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

Abraham Lincoln

When I was 17 my neighbors had a garage sale. They were selling a giant cardboard box full of huge hardcover books about former presidents.

They had:

·      An 1,100 page book about Harry Truman

·      A 600 page book about John Adams

·      A 750 page book about Abraham Lincoln

·      A 450 page book about the American Revolution

·      And more.

I bought them all. (Don’t ask me why.)

I’m way too intimidated to actually read them. So they’ve just been sitting around collecting dust for years, until I decided to take the Lincoln book with me during my travels.

A couple weeks ago I finally got around to reading it. (Which is a pain in the butt: when I’m carrying it around, my backpack is twice as heavy!)

If you grew up in the US, you learned about him in school. You learned how he grew up in a log cabin, and then he gave an address at Gettysburg, and then he freed all the slaves, and then he got shot while watching a play.

What you don’t learn is that Lincoln was never actually supposed to be president. At the time, a guy named William Seward was the hotshot politician considered next in line to become president. But for weird political reasons, Seward didn’t get nominated by his party.

Abraham Lincoln saw those weird political reasons coming a year in advance. He saw that there was a chance Seward might not get nominated. And if Seward didn’t get nominated, his party would need a “compromise candidate”. Lincoln wanted to be that compromise candidate.

His problem was that nobody knew who he was. So he spent the entire year before the election building his reputation. He toured the US, speaking everywhere he could. He published his autobiography. He got his hands on the transcripts of his debates with Stephen Douglas, and had them published. Anything to get his name out there.

Seward didn’t get nominated on the first ballot. Then he didn’t get nominated on the second ballot. Some of the delegates started whispering that Seward was unelectable, he had too much baggage.

But they had to nominate somebody. So some of Abraham Lincoln’s friends said, “hey, what about Abe Lincoln?”

A few ballots later, Seward was out, and Lincoln was in. And you know the rest of the story.

I say in these emails constantly that if you want to sell high-ticket, you need to build your personal brand. People don’t buy high-ticket coaching from people they don’t know.

The more famous you get, the more you can charge. The difference between a $2,000 coaching package and a $20,000 coaching package is mostly just, how much do people recognize your name?

(This is how Tony Robbins can charge people $1,000,000 for a year of 1-on-1 coaching.)

In 6 years, Abraham Lincoln built one of the best personal brands ever. He went from being completely unknown to being an American legend.

How’d he do it? He started by just getting his name out there. He talked to as many influential people as he could. He published as much stuff as he could. He basically went on the 1800’s equivalent of a PR blitz.

You can do the same thing today. In fact, it’s way easier, because of the internet. And because unlike Abe Lincoln, you don’t need to become president — you just need to be famous in your niche.

There are a bunch of ways to do that: you can write a book, you can start a podcast, you can start a YouTube channel, you can post on Instagram. But my recommendation: write emails just like this one.

Want me to help you with that? Then check this out:

theoseeds.com/brandvoice