NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Archives for 2011

June 2011 Goals

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What has two thumbs and new goals for June 2011??

THIS GUY!!!

So here they are:

1.) Starting work on KopywritingKourse.com (in fact I just put up a page).  After the success of the copywriting video I did for AppSumo, it’s time to step that up a notch.  I can’t believe how many people it’s already helped.  The Kourse I’m throwing together will do an even better job.

2.) Action Video on AppSumo.  I want to do another free Action Video like the copywriting one…except I’ll interview someone, instead of me getting interviewed.

3.) Two HouseOfRave giveaways.
I’ve got a bunch of product samples piling up in my closet and I need to get rid of them with my famous HoR Giveaways: Screenshot here.
Usually in the past this has worked very well because….well….how can I say this eloquently?  –> People love free shit!

Cheers to a good start to June 2011!  Do YOU have YOUR goals down yet?

Free (almost) Copywriting for you

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I’m doing an experiment where I will be offering (almost) free copywriting.  This is GREAT for anyone about to send out an email or promotion to your list of customers!

Yes, there is a “buy now” button at the end of this post….but it’s there to prevent every weirdo with a website from taking me up on this.

SO HERE’S WHAT I’M GONNA DO:

If you have a testable page or email you’re sending out soon…..send me:

  1. The text you’ve already wrote (if you already have it).  This can be your monthly newsletter, a “welcome” email,  a specific product promotion (like I did here) etc…
  2. A little info about the offer and some benefits it has for your customers.  You can also call me and tell me instead of emailing everything about it.

…and I will re-write the email or page copy for you!

It will be written in my own style…so it will naturally be very different from what you traditionally send out.
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WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?

Because when I sent out my first email like this, I was used to getting 2 orders per promotion I sent out….then I changed the style…..and got 120 orders in a day!  Read about it here.

I’ve also helped AppSumo make a lot more money through their emails using this style.

I’ve also helped on a lot of different projects which have made the promotions much more successful.

So if you want to try this “experiment” with me….sign up for this.
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HERE’S THE CATCH:

You have to promise me you’ll give me the data for the copy I write for you.

For example, Andrew Warner of Mixergy used copywriting stuff I taught him and sent me this screenshot with experiment data:

See…THIS kind of stuff helps me AND you.  If I write an email for you….I don’t really know if what I’m doing is correct or not.  Maybe the writing just plain sucks.

I need to know this stuff….so I’ll be asking for your data if you take me up on this offer.  This also further helps YOU figure out what “tone” to address your customers in.

If you want me to write something for you, but don’t want to send me the data….the price will be higher.  Contact me separately for that.
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SOME QUICK NOTABLES:

  • I prefer doing emails instead of webpages as those are easiest and quickest to measure.
  • I’ll be writing a max of 2-3 pages for you.  Don’t send me long-ass webpages to reformat unless you want to pay more.
  • You MUST send me the results data after sending.  Preferably split-tested stuff.  The ideal experiment would be something like: Someone sending out an email promotion they already wrote, then have me re-write it, then split-test the two against each other.
  • I can refuse any request.  If your request is just plain spammy or bad I cannot do this for you.  Or if I just think I can’t write a good piece for you….a prompt and courteous refund will be sent back to your PayPal account (and PayPal refunds fees, so you won’t lose a cent).
  • It will take me up to 3 days to do your copy (I’ll write them in “first come, first serve” order).
  • I’m taking a maximum of 10 people for this. Each piece takes hours…so this isn’t a profitable thing for me (remember…I’m going after your DATA here, not your money).

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SO IF YOU WANT PARTICIPATE:

Buy the offer through PayPal ($35) and it’ll immediately re-direct you with a page for more instructions of what to send me:

SOLD OUT

Email or call if you have any issues!  I’ll be taking down the Buy Now button soon as the 10-person quota hits.
Neville Medhora
n e v m e d @ g m a i l . c o m
7 1 3 . 3 0 1 . 1 5 4 6

The Eight Secrets to Getting Rich

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One of my favorite books EVER is How To Get Rich by Felix Dennis.

Towards the end of the book in chapter 19 he attempts to summarize the entire book into eight very-condensed bullet points.

I have written them out verbatim in order to remember them better:

Short Copy Vs. Long Copy

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I was just interviewed by Andrew Warner of Mixergy for a video course on how to improve website or email copy….

…and one of my favorite things to say when he asked the question:

“What’s better: Short copy or long copy?”

I answered with the old adage:

Hahahaa!

You should be able to see the full course on AppSumo.com this Friday (5-6-2011).

I believe it will be 100% free for one day.

This will be really useful if you write, as it explains exactly how I made AppSumo a ton of money through emails.

May Ripped Month

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On the May 2011 Goals I wrote “MBT Ripped Month”.

This means I’ve joined MyBodyTutor again for a one month “Re-fresher”.

In 2010 I did a Six-Pack Experiment where I tried to get six-pack abs in a month (it ended up taking more like 5 weeks).  I’ve pretty much maintained that physique for the most part until 2 months ago.

Two months ago I tried GAINING weight, and would eat about 3,500 to 4,000 calories per day.  That’s actually A LOT considering I eat mainly healthier foods.  It was actually quite a bitch to eat that much every day.

However two months of eating like that put a liiiitttlle more “chub” on me.  I’m still not fat by any measure, but I’d like a re-fresher for summer.

So over the next month I’ll be in extreme-healthy mode and be tracking everything I eat on this ghetto chart I made:

You can already see the first few days have been tracked meal-by-meal.  I’ve been writing the total number of calories consumed per day, then the net calories (total calories – calories burned working out).

Simply by looking at this chart at the end of May I will be able to tell if I lost or gained weight….did you know 3,500 calories = 1 pound?

This re-fresher is not about weight, it’s about looks.  Now to track visual progress I need a reference point.  So that point was today (forgot to take pics on May 1st).

Without further ado, here’s more of what this blog needs…MORE HALF-NAKED PICTURES OF NEVILLE!

From the side I look ok.  This picture was actually taken after 3 full dayrs of extremely healthy and low-cal eating plus right after a workout PLUS I forgot to eat in the morning. …so it probably is slightly better than a few days ago.

I also made a .gif image to show the sucking-in effect on my abs….this picture kind of freaks me out and makes me laugh!

As you can see the six-pack isn’t showing up AS MUCH from the front view.  This will hopefully change over May mainly because of a better food intake and partially because of exercise, and a great help from MBT!

May 2011 Goals

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Got your May 2011 goals set out yet?  I do:

1.) The HoR Promo is a promotion I’m getting done for House Of Rave.

2.) The MBT goal is as you may remember MyBodyTutor.  This is the company run by Adam that I used to get a six-pack in about a month.

Since it’s summer I want to do at least one “refresher” month.  The last two months I’ve actually been trying to GAIN weight, now it’s time to shed some of that.

How I made AppSumo a lot of money through emails

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Two quick background stories then I’ll show how some clever writing made AppSumo an ass-ton of money:

———QUICK BACKGROUND STORY 1———

This guy, Noah Kagan is one of my close friends.  He was something like employee number 30 at Facebook and employee number 3 at Mint.com, then started a bunch of other companies.

His new thaang is AppSumo.com which is like “Daily Deals for Geeks”.  It’s like Groupon but for nerds like me.

Well recently Noah moved back to Austin, and he gets bored running his $(he-won’t-let-me-release-his-revenue-but-it’s-really-good) company from home, so he scooters on over to my place to work.

We sit around, work, geek out….and for some reason on Fridays we have a weekly tradition of drinking while we work.  It’s nerd heaven.

Whatever.

On to the next piece of this puzzle:

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———QUICK BACKGROUND STORY 2———

Roughly 9 or 12 months ago I started taking a deep interest in copy writing.

Copy writing is the “art” of writing…..copy (aka WORDS).

Basically copy writing is used to “sell stuff better”.

Naturally this interests me since I:

1.) Write a lot (hence this blog).

2.) Own an online rave company that persuades people to buy stuff.

It was weird because I was staying up sometimes till 6am reading about this stuff and taking notes.  It somehow just….gelled with me.  I started reading everything I could about copy writing…and essentially bought every book I could about it.

I took notes.

I re-read things.

I re-read my own notes.

All the concepts all the gurus talked about were the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I was doing in my own business…so this angered and intrigued me.

I quickly remembered a sort-of-relatable quote about why so many people fail at losing weight:

“Reading about sit-ups, is not DOING sit-ups”

So with this guilt trip in my head, I decided to implement some of this copy writing junk…even though it was 100% the opposite thing I’d been doing with HouseOfRave.com.

To my utter-shock-surprise the first time I implemented all the copy writing rules I learned….the email blast I sent out pretty much sold out my inventory in two hours.

You can see the exact email I sent out that did this (warning: it’s password protected, so follow the instructions to get the el passwordo).

Fan-freakin-tastic for me eh?

Now let’s move on……

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———LET’S TIE THOSE TWO STORIES TOGETHER———

So one day Noah’s geeking out at my place, and I get an email from AppSumo for some deal they were running.

It was a Grasshopper.com $100 credit or something like that…and I wanted it.

However I was blatantly disappointed by the email saying simply:

“$100 Credit for GrassHopper.com, the phone system for entrepreneurs!”

AppSumo was still selling a TON of the deals with this format…but after all my intensive copy writing studying, this type of short email seemed like an egregious injustice to AppSumo AND the email reader.

Naturally I yelled at Noah saying, “Dude….I bet a lot of people don’t realize the true value of Grasshopper….why don’t you EXPLAIN what it can DO FOR THE USER, then offer them the $100 off?”

Noah agreed.

I further started showing him the structure of good sales copy, and “How I could TOOOTTALLY do better.”

He put me up to it.

I actually WANTED to do some of the emails in exchange for collecting the performance data.  Where else could I test out several emails a week to 50,000 people?

Anywhozit….I started preparing the emails 2 days before each deal came out, and….

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED:

The first deal was something of a crappy deal.  Now I don’t mean it was a BAD deal….but it was going to SELL CRAPPY because it was extremely niche based.  It was a deal for a service that sends you 4 sets of matched fonts per month.

Now NO ONE BUT HARDCORE DESIGN NERDS would buy this….in fact, they all know you can get thousands of fonts online for free.  This was a carefully curated collection of fonts, and only hardcore graphics designers would buy something like that….to make it an even harder sell, it was a lifetime membership costing something like $125.

With the old AppSumo email style, this deal had no chance of stellar sales.

But then Enter Copy-Writing-Minded-Neville:

I quickly realized a VERY specific deal would exclude tens of thousands of people in this case…so I tried applying copy writing techniques to neutralize that.  Basically, being open and honest about it.

It started out like this:

If the names “Lucida Sans Unicode” or “Courier New” don’t mean anything to you, go ahead and close this message.

You see my friend, today we’re reaching out only to the community of people known as font whores.

You know who you are!

If your knees go weak when I whisper, “GARAMOND.”
…you might be one of em.

Right off the bat this doesn’t necessarily sound like a typical marketing message.  In fact, it’s mildly offensive and quite sexually suggestive.

But you know what….PEOPLE READ IT.

People emailed us back saying the email had NOTHING to do with their line of work, but they still enjoyed reading the email.

We also got people saying they HATED the email and that it was misogynistic and (insert more whiny-bitch-complainer examples)…..you get the point.

SO THEN WHAT HAPPENED??

To Noah’s surprise, this particular deal TOOK OFF!  It was like one of those movies where the ugly girl puts on some makeup, let’s her hair down and wears a gown and is suddenly hot.

So what did this mean?

It means I just made AppSumo a bunch of MONAAAY!!:

Hooray right?  I just made SOMEONE ELSE a bunch of money!

So that was pretty damn cool.  We turned the ugly girl into the “belle of the ball” with the power of of the pen.

Naturally the Chief Sumo wanted me to do the next email, then the next, then the next etc….

Some funny things happened in the next few email send-outs:

  • Every email did EXCEEDINGLY well compared to past emails. Only difference: Good copy.
  • The emails did piss off a small subsection of people, and the unsubscribe rates went up 1% on certain emails.  1% is actually BELOW industry standards…so we’re all good.
  • We got people saying they LOVED reading the emails and how cool they were.
  • We got some people saying they LOATHED the emails (these for the most part were whiny-bitch-complainers who never bought anything anyway).
  • One of the emails (that I spent a lot of time on) got the HIGHEST CONVERSION RATE EVER for any AppSumo email…..or ANY email I’ve ever heard of in my life.  A normal “good-converting” email is usually at 1% conversion (meaning 1% of the people it goes to actually BUY something directly from that email).  This particular email had over 10% conversion. If you understand what I’m talking about, that’s INCREDIBLE.

So that’s how I made AppSumo a ton of moolah….and learned something in the process.

I should teach a class on this stuff…..

Fringe benefits of owning a blog: Interviews

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Haha…today I was awoken by a phone call from a reporter in Montreal about Car2Go.   Apparently he was searching for people who had used the cars frequently and could talk about them from experience.

Unfortunately only Hamburg and Ulm Germany are the other places besides Austin that have had Car2Go for over a year…so his only English-speaking and time-zone-similar place to call was Austin.

So he did some basic searching and found…me!

So after a 10 minute interview or so…he said I would be on the radio broadcasting to all of Montreal how cool Car2Go is!  I’ll try to find the clip at some point…

It’s one of those funny side benefits of posting random stuff on a blog :-)

It kind of reminded me about the random call I got to speak to poor people in Sierra Leon (and accidentally pissed one of them off)!