Brad Petersen

It has been a ridiculous two years since I last emailed you.
It seems that sending out a yearly email is too much for me,
let alone something monthly, weekly or daily.

And boy do I have excuses. Lots and lots of excuses.

I’m too busy with client work right now.

I’d better wait until I have something brilliant to say.

I don’t feel like it. And it’s too hard anyway.

I’m hungry. I’d better eat something first.

I’m too tired right now. I’ll do it later when I feel more
up to it.

I need a break and I’m in the mood to binge watch Hawaii
Five-0.

I’ll do it right after I check my email for the 400th time
today.

And while I’m at it, I’d better check The Drudge Report …
and have a look at my favorite blog … and maybe jump on that
clickbait about some actor Hollywood refuses to cast any
more.

Or, as I’m thinking right now as I read a draft of this
email: “This email could be better. I need to tweak it until
it’s perfect, so I’ll come back to it later.”

And on and on and on.

All the common excuses for failing to get my ezine written …
to update my web site … to create my own products … to start
an affiliate business … to launch a new client acquisition
campaign … to follow up with a few prospects … to create a
sales funnel … and to write a new lead magnet.

And without a boss or client breathing down my neck,
demanding that I do those things … my ezine and these
various projects just fell by the wayside.

Perhaps you’ve fallen prey to some of these time-wasters
when it comes to doing what you need to do to build your
business.

Or maybe you’re simply overwhelmed with all the options
available to you.

I know I’m overloaded with too many strategies. Too many
reports and ebooks clogging my hard drive. Too many magic
bullets to choose from. Too many different ways to do what I
need to do. And just too many things to do.

That’s especially true when it comes to digital marketing.
You have to build a funnel, which means writing a squeeze
page … creating a lead magnet … putting up thank you pages …
download pages … sales pages … upsell pages … and one-time
offer pages.

And then you have to write a 99-part autoresponder series
to keep trying to sell all the non-buyers.

Then, when you’ve got it all done, you’ve got to figure out
how to drive quality traffic that results in actual sales.

And then you’ve got to keep it all fresh and updated.

It’s a giant pile of things to do, but your schedule is
already full. So a lot of it falls by the wayside.

So, what can we do about it? How can you and I grow our
businesses without being stopped cold by time-wasting
behavior … without wasting the day on nonsense … and
without getting bogged down and frustrated by overwhelm?

We can choose, of course, to whine about these admittedly
first world problems. That’s exactly what I’m doing in this
email — as if having to do all that “work” is equivalent to
mining gold with my bare hands or plowing a field with
a rake and a hand trowel.

Or, instead maybe it’s time to take just a few small steps
in the right direction every day, and just get it done tiny
step by tiny step — keeping things as simple as possible to
start, and then build from there.

And I invite you to join me as I do exactly that in the
weeks and months ahead.

I’ll show you what I’m doing to grow my businesses … to get
new clients and customers (and to grow their businesses) …
to create new products … and, perhaps most importantly, the
steps I’m taking to overcome my addiction to wasting time or
frittering it away on non-essential tasks.

The fun begins tomorrow.

by Brad Petersen

Many years ago, the late, great Gary Halbert referred a copywriting prospect to me. He was a Florida-based pool and billiards retailer who had begun manufacturing and selling his own line of pool cues.

To get started, the prospect wanted to run an ad in a magazine read by both pool players and pool cue retailers.

Not surprisingly, every ad in these magazines was long on pretty pictures of pool cues… short on sales copy that actually sold anything.

Fortunately, as a Halbert disciple, my new client was open to doing things the Gary Halbert way — meaning more reason-why sales copy, fewer pretty pictures.

Better yet, the client gave me many good reasons to buy his new cues — reasons that apparently nobody had ever explained in an ad before.

And those reasons were critical because he was promising to deliver “a quality cue at a low price.”

A vague promise at best — and one that will almost always get you a “yeah right” reaction from your prospects.

With that kind of promise, an ad featuring nothing more than pretty pictures would likely have generated little interest.

Instead, these cues cried out for some “reason-why” copy — copy that reveals as many good reasons as possible to buy the cues.

To help me make a big splash with this ad and this new client, I teamed up with Gary Walterscheid, a talented copywriting crony of mine.

And we proceeded to knock it out of the park with a two-page, first person ad from the company’s owner — packed with sales copy, along with small photos of my client and his new cues.

The copy didn’t just say “high quality cues at a low price.” It proved it by revealing five features and benefits that set the cues apart from everybody else — each of them of great importance to our prospects.

Furthermore, we acknowledged our prospects’ inherent skepticism right off that bat with a headline that read:

Cues this good at prices this low…

“Who Will Believe Us?”

No, not your typical benefit-oriented headline — but it does contain the promise of a quality cue at a low price, while letting the prospect know that we understand their automatic “yeah right” reaction.

So then, did it work? You bet it did. Not only did this ad — and a similar sales letter sent to pool and billiard dealers — launch the business with a bang, it actually made my client an instant celebrity at the next industry trade show. Everyone had seen his ad and his photo — and he was besieged with admirers.

It wasn’t long before his cues were the hottest thing in the low-priced segment and over the next few years he sold more than 100,000 of them.

In no time, he went from nothing to the leader in his category.

And this was just the beginning. He went on to successfully create and distribute many additional lines of cues — and I wrote successful ads and promotions for many of them.

Today, my client’s little side business is a multi-million-dollar industry behemoth.

But it all started with a single ad that gave his prospects good reasons to buy his cues…and backed up his claims with proof.