September 17, 2025 • 45 mins
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I sat down with Neville Medhora, one of the sharpest copywriters out there. We talked about the fundamentals of writing words that actually sell, how simple tweaks can turn a dead email list into a money-maker, and why the old rules of professional writing don’t really work anymore. Neville also shared the framework he leans on for almost everything and broke down what makes certain stories and ads go viral.
Find Neville at copywritingcourse.com
Follow Neville on X: https://x.com/NevMed
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00:00 The Power of Copywriting
03:11 – Power of great copy: scaling sales
05:33 – Why real feedback is crucial
07:53 – Copywriting Course beginnings
10:11 – The first AppSumo “fonts” email
12:28 – ADA formula explained (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)
14:55 – Interest vs. Desire: key difference
17:09 – Expanding product markets with copywriting
19:36 – Beehive & Texas Snacks email example
22:01 – Fun email formats that boost engagement
24:21 – Where ADA applies (and where it doesn’t)
29:03 – Cold emails: short, medium, long strategy
31:28 – Email frequency & the 70/30 rule
36:17 – Classic ads & copywriting legends
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
My buddy Noah Cake and started Appsumo and they would sell a
few here and there and then I came in and I was just like,
dude, you got to apply this copyright stuff.
Let me try writing one of these.And I sent it out and that was
their first $10,000 profit day. And we're kind of like, wait,
was that a fluke? Can we do that again?
And so we did it again and again.
It was not a fluke. I'm just saying most people do
such a bad job of selling. We sold so many more when I
started understanding that you can use these for a lot of
(00:21):
different things. Tell me about Ada.
I love Ada. Attention, interest, desire,
action. That's what every single Appsumo
e-mail was based on. We write all these emails for
Fortune 500 companies, that's what they're all based on.
I see the basic psychological framework of ADA in almost
everything and it's the only copyrighted for you to learn.
There's literally 7 stories in the whole world that everyone
just repeats. If you're going to use ChatGPT,
(00:42):
use ChatGPT projects. Have you ever wanted to sell
anything? Have you ever wanted to make
money? Well, the pen is mightier than
the sword, as they say. So what if you could learn
almost everything you would everwant to know about amazing
tactical sales copywriting in one short episode?
Well, today is the day for you because I brought on my new
(01:02):
friend Neville, and he is one ofthe world's foremost experts on
copywriting. What is copywriting?
It's writing to sell something in an e-mail, on a letter, on a
landing page, anywhere it works.And he's the best in the biz.
Please enjoy. Now, when it comes to
copywriting, I'm sure you could talk for hours about this, but
what's the 8020 of good copywriting?
(01:23):
So you you just said you were doing a a my first million
episode with Sam. So we'll talk about that.
I think Sam's a great copywriter.
I think he's really good, even though he's not considered a
quote UN quote copywriter. And one of the things he loves
doing and is always done very well is on his sales pages.
You know, it'll have like you know, about us and this and all
the different sections on a sales page for so he's writing
(01:43):
one for Hampton. He's really good about putting a
personal note from himself and the way he writes that is just
like he would say it in the moment.
So me and him bounce copywritingideas off of each other all the
time. So me and him were in Central
Park 2 weeks ago. I just chatting on a bench.
He was just like dude I want Hampton is like and he just went
on his rant and it was kind of epic and I was like dude that's
(02:06):
no right there. You nailed it.
Like write that down. Immediately pulls out his phone,
writes down everything he can asverbatim as he could.
And if you on their next couple of ads, that will be the primary
thing on the web page. And so I don't think using fancy
language and everything is very useful anymore.
And just that personal plain English sounding stuff.
(02:27):
Honestly, where you're just talking is probably the best
writing out there. It's it's very very simple.
Which is the opposite of what welearned in high school.
Right. Very opposite of what we learned
in high school. Fortunately, I do think a lot of
that is going out the window nowthat like AI and stuff is there
that kids are like, people are like kids aren't learning how to
write an essay. It's just like, why do they need
to learn how to write an essay like that?
(02:48):
Well, what's the point? Like who like in your real life,
do you need to learn how to write essays that well?
And so those old school essays, I think are just kind of falling
out the window. But from my generation, I know a
lot of people are like to whom they may concern that kind of
stuff. And they wrote that that really,
really boring text. And I think that's all all the
way out, fortunately. What are some examples that you
can think of that where good copywriting changed everything,
(03:11):
right? Like it was the difference
between, you know, 100 sales and10,000 sales that do AB test it
that often or like what kind of anecdotal stories can you think
of? Yeah, some of the biggest AB
test is when I I come in with anexisting e-mail list.
So they have some pre-existing sales, right.
The best example was always, this is my first is when Appsumo
(03:33):
started my buddy Noah Cake and started Appsumo had about 50,000
people on an e-mail list to get deals for tech stuff.
Is that simple. And they would sell a few here
and there. And then I came in and I was
just like, dude, you got to apply this copyright stuff like,
yeah, these good deals. But like you don't, you don't
talk about it. You don't tell people how to use
the product. He's like, I mean, do people
want to know that? I was like, let me try writing
one of these and I sent it out and that was their first $10,000
(03:56):
profit day after that e-mail. Keep in mind they were making
like $1000 of profit from each e-mail before.
So that was a 10X result. And we're kind of like, wait,
was that a fluke? Can we do that again?
And and so we did it again. And again, it was not a fluke.
It worked really well. But here's the thing about it.
Here's the insidious thing and let me relate it to this.
You go to restaurants, right? Are, are you a big foodie or no?
(04:18):
Oh, huge foodie. Huge, huge foodie.
OK, so I'm not that big of a foodie.
I'll go to restaurants with people's suggestion.
I'm never like I want to go to arestaurant guy.
So whenever we go, do you talk to the chef and give them
feedback? No, I'm an introvert.
I just want to eat. I don't even want to talk to my
server. That's interesting.
OK, so you're a huge foodie. If you were giving
(04:39):
recommendations to people because you're a big foodie, a
lot of people would come and they get thousands of dollars of
business. However, you, if you don't
really love the food, won't evertell them that.
Yeah, correct. Don't you think that that's a
pretty dangerous thing? So like you, who could be maybe
a small food influencer within your friends, do never tell the
chef that the something sucks. You never tell the the the owner
(05:01):
that you know, the the service was bad or whatever that the
chair was squeaky or that the sauce was too saucy.
Whatever it is, you never tell them that.
So I think an e-mail list is exactly the same way.
If the e-mail list is not that great to where you don't read it
all the time, you just get in this habit of never reading it,
eventually unsubscribing. And The thing is, no one ever
tells you that. So no one ever, ever said you
(05:22):
send out your chat GBTD newsletters and everyone's like,
oh, cool newsletter, whatever, but they never say anything bad.
And I think that's the worst thing that can.
Happen. Yeah, for writing really, really
good copy, what you notice is like over the long run, people
will still reply to newsletters,still read it, still be
influenced by it, versus newsletters that have been going
(05:44):
out for 10 years and looks like no one's reading it at all.
That's a big difference. And how can you tell?
It's very, very difficult to track that you can't.
It's so funny you say this because my wife and I went we
found a nice Italian restaurant we've never been to. 4.7 stars
on Google out of 1000 reviews. You know, we had positive
confirmation bias at the Ying Yang.
We sit down, we're expecting something amazing.
(06:06):
Everything was bland, everything.
And like my framework for food is like salt Throughout all the
processes of cooking, it fixes like a multitude of sins.
Just salt. That's it, that's it.
And every single thing we got was just no salt.
No salt. And how many compliments does
that chef get on a regular basis?
Probably tons, right? But if I would have gone back
(06:28):
there and said, listen, dude, I'm not a chef, You're a chef,
but I know good food. And you're missing salt.
Like, you just need to add more salt.
That would probably stand out more to him and maybe even
effectuate change than any of the compliments he'd ever
gotten, right? It would just kind of be a Burr
in his side. And he'd think about it because
people give me feedback about mycontent sometimes.
And whenever I get a piece of feedback that stands out for
(06:50):
better or worse, like a lot of times it effectuates change,
even if it's not like a representative sample size.
Like I send a newsletter, 100 people are like, this was a
banger. And then one person's like,
dude, I can tell on this sectionyou, you mailed in with ChatGPT.
I don't appreciate that. I probably think twice about it
and not do that again because ofthe one guy you know?
It's really hard to get that type of feedback.
(07:11):
And then if you ask for feedbackfrom 100 different people,
they're going to give you all sorts of different stuff,
especially as subjective, something as subjective as food.
So it is difficult. And then with your newsletter,
with your, with your marketing, people never tell you.
They're probably just like, it'sfine, but that's it.
And I think that's like the mostdangerous place to be, even
though it's it, that's why it's so insidious, like it's so
dangerous to your business because over time, just like
(07:32):
quality goes down. That's one of the ways where
like when you see someone who really slaves over their copy
and putting stuff out, like justpeople read it for the long term
because they can tell like this is real, you know, it's an
interesting thing I've been going back to with AII used to
draw. I don't know if way back in the
day, copywriting course was spelled with K's.
I just couldn't. Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah. And it was really fun because I
(07:54):
had like the copywriting course community and which had an
acronym that people didn't like.I was like, look at me.
It's a joke. Right, Yeah, yeah, it's a bit.
But and The thing is like, I just I thought it, I thought it
was fun, right? I thought it was funny.
It was stupid. I like, I liked teaching people
with like dumb ways that are just like, hello, welcome to
(08:16):
copywriting course. That's just boring.
In fact, I made I made a copywriting course for business
where I like dressed in a suit and rerecorded the entire thing
and it and it completely flopped.
Companies were like, no, we wantthe stupid stuff.
That's why we're going to you like, you're not a professional
guy. Don't be professional.
Every time I'm trying to teach people something, I try to be a
little bit funny and a little bit wacky.
And so therefore I was using a lot of stick figures back in the
(08:38):
day. That's just how I drew like,
wait, why? That's what it reminds me of.
What? Everyone, everyone says that I
and I guess what I love, wait, but why?
It's very wait, but why? If you know what that is, That's
a lot my style as well, just like stick figures and stuff
like that. And over time, I started kind of
like cleaning it up because now we had tools like Canva, you
have ChatGPT that can make images for you.
(08:59):
And I started going like, let mestart using these tools more and
more. The problem is it just kind of
lost some of that spark, some ofthat magic.
And so I've started going back to stupid drawings, hand drawn,
get the iPad out, just drawn it a bunch of times.
And it's kind of funny you mentioned Sam before.
Guess what we were doing on our last call together?
We were doodling for Hampton. He made some doodles.
(09:22):
He's like, how do you make thesedoodles like that?
So we doodled for Hampton and I showed him my whole process of
that. So actually going back to like
Goofy to where it's just like, this is so stupid.
AI wouldn't have made it. It's kind of the move I think
right now more than ever. Ironically, going back to that
stupidity is better. There was a phase where like
professional was really cool. You're on YouTube a lot.
(09:43):
I'm sure you noticed these trends with YouTube over time.
It used to be Casey Neistat vlogging all the time, every
day. That totally dropped off and
then I think it's coming back now.
All these things go in cycles. So going back to the old school
hand drawn handwritten stuff I think will be a major advantage
in the near future. Is there any chance you still
have that first Appsumo e-mail that you sent out so we could
(10:05):
break take it down and what madeit interesting?
The first. One, for those unfamiliar with
Appsumo, it's kind of like Groupon for like tech deals,
right? Like lifetime deals.
They'll send out one e-mail to their whole list and instead of
paying 30 bucks a month for something, you pay like $50.00
for a lifetime deal, right? Yeah, that accurate, OK.
So, so believe it, believe it ornot, this is for designers,
(10:25):
right? So the, the deal that they they
gave me was kind of like this one they thought was like a
throwaway deal, OK? They didn't think it would make
that much because it was a pack of fonts.
OK Is this fonts description service?
You sign up and they would send you, like, pairings of fonts.
This is for hardcore designers. Now, what I knew was this, like,
OK, the general public does not need this.
There's zero chance anyone wouldneed this.
(10:46):
However, if you're a hardcore designer, this would make a lot
of sense to you. So I started off.
It's like, if the names Lucidia Sans, Unicode or Courier New
don't mean anything to you, go ahead and close this message.
Yeah. You're just like and like, even
if it doesn't mean anything to them, people keep reading
because they're curious, like where you're going with this.
(11:07):
Exactly. And I said, you see, my friend,
today we're reaching out to the community people known as font
fanatics. I actually want to say font
because there's like that's that's what they were called.
We're not doing that. I don't.
I think Noah was OK with that. I think some other people on the
team were like, the word is aggressive to start with.
(11:28):
And so it's like if your knees go weak when I whisper Garamond,
you might be one of them, right?And then I described like Steve
Jobs always talked about font faces and stuff like that.
And I was a big Steve Jobs fan and so I included a quote of
his. And then I go into, you know,
Kernest and there's this guy Kernest who like delivers these
cool font packages that all these designers used.
(11:49):
And so most of this was about fonts, why they play a role in
web design and why typography isso important.
And then at the end, we said, bythe way, we have a deal on this,
right? So it's $180 a year, but if you
buy right now, it's whatever dollars.
And that, that was the whole e-mail.
There was no, there's no pictures, there was no nothing.
(12:10):
It was just so jarringly different at the time, right?
So now this might not be the most groundbreaking thing on the
planet, but at the time, people were like, Oh my, I can't, I
can't like this right here. We convinced Kernest and I
underlined the K and then the K that people were like, what,
like I've ever seen something like that.
(12:31):
And so those types of things, just like being so outlandish
and unique were quite, quite a weapon back then.
And so still to this day, I think that the way to approach
this is like, if you write stufflike this, it just does not look
like AI. It doesn't feel like it.
You're just like this, this feels something different.
And if I were to do this again today, I'd probably have a bunch
(12:53):
of hand drawn pictures in there as well.
OK, I feel like this template could be used for so many other
launches or things or anything like this.
Is basically an Ada template, so.
I was going to ask you about Ada.
You got ahead of me. Tell me about Ada.
I love Ada. Attend attention, interest,
desire, action. That's what every single Appsumo
e-mail was based on. All my sales emails.
(13:15):
We write all these emails for Fortune 500 companies.
That's what they're all based on.
And instead of coming up with anargument of why someone should
buy something, you have this framework to go off of.
Get their attention with something interesting thinking
about it, interesting facts, interesting testimonials,
interesting use cases desire making them show like if you buy
this, your life will be better because and then action like
(13:36):
telling them how to buy right. And so so that framework is an
easy skeleton You can make for asales page for an e-mail for any
sort of pitch for telling your kids to clean their room right.
So anytime you have an argument to make or sale to make, instead
of just saying like go clean your room, you can start off
with like, hey buddy, you want to go to Astro World today,
(13:57):
right? Like, well, let let me tell you
that. You have your attention.
It's going to make, it's going to make me and your mom really,
really, really happy. And we're going to be very happy
with you. So we're going to take you
there. We're going to buy you ice
cream. We're going to do everything.
So if you clean your room, I mean, we'll go to Astro.
What we we're packing up the carand we're going to go in 10
minutes. But if you don't, you know, we
(14:17):
can't do it. So this is his desire to go.
And so it's like, all right, ready.
Like on the count of three, you're going to go run in there
and clean your room as fast as you can.
Action. That's the call to action, yeah.
Yeah, lamest example in the world.
I'm just kind of making up that as we go.
But it's it's it's this framework that when you start to
think, have that framework in your mind every time you're
trying to ask someone something,you go, how can I just aid at
(14:39):
this real quick? And then you have a much better
framework and a much higher chance of getting them to do
said action. The the I, the interest is the
hardest part for me. In your example, where where was
the I? Yeah, everyone gets I and D
confused interest and desire. Interest is like interesting
with interesting use cases, interesting facts about the
product, interesting ways that people have made money with the
(15:01):
product, interesting testimonials.
The desire is like, if you buy this Roomba vacuum, you'll never
have to vacuum again, right? So it's like what their life
will be like with that product. So that's that's the main
difference. A lot of times the intersection
is bullet points. For example, one of the first
things I did for one of my firstthings I applied on House of
(15:22):
Rave was when I started like a dying.
All the the sales pitches was I was selling these things called
finger lights and I got a coupleof plumbing companies buying a
bunch of them and I thought theywere like fake orders because
like from Josh's plumbing company, I'm like, the hell are
they doing ordering 500 packs ofthese?
Turns out they give them the plumbers and use them to like go
(15:42):
under the sink and and they put them on their fingers.
I was like, yeah, because they have a headlamp, but they can't
always see directly with the headlamp.
And I was like, that's a freaking bullet point to put in
a sales pitch somewhere that plumbing companies use these.
And then it turns out parents ofautistic children would use them
to like, they would like, wave them around.
It would calm them down. There would be all these little
(16:02):
use cases. And that sold a ton of them
because instead of just being a light for like 16 year olds to
dance at a rave, this became a thing that you can, like, use
around the house all the time. You can use it when you went
camping. You can keep a couple in your
car. They're so cheap that they're
just basically disposable. So making this a product that
you can use in all aspects of life rather than just one
(16:23):
specific aspect. It reminds me of the phrase
invent the disease, sell the cure like you're just teaching
them, hey, you have this disease, you have that disease.
You can't see under the sink. You can't entertain your
autistic kid. And they're just getting these
ideas of why they need it as you're describing this quote
disease they have. And then you oh, conveniently
the A at the end of ADA is you selling them the cure.
(16:45):
Yeah, we sold so many more of these when I started
understanding that you can use these for a lot of different
things. Another thing I sold, we sold
these like a light up golf balls.
We called them rave balls because they were just like
indestructible lights that you can sell.
You could literally hit them with a golf ball 400 yards and
they wouldn't break. I was just like, man, you could
use these for all sorts of stuff.
So I made pictures of them beingused as Halloween costumes.
(17:06):
The number one buyers of them, wedding planners, They were
using them in centerpieces and stuff like that because they
were water resistant. There were all these things.
So now people went from buying these just for like, you know,
once again, waving around on a dance floor to a billion other
use cases. And waving around these things
on a dance floor was like 1% of the people that the total
addressable market wedding planners spending $3000 on them
(17:29):
were far better customers than aguy buying one of them.
Yeah. So interest is a very important
thing to just put a bunch of bullet points.
So how people can use that? Product bullet points.
OK, what first got you interested in copywriting and
why? What was it about it that just
intrigued you? I had a business called House of
Rave and it wasn't selling very well on e-mail.
In fact, I was losing money because I was making no sales on
(17:50):
e-mail. And in like I'd go to these like
marketing meetups and everyone'slike your e-mail list is your
ATM machine. Like that was a big phrase.
And I was like, I don't make no money off this e-mail list.
So buddy of mine looked at my emails and was like, dude, these
like they look cool, a lot of images and big buy now buttons,
but you got to tell people aboutthe product.
He's like, you should check out Gary Halbert.
(18:12):
So I read the Gary Halbert letters chapters one through 25.
I literally printed them out andI instantly was like like, I've
literally been doing this all wrong.
And so that's when I redid my first e-mail with like the Gary
Halbert style. And that's what I made like way
more money. And literally overnight, House
of Rave turned into like an e-mail marketing company more so
(18:32):
than the e-commerce company thatjust depended on SEO.
How big was your list? 7500 previous customers, there's
a 7500 people that had previously bought from me.
That was my list. So I thought that would everyone
was like that's a warm list. However, every time I sent out
an e-mail, it was just a bunch of pictures.
They were very well done. I'd say they're visually pretty,
(18:55):
but no one would buy anything. I've been using Beehive for
about two years, almost as long as they've been around.
And I got to tell you, watching other creators stay stuck on
basic newsletter platforms is painful.
You're losing thousands of dollars because you don't know
what your subscribers are worth.And when potential sponsors ask
who reads your newsletter and you say entrepreneurs or moms,
(19:16):
you lost the deal. But Beehive has a survey feature
that's brilliant. You can set up a few questions
about demographics and spending habits that you send them
through right after they subscribe.
So instead of telling sponsors, oh I have 5000 subscribers, you
can say I have 3750 homeowners making over $75,000 a year who
spend $200 plus per month on home improvement.
(19:38):
And that's proof that their ideal customers are reading your
newsletter. Go extract your e-mail list from
whatever platform you're stuck on because it's probably costing
you thousands in lost deals. Beehive makes migration easy.
You can move all your emails in minutes so you can get paid what
your actual worth. Head to beehive.com/chris for
(19:58):
30% off your first three months.That's BEHI v.com/chrisyou'll
thank me later. So I literally just lose $80.00
a month for the e-mail service. Yeah.
So yeah, it's funny. Said you make money off emails.
I was like, that doesn't seem tobe true.
And then when I started writing them this way, then I made
money. Yeah.
We have an ecommerce brand that has like 160,000 on the e-mail
(20:20):
list and we've AB tested them a ton of different ways and we've
learned that the shorter the subject line, like you can't
reveal anything in the subject line because you want them to
click. You can't answer the question.
And whenever we have a new product drop, we only link to it
in like a blue ugly hypertext. We put no pictures in the
e-mail. It's the ugliest looking e-mail
you've ever seen and it just crushes.
(20:42):
I would say there's another way to do that.
Do you mind sharing what productthat is?
No, let. Me share my screen.
So it's at texassnacks.com. We just resell Bucky's products,
right? So we might have a new snack or
a new T-shirt. So let's say you know, Bucky's
one of their biggest drops everyyear is a Halloween T-shirt and
everyone looks forward to it in early August.
(21:04):
So we'll send an e-mail that says new Halloween shirt just
dropped. That's it.
That's the whole e-mail was justa hyperlink.
And we sell more and we get moreclicks when we do that than if
we put the picture in there. You know what's interesting?
I would say that there's anotherformula that you could possibly
use for these. So there's like all text, which
works great. I think another format that
(21:24):
would be really fun is little text and a lot of pictures.
And it goes headline, picture, repeat, right?
So what I mean is check out these Bucky's Snacks.
Sorry, I probably know that's not the right spelling of
Bucky's. I'm just going to take these.
I'm going to make this a big oldheadline.
(21:46):
I'm going to post this picture here and then I'm basically just
going to copy this over and overand over.
They come in four flavors, right?
Once again, steel image, bam bam, and then I go copy this
again. My personal fave is Mesquite.
(22:08):
And so you tell a whole story almost in this like social media
scrolling type way. And so you can see, you can see
how this is like pretty fun to Scroll down.
So it's like, check out these Bucky snacks.
Progressing. Four different flavors.
My personal flavor is Mesquite blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah. And you do that 6 to 10 times.
That's a pretty fun e-mail and really easy to make.
(22:29):
If you notice, if you take all of this text and put it together
and spit it out, I mean, what are we talking?
Like not even one sentence yet? Yeah, yeah, Look, it's not, it's
literally one line of text, but it feels like a long e-mail.
Yeah. So these types of emails are
pretty cool. We did like these flash test
sales on a bunch of different e-commerce things.
(22:50):
This one was a best self journal.
And we do like a flash sale. And it's like get yourself
journal. It comes with a guide every
single day. I'll get you close towards your
goal, keep momentum going and basically explains the product
in this like headline thing, headline picture style.
That could be a really, really fun e-mail for you.
Yeah, it reminds me of like yourone of your spammy click
(23:11):
funnels, like landing pages, right, That it's like a mile
long, but you just keep scrolling.
Like why am I still scrolling? Yeah, because there's there's
not a lot to read. There's a lot to look at.
Now, the, the goal isn't necessarily to get them to just
keep scrolling, it's just to like, how can you tell a fun
story? And these types of things are
really fun to do, especially if you're talking about Bucky's
(23:31):
snacks, which has like a fun logo and all that kind of stuff.
So like this is a fun thing to do.
And so it's like you can buy them here.
At the end, you give them a little pitch.
Yeah, I think this that's a great style e-mail that has a
lot of personality into it and they're just fun and easy to
read. So I know, I know you're stuck
on like that text 1, but I wouldsay like it'd be fun to try one
(23:52):
of. Those I'm going to do this for
sure, especially for like a Halloween shirt.
It's like, did you know Bucky's released a Halloween shirt every
year? Here's 2021.
Here's what 2022's look like. Here's a like what?
What you? Already you already got it, so
some H ones and some pictures. That's the whole thing in a
button at the bottom. It's it's really, really simple.
(24:13):
Where does ADA not apply, if anywhere?
Like if I have a local newsletter that's just informing
people about it doesn't apply tothat.
It applies to almost everything.It doesn't apply to something
super, super short like a tweet.So sometimes a tweet is just
like a single thought. You don't need to ADA it, right?
Yeah. It's generally when you're
trying to make a sales pitch of some sort.
(24:33):
So if you're trying to tell makea make a novel or something like
that, I don't think it really applies there.
ADA is a copywriting thing. And just remember, copywriting
is when you're trying to sell something through text, right?
So whenever you're trying to sell something, that really
helps. Now, once again, I don't think
that you have to follow ADA necessarily.
I'm just saying most people do such a bad job of selling things
that Ada probably is an upgrade compared to it.
(24:56):
So I'm I'm a big fan of like, you know, Tom Morello, Rage
Against the Machine, He makes all these sounds that don't
sound like a guitar. He's just like, I know you're
supposed to just play it like this, but I want to play it
doing all this stuff. It's like valid.
That's fine. They're similar with text.
You want to be all funky, that'sfine.
A lot of the new Youtubers that come out of nowhere, they're
making videos and styles that noone's ever seen or just like
(25:17):
completely wacky. So it doesn't always have to be
followed. But Ada is surely a very very
helpful framework to get started.
What are some other framework similar to Ada that you use?
I used to love making these framework things because people
like frameworks. I will say I use no other
frameworks besides Ada. I have posts with like 40
different frameworks you can use.
I don't use those. I I don't personally use them.
(25:40):
These Ada formulas are a hotly debated content.
It was like, well what if it's Ada PS and it has these other
sections? It's like it's just Ada with
like more stuff on it. So Ada is the only formula I
generally use. I I know that sounds crazy like
a cop out but that's it. No, that's amazing.
Do you see Ada when you're watching like short form videos,
(26:00):
like the creator probably doesn't even know they're using
it. People use it by accident, I'm
sure, but you know, you'll see aa video of someone just talking
in their car, giving like an opinionated, you know, example
of something that an interactionthey had at the grocery store
and you realize like, oh, the a the attention, that's the hook.
Oh, the interest. That's kind of like a re hook.
Oh, the desire. You know what I'm saying?
(26:21):
Do you do you see it in the wildand other forms?
Desires. A lot of times the short videos
aren't trying to sell you on something necessarily, so the
the D is often not there and there's no action sometimes.
They're implicitly selling you on watching to the end.
And if you do, then the algorithm's like, oh, people
like this, let's make this go viral, right?
I see the basic framework, the psychological framework of Ada
(26:42):
in in almost everything. Yes, in a lot of good stuff you
see. It's just like if you watch
movies you basically see the same 7 plot lines over and over
again. There's a book called Save the
Cat that's like the the standardscreen writing book that
everyone reads. And when you see every single
movie, you're like, oh, there's an orphan, he has a downfall and
then somehow he climbs himself back up the hero's.
(27:02):
Journey. The, the hero's journey,
there's, there's like there's literally 7 stories in the whole
world that everyone just repeats.
And so yes, you see that everywhere.
However, I try not to let that distract me from, you know,
sometimes I want to watch a video and have a good time.
Yeah. But yeah, everything, a lot of
stuff uses ADA and it's probablythe best formula to learn.
I'd say the only copyrighted formula to learn.
(27:23):
If someone doesn't already have a newsletter or already have a
business no e-mail list, how canthey use that first principle of
ADA to be monetized to start a business?
Like maybe something obvious like being a consultant to small
businesses, or maybe something less obvious.
A cold e-mail or a warm e-mail pitch like trying to sell
something right away. So writing a newsletter, I would
(27:45):
say ADA is not necessarily quiteas strong for it because
newsletters can be like like Sean Perry just sends like 5
tweets he likes, Is that ADA? I don't think so.
I think it's just a collection of cool stuff.
However, if he was sending out like, hey, join our thing and
we'll hire you a developer for half the price it costs in the
United States, using ADA to sendout an e-mail to his list would
(28:05):
be very beneficial and very profitable.
So yes, whenever you're trying to sell something directly, I'd
say Ada's probably like the formula you need to use.
Yeah, or sending cold emails to someone whose attention you're
trying to get. Yeah, because you're selling
emails, I actually, I actually recommend a few.
I recommend this because cold emails you can send multiple
ones. Like that's the beat of e-mail.
(28:26):
You don't just get one chance you have, you have multiple.
So I say short, medium, long. The short one is it's like so,
so literally Amon, the CEO of Appsumo would reach out and be
like, Hey, we have 700,000 customers who want to buy Chris
(28:47):
software, whatever it is in Amon.
Like that's, that's his cold e-mail, right?
So my favorite cold e-mail to send is one that is so painfully
short. It's uncomfortably short that it
seems it has to be a human sending it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.
(29:08):
And those are hard to write because you got to get every
word right. It's why I say painfully short
and and actually The funny thingis even with like a couple
misspellings, like you don't capitalize something.
The weird thing is it looks likea real human sentence.
So I don't know if you've ever looked at like a CM OS inbox,
but it's like just slammed with like pitches and stuff.
How do you stand out? One way is writing a like 1/2
(29:31):
sentence as a cold e-mail. So if you start confounding on
this, you say like we can't, we get average 10 or you know, 1000
customers per blast, you get 70%of Rev, you get SEO benefits.
(29:51):
We will also work with you whatever excuse all spelling
errors just to for time sake when you send this, this looks a
little bit more like someone planned it out, right?
So I'd say like the the mid sizeis probably the best type of
short e-mail. So, and then the long one, the
reason I go for a long, short e-mail is because I want to
(30:14):
cover everything you can to convince them because if they
saw the temptation and if beyondthat one they don't respond, the
chances of them actually responding after that are very,
very low. So that's when I say what that
when people say what's the best type of cold e-mail?
I say sending out one short 11, medium, 11 long one to everyone.
(30:35):
Yeah. In that order.
In in that order, yeah. What about like e-mail best
practices for my newsletter? I hold that very sacred.
I e-mail them once a week. But for like my e-commerce
business I don't really care. I spam them right?
What's your opinion on like sendfrequency best practices for any
setting? I have one thing 70% content,
(30:57):
30% sales. So frequency, it really depends
if you're a Pad Thai place that you, your Pad Thai restaurant
and people come there and sign up their e-mail for some reason
spamming them every day. Does that really help or just
annoy people, right? You could, you could argue both
sides. All I say is this, if you are
willing to do 70% content and 30% sales, you can e-mail them
(31:19):
unlimited and they never get mad.
And so this was the rule I made with apps Sumo specifically
because every single day a sale goes out.
And so people are like, why do Ikeep reading these?
It's like, well, because I include 70% content, you learn
something from every e-mail. So if they learn something, get
something out of it, laugh, whatever on every single e-mail,
they don't get tired of it. If you're just like buy this,
(31:40):
buy this, buy this, buy this, nofun or entertainment or
learning, then people get pissedoff.
So when people say frequency, I'm like, how often can you keep
this up? It's kind of hard to make 70%
content for every single e-mail and then do a sale.
It's easy just to like throw outa sale, especially with ChatGPT
each time. So if you were to do this, you
(32:01):
could send out every single day and people would be totally fine
with it. Are you still writing Appsumo
emails? No, I mean, we're well past
that. I don't have anything day-to-day
to do with Appsumo anymore unless I unless I want to.
But yeah, there's also too many emails for me to handle.
So that was the problem. When you start getting to an
e-mail a day, you have to hire like additional help.
And so I trained all the writersand stuff.
(32:22):
There are certain tools that just do a thing really well that
everyone knows that you don't actually don't have to write as
much like a like Grammarly or something if you were to send
out. Most people know what that is
and people are on the fence about buying it or not.
And if they get 50% off, then they'll just buy it, right?
So there are some deals where you actually don't have to write
a lot, but if you go to most Appsimo deals, there'll be a
(32:45):
whole thing on how to use it, who it's for, who it's good for,
is it good for agencies, individuals, what it does, a
video going over it. There's a lot of content on each
deal now and that's very tough to make.
Have you ever seen this piece ofcopywriting here?
I'm sure you have. It's called They Laughed when I
Sat Down at the Piano Classic when I started to play.
(33:06):
Can you can you break this down for us?
And like why this is so effective?
This is like 100 years old, isn't it?
Yeah, it was written in the 20s.I believe it was like something
20 Hopkins era. Yeah, exactly.
So I'm not going to break down the individual thing, but let's
just say in the context of the time copywriters, you have to
pay for every eyeball they see, right?
(33:26):
You have to pay for newspaper adplacements.
If you sent direct mail, you have to pay for the stamps,
writing out the, writing out theaddresses, all that kind of
stuff. So they have to make sure that
in that newsletter people would actually buy.
And the number one thing was to get attention with the headline.
I would say that's actually lessimportant now.
Well, about as important, but I'd say less in some cases.
(33:48):
So they laughed when I sat down at the piano when I started to
play. Playing the piano in the 1920s
was a very in demand skill. Remember, you couldn't just
throw on the radio. You couldn't just throw on
YouTube. We didn't have phones where we
could just play any song. So if someone wanted to hear
Jingle Bells and Merry Christmasat the holiday, someone had to
play. So the value of someone being
able to know how to play was like, really high.
(34:10):
And that dude was like, kind of a baller, right?
You're just like, oh, that guy can sit down and play anything.
That was a cool guy to have around.
So a lot of people fantasized about being the piano player guy
that you just sit down, everyone's like, you can play
the piano. Yeah.
Nowadays, you sit down and play the piano at, you know,
someone's party and they're like, shut up.
I'm trying to listen to like Kendrick Lamar that's playing in
(34:30):
the background. So.
So just keep that in mind with the context of the context.
Yeah. Yeah.
Previously also you have to learn without a teacher.
So buying like a book on how to learn to play piano was not as
common. And now someone made one.
So they go through that. You can teach yourself how to
play. Yeah.
Any of these instruments. But I, I've actually, I've seen
(34:52):
this so many times. I know, I know the ad.
Yeah, you can teach yourself to play any of these instruments by
learning these, these simple rules and stuff like that.
And then they give a, a free booklet and demonstration
lesson, right. And then you have like the
action at the bottom and you send that in.
So, I mean, that was a classic ad.
And when something, when you pay$1000 to run an ad and it
(35:12):
returns $100,000, well, you justkeep paying $1000 to keep
running that ad. And this was one of those that
just, like, struck absolute lightning.
Yeah. And so they kept doing it.
Yeah. It's.
Do you know? Basically, do you know about the
Gary Halbert coat of arms letter?
Oh, is that like the taking yourlast name making a Crest out of
it? Yeah, type in, type in, swipe
file, coat of arms. And I think you'll just just
(35:34):
find what. And so yeah, what he would do is
he'd type in like McDonald as a last name and be like, hey, me
and my wife figured out that like McDonald has a has has this
like cool. Meaning we'll send you a report
and a print out of the thing. It's literally like a report on
the back and the the picture of the coat of arms on on like a
printer piece of paper. And they would just send that to
(35:55):
you in an envelope for for 2 bucks and and.
He would love it. Yeah.
And and just keep in mind this is the 70s, right?
And so it's not like exactly youexactly had access to this type
of thing. And so, So what he would do is
look up every last name McDonaldin the phone in the directory
and send them out to them. And they expanded that across
(36:17):
every single thing. It got so big.
And this is his side of the story.
He ended up going to jail for mail fraud because he got so
many complaints. Now I'm I'm saying to Gary
Halbert's side. So, you know, maybe there's
other side to this, but they never had someone that got like,
you know, 1000 complaints. So they're like, clearly this is
fraud. Here's the thing.
(36:37):
They sent out 600 million of these over the course of like
two or three years. So like one for like like
several for every household almost over the course of years.
And so, so if you look at percentage wise, 1000 people out
of like, you know, millions of sales, it was actually a very,
very good complaint rate. But the US Postal Service was
(36:58):
like, what is going on over here?
They just never had someone do it at this scale.
Yeah. So this one page brought in
millions of. That's what made him a
millionaire back in the day. Oh my gosh.
Isn't that wild? It's wild.
And it's like Facebook ads. Like if you have an ad that
crushes, you're going to show itto the same people over and over
and over because it keeps crushing.
Until it doesn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, eventually.
(37:20):
You keep you keep going until that number makes sense.
You spend $1000. You make 1000 + 1.
You keep. You keep doing it until it makes
under that. Yeah, What about length, right?
Because on one hand of the argument you can say, well,
don't make it too long. And on the other hand you could
say, well, as long as it's good copywriting, people will keep
reading. But if you know the longer you
make it, the harder it is to make it all good copywriting and
(37:42):
the the greater your margin for error.
Where do you land on that? Yeah, two things, two things
there. It would be long winded is bad.
Long is OK. Harry Potter book long good.
A sales page as long as a Harry Potter book bad, right, that
that's too. That's too long winded.
The other thing is long sales pages were a product from like a
(38:03):
long time ago when browsers wereslow, Internet was slow, and you
loaded up one page and that's like the chance you got or back
in the day when you were trying to sell in the back of a print
ad or something like that. The longer you had, the better
because you explain more. But now, like for you, you have
social media, you have Twitter, you have YouTube, you have a
podcast. People listen to you in many
multiple different forms. So I would argue that sales
(38:23):
pages are actually getting much shorter nowadays.
They're not as long as they usedto be.
I don't know if you remember like 10-15 years ago, it was
kind of this trend have like a sales page that would like
nearly crash your browser because it's so long now you can
have people browse through multiple pages.
We got AMP loading, everything'sfast now, so it doesn't matter.
And people see you over time. They see your Instagram stories,
(38:45):
they see your YouTube shorts, etcetera.
They see you multiple, multiple,multiple, multiple times.
So you can contact someone 80 times before they buy their
product. They're not just looking at a
sales page once and you got to get it right there.
And so we look at tracking for abunch of different sales pages.
I would say I have shortened allof my sales pages because people
are not reading those super, super long sales pages as much
(39:06):
anymore. Is this a sentiment you share?
Is that your experience as well?Totally.
I, I tweeted a couple years ago.It was a 1700 word tweet.
There was one picture, 1700 words.
It was a personal story. It got one and a half million
views and it just broke my frame.
I'm going to share my screen real quick.
And the hook is I just did a word count.
Before you pick a business partner, read this.
(39:28):
I know it's messed up, but you're out and we're doing this
anyway. And I just outlined this story
that happened to me of, you know, getting screwed out of
this business partnership, yadda, yadda, yadda.
You know, you're not going to read it right now, but, and
that's a picture of the Starbucks where it happened.
Why do you think something like this could go so viral on on
Twitter, on a platform where people are consuming 280
characters at a time? Think it's a good story?
(39:50):
It's relatable, right? Do.
You think people just want to know how it ends?
So like they read to the end. Therefore, Twitter says, oh,
there's good retention, let's push it to more people.
I think that was a particularly good story at the right time.
Like if you put a 1700 word tweet out, just a 1700 word
tweet, would it do Well? No, I don't.
So I don't think, I don't think the length is actually the main
KPI over here. I think you wrote a really
(40:12):
heartfelt story, right? But how can I?
How can I do that more and more without getting screwed out of
more business partnerships? What what have you have you?
One of my most popular apps, Sumo things was right after I
got robbed. I got robbed once in my life and
it was like the most violating feeling.
I was just like like I every dayI would go to sleep dreaming of
like finding the guy and like going beating him up with a bat
(40:34):
or something like that, right? Like I had those like vengeance
fantasies and I wrote this storyabout a thing called Prey,
which, which is like this, it sits, it's still around.
It sits on your phone like deep inside your phone, kind of like
previous, like Find My iPhone isright now, but it really sits
deep in the BIOS of your, of your computer.
And so no matter what they do, they can't get it off.
(40:56):
And I was like, I should have had this.
And I told that story of how I like fantasize about beating
this guy up. That's how it looked.
The thing started and that endedup being one of our most popular
deals. And people are like, the story
is like wild that like rawness of like feeling hurt.
And I was like, I'm going to translate this into like this
story that really captured people's attention.
(41:16):
So so for you, getting screwed with a business partnership
probably felt a little bit raw and that's why that did well.
Now, do I think the length of ithad anything to do with it?
I mean, I don't know. I think just writing 1700 words
isn't like some magic number. It's just like, that was a
freaking good story. I think that's why people.
Yeah, I just assumed that the longer it it it was on Twitter,
(41:37):
the the lower the likelihood it would be of going viral.
I also have another theory. There are times in algorithm
history where a certain thing accidentally starts getting
shown a lot more, and you may have just written a really long
story that people didn't want toread, and so they bookmark it.
Oh yeah, yes. So that's why a lot of tweet, a
(41:58):
lot of tweet threads. I'll see a tweet thread, it's
like 40 tweets. I don't want to read it right
now, but I'll read it later. Bookmark.
Bookmarking is the most powerfulsignal that they get besides
like reposting or something. Bookmarking is a very, very
powerful signal or sharing. And so that could be another
reason. There was also a time in Twitter
history, just like a few years ago, where people would
screenshot a page of something and it would have a lot of text
(42:21):
on it. And because you couldn't read
it, you have to click on it. And because you clicked on it,
that's an action. So there was a time when I'm
like, I'm seeing a lot of screenshots all of a sudden and
sure enough, they patch it up. And then like, you know, they
understand that like people literally cannot read this, so
they have to click it. That doesn't mean that they like
it. So it could also be one of those
things. Yeah, like many people didn't
(42:43):
actually read it in the moment. They just signaled to Twitter
that this was high quality. I'm going to get to it later.
They probably never even got to it because I don't really check
my bookmarks. Other recent LinkedIn fodder,
remember like after after the second line, it would cut off
and you'd be like, so the reasonthat I did that was.
And you're like, oh, I got to click it.
And so then every all of those just like shot to the top for
like a year. Yeah.
(43:06):
Well, is there any other good like copywriting tips you could
leave us with that you we haven't covered?
I mean, surely there's a lifetime.
You're going to use ChatGPT if you use ChatGPT projects and
Brock has projects, they all have.
And that's basically where you can actually tell it like, hey,
this is my web page. Here's things I've done.
Read my blog. Anytime I write an e-mail, make
sure to relate it to one of these stories.
(43:26):
Use real numbers and results. So for companies, when they have
like a writer that's using ChatGPT, I'll say use a ChatGPT
project. Upload all your images, all your
PDF decks, all that kind of stuff.
And whenever it uses makes your emails, it now actually uses
real numbers and real case studies that you can use.
So at least it makes it the bestit can be.
(43:46):
And as the model updates ChatGPT678 come out, it'll just get
better and better with projects versus, you know, retelling it
all these things each time. So yeah, use ChatGPT projects or
sign up for the copywriting course.
Not only will I like talk about all these types of things, but
we actually have a thing like ifyou have an e-mail, you paste it
into our community and myself and our writers go and just
(44:08):
update it for you. That is what most people
realize. They're just like, oh, it's just
a course. I watch it.
I'm like, yeah, it's like a partof it.
But the main thing is literally post your social media posts.
Some people post YouTube video scripts and get a whole like
high level overview of it from other people.
And we don't generally go and dolike grammar and stuff.
It's more like someone's making a sale and they'll be like, hey,
(44:31):
what do you think about this flash sale e-mail we're doing
for AB2B company and chat? TBT will just say like here's
how I would rewrite it. I would probably say here's how
I'd rewrite it. However, let's think about this.
Do most companies that do B2B stuff buy flash sales?
Like your lead times are three months to turn around a deal?
Are flash sales going to be the main driver of business here?
(44:53):
So we talk about like higher level stuff like that, and I
think that's where people get most of the value from posting
in like our community forum. Then we have like office hours.
The interactive part. Yeah, that part's really fun.
That also keeps me really sharp.It also keeps me exposed to a
lot of different industries. Okcopywritingcourse.com, right?
Yep. With CS but.
I'm sure your K is auto auto direct.
(45:14):
Decay is on auto direct. I might move it back because I'm
like, I'm having more fun, just like going back to the old
school style of just like just with AI coming in, I'm just
like, I'm going full silly at this point.
Yeah, I love it. Hey guys, if you're still
listening to this, it's probablybecause you haven't had a chance
to take your Airpods out, You'restill mowing the lawn, you're
still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I
(45:37):
would really, really love and appreciate a five star review on
Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast.
It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra
mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an
interest in starting a business.It would mean a ton.
Hope you have the best day of your life today.
My buddy Noah Cake and started Appsumo and they would sell a
few here and there and then I came in and I was just like,
dude, you got to apply this copyright stuff.
Let me try writing one of these.And I sent it out and that was
their first $10,000 profit day. And we're kind of like, wait,
was that a fluke? Can we do that again?
And so we did it again and again.
It was not a fluke. I'm just saying most people do
such a bad job of selling. We sold so many more when I
started understanding that you can use these for a lot of
(00:21):
different things. Tell me about Ada.
I love Ada. Attention, interest, desire,
action. That's what every single Appsumo
e-mail was based on. We write all these emails for
Fortune 500 companies, that's what they're all based on.
I see the basic psychological framework of ADA in almost
everything and it's the only copyrighted for you to learn.
There's literally 7 stories in the whole world that everyone
just repeats. If you're going to use ChatGPT,
(00:42):
use ChatGPT projects. Have you ever wanted to sell
anything? Have you ever wanted to make
money? Well, the pen is mightier than
the sword, as they say. So what if you could learn
almost everything you would everwant to know about amazing
tactical sales copywriting in one short episode?
Well, today is the day for you because I brought on my new
(01:02):
friend Neville, and he is one ofthe world's foremost experts on
copywriting. What is copywriting?
It's writing to sell something in an e-mail, on a letter, on a
landing page, anywhere it works.And he's the best in the biz.
Please enjoy. Now, when it comes to
copywriting, I'm sure you could talk for hours about this, but
what's the 8020 of good copywriting?
(01:23):
So you you just said you were doing a a my first million
episode with Sam. So we'll talk about that.
I think Sam's a great copywriter.
I think he's really good, even though he's not considered a
quote UN quote copywriter. And one of the things he loves
doing and is always done very well is on his sales pages.
You know, it'll have like you know, about us and this and all
the different sections on a sales page for so he's writing
(01:43):
one for Hampton. He's really good about putting a
personal note from himself and the way he writes that is just
like he would say it in the moment.
So me and him bounce copywritingideas off of each other all the
time. So me and him were in Central
Park 2 weeks ago. I just chatting on a bench.
He was just like dude I want Hampton is like and he just went
on his rant and it was kind of epic and I was like dude that's
(02:06):
no right there. You nailed it.
Like write that down. Immediately pulls out his phone,
writes down everything he can asverbatim as he could.
And if you on their next couple of ads, that will be the primary
thing on the web page. And so I don't think using fancy
language and everything is very useful anymore.
And just that personal plain English sounding stuff.
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Honestly, where you're just talking is probably the best
writing out there. It's it's very very simple.
Which is the opposite of what welearned in high school.
Right. Very opposite of what we learned
in high school. Fortunately, I do think a lot of
that is going out the window nowthat like AI and stuff is there
that kids are like, people are like kids aren't learning how to
write an essay. It's just like, why do they need
to learn how to write an essay like that?
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Well, what's the point? Like who like in your real life,
do you need to learn how to write essays that well?
And so those old school essays, I think are just kind of falling
out the window. But from my generation, I know a
lot of people are like to whom they may concern that kind of
stuff. And they wrote that that really,
really boring text. And I think that's all all the
way out, fortunately. What are some examples that you
can think of that where good copywriting changed everything,
(03:11):
right? Like it was the difference
between, you know, 100 sales and10,000 sales that do AB test it
that often or like what kind of anecdotal stories can you think
of? Yeah, some of the biggest AB
test is when I I come in with anexisting e-mail list.
So they have some pre-existing sales, right.
The best example was always, this is my first is when Appsumo
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started my buddy Noah Cake and started Appsumo had about 50,000
people on an e-mail list to get deals for tech stuff.
Is that simple. And they would sell a few here
and there. And then I came in and I was
just like, dude, you got to apply this copyright stuff like,
yeah, these good deals. But like you don't, you don't
talk about it. You don't tell people how to use
the product. He's like, I mean, do people
want to know that? I was like, let me try writing
one of these and I sent it out and that was their first $10,000
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profit day after that e-mail. Keep in mind they were making
like $1000 of profit from each e-mail before.
So that was a 10X result. And we're kind of like, wait,
was that a fluke? Can we do that again?
And and so we did it again. And again, it was not a fluke.
It worked really well. But here's the thing about it.
Here's the insidious thing and let me relate it to this.
You go to restaurants, right? Are, are you a big foodie or no?
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Oh, huge foodie. Huge, huge foodie.
OK, so I'm not that big of a foodie.
I'll go to restaurants with people's suggestion.
I'm never like I want to go to arestaurant guy.
So whenever we go, do you talk to the chef and give them
feedback? No, I'm an introvert.
I just want to eat. I don't even want to talk to my
server. That's interesting.
OK, so you're a huge foodie. If you were giving
(04:39):
recommendations to people because you're a big foodie, a
lot of people would come and they get thousands of dollars of
business. However, you, if you don't
really love the food, won't evertell them that.
Yeah, correct. Don't you think that that's a
pretty dangerous thing? So like you, who could be maybe
a small food influencer within your friends, do never tell the
chef that the something sucks. You never tell the the the owner
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that you know, the the service was bad or whatever that the
chair was squeaky or that the sauce was too saucy.
Whatever it is, you never tell them that.
So I think an e-mail list is exactly the same way.
If the e-mail list is not that great to where you don't read it
all the time, you just get in this habit of never reading it,
eventually unsubscribing. And The thing is, no one ever
tells you that. So no one ever, ever said you
(05:22):
send out your chat GBTD newsletters and everyone's like,
oh, cool newsletter, whatever, but they never say anything bad.
And I think that's the worst thing that can.
Happen. Yeah, for writing really, really
good copy, what you notice is like over the long run, people
will still reply to newsletters,still read it, still be
influenced by it, versus newsletters that have been going
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out for 10 years and looks like no one's reading it at all.
That's a big difference. And how can you tell?
It's very, very difficult to track that you can't.
It's so funny you say this because my wife and I went we
found a nice Italian restaurant we've never been to. 4.7 stars
on Google out of 1000 reviews. You know, we had positive
confirmation bias at the Ying Yang.
We sit down, we're expecting something amazing.
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Everything was bland, everything.
And like my framework for food is like salt Throughout all the
processes of cooking, it fixes like a multitude of sins.
Just salt. That's it, that's it.
And every single thing we got was just no salt.
No salt. And how many compliments does
that chef get on a regular basis?
Probably tons, right? But if I would have gone back
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there and said, listen, dude, I'm not a chef, You're a chef,
but I know good food. And you're missing salt.
Like, you just need to add more salt.
That would probably stand out more to him and maybe even
effectuate change than any of the compliments he'd ever
gotten, right? It would just kind of be a Burr
in his side. And he'd think about it because
people give me feedback about mycontent sometimes.
And whenever I get a piece of feedback that stands out for
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better or worse, like a lot of times it effectuates change,
even if it's not like a representative sample size.
Like I send a newsletter, 100 people are like, this was a
banger. And then one person's like,
dude, I can tell on this sectionyou, you mailed in with ChatGPT.
I don't appreciate that. I probably think twice about it
and not do that again because ofthe one guy you know?
It's really hard to get that type of feedback.
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And then if you ask for feedbackfrom 100 different people,
they're going to give you all sorts of different stuff,
especially as subjective, something as subjective as food.
So it is difficult. And then with your newsletter,
with your, with your marketing, people never tell you.
They're probably just like, it'sfine, but that's it.
And I think that's like the mostdangerous place to be, even
though it's it, that's why it's so insidious, like it's so
dangerous to your business because over time, just like
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quality goes down. That's one of the ways where
like when you see someone who really slaves over their copy
and putting stuff out, like justpeople read it for the long term
because they can tell like this is real, you know, it's an
interesting thing I've been going back to with AII used to
draw. I don't know if way back in the
day, copywriting course was spelled with K's.
I just couldn't. Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah. And it was really fun because I
(07:54):
had like the copywriting course community and which had an
acronym that people didn't like.I was like, look at me.
It's a joke. Right, Yeah, yeah, it's a bit.
But and The thing is like, I just I thought it, I thought it
was fun, right? I thought it was funny.
It was stupid. I like, I liked teaching people
with like dumb ways that are just like, hello, welcome to
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copywriting course. That's just boring.
In fact, I made I made a copywriting course for business
where I like dressed in a suit and rerecorded the entire thing
and it and it completely flopped.
Companies were like, no, we wantthe stupid stuff.
That's why we're going to you like, you're not a professional
guy. Don't be professional.
Every time I'm trying to teach people something, I try to be a
little bit funny and a little bit wacky.
And so therefore I was using a lot of stick figures back in the
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day. That's just how I drew like,
wait, why? That's what it reminds me of.
What? Everyone, everyone says that I
and I guess what I love, wait, but why?
It's very wait, but why? If you know what that is, That's
a lot my style as well, just like stick figures and stuff
like that. And over time, I started kind of
like cleaning it up because now we had tools like Canva, you
have ChatGPT that can make images for you.
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And I started going like, let mestart using these tools more and
more. The problem is it just kind of
lost some of that spark, some ofthat magic.
And so I've started going back to stupid drawings, hand drawn,
get the iPad out, just drawn it a bunch of times.
And it's kind of funny you mentioned Sam before.
Guess what we were doing on our last call together?
We were doodling for Hampton. He made some doodles.
(09:22):
He's like, how do you make thesedoodles like that?
So we doodled for Hampton and I showed him my whole process of
that. So actually going back to like
Goofy to where it's just like, this is so stupid.
AI wouldn't have made it. It's kind of the move I think
right now more than ever. Ironically, going back to that
stupidity is better. There was a phase where like
professional was really cool. You're on YouTube a lot.
(09:43):
I'm sure you noticed these trends with YouTube over time.
It used to be Casey Neistat vlogging all the time, every
day. That totally dropped off and
then I think it's coming back now.
All these things go in cycles. So going back to the old school
hand drawn handwritten stuff I think will be a major advantage
in the near future. Is there any chance you still
have that first Appsumo e-mail that you sent out so we could
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break take it down and what madeit interesting?
The first. One, for those unfamiliar with
Appsumo, it's kind of like Groupon for like tech deals,
right? Like lifetime deals.
They'll send out one e-mail to their whole list and instead of
paying 30 bucks a month for something, you pay like $50.00
for a lifetime deal, right? Yeah, that accurate, OK.
So, so believe it, believe it ornot, this is for designers,
(10:25):
right? So the, the deal that they they
gave me was kind of like this one they thought was like a
throwaway deal, OK? They didn't think it would make
that much because it was a pack of fonts.
OK Is this fonts description service?
You sign up and they would send you, like, pairings of fonts.
This is for hardcore designers. Now, what I knew was this, like,
OK, the general public does not need this.
There's zero chance anyone wouldneed this.
(10:46):
However, if you're a hardcore designer, this would make a lot
of sense to you. So I started off.
It's like, if the names Lucidia Sans, Unicode or Courier New
don't mean anything to you, go ahead and close this message.
Yeah. You're just like and like, even
if it doesn't mean anything to them, people keep reading
because they're curious, like where you're going with this.
(11:07):
Exactly. And I said, you see, my friend,
today we're reaching out to the community people known as font
fanatics. I actually want to say font
because there's like that's that's what they were called.
We're not doing that. I don't.
I think Noah was OK with that. I think some other people on the
team were like, the word is aggressive to start with.
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And so it's like if your knees go weak when I whisper Garamond,
you might be one of them, right?And then I described like Steve
Jobs always talked about font faces and stuff like that.
And I was a big Steve Jobs fan and so I included a quote of
his. And then I go into, you know,
Kernest and there's this guy Kernest who like delivers these
cool font packages that all these designers used.
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And so most of this was about fonts, why they play a role in
web design and why typography isso important.
And then at the end, we said, bythe way, we have a deal on this,
right? So it's $180 a year, but if you
buy right now, it's whatever dollars.
And that, that was the whole e-mail.
There was no, there's no pictures, there was no nothing.
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It was just so jarringly different at the time, right?
So now this might not be the most groundbreaking thing on the
planet, but at the time, people were like, Oh my, I can't, I
can't like this right here. We convinced Kernest and I
underlined the K and then the K that people were like, what,
like I've ever seen something like that.
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And so those types of things, just like being so outlandish
and unique were quite, quite a weapon back then.
And so still to this day, I think that the way to approach
this is like, if you write stufflike this, it just does not look
like AI. It doesn't feel like it.
You're just like this, this feels something different.
And if I were to do this again today, I'd probably have a bunch
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of hand drawn pictures in there as well.
OK, I feel like this template could be used for so many other
launches or things or anything like this.
Is basically an Ada template, so.
I was going to ask you about Ada.
You got ahead of me. Tell me about Ada.
I love Ada. Attend attention, interest,
desire, action. That's what every single Appsumo
e-mail was based on. All my sales emails.
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We write all these emails for Fortune 500 companies.
That's what they're all based on.
And instead of coming up with anargument of why someone should
buy something, you have this framework to go off of.
Get their attention with something interesting thinking
about it, interesting facts, interesting testimonials,
interesting use cases desire making them show like if you buy
this, your life will be better because and then action like
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telling them how to buy right. And so so that framework is an
easy skeleton You can make for asales page for an e-mail for any
sort of pitch for telling your kids to clean their room right.
So anytime you have an argument to make or sale to make, instead
of just saying like go clean your room, you can start off
with like, hey buddy, you want to go to Astro World today,
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right? Like, well, let let me tell you
that. You have your attention.
It's going to make, it's going to make me and your mom really,
really, really happy. And we're going to be very happy
with you. So we're going to take you
there. We're going to buy you ice
cream. We're going to do everything.
So if you clean your room, I mean, we'll go to Astro.
What we we're packing up the carand we're going to go in 10
minutes. But if you don't, you know, we
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can't do it. So this is his desire to go.
And so it's like, all right, ready.
Like on the count of three, you're going to go run in there
and clean your room as fast as you can.
Action. That's the call to action, yeah.
Yeah, lamest example in the world.
I'm just kind of making up that as we go.
But it's it's it's this framework that when you start to
think, have that framework in your mind every time you're
trying to ask someone something,you go, how can I just aid at
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this real quick? And then you have a much better
framework and a much higher chance of getting them to do
said action. The the I, the interest is the
hardest part for me. In your example, where where was
the I? Yeah, everyone gets I and D
confused interest and desire. Interest is like interesting
with interesting use cases, interesting facts about the
product, interesting ways that people have made money with the
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product, interesting testimonials.
The desire is like, if you buy this Roomba vacuum, you'll never
have to vacuum again, right? So it's like what their life
will be like with that product. So that's that's the main
difference. A lot of times the intersection
is bullet points. For example, one of the first
things I did for one of my firstthings I applied on House of
(15:22):
Rave was when I started like a dying.
All the the sales pitches was I was selling these things called
finger lights and I got a coupleof plumbing companies buying a
bunch of them and I thought theywere like fake orders because
like from Josh's plumbing company, I'm like, the hell are
they doing ordering 500 packs ofthese?
Turns out they give them the plumbers and use them to like go
(15:42):
under the sink and and they put them on their fingers.
I was like, yeah, because they have a headlamp, but they can't
always see directly with the headlamp.
And I was like, that's a freaking bullet point to put in
a sales pitch somewhere that plumbing companies use these.
And then it turns out parents ofautistic children would use them
to like, they would like, wave them around.
It would calm them down. There would be all these little
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use cases. And that sold a ton of them
because instead of just being a light for like 16 year olds to
dance at a rave, this became a thing that you can, like, use
around the house all the time. You can use it when you went
camping. You can keep a couple in your
car. They're so cheap that they're
just basically disposable. So making this a product that
you can use in all aspects of life rather than just one
(16:23):
specific aspect. It reminds me of the phrase
invent the disease, sell the cure like you're just teaching
them, hey, you have this disease, you have that disease.
You can't see under the sink. You can't entertain your
autistic kid. And they're just getting these
ideas of why they need it as you're describing this quote
disease they have. And then you oh, conveniently
the A at the end of ADA is you selling them the cure.
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Yeah, we sold so many more of these when I started
understanding that you can use these for a lot of different
things. Another thing I sold, we sold
these like a light up golf balls.
We called them rave balls because they were just like
indestructible lights that you can sell.
You could literally hit them with a golf ball 400 yards and
they wouldn't break. I was just like, man, you could
use these for all sorts of stuff.
So I made pictures of them beingused as Halloween costumes.
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The number one buyers of them, wedding planners, They were
using them in centerpieces and stuff like that because they
were water resistant. There were all these things.
So now people went from buying these just for like, you know,
once again, waving around on a dance floor to a billion other
use cases. And waving around these things
on a dance floor was like 1% of the people that the total
addressable market wedding planners spending $3000 on them
(17:29):
were far better customers than aguy buying one of them.
Yeah. So interest is a very important
thing to just put a bunch of bullet points.
So how people can use that? Product bullet points.
OK, what first got you interested in copywriting and
why? What was it about it that just
intrigued you? I had a business called House of
Rave and it wasn't selling very well on e-mail.
In fact, I was losing money because I was making no sales on
(17:50):
e-mail. And in like I'd go to these like
marketing meetups and everyone'slike your e-mail list is your
ATM machine. Like that was a big phrase.
And I was like, I don't make no money off this e-mail list.
So buddy of mine looked at my emails and was like, dude, these
like they look cool, a lot of images and big buy now buttons,
but you got to tell people aboutthe product.
He's like, you should check out Gary Halbert.
(18:12):
So I read the Gary Halbert letters chapters one through 25.
I literally printed them out andI instantly was like like, I've
literally been doing this all wrong.
And so that's when I redid my first e-mail with like the Gary
Halbert style. And that's what I made like way
more money. And literally overnight, House
of Rave turned into like an e-mail marketing company more so
(18:32):
than the e-commerce company thatjust depended on SEO.
How big was your list? 7500 previous customers, there's
a 7500 people that had previously bought from me.
That was my list. So I thought that would everyone
was like that's a warm list. However, every time I sent out
an e-mail, it was just a bunch of pictures.
They were very well done. I'd say they're visually pretty,
(18:55):
but no one would buy anything. I've been using Beehive for
about two years, almost as long as they've been around.
And I got to tell you, watching other creators stay stuck on
basic newsletter platforms is painful.
You're losing thousands of dollars because you don't know
what your subscribers are worth.And when potential sponsors ask
who reads your newsletter and you say entrepreneurs or moms,
(19:16):
you lost the deal. But Beehive has a survey feature
that's brilliant. You can set up a few questions
about demographics and spending habits that you send them
through right after they subscribe.
So instead of telling sponsors, oh I have 5000 subscribers, you
can say I have 3750 homeowners making over $75,000 a year who
spend $200 plus per month on home improvement.
(19:38):
And that's proof that their ideal customers are reading your
newsletter. Go extract your e-mail list from
whatever platform you're stuck on because it's probably costing
you thousands in lost deals. Beehive makes migration easy.
You can move all your emails in minutes so you can get paid what
your actual worth. Head to beehive.com/chris for
(19:58):
30% off your first three months.That's BEHI v.com/chrisyou'll
thank me later. So I literally just lose $80.00
a month for the e-mail service. Yeah.
So yeah, it's funny. Said you make money off emails.
I was like, that doesn't seem tobe true.
And then when I started writing them this way, then I made
money. Yeah.
We have an ecommerce brand that has like 160,000 on the e-mail
(20:20):
list and we've AB tested them a ton of different ways and we've
learned that the shorter the subject line, like you can't
reveal anything in the subject line because you want them to
click. You can't answer the question.
And whenever we have a new product drop, we only link to it
in like a blue ugly hypertext. We put no pictures in the
e-mail. It's the ugliest looking e-mail
you've ever seen and it just crushes.
(20:42):
I would say there's another way to do that.
Do you mind sharing what productthat is?
No, let. Me share my screen.
So it's at texassnacks.com. We just resell Bucky's products,
right? So we might have a new snack or
a new T-shirt. So let's say you know, Bucky's
one of their biggest drops everyyear is a Halloween T-shirt and
everyone looks forward to it in early August.
(21:04):
So we'll send an e-mail that says new Halloween shirt just
dropped. That's it.
That's the whole e-mail was justa hyperlink.
And we sell more and we get moreclicks when we do that than if
we put the picture in there. You know what's interesting?
I would say that there's anotherformula that you could possibly
use for these. So there's like all text, which
works great. I think another format that
(21:24):
would be really fun is little text and a lot of pictures.
And it goes headline, picture, repeat, right?
So what I mean is check out these Bucky's Snacks.
Sorry, I probably know that's not the right spelling of
Bucky's. I'm just going to take these.
I'm going to make this a big oldheadline.
(21:46):
I'm going to post this picture here and then I'm basically just
going to copy this over and overand over.
They come in four flavors, right?
Once again, steel image, bam bam, and then I go copy this
again. My personal fave is Mesquite.
(22:08):
And so you tell a whole story almost in this like social media
scrolling type way. And so you can see, you can see
how this is like pretty fun to Scroll down.
So it's like, check out these Bucky snacks.
Progressing. Four different flavors.
My personal flavor is Mesquite blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah. And you do that 6 to 10 times.
That's a pretty fun e-mail and really easy to make.
(22:29):
If you notice, if you take all of this text and put it together
and spit it out, I mean, what are we talking?
Like not even one sentence yet? Yeah, yeah, Look, it's not, it's
literally one line of text, but it feels like a long e-mail.
Yeah. So these types of emails are
pretty cool. We did like these flash test
sales on a bunch of different e-commerce things.
(22:50):
This one was a best self journal.
And we do like a flash sale. And it's like get yourself
journal. It comes with a guide every
single day. I'll get you close towards your
goal, keep momentum going and basically explains the product
in this like headline thing, headline picture style.
That could be a really, really fun e-mail for you.
Yeah, it reminds me of like yourone of your spammy click
(23:11):
funnels, like landing pages, right, That it's like a mile
long, but you just keep scrolling.
Like why am I still scrolling? Yeah, because there's there's
not a lot to read. There's a lot to look at.
Now, the, the goal isn't necessarily to get them to just
keep scrolling, it's just to like, how can you tell a fun
story? And these types of things are
really fun to do, especially if you're talking about Bucky's
(23:31):
snacks, which has like a fun logo and all that kind of stuff.
So like this is a fun thing to do.
And so it's like you can buy them here.
At the end, you give them a little pitch.
Yeah, I think this that's a great style e-mail that has a
lot of personality into it and they're just fun and easy to
read. So I know, I know you're stuck
on like that text 1, but I wouldsay like it'd be fun to try one
(23:52):
of. Those I'm going to do this for
sure, especially for like a Halloween shirt.
It's like, did you know Bucky's released a Halloween shirt every
year? Here's 2021.
Here's what 2022's look like. Here's a like what?
What you? Already you already got it, so
some H ones and some pictures. That's the whole thing in a
button at the bottom. It's it's really, really simple.
(24:13):
Where does ADA not apply, if anywhere?
Like if I have a local newsletter that's just informing
people about it doesn't apply tothat.
It applies to almost everything.It doesn't apply to something
super, super short like a tweet.So sometimes a tweet is just
like a single thought. You don't need to ADA it, right?
Yeah. It's generally when you're
trying to make a sales pitch of some sort.
(24:33):
So if you're trying to tell makea make a novel or something like
that, I don't think it really applies there.
ADA is a copywriting thing. And just remember, copywriting
is when you're trying to sell something through text, right?
So whenever you're trying to sell something, that really
helps. Now, once again, I don't think
that you have to follow ADA necessarily.
I'm just saying most people do such a bad job of selling things
that Ada probably is an upgrade compared to it.
(24:56):
So I'm I'm a big fan of like, you know, Tom Morello, Rage
Against the Machine, He makes all these sounds that don't
sound like a guitar. He's just like, I know you're
supposed to just play it like this, but I want to play it
doing all this stuff. It's like valid.
That's fine. They're similar with text.
You want to be all funky, that'sfine.
A lot of the new Youtubers that come out of nowhere, they're
making videos and styles that noone's ever seen or just like
(25:17):
completely wacky. So it doesn't always have to be
followed. But Ada is surely a very very
helpful framework to get started.
What are some other framework similar to Ada that you use?
I used to love making these framework things because people
like frameworks. I will say I use no other
frameworks besides Ada. I have posts with like 40
different frameworks you can use.
I don't use those. I I don't personally use them.
(25:40):
These Ada formulas are a hotly debated content.
It was like, well what if it's Ada PS and it has these other
sections? It's like it's just Ada with
like more stuff on it. So Ada is the only formula I
generally use. I I know that sounds crazy like
a cop out but that's it. No, that's amazing.
Do you see Ada when you're watching like short form videos,
(26:00):
like the creator probably doesn't even know they're using
it. People use it by accident, I'm
sure, but you know, you'll see aa video of someone just talking
in their car, giving like an opinionated, you know, example
of something that an interactionthey had at the grocery store
and you realize like, oh, the a the attention, that's the hook.
Oh, the interest. That's kind of like a re hook.
Oh, the desire. You know what I'm saying?
(26:21):
Do you do you see it in the wildand other forms?
Desires. A lot of times the short videos
aren't trying to sell you on something necessarily, so the
the D is often not there and there's no action sometimes.
They're implicitly selling you on watching to the end.
And if you do, then the algorithm's like, oh, people
like this, let's make this go viral, right?
I see the basic framework, the psychological framework of Ada
(26:42):
in in almost everything. Yes, in a lot of good stuff you
see. It's just like if you watch
movies you basically see the same 7 plot lines over and over
again. There's a book called Save the
Cat that's like the the standardscreen writing book that
everyone reads. And when you see every single
movie, you're like, oh, there's an orphan, he has a downfall and
then somehow he climbs himself back up the hero's.
(27:02):
Journey. The, the hero's journey,
there's, there's like there's literally 7 stories in the whole
world that everyone just repeats.
And so yes, you see that everywhere.
However, I try not to let that distract me from, you know,
sometimes I want to watch a video and have a good time.
Yeah. But yeah, everything, a lot of
stuff uses ADA and it's probablythe best formula to learn.
I'd say the only copyrighted formula to learn.
(27:23):
If someone doesn't already have a newsletter or already have a
business no e-mail list, how canthey use that first principle of
ADA to be monetized to start a business?
Like maybe something obvious like being a consultant to small
businesses, or maybe something less obvious.
A cold e-mail or a warm e-mail pitch like trying to sell
something right away. So writing a newsletter, I would
(27:45):
say ADA is not necessarily quiteas strong for it because
newsletters can be like like Sean Perry just sends like 5
tweets he likes, Is that ADA? I don't think so.
I think it's just a collection of cool stuff.
However, if he was sending out like, hey, join our thing and
we'll hire you a developer for half the price it costs in the
United States, using ADA to sendout an e-mail to his list would
(28:05):
be very beneficial and very profitable.
So yes, whenever you're trying to sell something directly, I'd
say Ada's probably like the formula you need to use.
Yeah, or sending cold emails to someone whose attention you're
trying to get. Yeah, because you're selling
emails, I actually, I actually recommend a few.
I recommend this because cold emails you can send multiple
ones. Like that's the beat of e-mail.
(28:26):
You don't just get one chance you have, you have multiple.
So I say short, medium, long. The short one is it's like so,
so literally Amon, the CEO of Appsumo would reach out and be
like, Hey, we have 700,000 customers who want to buy Chris
(28:47):
software, whatever it is in Amon.
Like that's, that's his cold e-mail, right?
So my favorite cold e-mail to send is one that is so painfully
short. It's uncomfortably short that it
seems it has to be a human sending it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.
(29:08):
And those are hard to write because you got to get every
word right. It's why I say painfully short
and and actually The funny thingis even with like a couple
misspellings, like you don't capitalize something.
The weird thing is it looks likea real human sentence.
So I don't know if you've ever looked at like a CM OS inbox,
but it's like just slammed with like pitches and stuff.
How do you stand out? One way is writing a like 1/2
(29:31):
sentence as a cold e-mail. So if you start confounding on
this, you say like we can't, we get average 10 or you know, 1000
customers per blast, you get 70%of Rev, you get SEO benefits.
(29:51):
We will also work with you whatever excuse all spelling
errors just to for time sake when you send this, this looks a
little bit more like someone planned it out, right?
So I'd say like the the mid sizeis probably the best type of
short e-mail. So, and then the long one, the
reason I go for a long, short e-mail is because I want to
(30:14):
cover everything you can to convince them because if they
saw the temptation and if beyondthat one they don't respond, the
chances of them actually responding after that are very,
very low. So that's when I say what that
when people say what's the best type of cold e-mail?
I say sending out one short 11, medium, 11 long one to everyone.
(30:35):
Yeah. In that order.
In in that order, yeah. What about like e-mail best
practices for my newsletter? I hold that very sacred.
I e-mail them once a week. But for like my e-commerce
business I don't really care. I spam them right?
What's your opinion on like sendfrequency best practices for any
setting? I have one thing 70% content,
(30:57):
30% sales. So frequency, it really depends
if you're a Pad Thai place that you, your Pad Thai restaurant
and people come there and sign up their e-mail for some reason
spamming them every day. Does that really help or just
annoy people, right? You could, you could argue both
sides. All I say is this, if you are
willing to do 70% content and 30% sales, you can e-mail them
(31:19):
unlimited and they never get mad.
And so this was the rule I made with apps Sumo specifically
because every single day a sale goes out.
And so people are like, why do Ikeep reading these?
It's like, well, because I include 70% content, you learn
something from every e-mail. So if they learn something, get
something out of it, laugh, whatever on every single e-mail,
they don't get tired of it. If you're just like buy this,
(31:40):
buy this, buy this, buy this, nofun or entertainment or
learning, then people get pissedoff.
So when people say frequency, I'm like, how often can you keep
this up? It's kind of hard to make 70%
content for every single e-mail and then do a sale.
It's easy just to like throw outa sale, especially with ChatGPT
each time. So if you were to do this, you
(32:01):
could send out every single day and people would be totally fine
with it. Are you still writing Appsumo
emails? No, I mean, we're well past
that. I don't have anything day-to-day
to do with Appsumo anymore unless I unless I want to.
But yeah, there's also too many emails for me to handle.
So that was the problem. When you start getting to an
e-mail a day, you have to hire like additional help.
And so I trained all the writersand stuff.
(32:22):
There are certain tools that just do a thing really well that
everyone knows that you don't actually don't have to write as
much like a like Grammarly or something if you were to send
out. Most people know what that is
and people are on the fence about buying it or not.
And if they get 50% off, then they'll just buy it, right?
So there are some deals where you actually don't have to write
a lot, but if you go to most Appsimo deals, there'll be a
(32:45):
whole thing on how to use it, who it's for, who it's good for,
is it good for agencies, individuals, what it does, a
video going over it. There's a lot of content on each
deal now and that's very tough to make.
Have you ever seen this piece ofcopywriting here?
I'm sure you have. It's called They Laughed when I
Sat Down at the Piano Classic when I started to play.
(33:06):
Can you can you break this down for us?
And like why this is so effective?
This is like 100 years old, isn't it?
Yeah, it was written in the 20s.I believe it was like something
20 Hopkins era. Yeah, exactly.
So I'm not going to break down the individual thing, but let's
just say in the context of the time copywriters, you have to
pay for every eyeball they see, right?
(33:26):
You have to pay for newspaper adplacements.
If you sent direct mail, you have to pay for the stamps,
writing out the, writing out theaddresses, all that kind of
stuff. So they have to make sure that
in that newsletter people would actually buy.
And the number one thing was to get attention with the headline.
I would say that's actually lessimportant now.
Well, about as important, but I'd say less in some cases.
(33:48):
So they laughed when I sat down at the piano when I started to
play. Playing the piano in the 1920s
was a very in demand skill. Remember, you couldn't just
throw on the radio. You couldn't just throw on
YouTube. We didn't have phones where we
could just play any song. So if someone wanted to hear
Jingle Bells and Merry Christmasat the holiday, someone had to
play. So the value of someone being
able to know how to play was like, really high.
(34:10):
And that dude was like, kind of a baller, right?
You're just like, oh, that guy can sit down and play anything.
That was a cool guy to have around.
So a lot of people fantasized about being the piano player guy
that you just sit down, everyone's like, you can play
the piano. Yeah.
Nowadays, you sit down and play the piano at, you know,
someone's party and they're like, shut up.
I'm trying to listen to like Kendrick Lamar that's playing in
(34:30):
the background. So.
So just keep that in mind with the context of the context.
Yeah. Yeah.
Previously also you have to learn without a teacher.
So buying like a book on how to learn to play piano was not as
common. And now someone made one.
So they go through that. You can teach yourself how to
play. Yeah.
Any of these instruments. But I, I've actually, I've seen
(34:52):
this so many times. I know, I know the ad.
Yeah, you can teach yourself to play any of these instruments by
learning these, these simple rules and stuff like that.
And then they give a, a free booklet and demonstration
lesson, right. And then you have like the
action at the bottom and you send that in.
So, I mean, that was a classic ad.
And when something, when you pay$1000 to run an ad and it
(35:12):
returns $100,000, well, you justkeep paying $1000 to keep
running that ad. And this was one of those that
just, like, struck absolute lightning.
Yeah. And so they kept doing it.
Yeah. It's.
Do you know? Basically, do you know about the
Gary Halbert coat of arms letter?
Oh, is that like the taking yourlast name making a Crest out of
it? Yeah, type in, type in, swipe
file, coat of arms. And I think you'll just just
(35:34):
find what. And so yeah, what he would do is
he'd type in like McDonald as a last name and be like, hey, me
and my wife figured out that like McDonald has a has has this
like cool. Meaning we'll send you a report
and a print out of the thing. It's literally like a report on
the back and the the picture of the coat of arms on on like a
printer piece of paper. And they would just send that to
(35:55):
you in an envelope for for 2 bucks and and.
He would love it. Yeah.
And and just keep in mind this is the 70s, right?
And so it's not like exactly youexactly had access to this type
of thing. And so, So what he would do is
look up every last name McDonaldin the phone in the directory
and send them out to them. And they expanded that across
(36:17):
every single thing. It got so big.
And this is his side of the story.
He ended up going to jail for mail fraud because he got so
many complaints. Now I'm I'm saying to Gary
Halbert's side. So, you know, maybe there's
other side to this, but they never had someone that got like,
you know, 1000 complaints. So they're like, clearly this is
fraud. Here's the thing.
(36:37):
They sent out 600 million of these over the course of like
two or three years. So like one for like like
several for every household almost over the course of years.
And so, so if you look at percentage wise, 1000 people out
of like, you know, millions of sales, it was actually a very,
very good complaint rate. But the US Postal Service was
(36:58):
like, what is going on over here?
They just never had someone do it at this scale.
Yeah. So this one page brought in
millions of. That's what made him a
millionaire back in the day. Oh my gosh.
Isn't that wild? It's wild.
And it's like Facebook ads. Like if you have an ad that
crushes, you're going to show itto the same people over and over
and over because it keeps crushing.
Until it doesn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, eventually.
(37:20):
You keep you keep going until that number makes sense.
You spend $1000. You make 1000 + 1.
You keep. You keep doing it until it makes
under that. Yeah, What about length, right?
Because on one hand of the argument you can say, well,
don't make it too long. And on the other hand you could
say, well, as long as it's good copywriting, people will keep
reading. But if you know the longer you
make it, the harder it is to make it all good copywriting and
(37:42):
the the greater your margin for error.
Where do you land on that? Yeah, two things, two things
there. It would be long winded is bad.
Long is OK. Harry Potter book long good.
A sales page as long as a Harry Potter book bad, right, that
that's too. That's too long winded.
The other thing is long sales pages were a product from like a
(38:03):
long time ago when browsers wereslow, Internet was slow, and you
loaded up one page and that's like the chance you got or back
in the day when you were trying to sell in the back of a print
ad or something like that. The longer you had, the better
because you explain more. But now, like for you, you have
social media, you have Twitter, you have YouTube, you have a
podcast. People listen to you in many
multiple different forms. So I would argue that sales
(38:23):
pages are actually getting much shorter nowadays.
They're not as long as they usedto be.
I don't know if you remember like 10-15 years ago, it was
kind of this trend have like a sales page that would like
nearly crash your browser because it's so long now you can
have people browse through multiple pages.
We got AMP loading, everything'sfast now, so it doesn't matter.
And people see you over time. They see your Instagram stories,
(38:45):
they see your YouTube shorts, etcetera.
They see you multiple, multiple,multiple, multiple times.
So you can contact someone 80 times before they buy their
product. They're not just looking at a
sales page once and you got to get it right there.
And so we look at tracking for abunch of different sales pages.
I would say I have shortened allof my sales pages because people
are not reading those super, super long sales pages as much
(39:06):
anymore. Is this a sentiment you share?
Is that your experience as well?Totally.
I, I tweeted a couple years ago.It was a 1700 word tweet.
There was one picture, 1700 words.
It was a personal story. It got one and a half million
views and it just broke my frame.
I'm going to share my screen real quick.
And the hook is I just did a word count.
Before you pick a business partner, read this.
(39:28):
I know it's messed up, but you're out and we're doing this
anyway. And I just outlined this story
that happened to me of, you know, getting screwed out of
this business partnership, yadda, yadda, yadda.
You know, you're not going to read it right now, but, and
that's a picture of the Starbucks where it happened.
Why do you think something like this could go so viral on on
Twitter, on a platform where people are consuming 280
characters at a time? Think it's a good story?
(39:50):
It's relatable, right? Do.
You think people just want to know how it ends?
So like they read to the end. Therefore, Twitter says, oh,
there's good retention, let's push it to more people.
I think that was a particularly good story at the right time.
Like if you put a 1700 word tweet out, just a 1700 word
tweet, would it do Well? No, I don't.
So I don't think, I don't think the length is actually the main
KPI over here. I think you wrote a really
(40:12):
heartfelt story, right? But how can I?
How can I do that more and more without getting screwed out of
more business partnerships? What what have you have you?
One of my most popular apps, Sumo things was right after I
got robbed. I got robbed once in my life and
it was like the most violating feeling.
I was just like like I every dayI would go to sleep dreaming of
like finding the guy and like going beating him up with a bat
(40:34):
or something like that, right? Like I had those like vengeance
fantasies and I wrote this storyabout a thing called Prey,
which, which is like this, it sits, it's still around.
It sits on your phone like deep inside your phone, kind of like
previous, like Find My iPhone isright now, but it really sits
deep in the BIOS of your, of your computer.
And so no matter what they do, they can't get it off.
(40:56):
And I was like, I should have had this.
And I told that story of how I like fantasize about beating
this guy up. That's how it looked.
The thing started and that endedup being one of our most popular
deals. And people are like, the story
is like wild that like rawness of like feeling hurt.
And I was like, I'm going to translate this into like this
story that really captured people's attention.
(41:16):
So so for you, getting screwed with a business partnership
probably felt a little bit raw and that's why that did well.
Now, do I think the length of ithad anything to do with it?
I mean, I don't know. I think just writing 1700 words
isn't like some magic number. It's just like, that was a
freaking good story. I think that's why people.
Yeah, I just assumed that the longer it it it was on Twitter,
(41:37):
the the lower the likelihood it would be of going viral.
I also have another theory. There are times in algorithm
history where a certain thing accidentally starts getting
shown a lot more, and you may have just written a really long
story that people didn't want toread, and so they bookmark it.
Oh yeah, yes. So that's why a lot of tweet, a
(41:58):
lot of tweet threads. I'll see a tweet thread, it's
like 40 tweets. I don't want to read it right
now, but I'll read it later. Bookmark.
Bookmarking is the most powerfulsignal that they get besides
like reposting or something. Bookmarking is a very, very
powerful signal or sharing. And so that could be another
reason. There was also a time in Twitter
history, just like a few years ago, where people would
screenshot a page of something and it would have a lot of text
(42:21):
on it. And because you couldn't read
it, you have to click on it. And because you clicked on it,
that's an action. So there was a time when I'm
like, I'm seeing a lot of screenshots all of a sudden and
sure enough, they patch it up. And then like, you know, they
understand that like people literally cannot read this, so
they have to click it. That doesn't mean that they like
it. So it could also be one of those
things. Yeah, like many people didn't
(42:43):
actually read it in the moment. They just signaled to Twitter
that this was high quality. I'm going to get to it later.
They probably never even got to it because I don't really check
my bookmarks. Other recent LinkedIn fodder,
remember like after after the second line, it would cut off
and you'd be like, so the reasonthat I did that was.
And you're like, oh, I got to click it.
And so then every all of those just like shot to the top for
like a year. Yeah.
(43:06):
Well, is there any other good like copywriting tips you could
leave us with that you we haven't covered?
I mean, surely there's a lifetime.
You're going to use ChatGPT if you use ChatGPT projects and
Brock has projects, they all have.
And that's basically where you can actually tell it like, hey,
this is my web page. Here's things I've done.
Read my blog. Anytime I write an e-mail, make
sure to relate it to one of these stories.
(43:26):
Use real numbers and results. So for companies, when they have
like a writer that's using ChatGPT, I'll say use a ChatGPT
project. Upload all your images, all your
PDF decks, all that kind of stuff.
And whenever it uses makes your emails, it now actually uses
real numbers and real case studies that you can use.
So at least it makes it the bestit can be.
(43:46):
And as the model updates ChatGPT678 come out, it'll just get
better and better with projects versus, you know, retelling it
all these things each time. So yeah, use ChatGPT projects or
sign up for the copywriting course.
Not only will I like talk about all these types of things, but
we actually have a thing like ifyou have an e-mail, you paste it
into our community and myself and our writers go and just
(44:08):
update it for you. That is what most people
realize. They're just like, oh, it's just
a course. I watch it.
I'm like, yeah, it's like a partof it.
But the main thing is literally post your social media posts.
Some people post YouTube video scripts and get a whole like
high level overview of it from other people.
And we don't generally go and dolike grammar and stuff.
It's more like someone's making a sale and they'll be like, hey,
(44:31):
what do you think about this flash sale e-mail we're doing
for AB2B company and chat? TBT will just say like here's
how I would rewrite it. I would probably say here's how
I'd rewrite it. However, let's think about this.
Do most companies that do B2B stuff buy flash sales?
Like your lead times are three months to turn around a deal?
Are flash sales going to be the main driver of business here?
(44:53):
So we talk about like higher level stuff like that, and I
think that's where people get most of the value from posting
in like our community forum. Then we have like office hours.
The interactive part. Yeah, that part's really fun.
That also keeps me really sharp.It also keeps me exposed to a
lot of different industries. Okcopywritingcourse.com, right?
Yep. With CS but.
I'm sure your K is auto auto direct.
(45:14):
Decay is on auto direct. I might move it back because I'm
like, I'm having more fun, just like going back to the old
school style of just like just with AI coming in, I'm just
like, I'm going full silly at this point.
Yeah, I love it. Hey guys, if you're still
listening to this, it's probablybecause you haven't had a chance
to take your Airpods out, You'restill mowing the lawn, you're
still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I
(45:37):
would really, really love and appreciate a five star review on
Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast.
It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra
mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an
interest in starting a business.It would mean a ton.
Hope you have the best day of your life today.
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