Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

I began losing my hair when I was 19. By the time I was 21, I looked like I was 30.

Best thing that ever happened to me.

People take you seriously when you look like a grown-up, and I needed people to take me seriously.

I sold advertising for the smallest radio station in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were rock-solid at number 23 in a city of 23 radio stations. We had a 0.5 share during the Average Quarter Hour. This means that out of every 200 radios that were turned on, only 1 of them would be tuned to my station.

Best thing that ever happened to me.

At any given moment, my station would have between 500 and 800 people listening. But the total number of different people we would reach in a week was about 18,000. Woo-Hoo! I was overjoyed. There wasn’t a single business in our city of 1,000,000 people that couldn’t use 18,000 more customers.

All I had to do is figure out what to say to get my 18,000 people to remember – and prefer – my advertiser. I cannot say with certainty how I knew success would be found in the crafting of a persuasive message rather than in the selection of the “right” audience, but my memory shows me a young boy sitting in an empty classroom reading books during recess rather than playing with the other kids on the playground.

Best thing that ever happened to me.

Yes, I know I’ve said “Best thing that ever happened to me” three times and they can’t ALL be the “best thing,” but I don’t feel like ranking them “#1 Best,” “#2 Best,” etc., so go with the flow, okay?

I restricted my sales calls to businesses that were so tiny they couldn’t afford any advertising other than my little nothing of a radio station. When these people believed in me and wrote me a check, they were giving me their life’s blood. If my plans for them failed, my clients couldn’t pay the rent. They couldn’t send their kids to school with a sack lunch. They couldn’t pay the electric bill.

When you face those kinds of consequences, you lie awake at night figuring out how to make the ads you sold work, because there is no one with whom you can share the blame. It’s all you.

Guilt, Pain and Remorse are powerful teachers.

I quickly figured out how to make advertising work.

And what Guilt, Pain and Remorse taught me was very different from what is being taught in colleges.

Few marketing professionals will ever be solely responsible for the outcomes of the ad campaigns they help to create. Most people in my profession go to college, get a degree, and then become a cog in a marketing machine. Their failures can be attributed to a wide variety of forces beyond their control. Their ink pens are never filled with the blood of the families for whom they write.

My station owner was hoping our little station might bring in about $11,000 a month. Within 18 months, my personal billings were averaging $51,000 a month. My base pay was $800/mo. and I made a 15% commission.  Do the math.

I spent my early twenties as a joyously married, rapidly balding boy with ten thousand stories in his head and an ink pen full of blood in his pocket. Then, at 26 years old, they made me the General Manager of a much larger station.

Worst thing that ever happened to me.

I no longer spent my days talking face-to-face with business owners and crafting stories. Instead, I stared blankly at spreadsheets and spoke by telephone with corporate officers and bookkeepers and listened to the whining of 32 employees who had me confused with their mommies.

Six months into it, I said, “You can keep the cheese. Just let me out of the trap.”

With the unwavering support of Princess Pennie, I became an independent ad writer and media negotiator. I adapted my stories to fit billboards on the highway and TV ads during the Superbowl and websites on the internet.

But some things never change. Thirty-four years after saying “no” to spreadsheets and corporate politics, my relationships continue to be one-on-one with business owners, never with the companies they own.

I don’t believe in destiny.
I believe in choices and consequences.
I believe each of us chooses what we become.

What have you chosen to become?

If plan A isn’t working out for you, consider plan B or C or D!

New choices bring new consequences.

Isn’t life a wonder?

Don’t forget to live it.

If you aren’t a showman or a storyteller, you’re still in good company. Wizard of Ads® can help you create the brand or marketing story you need to drive your user experience. Book a call.

Your body doesn’t have a single immune system; it has a bundle of them. And the most powerful of these systems is the one that rejects foreign tissue. This is why doctors do everything they can to suppress it during transplant surgery.

That suppression doesn’t always work.

When the cells of your body detect an intruder cell – “This is not like me, and I am not like it!” – they employ powerful forms of rejection.

Your company employs a body of people who work together and each employee is like a cell within that body.

And when a new employee comes and goes, they say, “He never really fit in.”

This is why onboarding and enculturation should begin while the candidate is reading your job posting. When you’ve been taught how to write ads for employment, your ads will repel the people you don’t want while powerfully attracting the people you do want. When the right people read your ad, their hearts will whisper, “These people are like me, and I am like them.”

Branding is nothing more than corporate culture made known.

Good advertising promises or implies a specific kind of customer experience. It is then up to your people to deliver that experience.

Your people are the essence of your brand.

The most valuable skill a businessperson can have is the ability to recruit and retain good people.

Did you hear that?
Did you?
I just heard ten thousand successful people quietly whisper, “Amen.”

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.  

Wizard Academy began with an itch and an image.

I got the itch in Tulsa in 1978 when I was 20 years old.
I saw the image online in 1994 when I was 36.

The itch was to help little businesses succeed.

The image was of a boy sitting beneath the stars with an open book in his lap. The crenels and merlons in the battlements beyond him suggested that he was sitting on the top of a castle tower.

Looking at that cartoon image on my computer screen, I knew I was going to build that tower.

I know this makes me sound crazy, but there have been a handful of moments in my life when I quietly but suddenly knew what was going to happen. I’m not talking about premonitions or visions or dreams or hopes or wishes. I’m not talking about goals or goal-setting. I’m talking about knowing something as surely as if it had already happened.

Did I mention that I know this makes me sound crazy?

I was 13 when I saw a photograph of Pennie Compton and knew that I was going to marry her. The two of us had never met. A few months earlier, I had been flipping through a 1963 Reader’s Digest atlas of the world when I noticed a city – Austin – in the center of Texas. I remember raising an eyebrow when I suddenly knew I would move there someday. The sequence of events that would cause these things to happen remained an absolute mystery to me. But the outcome was never in question.

So I knew I was going to build that tower. But I had no idea why.

My 1978 itch to help small businesses grow led to a string of remarkable successes. By 1992 I was traveling 40 weeks a year teaching ever-larger groups of business owners how to lift themselves to higher levels of success.

I hated it.

Dorothy was right, “There’s no place like home.” I’ve suffered from separation anxiety throughout my life. Travel, for me, is “the little death.”

“Honey,” said Pennie in 1993, “let the people who want your help come to Austin. Schedule a monthly class in our conference room and if someone wants to come to it, they can come.”

When we outgrew that conference room we began to rent the ballrooms of luxury hotels. By the time we paid for those rooms and rented the projection equipment and bought the coffee at $60 a pot and fed lunch to all our guests, we were spending about $20,000 per event to host these classes.

Did I mention that we weren’t charging anyone to attend the classes, and that we had no capacity to serve additional clients?

So we built a new headquarters building for our marketing business with a large, open room on the second floor that we could use as a classroom. That worked for about 2 years.

Then we built a classroom building next to the main office building. That bought us an extra 4 years.

Then, in 2004, Pennie said, “Honey, I found some land we should buy.”

“Why do we want to buy some land?”

“We’ll build some stuff for ourselves on one half of it, and then donate the other half to Wizard Academy and let the school become whatever it wants to become.”

When she showed me the land, I smiled. There, on the top of that majestic plateau was the tower I had seen 10 years earlier. It wasn’t physically there, of course, but I knew that someday it would be.

If you have a crazy image in your mind of a possible future, an inexplicable guiding star that encourages you in the dark moments and lights your way one step at a time, never forget that you have a tribe, and they’ve built a fascinating place for you to come when you need guidance or instruction or fellowship or encouragement.

Do you have an idea? An itch? A hunger?
Do you see something that no one else can see?
Are you willing to leave a trail of sweat and tears and dollars behind you as you struggle to make it real?

Welcome to Wizard Academy.
You, my friend, are exactly our brand of crazy.

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads®, and we’ll hook you up.

Listen, my young apprentice, and I will release you from your chains.

Every door of opportunity begins as a window in the mind.

Look through that window of imagination and glimpse a world that could be, should be, ought to be someday. Keep looking… and watch it grow into a door of Opportunity through which you can pass into an entirely different future.

Opportunity never knocks. It hangs thick in the air all around you. You breathe it unthinking, and dissipate it with your sighs.

Opportunity never knocks. It appears, flickering, like faulty neon at a nondescript fork in the road.

Opportunity never knocks. It whispers, a tickle in your distracted mind.¹

Yes, opportunity begins as a window in the mind through which we glimpse possible futures.

And then one day we leap through that window.

“What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”

“That we shall die.”

“Yes, there’s really only one question that can be answered, and we already know the answer… The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.” ²

There is a space between yesterday and tomorrow. Do you know the place I mean?

It’s called Life.
And you’ve got to make a living if you’re going to have a life.

How do you want to be paid?
Do you want to be paid for your time,
or do you want you be paid for your knowledge?

Listen, my young apprentice, to what an old man knows.
There is no future in being paid by the hour.
You must escape from that financial prison.

Become good at something.
Become astoundingly good.
Do you see a person who is skilled in their work?
That person will stand before kings. ³

Do you wait tables?
Become the server whose tables spend twice as much money as the other tables. Restaurants around the world will hire you to teach their servers how to do the same. But don’t let those restaurant owners pay you for your time. Insist that you be paid for the difference you made.

Do you stack bricks?
Stack them in a way that no one has ever seen bricks stacked before. You have sizes, shapes, and colors. Stack them so they can’t be ignored! But don’t let your customers pay you for your time. Be paid for the difference you made.

Listen, my young apprentice, to what an old man knows.

Craftsmen are paid for the quality of their work.
But craftsmen are paid by the hour.
An artist is paid for the impact of their art.
Artists are paid for the difference they made.

The only thing that separates a craft from an art
is how you agree to be paid.

If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads® can help. Book a call.  

They told you it was called, “reading between the lines.”

But what they didn’t tell you was that the writer put it there – between the lines – for you to figure out on your own.

Speak the truth and people will doubt you. But if you can tempt those people to follow you to where they can discover that truth on their own, you will have convinced them to the core of their soul.

You’ve got to let them find the treasure on their own.

But it’s okay to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.

Just don’t be too obvious about it.

When the crumbs are too big or too close together, people feel manipulated.

You’ll know you’ve done the job perfectly when the person whose eyes you’ve opened wants to tell you about “this wonderful new thing” they have discovered.

Mothers go through this every day.

How old were you when you finally figured out that most of what you were “discovering” and sharing with your mom was just stuff she had placed in your path for you to find?

Wives are good at this, too. Princess Pennie does it with such subtlety and grace that it’s often days or weeks before I realize what she has done.

But I am neither a mother nor a wife, so my only option is to clumsily remind you of things you already know. You will then be free to say, “Yes, I already knew that, but thanks for the reminder.”

These are the things I would not have you forget:

(Or should it be, “These are the things I would have you not forget:”?  I’ll let you decide. And I’m reasonably certain that my colon–quotation mark–question mark sequence two sentences ago is improper punctuation, but I can’t figure out how to phrase the question for Google, so with your permission I’ll just move on, okay?)

1. Never claim to be honest. Just say things that only an honest person would say. Having followed the breadcrumbs, the listener will then conclude, “Wow. This person is really honest.”
2. Never claim to be generous. Just freely give what only a generous person would give. The recipient will then conclude, “Wow. This person is really generous.”
3. Never claim to be intelligent. Just listen intently and nod your head as though you understand. The speaker will then conclude, “Wow. This person really gets it.”
4. Now that I think about it, never claim anything at all. Just demonstrate the quality you want to be known for.
5. In other words, shut up and do the thing.

Don’t claim things.
Demonstrate them.
I’m talking about advertising, of course.

But I think the same advice also goes for pretty much every other situation in life.

Did you notice the anomaly in point 3, the one about intelligence? Did you notice what was missing? Did you hear what I did not say?

I did not tell you to, “Just say something that only an intelligent person would say.”

Because that NEVER works. Trying to sound intelligent just makes you look like a pompous ass.

But you already knew that.

You’re such a great listener.

Thanks.

To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

Reading that Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Christian anarchist, I had an unexpected thought, so I asked Google, “What is the difference between an anarchist and a libertarian?”

Six-tenths of a second later, The Goog told me – in a highly visible block at the top of the Search Engine Results Page:

“An anarchist is an extreme libertarian, like a socialist is an extreme democrat, and a fascist is an extreme republican. It’s like the difference between a lover and a rapist. They’re both in the same place but one uses violence to get there. Libertarians believe in free markets, private property, and capitalism.”

And included in that featured snippet was a hyperlink to ChaosPark.com, the low-budget website of a better-than-average writer named Harry Reid.

Harry paid nothing for Google’s recommendation of him and his website. He earned it by crafting the most concise, cogent answer to an often-asked question.

Google is rewarding writers of concise content, wordsmiths who get to the point.

When Google’s featured snippet is your answer to a commonly asked question in your business category, Google is telling the world that YOU are the expert of experts. It seems, to me, this should be the goal of every Search Engine Optimizer.

But this would require them:

1. to be experts in your business category, and
2. to be better-than-average writers.

But since they are neither of these, they will tell you the secret to becoming a featured snippet is in the microdata, and then fly into a blur of activity with a flurry of sparks and elbows.

Take a quick look at Harry Reid’s ChaosPark. com and I think you’ll see that Harry doesn’t give a rat’s ass about microdata, metadata, or SEO. He’s just a guy writing about things that interest him, and he knows how to summarize big ideas in few words.

Does your business interest you? Can you summarize big ideas in few words?

Before you can take a person to where you want them to go, you must meet them where they are. You must answer their questions –as asked– and speak to them within the frame of their own experience.

Leo Tolstoy knew this, and he used his novels as instruments for the examination of social issues. War and Peace (1869,) Anna Karenina (1887,) and The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886,) were not meant to be entertainments, but persuasive lessons about life and living. Tolstoy met his readers where they were, so that he could take them where he wanted them to go.

John knew this, too, so he framed his Good News to be easily understood by the people of the region in which he made his home. One of the 4 “first followers” of Jesus, John wrote to the people of Ephesus within the frame of their own experience.

But that’s another story.

What does your customer already care about?
What does your customer already understand?
If you will be persuasive, you need to begin your story exactly there.

Before you can take a person to where you want them to go, you must meet them where they are.

If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads® can help. Book a call.