Ben Settle

Usually I’m running around mocking so-called “AI”, fapGPT, etc.

But even I admit it has some legitimate uses.

For example, Stefania recently asked Grok to roast me:

Ben Settle, the email marketing maestro, or should I say, the “daily dose of discomfort” in every inbox? This guy’s emails are like that one relative who talks too much at family gatherings — you know, the one who insists on giving you life advice while you’re just trying to enjoy your mashed potatoes.

Ben’s got more opinions than a comment section on a political video, and boy, does he share them with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. His daily emails? More like daily affirmations that you’ll never become half as good at email marketing as he claims to be.

But let’s give credit where it’s due: Ben has turned his personality into a brand so well, you’d think he invented the concept of “authentically abrasive.” He’s the only guy who can make subscribers feel both enlightened and insulted in one breath.

His newsletter, “Email Players,” might as well be titled “Email Prayers,” because you’re praying for the end every time you open it. And for $97 a month, you’re not just buying content; you’re buying into Ben’s worldview where everyone else’s marketing strategies are apparently “B.S.”

So, Ben, here’s to you. You’ve managed to make email marketing as thrilling as watching paint dry, but with more personality. Keep on unsettling the world, one email at a time.

Eerily accurate…

Anyway, it occurred to me while reading that, that using Grok is a good way to test whether or not you have been pushing things hard enough in your emails and other marketing… creating something that stands out from your lazy bum copy & paste competition… and are known for something specifically vs just being a generalist or jack-of-all-trades and master of none.

If you’re not insult-able, you probably don’t have much influence.

Because, let’s face it:

Nobody roasts a boring brand…

If you run a similar test on your own brand, and it can’t come up with at least a half dozen ways to mock, make fun of, or outright insult you… then you probably ain’t trying hard enough. If you want to fix that I suggest checking out the paid Email Players newsletter, and marketing to your list as it teaches.

Here is the link:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

An Email Players subscriber (not sure he wants me naming him) asks:

“What’s the best approach when you get stuck and make little progress? There are times that sales go down or clients leave. Then I try to get things back on track but sometimes don’t work. So,when you get stuck is it better to work harder or take a more cool approach to kinda build momentum?”

My answer:

That’s just the ebb and flow of business and will always happen.

My advice is to focus on what you can control and ignore what you can’t.

You have 100% control over being consistent, out working the other guy, giving better service, creating new offers, studying your market more intensely, doing something every day to grow your email list, fanning the flames of customer & JV relationships, asking for referrals when applicable (any time you get a testimonial or just a compliment from a client, basically), making yourself a little better at what you do today than you were yesterday (1% better, smarter, etc per day is 350+% better in a year), investing your time & money wisely, getting up a little earlier if you have to, going to bed a little later if you have to, and doing those things consistently.

That’s all under your control.

And 99% of your competitors are likely not doing them all.

It may not seem like it, but when slow times hit it’s an opportunity.

Specifically, it’s an opportunity to get better/smarter/more cunning, more prepared to seize more marketshare as your lazy competition drops out (if you’re feeling the pinch, you can bet your arse they are too), slacks off, falls more into the bottomless pit of majoring in the minors from listening to goo-roos, wasting money, flailing around.

To use an analogy:

Focus on eating right, exercising, getting enough sleep, sunlight… while ignoring the scale other than as a way to periodically make sure you’re on track. Same principle applies when your business is “out of shape.”

On a similar note:

Already this year I have been getting more mindset and inner game questions like the above than I have the last several years prior. A lot of businesses are not sure how to deal with ebbs & flows, becoming plagued with self doubt, second-guessing themselves as what they were doing is not working as well now, have confidence problems, and the list goes on.

Not hearing this so much from older customers. A lot of this is due to age, probably.

But younger men, especially those who got in during the lockdowns when everyone and their mother suddenly became a content creator, course creator, copywriter, etc without really understanding the fundamentals of what they were doing and had a free platform to pitch from… and this is their first taste of a market pull back.

Always remember:

Solomon wasn’t just whistlin’ dixie when he said there ain’t nothing new under the sun.

Never has been, never will be.

This madness you see will pass, things will get better, business will grow again… only to hit the next downturn after that, after which it goes back up, drops, up, down, sideways, then up, breaks down, shoots up… the game never ends.

You can’t control the market forces.

But you can control YOU and how you react, exploit, use those forces.

Something to keep in mind, especially if you subscribe to the paid Email Players newsletter here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

There is a trope that goes back many decades and well before the internet.

And it is the “But ‘MY business’ is different” crowd.

Just about anyone who’s been in the game has heard it, and many of us dismiss it for the assumptive-based reasoning it is that is 99% of the time completely untrue and only holding back those who buy into it hook, line, and sinker – which many online do, unfortunately.

Whatever your business is, it is probably not different.

And prancing around telling everyone it is basically makes you the business equivalent of the chick dressed as Harley Quinn at the Halloween party, surrounded by 100+ other chicks also in the exact same costume, telling the guys she talks to, “I’m not like those other girls.”

And so it goes with the “my business is different” crowd.

Take images in emails, for instance.

I got this question not long ago:

“What if you absolutely need to add images as a form of social proof? Since I write financial and sports betting-related copy, adding member wins and proof of profits is necessary.”

Admittedly I am not familiar with his exact niche.

So maybe I am missing something.

But I daresay 100 years of direct response says otherwise.

The way I see it, if you “needed” pictures in a niche/market/industry like that — or any adjacent industries — then all those broadcast radio ads and shows on flat sounding a.m. bandwidths selling financial advice, or narrating live sporting events, etc would never have made any money, never had lasted for decades in some cases, never had 10s of millions of listeners happily getting their info driving to and from work, totally engaged, and ready to buy from the other audio-only financial direct response ads during the commercials.

I am the last to prescribe any kind of one-size-fits all solution to any business.

But here is what I suggest this person try out just to see:

Write 30 days of daily emails ranting about the sport, exposing dirt and/or gossip about the players, critiquing what’s wrong about the industry that pisses you and your audience off, hot breaking news that affects everyone in the niche, your most radical opinions and predictions that you know half your list will disagree with, etc.

Then, if you must show visual aids?

If they HAVE to see a visual for so-called “social proof”?

Send ‘em to a website which you can control the end-to-end user experience (as opposed to emails especially if you use images — as different devices/user settings/ISPs, browsers, clients, screen sizes, etc show emails different, and, worse, if they have images turned off they are looking at blank squares) that also sells your offer, right there, while they are in “heat” to buy.

I can’t make you any promises.

But I highly suspect inbox deliverability will be a lot higher.

And, also, sales too.

Only one way to find out though, and that is to try it out.

Far too many “But Ben my business is different, I have to use images!” boys & ghouls don’t even bother learning and trying even really basic copywriting 101-level skills to use words to create far more engaging Vision than some graphics/images (which, by their nature, create scrolling not reading), or how to think beyond the typical binary-thinking online goo-roos and “agency” crowd who can’t write themselves out of a paper bag.

Anyway, that’s my opinion on it.

Do what you want with it.

For those who can think beyond amateur online goo-roo dogma, you might enjoy the paid Email Players newsletter here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind lately.

And, in fact, I back-and-forthed with my pal Doberman Dan over the Marco Polo app for some 3 hours about it yesterday, as it’s such a fascinating topic. Anyway, this month’s Dan Kennedy newsletter (the one he does with Pete the Printer… do not bother asking me where to find it, they make it hard to find, seek ye Google) was extremely good.

Specfically:

A bit he did on how business is different and way less fun today than years past due to changes in character and mindset of customers/consumers. And he explained in half a page what I’ve spent the last year unsuccessfully trying to describe verbally to Stefania over many long hours of conversation.

The gist of it?

His observation in the lack of excitement about being successful compared to times past when the country was awash in opportunity & success and business magazines, hotel meetings always booked by businesses, seminars all over the place, and a US President even declaring US is in the business of being in business.

Anyone in the game back in early 2000s, 90s, 80s knows.

What changed?

Many things but I will just focus on something I noticed after leaving ALL social media at the end of 2018. I left everything in one swoop and focused all my energies on reading actual books (mostly biographies) and hunkering down to write lots of books and grow my business outside of the noise and stupidity I was seeing all around me on social.

Then, in early 2023 (after Elon bought Twitter) I returned there.

And it was a totally different planet than late 2018.

It was nothing like the Twitter from 4 years prior.

I suspect most people who had been there during those 4 years didn’t even notice the change. Clicks & algorithms were obviously already a thing before that. But upon returning everything was almost entirely click & algorithm-driven to the point where it was dominated by absolute talentless hacks and blatant grifters without a single ounce of marketing skill or having spent any time grinding to build and grow or produce anything have platforms of millions of followers (a lot of them bots, most likely, though) due to the phenomenon.

They get paid not on producing or selling anything, but shock and rage bait.

Or, in some cases, being one of Elon’s baby mamas.

It’s almost become like a giant Jerry Springer episode in some ways.

Nothing is produced.

Success is not so much earned as granted, and then measured as metrics/numbers.

No sales of anything required or even mentioned.

It’s even affected the entertainment industry where now casting decisions are being based not on talent but social media following numbers. A producer lamenting this last year I quoted at the time put it perfectly when he said what everyone is thinking:

“Everyone’s a celebrity but nobody’s got talent”

So that is one of many reasons behind today’s change, imo.

It’s all fleeting, though, as all illusions are.

And the ending is predictable.

Stefania sees me talk about this and says I sound giddy and am banking on it all crashing.

And, admittedly, she’s right.

Then we can get back to the business of selling instead of clicks.

More info on the paid Email Players newsletter here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Over the last few years I’ve gotten some “flack” from the troll sewing circle crowd about why I rarely ever appear on video or prefer not to be on video unless absolutely necessary.

For example:

One particularly self-loathing troll recently said it’s because I’m “scared” to be on video. He used my Client-less Copywriter program (which is audio-based) as an example, even though there is video (of me giving a live presentation) I constantly refer students to inside.

I was also on video with AWAI (a Facebook live) to promote it last year.

Not to mention the probably hundreds of collective hours of video content of me circulating around between my free mobile app, YouTube, others’ podcasts, etc. Just last week, for example, I made a live video appearance on Kia Arian’s podcast along with the great Dan Kennedy and my business partner Troy Broussard.

If troll boi is right, then I must be doing this scared thing wrong.

Another example is guy who said I don’t do video because I’m trying to be a “rebel.” Yet another guy said it’s because I’m a boomer (I’m not, I’m on the younger side of GenX) and should join the 21st century. And so on, and so forth, yada yada yada.

Anyway, like all trolls & reply guys they are all wrong.

And if they’d but asked instead of assuming they’d realize the real reason is:

I prefer to walk & talk.

It is no more complicated than that.

I don’t find it particularly comfortable being tethered to a desk, looking at a screen for an hour straight, and would much rather walk around.

Frankly, I already sit atmy desk for several hours writing every morning.

And the last thing I want to is have to talk into a screen from my chair, too. I also think better and give better teaching/interplay/ideas/and an overall teaching experience when walking around.

More:

I have a personal goal to walk at least 15,000 steps per day, minimum.

Often times it is much more than that but 15k is mandatory.

And whenever I can find a way to walk while doing work, I’m on it like white on rice. This includes when walking around talking on the phone with my parents. Or walking around the yard with Willis listening to audio books or info products about options trading, copywriting, or doing market research for Low Stress Trading (listening to interviews, etc with people in the market).

I even walk around the den as Willis watches TV when Stefania makes our meals each day.

If I can merge walking with an activity I breeze right through my minimum 15k steps goal.

There are obvious health and fitness reasons for all this walking.

But it also is an extremely good content creation activity (I created Client-less Copywriter while walking around in my office for example) and I am going to record my next audio-based course while walking around, too — not to mention when I do Twitter Spaces calls, Zoom calls, or any other kind of call/interview/training where I can use my phone and a headset, without having to sit in one spot staring at a screen for an hour or longer.

This does not mean I refuse to do video interviews or content.

Just that I prefer audio for the reasons above.

And if it ain’t necessary, I don’t do the screen-on thing.

Instead, I walk around with the audience in my pocket.

(i.e., my phone in my pocket as I walk and think to & fro)

One reason why I get so much more work done, more research done, more ideas generated, etc, than a lot of other people I know up in this business is because I combine as much high payout activity as I can with walking like this.

Anyway, for the trolls who bleat about me not being on video:

I hope that helps.

For everyone else:

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

An Email Players subscriber asks about guarantees:

“What is your opinion on guarantees? Also, instead of a guarantee, what can I do to provide that level of confidence besides testimonials? Thanks for all you do Ben!  Feel free to use this information and your answer if you think it will help someone else.”

Don’t mind if I do…

Here’s my opinion on it:

Instead of diddling around with guarantees I focus instead on the relationship via daily emails, building trust, using valuable premiums, giving outstanding service, encouraging referrals, repelling cheap skates, using lots of proof, targeting players with money vs miserly & self sabotaging price shoppers, and remembering that probably every single man or woman in the history of direct marketing who has ever asked about a guarantee or complains you don’t offer a guarantee… was intending to refund before even buying. Even if just subconsciously – with rationalization hamster spinning like crazy to justify it without feeling like frauds.

I have noticed this is especially true at Christmas time.

(When it’s time to buy little Tommy his Playstation)

Anyway, I haven’t used guarantees in almost 16 years.

It’s never really been a problem and, in fact, it’s helped me dodge several bullets.

Does that mean everyone should do the same?

No.

There is context with everything and sometimes one definitely should use them. That is where experience, discernment, history, skill level, positioning, and agendas come in.

So that’s my opinion, do what you want with it.

If you want more of my more obnoxious takes on all-things business, marketing, copywriting, and, frankly, humanity… see the paid Email Players newsletter.

You can read more about it here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Let me tell you a story every marketer should hear and probably memorize.

Recently I saw a post about the comicbook Uncanny X-Men #211 from 1986.

This single comicbook issue was, in some ways, responsible for the downfall of a publishing empire, sending Marvel Comics into bankruptcy and not being given more life until the movies came out to pick up the slack… only for the studio to start repeating a similar mistake, with the actual publishing wing of Marvel not even making a profit anymore, from what I can tell, although I cannot say for sure either way.

Probably just depends how creative Shifty the Accountant in the back room gets.

Here’s what happened:

Writer Chris Claremont had been writing Uncanny X-Men for about 11 years. He took it from a tier 3 title nobody read to the #1 selling comicbook on the planet each month, paying him so much in royalties that he owned a plane, if that tells you something. And then one day in 1986 he woke up and decided:

“There are just too many mutants.”

And so he told his editor his plan to kill a bunch of the characters off.

That turned into what became known as the Mutant Massacre storyline. And Louise Simonson, who was writing the X-Men’s sister title X-Factor at the time, asked if she could play as it sounded like a lot of fun. So did a couple of other writers.

And so they ran this multi-part crossover.

And it was just a gigantic success — all from Chris’ brain fart. In fact, it was such a success the stock holders and powers that be at Marvel demanded a crossover event every year after that. That meant writers and editors now having to fit storylines and character development into these pre-determined crossovers.

Claremont hated it, so did other creatives, as you can imagine.

But the money guys loved it, and they made lots and lots and lots of sales each year doing it. Then Marvel was bought by another investor who didn’t give a shyte about comicbooks. He was the quintessential what I call “Psychological Marketer” — letting the numbers and metrics dictate everything, no matter what.

He wanted to squeeze every last penny he could out of it.

Customer experience & respect be daymed.

The “metrics” lead the way.

So not only did they do the forced crossover each year, but he would, for example, look at titles that had Wolverine in it, who usually boosted sales by his mere appearance. Thus, he declared Wolverine had to be in nearly every main comicbook title throughout the year as often as possible, whether it made sense or not. As Claremont put it after he left and they started giving the artists all the creative power over HIS storylines he’d been developing for over a decade:

(Paraphrased)

“For a guy [Wolverine] who is supposed to be a loner, he sure gets around…”

He was astonished how in just a year and a half after he left, how much they gutted his 10+ years of stories and build-up and ruined the context and mystery, and just merchandised everything to the point where there were now multiple variant covers, trading cards, 3D covers, poly bagged titles… all to get speculating investors to spend all their money each month to get them all.

Again, all due to the “metrics” leading the way.

Not customer experience or satisfaction or serving the true fans.

(Who made the company possible in the first place)

Eventually Marvel collapsed.

And it was brutal — there was literally at least one suicide and, from what I read, some others dropping dead or getting sick from the stress. There was also bankruptcy, and the company was so broke the owner who screwed it up started mandating employees use the bathroom in the restaurant in the building Marvel’s offices were in so the restaurant would get the bigger water bill. He would also punish people for not using both sides of copy paper and even collected staples off the floor so they could be reused, etc.

All this is in Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Admittedly, I may have gotten a fact or two wrong (going on memory).

But basically that is what happened.

But back to Uncanny X-Men 211:

I started collecting around the time of this particular issue, and I remember watching it all unfold over the next 10 years. It was like watching a car wreck in slow motion. You could see the deterioration in the stories and the outright trying to squeeze as much as they could from the fans to the point of outright disrespect and, I would argue, contempt — with everything ruthlessly bent towards the bottom line. i.e., Psychological Marketing vs the what I call “Sociological Marketing” approach Stan Lee mostly used to build out the Marvel Universe 25 years earlier.

There are a lot of cautionary lessons in that story.

Like, for example, that Chinese proverb I have heard the great Matt Furey quote about how a strength overextended becomes a weakness. And, also, I’d add not letting spreadsheets and greed drive every nook and cranny of your business, and certainly not at the expense and lowered experience of your best and most loyal customers/clients.

A book I recently revisited is related to this topic called:

“The Tyranny of Metrics”

It’s not that metrics and tracking are bad. It’s just that they are often used to make incredibly bad — even deadly — decisions. Especially at hospitals (leading to deaths and suffering), with law enforcement, etc. When it all becomes about metrics it’s stop being about people.

All right, so that’s that.

You can read more about the paid Email Players newsletter here:

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Ben Settle

An Email Players subscriber (who I don’t know wants me naming him) asks:

“…I’ve been dealing with a lot of self-doubt and overthinking. I know it’s not your topic and you don’t have this problem, but maybe you could suggest something to read on this—or offer some quick advice? (Besides your Villains books, which are great and I’m already rereading.) Thanks in advance!”

The good news:

There are very few self doubt and confidence problems that cannot be defeated by:

1. Focusing on the work and NOT the outcome/result

Using fitness as an example:

Focusing on eating right, getting sleep, gym, being circadian synced – the things you have 100% control over vs what the scale says, which you have zero control over unless you tinker with the scale’s computer or something. Now apply that approach to business – only focusing on the activity (writing each day, getting a little better today than you were yesterday, creating more offers, doing something to grow your list each day, etc) not the result and adapt to the areas of your life needing work.

2. Always outworking the other guy

You have 100% control over that, too.

And control = confidence in what you’re doing.

Easy?

Absolutely not.

And you’ll still have setbacks.

That is life.

But doing the above means you’ll always at least be in the game, making progress, be able to lift your head up with pride whatever the outcome. It also helps to think in terms of not success or failure — but results. Win or lose it’s just a result. Learn what you can, regroup, go after it again. Nobody learns anything from their successes, so might as well fook up as much as you’re going to and embrace it.

Who knows?

You might even catch yourself having some fun in the process…

Also:

Every time you’re under pressure, frustrated, emotional, prone to bad decisions… remind yourself, “it’s just a test, and I’m going to pass it. ” then proceed accordingly. I literally do this every time my 4 yr old has a dietary-caused (we have found there are some foods that set him off, where he’s almost like a different kid altogether) tantrum and it is surprisingly effective in getting your priorities straight, focus on point, and staying calm, cool, collected.

Anyway, I don’t know who needed to hear this.

But if you like my approach to business and marketing then you might enjoy the paid Email Players newsletter.

To find out, you can read more about it here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

This may seem a tad morbid.

But one tip I can trace a whole lot more profitable content written, created, sold in my business to is simply reading lots and lots and lots (using Audible 2-3x speed on long walks and in the shower, while shaving, driving, whatever it is) biographies from people who accomplished a lot in their lives.

I started doing this in 2019.

And I don’t think the sheer output of writing dwarfing everything I did the 17 years prior to that is a coincidence.

The reason for bios ain’t so much instructional as it is practical:

You realize lickety split how little time you have in this world.

If you’re a young turk full of piss & vinegar this won’t be as easy to grasp than if you’re an old fart in his 40’s, 50’s, and beyond. But when you read lots of biographies of people who got a lot of things accomplished in their lives, and see them from birth (or before birth — most bios start with their parents’ lives) all the way to the moment they wheezed out their last breath… it can’t help but give you a better sense of your own mortality.

It’s no different than when you hear about anyone dying.

Funerals and death remind the living that we’re all mortal and gonna die.

My Enoch Wars and Villains books publisher Greg Perry likes to talk about how old school preachers in churches used to get people’s heads on straight and to stop sinning by simply pointing out the window at the graveyard and reminding them they’re all gonna end up there sooner rather than later.

No other lecturing required.

The grave has always been the “great equalizer” — once you’re there, that’s it. And while this may or may not apply to anyone else, I can say after reading more biographies than I can even count or remember at this point, it definitely has given me more of a sense not just or urgency… but emergency.

I don’t have to coax or force or trick myself to get up and write.

It’s the exact opposite:

If anything — and Stefania can attest, she jokes about how I don’t know how to just coast — I’m up an hour or two earlier than I have to, in my office, banging away at whatever project. I have way too much work to do to do anything else but either write or think about writing whenever I’m not writing, in order to better prep for the next time I sit down to do some more writing.

The money is obviously one motivation.

As is legacy.

Something I never cared much about BW (Before Willis).

But now I think about it all the time.

And all this adds up to a sort of impending specter of doom constantly hovering behind my shoulder, letting me know I better hurry up because I only got so much time left… thanks to reading all these biographies of people that accomplished all kinds of things but ultimately died, and many of them with unfinished work.

Another thing about biographies:

If you read ones about people who died young it’s even more motivating.

Steve Jobs and Napoleon come to mind.

And if you have things you want to get done, and if you’re like me where the more you get done the more ideas you’ll get for other things you want to do… reading bios of long dead people (I rarely read bios of people still living), seeing their entire lives from sperm to grave can be a tremendous motivation for doing a lot of writing, creating a lot of content, growing your business a lot bigger and faster than you would have otherwise.

This all could admittedly be just a morbid quirk of my personality though.

As I’m the kinda guy who watches a Hitchcock movie, and constantly pauses it throughout just to Google how the actors in the movie ultimately died. And I thought the first Faces of Death (not the sequels) movie was especially fascinating, in its own gruesome way.

So I really have no idea how many people will find this useful much less do it.

But it’s not something I’ve seen anyone talk about.

Anyway, I regret to say I don’t have a $497.00 course about this.

But what I do have is the paid Email Players newsletter.

You can read more about it here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle