Why I'm going deeper into crypto AND SMS

Hey {NAME} -- In 2009 I was in San Francisco and dressed up as "Twitter" for Halloween. The only problem was, even in SF, not many people knew what Twitter was at that time. The costume flopped and I didn't use Twitter much after that (and still don't). In 2013 I signed up for a Coinbase account and started buying Bitcoin at ~$28. The price fluctuated a lot that year so I ended up offloading all but a fraction of a coin. Whoops. Now... am I equating the current crypto market and SMS marketing to those early misses of mine? Not really. But I *think* I've learned my lesson in a way. The story below is an old one but a good one and it explains why I'm starting to go deeper into both crypto and SMS. Businesses will be moving harder into these spaces over the coming years and I want to be ready. Read on... +++++ I was introduced to "Jake" several years back at the Traffic & Conversion conference here in San Diego. Do you remember live in-person conferences pre-covid? Sad face. Anyway, Jake was in his 40's but looked no more than 25. With only a few words I could sense it... this guy was successful. Very successful. I'm not saying he was bragging about his wealth or bank account zeros. You've probably met the type: someone that seems to have "it" figured out. The conversation turned towards business — we were at a marketing conference after all. I told Jake about the organic skin-care business (before it was sold) & [CopyHour.]( Jake told me that he owned 10 companies. My jaw dropped. 10 different companies!? How. The. Hell.? I asked him how he managed and compartmentalized his life. He said his only job was coming in and giving each company "the vision". I, of course, had to know more so I drilled him about his past. Jake was initially reluctant but I'm such a charming man (and handsome too) that he pulled me aside, lowered his voice a smidgen and gave me the dirt. Turns out Jake made a boat load of cash in the early 2000's with ARBITRAGE. In this case, it was affiliate marketing arbitrage. He'd gamed Google Adwords (not unethically or anything like that) by purchasing paid traffic for pennies, and converting those clicks into dollars with CPA offers. You've probably heard stories like this before. Let's talk about ARBITRAGE. Arbitrage was such a common theme at the conference. A lot of highly successful business owners there had made their initial nut after discovering an arbitrage opportunity. The Arbitrage concept can be explained in many ways. The fancy definition: Arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. There's Geo-arbitrage: Say you're earning money in American dollars but living in a cheap country like Thailand. Your money will go very far. You're paying $50 for a luxury that costs $100 elsewhere. A common Arbitrage scenario (Google has shut this practice down): Let's say you have a keyword phrase like, "DUI Lawyer San Diego" that an advertiser will pay $5 a click for. You put that ad on your website. You now go out and buy clicks to your website for a keyword that's something like, "I got a DUI in San Diego". You can buy that keyword phrase for 10 cents a click. The entire purpose of your website is to get the "I got a DUI in San Diego" website visitor to click the "DUI Lawyer San Diego" ad on your website. Here's another example of someone that was making $30,000-$50,000 per day... on autopilot.. He developed a script that would buy .net domain names. After the .net was purchased, the script would send a series of emails to the .com owner's email address (another script scraped the email address). There was a 6 day follow-up sequence that would say something like, "Hey, I noticed you have the .com. Do want you me to transfer the .net? Just cover the transfer fees and a nominal but reasonable profit for me." If the .com owner didn't jump on the opportunity they'd follow-up for the next 6 days decreasing their price offer. And here's where this is absolutely brilliant -- and what makes this true arbitrage -- if, after the 6 days, the .com owner didn't bite... there was a refund window on the .net. Come day 7, if the .net did not sell, he'd get a full refund on that .net and not have to buy it! Brilliant. Like I said, while that little scheme was active it pulled $30k-50k a day. Now, some of this stuff can get super black-hat and seem like a scam. I'm of course not advising you to scam people or even operate on the fringe. I'm just saying that arbitrage opportunities (returns w/ zero risk) are all around us and available to ethical, legitimate businesses. And in many ways, if you don't find these opportunities you're going to struggle. So how do you find arbitrage opportunities now-a-days? One way is with "Attention Arbitrage". Before we talk about that, let's talk about the one common thread I noticed with these arbitrage folks. When they found their opportunity... they didn't just dabble. They went ALL IN. If they knew that they could buy a click for 5 cents and that traffic was guaranteed to spend 10 cents… they put ALL OF THEIR NUT in the equation. If I can buy a $10 dollar bill with a $5 bill, I'll do that all day long. If I can buy a $10 dollar bill with $9, I'll do that too (as long as there's a real profit in there somewhere). In most cases, these people were working with much more dramatic numbers. Ie, the guy selling domain names that he never even had to pay for. He was making $10 for $0 spent (his genius humbles me). Okay, so where are these opportunities right now? Go Where Attention Is Being Undervalued. At this same conference Gary Vaynerchuk just so happened to be speaking. Gary gave an impassioned keynote that had the entire conference buzzing. The gist of his message was this: Smart marketers are going where their customer's attention is going. Where is their attention right now? Their phone. The phone is the new television and apps are the new networks like NBC, ABC, etc. You want your "commercials" on those apps because it's cheap right now. If you stop evolving and not going to the new attention-drawing apps, you're going to get crushed. What you really want to do is get out ahead of all the marketers and start BUYING ATTENTION for super cheap before competition drives the prices up. You know how people talk about the good ole days of Google Adwords? Now what's happened? It's not so cheap anymore. Facebook ads, not along ago, were comically cheap. With an acting career course client I had, we were buying clicks to our webinar registration page for 15 cents. These same clicks are now $2.50. The marketers of yester-year gamed direct mail (look at Gary Halbert's Heraldry letter). They gamed infomercials - listen to Carlton talk about this. They were dirt cheap to produce and put on the air, and people bought, bought, bought. Here's another example: Video Sales Letters (VSL's). When these things first came onto the market, they held attention like no other. Marketers were getting 6% conversion rates when the standard was under 1%. Attention Arbitrage What's next? Where's there a lot of attention now... where is the cost of getting said attention under-valued? That's where you want to go as a marketer and copywriter. I can't tell you exactly where your personal next arbitrage opportunity will be. But I can tell you that you need to be prepared for when one of these opportunities arise. Part of the reason why CopyHour works so well for so many marketers and copywriters is that I teach you OVERALL copywriting strategy that will apply to whatever arbitrage opportunity you might find. CopyHour isn't a tactical course. CopyHour is a course that will be useful for your entire career no matter what crazy attention-grabbing app they come up with next! Effective communication skills are applicable to everything. There's always an underlying script that needs to get written. Several years ago, when I first sent a version of this email, our organic skin-care business was killing it on Instagram. Each photo, and the words we used in our posts was carefully curated. And true to CopyHour principles, we used the medium (Instagram) like regular users did... and how it's intended to be used. We got attention there for relatively cheap. If I had been dead-set on using Google Adwords to drive traffic to a traditional direct response sales letter or a VSL we'd have missed out on a large opportunity to capitalize on Attention Arbitrage. Of course, Instagram marketing is no secret -- and prices eventually shot up. If we still had that business I'd have had to adjust significantly. If there's one thing I learned at T&C, when you find something that clicks... you gotta jump fast and go ALL IN. And then when that attention arbitrage opportunity dries up, you find the next one (or retire, or sell, or hand-off the marketing to your team). The search and the game are NEVER ENDING. Good thing I'm ready to pounce. I've already started building my copywriting skills. Want to join me and get this aspect of your business-life under control? [CopyHour opens next week on Monday April 4th.]( Cheers! - Derek Sent to: {EMAIL} [Unsubscribe]( CopyHour.com, 340 S LEMON AVE, 5007, WALNUT, CA 91789, USA