Ben Settle

Maybe it’s time to switch up my email game?

Ben, I found you lately and been loving the paradigm shift around daily e-mails.

Here’s my skepticism about using it in my business:

You’re selling the strategy of selling daily emails by sending daily emails.

It’s like the marketers selling marketing tactics. Yes we gobble them up, but it’s ok for you to sound really salesy because we know you’re selling.

In my business, I don’t want to sound overly salesy in my emails because I think it will turn off a lot of my audience. I have 50,000 YT subscribers and a 5000 person list. 

Trying to think through how to do this.

I guess what I’m saying, is you can get away with more because you’re treating your business like a direct response marketer. 

I don’t want to build a business where I just burn through leads and don’t care about my reputation. I want to be for the people. Does that make sense?

Anyways I love you dude, listening to podcasts of yours on YT all the time and already have been sharing your stuff with friends of mine.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the question.

It’s the same question/assumption online marketers have had since 1993.

But in his case, I’m pretty sure his 50k subscribers who do not enjoy being forced to sit through multiple 15-second unskippable ads that blatantly sell them crap they don’t want or need and adds literally nothing to their lives appreciate him being “for the people” and not selling them.

The question is not unreasonable, though.

And I understand why people ask it, don’t get me wrong.

But these guys always think “they’re” business is different.

That they need to be seen as nice guys who don’t just want to sell.

That they are somehow “above” it all.

And it’s all pure, unadulterated self-projection and, I would add, self-delusion.

It reminds me of a question the late, great “World’s Most Feared Negotiator” Jim Camp got from someone on a call once, asking how, as a consultant when he’s prospecting, he can do it in a way where he doesn’t come off as a greedy vulture who just wants to get inside the client’s wallet and squeeze out profits?

Mr. Camp’s retort?

“I think, unfortunately, the real problem there is the person that sees himself as just the consultant squeezing out profits. That’s not a problem that the vendors have; that’s a problem the consultant has.”

And so it is with the boys & ghouls worrying about these things.

They’re problem isn’t daily email, or selling, or whatever. It’s getting out of their own heads, and thinking in such a way where selling is not only the right thing to be doing but the only thing you can do to truly help someone with whatever problem your offer sells.

In order to do that you have to use the R-Word:

Relationships.

You don’t build relationships by giving stuff away free. All you do is build entitlement, get zero consumption of whatever it is you are generously giving away to play Mr. Nice Guy, and, eventually, earning lots of resentment when you DO finally sell something.

Real life story about that:

I learned this lesson the hard way in 2006.

My list was small, and I bought into what Gary Halbert taught that you don’t sell anything online very often unless you really have something to sell, yada yada yada. He also said phone ordering ONLY does better than a link with an online sales page. Go ahead and do that if you want. Let me know what happens… Anyway, so I did that and used to get lots of praise, lots of people thanking me, and lots of people saying how I had the best list, the best info, the best this, that, or the other, thinking I was on to something.

But then… I sold my first affiliate offer.

It was for a course for freelance copywriters.

Extremely valuable, too.

And I was excited to mail about it.

So I did the PLF emails my buddy who was selling the course gave me where you give stuff away free, don’t sell, then, eventually send an actual pitch.

When I got to the pitch?

Bam!

F-bombs.

Insults.

Cursing.

Accusations of being a “list pimp”, and all that.

I learned real quick that if you do nothing but give stuff away free, become known as the guy who gives all the stuff away free, never sell anything except once in a while, and do the “moving the freeline” dance you get (1) LESS customers (2) a smaller business and (3) you attract nothing but the worst of humanity who will absolutely turn on you when you do any actual selling.

It’s probably not as bad these days.

(I like to think I have helped at least play a small part in breaking the selling “taboo” over the years)

But that entitlement attitude those who are used to free stuff foster and hamster spin in their heads is always there, and always will be there, because that is just how humans are. And even if you do just give free stuff away, you’re not really doing them any good anyway since they’re never going to value what you give them.

And certainly not as much as if they pay for it.

And, especially, if they pay a lot for it.

The best relationships I have, with my best customers (and I am NOT unique with this, this is something anyone who does any significant numbers over 10+ years straight knows is true) is with those who have bought, consumed, and used what I sell.

This goes beyond “my” niche.

I saw it first hand when I co-owned a weight loss biz too.

And when I worked in the golf niche.

And the self-defense niche, prostate problem niche, dating niche, and the list goes on.

B2B or B2C — I don’t care who you’re selling to or what you sell:

If you want to build a strong relationship, genuinely improve lives, and solve real problems then you can’t pussy-foot around trying to sell without selling and dishonestly acting like you don’t really want to make any money in your business by pretending to be the nice guy.

A servant is always worthy of his hire.

And the more you serve, the more you get hired.

But you can’t serve if they don’t appreciate.

And they won’t appreciate without skin in the game.

An attitude that is required to embrace if you want to use what I teach in the paid Email Players newsletter.

Something you can get more info on here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Came a question:

“Ben, I hope you are doing well. Is copywriting agency something you would make if you are beginner?”

My answer:

A couple years ago I was interviewed by a digital agency owner talking about email and using it with agencies, and how agency owners can use email, benefit from email, profit from email, get clients from email, and all that jazz.

And during the call I kept hearing a lot of ignorance.

By that I mean not in skill or marketing, but ignorance of their own industry (agencies).

And eventually I asked:

“Haven’t you guys studied Ogilvy, Burnett, Foote/Cone/Belding, Thompson, Norman, Barton, or any of the old school agency guys who literally build the modern marketing world as we know it?”

“…”

Yeesh.

If anything qualifies as what Email Players subscriber and the man universally known as the World’s Greatest Living Copywriter Gary Bencivenga describes as “Marketing Malpractice” that does.

It reminds me of this professor I had in college.

401-level class in radio/tv major.

Last day of the semester, and all of us graduating, and someone asked what the difference between AM and FM was! The professor — who was no mere professor, he owned several radio and TV stations, I always respected him — asked:

“How can you people accept a diploma from this university and not know the difference between am and fm?”

A good question.

And I would ask today’s digital agency guys the same thing:

How do they expect to make any real money, grow any kind of immortal brand, make any kind of real impact in their industry without studying the old school ad men (and Mad Men) whose names are STILL on the buildings of the companies they founded nearly 100 years ago?

It’s all rather amazing to me.

Whatever the case, for more info on the Email Players newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Let me tell you a story about fapGPT:

Several months ago on Twitter, everyone was yapping about AI this, and fapGPT that, and it’s going to change the game, and if you aren’t using AI in your sales copy you’re going to be left behind (or, as the broccoli headed ones like to say: “NGMI”), and a bunch of other nonsense many times most aggressively spread by people selling offers about AI, from what I could tell.

Well guess what?

Almost a year later I hardly see any of these people singing this tune anymore.

Even the ones whose only reply whenever I questioned it was:

“give it two years, bro.”

It’s almost like even a lot of them have given up on their predictions of becoming junior masters of the universe using fapGPT in all its glory. In fact, around that time I publicly asked, several times, for someone to show me just one example of competent AI-written sales copy that didn’t read like a robot randomly cutting & pasting from multiple swipe file ads.

I assumed these guys knew something I don’t.

Only one person answered my request.

I won’t name him (he’s an Email Players subscriber, but I don’t want to give up his “cover” — as he sent it to me in confidence, from a private membership site he probably was not supposed to share info from. And so it goes with my righteous Spy Network. Daddy has eyes on a lot of places he’s not supposed to…)

And what happened was this:

He sent me a private email where he copied and pasted some AI-generated sales copy from this private membership site where copywriters were all fapping to AI.

The offer was for dog owners.

And it sounded like you’d expect machine-generated copy to sound:

awkward, choppy, totally not human.

Which, admittedly, whoever the guy was who shared it came clean to, and said a good copywriter could smooth it out, etc. Just like I keep hearing other copywriters fapping in the AI sock saying, as well as email platforms all hopping in the AI game talking about.

Back to the copy:

It just listed a bunch of benefits, awkwardly, while trying to sound fancy. But really, it sounded like Data from Star Trek reading off a bunch swipe file copy from random ads in the same niche, without context or depth or humanity, from his memory banks.

That is the best description I can think of for it.

Realize, I was quite connected to that market at the time, as I had just lost my own dog a couple months earlier after 15+ years having her, with her last year being extremely difficult watching her waste away day-by-day, cleaning up poops tracked all over since she was blind and walked in it, and the smell of “sickness” all over the downstairs wing of the house (which she had all to herself the last 9 months of her life). I spent several months trying like hell to give her as good a quality of life as I possibly could after giving me 15+ years of the best times I have ever had in my entire life, before putting her down.

And I can tell you:

That AI-generated copy sounded not just stupid and cold — but had zero empathy.

And even borderline insulting in some ways.

My Email Players subscriber showed me a few paragraphs from a discussion about the copy.

And they all thought it was “cool!”

One guy said it made him cry about his dog.

Which I call bull sheee-yat on.

No real dog owner who loves their dog, has a bond with their dog, and has a strong relationship with their dog would think that copy was anything but nonsensical. And that is what I told my Email Players subscriber: it was “functionally” correct with benefits, certain words dog owners use (although awkwardly stated), no doubt pulled from dog related sources.

But it was also clearly not written by a dog owner.

Or, at least, not with one with more than a shallow, cartoonish relationship with his pet.

And no “smoothing” it over would change that. Back when I would do “rewrites” of ads it was clear it was very rarely easy to “smooth” out shyt copy. It always required a total rewrite, as it goes beyond words and stacking benefit. It’s about relationships, connecting with another human, and solving that person’s problems. AI is just a tool — a machine — and a tool/machine cannot create a relationship with another human being for you any more than your calculator can help you create a relationship with your accountant.

AI is probably going to be a very powerful tool for some things.

(I agree with the AI crowd that in 5 years, for example, it will do all the menial ticky-tac stuff like balancing checkbooks, etc and save people loads of time).

But it won’t build, strengthen, or solidify relationships in a vacuum.

It won’t solve serious customer service problems.

It won’t conduct important negotiations where the stakes are high.

And it won’t “write” copy that connects with people with humanity.

That’s my opinion.

And you know what?

So far I’ve been proven correct on this..

More on the Email Players newsletter here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

One of my favorite marketing & merchandising case studies is Christian Louboutin.

I write a lot about it in my Markauteur book (not currently available for sale) especially.

But basically:

Stefania (who has a background in fashion, and saw all this first hand) was telling me how this French designer’s shoes are so horrifyingly painful to wear that customers sometimes have to literally get liposuction surgery on their feet to wear them.

This is no joke either.

They even have a name for it:

“Cinderella Surgery”

And yet, these prohibitively expensive (they ain’t cheap), “feet-mangling” shoes sell out the same day they drop — with people even getting depressed if they aren’t invited to the company’s sample sale, shoving matches & fights happening in line over who can buy them first, and thieves routinely stealing these bizarrely designed shoes out of other customers’ shopping bags while on the way to the counter to pay for them. Certain A-list celebrities have even been known to pay through the nose just to put a special kind of Botox on the balls of their feet, so they can more comfortably stand in this brand’s stilettos on the red carpet.

Very strange.

Not being a “shoe” guy, it’s all rather bizarre to me.

But what is not bizarre is all the Chinese factory pirates who take advantage of the demand, ripping off the design, and hawking them in the typical mass produced, shoddy fashion Chinese factory pirates are known for doing — all the way down to finding the same shade of red paint for the bottoms.

And what is also not bizarre is those shoes don’t fetch nearly as much money.

If anything, they are balked at by the high roller customers.

And they don’t make anywhere near the $50 million ol’ CL’s company gets last I checked.

The reason:

Nobody finds rip-offs as valuable as the real thing.

Which brings me to AI:

I have read all about how AI is going to radically change everything in marketing & copywriting — from content to design to marketing to copywriting to emails to everything in between. The broccoli heads on Twitter have been insisting ever since I hopped back on the platform in February that those who don’t use AI (like fapGPT) are “not gonna make it” or whatever.

And it’s all pure, unadulterated nonsense.

Just another “mad dash” as the great Dan Kennedy recently wrote.

The gullible will eat it up (and they are).

While the craftsman at the game will profit immensely from it.

No, the craftsmen will not profit necessarily by using it.

They will profit from it by continuing to be craftsmen at what they do selling the genuine thing instead of the cheap, Chinese pirate factory content that AI can only produce – where even if it looks and behaves in a passable way, it still won’t be the same thing, generate the same engagement, make the same kind of money, or create the same kind of raving fanbase companies like Christian Louboutin do in the fashion world.

I kinda wish AI would hurry up and do what all the AI shills keeps saying it can but clearly can’t.

It’ll only make those of us writing our own copy, our own emails, our own content that much more valuable, that much more of a novelty, and, yes, that much more money.

I’m always amused by the AI bois.

They really do live in an alternate reality — it’s like they literally live on the internet.

And it’s even more than amusing how they are always the ones to tell people to touch grass when they haunt social media 24/7, in echo chambers of other AI bois, all high on their own hopium and copium that AI will liberate them from this dirty, nasty thing called…

Work.

It reminds me of another story about this.

Back in July 2020 when Stefania was pregnant with Willis, we sallied forth down to the DMV. Me to renew my drivers license and her to get her Oregon license. And due to the idiotic covid rules (that, admittedly, worked in my favor as a recluse…) the DMV was appointment-only.

That meant we were the ONLY two people there.

With no lines or having to take a number.

And with the place sparkling clean.

I mean, you could practically eat off the counter, that’s how clean it was.

And the service?

Like I told people after:

The only thing that would have made the DMV more pleasant (again, the DMV!) would be if they had served refreshments. I mean, the employees there were not rushed or stressed, and were so pleasant we almost didn’t even want to leave.

In fact:

Stefania had some trouble with her social security number which they had to change after we got married. And the DMV employee, without being asked, spent over an hour on the phone dealing with the state to help expedite and get the problem sorted that ordinarily would have taken something like 6 weeks or longer, especially at that time when all the state agencies were backed up.

But not for Stefania.

She didn’t wait six weeks — she had her license when we left the DMV that day.

Now, do you really think AI or some automated process could have done that?

Of course not.

It would have coldly dealt with it, with zero humanity, because it’s not human.

It can’t negotiate or do anything it’s not programmed to.

That lack of humanity means there’s no relationship.

The only people who have a relationship with AI are deviants who molest sex robots.

I bring all this up not to cause a fight or piss off the AI bois, although I have no doubt this email will have done that in some cases. No, I bring this up because they are clear examples of how what is not human, what can only copy & mimic humanity, can never really have humanity any more than a sociopath can have a real connection with another human even if they intellectually wish to.

And that means opportunity for the rest of us.

That opportunity being:

Relationships will be an even far more valuable new coin of the realm.

I will happily go on record (not that this is a unique take, it’s not) right now and predict as AI gets more adopted, used, relied upon by businesses for writing ads, content, emails, whatever… the more in-demand, the more valued, and the more money will be made by those who don’t use it for those purposes, and give that human connection that can only be given by someone creating content of any kind with genuine humanity — flaws and all.

There are already agencies now using this to their advantage.

Literally saying they do NOT use AI in their marketing, to stand out.

Something to think about.

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Exactly 13 years ago in 2010 during the week between Christmas and New Years, I decided I’d had enough of client work.

I was doing a lot of copywriting for others at the time.

But I grew tired of it and wanted to be my own client.

So I sat down during that week and hammered out a detailed business plan to build out a business selling info products and supplements to a male health-related niche. The plan heavily involved following what a guy at the time showed me for how he built a $70k per year weight loss business doing literally nothing all day except answering a few customer service questions and playing with his kids.

A $70k business may not sound like much.

But his entire operation was:

1. Almost 2,000 articles on various article directories (SEO-driven, no longer viable)

2. Which drove traffic to his opt-in page

3. Then email to sell a $19 eBook via PayPal

And that was it.

That was his entire business — no affiliates, no funnel, no back end sales, no joint ventures, no nothing else but that. And I remember thinking if a guy like that could do $70k per year doing almost nothing, imagine what someone who does know copywriting, who does know how to create a back end, and who does understand how to build out a funnel could do?

And so I got to work.

And I spent the next month and a half following his protocols:

* Writing nearly 1,000 key word optimized unique articles for article directories

* Writing nearly 500 key word optimized unique blog posts

* Writing the eBook, the sales page, and a 101-email sequence (overkill in hindsight..)

Plus, I was on retainer with a client at the time writing all their emails, sales pages, webinar scripts, squeeze pages, and other advertising — not to mention writing all my own stuff selling a print newsletter (no longer published called The Crypto Marketing Newsletter), daily emails, etc.

That was a lot of writing.

Probably around 3 novels’ worth of writing by sheer volume.

And I distinctly remember getting so little sleep during that month and a half that I was just sort of existing in a haze, like a waking dream state, where I couldn’t tell you anything about my life during that time other than I was just always writing, Writing, WRITING… often only sleeping for an hour or two, and probably putting my health at risk in ways I shudder to think about now.

But I got the work done.

And I then took a much-needed road trip to see my dad.

During that road trip I watched as my little fledgling operation started paying off. I wasn’t making a fortune. But I was starting to get 2 or 3 sales of my own little $19 offer coming in, and then increasing to 4 and 5 sales per day, all automated (me doing nothing at that point) and it was looking like it’d keep going up with very little upkeep on my part.

Daddy was pretty proud himself that day.

Then, out of the blue:

Half way through the vacation… Google decided to ‘slap’ article directories.

All my page one content got zapped to page whatever.

The sales all dried up immediately.

And all that work was in vain.

Or was it?

Because a strange thing happened after that.

After all those words and sentences and pages… after all that writing and not sleeping… after all that work and effort… I found sitting down to write just ONE email per day so easy, it was almost laughable. Banging out sales pages took probably half the time, and I was already really fast at it following what later became my Copy Slacker methodology. And what used to take an hour or two would be done in 5, 10, maybe 15 minutes — max. To this day, writing “a” email is so simple and routine to me, I genuinely get irritated at people who whine to me about how hard and inconvenient and frustrating writing just one email per day is for them.

I simply can’t relate to those kinds of boys & ghouls.

And it’s one reason I actively try to dissuade lazy people from buying anything from me.

I don’t want to hear their stupid lazy “oh woe is me!” nonsense.

Now, fast forward about 5 years later after that.

I’m sitting at one of the Oceans 4 Masterminds I co-hosted with Andre Chaperon, Ryan Levesque, and Jack Born. And one of the clients at one of the Vegas ones was Mike Lovitch. And during one of the sessions he said his supplement business imposed MORE strict standards and more strict rules on their copywriters than the actual FTC laws required. He said that helped keep them off the radars and less likely to get messed with by the alphabet agencies.

Fast forward a couple more years after that.

I had written a sales letter for a nearly $1,000 book.

And I decided to hire internet marketing attorney and Email Players subscriber Mike Young to review it. And after getting his review, I implemented everything which, like with Lovitch, meant holding my copy to a higher standard than the government’s rules, only to find that it made all my copy more believable and credible and better.

Anyway, I am not sure where I’m going with this.

Other than I was reminded of these above three situations recently.

Specifically, when I read how Mike Tyson used to train so hard as a professional boxer that he considered the fight days themselves to be just “light” workouts.

A non-athlete would say that’s because he knocked people out so fast.

But it goes beyond that.

Any real athlete knows exactly what I speak of.

And it’s the heavyweight champion of the world of success hacks.

All right, that’ll do it for today.

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Recently, I was asked on this on Twitter:

“Yo Ben random question, do you think it’s still feasible for someone to get into a crazy hot niche like email marketing / direct response services and actually go and ramp up to like $30k/m within a year if you’re completely new with no connections and experience ?”

My response:

1. Email is very trendy – where it’s big and cool for a few years, then the next bright shiny object tool comes along and everyone grifts to that and says email is dead, nobody reads emails, email is worthless, none of them get delivered… the usual nonsense.

Offering email services is just a bubble right now in my opinion, ripe for the popping.

Just like it’s done multiple times in the last almost 30 years.

2. If you want to sell direct response-related services, email or anything else, best way to do it is you go find a niche you’re passionate about (outside of teaching anything marketing-related, which you’re not ready for anyway if you’re asking this), grow your own list, sell it offers with email and sales copy you write, create, while working a 9-5 job to pay your bills.

Takes very little start up investment to do this.

All you really require is an email platform. If you use our BerserkerMail platform we will even host your opt-in page. What that means is, technically you don’t even really need a website at first. Just send people to your opt-in page hosted on our services and you’ll grow that righteous list of yours.

I realize nobody wants to hear any of this advice about getting a job.

They want the $100k business right out of school.

I mean, who doesn’t?

I was just reading about a poll saying zoomers all plan to retire at 56 years old or something.

Good luck with that, boys & ghouls..

Something else:

Worst thing you can do is market any kind of service when your broke, needy, and/or hungry.

Dig ditches or work at McDonalds (everyone’s hiring right now).

Or, better yet, find a helpdesk job for a SaaS company.

You’ll probably learn more about service and customer psychology doing that than probably any other method, and very quickly, and while getting paid. Frankly, if I was just getting started I’d get such a job. And thenI’d work my direct response business on the side, network my gluteous assimus off, make deals, and avoid clients until I had a business selling my own offers making enough where I don’t need clients.

At that point clients are optional.

Even better:

At that point if you still want to grace customers with your presence, you’ll come from a position of strength, expertise, and knowledge, and can charge far more, get far more compliance, and have far less headaches. Of course, if you do build your own thing and if you do become your own client, you will probably come to the conclusion I did many years ago:

Why bother with clients?

Why give other businesses the best of what you have to offer and the bulk of your time and the depths of your creativity & passion & knowledge building a lifestyle for that client and his family, when you can keep all the sales for yourself, control your own destiny, and create a lifestyle for yourself and your own family?

I say all this as someone who hates dealing with clients.

So I am obviously biased.

There are people who genuinely like dealing with clients.

And God bless ’em, someone has to I suppose.

But even if you want to lick client boots for the rest of your life, I’d still recommend getting a job, working your own direct response biz on the side selling your own offers to your own list first before finding any clients, relying on any clients, putting up with any clients.

All right ’nuff said.

Only other thing I will say about this is, when one is ready with a list and an offer and an eagerness to grow, Email Players newsletter could be the right move.

But until then?

Best stay way.

Otherwise, here is the link:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

“This is the short sighted shyt direct marketers do that riles up privacy advocates, prompts legislation to be drafted, and gets perfectly good marketing media neutered by the government”

So I told my biz partner at BerserkerMail Troy Broussard.

The context:

An article about “email laundering” where the owner spent $800k on the domain name.

This is where a service can link anonymous website visitors (by cookies, abandoned cart info, something like that in popular carts like Shopify, etc — it’s all rather shady in my opinion) to their email addresses so a business can then email those visitors selling them stuff.

In other words, there is no opt-in or permission.

I don’t know, Butch.

Sounds like a magnificent way to rile up the privacy wonks and give the government an excuse to revisit & give sharper teeth to CanSpam. I remember Email Players subscriber and internet marketing attorney Mike Young having a field day with this on Twitter.

Not to mention as Troy put it:

“One minor change to can spam law and him and his $800k domain go up in smoke”

My take:

Direct marketers enslaved to their hindbrains like this always are, always will be, and alway have been the weakest link in our industry. They’re obsessed with trying to “get away” with something shady by abusing perfectly sound marketing medias and tools, which then prompts opportunist attorney generals and politicians to want to “fix” things, which then just screws everything for everyone else doing things legitimately.

It’s happened with just about every media marketers have used.

And now they’re working hard to fook up email for the rest of us.

But, there is a way to help insulate your business from this sort of thing. And that is by creating such an airtight relationship with your list where, as they see all this shady nonsense going on, you are basically the only one they trust, read, pay any attention to in the inbox… and even if your media is taken away, they are more likely to follow you wherever you may roam next.

The good thing about spammers is it’s easy to stand out from them.

Even if, ironically, you wind up in the spam or promotions tabs.

On that note, for more on Email Players paid newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

I wrote the following on Twitter the other day “stream of consciousness” style.

I’ve slightly edited it for clarity.

But it’s quite timely for what’s coming down the pike, so I am sharing it again here:

One of the problems info publishers run into eventually are customers who bytch & moan about “too much info!” and “info overload!” and “I need time to implement!”

And it’s all hamster spinning.

Take my Email Players newsletter as an example.

It’s usually about 17-pages of content and 3-pages of ads. No particular reason for that many pages, incidentally. It used to be 16, another newsletter I used to publish was 12. If I was starting from scratch I’d make it only 8 pages, will not explain why here though.

Whatever the case:

Sometimes I do an extra-sized issue.

And, like in January next month, a Triple+ sized issue (64-pages — to commemorate the monthly newsletter’s 150th issue). I can’t say for sure, but I suspect this upcoming January 150th anniversary issue will get a bunch of people complaining and barking at the moon about how they don’t have time to read it all, yada yada yada.  And that is okay — as I figure 2024 would be as good a time as any to do some “new year cleaning” of the bums off the customer list anyway.

It’s not that I don’t want lots of subscribers.

It’s that I want the right kind of subscribers.

And people uncomfortable with too much info that can make them lots of money are so outside my realm of reality that I cannot comprehend their way of thinking, and have nothing to offer them. And while it may be anecdotal, my customer list has always, without exception, grown, along with my sales, the more aggressively I repelled and gotten rid of the crud.

It’s almost like it “makes room” for better customers.

Back to the point:

In a lot of ways doing a 64-page issue is the worst thing anyone can do in info publishing.

Too much info scares away the luke warm types, and they tend to make up the majority of most customer lists.  One reason why a lot of people in the subscription offer business (like newsletters, membership sites, SaaS, whatever it is) like to find the perfect balance (not too much, not too little) is they want to keep people as long as possible, almost hoping they forget about the offer, and just keep paying.

Retention is everything, after all.

You are not really in the “subscription offer” business if you sell a subscription offer, you’re in the — as Bob King told the great Gary Bencivenga — renewal business.

But I  have always run my newsletter differently.

I prefer the types who are so disorganized and have such jumbled life priorities (as business owners and marketers) they can’t read 17-pages a month get off my list (not just not buy, but leave my email list, stop following me on social media, etc) altogether.

Most of them are not ‘bad’ people.

But they do make bad customers for my business and always have. And so this 64-page issue is sure to drive a bunch of them away and, as always happens, they’ll be replaced with better and more higher quality customers.

It’s a weird phenomenon I cannot explain.

It does not even really sound all that logical.

Frankly, it almost borders on the woo-woo, although there is nothing woo-woo about it ultimately. If it was woo-woo I’d just reject it as bull shyt as I think all woo-woo, life coach, airy fairy, crystals & rainbows & pronouns is bull shyt.

What’s definitely not woo-woo though is the math.

Imagine a grown adult who votes and pays taxes not being able to read 17-pages per month of a newsletter where they need only pull out and apply ONE thing to make that issue’s money back in spades. Like, for example, this customer in the tennis niche (not sure he wants me naming him) does who told me just yesterday for his side business (he barely puts much time into):

“I only read your stuff and implement minimum one thing from every issue of Email Players. That works well.”

The punchline:

17 pages is a little over 1/2 a page of reading per day, for a newsletter that costs just $3.23 per day. The guys who can’t even do that are, I guarantee you, reading more than a 1/2 page of absolute horse shyt on social media or somewhere else each day and spending more than $3.23 per day on frivolous sugar coffees, or entertainment, or God-only-knows what else that does nothing to add to their business, their health, or their life.

Of course, 64-pages like the upcoming January issue is a lot more than 17-pages.

Or, more specifically, 61 pages of content and 3 pages of ads.

In this case someone need only read 2 pages per day before the February issue hits their mailbox to read it all (they can literally do that on the toilet while pinching a loaf if they want, instead of doom scrolling twitter or facebook or fapping or whatever they are doing), and read it with understanding — while spending a few minutes implementing just ONE of the dozens of ideas I am sharing inside this one.

All of which brings me to another point:

Recently a guy on his way out said:

“I look forward to returning in the future!”

And I told him —

“I don’t allow people to come back  – good luck”

To which he replied:

I was surprised and disappointed by your response to my cancellation request. As a fellow business owner, I understand the value of every customer, especially in challenging times. Your policy of not allowing customers to return is, frankly, unusual and seems counterproductive. It’s particularly unexpected coming from someone in your field, where communication is key.

I had hoped to return as a subscriber once my situation improved. However, your response has not only deterred me from doing so, but also makes it difficult for me to recommend your services to others. In business, as in life, bridges are better left unburnt. A respectful and considerate approach often leads to lasting relationships and opportunities.

No, Spanky, you got that backwards.

It’s precisely because of my policy that I do have such a strong, lasting relationship with my customers, list, and market — with a monthly newsletter that’s run for 150 consecutive issues/months, with more testimonials than I can possibly count at this point. Certainly it’s a far stronger relationship than the needy goo-roo types have with their customers, always nattering on about how they will happily take in anyone like a lonely wine aunt taking in stray cats.

More fun:

There was one goo-roo a couple years ago who said my policy was the result of a “scarcity mindset.” It was borderline Babylon Bee parody-level sounding to the people who sent it to me, and it made for great email fodder (to sell our Subscription Biz course the couple times we’ve promoted it), so it was useful.

However, at the same time:

It had to have been one of the single most backasswards takes ever uttered in the online marketing industry. Turning money away from people who should not be buying from your business is the exact, polar opposite of scarcity. It’s raw, unfiltered honesty, which is what everyone should be striving for to bring out truth, do right by your market, create real value and solve real problems… as opposed to creating a revolving door and letting anyone buy from you, many you can’t help and will just be wasting their money and time, which is like the poster child for scarcity mindset.

People make all kinds of idiotic assumptions about my no coming back policy.

Usually it’s from someone who I’ve blocked to-so-surprisingly.

And it’s as ironic as it is amusing that more and more legitimate players in our space are either following suit or considering it. Like, for example, Perry Marshall – who publicly admitted (in an email to his list) a couple years ago he shamelessly got the idea to have the same policy with his subscription offer buyers from me.

Same with my pal Doberman Dan.

And, I don’t know his name, but apparently one of the guys over at Agora Financial (in charge of a 8 or 9 figure wing of the company, not exactly sure what the details were, but no matter) was telling my pal & Email Players subscriber Tom Beal he was inspired by my no coming back policy to the point where he would like to do the same thing with his own subscription offer eventually.

On the other hand:

The gaggle of social media naysayers gossiping like little girls about my policy — none of who have ever bothered to ask me personally, and instead just post about it on social media (no social clout in asking me privately, I guess) — assume it’s because I’m trying to “trap” people or something. When anyone who spends more than a few minutes reading any of my content knows if anything I’m constantly curating, trying to “break” people for worthiness (I wrote a 40-page Email Players issue about this for the newsletter’s 10-year anniversary a couple years ago, it’s a deep topic, and important) to get rid of them, and am in full-on repel mode.

No, not as some kind of idiotic goo-roo trick.

But as curation.

A small curated list is far more valuable than a big non-curated list.

It’s much better, in my way of thinking, to have 4 shiny easy-to-manage quarters in your pocket than 100 sticky, dirty, God-only-knows-where-they’ve-been pennies stuck in there. It’s why some 15+ years ago I consciously started defying the norm of of “attraction marketing” and started aggressively implementing:

“repulsion marketing”

I never focus on attracting anyone, only on repelling people.

I don’t know if I am the first to coin the following term or not, but I call it:

“Sell by repel”

It’s automatic just by following my Email Players methodology that I follow myself each and every day:

* Daily emails repel by default

* Imposing your expectations on your customers repels

* Telling them the truth (the downsides, flaws, glaring problems with your offer) repels

* Keeping your sales copy as legally compliant as you repels since you’re not bull crapping anyone, and automatically turning away the new product junkies and other idiots who just buy and never use, whose attitudes are useless to both themselves and your business

* Making it abundantly clear who should NOT be buying from you, and why, repels

* Creating barriers to entry (opt in, buying, access to you, etc) repels

* And the list goes on

Repel who, exactly?

The lukewarm.

It’s a Biblical concept that works magnificently in marketing based on Revelation chapter 3. Jesus is talking to 7 churches and is displeased with 5 of them, only happy with 2 of them. One of the churches He is angry with does good deeds, etc but, they were, as He put it:

“Luke warm”

God would rather they be hot or cold.

But because they were luke warm He said He’d vomit them out.

Thaaaaaaat’s what I’m talkin’ about.

Vomit out the luke warm.

Force them to be hot or cold.

Hot is obviously good — they will buy if you stick with them long enough.

Cold is okay too, they will leave peacefully, on their own, and maybe even come back later. Email Players subscriber Russell Brunson told me, about 10 years ago at a mastermind I used to co-host while we were at dinner, that he originally hated me.

Guy couldn’t stand me or anything I said.

But he kept reading and I grew on him.

Until, he admitted, he went to that event just to hang with me.

That’s not something that happens a lot.

But it does happen when you sell by repel.

And in a lot of cases:

A cold lead will leave, go venture off into the great night of your market, see a bunch of horse shyt, maybe even get royally screwed over, realize you are indeed the real deal, and come back and be hot.

All these forces are impossible to control.

They’re too big.

But you can harness them by doing the right things, long enough, consistently as I once heard some motivational speaker (think it was Kevin Trudeau actually) say. And I have found it to be true in many other disciplines in life — not just business and marketing and copywriting.

It all comes down to:

Having standards (no, you don’t have to have my no coming back policy, you run your business in whatever way you see fit, this is not a checklist or “how to” post) and enforcing them mercilessly. Those left over will be the best, most successful, and most eager to spread the “gospel” of your business.

People want “value”.

But the best value is not a list of stuff to do.

It’s content that gives people a different way of looking at the world, at their business, at their problems.

Hopefully this post did just that.

If not?

That’s your problem for having read this far…

For more on the Email Players newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

I wouldn’t want James Gunn within 10,000 feet of Willis or any grade schools.

But he recently said something useful when talking about how the score for his upcoming Superman movie was mostly finished already, even though the composer hasn’t officially signed a deal or (presumably) gotten paid anything for it yet.

What he said was this:

“when you’re riding the waves of inspiration, what are you going to do? I wrote most of Peacemaker and all of Creature Commandos before I had a closed deal!)”

And for whatever reason, that got me to thinking about writers.

Specifically, the different “species” of writers.

Like, for example:

* A lot of writers are purely mercenaries — if they don’t get paid, they don’t write. A lot of old timey day screenwriters admitted to that. A lot of freelance copywriters, journalists, and work for hire types fit that bill too. So were a lot of pulp writers and anyone else who has to write or they don’t eat even though they don’t particularly enjoy writing and would rather be doing something, anything, else than writing. Gary Halbert once claimed to be this type of writer.

* Still others do it for the love of the craft — and it’s like an art form for them, where every sentence is like a brush stroke, every page like a canvas. They don’t tend to be the most commercially successful writers any more than artists tend to be commercially successful, although some obviously are enormously successful. I admire these types of writers in a lot of ways, but have absolutely nothing in common with them beyond the fact we both write stuff.

* Then there are those who are only writers in their own heads — they want to “have written” but never quite get around to actually writing anything on any kind of regular basis beyond social media takes or blog posts. And even then it’s only when they get inspired to write something.

* Finally, there are those of us who do it because it’s basically therapy — and/or from having so many ideas it’s like Niagara Falls and they gotta go somewhere, and we can’t not write whether or not we want to write, “feel” like writing, are inspired to write, or even if we don’t have the time to write. We’re not gonna win any writing awards, but nobody ever accuses us of not being shameless anyway.

There are writers who are probably a mixture of some or all the above.

And maybe there even whole other categories of writers I am completely unaware of.

That admittedly is probably the case, as I don’t really talk to a lot of writers.

i.e., I think Bukowski had a point when he said:

“The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.”

Not sure what the point of all this was.

Except, maybe, to write something..

On that note:

I was talking to Stefania recently about the idea of putting the screenplay I just finished (based on my first novel “Zombie Cop”) up on the internet for people to read or ridicule, enjoy or hate, mock or encourage, whatever the case may be. I am rewriting the entire novel in a couple weeks based on the screenplay either way, as when writing the screenplay I realized how:

(1) the novel is so bad and amateur and gross it makes the rest of the 8 books after it mostly inaccessible except to the most depraved minds…

(2) the screenplay is probably 100x better than the novel in its current form, and certainly I am 100x more proud of it vs how embarrassed I am of said novel – which I don’t even let my mom read for fear of her wondering how she failed her boy…

In the meantime, to check out the Email Players Newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle