Came a question: “Ben, What’s been your general experience with female customers/leads? Are they annoying/different to deal with in any particularly noteworthy way? I don’t mean customers annoy me or I find women annoying. I guess what I mean is if they’re more likely to be (unreasonably) demanding, or (overly) fussy, or likely to be a pain/cause drama, just due to their more emotional nature/communication style. Or maybe you’ve found the opposite and they actually tend to be more pleasant to deal with. Just curious because I’ve only ever sold to men, which was fun” In this guy’s case I gave ..read more

Following is what I foresee for the US and what it could look like for online-driven businesses. Here goes: * Texas secedes * Feds can’t stop them from blocking the importing of 3rd world invaders which the regime wants to recruit for US military as soldiers who’d have no problem firing on Americans * Feds start funneling invaders in through California, Arizona, New Mexico even more aggressively than they are now * Nothing really changes * US breaks up as a country by 2033 as per Vox Day’s prediction he publicly made on his blog in 2004 that everyone laughed at then, that now even mainstream t ..read more

A couple months ago I got sudden rush of questions about writing stories. I figured someone must have been talking about it. (And it turned out someone had… on Twitter) And so, I decided to chime in with my too many sense on the topic: * If you are having trouble telling stories you are probably overthinking it – almost everyone does – break it down into 1-2 sentences like a TV guide description. Start with that. i.e., entire story of the American Revolutionary War “we fought the British, they lost.” (hat tip to the great Paul Hartunian for that ditty). * Study all of Gary Halbert ads with sto ..read more

I think the most screwed people in online marketing are boys & ghouls who declare: “I’m done buying, time to implement! I am not buying anything else and I am just going to focus on implementing what I have!” I’m not saying that’s a good or bad idea. But if they are in that position at all, then in my experience with dealing with these kinds of people over the past 22+ years up in this business… they still never do anything and will continue not to do anything. Their problem is not too much great info that can make them money. A problem that I still, to this day, do not understand. How c ..read more

No. Although, many years ago (2017-ish) I did toy with creating my own agency. Specifically, I was going to have it specialize in email. And sometimes I still think about it. Not as anything I will ever do. But because how fun I suspect it’d probably be to have my own agency… for about 5 minutes. The problems? 1. I have no desire whatsoever to copy chief, babysit, or deal with other copywriters. I see copywriters the way Charles Bukowski saw writers as a whole: Like flies on the same turd. It’s one reason one of my quests in life is to help liberate as many freelance copywriters as I can from ..read more

Several months ago there was a big broo-ha-ha on Twitter when my pal Sean Kaye got fed up with guys cold DM’ing him about how to make an extra $1k per month… and he screenshot and mocked it. Very amusing post. And quite brutal too. He basically mocked guys who sit around stroking their bobble head dolls of Andrew Tate desperately trying to manifest greatness by squirting out cold DM’s on social media and sliding cold into strangers’ DMs like dik pics on grindr. And to do my part to help cure the cold DM bros of their misguided bad marketing habits, I told a story about when Stefania had gotten ..read more

Or, at the very least, effectively frozen in carbonite like Han Solo. Here’s what I mean: Over the last couple years especially… several people both from my email list (and most recently on Twitter) have been asking me how to go about morphing their current info publishing business into a business like mine with a print newsletter, selling print books, etc. And with rare exception I try to warn people away from it. Here’s why: The costs are way higher than they were even a few years ago thanks to inflation plus a worldwide paper shortage according to my printer last I checked. Plus, the logist ..read more

In which the writing question is asked: “Did you ever find yourself lacking motivation at times to write your novels? Or like, what did you do if you were stumped for ideas or just don’t know where a scene should go next” The answer: Is explained in gruesome detail in the “Author’s Note” in the forthcoming and completely revised (i.e., I rewrote it from start to finish a few months ago after finishing the screenplay for it, and realizing the screenplay was way better than the novel I wrote in 2013…) version of my first novel Zombie Cop which will be re-published soon. Until then, here is the ..read more

Easily one of th e“most asked” question I get around here is: “What are some tips for coming up with ideas?” (For emails, books, newsletters, courses, sales copy, all of it) The answer is what I call my “4 W’s.” They are: 1. Writing 2. Working 3. Working out 4. Willis I can trace nearly all my best ideas to those 4 things. The more I write, the more ideas I get (writing begets writing). The more I work on something else, the more ideas I get from that, too. (There is even science behind the hand-creativity connection that I won’t bother going into here, but it is easily Google’able. Excludes w ..read more

A question that may be hard to read with it’s one-sentence-per line, but well worth the answer: Hi Ben, I’ve been learning about copywriting for awhile now, And I have been starting to write bits eg practice emails, But I ran into a small wall… And since you are one of, if not the BEST, I was wondering if you could help. The problem is how do you write your metaphorical analogies, You know when trying to emphasise something, But you don’t want to sound boring   You know those analogies Well when writing them I find sometimes they may be hard to understand, Or they need changing, But I ca ..read more