You’re Being Sold Without Knowing It (How To Copy This Trick)

My buddy Noah Kagan started up Sumo 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 copywriting stuff. Let me try writing one of these. And I sent it out, and that was their first $10,000 profit day. 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 different things.

Tell me about ada. I love ada.

Attention, interest, desire, action. That's what every single appsumo email was based on. We write all these emails for Fortune 500 companies. That's what they' based on. I see the basic psychological framework of ADA in almost everything, and it's the only copyrighted formula to learn. There's literally seven stories in the whole world that everyone just repeats. If you're going to use chat GPT, use chat GPT 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 ever want to know about amazing tactical sales copywriting in one short episode. Well, today is the day for you because I brought on my new friend Neville, and he is one of the world's foremost experts on copywriting. What is copywriting? It's writing to sell something in an email, 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?

So you just said you were doing 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 unquote copywriter. And one of the things he loves doing and has 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 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 copywriting ideas off of each other all the time. So me and him were in Central park, two weeks ago, just chatting on a bench. He was just like, dude, I want Hampton is like. And he just went on this rant and it was kind of epic. And I was like, dude, that's note. Yeah, right there. You nailed it. Like, write that down. Immediately pulls out his phone, writes down everything he can as verbatim as he could. And if you on their next couple of ads, that will be the primary thing on the webpage. And so I don't think using fancy language and everything is very useful anymore. And just that personal, plain English sounding stuff, 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 we learned 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 now that 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? 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 it may concern, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And they wrote that really, really boring text. And I think that's on the way out. Fortunately.

What are some examples that you can think of that where good copywriting changed everything? Right. Like, it was the difference between, you know, 100 sales and 10,000 sales. Do you a B test it that often or like, what kind of anecdotal stories can you think of?

Yeah, some of the biggest a B test is when I, I come in with an existing email list. So they have some pre existing sales. Right. The best example was always this was my first. It was when AppSumo started. My buddy Noah Kagan started AppSumo had about 50, 000 people on an email list to get deals for tech stuff. It was that simple. And they would sell a few here and there. And then I came in and I was just like, dude, you gotta apply this copywriting stuff. Like you have 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 wanna know that? I was like, let me try wr these. And I sent it out. And that was their first $10,000 profit day after that email. Keep in mind they were making like $1,000 of profit from each email 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 you a big foodie or no?

Oh, huge foodie. Huge, huge foodie.

Okay, 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 a restaurant 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. Okay, so you're a huge foodie. If you were giving 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 ever tell 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 owner that, you know, 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 email list is exactly the same way. If the email 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 and eventually unsubscribing. And the thing is, no one ever tells you that, so no one ever, ever said. You Send out your ChatGPT 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.

It's like a selection dangerous thing.

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 out for 10 years. And it's 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.

Oh, it's so Funny you say this, because my wife and I went. We found a nice Italian restaurant we'd never been to. 4.7 stars on Google out of a thousand reviews. You know, we had positive confirmation bias at the ying yang. We sit down, we're expecting something amazing. 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 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 bur in his side, and he'd think about it. Because people give me feedback about my content sometimes. And whenever I get a piece of feedback that stands out for 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, a hundred people are like, this was a banger. And then one person's like, dude, I can tell on this section. You. You mailed it in with chat GPT. I don't appreciate that. I'd probably think twice about it and not do that again because of the one guy, you know, it's really hard.

To get that type of feedback. And then if you ask for feedback from 100 different people, they're going to give you all sorts of different stuff, especially a 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's fine, but that's it. And I think that's, like, the most dangerous place to be. Even though it's. That's why it's so insidious. Like, it's so dangerous to your business. Because over time, just, like, 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, just. People read it for the long term because they can tell, like, this is real, real quick.

Please subscribe to my channel. I know it's kind of lame to ask, but it means a lot. Thanks.

You know, it's an interesting thing. I've been going back to. With AI. I used to draw. I don't know if you. Way back in the day, copywriting course was spelled with ks. I just couldn't.

Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

Yeah. And it was really fun because I 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 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 completely flopped. Companies were like, no, we want the stupid stuff. That's why we're going to.

You.

Like, you're not a professional guy. Don't be professional anytime. 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 day. That's just how I drew.

It's like, wait, but why? That's what it reminds me of.

Everyone. Everyone says that, guess what? I love weight. But why? It's very weight. 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 know, have chat, gbt that can make images for you. And I started going like, let me start using these tools more and more. The problem is I just kind of lost some of that spark, some of that 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. He's like, how do you make these doodles 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. Yeah, it's kind of the move, I think, right now more than ever, human, ironically, going back to that stupidity is better. There was this phase where, like, professional was really cool. You're on YouTube a lot. I'm sure you notice 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 email that you sent out so we could break it down? And what made it 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 email to their whole list, and Instead of paying 30 bucks a month for something, you pay like $50 for a lifetime deal, right?

Yeah.

That accurate. Okay. So.

So believe it or. Believe it or not, this is for designers, right? So the deal that they. They gave me was kind of like this one they thought was, like a throwaway deal. Okay. They didn't think it would make that much because it was a pack of fonts. Okay. It was this font subscription service. You sign up and they would send you, like, pairings of fonts. This is for hardcore designers. Now, what I knew was it's like, okay, the general public does not need this. There's zero chance anyone would need this. 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. Like, even if it doesn't mean anything to them, people keep reading because they're curious, like, where you're going with this.

Exactly. And I said, you see, my friend, today we're reaching out to the community, people known as font fanatics. I actually wanted to say font, because there's like, that's. That's what they were.

That was like, we're not doing that. I don't.

I think Noah was okay with that. I think some other people on the team were like, the word is aggressive to start with.

Yeah.

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, Kernist, and there's this guy Kernist who, like, delivers these cool font packages that all these designers used. And so most of this was about fonts, why they play a role in web design and why typography is so important. And then at the end we said, oh, by the 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 email. There was no, there's no pictures, there was no nothing. 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. This right here, we convinced Kernest and I underlined K. K, yeah. And then the K that people are like, what? Like we're seeing something like that. 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 stuff like this, it just does not look like AI, it doesn't feel like it. You're just like this, this feels something different.

Yeah.

And if I were to do this again today, I'd probably have a bunch of hand drawn pictures in there as well.

Okay. 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 email was based on. All my sales emails, we write all these emails for Fortune 500 companies. That's what they're all based on. And inst of coming up with an argument of why someone should buy something, you have this framework to go off of, get their attention. What's something interesting 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 telling them how to buy. Right. And so, so that framework is an easy skeleton. You can make for a sales page, for an email, for any sort of pitch for telling your kids to clean their room. Right? So anytime you have an argument to make or a 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 Astroworld today? Right? Like, well let, let me tell you that. Yeah, it's gonna make, it's gonna make me and your mom really, really, really happy. And we're gonna be very happy with you. So we're gonna take you there, we're gonna buy you ice cream, we're gonna do everything. So if you clean your room, I mean, we'll go to Astro, we packing up the car, and we're going to go in 10 minutes. But if you don't, you know, we 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 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 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 ind. 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 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. Yeah, 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, one of my first things I applied on House of Rave was when I started, like, a daying, all the. The sales pitches was I was selling these things called finger lights. And I got a couple of plumbing companies buying a bunch of them. And I thought they were, like, fake orders because, like, from Josh's plumbing company, I'm like, the hell are they doing ordering 500 packs of these? Turns out they give them the plumbers and use them to, like, go under the sink. And they put them on their fingers, 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 of autistic children would use them to, like. They would, like, wave them around. It would calm them down. There'd be all these little 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 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.

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 being used as Halloween costumes. The number one buyers of them, wedding planners, they were using them in centerpieces and stuff like that because they were water resistant. They 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 $3,000 on them, were far better customers than a guy buying one of them.

Yeah.

So interest is a very important thing. To just put a bunch of bullet points of how people can use that bullet points.

Okay, 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 email. In fact, I was losing money because I was making no sales on email. And in like, I go to these like marketing meetups and everyone's like, your email list is your ATM machine. Like, that was a big phrase. And I was like, I don't make no money off this email list.

Yeah.

So a buddy of mine looked at my emails and was like, dude, these like, they look cool. There's a lot of Images and big Buy now buttons. But you got to tell people about the product. He's like, you should check out Gary Halbert. So I read the Gary halbert letters, chapters one through 25. I literally printed them out and I instantly was like. Like, I've literally been doing this all wrong. And so that's when I redid my first email with, like, the Gary Halbert style. And that's when I made, like, way more money. And literally overnight, House of Rave turned into, like, an email marketing company, more so than the e commerce company that just depended on SEO.

How big was your list?

7,500 previous customers. There's 7,500 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 email, it was just a bunch of pictures. They were very well done. I would say they're visually pretty, 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 gotta 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, 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 5,000 subscribers, you can say, I have 3,750 homeowners making over $75,000 a year who spend $200 plus per month on home improvement. And that's proof that their ideal customers are reading your newsletter. Go extract your email 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 you're actually worth. Head to Beehive.com Chris for 30% off your first three months. That's B E H I I V dot com, Chris. You'll thank me later.

So I literally just lose $80 a month for the email service?

Yeah.

So yeah, when people said you make money off emails, I was like, that doesn't seem to be true. And then when I started writing them this way, then I made money.

Yeah, we have an e Commerce brand that has like 160,000 on the email 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 email. It's the ugliest looking email you've ever seen and it just crushes.

I would say there's another way to do that. Do you mind sharing what product that is?

No, let me share my screen. So It's@texas snacks.com we just resell Buc ee's products, right? So we might have a new snack or a new T shirt. So let's say, you know, Buc EE's one of their biggest drops every year is a Halloween T shirt. And everyone looks forward to it in early August. So we'll send an email that says, new Halloween shirt just dropped. That's it. That's the whole email with just a hyperlink. And we sell more and we get more clicks when we do that than if we put the picture, picture in there.

You know what's interesting? I would say that there's another formula that you could possibly use for these. So there's like all text, which works great. I think another format that 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 buc EE's snacks. Sorry, I probably know that's not the right spelling of Buc EE's. I'm just gonna take these. I'm gonna make this a big old headline. I'm gonna post this picture here and then I'm basically just gonna copy this over and over and over. They come in four flavors, right? Once again, steel image, bam, bam. And then I go copy this again. My personal fav is mesquite. And so you tell a whole story almost in this like social media scrolling type way. And so you can see, you could see how this is like pretty fun to scroll down. So it's like, check out these bucky snacks.

Progress coming.

Four different flavors. My personal favorite is mesquite. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you do that six to 10 times. That's a pretty fun email. And really easy to make. 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 literally one line of text. But it feels like a long email.

Yeah.

So these types of emails are pretty cool. We did like these flash test sales on a bunch of different e commerce things. This one was a best self journal and we did like a flash sale and it's like get yourself journal. It comes with a guide every single day. It'll get you close towards your goal, keep momentum going. It basically explains the product in this like headline thing, headline picture style. That could be a really, really fun email for you.

Yeah, it reminds me of like your. One of your spammy click 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 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. But I think this, that's a great style email that has a lot of personality into it and they're just fun and easy to read. So yeah, I know, I know you're stuck on like that text one, but I would say like it'd be fun to try one of those.

No, I'm all, I'm gonna do this for sure. Especially for like a Halloween shirt. It's like, did you know Bucky's release a Halloween shirt every year? Here's 2021. Here's what 2022s look like. Here's a 20. Like what, what you know, you already.

You already got it. Some H1s and some pictures. That's the whole thing and a button at the bottom to buy. It's really, really simple.

Where does ADA not apply if anywhere? Like if I have a local newsletter that's just informing people about. It doesn't apply to that.

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 in. Right? Yeah, it's generally when you're trying to make a sales pitch of some sort. So if you're trying to tell make a, make a novel or something like that, I don't think it really applies There, Aida 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 Aida necessarily. I'm just saying most people do such a bad job of selling things that ADA probably is an upgrade compared to it.

Yeah.

So I'm a big fan of like, you know, Tom Morello, Raging is 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. Yeah, so similar with text. You want to be all funky. That's fine. A lot of the new YouTubers that come out of nowhere, they're making videos in styles that no one's ever seen or just like are completely wacky. So it doesn't always have to be followed, but it is surely a very, very helpful framework to get.

What are some other frameworks 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 don't personally use them. These ADA formulas are a hotly debated content. It was like, well, what if it's ADA? P.S. 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 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? 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 a video of someone just talking in their car giving like an opinionated, you know, example of something that. An interaction they 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 rehook. Oh, the desire. You know what I'm saying? Do you, do you see it in the wild in other forms?

All the time. The desires. A lot of times those short videos aren't trying to sell you on something necessarily.

Yeah.

So 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 in almost everything thing. Yes. And a lot of good stuff. You see, it's just like if you watch movies, you basically see the same seven plot lines over and over again. There's a book called Save the Cat that's basically like the standard screenwriting 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 ladder's journey and the, the hero's journey. There's. There's like, there's literally seven 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 Aida, and it's probably the best formula to learn. I'd say the only copyrighted formula to learn.

If someone doesn't already have a newsletter or already have a business, no email list, how can they 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.

Email or a warm email pitch, like trying to sell something right away. So writing a newsletter, I would say ADA is not necessarily quite as strong for it because newsletters can be like. Like, Sean Puri just sends like five tweets he likes. Is that aided? 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 send out an email to his list would be very beneficial and very profitable. So, yes, whenever you're trying to sell something directly, I'd say ADA is probably like the formula you need to use.

Yeah. Or sending cold emails to someone whose attention you're trying to get.

Yeah, I actually, I actually recommend a few. I recommend this because cold emails, you could send multiple ones. Like, that's the beat of email. You don't just get one chance. You have. You have multiple. So I say short, medium, long. The short one is just like, so. So literally Eamon, the CEO of AppSumo, would reach out and be like, hey, we have 700,000 customers who want to buy Chris software, whatever it is in AMEN like that's, that's his cold email. Right? So my favorite cold email 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, 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 thing is even with like a couple misspellings like you don't capitalize something, the weird thing is it looks like a real human sentence. So I don't know if you've ever looked at like a CMOS inbox, but it's like just slammed with like pitches and stuff. How do you stand out? One way is writing a like a half sentence as a cold email. So if you start confounding on this, you say like we can't. We get average 10 or you know, a thousand customers per blast. You get 70% of Rev, you get SEO benefits. We will also work with you, whatever. Excuse all spelling errors just 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 size is probably the best type of short email. So and then the long one, the reason I go for a long, short email is because I want to cover everything you can to convince them because if they saw you short one respond and if beyond that one they don't respond, the chances of them actually responding after that are very, very low. So that's when I say what, when people say what's the best type of cold email? I say sending out one short one, one medium one, one long one to everyone. Yeah.

In that order?

In, in that order?

Yeah. What about like email best practices for my newsletter? I hold that very sacred. I email 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 send frequency best practices for any setting?

I have one thing. 70 content, 30% sales. So frequency, it really depends. If you're a pad thai place that you visit your pad thai restaurant and people come there and sign up their email 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 email them unlimited and they never get mad. And so this was the rule I made with AppSumo specifically because every single day a sale goes out and so people are like, why Do I keep reading these? It's like. Well, because I include 70% content, you learn something from every email. So if they learn something, get something out of it, laugh, whatever, on every single email, they don't get tired of it. If you're just like, buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this. With no fun or entertainment or learning, then people get pissed off. 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 email and then do a sale. It's easy just to like throw out a sale, especially with ChatGPT each time. So if you were to do this, you 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 email a day, you have to hire, like, additional help. And so I trained all the writers and stuff. 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, 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 appsumo deals, there'll be a 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, there's a lot of content on each deal now and that, that's very tough to make.

Have you ever seen this piece of copywriting here? I'm sure you have. It's called they Laughed when I sat down at the piano.

Oh, classic.

When I started to play. 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 right in the 20s. I believe it was like some sort of Claude 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 had to pay for every eyeball they see.

Right.

You have to pay for newspaper ad placements. If you sent direct mail, you had to pay for the stamps, writing out, the writing up, the addresses, all that kind of stuff. So they had to make sure that in that newsletter people would actually buy.

And.

And the number one thing was to get attention with the headline. I would say that's actually less important now. Well, about as important, but I'd say less in some cases. 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 Christmas at the holiday, someone had to play. So the value of someone being able to know how to play was like, really high. 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.

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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 the background.

So.

So just keep that in mind with the context of the context.

Yeah, yeah.

Previously also, you had 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've actually, I've seen 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 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 $1,000 to run an ad and it returns $100,000, well, you just keep paying $1,000 to keep running that ad. And this is one of those that just, like, struck absolute lightning.

Yeah.

So they kept doing it. Yeah.

It's product. Do you know, basically.

Do you know about the Gary Halbert coat of arms letters?

Oh, is that like the taking your last name, making a crest out of it?

Yeah. Type in. Type in swipe, file, coat of arms. And I think you'll just find it. 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 printout of the thing. It's literally like a report on the back and the. The picture of the coat of arms on, like, a printer piece of paper. And they would just send that to you in an envelope. Envelope for two bucks. And.

And he would go, love it. Yeah.

And just keep in mind, this is the 70s, right. And so it's not like exactly. You exactly had access to this type of thing. And so. So what he would do is look up Every last name McDonald in the phone in the directory and send them out to them. And they expanded that across 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 you got so many complaints. Now I'm saying Gary Halbert's side. So, you know, maybe there's another side to this. But they never had someone that got, like, you know, a thousand complaints. So they're like, clearly, this is fraud. Here's the thing. 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, a thousand people out of, like, you know, millions of sales, it was actually a very, very good complaint rate. But the U.S. postal Service was 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, it's wild. And it's like Facebook ads. Like, if you have an ad that Crushes, you're going to show it to the same people over and over and over because it keeps crushing until it doesn't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eventually. Yeah. You keep.

You keep going until that number makes sense. You spend a thousand dollars, you make a thousand plus one, 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 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. Okay, Harry Potter book long, good. A sales page as long as a Harry Potter book bad. Right? That's too. That's too long winded. The other thing is long sales pages were a product from like a long time ago when browsers were slow, 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 pages are actually getting much shorter nowadays. They're not as long as they used to be. I don't know if you remember like 10, 15 years ago, it was kind of this trend to have like a sales page that would like nearly crash your browser because it was so God long. Now you can have people browse through multiple pages. We got amp loading. Everything's fast now, so it doesn't matter. And people see you over time. They see your Instagram stories, they see your YouTube shorts, et cetera, to 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 a bunch of different sales pages. I would say I have shortened all of my sales pages because people are not reading those super, super long sales pages as much anymore. Is this a sentiment you share? Is that your experience as well?

Totally. 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. 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, yada, yada, yada. 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?

It's a good story. 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 heartfelt story. Right.

But how can I. How can I do that more and more without getting screwed out of more business partnerships?

Well, have. Have you. One of my most popular appsumo 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 every day I would go to sleep dreaming of, like, finding the guy and, like, going. Beating him up with a bat or something like that. Right? Like, I had those, like, vengeance fantasies. And I wrote this story about 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 is right 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. 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 the thing started. And that ended up being one of our most popular deals. And people were 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. 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 it had 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 read.

Yeah. I just assumed that the longer it was on Twitter, 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 to read. And so they bookmark it.

Oh, yeah.

Yes. So that's why a lot of tweet. A lot of tweet threads. I'll see a tweet thread. It's like 40 tweets. I'm like, I don't want to read right now, but I'll.

Yeah, later.

Bookmark. Bookmarking is the most powerful signal 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 on it, and because you couldn't read it, you'd have to click on it. And because you clicked on it, that's an action. So there was a time when I was 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 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 the second line, it would cut off and you'd be like, so the reason that I did that was. And you're like, ugh, I got to click it. And so then every. All of those just, like, shot to the top for, like, a year.

Yeah. Well, is there any other good, like, copywriting tips you could leave us with that we haven't covered? I mean, surely there's a lifetime if.

You'Re Going to use Chat GPT. Use Chat GPT projects. And GROK has projects they all have. And that's basically where you can actually tell it like, hey, this is my webpage. Here's things I've done. Read my blog. Anytime I write an email, make sure to relate it to one of these stories. Use real numbers and results. So for companies, they have like a writer that's using Chat GBT, 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 best it can be. And as the model updates ChatGPT 6, 7, 8 come out, it'll just get better and better with projects versus you know, retelling it all these things each time. So yeah, use chat GBT 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 if you have an email, you paste it into our community and myself and our writers go and just update it for you. That is what most people don't realize. They're just like, oh, it's just a course. I watch it, I'm like, yeah, it's like a part of 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 do like grammar and stuff. It's more like someone's making a sale and they'll be like, hey, what do you think about this flash sale email we're doing for a B2B company? And ChatGPT 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 3 months to turn around a deal. Are flash sales going to be the main driver of business here? 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.

Okay, copywritingcourse.com right?

Yep, with Cs.

But I'm sure your K is Auto. Auto Direct.

The K 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. All right, What'd you think? Please share it with a friend, and we'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.