The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast

What if you could get 500% more done? Imagine. You sit down to write an email. Brilliant copy cascades from your brain onto the page… You crush your scariest goals. You take breaks STRATEGICALLY – …and have business epiphanies while you’re off hiking in the woods. Meet Steven Kotler. Kotler is the author of two bestsellers: Abundance and Rise of Superman. He’s here to show you ONE thing: How to hack “flow” state. Now – Flow is the secret sauce behind all great innovations. It’s the edge of your current SKILL… …and the naked frontier outside your comfort zone. Would you like to get more done? Make more money in your business? Do you ever wonder “Where did my day go?” Tune in to this one. Get ready to explode your productivity… …and unlock more results than you thought possible. In this episode, you’ll discover: the shocking trait that gives top executives a 500% edge in productivity what the invent of jazz and can teach you about copywriting a proven framework to access FLOW today 2 crucial differences between optimal performance and “self help” one weird “pick-a-sentence” technique to stretch your creative limits how to make your subconscious work for you (HINT: you’ll need 10 seconds and a pen) the disturbing reason people today spend LESS than 5% of their work life in flow Mentioned: Steven Kotler Flow Research Collective MacGyver Method Steve’s book Abundance Flow Profile – free flow diagnostic tool to test how you experience flow Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy.  I’m here with Steven Kotler. Now Steven Kotler is the author of a book called The Rise of Superman and another booked called Abundance.  The reason I wanted to get him on today was to talk about what he talks about in The Rise of Superman. Now this book is about what he calls The Rise of Superman obviously.  What does that mean though?  It means if you look at snowboarders or action sports, skateboarders, people who are rafting down rivers in Canada or climbing ice waterfalls, doing the crazy stuff.  Those wingtips, the skydivers with wings, which is extremely dangerous stuff where basically, people have to access a certain flow state to stay alive.  That’s what this book’s about. The interesting part, and where I thought we’d link it to marketing, copywriting and business, is that these people when they’re in there, these snowboarders, when they’re in this situation is that they have to access this flow state, these different brain chemicals or they’re going to die.  The idea is if we can learn how to hack that state, then we can become better writers, better musicians or better anything in life.  That’s the kind of natural link in there or how I’m trying to do it.  We’ll get into that in just a minute. Steven, how are you doing today? Steven: Really well, thank you.  How are you? John: Fantastic.  Good to have you on.  Before we get into this flow stuff, the listener might not be fully familiar with you.  Give the listener a little bit of a background on who you are and a bit about what you do. Steven: I’m an author and a journalist and the director of research for the flow genome project.  What I primarily work on is disruptive technology.  Sometimes I work on disruptive external technologies, vertical farming, that sort of stuff, stem cells, et cetera.  Sometimes I work on disruptive internal technologies.  It’s about flow states which are probably the most disruptive internal technology available to any of us. John: Okay, and the idea, I like how you frame it up as though it’s a technology.  That’s something that has evolved in the same way that technologies evolved and that it’s something that we can use in a very practical way.  This is kind of like peak performance.  Guys are like, I guess this is what Tony Robbins, guys like him, teach people how to do.  Is it the same kind of thing as that? Steven: No, not at all.  Let’s define flow states for your listeners.  Let’s give people some context and then I’ll answer your question.  Flow states are defined technically as optimal states of consciousness, where we feel our best and we perform our best.  I think everybody has had some experience with these states.  Have you ever lost an afternoon to a great conversation, or gotten so sucked into a work project that everything else falls away, then you’ve probably tasted the experience.  In flow, we become so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears.  Action and awareness start to merge.  Our sense of self, self-consciousness, those disappear completely.  Time dilates, so sometimes it slows down and you get that freeze-frame effect like you’re in a car crash. Sometimes it speeds up and five hours will pass by in five minutes.  Throughout all aspects of performance, and that’s mental and physical, go through the roof.  Tony Robbins and the rest of those guys, they work A, primarily in self-help.  There’s a couple of key differences.  The first is that nothing I tell you here today are you going to apply on Monday and you’re life’s going to immediately start getting better.  It doesn’t work that way.  Flow is ubiquitous.  The state shows up everywhere in anyone provided certain initial conditions are met.  Unlike self-help which is about a 5%/10% improvement, flow offers a step function worth of change. Let me give you an example.  McKinsey and Company, the business researching firm, did a 10-year study of top executives.  They found top executives in flow are 500 times more productive than out of flow.  That means you could go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state and take Tuesday through Friday off and get as much done as your steady state peers.  That is a massive application; 5 times more productive is a 500% increase in productivity.  Productivity is just one example.  You could go to creativity.  Studies show that flow provides about a 7X, so 700% boost in creativity.  Learning, the U.S. Military did studies with snipers in flow, and they found that snipers in flow learned 200 to 500% faster than normal. So, Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000 hours to mastery, the research shows that flow can cut it in half.  On one end, flow is not self-help because it is a much bigger change.  The second reason is, flow is a little dangerous.  You have to understand.  We now understand kind of the neurobiology of flow, what’s going on underneath the surface.  As you pointed out in your introduction, one of the things that’s going on is a huge neurochemical dump.  You get five of the most potent neurochemicals the brain can produce, all at once in a flow state and that’s kind of the only time that happens.  Now these chemicals are all performance-enhanced chemicals, but they’re also the most addictive reward drugs the brain can produce. You’re getting a very, very deep and very, very addictive cocktail of neurochemistry.  When you’re working with flow you have to know what you’re doing because you’re playing with very fundamental biology, very powerful neurochemicals and it can go wrong, disastrously so. John: What’s an example?  Like let’s say I’m trying to hack this and I’m doing business, and I’m trying to hack this flow state.  What could go wrong? Steven: Well, let me give you a couple simple examples.  I have to back up actually.  To answer your question I have to tell you a little bit more about what we know about flow.  Flow science goes back about 150 years.  The first 120 of those years, or first 130 maybe, were spent figuring out what is the psychology of the state, right.  What are its characteristics and what are some of its psychological triggers?  What brings it on; what precipitates the state?  Out of this research into flow triggers, right, these are pre-conditions that bring on more flow, one of the things discovered is known as the challenge skills ratio.  Very simply, we get into flow follows focus, right.  It’s a state of massively heightened focus.  All these triggers are ways of driving attention into the now. One of the easiest ways to do that is the challenge skills ratio.  It means that when you approach a task, the challenge of the task should be slightly harder.  It should slightly exceed the skills you bring to bear, right.  To define flow frequently, you want to constantly be putting yourself into situations where you’re stretching but not snapping.  It’s a very slight gradient, but it’s a gradient nonetheless.  That means that when you’re looking for flow, when you’re seeking this state and trying to get more of this state in your life, you are taking, you’re climbing the ladder of escalating risk.  You are pushing yourself slightly farther, slightly farther, slightly farther, day-in and day-out, over and over and over again. It doesn’t matter what your profession is.  For action and adventure sport athletes, this pushed them into situations where if they make a mistake, they’re going to die, but you can see it.  When jazz moved into bee-bop, right.  This was a very, very big risk for those musicians.  When filmmaking in the 70s moved into auteur filmmaking.  Every time these guys pushed, they kept pushing and kept pushing, kept pushing and suddenly they got to the edges of things where they were suddenly betting their lives, in the case of some of the athletes, or their careers, in this case of some of the artists.  You see this with businessmen as well, right.  Businessmen who are good at this will constantly be seeking harder and harder and harder challenges. For myself as a writer, this means that I’m now starting to work on my eighth book.  The ideas I’m going at are far bigger than anything I’ve ever gone at before because I want to raise the challenge level, but there’s always that danger of, hey, maybe these ideas are just too big for me.  Maybe I shouldn’t be writing it, you know what I mean, like maybe I shouldn’t be going there. John: Yes. Steven: Maybe people won’t believe me.  Maybe I’m not.  Maybe I’m stretching too far, right.  There are a lot of other dangers; one of them is this escalating ladder of risk. John: Okay.  The interesting thing here is the ladder of escalating risk goes up.  Also, just the reward.  So, you’ve got a businessman who’s like Steve Jobs, he would be continually pushing the envelope where he’s taking on bigger and bigger and bigger challenges.  It’s risky on the one hand, but it’s also those people in their respective fields, whether it’s music or sports, I mean you mentioned this in the book.  It’s these people who are taking things forward, who are actually making the real change. Steven: Yes, that’s absolutely correct, right.  I mean you have to be living in this way, but the other thing is what you find when you scratch the surface, under all people in all disciplines; when researchers look at flow and what flow has affected change, flow has affected society, they now see flow with the heart of almost every world championship or gold medal that’s ever been one.  It underpins major scientific breakthroughs and accounts for significant progress in the arts.  All right, we’ve talked about what flow does in business.  Yes, everywhere you’re seeing people stretch, you’re seeing boundaries being broken, you’re also finding flow. This is, by the way, not a new finding.  Back in the 40s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, up until he had come along early research on flow had mistakenly looked at it and thought we were looking at mystical experiences; something that was common in religious people, people on spiritual paths, but not common in normal people.  Then Abraham Maslow came along in the 40s and he was looking at this state and he wasn’t interested in religious people.  He was actually interested in successful people, across the board.  It doesn’t matter what you do, he was studying successful people.  He wanted to know what commonalities they shared. What he found … it didn’t matter who he talked to, and he looked at Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frederick Douglas, and on and on, he found … first of all, a lot of his subjects were atheists so the idea that this was a mystical experience kind of went out the window.  He found that across the boards, most of these people used massively heightened attention to produce altered states of consciousness that allowed them to do some of their best work.  Right, he was looking at flow and he found flow a commonality among all successful people.  This is only continued, right. In the 1960s and 70s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who was then the chairman in the University of Chicago Psychology Department, came along and he went around the world and did a global study asking everybody he could think of.  He started out with experts, rock climbers, chess players, dancers, et cetera, and then surgeons, and then he just started talking to everybody else.  He talked to people writing advertising copy.  He talked to people who were Italian grape farmers, Navajo sheep herders, Detroit assembly line workers, Japanese teenage motorcycle gage. Everybody gets it, right.  They all told him the same thing.  They were at their best, they felt their best when they were in this state of flow.  That is when they were doing their greatest work.  The point is not just that flow shows up when we’re pushing the great boundaries.  Of course it does, but it also shows up when anybody is pushing themselves to be their best. John: Right, and I love this.  You don’t have to be extraordinary to access this state.  It’s really just about within your personal realm.  There’s that image that a lot of people have seen actually.  This would be a good way to illustrate it.  You’ve got that circle which is your comfort zone, and you stay in there and not much is happening, but if you step outside it too far, then you break down.  If you’re just outside that edge, that’s when you start to access that state.  Everyone, even the people who are the smallest bill, who … there’s nothing seemingly exceptional about them, they have their own comfort zone.  If they step slightly outside of that, they’re going to start to access this state in varying degrees. Steven: Yes, absolutely.  We have to make it clear, most people have already experienced flow that probably didn’t know what was going on because it doesn’t show up all that frequently.  In that McKinsey study, they calculated that most people spend less than 5% of their work life in flow. John: Yes. Steven: Right, now that depends on your job, of course.  Coders, software coders, get into flow all the time.  It’s kind of fundamental.  Video game designers, very fundamental.  Surgeons, very fundamental.  Certain other jobs are more difficult.  I make my living as a writer; flow is fundamental.  I don’t survive as a writer without the state and if you look through my career, like go through the 1,000 magazine articles and the eight books, et cetera, et cetera, what you’re going to see is the ones that have won awards, the bestselling books, the articles that have won awards, all of them were written in flow states. John: Okay.  Let’s dive in right here then to this writing stuff.  So you’re a writer and you just mentioned that the best books you’ve read, the ones that have gotten the most attention are ones where you’ve been in a flow state.  This is a great area to dive into because a lot of people, when they sit down to say write an email, or write some advertising copy, or write a sales letter, they get tongue tied.  Most people, I mean it’s the whole classic writer’s block.  They just can’t get started.  What you’re talking about is that there are ways to access this flow state whereby, not only would you get started writing, but you’ll actually write the best stuff you’ve ever written.  How do you get into this? Steven: Okay. John: What does it mean for you to be in a flow state and then how do get there? Steven: Well, so you’re asking a number of different questions and I’m going to back it up further, right. John: Okay. Steven: Most people don’t … it starts with creativity.  As I mentioned earlier, flow states have triggers.  Creativity is a trigger for flow.  What that actually means under the surface, if you look at creativity coming from a neurobiological level, what you see is risk taking because you’re going to have to do something new.  You’re going to have to put it into the public sphere.  There’s risk taking involved.  Risk is actually a trigger for flow.  Every time we take a risk, the brain releases a neurochemical called dopamine.  This is one of the chemicals that underpins flow and that helps put you into the state.  Risk also focuses attention, it drives attention into the now, right.  Obviously there’s danger, so you get focused attention. Simultaneously, you see pattern recognition.  Pattern recognition is the ability to link ideas together in new and unusual ways.  So, creativity, this isn’t always the case but often is.  It’s the result of something novel bumping into something old.  So a novel idea, a novel experience bumping into an old thought creates something utterly new, right.  That’s how it works under the surface and to make those connections for the novel thought to trigger to bump into the old idea, you need pattern recognition.  Where flow comes into play here is it actually amplifies both sides of this equation. When we’re in the state of flow, we’re more actually in the state, the neurochemicals that underpin the state sort of surround the creative process.  You get, I mentioned dopamine, you also get a chemical called norepinephrine.  Ignore the fancy names but just what’s important is that these two chemicals together massively increase focus, right.  We’re paying more attention.  We’re taking in more information so that heightens our access to novel information.  We’re paying more attention to what’s going on in the world.  We’re seeing more, we’re taking in more information.  We have actually greater access to novelties, so we have greater access to the front end of the creative process. Another thing these chemicals do is they lower signal to noise ratios, which is a fancy way of saying they allow the brain to see more patterns, to make more connections between ideas.  Not only are you taking in more ideas, the brain is heightening its ability to link these ideas together.  You’re also getting another neurochemical called anandamide.  This increases lateral thinking.  This is our ability to link tangentially related ideas together.  These three chemicals essentially surround the creative process so when we’re in flow, all are heightened, right, so everything becomes easier. Flow is actually a technical term.  Most people don’t know this but the state got its name because when you’re in flow, every decision, every action leads seamlessly, fluidly from the last.  Flow feels flowing.  The ideas just kind of roll.  There are reasons for this neuro-biologically.  One of them is that your pattern recognition system is all jacked up, so one idea can lead to the next, can lead to the next, can lead to the next, right.  In flow, once you’re in that state, the writing is going to go really, really well. The question you’re asking is if you’re not in flow, if you’re facing the blank page, how do you get yourself into that state?  That’s a kind of a different question and it’s got a couple different answers.  I think there are three easy answers.  The first we talked about earlier is the challenge skills cell, right.  How do you push up the challenge level in flow?  When I’m talking to young writers and teaching them about this stuff, I always say there are two tricks I use all the time when I’m stuck in a dope and I don’t know what to do. First of all, good writing, I don’t care what you’re writing, means telling the truth.  You have to be slightly vulnerable.  How vulnerable is slightly vulnerable?  Well, I want the challenge to slightly exceed my skill level. I have discovered that for me, that means I have to tell enough of the truth that I’m always slightly uncomfortable with what I’m writing.  That feeling of uncomfortably doesn’t necessarily go away.  I have just learned to recognize it as a level of honesty that leads to good writing, compelling writing, something people want to read.  On top of it, I’m taking risks here.  I’m giving myself the space to push up the challenge level, to take risks and to use those things to slide into flow. Concurrently, one of the other things I often do to push up the risk level, and I think this is a very useful technique for anybody and it’s going to sound silly, but go to your bookshelf, close your eyes, shove your hand out, grab a book at random and open it up.  Look at the first sentence you see and steal that sentence.  Take that sentence, write it down; that’s the first sentence of what you’re writing, but you can’t take the words obviously because that’s plagiarism, so replace all the words with your words.  There’s a noun there, you write a noun.  If there’s a verb there, you write a verb. You’re trying to write in somebody else’s style and somebody else’s voice.  By doing that, you’re replacing their words with your words and once you get that first sentence, you’re going to try to keep going in there, in that voice.  It’s like wearing a costume.  People are much more audacious, bold, creative, whatever you want, when they’re wearing costumes because they’re slightly hidden.  If you start writing in somebody else’s voice and you make it about trying to write your best work in their voice, even though you’re not … don’t copy their sentences, copy their structure.  It requires pattern recognition which will release dopamine which will trigger flow. These are two very simple exercises.  The thing you have to remember about flow, this is fundamental neurobiology, this is evolutionary biology.  Everybody is hardwired for optimal performance.  Ubiquitous shows up everywhere, so all we’re doing is we’re playing with ways to drive attention.  These tricks, they may seem really slight and small.  It seems kind of weird that something so small could bring on something so big, but this is just the way we’re hardwired.  We’re hardwired to have easy access to the state. John: Yes. Steven: You just need to know what you’re doing. John: Absolutely.  One thing that works for me, and I think a few of the listeners will relate to this, is when I’m writing say an email versus a sales letter, I’m not sure how much you’ve experienced with advertising stuff, but say with the sales letter, I find it really hard to write them.  I get all tongue tied, but let’s say if I sit down to write an email which is a much more relaxed form of marketing, often how I start an email especially if I can’t think of anything to say, and I’ll do this for sales letters as well … I mean you could do this with an article or a book or anything you’re writing.  I’ll just start writing.  I’m sitting here in my room, it’s 3:33pm and I’m drinking a coffee, and here I am, I’m going to sit here and write you an email or write you a whatever. It’s almost like when you remove the plug and you just let things … I mean here’s that word, you just let things flow, things just start.  It’s kind of like the brain starts.  It’s all blocked up, but once it starts going, it really starts going.  Then I can go back after the fact and edit those first few sentences out, but initially, those first few sentences can be the catalyst to actually trigger the rest of the writing.  That’s sort of like the tricks, although that would be another trick. Steven: You’re absolutely correct.  There’s two things I want to mention.  One is it’s important to know that flow … a lot of people think of flow as a binary, like a light switch.  You’re either in the zone or you’re out of the zone.  It doesn’t work that way at all.  It’s actually a 4-stage cycle, and a couple of stages don’t feel flowy at all.  At the front end of a flow state is what is known as struggle.  This is a loading phase. John: Yes. Steven: It means you’re overloading the brain with information.  In the struggle phase as a writer for example, if I’m researching an article, this is when I’m reading books, I’m reading articles, I’m doing hundreds of interviews.  I’m trying to figure out what the structure of what I’m going to write, what shape it’s going to take.  You’re really driving yourself to the absolute brink of frustration.  Then you talked about something very interesting, and this is the second stage of the flow cycle.  Once you’ve overloaded yourself and you’re at the brink of frustration and you can’t learn anymore, and you can’t take it anymore, you need to take your mind off the problem.  You actually need to relax. The second stage of the cycle is known as release and it happens, you know, some people get all their inspiration in the shower.  They’ve been working all day and they go into the shower.  It’s because by taking your mind off the problem, what is happening in flow, one of the things that is happening is we’re trading the conscious for the subconscious mind.  We’re handing over information processing duties to our subconscious, right.  We’re doing this for a lot of different reasons.  The conscious mind is very energy expensive.  It’s very slow, it’s not very fast.  The subconscious is much faster, it’s much more energy efficient. The brain is always trying to conserve energy.  The minute you relax and take your mind off the problem, brink and make this switch.  The subconscious is much faster than the conscious mind so we can find those patterns much, much easier.  That release period triggers the flow state itself which is the third stage in the cycle; great, huge high and this is followed by a deep low.  On the back end of the flow cycle is a recovery phase.  Those neurochemicals that we spoke about earlier are expensive to the brain to produce.  You need nutrition, you need sunlight and you need vitamins, et cetera, et cetera.  It takes a little while for the brain to be able to build them up again. During this period, you go from this very big high to this deep low.  A lot of people have a lot of difficulty kind of navigating that low.  Earlier we talked about the dark side of flow.  That low is part of the dark side.  You have to basically learn that you need to go through that recovery.  That’s, by the way, where that amplified learning takes place and if you’re stressed out during recovery because you don’t feel as great as you used to, you’ll block that learning cortisol which is the stressed form on blocked learning. Interestingly, you pointed out, you go back and you edit later.  This recovery phase when you’re really down is perfect because in flow, pattern recognition is all fired up so you have lots of ideas.  Not every one of them is a great one.  It feels like they’re all great, right.  This recovery phase, it’s actually, especially for writers I think, perfect because it’s a perfect time to go back and edit and see what was a good idea and what was a bad idea.  It’s interesting that the process you just described sort of maps onto the flow cycle itself. John: I absolutely love this idea.  I have this so many times with, not just writing, but just life in general where I’m frustrated and I’m depressed and I’m just pissed off that I can’t figure something out.  Then, maybe I chill out, I go for a walk or I’m off doing groceries or something like that, and all of the sudden it’s like the mind just starts firing.  It just goes into overdrive and it’s like, boom, there’s the solution.  Then I get home … Steven: Yes. John: … I sit down to work or I start toying … I often get it in conversations with someone.  It’s like the idea clicks in and all of the sudden, you see everything in a whole new light.  I love to remember those moments. Steven: Let me take it one step further for you.  This is not directly related to flow, though it tends to produce flow states on the back end.  Two things to know.  First of all, if you can’t get started, if it’s not clicking, there’s one of two reasons.  The first is that you haven’t done enough homework.  You really haven’t filled the brain with enough ideas for it to start pattern matching and making connections between ideas.  Sometimes if the walk, if those little halves that you’re talking about, aren’t working, it’s because you actually need to do more research.  You need to load the brain up more. Simultaneously, if it’s not clicking, if you’ve already loaded the brain up and you’re so frustrated, you still can’t find it and nothing’s coming together, you have to understand that this pattern matching and the pattern recognition is fundamental to the brain.  It’s what neurons do at a basic level so there’s nothing fancy going on here and you can actually program the system.  If you want to find out more about this, you can Google the MacGyver Method, which is one guy who’s teaching it.  The simple idea here is, and I do this by the way at the end of every writing day, right before I’m about to go up for the end of work, pull out a blank piece of paper and I give my subconscious an assignment. If I can’t write the opening line to my new book, I say subconscious, I would like you to write out the opening line to my next book.  I’d like to wake up tomorrow morning, start writing and have that line please.  Then you write out the question.  You want to write … I use a numerical system, kind of as many things.  You may not know what the opening line is but you know you want it to include the word peripatetic and you know, whatever descriptors, feelings, guts, whatever you have about this, write that down too.  Then, be done for the day.  What is going to happen is at some point, you’re going to forget that you did that, it’s going to click over from the conscious mind into the subconscious mind, right, writing it down. That’s why you’re writing it down.  By bringing in the tactical sense with everything else, you’re just kind of giving memory a little bit of a toehold into it.  You’re saying hey, this is important.  Do something with this.  Pattern recognition will take over.  Wake up the next morning just as you planned out, start writing.  It doesn’t matter what you’re writing, start writing.  You will find that the answer to your question, use of that line or whatever, will show up within the first couple of sentences because your brain has done the work while you were asleep, or while you were whatever, and you just have to kind of kick back in and access those files. This is simple brain function, but you can program, especially as a writer.  You can program your brain to problem solve for you creatively while you do other things. John: Yes, I love it.  It’s just great how simple it is.  What I’ve been telling myself recently is, I’ve got to take time off, but I know the brain’s still working.  I guess it’s giving me the permission almost to kind of go and relax, go bowling or go … I haven’t been bowling in two years. Steven: Well, you’re super right.  We teach this.  One of the things that’s really hard, especially for high-performing individuals, is understanding that flow has a cycle and that the brain works a certain fundamental way.  You can’t short circuit the process, right.  If you want to go back into a flow state, you have to go all the way through this cycle.  Most of the brain is like that, most of the things in the brain work that way.  There’s a process, there’s that cycle. John: Yes. Steven: It’s very useful to know how learning works under the surface, how creativity works under the surface, how flow works under the surface, because once you can figure that out, if you have to do something creative for a living, there are … not shortcuts, but there are ways to kind of maximize the process, right. John: It’s almost like you’ve got to … I was just thinking then that you  just learn to embrace it.  Instead of thinking like, well, how do I get on a high every single day, it’s like well, what stage am I in and how can I just maintain to keep showing up each day, keep showing up to work despite the fact that I feel frustrated because I know that in a few days, or next week, that state’s going to trigger, then I’m going to get a whole bunch of work done.  Then afterwards, I’ll be able to relax, do some editing, chill out, take a nap, all that sort of stuff.  You can embrace it, ride the roller coaster. Steven: Yes, absolutely.  On a certain level, you don’t want to take the roller coaster personally, right.  That’s really the truth of the matter.  You can’t really escape it, as far as I can tell, but you can’t take it too personally.  You need to understand that it’s a process and that what you’re feeling as frustration, for example, on the front end flow state, when you can’t start writing, when nothing’s coming together, that frustration is actually part of the process.  It’s a good thing and not a bad thing. John: Yes. Steven: Knowing this, over time and kind of practicing with it and living into I guess, gives you the confidence to kind of handle the emotions, have the emotional control to kind of get through it.  The other thing that’s so important, as you pointed out, you need that recovery phase.  You often see this in business.  I was talking to a salesman a couple days ago, there were just really high-stakes sales, and he was talking about how he’ll get into flow state.  He’ll go on a tear.  He’ll quadruple his sales and blow his quotas out of the water, 300% greater for a period of time.  On the back end of that, when the quarter’s over, he’ll actually need that deep recovery period, but instead he works for an organization where they say, oh my God, you did so great.  Here, here’s half the territory and we’re going to triple your quotas. There’s no time for recovery, the challenge level goes way up and he’s blocked from flow.  We talked earlier about action adventure athletes.  One of the reasons these guys got so good at getting in the flow so repeatedly had nothing to do with anything they were doing consciously.  It’s their sports are very weather dependent.  If you’re going to ride big waves, you’d have to wait for the storms to come in.  If you’re going to ski these amazing lines, you need perfect powder.  What happens is, storms blow in, everybody charges really hard for a few days, gets in the flow, does whatever, the storms leave and there’s a built-in recovery period on the back end. This doesn’t happen in our daily life very often and high performing people rarely give themselves time to recover, and it’s really important.  It’s really important to know that when you chill out and go back and edit, and kick your feet up and relax, that’s critical.  Just like taking your mind off the problem is critical.  These are counterintuitive things that kind of go against what high performers normally do which is just buckle down and buckle down, drive forward and drive forward, through hell or high water. John: Yes. Steven: You have to know that slow and steady wins this race. John: Absolutely.  It’s kind of like, yes, ever player or high performer has been through that stage where all they want to do is just work, work, work, work, work, because they’re a hustler.  If they just work harder than anyone else, they’re going to get there.  Then eventually, everyone realized that when you do that and you burn out, and then you crash, then it’s much worse than if you’d taken a short break every now and then. Steven: Yes. John: Cool. Steven: Absolutely. John: Alright, well let’s wrap it up here.  I really appreciate you coming on to talk about flow.  Before we wrap this up though, give the listener a heads up about where they can go to learn more about your book, or books, and then we’ll say goodbye. Steven: Absolutely.  You want to check out riseofsuperman.com, stevenkotler.com, or my organization, theflowgenomeproject.co.  On the flow genome project website, there’s a flow diagnostic free-of-charge.  Anybody can sign up and take it, and it basically is kind of a quick survey that looks at the categories in your life, the things that you do, that you like to do, where you’re most likely to find flow.  It’s a great primer if people want to get started. John: Cool, I’m going to go check that out right after we sign-off here.  One other thing that’s a little bit unrelated to flow is your other book, Abundance, which I read two years ago.  I absolutely loved it.  It put me in the best and extremely positive state just about the future of mankind.  If you’re looking for something that’s going to pump you up and get you excited, go and check out Steven’s book, Abundance, as well.  Steven, thank you.  Thanks for coming on the show. Steven: Thanks for having me. The post Episode #55 – Steven Kotler On Finding “Flow” State and Increasing Your Productivity 500% appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

You f***ing rock. That’s the subject line Terry sent me. Outta the blue. Why? …Because the Email Marketing Podcast just made him a TRUCK-load of cash. Who is Terry Dunlap? Terry’s a hacker. No…not a “life hacker.” I mean…he’s at Starbucks, nursing a caramel macchiato and watching you browse Facebook… …from HIS laptop. (In this episode he tells us how.) But Terry’s not just a wicked-smart techie… He’s also a McMethod subscriber. Terry had been listening to the podcast for about year… One day – He decided to give this “autoresponder” thing a try. Boy, did it pay off. Check this: In just 5 months – Terry made $88,312 from his autoresponder “experiment.” Here’s the funny part: Terry kept his emails STUPID-simple. …and they still paid like crazy. The lesson? You DON’T have to make your autoresponder complicated… …but you do have to TAKE ACTION. Now – Here’s my challenge to you: Listen to Terry’s story. How can you do the same? Get inspired. Think bigger for YOUR business. If this episode doesn’t get you excited about email marketing… …I don’t know what will. In this episode, you’ll discover: 2 tips to write autoresponders for physical products how to build an email list from zero this weekend  a weird “un-boxing” trick to bake videos into your email marketing the “Give the what, Sell the ___” framework for profiting from info products how to seduce your prospects – even if you DON’T have a product to sell  one clever “A or B” call-to-action that helped Terry bank 88 grand with email one eye-opening question to stick in your welcome email the “icing on the cake” that got Terry’s list to buy  Mentioned: Want to ask Terry a question? Contact him at Terry.dunlap at gmail dot com Chris Ducker Bootcamp Terry’s video unboxing the Reaver Pro DEAF CON Hacker Conference Black Hat Conference Tactical Network Solutions Constant Contact Campaign Monitor Scientific Advertising Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Terry Dunlap. Now, Terry isn’t an email marketing expert that you might have heard of. Terry sent me an email, it must have been, I think, six weeks ago, maybe two months ago, right before I was due for a trip to Sydney to catch up with the family. This email, I was reading this out, I remember cracking up when I got at the subject line. He’s dropping f-bombs in the subject line, and then throughout his email it’s great, mentioning numbers and talking about his business, and we’re going to talk about that today. The reason I got him on was that the results he’s gotten, which I’ll let him tell the story, mostly, from what I understand, from just applying what he’s learned from the Email Marketing Podcast, so I thought, instead of just go back and forth with a few emails, why not get him on the podcast and get him to share what he’s done, what’s worked for him, what he’s applied, how he’s applied and all those kind of things, so then you as the listener can think and get really, really, really fucking inspired and then go and apply the same in your business and make a whole ton of money just like Terry? We’ll get into that. Terry, how are you today? Terry: I’m doing outstanding, man. How are you doing? John: Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Terry: That is cool. I want to say, before we get into the meat of this stuff, that you are absolutely right. I am not an email marketer, I have never done any of this stuff before, and I have to say that when I listen to your podcast or anybody’s podcast about internet business and marketing and things of that nature, when I read reviews, I look for people that have actually implemented this stuff and what the results have been. I thought it was worthwhile for me to come on here and tell your audience, just by listening to your podcast, and I subscribe to your emails, too, once I got a feel for how you operate and everything you and your guests have provided, I implemented and had fantastic results, and I mean it’s a money-making machine, my friend. Now we’re not talking the likes of a John McIntyre himself or somebody like Amy Porterfield or David Siteman Garland or those types of people, but it’s starting. I had to start somewhere. I started back in October, and things are just taking off. What I basically did was I had a physical product that I wanted to sell. It’s basically a product, now I can describe it here later, but the product is tailored to the hacking community. It’s a very nichey product that hackers love. I followed your advice. I basically put up a landing page and I announced that this product was coming out. I did a very simple Google AdWords campaign because I don’t have a blog, I don’t have a podcast. I’m a nobody when it comes to this internet stuff, so the only way I knew to build traffic was to actually start building my list with paid traffic. Anytime these hackers would look for certain keywords, our ad was the only one that ever popped up, so we’re getting people added to the email list. While I’m doing this, I’m listening to you, I’m following your emails, I’m listening to what you’re giving as advice, and so I start to implement an autoresponder into my campaign as these people are joining the list. I think I did seven or 10 emails that basically kept people intrigued, gave them tidbits of information, kept them always on the hook at the end, made it a story. When it came time to launch, this thing just exploded. Let me give you some numbers here. I actually launched this online live October 1st of just last year, so we’re talking six months ago barely. In total sales, $88,312.88. If you break it out, that’s roughly 15 grand a month, my friend, from selling a physical product. It’s killer. To be honest, I owe this success to you. Seriously. There’s no doubt about it. In fact, the whole autoresponder series thing works, the email marketing works. I’ve actually now launched a completely online training class for people that want to learn how to hack wireless networks. It’s a seven-day boot camp class and I’m doing the exact same thing. I have a landing page up basically that says “Registration is currently closed. If you want to get on the waiting list, you can join,” and then as people join the waiting list, I’m actually writing the email responder series now, but I’ve learned from the first set of autoresponders that I created to be a little more enticing with the subject line and to do a little more tease in the content, say, “Here’s something you need to know,” but I don’t show them the ‘how’ unless they actually join the boot camp. I give them the information they need, but I don’t show them the ‘how,’ unless they join the boot camp. Dude, this shit works. John: All right, just that right there, that last bit that you tapped on, which is the tell the ‘what’ and sell the ‘how,’ this is such a classic marketing thing, and so simple, but it works. Terry: It works. I think the other thing that I’ve learned from you, too, and I’m applying not only in email marketing, but when I need to communicate with someone I may not have a connection with, like I did with you, I had a very intriguing subject line, did I not? John: Absolutely. Terry: Now, you’re familiar with Chris Ducker, right? John: Yeah. Terry: I listen to his podcast as well. He gives some really valuable content, too. Unfortunately, I’m usually listening to him while I’m driving to work in the morning, and so I have to re-listen and then take notes and stuff after the fact. I sent him an email, and I didn’t expect him to actually talk about it on his show, but the subject line of the email I sent to him was, “I HATE Chris Ducker!” exclamation point and “hate” in all caps. I told him in the email, I said, “You know? I really hate your show because it has such valuable content that when I’m listening to it driving, it pisses me off that I can’t write anything down because I’m driving.” He even admitted that he was hesitant on actually opening and reading the contents of that email based on the subject line, but it got his attention and it got a mention on his show, which I never intended. John: This is great. I love this. He replied to your email? Terry: Your stuff works. It is the subject line and it is the content, the hook, you get them, and like you said, give them the ‘what,’ ‘where’, ‘when’ but not the ‘how.’ If they want the ‘how,’ they can pay for it. John: Let me back up. Let’s just recap a little bit. You’ve got this product for wireless networks. This is the Reaver Systems, right, the original product? Terry: Yeah. John: You set up a Google AdWords campaign basically to build who is searching for terms related to this. You drove them to a landing page which offered them something. What did it offer them, by the way? Terry: It actually didn’t offer them anything. I wasn’t giving anything away. It was basically a description of what the product was and that we were going to be launching soon, and if you wanted to get in on special pricing and be one of the first people to get your hands on this limited release edition, add your name to the email list. John: So a bit of suspense, and they join your email list. What do you from there? What were you doing with Email 1? Was there anything special going on? Terry: Email 1, some of your listeners in the States who are tech-savvy might know this conference. Have you ever heard of DEF CON? John: I have, but that’s an electro dance music festival in Sydney, but you’re not talking about that one, are you? Terry: It’s not that “def con.” Every year in the U.S. out in Las Vegas, there’s a hacker conference. The first one is Black Hat, which is where all your professional security pentesters and stuff show up at. Then after that is where all your hardcore hackers show up. They’re the people that are wearing their black and white and their piercings and all that kind of stuff and show up and hang out at the scene. There’s talks about hacking the latest and great, GSM phones and hacking Android devices and television sets and all that kind of stuff. Some of our people actually go out there and either give talks or we have a booth and talk about what our company does. There was a rumor, before we launched this, that someone had said, “Hey, I heard that there’s a new Reaver Pro coming out,” because prior to this physical product, all it was was a software download that we had for some of our customers. We started getting a brand-new target audience out of DEF CON, and when they started signing up on the mailing list, the very first email that went out was simply titled “Rumors.” I’ll quickly run through this. I’ll read the first one. You open up the email entitled “Rumors” and it begins this way: “Many of you have emailed me asking if rumors are true. ‘Is it true that a new Reaver Pro was seen at DEF CON last week?’ Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t there, so I can’t speak about what was or was not at DEF CON, but what I do know is that our guys in the lab who’ve been hacking up some Reaver Pro goodness all summer long, it’s a tasty treat that is cooking to near perfection.” “I can’t go into many details now simply because I let our hackers do whatever they want, when they want. Our deal is this: partners don’t ask questions and the hackers in the lab will crank out awesome stuff. Think I’m joking? Then see what happens when I leave Craig Heffner to do what he wants to do. Here’s his talk at Black Hat last week,” and it’s a link to his actual talk that he gave how he actually hacks IP cameras Hollywood-style, where he can literally take over an IP camera … John: What’s an IP camera? Terry: … increase the image, and then be able to do whatever you want without the image actually being seen. John: What’s an IP camera? Terry: An internet camera. If you go out and buy some of these cameras … John: Oh, a webcam? You mean like this webcam on my Mac? Terry: Like a webcam, yes. Like even security cameras. A lot of corporations have security cameras to monitor the perimeter or industrial control systems, or even nanny cams or something like that. Our guy had discovered a way to hack these things and presented a talk at DEF CON. What he did on stage was he’d go through his whole technical talk of how to do this, and then the demo was, he’d set a can of beer in front of the camera that was supposed to be protecting and monitoring this can of beer. Then he does his hack. The frame freezes, and then he can take the physical can away, but yet to you and me, it looks like it’s still there. That was the first email that went out. The second email that went out basically started enticing people about what the new features are going to be, and it was simply titled “Black Box.” I said, “Where do I start? Let’s start with one of the coolest new features of Reaver Pro. Man, is this cool. Once we find the WPA passphrase to the target network, Reaver Pro will automatically connect to the network and then email you the passphrasing keys to an email account that you configure ahead of time. Consider my mind blown. Is that cool or what?” and I go on. This is the style that I have. Then I have it on boxing video where I actually talk about, ‘Hey, we just got the master copy from the manufacturer’s. Here’s what it looks like,’ and then actually put a YouTube video up there for that, and then how to actually use it. Preorders haven’t even started yet, so I’m getting people, ‘Here’s what it looks like,’ ‘Here’s what it can do,’ ‘Here’s all the cool stuff that you can do with this.’ Then finally I open it up for preorders, and then I announce to people that it’s actually shipping. Using the landing page and the email autoresponder series, I think we ended up, prior to launch, with about a thousand-plus emails on the list, and I’d say probably 20% of those actually ordered during the preorder. Now it’s getting to the point where it’s actually … It’s self-sustaining. There’s no more mailing list to join. The word has gotten out, people have written blog reviews about it, people have posted their YouTube reviews about it. Now it’s just organic. I don’t have to run the ads anymore. We’re selling probably anywhere, on the low side, five to as many as 15 of these a day at 75 bucks a pop. John: Damn. Basically, it’s a product launch sequence in this site. If someone goes there now, they will just go through that launch sequence, even though it’s already on [inaudible 00:13:56]? How does it work? Terry: No, now if you go through it, you just buy it. You just click the “Buy” button. The whole launch sequence for this particular product is done. Now I’m working on the one for our Wi-Fi boot camp class where I teach you as an end user how you can use a very basic Linux operating system distribution on your laptop and, with built-in tools, be able to sniff wireless networks, collect packets, look for usernames and passwords on those networks, and how to create what’s called a “man in the middle road access point,” where if you’re in a hotel, like Hilton HHonors or whatever is the AP name, I teach you how to create that exact same setup so people think they’re connecting to the hotel but they connect to you, and you sniff all their traffic on your laptop as you tether it to your phone or mobile device for an actual internet connection. That’s called the TNS Seven-Day WiFi Bootcamp. Registration is currently closed and so we’re adding people to the mailing list there. I’m working on that email sequence right now for the autoresponders. I didn’t wait to get my autoresponder done, because the most important thing I think you could do now is start collecting the email addresses. Don’t wait. If you have an idea, you think you’ve got something that the market wants, number one, put up a landing page. Number two, if you don’t have an email list, you don’t have a blog, you don’t have a podcast, you don’t have a YouTube channel, then I think the easiest and fastest way is to set up a Google AdWords account. Figure out what keywords you need, and then run it for seven days and see what happens. See if you get people adding names to your email list. That’s what I’m doing with the boot camp. We’re getting people adding names to the list. It seems to be working out. Let me give you a quick rundown of some of the subject lines that I’m going to use for the boot camp sequence. I’ve got 10 emails here. I’ve got half of them fleshed out already. The Subject Line 1, of course, is “Welcome to the list,” and that’s pretty generic. Second one is, “I don’t do Windows.” Basically the gist of that email is, ‘In this course, we don’t use the Windows operating system. We use the Linux operating system.’ Then the next one is, “Pick the right wireless card,” because people that are in this community that do wireless penetration testing, wireless hacking, they’re all fixated on one particular brand card that’s out there that’s very popular and I dispel the myth that ‘This is not the card you think that you should be using.’ There’s a couple open source tools that people use called Aircrack and Kismet. In this next email, the subject line says, “But I already use Aircrack and Kismet,” and I basically dispel the myth that ‘Hey, they’re good tools, but you really should know how they work under the hood, because the next email subject line explains why you need to know that.’ This subject line is called “When the excrement hits the oscillator.” ‘When the shit hits the fan.’ That basically talks about a story where I was actually out in the field doing a penetration test one time against a client. I didn’t have an internet connection and my tool shit the bed. I basically needed to open up a terminal, get on a command line and figure out how to do all this stuff just with a black-and-white terminal. No GUIs, nothing. ‘So understanding what you learned in the boot camp will help you when the shit hits the fan.’ Then there’s one called, “Hey, where’s the Easy button?” It talks about a story where I was teaching a class and they saw the power of working on a command line but then they wanted to know, ‘Can’t we create a GUI, an easy button?’ and I talk about the pros and cons of that. Then there’s one called “How fast can you hop?” There’s a concept in the wireless world that when you’re monitoring wireless networks, you need to channel-hop. Once I show you how to do this, it’s a piece of cake. That one is, ‘Do you have a big or little pipe?’ That one basically talks about, when you’re actually collecting the packets, how much space do you have to store it in basically more efficient ways to store the data that you’re collecting? Then the final email in this series is, “How to have fun at Starbucks,” which basically goes into detail how you can set up a rogue access point in Starbucks, mimic the Starbucks access point, have people that come in that are sipping on their cappuccinos and lattes connect to you instead of the Starbucks network, and then you see everything that they do, all their web traffic, all their banking, everything. That’s the series for this particular funnel. John: I’m going to say it right now. What it looks like you’re doing is you’re just going through each module of this course for each day, and you create an email around it that’s really just preselling that, and then you’re going to link to, say, I’m guessing a sales page where they can sign up and actually purchase the course when it’s ready. Terry: Yeah. Now what I do is, if you’re on the boot camp page, you should see where it says that “Registration is closed. Add your name to the waiting list” at the very top. What we’ll do is, as people add their name, they will basically get this email series which, you’re right, it corresponds to each of the particular modules. I’ll tell the ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘when,’ ‘why’ but not the ‘how,’ and then I’m going to announce, date yet to be determined, when we’re going to have a webinar. The webinar is going to be one-hour long, so everybody on the mailing list can come and see exactly what the program is all about. I go into a lot more detail, I provide more specific links to open source resources. Basically it ends by saying, ‘When you leave this webinar, I have literally given you everything that you need to do what I teach you in the boot camp. You have two choices now. You can take the information I gave you and by trial and error figure it out on your own. It’s going to be slow, but you’ll figure it out, and you’ll probably be better educated for it.’ ‘Or if you want to learn it quickly, you want your hand held, you want a step-by-step seven-day process to take you from zero to hero, then join the boot camp. I’ve given you everything, the links, the sources, the webpages and all that stuff to go learn this all on your own, or you can join the boot camp and I can teach it to you in seven days.’ John: The thing that’s so badass about this is you’ve done one thing, that’s worked with email marketing. ‘What’s the next thing? Now I’m going to do this seven-day boot camp.’ It sounds like, I can hear it in your voice, you are so excited about it, about email marketing, what the whole thing is going to do. I’m thinking you probably got, what, 10 … How many ideas have you got that you think you could roll out over the next … if you had all the time in the world? Terry: Jesus. I’d have to go get my book. I have pages. I literally have pages of shit that I want to do. I just don’t have enough time in the day. If you listen to Chris Ducker, his solution is hire all these goddamned VAs. I can’t manage that many people. Now, I’ll give you guys some little backstory here. The company Reaver Systems is actually a subsidiary of my larger company, which is actually a government contracting company here in the United States. We cater a lot our reverse engineering skills and our hacking skills to the military and the intelligence community, but we wanted this to be completely separate. My partners and I said, ‘Okay, if we want this to be completely separate from this other business, that’s fine,’ because it’s a completely different clientele, completely different mentality, completely different skillset to market to these people, because I remember, when I joined your email list, your very first email says, “Hey, what’s your problem? Reply to this email and let me know what it is.” I sent you a very detailed explanation that we deal with the intelligence community. Trying to get these people to get in touch in front of the right people is painful, and of course, I didn’t expect you to have an answer, but this is a completely different market. We made the decision, ‘Hey, let’s spin off the Reaver product, create a company just around that, and then, Terry, you figure out how to market it, you figure out how to sell it,’ and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing, and thanks to you, John, and all your guests and everybody you’ve had on, I’ve been able to take bits and pieces and adapt it and, goddamn it, the shit’s working. John: One thing that’d be cool to touch on is what were some of the key light bulb moments or the things you were like, ‘Oh, that’s how it works?’ What were some of those? Maybe challenges that you had, and then you listened to the podcast and you figured something out and it clicked for you? Terry: To be honest, I think the biggest challenge I had was finding an email provider that had an easy-to-use autoresponder series. I started off with Constant Contact. What a pain in the ass that system was. I dropped it after a while. On a side note, it’s funny because they followed up with me with a phone call and said, “Hey, why did you cancel? If you give us some feedback, we’ll send you $100 gift cards.” I was like, “Okay, fine.” I laid it on the line, man. I was like no holds barred. At the very end, they said, “Wow, that’s pretty brutal, but hey, thanks for your honesty. We wish everybody would give us feedback like that.” Then I went to Campaign Monitor, which was my very first autoresponder series that I implemented successfully. Let me back up a second here. It dawned on me about the whole autoresponder series when I first prototyped the boot camp almost a year ago. What I had done was basically made some very short how-to videos basically along the same content that you see on the website there in the seven different modules, but they were just like private YouTube videos, and I had some beta testers that I wanted to use. I used Campaign Monitor and their autoresponder series. The idea came from Chris Ducker where he had his new business boot camp series. You’d join his email list and he’d send you three or four things about how to start your online business. I was like, ‘I like that idea. I’m going to steal that idea. I’m going to do it for this how to do Wi-Fi [inaudible 00:24:39] and Wi-Fi hacking with my beta group.’ I would just send out an email in an autoresponder series every 24 hours that linked to the next video. These guys loved it and it’s like, ‘Wow! This is awesome!’ but I didn’t want to do it just strictly delivering videos via email. I wanted to set up a membership site where people could join and interact and I could have live office hours and actually talk to these people. I think it was the combination of listening to your methodology and following the examples in your email letters, combined with the boot camp concept that Chris Ducker uses over on his site. When those two just combined, it was like, ‘Wow, I could actually do this with anything,’ and then the fact that it actually worked, and dude, fucking made money with a physical product with a bunch of hackers around the globe. Dude, I’m shipping these things everywhere. You name a country, I’ve shipped it. I did the beta test. That seemed to work. The beta testers loved it. I did it for real with the physical product and we’re making money. Now we’re getting ready to do it with the boot camp, but like I said, if you join the wait list now, you’re not going to get the autoresponders series because I’m still working on it. John: You know what? I’m going to sign up for it now. Terry: I like the methodology of where it’s just quick little sentences, because my first responder series was paragraphs of stuff, as I was reading it to you, but now they’re short, quick jabs, just like your emails. John: By the way, I’ve just signed up to your list. I want to see your emails when they come out. Just one of the things that people get mixed up with, they think they need to be some copywriter to write a good email, but you’re not a copywriter, you’re a hacker. I read the article that you sent me before we got on the phone, which would be a bit of fun to talk about, but you don’t have to be a writer. You just have to get on there and basically, it’s like you’re having a conversation with a buddy at the bar, you’re three or four beers in and you’re just talking shit. Terry: Yes. Exactly. That’s exactly it. It works. I cannot envision a scenario where it wouldn’t work. Now I haven’t used an autoresponder series with other CEOs and stuff of other major companies or anything like that, but given the opportunity, of course, hell, I’m going to try it, because you don’t know if it’s going to work unless you try it. So far, it’s been working for me and I can’t complain. Dude, you’ve been badass. John: You said it, man. You [inaudible 00:27:26]. You execute it, man. Terry: That’s true. I personally think a lot of problem that people have when they’re trying to start the business, because there’s so many different ways you can go, to be honest with you, in order for me to concentrate and actually execute like you said, I think that’s the problem. A lot of people have intentions to do this, good intentions, they want to do it, but for some reason they get bogged down at the execution phase. I’ll tell you right now, one of the things I had to do to concentrate is I had to shit-can a bunch of the podcasts I was listening to and I had to get off of people’s email lists that I was on just so I could concentrate. To be honest, I basically have my podcast down to you, Chris Ducker and the guys that do the Business Growth Podcast or something like that. That’s it. Otherwise, you’re just overwhelmed. You are just overwhelmed, you don’t know where to start, this guys says to do this, this guy says to do that. You need to focus. Just get rid of the extraneous background noise, find the people that you seem to relate to, like I did with you, and just listen to you and listen to Chris Ducker and one other one, and that’s it, and then implement. I’ll tell you, the biggest thing that I think helped me execute on this was I actually sat in my garage one day on a nice, warm day with a microbrew beer and I sketched out on a pad of paper what modules do I think I need to cover, how long do I think it’s going to take me to create, and then broke out a calendar and started putting dates on the calendar, and then held myself accountable to make sure everything got done by these certain days. It worked. John: Absolutely, absolutely. All from a simple autoresponder. What did you have, seven emails, 10 emails in there? Terry: Yeah, seven, and this next one that I’m working on is 10, but like I said, I only have the bodies of the first four or five already fleshed out, and then I go back and change them, I try and tighten them up. I’m listening to people like you and others talking about, ‘Hey, go read the classic copywriting books,’ the Gary Halberts of the world in scientific advertising. I grabbed this stuff and I downloaded it on my Kindle and read it when I can. You read it and it’s like, ‘Wow, this shit hasn’t changed in decades. It’s the same concept. The medium is different.’ Instead of being a direct mail piece, you’re getting the freaking electronic direct mail piece. God, it was outstanding. John: Yeah. There’s no magic to it. It’s so simple. You can’t package this up. What we’re talking about right here and selling is like a $3,000 product because it’s so, so simple: bit of traffic, bit of people who have a problem that needs solving, and then you need a way to connect them to your product. You have a product that you need to sell them, and you just need a way to connect them, and the autoresponder is an easy way to connect them. That’s it. That’s not a $3,000 product. That’s the problem. People want that huge, big solution when really, then you sit down, get a bit of traffic, have something to sell, write a few emails. Terry: I’m telling you, I think a lot of people think that they have to have a huge email list before they can do any of this stuff, and that is simply not true, because when I started the Reaver Pro stuff, granted, we collected a lot of emails over time before we actually launched. That’s fine. The boot camp, for example, when I did the first iteration of the boot camp, I had maybe 300 email addresses, and then I launched to that list. I got 50 people to sign up and pay anywhere depending on what webinar they went to, I had different price points to see what worked and what didn’t work, it was as low as $47 and as high as $297. I got people all over the board that were paying. I think the sweet spot happens to be right around $97 is where most people seem to be comfortable with. Here was a list, I just simply put up a landing page, collected email addresses, Google AdWords, had 300 emails, had a webinar, ‘Hey, join me on this particular day. I’m going to go in-depth, talk 60 minutes about this and open up to a Question & Answer session.’ When it was over with, I opened it and people started joining. Then after so many days, I closed it down, and now I’m building the second phase of the email list and I think I got maybe, and I just started the email list a few weeks ago, so it’s maybe around 100 people or so right now. I’ll launch another webinar, invite everybody to join, get all the details, and then I’ll open it up for three days, and then I’ll close it down again. I need to get my autoresponder completed. It’s just me being lazy, I guess. I’ve got other shit going on, but it’s not going to stop me from collecting emails or pimping the product. The icing on the cake, to make more people convert, I believe, will be the autoresponder. Maybe I won’t implement it during this phase, but it will definitely be implemented in the next one. John: One thing I wanted to ask, just to play devil’s advocate for a second, is, Facebook is stiff competition. They’re in markets where it’s very, very competitive. I don’t know your market with all this tech stuff where you’re dropping all these industry jargon, and I get most of it, I’m not sure how many people listening do, but how many people … Terry: Sorry about that. John: … in … Are you the only guy in this industry offering this kind of stuff? How much is that contributing to the sales, to the success? Terry: No, there are other people out there. In fact, he’s a friend, but he’s also a competitor because he has a similar product. The name of the group is Hak5, H-A-K 5. They have an internet TV show that talks about hacking and all that kind of stuff, so they have a huge, huge following. Now if you go to their store, the HakShop, which I think is H-A-K S-H-O-P, they sell all kinds of devices like ours, multipurpose devices. Now here’s the kicker: I get a lot of emails saying, ‘Why should I buy your Reaver Pro over the HakShop’s WiFi Pineapple?’ I’m honest with them. I say, ‘The Pineapple is great if you want a device that does multipurpose things. If you want to do man-in-the-middle attacks, you want to break WEP, if you want to break WPA, it even has our open source version of Reaver built into it.’ ‘If you need a multipurpose device that does multiple things and has battery support and all that kind of stuff, then go with that device, but if you want a single-purpose device that goes after Wi-Fi-protected setup, which is on most modern APs today, you need to either test or gain access to those networks and you want an easy-to-use GUI on a very stable platform with awesome customer support, then buy our product.’ People are like, ‘Wow. Thanks for the honesty. Really appreciate that. I just placed my order with you.’ I am customer support, unfortunately, so when people email me with a problem, I’m the one that replies. What I have heard throughout the months is that our competition’s platform is a little more unstable than ours, so it may have a tendency to crash or not function as properly, and their customer support literally sucks. People will email them and may not hear anything back within weeks. John: What you have there, what I’m seeing is that you have just a killer USP. You know exactly who you are, you know exactly what part of the market you’re serving and what sort of person is going to buy your product. Terry: Yes. John: That’s a killer thing is like, when someone’s going to set up their order or something or someone’s going to do their marketing, they need to get their shit worked out like, who are they, who’s their prospect, who are they trying to talk to, and then exactly why is their product different to everything else out there, why should people buy theirs than the other stuff, because they’re thinking if they can iron out those kinks, everything else will flow over naturally and you can have easy answers to all these questions. Terry: Yeah. Now let me caveat what you just said by saying, I agree with everything you just said, but I did not have all that information before I launched Reaver Pro. I didn’t know they had an inferior product, I didn’t know that it was unstable, I didn’t know that their customer support was bad, but that didn’t stop me from just getting out there and putting the autoresponder together. Now, in light of this feedback that I’ve been getting for these past six months is going into my waffling on putting together the current autoresponder, because I want to make sure I address the most common complaints that the competitor has and be able to say why mine is better, so I’ll write it, and then I’ll look at it and let it rest for a day, come back and say, “Nah, I need to rewrite that.” I just need to fucking stick with it and just pull the trigger and do it, like I did the last time. It was kind of interesting because, when I did it the first time, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, so I just did it. Now the bad part is, I got a little knowledge, I kind of know how it should work, and now I’m waffling, trying to tweak it too much and I’ve got to slap myself and get out of that and just pull the trigger and just do it. John: Yeah, you’re thinking too much. Terry: Yes, exactly. Yes, I am. John: I’ve heard of stories, they get successful early, and then it becomes a lot harder the second time because they ask the question, ‘Can I live up to it? Can I get the same results that I just got?’ Terry: Yeah. Dude, it’s been a ride. I’ve been through four different email providers. I finally for now settled on MailChimp. I just think it’s easy to use and it seems to integrate with everything that we have set up e-commerce-wise and what not. I’m really digging some of these capabilities that some of the bigger things have, and they’re not just emails, like Infusionsoft and Office Auto Pilot, but that’s just too rich for my blood right now. I’m happy with MailChimp. It does what I need to do, it does my autoresponders, I can do my split testing. Again, I don’t do a lot of fancy graphics or links, right? It’s just plain text emails with links. That’s it. John: How long are your emails? Terry: How long are they? John: Yeah. Terry: They’re short. Compared to yours, mine are short, because you can pull up the email and you can probably read it within six, seven lines or so. They’re very short, very quick, to the point. Now the autoresponder series that I’m working on now is going to be a little bit longer, but when I do my broadcast and stuff, it’s usually, ‘Hey, here’s a link to X, Y, Z’ or ‘Here’s a new video I released on Reaver Pro on how to add a Yagi antenna’ or how to set up some certain configuration. I do a lot of broadcasting to the group just to keep it fresh so there’s interesting stuff and I don’t end up in the spam box or the promotions tab. Most recently with the boot camp, I sent out an email that simply said, “Now that you’ve been through the boot camp, can I get your feedback?” I think I’ve had like a 75% open rate on that email and almost damn near everybody responded with some very, very valuable feedback that most of it I plan to implement in the near term, which is great because now I don’t have to fear going to their spam box or to the promotions tab because now they’ve clicked on the link, they’ve responded to me. Dude, it’s been a ride. You are solely responsible for all this email bullshit that I’ve gotten myself into. John: I love it, I love it. Terry: Dude, my partners think I’m a wackjob getting involved with this stuff, but the numbers work. I show them what our profit margin is on me just running this part of the business and just selling this physical product. Now we’re at a position where, ‘What do we want to do with it?’ We’ve proven that it works, we’re making good money, the profit margins are usually around the 20%-plus area. Do we want to sell it off? Because it’s a turnkey system right now. Do we want to sell it off or do we want to expand the product line and what not. I don’t know. It’s a decision we have to come to grips with, how much more time we want to put into it or where we want to drive it. John: Very cool, very cool. Let’s wrap it up around here. Before we go, though, if someone wanted to email you and talk to you more, ask you a few questions about email, do you mind if they get in touch or …? Terry: No, not at all. I love helping people out. I’ve been to a couple of different networking events where I’ve talked about my methodology about how I go about testing ideas before you even put money into it. It’s our little process, our little funnel that deals everything with setting up the AdWords account, setting up the landing page, setting up the autoresponders, questioning the people, and then deciding whether or not that there’s a market out there for it. I’ve kind of put together this little funnel that I go around locally talking about other businesses about, whether it’s a physical product, an online product or maybe a class that they want to teach, how you can test it out without spending a lot of money and going down a rabbit hole that you can’t get out of. Yeah, they can contact me. I’ll give you my personal email address. John: Sure. Terry: It’s terry, T-E-R-R-Y, that’s “T” like in tango, E-R-R-Y dot dunlap, D-U-N-L-A-P, @gmail.com. John: Perfect. I’ll have one of those quickie links to that on the show, and you’ve seen what I do, Terry. You’re a hacker, you should know what I mean, terrydunlap, with a little A-T for “@” so they can’t scrape it. It will be on the show notes at McMethod.com if it’s the list they want to go check out. Now, Terry, thanks for coming on to share your story. Terry: No problem. Anytime, man. Keep up the outstanding work. The post Episode #54 – Terry Dunlap On How A Hacker Makes $88,312 with Autoresponders appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Congratulations! You can eliminate 80% of your to-do list. That’s right. Find the one or two tasks that “move the dial”… …and ONLY do those. Work less. Make more money. Sound good? Good. There’s only one problem – How do you decide what tasks are high-impact? Today – You’ll meet an 80/20 expert… …and learn how to best leverage your time into cash. Perry Marshall is the world’s TOP expert on 80/20 marketing. He’s the author of several “Ultimate Guides”: [+] Google Adwords [+] Facebook Advertising [+] Pay-Per-Click Advertising …and most recently: 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More. TRUST me. Perry’s book was one of the best I read all last year.  While reading – I remember thinking: “This book’s going to make me a millionaire.” Felt like escaping the Matrix. You’ll see why. Stick around to the end – Perry offers you a deal you can’t refuse. In this episode, you’ll discover: why it’s EASIER to make $100,000 than $10,000 how to approach direct marketing like an engineer the most common personality type to starting a successful business (is this you?) what Starbucks can teach you about growing your revenue the #1 question to ask your prospects (stick this in your survey!) how to instantly differentiate yourself from competitors Mentioned: Dan Kennedy Perry Marshall’s book: 80/20 Sales and Marketing Sell8020.com – Perry’s offer to you: get his book here Legendary copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis “Sell results, not procedures.” Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here.   John: It’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Perry Marshall. Now, Perry is the world’s top expert on online marketing, especially pay per click marketing with Google AdWords, with Facebook. We’re just chatting. He does a whole range of stuff from the page graphic to the email marketing. He’s got email copywriting products. He’s got stuff on the strategy and the 80/20 principle and a whole bunch of different things. There’s several books on AdWords, on Facebook ads, on split testing, all this different stuff. It’s really, really good. I just actually read one of his books recently and it blew my mind. I’ll talk a bit about that today. Now, that book was actually 80/20 Sales and Marketing. I read it a couple of months ago. I’ve recommended it to I don’t know how many friends. I seriously recommend it. It was one of the best books I’ve read probably in the last year. How about that? I remember thinking while I was reading it that the ideas in his book are going to make me a millionaire one day. It felt a bit like escaping the matrix. You’ll see why in just a minute. So that’s that. First, I want to welcome Perry. Perry, how are you going today? Perry: Good. Great. It’s a beautiful day and I’m glad to be talking to you. Nice to meet a guy who knows the power of auto-responders. It’s a little bit of a best-kept secret still. John: It is. Perry: I’m glad that we’re talking. John: Cook, man, cool. I’m actually blown away by how many … outside the internet marketing space, a lot of people have no idea, business owners have no idea what an auto-responder even is. They’re blown away that you could even do it. Perry: Yeah, you have to be an internet marketer to really know. I think a lot of us do, but yeah, 90% of people out there, some of them may have heard of it and it doesn’t mean a thing to them. There’s a lot of ignorance yet to stamp out. John: Before we get into the … we’ll talk about some stuff, tell the listener a bit about who you are. I’ve given you a quick little intro. Maybe you can give them a bit more on who you are, what you do, all that kind of stuff. Perry: Well, I’m a guy who got laid off from my engineering job when my wife was three months pregnant with our first kid and kind of … I ended up in sales. I couldn’t find the engineering job I was looking for without moving away and I didn’t want to do that. “Well, I’ll do sales. Those guys aren’t very smart. I’ll show them.” Two years later, after a lot of baloney sandwiches and Ramen soup and overdraft notices and all that stuff, I was, “Man, this is a lot harder than I thought.” It was even hard if you had a really nice boss and you worked in a good environment. It was still brutal. It’s like get up every day and open the manufacturer’s directory and start pounding the phone and get some appointments. It was just, it was brutal. Well, I got fired from my first sales job after trying really, really, really hard for two years, but around that time I discovered direct marketing. I heard Dan Kennedy at a seminar that I went to and he was talking about direct response advertising, which today is pretty common. It was very definitely the red-headed stepchild of advertising back then, and I found that direct marketers are kind of like engineers. I could understand what they were saying. When somebody finally started explaining direct marketing, what actually started to make sense to me was direct mail. Now, the internet was pretty new at that time and I was beginning to use it, but it was like, well, a sales letter needs to have this sort of a structure to it, you know. You’ve got to grab the person’s attention. You’ve got to draw them in with a story that talks about their pain, and eventually you’re going to get around to explaining how your problem solves it. I’m like, okay, that’s something I hadn’t really understood. I would go into a sales situation and I would just start showing people stuff and saying stuff and asking questions and just kind of riffing; okay? My riffing just didn’t work very well. There’s just so many things I didn’t understand. All of a sudden it started to click in place. I took this other job. We had a website and we sold to people who used the internet, and it all started to click. After a few years of that, it was a reasonably successful sales career at that point, and I said to myself, wow, what if I actually got good at this stuff, because right now I’m just, I’m functional with it; okay? I’m functional and that’s great, but what if I got really good? How much would that pay off? Well, that kind of leads to where I am now. I got a touch of attention deficit disorder so that’s probably why I got my fingers in so many pies. I think most of us … You’re a copywriter and good copywriters, I find … I barely know you; okay? You contacted my office and you passed the smell test and my staff checked you out and I checked you out. It looks good. You’re the Autoresponder Guy, but I can probably make some pretty accurate predictions about you. You’re a guy who I am going to guess is endlessly fascinated with about 900 different things and it’s the only way that you can not go stir crazy is to have another new project you can sink your teeth into everyday that takes you into some other hither-to unexplored corner of the universe; right? If that sounds like something you’d like, well, maybe you should be a freelance marketer. Fair enough, John? Is that good? John: Fair enough, man, fair enough. That’s the endless struggle. Perry: Your family, your school teachers didn’t know what to do with you. What is the matter with this kid? Why won’t he sit still, you know? Why does he fidget all the time? If he would only apply … he has so much potential. If he would only apply himself to his schoolwork instead of chasing caterpillars with a magnifying glasses. John: It’s funny. I remember for a long time I looked, these kind of things, like diving off in a million different direction at once as though it was the bad thing, and as I’ve met more entrepreneurs and more marketers I’ve seen that that’s like a prerequisite personality function to be successful at business. If you don’t have that, it’s really hard to be successful. Perry: Yeah. Yeah, it is. In fact, I was on the phone yesterday with one of my close marketing friends, and he goes, “I am …” and he’s hunting for the word … he goes, “ I’m slightly autistic.” He goes, and I read this book and it said I’m constantly checking things, checking this, checking that, checking the other thing. Well, that’s actually a form of autism. It seems to be like really healthy for me. It works. I’ve got these clients and I’ve got to watch their stats and make sure their websites are working right. Well, you know, I guess I kind of like it. Well, all right. We all get our diagnosis and we harness our dysfunction. You know, frankly, whatever dysfunction you have, even if it’s borderline personality disorder, you can find a way, some kind of career, that’s going to put it to good use. So flow with it. John: That’s the interesting part. They call them personality disorders. I wonder why. I think sometimes they’re only disorders because they don’t fit into most people’s idea of the way we should all live, but if you can find the right way to apply that … Perry: The people that invent the labels are just trying to displace the attention away from their own disorder onto somebody. That’s what’s really going on. John: Technically, if we were all the same in terms of business, if everyone was an entrepreneur, then all those weird people, people would have disorders if they only wanted to focus on one thing instead of a million things. Perry: I’ll tell you, really, in all seriousness, the most important thing in marketing is having a USP, a Unique Selling Proposition. It even took me a year or two to figure that out, and I didn’t really figure it out until the direct marketers taught it to me. But eccentric people come up with USPs a lot easier than normal ones do. If you were always eccentric and you considered it a curse, well, here it’s a blessing. John: Absolutely. This is a great place to segue into this idea of 80/20 Sales and Marketing, because basically you’ve got a million things. We all want to go in a million directions at once in our business, but the whole principle of this book, 80/20 … The reason why I found it so valuable is I read The 4-Hour Workweek maybe three, four, five years ago, something like that, Tim Ferriss mentions the 80/20 principle in that book. I was like, that sounds kind of cool, it’s a little bit helpful, but I thought, I want 100% of the results. The way he seemed to put it is I’d have to do 20% of the effort and only get 80%, but I wanted to get 100%. Then what happened with your book is that it kind of made me decide, it clicked, hang on, why can’t I just scale back, just do 20% to get 80% and then not only that, double the amount of investment I put in that 20%, which then makes my output 160%. Then when that clicked it’s like, hang on, out of all those million things that I could be doing, all I have to do is identify the 20%, those small things, and just double, triple or whatever, my investment of time and energy and focus into those areas and they’ll be exponential improvements over time in the business. Perry: Yes, that’s exactly right. The thing that people don’t understand about 80/20 is that when you find a way to get the insignificant 80% taken care of, like sometimes it does have to be taken care of. There are some things you can’t ignore. There could be 78 things that make your website work and any one of them could make it fail; right? You have to have all 78, and there is a sense where there does have to be a 100%, but if you can get the 80 taken care of and focus on the 20 and make space, you will always find that there’s another place you can go where your time is even more valuable. John: Right. Perry: In the book it’s called the 80/20 curve, and you can graft 80/20 and it looks kind of like this exponential growth curve except it’s more than that. It’s more than exponential. It’s really mind-bending when you get down into it. When you climb that curve, you find there’s always territory ahead of you that you’re still not doing. You just kind of have to trust the process and understand that pretty much is a law of physics that those higher realms are always there. There might be occasional exceptions, but for the most part, it’s true. What you come to understand is that the results that people get, the incomes that people make, the sales they create, all of that stuff, it’s not in additions and increments, it’s in multiples and powers of 10. It’s not $50,000 a year, $60,000 a year or 70, 100, 110, 120. No. It’s more like 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000, 10,000,000. John: I like the way you framed it up there. What was kind of running through my head when I read the book was that it’s a bit like … It was a great metaphor for entrepreneurship was when you’re getting started, you start off and you’re trying to make $1,000 a month. But while you’re trying to make $1,000, you’ve still got this idea in your head once you get to 1,000, it’s going to take the same amount of time to get to 2,000, and it’s really hard to shake that feeling or that idea in your head. But once you get to 1,000, all of a sudden you get to 3 or 4 a lot faster and a lot easier than it was to get to 1,000. Then you take that 3 and 4 and you get to, say, 10 or 20. It seems like entrepreneurship, this definition; it’s on Wikipedia from some French guy. I hope that’s not bad that I don’t even know this guy’s name. He might be real famous. But the idea is that you’re moving your resources from a lower area of yield to a higher area of yield. What we’re doing, everyone has got their own 80/20 in their own life right now. If they just execute on those tasks, on that thing, that will get result in the fastest way possible. Then as soon as they’ve done that, there will be another playing field and then another playing field and then another playing field. Every time they run that script, they run that, it’s almost like a script on a computer. Every time you run that 80/20 script you get bigger and bigger and bigger results. Perry: Yes. In fact, I’ve said for years, it is easier, like in an online business; it is easier to get from $100,000 a year to a million than it is to get from 10,000 to 100. For most people the real barrier is getting from 10,000 a year to 100,000, or in monthly sales $1,000 a month to 10,000 a month. That’s where the competition is really thick. Then you get a breakthrough. It’s certainly not harder to go from 100K to a million than it is from 10 to 100. People don’t understand that. It always does require a change in focus. The exact thing that got you to 100K a year is not going to get you to a million. You’re going to be doing very different things. John: Right. It’s kind of like the level of thinking that got you to where you are today is different from the sort of thinking that’s going to get you to where you want to be. Perry: Right. John: Go on. Perry: No. Go ahead. John: A lot of business owners have heard this. I heard it in the 4-Hour Workweek five years ago and it took another five years for it to really click. It wasn’t sort of seeing that, like, I understood it but I didn’t  do anything about it or really think about it with any sort of proper focus. This year, since I read the book, every day when I wake up it’s becoming more of a habit now and I’m thinking, well, what can I eliminate from this list that just isn’t going to matter much at all. It turns out there’s a lot of stuff that I’ve been doing that I don’t really need to do or I can just hire … I’ve hired one person. I hire another person next week. It’s all because of starting to think like this. What have you seen in your work with business owners, some of the biggest barriers that stop people from thinking like this, and how do we overcome them? Perry: Well, the way that I overcame it was starting to see all the things on my list to do everyday as being on an exponential scale, so there’s $10-an-hour tasks, there’s $100-an-hour tasks and there’s $1,000-an hour-tasks, and $10,000-an-hour tasks. In fact, I have a chart on page 119 that describes typical … There’s a $10 column and a $100 column and $1,000 column, and it tells you what those things typically are and what you typically earn from those efforts. Let’s say that you have a to-do list with 111 things, which for a week there might be 111. Well, 100 of those things are worth $10 an hour and 10 of them are worth $100 an hour and one is worth $1,000 an hour. That’s kind of how it is. Okay? If you know that, if you know that one-tenth of your tasks are ten times as valuable, if you know that 1% of your tasks are 100 times as valuable, all of a sudden it just completely shifts your understanding of what’s important and what’s not. What I find is a lot of people are, I think everybody who’s really good at anything is a perfectionist in some sense, but most of us misapply our perfectionism, and we sit and we polish these little turds and it doesn’t actually make any difference whether most of these things are done really well or frankly done sort of lousy as long as they get done somehow by somebody, whereas if you focus your perfectionism on a few things … You think about it, think of bands and songs and stuff like that. A band in their whole entire career will probably have five or ten hits. What that means is there’s only five or ten songs that absolutely had to be perfect, you know? You have an album and you get one or two hits and the other songs are definitely not hits. Well, those other songs, sure, it’s good for the fans and the people that buy the album for those songs to be done well, but it’s really the hit songs that need to be perfect. Now, what I’ve found is you can’t predict the hit song before you even record them. Maybe you can but usually you can’t. You have to get things to some level of acceptability before you can tell which one is going to take off. But I bet you by the time at least had the basic tracks laid down most of the bands had a pretty good idea which two or three songs were going to be popular and which ones weren’t. You have to be very selective about your perfectionism. Then also understand that there are some things, there’s a tiny, just few things, that almost couldn’t be perfect enough. It’s like you could just continue to make them more and more perfect and you will continue to make exponentially more results from them. John: What’s an example of something like that? Perry: Well, I think a big one is how products get simplified. I think the highest form of perfection and perfectionism is the kind of perfectionism that Steve Jobs applied. Steve Jobs, he wanted products to be, they needed to be functional and they needed to do the things that they’re supposed to do but they also needed to do it with utmost simplicity and ease. What I think a lot of us do is we get into business and we finally eventually figure out how to make it work, but then what we try to do, we try to become more successful by making what we sell more complicated. I think that’s okay and it’s kind of normal, but the real breakthroughs are when you figure out how to simplify something to a tremendous degree. The Smartphone is a tremendous simplifier because, oh, you need a guitar tuner? Download an app. You need a metronome? Download an app. You need a map? Download an app. And it all fits in your pocket, and the phone only has two buttons. Right? It’s got that little round one in the bottom and it’s got the power button at the top. That is extreme simplicity. John: Okay. Perry: Extreme simplicity. I think what everybody needs to be doing, so one of my favorite phrases in marketing is, “Sell results, not procedures,” and I stole it from Herschell Gordon Lewis. Now, if you apply “Sell results, not procedures” to everything you sell, it changes the definition of what you sell. Coffee, okay, coffee shops thought they were selling coffee. Starbucks, 20 years ago, whenever they kind of caught their stride, they said, we’re going to sell a $2 luxury and a luxury experience that everybody can afford. They made a Starbucks store into a little taste of luxury. Now, I like Starbucks. I like going there. I went there yesterday. Why do I like it? Well, I like the music. I like the atmosphere. I like the coffee. I like the caffeine buzz, and I like the fact that I can go sit there with my notebook or my laptop and I can do some work and it’s a very pleasant thing. Think how different that is from going to McDonald’s where for the same amount of money I get a meal … McDonalds is remarkable too. Their food is not healthy and I don’t really like it, but it’s remarkable that you can go and for 4 bucks you can get a lunch. The kids think it tastes great. That’s for sure. Right? McDonalds is selling you a hamburger. Starbucks is selling you an experience. They’re selling you a result, not a procedure. Starbucks does not sell coffee. John: Okay. Perry: I don’t care if you sell medical equipment or you sell … If you can say what is the end result the person actually wants? Nobody who bought a drill wanted a drill. They wanted a hole. If you say, I am in the hole-making business instead of I’m in the drill business, that will always lead you to solve problems better and more simply than everybody else is. There’s no end to how much you can do this, because there’s no end to problems in the world. You can do it and do it and do it. I think one of the most important … The 80/20 curve, it goes up and up an up and it never stops. It just goes higher and higher. For me, what the 80/20 curve is, it’s a rational reasonable to have faith that there’s always another opportunity, that there’s always a higher ladder that you can climb. I think all entrepreneurs, all business owners also need to know there’s no end to the problems that they can solve. The well of human desires is bottomless. How high is up? It doesn’t stop. There is no limit. Compared to 200 years ago, everybody on the planet just about is wealthy. Compared to now, the people 200 years from now, they will consider us to be unfortunate, all those poor people. John: IPhones and computers and all that stuff. Perry: That’s right. John: We’ll wrap it up right here. Just to summarize that, this is like saying you’re not in the Facebook advertising business, you’re in the make-more-money business. Perry: Well, yes. Yes. If everybody is in the make-more-money business, and if you don’t have an identity, something that people can hang their hat on in a USP, then you’re still dead in the water, but regardless of what you’re exact unique individual USP is, there is still the bottom line that … My customers want to make more money, absolutely, and I have to be in the business of that. If I start thinking that I’m in the business of click-through rates and impressions and all these funky little techniques that I get enamored with, I’m going to stagnate, and we all will. You’re in the get-more-clients business. John: Yep. Yep. I see what you mean. You’ve got to have the USP. I’m the Autoresponder Guy, you’re the traffic guy, but then under that, the second layer of that is, yeah, I’m this guy, but I’m really here just to help you make more sales but I’m going to do it under the guise of email traffic or whatever that happens to be. Perry: That’s right. That’s right. John: Fantastic. Well, we’ll wrap it up already. I know you’ve got to get going, but before we go, give the listener a heads up about where they can go to learn more about you or the book or anything you want to talk about. Perry: Yeah, so if I could just pick one thing to encourage people to go do, it would be read the 80/20 Sales and Marketing book, and read the whole thing. I wrote this for two kinds of people. I wrote this for the guy who is just like I was 20 years ago when I got fired from my first sales job and was scraping change out of the car seats in order to buy lunch. But I also wrote it for the guy who’s running a $50,000,000 company. Okay? Literally, the book, it will change your perspective. John, you can agree or disagree, but I think it will actually alter your perspective about what’s important in sales and marketing in a major way. It will make a major shift. I have a very interesting offer on my website. If you go to sell80/20.com, S-E-L-L 8020.com, I’ve got an offer. I’ll sell you my book for 7 bucks. It’s a penny plus $6.99 shipping if you’re in the US. Shipping is double if you’re outside the US, but less money than Amazon, less money than the bookstore. I’ll ship it to you. Read the book from cover to cover. Why am I doing this? I mean, I’m taping dollar bills to this book; okay? Here’s why I’m doing this. I found out, I did the numbers and did the math, 80/20; right? Well, 78.6% of the people who buy that book don’t buy anything else from me. You know what? 21.4% do. And they go on to be raving fans and great customers. I’m willing to tape dollar bills to that book for the 20% who step up and go, “Hey, I really like that.” They’re like John McIntyre, “I really like this book. I’m going to pay attention to this guy.” I think it will change your life. You can go to sell 80/20.com. You can buy it for 7 bucks. Even if you have to scrape the 7 bucks out of your car seats and skip lunch, you should buy this book, because it will change your life. John: All right. I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes at theMcMethod.com. I can highly recommend the book. It does produce a huge change, a huge shift in your thinking, so no arguments there at all. Perry, thanks for coming on the show. Perry: Thank you, John. It was great to talk to you today. The post Episode #53 – Perry Marshall On 80/20 Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Bottom Line appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Here’s the problem with your business. Maybe you can rattle off 15 product features… *Yawn.* You might even have the writing chops to “re-frame” those features as benefits… …but here’s what you’re missing: Your customers don’t give a damn. Truth is – Your most profitable customers ONLY care about one or two problems your product solves. Sell the wrong benefit… ...and your sales will suffer. Key in on the RIGHT benefit – …and you’ll see geometric increases in your revenue. In this episode – Veteran copywriter Michael Silk returns to dish on empathy: The 7-letter word that underlies ALL marketing. Michael joined us back on Episode 42 – …and shared his seductive F.U.N. formula to write emails that sell. (That episode here: www.themcmethod.com/42). Today – You’ll discover how to read your customers’ minds. Study this process… …use it to dial in your email marketing… …and enjoy higher conversions than you thought possible. In this episode, you’ll discover: how to dig into your market and figure out what prospects REALLY want how to profit more…by making fun of your competitors  why copywriting “formulas” are NOT the beez-kneez when it comes to sales the make-or-break appeal that’s at the front of your customer’s mind a disgusting “stomach ulcer” lesson in solving REAL pain points one trick your competitors are doing to get a leg up on you why EMPATHY is king Mentioned: Michaelsilkconsulting dot com – Michael’s site Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John: It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with a guest who’s been on the podcast before. His name is Michael Silk. He originally came on to talk about how he wrote F.U.N. emails for a bunch of different companies. One of them was doing a high seven to eight figures. That podcast episode was all about these fun emails which was fun, unusual, and they get noticed. If you want to check that out, you can go to themcmethod.com/42. Originally, we had … On that episode you can get an intro or a background on who Michael is and what he does. He is a copywriter; a damn good one. He has some really interesting ideas, but today instead of going into formulas … We talked a bit about this before the call. The idea of fun, that’s a bit of a formula. Today I wanted to talk a bit about why formulas aren’t … They’re just not everything you need. There’s a little bit more. We’ll get into that. We are going to talk about a few different things. This is more of a free-flowing podcast. I’ve done a few of these in the past and I have no idea where they are going to end up, so we’re just going to have some fun. How you doing today, Michael? Michael: I’m very good. Thanks, John. Yeah, thank you. John: Good to have you back. Michael: Yeah, good to be on. Like you, we’ll just see where this podcast goes and I’m sure some good ideas will come out it and bring a lot of value to it. John: Sounds good. Take 2. Second time lucky, right? So this is … This is our second take, second attempt at this podcast. This doesn’t happen too often but sometimes you’ve got to hit the stop button, delete it, and start again. Fingers crossed. ‘ Let’s talk about these formulas. Just before I hit the record button, we were talking about how a lot of people are out there teach formulas. There’s nothing wrong with formulas, but you made an interesting point about why … basically why you don’t want to talk too much about formulas. You think are some more important things. Can you rap on that for a little bit? Michael: Yeah. First of all, I know your podcast is mostly directed to people writing email copy. I should just mention that although I do write email copy I don’t see myself through the lens of just an email-marketing copywriter. I write sales letters. I do write email copy. I also write video sales letters. I come to the conversation as it were with more of an overall perspective. First off, off the bat, I’m not dissing any formulas. I gave you that fun formula for our last podcast and all of those are useful. What’s I think … What you wanted to talk about today was this … I think there’s a couple of things that perhaps go a little bit deeper than formulas. You can … There are so many different sales formulas out there. Probably most people are familiar with the formula. Then there’s the problem agitation solution. There is lots of different markets and copywriters, they’ve all got their own take on those. All of them are useful. Perhaps what’s more useful is getting the right appeal to the market. If I can just explain this with an example. John: Go for it. Michael: There was … This is not based on myself but it is based on another copywriter I know of.  He was doing some work for some mortgage brokers, selling to mortgage brokers I believe it was. Now let’s say that this copywriter had followed the very best formula out there. Some copywriters come up with the de facto sales formula. He had followed it to a T.  In his sales letter, he covered all of those elements, the components of that de facto formula that is the very best sales formula out there. He wrote to those … His target market was the mortgage brokers. And he … It was all about getting more clients. What he found is that when he mentioned getting more clients the sales promotion didn’t ever do as well as when he mentioned getting referrals. Every time he put in his marketing promotions about getting referrals, the response spiked up. That is all that these mortgage brokers were interested in was referrals. Do you get what I’m saying there? The appeal was the referrals. He could mention getting more clients. He could mention getting paid higher fees. He could mention taking more time off. He could mention having more practices and so on and so forth, but all of that paled into comparison in terms of response compared to when he mentioned getting referrals. John: Okay, so what you’re saying is- Michael: It’s all about  the appeal. John: Right, so you could take a … the best sales letter formula in the world and you could fit any of the appeals in that marketplace into that sales letter. What you’re saying is that, that doesn’t actually matter. You could have the best formula in the world but the formula is beside the point. What makes it the sales letter convert is not the formula or the structure so much as the understanding that the key benefit … This is one thing that I’ve tried to stress before is that people talk about benefits. That you should just go and write a list of benefits for the product, but it’s just not about benefits. It’s about tapping into the right benefits. What we’re talking about here, benefit or appeal in that the benefit is like you said, they are going to get more referrals. Are they going to get more clients? Are they going to have more time off? The key thing is what benefit do they actually care about. What appeal is actually in the front of their minds when they think about their problem? Michael: Absolutely. It’s the make or break thing. Again, not to say that the sales formulas are not important. They have their place. I’m just saying that there is deeper stuff to look at. John: How would … I talked about this a lot in my emails and my … this idea that you need to have empathy and without empathy even the … without empathy, without really understanding what your, what the marketplace wants, the best copy in the world won’t save you. I’ve talked about that with my audience, things like surveys, and going to Amazon, and things like that. What specific things do you do to figure out the appear when you’re writing for yourself or you’re writing for a client? Are there any go-to tactics or strategies? Or do you sit down and visualize yourself in a chair opposite your prospect? How do you do it? Michael: Again, it would be nice to give a cookie-cutter answer. Unfortunately, life is not always that simple. I think a lot of it for myself, to comes from conversing with the clients. They often got a more of a better understanding of the type of person that … the core clients as it were or their core customers. They have a better understanding with what they want. I’ll give you an example of that. I write for a company that is involved in the hypnosis, hypnotherapy world. I write a promotion for them that’s, I don’t mind saying, didn’t work. It worked but it didn’t work to the extent that we were hoping it did. I wrote the promotion for … it was very much aimed at people that, hypnotherapists and how to get more clients. A lot of their customer base, they don’t actually want to be hypnotherapists. They just want to be able to do a lot of cool stuff with hypnosis. There was a mismatch, you see. It wasn’t until we went back and conversed more with the client … It was like, ah, you know, this letter would have worked in another arena perhaps better than it did to their customer base. John: When someone is sitting down to write an email or a sales letter or any sort of promotion or advertisement, the important thing is not so much the writing. Not being the best writer in the world but having the greatest understanding of the prospect. It’s like … I’ve met plenty of people … it’s funny, a couple of my friends in this industry find this funny as well. When you hear about someone or meet someone and they’ve never studied marketing, they’ve never sat down and written out sales letters by hand, they’ve never read any books or anything by Gary Halbert or any of these guys. They don’t really know much about marketing yet they have a business that’s just raging. They are crushing it. While they may not understand marketing in the whole direct-response fashion, what they do understand is that … They have a very intimate understanding of what the marketplace wants. That gives them almost a huge, it’s surprising, but a huge advantage over everyone else. Sometimes I feel like me or like some of my friends that where we put so much emphasis on the marketing side of it and being a good copywriter when it seems like almost all of the battle is really just understanding what this main appeal is. What’s the main thing that people want? Michael: If you take a step back from it, John, and I think it’s good advice for me as well and it’s good advice for everybody. From the customer’s point-of-view, from the buyer’s point-of-view, prospects, how much do they understand about the marketing side of it? Probably not anything. They … What I’m saying is they couldn’t care less if you got the best marketing system in place or you follow the very best sales formula. If you’re not talking to them, if you’re not communicating or connecting with them at the level that they resonate with, that’s all they care about. John: It’s a bit like a kids. You could say kids are very fantastic sales girls and boys in that they know their parents so well that when they want to manipulate their parents to give them what they want, it just comes intuitively to them. They will say stuff to their parents that just make the parents crumble. They’ve never been trained. No one has ever taught them how to be good at this. What they do understand is exactly what is important to them and their mother and dad. That allows them to lead, you could say manipulate, but really just lead their mom and a dad around. Sell them on doing something or not doing something. It’s almost like if you can have the magical eye to see what your prospects really wants, what the marketplace really, really wants, don’t even need to worry too much about having the best copy in the world. Michael: Absolutely. People want to feel that you’re for real as well. They want to have an understanding that you’ve got their best interests at heart. All of that is important. Another area that I think is important, John, that is what I call cause-marketing. I don’t mean attaching your marketing to a cause as in a charity or a fund-raising event or you know. Often that is denoted as cause-marketing. What I mean is coming up and finding the new or the hidden cause behind the problem that the market has. I think instead of me rapping on and trying to explain this … If I give some examples, I think it will become very clear. If you can find the new … And when I say new it maybe the unknown cause. It may not actually be the new cause but it may be a cause behind their problem that they’ve not been aware of. If you can bring them that to their attention and bring clarity around that, then that is also very powerful and can create some sales breakthroughs in and of itself. Again, all of these principles … I prefer to talk about them as principles as opposed to formulas, can be applied to email marketing or more traditional sales letters or website copy or even conversations, however you communicate with your market. In any case, here is some examples of cause, what I mean by cause-marketing. It used to be universally believed that stomach ulcers were caused by excess intestinal acid. Most of the products sold helped alleviate stomach ulcers were based on the concept, on the precept, that they were going to reduce stomach acid. It was then discovered that stomach ulcers are in fact caused by too much of the wrong type of bacteria. The companies selling remedies to alleviate stomach ulcers, if they can educate and bring clarity to the situation and say, hey, your stomach ulcers are not caused by too much stomach acid but actually caused by intestinal, the wrong type of intestinal bacterial. The reason our product is so superior to all the other products on the market, because it actually targets the real underlying cause of stomach ulcers and blah, blah, blah and etc., etc., etc. Does that make sense? John: Absolutely. Michael: If you yourself or anyone listening had a stomach ulcer and they’ve been trying all of these different tablets and … I don’t’ even know what kind of things are that deal with that kind of stuff. If they’ve been dealing with everything and they’re going to the doctors and it’s all been about stomach acid and then all of a sudden they come across something that says, actually, it’s caused by stomach bacterial and this alleviates the problem by targeting the stomach bacteria, etc., etc., etc. it’s like, wow, why has nobody ever told me about that before? That’s the answer. If you can position your product or your solution as addressing that when nobody else is then it can give you a significant advantage in the sales marketplace. I’ll give you another example. It used to be, or pretty much still is, universally believed that cholesterol level is the most meaningful indicator of heart disease, whereas it’s becoming more common knowledge that the actual, real underlying cause and best indicator of heart disease is something called your blood homocystine level. If you can out with a product, a heart pill or whatever, that actually educates the reader into you being … Cholesterol is not where it’s at, it’s actually … You need to get your homocystine levels checked and this product will reduce those. Then again, you can create a significant sales advantage for yourselves. I’ll give you another example and this actually from a real example. There was a company, a maintenance supply company in the United States, the sales, utility, maintenance, goods to businesses … Things like kind of maintenance stuff from brooms to probably big industrial cleaners and everything like that. What was happening is that had accounts across the county with a number of businesses but they were losing a lot of those accounts because the businesses were going more locally to buy maintenance supply equipment as and when they needed it. The big, centralized maintenance company that had been supplying businesses all across the country started to lose a lot of business because the businesses could buy more locally and buy cheaper. they addressed this problem by … They were able to show … They were able to go back to the businesses and say, look, you closed your account with us, but they were able to demonstrate this in raw format that a company buying its items locally could actually buy those items locally a lot cheaper as and when they wanted to. But when they factored in all of the disruption costs, the buying costs, the storage costs, and what these companies were tending to do, the businesses were tending to do, is that if they needed to replace one item they tended … It’s human nature that you would buy three items just in case you got backup. They were actually spending more over the course of the year. They were able to buy the items more cheaply but they weren’t able to save money throughout the year. The big, centralized maintenance supply company was able to go back and demonstrate that they were actually causing themselves to spend more money. Now they’ve got a lot of these businesses coming back on board and reopening their accounts. Although they were able to buy the items cheaply, they didn’t have … They weren’t able to reduce their management costs of buying, if that makes sense. That’s a bit of a convoluted … John: Tell you what’s going on here. They can buy them for say $10 at the main-, the big maintenance national warehouse guys, but if they’re buying them from the local guys they can buy it for say $8 which is a cheaper price. Michael: Yeah. John: Then what’s the reason that they should go back to the big one? Michael: If they’re buying them $8 locally they can buy the item obviously cheaper. When they’ve got to factor in the time that it costs someone to actually to and make the purchase, to go and have the thing delivered, companies were tending to buy, if they’re going to buy one we may as well buy two or three so we’ve got backups in future. Then they’ve got storage costs that they’ve got to take care of. All of these ancillary quote-unquote “hidden costs” all of a sudden start adding up. Where they can by the item for say $8, it may in actual fact be costing them $15. John: Okay. Michael: The big centralized company was able to go back and show that actually what buying from them … From buying from independent stores, they were actually causing themselves to spend more money. John: Okay. Then they had a promotion that went out that basically explained what was really going on. Michael: Yeah. John: Then the people came back. Okay. To bring that back, this goes back to the idea of the cause. If you can see into the problem better than prospect can and explain it in a way that really, really makes sense, it’s going to connect with them. Michael: I think a big part of the job of a quote-unquote “copywriter” or however you want to label yourself up as or an email person or marketer is to bring clarity to your target audience. I think if you can be a source of clarity and … into what is for all of us a very cluttered world. There is so much information out there but if you can bring clarity around their situation and their problem, they immediately identify with you as somebody as having the solution for them. That comes back again to you mentioned the word empathy. How do you in practicality demonstrate empathy? You could be sitting where you are writing your promotion, feeling very emphatic for your target market, but how does that actually transfer across to them? If you can bring clarity to the situation, all of a sudden you’ve already provided a service to them. John: It’s a bit like when you have a problem, a personal problem sometimes, and it helps to go and talk to a really good friend about it. You sit down, you go out with your friend for coffee, and you start talking. You just go into event mode where you talk your way through the whole problem. Sometimes the friend just listens, sometimes the friend is able to add a bit of perspective, but what you really walk away with from that conversation is clarity. It’s the hard part when you have problems. When I … If I’m going about my day and I’m used to having a lot of energy, which is pretty typical, some days, there’s a day where I can’t get out of bed or I crash and burn at 3pm, it makes me really frustrated unless I know what’s making me tired. If I go, hang on, I ate a plate of rice over lunch, that’s going to be it. All of a sudden there is no need to worry about it. When I don’t know what’s going on or maybe I thought it was the plate of rice and then I tried … then I get rid of the plate of rice at lunch but it still keeps happening. I’m frustrated and it’s annoying. When I finally figure out what’s going on, in comes that clarity. I can relax now. Michael: Yes, you’ve still got the problem. Some to me, yes, is burn a bit yesterday afternoon. My heart felt really e … Two days before I did some really heavy leg-training work, weight training. I correlated it now but that really takes it out of me. It can kind of creep up on me. It doesn’t … Straight after the workout I feel really buzzed and alive. Then a day or two later it really … It’s just like you’re saying there. It’s like, ah, that’s the reason for that is that and now I don’t have to worry about it too much. John: If you could come in and explain to someone, basically give them clarity and what’s going on with problem, that’s going to build an enormous amount of trust it what you’re about and what you’re going to end up selling them Michael: But clarity in a way that it identifies as the real cause behind what’s happening. John: Not clarity for the sake of clarity. Clarity with a purpose. Michael: Yes. John: How would … An interesting topic would be how would, say I’m … This is a hard thing to think of. How would one go about finding or giving someone clarity? Let’s say you’re in marketing and you’re trying to sell something. You’ve got several competitors and you all seem to be saying the same thing more or less. Do you have to … It sounds like it’s worth spending quite a decent chunk of time as well as I’m trying to understand your prospect, trying to look for angles in the market that would give you a leg up on your competitors  if you could walk in and you could explain something that no one else has explained. That’s an interesting way of looking at it. If you could for a U. S. P. or a unique approach you could go in there and explain something that no one else is explaining. You might sell the same thing, but if you explain something that no one else has really touched on yet and it’s a bit of a paying point that’s going to be a big win. Michael: Absolutely. I’m just … This like … This is an area, John, that is, it’s not something that is a … it takes thinking but I think this what we’re discovering for this conversation. It’s not just a ready-made answer to everything. This is the kind of stuff that you have to cut a bit deeper with. Often times, there’s not ready-made answers like you can just pull out of a hat, and oh, I can used that read-made answer to this. It does take a bit of investigation and bit of introspective sometimes and thought into it and some time. You have to circle the desk as it were. I think … Here’s my take on it. Probably like you and probably like a lot of people listening to this recording or who will listen to it at some stage, if I read in a sales letter online sometimes it can have all the right elements to it but it still leaves me a bit cold. It’s saying all the right things. It’s just somehow I don’t just quite … sometimes I just quite put my finger on it. I can’t … It’s something just not resonating with me or something I just don’t feel comfortable parting with money for. It all sounds good but I don’t quite … This happened the other day actually. This brings to mind something the other day. There was a program, a selling system being sold by somebody who is quite well-known. They have a celebrity appeal as it were. They have a selling system that they are currently promoting. I watched … There wasn’t a letter for it, it was actually an interview webinar thing. I watched it all and I didn’t … It’s strange, it was almost like I wanted to buy it but then I didn’t feel comfortable buying it. There was something lacking. There was something … and I think you’re hearing I don’t know quite what it was. The more I think about it, I think what it was is that I didn’t understand the reason why it would work above and beyond any other system. I didn’t understand the mechanics of it. It was like … Going back if we tie this back into to where I was talking about the cause marketing or coming up with a quote-unquote “new cause behind the problem” that obviously can be quite difficult to do because sometimes there isn’t another known cause behind the problem. Everybody knows what the cause is. It’s universally accepted. It’s universally been proven or whatever. Everybody knows what the underlying cause of the problem is. I’m trying to think of an example off the top of my head and I can’t quite. You get what I’m saying? There is no new cause you can come up with. What you can do is that you can illuminate on what you’re selling. You can go into … You can get somebody to … Here’s where I’m going with this, you want somebody to conceptually understand why the thing that you have actually works. John: Okay. Michael: For example, let me try and give an example because otherwise I’m talking very surface-level. Let’s say, for example … What should we talk about, John? John: I’m thinking- Michael: Let’s say, let’s say, okay … for the gym. Somebody wants to pull a muscle at the gym. There are so many different supplements out there … protein shakes and muscle-building supplements and so on and so forth. They, nearly all of them will take basically the message is, take this and you will gain x-amount of muscle. John: Right, right. Michael: In x-amount of days. John: I see where you’re going with this. Michael: What really … Personally what I would want to say is show me why it would work. Don’t just tell me that it will … Don’t just … I think this goes back to you saying before about the benefits … keep … okay so you’re going to get more muscle and you’re going to look good and blah, blah, blah, and you can reduce your fat and so on and so forth. You can train better and you can have more energy. All of those … All of that is a paid-end stuff. All of that is, yes I want all that. I want it but I may not necessarily be comfortable buying it because I don’t quite believe, I don’t’ quite have the conceptual understanding, the clarity of why it would it. If I take this, what’s it going to do on my …? If somebody can come along and communicate that. Not necessarily in a very anatomical, biological way but in a way that perhaps uses analogies and so on and so forth. It’s like you can paint a picture into someone’s mind. Oh, it get why that works now. I want the benefits. I now understand why it would work. I understand what causes it to work. I now feel comfortable buying it. You’ve got this emotional side just to want those benefits but the logical side is like … John: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I can think of a few different examples. One, one is that a couple of weeks ago I saw some ads popping up on Facebook for another make-money-online product. It was a very niche one but still very much a make-money-online. It looked the same, the way they all look. Very — claims. Very make x-amount of dollars in x-amount of time and all that sort of stuff. I read it for a bit. I always scan those things just to see what is going on, but I didn’t buy it. Obviously, I want that, I want to make $10,000,000 in an hour and all that sort of stuff. That’s not going to happen. You can’t really … You haven’t told me how it’s really going to do it. Then I spoke to a friend today who has actually … He told them about not so much the product but he explained that he was using a strategy to make money. Then  he told me about the product. He told me about how it all worked, how he was making money. I was like, all right, that all makes sense. That’s a great explanation. Then I … and then he mentioned the product that I had seen a couple of weeks ago. Finally, by that point, I knew what the product was offering. Then from him I had the explanation of why the product worked. Then I went and bought the product because now you can back up those claims, knowing how you’re going to achieve those claims. Michael: That’s an excellent example. He conceptually understood the mechanics behind it, mechanics that would make it work. John: Yeah. This is like when you go, you sound like you’ll get a six-pack or you’ll lose x-amount of weight or anything like that. When you can explain it that there is some unknown recently discovered mechanism within the body that when you ingest 100 mg of RHEA and Vitamin D 30 minutes prior to be that has an effect on … who knows, your digestive system blah, blah, blah. He explained the whole scientific mechanism and layman’s terms in a way that’s very easy to understand. Perhaps you explain it like a classic way. You put a chain on the … I’m coming up with stuff now. Michael: You’re doing a much better job … You’re doing a much better job than me, John. John: Yeah, you would take something, give it a good explanation, and then all of a sudden it’s so much more believable. I’ve had fun with friends out … Sometimes we’ve been out drinking and I’ll start off a story. A couple of my friends, they know what I do, they know that I write stories like this for a living. I’ll start telling a story. There might be a few people there that might not know what I do and I’ll tell a story about what, about something. I know that by telling the story and almost … speaking with a very authoritative tone as though the claim or the result is guaranteed and here is how it works. Then you just explain it with a very serious voice and make it interesting on why x is true. Most people will believe it. They start going, ah, how did they, ah. They really … They’ve got no idea whether to believe you or not. It’s absolutely incredible. Even if the explanation is absolutely crazy, just the mere fact that you have an explanation seems to bolster their belief big time. Michael: Yeah, and it comes back to that … What Jay Abraham was saying, you know if you want to sign a secretly, silently begging to be led. Again, it’s a way of emphasizing leadership and authority. You don’t have to … It’s not like banging the drums kind of authority. It’s not talking down to anyone. It’s demonstrating authority by the way that you’re able to come into a situation. Again, on account of all of these things, the sound like they’re all different separate techniques but they’re not. They all fit … They all weave together. Again, by being able to demonstrate this authority and this, and the mechanics behind why something would work brings us back into the area of clarity. You proved clarity to the situation again. I think what ideally in sales everybody … The holy grail is always, is everybody to say yes to what you’re saying all the time. I think actually what you want is, yes, because ultimately you would like someone to say yes to buying something from you. I think actually it’s more profound to have actually somebody say, ah, I’ve never actually thought about it like that before. Like, huh, it’s like that. Here’s what’s coming to mind. Instead of just relaying information to somebody to make the sales, make the sale, you’re communicating in such a way that the person is getting insight. When they have their own insight into what’s being said, they feel very much drawn to you and very much drawn to the mission and very much drawn to the products. It’s like their internal idea. It’s like I’ve discovered this and nobody else knows this. Ah, I put A and B together in my own mind. Does that make sense? John: You trigger, you make people think differently about something. You give them a new perspective. Some people say to say what no one else is saying. Go into an industry and start calling … don’t’ call people out by being a douche bag but its say stuff in a way that no one else is saying. Try and talk about stuff that no one else is talking about. I’ve seen this … You can see this with copywriting and I saw it recently with something completely different. There is a site out there that sells stock videos. That’s where you might get a video of, any of those videos you might have seen in an advertisement on television. This is the sort of company that does it. Now they created an ad for their website which actually poked fun … Yeah, it was basically a, about … What was it? It was an ad where they have different words on the screen like vision and truth and progress and then they have an image of a train in the background. The writer was just reading out the … I guess explaining the mechanism of, ah, so we’re trying to inspire people so we’re going to use forward-thinking words like progress and like I said vision and positivity. These flash up where there’s an image on the, in the video of someone reaching their hands to the sky on top of a mountain with sunflowers all around. The whole video was just poking fun at how companies use these stock videos to try and make a point and present themselves as some world changing company. They are saying something that no one else is saying. It’s like poking fun at all the corporate companies. When you watch it, you can’t help but think differently about the whole thing. All of a sudden, oh, yeah, that’s totally rad. Aha, I see what they’re doing. That kind of thing. Michael: Yeah. John: The aura effect. We’re right on-time here. Before we go, I give people a heads-up about where they can find you if they want to learn more or how I even used to work with you. What is the best place for them to go? Michael: I have a website where I hang out online which is my name, so it’s michaelsilkconsulting.com. John: Consulting. Michael: Consulting I N G dot com. Yeah. John: Michaelsilkconsulting.com. That will be in the show notes at theMcMethod.com/podcast and any other links to anything else we mentioned in this show. Michael, thanks for coming on again. Michael: Appreciate it. Thank you very much. The post Episode #52 – Michael Silk On How to Gain Extreme Empathy In Your Market appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Would you like to position yourself as an authority in your niche? Want to connect with POWERFUL influencers – and open new doors to more lucrative clients and customers? Ever feel like millionaires are laughing at your cold emails and hitting DELETE while they ash their Cuban cigars? (They are.) Enter: David Dutton. David Dutton is known as “the Most Connected Man on the Internet.”  He’s worked alongside Kristi Frank of The Apprentice on NBC with Donald Trump. Before that, David was brokering 8-figure business deals... …from his dorm room at 22 years old. These days? He consults bad-ass entrepreneurs, CEOs, and hustlers on relationship building – …and has done over 130 interviews to strategically build his own tribe.  The best part? In this episode, David reveals his potent networking secrets for free. You’ll discover overlooked tricks and tactics to send winning emails – …and get on a first-name-basis with the Michael Jordans of business. Plus, there’s this: In this episode, David hands out his PERSONAL email address. You’re invited to join the Most Connected Man on the Internet‘s private entourage. See you on the inside. In this episode, you’ll discover: a word-for-word email script that CATCHES influencers’ attention  the genius “15 minute framework” to separate yourself from amateurs in the inbox 2 tested subject lines to get your emails read how you can land interviews and position yourself as an expert the story of one weird paycheck that changed David’s entire mindset at 22 in Bible school why David earned his name “the most connected man on the internet” (it’s not what you think) the #1 response-KILLER when cold emailing ballers The Autoresponder Guy’s secret strategy to landing BIG name interviewees Mentioned: The Apprentice Jeff Walker Ryan Lee david at mostconnectedmarketer dot com – David’s personal email address mostconnectedmarketer dot com Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John: It’s John McIntyre here the Autoresponder Guy, I’m here with Dave Dutton a man who they say is the most connected man on the internet. That’s how a Drop Dead Copy or a McMethod subscriber said recently and the subscriber said that I just had to interview this guy so what we’re going to talk about today is how to connect with people via email marketing. Now he’s a formidable entrepreneur and he started by selling 150 space heaters out of a pickup truck in college. He’s worked with Kristi Frank from NBC’s The Apprentice and he’s done a bunch of interesting business stuff including after studying sales and marketing for a little while in college he brokered an $8 million deal from his college dorm room which sounds like a very interesting story. Dave: It is. John: Like I said today we’re going to talk about how to connect with big ass people, influencers, people who have clout in an industry and how to use email to get through to them and get them to listen to you, so we’ll get into that in just a moment. Dave how are you doing today? Dave: Hey, wonderful man. I’m always looking forward to it. I mean any time, I’m a junkie, a marketing junkie and this is one of my favorite topics too so anytime I get to talk about it I’m always glad and it’s not work for me it’s a lot of fun so I appreciate you inviting me on the show. John: Absolutely man, I’m the same. I get the feeling that you like doing interviews as well, you said you’d done 150 interviews? Dave: Yeah, over 120 of them or almost 130 of them now and I’ve used those strategically to network with people and to learn a lot of stuff, build relationships with people and now I do it as a way to generate leads. I help my clients do interviews to position them as the expert and that’s worked very well so I kind of transition into another business with that so it’s been a lot of fun. John: Okay, cool. In a minute we’ll talk about how to use email to network with these influencers and how you’ve done it and how you’ve become just a really, really connected guy on the internet. Before we do that tell the listener a bit about who are you and what do you do? Dave: Sure, I’m 35 I live up just outside of Nashville Tennessee. I started making a living on the internet while I was in bible college, I was 20 … I always forget now, it’s like 22 or 23. Didn’t get rich overnight but Marlene Sanders affiliate program was my first commissions check for $47 and I was sold, I was like … because I don’t know where they came from, I don’t know what I sold, I don’t know who bought it but I woke up and there was commission and I was just like I’m done, this is awesome. Again I didn’t get rich overnight, I ate peanut butter, ramen noodles, I started other businesses like you mentioned in my intro about the … I’ve done, brokered $8 million deal. We were buying and selling stuff from a local scratch and dent store and we bought 150 space heaters, these were heaters that … they’re just little small heaters. They retail for 25 bucks. We bought pallets of them, they were selling them and we’ve done a lot of stuff but I love my time. My time is my hot button. Money is awesome, I mean everybody loves money but time is my hot button so I gravitated towards the internet just because at least a digital footprint and you could put all the stuff out there. Just like this I mean you found me through one of your subscribers and I don’t even know how but somehow they tripped over my stuff and they liked it the stuff that I put out years and years ago and it still works and I love that because … To fast forward I’ve written 3 books, I’ve published 2 in the past year, that’s a whole other topic, another discussion someday, book marketing because that’s done very, very well for me. I do, fast forward I still own probably about … on the internet and they pay the bills. Then I do consulting, I started a consulting business back in 2007 and so to where I will basically help people generate leads, position themselves as the expert through coaching or done for you. I actually will do it for them, it just depends on what people want. I did a lot of local business now in the past year and a half. My 2 books that I published that are on Amazon they’re local books and I … John: Okay. Dave: It’s all about influence that’s what we’re talking about today and that’s what I’ve done. John: Okay, tell me a bit about this, how you’ve become known. It sounds like there’s more than one person, sounds like there’s a bunch of people that know you as the most connected man on the internet. Tell me about that. Dave: Yeah, so it’s fascinating. I was networked with people years ago because I made my first money brokering joint ventures back in the day and the internet was as congested as, it’s insane now but it used to not be as congested. I could just connect with people and I was just good at it. I mean it was something I could do and I was not a techie. I mean I didn’t know how to go to websites back in the day and that type of thing so it was hard for me but I got good at networking. Well some of the people I would network with that were really, highly successful and known and all that stuff they were shocked by my networking ability and the fact that I’ve never flown on an airplane and I was networking with all these really cool people and I was like really? I couldn’t believe it because I looked up to them because I thought they were connected and they weren’t as connected as I thought. They were like you should really write that stuff down and I almost was embarrassed by it to be honest with you. I was really kind of oh man, is this going to be like somebody is going to read this and I’m going to waste their time because I just thought everybody knew that stuff, I really did. I was embarrassed to actually write it. It’s called Get Connected and you can go to mostconnectedmarketer.com, shameless plug there but it’s free now. I’ve sold like 9000 copies of that but I give it away for free now, the Get Connected report. I started calling myself the most connected man on the internet and it just, it literally just came about from there. I mean my cell phone is filled with really big influencers and it has been and so I just started … then it kind of just progressed from there or whatever, it just got bigger and bigger. John: Okay and so what part did email, you could call this marketing I guess but what part did email play in it? Dave: Yes, so I have an email and the template is actually in my free report so I give it away completely for free, I still use it, it’s 2014 as we record this but I’ve been using the same email since 2006, the template of it. Obviously I change the contents but the template of it. I used, I started doing interviews with people back in 06 when I wrote my first book and I used a subject line called quick question. It’s still one of my big subject lines to this day because I think people understand that it’s quick and the curiosity factor, curiosity and anticipation they’re both extremely powerful triggers. In this case I’m using curiosity of what is the question? With quick I feel like it might not waste my time so that’s what I used. Then I have just certain paragraphs that I write in the email to reach out to people, connect. Kind of, I mean very similar to what we were doing. I mean you reached out to me for an interview and that’s what I would do, that’s how I started connecting with people is doing these interviews. Then because I did more interviews and Joe Vitale was in it then Willie Crawford was in it in all kinds of really cool people in our industry. Jeff Walker, I have one of the first interviews ever on the internet of Jeff Walker back in 2006, the product launch guy. John: Yeah. Dave: It just snowballed from there. That’s when social proof took over but it all started with reaching out through email and just really figuring out what how to get their attention because the only thing you have to get their attention is your name and the subject line at first. John: Right. Dave: If you’re not famous, I mean nobody knew who I was back in the day and so just really the subject line. I had to get my subject line really, really good and I still to this day, you don’t want to slack but there’s some things that you can do or whatever that get their attention. John: Okay, tell me about … we will talk about how to do it, how to make it work in a minute but tell me about some of the mistakes that you’ve seen because I’m sure you get emails from people who want to do stuff with you, maybe it’s a JV or it’s an interview or it’s a whatever and … I get these kinds of emails all the time but from your perspective what mistakes are people making when they try and contact influencers. Dave: Definitely, this is a great topic. One of the things that they do is they don’t try to give first. I mean they try to just, whatever their thing is they’re trying to promote they start with that and they’re just all about trying to, you can make this amount of money and this is a proven thing and whatever. They’re just really trying to, they’re not giving first and reciprocity is a really powerful trigger as well and so you always want to kind of give first when you do that. It sounds like captain obvious but I can tell you I wouldn’t say it right now if it was that common, common sense is not that common. People will approach just thinking about themselves first, I think that’s the big thing really. That’s the big one, I’d have to really think about other ones that are really significant but that’s what I see just quite a bit, they’re reaching out just thinking about themselves first and it’s like you want to position yourself where … A lot of times the people that are influencers then that means they’re really busy and so you want to basically make sure that you’re not wasting their time and that’s what they’re thinking when they read the email, is this dude going to waste my time. John: Right. Dave: You want to think about that, that’s what they’re thinking because successful people have very limited time, it’s usually their hot button so if you think about that before you hit send on that email what can I do to make it worth their time then it’ll save you some heartache. John: Right, okay. I get a thing all the time when people email me and they, I mean Dane Maxwell pointed this out in an interview done a few months ago but people will email and they’ll write a few paragraphs, few big long scary paragraphs about their problem and then at the bottom there’s a question which is really the point of the email. The point of the email is in the very last sentence. Someone is going to open that email and read a few lines and by the time they get to the end of it they’re sick of it or they’ve archived it or deleted it already. Dave: Yeah. John: Dane’s suggestion and I think this is great is you can just delete most of what was in that email and just keep that one sentence or what you do is flip it around, I do this a lot and I’ll go and write someone an email if I’m contacting people and I’ll flush out my idea, it’s almost like I need to write the email to flush out the idea and then I finish up with the question. It’s like hang on let’s take the question up to the top. Then it’s kind of like they read the question, they know what the email is about as soon as they open it, it takes them an instant and then if they want to read more, some of them want, some of them are I’m not interested they can delete the email you haven’t taken much of their time. If they are interested they’ll keep reading, the background will be there and … Dave: Yeah absolutely. I think this is a really important thing that I think about all the time. When you write copy the goal of the headline is to get them to read the next paragraph. The goal of the first paragraph is to get them to read the second paragraph. Okay? Think about that so when you write an email to somebody whatever the goal is for lead in or whatever it’s to think about what’s the goal. A lot of times my goal would be to get them, not every time but a lot of times my goal is to actually get them off, the goal of the email is to get them off of the email onto the phone. That’s actually my goal. If anything, every single piece of that email whether it’s a line or 5 paragraphs, whatever, every word, the goal is leading them to say yes to a 15 minute phone call or 10 or 15 minute phone call. I just did one the other day, there’s a huge, I don’t want to drop his name but he’s a crazy highly successful really connected guy in Washington DC, runs a big networking group and he’s got Gary Vaynerchuk as his guest in the next week or two, he’s a big guy and that’s what I did with him. I had to follow up with him because he’s really busy, he was in the middle of writing a book but I followed up with him a couple of months later because he was busy, really busy at the time but we scheduled a 15 minute phone call and it ended up being probably 45 minutes or whatever because we connected and we hit it off and he realized I wasn’t going to waste his time and that type of thing and we both get value out of it. I just did that last Thursday I guess it was. I did exactly what we’re talking about but the goal of that email I said literally was hey can we talk for about 10 or 15 minutes on X? John: It’s interesting when I found that you get someone on the phone for 10 or 15 minutes there’s a good chance you’re going to talk to them for another half an hour. It’s incredible. Dave: Yeah, unless you’re … yeah, I mean that’s very rare unless you do something really weird or whatever. I mean there’s very few people I’ve ever not connected with or whatever but you just, yeah that’s how it works. It’s kind of commitment consistency and kind of the foot in the door technique and that’s really what it is. John: Right and then there’s the follow up. We were talking just before this call or just before I hit the record button about some of the guests I’ve gotten on this podcast I’ve had emails saying how did you get that guest? They can’t believe it and there’s an element of social proof just by the fact that I’ve been able to get them for an interview. Sometimes people often think that there’s some advance maneuvering or you’ve got to get good hookups or anything like that but I literally had people that I’ve had to follow up with, I have a note in my calendar once a week I go through a tab in my Gmail inbox called podcast interviews and I just follow up with everyone that hasn’t replied yet about interviewing. Sometimes I followed up 10 times, 20 times before they finally book in an interview. Dave: Good for you. John: They’re not annoyed, they never get annoyed about it it’s just that they’re busy. Dave: Absolutely, yeah. See that killer, that’s a little thing but I think that’s going to separate you from everybody else if it hasn’t already just because, I mean obviously I guess it has because people are shocked at some of the people you got on your show so it’s working and most people they just won’t do that. I mean I’ve dropped the ball myself before but some people if you’re trying to get a Seth Godin or something like that, some really huge name I mean you’re going to have to follow up. I mean they really are legitimately busy. John: Yeah it’s funny and some people take it personally, they’re too worried to piss someone off but I think you kind of have to bring out the body armor sometimes and not worry about that stuff. Be willing to piss the assistant off. Dave: Yeah, well I’m going to tell everybody listening the reason why we’re doing an interview right now is because you had the character to actually follow up. You sent me this email, I don’t even think I responded, I can’t even remember if I responded to the first one or whatever. I had every intention of responding, I was like of course yeah absolutely I’ll do it. I love the topic, I’m glad to help and all that stuff and but it was just like the timing. I stopped, I’ve been testing something as part of my productivity I deleted my email app off of my phone. I’m not even checking emails as much anymore. I mean I’ve never done that, I’m just testing certain things to kind of wean myself off of, so I don’t even check email as much like I used to or whatever, just at the end of the day or whatever. Anyway but you followed up with me I’m like yes, thank you, yeah absolutely. It literally had nothing to do with you, it had everything to do with just what I had going on and it got crushed in my inbox and that was it so follow up guys if you want to land some good interviews. John: Absolutely, I mean it’s … I think with a topic like this, this is kind of related to autoresponders, it’s more like manual autoresponders or manual email marketing when you’re trying to market yourself to big people and there’s really no secret to it. It’s as simple as you have a subject line like your strange question or quick question, something like that that just gets them to open the email like what’s this. Because no one can … everyone likes checking their email inbox, it’s so addictive because every time you go in there and there’s a new email you get a shot of dopamine and that feels good in the brain right? You’re feeding someone drugs when you send them an email but you can’t be boring. Dave: You’re right, yeah. Absolutely you can’t be and you usually only get one shot that’s the thing, I mean if you’re going to, like that whole kind of BS meter is running or whatever when somebody is like you know what no, this person is not in the game or he’s not going to add value or whatever. Sometimes you might not get a reply. John: Another thing too I find sometimes people email me and the email is written and it’s about a favor for them, they need help with something, they need coaching, they need advice, they need something. Whereas I know what I’ve been doing is I make a point to not talk about what I want, I’ll say I want an interview but then it’s all framed about what the interview is going to do for you. Here’s what you’ll get out of it, here’s how it’s not going to cost you much all you got to do is show up on Skype. This is what people have to do, when they want something from someone else they should never mention that it’s a favor because it’ll never be a favor. The only way to get that other person to do what they want them to do is to give them whatever they want which is PR or whatever. Dave: Yeah and more exposure, stuff like this, yeah. Just so you know the biggest thing is try to give first. I mean if you will come in like that and just think about what you’re doing is adding value to the person and do you feel like they’ll find value out of it. Just if you focus on that I think everything takes care of itself even if you’re a newbie and you’ve never done this stuff before it takes time. I mean my second interview was Joe Vitale. This is like when he was big with the Secret and all that when he was making his rounds and stuff. That was my second interview of my life. I mean I still remember doing the interview and that was 2006 or whatever and I still remember like it was yesterday because I was so nervous. I landed him and then it just, it snowballed from there. John: Okay. I’m curious man, where are all these interviews. You keep mentioning these interviews done, where can people go and get these interviews if they want to listen? Dave: Yeah, I’ve got internet empires inner circle. I’ve actually taken them down now but if somebody emails me, I mean I’ve got insane interviews, people that are famous and then other people that are not well known but they got really cool stories like a guy making 100 grand a year selling juggling supplies online and different things like that. If somebody wants to email me then I think then I’ll send you the file or whatever of the interview and stuff, they’re really fascinating. I took the interviews, I transcribed them and that was my first book. Actually my first book is hanging on my wall right here called Internet Empires and it’s just stories of people making a living on the internet but we do all kinds of different interviews for different things, podcasts and that type of thing. John: Okay, so we’re right on time then. Where can people go to learn more about you or what email address, what’s your email address basically? Dave: Yeah, sure, david@mostconnectedmarketer.com, david@mostconnectedmarketer.com and you can go to mostconnectedmarketer.com and start there since we’re talking about email and connecting with people. That’s, we were talking offline or whatever that’s probably some of my best stuff I think and also I have a course set, up sell course going, I think it’s 17 bucks I think I sell it for now but specific strategies from … I mailed a little red ball to David Frye from sendaball.com to David Frye and he’s a huge, huge, marketer whatever. That landed Ron Lee as a client, he’s a big internet marketer, multimillionaire, the world’s strongest man and I talk about very specific strategies of how I’ve actually connected with people strategically. It’s all strategic for me and it works really well but I give a lot of free stuff away and I’m glad to help if somebody is interested in this topic and I can point them in the right direction. John: Fantastic, I’ll have links to mostconnectedmarketer.com, that was it right? Dave: Yeah. John: In the show notes at theMcMethod.com and yeah. This is the McMethod Email Marketing podcast. Thanks for coming on the show Dave. Dave: Thanks for having me, I enjoyed it. The post Episode #51 – David Dutton on How to Build A Powerful Network of Influencers appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

  tw In this episode, you’ll discover: 00:29 – a surprisingly honest confession I give opt-ins when they join my list 00:45 – how to avoid prospects viewing you as a “library” 01:51 – why SELLING makes the world go ’round 02:14 – the responsibility you have to your prospects 02:31 – my weird philosophy on folks who COMPLAIN 03:27 – one sales framework that works every time if you have an email list Tweetables: If you want to make more sales, start sending more emails and pitching more. Mentioned: The McMethod daily email marketing tips Transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s Johnny McIntyre here again the Autoresponder Guy here with another email marketing update from themcmethod.com. Today, in this video I want to talk about how to pitch in every single email without getting complaints, without getting many complaints. I think that’s the main thing here to understand here. Here’s what I do. Here’s what I do. Here’s what works at least why it works pretty well for me. When you sign up to my email, when you sign up to my autoresponder I make very clear that I’m going to send you daily email so if you sign up and you get the daily emails it all just makes sense. You’re not going to get upset or wonder what the hell I’m doing because I’ve told you up front that I’m going to send you daily emails. He’s what I also do, on the thank you page when you sign up and then also in email number one I’m very up front I’m going to pitch you. I’m not a library, I’m not a charity, I’m not a free information business or anything like. I help people improve their email marketing and to stay in business I sell information, I sell coaching, I sell a number of different things and that means with my emails I will help you but I will also be selling you with stuff, if you are not okay with that here’s a link to unsubscribe. Every day I’m going to be sending you emails on how to improve your email marketing but along the way, I’m also going to be pitching in every single email. You be free to either sign up or not sign up that’s up to you but just be aware that that’s how I roll, that’s how I do things. If you are not okay with that, you can get out. That’s how I started off. I don’t come out of the gate. I think a lot of the people make the mistakes especially marketers sometimes of trying to pretend that they are not marketing. It’s kind of, like they feel, they’ve never been able to get rid of that sleazy feeling that some people have about marketing and selling. It’s like they are afraid, definitely afraid of being perceived as a marketer or someone that sells something but I don’t think that’s very fair. I think marketing and sales is really what drives the world around. The reason why is that people have problems out there. The reason they are haven’t out and found solutions to those problems is either because the products don’t exist yet or that they don’t trust the people that are selling the products that do exist. If the products don’t exist, well that’s one thing you can go out and create that stuff. That’s what entrepreneurship’s for but as for convincing them to step over that barrier and buy their product and get their solution. I think that we as people that sell products owe it to people with the problems that our products solve to it to them as best as we can otherwise they are never going to get the benefit of this product. This is why I think there’s nothing to be afraid about pitching at every email, and yes some people won’t like it but that’s okay. The people that are ready to buy, that have the problem that you solve are really going to enjoy it. They are going to appreciate it because you finally pushed them over the edge. You finally broke through those limiting beliefs they have about it’s never going to work, I don’t trust guy, whatever. You have to be ethical about it. That’s the kicker but assuming you are ethical, you have a good product and good service and all that sort of stuff you are doing people a favor by pitching them as often as possible. As for how to pitch there’s so much to talk about with email marketing. That’s going to have to be another email but how to pitch is a whole new ball game because there are ways to pitch without grading on people the way you think. I just wanted to get that clear. You can pitch every day and you can just follow what I did, how I explained to do it earlier in this video, you can do it every single day if you want. It depends on what you are comfortable with. It depends if you are ready for the sales torrent of sales, which will come afterwards. I don’t know. It’s working for me. It works a whole lot of people, general thing is you want to make more money, and make more sales start sending more emails and start pitching more often. That’s the short side of it, okay. I’m John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy. I’ll see you next time with another email marketing update from themcmethod.com. The post How to Pitch in Every Email (and Get Away with It) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

  In this episode, you’ll discover: 00:22 – the most important email in your series 00:30 – if you screw this up – your prospects will DISMISS your emails 00:51 – an easy subject line template you can swipe 01:01 – 3 painstakingly-tested questions to ask your prospects that develop deep empathy 01:34 – one key phrase to create a STRONG relationship with your list 01:54 – why “planting seeds of curiosity” in your emails is a winning formula (here’s how you get started) 03:06 – how to get customers INSPIRED about what’s to come in your sequence 03:29 – a proven template for your first email (steal this now!) Tweetables: If you get 2 replies, you are skipping that Gmail Promotions Tab. Mentioned:  The McMethod daily email marketing tips Transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s Johnny McIntyre here the Autoresponder Guy here again with another McMethod email marketing update from themcmethod.com. Today this is a very important topic I want to about how to or the purpose, sorry, the purpose of email number in your auto responder. I would say, go as far as to say that this email is the most important email in your autoresponder sequence. The reason why is because it sets the stage of everything else to come. If you mess this up, I’ve seen this, open rates will often plummet after the first email. You get a higher open rate at first because people want the bribe, or the video or whatever you are offering for that but after that there’s no reason for them to open an email especially if you haven’t used email number one correctly. Here’s what I do. My email number one is welcome to the family and then in brackets or parenthesis, please read. Someone opens that email and say, “Hey, it’s great to have you here. Welcome to the family. Really, really cool. Before we start, the first thing I want to ask you a couple of questions.” I then ask them a few questions usually related or always related to their problem. I might say up until now, what’s the biggest that you still haven’t answered in regards to email marketing, in regards to weight loss, in regards whatever? Then up until now, how difficult has it been for you to find a solution, an answer to this question? Then number three I might say something like, what would it mean to you if you were to get a solution to this problem today? How would you feel? What would the result look like? Something like that. Then I usually, what I always as well, I read and reply to every email and you can reply to them yourself, you can get an assistant to do it. I strongly encourage you to do it because people will reply, and you are going to create this dynamic relationship with your list whether they know you and interact with you and they just have this feeling that you a person. Start with that and then what I say after that is I go, here’s what’s coming up in this emails. Here’s what I’m going to do for you. You’ll discover and then I’ll give then like five or ten catchy curiosity inducing bullet points such as the seven-letter word that underlies all the effective marketing. I mentioned this in another video and a bunch of bullets like that that make them curious but they don’t give away the cake so they tease them. Then I tell them I’m going to be sending you an email every day, in my case just like housekeeping stuff, email every day, 200 to 300 words. I pitch in every email. I usually say something like set up a custom label and call it MM for TheMcMethod and set it so my emails automatically get labeled with that when come, and when my emails come in, read it, take the lesson and the action item, do that and then archive it, something like that. That’s email number one. The mail goal here, there’s two goals. The primary goal is to get someone to reply. I’ve spoken to some deliverability experts and according to them you get two replies from someone and you are skipping that Gmail promotion step. If someone replies to your email twice, Gmail Google will think that the person wants to receive your email and they are going to put you in the inbox. That’s extremely important especially if you are doing some big numbers. You want to get that reply in that first email and then you also want to set the stage for what’s to come. If you don’t tell them what’s coming, if you don’t get them excited about what’s coming up there’s no reason for them to open the rest of your emails. That’s email number one. That’s how I do it. That’s what works for me. I strongly suggest you do something along those lines. If you want the template go sign up to my list at themcmethod.com, right, see how I do it and go ahead and rip my email number one template, customize it for your own business and use that because it’s a great starting point. I’m John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy coming to you from the themcmethod.com with another email marketing update beside the river. The post How to Write the Most Important Email In Your Series appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

  In this episode, you’ll discover: 00:31 – why snowboarding is just like copywriting 00:41 – how to keep your emails from becoming “sticky” 01:08 – what you MUST include in your subject lines 01:15 – the endgame of storytelling copy 01:47 – how to pen slippery emails that slide prospects into buying Tweetables: You need to slide into the pitch.  Transcript: Download PDF transcript here. Hey, John McIntyre here again the Autoresponder Guy coming to you from the themcemethod.com with another email marketing update. Today I want to talk about snowboarding. I love snowboarding. I was about maybe seven, eight … no it was actually 12 years ago, I went snowboarding for the first time in Australia and yes, we do have mountains for the skeptical. The snow isn’t anywhere near as good from what I’ve heard of places like Japan, and the US, the Rockies but we do have snow, okay. Anyway, we are going snowboarding and one of the things I love about it, I’m not sure exactly but it’s just, just getting to slide everywhere. The problem is in Australia the snow is so often, it’s very wet and so you don’t actually slide you kind of stick. It’s a bit like porridge. I’m going up there once. It must have been a year, a long time ago, a couple of years after I’d started and we had a snowstorm. A foot of snow had come down so everyone was really, really excited but we get up there and like I said it was like porridge, it was horrible and how does this relate to email marketing? Okay, well email marketing maybe you’ve seen my emails, maybe you’ve seen other emails. How it works is you have a hook, which is the subject line, and you get them interested then you might have some sort of story. Then you need to slide into the pitch. Now you can slide into the pitch like I was sliding on wet, sloppy snow in Australia where it’s very abrupt. it’s not very enjoyable where you kind of maybe tell a story, or maybe you have some sort of hook on how to tip and then you go into some pitch for your product but it’s not very good and it doesn’t work very well especially if you just stick. I don’t know that’s the best way to explain it. Sometimes people are going to read that, and they are going to get stuck in it. It’s not going to work for them. It’s going to break that flow so what you have to do is to make it slide smoothly just like if I was to go snowboarding in Japan or in the Rockies, and the US or New Zealand. New Zealand has snow by the way, it’s going to be slippery so that when I open that email I slide gently, and evenly and smoothly without any effort at all down the bottom of that email where there’s a link to buy the product. That’s how it has to be. How do you do that? That’s a topic for another day. If you want to learn more about email marketing, you can check out themcmethod.com. I’m John McIntyre the Autoresponder Guy. I will see you next time.   The post The Snowboarding Strategy to Writing Email Copy appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

  In this episode, you’ll discover: 00:30 – a mad frenzy in Australia with a lesson for entrepreneurs 00:42 – the unfortunate truth about “gold rushes” 01:02 – how you can (really) strike it rich in marketing today 01:38 – one variable that separates the winners and losers online 02:09 – how to “dig” for empathy 02:41 – 4 places to discover common objections preventing customers from buying from you Tweetables: You have to understand who your prospect is and what they need. Transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s Johnny McIntyre here again, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with another email marketing update coming to you from themcmethod.com. Now today I wanted to talk about digging for gold. A couple of hundred years ago, I’m from Sydney, Australia. A couple of hundred years ago we had a bit of gold rush going on in Australia. People who came from I think all over the world with pick axes, and shovels and all sorts of stuff to go to Australia, I think it was in Victoria at the time to go and dig holes and look for gold. We’ve had gold rushes all over the world and everyone flocks to it. It’s a mad frenzy and not everyone gets rich, that’s the problem. Of all the people who come to the gold rush, most people don’t get rich. There’s that old cliché that adage but there’s that old phrase that the people who make money in the gold rush are the people selling pick axes and shovels. That’s not the point of today’s story. Today, what I wanted to talk about is when you go to a gold rush the way you find gold is you dig, and dig some more, and you keep digging, and you do some more digging. Maybe you take a nap, maybe you take night off, and you go out with the boys, have a few beers down at a local bar and then you dig some more. You might read a book, go for a bit of a travel, take a bit of a holiday, and then you come back and you dig some more. Then you dig some more and do this over, and over, and over in the hope that one day you find some gold and if you are the one who is digging like that you are probably more likely to find the gold. The people who dug the most, not always but the people who dug the most increase their chances of finding gold are probably the ones who found the most the gold. There’s some strategy to it. You see the basic idea. Worker hard, get more gold. Within our marketing, it is no different. You have to dig. What to dig for? You have to dig to develop empathy, to develop customer insight, to really understand who your prospect is, what they need, what they want but the way to get this information is to dig. Digging with surveys, dig in with Amazon reviews, go in forums, do all these different things. This is how you dig deep for gold and I am telling you it is gold because when you have these insights, when you understand your prospects better than he understands himself you are going to make so much money because you are going to know exactly what solution to recommend. Exactly how to phrase everything and say everything when it comes to convincing him to buy because you are going to know, does he trust you? If he doesn’t trust you then all you have to do is bring in some trust factors, some testimonials. If you know exactly why he’s not buying, if you know exactly what his objections are which is exactly what happens when you dig for gold and develop that empathy you are going to know exactly what you need to do to get him to buy. It’s that simple, okay. That’s what I wanted to talk to you today empathy and digging for gold. Go and dig for some gold today, go on Amazon, go read some reviews, go on a forum, do an interview, send a survey, something like that. Do it and do it now. I’m John McIntyre the Autoresponder Guy coming to you from themcmethod.com with an email marketing update.   The post Not Everyone Gets Rich appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Do you use Gmail? News flash: Your prospects do. That means that your emails might be getting BURIED in the Gmail “Promotions” tab. Or worse – …not delivered at all. That’s helluva problem. It’s the difference between selling like hotcakes in your prospect’s Inbox, next to “hey honey” from Mom – …or getting tossed in with the Viagra Spam. Where do you stand? (HINT: in this episode, you’ll learn how to quickly check.) Fortunately, there are a few tiny “smoke signals” you can bake into your autoresponder. Do these, and your emails get ushered past the velvet rope… …and waltz STRAIGHT into the profit club. So what are these tweaks? And how can you take advantage? Meet Brendan Dubbels. Brendan is the Post Master at Ontraport. The guy gets PAID to deliver emails. (And keep marketers like you profitable). In this episode, Brendan shows you how to get your emails prioritized. That means more CA$H. From emails you’re already sending. Curious what % of your emails actually get seen? Want to skip to the front of the line? Would you like to impress clients and partners with high-impact email marketing advice? Then listen carefully to this episode. Welcome to the VIP club. In this episode, you’ll discover: how to guarantee prospects see your emails why IPs and the technical stuff is becoming less important…and the exciting trend on the horizon a benchmark open rate for your emails (how do you measure up?) Google’s little-known Gmail algorithm, public online when unsubscribes are a GOOD thing the 30-second trick that turns your autoresponder into a profit machine (do this today) 2 scary metrics that Gmail tracks when you read your emails how to protect against DANGER to your identity (this is a must if your biz is growing) how to skip right past the Promotions tab why you don’t need to be clever in your email subject lines Mentioned: Gmail’s public algorithm Quora DMARC MailChimp Ontraport (formerly Office Autopilot) Brendan’s free offer to Email Marketing Podcast listeners: Get a free 30-min consultation with Brendan on your email deliverability as a listener of the podcast! Email him at brendan@officeautopilot.com Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John: It’s John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here Brendan Dubbels, a deliverability expert, I think the deliverability man at Ontraport, an Office Order Pilot. He’s in charge of making sure customers get their emails, as far as they get their emails into their customers inboxes. I actually saw him on Quora. I was clicking around on Quora, which is a great site, by the way, quora.com. People ask these crazy- these very intellectual questions. It’s like Yahoo! Answers for smart people, and there’s some great stuff on there where it’s about, “Does God exist?” Or the most interesting things you’ll learn from splits tests and some really intelligent responses. Anyway, that was how I found Brenda. He posted on someone’s- I think there was a thread on Quora about how to get your emails read, “What’s the latest stuff that’s going on that’s really helping people at in getting their emails read?” Then Brendan jumped in there and had a great response so I thought I’d send him an email and get him on the show. That’s what we’re doing today. Brendan, how are you going today? Brendan: Doing great, John. Thanks for having me. John: Good to have you on the show, mate. Before we get into the deliverability stuff- I’ve given the listeners a bit of a background on who you are and what you do, but fill in a few of the gaps and tell people who you were. Brendan: Yeah, so I’ve been working with Office Auto Pilot and Ontraport as Postmaster now for about five years. I’ve worked with a ton of the top internet marketers in the world. Having sent so many emails for so many marketers, I’ve really come to see a lot and gained a lot of information that a lot of people just don’t have access to, especially considering that we send for everything from the hardcore internet marketers to mom and pop working on the shops. Just giving me some really unique insight and I’m able to share it. John: Okay, cool. You said postmaster. That’s your title at Ontraport? Brendan: That’s my title at Ontraport, yeah. John: That sounds pretty cool. Brendan: It’s pretty all-encompassing so not everyone’s happy to hear from me. We do try to get our customer’s email in the inbox but unfortunately sometimes, we have to have to be strict with our customers as well and make sure they’re not getting complaints and bounces. John: What specifically are you doing? You’re the guy who’s in charge of making sure that emails get to the inbox and get opened, right? Brendan: Exactly. Another term that some people use is compliance or abuse at other companies. We’re trying to move away from that simply  because we think your email service provider should be your partner and not sort of a big brother, as it were. John: Okay. I’m curious, do you have to reprimand many customers because they’re getting too aggressive and getting too many complaints? Brendan: I would say that we probably warn about two customers a week, so really not that many in the grand schemes of things. Most of the time, it’s a really case of people just not knowing. You don’t know what you don’t know. With a quick message and some follow up education, we generally never see repeat issues, which is pretty awesome. John: Obviously, the emails go through a few of your demands so your job, as I suppose, is to maintain the reputation of Ontraport’s demands with the various ESP’s so that you don’t get blacklisted so then all your customers … This is getting pretty technical. I just want to be technical. I want to try to fully understand  this stuff. The idea is if someone sends too much spam or too many emails that get complaints from your domain or through your service, that can ruin it for your other people so your job is to make sure that doesn’t happen, that the domain stay in good standing, right? Brendan: Exactly. That way, anyone who’s sending mail can be A, that not only is their mail going to reach their servers but for example, a friend of theirs signs up, that their behavior isn’t going to affect their buddy who signs up as well. It’s definitely a full-time job and I’m really lucky to have a fellow associate who does deliver here. His name is Brad. Things are good. John: Okay. How do we do this? That’s what I wanted to get you on for, is to talk about how you- because it’s really in your best interest and it’s in the best interest of your customers, of the clients who are sending the actual messages that you need to get the emails to your inbox, you need to get them read, opened. I know you need to get them engaged with so click on Reply to, that kind of thing. This is all going to drive that send score or the scorer and say, “the domain’s up or Ontraport’s demands so that Ontraport looks better and everyone’s happy.” That’s how it works, right? Am I …? Brendan: Yeah, that’s pretty accurate and it’s been a really interesting trend over the past, I would say three years or so, as engagement is becoming more and more important and peer reputation is becoming less and less important. We can clearly see this because all of our IP’s with Ontraport are in the mid-90’s range, so that’s pretty solid. Higher than most ESP’s, in fact. John: Okay. Brendan: What’s strange is that we’ve got all of these people using the same IP’s, yet some people will only get 50 to 60% inbox rate, while we have others regularly pegging 100%. We’re saying that engagement and less hygiene by the individual marketers really was becoming king and IP reputation is becoming less important. John: You just said something very interesting. You’re saying some people, because their engagement score is low, they only get 5 or 6 out of every 10 emails into an inbox? Brendan: Yeah, and to be honest, that’s not even worst case scenario. I’ve had people who have gotten down to 15 or 20% simply because they just send so much cold mail. They get so used to an open rate that’s slowly declining that they think nothing is wrong and it’s just business as usual. For me at least, one of my favorite things about my job is to be able to contact them and work with them and say, “Hey,  you’re messing up. Let’s fix this,” and seeing them light up when their inbox rates go back up to in between 80 and 100% and over the rates double or they triple. It’s a really, really cool thing. John: I’m curious, when you’re getting 50, 60% off of an inbox rate, what sort of open rates it may sound like? Brendan: To be honest, it really, really depends with what business you’re in, how frequently you mail and how well you set your expectations. I would say someone who gets 50 to 60% inbox rates on average probably be getting about a 5% open rate granted, like I said, that is a gross generalization simply because it varies so much by your target audience and your frequency of mailing. John: Let’s talk about engagement then because this sounds really key. It’s not IP’s or just to clear something out. I’m speaking to a friend recently. We had lunch here in Thailand and he said it started around a podcast, he listened to a few episodes. Then he asked me, he gave me this idea to go and get some more interesting people on the show. I’ve been doing lots of copyrighting guys marketing guys but it would be good to hear from someone like you on the deliverability side. He mentioned stuff that I have just no idea what’s going on and how it works, which is not just the IP address but the email header. I think he’s got the SPF records or the technical details. Do they affect the deliverability? Brendan: They definitely, definitely do. The nice thing though is if you’re with a professional email service provider like Ontraport or any of our competitors, that’s going to be handled for you. The truth of the matter is, is you don’t have that infrastructure in place, your mail just simply isn’t going to get delivered at a rate that makes sense. There’s a ton of great resources out there for how you can create an SPF record, which stands for Sender Policy Framework, or a DKIM record as well, which is also equally important if you’re looking to do some self-hosted email. The one other thing I would suggest if you are looking to go the self-hosted route, DMARC is also very, very important. It’s one of the newest authentication methods they’ve created. The short version basically, it makes it so that you know if someone is trying to impersonate you via email. If you have high brand value and you think someone may benefit from impersonating you via email, DMARC is key, D-M-A-R-C. John: Interesting. Are you doing DMARC with the offshore part of stuff on Ontraport? Brendan: Yeah, we are. We have DMARC authenticated on all of our outgoing mail simply because we don’t want anyone trying to trick our customers. John: This is very interesting though. IP address, that technical stuff, sounds like it’s gradually becoming less important and you talked about engagement. What is engagement specifically? Brendan: Engagement is just the monitoring of the touch points that your customers have with your emails. If you think back to how emails evolved over the years, when it started, it was completely unregulated. As time progressed, people started using it for marketing, which isn’t it’s original intention. Originally, it’s, “Holy crap, we can send information from here to Washington in three seconds.” That blew people’s mind. It was one to one communication. Then marketers came along and they’re like, “Wow, we could make a killing with this stuff.” Then, email marketing was born. It made sense. It was much less expensive to communicate with our prospects and our customers. However, some people went down the route of spamming and ruined it for everyone. Then, ESP has noticed that the people who receive spam frequently would just shut down their accounts and move to another provider, which was a major bummer. They realized they had to start regulating what was going on. IP reputation worked for a while but it became very apparent that a spammer could get an IP, do a broadcast to five million spammed addressed and then just buy a new IP and then mail from there. IP reputation didn’t cover it all. It wasn’t an end-all deal. Now, they measure, “All right, well, how long do your readers have their email opened for?” In other words, how long are they reading it for or how often do they click it? Do they delete it right when they get it or do they file it away and read it later? How many times do they open it? Google actually has a very, very advanced algorithm for this and they published it in a white paper, if you check out their blog. To be honest, it’s a little too complicated for me but it’s a very, very interesting read. The bottom line is, if your people are engaging with their email, you’re going to see lower and lower open rate and you’re going to start to see that 50 to 60% inbox rate we are talking about earlier. John: The big picture in here for people to understand is that when they’re sending an email, they need to … We’ll talk about the specific stuff that they can do in a second but they basically need to- I’ve been doing this, you need people to get to reply, you need to get people to click stuff if you’ve got resources and emails that you said. I don’t even know some of the stuff. DMARC tracks how long the email is open for as well as how many times its clicked, how many times it actually gets opened. What you’re saying is a whole bunch of different metrics that Gmail uses to figure out like to rank sites, or the Facebook gallery with page rank, whatever it’s called. They figure out what email is important and what’s not. If you’re not important, if you’re not sending valuable stuff that’s helping people, it’s just not going to work. Brendan: Exactly,  yeah. They even keep track of how far down you scroll down below default. They literally track everything you can imagine. John: In that sense, I’m getting so many different ideas. Let’s go through the stuff. How about we just go through all the different metrics that they track and then what you can do to get a good metric? Brendan: Definitely. My first and favorite is just simply asking people to add you to their address book. It’s really, really simple. Basically, if you’re in someone’s address book, you’re white listed with them. This engagement stuff and the spam filter kind of takes a backseat. You get to skip that and you just get front row seats right into the inbox. Even better if it’s priority inbox and you’re in their address book. You’re going to place even higher in their folders. John: Some people are going to hear that and I think there’s no point asking my subscriber to put me in their address book. There’s no way they’re going to do that. You’re saying you can say this and people are actually putting them in their address book? Brendan: Yeah, I would say generally about 5% of readers take action on it. Another way that you can be added to someone’s address book, and this one is kind of sneaky, but it also works. If you get someone to reply to your email twice, most email providers, that will add you to their contact book through Gmail and also through a Hotmail. That’s something that you should definitely take into a consideration. As for a reply, golden. John: Once you get two replies, they’re in your address book? Brendan: Exactly, and then you’re golden. John: Damn, that’s some interesting stuff. Okay, what’s next? Brendan: Next stuff is going to be just overall opens. I’ve seen a lot of people in the past do anything to get that open. Obviously, subject line is key when you’re hunting for opens. The problem is if you’re using that sort of, “Anything goes,” in the subject line method, you’re going to lose credibility and sure, you’ll get that first open but guess what? Next time, they’re going to see your name in the front line and they’ll be like, “Oh, what a bullshitter,” and then you’re going to end up in their trash can or their spam box. It’s really just being clear and interesting with your subject lines. I know that’s kind of obvious but far too often, people will anything on the subject line to get the first open. You just want to make sure you summarize your email to get the click. John: That’s what I find too. With email, especially with a subject line, you don’t have to be clever or anything like that. Often, it’s just simple as finding a really concise way to say whatever is in the email because then, what will happen is this sort of person that would respond to whatever is in the email will be attracted to the subject line and will open the email. There’s no point. Everyone else who the email contact is not relevant to, there’s no need for them to open an email if it’s not going to help them. There’s no need to make them or try and trick them into opening an email. That’s a waste of your time, that’s a waste of their time. Brendan: Totally, totally agree with you, yeah. John: After I add you to my address book, overall opens. It sounds like you’re saying don’t focus on the single open, right? Focus on how can you cultivate an ongoing, long-term open rate. Brendan: Agree, and this is another one that is semi-nebulous but have that conversational tone. At least in my experience, people don’t like being spoken to in emails; they like being spoken with. Be it as simple as asking them what they want to hear about via survey or asking them how often they want to hear from you. One of the best engagement tricks I’ve ever seen is companies set up a survey specifically and ask how often their subscribers wanted to hear from them. It seems so simple and so obvious but it made a huge, huge difference. You interact with people how they wanted to be interacted with, not how you want to interact with them. John: Just actually one of the features of Ontraport, right? If you hit Unsubscribe, it will actually get them to change the mailing to once a week, right? Brendan: Yeah, through various tagging methods. It’s definitely easy to set up with OAP. John: Interesting. Those things that we open and we write in conversations. What’s the next thing? Brendan: The next thing is with Gmail. I’m sure many people have seen primary social promotions tab. Marketers were all up in arms saying that their business is going to explode and their professional lives were over with this one change that Gmail made. If you’re smart,  you can actually use this to your advantage. I really suggest putting a call to action in, if you advanced auto-responder service that can fire off rules. You can set up rules so that any time someone gets added to your database who has an @gmail.com in their email address, automatically fire them email that says, “Hey, we want to make sure that you get all of our stuff so to make sure, just drag this email over into Primary.” John: That’s very cool. Brendan: From then on, you’ll automatically hit the Primary box and that dragging into the Primary tab is one of the biggest compliments to Google’s Engagement metrics there is. I’m getting a little bit tongue-tied today. That’s something else to take into consideration. John: You can tell them to drag it or you can send them an email like that? Brendan: Yeah. John: What are some other ways like if they’re interacting with email- I’ve often wondered about this. If you send them an email and ends up in their Promotions tab and they go through it, if they reply to it a certain amount of times or click on it a certain amount of time, is that going to move you to the main inbox? Brendan: Yeah, it is so that’s also something else to consider. Based on engagement, you can generally tell whether you’re running up in the Promotions box or the Primary box. You’re going to get less opened up if you’re hitting the Promotions box in Gmail. It’s a little bit different with every business but I highly suggest going and checking out just your Gmail section of your list and seeing where you’re coming through consistently in getting opens and where you’re not, and then sending less mail to the people that you’re not getting open from. This makes sense when you think about the grand scheme of things. If email delivery is a lot about engagement and it’s also a lot about percentages. If you think about complaints and bounces, it’s a percentages game. If you’re sending more engaged email than un-engaged email, that percentage is going to stir you in the right direction towards the Primary box. I highly suggest mailing your active engaged users who have opened or clicked an email from you, say in the past six months. Mail them twice as much as you mail your inactive people and you’re going to start to see a big shift in the way that your new subscribers interact with you. John: This would be an interesting business idea. I don’t know if you guys are doing this yet, but like a smart email orders on the service, that what happens is it basically changes the right at which it sends and not depend on how people interact with it. Let’s say if someone enters your sequence and they reply to your first email and then they click a link in the second email, they’re going to be in daily email or something like that. Then, if they stop replying or if they stop opening, they gradually get less down to say- or maybe you could set the settings to a minimum of once a week and a maximum of once a day. Depending on how much they interact with it, basically you could have an algorithm that then caters or structures or sends the auto responder based on their engagement level. That would be very interesting? Brendan: Yeah, it’s actually completely possible with Ontraport or Office Auto Pilot. It is a very, very amazing tool and that’s one of my favorite things about the platform is that it’s very, very flexible. If you can think it, chances are we’ll be able to do it. John: One thing, I’ve asked this question and then this next question. Sounds like some people find that they read a lot of data … I’m always interested in asking something like this, but here it is. What’s the most interesting or some of the most counterintuitive things you’ve learned doing the marketing for all these big name marketers with lots of data? Brendan: One of the funny things I’ve ever seen is that a marketer actually took our Unsubscribe link and he attached it to one of his emails. Then he put a red banner and it said, “Complain, or This is Spam,” or something of that sort. Whenever anyone would open one of his emails, there’s this big honkin’ red button that says, “This is Spam,” at the top of his emails. His messages have gotten some of the lowest complaints I have ever seen because instead of clicking the in-app, this spam button and a complaint being sent to Hotmail or to Yahoo! and penalizing his sending, they would  click what they thought was a spam button, which is really an Unsubscribe button, so they would just be unsubscribed. I thought that was pretty tricky and pretty awesome. John: Did his unsubscribe go up or down with that? Brendan: The unsubscribe rate went up slightly but I would take an unsubscribe versus a complaint any day. An unsubscribe is completely unconsequential. It’s one of those things that people don’t unsubscribe because they want to buy from you. Just like happy people usually don’t get divorced. It’s kind of the same setting there. They’re unsubscribing for a reason and that’s okay. They don’t complain and you’re better for it.  Your list is cleaner, your list is more engaged and you’re better off without them. John: Because like the spam, the spam complaint will hurt you. It hurts the domain, it hurts the center score, it hurts Google’s algorithm engagement score but if they just unsubscribe, they’re just saying, “Yeah, it’s not for me. It’s all good.” Brendan: Exactly. The ISP’s out there, they understand that too. That’s why they have feedback loops. When someone complains with one of the major providers, it sends out a notification assuming your provider’s hooked up with them about them complaining so they can be unsubscribed. The idea is that they want unsubscribes, too. John: I’m curious, with some of these guys, do you have an engagement algorithm so you can track the engagement for your customers? Brendan: Right now, what we do is we just have a last activity field that updates based on whether someone has clicked an email or opened an email. That’s been sufficient so far. Looking forward, we are looking into more advanced methods. Maybe having an automated scoring method. I know Mail Chimp, who’s another great ESP out on the market if you’re only looking for email. They’ve got a five star rating system so when you look at your list, they’ll just break it down and tell you who’s engaged and who’s not, who you probably shouldn’t mail. With us, we have the data available but it’s really more of a judgment call than something we force on you. John: Right, okay. I’m just curious, we’ve talked about some ways to increase engagement. I’m curious what are the best customers doing? What are the guys and girls with the highest engagement scores doing for engagement? Like in my email in my sequence, I ask people to reply than in email, I usually get them to click a link. At various emails throughout the rest of the sequence, I’m asking them to click something or reply to the email with feedback on something? Brendan: I would say that all of these tricks definitely help, but at the end of the day, the guys are doing the best or really the guys that are just out there to help and to make a difference in the lives of their prospects and their customers. That true voice and that true intention, it can’t be replicated. Your customers can tell if you’re trying to BS them into a sale. If you’re really just out there and providing value, your customers are going to engage, whether you’ve got this spam button at the top or not. That certainly helps but at the end of the day, content is key. I would say another really good thing is if you’re really good at writing hooks in a paragraph or two, write a hook and then put a Read More link to your blog. I know that’s standard operating procedure for a ton of people but that will get you a click very easy. If someone is reading and all of sudden, to finish it, they have to click to the next page. John: Just to have a really engaged list, instead of giving them a content in the mail, just give them that Read More link. Brendan: Yeah, exactly. John: Okay, interesting. That sounds a great note but there’s more about why you can go and figure out all these tricks and these ways to hack I guess the engagement. At the end of the day, what really counts is are you solving a real problem in the marketplace? Are you creating value? Brendan: Exactly. John: Tell you what, before we go then, let’s wrap it up here. Tell people where they can go to learn more about Ontraport, Office AutoPilot, what’s the difference, all that sort of stuff. Brendan: Yes. Office AutoPilot is the current version of our software. Ontraport is a new version, 3.0. We’re currently in beta and we’re getting less and less bugs by the day, which is awesome. We’re looking to go live soon. If you want to sign up, I highly suggest to check out officeautopilot.com. Don’t worry, when the new brand and the revamped version comes out, we will be doing an account transfer so no need to worry about. If you listen to this podcast, I’m also offering a free 30 minute, one on one deliverability consultation. Shoot an email to brendan@officeautopilot.com and we’ll be able to get something set up for you. John: That was cool. Thanks for coming on the show. This has been really helpful. Brendan: Of course, great. Thanks for having me, John. It’s been awesome. The post Episode #50 – Brendan Dubbels on Ninja Tricks to Skip the Waiting List and Get Your Emails Prioritized appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.