Someone’s got to be the best. And at least a few people believe that Daniel Throssell is Australia’s best copywriter—even if only because Daniel told them he was : ). In the 394th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Kira and Rob brought Daniel into the studio to talk about his email strategy, world building, and how he turned a children’s book into Australia’s best selling book. And Daniel got real when it comes to what a day in his life really looks like. This is the second time, Daniel has been on the podcast (the first episode is here). Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript of today’s appearance on the show.

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Rob Marsh:  If you’re going to say you’re the best at something, eventually you’re going to have to back it up. The late Gary Halbert once sent out a newsletter titled “why I am the best copywriter alive”. Of course, any one can make a claim like that. But eventually you have to back it up… and at least when it comes to Gary, he had the clients, the sales, and the results to make a pretty strong claim on the title. Which brings me to the guy that many people call Australia’s best copywriter.

Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, my co-founder Kira Hug and I interviewed copywriter Daniel Throssell, who has been called Australia’s best copywriter by many in the marketing world. But does he have the chops to back it up? Indeed he does. We covered a lot of ground in this interview—we went really deep on his approach to email, which in many ways he treats as if he’s writing a novel. He also shared a few of the details about his strategy for pushing several books to #1 on the best seller list, a strategy by the way that works for all kinds of products, not just books. And Daniel got real when he talked about what a typical day looks like for him. We think you’re going to like this one.

But before we get to the interview… you’ve heard me talk about the copywriter underground and what it includes. If you’ve been thinking about joining this amazing community, I want to give you two reasons to jump in now. The first is a limited time Client Emails Masterclass with copywriter Michal Eisik. Michal launched her business after completing the copywriter accelerator and think tank. What she’s built is amazing. We asked Michal if she would share her masterclass with The Underground. But because Michal actually sells this to her own email list, she asked us to limit access to just a couple of day in May.  Which means if you want to get the Client Emails Masterclass for free, you’ve got to jump into The Underground now.

We also have a second bonus… it’s the strategic plan that today’s guest Daniel Throssell used to make his client’s book a best seller in Australia. You’re going to hear a little bit about it in this episode, but Daniel only scratches the surface here. Because the only other time he’s shared his strategy was with his paying subscribers and he wants to make sure to honor them by not sharing it elsewhere. However, he has made one exception. He’s sharing it for a limited time with the paying subscribers of The Copywriter Underground for just a few days in the month of May. If you want to learn more about the strategy he teases on this episode, jump into the underground today so we can share the details of how to get your hands on the whole thing with you.

There’s never been a better time to visit thecopywriterclub.com/tcu to claim your free bonuses now.

And with that, let’s go to our interview with Daniel.

Kira Hug: All right. Welcome, Daniel. I want to kick off with a question about the last year in business. So we can zero in on the last six months, last year, but I’m curious, what has surprised you the most about your business in particular over the last year or so?

Daniel Throssell: Wow, that question kind of hit me. That’s the most surprising. I was not ready to answer that. The last six months.

Kira Hug: I don’t think I’ve ever asked that.

Daniel Throssell: So yeah, I wasn’t even expecting that as the first question. I thought it was gonna be like, Daniel, nice to nice to finally get on the podcast with you. 

So okay, last six months, what’s happened? Honestly, what has surprised me? I don’t know how relevant this is going to be to people. But I’ll just be honest—how well my monthly subscription has gone. I don’t follow a lot of news, but I’ve heard people saying, you know, bad economy, whatever. People are not spending as much. I literally have a zero news policy. I don’t watch anything. There was an eclipse, not the one you saw, Kira, recently. There was one last year and the eclipse went over Perth and I didn’t know everyone in Perth knew and I was sitting in my house and I was like, Why is everybody outside looking at the sky? The sun’s dying. Well, no, no. I was alone. There was no one there. And I was like, I think the sun’s dying. Because I’ve just been listening to some sci-fi Audible books. I was like, maybe this is like Project Hail Mary. This is really bad. What’s going on? Because the sun just went dark. It wasn’t a circle. And so that’s the only thing that has been a negative out of my no-news policy. Otherwise, I’m a happier person. But the point is, I just don’t know. 

I have heard people saying the economy is no good, whatever. I have personally found that my business has done really well the last six months and again, I don’t know how relevant this is to your people but, it does make me think there’s a lot of people who get really caught up in listening to what other people say about the economy or no one’s hiring no one’s buying, people are being more conservative with their purchases or whatever. 

All I know is that by keeping my head out of that and just focusing on what I’m doing each day, which is nurturing my list, working on good products and selling them as best I can, I have not seen any big hits. And supposedly, as copywriters, we should be really exposed to that sort of thing because we’re intimately connected with the selling of stuff. So if people aren’t buying stuff, they don’t need sales copy. And my market is entirely copywriters. 

So that’s been the biggest takeaway for me for the last six months. I’m just not noticing whatever other people are saying about an economy being bad. If you just keep your head down and focus on what you’re doing, it seems to work out really well. Now, I don’t know if that is just going to come off as like, you’re so insensitive, because everyone’s losing their jobs. I’m just being honest. I got hit with this question out of the blue first on the podcast. So I hope that was insightful.

Rob Marsh: Fair answer. The last time that you were on the podcast, I think it was 2020, just coming into the pandemic, if I remember right. Well, I should have looked it up before we started recording, but I feel like it was spring of 2020. And so maybe in case somebody hasn’t gone back and listened to the entire back catalog or heard our previous interview with you, Daniel, maybe just break down really quickly what your business looks like and exactly what you’re doing. Those who know you are probably going to know you do a daily email. You’re widely known as the self-proclaimed Australia’s best copywriter, although there are a few people who seem to agree with you. But yeah, tell us what your business looks like.

Daniel Throssell: Yeah, so like my business model, what I’m doing.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, or just the pieces of what’s going on.

Daniel Throssell: Well, just a quick backstory kind of thing. I was a freelance copywriter for several years. I started copywriting in 2016. And so I worked for a long time freelancing first, and then I worked with an author called Scott Pape for several years. I was kind of the right hand man in his business from maybe 2016, 17-ish until he shut down his newsletter in 2020, I think. So, after 2020 is when I started building my own brand. Before that, I’d never really done anything for myself. 

And so, I think you had me on shortly after that, maybe a year after I started. It might have been 2021, I think, Rob. And so, I just started building my own brand, which is just kind of teaching the things I had learned And that’s mostly what my business is now. Like I don’t do any client work anymore. I create copywriting training and sell it. So I write a daily email. I’m very inspired by Ben Settle and what he did. He was a huge influence on me. So his business model, I’ve taken a lot of that and applied it to myself. So it basically revolves around publishing a monthly newsletter, selling courses, and I sell them with a daily email to an email list. It’s a very simple business model, but it’s very fun, very effective for me.

Kira Hug: Okay, so you mentioned building your brand. And I think when you were on the show last, you were building it, you were becoming well known. And since then, you’ve become a bigger name in the copywriting space for sure. So when you look back, are there certain ingredients that you think have helped you build that brand that you’d recommend to other writers?

Daniel Throssell: Well, one of the biggest things I’ve done—and you know, it’s just a very unpopular message. I talk about it all the time, but I’ve just continued to write that email every single day. I have written something new to my email list and I did it from very early on when no one was watching. No one was paying attention. I had like 40 people on my list that had opted in for some old lead magnet and I was, it was like a dead list. 

I am a big believer that you know if you are putting the work out there if you’re doing well nothing can happen if you’re not doing anything so number one is, I have consistently showed up even when I didn’t feel like it to create create stuff. And that’s, that’s probably number one, because a lot of people who are asking this question, they’re just not doing much to actually promote themselves. You know, they’ll write an email once a week, or they’ll write some content once a week, but it’s just not enough what they’re doing. It’s also got to be really good. I don’t want to say you got to spam stuff. Cause I also put my heart into making everything really good. So the foundational pillar was doing enough work to actually get noticed.

And I’ve also, it’s not really everyone’s cup of tea, but I have aggressively pursued, how should we put it? A self-aggrandizement strategy—self-promotional. And I’ve really embraced playing that character, if you will. In person, I’m not really outspoken. I’m actually very shy and conflict-averse, you know. So people who know me in real life are often shocked when they read some of the stuff I write. And frankly, I am too sometimes. But it’s like this persona that I put on. I was like, I am not interesting enough to have people talking about me on the internet. And if I want to build a really well-known brand that people talk about, I got to be more interesting than I am in real life. And so there’s this sort of persona that I’ve had which you alluded to Rob, very, um, boastful. You know, even talking about my persona is kind of awkward for me because it’s like, he’s just a different guy—very obnoxious, very cheeky, takes shots at people all the time. And what I found is there’s a lot of people in the copywriting industry who really take themselves very seriously or don’t really have a sense of humor. 

Over the years, over and over again, people have gotten really wound up by me. It’s like, this guy calls himself “Australia’s best copywriter”. Who does he think he is? Whatever. And, you know, they’ll get mad about it. They’ll talk about me. And part of me finds it really funny. I think this is fun. I don’t know why you guys are so mad about it, because it’s funny to me that you’re talking about it. I’ve used that to get people talking about me. And I’ve done really, really well in a series of affiliate promotions over the years against some other copywriters, placing first on the leaderboard. In person, I probably wouldn’t talk about that. But, you know, in my emails, I’m like, I’m the best copywriter in the world sort of thing. It is tongue in cheek, but it also people like that energy, people like that obnoxiousness. And I think that’s another big thing that I’ve done. 

I’ve been creating content so there’s something for people to actually look at. And I’ve also had this persona that’s had people wanting to talk about me. And I think if I had a third pillar in there, it’s that I have tried to come up with new ideas that are worth talking about. And in fact, the first thing that you guys had me on the podcast for was that parallel welcome sequence that I came up with, which is kind of a creative new way to do welcome sequences. And so I’ve come up with things like that, ideas or techniques that are actually worth talking about or interesting. And things like that have opened the door to me. It’s how I got on your podcast. Rich Sheffrin had me on Steal Our Winners to talk about it. So there are things like that. 

And I guess if I could put those three things altogether, it has made it harder than not. That doesn’t even make sense. It’s made it harder for me to not grow a brand than to grow a brand. Because when you’re doing interesting things, you’re coming up with genuinely interesting ideas, you’re constantly creating new content, and you have a very interesting personality. It’s hard for people not to talk about you and be like, oh, go and check out so-and-so. 

Honestly, most of the growth that I’ve had over the last, especially two years, I think, I have really dialed back on any kind of promotional strategy. I’m not even really advertising or anything aside from one little arrangement I have with one guy’s website. It’s almost all referral and word of mouth. So even this, this is the first podcast I’ve done in probably a year. I just don’t really do that sort of stuff because at this point people talk about you organically. And I think it was those three things, putting them together helped get to the point where I am now, where I sort of can step back from that a little bit and just kind of focus on the work I’m doing, the emails and the newsletters I’m publishing.

Rob Marsh: So Daniel, you mentioned you’ve modeled your business a little bit off of what Ben Settle built. I can totally see the influence. You seem to be a “nice” version of Ben. Although I will say this, in credit to Ben, I think the Ben of today is a lot nicer than the Ben of three or four years ago. He’s kind of mellowed out. I think probably because he has a kid now. You know, family. But let’s talk a little bit about world-building because obviously that’s something that Ben does. That’s something that you’ve done with your emails. When you pick up a Daniel Throssell email, you’re sort of stepping into, or maybe the better way to say this is, I’m stepping out of reality and into whatever it is that you’re building. Sometimes you’re writing question and answer type emails, which are kind of fun. You oftentimes will use, insert first name, list merge techniques to make fun of your readers, which I know sometimes doesn’t go over very well. You already talked about self-aggrandizement but all of this stuff kind of plays together to create something that’s really unique or pretty rare. There’s three or four copywriters. I can think who do it and you’re one of them.

Daniel Throssell: So you mean what’s going on with the email strategy?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, if somebody has been reading your emails and they see this world-building and they think I want to replicate it, but obviously they don’t want to copy—how do you build your own world? 

Daniel Throssell: Yeah, that’s definitely a Ben thing. I think world building is sort of his concept. And I’ve been influenced by Ben for sure, but a lot of what I’m doing actually came from my work with Scott. So I mentioned that I’d worked with Scott Pape, the author, also known as the Barefoot Investor. I’ve helped him with his book launches, which I think we’re going to talk about. 

One of the things he has done very, very successfully for a long time is to create his, if you want to use the terminology, because I hadn’t heard it at the time, world building, where he would use people in his life as characters in his emails and columns and stories. And one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from him, and this was probably before I’d even heard of Ben, was make characters of the people in your life. It’s what he does, and it’s what I’ve done from day one, really. I have recurring characters or themes that come up in my emails, and I want people to have “a sitcom style” email marketing. I want people to have the same experience when they’re reading my emails that they do when they’re watching an episode of Friends or something. Because there, what you have is the continuity of these characters that you know, and these settings that you know. And what’s interesting is seeing how those people interact and you get this payoff from in-jokes that were set up a long time ago. The longer back the joke was set up, the funnier it is to you. So I will have things like that. 

For example, I have a recurring gag that my wife is the bad idea zombie. And that’s just a name that I came up with for her a long time ago, because she always gives me these terrible ideas. So it’s a recurring gag. And when it comes up, the longer you’ve been on my list, the more satisfying that joke is, because you get it. And someone who’s new to the list isn’t going to get it as much. 

So in a way, you create this thing where the deeper people get into the world of your stories and so on, the more rewarding it is for them to see those things. And so what I have done from the beginning is to take characters and things from my life and themes and have them repeating. So my wife, my kids will always come up. I try to make sure to introduce people like my brothers and so on who are regularly in my life and make them recur with enough familiarity that people start to get to know them. So you have that sitcom effect. 

So the first part of the answer, Rob, when someone’s saying, how do I do something like that is—you’re never going to have the same world as someone else because your life is unique. Your people. Your characters and so on are going to be unique to you. One of the big problems I have seen especially with students of mine in the past when I’ve looked at their emails is they took what I was doing but they wrote their characters the same way as I wrote mine and especially my projection of myself in my characters. I have a caricatured version of myself in emails and I’m not talking about the arrogant jerk guy, I’m talking about when I tell stories about my daily life. It’s meant to be a representation of me in real life. There’s a certain way i portray myself and often it’s kind of hapless and chaos is going on around me like i’m at subway ordering a sub and I ask for a tiny bit of chili sauce and the girl’s like slathering it on and I’m like too nervous to say please stop and I’m like you’re just killing my dinner here lady. It’s just this certain characterization of myself and one of the big mistakes I’ve seen when people are trying to use the same kind of storytelling is they’ll characterize themselves the same way as I characterize myself. They’ll use the same kind of humor, they’ll have the same quirks, and they’re not really making their own character. So that’s an issue that if people are going to be inspired by what I’m doing, you can take the style, but don’t copy the characters and their personalities as well. That’s one big issue. 

Now, the sitcom style storytelling is kind of one half, I guess, of what I’m doing in the e-mail, Rob, because I also have this thing—and I think this one is, as far as I can tell, it’s unique to me—I’ve never seen anyone doing it, but it’s that I blend half of that with, with fiction. And so in the welcome sequence, the parallel welcome sequence, which we talked about on the first podcast, I set up this parallel universe, if you will, where it’s fictional and it’s like this island and I call it copy land. And it’s part of my world building that it’s this fictional place where there’s like giant copywriting themed monsters. And all my products are weapons in this world. And I actually have—I think I showed you Rob—I’ve got a mobile app that integrates with my business. And I got my designer to design it like Pokemon, because I flippin love Pokemon. You can probably see all the Pokemon on the wall behind me. I was like, I want this inspired by Pokemon. And so it’s meant to feel like that. And so half the time I will—not half the time, but often—I will also tell these fictional stories. I’ll take real emails I got and I was like, I was in my evil lab on Copyland and I got this request. And then suddenly sirens were blaring around the island because there’s this customer service request. And I’ll write this really tongue in cheek, fictional thing. 

What is kind of strange I guess you could say about this is I have these two worlds. One’s like real life and one is fiction and I freely blend them. Sometimes I will start telling a story from real life and then I’ll cross into fiction. I will just start writing wild fiction like things explode or you know a plane crashes in my front room or a ninja comes in. I don’t know… some giant copywriting robots invade the scene. And it’s really, really fun for people. And I think, again, you can do that, you can have fiction, but make it your own style of fiction. 

And the the error that people are going to make if they’re trying to copy that—I don’t mind if you want to do it, if you want to say, I want to do what Daniel does, and I want to blend fiction with my real life—but just make the fiction your own. Make the characters, make the style, everything should be unique to the way you write. And if you do that, you can build something for yourself. It was my idea to sort of do that in the first place, but there will probably be a way to integrate that with your own personality, your own world, your own storytelling style, where you could build something interesting for yourself. 

It’s not for everybody because it is quite silly. And one of the things I’ve done is embrace that. Before I started doing this, like I said, copywriting was really, really serious. A lot of people were really serious about it. And I was like, I’m just going to make this really fun. I’m going to have silly stories, giant monsters, weird stuff. And some people are going to say, this is so dumb. And some people are just going to say, I love this so much. And they’re my people. And that’s kind of how I’ve looked at building that world, if you will.

Kira Hug: Yeah, I think we’ve written a couple of emails where Rob and I are fighting. And I think there was one, Rob, where I tied you up and put masking tape on you and strapped you to a chair.

Rob Marsh: When you say we’ve written them, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a say. Let’s be honest.

Kira Hug: Right. That’s right. That’s why it’s fun. Yeah. So I definitely, I’m with you. I love the idea. And I think that we can have so much more fun. And even recently, I feel like I’ve moved away from that. And it’s just like all very truthful. It’s like, this is what happened. These are the details of my day. And it’s almost like we forget, because there’s so much beauty in the truth, but we forget that we can also pull fiction in and have more fun with it.

Question is, how could someone listening who maybe isn’t familiar with your work, integrate characters like just the basics… is that we start with our partner if we have a partner and we’re like that’s character one and then character two is a parent or uncle what are some basics? 

Daniel Throssell: Well that’s how I started so for me in the beginning it was my wife and honestly with one character you can do a lot and a mistake a lot of people make will be to try and set up too many characters too soon and what’s a lot of the characters I have introduced have been, they were kind of there by chance once. 

For example, there was a guy at my supermarket who worked behind the deli counter. And every time I would order some meat from him, he would just do this weird passive aggressive shtick where he’d be like, I’ll think about it. And I was like, bro, just give me my meat, man. I just don’t want this. And I wrote about it to my email list. I wrote a little story about it. And it really resonated with people. And so I’m going to write about him again. And I went there the next week. And he did something similar. And I tried something else. And I wrote about it. And he became this character called Rude Deli Guy. And I ended up riffing on him a lot. So that wasn’t planned, necessarily. Sometimes there would be just guest characters, if you will, And I’m like, oh, that worked out really well. Or I might introduce someone. And I won’t even think about them. And then like a year later, I’ll do a little callback to them. And people who saw the original email, I remember that guy. So it doesn’t have to be this big plan. And I think honestly, if you try too hard to do that, you’ll go wrong. Because what I started with was just using my wife and then occasional little scenes from my kids. And that’s like one main side character and a few little guest characters. And over the years, as people have recurred, they start to build up. But it’s not like every email has everybody. Honestly, some of these people, they come up like once every few months. 

So I’m not trying too hard and I think that’s a mistake some people make is that they are trying too hard to jam all these people and all these scenes and it’s like you will understand my world. It’s like just back off and make it a lot more organic. And it’s really about just telling stories that have other people in them. 

The biggest thing for me is, and one of the biggest keys is using dialogue. If you can actually show someone a scene that has two or more people talking in it, it’s so much more engaging. than just writing as yourself. And so that to me, that’s the gold standard. I don’t always have the energy to do it because I’m writing an email every day. And honestly, it’s hard to find a scene every single day that you can make super funny or interesting or that’s worth talking about. But I try and do it as much as possible because people love it. People love seeing dialogue in emails. It’s just one of my favorite things to do in email and that organically builds characters. So you don’t have to sit there and think about, what does this character do? What is their personality like? You just put dialogue in. What are they saying? Because that’s how we see, that’s how we perceive things in a sitcom. We just see what they’re saying and what they’re doing. So it’s just kind of, that’s my storytelling style, I guess. I try and put a lot of dialogue and a lot of visual storytelling. 

I will show often what characters are doing. They put their hands on their hips. you know, they’re leaning on the door, whatever it is, you can see it. I learned that from a guy called Matthew Dicks. I don’t know if you know of him. He’s written the book Storyworthy. That book was a really big influence on my storytelling. I got a lot from him. And one of his things was, you always want people to be seeing the story as you’re telling it in their mind. You don’t want to have the equivalent of a movie where there’s a black screen and dialogue voiceover. Always have something they can see. And so that kind of infused itself into my email writing style. And to answer your question, Kira, that organically builds the characters. When you’re just showing what people said and what they did, it automatically builds them up without you having to tell them.

Rob Marsh: Yeah, if anybody wants to see how this works in real life, they should sign up for Daniel’s email, which we will promote at the end of the episode. So stick around because it’ll be worth getting to. But I want to shift gears here a little bit, Daniel, and talk about the thing that you and I have talked about several times offline. And you teased just a moment ago, and that is the promotion strategy that you use to get Scott’s book to the number one bestseller spot, at least for a while. And just to set it up, I know you’ve only shared it with your own list, and so you don’t talk about this. So when we said, hey, let’s come back on the podcast, I’m like, okay, but I want some of these details that you don’t talk about anywhere else. So let’s spill the tea.

Daniel Throssell: Right, so I’ll give you a bit of backstory so people have the context on what happened. So I mentioned I’d been working with Scott Pape from around 2016. The very first thing he hired me for, he was like, I’m actually launching a book and I need someone to help write the copy. And so that was the first job I did and neither of us knew at the time. So I actually came on to write a little launch funnel for this book, which went on to become the best-selling Australian book of all time. It was called The Barefoot Investor. Following on from that, a couple of years later, I helped him with the writing and editing process of a new book, and we launched that one. It also became a number one bestseller nationally, and that was called Barefoot Investor for Families. But the one that we’re talking about now was his third book. It’s called Barefoot Kids, and we launched that in 2022, I think. And that became, I think it might, I haven’t checked, but at the time it had the record for the biggest pre-launch in Australian publishing history. We sold 120,000 copies in the launch, which was bigger than anything that had ever been done in Australia. 

So that’s what you were like, oh, can you come on and talk about that? And so there are a few big ideas to the launch that kind of made it work. And as a bit of backstory, in 2022, Scott actually flew me to Melbourne and we were planning the launch. And one of the things that I actually did, I actually pulled up while we were in this meeting room in the heart of Melbourne, I pulled up these notes from a course that I actually sell to my email list. which was built on how I do affiliate promotions and how I’ve been really successful at them. And so the first thing that we decided was that we were going to try and base the launch around an email list. So in your traditional book launch, you kind of have all these parts like PR and book tours and deals with bookstores, book signings, podcasts, and so on. The author is spread very, very thin. And so one of the strategic decisions we made for this launch was we are going to primarily focus it around our email list. 

I mentioned that we’d done two launches before that and we hadn’t used emails to launch the book and that had been effective, but we hadn’t really gone all in on creating a promotion, especially the way that I had learned how to do on my own email list. And so that was the big thing is that an email list can really move the needle more than anything else if you do it the right way. Which kind of leads, do you have any, do you want me to just keep talking or are you going to jump in?

Rob Marsh: Yeah, keep going. And you’ve set the backstory. So let’s talk about what you did to make this happen.

Daniel Throssell: Yep. So one of our big ideas around this, I guess, was that the way that most people do their launches is backwards. And by that, I mean, they kind of write their book and they sort of, go into their shell, they don’t really say anything about it. And then they come out of the woodwork and they’re like, “hey, got a new book to buy, go buy it.” And they start, they do this long promotional period where they are trying to get people to buy for as long as possible and just keep pushing and pushing and pushing people to buy. And one thing that I had found in my experience, selling to an email list—and you’ll remember this, Rob—In 2021, there was this affiliate promotion on Black Friday that all these copywriters in the industry were doing. And it was a really, really big deal. And I ended up selling more than everyone else put together. And what I did was really weird because there was this 10-day cart open for that promotion, and everyone else promoted for 10 days, and I only promoted for four, and I made more sales than anyone else put together. 

And so one thing I had been finding over the years was that with these really tight launches, you could make more sales if you did them right than really extended one week, two week, longer cart open windows. And so what we did when I went to Melbourne, I was talking to Scott, I was like, I think we should do a really short launch. And we’re going to flip it on its head instead of not much beforehand and then a long push afterwards, we decided we are going to tease for a really, really long time. We’re going to talk about the book as much as possible and say, the book’s coming, the book’s coming. And I’m talking for months and months in advance. The book is coming. It’s going to be fantastic. And then we did a very, very limited launch window. I think it was three or four days. And the entire pre-launch, all those 120,000 copies were sold in those three or four days, compared to normal book launches, which are, they’re coming in over weeks to add up to that much. And a lot of people think if I close my cart, early, I’m going to miss out on a lot of sales. I get that logic, but it just did not prove to be true because we set the Australian publishing record with one of the shortest launch windows you’ve ever seen. 
多年来我发现一个现象：如果操作得当，紧凑型发售期（比如仅开放几天购物车）反而比拉长到一两周的常规发售窗口能创造更多销量。在墨尔本与斯科特讨论时，我提出要做个极短周期发售——彻底颠覆传统模式。我们决定反其道而行：不再采用"前期低调+后期强推"的老套路，而是进行超长预热。提前数月就不停造势："新书即将上市""绝对值得期待"，把期待值拉到最满。然后突然开启仅 3-4 天的闪电发售窗口。结果 12 万册全部在这三四天内售罄，而普通图书发售通常需要数周才能达到这个量级。很多人总担心提前关闭购物车会损失销量，但事实恰恰相反。 我理解这个逻辑，但事实证明它并不成立，因为我们用史上最短的预售期创造了澳大利亚出版纪录。

My friend, Laura Belgray, when she was publishing her book, Tough Titties, and I gave her this advice, she was like, that’s completely opposite to anything the publisher has ever told me. You’re the first to ever tell me that, but she went and applied some of this stuff and she, I think she made it to the bestseller list too. So it worked really, really well to limit our cart open. As for what we, you’re probably asking like, well, what did you do in that, in that cart open window?
我的朋友劳拉·贝尔格雷在出版《Tough Titties》时，当我给她这个建议，她的反应是：这完全和出版社告诉我的所有建议背道而驰。你是第一个这么跟我说的人。但她后来应用了其中一些方法，我记得她也登上了畅销书榜单。所以缩短购物车开放时间的效果真的非常非常好。至于具体操作——你现在大概想问：那你们在购物车开放期间到底做了什么？

Rob Marsh: Yeah. Let me jump in and ask the question while you’re taking a drink of water. Daniel, what did you do during the cart open window?
罗伯·马什：没错。趁你喝水的间隙让我插个问题。丹尼尔，购物车开放期间你们具体采取了哪些措施？

Daniel Throssell: So the other thing, and I’m just going to backstory that one too, the other thing we realize is that most people don’t want to buy a book. And so the problem with most book launches is they’re selling a book. The thing is, only book buyers buy books. And it’s like, duh, that’s obvious. But think about it. Most of the people on your email list probably aren’t book readers. Like they’re not the kind of people who are like, I will buy that book and I will sit down and I will read it. There will be some, sure, but those people are going to buy no matter what you do. Most people don’t want to buy a book. And that’s the real problem you have with any book launch. 
丹尼尔·特罗塞尔：还有一点，我也要补充一下背景，我们意识到大多数人其实并不想买书。所以大多数图书发售活动的问题在于，他们只是在卖一本书。但事实是，只有爱买书的人才会买书。这听起来像是废话，但仔细想想——你邮件列表里的大部分人可能都不是读书爱好者。他们不是那种会想着"我要买那本书，然后坐下来好好读"的人。当然会有一些这样的读者，但这些人无论如何都会买。真正的问题在于，大多数人根本不想买书。这就是所有图书发售面临的本质难题。

So what we did, again, this was taken from principles of email marketing. It’s like, well, how do you sell products in an affiliate launch? How had I successfully done over the years? Well, you offer bonuses with the book. And the bonus should be something that people want even more than the book and actually targeted to the list, even if the book isn’t, so that people are actually buying for the bonus. So what we did in this short launch window is we actually came up with a bunch of targeted bonuses that were each individually more valuable to the list than the price of the book. And essentially, we weren’t selling the book so much as we were selling the bonuses, because we’re like, yeah, well, a small percentage of people on this list are going to want to buy a book that is for children about money. But they all are going to want this report on how to survive the coming crash, for example. And this was a financial list. That’s something that is appealing to a lot more people, even if they don’t want the book. And so we had a few bonuses like that. And our strategy was, these are only available for this three or four day launch. They’re never going to be offered again. and if you want this stuff, you have to buy during this launch window. 
我们采取的做法，再次强调，这源自电子邮件营销的原则。就像在联盟营销活动中如何销售产品？多年来我是如何成功做到的？很简单，你为这本书提供赠品。这些赠品应该比书本身更具吸引力，并且精准针对邮件列表受众——即便书的内容并非如此——这样人们实际上是为了赠品而购买。在这个短暂的推广窗口期，我们设计了一系列针对性赠品，每个赠品对邮件列表用户的价值都远超书籍定价。本质上，我们主要不是在卖书，而是在卖赠品。因为我们清楚，这个邮件列表中只有小部分人会想买一本给孩子看的理财书。但比如说，他们都会想要这份《如何度过即将到来的经济危机》的报告——这是个金融领域的邮件列表。即便不想要书，这类内容对更多人具有吸引力。我们准备了几个这类赠品，策略很明确：这些仅在三四天的推广期内提供，过后永不返场。 如果你想得到这些，就必须在本次推广期间购买。

And during that launch window, if you are doing this, you have to go really, really hard. You cannot just send one email or two emails. You have to push hard. And I say that, and even with Scott’s List, we actually canned a few of the emails. I think I can’t remember how many we sent. It was nowhere near what I would have done because I have sent like 5, 6, 7 emails on the last day of a promotion and I definitely would have put on my list, but his list was 500,000 people or something and he just did not want to get his account shut down. We just had like maybe four or five emails go out because we canned some that we’d written because the sales were coming in so fast. He was like, okay, I just don’t want to push it. We’ve already done really well. But you have to be aggressive about it. In this short window, you have to make sure people are opening their inbox and seeing you in there and seeing that there is a limited time offer. And by reframing it so that we weren’t actually selling the book, but we were actually selling the bonuses and doing it over a very short period of time, we ended up making more sales than anyone ever had when they were pre-launching a book with these week-long windows and bookstore interviews and signings and so on. 
而在推广期间，如果你要这么做，就必须全力以赴。你不能只发一两封邮件。必须加大力度。我这么说的时候，即便是斯科特的邮件列表，我们实际上也取消了几封邮件的发送。具体发了多少封我记不清了，但远不及我平时的做法——在促销最后一天我通常会发 5、6、7 封邮件，我肯定会给我的列表发这么多。但他的列表有 50 万人左右，他不想账户被关停。我们最终只发了大概四五封邮件，因为销量增长太快，我们取消了几封写好的邮件。他说："行了，我不想逼太紧，已经做得很好了。"但你必须保持攻势。在这短暂的窗口期，你必须确保人们打开收件箱就能看到你，看到这个限时优惠。 通过重新定位，我们实际上不是在卖书，而是在卖赠品，而且是在极短时间内完成销售。结果我们的销量超过了所有那些用长达一周的预售期、书店访谈和签售等方式来推广新书的人。

It was just so effective to just go back to the principles of email marketing. As copywriters, we’ve kind of known about this stuff for a long time that it works, but authors don’t really know it. They don’t really know how to apply it. So all we did really was apply good email marketing principles to the launch. There was, you know, I did say this to you guys, there was other stuff that we did that like incentivizing the average order value. And there were certain ways that we wrote the copy on the sales page that we’re pushing to that I kind of don’t want to talk about because I had people buy this info from me. So out of respect to my customers, I don’t want to give it all away. But it was honestly a large part of it was reframing to this short launch window, focusing on an email list and reframing that we’re not selling a book, we are selling these bonuses. And that turned it kind of into an internet marketing launch, if you will, which was a really unusual thing for an author to do. And yet it worked really, really well.
回归电子邮件营销的基本原则确实非常有效。作为文案撰稿人，我们早就知道这些方法行之有效，但作家们并不真正了解。他们不知道如何运用这些技巧。我们真正做的就是把优秀的邮件营销原则应用到新书发布中。记得我跟你们提过，我们还做了其他事情，比如激励提高客单价。在销售页面的文案撰写上，我们也采用了一些特殊手法——这部分我不太想详谈，因为有人花钱向我购买过这些信息。出于对客户的尊重，我不便全盘托出。但说实话，关键就在于重新规划这个短期发售期，聚焦邮件列表，并重塑概念：我们不是在卖书，而是在卖这些赠品。这某种程度上把新书发布变成了网络营销活动，对作家来说很不寻常。然而效果却出奇地好。

Kira Hug: Amazing. Are you comfortable sharing some of the numbers from your subscription business as far as like, how many people are on your list and how many people are part of your subscription and paid community or just like rough numbers, rough?
琪拉·休格：太棒了。你方便透露些订阅业务的数字吗？比如邮件列表有多少活跃用户，付费社区或订阅服务的参与人数？大概数字就行。

Daniel Throssell: Yeah. Okay. Well, my list, I think it’s 12,000 active subscribers at the moment for the newsletter, and for my paid newsletter, I haven’t really talked about that publicly, so I don’t really want to give numbers away. It’s in the hundreds, I will say, but I just don’t really like talking about my revenue too much in public.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：好的。目前我的新闻简报约有 12,000 名活跃订阅用户。至于付费简报，我还没公开讨论过具体数字，所以不太方便透露。只能说有几百人订阅吧，我不太喜欢公开谈论收入细节。

Kira Hug: I ask because I think there are a lot of copywriters, freelancers, creatives who would love to use this model in their own business or transition to this model and consider a subscription similar to yours, and pulling their own ideas into it, obviously. Do you have advice for them on what it really takes to make this model work? It’s obviously not as easy as it looks on the outside where it’s just writing an email and then you get paid subscribers. What does it take?
琪拉·休格：我这样问是因为很多文案写手、自由职业者和创意工作者都想在自己的业务中采用这种模式，或者考虑转型做类似的订阅服务，当然会融入他们自己的想法。对于真正想运作好这种模式的人，你有什么建议吗？显然不像表面看起来那么简单——写封邮件就能获得付费用户。成功的核心要素是什么？

Daniel Throssell: Yeah, so are we talking about copywriters doing this for, you know, their lists or helping their clients set it up?
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：对，所以我们讨论的是文案撰稿人这样做是为了他们自己的订阅列表，还是帮客户建立这种模式？

Kira Hug: The reason I asked… Yeah, they could help their clients. I was thinking more for their own business. This is a great model we could all use. We’re all writers.
基拉·休：我问这个的原因是...没错，他们可以帮客户做。但我更多考虑的是他们自己的业务。这是个我们都能借鉴的好模式，毕竟大家都是文字工作者。

Daniel Throssell: Sure. Okay. So the biggest thing is you have a lot, like a lot of people are teaching copywriting. So one of the hardest things in running a model like this, I will say, I see where your question was coming from now. So I’ll say the business is very profitable for me. Okay. So it does very well. I’m not worried about anything. So I think that was the intent of your question. I just get uncomfortable sharing numbers. It’s kind of like pyramid scheming to me. It’s like, look how much money I make selling training to you showing how much money I make. It’s like, come on. So I deliberately make a thing of not selling that way. I don’t talk, I say, yes, I do well, but I don’t really want to talk about numbers. But yeah, it’s good. It’s a good model. 
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：当然。最大的问题是现在教文案写作的人太多了。运营这种模式最困难的一点...我现在明白你问题的用意了。这么说吧，这个业务对我来说利润非常可观，运营得很好，我完全不担心。我想你问题的重点就是这个。只是我不太习惯透露具体数字，这感觉有点像金字塔骗局——"看我靠卖培训赚了多少钱，快来学我怎么赚钱"。拜托。所以我刻意避免这种销售话术，我会说确实做得不错，但不想讨论具体金额。不过这确实是个好模式。

The biggest problem with it is it’s very, very hard to have something genuinely worth paying for month after month. And I’ve been doing this for 20 months and you know, I’m not feeling like I’m running out of ideas or anything, but I will say like, I hate my life the week before I’m publishing. Like it’s just, Oh my gosh. I’m like, why am I doing this? This sucks. I hate deadlines. And uh, no matter what I do, that happens every single month because you will have a lot of people get really, really excited about signing up for this thing. But to actually retain people is really, really hard. Because number one, they get bored of stuff, like they stop opening it. We’ve all bought stuff that we don’t open. And with a one-off course, you have enough of a dopamine hit that you can get them to buy it and not think about the fact that, wait, I have 17 other courses I haven’t finished. But when you have the same product, a newsletter that you are selling every month, It’s very, very hard to get away with that. 
最大的问题在于，要持续产出真正值得每月付费的内容实在太难了。我已经坚持做了 20 个月，虽然目前还没遇到创意枯竭的情况，但必须承认——每次发刊前那周我都痛不欲生。真的会抓狂到质问自己"为什么要做这个？太折磨了"。我讨厌截稿日。可无论怎么调整，这种痛苦每月都会准时降临。因为虽然很多人会热血沸腾地订阅，但长期留住用户真的难如登天。首先人们容易厌倦——就像我们买过无数从未拆封的商品。单次课程销售时，多巴胺刺激足以让人冲动下单，暂时忘记"家里还有 17 门没学完的课"这个事实。但当你每月都在销售同款产品（电子报）时，这种套路就完全行不通了。

I want my people to open the thing, but you cannot rely on someone just continuing to buy it month after month and not use it. They will get sick of it and they’ll be like, yeah, I’m not using this, I’m going to cancel. It’s really, really hard to come up with ideas. What I’d say is first, you have to be really confident in the value you are offering to people. You need to be really, really good at whatever it is you’re teaching so that you have ideas that other people can’t sell. And so that’s one of the big value props that I try make in my marketing. It’s like, these are ideas that you’re not going to find taught everywhere else because copywriting is such a competitive market because everyone you’re competing against is a copywriter. They’re supposed to know how to sell this stuff. And so a lot of people are jaded. They’re like, oh, well, I can learn this. It’s just the fundamentals that you got from some old copywriting books. And so I have to work really, really hard on saying, no, this is stuff that I’ve come up with that you’re not going to find elsewhere. So I would say that’s the biggest challenge. You need to be like, do I have enough ideas that I can teach them and that they will be useful to my audience? 
我希望我的用户能打开邮件，但你不能指望他们月复一月地购买却从不使用产品。他们迟早会感到厌倦，然后心想"这东西我根本没用过，还是取消订阅吧"。构思创意真的非常非常困难。我认为首先要对自己提供的价值有绝对信心。你必须在自己教授的领域做到极致，才能产出别人无法复制的独特创意。这正是我在营销中着力打造的核心价值主张——这些创意理念你在别处学不到，因为文案写作本身就是个高度竞争的市场，每个竞争对手都是专业文案人，他们理应懂得如何推销这类内容。很多人已经审美疲劳了，觉得"这些不就是老掉牙的文案教材里的基础理论嘛"。所以我必须格外努力地强调：不，这些都是我独创的、绝无仅有的内容。可以说这才是最大的挑战。 我需要思考的是：我是否有足够多的创意可以传授给他们，并且这些内容对我的受众真正有用？

I would also say it really, really helps to know who that audience is and have it really niched down. Because even me, I like to say that I’m only selling to copywriters, but I have a huge amount of business owners who are who are on the list and they have different challenges to copywriters. And frankly, they are better customers. 
我还要特别强调，真正了解目标受众并精准定位细分领域至关重要。就拿我自己来说，虽然总说只面向文案撰稿人销售，但邮件列表中其实有大量企业主用户——他们面临的挑战与文案人员截然不同。说实话，这些企业主反而是更优质的客户。

Copywriters are really, really flaky. I mean, okay, I just realized I can rant and you guys have just been nodding your heads because you saw the copywriter… It’s like, copywriters will be like, oh, yes, I found a YouTube video. I’m a copywriter now. I watched this video yesterday. How to make six figures in a year. I’m a copywriter. And then three months later, that guy’s like, copywriting sucks. I’m going on to the next thing. 
文案撰稿人这个群体实在太善变了。好吧，我刚意识到自己可以开启吐槽模式，而你们之所以频频点头，是因为都见识过这类人...有些文案新手会这样：看完一个 YouTube 视频就宣称"我是文案撰稿人了"，昨天刚看完《年入百万速成指南》今天就自称专业人士，结果三个月后就开始抱怨"文案这行烂透了"，转头又去追逐下一个风口。

If you are selling to florists or bakers or something, he’s not saying I’m going to be a florist today. And then three months later, being a florist sucks. I’m going to sell my shop. They can’t. They have to be whatever they are. They’re too invested. Copywriters, nope. They’re not invested. So I have people who’ll subscribe and they’re like, this is the greatest thing ever. I love you. You’ve made me, I just closed my first client. I’m like, well, sweet. You know, I’ve changed your life. And then three months later, they’re like, I’m not a copywriter anymore. I’ve moved on to something else.
如果你面向花店老板或面包师这类人群推销，他不会说"我今天要当个花店老板"，然后三个月后又抱怨"开花店糟透了，我要把店卖掉"。他们做不到，必须坚守本行，因为投入太大了。但文案写手不同，他们没什么沉没成本。我有些订阅用户会热情洋溢地说"这太棒了，我爱你！多亏你我签下了第一个客户"，我就觉得"不错啊，我改变了你的人生"。结果三个月后他们说"我不做文案了，改行干别的了"。

Dude! What? There’s a lot of that. And you are both so familiar with that. So, you know, as much as I would like to focus on the copywriters, they’re also a big bunch of flakes with all love to copywriters out there. they’re very flaky and so you kind of want to appeal to the business owners. 
老兄！什么情况？这种事太常见了。你们俩都深有体会吧。虽然我很想专注于服务文案写手，但说真的（无意冒犯所有文案同行），这群人实在太善变了。正因为他们反复无常，所以你最好把目标转向企业主。

But then that makes things harder because if I only sold the copywriters and I think you, Rob and Kira, have an advantage over me in that regard, you are even more niched about like we are for copywriters and so you can just talk about getting clients, for example. I can’t publish a newsletter on getting clients because that would alienate half my subscriber base. They get nothing out of that because they’re not looking for copywriting clients. And so the reason I bring this up is if you’re going to do something like this, you need to have a really good idea of who your product is going to be for so that you know you are delivering things that are useful to them. And so me, I would love to say it’s for copywriters because then I could talk about getting clients, but I can’t. 
但这反而让事情变得更困难，因为如果我只面向文案撰稿人销售——罗伯和琪拉，我觉得你们在这方面比我更有优势，你们的定位更加垂直，比如专门服务文案撰稿人，所以你们可以直接谈论如何获取客户这类话题。而我不能发布关于获取客户的新闻通讯，那会疏离我一半的订阅用户。这对他们毫无价值，因为他们并不需要寻找文案委托。我之所以提到这点，是因为如果你想做类似的事情，必须非常清楚你的产品要面向谁，这样才能确保你提供的内容对他们有用。就我而言，我很想说是为文案撰稿人服务的，这样我就能谈论获取客户的话题，但我不能。

I know that everything I write has to be related to something that you could use if you’re a business owner or if you’re a copywriter. And that makes it a lot harder. So those are two things related to coming up with ideas. So you have to be really comfortable with coming up with enough ideas and you also have to know who you’re going to be writing for. 
我深知自己写的每篇内容都必须同时兼顾企业主和文案撰稿人两个群体的需求。这让创作变得困难许多。以上两点都与选题构思相关：首先你必须习惯持续产出大量创意，同时还要明确你的目标读者是谁。

And then I would say you have to actually have that subscriber base of a free list that you are going to start selling into a newsletter. And I know like, it does seem really appealing to have this kind of thing. And it’s good to have a recurring newsletter. But I spent three years building up that list to the point where I felt comfortable in actually having those ideas to share, committing to doing it once a month, and being able to get enough people in through the free list to sell to. And if you If you haven’t first built the discipline of mailing a list regularly and building that relationship with them, you’re not going to be able to take the next step and start actually selling something. 
然后我要说的是，你必须先拥有一个免费订阅者基础，才能开始向这些订阅者销售电子报服务。我知道这类业务模式看起来确实很有吸引力，拥有一份定期发送的电子报也很不错。但我花了三年时间才建立起这份订阅名单，直到我确信自己既有足够的内容可以分享，又能坚持每月更新，还能通过免费订阅名单吸引足够多的潜在付费用户。如果你连定期发送邮件、与订阅者建立关系的基本功都没打好，就更不可能迈出下一步真正开始销售产品了。

So I’d say if you’re looking to do this, you need to make sure like, do I already have a list of, I’d say a few thousand at least you want to have, because I probably had around 10,000 on my list when I launched Adventures in Copyland. I’m not sure. But you want to have at least a few thousand that you are regularly in contact with. They’re buying your other stuff. They’re buying one-off courses and offers from you so you know that they are going to buy from you before you take the next step, which is to get them to commit to something recurring. Because that’s the hardest thing to do, recurring things. 
所以我认为，如果你想做这件事，必须确保自己已经拥有一个邮件列表——我建议至少要有几千人。当初我推出《文案奇境历险记》时，大概有 1 万订阅用户（具体记不清了）。但底线是至少要有几千个保持定期联系的受众。这些人在持续购买你的其他产品，会为你的单次课程或限时优惠买单——这样你才能确信，在推进下一步（让他们承诺周期性订阅）之前，他们已经建立了购买习惯。因为周期性订阅才是最难的环节。

I have a policy that I got from Ben Settle, which is once they cancel, they can’t come back. And it’s intense. And even as a customer, I used to hate it on bans like that. I feel trapped in that. It was only when I started running my own that I realized why you do it. Number one, cancellation is a hassle for me. I don’t like it. Number two, I’m selling really, really good stuff like the book launch model. I thought the whole book launch strategy, which probably could have been a several hundred dollar product, and I sold it for $50 in an issue of a newsletter. I was very honest. I said, I just don’t want people coming in for one month, paying me $50 to learn something so valuable. And then canceling and being like, I’ll see if next month is for me. You know, I want people who are committed, who are like, yes, I trust you, you’re going to deliver because to me, it’s a two way deal. You need to trust me to deliver and then I need to not have to worry that you are just going to keep cancelling every month so I can just stop worrying about retention and so on. I say, I know I’ve got the subscriber base. I’m going to focus all my energy on coming up with really good ideas. And to me, people who buy, cancel, buy, cancel, buy, cancel were violating that trust and they didn’t allow me to focus on just coming up with ideas because they have to keep worrying, oh, I’m going to lose my entire subscriber base. To me, it’s kind of a trust relationship. It goes both ways, and that’s why we have the policy there.
我奉行一条从本·塞特尔那里学来的原则：客户一旦取消订阅，就永远不能再回来。这条规矩相当严苛。即便作为消费者时，我也很反感这种禁令，感觉像是被束缚住了。直到自己开始运营业务，我才明白为何要这么做。首先，处理退订对我来说很麻烦，我不喜欢。其次，我卖的是像图书发售模型这样的精品内容——整套图书发售策略本可以定价几百美元，我却以 50 美元的价格放在新闻稿里出售。我直言不讳地说：我不希望有人付 50 美元学完超值内容后，只待一个月就取消，盘算着"下个月再看适不适合"。我要的是铁杆用户，那些真心信任我、认可持续价值的人。这本质是双向契约：你需要相信我能持续交付优质内容，而我需要确信你不会月月纠结续费问题——这样我才能彻底放下用户留存压力，专注服务现有订阅者。当我知道用户基础稳固时，就能全心投入创作绝佳内容。 在我看来，那些反复订阅又取消的用户违背了这种信任关系。他们让我无法专注于内容创作，因为我总得担心"订阅用户会全部流失"。这本质上是一种双向的信任契约，所以我们才制定了这样的政策。

Rob Marsh: A lot of what you’re saying rings a bell, feels familiar. Obviously, we sell to copywriters, so we deal with a lot of that. And one of the things that we advise a lot of copywriters to do is once they start seeing, hey, I’m actually pretty good at this thing, maybe I will start talking about some of these skills and helping other people do it, is to not focus on other copywriters, but talk to your niche, who don’t know anything about copywriting or know very little about it. They know very little about marketing. You’re so far ahead and it becomes so easy to provide value to your niche that just is the same old, same old if you’re talking to other copywriters.
罗伯·马什：你说的很多观点都让我深有共鸣。我们面向文案撰稿人开展业务时也常遇到类似情况。我们给新手文案的建议是：当你发现自己确实擅长这行时，与其和其他文案同行反复讨论基础技巧，不如直接面向你的目标客户群体——那些对文案写作一窍不通或知之甚少的人。他们对营销几乎毫无概念，这时候你就能轻松提供价值，而不用在同行圈子里重复那些老生常谈。

Daniel Throssell: I completely agree. I think that’s what I was getting at too with, if you’re trying to do this to sell to copywriters, it’s so, so hard. If you’re teaching copywriting to people who’ve never heard copywriting, you can be like, write to one reader and they’re like, oh my gosh, wow, this is so cool. So it’s just playing the game on easy mode. I would completely agree with you there. I think it’s just a very advanced thing to do. You have to know that you can deliver. You can deliver on your deadlines, that you can hit deadlines, that you can keep coming up with ideas. And to me, that’s even more important than any numerical things like, do I have enough people on my list, blah, blah. It’s like, am I the kind of person who can thrive under this model? Because I will tell you, before I started this newsletter in September 2022, I didn’t have any subscription stuff. I made all my revenue through launches and new products. And frankly, I did really, really well for myself. I’ve made a lot of money doing that. And yeah, it’s nice to have the recurring revenue, but it’s also an added layer of stress that you don’t have if you’re just coming up with individual products. And there are some people in the industry, they just launch stuff, they just sell new products. And honestly, that has more of a new shiny object appeal to it than a recurring newsletter. 
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：我完全同意。我想我要表达的意思也是，如果你试图向文案撰稿人推销这个，那真的非常非常困难。但如果你在教从未接触过文案写作的人，你可以说"写给一个读者看"，他们会觉得"天啊，这太酷了"。这就像在玩简单模式。我完全赞同你的观点。我认为这是件非常高阶的事情。你必须确信自己能做到——能按时交付、能持续产生创意。对我来说，这比任何数字指标（比如邮件列表人数够不够）都重要。关键在于：我是不是能在这种模式下茁壮成长？说实话，在 2022 年 9 月启动这份通讯之前，我没有任何订阅业务，所有收入都来自产品发布。坦白说，我做得非常非常成功，赚了不少钱。虽然经常性收入很美好，但相比单独开发产品，这也额外增加了一层压力。 这个行业里有些人就是不断推出新产品，不断销售新品。说实话，这种模式比持续发送新闻简报更具"新玩具"的吸引力。

And people are way more likely, I actually lamented about this the other day in my emails, like the total cost of my newsletter until now has been $1,000. And I have taught so much good stuff, it blows my mind and yet, Like people are still like, oh, I don’t want to commit to a $50 a month thing. And yet they will. buy a $1,000 course like, oh yeah, sure, no worries. They’ve probably bought five of them over the last two years. And it’s like, I can’t make people see that. So it’s very, I will say like, you know, the grass can look greener on the other side. Yeah, it’s nice to have the model I have and it works for me, but you need to be the kind of person who enjoys that, who can deal with that. And if not, if you don’t like the deadlines, if you don’t like the stress, you know, maybe just stick into a launch model or offering services or productized services that can actually be a way to do it because it takes a kind of person more than any business metric. You have to be the kind of person who is able to show up every month and say, I’m going to deliver something fantastic, no matter what. And frankly, people have to be honest with themselves. A lot of people don’t have that in them, I don’t think. And you have to be, you have to know the kind of person that you are. And so I had written a daily email every day for, you know, three years running when I launched that thing. So I kind of had that idea that I’m the kind of person who can do this.
人们往往更倾向于——我前几天还在邮件里感叹过这事——比如我这份电子报至今总成本是 1000 美元。而我传授了这么多优质内容，简直不可思议，可人们还是说"哎呀，我不想每月花 50 美元订阅"。但他们转头就会买 1000 美元的课程，觉得"没问题啊"。过去两年他们可能买了五门这样的课。可我就是没法让人明白这点。所以这真的很...怎么说呢，就像隔岸风景总显得更美。我现在这种模式确实不错，也适合我，但你必须得是享受这种模式、能驾驭这种模式的人。如果不行——如果你讨厌截止日期，受不了压力——那或许还是坚持用产品发售模式，或提供标准化服务，这确实也是条出路。因为这更多取决于个人特质而非商业指标。你必须成为那种每个月都能站出来说"无论如何我都要交付惊艳作品"的人。说实话，人们得对自己诚实点。 很多人骨子里没有这种特质，我觉得。你必须认清自己是哪种人。要知道，在推出那个项目之前，我已经连续三年每天坚持写邮件了。所以我心里有数，我就是能做到这种事的人。

Rob Marsh: Or they have it in them for six months or nine months, but not for years and years and years, which is probably why most newsletters end after I think 12 or 14 issues is kind of the standard. 
罗伯·马什：或者说他们能坚持六个月或九个月，但没法年复一年地持续。这大概就是为什么大多数电子报在出了 12 到 14 期后就停更了——这似乎成了行业标准。

Kira Hug: Well, and unfortunately or fortunately, I mean, there’s deadlines with subscriptions, but there’s deadlines with services. If you’re a copywriter working with a client, you’re going to still have deadlines.
琪拉·哈格：不管是好是坏，订阅服务有截止日期，但为客户提供文案服务同样有截止期限。作为文案写手，你始终要面对交稿期限。

Daniel Throssell: I’m not disagreeing with you, Kira.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：琪拉，我并不是在反驳你。

Kira Hug: The deadline will always exist. We just have to adapt to the deadline.
基拉·休：截止日期永远存在。我们只需要学会适应它。

Daniel Throssell: It’s true. It’s true. I cannot think of anything I hate more in life than client work. It was just the worst thing I’ve ever done. I just wanted to be out of that as soon as I could. It was my goal from day one. I don’t want to work with clients anymore.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：确实如此。我这辈子最讨厌的就是接客户项目。那简直是我做过最糟糕的事。我只想尽快摆脱这种状态。从第一天起这就是我的目标——再也不要接客户了。

Kira Hug: So to thrive under this model, you are focused, right? You have this consistency that we can see from the outside looking in that’s allowed you to be successful in this model and to grow your business. I’m curious about your day and how you structure parts of your day. I also know you have kids. How old are your kids?
基拉·休：那么要在这个模式下取得成功，你必须非常专注对吧？从旁观者角度看，正是这种持之以恒让你在这个模式中获得成功并发展业务。我很好奇你如何安排日常生活——听说你还有孩子？他们多大了？

Daniel Throssell: Seven, four, and two. And they’re running around outside this office right now. I can hear them.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：七岁、四岁和两岁。这会儿他们正在办公室外面跑来跑去呢，我都听见动静了。

Kira Hug: I love hearing them. I also have three kids. So yes, you’re in it and you’re doing all this and you have this focus enough to bring in new creative ideas, which is not easy. Being creative is not easy. So how do you structure day to day so that you’re able to execute at this high level?
Kira Hug: 我很喜欢听这些。我也有三个孩子。没错，你身在其中，做着所有这些事，还能保持足够的专注力来提出新的创意点子，这并不容易。保持创造力绝非易事。那么你是如何安排日常生活的，才能保持如此高水准的执行力？

Daniel Throssell: The important thing for me is understanding what my goals are at the moment. And so my view is that everything, everything is just going to be for a season. Like that’s just one of my philosophies. Everything’s just going to be for a season. And there’s going to be times when my kids, when I’m going to have a newborn, and not a lot is getting done in that season. And that’s okay. That doesn’t mean the rest of my life is going to be like that, but it means for that season, it is going to be. And so that’s, that’s a big realization. It’s been a big realization for me over the last few years to not judge the stage that I’m in now by any stage that’s come before and compare my output to, to whatever I’m doing. So a few years ago with just one kid, it was very easy to find a lot of time to do stuff. And you know, with one kid, you outnumber the kid two to one, parents are like, great, you know, even with like, you can handle it, you can split up, but when you have two or three, it’s just not like that. And so what I have had to do, as of late, is I mentioned, I had pulled back on a lot of you know, promotional stuff and doing things like this is the first podcast I’ve done in ages. 
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：对我来说，关键在于认清现阶段的目标。我的观点是，所有事情都只是阶段性的——这是我的人生哲学之一。万事万物皆有时节。比如当我有新生儿时，那段时期可能做不成多少事，这很正常。这并不意味着我余生都会如此，只是那个特定阶段会这样。这个认知对我意义重大——过去几年我逐渐明白，不该用过往任何阶段的成就来评判当下处境，也不该拿现在的产出与从前比较。几年前只有一个孩子时，很容易找到大把时间做事。毕竟父母二对一，应付起来游刃有余，甚至可以分工协作。但当你有了两三个孩子，情况就完全不同了。 因此最近我不得不这样做，正如我提到的，我已经减少了很多推广活动，像这次播客是我很久以来第一次参与录制。

I realized my main goals right now are getting that email done every day and getting that newsletter done every month. If I do those two things, I will at least maintain, if not grow my business. Frankly, like I told you, it’s been growing, it’s been doing very well. I’m going to have my best year ever this year, I think. But I know that I’ll at least maintain what I’ve got if I do those things. And so I organize my day around like that’s the goal. I don’t have to come up, there’s other courses I wanna make, there are advertising strategies I wanna pursue, there’s other things I want to do, but they are not the main goal right now. So if I get them done fantastic, the truth is I haven’t made any progress on them for the last six months, that’s also okay, because I’ve hit the main goals. And the main goals are, do the email, and do the newsletter. 
我意识到目前的主要目标就是每天完成邮件写作，每月完成通讯撰写。只要做好这两件事，我的业务至少能维持现状，甚至可能增长。说实话，正如我告诉你的，业务一直在增长，表现非常好。今年应该会是我有史以来业绩最好的一年。但我知道只要坚持做好这两件事，至少能保住现有成果。所以我每天的工作都围绕这个核心目标展开。虽然还有其他想开发的课程、想尝试的广告策略、想完成的事项，但它们都不是现阶段的主要目标。如果能完成那些当然很棒，但事实上过去半年我在这方面毫无进展——这也没关系，因为我已经达成了主要目标。而主要目标就是：写好每日邮件，做好每月通讯。

So the days don’t really look like super productive, honestly. Like yesterday, I’ll be honest with you, yesterday, what did I do? Like in the morning, you know, I wake up, I’ll do some Bible study for like an hour and then I’ll do a workout. Yesterday’s workout took way too long. It was like two and a half hours.
说实话，这些日子看起来并不算特别高效。比如昨天——跟您说实话吧——我昨天都干了啥？早上起床后，我花了一个小时左右研读圣经，然后去健身。昨天的训练耗时实在太长了，大概两个半小时。

Rob Marsh: Every workout takes way too long.
罗伯·马什：每次健身都耗时过长。

Daniel Throssell: It’s just the way they are doing this program. My brother’s a personal trainer. He has me on this special program at the moment. It’s just taking so long. I hate it. But yeah, so I finished the workout at like, 10:30 or something like that and then I get a call from Scotty who’s like, oh, can we can we talk about my column for this week? And so I’m on there for the next hour. I was talking to him and so I was like 11:30 a.m. And I haven’t done anything at all for my business yet. And by the way, I have my youngest kid there because I’m looking after him because Haley’s gone to work so then I have to feed him lunch and put into bed and now it’s midday. And so I’m having my own lunch, and I still haven’t done anything for my business. And so I’m like, Hmm, what am I going to write an email about? And I came up with an idea. And I wrote it in about half an hour. And then I sat there for about an hour and a half trying to work out how I was going to end that email. And literally I did nothing else. I was just like, I don’t like this. And I’m just, I will often write at my coffee table, and I’m just like lying there on the floor, like looking up at the roof and my wife walks past me. She probably thinks I just don’t do any work. I think she knows she can see the thinking look on my face, but I’m just literally lying there on the floor. It’s like, what am I going to do? And then I get distracted. Then I go think about it again. And so by about three o’clock, I think I finished. I finished that email and I loaded it up. So that was yesterday’s email. That was the first goal achieved. And then I’m like, okay, I’m going to start working on an affiliate promotion that I’m doing. And so I opened up Google Docs, and I started writing some notes for that for about half an hour. And then I was like, yeah, I should probably just go and call it a day now. And so that was the output of my day yesterday. 
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：这就是他们安排训练计划的方式。我兄弟是私人教练，现在正让我执行这个特殊计划。耗时实在太长了，我讨厌这样。总之，我大概在 10 点半左右完成训练，接着就接到斯科蒂的电话，问我能不能讨论他这周的专栏。于是我又花了一个小时和他通话，转眼就到上午 11 点半了，可我的工作还完全没开始。更糟的是，因为海莉去上班了，我还得照顾小儿子——要给他喂午饭、哄睡觉，等忙完这些已经中午了。我自己吃午饭时还在发愁：今天邮件到底该写什么？后来总算想到个点子，花了半小时写完正文，却坐在那里苦思冥想一个半小时不知如何收尾。那段时间我其他什么事都没干成，简直糟透了。 我经常在咖啡桌旁写作，就这么躺在地板上，仰望着天花板。妻子从身边经过时，大概觉得我整天游手好闲。虽然她应该能看出我脸上思考的表情，但我确实就是直挺挺躺在那儿——像在琢磨接下来要干什么，然后就走神了。等回过神来继续想，直到下午三点总算完成。那封邮件终于写好发出，算是达成了昨天第一个目标。接着我盘算着该开始准备合作的推广文案，于是打开谷歌文档写了半小时提纲。最后想着"今天就到这儿吧"，这就是我昨天全部的产出。

I share that with you, because that was a very real day. I’d love to be like, oh, I wake up and do a cold shower, and then I do the 10-mile run. But it doesn’t look like that often. Because at about 4 PM, I went, and I was playing with my kids. And then I went and cooked dinner, and I watched football. That was the ultra productive day of an entrepreneur there yesterday. 
我之所以跟你分享这些，是因为那确实是再真实不过的一天。我也希望能说些漂亮话，比如"我起床先冲个冷水澡，然后跑个十英里"。但现实往往并非如此。因为下午四点左右，我去陪孩子们玩耍。接着做了晚餐，看了场球赛。这就是昨天我作为企业家的超高效率一天。

But what was important to me is like, I am always going to get that email done. I’m going to get it done. I know that’s not negotiable. Because I published the monthly newsletter on the 15th, today is the 19th. So I kind of give myself five days to just be in holiday mode and not think about it because it’s so miserable. The week or two leading up to it just sucks so bad, like the publishing deadline and everything. So I’m just like, yes, I’m on holiday. So that wasn’t part of my day yesterday, but if we were closer to a deadline, that also would have been part of the day and I would have got that done. So it’s not that it looks super productive or anything. It’s just, I know the things I have to do and I make sure I do them. And if other things happen, that’s fantastic. They probably won’t. That’s lamentable, but that’s okay. And one day my kids will be older. I won’t be working out for two and a half hours that day, whatever. One day this season will be over and I maybe will get more done. And that’s how I console myself. I don’t lose hope. I’m like, okay, this is my current season. This is what I can do. And so I’m very pragmatic about it in that regard, I think.
但对我来说重要的是，我总会把那封邮件搞定。我一定会完成它。我知道这是不容商量的。因为我每月 15 号发布通讯，今天是 19 号。所以我给自己五天时间完全进入休假状态不去想它——因为筹备过程实在太痛苦了。截止日期前那一两周简直糟透了，各种出版 deadline 什么的。所以我就想，对，我现在就是在休假。昨天确实没处理这事，但如果临近截止日，这也会成为当日任务并且我一定会完成。倒不是说这样显得效率超高，只是我很清楚自己必须完成什么，并确保落实。如果还能处理其他事当然很棒——不过大概率做不到。这很遗憾，但没关系。总有一天孩子们会长大。到那时我就不用每天健身两个半小时了。总有一天这段时期会过去，或许我能完成更多事。我就是这样安慰自己的。我始终怀抱希望，想着：好吧，这就是我现阶段的生活，这就是我能做的。在这方面我觉得自己非常务实。

Rob Marsh: I’ve been on your list a long time, so I’ve seen the breadth of what you write, the different things you bring to your emails, and even some of the courses that you create. I’m curious, aside from just living life, where else do you get inspiration? Are there particular books that you love reading? And by the way, a long time ago now, you recommended Blake Crouch on some of your emails. I immediately went through all of his books. His books are so good. They’re just good enough to reread or re-listen to. But where else do you find any inspiration?
罗伯·马什：我订阅你的邮件很久了，所以见识过你写作的广度，你给邮件带来的各种元素，甚至包括你创作的一些课程。我很好奇，除了日常生活，你还会从哪里获取灵感？有没有特别爱读的书？顺便说一句，很久以前你在某封邮件里推荐过布莱克·克劳奇的作品，我立刻读遍了他所有的书。他的书好到值得反复阅读或聆听。但你还会从哪些地方寻找灵感呢？

Daniel Throssell: For emails, honestly, I try number one is daily life. And for the reasons I said earlier, dialogue is my favorite thing to have in an email. So I will try and get a moment from my life because that’s just the gold standard. If I can’t get that, the next place I’m going is my inbox and just riffing on things people have sent me from readers or other things I’ve read from other copywriters, what they’re doing. Because to me, dialogue, my stories is number one. 
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：说实话，对邮件写作而言，我的第一灵感来源是日常生活。就像之前说的，对话体是我最爱的邮件形式。所以我会努力捕捉生活中的片段——那才是黄金素材。如果找不到生活素材，第二选择就是收件箱，我会根据读者来信或其他文案作者的作品即兴发挥。因为对我来说，对话体和亲身经历始终是首选。

Number two thing people love is just clashes of opinions and controversy and just opinions on opinions. That’s why I watch a YouTube video for five minutes and then you spend half an hour reading the comments. You know, just this long argument between two guys who just resorted to calling each other idiots. And it’s like, you’re fascinated by it. You just can’t stop reading. So I will try and just do opinion or commentary on anything I’ve seen that someone else has said, because people find that fascinating. 
人们热衷的第二件事就是观点碰撞和争议，以及各种意见交锋。这就是为什么你会看五分钟 YouTube 视频，却花半小时翻评论区——两个家伙争论到最后互骂对方白痴，而你却看得津津有味，根本停不下来。所以我常会对看到的他人言论发表观点或评论，因为大家就爱看这个。

And if I can’t do that, those are the days that I’m sitting there lying on the floor next to my coffee table for two hours. Like, what am I going to write about?  I don’t know. Sometimes I just have to make it up on those days where I’m like, you saw the email that had 15,000 O’s in it. Like that was just sometimes things like that happen.
要是连这也写不出来，那些日子我就只能瘫在咖啡桌旁的地板上发呆两小时：今天到底写什么好呢？实在没灵感的时候，我只能硬编——比如那封塞了 15000 个"哦"的邮件，这种奇葩事偶尔就会发生。

Rob Marsh: That was, that was Daniel fell asleep at his laptop and somebody hit send. Yeah.
罗伯·马什：那次绝对是丹尼尔对着笔记本睡着了，然后有人误点了发送键。没错。

Daniel Throssell: It’s really just trying to react to things that I see online. And I don’t like doing that because I don’t like spending time on the internet. I hate the internet. I don’t like watching news. I don’t have social media. And frankly, I don’t like being in my inbox either. But sometimes it’s a necessary evil to come up with. When you’re creating daily content, you can’t really escape it, unfortunately. I just don’t think I’m getting inspiration for emails from books or anything because Most of the books I’m reading are fiction. And copywriters, I don’t know, there’s not many ideas I get out of fiction that I can write about. And one of my pet hates with people in the copywriting industry is that, especially newer people trying to come up with content, it’s like, three marketing lessons I got from watching this or reading this. It’s like, what a miserable way to live your life that you’re just enjoying fiction or a work of art and you’re like, what’s the marketing lesson in this? I just, I rebel again.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：其实我只是在尝试对网上看到的事物做出反应。我讨厌这么做，因为我不喜欢花时间上网。我厌恶互联网。我不爱看新闻，也没有社交媒体账号。坦白说，我连收件箱都不想打开。但有时候这是不得不面对的麻烦事。当你每天都要创作内容时，很遗憾你确实避不开这些。我觉得自己很难从书籍中获取邮件写作灵感，因为我读的大多是小说。至于文案写作——我不知道，从小说里能提取的创作点子实在有限。我最反感文案行业里某些人的做法，尤其是那些刚入行想找内容素材的新人，动不动就是"从某部作品里学到的三个营销技巧"。这种活法太可悲了，明明在享受小说或艺术作品，却非要琢磨"这里面有什么营销门道？"我对此特别抵触。

Rob Marsh: I’m going to be the email promoting this episode is going to be titled marking lessons from listening to this podcast.
罗伯·马什：这期节目的推广邮件标题就定为《从本播客中学到的营销技巧》。

Kira Hug: Yeah, unfortunately, my brain is also wired that way, where I’m like, oh, there’s a marketing lesson. And it just goes there. And it’s hard to shut up.
基拉·休：是啊，可惜我的大脑也这样运作，总是不自觉想着"这里有个营销技巧"。根本停不下来，想闭嘴都难。

Daniel Throssell: Yeah, I get it. Because you’re actually a copywriter. And you think in terms of that. And that’s okay. But I mean, people who approach fiction thinking they don’t approach it as a work of fiction to enjoy, they approach it as like, yeah, what marketing lesson am I going to get out of this? And I’m just like, that’s true. There’s no joy in your life when you live like that. So I will. Yeah. I listened to audio books. I love the Sherlock Holmes audio books. I love the Aubrey Maturin series. I just like fiction and it was a shift I made a few years ago to stop reading so much self-development and start reading a bit more fiction. And it’s just enjoyable. It’s nicer than listening to self-development stuff. 
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：我懂。因为你本质是个文案人，思维模式就这样。这很正常。但有些人读小说时，不是抱着欣赏故事的心态，而是想着"能从里面学到什么营销技巧"。说实话，这样活着多没意思啊。我现在改听有声书了，超爱《福尔摩斯》和《奥布雷-马图林》系列。几年前我刻意减少读成功学，多读小说，现在觉得特别享受——比听那些个人成长类内容愉悦多了。

Kira Hug: All right, I have three quick questions like a real lightning round.
基拉·休：好，现在进入真正的快问快答环节，就三个问题。

Daniel Throssell: Oh, I’m nervous. I feel like I butchered some of the questions.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：噢，开始紧张了，感觉刚才有些问题答得稀烂。

Rob Marsh: There’s no such thing as a lightning round with us, Daniel, just keep that in mind.
罗伯·马什：丹尼尔，我们这里可没有什么闪电问答环节，你记住这一点就行。

Kira Hug: I can’t even remember all three. And if you don’t answer one, that’s fine. So first one, when was the last day—you said you don’t read the news typically, but like—was there a certain date where you cut it off? And you’re  going to make this change and go from this to this?
琪拉·休：我连三个问题都记不全。要是你漏答一个也没关系。第一个问题是——你说你通常不看新闻——但你有没有一个具体的日期作为分界线？就是从那天起你决定做出改变，从此不再看新闻？

Daniel Throssell: I read a book called Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli. I think it was 2021 that I read that book, maybe 2022. Just fantastic book. Honestly, I recommend that book so much. Stop Reading the News by Rolf Dobelli. You’re like, oh yeah, well, I know what it’s going to say. Sure. But it’s the arguments for it. So whenever I read that book, I was like, I’m not reading news anymore. And I use an app called Freedom. It’s blocked on my devices. I can’t. I try and load a new site, it won’t open.
丹尼尔·索罗塞尔：我读过罗尔夫·多贝里写的《停止看新闻》这本书。大概是 2021 年读的，也可能是 2022 年。这书实在太棒了，说真的我强烈推荐。《停止看新闻》，作者罗尔夫·多贝里。你可能会觉得"哦，我大概能猜到内容"。但关键在于书里的论证逻辑。读完那本书后，我就决定再也不看新闻了。我还用了个叫"Freedom"的应用，它在我的设备上屏蔽了新闻网站。我想打开新闻网页都打不开。

Kira Hug: Okay all right so should we tell you when the next eclipse is happening? Should we look that up for you?
琪拉·休：好吧，那需要我们告诉你下次日食是什么时候吗？要帮你查查吗？

Daniel Throssell: That’s the one hole in my system is the other copywriters I’m subscribed to and they talk about stuff and I’m like dang it stop. You know Sean McIntyre you had him on recently. He’s a good friend of mine. I actually unsubscribed from his investing thing. I was like, dude, I’m sorry. I love you. It’s a great newsletter, but I just don’t want to know. My whole investing philosophy is about passive investing. I invest. I buy the index fund. I don’t look at it. And then Sean’s sending me this weekly email like, gold is going up 3%. You better buy. It’s like, dude, I love you and your writing is fantastic, but I have to unsubscribe. And he’s like, I understand that. So yeah, I even just try and pursue active ignorance about things that I don’t consider important to my life. So if there is an eclipse coming over Perth, yes, feel free to shoot me an email and let me know. That way I won’t freak out.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：这是我系统中的唯一漏洞——我订阅的其他文案撰稿人谈论的内容总会让我抓狂。比如肖恩·麦金泰尔，你们最近刚采访过他。他是我的好友，但我其实退订了他的投资通讯。我当时说：老兄对不住，我爱你，这简报很棒，但我不想看。我的投资理念就是被动投资——买指数基金然后彻底不管。结果肖恩每周都发邮件说"黄金涨了 3%快买"，我只能说：兄弟我爱你，文笔绝佳，但我必须退订。他很理解。所以我主动屏蔽那些我认为无关紧要的信息。要是珀斯有日食，尽管发邮件提醒我，这样我就不会惊慌失措。

Kira Hug: Not on social media, but we’ll email you. Okay, second question is, how do you feel about AI in a sentence or two?
琪拉·休：我们不会在社交媒体通知你，但会发邮件。第二个问题：用一两句话说说你对 AI 的看法？

Rob Marsh: This is not a lightning round question with Daniel.
罗伯·马什：对丹尼尔来说这可不是快问快答环节。

Kira Hug: You have to answer in a sentence or two. Those are the constraints. You cannot go past that.
基拉·休格：你必须用一两句话回答。这是硬性规定，不能超字数。

Daniel Throssell: Overrated. I don’t know how I can answer that in a sentence or two. I want to share this one thought, like everyone talks about AI, like, give it five years. It’s gonna get so good. One day it will do everything we do. And I just want to give a perspective. It may not even be right, but no one’s even thought of it. What if that’s not true? What if like people say in 1960 we’re gonna have hover cars just you wait look we’ve gone from horse and cart to petrol engines like by 2024 we’re gonna have flying cars just watch it’s inevitable. Maybe it’s not, maybe it actually has a ceiling. And I just want to put that out there. I’m not going to argue for it. It may not be true, but everyone is just so hooked on the idea that AI will get better and better and better. What if it doesn’t? What if it actually has an inherent limit to how creative it can be? And it’s currently, in which case it’s not that good.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：被高估了。我不知道怎么用一两句说清楚。但我想分享一个观点——现在人人都在谈论 AI，说什么"等五年就会突飞猛进""总有一天能取代人类所有工作"。我想提供个可能不对、但没人想过的视角：万一不是这样呢？就像 1960 年人们说"等着瞧吧，我们从马车进化到汽油发动机，到 2024 年肯定会有悬浮车，这是必然的"。但万一技术真有天花板呢？我不打算论证这个观点，它可能不对。但所有人都坚信 AI 会无限进步，万一它存在与生俱来的创造力上限呢？那它现在其实...也没多厉害。

Kira Hug: That’s fair. And we don’t argue in the lightning round. We can’t argue.
基拉·休：这很公平。闪电问答环节我们可不争论。也没法争论。

Rob Marsh: I’m not going to argue, but I’m going to throw out my two or three sentences, which I think the limit is actually going to be energy use and cost of equipment, because at some point the VC money dries up. And if it doesn’t pay for itself, AI doesn’t work anymore. So a lot of the tools that we use are going to get more expensive. A lot of them are just going to go away. And I think that’s where we’ll start to find the limits. But there might be some intelligence limits, too.
罗伯·马什：我不打算争论，但我要抛出我的两三句话——我认为真正的限制因素其实是能源消耗和设备成本，因为风投资金终有枯竭之时。如果无法自负盈亏，人工智能就难以为继。所以我们使用的许多工具会变得更昂贵，不少甚至会直接消失。我觉得这就是我们会开始碰壁的地方。不过可能也存在一些智能层面的限制。

Kira Hug: All right.  基拉·休：好的。

Daniel Throssell: There are severe intelligence limits on that thing.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：那玩意儿的智能限制可大着呢。

Kira Hug: Moving on with the lightning round. Sorry. Third question. Final lightning round question. Is there someone that you’d like to have a battle with online? They don’t have to be a copywriter online.
基拉·休格：继续我们的快问快答环节。抱歉。第三个问题。最后一个快问快答问题。有没有你想在网上与之较量的人？对方不一定非要是网络文案写手。

Rob Marsh: I’m pretty sure Daniel put me in the hospital in an email one time.
罗伯·马什：我相当确定丹尼尔有次用邮件把我怼到住院。

Kira Hug: Someone else you haven’t had a battle with that you would like that you’ve been eyeing and that you’re like, oh, I might battle that person at some point, but I’m not quite ready.
基拉·休格：有没有你一直暗中观察、跃跃欲试但还没准备好挑战的潜在对手？

Daniel Throssell: I am not going to say anything on the record for that.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：这个问题我拒绝发表任何正式回应。

Kira Hug: Give us a hint. Give us one hint.
Kira Hug: 给点提示吧。就透露一个线索。

Daniel Throssell: Aanyone who’s been on my email knows very well, I have been in several. There are a couple. There’s more than one when when we stop recording, I will regale you with tales that I would just not want on public record. 
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：订阅过我邮件的人都很清楚，我参与过不少（论战）。确实有几场。等录音结束后，我可以给你们讲些不适合公开记录的精彩故事——远不止一两个。

Rob Marsh: You do take on groups like copywriting on Reddit, the Reddit subgroup copywriting. That’s one of your enemies.
罗伯·马什：你确实会针对某些群体，比如 Reddit 上的文案写作小组，那个 Reddit 文案写作子版块就是你的"敌人"之一。

Daniel Throssell: It was. Yeah. A while ago, that was one of my targets. I don’t like people who don’t really have their audience’s best interests at heart. And there are some in the industry, they’re selling stuff. They’ll literally say, which of these products will you buy? And then they’ll make the product that people will buy. There’s no question of, is this really going to be the best thing for you? Is this really going to help you? It’s just about, can I make money? And I really rail against that kind of stuff. And I feel a lot of my hatred for AI stuff stems from that, from people who’ve tried to use AI as a way to make money off copywriters rather than helping them. And my anti-AI stance is that when you are relying too much on it, it’s actually really cool. I use AI all the time, but just not for copywriting. But if you’re relying on that to paper over the skill gaps that you have as a copywriter, you’re not going to progress. And the reason we talked about this in this episode, like if you want to have a business something like mine, you have to be the kind of person who can come up with creative and valuable fresh ideas worth paying for. AI will not help you do that. And so I just really feel like it’s not good for people and a lot of people selling AI prompts and so on. It’s going to get outdated. It’s not valuable. It’s just a cash grab. And I just really have an issue with that. So that’s probably a serious answer to your question, Kira.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：确实如此。那是前阵子我的一个目标。我讨厌那些根本不把受众利益放在心上的人。这个行业里确实存在这种人，他们只顾卖货。他们会直接问"这些产品你愿意买哪个？"，然后就按人们的选择去生产。完全不会考虑"这真的对客户最有利吗？""这真能帮到客户吗？"他们只在乎"我能赚钱吗？"我特别反对这种做法。我觉得自己对 AI 的很多反感也源于此——那些试图用 AI 从文案写手身上赚钱而非帮助他们的人。我的反 AI 立场在于：当你过度依赖它时，它确实很酷。我经常使用 AI，但绝不用于文案写作。如果你指望用 AI 来掩盖作为文案写手的技能缺陷，你永远无法进步。这期节目我们讨论这个的原因在于——如果你想建立像我这样的业务，你必须成为那种能持续产出值得付费的创意性价值主张的人。AI 帮不了你做到这点。 因此我真心觉得这对人们没有好处，那些兜售 AI 提示词之类的东西终将过时。它们毫无价值，纯粹是捞快钱的手段。我对这种现象非常反感。基拉，这可能就是对你问题的严肃回答了。

Kira Hug: We like to end on a serious note. That’s perfect. All right. Where can listeners go if they want to connect with you? Obviously not LinkedIn. Tried to connect with you there. Not there.
基拉·休格：我们喜欢以严肃话题收尾。这个回答太完美了。好的，听众们该去哪里联系你呢？显然不是领英——我试过在那儿联系你，行不通。

Daniel Throssell: So, yeah, LinkedIn’s blocked on my computer. I set up the profile to link to my homepage and then I blocked LinkedIn. So, I can’t even go and change that now. So, I don’t see anything there. I only have one point of entry into my world and one alone and that is persuasivepage.com. That’s my website and my email list is the only place I create anything. So, it’s very simple for people to find me and very simple for me to manage. I’m just not on all the socials or anything.
丹尼尔·斯罗塞尔：没错，我的电脑屏蔽了领英。当初设置个人资料时只放了主页链接，然后就把领英屏蔽了。现在连修改资料都做不到，所以我完全看不到那上面的动态。进入我世界的唯一入口就是 persuasivepage.com——我的个人网站，而邮件列表是我发布内容的唯一平台。这样既方便大家找到我，也便于我管理。我压根不玩任何社交媒体。

Rob Marsh: Okay. Well, thanks Daniel for opening up a bit about the launch plan as well as, you know, what you’re doing with emails. There’s a lot of stuff here to consider and think about. So we really appreciate it.
罗伯·马什：好的。非常感谢丹尼尔分享了关于发布计划以及你在邮件营销方面的做法。这里有很多值得思考和探讨的内容，我们真的非常感激。

That’s the end of our interview with Daniel Throssell. 
以上就是我们对丹尼尔·索罗塞尔的采访全部内容。

I want to add just a couple of thoughts to the discussion that we were sharing. While we were talking, Daniel mentioned the Black Friday promotion where he doubled the sales of all of the other participants put together. on that promotion. He did an incredible job. We were part of that promotion and saw what he did firsthand. And when it comes to promotions that work and turning ideas on their head to find new ways to do things, Daniel’s really good. He’s worth listening to and paying attention to. 
我想就我们刚才的讨论补充几点想法。在交谈中，丹尼尔提到了黑色星期五促销活动，他的销售额超过了其他所有参与者的总和。他在那次活动中表现惊人。我们也参与了那场促销，亲眼见证了他的操作。说到有效的促销策略和颠覆常规的创新方法，丹尼尔确实是个中高手，他的见解非常值得倾听和关注。

Also, don’t miss the fact that Daniel has written and sent an email to his list every single day for more than four years. That includes when he was on vacation, sick days, he doesn’t miss. In fact, I think he’s missed one in something like seven years. There’s a lesson in that. You can call yourself the best, but it’s stuff like showing up every single day that actually proves that you’re the best. And like Daniel said, nothing happens if you’re not doing anything. I’m encouraging you to take a lesson from that. How can you show up, maybe not every single day, although that’s definitely not a bad idea, but how can you show up consistently more than once a week over and over to prove that you’re the best at what you do? It’s worth thinking about. Actually, do more than think. Once you know what you want to do, start showing up. There’s a little bit more to it than just showing up because most of what you have to do has to be good. Now, not everything’s going to be a hit. You’re going to make a few mistakes. You’re going to fail, especially as you’re getting started. And as Seth Godin likes to say, half of all of your posts will be below average. But by continually doing good work consistently, you’ll eventually build the audience that you need to support your work. 
另外，千万别忽略这个事实：丹尼尔已经连续四年多每天坚持撰写并发送邮件给他的订阅列表。这包括他度假期间、生病的日子——他从不间断。实际上，我记得他大概七年里只漏发过一封。这其中蕴含着一个道理。你可以自诩为最优秀的，但正是这种日复一日的坚持才能真正证明你的卓越。就像丹尼尔说的：如果你什么都不做，就什么都不会发生。我建议大家从中汲取经验。你该如何保持出现？或许不必像他那样每天坚持（尽管这绝对是个好主意），但怎样才能做到每周持续多次地展现自己，反复证明你是所在领域的佼佼者？这值得深思。其实，光想还不够。一旦明确目标，就要开始行动。当然，仅仅出现还不够——因为你所做的内容大部分必须足够优质。当然，并非每件事都能成功。你会犯错，会遭遇失败，尤其在起步阶段。正如赛斯·高汀常说的：你发布的内容中，总会有一半低于平均水准。 但通过持续不断地做好工作，你终将建立起支持你事业所需的受众群体。

One other piece of Daniel’s approach that I think is worth thinking about is the fact that Daniel’s online character is a bit brash. He mentioned how he’s self-aggrandizing, and that’s part of his approach to every email and to the character that he’s building. And while that kind of character may not ring true for you, there’s something about that kind of self-assurance that attracts attention, and sometimes it attracts criticism. But even critical attention helps him build his brand. Like I said, this isn’t going to fit most people, so think of it as showing up larger than life. What can you emphasize or use to play big? If you know the answer to that, then you may be on your way to being the best at what you do. Whether that’s copywriting or marketing or some particular deliverable, you want to be the best. 
丹尼尔策略中另一个值得思考的点在于，他塑造的线上形象带着几分张扬。他提到自己善于自我吹捧，而这正是他每封邮件写作策略的组成部分，也是他刻意打造的人设。虽然这种形象可能与你并不契合，但那种自信满满的特质确实能吸引眼球——有时也会招致批评。但即便是负面关注，也在帮助他建立个人品牌。正如我所说，这并不适合大多数人，不妨将其视为一种夸张的自我呈现方式。你可以强化或利用哪些特质来放大存在感？若能想明白这一点，或许你就能在所属领域脱颖而出。无论是文案写作、市场营销还是某个具体交付成果，你都要立志做到极致。

I want to thank Daniel again for joining us to talk about his business and the characters that he’s building, his launch strategy. Be sure to jump on Daniel’s email list at persuasivepage.com. That’s the only place that you can connect with him. His approach to writing emails is unique, and it’s probably worth paying attention to if you write emails for clients or if you write emails for your own list. 
再次感谢丹尼尔与我们分享他的业务发展、角色塑造以及产品发布策略。务必前往 persuasivepage.com 订阅他的邮件列表，这是唯一能与他建立联系的渠道。他撰写邮件的独到方法值得关注，无论你是为客户撰写邮件还是经营自己的订阅列表。

And don’t forget, if you want to get your hands on the full strategy that he used to help Scott Pape get three different books to number one on the bestseller list, and remember, this strategy can be used to sell a lot more than books, you need to be a member of The Copywriter Underground, which you can join at thecopywriterclub.com/tcu. We’ll be sharing details with members there shortly. 
另外别忘了，若想获取他帮助斯科特·佩普三度登顶畅销书排行榜的完整策略（请记住这套策略的适用范围远不止图书销售），你需要加入 The Copywriter Underground 会员，登录 thecopywriterclub.com/tcu 即可注册。我们将很快向会员分享具体细节。

That’s the end of this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this interview, please share it with a friend or an associate or anyone else who might enjoy it or learn from it. And you can always leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. We’d love to see your reviews at Apple Podcasts, where it really does make a difference. 
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