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I’d like to introduce someone to you.

This is Sean Platt. I spent a MIND-BLOWING hour with him talking about micro-publishing (you know, selling 99c books on Kindle), how to get started and rock it out, some of his most epic fails, and his hard-earned lessons. And lots of other topics. We’re both talkers.

If you are interested in publishing anything ever, you should . It is seriously that good.

If the note-takers among you want to share your notes for the benefit of those who aren’t audio-friendly, that would be awesome. Tell us in the comments or send me an email.

Sean is a better writer than I am, so I let him write his own bio. Except I said I’d also call him “nifty”, because that is how I roll.

Want to know more about Nifty Sean?

Sean Platt is a content marketing specialist, publisher and awesome dad. You’d be really silly not to 

Click on the link to buy the Yesterday’s Gone pilot. It’s, but if you want to get the full “season” now,  Click to become a “goner,” and get exclusive chapters with shocking endings, along with a ringside seat to all the behind the scenes stuff (perfect for readers AND writers!)

Fair warning: if you don’t like serials like LOST and writers like Stephen King, you probably won’t like reading Yesterday’s Gone. But if you like stuff that starts out awesome, and then is awesome on every page until the WTF? cliffhanger ending, then you’ll totally dig Yesterday’s Gone. (I dare anyone who reads Yesterday’s Gone to not secretly like Boricio, especially by season’s end.)

Thanks Sean, for sharing so much smartness on how to rock it out to piles of cash AND joy.

If you have any follow-up questions, please pop them in the comments. And if you too would like to hear Sean and I talk about balancing strategy and white-hot passion, then let us know!

London was soot and smog and ceaseless machinery, and Charlie was one of the many many boys fed daily to the machines.

Charlie, like a swarm of other ragamuffins, sold the ha’penny broadsheets over on Whitechapel for enough blunt for a chop, gin, and a bit for his mum.

Not the biggest or the boldest, his only advantage was a fair dash of cunning and a quick tongue. Competition was deadly intense: once Charlie managed to claim a prime corner and had a half-brick thrown at him.

So Charlie made do with a less ideal situation, and used his wits to shout out attention-grabbing slogans. “Ya don’t wanna look ignorant, do ya?” was not a huge success, but most did get him more sales than he would otherwise make.

Then one day he awoke with a nonsensical rhyme in his head. When he reached his patch he tried it. “‘Oos dead, ‘oos wed, ‘oo fell off a sled?” he chanted loudly while waving his paper. Doggerel though it was, the rhyme got more attention than usual, and more ha’pennies.

One posh gent in a frock coat and fob watch walking past said, “Who fell off a sled?” Charlie cheekily replied, “I dunno, guv, I carn’t read now can I?” The gent laughed and paid Charlie a whole penny. With that unexpected windfall and the rest, Charlie sold more than he’d usually get in two days.

The next day Charlie tried another new slogan, but it wasn’t doing anywhere near so well as the rhyme had. Shrugging, Charlie again chanted ”‘Oos dead, ‘oos wed, ‘oo fell off a sled?” and sold papers. The gent exchanged another round of banter and another penny, and Charlie decided he was on a winner.

Month after month, Charlie used the same rhyme, with only occasional variations. (Once, topically, the rhyme became ”‘Oos dead, ‘oos wed, ‘oo went off ‘is ‘head?”) He became a fixture, with more regular customers than a broadsheet seller can generally hope for.

And on his birthday, the gent gave Charlie a whole farthing. Charlie bought his mum new scissors, his sister a ribbon, and got knock-down-drag-out drunk on the rest.

The rhyme continued, a bit subdued, the next day… and every other day until Charlie went off for greater adventures.

The moral of the story

Repetition is criminally underused.

There seems to be a shared belief in the online world that repetition will make you dull and predictable and forgettable. But while repetition often accompanies dull forgettable content, it’s not responsible for it. Repetition, used well, can produce beautiful results.

Repetition builds trust.

When there are themes, words and motifs that reoccur on a regular basis in your content, they become familiar. YOU become familiar. And familiar lives next door to trustworthy.

Repetition creates community.

Ever had a moment where you and a near-stranger have sung a theme song together and them laughed as friends after? If that theme song had changed every week, that could never happen.

Pretty obvious, I grant, but so many of us seem determined to have nothing the same this week as last week.

Repetition creates rhythm.

This one often feels especially important online, where the barriers to entry are so low. We need to see that you’re you’re here to stay before we are likely to trust and invest with you. Rhythm is a dance with time, and demonstrates it beautifully.

Repetition is memorable.

Our brains love encountering information they’ve seen before: it reduces the cognitive load in processing. Repeated elements are more likely to be remembered than one-time ones. This also means that repeated information has more impact.

Repetition saves your brain.

If you have to create a new intro and signoff for every single email and newsletter and article and interview and podcast, or whatever, then you are monstrously inefficient. Worse, if you’re trying to make every single one of them interesting and memorable…

How to use repetition well.

Firstly, choose what you’re going to repeat. Here’s a big-ass list of options to get you started:

Words and phrases

Repeat as desired.

• technical terms (especially your own)
• endearments
• intros
• endings
• metaphors
• running jokes
• quirky phrases
• references
• quotations
• made-up and portmanteau words

Frameworks, formats and templates

The specific words change, but the shape is the same.

• newsletters
• product names (it works for Apple)
• product descriptions
• image captions
• teleclasses
• email signatures
• e-books
• autoresponders
• article titles (“X ways to Y”)
• the articles themselves
• sales pages

Other stuff

• visual elements
• fonts
• recurring characters
• themes
• colour schemes
• topics
• theme music
• shared beliefs
• stock photos
• easter eggs

Second, experiment until you find what suits you and your audience.

(For example, I play around with words constantly. “Squoodles” was added to my regular vocabulary after four different people emailed me just to say how much they loved that word.)

Then there are two ways to implement the repetition.

Set it in stone and do not alter it unless absolutely necessary.

This works best for elements that exist in specific times and places, like intros and outros. (Edward R. Murrow wasn’t the only reporter to use the same sign-off line at the end of every show, but he’s a beautiful example of doing it well.)

Use it as a motif.

You can use the melody, or a variation on the melody. For example, if you address your readers as “mewling minions”, then a) that is awesome, and b) you don’t have to use the exact phrase all the time if you don’t want to. (You could also call them “subaquatic slimebags”, if you like.)

Then the most important part: stick to it.

The more consistent you are with this, the more clear the impression will be.

You’ll notice it happening, as your readers quote you to each other, or describe something to you in your own words, or reference you to someone else as an example of a particular feel, or regard you as the go-to on a topic you revisit often.

Yes, that is exactly as awesome as it sounds.

A little less conversation, a little more action

If you want to start using repetition in your communications, then today:

1. Decide what you’re going to start repeating.
2. Create a repository, if needed (a notepad, a spreadsheet, a template).
3. Use it today.
4. Use it next time.
5. Repeat.

If you don’t know what to repeat because you couldn’t describe your audience at gunpoint, then have a look at Goddamn Radiant. We’ll get you describing your wonderfabulous readers with spot-on repeatable prose in no time.

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For the last decade, I have lived in various houses near Mount Gravatt.

Mount Gravatt is an oversized hill with a repeater dish on top. It is utterly lacking in mystery, intrigue and romance.

I still like it. I’ve been meaning to go eat my lunch at the top of that place for the entire decade that it’s been in my vicinity.

But I’ve never done it.

For many years there were reasons that was difficult: Day Job, no car, yadda yadda. Nowadays, I have no reason that’s stopping me from going. None at all.

Yet here I am, still eating lunch at my house, while Mount Gravatt lurks just a kilometre or two away. I want to go. There’s no reason at all for me NOT to go.

But there’s been no pressing reason for me to go, either: to bother putting on my shoes, packing up my lunch, backing the car out of my horrible driveway, etc etc etc… it feels pathetic to say it, but that’s a meaningful amount of effort.

It’s just easier to sit here and eat my lunch on the couch.

Welcome back to high school science lab.

*white lab coat and safety goggles… on*

Remember inertia? It’s a basic principle of physics: bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.

Simple physics: in order to create motion, you must impart enough energy to overcome inertia.

If you don’t, then the object goes… nowhere.

You can try this right now, science fans.

1. Put a pencil on a notepad.
2. Remove all obstacles in its path.
3. Raise the end of the notepad an inch so the pencil wants to roll downhill.

And what happens? Not a damn thing. Inertia holds that pencil in place like it was glued there.

It wants to move, and there’s nothing in its path stopping it. But it doesn’t move.

It’s the same with me and that mountain.

It’s the same with your people and the offerings you present to them.

It’s not enough to make something people want.

It’s not enough to remove the obstacles and objections.

You have to do more.

You have to help your people overcome inertia.

This doesn’t require force, except in the most technical scientific sense. It’s better to think about it as requiring energy.

Scarcity is a source of energy. It says, “Do it quick, before we miss out!”

Peer pressure is a source of energy. It says, “Do it now, so we can belong!”

Caring is a source of energy. It says, “Do it now, so [someone] can benefit!” (The [someone] might be the client, or you, or a charity, or someone else.)

All of these things create urgency. Urgency overcomes inertia. Voilà! Movement.

Which is why all my launches in future will be closed, not open.

I refused, totally utterly refused, to use urgency for quite a long time. “It’s fake,” I said. “But I want to be available when my readers are ready,” I said. “Transformation takes time, and you have to be ready for it,” I said.

These are all true statements. But they don’t matter as much as inertia does.

My buy-it-whenever-you-like-seriously-it’s-all-good offerings did nothing to impart the motion toward buying it NOW instead of six months from now. And as the mountain and I both know, six months becomes a decade pretty damn quickly.

People wanted the offerings, the same way I want to eat overlooking the city. In most cases there was nothing stopping people from signing up that day. But they didn’t.

“It can wait. I’ll get it next week after that cheque comes in. I’ll get it after I buy that other thing I’ve had my eye on. I’m thirsty. I better go feed the cat. Where was I?”

Does it make that much difference?

Yes.

I admitted to my newsletter subscribers that my leave-every-offer-open,-forever-and-ever, launch style wasn’t really working for either of us. So I announced that access to the awesometacular Cash and Joy Foundations resource would be closing in one week.

I tripled my sales total in that week.

Tripled.

Nothing about the resource had changed except for two very small things:

• I told people about the resource more often.
• It had an end date.

I heard from people who have been reading this website for six months without ever making contact.

I heard from people who suddenly wanted to take action, rightthissecond, and wanted to ask more about the resource.

I heard from people who were wondering if they should sign up right now because they have these things coming up, and they don’t want to miss out, so…

That is a lot of overcome inertia.

But doesn’t it feel manipulative?

No. I thought it would, but it doesn’t.

Let’s be clear: urgency is manipulative. You are manipulating external conditions in order to produce a result.

But you’re not manipulating people.

It’s an important distinction.

My bestest people wanted this resource.

My bestest people could afford this resource.

I manipulated the conditions to say that NOW would be a good time to get started.

That’s all.

Some people don’t have the money now, or the free time, or the headspace, or whatever. Some of them emailed me to find out when it re-opens. (Later October-ish, by the way: you can pop your email into the box to find out exactly when.)

That’s only two months away. By that time they will have either figured out the answers for themselves – yay! – or be one zillion percent ready to rock it out when it does re-open.

In the meantime, there are twenty people rocking it out now who might never have signed up, ever, if I had stayed with the doors-don’t-close model.

No movement, no action.

Urgency works.

I am now a convert.

I unashamedly and unreservedly apologise to urgency. You were right, I was wrong. I’ll be seeing you a lot in future.

But first, I gotta go have lunch up this damn mountain.

You might be wondering how I’ve stayed in business this long without using urgency at all: it’s because I do a lot of other things very, very well. Want to learn more? Sign up for Mo’Cash, Mo’Joy and we can talk about how you can do the same in a free 30-minute Marketing Check-up!

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