The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast

If there were ever an Entrepreneurial Hall Of Fame, Rob Walling would no doubt be in it. Almost a year ago he blew The Email Marketing Podcast up with Drip… …his state-of-the-art email marketing software that literally creates autoresponders for you. You’ll want to hold onto your hat once again today – Because on top of the magic that Drip already provides, Rob… the same Rob that’s been coding since he was 8 years old (yes, he’s dangerous), Has added MARKETING AUTOMATION to Drip. HUGE. Ontraport and Infusionsoft better be checking their rear view mirrors, Because Drip’s coming up fast… …marketing automation is the future. And never before has it been so dang accessible either. Until now. Heavy-duty ESP’s come with heavy-duty price tags, But Rob says forget all the extra bells and whistles. He’s a marketer too, remember? So he built marketing automation into Drip from the ground up. No bolt-ons here… …it’s as fluid as the sea. Whether a beginner or a bigtime company – If you’ve yet to use marketing automation, You’re in blue-collar email marketing territory… …working WAY too hard. Let Rob tell you why you NEED marketing automation. And how it’s the future of email marketing. Once you tap into those tagging, triggering, no thinking-twice about it waters,  You’ll NEVER look at your regular ole ESP the same again.   In this episode, you’ll discover: the counterintuitive technique to segmenting your prospects and leads (Drip lets you do this Russell Brunson style… do less work – get higher conversions) how mind-bogglingly easy it is to segment subscribers with marketing automation (never again will you manually move an email from list to list) the unknown fact that marketing automation, as scary as it sounds, is not scary one bit… nor expensive (anymore) why Drip is special compared to other ESP’s marketing automation abilities (think… bolted-on vs naturally ingrained abilities) how to use “tags” through marketing automation to never have to use multiple email addresses in multiple lists again (email address = person, not just another set of letters) the bait dangling prowess in marketing automation that allows you to give prospects your utmost value (fishermen worldwide will be zealous) how to never again send customers content not catered exactly to them (what’s not relevant is not helpful) that doing the bare minimum – pretty dang easy to do – with marketing automation will return your efforts ten-fold (something that regular ol’ newsletter sending providers won’t allow you to easily do if at all) how growing your business just 10% a month for a year will make you very successful (marketing automation does this for you) Mentioned: DRIP Startups For The Rest Of Us Software By Rob Russell Brunson Dan Faggella Ontraport AW Pro Tools Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. Hey, it’s John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy. It’s time for episode 75 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one simple thing… How to make money every time you send an email to your list, which is a pretty freaking awesome skill to have… I bet a lot of people who wish they had that. Now, today we’ll be talking to Rob Wine, but I just want to mention just quickly it’s episode 75. I want to just give myself just a quick little pat on the back. That’s pretty awesome. I hope you’ve enjoyed the podcast. We’re three-quarters of the way to one hundred episodes, to a century, and maybe I’ll do something special when we hit 100. I’m not sure what that will be, but that just popped into my head, that idea, but anyway… Episode 75, so if you’ve listened to every episode, you can give yourself a pat on the back too, Give nd even you could try to do this, tap you head and rub your stomach. Have you ever tried to do that? It’s pretty tricky. Anyway, today we’ll be talking to Rob Walling, Rob is a friend of mine. He’s big in the software business service, start-up I suppose. Well, software as a start-up. SaaS Apps, software as a service, that’s what I meant to say. So, he’s launched a new one. He’s had this email autoresponse service, like AOL or whatever, I guess it’s targeting that part of the market. And it’s been fine. I haven’t been using it, but I have heard that he’s added some marketing automation features, so think about AW Pro Tools or MailChimp but plug in the automations, so plug in with AW Pro Tools add some automation features. Now you might be wondering, what is automation. Now, you can say, if Joe or whoever clicks the link in email 3 and that link went to a site about Oprah, now that will send them 3 automation email responses about Oprah and why they should buy an offer form of Oprah’s products. So it allows you to customize, you know. It’s marketing automation and automates the whole process so you have the right email going to the right people which improves your deliverability, improves your conversion rates, and you don’t piss people off by sending them stuff they don’t want to hear about because if they don’t click on a link to an Oprah article you can be pretty damn sure they don’t want to hear more about Oprah, okay? Now, so Rob has this great little autorespondant software, great user interface and is really easy to use. He built it from the ground up and added market automation features into that. So, anyway, I thought I would get him on the show today to talk about how to set up an automated marketing campaign because he has data based on what his customers are doing and what he’s doing. So today I wanted to talk to him about the different ways you can set it up instead of just having one straight email sequences what are the different ways? Once you get some of these advanced features, whether you use his software Drip or whether you use another one. What are some good sequences to send out? What are some ideas on how to do this? And we are also going to talk about what are the problems with AW Pro Tools and MailChimp. Like I said, MailChimp just release some new automation stuff, and according to Rob and I think Rob has a pretty good argument there that it’s not ideal the way they’ve done it, and that if you do some automation stuff, you’re gonna be better going with a software that was built from the ground up, and that might be Drip, like Rob’s software. There’s another one called Active Campaign, Infusionsoft or Entrepot, something like that. So, we’ll get into that in a minute. Now to get the … for this episode of the Email Marketing Podcast, got to the McMethod.come/75, I like that that url there. Now, for today’s insider of the week is accountability. Now, I’ve noticed recently with the coaches I work and also the people I’m working with inside McMasters is that accountability is huge. You could have great information, you could know all the stuff that you are supposed to do, you could have money, you could have time. You could everything that you need to get something done, but if you are not accountable to someone… If I’m not accountable to someone, people think I’m a hustler. If I’m not accountable to someone, I don’t get shit done either. If I spend too much time on Facebook, I’m not getting anything done, I’m just wasting time online. So, we need to be accountable. And I know when I have a coach or a friend or someone keeping me accountable, whether it’s in business or in some other area of life like fitness or relationships, I just do so much better. And that’s why this is the McMasters Insider of the Week, is that we have an accountability forum inside the community, and when someone joins they fill out an accountability form. And that’s where they just jump in there and fill out a few things that they’re going to do that week. And if they don’t do them, then I’m gonna go find them and ask them what happened. They are going to get in trouble. They are going to get the angry stare from John through the internet. Anyway, so that’s the accountability thing. So, whether you join McMasters or whether you go find a friend or mentor or coach or whoever, you need to have some accountability in your life if you’re gonna be successful. And that applies if you’re just getting started or you’re a CEO of a million dollar company. Okay, so McMasters, just quickly, is my private community. You can say it’s a training community, it’s a bit of a mastermind. It’s all of the above. There are training products like the McIntyre method on how to write emails, how to create an autoresponse, how to tell good stories, how to create a good landing area to really convert from a copyright perspective, not a design. And what I’m really excited about right not is the templates. We have just been developing some fill-in-the-blank templates, and that’s for people inside McMasters and you can go in there, grab a template, fill in the blanks, and you just drop it into the AWeb or drop it into the autoresponse software. So, instead of having to fight writer’s block, instead of trying to having to do training, you can just get set up an hour, grab a couple templates, and put them into your autoresponse sequence. It’s that simple. So, anyway I have been finding the templates work really well for people, and people just love templates. So, if you want templates, go join McMasters, the information: themcmethod.com/mcmasters. That is the sales page that will give you all the information you need to make a decision. Now, let’s get into this interview with Mr. Rob Wine. It’s John McIntyre, here, the autorespondant guy. I’m here with Rob Walling. Now Rob came on the podcast about 6 months ago… 8 months ago to talk about Drip, which is a neat bit of software that makes creating autoresponses really easy. And it actually had a cool feature where you give them a few blog posts and they turn those blog posts into 5-day mini sort of course for your email thing. So in that podcast we talked about some of his foot-test results he had noticed from having all these different customers, opt-in rates, conversion rates and what sort of businesses these courses worked with. But I haven’t actually spoken to Rob in a while, but he came back under my radar recently because I got an email from his company, or maybe someone told me about it. They have updated the software, Drip, to include some lightweight marketing … so you’ve got Infusionsoft and Entrepot which is really quite expensive, number one. They are like 300 bucks a month to get started and this is a setup fee. And they can do some advanced stuff, but they are quite expensive and are not the best to get started with. So then you’ve got this middle layer where people who are on AWeb or MailChimp and then want marketing automation, but aren’t ready or don’t have the budget for it or they just don’t need all the extra features that Infusionsoft and Entrepot have. And there’s not many serving that market yet. So, I got an email from Rob about this to talk about some of the updates they have made to his software Drip because now they have made … from the ground up and they have added some really cool marketing automation stuff. So, with that in mind, I thought we’d get him back on the podcast and talk about marketing automation, what sort of … it offers to customers he’s got, and talk about why Drip is really one of the … players out there in the market at this point of time. So, we’ll get into that. Hey, Rob. How’s it going man? Rob Walling: It’s going great. It’s my pleasure to be on the show again. John McIntyre:It’s good to have you back man. It’s actually really interesting thing, you know, this podcast has been going on since, I think episode 80 or around about. And it’s cool looking back and seeing what happened a year ago and bringing someone else back like yourself and seeing what’s new and what’s changed and sort of get a sense that stuff does change over time. Stuff takes a long, long time to change and we all want it to happen faster, but it does change, and it’s cool to see that isn’t it? Rob Walling:Yeah, it always feels like it takes so much longer than I want it to, for sure. John McIntyre: So, before we get into sort of marketing automation stuff that we’re chatting about, give our listeners who might not know who you are or what you are thinking, sort of a background about what you do. Rob Walling: Yeah, sure. So, I’m a software entrepreneur. I live in California, in the United States, and I have been starting software companies for about 12 years, 10-12 years. But I think what I am most known for is kind of sharing how I do it, and what I do, and trying to give away as much of the information that helps me, I try to give that away to people. So, I have a podcast called Start-ups for the Rest of Us. I started a blog called Software by Rob. And then I’ve had a number of different software successes and failures, ranging from invoice, a software called ASP.NET Invoicing System, a software called HitTail that I bought and then revamped. And then most recently, as you mentioned, built Drip which I built from scratch with a developer I know. And the team is now 5 people, but we’re on bootstrap, have never taken funding. And yeah, that’s where I am 10 years later. John McIntyre: That sounds good too. I get the vibe from you. You really love doing software. This isn’t just you trying to make a buck. Software is your bread and butter and you love it. Rob Walling: Yeah, I mean I am a software developer. I started writing code when I was 8 years old. So this was 1970… I’m sorry I mean 1982, and I loved code first. And I first learned to code basic and then came up in college and got a computer engineering degree, but code wasn’t cool in the 80s and 90s, right you were kind of the nerd to do it. So, I got into sports at that point. And then in the late 90s when the .com boom hit the Bay area, which is where I’m from, if you had a pulse you could get a job coding for someone, and I realized that I had a love. So, the software has always been the primary thing for me. Like I love building gorgeous software, and the fact that it’s now a valued skill and I can build a successful business on it is kind of like a cherry on top of my sundae. John McIntyre: It’s cool too, like now you’re getting into… you seem to build marketing tools. So a lot of software developers and coders they’re very much interested in the coding, and that’s just programming, like that’s all they care about. But it seems like with the direction you are going, and itseems like with Drip, you’ve got the coding and that’s what’s up, but you’re also bringing in the marketing to sort of make something more powerful. Rob Walling: Yeah, you know, in the beginning, I was a developer’s developer, and some of the first tools I built were for other developers, as most of us do. But pretty quickly, my first success was because the marketing was better, not because the code or software was better than my competitors. And that’s when it clicked for me. I was like Oh man, I gotta learn this marketing stuff. I gotta learn copyrighting. I gotta learn some SEO, learn some paid acquisition, learn some content marketing, that sort of stuff. And this was around 2005, so about 9 years ago. Once I realized that then I really dove in and I started consuming a ton of marketing content, and I think it naturally led me down this path of you know looking at… because you know what’s interesting is if you’re a marketer and you try to build software you’re software doesn’t tend to be that good. You know, like you see a lot of examples of really crumby software that’s built for marketers because it’s built by marketers. So, I tried to merge those worlds as best as I can and take my marketing knowledge plus my software knowledge and built better tools for marketers. John McIntyre: Hmm, I think that’s what I was really trying to get at, is how marketers, you know marketers build software and they’re not developers, they’re not coders, that’s not even their passion. They just want to build software to make some money and help marketers do something that’s not the most elegant software. Rob Walling: Sure. Yeah and there are a lot of examples, and I wouldn’t name names. I think all of us know them, where you use the software, and you’re like, you know, I understand this does some really good things but, good God the user interface is hard to use and it feels dated even though it was built like a year ago, it feels like it’s 10 years old already. John McIntyre: Yeah, yep. Alright then, well let’s start getting into some of these marketing automation stuff, and I’ll open it up right now. I’m currently using it; however, I’ve used Data … and Pro Tools before and I didn’t really get it setup properly, partly because I was lazy and partly because I thought it was just… well mostly just lazy. It’s easy to just send out a bunch of emails and just brainstorm on the architecture of what I’m going to do with the different segments of the audience, but that’s changing and that’s sort of why your email caught my eye. You know, I know I’ve gotta change things over to a platform, but I haven’t decided which one yet. So,I know enough about email automation through this podcast, but I just haven’t done it yet. But, one belief that I have or had is that it’s actually quite complicated, and what you started to say before we recorded is that it’s really not that complicated. Rob Walling: Yeah, I was in the same boat probably just a year ago. I was looking at marketing automation was this massive enterprise thing that you needed to pay $2000 a month for and there are tools like Marketo and Tool Dot and HubSpot that I kept hearing the names of and I would go to try to research them and you can’t even tell really what they do because the furbage on their website is so eye-level. It’s painful to read, so it’s like, you know, this is not a tool for me, right. But then I started digging in there are tools like InfusionSoft and Entrepot which used to be Office Autopilot and there’s Active Campaign, and now there’s Drip, the tool that I own. And I’ve realized that market automation is way less complicated than I had really thought, and it really is kind of the natural next step once you feel you have outgrown MailChimp and AOL Webber, which these days I kind of consider solid tools. I actually know Ben Chestnut, the founder of MailChimp, he’s a great guy and it’s fantastic. But it’s getting older and is a static email newsletter tool, that’s what I think of it as. And it bolts it on autoresponder, but it wasn’t built natively and there are some issues with that, and a lot of people that I’m talking to feel like they’ve outgrown MailChimp. Like they want tagging. They want to be able to tag the prospects of their customers or trial users. They want to be able to move people in and out of features…not do a ton of fancy stuff, not have to design some big flow chart, but maybe just have some additional features. You know be able to do something beyond just send very basic broadcasts and very basic autoresponders. And that’s what I’m calling light-weight market automation. So, it’s not the $2,000 a month tool, maybe its $50 or $100 a month, instead of $20 that MailChimp is. But it’s just the basic MailChimp or AWeber with just some automation rules built onto that. John McIntyre: Right, right. And so when we say automation, maybe the listener doesn’t know what automation is. Give me a couple of examples of what this sort of automation rules that you might set up. Rob Walling: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, if you think about automation in terms of triggers and actions. Okay, so a trigger might be someone subscribing to your campaign, to an autoresponder campaign or maybe that user clicks a link in that email that you sent. Where maybe you sent the email that said “Hey, would you like to hear more about SEO? Click this link”. And when they click that, then you can take an action. And that action might be to apply a tag and a tag is just a label, so now that SEO. Rob Walling: So now anytime someone who is tagged with SEO, so when they are done with the core sequence, funnel them into this other sequence about SEO that I’ve written. And it’s just going to speak more to their interests. Or even right away an action can be I’m going to remove me from this campaign and put them into another one. Or another trigger I’m thinking of, someone could perform a custom event, so say you have someone selling an eBook and they buy your eBook. Well that can be an event. So even you can put in one line of Javascript to call that an event when they purchase it or you can integrate, like Drip integrates with Stripe and McCurley and Gumroad and DPD and PayPal and all those things so that any of those will then recognize purchase an event and will then… that customer and then you can say anyone who made a purchase from me, tag them as a customer. So then you can just go in and you can just report. You can say, give me all my customers, I want to send them all an email right now… much more like a CRM, you know like a singular view of your people, whereas an email address represents a person. Rather than MailChimp which has a list, an email can be on three different lists and you kind of have one person represented three different times. So, I went a little off the reservation on that rules thing there, but that’s the basic concept of it. John McIntyre: Right, and I think one of the cool parts is that you’ve integrated those so you’ve just got one email address for each person instead of same email address three times for one person. You can actually go look at someone’s email address and say, alright there on this sequence to register for SEO and copyrighting and bought these three products. So, then you go in, like I love it because it allows you to go in and see a much more granular look of your subscribers. You know, I can go on PayPal and see who’s bought what and I can go on AWeber and I can set it up this way on different lists which is clunky but it works, but I can’t really go on AWeber and pull up someone. I have to go through manual filing and see well what’s this email address, are they on this list are they on the prospect list, or are they on this list, did they buy this product, instead of just having this one, very quick one look that tells you everything about them. Rob Walling: Right, and that’s done with tags, that’s done with events, I mean there’s custom fields as well, but I’m on Drip right now looking at some customers, and I see their entire activity feed. So, I can see when they first visited my website, from where they were referred, that they subscribed to my prospect, my lead nurturing campaign. John McIntyre: So, you could put the Drip track on your site and that’s going to tell what source, what website, what referral it was before they signed up? That’s pretty epic. Rob Walling: Yeah, it’s cool. I can trace them all the way back to that, and can see if they signed up for a trial. John McIntyre: So, you could, for example, this is something I have as a campaign on Facebook, you know, I have a bunch of UTM codes and scanning google stuff like campaign… and stuff in the URL. I don’t know if this gets into that Drip, but if it does, is there a way, say someone signs up on the list and they buy say product 1, 2, and 3 later down the line on day 30, day 45 or whatever, that I can bring them up and say, well this person came on Facebook, but did this campaign, opened these terms, this content, and bought these three products. Rob Walling: Yes, except for the UTM stuff we aren’t parsing yet, but it is on our feature list. We can do everything else though. We can get the refer and we can do everything else you just said. And yeah, the UTM stuff is a no brainer because I use it all the time as well. It’s pretty crazy, yeah. John McIntyre: One thing that I thought, thinking the last few months with the marketing stuff when I thought you know I setup, and I talked to Russell Bronson last night doing the podcasting there in what he had set up. And I don’t know if you know Dan Figel, he’s another guy doing something similar, but you have different funnels for your business. So you know you might be I have an email marketing landing page, a copyrighting marketing landing page, a page about landing pages, each page with three different landing pages and one of them speaking to a different people who want to be good copyrighters and want to speak to email marketing and sort of gives them a different report on email marketing. And each one has its own email opt-in form. And then what happens is as each one signs up they get sort of custom email autoresponses in one to two weeks which is sort of going to … if they’re interested in copyrighting or email marketing. But after that two weeks they get moved to a house list and that’s where they get pitched and everyone gets emails sent out to them. So it might be sign up on email marketing or copyrighting, but it’s ends up funneling them to the house list or main list after that sequence, and then they get all the broadcast like that. And I’ve heard of a few people doing that, so instead of having the mailing list first and then singling people off, what Russell Bronson and this guy, Dan, is doing is starting with the second tier and finding out what people are interested in first, they are bringingthem so it’s sort of more relevant and then putting them on the house list and then sending out their offers and their products to everyone on that list. Rob Walling: Yep. And what I like about that is it’s just not that complicated. What you described, you know, makes total sense as a marketer that a) that’s going to resonate more with them, you’re going to close more sales and you don’t need that much extra content to do that. And that’s where the marketing automation doesn’t have to be that difficult. And that’s like I said a year ago I thought it had to be more complicated than that, but even taking that step is a challenge, you know with a static newsletter, and to do that with AWeber would be not impossible, but it would be pretty heavy to do that. So that’s where we are talking about these tools to do that is just much easier because it’s just one click. It’s a complete no-brainer to do it with them. John McIntyre: You know one thing I worry about when we talk about marketing automaton is just that if I go into do that strategy I was just talking about, you know, going in on that second tier or SEO or copyright email marketing, then instead of writing one email a day, sent out to different segments, then I have to write out three emails. So that’s why I really love that strategy I just mentioned because you can have 5 emails, 10 emails for each segment but then they are on that house list. You still know what they are interested in, you know segmentation wise, but they are still on that house list. They can just write one email, you know you can sort of just hit one button. And in an ideal world it may seem like you have different emails for each segment, but you know that’s just too much work at the end of the day. Rob Walling: Yeah, no I agree with you.You know, you keep the work load low and you still get better results by say just using a straight autoresponder.Yeah, it’s much easier because you have so much targeting. John McIntyre: Okay, so let’s talk about you mentioned one thing we were talking about before the call about some of the different ways you can split up, so you’ve got customers, you’ve got prospects. You can also split your prospects up into people who are ready to buy and people who sort ofhave no idea who you are yet. So, what have you seen and what sort of ways have you seen to split your audience up that you’re using right now? Rob Walling: Yeah, there’s kind of four different target markets that are using the information that I’ve been focusing on, you know kind of the light-weight sets, people who have SAS apps, people who are wordpress plug-ins, people who are selling consulting services and then people who are selling info products, like eBooks and membership websites, and those are the ones that I am really focused on because that’s kind of my market, the one that I most really understand. And what I am seeing is that the four stages of the funnel that people are focusing on and it’s prospects, leads, trials and customers. And you know wordpress plug-ins don’t have trials and SAS may not have leads, you know it’s just kind of the prospect or trial. But those are really the main four segments and you have to parse out which one applies to you. But what I’m seeing is that people are… the difference is, if you sign up on MailChimp, you have maybe one big list with maybe some merge fields and tread people in between them. But if you set up with marketing automation, what you get is a different forum that you hopefully want to appear on every form of your website to try to get people into that prospect list. And that leads to more traffic but more cold leads to people who don’t have much interest in your product, they just are probably very light pitches and you are just trying to educate them about some stuff. It’s really more content marketing at that point with a PS here and there. Then, as they express more interest, if they engage, if they click some links, you move them more into the lead mode where you can tag them as a lead and you can kind of start talking more about your product a little more because now they have expressed a little more interest. You know, maybe I would like to use your software, or maybe I would like to use your consulting services. And then you start selling a bit more to try to push them towards a sale while you are still educating, but you are doing a little more selling. Then, if you have a trial or a demo that someone tries that out and downloads the demo, then you probably know that right? Because they have probably entered their email to use it, so you can tag them as a demo or trial user and that’s really when you say, hey you just downloaded this now here’s an onboard thing. Because now they have taken the bait and you really want to help them get the most value out of that trial or demo that they can. And so that’s when you cut to a really honed sequence of maybe 4-7 emails where you are just like, here are the steps to do it and I’ve noticed you haven’t done this. Because you can easily have an API hooked in there to say, hey this person hasn’t created their first project or whatever. So then you kind of hound them about it, you know, hey you aren’t going to get anything out of this if you don’t create a project. And then, I found that just that alone gets a lot of people on board. And that converts people to customers and then you can tag them as customers and run upgrade specials now and again andcommunicate with customers to refer people and that sort of stuff. So, it comes back to really segmenting, tagging each phase of the funnel and being able to communicate what’s relevant to them at that point so that you aren’t sending customers that really early contact marketing because that isn’t helpful to them. It’s just not as relevant. John McIntyre: Okay, so it seems very similar to the other strategy I just mentioned where you’ve kind of got to bring someone in with a prospect funneling which might be SEO or marketing or whatever and then after that, whether you do it automatically or you do it another matter or choice say whether they open at least three emails or whatever, then you then put them on that mail list, which is probably your lead list where you get more aggressive with the pitches. And now whether you have a trial stage is just dependent on what your business is and now you can put them in the customer phase and even up-sales after that and start tagging them to say, hey you haven’t bought this add-on to the product, let’s send them a sequence based on that. You could, and I think that why it seems so complicated, is because you could get so deep into this. Rob Walling: Yeah, you can, but you don’t have to is probably the message that I want to get across today. You know, I kept thinking you have to write a hundred of emails and have a different email for everyone depending on what they are doing, and you really don’t need to do that. Most of the niches I talked about, SaaS… and Info Portal, they really only have three phases, each of them, one of them has four, but most really only has three phases and those phases don’t have to be that long. You know, if you’re posting blog posts and you can summarize those and do a teaser, then you have the prospect content that you need, right, for your cold prospects. And then if you have a nice even four email sequence about getting someone to use or download your demo or trial, then you’re done with the trail sequence. And then you only need a few customer emails to get people to send referrals and take other actions that you want them to take. And if you just do that, you totally get the value out of it that you are paying for, whether you are paying someone to write it or you are paying for the tool, you will get so much return on that money, even if you are just doing the basics. The tuning and high optimization of it, some people love that, and yes you can get more out of it, but it’s kind of an 80/20 thing that if you just get the basics done it will work wonders for you over sending purchase static content to everybody. John McIntyre: And I guess the primary option and goal is to get it set up and running to get that basic setup running through 80/20. But you know, if you plan on being in business for two years, five years or however many years, sign up where each month you can add five emails or ten more emails or tenmore triggers. And it’s just you can continue to optimize and refine it. You don’t have to continue to erase this more like a marathon, but it’s kind of like a wheel you are trying to gradually improve. Rob Walling: Exactly, and that’s the thing, is you are building this fly wheel. It’s not like you write this email once and it goes away. These are all sequences that will repeat over and over and over so you are building assets over time. So, I like the way you put it; if you’re gonna be in business for two years, five years, ten years, you’re gonna take the slow road and build this fly wheel over time and it’s just basically elevate your conversion rates across all the stages of your funnel. John McIntyre: I love this. This is from Perry Marshall and he talks about breaking the sales funnel into pieces by distinguishing each piece and by doing that you are improving it by tweaking it. And what happens is, you don’t get very far over a few weeks, but over time when you tweak this, you tweak that, 20% here, 7% here, 10% here, 5% here, you have just compounded interest. When you read some email about making a million dollars in three months, that’s not really how it works. You know if you are doing it for 2 years and you get 10% in a month, you know on a step sequence of 2 years or 5 years or even 10 years, business explodes just because that’s what the compound of interest does. Rob Walling: Yeah, that’s right. That’s what truly building a sustainable business is. Even the big start-ups. You know you hear about Y Combinator start-ups and if they’re growing 10% a month, that’s nice, you know growing 10% a month, but if you do that for a year or two you’re in big business. You get big quick. So between 10 and 20% growth is what we’re looking at, and that’s what this is. It’s just building that fly wheel. John McIntyre: Alright, now let’s talk about, because I know you’ve got Drip, before we talk about Drip, let’s talk about, let’s say you wanted to do this MailChimp or AW Pro Tools, you mentioned before about how that works if you wanted to hack onto it. So some people have heard about MailChimp or heard about AW Pro Tools and they want to do it that way, but it sounds like that’s not the best way to do it. Rob Walling: Well, it depends on what best is for you. It’s like if it works for you, if you use AW Pro Tools and it works for you and it doesn’t feel hacky and it doesn’t break and it’s good enough for your scenario, then I would say stick with it. There’s no reason not to, same with MailChimp. They justadded, two days before this interview, some automation tools. And I know they have had a quest for this forever, and they are a big company, so it’s hard to just bolt something on real quick. But you know if it works, I have been telling people to stay with it. But my guess is that if you do automation, if you have any type of complexity or any type of expansion that you want to do, you are going to outgrow it pretty soon, and when that time comes, that’s when you need to start looking at something like an Active Campaign or Drip or Entrepot. John McIntyre: So by the sound of it, what it sounds like the problem is that when you go to the database, essentially all that AW Pro Tools or MailChimp are, the database has been built or organized in a certain way for the last 10 years, and it’s been built for them to be just a straight user or straight autoresponse thing. So when you tag on marketing automation or because it’s not built from the ground up, you can’t do as much, they can’t do everything with the data. They have to work within the rules they already have, unlike say, Active Campaign, Entrepot, Drip or any of these other ones, that’s because they’re built from the ground-up. They have a lot more flexibility, and I’m guessing they’re a lot more reliable as well, too. Rob Walling: Yeah, that’s right. I mean the number of scenarios that you can cover with automation rules in say Drip or Active Campaign, is definitely a lot more than you can do with MailChimp or AW Pro Tools. There are just a lot more cases you can cover. We spent like two months just moving data around to make this possible because when we built Drip a year ago, we didn’t build it with automation rules and so we stepped back and spent two months moving data all over the place in order to make this possible to build it really from the ground up. You know, MailChimp couldn’t do that. They literally have too much data for that to be possible, so they would have to bolt-on, that’s the phrase we use in software. It’s like bolting something onto the side of a car or bolting it onto the side of a building. You kind of have to bolt it on and work around your limitations. And so they do have automation, but the further you dig into it… I started looking and I was like, well I can’t do this. Like there are some very basic things, like you still can’t view a subscriber, one email address does not equal a person in MailChimp and that still fundamental thing that I really want if you’re gonna do this. You know you don’t want that email address to show up on three different lists and that to look like three different people. John McIntyre: And an element too where someone might be thinking about, well, I’ll just go on MailChimp for the next two or so months or I’ll just go on AWeber for the next two or so months and then I’ll switch later on, but I think thedownside of this is that I know that once I switch… I mean I know it’s gonna be a pain in the ass just to move from AWeber anywhere, so now I’m thinking well if I want to do this marketing automation stuff, I don’t want to go from one place and say well this didn’t really work, let’s go here and do it again. I really want to get something that’s going to grow with me for the next 1, 2, 5 years. Rob Walling: Yeah, that’s right. Because doing it once and then repeating it would be kind of a pain. And at this point, the pricing difference used to be more but it’s not actually that much if you look at it. MailChimp and AWeber start around $15-20 a month and Active Campaign and Drip are right at $30-50 a month, just to start. So, it’s like if you are going to move into that, it’s not like it used to be where Marketo and … are $800 a month to start and InfusionSoft are $200 and $300 a month to start. But now, there’s people who are like us who are coming down and making these a lot easier to kind of get into that. John McIntyre: Let’s talk about Drip then. You’ve mentioned Drip, and we’ve learned a little bit about Drip so far, so let’s wrap it up on the content and hear what you can do with Drip. Rob Walling: Yeah, so Drip is a light-weight marketing automation that doesn’t suck. I mean that’s kind of the headline that I’m using on the website right now, and to be honest I took that headline from a customer who told us about 6 months ago, he was trying to tell me about all the features he wanted. He was telling me, I want an email address to represent a person, I want to be able to move someone around the list with a click, and then he kind of got flustered and he was like can you just build a marketing automation software that doesn’t suck? And that was the thing. And I was like, that is a headline, right there. So that is literally the headline on the homepage right now, and Drip allows you to basically do everything we talked about here. It allows you to tag customers or prospects or leads as prospects, customers and leads. It integrates with Stripe and Gumroad and McCurley and Chargify and PayPal and DPD and we are rolling out like one or two more a week so that any payment provider, we want you to not have to write any code and for it to just call into Drip and you can say, Boom, this person made a purchase, tag them as a customer, move them into your customer campaign. We are integrated with Unbounce and Leap Pages and we’re adding some more landing page folks so you can easily have landing pages and send folks straight into Drip. Drip still has a pretty cool widget where you just add some JavaScript in website footer and in every page of your website you can instantly have an email capture form. It’s a little toaster pop-up, kind of like the chat widows in Olark chat and it will collect these emails for every page of your site without you having togo in with HML, it just works. And so that’s how you get that prospect list started. And, I can’t tell you the number of people who come in, and they install that footer and I keep thinking to myself, boy once they make the first sale they’re gonna be happy, but they get 5 subscriber their first day, and they email us just this roar like, I can’t believe I have 5 people on the email list already. And I have forgotten the joy of that when you’re just building your list, how hard it is to get people on your email list and it’s really cool just to get a handful of folks on it. John McIntyre: I think what’s really cool, is I haven’t tried to get any of this across yet, but I’m on the back end of drip right now and the interface looks beautiful. It looks real good. Rob Walling: Yeah, we spent, like we talked about earlier, I’m a software guy. And so when I use software that isn’t easy to use or it isn’t well designed, it pains me and I’m pretty picky about it. So we spent an enormous amount of time, and I hired a couple of guys who are quite expensive to do this design and then the user interface and then the user experience to try to make it so that you don’t have to click 20 times to try to get somewhere. You don’t have a whole bunch of pop-ups that interrupt you. And we really think through the phases of if you want to get from here to there for the quickest click path, and we look at it, and it’s more of a science than an art, you know building software. There’s a lot of rules and patterns that we follow to try to make it simple for folks to get started with it. John McIntyre: Yeah, cool. Alright, well let’s wrap it up here then. If people want to learn more about you or about Drip or about anything else, where’s the best place for them to go? Rob Walling: Sure, well Drip is at Getdrip.com or it’s at, actually the number result for the word in Google right now for the word Drip, and I don’t know how long that will be, but it’s been that way for a couple of months, that is kind of cool. And then they can follow me on Twitter @RobWalling and then I have a podcast called Start-ups for the Rest of Us where I talk a lot about starting software companies and marketing them John McIntyre: Cool, well I’ll have links to all those sites in the show notes at the McMethod.com. Rob, thanks for coming on the show. Rob Walling: It was absolutely my pleasure. It was great to be back on, John. The post Episode #75 – Rob Walling on Marketing Automation Made Easy And Its Mind Blowing Empathy Creating Power (plus its new shocking affordability factor) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Russell Brunson is a wealth of knowledge… …literally. His information products and his know-hows have made him a very wealthy man. Russell’s signature Seinfeld Emails are making his exponential rise inevitable. Don’t let his boyish looks fool you, Russell’s years of experience make him a great-grandpa in internet years – He’s been laying the info marketing smack down for 10+ years now. And is the most accomplished info-marketer I know. After selling millions of his OWN products so dang successfully, And teaching others how to do it exactly the same way, You’ve got to wonder… How does he do it? And how does he manage that multi-million dollar email list? THAT is why Russell is on the show today. He lets us know HOW he controls that massive list, …distinct email tactics he’s developed through years of various trial and errors, And the genius technique of taking 2 of the most accomplished email marketer’s mantras –  Then wrestling out of the two – Something quite special… …something his – Something that keeps that cash raining down on him (and his clients) for days on end.   In this episode, you’ll discover: why drilling down… only focusing on list-building in your initial years will serve you well for the rest of your life a proven way to instantly be best friends with your new optin-ers (skip the pain… Russell’s already tried out several ways that didn’t work like this does) how to indoctrinate subscribers the right way, your way… from the second you’ve converted them onto your list from a squeeze page. why certain emails pissed him off so bad… they showed him the light to bulletproof email marketing success. how watching a show about nothing can generate ideas that will bring you mountains of revenue (find out what The Daily Seinfeld Email is and how you need to be using this in your business) the vital importance of a business core structure no matter how many industries you’re dabbling in (learn backend techniques that work like magic within any industry) Russell’s golden insights to attract all segments of your industry using multiple front-end products (use these angles to funnel your customers all day eerday) a simple mindset tweak that catapulted Brunson’s success after utilizing people he admired’s advice, but in his own way (no hand holding here… Brunson gave birth to a new, damn profitable style of email marketing) no brainer easy-to-implement steps to turn that traffic into long-time loyal fans aka buying customers how a bulldog wrester’s mentality can translate a bad day into a business revelation (learn how a bad sales call made Russell over $100k...what? Yup) Mentioned: 108 Split Tests Book Dot Com Secrets Mark Joyner Simpleology Andre Chaperon Ben Settle Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy and it’s time for episode 74 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one simple thing… How to make money every time you send an email to your list. Now today I’ll be talking to Mr. Russell Brunson. Russell is one of the most accomplished info marketers around on the planet. He’s sold millions and millions of dollars of his own products, he sells to clients. I just bought his book. It’s called like 101 Split Tests and it’s got some great ideas in there on testing and split testing. Anyway, today we’re gonna talk about how Russell builds and manages a multi-million dollar email list. How does he use his email list in his business to create basically a crap ton of money?  A crap ton of profit and revenue and sales and all that stuff that we all want. So, that is today, we’re going to get into that in just a minute.  To get the show notes of this episode of The Email Marketing Podcast go to themcmethod.com/74. Now this week’s McMasters Insight of the Week is a special one. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before – the insight is basically this – that email is just one piece of the puzzle. Cuz one thing I’ve realized over the last 3 to 6 months, it’s that sometimes it’s easy to think well you know email… you’ve heard about it from me, from Andre Chaperon, from Ben Settle, from any of these big email marketers out there and sometimes just, you know, a marketer. Someone whose told you and you’re like, wow, email is going to change my business.  And, unfortunately, it’s probably not gonna change. It’s not gonna revolutionize it. Its not gonna make you a millionaire just because you start using email alright? Email is just one piece of the puzzle.    In business you need traffic, you need a conversion process, and then you need an economic process where you make people buy a lot of stuff. Email falls under that conversion banner.  It’s another tool in your arsenal. Another weapon you can use to make people buy your stuff.  So instead of just thinking, well email is gonna save me and email is gonna make everything better, you really gotta have the mindset and think, “well in my business right now… within everything in my to-do list, everything that’s not on my to-do list… where can I make the biggest impact?”  You know, you got a big ass wall in front of you, and there’s one spot on that wall where if you tap it softly the whole wall will come crashing down, but if you tap it anywhere else, it’s a wall of steel.  There’s no way you’re getting through it.  So you have to be a bit of an engineer and think, “is email really my biggest area of improvement right now? And if not, what is?”  And then go work on that.  We’ve been talking about this in McMasters.   McMasters is my private training community that teaches how to write emails, how to write pages that convert, how to basically build a sales funnel that’s converting well… And why I’m really excited about today is I’ve just added 10 fill-in-the-blank templates. Now these templates are based on story based selling format that I use in my own list.  I’ve taken these ideas and the method that I teach and created some templates that you can use. You sign up, you take the template, you literally fill in the blanks and then you add it to your auto responder software. Then you can send it out. The idea is that someone can sign up and have a 5-10 email sequence on the first day. They don’t even have to learn how to write emails. No struggling with writers block and no training at all. Just fill in the blanks, maybe some people in there have tweaked them a little bit to sort of fit their audience more, but… I know for a fact, Im a copywriter and I would much rather have a template that I can work off then be starting from scratch.  Cuz even if you do tweak it, it’s just so much easier. There’s way less creative energy and power needed. So anyways, I wanted to mention that those templates are in the McMasters. To learn more about McMasters, just go to www.themcmethod.com/mcmasters. That’s the sales page. That’ll give you all the information you need on whether you should sign up or not. Anyways, that’s enough for now. Let’s get into this little interview conversation with Mr. Russell Brunson. John McIntyre: It’s John McIntyre here, the Auto Responder Guy. I’m here with Russell Brunson.  Russell is one of the most accomplished Info Marketers around online.  He’s sold millions of millions of his OWN products.  And he actually just put out a recent book, which I’ve got right here in front of me called the 108 Proven Split Test Winners and he sent it out all the way to Thailand, which is pretty cool.  He’s got Dot Com Secrets, which their goal is to help 100,000 people earn their first hundred dollars online.  And some other cool goals going too and success, etcetera.  I’m not sure how to say it, but they want to help making a more healthy, wealthy, and wise, which is pretty cool.  How’s it going, Russell? Russell Brunson:It’s going awesome, man.  Great to have … Good to be here with you. John McIntyre:Yeah.  Good to have you on, man.  Before we get into sort of the content, tell the least that I’m kind of giving them a little bit of a background on who you are.  Some people might have heard about you anyway, but for someone you hasn’t, give the listener a bit more background on who is Russell Brunson and what does he do. Russell Brunson:Yeah, definitely.  So, yeah, my name is Russell Brunson and I look like I’m probably 11 or 12 years old as everybody tells me.  But I’ve actually been doing this game for long time.  I had my online business for over a decade now, over 10 years, which is crazy.  I feel like a dinosaur in Internet years, but I’ve been doing this for long time. And because that we’ve had a chance to test out and try a lot of things in lot different markets, we’ve had a lot of stuff that works really good and a lot of things that don’t work good.  But I’m super passionate about business and about marketing, and about the testing like you said, our most recent product is our 108 Split Test Book, which is, in 4 or 5 in the markets wherein we do a lot of heavy split testing, and so, we kind of just shared all our results and gave it away for free, and it’s been a ton of fun, and yeah, that’s kind of … I mean I’m probably the biggest marketing nerd you’ll ever meet.  I buy every book, every course, have to go through their sales process and have to see what I can get from the information. Prior to my marketing world, I was a wrestler.  That’s kind of my passion.  It was wrestling forever.  Now, I do more jui-jitsu because it’s like wrestling for all fat guys.  It’s kind of nice show out there.  You know, I have to work nearly as hard as wrestling.  But you still get kind of that rush and I got a wife and four kids, and life is awesome. John McIntyre:Nice, man.  You’re in Boise, Idaho right? Russell Brunson:Yeah, I’ve been living in Boise. John McIntyre:Okay, I’ve got a friend from out there. Have you been to Thailand? There’s tons of like Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu, couple of friends do it. Russell Brunson:I … No.  No, I never actually have been there.  One of our own employees actually was a Muay Thai fighter from Thailand and so, we had 2 or 3 years, we hung out a lot with him.  And so, I’ve never made it out there, I really would love to.  It’d be fun. John McIntyre:You should come.  Check it out, man.  It’s a good place.  Anyway, let’s talk about some of the content… you got a podcast on Daily Seinfeld Emails and you talked about an epiphany on email marketing.  So, let’s sort of dive in to that and see what we can … what sort of fun we can have.  Tell me about that. Russell Brunson:Yeah.  So, we’ve been doing email marketing forever.  Right?  And that’s kind of I was lucky.  My very first mentor was a guy named Mark Joyner.  Yes, you may have heard of him.  He owns a company now called Simpleology.  And I’m grateful that he was my first mentor because a lot of mentors teach everything but he like drilled my head like “build the list, build the list, build,” like that’s all he would just … preach, and so, for me, that was like … you know, all that mattered.  So, I focused my first 3 or 4 years 100% on building a list and it served me ever since. And so, big into list building and then, try to figure out like how … what’s the best way to monetize your list but keep them happy?  And you know, get kind of that balance like, “How do you … how you do that?”  And I’ve had times in my business where I totally screwed it up and I’ve killed my list.  I’ve had times I had to go back, and rebuild it because that I’ve had times that were awesome.  And so, it’s kinda interesting, I … and that you may have had both these guys on your show.  I’m not positive if you have or not.  But there are two kind of guys that I started really looking at.  It was interesting because they very like conflicting beliefs on how to do email marketing.  And one of them was Andre Chaperon. John McIntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:And Andre’s whole thought process is the “Soap Opera Sequences,” right?  Somebody comes in and you have this 5, 10, 20 and he’s got like 80-day … like Soap Opera Sequence email series that I don’t know how he does it… that are weaving together these storylines and sucking you in and then, you’re like … he’s like a sniper and all of a sudden he introduces this offer after like 80 emails and like everybody buys because they’re so connected, right? And so, like that whole school of thought, I thought, “Oh, that’s really cool! I like that,” then I met this guy named Ben Settle, and I don’t know if you’ve had Ben on your show or not, but Ben just like sends out a daily email every single day they’re all over the place.  And I was like on his list and stuff, and it was funny because at first, I was like, “This is really cool.”  And after a while, like his emails started like, I was getting emotionally charged by these emails.  I remember like a couple days I’d wake up and I’d read these and I’d get so angry by these emails and I was like, “Just so frustrated.” I was like, “I can’t stand this guy.”  Like, “I don’t like the way he does in marketing, doesn’t like anything. And one day, It was literally like six in the morning, I was on my phone in my bed reading one of those emails.  I was so upset and I stopped and I was like, “Whoa!  Look at the reaction he’s getting out of me like, “This is like amazing, like I haven’t had every single morning I’m reading his email first.  Everyday I’m getting frustrated or annoyed, whatever.  I’m having this like emotional impact.  It’s like sucking me and then making me keep reading, right, and I was like, “Wow!  There’s something to this.  I need to step back and pull my emotion out of it and look it like what he’s doing.”  I started watching and I think that’s one of the big takeaways for anyone.  A lot of times just look at what people are doing and not what they’re saying, and that’s the couple times I stepped back started watching him, and that’s the guy I gave the really big respect for him and I became friends with him since, but just realizing his model. So, his model is kind of like … and I can’t remember if he told me this or if I just kind of … I don’t remember what, but like his model is kind of like a daily Seinfeld email.  So, you got Soap Operas which … you look at a Soap Opera, it’s a multi email sequence and just dragging people from thing to thing to thing and it’s a soap opera, right?  Then, you’ll get the TV show Seinfeld, what’s the difference?  Seinfeld is like these shows that each show is kind of its own standalone episode.  And if you watch the episodes where Jerry was trying to actually pitch a show on NBC or whatever, right, and it was a show called Jerry and they’re like, “What’s the show going to be about,” and like, “It’s a show about nothing.”  And they’re like, “Why would anyone watch a show about nothing?”  Well, this is … because it’s there.  It’s on TV, and like this whole big thing, right.  And then, obviously, the irony of it was that Seinfeld was a show literally about nothing like they ask him like, “What’s the Seinfeld about?”  They’re like, “I don’t know,” and people just hanging out, right? John McIntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:But it’s like the greatest sitcom of all time.  It’s been off the air for like 20 years and people still watch it every single night because of what it was, right?  And really like the daily Seinfeld emails that the power of them is very similar.  It’s emails you’re sending out that don’t really have much to do about anything.  They’re more just kind of like telling a story.  It’s more like entertainment, right, telling a story about what’s happening.  And then, from there, somehow tying it back into your product or your service.  And so, after I met Ben and he kind of walk me to some psychology about what he was doing and you know, why I was getting so emotionally charged by his emails.  He’s like … you know, it’s very much just like thinking each day like, “What’s something happened to my life that’s exciting or dumb or funny or annoying or whatever,” and then, you just kind of write this email about it and he get the emails to do … has nothing to do with anything.  They’re just kind of these random emails and then somehow, at the end, you have to tie it back into – John McIntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:- into your product, right.  And so, for me, I’m kind of walk you through my psychology real quick, now, then I’ll dig deeper into actually Seinfeld.  So, for me, like if you look at our businesses now, the way we do it is that somebody first joins our list, at that point, they don’t really know who I am or some of our businesses, I’m a big guru.  But they don’t know who the attractive character, who the guru is, right?  And so, I think that the best way to do that and to build that initial bond with your audience is through the soap opera’s sequence.  And so, typically, someone joins our list and they go through anyone from like a 3 to a 10-day email sequence.  It’s kind of like a soap opera.  I can’t write the 80-day once that Andre does.  But they’re shorter and they kind of like build … they very quickly build the relationship with the attractive character because that’s like the key because, otherwise, in the future, they’re not going to open your emails.  They’re not going to buy your stuff.  They got to have that relationship. John McIntyre:Right.  So, before … Because this is what I was talking to a client about, today is, when someone signs up to the list, I think I have no idea who you are.  Before they’re going to buy anything, they’ve got to know who you are.  So, you sort of got that. Russell Brunson:Yeah. John McIntyre:I mean, the goal of these is like an indoctrination sequence where the goal of that, you know, you’re just sending 12 emails, to literally just indoctrinate them so they think that you’re awesome.  So, that’s what you’re talking about, right?  You’re telling them a story – Russell Brunson:Exactly. John McIntyre:- about who you are, they position as you as the authority that he was the trustworthy guy or girl, and so on. Russell Brunson:Exactly, because you got to have that, because I’m here driving traffic, you’re taking their squeeze pages, so it’s kind of blind.  It was something to increase conversions, right?  But after you’ve got them in, now, it’s like, now, you’re going to warm them up and it’s got to be pure relationship.  I know, if your listeners are … or you’ve tried like if you … if you do a landing page that’s all like you focused and you start driving cold traffic to it, it doesn’t convert at all.  It’s really frustrating actually.  But you go in and do one that’s very like blind and that’s very bling and after getting them in.  But then, it’s hard to keep those people around just because like they don’t know who you are.  And so, that it’s key. For me, it’s like that first 3 to 5 days, we’re building this awesome relationship.  Then, after that, after we build soap opera, we’ve got that relationship with them, then I transition to what we call in our … internally hear our daily Seinfeld emails.  And I can read you one or two if you want to hear them because the very first when I sent out, it was totally like … it was one of those days where like all the stuff was happening and it was frustrating and we had a bad sales call that … and a sales call, it went bad and it was … you know, I’m upset.  So, all of these things were happening and I was like, “You know what?  I’m going to write that Ben Settle style email, like a Seinfeld style email.”  So, I sat down and I’ve started typing this thing out. John McIntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:And it was like funny and it was like … had nothing to do with anything.  We send it out and that email made me over $100,000 in sales, and I was like, “Huh?!  I should do this more often.”  And so … Anyway, so, do you want me to read you that email because that email is my favourite one I’ve done so far? John McIntyre:Yeah, do it, man. Russell Brunson:All right.  So, the subject line said, True Story: He Flushed $20,000,000 Down The Toilet Today.  So, that’s the one out.  Then, here’s the copy.  So, it said, “So, yesterday, you had a guy who applied for my inner circle program.  I saw its app come through and I was actually really excited because he’s in the golf market.  Now, I’m no golfer, but I’ve got a lot of friends doing $20,000,000 plus in the golf market online.  I saw this product and I knew it was a homerun.  So, the coach who was going to call him back asked my opinion on his business before she called them, and I sat down with her for 10 minutes and pulled up, first, his three major competitors; second, I showed her every site that they were successfully buying traffic from; third, I showed her the top three converting ads for each of his competitors; fourth, I showed her the sales funnels that were converting and the main reason why his was not. I then showed her the two media buyers I would use if I were in a golf market.  Both of who can send over thousands of sales a day consistently and armed with this information she called the guy out.  Now, he was a little cocky and rightfully so it’s all over 100,000 units of his product on TV.  And for some reason, he couldn’t figure out this pesky little Internet thing.  So, she started sharing with him some of my ideas and then he stopped her, “Look, I’ve read 20 books on Internet Marketing, and there isn’t a single thing that Russell could teach me they don’t already know.”  So, she tried to explain, “Look, you can read a million books on Jiu-Jitsu but that’s not going to help you to street fight.”  Now, I thought that was pretty funny.  But what happened next was just sad.  He said, “Well, Russell doesn’t know anything about golf,” and then he hung up on her.  Now, while he was right about me that I don’t know anything about golf. I know everything about selling golf stuff online.  I’ve been doing this now for over 10 years and I’ve personally trained over 2500 companies in my offices here in Boise in those 10 years.  I worked with a lot of golf guys and even one golf gal. Now, I have worked with people who just know about every mark that I can think of except for bowling.  I never had someone teach bowling come with me which makes me sad because bowling is my third favorite sport behind wrestling, number one, and Jiu-Jitsu, number two. Anyway, so you notice how these emails are just like … I’m just talking about stupid things, right?  So, anyway, for anything else I can think of and help them out on a funnel, show them what they were doing wrong, introduce them to my media buyer, showing them what size by their ads on, and what they should be spending to acquire customer in their specific market, and then, usually ensure them to gurus I know in those areas.  And after speaking on Dan Kennedy’s stages for over six years, I got to meet almost … most of the gurus in most industries and makes it easy to find connections for those people.   Those are the things you can’t learn in a book.  Those are the things I bring to the table for my inner circle people.  My goal for them is not to teach some more stuff.  It’s to make them more money. Anyway, if you got a golf product, let me know because I’ve got a killer $20,000,000 a year blueprint that this dude just flushed down the toilet because of his arrogance or his ignorance, either way.  He lost out.  So, you can just plug in around with it or if you sell … well, anything else, I’d love to help you out with that.  Our next inner circle meeting is here in Boise, in May.  If you’d like to come, you gotta act fast.  You can apply here, boom!  And then, oh?  We only accept cool people. If you like to flush money down the toilet, please don’t apply.  Thanks, Russell Brunson. Sent that out.  We got like 100 and something applications.  And from that, we signed up four people for inner circle at $25,000 a pop.  So, I was like … that was like so much fun and it was just me kind of ranting about just telling this random story and somehow tying it back into … to what we’re doing, right? John McIntyre:Yeah.  It’s pretty cool.  I’ve seen that.  Like I was playing around with the Andre stuff about a year … a year and a half ago, and all like it works, it goes well.  But it wasn’t until then that I stumbled upon Ben Settle, same kind of story, started using that and that was when everything sort of took off like the whole people’s … yeah, people started listening.  People started responding to the emails and it was quite incredible to watch.  And since then, that’s pretty much all I do, every email is like a self-contained, you know, Seinfeld episode where it’s a random … Russell Brunson:Yeah. John McIntyre:It’s not even a story.  Like sometimes like you can just have a rant about … I told a story once about how I almost get arrested here in Thailand one day while driving.  And another one how I … think I went mountain biking one day and almost crashed into a tree, I think that was in the subject line… just like the most random stuff and it’s blowing me away how – Russell Brunson:Yeah. John McIntyre:- you take anything… Russell Brunson:That’s the stuff to get keep people to move, right? John McIntyre:It’s crazy! Russell Brunson:Yeah. Yeah.  And, you know, it’s true because like, think about it, like people are bored out their minds like life is kind of boring and that’s why people have Facebook.  So, therefore … and literally hours that every night, they go to bed … before they go to bed, they stroll for like 20 minutes through Facebook trying to find something entertaining for 5 seconds so you can go to bed. John Mclntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:That’s the world we live in right now, right?  And so, I think one of my big epiphanies is now I think that was the premise about that podcast you’re talking about, it was just … it’s less like teaching and training and more just entertaining.  That’s what people are looking for.  And they’ll buy … John Mclntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:If you entertain them, they will buy from you. John Mclntyre:Yeah.  It’s kind of like, you know, people want the education to train, there’s thousands of blogs out there on every topic.  The training is not hard to find but the entertainment is.  Because most people – Russell Brunson:Yeah. John Mclntyre:- can deliver.  I mean you can still teach someone in an email.  When you tell a story like or just have like an anecdote or a random, whatever, you can still teach them stuff.  But even if you don’t, the entertainment is the value for a lot of people like … anyone can talk about tips, but not everyone can entertain. Russell Brunson:Yeah.  That is true. John Mclntyre:So, what … Russell Brunson:And it’s actually a lot easier than the other stuff.  And after you learn it, first, it’s kind of like hard.  But after you do it, it’s like … literally it’s like in the morning, I’m like, “Okay, so what happened today, or what happened yesterday? K my kid did something stupid or, you know, whatever it is, and then I just write a thing, I send it out and boom! John Mclntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:It gets the reaction. John Mclntyre:It’s kind of like … I’ve done things where you set a time, and I do like a 15-minute time or … and just think, “All right.  Let’s just bust this out as fast as possible.”  And somedays you end up with a terrible email.  Send it out anyway.  But you know it’s not terrible.  You know what I mean, it’s a bit like, “uhh.” Russell Brunson:Yeah. John Mclntyre:But you can just pick up anything.  It’s crazy.  I just pick a random line like I would show someone at dinner before or something and just to show someone what I mean I would pick like a glass on a table and turn that into an email and then get them to do it too with something random like a fork.  And once you sort of get the idea, you can take anything and link it to anything.  It’s fascinating. Russell Brunson:Yeah.  And the key is linking it back to your things.  So, that’s … I’ve talked about this a couple of times and people like, “Oh, I wrote a Seinfeld email,” and they show me, and I’m like “All right.  Well, technically you did, but you never sold anything.  You have to tie back to your things,” something like – John Mclntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:Telling stories is one thing, but how does that somehow tie back to your thing, and sometimes it’s not obvious, sometimes it’s like a … that I’ve seen even Ben the couple of times maybe laugh [inaudible 0:14:40.6] where he just like, “What’s that have to do with anything?”  “Nothing, but go buy my thing over here.” It goes like, if you can’t do anything maybe you can do that, but you got to bridge the gap somehow and kind of bring it back,” you know. John Mclntyre:Yeah.  I mean how do you manage this, say, with the long-term?  Because I think … because like the email that you mentioned that you get $100,000 off and that was the first one you sent.  I think part of the reason that would have worked so well is because you’re one doing that at a time.  So, it was very much a pattern interrupt in terms of an email.  But once you do it every day and once you do it frequently, I think it starts to lose its effectiveness because people start to expect.  And when people expect, it doesn’t sort of interrupt or break that pattern as successfully.  So what sort of … and you’ve got that indoctrination sequence when they first sign up and then what do you do after that?  It sounds like you do the daily … the Seinfeld email, but you’re doing this every day indefinitely.  Well, how do you manage it? Russell Brunson:In theory, I wish I was this perfect as I wish I was like if in a perfect world, I will send out email every single day this way.  I haven’t been as perfect, but, yeah.  I mean, basically, there’s the pattern but there’s different types of the things, right.  It’s not as always like a random source, sometimes it’s gave me some training and some content or something.  And for me, like we roll out new products every month or so. So, my call to action and how I push people is different.  So, it’s always tied and kind of the new thing we’re doing.  You know, somebody like Ben I think is interesting that, I’ve been on his list for like 3 years, and every day, he’s pitched the exact same product for 3 years.  And how awesome who does that?  Because I think that eventually, there’s the … you know, you’re talking about the pattern thing, but just the nature of this like because each one … I mean and conceptually, they’re the same, but the content and the entertainment is different in each one.  I don’t think that there’s the pattern thing as much.  It’s more like, what are you pushing in … and like I said, “For me, it’s just because each … every two weeks or so, we transition to new product, new service, or new kind of thing we’re focusing on.  The new frontend offer we have, it could change for us.  You know what I mean? John Mclntyre:Okay.  So, you said you’re rotating an offer.  Every two weeks, you change the offer.  Where as Ben Settle, he’s got the email plays where he’s running in every single email for years at a time. Russell Brunson:I don’t know how he does that, but he’s crazy focused.  I’ve got just too much cool stuff I want to create and put out there in the world.  And so, for us, so if you look at my business, it’s kind of interesting.  We have tons of front ends, and so people are like, “You have tons of products,” and we do.  But like the backend is the same in all of them, right, like I’m taking to every the same direction.  I just realize that for me, like people are going to respond to different things on the front like they all need the same thing in the back, right?  They need my inner circle.  Okay.  That’s what the people need.  They don’t know about it initially. Like they think, “Oh, I’m in an e-commerce business, so I’m doing this or I’m doing … like they’ve got their thing that they think that they … for them, they think their business is different like everyone does. John Mclntyre:Right. Russell Brunson:And so because that we create different frontends to attract different people like I’ve got a frontend for people who wants to sell High Ticket Stuff.  I got a frontend for people who are network marketers.  I had a frontend for people who were selling info products or creating a frontend people who got supplements like we’ve got … so all these frontends.  And they’re just frontends to kind of introduce an idea and then get somebody into our core backend, which is the same for everything, right?  So, for me, like on my business is the backend, we have this frontends that attract the different people into it. John Mclntyre:Okay. Russell Brunson:And so, for us, like I got my list of the half million people and I have no idea like … you know, my message I’m talking about, you know, information marketing is only relevant to half of them, let’s say, right?  And the other half are doing physical products.  And then, I got transition and talk about my experience to physical product business.  And often those guys are also raising their hand.  They come in the door and then we can get all those people into our program, is that we switch it to like a supplement thing.  We get people in the show now.  And so, that’s kind of how we run our businesses.  In every few weeks, we’re changing at the frontend just to attract and suck out a different segment of our audience – John Mclntyre:Interesting. Russell Brunson:- and bring them into our backend programs. John Mclntyre:Okay.  Okay.  So, you’ve got … so the frontend might be the different angles that the different types of businesses that you’ve got.  But then, at the end of the day, every business owner needs a good masterminder, or a good sort of inner circle coaching program, and that’s really … like it doesn’t matter what sort of business they have – Russell Brunson:Exactly. John Mclntyre:- if they can work with you in the coaches.  It doesn’t matter.  You can just work on any business and you can help them out. Russell Brunson:Yep. John Mclntyre:That’s the idea. Russell Brunson:Exactly.  And it’s the same with … and like … you know, any business, the weight loss industry is the same way, right?  Some people … and so like your backend coaching is the same.  But how many different ways do you know there are people who want to lose weight, people want to gain weight, people want to … you know, females, males, people post pregnancy, people pre-pregnancy, like there are so many different frontends you can attack.  Like if I was in the weight lose space, that’s what I’ve been doing, is I’d be figuring out all the markets they want.  And then I’ll create little frontends to attract those people in because … John Mclntyre:Yeah.  So, you have like the same product for like $20,000, whatever, for each different angle. Russell Brunson:Exactly. John Mclntyre:And that funnels into the 200 – 300 – 500, whatever, main product, the flagship how to lose your weight, gain muscle, just does the whole… Russell Brunson:Boom!  You got it. John Mclntyre:Yeah.  Okay.  Okay. Russell Brunson:And it works that way in every market like, “How do you supplement throughout to attract different segments?” John Mclntyre:Right.  Right.  And you’re doing like … so, when you say you’re doing emails, your 500,000 people on the list, are you segmenting them out in terms of like these are the info marketing guys because they’ve come through that funnel they’ve clicked on links, or something like that, or are you just sending them out daily emails to everyone? Russell Brunson:So, good question, so my initial soap operas are specific to the landing page they came in through.  And after they’ve come through that, now, we just group everybody together because the reality is that dude who comes in an from info thing, he may be interested in the info businesses, but he may have a physical product business, right, or whatever it is.  And so, I don’t know who those people are.  And so, like if I’m selling something specific just for info, I can go and send out just for that segment, but usually for frontend, I’m kind of just casting this net out there and trying to find out who is going to respond because like they may be in a network marketing business and they hate it.  And so, I came in through our network marketing funnels and so I can sell their marketing stuff but in the back of the mind, they hate it and I’d introduce info marketing.  I’ll introduce supplements, and all of a sudden they’re like, “This is the greatest thing in the world,” you know. John Mclntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:After they come in the initial thing, then, we’ve got this big pool and we’re just casting nets out and trying to grab the segment that we think will be interested. John Mclntyre:Yeah.  What’s interesting about that is, so many people like spend … I have had people on this podcast where they go on and on to that segmentation and granted there’s reasons… you know, there’s a good time for it.  But I like how your approach here.  It’s very simple and, you know, bring him in.  Give him that soap opera sequence that’s relevant to, you know, in a context of where they came from.  But at the end of the day, somebody’s got that supplement business.  He might have any common business, too, or an affiliate business like that.  So, that makes your life, and whoever is, you know, managing the list, makes their life so much easier because you’re just sending that email out to everyone.  You don’t have to worry about – Russell Brunson:Yeah. John Mclntyre:- if you don’t have like 10 different lists with, you know … otherwise then you’d have to have ten daily emails.  I mean 10 emails a day – Russell Brunson:I know. John Mclntyre:- to 10 different segments, that would suck. Russell Brunson: Yeah. Well, I thought about that a lot because that when people … I mean, you hear somebody who talk about segmentation, and only targeting the right person, and I really had the big epiphany.  I was out to dinner when I was this guy named Rory Fatt, who he’s like the guru of the restaurant industry, right.  And so, I was like trying to figure out like I want to make the frontend to get all the restaurant people and I’m talking to them and drawing about his business and trying to figure out, you know, what his audience wants.  And he stopped me in the middle, and he said, “Russell, you know, what all my people want?”  And I said, “What,” and he said, “They want to be out of the restaurant business.”  And I was like, “Really?”  He said, “Yeah.  Everyone like the number one thing they want to do when they start a business like, yeah, if you survey the world, they all want to start their own restaurant.”  So, they started.  They hate it and they went out. He’s like, “So, for me, helping them figure out other ways to make money outside and give them out of the restaurant industry is what all they want now.”  that epiphany, I was like, “Wow!  Like that’s … you know, who … who knows what people want?”  Like who are we to say it?  And I think we can segment and target things so specifically we are speaking to it perfectly.  But maybe we were not.  Maybe we were completely off because they may be in that situation.  They don’t want that situation, you know. John Mclntyre:Yeah.  It’s kind of hard like segmentation almost implies or it’s sort of set up to think that people are black and white, and they’re just not Russell Brunson:Yeah. John Mclntyre:Like … So … and I think you sort of start falling into trouble when you start treating a list like that where it’s a bit more of a dynamic relationship.  They’re not just numbers or, you know, people in a database with the little, you know, tag next to them.  These are people with, you know, varied interests. Russell Brunson:Yeah.  And people who buy … The other thing is that there are people who will buy everything you’ve got like … John Mclntyre:Some people, yeah. Russell Brunson:If that’s … You know what I mean?  And that’s the other interesting thing, is like … is if you’ve got four or five things, they’ll keep buying them.  So, why hold those things back for him and not show it to him because they don’t fit the profile or the segment.  I think that let them raise their hand.  Let them figure out.  And I won’t go deeper on this topic unless they have opted in.  You know what I mean? Like most of … I feel like most of our business, most of our frontends like free plus shipping type things, right.  Our DotComSecrets Labs book that you got on a 108 Split Tests, that was bait that we created to track people who already have websites that are interested in testing because that’s the segment of our audience that in fact, that just … so, you know, like that bait that we created, has created more people in our inner circle on anything else we ever done.  We don’t have as many leads from it because it repels the person who doesn’t have a business yet and the person who does have a business, it attracts them like crazy. And so, we will get as many leads from that, but the leads that come through are like gold forming, right?  And so, most of my friends are free plus shipping, so we just … You know w’re mailing the list we’re like, “Hey, there’s this cool new idea.  It’s free plus shipping, go check it out.”  And now, they start seg … they’re segmenting themselves from my entire pool they’re segmenting themselves if they buy that.  Now, they’re in the funnel that we send them up in that value at. John Mclntyre:Right.  So, you’re saying, I can’t remember it now cuz it’s been a month or two ago.  But when I bought that, the split testing book, you’re saying that I would have been out for like a soap opera sequence of, I don’t know, a week or two on, you know, who is Russell Brunson, and that sort of stuff. Russell Brunson:Yeah. John Mclntyre:And then I would have start … I think I probably … I remember finding the inside of circle, the inner circle emails at some point.  So, that was when I got off the main list. Russell Brunson:Yeah, exactly. John Mclntyre: Interesting.  Interesting. Russell Brunson:Very sneaky, isn’t it? John Mclntyre:I like how it’s so simple.  So you get like these … different like free fronts the shipping the free opt in pages and then you go to the frontend like, you know, free product with pay for shipping, and then, you’ve got the inner circle.  It’s a very simple business structure. Russell Brunson:Yeah.  It’s easy and it’s nice because it makes it easy because all … that it can get on all backend.  The middle level products in a backend are all the same.  And so, all I’ve got to do is I got to create new free plus shipping things to test different markets that I look at it as bait. Who do I want to attract? Create some different banners for that throw it out there and bring a new group.  But yes, it’s way simple to create a free plus shipping thing right our soap opera sequence, send it out, start driving leads in, and then they start adding a whole new stream of leads and traffic into our funnel and like I said, after that … after their 3 to 5-day soap opera sequence, they drop into our daily broadcast.  And now, they’re in the gauntlet to find out what are their offers they can raise their hand for. John Mclntyre:I’m curious, man.  Why do the free product with shipping instead of, say, like, “Why not just give them a PDF or an e-book or a video?”  Why do you send it out? Russell Brunson:Two reasons.  Number one, is there are so much free step on the Internet.  Like it doesn’t … it’s not interesting like “Hey, here’s a free PDF.”  And they’re like, “All right.  Sweet.  I got a billion PDFs that are never opened,” right.  But free book or free CD or free DVD is like … it’s this cool … just cool thing, right?  Second off, so you or the book a month ago, right? John Mclntyre:Yeah, a month or two.  Yes, something like that. Russell Brunson:So, is it sitting on your desk that you work out? John Mclntyre:Yeah.  It’s got to … Yeah, you mean the glossy magazine, yeah, it’s right next to me.  I’ll grab it. Russell Brunson:Yeah.  See, that what’s interesting is I want that, a thing on the desktop of every single person in my market.  So, every day, we wake up … John Mclntyre:I’ve shown … I’ve got people out here and I give it to them and, say, “Check out this book.  I got from Russell Brunson.”  It’s like glossy and I say nice.  So, it’s like a proper magazine. Russell Brunson:Yeah. John Mclntyre:Like I mean it’s … Yeah, feels like a magazine you’d find in the news agency. Russell Brunson:And people like … and literally people are like, “Yeah, this is in my bathroom.  I read it every day.  This is on my desk.  I look at it every day.”  And now, I started website opening it up like, “That’s what I want.  I want my name in front of their face all the time.”  And if it’s in a PDF, it disappears. John Mclntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:Because the physical thing, you get the mailman delivering it.  They get that euphoria like, “Oh, this is a cool thing I got.”  They put it on their desk.  They show their friends. John Mclntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:It just … It changes the relationship.  And so, I’m big on that.  And just the fact that by saying it’s free, our conversions shoot up. By having them pay shipping, it qualifies the buyers. John Mclntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:Because PDF, you get all these people from India who have no money who will buy … you will opt in in download it, right?  Like half our list is probably, you know, people in the Philippines who made $20 a year right?  So, it’s like that’s hard to … you can’t sold people things, right? John Mclntyre:Right. Russell Brunson:But with free plus shipping, they got to pull a credit card out their wallet.  They got typed in the digit thing and I’ll click Submit.  So, now, and those people were actually buyers and it just changes … now, that I know their buyers, I can change how I market to those people. John Mclntyre:Right.  I’m curious, too.  Like I know that if someone might be listening to this thing, well, that’s a cool idea.  But I just don’t have the resources to create a glossy, you know, 200-page magazine.  How do you go … How does like a layman go and get, say, take PDF that they’ve got and have been, you know, giving it away to people. How do they take that and turn that into a glossy magazine and have that sent out and do it sort of automatically?  So, they’re not actually… Russell Brunson:Yeah, because that’s the really easy way.  So, what we use is … So, again, with DotComSecrets Labs, the book you got, like obviously went over top on that.  But most of our students that we teaches the process to, we show them through either CD or DVD, even if it’s a PDF like put it on a CD and tell people it’s too controversial for the Internet and you don’t want getting links.  So, it’s got to be on this magic CD, right? John Mclntyre:Yeah. Russell Brunson:And then we use a company called Disc Delivered.  If you go to DiskDelivered.com, I think it’s like $50 to sign up and then, if you put in a coupon code DotComSecrets, orcompany name, they knock off 50%, which is kind of cool.  And then, they will send you like the artwork for the DVD and you just design that, send it back to them, you record your CD or your DVD or PDF and then you mail them a physical copy of the CD and then they’ll do print on demand for you and it connects to most shopping cart.  So, somebody orders it, and then they just ship out the DVD for you.  And I said it’s print on demand so there’s no like it doesn’t cost you anything until something gets sold. And so, that’s what we do.  And in fact, we have like 5 or 6 of our frontends are just through … just delivered because it’s so easy to set up, and it doesn’t cost us any money out from. John Mclntyre:Nice.  Nice.  Cool.  All right.  I think we’re right on time. Russell Brunson:It’s the fast, easy way like … It’s like a fast, easy way to just kind of test the market, right, through a CD, delivered, send it out, and see what happens.  If it doesn’t work, move on. John Mclntyre:Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Nice.  Cool.  We’re running on time.  We’re running on 30 minutes.  So, we didn’t want to run out of stuff to talk about. Russell Brunson:Very cool.  I was hoping I won’t bore you, guys.  So, I’m bringing out some good stuff. John Mclntyre:I’m just being cool, man.  This is being fun.  Before we go, if someone wants to learn more about you, you know, sign up to one of the frontends or maybe you and check out the inner circle, where is the best place for them to do that?  Russell Brunson:Yeah.  I would say the best thing is our … I mean our main website is DotComSecrets.com and that’s got our blog and our links to all products and stuff like that and our inner circle.  The other thing is that we just rolled out a new software program directly checking out.  It builds sales funnels called ClickFunnels.com depending where you’re listing this.  We did the beta launch last month, and then we closed back down in about two weeks for reopening it.  But it’s where I literally think will change the market.  I took … Yesterday, I built a 12 sales funnel that typically would take immediate programmer and a designer probably 3 to 4 weeks to design and get done.  I built the entire thing in two hours as well as the membership site.  It will change our entire industry for everyone.  It has for me already I can fire my entire team.  It’s pretty awesome.  So, that’s at QuickFunnels.com, you can check it out and get a free trial and you go play there. John Mclntyre:Cool.  I saw that a couple of hours in a couple of weeks.  You go upon that from how do I think and it looks like I’ve been trying it out… Russell Brunson:Oh, you allow it, and it’ll change everything for you. John Mclntyre:And you’re still selling the 108 Proven Split Test, right? Russell Brunson:Yup.  If you go to DotComSecretsLabs.com, they can get … they can go pick that up for free and just cover shipping. John Mclntyre:You get that shipped that, and I can get on that list of yours.  That sounds good, man.  Well, thank you.  Thanks for coming on the show.  I really appreciate it. Russell Brunson:No worries.  I appreciate you having me and it’s been a lot of fun. The post Episode #74 – Russell Brunson on How To Generate Boat-Loads of Cash With A Multi-Million Dollar Email List (and manage it like a BOSS) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

How powerful are stories for email marketing? How powerful is gravity on Earth? They’re basically an inevitable force that everyone falls to. Like gravity, stories are an irresistible power hardwired to stick into the human brain. Take it from the world’s best copywriting coach himself… …they are the ultimate form of persuasion – And the GO-TO tool the BEST copywriter’s snag first from their toolbox. David Garfinkel is on the Email Marketing Podcast today to talk about this one topic – Stories. He’s a copywriting veteran that can coach you how to sell anything… …he’s pretty much a legal pickpocketer through his gripping stories. And he’ll coach YOU exactly how to be one too. Whoever David coaches becomes number 1 in their industry. You WANT to learn from him. But at the very least, …you need to hear what this 20-year copywriting vet’s got to say. Did I mention that he started his career off writing a sales letter for a small company – …THAT GENERATED 40 MILLION DOLLARS? True Story. Learn how to get your story selling chops down in today’s episode.   In this episode, you’ll discover: how you can’t just tell any old story to suck people in (learn the key human-element for sales success) the 80-year-old story you can use to nail down profits no matter what niche you’re in the deepest hidden secret to crafting a persuasive story (find it, and un-tap a never ending flow of prospects) a secret hack to get people hooked from the first sentence (its a bulletproof method for the inexperienced storyteller) what to avoid when selling products through email copy (be careful you don’t do this, or you might go bankrupt) the magical technique you can use to lure people in without even being persuasive effortless key elements to use in email copy that make it inevitably persuasive (you learned these in elementary school) how to write endless emails with ease (you won’t be able to stop writing spot-on money-making emails) Mentioned: Want David to coach you? (he even critiques the pros) David’s Amazon Best Seller, Breakthrough Copywriting Jay Conrad Levinson Charles P. Roman Meg Whitman Joe Karbo Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Auto Responder Guy. It’s time for Episode 73 of the McMethod Email Marketing podcast where you get nitty-gritty techniques, tips and strategies to make more money with e-mail marketing and sales funnels in your business, so you can have a kick ass lifestyle and do pretty much whatever the hell you want whether it’s living in beautiful sunny Thailand, it’s actually rainy season right now, if you look at the window or if you want to play with your kids and go snowboarding and live in the Arctic Circle or whatever that floats your boat. Now, today we’re talking to David Garfinkel. David Garfinkel is a hell of a copywriter. Right now, he is the world’s greatest copy writing coach. His clients tend to become leaders in their niches. Now, we’re going to talk about that including who those clients are or a couple of them in this interview. He’s also the moderator of John Carlton’s [inaudible 00:00:47]. This guy is one of the top copywriters in the world. He’s also the greatest copy writing coach and he’s also available to coach you if you’re up for it and we’ll talk about that in the show today as well. Now, a copy writing DNA story format, that’s the topic for today. He’s got a couple different story formats that we’re going to run through that you can use in your emails and your sales letters. Anytime you need to persuade so much to do something, a story is a fantastic piece you can add to the recipe to really pump up the persuasion power, pump up the selling power of what you’re trying to achieve. Okay. Now, these are very simple stories you’ll recognize them but what’s greater about David is that he breaks it down and makes it quite simple to execute on to take his story telling format or the copy writing DNA story format and take that in and come up with your own story that’s going to work with it. Okay, he’s a great teacher which is why he’s the world’s greatest copy writing coach. Now, to get the show notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast, go to the mcmethod.com/73. Now, this week’s McMaster’s inside of the week is I’ve mentioned this … I’ve mentioned this everywhere in some McMaster’s on the blog on the podcast is this handwriting sales letters that’s taking old school sales letter and old school add those long form direct response ads you might see in the newspaper taking a pen and paper and sitting down and literally, writing it out by hand. I did this for about one hour a day or I’d say, maybe it must have been six months and I got through I think it was at least 100 sales letter because I tracked it in a spreadsheet. Now, that I really credit that, that time which I haven’t been doing it lately but I credit that period which was probably a year or two ago which was really given me this sort of copy writing chops in the marketing knowledge that I have today. I’ve built a really solid foundation. Whenever someone asks me how to become … How can they become a great copy writer, the first thing I suggest they do is they go and do  that and really, you’re just studying old school pieces of copy writing because sales and persuasion doesn’t really change, psychology doesn’t change much.  You go and study that and even if you’re not writing long form sales letters for your business or working as a freelance or with clients or anything like that, you’re still going to develop an incredibly deep understanding of what you got to do to persuade someone to do something, okay? Now, we so we talk about the McMaster’s. If you want to learn more about handwriting sales letters or find a good product that’s going to help you do it, I recommend Copy Hour which is what I did. It’s by a friend of mine, Derek Johanson. If you’d to Google in sort for McMethod, two simple steps. You’ll find an article that I’ve written called “Two Simple Steps to becoming a freelance copy writer.” That’s where I break down my journey what’s worked for me and also, there’s a link to Copy Hour which you can click on and go sign up to that and get started with handwriting sales letters. That’s it from the McMaster’s insight of the week. McMaster’s is my private training committee, there is a form, there are separate products inside that form. We have monthly training webinars. We called them the McMaster’s round table and it’s just a great cool place where it’s that getting better with email marketing and sales funnels and the pay traffics and split testing, all of that stuff, basically hoping you make more money in your business, the very simple value proposition. Okay. Now, if you want to learn more about that, go to the mcmethod.com/mcmasters or just go to the mcmethod.com and on the top menu, there’s a link to the sales page. Now, that’s it on that. Let’s talk about one review this week from Enox. Enox is a subscriber actually on my list. He’s being indeed some great results for the consulting and he’s just an all-around great guy. Sorry. He’s got a review here. Five stars, not just about email. Anyone interested in making more money or running a real business would do well, they listen to John’s interviews and hopefully your competitor is enlisting. He’s the best and the brightest on and off on my marketers for his show and he manages to squeeze the valuable insights from them again and again. Well done John, keep up the great work. “This show is my current favorite.” Thank you for the review and I am honored to be your current favorite podcast to listen to and keep sending me emails. I like it. I like getting emails from you, brother. Now, if you want to leave a review, you can do so on iTunes follow the clunky interface search for the McMethod Email Method podcasting and you find a place to leave a review and that’s it for me for now. Let’s get into this interview and talk to David Garfinkel. It’s John McIntyre here, the Auto Responder guy. I’m here with David Garfinkel. Now David is one of the world’s greatest story, he is the world’s greatest copy writing coach and many of his clients have become leaders in different niches. One example I like is Chris [inaudible 00:11:38], he’s the guy who did “Text your ex back” which was a huge dating product or is a huge dating product on Clickbank. The whole idea is you use a few text messages and you get your ex-girlfriend back. He is also, David is also the moderator of John Carlton’s master mine now, so he is helping out with John Carlton and making sure that that is a huge win for everyone involved.  David how are you going? David Garfinkel:Great. Thanks for the intro and nice to be here. Yeah I’ve been coaching people and copy writing and coming out with on-line courses for almost fifteen years now and it’s an interesting job because the more things change the more they stay the same. The hot thing right now is video sale letters VSL as opposed to the written sales letter but the same basics apply. There are subtle difference so forth but storytelling, making an experience real through the written word it’s all the same. It’s been that way for as long as you have written word. It’s a lot of fun to me. I started out as a business journalist and yeah did well, did really well, became the San Francisco bureau chief for [inaudible 00:06:09] World News but it wasn’t me so I finally went to copy writing about twenty years ago, over twenty years ago. I just love this field, I love the people in it and the work that we do. John McIntyre:Okay so you … what did you do over the last twenty years? Just give me a quick run-down on what sort of happened in the last twenty. You started writing and copying and you did direct mail stuff. David Garfinkel:Yeah I did direct mail; I had a stunning home run earlier on. I wrote a letter for a small company that turned into forty million in dollars’ worth for them. It’s almost embarrassing when you have that big, I have had some other multi-million dollar promotions but I’ve never done anything like that since. I met Jay Conrad Levinson, the Guerrilla marketing guy a few years and he asked me to write the book called “The rule of direct mail,” with him. I’m just sort of a natural teacher. I love to do it. That book never got written but we did two others together and we did an audio book, I don’t even know if it’s in print anymore on “Guerrilla Copy Writing” so yeah I basically worked my way up the ranks like everybody else does when you first get started. You know work too hard for too little money.  Finally when I really got it people just kept asking me to teach them and that’s how I got here so it’s been … Maybe in the [inaudible 00:07:20] I’m coaching, teaching and creating products and half my time actually writing copy for my own business and [inaudible 00:07:27]. John McIntyre:Okay so as well as the copy writing coaching, you’re also … you got seven of your own products that you’re writing copy for? David Garfinkel:Yeah, I am. You know the copy writing indication works and then I’ve got something that I’m going to be working on in the financial services industry. I really can’t talk about too much yet as its premature. I’m an entrepreneur at heart which I guess every copy writer is or should be because think about it, in one sales letter industry you can save 40 million dollars for business, that’s pretty entrepreneurial. I’m not saying you can or I never did again but that’s not just being an artist putting beautiful words together, it doing business. John McIntyre:Yeah absolutely okay. Well let’s get into some of the contents. You mentioned a couple of different topics. The one I thought was the most interesting is this copywriting, you call it “The copywriting DNA story informer” and one thing I talk about a lot in this podcast with the other guests is just the power of stories.  It blew me away before I sort of got the hang of storytelling and how persuasive it was. I didn’t really get it but after the fact when you start, when you get good at it you see how with a good story you can make … I’ve done it with friends at bars or parties and things like that With a good story you can make anyone almost believe anything. I love talking about stories and that, that’s why I thought we would go down this line.   Tell me about this copy writing DNA story format. David Garfinkel:Sure. I have seven of them out. I’ll share three of them with you now. We don’t have time for all seven but one thing I like to say is people can argue with an opinion. These days they argue with your facts but the truth is nobody argues with a story. We’re sort of wired to listen to them where some days which I buy into, that stories where the original way the human race survived before we had writing, we would convey wisdom about that saber tooth tiger in the woods and how you need to keep yourself safe when you’re out there. Stories about, stories are kind of metaphor. Stories I think are wisdom that has been passed down and somehow neurologically we’re wired to be entertained by stories. I know I certainly … I love good stories, I love to watch good shows on TV, good movies and good story [inaudible 00:09:25]. What I did when I got serious about teaching people copy is to start to go through lots of ads, sales letters and other promotions to find out what where the common elements and found several themes that I call copy writing DNA so [inaudible 00:09:41]. John McIntyre:Yeah let’s get stuck into it, let’s do it. David Garfinkel:All right, well the first one is what I call “From humiliating defeat to triumphing victory,” and this is one of the most universal stories. You can see it in a movie, you can see it in stories in the bible, you can see it in great legends, you can see it the theme of a fairytale. That’s not coincidence because these are things the stories would inspire people and when you use this in your copy you are almost programmed in a way you could say to listen for a story, to start routing for this underdog hero. I’m sure you’ve experienced that as will be when a guys down on his luck and he’s trying so hard and he deserves to succeed and just gets beaten back at every turn.  Let me tell you a story that is actually one of the best copy stories in all of history. It starts off almost a hundred years ago in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. Its Summer time, the sun is hot and you’re at the beach and you can feel the sand beneath your feet, the breeze is cool but your feet are hot, you can smell the hot dogs in the air and smell all the food, waves are rolling and you get the picture … it’s the beach in the Summer. Off in the distance you see this young man lying on the beach on a beach towel and there’s a nice girl next to him. There’s this skinny guy and he’s with his girlfriend and suddenly this big hulk of a bully comes up and kicks sand in his face and he shudders  and his girlfriend says to him, “What are you going to do about it?” and he says, “Nothing” and shrugs his shoulders and looks at this bully. The bully laughs at him and insults him and walks off. Well the girlfriend leaves …  She doesn’t want to be around a guy who’s not going to protect her right?  You flash forward a year, it’s the same beach and the same people except now this guy is pretty bulked up. The bully comes up and says, “There’s that little squirt again,” and he kicks him. The same guy gets up and he beats the living crap out of the bully. His girlfriend is [inaudible 00:11:38] is very excited. Imagine what happens next with them … and I’m going to stop the story here but let me ask you something … You recognize that story? John McIntyre:Oh yeah. David Garfinkel:Can you place it? Do you know what it is? John McIntyre:I can place it. This is … that’s from a sales letter. David Garfinkel:No it’s actually a comic strip. It’s probably also found its way into a sales letter. A copy writer named Charles Roman wrote it and Hatton a New York copy writer. He wrote it about an Italian immigrant who was from [inaudible 00:12:05] in [inaudible 00:12:05] and the immigrants name was Angelo [inaudible 00:12:07] but he changed his name to Charles [inaudible 00:12:11] when he came to the US.  The name of the comic strip was “The insult that made a man out of Mac from humiliation to victory,” and it’s for a muscle building course of a Charles that was [inaudible 00:12:23] course, it’s that. I haven’t checked like this year but as in a couple of years ago it had been running solid in certain magazines as a comic strip for seventy to eighty years solid.  You can see the elements of this story there. Here’s this guy, his humiliated and then he was hurt after he was humiliated by his girlfriend just walking away, the guy laughing at him. He decides to do something about it and he goes from that humiliation initially to triumphing victory when he beats the guy up a year later when he tries to bully him again. You can apply that story to just about anything, doesn’t have to be about muscle building or bullies but it can be about being defeated and getting up, dusting yourself off, making the changes in your life, whatever you need to make It’s a fascinating story.  It’s interesting to me as I tell it and I’ve been talking about this on and off for at least ten years myself. Yeah there’s something about that. That’s one of the happy writing DNA things from “Humiliating defeat to triumph and victory.”  John McIntyre:Okay, one thing that I think is worth pointing out is sometimes and I’ve done this before I was copy writing I think that if I just tell a story someone’s going to believe me and that might be true. A story is going to be more persuasive than just telling them the facts which I guess might have been, “Buy this muscle building, gain weight.” What’s really important or probably the most important part is that the story is something that resonates with the prospect of the person. In this case with this the skinny guy on the beach. The whole idea is the reason is not because it’s a story, it’s that resonates with skinny guys everywhere because they have had to put with bullies in school and in college and maybe on the beach. David Garfinkel:Oh yeah very good point. A story is much more believable when you can identify with the hero and that is what one of the great secrets about making a story work. That’s why I always advise writers to start with a true story and report it as facts. You don’t have to end up with that same story but if you don’t have a lot of experience constructing stories you may not be able to pull something out of a whole box.  On the other hand if you start with a true story, you have the basic and the facts there, then you obviously want to trim it down, start as late as possible and just have the interesting exciting details. You can change facts if you don’t want to … Obviously you’ve got to be careful with copywriting especially if the story’s a claim about a product and how it works and that’s a long conversation. Essentially if you are promising a certain kind of performance about a product you’ve got to be able to back it up. There are other kinds of … That story … obviously nobody’s going to think well if I do the dynamic tension system I’m going to be able to beat bullies up. That’s different. It’s not like the guy said, “Well you know I’ve gained three inches of muscle and like biceps and cholesterol leveret.” That’s different when you start to make real specific claims. I’m sorry for going off on a tangent but I wanted to make that point. John McIntyre:No it’s a great point. I think the interesting part though is I think with a good story that really … you don’t necessary for it to be persuasive. You can like a vague plan about beating up bullies and no one’s really going to go out and beat up bullies if they get big and ripped. That’s not the point. That resonates it’s still very, very powerful  David Garfinkel:That’s one thing stories do, when you have very specific believable events in them, people will generalize, they will take that one story and they will say … Okay well I don’t really have to worry about beating up bullies but I want to look good at the beach or I want to look good at the club or I want to have more energy or I want my girlfriend to stop bugging me about letting my muscle tone go … or whatever. People will fill in blanks but if you have a very general story with nothing specific it’s not very believable. If you started talking about this in terms of … Well some people aren’t in as good shape as they could be and if you are like that and you can do it … First of all its boring, it’s idiotic. Hopefully no one will do that but you see the difference between them … I took you to a time, a place, I put you on this beach where you can feel the sand, smell the hotdogs, it seemed very real because of those real details. John McIntyre:One thing just to bring it back to email. We talk about marketing on this podcast … the reason I love email marketing is because you can take … my way doing email and several other people that I know … is that you take a simple story like that, make it two hundred or three hundred words and then you have a pitch at the end. One side benefit of doing an email that way is that you get so … you end up writing a lot of email. What that does is that it means is that you end up writing a lot of stories so you continually hone this story telling ability when you realize that you can take anything and turn it into an interesting story. It’s quite fascinating.  David Garfinkel:Yeah, you’re right and I love emails.  Don’t know if you read Ben [inaudible 00:17:25]? I love his stuff all the time. He’s able to tell a good story in two, three hundred words. I’m sure you are too. Once you get the practice you’ll learn there are certain elements. You need a set-up, a challenge and the transformation and the result. Right, set-up, challenge and so … you can do that in two or three hundred words. If you’re sort of wordy then you may need a little practice but that’s entirely possible to do it. It’s not really hard once you get the hang of it. John McIntyre:Let’s talk about … you said you had three stories, well story telling formats. What’s story telling format number two? David Garfinkel:Okay, this one’s called, “Turn traction to cash.” John McIntyre:Okay. David Garfinkel:Turn traction to cash … so obviously there’s a real story there. It’s a major on-line business eBay. The CEO of eBay later ran for the Governor of California. Now I think she’s in charge of another [inaudible 00:18:17] company Hewlett Packard. I’ve seen this a lot as a kid, I used to see these ads for coins, I used to be a coin collector and they’d say “If you have a nineteen forty five D nickel it’s worth a blah, blah ….”  People go through their coins.  They used to run these ads in Popular Science about worm farms and they would tell a story about how you could take earth worms and breed them and then sell them. Well, the first two parts were true. It wasn’t quite so easy in this I didn’t know anyone to buy your worms but … It was a good story; it got me to send away for it. Actually one of my subscribers in the “World copy writing this letter” told me she’d been into that to. In fact Jimmy, president Jimmy Carter’s brother was selling this little eBook or little … it wasn’t an eBook at the time. It was like fifty years ago but … this little manual on how to sell earth worms. I mean this is almost the fable of the … not the fable so much as the ark type of the oculist that turns lead into gold. It is a very up-healing human story. You can probably think of examples yourself where people- John McIntyre:This is a … Is this mainly for if you’re selling like a sort of a business or can you use this anywhere? David Garfinkel:I think you can use it anywhere. I’m meaning you might be selling a book to women who’re trying to save money and they have clothes that are out of fashion and here are a few patterns that you can use to make your clothes look like new. You can see how much I know about woman’s clothes and fashion. That’s probably totally impossible.  This is really the story about adding value. It’s what we do as entrepreneurs so you can apply it to just about anything. Of course people who do this if you’re trying to sell a story about a guy who came in and turned around a company that was dead or bankrupt.  That’s sort of the same thing to right, turning trash into cash. It fits in a lot of different concepts. These are not narrow purpose stories; these are kinds of stories that are sort of universal that I found were showing up over and over again in copywriting. John McIntyre:That the whole idea of “The copy writing DNA.” You can take a story like this and use it anywhere. What do you think about … I think it was Kurt [Vanaguard 00:20:37], his got the … a lot of people talked about it, Kurt [Vanaguard 00:20:39] … I’ve no idea if I’m saying his name right. [crosstalk 00:20:41] selling [inaudible 00:20:43]. Yeah Kurt [Vanaguard 00:20:44]. I remember reading he was on a [inaudible 00:20:48] for seven different types of stores. This is similar to what we’re going through here. It that towards your stories or is that a different thing? David Garfinkel:I’m not familiar with him. I really enjoyed his novels but I’ve never seen that but … they may be different. You’ll have to tell me what they are as I don’t honestly know. There are people that say there are only four plots or twenty plots or … Stories … okay this might be a better answer for you. Stories are about change, stories are about somebody who wants something or needs something or is afraid of something.  They cannot go in their life they way they are and so something happens to them or they make a decision or they go on a journey to make some kind of transformation, some change and they end up better or if it’s a really tragic story and we probably wouldn’t use this, except maybe if we’re were talking about a competitor’s product, we probably wouldn’t use this in copy writing. It’s a tragedy that may turn out worse or they may die. They’re John McIntyre:You could do that.  David Garfinkel:[inaudible 00:21:47]. John McIntyre:You could use a tragedy story for showing what would happen if someone didn’t use the product. David Garfinkel:There you go, that’ll probably be much safer than inviting a law suit from one of your competitors. John McIntyre:You could insinuate that. David Garfinkel:That’s true, that’s true, exactly. Yeah. I’ve got a third one though if you want. John McIntyre:That’s good. David Garfinkel:I don’t know if this will be in Kurt [Vanaguard’s 00:22:13] list but it works great in marketing or advertising.  The name of this DNA structure is “You work hard and you deserve a reward”. We even … I guess it’s been in Australia and Thailand, in America for a while. Mc Donald had a TV commercial that (singing), same thing. Why do you deserve a break, because you worked hard and you deserve a reward … Anything? John McIntyre:No. David Garfinkel:No. don’t mess up you lunch or you’re at Mc Donald’s. Again this is sort of in the past in the eighties, which is what about thirty years ago. There was a guy named Joe Kirble, he was one of those great copy writers, a great teacher of copy writing Kirble with a K-I-R-B-L-E of “The lazy man’s way to riches’. To my mind that title has the implication of what went into it that you worked hard and deserve a reward, meaning you worked hard all of your life but you’ve only made a living not a fortune. Now you deserve an easier way to make all the money that you deserve.  He sold billions. Oh my god I don’t know how many books he sold. He used to run full page ads in the Los Angeles Times and they could make two or three times his ad’s cost back. Amazing [inaudible 00:23:36]. John McIntyre:Just with that book. David Garfinkel:He’d do a lot of other things too. He did real estate courses, he did galling systems, god knows what else he did. I don’t know his whole [inaudible 00:23:47]. I never met the guy. I know people who’ve met him but I never met him myself. John McIntyre:I remember, I think his sales letter was one of the first ones I wrote out by hand when I was doing the whole hand writing exercise.  David Garfinkel:It’s excellent isn’t it? He would tell a story after story up there. He talks about- John McIntyre:Its one big story. David Garfinkel:Begging the bank for a loan and himself. Now he’s giving them loans of a hundred thousand dollars a crack with CD’s or [inaudible 00:24:15]. He is a great story teller for sure. John McIntyre:Yeah absolutely. All right that’s from “Humiliating defeat, triumph to victory” and “Turn trash into cash” and “As you’ve worked hard, you deserve a reward”.  Just with this last one, you could be selling anything, like especially with a product where someone’s [inaudible 00:24:32] enjoy it and then not have to work even harder. Mc Donald’s use it with their food. You could use it with [inaudible 00:24:38], make someone relax and have fun. It’s like you worked hard, now you deserve a reward … and the reward is our product. David Garfinkel:Exactly. It would work very well. John McIntyre:So what about … one think I thought would be interesting to ask before we wrap it up was … I know you have a number of coaching clients and you probably see it in your good things and bad things when working with people one on one like that. I’m just curious how many mistakes do you see people make when it comes to storytelling? David Garfinkel:That’s a good question. People make a lot of mistakes. The biggest is when the story is boring and no matter how [inaudible 00:25:12] good the story is, it’s no good if it doesn’t pull peoples interest. A lot of times people don’t include dialogue. In stories there should be people talking to each other. There should be people interacting. Stories are about people, not about products and technology. Stories lacking human drama are often boring. I think the other problem is often stories are too long. People in the beginning tend to put to many details in it which is good but when you put to many details in it, you’re not done yet. In fact I love this [inaudible 00:25:46] from Joe Carbo; he talked about the art principle. You remember that? Build the best radio you can and then you take out as many parts and see if its still working and when you get down to the minimum amount of parts that’s what you sell. John McIntyre:That’s a great way to put it.  David Garfinkel:Same thing with the story. I wasn’t here with anything. Write it out as long as it needs to be and then you see whatever you can siphon. How to substitute a shorter sentence, how can I substitute a one syllable word for a two syllable word? How can I make this flow better?  I guess one problem is thinking that because you’re a smart person and you’re successful you can get everything done in one take, you can get everything done in one time, not going back and editing and really looking at it at what we call “The cold light of day”. Actually taking some time to refine it, to take it to the next level, really give it that craftsmanship it needs. John McIntyre:Okay, so really just take a bit more time to sort of… Obviously it’s got to be interesting, make sure it’s about people and then … That reminds me that’s such a classic just writing tip of writing which is basically to remove, if you can say something with less words then say it with less words. David Garfinkel:Yeah absolutely. John McIntyre:Well let’s wrap it up right here. Before we go there, we talked about you mentioned your coaching program and you also have a book on Amazon. Let’s talk about that. David Garfinkel:Sure. My coaching program is for somebody who … I think my best clients these days are people who have their own businesses, they understand the power of copywriting and direct response stories, a video, scripts, emails and they’d like to get better at it. I have one client right now who is a seven million dollar software company. He’s been writing copy for twenty years and he’s good at it. He’s built a company off of its copying but he’s finding a fresh set of eyes, someone who’s worked with a lot of business owners like me can help him take things to the next level. I also work with copywriters who really want to be the best, Chris [Sidod 00:27:57] aka Michael [inaudible 00:27:59] is a great example. Chris is just unstoppable. He is a very driven guy, very successful, as you said a top selling [inaudible 00:28:09] products. Those are the two types of … and I have a number of other people become really successful, freelance copywriters.  In Chris’s case he was a freelance copywriter. Now he’s become a business owner.  I guess that bridges both categories. That’s why this year long program, it’ll be the hardest course you’ve ever taken in your life because I push people. Learning to write copy was harder than anything I’ve ever done to. Gosh it’s worth it.  I’ll give you URL, it is garfinkelcoaching.comand there is some information if someone’s interested in that. Also I do sells letter [inaudible 00:28:56] and work for many top people. Some of them would not like me to use their names but trust me I have. There’s information about the [inaudible 00:29:06] on page two. The other thing I have an Amazon best seller out called “Break Through Copywriting”. It’s available only as a Kindle right now. My publisher asked me if we can release it as a hard cover or no maybe a soft cover. It’s a print book and that’s not going to be available for several months but you can get it on Amazon right now so you can break though copy writing or David Garfinkel will break you operating. As Amazon says you can be reading it in less than a minute. How’s that?  John McIntyre:Cool well all the links to those to the coaching and the Amazon book “Break Through Copywriting” on the website at the mcmethod.com so we can get the show notes there and get the links. Yeah well thank you David. I really appreciate you on to talk about the story time. David Garfinkel:You welcome, my pleasure, nice to talk with you John. The post Episode #73 -David Garfinkel on 3 Copywriting DNA Story Formats That Persuade Anyone To Believe Anything You Say (and buy anything you sell) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Striking out with women lately? What about your online sales? The Email Marketing Podcast has a 2-for-1 treat today – Just for YOU. You’ll walk away from this show with the knowledge to fatten your wallet… …and the confidence to feel that red carpet under your feet wherever you go. The man behind Tao of Badass’ explosive success, Copywriting rockstar Jim Clair, …is a HUSTLER of an UPSELLER (due to a strong background in car sales). Add pro-copywriting skills to the list, And it’s easy to see how he made Tao of Badass the #1 product on Clickbank. Jim’s mastered the art of the upsell… …first in person, And now online. He’s a powerhouse copywriter. He learned from the greats. And he’s here to teach you how to upsell your way to riches. If you don’t create your own upsell after this episode, …your head was in the clouds – you weren’t listening. Because when you listen-in on today’s show, You’ll be drooling and dreaming of upsell ideas… …and the infinite possibilities they provide.   In this episode, you’ll discover: why a flow is so important to connect with your readers (use this flow to guide them into the upsell vs slamming it in their faces) what the fast-food chain, McDonalds, can teach you about business success (young, pimply high-schoolers have even mastered this money-pulling technique) how to create the ultimate sales letter or VSL in a way that allows for future sales (stack your on-point sales letter with additional products smoothly using this mindset) how to pre-warm your readers during the initial sale to allow for unlimited upsells (and unlimited profits) the Jim Clair technique to finding additional problems to solve in your market (use this method to easily think-up future enticing upsells) a simple practice Jim does daily to keep up his headsnapping copywriting chops (this is so effective and fast, you cant afford not to do it) how even ghetto upsells can create over 2/3’s of your revenue per funnel (business revenue… is in the upsale!) how to create and offer a downsell out of any of your products (gain that new customer no matter what using this very easy product creation tip) Mentioned: The Tao of Badass John Carlton Ryan Holiday’s Growth Hacker Marketing Jon Benson Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for Episode 72, seventy two of the McMethod email marketing podcast, where you get nitty-gritty techniques, tips and strategies to make more money with email marketing and sales funnels in your business. Today I’ll be talking to Jim Clair about how to write copy. Very simple.  Now Jim, the reason he is an interesting, very interesting guy is he wrote the copy for Tao of Badass, where he was like main copyrighter, the head copyrighter for the Tao of Badass, I’ve been saying like the Dow, which used to be the biggest product on ClickBank in terms of sales. They were doing a huge volume of sales and they are heading, they are still very big, and Jim was their copywriter.  He has had some experience with very big products, and I thought I’d grab him on, I’ll grab him and bring him on to the show and pick his brain on how to be a good copywriter, and I think upsells. All right, that’s what we are going to talk about today, how they are using upsells with the Tao of Badass to how they’ve used them to really crank up the revenue per customer. This is going to be an interesting episode, I mentioned upsells last week as the, maybe two weeks ago was from the McMasters Inside of the Week, and we are going to talk more about that today.  If you listen to today’s episode and you don’t go and create an upsell for your business, then something is off, you got to get started. If you don’t have upsells you need to go and get some. Now to get the show notes, for this episode of the email marketing podcast, go to themcmethod.com/72. Now I’ve got the McMasters Inside of the Week now.  What I’ve got written down here in front of me, my little text that says, testing, testing, testing. Now the reason I say this is I’m learning a lot right now because I’ve got a campaign running with some Facebook traffic. What’s blown me away is how much testing is involved in just making something, to make money. You need to test stuff, you need to test if autoplay on the video sales letter works, you need to test your prices, you need to test which headlines work, right.  It’s all well and good for me to sit down here and say, you should do this and you should do that, and you are going to listen to all those Internet marketing viewers out there who tell you what you should do with your business, but at the end of the day you need to adopt what you might call the testing mindset, which is a thing where you take your emotions out of your business, take your emotions out of your sales funnel, stop, I guess riding the emotional rollercoaster, which is easier said than done, but you got to do it and adopt that idea, that feeling that you are a scientist.  You are an Albert Einstein and when you approach your business, when you approach your sales funnel and how to get more customers and all that, you’re looking at a formula, you have a hypothesis, maybe this will get me customers, you go and test it. If it doesn’t work, this is the thing, a lot of the time it won’t work, right, and then, you haven’t failed, you haven’t messed up. What you have to do now is think, okay, so we tried that, it didn’t work, what else could we try? The same way Albert Einstein might mess around in his apartment or in house, wherever he’d tinker around with his experiments to figure out what works.  Now a great book to put you into the right headspace for this is Scientific Advertising, it’s a great read, it’s must-read really for anyone doing marketing or copywriting because it just, you have to understand that there is not an ultimate formula, no one can give you a product that’s gives you a magic bullet or just the whole system that’s just going to work when you plug it into your business. It doesn’t work like that, you are going to have to test.  Now I’ve been talking about this in McMasters on some of the training webinars, the forum that testing is extremely important that you have to have this scientific mindset. Now McMasters is a private training community, where you can learn more about email marketing, the McIntyre method which is a four-week training program on how to write auto-responders. There is a forum where you get access to me, there is a monthly webinars, we go through training, I’m doing my business, how things are changing and how you can grow your business too. That’s McMasters, more about that at themcmethod.com/mcmasters.  Now we’ve got review here, this one is from Jesse Moscoe, this is a long review. I like long reviews. “Five stars, terrific podcast, super information. John has been sending me emails every day for a long time.” I send emails every single day. “He is a razor-sharp marketer, practices what he preaches and does a terrific job interviewing. I’m always disgusted when I hear a podcast, I was [inaudible00:03:58] on and on about themselves stuttering and repeating what their guests has just said with no question in sight. John will do none of this, he is a smart guy, obviously he lives in beautiful Thailand, and you’ll do well to get into his sphere of influence. I’m a relatively new copywriter but have gained immensely since I started following The Autoresponder Guy. Great job, John.”  Jesse, thank you for the review, I love reviews and I especially appreciate the time you took to write a lengthy review. I appreciate it. Now if you want to leave a review for this show, you can go to iTunes, it’s a little bit clunky, that interface, search for McMethod or the email marketing podcast, hit me out with a review and I will read it out on the show, and you’ll get famous. Now that’s it from me for now, we are going to get into this interview to talk about Jim Clair about upsells and how you can make more, way more money from your sales funnel.  It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy, I’m here with Jim Clair. Now I found Jim on Facebook, I was clicking around through random Facebook groups of copywriters and marketers, and Jim pops up and I notice that he was one of the copywriters, the copywriter for Tao of Badass, which is what used to be the biggest product on ClickBank.  It’s one of the biggest dating products that teaches man obviously how to pick up girls, and it has done some really, they are like a kill of VSL, which Jim might mention in a minute that they did. They just done a ton of interesting stuff and I thought, I keep hearing, friends keep mentioning that Tao of Badass is just having a [inaudible00:05:21] funnel and [inaudible00:05:21] copy, so I thought why don’t get Jim on the podcast to talk about what they are up to and what they’ve learnt especially in relation to upsells. We’ll talk about that in a minute. Jim, how are you doing?  Jim:Good. Thanks for having me on here, John, I’m glad to be here.  John:Good to have you on the show, man. One thing I just want to mention because I hit record was that you and me, it’s like, like I said the copyright, I don’t know how many years into it, I’ve been doing this for two years maybe, two and a half years. It’s fun to talk to someone who has been on a similar journey, who is, it’s just like you get some of the income like, both writing copy, both writing it up by hand, both reading the books, and it’s just different. I usually speak to people who are just way, way, way, they are just gurus like John Carlton or Perry Marshall, who [inaudible00:06:03] Zofia.  Jim:No, it’s been quite a journey, for sure. I started out with Tao, I had a long background in car sales, and its pretty much in upsell, so that my favorite thing to doing the car [inaudible00:06:19] was, it’s called the F&I or Finance and insurance, that’s really where you are upselling them. Someone just bought what they think to be a $30,000 car and then here we have to stare them in the face and somehow just squeeze a ton of more money out of them, especially with new cars, since regardless of what people think most new cars don’t have a lot of markup, it’s on the F&I guy to upsell them.  John:Interesting. We’ll get into the upsells in a second, but I gave people a quick little intro, you want to give people a bit more about who is Jim Clair and I guess, a quick look, what have you done and what are you doing right now?  Jim:My, probably the most famous thing is, I’m the copyrighter for the Tao of Badass, which I’ve been doing now for, I want to say close to three years. I came on there right during the meteoric rise, which came from the Goldfish VSL, which is a pretty famous VSL.  John:What is this VSL? I think a lot of people liking to know what that is.  Jim:Basically the Goldfish VSL is, it has a hook of, hi, my name is … its Josh [inaudible00:07:31] reading. Hi, my name is Josh and this a fish, and this fish is going to show you how, or I’m going to show how this fish can get you laid is the main hook. Actually it’s John Benson, it’s his formula, Josh basically mentored under Benson, and then Benson helped him write that VSL, and then it hit and then it just, Tao went from three guys struggling in a coffee shop to all of a sudden this huge meteoric rise and we’ve been rocking ever since and it’s like being in a rock band.  Now Tao has become my client, I do write in the golf niche, I’m just starting there and it looks like they might have something coming up in the self-defense niche a little bit down the line here. Then my website, although it’s not up and running yet, I have it, there should be a blog post soon as kickasscopy.com.  John:Nice, man. You’ve been doing, I noticed, the interesting thing, you mentioned, I think it was on your Facebook page about writing out sales articles, sales letters by hand.  Jim:Yes.  John:I did that for so long, I did that for a couple of months, at least in the Philippines and it was tracking with the spreadsheet to count how many I’d done. That was how I got started too, so I thought it was so cool that you’ve done as well.  Jim:I still try and do it almost close to every day as I can. I get up at around 6:00 in the morning every day to go to the gym, but as soon as they get up, once I take a piss and then feed the cat and then usually, for hopefully about 15 minutes to half hour depending on how sluggish I am feeling I’ll hand copy sales letter, I’ll keep working on the sales letter.  John:Let’s talk about it, let’s get into the upsell thing, and the reason I wanted to bring this, the whole upsell thing up, upsell is because I mentioned to you, I’d running a paid traffic funnel or a funnel on Facebook right now, and I wasn’t originally going to … when I originally set it up, it didn’t have any upsells. Then I spoke to a guy here in Chiang Mai, Thailand, who has been doing this for 10, 15 years, and he just says, “Dude, you got to have some upsells.”  I say, all right, you’ve been doing this for long, I’ll go and setup some upsells, I came up with some upsells, made a few videos, basic thing, super-basic, my setup was like, I was not using one click upsells, which is, I was sending people to PayPal for the first product, they were coming back, and then they had to go. Even if they took the upsell number one, they had to go back to PayPal and keep doing that, to keep on doing the upsell, so super [ghetto00:10:03] and then forcing people to sign-up [inaudible00:10:05] even before every single time they brought another product.  I made them jump through so many hoops and created so much friction, but when all was said and done, the upsells made up more than two-thirds of the revenue in that sales funnel. Without the upsells the whole thing would have been a complete failure. That was like, I was [inaudible00:10:21] it was like, holy shit, like these upsells, this is where its at, like the money in the business is the upsells. Jim:Oh, for sure. I think that was part of the reason why Tao was looking for copywriter because they weren’t monetizing the Goldfish. Josh put these upsells together in a hurry but they didn’t, in all honesty they are crap, it didn’t really perform. That was task, it was my first duty that came about. Josh asked about the car businesses so I’ve used the Hammer people. It’s where the money is and a lot of things and then McDonald’s does it, has been doing it to us for years. Would you like fries with that?  John:An upsell, just in case our listener doesn’t know, an upsell is when you go to buy something, it could be anything, like a McDonald’s burger or whatever, and then immediately after you buy that, you are asked if you want to buy another thing. At McDonald’s its like, you buy, they are like, do you want fries with that, do you want a drink with that? With a product like, I don’t know what the upsell is for, Tao of Badass, but if you buy the main product, then afterwards they’d sell you like an eBook on the 10 best pickup lines for another 50 bucks.  Jim:The thing that I find with upsells, that’s where I started cutting my teeth, started trying to beat my own, a lot of that depends on the angle you take on it, to really make them successful.  John:What do you mean by the angle?  Jim:The problem is, not the problem is, a lot of people when they, they spend so much time in the VSL or they are, the long-form sales letter in that main funnel, in their main offer, their main product, that if they write something really good, it makes them sound like the Grand Poobah, they and to all be, all this is the shit, like you are going to do whatever. There is no.  John:This is the last thing you need, to be able to end up.  Jim:Exactly. Then all of a sudden you get to a page and it says, wait, you need this. [inaudible00:12:14] can be done in the right way. The angle, I think there is probably a couple of angles, but the angle I really like is and it depends, there is really two angles, the first angle I really like is basically presenting like, now they have all the stuff, what problems are they going to have now?  On the dating niche, we basically said, you guys are going, and this comes from market researches, basically these guys they are so scared really, like they get this product, now they can talk to girls. In reality they’re just hoping for numbers. These guys who get the product, in their mind they don’t think they are going to have girl problems. Now it’s like, okay, they get the Tao of Badass, they get this product, they are going to have all these great new things happen to them. But now it’s like, wait, you guys haven’t dealt with this before, so I took it as the angle, it’s like what new problems are they going to have.  John:Yep.  Jim:Obviously its done in a copy thing, but this is like if you’re, if you’re a content creator, it’s going to be put on the coaches, like if they lose a ton of weight, the problem might be, what’s the new problem going to be, and you have to handle it, and this upsell is going to handle that. The dating it’s like, okay, you are going to deal with crazy girls, you’re going to get over the mindset of, you’ve to chase every woman, you just realize some of these women are batshit crazy. How do you deal with crazy girls? How do you deal with multiple girls?  We use a story of a guy, he had two girls pounding on his door at the same time and he is like freaking out, because it’s never ever had happened before. It’s something, what new problems are they going to have, and then solving those problems, and finding those problems comes from market research and from your emails of. It usually comes from pretty good testimonials of guys like, hey, I did this, but if it’s weight-loss or something, I don’t have any jeans that fit like, how do I style myself, something like that, I’m not saying write a styling thing, but something you’re introducing new problems, more money more problems and how to handle those new problems.  John:One way that I was thinking about it when I had to do the funnel in Facebook was that, like everything needs to flow. The cool thing, the interesting part it covers, it needs to flow from one thing to the next very naturally. When I … I coach people from time to time, and when I see that copy, usually the biggest problem is it just doesn’t flow, they jump from one idea to next too quickly or it’s a bit disjointed or there was no connection. It is like selling a dating, sell the main dating product and then selling a book on maybe how to cook, it doesn’t really flow. You can see a connection there, but it’s not that close of a connection whereas [crosstalk00:14:53] you know what I mean.  Jim:Exactly. I think it’s a congruence, I think a part of a good lead into an upsell whether it’s a, you are doing a VSL or sales letter form is reassuring that their product is awesome. I noticed what you said, I think it’s disjointed when they get this, they get this product, whatever product they are getting and then it has jumped to a page, and it’s like, but wait, you need this. It’s like versus I think putting in a couple, just a few paragraphs of like this product works great, this is this, but you got a problem, you might run into this, this has been, in my experience or client’s experience. That keeps that congruence, just like you said, you don’t want to disjoint them and be like a whiz.  John:It’s like you’d … I was selling a template, template for the first email in their sequence and the upsell was basically like, thanks for signing up, Templeton is waiting your email, blah, blah, blah, it’s good because of this, just reiterating the benefits of the sale, and then saying, that one was actually, that wasn’t much of a prologue, which is like, he want through me more templates, he used three more, and that was the upsell.  But then in the next one, I’ve sent number two, that was like, all right, so these templates, they will use a storytelling format, which is great. You feel like the templates, they are going to work really, really good for you, but what about this, what if you want to write your own templates. What if you want to come up with your own ideas in your own stores, because right now these templates aren’t going to teach you anything, so you don’t actually know how to do it yourself yet. That’s why you need to learn how to tell stories, and that’s where my new product, my other product, Stories That Sell, comes in. It’s like you use that, you have that lead in that pre-frames the upsell.  Jim:Exactly, it’s staying congruent across the board. It makes them way more interesting at least in my opinion but or sales.  John:One thing I’ve noticed with email marketing is when you are trying to position the pitch at the end of the email, the whole idea of the email is all you are doing is pre-framing, all you are doing is like thinking what thought, what thoughts do I need to inject into someone’s head, so that when I introduce the idea of the product, they are going to receive it favorably.  Jim:It’s a great way of putting it, for sure, into keep in that conversation in that head.  John:Tell me about like what happens on, let’s say like I go and buy the Tao of Badass or, I keep calling it the Tow, I know it’s the Tao.  Jim:It’s Tao.  John:Let’s say I buy that product or I buy a golf [inaudible00:17:18] or I buy a product that you’ve written copy for and then you’ve created a whole bunch of upsells, I go to PayPal or I go to pay, and then I get, after PayPal what happens? You send me to a page with a video on it or text on it, both?  Jim:We tested a couple of ways and we found, when you get the Tao and after you pay for it, it lands on a VSL and it’s told from a student’s perspective. It’s a VSL or, VSL plays in underneath these bullets and the offer again. It’s the exact same thing that’s said in the VSL, we tested a couple of different ways and this way it works best for us.  Basically it’s a student that says, Hi, its Brad here, it’s basically he reassures him, I’m really glad you are here, and yes, the things do work, like I was. It’s a very, very small story, because it going out for the low-hanging fruit, and it’s a very small story, like I was a nerd and I couldn’t do well with women and I went with Josh’s thing, and it was absolutely incredible. But the issue was is that I, all of a sudden had these problems I never knew would exist. Most of our clients when they, you notice this, when they first got this, they never knew they existed.  Josh created what’s called the Advanced Coaches Prep Course, and then it goes into, it’s like here is what you’re going to find because here are some of the other common problems you are going to hit, and then here is what you are going to find inside. It gives a little bit of the fear, like we’d see what happens if you run into a gold digger because we had guys [inaudible00:18:49] our gold digger, it’s just funny because generally guys were [inaudible00:18:53] gold digger, driving like a ’97 Honda Civic at work. It’s really bizarre.  It goes into what problems they are going to run into and how this course is going to handle it, and then the guarantee and stuff. The VSL plays and then underneath it is the bullets that I mentioned, pretty good stack of bullets, and then the offer, same thing. If they watch a whole VSL and read it, they are going to see the same thing, and then the guarantee. There is a bunch of Buy buttons, I don’t want to make it sound like a, it’s all Buy buttons, but there is one right below the VSL to handle low hanging fruit, and there is one right at the end of the bullets, there is one at the end of the offer, and there is one at the very, very bottom of the page.  John:Now when you click that, let’s say I clicked that one underneath the video, does that cycle me down to where the offer is, or does that make me to the payment form?  Jim:It takes you to the payment form.  John:I have to reenter my details or are you guys are doing a one click upsell?  Jim:It’s already, I think it’s just, it’s already coded in so it just adds to the order. Then all of a sudden if they button, no thanks, I think I’ll pass in this and I understand I’ll never see this again. Very standard stuff, and then it goes to another upsell after that is to how we have, but actually we got to swap that upsell or we are going to test that upsell if that’s an entirely new product here pretty soon.  John:Interesting, you got the main product and then two upsells.  Jim:Then obviously it goes to the downsells, and the downsells basically if you click off, it just goes to like the bullet form. You say, hey, just in case, here is some of the problems you are going to run into, and here is what, just in case, here it is again. It reassures, we know that you are probably going to be able to handle a lot of issues with women, but so you may or may not need this, but you just might want to take again or in case you are worried about what are these things. Then it just goes, goes down into the bullets again, and then another Buy button, and it’s the same thing on the last upsell.  John:All right, let’s just, just to summarize all that, we’ve got the main product, you buy that, you go to PayPal, you come back, you go to a page which has a video and text on it. That’s basically for upsell number one. And if you buy that you go to upsell number two. Now if you don’t buy it and you click no, that will take you at the downsell. The downsell is like, let’s say you just offered something for $50, you downsell them to, offer them something a little bit smaller for $30 because maybe the price was the problem, so you downsell them. Is the downsell page the same as the upsell page with the video and text and all that?  Jim:No, there is no video or text, it’s just a bulletin, it’s like I said, it’s the price difference, I think we offer, it’s just payments, and its price difference, but wait, we want to make sure you don’t miss this. It’s the bullets again, just in case here again, because at that point they are just skittling, just like get rid of, I don’t know if I want this. We are just hoping that one of the bullets catches them or a few but, then its same thing in the next one.  The last one is just a sales pitch, it’s very short, because we think if, what we’ve done, the shorter ones seem to be handling the low-hanging fruit more, but at that point if they’ve agreed or not agreed, but hopefully they agree. We go on if they agreed, they are already prequalified, so we don’t need to spend a shit ton of time trying to sell them because I think, that has the reverse effect at that point.  It’s the quick thing of what it is. Its more of a handholding thing, which is actually the other angle like, like here is the VIP, we are going to hold your hand, it’s a handholding thing for us. It’s on confidence, which is ideally very tough to sell in the dating space. We sell, you are going to handhold it, like you are going to look deeper inside yourself, speaking in language of that client, the guy who is already buying a lot of stuff. That comes from just research, really like your own, lot of from daily emails, understanding how they respond back, and the good clients tend to be curious about confidence.  They read the book and they are like, man, like I never realized how I was a doormat for all my life, this is really interesting, do you have anything else I can figure on this? I just use that language on the third upsell of, here is what you are going to find, so it targets that guy who is most likely afterward he reads a couple of chapters of the book, probably when he gets at that night, he is going to do like, okay, I want to work on confidence, so we are targeting him before.  John:I liked it. If someone is listening and they wanted to implement this, basically the idea is that, you got that product, whatever that happens to be. This could even be a service product, you could be selling a ten email order, you could be selling a kitchen, a commercial kitchen for $40,000, or whatever. The point is, is after that purchase happens, you can make another offer. Now if you are doing, selling with the Tao of Badass, you’ve got, you are going to be using this with webpage, so they got your PayPal, they come back and if you are using advanced or a good checkout system, you can make it a one click upsell, which is why when they click that Buy button, when they buy the first product, it says the order is complete, but it hasn’t processed yet.  Then they go to the upsell page, and then if they click the Buy button, it will just automatically add it to their order and then 10 minutes later or half an hour later when they’ve left that page the credit card would be hit with the charge of the original product plus however many upsells you’ve got. That’s a one click upsell.  Somebody could do this to your webpage or you could be selling like a commercial kitchen and someone comes in like, ah, I’ll take this commercial kitchen. How about do you want these $10,000 taps? They are great taps, they’ve got a lifetime guarantee. How about this floor mat and how about just all these random crap, which is good, it’s got to solve some of its problems. It can’t be random crap that no one wants, it’s got to be stuff, this is [inaudible00:25:10] recently. Do you know Ryan Holiday?  Jim:I don’t know him.  John:He has got this great book, right. It’s a great book for someone like us, as a copywriter who, it’s all about direct response, it’s all about like, often the emphasis in our industry is placed on, you do have a crappy product, but if you have a really good copy or a good positioning or you are a good marketer or a good salesman, you can sell it. That’s true to a point. But even Gary Halbert mentions in one of his things that you could have the offer or the thing you are actually selling. That’s the best way to change the response, it’s not the copy, it’s not the headline, it’s not any of that, just a better offer, which is the same thing as saying that sell shit that someone actually, he wants to buy.  Here comes the upsells and even just the original product, it can’t be just a random thing, it can’t be like, do you want to buy this $10,000 taps as well? Even if they’ve already got taps, they don’t even want taps, that’s not going to work. I like how you brought up the issue of, you’ve been doing market research, you’ve got to survey them, you’ve got to know what you could do, and if you had enough traffic for it you could even, I don’t know how you do the survey, but maybe you could do like, do the product and then after the purchase you could send them to a survey instead of the upsell, at least initially to gather some data on what’s the next thing they want to buy.  Jim:Exactly. Also it comes from, if you have your product, the feedback that you get from are like, our second upsell which, the one that is going right now is absolutely crushing. A lot of it just came from, we were trying to for awhile, we were trying to crack the code of, okay, at least, the VSL was so strong, it makes it sound like they are just going to stare at a girl and get it on. How the heck are we going to do this?  I was just doing research and we are looking at the replies back, [Gerard 00:26:51] is looking at the testimonials and then on the testimonials that’s going to hit me, and also I got to give credit, I don’t know if you’ve heard it but as in a mastermind with Ben Settle and Andre Chaperon and Ryan Levesque and Jack Born. They gave me, they planted a seed in my head, I went back, and all of a sudden I found some of our top guys with these crazy problems that they never ever experience, all of a sudden they go from nerd and now they have two girls pounding on their door at night, and he already has a girl inside and these two girls outside, don’t know each other.  It’s us taking almost the ridiculous testimonials or also like, hey, I’m running into this issue, like what if girls are liars, I’m scared to approach girls, I really believe in your thing but I’m really scared to approach, what if she is going to lie or be a gold digger, it was like putting on the detective cap, which I think John Carlton calls it, it definitely, I busted my ass finding that language and then that was it, I was like okay, here is the new problems and then coming from a coach’s perspective of, okay, how are they going to handle these new issues? That was what hit for us.  John:I like that. I mentioned the book that actually, it was funny, I was about to mention that book but didn’t actually mention it. It’s called Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday, and he calls it.  Jim:Cool.  John:In the startup industry, he talks about how with IBM being with Dropbox and [Uburu00:28:19], these companies they never started out as companies they are today worth billions of dollars. They started out with like, they were servicing a tiny market, like Airbnb was an airbed and breakfast for conference attendees who didn’t want to stay in the conference hotel. That’s how it started.  But then what happens as they do that they are not really getting enough traction, they are not that happy, so they iterate, they try changing the [inaudible00:28:40] words, more just general hotels and more and more, and just broaden it. What they are looking for is a product market fit, which is a point where they are selling something that just fits the problem that the prospect has, like a freaking glove, so that when they talk about, like here is the idea, here is the offer, the prospect, the person is just like, well, I’m in, I’m in, here is my hand, here is my money.  What you are talking it is using these research and these testimonials and the stuff to just drive products because you don’t want to sell just randomize, like you can’t sell, a lot of people think it’s coming with a product and they go find a market to sell, but it’s the other way around, you find the market, find out what they want. What would they want to buy? What problem are they, what problem would they love to spend money on to solve? Because they’ve probably got … they’ve got problems, but they are not going to spend money to solve. They are just not urgent enough, but you to need find out what problems they had that they are willing to spend money on.  Jim:Exactly, and sometimes you have to create a product to that instead of trying to, just like so you can’t stuff something down their throat, just because it’s the only other product you have and sometimes you just got to psyche it up and create it. The easiest way, if you don’t have it is to do a really VIP handholding thing where they have access to you. That’s, one of the golfoffers I’m with, it’s really just starting out, it’s complete opposite of Tao.  We have a hundred, couple thousand guys in our list, and these guys have, literally just at ground zero. They don’t have a product, so the upsell that we have is a handholding thing, its access to the pro. Wow, you have access to the guy. You get swing submissions, you get access, he is going to hold your hand, he is going to formulate a plan for you, if you feel like you don’t want it necessarily, you can go it on your own with your program, but if you want a little bit more you are going to have full-on access to the actual creator, you’ll make it soundlike the shit, it’s a hungry market, like okay, I’ve got this like, I want access to this guy, how do I get them so we are going to give you a little, more of a step-by-step handholding, upsell.  John:Golf market.  Jim:Versus, because they didn’t have anything, so it’s like, buy legal pads for or something that doesn’t make any sense, like golf socks or something but.  John:But something, there is just like [inaudible00:31:00] with my sales funnel I’ve been doing with Facebook, like it’s the upsells could be, because usually you might have, I’m selling like $17 product, then going straight to a 50 and then $100. I’m jacking out the price with each upsell, what happens is all the money comes in on those upsells. It’s like even if you don’t have any products [inaudible00:31:16] just slap something together. The point is it doesn’t have to be the most beautiful thing in the world, it just has to solve something, so we are willing, someone wants to solve.  Jim:Exactly.  John:Cool, man, all right, we are right on time here. Before we go though, I know you mentioned that you are not taking VSL clients, you are all booked up, which is great, but if you people want to learn more about you, where is, or maybe even send you an email and get in touch or get on your waiting list, maybe even start a waiting list. What’s the place in the context, go to your website at kickasscopy.com, right?  Jim:Yes, kickasscopy.com, it’s not up and running yet, it should be, it should have a blog post soon, but if you want to find me right now, and I’ll probably make an announcement, its at I’m on Facebook, would probably the easiest, instead of sending to a dead link but. It’s just, Facebook.com/jim.clair.9. On there are probably key people posted when like kickasscopy is up and running, which should be hopefully, a blog post should be coming in a couple of days anyway, [Inaudible00:32:22] should be up and running.  John:This episode will go live in say six weeks, seven weeks. By the time this is out, your website should be up.  Jim:I [inaudible00:32:30] so kickasscopy.com, I think it’s backslash blog should be up and running by then.  John:Should be up and running, right.  Jim:Or you can stalk me on Facebook or something.  John:Sounds good, Jim, I really appreciate you coming on, this has been good to have you on the show.  Jim:It’s been great, John, I appreciate you having me on.  The post Episode #72 – Jim Clair on Exploding Your Current Business’ Profits Through the Power of the Upsell appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Calling ALL eCommerce business owners: When’s the last time you checked your email marketing strategy? Has recent success got you thinking it’s perfect? Think again. Whether you’ve recently strategized, Or haven’t looked at it in ages (you know who you are), Brendan Tully is here to show you 4 email marketing mistakes that – Chances are… …even YOU are making. Email marketing generates up to 30% of an eCommerce store’s revenue. Do you CAPITALIZE on that cash flow? Or are you letting good money slip through your fingers. These mistakes PROVE that you rob yourself of your OWN money. Identify them – And watch your conversion rates blast through the roof. It’s not rocket science. Any regular Joe can rack up sales with these golden insights. Brendan’s worked with over 2,000 biz owners in the last 5 years. He WANTS you to gain from his experience. So quit being “regular eCommerce Joe”… And notice that elephant in the room. Simple tweaks produce MASSIVE results. Brendan shows you WHAT they are… …and HOW to fix them. The money’s there. Tune-in to make sure your eCommerce store gets all of it.   In this episode, you’ll discover: a simple trick to remove friction from the sales process (less friction = more sales) how to break the mold on your standard abandon cart email sequence to gain a deep connection with those cart ditchers why offering discounts can actually hurt your conversion rates (and how to use them strategically) how to avoid sounding needy in your abandon cart emails (ditch the hard sale and use this style of email instead) effective insights to gain a long-term mindset that converts more sales than any discount ever offered how to use all that header space to your advantage (use this info to gain an edge over your bigger competitors) the crippling effects of a sub-par product page (ease the friction by infusing this into all your product descriptions) how to reduce customer overhead with a simple maneuver you can implement today. a bulletproof hack to write solid transactional, abandon cart, and other emails you need to convert more sales in your ecommerce business Mentioned: Pareto Ecommerce The Search Engine Shop X Wang Ezra Firestone Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for episode 71 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you get nitty – gritty techniques, tips and strategies to make more money in your business with email marketing, with sales funnels, with all those little conversion elements and marketing. Okay, now today I’ll be talking to a good friend of mine. His name is Brendan Tully. He’s one of the most knowledgeable guys I know on e-commerce, so setting up an e-commerce store and more importantly, not so much for beginners, he really knows what he’s talking about, especially when it comes to helping people who already have an e-commerce store, helping them make more money with all these sort of little conversion hacks. He’s just built a product which I think is a fantastic product with just a basically a long list of simple steps that anyone can take who already has a store to increase their profitability and make more money and make more sales. Today, we’re going to be talking about four classic email marketing mistakes. Now, the interesting thing here is that it’s a little bit controversial, not crazy controversial, but a little bit. The reason why is that I’ve done a couple of podcasts before with e-commerce email marketing experts, Ezra Firestone and X Wang. Now, they’ve mentioned things that Brendan sort of takes a different slant to. He goes off in a different direction. He has some interesting, compelling arguments for why he does so.  Now, he’s a very known honest, down to earth Aussie guy, so you’ve got two Aussie accents in this show, in this episode not just one. Okay, to get the show on the road for this episode of the Email Marketing Podcast go to themcmethod.com/71.  Now, here is this week’s McMaster’s Insight of the Week, the DAT formula. Now, what is the DAT formula? I love formulas. First of all, before I tell you what the formula is, the reason why I love formulas like this is that it makes writing copy and it makes writing emails, it makes creating marketing pieces for your business really easy and really straightforward, so I’m a big believer in breaking things down into a formula or a framework. Whatever you want to call it, okay. Now, the DAT formula is like this:  Number one, you describe the problem, all right? That’s step one. Step two is you agitate it, and step 3 is present your solution. Now, this, I introduced this DAT formula in one of the products inside McMasters in pages that convert because this is the simplest easiest way to write a great sales pitch for any sort of products your selling even if you’re trying to get someone to sign  up to your list. Anytime you want someone to take an action, the DAT formula is fantastic for it.  Now, it’s a little bit finicky. When you describe the problem such as “Are you sick of being fat?” Then you agitate it, and then you start talking about, well, “Here’s why it sucks to be fat.” You’re trying to get them feel the pain of what it is like to be fat. Before you present your solution, instead of going like “Well, are you sick of being fat?” and then agitate it. “Well, here’s why it sucks being fat. You don’t have energy. You can’t run around with your kids.” Instead of them going, “Well, that’s where my product comes in.”  Before you present your solution, you really need to present your solution in a general context, so you describe the problem: “Are you sick of being fat?” This is a very colloquial, casual example. “Are you being fat?” You agitate it by saying, “Well, now you don’t have energy. You can’t run around with your kids. You’re going to die early,” all this sort of stuff. You see what I’m doing? I’m just making them feel the pain of their problem. That’s all the agitation stage is about, okay?  Then before I present my solution though, I’m going to say, “What if there was an easy, simple way to lose weight and get fit?” Alright, and the problem there’s tons of products out there that don’t work. You’ve tried pills.  You’ve tried blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so I sort of talk about the solution in a general way, before I actually present the actual solution, so I’m like: “What if there was a simple way to do things that didn’t involve dieting, that didn’t involve painful workouts and didn’t involve all of this stuff?” Then I go: “That’s where lose weight in 10 days — lose 10 pounds in 10 days comes in, my product.” Lose 10 pounds in 10 days is my simple step by step program on how to lose weight blah, blah, blah.  The idea is you describe the problem, you agitate it, but before you present your specific solution, you need to describe the solution in sort of a general detail so that when you present your product so that it’s pre-framed as the ultimate solution. That’s a bit like saying you describe their problem, “Are they fat?”; you agitate it, “Here’s why it sucks to be fat …”; and then you might talk about “Well, there is a solution, but here’s the problem …”  You go back to the problem: “The problem is with most solutions they don’t work because of X, Y and Z, and because they don’t work …” You agitate it again, so you’re going problem, agitate, and then the solution is obviously to buy a product on weight loss, but then there’s a new problem: “Most products suck. The reason why that’s bad is that then you go and spend money. You waste money and time, and you don’t get what you want,” so we’ve gone problem, agitate, solution, and then we’ve gone back to problem, different problem this time, that most products suck. We’ve agitated it, and then we present your solution which is: “That’s where my product comes in.”  I think about it like that. I could probably come up with a 2X DAT formula, where you describe the problem, agitate, present a general solution, then describe the problem with the average solution then rinse and repeat the same formula, okay? That’s the problem I said that most people having with this formula, this problem, agitate, solution, is they go straight into their pitch, rather than talking about the solution in a general context of pre-framing, okay, so that’s this week McMasters Insight of the Week.  This insight came from McMasters, obviously. McMasters is my private training community. There is a forum. There’s monthly webinars, several products inside the community, including the McIntyre method which is a four-week training program on how to write an autoresponder, so if you want to learn more about that, go to themcmethod.com. There is a link in the top header. Learn more about McMasters and find out how to join. I’ve got one review and then we’ll get into this interview. This review is from Mr. Sean Markey. Sean says, “Five stars. Love it. Hey man, super love the show. Getting into the thick of things with my business and really starting to be able to use a lot of things that you teach in the show. Going to be joining your membership site soon, I suspect. Rock on.” Well, Sean, I can’t wait to see you inside McMasters and we can jump on these training webinars and we can talk about these insights inside. Yeah, it would actually be cool to have you in there, man. Anyway, if you want to leave a review for the show, you will put a huge smile on my face and make me crack up like this when I forget what to say.  Go to Itunes. Search for the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast and leave me your review. Tell me what you think. Good and bad, I’ll take it. Okay, now, let’s get into today’s interview with Mr. Brendan Tully and the four classic email, well, e-commerce email marketing mistakes.  It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy, and I’m here with Brendan Tully. Now, Brendan’s a consultant who I actually met way back in Sydney about three years ago before I’d moved to the Philippines, before I knew anything about copywriting business, or any of that and had all of those starry stars in my eyes about what sort of lifestyle you can get from it. I found Brendan on this forum and we … you lived in Sydney at the time, as well, so we met up. We had a beer and a lunch or something like that, and I was telling you about content site that made 400 bucks a month, and Brendan told me that it wasn’t a business and … we just had a conversation about that. It just totally blew my mind. Anyway, today, I thought I’d bring him on, he’s an e-commerce guy or a marketing consultant, but he’s got an e-commerce product coming out, a training product, which …. He’s just done a lot of cool e-commerce stuff and I’ve been through some of the product. While I’m not an e-commerce guy, it’s really actionable. Some of these screen shots, there’s just a lot of time put into this, so we’ll talk about that, but first, we’re going to talk about the four classic email marketing mistakes when it comes to e-commerce store owners.  If you’ve heard the other podcast with, I think it was X Wang and Ezra Firestone, this is going to be a little bit more of a not so much controversial, but a bit of a different take, coming at it from a different angle which is … Brendan usually does this. I’ve seen him do this in forums where everyone’s coming out saying one thing, and then he goes, “Look guys, this isn’t how it works. This is how it works.” That’s what today’s going to be about. Anyway, we’ll get into that. Brendan, how are you doing?  Brendan Tully:Yes, good mate, good mate. You make me sound like a grumpy old man. Come on.  John McIntyre:Just flowing with it man. It’s like … with these intros, like I said, I don’t plan them out too much these days. It’s just see what comes to mind like get a bit of inspiration from the divine and see what comes out.  Brendan Tully:Nice, I have some contrary viewpoints that I think often they’re very valid. John McIntyre:I think they are, too, but are we bracketing this one in the rant tag like the …  Brendan Tully:I don’t think it’s quite a rant, so yeah, I don’t think we need to put the rant tags around this one.  John McIntyre:That’s a good one. All right, before we do that, I’ve kind of given you a sort of the JMac intro, how about you give a list sort of a background on who you are and what you do.  Brendan Tully:Yeah, sure, so as you said, I run Home Marketing Consultants, so I run a consultancy called The Search Engine shop. It’s been around for five years, five and a half years; started in 2008. Before that, I actually ran an IT company for about eight years. We had 20-25 staff, and as well as owned a fairly sizable online store that back in the day, we actually acquired it for free. Then the first year, we took it from doing a 100k revenue a year to a million, and then in the second year, took it from doing a million to  6 and ½ million. It’s a long story, but we were fairly young at the time like 24-25 and had no idea how to manage that much cash flow and that many people and a business of that size.  There’s a big division between growing a business and business growth, and completely uncontrolled explosive growth where you’re so out of your depth that the business has just outgrown you by a long way, so ultimately we ran out of cash and both businesses failed as a result.  Other than that, I started doing online marketing stuff. I started getting a lot of calls from people asking about e-commerce and SEO’s. This was back in 2007 and 2008, and that’s how the Search Engine Shop started. I was very lucky in 2009 that with some friends, we won a government contract to do workshops and trainings for small business owners, so we’ve actually been doing those workshops for contractors. They enrolled in various forms for the last few years. I basically built the business on the back of those workshops.  Over the last five years, I’ve worked with around through the workshops and one-on-one consulting and services with around 2,000 businesses and most of them, they’re probably broken down into three, [durasale 00:09:40] small business, bricks and mortar, retail kind of businesses, e-commerce businesses, and bigger corporate businesses and marketing departments.  That’s the primary business of the Search Engine Shop. I’m actually in the process of taking the e-commerce bit out and splitting it out into its own brand called the Pareto E-commerce, so as you mentioned, we have a new product that we’re kind of in beta testing called the Pareto E-commerce Blueprint. What that is is basically the same consulting process that I run through with e-commerce clients in a DIY format because today a lot of people, e-commerce business owners are tech-savvy and can do the work themselves. They just need a bit of guidance and need to know what to do.  John McIntyre:I went and took a look at it. I like the idea of just like a list of I don’t know how many tweaks it was when I checked it out, but just a long list of here’s call up your bank and ask for a, I think it was a cheaper rate on the processing and then it was like just do this and just do this and then just do this. It was kind of cool. It was just a list of actions that you could take. Someone could sign up and just go through them and I don’t know, aim to set up one of those things once a week or something, and by the end of the year, you’d have a much more profitable store than you did at the start. Brendan Tully:Yeah, absolutely. Like a lot of it, there’s no rocket science, and a lot of its common sense. It’s kind of like those things that people just forget about or they ignore or it’s not on their radar, so I have four things to talk about today, classic email marketing mistakes that e-commerce business owners make.  I think a lot of these come from people reading a lot of blog posts online and just following the general wisdom that’s out there on the internet that’s not necessarily that hasn’t been, I guess, checked or logic-checked and they haven’t run it through because they’ve read it online and they just assume that’s what they need to do. They haven’t really run it through their own filter and thought about it in detail and logically approached it.  I guess they’re in a way contrary in viewpoints or again these are like kind of obvious things like they’re just like, “Ah, yeah, that makes sense. Let’s try it and see what happens,” and you can get a completely different result.  In a sense, they’re kind of 80/20. You do them. They’re small little tweaks, but they can have a massive impact.   John McIntyre:Cool, all right, so four classic contrarian. We’ll make sure to put that contrarian in our marketing mistakes. This is stuff like I haven’t done e-commerce before, so I have spoken to Ezra and this guy X and like it makes sense to me that you should do an abandoned cart email that you should do some auto follow up. What you’re talking about here and what we’re getting into is sort of doing it with a little more finesse instead of just firing away emails at these places with these events actually put some strategy into it.  Brendan Tully:Yeah, exactly, I think a lot of it comes as well … I’ve got a lot of real world sales experience like selling in person, selling big IT projects and things like that so for me a lot of these things are common sense, but a lot of people who run online stores and doing email marketing haven’t necessarily sold in person, so they wouldn’t necessarily think about these when they’re setting them up. The first one is abandoned cart emails and absolutely, you’ve done podcasts on it before – you need to have an abandoned cart email system placed. It just makes sense. It’s easy.  John McIntyre:What’s an abandoned cart email system? Brendan Tully:Abandoned cart basically is anytime someone comes to the website puts together a shopping cart, gets some way through the checkout process and leaves the website. The abandoned cart email system or cart abandonment system will detect that and send them a series of emails based on where they are in the checkout process, so basically asking them why they didn’t checkout their order. John McIntyre:Okay, and so what we’ve done, from what I remember in the previous podcasts, usual thing is you just send them out three emails, five emails. One goes out an hour after. One goes out a day after, and you could offer them a discount. You could give them a testimonial. You could remind them about the guarantee, and they’re all sort of standard things that you might do, but you’re talking about something that’s a little bit different. That’s the mistake, right, is doing just that? Brendan Tully:Yeah, so what I think is really trying a close-harder approach, so pushing them into the sale rather than trying to find out why they didn’t purchase in the first place. Basically, people have their priorities wrong, so with cart  abandonment emails, the typical or the standard approach is I want to get the conversion. It’s like trying to make the sale like really, “Here’s a discount. Here, try this. Check this out. Here’s a bigger discount.”   If you think about it, if you were in a physical retail store, you walked in there, you poked around, picked out some products, had a look around, decided not to buy and walked out. If the sales guy came out and ran down the street chasing after you screaming that he’d give you a 10% discount, and you said no and he was like, “20% discount, 50% discount.” That’s not a very sophisticated … it might work you know if the discount’s big enough, but that’s not a very sophisticated way of selling, and it cheapens your brand and it’s not very effective. Instead, the priority should be to uncover why they didn’t check out, so find out the reason why they didn’t complete the purchase.   Now, obviously, there’s going to be some people who got interrupted that had internet connection problem. They got distracted. They walked away from the PC. There’s going to be a proportion of those, so typically on the first email any sort of reminder is going to pick up those people, but asking them what was wrong if we did something wrong, why you didn’t check out, and then using those insights, asking them for a reply.  You’ve talked about it – the basic email structure should always be sent from a real person’s email address so they can reply to and asking them why they didn’t check out and using those insights to improve the website, make tweaks and changes, change the pricing structure or whatever it is. Long term will work a lot better than just simply throwing discounts and focusing on trying to make the conversion or the sale.  John McIntyre:Okay, so we’re thinking much a long term perspective where you sort of bringing that sort of iterative process when every time someone gets a reply, you might create a Google doc or a spreadsheet with all of the different reasons why people aren’t checking out. Then once a month you go in there and you kind of go, “All right, everyone’s saying that they didn’t know the kind of guarantee, so maybe we can make our guarantee more visible in the header of the page or something like that or that we have free shipping.” That sort of thing, using the information that will reply to these emails to sort of drive the development and the optimization of the website.   Brendan Tully:Absolutely, and you’ll notice, over time, you’ll see the trends, so it might be that your shipping cost is too high or all of a sudden there’s a cheaper competitor on the market and your prices are too high compared to those. Just throwing away the discounts and trying to close harder is a stupid way to approach it. If you approach it with some finesse and find out, uncover the objections basically and then answer those objections in updating the website content, changing the marketing strategy or whatever it is, long term it’s a much better approach than simply just trying to make the sale.  John McIntyre:I like the story there, too, when you got like, “If you went into a store, and you didn’t buy something. You walked out and some guy is chasing you down the street yelling out discounts at you,” maybe it works but that kind of – that story sort of highlights just the stupidity like it’s a bit silly. It’s just silly. There’s much better ways to go about it.  Brendan Tully:Yeah, absolutely. John McIntyre:All right then, well let’s do the classic contrarian email marketing mistake number two.  Brendan Tully:Okay, let’s go into the next one, using unsophisticated sales and marketing tactics. The classic one is just like what we’ve talked about, discounts, so throwing away discounts without any strategy around them. Discounts really should be the last option. You don’t want to cheapen the product or throw away margin when a better sales tactic will work or be more effective.  Discounts are really the last resort. You shouldn’t use them so often. You shouldn’t be throwing them away every month; doing a sale without a good reason. I would share and say whatever you do, make sure that the discounts are the last thing that you try in all your marketing.  There are other things you can try upfront for example, a buyer’s guide or top ten tips for things people don’t know about this product. Something like that is going to be more sophisticated and probably work better than just throwing away the discounts.  Again, if you take the real walking into a retail store analogy, you walk in there, you look at products, sales guy comes up to you, the first thing he says is he has 10% off. It just doesn’t make sense, so you want to explain the products, help the customer make a buying decision rather than just saying, “Here’s a discount, quick buy.”  John McIntyre:This is going to – I mean you can give the discounts and get the sale, but you’re saying what’s going to lead to sort of I mean more of a long term profitability with the store or maybe even a short term profitability that’s going to take more time to massage the sale.  Brendan Tully:Yeah, absolutely, so stop trying to … there are some reasons to use discounts, right, so they can be used strategically to increase the size of orders for example, so you can have an opt in pop-up when people get to the site where there’s a $10 coupon if they spend more than $200 or something like that. That’s using discounts in a smarter way because you’re using that to increase the order value, but simply just throwing away money is a bad idea. It’s important to think about there are things customers need to know in order for them to make the purchase, so they need to know about shipping methods. They need to know about payment methods, returns and warranties, so those sort of things. A lot of people forget that they need to remove the friction from the sales process. Updating the website, copy and content to help the customer uncover more of those things or find that information out more easily will often work much better than just simply throwing away the discount. Classic one is we see on e-commerce sites product page copy that really has a line of text about the product and that’s it. It has nothing about shipping, returns, warranty or payment information, so simply just being better about the sales copy and the sales message will work a lot better than just throwing out discounts out there.   John McIntyre:Okay, so is this the sort of thing you’d have in like the product description or could you have like in the header, you might have free shipping on all orders over a $100 or you could make it sort of like a site-wide explanation or would you have product specific sales copy? Brendan Tully:It depends. There’s definitely … The header is something that a lot of e-commerce stores underutilize. It’s a big chunky bit of space that displays on every page, so if there is something like free shipping or there’s some advantage you have over competitors, absolutely that should be in the header because that appears on every page and a lot of people for an e-commerce store in particular, most customers are not coming in through the home page. They don’t read all of the sales copy on the home page, so having something in the header is more likely to make them stick around.  I like to think, the way I explain to my clients is that the product copy, the copy on the product pages should really act as a sales letter in itself. The customer should be able to get the majority of the information they need to make the purchase without having to leave that page, so that means really that product description should have something about shipping and something about payment information and warranty and maybe some videos or a link to a buyers guide or some extra information. If the customer has the click around to find out about shipping information, it’s adding more friction to the sales process, and it’s probably going to hurt your conversion rate.  John McIntyre:Okay, so what you could do is you could have a widget on the side, in the sidebar or something like that that explains sort of in more detail because you’re not going to be able to fit that in the header, that sort of explains how it like [buy process 00:20:02] how it works or something that’s like, “Well, first you make an order and second, this happens and third, this happens,” really just so they know exactly what’s going to happen when they make an order and the shipping, the returns and all of that sort of stuff and then you have product specific copy just explaining the product itself in the description which is usually the more words you’ve got, the more selling you can really do, as long as it’s interesting.  That’s the usually the idea, so kind of take some time to actually sort of articulate what the product is and who it’s for and what it’s going to do or them. Brendan Tully:Yeahp, absolutely. It depends on the site layout as well. Ultimately what you’re going to be able to do, so different site layouts are going to allow you to do different things, but yeah. It’s a classic mistake, not enough sales copy on product description pages. One good tool that we use that you often – because it’s hard when it’s your site, you’re so blind to these things and you’re not the customer, so you don’t see a lot of these things, you don’t feel a lot of these problems.  Two tools that we use to uncover a lot of this stuff, one is CrazyEgg Heat Map Analytics, so you can kind of see the visitor behavior as they’re poking around the site. Another good one is ClickTale Analytics Suite and actually see videos of user behavior on the site. You can see them clicking around and scrolling up and down the page, moving through all different pages and it gives you a good feel for what they’re looking for. You see them land on a product page then click out to the shipping then click the contact us page and bounce around the site, so you get a much better feel for what the customer’s looking for and what they’re doing.  John McIntyre:Okay, okay. Well, cool, what’s mistake number three? Brendan Tully:Okay, number three is – we kind of talked about this already, but caring more about the conversion than the customer, so a classic one, auto-follow-up emails, post-purchase emails, and I know you’ve had podcasts about this before with other guests talking about there’s a whole bunch of strategies around you could have automated sequences and order respondents about following them up and if they have consumables, emailing them after three months or whatever, following up to see if they’re going to buy more consumables.  One of the key things that people forget is if you care about the customers and make them feel cared for, that’s one of the best ways to improve your conversion rate. Classic way to make the customer feel cared or a really easy way to do that is have the order follow-up emails and typically that’s a review request email that goes out, so 10 – 20 days after people order, the e-commerce system will send them an email automatically saying, “Can you put a review on our page? How’d the product go?” Adding a couple of lines in there to just ask the customer if they received the order. What do they think about the product? Is it doing what it needs to do?  Just asking them a few questions and caring and asking them to reply with their feedback will work a lot better than just saying, “Hey, could you put a review for the product?” John McIntyre:Okay, so sort of treating them like a person instead of just a sale? Brendan Tully:Mhmm. You’ve got to think if you think about the customer if they’re your best friend, if your best friend orders from your site, 10 days after the order, you’re going to shoot them an email and say, “Hey! How’d you go? What do you think about the product?” If you treat the customer like they’re your best friend, then the whole email marketing system is going to work much better for you and the conversions will just be easy. You won’t be pushing uphill all the time. John McIntyre:Okay, so I guess it would be worth having someone on the support staff to reply and respond to those emails that come in from customers. Brendan Tully:Yeah, absolutely, it really depends on the size of the store, so if you’re a small store, you can have the emails coming out from your name. If you were running a site, you could have the emails actually the automated emails come out with john@mcmethod.com or whatever, and they reply and they go directly to you, but if you have a bigger site where you have customer service people you can make someone dedicated in the customer service team to stick their name on the outbound emails and they handle the replies.  John McIntyre:Okay, okay. I like this. Would you have like an email going out first that says, “Hey, I just wanted to know how the product was?” and then after that you’d send another email about the review? Brendan Tully:I usually do it in one because a lot of the time when dealing with a small business clients that the e-commerce system will only support on email, so usually, we’ll put up – you could do both, but usually we’ll just lump it in together with the same emails so we start of, “Hey, it’s John from McMethod or whatever. We just wanted to see how the order went. Did it actually arrive?”  We set the order follow-up email usually to go out 18 to 20 days after the sale because by that stage, they should actually have the order.  The product should have arrived, so ask them whether it’s actually arrived, what they think about it, if they have any feedback, so just ask them to reply, so we ask them, “Do you have any feedback or ways we can improve the website or anything you didn’t like about the website?” Then we have the blurb, the kind of standard copy with has the link to the product page where they can submit a review on it. Ask them for a favor, “Can you do me a favor? If you have three minutes, just put a review for the product and let us know what you thought of or think about the product itself.” John McIntyre:Okay. What about things like, so within that sequence you’ve got the review, sort of like the asking treating them like a person asking them for a review, can you do things like say, ten days in you send them an email with sort of like “Here’s how to get the most from your new kitchen knives” or something like that? Brendan Tully:Yeah, absolutely, I mean it depends on what the product is and it’s definitely product and market specific, but yeah, again just caring and treating them like your best friend. If they’re your best friend, if your best friend ordered, what would you send them after the sale? If you think about it through that sort of lens, you’ll write much better emails and the whole order respondent post-purchase sequence will work much better. John McIntyre:Okay, does that mean, so like when I’m emailing my friend sometimes, I kind of write pretty casual. Can you get away with that sort of thing with follow-up emails? Brendan Tully:Yeah, I think so. I think you’ve got to walk the fine line. It depends how casual. It needs to be casual sounding, and one hack to do that instead of opening a blank word document or opening the email tool and trying to write emails from there is actually just open your Mac mail or your Gmail and write the email in there because your mind will frame it differently and it will sound more natural and more casual rather than a bit more forced and … You don’t want it to come off like being kind of cheesy or even sleazy, so … John McIntyre:Yeah, okay, well, what if I were, I don’t know, friends with Rob Hanley? He’s got this way of doing – this sort of thing where you go on Facebook, he’s got a few fake accounts with pictures and sort of like an avatar that he’s drawn up so they each have a personality, and then he pretends he’s writing to them and writes them a message and copies and pastes that message to his email to send it out to his list. Brendan Tully:Yeah, I mean anything you can do kind of hack it, and get it out of your own way like it’s really hard to stare at a blank page where you’re in your own email client or in Facebook half the time, well, half the day, so it’s really comfortable to start writing in there. You just got to make it sound more natural and flowy rather than forced and kind of manufactured.  John McIntyre:Okay, well, let’s move on to the last one, number four.  Brendan Tully:The last one: we’re just not paying enough attention to email in general. One really common mistake or one really probably more of an oversight than a mistake is e-commerce business owners set up a site and business is running great, been running for a few years and the owner themselves or anyone in the business hasn’t been through the checkout themselves in years, so they don’t actually know, they’re not familiar with what the extent of the checkout, how it’s working, what’s wrong, what the emails look like.  By not paying attention to emails and caring about even just those automated transactional emails, often they’ll be saying the wrong things and it won’t look good or they’re missing out on a huge opportunity to do better emails and send better emails to the customer because I know in the X Wang podcast, he talked about leveraging those transactional emails and they’re a huge opportunity because people read them. Also not just from a conversion perspective, but from a customer service perspective, answering common email uncommon questions in those emails can also significantly reduce the customer service overhead as well. I’ll say that email is probably in almost every business is probably the cheapest marketing tool they have and one of the easiest ones. There’s a very low barrier to entry and once you are doing email, it’s very easy to tweak it and do it better. I’ll tell you it’s just generally not paying attention and not caring about it enough.  Those e-commerce businesses that are giving so much time and attention to SEO and Ad words and they’ve got all of these consultants and management going on for those marketing channels and there’s nobody really caring about the email marketing, so I would say giving it more attention, some dedication is really going to pay off and you’ll see it – how it impacts the conversion rate if you consistently give it some attention.  John McIntyre:I liked it, too, how – I mean the cool thing about email is that it’s such a automated sort of system, so that once you’ve got this setup, you might want to check it once a month or once every three months going go through that check out process to see what’s actually going can, but once it’s all done, you can kind of just … then you go back to SEO and page traffic and you just kind of pour leads into that funnel email sort of part of that conversion process.  Brendan Tully:Yeah, absolutely. It’s the ultimate way to clone yourself because you do something once and it because it’s systemized and automated, it happens every time without you thinking about it. That’s why it’s easy to forget about it, as well, like it’s easy to forget that it’s so powerful if you give it some time and attention or put some attention towards improving it over time.  John McIntyre:Hmmm, but with the transactional emails, so you’ve got the like order confirmation, the shipping confirmation emails, what sort of – like do you have like a sort of like a template or three different emails or five specific emails that you put in those? How do you do it? Brendan Tully:I don’t have anything templated, apart from just giving them some attention and the big win there particularly the transactional emails is getting ahead of any customer service inquiries, so you want to tell the customer how they can find the tracking information about their shipment. You want to tell them what to expect next like in the selling process as a general rule you should always, the customer should always know what’s next, so you should be leading them and leading the way, so in those transactional emails you should be explaining them or telling them what to expect as the next step. You see, the default emails that come out of e-commerce systems are terrible. They’re badly formatted. They have a whole bunch of words in there that are not very marketing-friendly, I guess, so I’d say, again, with the transactional stuff, it’s bare the focus on the customer and caring about the customer as opposed to simply trying to make the transaction, and so if you can anticipate what they’re asking or take those common customer service questions and rework the transaction emails overtime, the customer will feel better and their general experience with you will be better so I think that’s where for me, that’s where I’ve seen the win on those transactional emails. John McIntyre:Okay, and what about some sort of referral in there when they’ve bought say, I don’t know, a big steak knife or a set of steak knives to cut up steak and of course. Then you offer them some you like, “Well, would you like this big meat cleaver, as well?” Would that be the sort of thing that you could put in a transaction email? It doesn’t have to be the main topic, but it could be just down the bottom, so they read the email, they read the customer service stuff. Then in the bottom, it might say, “By the way, people who often buy steak knives, they also buy this meat cleaver.” Brendan Tully:Yeah, I think if it adds value then it’s definitely worth trying and testing – I think you need to test it and see what offers work better, but if you think if there’s something that’s going to add value to them if they – maybe they need a sharpener for their knives or they need to know. Maybe you could just send them a link to a page with “How to Sharpen the Knives” and on there, your sharpening product or whatever, but if you’re going to if there’s something that will add value to them or the sale or the whole transaction process in general, you should absolutely be promoting it.  You should be there to help the customer. Selling is not – people have a bad – selling typically has a bad rep. It’s really solving someone’s problems, so if you can solve their problem better by if there’s a complimentary product or service or there’s another company that you’re partnered with even, maybe getting affiliate or a [fill 00:31:27] permission then anything like that absolutely can go in transactional emails or just like a proposed purchase follow-up.  John McIntyre:Okay, cool. All right, well, we’re right on time. We’re running 30 minutes, now. Before we go though, let’s talk about Pareto E-commerce. What’s the deal? Brendan Tully:What’s the deal? Well, the website’s paretoecommerce.com, so if anybody’s interested in checking it out, they can head over there and stick their email address in, and they’ll get a whole bunch of information. Like I said, it’s basically my consulting product broken down into DIY format, so once it’s on up the site, it will walk you through a bunch of modules and you’ll also get the tools that I use when I’m working with clients, so you get like a framework document, which is really just this spreadsheet with the list of their improvement items and some conditional formatting in there, as well, so you can actually track where you’re at with those improvement items. Particularly if you’re a bigger store, it’s a good way to manage a delegate that goes out. Typically, there’s something like 120 improvement items in there, line items and typically, when we do consulting with clients, we’ll get three to five improvements done per month. It really is, there’s a lot of meaty stuff in there, and it’s probably realistically, if you’re hustling, you could probably get all the improvements done in 6 or 12 months, but if you’re a bigger site and a bigger business, then there’s probably a few years worth of improvement action items there.  It’s a bit different to your standard information product where it’s not just throwing information at you; it’s giving you the tools to actually go out and be able to do it yourself. The add-on tools and cloud tools that we use to do things like abandoned cart emails and post-purchase follow-up and all that sort of stuff.  John McIntyre:Okay. This isn’t like – there’s a lot of other products out there where they teach you about drop shipping and e-commerce as a sort of like a Biz-Opp, business opportunity, whereas this is more for someone who’s already got a store, who’s already making money and just wants to get better results with it, so they’re sort of like an experience entrepreneur, they’re already getting results.  Brendan Tully:Yeah, so it’s definitely, it will work better for established businesses and typically you need to be earning six figures a year revenue or more to get the most out of it. If you’re a small authority doing five figures a year, you will get some benefit, and the price is right now, the price is 197 Australian a quarter which works out every two bucks a day, so it’s not super expensive anyway, but … John McIntyre:It’s less than a Starbucks coffee a day, right? Brendan Tully:Yeah, exactly, but the bigger you are, these are kind of multiplier type improvements, so if you have a big site to begin with, making an improvement that improves sales by five percent. If you have a million dollar business that’s going to be a much bigger improvement than a business doing a hundred grand a year.  John McIntyre:Yeahp, yeahp, yeahp, absolutely, okay, so they sign up and they go through it, and they can sort of pick and choose which direction they want to go in? Brendan Tully:Yeah, they get – so it’s broken down into sections. The first section is quick win, so whenever I work with a client you want to hit the quick wins first. Then some of these things are super simple like for example, the abandoned cart emails. Just by implementing something like that can be a massive win for conversion rate, so start off with quick wins which should within the first couple of weeks, the product should pay for itself and making you money  John McIntyre:Cool, and then after that, that goes into the main list of changes. This – I like the idea here where you kind of go in there and maybe you can do it yourself or do it to some contractor or an employee and you just pick like you said, three to five things, maybe ten things, depending how busy you are, just hand them out and then that’s sort of your work done for the month.  Brendan Tully:Yeah, and I’ve got templates like Swipe files where you can just – I have some examples in there where you can just simply cut and paste and change out the words to your business name and you’re away.  John McIntyre:Yeahp, and just to get back to the name, I don’t know if we’ve mentioned it yet, but this whole idea of the Pareto principle of – I’ve had Perry Marshall in here to talk about this whole 80/20 idea, so you’re talking about little changes that produce big results? Brendan Tully:Yeahp, absolutely. John McIntyre:Sweet, so that’s the paretoecommerce.com. I’ll have a link to that in the show notes at themcmethod.com, and if someone’s interested in your consulting or wants to learn more about that, where would they go for that? Brendan Tully:Probably, head over to my consulting website thesearchengineshop.com, and shoot me an email through the Contact Us form.  John McIntyre:Cool, all right, so links to all that at the McMethod. Brendan, thanks for coming on the show.  Brendan Tully:Yeah, of course, man. Thanks for having me on. The post Episode #71 – Brendan Tully on The 4 Classic Email Marketing Mistakes Almost All E-Commerce Business Owners Make appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

What do you get when you put a neuroscientist, a Wallstreet banker and a highly successful AIG sales professional all in one? …Ryan Levesque. This guy is a baller. His first online business going from ZERO to $25K per month in its first 18 months was only the beginning. Ryan’s built and sold multiple internet companies… As well as coached over 45 clients – …generating over 37 MILLION bucks for them in the process. Ryan takes your basic survey and turns it around on it’s head – …creating a distinct survey funnel strategy that when used, Guarantees to SKYROCKET your conversion rates – And your business revenues as well. In this episode, Ryan talks funnels… He breaks down his GOLDEN unique funnel strategy into 7 easy to follow steps… He’s used it to generate 2.8 million leads and 175 THOUSAND customers across 17 different markets. In other words – It WILL work for you. Tune in to bask in the greatness that this surefire funnel strategy is.   In this episode, you’ll discover: The trick to using Ryan’s bulletproof formula in any current or future business you will ever create (it’s easy and infinitely profitable) How to convert catastrophic life-events into fuel for success (don’t let anything bring you down) The hampering herd mentality that will hamper your conversion rates when following-up on completed surveys The biggest mistake people make when creating and then offering surveys (learn a simple trick to avoid it) A perfect funnel execution if you have multiple front-end products (guide people to their perfectly matched product) How to best funnel people into your product VSL if you have only one product (hint… use marketing angles) How to use neuroscience to take advantage of people’s subconscious cognitive biases (never worry about conversion rates again) The ultimate custom merge field email strategy that creates extremely personalized autoresponder sequences (no one does this… don’t be generic like everyone else and you’ll have to thank Ryan later) How to mirror Ryan’s distinct survey funnel strategy with ease The micro-commitment survey method that trumps your basic squeeze page optin (builds action-taking momentum that will blow up your optin conversion rates) Mentioned: Rocket Memory SurveyFunnel.io Ryan’s Survey Funnel Formula Coaching Free Daily Email Marketing Insight from Ryan Andre Chaperon Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the autoresponding guy, and it’s time for episode 70 – the big seven zero – of the McMethod e-mail marketing podcast where you get, every week, nitty-gritty techniques, tips, and strategies to make more money with e-mail marketing and sales funnels in your business. This podcast is really just about the [outsides 00:00:16] of making money online, but I like to have a little cool catchy intro there, so I’m tweaking things and changing things as we go.  Today, I’ll be talking to Ryan Leveque – or Levesque – I think it’s Leveque – about survey funnels.   Ryan is very well known for his survey funnel formula, which is basically a way of building sales funnels that uses surveys, and today, we’re going to talk about exactly what the survey funnel formula is, why it works so much better than ordinary typical funnels, and [inaudible 00:00:44] the survey, what to do with the survey data, how to use the survey data to boost your conversions throughout the autoresponder. What I love about Ryan’s strategy is that it’s very simple, it’s very straightforward.  It sounds complex, which is why a lot of people aren’t doing it, but because it’s easy – it’s quite straightforward, I think – that you can go and set it up and you can execute on it, so there’s some great information in this podcast.  You might want to pen and paper for this one or some sort of note-taking device. To get the show notes for this episode of the e-mail marketing podcast, go to themcmethod.com seven zero 70, okay? This week’s McMaster’s inside of the week – if you don’t know, McMaster’s is my private training community where you can learn more about e-mail marketing, sales funnels, how to write pages that convert, how to tell stories, all that sort of stuff, that’s weekly – sorry, monthly – webinars, and expert interviews and a bunch of stuff inside there.   Now one thing I’ve been talking about on some of the latest training webinars – we call them the McMaster’s Roundtable – is upsells.  I’ve been running paid traffic on Facebook – well, sorry, I’ve been running a campaign on Facebook – for the last month or two, and what’s blown me away so far is that the upsells that I have in that funnel – which someone buys the first product and then there’s a series of upsells after that – have been making up two thirds of the revenue on the campaign, and so now it’s now a profitable campaign. I’ve never been into upsells.  It’s never really been my thing.  I’ve heard about it, but I just thought, oh, I’ll wait for that, I don’t need to do that stuff.  But now when I look at the sales funnel, the whole reason that sales funnel and the paid traffic campaign is making money is because of those upsells, and that’s why I’ve been talking about it inside McMaster’s on the training webinars, because it’s one of the easiest ways for you to make more money in your business is to increase the amount of money that each person spends with you, and the easiest way to do that is to create relevant products – which is a lot easier than it sounds – but create products and sell them as upsells. If you have a book that you’re selling for a hundred bucks, create another product to sell them straight after they make that purchase for another hundred dollars.  You could be in services.  Maybe someone wants to pay you $2000 to write a sales letter and you say, “Well, how about we do the sales letter for 2000 and then I optimize and then split test it for another thousand?”  Figure out ways to do upsell.  This is, by far, the easiest way to increase the amount of money you’re already making in your business. It’s hard to get traffic, it’s hard to boost conversions.  Upsells are such a simple, simple hack, but most people aren’t going to do it.  Most people won’t do it because it makes them feel uncomfortable, right?  So you gain an instant advantage if you can get over that discomfort and just do what makes – I think, what makes very good business sense, which is just increasing or improving the economics of your business. I’ve got one review this week, another five-star.  This one comes in from Dylan Sigurd from the United States.  He says, “Five stars, insider scoop on e-mail marketing and more.  McIntyre is basically the e-mail expert in this podcast and he sheds more light on very profitable e-mail marketing methods.  Thanks for giving us a lot of value, John.” Thank you for the review, Dylan Sigurd.  I hope I said your name right there.  I don’t know which one’s the first name.  Anyway, but thanks for the review.  If you want to leave a review for the show, you can go to iTunes, search for McMethod, search for the e-mail marketing podcast, jump in there, leave me a review, it totally makes my day, blows me away, and it really gives me a hit of motivation to keep doing these podcast interviews.  So yeah. Let’s get into this interview, this little podcast with Mr. Ryan Leveque.  It’s John McIntyre here, the autoresponding guy.  I’m here with Ryan Leveque.  Ryan is a marketing expert, a business coach, and I’ll give a quick little intro and then I’ll hand it over to him, but he went zero to $25,000 a month in 18 months with his first online business.   He’s launched, built, and sold multiple Internet companies.  He’s coached over 45 clients through the process, and he’s helped generate $37 million in revenue for these clients during that time, so he’s done some cool stuff, and I thought we’d get on today to talk about the specific funnel that uses … Sort of like a different way of doing a sales funnel that’s very intriguing, and I don’t know too much about myself because I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard good things from him and from a lot of other people who do it.  Andre Chaperon, I think, has used this approach before, so we’ll get into that. Ryan, how are you doing? Ryan:I’m doing great, and I’m pumped, really excited to be here, man. John:Good to have you on the show, man.  Good to … You don’t have a green juice or green smoothie right now, do you? Ryan:I don’t.  I just have water.  It’s funny you bring that up, because before the call we were just chatting about our obsession over green smoothies, green juice, salads, and just living healthy.  You got to fuel the body to fuel the mind. John:But do it fast as well.  That’s part of the point with the smoothies, is you can … You don’t want to sit down for an hour and eat a meal.  You don’t have time for that. Ryan:Because I have too many e-mails to write.  No, you’re absolutely right.  Originally I did it out of necessity.  I don’t know if I mentioned this, but two years ago, I was diagnosed with type I diabetes, and it was a complete shock to me, because I’m in my 30s right now.  Type I diabetes is juvenile diabetes, so it’s usually kids that are diagnosed, but the reason why the way I found out is I applied for life insurance and I was rejected, and I’m an otherwise …  If you look at me, you would say, “Oh, he’s a healthy guy.”  I’m not overweight.  I’m in pretty good shape.  But I was, again, rejected for life insurance, and I went to the doctor and said, “Here are my labs.  Do you think we should get some labs done to corroborate the results and see if they’re real or not?”  We did that, and I got a phone call from my doctor about an hour later and he said, “You need to go to the emergency room now.  You’re in what’s called DKA, diabetic ketoacidosis, and you could literally slip into a coma any day.” My wife was freaking out, I was freaking out.  We went to the emergency room.  I spent four days in the ICU, the intensive care unit.  I was pumped with 15 pounds of fluids.  I had lost a bunch of weight leading up to this, and I had all sorts of other symptoms, but I just never really attributed it to a disease.  I was just working really hard and I thought I lost all this weight because I wasn’t eating, and I wasn’t eating because I was working really hard, and I was weak and tired because I was spending so much time working, and we just had a baby, so I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep. Anyways, long story short, the reason why I bring all that up is that’s been a huge motivator for me and a real kind of eye opener that, listen, we’re not here forever.  I was the last person to think that something like that was going to happen to me.   Bringing it back to the green smoothie, one of the reasons why I eat the way I eat now, which is three green smoothies a day, one green juice in the morning, two salads, and high-quality protein at night, like an organic grass-fed steak or wild salmon or something like that – the reason why I eat so healthy now is basically out of necessity.  I do it because I want to limit the amount of medications I need to take and just really be healthy.  I’ve got a son and another one on the way, and so I think all of us have our own motivations for what drives us to do well in business and be successful. For me, it’s to provide for my family knowing that if I take care of myself, I’ll be around for a long time, but if I don’t take care of myself, a type I diabetic’s life expectancy in a place like Africa is really … It’s pretty sad.  After diagnosis, it’s like 15 or 17 years, so you have to take care of yourself, and we were just joking, “Feel the body, feel the mind,” and it all comes back to what you put into your body, so for me that’s what drives me, and what’s interesting is after I was diagnosed, we had literally the best year ever in our business and I’ve been doing this full-time since 2008, and this was, I guess, 2013?  Yeah, 2013, the next full year after diagnosis, and now in 2014, we’re five months into the year, and I’m already 150% over entire last year. In other words, what we did in 2013, I’m already 150% better, and ahead of the game there.  It just goes to show you that if something like that happens to you, if it’s bad or whatever, you can use it as motivation to drive you to take things … Step up your game and take things to the next level, so anyways.  I know that was a real long introduction.  You weren’t probably planning on talking about it, but I think it’s interesting to hear when I’m listening to interviews with people to understand what motivates them, what drives them, and a little bit of background before we dive into the nuts and bolts of the business side of things. John:Okay.  Cool.  Thanks for sharing that.  One thing I’m curious about – this is to stay on this story just for a little bit longer – is to think, well, you have this huge motivation that’s come from diabetes and we’re not around forever.  How do you convert that?  How does that propel you in business, say, instead of saying, “Well, I’m not going to work as much anymore, I’m going to spend more time with my family,” or whatever.  I don’t know how.  How do you frame that up? Ryan:Yeah, it’s a really good question.  I remember when I was – I think, 25 – I had this feeling … I was working in a corporate job, I was living in Asia, I was working for an insurance company, AIG, I had a really great job, high-paying job.  I think I was making like $278,000 a year, and I was running a team of 24 people.  I was opening up sales offices all around the country, and I had another one of these moments, and I said, I don’t want to spend the rest my life doing this, and I just had this feeling that if I don’t do something now, if I don’t just …  I had this flicker of entrepreneurialism in my gut that was about to be extinguished.  It was just a little bit of a flicker there, and I just had this feeling that if I didn’t do something now, that flame was going to go out, and it was going to go out forever, so I made the bold decision to quit my job, move in with my wife who, at the time, was getting her PhD in a 400-square foot apartment, and started my first Internet company, and that’s when I went from zero to 25,000 in 18 months, and I had a similar … The reason why I had that feeling was – whatever, this number feeling, like, I’m going to be turning 30 in a couple years – just felt like it was so close.  It was right there, and it felt like … In my early 20s, I felt like I had all the time in the world, but just seeing that that number was there, like if I didn’t do it now, I was never going to do it, and I don’t want to look back at my life, 75, 85 years old, and saying, I wonder what if.   This time around, when I got sick, it was a little bit of that.  It was a little bit, well, I might not be around forever, and so I want to earn as much money as possible for my family so that if something did happen to me that I would leave them in a really great position.  I’m not in a position where I’m three months away from dying.  I don’t want to create that misconception, but that was the thought going through my head, especially when I was sick.  I think anyone who has kids … You don’t have kids, right, John?  You’re single? John:Yeah. Ryan:Yeah.  I think when you have kids, it’s sort of like this daddy gene kicks in where you’re like, I got to step things up.  I want my boys to look up to me and say, “Wow, Dad did amazing things,” and really proud for me to be their father on the one hand, and on the other hand, I’m working really hard now so that I don’t have to work hard forever.  Whether this happens or not, I’m in a position where I could conceivably retire in a few years, as crazy as that sounds, in my 30s, and so there’s that that appeals to me as well.  That if I just really burn the midnight oil for another year or two, I could legitimately just say, done.   Not that we’d be living crazy millionaire lifestyle where we’re riding Rolls-Royces and living on private yachts, but we could live a comfortable lifestyle and I wouldn’t have any work obligation, so I’ve thought about things like that.  If I just do the sprint for a couple more years and then, secondarily, if not, well then I can take things down a notch and the pressure is off and I can work really, really short hours.   At the same time too, I’ve engineered my schedules that I work in very set, specific times and I take time off to be with the family and, just like you, I could work anywhere, so we take vacations all the time and just bring my laptop and everything like that.   I think the way things are set up right now is pretty good, and I know we’ve spent a little bit more time talking about the lifestyle side of things, but we can bring it back to business, and the thing that’s allowed me to do that is, like you, I’ve invested a tremendous amount of time in becoming a really skilled copywriter and then taking that skill and bringing it one step further and focus on becoming a funnel specialist, building end-to-end online funnels, and my contribution to the marketing world is a very specific type of funnel that I have … I’m the only one that does this funnel in this specific way and it’s something I call my survey funnel. This is something that I’ve used to generate 2.8 million leads, 175,000 customers across 17 different markets in the last 23 months alone, and I’ve just since added two more markets that I’m going into, and I basically work with and partner with large seven, eight, and nine-figure businesses.  I build their entire funnels on a fee plus royalty basis, and I get paid handsomely to do it.  We can talk about some of the mechanics of that funnel and maybe how some people on the call can use elements of that in their business and take what’s working so well for me and my business and maybe apply parts of it in their world. John:Sure, let’s dig in.  Let’s talk about … I’m curious about what this survey funnel looks like.  I’ve seen … My idea from what it sounds like and what I’ve seen out there before is when someone opts in, use a survey to segment them.  But now that you mention it, it actually sounds like it’s probably a bit more involved than just simply giving someone a survey and segmenting them when they sign up.  Let’s start off with a broad view.  What is it, and what does it look like, and then we can dive into the nitty-gritty. Ryan:Sure, absolutely.  Typically, in a lead capture funnel, we all know the squeeze page, right?  You go to a squeeze page, it’s opt in for X, Y, Z, free report or free video or whatever.  What this does is it turns it on its head, and I’ll talk very high level, and then I’ll talk a little bit about the psychology behind why it works.   One of the things I didn’t bring up is that in a prior life – what feels like a prior life – before getting into business, before getting into marketing, I actually studied and taught neuroscience at the Ivy League level at Brown University, and I was actually intending on going into academia, going into grad school, and becoming a neuroscientist.  My best friend in college is a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic.  We went through all of our classes together.  He just took it all the way. But I decided that wasn’t for me.  I kind of meandered for a while.  I worked on Wall Street for the investment bank Goldman Sachs and then, like I said, lived in China for five years working for AIG and then got into our world.  The reason why I bring that up is because one of the things that makes this approach unique is – and in my marketing – is I tend to really focus on the neuroscience and the psychology of what’s going on behind the scenes, and so a lot of times there’s these effects that are going on that aren’t apparent.  Taking advantage of cognitive biases that people don’t realize that they have, and doing it in a way that drives up conversions tremendously. 30,000 foot view: the way that this funnel works is, you send traffic from any number of sources, whether it’s PPC, SEO, video traffic, Facebook, whatever.  Traffic goes to a landing page.  On the landing page is a short video.  The short video has a button below it.  The video sells people on why they should take the survey.  Now, it’s not positioned as a survey.  That’s the biggest mistake that people make.  “Take the survey, and I’ll send you to the right sales page,” or whatever.  It’s not positioned as a survey, and we’ll get back to that in just a moment, but I just want to take the 30,000 foot view. After they click on that button to take the survey, the survey typically culminates in an opt-in form: name, e-mail.  From there, the survey does a couple different things.  Number one, it funnels people into one of several different, typically video, sales letters.  So that’s number one.  Now, it depends on how they answer the survey, what responses that they give, and they’re sent to either … If there’s just one product that’s being sold, different marketing angles for that one product, or if it’s a situation where you have dozens of products on the shelf, so to speak, it’ll funnel people into the best match product based on how they answer the series of survey questions. In addition to that, from there, all the responses that people take in the survey are incorporated into the e-mail follow-ups.  Not only are people sent to potentially different autoresponder sequences based on the results of the survey, the autoresponders are also customized.  We all know the merge field, you know, “Dear First Name,” but what we do is we create merge fields for every single question that people answer.   A very basic one, a question in the survey might be, “Are you a man or a woman?”  The reason why I ask is because men and women suffer from different … Take weight loss.  Different weight loss challenges.  We would then capture that data in a merge field and then in the e-mail follow-ups, the person who says that they’re a man, the e-mails are customized, and the e-mail might say something like this: “You know what’s interesting about guys who are looking to lose weight and guys specifically, is that they tend to have a very unique challenge.”   That same e-mail could be read, “You know what’s interesting about women who are looking to lose weight and women specifically, is that women are looking to solve a very unique challenge.”  So the effect – and that’s just a very basic example, you can imagine taking that to the nth degree across a number of different questions – but the net effect is that when people go through that AR sequence, they say, “Holy crap, this is squarely, exactly for me.” Nobody does this.  Nobody takes this level of customization and tailoring to the same extremes that we do, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s so effective.  It’s so refreshing for people to have a customized response rather than a generic, one-size-fits-all answer marketing approach, which is what 99% of businesses do.   There are some other things that we do with one-click upsell paths and re-marketing and buyer e-mail sequences, but at a 30,000-foot view level, that is what the survey final is, in a nutshell. John:Okay.  Is it something that … I think I could put this together.  You could do this for, say, AWeber, fairly straightforward.  It would be simple to do with something like AWeber, but you’d have to be good at, say, the tech side of things, knowing how to set up … [URL variables 00:19:20] and filling those hidden fields with the data.  But is this something that, say, an average person who’s probably not so techy but they’ve got some e-mail software like AWeber or Infusionsoft or this kind of thing … It sounds cool.  It sounds awesome.  But how hard is it for someone to actually set up and then actually get the e-mails written so they make sense no matter what someone answers in the survey? Ryan:Right.  That’s a good question.  Again, the main thing that I do is I implement this for very large companies.  The whole thing.  In that process, my partner and I found that there was no software in the market that did exactly what we needed it to do, so we developed a piece of software that’s called surveyfunnel.io.  We just recently made it available to the public.  That’s the software that we use to create that survey that pops up that I describe that captures all that merge field data and sends people into the best match video sales letter page and funnels them into one of several autoresponder sequences or a single autoresponder sequence that uses merge fields to give the appearance of customization. That software ties into whatever e-mail service provider that you use, so it ties into AWeber, it ties into Infusionsoft, Constant Contact, [Entreport 00:20:38], whatever you use, the software integrates with that.  That’s the software that allows you to create those surveys that I’ve described, capture the merge data, send that data to the appropriate hidden fields in AWeber, and then have the ability to use the merge fields.  Technically, it’s actually not that difficult to do if you have access and use that software, and that software, by the way, it’s a SASS program.  What that means is, it’s not a WordPress plug-in.  It’s platform-agnostic so it doesn’t really matter what technology you use to build your website, whether it’s WordPress or Joomla! or just straight HTML.   Literally, you just do all the setup work in the dashboard and then you just plug a line of JavaScript in your website where you want the survey to pop up and, like I said, the path that we use is, we use just a video to sell people on why they should take the survey.  Typically there’s a button below the video.  When they click on the button, it pops up the survey and a light box and you go question by question by question and you fill it out. Technically, it’s not that difficult.  As far as thinking through all the possible permutations on how you might integrate the merge fields into your e-mail, well, that’s something that you can go as far or as not involved as you’d like, so at the bare minimum, you might want to make one very basic segmentation, like men and women.  If it’s appropriate.  If you are a business consultant, you might want to find out if someone is either a business owner or maybe another business consultant.  Do you own the business or do you help other businesses grow their revenue?  With that, you might use that to customize things. You do need to think it through.  You need to think through the different permutations.  One very basic example I’ll give you is, if you’re going to be using the gender thing when you, for example, set things up – and you don’t have to use our software, you could have something custom coded if you wanted, but our software just makes it easy – but in the software, for example, you would want to set up a gender singular merge field and a gender plural, so that we could say, “As a man, you probably ask yourself, why is it that I struggle with weight?  And the reason why is because men” – gender plural – “tend to have different metabolism and women, especially as they get older,” right?  You just flip that around.  You want to think through certain things like that, so gender singular and gender plural is a good example. The other thing that we haven’t talked about that I think is important when you do this is the psychology of why this works.  Why does his work better than just a squeeze page?  There are a couple things going on.  The first is the power of what I call micro-commitments.  Micro-commitments are basically asking your prospect to take infinitesimally small steps to move them towards the action that you want them to take, and it’s akin to when you’re in a relationship with someone.   Going straight from new visitor, landing page, to squeeze page is like … If it’s cold traffic, unendorsed traffic, where people don’t know who you are, it’s akin to meeting someone for the first time and maybe reaching in for a hug.  Some people might be cool with it, but it’s a little bit too much, right? Instead, the micro-commitment thing, instead of going straight from, “Hey, sign it, give me your name and e-mail, and I’ll give you this thing,” which, by the way, when people see that, you’re going to get a lot of fake e-mail addresses, bogus e-mail addresses, or someone’s third tier e-mail address, some Yahoo e-mail address or Hotmail e-mail address that they barely track, just to get the thing that they came there for.   But when you instead start with, “Before we get started, tell me a little bit about yourself.  Are you a man or a woman?  The reason why I ask is because I want to point you in touch with the best possible resource for you.”  Man, woman.  It’s an easy, low-threshold question to answer, so it doesn’t take a lot of brain power.  Man, woman is … Unless you’re being a smartass, you know the answer, right, so there’s basically zero thought that goes into it.  They don’t have to think about the response, and it builds what I call action-taking momentum. They click on that one little thing and it’s that first, dipping that toe in the pool, and it’s much easier to get things moving from there than that very high-threshold decision which engages that flight or fight response where people are saying, “Do I really want to opt in?” or, “Maybe I’m just going to get the hell out of here.”  This is the baby step that leads up to it.  The net result is that, A, your opt-in rate is going to be significantly higher, and B, you’re gathering all this extremely useful intelligence along the way and, if nothing else, just using the gender one as an example, think about what you can do from a segmentation standpoint when you’re doing broadcast offers. Perfect example.  If you operate in a health market and you just know your prospect’s gender coming in.  For men, you could do broadcast.  You could create a custom segment for just men and only broadcast to them an erectile dysfunction product or a low-T product, low testosterone.  Then for women, conversely, you could offer a perimenopause product or if you get a gender and age, you could focus on the women of childbearing age and do some sort of pregnancy or mom type products, and I’m just giving you very basic examples, but you can start to see how, really, the possibilities are endless when you start going down this path. John:It’s funny, because there’s that philosophy with squeeze pages or with any sort of conversion process that the easier you make it for someone to sign up or join, the more conversions you’re going to get.  But in a sense, what you’re proposing, it does make it easier in the sense of micro-commitments, but it’s almost like putting a barrier.  Instead of just … Some people would be like, “No, the best way to get someone to opt in is just give them the opt-in straightaway.”  If you give them the survey, they’re going to be like, “Well, I don’t want to do the survey,” and every time you add another step in that journey to the opt-in, you’re going to lose people.  But it sounds like that’s not actually the case. Ryan:It’s not the case for two reasons.  Number one is even if your opt-in rate is a little bit lower doing this – which, to be perfectly honest, and some markets, it is, it will be – I will take 10 opt-ins where I know age, gender, their hot buttons, the biggest objections they have, what their single biggest goal is in this particular space over 100 opt-ins where all I have is the e-mail address, because I can market so much more effectively knowing just a little bit of information about the prospect, so those 10 people, I might get five sales.  I might have a 50% conversion rate because I’m able to tie them into the absolute best match offer, but if I only have their e-mail address, it’s a finger in the wind exercise, and it’s also key if you ever want to scale. If you’re in an niche market and you’re only going after, for example, a keyword – I’m in Austin, Texas right now, so if you’re a plumber and you advertise on the keyword “how to fix a leaky toilet Austin Texas” or with a geo-targeting Austin, Texas, you can have a very targeted squeeze page.  “Discover how to fix a leaky toilet in just three simple steps.  Enter your name and e-mail here.”  That’s great.   But what if you advertise on the keyword “weight loss”?  Weight loss represents a million things under the sun.  I discovered this in one of my own businesses.  I have a six-figure business in the information product space in addition to the client work that I do and the business is rocketmemory.com and it’s a series of courses that teach people how to improve their memory.  It leverages my background in neuroscience.   But anyways, long story short, I was advertising on the keyword “improve memory” and I couldn’t make it work.  Could not make it work.  Just my lead cost, my cost per sale was so high, it just … The economics didn’t work.  When I started digging into the data, I started realizing the reason why is because that keyword represented a massive spectrum of people, everyone from the college-age student who is looking for memory tips to study for the test all the way through the 65-year-old man who’s concerned about mental decline and everything in between. It’s no wonder that you can’t make a keyword like that work when you have such a spectrum of people searching on that keyword.  What I realized is that if I just asked a few simple questions about who the person was and then tailored the sales message and sent them in the right direction, all of a sudden that traffic worked, and those were the highest-volume keywords in my market, improve memory, how to improve memory, memory improvement, which were too vague to know what was the rationale behind the search query. If you want to scale – and again, I’m in environments where I’m generating, in some markets, up to 6000 leads a day – you don’t generate 6000 leads a day on some niche keyword.  To do that, you are doing media buys, banner advertising, a lot of display advertising, and the search keyword advertising, the PPC advertising that you’re doing, the keywords phase, is on high-volume keywords.   To answer your question, is it adding more friction?  Even if it is, I’d rather have that data so I can market more effectively.  That’s the first thing.   The second thing is that – you brought up the point of, is it slowing down the process, putting friction in the sales process by putting these additional steps?  If you just say, “Hey, take my survey,” it will.  But what you need to do, the way I do it, is I find a way to present and position the survey as an opportunity for self discovery.  What I mean by that is – I never talk about specific client examples whenever I do interviews like this because, for competitive reasons, I don’t want to give the psychology and rationale behind it, but I’ll try to make one up right now. It would be, instead of saying, “Hey, take the survey,” it would be … Pick a market.  If it’s a market that I’m not in, we’ll come up with an example right on the fly.  Just pick any market that … John:Mobile phones. Ryan:Okay, mobile phones.  Most of the markets that I’m – not all of them –are information-based markets where – John:[inaudible 00:30:40] how to crack a mobile phone?  How to jailbreak it? Ryan:Perfect.  It’s not the best example, but we can do this.  It would be … Okay, this would be a little bit different angle than I normally take in most of the markets, but you could do something like this.  You could say, “Discover the number one reason why people who try to jailbreak their phone basically screw up their phone for life.”  Then you’d have a short video that basically sells people on the idea. “Hey, listen.  Do you realize that there are three common mistakes that people tend to make when they jailbreak their phone, and all three of these things will render your phone useless if you make them. But the problem is, because there are so many mobile phones out there – literally, there are thousands of models and hundreds of brands across the world that if you try to search for information online, it’s almost impossible to find your specific make, model, and year.  But the good news is, we’ve put together a simple little database that covers every mobile phone under the sun, and if you just take a moment now to click on the button below, tell us what’s your mobile phone brand, the year you purchased it, and the generation, we can send you directly to the specific jailbreak instructions for your particular phone as well as how to avoid those three simple mistakes that I meant.   “And by the way, these three mistakes are different – slightly – depending on the phone that you’re trying to jailbreak.  The only catch is, we haven’t decided how much longer we’re going to make this service available for free online, so go ahead and do this right now while you’re on this page and you’re still thinking about it.  Click on the button below, enter your information, and I’ll see you on the other side.” It’s not the best example, but you can see the way I worded it right there.  It’s not a survey, right?  It’s about getting some sort of end results and it just makes sense, and along the way, you could find out, shit, what their phone is, you could find out … You wouldn’t even need to really ask the question, but you could ask it, what their geolocation is if that was relevant to you as a marketer.  It would be a stretch to ask for gender, but you could ask for certain things like, “What’s the reason why you’re trying to jailbreak your phone?” and the rationale, you would say, the reason why is because there’s some subtle differences depending on what your goals are and we want to make sure that we put you in touch with the best possible guide to do this, and that’s just off the top of our head right now, just coming up with something. I’m sure we could come up with a better angle, but the point is, it’s all about making it … We came up with this right now, on the fly, and if you’re trying to jailbreak your phone … If I’m jailbreaking my phone, I’m sold.  I don’t want to wade through forums, and I’ve never tried to jailbreak my phone, but I don’t want to wade through forums and hundreds of pages of information.  I just want to find my phone right now, get the thing done, and move on with my life, so I feel like it’s a pretty compelling offer.  That’s just one example, but you can hopefully see when you do this sort of approach why it’s potentially so effective. John:Absolutely.  I’m really seeing it.  Absolutely.  We’re right on time here, Ryan, but before we go, I know you mentioned the software a couple times, so let’s talk about … If people want to learn more about you or about the software, where should they go? Ryan:A couple different places.  If you just want the software itself, you can go to surveyfunnel.io.  That’s a site directly to the software.  I will say at the time of this interview, this is my own internal software that I use in my company for our high-level implementations.  We literally within the last couple months just released it to the general public and we had doubts if we wanted to do that because it’s kind of like our secret sauce, so if you go to that page, you’re not going to find a real fancy, slick sales message or sales letter or anything like that.  You may just see a simple form to opt in to find out about the software itself, so that’s the first thing. If you’re interested in learning the nuts and bolts and details behind how to create one of these funnels from end-to-end, I do periodically teach this at a site called surveyfunnelformula.com.  It’s a paid program in which I take people through my six-week process of building one of these funnels from end-to-end.   The reason why I put together this program, to be perfectly honest, was I never intended on making it for sale to the public, but when I expanded my team earlier this year, I brought on a couple different team members and I wanted them to understand the process so they could take off a lot of the work that was on my desk, so what I did is I actually created a real-live funnel from beginning to end and I had them go through the whole process with me, take notes so they could then replicate it, and then we put in our internal company website and periodically I let people in and go through that training as well.  That’s if you want to learn how to do the whole thing.  Both of those are paid software, paid programs. If people would just like to get some of my free stuff, I put out a daily marketing e-mail where I talk about some of the tests that I do and the markets that I’m in and the insights that I’ve picked up and it’s fun, it’s like this interview, it’s not super formal or anything like that.  It’s just a cool little thing, and if you want to sign up for that, you can go to thefunnelspecialist.com and then you’ll see a nice little form on the right hand side to sign up for that free daily marketing tip.  Those are probably the three best ways to learn more about what I do and to get some good stuff. John:Cool.  I have links to those other sites on the show notes at themcmethod.com.  Ryan, thanks for coming on. Ryan:This was awesome, man.  Really, really happy to do this, and look forward to chatting again sometime soon, my friend. The post Episode #70 – Ryan Levesque on His Highly Profitable and Unique Survey Funnel Formula appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Matt Paulson is a serial entrepreneur and author who KNOWS how to create business. In today’s world of online marketing, entrepreneurs are constantly chasing the newest shiny object in sight. This alone is enough to stifle progress, Even for the most experienced. Forget about the latest and greatest tips. Matt is here to tell you exactly what you need to avoid in order to get your ideas up off the ground and running– The right way. Follow his tips… And you’ll be sure to smash your goals to smithereens. Take it from Matt – He’s currently got three wildly successful businesses. One of these alone creates a daily newsletter… …reaching 97 THOUSAND readers – That’s over 2.5 million page views per month. Insane. In today’s episode, Matt shares seven all-too-common mistakes that most entrepreneurs make while creating their first businesses. These 7 DEADLY BUSINESS SINS will break you in half. So address them properly, and you’ll find yourself just where you want to be.   In this episode, you’ll discover: how to manufacture your own destiny no matter what opportunity lies before you (make money in any niche) the master key to building solid business momentum even before your product or service is created (get that ball rolling… ASAP) how to avoid the scary result of a product that pleases no one (keep only your target avatar in mind) how to stay on top of your game while still working a full-time job (commit to this action-step and you will cross that finish line a winner) the tried and true technique to creating a perfect problem solving product or service (your solution in mind might not be the solution in theirs) how to not stifle your own progress before you even get started (screw the pat on the back… blaze your own path) the must-have mindset that all the richest entrepreneurs in the world have (don’t be a dabbler)   Mentioned: 40 Rules For Internet Business Success Matt’s Twitter MattPaulson.com Perry Marshall Dynamite Circle Rob Walling Tim Conley GoGo Photo Contest Lightning Releases Analyst Ratings Network Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. It’s time for episode 69 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you get nitty-gritty techniques, tips and strategies to make more money with email marketing and sales funnels in your business. Today, I’ll be talking to Matt Paulson. Matt’s a buddy of mine. I met him or know him through a forum called the Dynamite Circle. He is real smart. He’s real switched on. He’s got a great business. Today we’re going to talk about The Seven Deadly Sins of First Time Entrepreneurship. This is something that a lot of people don’t talk about especially online because often everyone is chasing the latest and greatest tip and strategy or magic bullet system. We don’t have to talk too much about entrepreneurship at least in the internet marketing field. That’s what’s great about Matt. We’re going to talk about the myth of hard work. Do you really need to work hard or maybe you’re not working hard enough? Another issue which could only be described as being a bitch. He will talk more about that in just a second. The other thing worth mentioning is whether you should be a people pleaser or not because in business we exist to serve the market but you might go a little bit too far with that. We’re going to talk about people pleasing in this episode too. To get the short notes for this episode of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast go to the McMethod.com/69. This week’s McMasters Insight of the Week is this; email marketing is a piece of the overall puzzle. What I mean by that, we’ve been talking about this on some of the training webinars Insight McMasters. McMasters is the private training community I’ve got for people who want to learn more about email marketing and sales funnels and make more money in their business. There’s a forum in webinars. One of the parts of the membership is these training webinars. One thing that we’ve been going through lately is this issue of email marketing. It’s a piece of the overall puzzle. It’s not the whole app, it’s not the puzzle. Some people come in and they think, “I’m going to use an Autoresponder and that’s going to totally change my business.” Unfortunately it just doesn’t work like that. In email marketing, your autoresponder is a piece of the overall sales funnel and the overall marketing strategy for your products for your company. When you understand that, then you start to look at, “Maybe my weak point is not the autoresponder. Maybe I need a better sales page or maybe I need better traffic. Maybe I need to be split testing.” There’s a range of different directions you can go in. Perry Marshall talks about this in 80/20 sales and marketing. That’s the insight of this week is don’t focus on email marketing to the exclusion of everything else. Don’t treat email marketing like it’s a magic bullet. Sometimes it can be portrayed that way. It’s not. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s a piece in the overall puzzle. You need to treat it that way and think, “Is it good to divert your resources in that area or should you be doing something else?” That’s a very important question to ask. I’ve got one review this week. This one is from Matthew D. P. Matthew says, five stars, he says, “The absolute best way to learn email marketing. I’ve been listening to John’s podcast from episode one. John has brought on some of the best email marketers on to the show that drops knowledge bombs on a regular basis. Keep up the good work.” Just a quick little review from Matthew. Thanks for the review Matthew. I love getting these. If you want to leave a review go to iTunes. It’s a bit of a clunky interface, go to the store. You can search for the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast. If you just search for McMethod, you might be able to find it too. Leave me your review. Tell me what you think about the show. That’s it. Let’s get into today’s interview with Matt Paulson on The Seven Deadly Sins of First Time Entrepreneurship. It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Matt Paulson to talk about The Seven Deadly Sins of First Time Entrepreneurship. I met Matt on the forum for people who work online and do a bit of traveling and all that stuff. This is the first time we’ve spoken. He sent me an email out of the blue a couple of days ago or a week ago telling that he’s writing a new book, 40 different things or 40 cool rules in his book which we’ll talk about in a bit. I said, “Why don’t we get on the podcast and we’ll talk about some of these rules?” Matt’s had some really good success online, especially with email marketing but also just with business in general. He’s just really switched on. I thought get him on; find out what his thoughts are on all this stuff. It’s going to be a little bit about email but also more the general business stuff which whether you’re new to the game or whether you’ve been doing it for a while it can be really, really helpful to either revisit this stuff if you’ve already heard it before or knuckle down. This is fundamental stuff that’s really, really important. It does help at any time to brush up on them. We’ll get into it, The Seven Deadly Sins of First Time Entrepreneurship. Matt, how are you doing? Matt:Good. How are you? Thanks for having me on. John:Good man, good, really it’s good to have you on. It’s good to finally connect man. Matt:Yeah. It’s good to be on the show. Maybe I should take a moment just to introduce myself to your audience because I assume most of these people don’t know who I am. John:Go for it. Matt:I have three different businesses. The first is called Analyst Ratings Network. I publish a daily investment newsletter to 93,000 subscribers now. That ends up being several volumes of emails a month. I sell email ads against that. There’s a premium sponsorship. We’ve got maybe 2,000 people paying me 15 bucks a month for the continuity program or it’s basically a premium version of the email newsletter. Two other businesses, one is called GoGo Photo Contest, that business helps animal shelters and humane societies to raise money by offering a photo contest fundraiser. People can, humane societies can run a contest, people can vote. You pay a dollar for voting. At the end of the contest whoever wins gets some kind of price. Third business is called Lightning Releases. It’s a press release writing and distribution business. That business came about a couple of years ago because I was issuing some press releases for [inaudible 00:05:28] and some of these other guys that, for some stuff for Analyst Ratings Network. I was not very impressed with the results for what I was paying for. I figured you know what? I bet I can make a distribution network that’s as good for not nearly the price. So far we’re selling a couple hundred dollars a month. People must be agreeing with us. That’s the three businesses I’m running right now. I’m also obviously in the process of writing a book called 40 Rules for Internet Business Success. We could talk about more a little bit later. John:Cool. What I like about what you’re up to is it’s not your typical internet marketing thing with information product and a bit of paid traffic or something like that. You’ve got your own thing going on which at least in my network I don’t really know many people doing it the way you’re doing it which is quite interesting. Matt:Yeah. What a lot of people do is as, if you’re teaching internet marketing to people you need to make money teaching internet marketing to people. I’ve already got a business that generates a crap ton of cash. I can sell a book for $8 and not really worry about whether or not I get people paying me 1,200 bucks for some kind of webinar. In fact I’ve already got the money. It’s more about getting the information out there and building the personal brand. It’s hopefully a lot of value for the 8, 10 bucks the book is going to cost in a month or so. John:Cool. Let’s get into The Seven Deadly Sins of First Time Entrepreneurship. You mentioned a few of them before we hit record. I’m excited to dig in. Let’s get into it. What’s number one? Matt:Sure. The first deadly sin is not doing enough work to get your business of the ground. I see a lot of people, I get a lot of people that say, “Hey Matt, can I buy you lunch? I want to ask you about your business. I’m thinking about starting one.” They’ll tell me what they want to do and that they will be excited. They’re getting started. I’d see them again two or three months later and then they’ve done maybe 10 or 20 hours of work in that three month period. If you’re going to start a business, you need to be working on it. Assuming you have a full-time job for 40 hours a week, you need to be spending another 15 or 20 hours a week working on that business until you launch. It’s going to be a lot of work. You have to really put a deadline out there and say, “I’m going to launch on this date regardless of what it takes to have happen to do that.” Because if you don’t have a deadline for a launch date, it’s easy just to push it off and push it off and work slowly. You tend to never get it done. If you get it done it’s way beyond the point where it’s going to be valuable to anybody. John:Right. The challenge, Dan mentions this; we both know Dan on Tropical MBA. He mentions this where a lot of people get into the internet game because they want to be able to make money, get that passive income, make a lot of money without doing much work. Yeah it’s possible. It’s a very real thing and plenty of people are doing it right now. That’s not how it starts. It’s that if you want to get to that point, part of the journey is you’re going to get through that valley of death where you are working your ass off because there’s so much you have to, not only just to get stuff done, there’s just so much you have to learn in terms of basic skills and also mindset shifts that you have to make to be the person that makes passive income. Matt:Absolutely. I’ve got business where I don’t do much work on a daily basis. Starting them up, there was a lot of work to make that happen. You think about people like Tim Phares and how he had supplements business that he supposedly worked on a handful of hours a week. You know that he was working a whole bunch just to get to that point so he could do that for a few months to make it a big thing. John:Yeah. Matt:The true passive income business just doesn’t exist. Somebody is doing work somewhere whether it’s you or a virtual assistant you hire or a software that you’ve set up, work is going to be happening. You really can’t avoid it. John:It’s almost like the irony of it is like we all know about this. We got to work hard. They want to skip the working hard bit. If you skip that, you don’t really have … You’re never going to get the business. Matt:Yeah. Let’s move on to mistake number two. John:Let’s do it. Matt:That’s worrying about problems before they’re actually problems. I see some people that are starting businesses. They come up with these huge responses to things that aren’t going to be issues for a year or two down the line. For example, let’s say you’re going to have a website. You think it’s going to get some traffic, hopefully a lot. You go out and you buy a dedicated server right away. That’s 250-300 bucks a month when really you could get away with the $5 a month Bluehost account or whatever the cheap option is, somewhat reliable. John:Yeah. Matt:You can always move down to that dedicated server later. You don’t need to get it from day one. You really have to think about what issues am I actually facing now and not what could possibly be an issue 18 months from now. That might mean you have some manual processes when you first get started and not everything is going to be automated. That’s okay. You should start automating and systematizing stuff when it really becomes a pain in the butt. Until it happens, there’s not really a good business reason to do that. John:That reminds me of Perry Marshall and his 80/20 Sales and Marketing. We had a bit of a podcast on it. This idea that any point in time, out of 10 things that you can focus on, there’s probably one, two maybe three that you really should actually focus on. Matt:Sure. John:I’ve noticed this with … I’m building right now it’s in the optimization stage, I’ve got ads running on Facebook to a sales funnel for some of my products. Before I started, it’s like I need a page shopping cart. I need some sort of advanced email software. I need this. I need that. When I stepped back and thought, “What do I actually have to do? What’s the real problem here?” The real problem is I didn’t need a shopping cart. I can just use PayPal for now. PayPal is not perfect but it will do the job. I don’t need the advanced email thing, I’ve already got AWeb. AWeb once again it’s not going to do the advance stuff but it will do the job for right now, a bunch of things like that. By eliminating all these extra stuff that I didn’t really need to do, it’s not really a problem yet, it makes me feel maybe a little bit less, I don’t know, it’s that don’t rush when you go out and buy a dedicated server or say a nice shopping cart or something like that. You eliminate all that and then you can just focus on really what needs to happen. It’s like building, usually what needs to happen is building a sales funnel, figuring out how you’re going to really connect your product with the market place and sell it. This thinking I find for me it’s been pivotal in helping me to grow the business. Matt:I totally agree. When you try to do some of those fancy things too early, you may end up not solving the problem in the right way. The term is premature optimization of your business. I need this big, dedicated window server when actually all I need is a Linux server. I have to go get another server down the line anyway so I didn’t really save myself any time. You think that the autoresponder experience looks like this or the email marketing funnel looks like this but then later on when you have a whole bunch of people in it, you find out that doesn’t really work. You didn’t set it up right to begin with because you didn’t really know what you were doing yet. I totally agree that you are on the right track to just do enough work to kill whatever you’re trying to kill ahead of time. Let’s go on to mistake number three. John:Okay. Matt:That’s not talking to your customers when you’re doing product development. Some people don’t talk to their customers when they’re building their product because they already understand what problem that you’re trying to solve or what your customers are thinking. I don’t think you can rely on that. When you talk to customers they tend to throw wrenches into your thoughts processes. They give you more work to do. It’s really easy to ignore those things. It’s just not the right way to do it because your vision to solve a problem might not be the same as your customers. You just won’t see the problem the same way your customer sees it. What you think is a solution might not actually be the solution. Maybe they have a solution that’s better than what you had thought. You won’t know that if you don’t talk to them. John:Yeah. This is huge whether it’s customers or prospects when I tell people a lot that you got to have empathy, you got to do surveys and if you can get on the phone with them. This is a good issue. Before you create even products that marketing aside that yeah you need to talk to them. Often I find the big challenge is really finding out what’s the real problem that you’re trying to solve. It’s easy enough to go in and be like, “I’m going to solve this problem.” Matt:Sure. John:What you really want to do is talk to the customer, talk to the prospect, to find out what’s the actual problem that he’s trying to solve, things like why does he want to solve it? Because if you come out guns blazing, I’m trying to give an example like with email copywriting for example, I might have a product on how to run an autoresponder, what people might want to … Because I thought people want to learn how to write emails. Maybe what people need and want is to be a copywriter. Then they can use that as part of the autoresponder thing or for sales letters or something like that. People seem to, they like to cause, this isn’t actually a problem. If it was, maybe people don’t actually care about autoresponders. They just want to know how to write stuff that converts and sell stuff in which case I’d be better off creating a different product with the more focus on that. I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t spoken to the customers. Matt:Yeah or maybe they don’t even want to learn how to write autoresponders they just want you to write one for them. John:Yeah exactly. Matt:Yeah. This really goes back to understanding your market while you’re building your product. I see this a lot with software people that they want to build the next great software as a service product or some app. They think they know exactly how it’s going to work. They end up doing a bunch of work. It turns out that they built the wrong tool to solve the problem. John:Yeah. I’ve seen that happen a lot. Let’s do number four. Matt:Yeah. That’s waiting for permission. People that are first time entrepreneurs, they tend to think that they need to get an endorsement from somebody whether that’s a trusted friend or a family member that says, “Yeah you can do this.” Or some kind of person that they look up to, often this ends up being people like Pat Flynn and John Lee Dumas. It’s like you might … I’ve actually heard somebody say like, “I emailed Pat Flynn to ask him if my business idea was good. He never got back to me.” It’s like, “Really, that’s the thing that’s going to stop you from starting your business? You’re telling it’s Pat Flynn’s fault that your business never got off the ground, it’s not your fault?” Yeah, you don’t need anyone’s permission to start a business. You just can’t wait on anyone else. You don’t need to ask permission. You need to brace your path and really move forward and not expect to get a pat on the back from some big name. A pat on the back is going to be five years down the line when you’ve got a million dollar business. They’ll say, “Hey, good job.” John:Yeah. There’s an element here where people when they want the permission. It’s when people start there’s a huge fear of failure, failure at something, to be avoided and that if you can get say a green light from Pat Flynn or a mentor or a friend, maybe that’s going to mean your business is going to be successful. If they say no, you’re probably going for a world of hurt and pain. You’re not going to make any money. Matt:Yeah. Those people can be wrong too. They don’t always know everything. John:I can say they almost always are wrong. It’s not even really about what they say, if you have the determination, grit and persistence that you’re going to go out there, you’re going to fail that’s just part for the course. If you’re the sort of person that is just going to go through that and be like, “I’m going to figure this out. I don’t care what it takes. I’m going to figure it out.” There’s no way you can lose. You might die, get hit by a bus. Assuming that doesn’t happen, sooner or later you’re going to be successful because it’s more about having that attitude. It’s not about the people that tell you, “Yeah you can go and do it, here’s permission.” Matt:No, if you look at like you start with doing with internet business master guys and Pat Flynn did his own thing without really asking for permission from them and all of a sudden he’s bigger than they are and then John Lee Dumas, he’s Pat Flynn doing podcast, all of a sudden he’s bigger than Pat Flynn. You shouldn’t see the person you’re looking up to as somebody to copy and to do exactly what they’re doing it’s like, “Where is he missing a mark? How can I be 10 times better than he is or she is?” Granted, half the stuff you’re going to do isn’t going to work. I’ve got a list of failed business ideas a mile along. That’s part of the process, 80% of the crap you’re going to do is never going to work. That’s always part of the process but 20% will and you can maximize on that and really make it happen. John:That reminds me of another one. I don’t know if this is going to be rules. It’s worth bringing up is the issue of focus. I watched the video a while back of the editor of the entrepreneur magazine. It was about the habits of super achievers and productivity happens, something like that. This whole presentation, an hour and a half boiled down really just saying, “The best guy, richest guys in the world, Richard Branson, billionaires, what these guys do to be so successful, they just focus. They’ve got one thing on their, one main strategic goal right now and that’s the only stuff they will do or except when [inaudible 00:17:54] it’s interviews or books to write or whatever it happens to be has to be related to that objective. If it’s not related, it is pure [inaudible 00:17:59] they’re 100% focused on that objective. If you look at most people when they first start getting into business, they want to go. They check and especially if it’s online and I’d be like, “I want to do some ecommerce.” When that doesn’t take off, I go, “I want to go do some affiliate marketing. I’m going to go create maybe an eBook. I’m going to do a blog over here.” They’re running in 10 directions at one or even like five, four or five directions at once. What you need is one direction. Once you get that knuckle done, you need like, like within my business right now I feel like I can get in a bunch of one focus. I could go and do client work, I could go and do paid stuff, I could go and do consulting, there’s a bunch of different directions. I know that I need to focus on just one at a time if I’m going to make any progress. Matt:Sure. That is one of the sins, Tim Conley did a great job of naming that a Shiny Object Syndrome. It’s like, you’re working on something and it’s like, “Ooh there’s a shiny object over there. I want to go work on that.” A month later you’ve got five half inch of finished projects. Then there’s nothing done and you’re always, “We’re going to do a bigger, better deal.” You never actually launch a product. You’re not really getting anywhere. You’re not really able to learn from the experience that you have and getting one thing done. You’re doing the same work five times you’re not really seeing any results. You don’t really know what you did right or what you did wrong. John:Yeah. I had that happen, it was October last year, I went to DC Bangkok, the conference in Bangkok. I came back. I’ve been working for a few months on the supplement business with a guy here in Thailand and realized that the whole reason I got into that was because that was where I was going to make a whole ton of money and I cut back. It stopped feeling right and all of a sudden I realized that I kept looking for stuff that I thought was going to make me a millionaire, whether it was ecommerce or supplements or even marketing and stuff, I kept looking for the best thing that’s going to make it. Then I stopped and thought, “Hang on, if I could just focus on this email marketing business, if that’s all I did, could it be a huge business?” I’m like, “Yeah it probably could be.” It’s like, “Why even worry about all that other stuff? Because every time I got to get back to the beginning and learn a whole new set of skills and marketing and all that stuff. Why don’t just focus 100% on this and see where I can take it?” That was October last year and things are better than ever now. Matt:I totally agree. Are you on your path to becoming a millionaire yet? John:I’m on the path. I’m not a millionaire. Matt:I actually became a millionaire earlier this year. It was mostly because I focused on one thing and I really maximized it, Analyst Ratings Network, it gets money from display ads, from email subscriptions, from email ads and all that stuff. I just focused on it for basically three years straight and didn’t really do all that much else and three years later I’ve got close to 100,000 subscribers just by focusing on that one thing. John:Yeah that’s cool. I remember reading part of that story. I think you posted it on the DC brag thread. Matt:Yeah. I love that thread. John:This thread for the listener, this is a thread inside the DC, the Dynamite Circle, it’s a paid private forum thing. There’s [inaudible 00:20:54] someone called the bragging threads, anyone who makes a lot of money or has some sort of big win in their business posts a picture of … One guy posted a picture of his tax invoice for $2 million? Matt:Yeah, a $7 million tax bill. John:It’s just great little motivation. Back on the focusing, I love hearing those stories because it’s like it’s on the right track. If you’re listening to this and you’ve got five projects going on, maybe you’ve only got one and you’re just focused down on it, this is your reminder that you need to just stay focused on that for another couple of years. It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re selling chicken coops or nail polish remover, I don’t know how big the markets are in tiny, tiny little market and the market size is not going to support your million dollar dream, maybe you need a new business. For most people they just need to focus, you can make a lot of money in some tiny market. Matt:We spend enough time to realize you know what? This is a big opportunity. I’ve got the right market. I see customers are in contact. These are all the issues, whatever method. I see they have a problem. I think I can solve it. Once you have those bases down, when you spot it you say, “All right, I’m going to look forward. I’m not going to get distracted by looking at the side. This is the one thing I’m going to do. I’m going to do it until it’s done before I look at something else.” John:Yeah. Something that I found that really made it click for me was it’s scary when I was like I just want to focus on this one thing. I hadn’t really done it. Once I finally committed myself just to this business, it changed things. It’s like something shifted in my head and all of a sudden it became less about trying to find that opportunistic mindset which is very typical of a new entrepreneur where you’re always chasing another opportunity. Really the secret of making a lot of money is not about finding the best opportunity. That’s what people I guess rookies think it’s about. It’s not about the opportunity, it’s about what can you make off … This sounds so cheesy but what can you make of the opportunity? You could take anything. There’s people making a shit-ton of money in so many different areas online that you could do whether it’s ecommerce or affiliates or what you’re doing or what I’m doing, you could make a ton of money in any of those areas but you’re not going to make money in any of them unless you just focus on one of them. Matt:Yeah. It’s really a matter of execution. There are a lot of great opportunities out there. It’s like which one are you going to pick and actually do something about it. Once you’re doing it a while, opportunities that are related just show up out of the woodwork. I had a company email me six months ago saying, “Hey, can I sell ads to your email list?” I said, “What are the numbers?” They said the CPMs tend to be anywhere from 50 to $100 CPMs and I get to keep 70% of that.” It’s like, “Let me go think; 90,000 people times 50 bucks, that’s 4500 bucks every time they want to send an email.” It’s like, “Sign me up for that.” That opportunity showed up at my door. It’s not something … I didn’t go looking for new tangential opportunities right away. John:It’s interesting how that whole [inaudible 00:23:46]. I’ve had that happen with the podcast which it’s showed up on someone’s newsfeed on Facebook. Some guy who is probably a big marketer. He’s a much bigger guy than I am. I feel like I’m just a little guy. Then I’ll get an email from him just saying, “I was just listening to this episode, great work. We need to talk about doing some sort of joint venture promotion thing.” It’s just crazy, just these little doors start opening. You’d never get to that stage if you didn’t just stick with it and focus on something. Matt:Yeah. The best opportunities will show up on your door once you have some momentum going. Let’s go back to the seven deadly sins. We’re one number six now. John:Yeah. Matt:We’ve already talked about this a little bit. It’s building your product or services without doing any marketing up front. I see this a lot with people that write software. I’m a developer by trade. I have some friends that have made pieces of software. I had a guy I talked to last week; he built a big piece of time tracking software. He spent 300 hours on it. He never did any marketing up front. He put a little website up. Obviously he didn’t sell a single one. When you’re building your product it’s really, it matters how big of an email list can I build while I’m doing that? How can I find my target audience? How can I get them on the list? How can I reach them easily? Can I reach them cost effectively whether that’s through by an email list or Twitter or Facebook or whatever, your social media marketing or a blog or who knows what? What’s the biggest email list that you can possibly build while building the product? John:Yeah. This email list thing, we should do a podcast on this sometime. I’ve spoken to friends here in Thailand where maybe they’ve got a couple of clients but they want to fire one or a couple of them. They need to make money. I’m like if you had an email list. I’m usually like, “Why don’t you send the email to your list, you probably got a blog, send them an email and say you’re available [via 00:25:39], here’s the offer, here is the cost.” Most of these people don’t have an email list. I use my email list for so many different things, surveys or if someone wants to buy products or buy services or just ask for help sometimes. If I need guests for the podcast whatever it is. If you’re starting a new product, it’s absolutely perfect. If you have an email list, you can do more than just sell it to them. You can ask them to reply on the email. You can see if any of them would jump on Skype with you. You can say open it up for Beta test as in give them an inside look into the program and really build it with them because that’s really where the market is going to come from too. That’s marketing in itself. As you talk to them you’re going to find out what the key problems are, which then once you’re done and you really start marketing heavy, that’s going to then flow into all the marketing outside of that. That’s going to be your headline and your copywriting and your emails and all that stuff. Matt:Yeah that reminds me of Perry Marshall’s 80/20 Sales and Marketing book that just came out. He says that, “You should never ever make a quote call. You should always have … Stroking the fires and finding a way to make people raise their hands whether that’s through an email list or some kind of lead forum that you have if you’re just trying to find people out of blue which is not a winning game plane, it’s what can you give them so that they all raise their hand and say, “Hey, I’m a warm read” so to speak. John:Yeah I’m interested in say time tracking or financial stuff or email marketing, yeah okay. Matt:Let’s move on to number seven, it’s the final deadly sin. That’s trying to build a product for everyone. If you try to build a product for everybody, you end up building a product that doesn’t really solve anybody’s problems. My investment newsletter business is primary geared towards men that are aged 40 to 70, have some money and pick their own stocks that are in US or Canada. If I try to make that for them and also for 30 year old single moms that have no money, it’s not going to end up solving the problem for the people that are willing to give me money for it. John:Yeah. Matt:In reality you or I or anybody that’s listening to this podcast are probably not the Coca Cola Company. We just don’t have the capability of creating a product that’s literally for everyone. Coke isn’t for everybody, people that are diabetic or health conscious don’t drink it. If the largest brand in the world doesn’t even try to build a product for everyone. John:Yeah. There’s this illusion or this myth that if you help everyone you can make more money. From a marketing perspective or just from, business it’s really just solving problems, finding problems that you can solve. You can’t solve, if you’re trying to solve two problems at once, you dilute your effectiveness. It’s less that size of the market by trying to get more people in and really being the best, one of the best people in that industry at solving whatever the problem is. In your case, these guys come to you for the financial advice, these 40 to 70 year old men who want to invest in America or Canada. If you started talking about what single moms who don’t have much money or had a little bit of money or whatever, what they want to invest in as well, all of a sudden you’d be diluting the oomph or that power, the problem solving power of that newsletter. That’s the real problem. It’s not the size of the market that really dictates, that’s part of what’s going to make up how much money you make. Really it’s about how well you’re able to solve the problem. Matt:Yeah. Certainly there are some markets that are too smart to make a lot of money off of. If you have 10,000 possible customers, that’s big enough of a market to do something. The common piece of advice is to niche down until it hurts. I’m not just marketing to men and marketing to men that have money that are of this age or that live in this place. If I niched down too much more than that, then I’m going to be at a point where it’s hard to reach my potential customers. It’s hard to build a product that I can charge enough to get enough people to sign up for it. If you can target it down pretty well, not be crazy about it, you’re going to have a big enough audience to sell something to. John:Right. You can have a lot of fun with it. When we were talking before we hit record here about this podcast, it’s called the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast. I talk a lot about email marketing with the different guests. The interesting thing that I’ve realized as I’ve done it is that I can talk about anything that’s going to help the people who listen to it. I know the people who listen to it obviously they’re doing some email marketing or about to or trying to. There’s a lot of people who are listening to this who probably haven’t done anything yet. They’re interested enough to keep listening. This will act as a motivation for them to do it. There’s people who they’ve already got business, they’ve already got problems, they’re entrepreneurs at some stage in the journey. That means that I can talk about email marketing or we can talk about anything across the board that’s going to matter to these people. Even when you say niching down until it hurts is cool. It also still gives you a lot of breath in terms of what you can talk about and what you can create. Matt:Yeah. Those are the seven deadly sins. To go over them quickly; number one is not doing enough to get your business off the ground. Number two is worrying about problems before there are problems. Number three is not talking to customer. Number four is waiting for permission. Number five is shiny object syndrome. Number six is building your product without marketing it. Number seven is trying to build a product for everybody. John:Cool. I like it, seven deadly sins. You mentioned that you’ve got an email marketing quick tip. Matt:I do have a quick tip. I heard this on the startups for the rest of this podcast this morning. Apparently on Twitter now, you can create an opt-in where you can actually get somebody’s email address with one click. Twitter has these cards that are add-ons for promoted tweets. You can promote a tweet. You can say, “I want to show this promoted tweet to all of my competitors followers or people that are interested in say in my case investing in stocks and options and those things.” Then underneath the tweet there’s a card. It’s got the 600 by 150 banner it. Underneath that there’s a call to action button. Mine just says, “Subscribe now free.” If somebody clicks that button, Twitter will give you their email address just by them clicking on that one thing. I can actually get people to sign up for my newsletter now just by having them click one button and a tweet that they see that’s now showing now to all my competitors followers. That’s really cool. I haven’t been doing this very long. From what I can tell the cost is pretty damn cheap, under a dollar per follower per email address. John:They click the link and then they’re signed up or do they need to click the link go to a page and then the email address is already in the form and they just need to click sign up again. Matt:No. It’s just one click. After they click it, Twitter will do a behind the scenes HTTP get to whatever marketing automation software you’re using to give them your email address and then you can put them in whatever funnel that you want to. John:Interesting. Matt:I’m really bullish about it. It’s Rob Walling on his product Drip. They wrote a big post on it today. It was a guest post but it’s, if you go to blog.getjob.com you can check it out and see how to guide and you could get that set up. John:Interesting. I’ll go check that out, that’s cool. Matt:Yeah. John:Before we wrap up, it’s right on time; give us a bit more information about this book that you’re writing and when it’s coming out and all that stuff. Matt:Sure. The book title is 40 Rules for Internet Business Success. It’s basically all the lessons that I’ve learned building my businesses during the last seven, eight years so that you can avoid many of the mistakes that I made and build your business faster. If you want more information about the book, it’s coming out on July 21st. After that date go to the domain 40rulesbook.com. You’ll get sent to Amazon to get the book. If you just want to get more information about the book, you can follow me on Twitter. My ID is @MatthewDP or you can go to my website. I have an email list there that you can sign up and get some stuff too. It’s mattpaulson.com, Paulson is P-A-U-L-S-O-N. John:Cool. We’ll have all that in the short notes at the McMethod.com. By the time this podcast goes live, the book will be live as well. You’ll probably be able to go straight to 40rulesbook.com. Matt:40rulesbook.com. John:I just went to it now actually it’s taken to your blog post about writing a book. Matt:Yeah. I will get that changed. John:Interesting cool. All right Matt, it’s been really cool to have you on. Thanks for coming. Matt:Yup. Thanks for having me John. The post Episode #69 – Matt Paulson on The Seven Deadly Sins Of First Time Entrepreneurship appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Justin Brooke’s middle name is paid traffic. So learn it RIGHT from the start, Or change your game-plan now, Because Mr. Brooke has the magic key to your success… He’s rubbed elbows with POWERFUL influencers – …Russell Brunson and Rich Shefren among others. And he’s got this paid traffic stuff dialed down. Justin ramped up his first biz from $2 per day to a six figure company – … in ONE year. How does he do it? Brunson and Shefren’s MASSIVE libraries played their part. But his paid traffic success is heavily owed to ONE book: Breakthrough Advertising. And ONE idea especially… …The 5 Levels of Awareness. Justin is an awareness level extraordinaire. And if you want to know and grow YOUR paid traffic, You gotta be an awareness level genius as well. It’s NOT hard. But you MUST learn it to be successful. Until then, You’re leaving WAY TOO MUCH money on the table. Listen-in and learn how you too can implement this on your biz. Learn exactly what to write and when. Soon you’ll be laughing at how silly you were for writing that copy to that list. And once you learn that, You’ll also be laughing yourself to the bank… Like every day.   In this episode, you’ll discover: the main reason why your paid traffic isn’t cutting it (the magic key to your business success) how to turn an attention-grabbing story into a powerful pitch the unknown fact that copy is not just copy (it takes more strategy than you think) how to transform yourself into a Converting Incredible Hulk (traffic is cool, but converting is money) the profit-murdering mistake caused by your awesome copy (yes, even stellar copy needs this treatment) the process to finding your potential customer’s correct level of awareness (do not take this bullet point lightly) how to schedule your broadcasts the right way (broadcasts are stupid powerful if used correctly) the essential first step you must take before you set that pen to paper (don’t waste your time and money ever again) the traffic microwave technique to explode your list out of cold traffic (implement these actionable steps today) Mentioned: Justin Brooke IMScalable Russell Brunson Rich Shefren Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz Jay Abraham Joe Polish Chet Holmes Agora Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:Yeah, it’s John McIntyre here. The Autoresponder Guy, and it’s time for Episode 68 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast. Where you’ll discover one simple thing. How to make more money with every single email that you send. Today we’re talking to Justin Brooke from IMScalable.com. Now Justin, … The reason I got him on was to … I mentioned before that I’m in the process of diving in a [page writer 00:00:20] myself right now. Part of that journey has been, and I wanted to get some of these marketers out there that are big on paid traffic, and get them on the show obviously to ask them questions that will help me get better results, but also to help you because a lot of people come to me. They want to know about email marketing but they also want to know how do they get traffic? How do they get people to their site? What about paid traffic? How do they make paid traffic work? If you can make paid traffic work you can scale the crap out of it and make a thousand dollars a day right? It’s very exciting. I thought I’d get Justin on the show. Justin’s from IMScalable. I’ve actually hired Justin for a bit of coaching to help me with my own file. I’ve got him on here and we’re going to talk about paid traffic, right? He interned … Just to give you some background. He interned with Russell Brunson way back in the day, and he was hired by Rich Schefren at one point to do his paid traffic stuff.  These guys work with some of the biggest names in the business on paid traffic, and he knows what he’s talking about. Which is why I’ve hired him to coach me. Now anyway, today we have to talk about the difference in copy for cold traffic and warm traffic in [JB and Affiliates 00:01:09]. There’s … Someone [inaudible 00:01:11] copy is copy is copy. In a way it is, but at the same time it’s not because when good copy is good copy, but there still needs to be context there. That when you’re writing copy for cold traffic, that people have never heard from you before, you need to take a different approach then with warm traffic. We’re going to dive into what approach you need to take. We’re going to talk about the sales front. What’s the sales front you need to have and how to make it work. The five stages of awareness. That’s another key thing that totally blew my mind, and one of the stages of awareness is solution aware stage. This is someone whose … They’re overweight, they want to lose weight, and they know their solution’s out there; diets and pills, and all that sort of stuff. They’re in the solution aware stage. They’ve got a problem, they’re aware that there’s a solution.  Now there’s specific things that work better in different stages. One of the things we’ll talk about today is the best thing for people in the solution aware stage. What you need to do to get them to buy stuff. To get the show notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast, go to the McMethod.com/68.  Now this week’s McMasters Insight of the Week is up-sells. On a recent McMasters round table … It’s basically a webinar for the private community that I have McMasters. We talked about up-sells. I want to go through the sales funnel that I’ve got running around now. A key part of that sales funnel was up-sells. This came from a friend of mine who suggested that before I go live on this paid traffic, I setup three up-sells. That I go from …  The first products right, is a seven dollar product on the front end. That’s the first product that someone buys. Then at first that was all I was going to do, but now what I’ve got setup is someone can buy … Once they buy seven they get an offer for the forty-seven dollar product. If they buy that they get an offer for a ninety-seven dollar product. If they buy that they get an offer for a two hundred and ninety seven dollar product, right?  What that means is that somebody goes to that phone, that’s going to dramatically increase the amount of money that they can spend with me, which then pushes me closer to that say breaking even on the front end, and then I can use autoresponders to make money … Different emails sent out to make it up on the back end. With the up-sells, and the reason I think it’s so important right here, is that if you need [inaudible 00:02:56] paid traffic,  up-sells … Well placed, a good offer that people want could be the thing that makes or breaks your paid traffic campaign. Maybe you set up a series of up-sell flow is what it’s called, and it doesn’t work. Maybe you just need to change those up-sells around. Maybe you need to change the prices a little bit. Maybe you need to change a forty-seven to a ninety-seven, and all of a sudden you’ll be wildly profitable, okay? That’s up-sells. That’s why … Even if you’re not doing paid traffic, just on your normal product. If you sell a product for ninety-seven dollars or a hundred and ninety-seven or a thousand dollars, whatever. You should have an up-sell on that. If someone buys it, what else can you offer them?  To see, all right, would you like fries with that? It sounds so simple and so silly, and it took me so long to do it, but I’m so glad I did because now I’m making … When I look at the stats of this paid traffic funnel I just did yesterday; almost all the money in that funnel from that campaign so far has been from the up-sells. If I didn’t have that the whole thing would look like a complete joke with those [inaudible 00:03:46] sales. That’s this week’s McMasters Insight of the Week. Now if you don’t know, McMasters is the private training community that I’ve got. It’s where you would go if you want to learn how to write an email order responder for yourself, for your business, for your clients; anything like that. Pages as well. Thinking about how to tell stories that sell. All this sort of stuff that I talk about on the podcasts. You can learn more about it inside McMasters. It’s also the best way to get direct access to me and to help on your training and coaching. We have a round table each month, a webinar where I jump on and I give a lesson, and then answer and questions. There’s also the forum where you can get in there and ask me questions, talk to the other people in there, and really get some concrete, specific, actionable feedback there on campaigns.  If you want to learn more about McMasters go to the McMethod.com/McMasters. That’s the sales page right there. Now, if you enjoy the Email Marketing Podcast, you get a lot of value out of it. I would love it if you could head over to the iTunes store, search the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast, leave me a review. Make it five stars if you really do enjoy it or whatever other stars you think it’s worth; give me some feedback, tell me what you think. I will read out your review on the show. We [happy 00:04:44] days. You send me an email, I’ll send you a virtual high five and I’ll buy your dinner if you come to Thailand, how’s that?  Before we get into [inaudible 00:04:51] one listener question. At one point did you know it was the right time to quit your job and do this full-time? That’s an interesting question because the answer, at least for me, was that I got a job, I did. I got a job in the Philippines. I quit my job and went to the Philippines. It wasn’t … It was halfway in the … It was in the Philippines that I started learning how to write … I taught myself to write copy. Then that led into client work, and then once I had clients I was told that the job was over. I didn’t even choose to quit the job. It’s just once I was making enough money to support myself and just get by from the copy-writing, the job was just really just an internship just wrapped up.  I got kicked into the deep end perhaps a little bit. Then I moved to Thailand. It kind of happened like that. For someone else at what point do you know is the right time to quit your job? If you’re young or you’re able to travel or able to relocate. Which that’s going to be easier if you’re young. If you’ve got a family it might be a bit more difficult. Move to Thailand or the Philippines or somewhere like that. You’d be able to drop your monthly burn rate, your expenses, to far less than what you’re going to be paying … Generally speaking, then what you pay in a Western city. If you’ve got a savings in that, that will give you more runway to build your business.  If you don’t want to do that because that can be sort of risky, but it will allow you to work full-time on your business. If you don’t want to do that then you basically work nights and work until your business is making enough money to cover all your expenses and maybe then some or replace your salary. Simple as that. Anyway, that’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview with Mr. Justin Brooke, and talk about paid traffic.  It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Justin Brooke. Justin is a paid traffic specialist. He’s the founder of IMScalable that generated billions of ad impressions, millions of paid … They’ve driven millions of dollars in sales, and they have quite an impressive client list. Now their specialty is Facebook with re-targeting, but they’ve got accounts in fourteen other networks.  Now I actually hired Justin about a month ago to do some coaching. To help me build the … Help me with the strategy and how to get the traffic to the new … I’m building basically a paid traffic sales funnel for the McIntyre Method. I thought I’d get Justin, hire Justin, and get his help. What I also thought was it’d be cool to get him on the podcast to talk about some of his expertise in traffic and funnels and all that, and how that relates to email copy. He’s got something that he suggested before we hit record, that we could talk about. Which we’ll get into in just a minute. Before that, Justin, how are you going man?  Justin Brooke:I’m good man, thank you so much for having me on the call. You’ve got a killer lineup of people that you’ve been interviewing. It’s an honor to be one of  the same … Be on the same podcast. Thank you. John McIntyre:Thanks for coming on man, I  appreciate it. Before we get into the nitty-gritty today can you give the listener a bit of a background on … I’ve done a little bit from the bio on the website, but can you give the listener a bit more of a background on who you are and what do you do? Justin Brooke:Yeah. The really short story is I got started in 2005. Didn’t make any … I mean I made a little money between 2005 and 2007, but nothing … I mean I think at my height I was paying the car bill with my online projects, but that was validation. Then I got an internship with Russell Brunson who lives out in Idaho. Runs Dotcomsecrets and a couple of other websites, and he was a multimillion dollar Internet publisher. Getting an internship with him; my job there was to … He had this quarter of a million dollar library of marketing courses, and recorded seminars, and DVDs, and books. My job was to go through that stuff, write affiliate review articles so that he could promote the site and make affiliate commissions on the courses that he had bought. I got the education of a lifetime from that. I literally, a quarter of a million dollar education learning from J Abraham, and Joe Polish, and Chet Holmes, and Stephen Pierce. I mean, just all the absolute top guys. It was an unpaid internship so I was still broke when I went home, but I took the … I borrowed half of my electric bill. I only paid half of the eclectic bill when I got back, and I took the other sixty bucks, put it on an AdWords account; pathetic two dollar a day budget, but used what I learned and rolled that money into a hundred a fifty, and then three hundred, nine hundred, yada, yada. Eleven months in a row doubled my money. I had a six figure business by the time it was all done. It was paid traffic that I saw change my life from eating Ramen noodle soups to going out to Red Lobster. It was the difference for me. I’ve just been a paid traffic geek ever since. I mean all traffic. Inbound, SEO, native ads, Facebook ads, traditional media buys, anything. John McIntyre:Okay, cool man. I like that. I didn’t actually know. I read it right here in the grapevine somewhere that you interned with someone or there was some kind of background story there. I didn’t know it was Russell Brunson. That’s pretty cool man. Justin Brooke:Yeah, yeah I did that. That started my info business career. I had a couple of different info product businesses. Different products make money online. Software … I had a movie review website for a very short time. It didn’t make any money, but was fun. Then around 2010 or 2011 I got hired by Rich Schefren just because my business wasn’t doing too hot.  I mean I had plenty of traffic but there’s a lot of other things that go into a business. He hired me and that’s when I was really able to prefect my craft because I didn’t have to worry about bills. I didn’t have to worry about hiring; just any of the business stuff. He had a really big budget, he had a really good funnel. He had all the resources and I was just really able to take the knowledge that I had, apply it in so many different ways on so many different networks that, that was where I really got the experience to go along with all the knowledge, and that’s where I feel like I was really able to master this stuff. John McIntyre:Oh okay. You mean Rich Schefren hired you to do some traffic campaigns for him? Justin Brooke:Yeah I was his media buyer for a year … Almost two years.  John McIntyre:How was that? That would have been pretty killer; hanging out with Rich. Justin Brooke:It was great. You don’t get a whole lot of opportunities to hang out with Rich but when you do it’s always memorable. He has amazing reading processes and workout processes. He’s got the greatest vodka in the world, literally in his office, and the greatest cigars. One minute … Then he has books. Most business people are all reading the same books. You probably read Think and Grow Rich, and you probably read this book and that book. You go into his office and he’s got books you’ve never heard of before. It’s just really cool. It’s a very unique experience working for a guy like Rich. He’s not like other human beings.  John McIntyre:Yeah, I remember watching. There was a video on You Tube of him with his reading process. How he takes a book then gives it to his assistant, then she scans it into his iPad or something like that, then he gets on the treadmill and reads through it, but he’s using a speed reading app and he’s getting through …   Justin Brooke:Forty thousand words per minute on a treadmill with oxygen hooked up. I have seen it with my own eyes. It’s crazy. John McIntyre:Oh I always … Well I saw that and I was like, “Is that … Does that even work?” If you ask him after he’s read that book, does he actually know what the book’s about? Justin Brooke:He does, he does man. He has an amazing amount of information in his head. John McIntyre:That’s incredible, that’s incredible. All right. I’ve been trying to get him on the podcast, but so far no luck. Anyway, you mentioned before you hit record here, you mentioned talking about copy for cold traffic and warm traffic, and that there’s a difference there. I think I realized that probably in the last three to six months. Before that I would have just thought copy was copy. That if you’re writing copy for when it’s a Facebook ads, Google ads or affiliates or even just for traffic that’s coming through my website; through articles or podcasts or whatever it happens to be, that copies is copy, is copy.  There’s probably some people listening to this right now who either think the same thing or used to think the same thing or we could talk about this and figure out the problems with that. Let’s get into it man. Give me the broad overview of what the issue is here. Justin Brooke:Yeah, I used to think exactly the same thing. I mean you hear about copywriting and you think that’s it. There’s one type of copywriting. You learn that there’s a headline and a hook and an offer. The [zignarick 00:13:03] effect; all these different things. It wasn’t until later in my career. Actually probably halfway through working with Rich, where I had access to really, really high level copywriters. To guys who were working with Agora and [Boardroom 00:03:19]. When I had access to these guys they showed me books that I had never read before. They turned me onto Eugene Schwartz’s Five Levels of Awareness.  Eugene Schwartz wrote a book. It’s pretty much the greatest book on advertising ever written. It’s called Breakthrough Advertising. It’s finally in read print now. It used to be you had to find a used copy for eight, nine hundred dollars. It’s being re-printed now for a hundred dollars. I highly suggest everybody get it if you’re into copywriting. If you’re into marketing in general. He has this thing in there called the Five Levels of Awareness. This really changed the game for all advertisers for decades. I mean until today. You can use this on social media. You can use this in your email list. You can use this on banner ads. The five different levels are you have … This totally relates to paid traffic and warm traffic because when you’re speaking to your email list that is somebody who already has a relationship with you. They’ve already given you some contact details. They already know what you are about. You know that they want this stuff. There’s a much different context to somebody who’s on your list. There’s a lot different context between somebody who’s been on your list for one week, and somebody who’s been on your list for a year. Totally different context. Then you have a perfect stranger. You walk into the mall and you walk up to someone, that is a perfect stranger.  What he was talking about is, is the way … How do you structure your copy differently for the perfect stranger, differently for the person who’s been on your list for one week, and differently for the person who’s been on your list for one year? To give you a little bit of an idea, you have Apple who when they announce the iPad 3 or the iPad 2, whatever they’re on, they’re able to create an advertisement that says iPad 2 on sale now. That’s all the copy that they need because the market is already aware. They’re lining up for days in advance trying to get one of the first of these things available. This person is in the most aware. The levels of awareness are most aware, product aware, solution aware, problem aware, and then unaware. Apple right now is in a most aware state. The market knows who Apple is. Everybody knows who Apple is, what they sell, what they do, the quality level; all that stuff. They don’t need copy anymore really. They just need to  … They’re really selling it on the price and the features of it. What are the new retina screens or whatever?  Now you go back to … If you think about the ads that they used to run years ago, people didn’t know who they were. They were unaware of who they were. They had to use stories and they had to use secrets. That’s much like Agora. Agora runs a financial newsletter business where they sell newsletters as front end. You get on a newsletter for like fifty bucks for a year. The newsletter has stock tips or gold investing tips or real estate tips, whatever. Then they back end that with coaching, various levels of coaching. In order to get the most amount of people to scale to the hundreds or millions that they’re making each year from these newsletters, they are reaching out to the unaware people because that is the mass population. You can reach … The masses are the unaware.  In order to attract the unaware you have to use a story. Their video sales are always about something that Obama’s doing or something that’s in the news. It’s always something that’s timely and relevant. Then they connect that newsy controversial story to what they’re doing. For example, “Do you think … I’m not taking any sides of the political party here, but they normally market to the people who don’t like President Obama.  They would say something like, “Do you think President Obama is ruining the world?” They would tell this story about all the things that he’s doing wrong and they’d say, “And that’s why you need to invest in gold, and that’s why you need to learn how to invest in gold.” They turn that story which gets the attention, into the very reason why they need to learn this information. Then they start pitching their product.  Totally two complete different sides of the copy. When somebody is … A lot of times to wrap this whole diatribe up. Most people, they build a sales letter. They create an autoresponder sequence; they create a via cell or a webinar or a sales letter. Then they use that the same way they would for their affiliates, their house list. Then they go and they’re like, “Well man, this stuff is working so well, I want to try Facebook ads.” Then Facebook ads bombs and because it was working well for their lists and their affiliates, they think that it’s the Facebook ads that weren’t working. That’s why you have all these people saying, “Facebook doesn’t work, AdWords doesn’t work, Twitter doesn’t work.” Whatever doesn’t work is just the difference in the copy. It’s literally all about these five levels or awareness, and that’s how you change it. I’m sure there’s some questions. I’m sure we need to unpack some of that. I’m hoping you will lead me through unpacking all of that.  John McIntyre:Well let’s say … For an example … All right, I mean you know what I deal with, with [the email 00:18:53] marketing stuff. One thing I’m thinking of, and we’re just obviously going on Facebook. This would be a cool way to dive in. Would be I’m trying to get people to buy more of my products say on Facebook, but off the top of my head just thinking about it, they’re going to be problem aware, maybe solution aware because they know that this product’s out there that will teach them more about marketing, and more about copy, and more about the emails and funnels and all that sort of stuff. They’re not aware of the product really, and they’re not hyper aware or whatever that last stage of Apple was; I wish. Knowing that they’re problem aware I would say … I mean correct me if I’m wrong. That, that therefore means that I would need to go out there and hit them with the problem first, and then lead them to the next stages. Justin Brooke:Well actually the Internet marketing audience, and those are the people who are interested in autoresponders and via cells, and Kindle books. I think everybody kind of knows what this industry is. It’s actually in the solution aware. They know that the problem that they have is that they want to build a business, but their business because … They want to build a business because they want financial freedom. They want to not work for the man anymore so they know what their problem is, and they know that the way to fix this is to learn how to run a business, learn how to write better autoresponders or website flipping or Kindle books.  They’re solution aware. They are aware of solutions to the problem that they have. In a solution aware market the best thing that you can do is use claims and proof. That’s why you see everything that I’m marketing is my case studies, is the video of how to get a million visitors to your website. I’m always trying to read with case studies, screen shots; any kind of proof because that’s just what this market really craves. I mean it’s like they’re moths to a porch light when it comes to case studies. If somebody says hey we came out with a new squeeze page or a new button, and we’ve split tested it to high heaven, yada, yada, yada. Then everybody’s all of a sudden using that button. I mean the last couple years ago it was the Belcher button, and today it’s a certain squeeze page. That’s what that market really craves, is the claims and the proof. John McIntyre:Like you said, that’s more about the marketing though. The Internet marketing market as opposed to the stage right? Justin Brooke:Right. I mean well that’s where they’re at so that’s what the level of copy would want to write to them. Now if you wanted to scale out because the Internet marketing in history is relatively small compared to other markets. There’s really about … I’ve tried to gauge the size of it. It’s somewhere between four hundred thousand and a million really. You could stretch the boundaries to about three million, but it’s a relatively small market. If you wanted to stretch it out to instead of the Internet marketers; all the guys. You know who Frank Kern is, and they know what A Weber is.  You back it out to just entrepreneurs; all entrepreneurs. Now you’re probably more at the problem aware market, and then you can back it out even more to the unaware, and that’s when … To the unaware is basically the masses. When you market to the masses it’s usually just how to make money online. It’s MLM’s, it’s network marketing. That’s why usually if you’re an Internet marketer and you’re talking about Internet marketing with your friends or whatever, usually the first step to becoming an entrepreneur is some sort of MLM or network marketing company.  I did it and most of my friends did it, and I see my own friends and family now are joining these things because they hear about the stuff that I’m doing and the life that I’m living. They’re now getting into that or they’re getting aware of that, so they’re joining these various programs. That’s how you would back it out. Am I making any sense here or am I just going off? John McIntyre:This makes a lot of sense. It’s interesting because it adds a layer of complexity to trying to figure out … It’s almost like before you even start writing copy you’ve got to figure out what stage they’re in. If you can’t do that you’re going to end up completely going off in the wrong direction.  Justin Brooke:Yes absolutely. I mean when you’re creating your avatar of who am I going to be talking to? I mean anytime anybody’s writing a piece of copy, if you’re writing an email to your list or you’re writing a sales page you have to think of okay, how am I going to distribute this? How am I going to get eyeballs to this? If I’m going to use my list, like you’re using an email, well then you’re going to write probably to a product aware or a most aware because they know what it is you have. You … When you’re writing to your list, you don’t need to use as much claims and as much proof. It’s really your announcing a new product and there’s a discount, and there’s a special bonus. If you just did that level your list would probably jump all over that.  Whereas if you were to say that to a cold stranger like, “Hey I just came out with this new product and I’ve got a special bonus on it.” They’re like, “Dude who are you?” They don’t even … They’re just not at that level yet. Yeah, you’re right. Every time you sit down to write some copy, you need to think about who is going to see this? Who is going to be the most likely person because obviously you can’t be a hundred percent correct to every human being in the world. You just have to think of okay, the seventy percent or the eighty percent of people that are going to see this are in this level.  He breaks it all down in his book. He literally unpacks this way better than I could ever do in thirty minutes on podcast.  John McIntyre:Yeah, okay. For email specifically, this brings up the issue of you’d want to be … Someone signs up for the list, you hit them with an autoresponder for say ten days, thirty days, whatever. Then your broadcasts, if you’re doing the broadcasts, they would only go out to people assuming that they’re more for people who are aware of who you are and know what you do, and just want to know about upcoming products. Your broadcast would only go to people who have completed that autoresponder. That would tie into this whole idea? Justin Brooke:Yes, yes, yeah. I have a seven day sequence that everybody goes through, and I treat them as they’re strangers. They don’t know who I am yet. I mean, email number one is,  “Hey, here’s the free thing that I gave you, but by the way my name’s Justin, here’s what I’ve done, and here’s why I think you should listen to me. Tomorrow I’m going to tell you a really cool story about yada, yada.”  Then I tell them how I got started. I tell them what I stand for. It’s all about introducing myself and building the relationship in the first seven days. Then whenever I’m doing a broadcast after that, I don’t broadcast to anybody who’s still in that sequence.  John McIntyre:Okay, okay. Then when you do, do a broadcast it’s probably less just talking about who you are and what you do and get to know someone, it’s more direct to the point of, “Oh I’ve got this product or I’ve got this offer.” It’s more to the point? Justin Brooke:Yeah. When we announced that we changed our coaching program. We’ve had a coaching program for a long time, but when we changed the name to The Midas Network and we changed the format up a little bit and the pricing, I didn’t need to write to my list and start out by saying, “Before we talk about that my name is Justin Brooke and I got started by interning with Russell Brunson.” I didn’t need to do all of that stuff because they already know my story and who I am.  I was able to get right to it, “Hey we have revamped our coaching program based on the feedback over the last year and here’s how we’re changing it.” “For the next seven days I’m doing a launch special pricing so if you want to get in you can have it at this price right now, otherwise it’s going to go back to its normal price.” That builds a little urgency, but if you look at his scale; my list, your list, all of our lists. They’re in the product awareness. They are aware of the products that we sell. They’re aware of what we do and what we sell. They are most motivated by discounts and deals on those products that they know we already sell. John McIntyre:Okay, okay. Then it brings up the issue of some people would say that discounts are bad business because you’ve got the whole if it’s valuable you shouldn’t be discounting it, right? Justin Brooke:Well yeah, that’s why I say discounts and deals. You don’t have to … I hate discounts. I mean I had a product inside youtome.com and it seems like their only marketing strategy is every week they say, “Hey you can buy all of our products for eighty percent off,” and they’re like, “Wow we get a lot of sales from that. Yes of course, but then nobody ever buys anything at the full price.  John McIntyre:Yeah.  Justin Brooke:They’re training to wait for Saturday when you’re going to do that sale thing. Instead you can offer an extra bonus or you can offer an extra interview that goes along with it in another module. You don’t have to discount the price, you can stack the value, and which makes the price feel like it went down. John McIntyre:Yeah, okay, okay. That’s very cool. To go back to the whole funnels thing. Let’s say … Let’s pick something random. I’ve got a guy who’s in my community who does … He teaches people how to speak better English. He’s getting people from I think You Tube right now. He’s got a bunch of You Tube videos that then obviously funnel people to his website, but suppose he wanted to go and say jump on the Facebook and do some ads and advertise? Well, I’ve never heard of him before. Based on the stuff I’ve talked about here, what would be the right approach for this situation? Justin Brooke:Okay, and really hard to do this on the fly, but I did have a couple of ideas. He teaches people how to speak English. I assume that they are speaking Spanish? They’re Spanish speakers or they’re French speakers or whatever and they just moved to the United States and they want to speak better English, right, something like that? John McIntyre:I think … Yeah it’s something like that. He’s an English teacher in Japan and so he’s got this program. His job is teaching people how to speak English and he has his products online that help teach people how to speak English. I’m not sure exactly what his avatar is but it’s along those lines. Justin Brooke:Okay, all right. Somebody who wants to speak a language, you’ve got to think about why do they want to speak that language? If they want to speak English, maybe they want to move to America. Maybe there is job position that they’re seeking or maybe it’s for business reasons. They want to learn how to speak English so that they can broaden their customer base. You would tell a story that would … Something that’s timely in the news. There’s a lot of travel to … I don’t know. I don’t watch enough news to really go off that angle, but you would use a story.  For me, one example would be the story of the guy who’s going to the United States and he wants the freedom. He’s heard about the United States and all the glory that comes along with it. That you can show up with seven dollars in your pocket and you can stake a claim, and you can build a business, and you can chase the American dream. You would tell a story like that about the American dream and then you would then relate to it, and because you want this dream the only thing that’s stopping you from having this dream is being able to speak to the Americans because when you get over there if you’re speaking a different language, they’re not going to understand you.  You’re not going to be able to get a job, you’re not going to be able to communicate with customers, you’re not going to be able to buy food, you’re not going to find where the bathroom is. You build up all these problems of what it’s like to not be able to speak the language, and then you tell … Now you introduce your product. You lead with a story that gets their attention. Something that they would already resonate with, and then you cross the bridge. You connect the dots for them to why they would need your course, so that they can get what the story was talking about.  John McIntyre:Okay, okay. Justin Brooke:For example. I got a really good example. I had a customer who came to me, and the reason why this is so relevant for traffic for everyone listening who’s like, “Wait I thought we were going to talk about traffic.” This is so relevant to traffic because if you can’t convert the traffic … Like what I learned from Rich Schefren. He always says, “People don’t have a traffic problem, they have a conversion problem because if their website was converting the traffic then they would be able to write a check.” Anybody can write a check and buy clicks. It’s whether or not you can convert them. That’s why we’re talking about this subject because this is what will help you convert paid traffic.  The example that I have is a client came to me with a sinus relief product. That’s probably one of the most boring things that you could sell on the Internet. The problem with selling sinus relief is it’s not like fibromyalgia or diabetes where it’s a problem that they wake up with every day and they’re constantly thinking about it and constantly needing a better solution for it. A sinus relief is you have a sinus headache. When you have a sinus headache you will do anything to get rid of that sinus headache because regular ibuprofen and Tylenol won’t fix it. You need specific sinus relief medicine for it. It’s so painful. I get them. If anybody does get them they know. You will move mountains to get the relief, but you have to catch them when they’re having the sinus headache. If you aren’t catching them when they have the sinus headache, then they don’t care. The problem’s gone, they’re not thinking about the problem anymore. We had to move it to the unaware. They are in the solution aware or they’re in the problem aware or the solution aware actually, when they have a sinus headache. When they’re not they’re in the unaware stage, so I created an angle called Zombies Disease.  Basically the story … The via cell comes on and starts off with, “They called it Zombie Disease, and they called it that because of the mucus that was bubbling up over their eyes.” It goes into this story about how this tornado … I think it was in Kansas; came through and it whipped up a bunch of dirt which had a bunch of bacteria in it, and then people were inhaling this bacteria. It was actually a fungus. They were inhaling this killer fungus and it was giving them this skin eating disease that they literally called Zombie Disease.  I used a new story about breathing in [funguses 00:33:19] and then I connected it to your body has a built in way of defending against these [funguses 00:33:24] because they are all around you. They could be hidden in your walls of your house. They could be in the food you eat and whatever, so your sinuses have a built … They are the natural human defense for blocking out bacteria and [funguses 00:33:40], but most people’s sinuses aren’t working correctly.  I go into a little bit of a science of how sinuses work and how they clean things out, and if you have proper working sinuses you don’t have to worry about these [funguses 00:33:53], and yada, yada. Therefore, that’s why you should buy these sinus relief pills. That was how we connected it for paid traffic and it worked great once we got it all done. We spent a ton of money trying to buy traffic for this beautiful sinus relief via cell and sales page. We literally spent like ten thousand dollars trying to market this sinus relief pill, and then once we connected it to … When we told a story first, then we were able to all of a sudden start converting paid traffic.  John McIntyre:On the interesting part, it’s like … Some people would hear that story and I would be guilty of this, I’ve done this quite often, is go “Oh that’s the story.” That’s why stories are important. You’ve always got to be telling stories. That’s not the lesson. The lesson is that you got to understand where your prospect’s really at in their head. This goes back to, I think it was Robert Collier. You’re going to answer that conversation going on ahead, and then lead them from that point whether that’s the solution aware or the unaware or the problem aware or whatever stage they’re in; you’ve got to figure out exactly where they’re at, and then lead them to the product. If you screw that up, and you can screw that up. In some situations telling a story would be the worst thing you could do because they don’t want a story. They just want to hear about the deal or the offer. That’s the issue. It’s not that stories are the lifesavers. Stories are useful in a certain context, and sometimes they’re not.  Justin Brooke:Stories are clearly useful, but the Five Levels of Awareness helps you know what story you should be telling because you could totally tell the wrong story at the wrong time, but knowing the different levels of awareness … If I’m talking to the IM market I’m going to use a story that has a lot of claims and a lot of proof in it. If I’m using a story to my own customer list I’m going to tell a story about the product and how it works so great, and I’m going to end that story with the discounts and deals. The different levels of awareness help you know what story you should tell and what you should say in those stories to convert that person from not being a customer to wanting to be a customer.  John McIntyre:Oh, okay. Just quickly because we’re right on time here. What would be the best way to … What’s the best way to figure out what stage people are in? Just some common sense thinking or is there some sort of process to it? Justin Brooke:I mean literally, go to Google and type in Eugene Schwartz Five Levels of Awareness. You’ll find … There’s tons of blog posts about it, there’s pictures. I mean that’s what I’m looking at right now because I don’t have it all memorized. I’m looking at a picture of it. Keep that on your desk because it’s a good little cheat sheet that will tell you what type of angle you need to use. The ultimate solution is to buy the book, but it’s a little bit of common sense. What you can do as a fast start because nobody likes to hear, “Oh great I need to build a whole new funnel now.”  What you can actually do is you can build just a squeeze page. I call it a traffic microwave because I’m taking cold traffic and I’m warming it up really fast so that I can get them on my normal sales funnel that isn’t adapted for the unaware market. You just create a squeeze page that would work for the unaware market, and then lead them in through a autoresponder sequence which you would help people on. Then autoresponder sequence would then warm them up so that they’re ready to work.  That’s the fastest way somebody could get cold traffic to start working for them, is instead of trying to drive the cold traffic to your warm traffic ready sales letter, put up some sort of a lead gen device or even an article. I mean this is why native advertising is working so well for businesses is because the articles which are stories that they’re using, appeal to the market. Warms them up a little bit, and then gets them ready for the sales presentation. That’s the easiest way people can get started with this.  John McIntyre:Okay. Sounds good man. We’re right on time here. Before we go though can you give the listener a … What is the best place for them to go find you, a little more about and get a case study or check out the coaching? Justin Brooke:Yeah I know we robbed them a little bit of talking about traffic strategies and all that stuff, but if they go to my blog there’s just a ton of videos and articles. If you search my name on Google; Justin Brooke. Brooke with an E at the end, you’ll find all my stuff. My website, my Facebook, my You Tube; all that stuff or you can just go to IMScalable.com/blog and you’ll find the stuff there. You Tube, if you do a search for traffic strategist on You Tube you’ll find the videos. We have over a hundred videos about traffic over there.  John McIntyre:Perfect, perfect. Well thanks for coming on the show Justin. It’s been good man. Justin Brooke:Yeah man, thank you so much for letting me vent all this stuff. It is a message that I’ve been wanting to tell people for so long because it’s like, “Yo people, this is the reason why Facebook is not working for people, this is the reason why they’re not getting the ROI they want.” If they just knew this, this is the magic key that unlocks it for them. I’m really passionate about this.  John McIntyre:That’s a good note to end on. Cool man.  The post Episode #68 – Justin Brooke on The Unlimited Scaling Potential of Your Business Through Targeted Copy appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

When’s the last time you ran a direct mail campaign? Never? Then chances are you’re missing a key ingredient to a concrete online biz: The direct mail MINDSET. Craig Simpson KNOWS direct mail. He’s been in the game for 20 years. So what’s he think about today’s online marketing? Not. Enough. Direct. Mail. All online marketing NEEDS at least one direct mail campaign… …big or small. Not only will you see your big promos get BIGGER, And your product launches transformed into money engines, But the mindset that comes along with – …is IRREPLACEABLE. You end up with a more SOLID business. Once you achieve that mindset… …get ready to step your game up – because that’s where it’s headed. And same with your revenues. Tune-in to this episode and find out WHY you want these harder-to-aquire customers, As well as Craig’s step-by-step rundown that will get you going TODAY.   In this episode, you’ll discover: how direct mail will make everything you do online more successful what Google can teach you about killer direct mail campaigns (yes, Google… go outside and check your mailbox) how stupidly simple it is to get a brilliant DM campaign up in no time (no need to hire Craig either) the surefire method to creating killer ideas within any niche the little-known differentiator between direct mail and online marketing (a single word will make it all click) how one question maximizes your testing efforts (split test your heart away without wasting money) how not to be yet another online one-hit-wonder (a longevity technique keeps you successful… forever) that you can create lifetime customers with a simple pitch (craft it with ease through two must know tips) how to tap into your prospects emotions (might not be easy… but it’s crazy effective) Mentioned: The Direct Mail Solution – Authored by Craig and Dan Kennedy Perry Marshall Gary Halbert Google  Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre:Hey, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy and it’s time for episode 67 of the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast where you’ll discover one fairly simple thing: How to make more money with every email you send whether it’s with autoresponder or sales funnels, blah, blah blah, all that stuff. Today I’ll be talking to Craig Simpson. Craig is a well-known direct marketing consultant and coach. As he had for you aid us at direct mail service and I wanted to get him on the show to talk about some of his direct mail stuff and how it relates to email marketing.  Now specifically we’re going to talk about the direct mail mindset and how that applies to email. Some really interesting insights here, the testing mindset. Now I mentioned this before it’s absolutely imperative, it’s essential that you learn this, this whole idea of the split testing mindset, the testing mindset, that when you start a campaign whether it’s paid traffic, whether it’s offline, whatever, that initially if it doesn’t work that doesn’t matter because you’re in the buying data stage, you’re in the figure-out-what-works stage. You’re not in the be-profitable-from-day-one stage. This stage doesn’t even exist.  I’m also going to talk about the good and bad about direct mail, with direct marketing and how good of a copywriter do you really need to be because one thing  I’ve been interested in is, online I think you can get away with, you don’t need to be the best copywriter. You need to have [inaudible 00:01:08] if you want to do it, but you don’t have to be the best because let’s say I’m going to go in to paid traffic campaign on Facebook, I can get on and spend $50 and find out if my copy works. If I want to write a sales letter and send it out to or mail out to list and do a direct mail test, I’m going to spend thousands of dollars printing it, putting it in an envelope and sending it out. To do a simple test online is easy and cheap, to do it offline; it’s not. There’s good and bad things about that and we’re going to talk about that in today’s episode.  To get the show notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast, go to themcmethod.com/67. I’ve got this week’s McMasters Insight of the week, Michael said, “Today, I discovered Solo Ads,” which are basically direct email where someone else just tell you a list and you could pay per click sent to your site just like PPC, “… the advantages seems to be faster set up and less restrictions in Google Adwords.” That is correct. Michael mentioned this in McMasters and I haven’t used Solo Ads myself. I’ve heard different opinions on whether they’re good or bad. They seem to work better for some niches, things like that, better for the marketing, make money online biz type of stuff, but there may be other stuff out there.  Just something to get you thinking, this week’s insight, you might want to look into it if you’re looking for more traffic and it can be a cheap way to get started with paid traffic and start testing some stuff. Michael put that in McMasters. McMasters is my private training community where you can learn more about how to write a 10-email autoresponder, so even how to build out your email marketing, how to build your sales funnel. All that sort of stuff. It’s the best way to get direct access to me because there’s a forum. You can jump in there, ask questions and I will get back to you. I’m in there every day. That’s the best way to get some coaching at far less than the one-on-one coaching process. Now, if you want to leave a review, go to iTunes, go to the store and leave me a review. Search the McMethod Email Marketing Podcast. I should say it this way, if you like the email marketing podcast and you’re getting a lot of value from it, go to the store, leave me a review and I’ll give you a high five and I’ll read it out on the show. Yeah, go on list a question and then we’ll get into it. Today’s listed question is, how long did it take you to get good? I’m assuming this person means get good at copywriting. The answer is, it really depends. Good enough to what? Good enough to make a lot of money? Good enough to make, you know, get clients? Good enough to … It’s really hard to define it. Basically, what I do is good enough to …  I’m wondering, this probably from someone who just maybe had a job, maybe wants to quit. They’re trying to learn to copy and they’re wanting to learn how long it’s going to take them before they’re good enough. A lot of that’s going to depend on their personal thing, how hard they’re willing work. Are they willing to sit down every day and write out sales that are by hand with a pen and paper? It’s really going to … It’s a balance of lot of that stuff and also, just their natural aptitude for being a persuader. If he’s done sales before, it’s going to be easier than if you’ve never done sales before, generally speaking.  Whereas if you’ve been like an English major in school, you’ve probably got these bad habits about what writing’s mean to look like, hence it might be harder to write copy because you’re stuck in this that writing has to be all professional and be all grammatically correct. That’s a load of crap, at least when it comes to copywriting. If you’ve got a natural aptitude for it, you might be able to walk out tomorrow and get a client, right? It’s a very hard question to answer, but put it this way; the harder you work and the more you immerse yourself in sales and marketing and advertising, the faster you will get there. Put it that way. That’s it for now. Let’s get in to this interview with Craig Simpson.  It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Craig Simpson. Craig is a direct mail guy, another direct mail guy. We just did Brian Kurtz last night and that podcast probably went live last week. Now, Craig’s another direct mail guy. He’s just had a book that he’s done with Dan Kennedy. This guy’s up there, he’s sending lots of mail and I wanted to get him on because I’ve done a lot of email guys and copywriters and internet guys coming on this show, but I think that the roots of what we do really goes back to direct mail and old school advertising, which isn’t really that old, too. I mean, it’s still all around.  I was just talking to Craig just then and I was thinking that what would be really interesting, at least as a starting point for this conversation will be to look at the direct mail mindset because with direct mail, there’s a lot more at stake. With email marketing or with online marketing or a product launch, you can do it and if it doesn’t work, it’s not that big of a deal. You got a domain, maybe you bought a domain, you paid for some hosting. You don’t have to spend much money doing a lot of test, you can split test with a bit of software and it doesn’t cost you anything.  Whereas when you’re doing direct mail, me and Bryan, we talked about this last night, you go spend like $500 per 1000 names that you might send out and that makes any sort of test extremely expensive so you’re going to be on your game. I think there’s a lot to learn. Being an online marketer and coming from this world, there’s a lot to learn from me and from everyone else in this situation from the people doing direct mails. We’re going to see what sort of good news we can get into today. Craig, how are you doing mate? Craig Simpson:Excellent. I’m doing very good. Thanks for the introduction. I’m excited to be on this podcast today. John McIntyre:Yeah, it’s good to have you on this show. Before we get into some of the direct mail mindset and some of the other stuff, can you give the listener a bit of a background on what you do and what you get up to most days? Craig Simpson:Sure. I’m a direct mail consultant and I have a company, Simpson Direct, and we send out almost 300 mail campaigns a year for a variety of clients. I mean, we work with everything from pet food store selling dog food to big information marketers to companies, like Beachbody that does P90X and Insanity, and we sell off face clean called Derm Exclusive. We sell different products and services for dentists, attorneys, I mean, you name it. There’s just about someone we’re working within a niche using direct mail to help different companies acquire new customers, new patients, generate leads, build their herd. I’m an old school guy, I’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now so I’ve been doing it for a long time.  John McIntyre:Okay. I think an interesting question right now would be … Like you said, you’ve just been doing this for 20 years, what are your thoughts on the whole internet marketing game and the product launches and all the guru hurrah that happens online which I’m sure you’re aware of? Craig Simpson:Totally. You know I think a lot of it is great and I think the one area that they’re missing is they should all tie it in with direct mail. I think they’d all see their product launches and a lot of their big promotions being much more successful if they tie some direct mail into it. I mean, when you’re out there in the media and you’re testing all these different media options whether it’s radio or TV or internet, you compare the results and you look at them. I mean, everyone’s got a little bit, you know, they all have some strengths, but for me, you know I’m saturated in direct mail so I’m constantly seeing positive results from the direct mail marketing. I’m seeing internet and online guys using direct mail.  In fact, Google, they’re the 8th largest technology mailer in the country. You think all the hype and hoopla goes along with Google and their online pay-per-click advertising. Well, behind the scenes, it’s not really being reported is that they’re heavily using direct mail, so much mail that they’re up there with DirecTV and AT&T and Verizon and Dell Computers. They’d become the 8th largest direct mail company in the United States for the technology niche. I love direct mail and even though it’s not the shiny object right now, it’s still getting a lot of attention behind the scenes. John McIntyre:Okay. Interesting. I’m curious, how hard is it? This might have been a question for more towards the end, but how hard is it for someone like me who’s got a website and maybe a marketing consultancy or a business selling anything from, like you mentioned, pet food, someone who could be listening to this, maybe they want to give direct mail a try. How hard is it for them to go and get a campaign up and running without hiring someone like you? Is that possible or do they need someone like you who’s kind of in the trenches? Craig Simpson:No. I think it’s totally possible. You know, I did my first direct mail campaign selling fake rock climbing holds through the mail. I don’t know if you know what fake rock climbing holds does but the thing is you bolt it on the rock walls. I started it out with 250 pieces mailing and to be honest, my first mailing was a complete bum, but I kept testing and testing and trying different things and eventually on my own without anyone else’s help, I ended up selling over 4,000 rocks through the mail. I think with anybody, whether you’re a small business owner or just getting started, found a new product or service, if you read some of these books and look at the testing methods that you learn and start out small and spin it, send a few hundred pieces at a time, you can find something that’s working for your niche and then just roll it out. You don’t have to start out with a 50,000 piece mailing. You can start out with small sample size and work your way up as you get a great return on investment and you test things and you figure out what works and what doesn’t. John McIntyre:I like that you mentioned this, basically the testing mindset which is something that’s taking a long time to click. For me to understand this, I’ve done campaigns just online, paid traffic campaign before, this was a couple of years ago when I was just getting started and it didn’t work. The first few times, it didn’t work and me not really knowing what I was doing or understanding how this stuff really worked. I was like, “All right, well …” I don’t know if I consciously decided to give up. I just gave up. I just didn’t follow through and I stopped doing it and that was that. Now, as I’ve been reading, doing some Perry Marshall stuff and I’m setting up paid traffic campaign for my own business, now it’s starting to click that if all I’ve done is just kept that campaign running, spending $10 or $20 a day, whatever it happened to be, 2 years later which is now or 3 years later now, I would be miles ahead, just by that simple fact of just sitting down and testing consistently. This is something that a lot of people online might take them a while to get it. If they’ve been in the game and get the right mentor and they will get up quick. Everyone says split test, split test, but this is … Maybe online like I was saying before, the stakes aren’t as high as direct mail. If you fail, you’re not going to lose that much money whereas with direct mail, you have to get this stuff ironed out. Testing is really like, it’s mandatory if you’re doing direct mail, isn’t it? Craig Simpson:It is. You know what, that’s a great point. You started the conversation talking about how the stakes are different with direct mail. The stakes are high because of your investing so much. I mean, if you don’t really think through the testing process and what it is you want to achieve out of your test, you can end up wasting a lot of money. You’re forced with direct mail to really not just run out there and throw something together and hope that it works, you really have to put the time and energy to think through the process and think, “Okay, what testing variables are going to give me the best chance for success? What are the things that I need to see first? Do I need to test my price points to see if one price point has a significant boost, gives me a significant boost in response compared to another? Do I need to test format? Do I need to test sales copy or headlines?” I mean, you have to think through what is the thing that I can test with a limited amount of capital that I can use and see what’s going to help me out the most. I think it’s the preparation side of direct mail that makes you so much different than the online marketing. The testing idea’s maybe a lot of the same, but you have so much more at stake so you really have to put more time upfront thinking through the process because there’s so much at risk. Does that makes sense? Does that help explain that? John McIntyre:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, when I was talking to Bryan last night about this, it was the thing that I have planned of doing, which we discussed, is the whole, there’s a good and a bad thing about it. You’re online, the stakes are low so therefore, you’re going to have to try that hard which is, in a sense, is a good thing. The stakes are low and you’re not going to … If you mess up, you’re not going to lose your house or whatever, but with direct mail, the stakes are higher. On the one end that’s bad, there’s more risk, there’s more at stake, but that also means that you have to be on your game which means you’ll end up with better copy, better campaign, you test more stuff and you end up with probably a more solid business. Craig Simpson:Right. John McIntyre:I mean, Bryan mentioned there’s a lot more one-hit wonders online than there is offline. Craig Simpson:Totally. Totally. I did a study on the customer values between someone who’s generated online versus someone who’s generated on TV and someone who’s generated through a direct mail, and I took 50,000 buyers from TV, 50,000 buyers from direct mail and 50,000 buyers from the internet all who had paid the exact same price for a product within the same time period. We looked at the long term customer values of them, the customers that were brought in through direct mail ended up spending 3 times as much as those who have brought in through the internet and they spend twice as much as those who are brought in through the TV. It was harder to acquire those customers, but they ended up spending a lot more money than those that were generated through other sources. There’s a lot to be said about direct mail. When you can get a customer, you can find a system that works, it’s something that you can use to really bring in your best customers.  John McIntyre:Okay. I’m curious because I’ve never actually done a direct mail campaign. Maybe I’m feeling almost a big guilt. Craig Simpson:Shame on you, you should.  John McIntyre:I totally should. I’ve got a basic idea what I think a direct mail campaign looks like, but give me a rundown. Suppose I was to do a direct mail campaign, what would it involve and what would it look like? What sort of things would I have to do to make it happen? Craig Simpson:I think the first thing is you start off with what is your offer? What is your sign? You really want to take a close look at it and figure out, you know, you’re going to be talking face to face essentially through a sales letter with someone. You got to think about what a reasonable offer would be that would be good enough to get them to respond and take action. Let’s say you’re going to a list of called prospects, you’re probably not going to have much luck selling them a $7,000 coaching package right out of the gate with direct mail. You’re going to have to get them to warm up to you a bit before you can do that.  What I find for the first offer, it’s best to either do a price point that’s below $200 or some kind of a free offer to get them into a sales funnel where you can send them free reports and other information, kind of bring them up the essential matter. First, you want to look at your offer and identify what it is, make sure it’ll fit for direct mail. Then, you’re going to write your sales copy and the length of the copy will depend on how long it takes to tell your story and to list all the benefits, and get them to respond and get the information across to the prospect that will motivate them to respond. Once you have the copy, then you get the design done. With direct mail, it’s not the Madison 5th Avenue, really flashy, big photos and images of design. It’s really focused on the copy in it and we want any design work done to enhance the copy and not distract from it. Once we have those things, we work on finding the right mailing list which is making sure that we have the best prospects to go after to present your offer. Then once we have those things, we get the piece printed and mailed, and track the response and find out what worked and what didn’t. That’s a basic rundown of the direct mail schedule. John McIntyre:Okay. How good of a copywriter do you need to be to really pull something like this off with the sales letter. Craig Simpson:Boy, it really depends on who you’re marketing to and what you’re selling. If you’re a regional business and you’re selling pizzas, you can probably be not a very good copywriter and do okay because you really have a targeted market in a targeted area. If you’re trying to sell a joint pain supplement on a national campaign, you’re going to have to be an A-list copywriter in order to get the response needed. Really, the offer and the market that you’re in really determines how good of a writer you have to be. John McIntyre:Okay. That’s interesting. It’s like, you can’t by with not bad copies, you don’t need a good copy, but it’s almost like the copy really depends on, you know, I understand that’s context and that you can lower the requirement for good copy, but improving your target and your matching. Craig Simpson:Yeah. To piggyback on maybe your conversation you have with Bryan, I believe you said either last week or last night, he always brags about, not brags, but he talks often about how, you know, Boardroom, often their highest paid employees or people that work for them were the copywriters because they knew that that copywriters were the ones that were going to bring in the success, the ones that talk directly to a customer through a piece of mail and get them to respond. The big companies that are really successful in direct mail, they spend a lot of money with copywriters knowing that that’s a key, key part of the success of the campaign. John McIntyre:Yeah. Okay. This is really why copy kind of grew its legs. Once upon a time, copy didn’t really exist. I think it was back in … Claude Hopkins talked about in his My Life in Advertising where no one was really doing it but eventually people started selling the same thing and all of a sudden you needed a way to differentiate yourself from everyone else. That began, you know, sending a letter and then obviously with everyone sending letters, you have to send the best letter and that’s where copy … Craig Simpson:That’s right. John McIntyre:That’s where copy grew out of. Craig Simpson:Exactly. I mean, it really is an art. I mean, as you know it’s not an easy task just to sit down and put a pen and paper, and create a message that is going to motivate somebody to respond. Especially with all the clutter and things that are out there today, you got to really stand out and make yourself look different so that you can motivate then the prospects to respond. John McIntyre:I find that absolutely fascinating. It’s almost like … I look at copywriting not so much as copywriting or persuasion, so much it is just clear communication where you have to figure out how can you use just the utmost clarity in describing whatever you’re trying to describe, whatever you’re trying to sell in a way that like if you’re going to put aside every single prejudice you have and believe all your ideas you have about whatever it is you’re trying to sell and started thinking highly within the mindset of the person you’re writing to, so then the copy that you write, the sole purpose of that is to get this prospect to understand it in a way that it’s going to fit with his mindset and his beliefs and everything like that. It’s a communication game, that’s how I look at it. Craig Simpson:You’re exactly right. You’re exactly right. I think it was Gary Albert that said, there’s not a problem that a great sales letter can’t solve. It really does. I mean, that great sales letter can do so many things as far as getting the emotion of the prospect and getting them excited about something to the point where they may not even know you but yet they’re willing to pull up their credit card and spend money with you. It’s not easy to do, but when it’s done right, it’s very effective. John McIntyre:Tell me about some of the, maybe the mistakes. Maybe you see some sort of mistakes that happen with people who go online and … Like based on your experience from doing direct mail for 20 years, that’s … I’m sure there’s got to be something that you’ve seen some of these online guys doing and then go, “Why are they doing that? They just don’t get it.” Is there anything like that? Craig Simpson:Well, possibly. You may know better than I do on this, but [inaudible 00:20:03] I’ve consulted with over a hundred companies and I’ll tell you, the number 1 mistake that I’ve seen made across the board has to do with the long term customer value. I don’t know if this is an online mistake or not, but for most of the companies that I’ve consulted, I’ve seen this problem over and over again and when it comes down to when you’re evaluating your marketing campaigns, people often look at that initial fail, what was made off of that initial campaign and think, “Wow, that wasn’t very much money,” or “I lost a few dollars here on every customer that came in the door,” that wasn’t worth it so therefore, the campaign bummed. It wasn’t a success. If you look at the long-term value of the customer and see what they’re going to spend over the course of a lifetime, then that campaign whether you may have lost a few dollars in every customer coming in the door, all of a sudden looks totally different when you consider the customer’s long term value. Let’s say for example it cost you $200 to acquire a customer and the customer only spend $150 with you so you end up losing $50 for every customer you brought in the door, but what happens if that customer’s long-term value over the next 9 months to a year that they end up spending 350 – 400 dollars with you?  If you look at it in those terms, it becomes a super profitable campaign because you’re calculating it in what this customer’s going to bring you down the road. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with online or not, but just in general with what I’ve seen with a lot of companies I consulted with is that they don’t consider the long-term value when they look at the results of their campaigns.  John McIntyre:This is something that’s sort of is ringing true or rang true a lot lately is because I had another guy in this podcast that talked about it. He’s an internet guy and he’s all about recurring revenue, which is great. I’ve never really done it before, so I’m like, “All right. I’ll give this a shot.” He had a forum and a community over [inaudible 00:21:54] pay per month, so you get that recurring revenue come in. Him and there’s a bunch of guys who are talking about this right now, so I went and set the forum up, it’s going great and it’s still out there. It’s still running.  I’m still pushing people to go, but what I realized after a month or 2 I had it open was that the point isn’t to have recurring revenue, the point is to have a higher lifetime customer value. When you make a product and you sell for say a hundred dollars, you make a hundred dollars, but if I can put something in the community where they pay a hundred dollars a month, I’m going to make $300 or whatever it happens to be. The catch though is that you might have a community where people can pay per month, that doesn’t mean they’re going to stay forever.  There’s always going to be an average amount of time. Maybe it’s 3 months. If it’s 3 months at a hundred dollars a month, your lifetime customer value is $300. That’s the real figure. That’s the important part and that’s where you might think, “We could sell a hundred dollar product on the front-end and a month later then sell them a $500 product and then we’d have a $600 lifetime value,” therefore, we’ve eliminate the need for this forum. It’s like, once you realize what metrics you need to focus on, it actually becomes a lot easier to manage and build the business. It’s like what Peter Drucker said, what gets measured gets managed. Craig Simpson:Exactly right. It’s amazing how many businesses actually miss that. They’re so near-sighted in their thinking that they really just need to take a look at the long-term value and think about that in goal. I mean, you know most people buy because they’re a creature of habit. They’ve got a hobby and interest or desire, and you are offering them something that makes them … You’re offering something that they want whether it’s a hobby, an interest or a desire. Why not keep offering them other products and services and try and keep them part of your family, and keep them buying from you because if they’re not going to buy from you, they’re going to buy from someone else.  Being nearsighted and only focusing on that first transaction is going to cause you to miss out on low hanging fruit and easy to acquire or easy to sell customers on the back-end. Whereas if you really think long term relationship, long term customer value, offer other products and services, you’re going to fulfill the needs of that customer’s desires and their hobbies and their interest and at the same time, it’s going to bring you more revenue and allow you to be able to grow your business quicker because you can build it based on the back-end sales.  John McIntyre:Yeah. Absolutely. It seems to me that as a business center, the point isn’t to do any … Like, the primary job of really the guys managing the business, the entrepreneur is to get more leads in, and this what marketers do basically, but get more leads in, convert more of those leads to customers and then make those customers spend as much money as possible over the course of their lifetime. Craig Simpson:That’s exactly right. Let me ask you. Do you find the internet world that that focus, do you feel like that most of the internet marketers have that long term value thought in mind or do you think they’re more short term and just trying to grab that initial fail and move on to the next customer? John McIntyre:Yeah. I think a lot of people online, they … I mean, I was one of them, I’m still one of them, I guess in many ways, that people getting into the online game because they want to … I live in Thailand, so [inaudible 00:25:07] and they’re like, “I want to move to Thailand and work online and travel around, and do all that.” The emphasis is less on building, less on doing things the way business should be done and more on, “I want to have a great lifestyle.” That’ll often mean that someone will make, yeah, I guess short-sided decisions.  They’re not in the game to build a big business that maybe one day they can sell or that they … basically like a recurring net income asset. I think that’ll come down a lot. I’ve doing this a couple years now and it’s starting to click and I’m starting to get it, but at least initially no one really thinks like this because most people come straight from jobs, straight from the working class. No one in their family has done business, so no one really explained this stuff to them and it’s very hard to get these sort of realizations from a book. You’ve got to be in the trenches working and doing it for a while until you start to get the hang on, “If all I do is sell an e-book here, that’s not a very good business.” You can’t do much of that.  Craig Simpson:Right. John McIntyre:It’s not worth much to anyone. You start to get those light bulb moments and that’s, I guess, what’s been happening for me this year is starting to go; “I can’t just sell an e-book. I can’t just sell one product. This has to be a big business with various different products at various price points with a marketing system in place and all that stuff.” Craig Simpson:Exactly. Yeah. Good.  John McIntyre:I’ve notice, too, these guys like Perry Marshall which are out there talking about this stuff and if you go to any kind of like advanced marketing lesson or course or something like that or listen to podcast like this, you’ll hear about it but even then like, you know I’ve read Dan Kennedy stuff before and a lot of these guys, and they talk about this lifetime customer value and I was always annoyed, in a sense that to me, it feels like a very hard number to track and it’s annoying and cumbersome and all of that. It’s just so much easier to focus on just the sale. I think what’s really making it click for me right now is that I’m in the process of setting up a sales funnel for a paid traffic campaign and I just sat down with, I guess, a mentor last … that was 2 weeks ago or a week ago and his advice is basically, instead of just selling that one product on the front which I’ve got up for I think about $7 right now, he said, “Go and set up 3 upsells, so instead of $7, you make $300.” At first I was like, “Okay, that’s not that big of a deal, but I’ll go ahead and do it because he told me to,” but then I started thinking, I was thinking, “Why do that?” That means that if all I did … If I get one person to buy the product and buy every upsell, so one person through the funnel in say 2,000 people and it only cost me … that could cost me $300 and I’m breaking even.  Then there’s an email sequence, it’s like a back-end sequence which is always going to pick up a few more sales, so it’s going to put the campaign into just straight profit. Whereas if I only had that one product and the potential would only really make $7 from one person on that first day, it would be a very different game. I think this is happening all the time online and probably maybe direct mail, too, is that because I dramatically changed the potential money that I can make on that front, I’m going to be able to look at a campaign with a lot more positive outlook because if it’s not working straight away, I’m going, “Hang on. I can probably spend up to $300 on this campaign before I really can start to think that maybe it’s not working.” Which is [crosstalk 00:27:58] … Craig Simpson:Right. John McIntyre:… is $7, that’s a very different. You’re going to start, “This campaign is not working. There’s no way I’m ever going to make my money back.” Then you give up too early. To me, it’s like, this is almost like the fundamental foundation. If you can get this part lined out, the amount of money that you make from someone, everything else gets easier.  Craig Simpson:That’s right. Everything else does get easier when you do that. Exactly. It guides you and tells you what marketing campaigns are worth pursuing and which ones you should stay away from because you know the value of the customer and how much they’re going to bring in. It really becomes basically a road map for you to follow and it’s a lot of work to track it, but it’s well worth it and will save you money or make you more money in the long run. John McIntyre:Yeah. Absolutely. I think it’s probably not … Someone might be listening to this and they’re thinking, “This is too hard to track. This isn’t fair.” That’s how I used to think and now it’s like it’s somewhat … It is hard to track in a way. You may need months and months of data to figure that out, but when you think about it like with this traffic campaign that I’m about to run, I know I’ve got roughly the potential to make $300 on the front end if someone buys and then depending on how many sales come on back, there might be 500 or a thousand dollars or whatever on top of that.  There’s potential for profit on the back-end. It’s very helpful to know that and with the forum which is actually called McMasters, which people have probably heard of, I know that while … It’s actually a quarterly thing right now. While people are only going to stay for 1 quarter or 2 quarters, don’t get me wrong, however long it happens, there’ll be an average time, it helps for me to keep that in mind so I know that it’s not going to be infinite amount of money. I know that there’s only going to be $250 or $500 that this person’s going to give me. When you know that, it gives you a lot more … It’s kind of like decision-making power. Craig Simpson:Right. Totally. Exactly right. John McIntyre:Killed it. All right, man. We’re coming up right on time.  Craig Simpson:I wasn’t sure if you want me to call. I’m sorry go ahead.  John McIntyre:We came up right on time here, but before we wrap up, can you … A listener might be wondering where they can learn more about you and maybe they even want to hire you or maybe they just want to talk to you about the direct mail stuff and how they can set it up in their business. Where’s the best place to get on and learn more about Craig Simpson?  Craig Simpson:The best place to go and get my book which is called The Direct Mail Solution, you can get it at thedirectmailbook.com, simple, just thedirectmailbook.com and it’s called The Direct Mail Solution. It’s written by Dan Kennedy and myself. It basically gives you all the details on how to put together a direct mail campaign from start to finish, the things to watch out for, the things that will save you money, the things that will help make you more money, it gives tips on copywriting, lists, production, tracking, the whole nine yards. Even lifetime value and even tracking lifetime value. You can get the book on Amazon as well. It’s called The Direct Mail Solution. That’s really the best way to find out more about me and more about direct mail is to get that book. John McIntyre:Perfect. Follow the links through the book on the show notes at themcmethod.com, so if you want get ahead over there and get that link and head over and buy that book. All right Craig, it’s been good man. Thanks for coming on the show. Craig Simpson:Great. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. The post Episode #67 – Craig Simpson on The Crazy Scaling Power behind Direct Mail Campaigns (and yes, YOU should have one) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

How many marketing channels do you use? Are they ALL online? Brian Kurtz is an offline guy. However, his offline marketing strategies are directly applicable to all online marketing. He’s sold hundreds of millions of dollars through direct mail… Brian’s direct response knowledge makes him the Bruce Lee of marketing. But he’s here to stress one point today… …if you’re an online entrepreneur making money with ONLY one channel, You’re shooting yourself in the foot… Big time. Brian’s never met a medium he didn’t like. He does not miss out on opportunities. So open up that Evernote app… …grab a pen and paper. After hearing this episode, you’ll have brilliant ideas flying out of your ears. You will INSTANTLY have what it takes to become a marketing BEAST. In this episode, you’ll discover: the deep, dark secret of profitable online marketing that will upgrade your whole game plan (brought to you by Yanich Silver) how you are missing opportunities up the wazoo by not being a multichannel marketer (learn exactly where to utilize each channel available) the game changing process of combining two certain marketing channels into one unified whole (put these together and watch yourself blast-off FAR above the pack) the MOST IMPORTANT action steps that will keep you one step ahead of everyone else, at all times how to build CONCRETE relationships with your customers through easy to do back-end marketing the mindset you must have in order for your business to flourish FOREVER (hint… money has very little to do with it) the reason why some marketers turn lazy (avoid this deathtrap AT ALL COSTS) the one vital thing you must have in order to succeed in direct response marketing (don’t be a one hit wonder) how to be a marketing beast (you can’t be an expert in everything… know that) why you NEVER want to be the smartest person in the room how to avoid the huge mistake of living launch-to-launch Mentioned: BrianKurtz.me Martin Edelston Gary Bencivenga Ken McCarthy Perry Marshall Jay Abraham Joe Sugarman David Deutsch Arthur Johnson Greg Rollett John Carlton Jeff Walker The Titans of Direct Response Copyblogger Yanich Silver singlechannelmarketingissoboring.com Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John:Hey you. It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. It’s time for episode 66 of The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast. We’re here to discover one simple thing; how to make more money with every single email you send, exciting days. Today, I’ll be talking to Brian Kurtz. Brian, Brian is a legend. He helped sell hundreds of millions of dollars of products with Boardroom Inc. Boardroom is a big, big publishing company in the US. He’s worked with the biggest and best copywriters on the planet. He’s an absolute wealth with direct response marketing knowledge. He’s actually a friend of a friend. That’s why I wanted to get him on a podcast. There’s a little connection there. He’s got some cool stuff to share. Today, we’re going to talk about storytelling and how that leads to lessons, how multichannel marketing … Brian is not an online guy. Brian is an offline guy. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars with direct mail. As far as I know is all direct mail or advertisements things like that offline stuff. He’s big on multichannel marketing, TV commercial, like infomercial, that was one of the things they do as well. He’s huge on this stuff. We also talk about the entrepreneurial challenge of, a lot of people start as copywriters and then eventually you get to this point where do you want to be a copywriter or do you want to be an entrepreneur? Because they’re very different things and they require different skillset. If you want to be the best copywriter in the world, you can’t really be the best entrepreneur in the world. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you’re not really going to have the time to say be the best copywriter I’d say. It might not be an either or thing like that. You’ll see what I mean when you get there. We’re just going to talk about that in this episode. To get the short notes for this episode of The Email Marketing Podcast go to TheMcMethod.com/66, the 66. This week’s McMaster’s insider of the week, if you don’t know McMaster’s is my private training community where you can get access to training programs like the McIntyre Method Pages. There are a bunch of different things where you can basically learn how to create a 10 email autoresponder sequence, how to set that up in your business and how to create learning pages for sales pages that are going to make you money. That’s at TheMcMethod.com/McMasters. I’ve got the insider for this week right here. It’s from a thread titled you versus I. Don’t make the stupid mistake in your email. Joy asked a question about her, why you should trust me? Why you should trust me or about me section in a sales letter. I brought up this issue of that you need to focus more on the prospects. Instead of saying I this, I that, I really hope this, or I’ve got this great thing to show you, you’ll discover, you’ll learn, you’re going to get this, you’ll probably feel like this, talk about that. This doesn’t always apply, that’s where Joy question comes in. Yes, you focused language instead of I focused is better most of the time generally speaking but not always. Zack replied. Zack’s been on this podcast before. He’s the main guy writing my copy right now for clients is he said, “Just my two cents here. Why you should trust me section can be useful especially if your prospect is coming from caller traffic and you’re asking them to pay up for your expertise. You’re answering the, are you credible objections. It’s tough not to say I in your answer to that.” When you’ve got caller traffic and when you’ve got someone who eventually before they buy something they’re going to want to know who the hell you are. When it gets to the point when it makes the most sense for you to talk about who the hell you are, it’s okay to say, “I am John Smith.” “I’m John McIntyre. I write emails. I help people make more money with email marketing. I have a podcast blah, blah, blah” all these different things. You can say I because that’s the context is okay. At the topic of your sales letter, when you’ve got a headline and you’re trying to bring people into it, don’t start talking about yourself straight. Just say, “I have got a cool thing to talk to you about today. You’re really going to like to hear it” all this stuff like that. Talk about them. Once they want to know about you talk about you, simple as that. If you want to spread the word about The Email Marketing Podcast which you really should go to iTunes, go to stores, search for The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast. Leave me a review. I will review out on the show. Make it five stars if you can. If not, that’s cool too. Give me a suggestion. Give me some feedback whatever you feel like. I can take the feedback. You can go and do that. That’s iTunes store. We’ve got one listener question and then we’ll get to this interview before I get too crazy here. Would you recommend the long email or a short one that drives people back to your website? This is an easy question to answer. That is if you’re trying to drive people just back to your website, to say a blog post or something like that, give them what’s called teaser copy, 50 words, 100 words of teasing them, making them curious and they have to click the link to go to your site to find out what it is. If you’ve got a sales letter on the other hand, that’s a little bit different. That will require a bit more longer copy because you might want to pre-frame the sales letter before they get to it. That’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview with Mr. Brian Kurtz. It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Brian Kurtz. Brian is a partner in Boardroom Inc. He was partly responsible for taking that company to over, was it $150 million? We’re just talking about this. He’s just an absolute expert in this direct response stuff in not so much email specifically but so much of what these guys do in the real world outside of the internet is directly applicable to online and just offline stuff. It’s so much bigger. Sometimes us on the internet here sending emails, we think we’re so cool and that we’re such ninjas for being able to send emails and make money. The world outside of the internet, outside of these product launches and JVs and Affiliate marketing and everything is so much bigger. Brian came to me through another friend who’s been on this podcast Greg Rollett. He’s just a pro at this stuff. I admit. I’ll openly admit I don’t know much about this stuff. I’ve written a lot of copy. I’ve never done direct mail because that’s not where I go down. I never go down with a business like that. Even I’m a beginner. I’m an armature at this stuff. I know how to write emails and maybe the sales letter every now and then but that’s it. I’m going to learn a lot today as well. Brian, how are you doing? Brian:Good, how are you? This is an honor. Based on who you’ve interviewed, I’m in good company. Let’s put it that way. We were just talking about Perry Marshall who you interviewed recently. He’s one of my close friends and gurus. I would start by saying, just to jump on what you just said about me, I said to you in preparation that I just recently bought a URL that I’m using. If you go there there’s nothing there. I just bought the URL for the sake of buying it. The URL is www.singlechannelmarketingissoboring.com. The reason why I bought that I bought it so I could tell you that; it’s funny and I can make you laugh on an interview for one thing. Secondly, it’s very, very meaningful to me to talk about that being in any single channel, I was direct mail for most of my career I still am. I’ve never been in one channel to say, you’re right to say that I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in online, in email marketing, I am no [inaudible 00:06:27]. I had trouble getting on Skype today but that’s a different discussion. I’m a techno idiot on the one hand. On the other hand I know a good copy when I see it. I know a good email promotion when I see it. I know that to be in any single channel is a huge mistake if you’re in business building mode. From what you’ve told me your audience is very much interested in building businesses not just having a series of revenue events. Revenue events are fine. You got to pay the bills. My daughter is graduating from college next Sunday. I’m done with tuition payment. Cash flow is a little different for me going forward. It’s a huge issue for me and everybody else. I’m not saying don’t make money. I’m not saying don’t create revenue events. To be in a world say of just affiliate marketing as your only way of buying media. We get into a lot of details and all of this stuff, using that as an example, huge mistake, huge mistake. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be in affiliate marketing. It’s a great way to generate money. It’s a great way not to pay for media and actually make money and share it with your partners. If you think or anybody on this call thinks that to ignore the media choices that are available to us other than affiliate marketing and online you’re missing opportunities [inaudible 00:07:46]. If I could give that message today as the overview, I’ve done a great service to your audience. We can drill down wherever you want to go. I’ve been in every medium. I used to say, “I never met a medium I didn’t like.” I’ve been in direct mail, I’ve been in TV. I’ve been in radio. I’ve been in space. I’ve been in inserts. I’ve been all over the internet. Not to say I’ve done every one right all the time. If I did them all right at the same time I probably wouldn’t be talking to you. I would be vacationing in Thailand. John:This reminds me, this probably happens a lot all the time online when someone we talked about it before I hit record here where someone creates an eBook and then do a product launch we say product launch formula or something like that. They make some good money. Maybe they make 50 grand or 100 grand or 20 grand or whatever happens to be a lot of money to them. That moment would change a lot of things for them if they’ve never done it before. What people might fall into in that moment is thinking that they’ve made it or that they have a business now. That’s really not true in the sense that like a product launch or one promotion or one product, it’s a business in the sense that you just sold a product instead of your time for money. You’re not an employee. It’s not a very good business. If you want to have a good business, what you’re talking about here is instead of going single channel just if someone is running a channel in say Facebook or Google AdWords or direct mail, you want to be going in basically having different legs everywhere. You’re going to have all these different channels, several different products where you’re building out an entire street. You’re building a business not just one product stream. Brian:Yeah. I’ll build on what you said. That was brilliant what you just said. Using product launch formula I’ll use that as an example. Jeff Walker is I’m not name-dropping. He’s a very, very close friend. I’m in his platinum plus mastermind group and don’t even do launches online. Why would Jeff Walker want me in his product launch formula high SN mastermind group? He wants to take my money for one thing. Jeff’s not about the money. He wants me in that group because I educate in different areas that no one else has been exposed to in that group. These are the best. The people in that group are the people who use product launch formula at the highest level. These are people I really look up to. They know how to maximize launches online to the nth degree. The reason why they’re really good at what they do is that as soon as they get a successful launch whatever the dollar figure is; 20,000 or 100,000 and of course people talk about the million dollar launch. How much do you really keep when you do a million dollar launch that’s complete affiliate? Half of it is gone already to the affiliates and then how much of the 500,000 did you spend on everything else that you had to spend on? What’s the net? I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. It’s a really easy way. You don’t have to pay for media. It’s a great way to launch a business, launchers launch businesses, there’s no doubt. If you’re going to live launch to launch, you’re nuts. First of all, being in the launch mode online is like living in a fire drill which is something I refuse to do. I’m old. I don’t have the patience for that. I’ve done launches. It’s not like I haven’t done them. I’ve done direct mail launches since 1981. The word launch was not invented by an internet marketer just so you know. People have been launching products and businesses forever. The online launch concept and you hit it right on the head and brilliantly that don’t mistake a successful launch for a business. I gave you two quotes before we hit record. I’ll repeat them here for everybody. One is from an internet marketer who I really respect; his name is Chris [Thrall 00:11:22] from the UK. Chris said, “The product is not a business.” The other quote is from John Carlton who is a crusty, old-time direct marketer like me. What John says is, “A promotion is not a business.” John is one of the copywriters who’s ever lived. The idea that knowing that a particular product, there are people online that get a killer product or a killer promotion and that promotion they start going out to all of the affiliates. They start crushing it as it were, I hate that word. They start crushing it everywhere they go. They are the number one affiliate on ClickBank or whatever affiliate network they go on. All of a sudden they don’t even think about the first thing they should do is how are they going to beat that promotion? We have an expression here for the last 40 years that control is your enemy. Those of you on this call all know what a control is in traditional direct response, the control package is you’re winning creative, you’re winning promotion. The second you have a winning promotion, the first thing you must do is to beat it. Think about how you’re going to beat it. It’s “The king is dead long live the king.” People have heard that expression. The control is your enemy. That’s a good one too. You must, must, must always think about not living in the present, you’re always going to the next step. Getting a successful launch, getting a successful promotion is just the beginning I’m a big believer too that all of the other media, online is great to launch a business because it’s much less expensive. To do direct mail, to launch a business, I don’t think I’d recommend even though I’m the direct mail guy, to not do direct mail on the back end when I already have a buyer who I now have a more intimate relationship with, the beauty of doing things like direct mail or telemarketing, I’ve done telemarketing with actually shipping physical product as opposed to just digital product, you can start seeing the value add that you might have to parts of your audience that would appreciate a more intimate relationship, a more concrete relationship and one that has a higher perceived value. Frankly, whether you like CDs, whether you like USBs, whether you like a physical product versus a digital product or not, there’s no doubt in my mind that giving somebody giving physical product as opposed to digital product could definitely change that relationship. To do that on the front end which I did my whole career is tougher and tougher to do these days, the US Postal Service isn’t helping me at all; printing and production and all the stuff that people hate. To ignore that is just, ignore that at your peril is my suggestion. I’ll give you one quick thing too just speaking of PLF. I met somebody who is an online launch expert who showed me her database one day. Basically it was a snapshot of her customers, her database, her customers or people who bought her products. She has a lot of products which is great. She has a lot of diversity. She started showing me the breakout of her list. Of course she had 10,000 people on her list we’ll say and of course 8000 of them that bought one product only. The other 2000 they bought two products, three products, four products, five products. At the bottom of that list, there was one person who bought 17 products from her. I looked at her and I said now I was joking but I wasn’t joking. I said to her, “This person right here whatever her name or his name is 17 products from you, when is the last time you invited them to dinner?” She looked at me funny like “Why are you being such a wise guy Brian?” What I was really trying to get to is that whether you invite them to dinner or whether they get the gold platted X price for being the 17 time buyer who is the person that knows more about your content than anybody in the world or something, I’m making stuff up because I’m not going to tell you what to sell them or how to treat them. Why wouldn’t I want to treat that person like royalty and try to move everybody else on my list closer to royalty? If you think about your list like that, how many people may be listening on this right now have an email list of 100 people, 500 people, 500,000 people and that when they send an email out, it’s one size fits all. They send the same message to everybody. That’s a huge mistake. List segmentation is all part of this mix as well. I’m going off on a lot of different topics here. The whole umbrella that I’m trying to get to is that you have to look at this … I’m going back to exactly what you said you have to look at this as a business not a series of launches, not a series of revenue events. You’ve got a business. You’ve got people who love you. You’ve got people who love you more than other people love you. How are you going to treat them versus other people on your list? How are you going to deliver product that may be different to some people than the product that you deliver to others? I just put all that out there because if you’re not thinking like that you’re not thinking about growing the business. You’re just thinking about making money. John:Right. That reminds me a lot of everything you said there reminds of this is why I brought Perry Marshall on the podcast is because I just read his book on 80/20 Sales and Marketing. I keep mentioning it when I talk to people now as well. Brian:It’s the best book I read last year, best business book. John:It blew my mind. Brian:Yeah great book. John:Yeah. Brian:It’s based on a basic print principal. He took it to a whole nother level which was very cool. John:Yeah. It’s basically focus on the right stuff and you get a much higher return. One thing I thought about, recently with, I’ve been testing in your format where people pay per month to go in because everyone is going in. They’re creating revenues, the best thing in the world. The more I thought about it the more I started realizing, it’s not really, the whole point of being an entrepreneur is there’s that old French definition which is an entrepreneur is a guy who will go and he moves resources from a lower area field to a higher area field. It’s all the job of the business owner not necessarily the copywriter but the business owner or the entrepreneur is to figure out basically increase, figure out ways to increase the last time of the customers, how much money they spend with you and try to lower the cost of the amount they have to spend to acquire that customer and then to scale that as high as possible. Brian:Exactly. John:Just do that on every channel. You add more products into it. The reason why I mentioned Perry Marshall is because he’s got his thing in that book that he mentions the conversion triangle, the trafficking consistency where you’ve got traffic at the front or the top of the triangle and then on the bottom right hand corner you’ve got conversion because you’ve got to make that traffic do something. You’ve got economics which is you’re going to make money with it. The economics then you feed back into traffic and the traffic feeds back into the conversion. Then that brings in what you mentioned is always try and beat the controller. That’s the cool about online is you can just set this up automatically with a split testing software. You’re just always running a split test. As long as you’ve got traffic, you can be running a split test or several split tests on every step in that entire sales sequence. It’s all automated. It goes on to talk about expanding the universe to where you might stand on paid traffic because that’s one of the hardest mediums at least online to convert. Then you move out to JVs and then affiliates and then email traffic and then you go and optimize for your search traffic. Then you go and go offline. It’s like you take this one basic principal of get a product and sell it. You just blow things out of proportion. Brian:Right. It is common sense. Email marketing and online marketing has made for some lazy marketers because of the, it’s inexpensive. What you just talked about, do you understand? I’ll be 56 tomorrow. John:Happy birthday. Brian:Thank you. I’m proud of that because my mentor Marty Edelston who founded this company, he never complained about getting old because getting old means he had all this extra wisdom that he had accumulated. When you talk about A/B split testing and as soon as you take control, how do you go out and tweak it. The idea that indirect mail promotes my career the cost of doing that was so high. I had to mail an additional 25,000 names in direct mail at a cost of 3, 4, $500 per thousand to decide what panel to test against that initial panel. Online as you just said you can do this on the fly. Make sure you have somebody who understands statistical significance though because 12 orders beating eight orders for $100 product is not a winner just FYI. You must have all that, I’m not a statistician. I was an English major not that I speak the language that well. I was not a math major or a statistics major. If you don’t live by your numbers, that’s what direct marketing is all about. The idea true A/B split testing to really determine how you beat your controls, how you take your business, once you get something that wins and start incrementally moving it up, building, building, building and at the same time thinking of the next new products. There’s a great quote in the Bible of direct marketing. There’s a book written by Bob Stone, I used it as a textbook when I taught direct marketing at the college level. It’s called Successful Direct Marketing Methods. It’s in its seventh edition. Right at the beginning of that book, one of the first quotes is “No direct marketing business can succeed without repeat business.” Anybody on this call is probably saying this guy should not be being interviewed by John. He’s not telling me anything I don’t know. Frankly, that may be true. I will tell you right now what I observe in the market place is that not everybody is understanding the concept that no marketing business that if you want to succeed whether online offline I don’t care what you do that you must have repeat business. You must have business that builds upon your existing business and nobody wants to be a one-hit wonder. There are many more one-hit wonders online than there are people who’ve built franchise businesses, my opinion. John:That’s because you can probably, when you have a real, I always say it is a real business, when you have an offline business the stakes are much higher. If you don’t pull it off, if you don’t succeed then you’re gone, you’re out. You can’t stay in business whereas online it’s easy enough. The stakes aren’t that high because you don’t have any costs. Brian:Good point. John:You’ve got a couple of outsource in the Philippines. You make a little bit of money. It’s all good. It’s not a big deal. Brian:Yeah. I did a post on copy blogger which is a really great site. I’m sure you know it because you’re a copywriter. My post on there, my article on there that I’ve done it’s called How Paying Postage Made Me a Better Marketer. It talks about nine things of why the thought process it takes when the stakes are as high as you said … Look, I’m not sitting here running around saying, “Oh man, I’m a better marketer because I pay postage. I paid all this money to do direct mail.” Maybe I’m the idiot. I should have figured out how to do a lot cheaper marketing earlier. The discipline that it took to do that has really been something that I’ll take with me as I move into all kinds of media cheap or expensive. It doesn’t matter. The discipline of marketing is the discipline of marketing which you hit on perfectly. John:There’s almost like pros and cons if you’re online there’s less downside. That also means it’s easy to be lazy and give up because offline there’s a lot more downside. That at the same time forces you to up your game. Brian:Absolutely. There’s also a bigger upside. I’ll say that nothing still scales like direct mail. We do direct mail programs now that can get three, 4, 5% response rates. The economics are tough if you’re dealing with physical product. That’s the difference. You’re delivering physical product. You are cutting into your profits by not having a downloadable product. If you do your direct mail right today, the response rates are as good as they’ve ever been. The problem the list universes aren’t as big and then you’re margins are tighter because of physical product. The risks are much higher. I just want people to know that’s why I was emphasizing that using direct mail on the back end of an online business once you have customers who have already paid money with you the investment that you can make in them is much higher therefore using “more expensive” media is going to have a chance of paying out. I’ll just tell your audience that the response rates that you’re going to get with direct mail even with an audience that may be not used to responding by direct mail but they’re used to responding to you as a guru. Look at Dan Kennedy. Dan Kennedy, he swears by still sending his print newsletter on the back end. Once you’re at $60 a month member of whatever he’s doing. Don’t underestimate physical product. I’ll tell this quick one; I was at Underground two years, maybe three years ago which is the number one internet conference Yanik is a real good friend and somebody I really, really respect. Yanik is a student of all the things we’re talking about today. People would think Yanik Silver is an internet marketer. Don’t let him fool you. Yanik Silver is a direct marketer. Yanik Silver had a guy on stage. It was Saturday morning of Underground two or three years ago. The topic of the speech was the big, deep, dark secret of online marketing. The deep, dark secret I’m going to whisper into my microphone here. The deep, dark secret, I don’t want anybody to hear this is physical product, physical product. That was the secret from an online marketer talking to online marketers that they just found out. Fortunately I was sitting next to a fellow dinosaur who’s been in direct marketing since the 1980s like myself. I looked at him I scratched my head I go, “That’s brilliant. We could definitely benefit from this physical product thing.” I’m not bragging. It’s not bragging if you did it. I sold $300 million worth of books, hardcover books on TV over a three year period. People will still buy physical product. I don’t want to go crazy with that. You get my point. John:It was about a month ago, I actually bought a physical book online from an internet marketer. It was actually the first product I’d bought from him Russell Brunson I don’t know if you know him. Brian:Yeah I know Russell. I know him well. John:Yeah. He had his ads coming up on Facebook for some is 101, 103 split tests, you got to the site, it’s free but you got to pay $20 postage or $10 postage I can’t remember what it was. He sent it out in Thailand. Obviously after that I start getting a whole ton of emails from him as well. That was an interesting example. When this book came out, I don’t have it with me here. It’s high quality paper with glossy prints, it’s gorgeous. There are problems with the book. The book was an example of this guy doing something different. It’s incredible. It’s got my attention. I’ve told I don’t know probably at least five or 10 people about it who have then gone and either bought it or told other people about it. It’s a very disruptive marketing as well. You’ve got a list of people who are used to eBooks or videos online and you send them a letter, postcard even, they’d freak out. Brian:Yeah. I’ll tell you. It’s not anecdotal. This is a real story. I do a lot of speaking for students in direct marketing. These are college students who are going to go into direct marketing. I got up in front of them; this is when I whisper into a microphone as well. It was a dark secret. I said to them. I said, “When you go on a job interview, after the interview, how many people here send an email follow-up?” Of course every hand goes up. I said, “How many people send any other kind of follow-up?” No hand goes up. There were 300 kids in the room. I said to them. I said, “Just so you know that if you go on a job interview and after the interview you send something” and then I actually happen to have at my fingertips, “If you send something on this.” I held up a piece of paper. I said, “This is called paper.” I said, “This is called a pen. There’s also called a Word processor which you can actually type on paper. You don’t have to do it as an email.” I said, “This is an envelope. I don’t have postage on me now.” If you’re sitting in an interview talking to an interviewee and they are talking about an author or an article that they read or something that you have in common. I’ll make this up that you send an envelope on your follow-up with a cover letter and then you attach an article from the author that you were talking about in the interview, you know what? I whisper in the microphone again, no one else is doing that. No one else is doing that. Differentiation, I’m using that as an example. I’m not telling people to go apply for jobs here. I’m saying that that thinking is the same thinking that marketers should have that … You said, I love the word you used, disruptive. It’s so ironic to me that physical product on the back end for an online marketer is considered disruptive marketing. I applaud you for looking at it, for observing it and then saying, “This is something that people should learn how to do.” Keep in mind it wasn’t disruptive in the 1980s. It was how we did things. Now the combination of things given the high cost of physical product, the high cost of postage and the low cost of email, the low cost of digital product combining those into a unified whole is a game changer. I’m saying the people on this call right now are privileged to be talking to me and you because if they haven’t thought about their business this way, think about your business this way. It can be game changing. I’ll repeat something. Listen carefully; no one else is doing it. John:There are sites out there. I’m guilty as charged. I’ve never done any physical stuff myself. I know people who do. It’s not even that hard anymore. You can set it up so you send out. You can take a PDF send it to someone else or another company. They’ll put it on to a, they’ll print it out into a report. You can put it onto a CD. You can even send people USB drives with probably videos and all sorts of stuff on them. It’s not even that big of a deal. Brian:No question. I’m doing a live event in September that’s going to be an epic event. I call it The Titans of Direct Response. Basically I’ve got a lineup of speakers that is unprecedented. The thing that I’m doing there, one of the giveaways, I’m going to actually give a binder, two binders actually, Dan Kennedy does this too. I’m going to have a binder that’s going to have PDFs of all of the best control packages that the copywriters who were speaking at the event have done for Boardroom that have mailed over 650 million pieces of direct mail. These are control packages that they wrote for us. In the binder, it’s going to be the PDF and also everything on a CD. I was thinking about a USB drive since you buy a Mac Air now, you don’t even have a CD drive anymore. I’m still cool with giving a CD and a PDF. I’m going to have another binder that’s going to be a printout of every direct mail piece not written by those copywriters who were speaking that have also mailed in the 100s of millions of pieces for Boardroom. I’m going to give those away as physical product. These are direct mail packages. I could give those away digitally. They’ll be on the CD for those people who are allergic to paper which there are a lot of people that still are. The idea of touching and feeling the direct mail package, that’s a 12-page letter, that’s a 24-page magalog, the kinds of direct mail that we do that weave a story, that tell a story that is powerful that sells product, sells through on a product and not just is on the periphery of the sales. By the way a flashing arrow in a red box on a landing page is not necessarily good creative just FYI. There’s a lot that goes into it. You as a copywriter I know you really understand this. That the copy approaches of my direct mail from the 1980s, ‘90s and 2000s is all applicable to steal smart from in online marketing today. That’s why I’m giving it away as physical product. I’m giving it away on digital too. I’m giving it away on physical product because it existed as physical product first. John:The whole [inaudible 00:30:57] the disruptive idea I mentioned before is that it’s almost like marketing is the art of figuring out what’s going to disrupt someone the most? When no one is saying lose weight, the person who comes out and says lose weight as their headline disrupts the person because someone is like, “No one has told me that before. I want to buy this product.” Everyone starts saying it and all of a sudden you got to say something else. Brian:Exactly. John:When online doesn’t exist if you have something online that’s disruptive. If everyone is doing online and no one is doing offline then offline is disruptive. It’s almost like the game is always shifting. A good marketer is always basically taking in the environment, the surrounding. They’re saying, “What’s everyone expecting and then going, “I’m going to do the opposite of that.” Brian:Yeah. As a copywriter you’ll love the title of an interview I did with my friend Joe Polish which is actually on my site for free if people on your list want it. In the interview we said, “Everyone is going right time to go left”, which is exactly what you just said. It’s really about direct mail for internet marketers. It introduces this concept that it’s not that … We’re not telling people to replace online marketing with offline marketing. We’re encouraging people that there’s this thing that people aren’t doing that you’re going to stick out. I know some online marketers that are just doing incredibly well with that. I bet Russell did great with that back end book to his online audience. I have a ton of stuff on my site that your folks are welcome to eat it up. It’s all free. It’s BrianKurtz.me, www.BrianKurtz.me. I’m not selling anything there. They can opt-in to my list. I’m blogging every week on all of these kinds of topics. I want them to have that interview in particular. It’s on there. It says, “Everyone is going right time to go left.” John:Okay. I’ll have the link to that on short notes at The McMethod.com. One thing I’ve been meaning to ask you about which we talked about a little bit before is this whole idea of being a beast of marketing. In this case being a beast is a good thing. Tell me about that. Brian:Marty Edelston who passed away this past October. He was my mentor. He’s the guy who founded Boardroom in 1972. An entrepreneur is an entrepreneur just and he was a beast. Marty was a tenacious marketer. He was also incredibly generous as well. That’s what makes to me a beast. The beast sounds very aggressive, always on the prowl, always have to sell the most. My definition here would be tenacious yet generous marketing. How I would definite that, there’s a picture I have in my office here of Marty in his prime, he was black belt in Karate. He’s Karate chopping a board on two stacks of books. The books are called The Book of Secrets which is a book that we mailed 20 million names over a couple of years. The Book of Secrets was the third version of a book that the first two versions were disasters in direct mail. I won’t go into the whole story. I’ll be telling the story actually at Info-Summit in November which I was invited to speak at which I was flattered to. I’m going to tell this story about tenacious marketing. Marty believed so much in this product and realized he was a great promotion away from 25 million pieces or 20 million pieces in direct mail from a disaster one, disaster two, big winner three. It’s not just being relentless and stupid, doing the same thing over and over again is not and getting the same results. That’s stupidity. That’s not what I’m talking about. Gary Halbert who is one of the great copywriters of all time had the classic line that every business problem can be solved with a great sales letter. This idea of being a beast in marketing and being tenacious, you have to put it all together. It’s not any one thing. We’ve already talked a little bit about the product alone is not enough; the promotion alone is not enough. The list and the segmentation and the media buying is not enough by itself. You must put all of those things together and to be a true beast of marketing involves making sure that you have experts at all those areas. There’s a great quote that I have in one of my presentations from an investment banker in New York. He was talking about buying internet companies. He said, “Advertising opportunities are now infinite.” What does that really mean? What that means is that anybody who … I said this one on my blogs recently, anybody who comes to you today and says, “I’m your one-stop shopping for all of your media needs”, run away, run away, run, run fast. Don’t even stay near that person. There is nobody, nobody that can be an expert on all those things. Being a beast in marketing as I’ve talked about creative, as I’ve talked about lists and audience segmentation, as I’ve talked about product development, all of those things, there are experts at all of those areas. I don’t care what type of entrepreneurship or star you are. You’re probably not an expert in all of those things. You have to using Dan Sullivan’s term the entrepreneurs’ coach who talks about working your unique ability. If you’re a copywriter for example, yeah you should be writing your own copy. When you want to start working on new product development, collaborate with people that can help you based on what you want to do, what your passions are and make sure you’re running it by people, make sure you’re in mastermind groups. Marty didn’t invent mastermind groups. He always supported me being in them. Mastermind groups also were not invented by internet marketers just saying. Napoleon Hill talks about masterminding in his books from way back in the early 20th Century. Being around people that can help you develop your business, going to experts in those areas, you can’t be the list expert. You can’t be the Facebook expert. You can’t be the SEO expert and all those things. You must find those experts. If you’re not the expert in copy, find a copywriter who is. I was writing the promotion for this [inaudible 00:36:59] that is in September. I sent it to one of my buddies David Deutsch who is a world class copywriter. It was on a Sunday two weeks ago. David sends me a very, very polite yet pointed email after he looked at my copy. He said, “Brian, you’re an expert in list, right?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “If I was looking for information on lists, databases and list segmentation, I would come to you. If I was [inaudible 00:37:24] if I was trying to do that myself, that would be a big mistake.” He’s sitting there trying to in a subtle way saying, “Brian you can’t write [inaudible 00:37:32].” It wasn’t like my copy sucked. It was I was writing prose. I wasn’t writing sales copy. At the end he goes, “Brian, it’s Sunday go to your family. Give your sales letter to a professional copywriter.” He wasn’t going to do it because he’s too expensive. Basically that’s what I did. I had violated my own rule of thumb of why I am a beast in marketing and why am I a tenacious marketer. It’s not because I know everything about everything. I know everything about this much. Right now my thumb and my index finger are an inch apart. I know everything about this much. I have a sense of what else I need to know to make sure that I can get my products and services to the market place in the best ways possible. If I think I can do all that myself at the highest level, I’m an idiot. John:Yeah. This is like what Richard Branson talks about. Some of these guys who are building billion dollar companies is if you talk to them or you read their books that kind of thing, it’s always about hiring. It’s never about doing anything specifically. It’s pretty much always about finding good people who are smarter than them to get the job done. That’s what these guys do. They have a vision. They have other people to execute on it. They just do that over and over and over again. Brian:Yeah. In this event in September, there’s going to be a huge tribute to Marty Edelston who I mentioned before. Dan Kennedy was a big admirer of Marty. Dan and I are going to basically spend the first morning of two days at the event going through the four pillars of what made Marty Edelston this modest guy from Newark, New Jersey an extraordinary entrepreneur and businessman. One of the four things is basically if you’re the smartest person in the room you’re in the wrong room. Marty always surrounded himself with people smarter than himself even though he always used to say he had the great bullshit antennae. He knew when people were bullshitting him. He also knew when he needed to take a piece of this and piece of that. That’s how he built his business. He had the smarts. He had the drive. He had the work ethic. He had the entrepreneurial spirit to the nth degree. If he didn’t have this idea that he wasn’t the smartest guy on everything, he never would have built $100 million business. John:Tell me about this event man, because we’re getting up to about time here. Before we go though, you did mention this event with all these speakers. You’ve told me a bit about it. I wish I could be there for it but I’m not going to be in the States I don’t think. Tell me about it. Tell the listeners about it because I’m sure there’s a few of them that are going to be in the area. Brian:Yeah. I wasn’t planning on going on this call to pitch anything. I’m not a sales guy. I’m the only guy that’s never spoken at a Glazer-Kennedy event that didn’t sell anything from the stage. I’m very proud of that. That’s not my game. This event is going to be the ultimate educational event to bring together the greats of direct response and the greats of today’s marketing environment in one room to teach, to educate, to interact. Basically as I said it’s called The Titans of Direct Response. The first part of day one is Dan Kennedy and I basically talking about those pillars from Marty Edelston which are both marketing pillars and entrepreneurial pillars of how to build a business and how to have insatiable curiosity when it comes to building a marketing business. Dan is going to actually do a bunch of things on his creative approach that he has not shared at other events. That’s going to be cool. After that, I’m going to have what I call the Boardroom’s Mount Rushmore of copywriters. There will be four copywriters on this panel who are responsible for 650 million pieces of direct mail, all profitable direct mail. It’s not like mail we threw away. It’s this mail that actually mail with response rates. That’s the Mount Rushmore the four best copywriters for Boardroom currently. That’s David Deutsch, Parris Lampropoulos, Eric Betuel and Arthur Johnson. Maybe people have heard of them, maybe they haven’t. These are four of the best copywriters in the world. After them I am going to have the best copywriter in the world Gary Bencivenga who is no longer writing and yet he has his own business. He is going to speak. He never speaks anymore. He did the Bencivenga 100 many years ago. That was his farewell to the direct marketing industry. Gary thought that he needed to be on stage for this event. He’ll speak for an hour on things that he has not talked about since his retirement. If anybody in copywriting or creative, we’re talking about copywriting royalty here. After him, we’re going to have Ken McCarthy who is basically if Al Gore invented the internet, Ken McCarthy invented Al Gore. Ken McCarthy is one of the pioneers of internet marketing. He’s a direct response. He’s my age. He’s got the experience. He’s studied all the greats of direct marketing. He’s no [inaudible 00:42:19] by any means and just the opposite. He’s still doing tons of stuff online, doesn’t speak anywhere anymore. He used to have the system seminar which is probably the best marketing seminar that you could go to in the ‘80s and ‘90s. That’s day one. Day two, I’m going to have Perry Marshall who you’ve heard on this podcast. He and I are similar in that I think we’re bridges between the past and the present. Perry is a lot smarter than I am. That’s why I’m having him speak because why do I want to be the smartest person in the room? I’m by far, I maybe the dumbest person in the room. I’ll have Perry Marshall. I’m going to do one-on-one interviews with Jay Abraham who is one of the great pioneers of direct marketing. I’m going to do a one-on-one with Joe Sugarman who is the eventer of BluBlocker sunglasses and probably sharper image and any hi-tech cataloger owes Joe Sugarman a debt of gratitude for inventing that category. Those will be interviews with them. I’m going to have, in the afternoon I’m going to have Greg Renker of Guthy-Renker which is the largest infomercial company in the world. They’re close to a $2 billion business. It’s not to talk just about direct response TV. It’s to talk about multichannel marketing on steroids. Greg Renker, Guthy-Renker does TV. They also do kiosks in malls and everything in between. I’m going to have Fred Catona who is the father of direct response radio, probably the number one guy on direct response radio in the world. I’m going to do a final panel with my internal mastermind group, the closest people in my particular circle of why I can be a tenacious and beast marketer. That will be Michael Fisherman, Jim Quick and Ryan Lee. Your listeners probably are well, very familiar with Ryan Lee. I’m not just getting a bunch of old guys. I’m getting some people together who are the Titans of the future. The four of us are going to talk about true masterminding and what it means to be accountable to people in your world so that you don’t go out and launch product indiscriminately. I am going to do a day three as a VIP package where David Deutsch and I are going to spend an entire day all hot seats probably a maximum of 30 people and 15 minute hot seats, people bring their business problem, their copy, they’re tired, they’re poor, they’re hungry, whatever they want to bring. David and I, David is one of the top copywriters in the world. In this context, I’ll consider myself one of the best direct marketers in the world. David and I will spend the entire day with a group of people. That group also will have a special dinner with Dan and I in the VIP package which will be cool too. They’ll get a tour of the Boardroom. All of that will be in Stamford, Connecticut September 11th to the 13th of this year. Promos are going out soon. If your folks want to hear about it I’ll send you a link at some point when I announce the event formally which will be in the next two weeks. If they go to my list www.BrianKurtz.me they get all that free content. If they want to opt-in to my list, they’ll get the link to the event if they want to come. It’s going to be an epic event. John:Sounds good man. I’m on your website right now. I’m signing up. I want to hear about this event. Maybe I can make it over, who knows. Brian:That would be awesome. I would love to have you. I could just tell by the questions you ask and the preparation for this interview that you’re someone that really gets all of this. That you want to teach the audience about everything they need to know about email marketing. You’re bigger than that I can tell. I’m really flattered that you asked me to participate in this. We weren’t able to drill down too much into specific marketing techniques. There’s a lot of stuff on my website that has some of that. I’ll be moving much more into drill down type content over the next year or two. I’m very excited about the possibilities for the marketers of today. It’s the best time to be in marketing. I say marketing. I don’t say online marketing. I don’t say offline marketing. I’ll say direct response marketing. Online is the ultimate direct response medium. John:A quick question before we go though you know about the GoPro camera right? Brian:Yeah. Is that the thing that Mike [Annese 00:46:30] talks about? No. John:This camera, the guy who started it is one of the newest, America’s newest youngest billionaires, one of those guys. Brian:Yeah, yeah. John:I don’t know too much about the story. I remember hearing somewhere along grapevine that those guys did a ton of infomercial stuff. Brian:Hmm (affirmative). John:I thought you might know. Brian:Yeah infomercial is a tough business. We could do a separate podcast someday if you want to talk about direct response TV although Greg Renker that’s why I got Greg Renker because if I was going to talk about TV, why would I want to talk about TV when I can have Greg Renker talk about TV? We did do well on TV. The problem with direct response television is that you spend a lot more money on the production infomercial for example and to get on the air. The media cost to test is not that high it’s maybe 15 or 20,000 bucks. The production could be 50 to $150,000. The thing is as soon as you run it on the media that you think is going to work on TV which is limited to some degree and it doesn’t work, it’s all sunk cost. It’s not like direct mail or in email where you can tweak it, where you can change it, where you can recoup some of the money you might have had in product development, very tough to recoup on that big upfront investment when you’re in direct response TV. I find it to be a very dangerous medium. It’s also one that if you hit you will go nuts. We not only went nuts by getting a successful, we had four successful infomercials. In every case increased all boats rose. We were able to get into direct mail in a big way for the products that we sold on TV using direct mail that talked about the infomercial. We actually had screenshots from all the experts that were in the infomercial in the direct mail package and then we went online with the experts that we used. In one case Hugh Downs who was the famous newscaster. We put Hugh Downs all over the internet talking about this book. That is seen on TV, seen by millions which was true. All of a sudden all boats rose because I think singlechannelmarketingissoboring.com. We were able to take the infomercial combine it with direct mail and online and it became this juggernaut. It really, the TV scaled so quickly. I tell that story a lot I’d like to repeat it one day. I don’t consider it a one-hit wonder. I do consider it a four-hit wonder. That’s why our company went to 150 million but then went way back down to 80 million very quickly because we were able to hit on something that big. The interesting thing, talk about building a business, we didn’t have to really staff up to do any of that. We went from 70 or 80 million to 150 million within one year or a year and a half. We stayed at 150 million for close to three years. I didn’t increase our staff at all. Talk about direct marketing scaling, right? John:Yeah. Brian:I already had the direct mail people in place. I already had the online marketing people in place. I outsourced almost everything for the infomercial, the production, the telemarketing, the fulfillment I already had in place. I didn’t have to add vendors. I had to add telemarketing vendors. They’re getting paid as a piece of the order. I did not really increase my overhead at all. I went from 80 million to 150 million. If I could do that on a regular basis, see you in Fiji right? If I’m making this sound easy you can slap me up the side of my head. It’s not easy. Boy, when you’re thinking in terms of this multichannel approach, it can just scale quickly. It was probably the most exciting period of my career to date. I’ve had a lot of exciting periods of winning controls with all those great copywriters and all this other stuff. In fact at the event, one of those four copywriters, Arthur Johnson was actually in the infomercial with Hugh Downs. He wasn’t a TV star beforehand. He is just so passionate about the health topics that he writes about. He really is a health writer. He’s not a copywriter. Talk about a copywriter becoming a health expert, he really was, because to become a great copywriter he had to become a health expert first, to write about health information. Arthur will talk at the event about that being the most exciting period of his career. He’s had an illustrious career as a copywriter writing for the best direct marketers in the world over a long period of time. He considers that whole infomercial to direct mail to online as the most exciting marketing that he’s ever done in his career. That case history will be really mapped out. On my site, there’s an interview that Perry Marshall did with me which is about, it talks about the three biggest successes of my career or something like that. I map out the case history from my perspective on that interview if people want to listen to that. Arthur will give it from the perspective of the copywriter and from someone who is actually on camera the whole time. I went crazy there when you said infomercial. I wanted to get all that in. It’s a phenomenal medium, direct response TV. That’s why radio is a forgotten medium. A lot of online marketers have found it. You hear a lot of stuff online on the radio that our online marketer is using radio for lead generation. That’s why I went and got Fred Catona to speak, because I said to Dan Kennedy, “Who is the number one guy in direct response radio?” It isn’t me. I’ve not had big success in radio personally. I want to make sure I put the person on stage that’s going to teach that because this is just the beginning. The concept of the Titans of Direct Response is something that I’m going to … This is the first event. This will be the big one. I could see a whole series of workshops coming off of this in all of these different media, medium or whatever because I might, maybe I will use that site singlechannelmarketingissoboring.com because I think people will remember it even though it’s long. Use that as a link to bring all of this together because that is one my real passions. I have this thing called O-to-O-to-O, online to offline to online. That to me mixing and matching all the media probably is what excites me for my next 30 year career. The first 30 years have been really, really good. I’m really happy with my first 30 years. Now I got to decide what I want to do when I really grow up. These next 30 years are all about this merging of the old and the new, merging online and offline and being a bridge, being Perry Marshall junior maybe. I don’t know. John:It sounds good Brian. I’ll have to get you back on sometime in the future maybe in 20 years’ time we’ll have to talk about what’s happened since then. Brian:Yeah. I’ll be in a wheelchair but yeah sure. John:Absolutely. I really appreciate you coming on the show Brian. It’s been good. Brian:Okay thanks. The post Episode #66 – Brian Kurtz on Using Direct Response Marketing Through Multiple Channels to Grow a Rock Solid Business appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.