The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast

Ben Settle is one of my favorite business badasses. He is brash and contrarian…hence why his podcast used to the “Antipreneur Show”. Like Ben years ago, you may be starting into the freelance game (or deep in its clutches!). He was once where you are…and lived to tell the tale. Not without some battle scars though. So listen while he recites the do’s and dont’s of freelance copywriting and then… What he does now. A business which in the simplest terms… Takes only 10 minutes a day. You’d better sit down to listen to this. In this episode, you’ll discover: The book of “Lost Secrets” that gave Ben a head start and the incredible way it tied into Gary Halbert. The single critical piece of advice Ben would give a freelancer (prevent burnout and get paid!) Why the “natural” way most people want to go in business is dead wrong (and why no one thinks Ben’s way should work!) A business lesson Ben learned the hard way. The reason he abandoned a membership site and what it means for you. How Ben gave a girl a personality. Discover how to fashion your own without becoming REPULSIVE. Mentioned: Ben Settle Jonathan Rivera Bruce Barton David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO David Allan: Hey everybody it’s David Allan. We’re back with another edition of the Email Marketing Podcast. We have a veteran email marketer on todays show I’ve wanted to talk to for a long time. He’s been on John’s show before and his name is Ben Settle. Ben Settle, how are you? Ben Settle: I am doing great. How are you doing David? David Allan: I’m doing fantastic. It’s a nice day here in Monterey California. And you’re up in Oregon. Ben Settle: Yeah I’m in I’m in Bandon, Oregon where it’s pretty shitty out here. Can I use that word on John’s podcast? David Allan: Yes absolutely. John would probably tell you to only use those. Ben Settle: Yeah it is pretty it’s probably – it’s one of those days where it’s like really windy and everything’s blown all over the place and I like it though. I like the storms and everything and it’s right up my alley. David Allan: Oh good. That’s awesome. Now I think I first heard about you from Michael Senoff I believe… Ben Settle: That’s very possible. David Allan: Yeah. Because I first started learning about email marketing from my course put up by Matt Furey. Ben Settle:Me too. David Allan: Yeah. And I later found out that you were much the same and then I stumble across Michael’s web site when I first got on the Internet I think it was poking around for a couple of years and then you guys had some dealings together so I think there were some products and stuff to you guys worked on together. Ben Settle: Yeah. And we’ve been friends for a long time we’ve worked on a lot of stuff together. David Allan: That’s awesome. You first started out as kind of a freelance copywriter, is that right? Ben Settle: Yeah. Yeah when I first started out I didn’t even know what I was doing. I just knew I wanted to learn this copywriting thing and I thought I’d better get some clients so I can figure out this game as fast as possible. And you know it didn’t happen fast. David Allan: I know the feeling. This may have been covered in the other podcast but what was the first sort of your first. I think I heard the story somewhere but who knows how much I’ve listened to or read. It was something to do with like you had a business at the time that was kind of failing and then you stumble across a book or something. Ben Settle: Yeah I was I was I was partaking of the gateway drug known as MLM at the time.I was like the worst distributor that’s probably ever walked the face of the planet. I’m like this introverted Grinch like crotchety guy. I don’t want to go up to everybody and say hey do keep your options open for ways to make money. It’s just you know and that’s what they want you to do. And it’s like oh yes. Yeah I end up living in like this office because I was in so much debt. I was passing recruiting tapes out door to door to businesses and getting laughed at and mocked and rejected. And one morning like 3:00 a.m. I woke up I was laying on the floor of my office because then I didn’t have furniture or anything and I was like God you obviously don’t want me doing this is like two years. I hate this guy. And I went and picked this book up just in my other room which I had read a couple times before but it never really got me or anything it was called The Seven Lost Secrets of Success by a guy named Joe Vitale. Joe’s a copywriter and author and it’s about this old school advertising guy named Bruce Barton. And most people don’t… Well I don’t know I think I’m spreading the gospel of Barton because I tell this story so many times. But basically he was this old school advertising guy and he was well-known. He was like a contemporary of John Caples and he was a congressman and he was a open enemy of FDR and he is well known in the business world on Wall Street and just you know just everyone knew who he was at the time. And in 1919 or after World War Two or were World War One I should say and this is in the book this is the page you just turned to. Some out of work sales manager came up to him and said I need help, Bruce. Help me find work. And he’s like well tell me about yourself and I guess the guy turned out to be. His specialty was sales letters. He was a sales manager but his specialty was sales letters. And so Bruce takes him to the window and says Look at all these buildings out there full of businesses why don’t you’re supposed to be good at writing sales letters why don’t you write a letter to them on selling them on hiring you. And that’s when the light bulb went on for me after that. You know that’s where I learned – discovered this magical kingdom called copywriting and never looked back. David Allan: That’s awesome. Yeah I’ve read that Joe Vitale book too. And probably because on your recommendation I’m sure along the way somewhere probably because I heard what you said. Now when you first started down that copyrighting – because a lot of our audience is of course freelance copywriters and people probably looking to hire freelance copywriters as I have found out. And also you know new business owners the stuff that they’re sort of learning about the importance of copy. What sort of steps that you take to try and find those clients? Did you pull a. you know, Bruce Barton-like idea? Ben Settle: Well know this was in 2002 so we didn’t really have the options you have now. It’s so easy people now getting started so freaking easy to get clients it’s like you’ve got people with no talent what’s what we’re getting you know five ten thousand dollar jobs. I’m thinking Holy crap this Facebook has made people so gullible and stupid that they just hire anybody off there. You know honestly I didn’t have that I would love that man but they didn’t have that back then at least not that I was aware. I ended up getting my first few clients. They weren’t even paid clients – I had read this this article by Gary Halbert called Why MLM sucks or why multi-level marketing sucks and and in the end that newsletter he was talking about how look don’t even bother with clients just go make deals with people who already have product to sell you just write the ads and then you split the money which sounded really good in theory. I did that and I never got paid on anything until I met Michael Senoff, and him and I did it. And that turned into a very like a three year relationship where we sold a lot of stuff and we split the sales and it just worked out great. But that was such a rare thing to make happen. It’s like that was like winning the lottery in a sense because I’ve never found one since I like that you can trust at least. Right. People get weird is what Michael told me. He goes Ben we’re going to have to sign. We’re going to sign an agreement here for your own protection. And I said why is that. And he’s as honest as the day is long. He goes because when big money starts being made people get weird and I don’t want that to happen with us. David Allan: So you know that’s a very you got very lucky that because I know I’ve been burned personally myself and seen other you know happen other people and it seems very counter-intuitive that something that’s going so well would cause such issues. You know in some case I think Michael said it perfectly when he said that when that big money starts being people get weird because. Yes. I remember Gary Halbert even talking at some of his seminars about how people stopped mailing stuff at no reason other that just like I’m bored you know I don’t want to do more. I mean just rake in money and they’re like what are you talking about you know. So if you had like that because you sounded like you went through several instances where you sort of tried to partner with people. And ended up getting nothing. What sort of advice would you have for people who are looking. You know look at what clients are looking to partner with people who maybe approaching them? Ben Settle: Well I you know I’m probably the last person who should be answering those questions. I haven’t done client work for like six years but I’ll say this I will say this. You know get paid up front and establish like a relationship with that client and if it makes sense later to do something like that fine. But you know otherwise just don’t don’t like go in there with someone you don’t know. I mean you know I’m not saying it’ll never work. But I will say that it is you know in my case that even people that that you would think would not pull any shenanigans did. And no I see it. Yeah I’d just look back and think I would have I wish I had gotten paid other than what Michael Senoff. I wish I had because it worked out with him but I wish I would put it taking money up front and then if it made sense you know make a partnership – But, I’ll say what you don’t want David even that you’ll get burned. I was in the golf niche and I wrote an ad for this very prominent golf company. Am I going to name who they are but they’re very very prominent. And I wrote that I wrote their sales letter for them and it just you know they kicked ass and all that and it was great. And then I approached them I said well what if I’m just the copywriting guy and you know I write all the emails and sales letters and they liked it. And then I ended up you know ended up kind of not being very ethical and and that just not ethical. You know at the same time it was my fault. I should never know. I didn’t hold them. I didn’t hold them to the standards I should have and you know I mean it’s all my fault at then end. But even in those situations where you life not liked them originally I really did. I didn’t know they were crooked all that and you know. Yeah. I don’t know man. I just think that people should do…My whole thing is this…sell your own stuff. Be your own best client. Until then you know work for other people. But on the side. But the first hour of every day into your own business selling your own stuff and eventually you won’t need clients. And if you do have them they’ll be optional. David Allan: Right. I think that’s very good advice. And you know I once heard John Carlton I think one of his seminars I watched on DVD was funny that he you know mentioned it, because I’m going to ask you a question about how your sort of business personality has evolved and one of the first things I really heard about this was John Carlton – the way he said a consultant needs to be a total prick and you need to double your price. Ben Settle: I like that. I wish he told me that. David Allan: So now you have a very – you had a podcast for a while. The antipreneur podcast and you have a very strong personality that people see come across in your daily emails that people are familiar with you of course know what I’m talking about. For those that don’t know you jump on Ben’s list you’ll see has a very distinct personality – did that evolves out of those dealings. Or were you like that beforehand? Or how did that sort of come to fruition? Ben Settle: I’ve always been a crotchety guy like that. But what I you know well the longer I do this the more I like to put a little bit of a show on for people. So the personality you see in my emails on my podcast is 100 percent me it’s me with that with less. With without the filter I would do in polite society. And you know and that’s all it is it’s actually more me than the ME. I deal with in my little small town of Bandon here. You know I can actually I could I mean you know I’ve been getting kicked out of restaurants and stuff and that’s the beauty of it like in marketing you can be you if you can be whoever you want. I just did that. I just consulted some girls on this actually. You know I told them I would help them with some stuff. And one girl who I just look around sometimes and I told her the look I said don’t worry I will give you a personality with because she does videos and stuff. She was I don’t I need help like that. I go don’t worry I’ll give you a personality. And I said I was joking when I said it at the time- her and I we’re always flirting with the others though. Yes. So it’s just like kind of a joke. And then when I had her on this call her and these other people on this call recently she goes I really want to impress you on this like what personality should I have. And I said I don’t know. I told you I’d give you a personality. But in the meantime I want you to take your personality and then just ratchet – exaggerate it a couple of notches. And that would be the advice I would give to anyone is to take your personality whatever it is. Don’t try to be somebody you’re not because this is where everybody goes wrong. They’ll read my e-mails and I’ll try to be me or they’ll read someone else’s stuff and I’ll try to – They’ll read David Allan’s stuff and try to be David Allan or whoever and that’s the wrong way to do it. You’ve got to be you. But you can exaggerate it a little bit just be you with – If you didn’t have to worry about when you had to say. And as I say that with this little bit of a warning you know I’m not a big fan of being like the potty mouth guy. You know it happens sometimes. But some people take this to such a degree where they become repulsive to the point where nobody wants to deal with them. So you’ve got to modulate to your market at all timews. David Allan: That’s a very good advice. Now from people I’ve interviewed on my own podcast – I’ve interviewed a lot of the best copywriters that are alive and John’s had a lot of them on this show as well. One of the things I’ve noticed is that people tend to go in a full circle they sort of start with the client work then they come out with their own products and work themselves eventually. Now you seem to be one of the people which is one of the reasons I want to talk to you who sort of spent as little time as possible in that client aspect and then you sort of figured out OK I need to do my own products to make my life so much easier like what we’re talking about. So when did that sort of click for you. Ben Settle: What I’ve always you know if I hated authority. So I’ve never really liked doing client work. There was never a time doing client work where it wasn’t just a high paid job for me. You know like I mean I was inspired by it. Well you mentioned earlier I was originally inspired by Matt Furey like back in like 2003 2004. He would talk about in his daily emails and he wasn’t writing to business people, he was writing into the fitness market and he would he would brag about you know I’m not even going to edit this email this is all I’m doing for the day and I’m when I’m in China right now I want to go ride elephants. I thought that is such a cool lifestyle like I don’t need to ride elephants but I love the idea of just writing an email and being done and have my business set up in such a way where I can do that. So it was very early on but it took me many years the kind of put it all together because there was nobody showing. I mean there is stuff out there that would show you how to do an informational business but not like that. I mean it’s it’s simple but it’s not necessarily easy to set all that up and have it going so you’re full time in it and it took me many like seven or eight years to figure that out. David Allan: Right…now you have a new product that just came out. I said just came out to me and like the last quarter or something of last year a product you did with AWAI – may want to talk about that because that’s sort of the offshoot of all that you’ve learned in those last you know years of starting your own project and become more Matt Furey-like. Ben Settle: Yeah and it’s funny because in that program which is called the ten minute workday I think that by the way I would love to take credit for that name but one other writers at AWAI figured that out and I just took it is – They’re like the greatest people in the world over there I just can’t think of a single negative thing about them they’re just awesome. But it’s funny because in that program I like one of the first slides is something like Furey-esque origins or I give all the freaking credit for this because without him like studying his business and studying just him I don’t think I could have figured this out. And it’s not like there’s a lot to figure out in fact it’s all very simple and that’s the problem. It’s so simple nobody thinks it should be able to work. And it’s like the biggest sales job is convincing people yeah it really is that simple. You know what they want to do ? Everybody wants to complicate stuff like they will go out of their way to complicate. I mean I gotta tell ya. This is why I don’t take, by the way, personal like students anymore one on one because all they want to do is comp… I will show them the most simplest thing and they gotta go out into the weeds. It’s like when I’m walking my dog I just is like an epiphany I had yesterday actually while walking my dog. I’m trying to get her to. I want to take her to the beach where she loves to walk. So on the way to the beach or she keeps wanting stray off into the side you know into the woods. And it’s like I’m trying more in the morning in the morning time she wakes me up in the morning every day and then I say Oh let her out but she will pin me to the ground and will let me get up. I’m trying to give her what she wants – but she won’t let it happen and that’s what people do with the ten minute workday stuff I’d like. I mean hopefully they’re not because we’re doing like monthly webinars this year for that or anything to help people. But I think that’s the biggest challenge people have with this kind of stuff. They want to like. They want to try to personalize it – don’t – just take the raw materials and build the house. However you want why don’t we use the blueprint I give you? David Allan: Well it’s true and you’ve been a big inspiration for me too I think to some people I had on my other podcast were people who kept stuff very simple and they sort of stayed away from – you know funnel is a big sort of… everyone funnel this funnel that funnel cake – who knows – but it’s it just serves to complicate things. You know those things have been around forever. Those aren’t new things. It’s just because you know it’s become it’s become a terminology, a jargon but in reality those things are what every business does. Hopefully you know how they have some funnel in place. And so I think it just gets in the people’s head and I think have to be the sort of big parade- a show like you’re saying. Ben Settle: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like 30 steps and they don’t have a product yet to sell and that’s just like you know you don’t need all that. I mean there’s a place for all the software like you know all the popular – like Russell’s. There’s a place for it. And I’m talking about Russell Brunson like is a place for that stuff but not for the new person who still hasn’t figured out an offer and it’s like all they should be focused on is getting the opt in. Making a sale and then selling those buyers something else. Start with that and then you can start branching out. But they want to start with everything. They have these big flowcharts and all this like what are you selling. I don’t know yet but I have my funnel figured out and doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But now – there it is. David Allan: It’s true. Now what do you getting into copywriting – then most people listen whether they need to make the jump into copywriting as well or may go the freelance route or write for themselves hopefully like you’re advocating. Were you one of these people who took old letters and copied them out by hand sorta the Gary Halbert advice and advice to people of you know either copywriters give that advice – the A-list quote unquote copywriters give that advice. Is that something you did? Ben Settle: Oh yeah I did it day and night. Like whenever I could at my job I worked at I mean I even I was. And then I learned and I got -some advice I would give on this for people because people get people who find this hard to do sometimes and I get it. It’s tedious writing. It’s like hand cramps and all that – pick a one copywriter that you actually like you read their stuff for fun. For me that was Gary Halbert. I would read his stuff for entertainment. And so it’s much easier to copy his stuff out than someone else. And I don’t know why I would focus on his stuff. I’m not saying that the listeners should I I think the listener should find a copywriter that they just they like reading their stuff and do it with them. And I like copy like his or Boron Letters book by hand like goes also but it was it was great. I think it really does work. I mean that people say..that’s just bullcrap I don’t know. I think it does make a. I think it definitely does – there’s something to that because yeah there’s something to it. And even certain novelists have done that like the guy who wrote the book Roots. That’s the reason I’m thinking is because it’s in the book on letters you talk about Alex Hailey. Yeah. He said the guy the Alex Hailey Not only did he go across the ocean in the belly of an old ship so he can get experience what that was like. But I think he I think he said that he wrote some a book out by hand to like some I don’t know what book it was just so he can understand what writing a book feels like and there’s something to it. I don’t you know I’m not going to say I’m the expert at it but there’s like a product that I hear a lot about that – I am not endorsing it I don’t really know much about it called Copy Hour and I know they do that. Well actually one of the one of the owners I think is Ian Stanley who I like him alot of I don’t I just have never used it. You know I can’t tell you. But I mean even if it’s advocating this stuff I don’t think it can be a bad thing. David Allan: Yeah I heard too. I think it probably was from Copy Hour because I was a previous member as well that Hunter Thompson also wrote out if not whole books then certainly passages by people like Hemingway and stuff like that that he could get better at writing. Ben Settle: Yeah I didn’t know that but that’s interesting to know actually. David Allan: Now one of the things that I really enjoyed about stuff that you put out over the years was when you started your antipreneur podcast back then I was listening to the different podcasts and I hadn’t really found one that I truly know I would list them on and off. But when you sort of started yours that was when I really you know I admired and it was succinct and short to the point it got a lot of good information out and you and Jonathan of course are both funny guys – I’ve had Jonathan on my other podcast as well. Ben Settle: Oh Good. He’s great. David Allan: Now what made you get into podcasting originally because I don’t think I’ve ever heard the story. Ben Settle: On New Year’s Day or of 2014, I put an e-mail out there. Where I said here’s my goals for 2014. And one of them was to start a podcast. I know nothing about podcasting. I didn’t know nothing about how to do one or how to produce one how to do on iTunes I knew nothing why. I just thought it would be fun. Like I I had no purpose for it I didn’t think it would be a money maker and I just I just I have so much to say on this stuff it’s like therapy and I thought that would be a cool thing to do. Well I can’t say there was that was the only reason I I had recently like a couple of weeks before that I had a talk with a guy named Danny Iny and he just he really changed my brain on some things in a good way about the idea of building a list and how building an audience is much more important than building a list. List is part of your audience. What an overall audience isn’t just an email list. It’s it’s a lot of stuff. And the bigger your audience the better so that was another aspect of it. And Jonathan Rivera replied to that email said well if you want to help with that you know I can I can help you with that. I was like holy crap. Yeah. I knew nothing about this stuff. So that’s what got me into that and it lasted a hundred and thirty seven episodes the last 12 which were like secret episodes we never aired publicly. I just gave those away to buyers of my villains book when I launched that a couple of months ago. But it lasted over two years like two and a half years and then we decided we’d want to put it to a paid membership site because I was giving away. I was teaching way too much and I was like I didn’t mean to. David Allan: I was the opposite of your emails. Ben Settle: It really is. It was ridiculous and Jonathan kept saying Ben what are you doing. I just paid you to learn that. And is here right now we’re going to put this in like a membership site or something. And you know we’ll see what happens and we could add some more stuff to it like he would interview some A-list copywriters. We had that in there. I had some other stuff going on. And that turned out to be like a huge nightmare. I mean I just hated the idea of having a membership site I hate having to rely on a team of people – I’m a one man band. I missed my print newsletter at that point. It was super successful. It was like the most successful launch I’ve probably been involved in but it was just to me it was a nightmare. People were chasing me down and our other partner Misty who does the voice on the podcast chasing her down like for technical stuff where we don’t know jack about that stuff but they’re like chasing her down on Facebook and chasing me down. It’s like if this is this bad it like 950 members how is it going to be when we get to know 5000 members like it’s a nightmare. So I literally the day after the launch I just told Jonathan I want out. And I thought was going to be mad at me you know but he was so relieved. He felt the same way. So. So it all worked out. You know whatever. So then I took I took the rest of the year off and I relaunched the new one on New Year’s Day this year and it’s so far it’s getting some pretty good pretty good feedback from people. So we’ll see how that goes. David Allan: So I guess a lot of the problem stems from like you want to keep your lifestyle the way it is. That’s very very you know, uncluttered if you will. Ben Settle: Absolutely and that clutter it quite a bit because he had – like Jonathan has a great team in place now but even they were getting like you know even they were like It just I don’t know what it is. I’ll tell you what it is. And I thought about this because like why was this such a miserable experience for me just because because my name is attached to that to that which was a different entity than my main website and stuff like that was all owned by Jonathan and his team dealing with that. And people are just used to contacting me personally you know. And so it’s kind of my own fault like I almost did too good of a job branding myself over the years as like so you know I think that was a big factor of it. But yeah I don’t want to discourage. I have to say because I don’t want to discourage other people from doing a membership say for some people that’s what I see. I see some people starting to do print newsletters because they just want to copy what I’m doing. And they’re missing the point because I can tell they hate writing and they don’t really want to do it. They just like the idea of it but they would be better off just you know recording some audio or something. Or doing a paid YouTube channel or something. Yeah I might. I mean I can’t speak for what people are doing but I just see that people are much more like naturals as video for example and yet they’re struggling writing a print newsletter because that’s what Ben’s doing. I’m not saying people should do that at all. I think that’s one way of doing it. I wish I was a video guy. I would definitely have a paid YouTube channel. I would just let them handle all the hosting. They’d be the easiest thing in the world. But nobody wants to do that. David Allan: I think that’s good advice too because it’s a lot of people are much more comfortable with the different mediums. I myself I’ve enjoyed doing audio and I’m entertaining the idea of doing an audio product instead of like you know a paid letter or something like that. Ben Settle: Yeah David Allan: I really want to thank you for coming on the show, Ben. It’s been really illuminating talk just as I hoped it would be. Ben Settle: Oh I appreciate you having me David Allan:. Yes. You had a lot of good advice now. People want to get in contact with you which I’m sure they will what’s the best place to sort of go. So they can get involved with the you know being brainwashed by Ben Settle. Ben Settle: The brainwashing begins at bensettle.com and if you go there and I think if you give me your precious e-mail address you Opt-In and not some stupid hotmail address but like a real email address you know. You know if you’re really into this you don’t just do this for the freebie like a loser. No actually be committed right. I mean I have to say that because… David Allan: Don’t pull any punches Ben Ben Settle: You know there’s certain people that just do that and they wonder why they’re spinning their wheels. But you opt-in. I’ll send you the first issue of my email players newsletters in PDF. Now it’s a newsletter but I’ll give you the PDF for the first issue 24 ways in there to make more sales with emailing starting right away. They’re not hard things to do or anything people have. Some people told me they’ve made thousands and at least one or two cases tens of thousands of dollars just with that free information just applying it to their their business. David Allan: It’s a great issue. I can attest to that. Ben Settle: Yeah. And it’s a very real retail value of $97. It’s not like I’m making the value of what people charge – it cost them. So you get that if you don’t give me your e-mail address you can still like click through to the blog and there’s like 2000 pages of blog posts on there and I’ve got all my I’ve got over a dozen hours of audio and video training and I have a podcast on that site but it’s hidden now I give the link to people who are actually on the my list but if you get that link then you’re going to have all three two and half years of my old podcasts plus the new one all at your fingertips. So much stuff there I would only I mean I could spend like two hours of time all this stuff but that’s at bensettle.com David Allan: Yeah that’s a great place to go. I’ve listened to all those past podcast before you attempted to make it a paid thing so I can attest to the content there like you said you were almost teaching too much. And I was thankful for that. And yeah if people want to get involved with Ben go to bensettle.com but opt-in like not with a lazy e-mail address like who says I know you will be rewarded because I have made money by listening to Ben and it’s a real pleasure having you on the show again Ben, and I wish you the best in the future I look forward to seeing what you’re up to. Ben Settle: All right man I appreciate it. Thank you. David Allan: Thank you very much to everybody else. Of course our podcast will have another exciting guest. I think it’s going to be a guy who’s coming out with some new auto responder software that you need to know about. So for people tuning in this should be a chronological order. You know a very exciting guest is going out with a sort of a game changing auto responder software so tune in next time for that. And for people who want to get a hold of me, David Allan, go to makewordspay.com Yes for those that I’ve been asking I still do take on clients if the fit is right. So go to makewordspay.com or shoot me an email – Dave@makewordspay.com and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. The post Episode #144 – Ben Settle On Slacker-Preneur Secrets Of A 10 Minute Business Lifestyle appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Guess who gave Lady Gaga her first TV interview? This guy… Louie La Vella, music marketing BOSS. Louie’s works in the music industry, where he helps artists, musicians and record labels sell more music and get more fans. What’s Louie doing on The McMethod Email Marketing Podcast if he’s a music guy? Well, it turns out that Louie uses a lot of strategies and tactics that I use. He’s big on personal branding and encourages his clients to ALWAYS tell an engaging story that magnetically attracts fans, customers and clients to your door. He has also produced over 40 live music events, and has worked as the Marketing Director for 5 festivals. In other words, Louie’s been around the “marketing block” a few times and has plenty of hard-won wisdom to share. And since he’s outside the “internet marketing bubble”, Louie brings a fresh perspective on what we can all do to grow our businesses and make more money. The “internet marketing world” is quite small, and if you’ve been to a few conferences, you’ve probably bumped into the same people. In many ways, it’s great. But in other ways, it’s dangerous, because it leads “intellectual in-breeding” and stale, stagnant ideas. That’s why it’s important to look outside the internet marketing industry once in a while, to get a breath of fresh air, see things in a new light, and come back with killer ideas that no one has thought of yet. So listen in, breathe the fresh air and discover Louie’s secret strategies for building a magnetic personal brand so that EVERYONE wants to work with YOU.   In this interview with Louie La Vella, you’ll discover: how to craft a personal brand that’s so magnetic and irresistible that EVERYONE wants to work with YOU how Louie worked his way up the ladder in the notoriously-competitive music industry (fantastic advice here – especially if you’re looking for a career that you LOVE) how to get featured in mainstream media publications like Entrepreneur, Forbes, Business.com and The Huffington Post how I use guest posting to generate highly-qualified leads that pay $10,000 or more per copywriting project how to generate clients and customers at ANY stage of the game (I share a strategy that ANYONE can use to generate clients, whether they’re a beginner or long-time marketing consultant or copywriter) how to maintain momentum once you get started on this path (if you lose momentum, it’s GAME OVER) how to handle the pressure of being an entrepreneur with the serene calmness of a bomb squad veteran (if you want to play the entrepreneur game, you MUST learn to deal with pressure… the pressure to pay bills without a guaranteed salary, the pressure to perform for clients, and so on) Mentioned: Louie La Vella’s website Louie’s Twitter My eCommerce email marketing post on Digital Marketer My eCommerce email marketing podcast on Shopify Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Hey podcast listener, you’re about to discover insider tips, tricks and secrets to making more sales and converting more prospects into customers with email marketing. For more information about the email marketing podcast or the Autoresponder Guy go to dropdeadcopy.com/podcast. All right, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Louie La Vella. Louie is an interesting guy because he’s not really in the business. He is in the business world, but he’s not in the typical world for some of the guests I’ve had on this podcast. He’s actually in the music world, but he’s applying a lot of the concepts that we talk about here, copy writing and funnels and all of that stuff to marketing music, to helping festivals, and bands, and artists get playing at nightclubs and all this sort of thing. I thought it would just be really interesting to hop on and have a chat about this, because I think he’s going to bring a really interesting perspective on how this stuff works. What I haven’t probably mentioned here, I don’t think, is that I’ve actually been doing some music, so it’s a topic close to my heart at this moment that’s quite interesting to me. Louie, what’s up man? Louie: Hey, how’s it going? Thank you so much for having me on. Thanks to everybody out there in podcast land taking the time to listen. This is going to be an exciting one. I’ve been doing a lot of podcasts but I was excited about this one. I mean first of all I’m always fascinated about the internet marketing field and all aspects of it, especially because I love learning from those other industries and taking that over to mine, and like you mentioned promoting the festivals and concerts and musicians and labels, but you as a musician too. I don’t know if I’ve done, like I said, I’ve done like 60-something odd podcasts and none of them are music marketing. They’re all business and internet marketing, but it’s cool to be able to take my flavor of marketing and bridge that, but I don’t think I’ve done one where there was an actual musician or an actual music marketing one, so here we go. Now it’s even double exciting for me so thanks for having me on. John: It’s been funny actually, because I’ve been doing this since … I grew up playing guitar. It’s been a while playing music, but started producing music about a year ago now, and one thing I’ve noticed since I’ve started to explore some of the different ways I can market the music is there’s a lot of really bad internet marketing in the music space. Louie: Yeah. I find there’s a lot of outdated stuff. I don’t know if it’s some of the experts that have come forward that had a course a couple of years ago or articles and then they were stuck in their ways. I notice that in a lot of industries though, so you might be noticing it in music because you’re starting to learn and you’re starting to dig in, but I bet you if you go on certain forums, Facebook groups in any digital marketing you’re going to find people who were experts perhaps a few years ago or even further that are now trying to answer questions that you may know is completely off now, because things move so fast. I’m not sure if it’s because they stopped actually practicing, you know what I mean? Maybe they have a label but they’ve backed off. I even have label friends and they are sort of scaled down. They stopped signing artists. They’re just putting out their own music which is totally cool, but they’ve also stopped really aggressively trying to figure out what’s happened, and as you know and everybody who is listening now because we’re all in that internet marketing space still, it changes really quick. Some things that are six months ago working, may not work now. I feel that that’s probably a reason why even in music marketing you’re finding outdated stuff or those kind of pieces of information that you’re thinking, “This may not work anymore. I don’t understand why he’s saying that. This is outdated.” I think it’s because they’re in the music business. I’m in the music marketing business and I know I got to use stuff constantly, have to be an early adopter especially because of festivals. Those are like 18 year olds, 17 year olds, 20 year olds, and they’re all over the new platforms. I need to understand their user behavior, so I can update my information and my articles and my courses, because I know it has to be done. I cannot put out an evergreen that lasts three, four years. Even the ads manager on Facebook has changed its look a million times. John: It’s so annoying. Louie: I have a course from a year ago. I looked at one of my other courses, I’m like, “Can I regurgitate some of that stuff?” I’m like, “Crap. They changed the look of the ads manager, so going left means going right now,” and it’s just I have to redo it. That’s could be a reason why you’re finding that, but it happens in many industries. John: Right. We can come back to that, but first let’s, well second I guess. We’ve already gotten a little bit into a bit about you. Can you give the listener just a bit more of a background, like who are you; what do you do, what’s your story? Louie: What is my story? It’s a fascinating one. You know how everybody has their part time job when you’re in college or university. It could be bar tending, grocery store, or whatever. I was always fascinated with the entertainment industry even as like in my elementary school days. I wanted, “Mom, let’s get an agent so I can do extra work in film.” Stuff like that. I always was fascinated with entertainment, so my part-time job, I mean I did a little bit of grocery, of course, because my friends owned one or parents owned one. I started working in the nightclub and bar industry as a sub-promoter, so I went and asked some promoters can I help you bring in people. I’ll try and contact, not my friends because they’re too young to come in, but people who are you’re looking for. Give me fliers, give me whatever you need and then I’ll help. Of course they’re always interested in adding traffic without doing the work, so it was I got in. I quickly realized, you know what, I can book my own shows. I can book my own DJs, my own bands and I can be the promoter and do my own venue, like make the deals and get out of being a sub-promoter. I did that very quickly. I was pretty young as a promoter. I remember even some places were joking that the legal age to drink in Ontario in Canada is 19 and I was like 18 year olds promoting clubs. They were like, “You can’t even legally be in here.” I got the business. I got the user behavior pretty quickly and was able to build that as a relationship style business, because that’s what entertainment is. From there I knew I wanted to stay in entertainment and grow this into a major career, but it wasn’t going to be as a nightclub promoter. I was going to leave that within a couple of years and get into other aspects: radio, television, and now to where I am today as a consultant that works with large festivals, and concerts and record labels. I have friends that are still the nightclub promoter and they could make good money but you’re stuck to one local area. You’re at the mercy of the few clubs that are around you, whether you get into bad relationships with the club owners or they start to die out, and it’s just a struggle. I knew I didn’t want to stay in that position. I didn’t want to just be a nightclub promoter. Not to talk down the nightclub promoter at all. They have a great job, lucrative money. I wanted to do something different. That’s where I started. I always had that longer term goal, so throughout the whole journey I had to use personal branding for myself and figure out how do I level up constantly so that I can keep growing client base, authority, so people look at me as the best promoter or marketer in the industry. It’s fascinating when you’re on Facebook and you get tagged in a completely unrelated group, when somebody is talking about music marketing or nightlife promotions and I get tagged in that. Hey, if you want to, go talk to Louie. You know what I mean? That’s great. That means I’m doing a pretty good job at branding myself as the guy in that space. It’s a journey. You have to know the long term goal and chip away at it. John: That’s awesome. That’s really cool. One thing that’s interesting to me is you’re not a musician by the sound of it. Do you play anything? Louie: No. John: Do you sing? Like nothing. Louie: I played piano because mom put me in piano lessons, but, no. I’m definitely not. The cool thing is I get the music business really well, and I have a good ear. I could probably be a great A&R rep, someone who works for a label and finds the right sound and develops the artist. I have a great ear for possibly what could be a hit, but as an actual musician, no, I don’t play guitar. I can’t sing, not that I … No. Not well enough at all. I am completely not in that art space. You guys fascinate me with the talent that you have. John: Interesting. Okay. I think it’s really cool because a lot of people talk about going and doing what they love. Music is one of those classic things that people bring up, like what did you want to do when you were a kid. I wanted to become a rock star or something like that. It is cool seeing and, like you said, meeting people who are … There’s so many ways to do it. You can go and be an artist or you can go and do what you’re doing and do what I do, but do it just in a different industry like the music space, and there’s just so many different journeys or paths you can take which is cool. Louie: There is. When you’re at a live show, concert and you look back at all the moving parts to that, whether it’s the agent, the manager, the sound technicians, and the venue owner. There’s a lot of moving pieces to that piece of the entertainment industry, and if you can carve out your passion and then go at it, you can make it. I mean entertainment like any business has got its walls up and it’s a tough nut to crack, so to speak, but you always hear the same stories of the never-give-up attitude and the keep moving forward, and that’s true. It’s built to stop you so that the best of the best come through, but when you have the right formulas, that adds to your hustle, and it adds to a little bit of your fire, and you can make it. You can actually get to that goal that you want to get to. John: I think probably a good corollary to that is that a lot of people get into whatever it is. It might be the music business. It could be the digital nomad, your Four Hour Work Week thing, like whatever people want in life. Because people often think if I work really hard and I want to try this. It doesn’t work out immediately for them, a lot of people give up. You mentioned the formula there. It’s a bit like cooking. I’ve said this about copy writing before. I think you can say this about anything. Whenever you’re trying to get somewhere, like lose weight or get ripped or build a business or get a girlfriend or boyfriend, it’s really you just got to figure out the recipe and if you’re not getting the result that you want yet, the only problem is you just haven’t figured out the precise ingredients yet. If you figure that stuff out, you’re going to get the result, and so a lot of people give up thinking that they’re just not destined to be this way or that whatever, like there’s some external thing that prevents them from being that, but it’s usually just us. Louie: Yeah. Absolutely is, and you’re right, it’s usually the tweaking of the ingredients to the recipe. Absolutely. It’s a matter of learning the recipe or recipes. Sometimes there’s several ways to get there or a combination of a few and just learning and then testing for your own, and finding out what works, and then it almost is funny when you step back. For me I work with a lot of different clients, and you as well, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people who are freelancing who are listening that have several clients, and it’s really weird that sometimes we overcomplicate the recipe a lot. Because we’re having all these moving parts, but it’s cool when you start seeing successes, you’re thinking, “Man, it’s almost like it works over and over and over again because I now learned the recipe.” When I’m promoting clubs, or I did a lot more nightclub promotion obviously back in the day and have very few, a handful of clubs that I work with now. Most of them are festivals and labels and stuff, but they would struggle and what might help, and how do we do the promotions. I would say, “Look, this is literally the formula I do all the time,” and it works again, and, “Oh, my God. How did that happen?” I’m like, “That’s just how it works. That’s the recipe.” Just like you said, you’re going to bake a pie or whatever it is, this is the recipe. You have to follow it, you know what I mean? If you have that ingredient, so if their bartenders spit in their cups or your music is no good and you’re out of tune type of thing, that’s an ingredient problem but the recipe is still going to work if you fix the ingredients or the product. It’s pretty fascinating. Funny that you mentioned Four Hour Work Week because out of the billion podcasts I’ve been on usually ask me, “Well, what’s a book you can recommend?” I always mentioned Four Hour Work Week. I really do. I love that book, and it’s not always about, because some of the business owners are like, “Oh, yeah. You can work four hours. Good luck with that.” It’s not about an actual four hour work week. I’m sure you’ve talked about this, it was the message on figuring out your lifestyle and your perceived wealth and outsourcing things you don’t need to do on your own that are redundant tasks that somebody else could do and creating the right life design, and that’s what I got out of that book and how I’m crafting even my own life design in the entertainment industry. John: Yeah. Much more about designing your dream life in many ways. Let’s go in a different direction now. Talking about personal branding, because I think that there’s going to be people listening to this that, like I said, I’ve sort of redone The McMethod, the website there to focus a bit more on freelance copy writers and people who want to, you know maybe they want to read the Four Hour Work Week, learn how to write copy, for example, and then go and travel the world. I live in Thailand right now. We’re talking about that. They might want to do anything else. There’s copy writers who might live in New York and want to get a cool apartment, but the point is there’s people listening, they want to learn how to write copy or they usually can, because you can learn that stuff on your own time. You just sit down, you read some books. You practice. You can get better. That’s pretty straightforward. The hard part that people struggle with, and I think this is probably true of anyone who starts a business is how do you get clients. How do you actually, and this is where the personal brand comes in because I think that’s the thing that I ended up doing that worked for me best, was I started calling myself the Autoresponder Guy, which an autoresponder being a sequence of emails that goes out [crosstalk 00:14:03] buy stuff. I came up with that name on my own. No one called me that, but then I just started telling everyone that everyone called me that and then it became a brand or a mythology that then someone would be at a conference and a friend of theirs or someone they’re networking with would say, “I need some email copy.” They’re like, “Oh, man. You should talk to this email copy writing guy, the Autoresponder Guy.” Even if I wasn’t the best copy writer, I was the most relevant because I’d branded, sort of positioned myself as that, and then it’s just once you’ve got that brand it seems to be very much just you need to get that out in front of as many people as possible. It’s tricky to do. I think that’s the hard thing. A lot of people struggle to understand how do I actually go about, like number one, creating whatever that brand is without being just a me-too brand because I’ve done that. It’s going to be weird if someone, it’s not going to work if someone else just copies my Autoresponder Guy thing and tries to do the same thing. There’s that step, and then there’s the how do I get it out there. You mentioned Huffington Post, but how do I get on podcasts; how do I get guest [crosstalk 00:15:00]; how do I go and get on these huge Huffington Post or entrepreneur.com, or that sort of thing. Tell me about that. Louie: Absolutely. It’s funny because it’s me coming from the music industry and festivals and live music, it’s a similar problem. I had this conversation today with one of my clients. He’s a hiphop artist and we were talking about you need to come up with a personal brand. What is your story? Because you have great hiphop music but there is this guy beside you that also has great hiphop music, and now you’re also competing with Drake, and Chance the Rapper, and Kanye West who are hiphop artists and super famous. You need to come up with a unique story. For you, as a fantastic example, the Autoresponder Guy, there could be other people that are experts at auto responding, copy, email funnels, things like that, but you came up with a specific brand and now a story behind that. For the most part I’d like to have clients that, again, talking musicians but this happens with any freelancer, is to sit down and be like what is your core why, like why are you doing this and what exactly is your specific niche expertise within this whole realm of internet marketing, for example, if we’re talking about your listeners. What is it that’s your specialty? There’s nothing wrong with getting some inspiration from other people. That’s okay. Not by taking their name and stuff like that, but to see, “You know what, I really like how,” whoever. Jon Loomer in Facebook ads or Chance the Rapper as a hiphop artist, I like how that guy is family-oriented and give back to the community, and kind of looking at the styles of post they make, but then you have to make that your own. You absolutely have to make it your own. The first thing that I would do is just figure out your why. My why is definitely helping the underdog. I’m always working with the underdog festival, not the massive fest- … They’re huge because we made them huge, but not the corporate festival. You know what I mean? I love working with the indie labels and the start-up musicians. Yes. I love and would love working with the Universals and the Sonys, but that’s not where my why is to be in that corporate environment, and so that’s kind of where my push comes, and you could tell when we talked earlier about in this podcast, you know what am I selling type of thing. I’m like, “Nothing. I don’t have anything.” I got nothing to sell. If you’re a musician I have courses, but that’s not even your audience so to speak, so that’s my why and you can see that, and that’s where the brand starts. Then you have to develop that and dig into that, and you might tweak and pivot here and there, but it really comes down to if you have that passion every day, why exactly are you doing it. Forget that you aren’t getting paid. What is the thing that is just driving you and have the most fun, and I have the most fun talking to musicians and podcasters. Like I said earlier, even off the call here, because it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun. I love doing it. I love brainstorming and talking. I’m not getting paid to do this, and I’m not going to get clients out of it. I’m sure I won’t but that’s okay because we’re having fun and it’s great, and I give back whatever knowledge I have from my industry perhaps could help somebody and that’s cool. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s my why without even getting paid. That’s what people have to figure out and then you can create a brand around that. Now, how do you expose that? I talked earlier about getting on Huffington Post and Forbes and I was on Inc, and I’m a contributor in a whole whack of places now, and it comes from a little bit of hustle, but at the very beginning you might have some assets that you can use, whether it’s your own blog, your own video you put out. Maybe you were on a local blog or a small publication that talks about copy writing or whatever it is. Use that as leverage and start to level up. Level up into the next publication. You want to build an authority piece somewhere, so now when I got into Huffington Post and then got featured in Inc and stuff like that, I can use those articles and advertise to any potential clients: musicians, festival owners. “Hey, look, this is when I got featured in Huffington Post, and here’s an article I talked about.” It’s not just my blog. If you can start with your blog, but start to level up. When you get other people writing about you, or even if you’re the contributor of the other magazine it looks better. It just looks better. You need to hustle and get into that position, but then you can use that to your advantage and that starts building your brand a lot further because people can see you as an authority figure. It starts to separate you from perhaps the other copy writer that doesn’t have that, or if they do at least your story might be different than theirs because, again, you go back to your core why. They read both Huffington Posts and they will lean on one or the other. Similar to music, if I go back to that as an example. When I figured out that hiphop artists like Chance the Rapper, fine. This is the kind of post you want to make, but I could build a story around that and start with the local blog, then get up even further. Then get up into 247hiphop.com, use that to my advantage and say, “Hey, thesource.com;” this is a huge hiphop magazine, “look, he got featured in these three. Maybe you want to write a story there?” Because writers need traffic so they need a good story, not a boring pitch, but a good story. When they see other people write about it, it starts to convince them. All that helps expose their brand and get more traffic, so similar idea with any freelancer. They want to level up. Don’t forget use the ad system, like put those featured articles in your own blog and promote to writers and contributors of Billboard or Inc, entrepreneurs, you know Entrepreneur Magazine, and Forbes, and Influencive, and business.com, and all those ones. Start using the ad system and spend only a few dollars a day because your audience will be tiny, but get those onto your blog to start with, but get those other features out in front of them. It’s going to be a little two-pronged attack: your client base, and more contributors. That’s a great way to start and get the brand rolling, and then of course you can start moving that boulder up the hill from there. John: Right. There’s a few things there it’d be good to dig into, but I think one thing that would be good for people to understand is this leveling up concept, like no matter how small you are, like you could have no one, you don’t know anyone in, like let’s say you’re a copy writer or you’re a marketing person trying to get into it, like you could know absolutely no one. You’ve never been to a business meetup. You don’t know anyone. You could set up a website, figure out this why, figure out this brand. Don’t call yourself the Autoresponder Guy because it won’t work. Figure out a brand. Set up a website which, I mean there’s so many different ways to do that. You can make a great looking website for free in a lot of cases, and once you have that you then just need to find, like you’re not going to be able to email entrepreneur.com or Forbes.com and get on there right now, but you’re going to be able to find someone somewhere with a small enough blog that just needs content. They’re going to either have you on the podcast which I only really recommend if you’re good at speaking and good at that sort of thing, or if you want to get good because some people are super awkward and I think it just makes them look worse. That’s something to keep in mind. I think you got to play to your personality. Someone out there is going to give you something and then once you have that one thing, you then take that and like Louie was saying you then go to something that’s a little bit bigger, and say, “Hey, look. I’ve already done this. Now let’s do this.” You can use this. I used this with a podcast. I remember starting off with it was Andre Chaperon and a bunch of internet marketing guys, and eventually when I had move up the food chain and start pitching bigger names, I’d always mention the biggest names I’d had up until that point on the podcast. They would always be one of the first lines in the pitch. “Oh, by the way I’ve had this person, this person, and this person.” Then I’m trying to make this other person, John Carlton or Perry Marshall go, “Oh, shit. I’d better get on this podcast. It’s pretty good. Man, I’m missing out.” Then you can keep going and it just never really ends. Louie: It absolutely works that way, and so I see user behaviors a lot in the entertainment industry. I can see how people gravitate to celebritiness and how it works and why people keep in the spotlight, and they liked my tweet. Oh my gosh. Giddy, and all giggling. You know what I mean? I can see that user behavior and that’s the same way across so many industries. It’s so funny. That’s why I love doing these podcasts because it’s just trying to to make it an eyeopener for any business. That celebrity factor on whatever level it is, people love. If you can level up and utilize any of those publications to your advantage or those kind of concepts, it works really well, and it just makes you some sort of authority. That’s why there was the concept of, and it still works, you write a book. If you write a book, you wrote a book on it even if you’re self-published, you wrote the book on the topic and people respect that. It’s a great business card to have, which is true. It works. Now there’s a million different ways whether it’s podcasting, being a host on a podcast is great, as an expert, write your book, that kind of thing. You just try and continue to outdo your last step, because then, like you said, it’s fairly easy to create a WordPress site or Wix or whatever you want to have and have a blog. What’s the next level, or and the next guy can do that as well? Maybe I’ll utilize that blog and get on Huffington Post. Cool. Now he’s on Huffington Post. Maybe I’ll use that and get on Forbes next. You just level up, and then perhaps you can get on television. Local news if you’re the news expert, or even if you’re on once, it’s awesome to leverage online, but will you get clients out of that? Perhaps if you have a local business, sure, like an AM station instead of a podcast. Perhaps you want to be the local expert for copy writing or at a business show. Awesome. It’s very local and very restricted audience compared to podcasting, but maybe you will use that as leverage. “Oh, I was on an AM show.” That may sound good to some people and you use that as leverage. These are all assets. I like to build these as marketing assets and keep those with you. If you speak in a room even if it’s a small room, get a couple of pictures. That’s leverage now. Wow, you’ve had a room that you got to speak to. You did a keynote or a workshop. That all adds to that authority and that personal brand, because when you’re trying to get out and get clients they’re looking at all the different assets and what makes you trustworthy/the expert in the field. Since the internet is the great equalizer and makes the world really small, now people can hire somebody from around the world as opposed to just their local area, and who is the best in Toronto, who is the best in Minnesota or in your city, in Thailand, and now we have a global audience which is awesome, but also there’s a lot of noise and now how do we cut through that and make ourselves rise to the top. John: On that note I think that, because I was actually thinking about this with the music the other day is that the best opportunities are usually the ones that the less competition. The easiest opportunities are going to be ones that everyone is doing just because they’re easy. They don’t take much time. You’re going to find the best return on probably your investment of time, and energy, and money if you’re spending money, on opportunities that other people either aren’t doing because it’s too hard or just haven’t thought of. In the context of the music I started to ask myself, this is a bit of a confusing question: “What do I not know that I’m not doing that if I did would be incredible?” Another way to- Louie: Yeah. Then you just sit there and brainstorm with yourself, right? John: Yeah. It’s weird to think about it, because like how do you figure out what you don’t know that you’re not doing, or how do you figure out what you don’t know that you don’t know. That’s the question. The fact that it’s hard, that it’s a hard question to figure out is exactly what makes the results, if you think of stuff, really really good. With content and this going on podcasts or writing guest posts and doing these things, initially it’s hard to get on Inc. It’s hard to get on Huffington Post, for example, which is why it works well. It’s hard to go and speak in front of 300 people and have a picture of all of that in the photo, because not everyone can do that. Some of that stuff is going to come later once you’ve built up some momentum and some social proof and all of that. You’re not going to be able to come out of the gate and do that. What you can do out of the gate, and what I’ve done is you can do these guest posts, and you can guest post on a lot of different websites. All websites want content, but the trick is going and looking at the guest posts they usually get and then doing something that’s like five or ten times better. It’s longer. It’s more informative. It’s more detailed. This is a way that you can stand out from everyone else, because most people won’t go to that effort, and as an example of that, I’ve done this twice recently with ReEngager which is an e-commerce email marketing company, website that I set up. There’s a post on Shopify which is, I mean the average blog post there must be 1,000 words or something, 1,200 words which is a longish blog post. I was like, “Well, I’ll go write something.” I was thinking I’d write two or three. I ended up writing 7,000 words. It’s very actionable. It’s not fluffy. Then I took that and then used that to get a post on the same topic on a site called Digital Marketer which is one of the biggest companies in the digital marketing space. That post became 14,000. I think it’s probably like 16 or 17,000 words actually because we extended it. What ends up happening is then now like these posts which are almost like mini-books or courses have become basically a go-to resource for people with e-commerce sites who want to learn about email marketing. They get shared around. They’re very high in Google. If you go and look up e-commerce email marketing I think the digital marketing one might even be number one. This is something like I did it, I’ve been doing this for a while. I’m not new. This is something you could do at the very, very, very beginning of the game to stand out and separate yourself. Louie: Like I mentioned earlier even with my career, you got to look at the long game, really. You just mentioned you’ve been doing it for a little bit, so you’ve got some fantastic posts now on high-end sites and lots of traffic, organic traffic. Somebody starting out who’s thinking, “Man, I’m not going to get on Inc.” First, bad mindset. You can get on Inc eventually, but don’t think of the immediate I’m going to send an email today; I’ll get on Inc tomorrow. Let’s level up and lets work on it. All of a sudden you look back on the past six months or a year and go, “Wow, look at all the stuff I’ve done.” Right? You got to keep chipping away and not just stopping. It has to be consistent, otherwise you stop an eighth of the way up the ladder and you move onto the next thing, and you’re never going to climb that ladder ever. It’s absolutely smart to consider the long game and celebrate the small wins otherwise you’re never going to be happy until you get to the end. Celebrate the small wins. There’s a little blog post you were on, and they’re not little. The smaller podcasts, like just you can do them all and just keep chipping away at it. All of a sudden things start to grow and, like you mentioned, if you have a niche market then you become the guy, or one of the guys that people will start to tag you in posts. You’ll start to get that organic push and that authority push as opposed to just advertising. You want to have a blend of them all, but you have to consider the realistic goals that you want to hit, and you’ll hit those. John: Right, and it’s probably worth mentioning too that you can’t just go and listen to this podcast then go and write some posts because this all comes back to why are you doing this, and what’s that story, but also based on all of that what are you trying to achieve here. With the e-commerce stuff I wanted to get people coming in paying a recurring fee for e-commerce email marketing services, so I’m like, “Well, go write a post on Shopify.” They got plenty of e-commerce owners there and Digital Marketer has a few as well. It was all on content: here’s how to do this. Very actionable. At the end I was like we’ll give them templates, because there’s going to be people who read all this and go, “I don’t want to do all this. This is going to take too much time. Can you just give me some templates?” I said, “Well, if you want to download some templates, go here.” And gave them a landing page. They sign up for the landing page. The next page says, “Here’s your templates, by the way if you don’t want to screw around with these templates we can just do it all for you. Request a free consultation here or use this ROI calculator to check how much of an opportunity there is.” You need to do this. When you’re doing these posts or when you’re doing these ways of promoting yourself there needs to be some kind of funnel that points back somewhere. It’s not a matter of just writing a cool fancy post on five ways to do X. It needs to then flow into the next natural step, and then the next natural step with the goal being that they either buy something, they buy your service or buy your product. Louie: That’s a mistake that not just, as you’re kind of bringing out, many business owners or freelancers make, but even in my industry musicians and event promoters and owners notoriously just drop posts anywhere. They might be semi-related but there’s no strategy behind them. Even an event promoter, you’re going to drop a post for your Friday night, but what is that post doing? Is it just awareness again? When you post photos of all the guys and girls that were there that week, and that’s awareness, like perhaps you need to strategize do they go for a guest list. Do you want them to send a message for a reason so that you can retarget them? There’s got to be strategy behind it all and some sort of funnel so that you got continuing traffic, continuing engagement, and people will love your brand so that it becomes easier to maintain the ads and maintain the push. You’re absolutely right. A lot of people have their social media or their blog posts disjointed or there’s no real rhyme or reason other than, “Well I think it’ll get me traffic. They’ll come to my website and they’ll look around and perhaps I’ll get them as a client.” You need to send them through the rabbit hole or through the funnel. You have to hold their hand and bring them through somehow, so you have to strategize everything, but then it starts to work really well. John: Exactly. I reckon it comes back to this big picture idea, that you can’t just take a piece of this like write a post or go on a podcast. You need to step back and figure out this big picture and then you put the pieces together. For the last year I found this like the most important thing, the thing that powers everything else is this question which you mentioned before, which is you’ve got to figure out why you’re doing it. I used to think, like a few years ago I thought that was really simple. Because the reason this has been such a big thing for me in the last year is because in April I ended up moving back to Thailand to do some music, and to spend most of my time working on music which has been fascinating. I remember being in Berlin, and I don’t think I’ve fully told this story before on the podcast but I was in Berlin at the time back in, I think, April/March, April. I was working really, really hard to build a business because I thought I’m going to make all this money and then I’m going to go do a start-up maybe in Silicon Valley. At that stage, because that was one thought in my head, because I’d been to an event with some amazing people which had inspired me to do some of that stuff. Then in December, I think, so about a year ago now I stumbled onto this music thing. We can get into it if you want, but that then led into by April I’m like, “Man, I actually just want to do music.” I don’t know where it came from, but I’d been meditating and doing different exercises to try and figure this out. It’s like some part of my subconscious was like, “Yeah.” Like just that feeling that you get when you’re dancing and making music, like that is just like it’s goosebumps. I’m thinking, “Well, do I need to go and build this business and just work all the time or is there a way that I can then come and do the music?” That was this, I guess, a really deep process of figuring out what do I want to do and why do I want to do it. Am I just building this business to make money and then get somewhere else that I’m not even sure if I want to be at, or is there a … Maybe this is part of it because I’ve been doing this for five years, and you do something for a few years and you’re all excited. Eventually you just maybe you meet that goal. I wanted to travel and I’ve done all of that, and then you got to figure out what’s next, and maybe this is me figuring out what’s next or what’s going to motivate me. I remember there was this specific moment where I said to someone, I’m like, “I got to make all this money and then at the end of the year I’ll go make music.” He’s like, “Dude, like if you want to make the music, why not just make the music now? Like why do you need the money?” When I started asking that, it’s like I didn’t have a good answer. I thought I needed it, but it was kind of like when I actually looked at the numbers and thought about it, it’s like I don’t. There’s no obvious reason why I have to have all this extra money right now. If I want to do the music I can just go and do it. Louie: Absolutely. John: It’s amazing when you dig into the why, but the reason I tell a bit of that story is because it’s not something, I think, I found it’s not something you want to rush. It’s important to get deep into it to ask why are you doing whatever you’re … Why are you working at that job? Why are you dating that person? Why are you going to the gym? Asking why about everything to get at the heart of it. Louie: Yeah. It seems like maybe it’s just how the systems are set up, whether it’s schooling and parenting and just it’s a similar system, but I think people get stuck in this is the routine and this is what’s acceptable, and what everybody else does, as opposed to like you’re discovering I don’t have to be like that. Why do I have to do this first and then that? I could enjoy the journey and this is good enough here, and still very enjoyable, actually more enjoyable maybe going this route. You’re starting to figure that out. I hear from a lot of especially like club owners or the older label, you know the millennials and they’re entitled, and they’re lazy, or they don’t want to follow the same things, and they all quit their job. I’m like, you don’t understand. I ride the line on millennials/generation, what is it, X? What’s the next one, Y? What am I Y, X? I’m 39 now so I’m just; a millennial is below me, but riding that line. John: Maybe X and Y. You’re the X/Y. Louie: Yeah. X and Y. John: I think I’m the Y/millennial. Louie: You’re a bit younger. I could understand because I can see the user behavior when I’m marketing to millennials and younger, even generation Z, but I’m like, “You don’t understand,” to baby boomers perhaps. You guys went through this system and you suffered through perhaps jobs you didn’t even want, for the family because then I’ll retire, and now you’re complaining that retirement isn’t great, either your back hurts, you lost your money in the five crashes that have happened, and another one might happen again, and everyone else is looking at it saying, “Screw that. I’m not going to do 40 years of that. Not happy, making somebody else … ” You know what I mean? Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, but you’re working somewhere and that’s where I’m getting the, even if I’m working at a coffee place or another job. If I’m not enjoying this, I’m out. Because I got sold a bill of goods, you know, “If you go to school you’ll get the job. If you do this, you’ll get that.” It’s just if it’s not working, it’s very quick to change. You know what I mean? It’s a very different mentality, and I don’t think that the older generations can see that, so me kind of riding the line and seeing a lot of generation Z, because I market to them and study them a lot, I can understand why. You’re right when you tell that story on just do what makes you happy. You’ll figure it out and especially if you’re an entrepreneur, then you can create money out of thin air. That’s what we do. John: It’s interesting because I feel that you’ve got the crowd that says you got to follow your passion, and then you’ve got the crowd that says, no, don’t follow your passion. Go and just pick something and get really good at it. There’s a book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You, from Cal Newport, which is a good book, but I feel like the conversation gets confusing because I’ve noticed that as you dig into it, people mean different things when they say passion. Because passion can be I’ve got to be really excited all the time, and that sort of thing. When I think about the music, yes I love it, but there’s plenty of stuff I do that isn’t, I wouldn’t say it’s like super exciting. If I’m studying music theory, I understand it’s important to the goal. It makes me a better musician, and it’s fun and it’s enjoyable to get better in that sense, but I’m not sitting there going, “Man, this is so amazing. I can’t wait to dig into the mathematics of mu- … ” It’s not like that. I would say that I’m passionate about the music, but then other people would be like that’s not how they would define passion, so there’s this, I think, like you said, it’s important, and this is what I, because I used to think, no, don’t follow your passion, because it’s sort of flimsy and who knows what it even is and it doesn’t really lead anywhere, and you don’t make any money. I think to be really effective at anything in life you have to have some kind of deep and maybe deep is the word there, like some kind of deep passion or deep draw or joy that attracts you to doing that thing. If you’re doing something that’s not important to you, that, again, you don’t have any reason why you want to do it, you’re just not going to follow through. You’re not going to be effective at it. Louie: You’re going to give up, and it’s cool because I’m an entrepreneur, so I follow the same paths that entrepreneurs follow, and it’s cool when I’m trying to grow my own brand in speaking and stuff. I also understand the music side of it because I work in it, but I get how you have to be passionate otherwise you’re going to give up fast because the gigs aren’t there yet. You can have 10,000 spotify listens and get $8 in revenue or whatever it is, and so you need to have a different drive other than just money, and entrepreneurs and business owners are in that same boat where especially when you’re starting or you’re trying to figure things out, you’re doing things that you love and you think it’s going to make great money, but it takes some time sometime, and if you’re not passionate about that then it’s very quick to get discouraged. There’s a cool bridge between entertainment and a regular entrepreneur, entrepreneurship and business owner, but you’re right if you don’t get that why down or that, and, yeah, if you’re a musician and music theory is kind of boring, but still you’re going to have a certain passion and excitement to keep you going when you have the crap happen to you and when you have no money, because of the passion. It keeps you going. It’s still in there. I think that that’s the one that people still need to figure out just so that when the money does come in might as well be there and not the other side, in something you don’t like. If you can do it, then absolutely try. John: Right. It’s interesting with business right now and entrepreneurship because it’s so cool. It’s cool to be an entrepreneur at the moment with Silicon Valley and the start-up world and all the billionaires that are coming out of there. Everyone is building a personal brand and I meet a lot of people who have travel blogs, and it’s cool. I think this has only been a recent thing, so it’s interesting like I’ve seen people because I’ve been doing this since 2011, so five years now, and I’ve seen plenty of people come and go. They come out here to Thailand or Berlin, or they come out somewhere. They’ve got six months to figure it out and to build a business, and then they go home and they go back to their job or they go back to something and sometimes it’s because they’ve failed or because they gave up. I have met people, I can’t remember anyone specifically right now, but I know I’ve met people who have gone, “Look, I tried it. It was good and I see why people like it, but it’s not for me. I don’t want to be an entrepreneur. I don’t want the stress of running a business, of those sorts of things.” Sometimes that’s because maybe they’re not strong enough or whatever, but sometimes I think that’s just not how they want to live and that’s totally cool. What I think people need to keep in mind as they’re trying to become a copy writer or build their business, these sorts of things is like there’s not some God given rule, or there’s not some thing where you have to be an entrepreneur, and the cool thing like or the fact that people think it’s cool, like that’s an illusion. It’s what you want to do, which might be business and might be the good things and the bad things, because there are bad things that come with it, or it might not. Maybe you’d prefer to go and do music, like right now I’m doing both, business and music. Maybe eventually I’ll just do music, but other people might go what I really want to do is I want to write books, fiction books for kids. It’s like go and do that. Don’t go and do the business, unless there’s a why in there. I just think it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot over the last year because too many people seem to think we do things because we think we should do them. Louie: There’s a lot of people who, like for the example, the copy writing, that doesn’t want to. It’s not that they can’t do it or they don’t have the guts to do it or anything. Maybe they just don’t want to have, like you mentioned, the stress as an entrepreneur, but they’re great copy writers, but they go get a great job at a publishing house or at a company that hires them and there’s no stress on the paycheck, but they still do what they love and there’s nothing wrong with that if that’s the passion, then that’s great. If you have a different life design where you want to travel all the time, perhaps you can find a job that does that. Maybe you can’t, so you have to do the other side of the struggle and create the life design being an entrepreneur, but there’s no like well then you have failed. It’s the same we talked about earlier in the music business and entertainment, there’s a lot of moving parts to that. Perhaps you want to be in the music industry. Let’s say for me, I like being an entrepreneur, but I know the business side. I could probably get a job at a record label as an A&R rep or their marketing director, and work in the Universal Music building probably with no problem. That’s cool. I’ll be very happy because I’m doing still what I love and I don’t have to worry about the entrepreneurship. That’s Universal’s, you know what I mean, paycheck that comes down. That’s not what I want to do. I want to be able to work from home, travel, take the wife and kids everywhere, and create, you know hire and fire clients as I see it. That’s what I like to do, but there’s nothing wrong with going the other route. Maybe not everybody is cut out to be an entrepreneur. Maybe you can’t teach that. Maybe it has to be in you that it’s just a brain setting and it’s, I don’t know. You could teach business. You could teach some entrepreneur knowledge perhaps, but maybe when it really comes down to the house is on fire so to speak, you’re cool with that. You know what I mean? It’s okay because you can figure it out and that’s what you thrive in, and maybe that’s just it. I don’t know. John: There definitely seems to be, we’ll wrap it up in a second, but there definitely seems to be this, like, yeah, you can learn all the skills. You can learn how to write copy and build a website and network, and all those things are just learnable skills, but it’s almost like you’ve got to be able to … Maybe one of the fundamental things is there’s going to be months when especially when you’re getting started, like you can’t pay yourself, or maybe you lose money, or you can have months when you got one month left in the bank and you’re like, “Shit, I don’t know how I’m going to do this.” Louie: Not only that, not only is the revenue not coming in, but you have to put out revenue to keep, because then if you stop that and you say, “Oh, well there’s no revenue. I won’t advertise this month.” That’s even worse, because now you have guaranteed probably no clients next month, so now you’re not just because you’re losing money with your rent and food and stuff, but now you’re like, “But I have to inject perhaps $2,000 in ads to get these clients coming in.” Now you’re jumping off the cliff without a parachute. There’s a lot. John: Right, and so it’s hard. Some people are going to be able to handle that, and a lot of people aren’t, and it’s not that it’s a good thing if you can and it’s a bad thing if you can’t. I think having that value judgments, like that’s not helpful. It’s just that some people are good at it, and the people who … Like I don’t really think I’m very [inaudible 00:45:06] to be an employee because I’ve tried that and I don’t last very long before I get really lazy and demotivated and just not really enjoying it and that sort of thing. That’s not something that I choose to make happen. It just happens, and so I could fight against but it wouldn’t make me happy, and it certainly wouldn’t make the employer happy, so the best thing that I found for me is to do what I’m doing, to follow these natural urges, and so I think that it’s a bit like that. You’ve got to figure out where do you fit, where makes the most sense for you based on what you want to do and your personality, how your brain works, and your ability to handle pressure, and all of that. None of it’s good or bad. There’s just all the stuff that’s not good for you and all the stuff that is, and go and do the stuff that is. Louie: Yeah. Some people do both depending on where they are in their life. Some people work in a great executive position or a job for many years and decide, “Boy, I have lots of experience. I can go out and consult now. I have maybe some money, or it’s easy for me to jump into consulting now with my own business because I have the experience and I have the confidence.” Some people go the other way. They do entrepreneurialship and it’s a great run, and then they just maybe get, they just get … You know what, I don’t chase for clients, and it’s cool. I’m done staying at home. I want to go into the work environment and have coffee and joke around, and I now have all the experience too, so I can get hired, just like I just said. I can get hired by probably a record label very quickly. It just depends what you want, and it’s like you said, not good or bad. It’s not like, “Well, you’re not an entrepreneur. You suck.” Or, “Ha ha. You work in a cubicle. Ha ha you can’t pay your bills and I get a paycheck.” It’s none of those. It’s really a matter of what you want, and that really is that millennial mentality which I would say, I don’t know if there’s baby boomers listening, but I think that’s the disconnect where boomers and maybe the older generation Y is kind of pointing down at: “Hey, that’s not right. That’s not fair.” It’s just a different mentality, and they don’t understand each other’s brains, and I think that’s kind of where that comes from. I think just deciding whatever point in your life what’s best and what makes you happy is really important. John: I love it. Let’s wrap it off here. I think that’s a good note to end on. Before we go though, if people want to learn more about you or hit you up, send you an email, tweet you, what’s the best way for them to do that? Louie: Absolutely. Obviously on my website I list all the podcasts I’m on, of course, and my own blog is there. That’s louielavella.com, which is L-O-U-I-E-L-A-V-E-L-L-A, and I’m absolutely all over social media, of course, and that’s all the usernames is Louie La Vella, so Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, all those fun ones. Mostly Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. Those three are the main ones I’m on all day long every five seconds, and it’s all @louielavella, of course. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate everybody listening. John: Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show man. I’ll have links to all of that in the show notes at themcmethod.com. Louie, it’s been good man. Thanks for coming on the show. Louie: Thank you so much. John: Hey, everybody, thanks for listening. If you want to discover more insider tips, tricks, and secrets about driving sales with email marketing sign up for daily email tips from the Autoresponder Guy. Go to dropdeadcopy.com/podcast, sign up, confirm your email address, and I’ll send you daily emails on how to improve your email marketing and make more sales via email. You’ll find out why open rates don’t matter, and the seven letter word that underlies all effective marketing and much more. The post Louie La Vella on How To Craft A Magnetic Personal Brand (So EVERYONE Wants To Work With YOU) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Josh Muccio is an entrepreneur with a few notches in his belt. Including a couple previous podcasts. When an angel investor and business founder approached him to team up… He couldn’t say NO. The project? A podcast version of “Shark Tank” With one season in the bag and the second just released… It’s “all in” for Josh and his partner as they navigate the world of angel investing and venture capital. From getting s— done and pushing publish… To making business contacts, finding collaborators and securing sponsorships… It’s been a wild ride. Josh has a few expert lessons to pass along. In this episode, you’ll discover: How to go from ground zero to published podcast in less than a day (Without worrying about perfection!) The one critical element about pitching the “Big Vision” of your product or service…so angel investors will be beating down your door! Domain name secrets the Registrars don’t want you to know (rake in money with your own domain extension) How Josh monetized his podcast and set himself up for success (without selling products!) The “slight edge” advantage that will help you build your own online business (and how to make use of every single day while doing it) Mentioned: The Pitch The Slight Edge Book Shark Tank David Allan’s Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Dave Allan: Hey everybody it’s David Allan, flying solo for the first time on the email marketing podcast and today I have a very special guest, Josh Muccio – He has his own podcast called “The Pitch”, Josh…How are you doing? Josh Muccio: Hey, I’m doing really great, thanks David David Allan: It’s awesome to have you on the show. I’ve listened to a few of your podcasts and done alitle research about you as an entrepreneur – seem you had a few prior…you had a different podcast earlier… Josh Muccio: Yeah, I’ve done a few stuff Dave Allan: Yeah, you’ve been around for a bit and this is the first time I’ve heard of you – it was interesting sort of reading about you and I listened to some of your stuff. So, what can you tell us about – First, et’s start with “The Pitch”, because it’s your current project I presume…and what that’s about. Josh Muccio: Sure – So about a year ago I was working on a different podcast – there was somebody that listened to the show that was an investor and he had it in his mind that it would be cool to have a podcast the TV show “Shark Tank” – so he was an investor himself and he reached out. So, we ended up talking on the phone, it took about three or four months but we decided hey, let’s do this thing. So, this is actually about a year and a half ago now – we’ve done 50 episodes so far – that would have been Season One of the show – but we never had anyone commiting to invest real money on the show – and that’s the whole premise of “Shark Tank” so, I felt like we were just failing and letting people down right off the bat. So, we kind of drew a line in the sand last October – we stopped recording new episodes and we just planned this event. 12 startups come in – we found four or five investors to commit to invest in an hour and we did it, we recorded an entire season. I don’t know when this episode is going to go live, but those episodes won’t start airing until January 11th, 2017. Dave Allan: OK, awesome brother – this will be right about the same time I imagine… Josh Muccio: Well, perfect! Dave Allan: It should be coinciding. I was looking through some of the episodes you guys had up online, and there are some very interesting products, I’m from Canada originally so I’ve watched “Dragon’s Den” and associated shows – so maybe tell us about some of the interesting and weird products. I scrolled through and listened to some of the episodes and there’s some very interesting stuff going on there. Email encryption for healthcare was one that sort of caught my eye as an email marketer, so maybe talk about a few of those exciting things. Josh Muccio: So, we’ve had a whole variety of companies on the show so far, and then tend to focus on tech, because my co-host and co-founder is based in San Francisco, Sheel Mohnot of 500 startups is a partner there, and he didn’t when we first started the show so I guess the show is working for him. So, we’ve had a lot of tech deal-flow come through the show. It’s been real interesting. So, I’m trying to scroll through, we’ve had a company that’s building something that is competition for- oh, shoot what was the name of that app – track expenses and miles…MileIQ is a company…email encryption for healthcare… Dave Allan: That’s really cool, that’s a good idea… Josh Muccio: We’ve even had somebody that’s like creating this laptop where you plug in your Android phone and instead of it running its own operating system, it just boots up the operating system on your phone and then essentialy puts a UI layer for desktop on it. It’s for people in third world countries that have Android phones but can’t afford a computer. Which is really very interesting to think about. But, I mean yeah, there’s been a bunch. We had “Dollar Beard Club” – if you’re familiar with “Dollar Shave Club”, this is kind of the antithesis to that and that was a real interesting episode, and I don’t want to give too much away but response from investors wasn’t what you’d think it would be after you lkistened to the episode. Dave Allan: I’ll have to check that one out, I missed that I think. So, when you were first satrting this up it was you and the co-founder, the guy with 500 startups, and you guys wnated to make a “Shark Tank” podcast… Josh Muccio: I mean it sounds fun, right? We thought it sounded fun. Dave Allan: Yup, when I first heard about it when you guys reached out to John, I thought this was an exciting thing I want to hear more about this. When you first dedcided, OK, we’re going to do this, you had contacts already within the startup community and so forth? Josh Muccio: So Sheel did. Because he’s based in San Francisco. His forst company, he sold to Paypal. Then he started another company, this is super interesting…So, you know all those new top level domains that came out across the last three years essentially, .club, .app, .xyz – there’s hundreds of ’em. Well, you can apply at any point in time, essentially to make-up your own – I don’t know if there was a certain amount aavailable or you could just make up any word – But I think the cost was like $150,000 to apply. So, you could do that and if nobody else applied you would own it. You could sell .app domain names across all the registries, rake in all the money and all you paid was $150,000 to ICann, the company – I don’t know what they’re called – the entity that handles all that stuff. If there were multiples parties that wanted that, ICann would say – figure it out amongst yourselves. Well, that didn’t always work so he essentially launched a company that handled it – it was like an online, reverse bidding, it was real interesting stuff and I don’t fully understand it to be honest and then he sold that company. So, he’s been kind of angel investing out in San Francisco for awhile before he joined 500…So, I say all that to say he’s been in it, he’s been in the mix for awhile now and had quite a few contacts to help us get the show off the ground. Dave Allan: Now, when you first started, the original podcast was called… Josh Muccio: Daily Hunt. Dave Allan: yeah, Daily Hunt, right. How did you get satrted with that. What were you doing at the time that you decided to jump into the podcast? Josh Muccio: Sure. We’re going through my story in reverse and I’ve never done that before, this is interesting. Daily Hunt was a project I started because of a dream – This sounds super weird but – I had a dream that morning and I woke up and it was like, Oh, a daily podcast. Like, I should do a daily podcast about the website Product Hunt. Which is a cool tech website and products get upvoted to it – this was a couple years ago – I was obsessed with the website, checking it out every day – super involved with the community – and so, creating a podcast for someone else’s thing sounded fun but who does a daily podcast? So I tweeted out at the founder of Product Hunt, Ryan Hoover, the guy is super accessible on Twitter, and he says “You should do it”. And I’m like, “What?”, and so I made sure I could use the name “Daily Hunt” even though your website is called Product Hunt and he was like “Yeah, that’s fine, whatever” – and so literally that day – you mentioned before we turned this on that you like to just dive right into things and figure out the details later so that’s essentially what I did, but it’s kind of a tribute to what’s possible today – The fact that I spun up a website, dailyhunt.co, and essentially bought hosting for the podcast, recorded the podcast that afternoon and published the podcast that evening. So, you know a dream to a real podcast in less then 24 hours. This show ended up not going anywhere at all – Unfortunately it didn’t pan out. So, that’s one of the reasons when Sheel reached out to do the “Shark Tank” podcast, I was definitely interested in trying something different. An dtruly within the first 24 hours of the new podcast, we had more downloads of the preview episode – I don’t think there was any episode that even came to half that of the previous show, Daily Hunt. Yeah, that was kind of what got me into podcasting in the first place. Dave Allan: That’s awesome. So, you basically found a starving crowd looking for something for startups because your podcast, The Pitch, jumped right up the charts kind of thing…and gave you the fame and fortune you have now. Josh Muccio: [laughing] Fame and fortune, if that’s what you want to call it. Dave Allan: Let’s talk more about…most people who podcast, myself included, you sort of quickly find out that the podcasting itself you may be able to monetize it in sort of a long game, perhaps with sponsorships other things like that, that most of the people have made money in podcasting through productizing their services – whatever it is they do.So that’s what you guys did with The Pitch, you cam eup with… Josh Muccio: You talking about our coaching? Dave Allan: Yeah, the pitch coaching… Josh Muccio: Yeah, you know and our goal honestly is I don’t want to hawk very much of our own stuff on the show because the nature of the show is companies coming on hawking their stuff. Now, they’re not necessarily pitching it to the listeners, they’re pitching it to an investor, so it’s a very interesting conversation, very interesting way to hear about a company that’s unique in itself. So, I’m cutting it a little bit short by saying people are hawking their own stuff – it certainly doesn’t feel like that when you’re listening to the show. But, there is enough “Hey, here’s this new product”, “Here’s what we do” – that it doesn’t feel right to then go “Hey, I’m the maker of this podcast also check out my thing”. And so, we wanted to kind of step back from that a bit and that’s why we focused mainly on sponsorships, that’s been our main revenue stream. We will occasionally in an episode say, “If you need help crafting your message to investors – we can help you get out of your own head and do that effectively” and essentially, and we can go into more details if you’re curious, but we didn’t realy set out to become pitch experts – it’s just that there were enougb people asking for help with that – by listening to the show, they wanted to learn more – So, that’s what we did. Dave Allan: I mean a lot of our audience is freelance copywriters and new business people. Maybe some people in the throes of starting their own startup perhaps or solopreneur idea and when it comes down to pitching things you find a lot of cross-referenced…whether its pitching something on the street…I’m a street magician…or pitching something at a fair, or its pitching the miracle brush at a shopping mall – whatever it is – They all have a lot of the same tactics and strategies…What have you learned about pitching something for investing? It’s kind of a whoe different arena. Personally, that you can pass along to people who have to pitch clients and so forth for marketing strategy… Josh Muccio: Yeah, I think the first thing that people need to understand is that its really all about the audience you’re talking to and this will obviously apply no matter who you’re talking to – its where are they coming from, what are they interested in – and investors, they need to understand the opportunity you’re building. So, not really the product necessarily – You have to understand the product first – What this widget is – But, they have to understand what it means long term, why this is so huge for them and tech investors and venture capitalists are a unique bunch particularly because they’re looking for the outliers – they’re looking for the Ubers, they’re looking for the next Facebook and so for them they’re looking for – “How big can this thing get?” – And once you start seeing it through that lens it changes how you talk about your product because the death trap that most pitches fall into is, “Oh, we’re building this thing for this specific type of person that does this” – It sounds too small, but most products initially are small, they need to be that way, they need to be focused – it’s how you’re supposed to build a company, but it doesn’t translate well to a pitch. When you sit in front of somebody and you pitch them and say this is our big vision, this is how big this can get, this is how big the market is, and right now this is where we’re starting – here’s our beach-head essentially in this market with this product that we’ve created that sort of thing and we give people a bsic overview of what they can do to enhance their pitch. Dave Allan: Yeah, that sounds great. It is the same when you’re pitching clients on marketing strategy or copywriting services or whatever, because a lot of people, unfortunately, and like you said you’ve seen yourself – they’re pitching what we’d say, the features of the product – like this widget does this, it grinds this up or walks across water or whatever – but reality is, the big…really big idea is the value that it brings of course and so the same with copywriting services – it brings alot of value to people because not only does it solve the problem of selling the widget to whoever, but also can go on for years ad infinitum where you don’t have to have sales people or whatever – its going to do the selling for you and I see people make this mistake all the time where they’re trying to push what the widget can do instead of the problem it solves. Josh Muccio: Yeah, that’s really great… Dave Allan: You personally, you’ve got this pitch, this new season coming up with The Pitch, where you’re going to release therse new episodes and this was made at an event… Josh Muccio: Yeah, I say event to say we brought everybody together in the same room, but it was a private event. We didn’t want to optimize for the people in the room, we wanted to optimize for the listening audience later and there was just too many variables the first time. It’s possible that we will open it up and will be a paid event, semi-private, in the end. But this first one was completely private, just the four investors and the founder in a room and then the tech guy and me the producer, listening in – in another room. And then there were a few miscellaneous people listening in too. Yeah, it was real interesting, I had just met the tech guy that morning – before we recorded the entire season so it was pretty nuts. Dave Allan: You seem to follow the jump off the ledge and build the parachute on the way down idea… Josh Muccio: We tried to plan as much as we could ahead of time. My wife’s an event planner and I really leaned heavy on her for that, but at the end of the day we basically just had to show up and figure all the details out. Dave Allan: Now, in terms of finding your friend, your co-founder, and for people looking to find people to start stuff with. How did you meet and how do you get into a community like that – how do you meet these kind of people? Where do they hang out? Where do they go? Josh Muccio: This is an outlier, the fact that I met Sheel because I didn’t meet him in person until we went out to record the first season – or the first few episodes of the first season. We’d already decided to do this thing at that point. It was juts a couple of conversations – he’d met me, reached out to me, because of the podcast I was doing. So, I’d say the lesson there is actually pushing publish and doing things to put yourself out there. You could say that by going to events, you know, locally. By blogging, if that’s something you can do, I mean there’s so many ways to put yourself out there right? Even emailing a bunch of people – that may be less effective because it’s hard to get…well, I dunno that would be an interesting topic to explore – how would you find a co-founder via email outreach? I’ve never seen that email from somebody yet. Hey, Josh…I need a co-founder for what I’m building – I thought of you [laughs] I would like to schedule a quick call to see if we’re soulmates. Dave Allan: Yeah, you’ll be on my list now if I ever undertake that. No, that’s a good point, I think that I’ve got jobs from meetups, even from meetup.com – from meetups based on there – from different networking events in different niches and stuff and the podcast for – I have my own podcast and now I’m working with John on his and already it’s returning some dividends in terms of people getting to know who you are and what you offer,so basically its just getting some content of some kind into the world. It doesn’t have to be 18 different kinds, I think people get bogged down – for you personally, you’ve started a number of things now – worked on a number of different podcasts. For you, how did you keep the momentum going forward and not get bogged down – seems people get bogged down with analysis and trying to make everything perfect – like the Daily Hunt podcast you got all done in one day and published – that’s obviously someone taking massive action. How do you stop yourself dfrom being a perfectionist? Josh Muccio: I don’t know that I do, to be honest, and Season Two is an effort to get closer to that perfection. We’re probably that quality over quantity side of that coin – We’re really betting on creating shorter content that’s way more interesting rather than more content that’s less interesting. There’s obviously use cases for both but tips for being less perfectionistic – I would say push publish. To my mind there’s a limit for me – We already committed – Season Two is going to start January 11th and so by doing that I’m going to get it to a certain point on January 11th and its not going to be perfect – its going to be way closer to perfect than anything we’ve done before and its going to hopefully really drive the needle for us. But,at the end of the day because I’ve set that date and I’m talking to people like you about that date – that’s something that’s real and so at the end of the day, on the 11th – Hopefully actually earlier on the day – We’re going to push publish on that episode and its not going to be perfect but I’m going to push publish. Dave Allan: Yeah…maybe that’s one of the things you’re looking at in terms of setting a deadline. Having a dealine is something that has helped me in the past and usually on a copy job there is a definite deadline if you’re working for a client. I think for me personally I’ve had ,ore problems when there’s a lack of a deadline when I was doing my own podcast- so I tried to do it by setting it up so that I would record every Monday and put it out every Tuesday. SO, it was one of those things where you kind of had to force yourself into some sort of little box, and then it becomes routine… Josh Muccio: I think you have to do it, especially as an entrepreneur becasue you don’t have anyone else looking over your shoulder and saying “Here’s your schedule”, “Here’s what we need done by this time” – You kind of have to be that mean boss to a certain extent I mean, depending on who you are. Some people drive themselves way too hard. But, for me, I need those deadlines. Once that goes January 11th, there’s another episode droping the following Wednesday and the following Wednesday after that. So, we’ll be on a very quick episode release cycle, well…relatively quick – some shows obviously quite a bit more – For our show that’s going to be a challenge but it will be good. Dave Allan: Right. Now, for your particular podcast, you’re doing all the editing? Or you have other people helping you out? Josh Muccio: So, that has been the most challenging part. I don’t come from a public radio background – I’m an entrepreneur – And obviously thought the “Shark Tank” podcast would be a really cool thing to do, but I’ve become keenly aware of how much I don’t know in this space so when we made the leap and tried to create Season Two – After we recorded it one of the things I did was each out to as many people in the industry that I respect, those shows that I love like Radiolab, ReplyAll, HowSound – there’s a bunch of really good, well produced shows that I knew we could benefit from if we just learned a little bit from them. And so reaching out to them and saying who can I work with – essentially saying I need to bring another person on the show, I need to bring on an editor – All these different things, which I didn’t know what to ask for in the beginning – I was just saying “Hey! I need help”, and they connected me with people in the industry. So right now, we’ve got two producers working with us and an editor and I still do the final mixing because that’s somthing I’ve gotten quite good at myself. Someday, we will find someonewho’s better than me at mixing these episodes and I’ll stop doing that but for now, for Season Two, I’m going to be mixing them. Dave Allan: Awesome, awesome dude, no that sounds good. I think everyone sort of reaches that point too when they realize they require help and its hard to relinquish for some people, myself included, hard to relinquish some of those reigns because you have a certain ideology in your mind and a certain standard and its hard to find people to meet your own standards sometimes. Josh Muccio: You know, and I’ve always preached that as long as you can get let’s say within 5% – I mean that’s kind of an arbitrary number but like 5% of what you could hit, like, that’s good. You have to accept something less than perfect when you outsource anything for the most part or delegate anything. The problem for me is when its more than that 5% – Its really hard for me and knowing that you have to train that person over time and maybe they can get closer to that 5% – I dunno, for me its been harder building this podcast than anything to really let go of certain pieces – But the actual episode planning, having an editor look over my shoulder and saying, “No, this narration is not working at all” or “This section of tape, just cut it out”, because people are going to drop off when they’re listening to it” – Things like that, that I need secondary opinion on from peole who know this stuff more than I do – That’s been great because that’s an area I’ve been weak on. Knowing your strengths – I found out that I’m actually pretty good at mixing podcasts, who knew? Dave Allan: Now where do you see this going? Where’s The Pitch going to take you in the future? Josh Muccio: Ah, good question. We’re kind of in the middle of this decision. I think, we’ve high hopes for Season Two and we”d like to continue so obviously – Well, we’ve actually sold out all of our ads for the entire seaason up front and that’s something we did to help finance the show – to kind of cast the vision – And it helped us get with someone we can essentially call a partner for this next season, and that’s proved to be extremely beneficial and its going to work out really well for them. But we’ve locked in our income potential for this next season and that’s a lot of time how you do sell sponsorships on podcasts, is upfront. So, we’ll have another opportunity to renegotiate, raise our prices, to reach out to new sponsors after we know how Season Two is going. So, we’re going to continue doing this show assuming things go well. Assuming response to Season Two is well, is good. Then we do also have aspirations to create the premier podcasting network for entrepreneur-style shows. So for small business people, people interested in entrepreneurship…You know I don’t know what the percentage is but there’s a lot of shows in the business category – A lot more than in the other categories. But ther really isn’t a podcast network t at’s focused on finding the best of these shows and , you know, curating them in one place. And podcast discovery, as I’m sure you know, is a real challenge. So, its something we’ve got on the road map. I do feel that we need to figure out a few more things in the world of podcasting before we can have a definitive edge on the space, but…I can’t say anything just yet but its something we’re thinking about. Dave Allan: Awesome. Now if you had to give our audience, who are entrepreneurs mostly, a single piece of advice you feel like you’ve been given that worked for you – that’s particularly profound or however you want to think about it – What would that piece of advice be? Josh Muccio: It’s actually a combination of a few things that I try to live my life by. Number one was inspired by a book called “The Slight Edge”, adn the principle of this book is that its small things done every single day that lead to a highly successful life. This is porbably the best example in the book and its one of those business books that’s highly repetitive, but the lesson of the book is so good if you can digest it. For example, you’re 20 years old and you go to lunch with a co-worker – everyday you have a hamburger but the guy next to you doesn’t. They get something healthier, whatever that thing is. There is going to very little difference between you and that person for possibly 10, 15 or even 20 years – but 25, 30 years down the road there will be a massive difference in the one person’s health who is eating the hamburger everyday. This applies in so many different areas whether its relationships or professionally, and so for me I’m trying to find those small things that I can do every single day – whether its reading something that’s going to challenge me or listening to a podcast…OR, this is porbably the best piece of advice I have to give someone who is wanting to break into some sort of online business is to create something every single day and yes, creating something could be a page of something much larger – You don’t have to finish it that day – But spend some time creating something because ultimately you’re trying to add value to somebody, somewhere and so, you have to do more of that and even if you don’t have it figured out – Even if you don’t have the end game figured out – A lot of people spend time trying to figure out the end game, the overall strategy and how are they going to be the best. And you really don’t know how you’re going to be the best until you start. So I always tell people start creating something every single day, and if it is something you can push publish on, lke a small blog post or a podcast epsiode you can push publish on, then great! You’re going to be setting in motion things that down the road will cause the next thing to appear. Because let’s not be naieve and assume that the genius idea we have right now is the idea – Because its probably not – Its probably not the thing that takes you to the top…so… Dave Allan: Awesome. That’s really great advice. Now if people want to get ahold of you Josh, where should they go? Josh Muccio: So, my name is spelled J-o-s-h M-u-c-c-i-o, and that is my username on Twitter, on Facebook, adn of course you can check out the pitch at thepitch.fm or just seaarch for the show in iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Or you can shoot me an email – If you have something personal you wanna share, its Josh@thepitch.fm Dave Allan: Awesome. Thank you very much, that’s Josh Muccio – You heard him here at the Email Marketing Podcast – Its been great having you on the show Josh, you gave a lot of good information. Josh Muccio: Thank you David, I really appreciate it man. Dave Allan: Yeah, and I really wish you the very best in your future endeavors, especially with Season Two coming out on January 11th. Josh Muccio: Hey, thanks, I am a bit bummed, though, I was expecting to learn a magic trick. Dave Allan: [Laughing] Well we’ll have to do an episode and delve into…now that I’m doing some of these solo, I’ll probably have to include some of that in the future… Josh Muccio: I dunno, maybe it should be an email magic trick? Instead of tips for email marketing what about a magic trick for email marketing? Dave Allan: Well, there is a lot you can learn…by studying deception there’s a lot you can learn about marketing. We’ll hear you next time on the Email Marketing podcast, thanks to Josh again and we’ll be back next week. The post Episode #143 – Josh Muccio On Pitching Secrets From The Podcast “Shark Tank” appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Becoming great (or even better) at a new skill requires a plan. Outside of copy, John and Dave have used strategies to get good at an accelerated rate. Dave talks about his start in magic and street performing (aka charming people on the street) John dives deep into research and what he’s been spending the last year on (which is awesome). Together, they lay out how you’ll be able to hone your skills to a razor sharp edge. So that you’re so good… Clients can’t ignore you. In this episode, you’ll find how real “street smarts” can find freelance clients now and show you the money! In this episode, you’ll discover: The truth behind the 10,000 hour rule How to “cancel out” wasted practice hours starting today How to use the deliberate “egg timer” secret of a famous ad man to become a copywriting stud or studette One simple tweak anyone can use to boost the results of their skill training What John has been working on the last year and how he’s made twice as much progress as anyone expected Mentioned: Peak by Anders Ericsson 4 Hour Chef Takeover Tuesday Podcast – Roy Furr Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO John McIntyre: Alright it’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy, I’m here with Dave Allan once again, the street magician turned copywriter. I thought it would be really fascinating to talk about how to learn…anything, and not just say, copywriting – but a lot of people are like, how can I get clients – well there’s a way to learn – obviously people who get clients, they’re doing specific things. You need to learn what they’re doing and do those specific things and you should be getting clients – so it will be really valuable to have a bit of a chat about how the brain learns, how one learns, so you can apply that and go achieve your dreams… Dave Allan: Absolutely John McIntyre: [laughing} So tell me about you, man. You’ve done, I mean street magic’s pretty cool. I think you’re the only street magician I’ve met – it’s a rare breed. So tell me about that , how do you go and learn magic, is it something you do when you’re five years old, you know, you’re a kid and you’re obsessed, did you follow some kind of – how did you learn, how did you how get into it and did you develop – get it to the point you were like going into the street and shouting at people to come watch your show Dave Allan: You know, it’s interesting because I am an atypical example of this I’d say because most magicians, just like you mentioned, start very young and progress all the way along a sort of linear path. And for myself, I didn’t start – I’m 42 now – I started when I was 29 and basically I started into magic because I was interested in psychology and I had taken stuff like that in university – my dad was always a very big practical joker – so the first few magic tricks I tried were in retaliation [laughing] on my father. And so when those things worked and I saw the effect it had and how easily – my dad is a rather sharp individual – how easily he was duped, I thought wow, this is really interesting and that sort of made me delve further and for a couple years after that it was a hobby until I started doing it professionally and the way I sort of learned it – Now I was lucky in a way I think – Because I think when you’re a child you sort of learn everything when you get into magic and a lot of stuff later in life you just discard. That’s not to say it’s not valuable because you probably learn what you like or what doesn’t work, or isn’t good, but by the time I got into magic like I said, when I was 29, I already had tastes in other arts that helped me inform the magic. So, I already had tastes in music, I already had tastes in literature, and so forth so I knew what I wanted to do in the magic thing. I saw tricks or I saw presentations and thought oh, I could see myself doing that, or I would like to play with that and so forth. So I sort of just went down that path in a very specific manner where I studied only things I thought I would actually do. So that really helped because it really narrowed down to the time I could spend on things – because I would only have these few things I would spend my time on – I wasn’t trying to learn everything at once. I think that directly applies to copywriting too because it does seem like this very big, gigantic, 5000 different tactic type thing where – and really it’s not, you know, if you sort of wipe the mystique away it’s actually pretty simple. There are a lot of nuances to it that you can use and people have used but, you know, it’s actually a pretty straightforward thing. So I think a lot of people make a big deal out of things that aren’t necessarily that big of a deal – and magic was one of them. Because people don’t know – unless you’re a magician or unless you’re familiar with how some of the tricks are done, there’s a lot of mystique surrounding that too – I for one, and we’re not allowed to reveal the secrets usually, it’s against the code – But I will say that a lot of the secrets are stupid. They’re very simple and you’d be surprised that you’d be fooled by them but it takes the magic really away – the magic is really in the performance, the performance of the effects, it’s not in the learning. There are a lot of cool ideas in magic, but most of it is when it’s finally presented live to another person that it does take on the actual magical quality because a lot of the stuff is pretty mundane, actually. So for me, I just decided to learn very specific things and then, like anything I think, I went at it basically every day and it was a hobby at first so there was no pressure to turn it into anything and that’s sort of how I got into copywriting too because when I first started I started looking around and first got into email, as I mentioned before, started with something very simple and worked my way up and I think that’s one of the best ways to do it when you find something you want to do – If you don’t have a passion for it or it interests you – I have tried almost innumerable things throughout my life and if I wasn’t super passionate about it or I didn’t really want to do it, it lasted, like, a week. And I was done. I don’t know what you’re like John, I know you’re into a bunch of different things and you just told me recently that you’re into music so maybe you can talk more about that. John McIntyre: Yeah, it’s a – I grew up playing guitar so I have that sort of in my background and became good at that, played in bands, stuff like that. But then I haven’t really touched music for a while – by the way, what we’re trying to do here is to pull out the concepts that you can then apply to copywriting and clients. But with music, haven’t touched it in five years and then back in December – bit of a long story on how this all came to be – back in December I downloaded some software on my computer, and I wanted to make dance music, music that you hear at ultra music festival… Dave Allan: Oh ok, EDM. John McIntyre: EDM, yeah totally. I wanted to make some EDM, go on a stage in front of 100,000 people and play some music. But so then the first thing – I have a basic understanding of music and I started making some…songs. The problem was, they sounded so terrible compared to the mainstream stuff. It’s very common, right. A good song sounds really simple but to number one write a song in the first place that sounds good and then to actually produce it – to use the right instruments and mix it and engineer it in a certain way that sounds good when you play it on a stereo – they’re actually quite difficult things. So then I’m in that situation where I’m like I can either have fun with it and just do what I want whenever I pick it up or I can deconstruct it and try to get there in a more effective way. So the first step, and I think this is really important, is I had to figure out where I wanted to be. I couldn’t just make music or try and create exercises for specific things without knowing where I wanted to go. If I wanted to be a mixing engineer that’s a very different thing than an artist like Skrillex, for instance, DJ-ing, yeah like that. So that was what I thought I was like if I could have anything yeah, if I could be on a stage in front of 100,000 people, that would be like the pinnacle – somewhere around that pinnacle. So that gives me something to aim at, what do I need to develop now and there’s two good books on this – “The 4 Hour Chef” – You don’t need to read the whole thing just the one chapter on learning is worth reading and then one book called “Peak” by Anders Eriksson – which is the guy who sort of invented the 10,000 hour rule – which isn’t actually a rule at all, it’s sort of a misappropriation of the research. You do need to do a lot of practice – but the fact it’s 10,000 hours you know it could be 5000, 200 or 15,000 – so he did that research, the book is called “Peak”. So I read those two things and broke up the process into all its components – you mentioned that it can be very overwhelming – any field can be overwhelming when you look at it like this big collection of stuff. What I did instead was to get the various components – you’ve got songwriting, you’ve got sound design, you’ve got mixing, mastering, probably got DJing – You can break it up into 5,6,8,10 different things and then – I think this is important – then after you break it up into things you need to figure out what’s standing between you – I’m like what’s the problem right now – between me and this goal, this rough point I’ve set – like, why don’t I have it already is a good question and I think the honest reason is, I’m a good marketer, I know that, but I just can’t make a song sound that great and this was almost a year ago. So then I was like let’s just work on the sounds, writing songs, did that for a while and then realized to split it up further – the songs are sounding pretty good now, but the song as a whole doesn’t feel like it’s that great of a song – So I started to think more about, you know, a great song in terms of the composition, is a great song no matter how it’s produced, whether it’s on a guitar, or piano, or an electronic song – it’s a good song. So, I’m like the biggest thing, the biggest limiter, the biggest problem is going to be my ability to write a good song. At least right now, it’s not how well I can produce the song – how great can I make it sound on my computer – it’s the song as a concept. Dave Allan: I think that’s good – a good way of looking at it. John McIntyre: It’s to basically find out – and it’s backed up by those books – is figuring out where your weaknesses are and creating exercises to target those and the real point of this – after twelve months – I’ve been working with a mentor to do this – this is the first time I’ve told this story on the podcast. I’ve been working with a couple different people to refine it and improve – teachers or mentors you might call them – and one said I made two years worth of progress in six months. And when I show people the music that I’m able to make, most of them are surprised I’ve been doing it for such a short time and I don’t think that’s necessarily me, I’ve spent a lot of time practicing but the method, which I just explained to you which is figure out what you want – figure out what’s stopping you from having it right now – what the problems are – and then, like don’t just practice in general, If I just sat down every day and said I’m going to practice music I wouldn’t get very far – but if I said “Where do I suck? What can I do today that will make me suck a little bit less?” with that specific thing. If I did that enough times – like what I did with songwriting – it wouldn’t be the issue anymore – I can write a pretty good song, that’s not holding me back anymore – what’s holding me back now is my ability to create a really great sounding synth – then I need to do that. So it’s as simple as that – and using teachers and mentors and coaches and stuff to just improve, improve that process of you getting data to find out where you’re good at or bad at. You could apply this process to copywriting, you could split copywriting into sales letters, emails and other specific things, get more granular, to me that’s really the way you learn something. Dave Allan: No, I think you’re right and just thinking about it while you were talking it’s definitely the process I went through as well. When I got into magic and started learning the tricks – you have the sleight of hand aspect of it, that is whatever you’re going to do with your hands and whatever implement you’re using whether it’s a deck of cards or a piece of rope or whatever it is you’re using – then there’s the psychology of it you know, as to how this thing is presented such as what you’re going to say and how you’re going to address things like where you’re going to do them – not necessarily the moves – but how you’re going to block it, for those people who are familiar with theatrical ideas. There’s so many different components but chances are you’re weak at more than one of these things so when you address it as an individual part first and then you combine them all, and usually there’s a synergy where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So you improve on these certain aspects and then when you bring it back to the whole it boosts everything to a higher level, it doesn’t add, it’s not just a +1 – it’s a +5. So that really helped me and if I really thought about how much I practiced doing the magic especially – practiced a lot more at the beginning – I don’t practice a whole lot now, I practice very specific things though, like you’re saying because I’m trying to do very specific things with the magic I’m presenting these days and I’m really hyper-focused on those things – it’s less broad and more specific. John McIntyre: Right, it seems like in the – like where this research came from – he mentions this in “Peak” – Anders mentions this in “Peak” – You have a violinist – When they’re trying to practice a song they’re just playing the song – let’s say it’s Beethoven’s 9th – I don’t even know – whatever, some song – I don’t even know if that’s the right one – I’m not really a classical music…So they just pick up their instrument, play the song a few times and “Ah, I kind of missed that bit up there”, play the song through a few more times and then we’ll be good – like that’s how an amateur practices. And at the same time – I’ll give that example in a second – The experts on the other hand, the way they will practice – like medium, the amateur/expert next level up – they’d play the song and keep missing a note in the intro – so they’d practice the whole intro, 16 bars or the whole first minute of the song or something like that – just that. But the expert – true experts who get really good and keep getting better – if they find there’s a specific note in the intro that they keep failing – they try to isolate that 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 second sequence in the intro and just practice that and they will practice it as many times as it take to make it perfect – let’s say ten times in a row – not do it ten times to get it right once but do it so they nail it every time consistently – You know, that’s just sort of practice and to just give you an idea and another example that I think is really fascinating, there was a study where they got a bunch of amateur singers – let’s say you and me went to a singing class and we really don’t care that much about singing – let’s go have some fun, go sing and they get a group of people like that and then a group of people who are really expert singers and really trying to improve – they both went through this lesson and afterwards here’s what was interesting right – the amateurs had a great time, right, and felt like they were refreshed – got a chance to express themselves and tap into that part of them that wants to sing and be joyful and all that sort of stuff, which is great. The experts, on the other hand, were exhausted and they didn’t necessarily enjoy it and they didn’t feel fulfilled or satisfied that they were able to express themselves – they felt like they’d practiced and the difference between them was that they noticed the amateurs looked at the practice as a chance to have fun, to enjoy themselves, to express themselves whereas the experts approached the practice as a chance to improve – using the practice again, to find out where they suck and then, again, to repeat that specific thing until it gets better. This brings up an interesting side note here because I’m doing the music and fundamentally I really, really do enjoy it _ I would really enjoy being on stage, I’ve done that before – there is a deep sense of satisfaction and meaning that drives it but at the same time I’m trying to temper this idea with the things I need to do to get better – that aren’t going to be fun, they’ll be positively uncomfortable and that I’m going to have to use self-discipline to do. It’s true, you can go and follow your passion, but if you want to get really, really good at something, no matter how much you like it and think it’s really, really fun – getting better and getting really, really good at it is hard work and it’s not fun – that’s just what the data says. Dave Allan: I think you’re 100% right on that – everything that you get good at requires hard work or its not worth anything. And another aspect, just as you were talking, and you went through the various stages of finding out what you were terrible at – what was holding you back – One of the things that really helped me in learning magic, and in copywriting and a lot of things and I can remember the specific examples too – was when I saw other people who were good at it, FAIL. It reminded me, these are just people and are capable of failure, and it isn’t as easy as they make it look most of the time. So people are often measuring themselves against this ideal that they have, you know with magic is was certain professional magicians I looked up to or with copywriting it was the Gary Halberts or John Carltons of the world. But when you listened and eventually heard stories, and in some cases I saw people in person who did things very badly, and street magicians, when I first got into street magic I saw people who had been doing it for decades fail to be able to get a crowd- it emboldened me to work harder because I saw how – in bold relief I saw how that this is very difficult regardless of how long you’ve been doing it so it was almost, whoa, these people screw up too and so that really helped me focus even more. I don’t know if other people have that same experience- it almost, definitely kind of pulled back the curtain and you saw the wizard kind of thing. John McIntyre: Right. And that reminds me – I mentioned before that the 10,000 hour rule is actually a lie. Because how that became a rule is that – Anders Eriksson did the research – the original scientist who did all the research behind elite performance – the book is incredible – totally worth reading. Malcolm Gladwell then wrote, I can’t remember what the book is called, one of his books, he then pulls it out of context and calls it the 10,000 hour rule and it’s a catchy way to refer to it takes a lot of time to get good. The reality was – the way I understand it – and the way the book seems to explain it – that its more like an economy where within say, violinists, being an elite solo violinist – that’s an old profession, it’s been around for 100s of years- so that means you have had people who have been doing it for 40, 50 years and who have also been standing on the shoulders of giants – there have been people developing methods to learn violin for hundred, thousands of years maybe – the violin is an industry maybe violin soloist learning and mastery side of it is very well developed. Therefore, it means if most violinists are putting in roughly 10,000 hours to reach an elite level of performance – you need to not hit 10,000 hours as he mentions in this book – 10,000 hours will take you 5 hours a day 4 days a week for 10 years, but what you’ve got to understand is that by the time you spend that ten years, where’s the violin industry going to be ten years from now, 2026, because maybe by that point people are investing thirteen thousand hours to become masters which means you don’t need 10,000, you need 13,000. Now this sounds kind of intimidating, but I think where this gets really interesting – Cal Newport has written a bit about this stuff – 10,000 hours and deliberate practice might apply to violin solos, it applies differently to, lets say there’s a new – let’s take Ruby as a programming language right – it’s been around for a while and you probably have a fairly high level of proficiency, a lot of experts around, a lot of ways to learn it, but because it’s a relatively new programming language, t might only take you 1500 hours to become an expert in that. Whereas you could take some brand new database CRM software, like go take a new salesforce release or machine learning software or whatever, go take something like that and there’s probably like two people in the world – you know, you might only need two hundred hours to become an elite expert at that. And so there’s this interesting economy and I’m thinking that the most significant event in our lives will be A.I. – artificial intelligence – and that’s a huge topic may e for another time and I’m thinking how could you apply it to A.I. and it’s a fairly new industry, been around for a couple decades and it’s proceeding at such a fast pace that whatever you learned from 10 years ago is not particularly relevant now – so if you wanted to become an A.I. expert, A.I. and nanotechnology and all that which will be huge industries – you could go apply this same thing. What don’t you know right now? What are your weaknesses? What do I need to get better at? And apply the same process – you’re choosing which game you want to play and each game has a different amount of hours that’s going to require to get good. Dave Allan: I think that’s exactly true and for people out there we’re mostly talking about marketing and copywriting and that’s the same way to approach it – just chunk it – You know I think a guy I interviewed that i consider a friend, Roy Furr, who’s a copywriter that people may be familiar with and he actually wrote the letter for the Titans Of Direct Response event that Brian Kurtz put on – that’s one of his big successes – he said that Gary Bencivenga, whose considered the greatest living copywriter I guess, told him that the way he approached it was to get just 1% better every week. So he would go about learning, reading, applying things and learned to make himself 1% better and by the time you get to the end of the year – that’s 52%… John McIntyre: Well, actually of you think about it- you have compound interest on that, 1% of 1% of 1% is more like 60 or 70% by the end of the year… Dave Allan: That’s a good point. I did the same thing when I learned various card tricks and so forth – was I just chunked it down to the moves I had to learn- the ways in which I had to present it – and then eventually added them all back together – and once you come back to the whole, for instance with copywriting you’re going to learn about how to do offers or how to structure offers better and how to present them and so forth and you come back to the whole which would be like a long for sale page – it will boost it up – much higher than just adding it linearly – it will create that compound effect and the whole will be much greater. People out there you don’t have to do everything in a single day – it’s a journey and a friend of mine – Colin Theriot who runs the Cult of Copy – on Facebook, a group that probably any copywriter should be a part of – to hang out with other copywriters and learn and talk about this kind of stuff. He had said that there is no board, no judgment council that proclaims you capable – so its just can you produce the results or not and at first if you’re looking for somebody to say “Yes, you are now a copywriter!” – it’s just not going to happen – you have to just go out there, do it and fail like John said in an earlier podcast and cut your teeth. You’ve got to take action, you can listen to podcasts until you’re blue in the face, but action always trumps meditation. So just get out there and do something, trust me, when I started doing street magic and I went out there and talked to people walking by and nobody stopped or gave a you-know-what and then you became emboldened and numb to that and then you started talking louder, which is what you needed to do, and saying funnier things and acting more extroverted and it’s just a process so it gt a little better, a little better, a little better you know and even when you get really good at it – it’s still hard. That’s one thing to keep in mind, you don’t all of a sudden hit easy street and everything flows out of you and you never have to work hard again – it’s always a battle. John McIntyre: Yeah, absolutely. And one thing – you mentioned this a moment ago – the time – you don’t need to be doing this all day every day. The data actually supports this, in this book he talks about the various violinists and how much they study and they found that the most expert – the elite violinists – weren’t the ones who practiced the most – I think this is revolutionary because you have guys like Gary V saying you need to be working 16 hours a day and if you don’t you’re going to fail and then you have Kanye West in the music industry saying he went and locked himself in a room and made beats for three months or four months and you have to be so passionate that you work all day. The reality is that most everyone can’t do that and sustain that level of focus and try and work for 16 or 18 hours a day you will burn out sooner or later or the quality of the work that you do just won’t be that great and you’ll end up reinforcing bad habits. What the research actually says – with these violinists is that the best violinists would practice for two hours usually in the morning when they’re fresh – they’d take a break, take a nap or a break of some kind and then they would practice for another two hours. They’d usually practice on average three and a half to four hours a day, five days a week – they slept on average one hour more per night than the average players and I think they had a more active social life as well. So that’s really interesting right, these most elite violinists practice less, have more sleep and have a better social life = the difference was when the amateur players practiced they would just sit there and play the song lots and lots of times which takes a lot of time, it’s not efficient – the expert players would go in there and let’s say practice for one and a half or two hours – the reason they would take a break or a nap was because of how intensely they were practicing and how much they were focusing on their weaknesses. the brain was so overloaded, so exhausted it needed to take a break, it had to rest and couldn’t have continued all day. So that’s something to keep in mind when you’re trying to learn copywriting or you’re trying to learn how to get clients – Intensity trumps volume. Dave Allan: Yep. I think that’s a very good point. If memory serves me correctly, this very famous copywriter amongst copywriters by the name of Eugene Schwartz = he used to plant himself at his desk and set his egg-timer for 33 minutes and 33 seconds if I remember correctly and force himself to work but he only put in like two or three hours a day and had other pursuits, he was an art collector and so forth and he did all the stuff in the morning if I remember correctly – but he did that every day and by knowing what worked best for him he might have been onto something which was later borne out by the research. John McIntyre: yeah, it’s like with the music I set a time for 60 minutes – no Facebook, no email, the idea is to be completely focused and then as soon as that time is finished take a ten minute break and then once that’s over back into it and you can apply that to learning anything – you might not need to take a nap but you need structure – like, if you were able to practice for four hours a day like that and do that consistently for three, six, twelve months, you’re going to be really, really… Dave Allan: You’re going to crush John McIntyre: Most people don’t have four hours of good focus time each day, you know. Dave Allan: You know that’s really funny that you say it that way too because that’s one of the reasons I became a nomad and left the jobs I had several years ago was that I realized that because I was working normal jobs and had most of the time allocated to that- that I couldn’t allocate the time I wanted to learn the things I really wanted to learn – copywriting and , at the time I didn’t know I was going to be a street magician so eventually that – and so that’s one of the reasons I became a nomad was to get that time back so that I could focus on things I really wanted. John McIntyre: Alright. Let’s wrap it up I think it’s been a pretty good discussion and if you can’t figure out how to learn anything after this then ….you’ve got some problems Dave Allan: [laughter] There’s no hope for you! John McIntyre: Maybe you need to go listen to this podcast with maybe lots of intensity, you know for four hours a day for a few weeks and then you’ll get it – maybe that’ll help. Anyway, well let’s wrap it up here – thank you for listening, links will be in the show notes at themcmethod.com, if people want to get a hold of you where should they go? Dave Allan: makewordspay.com John McIntyre: Cool, cool. Good chat and I’ll see you next time. The post Episode #142 – David Allan On Deliberate Fast Tracking Of Your Copy Skills appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

As a freelancer working with clients, finding great ones is usually a trial and error process This can be especially daunting with a service such as copywriting John and Dave team up to talk about their experiences with both good and bad clients. Especially… what separates them John talks at length about establishing criteria. Dave gives some red flags to look for. In this episode you’ll find battle tested ways to sift through opportunities… So you get paid. Create lasting relationships. Build a fun and fulfilling freelance business. In this episode, you’ll discover: A one-step, pain-free method to steal back relief AND closure from freelance “editing” vampires The exact scale John uses to determine businesses who qualify for his services. So you can target and raise your own standards One critical mistake all newbie freelancers seem to make. Why you cannot always trust this kind of work, saving you years of frustration How clients can change when you charge higher fees. 3 short stories from famous entrepreneurs teach who to do business with…and who NOT to! Mentioned: Derek Sivers Tim Ferriss Dan Kennedy Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO John McIntyre: John Mcintyre here, the Autoresponder Guy – I’m here with Dave Allan. Dave is a street magician copywriter, he’s been on the show before, you can check out those past episodes – wetalked about Donald Trump…sort of, and today we’re going to be talking about how to find great clients and avoid the shitty ones, and what the difference is. Because not all clients are equal, are they Dave? Dave Allan: They are certainly not all equal, and when I got into copywriting, of course, people heard the story a couple of episodes ago about Gary Halbert and how I got into copywriting – one of the first things I learned when I started investigating Gary Halbert more in-depth-ly and learned who he was I heard this mantra of “Clients Suck”. He even wore a hat or a shirt to many seminars perhaps, because I haven’t seen them all, with that emblazoned on the hat or the t-shirt. So that was the first time I sort of heard stuff like that but to be honest, in all the different jobs I’ve had over the years, since I started working since I was 17 – then there was definitely very broad strokes between the people you never wanted to deal with again and the people you didn’t mind dealing with almost every day. I think that is something we can talk about here today. How to ward off some of those other people and how to embrace those people who are awesome, that you want to work with for a long time. John McIntyre: It’s an interesting point actually as I’ve been doing this for the last four or five years – some clients are great, perfectly on time, they don’t care – they’re not fussed, about the total amount, they just really want to work with you. Part of this, the caveat here is that you need to be a good copywriter – if your copy sucks it’s going to be hard to get the really good clients – so let’s assume that you can write good copy – then you’re in a position where lots of businesses could get value, therefore you have lots of people that are going to want to work with you if you market yourself properly. So what’s the difference? Let’s talk – what’s a bad client? Let’s start with that. Dave Allan: Well, for me, in my experience, a bad client is someone that tend to eat up a ton of your time, they don’t like to pay, certainly don’t like to pay on time or certainly pay ahead of time, that’s for sure and it’s almost scary how close it is because one of the first things I read when I was looking to get into business was the 4-Hour Workweek – that’s where I was at that point in my life, in my early 30’s and looking to start businesses – and in there he talked about the story where he had to fire a large percentage of his customers – he wasn’t a freelancer he was selling supplements but he fired those people anyways – Tim Ferriss this being of course – because only these people ate up so much of his time with useless crap – wasting his time – and didn’t contribute significantly enough to the bottom line that he got rid of them. So when you’re a freelancer…Now at the very beginning it’s often the case that people feel the need to whore themselves out, and in some cases, you know…I’m not you, I didn’t like to do that, I sort of skipped, or tried to skip that phase a bit, but it’s one of those things where the people who are serious who you really want to work with – they’re already on a different level. You know, they have a business – which is a key point – because I run into people all the time who want to start a business and hire you for copy, I ran into this a lot when I started out, and they don’t have a business, don’t really know what they’re doing, or really know anything about it, so the copy isn’t going to work. They could have the best copy in the world and have no traffic running to it, they have no offer, no business, and this shouldn’t even be a conversation and so you have to have a way to filter people out who are serious and that comes from your personality a lot too because you want to work with people that mesh with your personality – When John and I started doing these podcasts together a few episodes ago, when we first talked – and we had emailed back and forth a few years – but when we first talked we kinda just hit it off right away, it was very easy, we got along, joking and stuff, and it’s like sitting down with somebody – I think Tim Ferriss called it the beer test or something – where if you felt like you could sit down with that person, have a beer with them and be okay spending that time with them, you could be in business with them and if you couldn’t, you couldn’t. I think another guy I sort of looked to for inspiration in that regard was a guy named Derek Sivers, and his sort of format for deciding who he was going to work with was – if it was hell yes…or it’s no – If he was super excited and pumped and thought that it was a real awesome thing, then he was in. Anything short of that, he was out. That’s a pretty good way to do it. What about you John? You’ve done this for a long time too now – how have you sort of weeded through some of these problematic people? John McIntyre: One thing that took a little while to learn – I think at the start you do have to a little less selective depending on the situation you’re in and how good you are at getting clients – You start off and you work with small businesses and eventually you realize in working with these different companies that you want to work with companies that are making at least six figures – I mean they’re doing a few hundred thousand dollars and that’s like on the bottom end ideally – when you think about your average business doing a hundred thousand dollars a year in sales, which is a really, really tiny business in the grand scheme of things – you know if they’re in margins – if they’re doing physical products, e-commerce, average margin is 40%, which means they’re only making $40,000 gross profit off that, and they still have to pay for things their ads, their office if they have one, a staff if they have any, gotta pay their own salaries…after all that they may like a grand or two left over to pay you to write email sequences, which is not much, and then again because their business is so small you’re not really going to be able to help them that much. Whereas on the other side of things, another company that I started a year ago, a different sort of branch, called Re-engagement, which aspired to do email marketing for e-commerce companies that started at two million dollars or more because that was sort of the rough range I figured they’d be able to spend quite a bit on monthly email marketing services. And it did work to a certain point – we ended up dropping it down, I think it’s at $50,000/mo now is the rough minimum we use, but, the larger the company, the better the job you’re going to be able to do – if you increase their sales by 10%, whether this is e-commerce or a guy selling a weight loss product on Clickbank, whoever it is, the better your copy does, the better you’ll help them,the happier they’re going to be – which means the more you can charge as well – Plus, the bigger businesses, because they’re busier and things like that, they want to just give you the money and have a good job done instead of sitting around critiquing your work. Have you ever had a client where you send them stuff in Google docs and they send it back with 50 comments and things to change and they’re not even a copywriter… Dave Allan: Uh-huh, I have had it happen – we’ve had it all happen and I can tell you because this happened to me on more than one occasion, unfortunately, because when it happened the second time it hasn’t happened since, and basically what I did was when that person sent back the markup like you’re talking about, and I just sent their money back and that was it, and I was just like…No. I’m unapologetic and you know, I think that comes down to how you deal with people, how people take you either seriously or non-seriously. There are so many people, and when businesses come to me, I try to get them to niche down and target specific clientele who are their best customers already – and they don’t even know that a lot of the times – who is this person that actually walks in the door and purchases your stuff – seems to be this big mystery to a lot of companies which shocks me – I keep finding that with people, they’re not exactly sure who that person is and the narrower you can get that down the more specifically you can target them. So you try to find out that information and they’re afraid of finding those specific people because they’re trying to everyone, all the time and you’re not going to sell, chances are, let’s say you’re selling a weight loss product – there aren’t 8 billion fat people – there is a certain percentage of fat people, and there’s a certain percentage of women who are overweight, and men who are overweight, and people who are over 40 who are overweight and you can go down, down, down, down, down and down. So if you’re selling to everyone, you’re selling to nobody and the same thing applies to clientele. You don’t want to have everyone as a client, you want to find those people you can work with the best – that are, like John said, that are serious, the stuff he just talked about, the figures people are putting through their business every month. These are serious people you know, they’re not messing around and I learned the hard way a few times when I first started too of how to differentiate. But you find that in any field you get into – the exact same thing – whether it’s copywriting or street performing, it’s exactly the same, and it’s almost shocking how the same it is because you can just see – I can just talk to somebody for 10 seconds or seem them not laugh at a joke during a street show and I know those people aren’t going to give me any money, I can tell immediately. So it’s very important – there are tactical ways – like for me, for instance, I don’t like to talk to anybody – and this is something I learned from a specific marketer – I don’t like to talk to anybody – I’ll shoot the breeze with somebody, I don’t have a problem with that – but if we’re talking about their business, I’m getting paid. So, and that’s something that I didn’t do at the beginning and I’ve regretted almost every day I didn’t do it – because I heard that very early on and its was lingering in the back of my mind, but again, you have this thing like maybe I haven’t paid my dues or done enough maybe I can’t ask for that and it was horseshit – I could’ve asked for that stuff upfront, wouldn’t have had to deal with any of those people – because the people who won’t go that extra, you know, they just don’t get it and are never going to get it, if you have to go that far… John McIntyre: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean it’s sort of like the whole, if you have to try too hard – I mean if you have to go to the point of giving away a bunch of stuff for free…I mean, to be honest, the answer to all these things is …it actually depends. It’s relly hard to give someone a – if you do all these things you will be successful – in some cases people have been very successful doing free work and then using that as a leverage point to get paid work. It is a valuable strategy. However, probably far more people misuse it and end up in this position where they’re doing all this free work and they’re not getting anything back. You have to be very strategic about it. And the other thing that I thought about while you were speaking is – sort of how my journey worked is I started off doing stuff for really cheap and then gradually just increased my prices and over time I’d meet someone who’s like “Man, you need to be charging $5,000 or $10,000 or $20,000 for stuff because that’s how you make real money”. You know, I’d go and do that and see what’s good and what’s bad about that and now four or five years down the line and reflecting on it – you could go and sell something and get paid $25,000 for a sales funnel and it sounds a lot better than getting paid $500 for a similar type of thing, However, they always come with different pros and cons – and the thing is like – I have a friend of mine who runs a search engine agency, they do SEO, paid traffic, stuff like that, and me and him talk about this idea of selling something – he’s got clients paying $500/mo for some SEO stuff, and he’s had them paying $500/mo for three years and they email him once every six months, because to them $500/mo is small enough – it’s not big enough to really worry about as long as it seems to be working, we’ll keep paying it. Once you start to get over $1000/mo, that’s when you have people go “Do we really need this?” – can we get rid of it – let’s talk to them and make sure we’re getting our value from it. If you do charge more you tend to have people who want to get more value for their money because obviously, they’re paying more to get more value but they get to a point where $500/mo for a good-sized business is nothing, they’ll just keep paying it – no questions asked – but when you get above $1000/mo, unless we really, really need this, we’re probably going to get rid of it. If you enjoy managing clients and you have 10 clients paying you $1-2000/mo, and you like that hustle…Do it! Me personally, I didn’t like it, I don’t like managing a team or managing clients in that way probably because I like having more autonomy and freedom where I can just wake up and do whatever the hell I want and not have any phone calls if I don’t want them…but that’s me. Some would rather have the money and would rather sacrifice that freedom for the money because they want to buy more expensive things with it with the money – so it depends – what do you want? Dave Allan: I think it’s all in the how you set it up too you know. Very early on too, when I first got into copywriting and learning about internet marketing I would try to find as many things to read or watch as I possibly could and I remember stumbling across a lot of Dan Kennedy stuff because it was just very pertinent at the time, like he still is now. But he, and I think we spoke to this before, he set himself up very specifically sort of on that far end of things and I think he does a lot of things right and I see now why he did those things such as being hard to get a hold of, and he’s sort of…he’s not discourteous but he’s like very blunt, uber-blunt, to the point where you kind of don’t want to fuck with that guy, you know, and as a result he attained a level of respect and as we said before when we started this episode, you have to be able to produce the goods, but also the way he handles himself in those relationships, you know you really can’t get away with anything with him. He’s hard to get at, he charges a lot, he’s a kind of recluse and so forth and people are just very happy that he’ll even talk to them. I’m sure it took years to get to that point but it’s a very interesting model to see how he…one of his famous sayings, which I think which even you said last time was that people are walking around with an umbilical chord looking to plug it in somewhere. And that’s sort of how he thinks about it. You’re coming to me, you want me to do this stuff for you, and it’s not that the person doesn’t know anything about it, they just don’t want to do it because they think you can do it better or faster or whatever they believe, so if you set it up. I know for a fact he doesn’t take all those freaking calls – he takes calls only on one day a week or something like that – so he’s not taking calls the other six days – you know so stuff like that. Tim Ferriss did stuff like that where he would only check his email twice a day I think it was – there’s just various ways you can approach it – because I think when people do charge a lot of money they feel guilty themselves. Like I don’t feel guilty when I charge a lot of money because I just don’t care – I know what the stuff can do and I don’t really need – there’s a lot of stuff I could for money – when I was doing street magic and just getting into copywriting – I had the street magic to fall back on if I was about to go destitute or something – because that was bringing in regular money – so I didn’t need to take every client that came in the door and being able to walk away from things is the big reason why some of this stuff works – it’s because you don’t need to take all those jobs, you can pick or choose jobs because they excite you and not just financially but excite you as a project and a long term relationship you can build with this person. That’s another aspect. Lifetime value of a customer – same thing applies to clients – you said your buddy is charging $500/mo going on for three years with very little maintenance, that’s…great. Because that’s regular income coming in for doing basically nothing so you have to look at the total picture not just I’m going to charge x,y. terms and everything come into it. How long is this going to be for, and time committed. I think for me, the thing I try to keep in my mind is and I think it is something Dan Kennedy said was he said that the people the least trade dollars for hours, and the people who are in the middle, who are doing good but aren’t quite at that next level, is that they’re aware that their time is worth a lot more because they bring value, and they base their ideology on their time being worth more, so their still on a time model but they bring a lot of value and are aware of it, and the people who are at the absolute highest echelon, they know it’s not a time thing and it’s only about the value and so that’s something I’ve always kept in the back of my mind because you know, you grow up and you work an hourly job and it’s hammered into you from the word go. But if you’re doing something like copywriting, the amount you charge can be dramatically outstripped by sales and revenue that it produces, you have to get it into your head how valuable this can be when you’re talking to a client because you have to see the potential what they’re going to take from this copy and what’s going to happen. What could it produce? You have got to keep that in mind when you’re charging your fees because I think almost every copywriter I’ve ever talked to, and John maybe you can speak to this in a second, had that sort of moment where they charged $8-10,000 for a sales letter and the person they wrote the sales letter for made a million dollars with it. I have a friend named Mitch Miller, who’s a copywriter, and like a year or two ago he put together a funnel that jumped a guys business from whatever it was to one million dollars a month and said that the amount he charged was an extremely small percentage of that, and the first thing he thought was, “Man, I should be doing this for myself” you know, something to that effect. Maybe that’s something to get into in the future. When you’re a freelance copywriter and you’re looking for clients, but a lot of the best copywriters if you look at their careers they go full circle and they end up working for themselves eventually. So that’s something to look at for people. I have heard people complain they should have started doing that at the very beginning, so you know, it’s one of those things to keep in mind as you advance your freelance career. I wouldn’t say don’t work for clients as I’ve had some awesome people, but you have to get away from the people who are going to waste your time. John McIntyre: While all of this is great advice, I think where it all really comes back to what you really want? The freedom or do you want to have really high-paying clients? Mix of both? Do you want to end up in your own business and then getting out there and doing it, not just listening to a podcast but going out and getting clients and making mistakes, because you’ll get some bad clients, you’ll do some of the things we mentioned here that you shouldn’t do and that’s okay! You get some bad clients and you can fire them or finish the project and just don’t take any more clients like them. You’ve got to get in that ring. Dave Allan: I think one thing I would recommend, and this is something that has applied in a few different fields I’ve been in, is I would try to stay away – now you said earlier that some people have parlayed free work into some very successful things happening to them, and that is true – but on the whole from what I have seen and experienced I would say to the people who are tempting you with free work or promising some sort of percentage of the outcome – that can get you into real trouble because that percentage, royalties etc. all fall into that – you may not even be where you’re thinking about that kind of stuff – if someone is approaching with that kind of deal I’d be very cautious unless it’s someone who really checks out. Because I have been burned myself on things like that and I know that a lot of the name copywriters, that are the best in the world at this, have been burned. I remember Gary Halbert in some of his things saying you’re never going to see the royalties, you know, so just be careful, you can always say no if you’re unsure. Your gut instinct always comes into play here because the times I got burned I knew it probably ahead of time and just didn’t act because I wanted to do it or thought this would be another notch on the belt or whatever you want to say, so just keep all that stuff in mind – if you listen to other copywriters they have a lot of these kind of stories – and a lot of success stories too – So just keep it in mind that these things can happen to you and be careful what you get involved with, because almost the worst thing you can get involved with is something that eats up your time, doesn’t pay you very well and makes you miserable. john McIntyre: Absolutely. Cool, let’s wrap it up there, that’s a good note to finish on. We’ll get the notes, or the links will be in the show notes at themcmethod.com – If people want to look me up and talk to me it’s makewordspay.com? Is that it? Dave Allan: That’s it, makewordspay.com John McIntyre: Awesome. Great. Thanks for coming on the show once again, and I’ll see you next time. Dave Allan: Thank you, John. The post Episode #141 – David Allan On Tried And True Ways To Find Amazing Freelance Clients appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Love him or hate him… Donald Trump has been successful. Whether convincing people to give him unprecedented breaks while building a real estate empire, or becoming the next President Of The United States , “The Donald” has his mind set for success. John welcomes David Allan back to the show. Together they use Trump as a jumping off point to discuss getting your head right. When you’re struggling as a freelancer, how do you cultivate the right outlook to get over the hump? John talks about the latest brain research on future success. Dave reveals what he’s learned through trial and error, and practical tips from one of the most badass entrepreneurs. By the end of this episode, you should be able to get a handle on how your thinking is working for you… Or holding you back. AND… What to do about it. In this episode, you’ll discover: Why Dave bet money early on Donald Trump to win the election What Hollywood submarine captains can show you about confidence. (You can adopt this IMMEDIATELY) This simple daily exercise has helped propel one badass female entrepreneur to over $300,000/month What the latest brain research says about your freelance copywriting career The “no-frills” secret to getting so good at copywriting…great clients can’t ignore you! Mentioned: Kat Loterzo Anders Ericsson Takeover Tuesday Podcast Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO Episode 140: John McIntyre: It’s John McIntyre the Auto Responder Guy here with David Allan. David was on the podcast I think a couple weeks ago talking about magic and how he sort of went traveling became a digital nomad and you know, taught himself how to do magic tricks , became a street magician and then use that to then get into copywriting and told his story of you know Gary Halbert, and a bunch of things like that. So we’re not going to get into the story today but I wanted to get Dave back just to talk about a couple different things – and part of the reason for that is that you might you may have noticed that I haven’t been doing , releasing a lot of podcast lately in the last few months, and that’s just because I’ve been focused elsewhere. So what I thought was I get someone really awesome like Dave to come on and ’cause you know who’s really passionate about the podcast he wants to sort of keep it going basically and David came – so hear we are – we’re going to do a few interviews where it’s me and him and eventually he’ll probably start doing some interviews on his own – I have a good feeling about that so…fingers crossed. Dave Allan: Yeah , fingers crossed. It’s going good so far and we get along good of course, John is a great guy and Yeah I’m just happy to be here to help and it’s a good opportunity. John McIntyre: Cool cool. It’s good to have you. Now, um, we’ve got a few different things we’re going to talk about and we’re going to split these up into different episodes. First thing is being that it’s so pertinent and so timely right now let’s talk about Donald trump and the topic or the idea I’ve got written down is Donald Trump’s guide to winning friends and influencing people who play on the old book. So that just to put some things in context I have barely followed this- not that I don’t care about I just know that if I do start reading about it all probably spend all day every day learning about Donald Trump and reading about getting mad or getting in arguments or whatever. So I’ve avoided it and just chosen to sort of get the updates from other people who much more into it which it sounds like you’ve been because you’re in the States right now right you probably get this a lot more you’re much more familiar with it. David Allan: Well I didn’t really like go out of my way to like study – I’ve been familiar, I’ve read his book Ar of the Deal you know many years ago and he’s always sort of fascinating character you know he really had some extremely interesting things happen in his business career and his ability to bounce back from his own mistakes and his bankruptcies which was always sort of intriguing to me and so when he started running for president you know it seemed pretty preposterous to a lot of people – but you know having the prior successes that he did have you know I actually bet a friend of mine some money that he would win, way back at the very beginning. So – and the reason I did that is because I I really sort of understood quickly I think that although I may have not agreed with what he was saying specifically, the way he was going about campaigning was essentially the way you do good marketing. And so I thought he was really taking advantage – and he’s just a master at that kind of stuff you know he’s obviously he’s got his name everywhere on buildings, he’s built all these things the people know who he is. He is a celebrity, so he knows how to get his name out there and so I think there’s a number of strategies where you don’t have to necessarily agree with Donald Trump you have to agree with what he said you don’t have to take in any of the content in his messages – but how he delivered stuff and how he went about finding the people that would elect him, And how’s that turned out – which was successfully. It’s a lot of important marketing lessons I think to people out there especially for a freelance copywriter to looking to find their certain niche and their clientele it could be very helpful. John McIntyre: Right. So I think this has an interesting and worth making that distinction that you know regardless of whether you like the guy or agree with him which is probably not particularly relevant here – we just want to talk about what – I mean he’s a guy, who’s not a pol – not really a politician you know he’s actually a billionaire, he is a businessman, he is an entrepreneur you know he is a deal maker and and yet he managed to beat out, you know probably more experienced politicians – people who may have been you know more eligible or whatever you want to call them and so he’s done something you know sort of beaten the odds you might say in quite an interesting way, so what’s interesting is like I think there’s a lot of articles out there that sort of deconstruct some of you know the strategies he used, the tips and tricks that – maybe it would be interesting to talk about like the sort of the mindset he has, so you can because I think that’s probably where people fall down and search the internet that you know how to do X.Y.Z. how to write a sales page for example. What is harder is how to develop the right… I guess attitude of mindset belief system that allows you to execute upon that. Like finding a system you know going in the gym It starts pretty easy as far as your you get in the car or bike., whatever, go to the gym, train and come home. But a lot of who find it really hard to get off the couch and do that and you know whether it’s the self -image or something like that something in their brain is not you know is making it just hard for them to go and execute on that. So they will be what will be really interesting instead of talking about like all his five things Donald Trump did which you know you can get from all over the place. Maybe just tell you we have a bit of a philosophical conversation about like where how does how does he think as a whole and how it could one adopt the same style of thinking and you know strategizing in life in general and you can apply that to copywriting, or you can apply it to anything else how does that sound? David Allan: That’s sounds great. John McIntyre: So what do you think? I mean, you sound like you know more about this than I do and tell me about Donald Trump in the context of this politics not so much what he necessarily did, but how he thinks? David Allan: Well it seems to me, having never met Donald Trump personally – which is a shame because I would be able to speak more with a more definitive nature perhaps, but from what I have seen and read and heard and witnessed in this most recent campaign is that clearly Donald Trump you know thinks a lot of himself. And a lot of people you know they take that arrogance, other people say you just should may confident, you know depends on your perspective. The part of the problem with getting freelance clientele, especially when you’re in the beginning is you don’t really believe in yourself. A lot of people have trouble I think we spoke to this very briefly on the last episode with lot people have this deserving issue where they don’t feel like they paid their dues and they don’t feel you know enough dues perhaps in some cases, people go on for years doing that and never get anywhere and so Donald Trump , I don’t think that he ever had that problem. You know from a very small you know for a very sort of you know, I hate to say a small beginning because I think his dad set him up an early stages with a lot of money to start his career but you know he never doubted his decision making. It reminds me very much of there’s a movie which people may have seen and this may mean that you get more clarity I think the movie is called “U571”, and it’s a submarine movie about World War two and capturing of the enigma decoding device that the Germans were using to communicate. And in that thing you know all all heck fire breaks loose you know they end up on a German – Americans end up on a German submarine that they have to commandeer because their submarine is sunk , the Captain is killed and so the second in command guy is that the captain, and when the left over people who are still alive. They ask him they look to him for the leadership because that is the captain and he doesn’t have an answet. So one of the other senior officers pulls him aside d says you have to have an answer whether you have one or not. Because that is a submarine captain. So for people out there who are doing freelancing. This kind of this idea of like fake it to make it , you know I’m not saying fake everything, but if you don’t have confidence in what you’re doing you have to believe in yourself first before other people can believe in you. It’s like an old N.L.P. thing to talk about go first is that you know if you don’t you don’t think you can do this kind of stuff and you’re not going to be able to find those clients who really want to invest in you because that just comes – it comes off like stink on a monkey. That you don’t believe yourself, so Donald Trump never had that problem I don’t think. I‘m sure father believed in him, gave him the money and he’s believed in himself ever since to like a dizzying degree. John McIntyre: What’s interesting is I see you bring up like just mention that I spoke to Anders Erickson this week which is the leading scientist on you know, elite performance and how to learn anything really and I maybe we’ll talk about story in a future sort of you know where an interview came from and it won’t be on the podcast unfortunately, but fascinating guy. One of the things he mentioned because after the interview sent me a chapter to a book that hasn’t been published yet and in this chapter he explains that when you look at sports people like you know people training for the Olympics or to be you know elite musicians like a vile – you know a violin soloist or something like that they’ve actually found – and you can back up this point with the research that you’ve got to be able to do you know apply what’s called deliberate practice which is very focused practice, you know exercises that target your weaknesses, which is you know generally not fun. It’s quite uncomfortable because it’s hard. But the thing they’ve noticed is that when you survey the you know the competitive landscape in whatever field you’re in and you kind of look at you know where other people are do have a chance to beat them. Apparently if you don’t believe that you can beat them at some point in the future or at least reach their level, you are I don’t know how much more maybe you’re a lot more likely to give up and therefore not execute, so part of part of doing you know you know sort of reaching whatever that you know the goal is whether it’s in a freelance copywriting or building a huge business of whatever it is you have to believe that it’s possible – or your brain literally there must be some way the brain works that unless you can – whether you believe it because you know just on faith or whether you’ve figured out is and I think in most case unless you want to be like a basketball player and you’re really short or really old and obviously that’s not going to happen – most things – the research tends to show that if you’re able to invest the time in the deliberate practice in certain types of practice, you can become a master of anything and it does take a lot of time. So if you start with that assumption then then you can believe that let’s say with copywriting instead of kind of like well I’m not going to get terribly if I can make it because I will know it’s not about that it’s not it’s not like this unequivocal unequivocal you can’t do it or I can’t do it. It’s more a case of well maybe I can do right now, but if I apply a certain amount of time and energy in this area – whether it’s learning copywriting itself , writing out sales letters by hand or buying and reading books or whether it’s going to meet ups, you might say or I will you know maybe I can’t you know just click my fingers and add up but if I go to you know one meet up a week for the next year. Something’s probably going to happen and you going to get data through that process that’s going to enable you to improve the way you engage in those you know interactions, and so you really it’s just interesting that I found that the research really backs up this idea that you have to believe that it’s possible otherwise you just won’t even try. David Allan: Yeah you know I think that’s a very interesting point you know if you’re talking about someone like a Donald Trump that he probably believed that very you know I mean I don’t know but I’m assuming he believed that very easily probably because his dad was quite successful too and so forth and he was sort of surrounded by that kind of stuff as a result he probably believed the extremely possible to rise to those levels and some of the deals he made early on in this career which were you know sort of landmark deals really drove that home that total he could do anything. Years ago I remembered he said he was you know he would you know think about running for president, almost jokingly, but until I’m sure in the back of his mind somewhere he probably had considered it… you know John McIntyre: Right. So what I think of think you them is this to stay on topic can going to will look if I was listening to this and I was getting started or if I was sort of in the throes of building a business and maybe struggling a bit. I’ll be like well, that’s great, that’s great that I have to believe that math to be confident but the fact is I’m not. You know when I wake up in the morning I’m depressed and when I go to these meet ups, I’m nervous like I’m a nervous wreck I can’t you know I just sort of I can’t express myself like I’m just terrible at this, so like yeah it’s great if you like that If you’re Donald Trump and you dad gives you millions of dollars and you’re brought up to believe in yourself. What if you don’t? What if you know what if you lack confidence? What if you are on nervous? How does one go and develop – that’s really the key question is if you can develop that, then you have enough conference, you know, to figure out, you know, the tactical things you need to do to get there, but if you can’t develop this belief in the first place then you know you’re going to go into that other stuff, so it’s sort of like how do you I mean how do you personally because you’ve been a street magician, I’d be pretty scared and terrified and most people would be going to like a random shopping mall, setting up a little magic table and doing some tricks and stuff, so like I’m sure you’ve got some interesting insights on how the hell one develops this sort of self-belief. David Allan: Yeah you know it’s an interesting thing because I think for a lot of it, and this might not help anybody but for in terms of where I got that from or the belief that I could do whatever it is I set out to do I think I got a basically from my father. My father was very extroverted and sort of a man about town and when I grew up and we lived in a small town of about ten thousand people and everybody knew him, and so I think a lot of my personality came from mimicking his personality as I grew up, and so I he had an actual confidence about him and probably through watching him – I sort of saw how people, how he was and how people reacted to how it was. So if you’re looking for people I mean you may not want to model for specifically Donald Trump perhaps but if you look at people who are very successful, they have a very easy way about them you know they’re not the necessarily the flashiest person or whatever they’re often the people who are just very calm and composed and just go about it and don’t think it’s a big deal, everything’s a big deal. You know some of the richest people I met are very you know in terms of actual success are very down to earth and don’t talk a whole lot about what they’re up to you know they just kind of think it’s just another thing, they don’t make a big deal out of it now for I have seen other entrepreneurs don’t like give you a good example people who may want to look this up to show notes there’s a lady by the name of Kat Loterzo and I interviewed her for my podcast a couple months ago and she’s doing very well for herself. What she does respect to be something more practical, I’ve never done this myself but it seems to work very well for her and the people that want her students. Is she does the daily affirmation thing where she journals and she writes down where she wants to be you know actually reflects on that every day and I’ve heard other people in other fields beside from you know making money like sports and other things to to do the very same thing and so that may be something that people want to look into because she talked about that a lot of our podcast actually write down exactly how much money she wanted to make it and so for and you know what after a couple years of doing that she’s exactly at that level. John McIntyre: Right. David Allan: So its feel weird to you know that’s kind of almost like a woo-woo type thing and I’m not usually on that wavelength but it’s undoubtedly worked in her case and that may be something that resonates with some of the people out there I would say you know for me personally I’ve gone about sort of getting into different things is to sort a small chunk it and move on just barely better as you’re going along you know like for me I started with email so I did start by writing long sales pages or doing videos or you know any kind of stuff I started writing emails and I learned that from Matt Furey. So I wrote you know those like daily mails , that’s how I got into copywriting and that’s kind of an interesting when you get into it because you know you’re taught like a conversational tone and as you get more, you know, better that is exactly how you write those other other things, so it has a direct correlation and you became more confident and were able to write those and so when it came to write the longer things are things are more robust or different, in different media than it was a lot easier because you know with your confidence was higher that point when I was any, so you got a look at those maybe small wins too it doesn’t have to be a hit a home run you know for for Agora or somebody and everything goes you know and I don’t ever – thinking about copywriting for myself and freelance copywriting – I never aspired to be like John Carlton or somebody you know it was always like I just wanted to learn how to copywrite, so I could be successful for myself, you know, so maybe you know there are people out there truly do want to be the next John Carlton or Gary Halbert, some of these big name copywriters that write for some of the most high-end direct mailers and so forth but for me it was something – another tool or skill and so you know you look at it look around at some people and maybe this is helpful for people you know I look I’ve learned throughout my life of course like how to do magic – And how to do street magic – Which was another set of skills, how to play the guitar a bit – Various things and all those cases I usually looked around the people who were doing it and thought to myself, perhaps even arrogantly, if that person can do it surely I can. You can, so you know had a maybe a little believe myself that I was smart enough to get the job done and I think if you honestly look at them a lot of people who listen to this – you can do this. This is not you know maybe needs to have the mystique wiped away a little bit. If other people like John and myself and other people you’ve heard on the show can do this kind of stuff? Surely you can do it too. I, for one, believe in them, even if nobody else does. John McIntyre: I mean the thing to keep in mind as I like and the woo-woo stuff’s interesting image that is some of the things we would like some of the affirmation might seem a bit woo-woo. You know it’s interesting lately I’ve been reading about – great book called Sapiens and the sequel Homo Deus – that how much you use both really really fascinating to sort of what’s coming in the future with now artificial intelligence in all them. Basically the current scientific understanding the way the brain works is that it’s a collection of algorithms, it’s basically a really really complex computer and so when you when you say like a person says well I can’t do something you can look at that is a software problem you’ve basically got a you know a computer virus in the brain that saying that you can’t do it because the reality is if you look at the data behind why people are good at guitar, good at magic, good at anything – The data pretty much unequivocally says that like I said before if you can invest the time in proper – let’s call deliberate practice into into doing it you can do it, you can do basically anything and so you’ve really got to like if you don’t believe that if you like I can’t I can’t you know be more extroverted or I can become a copywriter or I just can’t be good at sales because I just don’t like talking to like anything any I can’t I think you’ve got to accept that goes generally goes against the entire scientific establishment that because what you’re saying is that like we say I can’t do something, it’s not just you know you could put this down to like all those self-esteem let’s go see a therapist about it, but I don’t know that’s really going to that’s really help – you’re just focusing on the problem what you need to sort of understand is that that you can do anything, given the time of course you can do everything because it’s just not enough time to do everything, but given if you were able to put in the time to learn something and practice something to become better at something you can pretty much do anything you want and that’s a fact and so you have to start with that then you can start to do this mindset that when your brain starts spitting out I can’t do it, I’m nervous something like that instead of that being a story in your head It’s going to stop you from doing whatever it is you want to do it becomes sort of a like oh wow ok this is an area in the code in my brain in the programming in my brain and I let’s basically we need to work with it and change and that’s when you bring in say daily affirmations or meditation is another thing or you know what I do a lot of I found to be – I don’t know how to explain like just extremely valuable in the last year for me is being you know meditate but then after I meditate and it is really the key is figure out what I want which starts at a feeling so I like all sit there and starts visualize whole I’ll see what mark even feels like when he said if I died tomorrow I can come back as anyone in the entire world come back is me. As I want to feel like that about my life and so when I you know after I finish meditating each morning I sit there and I want to try to do is to just bring up that feeling and to sit with it for a few minutes and that sounds really weird like what the hell you know like what the hell is I going to do – but I just I think that is one of the it’s such a small thing but I think that’s one of the biggest things that’s made the last twelve months last year has been just absolutely incredible on a personal fulfillment satisfaction level. David Allan: Right. John McIntyre: And I think a large part or big part of it is due to that’s that sort of exercise so I don’t think that woo-woo as we were now I think it’s more about like your brain software and what we all these exercises do it different ways of sort of you know hacking into the brain and changing the software. David Allan: Yeah you know it’s very interesting. I have a book that I have yet to read so I can’t really comment on this but it’s by another magician by the name of Richard Wiseman, for people out there want to look up this he has a new book out and is it is about the whole fake it ’til you make it thing. I can see it, its mocking me – from my desktop – I have to listen to it ’cause I have the audio book but I have yet to see maybe in a future podcast I’ll report back with what they said because I would have feeling perhaps he’ll have some interesting things to say and his always – his presentations and some of the stuff I seen remember that magical conventions stuff has been all about the mind and those kind of ideas. Won’t help us today perhaps but I will report back with what I find out and I’m sure lead down other paths and the people out there that are struggling with their confidence – we can help them out John McIntyre: Perfect hope I will think where I am let’s keep it nice and tight, we’re right around the twenty minute mark – let’s wrap it up here. If always, if you want to know more about the show you can go to the mcmethod.com and if you want to learn more about you – get in touch. How do they do it? David Allan: Go to makewordspay.com. There is a landing page there of sorts I’m told which I checked out the other day, so they’re still working on the main site but you can get in touch me – you can jump on the email llist there – I believe there is also an email there – to email me personally. So if they want to get in touch by all means I love to hear from people on the show because you know, probably people I don’t know yet as you have known audience so forth that I’d love to get to know some people who listen to this on a regular basis. John McIntyre: Awesome. Links in the Show notes at the mcmethod.com. Thanks for coming on the show once again Dave. David Allan: Awesome. Thank you John. The post Episode #140 – David Allan On Mindset Secrets To Trump Your Fears appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

David Allan has been traveling for almost three years nonstop. He used street magic to create freedom while he found his copywriting groove. He also found the enormous crossover between the two. Especially when it came to positioning. Whether it’s building crowds or attracting freelance clients… …this magician understands psychology. In this episode, you’ll find how real “street smarts” can find freelance clients now and show you the money! In this episode, you’ll discover: How a world famous copywriter lured him into buying a product AND a new career! Newbie copywriters and street performers always do THIS… and miss out on making any real money! Key strategies street performers use that will improve your copywriting immediately The truth behind how performers and copywriters make their end product great. (HINT: It almost never starts out that way). What drunken, vacationing tourists have to do with the readability of your copy Mentioned: Penn Jillette Gary Halbert Takeover Tuesday Podcast Make Words Pay Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO John McIntyre: Alright, it’s John McIntyre here, the Autoresponder Guy. I’m here with Dave Allan from from Canada. Now I’d give you a web site here, but It’s currently under construction.David Allan: Yes.John McIntyre: [laughter]David Allan: That’s true. I was going to interject there. It’s – It’s going to be called, It is called but it’s just the site is down currently for some reconstruction. But It’s called MakeWordsPay.com. John McIntyre: Good. Good site man. John McIntyre: Pretty simple. Pretty easy to understand. Anyway, So – you’re from Canada, you’ve moved to California, you’re a digital nomad. Like you said you’re a professional magician and you go into direct marketing copywriting because of Gary Halbert, which is a cool story that we can get into. Now you’re running a book on combining magic with marketing which sounds pretty cool. Now, I think I’ve mentioned before we hit record here that you know you’ve got one portion of the audience. You know one type of listener is going to be the copywriter or aspiring copywriter who wants to get clients maybe has a job maybe doesn’t have a job but wants to figure out that side of things – then you’ve got the business owners that have an established business and they’re looking for for ideas to grow the business sell more stuff. And the reason you know we started speaking is we’re actually emailed for you know I think several times in the last couple of years you’ve been around for for a while now and I thought it would be good get to get you on the show have a chat – I think the magician things really good and I think you probably have a unique perspective. You know it’s not going to be like seven tips on how to do X Y Z and it’s going to be how many copywriters do you meet who are magicians, right? For example. David Allan: No, that’s great. So thank you for having me on the show John and I have been following you for a while we have exchanged e-mails over the years I’ve watched your ascent to the heights of email copywriting and you know you just seemed like a real cool guy, I know you hang around with you know luminaries such as weirdos like Dan Meredith and so forth. So I think it’s just that you know fantabulous to be on the show and I think it’s always fun to talk about copywriting and marketing. So thanks for having me on. Yeah man it’s going to be great. So I am a professional magician and have been for I think like 11 or 12 years now at this point I don’t know what year it is. But I was I hit the road became a digital nomad not quite – just shy of three years ago. It will be three years in December, actually. And so I used magic to make myself independent digital independent or just independent at the time. And at the time I was doing a little bit just a little bit here and there as I was learning copywriting and really sinking my teeth into it and started to do stuff for actual clients and so forth. And so I’ve done more of that in the three years hence and I continue to do street magic which is what actually I was able to use to go independent and travel. So I’ve been traveling for for three years almost now straight. John McIntyre: OK so you actually got into this I guess the digital nomad, it’s more of like the magical nomad lifestyle. So that’s going into the travel sort of lifestyle – the digital nomad thing. And Magic was what sort of kept to going at first but that is how you made this transition – you’re still doing magic but now you’re also doing the marketing. ‘Cause I’m sure there is – as we’ll talk about – there’s a lot of similarities between them. David Allan: Yeah there are a lot of similarities. You know this. Is funny because once you’re doing one thing and you learn about another you see it’s remarkable how a lot of things are similar. When you get into deep dive into different fields you notice a lot a lot of similarities once you’re in them. And Magic – when I was just doing a high-end private parties as a magician that was sort of one thing that sort of helped me and for aspiring copywriters and freelance copywriters, I can talk about that in the future too but what I learned from working for high end clientele how to get those high end clientele and so forth became you know much of it became much easier when I became a copywriter. And also when I started to transition from doing private parties going location independent with the magic and actually doing street magic was what I used to go independent and started traveling around just starting impromptu magical theater on the street corner. That I sort of had to assimilate a new skill set and a lot of those skills are actually a form of marketing – and marketing concepts distilled down into sort of you know what you use to to make a street show. So it was really interesting to see the connection of the two parts – the copywriting marketing and the street magic because the principles came to life you know because I was doing less copywriting at the beginning the principals came to life in the street magic and then you saw this crossover where you went back and said I know what this is, you know. So for instance, because examples are always best I’d say – when you start a street show of course you’re just there by yourself usually And there’s just people walking by or congregating or usually working in some sort of tourist area. But the first thing you must do is get people’s attention and you really get to know pretty quickly that people walk around in a virtual daze, you know, especially because you’re working for tourists you’re in some sort of touristy location where people are congregating. I mean I don’t know about you John, but when I go on vacation I don’t want to do math, you know. I’m not trying to do any complex psychological games or anything. I’m just trying to relax. Probably happen a few drinks. You know do some fun activities or whatever you’re into. And as a result you know it’s hard and something hard to focus people’s attention. I would say the same applies to copywriting and stuff you see ads, marketing materials all the time that have a very weak you know headline or a very weak start to whatever the marketing piece is. And as a result it’s very hard to get noticed. In street magic its the same too, it’s got to sort of start with a bang. And you can kind of tell people what to do. I learned that very quickly because when you’re doing street magic and you’re out there and it’s very daunting because you’re out there by yourself and you’re trying to start a show impromptu. People are just going by you and luck and unless you can really extrovert yourself. It’s just not going to get started and you’re going to just look like a crazy person talking to themselves. John McIntyre: [laughter] John McIntyre: And I was going to say there is this you know five six years ago I was doing you know we’ve all probably you know when you’re in the mall you see like these people trying to sign you up to a charity. So I had that job six,seven, eight – I think 2009 is a long time ago. Seven years ago. It was the same thing. It’s funny how you know copywriting is you know this on a page but any kind of human communication is. Yes step one, get their attention and with charity thing its the same thing that you’re wearing like a charity T-shirt. People know that you know you get with a board like you look like you know you got like a big you know sign on your chest saying you know I’m a salesperson I’m trying to sign you on to this thing. And when people stop – like we would try all sorts of you know,gambits you might call them, or headlines to try to get them to stop because I mean like you said people that people are rushing – I imagine with magic its even harder because at least with me, I’m a charity so they kind of like well you know it’s you know it’s nice that we can help the world out of it all have a chat to them whereas you know it was magic you don’t really have that benefit. It’s more like Hey, look at me I’m special. People are in a hurry you know. It’s tricky. David Allan: It’s very tricky. You know it’s stunning sort of as a more you get into it. It was more stunning to me how you know, how you chose to craft you’re basically playing a character you know out there and how you crafted the character has a lot to do with who you’re going to draw you know to your show. Who’s going to stop and watch. And it’s very interesting to see the crossover and copywriting where you have you know you’re trying to target a specific market and really a specific person – a real customer avatar of some kind where you know these very hopefully, if you’ve done your research you know these very specific things about these people. And the same street magic you get to know depending on what you know because it’s all done by trial, you get to know who your people are. And if you want those people at your show maybe you should go in this direction more in this direction more. And the beauty of both a street magic show, which I think all copywriters and people aspiring to be copywriters who are just getting into this. What I really appreciate is really street magic is like a testing battleground – Basically – because in copywriting you know you’re testing different headlines you’re split testing you’re doing ab testing and testing different offers and so forth or you should be. I think most people probably don’t but they should be. Also in the street magic thing, the iterations are so fast because you can do another show 10 minutes from now you can do another show 10 minutes from then – that you make these corrections and these choices and everything happens. Yeah happened so fast you know. So you get to really see what works. John McIntyre: Right. Yeah, that be really cool. Sometimes a problem with something with doing life is you get one chance at it. You know once a week or something you don’t get enough data in to try different things to test it for new ideas. Yeah with the magic you’d be at it’s it’s not just the opener but the entire show and find that will because you get at the end of the show. You ask people did that you know give some money basically people watch the show so that you’d be out to test different like that would be a call to action. So it’s like what do you have to say at the end to get the money. Do you go for the pity angle and talk about how you don’t have any money or do you go for you know a different angle where it’s you know they’re investing in Harry Potter or something. I mean if there are a lot of different ways to do it. David Allan: There are, there are there’s almost like an infinite – just like there an infinite number of ways. You know it really depends on who those people are or what you know and when you get to know that over time but you can only know it by doing it just like with testing you may come up with this brilliant idea for what you think might sell this and overcome different objections these people have and so forth. But until you actually put it out into the world you don’t know diddly squat basically. And the lucky thing about what you should be doing with your copywriting if you’re a business owner and what you should be doing your street magic show is you get to it you’re just constantly testing new things and slight variations so that you can understand what’s actually happening. You’re keeping things constant you’re changing. You know maybe one or two things and a lot of people do play around with the money aspect of it. A lot of people do a speech of some kind near the end right before the finale. You know other things, a close – a call to action. And it’s just it’s just fascinating how the two things really overlapped. Once I was immersed deeply sort of in both worlds it was it was really fascinating. And here here’s a good example. We’ll talk about this maybe on a different episode but of course we’re recording this the day after Donald Trump won the U.S. election. What do you think about Trump or not. People are excited and not about that – his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” was very simple and direct, easy to understand, and I think it had even another little special element too which was people were able to fill in in their own minds whatever that meant. So they were you know dissatisfied with whatever – . Now in a street show that has a lot of impact as well because like I said you’re delivering a message to people who are on vacation usually because you don’t get many locals, you usually get more of that you know your whole crowd is mostly tourists depending on where you are and you’re delivering it to people who are on a reduced mental faculties because of a inebriation or just because they are on vacation and they’ve tuned out a bit. And so simple and direct messages and the jokes you make and so forth in the show, usually show has humor in it. A lot of humor usually. And that really is able to get at people and make them enjoy the show. Whereas on a copywriting message you keep the reading level low so people are able to understand it and comprehend what you’re trying to get across. And that makes it easier to read as well. John McIntyre: Right right. I’m actually curious because there are some things you mentioned to you know standard copywriting stuff, you know like how to headline – you’ve got to be out to get their attention you’ve got to have a strong call to action and you’re really going to be testing this process the whole way through. I mean the big thing that a lot of people takes time to learn is – a big part of developing great copy is number one doing your research, number two taking the time to sort of try different things like the great copywriters don’t generally write things out of you know great out of the gate. It’s a process almost like a sculpture you start with something roughly in the direction that you need to go and you gradually refine it over time. But the you know one of the challenges and I’ve seen that comes up again and again when I’m coaching people when I speak to especially people who are, not necessarily new to business or copywriting for example, but just sort of at an early stage of the game it might even be they might have been in business for a while now it’s starting something else. It’s really you could call it positioning. You call it – You mentioned that part of it is figuring out who are the people that are likely to show up who you want to show up and then targeting you know your headline and targeting you in the case of magic targeting messaging in that situation to attract the people that you want there might be that people that are most likely to spend money at the end, because you might notice that business people despite having more money are actually kind of shitty customers, basically as far as I’m concerned. But you’ve got like little kids you know get all excited and then drag on their parents t-shirts to give them money so they can give it to you. So you might find that that then you need to headline towards the kids for example and ignore the business people. So how do you how do you relate that to copywriting. I know a lot of people struggle with this like how do I, How do I position my site, like you know you said you had a site, make words pay, and I think that’s a great positioning statement because it clearly says what you do. Whereas I’ve seen other people and I don’t want to mention any specific. You know I don’t want embarrassed looking and then people come up with these names that sound really cool like a brand, a brand sense. Right. But they don’t actually – like I’m seeing this is actually you know maybe kind of, what does this person actually do? Maybee they do everything copywriting, writing emails, sales funnels like they’re a sales funnel copywriting person but I don’t know like who do they serve. And what do they actually do for them like this. No clear concise simple way to set a how. How would you frame that up for someone. David Allan: You know it’s very interesting like years ago there was a famous entrepreneur amongst entrepreneurs now a guy by the name of Eben Pagan and he started you know with an alter ego by the name of David D’Angelo and a dating book. One of the things I thought somewhere along studying him and some other stuff he was doing in his online marketing and so forth I heard somebody made the point I think that was another copywriter, I think it was Craig Clemens if I remember correctly – but he had said that because he had worked for Eben – that Eben doesn’t have a site like ebenpagan.com He has his site so that you know what you’re getting into basically. So it doesn’t you know he might have an ebenpagan.com now I have no idea. But at the time, it made a very strong impact because you want to able to communicate very quickly why that person might want to be here. You know if you’re here you’re talking about a web site and for positioning purposes. Now on the on the street. What I did and I did it very specifically was I. You know people are very familiar with certain archetypes. And so I used the traditional, like when people say magician – If I say to you right now John what does a magician look like?. Give me a little rundown of what you think. John McIntyre: All right. David Allan: What’s he wearing? John McIntyre: Probably black, he might have a hat. You kind of look a little bit old like old school in a sense almost like a bit theatrical, like he’s walked out of the 1800’s and he’s wearing black. Maybe wears boots – David Allan: Yes exactly. And a lot of people associate of course rabbits with magicians and so forth as well. Now what I did when I did street magic was I sort of glommed onto that archetype you know with the top hat and the you know, I had a suit jacket originally and a vest , and I was kind of like a Victorian style magician. John McIntyre: Right. Right. David Allan: Because everyone instantly recognized who you were when they were coming down the street the like they didn’t think I was anything but a magician and especially children which was interesting. So and then because I was dressed a little bit better than everybody else generally and I got this tip from Penn Jillette. Of Penn and Teller fame, for anyone who knows anything about magic and on TV magicians Penn and Teller Penn Jillette originally was a street performer and he always said to dress better than the crowd because people often give money to people who you know are trying to force money on people who don’t need it. It seems kind of counter-intuitive, but from a position standpoint from people who are listening and getting into copywriting and stuff there’s a lot of people who end up fighting at the very bottom you know making like no money. You know, going through what you know you call it the dog days or the shameless whore phase. I think Jon Carlton calls it, where you’re really fighting at the bottom rung of a ladder. That’s not necessary. I’m not saying you don’t pay your dues but if you start on the right foot of knowing what these things are worth – you know what your services can do. You know in copywriting I heard somebody say one time that you’re basically selling money at a discount. Right. And that’s a great statement. And that’s a very simple way of you know if you can comprehend that you know exactly what I’m talking about. And for doing the street magic because I looked up upscale and so forth that because I looked a very classic archetype then families and so forth, you know, generally who have money that they have several kids and they’re brought up on vacation. They resoundingly, you know, were magnetized to me and the way and the way you know I spoke in and the words I used and still even though you’re sort of dumbing everything down slightly for people who are sort of daze or drunken stupor, clearly I was educated. And so all those factors start to come into play. You know a good street sort of like has all these layers like a good sales promotion has all these different layers. You know when you’re writing for instance bullets as a copywriter often, you know, It’ll be one bul – I know this has happened to me – it can be be one bullet that it just absolutely resonates with that person and they end up buying and the same thing with the street magic – one joke that I told which by-passed maybe you know a good chunk of the audience because of their educational level or what or whatever or there cultural differences. But it would resonate with those two or three people who really had money and they wouldn’t be like – This guy is one – He’s one of us as opposed to you know we’re not one of them almost you know. So it’s fascinating how the two things are so closely intertwined. And for positioning purposes like I said earlier when I first started I sort of started with a bang and my magic career because I sort of started with high end parties almost by accident. And the way I did that was I had someone ask me at a party I was attending of a friend of mine and somebody asked me if I would do magic at their party. I was just at a friend’s party. I was just doing magic for people in the corner you know because I was attending the party. But I had some guy ask me if I do the same thing at his party – Because I didn’t really want to because I really wasn’t a professional magician at that time. I just tried to blow him off by asking for quite a bit of money and sort of you know fake it to make it I guess is something people call it sometimes. But I think I employed a little bravado where I was kind of like well I don’t work for free and you probably, it will cost a lot to come to your party so I don’t know, I don’t think you really want to do that. And the guy was like all over it. So those things you know think about this if you’re listening to John and I talk about these kinds of things. And as we go forward you – the positioning aspects are so crucial because you know if you position yourself wrong – and I positioned myself wrong on the street at the beginning big time you’ll get the wrong clientele and those people in the case those magic they have no money you know. And likewise with your copywriting clients you want people who are serious who are capable – who understand what it is you do, of course, and are able and value it because you built up this value through your positioning. John McIntyre: There’s definitely this element where you have to stand out and you have to stand out in a way that’s going to bring in who you want and I think its really smart where you kind of go with the archetype of the magician,you know if you look like a farmer or something and you started trying to do magic, there’s so much cognitive dissonance there that you’re calibrated to what they’re expecting. Then again though, that might work you could be like he magic farmer. Because it’s so different. You see this a bit in the in the marketing space where you’ve you the standard internet marketing so that with these big bold headlines usually got a red yellow highlighter, it’s like it’s pretty standard stuff. And so some people love it. You know they really resonate with and that’s why people do it. But then you see guys like Neil Patel, will tell you I’ve gotten a lot of the you know the latest updates to the McMethod off. It’s it’s all clean it’s very – it’s not corporate say, but it’s it’s you know sort of like a 180 away from the standard stuff you expect of internet marketing. You’ve seen the same thing with Digital Marketer, they’ve done a similar thing to it. There’s still a lot of copy there. But the way it’s presented is much more it’s much less you know hey I’m a marketer. It’s much more hey we’re like a legitimate business when we do have things that can help us sort of this interesting and they do it. Both strategies work and other strategies work too, but it’s interesting how you’re going to attract different people to your company or service from how you look and also the way you write the copy and all these different factors that you’ve got to keep in mind. David Allan: No it’s true. And at the beginning of this you’ve said that you know you correctly stated that I’ve been sort of dragged into this direct response copywriting world by Gary Albert. What happened there was – and this will tie this all together – what happened there was I was 19 and I bought a bodybuilding course. I can’t remember what the – Optimum Training Systems I believe was the company at the time and I was just – the sales material that they had in the magazine or wherever I got it from was so compelling I just had to have that course like I just oh man, I can remember even right now I can just feel the anticipation of getting that. Now years later I found out that Gary Halbert was the copywriter who wrote that piece Wow, when I found that out I was like somebody put that together and specifically targeted because I can still create such an emotional response and it had such juicy stuff in there that I just had to know. So now when you go into copywriting I was kind of like, man, this is really interesting. And so I didn’t know at the time when I first heard it that it was Gary Halbert or that Gary Halbert was so famous – it wasn’t until a few years even further when I found out he was an extremely famous direct response copywriter. Now one of his I should say I guess his most famous letter is the coat of arms letter which was mailed out like six bazillion times. John McIntyre: [snickering] David Allan: And if you look at that letter like John was just saying it’s very unconventional to what John mentioned in regards to what’s sort of current nowadays when you get a sales letter and even some of Gary’s later pieces where you had that sort of classic headline and so all that kind of stuff. You look at a coat of arms there it’s very much like a personal letter and has that sort of pulled back approach almost if you will and you don’t think so the bejesus out of those coat of arms things. So I see what you’re saying with Neil Patel’s stuff and Digital Marketers stuff and it is, it’s you know, there’s different ways to skin a cat and really knowing who you are getting those messages in front of, is so paramount. John McIntyre: I mean absolutely it’s it’s a bit like how I find when people get into this. I get emails. You know they you know they sign up and they’re asking questions about how to how to do that copywriting how to represent themselves and part of the issue and I think we’re all like this when we first start to learn anything everything is black and white. Just period. The things like that. You know if if sales letters with big red headlines and yellow highlights works, then that works for everyone and that reality, or daily emails for example another thing that everyone talks about is all day. You know I’ve talked about this in the past and maybe I was you know a bit younger. I had a little bit less experience and I was like man, daily emails, they just they are amazing they work for everyone and the truth is they don’t. The truth is that there’s far more nuance to it you know if you want to attract you know Sales Force or Google or, you know major world- leading companies like that you better not look like an internet marketer, because if one of them sees that looking like that they’re going to like this guy’s, this guy’s a douche bag. Let’s go work with the real company. Even if you can get better results, the issue is that there is this cognitive dissonance or you’re not really congruent with that market so this aspect of daily emails can work. Or even text based emails can work, but there was a – .I think I’ve mentioned this before in the podcast – I worked with a start up a while ago, couple of years ago now, and they went and got a bunch of copywriters – I was one of them to write an email for them and I went with the standard text based approach you know hi name was lots of you know, a couple hundred words and the e-mail I wrote was one of the worst performing e-mails, if not the worst in the 8 or 9 they got done. Which either way was fascinating to me and when I thought about like why you know my copy of my e-mail had failed in that sense. It wasn’t that it was necessarily bad copy or you know in that sense it was that I think it was poorly matched to you know they’re a big company. They were I think a winning e-mail had a logo in it so it looked more – it was a branded email and only had one or two sentences that was basically trying to get them back to the site whereas I used a couple hundred words of copy to try to persuade them which I think in retrospect that was total overkill. There was no brandingso that people thought it was a bit spammy and a bunch of problems with it which on the other hand if it was something like a weight loss product – .and we were all trying my my email would do better because we would have needed to explain the story a bit more to get someone to be interested in his weight loss products. So there’s this all, You’ve really got to match, matching the message with the right market and with the right medium too. And that’s another thing with people you know if you’re trying to write e-mails to a market that spends all that time on social media it’s not going to work. David Allan: You know, that is so true. I have another example that may aid people, I’m sure people are understanding this but just to clarify a little bit – I have a couple of chiropractors in my immediate family. They are in the same city but in different demographic areas. Whereas my brother in law charges, you know, X number of dollars – a lower price let’s say . It’s what the market can sort of bear in that particular region. But for the same services that my sister offers she charges a much higher price. And we’ve had many discussions about this and she said that you know if she didn’t, she knows her people, if she didn’t charge a higher price you wouldn’t gain any respect, they wouldn’t respect you they wouldn’t because they think something was wrong. That you weren’t charging as much. And that’s one of those weird counter-intuitive things you come in contact with when you get into marketing and copywriting pricing products and so forth and how you position yourself because you have to be aware of who is getting in front of, and then if you’re doing freelance work, who you’re trying to attract. You know so it’s very important to decide who you want to work for now. It may take you a few iterations to decide – you know you’ll see the red flags go up with clients that you’ve had in the past, you know you go through and say I don’t want another guy like that or another person, or another business like that because of X Y and Z you know and we can talk about that kind of stuff perhaps in the future – rather how to safeguard against having clients you never want to hear from again. But it’s all a matter of getting that sort of straight from the outset. And I think what you said when you first learned something is very black and white. You’re Right. It is very black white and by the same token I think a lot of people when they first learn something they feel undeserving. You know they feel like they couldn’t charge a certain price because they are new. And even that, you know because I’ve seen some people pick up things very quickly and they may not have the most, the biggest, the most experience with this but they know what they’re doing and then with a little bit of experience they’ve been able to go quite far, quite fast. But a lot of it has to do with people’s own self-esteem and mindset. All these sort of weird woo-woo type things that you, people often you know don’t like to talk about because if you don’t get your mind straight you’re often keep yourself at the bottom rung of that ladder. John McIntyre: Right and this is interesting thinking that when you’re talking like part of the challenge with this is like if someone is all rich people wealthy people are more likely to be put off by a low price than a high price that says you know it can lead to the black and white thinking of boy you have to create products for rich people or wealthy. And the issue is that you know, that’s not how it works it’s because you might find that often yes especially with client work, the higher the price the more premium service you might you may have to offer it might include phone calls or lots of emails from them because they’re concerned because they’ve invested so much money. No it’s sometimes you get someone who pays a lot of money and just wants to hand the problem off to you and doesn’t even want to talk to you about it and their great clients. But there are sort of tradeoffs. If you have a low price like the selling of say a $500 done for your service you can usually just smash it out. People aren’t going to, you know existing businesses generating revenue they’re not going to be too fussed as long as they get what they ask for it’s pretty good. Once you start moving into like probably around above a thousand dollars for stuff people get a bit more finicky about what they want, what services involved and so there’s more money but it’s not necessarily more work, might be more, you know, mental. Just to think about it. It is these trade-offs between all these different things that some people will prefer just based on their own personalities to do the selling expensive stuff, like a few high priced products to wealthy people, wealthy businesses. But on the other hand some people with other personalities that don’t want to do don’t want to manage projects don’t want to talk to clients will be much better off selling a cheaper product to a large number of say,you know, smaller businesses. And so there’s not a black and white thing you know and part of the answer is you can’t figure this out just by thinking, you’ve kind of got to go and try to get a few really expensive, you know, really wealthy high-paid clients and see what they’re like. David Allan: That’s true. You know I think – really, what you’re saying there is so important because whereas it might be, you might make the most money, if you don’t have the right personality for dealing with those people, it’s going to be a miserable slog for you to get through all that, you know, whereas you might be much happier with less demanding clients, who are paying you less, but the work is easier, or is less fraught with panic or like you said, people who are on you all the time. If people are getting new into copywriting and they’re listening to this, or they’re into the intermediate phase, then Dan Kennedy is a good resource for someone who has positioned themselves in a very specific way, kind of a cantankerous expert. That is one extreme. Now if you look at that and think about what he’s doing there and if you’ve been through some of his products, the way he talks about clients is quite funny, and you can’t even get a hold of him, you have to fax him and do weird things to get a hold of hi. It’s very interesting to see those things at work. Then you can sort of decide – try a few of those things and see but one of the worst things I will say and this goes for street magic and selling anything really is, you really don’t want what we’ll call the tire-kickers or freebie-seekers. John McIntyre: Yep David Allan: They make your life in marketing a living hell. And so, if you’re at all getting anything from this, know that this, you know, you get into this and you start to cut your teeth on stuff, this can be a very good career choice for anybody and it’s very valuable, and this is the same, I’ll make another correlation between street magic and copywriting, you know, when you do street performing, a lot of people who just get into it are very reticent to ask for money. Right – they’re scared to ask for money. Because at the very beginning it seems like this impossible wall to break through, like are these people really going to give me money. John McIntyre: Yeah David Allan: And it’s kind of the same in copywriting. Until you start asking for fees that are a little above what you think is reasonable, you don’t really understand some of the psychology at work with how to price your services and stuff like that. So don’t be afraid to step off a few precipices too because, yeah, you can always dial it back , and the same with the street magic,you could always go in a different direction later. You know, test a few things out. Because, you’ll be surprised at some of the boundaries you can push. John McIntyre: Absolutely, absolutely. Well, let’s finish on that note, I feel we could keep going for a long time. It’s sort of like a meandering discussion. I think these are my favorite podcasts. Having done these podcasts for a while, I think this will be episode #139 – David Allan: OK, wow – John McIntyre: Yeah, it’s been a while. But, it’s interesting, I don’t know if you’ve seen this but from different podcasts, but I’ve found that when you have a really strict formula, and this is an interesting side note I guess, but when you have a set formula, it’s OK but it starts to feel a bit canned – like some of the podcasts out there – and when you have this open-ended discussion sometimes it kind of leads you down some interesting paths you wouldn’t have gone down otherwise. David Allan: Yeah I think that;s true John and I’ve always preferred listening to those type of podcasts which feels like a conversation with two people sitting around talking like they normally would. I was always a big fan of Joe Rogan’s podcast, and those one would go on for three or four hours sometimes. And, you know, because it’s more natural and sometimes like you said, you unearth things you wouldn’t have talked about if you had stuck to a more rigid format. John McIntyre: Cool, awesome. Well, before we wrap this up, if the listener wants to learn more about you, I know you said – do you know when the site will be up. Might be up when this goes live I’m sure. David Allan: Yeah, probably, I dunno, I want to say within a couple weeks, but I’m not the guy doing it so I don’t want to throw him under the bus either. That’s sort of what he’s said so we’ll see, but you can get a hold of me on Facebook, David Allan, probably when this goes live we’ll have links and stuff to get a hold of me if people want to talk. John McIntyre: And you’ve got your own podcast too, you’ve put out a lot of interviews – David Allan: Yeah, I’ve interviewed a lot of the superstar copywriters and so forth that the world has right now, and a lot of contemporaries and stuff, it’s called the Takeover Tuesday Podcast and it’s sort of something that’s been keeping a low profile, sorta just been doing it for about a year and people can probably find me through that avenue too. John McIntyre: Awesome. Cool. We’ll have links to all that in the show notes at themcmethod.com, Dave, thanks for coming on the show man. David Allan: Thanks a lot John, it’s been great. The post Episode #139 – David Allan On How A Street Magician Copywriter Seizes Attention And Positions Himself To Make Money Appear appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Laura Bell Greeno started in sales, helping companies like Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch brand themselves. She quickly realized sales was HARD. It took long hours, cold calling and a ton of effort. But she didn’t want to cold call… Laura realized early on from this need that branding and self marketing are key to easier lead generation. So she became a woman with very good branding and self-marketing. She calls it attraction marketing. Laura shot up to number 2 in the entire company after learning this simple and amazing insight about herself and her position in sales. And it did not go unnoticed. Not too long after this, Laura had 4 recurring clients and was forced to start her company, Webscout. In this episode you will learn why everyone came to Laura in her organization for advice, How she grew her agency, including the ups and downs, And how she runs Webscout today.   In this episode, you’ll discover: the interesting way Laura’s agency was forced upon her (and how she created this need in her organization) how Laura uses outsourcing, contracting and on-staff team members to grow her business and take care of client needs why being bold and courageous and not afraid to make mistakes is essential for starting a business (plus the difference between a smart and a dumb mistake) how looking at everything from a SEM lens is an advantageous perspective that can be used to identify key branding improvements for any client (learn about search volume, trends and different audience factors) Mentioned: Laura’s agency: Webscout Marketing To get in touch with Laura, contact her via LinkedIn. Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy; I’m here with Laura Greeno. Now Laura is the founder of WebScout Marketing. Now she focuses on SEO and everything she does is based around getting more leads and making more sales through the website. She does this through like SEO and attraction marketing. Now the funny story is that she actually contacted me to — I thought this was really, really cool by the way and if you’re listening and you want to do this please do, but Laura contacted me out of the blue and said, “Look I can’t see any women on your website. You need some women up there,” and it made my day really [laughter] it really put a smile on my face. Here we are recording an interview and we’re going to find out what Laura does and how she makes her clients happy. Laura how are you today? Laura Greeno: Hi! I’m great, thanks for having me. John McIntyre: Thanks for coming on. Before we get into, I guess, the nuts and bolts give me the more tactical stuff of what you do. Tell the listener a little bit about who is Laura Greeno and what do you do? Laura Greeno: Okay so technically I’m an online marketing consultant, but I started in sales. I came from this from a sales perspective and I worked for a — my first sales job was with a digital experience branding company. You walk into a — yea do you have a Hollister, an American Eagle and all those in — where you are? John McIntyre: We — no not right here and — Laura Greeno: [Laughter]. John McIntyre: — we don’t have them in Australia either. Laura Greeno: Large retailers create an experience when you walk into their store. They’ve got music, they’ve got certain scents that goes along with their brand and sometimes there’s messaging that comes in overhead. That was my first sale job with this digital branding type company and I soon quickly realized that in order to be any good at sales I had to understand and learn how to market myself and to — I didn’t want to do it like everybody else. I didn’t want to make the cold calls. I didn’t want to work so hard. I really wanted leads to come my way and based off on my first experience with our first marketing campaign I realized that the marketing team, in most large companies, are just so far away from the customer, so disconnected from the failed organization that I was going to have to do it myself. In order to be a good sales person I had to be a good marketer and the way that I did it was through attraction marketing. I used a lot of email marketing with EXTEND more like 2000 — well 1999 in my hard disk [?]. John McIntyre: Wow, okay. Laura Greeno: Yea so I did a lot of email marketing, but it was all one on one and I did everything that you did auto responding I was doing by hand like manually [laughter]. I did learn that it work and over time like when we got more tools and learned a little more. Was able to make that happen more, but the attraction piece really worked for me and my boss had no idea what I was doing, but I ended up — I was like number two in the company overall [laughter]. John McIntyre: Nice. Laura Greeno: It was — John McIntyre: It was worth it basically. Laura Greeno: It was a little all right. Yea it was working and I just kind of — I started having people come to me to ask me, way back then, “What — how are you doing this?” and “What are you doing?” and “Can you help me?” and “Can you also do this?” and “What do you become —” so all the — anything and everything that had to deal with marketing and branding and then email and eventually research and documentation and research and marketing and content marketing, all those things. People just kind of picked me just for help and I always had a full time job and for this help kind of became a bigger job, for me, than what I can handle and I decided, “Well I’m going to make money off of this somehow because I’m running out of time helping people on the side.” I just kind of created my agency after all the different experiences and technology and creative kind of mixed together with sales and the behaviour knowledge that I learned over time through being in sales and actually for 10 years before that. I was a bartender so I had 10 years of watching people and learning how people behave. Using that knowledge in sales and marketing has been really helpful. John McIntyre: Awesome so it sounds like — cause the interesting part of that story is like a lot of people right now, who listen to this, I mean some of them anyway who are listening to this, they’ve got a job or they’re trying to figure out this online so they can go and live the lifestyle that you talked about where some people, who have a job, and you know, “If I can just have a few clients, you know? Then I would be able to set my own hours and wake up when I want and travel or do things like that.” Some people their journey to that is they sort of consciously go out and try to create it which it sounds, for you, it just sort of happened. It happened very organically. Laura Greeno: That’s right. It came to me and before I even decided, “Okay I’m going to turn this — I’m going to actually legally make a company and turn this into something,” before that happened I already had 4 clients came to me on a monthly retainer. It was because they wanted my help, they wanted to pay me, they wanted me to do — assigned me and I could and so I did. Then from there I’m like, “Okay I’m going to — how can I optimize my own time so that I can be my own boss and that I can make a big difference for other people in our own company?” John McIntyre: Right, right and so that really marked the transition, it sounds like from basically being a freelancer to hiring a team is that what you mean? Laura Greeno: Yea. Hiring a team — the way that WebScout works can be, but we can do just consulting or we just, my favourite part, you just show up, there’s no research before [laughter]. You share everything that you know based on what you already know and based on what they’re telling you and you charge them an hourly fee and you give them a 1, 2, 3 next step and they either go do them or they ask you to do them [laughter]. When they ask me to do them I either — I do one of two things. I either put together a project team for that specific process based on variables or budget, audience, all those things — industry and I find the right people for the team who may be contractors, but they might be somebody on my team as well. It just depends. I’m going to get the best person for the job whether they’re on my team or not. That’s kind of the flexibility of building the project team once you plan the project and you figure out the resources and you have everything ready to go 1, 2, 3. John McIntyre: Right, right, okay. What was some of the challenges when you made this transition from being an employee, basically, from having a job to doing what you do now? I’m sure there were some mistakes along the way. Laura Greeno: There are always mistakes but actually one of the things, when I hire someone that I think is so important, is that they’re not afraid to make mistakes. Basically the way I look at mistakes is if I’m not making any I don’t know what I’m doing because things move so fast and they change so fast in digital marketing that if I’m not screwing up [laughter] granted I’m not going to screw up with my own clients’ dollars or my own clients’ brand, but if I’m not taking that next step then I’m already behind everybody else and I’m just doing what everybody else’s best practices are and I’m not trying anything new, I’m not doing any R&D, I’m not testing. That is, to me, the mistakes are important and when I hire someone, when I have that — a girl I interviewed yesterday and I said [laughter] “I just need somebody who’s not afraid to make a mistake, but a smart mistake,” right? Note the difference [laughter]. That’s kind of how I feel about that so, mistakes in the industry are very important to me. As far as building a whole business those are, you know, that could go anywhere. John McIntyre: [Laughter]. Laura Greeno: That could go all the way to where my husband’s like, “Wait a minute you don’t know how much you’re going make this month or next month or the next month?” [Laughter]. John McIntyre: [Laughter]. Laura Greeno: “Like well I think it’ll be this,” but he’s the use to the pay check that when it started changing, you know, one month it could be as little — anyway it could be a very small amount and then the next month could be 20 times as much. John McIntyre: Yep. Laura Greeno: Getting him used to that was interesting [laughter], but he, you know, once the year went by and he saw how it worked and saw how happy I was doing it and enjoying it — I could pretty much tell him that I’m doing anything at this point and he’d believe in me [laughter]. John McIntyre: That’s cool. I mean that would be — I feel like that would be a podcast in itself is how to manage a relationship like that. Is he an employee or is he an entrepreneur as well? Laura Greeno: No he has his own job. He has not worked for me at all, actually. John McIntyre: But I mean does he has his own business or does he work for another company? Laura Greeno: Yea he is an Operations Manager for a restaurant chain in the States. John McIntyre: There you go, okay. Cause the interesting thing here, I find, is almost just from a philosophical point of view. Like I notice it when I go home to Australia to visit my family, I’m not married or anything at the moment so, finding solace that makes on the one hand it’s easy in a sense, but when I go home to visit my family — so my mum, my dad, my sister, things like that they’re all — dad’s self-employed so that helps, but there’s very much — it’s been very difficult to explain like they’re always like, “So what do you actually do?” Laura Greeno: [Laughter]. John McIntyre: Most people have no idea. Like it’s like, “How do you get paid? Where do you get your clients from? Why do people even want to hire you?” like, “What’s the —” they just don’t understand how the — if you don’t go to an office and perform work and check in and you have a boss and then you leave. If you don’t do that there’s no way you could make money. There’s this weird difference between being an employee and being, I guess, sort of like an online entrepreneur. If you’re a baker or something they’d probably get it, but they’re not saying that either way is right or wrong it’s just it’s a fascinating thing. Laura Greeno: Yea especially with the energy, right? Online marketing or digital marketing because it’s so foreign to someone who’s 70 plus. The age — they may never get it [laughter] so — John McIntyre: Yea. Laura Greeno: A lot of questions, but then at some point they stop asking questions. When you start showing them, “Hey look I got top 10 Start Up in North Carolina this year. Look at my award!” you know and, “Hey I got —” you know when they start seeing those kind of sort of press or that proof, “Hey I was these [?] magazines did you see it?” they’re like, “What?” John McIntyre: [Laughter]. Laura Greeno: Okay what you’re doing is working and you must be pretty smart. I think you might be one of those what do Jesus say, right? Something like you’re a prophet is never respected in his own hometown or something like that. You’re never an expert in your own area because they know your mom and your dad and they watched you grow up and wipe snot off your face, right? [Laughter] so — John McIntyre: Yea, okay. Well let’s — I’m curious about what do you actually do? When you say attraction, right, walk me through — Laura Greeno: Yea. John McIntyre: — what do you actually do with these clients specifically? Laura Greeno: WebScout specifically — so what I first do is a little bit of research and planning so, we have a goal. Whatever that goal is which is usually I want to have 100 new leads per week through my website. Right now I have 10 [laughter]. First thing first is we do some initial research and I’m usually looking at this from a very holistic point of view. Comprehensive kind of research on what they’re doing now, how are they measuring it [laughter], what — how do they know those 10 turned into what amount of revenue. Are they tracking? The early step of what they’re doing, what needs to change as far as what do we need to change on their website, what do we need to change to make sure that measurement is automated. Are there any tools that we need to introduce? Do you know your audience? Who is your audience? Where are they hanging out online? Do you know your differentiators? What are they? Are they really different? Are they perceived? Does that need to change? Do we need to work on the brand? How do people see you now? What do they perceive when they think of your brand is it negative, positive? There’s customer interviews, there’s a lot of online research as far as finding the audience and where they’re hanging out in order to attract them to your product or service. There’s a handful of other things, right? There’s paperclip audits and are you spending too much? Are you not using the right keyword? Keyword research, on page conversion optimization all those things have to be looked at first then you devise a plan as far as what to do, what’s going to happen, first, second, third. What’s the biggest — number 1 is always going to be taking a step back to make sure that the brand is solid before we go do any marketing around it. It be that they need to separate out a product that need its own brand identity that goes with this product because it doesn’t fit in with the rest with what you’re doing or — John McIntyre: How did you figure that out? Laura Greeno: — that kind of — what’s that? John McIntyre: How would you figure that out? Laura Greeno: It really comes down to, again, a swarm approach. I approach everything from a search engine perspective. The way that people find things and buy things online is how I look at everything. Depending on the behaviour of people and the way that they search would be a factor not 100% but would be one of those variables that goes into deciding whether or not this product needs to be separated out. Let’s say for the sake of, you know; let’s say we’re just talking about shoes. What fits a blue, if there’s a blue pair of shoes that has a very different look and feel and would have a different audience. Like different people would buy this blue pair of shoes than people that buy the rest of the shoes. Then well I need to attract this person, this type of people, and they’re different than the other 5 people. That would be another variable that goes into it. Who the audience is? If it’s a different audience that could be an indicator that we need to at least explore whether or not that product needs its own separate brand and so, you can start to create — you can, don’t know if you need to or have to, but you can become very niche as far as this blue shoe. Now I have a brand around this blue shoe. This blue shoe shop could possibly learn that we could actually build a whole business around just this blue shoe based on solely on short volume trends and audience. Does that make sense or do I need to kind of change the way I talk about that? John McIntyre: [Laughter]. It’s definitely very complex. It sounds like what you do is — I’ve got a big sort of large scale overview everything and trying to find the weak points in almost the whole marketing aspect. Sounds like you really do approach it from this holistic perspective and then when it gets down into it in the sort of the modern and dirt it’s like seeing what specific things can we do like can we figure that certain groups of people are looking for certain types of things so, maybe we need to split off the product a little bit so it’s more easier to understand. Laura Greeno: If they can find it, yea. John McIntyre: So they can find it, yea. Okay. Laura Greeno: Yea. John McIntyre: What would, you know, someone listening to this and they were like, “I want to do what Laura does,” or maybe there’s — how about this, maybe cause this is what we talked about, right, a week ago that maybe because the overrepresentation of men on this podcast has maybe discouraged some women who listened to it. Maybe they’re thinking, “I can’t do this, it’s all guys,” or they’re like, “It’s just a sausage fest I don’t even want to get involved in that,” so here we are we’ve got — you’re representing. What would you say to the women out there, if they’re listening, what would your advice be if they want to go and create a similar life to you, you know, with the same business and freedom and all of that? Laura Greeno: That’s a good question. To all the women [laughter] okay — John McIntyre: What would you say to 1 woman, if that’s a bit too grand? Just imagine you’re just speaking to 1 woman, she’s a brunette, — Laura Greeno: [Laughter]. John McIntyre: — she’s sitting there expectantly like she’s just asking you the question and she wants to know how does she create a life like yours? How does she have the courage to live the way you live? Laura Greeno: I think you just answered it. I think the word “courage” because if you don’t go and do or if you don’t try or if you don’t take that risk you’re never going to get to the next step. It’s that first step. I actually mentor some young women, quite a few, and 1 of them — I was in a conversation with a newer mentee, for me, she is in a full time job that she is a graphic designer and she does content development for a real estate firm. She manages a team of 6 or 7 people and she is bored out of her mind [laughter] because it’s so corporate that she doesn’t get to play with her creativity and be — the people in charge are kind of holding her putting her own company back from really exploding, potentially, but they don’t see it that way. They just see it as controlling [laughter] a level of professionalism, probably, is how they look at it and kind of keeping things as they are, not to mention that. Anyway she came to me because she wanted to talk to a successful entrepreneur and definitely a strong one and so, she is how she was introduced to me and wanted to know what to do and I said, “Well what do you want to do? Figure out what you want to do first. Anything — you could do anything.” If you want to do it for her she wanted to do something very unusual. I have never heard of this before, but Christmas decorations [laughter]. Christmas decorations for your home or your office or your retail space that was her passion. That was what she got excited about doing. I mean I guess it’s the design line, right, the graphic design line. That’s what she wanted to do so, we just kind of spent 10 minutes and put together a plan of how she’s going to get started and she was already doing — you need to do it on the side, keep your job, keep your income. Do what you want to do, on the side, if the money will come you have to figure it out, right? You have to do it sometimes for free until people start talking about you and then you just take advantage of that people talking about you and spread that word of mouth using a lot of different means, but digital is what I would use. Then the word gets out and people start — you know you start to figure out what people want and what they’re going to pay, but you got to go do it. You can’t still think about it, wish about it, or wait. John McIntyre: Yea. Laura Greeno: Like she’s waiting for her sister to get out of college or something to help her and I said, “Don’t wait [laughter]. Just — John McIntyre: Yea. Laura Greeno: — go do now.” Here’s the first one for you to do. Don’t wait until Christmas, all right? Go do Valentine’s Day, go do Easter even though that’s not what your passion is. Go do that to learn and then by Christmas time you’ll be ready to have people pay you. John McIntyre: I like that. I like that. I think that’s a good note to finish on. If people want to learn   more about you, whether they want to hire you to do some marketing for them, or maybe there’s someone listening who would like to hire you to be their mentor, where — Laura Greeno: [Laughter]. John McIntyre: — can they do all of that? Laura Greeno: My website is called website — I’m sorry, webscoutmarketing.com, but it’s really — I really LinkedIn quite a bit to connect with people. I think that’s how we connected. Actually didn’t you reach out for me? John McIntyre: Yea on LinkedIn. Laura Greeno: You did. John McIntyre: Yea. Laura Greeno: You reached out to me. How did you find me? Where did you — why did you like reach out to me? John McIntyre: I was just on LinkedIn looking for people in ecommerce and I was connecting with them and just trying to get phone calls to see what would come out of it. In this case we did a podcast and sometimes it’s a webinar, sometimes it’s a client and yea it’s just been a big push for me, with a different business actually, but yea so — Laura Greeno: Okay. John McIntyre: — I’ve been connected in LinkedIn so, yea people could check you out. Laura Greeno: Yea definitely so, Laura Bell Greeno. My middle name B-E-L-L so it’s my nickname. Laura Bell Greeno is how it is on LinkedIn. Just connect with me there and let me know where you heard about me and why you want to connect so I don’t delete you [laughter]. John McIntyre: Awesome, cool. All right I’ll have links to all of that in the Show Notes at themcmethod.com. Laura thanks for coming on the show. Laura Greeno: Thank you! The post Episode #138 – Laura Bell Greeno on Getting More Leads And Sales Through Attraction Marketing appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

Are you waiting to make sense of this crazy thing we called life? No need to wait, Craig will tell you. Because the best things in life are simple. By following these simple yet powerful Five Pillars, Craig Ballantyne was able to overcome crippling anxiety, And find all the answers he needed. Now the author of The Perfect Day Formula, …Craig shares how he beat all his doubts down, As well as shares MANY potentially life changing nuggets throughout this show. It’s a long one for a reason! He’s been interviewed on Russian Television about this method. Has gone viral on LifeHacker, And is featured regularly in Men’s Health. Learn how to carve your perfect day, And smash all your goals. Even Russell Brunson swears by his method.. If you are ready to put some order in your days, Or if you just want some great advice, This is a good episode for you. P.S. Read his daily essays over at EarlyToRise.com   In this episode, you’ll discover: How Craig helps his coaching clients get more done, make more money, and have a lot of freedom in their lives (no matter how busy they are) Your Magic Time: Find it , build it, protect it and then build your schedule around THAT (this alone is pretty life changing) Why you should stay as close to your wakeup time as often as possible (find out why and how waking up halfway through your natural sleep cycle is messing up your mornings..) The 5 Pillars derived from Epictetus teachings (these work for literally ANYTHING.. from fitness to business to getting out of debt goals) How writing your goals at night lets your subconscious come up with your hardest to find answers.. How to identify your Season of Life; Health, Wealth, Family or Personal Development, and then build your goals around it Mentioned: Blacksmith Club PerfectDayFormula.com Jocko Willink’s 4:45am Club Cal Newport’s “Deepwork” Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson The Surrender Experiment Sleep Smarter Book Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. All right it’s John McIntyre here; I’m here with Craig Ballantyne. Now Craig is a productivity and success transformation coach from Toronto Ontario, Canada and the author of “The Perfect Day Formula: How to Own the Day and “Control Your Life”. He’s been contributing to Men’s Health magazine since 2000 and in 2001 he created a popular home workout program called Turbulent Training. And on his journey to success he’s had to overcome crippling anxiety attacks and he beat them with his five pillars of transformation. Today Craig show’s men and women how to use the five pillars to lose 10 to 75 pounds get a raise and make more money. Find the love of your life and pretty much overcome any obstacle in the way of your success. Now you can read his daily essays on Success Productivity and Fitness Early to Rise. what’s interesting is I actually met Craig three — I think it was three years ago at the blacksmith — there was a blacksmith in Lithuania, of all places, which was sort of a strange story when people would ask me if I’d been in Europe and the only place I’d been was Lithuania, but anyway back then I tried to get a podcast going. Didn’t happen and now three years later here we are finally talking about — we’re doing a podcast here with Craig. So today we’re gonna talk about his book, “The Perfect Day Formula”, and we’ve got some questions that we’ll get into. I think you’re gonna make this really interesting cause I’ve played around with my routine a lot. So there — there we go. Craig how you going? Craig Ballantyne: Yeah real great, yes. So it’s great to connect again after all these years John. It’s fantastic to see what you’ve been up to. I mean you’re just making an amazing head waves in the world. John McIntyre: [Laughter] thanks mate, you too, by the sound of it. Craig Ballantyne Well I appreciate that and you know I actually I will say that one of the interviews you did with John Lee Dumas about constructing webinars really helped me with a webinar I had the other month. So thank you very much. Now the student has become the teacher so, thank you very much. John McIntyre: He is a machine when it comes to those webinars. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah he is. John McIntyre: So let’s — I mean I’ve done the, you know, given you a little bit of an intro there. Can you give the list — maybe a bit more of a background? You know who are you, what are you like, what are you into, what do you do? Craig Ballantyne: Yeah for sure. So I’m — I was born very close to Toronto in Canada and I grew up playing ice hockey. Ice hockey was the thing there and so, I went to college thinking I was going to be a strength and conditioning coach in the National Hockey League, of all things, and so that was what I wanted to do and then in 2000 I started writing for Men’s Health Magazine and realized I loved helping the busy guy get home from work and do these short burst workouts that I invented and so, I got into creating information products and selling them on the internet. Did that for about 12 years before we met, John, and I also have bought another business called earlytorise.com which is more of a personal development business. And so we sell books and all sorts of information on helping people build their wealth and their health. John McIntyre: Awesome, awesome. So I was reading a bit about your story and how it all came together with — cause it started, you know, I read this a few days ago, but you started to want to get into the online stuff. I think you had a business coach, at one point, then that — eventually you came, you know, Turbulence Training grew and grew and grew into from — what I remember was a million dollar business or multiple millions and then you eventually leveraged that or leveraged that success to then go and invest or buy or become a partner in Early to Rise which is where you’ve been now, for a few years, and now it’s just grown from there. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah that’s pretty much it and it was 2006 when I hired that first business coach and that’s when my Turbulence Training business really took off. I mean it was doing okay before that, but getting that business coach was like the exponential increase in business and so, I always tell people that was my number one mistake, was waiting too long to get a business coach. And it’s the number one piece of advice that I give to anybody is get a coach! Get a mentor! Someone who has been there and done that, who has achieved what you want to do and who shares your morals and ethics and your values. And when you have somebody like that to guide you, whether it’s for a couple of months or whether it’s for years, you’ll become a better person and a much more successful person as well in so many areas of life. John McIntyre: I was wondering that when I read that. It seemed like you’d been going for three years or four years or something before you actually got around to hiring the coach. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, I mean, I was just silly and stupid and cheap and stubborn and thinking I knew everything and it was just a bad, bad decision to wait so long. I should’ve been in there earlier; I should’ve hired a coach in 2003 or 2004. I would’ve got my book out earlier, I would have helped more people — everything would be even greater than it is right now. So it just, you know, anybody that’s listening — no matter how much you think you know everything or you know even if money is a little tight, if you get enough money to invest in resource do it because it will then give you a 10 to 1 or 100 to 1 return on investment which then you can leverage and invest into more coaching. So I always tell people if you’re really broke start with free YouTube videos. Make a little bit of money from that, you know? From learning about people or go to the library and read somebody’s book. And then when you made $100 or $500 invest in your next course. And then when you made $5,000 invest and go into their seminar. And then when you made, you know, $20,000 or $50,000 invest in that person’s mastermind group or find a way to intern with them. But get out there and find your coach as soon as you can. John McIntyre: I reckon that’s great advice, but the challenge — the challenge that I’ve found with this, cause I’ve worked with a few different coaches now, and I think people who are listening to this it’s gonna be like well in today you would’ve seen this — there’s a proliferation of life coaches and business coaches who are gonna, you know, solve all the problems in your life and help you — like they’re all making the same claims. I’m gonna help you lose weight, I’m gonna help you make money, I’m gonna help you get — find the love of your life or learn to pick up girls or whatever it is — there’s so much of — cause anyone could be a coach these days. So there’s a slight tangent, but I think it’s quite interesting and valuable. How do you think that — how do you go about finding a good coach? Craig Ballantyne: You make a very fair point and it’s a fair assessment of the world today, however you should be able to find hours and hours of free content from people whether it’s from podcast or whether it’s through YouTube videos or whatever it is, I mean, there is just — there’s no — there’s almost no way to hide these days. And so right now if someone listening to this, you know, there’s gonna be that bell curve of people, you know, there’s gonna be that huge amount of people in the middle who are like, “Yeah this guy’s got some good information, but he doesn’t hit me in the gut.” And then there’s gonna be a few people who are like, “Yeah this guy hits me in the gut the wrong way. I don’t ever want to hear from this loser ever again,” and that’s totally fine because then, “Oh I got a way of life that I live and it’s not going to attract everyone.” But you repel those people to attract that 10% at the top. There’s gonna be 10% of people who are gonna go, “I got to get to Lithuania for the Blacksmith Camp and learn from this guy.” If they’re — if you’re younger or if you’re older you’re like, “I gotta investigate this guy more. I got to read his book, I got to and check out Early to Rise, I got to do X, Y, Z, you know, if I’m in America I’m gonna find one of his seminars — where ever he’s speaking and I’m gonna go and learn more from this guy because this guy is my guy.” And so I think that, you know, if you’re a coach yourself or if you’re someone who — well if you coach yourself you should be going and trying to get your message out as — every where you can. I mean I’ve been interviewed over 50 times this year. Health has helped me communicate my message better, but it’s also allowed me to get in front of people and show them that I can help them. And then if you’re a student looking for a coach you should find everything you possibly can about somebody who’s, you know, kind of tickled your fancy a little bit, who’s got a little bit of interest from you, you know, if somebody got on your list, John, a referral from somebody else, they should listen to dozens of your podcasts to see if this person is right for you. And I mean it’s very much like dating. I we’re gonna kiss a few dragons before we find our princess, but that’s how — John McIntyre: [Laughter.] Craig Ballantyne: — things should work, you know? And last thing I’ll say is you should ask around people that you respect and say, “Who would you refer me to if you were in my situation looking for a coach at my age, my experience, my goals?” you know, “Who should I go to?” and you should ask for referrals because that’s really one of the best ways especially to become wealthier — to actually find people that you can trust and that is, you know, among affluent people — they generally get their advisers, their coaches through referrals so, you should start that process pretty soon. John McIntyre: Point worth pointing out too like I think in the — especially in the marketing world there can be a bit of like a — bit of hurrah that gets around and to this benefit, I think, it’s almost sort of — especially when you’re a beginner, it can be hard to see through the noise where you, you know, you don’t know — you don’t really have the expertise yet to see through the claims that different people have and it’s — Craig Ballantyne: That’s a great point. John McIntyre: Yeah so I reckon, you know, and there’s a lot of like, you know, sleazy, scammy, sort of people at it that don’t really — it’s like they, you know, business coach you’ve never really built a business and the best way to probably get through that is to go and find people who aren’t in that world who have a, you know, a normal business or an e-commerce business, something outside the internet marketing, info product world, for example. Find someone from out of that and ask them for feedback and what they think of this person’s, you know, branding or image or whatever it is. Cause they’ll probably be a pretty objective sounding board. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, I mean, I would just definitely get into the world as well of past clients, you know, and ask for referrals or references. If you — if you’re gonna invest $1,000 a month or more, you should be able to go the coach and say, “Listen, I would love to speak to two or three of your past clients.” And you know, as someone who runs mastermind groups, I would have no hesitation of sending you to people — not only who have had success in my groups, but to send you to the people who dropped out after one or two months or six months because people do. I mean not everybody joins my mastermind group becomes a millionaire, but there are some that become, you know, multi-millionaires and there’s some people who have been with us for four — five years and we, you know, we’re — we got nothing to hide. And it’s those people who do hide — have something to hide — who don’t act congruent with their image at all times that — those are the people you want to avoid. And that’s why you start with just a seminar first. Don’t go directly into somebody’s coaching program. Go to one of their seminars. Try and see how they act around the hotel staff. Try and see how they act around other people. And if they don’t strike you as sharing the same values as you then no matter how great they are at marketing you — you’ll probably won’t be a great long term fit. And so, yes, you could still learn marketing from them, but they probably got courses on that and you would avoid them as a coach because there’s more to coaching than just the tactics. There’s so much more about — listen at the end of the day you can take my tactics and — but you’re still gonna have those days where you swing and miss. And when you swing and miss am I going to be there for you to raise your spirits? And that’s what coaching — there’s an art and science of it and so, science of tactics, but there’s also the art of making sure that you take care of the person as a whole. John McIntyre: Totally, totally. And on that note I reckon we should probably talk about Blacksmith Camp probably at the end. So drop an open loop for them. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. John McIntyre: The — but we can talk about that at the end and who that’s for. So let’s move on then to The Perfect Day Formula. Tell me about the book, what it’s, you know; what it’s about, you know, what made you write it? Let’s start — Craig Ballantyne: Well, I mean, it’s — yeah. I mean it’s a compendium of everything that I’ve used over the years and I’ve used with so many of my coaching clients. To help them get more done, make more money, but also, most importantly, to have more freedom in their life. And so we help them put a lot of structure into their day and so, for some people they want to resist my idea of structure, structure, structure in the day, but we’re only doing this so that you have more freedom in your evenings for your family or for your hobbies or, you know, to live where ever you want because you’ve gotten so much done during the days. And so it’s people that are proactive are really gonna love the book. People that just want to react to the world. You know those people struggle and they’re gonna either take a lot from the book and say, “Oh I get it, now I can really fix my day,” or they’re just gonna reject everything I say which, again, is fine. I don’t expect everyone in the world to love what I say because it is very structured, but essentially it helps people find when they’re most productive. It helps people block that time, it helps people really focus on their days and really control the chaos that the world brings at them so they can concentrate on what counts whether it’s at night or on the weekends or in the morning. So if they have more free time and freedom in their life. John McIntyre: Right. And then one of the guys that I’m a big fan of on Instagram is The Rock, Dwayne Johnson. You know the guy, right? Craig Ballantyne: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. John McIntyre: He posts these photos every — he hasn’t — I don’t think he’s done it in a while, but he — every now and then he posts a photo of it’s — you know 4am or 3:45 am and he’s alarms going off and he’s — then he’s got like an Instagram status update about how, you know, let’s wake up and chase our goals and chase our greatness blah, blah, blah. And it’s really cool like ah you know I like that — I like the hustle that he has with that, that  he’s up at  4am. And from what I understand that’s when he’s — has to be on set say at 7 am, he’s waking up so he — like do basically a weight workout, go and eat some carbs, and then do a cardio workout or something like that. Then he goes onto the set and probably works 12 to 14 hours acting. So there’s something really cool about that, but I think from memory you are — you actually wake up something — some time around then as well at 4 or 4:30. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah I get up at — I start work every day at 4 ‘o clock so, you know, I — what I found, and I talked about it in my book, is there’s something called magic time and everyone has magic time and — when do you work, John? Are you a night owl worker? Like when do you just crank out your emails like you’re a magician? John McIntyre: Right, I mean, right now I’m in this flex. I’m trying to figure some of this out. I was waking up at — I was doing 4:15 am for a month or two in — when I was in Berlin. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. John McIntyre: But that — it burnt out and I don’t think it was the 4:15 was the problem, I think it wasn’t being disciplined — I was drinking too much coffee. So basically that was — Craig Ballantyne: Hah. John McIntyre: — screwing the whole thing up so, that worked pretty well, but then the downside of that was that if I want to go out, you know, have a social — it felt like you wanted to have a social life — go out, you know, with a girl or go dancing or something like that. I couldn’t really do that cause I had to be in bed by 8 which it had it’s own downside. So then now I’ve been testing no alarm at all, but you know I’m sort of — I can just go on sleeping. So I’ll wake up at 10 am and that’s not really conducive to getting that much done cause you feel like you’re already behind when you wake up so — Craig Ballantyne: Right that’s — I felt when I was, you know, in about 2007 when I was able to go from being from a personal trainer to, you know, being a full time online fitness guy and, you know, I was starting — I was like, “Okay I don’t have to get up and train people really early in the morning,” so I was getting up late, you know? Air quotes around that. It’s 7:30 in the morning, but I’d felt I was always chasing the tail of the world. And so I realised I need to get up early, just personally, for me I love the spirituality of the morning when I’m the only person up. It’s just amazing to me. And so that’s when I get my most work done — most of my work done. Now going back to the social aspect I do believe in keeping a regular wake up time and a regular bedtime, but you know last week I was just in Las Vegas for a mastermind meeting and there’s no way that you — you know first of all you’re gonna be social with the members. And plus there’s plenty to do in that town so, I don’t — I recommend trying to stick to your wake up as close as possible. So even if you stay out ’til midnight, you know, not — and you regularly get up at 4:30 don’t sleep past 6 ‘o clock in the morning. I know it’s only a few hours of sleep, but you know have a nap later on, but you don’t want to get too far away from your wake up time. Your wake up time is one of the most important things you can stick to. So you stay up a couple of hours late, and that’s fine, try not to overdo it too much. And obviously people that are listening, you know, don’t drink too much alcohol on too many nights. And so you stick to that wake up time, you have some naps, and that will give you a lot of all day energy and so, going all the way back to your original question, I do get up — I start work at 4 in the morning because I get 3 times as much work done in my magic time, which is in the morning, than I do at any other time of day. And everyone has magic time whether it’s 2 ‘o clock in the afternoon or whether it’s like my friend, Joe Marion, who has it at, you know, midnight and he gets 3 times as much done then as if he would try to do it at 10 am. So everyone has it, everyone should find it, everyone should protect it, and then build your structure around that as much as possible, you know, with considerations of if you have a regular work job or if you have family stuff you have, family stuff you have to be around with. But everyone can do that. And so going back to The Rock, there’s another guy named Jocko Willink who has a book out and he has something, I think, like the 4:45 am club. And then there’s another guy who — Robin Sharma who has the 5 am club and there’s a lot of people who are like me — about getting up in the morning because if you get up in the morning there’s nobody there stealing your time. And when the world — when your life is so busy that’s what you have to do in some cases especially if you have a priority project. If you want to write a book — if you want to write a sales letter, and you try to do it during the normal work hours, there’s just too much stuff going on and no matter how disciplined we are it’s very, very difficult for us to overcome the phone calls, the emails, the people running into your office with their pants on fire, the — you know what they think is their pants on fire. Even though it’s not an emergency, but you know they think the end of the world is coming because, you know, some — something happened, they got a phone call. You know so, all that stuff happens during your regular workday so, you either have to do it first thing in the morning or you have to do it at night. And there’s this, you know, then there’s too many social calls in the evening for most people to stick to it at night so that’s why I get up in the morning — that’s why I think most people should get up in the morning and, you know, have that quiet time and make massive progress on their big goals. John McIntyre: Yeah, I mean, that was the feeling I had in Berlin until the — too much coffee is only go — overload the adrenals. The feeling of like being up at — cause I’d start at — I’d wake up at 4:15 then I do sort of a morning routine of meditation and few things like that — Craig Ballantyne: Yup. John McIntyre: — and I’d start work at 5. And the whole idea was I’d do 4 and a half hours of focused work so, priority — whatever the priority goal was for 4 and a half hours — no email, nothing like that. It was meant to be primarily creative. And then at 9:30 I would stop and go to the gym. And it’s — it was great cause I’d be walking to the gym, which was 5 or 10 minutes away from the place I was staying and everyone else is on their way to work and I’ve already gotten done more than most people — more than what I would get done in a whole work day or several work days and it’s 9:30 am. And that’s a cool feeling. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah I know that feeling. Oh man that’s a great feeling. John McIntyre: It’s addictive though like it started to get to a — like I started to think more about the tradeoffs it’s like you keep pushing it back — you could then go to 4 or 3:30. Cause what time — cause if you start work at 4, what time do you get up? Craig Ballantyne: I like to get up about quarter to 4 and then I do my meditation after I’ve written for a while so, I don’t let — because I know, I mean, I’m a weak person and that’s what I have these — this structure in place because I’m as tempted and distracted as anyone else. So that’s why I go, you know the night before? I have the outline created; I put my subconscious to work at night which I actually truly believe in. I think that you can have your brain work while you sleep so that when you sit down in front of your screen or piece of paper that you can pour thoughts out better than if you did not go through this little subconscious programming at night. And so that’s what I do and, you know, the first hour I get, like I said, the magic time — 3 times as much done in any other time of day and so, if nothing else happened over the course of the day, John? No one can take that victory of that first hour away from me and that — but then after I do that I go into meditation and then I go to the gym and then I actually — when I’m in Denver here I have to spend a full day in the office with a lot of meetings because we’ve grown our team up and our marketing team and we actually do a lot of meetings. So there’s no way I would get all that writing done unless I did it first thing. John McIntyre: Right, right so you’re thing is you wake up and then at 4 — you at 4, right? 3:45 you’re up, 4 you start — Craig Ballantyne: Yes. John McIntyre: — and you’ll write for an hour and then you meditate? Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. John McIntyre: Yeah and then off to the gym and then the day kicks in. The reason why I like to focus on this is this — like the waking up early is like step — it’s probably one of the hardest steps, but it’s also the most essential because if you could get this down the rest of the — all the other stuff of organizing your routine and staying off social media and everything like that — a lot of that becomes a lot easier when you win the morning. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, absolutely and so, really great example is, you know, Russell Brunson got a copy of my book and my — the kit that comes with my book — so I have a kit that I actually, you know, people can invest in this kit with all these work tools and stuff. And so Russell was, you know, he was getting up to like 8 or 9 before he read my book and, you know, then he was going into the office and he never felt like he was getting time to work on his click funnels which is his business. So he read my book and he said to his wife, “I’m gonna start going to bed at 10, getting up at 5 and writing for two hours on these funnels.” And he did an entire podcast on this. I think his podcast is called like “Marketing in The Car” or something and, you know, out of nowhere he just did this amazing testimonial about using my system. Now he’s getting up and doing 2 hours of work saying the exact same thing that you and I have said here John that, you know, he’s got more work done in those 2 hours than he would all day and he gets into the office and, you know, he’s on this role. And even though the rest of his day in the office is spent on the phone or with team members and all that stuff, he’s gotten his click funnels done, and he just had an amazing story about it and so you’re very right. And what it comes down to is not getting up in the morning, but getting to bed on time and in the right environment so that you can get up on time. And if you were doing it for 4 am you know you’ve probably got a great routine. I’d love to hear about it. John McIntyre: [Laughter] right now I’ve just got back to Thailand so, I’ve relaxed the routine for a while just to experiment with some things, but back then there was a realization. It’s like yeah you could use some self discipline to wake up, you know, after 4 hours sleep or 6 hours sleep, but that’s not sustainable. The whole battle is really won when you go — it’s totally when you go to bed. Like the mood you’re in — are you gonna fall asleep quickly or have you been, you know, on YouTube until, you know, you’re looking at the bright screen until too late at night. You’ve really gave — Craig Ballantyne: Right. John McIntyre: — me — you have to be disciplined about the night before. That’s what really sets up the morning. Craig Ballantyne: Absolutely. And it’s — I’ve written a chapter in the book called the “10-3-21-1-0 Formula”  and I’ll explain it in a second, but you know that — I posted an excerpt of that online and it’s gone viral because it just speaks to so many people. So we’ve had it on the telegraph.co@uk. In England it was picked up there, it was picked up by inc [?], it was picked up by Lifehacker, and we’ve had hundreds of thousands of people to our website from this article. And then I was actually even interviewed on Russian television about it. John McIntyre: Wow! Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, I mean, it’s just — John McIntyre: Did you speak Russian? Craig Ballantyne: — it speaks — I didn’t. They dubbed it over. John McIntyre: [Laughter]. Craig Ballantyne: And then we have — we have a girl, I don’t know if you ever met her? A sous chef from — that I met at the Blacksmith Camp back in 2010. She went and listened to it and said they kind of screwed up some of the stuff because she speaks Russian. And she translated it, but it was funny. I just did this little video and then sent it over to this person who contact me on Facebook from Russia and it’s on Russian national television, but again, it’s because it speaks to so many people and it’s such a problem that so many people have. And so the “10-3-2-1-0 Formula” goes like this: 10 hours before bed you stop drinking all caffeine. So, you know, you found out the hard way about that one, unless you’re ballsack who drank 50 cups of coffee a day and, you know, kept to strange hours, but you know it’s — no more caffeine after — 10 hours before bed because the half life of caffeine is about 10 hours. So if you stop drinking caffeine there’s still some in your blood 10 hours later, but it’s not enough to generally keep you up. So — and then for me, personally, I just can’t handle much caffeine at all so I stop drinking caffeine about 14 hours before I go to bed. The 3 is to stop drinking alcohol or having heavy meals 3 hours before bed which means some people might have to be afternoon drinkers. John McIntyre: [Laughter]. Craig Ballantyne: Which is okay, but — you know? They drink on the patio and then — but the thing is, you know, people do feel sleepy after they’ve had a little bit of alcohol, but the problem is it interrupts your sleep cycles. And I’m a big believer in the 90 minute sleep cycle — the power of the 90 minute sleep cycle. And so science shows that we go through these 90 minute phases while we’re asleep and so, if I wake up after 6 hours of sleep and my alarm is set to go off in an hour I actually  won’t go back to sleep because that would mean I would get half way through another sleep cycle. And if you wake up through a — half way through a sleep cycle you’re actually groggier than if you would be if you got up at 6 hours and have an hour less sleep. And then you try to have a little nap later on. So I’m a big fan of that, but alcohol does interfere with those sleep cycles and so, you wake up — even if you know you have like 2 or 3 glasses of wine an hour before bed and you wake up and you’re kind of like stuffy and kinda groggy the next morning even if you get 7 or 8 hours of sleep. And it’s because the alcohol interferes with that. So 2 hours before bed stop all work, an hour before bed stop the screens. So no blue light screens which are iPhones, laptops, and some televisions. You can get glasses actually that stop and block the light — the blue light that keeps you alert, but if you just look at your iPhone in bed right before you go to sleep the light from that keeps us alert and, you know, you toss and turn in bed all night. So that’s the 1 hour rule. And then 0 is the number of times that you should hit snooze in the morning because, again, it goes to that sleep cycle. Yeah, I know, I mean easier said than done, but with practice you can do it. I mean I’m probably 10, 15 years older than you, John, so when I was your age I wasn’t even as good as you are with the habits. So I rejected a lot of this information and I wish I hadn’t, but now I don’t hit the snooze button. I just get up because I know if I go back in to 10 minutes of sleep, again, you’re into the sleep cycle and you’re gonna wake up groggier than if you had just gotten out of bed at that first alarm. So, you know, some situ — you know ideas if you sleep alone. Some of the time or all of the time you can put the alarm across the room or — I actually have my alarm outside of my room when I’m travelling — outside or sorry — really across the room when I’m travelling. If I’m sleeping alone at home then I have it outside the bedroom so that I actually have to get up, walk across the room, and by then you’re just not going back to bed. Another thing is you can get one of the light alarms. So Philips is a company that makes them and you can set it so that it just gradually increases the light in the room so it’s like waking up naturally. You can buy those on Amazon and those are another way that people are using to have less of a harsh awakening in the morning. John McIntyre: Right. I mean it’s — this is what I’m trying to experiment with at the moment because in Berlin it was great to do the, you know, waking up at 4:15 or whatever it was. That was fantastic, but then yeah I found that it wasn’t — I mean that’s quite early so I felt like it wasn’t that sustainable with going out, but it also that the wake up time’s — becomes — it starts to feel very, very abrupt sometimes. And so I’ve experimented with the 90 minute cycles and I think there’s like an iPhone app where it tracks your sleep cycle and then tries to wake you up when you’re at the light stage of sleep, but that — Craig Ballantyne: Okay. John McIntyre: Yeah. Craig Ballantyne: I don’t know that app, but I’d love to — if you find the name of that I’d love to hear about that cause I think sleep is very important and you know I would say for a young man like you try and aim for like a, you know, 10 to 5:30 or if you wake up at 4 ‘o clock or 4:30, you know, just get out of bed then, but you know 10 to 5:30 you’re still up before 6. I think there’s still something really fantastic about that. You’re still up before most people are going about their day. It’s not inhuman, you know, to get up at 5:30 as a young man. I mean a lot of construction workers do that. So a lot of people are doing that during the week. And then on the weekend you relax things a little bit, but not ’til you’re sleeping ’til 10 ‘o clock in the morning. And really, you know, using the meditation is also, from what I’ve talked to some Doctors say that if you meditate for 20 minutes it’s almost like having a 20 minute nap or even an hour of sleep and then you can have an afternoon nap of 20 minutes and collectively even if you only sleep 6 and a half hours a night it adds up to being the same amount of rest. And you know you should try and get 7 or 8 hours of sleep, but I think that a young, ambitious man who still wants to have a good social life, but also take advantage in the morning would do well on a 10 to 5:30 schedule. John McIntyre: Interesting. I mean this brings up another issue that I’ve kinda wrestled with a bit. It’s like how much like sleep do I need? Because some days it’s like, you know, 9 hours isn’t enough and then other days I can have 6 hours and I’m like — I’m up like a rocket in the morning. And so I’m still toned, I seriously go up and down depending on exercise. Right now I lift 4 days a week and so, I’m not sure if 7 and a half — sometimes it feels like it’s fine, sometimes it feels like it’s too little. How have you train — you know figured out how much sleep you need? Craig Ballantyne: I have to force myself to sleep cause I can sleep, you know, 6 hours and you know have days go about me. Days go by before I feel tired and I — but I know that’s not right, I shouldn’t give in to that temptation of cutting back on the sleep so, I force myself to make sure that I get — go to bed early on some nights or to have the nap and I try and — I would say I average 7. I wish I was averaging more like 7 and a half or 8, but I’m doing pretty well when I get an average of 7. John McIntyre: That’s so interesting. I find this fascinating how some people are like that. There’s a girl who goes to the local salsa dancing I’ve been going to here and she just wakes up — she doesn’t use an alarm which I think is really cool. And so I was like, “Oh I want to try that.” Now she wakes up at 6 cause her pets come and wake her up. And I think if she just wake up at 6 she’s one of those people anyway. If I — Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. John McIntyre: — don’t use an alarm I’m waking up at like 8:30 — 9. Starts to get — seems to get a bit later each day, cause each day I wake up late then I stay up a little bit later the next night, then I wake up a bit later the next day and it creates this — eventually it’s like 11 and it’s [laughter] what’s going on and this isn’t — you can’t live like this. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah that’s very interesting. John McIntyre: So it’s — it is fascinating to me how different people — you, you know, you talk about you can get, you know, for days on 6 hours and not feel tired. If I had 6 hours usually now, yeah, I’d — depends on the day, but most the time if I had 6 hours I’d be pretty tired. I’d — Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, you know, then there’s the thing, John, is well, you know, someone’s 8 hours can be actually worse than someone’s, you know, 6 and a half hours, right? Because of the quality of sleep, you know, the noise and all that sort of thing. So there’s other things that people should make sure that they’re doing at night, you know, 65 degrees Fahrenheit temperature in their room. You know blacked out and no light getting in. I sleep with earplugs and an eye mask like an old lady, you know? John McIntyre: [Laughter]. Craig Ballantyne: But I mean the earplugs have been a lifesaver especially in the hotels. And same with, you know, you go to hotels and they got these little green lights up in the ceiling and you always — John McIntyre: Oh I hate that. Craig Ballantyne: — and, you know, so the eye mask, as silly as it is, it’s really, really been a fantastic little tool. So I have eye mask, I have earplugs, I use this sprayable melatonin which is a company from the Blacksmith Camp that I invested in. So I use sprayable melatonin a couple hours before bed, magnesium before bed, and you know I just get a little dialled in sleeping routine. And I travel a lot so I done this because I travel a lot and I want to adjust as quickly as possible between going to different time zones. And so there’s an art and science to it, there’s great books out on it. A friend of mine, Shawn Stevenson, just wrote a book for Rodale Press which is a company that publishes Men’s Health and he has a book called “Sleep Smarter”. He has about 300 5 star reviews on Amazon. So if you want to get the ultimate bible in sleeping get that book and you’ll learn about dialling that in. Because sleep is so important and it’s not just how we feel, John, it goes back to — you know you were talking about training, you know, if you want to recover properly from training that’s when you have to get that extra sleep. And so that’s why even if I can feel fine on 6 I know that mentally and physically my body and brain need the recovery of 8 hour sleep. And I definitely feel different when I get 8 hours sleep compared to 6, you know? I don’t feel like I need caffeine if I’ve slept 8 hours. John McIntyre: Right you can notice it in the gym too. When I was in, I think couple of days ago, I had one of those big sleep ins and I went in the gym and I just felt so — just don’t feel worn out. It’s like you’ve had, you know, two coffees before you into the gym and everything’s just working except — Craig Ballantyne: Yup. John McIntyre: — that I hadn’t any coffee. So — Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. John McIntyre: — and on the lights down here it’s funny like I’m — noises don’t do that much, like I’m very — I’m a musician so I think I’m sensitive to noise, but some reason not while I’m sleeping. Craig Ballantyne: Right. John McIntyre: But I hate lights. So like if I’m lying in bed and there’s that little red light or green light on the TV I — unless I have an eye mask, I’ll usually try and — I have to cover it up. Craig Ballantyne: Right. John McIntyre: I’ll have to get sticky tape, a bit of paper — Craig Ballantyne: Right. John McIntyre: — the same thing on the AC. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah. It’s funny my friend, Bedros Keuilian, I was just with him in Vegas on the weekend. He’s a really great marketer, he’s got a great YouTube videos on mindset, but Bedros was thinking of buying a house beside the ocean where he surfs in California. And so they went down and they rented a house there and he could not sleep, for the life of him, at night with the waves coming in. You know some people love that white noise, the fan, whatever it is, but he’s the opposite. You know he’s the opposite of you and so, they decided they would only buy a house on the other side of the street where they couldn’t hear the waves coming in. So everyone has their own little sleep things, you know, some people like to be really cold, some people can’t sleep unless it’s warm, and you just have to figure it out and make a routine out of it because this is what allows you to have amazing mornings and get stuff done. And if you’re dragging your tail every morning you’re gonna have a hard time getting ahead in life. I mean that’s just the bottom line as far as I can see. John McIntyre: All right so let’s move sort of further on into that. The “Perfect Day Formula” what — you mentioned the — there’s a 10-8-3-2-0 rule and then, you know, what else is there to it? I know you’ve got the “5 Pillars.” What do you think would be — what else really, really matters? Craig Ballantyne: Well I think the “5 Pillars” are very helpful for anybody looking to make a change in their life. Because I actually discovered these from my weight loss transformation clients so, in my fitness business I’ve run 25 before and after contests. So we’ve been doing this since 2008 and we have 4 categories in each one. So we’ve had about 100 winners in this contest and they have to submit this little 200 or 300 word essay, I guess you would call it, and every time I would read them the people who won had 5 common pillars in place. And the people who dropped out after 2 weeks, I take a look at their entries in the form that we keep, and I’d realize that some of these pillars were missing. And so the “5 Pillars” work, not just for losing weight, but they’ll work for anything. If you want to become a better copywriter they’ll work for that. If you want to get out of debt it’ll work for that. If you want to make more money, if you want to find the love of your life, if you want to buy the house of your dreams these 5 pillars work for everything because you can implement them this way. And so they go like this: better planning and preparation is pillar number 1, pillar number 2 is professional accountability, pillar number 3 is positive social support, pillar number 4 is a meaningful incentive, and pillar number 5 is the big deadline. And you can just, you know, pull a topic out of a hat, John, and I could show you it’ll work for anything. John McIntyre: I mean one thing that I — sort of on my list of questions to ask you about this was it’s — like we’re often used to thinking about this stuff in terms of let’s lose weight, let’s make money, let’s get a partner and I’ve been doing some — I guess you could say — recently I read a book called “The Surrender Experiment” which, as the title implies, the guy just decides to surrender to life. Gives up his preferences and gives up his goals and if someone comes up to him and says hey, you know, can you help me do this? He’d just say yes even if he didn’t want to and that was the way he started to live. And so it’s made me start to think about where do our goals come from? Like why is it that we, you know, not — it’s fine to want to lose weight or it’s fine to want to make money and all these things — the great things in life, but a lot of the — well I don’t know, maybe a — some of the time, at least, these are driven by these needs and we wanna be someone or — driven by sort of an egoist need or a, you know, insecurity in us where there is — there’s also goals that might come from a desire to express ourselves. Like I’ve been thinking about this, it’s a bit like dancing. When you’re dancing you’re not really trying to get to the end of the song, you dance to express some kind of sort of energy or something inside you. It’s not to do anything other than to simply express that. And so this is where it’s interesting is what I wanted to ask was why or how do you come up with these, I don’t know, you might not even think this matters, but how do you figure out what to do? So what to apply these 5 pillars to? Cause you got to apply it to something that’s driven by this, “Oh I feel bad about myself so I’m gonna lose weight,” but if you don’t fix the core underlying emotional issue — losing the weight may or may not help. If you’re not — do you understand what I mean? Craig Ballantyne: Absolutely. So I’m gonna answer that in two ways. First of all, you know, we’ll talk about that meaningful incentive. And so people at the start of the year, in most cases, they’ll say, “Oh I want to lose 10 pounds this year.” And that — combined with that time of year will get you through the first 2 weeks, right? You know 2 weeks of you’ll have motivation enough to do almost anything, but because it’s just this goal of losing 10 pounds it doesn’t really mean anything to somebody. And so that’s when people drop out. Now how do we figure out what really matters? And that comes down to what season of life you are in. And I learned this from a good friend of mine whose name is Luciano Del Monte who — he’s a pastor and the father of Vince Del Monte who, you know, has sold a lot of information about building muscle on the internet. So Vince’s dad, Luciano, said to me, “Craig people are in a season of life and what that means is we need to go and take a look at our priorities in life and figure out whether we’re in a season of health, wealth, family or personal development.” And so, for example, if someone is 55 years old and listening to this interview and they’ve built a nice career and they’re kids are off to college and they’re relationship is good they’ve probably let their health go. And so, you know, they’re 20 pounds overweight, they got, you know, pre-diabetes — something like that. They’re in a season of health and so, they need to wake up. And instead of writing or doing whatever you and I do first thing in the morning they need to focus on their health. So it might be preparing meals, that might be getting some exercise, and so that person is in a season of health. They’re gonna build their goals around that, they’ve got a meaningful incentive and it’s also gonna help them build their vision for their life. And so that’s one example. Now someone else, who might be closer to your age John, who might have a fiancé, who might say, “Oh we’re gonna start a family in 2 years,” that person’s gonna be in a season of wealth building because they need to go and make money to buy the house, to take care of the kids, take care of their spouses, gonna be awful work for a couple months. So that person needs to be focused. Number one priority — get up and make money whether it’s figuring out what to say on sales calls or to, you know, get new clients or to do whatever it is they need to be making money. Now they’re not gonna let their relationships suffer, they’re not gonna let their health suffer, but they’re gonna be put off to the side a little bit as they focus on their wealth building priority. And they’re gonna build a meaningful incentive around that. And then someone who’s my mom’s age, you know, she’s got her kids out of the house, you know, she’s financially secure, she’s got her health — doing well enough. And so she is in this phase of volunteering and helping other people. And so she’s gonna get up first thing in the morning and after she has breakfast she’s gonna, you know, organize her volunteering schedule and check in with all the people that are supposed to be doing the volunteering, you know, taking this shift and that shift. And so everyone’s in a season of life and they’re gonna build their 5 Pillars around that, they’re gonna build their rules for living around that, they’re gonna build their structure for sleeping around that, they’re gonna build their vision for their life around what season of life they are in right now. John McIntyre: I really like that. I’ve read a lot about this topic and I haven’t heard someone say it like that. I mean the hard thing, I think, is like these days — I’m just reading a book right now by Cal Newport called “Deep Work” and he mentions this a lot. Craig Ballantyne: Oh yeah. John McIntyre: You’ve read it, yeah? Craig Ballantyne: Well I’m a big fan of Cal and he’s like the angel on your shoulder where it’s like, you know, or maybe not an angel on your shoulder, but I mean that’s the kind of guy you would look to as — I would call him a virtual mentor. Like what would Cal do? You know like right now, would he be, you know, how would he focus and I look to him as a role model. I’ve never interacted with him. We do publish his stuff at Early to Rise because it is such great thinking. And I do take a lot of inspiration from it, but sorry to interrupt on that. John McIntyre: No, no it’s fine. He mentions this idea of like social media especially Facebook. So I probably spend, I don’t know exactly how much right now, but I — social — Facebook’s probably the main social media site I’m on — probably for most people. And the challenge with these sites is that we spend all day being, hopefully not all day, but big part of the day being bombarded with this image just of how great everyone else’s life is whether they’re losing weight or they’re getting married, they’re having a kid, they’re doing volunteering. And so one of the challenges that — and it’s not just that. It’s also — today with the amount of opportunities, you know, could be career opportunities, could be different diets we could go on, do we wanna, you know, if you’re guard you wanna bulk up. Do you want to get lean; do you wanna get, you know, really big like a body builder? You just wanna get kinda, you know, more like just athletic. There’s all these options that we have and plus it’s compounded by social media where all these other cool things that people are doing and so, we’re being, you know, hit by these fummel [?], fear of missing out, and so that’s part of the challenge, I think, is figuring out what do you actually want versus what do you just think you want because, well, you know would be cool to be as ripped as that friend of yours. You know be married and having that baby like that — those friends or whatever. Craig Ballantyne: Absolutely and so, John, to go back to the inspiration for my book, it’s based on stoic philosophy on Epictetus and the teachings he has. And it’s actually built on what I call the “3 C Formulas”. I interpreted his teachings which is control what you can, cope with what you can’t, and concentrate on what counts. So we control our mornings, we cope with the chaos of the world in the afternoon with the 5 Pillars and we concentrate on what counts in the evening with our vision. And so, you know, I’m a big fan of just cutting things. I mean I just can’t, you know, keep up with everything in the world. Eventually you have to draw the line somewhere. I mean you can’t have 9,000 friends on Facebook and keep up with all of them. You have to decide which ones are gonna be most important to you and which ones you’re gonna keep up with. And then you just kinda have to say, “You know what? I’m just have to let my interest in all these other people kinda wane because I literally can’t read Facebook updates from 900 people a day.” I mean you just can’t do that and get ahead in life. And there’s the quote from Warren Buffett that the difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything. And so most people think of Warren Buffett, they see this old man at, you know, his annual event or they see him on TV a little bit. But he actually spends 90% of his work day reading. All he does is read annual reports from companies. And everyone thinks, “Oh he’s got this great life, he’s a billionaire,” he reads annual reports which is boring as saw dust 90% of his day because he knows what really matters. And so, you know, another example is like Michael Phelps. Everybody would like to have, you know, 16 gold medals or whatever he’s won, but nobody wants to spend 10 hours a day in the pool. But listen if you want to succeed you have to know where you’re line is, you have to know when enough is enough — so if you want to make $100,000 a year — you can have a much more leisurely life than somebody who wants to have an income of $1 million a year. You have to realize though at $100,000 a year that you’re gonna sacrifice things compared, I mean obviously it’s not a huge sacrifice — $100,000 a year, but you know rela — you know respective to the person who’s making $1 million you can’t be jealous of the fact they have a brand new Tesla and you don’t, you have a 5 year old car. And if you’re okay with that, you know, going back to the stoic philosophy, we can only control our thoughts, our words, and our deeds. So if somebody buys something we control whether we’re happy for them or whether we’re envious of them. And if you’re on social media it’s gonna be much, much more difficult to be able to overcome all the envy that is naturally, you know, inhuman. And so if you have all these things coming to you and bombarding you it’s gonna be tough to control your emotions. And so you have to just cut things off and you have to say, “Listen I’m gonna stay in touch with these 10 people, they are my core circle of 10 people. I’m just not gonna pay attention to all these other updates. I’m gonna contact them on a regular basis. I’m gonna stay in touch with other people — if somebody emails me I’m not gonna ignore them, but I just can’t, you know, be on social media 24 hours a day keeping up with 900 people. And I’m gonna dedicate 4 hours a day to writing because this is what I do. I have to get my message out there to the world and change people’s lives.” I mean you could go on in Facebook and go back and forth with somebody for 30 minutes or you could send, you know, write an article that could be read by 5,000 — 10,000 people. And so which makes a bigger impact on the world? And if that matters to you, making an impact on the world matters to you, then you should better spend that 30 minutes. And so really it comes down to what’s called “introspection”. Taking a look at your life objectively and figuring out what you’re doing. Right now is that the right thing for your right life, right now? And that’s the biggest decision you should be make — or the decision you should be making all day every day. Is this second coffee the right decision for my right life right now? Is this third glass of wine the right decision for my right life right now? Is going out salsa dancing ’til 11 ‘o clock at night the right decision for my right life right now? And in some cases darn right it’s gonna be! You know staying up ’til 4 ‘o clock in the morning when you’re 21 years old in a beach party in Thailand is the right decision for your right life. When you’re 35 years old it’s not — probably. And so you have to make these decisions properly at all the right times and you always have to be thinking about this and so, I’ve ranted and rambled on a lot here John. John McIntyre: [Laughter]. Craig Ballantyne: I hope it’s given some clarity to people because I thought about this a lot. You know I’m a 41 year old guy so; I’ve got a little bit of — a few years on a lot of people listening to this. And I just want to say people use your time wisely no matter what age you’re at. John McIntryre: Yeah, I mean, one thing I’ve been thinking about lately is this idea of tradeoffs and that we’re often not aware that we’re making each other [?]. When I was in Berlin I started thinking about, you know, I’m in Berlin spending a certain amount of money, you’re living in a certain type of place — all that. And, you know, I thought — I was saying, “Oh I’m choosing to be here it’s great. It’s —” what I wasn’t thinking about was all the other stuff I could’ve been doing which may or may not of been, you know, been something that I would’ve rather been doing or whatever. And so, okay, you know one of the things I sacrificed was coming back to Thailand, for example. So staying in Berlin meant sacrificing Thailand. Coming to Thailand meant sacrificing Berlin and obviously, you know, by just you going to Berlin or Thailand — I’m also sacrificing being in say Australia, from where I’m from. Craig Ballantyne: Right. John McIntyre: And so it’s interesting, you know, of choosing to have that third glass of wine than you were choosing not to have that early morning tomorrow when you feel great or if you’re choosing to skip the gym and watch TV, you choose — you know at the same time you’re making the choice not to be fit or to a, you know, to a road to your self-discipline and things like that. And we often don’t — we sort of put these tradeoffs out of our mind cause their uncomfortable in the moment, but it’s sort of through the introspection, that you mentioned, — when we think about it then we can make a proper decision about what we actually want to do cause we’ve sort of looked at the options, you know, squarely in the eye. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah and one thing I’ll add to people, you know, this whole concept of a bucket list has become quite popular, but the bucket list is like the shotgun approach to life. I mean if you got 50 things on your bucket list you’re gonna be chasing these things — I mean do they really matter? Do you really need to go and bungee jump in New Zealand? I mean do really, really, really, really need to do that? I mean sure you could put it on your bucket list, but you know at the end of your life are you gonna die and you know be on your deathbed and think, “Oh man if I had only gone to New Zealand and bungee jumped,” no what you’re gonna think is, “You know there’s these core people, I wish I spent more time with.” That’s what most people are gonna think at the end of their life. “I wish I spent more time with these core people,” and maybe there was a couple of experiences they wished they had, but it’s not this 50 bucket list items. And so you got to cut back and cut back and cut back and say, “These are the things I’m gonna do in my life and these are the people I’m gonna spend my life with because this is what really matters to me.” And that’s what people need to do is tighten it up. I mean sure you should have some great experiences on there, but you need to tighten it up and so there’s not 41 things. It’s like people that set 30 goals for the year, you’re gonna do a poor job — John McIntyre: [Laughter]. Craig Ballantyne: — on all 30 versus a person who has 3 goals. They’re gonna conquer all 3 and they’re gonna get better at 30 other things. And they’re gonna be at a much better place than the person who had 30 goals. John McIntyre: Right. I feel like we could talk about this stuff forever, but we need to wrap it up. Craig Ballantyne: I know, I know. John McIntyre: Before we sort of do wrap it up let’s talk about Blacksmith Camp briefly. Tell me about that. Craig Ballantyne: Yeah so Blacksmith Camp is where you and I met, John, it’s something that we are now on our seventh year. So we started this in 2010 I believe. It was started by my friend, Simon Black, from sovereignman.com and my business partner here in Denver, Matt Smith, and we do this for young people generally between the ages of 18 and 30. We have 50 students, I think, every year from about 35 different countries. We teach them entrepreneurship, little bit of liberty talk — libertarian type politic talk. Basically just about helping people, your age John, get their freedom. Get their freedom in life, get out of the system, if they want to, realize that they don’t have to live in Podunk, Iowa or Ohio or where ever you grew up, that there’s a big world out there. You know we get people from Zimbabwe, Tajikistan, all these countries and a lot of people we never heard of. It’s — I mean you’ve built incredible relationships at the event you went to, right? John McIntyre: I think it was amazing for the time and the place — cause you got to be under 25, right? Craig Ballantyne: Yeah, I mean, we get it up to about 30 now, but I mean there’s just so many amazing people doing such amazing things — people that have sold tech companies at age 25, I mean, it blows my mind. It’s just unbelievable what kids, you know, and I say that affectionately. Kids these days are — John McIntyre: [Laughter]. Craig Ballantyne: — and I mean I’ve — some of my dearest friends and some of my employees and business partners have come through the Blacksmith Camp and so, this year we’ve filled up the camp, but people can go to blacksmithcamp.com or sovereignacademy.org and find out — watch the video, find out more about the camp. They can go to sovereignman.com and learn more about Simon Black and if they want to meet amazing people and see other people who are just doing awesome things and who have that same freedom and success mindset then they should be there. So I do have to run John, but that’s what I’ll say about the camp and it just is my favourite part of the year because I love hanging around ambitious young people. John McIntyre: Absolutely and me too. I think it’s one of the best places to go and build a peer group if you’re — just to be young upstart trying to go somewhere so, we’ll let’s call it here then. What — say if people want to learn more about you, learn about the book, where should they go and do that? Craig Ballantyne: They can get the book on Amazon or they can get the full kit and watch a little video about it at perfectdayformula.com and see all the amazing marketers and business owners that have used the kit to make more money and have more success in life. And it’s really fantastic there, and then they can join me at craigvalentine.com or earlytorise.com. John McIntyre: Perfect. I’ll have links to all that in the shownotes at themcmethod.com. Craig thanks for coming on the show! Craig Ballantyne: Yeah really great to speak with you again John. Hopefully we catch up again in person very soon. The post Episode #137 – Craig Ballantyne on How To Own Your Day & Control Your Destiny (practical steps & advice) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.

How would you like to learn several ninja secrets to gaming search engine recommendation algorithms (so you can sell more of your products at fractions of the effort)? Alex is not your run-of-the-mill SEO consultant. During his software engineer days. He was not content with sitting there in a corner all day.. ..coding for the man. Instead, he tinkered on his own apps. And tinkered away he did. Soon after his spare-time app building obsession and a few app failures out of the way,  Alex learned what it takes. Today his business apps are number one on the Android marketplace… Sitting on TOP of major brands and businesses. Learn how to do the same with your products. Learn how to make more money with a lot LESS effort (and maybe avoid paying for traffic altogether once you can game SEO like Alex does). Bottom line – don’t break the camel’s back and instead go for what everyone else is NOT doing. ANY of the other search engines outside of google are able to bring you floods of traffic.   In this episode, you’ll discover: why niche and platform are the only 2 things you should have in mind when choosing your new business venture how to hack SEO algorithms and tap into unseen profits (soar past your competitors who actually own the top keywords on Google) Alex’s unique strategy to sneak into Google ranking (a benefit to building your business on a large search engine platform like Udemy) how to get started if you’re a new online entrepreneur (it’s the part about deer hunting) Alex’s tricks to tackling SEO on NON Google search engines (and why he does it this way) how SEO will only ever give you as much traffic that is searched for that one keyword (learn where the real traffic comes from…. AKA The Recommendation Algorithm.  advanced strategies to get search engine algorithms favoring your YOUR product (when you’re getting recommended you don’t really see it, but the benefits are INSANE) Mentioned: The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing – Themcmethod.com/udemy Problemio.com (Alex’s website) Alex’s Courses Alex’s discounts and coupons Intro and outro backing music: Forever More by CREO   Raw transcript: Download PDF transcript here. John McIntyre: It’s John McIntyre here, The Autoresponder Guy; I am here with Alex Genadinik. Now Alex reached out to me actually a few weeks ago about putting an Udemy course together on email marketing and so, we’ve decided to partner and put together a whole how to, you know, how to basically make money every time you send an email. A course that’s gonna be on Udemy. It’s gonna be a quite – a – it’s gonna be pretty comprehensive. Now this podcast really isn’t about that. What we’re gonna do is – I wanted to dive into some of what Alex does coz he does some pretty amazing SEO stuff and he even has some almost like ninja hacks to game recommendation algorithms which I think he’s been using on Udemy to sell – I think he has 60, 000 students or something incredible like that. So he’s very good at SEO, but not just SEO it’s, you know, understanding how to gain that recommendation algorithm, how to sell more products on Udemy, it’s really interesting stuff like that, that you don’t really – you don’t usually hear about especially from your run of the mill, you know, SEO consultant that you know all they do you know is build a few links and send you sign up. So here we are today, I’m here with Alex. Alex how you doin mate? Alex Genadinik: I’m doing great John. Thank you for having me on. Thank you for all the hard work you do for putting together the podcast and I’m excited to share my strategies with your audience. John McIntyre: Awesome, awesome, cool! So I mean like I said we’re doing the course, now we’ll talk about that at the end you know we’ll go through sort of what it’s gonna be about and where they can get more information, all of that, but right now let’s dive into – before we get into some of the like the nitty gritty advanced SEO and the recommendation algorithm and stuff like that, can you give the listener just some background like who are you and what do you do? Alex Genadinik: Oh yeah. So I started off as a software engineer and you know I got a computer science degree, but when I worked as a software engineer for a company it was always – always it felt so limiting, right? Because I was kinda spending my time just making other dreams – people’s dreams come true like I would walk by the CEO’s office and he’s job always seemed more fun and I was like, “I want that job,” but like you know – but as a programmer they just wanted you to sit in a corner and like just go and you know it was a little – a lot boring. So you know always – I was tinkering with stuff like in the morning, in the evening, on the weekends I was like trying to build my own things and of course they would you know – programmer you know like nothing of the business so, you would fail all the time. And it just would fail like miserably, but over time I started like learning you know little bit more about business which is like really a mysterious thing for like if you’re a software engineer. And things started failing less and less and then you know at one point I started making successful products with my first special products were like the business planning apps on Android and now the iPhone and for the last 4 years they’ve been like the number 1 – if you search for the word business on Android in fact for the last few years it’s been like the top, top app like literally number 1 and behind me is a bunch of million dollar companies – I laugh at them, but in those apps they’ve gotten like over a million dollars all together now and then after the apps you know because they were business apps I was seeing all the issues people were struggling with and that sort of formed my books and now you know fast forward a little bit, I have like over 15 books on Amazon. And then I started answering people’s questions on the apps in video which you know now I have like 8 YouTube channels with like a million views. And that really led me to – the YouTube experience really was a training ground for me and led me to Udemy which is where like you know you make more premium video premium educational content and basically online courses and I really fell in love with that because the fantastic platform and the students really loved you know learning and I – actually I love sharing what I know and really I love helping people prevent the mistakes that I was making when I was just learning business coz a lot of the mistakes I would make later on, when I would look back at it I was like, “Wow if only I had an adviser or somebody like only in like a 5 minute conversation, they could have like prevented me from this like 3 months mistakes.” And so now I’m really happy that I’m able to help others avoid those kinds of mistakes in their businesses just by providing like you know really sometimes common sense, but sometimes events you know business and marketing advice. You know online app, app books, courses and YouTube so, that’s pretty much how I started and where I am now. John McIntyre: Awesome so, you know it’s interesting, I think, because you mentioned one thing that like programmers aren’t you know not usually good at business, I’m not usually marketers. The thing is there’s a lot of like – you know there’s a decent amount of you know I think you know fairly successful entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast, but there’s also a segment that are beginners or they’re wantrepreneurs or they still have a job and they’ve heard about, in my case, it’s gonna be copywriting and you know so my story was I was in the Philippines and that was where I sort of got my chops, but you know some people you know they’re working in New York, they’re working in a western city in Sydney or where ever they’ve got a job, they want to quit, they want to have this lifestyle, and so they focus on marketing, but – here’s the interesting thing is most people – it’s you know it’s funny that in the internet marketing eco-chamber most people who are really good at marketing don’t make any money and so I think what’s really cool about what you’ve done is you’re not coming from a marketing background. You’re coming from the technical programming background and you’ve managed to figure things out and get some pretty incredible results. Alex Genadinik: Yeah thanks. Yeah actually the engineering degree does help a lot especially kind of like decoding – trying to decode the Google algorithms and the different algorithms of the like different websites. I think that just mindset actually ended up helping you know and just like kind of like more analytical I don’t know if I’m more analytical, but something about it made it a little bit more natural for me and it definitely also it helped me because I was able to actually make the apps whereas a lot of people who – they don’t have like the engineering degree. They struggle with the apps or making products because they have to outsource and dump a lot of money and then most of the time they’ll be at a lost, you know? In my case I had to make like – there’s almost 200 iterations of my app you know different things I’ve tried with them. And that’s just my main app. And if I had to outsource and hire anybody that would – it would’ve been like over $100,000 or like – so that’s kinda how I have a little bit of advantage coming from the tech. John McIntyre: Yeah, okay. So anyhow if I was listening to this I – you know I guess I technically am listening to this coz I’m right here, but if I was a listener right now I’d be wondering, “How the hell do I get a million downloads,” or, “How the hell do I you know hack a you know a SEO algorithm so I can you know ultimately make money? And you know whether to quit my job and travel or whether it’s you know grow my business or double the business? Whatever it is I want to know how to do it.” So where do we start? Alex Genadinik: So I think people don’t necessarily need to get into apps, I think people need to get into something at least where they’re comfortable with and especially if people are first time entrepreneurs. There’s a very famous blog post by Mark Suster you know – I don’t know if you’ve ever come across of it, but deer hunting – and it talks about how for the first time entrepreneurs should go deer hunting and for people who are you know into animals’ rights – I’m also into animals’ rights, I’m not in – I’m not into hunting, but that’s just a blog post. And it really talks about like you can hunt rabbits, deer, or elephants, right? And if you kill rabbits they’re easy to kill, but there’s no meat there. And if you kill elephants they’re really hard to kill, right? So if you’re a first time entrepreneur you should try to find an area like that’s a deer. It’s not that hard to kill, but there’s a lot of meat there and that’s what I’m talking – and what I mean by that is kind of like there’s enough money to be made there, but the competition isn’t that insane, right? If you try to go, “Oh I love travel why don’t I try to go after the travel industry?” well that’s an elephant and you probably and everyone [?] else. So you wanna go with something – after something smaller, but whatever you end up deciding on choosing in what – you should think about also you know the niche, but also the platform, right? And a lot of people want – people first start out the first thing that they learn about marketing is like – and literally what – when I – on my apps coz people enter like their marketing plans and literally like 80% of the people they enter the same marketing plan which is like the newbie – “I’m gonna promote my business with Facebook, Twitter, business cards and flyers.” And that’s what like almost, to my surprise, like almost 80% of the people literally you know they enter that, but as soon as they get a little bit more savvy they get into like, “Oh I’m gonna do you know social media and SEO.” And then they kinda start doing the Google searches you know which is just like a mountain to climb in almost any niche at this point. And I think you know if I had done that with my business, right? Like my business is about business and marketing, right? I would never rank for these firms. Business planning? Forget it! Starting a business? Forget it! Right it’s just like in a – so my business would be dead. And so I think the first thing that I’d like to get people to think about is to realise that there are – almost everything online is a search engine, right? And I think back in the day that meant Yahoo! or Bing, but really what I would mean is like Amazon is a search engine, mobile app stores are a search engine, iTunes are search engine, Yelp is a search engine if you’re business is a local business. Almost any place. You know YouTube is a search engine so, almost any place online – a huge part of the discovery happens through search and I think that in – not I think, but it’s true that in all those search engines you can – the actual I see on the ranking which is how you people can get the traffic is infinitely easier than if they did it on Google search so, like for example my app is like number 1 on Android for the search business, right? And has been for the last 2 years there’s like no way I would break into the top 10, even, for you know on Google search for that. And so I ended up finding like easier hills to climb in terms of SEO. And it’s important to keep in mind that any of the search engines they can give you, if you’re a small business, a flood of traffic. They’re all gigantic. And then you know what else would kinda like to tell people is like don’t – like don’t – like SEO is great, but don’t just focus on SEO because what most people don’t even realise is that the real volume of traffic actually does not always come from SEO and you can get even more traffic if you can leverage the recommendation algorithms, right? Because on SEO you’re only gonna – even if you’re number 1for some search term you’re never gonna get more traffic than people are searching for that search term. So there’s always a limit. Whereas if you leverage the recommendation algorithm for you know any website that website is gigantic so, for example if you’re on Amazon and if you’re recommended you know people who bought this book also bought your book. Well if your book appears next to some of the top books there are intimately more sales you can make than if you’re ranking for whatever keywords you’re after. Even if you’re keywords are pretty juicy. So – and most people don’t really think that. John McIntyre: Hmmm. Alex Genadinik: People just stop at SEO, but I also want to get people to notice that whatever there are search engines online these secondary non-Google search engines? Like Google does not have a recommendation algorithm, but almost everything else does. Amazon does, YouTube does, Udemy does, like you mentioned, you know even the Yelp does to a lesser degree. There is – once you get the – those websites to – once you get those websites recommendation algorithm which would favour your product you’re just gonna get a flood of traffic. You won’t even know where they’re coming from because they don’t tell you and that’s why most people don’t quite yet – there – it’s not a visual thing. Most people don’t even see that their product is getting recommended next to other products. And that’s why it never registers with – in the most people’s minds. Like SEO is visual. You can see your ranking; you check where you see where you are. What – when you’re getting recommended you actually don’t see it unless you sort of know to aim for it, you know how to try to manipulate it and then you check up on it. And – I mean I call it in advance strategy. I mean in marketing like nothing is rocket science like it’s not like brain surgery, but I – most people don’t do it I kinda call it events and I think this is something that like most people don’t even – not only they don’t do it, but they don’t like even think to do it. John McIntyre: Hmm. That’s fascinating you know coz most people are thinking about how do I rank first? I would say search term, but yeah you’re right like if you get ranked for the recommendation algorithm you get to capture all the traffic to Udemy or the potential. It goes way, way, way up. The same with Amazon and all these sites so, all right, so in this case it sounds like – so in the – you know in the bill we’re trying to rank a website in Google this isn’t really gonna apply to them, but it’s almost like you know if you want to learn how to get traffic and perhaps an easy way in trying to rank your site in the search engine is gonna be creating a product that you can sell on a platform like Amazon or Udemy or something that has a recommendation algorithm and then figuring out how to rank coz that might be creating a course on Udemy and then someone will say, “Well you got to market it and you know that is a bit of a challenge,” but if you could figure out how to get the – to gain the algorithm you could probably make more money on Udemy with a lot less effort and you don’t have to spend any money on paid traffic. Alex Genadinik: Right and I’ll tell you even a further point that the you know the – you know Google SEO – the reason small companies like our can’t rank is because Google SEO Algorithm at the moment strongly prefers very authoritative domains. So you know stuff like from cnn.com, even if it’s almost not related, it will outrank you. Just because they’re cnn.com, right? So – but Udemy and YouTube and Amazon and all those places they are the authoritative websites so, it’s actually easier to rank in Google with your Udemy course, your YouTube video, your Amazon page – right your Amazon listing. Those things will rank more likely higher than your website so, it’s actually a nice way to sink into Google. And you can do SEO for those pages. The links you might deal with the social media you might share. You can do them – that for your listings on Udemy, YouTube, Amazon, and those listings will actually often rank above your actual website. So that’s like another added benefit of building a business on these large platforms coz you also get that SEO benefit. John McIntyre: Okay. Alex Genadinik: From Google. John McIntyre: Okay so let’s say that – let’s say that I’m convinced. Let’s say that I’m – like all right I’m sold, I want to do this, I’m not gonna create my website, I’m gonna go create a course on Udemy or Amazon or something like that. What – how do I do it? What’s the – how does this magic work? Alex Genadinik: Right so, you always have to build a product that’s competitive in quality, right? Because whatever it is, you might write a book or you might create a course, all of these websites, let’s call them “search engines” they track – when your product goes live they track signals and signals are typically engagement signals and social signals like engagement signals are like you know our people you know, if it’s Udemy, they track like are people making it their way through the course, right? What’s the course completion rate? Are people quitting the course at some point, right? Obviously people are quitting earlier than competitive courses then that’s a plus 1 for the competitive courses rank. Then there are the social things like reviews, right? And diff – you know user gigantic everywhere. Yelp, Amazon, Udemy. If you can… So you can have these signals that these search engines collect and they’re all very similar across the board coz they can’t be different because they’re all search engines, they all work on same principles just different search engines track slightly different… John McIntyre: So what are these principles? Alex Genadinik: …things… John McIntyre: Coz it sounds like – coz you’re a technical guy, right? So maybe for you – you know coz I’ve seen this like I’m somewhat technical, but probably more so… Yeah I’m a musician back – you know back – and I think I’m very creative. So I’m like – I mean I kinda get it, but when you say that … Alex Genadinik: Yeah. John McIntyre: …all search engines are sort of the same thing well what do you mean? Alex Genadinik: So like they track – they have these clues that they collect, right? About how people are using your product and they collect that about your product and about competitive products, right? So, for example, with my apps they collect – so the clues are you know, like I mentioned, they’re reviews, right? And the quality of the reviews and then on apps it’s like another issues you know, “Am I getting the numbers up daily downloads? And out of those downloads how many people are keeping the app? How many people are deleting the app? How many people are opening it daily? How many times are they opening it daily? For how long?” So all those things are clues that the search engine – that’s you know – that’s the app store collects, right? John McIntyre: Hmmm. Alex Genadinik: But if you look at Amazon they’re almost identical because the reviews are there, right? The number of purchases – so the number of total engagements you know that’s a signal that they collect and also they you know they can track at the Kindle how many pages people are reading, right? So if people are reading a larger percentage of your book compared to a competitor’s books that’s a big plus for you. Same with Amazon – sorry same with YouTube, right? If people are watching your videos longer than competitor videos that’s a big plus for you. So across the board they just want to track are people engaging with your product longer? That’s a big you know it’s not the definitive signal, but it’s one of the very strong ones because people are quitting early. That’s a bad, bad sign, right? John McIntyre: Hmm. Alex Genadinik: And it’s something – it’s hard for you to manipulate. Like reviews? You can manipulate them you know if you’re a marketer you know you can manipulate reviews by asking your friends, having you know black cat’s strategies whatever, but that more like let’s say grey area strategies, but there’s engagement signals that’s really – it’s actually comes from the design of your product. It’s comes from the quality of the product that you create because if they product is good people are gonna go through it. If the product is not good they’re gonna quit it and that’s – so you see all these things – so what I call number of engagements which is purchases, downloads on the app stores, views on YouTube, purchases on Udemy those I call like engagements and reviews and total engagements which is a little bit confusing coz I’m using the word engagements and engagement in different ways. But – and also the acceleration of this so, sometimes if you’re getting downloads or views faster than the competitor that’s a big plus for you, right? John McIntyre: Hmm. Alex Genadinik: And so sometimes what I try to do, and here is a kind of an advanced key wording tip, coz again all of these things are search engines, right? So key wording is very important. So in one headline – in one title which usually the most key word – the key words in the title are usually the heaviest weighted I try to rank – I try to aim at multiple variations of keywords. So like business plan is a good example, right? Business – in one headline I might say, “Business Plan: Learn How to Write a Business Plan and something, something business planning today,” or engage with – so I kind of – basically I have different permutations you know how to write a business plan you know whatever. Like yes – I don’t know if that was clear. Like maybe I’ll try another one like I have a Facebook marketing, right? John McIntyre: Hmm. Alex Genadinik: I have like a Facebook marketing video that’s been ranking on YouTube for Facebook marketing which is like a really competitive term. And so the – in that title I ranked for like Facebook marketing, Facebook marketing strategies, how to promote your business on Facebook. And so basically I put a lot of different combinations of potential key words into the title and so, what that does is I get views from all those keywords whereas the competitive videos only get views from one keyword. John McIntyre: Hmm. Alex Genadinik: So my engagement – my total views are always more than the competitors. John McIntyre: Right okay. Alex Genadinik: And because of that, yeah, and also the secondary thing because of that over time that’s – that actually influences the recommendation algorithm and Facebook starts putting me on better and better other videos like, “Hey people come watch this video – also likes Alex’s video,” which gives me even more views. And that’s really the way to leverage these is to create a competitive product, SEO it so that you can get a lot of traffic from different keywords that you’re targeting, not just 1 keyword, and that acceleration of views or purchases or whatever, that’s gonna trigger – it’s not the only thing, but it’s one of the strong triggers of getting eventually recommended by this website which really is all the best worlds, right? And by the way that ultimately – that recommendation? That also helps you rank higher because you’re getting more views and more engagement and more overall you know everything, right? More purchases more views and then you get propagated to be number 1 and when you are in number 1 for something like number 1 for good for some topic, number 1 video for some topic, that’s the thing that gets put into actual Google search. So over time you could truly make a competitive grade product – whatever it is course, video, a book, you will get this – your traffic from that search engine, like say from Amazon or YouTube. You will get their recommendation algorithm traffic from that search engine, but also this will put you in the best position to rank in the actual Google search more than your website would do that. John McIntyre: Cool okay so, to break this down coz I know we’re coming up on time here. To break this down into a step by step process, it sounds like step 1 is basically create like build shit that matters and build something that’s actually of value whether it’s writing a book or creating a course or anything. Whatever it is you’re creating make sure it’s just valuable. And then that – having a valuable product makes the rest easier which is pretty basic business concept, but so then it’s a case of making sure you’ve got a keywords in the title you know making sure – trying to get like a bump of traffic at the start coz if you do that you get a momentum – sort of like you get a little bit of an edge and then you’re authority in terms of the algorithm grows – if I – it sort of starts of outpace your competitors and even if you’re in the .10% ahead that 10% compounds over time eventually to the point where no one can catch up. Alex Genadinik: Yeah and you do amazing defensibility coz, exactly, it’s very hard to build to jump over you and you just get entrenched in your number 1 position. John McIntyre: Awesome cool, okay well that’s – I think that’s a pretty – I think it’s a good little episode. I think someone could take this and create a product, as long as it’s good, and apply some of these concepts and probably do pretty well at it. And if you got an email list and you know how to write some emails and you probably do if you’ve been listening to this podcast, you can do even better because you know how to drive traffic from your email list through your course on Udemy or on Amazon or whatever it is which is gonna create that edge so, let’s wrap that portion up there. Now let’s talk about the product that you and me are putting together. Tell me a bit about – so since you’re the Udemy expert I know I’ve created the outline and what it’s gonna be about. Why don’t you tell me, tell the listener as well, why you wanted to do this and so, we can get them a little bit of an insight into your thinking behind it and why we decided to do this. Alex Genadinik: Well for me I’m always like the traffic guy. Like I know how to leverage SEO, I have a ton of courses on the social media, SEO you know all business accounts apps, but you know it’s funny because I, myself, I’ve been a little bit behind on email marketing. And I feel like it’s the perfect complement to the other courses that I have because you know email marketing is so amazing because you know in business a lot of people are always after the subscription model, right? The reoccurring revenue model, but it’s so hard to sign people up for that because you know people obviously they’re not stupid they know they’re gonna not use the product and like keep paying, but the closest thing to it is email marketing in a sense because people don’t have to sign up for a subscription or a paid subscriptions or anything, but like you can even – you can rechannel them time and time again. If you can engage them it’s almost like they’re subscribed to something you can sell to them time and time again and make thousands of percent more money from them. John McIntyre: Hmm. Alex Genadinik: So I find just doing a course on exactly how to engage them, exactly how to form the emails, exactly how to like you know you got to sign up and you know that sign up doesn’t answer your emails why not, you know? Like it’s so much work to actually get the person to sign up for your email and then they’re just dormant and they don’t open it. So I think this course was – I really wanted to do the course because I really wanted to open up that extra source of traffic, extra source of purchases which will, in turn, help to influence those – all those algorithms if you can get the army of your email subscribers to actually do what you need them to do. It’s almost like having like a marketing army for you every time you want something, every time you promote something, then you have your own list. And so that’s why, I mean, that that email marketing is so amazing. And I really wanted to do the course. John McIntyre: Okay cool. I mean you pretty much summarized it right there. Basically we’re creating a course on, obviously, email marketing. It’s called, with a tentative title, any way this might change I guess if we want to put keywords in there. The title I came up with was “The Ultimate Guide to Sending – ” let me actually bring out the whole thing. It’s “The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing” here’s the outline. “The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing” I think its how to grow your list, build your audience, make money every time you send an email. So just going to run through – I’m gonna do a pretty comprehensive run-through of everything that I know about email marketing that I’ve learnt from doing 130 episodes – over 130 interviews now on this podcast and in launching “ReEngager” which is a new ink on the wall [?]. Somewhat new eCommerce email marketing agency. And it’s already going to this course and then based on the feedback where we’re gonna try to put something together that after that, on specific topics that people want to learn. More about – there’s gonna be a – quizzes in there so you can refresh everything and make sure that you’re understanding it so, you know some cool engagement pieces and a bit of homework at the end of every section to keep you focused. And one of the cool things that I’ve got – I’m gonna mention there is – I had a product, ages ago, called “Stories That Sell” and that’s gonna be one of the modules – one of the sections in there so, you’re gonna talk about stores and break down the framework I developed called the HIPS Framework” which will show you how to write stories in your emails to help you to sell more products. Basically pretty straight forward so, we’re gonna have all that now the link – to learn more about the course – coz by the time this goes live, as in right now, as you’re listening to it. This course is probably gonna be live. Yeah check it out go to themcmethod.com/udemy U_D_E_M_Y. Okay so we’re gonna start – that’ll – I’ll set up that link so it redirects directly to the course page. And later on if we create a second, third, fourth, or when we create a second, third, and fourth course what we’ll do is we’ll update that link and that’ll take you to a landing page where you can look at all 3 or 4 or 5 courses or however many there are. So that is www.themcmethod.com/udemy U_D_E_M_Y to learn more about that. Now Alex before we go, if someone want to get in touch with you or learn more about you or check out your Udemy channel, I don’t know what you really call it, but where’s the best place for them to do all of that stuff? Alex Genadinik: You know I always suggest people email me, but my email is so brutal because it has my last name on it. And so my website is problemio.com it’s problem I_O.com which is, I guess, the easiest thing I have to spell, but so it’s basically easiest to – and all my – my email’s there you know you just go to the bottom and there’s contact agent. I’m always happy to hear from people and if people can remember my name it’s Alex Genadinik and if you just type in that into Google a million things come up. One of them is you know Udemy – my Udemy courses and I think if people can actually find the show notes of this podcast maybe there’ll be a link to all my courses and the discounts for them. So if you’re good at like finding, remember my name and spelling it, then there’ll be discounts for you. John McIntyre: Awesome. Alex Genadinik: But really it’s problemio.com it’s problem I_O.com and all my stuff is there especially go to the bottom contact us and I’m always happy to hear from people it’s my business is sort of predicated on helping people so, I love to hear from people and I welcome people to reach out. John McIntyre: Awesome so, I just went to Google and typed in Alex Genadinik so, it’s A_L_E_X it’s pretty easy. The surname is Genadinik so G_E_N_A_D_I_N_I_K. now if you search for that too you’re gonna find the number 1 result right here is your Udemy page. We’ve got linkedIn, there’s – looks like there’s something on Amazon which Twitter, then you got problemio – so basically you can either go to Google and type in Alex Genadinik or you could go to themcmethod.com, find the show notes, and I’ll have links to all of this. You know the Udemy page and problemio as well as themcmethod.com/udemy that’ll all be at the show notes as well. So we’ll cover all our bases in there there’s no way that you can’t find this so, I think we’re good. Are there any final words of wisdom? Alex Genadinik: I – you know I think the smartest thing, for me, I just realized, because you know I am like a SEO guy, I should’ve make, when people type into Google, Alex G that should bring up my name. You know in the suggestion box. John McIntyre: Yeah I know what you mean. I’m gonna check that. You should do that I mean that’s your recommendation algorithm for Google right? Alex Genadinik: Yeah I’ll make that. That’ll be such a good thing. Like Alex G that’s just me, you know? All you have to do is just Alex G that will solve all my last name problems. John McIntyre: All I’m seeing – Alex Grey comes up. Have you ever done this in Google? This is just a bit of fun at the end of the episode. Just go in and type in, “Alex is a – Alex is a…” Alex Genadinik: I’m doing that right now. John McIntyre: Do it right now – tell me what see it is. Alex Genadinik: I do come up – Alex G. I am there. John McIntyre: Really? Alex Genadinik: But now right now I’m like 1,2,3,4,5,6th,7th, 8th person. John McIntyre: Ah okay. I’m only seeing the first four, but if you say, “Alex is a…” you’re gonna see, “Alex is a poo.” I wonder what it says, “John is – ”. “John… Alex Genadinik: Alex is a dork. John McIntyre: “John is a doctor who does not make house calls.” Here we go, “John is a 6 year old with chronic serous otitis media. Treatment for his condition would be…” “John is a self-employed computer consultant…” Alex Genadinik: I think – for me it says, “John is awesome.” John McIntyre: I mean that’s pretty cool too. What did you do, John… ? “John McIntyre is a – ” nothing comes up. That surname doesn’t work. Anyway we – it’s just a bit of fun at the end of the episode. So yeah. Alex Genadinik: I think what – maybe this is messed up. I think it’s messed up, but if I just type Alex into Google I am number 4 like in the recommendation, but maybe that’s just because it’s for me here. John McIntyre: That’ll – yeah that’ll be because you’re logged in, it’s tracking your IP or cookies or… Alex Genadinik: But then I’m logged into something else, but I’m like in a browser room, but maybe it’s smarter than me. John McIntyre: They – I mean maybe. Maybe there’s some – maybe the ghost in that machine. Anyway we’ll wrap it up here. I’ll have links to all this in the show notes at the mcmethod and if you want to learn more about email marketing and how to make money every time you send an email, the best thing you could do is check out that Udemy course. And I’ll see you in there. Alex thanks for coming on the show man. Alex Genadinik: Thanks for having me, it was really fun. And I hope my strategies really help your audience. The post Episode #136 – Alex Genadinik on Gaming Search Engine Recommendation Algorithms To Rank (and bank) appeared first on Drop Dead Copy.