Adam Street's Blog
The spiritual and practical path to freedom to do your art

More is not always better.

Choking out your customers rarely solves problem.  No matter how much better you may think you may feel afterwards.

And I am a professional after all, but…

I was at an event and this photographer dude wanted a caricature of his wife from a photo.  He was annoyingly sifting thru photos on his high dollar camera.  He showed me about 40 photos of her all while telling me every detail of her that he thought I needed.

My patience was thinner Calista Flockhart.  I was SO ready to slap the camera out of his hand and make my way to a bar.  

I didn’t though.  There was something about this guy that kept me captivated.

What made Photo Dude annoying was also what made him magnetic.  It was the love and passion he had for his wife.  There was literally NO wonder as to why him and his wife had been married for 20+ years.

I have seen this a lot over my 11 years of drawing live.  Men who deeply love their significant others is absolutely beautiful to me.  And it’s a lot different than how men in shorter relationships view their partners.  

I’ve broken it down to this…

My wife’s beauty is the lens that I see beauty through.  When beauty doesn’t start with my wife I could easily think…  

Shouldn’t she be more thin?

More blonde?

More pretty?  

More of something she’s not instead of appreciating her for who she is and the fact that her imperfections are perfect for me.  

The same is true with your and business.  You look at the work that YOU wanna do.  And from that lens, you figure out the best ways to grow it.    This approach is much better than focusing on the media and types of marketing and promotion FIRST.  

I’m going to go deep on this in my program that I’ll be unveiling in a few days.  Grow yourself and your biz by focusing on YOUR WORK and your personality.  

The only lens that matters.

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam Street

The Trade Show Offensive

I’m good at email marketing. I’m not Neo from the Matrix good but I’ve gotten really skilled at pressing the right buttons over the years.

Several years ago I wanted to sign-on as a vendor at a few trade shows and I needed thousands of dollars for all the upfront fees.  I debated on how I should pay for the shows (credit, cash, etc.).  Suddenly my  inner Dan Kennedy kicked in.   I thought, why not create a few sales emails and raise the money from scratch.  

That’s what all my direct response marketing gurus would do.    Cause after all… “the money is in the list”.  “There’s no problem a good sales letter can’t fix”.  “If you haven’t offended someone by 9 am you’re not doing your job”.  These are in quotes because this is the soundtrack that was playing in my mind.  

I wrote a three email series to create my cash surge.  The plan was to send them over the course of about four days to a cold list of brides to be.  I was so excited.  My open rates were off the charts.  The open rate of the first email was in the mid 40% range and the second email had nearly a 70% open rate.

Did I mention I was good at email?  

Well, it turns out that I’m not as good at email as I thought I was.   In my first two emails I got every bridal fear that I could get my grubby little hands on and exploited it.  I wasn’t being a good marketer I was being an asshole.  And my list let me hear about it…

Surely my wife would back me up and everyone is overreacting.  I printed email #2 and showed it to her.  After she finished reading it she handed it back to me holding it with two fingers passively with her nose scrunched up.  She looked as though she just smelled something foul or accidentally stepped in chewing gum.  All while saying, “yeah…”

I thought I was so cool, so creative, so cunning.  But all I really was was a bully who only thought about himself.  Afterwards I felt like I was on an episode of Dirty Jobs.

In Darren Hardy’s book The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster he has a section on ‘not killing your customers’.  When he was starting out in real estate he went to a mentor to learn how to sell more.  He showed him his ambitious “Hit List” of prospects.  The mentor wasn’t impressed.

He said, “no one wants to be your next hit, Darren.  They don’t want to be your next victim.”  I’m glad Hardy included this experience in his book.  He was right.  You shouldn’t maim or kill your customers and you shouldn’t insult them either.   

The weekend of that email campaign I grew up.  I learned that I make a better Adam than a bad version of Dan Kennedy or any other marketer that I adore.

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam

Proof I’m not a guru :(

I’m on a copywriter’s email list.  Today’s email had this line:

“Copywriters are NOT writers! We are marketers. We are strategists. We are salespeople in print.”

She said that quote was “every copywriting guru’s favorite line in the world”.

I thought not only have I not used that line before but I’ve never heard or seen it before either.  

See, and just when I thought I was one of the cool kids…

I do agree copywriters can be strategists and we are certainly salespeople in print.  

That first part bugs the hell outta me though.  It’s like wearing only a furry itchy wool trench coat in the middle of summer.

And I live in Phoenix by the way…

When we use the fire emoji here it’s cause it’s 114 degrees, not because we think something is cool.  

Anyhoow, back to copywriters are not writers.

This is why there is so little creativity in marketing nowadays.  If you rely on formulas and short sited tactics your marketing will stop evolving.  And then you’ll take another course and learn one more thing.

You’ll keep living your life and running your business off borrowed time.  

Albert Einsten said, “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”

This is why studying some of the old direct response marketers can be so effective.  NO, you don’t want to model most of their ads but you DO want to learn how they think.  

Read about Claude Hopkins, Rosser Reeves, John Caples, or Robert Collier.  And plenty of others.

Also study good writing.  You can learn just as much reading Michael Crichton or Mark Twain.

Good writing is good writing.  

Not only will your marketing get better but you will develop your own voice.  

Your own approaches.

Your own techniques.  

That’s when writing your copy and emails gets easier.  And you start to enjoy it.

You still will have to start with a blank screen when you write.  But at least you’ll reduce your urge to jump out of your office window.

Want less stress when you write?  https://adamstreet.net

Adam

Candy coated Kale

I don’t mind Kale but I don’t love it either.

But what if it was wrapped in candy?  

Like white chocolate?

Jolly Ranchers or…

M&Ms? 

That may sound gross, especially if you love Kale.  But if you’re like the millions of people who don’t like the stuff, a candy coating may give you some incentive to give it another shot.  

Imagine this at your state fair.  Right next to the deep fried Twinkies.

This sums up how you want to market on social.

Fun and deliciously entertaining on the outside with a strong message on the inside.  

Pew Research did a survey and they found more than half of Americans get some or all of their news from social media.  And 1/3 get their news from Facebook alone.

YES, you may coach people with some serious problems.

YES, your course may solve some un-funny problems but people won’t stop to look at your posts on Facebook if they aren’t interesting.  

If your focus is always “giving value” and teaching.  Or worse, giving your stuff away for free.  Do you think you have a shot against the cucumber vs. cats videos?  Or all the little adorable toddler Tiktoks out there?  Girls in bikinis?

Fat chance.

Use what I teach in the Blockbuster Marketing Club.  

What Ben Settle teaches and many others.

Be fun.

Be interesting.

Be curious.  

Do that and people will watch.  They will care.

They will eat right past the crunchy candy coating and go straight to the nutritious center.

Gotta bon appétit? https://adamstreet.net

Adam

PS  If you want to read the study:  

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/new-research-shows-that-71-of-americans-now-get-news-content-via-social-pl/593255/

Beating Entrepreneurial Fibromyalgia with 1%

When my mom was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia her doctor gave her a cheery little nugget of wisdom.   

He said something like…

You will have pain everyday for the rest of your life.

Well, that was harsh I thought…

But he wasn’t doing it to be crass, or to be a dick.  

He was doing it because to him, that was the reality of Fibromyalgia.  And he said if she could internalize that now, it wouldn’t be as bad.  

This doc’s philosophy goes against my overly Pollyanna-ish like nature but I get it.  

This is also why I tell entrepreneurs and service pros that marketing is hard.

Copy writing is hard.

Figuring out your product, your message, and the best media for you is hard.  

This is why Swipe and deploy and copying ads have a tipping point.  They work and they’ll get you started but you almost never see the success of the original.

Eugene Schwartz said it best.

“Each and every formula is simply the written solution to a particular problem that occurred in the past.  Change even one part of that problem, and you need an entirely different formula.  That’s why memorizing theories won’t make you a scientist…or rewriting somebody else’s headlines won’t make you a copy writer.”

I could steal all Lebron’s moves and the Laker’s wouldn’t be calling me anytime soon.  

Great teachers help you learn and understand foreign and complex ideas.  That’s what makes them great teachers.  

That is what I aspire to do.  

That’s why I do what I do.

That’s how I’m wired.

But I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it’s easy.   Or that if you take my course you’ll become the next David Deutsch and 10x your income in six months.

But when you KNOW it’s hard.  All you have to do is little things.  

Like get 1% better everyday.  

The compound effect of daily improvement will make you an entrepreneurial bad-ass.  It might take 6 months it may take 6 years.      

But it WILL happen.  

Better to put your faith in that than some mamby pamby hocus pocus course.  

If you need a little “Riddikulus”:  https://adamstreet.net

Adam “Expelliarmus” Street