(Swipe, Thought, Uplifting, Picture, Interesting, Drawing)

This is a fun email for Friday May 27th, 2022. Hope you like it 🙂

🎤 Listen to this email here:

Swipe:

The famous old-school copywriter Gary Halbert made his first million dollars at age 32 with a promotion called: The Coat of Arms Letter.

This was the one-page letter to specific last names in the phonebook where he would sell "Coat of Arms" family crest you could buy through the mail (this was 1971 and that was the only way to buy):

The product people received was literally a printed family crest.

This was an example of the front & back of the Coat of Arms you would get:

Shoutout to @eston_esau who sent me these pictures of his grandpa's framed Coat of Arms!

Thought:

Some types of media take longer per minute to make than others.

For example:

Production Time -vs- Final Product ratio:
• MOVIE: 12 months for 2 hours (4,300:1)
• SONG: 100 hours for 3 minutes (2,000:1)
• PODCAST: 2 hours for 1 hour (2:1)
• LIVE VIDEO: 1 hour for 1 hour (1:1)

Uplifting:

This weekend we did a fun Spartan Race with some friends and it was a great time!

I'm MAINLY just happy I didn't hurt myself! 😬

It was 10k of running with 25 obstacles and challenges in between.

We rented a nice house near the lake where the race was being held:

Goofing off before the race

The morning of the race, having some snacks and getting ready

We arrive at the ranch where it's held

We're all still clean and about to start!

The race begins! Carrying a bucket fill of rocks

There were lots of monkey-bar-type hanging obstacles

My friend Noah Kagan running through mud

We all completed the race!

Jumped in the lake to clean off

Enjoyed the rest of the weekend hanging with friends

It was a good time, good friends, and we made a full weekend out of it on the lake 🙂

Picture:

On my iPhone always use a few unknown settings to make better pics.

These 5 iOS photo modifiers make your pictures look WAY better (and doesn't wash out the photo)!

On almost any photo you take, apply these:
• Increase "Brilliance"
• Increase "Shadows"
• Increase "Vibrance"
• Increase "Definition"
• Straighten & Crop

Here's an example:

Here's an example of a photo ruined by lots of backlight, and simply increasing the exposure just washes out the picture, but if you do those 5 modifiers the photo becomes great:

This photo was almost unusable, but 20 seconds of:
• Increase "Brilliance"
• Increase "Shadows"
• Increase "Vibrance"
• Increase "Definition"
• Straighten & Crop

...and we're in business!

Toggling these 5 settings is often the difference between a "meh" photo and an awesome photo. The magic is in the post-editing!

Interesting:

A Copywriting Course member wanted to build an email list for sneaker deals:

↳ Progress for emails was slow, so he started his own sub-Reddit instead!
↳ 3,000 subs first month! 200,000 views. 2 viral hits.
↳ He tried a promotion but it failed.
↳ Then he made a Top 10 post, it hit and brought in revenue!

↳ The sub-Reddit is now 6,100 members in about ~2.5 months!
↳ He's been turning those members into email subs (currently 140+)
↳ Is now releasing a paid database of sneaker deals to them.

Kind of neat how email collection was going slow, but starting a Sub-Reddit was an immediate hit!

See Sub-Reddit: https://Reddit.com/r/midsoledeals/
Follow progress: https://Copywritingcourse.com/blogs/50 (you can see a full live-updated journal of progress here)

Drawing:

Here's a cool little artifact from the 1990's:

A Simpsons drawing guide that Matt Groening created for the animators:

He had these pages that would guide the writers to create a consistent product like he liked:

This is pretty common in the animation world.

For example this is "Mickey Mouse's Hand Guides" from Walt Disney:

Cool to see these behind-the-scenes guides 🙂

Hope you enjoyed these little tidbits, have a happy Friday! 
Sincerely, 
Neville Medhora - CopywritingCourse.com | @NevMed

(Swipe, Thought, Uplifting, Picture, Interesting, Drawing)

This is a fun email for Friday May 20th, 2022. Hope you like it 🙂

🎤 Listen to this email here:

Swipe:

This is a cool chart sent along with a toaster that visually shows the different heat settings.

The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 don’t really mean much to the user, but showing them like this instantly conveys what each setting does!

This is an example of simple and effective copy visuals!

Thought:

Movie posters are basically one-pager advertisements, however they often contain NOTHING but the title of the movie and an image.

For example this Spider-Man movie poster just says "Spider-Man" and some action shots of the main characters:

They can get away with this because everyone already knows what Spider-Man is! All they have to do is show the new movie is coming out, and an audience will follow.

Another sequence of posters that needs very little explanation or words is James Bond.

The franchise is so popular that just showing a sparse poster is enough, like this Golden Eye poster:

...or this Spectre poster with nothing but a cool picture of James Bond:

Now some movie posters need to add more context to the poster because the general public may not know much about the character, like this awesome Kamen Rider poster.

Notice the extra story text on the left and right:

Or when Scarface came out it's poster had additional context explaining the story because no one knew this character:

Uplifting:

One of the absolute simplest time-saving tricks I’ve seen bars do in recent years is:

“We’ll keep your tab open but give your credit card back right away.”

When they do this you can just leave, and at the end of night they’ll close your tab and do an automatic 20% tip.

Customers love this because they can leave anytime without spending 10 minutes trying to close a tab.

Bartenders love this because they get 20% gratuity on every check.

Bars love this because bartenders are filling drink orders, not settling tabs.

This is such a small change, but yields big results!

Picture:

Totally random, but these are the 5 different light settings my home office scrolls through depending on my mood:

It's all controlled through a Phillips Hue remote, with 4 Phillips Hue Play lights, 2 Phillips Hue color bulbs inside lamps, and 4 LED lamps for some extra lighting power when on calls.

It all looks like this in the day:

...and looks like this at night:

Interesting:

I couldn't believe this actually works! Notice the difference in reading speed on the below text:

Text on left: Normal text. Text on right: “Bionic Reading” text with specifically bolded letters.

Watch how fast you can read the text on the right with the bolded letters!

It's kind of wild how much faster you can read the right side with these specifically bolded letters!

Drawing:

I've utilized drawing little stick figures and such for years, and it's always been difficult....but over the year's it's become easier.

My original drawings were done on tablet computers or an iPad Pro and then edited in Photoshop:

Then for a while I used a Google Presentation file with different body parts of StickGuy (heads, eyes, noses, mouths, bodies)....so I could just drag-n-drop them into different permutations like this:

Then I was using Canva a lot, and you can draw + add images:

Or you could use Canva pre-existing templated stuff:

Now I'll often edit and create images directly within ConvertKit (what I'm using to send this email):

Making images used to be this very skilled thing few people could do, but now it's become so much more accessible with better tools!

Hope you enjoyed these little tidbits, have a happy Friday!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora - CopywritingCourse.com | @NevMed