The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - How to Sell Anything With Just 4 Simple Steps⏐Ep. #222

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

Beehiiv is the newsletter platform I’ve used for over a year and a half because their data shows you exactly what’s working. Get 30% off three months at ⁠⁠beehiiv.com/chris⁠━Check out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and join my new community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠━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.comFollow Neville on X: https://x.com/NevMedEnjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tkopod.co/p-yt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ask me a question on or off the show here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-ask⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn more about me: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cjk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn about my company: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cof⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow me on Twitter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-x⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Free weekly business ideas newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-nl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Share this podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-all⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Scrape small business data: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-os⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---00:00 The Power of Copywriting03:11 – Power of great copy: scaling sales05:33 – Why real feedback is crucial07:53 – Copywriting Course beginnings10:11 – The first AppSumo “fonts” email12:28 – ADA formula explained (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)14:55 – Interest vs. Desire: key difference17:09 – Expanding product markets with copywriting19:36 – Beehive & Texas Snacks email example22:01 – Fun email formats that boost engagement24:21 – Where ADA applies (and where it doesn’t)29:03 – Cold emails: short, medium, long strategy31:28 – Email frequency & the 70/30 rule36:17 – Classic ads & copywriting legends

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 gotta 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 app sumo email 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 copywriting for you going 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 chitpT 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 80, 20 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 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. 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 no. Yeah. Right there. You nailed it. Like, write that down.

It 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 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, honestly, where you're just talking is probably the best writing out there. there. 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 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 a difference between, you know, 100 sales and 10,000 sales. Do you A, B tested that often or like what kind of anecdotal stories can you think of? Yeah. Some of the biggest A.B test is when I come in with an existing email list. So they have some preexisting sales, right? The best example was, oh, this was my first is when App Sumo started. My buddy, No, okay, can start it up Sumo, 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 got to apply this copywriting stuff. Like, you had these good deals, but like 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 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 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 get a restaurants, right? Are you a big foodie or no? Oh, huge foodie. Huge foodie. Okay.

So I'm not that big of a foodie. I'll go to restaurants of 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, is do never tell the chef that the something sucks.

You never tell the, 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 never, ever set, you send out your chat, you betted 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 bias 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 just 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 due 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 missed 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 my content sometimes. And whenever I get a piece of feedback that stands out for better or worse, like a lot of times it affects youates 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 section, you mailed in with chat, GPT.

I don't appreciate that. I 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 something is subjective food. So it is difficult. And then with your newsletter, with your marketing, people never tell you. They're probably just like, eh, 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.

You know, it's an interesting thing I've been going back to with AI. I used to draw, I don't know if way back in the day, copyrighting course was spelled with K's. I just couldn't. Yeah, I remember that. 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. Yep. Right? Yeah. It's a bit. But and the thing is like I just, I thought it was fun. Right.

I thought it was funny. It was stupid. 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 re-recorded 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. And meantime 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 weight, but why? That's what it reminds me. Everyone says that. And guess what? I love wait, 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 have chat Chubit that can make images for you. And I started going like, let me start using these tools more and more. The problem is it's 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 fun. 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 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 a 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 Nystad 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 APSumo email that you sent out so we

could break it down and what made it interesting? The first one? For those unfamiliar with APSOMO, it's kind of like group on 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 believe it or not, this is for designers, right? So the deal that 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 a 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 name's Lucidia Sands Unicode or Currie or New don't mean anything to you, go ahead and close this message. 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. 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 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, Kurnist. And there's this guy, Kernest, 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 it right now, it's whatever dollars. And 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. Like this right here, we convinced K. K. And I underlined K. K. Yeah. And the K. That people were like, what? Like, I've never seen 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 the way to approach this is like, if you write stuff like this, it just does not look like AI. Yeah. It doesn't feel like it. You're 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 gonna 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 app sumo 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 instead of coming up with an argument of why someone should buy something, you have this framework to go off of, get their attention with 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. And 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 clear, 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 me tell you that if you clean your room, 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 Astero. We're 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 a call to action. Yeah.

Yeah. Lameous 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. the the eye 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 product interesting testimonials the desire is like if you buy this rumba 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 interest section 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-Dying all 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. It's 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 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 you're just basically disposable. So making this a product that you can use in all aspects of life rather to just one specific aspect. It reminds me of the phrase invent a disease self a 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 can 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, 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 to how people can use that product. 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'd 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 out of this email list. Yeah. So 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 1 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 what I made like way more money. And literally overnight, House of Rafe 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 was 7,500 people that had previously bought for 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 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 subscriber. 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 Behive.com slash Chris for 30% off your first three months. That's B-E-H-I-I-V.com slash 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 A, B, tested them a ton of different ways. And we've learned that the, the short of 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 linked 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 at Texas Snacks.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 every year is a Halloween t-shirt. And everyone looks forward to it in early August. So we'll send an email and 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 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 Buckees snacks. Sorry, I probably know that's not the right spelling of Buckees. I'm just going to take these.

I'm going to make this a big old headline. I'm going to post this picture here. And then I'm basically just going to 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 fave is mesquite. And so you tell a whole story, almost in this like social media scrolling type way.

And so you can see how this is like pretty fun to scroll down. So it's like, check out these bucky snacks. Progressive. Four different flavors. My personal flavor is mesquite. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you do that six to ten 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, there'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, I'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

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 not a lot to read. There's a lot to look at. Now the goal isn't necessarily to get them to just keep scrolling. It's just like how can you tell a fun story? And these. 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 that's a great style email that has a lot of personality into it. And they're just fun and easy to read. So I know you 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 going to do this for sure. Yeah. Especially for like a Halloween shirt.

It's like, did you know Bucky's release a hell? Weensured every year. Here's 2021. Here's what 22s look like. Here's a 20 like what? What? 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. 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 novel or something like that, I don't think it

really applies there. Ada is a copywriting thing. And just remember, copyrighting is when you're trying to sell something through text, right? So whatever 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. Yeah. So I'm a big fan of like, you know, talking. Marello, Raging 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. 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 and 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 started. 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 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 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 a 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 do you do you see it in the wild and other formats all the time the 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 algorithms 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. 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 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. The hero's journey. The hero's journey. 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 Ada and it's probably the best formula to learn. I'd say the only copyrighting 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 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. For cold emails, I actually recommend a few. I recommend this. Because cold emails, you can send multiple ones. Like, that's the beat of email. You don't just get one chance. You have multiple. So I say short, medium, long.

The short one is like, so literally Amon, 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. Mm-hmm. In AIME. 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 actually the funny thing is even with like a couple misspellings

like you don't capitalize something. The weird thing is it looks. looks like a real human sentence. So I don't know if you've ever looked at like a CMO's 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's sake. When you send this, this looks a little bit more like someone planned it out, right?

So I'd say like the midsize 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 your short one to 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 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 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 tie place that you visit, you're a padtire 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 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. get mad. And so this is the rule I made with that sumo 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. 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 chat chit 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 absumo emails? No. I mean, we're well past that. I don't have anything day to day to do with absumo anymore 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 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 Absimo deals, there'll be a whole thing on how to use it, who it's for, who it's good for, it's 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 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 break this down for us and like why this is so effective? This is like 100 years old, isn't it? Yeah, I was

were in the 20s. I believe it was like some from 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, copyrighters had to pay for every eyeball they see, right? You have to pay for newspaper ad placements. If you sent direct mail, you have 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 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 so a lot of people fantasized about being the piano player guy that you just sit down and 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 geta Kumar 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 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 any of these instruments. But I've actually, I've seen this so many times. I know the ad. Yeah, you can teach yourself to play any of these instruments by learning 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 was one of those that just like struck absolute lightning. Yeah. And so they kept doing it. Yeah. It's a product market fit, basically. Do you know about the Gary Halbert coat of arms letter? 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 picture of the coat of arms on like a printer piece of paper. And they would just send that to you in an envelope for two bucks. And what he would 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 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 he got so many complaints. Now, I'm saying to Gary Halbert's side. So maybe there's another side to this. But they never had someone that got like, you know, a thousand complaints. 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. And 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 it to the same people over and over and over because it keeps crushing until it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. Eventually. Yeah. You keep going until that number makes sense.

You spend $1,000. You make $1,000 plus one. 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. 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 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 can 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's so got 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 of years ago. It was a 1,700 word tweet. There was one picture, 700 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. And that's a picture of the Starbucks where it happened. Why do you think something like this could go so viral on Twitter on a platform where people are consuming 280 characters at a time? I think 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 part of our shows. Well, have you, one of my most popular app 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 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 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 are like, this 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 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 1,700 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 don't want to read right now, but I'll read a little 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 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, oh, I got to click it. And so then all of those just like shot to the top for like a year. Yeah. Oh, well, is there any other good like copywriting tips?

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 chitpt projects. And Ed 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 chat to be 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 chat GPD6, 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 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 by 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? 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 and 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. Copywriting course.com, right? Yep, with C's, but I'm sure your K is 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. Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn. You're still driving. What have you.

If you're still here with me, I 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.