Even more cats

A month and a half ago I sent you an email with the subject line “Cats”.

You guys loved that email. It had my highest open rate ever.

So last week I sent you an email with the subject line “More Cats”. You guys loved that email too!

One of my former copy coaches, Ning Li, says that part of every marketer’s job is to find their “customer crack”.

Once you figure out something your audience likes — their “crack” — just give it to them over and over again.

I guess I’ve found your crack. You love cats!

Don’t worry — I’m not gonna turn this list into a cat email list. It’s not just gonna be all cats all the time. I am gonna keep giving you marketing tips.

(Although the next time I have a cat story I WILL write an email about it.)

Here’s your marketing tip for today. What are your top performing pieces of content?

Look at your Instagram. What got the most likes?

Look at your YouTube. What got the most views?

Look at your blog posts. What got the most clicks?

Look at your emails. What got the most opens?

Make MORE content like that, until it stops working.

If you don’t have any top-performing content yet, how can you figure out what your audience will like?

There are a few ways.

You can do them in 10 minutes. They’re easy.

That’s one of the things I’m writing about in my new mini-book. Next week you’ll be able to get a copy for $7.

You’ll also learn a bunch more of my email marketing tactics and strategies that have made my clients 7 figures.

So stay tuned.

-Theo

More cats

On Sunday I wanted to pet some cats.

So I went to a park near where I live. But the cats in that park were shy. I tried walking up to 4 of them, and they all ran away from me.

I kept walking, feeling rejected and heartbroken. Then I got to another park, a smaller park.

In this park there were 0 other humans and 3 cats. All 3 of them were happy to be pet. They walked up to me and started rubbing themselves against me, the way they do.

(One of them even sat in my lap as I read my book.)

Why were the cats in the second park friendly, but the cats in the first park weren’t friendly? Here’s my guess.

I think the first park was a saturated market. There were a bunch of people trying to pet the cats there, so the cats there were sick of being pet.

The second park was an unsaturated market. Those cats hadn’t been pet in a while, so they wanted to be pet.

Same goes for selling, well, anything. If you want to make money, the most important thing is just to not have tons of competition. The less competition you have, the more you make.

Are you in a saturated market? No problem: you just need a little marketing alchemy.

For example: Once upon a time, some SEO guys stopped calling what they did “SEO” and started calling it “organic lead generation”. Then their business exploded.

(Tigger from Winnie The Pooh does the same thing. There are plenty of tigers. But there’s only one Tigger.)

A lot of my more successful clients do this, too. I have a form that I have all my clients fill out when they hire me. In that form I ask them who their competitors are. A lot of them tell me, “I don’t really have any direct competitors. What I do is unique.”

So try putting a unique spin on what you do. You can offer a fundamentally new type of offer. Or you can just repackage something that everybody else is already doing, and make it sound different.

-Theo

P.S. There are tons of copywriters who can write your emails for you. What makes me so special?

Well, most copywriters are trained to write for dumb audiences. If you’re selling diet pills or a Forex trading bot or golf clubs or something, you dumb your copy down so that everyone can understand it.

But the people who buy info products tend to be pretty smart. So your content better be REALLY good — because if your free content stinks, people will assume your paid content stinks, too!

So if you want to outsource your content writing… you’d better hire somebody good.

You can read more about that here:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice

Special Order 191

On September 13, 1862, Confederate General Robert E. Lee wrote “Special Order 191”, his plans for an upcoming Civil War battle.

He handed Special Order 191 to a few of his messengers, then told them to deliver Special Order 191 to his lieutenant generals.

One of the messengers didn’t deliver Special Order 191. Instead, he took out his tobacco pouch and rolled Special Order 191 into a cigar.

Somehow, he lost that cigar. The Union Army found it, unrolled it, and learned all of the Confederacy’s battle plans. Then they trounced the Confederacy in the next battle.

A lot of the stuff that happened in the Civil War looks really dumb to modern military historians. Like rolling your battle plans in a cigar and leaving them for the enemy to find.

Another example: Civil War era soldiers did not try to take cover. They just stood in a line, walked slowly towards each other, and shot at each other.

They didn’t think to dig trenches they could shoot from. They didn’t think to hide in trees. They just said, “you know, standing in a formation, walking slowly towards the enemy, and getting shot is good enough for us.”

Lots of business owners think this way. They assume everything they do is “good enough”. So they do things the way they’ve always been done, without questioning them.

But other business owners are always questioning the way other people do things. They’re always testing and improving and looking for an edge by doing things slightly better than their competition.

The hyper-successful business owners who make it big are almost always the second type. The Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses, Oprah Winfreys, Tony Robbinses, et cetera are obsessed with finding the best ways to do everything.

Now, I’m not saying to start overthinking and second-guessing every little thing you do. Or to overcomplicate your business and destroy your work-life balance.

I am saying there’s probably a few things you’re doing that are dumb and outdated. They’re the business equivalent of rolling up your battle plans into a cigar and then leaving them laying around for your enemy to find.

How do you stop doing dumb things and start doing smart things? My advice would be to look at what you’re doing that’s not making you money, and then stop doing it. And then look at what is making you money, and then double down on it.

Most coaching businesses get clients when they a) make content and b) send emails. So my recommendation is, create more content and send more emails.

And if you want some help with that, check this out:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice