Bom dia

On Friday morning I stepped onto an airplane. I looked the first flight attendant I saw dead in the eye.

He smiled at me and said “Bom dia”. (That means “good day” in Portuguese.)

“Uhhhh… bommjia”, I said back.

I was confused. Why was he speaking Portuguese?

My flight was between Bogotá, Colombia, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. 2 cities that speak Spanish. Not Portuguese.

That wasn’t the only time I heard Portuguese on that flight. Once we were all sitting down, they told us the safety instructions… in Portuguese.

Then after we took off, the captain told us he was turning off the fasten seatbelt sign… in Portuguese.

(“I don’t know what the hell they’re saying”, said the Argentinian man in the row behind me.)

Why were they speaking Portuguese? Because they were a Brazilian airline. They spoke Portuguese… and I guess they must’ve thought we did, too.

It was even weirder because the flight crew spoke Spanish just fine. When they came down the aisle to offer us drinks, or give us food, or take away our trash, they spoke Spanish. I have no clue why they spoke Portuguese over the loudspeaker.

Seems silly, right? But pretty much every business owner makes the same mistake. Especially coaches.

A lot of coaches come to me and ask me, “Theo, why isn’t my program selling?” Then I look at their website, and it’s covered in weird jargon and pet theories.

In other words, they’re saying stuff that they understand, that nobody else understands. (They might as well be speaking a different language.)

Some examples include women’s business/spirituality coaches who talk about stuff like “chakra meditations”, and men’s dating coaches who talk about “inner game”.

What’s the problem? Most people don’t know what that stuff is, and they don’t care. And if you try to explain it to them, they’re not gonna understand you.

So don’t speak your own language. Instead, speak your audience’s language.

Put yourself in their shoes. Ask yourself what they know. Ask yourself what their biggest problems are right now. And ask yourself what they need to know before they buy something from you.

Don’t know how your audience thinks? It’s not that hard to learn. Just do some market research.

Market research usually takes forever, but I’ve learned a few tricks that make it way easier. I included them in my mini-book, How To Make 2x More Money From Your Email List.

One of the tricks involves doing a 5-minute search on YouTube.

Wanna know what it is?

You can get a copy of the book here:

theoseeds.com/minibook

My favorite professor, a pot farmer, and how to make your content less boring

Last week I told you about the “favorite professor effect”. Now I’m gonna tell you about my favorite college professor, a guy called Dustin Frye.

Frye was my favorite professor because he understood a secret about how to teach stuff. The best online marketers understand this secret. Most regular people don’t.

Professor Frye was objectively a very bad teacher. Some of my other professors had written books and gotten published in super-prestigious journals and were considered experts in their field. Others were mind-bogglingly smart. But Frye was just a normal dude.

Meanwhile, Frye had just gotten out of grad school and was making a name for himself. And he wasn’t some rising star, either: he actually got denied tenure after I graduated, and went to work at a less prestigious school.

But Professor Frye’s classes were still my favorite, because he was entertaining. Most teachers just kinda read from the textbook. But Frye’s classes were human: he taught, but he also cracked jokes and told us funny stories from his life.

For example. One day we were reading this economics paper that compared people to their brothers. So Frye started telling us about his brother.

“My brother and I couldn’t be more different,” said Professor Frye. “I’m an economics professor at a prestigious university. And my brother is a pot farmer.”

He told us that his brother’s pot farming business hadn’t been doing well lately. “It really cuts into your profit margins when you smoke most of what you grow.”

Now I am doing the exact same thing that Professor Frye did. You joined my email list so you could learn more about selling courses and coaching programs. And here I am telling you stories about an economics professor and a drug dealer.

But that’s my whole point! Learning all by itself is boring. If all you do is teach, teach, teach, then your students will get bored with you!

If you want people to actually read what you write or watch what you record, you need to entertain people.

That means you have to crack jokes, tell stories, and do more than just info-dump all your knowledge.

(This is also why I put memes in my emails. It makes them more entertaining, so you’re more likely to open them next time.)

College professors get paid a flat salary. Meanwhile, you get paid per student who signs up for your programs. So you might want to be more entertaining.

If you want to send entertaining emails (like this one) to your audience, check this out:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice

Why I spent $3500 on a spiritual retreat even though I think spirituality is a scam

Earlier this year I spent $3500 on a spiritual retreat, even though I had absolutely zero interest in spiritual retreats.

I had no idea exactly what my $3500 was buying me. The benefit seemed really vague to me. But I did it anyways.

Why?

In college I got some advice: “if you get a good professor, take every class you can with them. Even if you don’t think you’ll be interested in what they’re teaching.”

Well, my first copywriting coach had a pretty vague spiritual offer up on his website. He was saying that this “ceremony” had helped him tremendously.

If anybody else had said this stuff I would have thought it was a scam. But I knew he’s a super smart dude, and I know he’s honest. So I figured, if he believes in this so much, maybe I should give it a shot.

So I shelled out $3500 and I flew to San Diego for a weekend so I could talk to my inner child with him. (And it was worth it!)

The point is, if you’re somebody’s “favorite professor”, they’ll buy just about anything you offer. Even if it’s not exactly what they’re looking for. They’ll buy it just because it’s you.

(This is super helpful if you have a strange or hard-to-explain offer. If you can get people in the door and prove you know what you're talking about, they'll take a chance on you, even if they're not 100% sure what they're getting.)

2 lessons from this. First of all, when someone buys something from you, that’s not the end. It’s the beginning.

Now that they’re your student, it’s your job to be the most amazing teacher they’ve ever had, so they’ll want to buy more and more stuff from you.

So treat your course content like your marketing content. Make it as good and interesting and entertaining as you can. Cut out as much of the fluff and the boring parts as you can. Dazzle them.

And then second of all, have an upsell!

Your upsell doesn’t necessarily need to be perfect. You can sell a pretty vague 1-on-1 coaching offer, or a weekend retreat in your backyard where you sip margaritas and do yoga. If someone likes you enough, they’ll still buy it.

Just have something.

Best,

Theo

P.S. Of course, before you can be somebody’s “favorite professor”, you need to get them to buy one thing from you.

The best way to do that is to do more of whatever’s working for you right now. If you’re getting tons of clients by posting on LinkedIn or from referrals, do more of that.

The second best way to sell more of your stuff is to get better at email marketing. (Email is the easiest place on the internet to sell anything.)

That’s why I wrote a mini-book about email marketing, which contains all the secrets I’ve picked up from selling millions of dollars worth of courses and coaching through email.

It costs $7 and you can learn more about it right here:

theoseeds.com/minibook