I witnessed something I was not supposed to see last night.
My balcony looks onto the kitchen entrance of the best steakhouse in Istanbul.
And they certainly are a media darling.
You can’t pick up a newspaper without stumbling on yet another gushing review.
The meat is great, the ambience authentic, the service impressive… blah blah blah.
It’s like this restaurant can do no wrong.
Except they have.
What they did was dangerous, blatantly illegal, and could cause them to be shut down permanently.
And I was probably the only witness to this food crime - up there from my balcony.
Last night, they got this delivery from the butcher. One of the kitchen staff came out to take delivery and started chatting with the driver.
He momentarily put down the meat bags to light up a cigarette. And as he was fumbling with the lighter, a street cat jumped out the dumpster, snatched a slab of meat and started dragging it across the road.
When the kitchen guy realised what was going on, he kicked the cat away (and cruelly, I might add), picked up the discarded piece of meat, dumped it back on the tray and took it into the kitchen to be cooked as if nothing had happened. (WTF!?!?)
And some unsuspecting idiot probably paid $100 to eat a steak that had previously been chewed by a dumpster cat and dragged across a road stomped by 50,000 pairs of dirty shoes each day.
If word of this were to ever get out, they’d be shut down faster than you can say “The bill, please”.
Fortunately, nobody knows that I saw it happen - or the restaurant might send the food mafia to keep their dirty secret under wraps.
Well, let’s just say I am NEVER eating at that place again.
I would much rather go to the small, family owned boutique restaurant two streets down, where I know the owners and can actually watch as the food is cooked.
(It’s part of the experience. The chef likes to display her showmanship.)
But you know what?
As disgusting as this episode was, it’s much better to be in the know than to remain in the dark.
On the other hand:
If I had never seen this, I would have eaten there tonight, had a great gourmet experience, and gone home feeling smug…
... and be none the wiser until three weeks later, when I started wretching my guts out vomiting at the hospital, tied to an IV drip, wondering where an intestinal worm the size of a rattlesnake came from.
And so it is with swipe templates and email sequences:
A big name guru hauls in a 7-figure launch. And then you greedily snatch the email scraps they so generously discard to the starving masses post-l(a)unch.
But just like you don’t always know the history of that $100 steak on your plate, you don’t always know the history of those launch emails.
Was the success of the launch really due to the strength of the email sequence?
Or was it something else? Maybe their celebrity status, or affiliate network, or their skill with live webinars?
When you have that many things going genuinely well in your business, it’s hard to recognise the weakness of any one particular asset (like your emails), because it’s often offset by the strength of the other assets.
Personally, if I’m going to swipe any templates, I’d rather borrow from the “boutique restaurant” who makes good money, with just emails, from a tiny list.
Because if they can rake in more cash than I can with a list that’s smaller than mine, then the math is in my favour.
Those emails would probably work just as well for me.
I don’t know about you, but I like that kind of certainty. I like to see where the meat I’m eating comes from.
Whatever the case, here’s the deal:
I’m going to run an experiment. I’m going to build that “boutique restaurant” for email over the next 30 days.
And I’m going to do it live, so you can watch over my shoulder as the whole thing comes together.
It’s NOT going to be a course.
It’s NOT going to be an “inner circle” group programme like Email Prodigy.
And it’s NOT going to be expensive like all my other programmes.
(My work is of sterling quality, and thus expensive.)
Instead, I’m building a “reliquary” - of templates, swipes, and rolodexes.
100% implementation focused.
You swipe, send, and potentially put money in your piggy bank the same day you use them.
(Assuming, of course, that you’re selling something people want and you have an email list to sell to - however tiny it might be.)
Here is how “The Email Reliquary” works:
1) Each week you get ONE “battle-tested” template.
That template is based on an actual email I sent my list, which made money the same day it was sent.
2) You see the “behind-the-scenes” metrics of how that original email performed. How many people received it, how many of them clicked through to the sales page, how much revenue it brought...
3) You work through a “prep worksheet” that (duh) preps you for the writing by giving you exercises to develop each “ingredient” used in the template.
4) You watch an “over-the-shoulder” tutorial, where I take that template and whip out an email from it in 15 minutes. So you not only learn what to do, you also see exactly how I’d do it.
5) You sit down and do the same thing. You take the template and whisk it into an email. (You probably won’t be able to do it in 15 minutes like I do, at first. I recommend setting aside an hour.)
I will release the first email template next week - it’s called:
“Ganesha, The Storyteller” Template: Remove objections and make more sales by tacking a story to whatever you’re selling
It’s based on an actual email I sent my list earlier this year.
Took me 23 minutes to write. Was sent to a tiny list of 1,200 people. Brought in $793 in sales.
Which translates to an “hourly rate” of $2068/hr. Not bad for a measly email, eh?
(And it wasn’t even part of a “launch sequence” - just a standalone email.)
It works because nothing will persuade people to make a decision - including a purchase decision - better than creating a vision.
The late Jim Camp, arguably the world’s greatest negotiator, used this technique in every negotiation.
(In case you don’t know who Jim Camp is, he was the guy the FBI called to teach their agents negotiation strategies. His methods were used by over 100,000 students and were featured on CNN, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review.)
If you want to enter the Email Reliquary as an early adopter, the investment is $10/m.
You’ll be grandfathered in at this price, and won’t have to pay the extravagant rates I will be charging when it becomes publicly available to people not on my list.
Should you become a Knight of the Reliquary and purchase before Labour Day, I shall confer upon you one final boon:
You’ll not only get the “from the trenches” email the Ganesha template was based on, but also it’s “doppelgänger”.
On the surface, the “doppelgänger” looks very similar, but it just flopped and didn’t bring in a single sale.
I’ll show you exactly why one email took 23 min to write and hauled in $793 in sales, while the other took 98 min to write but couldn’t buy the paper it was written on.
This was the “aha! moment” that made my subsequent emails consistently profitable. ‘Twas a turning point for me - and who knows, maybe it will be for you too.
Want to become a Knight of the Email Reliquary?
Subscribe at:
http://trial-eureka.teachable.com/p/email-reliquary/
