The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast

Carlos Redlich is a life-long martial artist turned copywriting and marketing black belt. Carlos and I (David Allan) once did a podcast together before he landed a massive retainer client. He has continued with his freelance copy career since last we spoke… BUT he has some new experiences to share. From in the copy trenches. This one strategy I have heard from a few copywriters (like Ben Settle and Doberman Dan)… But it bears repeating because it can work almost like magic. He also drops a very simple and straightforward Facebook system to lure new clients. So listen and then DO. The rewards are yours for the taking. In this episode, you’ll discover: Bruce Lee’s secret to learning anything…including copywriting! How stories endure…the PR savvy of dead celebrities. One angle you can use in your copy that you may have overlooked (leaving money on the table). How to steal your way to the bank (the ethical genius of Jay Abraham). Carlos’ secret to closing sales even Obi-Wan Kenobi would be proud of. (Also – his “Cohones” method to getting money upfront!) Mentioned: “I Love Jeet Kune Do” Group Takeover Tuesday Podcast Jay Abraham David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody we’re back for another edition of the podcast and I have a very special guest. Normally I’d say that anyway, but this is extra special because Carlos Redlich and I started a podcast more than a year ago now I think because I just got a Facebook reminder about a couple of the interviews we used to do and he’s a fellow copywriter who became too busy with his freelance career to basically continue with the podcast. And I ended up doing the podcast for John McIntyre and releasing other ones which was called Takeover Tuesday and Carlos is now on the show. Finally we are here. Carlos Redlich: Yeah man happy and excited to be on the call as though it’s a long time no see. You know what I mean. David Allan: Yeah man. We’ve been out of touch for a bit because everyone’s been busy as heck fire. So yeah. So it’s been crazy it’s been a wild ride. So let’s start with sort of you know I can’t remember the last time I talked to you it’s been a lot of months anyways. But at that point you you had landed a massive client for your freelance business. You didn’t cooperate you were doing a whole you’re on retainer you were doing a whole bunch of shit for them. Maybe start from there and sort of you know what’s it all for you. I know you went to trafficking reversions I know you the US You just moved to Arizona I think back when we were just diverting parts basically. So would you bring us up to speed. Yeah. Carlos Redlich: So I mean again appreciate being on the call. Yeah I mean I think last time we talked when I picked up our one really big retainer client who’s pay 10 grand a month we were doing tons of shit and then we actually mean we’re still friends. We don’t do the retainer any more we’re doing kind of like profit share stuff and he’s crashing into it and stuff so it’s really the best part is he’s actually in Arizona way 15 minutes down the street. I usually go have a barbecue at his place anyway. I get free food and money so. But I mean since then it’s actually I’ve kind of had a slow evolution. I still do clients except I don’t do like these 10 hours on our client anymore. Generally speaking to me like thirty five hundred dollars a month or five grand a month and then you know just like the one off DSL or e-mails and stuff like that. But what I’m really doing is focusing on putting all 15 on my martial art niche so nobody knows this probably but I want to of the biggest combo more short groups on Facebook. And it’s it’s really taken off like wildfire. All I really did was drive a wench to Facebook actually drove her from one Facebook what I this big group with. And so right now I’m just kind of putting all like all the clients and all my clients actually notice my clients. Essentially they’re mostly retainer like 80 percent of a 20 percent you know go you know papers to write and all that shit and everything else is going right into my list so yeah man I mean since then I’ve just gone again like I said foot shifts on my own more short selling my own stuff. What I can march. But as I’ve started my own stuff and I share screen shots of like hey my Lannie page you know got to 60 some percent conversion rate. You know check this out and I’m just sharing stuff that I experience as an entrepreneur as a digital marketer of stuff like that not just as a copywriter but when I do that you know my clients are all end and marketers are real businessmen and all this stuff and they’re doing something similar. So I’m probably a much higher scale so there’s kind of a commonality. Know I’ve gotten more business and more referrals now that I’ve kind of gone all in on my martial arts stuff and also just I mean just a suicide note if anybody’s ever building your own copywriting business I can’t recommend enough to take your copywriting money that you make from like your freelance gig right relative doing some kind of offering your own. And man it’s like killer for positioning and making money so that you can be fully owned. So how long ago. Now I’ve sort of seen you I’ve watched sort of from afar as we haven’t been talking with labels. I remember when you started the group and I sort of watched you talk about various aspects through your Facebook post and stuff so you know you started with nothing presumably. And you built it up to how many people got your group 13 hours in something like that. You know it’s actually funny. My goal is to make it the biggest one and the second biggest one I can’t seem to be. He said he was a nice guy. He’s actually in my group too and he’s got like a 16000 person group and you know Mad respect to the dude everything but it’s not a very active group and there’s like a bunch of scammers and shit and they’re like the spammer people so I’m going to brag about my Lorrimore is because we build it through Facebook and what we also did a really good filtration process too where there’s like no spam for the most part every once in a while you’ll get somebody and we just got a blocked political leader. But for the most really tight knit group of people who all of we who of cheak who don’t use the work could say I get and it’s cool man is that community just don’t like praise the bad stuff. I already literally on a spur of the moment thing and it just kind of took off from like oh shit I guess we should really go our chips in on this. You know. So for you that was like a passion of yours before because we know from if you know if people listen to the earliest take over Tuesdays I know you run a martial arts gym at one point. Yeah. Yeah I don’t. I’ve been involved in. He produces I was like 13 I’m 30 now so a few years you know what I mean so it’s only I’ve always been involved with whether I’ve been training it teaching it or just reading about it and I was like you know what I mean. I mean just start a little page and then I hate group and I say I will see if anybody likes anything. I just tried selling some little. It’s funny. I used to sell posters of Bruce Lee into the Presley foundation and shut my ass down to sleep with Zusman for like nine bucks for like a free shipping offer. Again it was like I sold like a few hundred of these things happening are they putting it on like my group are like Hey go check it out. And I would put in my crew. So I was like me and this is powerful I should probably start paying attention to this and then I actually heard one of my old clients Chris record he’s really big like the internet marketing and all that stuff and one of the things that I learned from him is passion is not just passion but a passion an audience is just huge. And it sounds obvious and I knew it I guess before hearing him and seeing his results. I mean it makes sense it’s not that I kind of look back on the whole Jay K-T thing and may have started kind of as a fluke and I was like yeah I like this stuff we just make it for fun. But these are national groups of people they’re not your typical mixed martial artists these are Bruce Lee you know fans who are like you they’re I’m I’m the issues a anti karate or anti type window but to a degree it’s like you know you don’t really get that kind of a smile when they really associate they’re really passionate about something. It’s like it’s stupid it’s it’s very simple to sell stuff you just got to put it right in front of the window by just gotta make sure they’re really passionate you know what I mean. Yeah you know it’s funny you mentioned that you know gee can do the stuff because I mean I’m a big fan of Bruce Lee movies going back some time as a kid I used to watch them all over and over and over again. And so our history of him you know I prematurely is a mystery and an interesting quality to it. And I bought some j k d tapes which I wanted to put out. I bought some tapes back in the day that were like turned out to be giganto days. But I think they were just self defense tapes. And the reason I bring this up is because you know how I first heard about copyright and people will know what’s in the podcast about Gary halber writing. I think it’s actually Gary Helmer and John Carlton teamed up to write a sales letter for something called serious growth which was a bodybuilding system out of all of the Sayliyah California the way. Yeah. And they had that same group was it was all Belke they all sort of had the same. They were involved in that. They were I think they’re all connected because there are Bauld that they were involved in self-defense stuff and just a number of different products and different pieces. And one of the ones was these self-defense tapes I think they’re called tactical response systems was the terrorist act. Yeah exactly. And whore and I think people were Melber and he put out these tapes. I remember getting them because they were actual tapes or VHS tapes or whatever. It was like but advocated like I’m one of the things that some of my day advocated to like you know the person’s attacking your own restrike and then run away you know get out of there quickly. Basically there was there’s like self-defense was like you know step you know stamped their knee and then get the fuck out of there basically. And but there was a guy who evers was struck. I don’t remember his name who was struck it was crude though. You know a guy who Nakh I went to hear Paul Mooney who was governor Yeah. Paul Vitex very famous and JKA he went on I know he did a lot of stuff for TR restore act and so did Frank Kuchi who is a former Navy SEAL I believe who. Guy. And he does stuff with TR Esther. So yeah I mean Jacob has been around for so long and it kind of went through his popular face. So it had its like they blow up to a degree kind of big blow up in the 70s 80s something. Again the years mixed up I see around that time and then it had fizzled out a little bit and then now with the whole rise of mixed martial arts and the UFC say hey you know I’m sorry the whole thing with the UFC he said hey you know Brucey is the founder of anything and whether it’s true or not. I’m kind of like Brucey was a founder of scientific street fighting not like an ape. But whatever. So he kind of gave the whole secondo community a little bit of a boost a little more popularity so yes. I mean it’s been around for so long. It’s just that. I don’t think people have really tapped into it enough. And and one of the things that I like just kind of is a copywriter. A lot of people were injured and I actually went down this route to Australia. So like copyright and templates and my products and you know one of the things I was like I was not having fun doing this like I like selling to marketers. I don’t know why it’s just not fun for me. I’d much rather use you know my like evil secrets and actually sell to people who aren’t marketers it’s like that’s a test of your ability and by selling it to marketers who are trying to follow you and get the latest technique or are you using your skills to actually go out into a marketplace that’s not familiar with more than and it’s up to them. It’s cool man but yeah it’s cool that he brought up a tiara Esther and that’s pretty funny I haven’t heard that. There’s no around. Really. Yeah. That’s funny you know. And one thing that always comes to mind when I hear you know the name Bruce Lee aside from his obvious prowess and sort of the like it’s a mystical mysterious legend surrounding him is the you know sort of the short version you know of his sort of philosophy which I think directly applies to God which is the use what works and discard all else we as ordered is used for rejecters useless there yeah. And that’s kind of it that has a lot of application for marketing and copywriting because you know you have this whole bag of tricks and stuff if you will these evil evil scheming. So for the Jews and the testing is where that stuff is out sometimes this thing will work for this particular thing or something right. Yeah it’s really. Yeah totally I mean it’s finally you bring that up because my martial art instructor is the one who taught me. GK No he’s a cool go school already. He was also a danger free market. You know what I mean like he learned he built the school using marketing so. And that’s it’s funny that you see that because not many people make that link and it’s very true. I always thought Bruce Lee was like a renegade marketer. When I saw a clip one time of Bruce Lee’s library if you look at it he’s got hundreds of books on sales persuasion. There’s a human development not just on how Wright beat somebody up or not just our philosophy but he really understood that communication in sales is that it can’t take you to the next level. Another thing that was really interesting. This is all crazy because I love how you said that because very few people actually get that connection. So let’s go on half on it. You see you’re familiar probably with the ultimate aim that the player and he’ll talk about right here. And we’re definitely putting your pocket in looking very well recently did that and I don’t remember exactly what his his Definitely Bainbridge chief aim was but it something along the lines of you know I’m going to be the most popular actor Asian actor in Hollywood. I’m going to make. I don’t know if it was a million or ten nine or 100 million dollars in x 9 years and he had a real financial goal and not many people like it that almost gets glossed over everybody Reynosa for the martial arts stuff for the fullest philosophical stuff. But nobody knows that or nobody pays attention to how he was actually a really sad it’s a savage a businessman and a savvy businessman and he really loved it. He was a good marketer. Horror Story from my structure back in the day I don’t know if it’s true or not maybe it’s you’re saying it’s not but apparently Bruce Lee when he added I don’t know how many schools he had a camera. Maybe it was two or three or whatever but yeah a couple schools in California and Seattle. So it’s so bad that only the GI could represent a around like forgetting all the shit anyway. I mean he had all these different schools and he had to make a decision whether he was going to teach a bunch of schools or just teach are in one school or whatever. And so apparently and tried fudging the story little I don’t have like 100. But it was something like it wasn’t as profitable to have all these different schools and it was just I guess trained celebrities and do movies. So he closed the school down because it’s like a business. It was just smarter to make more money doing it through movies and doing and all this other stuff. And he could if you just tried opening up a bunch of little bike martial arts schools you know what I mean. So she was a renegade martial artist and also a renegade marketer. You know what I mean. Yeah well he because he get all sorts of people as clients like he had creme Abdul-Jabbar and stuff for the clients and as actors of that era that you see in some of the films and so forth and you know in the documentaries and stuff I’ve watched about Brisley you know totally ease he had some of the top guys in industry training with him. Right. And what’s a better marketing than that. Exactly. Exactly. And a lot of that you know and this is an interesting sort of thing when it comes to positioning and stuff because of course that helps your positioning when you’re dealing with the high end people so to speak. And also you know when you’re building out lead like we have a legend now about Bruce Lee about you know who he was and the fact that he died early. It’s like this just this awesome. You know which a lot of you know marketers or sports figures and you know past presidents and all sorts of hobbies like legendary things surrounding them which have built their reputation. In my other field that I’m interested in which is magic. Houdini is a good example of that because everyone nowadays you say oh who always like Houdini when he’s get people’s goddamn narrow situations. And you know there were many people of the time who were you know as famous before Houdini and after but Houdini you know he was very careful about you know how he projected himself was very good getting publicity and his wife employed like a PR firm for like 25 years after he was dead. Yes. And so that’s probably why we still know who who did. That’s crazy. Yes that’s for sure. So there is a lot to there’s a lot of cachet when people have you know that Legenda you know when people have stories about them. Yeah absolutely. I mean it’s also just like the pursuit. Right. So I don’t know as much about Houdini but I would imagine just like gristly or anybody who’s really great or at the top of their game they’re always ready they’re always advancing something in their nature and what they’re interested in right. So again maybe Houdini had like millions of books on magic but I’m sure I don’t know that’s what I missed or he had tons just walks on like human behavior on these other things. All right so I mean whenever you are constantly subjecting yourself to all these different aims there’s no way you can’t really I one of the things I learned from Jay Abraham who’s you don’t know who he is and everybody knows who he is then push puzzlements call and go fight and go a long way. So were things I actually had learned from him is that he not personally but just how useful is that. You can’t take stuff from other industries and different industries and put them into yours and it’s totally revolutionary. It’s like the whole you know drive through window at a at a fast food place like that’s common right but if you move to a dry cleaners or back in the day when no one did that that’s revolutionary you can actually sell stuff. When I used to live in Jacksonville Florida I know at least two or three places that would have liked drive through liquor stores that was totally. Legal like to plant it worked. This was a man that’s like revolutionary. Nobody wanted to go inside or do all that stuff and they were going to go to the bars or whatever they wanted to pre-game. It just go through the drive through cops like for any answer to that. I mean just being able to of all those different things just like any. Like I said briskly you’re like I’m sure Houdini or all these other people did. That’s what can take the next level. It’s just that the combination of some different ideas put together put him in one thing it’s just revolutionary in another industry. That’s 100 percent true. Anyone who is familiar with Dan Kennedy of long that you mentioned earlier he’s a master at you know he has a super high end group where they all do that they all cross you know cross-pollinate if you will their ideas from different industries. And you know it’s worked wonders for different things and it’s and it’s people just don’t. They tend not to look outside their their current mission that’s usually the problem. It is as if you are a copycat and yet to come. So bring us up to speed on some of those. So you know you moved on to having this huge condo thing in your soul and chucks and stuff. I’m not talking the king of the shocks. I follow your sales pages I like it was for training but those would train things or something. Yeah. The other thing you do all the yeah you see in the movies and stuff all the time. Yeah. And I was like oh this is cool you know. But so aside from that you still have clients you’re still doing some freelance copy stuff for people. You know what. You know what’s since lost I thought doing so would solve some of the stuff you’ve learned because I know you have a variety of clients in your you do like myself who do a bunch of different you know you do e-mail you sales pages you do funnel stuff. You know what’s what are some of things you learned from dealing with some of these people. I mean well I mean I guess it is safer. I mean I guess there’s like a few different things but were things that I’ve learned just to my copy perspective is if you’re trying to disrupt the cold traffic test a news angle. Right so a lot of this supplement companies are trying to do this. Skin care companies are doing this right if you try and get in. This is just something out right now and I didn’t think it would work. For some down there I’m like oh shit when it ain’t worth a price I’d like to pay it. Yeah we have a low end user like intro. I she ripped her off from another copy writer whoever wrote lifestyle. It’s like an idea. So I withdraw from that. So good credit those guys. But that stuff really works. I mean well I’ve trained at least two or three different right to know two different industries with clients who are in the same I would ever buy it. I mean it works really well. But. One of the I mean I had already learned I would say I hadn’t learned anything like crazy mindbogglingly copy wise. One of the things I’ve learned is that people are going to hire their friends. I mean it’s something that is I guess basic and everybody kind of gets it. But I think they really take action on it. Like so when I say it like you know I’ll send my thumbs up or like like fingerpicks sure like so don’t share with me in there and I’ll do this too like prospective clients too and it’s so crazy how no one does this and I’ve said it’s like and that’s something you know. But it closes deals actually. I’m working a lot with Everett for an hour. You know my partner we’ve kind of tag team on a few different B-cells and finals and stuff like that and she was blown away because we had like a 15 minute call with somebody where I asked for 500 bucks up front and she was like OK what was on the table when we don’t over we’re going to hopefully close them tomorrow. Well the one that I’ve done is after we did get a check this shit just. We had a little face to face. Call I should just say what we’re doing now. But I did a video like a selfie video and then I was a good little Thousands of thing or whatever picture like that man. What is the relation of more and and having some guts right. So if you’re ever a copper and you talk to different clients you probably have clients ask you a couple of things right. So one thing they say is you know how much do you charge. Don’t like it. I don’t know. Some people get scared that I’ll be like oh yes please. So my flight rates are you know seventy five dollars for this trip and I just held them and having the guts and courage to say that is huge. What was the other thing. Gosh I was going to say something else. Oh when they say OK yeah. So thanks for the call or whatever. We’re going to go talk to a few of these other cooperators that we have to interview. Here’s what works right. And this I do it’s and it’s just whatever. As soon as I see that shit I say something along the lines of Oh no no worries I’ll have to hire them. It’s cool. So what is it to send you the questionnaire something and I just say I hope this works. I don’t know. We don’t get it like I’ve had I’m not going to mention some of their needs because it’s like friends of mine that I kind of compete with obviously for the same client but they’ll be like oh you know this person is you know partnered with this person and they’re crushing it and you know I want to talk my. And no worries on Friday. They’re really good. But you’ve got tops then we can crush this too. So what’s the go ahead. And the questionnaire tousling time to get the ball in there. What the fuck did she just say Mike. Yes. Carlos just said that. I don’t know. I don’t mean I don’t know maybe the sex of an LP is with me I don’t look too deep. I just know that every time I say a great laugh it makes them smile and they’re like oh this guy is kind of cool you know. And then if I ever feel like you are then I say hey I won’t be a good director copyright and try to shut down the deal. Right. It’s true. Exactly. These aren’t the carburettors you’re looking for. Yeah yeah yeah. It’s than any copyright. I mean if you’re Compuware you’ve got to learn how to sell like you don’t have to be like this. Master Koeser on the phone or anything but you’ve got to have the courage to ask for the sale and get a yes or no the worst that can happen is going to say no. The problem is that some people won’t have enough people enough lead so we don’t have enough. You’re desperate. And you right as I write this I can pay rent or some shit. So if that’s the issue you don’t have a pricing issue you fight when you have that much of a skill issue you have a marketing issue in Europe Rick and operator markers we should fix that. Well short of doing so are sort of just posting on Facebook or something like that. One of the things that’s worked pretty well is if you’re decent. Facebook has a lot of Facebook ads. GRUBERT I mean I’ve used them I’ll just literally promote like boost a post or do a paper or engagement post or whatever. Just content and ask for a call of action or anything like that. I’ll just give out free content and that’s it. And then I do that for a few days like three or four days and then I run a fellow asking him to send me a message and whatever and that just works. I don’t know why I don’t even have a website but I just do everything through Facebook and it works. It really works well. All right. So that you would release content over three or four days and then you run an actual ad or do you just get your size on this. If I release the content whatever it might like. I know one of them are saying things I just give out is my five cents for reading and Facebook right there is a yes question story to relate the big amo and suggest solution in the call of action. So I just give an example and I put in a Facebook post and I pay 20 bucks for it or 50 bucks towards it spent over a week or five days or whatever. And then after it if it gets enough engagement what I’ll do is I’ll just run another ad to the exact same audience that now is say it kind of follows the previous offers just hot and has a call that’s at the bottom he says if you want me to write it’s very sad. I think it’s like if you want me to write where you a message like I used to say people link just on private message me or comment. Yes type. Yes. And then you just you know follow up like that. Anybody listening to this will give such a ton of like like anything of yours that you put out when you write a Facebook post or you shoot a video. There’s always value given you’re a very generous person I think and that’s why you know that’s why you’re doing so well. One of the reasons why you’re kicking ass so much. I appreciate that man. You’re very nice. Nice. And for everybody else of course we’re back again with another exciting edition of the podcast. If you listen to this one. Macbeth and you can hear the rest of this interview on take over Tuesday because that’s how we’re going to be doing it from now on will be releasing a part on the method and the rest on take over Tuesday. So until then you know hit me up with any questions you have and and we’ll see what exciting guests we have next week. Ta-Ta The post Episode #154 – Carlos Redlich On A Simple Strategy Which Makes Copy Clients Beat Down Your Door – Every Single Day! appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Craig Simpson started making fake rocks in his parents garage. What he learned first from a marketing book and then trial and error led him to sell 4000 of ’em. When he joined a direct response company they threw the classics at him. Claude Hopkins… Robert Collier… David Ogilvy. The rest, as they say, is history. Unlike other guests on the podcast, though, Craig deals in what is becoming a more “hush-hush” media. Direct mail. From an eye-opening study of lifetime customer value… to what the internet is doing to copywriting… This interview with Craig is spillling over with marketing nuggets. In this episode, you’ll discover: How backyard rock-climbing led Craig into his current marketing career Which marketing classics? (The book he recommends if you want to learn how to persuade like a pro) Why the internet has scared people away from direct mail and the consequences. 150,000 people can’t be wrong. How to increase lifetime customer value five-fold in 18 months. Are we witnessing the death of copywriter royalties? Craig weighs in – AND copywriter blunders that drive clients crazy! Mentioned: The Advertising Solution Simpson Direct – Turning Mail Into Money The Direct Mail Solution with Craig & Dan Kennedy David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody we’re back with another edition of the podcast we have another exciting guest on today. He is a direct mail specialist and he has coauthored many books with some of people that I’ve learned from. And his latest one is called The Advertising Solution with Brian Kurtz… Craig Simpson…Welcome to the show. Craig Simpson: Great thank you for having me. I appreciate being on the show today and get a chance to talk to you. David Allan: Yeah you know you’re somebody I’ve heard about for quite a few years now when I got started in copywriting I heard your name sort of bounced around a bit. I’ve read some of the books you’ve coauthored with Dan Kennedy. And it’s interesting to sort of put a voice and in this case a face because I have the book in front of me and said that you’ve just heard about for a while in sort of a mix around in the same circles. So maybe like we like to do start from this sort of your humble beginnings and give us the trajectory of how you arrived at where you’re at today. Craig Simpson: Sure. You know I got into marketing a really interesting way. I was about 18 years old and I had built this 20 foot high fake rock climbing wall in my parent’s backyard they live in the home I was really into rock climbing and so I scraped together a few nickel and dime. I built the you know everything I had. I built the rock climbing wall. And when I was done building it I had no money left to buy the little fake hold that you bought on the wall. And so I started messing around with some different polyester thing and then I found a formula that made these really cool fake rock climbing. And so my buddy came over and they climbed in the water I had made these holes and everyone loved them and they said great you should start selling them. And so I thought OK all I’ll now these big rock. Well I went into business for myself at 18 18 years old making fake rocks. And of course you know I had to market the business so I started testing all these different types of marketing. I tried magazine and print campaigns and they are of course the direct mail and my first direct mail campaign I wrote this letter and I put a brochure in with it and I mailed it off to like 250 people. And I stopped by the phone and I thought Man the phone is going to ring off the hook because I told people it’s going to be amazing. Right. That’s how we feel with you. Absolutely. We think we’ve got the best campaign in the world. So I sat by my phone and it didn’t ring right. I mean that we would find now though this goes on my part. All the money and I licked all the CMs individually in both the addresses and I got their response but I didn’t give up and I kept on testing and I eventually found a solution that worked a system that works and I ended up selling over 4000 fake rock to the bone. Yeah. Nice so. Yeah. So end you know they sold this you know 18 19 years old and they sold anywhere from $2 to $5 a piece so I was bringing in pretty good money doing that. Awesome. And so what I found is that I love this marketing thing I’ll do a campaign. And I was so excited when the phone rang and I was so excited. A credit card numbers. I mean who doesn’t like to I’m guilty and then processing them and then look at the bank account. Those were wonderful days. But the part that I hated as soon as I took that order my stomach was thinking like oh I’ve got to go out to my sweat shop which my parents garage and make all these things because I made them by hand one by one by one. And I hated that part of it though. I love the marketing and fell in love with marketing and testing but I did not like the manufacturing side. So I sold the business and I got on working for a large publishing company. I got in at the ground floor and they didn’t have the direct mail. And so I went for a meal and you know thousands of pieces to mail 30 million pieces a year. And I was working for the publisher was called the Ken Roberts company. And we sold the information products in the financial market. And so I worked there for about 10 years and then I decided to get out of my own. And for the last 11 12 years I’ve been a full time direct mail marketing consultant. So that’s kind of I guess a longer version of how I got started in that. Right now when you were first delving into it because I’m sure there’s people of that same age listening to this show. You know we’re about to embark on a marketing career of whatever form that takes. When you were first testing out you know these direct mail pieces for your for your fake rock business. I mean you talked to afford rocks of the mail. You know it’s awesome. It’s a very interesting story. And we’re taking direction like where you’re reading Mark the books and using techniques or you know I read like I had read co-marketing book I remember which one it was but I remember reading about handwriting addressed and putting lights up on there so I did those two things that were the only thing I did right that failed copying side was absolutely awful. I think that’s why I didn’t sell anything. Plus the list was awful too I got the list the wrong place wrong time and it was not a good group of prospects to go after. So once I figured out some of those things out that’s when I really started doing well. But initially I had read some marketing books somewhere it wasn’t a well-known one I don’t know where I got it. Probably the library and I didn’t do well with my first campaign but after that I figured things out. Right now when you. I guess it was probably from that marketing book where you hear about doing direct mail was asked from the same marketing book. Yeah I had an idea and I do it. I wish I remember what book it was. It might have meant some kind of marketing textbook or something. But that’s where I had read about it. And so I want to give this a try and it made it sound so easy. You know made it sound like Hey you send these things out and people are you know a truck backs up for cash you know and it wasn’t that way. Definitely not. Now when you when you sort of graduated from you know working for yourself initially and then moved to the Ken Roberts company and they’re really mailing so many million pieces of mail were they all up to speed on direct marketing techniques and stuff like that. Is that sort of where you got your estimation. Yep they were there very much so. And I take and I had very little knowledge going into it I mean I had some but not a lot. And that really took me to the next level. And I had there I began to realize the importance of studying direct marketing. And I remember the first real marketing book that I read was a book by David Ogilvy called Ogilvy on advertising. And basically it was an introduction to direct mail direct mail direct marketing and really the difference between direct marketing and then frap brand advertising. Right. And they are so different. And David Ogilvy at the time was huge in the advertising world as one of the greatest sought after marketing wizard you know of his time and he talked about even though he had a big brand agency it was the most successful campaigns were done through direct response marketing. And so that was my first book that really got me into it. And then there was a series of others that led me down the path of really becoming the ear of it and finding out what are the things that really make people tick that make it so that you can generate a response from a campaign. And since then I mean it just fascinates me still and I get excited every summer campaign because I get to watch and see what comes back right now or people that can operate company where they the ones that are influenced you or told you about the different books or a.. Yeah. So they were like can read these books. Yeah. Read these books studies. I had a boss Jeff Robinson Some who was really into it and he was you know a real proponent behind studying these guys. And once I get into I didn’t stop I just loved it. I read these books like Claude Hopkins and calling him up in fact so the book that you reference really the one to go with Brian Kurtz. It goes back to all the legends that first studied and and there’s Robert Collier which recall your letters is one of the great book ever written on direct response direct mail marketing and creating ad copy that really get people to read on that when there was that was a reply. That was one of the early books I read that really got me going. So I have favorites it is. It is. And I’ll tell you for those who you know are listening if they want to if they really want to study that’s a book to go to. Now tell you it it’s a hard book to read it because the type it doesn’t always entertain. I mean it’s it’s like that copy in there it’s tough to get through but you’ve got to pull up the nuggets and that partly you know the book that I wrote Brian Curtis. I mean it was let’s pop a nugget for everyone so they don’t have to go through the pain of reading this book or the arcane language and so forth of the Estre That’s right. Oh that’s right yeah yeah. That’s what to read to you I mean the language back then was just different in the 1920s. Those were kind of funny to read some of that the way they wrote add back and it’s really comical but it was very persuasive and it motivated people to respond. Yeah I remember when I cracked him in the rubber collar book and a lot of those other books you’ve written about in your advertising solution books and what sort of was interesting was like you sort of saw where these things came from. Now you know being not of that era you you know have are familiar with through other avenues perhaps like oh like this is a scratch and dent sale or whatever you know they come from it’s like oh man this is this is where the stuff comes from. Yeah you know I don’t if you know what I’d like to one more thing that’s really interesting about that because you’re right. I mean all of the things we do today came from them and you’ve heard of the one bill now. Right. Right. Everyone’s saying that. And Gary halber was famous for them. He really pushed that. But Robert Collier was as far as I know the first one to ever do it. And he mailed out an actual physical dollar dollar bill in the 1930s maybe in the 1920s actually and it was for a nonprofit organization and it was about. It was for a hospital you know had supported and worked with crippled children and the offer just as there was that the into. Hey here’s a dollar bill and we would ask that you would simply return it with a few more of your own to help out. And he got a 90 percent response rate and then. You know what know what an example many people are still using the dollar bill mailing today jaggies personally. Actually you have. I have wonderful. Yeah. So my consulting services actually awesome. And so I just need you know that Robert Collier was the first one to do in the 1920s or Gary Halbert. I didn’t know it was Collier because I read or saw Essel and it must have been socks. And also it appeared in his books but I definitely saw a video of Gary halber talking at a seminar and he had suggested reading that book and I don’t know. So sad that it was from there or if he just said you know there’s things like this in this book and this if you haven’t read this book you know side done that but it’s still well and alive today almost 100 years later. So and I’m sure I’m sure you know if you are smart people you will be one of those hundred year old tricks of marketing that’s still being used. Yeah. Know being a direct mail specialist yourself of course. And Brian I think talked about this on on the take over Tuesday. Like I said to Brian where you know it seems like Troy and for whatever reason I guess because everyone’s sort of rushing to the internet out asked that a lot of these direct mail techniques and so forth and just the process of using direct mail to solicit customers or prospects. That’s kind of fallen by the wayside. Tom followed by you know I don’t favor somewhat but a lot of people who are not like the super savvy marketers but sort of in general. Yeah. Yeah. And yet you base your business around direct mail. So maybe speak to that a bit sort of like how it’s not gone away and the end user still specializing it. But you know I you think it’s just been forgotten because of the deal. You know what do you call it. Yeah is the. You know I mean people don’t want to spend the money on it. Right that’s it. You can go and send an e-mail for free. And here you know with direct mail you’ve actually got to pay for postage on for printing. So a lot of marketers stay with me because there’s this huge you know cost involved. So we send out they’ll right. My company about over 300 different mailings per year so that 300 different print job 300 different list orders 300 different you know. It’s a huge high volume. And then the one I’m trying what I’m getting at here is that there’s still a lot of business that you can get at the savvy marketers are still finding ways to use direct mail. And the thing is is every you know Fortune 500 company is using it. You got Google who at one point was the eighth largest technology mail in the country using it. The garment business is like in the dot com. I mean there’s just you know dozens and dozens and dozens of these large businesses that still use it. It’s more of this small business middle sized you know companies that aren’t using it because of the cost or because they don’t understand it. But the big ones are still using the Usenet aggressively. There’s 46 billion dollars a year spent on direct mail advertising every year. But that’s a huge number. 46 billion. So it’s still a mass appeal it’s just it just has a lot of businesses are using it but it’s still a huge business. So it’s not like it’s gone. It’s just not as publicized as what it used to be. Yeah I think maybe just people are talking about it less. It seems like it’s fallen out of favor because of the lack chatter sort of around it but the real people that are dead are doing and obviously 46 billion is like doing it or maybe just delete it. Yeah yeah. Think about it. Get any. And you know the thing let me just share one thing with Eric no one of the reasons why I love it is we’ve done these tests where we’re talking about the value of the customer and how much they’re worth and I had one company where we took 50000 direct mail buyers 50000 TV buyers and 50000 the online buyers they all bought the exact same product for the exact same price within a month and all of the variables are the same. And what we did is we took those 250000 people we looked at the value of the customer. You know after six months nine months a year year and a half and we found that the direct mail buyers spent three times as much as the TV buyers and the TV buyers that twice as much as the online buyers. So we found that you know clearly with this sample size of 150000 people the direct mail buyers had significantly higher customer lifetime value. And we found that a lot of different niches but that was the biggest sample that we’ve run. So even though there’s a cost to getting the campaign out think getting responses. There’s also a reward that comes later on that really gives a good solid reason why people should be using it today. No that’s that’s very important that’s a very interesting test results. So basically you’re saying that the best customers came through the direct mail solicitation and that’s important like you’re talking of a lifetime value the customer that’s super important I don’t think I’m a business owner because I’ve dealt with them enough myself that day. You know take that into account that everyone sort quarter seems to have sort of short sighted you know of always wanting customers new customers but they don’t care where they come from. But I find that to be true in my own consulting thing is the best people sort of came through the direct mail stuff when I’m like out leads off you know doing these podcasts or e-mail or stuff like that. More often than not the direct mail one went out and stayed with. You know there’s that over a customer and. And. And these kids are older or more savvy or I never sort of broke it all down but she has a variety of reasons but I noticed that myself so that’s interesting that I bore out over such large testing samples. Yeah. And you brought up something to me I think age has something to do with it too. I mean this was based off of people who are 45 plus. So when those numbers change if it was you know 20 to 40 I would guess. So my weight. Right. And you know the boomers and seniors I mean are the ones that got the money anyway right now. So naturally they’re going to get a lot of money but you know I guess the age is across the board for the sample they were all older but they did prefer you know they did. They did spend more money if they were generous through direct mail. So now when you’re working in your own business to get these mailings out for the different clients that you have are you doing the cop running yourself or do you have a team or how does that work. No I mean we outsource a lot of it and then a lot of companies they have their own you know the big companies have their own in-house writers you know like a beach body or a great audience for the whole team of writers. And so in many cases they’ve got their own creative staff. And if it’s only if the smaller businesses then we then we we outsource the copywriting and find our copywriters to work with. Right. It seems to me nowadays I’ve talked with a couple of you know had a sort of a who’s who of copywriters and stuff on my show and on John show and John had other people that some of them especially the older ones seemed to have an opinion because the Web is in many ways a cheap media to slap up a web page pretty easily if you know what you’re doing and run a sales page and so forth to text and drive traffic to it that that breeds a markedly different caliber if you will of copywriter overall versus the direct mail. You know so little quote unquote old school people where your copy had to be like super tight to justify you know sending spending that kind of money I like to talk about on direct mail. Exactly right. Yeah. I mean 100 percent and that’s I would say that’s come up. Unfortunately the my world has has some ways damaged the quality of copyright because you can do stuff so cheap that cheap and they just kind of run with whatever right. Whereas when you’re spending you know 50 cents to a dollar or two meal a piece and there’s you know tens of thousands of them. You really have to make sure you have a dialed in print so a couple of things happen one. Also the copperas have popped up everywhere and they may not be that good but they can get it done or unmooring but they’re not great. And then the other thing is that probably the biggest detriment to copywriters is because of the cheap copywriting world in the way that a change is there’s no more. It’s really hard to find companies that are willing to pay royalties copywriters. Right. And they used to be this relationship where you would hire a cop rather they would want to see you succeed. And so long term they would get you know a loyal piece of per piece fee oftentimes you know that they get with you for every piece of mail. So then if they didn’t put as much effort as they could have peace knowing that there’s a long term relationship with they could be paid for it. And that is really going away. I mean there’s only a few companies that are willing to pay those royalties. And because there’s no other coppers willing to do it without a deal. Right. And so it’s kind of damage that and I’m not a Kopra and I know that you do copywriting tech I’m sure you’ve probably seen it all with as well. That’s one of the reasons why I sort of branched out further into other marketing sort of angles if you will and doing more overall marketing consulting too because I do love doing the copy. It’s fun and I the psychology behind it. I sort of came from a different field so I was originally and still am a professional magician. So I sort of came from the field of deception if you on the psychology of that got me interested in copywriting. And so yeah what you’re saying is right there are not a lot of people they’re not people familiar you know if they’re not one of those big direct mail companies like a Gore or some of these ones you hear about from the past that have gone through different you know shifts and change names and so forth. Yeah there’s not a lot of people that are even familiar with that set up you know getting royalties on the back end and stuff. And so their more resistance to an arrangement of that nature is get it selling you can toss some people into the things because the value is there if you can make that case and people will can be convinced but it is seems to be dying out sort of thing that’s getting getting less and less and less and B and that has to do I think with those less people understanding it and the lack of direct mail discussion and the lack of those you know that demographics of that age are people who are familiar with all that stuff has moved on. And so you’re right. Yeah. So that’s why I sort of stepped into more of a broader marketing aspects which still really involved all copywriting principles but just apply a little bit differently now because you’ve been in this for a while. What sort of advice do you have for freelance copywriters who are maybe looking for clients in regards to using direct mail. And maybe because it sounds like you are more on the end of having to deal with copywriters as more of a client than a you know doing copywriting yourself and when you do any contract that we sort of always hear from the copywriters we sort of oh you know on this show a lot we’ve we’ve talked about some of the horror stories how to protect yourself as a copywriter as a freelance cuppers civically and maybe talk from the other perspective like you know having to work with copywriters and stuff like that some of the things you don’t like or some of the trouble spots that you’ve encountered to sort of inform copywriters how they work how they should conduct themselves. Well I think we’re fortunate I mean I’ve really gotten some good writers I’ve worked with. I think that the downfalls are those that the ones the ones that I’ve gotten in trouble more copyrighted than they. I asked them the question how and when you try to piece and it takes three weeks for a short letter. And then I say ok and I go tell the client that and then if it turns out that me and I get this creative process going on and I’m OK with that but I’ve had some writers who have taken you know twice the time I’ve had writers where the pieces can be done in three months which is a generous amount. And it was nine months and it really makes you look bad. I consultant when I help my. No I really I try and stay away from people who I’ve had the kind of experiences with. But I think it’s just do what you say you’re going to do. You’re going to have it done by the time they get it done by then. And if you cannot do the job in the time that you did until rather than being up front about it what I can do at this time. Well I think that I think that probably one of the biggest tips I could give that the other one too is I always like to writers you know and I know everyone does this but I can tell is well how many pages do you want. You know they right. As many as it takes to get the job done. If it’s a two page letter a four page letter and you feel like you can be everything you need to give you your best health metrics and I’m OK with that. If it’s 20 pages I’m OK with that but I think one of the worst things we can do at businesses and business owners is to tell a copyright of the one that you hate letters. Well maybe that’s not enough faith for that. Or maybe it’s too much space for that. We have to let the copywriter do their job because they know how to write and persuade. Let’s not mess with that process too much. Yeah. No I think that’s a that’s a very good point because they’re you know if you’re capable of copyright you will be able to ferret that out very weekly in regards to doing your research as to where this might go in terms of the volume of material you’re going to have to use to persuade because it’s can now become from their market awareness and their awareness of the company that you’re writing for and what you know who that person is or what the service product is and all that kind of stuff and then quickly get a feel I think for how long that piece needs to be. Right. Exactly. And I think those are good tips and we appreciate that because we do hear a lot from this side of the fence so to speak for complaints about clients and so forth. I felt like to some degree we’re probably bagging on clients to talk about how it works. You know it’s sort of montra what if you manage what I find is if you manage the project the project right from the beginning meaning you’re very transparent that this is going to take me. Here’s the process I’m going to go through that client. Not when you think things go away you’ve got to live up to your part of the deal. I mean I mean I can’t count on them or writers that say that they can’t get into the you know the writing thing until the deadline for when they wake up with that talk about when they were asked. Well that’s not fair to the coroner now. And that’s why they stick it. I mean that the is what say hey could take me six weeks to write the letter and maybe going a take your five but next week in which you can make sure your job is done you know. Yeah. So I know you have to call it. No they don’t. And it is an important thing. It’s like you should be as a copywriter. You know having that time that you act in terms of time you actually need for the time that you know you’re going to say you need because you want a buffer zone in there so that you don’t make a mistake like that and then end up breaking a deadline because then it’s a chain reaction like you said you’re going to they’re working with you. You’re going to go tell the client that this is when it’s going to be done and my shoe and you are in your business of primarily direct mail. That’s a really massive deal because the cost and everything I’m getting all that together and putting it out is pretty significant. Yep exactly. Well that’s great I think. I think giving people a lot to go on here today have been very forthcoming. And then with all of your information stuff and it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show. Now if people want to get this book the advertising solution Craig where should they go they should go to the full Legin book Dot Com legend put dot com and what’s really cool is Brian I’ve put together an amazing resource package of free resources that you get if you buy the book for you to go to legends book Dot com. Ill tell you how to get book off how to get things like a swipe file that goes back a hundred years. It’s. How to get access to a special edition of Scientific advertising by Hopkin and we’re going to give you some live video some rare live video. Thorton have never been shared before with Gene Schwartz and Gary Halward. So you’ve got all those things free if you go to legend back home. Follow the directions and they’ll walk you through how how to get back. Everything is awesome. That’s awesome. I was lucky enough to get a advance copy from Brian but I went ahead and purchased anyways and got those extra resources. It’s a great book. It does plot all the nuggets you sort of highlight. You know the six sort of famous copywriters in history and I’d add men that are in the best of the best and the you know who’s your personal favorite of the people the six people that you highlight in there where you are most influenced by one or the other. I would have to say well my favorites are David Ogilvy because he’s so colorful and Frank and brilliant. The other one is going to be rough with Hollywood just because even though his book was really thick and hard to read he was just a master of persuasion. He knew what to say and get people to work on. You know he got started selling coal coal was his first. Well like me was wrong. Right right. Even harder. Yes. That’s great. Yeah. So he found I had a big get excited about that to sell coal. And so I think he for me is a real hero. I mean he was he added dialed in I would say those two guys be my favorite. Awesome. Now people want to get in touch with you directly to talk about perhaps you know I’m getting some direct mail diner or whatever what we’re actually reach you at. They can go to my Web site and his contact form on their phone number on their Simpson dash direct dot com and dash direct dot com. What they want to know more about direct mail I’ve got another book called The direct mail solution that’s the one I wrote with in Canada you can get that on Amazon. So there are a couple of different ways to get in touch with me. Awesome awesome. I know it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show today Craig. Likewise. I totally enjoyed it. Is that a phone conversation. Thanks for having me. Yeah I will definitely have to do it again for everybody else. This is yet another exciting edition and I hope you take some real nuggets that Craig is giving you away from this and improve every aspect of your marketing whether it is using direct mail or not and probably should be. But also you know the tips and stuff about offers and copywriting are pretty timeless and usable in every media. So everyone listening will be back again with another edition of the podcast. And another exciting guest next week. All right thank you The post Episode #153 – Craig Simpson On A 46 Billion Dollar “Secret” To 5X Your Business In 18 Months.(Bonus – A Client’s View On Low-Class Jackass Copywriters!) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

She’s been AWAI’s Copywriter of the Year. She’s appeared on Dr. Oz! She among an elite few at the top of the copywriting profession and she’s spilling her secrets. Rising up through the ranks at Phillips Publishing, she once gave her boss an ultimatum… and landed a better job. She struggled to break into copywriting as she was typecast as a direct mail list consultant. But she persevered. Carline is a testament to determination and hard work. Along with some street smarts, ambition and landing a world class mentor… she can make it rain money by putting pen to paper. She lays out her whole process – start to finish. Kick back, there’s a whole lotta insight in these 30 minutes. In this episode, you’ll discover: The “green sheet” gambit she used to land a promotion inside Phillips Publishing. The A-list copywriter who told her she “writes like a girl” and then became her mentor! Her entire A to Z process from the first call with a client to writing a million dollar package. Was Gene Schwartz right? Is copy assembled? Listen to discover Carline’s dump-file secrets. Her advice to the young upstart. What you should be doing TODAY to get your foot in the door. Mentioned: Carline Anglade-Cole Clayton Makepeace Carline on Dr. Oz David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody it’s David Allan the back with another edition of the podcast. I’m excited about today because we have really one of the best writers period. But I think she stands out because she’s female you know and you don’t hear as much about these kind of people in the copywriting world. And so one of the best A-list copywriters on the planet. Carline Cole, how are you? Carline Anglade-Cole: I’m great David how you doing. David Allan: Good. Very good! I was going to botch your name there a little bit so I skipped the hyphenation… Carline Anglade-Cole: I caught that. It’s Carline Anglade-Cole. David Allan: Oh, I would have got that then. And usually I screw up lots of names so nothing new then… Carline Anglade-Cole: Well with a name like david Allan, I guess you have the luxury of….[laughter] David Allan: Now, usually we like to start off with what I call your superhero origin story. Take us back to a point where you maybe weren’t in copywriting, weren’t in direct-response and maybe ha da normal job or just came out of school and sort of give us the journey up top the present time. Carline Anglade-Cole: Oh wow,OK. All right well in the words of Steve Martin I was born a poor black child…Is that back far enough? I actually thought of stumbling in and this whole area as most people in my in my group tend to do. There’s no such thing as a. It was no copywriting school. No. Are there really other ways to get into this industry. Unless you sort of stumbled into a wall of 20 25 years ago. So I had I had a daughter who was three years old and then another one. I’ll actually use two and a half years all and then I had another one who was a year old. My husband was a firefighter and I was looking for a job that would be a part time job that will have a flexible schedule to allow me to stay home with the kids and alternate the days that my husband was on shift work when the days that he would be home with the kids and days and he was at work. I would watch the kids because when we got married and had children we decided you know we’re raising our children. So our goal was if it’s not us then even our very close family members you know it’s not going happen. So you know you know we have we have four kids following that nice little pattern and I’m very happy about that. But it involves some challenges trying to find work. Because most people weren’t interested in my schedule or or trying to be flexible with me so I ended up one day looking into the paper and I found an ad for a customer service job. And the thing that caught my eye was flexible schedule. And so it turned out this customer service job was for this entrepreneurial company called Philips publishing and they were at that time in investment’s mailer. That’s what they did was all investment newsletters and direct mail. I had no idea what direct mail was. I barely understood investible newsletters on the news or industry as a whole. So I applied for the job that was close to home was only the one missing half an hour with my house. And again let’s see I do it as customer service so it was answering phones and dealing with customer complaints. So I went to the company was a great company a young small young company very entrepreneurial spirit spirit. They were willing to work with the schedule that I told them that I needed to know to do that I was getting paid maybe seven bucks an hour an hour. I had read didn’t graduate from college with a degree and all that but you know I need to make the money and it wasn’t working any other way. So I took the job and I got I guess that was my intro into the direct mail worlds because I started off answering phones I started listening to customers talking with them not realizing that that was probably the most important job I had in my entire career because I quickly understood that you know the customer has got to come first no matter what. And that’s a lesson that I still to this day as I’m writing a copy right now I just asked myself you know what does. What does my customer want you know. And that’s the same that’s the mentality in writing that I need to have a customer service. So I started working there I was there six months. Loved the company got tired get kind of bored with the job and I was able to get another job part time flexible schedule in the accounting department. And so I got to learn about you know the numbers and how things run in a business which by the way also helped me tremendously when I decided to go off on my own. So all the little jobs that seem to be picking up just because they need a flexible schedule to watch my kids somehow. We’re working towards really helping me to be on my own and go off on my own and do my own thing. So I really really appreciate that looking back of course I had no idea that was the case then. So I worked in accounting for about a year and a half and been found out that the company was looking to launch a health division. The beautiful thing about being a counterpart it you’re going to know what’s going on in the company before anybody else does because the money has to be there to do anything or approval for them. The money has to go through a college. So I heard about this this whole new group that was being started called the Health Group and I found that to be much more appealing than investment newsletters and it was a start up and out like wow this is pretty cool. And one of the jobs that I had at the time was every Friday it was my job to stay as late as necessary to be able to to hand deliver what was called the Green Sheet. Now the green sheet was every every day you got the total amount of money the company made and all the different divisions and different products and everything else. And then I was supposed to at the end of the week literally walk around to the president of a company who was Tom Philips at the time. Oh yes Philips. And then the vice president of our office that was Bob King who was going to now be in charge of the whole health division and other members of the company. So my job was to literally go to everyone’s office no matter how late it was on Friday. We were there six o’clock 7:00 in the evening and it matters not when the final numbers were tallied. I had to plug those numbers into the report to create the green sheet to give to the powers that be that they were looking forward to seeing it. Well I wanted this job I wanted to get involved in this health group and I’m trying to go the traditional route of turning out a resume for it and I’m getting nowhere because my resume was pretty lame. I had no experience in direct mail in those years and the whole deal. I had no experience in anything that they were looking for but I just wanted to try. You know I want to get in there. And so I ended up using my feminine wiles. No you can take the Grange sheet. As my ticket and ask them to be able to get to Bob King to get an interview. So every day we got to go there are with me I would give God the grace the same conversation I’ve got here. Hi Curly. You’re you are Bombays Carly. Bye bye bye currently. That was it. Well this particular time I’m getting frustrated because people are starting to come into this group and they put it all together and I’m getting nowhere with an interview. So I weigh in and I make sure Bob is the last person who gets the green tea that day. So I walk in his office and he so custom will be coming when he will look up. Sometimes he’s busy working the whole time able to stick his hand out. And I would just give it to him. Well this time he did the same thing he was writing. He stuck his hand out but I just stood there and I’m holding the green job so far enough away with he can’t reach it. So he has to look up at me and he’s like Well hi. Hi Carly you know I’m white. I’m not. And he’s like that for me. I said yup. And he’s like well are you going to give it to me. I said Nope. And he looks very straight. And he’s I said not until I get a you know an interview for the job in the end the health group. They had an assistant head of marketing assistant job at the lowest level job there would ever out here. I said I want to interview for a job in the marketing group. I know this sounds really exciting to me and I really love to get into this. And at that moment he looked at me I thought oh I just got myself fired. I just thought oh man I should go that far. I thought. But to my surprise he just looked at me and he looked down pulled out his arm his planner at the time and said OK how about. And he gave me a date for an interview. I said that works for me and I handed him the Rangely and I said Have a nice weekend. And I walked out I passed out because my heart was fabricating it just. Like you do you know. But I got the interview. And you know for the job and I will tell you I have had lots of interviews in my career but the interview for a marketing assistant job with Bob King was probably the most intensive interview I have ever had in my life. I mean he asked so many questions. The interview lasted two and a half hours. I mean this is like this is the position I’m not going after V.P.. OK. And he didn’t just ask all kinds of questions and play put scenarios in front of me as far as what I would do in this situation or what I would do. You know I try to use my humor to get me out of a tight spot. He wouldn’t let me go. I had to answer the questions and by the end of the interview I really figured you know what I don’t have his job there’s no way so I don’t care anymore. I just don’t let my attitude come through. And so I think he finished an interview and he said OK well thanks so much. I’ll get back to you. Now wait wait hold up wait a second. You have been really me with the past couple of hours. OK my turn. You know one of these questions or I’ll understand it was just the most random things he would ask and I’ll go on. What does this have to do with anything that we know beyond his job. In his profile way by the way I think Bucky is a marketing genius. And I look at him as someone who definitely molded me in my thinking the more direct mail area. So I have nothing but high praise for him. But at the time I thought he’s a little cuckoo. And on Monday morning I got a call from the gentleman who is going to lead the group the publisher’s name was Marshall Hamilton. I get a call from Marshall Hamilton and he welcomed me to the group. So that was why I was so shocked that like what. Are you kidding me. You know he said I don’t know what he said at the bar but he sure liked your fire style. All right. That night. And so I just started in the Help Group and I’m like OK so I’m learning on this point as a marketing assistant which I guess I got quickly I got a promotion a raise maybe a couple of extra bucks or Napster the marketing manager from. And so I did start learning about the list business. I mean my job was to find your help the marketing manager or create the mailing list that you know the creator was going to go to. So that’s where I learned about you know how your name is sold and rented all throughout you know and how you people go about trying to get the right name so to mail things. So I got into the business strictly on the analytical side which is not my script but I end up doing it for 12 years learning about how mailing lists work how to pick the right lines I really form relationships with list brokers and then I started hearing about and seeing these these people call copywriters I should say these guys they’re all males that you know these copywriters were living all over the country and we were writing these big fat royalty checks to them and they’re just turning in copy and then people love them a copy were made in the country and the copies making the company a bunch of money and they’re getting paid and I was like why in the world is the deal about I need to get into that. You know my my degree was in broadcast journalism in communications. The writing was definitely that night or more. I was always a writer but in a more market or for so many years and so I had the pleasure of actually working the group that are a star copywriter on the health group was called Clate made peace. And so I got to meet Clayton and I got to work with him and just form a relationship with him a friendship with him for many years and he is just another amazing person. And Clayton So as I’m reading his copy and I’m trying to go wow how does he come up with this stuff and does he do that you know. And he always say hey any questions feel free to call me you know. And it was just that kind of environment. And we’ll get to read the copy. I’m asking questions and he’s there and you know some say I can do this I just I don’t know how but I think I can do this. I remember calling Clayton when I was contemplating it and I said you know I really think I want to do the copywriting. And what was the one thing that gave me the incentive to go the copyrighting route was one day we were we needed what was called at the time a special renewal letter. We had so subscribers to our newsletters and then we would always write different letters and subscribers encouraging interns to renew their subscription. And in exchange they got certain gifts and some you know certain free free reports or whatnot. Well we had a meeting and it was like the group was saying OK we need to get a copyrighted writer to cereus a special renewal for a new a new premium or new special report and it was nobody available and so I just said well I’ll try you know I’ll try it and they’re like I mean that was all but my boss was so desperate I find find just do it you know we’ve got to get something out there where we’re kind of fallen behind schedule. So I had to write a special report or a special a sales letter for a special report that I called it the ABC of vitamins and minerals. Now we are back back talking like back in the early 90s that vitamins were still a very new thing to our market. And so I just wrote a story about my mom because because Clate novices tell me right you know right which you know right to people you know make it personal. So I’m going to write a two page special renewal to get people to buy this product. And I have no idea who I’m talking to so I decided I’m going to talk to my mother because she’s my market and let me write this letter to her and just you know share her frustrations and see how that works. And I wrote a two page sales letter to my mom why she should buy this why she should go get a newer subscription now and get this special report for free. Well at the time if we can get a 2 to 3 percent response on non-special we know that was considered very good and we expect that to get 2 or 3 percent on all these. Well they mailed mine and they got a 5 percent response on it. So vastly are a couple of years ahead and I am going to leave. And I recall Clayton and I said listen I’m going to leave the company I’m going to try to try this and just wanted to talk with you about a little bit and so diplomatically said to me well I can’t encourage you to leave my number one client. But when you do leave your call with and so on like OK. And so I said I’m officially gone. I’m getting Clayton a call and you know he’s like all right. So he was helping me get jobs but the jobs were go on the left side you have clients he was writing property for many years and help with the list rentals. So my first year hanging out my my my shingles as a copywriter. I was still doing consulting for list met marketing. I was still doing the same thing as I was Gobel or name was paying the bills. I can’t complain that I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t get it I couldn’t break into the business even though I had been in the business for 14 years. Yeah I know. So it’s like I’m starting from scratch because people I knew back then I call them up and the person they would say to me were you samples you know sample we need to look at it well you know I had direct Milsap but I just had one last question. You know they’ve got a 5 percent raise. You know if I try to swing that as much as possible but you know they’re not with the big leagues anyway. And next year is the 2000. No no plane 19 19 will be 20 years that I’ve been on my own as a freelancer actually. Ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch So he was a mentor. He was absolutely is my man. I still go crying to him now. So and that and I mean not only guy is also his friend he and his wife Wendy I actually work with Wendy. She was my Lagny director when I was the senior marketing manager in the health group. Now with the product where we at Barnes was called health and healing without good Huling Whitaker in that newsletter. Clayton wrote that he wrote the control for that that newsletter just bought blew open the whole alternative health market for us until that law and we were kind of struggling with another cardiac alert. It wasn’t doing that well we weren’t sure we tried that we tried some other stuff. But health and healing came. And Dr. Whitaker with his passion about alternative health and Philip’s willingness to you know go for it. Clayton coming in there writing amazing copy. Me and Wendy getting the right mailing list to the. It was a wonderful you know opportunity to be involved in a a great team. And so I got to work with for many years that went well with Wendy and he and when and getting married. I’ve got a you know a great relationship with both of them. I love them dearly and they are playing still like I said he’s still a mentor he has helped me in many ways just fine to my skills if I just try to imitate him as much as possible so if I write something and I go this is this sounds likely maybe you know I’m like yes. Yes. Absolutely. So I just I don’t I just call myself late make peace in drag. You look at that picture much much cheaper because cash always. Clash similarities between ch ch ch. Ch ch ch ch ch ch ch. I think my the way I normally start is with the phone call with the client. The client is going to call me and tell me hey Karleen I got this new product or that this product whatever it is and you know I want you to I want you to work on this for me you know. And so I initially go into my what I call the so what mode and I’m is very skeptical like it was. Come on very negative about it because I just need to know why this thing is so good before. I don’t want to do any research anymore I need the client to talk with me. And you know convince me that this is worth a month of my time and so I’m talking and saying I have this product and the x y. I’m like OK so what this all is a bunch of some other does that. Oh yeah. But no not like this because this product contains this nutrient. So what was so great about that. You know well the Nutri has scientific studies that show we can do X Y Z O. Or would that mean for me. Well I mean now you’re going to experience this and this and that or whatever. Really. OK when will I feel the results. You know of course we can’t guarantee stuff with people can those difference within you know days to a few weeks. And so we’re not going to feel when I go notice. Oh you’re going to notice that you’ve got you know new boobs and you got gray hair and you all right old fellow block your face and all is you know whatever it is I I’m listening and I’m asking the questions I’m really at this point as being a consumer and a very very skeptical consumer which I think is our market and I’m wanting to why do I get what I want to do this. So what is it doing for me. What so you know what’s so great about it. I’m asking where very simple question. And honestly back that conversation I don’t get the feeling that either the client knows what the heck he’s talking about in the we know what the product is going to do. You know over I feel like this is really legitimate stuff. I’m not going to say I’m not going to go any further than that. I’m going to stop right there. Now there may be some times when the client would say listen we’re just putting together the formulation and we don’t have everything clear is different. You know he may not have all the information clear but he does have that he’s already kind of research papers to show me that he’s got to do a lot of great things. OK I’ll take it and I’ll read it and find out about it. But initially the feeling is is more of a you know why why do I want to give you another month of my life. And why do I want to help bring a crappy product to the market place so I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to give you a of my life. This is going to be worth it to me. So that’s really every time I sign to partake I always have a kick off conversation with the client to better understand what it is. So once we get past that point and everything sounds good then the client will usually send me the starter kit and the starter kit can be very different. And you know depending on the client some of them give me tremendous amount of information some of them might be and keep asking for more. Some of them me binders of stuff sometimes it. It just depends what it is. But the start kit is going to hopefully give me the picture of the product what it is what it is who is going to work for the studies that support the ingredients. You know the price of any kind of if it’s been mailed before or how it performs if it’s a new launch I mean just all of the details that I would need to to really get into the product and then I just spend time just I start reading the start and I start reading stuff and I open up my file immediately and just start a I don’t fall every time I’m reading something that’s interesting in the data that they sent me I’ll either cut and pasted him electronically or just type it in there. It was hard on paper paper is bullshit. Klein has sent me or a bio the doctor all the information that I’m getting them going through it. I’m just dumping stuff into a coma. You know file with my own. Yeah. Oh that’s good. Oh that could be an idea for a headline. That would be an idea for some bullets that could be a sidebar. That could be this that could be you know I’m just I’m not making any sense of anything right now. I’m just taking it if I feel like I read something that I could go oh let me create cut some bullets off of this section of this go for this type of environment you know and just anything that pops up as as I’m doing my research. It just goes into my file and most of the time by the time I’m done with my research I’ve probably got about anywhere from 20 to 40 pages in my dump file and somewhere in that file is a package that I’ve got to choose the way I didn’t find it you know but somewhere in there usually I realize how I’ve done all my research for them are really sometimes I need help with the client not give me what I need. And I’m feeling stressed for time from time I’ll get a researcher to help me. It was a new trend I’m not familiar with. I may tell the reader look just give me a couple of hours your time I need it just give me as much information you can’t about this particular nutrient so I can understand it better. Sometimes my clients don’t want me to use any outside source. They only want to use their sources. So it just depends on the client and the product. And so you know I spent a week or two just reading and trying to understand the product. I go for walks every morning and as I as I was walking in the morning I’m kind of talking through what what you know kind of remember the night before from reading or just kind of ideas I have I have not call for my friends building it was a phone. I’m just kind of shook things off of them just saying you know work on his new project and it’s got this thing. What do you think about that. You know some people who are in the market and just you know I’m just talking every morning I’m just kind of talking out. Well I would I kind of put in our brain the night before and that’s kind of my process. And by the time I’ve gotten my research done that really a package in my dump file that got to go back now I try to find it. And so I just then asked if I have any questions so the clients are astute. I don’t use them at the meeting with the client and you send send e-mails like what does this mean any more of this or can I get this out ask for a sample of product. And if I can take it I will. So almost every month I’m taking it. How do you know that there’s a cozy stuff. Yeah I think the private and yes you are in on it right out. Function so whether they would take this. But anyway that you know so that’s kind of it. And then after that it’s just start getting into it. You know any ideas that sort of sound good I start trying to flesh them out and maybe they’ll lead me to a dead end that’s ok I’ll just turn around and go another direction and I just keep massaging massaging the when I start pulling copy right now you kind of move it up to like I’ll use maybe a letter in the letter section a move it up. Possibly the headline is in here and or you know just different things I’m doing as I’m kind of forming the package. One thing you always know you do all your packages can all consist of the same element. So you know you need a headlight you know really you know you need sidebars you know you use the bullets in there. We know you need to order form you need no guarantee. So all these they put maybe a pub pub no possibly. So all the elements that I know I’m going to have. I started looking at my in my dump file and seeing what can pull out to become those things. And it just sort of morphs itself. I am to this day is really I’d go with the flow I go with what I’m excited about it. There’s a point that I read about or when I want to kind of get more into I may start writing about it. There’s a story that comes to mind and my making my lead in my intro to you know and somehow to get in there and after this point everything just changes every package a little bit different. As far as how it is sometimes I got the headline immediately and bam I go with it sometimes the headline is the last thing I have. You know it doesn’t matter as I was a movie writing every day getting boring on it. So in essence you know wow there it is. Shut up. Absolutely. Because I’m like OK I need today I got to work on I’m working on Bulla’s today. I will do that. We’re going my sidebars Today I’m working on my guarantying my back and on working my special report my premiums I’m giving away. So I look at my day like that this day. That’s what I’m going to. Got it right. Unless some great idea pops in my brain or something else. I’m definitely flexible. But I try to get myself to say OK you know I got to get this back end like today we’re kind of a package and the whole day I just worked on all the special reports I’m giving away you know telling a story with all of them to get people to watch them. And so that was my whole day was Friday. You know back in copy you know because it’s very important you know to get that stuff done. And so by tomorrow I’m going to work on my sidebars because I’m getting I’m at a point now this is am I meant to the last week I’m writing with this so that I get my sidebar is finished. I got my clothes done. I got all the below guarantees all the back end stuff finished off so I can just start going back in and reading the whole package and seeing if it makes sense to me and all of the offers. The timing and everything kind of works so that’s that’s what happens for the last week of a project for me. So that’s what I’m doing this week. Josh. Just flash. Cash check. Why. Well things are reaching out to me. I’m glad we thought this was fun. I had it all in just you know if you want to be a copywriter be a writer just do it. You know I’m going get it. You know I look at the stuff that I wrote 20 years ago and I cringe going I cannot believe somebody paid me to write this old or both extract. And it’s true and you want to think that way because it shows you’re growing you’re progressing which you should be doing. You know that’s normal. And so you know for a copyrighted story not memory it can be intimidating because you think oh man I have to go and actually beat these controlled rabbies these copyrights who’ve been doing it for years. And that is not the case. You don’t have to be the best therapy writer to be successful in this business. You just have to be better than the control that you’re trying to beat. So would you want to do is you go out there you look at crappy copy that is where people are Maly and then you go to the go go business owner or the man the manager who got the say so to hire you and you tell them how to beat that package and how you package on a scale of one to 10 is fine. All you have to do is be a six year old and you’re a star. You just may just be in control. So it’s not a matter of don’t look at all is that these big old you know pieces you get in the mail they’re you know written by Cabrera’s. We’ve been doing it for a long time. You pay a lot of money doing it. Don’t get intimidated by that. Look at the smaller stuff you know locally. Look and see who your business is that you can get right for and think to get experience so that you can get better. And when you and your confidence will grow when you’re when you’re successful. So just go after those and they grow accordingly. And when you know you’ll find that you’ll blink one that almost inaudible my goodness I’m writing you know a lot of copy I’m writing for the clients you know but it is a ball. You know you’ve got it you’ve got to learn the skills that are involved to be able to write to those kind of clients. Check church stuff. Yeah. You can sign up right on my web site. That said it’s a free easy is called copy star I send it out when I feel like you so don’t pressure me. You didn’t get one every week. It’s great. Okay great. And for all the Web sites what does that and then you can take a look at it. Back in 2013. I was. Name the copywriter of the year. So if you want to see my acceptance speech is on the Web site. Well see my kid right. You got a daughter was on the Web site. Oh no. I’m using the Find side with my back to Oz. Yours is a Web site and so are samples of things that I’ve written. It just is meant to really help writers who are getting started to see certain things so learn some of the basics. And right now it hasn’t been on the Web site. When I say open the first year and then if you find you want more than you can buy more. But right now if you just described in a newsletter you’ll get a lot of really good advice. It is easy to read easy to follow and do. You know I hope you watch it again. Thanks for coming on the show. It’s been a real pleasure. You’ve really got to think about. Thanks David I appreciate it. Next day there’s another episode that actually looks just like Kylie just six seven different Betty The post Episode #152 – Carline Anglade-Cole On How To Assemble Million Dollar Copy Start To Finish appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Her mother thought it was a complete scam when she was flown to a live event by Derek Halpern. A year later, her mom still thought it was shady when she was writing for Ramit Sethi… And making real money! She brought some ideas from her journalism background that gave her a leg up. Which led to finding her niche in big personality brands. She has figured out the way you can imitate a client’s voice with a simple, easy system. In fact her entire freelance business is now run on simple systems… So she can focus on the work. This could be the most important episode of the podcast if you’re a freelancer. In this episode, you’ll discover: The first salesletter she ever wrote didn’t convert a single soul! The importance of attending LIVE events. (Abbey has made a career out of closing down the bar). The one idea she brought from her journalism career led to her “superpower” and created her own niche! How does she write her copy? Abbey walks us through part of her copy process. How systems have revolutionized her freelance business. (She provides her full workflow on her website – all 18 steps!). Mentioned: Abbey Woodcock Abbey’s Business Of Copy website Ramit Sethi David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody David Allan from makewordspay.com. We have another great exciting guest here today someone who is on the freelance route as a copywriter and has great experience – and systems stuff to put in place to help you with your freelance career. Abbey Woodcock. Welcome to the show. Abbey Woodcock: Awesome. So great to be here. Thanks for having me on. David Allan: Yeah it’s really great to have you on. You were recommended by one of the other people that we had on our one of our previous shows and came highly recommended for your story and your skill set. Everything of course. Now maybe let’s start at the very beginning. I got into all this superhero origin story. Where did you come from and how did you get into this mess of marketing a copywriting. Abbey Woodcock: Well I guess it depends on when you start counting. So my first ever long form sales letter was in seventh grade. I wrote a 30 page letter to a boy to ask to the eighth grade dance. So I was amazed by the zero percent were conversion on that line. So I’ve always kind of been a writer at heart. As you can imagine seventh grade nominee to know that not many boys are getting 30 page letters but. And so I dove into journalism first and learn two really important skill sets in journalism which was to write fast on a deadline and to write super clear. So I loved journalism loved reporting but the hours and the pay are terrible. So I had to figure out something else. And I discovered this land of Narnia as I call it online marketing kind of by accident and fell in love and I dove into copywriting from there. 00:02:00 It’s awesome. Now when you first heard of copywriting Did you have any idea what that actually was. 00:02:07 No of course like everyone I thought copywriting had to do with you know true trademarks in books and you know all that kind of stuff. 00:02:15 And I actually went to a an event a lot of events to learn about online marketing because even though I’d gone to college and got my master’s degree in communications they weren’t teaching any online marketing. 00:02:30 It was still very you know advertising and mass communications and that kind of thing. 00:02:35 So when I’d gone to this event it was like this whole world opened up of of all these people that were selling things online. So I knew that it matched my skill set really well. 00:02:47 You know writing clearly and succinctly and I was I’ve always been into behavioral psychology and that kind of thing has always been a real interest of mine so. 00:02:55 So it is a really great fit and that was I don’t know six or seven years ago now probably you remember one event that was yeah it was an event that Dirk Helprin put on actually. 00:03:04 And I won a ticket to it because I sent him in a funny YouTube video and he bought my ticket and my parents were convinced that it was a scam and that he was going to somehow try to swindle me out of money by playing you can. And then my first big copywriting gig was with raw meat Saidie and I was working with him for about a year and my mom was still convinced we flew out to L.A. for an event. My mom was still saying this is a big scam. 00:03:34 I’m like this is like beliefs profitable scam ever because he’s been paying me really well for a year. 00:03:38 So it all like the longest con in history. 00:03:43 That’s awesome. So did you get introduced to meet at that event. 00:03:47 Yes. That’s that’s where I met me. And then the rest is history. So I got into that world pretty quickly and I kind of put my flag in the ground as as writing for personality based brands like. Because people were amazed that I was writing for Rosemead. As for me some of his emails and blog posts and that kind of thing. And you know he’s had a really unique voice. And so it kind of became my my superpower is is capturing the voice of people that aren’t me and helping other copywriters do that. 00:04:20 So that’s that’s kind of what I’ve done since then working with you know Jeff Walker Ryan Levac those kind of really big personalities that people recognize when they read their email. 00:04:28 So right now at that point where was the company at when you brought on board at the time the content team was really small. 00:04:37 There was me a content manager who did more of the strategic you know editorial planning and that kind of thing. And then Remmy who is writing and he still writes a good portion of his own copy at the time he was writing almost everything. And so I found that that’s a really common transition period now that I’ve worked with a lot of these other brands. 00:04:58 Is that these people who love writing copy and who have really distinctive voice and are great writers and great copywriters and are now find themselves running you know multimillion dollar companies and are still writing like YouTube descriptions and you know blog post and it’s one of the last things that they that they let go you know they’re all onboard with delegating. But then when it comes to writing copy it’s a big transition between writing every single piece of copy to letting somebody else write your emails for you or your blog posts or you know even the YouTube descriptions little things you know because it’s it’s a really scary thing right. They built their community on their brand and their voice and their 00:05:37 personality so they’re really scared to let that go to. 00:05:44 Work. It’s like yeah definitely it was a process. 00:05:54 You know between when I first started working the amount that he was involved into I ended up working. I still I still do some work for them but I was a full time writer for about three years I think. And so by the end it was we just kind of found a groove. 00:06:11 But yeah it was a I think what what happened and I think this is really common I’ve seen this over and over again is they realize that they’re the bottleneck in why things are are are going late or why you’re doing launch emails. You know the night before they’re supposed to go live because they just have so much on their plate. 00:06:30 You know they’re running a company that the CEO of the company they have a big team to manage now. And so they realize that they’re they’re holding it up and that’s kind of I think the catalyst for letting go. And I think that that’s not unique to me or to anyone because I’ve seen that pattern play out over and over again and again. 00:06:54 Yes so I think it was the kind of the freelancers dilemma where I was really happy there. But I was getting a lot of opportunities. 00:07:01 People were certain to know who I was and I realized that I was saying no to a lot of things that were really interesting to me. And so yes and then I just. So now I guess three years ago two years to I don’t know. 00:07:18 Somewhere somewhere in that range I realized that I had a kind of a viewpoint that was outside of me had some opportunities that I wanted to I wanted to see how far I could take this thing. So and I’m still I’m still kind of curious to see see where I can go with it. 00:07:34 CH. Ch ch ch ch ch. 00:07:48 Well it kind of both. I I live events I always say are my natural habitat. 00:07:54 I’m just somebody that really enjoys meeting people so you know I’ve conversations with other copywriters are like What do you say at events like that’s never been a problem for me because I just talk to everyone so I’ll say all my clients came from bars at live events. 00:08:07 And so I wanted to learn more about this copywriting thing and I obviously was learning a ton from our meeting a great copywriter and I was reading a ton but I wanted to you know go out and see as much and attend as many events as I could. 00:08:22 And one of the most influential events I guess was Brian Kurtz who I know has been on your podcast before he put on titans a direct response and that kind of just opened my world to the whole you know the big big guns and directorates response and what the possibilities were for being a copywriter and all of the amazing things that are happening and the director response world so that was that was huge and I still am getting work from that event that was out years ago so that. 00:09:10 Yes. 00:09:17 Yes so it was you know all of the above and repeats and I think it’s one of his strengths and why he’s been so successful is raw meat is a natural teacher. He loves teaching and has his team members are. 00:09:30 That’s one of his things that he just really prioritizes with his team is continuing everybody’s education so he knew I was really into learning more about copywriting and learning about behavioral psychology which is where his background is so he was sending me books. 00:09:46 I mean probably every other week I’d get a book in the mail from him. 00:09:49 We’d have a conversation about something and you know he was sending me the classics the Robert Collier letter book you know breakthrough advertised all that all the x and that’s when I really dug in. In addition to reading you know getting on as many lists as I could of really influential people in all different spaces to kind of see what everybody else is doing and their e-mails and their sales pages and their launch sequences. And it was just a really intense time of learning because I had just never seen this world before and I’m somebody that can be kind of competitive. I have to be the best. And so I 00:10:28 just really dug in and wanted to become the best copywriter I could as quickly as possible. 00:10:34 So I liked. 00:10:45 Last time. 00:10:57 So yeah a little bit of both. 00:11:00 I’m actually in the last year or so have been way become way more systems oriented. Just because as my business has grown I can’t go with the light creative mindset of just doing things as they come to me. And so at the time I didn’t really have a system for it as a routine I would wake up and before I dug into copy I would open my e-mail and read all the emails that I was getting from the various lists that I was on. 00:11:28 And then at night I’ve always been a big reader before bed so I would I would read a lot at night and then you know in between there it was it was very haphazard of you know if I had a free minute I was I was reading up on different things or Rimi it would send me something or someone else. And so I didn’t really have a system for for learning it was just any time I had a free moment. 00:12:02 Ch ch ch ch ch ch. 00:12:09 CH Yes I think it started with I came from journalism. 00:12:15 Like I said so when I came into remits world there was two big things that I think made a huge difference and I realized nobody else was doing them. The first one was I came in and he is one of the first assignments he asked me to do was proofread one of his sales pages for a new product. And so I said yes sure. Can you send me your style guide. And hes like What the heck are you talking about. And I realized that in journalism I mean your style guide is like your bible you have the AP style guide which is the national standard and then each newspaper has their own local style guide which tells you like how the local school spells their mascot or what the colors are or 00:12:55 just all kinds of information like that and that thats on every single reporter’s desk is the AP style guide in the newspaper style guide. 00:13:02 And because I was new to this online world you know bloggers dont have style guides in general. So I created one. And so anytime that remet gave me feedback I never wanted them to have to give me the same feedback twice so what I did is created what now I call my Kodak’s persona. And so I use this now with all my clients. But its a style guide basically so you know Romney never says these words he always says these words he refers to his customers as students he abbreviates his courses in this way you know all just all kinds of things. Influences of his that 00:13:41 you know to be familiar with to understand references and that kind of thing. So it just ended up being this like 45 page document and their contents seem it team is still using that and that was just a huge way for me to shortcut the process so that he wasn’t making the same corrections over and over again I could reference the style guide when I tried to remember how to spell something or how to abbreviate something and then the second big thing was the content manager obviously was a little bit skeptical of me being brand new to the industry and so gave me kind of this busywork task early on and it was to go through and spend blogging now for 13 00:14:20 years. So at the time it was you know my 8 or 9 years worth of blog posts that he had to go through every single blog post and create a tweet saying so you know a tweet that we could tweet and promote like an old blog post and so I went through eight years of blog posts and wrote three tweets for every single one. 00:14:40 And I just wanted to kill myself the whole time. 00:14:42 It was like awful boring work. Oh it was awful. 00:14:47 But I’ll tell you what I knew more about the content on that blog than anyone in the company and they would joke about it all the time because I would say you know we’d be in a meeting and I’d say you know in January 2009 Rimi wrote on this exact topic like I’d like brainpan. Yeah. And so it was really interesting. So then later when I realized that we we ended up growing the content team quite a bit over those three years. 00:15:19 Ramita had a lot of growth in the company. I realized as these writers came on that that was like a really great task upfront is just to have them be super familiar with the backlog or content that you had. So it was creating systems to shortcut learning that and boy say you you learn the voice over time if you just work with somebody long enough but you can shortcut that by. I mean I was listening to his podcasts I was listening to his YouTube videos. I was listening to anytime that he had any audio and it was like his voice was on repeat in my head. So as I was writing the emails I could hear him saying the words and if it sounded like him or not. 00:15:56 I developed this guide to kind of shortcut that process for the writers on the team and then since then I have ive put it out on my blog for because it’s it’s just a huge need for copywriters to understand voice especially as these personality based brands continue to grow online. 00:16:22 Ch. 00:16:24 Ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch. 00:16:46 Yeah I mean it’s been especially so new copywriters tend to look for a position similar to what my position was for me. 00:16:55 You start out kind of as a content writer on a bigger blog to kind of grow your chops and work with with great clients and I’ve kind of defacto in the last six months or so started coaching some of these newer copywriters and content writers on these processes because it’s been a huge win for them because what happens a lot of times in these companies is the personality or the brand person tends to. They don’t even know what makes up their voice so what happens is they’ll hire a copywriter the copywriter will write an email the person will 00:17:36 say this doesn’t sound like me at all. They’ll rewrite it. The copywriter will say OK how can I improve in the future and they’ll give feedback that something like will make it sound more like me which isn’t helpful for anybody. So the copywriters feeling terrible because they’re not performing and they really want to be successful. The personality is not happy because they’re paying a copywriter that’s not producing anything that they can use. And so I’m kind of doing two things right now is consulting with these bigger companies on how to build up a system so that when they bring on copywriters they can be more successful. And then 00:18:14 just my contacts in the industry a lot of newer copywriters I’m working directly with them on how to build the skills so that they can come in and they can do some of the things that I did for me building a style guide as you’re learning which is like I said just really taking the feedback that you get and cataloguing it and taking you know idiosyncrasies that you notice and cataloguing those so that it helps you it helps the next person down the road. 00:18:49 Speech. 00:18:57 Yeah that’s a really easy question for me to answer because it was completely building out system so when I worked it was very much like a full time job. It was a work from home and it was flexible but it was very 4:51 type job for me where you know I would I would work on his schedule so you know he would have writing time say Monday morning so I would be available Monday morning to help him get something out the door or. 00:19:23 The deadlines were all very clear. 00:19:25 But what happened pretty quickly is because I had all this experience and launches. I started taking lead on launches for other clients so they would say OK you know we’re going to have this four week launch for this huge product and it’s going to happen on June 1st and you’re having this conversation on you know February 14th. And so then I’m like Okay great. And so what do you do. On February 14th for a June 1st launch like I had no idea on how to set up the systems to do that. And so when I asked business grew my first hire was a project manager to like really help me with the systems. 00:20:03 And it was an interesting process because he is a total systems guy and I am not. And so his systems were OK from 9 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. you’re going to be working on this e-mail from 10 a.m. to 11 you’re going to be working on the headline from 11 to noon you’re going to work on the subhead. 00:20:26 And it was just like I’m a freelancer like I don’t want to do a job like I want to go to Target at nine o’clock in the morning I’m going to go look it. 00:20:41 And. 00:20:42 I was like Yeah exactly. 00:20:45 So it was interesting because we were working he’d never really work managing a creative and I’ve never worked with a systems person. And so we kind of developed these systems that really help with creatives and how to structure your days and weeks. And now like I said this is now you know my other part of my blog is the system things because I had them write a guest post on my blog and just as kind of almost a joke and it was like blew up. 00:21:11 It was like the most reaction the most shares the most. Like everybody was like I need more this like systems because I and I had learned just by trial and error by missing a lot of deadlines by irritating a lot of clients by not updating them. And and so that was totally One hundred percent. The thing I was not prepared for is becoming a freelancer is is creating the system so that I could do my best work and still fit into the real world of deadlines and client expectations and all that kind of thing. 00:21:47 So fast things like this you know. 00:22:03 That’s why my writing. Is you know I asked my sister to watch. Ouch ouch ouch ouch. Ouch ouch. 00:22:30 Yeah definitely you know follows that that assembly. You know the research is so key and that’s where I spend so much time. 00:22:41 Because what happens is as I’m doing research to gather a lot of especially if you have a lot of client research you know market surveys and client testimonials and just you know dig in and I end up with that I’m not sure how it works for everybody else but I end up with kind of a crazy list of you know 50 different sound of things that I think are really interesting from various interview or articles or products or whatever. And then once I end up with the list of soundbites It’s like a puzzle it’s putting them in the most effective order that I can. And a lot of people say that they write the headline laughs. 00:23:21 I find the headline a lot of times for me reveals itself at some point during the process. I don’t spend a lot of time you know like what’s my headline going to be as I’m writing. 00:23:32 It’s always a line or a piece of information or a benefit that really pops and I’m like that’s that’s the headline that’s that’s the one right there. 00:23:40 And it’s just kind of rearranging everything. It looks like a mess. 00:23:46 To be honest I buy into special clients that have been copywriters in the past which tend to be a lot of people that I work with like I said these personality based brands so they know copy syllabi. You know what’s the status of the sales page and I’ll say oh you know it’s a mess but it’ll be you know done by the end of the week and they’ll say can I see what you’re working on now. 00:24:06 So my working document they’re like never mind just up they will click on it here. So. It’s like it’s just like laid out the roadmap for how. 00:25:01 You know something that comes across to us that way later what you’re talking about. Religion. I wish I would have this. And if you’re just starting out. You can just play something you should come to you know to get these things. You of course go to our website business copywriting is a pop up copy. 00:25:29 Doug thank you for coming on the show and sharing your story and sharing all these information and these great ideas to us again some time I’m sure everyone else for a podcast to look for yet another person coming on us hopefully may be dropped here today. Anyone looking to get in touch with me. Which of course will be back next week with another exciting episode of The post Episode #151 – Abbey Woodcock On Easily Imitating Your Client’s Voice (And Smooth Systems Every Freelancer Needs). appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

He started by building a website for his friend. Realizing that “something” needed to actually fill the design he created… He started cracking the old copy books. You’ve read ’em, right? Claude Hopkins – John Caples – the classics. In learning the traditional way and attempting to teach it to others… He found that students struggled and faltered. So he set about creating a different way to expose people to the world of writing copy. What he discovered was more than a little backward. So crumple up your preconceptions and toss ’em away. It can take a new perspective to create continued growth. In this episode, you’ll discover: How to avoid the many problems of copy-writing with this simple alternative. (Same thing taught by email superstar Matt Furey) How to pull off the hardest aspect of any copy project by changing where you start. The one freelance copywriting tip you can use to stop problem clients dead in their tracks. 5 red flags that should keep you from working with 97.5% of bad clients. Ferret out this one thing clients want and save yourself hours of frustration. Mentioned: Learn Copywriting Backwards Attention Thievery Bnonn Tennant David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey everybody, back for another edition of a podcast interview for you I think this is going to be good because we’re actually talking to somebody who’s in the future and that is because of the time difference between here in California and New Zealand is so great that he’s actually on I guess it would be Friday already. Is that right now are you going to have to tell me how to pronounce your name before I give a crack at it. Bnonn Tennant: Fair enough. So my name Bnonn (pronounced Non). David Allan: You know that’s what I was going to say. So I feel very good about myself. Excellent Bnonn Tennant, you’re in New Zealand and you’re a marketing specialist. We sort of met through a circuitous route, a person we have in common and it’s been a while I had you pegged for a guest a long time ago. But like anything of course we get caught up and those lists go missing and you know you sort of weave your way back around because I don’t really know that much about you either. Maybe we’ll start with your sort of superhero origin story you can tell us how you got this whole marketing thing that brings you up to today. Bnonn Tennant: Sure. Well my origins story starts in the pit of hell. An IT department. It’s where I had been working for seven or eight years and it got to the point that it was going to be some kind of postal or rooftop incident if I kept working that great at that time I had a good friend who runs a business to run the business is doing data recovery and he was complaining to me about the price of getting any website done and I had been dabbling in web design and I’d been writing as a hobby for a long time and I said to him you know I can do that website cheaply. And so I did. And then I thought to myself you know if I can pay for the website and he’ll pay for it like they do it for other people. And that was what happened. And of course I started out with design but as soon as I got into it I got clients I was like. So do you have any copy to put into this design that I made you and they would kind of look at me like what. No idea what they what I was about any of them that they would need to be some kind of and come to you and so I thought hey you know I been writing for ages I can do this I can do this. And so I I bought you know Ogilvy on Advertising and Tested Advertising Methods and taught myself copywriting and moved on from the great old copywriters to the great new copywriters – a lot of Ben Settle’s work influenced me quite a lot. Just looking at what people do as well you are getting on a lot of email lists as well. And that’s where I am now. David Allan: So you basically self-taught you didn’t really have a mentor you didn’t have anybody that you didn’t like… Bnonn Tennant: I didn’t no, I’ve always been it’s kind of my greatest strength and my greatest weakness. In fact just yesterday or the day before I realized that my insistence on teaching myself everything is what is holding me back at this point because I have a really good not to blow my own trumpet but it’s really good online course on copywriting I’m like in this process of trying to teach myself how to create online courses and sell them really successfully. And I’m in the process of also helping Danny Iny with his course builders laboratory launch. And I watched his webinar and he is a really good salesman. But his webinar was so good and I thought you know what he’s saying here is absolutely right. I’ve tried to teach myself to be an expert in something I don’t even want to be an expert in. Why don’t I just hire him to do it for me. So I joined I joined the program and I was proposing. David Allan: That’s great. I think that’s an important topic to bring up. It’s like just as you were saying that I felt some kinship with you because I think I’m one of those people too. I much prefer. And whether it’s for me it might even be arrogance or whatever to think I should be able to learn this. And I’m just being naturally curious which is why I got into copywriting in the first place. I think it’s just I’m a professional magician too. So the psychological aspects of magic really made me more aware of how people act differently usually helpful for any kind of psychology of this persuasion stuff hey you really really get a backstage pass to how the world really works. And then it got me interested in copywriting because I actually found out that something I had bought was written by someone who was actually famous in copywriting Gary Halbert, and that sort of put me down the dark rabbit hole of marketing copy writing which I’ve yet to recover from. So you started building these web sites and then you didn’t realize they had to put actual stuff on there that would actually persuade people to do what they wanted. So you started studying some of these classic books and were just sort of take it from there that you go out and use these web site clients to start to copy business. Or did you go strictly freelance you know and just copywriting and leave the website stuff behind? Bnonn Tennant: I kind of combined it really became something of my selling point for a while because there are a lot of copywriters who can do web design as well and well the ones that I’ve seen don’t do it very well. And the same is true of design as you know there’s a lot of web designers who can create good content for your site and understand the principles of you know this is. This is one of my big gripes with most web designers is that they’re not all that a website is a business asset. It’s more like a billboard to say my website is just something that has kind of looked pretty to impress people whereas I was always even before I got copywriting I understood that in a website has to actually make clients and said I want it to pay for itself. David Allan: It seems like a strange concept to some people. I’ve had that same conversation many times myself Bnonn Tennant: So for quite a while I would I would focus on both web design and copy and people would come to me for that. People still do have people that sometimes just recently ended up working for a guy in real estate but also being moving more into the copy side of things because of the fact that I want to teach my dad to teacher and my mom’s a librarian so I got it in the blood I guess I really want to be able to help people do it themselves because obviously there’s only so much that I can do for people. And actually our mutual friend is what really got me into that because she was kind of the first student that I had. And so that was how things moved and because I found that web design was really difficult to teach the average solopreneur which is who I wanted to help. Most of them just don’t have the inclination and the ability to do it that most people can write copy if you give them some good pointers because writing copy is not fundamentally different from cooking. David Allan: It’s a very very important point. People just getting into it like I got into copywriting through email marketing and you mentioned off air before we started this Ben Settle has been a big influence on you and it was on me as well and he was on the show here just recently. David Allan: But I got started with a course put out by Matt Furey and Matt Furey one of the things that I always sort of stuck with me was he would say you write-Talk. Talk-write. You know and I remember thinking that that’s just you know and there has been occasions where I have just dictated stuff into a recorder and then written it. Bnonn Tennant: That’s actually what I recommend to my clients when they first start copywriting is if you’ve got this kind of mental hurdle that school has instilled in you over the course of like 12 years that writing is this really difficult thing that requires special rules and you going to fail in the write…Just talk and then write down to this yeah and then write it down afterwards. David Allan: Yeah, transcribe it, exactly. No, that’s it’s a very good tip. But I think especially I think you may have a different opinion on this than I do. But for me e-mail was like a very easy inroad into copywriting because I think when I first learned about email marketing and I was like I can do this like this. So you know especially after Matt Furey made it so awesomely simple and just straightforward and was just a great teacher in that regard. So I thought man this is pretty I don’t know very very simple and it just clicked with me very easily whereas you look at copywriting books and stuff. Sure some of the older ones I mean aside from the arcane language and so forth they can make it seem like a very overwhelming and difficult thing Bnonn Tennant: You could kill a man with Drayton Bird’s Commonsense Digital Marketing. . David Allan: Oh yeah exactly. I have a book sitting not far from me right now is like Direct Response Marketing That Works by Joan Strockmorton or something and I mean that’s a book you could kill somebody with. So it can. I mean I have seen this through podcasting about copywriting and having people contact me thusly, people do experience a degree of overwhelm when they’re trying to get into copywriting and sort of get their head around copywriting. Bnonn Tennant: Well let me tell you one of the main reasons that happens is because most copywriting training starts with the headline because that’s the logical place to start at the top of the page. And what’s the hardest part to write on any piece, Dave? David Allan: Yes, the headline [laughter] Bnonn Tennant: So why get your students to do the hardest thing. So they don’t even know what they’re doing yet, that’s crazy. So I actually teach my students to start with a call to action. ‘Cause call to action shares about 80% of it’s DNA with a headline but it’s a very simple thing to understand compared to a headline. And there are so many ways you can do it compared to the millions of headline formulas out there. And I kind of move backwards through the piece and they get to the headline and by that stage they usually pretty much can do a much better job. David Allan: Right then they probably have a good idea what it is by then too. Bnonn Tennant: Yeah exactly. David Allan: You know I think for me I think the first sort of “course”you know I stumbled across was Ken McCarthy’s course and what he had you do is start with bullets. Which is a headline essentially. So you know that was a good way I think for me to go and I was used to writing bullet points from email and stuff to it but not to the not to the degree. So that was sort of how I stair-stepped my way up into writing copy but call to action That’s a great way to do it. That’s a very you want to make it as easy as possible to get people not to feel that overwhelm. Bnonn Tennant: Yeah, and to feel like they’ve made some kind of success early on as well otherwise there’s a high degree of probability they’re going to give up and probably one of my big bugbears is that there are a lot of great copywriters out there and they want to teach what they’re doing but they haven’t bothered to learn how people learn. And so they just teach the way that they teach themselves which unfortunately they are well-past the point of being able to know what to do. David Allan: Yeah. Oh yeah. No I think that’s why I’ve come across that in interviewing all different copywriters and stuff too. I’ve really come across that they are they’ve taken some really interesting routes and sort of. So if you feel like that’s the way to do it which everyone of course does then yeah you can make it difficult because that’s their personal story. I mean that doesn’t necessarily have to be your story and certainly isnt’t necessarily the best way. I’m a big fan of one of your fellow countrymen Sean D’Souza and he has a lot of ideas and stuff. Well you know I’m sure came from elsewhere as well. But I first heard about the way people consume things you know and how you move somebody through products so that they actually use them. Those are big you know big things I think when you take some a standard do you know the most famous copywriting courses are a real pain in the ass because it’s hard to move through some of them and I found myself it was difficult to move through some of those courses for me it’s got to be difficult for pretty much everybody. And I’ve heard that from other people. So for you or you know were doing the website thing and then you got these copywriting to put in there. What are some of the ways that you read some of these books you mentioned when you taught yourself was sort of a backwards way if you want to call it. That’s a term we’re going to use to look backwards when you teach people now is that something you used to teach yourself or did you figure that out later kind of thing that later. Bnonn Tennant: Kind of figured it out later – I honestly don’t remember exactly how I taught myself and as much as I was just devouring a lot of content and just trying to practice. I’m just you know writing as much as I could. And what I found was I had to say I’m a Christian and I’m really into theology and world views and apologetics that kind of thing. And I have a blog for that which I started several years before. And what I had discovered in the process of writing that blog was that when you write about stuff and try to teach it to other people you gain a way better understanding of it yourself. And so that was really what got me into the idea of teaching the first place. But as I was as I was learning this stuff I was trying to figure out how do I teach this back to someone because that was just the kind of mental model that I had put in place through that blog originally and that was just my work. And so I always try to bring everything back down to one of the fundamental principles of the fundamental principles fit together what are the connections here. And I get to decide – I have an analytical mind, I guess. And so I’m always trying to systemize stuff. So that was kind of how I moved in the direction of starting with the call to action. But my first attempt at teaching were not that way. My first attempts were pretty much the standard method which I see other people using because that was what I knew. And so once I started seeing the results that my students were getting and I realized that they were having issues early on – then I started thinking what am I missing here. Why. Why. Why all of these copywriting courses doing this if its not really effective. And so that was what moved me into learning about psychology and learning psychology actions. How did people actually absorb information what motivates them when they’re doing without learning how to teach them better. So on that kind of thing. David Allan: Right. That’s excellent. I think that’s a good way of going about it. I thought about what I would do differently too of offering you know copywriting training or training to people to help them facilitate their way through whatever it is that maybe they’re trying to learn or whatever course they have already. So I looked at a number of them or been through quite a few of them. But yeah it’s it’s interesting the way people consume information. It’s interesting when you get down to sort of the the utopia of what you’d like to have happen and then what happens in the real world. Bnonn Tennaant: You know they can write these amazing bullets and then they come back with this stuff that is super vague and you don’t even know what it’s talking about. It’s just getting that bad. You don’t want to break theirspirit. You don’t want to tell them that it’s terrible. David Allan: Yeah. And I think to that that’s part of become part of – and this is a part of a lot of things. This is not just copywriting this is just anything you’re trying to learn is that there’s some of this you know some suffrage or something that goes on where people need to suffer in order to become good. Yeah and that’s become you know sort of a classic school model I guess that we grew up with and then it’s been applied to other things other courses and stuff where people get beaten up and beaten down before they go actually learn something and see people learn things very quickly and I have to go through that in other fields and so forth. So there’s got to be ways like you are attempting here to smooth that process that maximum effectiveness is reached. Bnonn Tennant: I think that you’re right there is a certain amount of suffering that you have to go through. Yeah but adults tend to learn quite well. Through positive reinforcement as well. Do they actually want to do it. Right. So you know they really don’t need a lot of negative reinforcement. David Allan: Yeah. You see you seem to hear that. I mean there’s a lot of people who say you know maybe it’s the sensitivity of the people because you know when I got criticism and stuff and still receive criticism from people who’ve been doing this longer than I have I always look at it as an opportunity to get better. Bnonn Tennant: Definitely yeah. And I guess I would just I would just one obvious distinction between criticism and negative reinforcement. I think that the whole idea the whole mindset that criticism can be negative reinforcement is kind of pathological really. I’m so offended that somebody didn’t like what I wrote – it hurts me – grow up. Are you a kid? Take it as an opportunity to grow and get better. Bnonn Tennant: Exactly. I don’t know who said it but you know there’s a quote out there somewhere about the that not being a failure it’s just a learning you know success or a learning experience. Bnonn Tennant: Isn’t that Edison. I’ve learned 99 ways how not to make a lightbulb. David Allan: He learned one way to steal it, though. Bnonn Tennant: Always stealing from Tesla… David Allan: Whole other topic but you know you’ve worked now of course because you’ve been in this for quite a while you’ve worked with a number of clients and so forth that’s something we get into a lot of the shows is working with clients and how to smooth that process how to protect yourself for us. A lot of our audience are freelance copywriters getting into it. I’m sure as I do and everyone is basically welcome to the show we’ve got some horror stories about things that have gone really sour. Bnonn Tennant: One really comes to mind right away. So we get our horror stories. But if I had one tip that I would give freelancers and this would’ve prevented my horror story I think it’s this – don’t give free quotes. If someone wants to talk to you you’re the expert. So charge them to talk to you. So what I do is when someone called me and says hey I’m interested in doing this project I reply back and I say that sounds really interesting the way I work is I charge $299 for a strategy session and that makes me evaluate exactly what you’re doing. See what’s working whats not what you want to be achieving and that is make recommendations that shooting from the hip and just assuming that everything that you say is exactly as it is. If that’s cool with you lets book a time and very seldom do I get someone saying no I don’t want to do that. When I do. It doesn’t bother me because I know that they weren’t going to be a good client and before I was doing that I would get “clients” who would get on the phone with me for an hour and a half talk strategy discuss everything under the sun and then they would get off the phone and I wouldn’t hear from them again and I would e-mail them and say hey you know what were you interested in going into this product. Ahead with this project you seem really keen and they’re like, no we’re going to get our guys in-house to do it. Thanks. So I basically just given them an hour and a half of free consulting on how to get their guys to solve the problem. So that’s just not a good business model. David Allan: No it’s not. I think I think for me too. I mean I got into this through the conduit of Gary Halbert and so there was which I still didn’t adhere to stupidly of course too much my own regret is that he was very adamant about – and John Carlton being as you know a compatriot in some of these seminars I was able to watch the you know – all clients suck. Bnonn Tennant: You know that’s John Carlton’s motto isn’t it? David Allan: And John Carlton even in his one of his books I think I don’t remember which one but one of his books he says the best thing you can do if you’re going to do consulting is to be a dick. And I was like which is fine for me because I’m kind of a dick already. So I was kind of like OK I get a license to be a dick but really what he’s saying is exactly what you just said is you got to protect yourself because people will take advantage of you. Bnonn Tennant: I mean you want to be someone who turns off the wrong kinds of prospects and turns on the right kind. And if you don’t know what the wrong kind of prospect is well you just just bottle around until you figure it out because they’ll figure it out sooner rather than later you will find that there are a lot of them out there that people don’t like to pay the people who micromanage the people who like to pay in really small installments. People who like to get free advice. You know those kinds of people. People who are never hapy. David Allan: People who try to mark up your copy and send it back to you. Bnonn Tennant: Oh my goodness. David Allan: All those sort of classic because you come across and that’s all and it’s all those things and more when you’re operating at the level that Gary Halbert and John Carlton are operating at and it’s magnetised because it’s now or it’s magnified because now there’s so much money involved that people get really crazy. We had Ben Settle show not long ago when he mentioned the fact that Michael Senoff he had done some deals with early in his career and said to him I’m going to do a contract and you’re going to make you sign this Ben because I’m going to try and protect you even though you know it’s us in the partnership because when the money gets big people get weird. Bnonn Tennant: Yeah that’s right. David Allan: So I thought that was very good advice and yeah. So if people are – that’s the first thing you said was we want to set it up so that you’re paid for your time slot. None of this great information you’re letting on anybody who’s serious goes unpaid for. So what’s the next step? Bnonn Tennant: Well the next step is that you actually have a strategy session. If so what would you want to call it. It doesn’t have to be a strategy session but you have your initial call and you work through what they’re doing and you just kind of take it from beginning to end and see what needs work and often people will contact you and they’ll say for example a copy for a new home page and your impulse is to write back and say sounds right that’ll be x y z dollars. Let’s get started. If you do that a good percentage of the time more often than not you’ll get halfway through the project and you realize this guy didn’t actually need a new home page. What he needed was this outcome and he thought that knew he was going to achieve it. So what are you doing in your initial call is to make sure that that doesn’t happen. You’re know finding out what is the outcome. He actually wants. And then because you’re the expert you say all right this is the way that I recommend we go and get this outcome. And often it’s not the way that they thought and often that’s actually to your advantage because not only does it help them to understand the problem but it shows that you are more than just a peddler of a commodity. You’re actually an adviser to them. Bnonn Tennant: Well I’ve got an online course called Learn Copywriting Backwards and I’m actually working with as I mentioned, Danny Iny, in his course builders laboratory – every one of the problems that I’ve had to think about running back is that it’s just long. And a lot of people don’t want to learn everything that I teach and it’s kind of in that unhappy medium between being an advanced course that someone like you would want to take – It would be kind of a good refresher for someone like you a good perspective change. Maybe but it’s not going to teach you anything drastically new. And it’s also not really a total beginner course for someone who just wants to try to write copy because it’s too long. It’s four months. And basically I find people peter out after the first month. I want to break it up into something smaller where they can learn a key skill like email copywriting for example and they’ll get good results from that. And then if they want to come back to another module they can pay for that separately and they can pick up say sales page writing and this how to do that. So that’s it a moment but the actual cost itself is really good. I say my I haven’t got a lot of reviews – I’ve got ten up there at the moment for students that I haven’t had that many students through it. But the problem that I have with the reviews is that they look doctored because they’re all so positive. . I kind of wish I had a disgruntled student through there just to have like a two star view up there to show you that I actually do publish all the reviews. But you know that’s a good problem to have. David Allan: Yeah absolutely – so where can people find that? Bnonn Tennant: learnopywritingbackwards.com. Well it’s not exactly the shortest url but it’s simple enough. And of course you do that it’s kind of a pun because you do it actually backwards. You start with a call to action and you can run through the first five lessons on a call to action for free at the moment. David Allan: Awesome That sounds very good. Yeah. And where else could people get a hold of you if they want to talk to you personally or they want to see some other things you are into. Bnonn Tennant: We’ve mentioned informationhighwayman.com – that’s my ancient old business website and attentionthievery.com and just plain old Bnonn.com David Allan: Nice. Excellent. I’m sure we’ll get some people contact you because your personality and then your straightforwardness Bnonn Tennat: There is one other one if you’re a Christian and you’re into marketing I have biblicalmarketing.com which has been a very tough nut to crack as it turns out it’s something that I’ve kind of passionate about because I think that there is actually a biblical model for marketing which a lot of Christians find difficult because they feel like marketing is always sleazy and difficult and that kind of works against what they believe in. So that’s really to help people like that. David Allan: So you learn to market like Jesus, basically? Bnonn Tennant: Yeah pretty much. David Allan: That’s awesome. Well it’s been a great pleasure having you on the show Bnonn. I mean that’s just a lot of good information here that came here and your frank and forthrightness about the copywriting industry and clientele and so this could be a huge huge boon to all our listeners. Bnonn Tennant: It has been wonderful to be here, thank you very much. David Allan: Awesome, and for everybody else listening to us of course will be back with another exciting guest next week hopefully as informative and fun to talk to as Bnonn. We’ll talk to everybody then. For people who want to get a hold of me David Allan go to make words pay. The post Episode #150 – Bnonn Tennant On Going Backwards To Move Your Copy Skills Forward appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

She worked her way up inside a marketing company… Using what she calls the “stair-step” approach. After working on shorter copy projects she was finally given a shot. She broke through when she defeated a direct-response legend. Then she defeated a titan from the copywriting Mount Rushmore and his 7-year control. She has become known as a control-busting force and one of the best copywriters on the planet. All that and raising a family too! Her story is amazing and she delivers on this episode. So sit-down…plug in… And shorten your learning curve for getting to the very top of the profession. In this episode, you’ll discover: The “Godzilla” start to her long-form copy career and how to put yourself in the way of opportunity. How she defeated two copywriting legends and sent her stock through the roof. (After previous Boardroom brush-offs!) The one book NOBODY told her about when she worked at Phillips Publishing. (If you haven’t read it yet – get on it) One tip for freelancers that could rescue you from your parents basement while you get paid. The illegal lengths she went to in acquiring the absolute best knowledge. She was actually in the room when this legend gave his famous presentation. Mentioned: Kim Krause-Schwalm A-List Copywriter’s Manifesto The Girls Club David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey Everybody We’re back with another exciting edition of the podcast and we have a very special guest today. One of the A-list copywriters in the entire world. She’s the first female to ever get to control at Boardroom. And I’m really excited to talk to her about the new things she’s developing right now as well as all her control busting secrets. Kim Schwalm How are you? Kim Schwalm: I’m doing great, David. Good to see you. David Allan: Awesome awesome to have you on the show. So I guess the first thing we like to do on the show is we like to go back to how you got yourself all wrapped up in this mess – your superhero origin story if you will – give us what you were involved in before and then up to the present. How ever you wanna tell it. Kim Schwalm: Sure. Well I always knew I wanted to get into marketing but I kind of took some detours along the way and ended up working at a health insurance company pretty much right out of college and I was actually in the actuarial department because I was a math major of all things and finally got an opportunity to apply for a marketing job in a new division or newly created division of the company. That was I had always been there had been this money losing dog you know with you know being a nonprofit insurance company they had to offer insurance to everybody and even the bad risk but they brought this guy in who had a really strong direct marketing background and he saw a huge opportunity and he hired me. And you know being such a small department we know I got to wear every sort of hat you know from building a marketing database to learning how to write copy. And we ended up within three years. We turned that into the most profitable division of the company and actually split off into a for profit subsidiary. So I got exposed to a whole whole lot of direct marketing then and then I after some other detours there I ended up at Philips publishing which I don’t know if you know of Philllips publishing It’s no longer called that but it’s for several years it was considered one of the you know direct marketing powerhouses and has 100 million dollar company just built on newsletters you know selling very all sorts of niche oriented newsletters and direct to consumer newsletters all had personalities or gurus behind them. So I got in there in the early 90s and it was just when alternative health was taking off. They had launched a hugely successful newsletter at the right time that quickly grew to more than 300,000 subscribers partly due to Clayton Makepeace writing a kick ass launch promo and they brought me in to help scout out and you know market products the inserts to the back end because they knew there was this you know huge audience that wanted to follow his advice to make a long story short after six months what we found is that they really wanted his vitamins. And so I launched a supplement subsidiary called healthy directions. Actually came up with the name – wrote all the copy to launch it you know worked with a team of people within three months we had a business within three years it was $23 million in sales just going to the backend. And so you know so. So I’ve been in marketing jobs you know at least 13 years of marketing spring and I want a few other areas of the company but then I launched my first child and then I came back and it’s another part of the company but at that point I was really starting to think you know these copywriters have a pretty nice life. I mean we were you know the company worked with the very best you know A-level copywriters back when you know Clayton Makepeace, Gary Bencivenga when he was writing, Jim Rutz when he was still alive you know and I actually worked with some people when they were up and coming writers like Parris Lampropoulous and David Deutsch – you know kind of it’s kind of funny to think they were up and coming. Yeah. So anyway you know I just I remember having a conversation with my father I was like just a few months along in my pregnancy and unfortunately he was he had been diagnosed with with cancer which you know passing away a few months later that he was like you know maybe you should think about given that copwriting thing to try and so I took the leap. And here I am 19 years later. David Allan: Wow, that’s a great story. Working alongside up and coming people of the caliber you mentioned – that should be good for people to hear – because everybody starts somewhere… Kim Schwalm: Everybody starts somewhere and you know one thing I learned early on you should like working at Philips is like even the successful copywriters will have promo’s they write that either don’t work well or they don’t – You know they don’t beat the control me going have one control typically right. So you know people lose. And it’s OK. I mean no one bats a thousand and so that made me not feel like I totally sucked. You know when you know I did something to beat that control I mean you know it happens it happens to seasoned copywriters sometimes it has nothing to do with the copy but sometimes it’s just not the right approach. David Allan: So you’ve come renowned for beating controls. You were the first female to have a control at Boardroom, so maybe tell us a little bit a bout that and how exciting that was for you. Kim Schwalm: Yeah so I mean so you know I think I just told the story yesterday of somebody but you know I left Phillips and I had a you know I’d already established a good reputation within the company as being able to write copy. But I had to work my way up to getting to the point that I could write the you know the more high dollar royalty potential promotions I didn’t just walk into that because I always had written shorter length promos. And it’s actually something I highly recommend. Most people do. I mean I think it’s kind of unrealistic to think that you’re going to go from you know not writing copy at all or you know you know and then just suddenly you’re going to write this like you know full you know full blown you know long form copy and expect to get royalties out of the gate. I mean that’s that’s kind of a pipe dream. You know I kind of have to work. It’s just like anything you don’t just go to college and become like you know Vice President you know. So the reality is even with my seasoned career you know at Philips and my many successes I had to figure out what how do you do this long form copy and you know there wasn’t like an AWAI back then and there wasn’t you know people who would take me under their wing and coach me or you know so you know I had that just kind of figure it out and I had – So I had plenty of work right out of the gate. You know doing a lot of short copy renewals you know you name it I did a lot of work with former employer and finally I got a chance with working with KCI which was a big publisher of financial investment newsletters. I heard some very successful renewal campaigns and other types of backend campaigns. So they gave me a whack at writing a promo. I know you’re asking about Boardroom but I want to get to that. So because it’s funny because I also knew Brian Kurtz from boardroom you know just when I worked for said I had run into him around that time at a conference and I was like hey you know I’m a copywriter now and he was like OK whatever and kinda brushed it off until I was like, oh well… and you know that’s bad enough like I was at that awkward likeI was pregnant with a second child and I was like four months along. So it’s kind of like well if you’re pregnant or is she fat? you know you just kind of be you know the guy I like and what I really am. You’re feel like a big you know big L your forehead right. And so anyway my good friends at KCI said hey we’ll give you a whack at you know our flagship newsletter you know writing long form promos so I’m cool. You know let me give it a try. Rookie mistake. I am like yeah I kind of think outside the box I’ve got this crazy. You know it’s going to be brilliant right. Breakthrough idea and I convinced them to let me put like a big Godzilla like right on the front cover with this you know the monster that ate the economy or something and it actually didn’t do terrible. I mean I don’t think it did very well and it certainly did not beat the control and guess who had the control right then? Jim Rutz had the control. He had a killer control, alright. So I’m like OK well you know who beats Jim Rutz first time out. So like six seven months later though KCI said hey you know give you another whack at that. So like OK let’s take a little more conservative approach here. You know really like some of the other stuff that’s working out there. I ended up doing more of like an issue log and was just like looks kind of like an issue. Looks like valuable stuff doesn’t look like junk mail. You know but all you know is all direct response copy. And then that package beat Jim Rutz and I was like. Yes I was. That was like my big thing right. So then the marketing director I worked with at KCI shortly after that went to a financial roundtable meeting where all the publishers and marketers meet up and you know trade secrets and stuff. And Brian Kurtz runs and it was like well who’s got your personal finance control and he’s like Kim Krause-Schwalm and he’s like Brian could not call me fast enough so he get me dialed up on my cell phone and I’m like who you know say do you want to come write for Boardroom. I’m like sure you know. Finally – And so then I was when I got a chance to write a promo for Tax Hotline and Parris Lampropoulos had had the control for seven years and I beat that. And so that’s how I got to be the first female copywriter to get a Boardroom control that is you know get it’s all stepladder approach it’s like you don’t take that first job out of college thinking OK that’s going to be the dream job you like. You know what did those three or four things I need to do to get to that dream job right. So that’s how I got to that point. David Allan: That’s a very good story and you know those are some legendary people that you put down along the way – so to speak… Kim Schwalm: We all write so many promos and you know and there are and there’s and I will say and I’ve had people now who say I beat Kim Krause’s control you know and that’s you know and that’s all good. And you know sometimes you beat it when they’re fairly fresh and you know still mailing strong sometimes you beat them when they’ve been old and out there and fatigued you know. So much which habit they are you know they’re all you know people copywriters that I highly highly respect. And so it’s just it’s nice. And people always like to focus on that. But you know I think I think it is important for women to see that they can compete in this same arena and there are many women who are right now. I mean it’s…which is great. David Allan: Now you stated that you didn’t really have someone to take you under their winglike a lot of people do have now – and of course there’s people teaching copywriting all over the place. Probably much to some people’s demise, in some cases. For you, what sort of approach did you take to learn and get better when you were just learning yourself. Read the old books? Wrote out stuff by hand? Some of the things people say to do – what was your approach? Kim Schwalm: Well I didn’t know about writing out things by hand that probably would have been a pretty cool thing. I did study and read. You know things that were in the mail and back then when I got started it was mostly direct mail. I mean I did do some online thing is that there wasn’t anything like today you know. It was I got myself on as many mailing lists as possible and as soon as I just meant you had to order something through the mail like I would buy supplements which was fine of always took a ton of supplements anyway and I’ll get the latest love going out to my mailbox and just ooh look at all the stuff you know and I still have detailed files you know with all sorts of samples that you know that was always great to see what’s out there mailing what’s working reading and studying s – if I was writing a joint promo looking at getting some ideas inspiration. You know just you know just kind of learn. Know I knew enough about it having you know all those years of marketing and I also know working with writing copy and doing marketing at Philips and healthy directions so I knew enough to like. Oh ok. Like I get that now like I know why they went out on the front cover or whatever. So you know just you know constantly looking at what was working. The other thing you know I’m almost embarrassed to say but you know in all my years of working at Phillips like no one said you know you really ought to read Claude Hopkins…Really? So I literally I think it was like the first week that I started my freelance career I got and I still have it on my bookshelf. You know scientific advertising in my life in advertising and I read that and I was like wow this just now I know why I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing. Now I can understand you know why this work and that didn’t work and that you I mean it just put it all together. And then one of my first clients get to about Breakthrough Advertising by Gene Schwartz. Now I had actually been in the room when Gene Schwartz visited Phillips publishing and you’ve heard about this legendary talk that he gave I think some people sell it. Like I don’t know. For $1000. Yes. I was actually in the room before smartphones and I would love to have recorded it. There were only about 30 or 40 of us in it making all the people in marketing and management at Philips and you know Gene Schwartz came out and he spent this whole day heard the Butte Montana story – the timer with the 33 minutes and all that stuff if you’ve ever seen that Gene Schwartz transcript . I knew who Gene Schwartz is. So my client was like oh this is a great book but it’s been out of print for a while and I mean it was like silent for nine hundred ninety seven dollars on line I’m not going to pay that. So I literally took and this is illegal and I don’t Brian Kurtz can shoot me or arrest me. But I took I still have like I took the book and I literally photocopied every page. And I still have it. You know and I had like five or six copies now with the book you know from going to different things. But I when I when I go sit down to write copy and I want to refer to it I love my marked up post you know my little white my illegal copy my bootleg copy of Breakthrough Advertising. So that’s my you know I love that so. So you know there were some books that I just found incredibly valuable and just looking at the copy that was working. And then there were some few things that I did go to when I get a few things out like something to the direct marketing association on copywriting. Luckily it’s back when Herschell Gordon Lewis was teaching some of that and he was an amazing person to learn from you know just early on just some of the copy stuff. And you know words he’s such a wordsmith I mean he you know he passed away last fall as you may know. But you know you know that’s how I learn and I did have a few people who were very generous that you know looked at my copy. There was a guy Bob Hutchinson looked look at some copy that I wrote for a client gave me my ideas for a new approach that ended up netting me a controlled mail for 10 plus years. And then Don Houptman who was with profer write for Phillips and other major companies I’m sure he has retired by now but a few times he looked at my promos and he always refused to take any money so I would just ply him with you know nice food baskets and gifts and stuff like that. But you know some people did help out but there wasn’t. You know like I said that wasn’t like mentoring programs or you know things that I knew about anyway. David Allan: Well that’s great. Now. That’s you know people listen to this. That’s an excellent. Those books you mention of course are the – Be all and end all that people recommend. That’s an amazing story about your photocopying…that’s great. You know for you personally that you you know talk about Gene Schwartz he sort of had that rigid way of sitting down and setting the egg timer and doing oh I kind of think for 33 minutes and 33 seconds or whatever that you have to have a structure to the way you approached it like was it a daily sort of slight edge thing where you went out every day sort of you know keeping yourself fresh or was it more haphazard you know. All over the place. Kim Schwalm: I’d say it’s somewhere in between. What I found is I tend to have my most productive writing time in the morning. So that’s why I tend to schedule things like this podcast or other meetings or calls in the afternoon. But I’m finding too sometimes you know afternoon to be really good. I mean my life used to be a bit different. You know I. I one of the reasons I decide aside from loving copywriting and wanting the financial opportunity that it affords. You know I got into this right around the time I started having kids so I have and I always had childcare. You know when they were younger they did you know preschool and of course they did school. I didn’t home school them for crying out because you know I mean nothing wrong with that but I mean you know you can’t do two full time jobs at once right. So. So my schedule was often dictated by my family responsibilities in getting people up in the morning getting them off to school getting the dog walked you know etc. etc.. And I finally can get to my desk. I mean if it is up to me I would literally roll up if I could do it. I would roll out of bed. Probably just walk 20 feet to my upstairs you know spare bedroom office and I would just start writing because I do just kind of wake up in the morning and if I could get up an hour or two earlier I would do that except I always stay up too late. So you know so I would just say that it’s kind of has depended on that but that’s come down more in the last few years because my oldest is off to college. My other child is a junior in high school and she’s very independent except you know she still likes me to drive her to school but we’re working on that with the driver’s license. And just right to ask computer except for my dog should be looking at me like you’re going to walk me first you know. David Allan: That’s great. Now for people just getting into this first year or so into their freelance career. Lots of things you know we talk about things you did Did you think she should be helped you get to work. Maybe a little bit differently. Are there any sort of steps something people take now to sort of set them in a direction and cut that learning curve. Cut that time – maybe you wasted some time. Certain things weren’t productive or whatever. Just some tips for people. Kim Schwalm: Well I mean you know depends on where people are in their lives and their careers. If you’re just starting out if you can work or if you don’t mind the idea of working for somebody else you don’t work for a company that’s like a powerhouse direct marketing company you’re going to you’re going to just get paid to learn you’re going to learn so much. And when you leave. Oh you used to work and that could be let me hire you you know because that’s kind of the advantage I got coming out of Phillips publishing and Healthy Directions was wow you know. A) I learned a ton B) I had so many connections mostly not enough people outside the company that I dealt with the people in the company because they would know people who needed somebody and refer me or they would leave the company and go somewhere else and hire me etc. etc.. So that was huge. Now I realize nobody wants to do that but I had one young man who was I was coaching who helped me out and who still live in his parents basement and you know very good copywriter good potential. But I certainly couldn’t spend full time trying to teach him you know everything that he needed to know. And I said you know why well you know as much as I love working with you maybe you want to look into one of these companies so you ended up getting a job at Agora and he’s learning a ton and he’s getting paid to do it and he’s got his own place. He does have to live with mom and dad any more it’s all good. It’s Yeah his parents probably owe me a thank you letter for getting him out of their basement…You know we’re talking about freelancers who want to be successful and you know there are many many many more resources now. You know there are courses you can take. I mean I’ve heard the accelerated six-figure copywriting course from AWAI is pretty good. I think there are a few others out there that people are coming out with. But just being a good self you don’t necessarily have to spend several hundred dollars. I mean and again several hundred dollars is not a huge investment. But when you think about the potential payback. But you know like I said these books and studying what’s out there and you know that can teach you a lot and then just start taking on some work. I mean I personally never did spec work and I kind of. I don’t really recommend it. I’ve yet to hear of why. Well I did spec and it worked out great. I don’t I mean maybe there’s stories like that and I’m sure you know but to me it’s like why would you give them give it away for free. I don’t think …it kind of devalues you in the eye of somebody. So I would say you know even if it’s local stuff go to your local DMA chapter you know a direct marketing assistant here in the U.S. and I’m sure there are some other ones in Australia and other places and just network get some samples. Number one get your samples right. It doesn’t matter if people want to see have you actually written them before. And then you have something to show. So like one way that I broke into getting my first long form magalog you know I you know royalty type deal was. I had one client who he actually wrote all his own stuff and he actually had he’d studied under Ted Nicholas. I mean he was you not a bad copywriter and so he had a novella package she was using. And so I said you know this really might work well as a magalog and I can convert your copy and rework it and you know got all these ideas will turn into a magalog. And I just did it for a very low flat fee the you know no royalty but I got my sample right. And it actually did work better for him but more importantly I had a freakin’ printed magalog. So then someone called me from a supplement company in Florida and he’s like hey you know can I see your samples and I had my one little lowly sample but I sent it off. He hires me I got three times as much for that job plus royalties. This is one that ended up going on mailing for almost 10 years I wrote a promo for him. And so you know again step ladder approach David Allan: So if people want to get in touch with you – you’ve given a lot of people a lot of stuff to think about – things I consider the absolute fundamentals – advancing their copywriting career, I think you’re an excellent template, so how do people get a hold of you personally and how do these women connect with you and obviously the Girl’s Club is a good way… Kim Schwalm: OK so I have a website which I haven’t updated in like seven years but it does what’s my background info and my samples. And there is a way to contact me that way. Its kimschwalm.com. It’s k i m s c h w a l m dot com. And I also have like a little quick and dirty landing page. Put up a few months back and it’s at themarketingsuperpower.com. And if you go there I’ve got a free report and it’s for guys and gals. And you also get on my list and then you also will get an email within a day or two that will for the women you know invite them to join the Girl’s Club. Which is why I have a direct link to the Facebook page where you can go right to Facebook and you can look for the Girls Club. But just make sure you go to the right one because I know there are some out there actually up what they’re doing to me so but it’s the GirlsClub.club is sort of identifier on the Facebook page. And so but I would recommend go to the marketing super power dot com you’ll get a report called the A-list copywriters manifesto 7 success principles for creating winning promotions and has a real nice boiled down template for you know everything that you should do when you are sitting down to create a new promotion. David Allan: Awesome. Well that’s very good thanks. Thanks for that Kim, you’ve given us a lot to think about today – some excellent stories and I really want to thank you for coming on the show. Kim Schwalm: You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Dave. David Allan: Everybody else – that was very good, you should go back and listen to it twice, if not more. Some of thing things she said in there are so important and we’ll be back with another exciting episode next week. The post Episode #149 – Kim Schwalm On Control-Busting Secrets To Freelance Copywriting Freedom appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

He was a delivery guy back in ’96. Then he bought computer and within a few months had already eclipsed his pizza income. He’s back on the show and with a history of doing some freelance copywriting himself… The best of his freelance clients came from one single place. Sit back, crank up the volume and take notes because Terry is dropping some serious knowledge. In fact, I have heard a who’s who of successful online entrepreneurs all say they regret not taking this step earlier. So with the best time to get started on this having already passed you by (i.e. yesterday)… Now is the 2nd best time. Terry lays it all out for ya. In this episode, you’ll discover: The “almost-magic” ocean Terry found his freelance copy clients swimming in. (Highly-qualified and pre-sold too!) Start today with the “ice cream taster” method that pulls them into your world. (They learn to know, like and trust you)li> THE place Terry spends his money (and his clients) to bring in new people…even before Facebook. strong> The 3-step template to get you started making that cash register ring with new copy clients. Use this awesome 5-minute method to generate new clients, products and services. Every 6 months (template provided). Mentioned: Coach Terry Dean Terry’s “Autoresponder Alchemy” Ben Settle David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody. We’re back with another episode and today we have an internet marketer from way back. Somebody I first heard about through Ben Settle and Terry Dean from Florida. How are you. Terry Dean: I am doing excellent today. David Allan: Awesome. This is a real privilege actually because I have read a lot of stuff I’ve gone through a few of your courses. And I you know like I said – I came through it – Ben Settle was the first person I heard talking about you and I got into this stuff late as opposed to the rest of you. But. So, bring us up to speed a little bit. I know you started in like the mid 90s or something that’s going to be give us the quick superhero origin story. Terry Dean: The quickie version as I started back in 1996 I was delivering pizzas for Little Caesars for eight bucks an hour. Heard about the Internet wasn’t a whole lot going on in 96. I heard about it. I said you know what. This is something I think I can do when I bought my first PC ever taught myself to use it. Got online experiment with things like CompuServe and basically within the first few months I got to earning a full time living online which of course I was delivering pizzas for a living so when I say a full time income I don’t think I was earning a doctor the level income I was beating the pizza delivery income in a few months and have discovered one of my biggest secrets was about six months and I discovered just how closely related my income was to my e mail list as my e-mail list grew so did my income they went side by side. So we’re now talking 21 years ago and ever since that day my e-mail list has continued to be the driver of the majority of my profits. Since then I’ve helped thousands of clients and I’ve actually worked with hundreds of people directly one on one in all different types of markets. So that gives me a real broad base experience it’s kind of funny. I really enjoy the one on one work with clients because that means I’m not just in the Internet business field. I get to be in the tennis field in the golf field and selling to chiropractors and all these different markets that I’m helping clients and it gives me a lot of feedback. It gives me a lot of stats across all different markets seeing what’s really working online what’s not working on line. David Allan: That is awesome. That was a great superhero origin story of the pizza delivery guy. And today we’re going to talk a bit about email marketing and then we’re going to segue into a little bit about continuity products and for you know the majority of our audience being made up of people who are already doing copywriting and who want to jump into copywriting or that kind of thing. Freelancers. Maybe we’ll touch on a few things that you used find clients for your marketing strategies. So let’s start with the email thing because I’m most familiar with the idea of a product called autoresponder alchemy. Maybe it will just jump right into the deep end of the ocean. E-mail still remains the most profitable aspect of – Online Marketing. Terry Dean: And I would especially say for the for the audience’s listening to that as being copywriters and those who are attracting clients their email list is your That’s basically your little your ocean for bringing in clients – comes from your email list. David Allan:Right. So if people are getting started or haven’t built up a list is sort of the first few things they should be doing that maybe people are getting wrong because I’ve heard people in the past on their podcast people have gone on now to do very well sounds and almost universally one of the first things they said with their interviews sort of after they became quote unquote successful was I should’ve started my email list earlier. So what should people be doing. Terry Dean: Well the best day to start your email list was yesterday and the next best day is today. OK. So it. So that that means that you really need a start your email list now. The very first thing I would tell you to think about is exactly who you want to have on your list which is if you’re a copywriter any type of consultant that means I want you to think about your ideal client who is the perfect client for you the A-plus client who pays you on time who would implement whatever you teach Do you know the type of client that when you write for them they actually use the copy you wrote. That’s a good client. And they pay you for it. Well I would go back a few years and I say for years about 10 years ago I did some copywriting for others…actually it is more than 10 years ago maybe 15 years ago I was doing copywriting for clients and it was so annoying to me because I did I had an upfront fee which I always got paid the fee. But then I also had something of a royalty or pay for results and I didn’t I didn’t collect any of that. Like 70 80 percent of the time because they didn’t do anything. David Allan: And that’s shocking to a lot of people because I have experience being a copywri myself. That’s what I do. I would say mostly sort of moved into more marketing strategy as of late.. But yeah. I remember when I first heard about how – Gary Halbert was the first person I heard talk about that and I thought – that’s brilliant. But then later in that sam eseminar he said your hopes of collecting that are like nil ’cause clients suck , you know, or whatever he said and I’ve experienced that befores and it is a little surprising – but this is a common thing that people who write copy for others experience. Terry Dean: It definitely is. So I want you start thinking about the client think about the clients that you have right now who are the clients that you want you want more of those clients and start describing them what you know about them where they hang out what they do you know where you best resonate with them. So hopefully if you have clients right now you’ve spoken to some of them on the phone you’ve gotten to know them a little bit you’ve seen what resonated with them. You had discussions maybe they told you some of their stories if you’re writing copy for them you might have written some stories for them and all these pieces I’m just talking about getting to know the audience that you’re going to go after because that’s the first thing you want to do is think about email lists I don’t want to just bring anybody on my list. It might be nice that you know your mother or your brother or your sister want to join your list but they’re not your potential clients so they don’t really count on your list except for the numbers. What I really want are my best clients on my list. And so I’m I think about that first and then I’m going to think about giving away something free. And we talk about it as a lead magnet something that we give away when people join a list. I’ve actually started using different terminology lately and I call it the free preview. That means I want to give away something that is not only free and a value but it’s a bridge to what I am selling and I want you to think about it this way if we go to the ice cream shop they might give us a free scoop of ice cream. OK. So we go through we get the eat the free scoop of ice cream. It’s only good enough to get us hungry for more. That’s all they’re doing. It’s a bridge to what they’re selling. A free preview – your lead magnet – the same thing it’s a bridge to what you’re selling. So if you are a copywriter that means it’s going to have something to do with copy or something to do with conversion or some other little tips about things so. It depends on what of course what you’re offering what you’re doing what you’re selling you’re going to offer something that leads towards what you’re selling and a mistake that I think a lot of people make is this depends on what you’re selling. But if your product or service. If you have like a lower cost version I try to sell it immediately after somebody joins the list. OK so if the only thing you offer is a ten thousand dollar in-person coaching session where we’re probably not going to sell that the first day someone joins your list. I understand that. So take that other side. But if you sell a ebook or you sell an online course or you sell a discovery call maybe you give a free discovery click all your self-discovery call $100 and maybe you do Web site review for someone on the way bringing them into your services. All these types of things you can do things like this immediately. And so the process I like when I set up an email list is I set up OK we’re going to give away something for free and the process that I mean there’s a lot of different things you can give away you can give away a PDF – you can give away a video you can give away at audio you know almost doesn’t matter. Audio is sometimes the easiest because you can have somebody interview you about the methods and now you have an audio to give away a podcast episode could be something that you give away. David Allan: In fact that’s what I do. On my own website I give away the first month of a 12 month continuity program. Terry Dean: I give away. Well since I have a print newsletter – I sell a monthly print newsletter I give away an issue in PDF version first from my print newsletter. David Allan: And that’s what Ben does as well. That’s the model he uses. Terry Dean: Yes. So that’s a free preview and and what I recommend is you give away the freebie. So we have something of value that should give it away. It’s a bridge and then we immediately go for the offer right after I have a bunch of clients for example. Probably the most tested for paid traffic is we bring someone onto the list so we give away our freebie on a list and then often we’ll either have to download the next page or even better in many cases and have the audio or video on the next page that we’re giving the content from. And then immediately underneath it we have a link over to our first offer. So we’re going for the offer immediately after someone joins the list. Again lower cost I said $10000 a coaching program probably not. You know my monthly mentor club print newsletter. Yes a consultation call it’s a hundred bucks yes you can do that immediately. So you go for the sale immediately. And we that’s your first set up process. And don’t take a long time getting something to give away as I said if you don’t have anything right now to give away do an audio because it’ll be fast to put together the audio. Get that up and start collecting leads and then what you’ll do with those first few emails. I would even tell you to sit down and say hey let’s do an entire autoresponder sequence in the beginning. You mentioned I have a course called autoresponder alchemy but it teaches you know how I like to have especially in the beginning a sequence when somebody joins my list that introduces them to me introduces my products things like that. But since you’re just getting started today on a list I just say get people on lists and start sending an e-mail in the very beginning. Practice one e-mail a day just to practice it. David Allan: That’s something – the product I just mentioned with Jon McCulloch – when I was first looking around for examples of people doing daily email – you were one of the people. Terry Dean: Well, see, long term. I actually don’t do a daily mail at the moment because long term what you’re going to do is you’re going to look at the broadcast to do well you’re going to plug those back in as an autoresponder. So you say you don’t have to be there every day. David Allan: There you go. Terry Dean: I have clients right now who have autoresponder sequences that go out three to five years. And even my own auto responder sequence I have autoresponders that are programmed out for a very long period of time and then I send usually like new broadcasts like Tuesdays and Thursdays. David Allan: So that would be multiple times a day that people would be getting stuff? Terry Dean: A lot of times it’s multiple times per day – A lot of time for clients I’ll tell them to just programs that the autoresponder doesn’t mail out the two days they’re mailing if they’re doing broadcast. You can do multiple times per data. People think you can’t – Actually sending in the right system you can. The first thing. So we’ve got our lead magnet for people on our list – our free preview. Then the next thing we need to do is obviously we need to start getting people on the list for that. Of course we could go into every type of traffic method that you can do. I mean there’s tons of traffic methods but I lean towards starting off with paid methods in the very beginning just because hey I want to get things moving. The easiest one to mention is probably Facebook because you can target just about any market in with Facebook advertising and drive them over to an opt in page. David Allan: That’s become very popular in the last 10 years – five years – whatever it is…that’s become a very popular model – Facebook advertising. Terry Dean: Why is my actual favorite advertising at this moment is actually YouTube advertising. With Facebook in second because YouTube seems to get a little bit more qualified leads. So when I read it because people actually search for your subject instead of us interrupting them. But I like Facebook because Facebook is a little easier to start with and you don’t have to start with a video. So it’s a it’s an easier start method and you can pretty much target any audience in Facebook like I was just helping a client recently and we were looking for what we’re going to target we wanted to target female entrepreneurs who were like 40 to 60 who read entrepreneur magazine and were interested in a couple of other things. I’m not going to give his whole market but we matched it up so there’s like two three qualifications for this audience. And you can target just about anything again to hit the ideal client that you want. Starting with Facebook advertising. So we had traffic method. We have our lists we need is now start sending out some emails and I like to give the simplest model for email to start with and you know from my course I actually give a lot of different ways to do things. But the simplest model really just comes back to story. Start off with some type of story some type of hook connection give a tip which I call the moral of the story and then transition into your offer and pretty much although there are so many different ways we could do it you could say 98 99 percent of my email somehow hit that model. Story – tip – transition. That’s the model and then story could be as simple as hey I was watching my little 16 week old puppy was biting me like I just wrote an email recently called “Surviving the land shark” – which is about my puppy biting me. At that time I started at marketing email about my puppy biting me and I talk about the fact that he’s biting me and they call him a land shark. I then talk a little about training dogs . Again, internet marketing list I’m talking about training dogs and how all of a sudden they just seem to get it. See you teach the kid. Teach them that this and they just seem to get it oh you don’t want me to bite you like bite it. It just happens one day that all of a sudden figured it out. So even though the tip comes with all my marketing our online businesses are very much the same way because we will often be doing the work you’re trying to get started you’re trying to build that list. You’re sitting at your very first emails it seems like nothing’s happening that all the sadness like you hit that breakthrough and it’s like there it is. Now we get the momentum and everything starts working for you. And I’ve seen that so many times that it’s just that little in that place the lessons like an inspirational lesson and then I hooked in from there right into my monthly mentor club and offering how each month I’m going to give you guidance to help you push forward and hit that breakthrough point. So it’s just it’s a story tip and then tie in to an offer that’s the basics of doing the e-mails. David Allan: Yeah, I think for a lot of people – because I have taught – because I didn’t want to write them myself I’m generally lazy so I took money to tech a few clientele what you just talked about. One of the exercises I like to do was to – they would throw topics at me and I would just make a story transition to transition to their products. So they could see you know you really could really take anything. That’s what I was trying to get through to them. I think people think that their stories have to be like you know. So – you’re not Tolkien – you need to just do it. And you don’t want it to be just anything because you want it to be exciting. But like I’m excited because I have a dog. My cousin has dog I’m around dogs constantly. Now I’m interested in what Terry has to say about dogs because he talked a little bit. I mean this is interesting to me… Terry Dean: The stories could be anything. The way I like to describe it is you can go back to like story through your childhood things like that. And I don’t get people like story starters a bunch of different questions you can ask yourself to start with a lot of childhood things like you know wait where you went to college things you learned in school what’s up there from your parents but you could be as simple as what would you tell your spouse this week or what would what happened today that you tell your spouse, same thing you’re just going to just kind of chatting with people. David Allan: Then people get to know who you are and – and what you’re – what you’re like. Terry Dean: Exactly. And they get to know you and that’s where they make a connection with you. They build a relationship with you because you tell those stories. I will get once the way that they’re really good for when you start off. I like keeping things you might tell a story multiple times until you get it the way you really like it. And that’s your origin story where I gave you thequickie quickie version which was $8 an hour Little Caesars. Went to business. I mean I could of course extend that way out and tell you a lot more from the origin story but I really like clients to do an origin story somewhere even in the first week. That’s one of those messages I like to pull from the broadcast and put it in the autoresponder. One of the first week messages of the origin story and why you do what you do. David Allan: And that’s a very very good tip. I sent an e-mail out. Yesterday. I keep most e-mails I think you may have ideas about this and I’ve even got these ideas from you about keeping them sort of evergreen if you’re going to put them in the responder – autoresponder and not having a time element to them you know the email I sent out talked about the Super Bowl results of the Super Bowl because of course everyone’s talking about it. And I have my own opinions about it. So. And that’s something I used to tie into another event that’s going on. Another event. So you know it’s fun when you get people listen to this – and Terry’s been doing this forever but you just it’s really fun. Terry Dean: Well I like to say what if you’re not having fun no one else is either. Because if you don’t have fun writing it. No one’s gonna have fun reading it. And I actually think some of the most enjoyable replies I get to my emails are when someone mentions that I made their spit their coffee in the computer or something else that they did just a little joke because I don’t tell a whole lot of jokes there is just I’ll throw something in. I have a little dark sense of humor that pops in once in a while. To the emails – and it is just you’re having fun while you’re writing the emails and that’s all you can think of. Think about just sitting at the table talking to someone your dad at the coffee house you just having a chat with your friends. David Allan: You know I already had people – Patriots fans on my list e-mailing me. You know after I sent that out. Terry Dean: The funny thing is you probably have Falcons on your list and they don’t get mad but they could send you something to rib you right. David Allan: Exactly. OK so people got their lead magnet and they’re going to run some traffic to it starting to get into writing these e-mails. What are some things you’ve done maybe with your emails that maybe aren’t standard – that people maybe haven’t heard before maybe a little outside the box. Terry Dean: Well the thing is since I’ve been teaching this so long was the thing that I do they probably heard from before because I talked about someone else taught them. I think for example you’ve probably heard this that which isn’t true anymore but people still quote it. A dollar per month per e-mail. OK. I said that at back like 97 – 98 OK. And it was true back then. Right. That’s not true. Now because now I have clients who are you know on the low side. If it were a really big list it’s not a targeted they might be like 10 cents. Other people might be earning 20 bucks a month for e-mail because they’re very targeted in a business to business niche. That’s an example of what they might have what they got probably from who knows where it came to them from. But let’s see. So what am I doing that we do really uniquely that they haven’t heard before. Well they probably heard this but it’s hard to tell what they have or hadn’t heard. One of the emails I like to have early in autoresponder sequence also. Usually within the first week so this is some of this it is an I need your help email. OK. And they probably heard the I need your help strategy which is I do a subject line I need your help and you can do that about every six months or so to your list and I use that exact subject line in all different types list. I need your help. And in this e-mail you simply are going to start up saying hey I want to provide you with the absolute best information I can with my e-mail list. So what is your biggest problem or your biggest challenge with X and you just fill that in with your subject. And all you have to do is hit reply. Hit reply to this email and I read everything that’s sent to me. That’s the email – that’s all you’ve got to send on this and that email is awesome. The reason being is that email people are going to actually reply to it. They’re going to send you all kinds of ideas for your future e-mails. But there’s two other purposes to it too. The first one is is what we talk about people white-listing your email. But one of the best things you can have in most e-mail services is for them to reply to your email. Because now G-mail or whoever we’re talking about sees this person replying to your emails – Hey look. They’re actually responding to this person. That you are much more likely to land in their inbox. So that’s another reason to do it. And the third reason to do it is especially my client who sell higher ticket services. So if we went back to the copywriters again if you’re copywriting and you’re not doing this then you’re crazy. The reason being is because people are gonna respond back to this. And if you have a huge list you can’t really reply back. Personally everybody if you have a small list you should reply back personally everybody even if it’s just to thank them for answering it or to mention that you’re going to do an e-mail in the future. I’ve had a lot of clients. They get those replies back. They start a conversation and they make a lot of high ticket sales just from the dialogue that starts from the e-mail you know. And so that’s the thing is don’t just push them all to the side. Answer them. Reply. Keep your responses short especially if you have a offer that’s $500, $1000 or more on the higher level. It’s going to be worth it to you to have that direct dialogue. David Allan: If you’re good at selling it’s often easier to sell fact to face than to have to write it… Terry Dean: You start the email and you go back and forth in the email. You might go onto the phone from there. But I mean it’s people are going to be shocked that you reply. David Allan: They will be. Just recently I bought something – couple of ebooks – and the owner replied back and said “ I think this particular part would be especially interesting to you” – and hey, I’m talking about it now right? So it had a big impact. Terry Dean: So I’m sure that if they make another offer that you want you will be one of the first people in line there. David Allan: So you know you talk a lot about segmentation. Taking those hyper-responsive people and segmenting them – what sort of ideas do you have about that kind of stuff? Terry Dean: Well I have clients we do a lot of segmentation to their list. We do it more in the autoresponder sequence than we do in the broadcast. A lot of times what we’re doing with because again it comes back to work versus reward. OK so how much work is it to do the to to segment all the lists. And if you actually start with segmentation don’t be thinking about all the different segmentation you can do you’re just go crazy and you’ll never get any of it done. What you need to start is start off your list. Just writing e-mails to the biggest you know best ideal client. In the beginning. OK so gets to get started with this. Don’t even think about segmenting until at least you do it like and I need your help and then you find that some of the audience is different. Like I said Don’t think about it till then. And then once you’ve done something like that where a lot of my clients have used segmentation is we’ll use it near the front end asking near the front end of a list we’ll send an email like and I need your help email but we’ll give them specific responses so like here’s five different things which are these five sentences most accurate for you. OK. You’re most interested we’ll just say for internet marketing field. Well I’m most interested in Facebook traffic why I’m most interested in driving more profits from my email. OK and we give them a list like that. And whichever one they click takes them to an autoresponder sequence that you have prepared specifically for that subject to make an offer for that subject. You can do something like that on the very beginning. And again I’d recommend to you not to do that if you’re a beginner. The reason being is I want you to have all these e-mails when you go do that type of list. I want I would want to have already written all those emails as broadcast and I can easily put together that segment and autoresponder series when I do it. David Allan: So down the road maybe like six months to a year later when you have enough emails to put those segments together. Terry Dean: Yes. And so you do that in the beginning of the list. You then segment them off then you segment in the autoresponder – then eventually usually drop them into my all everybody into my broadcast again as well because let’s just be serious. How many people in their business have enough time and energy to write broadcasts for three different lists over a few a few really big companies get a lot of employees do it. Yes. If you’re writing your company you’re writing for your business you’re not doing it. So using the autoresponder sequences we make it easy. So instead of segmenting me off a little bit in a different direction. Let’s talk about where a lot of profits come from for my clients. And it’s funny because I just again I’ve been doing this forever. But I went through and looked at my most successful clients – we’re talking six seven eight figure clients and what we were all doing in common with our email list. And one thing that we all had in common was we all had a continuity program that we promoted heavily. To our email lists and I’ll bet you that a lot of the people that you respect who do email lists also have a continuity program that they promote heavily to their email list. David Allan: Absolutely, 100% of them actually. Terry Dean: And there’s a reason for that and I call it the freedom quadrant. OK. And that is first of all with email list. A lot of people have e-mail lists that they don’t use. So I think they would like that first god or they’re not making money. Pretty much any money at all. We have an e-mail list is not working for them. OK. They start learning how to use their e-mail list and they start make it from money. That’s where they move to the next level with plug in a continuity program. OK and they’ll start seeing if they know how to use e-mail. They start using that e-mail to promote a continuity program and they can start seeing a lot more money coming in. Then there’s another aspect of that where they learn how to use the continuity program as well. And what I mean by that is again when I look at my clients numbers – the continuity program the actual fees from the continuity program usually equal to. Half or less of the profits we’re getting from the continuity. And what I mean by that is think about it this way your best subscribers pretty much buy everything that you offer to them. I have. Several subscribers who regularly email me and ask me if there’s anything new that they missed buying. OK. So those are the hyper-responsive people who have chosen your email list when you plug people into a continuity program to the continuity program correctly. That’s going to be magnified version of that. OK. Because then your members are going to buy everything else you offer. And I mean even in consumer markets now this is kind of normal in business to business markets. But I have clients in consumer markets where we’re selling 750 to $2500 little workshops in consumer markets. Things you know things like golf and things of those nature is not just business to business markets I mean we have $15000 coaching programs things like that in the business market but we have all these high ticket services and you’re going to find that in most cases it comes back to the 80:20 rule 80 percent of their buyers of high ticket offers came from members of the continuity. David Allan: Terry, if people want to get a hold of you and get involved with you. What sorts of things do you have people can get involved with? David Allan: Well this might surprise you but I’m going to recommend that people join my list over at mymarketingcoach.com/free… mymarketingcoach.com/free and the gift I have for you are seven unique ways to create profitable emails even if you’re not a writer. What that actually teaches you Step-By-Step say it’s a free copy from my paid newsletter that teaches you seven different ways to use stories to write your emails. It also comes with several cheat sheets include putting Sixty-Four story shortcuts which are a whole bunch of questions to help you come up with your stories. Five proven templates for subject lines and it gives you my step by step for writing the emails that I’ve used throughout the years to basically produce millions of dollars online for myself and then tens of millions for the clients. I’ve worked with. David Allan: Thanks Terry, and for everyone listening we’ll be back with another episode hopefully even half as good as the one Terry just gave because that was amazing and we’ll talk to everybody then. And for people who want to get a hold of me – David Allan – go to makewordspay.com The post Episode #148 – Terry Dean On The Freelance Copywriter’s Best “Client-Finding” Friend appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

The Doberman is back. Once upon a time he lived with Gary Halbert… In Costa Rica. Aside from working alongside a master, Dan cut his teeth writing for himself. His own supplement businesses. So in 2012, when he went freelance… He made some rookie mistakes. He had to hustle up copy gigs because he no longer had an income after selling his business. It was a grind, but he’s a quick study. In his second appearnace on the podcast, Dan reveals a system that saved his freelance bacon. A secret system that has provided him with a steady stream of high-quality clients… So he can pick and choose his copy projects. A system he learned from Gary Halbert. In this episode, you’ll discover: The “Barberton Parking Lot” method Dan used to get Gary Halbert’s attention. (Gary’s own methods used on the master – to great success!) The honest, “no bull-crap” mistake Dan made – and newbies make all the time – when he finally went freelance. The one mistake even professional copywriters make. (Dan has seen people spend 30 years in this phase!) How to protect yourself against your own neediness. (Hustling to get this first step taken care of will work wonders). The Gary Halbert secret to cure neediness by finding a steady stream of leads. (Dan doesn’t look for clients anywhere else now). Mentioned: Doberman Dan Dan’s “Off The Chain” Podcast The Gary Halbert Letter David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey, everybody it’s David Allan. Back with another exciting podcast. Today’s guest is someone I’ve been looking forward to talking to for a long time since I first heard about him and read some of his stuff and his name is Doberman Dan. Welcome to the show. Doberman Dan : Thanks David. Appreciate the invite. Been looking forward to this. David Allan: Yeah it’s really great to have you. I first heard about you from Ben Settle if my memory serves me. He turned me on to you. I got into this stuff through Gary Halbert, but I don’t think that’s where I heard of. I think it was Ben because I wasn’t up to date on all the Gary Halbert stuff at that point. I read some of your stuff. Your rookie copywriters survival guide a couple years ago that I got off Amazon and you’re just one of those classic and somewhat legendary direct response guys still floating around. How did you get into all this mess of direct response advertising Dan. Doberman Dan : Yes, a legend in my own mind. Well, I didn’t want to get in to all this stuff to be totally transparent with you what I wanted was I wanted a mail order business. So I had a job that I was not crazy about. That’s quite an understatement actually. And I just you know nine years prior while I still had this job I was trying all these different kinds of businesses and failing and all of them. But I discovered I discovered direct response marketing through Dan Kennedy through a product I bought from him. And I thought this is cool man selling like paper and ink cassettes that cassettes just saying that, that alone, just totally dates me. And I thought this is a cool business man he’s sending letters in the mail like do ads and in magazines and selling stuff in the mail and I thought if I could do that and just equal my job income. So I was a police officer for the city of Dayton. So not making a big income. And I thought man if I can just do that – equal my job income because I know it’s not like I’ll be working eight hour days with a mail order business. I’d be like I could be free I could be free of the job I’d started to hate and go do all the stuff that I really wanted to do was like Go pretend I was a real musician and play music and stuff like that. So. David Allan: That seems to be a common thread among people… Doberman Dan: I know. Weird right. That was that was that was the goal. That’s what got me into I didn’t you know didn’t want to write copy. I didn’t even know what a copywriter was really. I didn’t know that was the right term. I didn’t you know I didn’t want to learn any of that stuff. I just wanted the benefits of mail order business. But of course I was broke so I couldn’t pay somebody to write the copy and copy is pretty darn important for a mail order business so I was… somewhat right. So I had to learn it myself. And that’s that’s here we are 22 years later I’m still doing that stuff. David Allan: The rabbit hole… Doberman Dan: Yeah. Big time. David Allan: So did you learn about Gary through Dan Kennedy then? Doberman Dan: I did. So I subscribed Dan Kennedy’s letter Dan talked about Gary all the time subscribed to Gary Halberts newsletter and then spent a couple of years chasing Halbert down and getting on his radar. Before I finally wound up working with Gary. David Allan: How did you?…you say chasing him down just attending events or corresponding with him – how did you kick off that relationship? Doberman Dan: What I did. I totally used this technique that he taught in his newsletter and turned it around on him. Yeah. It shows that it works. So he taught a technique about how to get the attention of a big shot. It’s what I did which was this he said you know write like a fake news article about them have it look like a newspaper article. Frame it in a really expensive frame send it to. So that’s what I did. I wrote a news Gary Halbert and I were both from the same hometown Barberton, Ohio so I – I wrote a newspaper story like it was in the Barberton Herald had a graphic designer make it look like it was from the barber and Harold put it in a frame and put all kinds of stuff in there that I thought he’d find amusing like that it told a story about. So these two Barberton guys you know Doberman Dan and Gary Halbert started working together on these mail order projects and they were so successful made so much money. They bought the entire city of Barberton and turned it into the world’s largest parking lot. So it got his attention or at least got me on the radar and then I sent regularly – usually monthly. I sent another mailing with that kind of theater you know just to stay on his radar for probably a year and a half and it eventually wound up to a working relationship together and then which wound up and turned into a friendship. David Allan: Now, you lived in. Correct me if I’m wrong. But you lived with Gary in Costa Rica, right? What’s the story behind that? Doberman Dan: That’s right. Yes. So that was actually part of this whole process of eventually working with with Halbert. So you know by that we’ve been communicating for a while and he wrote a newsletter about Costa Rica and I sent him a fax like asking some questions about it. He called me when his girlfriend from Costa Rica was in town and they and so she answered my questions and I’m like oh thanks man. Sounds really cool. And we left it at that. And then about 30 days later the next correspondence he got for me was an e-mail and said you know based on that newsletter you wrote in that phone call I got from you. I sold all my earthly possessions except my doberman,my laptop and three changes of clothes and I’m livin’ here now. So you know when your town hit me up let’s go grab dinner. And he was like oh God I can’t believe you did that. And so next time he was in town we did go grab dinner. The next time he came in town again he said hey could I crash at your place for the weekend. And I told him Sure Gary and he wound up saying like four months. David Allan: That sounds like something that became standard Halbert lore. Living with other people… Doberman Dan: Yeah. Yeah I think so he just you know hey man maybe I think he had the best of intentions when I did. You know I really intended only stay a couple of days. But he gets comfortable I guess. David Allan: So at this point did you have a business of your own or how were you making some money while living in Costa Rica? Doberman Dan: So it’s living my first little mail order business I told you about I was in the bodybuilding niche. And so I still had that going. When I moved down to Costa Rica and ended it it morphed into a supplement business also. So initially I was just selling information products and then it morphed into a. So I still had that business when I was living in Costa Rica. That was my frankly to be totally transparent. I had like I was letting that thing just run on autopilot at that point you know and doing as little work as possible and just enjoying this crazy hedonistic lifestyle down there… It actually was hard not to. David Allan: So at that point Gary’s living with you and are you working together or how is that relationship evolving? Doberman Dan: So what what he did is I was writing copy with him which most of it was his client copy and then so then he landed this one big guru at the time in the Internet marketing world who this guy just had a ton of work that he said he was going to keep us busy for the next year and so Halbert wanted to move back to Miami. And he talked me into moving back. I said I wasn’t going to do it but he talked me into moving back to the States. I moved back to Miami and lived in the same building as him. He let me stay in what he called his client apartment. So I lived there while we we we worked on a couple of different clients stuff but this one big guru guy was like most of it that most of the stuff was his stuff in spite of my newspaper my fake newspaper article. He and I never actually started any of our own projects together. It was just always working on client work. David Allan: So what did it go from there? When did you start taking on your own clientele and branching out… Doberman Dan: I felt like I had rarely done any client or I can think of only two client gigs I ever did you know back in those days back even prior to meeting Gary and after meeting Gary because I was always just doing my I was writing copy for my own businesses and I and I started you know I started a bunch of them and several different niches. So and then when I worked with Halbert So I still had the bodybuilding business going. But I mean it was you know just kind of an autopilot thing at that point. I wasn’t investing much time in it. So they were all his clients. So I wasn’t you know I wasn’t a freelance copywriter for hire when the arrangement with Halbert dried up because our our big whale guru client pulled the plug. I ignored it. I it I put that previous bodybuilding company on autopilot. Well let’s just be honest. I was ignoring it. So I’ll get to that. And at that point you can only do that so long at that point. That thing had dwindled down you know like just barely surviving a life support and the gig with Halbert and this is sometime in 2004. And I’m like you know I have really become accustomed to sleeping indoors and eating regularly so I gotta get something to go on. So I started another bodybuilding supplement company to take advantage of some supplements like that were super hot in that market back in the time. So I started in 2004 and that was I mean I had several side projects in other markets throughout that period of time but that was my main gig so to speak that supplement company and I. So did that from 2004 to 2012. And I sold that in 2012. And like I said with the exception of you know literally a handful of client gigs over all those previous years I really wasn’t a for hire guy but in 2012 that the deal to sell the business came together so fast that I didn’t plan out my next move too fast so I just decided OK well just you know I’ll give people my heart for free but I’ll whore out my mind for a price. And I became a hired gun copywriter. Then in 2012 David Allan: So, for people – a large part of our audience is freelance copywriters. First trepidatious steps towards that career. What were the first steps after you said “I’m going to be a freelance copywriter”… Doberman Dan: You know one of the importance of client attraction and client management even though at the time I first became a hired gun you know I’d been writing copy for a really long time but I’d never had to manage clients. And I underestimated how steep steep learning curve was going to be for me and I underestimated the importance of that process that was like I felt like I got thrown in the deep end of the pool even though I was a really experienced copywriter and a lot of people knew of me they didn’t know me as a freelancer because I was I was just a dude who wrote copy for my own business. So I felt like I was starting from scratch in 2012 as a freelancer. And you know so I had to hustle to get gigs. So guys you know like who hire freelance. They didn’t know me from Adam. So I did everything wrong I screwed it up I severely undervalued my skill set and the value to the marketplace. And you know I think that energy came out people could sense that I did everything wrong, David. I don’t feel like even though you know I had worked with Halbert I’d been writing copy for a long time. I really didn’t feel like I had any advantages as a freelancer. I’ll give you an example. I was I was hustling gigs on LinkedIn. Don’t think that I had this big network and I was you know I just make one phone call hey I might be available… and I’m flooded with offers. Quite the contrary. You know like all of a sudden I sell this business and realize wine I got an income. And I you know I want my income. I I was hustling gigs on LinkedIn from people who didn’t know me from Adam. It was it’s been a learning experience. David Allan: Things that you know for the benefit of our listeners like I think is just absolutely botched. Point out ’cause I’m sure people are still botching – just by listening to your voice. I know I’ve done some things too. What are some of the really bad things that people do. When they’re looking for new clients. Doberman Dan: This is this was going to say it borders on philosophy. But I guess not borders on this is philosophy but and I’ll clarify I’ll clarify this because I’m afraid there’s a freelance copywriter who’s going to hear this start rolling his eyes. Neediness man when you are needy you repel the like even if somebody is interested in hiring you as soon as even if they don’t and they’re unconsciously they’re just completely unconscious of it. If you’re projecting neediness you will drive clients away from you so fast. Now I can hear somebody saying like I am needy I need the money. Well OK. Trust me I’ve listened. I’ve gone legally bankrupt once and technically bankrupt an additional four times. I’ve lost everything dude. I lived in my car for a while you know so I understand financial need but that neediness is – even when you need the money. There’s head stuff you can do so you don’t project the neediness. But when I got really excited about a gig you know I know that neediness came across or the over anxiousness. So I had to work on the being detached – just doesn’t matter. You don’t get this gig. Another one is going to come along. You don’t need any particular client or gig. So that was that was a big that was a big lesson there. David Allan: Yeah, absolutely. I think I know exactly what you’re talking about. For me it was very helpful that I had. I’m a professional magician too – just to say I had something else to do to make money while I was getting into copywriting. So for me I didn’t need you know that came across the fact that I don’t need this gig per se because somebody else as it turns out that that’s what you’re talking about is to walk away or seem un-needy even when perhaps you want that or need that gig. Doberman Dan: That’s so important. By the way, that’s way cool that the magician gig. I find it fascinating. David Allan: You learn a lot about psychology, that’s for sure. Doberman Dan: Oh my gosh. I can only imagine yeah. You know here’s a really pragmatic you know I’d again like I had been talking about heads stuff of not projecting neediness but so I mean like that that’s a that’s a totally different topic but here’s a real pragmatic way to take care of that problem is that if you can just get like something going. So you you knew you could rely on on the income from the magician gig if you if you can land. Let’s say you can lay in a retainer gig. All right so you’re going to get retained for whatever it is you’re gonna write emails every month and you can count on x number of dollars coming in per month while there in your head. Hopefully that will give you a little peace of mind that you’ll know. Worst case scenario I got that now. When you know you’re talking with clients and they’re interested in hiring you you know now just think like OK I got that. I mean if if this gig comes about. That’s that’s cool. If it doesn’t come about. That’s cool too. David Allan: And you know I’m sure there’s lots of people out there I know because I talk with e-mail back and forth. People ask these very same questions. You know what are some ways that you have found or thought about because people obviously when they’re beginning their career they’re not they are needy like you said earlier. It’s a fact. You know they say they need these gigs and they try to look you know – trying to project neediness. Are there ways to like you know people often say fake it to make it I guess. Are there ways to appear to be honest. Here we are with how that comes across. Other ways to appear needy even though you might be. Doberman Dan: I’m still learning those lessons, David. You know like I get excited about gigs and I often think like now wait a minute. You know I’ve got a I’ve got a pull back. I’m excited about the gig because I know this is going to be a lay down but you know on the other hand I don’t need this gig. You can do all kinds of head stuff to not project it. But the thing I think that works the best to have a system in place that constantly brings you a steady flow of prospects because now you know if something doesn’t feel right you get a bad gut feeling. You don’t want the gig you don’t have to take it because you get a steady flow of prospects coming in or you know if the client is if the client says I don’t think so and then we’re not going to go ahead with this. You know we don’t think you the ideal fit for this. It’s no big deal because you know that daily or weekly or monthly you have X number of prospective people looking into your your service. That’s probably like the most important thing a freelancer can do is to have some sort of system now. Now I’ve also done the the hustle thing you know and chase down gigs that’s I get temporarily OK. You got to do what you got to do. Ideally if you want to make a business out of this and this is what you want to do long long term you better develop a system because I mean I know guys who’ve been doing this 30 plus years who are still in the hustle phase and always hustling gigs because they never established a system. David Allan:So for people out there that are looking to establish themselves build a system and take some initial steps they can take to get to where they have that in place. Doberman Dan: The most. Here’s what I realized a few years ago. So it was 2011 I started publishing a newsletter an actual – a newsletter the way God intended newsletters to be published and that you get paper and ink delivered by the Postal Service. David Allan: What is that? Doberman Dan: That’s right. Let me explain to you what that is. This is something you hold in your hands…So I still have my supplement business at the time so this was a side project. And at the time it was just a newsletter subscription now it’s it’s morphed into a membership. There’s my members I don’t call them members they’re knights because I call my membership the Marketing Camelot so my nights get this monthly newsletter delivered in hard copy to their mailbox – their real mailbox their snail mail box you know. But it also includes a membership site with content. And and I do a monthly webinar for my knights. But initially when I launched it was just the newsletter and I wasn’t launching that as as to get client gigs I still had the supplement business. I wasn’t even freelancing at that time. But then what I discovered after I’ve been doing it a little over a year I start getting offers to write copy. And then once I did become a freelancer in 2012 my best client opportunities came from that newsletter came from the subscriber base and it’s almost to the point now where I won’t I I won’t really probably even entertain any client gigs that come from outside of the newsletter. I mean yeah I mean never say never but it’s the best gigs and the best people come from that newsletter. And that was Gary Halberts entire purpose for publishing his newsletter. It was just a system to generate clients. That has been even though it was here dumb luck on my part. I just launched that newsletter because I wanted you know a little side hustle income in addition to the supplement business and I wanted to start getting down all of these marketing lessons on paper for posterity and some sort of you know legacy. And but what it wound up being is like the smartest thing I’ve ever done for my freelance business. And that’s like a super huge secret there even if you don’t charge for it if you just start writing a monthly print newsletter and comping people for a subscription. The people who would be your ideal client and don’t send them a letter saying hey give me a free subscription. Send them a complete new subscriber fulfillment package as if they just paid for it. Don’t tell them it’s free because I mean if these guys are players or gals our players their readers and they subscribe to a bunch of newsletters and a lot of them will just think oh I must to subscribed to this. So you know why I’m so dogmatic. Pun intended. Dogmatic – Doberman Dan – and all that about this thing being in print is just pure psychology math and print MRI studies have shown print lights up areas of the brain responsible for memories emotions buying decisions spatiality that the same word for word message. Delivered in any form digitally in a pdf an email on a Web site like just fizzles. So the magic of this thing is the fact that it is delivered in hard copy so now your perceived value is much higher the footprint it leaves in the brain and it is much deeper. And plus you’re showing us a live demonstration of your writing ability. You’re also showing you’ve got the discipline to complete a monthly newsletter every month. And clients value that more than you know because you know what. Very few people have the discipline to do that. David Allan: Well, Dan – you have provided us excellent stories. You want to get you know find out what you have to offer and maybe what you can do for them and then you know hit you up where should they go? Doberman Dan: The most typical entry way into my little world is at my website at dobermandan.com And I also have my own podcast called “Off The Chain” with Doberman Dan and so they can find that on iTunes where they can find that at it offthechainshow.com David Allan: And I highly recommend it. I listen to it. It’s great. Thanks for coming on the show man it’s been a real honor and a privilege and it’s been fun. Doberman Dan: Well the pleasure was mine. I appreciate the invitation David and I had fun. Hopefully you did too. David Allan: I did. Thanks everybody for listening to this edition and we’ll be back with another exciting guest next week. Tuesday as we are wont to do so. Join us then. The post Episode #147 – Doberman Dan On A Freelance System To End Neediness Now appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Mr. Marketology has risen through the ranks by proving his know-how to his superiors… Both in the military and the corporate world. He tackles several issues in this episode and with a little elbow grease you can fix them today. Whether it’s showing you the roadblocks preventing website conversions… What angle to take on the vast expanse of social media… Or how to get in front of the parade your customers are already dancing in. Jeff has some real-world answers. Is your marketing automated? In this episode, you’ll discover: Using automation in your digital marketing. The strategy of “triggered” response. The “un-sexy” way you must tackle your website. (it’s a grind but it works magic!) The one critical element almost every business owner forgets. (Fix your thinking fast or all you’ll hear is crickets). The missing links between your website and your social media. Discover the quick ins and outs. The quickest way to quench your customers thirst. (Like giving water to a dying man in the desert). Mentioned: Jeff Beale Heat Maps Jeff Beale on Twitter David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO [00:00:00] Everybody it’s David and I’m back with another edition of the podcast. Today we have a gentleman all the way from Atlanta Georgia. Mr. Marketology. Jeff Beale. What is up. [00:00:13] Hey Dave how are you doing. I am doing fantastic. What about you sir. [00:00:17] Oh wonderful you know the Falcons about to win the Super Bowl so I can find out like we talked about off air. [00:00:25] My sister does live in Atlanta she actually lives in Milton and she’s not the biggest football fan. And her husband is sort of you know watching on occasion. But yeah they were super pumped about the Falcons being in the Super Bowl and I have to say I will play for the Falcons because I despise the Patriots so hopefully it is a turnoff to many people but it’s going to be a great day. I’ll just I just hope it’s most of all I want to see it be a close game. [00:00:50] I hope so. [00:00:51] Yeah I think it was a out they too many of you will be upset because we all hate the Patriots so they better check those balls ahead of time make sure they are there. [00:01:01] All right so let’s let’s try to dive into this because you’re into marketing you’re into email marketing of course which we like to talk about a lot on the show. Let’s jump back now to how you sort of got into this whole marketing and e-mail marketing world how you got sucked into the vortex. If me start back you know when you maybe had more normal jobs how you sort of quickly you know got got to where you are now Joy is a beautiful transition. [00:01:27] So when I started I started in military after getting out the military I worked in the government for the military. And so I was in charge of webdesign. And for a symposium that they had. And as I transitioned from webdesign I said well you know I really it’s funny I got that job because I told them that their Web sites suck and they said well you can do better you should do better. [00:01:51] And so that’s how I got into web design. [00:01:54] And then from there moved into book Great started nosing that Web site weren’t getting traffic so me and my big mouth. [00:02:03] You know a nice web site but you’re not getting any traffic. So they say well you know so much better so got into marketing digital marketing that way. [00:02:14] And so from there move to an agency great agency 360. I worked for them for a while. I had some great clients moved into in-house working with some companies larger brands. From there I then transitioned to consulting and so I’ve been in marketing strategies ever since being in those transitions. I went from web development to MCO to digital marketing and started to see that emails convert more than anything. So I started looking at email marketing but I would like to say more than just email marketing marketing automation. So the difference between the two email marketing usually you collect emails you send out newsletters broadcasters maybe an autoresponder series but it is based on Push Marketing where marketing automation you’re interacting based on the behaviors of your visitors so there’s triggers if they look at this you’ll send them that if they go to this page you’ll send them something if they don’t go they don’t respond or reply then you’ll send them another series of emails and so forth. So it’s a little more advanced and complex but it’s still in the email marketing family and that’s currently what you’re focused on. [00:03:36] Yes yes. So when did you make the transition into helping people with this kind of stuff. [00:03:41] I would say probably two years ago started really enjoying this strategic part of it. I love to put together the strategy and pretty much I wouldn’t say try to manipulate minds but seeing what works and what doesn’t work with with the person’s behavior. [00:04:00] Right. So from a marketing strategist point of view as I am as well and this is a conversation. You know when you look at people’s Web sites now I find because I do copywriting primarily I find is the business people have advertisement making the exact same mistakes they’re making six major mistakes and then maybe some side ones. [00:04:22] What what sort of stuff do you find when you encounter new people or you take a look at a Web site you know what sort of things are you accounting on a daily basis. People are stock that do it. [00:04:35] I think the bundle it all up into one mistake it is they don’t understand their. So it’s more of vanity than it is actual value. They are looking at this is what I would like to see and what I would like to hear and how I would like to. But you’re not your customer and I tell my clients that all the time you are not your customer. First of all you’re too close to your product. You know too much about it it’s a lot of assumption in that there because you know so much where you or your audience may not know that your audience may not care about that. So a lot of times they don’t really understand the audience they don’t listen. So a lot of the techniques that they use methods and messaging that they use is self serving and so it isn’t as effective as it could be. [00:05:24] So that’s a great point. That is something I encounter probably on a daily basis is that the people here. You’re exactly right. They’re just too close to the product or too close to whatever they offer and they’re not their customer and so they see a real disconnect with the market that to try to try to get into or try to sell to now for for specifically digital marketing. When you’re going to different peoples websites stuff what sort of systems or stuff at a very basic level should people have set up the U.S. you know create the biggest differences. [00:06:02] The biggest difference I would say would be to get your analytics set up correctly. I mean if your numbers are right if you don’t know what you’re looking at you can’t really make an informed decision. So that’s the first thing. Make sure that your tracking is set up correctly and then based on that going back to strategy make sure that you have a good sound strategy and then you can put other things in place so things such as your marketing automation. You may want to put bring your souces sharing event to which you’re talking about Dave as far as content the type of content to write. You know that because you’re looking at the analytics and you are looking at the numbers and you’re seeing what’s working with may not be working or some patterns that are occurring that you can get in front of. So I think that’s the very first thing a lot of times it’s not the sexy thing. People don’t really want to see all that they want to see the nice slider and the beautiful flash animations and videos and this and that. It doesn’t matter if you’re not converting. [00:07:10] That’s true as a copywriter. That is a big big thing for us because people do like to pretty stuff up you know to the point of destroying their conversions and so forth and not just not using it that’s just not helping them sell whatever it is they’re trying to get people to do. You know it’s just it just seems to be a crazy thing and you see so much and I don’t understand why sort of happens to because you have people have aesthetic things in their head. Like you said just to go about what they like. Now they want to represent themselves. But again what are you trying to accomplish. They are such a such a big factor at it keeping it simple often is one of the biggest obstacles people think it’s we had a guy show here a couple episodes ago that settle a guy and he said that people think that his way of doing things is so simple it couldn’t work it out that it must be it must be it must be more magic mystery to it. [00:08:15] You know and it is true. It’s very it’s all these things are quite simple but hard to get people to do because you think well that’s got to be more to it than that you know you just got to think of how people encounter stuff and how reticent people are to really much of anything. [00:08:30] So yeah well it’s just like communicating with people. [00:08:33] I mean you’re out you see a person that you really want to meet and in your mind you’re thinking of all these wonderful things that you can say this is going to wow them right and they start the conversation just walk up and say yeah. [00:08:45] It’s that simple. Yeah yeah start the conversation before you can have. Yes. [00:08:52] So for people who are out there who have web sites they may be listening to this podcast themselves. I mean I’m one of these people who is making the same kind of mistakes and the chances are good that you are. Where should people start. You know what. Sort of maybe some maybe two or three steps that people can take a look at. You know that be simple to fix or simple to sort of think about but maybe they haven’t really into marketing enough to really know how would it affect that. [00:09:22] I would say the first thing to start with would be to A and analytic that has a heat map or video he map I love video he maps like inspect let goes right there a couple of what is out there of course details out there. But get one of those put it on your site and then you can start seeing what your visitors are doing and where they’re dropping off. If it’s an image or the page is loading slow or did some copy that just seems to turn off some colors and then start testing. I mean really marketing and app and I even cringe when I say it. [00:09:59] Because I don’t like it either. But marketing is all about failing modifying and retraining. [00:10:06] That’s that’s really you’re going to fail sometimes you know fail for you know try something different. See if it works. And with with the video or heat map type of technology tracking you can start seeing some things and you can start saying well OK I notice when they get to this portion of the Web site they always leave. And. And so now you can start making like again someone form decisions on what should I do next. That’s really the first place to start because if not you’re really just thrown or thrown in when trying to figure out where it’s going to blow. Instead of being able to actually see some of the some of the traction I think you’re right. [00:10:50] Because it’s important. I mean one of the things that copywriters like to do is we like to read stuff outloud to see where the you know where where the wording is not quite right in the rhythm perhaps throws you off so that people get stuck in you can see a heat map if you’re doing it digitally. Yeah because you can tell where the you know if they skip to the end or whatever. [00:11:13] Because it all sounds good in your head and it we’re going to shower mostly but does it. [00:11:22] And I think people who are in the market again and haven’t done marketing perhaps for other people suffer or haven’t done it themselves. Like you tested testing it’s hard to conceptualize. You know this is not know they think the sky is just going to take a paper brush this magic wand perhaps and make everything in one fell swoop but it’s it’s kind of a grind always to get it exactly converting it’s highest because you’ve got to test these little elements first. Some level reason can often make a difference. [00:11:56] Yes. And if you leave something small to it is it is. [00:12:00] I mean the people stupid things like what color text or stuff like this what you think why would that change anybody’s mind. [00:12:12] But it just it. You have to speak it to. It does. So what’s the next step. Once people got that heat map and they’re look at that see where people are falling of course are going to take steps to correct that. Hopefully somebody else thinks that people should be looking for can access quickly. [00:12:30] OK another thing would be actually the path that they use do they come to your site. Then they check your social do they respond to your e-mails. Do you know what other channels are playing a bigger back in your conversion. Most of the time with today’s market people do their due diligence so they’re not going to call you and say well you know I have these questions. Usually they’ll try to research it on their own. They’ll go to your Facebook or Twitter or Instagram Pandora is one of your social’s. They’ll start doing research elsewhere and then make a decision making sure that your communication on all of your platforms go in line with what your Web site is saying and going live with the strategy that you put in place. You know you may have your Twitter being a quote unquote be behind the scenes that gives that extra incentive and then Facebook you may have Facebook as more of your educational platform and YouTube being more entertaining platform. There’s several different ways you can do it but you want to see if you can take them on that path and you analysts will start to show what your first touch would be. All the ones in between and what your last touch and you’ll see that the commonalities and based on that you’ll start to notice a trend and you can start to I don’t want to say manipulate I hate that word but this column is kind of the truth. You’ve got to nip you late. [00:14:02] The behavior of your audience because now you’re saying if you’re going to this let me push you to this other channel because it’s the channel that is the next in line for that greater conversion path. And then based on that let me suggest and keep suggesting. Not not. Not selling because that’s another thing that a lot of Web sites and a lot of businesses do wrong. They try to force you to buy what you want to suggest and then they decide to purchase. They want to purchase it. So you’re suggesting as they go through the path you’re pretty much filling the holes that are there for them to make a clear decision to to do business with you. So you know that’s really the next step. [00:14:47] Yeah that’s a good that’s a very good thing to bring up. Where are these people coming from. [00:14:53] And then you can hone in on maybe or to also you know because a lot of people I think get overwhelmed by all the social channels they’re trying to be sort of you know all talks to everybody all the time. And it’s really tough to find you know the real people that are going to read your product or service whatever it is you offer it’s going to resonate with because they’re trying to be all things to all people the more you can sort of like me shut down those people are going to be able to help the best you know. You see where that’s coming from. Like you say you could probably tailor it even more to the people that are big and you know it’s kind of an 80:20 thing to bring in more people coming from YouTube. They might the people are interested in your kind of stuff maybe more video they’ll enjoy video or whatever. So with analytics You know you can sort of tell that kind of stuff now because it’s getting. I mean it’s getting the data you get it’s pretty fresh. [00:15:48] It is and you know one at a another mistake that a lot of companies use. They look at what other companies are doing and they try to base it on that. You don’t know all factors that play into that. I mean so yes take some information from your competitors. That’s good to know but don’t base your decision based on what your competitors are doing because you don’t know all the factors involved. [00:16:13] Right. Yeah that’s one of the sort of things I think I see most too is like people have no idea. I mean they do if you sit them down and like go through it all they have an idea of why people should be buying their products when they haven’t communicated that in any way. They don’t have what people would refer to as like a USP. And you know they don’t have this overwhelming reason to people to do business with our company as opposed to our competitors and having intel on competitors like you said is great because it allows you to differentiate. So yes. [00:16:45] And that’s another good thing is understanding first of all who your audience would be. But then there need. And then how do you benefit their needs. It’s it’s funny because a lot of times companies from behind the desk want to give you the features and benefits. I mean like we offer them as we all but but you know let me give you a little story I love given the stories a man walks through the desert. He was in the desert for three days. He comes to a water fountain. He drinks the water is the best water you ever drunk. Is it the best water because it’s the best water or just because he was that thirsty. The real need is that he’s thirsty. So your clients are mean and customers their real need a lot of times don’t really relate to whatever the features are. You need to just find out what their core need is and how you provide benefits that coordinate all the other stuff is just icing on that cake. [00:17:41] Yeah I completely agree with that. And one of the things I think people often mistake is when they get into business is you see people who say you know I’m going to offer this product and because they may see other people offering the product they’re just saying it’s like you said at the very beginning of this podcast it’s more of a personal choice based on what they think that what the market or the people or their audience is telling them like a very easy way to to have a thriving business is to find out what those people actually want and they just give that. You know that’s an easy way to make selling so much easier than trying to force something on them that it may not only be lukewarm to it may not really want or don’t see the value even though you see it it’s so hard because oftentimes and this is you know you sort of referred a few times to like I don’t like to say manipulation. [00:18:39] But often people’s desires and needs are so desperate that could be very difficult. So people are listening you might think of this a little harder. You know people I know they need this like we just talked about people should get some heat that they might need that because that’s something you could use initially to make decisions going forward. But at the time people to desire something entirely different. And as a business owner you could provide both you know. And you can often satisfy those desires and get what they need at the same time but not sell on the need selling it the desire you know. So it’s it’s very hard sometimes for business owners to understand that because they because like you said they are so close to a product they know that the real value of it and that’s how they stopped communicating. [00:19:28] Yeah. And that’s why they need to leverage people like yourself Dave that are wordsmiths that are experts in different areas leverage those experts that know how to pull that out of you. A lot of times you know businesses may look at their budget and they may say wow I don’t want to spend that money on that and not see that that will get you greater return because it’ll get higher conversions and you know it is worth it. [00:19:58] For instance need is funny you may have seen this. OK everybody’s on the health kick and see these fast food restaurants trying to force people to come eat their health. It’s a hard sale because you’re a real healthy person is going to just pick apart from ingredients pick apart everything that you offer. So understanding who your audience would be you may not want to go after a vegan you are McDonald’s it might not work out here. [00:20:31] No. [00:20:32] So knowing your audience but knowing their needs and in knowing how to communicate that that’s what makes it so beautiful. I mean you see you see companies like both will use fast food. Wendy’s did a great job. I mean Wendy’s is a fast food restaurant and they can attack all their health health. I would say health food nuts. Right. By offering the salads and they made the salads. The big thing in the end the little potatoes stuff potatoes the big thing. [00:21:04] And so people were like Well Wendy’s is healthy right now they really are good at. Right but they have salad. In the end they learn how to do that. [00:21:16] Well that’s very true. You know I heard a story about Burger King they talked about how Burger King and this is something you know as a marketing strategy of course we’re familiar with the Burger King’s main strategy for expanding their business for growing their business to where it is today was they didn’t have to do all the market research that McDonald’s did you know pioneering that industry. Instead they chose to accept that McDonald’s had done a lot of the right research given how successful and choose to leverage McDonald’s research. For instance McDonald’s has chose certain locations for market research. [00:22:01] Burger King is spending the money to do their own work market research largely they chose to say OK. McDonald’s has already done that research and looked pretty good. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to leverage their research. They’ve already done. And we’re just going to put our locations within that you know say two miles of every three dollars. And by doing that they put themselves in flight like. Remember where I heard my dad Kennedy obviously. I heard this from what he said you know the easiest way is just to get in front of a parade that’s already ongoing. Yeah. And that’s exactly what they did there. You know they just they got it now so people are on their way. You know they want a quick meal. They don’t really care if it’s Bedales they just oh we’re already here Burger King is right here. Yes. So that kind of thing is when it comes to marketing strategy purposes people have websites. If you take a look at that kind of stuff too because it can be it could be just slightly off and be missing a huge boatload of business. [00:22:59] Yeah. Yeah. Yes sure. [00:23:02] So Jeff if people are going to you know have one more take away from this conversation you really have people a lot to think about it because people are staring at the Web site medievalist has pulled it up on their computer on their browser like oh man I think I’m doing that. [00:23:20] What’s the other takeaway that people should be doing. And they could start doing it today. [00:23:26] If it’s relating to web sites I would say make sure that now your web site is mobile ready made sure that people can access your web site no matter where they’re looking at it from which device. A lot of times if if they can pull it up on their phone and as you know if you have any type of children they stay on their phone. And so if they’re pulling up from their phone and your site doesn’t look appealing you can lose a lot of opportunity. I’ve noticed from analytics mobile over the past few years have increased tremendously as far as the share of traffic. So make sure that your site is available on any device. The majority of device I’m not going to say any device you don’t really have to care if it’s on a BlackBerry you can use that anymore. [00:24:23] But you know just make sure that your brand is appealing no matter how they see it. And so that’s I guess you would say as far as web is concerned I would love to put this in as well and not just as your Web site leveraging social platforms as if it was your website. I make sure they’re appealing and make sure that you are consistently communicating with your base on there. That’s going to help you a lot. Even if your web site isn’t converting where you want it to be right now so you might find some golden nuggets and opportunities within you or other real estate which are your social platforms. [00:25:09] So people you know think about that. Listen to your words. This thing that I don’t find like I can maybe post enough or how often I post this will be a lot of consternation about people what exactly they should be doing is some sort of simple little template to give people to how often they should be communicate with audiences on those platforms. [00:25:30] Yeah you should. So as far as you know posting schedule that comes back into sitting down and actually having a great strategy up front and then from there you can google posting schedule for whatever that platform would be and it’ll give you from other experts have done the research some good best practices. Now that’s all they are just good best practices test them and then see how your audience response. [00:26:00] And based on your audience response which a lot of these platforms have their own analytic you can tie that into your main analytic and then find out the best times that you start seeing increase engagement. And I encourage you to look at engagement versus just peer followers. They’re following and not engaged. It really isn’t doing you any good. So their engagement and then you can start modifying your schedule based on your high engagement. You can start modifying your content based on what is engaged most and then be sure to communicate a lot of people post and you can use sweet’n Bufferin and what is it. There’s tons of those type of solutions that can schedule your posts but you need to be in the conversation. If you’re not communicating with the audience you’re losing a big opportunity there to build the relationship because that’s really you know in sales everybody knows people buy from who they know like and trust. You want to build that relationship and actually who gives you an advantage because they have what’s called auto schedule. So it will schedule for you at the best times based on and they have analytics with them as well based on best times best practices. So your data. So if you’re. [00:27:28] Each year I’m not going to say lazy if your time constraint I’m lazy and I do it as well. I always travel schedule I just the first step is to get out of denial. Right exactly. [00:27:44] A AB I have a bit of laziness to get back to pose and let’s say you have 20 different things you want to say and put it in a hit schedule on each one of them and it will deliver it at the best times. That’s one method you could use without doing a ton of research and procrastination. Just use auto scheduling. And then as you start seeing more engagement then you can start tweaking it to your liking. [00:28:18] That is awesome. That is very good advice. You’ve given a lot of good advice today for people to get started. Take a look at your web sites people. Check them out see what’s what maybe some some issues are very much of us told us here today a lot of a lot of very easy fixes. You know quick fixes and may give you some much more information about what your Web site is or is not doing that you’ll be able to make some decisions that could that could change a lot for for what’s going on with your website. Thanks a lot Jeff for coming on the show. Man it’s a great show they could give a lot of information. People going to school today take action with people who want to get a hold of you where do they go. [00:28:56] They can find me at Mr. Market already dot com. That’s m r m a r k e t o l o g y dot com. One thing is branding. So on Twitter Facebook Google Plus Instagram is Mr. Market ologies. [00:29:11] So all of them are designed. [00:29:14] That’s awesome man. So Mr. Market comment you know everything. Every platform tied to that name. [00:29:22] You’ll be able to fight Jaffe’s in Atlanta Georgia for people that may be local. [00:29:25] Jeff it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show. I had a lot of fun got to talk to Dave Dave. [00:29:30] So much for me on the show it’s been great. The post Episode #146 – Jeff Beale On Revving Up Your Digital Marketing In 3 Simple Steps appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

His boss laughed at him when he quit his high-stress broker job in 2000 to “make websites”. After finding gurus like Mark Joyner and Corey Rfacebooudl, he stumbled down the “internet marketing” rabbit hole. “There’s got to be a way to make money with this” A question that changed the rest of his life. His own internet dating and a later product led to an avalanche sent to him by none other than “David D’Angelo”. $39,000 on the first day…$100,000 for the month. He was on his way… Or so he thought. Then cancer struck his family…not once but twice. He neared bankruptcy. Years passed. He knew he had the potential to do more and so for the last 19 months, he has fought with a vengeance. After an entrepreneur worth over a half billion confirmed that his latest idea was worth a shot… He poured his heart and soul ( and a pile of money) into building the email software he knew the industry needed. It’s just days away… In this episode, you’ll discover: The presentation he saw that first gave him the idea. (What this company was doing with it’s VA’s was nuts!) What to do when a 500 million dollar man gives you advice. How to avoid the horrible mistake most software creators make with developers. (This can cost you years and tons of money). How this software will explode ancient email wives-tales. What this software does is amazing. (How this will punch ROI through the friggin’ roof!) Mentioned: Autoresponder Analytics Com Mirza David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Pop Up Archive Item: “145 edited_mixdown.mp3” : https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/16685/items/154204 Transcript for file: 145_edited_mixdown.mp3 David Allan: Hey, everybody it’s David Allan. I’m back with another edition of the email marketing podcast. Our special guest today I think you’re really going to enjoy because he’s bringing something new to the marketing game. That I think has never been done before and will be a real game-changer. Dave Miz, welcome to the show. Dave Miz: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. David Allan: I am excited about this because I know a little bit about what you’re up to but I will get up with the details because I think when this podcast comes out it’s nearly exactly coinciding with when you’re going to release what amounts to a new software product. Is that correct? Dave Miz: Yeah. Yeah. Something totally new. David Allan: So I’m very excited. Let’s dig into this. Dave Miz: I was at a seminar and a couple of years back from Greg Davis who’s like a big CPA traffic media buyer. He was in D.C. one of the guys that spoke at his seminar was this guy who was like 500 million dollars self-made. Guy’s name is called Com Mirza. I don’t know all this. So I was out in the hallway. We were shooting the breeze me him and a buddy of mine my buddy ends up joining his mastermind. He’s doing really well and much better than I was doing and you know he could afford it. So. So he ends up going and we ended up all becoming friends. About a year after you know we have we had traveled all together all of us and stuff and just built a good friendship and we’re at a mastermind Com was throwing in Miami and it were me and him were like the last two people of that night were at the pool area just chillin having a drink and you know just chillin and he said you know like so what else. You know the dating stuff. I don’t really think I can add any value to what you’re doing. You know it’s something that you know you’re you’re you’re just going to make some money but you’re not going to get rich off of it unless you get lucky and hit like a traffic source or something like that. And he kind of echoed what I was thinking. You know like my thoughts were like those those years at that point I was kind of on cruise control I kind of saw that I’d plateaued income-wise and I wasn’t really happy. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do next or how it was going to grow it. You know it was very difficult to grow farther than kind of where I was at. I tried a lot of different things and things kind of just didn’t pan out. I told them I said you know like I bought this domain name for this for this software idea I had. So he said Tell me about it. I told him you know I bought this domain name. It’s called autoresponderanalytics.com and he goes that’s that’s a good name but tell me about the software and I so I explained to him the story that was at a seminar in about maybe 2014 2013. And so this one guy was speaking and I think it was the guy from Mind Valley… Vishen or one of the guys or somebody from Mind Valley and he had this one slide up or he’s talking about e-mails and how they you know keep track of their e-mails and whatnot. And he said you know like here’s a spreadsheet that we use and he goes every day I have like one of our VAs or one of our employees they take like an hour or two everyday and they go through the system that’s just on this system this system and they start putting all the data you know and I was thinking to myself like why I like these dudes do like eight figures a year like 10 20 30 50 million dollars a year. They don’t have like some kind of system that bothers her. And I started digging and I couldn’t find anything. And I was like wow this is mind boggling, like how much how much do you pay a V.A. like every hour even if you just pay like 10 bucks an hour that’s 20 bucks a day you know five days a week seven days a week. That’s like 150 bucks a week you’re paying just for them to collect all this information. Right. It’s 150 bucks a week. So that by a month we’re looking at like 600 but 500 just to do this. So I’m telling this to Com and he’s like OK. Keep telling me so I have an idea for this software that actually does all this for you keeps track of your e-mail that lets you track everything you know optimize everything. Gives you data analytics on everything like that. So he goes actually that’s a really good idea. There’s nothing else like this on the market. And I was like really you know like that’s a good idea. You know what it’s pretty like we had a few drinks. So just to get confirmation from somebody that’s worth you know five six seven hundred million dollars and telling you like hey you that’s a good idea. That was that was like awesome you know that kind of gave me the boost you know that I needed. And he go and he told me he’s like you’ve got to build this thing. So you know like when though like the most the wealthiest person you’ve ever met in your entire life by a hundred times over tells you to… you build it. You know what I mean. So I never built software before successfully. I tried a couple of times but never had much luck with it. So it took me like a month or two to find some software developers. The first guy I spoke with was a referral from a buddy of mine and he said this is the best software developer I’ve I’ve worked with like swore up and down. So I had sketches in my journal of the different pages of the software what I thought each page would do. So I sent him a pictures I took a picture of my iPhone send it to him and the first question he had for me was what’s an autoresponder? David Allan: You’re like – this isn’t the guy. Dave Miz: Yeah. Yeah. That’s where so I had another referral from a buddy of mine. And he said that you know he built his software and they did a good job and so we started chatting with the lead developer or the product manager or I sent them the screenshot from the from my iPhone through Skype. And the next day he got back to me with with questions and I was like shocked. I was like really shocked not just questions but he actually sounded like he understood what my like scribble like sketches and I was like wow this is this guy who actually understands what he’s talking about. He understands what I wrote and what I drew and he’s actually asking me intelligent questions. And we just started going back and forth and he goes yeah we can build this. I mean it’s a big project but you know I feel good with the guys that I have and I have a couple of guys that will be perfect for this. And so we started you know at first I didn’t know how long the product was going to be. We thought it was going to be a few months you know 19 months later here we are. So software always costs more and it takes like you know longer than you than you anticipate. David Allan: Absolutely. Dave Miz: So here we are and the the analytics engine on this thing is so complex and crazy it took us a year to build just the the engine for this. Forget about the front end or anything. Just the actual engine that powers this thing. So it’s it’s pretty it’s pretty bad ass man that you know and I figured at the very least I’m going to build it for myself. But if not if nobody else wanted to we’re going to use it for myself I’m the toughest critic you know out of anybody. So you know it had to look exactly the way I wanted it to look. I had to work exactly the way I wanted it to work and if it didn’t I was going to keep building it until it did. I just don’t believe in putting out shit. I won’t sell shit. I won’t put my name on anything that’s crap you know. So here we are with the software. It took forever to build. I was kind of hush hush about it for the first 15 or so months and then like slowly the last few months I kind of like been leaking out hints and you know stuff about it just because I felt like it we were so far into it there’s no way anybody can even touch you know copy or take or anything you know. You know what we’ve done you know so yeah. So we’re we’re just working on the release of it hopefully by the time people are listening to this it will be out. And you can grab it and hopefully use it really well and it’ll make you more money with your e-mail marketing. David Allan: All right. Sounds great. Very exciting. For anyone that does email marketing. For most people listening to this they’re either involved with email marketing one way or another I’m sure. So tell us a little bit about what this stuff can do what are what are the… Dave Miz: You know normally like the big the biggest problem I guess with people when we’re sending out e-mails is you know like we’re sending out e-mails but we have no idea how these e-mails are doing. Right. David Allan: So basically the response… all the analytics. Dave Miz: Oh yes. Like let’s say for example you know you’re sending out an e-mail here podcast list right to all the listeners and you’re taught you’re talking about one specific topic but you have no idea if the listeners are actually going to respond to this topic. Right. And maybe you use a certain call to action in this email but you have no idea. That actually worked or not. So if you go to your eat you know like aWeber get response or any of that you know active campaign you know you’ll see clicks and opens or ends and click there right. That’s it. Yeah. Maybe you take it one step further and you use one of these ancient ad trackers you know like it built like 15 years ago and then you’ll see some basics stats on that. And you kind of wonder how accurate it is with a software that’s 10 to 15 years old and hasn’t been updated since. So that’s the next level up. But there’s really nothing else. What this system does is it allows you to track all of your e-mails. OK. So you’ll you’ll have complete marketing data like the data that we need you know and I was frustrated because I use a lot of stuff on click bank. So a lot of my offers are running on Click Bank but I love Click Bank. They’re awesome but they’re they’re reporting and stats system. So not for us you know like I just want to see how many of you know like what my average lifetime value is on this product. I can’t do that. I’ve got to do like some spreadsheet math computations. You know I want to see how this product is doing or how that’s doing. You know what my EPC is or or what not how much is a visitor worth or how much as a customer lifetime value. I can’t do any of that I can. I don’t have that. You know handy so we needed stats that we use you know like us in our industry. So like you know what’s the what’s the conversion rate on this email. You know what how do I know how this e-mail is converting. You know what the earning per click on this email. How much revenue has this e-mail generated. Because normally what we’ll do is you just log into your Clickbank account or JVZoo account or you’re you know or shopping cart you’ll see how much money they make for the day. But you have no idea how that actually the how that e-mail that you sent actually did. David Allan: You don’t know where they came from. Dave Miz: Exactly. Or what about your campaigns your… Forget about broadcast for a second if you have like follow up campaigns how do you know how these campaigns are doing and David Allan: Which e-mail maybe triggered selling best and so forth that we’ve always sort of speculated on which ones you know at what point in this follow up did they decide to go in. Dave Miz: Exactly like wouldn’t it be great to see like right at a glance. OK. This email campaign is doing being you know converting at you know five and a half percent. I made you know 12 and a half thousand six hundred dollars from this campaign. The lifetime value on this campaign is you know $210 per person. You know wouldn’t that be awesome to have. David Allan: It makes things a lot easier. A lot ofdecisions would be easier. Dave Miz: Yeah so the system does that and it does tons and tons of stuff more so it tells you the lifetime value for each campaign. One of the cool things that I added in was how long does it take conversion to happen. So like if you’re buying traffic you’re buying Facebook ads or whatever. How long does it take you to turn a lead into a buyer. So the system will actually tell you once you have it set up it will tell you OK it takes you you know 84 days. You know so if you know that you know how long you have to float your money for you know in order to recover your money. David Allan: And expectation wise to educate people perhaps on this podcast. This is a freelance business because you know you can just set expectations too. Manage client expectations. Dave Miz: Absolutely. Absolutely. And then the cool thing is for people that are not tech savvy you know I’m not I wouldn’t consider. I mean I don’t consider myself tech savvy even though I’m a little technical. I have to make sure that this was easy to use and simple to set up. Right. So we actually spent about three months just working on the setup to make it really really easy to use there was like four steps and that’s it. I mean I’m like you can do it but I was hire a programmer. You know if you can make it make a link in aWeber or any of the email providers you can set this up. I mean it’s just simple. It’s about us. Yeah so it doesn’t. You don’t have to be sending out tons of emails. You just have to have a list. You know if you have a list and you’re sending out e-mails any kind of e-mails you know this thing will work. So one of the cool things that it does is it actually scores your e-mails for you. So it’ll it’ll categorize and the campaigns like your best e-mails and your worst emails. So like going back to this podcast the e-mails let’s say you know you try a few different topics or subjects or whatnot it’ll show you what’s your worst performing ones. So you’ll see OK like this e-mail that I sent out yesterday isn’t really performing well maybe that topic isn’t good. Right. So it got to know not use that topic again you know or you’ll go by the best performing e-mails and you’ll say OK like these kind of topics are doing pretty good. Let me just keep writing up these topics because I know that they can work well. David Allan: That’s great. It’s really easy. Dave Miz: And then the other cool thing that it does is the demographic. This is where it gets like totally crazy. It’s what it does. So because we have all these smart pixel we call it on your pages we’re able to collect a ton of data on your Buyers. Stuff that you would never even know. So let’s say for example David you’re buying Facebook ads check and you have this campaign running. You’ll just go into the demographics section you’ll you’ll click. You know let’s say USA. And that will tell you your best performing and the worst performing states what you’ll do is you’ll just exclude the worst performing states. Maybe from your current ads or maybe just set up a new campaign only with your best performing states. David Allan: So you could just hone it right down to exactly who was responding. Dave Miz: Exactly. And you’re ROI just from the get go will skyrocket and you’ll be age you’ll be able to do this also for for countries you know as well. So we’ve been even able to drill down by city. David Allan: By city. That’s crazy. Dave Miz: So I don’t even know if Facebook ads can do it by city. I have a guy running ads for us so I’m really too familiar with the stuff because we can’t do it and dating and do Facebook. So that’s that’s another reason why dating sucks. And I always thought people would always ask me David like you know I want to get into the dating niche and I would always tell them no it sucks. And people always think like you’re being so negative. You know it just really sucks. David Allan: You missed the wave Dave Miz: You miss the boat and you’re like 10 years too late and so we can dive in even deeper we can go into the system data so we’ll know your conversions based on like Windows or PC or Mac or PC. We can do it by browser type. So you’ll be able to know which browsers are producing the conversions in the campaigns and even down to the device type whether it’s you know iPhone Android iPad. And then really the whole thing is we’re able to tell you which e-mail provider conversions by email provider whether it’s Gmail Yahoo. You know email AOL or Hotmail. So in this case let’s say you have a lot of you know your list. You’ve seen the e-mails in your list. You know you have a lot of G-mail e-mails but you look at this chart here and you see that Gmail is producing the least amount of sales for you. You kind of know at this point that you have an inboxing issue probably gmail. David Allan: So you could be somewhat of a email detective this the analytics Dave Miz: Yeah it really just gives you stuff that we that we need right. David Allan: That’s what it sounds like. Put a shit ton of work into this. Dave Miz: Yeah a lot of work and a lot of a lot of money. So yeah but it looks awesome. I’ll show you a demo when we when we’re done with the call with you what we can do a video call if you want. And I’ll show you around it. David Allan: People should be really excited about this because that sounds real in-depth. Like you said it just collects all the data you wish you had if you were in the internet marketing industry. Dave Miz: Yeah, like all the stuff you wish you had. David Allan: Yeah. that people talk about you know in passing. Like I wish – if only we could do this. Yes. So that’s a this could be very big for you. So this is this is your latest project. Dave Miz: This is my baby. This is my baby. David Allan: This is your internet dating for the year 2017. Dave Miz: Yeah right. Like took it to a whole another level. The dating stuff is kind of on autopilot. But golf clubs kind of on autopilot and yeah. So I I wanted to try to swing for the fences with us. You know like you know I have big aspirations and I felt like I wasn’t really performing up to you know what I was capable of and I figured you know what like let me take a shot out with somebody that’s worth half a billion dollars says this is a good idea and it’s worth a shot. David Allan: Exactly. That’s worth a shot. So when people – you mentioned the e-mail address probably about half an hour ago, so I assume it’s the same email address autoresponderanalytics… Dave Miz: Yeah autoresponderanalytics.com. David Allan: And is there I know this will be released probably around the end of January. Is there a specific day you guys already set for when this is coming out? Dave Miz: You know I’m real bad with that stuff. It’s definitely like a flaw or character flaw with me. I’m just like a scatterbrain. I think that’s probably all creative people are like that. I need to set a date for it but I just want to make sure that we have all our you know present all the yeah all the ducks in a row. You know all the stuff with the payment system and all these little loose ends I’ve got a page full of notes here that I’ve got to like make sure everything is done. So hopefully at the end of the month or beginning of February we will do like a soft release. We’ll do like 100 spots at first just to bring in a couple hundred users. Make sure everybody’s using the system and is able to use it successfully and yeah it just will get the bugs out if there’s any bugs from the users and then really just get new feature requests. You know I want to make sure that we have all the features. The main one is that everybody needs. And then we can start scaling up the development team. So everything everything that comes in is going right back into development so that you know we can turn this into like you know the go-to platform in the industry. David Allan: Awesome. Thanks a lot. And that’s really I think people are going to be very excited. I know listen to this. It’s got a lot of potential and I hope it really pays off. It just sounds like you really put the work you deserve it. Dave Miz: Well I hope everybody gets a lot of value out of that tool. You know I think if it’s it’s it’s an awesome to want to know that it’s going to help. You know anybody that’s sending out e-mails is going to help them. David Allan: If people want to get in touch with you personally… Dave Miz: Let’s put it this way just hit me up on Facebook. OK. Yeah just Dave Miz. And yeah I’m on Facebook all day. Just you know shooting the shit while I’m working. David Allan: Well thanks again Dave. For coming on the show. Dave Miz: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. David Allan: And of course we’ll be back again next week with another exciting guess hopefully as exciting as Dave because I think that was fantastic. Until next time The post Episode #145 – Dave Miz On Game-Changing Email Software Every Marketer Will Kill For appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.