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

Last month I did a deal with Email Players subscriber and syndicated talk radio show host Mark Kaye — where I gave him an hour of consulting in exchange for him plugging my opt-in page to his entire audience.

i.e., one long testimonial about lil’ ol’ me.

And I liked it so much I decided to swipe some of it.

Here goes:

Ben is a very reclusive, highly conservative business buddy of mine who is trapped in a very red part of a very blue state. He’s also the leading authority on email marketing and has written some of the most entertaining books I’ve ever consumed.

Re: what he said about how I’m trapped in a very blue state.

He is absolutely right about that.

This is the state that recently thought it was racist to make graduating students prove they can read and write. That’s what the pronoun socialist brigade bending to the will of the teachers union here think is a good idea — just like they thought decriminalizing hard drugs, tying the hands of law enforcement to stop a lot of crime, and a laundry list of other truly idiotic policies that have caused a great deal of pain, violence, and death are a good idea.

All in the name of equality and virtue, of course.

Whatever the case:

Yes, I am in a state so blue it makes the smurfs look albino.

But, to be truthful about it, I don’t really see the truly horrifying stuff.

Like I was telling a buddy recently:

“I’m more likely to see a Bigfoot than a drag queen in my neck of the woods”

Not yet, at least.

Although the California transplants work hard to turn wherever they land into what they fled from.

Back to Mark’s point though:

Another thing he talked about was how I sometimes go on tangents away from email, marketing, copywriting at times. And he’s right. And the reason I do that is because I write what I want to write and what pleases me to write, which also turns on and serves the kind of customers I want, while utterly repelling (or at least generating some free troll fodder from) the dingbats I don’t want anywhere near me – not online or offline.

The result?

A very curated list and customer base.

The kind that is the envy of many of my pals up in this niche.

And no, it’s not about veering into culture wars or whatever.

It’s not the “what” — it’s the mindset and approach.

I don’t care if you’re selling to that love child Castro had who runs Canada or to Trump himself — it’s not about “ooh! I need to talk about culture wars!” It’s about you writing what’s on your mind, making it relevant to those you want to sell to, and not giving a rat’s puckering bung hole if anyone else who is not your ideal customer or clients likes it, approves of it, or will whine and snark about it.

When you understand how this approach works a whole new world opens up.

You no longer fear the crowd’s disapproval you all but seek that disapproval out.

When that happens, in my experience, the real sales happen.

And possibly, very quickly.

Something to think about.

Especially if you’re interested in the Email Players newsletter.

Here’s the link:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

I’ve talked many times about the audio I have where John Carlton interviewed Gary Halbert about:

“The Go To Guy”

I first heard it over 20 years ago (on audio cassette).

And I still listen to it several times per year now.

Not because there are any tactical, marketing, copywriting, selling, or any other tricks for making more sales in it, because there’s not. It’s because of the mindset and approach that you only really see or hear about when one gets to the top echelons of the business world. And they’re not something you’re going to see a cartoon avatar guy on Twitter pretending to be bigger and more powerful than they are, or some schmuck beating his chest on Facebook talk about, much less understand.

What do I mean by Go To Guy?

Well, it’s a term they used.

And to paraphrase what Gary said:

Imagine you needed a task done where the stakes are enormous. Literally if this task couldn’t be done, you would be beheaded, or your baby daughter would be killed right in front of your eyes, or some other horrifying thing where (as Gary put it):

“The stakes couldn’t be any higher”

And let’s say you don’t even know what the task is.

You just know it has to be done and you have to pick someone else to do it, and are not allowed to do it yourself. You also don’t know if it’s a big task that takes a year and requires multiple deals and connections… if it means traveling across the world and hopping across multiple continents… if it requires lots of physical strength… or even if it means committing some kind of violence or outright killing someone (or several someones).

In that situation… who you gonna call?

Whoever that is, that’s your Go To Guy.

Very few of us have one of these, incidentally (I certainly don’t).

And even fewer are a Go To Guy.

But basically, a  Go-to guy will not question any of it, and just do it. And once they are committed to doing whatever the task is, that person will not stop until it’s done or they die.

Period.

For them failure is not an option.

And, also for them, there are no limits to what they will do to achieve the goal.

Again, I don’t know any real life Go To Guys (to my knowledge).

And hopefully I never will require one.

But, I can think of some fictional examples.

Like, for instance:

* The Godfather — Don Corleone (who Gary mentions specifically) who is truly a no-limits guy willing to do whatever it takes to win

* Fidel Castro — who Gary also specifically mentions, admitting he doesn’t agree with anything Castro stood for, but he was such a survivor, with people trying to kill him for 40 years, there’s no way he’s going down until the job was done

* Rosie from Point Break — the psychopath that Bhodi (the villain) needs to do his dirty work (like kidnap and hold a knife to his ex-girlfriend’s throat to get Johnny Utah to do what he needs him to do, and killing her in cold blood if ol’ JU fails)

* Mike from Breaking Bad — I mean, really, is there any doubt that, whatever the job is, Mike would both get it done and not bother coming back if he didn’t?

* Jack Bauer — the most radical TV character probably ever created who did everything from hold up convenience stores to hijack airplanes to even dumping a bullet in the back of his boss’s head and executing him in cold blood just to save the US from a virus

* Marv from Sin City — Mr. “just give me a name” (when he sees his favorite dancer beaten up) himself who is another guy that, you just know is not going to back down, is not going to give up, and is not going to come back without getting the job finished, complete with carrying back someone’s decapitated head if need be

* John Rambo — a true Go to Guy who even though he was used, abused, even spit on by America, would do anything, especially die, just to get a single POW back

* The Terminator — not a man, so maybe this is cheating, but speaks for itself

There are obviously many more.

But hopefully the point here is made.

And also hopefully, it gave you something to think about beyond just email subject lines, headlines, sales copy, and your marketing for thinking big, and taking your business to the next thing you want to do.

To get even more ideas see my Email Players newsletter.

More here:

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Ben Settle

Let me tell you a story.

A couple months ago my favorite news source ZeroHedge tweeted about how Elon Musk internally discussed blocking Twitter access in the EU. And I then quote tweeted it, talking about how I have, several times over the years, toyed with banning all EU countries from my shopping cart.

To which I was asked why I would do that by one of my loyal EU customers.

My answer:

Because almost all the problems with delivery… flakey “digital nomads” not keeping me up-to-date on their addresses as they flit from place to place… snobby entitlement attitudes… outright crooked customs agents… crazy invoicing demands (instead of just creating a template and pasting their receipt info in they want me to custom craft a unique invoice just for lil’ ol’ them each month — no…)… etc are primarily from my EU customers.

France and Spain are probably the worst culprits.

But it ain’t just them — I’ve noticed it amongst several of them.

It’s a pattern that repeats itself every single month.

So yes, I have considered just banning all of the EU whole cloth.

But I have not been able to do so.

And the reason why I have not been able to do so is because unlike Abraham who couldn’t find even one righteous person to justify to God why He shouldn’t smite Sodom & Gomorrah… I have way too many great customers in the EU who are not problem customers (just the opposite — total “salt of the earth” customers) and am not going to smite them for the sins of a few low class jackass bums who I simply find easier to eject and ban as they rear their fugly heads.

This won’t matter to any non-EU boys & ghouls reading this.

But there it is anyway.

For more info about Email Players go here:

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Ben Settle