Want to know THE single most hilariously terrible first sentence in the English language?
A few years ago, this was awarded the Bulwer-Lytton Prize for the dubious honour of the worst sentence in the history of fiction:
“Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.”
It actually reminds me of a little known mistake most amateur marketers make that renders their email lists 16% less likely to grow.
You know how most experts these days tell you to message on your target buyer’s pain points?
Identify a burning pain, lead in with the problem, expose the consequences of not taking action etc.
Well, there is a nuance here:
Yes, you should talk to their pain points, BUT you need to do it in a way that doesn’t depress them.
Why? Because emotions affect decisions.
Let’s explore the science behind this.
It comes from the research of Prof Jonah Berger, who is a marketing professor at the Wharton School and bestselling author of Contagious.
Sadness is a low-arousal emotion.
And low-arousal emotions - like sadness (negative) or contentment (positive) - decrease sharing. (For example, Prof Berger’s research found that sadder content was 16% less likely to make the Most Emailed list.)
There is a concept Derek Halpern always talks about that most people gloss over. He says:
“Breakaway audience growth can only happen when people share your content with their network of friends and colleagues. [If they don’t share], your blog and business will end up dead in the water. You’ll maintain it, but you won’t grow it and you’ll plateau.”
Obviously we want people to share our stuff. When they join our email list, we want them to bring along their friends. When they buy from us, we want them to spread the word and become brand ambassadors.
But forget about sharing for a second.
There is something even more fundamental at play here:
More subscribers = more revenue.
Regardless of what you do to get more subscribers - whether you run ads, or write guest posts, or do webinars, or wear a cardboard sign and stand at the street corner - it always comes down to this pivotal moment:
That visitor needs to enter their email address and click the subscribe button.
If he doesn’t, your email list doesn’t grow and your business doesn’t grow. It’s as simple as that.
In other words, there are many avenues through which you can drive traffic, but all those roads lead to the same place:
Your opt-in.
When you’re trying to build an email list, you need to use high-arousal emotions that kindle the fire, activate people, and drive them to take action - to sign up, to share, to buy.
In FAST50, I give you a paint-by-numbers system to make sure that you hit the right emotional buttons in your copy. You also get a master template you can use to write your opt-in page.
Want 50 other ways to phrase that “ask”, so people can’t help but say “YES, of course!”?
That’s where Hook, Line and Subscriber comes in.
It will be available for purchase as a separate product in Feb, but you can get it for free… read on for more.
Hook, Line and Subscriber gives you 50 opt-in hooks that work for every industry that I’ve never shared publicly before.
It can (and WILL) allow you to grab people by the eyeballs and lead them into your email list without tweaking the language thousands of times (even if you’ve never written marketing copy before and you feel like a baby deer trying to walk for the first time).
That said, here’s the fine print:
If you want to access Hook, Line and Subscriber for free, you gotta jump on that jet and fly to FAST50 and join before Monday (Jan 22nd).
Once the Monday blues hit, you will have to buy Hook, Line and Subscriber like a regular person.
Go here to grab it before it goes away:
