Jason Stapleton is a bona fide email marketer.

And he can back that up with the fact that he made 3/4 of a million dollars in just 3 days…

…with a list of only 14k.

That’s a lot of money for a list under 15 thousand.

He didn’t do it by using a bunch of tricks out of the profit-pulling email marketing bag either.

Nope.

Jason made it much easier on himself.

He took the natural approach.

The friendly approach.

Some call it non-pushy…

Or the consultative approach,

But Jason just thinks of it as providing value –

EVERY TIME HE SENDS SOMETHING.

It creates TRUST.

He doesn’t see emails as dollar signs,

He sees them for what they are,

People.

People with names, with trades, and with aspirations.

Jason takes his list down a journey of pure value,

Waiting 90 days until that first pitch.

But man is it worth it (he’s also added new strategies since, to not have to wait 3 months for the revenue to roll in).

Jason reveals today on The Email Marketing Podcast his most profitable methods behind HOW he creates sales minus the gimmicks.

He’s got a lot of tricks up his sleeve too, but they’re not really tricks…

…it’s just good old fashioned personal and business values.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

how to lead your readers from hooked-on-you fans to paying customers
why you shouldn’t think of your list as a list… but as a collection of real human beings (this mindset will force you to provide better value)
the reason why giving away your best stuff for free every time is a smart idea
the 3-video campaign method that made Jason 3/4 of a million dollars in just three days (develop this type of relationship with your followers for infinite monetization possibilities)
how to push the envelope using video in order to create strong long-lasting relationships (video creates a celebrity effect and much, much more..)
consistency is key… and king in the profitable email list-building world (Jason’s kept up with his insightful weekly videos since 2008. Every single week)
how to use the commitment barrier to turn your followers into ultra-committed customers (a strategy he actually picked up from Glenn Beck… who you can’t deny is an awesome marketer)
the segmenting strategy to pitch your list super targeted offers instead of burning them (whether through marketing automation or manual list building, segmenting is an essential ingredient to cust. lifetime value)

Email Marketing Podcast Episode 1

Mentioned:

Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO

Raw transcript:

Download PDF transcript here.

John McIntyre: Hey, it’s John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy and it’s time for episode 77 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one simple thing- how to make more money (or how to make money actually, every time you send an email to your list). Now, today I’ll be talking to Jason Stapleton, and Jason is not big in the marketing world, he’s big in stock, that’s online trading, forex trading, stock trading world. Now I met Jason on a private Facebook group for people who are going to ‘Titans of Direct Response’,and by the time this interview goes live I will have come back from Titans of Direct Response, which is going to be a fantastic seminar just over in Connecticut, and will be my first time in the US and it’s this week, but this podcast won’t go live for about a month.

So anyway, so I met him in this group and we started chatting and he mentioned that he’d been listening to the podcast, and so we caught up one day on Skype and I found out that he’d been doing a tonne of email marketing and he had some very interesting stuff to say about how he’d built an amazing relationship with this list and he’d done an incredible launch which we’ll hear about in a minute from himself, and so I wanted to talk to him, I was like “Man, we gotta do a podcast on this. We gotta talk about this stuff because, you know I’m new to this, I’m a very aggressive guy when it comes to emailing, daily emailing,sometimes two or three emails in a day, and pitching everyday and offering. And that works, in its own way, but there’s other ways of going about it, and maybe they’re more effective. Or maybe they’re just different.

So what I found fascinating about talking to Jason is that he had some great information to share about this, how to build that relationship with the list, and stuff that I’m honestly, I’m familiar with it, but I wasn’t familiar with how well it worked. So like I mentioned withBond Halbertlast week, this has challenged me in some of the ways that I think about marketing, especially email marketing, and I think it’s going to be part of the reason that I update my email strategy and marketing strategy in the next few months, so get ready for that!

To get the show notes for this episode of the podcast go to themcmethod.com/77 and this week’s McMaster’s Insight of the week comes from, (sorry ‘Insight’ not ‘Inside’, I’m slurring those words a bit there), comes from Kurt Vonnegut, he’s an old author. I think it was, posted something quite fascinating into the McMaster’s forum, which was an info graphic, I’m just looking it up right now (I had the tab open, but you know how tabs disappear sometimes),so he posted this info graphic and it’s called ‘The Shape of Stories’, and it’s a fascinating sort of info graphic because it’s all about how to use the different story arcs that author’s use to bring you in and make it so that you can’t shut the book, ok, so the basic idea of Kurt Vonnegut’s thesis is that the story’s main character has ups and downs that can be graphed to reveal a story shape. And when you learn to use the benefit of these stories is that when you go ad write emails, write sales letters, go and talk to people, when you want to persuade people and you use a story, and stories are the most persuasive thing on the freaking planet ok, and when you get this persuasion just becomes so much easier- for better or for worse (and you do have to use this ethically ok). So I’ll give you a couple of examples, so if you go to google and look up ‘Kurt Vonnegut stories’ in google images you’ll find the info graphic, it’s called ‘The Shapes of Stories’. So for example one of them is ‘Man in Hole’, so the image is basically the man is sitting in his lounge room reading a book, he’s relaxing, then something bad happens and he fall down into a hole, so he gets into trouble, then he has an idea at the bottom of the valley, he has an idea, gets out of trouble and at the end he’s better for having had that experience. That one’s called ‘The Man in Hole’.

Another one is ‘From Bad to Worse’, let’s see, the main character starts off poorly then gets continually worse with no hope for improvement. That might be more of a tragedy, more like Shakespeare. How about this one, ‘Cinderella’. It doesn’t really explain it here but there’s an image that shows her going up the steps than almost sort of dies, gets thrown in a dungeon, then ends up becoming the princess or something like that in the end.

Anyway, the point this is that when you start to understand that stories, there is a blueprint to persuasive stories you can then start to create these stories, weave them into your marketing, and use the stories to persuade people to help themselves by buying your products and by buying your services, and this is so wonderful for email marketing because email is a great medium for you to tell stories in and build an incredible relationship with your list and its also just persuasive, just gets people acting and feeling and doing what you want them to do.

Ok, so that’s that. Now that was shared Inside the McMasters, like I said by I think it was Rob Hanly who you’ve heard before on this podcast, and it was just one of the things going on on the forum, so part of the McMasters private membership is a private forum where we get in there and talk about a bunch of different stuff with marketing and email, but really just marketing in general. The other thing I’ve been mentioning over the last few weeks is the new templates which I’ve just put inside McMasters which ‘are fill in the blank’, which means you just pop one open and fill in the blanks with your email- simple as that. If you want to learn more about McMasters go to themcmethod.com/mcmastersand all the information is there. Anyway, let’s get into this interview with Mr. Jason Stapleton.

It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, I’m here with Jason Stapleton. Now I met Jason through Titans of Direct Response, actually, or will have happened by the time this podcast goes live, but right now as of this recording Titans hasn’t happened but there’s a Facebook group that we’ve been talking in and Jason posted in there and said he’d been listening to the podcast, that he got some great results with email marketing, so we got to talking, jumped on Skype, had a bit of a chat, and I thought he’d be a great guest for the podcast because he’s got some really cool stuff he’s doing with the list and today we’re going to talk about some of that which is really about the relational aspect of what to do with your list, how everybody says to build a really solid relationship if you want an engaged list, and they’re willing to through out a couple of tips here and there, but Jason really has sort of a wealth of knowledge on how to actually do it. Which is why I got him on, so we could talk about that today.

Now, Jason’s from tradeempowered.com, that’s his main business, where they help build consistently profitable traders, to help people learn to trade the market and do it consistently and profitably, so that’s that.

Jason, how are you going mate?

Jason Stapleton:Hey I’m doing great John, thanks for having me.

John McIntyre: Good to have you on the show, hey are you in the studio that last week when we spoke -was it last week of two weeks ago?- you were in this great looking studio, it looked like you were on t.v. or something.

Jason Stapleton:Yeah, we’re attempting to take things to the next level in the way that we deliver content to our listeners, and so we have the studio, the studio you saw me in was a smaller studio I have in my home, but we actually have a very large studio that can live-stream over the internet and we can deliver realtime commentary and information to our listeners in a way that isn’t being done by anybody else and it’s really cool, I’ve learned a lot about it over the last year or so, and it’s been a lot of work and a lot of money but I think it’s going to pay off.

John McIntyre:That’s really cool man. So before we get into, I mentioned the relationship stuff and we just chatted about it but before we get into that, can you give the listener a bit more of a background on what you’re up to in the online world?

Jason Stapleton:Well I started Trade andPower with my business partner Todd Brown about five years ago, and I was an active currency trader and I decided that I wanted to start a company and I sent Todd a note who was a friend of mine and had been doing something on a smaller scale for a while, and asked him if he wanted to partner up and so we made the decision to kind of partner up together and he had the background and the knowledge in how you actually start an online company because his company, while small (kind of a one-man-operation) was very successful and I thought “man, if I can build something half as nice as he had already built then I’d feel pretty good about myself.”

And so I started researching and doing a while bunch of training and I bought courses, one of the very first courses I bought was from Ryan Deisswho’s just a phenomenal person, I was in one of his mastermind groups for a while and he’s very personable, just an extremely good person. So I learned about building funnels and, just a great deal of information about how to generate and cultivate a relationship with your list. And on of the things that Ryan said, and I’ll never forget it because it’s something that I employ and continue to employ in my businesses, is “give them your best stuff for free.” He said “if you give them your best stuff for free then they’ll keep coming back for more and they’ll give you money to get the rest of it.” I took that kind of to a different degree in the sense that I started my company and I actually was on a 90-day cycle where all I would do was deliver content to them via email and video a solid 3-months before I ever asked them for any money. So it was a chance for me to, you know to put my best foot forward and try and validate what I was doing and what I was trying to teach, before I ever turned around and tried to monetize that email or that individual, and so we’ve been doing it now for several years and, like I said, we’re constantly trying to push the envelope in creating that personal relationship and one of the best things that we’ve found is through video. I think that when you’re talking to the camera and it’s like you’re talking to someone on the other side of that camera, not only does it create celebrity authority (which everyone wants to have in their business) but there’s also a relationship that develops there on a subconscious level, and we’ve been extremely effective at reaching our audience that way.

John McIntyre:Ok, so one thing that I’m curious about, because I’ve actually got a bullet point on my site where people can read about why they should sign up to my list, and one of the bullet points says something that basically says why content marketing is bullshit, and the reason why (well, my theory) is because a lot of people go and do that and they hear this idea that they need to go and give away a ton of information to build a relationship and what happens is they either give away the wrong kind of information and it’s not going to move people further down that sales funnel, or they end up giving people so much information that there’s no reason for them to buy down the track. But it sounds like you’ve had this experience where by just by delivering so much value it’s actually worked in your favor. You know, you’ve done it I guess the right way or maybe it just works across the board, I mean it sounds like it’s working for you.

Jason Stapleton:Well ultimately, in my opinion, what you have to do is, the first thing you have to do is you have to acquire an email address, you have to acquire information. Then you have to get that guy to continue to open up that email that you sent, and how do you make those two things happen? Well, acquiring the email can be done through a variety of ways: you can purchase the list, you can provide an ethical bribe. But what people tend to forget is that that’s a human being on the end of that, a human being who’s interested in some sort of content that you had, whether it was just for a short period of time or not, but while he’s there and he’s listening you have to respect the fact that he’s a human being and when you communicate with him you don’t ever want to communicate- one of the things that I learned from Frank Kern, who’s good at a lot of things, he’s a pretty good copywriter, but what he’s exception at is developing a personal relationship through video.And one of the things that Frank said was “Don’t ever send them an email, don’t ever communicate them where you’re not adding value.” And so what Frank did which was genius, was he would start out and say “hey I’ve learned something really cool, let me show it to you!” and then he show’s the the little trick or whatever it is that he’s learned and then he says “now there’s a whole bunch more about this that I want to teach you and if you’d like to know more just go ahead and click the little bottle underneath the video and it’ll take you there”. And, sure enough, when you click on the button there’s an order form there and a little sales page that says ‘buy my stuff!’ But every time you open an email from Frank there’s value there, so what I decided to do was that I want to do the same thing, whenever I communicate I want to add value and the way I did hat initially was I started essentially a video podcast where every single week I went through the markets and started talking about what I though was going to happen over the course of the next week, and I did some training on structure analysis and some of the other things that are important in our business and then I said ‘hey, if you like this, then here is where you can get some more information, or sign up for my list and join my little subscription program”, and it just worked like gangbusters. The validation that you provided to them by doing what it was that you claimed to be an expert on has a massive amount of value.

John McIntyre: But I suppose is there a risk that you give them either the wrong kind of information or that you give them too much information, so that they don’t need to, you know so like in Frank Kern’s case if you give them 10 tips, and you give them the first tip but then say the nine others you say click the button below and you can go get the other nine, but that’s sort of like you’re in the supermarket and they offer you a taste of a biscuit and you take the biscuit, eat it, and you’re like “Wow, that tasted great! I want ten of them, I want a whole packet” and then you have to go and buy the whole box.

Jason Stapleton:I get it I’ve just never thought of it that way, I’ve never treated it that way, you know “Now how do I rope these guys into buying my stuff.” Don’t get me wrong, there’s a massive amount of sales, and marketing, and funnelling that happens to create interest and desire and build that authority and to line people up at the gate. What I like to do is, I like to have people at the end of the day when I open up the card say “hey, come and get my stuff” I want them just like driving like, here in America we got the sales that happen around the holiday, the Black Holiday Sale, where people are just literally breaking down the doors to get what you got. And there’s a massive amount of sales and marketing that goes into that stuff, but for me it’s always just been a matter of ‘if I just keep providing really great information then people will keep coming back and asking for more’, and it doesn’t matter whether I say ‘hey, if I sell a $49 subscription they want the $300 product, and if I sell the $300 product they want the $3,000 product, and if they get the $3,000 product then a portion of them will want the $10,000 Mastermind Program.’ And so we’re literally like continuing to create levels inside of our organisation to handle the need and the desire for more clients to simply be able to do more with us. And I think it’s critically important if you’re providing a massive amount of value that you are actually good at what you do, there’s a huge opportunity for you to create I list. I recently did a launch for a product that we had, to a small list of about 14,000 people and to give an idea of the power I’ll share some numbers with you, but the power that has evolved from being able to cultivate a personal relationship with the list is that I did a 3 video campaign, just did three videos and showed them the product, explained why they needed to buy it, and over the course of three days it brought in just shy of 3/4 of a million dollars, off of a 14,000 person list. I attribute that entirely to the relationship we developed with that list, the trust that we built with them.

John McIntyre: So part of that building that relationship, building that trust, is doing this, really over-delivering with the content. This is cool man, I’m getting ideas for my own stuff as I’m about to revamp- probably within the next 2-3 months- all the email marketing stuff I’m doing, and it’s just so good to get ideas from smart guys like you to see how I’m going to change things and push it out to the world. But you said, it sounds like you’ve got a number of tips, what are some other ways that you’re using to really create that incredible relationship with your list?

Jason Stapleton:Consistency is important. The guys have to know, like the vide I do every week, I’ve been doing it since late 2008, and virtually every week without fail I’m in there doing the video and people wait for it. If I don’t email it out or for some reason I’m gone I get emails, people saying “hey, where’s our preview this week?” You know, people who are sitting there waiting for it.

John McIntyre: So what’s the video?

Jason Stapleton:It’s just a video of me, and I have a camera set up in the studio that you saw, at my desk in front of my computer screens, and I say ‘ok, let’s take a look at some charts. Here’s what I think is going to happen and here’s why, and this is what you ought to be watching for next week as the markets start to open and here’s where I think the best money is going to be made and what I’m going to be looking to trade. That’s it. It’s about 15-20 minutes long depending on what we do.

John McIntyre: So almost like a podcast, you just say “Hey, what’s up? Here’s some news updates…” that sort of thing?

Jason Stapleton:Yeah, it’s actionable information that they can take away every single weekend and on occasion we’ll break from that and I’ll do some training, because there’ll be a good training opportunity, and I’ll say “Ok, let me teach you a little technique here, let me show you something that’s really cool that most people don’t know, and if you like this go and join my syndicate and you can join me every single day when I do this.” And when they’re in there then maybe I’ll say “Well maybe you’d like to learn a little bit more and take a full training course”, and sure enough there’s a certain percentage of the people who roll over and do that and, you know I’m never pushy, one of the things (not to toot my own horn) is that I am a very, very, very good salesman, but we use a consultative approach. So I never demand, we never heavy hand, we always lead and direct- we always know where we want the client to go- and ultimately we feel like it’s in his best interests because we feel like we know what we’re talking about, and I do believe I have a product that’s of extreme value to people, and so I want to lead them to that in, but how we do that is through a process of consultation, it’s not through any trickery.

John McIntyre: It reminds me of Perry Marshall’s Power Curve, where you’ve got people coming in on the front buying your $47 subscription and then a certain percentage of them are going to jump up to the $300 product, and then a certain percentage of those will jump up to the $2,000 product and it just keeps going up.

Jason Stapleton:You’re exactly right, and one of the things that I’ve found to be extremely effective is, and something that Glenn Beck (I’m not sure if you know Glen Beck, he’s a radio show host and t.v. show host here in America), and despite what your listeners might think of his political views, he’s an amazing marketer and one of the things that he does very, very well is he draws a line in the sand and he says “You are either on that side with them, or you are on this side with us.” And they create that barrier, that commitment level barrier, and I attempt to do the same thing in my market by simply saying “Look, you’re either committed or your not. If you’re not committed then I have a massive amount of free information online for you, if you go to my youtube page there is more free content and training there- and better content and training- than you will find in most $1,000 courses that you buy online for forex training, and it’s there for free, and that’s for you because you’re not ready to commit to what we do. But if you are ready to commit then here’s where you need to go and here’s what you need to commit in terms of your time, your energy and your money. What happens then when people cross that line is that they’re ultra committed, with refund rates of around .25%, year after year. So when people come in they’re ready to go and they know exactly what they’re getting, it’s been incredibly effective across the board. We haven’t always had successes but it’s been phenomenally successful for us being brand new at this. You had Ryan on your podcast the other day and he’s been in this for like 30 years, I’ve been in this five so I’m a child compared to some of these guys, and I just look in awe at what they’ve been able to accomplish because to email email and internet marketing is one of the quickest and easiest and most effective ways for you to reach an audience. You know, you don’t have to drop $40,000 on a marketing campaign through direct mail to get people to try and buy your stuff, you could do it with a minuscule budget and you ought to go and get your training on that stuff because it’ll change your business, change your life.

John McIntyre: One of the things that I’m curios about is that you mentioned consistency, and so we’ve got this idea that you want to be creating tons and tons of value that you give away for free, and you want to be doing it consistently, but what I’m really curios about is say someone’s got a blog or a podcast or are advertising through Facebook and google and somebody gets onto their list through maybe, an email opt in or maybe they bought a product and get an opt in, after that, once they’ve got on and given their email address, and I know we need to be over-delivering and we need to be doing it consistently, but what’s sort of the rough flowchart for what happens there? So, would we be doing an email a day for the first week or two emails a week after that for a month, then one email a month after that? Do you have a sort of formula that you follow?

Jason Stapleton:Well there are several different ways to do it, you know Agora Modelis very simple, there’s no real personalization at all; you get on the email list, you download or get the free subscription to there little newsletter or whatever, and then Stansbury or whoever it is, they just hammer you with emails and offer after offer. That’s a marketing strategy that’s very effective but it wasn’t the type of business that I wanted to run, I actually wanted to have that relationship with people. So, what I did was if you signed up, it was kind of funny because the first year we were in business we did about $780,000, and if you went to our website there was nothing you could buy, not a thing. All there was was just pages and pages and pages of free content, and we did all of our selling through email marketing. We did one offer every ninety days. So I would take everybody who came onto the list and I would do nothing but deliver content to them for ninety days and then I would make an offer. Then another ninety days, then another offer.

John McIntyre: What do you mean by ‘make another offer’? Do you mean that you would have an email launch sequence of say three or four emails?

Jason Stapleton:Yeah, like a Jeff Walkerlaunch right, here’s a three-video campaign and we would bring in a big chunk of money over the course of that launch period, so we’d do a two week cycle. What that started out being was I would hold a live two-week long webinar series, a boot camp. I would say ‘come and join me for two solid weeks and I’ll teach you a bunch of stuff about trading” and at the end of that two weeks I said ‘if you liked that I’m doing a 90-day course, and you can join that 90-day course for like $3,000. Well, over that 90 days I would teach that group of traders who said yes and I would build more and more rapport with all of the new people that were coming onto the list. Now, one of the downsides to a marketing strategy like that is your revenue comes in really big spurts, and you better hope that every 90 days you have a very successful campaign and a very successful launch, because if you don’t then you’re going to be starving. We started to recognise that so what we started doing was creating content and subscription projects like that in between to try and smooth out equity in the business and cash-flow, and that has worked extremely well for us and now we have smaller products, and I typically will bring guys in that do an offer say once a month, but I’ll segment the list out, say I’ll bring an offer out to a specific group of people who bought this specific product, and then then the next month I’ll do make an offer to this group of people that haven’t bought a product. And the idea there is that a guy’s not constantly getting hit with offers, and if you’re trying to build and maintain a relationship with a list then that’s the way to do it.

John McIntyre:So what’s the advantage of doing it that way? At the moment I’m doing it more the Agora-way with daily emails with more or less an offer in it, and that does work. But I guess what you’re talking about is the more long-term approach, and there is the benefit of an engaged list, but do you end up with a list of free-loaders who are used to getting free information from you? But it sounds like that’s not the case.

Jason Stapleton: Yeah, yeah, and they can stay on as long as they want to and continue to get free information, I love to have them there because, eventually, they’re either going to have nothing but good things to say about me or we’re going to turn them into a buyer. So I don’t mind those guys being there. One of the things that we were able to develop by creating a personal relationship rather than just a consistent email everyday with an offer is that lifetime value. Agora looks at it a specific way, they look at it in terms of ‘there’s a certain amount of money that this individual is going to spend on this specific topic over a set period of time’, and our goal is to extract as much money over that period of time as is humanly possible, then have them go on their way. Like I said, there’s nothing unethical about that marketing strategy, but for me what I want is for that guy to continue to buy over and over and over again from me, and I don’t want to have to try and twist his arm to get the money. So, the lifetime value of client for us is really, really good. I think the lifetime value of client for us is somewhere between $1,200 and $1,500, that means for every single guy who gives as $1 he’ll end up giving us $1,500. We can pay a lot, more than anybody I know because our lifetime value is so high, and that ties back to how we treat and how we respect the people that are on that list, because it’s not, you’re thinking about it wrong if you’re thinking ‘it’s my list’, no: it’s a collection of people that are really interested in what it is that you have to share, and that’s human being on the other end of that, it’s Ted who’s an electrician who’s trying to get out of his dead end job, and it’s Tom who’s a doctor who’s 65 and rolling into retirement and who’s trying to figure out how he’s going to manage his own money, you know, they’re human beings, they’re people. When we start thinking about it like that it changes, for me it changed who I wanted to be because I wanted to be the face of the company and I didn’t want to go home feeling dirty at the end of the day.

John McIntyre:I like that, it sounds here like the goal is, and I think this will resonate with a lot of people, is being a person. Instead of being a marketing machine and, like you said, extracting as much money as possible in the shortest period of time, to look at it more like it’s a dynamic, it’s like a marriage or you’re girlfriend and boyfriend, where you’re growing in a dynamic relationship where you meet up for coffees and go out to dinner and go out and do holidays and trips together, and you’re on a journey together; it’s not just you trying to slap on as many products as possible.

Jason Stapleton:Yeah, my videos and in my morning video with the guys who are on subscription with me, I talk about my family, the vacation we went on, the stupid stuff my kids do. The whole goal is to develop a personal relationship, it can’t really be personal because you’re not friends, but there is a relation that’s developed and there’s a trust that’s built.

John McIntyre:One cool thing I think about this too is that you could send out, say, you could turn up in New York next week and send out an email and say “Hey, I’m going to be in New York and at this bar for a meet up together if you guys want to come hang out I’ll buy the first round of drinks” or something like that, “7:30 this bar, this street, this address”, and I bet you, by the sound of it, you’d have people show you and you could shake hands, sit down and get to know hem.

Jason Stapleton:Yeah, I do that every time I go somewhere. I sent out an email recently, I was in Dallas and I said ‘hey I’ll be in Dallas’, I was in San Francisco last year and had a chance to meet with a couple of my clients, I’ll be in London in November of this year and I have a bunch of people from the UK who are members and clients of mine who haven’t had the chance to come to the United States and I’ll be meeting with them there. So yeah that was another thing, that I didn’t want to have to hide from my clients. I wanted to be able to meet these guys and share in their experiences and I derive a great deal of joy and satisfaction in helping people achieve a goal.

John McIntyre: I like that because, it’s interesting, what I do, I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, is tell a story and slide into a pitch, tell a parable, so there is value in the email, it might be inspiration, or a tip that email marketing is about empathy, and then leads into a pitch so it’s sort of trying to bridge those two gaps, give away some value but also make an offer. I don’t know if it works as well as your one does in terms of that relationship, but it’s blown me away sometimes, I remember when one guy responded he said, maybe one guy in Germany and one guy in LA or something, said to let them know if I ever go there and I can crash on their couch. The first time that happened I was like “what? that’s crazy!”So…

Jason Stapleton: Yeah, that’s that relationship. And you know what, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing it the way you’re doing it, and I don’t claim to have the right way I just, you know, the way I’ve done it has blown my mind just in terms of the gratitude and, I like going to work every day and I like the clients that I have and if I din’t like the clients I just give them their money back and send them on their way. I made a decision a long time ago that I didn’t want to do anything that I didn’t want to do, and I wasn’t going to do it anymore. And so I don’t like doing taxes so somebody else does that for me, I don’t like mowing my own lawn so somebody else does that for me, if you’re a jerk of a client then you just get your money back because I don’t need it.

John McIntyre:It’s a tough life, hey?

Jason Stapleton:Oh yeah I know! I’m sitting here in my home studio talking to you, it’s just crazy, baffling how far, what we’ve been able to achieve in our company with our marketing strategy over the last several years. And I’m excited for the Titans event, I know you mentioned that, and getting to meet some of the real legends in our business, and what they’re doing, and I might be eating crow when I get back, I might say “don’t use that interview John, because I learned a bunch of stuff at Titans and I don’t think that way anymore!” The way we’re doing it, I enjoy what we do and we’ve been making a lot of money.

John McIntyre:Yeah, I certainly noticed it worked that way with the podcast, I mean I started this podcast way back about a year ago, just over a year ago here in Thailand, and at first I just thought it sounded like a cool idea, a nice way to get traffic and some authority, but I had no idea just what it would do. Now I get emails and emails from people going to Titans and stuff, chatting with Brian Kurtz(the guy who’s putting it on) via email and stuff just because I had him on the podcast, then looking at how that creates, I got an email from someone the other day, probably listening to this right now, he said he was in, told him a story of how I was in Thailand and I how I made a green smoothieor something like that, and he was like ‘that’s a cool story but I think I can top it’. Then he say that a while back he ended up, I won’t go into all the details, but he ended up going to prison in Thailand, he get sentenced for something like 25 years, got out after 10 and now he’s learning direct response marketing, he’s give n up that old life of his, and says that he’s loving the podcast. I remember when I got that email and I was like “that is so cool!”

Jason Stapleton: Well I don’t even know how I came across your podcast, but I had been looking for, I listen to John Carlton’spodcast and I’m always looking for them and most of them are so bad, and I downloaded a couple of your episodes and I was like ‘man, this is really good, and this guy has got a lot of really big names coming on his podcast with just incredibly valuable and entertaining information” and I was hooked, and that’s when I reached out and said “hey man, I want to just talk to you about what you’re doing because this is really cool!” And, I think we met on the Facebook forum, and I said I think you have one of the best Marketing podcasts out there, and I know you deserve every success.

John McIntyre: Cheers! I still don’t have that studio that you’ve got, right now I’m outside of a coffee shop so you can probably hear the trucks rolling past.

Jason Stapleton:You’ve only been doing it a year- it’s coming, it’s on it’s way.

John McInture:Alright man, right on time here. Before we go, for people who want to learn more about you, send you an email or go check out this website Trade and Power where’s the best place for them to do all those things?

Jason Stapleton:You can go to tradeandpower.com or you can, my email address is just jason@tradeandpower.com, that one goes to my phone, so you can email me there if you’ve got any questions. But I really enjoyed chatting with you John, thanks for having me on the show.

John McIntyre: Likewise Jason, and you can grab the show notes and links at themcmethod.com if anybody wants them.

The post Episode #77 – Jason Stapleton on Growing, Bonding, and Providing Value To Your List For Maximum Profit Potential (time to stop thinking of your list… as a list!) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

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