I learned a lot about pools from this simple Instagram Ad...the combo of showing an unfinished pool without water then highlighting (with text and arrows) the different parts of it was quite educational!

I love simple things, that teach a lot.

Sprinkling in some "Social Proof" is one of the simplest additions to sales copy.
Look at this email footer, and how it gains so much credibility by adding a few words of Social Proof!

I personally think:

Newsletters are just blogs!

Newsletters are usually a bunch of short posts and thoughts listed out. This is what most blogs were.

The thing that newsletters solved versus blogs: DISTRIBUTION.

When you publish a blog post it enters the void...

...but lets say you create this newsletter and send it out:

....when you publish the newsletter via email it gets read by 30% to 60% of your list!

The founder of an A.I. company (Paul Yacoubian of Copy.ai) sent me this awesome Olivetti Lettera 32 manual typewriter from the 1960's!

Watching the inner workings of this thing is fascinating. The amount of parts and precision for all this to work is pretty crazy:

I've been typing on it for fun...there's definitely a learning curve (some letters are in different places so there's frequent spelling mistakes)!

One interesting observation: Since you are manually putting ink on paper, and can't erase, you think VERY HARD before typing! 

This is the opposite of a computer where typing has no penalty.
 

I'm currently reading this great book about Prohibition, the banning of all alcohol from 1920 to 1933:

Originally it was called "The Temperance Movement" which pushed for moderate drinking and avoiding raging drunkenness.

But like most well-meaning movements it got hijacked by radicals in the group. The radicals pushed for fully abolishing alcohol, and they passed a law that was wayyyy too restrictive (it banned all sales and distribution or alcohol).

Eventually the law was repealed in 1933 because Prohibition massively backfired and caused MORE drinking and crime.

"Copywork" is the act of hand-copying a piece of marketing to better understand how the author laid it out and wrote it. 

We recently did this with one of my favorite types of marketing: The classic "Before and After" format, which in a small space shows a transformation:

We asked people to hand-draw this ad and got tons of people joining in the exercise!

You can do the exercise yourself here:

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...if you respond to this email with your hand-drawn picture, I'll add it to the post!