Cautionary Tales
My son Jacob makes his living as a commercial fisherman in southwest Alaska. Sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay. This year, the salmon run will shatter records. Average sockeye run (2001-2020): 41.3 million fish. 2021 sockeye run: 66.1 million fish (a record). This year: 74 million and counting. And the season continues through July! What a…
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Yesterday, I conducted a website makeover for a VIP member of my Content Transformation Academy. 30 minutes to transform his front page from “blah” to brilliant, prospect-repelling to prospect-attracting. In a week or two, after he launches the transformed site, I’ll put the URL in a bookmarks folder called, “Websites – Good Examples.” I also have…
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Remember Eddie Haskell? He was the guy on Leave it to Beaver (a TV classic!) who oozed insincerity. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. Isn’t it a lovely day,” he’d say to Beaver’s parents. And then, when the adults left the room, Eddie would wreak havoc. The sweet-talking devil. I had an Eddie Haskell flashback the other day. …
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Back when I ran an email marketing company, a client named Mike asked me to help him build a list. He ran a roofing company, and he wanted to send weekly emails. My advice: “Before you build a list, write two or three practice emails. Make sure you have your content creation game down. Confirm…
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I got an email from an artificial-intelligence robot this morning… …that’s so bad I had to share it with you and break it down. Here it is (display images to see it): I knew something was wrong when I read the first line: “We hope things are looking nice at Story Power Marketing.” Looking nice…
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I met a “PR guy” named Mark at an online networking event last month. He seemed like a nice guy. (Spoiler-Hint: Remember Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate, Robert De Nero in Angel Heart, or Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick? At first, they seemed like nice guys, too). So I was happy to hear from Mark…
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A few weeks back, I stumbled across an article by a so-called “storytelling expert” who droned on and on about something called Freytag’s Storytelling Pyramid. Freytag was a 19th-century German playwright. And, unless you’re a glutton for punishment, I have good news for you: You don’t have to know anything about Freytag or his pyramid…
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Every so often, I hear from a sad-sack marketer who plays the “easy for you to say” card… …as in “Write story-powered emails that captivate prospects? Easy for you to say, Tom. You’re a storytelling genius.” (Sigh!) I heard from someone yesterday who griped about my list-building advice. In yesterday’s email, I encouraged you to…
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I touched a nerve yesterday. In my Monday Mash-Up yesterday, I shared an article that called “B.S.” on Simon Sinek’s “start with why.” I received lots of replies from subscribers who agreed. No one defended Sinek. Sinek’s big idea from his 2010 TED talk, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” That…
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As jury selection entered its second hour, with no end in sight, the prosecutor strolled slowly to his table, grabbed his notes, paged through them, paused, paged through them some more, took a deep breath, and then asked, “Have any of you ever had a negative encounter with a prosecutor that would prevent you from…
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