Ben Settle

A while back on Twitter reader asked:

“Ben, how much time do you spend writing fiction? Or is it quite sporadic? When did you start? Seems like challenging work on top of everything else you do”

Fiction is like eating dessert for me.

i.e., can’t have my pudding unless I eat my meat first.

So I schedule time for it usually months in advance.

Example:

When I wrote my last novel (Enoch Wars: Serpent Seed) I spent about 5 months getting ahead on emails, offers, sales pages, and other projects to carve out 6 weeks or so to write the first draft. Then I did other work for the next 4 or 5 months to get ahead after that so could carve out two months to edit that novel.

Another example:

When I had the urge to turn my first novel (Enoch Wars: Zombie Cop) into a screenplay I spent probably 7 or 8 months doing a ho’ bunch of other work, offers, emails, sales pages, ticky tack projects, etc before having a good month and a half to do that. Then, I took a couple weeks “off” from it to write the 64-page January 2024 Email Players issue (150th milestone — wanted to go big with it) just to come back and finish it up after that.

Yet another example:

When I decided to totally rewrite that first novel based on that screenplay (which was not intended, huge pain in the ass, and not just for me..) I spent a month getting ahead on Email Players and other stuff, before banging out the new novel and other work that entailed the last week of December, and the following January this year.

Anyway, fiction, non-fiction, whatever it is… I live and die by a schedule.

And that means an ever-growing & ever-changing daily list of tasks.

I am not sure how people do business any other way.

Nor, really, do I care.

But when it comes to putting out a lot of content that is what works for me.

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

The short answer:

Take a market-first and not a marketing-first

I’ll use all the scamps spanking out cold and canned messages to randos as an example of what market first vs marketing first looks like. A market first approach would not include haunting DMs on social media like you’re sending dikc pix on grindr to strangers hoping to score.

Instead it looks more like this:

+ Pick 10 businesses you like, follow, respect, believe in what they are doing/selling – and, even more important, have bought something from and used it and benefited from it

+ Research them on their sites, their social media, Google, etc

+ Try to get an intro from a mutual friend

+ Or stop being like a timid little woodland creature hiding behind the internet and write them a snail mail letter, sent via FedEx, signature required – guaranteed to be received, noticed, opened, at least read

+ In that letter don’t pitch them or try to be cute… just tell them you’re a fan, how much their business has helped or inspired you, whatever it is you truly think…

+ Do not give them unsolicited advice, they don’t care

+ Instead tell them you would love to work with them in some capacity, any capacity, you just want to be a part of what they’re doing – all this has to be true, of course

+ Don’t give any deadlines or CTA’s – this isn’t a pitch, it’s a warm, personal, fan letter telling them how much you respect them and want to be a part of what they’re doing, even if it means doing some menial tasks for free for them that are way below you, that they could hire someone at minimum wage to do

+ What that would be would obviously depend on what intel you get from researching them

+The key is to offer to be useful – chances are you will see stuff about their businesses where you could be useful, make their lives easier, take stress off their plate

+ Will you get 100% response/replies? Absolutely not – but if you do it right, do your homework, aren’t a money twitter schmuck about it… I can almost guarantee you will hear from at least one or two, and even if they can’t use your help for something, you can always ask if they might know someone who does

+ Don’t pester those who ignore you or aren’t interested, you’re not that persuasive

+ In the meantime, if you are low on cash then get a real job so you don’t “need” a response – and come from a place of financial security instead of neediness, which people can smell like shyt on a shoe and want nothing to do with

+ I defy anyone to do the above and not come away smarter, better connected, be more respected, with more referrals/leads – and, also, with  “tentacles” out in the marketplace you would never get by blindly spanking out cold DMs to strangers on social media

Is that it?

No.

You should be growing an opt-in list you mail each day to demonstrate your knowledge, that you have a work ethic, that you are someone worth hiring. Do that right and you may just find clients coming to you, instead of you going to them.

But ideally do both ways.

That’s how you grow a solid customer base who never leave you nor forsake you.

To learn the email-side see the Email Players newsletter here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Came a question:

“Ben, What’s been your general experience with female customers/leads? Are they annoying/different to deal with in any particularly noteworthy way? I don’t mean customers annoy me or I find women annoying. I guess what I mean is if they’re more likely to be (unreasonably) demanding, or (overly) fussy, or likely to be a pain/cause drama, just due to their more emotional nature/communication style. Or maybe you’ve found the opposite and they actually tend to be more pleasant to deal with. Just curious because I’ve only ever sold to men, which was fun”

In this guy’s case I gave him an example:

I told him I used to co-own an info publishing biz in weight loss selling to women.

But I never really enjoyed writing the emails or sales copy to that market compared to selling to guys. In fact, at that time I was simultaneously off-and-on writing ads and/or emails for three male-dominated markets – golf, self defense, and guys with prostate problems. And I was having a lot more fun writing that copy, especially the self defense stuff where it started becoming almost more like screenwriting than copywriting.

I was good at selling to women, but it wasn’t much fun writing about feelings, validation, & jealousy.

But writing about violence, solving horrifying male health problems, and winning?

That was a blast…

The flip side of that is:

My female customers — a very small segment of my customer base, probably less than 10% of my buyers — tend to be some of the most loyal and successful customers I have. It’s literally how I met Stefania, (I, uhm, “recruited” her from the fanbase…), where we found BerserkerMail’s COO & now co-owner Nicole English, and how I ended up hiring Email Players subscriber Kia Arian for all my design-related projects for the past 7 years.

To flip back yet again to the other side…

While back Email Players subscriber & BerserkerMail co-owner John Wood posted on Twitter:

“Which chromosomes are watching the BerserkerMail YouTube channel? Not an egg carrier to be found, probably thanks to elBenb0 ‘s wicked ways”

Followed by a graphic of which of the two genders is consuming all the free content (much of it originally part of a $500/month coaching program, if that tells you something) BerserkerMail YouTube channel’s content.

According to the stats:

===

GENDER

Last 28 days – views

Male 100%

Female 0%

User-specified 0%

===

The point of all this Ben-splaining?

Probably there are several.

And while the following might seem like a totally different topic, I think it is related.

And that is:

The question above got me to thinking about one of the single most important consistent truisms in marketing that applies to both genders in any market, niche, industry, product category — man or woman, zoomer or boomer, GenXer or Millennial, and anyone else in any other demographic or psychographic.

And that truism is:

Don’t listen to what someone says they want.

Pay attention to what they’re buying.

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Following is what I foresee for the US and what it could look like for online-driven businesses.

Here goes:

* Texas secedes

* Feds can’t stop them from blocking the importing of 3rd world invaders which the regime wants to recruit for US military as soldiers who’d have no problem firing on Americans

* Feds start funneling invaders in through California, Arizona, New Mexico even more aggressively than they are now

* Nothing really changes

* US breaks up as a country by 2033 as per Vox Day’s prediction he publicly made on his blog in 2004 that everyone laughed at then, that now even mainstream talking heads are chattering about today

* Invaders either forced back whence they came or to Cartel-controlled Southwest, as various new regional nationalist governments emerge from the broken pieces of the empire

* The normies who listened to neocon boomers on TV about putting on masks while putting up foreign flags and pronouns in their bios realize those they thought were our allies never were, while the “bad guys” reach out to new political factions to establish commerce

* Big cities are fooked where people hire mercenaries to help them escape the various mini warlords blocking exits, keeping most people inside

* Small, homogeneous communities where all the various peoples naturally gravitate to for mutual survival thrive over next 50 years

* After that a new empire begins anew and the cycle repeats again in 250-300 years

Or not.

When I originally wrote this a few months ago as a gag on Twitter, I had just watched Van Damme’s “Cyborg” and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “The Running Man” and admittedly have no clue what’s going to happen.. But I will say this: Considering how many so-called “conspiracy theories” have turned out to be spoiler alerts, I could be far more right than I am wrong about all this.

Anyway, that’s that.

I do think it will all break up eventually.

One or two more burgled elections ought to turn the trick.

And when that happens commerce will still happen. In fact, those ready for it well in advance with their own lists, audiences, and buyers will very likely make out like the proverbial bandits depending on what you sell, what market you’re in, and how much your list and buyers trust and like you.

The details of that are for another day.

In the meantime?

To start growing that foundation now, email your list every day.

Grow your list every day.

And think about ways to serve your audience every day.

To learn how the paid Email Players newsletter can help go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

A couple months ago I got sudden rush of questions about writing stories.

I figured someone must have been talking about it.

(And it turned out someone had… on Twitter)

And so, I decided to chime in with my too many sense on the topic:

* If you are having trouble telling stories you are probably overthinking it – almost everyone does – break it down into 1-2 sentences like a TV guide description. Start with that. i.e., entire story of the American Revolutionary War “we fought the British, they lost.” (hat tip to the great Paul Hartunian for that ditty).

* Study all of Gary Halbert ads with stories you can find – he was the master. Copy them out by hand no matter how tedious it feels. Do the same with John Carlton ads and if you can find them Scott Haines ads. Those 3 are/were the masters.

* What you leave out is far more important than what you leave in.

* Write an email each and every day telling a story designed to sell your offers until it becomes second nature

* You already know what you need to know, everyone does, you did it naturally as a child, so try not to over think it and just tell the story as if talking to a child

* Nothing will teach you storytelling better than telling stories, everywhere, with every piece of content you write until it becomes second nature.

* There really is no substitute for just doing the work, no book or coach (certainly not me) will teach you how to do it better than just doing it over and over and over and over.

* Stay the hell away from fapGPT, or anything like AI when telling stories – use your own God-given brain, write with your own hands, engage your thinking, utilize your nervous system, your imagination, your problem-solving, your emotions, your unique experiences/observations/opinions/thoughts/personality/peculiarities.

* No, I don’t have a course or book teaching storytelling, you can’t buy experience, you have to sweat, bleed, fight for it.

* Unless you count this email as a teaching, I suppose

* But even then I probably just said more than I know…

Take this skill, combine it with what I teach in my paid Email Players Newsletter each month and I reckon your business can prosper beyond the dreams of avarice..

More info here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

I think the most screwed people in online marketing are boys & ghouls who declare:

“I’m done buying, time to implement! I am not buying anything else and I am just going to focus on implementing what I have!”

I’m not saying that’s a good or bad idea.

But if they are in that position at all, then in my experience with dealing with these kinds of people over the past 22+ years up in this business… they still never do anything and will continue not to do anything.

Their problem is not too much great info that can make them money.

A problem that I still, to this day, do not understand.

How can you have too much info that makes you money?

It boggles my mind but I have seen enough people take that attitude to know it’s not a fluke either. And that is why I personally don’t think they have an implementation problem like they think they do as they pound their desk rebuking themselves. Instead, I suspect what they have is a self respect problem. Something many people far wiser than I will ever be have been teaching as a danger for those in selling, business, etc for decades.

In this case, due to bad wiring or whatever it is:

They won’t allow themselves to be successful.

So then they never do anything more than the bare minimum to make the exact amount of money they are psychologically comfortable with, and lack the self awareness to recognize this is going on and do something about it. That then creates their knee-jerk reaction to attack the symptom and not the disease, and think they are somehow going to change anything long term.

Just a theory though.

It could just be they are simply flakey (certainly how they always sound) for all I know.

But either way:

This is on my mind because I just heard from such a person recently. And it got me to thinking about how many other people I’ve known, been friends with, hung out with, sold to, and even bought from who suffer from the same problem. This is one reason I don’t like selling to people who are not first on my email list, who do not already have a business and an offer, and who are total newbies. I just don’t relate to the ones who flit from one thing to the next then complain about info overload.

I admittedly don’t understand their plight nor do I care to.

I’ve never had “too much” great info that I benefit from.

So it makes no sense to me at all.

If anything it always just sounds like rationalization hamster spinning.

My opinion.

For more info on my paid Email Players Newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

No.

Although, many years ago (2017-ish) I did toy with creating my own agency. Specifically, I was going to have it specialize in email. And sometimes I still think about it. Not as anything I will ever do. But because how fun I suspect it’d probably be to have my own agency… for about 5 minutes.

The problems?

1. I have no desire whatsoever to copy chief, babysit, or deal with other copywriters.

I see copywriters the way Charles Bukowski saw writers as a whole:

Like flies on the same turd.

It’s one reason one of my quests in life is to help liberate as many freelance copywriters as I can from client work and so they can be their own clients. (More on this soon – daddy has something cooking up about this in his righteous kitchen.) If anything, I see more and more copywriters as the “used car salesmen” of the direct marketing world. Far too many have zero clue of the history of their industry, know nothing of the old school guys they should be studying, and would make my job harder as a result. Especially since I have to build trust from people whose faith they’ve butchered with their idiotic bull shyt claims, goo-roo fanboy’ing, and, most recently, their fapping themselves hairy-palmed and blind to AI which is quite a moldy turd they gather on indeed.

2. I’d end up turning away 9.9 out of 10 clients.

One false move, making one too many stupid suggestions about something they know nothing about, or I get even a whiff they are not on the level about something and they’d be gone. And don’t think they’d be the first. My opinion of most clients is even lower than that of most copywriters.

3. I’d have to spend too much time doing things I hate doing.

I’m not a team player at all.

That’s why I far prefer investing in companies with teams someone else runs.

My goal is to one day cash checks for a living as I write pulp novels & screenplays.

I don’t know if there is a moral to this or not.

Except maybe this:

Just because you can do something does not mean you should do it.

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

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