The S.T.U.P.I.D. Email

(Swipe, Thought, Uplifting, Picture, Interesting, Drawing)

This is a fun email for Friday May 27th, 2022. Hope you like it :)
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🎤 Listen to this email here:

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Swipe:

The famous old-school copywriter Gary Halbert made his first million dollars at age 32 with a promotion called: The Coat of Arms Letter. ​

This was the one-page letter to specific last names in the phonebook where he would sell "Coat of Arms" family crest you could buy through the mail (this was 1971 and that was the only way to buy):

The product people received was literally a printed family crest.

This was an example of the front & back of the Coat of Arms you would get:

Shoutout to @eston_esau who sent me these pictures of his grandpa's framed Coat of Arms!

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Thought:

Some types of media take longer per minute to make than others.

For example:

Production Time -vs- Final Product ratio: ​
• MOVIE: 12 months for 2 hours (4,300:1)
• SONG: 100 hours for 3 minutes (2,000:1)
• PODCAST: 2 hours for 1 hour (2:1)
• LIVE VIDEO: 1 hour for 1 hour (1:1)

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Uplifting:

This weekend we did a fun Spartan Race with some friends and it was a great time!

I'm MAINLY just happy I didn't hurt myself! 😬

It was 10k of running with 25 obstacles and challenges in between.

We rented a nice house near the lake where the race was being held:

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It was a good time, good friends, and we made a full weekend out of it on the lake :)

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Picture:

On my iPhone always use a few unknown settings to make better pics.

These 5 iOS photo modifiers make your pictures look WAY better (and doesn't wash out the photo)!

On almost any photo you take, apply these:
• Increase "Brilliance"
• Increase "Shadows"
• Increase "Vibrance"
• Increase "Definition"
• Straighten & Crop

Here's an example:

Here's an example of a photo ruined by lots of backlight, and simply increasing the exposure just washes out the picture, but if you do those 5 modifiers the photo becomes great:

This photo was almost unusable, but 20 seconds of:
• Increase "Brilliance"
• Increase "Shadows"
• Increase "Vibrance"
• Increase "Definition"
• Straighten & Crop

...and we're in business!

Toggling these 5 settings is often the difference between a "meh" photo and an awesome photo. The magic is in the post-editing!

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Interesting:

A Copywriting Course member wanted to build an email list for sneaker deals:

↳ Progress for emails was slow, so he started his own sub-Reddit instead!
↳ 3,000 subs first month! 200,000 views. 2 viral hits.
↳ He tried a promotion but it failed.
↳ Then he made a Top 10 post, it hit and brought in revenue!

↳ The sub-Reddit is now 6,100 members in about ~2.5 months!
↳ He's been turning those members into email subs (currently 140+)
↳ Is now releasing a paid database of sneaker deals to them.

Kind of neat how email collection was going slow, but starting a Sub-Reddit was an immediate hit!

See Sub-Reddit: https://Reddit.com/r/midsoledeals/
​Follow progress: https://Copywritingcourse.com/blogs/50 (you can see a full live-updated journal of progress here)

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Drawing:

Here's a cool little artifact from the 1990's:

A Simpsons drawing guide that Matt Groening created for the animators:

He had these pages that would guide the writers to create a consistent product like he liked:

This is pretty common in the animation world.

For example this is "Mickey Mouse's Hand Guides" from Walt Disney:

Cool to see these behind-the-scenes guides :)

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Hope you enjoyed these little tidbits, have a happy Friday!
​Sincerely,
Neville Medhora - CopywritingCourse.com | @NevMed​

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