Behold this question about having enough ideas to write daily (7x week) emails:
“oh I have so much RESISTANCE to this. I already feel I email my list a lot (3x/ week usually). I know you must get this a lot, but what do you send on the days you don’t feel like you have anything interesting or valuable to say?”
The bottleneck is, you are making it about you, instead of them.
If you make it about them the problem switches to having TOO many ideas.
For example:
My highest converting emails in weight loss (a market I am not “part” of, so not as easy as writing to my main list) rarely focused on claims, or testimonials, before & after pics, promises of losing inches, whatever. Nor did I ever once struggle with what to write about o. If anything I had too many ideas to write about and it was a matter of picking which ones.
The reason?
Because they were not about me, they were about them.
Take, for example, an email I did about a woman despairing because her friends were always trying to sabotage her weight loss goals demoralizing her by deliberately tagging her heavy Facebook pics. I didn’t ‘write’ that. The market did – it was a true story. And it did ridiculously well, while barely mentioning the offer. In fact, before the great “World’s Most Feared Negotiator” Jim Camp died, I was on a live teaching call with him, and told him about that email. He said it was a great example of what he would teach about influence-by-Vision.
But it was not MY vision, but the market’s.
It’s the difference between having a market-first vs a marketing-first approach to copywriting.
Market-first puts writing emails on easy mode.
Since I’m already doling out my favorite copywriting lessons, here’s another one. But, it’s not from me. It’s from one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived under God’s blue earth: the great Doug D’Anna, who I have learned much from about this over the years. He has this idea he teaches “the bridge to the breakthrough” and it goes like this:
Copywriting is not about building a bridge from your product to your prospect.
It’s about building a bridge from your prospect to your product.
It really is that simple.
Unfortunately, though, nobody but nobody can complicate what’s simple like copywriters. I don’t why that is, as it should be the exact opposite. And that is why as far as copywriting techniques go, the most important of them all is simply learning, practicing, and honing one’s ability to reduce the complex and complicated into something simple and consumable.
Do that and you almost can’t lose.
I don’t care if it’s sales letters, videos, courses, emails, or public talks.
Master this skill and you can have almost anything you want.
“But BEN!!! Is there a course that will show me this????”
No.
And if there was, it probably wouldn’t be very useful. This comes from doing the work, putting in the time, making the mistakes, learning from your blunders, connecting with your customers every day… rinse & repeat over and over and over and over… for months, years, and decades. The beautiful thing about email is it lets you practice this while making sales at the same time literally every day to speed up the process.
In my experience the #1 thing a copywriter can do is mail their list daily.
Yes, daily.
Even if you have no list, write an email as if you do.
Then get to work building it, growing it, serving it.
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Ben Settle
