Copywriting Experts Panel

Hello there, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today is really special. We get to listen into a panel of elite copywriters. We're talking about Clayton Makepeace, Bond Halpert, Doberman Dan, and of course, Dan Kennedy, all hosted by Nick Louis. So tune in, listen, and we're gonna be talking about how much research they do when they're writing their copy. What changes have they seen? You know, is it useful to do peer reviews or when is it not useful? Finding a mentor in order to help you grow. So much. Make sure you listen in and pay attention.

Here we go.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

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Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

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His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Nick, why don't you come on up and welcome everybody else up to the stage for our copywriting panel? Let's go. Big hand.

We got everybody coming up. That's wonderful. We're going to have Dan. We're going to add— we've added Bon Halbert. Is that all right? Mr. Bon Halbert. We have Clayton McPease and Mr. Doberman Dan. So, what a good group. Welcome guys, thank you for doing this. Thank you all for being part of us. Um, I say we just jump to it.

Um, we'll put some—

we have questions from the panel, we have questions from the audience, and we have questions from people online who are live casting this. Um, so whoever feels like answering them, we'll just kind of jump in and we'll just rip off each other. So the first one is What changes have you recently seen in copy that converts?

I think the main thing that I've seen since the internet's come on is that it's no longer a one-trick pony. You know, in the old days it was great. You spent a month writing a direct mail piece and it did everything. You know, it got the prospect's attention, engaged them, it presented the problem or the opportunity, it presented the solution, it got them to buy. And now We're seeing a lot more skill at stretching that process out online and having a situation where you, you may convert them on page and maybe get a 30% ROI, 40% ROI. Right now our control is a little over 60% on page, and then you begin the relationship with the funnel and get to 100%. We're getting there in about 2, 3 weeks. So That allows you to look at each little component of the campaign and optimize them. And so analytics becomes more important. You know, we were, we were the superstars. We were the gods of direct response. The copywriters were, right? But now a copywriter without a great marketing department and good analytics people is useless because nobody is monitoring what works and how something can be improved. And, you know, Rosenthal and Gene Schwartz were both very much into continual improvement. This whole idea of quantum change through small improvements in your funnel. And we have that opportunity now, and we're seeing wonderful results because of it.

Great.

You know, the only thing I'd add, and I don't think this is really new, is I think that sense of urgency in getting people to move because, you know, as the inbox and the emails and everything is just filling up so greatly nowadays, and you're getting people who are doing funnels and they're used to 3 and 5 email sequences and everything, there's so much more that you have to do to like kick them off the fence. And things like timers came along and they really helped out a lot of stuff, but I wouldn't really say that it was new because sense of urgency has always been an important thing. You know, there's a famous phrase, which is delay is death in sales. You know, because as soon as somebody says, oh, I can put this down and come back to it later, life intervenes, they forget about everything. And so, like, one of the things I was talking about yesterday is I like to, you know, if I'm doing an email sequence, the— and like I said, this isn't super new, because when people first started with their email boxes, they were excited that they got email. There was only a couple coming in a day. You know, now you got so many coming in a day, and you get people trained by the previous content that you sent them. And so now what I like to do is do a sequence where it's, you know, curiosity first in the subject lines and stuff, benefit, and then really push sense of urgency in the last bit. But that's one of— I think it's more of a question of one of the things I see lacking that people could do a lot better with. And also, yeah, that was it.

That's, that's a good point. When you go home today or tonight, your email box, you got 167 emails waiting, you know, probably most from other people in this room, and myself included. You know, the overwhelm factor is huge, so you got to have constantly have that in mind when you're creating copy.

So, so for the sake of So for the sake of just being a problem, I'll take the contrarian side of the whole thing. So first of all, I don't really think anything's changed about copy per se. I think what's changed, which is really what Clayton was talking about, is the deployment of it. And I think that's an important point to make because otherwise it allows the idea that everything that came before 2012 is now antiquated and ought not be paid any attention to. And I think that's, you know, that's a dangerous misconception. It happens with movement from one media to the next. Oh, none of that's valid because now we're online or now we're doing 7-minute videos, or now we're, and so I think there's a deployment has changed a lot, and deployment changes a lot. Copy actually hasn't. You could go rouse Gene Schwartz out of his nap, and you could still get copy that would work. So that premise is to some extent a lazy premise, because— so it's almost like old Sales Management 101. Which, sales— old Sales Management 101 is the answer to every salesman's problem is talk to more people, right? Make more calls, make more presentations, talk to more people. Okay, so there's somebody who is dying to know how to blank, right? And so I have always argued that if it is at all possible to do so, deliver great copy to people who actually have a predisposition to having a high level of immediacy in their interest about it. So translating to sales, If you must cold prospect, have 3 questions you ask somebody that if they answer no to any of them, you say, "Nice meeting you," and you move the hell on, right? You don't try and interest them. You find susceptibility, and then you monetize it.

So that's why in our industry, advertorials have always been the key. You know, even in the mail, you know, people got sick and tired of getting too much mail. So what do you do? You go to them with a direct mail piece or a magalog that brings value to their life, that bribes them for reading this by giving them content that can improve their life in some way. And if you do that, you're going to get a better— you're going to get an audience. These people are going to read your stuff. And online, it's especially important because, you know, in the mail, you could send them something on Monday and send them something else on Friday. And they can't equate the two. They don't know both of those were from you. But online, especially on your house file when you're doing backend, becomes really important. And one of the things that we're doing that's bearing great results is, you know, you don't have to be a genius to do this stuff. You just look at the numbers, you know. You've got an 8% open rate on your email blast and you've got a 23% open rate on your editorial copy that you're sending out every day in your ezine. So what do you do? You turn your editorial copy into an advertorial. And so that editorial copy has links throughout it that can take them to other pages or other articles that sell them things. And so we're seeing a huge increase in response that way. Because they didn't come to you to get a bunch of junk mail. They came to you to get the content that brings value to their lives. So that's— advertorial, I think, is more important than ever online for that reason.

One thing I agree with him about is that the copy doesn't change it, it's the deployment. And one of the new things with deployment is the technology's allowing you to deliver immediately copy that's customized based on what they want. So you're setting up, you know, people got 4 main emotions about something, you know, that's kind of divvied up. And the minute that you have segmented them or tagged them, you know, you're immediately delivering copy that reinforces their feelings, reinforces their structure. And again, the copy hasn't changed one bit. But it is the deployment that has definitely changed.

Well, just think about when you, when you, when you go to somebody with an email that says, hey, buy something. And maybe it's an offer, maybe, you know, you've discounted your product, or there's some advantage to them to buying. You go to them with that in the morning, you go to them in the afternoon, or maybe at the same time in a split test with another email that basically gives them a tip or an idea that they can use right away to improve their lives in some way. Now they're going to be more likely to open your stuff in the future as well, right? So it has to do with building a business instead of just getting a response. It has to do with retention. And we often say there's no such thing as editorial copy. Because even if editorial copy doesn't have a pitch in it, it still is contributing to your renewal rate down the road if it's quality editorial.

So good point. You're always selling something. Even in the editorial, you're selling the relationship with the editor.

That's right. Or setting them up for the next sale. Remember that the purpose of all of this is to get them to know you, to like you, and to trust you. And all of those things happen when you bring value to their lives. So they're going to be— that's why we get 3 times the open rate on editorial copy as we do on email blasts. And so I'd just like to see more people do that instead of focusing on big promise advertising. Actually demonstrate it. When you give them good editorial, you're demonstrating your expertise. You're doing more than just bonding with them. You're showing them how smart you are and how important it is for you to be in their life. So—

I think we hit that one. Thank you. How much research do you guys do when you take on a project?

1/3.

1/3? I believe that you should divvy up the time. The process is, in my— the power is all in your research. It's in knowing the customer so well. The example I love to use is the Domino's Pizza campaign. When they did that, everybody at that time was The pizza delivery places were working on freshest ingredients, tastiest recipe. But the truth was, just knowing that the customer was absolutely sick and tired of not knowing when the pizza would arrive would allow them, regardless of the copy, to do well. You could have said 30 minutes or it's on us, half an hour or it's free, they were still going to start dominating the pizza delivery industry. And then the other third, I believe— this is just my personal philosophy. So if you have 30 days for a campaign, do 10 days in research. If you have 3 hours to get an email out, do an hour worth of research, even if it's just reminding you of the prospect that you know so well. And the second part, in my opinion, is, you know, you're developing the, the big idea, the unique hook idea, the unique hook, offer, or solution. And the solution can be a marketing solution, like how to get your advertising for half off, okay? And then that usually comes out of the research. But that ugly first draft, it's the fastest part. Everybody thinks copywriting is sitting down at a computer and going, what should I write?

It's not.

It's in the conversations you're having and seeing, "Oh, Doberman Dan just laughed really hard when I wrote that. That's, you know, emotionally sparked some emotion in him. I'm gonna use that in my copy." And then the last third should be spent editing. It should be smoothing that copy out to create the grease slide effect. And, you know, but that's my opinion on it. Now, as you get moving along and you specialize in a niche, the more you know and understand that, that prospect. You know what makes them tick. So that's why it's a lot easier for somebody who specializes in diet or supplements or something like that to write another winning supplement campaign, because they've spent a lot of that time. And that's also why, you know, they probably want to turn you down or charge more to switch to a different prospect, because, oh, wait a minute, you need— now I have to understand teenage girls?

So. There's danger in the latter guy, and I am one of them, because you can become derivative of yourself and stop doing homework before you write. And so that's just something to be aware of if you hire copywriters or if you write yourself. If you really do wind up writing 80, 90, 100% of the time in one genre, one product or service category, it's pretty easy for your mind to trick you into sloth because you'll just kind of recycle what you've already done without being particularly thoughtful about it. And see, to your point about knowing the customer, customer, 3 different companies selling diets. Yeah, there's commonalities between those customers, some obvious ones. They're fat. The big question is whether they care. But there's also differences. I mean, I did a lot of work for Weight Watchers, and I did work at Guthrie Wanker on Susan Powder's Stop the Insanity and Richard Simmons' Deal in me, Ellen. Those customers are all different. And so they are pretty much demographically the same, but there are some profound psychographic differences even within one weight loss company's customer versus another versus another. And so whatever the ratio is, in your case you said third, third, third, sometimes shortcutting that is a dangerous temptation. My own answer would be it depends. And one of the things it depends on is what you've identified, is how much legitimate experience you have in that product category or with those customers or at that price point, et cetera. Another variable though is how smart or dumb the client is. Client is if you are writing for a client. By that, so they all lie, some intentionally, mostly unintentionally because they stop differentiating between what they know and what they believe. And so the amount of prep time before you can write, for me, has a lot to do with how much I feel I can trust the client not to be giving me their secular religion about their business versus their facts about their business. And some clients that I work with, fortunately, they're the ones who actually could do it themselves without me, are on a 1 to 10, they're an 8. In terms of you can trust them about that, okay? Others are like a minus 4. And typically, by the way, the bigger the company, the more they're a minus 4, okay? 'Cause morons have run amok, which is why I usually don't work with big companies. So that's a variable, right? Another variable is how much change there is in that product category or in that customer population. So some— like if you're selling to— if you get a reverse mortgage client tomorrow, the 68 to 75-year-old buyer of reverse mortgages, pretty much unchanged, right? And the last generation of them behaves just like this generation of them behaves. And so there's some pretty reliable customer avatar there of how this person thinks, what they're going to respond to, etc. You write to somebody in their 40s, today's 40-year-old is very different than the 40-year-old that maybe you sold to 10 years ago in the same subject matter category. And not enough copywriters worry about geo differences, you know, and often— and I'm always amused at the online people, because they have all sorts of technological capability, right, to do research, and then they do less of it than was being done before that existed. And they have all kinds of precise targeting that could be done, and yet nobody versions the damn copy for, you know, the targeting. And people in Kansas who buy swimming pools I'm sorry, they're different than people in California who buy swimming pools, right? The same copy about swimming pools should not be delivered, you know, to those people. And that, I think, is all really backed up into this research category of deciding who you're going to write to, how many variances you're going to create in what you write to, and how much you really do need to know before, you know, you write to them. I don't run a standard ratio, so as you were formulaic, I'm not. But I would say it's probably 6 to 1. I would say I'm pawing, prowling, reading, asking questions, gathering information for 6 hours for every hour I'm actually Wow. Putting words on a page. My theory is that by the time I sit down to write, the copy should write itself. If I'm having to think too much about it, I probably didn't get my act together about what I know about that audience and that product. And the history of that field and the contemporary nature of that field. So I'm having to work at it too hard on the quote-unquote creative. It should really just sort of come out of that knowledge.

You know, you mentioned that when you— you're totally right about not getting the demographics and targeting there. One of the things you get with email, when you get the people lining up is— I think they're called DMA. They're like, they're media market zones. And they, you know, they're like separated, just like television ones. And I've never seen anybody actually taking those and saying, okay, we're going to send to the people in the Southwest this.

No, no. And they— I mean, so if you watch— so that's the worst thing about national advertising. It's the worst thing about broadcast, right? So in infomercials, where I lived for 20 years, when we were doing a lot of local buys. So you bought, early in the industry, you couldn't even buy nationally. TBS was the first thing that would sell you a half an hour there to everywhere in the country. So all those buys were cobbled together. You bought Cleveland and you bought Dayton and you bought any place that had a TV station and you bought Fort Lauderdale and you bought Orlando And I used to scream bloody murder. Why aren't we tweaking the show for at least the damn state we're buying in, right? And nobody wanted to do it. And I always say the worst thing about national media is you have no opportunity to adjust to variances that can be useful to you.

Well, in my case at least, I'm lucky. I have one client, you know, so I know my prospects really well. I've been working with this one client for over 20 years, and I also do all of his acquisitions, so I know where they came from. And so when we're doing in-house promotions, sales pages, webinars, you know, VSLs and so forth, I already know where they're at. And then beyond that, in the investment field, there's two kinds— beyond audience research, which I think we have a pretty good handle on, You have two other kinds of research. You know, you've got research about the subject at hand. You know, we have a theme. Again, it's advertorial. We have a theme. And maybe the theme is government confiscation of assets is coming, right, based on Dodd-Frank provisions, Dodd-Frank. So you're working on this promotion. Well, now you need to know as much as you can about Dodd-Frank, but you also need to know a whole bunch of stuff about other provisions the government has for account, taking money out of your checking account. And there are quite a few, by the way, and they don't need any kind of due process to do it anymore. So you want to know about all of that. And you want to go deep enough so that when you talk about the subject, you have enough detail to really make it breathe. Okay, so that's subject research. And then beyond that, in my field in finance, you're going to be talking about the investment potential of this trend, whatever the main theme of the promotion is, and how much money they can make if they make the right moves. And that often takes a Bloomberg terminal. And I had one on my desk for years. It was like $2,000 a month, and I don't think I touched the damn thing once. It's highly technical stuff. And so because I've been with this client long enough, I basically molded the client to fit my work. Habits. And I'm more right-brained than left-brained anyway. I don't want to do that research. I'm a better copywriter than the researchers are and they're better researchers than I am. And so, I've got a research department that will go on Bloomberg and tell me if you would have bought this option on this stock on such and such a date, here's how much money you would have made. So, that's the other kind of research and I don't touch that. I've got other people that do it. But I'm really big on compartmentalizing your work as a copywriter because what I just said, you know, I'm not the world's greatest gardener, so I don't mow my own lawn. Haven't done it since the '80s. And I try to find the things that I do better than anybody else, and I focus on those things. And then I try to find people who are better at those other things. And I think I'm more productive because of that. But there is a trap there, and the trap is that you can get too lazy on your research where you're not really digging in. I was talking to Jed Candy in Denver a few weeks back and he did a promotion on a discovery of oil in a small Australian town and there's only one oil company allowed to get access to this oil and so it's a really good story and it's like this massive find that they had and if you buy the stock, stock, you could make a lot of money. So you could just tell that story and probably do pretty well. But Jed dug in and found out that the people there— the environment is so forbidding, the people there live in caves underground, because even air conditioners won't keep up with the heat in this town. And he had photographs of these cave dwellings that these people are living in. Now all of a sudden, that promotion just came to life. You know, it feels real. And so that kind of research, and again, that's the second type. You have audience research, you have subject research, and then you have the technical financial stuff that I leave to other people. And so I try to spend all of my research time on the second type of research, you know, on the subject research that I'm writing about. And I focus on that. But I don't have anywhere near a 6-to-1 ratio. Mine is more like, For every 1 hour in research, I have 4 or 5 hours writing copy.

Yeah, I'm the exact opposite.

Yeah.

And by the way, something interesting that may surprise some people, with very rare exceptions, I could beat his control, he could beat my control, I could beat Dan's. Dan can't be mine. I just blew this whole damn exam.

To get a jab in at me and ruin your example.

It's great to be in the middle, right?

Your wife, however, if she helped you, you could be my control.

That I cannot do.

Ron could be my control, I could be his control. It's really, with very rare exceptions, It's true, really, of all top copywriters, because we all get into a ritualistic routine about what we do, and we are also often under time pressure. And in many cases, neither you or the client are really well served by necessarily all the work required to get the best possible result, you're better off. Good result, we make money, let's move on to the next project, right? So almost at any time you can take somebody's successful promotion and you might very well beat it with the answer to that question. And that's why sometimes I don't like copy by committee. I don't like it at all. But it is sometimes useful to have 2 or 3 people comment, peer, and what I call the useful idiot, comment because, you know, we all have a work style. You have a work style, I have a work style, you have a work style, and we are applying the same work style again and again and again, no matter how cognizant we try and be of that, that's what we're gonna do. And it's useful to have somebody just poke at it. It doesn't mean you gotta listen to them, but just poke at it.

You know, Rosenthal is famous for walking up to total strangers and handing them a copy and saying, "Read this." On the street, just walk right up to them. And then he'll watch, you know, when their eyes start wandering, you know, their mind starts wandering and all this kind of stuff. And then they'll say— they'll ask questions, you know, "Do you believe this?" You know, so they'll be able to identify credibility problems. And I think that's really strong. And just to totally endorse Dan's point here, you know, the best thing that you guys can probably do at a conference like this is to meet each other, share contact information, and agree to crit each other's copy. You have a built-in audience here. But I think it's important to get the two kinds of people. You get the useful idiots, the total stranger that has agreed to read your copy, who knows nothing about copywriting, knows nothing about whatever industry you're writing for, and he's just reading it. Those guys are really important because they'll tell you how engaging your copy is by watching them as they read the copy. And then also to have people who understand how to write good copy, or at least the basic principles of copywriting, to also look at your stuff.

We had an interesting thing in the infomercial business. The useful idiot for us was the camera crew.

There you go.

And we knew an hour into a shoot if we were in trouble or not. Because if on the break, nobody on the camera crew is coming over saying, is that shit for real? How can I get in on that? If they weren't interested in it, if If they were tuning it out, so would the audience. But if one or two of them is coming over, "Really, can you do that? Can you buy property with no credit? I've heard that, but how does that work? Can I get one of those things?" Now we got something.

See, my wife has been in the information marketing her whole life, and she was the marketing director at Phillips Publishing, and it was her job to call Ben Sovenga up and tell him what had to change in his copy. And Jim Rutts and all of those other guys. So, you know, she knows what's going on here, but she also has a very skeptical personality. So when I show her something I've written, if the response is, "Well, Clayton, you know, this part here could be a little more engaging, and this part here could be this and that," then I'm getting the Chris she would have given to Ben Sovenga. If she comes to me and says, "Why haven't you bought this freaking stock?" then I know I've done my job.

Yeah. You know, my dad was doing the same thing. He'd take his— this is a Gary Halbert lesson, not mine— but he would go down to Mike's bar, and if he was at Mike's bar and he read them and they said, "Oh, that's good copy," or "That's well written," it's the last thing he wanted to hear. He'd rip it up and just throw it away. And you want— even when you're reading to other copywriters and everything, you know you got something when they say, "When's that coming out? Can I get a copy of that?" Yeah, exactly.

That's why I— I kind of like to do the old school thang with research. I write a lot of health stuff, so everybody always asks, "Well, what website can I go to to research the market?" And man, you'll learn more— there's a metal bench at the Walmart pharmacy. You will learn more sitting there for an hour and listening and striking up conversations with the, as I affectionately call them, the geezers there. That was really funny when I called it the geezer market when I was in my 30s. Not so damn funny now. Steve Gray.

10 years from now, there will be no humor left in it at all. At all. Just to give you something to look forward to.

You know, Carlene will actually take her copy and go to nursing homes.

Was she really? Yeah, that's brilliant.

Yeah.

And those people are dying to have someone to talk to. I guess literally, right?

Dying was probably an ill-chosen word.

I think it's pretty appropriate.

I wonder what judgment you make if one of them is reading the copy. Was that a good sign because they got overexcited, or was that a bad sign because you put him to sleep? I guess you have to wait for the autopsy. That's an interesting— but look, here's the point of all that. There's a point. What's the matter?

What's the matter?

You think that's a little—

you're fine.

What everybody is describing here is work.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. Going the extra—

what they're describing here is actually working on this. Yeah. And one of the horrible things that the internet has brought us is because it's cheap and because it's quick, and therefore we wait till the last damn minute to do anything, and it doesn't cost us anything. So let's slap it together, you know, and so nobody does any work. So you gotta be really suspicious if you're like looking at website copy or email copy and you think you're learning something from it. You better be damn sure it's working before you make any judgments about it because the chances are pretty good the person who put that up there did it between a bout of diarrhea and lunch. They had about 22 minutes allocated to that job. I killed it in 22 minutes. And they literally did it on the run.

I was talking to somebody at the break, and we were talking about this kind of thing, about process, and I said, first of all, there's no right way to do it, there's no wrong way to way to do it. Each copywriter is going to have their own approach. Dan and I have very different approaches, but the results are very similar in many cases. But the other part of it is each promotion I write tells me how it wants to be written. So the question about how much time you spend on research is unanswerable to me. There may be a project— well, for example, we're doing a promotion right now for a high-priced backend service. Based on Jesse Livermore's writings. A friend of mine, our editor, was chosen to annotate Jesse's book, and so he had access to Jesse Livermore's private writings. This guy's like, you know, the ultimate investor from the '30s and made huge fortunes and everything. So the new service is based on his strategy, and I'm working with Richard Armstrong on this package, and Richard took a full month just to read Jesse Livermore's stuff and to read John Markman's stuff. And I would have had to done the same thing there on that package, because I didn't know anything about Livermore. And so each package tells you how it wants to be written. Just listen to that. You know, as you're writing through something that you're working on, some part doesn't feel right, it's usually because you don't have enough information on that particular area.. And one of the big mistakes that my cubs make is that they'll try to, you know, shuck and jive through it. And you end up with frothy, empty, boring, horrible copy doing that way. So when you hit that point, you really don't know what to do. It's usually because you don't have information. And that's the time to just take a break and go do the research.

So what piece of copy has been your favorite piece of copy? Can't be your own piece, but what copy that you read, you said, wow, this is really good.

Where did you put all your questions? They're right here.

Oh, okay, I got them.

Now he's improvising.

I gotta bring us back after that last one.

What was that? Which piece of copy?

That you—

who—

other people—

somebody else wrote. Wow, okay, well, I can just throw it out. I got started by studying Ben Suvenga. He's about 10 years ahead of me. So when I was first getting started, he was already established at Phillips Publishing as a top writer there. And so I would subscribe to everything that Phillips Publishing put out, because I knew that once you subscribe to their newsletter, you're gonna start getting promotions for other newsletters. And so I'd beat feet to the mailbox every day and pull everything I could out of their direct mail pieces. Back in those days, there were no magalogs. It was just all envelope packages. But I'd pull them out and I'd cut the headlines off and I had like a photo album and I'd put, I had a headline section and then I had an opening copy section and then I had, you know, for each part of the copy I had a different section of this book. And then I would study what he had done. I'd study his transitions. How did he engage, how did he stop a prospect? You know, I love what you were saying about you gotta think about What is happening in your prospect's life while he's got this copy in front of him? He doesn't just say, oh, so-and-so sent me a copy, shut the doors, lock everything out, you know. Maybe some will, but most won't, right? So he's standing there at his kitchen counter holding your direct mail piece, and the doorbell's ringing, and the phone's ringing, and the kids just put the cat in the microwave, and, you know, and so he has these crises going on in his life, and, and that's who you're talking to. To. And so getting his attention and converting that attention to readership is key. And so I would really study that part of it. And I was talking to Gary, what, 5 years ago, 6 years ago, and I explained this to him. I said, you were my mentor. Find somebody that you love and admire their copy and you know it's successful and follow them. I think that's what worked for me. I guess I had—

It's hard to narrow it down to one favorite piece, but— so Dan Kennedy wrote about another guy from Barberton, Ohio. I'm from Barberton, Ohio. And he wrote about this other guy from Barberton, Ohio. Perhaps you know him. His name is Gary Halbert.

Gary what?

Gary—

yeah.

I kind of felt— Gary Halbert, Bond's father. And so, talk about jumping through hoops. I wanted to subscribe to his newsletter because you talked about his newsletter. And I had to track, this is pre-internet, you know, so I had to track him down, which was kind of difficult, and, you know, send an actual letter, a real hardcopy snail mail letter, wait for the info. So I got a sales letter for his book, Maximum Money in Minimum Time. I was just a total direct response marketing rookie then, and that was like, I just, I remember ripping that open because I had to jump through so many hoops just to get it, you know. There's a lesson there, by the way. The more your prospects have to jump through hoops, the more valuable your thang is. So I ripped that envelope open and read that with just so much excitement, and I mean, That changed my life. That piece of copy changed my life. I read that and reread it and reread it. Bought the book, of course, but just studied that piece. It was so exciting to think this guy, with a letter, he creates this income with letters in the mail. So I bought the book, then I was a subscriber to Dan's newsletter, subscribed to Halbert's newsletter. That changed my life. That's what I've been doing ever since to support my two bad habits of sleeping indoors and eating somewhat regularly. So that, it is really hard to narrow it down to a favorite, but I guess just because of, I remember the feelings I had. That's probably why I'm still excited about it today. I remember the feelings I had and the hope I had when I got that. That's still my favorite piece. I still have that.

So I have 3 favorites in my swipe files. And of course it's difficult to— so one which I've used in a whole program called Midas Touch Marketing, I read it a lot, is Gary's ad from which he found Paul at. Yes. A generous— I can't do it, can you do it?

The headline— semi-handsome, generous businessman.

It's a fabulous ad, it's just great. When you're 16 and they're doing that in your local town, it's a little bit— Somebody, Clayton may be old enough to know him, but so Harvey Brody. So Harvey had a mail piece which I bought the course from when I was a kid. It's a little booklet, it's about this big, and Harvey wrote all his own copy, and it's in like 4-point type, and it's orange type on blue shaded boxes, and blue type on orange shaded boxes on newsprint, and the sentence at the bottom of the page runs up the margin over where the staple is, up to the top, across, starts back down the bottom. You got it and you said, what the, I can't believe any moron, you know? And of course, I think it was $895 for the course, which I bought. I kept that thing because it was so freaking weird. And 20 years later, I met Harvey. I'm going, what the fuck are you thinking? And of course, he asked the right question. He said, did you buy? I said, yeah, I bought. He said, that's what I was thinking.

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