A “quickie” crash course in business World-Building

True story: Many years ago (2014’ish) a woman named Natasa Lekic, CEO of a New York firm that helps authors create a book and then connects them with sought-after editors in the industry, sent me an email that said two things: 1. She’s NOT a fan of my emails. 2. But she read my Zombie Cop novel (the first book in my Enoch Wars series), said it was good, and that it has a great sense of pacing & World-Building. She even graciously offered to connect me with an agent. (That’s not what her company does—so nothing in it for her.) Anyway, that got me thinking about something hardly any other marketers think about. And that is the idea of World-Building. To me, it’s very natural after mindlessly spending my youth in cahoots with a couple other kids, who also had no other friends or social lives, playing Dungeons & Dragons and other RPG’s. Building worlds, characters, adventures, narratives, and story arcs comes very natural from that. And it was just as natural to bring that to my marketing. And to my brand. And, yes, to my business as a whole. Like, for example: When I ran an insanely addictive—according to many of its members, at least—Facebook group called elBenbo’s Lair. I built a “world” full of surprises, rules, laws, languages, customs, characters, storylines, plot twists, and other such hijinx that made it so it wasn’t unusual to have someone call it “real life” with everything outside the group being ignored. Sometimes there were so many concurrent Thread-holes, discussions, debates, and arguments going on people would post stuff on their main timeline they’d rather the public not see, thinking they were safely in my group, only to have their friends and family think they let the cuckoo out of the clock. Such was the power of building my own world. Here’s something else: I once taught this topic to Email Players subscriber Brian Kurtz’s prestigious Mastermind. And it’s like I told them: In my experience, World-Building can not only create legions of fans & customers and potentially make your business all-but “cancel-proof”… but it can also help grow a business where making sales can become easy & automatic vs a constant struggle & chore—endlessly trying to gameify, hack, and manipulate your way into peoples’ wallets. World-Building can mean having a place people want to be and fight to stay inside of, instead a place you need to desperately try to keep people from leaving. In other words: It’s a privilege to be in your World, not a right. It’s also an adventure from their boring lives. And, yes, it can be a platform unto itself. Do it right and in essence you can become your own Platform. That is why I believe—even after your death, if you do World-Building correctly—your business can possibly never be completely cancelled, de-platformed, suppressed, manipulated, or controlled by some overreaching big tech or government entity. And perhaps best of all: World-Building—again, when done right—means putting your business in a position where you are not being pushy or selling as much as you are giving customers the opportunity to buy. World-Building can give you the kind of super tight bond with your fans, customers, clients, and audience no other “marketer” screwing around on Facebook and obsessing over a spreadsheet can ever hope to have. Especially as they reactively spank out their silly little offers while bragging and virtue signaling about nonsense in a desperate attempt to try to stay relevant—lucky to get even a fraction of the engagement, response, and sales you can get if you but build a world people want to inhabit, stay in, and buy within. In a word, World-Building equals what I have heard Dan Kennedy describe as: “Omnipresence.” In my way of thinking, the best way to have Omnipresence is to be omnipresent. And in my opinion & experience: The best way to do that is a World people want to be in their every waking hour. More: You can’t “swipe” World-Building from someone else. As I’ve had to tell a few people, I can’t even show many examples of it outside of observing what they see me doing. It’s like saying, “look at Disney, that’s World-Building!” without any context, because there are thousands of variables—all unique just to Walt in many cases—involved. Same with other great World-builders both dead & alive. It ain’t something you look at piecemeal. It’s something you look at as a whole. Especially when you understand the main intricacies of how it works. Still more: This is not something you build in a day or a month. It requires literally months & years & decades (I’ve been at this for 21+ years) of thinking about it, applying it, and growing it. You start with one “cog” in your world, and build from there. And even then it is never really “finished” if you are doing it right. In other words: Ain’t no checklist for how to do it. And no feedback is required. Building a world transcends feedback. And probably a lot of feedback should be ignored anyway. It’s YOUR world, not whoever is giving you feedback’s world, after all. I can’t speak for any of these guys, but Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Fred Rogers, George Lucas, Jim Henson, and the handful of other businesses I’ve observed who have done it, very likely did not seek a whole lot of “feedback” from this part of what they did. They almost certainly just did it intuitively, based on a whole host of factors and preferences and goals and motivations unique to them, and them alone—plus knowledge of their markets, industries, and lists. Bottom line: If it was “simple & easy!” everyone would do it. Which is exactly why everyone won’t or can’t do it. Especially those who struggle with original, strategic, creative, and/or long-term thinking. Or those who need a checklist for everything. Or who can’t make a move without consulting their Facebook friends, their life coach, or their horoscope. It certainly won’t be something anyone lacking patience can do. Which brings me to my newest book: “BizWorld” It is a "101" intro level book to World-Building I’ve been asked to teach for many years. And I have taught it in various high-ticket books, masterminds, and coaching programs. This newest book is a compilation of all the best trainings from these platforms, gathered together, in one place. Thus, it is not a perfectly written and structured book, and is almost entirely in transcript form, except for the appendices, which are from certain books I’ve written. If reading transcripts gives you heartburn realize you’d have to pay upwards of twenty thousand dollars to access all the trainings this book is made up of. For example: One of them is part of a, I believe, $19k per year mastermind I taught at. Another is part of a $500/month coaching program I co-created. And still others are from books I’ve written that costs several hundred dollars—not to mention the time you’d have to spend finding, gathering, and parsing some of the podcasts, resources I pulled some of the other chapters from. All right so that’s that. One last thing: As I mentioned this morning, unlike most of my books this one is not expensive, and is quite affordable to most anyone in business. Plus, I am giving away a valuable bonus analyzing one of my favorite business World-Builders (who was, imo, a bit insane) in my mobile app (you will need a smart phone — no exceptions) to those who: 1. Buy the book by Sunday, August 6th at midnight EDT 2. Send me the Amazon receipt by that deadline (not just buy it, but send me the receipt by the deadline too — if you send after that, it will be ignored) You can read more about the bonus in the P.S. below. Otherwise, here is the link: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/bizworld]( Ben Settle P.S. Regarding the bonus training in my mobile app I will give if you buy AND send me your receipt by the 8/6 at midnight EDT deadline. I call it: “Death Touch Marketing Secrets” It’s about a particularly insane & brutal biz World-Builder from the 60’s & 70’s. Someone I’ve learned a lot from studying, as have certain other very high-level 7 & 8-figure marketers I am aware of “in the know” who have spent many hours talking about, discussing, and learning from this guy about how he approached his marketing which, believe it or not, literally got him killed. But that’s neither here nor there. If you buy (print or Kindle) & send me your receipt by the deadline it shows my take. Including: * The little-known psychology behind how old comicbook ads were able to crawl right into the psychology of their readers to create literal mail-order millionaires even though they mostly were completely BS offers. (Not suggesting you sell crap — but what works to sell crap works even better to sell gold…) * How to make your cold ads (Facebook, Google, banner, space, classifieds… whatever it is) stand out like a MAGA hat at an AOC eat-the-rich fundraiser dinner. * A tasteful way to shamelessly milk money from fear & pain in your marketing. * Best “sleeper” place in long form sales copy to create lots of prestige and trust in you, your business, and your offer. (Believe it or not, this alone can potentially make the sale for even very high priced offers.) * An admittedly sneaky (but totally ethical) way to sell “between the lines” in your ads, sales, letters, and emails. (You won’t always be able to do this, but when/if you can — it can potentially pull all kinds of new sales your business might not get otherwise.) * The blatantly politically incorrect “fat chicks” secret for finding out exactly what your market’s worst pains & insecurities are to sell them more of your offers. * Absolutely one of the most cunning ways ever invented for using your competition’s own offers to help sell more of YOUR offers. * How to structure a near-perfect sidebar for your long form sales pages, ads, and sales letters. (If you do it right, a sidebar can do much of the heavy lifting — or possibly even make the sale on its own — to move more of your offers.) * Examples of how to make ordinary and “plain vanilla” offers sound exotic and sexy in your marketing without lying, deception, or exaggeration. * Stan Lee’s secret for writing product & offer titles people can’t resist wanting to buy. (Grown ass men & women still look for his fictitious countries like Wakanda & Latveria on maps 60+ years later, if that tells you something…) * How to write your name in ads to give your brand an almost Biblical-like epic feeling & power to it. * Real life example of how World-Building can sell your business’ offers with or without any formal advertising or marketing whatsoever. * The “U-Word” that can help add thick layers of proof & credibility to nearly any kind of offer or claim. * Example of how a literal $10,000 guarantee can be done without putting your business on the hook for any risk. * A quickie power lesson on how to add Showmanship to your marketing. * The blue check secret that gets people believing your offers and claims even if they hate you. * Hands down the single best spot in your ads to place your proof & credibility for maximum impact, belief, and response. (I learned this while writing an ad for a client who would add more zaniness and drama to my copy even after I thought I’d taken things too far!) * A shrewd way businesses still trying to grow a brand can use to help create proof and credibility almost out of thin air. * A secret method discovered years ago by a cunning weight loss author you can use TODAY (right after you learn it) to help combine showmanship, credibility, and intrigue for your business. * How to foil businesses in your market who give away everything free on YouTube. (A lot of marketers worry about this — but when you know what you’re doing, these give-away artists in your niche might be all but sending your business free customers.) * A completely “unorthodox” copywriting technique (used by a notorious comicbook writer/artist to prevent Batman from being cancelled back in the 80’s) that can help make your sales copy compulsively readable and engaging. * A hair-raising example (you should definitely use with caution) of how to turn your best customers & followers into soldiers — sally forth’ing into the internet, and picking fights with your competitors. (A lot of business people cannot handle this sort of thing, and it can get crazy… but it can also potentially make your business a lot of new sales, too.) * A bizarre (but ingenious) way to use an ordinary Bible to help make your sales copy, emails, & other writings more dramatic and engaging. * An old school Hollywood screenwriting trick (used by everyone from Walt Disney to Peter Jackson — in fact, a great example is in the first Hobbit movie) that can help make even the “plain vanilla” ordinary and mundane exotic and irresistible. * How introverts can grow rock-solid relationships with people on their email lists without engaging in mindless small talk and chit-chat. * How swiping John Caples can potentially get you thrown in jail! (Copywriters fight me on this, but what I say about this makes it no less true. If you’re going to swipe John Caples, tread very carefully.) * And a ho’ bunch more. All right, one more time: To get this bonus (which is ONLY in my mobile app, and not available anywhere else) you must (1) buy BizWorld in print or Kindle format before the Sunday 8/6 at midnight EDT deadline AND (2) send me your receipt by that deadline. If you send me your receipt after that? You will be ignored. And I don’t give a shyt what your excuse is, the answer is NO after that. Here is the link to the buy the book: [https∶//www.EmailPlayers.com/bizworld]( This email was sent by Ben Settle as owner of Settle, LLC. Copyright © 2023 Settle, LLC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this email may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from Settle, LLC. Click here to [unsubscribe]( Settle, LLC PO Box 1056 Gold Beach Oregon 97444 USA