Let’s rap about the Bible.
I diggeth the stories, lessons and history inside.
And, I loooove on Jesus’ iconoclastic style.
(Cue up the lone mindless whiner on my list living in his mom’s basement, keyboard keys orange from eating Cheetos all day, now idiotically thinking I’m pushing religion down his throat…)
But also, from an email point of view, I like the language.
Like the figures of speech.
The authoritative phrasing.
And, the endlessly swipeable analogies.
Like the term:
“uncovering your father’s nakedness” — which means having sex with your father’s wife (i.e. your mom, step mom, etc).
This happens all the time online.
No, obviously not in a sleeping with fathers’ wives kinda way.
Talking about the incestuous aspect of online marketing.
Dan Kennedy describes it like this:
You go to conventions, meetings, and conferences organized by, put on for, put on by, and attended by people in your same business. If you go to a strange town, you look in the yellow pages in your section to see whatever body else in your business is doing. You read books by people in your business. We have a technical term for this. It’s called ‘marketing incest’, because it works just like real incest in a short of time everybody seems to get dumber and dumber and dumber until the whole thing just grinds to a creaking halt.
I remember this in the self defense niche.
I once wrote a ton of ads for the then leader in the market.
And, at the time, there were certain companies that *seemed* to be doing extremely well on the surface.
(But, in reality, they weren’t.)
As a result, all our competition was copying them.
Swiping their ads.
Using their USP’s and appeals and language and vernacular.
Even stealing copy from each other.
What did we do?
We didn’t care what they were doing.
Didn’t care what their ads said.
Didn’t even care to be on their lists.
What we did was do an intense study not just of the market… but of my client’s buyers list — the people actually buying his products. Turns out they were nothing like the guys buying from Blackbelt Magazine ads, etc.
Our market was almost the opposite.
With different desires.
Different fears.
And, different motivations.
Anyway, the point?
Beware copying what your competition is doing.
Or what your favorite goo-roo is doing.
Or, really, what anyone is doing.
Go ahead and learn what you can from them.
But, don’t go blindly and mindlessly copying them.
Don’t uncover their nakedness, babycakes.
Or, like Ham who uncovered his father Noah’s nakedness… you’ll just end up with a nasty curse.
(On your marketing).
Awright, on to bid’niz:
The July “Email Players” issue goes to print in 2 weeks.
If you want in in time go ye here:
Ben Settle
