By Sean Platt, July 2020
I hate Internet Marketers.
Don’t take it personally. I’m not talking about you, at all.
Because of how we met, I already know I can trust you.
You’re here because of André, so your judgment is sound. André is phenomenal at marketing on the internet, but I’d never consider him an Internet Marketer.
I’ve built email autoresponders, written long copy sales letters, and sold millions of dollars worth of products online. But I’d never consider myself an Internet Marketer, either.
I’m a Storyteller, same as André.
These days I’ve moved from the world of conversion to full-time fiction. Before that, I served time as a ghostwriter, writing marketing copy for “gurus” who couldn’t have cared less about their audiences. I was too green to see much of it at the time, my eyes were opened when I heard some of these people laughing about their open rates, yucking it up about some of their idiot buyers, paying for products they never even used.
Only then did I realize how little these supposed authorities cared about the people in their audience. They weren’t in the business of relationships, they were in the business of milking their leads. Riding their lists like rented mules.
When my friend Danny turned me onto André’s work (almost a decade ago!), it was like seeing a mountain sky full of stars after too long in a smog-ridden city. There was a purity to André’s marketing. An honesty. A drive to do BIG things by way of simplicity. I’d seen list sizes that looked like telephone numbers, so I knew that bigger wasn’t better, and I was dying to hear what this guy said he could do with tiny subscriber bases of 100 emails or so.
It wasn’t magic. It was knowing how people think about things and giving them an honest path to a solution. Along that road André told stories, same as any solid raconteur from days of yore, same as story has sold the soap since long before Procter & Gamble made it official.
Open loops, Soap Opera Sequences, character arcs — this was the language of my world, perfectly blended into easy-breezy-can’t-stop-wanting-to-read-it marketing philosophy. I understood why my sales letters and emails converted as well as they did, and how to improve those that didn’t, but now here was a gentleman marketer laying it all out for anyone who cared enough to implement a philosophy that might require more upfront work, but would pay dividends in audience bonding.
And best of all? The dude was putting his money where his mouth was, delivering the information in the exact same way he expected his students to execute on their own.
The original ARM is still my favorite online product I’ve ever purchased. I couldn’t stop talking about it. Not just in masterminds around people who would care, but also around anyone who might have been interested. I didn’t want affiliate commissions. Seriously, I might have told my hairdresser. I for sure told my wife. And a couple of years later, when I was in New York and meeting my future business and writing partner for the first time, I blabbed on about ARM to him as well.
Johnny’s a storyteller, too. And knows a thing or ten about marketing. André blew him away by explanation alone. Years later, he and I referred to ARM as “our song.” That conversation with Johnny led to a lot of amazing things in my life. Amazon dropped the Kindle on the world and made it easy for storytellers like us to skip the publishers and reach our market directly. A way to reach our customers without a middleman. Probably a lot like you’re trying to do. Johnny and I took a dive into the earliest days of guerrilla indie-publishing.
Coming from a business background, I couldn’t help but wade through the industry as a maverick observer and occasional change agent. Together, Johnny and I wrote the book Write. Publish. Repeat., the first self-publishing guidebook blockbuster, if there is such a thing.
We’ve seen every way there is to make money with books, and guess which one beats them all? Which one is the only way to build a sustainable author career?
That’s right. Email lists. Same now as a decade ago when I first bought and fell in love with ARM.
Like all the other massive platforms, Amazon changes their rules overnight. They expel authors for no reason. Recently, I had to spend an hour on the phone every day for a couple of weeks, doing my best to fix a mistake that they made. Our little publishing company was largely out of business during that time. And worse, Amazon could have refused to correct the error, or expelled us from the platform entirely.
If that happened we’d be out of business … if not for email.
Email lists aren’t just your most powerful marketing tool (assuming your communication is relationship-based), they’re the best possible way to future-proof your business.
We don’t have any courses or high-ticket items. Our product prices range from FREE to $5.99. And still, three guys writing together sold more than a million dollars in book sales.
My business has changed all these years later, but the principles have not. I still write with Johnny, and I still work with Danny, the dude who introduced me to André’s work. Now our little studio has many storytellers, and it’s our job to make each of them six-figure authors. Email is a large part of how we do that.
In the time since I first bought ARM, I’ve been fortunate enough to know André in person. He has an inexhaustible kindness and a soft-spoken intelligence; two qualities I can never tire of.
I promise, you’re in the right place. I’ve met a lot of internet marketing frogs, but André is a storytelling prince, who cares about his audience, and the audiences his audience is serving.
André is a triple threat. Marketer, Copywriter, and Storyteller.
There is no one in the world I would trust more for email advice, and ARM is the first product I would recommend to absolutely anyone wanting to build an online business, regardless of their assets or niche.
Sean Platt
Sterling & Stone: July 2020
NEXT: Art of Email Introduction