Ben Settle

Recently I wrote an email listing Christmastime movies for marketers who like money.

Which then got this reply:

“Does any of these movies actually help? Or is it just content to produce over xmas time?”

Magnificent reply guy valor.

Especially since the exact helpful parts to watch/look for in each and every movie I listed were literally spelled out, in detail, in the very email he was reply guy’ing to. Which tells me he’s either (1) semi-illiterate and can barely read, or (2) was too lazy to bother reading, or (3) simply has TikTok brain.

I would not be shocked if it’s that last one:

TikTok brain.

It’s a phenomenon that is ruining a lot of people up in this industry. You can see it in the NPC-like lines they use in lockstep unison, the low IQ-bait trends they follow, and in the questions they ask — including questions where the answers are in the very email they are replying to like in the above guy’s case, or else are a 10-second Google search away.

Something else to think about:

I’ve seen email marketers worrying about having to compete with TikTok.

But you’re not really competing with TikTok. You’re competing with TikTok brain.

To beat that you have two options:

1. Dumb your emails down to Baby Shark level

2. Ramp up your lead curation/qualification game

Many are headed toward door #1.

But personally, I prefer door #2.

You can never really get rid of the TikTok brained ones of course. But in my experience, by not appealing to the boys and ghouls haunting TikTok and social media day & night, you will usually get a lot more of the higher quality leads who are actively avoiding learning from or consuming content from anyone who has TikTok brain like a lot of your competition who use TikTok no-doubt have.

One last thing.

I made some predictions for 2025 and beyond a few days ago.

And now here is another:

Email marketing will eventually be the exclusive domain of the thinking man or woman. Not just email marketers, but people who get on email lists at all. The Idiocracy boys & ghouls will stick to TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and other similar apps. It may take a while for the cold email chumps to burn out (or get drafted for the next forever war), but I see it as inevitable.

When that happens?

Those who already have a list they are mailing each day will make out like bandits.

Those who wait, will lose out.

That’s my prediction — rooted in bias as it is.

If you want a head start on using email see the paid Email Players newsletter here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Below is my latest Oregon Eagle article titled:

“Ancient Egyptian Marketing Secret Overruns Local Businesses With New Customers”

Here goes…

Behold a marketing secret from 1600 B.C.:

Many years ago, the late advertising genius Bruce Barton (the second “B” in today’s billion dollar BBDO ad agency) recorded a radio broadcast about the Biblical patriarch Joseph — who was like a god in Egypt. Everyone knew and loved him, and he was second only to Pharaoh himself. Then he died, and the scriptures say a new king of Egypt arose…

“Which Knew Not Joseph.”

All that prestige, influence, and “clout” up and vanished overnight, with his people enslaved soon after, closely followed by their children being genocided! And Barton’s point was every day, all over the world, new “kings” (customers, prospects, leads, clients, etc) are constantly rising up. And unless your business is there, in front of them, every day, they will forget you and… know YOUR business not.

Hence the power of relentless, daily contact with your market.

And, specifically, the power of relentless daily email contact.

But before I write another word, here are my biases:

I have been publishing and selling a print newsletter (called Email Players) about email marketing with subscribers in over 50 countries for nearly 15 years. I also co-founded and sell my own email broadcasting/autoresponder platform (called BerserkerMail). And in my admittedly biased opinion, email truly is the 8th wonder of the world — right up there with the Giza Pyramids.

The reason?

Because it lets you tap into a phenomenon best articulated by the brilliant “Mad Man” era copywriter Leo Burnett called:

“Friendly Familiarity”

He described it like this:

“the No. 1 factor in building confidence is the plain old-fashioned matter of friendly familiarity. . .When you meet a man on the same street corner every morning and learn to like the way he smiles, the way he dresses, and the way he conducts himself you are much more likely to be a prospect for the automobile or the insurance policy he may sometime want to sell you than you are for that of a stranger. . .Attitudes and convictions about products and companies do not spring into your mind full-blown, no matter what the stimulus. They grow.”

Take Fred Rogers and Johnny Carson, for example. They were arguably more popular than the President of the United States due to their daily, relentless contact with their audiences. Oprah is another example. Strangers on the street told her the most intimate details of their lives due to her daily, relentless contact with them. People not only watched and listened to these celebrities, but they talked about their shows at work, at the dinner table, and at the water cooler.

And guess what?

If you use email correctly it can grant your business — like Pharaoh granting celebrity status to the lowly slave Joseph — a similar kind of power over your clients, customers, and leads. The key word is “correctly.” Almost all businesses mess this up, and come off as annoying pests who get ignored and deleted on sight.

But not your emails, my greedy little Eagle-Eye.

Because next time I will show you exactly how to use this amazing marketing tool to get overrun with new business, banish cash flow anxiety forever, and transform your business into the proverbial “Joseph” in your own little corner of Egypt.

So stay tuned, the best is yet to come…

And so it is..

If you want to kick 2025 off strong, I have a pile of treasures stored up in my free mobile app.

Around 40+ hours of content, give or take.

And it’s all free, yours for the learning.

Here is the link:

www.EmailPlayers.com 

Ben Settle

P.S. You’ll need a smart phone or iPad to access the app.

Here goes..

Besides continuing credit deflation I talked about at end of 2023 which I think will only get worse and worse, I have looked into my righteous fake crystal ball and see… a series of deafening POP! sounds. Those sounds being from the following bubbles exploding.

I don’t think they’ll all pop in 2025.

But I would not be surprised by any that do, especially:

* AI

* Creator economy

* Cold emails

* Influencers

* Founders/Startups

* Any business models that exclusively rely on a 3rd party platform where customers can’t be exported into a database (a bunch of people on Twitter who spent all of 2023 and 2024 nattering on about how “BASED!” Elon is, found this out the hard way recently…)

* Digital agencies (A podcaster who teaches “agency” owners recently told me he did not even know who David Ogilvy or Leo Burnett — the guys who created the agency business — were… those who forget history doomed to repeat it, yada yada yada)

* Social media girl bosses

* Subscription offers – especially starting July 2025

For the reply guys already drafting a response:

This does not mean I think any of these will cease to exist altogether. But a lot of the dumb money and easy credit that has propped them up will disappear/is already disappearing. And while Trump and his boys & ghouls might somehow be able to soften the landing, Dotcom crash 2.0 is as inevitable as Judgement Day was in the Terminator movies, in my opinion.

Will my predictions come true?

Only time will tell.

But two things that are obvious are:

* Everyone’s a celebrity, but nobody’s got talent

* Hardly anyone is producing anything — from what I can see it’s mostly just a lot of clicks, algorithms, and ticket taking (i.e., talentless hacks propped up by big tech, big government, big studios, big publishing, big media, big corporate money laundering schemes, etc)

And my approach to business is, I assume 3 things and proceed accordingly:

1. Everything is fake.

2. Nobody knows anything.

3. Everyone is full of shyt until proven otherwise

Following those 3 assumptions has kept me from making a lot of costly decisions, chasing foolish opportunities, or wanting anything to do with goo-roos.

And maybe, just maybe, they’ll do the same for you.

And when ready, you can learn more about the paid Email Players newsletter here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

A reader asks:

Hi, Ben!

I was wondering, why do you use a longer line length than pretty much every other copywriter whose email lists I’ve subscribed?

I’m a beginner copywriter with only a couple of months of experience, but I think it was Joe Sugarman who said that a longer line length makes the readers eyes do more work and therefore is inferior to a shorter one.

What do you think of this?

What do I think of it?

I think that 8 or 9 years ago, I distinctly remember some people on twitter blaming me for the sudden rise of emails and tweets that were 100% made up of short, one line paragraphs that everyone nowadays – rightfully – hates, mocks, avoids reading today, even as more and more copywriters keep tripling down on plaguing their lists with them.

But I never once taught doing that with paragraphs.

I am a fan of contrast.

Contrasting sentences, paragraphs, etc.

So if anything, I use varying and contrasting paragraphs in size, shape, length which I first learned from studying emails written by the “High King of Email” himself Matt Furey. But copywriters are, overall, a rather copycat-obsessive & trend-enslaved group that usually miss nuance, and easily fall victim to marketing & copywriting incest.

It is probably why so many fap themselves blind to AI.

And since I’m getting more and more questions like this (I never used to get any, but over last few months I got several) about my longer lines and bigger paragraphs, maybe we can expect to see the rise of wall-of-text tweets – no line breaks or eye relief – from the above copywriters missing the nuance and point on that, too…

If that happens, only question is:

Will I get the credit… or the blame?

I guess time will tell.

In the meantime, to learn about the paid Email Players newsletter go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Behold…

* Trading Places — especially the scene where Mortimer and Randolph Duke are explaining to Eddy Murphy’s character Billy Ray Valentine how their commodities brokerage firm operates, followed by his reply on what business they are actually in.

* It’s A Wonderful Life — the very beginning when Joseph is giving Clarence his assignment to stop George Bailey from committing suicide, and Joseph snaps at him for wanting to try helping him before getting to know George first: “If you’re going to help a man, you want to know something about him, don’t you?” Copywriters more obsessed with copywriting tricks and persuasion choke holds than they are of the customer they are selling to can get a lot out of that scene alone.

* How the Grinch Stole Christmas — not so much lessons, but inspirational ingenuity of how the Grinch pulled off fleecing an entire town and then rebranding himself right afterwards as some kind of savior of Christmas.

* Eyes Wide Shut — A great example of how information doesn’t change, but the people who consume it change, thereby making the information seem almost new and different over time. This movie has a thick new layer of context in today’s Epstein Island and Diddy news cycle compared to 1999 when it came out and how ineptly marketed it was.

* Miracle on 34th Street — You will find a magnificent example of the power of what I call “market-first vs marketing-first” selling when Kris Kringle tells would-be customers they can get certain toys at better deals at the competition. Today’s typical Needy marketer can’t comprehend this. But customers tend to be more likely to trust you, buy from you, recommend you when you make it obvious you’re legitimately on their side, where you can’t possibly be lying to them or trying to lead the astray.

* A Christmas Carol — I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, but the short version is Scrooge was a moron with his being so cheap he’d eat dollar and crap out a penny, takes credit for things he didn’t do, making his long suffering employee miserable ensuring nothing but mediocrity, and thinking he can buy loyalty and forgiveness. Maybe that shtick works in the stories. But not very likely in the real world.

* Cobra — Stallone’s Lt. Marion “Cobra” Cobretti is the epitome of non-Neediness, which is something marketers are plagued with going by the desperation in their content, emails, sales copy, and social media chest-pounding. Plus, he shows the ideal way to cut up and eat pizza…

Those are a few of my own favorites.

Lots of lessons inside if you are looking for them like it is with all entertainment if done right.

All right that’s it for today.

Have a Merry Christmas.

And if you want to treat yourself to an Email Players newsletter subscription go here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

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

I’ve been listening to Bandersnatch since you recommended it a few days ago, too… so good, wish I’d followed your recommendation to read it earlier…

My question: You’ve got me thinking about writing a novel.  And I wanted to ask you about your experience with it and approach to it…

Specifically about the “grunt work” that goes on behind the scenes…

I’ve been writing since I was a little kid. Studied it at college. And as a copywriter I write 90 minute scripts regularly. So I understand about doing research, organizing and collating ideas, synthesizing, knowing what I want to say and in what order, etc.

But what I have no idea about is the process of plotting and keeping track of everything, and was interested to hear your approach to it.

Do you plot the whole thing out in advance, and build it brick by brick? Do you use a system for tracking all the elements of the story you want to include? Are all the character backstories and how they might react to certain situations… or the way they speak… written down, or do you just track it in your head?   

Thanks in advance for any insight you can share or any further recommendations you can provide. Even if it’s just to point me to an EP issue where you covered this and I’ve forgotten.

The book Bandersnatch he mentioned is a perfect book for aspiring novelists, imo.

I’ve read it probably half a dozen times so far.

As far as my answer:

I will be writing an Email Players issue about this eventually. But probably not until after my next series of novels are done or at least well under way. This month I was set to write a new one, and nearly wrote two different novels simultaneously since I could not choose which I wanted to go with. But alas… I got sidetracked with trading options and going deep on that instead, using Troy Broussard’s brilliant methodology in our Low Stress Trading bid’niz.

Sometimes you just gotta go with the flow…

For now I will just say:

I have an idea of how I think things will go, and possibly even end.

But I am also far more interested in the characters than the plot at first. As long as I can put the plot into a TV guide-sized summary I’m good. After that I just think about the characters. Sometimes for months or even years or, in some cases, even decades.

But I don’t force things and let them unfold as the story progresses.

The best and most fun part of the process is when everything takes on a life and path of its own and you become just as much a member of the audience as the other readers. My favorite parts of writing the 9th novel in my Enoch Wars series (Serpent Seed) was when suddenly the characters were writing themselves.

I never really understood what that meant until then.

It’s quite surreal when it happens.

And it was one of the most exciting parts of writing I’ve ever experienced.

The key is not to stress about it, or get worried about it, or overthink it. If anything, the less I try to force things, the less I know about the ending, the less I try to create “good writing” the better things turn out and the more great memories I have of the process.

Stephen King says a lot of dumb shyt.

Especially when he starts tweeting.

But one thing I learned from him — a “what not to do” lesson — that has been invaluable is about when he wrote Insomnia. He said he did not think it was all that great because he plotted it out unlike most of his works. And I agree, it just meanders. Like 300 pages of nothing happening that could have been cut out. It reads as if it is anything but tightly plotted even though it was plotted.

Something to think about…

I also don’t buy into the whole “know your ending” shtick.

I’m not saying it is always bad or it’s wrong or not to know it either way.

All I am saying is it can go great whether you know it at first or not. Take book 3 in my Enoch Wars series (Demon Crossfire). I had no clue how it was going to go, I just knew how it’d start. Much of the plot came to me as I was writing and I just let it happen. It looks like it is probably the tightest plotted book of the entire series that looks like I had it all figured out from the start.

But really I did not know jack outside I knew it’d have demons in it.

In fact, with the ending, I was sitting at a stoplight the day before writing that chapter. And I was starting to almost stress about how to end the thing. Then suddenly the idea hit me, along with the car that probably was waiting for me to go when it turned green, as I let the idea I had sink in…That ending then turned into a major plot point for the 5th book, which while I had a general idea what it’d be about, turned into something else altogether and effected all the books after that until the very last chapter of the last book.

Writing is controlled randomness in my opinion.

That said, everyone has their way of doing things, of solving problems, of enjoying the process.

I don’t think there is a right or wrong way.

There is just your way.

I like to think Bukowski’s popularity proves that..

If you’ve read this far this might disappoint you. But probably the only advice I am qualified to give about writing fiction is to turn on your computer, open your word processing app of choice, and type one word at a time until you get to the part where you write “the end.”

$497 course on writing fiction forthcoming…

Just kidding.

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

Last month I lost a customer because, as he said:

“I love the advice and insight, but, as a Canadian, I can’t take the politics.”

On the one hand, I get and understand the impulse, and certainly don’t blame him for high tailing it out of here. I am not, never have been, and never will be everyone’s caesar cocktail. But, on the other hand, if he genuinely loves the info like he said then he’s probably neutering his own success.

For example, if I had his attitude I would never have:

* Learned the best troll monetization tactic I now regularly use (from FDR — who I utterly despise in every way)

* I also would not have benefited from learning some incredible networking & relationship-building approaches that have helped my business (from Obama’s inspiration Saul Alinski)

* And speaking of Obama who I am no fan of either — if I thought like he does, I would not have benefited from or taught an entire Email Players issue about his 2008 email fundraising campaign that took in $600 million (almost a billion in today’s money) in donations with JUST email

* Nor would I have gotten deep into the idea of media stacking I’ve been benefiting from in spades… and that had originally got me interested in co-owning a SaaS company (from William Randolph Hearst — even during his ultra liberal years before the very social causes he championed turned on him)

* Not to mention all the knowledge I’ve learned from studying Steve Jobs or would be using an Apple computer at all

* Plus the incredible insights about persuasion and influence from liberal trial lawyer Gerry Spence’s books — who was so good at his job he was once accused by the opposing lawyer of hypnotizing a jury!

* Frankly, I would not have probably ever experienced the joys of writing horror fiction, or been able to utilize and teach the lessons for copywriting and marketing gained from doing so, if I took the Canadian attitude (Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot was a big inspiration)

Those are just a handful of examples.

I have gone out of my way to learn from many other people I think are as vile and even outright evil as the night is long — Marx, Lenin, Clinton (Hillary and Bill), Stalin, Castro, Lyndon B. Johnson, James Carville, even the reverend Jesse Jackass… and the list goes on and on and on. And have benefited tremendously from doing so by simply taking the good ideas and discarding the bad (and bat shyt) ideas.

Something else:

I’d argue the less you “like” or agree with those you learn from, the better.

Because you are more objective about whatever lesson you learn from them.

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

My new fan here seems to think so:

Ben don’t be rude and disrespectful to Nigerians .

How dare you direct this message to Nigerians like we have to do something extraordinary to get paid for our service . 

Moreover you had the guts to use our situation to sell your dirty program . You should have directed this message to any modafucka looking to get clients and not Nigerians . 

Embarrassing  coming from you and it’s not the fist time you’re putting out this same content .

Do better ! 

The context:

A few days ago, I gave a long, very detailed, and I argue extremely valuable answer in one of my daily emails to a question that was asked by a Nigerian copywriter who was struggling with not getting clients, even though he is putting out lots of valuable content like everyone says to do.

Plus he said, and I quote:

“Some [clients] rejected me plainly because am a Nigerian and not a US citizen. So I feel bad.”

In other words:

The Nigerian stigma was literally in the question he asked.

To leave that detail out just to appease the idiot reply guy above’s insecurities would not only have been a disservice to the readers who deserve full context, but also a sin against the email marketing gods for not using the inherent drama that comes with such a question in my subject line.

As far as using the situation to sell my “dirty program” as he described it?

Don’t mind if I do.

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

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle

About 14 years ago 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 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 (worth a lot more in 2010 than 2024) 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 total amateur 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, serve customers, think beyond making 5 sales per day 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 (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 per day 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 – going to $100/day to $500/day, etc, which was the plan.

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 sometimes take an hour 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 and instantly lose all respect for people who whine to me about how hard and inconvenient and frustrating writing just one email per day is for them. Especially when they somehow find the time, creativity, and energy doom scroll and shyt post on social media every day.

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

And it’s one reason I actively try to dissuade people like that 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.

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 for compliance. 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, there are many points I am making here.

But mostly I am writing this because 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, and the fights were over so quickly.

But it goes beyond that.

And it’s the heavyweight champion of the world of success hacks. It’s also the inner game and approach required to use the info I teach inside the paid Email Players newsletter.

More on that here:

www.EmailPlayers.com

Ben Settle