission:

This book is a massively revised version of Zombie Cop, and not the original I published in 2014. By that I mean: it’s the exact same story. But it also might as well be a…

Totally Different Book.

Here’s why that’s important for you:

I decided to write the original version of this novel after a stray brain fart on a coastal drive (“What if a cop turned into a zombie and started eating people he pulled over?”), followed by a long talk with a writer friend named Robert Bruce (who would later write the intro to the seventh book in this Enoch Wars series, Lucifer’s Favorite) a few years later in August 2013. He encouraged me to just start writing as it sounded like something he’d want to read. So, I started writing the first three or four chapters. Then I got distracted by business and life, put it down, and didn’t pick it up again until that December when I banged the rest of it out. However, before writing a single word of Zombie Cop, I already knew it would be a seven-part series. And I also already knew each part would focus on a different monster with my own “twists” on that monster’s lore. So I wrote the sequel (Vampire Apocalypse) later that year in July. Then it took almost a year after writing Vampire Apocalypse to write the third book Demon Crossfire. After that, it took me more than a year to sit down and hammer out the last four novels (Evil’s Child, Werewolf Bastard, Hell’s Frankenstein, and Lucifer’s Favorite) over a 5- or 6-month period to finish the series.

Part of the reason for writing the last four all at once is I just wanted to finish the series and move on to other things. And that’s why after I finished them and was satisfied with the story, I figured that was that.

Mission Accomplished.

That is, until a couple years later.

I got another “itch” to revisit the Enoch Wars universe in 2019 and wrote the eighth novel, God Blood. That book is a collection of 14 connected short stories to expand the world and play with various dangling plot lines and unresolved character arcs I’d set up. It also gave context to certain events that had happened in my mind (but not on paper, so to speak) in the stories. I thought it’d be a good way to make reading the series a more complete overall reading experience.

After I wrote that I once again thought:

“Finally! It’s for real over!”

And it was.

Until it wasn’t…

Because in early 2022 I saw the magnificently written—but totally ineptly ended—Dexter: New Blood show. And that show inspired me to write the ninth Enoch Wars novel, Serpent Seed—with even more ideas, themes, and plotlines (some starting as early as Book Four, Evil’s Child) I still had left over but didn’t put in the prior eight books. I also wanted to give the story a real ending after leaving both Books Seven and Eight on cliffhangers. The former was done that way deliberately (inspired by the ending of one of my favorite movies Sideways). But the latter just sort of “happened” and was not-at-all intentional. As probably any novelist will tell you: after a certain point, characters and stories start to write themselves. And when that happens…

The Writer Becomes as Much of a Spectator as the Audience.

It’s a strange phenomenon that is as nerve-racking (not knowing the ending and hoping it’ll be good) as it is exhilarating (also not knowing the ending and hoping it’ll be good).

Which brings me back to why I massively revised Zombie Cop:

I sat down for a month and put everything I had into Serpent Seed—dedicating it to my son, and even writing a bunch of appendices to further expand the lore with still more ideas that had been alluded to “off screen” throughout the books, that had also “happened” only in my head, but never confirmed in the stories themselves.

I was glad I did it, too.

Because of all nine books, Serpent Seed was—and still is—the one I am most proud of.

And, yes, once again I thought, “Oh yeah, baby! This is for real, for real finished!”

Until again…I got yet another “bug” to revisit this world.

Specifically, I wanted to turn Zombie Cop into a screenplay. I had zero illusion it would ever be made into a movie. And I had even less of an illusion that even if it did get made, the current Hollywood system would not butcher it with its predictable checklist-dance of race & gender-swapping characters, making at least one of the main characters trans and probably several of them gay, and stripping all the Christian undertones and themes completely out—turning it into just another boring slasher flick with a lame social agenda.

In other words, I did not want to write the screenplay for fame or fortune.

I Wrote It Because I Wanted To.

Whether it got made or not was irrelevant. Worst case, I was adapting the screenplay into a graphic novel anyway.

Not to mention this:

I am a writer by trade (copywriting and non-fiction books & newsletters). And pushing myself into different kinds of writing has always made all my other writing better. Plus, I’d also wanted to write a screenplay since the early 1990’s after writing a college paper on the subject. And it finally dawned on me after finishing Serpent Seed that I’d written some 8,000 pages of emails, several thousand pages of combined sales letters/ads, and more nonfiction books than I could remember…in addition to nearly 150 issues of my monthly Email Players print newsletter (which alone had a bigger word count than both The Lord of the Rings—including The Hobbit—and The Chronicles of Narnia combined). But I’d still never written a measly 100-page (give or take) screenplay in all that time.

So, write the Zombie Cop screenplay I did.

And turned out great (in my humble, but biased opinion) it did.

And get a glimmer of hope it might someday even be made I did.

At the very least, it was way better than the Zombie Cop novel. Certainly, the screenplay was much tighter, with none of the bloat, and with the redundantly deranged parts (there were many) either taken out, implied, or “retrofitted” in a way that made for far better storytelling.

And That’s When It Happened Yet Again…

What I mean by “it” is this:

After letting some friends and family read the Zombie Cop screenplay (some of who’d also read and enjoyed the novel) and getting their feedback…I realized that book being so ineptly written made the rest of the eight books…

Mostly Inaccessible.

Except maybe to the mentally disturbed minds who read it. No offense to the fans who enjoyed it. I was certainly mentally disturbed when writing Zombie Cop. Even my cousin’s stepdaughter asked, “What’s wrong with your cousin?” after she read it.

(I still have no answer to that…)

Which brings us to the here and chow:

I spent a month rewriting and re-editing, word-by-word, Zombie Cop based on that screenplay. This also meant—much to my own horror—doing even more work in the form of writing brand-new Chapters 7 and 14 for Book Seven (Lucifer’s Favorite) and a small edit to the ending of Book Six (Hell’s Frankenstein). Not to mention having to pay to have those changes (including all of Zombie Cop) re-recorded in the audio books and figuring out the logistics (like buying out all the old inventory of those books…) so all the new material came out at once. That way, I figured, anyone who’d gotten into the series wouldn’t be confused by what they read later due to changes I made in Zombie Cop.

Yeesh.

Sometimes I think I have an appetite for punishment as voracious as my zombie characters’…

Appetites For Flesh!

But you know what?

I’d do it again in a zombie victim-panicked heartbeat. Because it was not only a labor of love…but this version of Zombie Cop (we’ll call it Zombie Cop 2.0) you’re about to read is not only much shorter (nearly half the length), but a faster, cleaner, and hopefully more entertaining experience for you, the reader, to enjoy.

It’s also a story I’d let my mom read, too.

It’s no joke or exaggeration that, over all these years, I forbade her from reading the original. I just didn’t want her wondering how she’d failed her boy…

Again, this book is the same story.

But if you’ve read the original, it might feel like an almost totally different book in some ways.

Personally, I like to think of it as:

“Reverse Osmosis Zombie Cop”

I.e., a novel, adapted from the screenplay, which was adapted from the original novel.

All right, enough of this yapping.

If you’ve read this far, I don’t know what else to tell you.

You must have an appetite for wasting time as great as mine is for doing extra writing. How about we both fix our evil ways then? Me by wrapping up this author’s note, and you by reading something productive—such as the rest of this book?

As Chief Rawger might say with his hyena-like laugh:

BONE-appe-TEET!

That should answer the above question and then some.

I can’t speak for anyone else.

But for me it’s not a matter of needing motivation.

It’s looking at all my ideas and having to figure out what to work on next, and rearranging my schedule to fit it in. And if you write enough, and if you are invested enough in your stories and characters and legacy (even if it’s just a legacy in your own mind…) your problem could very well be like what happened to me:

You shift from not enough motivation, to TOO much motivation.

And between you and me… I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Because the satisfaction makes it a lot of fun, and a labor of love.

I hope this helps anyone reading this in some way.

I really believe copywriters have an advantage in fiction. Not because we are better writers (arguably we are worse pure writers). But because a good copywriter will be naturally paranoid about boring people. And I’ll take a non-boring but terribly “written” novel over a boring but perfectly crafted novel any ol’ day.

It’s not all that different from how I approach email, too.

You can learn more about that in the paid Email Players Newsletter.

More info here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Easily one of th e“most asked” question I get around here is:

“What are some tips for coming up with ideas?”

(For emails, books, newsletters, courses, sales copy, all of it)

The answer is what I call my “4 W’s.”

They are:

1. Writing

2. Working

3. Working out

4. Willis

I can trace nearly all my best ideas to those 4 things.

The more I write, the more ideas I get (writing begets writing). The more I work on something else, the more ideas I get from that, too. (There is even science behind the hand-creativity connection that I won’t bother going into here, but it is easily Google’able. Excludes wanking, of course — that’s not one of the W’s, sorry if that disappoints…) The more I workout, also the more ideas I get. (I’ve “written” entire Email Players issues and portions of books on long walks on my phone’s audio recorder and am constantly pausing to jot notes down in the gym to the point where I just keep my phone on with my note taking app standing by.) And the more I just relax hanging out with Willis all day the more ideas I get for everything from books and newsletters to big, sweeping business ideas/strategies for the other ventures I got my righteous fingers in (SaaS, Options Coaching biz, the newspaper I am buying ownership in… I am constantly writing ideas down when Willis is around).

The result:

The more of those 4 things I do, the more ideas I get. The more ideas I get, the more content I create. The more content I create, the more sales my business makes. Thus, I spend more and more time on those 4 things. My entire day is basically doing those 4 things — even when eating sometimes.

Bonus thought:

There is also a 5th thing I used to have but no longer do:

And that is a Zoe. Walking my dog Zoe was a huge source of ideas for content. Eventually I’ll get another dog. And when I do, I suspect I’ll have to give him a name that also starts with a W. I’m obsessive compulsive like that…

Okay so that’s that.

If you want to see the email & other methods I use to grow my sales, my customer base, and my influence in my market/niche… see the paid Email Players Newsletter.

More info here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

A question that may be hard to read with it’s one-sentence-per line, but well worth the answer:

Hi Ben,

I’ve been learning about copywriting for awhile now,

And I have been starting to write bits eg practice emails,

But I ran into a small wall…

And since you are one of, if not the BEST, I was wondering if you could help.

The problem is how do you write your metaphorical analogies,

You know when trying to emphasise something,

But you don’t want to sound boring ?? 

You know those analogies

Well when writing them I find sometimes they may be hard to understand,

Or they need changing,

But I can’t find how to improve them.

Anyways I don’t want to waste any more of your time,

My advice:

Combine what Frank Frazetta (“godfather of fantasy art”) and Todd McFarlane the world famous comicbook artist used to become the best of the best at what they did to climb to top of their respective games when they were out there competing.

And just what, pray tell, did they do?

I am glad you asked:

1. I once saw a video where Todd said to teach himself art (which at first challenged Marvel’s “house style” and then all but replaced it for Spider-Man artists, if that tells you something) – he would spend an entire week JUST on drawing one kind of body part, or perspective, or object, or building, etc. He’d really go deep into, for example, how to draw a knee, from various angles. Or feet (which artists tend to struggle with especially), or buildings, or whatever it is.

It was a lot of work.

But he figured it out and became one of the best & highest paid in the game.

Later, he leveraged that talent into a $300+ million toy company.

A true entrepreneur.

2. Frank Frazetta once said in an interview that when you run into a challenge:

“Sometimes you just have to sit there and think”

That’s also my advice to the guy above.

And it is what I do myself when wanting to get better at something – especially when it comes to writing. It’s also how I self taught myself bullet-writing, analogies, storytelling, headlines, transitions, drama, infotainment, rhetoric, etc… by learning it from the masters of the craft who figured it out before us, and then just doing it over and over and over again, for not just days… but weeks, months, years, and now well over two decades.

I still work at it as hard as ever every single day.

And, I will add, it’s a lot easier to do that if you are writing daily emails.

By writing daily emails… and sometimes multiple daily emails… it makes every single day not only an opportunity to make sales (which is the main reason to do it), but also an opportunity to practice the things you want to get better at, instead of avoiding or shying away from it.

There are all kinds of benefits to writing daily emails selling your own offers.

Even if you’re a freelancer.

Or, I would argue, especially if you’re a freelancer.

Just realize that like anything in life:

If it was easy everyone would be doing it…

If you want more info on the paid Email Players newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

For shyts & giggles I posted this on Twitter once:

“Ben why don’t you like to fly around speaking at events anymore?”

Followed by a screenshot of Drudge Report with these headlines stacked on top of each other:

“Mid-air blowout puts BOEING back in hot seat…”

“Stock tanks…”

“ALASKA decision not to ground despite warning signs comes under scrutiny…”

“UNITED inspections find loose bolts…”

“Moon landing attempt by company appears doomed after critical fuel leak…”

I was never a big fan of traveling as it was… but I used to do it whenever I got a chance to speak or train at someone’s mastermind or event. Nowadays? It’s like I told one company that asked if I’d fly to speak recently: at this point the only way to get me to go anywhere not in driving distance is to pay me far more money than whatever the “draw” my presence there would be worth to them, for the sole purpose of discouraging anyone from asking me to go in the first place.

Hence the beauty of having a content-driven business:

If you want to be a digital nomad living in hostels you can.

If you want to be one of these selfie king guys who can’t eat anything or go anywhere without telling their Facebook friends to feed their constant quest for attention & validation you certainly can.

Or, if you just want to be a shut-in holed up like Smeagol in his cave (admittedly, like me…) you can do that, too.

Anyway, I don’t know where else I’m going with this.

So I’ll wrap it up with one more thing:

I’ve been creating & monetizing content for a long time.

Including mere books (that aren’t “supposed” to be expensive) I sell for over $1,000.

And my primary way of selling it all is email.

Yes, good o’l “retro” plain text emails.

You learn more about my methodology for such in the paid Email Players Newsletter.

Here is the link for more info:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

A question about using my content creation ways to YouTube:

What are your thoughts on applying this “more and faster content” philosophy to youtube?

From what we can see people who post the most frequently on there are the ones who make the least views and money whereas the ones who take their sweet time and heavily balance it out with quality get way more views and money.

So I guess the philosophy of daily contact with your audience wouldn’t work as well there due to how the site works.

What are your thoughts on it?

First, a caveat:

I am not a “YouTube” guy. So I don’t keep up with its ever-changing rules and algorithms and biases… or play dodge ball with its censorship and de-platforming shenanigans. To rely on such a platform as anything other than supplementary (like we do with BerserkerMail’s YouTube channel) is a recipe for frustration and, I would argue, a horribly foundation to 100% rely upon for selling and/or distributing content.

Personally, I don’t create any content based on algorithms.

I don’t even create content based on clicks.

I base it on…

Relationships.

That is the only “algorithm” I care about.

I’d rather have ONE engaged person consuming my videos/audios/emails/books/other content than a million non-engaged peopled consuming it. I write, record, and talk to one person, not a crowd. To one person, not a list. To one person, not a crowd. When people go through my content I want them to feel like I’m communicating with them and them alone.

This goes back to old school Mister Rogers when he was told by an early influence of his that TV (video content) was all about:

“one little buckaroo”

That is who he was talking to.

And it added a huge layer of both humanity and influence to his content. I daresay he was the single most beloved and biggest “brand” of the 20th century — even bigger than Disney (not financially — although I believe he could have been if he’d chose) and any single President or world leader — just going by sheer number of people – and generations of people – who loved and knew about him, and who still do.

You think he made his show based on some fleeting rules or algorithms?

No.

He had the exact same format for 33 years.

On a public supported channel.

At a time of the day when most people were at work.

Obviously, this does not lend itself to businesses who wrap their livelihood’s up in click-based monetization on a platform they don’t control, run by a company that has long ago abandoned caring about making a profit and instead exists to serve a social agenda above all else.

So those are my thoughts on it.

Here are a couple more related thoughts:

1. With Congress trying to ban TikTok…

I don’t know what to tell all the online marketers who screwed around building a TikTok audience instead of an email list the last several years. Except, maybe a quote from the crazy Irishman in the movie Braveheart when he tells William Wallace (as arrows are raining down on their heads and puncturing through their thin, wooden shields):

“The Lord tells me he can get me out of this mess. But He’s pretty sure you’re fooked!”

Anyone who relies on a 3rd party platform is in the same boat.

Yes, even if it’s a so-called “based” one like Twitter.

Ffs build an email list, back it up, and get their snail mail addresses.

2. Many years ago (on the old “Better Networker” site — which served as a great article directory at the time for the home business niche) my friend & computer scientist the late Jim Yaghi once showed people the inanity of relying on soft metrics like clicks and views, etc.

In this case:

There were certain articles that got thousands of shares.

Maybe even 10’s of thousands, but I don’t remember exact numbers.

And he wrote about how dumb it was to base an article’s success or monetization on shares, which people assumed was the gold standard metric at the time. And he illustrated how dumb it was to care about shares by showing how almost all those popular articles got way less actual views than shares.

i.e., nobody was reading them, they were just mindlessly forwarding them.

Not all that much actual “engagement.”

This was probably back in 2009 or 2010 and that mentality has only gotten worse.

Immoral of the story:

Unless, I suppose, you get directly paid a lot of money based on views alone there is little reason to create content for clicks or opens or views or shares or anything you see so-called influencers obsessing over. None of them are direct response people. I doubt very many have businesses that’d survive if they were kicked off YouTube at all. So I suggest creating content for the creation/expansion/fortification of the relationship with the person you are trying to reach/teach/help with your content, so they go wherever you go, to whatever platform or media you use.

i.e., talk to that One Little Buckaroo.

You don’t have to ignore all those other metrics.

But to wrap your business around them is foolish.

* Build/grow your list.

* Create content for that list.

* Sell it to that list EVERY day (despite what some idiotic algorithm wants)

* Sell those buyers something else.

Focus on that and the rest will take care of itself. Then, if you want many more of my insights & experiences with selling with email check out the paid Email Players Newsletter.

Here is the link to learn more:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

An excellent question that came in a while back:

“Quick question (feel free to use for future content): how do you get so much done on your walks? Are you reading/responding to emails on your phone while walking? Taking voice notes? I know you do some great content creation while walking (as per your awesome YouTube vids) but wanted to get an idea for what else you do to make those walks more productive.”

The short answer?

Yes.

The longer, more detailed answer:

Some of my walks are 3-3.5 hours long — while others are maybe 20-45 minutes long. But long or short I never let the opportunity go to waste. That time is a pure, uncut, and unadulterated example of what the great Dan Kennedy teaches about:

“Unused Capacity”

i.e., time that can be used to grow my business.

Thus, depending on the day and situation that time consists of things like:

* Doing a Twitter Spaces call with Email Player subscriber and BerserkerMail co-owner John Wood — which has obvious immediate benefits, but that he then also uses as content on the BerserkerMail YouTube channel that he runs, and that we could put up as a BerserkerMail podcast, and probably be cut up and used for other things too.

* Back-and-forthing with my various biz partners on other matters — whether it’s with John & Troy Broussard about our BerserkerMail biz, or Troy with Low Stress Trading biz, or with Stefania about life/business/scheduling/whatever… and the list goes on. I have filled entire 3+ hour walks just doing this, barely noticing the time going by.

* Listening to audio books, podcasts, courses, or recorded conversations about business I want to review, dig deeper into, think about, etc

* And, of course…

Creating content.

I’ve “written” entire Email Players issues, for example, on walks with my phone’s recorder. I’ve also co-created a course or two on walks. Not to mention belting out content for bonuses, premiums, and that sort of thing. I’ve also gotten ideas and built the outlines of books while on walks — stopping whenever an idea pops in my mind to jot the idea down, email it to myself, catalog & organize it later when I get home.

And the above is just for starters.

I’m not even getting into the health benefits of all that walking/jogging/running.

i.e., Road work as Gary Halbert taught in his Boron Letters.

People like ‘hacks’ — well in my business walking is the most profitable hack of them all.

Highly recommend.

To learn more about the paid Email Players newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle