TCC Podcast #146: How to Sell Anything to Anyone with Richard Armstrong

A-list Copywriter and best-selling author, Richard Armstrong, is our guest for the 146th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Richard has been writing winning direct response copy for more than 30 years. And he just released his latest book, The Don Con. Kira and Rob invited Richard into the studio to talk about the book and a whole lot more. Stuff like... •  how Richard went from office boy to agency creative director •  the lessons he learned early on working on “junk” mail •  what’s changed in the world of direct response in 30 years—and what hasn’t •  his award-winning letter for Sea Turtle Rescue •  the go-to books he refers to again and again •  his favorite clients and the work he’s most proud of •  why he took long 3 martini lunches in his “Mad Men” days •  the one good copywriting habit he has •  the #1 thing that makes copywriters good at what they do •  what Richard learned while writing about con men •  the important difference between copywriters and confidence men •  his experience at Comic Con and FanCon •  what happened when he met Captain Kirk and The Fonz Don't miss your opportunity to get the free copywriting samples and download that Richard mentioned during the interview. And check out a few of the many resources he mentioned. This is a good one. To hear it all, click the play button below, or download this episode to your favorite podcast app. And if you prefer reading, you can scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: FreeSampleBook.com Claude Hopkins David Ogilvy Eugene Schwartz The Sea Turtle Letter The Responsive Chord by Tony Schwartz The Solid Gold Mailbox by Walter Wentz Being Direct by Lester Wunderman Boardroom Parris Lampropoulos Richard Viguerie Agora AWAI David Deutsch Clayton Makepeace Carline Anglade Cole Jim Rutz The Don Con Jonathan Frakes Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity   Full Transcript: Rob:   This podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Underground. Kira:   It's our new membership designed for you to help you attract more clients and hit 10K a month consistently. Rob:   For more information or to sign up, go to thecopywriterunderground.com. Kira:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That's what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob:   You're invited to join the club for episode 146, as we chat with author and direct response copywriter Richard Armstrong about the persuasion techniques used by con artists that copywriters use as well, what he's learned from 40 years of writing junk mail and what he writes today, his new book The Don Con, and a very useful free bonus he's sharing with copywriters. Richard, welcome. Richard:        Thank you very much. It's great to be here. I am a big fan of the emails you guys send everyday. A lot of tremendous personality and voice in those emails and I read them avidly. Kira:   Thank you. Rob:   That's nice of you to say. I think all of the personality is Kira. I'm kind of the boring side, so she deserves the credit for that. Kira:   That is not true, but thank you for saying that. That's very nice and I was just saying before we started recording, Richard and I are officially neighbors because I just moved to Washington, D.C. So we're going to hang out all the time, right Richard? Richard:        Absolutely. The only problem with being a citizen of Washington is that the rest of the country hates you. So when you go anywhere else on vacation, tell them you're from Brooklyn, you'll get a much better response. Kira:   Okay, these are things I need to know that you need to teach me, so we'll sit down and go through all the rules of what I need to know about living here. Let's kick this off, Richard, with your story. How did you end up as a copywriter? Richard:        Well, it was totally by accident. I'm always kind of amused nowadays when I see these people, very young people, including one successful copywriter that I know that actually got interested while she was still in college. That didn't happen in my day 45 years ago. I mean, I think just about all of us kind of fell into this business and that was certainly my story. I got a job as a copy, not a copy but an office boy with a direct mail agency. Now what an office boy is, is kind of like beneath a secretary. It's somebody who just hangs around the office and if the important people need to have coffee or sandwiches sent in, you go get them and you lick envelopes and you stand at the photocopier machine and make copies, and things like that. And I was doing that for a while. In our agency, which was a small direct mail fundraising agency, the structure that they had is that they did not have a creative department. All the account executives did their own copywriting and none of them were very good at it. And a few of them actually hated it. And one day I was sitting with one of them and he was just tearing his hair out about trying to write a fundraising letter and I said, ‘Well, give me a whirl at it.’ I had always been told from high school and through college that I was a good writer. In fact, it kind of got me through college because I didn't really work very hard. And I had professors tell me this, they'd tell me this on blue books and things like that, they'd say, ‘Well, you obviously didn't attend most of the classes and you didn't read most of the books, but you're a very good writer so I'm going to have to give you a B+.’ So it's kind of how I got through college. I thought rather highly of my own writing ability and I said, ‘I'll take a shot at it.’ And I did, and the account exec liked it and he showed it to his boss and his boss liked it. They decided to show it to the client, the client liked it. They mailed it and it was a success and the next thing you know, the boss came to me and said, ‘You're the new creative director of this agency.’ And I've got to tell you a funny story, not long after that moment when he told me I was the new creative director. We had this big meeting of the entire staff in the conference room and the boss was up front with a blackboard and he was kind of planning out the next few months of what needed to be done in the agency. And he kept, every few minutes it seemed like he'd say, ‘Okay, Richard, we're going to need copy for this and we're going to need copy for that and we're going to need copy for this over here.’ And when the meeting broke up, I turned to one of the guys in the room and I said, ‘My God, I'm going to be standing at that photocopier machine for the rest of my life. Do we need that many photocopies?’ The guy said, ‘No, you idiot, copy is what we call fundraising.’ So here I was a creative director and a copywriter and I didn't even know what it was. I stayed at that agency for about two or three years, which until they fired me for mostly unrelated reasons. And then kind of a common scenario there a couple of weeks later, they called me back in and they said, ‘Richard, we fired you because we didn't like the long lunches that you took, especially coming back drunk half the time. We didn't like the fact that you rolled in at 10:00 in the morning and left at 4:00. There are a lot of your habits we didn't like, but we liked your copy, we loved your copies. So what we'd like to do is just pay you on a per piece basis.’ And I went, ‘What? Sounds pretty good to me.’ And so that was how my career as a freelancer began and that was way back in 1979. So I've been a freelancer for about 40 years. Rob:   Wow. And so the first thing, when I first met you, Richard, was at a Titans event and you were sharing a bunch of the experiences that you've had from early on in your career. You had actually even put together a booklet, I think for the people who were in the meeting and shared a bunch of the stories that you had gone through. And I loved reading them because I also started my career writing direct response mail, the actual mail that shows up in the mailbox, not the inbox. And so as I was going through, I'm like, oh, these are ... you were talking about the envelopes that you are using and the teasers that you're using and the lessons that you learned from so much of that stuff. And I just found it endlessly fascinating. And at the time, I said, ‘Hey, Richard needs to be on our list for podcast guests eventually.’ So I wonder if you could tell us some of those lessons that you learned early on as you were working with direct response mail and how it applies to some of the things that we do today. Richard:        Well, the booklet is still available by the way, it's at freesamplebook.com, which is my website. But when I decided to do that, I mean most copywriters have some version of their samples on their website. And I thought, well, what if I created a booklet of samples and choosing interesting ones. And what I think I did that was somewhat different from many copywriters is that I didn't just choose the huge successes. I also chose ones that were failures, some of them spectacular failures. And quite often things were ... And I've been in this situation a lot where I've written something that's really great and the client thinks it's great and we're all excited about it, and then the marketplace hates it. And I'd sort of, I'd take each one of these things and I'd analyze what made it a success or what made it a failure and what I learned from it. And it's really a process of learning that's gone over the course of 40 years. I'm not sure if I can think of any particular lessons that I've learned,