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| | | Today: Zoom's good deed for the season, the dark horse of the Antitrust Olympics, and the hacker who saved the internet all by himself.
But first...
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| | | Russ can teach you how to sell anything.
But first, you need to understand... |
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| 1️⃣ Selling doesn't have to feel sleazy. In fact, it shouldn't feel sleazy. But it often does, and Russ will dispel some myths and misconceptions causing this.
2️⃣ Selling is helping. A lot of marketers are held back by the feeling that a sale comes at the customer's expense. Perhaps in some literal sense, yes—but we forget the true service we provide them, not only with the product being sold but with the marketing itself.
3️⃣ Copywriting is the key. It's not everything, but it's maybe the single most important tool on the tool belt of sales. Words matter... and they really work. |
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| | | (Yes, it will be recorded in case you can't be there live.)
Lifetime access is $295 $95 until the end of Thursday! Hop on that big-money discount before it's gone, yo. |
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| | | | | | | How YouTube Has Dodged the Congressional Bullet |
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| First, an (admittedly unusual) editorial warning: if you're not a Wired subscriber, think twice before clicking the next link. We issue this warning because we link to an awesome Wired story at the bottom of this mail and we wouldn't want you to miss out—especially where (1) they limit the number of free articles you can read each month and (2) we couldn't "nutshell" the other article, but we can summarize the high points of this one.
Having said that, Wired did raise an astute question:
How has YouTube avoided all of the recent antitrust and election scrutiny, even though it's technically the most widely used social-media platform in the country? People like Zuck and Jack Dorsey keep getting called up to Capitol Hill, but Susan Wojcicki—CEO of YouTube and former Google Garage Landlord—has never once been called to testify to Congress.
There are a handful of divergent (though not exclusive) answers in play:
1️⃣ Video is more complicated than text. This is to say that the problems of the day, no matter how you define them, are easier to find literally anywhere except YouTube—since YouTube's content is all video and you couldn't possibly parse all of the content, especially not with the sheer volume of stuff added every single day.
2️⃣ Journalists and politicians (the people throwing flags) aren't on YouTube. They're far likelier to be on Twitter or Facebook. Thus, there's a sort of selection bias happening in this public discourse, as the decision-makers and vocal opinions are both focused on the spots they know best.
3️⃣ More broadly, public focus tends to narrow to the biggest and most obvious problems. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are, again, far likelier to come to mind first—not just because they're widely used, but because these platforms have been at the center of major crises in the past. YouTube does not have any scandal equivalent to, say, Cambridge Analytica.
4️⃣ YouTube's PR strategy has been, in a phrase, to stay low and avoid any sort of drama. They have, in other words, banked very hard upon #3 above; since there are several big players in the social-media pool, all of them rowdier, YouTube has just kept its mouth shut and stayed out of the way. By and large, this has worked (for a long time).
5️⃣ It's easier to criticize what has been done than what hasn't. Of course, as we all know, there are definitely such things as criminal negligence and lying by omission. But we also know that inaction is harder to criticize—simply because (attempted) action can then be picked apart. It's hard to analyze a thing that doesn't exist or didn't happen; as negligent as it might be, YouTube's lack of action this year has been smart because it has avoided giving the press any ammunition—or really, any target at all. |
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| | | | | a ZOOM GIFT WORTHY of THANKSGIVING: This is simple news, but nice to hear: on Thanksgiving Day, Zoom will be lifting their 40-minute limit for free meetings so that people can be with their families. No word yet on whether competing services will rise to their offer and meet it. Good on you, Zoom. Nothing further to report.
the SMART MARKETER PODCAST FOR, y'know, SMART MARKETERS: They've got some sharp cookies over there at Smart Marketer, and we're excited to hear what they have to say now that they're saying it (and recording it). Check out their brand-new podcast (!) — and while you're on that page, entice yourself with their giveaway sweepstakes promoting said podcast. There's a ton of really cool stuff you could win whether you follow through and subscribe to the podcast or not. (We're actually subscribing.)
Pro tip: going forward, listen close for John Grimshaw's bone-dry Texan wit, because you'll miss some golden puns if you're not paying attention. 😆
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| | | | | | | Part 1: Four Reasons They Leave + Three Reasons We Care |
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| It's easy to celebrate new subscribers, but it's also easy to ignore the subscribers who leave. It's not happening if you're not looking, right? 🙈
More realistically: you're generally aware that people unsubscribe from things, that lists erode naturally over time like rocks in a river—but when you look at your unsub numbers, you don't see anything alarming. So you move on, perhaps satisfied that you bothered to check at all.
Either way, let's be honest: we've all been intimidated by these details. It's easy to feel like unsubs are the customers you've failed, or worse, made into enemies of the business. At that point, reviewing the details and reading any comments can sound like a pointless exercise in negativity... so why bother with any more than a passing glance to look for fires?
Three reasons to pay closer attention:
💎 Simply put, subscribers are valuable (especially via email). If your checking account were leaking, wouldn't you want to patch it as quickly and effectively as possible? Of course you would.
🗳 Data created during the unsubscribe process is valuable. To name two ways: (A) it's a rare moment of insight into your customer's mind, since they can indicate why they did something right after they did it, and (B) it allows you to break your unsub data into meaningful groups, which we'll discuss more in a minute.
🛡 The comments are rarely as "bad" as you might fear. In fact, you can learn a lot (and get useful ideas) from many of them.
It's important to remember that people can un-subscribe for many different reasons. Some reasons for unsubscribing are completely beyond your control or have nothing to do with brand activity; other reasons will reflect directly upon the brand's choices and behaviors. That's a hugely important difference for making informed marketing decisions.
Here are four big umbrella reasons that people unsubscribe from lists:
Attrition ⛏ They got worn down. Whether it took two years or two days, you were hammering their inbox just a little too much for their liking. Demotion 👎 They're no longer interested because hopes and expectations haven't been met. They've been disappointed by some part of the experience or, conversely, more impressed elsewhere. Expiration ⌛️ They've lost their reason for being on your list in the first place and so they're moving on. Inflammation 🔥 They're leaving because you pissed them off. These are the rarest in our experience, but they can leave strong impressions.
Next time, in Part 2, we'll discuss in greater detail how you can analyze unsub data to see groups like the above and understand what's happening to people on their way(s) out!
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| I'LL TAKE 'Hackronyms' FOR $100, ALEX
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| | | Jeopardy Clue: In this form of cyberattack, a hacker or group of hackers will attempt to disable a website or web domain by overwhelming it with traffic from many separate sources. |
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| Answer... errm... question at the bottom of this email. |
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| | | | | the Hacker Who Single-Handedly Saved the Internet |
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| As we've mentioned, we read a ton of stuff to fuel this newsletter.
Really, if we're being strict, we skim a ton of stuff and then go back to (fully) read the most promising pieces. Still, this isn't a quick process, so we try to stay efficient and keep things moving.
But every now and then, we find something that stops us dead in our tracks—something we have to fully consume right then and there. Today's exemplar not only accomplished this, but at full feature length (~20 minutes to read).
It's the story of Marcus Hutchins, who managed to stop the worst cyberattack in world history, by himself, at the age of 22. That was interesting enough to get our attention, but there's a twist: he was once a black-hat hacker himself.
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| | | Image Credit: Janelle Barone, Wired |
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| The article is structured very much as a story—it reads far more like a Steven Soderbergh movie than any tech writer's analysis—and from very early on, we got hooked on wanting to know what would happen next. 😲
A choice quote (not from Hutchins) for identifying a big theme here:
"We are all morally complex people. For most of us, anything good we ever do comes either because we did bad before or because other people did good to get us out of it, or both." |
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| We're more than just a newsletter.
Feast your 👀 on our digital marketing workshops!
- Lead Generation Mastery: Predictably build an email list of qualified prospects for B2B or B2C sales [Registration Fee: $295]
- Email Newsletter Mastery: How to Plan, Launch, and Virally Grow an Email Newsletter that Nurtures Leads and Drives Sales [Registration Fee: $295]
- How to Build an SEO Magnet: A 12-Step process for creating content that attracts free traffic, leads, and conversions from search engines. [Registration Fee: $295]
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| 'JEOPARDY' QUESTION: What is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack?
The idea here is actually fairly simple: send enough people to one spot all at the same time, then wait (usually not long). The cumulative weight of all the traffic will either (A) eat up all of the site's allotted bandwidth, (B) cause the domain host to throttle site activity, or (C) just break the site/server outright and cause it to crash. In any case, the site goes down.
You don't technically need to be a hacker to accomplish this; you can do it "organically" if you can coordinate enough real people in real time. Having said that, a single hacker can create the effect of many thousands of people; if that intrigues you, read the story above about the hacker who saved the internet. 🤓
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