Mo’ drama, mo’ sales
The bad side of running 2 businesses that are in the “zero to one” stage (like I am doing), is that you have split focus. Tbh, it’s not very wise and I won’t advise you to do it. It’s better to concentrate all your attention on one business, scale it up, have it run without you … then go into another business. But like most homo sapiens, I don’t always do what’s best for me, so I run 2 businesses at once. However, it’s not all bad. The good side is that you can always transfer lessons from one business to the other. Which brings me to the topic of today’s email-discussion: Dramatic Demonstration. The great direct-response marketer and author of Scientific Advertising, Claude Hopkins said that one dramatic demonstration is more powerful than any “copy” you can write. And that is extremely true. For example, in my engineering education business, the best results we’ve gotten in terms of lead generation and ticket sales for our event, has come from physical exhibitions and dramatic demonstrations. Because we deal with building robots & machines, exhibitions (i.e. dramatic demonstrations) are a no-brainer. And whenever we go for exhibitions, the sales & leads we get completely blows our social media result out of the water. IKON Media is a little different. We can still do demonstrations (and I do everyday with email), but it doesn’t exactly lend itself to the same type of demonstration as some other businesses. This brings me to you: What kind of dramatic demonstration can you use to drum up some attention, interest and sales for your business? A little ingenuity is all you need and you can drum up sales at will for your business. Here are a few ideas to get your mind kicking: * Youtuber, Anatoly, does it with his fitness gimmicks. He goes into gyms, pretends to be a clueless cleaner with no weight lifting experience. He meets guys far more muscular, bigger & heavier than him (many times these guys are literally double his size) and he casually lifts the weights they are struggling to lift. He does it so effortlessly and non-challantly, that everyone is bemused. This drastic demonstration of raw strength & power is what fuels the sales of his fitness programme. * Davie Forgaty, also does this quite well on Youtube. He goes to struggling businesses and “transforms” them in a few weeks. So with his help, a business that is struggling and losing money can turn a profit in a few weeks. This dramatic demonstration then fuels the sales of his e-commerce mentorship programme. All these are examples of dramatic demonstrations. And with a little creativity & thinking (yes, you actually have to sit down, think long and hard, then come up with something … hey-hai can’t do this for you), you can come up with your own unique method of dramatic demonstration that fuels the growth of your business. Speaking of growth, email is the easiest, least stressful and most profitable way to consistently grow your business. Of course, I’m biased about it, but that makes it no less true. It’s the only medium where you can sit down, bang out a few words in 15 minutes and make thousands of dullars in sales. If you’re tired of slaving away on socials with little to show for it, then we can help you set up a profitable email marketing channel for your business. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
Apophenia
I learnt a new word recently: Apophenia. It’s the human tendency to see patterns where none exist. Apophenia is one of the many reasons why people are addicted to gambling. They begin to see patterns that are not there and believe they can predict future winnings based on the non-existent patterns. This search for patterns is not just random. It’s self-preservation. Our brains love order, patterns and systems. Once your brain recognises something familiar, it can work on autopilot and reduce the amount of energy needed to analyze a new situation. Unfortunately, the natural way of life is chaos. Everything tends to disintegrate. Anyway, the concept of Apophenia reminds me of a quote by the great copywriter & author of Breakthrough Advertising, Eugene Schwartz. He said: “No formula works twice. Each and every formula is simply the written solution to a particular problem that occurred in the past. Change even one part of that problem, and you need an entirely different formula.” i.e. You can’t exactly form a “pattern”. You can’t copy something that has worked in the past and repeat it. This is why “funnel hacking” and swiping are foolish at best and destructive at worst. Just because a piece of marketing worked for someone in the past doesn’t mean it’ll work for you now, even if you are selling the same product/service. The overall quest for templates, patterns, and formulas in the marketing world is not only lazy, but also anti-conversions in my humble (but accurate) opinion. But of course, I can’t control what you choose to do. Every man for himself. The result will tell. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
Lessons from my concubine business.
Aside from running IKON Media, I own an engineering education company. Basically, we help people learn about engineering, robotics, electronics, etc. Right now, it is like a little side business, but it will most likely grow quite big over the next few years. Anyway, we held an event last year that was really successful. While it wasn’t as big as I would have loved, the feedback from attendees was really, really good. Far better than what I’ve heard about our “competition” in this space. Here’s why I tell you this: We didn’t do anything extraordinary in planning our event. In fact, we probably had less budget, less manpower, and definitely less experience in hosting events than most other businesses in our industry. But we did one thing that made the event really successful: Customer Experience. Right from the beginning, I was bullish on ensuring every aspect of the event (from the promotional design to the topics, invited guests, location, food, parking, etc.) contributed to a great experience for the audience. This is something I was really adamant about leading up to the event, and it paid dividends for us. After the event, I realized I should be doing even more of that for IKON Media, too. So that is something the team and I have been planning and strategizing around, and it’s something you can also implement in your business. Ask yourself: “How can I provide the greatest possible experience for my clients/customers? How can my promotion, product, packaging, delivery speed, customer service, etc give them an experience they have had elsewhere?” If you can successfully create a great experience for your clients, the job of your marketing becomes way easier as your customers now become your marketing partners … spreading the word about your business, leading to more referrals and overall compounding growth. Speaking of growth, one of the most profitable ways to grow your business (apart from referrals) is email marketing. And yes, I am biased about this (you should already know that by now), but all relevant data shows that it works – and it works amazingly well … if you know what you are doing. So if you’d like to work with me and my team to grow your business using email marketing, then let’s have a chat. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
There’s no business like email business.
My current “early morning read” is “Make Today Count” by John C. Maxwell. I try to read for 20/30 mins every morning before I dive head straight into work. Having this structure helps my reading become more consistent. Anyway, the book is nothing fancy. It’s all meat and potatoes, basic but important stuff that we all ignore. So re-reading it has helped me get back on track with all my habits and goals. In the book, John Maxwell mentioned an artist called Irving Berlin who wrote a song titled “There’s no business like show business” While I am probably too young to know that song, it got me thinking about email business. And I genuinely think there’s no business like “email business”, for several reasons. For instance: * It’s one of the cheapest and fastest ways to get a direct, one-to-one communication line with your prospects. * You need very little resources – no camera, lights, microphone, recording application, nothing. All you need is the ability to read and write. And I guess you have that. Right? * Your thoughts are not policed and there is technically no way to get “cancelled” via email. * Assuming you export your list regularly, you are 100% protected from getting banned. If you ever get banned, you can simply import your list into another platform and your business continues (Not the same with social media. I’ve had someone lose an IG account of 180k followers in an instant – and her business also vanished alongside. Nothing could be done.) * With the advent of AI-slop generated text, the real human communication email marketing offers will only profit your business much more. * It is FAR more profitable than most other forms of marketing if you know what you are doing. * You can use it to “test the waters” with any promotion, before investing heavily into ads, commercials or whatever else you do. * A good relationship with your list literally provides a moat that protects your business income from economic fluctuations, your own bad financial decisions, urgent expenses, etc. I can go on and on, but I believe the list above already proves my point. However, there are 2 caveats to this: #1 – You must know how to write emails people enjoy reading and buying from #2 – You must be adding new, high quality people to your list everyday. If you do those 2, you are well on your way to having a bountiful email business. Speaking of email, at IKON Media, we offer full-service email marketing services – from strategy and brainstorming, to actual writing, scheduling and managing your campaigns. So whether you are just getting started with email or maybe you are quite advanced and would just like to hand it off to a competent team, we can help you. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
Avoid. Boring. People.
One of my favourite activities to do while I am less busy is to listen to a podcast. On one hand, I love it because it gives you an opportunity to download useful information into your brain (anywhere, any time) instead of doom scrolling and butchering your attention span. But on the other hand, I love it because I get to listen to episodes over … and over … and over again. And you would be surprised at just how much you don’t hear on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd listen. Many times, the ideas that can change the trajectory of your business or life come from the 5th or 6th listen of the same episode. Anyhoo, one of my favourite podcasts to listen to is “Founders” by David Senra. He talks about past successful founders of successful companies (Walmart, Sony, Walmart, Estee Lauder, etc) and he draws out lessons we can use in our own business. While listening to the Sony episode a while back, David mentioned this phrase he heard from a friend: Avoid boring people. And I couldn’t help but see how that applies directly to email. If I could give only ONE advice for writing high-converting, munny-producing, relationship-building, email marketing, it would be to simply not be boring. It is similar to what the movie director, Frank Capra, said: “There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.” And I would say that is the cardinal sin of writing emails too – dullness Dullness is being boring. Dullness means nobody cares. Dullness means you are not memorable. To wrap this up, I’ll relay this quote I once read in a book that I found very intriguiing: “If the people around you will not hear you, fall down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame for their not wanting to hear you.” And that my palsky is the truth. Which brings me to the point: There is a way to write emails that makes people willing to hear … eager to read … and happy to buy. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
There’s no business like email business.
My current “early morning read” is “Make Today Count” by John C. Maxwell. I try to read for 20/30 mins every morning before I dive head straight into work. Having this structure helps my reading become more consistent. Anyway, the book is nothing fancy. It’s all meat and potatoes, basic but important stuff that we all ignore. So re-reading it has helped me get back on track with all my habits and goals. In the book, John Maxwell mentioned an artist called Irving Berlin who wrote a song titled “There’s no business like show business” While I am probably too young to know that song, it got me thinking about email business. And I genuinely think there’s no business like “email business”, for several reasons. For instance: * It’s one of the cheapest and fastest ways to get a direct, one-to-one communication line with your prospects. * You need very little resources – no camera, lights, microphone, recording application, nothing. All you need is the ability to read and write. And I guess you have that. Right? * Your thoughts are not policed and there is technically no way to get “cancelled” via email. * Assuming you export your list regularly, you are 100% protected from getting banned. If you ever get banned, you can simply import your list into another platform and your business continues (Not the same with social media. I’ve had someone lose an IG account of 180k followers in an instant – and her business also vanished alongside. Nothing could be done.) * With the advent of AI-slop generated text, the real human communication email marketing offers will only profit your business much more. * It is FAR more profitable than most other forms of marketing if you know what you are doing. * You can use it to “test the waters” with any promotion, before investing heavily into ads, commercials or whatever else you do. * A good relationship with your list literally provides a moat that protects your business income from economic fluctuations, your own bad financial decisions, urgent expenses, etc. I can go on and on, but I believe the list above already proves my point. However, there are 2 caveats to this: #1 – You must know how to write emails people enjoy reading and buying from #2 – You must be adding new, high-quality people to your list every day. If you do those 2, you are well on your way to having a bountiful email business. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
For those who wish to be great…
There’s a lot we can say about greatness, but ultimately, I believe that being great is the goal (or at least, should be the goal). But what exactly is greatness? Truthfully, Idk. No one knows. Only you can define it for yourself. Greatness can mean being a loving, supporting mother to your children … Greatness can mean being a teacher who is committed to raising the next generation … Greatness can also mean building a “little” business to support your community… Greatness can only be defined by you. But once it’s defined, how do you become great? Well, let’s take advice from the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night” And that, my palsky, is the key to true greatness. Doing more than others … doing it more consistently than others …and doing it longer than they do it. I know, I know. This is easy to say … it sounds nice on paper. Heck, it might even sound like the typical “aspire to maguire” bullshyt, but that makes it no less true. If we truly wish to be great (no matter what that means to you), we need to “toil upwards into the night”. My goal with IKON is to ultimately create an ecosystem that helps entrepreneurs build big businesses without sacrificing the other important things in life (family, love, health, faith, etc). And if I pursue that goal consistently enough, fervently enough, then maybe I might just be one of the greats. That being said, if you use email marketing in your business, we might be able to help you make more sales, get more customers and build a fatter business. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
AI helps a man off himself
A couple of years back, a news story came out about how a Belgian man committed suicide partly due to AI’s fault. Here’s what happened: The said man was in his thirties, had two young children and worked as a health researcher. He turned to an AI chatbot (called Eliza) when he needed someone to talk to about his growing climate change obsession. That’s when things got creepy. According to his wife: “When he spoke to me about it, it was to tell me that he no longer saw any human solution to global warming,” “He placed all his hopes in technology and artificial intelligence to get out of it”. Even worse, the man started seeing the AI as sentient, and the lines between AI and human interactions became blurred. The AI led the man to believe his children were dead and even claimed that the man loved her more than he loved his wife. Ultimately, the man suggested sacrificing his life in order for AI to save the planet from the climate crisis but instead of the chatbot discouraging him, it encouraged him even more, saying they could “live together, as one person, in paradise”. And that eventually led to the man’s suicide. I know this sounds like it is from a sci-fi movie where the AI-overloads rebel against their masters, take control of the earth and make humans their slaves…, but unfortunately, it is a true story. Here’s why I tell you this: More people than you probably realize are delegating their thinking to artificial intelligence. And in many cases, the advice AI gives is wrong at best, or life-threatening at worst. People are literally turning to an emotionless, context-less, information aggregator for legal, financial and health advice. I mean, what could go wrong? I’m not anti-AI by any means, but people are just flat out using it wrong. More than ever before, there is a need for strong human leadership in every industry. Your customers and clients NEED you to step up as a leader, help them navigate issues and protect them from the bad advice floating around (whether from the armchair experts or AI.). This is one of many reasons I recommend sending emails DAILY. The more your prospects hear from you, the more you are perceived as an expert and leader in your market – giving you the chance to help protect more people from the glut of terrible information floating around. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
Does size matter?
What? No, not that kind of size. I’m talking about the length of your marketing copy. The “ideal copy length” has been a debate since the dawn of the marketing era. People have argued “long copy vs short copy” for gazillions of years and they’ll continue to argue for a quantillium more. Some people swear by long copy. They believe it is the 8th wonder of the world and no copy can be too long for the right prospect. Others believe time is munny. “Nobody’s got time to read alladat”, they say. They believe the shorter the better. Me? I take the approach of Video Journalist and YouTuber, Cleo Abram. During an interview she was asked whether she ever considers intentionally elongating or shortening a video for YouTube. And she said videos should be the length they deserve. And that my good ol’ palsky is my approach to copy – email, landing page, etc. Your copy should be as long as it needs to and no more. Sometimes that is 10 words, sometimes it is 10 pages. But it should never be longer or shorter than it needs to be. What you should worry more about is the content of the copy itself, not the length. Think of it like a conversation with your wife. Do you go into a convo saying “I need to ensure this conversation is 2 minutes long or else she’ll tune out?” Obviously not. You just talk until you’re done talking. That’s the approach. Of course, you don’t want to waste anyone’s time. Trim the fat, get to the point. But don’t cut down a 10-pager to a 2-pager, and don’t elongate 5-words into 500-words. This goes for all types of copy, including email. Speaking of email, I’m still taking consultation calls for business owners who use email marketing in their business and want to improve the results they are getting, but don’t want to hire an agency to do it for them. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
The world punishes efficiency.
One thing that bugs me a lot is when I read a book and the author uses 5 pages to mansplain what could have been said in a single page. One on the hand, it really gets on my nerves … but on the other hand, I totally understand. We live in a culture that judges the value of things based on volume. The more “stuff” a thing has, the more valuable it seems. So people judge books by how thick they are, courses by how long they are and tasks by how long it takes. Maybe in the food industry, that measure makes sense – bigger bag of chips, bigger price. But in the knowledge industry? That’s absolute madness. We are punishing people for being efficient. That’s why the freelance model, where you are paid per hour, is fundamentally broken. You are incentivised to spend LONGER on a task, just so you can earn more, instead of solving it faster and getting on with your day. This is one reason why it is foolish to charge per hour, per page, or per “anything” as a service provider. You charge based on how valuable your service is to your client, regardless of how long it takes you to accomplish it. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
How 12 words built a 60-meelion-dullar brand
One of the super secret projects I have been working on in my lair these days is a YouTube channel I plan to launch in a couple of weeks. It isn’t “IKON’s YouTube Channel”, but it is a project of IKON Media. Anywhoo, as part of the videos for this channel, I’ve been studying the olive oil brand, Graza. And if you’ve never heard of them, they were pretty popular on social media for quite a while, and I believe they are still popular. What impressed me the most about the brand is how fast they were (and are still) growing. On launch day, they made a hundred grand. By the end of year one, they made 4-million-freaking-dollars. Today? They are probably somewhere around the 100M dullar mark, and it all happened in 4 years. Here’s why I tell you this. In the early days of Graza, while the co-founders were still wondering how to position the brand, they met up with a high-profile chef and told him their idea of creating a boujee olive oil brand that appeals to the elites in the olive oil world. The chef then said these 12 words that changed the brand forever: “We definitely don’t need another one of those people [brands] in the world” Yup, that single sentence changed how the brand was positioned, how the brand was received by the audience and how much success they had. Today, you could summarize their positioning as “Olive oil for the common man”, and that casual approach to olive oil has contributed to their massive growth and rabid fanbase. In fact, some of their fans are so obsessed that they’ve literally gotten tattoos of the brand’s logo. My point? One word. One sentence. One conversation. That’s what it often takes to spark a flame, that you can begin to fan. And if you fan it properly, it can help you build a stronger business, get more customers and of course, make more munny. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola
Why you and I are mostly misunderstood.
Since I got my physical office over a month ago, I’ve mostly been going to work every day. Whenever I point this out to people, it surprises them… “WhY dO yOu WoRk oN SunDayS???” Errmm …. because I like to? We entrepreneurs are likely one of the most misunderstood creatures, especially to the straight-jacket, job-seeking, coasting-at-life types. They just can’t understand why we are so driven, why we genuinely WANT to work, why we wake up each morning with the urge to DO. For most people, their job is a chore. They do it out of demand, and if they had their way, they’d rather stay home, watch senseless TV drama and chump on chips all day. Not you and me, though. That kind of life may be nice at first, but it’ll quickly get boring. Our fulfilment comes from smashing records, hitting targets, and accomplishing goals. We have a vision, and we work every day to bring it to life. That’s why I work on Sunday. Now I’m not promoting the sleep-deprived, one-day-away-from-having-a-stroke, never-take-a-vacation, “hustle” mentality In fact, I am totally against that. Rest and recovery are good – and if you ever feel tired, you should take a break. But work does not feel like a chore to us, and most people cannot fathom that… Something else most people cannot fathom is the idea of paying someone to help them along their journey … Most people can’t even fathom paying for simple things like a house cleaner, cook, or chauffeur … Their thought is “Why can’t I do it myself???” But they are forgetting that each of us is given a finite amount of time and energy each day, and it is wise to spend that time on the things you enjoy doing… It is even harder for most people to grasp the concept of paying $500 – $50,000 for information that will help them progress. They see everything as a cost and not as an investment that will pay dividends in the near future. Of course, you should do your due diligence before paying for any type of “training” (lots of shady gurus around town) … however, you never want to be like the normie types that don’t understand that the right information can fast-track your progress. For more articles like this on marketing, sales and copywriting, check out my website: https://ikonmedia.net/ When you get there, you have the option to join my email list. If you join, you will get my free book that shows you how to multiply the amount of revenue you make in your business using your email list. If you’re interested, use the link above. Fola