Direct Response Copywriting Dos & Don'ts

What would your business look like if you had the ability to double sales in a matter of 30 to 60 days?

Hey there, everybody.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. And if you've been listening for a while, the name Doberman Dan for you will absolutely resonate. You've heard this name before. He is a master copywriter, and we get to listen to him and Dan Kennedy speak about Gary Halbert and the lessons that they've learned from direct response copywriting and how to interweave it with online marketing appropriately. And if you're thinking about getting started with direct mail, we're going to talk about the basics, how to use the Standard Rate and Data Service as a tool, plus what most people get wrong when they're just getting started with direct marketing. But at the same time, we're also going to take it a little advanced and we're talking about Doberman Dan's analysis models for how he finds a market that works well, plus Gary Halbert's potato box story of finding fodder material. Let's listen in to direct response copywriting do's and don'ts with Doberman Dan and 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 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.

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to a, uh, uh, what I think is going to be a very cool and interesting and provocative diamond call for you. I have with me, popularly known as Doberman Dan, Dan Galipo, a really, really smart direct response entrepreneur and a great freelance copywriter. His ads have appeared in a long list of, an eclectic list of magazines from Muscle Fitness and Flex to Popular Mechanics to Penthouse to the tabloids, newspapers, all sorts of other magazines. He, like me, is a big fan of and a big user of direct mail. So we're going to talk about that. He has the masochistic distinction of having worked personally with the late, great Gary Halbert for a number of years. And so we have a couple of Halbert items to talk about. So Dan, welcome. You told me before we started that interrupting your family vacation, and so appreciate you being here. And I'm going to let you— I'm just going to give you the wide open kind of kitchen table entrepreneur question first as an opportunity to tell folks a little bit about where you came from and what your journey has looked like.

Well, thanks, Dan. I'm excited about being on the call with you today. I appreciate the opportunity. As you'll soon find out as we go through the Reader's Digest version of my backstory, that you are the reason I'm involved in all this crazy stuff today, the direct response marketing and copywriting. And I also want to say a heartfelt thank you for interrupting my family vacation. This couldn't have come at a better time, and it It's nice being with family for limited periods of time, and it was nice to be able to tell them Uncle Dane can't be disturbed this afternoon.

I'm happy to provide the alibi.

Thank you for that. Well, um, just a brief history of the Doberman Dan story. I, uh, grew up in Barberton, Ohio, very close to your old stomping grounds too, Dan, and, and of course also where Gary Halbert grew up. And you know, a high school pushout, I wanted to be a musician, and I quickly discovered that I have two bad habits I have to support, mainly sleeping indoors and eating regularly, and I was unable to do that playing music. So I just bounced around trying to find different ways to support those bad habits. So long story short, wound up at the ripe young age of 20 in the Dayton, Ohio Police Academy and stuck in that job for 12 years. After just a couple years, I quickly realized that that isn't where I wanted to spend my life because I looked down the road 20 years and saw what happened to the folks who stay in that job 20 to 25 years, and that wasn't what I wanted. So, um, it all started with the Amway business. Somebody sponsored me into Amway, and that's what started me on the path to entrepreneurship. Uh, like most people, Amway didn't work out very well for me.

By the way, were you by any chance— because of Barberton connection— were you in Kenny McEvick's downline?

No, I wasn't. I wound up in the, uh, the Bill Britt downline. Yeah, yeah, I know Bill. So, you know, the Amway was— it was a great experience that I knew nothing about entrepreneurship, so it at least got me started on the path. And so of the 12 years with the police department, the last 9 I was a full-time cop, part-time entrepreneur. I guess you could call me that, a part-time failed entrepreneur. For 9 years, every business, money-making idea or project I tried failed. After 9 years, I was big 5 figures in credit card debt, divorced, living in an apartment with no furniture and just an air mattress, and miserable. And I wound up, uh, I believe I ran into you at one of the success events, Dan, and, uh, bought the magnetic marketing kit in the attempt to try to save one of the failing businesses I was trying to get going. But after I got that kit Uh, it was a life-changing experience because I realized I don't want to do any of these other businesses that I've been trying. I want to do what this guy is doing. I want to sell paper and ink, you know, for, for what I thought was the big bucks back then. I mean, it was unheard of for me to spend $400 on a quote-unquote book and cassettes, but that was the turning point. I totally ripped you off and just observed what you were doing to sell information products and, and apply that in the bodybuilding niche, which was a longtime hobby of mine. And after 9 years of failure and lots of heartache and lots of debt and lots of humiliation, I finally had a business that was successful. I had a little mail-order business in the bodybuilding niche that really after about a year was, was making enough money that, that I left my full-time job. So you were the impetus for all of this, Dan.

Well, there we go. We opened up a job on the police force for somebody who needed one, and, uh, and we moved you to the dark side. And, and so that's, that's all fine. Um, so fast forward a little, maybe through Halbert to now. Um, so I assume you found Halbert because of me.

Absolutely. Um, you know, you— well, you talked about him a lot in, in your newsletter, and I tracked him down. Back then it was, you know, this was pre-internet. It wasn't easy to find the guy. So, um, tracked him down, bought the Maximum Money, Minimum Time book, and then subscribed to his newsletter. And. And for some reason, I don't know if it was just the Barbican connection or perhaps his sense of humor, Halbert resonated with me. And I, well, I basically took what I learned from his newsletter on how to get a big shot's attention and turned it around on him to get on his radar. And it worked. I just felt like we had a lot in common and I wanted to work with the guy. And it took, I don't know, it was over a period of a couple years of, you know, engineering this whole scheme to get on his radar. But, um, you know, I got on his radar, we maintained contact, and then, uh, well, he wrote an issue of his newsletter about Costa Rica. Uh, so I sent him a fax, asked him some questions about Costa Rica, and he called me while his girlfriend was in town and answer my questions. And the next correspondence he got from me about 6 weeks later was an email that said, hey Gary, you know, the way you described Costa Rica sounded really interesting. Just wanted to let you know I sold everything I have without ever even having visited there and have moved there. I'm living there now. Which, that got his attention. He was pretty shocked at that. And when he was in town, we got together for dinner, you know, and then when he came back a second time, he asked if he could stay the weekend at my place. And I said, yeah. And the weekend turned into about 4 months of him sharing my home there. So that's the long story short of how we wound up working together.

So you're now a direct response, uh, uh, uh, entrepreneur slash copywriter. What does the business look like? And then I want to start picking your brain on everybody's behalf.

Well, I didn't do client work for years. I felt as if that wasn't the right path for me. I felt like I needed to prove myself first, and how I would, how I would prove myself was by investing my own money and blood, sweat, and tears in various direct response businesses. And have real-world results paid for with my own money to show people. So it was quite a while before I ever did any client work. I had various businesses in the bodybuilding niche, martial arts niche. I sold B2B stuff to martial arts school owners and gym owners teaching them how to get more members with direct response. Well, several other things. I sold gadgets and different things through direct mail. And I think I had only taken one client on my own who wound up not paying me according to our agreement. And in a roundabout way, that led me into the supplement business. He also basically did a number on the lab and ordered stuff on credit and didn't pay it., and I had the ad written, and, and I told the lab owner, could I just buy the products from you? He said yeah, and that— and that the ad worked, and that led me into getting into the supplement business in the bodybuilding niche. And then anyway, that's, that's when the Halbert deal came together, and I wound up working with Halbert and doing client work for his clients.

And today you're still a hybrid? You're doing your own projects and you're doing client work?

Yeah, still hybrid. Actually, from about 2005, I got real fed up with clients and just focused on my own stuff with an occasional client here and there. In February of this year, I had sold the bodybuilding supplement business I started in '04. Whereas it used to be like maybe 85% my own stuff, 15% client work, now it's kind of shifted to 50/50 right now. My existing, or my only business I have right now is my newsletter business. So that's about 50% of my time, and the other 50% is client work.

All right. So now let's get to some stuff that maybe will will be of benefit to folks. And, you know, when we talked about this call, one of the things you mentioned was you'd be happy to tell people how to double the sales of an online business in 59 days. You and I also, of course, are, are big champions of direct mail, and, and you recently sent me some information about shocking a kind of an online-only marketer with taking him offline. So let's just talk about the whole online versus offline, online integration with offline, you know, that whole debate, argument, conversation, and how you've approached it. In your supplement business, how you approach it now with clients.

I, I feel like I had an advantage over a lot of the younger marketers. Um, when I started, the only thing, you know, to do was offline. Um, you know, I grew up in direct mail and space ads. Um, and as soon as the internet became a viable option I think I had my first website that was a direct response website. It sold directly to the bodybuilding market. I think it was late 1996 or early part of '97. But I never abandoned— except for a short period of time, I never abandoned my offline marketing. It seems like a lot of the younger marketers, the only thing they've been exposed to is online marketing. And they don't have exposure to all the classic stuff and all the, what I like to say, the dead mail order guys. The dead mail order guys can teach you a hell of a lot more about online marketing than actually some of the online marketing gurus. I feel like I get really frustrated trying to convert the online-only marketers to doing some offline stuff. But I've seen just time after time after time in my own businesses and those of clients that when I can get it through their thick heads that they're leaving a large portion of their money on the table by not integrating offline into the mix,— it's just, it's always been proven to substantially bump up sales. In many cases, doubling sales within a very short period of time. I mean, when I say short period of time, I mean literally 30 to 60 days. I know that sounds maybe a little bit hard to believe, but I've proven it time and time again. The challenge has been getting the online-only marketers to buy into that and at least try it. And once they do, they usually never go back. They see the value of integrating both.

Want to give me a case history or two?

Well, the most recent would be— an online-only marketer. The guy is just sharp as a tack, but again, no frame of reference for offline stuff. He's grown up, so to speak, as an online-only marketer. And so we did a JV to promote my newsletter, and his email list— he has an email list of 25,000 that consists of about 5,000 of those are customers. They bought something within the past 5 years with price points anywhere between a $97 price point and up to $2,000. And the remainder of the list, the other 20,000, would be, you know, just the free opt-ins who opt in to receive the free info by email. So he sent the offer for my newsletter to that list, well, basically 4 different times, the list of 25,000. I told him—

so we're talking about 100,000 emails? 100,000, yes.

To 20,000 leads and 5,000 buyers? Correct. Got it. Now, I, I did a— I played a little trick on them. I, first of all, I explained if I wanted I want to mail something in snail mail. I want to mail the exact same offer in snail mail. And I told him to give me the crappiest snail mail list he could, which I just said, take a random sample. I only want 1,000 names of the buyers, but take a completely random sample. So I could have people in there who bought the $97 product, immediately refunded, and wrote them and said, "Don't ever send me anything again, USOB. I never want to hear from you." Just completely random sampling. Obviously, if I really wanted to stack the deck, I would have done— A $2,000 multi-buyer. Yeah, of course. Absolutely. But I wanted to prove a point to him that even the crappiest snail mail list, I just knew, was going to completely beat him promoting this to 100,000 emails online. 1,000 snail mails to a crappy snail mail list, long story short, pulled 5 times more subscribers than the 100,000 emails.

Yeah, and that's, that's not— people should understand that doesn't always happen, but I have seen it more often than not. The other thing, and I imagine you'll agree with me, I find in situations where there are varying price points within somebody's business that the higher price point sale tends to be more effectively made offline than online.

Absolutely.

That's been my experience also. Well, so let's jump over and talk about copywriting, which is where, you know, you live. And, you know, most of these businesses, direct response businesses and/or direct response applied to real businesses, people need to get, you know, that it's not really about the nutritional supplement or the exercise device or the piece of information or the service. It really is about the sales copy. Um, and so you live there, I live there. Um, what do you, what do you know about copy that most people don't? Where do most people go wrong? What don't they really get about the whole issue of DR copy?

When I first got started You know, I just had very little experience. Well, really the only quote-unquote training I had was observing you and swiping you. The only thing I had was the Magnetic Marketing Kit, but I saw how you marketed that. I saw the examples in the kit, and then I, of course, I— the additional offers I got from you after I was on your list and a newsletter subscriber. So that was 100% of my training back then. So I knew I wasn't— I was just a rookie writer. But I mean, I needed to make money now. I desperately wanted out of my job. And so I cheated. I figured, well, I'm not that great of a copywriter., but I sure know how these guys in this bodybuilding market think. I know exactly what they want. I know how they talk. I know their deepest desires. I know, yeah, they say they want bigger arms or whatever, big shoulders, but I know what's behind that. I know the reason why they want that because they don't really want big muscles. They want They want what big muscles can do for them. Who knows? Maybe they were the 90-pound weakling getting sand kicked in their face. So I knew how they thought, and I knew exactly what they wanted. And I think that's the biggest reason I did well in that market, even when I was a completely wet-behind-the-ears rookie. I like to say I've made a lot of money with half-assed copy. Because initially the copy I was writing was not great, but I knew their hot buttons and I knew how they thought. So I really researched the market deeply. I was the market. So that was probably the biggest secret I had starting out. It wasn't about what I said so much as understanding the market and giving them what they wanted. And knowing the, you know, knowing the deep emotional reasons why they wanted it, hitting on those hot buttons, even if, you know, my copy was not all that great.

So if you'll forgive translation, um, what I would, what I would say about that, and I see it all the time, I've had a conversation as recently as today with somebody about this is clients certainly, marketers, business owners, and in many cases they sort of, if they use an outside copywriter, they take them by the nose and walk them into the same box. They tend to be just stuck on the thing they're selling rather than the person they're selling it to.. And, you know, they just want to keep going into the box of features and benefits and comparative superiority, one product to the other, function, rational reason, when in reality it doesn't matter what's being sold and what's being bought. The leverage is all in understanding the person who's buying it and what's going on internally with them and attaching to that.

That, that was the big secret that I discovered early on. Well, I was actually forced to discover because I just wasn't that great of a copywriter. Um, but yet, you know, I didn't have the 10 years to go through the learning curve to become good to make money. I needed to make money now. So, you know, that, that was, that was my discovery. Now you can, you know, you can make a living marketing that way, you know. Yeah, your reason why, feature-benefit kind of stuff. But the real breakthroughs are doing the hard work and heavy lifting that nobody wants to do, really going deep in the research to to figure out the mindset of the person you're writing to and then tailoring the message specifically for them and getting to understand the reasons why they want this stuff. I mean, like selling business to business, people always hit on, "Well, you're going to increase the size of your business, get more sales, and make more money." 'cause that's what they say they want. But there's more important reasons why they want to make more money, and it ain't the money. And it's finding out that kind of stuff and the mindset. And yeah, it's all about the market is where you get the big breakthroughs, not about the product.

And you're a very big market research guy. And so, and then I'm going to shift to a little Halbert stuff and then we're going to do Q&A. Why don't you just talk a little bit more about how you approach a market, and I know you've put together some resources specifically on that for our folks on the call, so why don't you tell them about that?

You know, at this point, I— in certain markets, I've done so much work that, you know, the research is done for me now. Especially if I have to write for the bodybuilding and the health market. I've been researching that nonstop for whatever, coming up on 20 years now. But if I have to write for a new market, then the first thing I do is— well, my go-to resource has always been SRDS. And I like that because I can get information about actual buyers in that market as opposed to, like, let's say the Google AdWords keywords tool. You know, that'll show me people who are searching for certain keywords, but it tells me nothing about the buying behavior of people in that market, whereas the SRDS I find out exactly what people are buying, what they're paying, how often they're buying, number of buyers. I find out who else is mailing those particular lists so I can look at their offers and find out what those mailers are selling.

So usually SRDS is first stop for me. You know, you just made— not to derail you, but you just made a very important point. And again, I think our friends who sort of, you know, have grown up with an iPad in their hands often don't get it. There is a big difference between what people are interested in, what they know to search for, the names they attach to things, what they will go look at for free versus what they buy, what is being sold to them that circumvents search, and knowledge about buying is at least as important as knowledge about interest. And you and I are in the same camp.

I think it's a lot more important. Absolutely. You know, I've used and still use the other tools, but it's not giving me the information I need. I mean, for example, a niche I was honestly looking at going into after I lived on this farm was the miniature donkey niche. Those people are pretty rabid about The people who raise them are pretty rabid about that topic. You know, but knowing there are X amount of people searching for miniature donkeys on Google has very limited value to me. You know, but if I can look on SRDS and I find out, you know, there's 1,000 people a month buying a course on raising miniature donkeys for fun and profit and they're paying $150 for this course. Sold via direct mail and, you know, like I said, 1,000 hotline names a month, and I know who else is renting that list, so I see what other products are getting sold. That's just infinitely more valuable than finding out search engine data. So talk about your whole market selection, market analysis process and resource. Well, I had to give it a sexy name, so I didn't have a name for it until I wrote about it in my newsletter and then figured out I got to call it something. So I wound up on calling it the Ultimate Desire Analyzer Profit Making Model. And mainly, like, it involves my go-to resource, the SRDS. And lately I've even been using the Nextmark tool. Nextmark has a list selection tool that is pretty good. Not as good as the SRDS, but some people may prefer the Nexmark one because it's free. And so my process is to, you know, do some keyword searching in there for my market to find out who's buying what, how many are buying, at what price points they're buying. And basically what I'm looking for is a hot market and what I call a natural trend, which the numbers will show you once you know how to do this kind of research. The numbers will show you, you know, is this a trend that's on the upswing? Is it on the downswing? Is this something that has a high risk of failure? Or, you know, is this a pretty good opportunity with a low risk of failure? And it's really easy. It may sound like, you know, it's complicated, but once you know what to look for, it's real easy. And it just makes your market selection, if you're looking to go into a new market, it just puts all the odds in your favor. If you have an existing business, I mean, it's the same process, Dan. I like, you know, I like doing this for products or businesses that I'm starting from scratch, but the same applies to an existing business. You know, if you're selling in a particular market, all the same research rules apply and the whole formula can be followed for that also.

All right. So tell me about Halbert's Potato—

tell everybody about Halbert's Potato Box. Well, uh, he had this old wooden potato box with a hinge lid in the corner of his apartment, which I never paid any attention to, um, until we, we came back from being stranded on his boat, which was a regular occurrence.

Yes, I know. I was stranded on it once too.

I just— you're floating towards Cuba. I don't get it. I never understood the attraction with that.

That thing always you know, always— those that don't know, Halbert had the boat, or at least one of the boats, that was actually used in the Sea Hunt television show with Lloyd Bridges, um, which predates a lot of people. But in fact, I think it was black and white, if I'm not mistaken, probably of the Andy Griffith era. And it was undersized because, of course, TV, you know, You don't necessarily have real size. So it was a pretty damn small boat. And it was not in particularly good condition.

And he insisted on taking people out in it. I think, I did the numbers in my head at one time, I think his boat mechanic made 6 figures a year just off of Gary's repairs alone. And so, you know, that thing was always stranding him. So we got stranded on the boat. It was a particularly long day out in the sun. On. He just, he was never prepared for anything. His radio on the boat didn't work. We had no water. So we were feeling pretty bad when we came, uh, when we came back. And this is when I moved back to Miami and was staying in his client apartment in the same building as him. So I guess he felt like he, you know, I endured all that crap, he'd throw me a bone and share one of his secrets with me. So he tells me to go grab this potato box and dump its contents out in the middle of the room. And there we sat surrounding this big pile of papers. And what he would do anytime just anything struck him as interesting, whatever it was, an article, a copy off of a product box, a direct mail piece, anything that he thought at some point in the future might have some what he called fodder material for a piece of copy or for an offer for possible business, he'd just throw it in this big potato box. And every so often he'd dump it out and we'd sit there on the floor Indian style and look through those. And in many cases I'd look at something and think, why in the world did he even throw this in the box? This makes no sense. And nothing would happen. We just look through it and think, hmm, interesting, I guess. Nothing would happen. We'd all, you know, we'd throw it all back in. But every now and then, something would spark an idea either for some client piece we were working on or possibly entering a new market or a new business. And it would be, you know, the breakthrough we needed at exactly the right time.. And so that was pretty eye-opening. I've continued the tradition to this day. I don't use a potato box. I'm a bit more organized than Howard was, but I have my fodder file. And some of the stuff can be pretty, pretty weird. You look at it, you think, I see no relevance whatsoever with this piece of fodder and, and direct marketing. But Um, even the weird stuff that you wouldn't think is relevant is oftentimes the tiny little missing piece of the puzzle that leads you to the breakthrough you need.

Um, and you understand that— you understand that was Gary's idea of a filing system. Um, uh, well, you know, see, I think— I think that really really good copywriters and really good direct response people and really good marketers of their own business, you develop sort of antenna, a subconscious recognition of things that may be useful and then you have synapses other people don't have. You see a product label or somebody's ad or a page out of a book and it suggests something that suggests something else that then works its way into the copy or the ad or the piece you're working on, you know, now. I mean, people often comment about the surprising, somewhat obscure references in some of my sales copy. Where did you get that? How did you think to use that story? How did you think to use that example? And the answer is, while I was working on the project, I was also doing the equivalent of going through my potato box. And I think most, you know, most great writers do that. And most business owners don't really play enough when they are— when they're putting together a campaign. Or a promotion.

So what's like the most important copy lesson you learned from Halbert? Well, that's an easy one. He required— and I found this out after I started working with him— I talked with a couple other guys who'd worked with Howard, Scott Mongo Haynes and John Carlton, It didn't matter how you preferred to write copy. Maybe you were an excellent typist and preferred to type your copy on the computer. He pretty much insisted you write copy like he liked to write copy, on a yellow pad with a pen by hand. And when it was time to write, it was time to write. This was his motion beats meditation. Put into practice. There was no thinking, there was no looking through the potato box, there was no, you know, reading or researching. It was he'd throw the pad and pen down in front of you and say, write. And you, you literally had to write. You— that pen couldn't come off the paper. And if I'd stop to think about a thought you know, he'd start yelling at me. Says, "Write, write, write! Don't stop!" And he would literally have me write— when I, when I couldn't think of anything, he literally had me write blah blah blah, the words blah blah blah. And, you know, at first that was a little unnerving for me. I never worked that way before. But after getting used to it, I saw the value of that because By not stopping, that stimulated thoughts and things that I probably never would have come up with sitting there meditating and trying to think things out. The interesting thing was a lot of times I started with blah, blah, blah because I had nothing to say. Ironically, blah, blah, blah led to some of the best stuff that we had produced. So that was the big secret. When you sit down to write, you know, I set my clock now to a countdown timer of 33 minutes and 33 seconds, and I write, and it's nonstop. There's, you know, the time for thinking and research was, you know, weeks before. You should have been doing that for weeks before you sat down to write. The time to write is to write and do nothing but write, even if that Even if the only thing you're writing is blah, blah, blah. Because I've never sat down, I've never set a period of time where I'm going to write where even though I had nothing, or I thought I had nothing to write at the time, I've never spent the entire time writing blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah just gets the pen moving and gets your mind in motion. And even just something as stupid as blah, blah, blah leads to all the good stuff you need to write. So that was the most important copywriting lesson. He always said motion beats meditation, and that was applied to many things, but when applied to writing copy, that was a huge breakthrough for me.

And with that, we've got to wrap this show up. Doberman Dan, thank you, thank you, thank you. I thought it was a great call, and I'm sure everyone agrees. And Thank you all for being here.

And again, Dan, thank you very much.

Thank you, Dan. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever. Designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free, just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.