🧠 The ultimate human motivator

Hey,

It snowed in NYC this past week.

And like any normal person would do, I decided to go to Central Park in 18 degree (-7 degree celsius) weather.

Here’s a pic of me trying to look artsy with my fish eye lens:

As I sat on this rock, I started to think about this past year. I thought about all the things that happened in marketing, the growth of this newsletter (and my SEO agency), and the emotional rollercoaster of my personal life in 2023.

I started to notice that I would go through seasons of insane willpower and motivation, only to find myself back in a low of confusion about what I was doing with my life.

In seasons where I felt immense confusion and pain, there was a season of drive that followed. And with that season of drive came a season of gratification. And with that season of gratification came a season of comfort. And boom, I’d slip up and the cycle would repeat itself.

It went like this: Pain → Drive → Gratification → Comfort → Pain → Drive → Gratification → Comfort → Pain → Drive → Gratification → Comfort.

Constantly oscillating up and down and up and down. If you look into your own life, you may find this pattern as well.

It’s no wonder I felt like I was losing my mind at times last year. But in hindsight, I can now see what was going on.

The one theme that kept popping up — as I thought about everything in my life — was my relationship with pain.

The biggest realization I had last year: pain leads to pleasure and pleasure leads to pain.

This is a bold statement, and I’m fully aware that this may not be the case for everyone — I’m just speaking for myself.

But a good example of this is to look at working out. Going on a run or lifting weights can feel quite painful at first. But once it’s over, endorphins rush to your brain and you feel a sense of bliss.

Sitting down to write a blog post is painful. But clicking that publish button (and seeing it rank in Google) feels great.

On the same token, eating a box of cookies feels great in the moment. But the stomach ache and brain fog that comes later doesn’t.

So where am I going with this? This is a marketing newsletter, not a self help newsletter (or is it?).

Well, when I started this newsletter it was (secretly) not only about marketing. It was about being a marketer — marketERRR. As in, a person.

This newsletter is about becoming a conscious, knowledgeable, and ethical marketer. Because here’s the thing: marketers are artists in disguise — even if we don’t fully believe it ourselves (yet). And being a creative can sorta be psychological warfare.

Understanding your brain will help you become a better marketer. And if we break down what I’m trying to get out in this edition, to first principles, it’s this: humans are constantly moving away from pain.

Since we are born, we are in a constant state of trying to be okay with simply existing. We feel pain from hunger? We cry out to our caretaker. We feel pain from not being able to pay bills? We seek new skills and jobs. We feel pain from someone rejecting us, we work on ourselves to attempt to “prove them wrong.”

Maybe I’m just projecting my own experiences here.

But my goal is never to tell anyone how to live their life. It is simply me talking to myself and maybe someone can relate and take something away to improve their own life.

What I realized was that pain is the motivator. It’s no wonder the term “pain points” gets tossed around in marketing.

Pain is simply an unmet need waiting to be satisfied. And our emotions dictate the quality of our lives.

I know this was a different edition than most, but in next week’s edition I’m going to talk about how I’m solving this oscillating up and down. And I'm going to explain how I learned how to solve this by simply looking at a Google Search Console graph — ya, it’s going to be an interesting one.

For now, I hope you can recognized how powerful pain is. And I challenge you to think about the pains your customers feel in their line of work. Check out this article to help spark some ideas.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• The art and science of product marketing

• Apple’s secret copywriting tricks

• Going from 0 to 119,000 organics/month

• How a DTC brand is growing via TikTok ads

• Ad from the past

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Google SGE impact by industry and emerging features

• Why advertisers aren’t likely to step away from X before the Super Bowl

• MrBeast uploads clip directly to X for the first time, as the platform leans into video content

• ‘Rates aren’t rising at all’: Freelancers lament stagnated rates amidst inflation

• Apple's Vision Pro is sold out

🚀 All things growth & product

How Design Pickle grew bookings by 86%, how FigJam uses growth loops at scale, the art and science of product marketing, and the SaaS homepage framework.

✍️ Copy, emails, & lifecycle

Apple’s secret copywriting tricks, 10 welcome emails to build long-term trust, and how to create an effortless user-onboarding experience.

⚙️ SEO & content marketing

How to increase SERP CTR, canonical tags dos and don’ts, can improving freshness signals benefit SEO, and a case study on 0 to 119K visitors per month.

🛍️ Ecommerce & social media

How DTC brand Jones Road Beauty makes 7 figures with TikTok ads, and is X slowly decaying?

🦖 Interesting stuff

📣 Ad from the past

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Social Media Intern @ seen

• Content Marketing Manager, Acuity @ Squarespace

• Growth Marketing Manager @ Stripe

• Social Media Lead @ Notion

• Director, SEO @ Sprout Social

Okay, that's it for now 💚. See you next Tuesday!

“Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.” — Dorothy Parker

Riddle answer: They want to be paid per click.