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The Art Of Just Trying Stuff

As marketers though, we think we’re rather strategic-thinking people and pride ourselves as such.

It’s pretty serious business. 

And usually, someone’s money is on the line.

So we tend many times to play it safe.

I can be guilty of that on rare occasions.

I mean being reserved is in my British nature–but I’ve overcome that a long time ago. 

(I’ll share how in a sec.)

But marketers like Gary Halbert didn’t see it like that.

I can remember listening to tapes of him telling story after story of him just trying stuff.

He’d live for it!

Scraping some money together just to test an idea to see if it could be rolled out big time.

Many times his ideas were off the wall.

Jay Abraham is the same way.

He’s always trying stuff. Even crazy stuff that he knows better not to.

For instance, one time he took his list to task for not buying one of his products.

This was years ago and I still remember it.

He wrote this email called:

 “You don’t know jack”.

A third of his list unsubscribed over that one!

I can also remember a time, when one of his seminars was doing poorly and he totally stopped his launch midstream, he wrote an ungodly long email titled:

 “Houston, we have a problem”

I mean, who would do that?

Jay would. And did.

It was a gamechanger. And it put 1000 people in the ballroom for the seminar.

But like I talked about previously, he and Gary Halbert were bold.

They tried stuff. They’re just wanted to get a reaction.

It’s where I got the idea of testing wide swings of ideas as opposed to obsessing over the details and standard copywriting stuff.

Sometimes, I’ll agonize over, for instance, the minutia of a subject line and test that.

Other times, I pretty much say “f–k it, let’s try something wild!” You know, something you would never in a million years think of trying…

That’s what I want to test.

It may work and it may not, but that’s not the point.

The point is to get a reaction.  

Of course, you want it to be successful, of course, you want it to convert.

But if you just got a reaction, and perhaps no reaction whatsoever, it’s still a good day at the office.

(Like Edison’s 9000 tests when inventing the light bulb, you know what doesn’t work.)

And after over ten years in the conversion optimization game, that’s what I’ve learned.

It’s about THE REACTION.

Because you just never know–until you test.

Until you try. Until you experiment a little.

Creativity aside, the only thing keeping you from doing this, I suspect?

Permission.

Permission to fail. Permission to mess up. Permission to look stupid for a bit. Permission to lose a little bit of money.

So you have my permission. 😉

Gary did it. Jay still does it. And you can, too.

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