Creating Your Own Copywriting Code

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. This episode is going to be a true pleasure because we get to listen to Dan Kennedy himself. Now in this episode, Dan Kennedy is going to be talking about why it's so important for us to understand how copy is created and create our own code. How do you write your own code in order to be able to create successful copy? Now this is going to work across multiple niches and it's going to let you break into any niche that you want. You're going to get multiple formulas from Dan Kennedy, including examples and how to be able to use all of this ethically. This is how you crack and create your own code with the man, Dan Kennedy.

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. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even even know his name.

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. So you guys all know the, the slogan. What happened to this thing? Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish. So the part of that that often is not quoted is teach a man to sell fish and you feed him for a lifetime without the cursed monotony of eating only fish. So, so copywriting is really, and John and I come from exactly the school of copywriting is Salespersonship. That's for the 4 women's lovers in the room. Salesmanship in print. My book editor corrects, so salespersonship. If she was here, she would like the fact that I tried to say that. So salesmanship in print is really what copy is. Good copywriting is good selling. That's what it is. In today's USA Today, I got it in my room. Do you guys get USA Today in your room, or am I a privileged person somehow? Okay. It's not such a privilege when you consider the front page headlines, but— so in USA Today today, there is a full-page ad for some contest they're running, okay, where you get to do an ad for USA Today So here's this ad, okay? By the way, in case you didn't know it, this is USA Today's new logo, which about a month ago they made— this was front page news that they had a new logo, a blue dot, which by the way, I will bet you 2 years of meetings about the circumference of the dot, should it be blue, should it— I promise you, I've sat in these meetings. So here's this ad. Give us your creative, win $1 million in advertising. You may want to enter this until I tell you why you shouldn't. So you get to do an ad for USA Today, okay? It's the 2012 print ad competition, okay? So here's your first problem. First problem is who the judges are. So it's judged by some of the best names in the business. What business? So number 1 is Andrew Essex, the CEO of Draga5. Number 2 is Chip Kidd, the designer and writer at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is a book publisher, okay? Not only don't they know anything about advertising, they don't even know how to sell books. They're printers is what they are. 3, Sean McLaughlin, the creative director of an agency. Ty Montague, the co-founder and co-CEO of co-collective. He's a co, co, co, co, co thing. So they can't even make a decision about who's supposed to run the place, and he's gonna make a decision about your advertising. Chuck Porter, the chairman of another agency, and Michael Wolff, the media columnist of USA Today. So your first problem is you got judges that don't know anything about how to sell anything, who are now gonna pass judgment on whatever it is you do. But it gets worse. Here is their statement underneath the 2012 print ad competition. Here it is. You'll— this is a write 'er down, or you'll want to write this down. Print advertising is an art, and you're the artist. They couldn't be more wrong. Art is art. We are not sure what that is. Some people claim to know it when they see it. At the National Endowment of the Arts, we give money for pictures of people peeing on crosses, and we call that art. So we have a wide range of what we consider to be art, but anybody who thinks advertising is art is a moron. The point of advertising is not to have somebody like it so much they wish to put it in a frame and put it up on their wall. That's not the point of advertising. The point of advertising is to sell something. And that bunch undoubtedly does not think so. So they will judge it on criteria that has nothing to do with whether or not it is capable of selling anything. Most of you in this room live in the real world, which is where John and I and our clients live, which often is advertising bought for a dollar with a hot check, ad must produce revenue before check clears. That's the real world. It's definitely the world I grew up in. That's how I came up. Buy postage stamps with hot check, drop stuff in mail, hope money arrives before check clears. It's an old trick you used to be able to do, you can't do it now. You used to be able to take an X-Acto knife and you used to be able to cut through the numbers on the bottom of the check. That bought you an extra 4 or 5 days. Some of the people in the room are nodding, other people don't know that, but that bought you another 4 or 5 days. I'll bet I didn't issue a check for 3 years that I didn't put in a razor blade and put a little thing through it. So I mean, you talk about hope as a strategy, we were running on that. So when that's the world you live in, it ain't art. Unless it's about a guy named Art, it ain't art. It's about selling stuff. And so when you get it that copy is selling and selling is really copy, then you're a long way towards being able to either produce for yourself or know when you see it produced for you effective copy. There's very simple tests. If you stood up on stage and read it aloud, would people run to the back of the room and buy things? Simple test. When you read it aloud to yourself, is this what you would say to somebody if you were face to face with them across the kitchen table or across the conference table trying to sell them something? And if it's not, it's probably not good copy. That's pretty simple. But we can make this much more complicated, and since we have 3 sessions to fill— tonight, tomorrow morning, and the next night— I am about to make it much more complicated for you. There is actually, there is a secret code, and so my contribution Tonight will be to talk about the secret code. So, there is a secret code to successful infomarketing copy in just about every category there is. So for categories, by the way, let me just jump to that for a second. Infomarketing, I mean, there's a million little ones, but basically the categories that the infomarketing business really deals with is health, and in there we find fitness, we find beauty, we find weight loss. There's finance, where we find the investment stuff, the personal finance stuff, the how to make money in stocks, how to make money in commodities, how to make money in real estate, how to make money in llamas, and the doom and gloom, Armageddon, the end of the world, the kind of the Glenn Beck crowd. There's the There's the opportunity category, okay? There's the niche business category, which our panel was all about this morning. There's personal growth and self-improvement, and there's hobbies, okay? And that pretty much is the list of the main categories in info marketing. So there is a secret copy code behind every one of those Categories. Whichever one or ones apply to you, I'm gonna tell you how to go crack the code for yourself and how to reverse the code into a template from which you can rather efficiently create, for the most part, serviceable copy. Now it may not be John Carlton level copy. It may not be Dan Kennedy level copy. But it will be serviceable copy for most of your purposes in most of your places, you will be able to get good and effective results working from this process. Crack the code, convert the code to a template, and then write to fit the template. So that's what we're going to do. Here's why it's necessary. The reason we want to steal other people's copy codes is because— oh, does that disturb some of you? Are you giggling at the word steal? There's ethical theft and there's unethical theft. So unethical theft is like theft of copy verbatim. For that, you should go to jail, and you actually can go to jail if somebody's very aggressive about it. I'm talking about stealing the architecture. I'm talking about stealing the framework on which you now hang the words. I consider that ethical theft. So the reason why it's necessary to steal other people's copy codes is because in most cases, most of you can't do enough testing to genuinely get to success by your own testing. So the big guys in any category do mammoth amounts of tests. They do big horizontal tests. 20, 30 different headlines. This is like the beginning, the beginning of a test matrix. This is why you have to steal code. So if you got— if we're going to test 4 lists and we're going to test 5,000 names on each of the 4 lists, we're going to do direct mail, we'll just start with this. So we have headline, A, headline B. Now we have offer A, which we have to test with headline A, but we also have to test offer A with headline B. Then we have price A, which we have to test with headline A with offer A, but then we have price A we have to test with headline A with offer B, etc., etc., etc., etc. So just this far, which is not a complete test, at 5,000 units to sell, I'm up to 400,000 pieces in the mail. In order to run the test. Most of you are in niches that don't even have 400,000 customers in the first place. So if we try and build our own code from scratch through our own testing, we either won't live that long, okay, some of us are closer to the end than others, but I'm telling you, nobody in here will live that long, we'll get weary, we'll go broke, right? One of those bad things is going to happen. Long before we crack the code through our own devices. So we want to steal code from somebody who is able to do a lot of testing with the people we want to sell to, preferably with something comparable to what it is that we want to sell. And their code, the good news is for you that once you identify who they are, they can't hide their code. They can't. They either put it in the mail, they put it in print advertising, they put it up on the web, they send it out in email, which you can sign up to get. They can't hide it. Now it's buried, but it can be unearthed from what it is that they do. So the example I'm gonna show you, I deliberately picked the category that very few people in the room, if any, are in, so that none of you have a bias about your own experience in this category. But understand, whatever category or categories are most relevant, are closest to you, you want to go do to them what I'm going to show you I did to this one. So this is, and you have this now, on your little Crack the Code sheet where we're going to go next. So this is the code behind the investment newsletter part of our industry, which you should know, it's— they're privately held companies for the most part, so it's hard to get a grip on it, but it is at least a billion-dollar-a-year industry. It may be closer to a $10 billion-a-year industry. Nobody's really sure. But it's big. One of our exhibitors here, EverBank, lives in that world with those publishers, by the way, and does very well with them. Mary Ellen Tribby, who some of you have heard speak here, came from that world. So that world is the Armageddon guys who publish newsletters about the end of the economy as we know it and what you're supposed to do to cope with it, which, by the way, they all had a very good night the other night. 'Cause they have 4 more— I'm serious. They have 4 more really good years ahead of them of mailing the same sales letters they've been mailing for the last 4 years. Some of them only come out when these circumstances reoccur. Howard Ruff, if anybody knows Howard, Howard's in that world, and the last time I looked, Howard, if he's still alive, I don't check every day, But the last time, well, I got caught on one today. We were in a meeting and I mentioned somebody and I said, you know, he's got very bad health problems, and somebody said he's dead. I said, well, see. Carlton asked me if I felt bad about it. I said, no, I just feel really good about being right. So Howard, if he's alive, is somewhere between 150 and 190 years old, and Howard's been retired I don't know how many times. But when kind of an economy like we just had happens, when a situation where people feel threatened by the government, Howard can't resist. He reappears and gets back in the newsletter business, and he takes sales letters he hasn't used in 20 years, and he changes the dates, and he puts them back in the mail, and they work great. So this is a billion-dollar industry sometimes. It's a $10 billion a year industry other times. But it's big. If you're unfamiliar with it, all you got to do is find one, subscribe to one, You will soon be getting all of the mail from all of them because everybody, of course, rents and shares everybody else's lists in that category. So they are all information marketers. Almost all their businesses revolve around a newsletter. Most of you are familiar with the End of America campaign that went on this, this past year. So their businesses revolve around newsletters. Some of them revolve around books and courses. Many of them then have ascension models that are not very different from what you're used to seeing. With us. They put people into seminars and conferences. They put people into different levels of membership. They often have 5 or 6 brands under one roof that they are running— Agora, Philips, those guys. So the investment newsletter category. So here's their code. Now, I want you to understand how I got their code, and I'm going to show you some examples. I did what you will do, is I took all their stuff And I Napoleon Hill'd it, okay? I hunted for the commonalities. And I stick counted the commonalities out of 6 bazillion pieces of their direct mail. And I created a code. Not in any particular order, by the way. We'll get to that. So their code is as follows. It includes, again, these are not in priority order. They're just numbered to make it easier to reference them. 1 is alarm, okay? So they all use the psychological trigger of alarm. There is some impending disaster just around the corner. The black helicopters are coming. All of your stuff is going to be confiscated. There'll be no food. There'll be no water. There'll be no colloidal silver. There'll be no whatever. And you got to get some right now. Many of them recently, Lee Bellinger, who's very big in this business, they're selling one of their backend products, I think it's $599, is a prepackaged get out of your house in 90 minutes kit. Okay? And so it's got an axe and a box of Band-Aids and some dried food and a flashlight, all put together in a box. Okay? That's one of their back-end products. Okay? So they live on alarm. You will not find hardly any pitch, no matter how positive it is otherwise, where they have not used alarm somewhere in it in this entire industry. Second, mystery and mystique. This industry is very big on the secrets they don't want you to know. The only difference is really who they are. But there is a they who does not want you to know things. That's important. Three, amazing stories of people like the reader. So whoever it's aimed at, there's going to be stories of people just like them, people they can identify with, people who appear to be, by description, ordinary, normal, everyday folk who are using the super XYZ formula to make money even as the economy crashes around them. 4, authority figure, expert, and media verification. Somebody verifies what it is that they're saying. 5, open acknowledgement that what they are saying is not to be believed. That it's strange, that it's weird, that it's, "Gee, if this is true, how come you're the first person I'm hearing it from? That doesn't make sense to me." They openly acknowledge that in almost every piece of copy you will find in this industry, this piece exists. Again, we're going to look at some examples in a second. 6, they answer the question of why this is different, because it must be different. Donna Kretz spoke this morning really about the point of differentiation. This must be different than everything that has gone before, because this is not the first piece of mail, this is not the first webinar, this is not the first email you're getting in this category if you're a buyer in this category. You're getting a lot of it. Like every day, so it must be different. Your enemy is my enemy, thus I'm on your side. You will find that in almost every case. If it's good enough for somebody famous, then it's good enough for you. Pronouncements of epic and profound importance. You won't find these people being subtle or talking about small things. They will talk about big, "this changes everything" sort of things. 10, some sort of emotional mission statement, a reason why somebody is there, is showing up now to tell you this story, to offer you this proposition. Pretty much without a mission statement story or an origin story, it doesn't make sense. Batman is a fine example. So Batman without his origin story— so how many know the Batman origin story? Raise your hands. You learn more by looking around at everybody else than you do looking at me. Keep them up for a second. How many know the Batman origin story? Okay. Now keep them up if you're a diehard comic book fan and like you paid attention to Batman your whole life. Not that many. So how come they know the origin story? Because it's been told over and over and over and over again to make sure everybody gets it, because otherwise he don't make any sense. Otherwise, he's a freak in a costume dressed up like a bat running around beating the crap out of everybody. This is not a heroic thing. This is a scary thing. This is not good without the origin story. So there's an origin story. Crisis to opportunity and/or privilege. So yes, there's a crisis. That's the alarm, but if you know certain things, If you're in the right place, if you're connected to the right person, it really means opportunity. 12, some sort of exotic, unusual, proprietary-named solution. We have to rename everything in this field, so, like, because otherwise, who is that? However, when you do the exotic, weird, strange, you've never heard it told this way before, you then have to explain it as it tastes like chicken. So in all of this copy, you will find, you've never heard of this before, but rest easy, it tastes just like chicken, right? Well, that's an important copy technique. That's what everybody tells you when they're trying to get you to eat something you shouldn't eat. Rattlesnake. I think it's today's USA Today too. It's either today's USA Today or today's Wall Street Journal. Big article about some restaurant somewhere that's serving kangaroo 56 different ways, and 80% of the people are ordering kangaroo appetizers. And I promise you, there's 4 people sitting at a table and 3 of them are going, "Kangaroo!" And the other person's going, "Oh, it tastes just like chicken." Right? Which my answer is, by the way, let's order chicken. See, I already know what I don't need. But so that's important. 14, the what to do without the how to do it. And timeliness, recency, and urgency. So now quickly, just so you see this, keep your little list in front of you. 'cause I only have numbers. So here is a control right now for— in this category, okay? So there's a pre-headline across the top, "Government restricts ads for." That's number 2 on your list, mystery mystique. Oh, the government doesn't want people— is restricting the ads. Okay, "US 801(k) plans." How many of you in here know what a 401(k) is? Raise your hands. Good, how many of you know what an 801(k) is? Tastes just like chicken, right? Right? Oh, 801(k), see it sounds familiar enough. Oh, 401(k), I've heard of that. So okay, there's probably an 801(k). They did a man on the street the other night. I forget which show I caught it on, but they went out and asked people if today, they were all going to vote in the vice presidential election and who they were going to vote for. And to a person, they either swore they had just gone and done it, lying like dogs. "Oh yeah, I went this morning and voted in the vice presidential election." Or they said they were going to go vote in the vice presidential election. None of them went, "There is no such thing as a vice presidential election." Nobody does that here either. Not a single person that gets this in the mail immediately goes, "There's no such thing as an 801(k) plan." That's not how they react. They react, "Oh, 401(k), I've heard of that. Maybe I should have heard of an 801(k)." Hmm, right? That qualifies as number 12 and number 13 on your list. And why they could help make 401(k)s and IRAs obsolete. That qualifies as a number 9. That's a pronouncement of epic importance. It doesn't say they're better than 401(k)s. It doesn't say they're more financially rewarding than 401(k)s. It says they will make 401(k)s and IRAs obsolete. Alright? So that qualifies as a pronouncement of epic importance. Here's a paragraph. One national news journal says, okay, now there's other references as we go along that are named, but still. That's the number 4, verification. Don't be, so the first sentence is, don't be surprised if you've never heard about. That's the acknowledgement, that's number 5 on your list. Acknowledgement that this is incredible, right? Sound too good to be true, it's not. Oh, okay. Then the bottom. Well, but that's exactly how people react, okay? That's exactly how they react. Understand, this is a control. This is a highly tested control from a highly sophisticated marketing company that is making huge sums of money with this letter. They know what they're doing, okay? Then we go into a story, number 3, okay? And the story continues, and there's some other examples on the next page again of ordinary folk So the Rosso family of East Hartford, Connecticut, they got an 801(k) plan with $250, and now it's worth $19,000. A 63-year-old Percy Schwartz of Clinton, New Jersey, his $166 is now $84,666. And a 101-year-old Andrew Kanter from New York City has turned an $1,842 stake into $8 million. Using the 801(k) plan strategy. Now, by the way, that's something that's not on your list. It should be. I missed one. So jot down number 16, meaningful specifics. Okay, see, it's very important that he's 101 and he's in New York and that Percy is 63 and is in Camden, and all that stuff's important. Okay, number 4, again, we have authority figure. So number 4 down here Here we now have the verifications, number 4 on your list. Robert Luke, who does financial research for the Atlanta Journal, says. MarketWatch says. Tom O'Hara of the National Association of Investors says. Kenneth Hooker, who writes for the Boston Globe, says. Okay, so that's number 4 on your code list. Number 4 on your code list, here's a beauty. IRS worker turns $1,842 into $8 million. It turns out the 101-year-old guy worked for the IRS. So who more credible to tell us about 801(k) plans that the government doesn't want you to know about than a guy from the government who's ratting them out? Perfect. He's perfect. So that's your number 4. Number 3 on your list, here's another number 4, and I'm only showing you some of the pages. So here's another number 4. The Wall Street Journal wrote, okay, Number 9, profound, epic, retire rich on just $10 a month. You should know, by the way, this is going to an Investor's Business Daily reader. This is not going to Roseanne Barr at a trailer park somewhere. This is going— here, number 6, why this is different. We got charts that show you why it's different. You'll never decipher these charts. Don't matter. There's charts. That's proof, proof that it's different, because look, it's got charts. Number 6, okay, how are we different? We are not brokers. We don't manage money, and unlike Wall Street brokers, our analysts never trade the securities they recommend. That makes them different. If you stop to think about it, It doesn't make them better. We would never invest in the shit we're telling you to buy. But it does make them different. 8 on your list, if it's good enough for George Bush's secret retirement legacy. Turns out George Bush has got one of these plans. How about that? Next letter. This is a different one. Same code, different letter. On December 12th, 2012— or December 21st, 2012, America's most popular investment will reach its use-by date. It will be a civilization-altering development. That's number 9 on your code list. Number 4: a reviewer in Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Now what's funny about this verification, this is what's called negative verification. This is because they attack me, I must be real. So a reviewer in Newsweek dismissed this as an unthinking attack on reason. And the Wall Street Journal categorically denounced it as no more than the natterings of a dopey aunt. So if you're worried about your negative reviews, this is what to do with them. You use them as verification because if you're being attacked, you must know something pretty cool. 11. By the way, that's a lot easier to do than continuing to shove stuff to push it further down in the Google listings. Just take it off of there and use it when somebody calls you a nattering ant. Number 11: Crisis equals opportunity, but if you were on the right side, you could seize opportunities that only come along once or twice in a century. Here's our number 10 on our list. Number 10 on our list. Yes? Emotional. It's all I can do to do this. Running the AV is too much for me. So, number 10, emotional mission statement. Civilization is about to confront its greatest crisis ever. It's why I have been impelled to return from retirement, for I have been warning that this day would arrive for many years now, and I am returning to the public eye to complete the job I began long ago. It will be the fulfillment of my life's work. Parentheses, I'm out of money, and I— no, no, that's not here, I'm sorry. Number 11, crisis equals opportunity. In fact, I believe more money will be lost and made in the 18 months following this event than ever before. Crisis opportunity. So if you went and got— so here's another one. This is a different one now. This is current. This is a control. It's a current control. So number 1, alarm, and number 9, pronouncements of epic importance. The mother of all financial bubbles is just now starting to pop. Alright? Then we have our number 14. 14 is what to do, not how to do it. Alright, so here's what you need to do. Step 1, make sure you live and work someplace safe. And then it tells us about safe places. Doesn't tell us where they are. Doesn't tell us how to get there. But it tells us we should be living in a safe place. Step number 2, move your money out of harm's way. Makes sense? How do we do that? Well, it doesn't tell us how to, just tells us. Step 3: Use underground banking. Doesn't tell us how to do that. Some guy's out in his backyard digging now looking for the bank. He didn't know he had it. That is what to, not how to. Here's another control. Here's number 8. This is caught on videotape. Footage from a recent— here's number 8, including the vice president of Chevron and even the managers of a $125 million pension plan in San Francisco. All right, so we've got, if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for— okay, so there's your code list from this industry. Now, if you take any category of info marketing, so if you take niche, the guys who were up— the folks who were up here this morning, if you take niches, So if we took all their marketing, and we lined it up on a table, and we carefully went through, and we identified something that they all did, and we wrote it down, we would crack their code. So here's how to crack any code. Number 1, you need at least 12 to 24 historical controls. You don't just want contemporary, because sometimes the current people drift away, from what works. So you want 12 to 24 historical controls. So I go looking. If I enter a new category, whether it's in info marketing or in something else, I go looking for the history of what was being sold in that category 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and I try and find some controls that have history. I will at least go, say, to the trade journals. So like, I'm rewriting right now lead generation ads in the chiropractic field for Dr. Tom Shack at HealthSource, who's a franchisor. I wrote his first lead generation ads. He's been living on them for a few years. They're starting to wane. I now gotta write them again. So even though I know a lot, I wanted every chiropractic trade journal for the past 2 years So I could go through and I could find my controls and I could make sure I had the, the code list right before I wrote the copy. So we want historical controls. Then we want 6 to 12 contemporary controls. So we want to find somebody, we want to find the people who are selling, preferably the bigger players, because we know they're doing a lot of testing to the buyers we're going to be selling to. And who are selling something for which they are going to need to make the same kind of pitch we would need to make. Understand it doesn't have to be exactly. So in the opportunity category, if I sell how to get rich in the carpet cleaning business, I don't just need carpet cleaning. Ron LeGrand's stuff about how to get rich in real estate counts. His controls count because the premise is how to get rich. What the shovel we do it with is really not particularly relevant. When you write copy, you can kind of plug that in at the last minute. So I want historical controls and I want contemporary controls. Then we sit down with them and we search for the commonalities. Oh, look, every one of these has tastes like chicken. Okay, I'm going to write down tastes like chicken. Okay, so we're looking for the commonalities That's where the code list comes from. Now, if this sounds arduous, by the way, I built this one for the financial newsletters. I did it for— I didn't do it just for you. I got paid. I did it when we started to do a lot of work 2 years ago for the financial advisors, and I updated it again about 3 months ago for the financial advisors because they, although they don't sell newsletters, And they don't sell books. They actually want clients for whom they're going to manage money or from whom they're going to take money. Okay? Manage, some yes, some no. But they're at least going to take it. However, they're selling to the same client, the same person that these guys are selling to. And they're basically selling the same premise is you need to do something different with your money than you're doing now and you need to do it quick. So if these guys are doing all kinds of testing, my local advisor in Scottsdale, Arizona can't do that kind of testing, so I've got to steal this code and use it for him. You get it? So we're going to identify commonalities. Fourth, then, we create our code list, just like I created a list. That's going to govern all of our copywriting. Then, if you want to get real sophisticated, if you want to do a little work so you It's faster to do a lot of work. Then you create a swipe file for each thing on your code list. So I can now go back to a drawer and I can find, pull a file that just says alarm at the top and has all the alarm stuff copied and put in there. And I can go pull the tastes like chicken file folder. You can do this on your computer if you like. I just like paper. But, and in there is all the tastes like chicken stuff. I've cut it up, I've copied it, and I put it in my file folders. So I have a swipe file for every item that is on my code list. Okay? Now the criteria of a code owner worth watching, because you don't want to be random about this. Number 1, they got to be doing direct response. They can't be doing brand or image stuff. They have to be doing real honest-to-God direct response. Secondly, it's better if they are— they can be doing online and they can be doing broadcast, but it's better if they are doing print and direct mail too, because they're spending more money doing print and direct mail than they are online. Therefore, they tend to invest more in it. In case you haven't noticed, most of the email you get is not as well crafted as most of the mail you get. Now that's not because it's necessarily less important, it's just because people have an attitude about it. It's cheap to send out, and we usually do it quick and at the last minute, so nobody wants to pay a copywriter $50,000 to write an email. They're happy to pay a copywriter $50,000 to write a print ad. So you want to study the print ads more than you study the email. Ideally, you want it to be a company of size so that they can be doing a lot of testing. They can be doing the testing you can't. Number 4, obviously you want them active in your category or comparable category. And number 5, you want some longevity, some evidence they've been running multiple promotions over a period of time, because you really don't want to be following an amateur around. Who is learning day to day just as you are. So how to find the code owners? Look in the specialty interest publications that your readers, that your customers, that your buyers read. Find code owners' ads, answer them, buy from them if you wish, if you must, get all their stuff. In a niche or a subculture, if you are not in the niche, you are not in the subculture, so you are— let's see, who is up here who's not? Well, really, they're all from their niches, but let's take Rory Phat. At Restaurant Marketing Systems who never owned a restaurant. So what Rory would do is he needs a buddy who owns a restaurant, 'cause he needs 3 months of that guy's junk mail. If you don't have a buddy, just go pay somebody. They put a big laundry basket in their office or their house, and they throw all their junk mail in it. And at the end of 3 months, you give them a buck for every piece of junk mail they threw in the big laundry basket, and you got 3 months worth of junk mail. And they're excited. And now you can take it all home and you can sift it into piles and you can check carefully to see who's— these 5 pieces are really from the same place, okay, and this one came 3 times during the month, that probably means it's a control, and you can now create your tabletop from which you are going to crack the code, okay. There's a book called the Directory of Major Mailers which you can get which tells you who's mailing how much to whom. Then you can go Google them, and you can find their website, and you can find their address, and you can buy something from them, and then you'll be on their mailing list, plus you'll be on the mailing lists of everybody they rent their mailing lists to, and bingo, you will soon have a big table full of stuff that you can begin to sift and sort and use to crack the code. There's a reference called Standard Rating Data Service, srds.com. It's a commercial marketplace of mailing lists. Again, it will tell you who's got what size list, how many new names they get every 90 days, how many come from direct mail, how many come from these other sources. When you find somebody who is very analogous to you that you want to model, there's another thing you can do. You can act like you want to rent that list, whether you do or not, And you are then going to get a thing called a data card, and one of the things it's going to tell you is who's renting that list on a continuous basis. You then can go to the Inside Direct Mail archives, and you can order the controls of everybody on that list. And they make Xeroxes of them and send them to you. You don't even have to go find them. And now, if you— so if we go find the Investor's Business Daily master file, of people who not only subscribe to Investor's Business Daily but buy stuff from investors, their best list. We see here's 8 companies that are mailing it all the time. We then go to Inside Direct Mail. We say, give me the current controls of these 8 companies. Bingo, we got them. And now we can search them for commonalities and we can crack the code. Not only can we crack the code in general in that category, we've cracked the code of who's selling to that list. And if we're going to mail to that list or advertise in that publication, we can, if we'll do a little work, have a code list just for it. Nanton, Dix, if you're in the room, this is part of the conversation we had earlier today of why the same ad really shouldn't run in 4 different publications without some changes, because there may be different code. Websites, of course, we can go to their websites. We can sign up for their email list. We can go to their webinars, et cetera. And of course, buy from the best. Spend a little money. Now, how do we turn all this into a template? So there's two approaches to templating. So first of all, you can decide sort of arbitrarily on the big architecture you wish to use. For copy. I happen to like problem, agitate problem, invalidate options, solve more than I like anything else. Okay? So if you examine my work and you want to look for an architecture code, you'll find that pretty quick. You'll see I use it over and over and over. I just hang different clothes on it. Okay? But the architecture is the same. Okay? Some people like the oldest sales formula, tension, Interest, desire, action. So you can decide on an architecture. Then you can take your code items from your code list and put them in order in the architecture. What do you think should go first under attention? What do you think should go first under interest? What do you think should go first under desire? And you can line them up. Then you can create your headlines and your subheads from that, and bingo, guess what you got? You got an outline. You can also take anybody's control. So if you find— if you go through the whole exercise I just did in the investment newsletter category, and we identify now that list which I gave you as a sample, the code list. If we can find a control that has all those items in it, we can convert it to a template. So if you'll flip your little handout over. You will see, okay, so this is the first page of that control that I showed you for the 801(k) plans, right? And at the bottom, I have converted it into a template to write a sales letter from it. The template is there's a pre-headline, there's a main headline which uses item 12 and 13 on my code list. The pre-headline uses number 1 on my code list. There's a secondary headline which uses number 9 on my code list. There's an intro paragraph above the salutation which uses number 2 plus 4 on my code list. Opening paragraphs use 5, 9, and 12, and the paragraphs in the latter part of the first page use number 3. I now have a template. If I'm going to write to these same buyers, I can write a sales letter to fit that template. All I need is my template and my code list. Oh, I'm gonna write a pre-headline and I'm gonna use number 1. What's number 1? Alarm. Okay, I need an alarm pre-headline for what I'm selling. You get it? Now we could go through the whole letter, page by page by page, which I did not do for you, Okay, and convert every page into a template just like I did here. And we could then go back and write a sales letter for our investment newsletter, built on that same successful template that has already come from an enormous amount of testing that we either aren't able to do or don't want to do or don't want to live long enough to do. Now, if this sounds arduous to you, if you're gonna generate a lot of copy and if you're gonna generate a lot of promotions, it's less arduous, a lot less arduous than starting from scratch every time you're gonna write copy. Yeah, this takes a little time to build, but once it's built, you get to use it over and over and over again because it doesn't wear out. So the reason freelance copywriters, those of us who make our living pretty much writing copy like John and I, we tend at least over time, if not initially, to get pretty narrow in the categories in which we will write, and we turn down a lot of other things. The reason for that is sloth on his part and efficiency on mine. So the reason for that is 'cause we got templates in that category where we have already done a lot of work. We've got copy banks, which I'm gonna talk about in a second, in that category. So if you want me to do skincare, see, I've got templates for that. I've already got copy banks for that. I've already done all this for that, and I just get to use it again and again and again. So the pro copywriters, especially the high-income ones, they tend to wind up only writing copy in 3 or 4 different categories of products or services because they want to reuse this stuff over and over and over Again, the real meticulous ones may check it like I just did in Chris's case, but the check was pretty quick because I already had templates and swipe files tied to my code. I got my code and I got a copy bank. So the last piece of this puzzle is a copy bank. So the copy bank now is you've decided on your categories, you've built templates, write copy hunks from your code for every one of those categories. Lots of them. Just anytime you've got a few spare minutes, write some copy. You don't have to need it this minute. So get 500 opening paragraphs that use alarm done, that have some relationship to your business, and have them in a box or a computer file. Now you got a copy bank. You definitely want a vocabulary list. A good copy bank has a pre-done vocabulary list. What— it's like your own thesaurus. What are the words you should use to describe Armageddon? What are the words you should use to describe opportunity? What are the words— so now again, when a pro builds that, so I've built that for clients. The last one I built, billed at a million dollars. So this is worth you taking the time to do if you're gonna do a lot of copy in your category, or if you're gonna have copywriters work for you, because if you can hand them a copy bank to work from, you make everybody's life a lot easier and a lot more efficient. You organize your swipe material by each one of these categories, and ideally you got one item on each card, on a card, on a piece of paper, in a computer file, so you can print out just the one thing that you want. You want your copy bank ultimately to work like a Chinese menu. So it is now time to write. I pick or build my template, and then I pick one item from column A and one item from column B and one item from column C, and I stick them in the template and then I smooth out the edges. That at least gets you to rough draft, if not to finished draft. So I'm not sure in John's case. I've asked a bunch of pro copywriters, freelancers, how many drafts they do, and many of them say to me 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 drafts. I never do more than 2. Never. I do a first draft and a final draft. That's what I do. The first draft is what I just described to you in most of the cases. It's Chinese menued into a template, smooth out the edges. The final draft is finishing it off, making this sound better, you know, oh, I got an inspiration for an idea I can fit in here. First draft, final draft, out the door. That's the power of a great copy bank. So how many think this is cool? Okay, good. Very good. Okay.

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