Agora does an estimated $1B per year in income across a range of one-off and subscription info products.

Evaldo Albuquerque is one of their best copywriters. His sales letters have driven ~$120m+ in business.

He wrote this great book on the framework he uses to write killer copy.

In it, he says that the foundation is built on one specific thing:

The single most important thing you can do when you write a sales letter is to make the reader believe that:

This new opportunity is the key to their desire and it’s only available through my new mechanism.

As soon as I read that, I was struck by how many newsletters and info-products miss the mark when we try to hook subscribers.

Because doing this means you need to get clear on two things:

  • What’s genuinely unique about your newsletter?
  • And what is it that your readers truly desire?

How many of us can say we’ve really done this?

Substack is the first thing that comes to mind. Because all the landing pages are roughly the same by design, the only thing that could possibly set a newsletter apart is the title/description.

Here are the landing pages of 3 random Substacks:

Notice anything?

All of these focus mostly on what the writing is about. Not what the prospective reader desires, or what makes the newsletter different from anything they’ve ever seen before (even in similar genres).

That’s not a knock on these writers. As the screenshots show, several of these have thousands of paying subscribers. So something is working.

But I’m left wondering how much bigger the audiences could be if more of us tried Albuquerque’s method.

I say “us” because even huge newsletters are not immune to this. Check this out. Here are the landing pages for a handful of the most popular free tech/business newsletters.

Yikes.

Okay, so the first thing we should say is that there might be a reason these are all practically identical:

They work!

These are all big publications with audiences ranging from ~100k to 4m+. They’ve all got smart teams split-testing their home pages, and optimizing for what performs.

So we’ll give ’em that.

It’s also worth pointing out that when a reader lands on one of these pages, they’re typically not simultaneously looking at all the others. So in that moment, the hook might truly seem unique and enticing.

But you have to admit that when you stack ’em up next to each other, it’s a little…

Can we do better?

If we look at this through Albuquerque’s model, it seems like we’ve all (as an industry) decided that the only thing readers want is to “get smarter,” and they want to do it in 5 minutes or less.

Obviously, readers’ desires go far deeper than that.

Ads come closer to capturing this. Because they have to. An ad is competing way harder for your attention out there in the wild. So the hooks on high-performing ads are worth looking at.

For example, readers don’t just want to be smarter. They want to be perceived as smarter by people they respect.

They also want to be on the inside…

But really, I think most of us could afford to think a lot more about this.

What is it your readers actually desire? What’s truly different about your newsletter that represents a “new opportunity” for them to get the thing they want? Why is it that they can only get it with you?

Answering these won’t just help you land more readers. It’ll improve your newsletter (or book… podcast… course… whatever!) content.