Ben Settle

Last month I was asked by an “Email Players” subscriber:

“When selling your products to customers in Europe, do you use an intermediary to collect the VAT (Value Added Tax)? If so, can you provide their contact details?”

Take this for what it is.

I admittedly know very little about it.

And what I do makes me not want anything more to do with it.

But, the way my printer described it recently, the EU has a system called the IOSS, where you can pay the fees for the end recipient and just collect it for them. Apparently (have not checked, and do not care enough to) you can even apply the IOSS number into your shopping cart so it will apply these fees when a customer buys a product so you are covered.

I don’t bother though.

Not going to be a tax collector for a foreign government.

Thus, I let the customer deal with it.

Admittedly, that has irritated certain EU customers.

And my indifference to this has caused some EU customers to quit Email Players.

Especially since some have been getting nailed with VAT taxes they weren’t before, and it’s getting to be more expensive to simply receive my books and newsletters due to factors completely out of my control, even if I did make a covenant with the EU and used their IOSS shtick.

Apparently my paying those customers’ shipping ain’t enough.

Thus when they get nailed with these fees and tell me about it?

I say (verbatim):

“I suggest canceling if the extra 80 cents per day or whatever it adds up to doesn’t fit your budget or if the info isn’t paying for itself enough to justify the investment.”

So far, nobody has bailed due to that answer…

If anything, it’s been a good way to separate the men from the boys in business.

Maybe I should thank the EU?

So that’s my take on all that.

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

One book I highly recommend for writers is called:

“Bandersnach”

It’s mostly about J.R.R. Tolkien & C.S. Lewis and their time in the writers group they founded called The Inklings that met for some 20 years. It talks about some of the other members, too. But the spotlight is mostly on Tolkien and Lewis — which is what I like about it, personally, having grown up on Lord of the Rings & Narnia.

Lots of good advice inside for writers.

Including copywriters.

There’s also some insights for community-building.

For example:

The inklings was like a mastermind but was also a community.

And without it the Lord of the Rings especially would be quite different.

In fact, Tolkien fans can thank C.S. Lewis for it being written at all.

Lewis basically had to nag Tolkien into finishing it.

Yet, Tolkien had an extreme… dislike… for Lewis’ Narnia books.

And so there was certainly some conflict there.

But what there was NOT between them was contempt. It was always mutual respect, with an “iron sharpening iron” effect, and the two helped each other in so many ways I am not even sure there is a book that could possibly cover every single way they did so without it being probably a 2,000 page book of its own. All the Inklings had this dynamic to some degree. And it wasn’t until the conflict started turning into contempt when the group broke up.

By contempt I mean not honest disagreement.

I am talking about literally trying to shut someone down altogether.

It’s a very insidious effect.

And I would not be shocked if that is how many masterminds end.

Certainly a lot of social media platforms encourage it. Not only by the nature of what the bigger platforms do to some people, but the very rules and biases of some of these platforms feed into it, shutting whole discussions, posts, and even entire accounts down instead of letting natural and healthy conflict arise, sharpen, repel, strengthen, and humble as it should, often due to a shrieking SJW who doesn’t want its feelings hurt.

Bottom line:

Conflict in a community is usually good.

Contempt?

Not so much.

All right, on to the business.

To learn more about my Email Players newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Something I’ve regularly read over the years is Gary Halbert’s bit on:

“The Halbert Index”

That one newsletter has guided my business for quite a long time.

And has been a “template” for many things I do.

This is especially true when it comes to how I grow my business, how I curate my lists, how I approach learning new skills, how I go about approaching being both an educator of what I teach as well as a student of what I learn, and most important of all… who I sell to, as well as who I actively do NOT sell to — yes, even if it costs me short term product sales, new subscriptions, opt-ins, and so on.

That last part has by far been the most valuable.

In fact, a big chunk of the issue is about who the best kind of customer is.

He called ‘em:

“Players with money”

And he enumerates many of their traits.

I highly suggest reading it.

And then re-reading it.

And this is especially true if you find you lack many PWM traits.

One of those traits being they:

“…read biographies of successful men and women who have gamely overcome obstacles to succeed big in their chosen occupations.”

This one sentence had a profound impact on my business at the time.

And it’s had probably (no exaggeration) 100xs more impact over the years as I followed it.

For example:

While most marketers are running around primarily studying & yapping only about marketing and copywriting and other marketers and copywriters… I have found biographies and looking at what people (business or otherwise) outside my niche — from great industry giants like Steve Jobs, William Randolph Hearst, & Walt Disney… to popular auteurs like Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, & Ray Harryhausen… to respected military & political leaders like George Washington, Andrew Jackson, & Douglas MacArthur… to insanely successful salesmen like Joe Girard, Ron Ron Popeil, & Dan Kennedy… as well as many of the great master strategists of all walks of life who one can easily read about — are far more profitable and insightful.

Yes, it’s good to know the principles & fundamentals of what you do.

But after that it’s time to go outside your industry & apply what you learn to your industry.

And so it is.

If you want the principles & fundamentals of email then you can read more about Email Players here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

One of my favorite books is Robert Kiyosaki’s:

“Rich Dad, Poor Dad”

An extremely good book in and of itself.

Also a perfect example of how to use infotainment in content.

It’s full of little anecdotes & lessons that are hidden “between the lines.” I have an audio cassette tape of his from back in the late 90’s that I recently digitized so I could listen to it again, and everything in it as just as applicable to now as it was 20+ years ago. In fact, I would argue it’s even more applicable.

One of the lessons was when he said:

(paraphrased)

“I am a best selling author, not a best writing author”

A lifetime of experience and context in that line.

I suggest thinking long and hard on it.

Especially if you happen to be a writing snob more worried about those evil dangling participles and making sure something not 1 in 1000 people would even know if it was spelled correctly or not is correctly written.

The small thinker will say I am claiming to write crap.

And that only the marketing really matters.

And many such small thinkers in direct marketing take that exact approach.

But I am not saying that at all.

I’m simply laying out a fact that you can accept or reject, use or not use, praise or poo-poo on all you want — not only do I not care, I won’t even know, unless you happen to let me know, I suppose.

I don’t know where else I am going with this.

But it is important info to know.

Especially if you are wanting to do a lot of email marketing.

To learn my methodology for that go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

A tale of both woe & dough from the olden days:

Back in late Summer of 2010 I took up a client in a biz-opp related niche where I got paid a nice $5k “base” fee per month, plus 1% of the gross sales of the company.

It was a great gig.

Lots of the green stuff was made.

Lots of fun was had.

And lots of copy was written — for everything from long form sales pages, to 100+ email sequences (leads and buyers), plus squeeze pages, webinar scripts, Facebook ads, JV copy ads, and the list went on and on.

The pay was good.

The people were great to work with.

And all was well as far as that went.

But after a few months I realized something.

I was still having to have all my work “filtered” and approved. I was still just an employee with no real ownership in the company. And, worst of all, I was still just as miserable and frustrated making lots of money each month doing what I loved doing (the marketing and copywriting side of things) as I was when I was broke doing those same things as a freelancer.

i.e., I knew I had to be my own client.

The hybrid copywriter/partner thing simply wasn’t my bag.

The solution?

I forced myself to sit down the week between Christmas and New Years at the end of 2010, block out everything and anything else, and create a business plan for my own venture. In this case, it was the prostate problem niche. So I banged out a business plan, very detailed, using info I had learned while selling an info course 6 years earlier about how to buy your own million dollar business using none of your own money. Before long I had an offer created, a back end already in place, and a plan for generating traffic on deck. It was all based on article marketing and some clever SEO tricks a guy I knew in the weight loss niche had worked out to create a $70k/year income stream doing literally nothing every day, with no back end, affiliates, etc. Just a $19 eBook, a squeeze page, a sales page, and a PayPal account. His day literally consisted of waking up at 10 am, playing with his kids, and maybe a few minutes of customer service. I figured I could just use his lazy model and actually do some work by treating it like a business and clean up.

The goal:

To be liberated from client work by the end of 2011 — exactly one year from the day.

All I had to do was execute the business plan.

And execute the business plan I did.

As rapidly and as aggressively as possible.

At the time, I still had the above client doing ALL their sales pages, emails, other copywriting-related projects… plus my own projects (I was selling a different print newsletter than I do now called The Crypto Marketing Newsletter at the time)… plus spending several hours per day on this fledgeling prostate niche side business (i.e., my “concubine” business)… plus gearing up to do some more stuff in the above weight loss business I was going to partner in.

To say my schedule was packed each day is an understatement.

For a month and a half I barely slept.

And even when I did I was not even sure I was technically “asleep.”

More like in a weird haze of half awake dreaming.

Sometimes I would literally start dreaming while writing.

Was very bizarre.

Anyway, by mid Feb I had written some 1000 pages of content (articles, blog posts, auto-respondered emails, premium content, etc) for the prostate niche concubine business alone, and probably even more than that. Plus my own Ben Settle stuff, my biz opp client’s stuff, and preliminary weight loss niche stuff.

But I had gotten a handle on everything.

And, I was seeing traffic come in to the prostate niche site.

I was getting a few sales per day.

And, those buyers were getting auto-respondered emails selling an upsell.

And… it was starting to happen.

That goal of being client-free was looking good.

So what I did I do?

I took a couple weeks off from everything to visit my dad.

And while I was there I’d check sales and stats, and all was going well. I had all kinds of content ranked on page one of Google, and was probably doing around $50 per day (3 or 4 sales per day), with that growing and projections showing two or three times that over the next month or so, plus my back end continuity starting to kick in simultaneously… all on auto-pilot at that point.

Until one day towards the end of my vacation…

It all came crashing down.

Google decided to (rightfully, in hindsight) “slap” article directories.

Was a huge learning moment about the stoopidity of relying on any one 3rd party platform. In this case it was Google. It’s why I shake my head nowadays when I see people wrapping their entire business around Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, or any other platform. The paranoia simply isn’t there yet for everyone. But it will be. Just a matter of time.

Anyway back to the story:

At first all that work and near zero sleep seemed a huge waste of time.

But I quickly realized it was just the opposite.

At the time I admit it sucked.

But it forced me to rethink everything.

I still had the goal of being client-free by end of 2011.

I simply needed a new plan.

And so I got back to work thinking and plotting.

I thought about a coaching model (was not a fan of doing coaching). I thought about a consulting model (was even less a fan of doing consulting). I thought about continuing the prostate business with paid traffic (and even partnered with a traffic guy to do just that). I thought about getting into the dating niche, which I had been tinkering with. I even thought about doing some kind of copywriting agency business.

But none of them excited me.

Then one day, I was driving up the Oregon coast and it hit me.

I had an $800 email course at the time that people loved and bought. But I was always having to update the dayem thing as every day — sending emails in multiple companies — was giving me new intel, making me realize some things only worked for me and not others, many things I was doing were not “evergreen”, and the list went on. In some cases stuff I was doing that I could pull off and get away with would even be counter productive to most other businesses.

Thus, constantly updating the course.

The solution?

Create a paid newsletter about email.

It seemed so obvious.

But it took a lot of frustration to be open to it.

Long story even longer:

I got out the laptop and hammered out a new business plan for this idea.

I was leaving nothing to chance.

And I was leaving nothing to the whims of Google or anything else.

And, most importantly, I was doing it MY way.

i.e., paper & ink newsletter. Not a membership site, not video, not audio, not delivered “by” email. But print & ink, like my Crypto Marketing Newsletter at the time. Reason why is, I just like that format and I like selling to readers in my niche. But if I was a video guy who likes video more, it’d be in video. If I was an audio guy who likes audio more, it’d be in audio. If I liked diddling around with a community, it’d be a social network based thing. But I don’t like those formats, so I went with the one I did/do prefer.

I was in a couple masterminds at the time.

And I remember two of my mastermind pals whose names you’d probably recognize — who to this day I have nothing but the utmost respect for, no hate here — tell me my idea probably wasn’t going to work.

And admittedly their reasons were sound.

But so was my business plan.

And so I went forth and launched this new venture anyway.

The result:

By late August 2011 (just over half way through the year) I was done with client work.

And even then I was still leaving a lot of money on the table.

For example:

I only sent 5 emails during the launch.

I had zero upsells in place.

And I was relying on just one merchant account.

All the height of stupidity and small thinking.

And so over the next several months and years since I’ve added to, subtracted from, and modified that original business plan for Email Players, and still do so to this day. In fact, just a few weeks ago I created an 11-point document for acquiring and retaining more strategically-thinking subscribers (my favorite kind, who get the most benefit out of the newsletter, although a clear minority amongst the online marketing space), while turning off and turning away more purely tactical thinking subscribers (my least favorite kind, who get almost no benefit out of the newsletter, although they are a clear majority amongst the online marketing space).

And just following those 11 things has already significantly improved sales.

But that 11-point document isn’t the point here.

(It’s only compatible with me and my business, nobody else’s.)

The point here is:

Business plans.

And the power in not only creating them, but sticking with them, and constantly changing, adapting, and modifying them — forever. I can only think of one single person I know who has ever done this. (My business partner in the software space Troy Broussard — I wrote the original SocialLair business plan, he wrote the original BerserkerMail business plan, and both are humming along quite nicely, to say the least.)

Yet, it’s the single most profitable thing I’ve ever done in business.

It continues to be the single most profitable thing I’ve ever done in business.

And I suspect it will always be the single most profitable thing I do in business.

If you have not created on for your business I highly recommend doing so.

And when you’re ready to use email to execute it, go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

The answer is related to… Wonder Woman.

In a “round about” sort of way, at least.

Here is what I mean:

I admittedly have had zero desire to watch the Wonder Woman movies.

Nor have I ever cared about the character.

But the movies’ director made some comments recently about how the last movie was shown. And her attitude is in many ways similar to why I don’t sell my print books and print newsletter in digital form despite the harrowing screams of broke goo-roo fanboy types I sometimes hear from who think they know “better” than I do on how to run my business.

Anyway, here’s what she said:

“The truth is I make movies for the big screen. I’m OK with people watching it for a second or third time on their phone, but I’m not making it for that experience. I love the theatrical experience, and I don’t understand why we’re talking about throwing it away for 700 streaming services that there’s no room for in the marketplace.”

Lots of context packed between the lines.

Normies will miss practically all of it as they always do.

But for the discerning types, here’s the point:

In 10+ years of selling my particular kind of print newsletter and my high-ticket print books I know what creates the best learning experience and is far more likely to get consumed, applied, benefited from with forward intent, and kept around the house/office for weeks, months, and years, as well as passed around to colleagues, talked about, and referred, picked up again and read… sometimes even left around offices of big companies like Agora Financial (so I’ve been told by multiple copywriters there, over the years), traveled with in bundles of multiple issues by my hardcore customers… instead of collecting digital dust on a phone or hard drive.

Not to mention the format that attracts the kind of customers I like.

And it sure as hell ain’t downloadable “air” that gets treated like a $13.99 Kindle book.

Something else:

This is an example of letting rules & principles guide one’s thinking.

And not flip-flopping to the kind of reactionary thinking so many cling to.

Rules & principles always work, not just when Google farts or Facebook burps.

They sometimes have to be adjusted, of course.

But rules & principles mean positioning.

And positioning means not having to constantly react.

If anything, circumstances might even react around your business.

A word to the wise is sufficient…

A question from an Email Player of the Horde:

Let me ask you: have you ever apologized for the angle or content of an email? Or see any value in it or an instance in which apologizing is necessary (other than unfulfilling a promise, forgetting to post a link, or some other customer service related error)? 

The context:

Last year, someone in a copywriting group said something (oh noes!)… nice… about Trump.

From what I remember, it wasn’t from a Trump fan.

In fact, it was more of a “orange man bad, but you can still learn something from him…”

The result?

A bunch of cherries complaining.

And, one of the people running the group publicly apologizing, groveling for forgiveness, virtue signaling and hamster-spinning all over the place to appease a gaggle of mush cookies and sob sisters who probably were too busy holding candlelight vigils over being offended to ever buy anything anyway.

To answer the question:

No.

Never apologize.

If you legitimately screw an order up or something like that, that is one thing.

But to apologize for content intended to help people that someone gets offended by?

What would be the point.

Let them go.

In fact, what I do is encourage them to haunt my competition, triple down on creating more of such content, and drive the rest of the rats off the ship before they infest it more, and attract more such types.

Go here next:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

True story:

Back when I was in 5th or 6th grade, I remember laying in my grandparents’ bed watching the Disney Channel (a big deal back then in the 80’s). And I was fascinated by an episode of a show called The Wonderful World Of Disney titled: “Disney’s Greatest Villains.” It was hosted by the same actor who played Man in the Magic Mirror from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and other Disney specials. The Mirror guy spent the entire show talking about why the villains — not the heroes — are the reason why Disney stories are so popular, along with clips of various Disney films to prove his point.

I probably am butchering how he put it.

But basically he said:

“Take a story with no villain, danger, or evil plans, and put them together and what do you got? Boredom.”

In other words:

It’s the villain that determines how much you like the good guys.

And, it’s the villain that is #1 in any story.

No villain = no conflict.

No conflict = no engagement.

No engagement = no outstanding box office gross.

Many years later I saw another documentary on Amazon:

“Necessary Evil: Super-Villains of DC Comics”

And I highly recommend it for anyone in the marketing game.

It’s hosted by the late Christopher Lee (the perfect voice for it) and it goes deep into the psychology of villains and why you really need villains to have an engaging story.

So it is with creating engaging marketing.

It’s practically embedded in my email methodology, too.

More on that here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

So goes my paraphrasing of the great King Lionidis.

(From the movie “300”)

Very applicable to trolls, too.

Admittedly I don’t get that many trolls these days.

Yes, a few still ankle bite now and then, especially during the BerserkerMail launch.

But I suspect many are on to my antics and don’t bother.

Yet there are many benefits to having trolls haunting your email list & social media pages, spreading lies & fake news about you, and trying to bring some significance to their pathetic little existences by latching onto you for whatever reason — or no reason at all — they chose.

Like, for example:

1. Easy profits — if you know how to “flip” their nonsense into sales.

2. Better email delivery rates — way I understand it is, on at least some level, when they mindlessly reply with whatever mind vomit they reply with, Gmail, Yahoo, etc see they are interacting & engaging with a real human, which can help your inbox delivery.

3. Entertainment — I know it can be hair-raising for some, but after a while hearing from them is like the hitman in the movie “True Romance” talking about killing people… the first one is the bytch of the bunch, the second time is more “diluted”, and eventually he does it just to see their expression change. So it is with trolls, in my experience, dispatching them is routine.

4. Exposing the animal they are — so you can proceed accordingly (block ‘em, bait ‘em in, profit from ‘em, whatever).

5. Good sport — for your own amusement and that of those you share it with.

There are many more benefits to having a troll.

The key is to give them nothing, and take from them everything.

Next step:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle