“Does this catch your attention?”

Here’s an oddly specific, yet potentially priceless, piece of random information you might be glad to learn.

From the book Ogilvy on Advertising:

When you put your headline in quotes, you increase recall by an average of 28 per cent.”

More.

Even though it’s wisdom—possibly timeless wisdom—being shared by the great late David Ogilvy, I’m not simply reading it in a book, believing it at face value, writing about it in an email, and sharing it with you, hoping you believe it at face value as well and think more highly of me as a result.

Instead, I’ve been actively testing this odd—be honest, it does seem a bit weird, why would a few curly lines change anything about how people recall information?—piece of advice myself in one of my hobby projects. And I haven’t just been testing the headline of the sales page. No, no, I’ve been testing it on every single sub-headline as well.

You see, where bigger brands, are playing an entirely different game than you and I—a game of brand recognition and perception—I’m playing a more simple game. A more relaxing game I find as well. A game with only two possible outcomes:

Making the sale or not making the sale.

So increased recall isn’t that valuable to me—there’s an argument saying it matters for retargeting campaigns, but let’s not go there now. What is valuable to me is skimmability. After all, we know almost nobody actually reads a sales page. People quickly scroll through it, read the headlines, look for a section or two they care about, and immediately know whether they’ll buy the product or not.

If you don’t believe me, do some heatmap studies of your sales pages (or look up some recent studies) and you’ll see this phenomenon time and time again.

Anyway.

For my, not so, scientific experiment, my question was, “Does putting my subheadlines in quotes (presumably) increase skimmability, and increase my conversion rate?”

Turns out, it does.

Or at least, it might. While this small change improved my metrics, I have no scientifically accurate way of knowing whether the quotes were the actual reason, let alone a causal connection instead of merely a correlation (read: I can’t be arsed setting up a proper scientific experiment in a controlled environment so this will do).

So there you have it.

Try it out if you want, don’t try it out if you think it sounds like a bunch of majoring in the minors, which I won’t deny it might be.

That said, if you enjoy reading tips and tricks on creating better-converting sales pages, then you might want to check out my course, Sales Page Sorcery.

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

The social media game is fake.

Attention is the new currency of our current time.

Whoever gathers the most attention, wins.

And so everyone is fighting to get a piece of it—as am I right now with this email you’re reading.

There’s no way around it.

You could say it’s wrong, there’s definitely an argument to be made for it. But how are you going to spread your message without gathering attention? How are you going to make an impact and make positive changes in the world?

Bottom line: getting attention isn’t evil.

But let me warn you about this: everyone on social media is playing the same game.

As with everything, there are evergreen strategies to get engagement and capture attention. One of those is to pick a fight. To choose an enemy and attack them. It can be anything: people, concepts, trends, ideas, beliefs, whatever you want. The more popular, the better.

Controversy gets attention. Controversy sells.

Which means people are fighting all the time. Coffee, morning routines, cold outreach, 4am club, cold showers, cohorts, daily emails, meditation, tweet templates, platitudes, ‘authenticity’, storytelling, copywriting, 18-year-old life coaches, best and worst markets to be in, unhealthy mindsets,…

The list goes on.

This is the sad cycle of social media:

Something rises in popularity → A lot of people talk highly about it → It becomes hugely popular → people start attacking it for attention → attacking it becomes popular → the thing itself is unpopular again → people start defending it again because now that’s the ‘unpopular’ thing to do (which gets attention) → it becomes popular again.

And the cycle repeats.

What I’m trying to say is that you’ll always have people hating everything on social media—it quite literally pays to start new fights and pick new enemies.

The only way to get out of this mess?

Building your own world. Doing your own thing.

The #1 worst mistake you can make is to listen to other people’s advice. Seriously.

Experiment with stuff you come across, get inspired by others, try stuff you think is cool, and stick with it.

Don’t let other people tell you what you can post and what you can’t. Don’t let other people tell you what’s going to make you successful and what won’t. And don’t let other people tell you how many emails you can send before people ‘get annoyed’ at you. Test it out and go see it for yourself.

If you think sending daily emails sounds stupid, boring, a waste of time, then don’t listen to me and do your own thing.

But if you think sending daily emails to get paid sounds cool, exciting, and something you’d like to test out for yourself, then check out Email Valhalla here to learn more: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla

My predictions for the upcoming American presidential elections

You may or may not be following the absolute crapload of articles, interviews, debates, social media posts, social discussions, commentaries, and pretty much everything else related to the upcoming American presidential elections.

But, regardless you’re likely to know it’s Biden vs Trump fighting one another for a second shot at being able to sit their sweet buttocks down in the White House.

And if you didn’t even know that, then now you do.

But you might be wondering. Who are both these people?

Well, people often refer to Biden as a senile old pile of crap who’s drugged up all the time and only awake for two hours a day (if that many) while merely existing the other 16 hours or so he’s awake.

On the other hand, Trump is a tiny, yet very angry, orange oompa loompa with a wet raccoon on his head. He calls himself a true businessman, but we all know the only reason people know him is because of his role in Home Alone. Did I mention that he gets extremely pissed off if you were to mention his mediocre golf skills?

Anyway.

My prediction isn’t nearly as exciting as keeping up with whatever new ploy or scheme the media is cooking up to manipulate, twist, and turn the public’s perception—there’s a lot of shady stuff going on everywhere you look and not a lot of honesty—every single day.

But as for a prediction.

As the elections will happen in November, I reckon people will already be in the Christmas spirit—since, you know, the selling and advertising of everything Christmas related is starting earlier and earlier every year to milk as much money out of the public’s pockets—so they’ll rewatch Home Alone (as people do). This will subconsciously alter the perception of Trump in people’s mind to that of the helpful guide (after all, he does guide the way), making it so Trump will win the elections by a landslide.

Now, whether any of this will actually happen, much less if it’s relevant at all, doesn’t actually matter.

You see.. in his book The Ultimate Sales Letter, Dan Kennedy wrote the following:

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“The two keys to unlimited media attention and publicity are being predictive and being provocative.”

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So I’ll leave this be for what it is and gently enjoy all of my newfound media attention, thank you very much.

But before I do.

Maybe you’d like to get some media attention as well?

In that case, do check out Email Valhalla where I’ll show you just how to write emails so you can get drive more traffic and attention to whatever you are selling (and make a profit while you’re at it).

My prediction is that you’ll become extremely successful after implementing everything you read inside of Email Valhalla.

But enough talking.

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