Licensing is the new black

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Today I finished crafting a licensing deal.

With that I mean, an agreement where I license the rights to a product someone else made. Either by outright buying the rights to the course, paying them a monthly retainer, sharing a percentage of the profit, or some other form of payment we agreed on.

Doing so allows me to offer many more products than I could create on my own, and serve a much wider range of audiences than would be possible for me to do by myself.

For some reason, even though I’ve been working for myself for over two years already, this is one of those things that makes me feel like I’m running an “actual” business, instead of a glorified side-hustle. There’s something about working together with other people, bundling your strengths, and generating more value for your customers than either of you could do on your own, all the while still keeping your independence and working for yourself, that makes it feel more “business” like and more like I’m actually contributing value to society.

I also thought doing such types of deals was out of my league.

But I’ve spent a lot of time this month learning about all of this licensing stuff, including how to negotiate and what kind of agreements are possible and extremely profitable for both parties involved.

The more I looked into it, the more I realized making these types of deals is a win-win situation for everyone involved.

I’m definitely no expert yet. But I’ll keep learning more about this side of the business.

And no worries, I’ll share a lot of my findings here with you as I gain more experience.

For now, feel free to check out my flagship course Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


I’m always breaking stuff

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I got a new guitar yesterday. A classical guitar, to be precise.

I’ve always been more of a piano man than a guitar player. But I did enjoy playing the occasional flamenco. Or even the blues.

Not that I was any good at either one of them. But I enjoyed it.

Anyway, the guitar wasn’t tuned quite right when I received it. So I went ahead and started tuning the strings. Except, I immediately snapped on right of the bat. And, as I haven’t had a guitar in quite a while, I don’t own any reserve strings.

So I still don’t have a working guitar to play on for now.

Maybe this is the universe trying to tell me not to even bother playing the guitar. Or maybe, and I think this explanation is just a tad more likely, just maybe, I simple break a lot of things.

Especially things I’m not that experienced with yet.

Maybe that’s just how life’s supposed to go.

Maybe breaking stuff is simply the best way to learn and to improve at stuff. If that’s so, than I do a lot of improving. Because boy let me tell you how often I break, or more generally speaking, fail at all kinds of stuff.

Let’s take writing these daily emails for example.

I failed at so many of them early on. I think I didn’t even make a single sale in my first 200 emails or so. But, as things always tend to go, the more emails I wrote, the better I got at doing so, and the more entertaining my emails became, the bigger a list I started growing, and the more sales I started making.

But maybe, just maybe, you don’t enjoy the idea of having to write 200 emails that suck before getting somewhat decent at it.

If so, I highly suggest you to check out my flagship course, Email Valhalla, where I’ll teach you what it took me over 200 emails to find out, so you can hopefully skip most of the failure and start right at the spot where things start to come together.

Click here to learn more: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


Why does everyone focus on the wrong part of creating ads?

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I finished writing another module of my paid ads course today.

This particular module might very well be the one many people on my list might be the most excited about. Especially because it’s the one topic so many people seem to dread where they have no idea how to even go about it.

In fact, almost anyone I’ve ever spoken with about this seems to spend most of their time worrying about this very topic… even though, it barely matters!

You might be shocked to hear that I’m talking about… writing the body copy for your ad!!

That’s right, I said it.

The body copy of your ad barely matters. It only affects about 20%, if even that much, of the total effectiveness of your ad. Much more important than the copy is the image (or video) and the big idea behind what you’re selling.

Yet so many people seem to flip this on it’s head…

They only care a tiny bit about the big idea. They barely think about the creative at all—for most who enter the advertising game, creatives are only an afterthought, and spend all their time writing and coming up with clever ways to write their copy, trying to sell the customer, who, let me remind you, is mindlessly scrolling on Facebook before they see your ad, not even thinking about anything else but the copy!

That’s the complete opposite of how you want to approach creating your ads.

Anyway, enough judging about what other people spend their time on. I trust you know better.

Speaking of spending your time on what really matters… While you’re waiting to buy my paid ads course which I’ll be releasing soon, why don’t you check out Email Valhalla?

You can do so here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


Am I adding too much information to my courses?

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I finished writing all of the more “technical” modules of the paid ads course I’m working on.

Modules such as how to set up your facebook ad account, how to install your pixel, how to get it to track the right events, and other boring technicalities most people don’t want anything to with.

I won’t say these modules were hell to write, but they sure weren’t paradise either.

And, to be fair, I could just as easily have said “look it up on Google, there are tons of articles out there showing you how it step by step”. Chances are that these articles would have better instructions as well.

But still I found it worthwhile to write and include these types of modules.

For one, if my experience selling info-products taught me one thing, it’s that almost nobody cares about “too much information”. Worse case scenario, people just skip a particular module, never even bothering to check it out.

However, the vast majority of people decide NOT to buy if they think there’s “too little” information. Especially if they feel that they, themselves, might not be “good” enough at a certain aspect, something they fear the product they’re thinking about buying might take for granted and not even bother explaining…

Such as the technical setup of an ad account or a Facebook pixel.

It wouldn’t be the first paid ad course that assumes everything is perfectly set up already.

So, while most people might not need it, it doesn’t hurt for me to add it and it can only make the course a much better product.

Anyway, do with this information what you want. I’m certain you’ll find a way to get something useful out of it.

I would love to promote my ad course right now, and I’ll definitely set one of my signature pre-purchase promotions sometime soon… but not yet.

For now, I’d highly recommend you to check out my course, Product Creation Made Easy, if you enjoyed reading the above anecdote about how I increase the quality of the products I make. Because you’ll learn a lot more similar (and highly valuable) lessons about how to make a high quality course in Product Creation Made Easy.

Check it out here: https://alexvandromme.com/pcme/


David Ogilvy’s 13 predictions about the future of advertising

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The final chapter of Ogilvy on Advertising is titled “I predict 13 changes”. As the name might suggest, in it David Ogilvy listed 13 changes related to advertising he thought would occur in the future.

Ogilvy wrote the book in 1983, which means we’re already 42 years into the future, so let’s take a look at some of those predictions, shall we?

Some of them aged like fine wine. Others not so much.

One of the best predictions reads, “There will be a vast increase in the use of advertising by governments for purposes of education, particularly health education.”

I’m not sure how much I agree on the health education aspect, but there’s definitely a big increase in government advertising—an overall good thing to see.

One of my personal favorite prediction reads, “There will be a renaissance in print advertising”. While, as far as I’m aware, this is far from the case—many businesses still overlook print advertising, at least in the form of direct-response advertising (the only exception is B2B advertising, for which direct mail is still being used a ton)—I do feel a movement popping up of people going back to print advertising, particularly direct mail, even direct-response newspaper ads such as the infamous advertorial.

This might just be because that’s what I personally want to see and I’m living in my own bubble. But still, let me have it for now.

Here are a few fun ones that didn’t pan out as expected:

===

“Advertising will play a part in bringing the population explosion under control”

“Candidates for political office will stop using dishonest advertising”

“Direct-response advertising will cease to be a separate specialty, and will be folded into the ‘general’ agencies”

“Advertising will contain more information and less hot air”

===

The first one, ironically, did happen… only to cause worlwide major underpopulation issue requring government bodies to spend tons of money encouraging people to have more children.

But I’ll let you be the judge of those other three.

As for the last one, that might just be a good sign for you. Most advertisements you see today are nothing more than hot air. Just some branding, a vague slogan, a few nice pictures, quite often some random celebrity to associate with the product (which has been proven to be less effective for over 50 years already), and sometimes the price, or more precisely, a discount…

Yet no or very little information about the product to be found (note: I’m not speaking bad about brand awareness campaigns major multinationals like you see Coca-Cola or Redbull doing—they’replaying a different game)

So what’s, the good news?

Well, that just means there’s less competition for you to create high-converting direct-response style ads that sell.

And one, maybe less intuitive, way I found helpful to teach me how to write better information-rich ads that convert is by writing daily emails. Writing these emails forces me to, well… write. But do it in an engaging, fun, and informational way that keeps people reading day after day. Even if people live busy lives and I have to compete for their attention with all the other unread emails in their emails, forcing me even more to grab their attention straight away without letting go.

So while I can’t promise you’ll be writing killer ads starting tomorrow, you might just find learning to write engaging daily emails a worthwhile skill to get better at.

If so, consider checking out my flagship course which teaches you all about it.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


Should you be afraid to fail?

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Fear of failure is the biggest cause of failure.

I’ve come to realize that to succeed at anything, you have to be willing to fail. Even better if you’re willing to fail fast and fail often. When learning something new, no matter what it may be, there’s simply no way around failing. Failing is as critical to success as getting an A+ is to a Chinese kid to be respected by his parents (or so I’ve heard—I’m not Chinese).

Let’s do a though experiment real quick:

Image you wanted to become successful at or in something, whatever that means to you. And let’s also assume, as would most likely be the case, that you aren’t that good yet at whatever it is you want to get good at when you first start out. In fact, let’s assume you suck, you have no natural talent at all.

Now, in order to get to where you want to be, you need to improve, of course. But how do you improve? Do you improve by doing the same thing over and over again, always successful, always without fail? That’s not really improving then, is it? That’s staying where you are. And, as we so axiomatically assumed, you started at the very bottom, the worse you could possibly be. So, by simple logic, we have to conclude that by NOT failing at something—not making mistakes and staying at the same proficiency you were already at from the start—it’s logically impossible to improve… Because improving means you were better than you were before, which requires a benchmark of growth, aka your “better” than you were before, which implies that you were “worse” in the past than you are now, which in turn, implies the version of you in the past made mistakes.

We can therefore conclude that success requires proficiency, which requires improvement, which requires a “better” and a “worse” version of you at some points in time, which finally implies a certain degree of “failure” for certain benchmarks.

And there you have it. A completely over-the-top, almost redundant, and way too complicated method—which probably none of it was necessary for you to believe what I was saying—to prove the necessity for failure in order to achieve success.

While we’re at it…

Maybe you enjoyed this email. That would be nice to hear. But then again, maybe you didn’t. In that case, I just failed at writing a fun and engaging email. And by realizing this failure I might just be able to learn yet another way, another method, another approach that does NOT work when it comes to writing engaging daily emails people like and keeps my readers reading day after day.

Which means that whatever the case may be, it’s a win in my book.

If you’d like to improve at your own email writing game, perhaps with just a tad bit less required failure than doing it on your own and trying out weird emails like I’m doing right now, then you might just be interested in my flagship course, Email Valhalla.

Check it out here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


I might not be the person I thought I was

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If you’ve ever taken a personality test before, you may have been asked a question such as “do you enjoy following a routine?”

I, for as long as I can remember, would always answer ‘no’ to that question. I never liked to follow a routine. Give me the feel of unbounded freedom. Give me a purpose, some tasks I need to accomplish and then just let me do whatever I feel like doing at that time, in whatever order I desire, based on nothing but pure intuition and “willingness to act”.

In fact, I adapted a similar system for reading as well.

At any one time I would be reading 8 to 12 different books, perfect for moments when I want to read but don’t feel like reading that one particular book, so I just pick up another one.

For some people a free, completely unregulated, routine-less schedule, able to fill in however you like, would be total chaos. For me, it’s heaven…

Or at least it was…

Not that it’s not anymore. A system like that sounds lovely. But as I look more closely at what I do, how I spend my time, and most importantly, how I decide what to do and how to do it, I find I’m, more than ever before, sticking to the same fixed routine day-in, day out.

I wake up at the same time every day. I take a walk at the same time every day. I even walk the same route every day. I work, eat, relax, write, read, learn, workout, and sleep at almost the same time every single day. I still, at the time of writing this email right now, have exactly 12 books on my “currently reading” shelf… but about 8 of those haven’t been opened for quite a while because I find myself focusing on reading the same 2–3 books until I’ve finished them before moving on to the next.

So did I change my preference?

Or did I always enjoy following a routine, yet never realized it because the allure of a “chaotic day without artificial barriers and obligations” sounded like something straight out of a fairytale for me?

Who knows.

All I can say is that having these routines in place made me much more productive than I’ve ever been before. And sure I do miss certain days. I do “mess up” my routine occassionally—don’t we all? But the thought, the intention, and the schedule is there. And so is the execution of the plan and most days of the year.

Occassionally I also like to switch it up. Throw the routine out the window, see what happens. Nine times out of ten, the quality of everything I do worsens… yet I still like doing it for some reason.

I fear I’ll never understand why…

Something I do understand however, is that writing and sending daily emails people love to read and buy from is a great way to strengthen your relationship with your readers, improve your writing skills at the fastest possible rate, and, generally speaking, is far from the worst thing you could try to improve your business success.

So if you’d like to learn more about that, then check out my flagship course, Email Valhalla, right here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


Open for the best April Fools joke ever

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April Fools!

Ha! I got you real good man. There’s no April Fools joke to be found in this email! Look at you now. I really fooled you now, didn’t I? You really expected an April Fools joke in this email! And not just any old joke. You really expected the best one ever??

Little did you know there was no April Fools joke to be found at all!

Wait…

Anyway.

While I probably won’t be winning any comedy awards anytime soon, I might just be able to teach you how to turn your otherwise bland and boring emails into engaging ones, at least at a passable level that keeps your readers reading day after day.

You might even start making some sales as well while you’re at it.

Click here to learn all about it: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla/


Where to easily find big ideas

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While I don’t know who said, “Ideas are cheap, execution is everything”, that man (or woman) knew exactly what was up.

It’s also not just ideas that are cheap. Big ideas, while a bit more “expensive” to find—and certainly more complicated for the untrained—are more than plentiful to go around as well. In fact, give me any niche and I’ll find you a big idea within one afternoon, potentially even sooner, and more than likely I’ll find a lot more than just one—because once you’ve got one, you’ll find a whole lot more.

In fact, big ideas aren’t something you have to “come up with” as much as they are something you have to go out and look for. That means just about anyone can go and hunt for them, barely needing any creativity to do so.

Truth be told, this is only possible because of the digital age we live in.

Regardless, I know exactly how to look, where to look, and what to look out for to get myself a fresh batch of good, working, even lucrative, big ideas no matter the market (although I wouldn’t want to start competing in just about every market, but that’s for entirely different reasons alltogether).

Gone are the days when you needed an entire research departement slaving away weeks or months to interview people, organize focus groups, talk to (potential) customers, or try go selling door-to-door to find big ideas.

All it takes is to know where to look and you’ll almost find it impossible not to find a bazillion big ideas.

And if that sounds like music to your ears, you might want to join Alex’s Marketing Adventures before midnight CET (that’s in 2 hours) because I’ll share exactly how and where I find all my big ideas in the first ever monthly issue of Alex’s Marketing Adventures.

Go here to join Alex’s Marketing Adventures before time runs out: https://alexvandromme.com/adventures/

PS: Alex’s Marketing Adventures is my new monthly newsletter that currently only costs $27 a month (instead of the full $47 I plan to charge for it later on). If you join now you’ll also be locked it at $27 a month forever (or until you cancel your subscription, which you can do whenever you want), regardless of future price increases.

If you’re thinking about joining now or later, just know your wallet will be thankful you did so sooner rather than later.


How important are big ideas, truly?

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Once upon a time the great, late David Ogilvy wrote:

“It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers… Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

And so it goes for a whole lot more than just your advertising. In fact, chances are, unless your product contains a big idea, it’ll be a pain in the proverbial to sell, let alone sell to a cold audience who’s never heard of you before.

Sure, some products can sell without a big idea. But those usually die off extremely quickly. You also won’t find many such products in many markets. You might have a shot in some unsaturated markets here or there, but for the most part you’re out of luck.

Not having a big idea in your product, service, marketing, advertising, or anything else means you’re either competing on mechanism, brand recognition, or, worst of all, price.

This whole lesson is something I’ve only begon to truly understand in the past couple of months.

I’ve heard about big ideas before then. People had told me how important they are. I acted as if I knew what they were talking about—I even acted as if I made all of my products with big ideas in mind…

But truth be told, I didn’t know jack shit.

It’s a giant concept that takes a whole lot of personal experience and skin in the game to truly comprehend just how important it is.

For one, what makes a big idea “BIG”? And where do they come from? Do you just come up with them or do you have to find them somewhere? Can you turn a regular idea into a “big idea”? How can you truly test, with real life feedback from your target audience, whether your big idea is actually good? And what do you do once you’ve finally found a big idea?

There are so many once you take the time to dig deeper and truly look into it. But luckily for you, I’ve already done most of the heavy lifting in getting to the bottom of it.

More.

I’ve dedicated the entire first issue of my new monthly newsletter, Alex’s Marketing Adventures to the topic of Big Ideas.

I give you all of the information you need to know. All that’s left to do for you is to make sure you’re subscribed to my Marketing Adventures before the deadline, which is tomorrow the 31st at midnight CET, then read the issue I’ll send straight to your inbox the next day.

Go here for more information about my Marketing Adventures: https://alexvandromme.com/adventures/