But back to fulfilling the promise of the subject line, I’m sure that now that Conan is off the air, a lot of the hubbub will die down.  But one of the most significant things I observed during last week’s scandal and turmoil over the NBC Tonight Show Host gig, is that NO ONE CARED until there was a villain.

Now, for the sake of disclosure, I’m with CoCo.  But for the sake of discussion, I think it’s crazy awesome how from a marketing standpoint, he got $32 million out of the deal by making his story have a villain.  Heck, he had 2: Leno AND NBC.  And what’s great about those villains is that they are GOLIATHS and everyone likes to come to defense of any Davids whose struggles are public ones.  Hence all the public support of Conan.

Everything is a story.  The best stories have dramatic tension.  The best way to get dramatic tension is to add a villain. So if you’re part of a story, or you’re creating a marketing story yourself, DON’T leave out the villain.  If you don’t have one, MAKE one.  If you want to be a hero, don’t wait around waiting for a tragedy to happen so you can be heroic then.  You can be a hero RIGHT NOW, simply by creating a villain you oppose.  You don’t even have to DEFEAT the villain to be the hero.

The ratings certainly prove that.

And I think it’s important to note that without Leno in the mix, if NBC would have just fired Conan outright, this would not have gone nearly as well in the public  eye.  There IS such a thing as the right villain at the right time.  Especially if the villain has a FACE.  You’ll notice that it wasn’t good enough for NBC as an organization to get slammed.  They very quickly gave it a face in Zucker, and of course, Leno.

So, note to self.  Your villains need a FACE.  The bigger the face the better.

Anyways, if you’re feeling so inclined, I’d love to hear your thoughts re: anything at all.  Leave a comment!

Time to fix that.   Here’s something I actually wrote one afternoon during the holidays, and never did get around to posting.  I guess the point of it is, if you’re stuck, you can find inspiration for your marketing anywhere you look.  And in fact, cultivating this “holistic” approach will help make sure you never get stuck again.

So here we go: 10 Marketing (and business) Lessons I learned Playing Super Mario Bros.

1. You can only move forward, never back, so don’t worry about the things that you missed and accidentally let pass you by.  You can’t go back, but it’s okay.  There are always more opportunities ahead, so keep your eyes open and looking forward so you can continue moving forward, doing better next time.

2. In Super Mario Bros, the finish line for a given level is a flagpole.  The higher you jump when you cross it, the higher you score.   So since you’re not in a race against anyone but yourself, you should pause, reflect, and aim high.  When you work hard to accomplish something and the end is in sight, and there’s no more danger or risk involved, don’t rush it just to be done.  Go for the gusto, take a moment to aim, and get the maximum reward for your efforts.  No need to rush right at the very end.

3. Invincibility is always temporary – In the game, if you collect a star power-up, you’re invincible, and no enemies can hurt you or knock you off the screen.  But it’s only temporary, so you have to be careful and listen for the sound that indicates that time is up, or else you could get a nasty surprise.  The lesson is, don’t get cocky.   Even if it seems like you’re effortlessly succeeding at what others find challenging, success breeds competition.   Enjoy any periods of seeming invulnerability, but assume they are temporary.   Pay attention to what’s happening around you to keep your advantage, even when you’re vulnerable.   Just as in the game, it’s probably always best to approach a problem cautiously – as if you’re vulnerable, even if you’re feeling invincible.

4. Be mindful what you send out because it may come back to bite you.   Just like those ricocheting turtle shells in the game, the content and products you produce and release are going to take on a life of their own once they’re in the wild.  Once you send it out, be prepared to jump on top of it if it comes back and becomes an issue.  Be responsible and aware of what you put out there.

5. In any level of the game, there’s always an easy path and a hard path.  The hard path is more rewarding, but the easy path is faster.   However, experienced players often discover that the “best” path is the middle – don’t bother conquering obstacles can avoid altogether, and focus your best efforts on the opportunities that are right in front of you.   Instead of puzzling over some unknown reward that may not be worth the challenge it takes to get, get as much of the easy pickings as you can in your market and power forward.

6. If you skip ahead, you might be woefully unprepared for the challenges you’ll face.  In Super Mario, Warp Zones allow you to advance through the game quickly by skipping levels.  But when you do that, you miss out on the gradual escalation of challenge, and you don’t get to hone your skills to match.  You can quickly find yourself completely out of your element and be doomed to fail.  That’s pretty much true of all shortcuts in business and in life.  There ARE shortcuts, but you may not be ready to handle what’s on the other side if you’ve never been there before.  Doing it the hard way the first time often gives you the experience you need anyway.  Take the shortcut the next time, but not the first.

7. You should only allow yourself to fail at something once before you adjust your approach for the second try.  You can’t expect to get a different result if you keep trying the same things.  In the game, you have a limited number of chances (lives) to finish the game before it’s over and you have to start all over.  So if you approach a particular obstacle and miss the mark, you really don’t have the luxury of making small adjustments until you get it just right.  However, in life, people seem to fall in love with a plan abd become dedicated to it, even when it’s not performing as hoped.  Don’t let that happen.  There are no 1-Ups in real life.  If you’re failing, adjust your strategy.

8. When opportunity presents itself, if you don’t act fast and deliberately, you won’t get the maximum reward.  Think of the multi-coin boxes Mario encounters.  When you find one, you need to keep bashing it until you get ALL the coins out of it.  But if you hesitate, they freeze, and you don’t get every coin you could have.  In business, when you discover an opportunity, quickly and thoroughly maximize it before you move on.  But referring back to the earlier lesson, if you do miss it, don’t sweat it.  Let it go and be ready for the next one (and there WILL be a next one).

9. Essentially, the entire game of Super Mario Brothers is a big pattern puzzle.  Every obstacle is defeatable if you learn the pattern, and the best way to learn the pattern is through practice.  I remember the game being incredibly difficult for me when I was a kid, but now, when I play as an adult, I find that I have little difficulty in getting a pretty high score and advancing pretty far.  That comes from many many years playing this and similar games, putting in lots and lots of practice.  If you hit a tough spot, back up, look at the big picture.  If you’re caught up in details, re-visit some fundamentals, focus on those, and then come back to the problem fresh.  A lot of times, it’s a LOT easier the second time around.

10. I’m sure if you played the game, you remember this.  So you get to the final castle, you defeat the villain, and you THINK you’ve rescued your beloved princess, only to see the message “Your princess is in another castle”.  The final lesson here is that any sense of accomplishment is fleeting, satisfaction is temporary, so always be ready to pursue the next challenge.  When you succeed at what you strove for so long, you may discover that you need to go even further – and that’s okay too.  Feel good about the journey, and think of every accomplishment as a milestone towards bigger and better goals.

Well that’s all for now – hopefully more things to come soon.  If you like this and comment to tell me so, maybe I’ll do a continuing series on marketing lessons from obscure places.  So if you dig it, let me know with a comment below.  Thanks!

Originally Posted By winebuddy: I was just going through one of my student’s followup emails and what I found is something that I think will help a lot of warriors.

The noobie was attempting to put all of his content in the followup email itself. That, in my book, is a big no no.

One of the things we are attempting to do in followup emails, besides build trust and repore, is to train the reader to click on links in the email.

I recommend to my students that they always put thier free content on a separate page hosted on their site or on a free blog or site.

The emails can then generate interest and have a call to action to click the link and then when the reader does click the link, they are directed to a separate page with the article or the video or the extra free download.

Not only does this build anticipation for what you might send them next, it also has a small element of surprise – like opening a gift.

Lesson for the day – Train your readers to CLICK by keeping your content out of your emails. Put your content on a separate free hosted page, a separate page on your site, or a free blog.

Just this one thing will increase your sales – I guarantee it.

I tell people this all the time. Every email you send should do two and only two things. Get opened, and get clicked. And you do this through repeated conditioning. Reward the open, reward the click. At least that’s what’s typically done, and I agree it works.

I will say though, you can hybridize what you’re saying, and I like to think I sort of “pioneered” this when I was running StomperNet’s lists. (At least I didn’t see anyone else doing it and it worked like gangbusters for StomperNet).

Basically, you have the content in the email AND on your blog, but you position a link towards the very top of the email that tells people that they can read the same content and leave a comment on your blog. Then, put the same link at the very bottom.

This does a few things that I think are very beneficial.

1. It gives the prospect/consumer the perception of having options, and that you’re catering to them in a means that focuses on THEIR convenience and not yours. Obviously, when your ongoing ulterior motive is to sell them things (and your audience is well aware of the fact) this can go a long way towards increasing “stick” and consumption.

Even though they’re already on your list, and they’ve given you what you wanted out of the initial exchange, what they see is that you keep on giving without ever asking anything in return. Even though you DO send promotions, they will tend to remember the content, and stick around.

2. When you have content-filled emails, people will actually SAVE them and read later. I can’t tell you how hard it is to track overall list results on a spreadsheet when literally HUNDREDS of people are opening and clicking on your emails MONTHS after they were sent. Of course, that’s a GOOD problem to have, right?

If you have a long-term content-based or membership-based business, this is great, because it makes your content have a higher chance of being effective, simply because the prospect at least intends to come back to it later. And even if they don’t, it’s only really the intention that matters. If they hoard your stuff, it means they’re addicted to it. That means it’s time to make more products, lol.

Some car dealerships and shoe stores will let you take home your possible purchase to keep overnight. Once you have it, you feel like it’s your own, and you don’t really want to give it back. And just like a “trial period” the prospect effectively “takes possession” of the content, strengthening their connection to the ideas inside (and to you).

Bonus tip: Everyone in the marketing world knows that the word “you” is powerful to use in copy. But one that’s even more powerful is “mine” but unfortunately that’s a label that only the prospect can apply. Having them think of something as “mine” in their own mind is way better than you saying to them that it’s it’s “yours”.

So anything you can do to get them to take an action that indicates taking possession of your material will only increase your ability to persuade them in the future. Your stuff becomes tehir stuff. Your ideas become their ideas. When you are locked in so tightly with a subscriber like this, do you know what it takes to make them buy things? All you have to tell them is that YOU want it. You don’t even have to say WHY. They will want it because you want it, and they’ll justify it to themselves some kind of way.

3. Even if they don’t click over, you are conditioning them that the link is there, right at the top. So when you DO run a promotion, and there IS no more content to be had in the email, the link position remains consistent and recognizable.

What happens here is subtle. Even though the readers who choose to consume the content via email will develop a kind of “blindness” to the link, when you remove the content, the link will stand out like you want it to, but it WILL NOT be an anomaly.

They can ignore it, but they will always remember that it’s there, because it’s always there.

If you didn’t include the link there at the top, on the occasions when you mixed in promotions, the link would seem blatant and would trigger resistance. I find that including the link this way every time conditions an expectation if not necessarily a behavior. A lot of marketers don’t place any value on that, but let me tell you – the power to set expectations in the mind of the prospect is extremely useful.

How? You know how you keep hearing how you need to overdeliver? Consider that if you can precisely calibrate the expectations of your audience, you can make ANY product “overdeliver”. After all, satisfaction is an entirely relative perception.

Consider also that what you’re repeating over and over is “if you can’t read it here, you can read it at this link”, so when you ONLY have the link, that notion remains. It won’t feel like an ad. It’ll feel like the same action: “I can get the content at the link instead”.

4. When you provide the content in the email AND on a blog, you have a totally logical “reason” to have the links in EVERY email, even a content-based one. You’re going to ask for comments EVERY SINGLE TIME. Again, even if they’re not clicking the link, you’re conditioning them to understand that they aren’t just getting a robotic email – they are participating in an ongoing conversation, which they can always participate in, any time they choose.

This makes you appear both sincere and approachable. Whether you actually are or not is up to you, but the appearance is more than most marketers can even manage.

This framing of your messaging as a “conversation” has another very subtle side effect in that again, when you remove the content for a promotional email and leave only the link, the perception is NOT that of being a link that leads to an ad. Every other link you send is simply an invitation to participate in the conversation. Through consistency and conditioning, the prospect sees promotional links the same way.

Here’s something freaky.

This is going to sound weird, but bear with me. When you have set up a repeating pattern where you have someone consume content and then ask for comment, they will automatically start thinking about the content and internalizing it just before they click the link. Or even if they don’t click it. It will happen subconsciously and they won’t even be able to help it. Because they read over and over “What do you think? Leave me a comment!”

The mind does what it’s told unless it has a reason to be skeptical and resist. Over time, they’ll just start actually *thinking* immediately about what they’ve just read, because they *know* you’re going to ask them to.

It’s similar to how annoying it is when someone’s brain turns off during a conversation and they stop listening so they won’t forget what it is THEY want to say next. It sort of forces the brain to switch gears from passively consuming to actively absorbing.

For you NLP enthusiasts out there, this is the written equivalent of doing a touch-based induction like Erickson’s handshakes.

So what happens when you suddenly switch from content to promotion? Imagine what happens when the prospect consumes your persuasive promotional message but they read it AS IF it’s content. Then out of sheer force of habit, he or she begins to internalize it subconsciously just before they click the link…

Now, imagine your persuasive copy is designed to subtly aggravate some pain or problem they’re having… They’re thinking, “yeah, I guess that is a pain I have” while hovering the mouse. They click, and then immediately see a headline that promises immediate relief from that pain they just had…

This is what’s called PRE-SELLING. I didn’t sell at all. I just sold them on the idea of being sold. I invited them to have a problem, which they have been conditioned to internalize. Then I leave them hanging with only a link to a product that can solve the problem.

See the difference there is in that you aren’t just using the email part of the promo to pique interest, but through long-term conditioning, you’re getting them to internalize WHATEVER it is you’re telling them, make it part of their own thinking, so that when they hit the salesletter or squeeze page you’re promoting, they already have the concept of what you’re promoting in mind.

They’re already wrestling with the problem you presented, asking themselves “what do I think about this?” – among other questions. Which ideally, the salesletter you’re sending them to should answer. If you encountered a salesletter that answered questions you had in your mind before you even had the chance to ask them, do you think you might respond favorably to that message?

I guarantee you will.

You know that old quote from Collier’s Letter Book about how you need to enter the conversation the prospect is having in their own mind? Do you get what I’ve been saying here now?

Basically, through conditioning and mixing content with promotion in this way, every salesletter you promote can have this powerful feature EVEN if it isn’t part of the copywriting. This is because YOU are the one that CONTROLS the TOPIC of the conversation in the first place. You start the conversation, so that when you expose them to your promotional message, it IS the conversation they’re having in their own head.

This is powerful, powerful stuff. Use with caution.

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That’s the full post from the Warriorforum, but if you read it and had something to say about it, I’d love to hear from you in a comment below!