Exactly 13 years ago in 2010 during the week between Christmas and New Years, I decided I’d had enough of client work.
I was doing a lot of copywriting for others at the time.
But I grew tired of it and wanted to be my own client.
So I sat down during that week and hammered out a detailed business plan to build out a business selling info products and supplements to a male health-related niche. The plan heavily involved following what a guy at the time showed me for how he built a $70k per year weight loss business doing literally nothing all day except answering a few customer service questions and playing with his kids.
A $70k business may not sound like much.
But his entire operation was:
1. Almost 2,000 articles on various article directories (SEO-driven, no longer viable)
2. Which drove traffic to his opt-in page
3. Then email to sell a $19 eBook via PayPal
And that was it.
That was his entire business — no affiliates, no funnel, no back end sales, no joint ventures, no nothing else but that. And I remember thinking if a guy like that could do $70k per year doing almost nothing, imagine what someone who does know copywriting, who does know how to create a back end, and who does understand how to build out a funnel could do?
And so I got to work.
And I spent the next month and a half following his protocols:
* Writing nearly 1,000 key word optimized unique articles for article directories
* Writing nearly 500 key word optimized unique blog posts
* Writing the eBook, the sales page, and a 101-email sequence (overkill in hindsight..)
Plus, I was on retainer with a client at the time writing all their emails, sales pages, webinar scripts, squeeze pages, and other advertising — not to mention writing all my own stuff selling a print newsletter (no longer published called The Crypto Marketing Newsletter), daily emails, etc.
That was a lot of writing.
Probably around 3 novels’ worth of writing by sheer volume.
And I distinctly remember getting so little sleep during that month and a half that I was just sort of existing in a haze, like a waking dream state, where I couldn’t tell you anything about my life during that time other than I was just always writing, Writing, WRITING… often only sleeping for an hour or two, and probably putting my health at risk in ways I shudder to think about now.
But I got the work done.
And I then took a much-needed road trip to see my dad.
During that road trip I watched as my little fledgling operation started paying off. I wasn’t making a fortune. But I was starting to get 2 or 3 sales of my own little $19 offer coming in, and then increasing to 4 and 5 sales per day, all automated (me doing nothing at that point) and it was looking like it’d keep going up with very little upkeep on my part.
Daddy was pretty proud himself that day.
Then, out of the blue:
Half way through the vacation… Google decided to ‘slap’ article directories.
All my page one content got zapped to page whatever.
The sales all dried up immediately.
And all that work was in vain.
Or was it?
Because a strange thing happened after that.
After all those words and sentences and pages… after all that writing and not sleeping… after all that work and effort… I found sitting down to write just ONE email per day so easy, it was almost laughable. Banging out sales pages took probably half the time, and I was already really fast at it following what later became my Copy Slacker methodology. And what used to take an hour or two would be done in 5, 10, maybe 15 minutes — max. To this day, writing “a” email is so simple and routine to me, I genuinely get irritated at people who whine to me about how hard and inconvenient and frustrating writing just one email per day is for them.
I simply can’t relate to those kinds of boys & ghouls.
And it’s one reason I actively try to dissuade lazy people from buying anything from me.
I don’t want to hear their stupid lazy “oh woe is me!” nonsense.
Now, fast forward about 5 years later after that.
I’m sitting at one of the Oceans 4 Masterminds I co-hosted with Andre Chaperon, Ryan Levesque, and Jack Born. And one of the clients at one of the Vegas ones was Mike Lovitch. And during one of the sessions he said his supplement business imposed MORE strict standards and more strict rules on their copywriters than the actual FTC laws required. He said that helped keep them off the radars and less likely to get messed with by the alphabet agencies.
Fast forward a couple more years after that.
I had written a sales letter for a nearly $1,000 book.
And I decided to hire internet marketing attorney and Email Players subscriber Mike Young to review it. And after getting his review, I implemented everything which, like with Lovitch, meant holding my copy to a higher standard than the government’s rules, only to find that it made all my copy more believable and credible and better.
Anyway, I am not sure where I’m going with this.
Other than I was reminded of these above three situations recently.
Specifically, when I read how Mike Tyson used to train so hard as a professional boxer that he considered the fight days themselves to be just “light” workouts.
A non-athlete would say that’s because he knocked people out so fast.
But it goes beyond that.
Any real athlete knows exactly what I speak of.
And it’s the heavyweight champion of the world of success hacks.
All right, that’ll do it for today.
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Ben Settle
