How To Write Copy For Female Buyers vs. Male Buyers

Hello and welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. So excited to have you here. Today we're going to be listening to Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer, and special guest Lori Morgan as they talk about not only how to write copy for male buyers, but especially for the female buyer. Now, how do you find them and how do you make sure that they stay loyal to your brand? That's what this episode is all about. Lori writes copy from the perspective of female buyers, and she's one of the leading female copywriters in the info marketing industry. And for those of us who think, no, it's pretty much the same copy you write for both audiences, incorrect. Lean in, there's so many insights that we can glean in order to help make sure we are converting our customer as best as possible.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Well, hello, Gold Plus members. This is Bill Glazer, and we bring you another one of our monthly Gold Plus calls. I'm joined by Dan Kennedy who's on the call with me. How you doing, Dan?

I'm doing great.

Also as our guest expert this month is— I'm probably going to butcher the name— but Lori Morgan-Ferraro. How'd I do, Lori?

You butchered it.

Well, that's as good as it gets. It's all right. A simpler name would be better for me.

I'll work on that.

Lori is a professional copywriter and one of the things that— we've known Lori for quite some time and one of the things that she really specializes in is writing copy sort of from the female perspective, getting inside the mind of the female buyer. Lori, you want to tell everybody a little bit more about yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. I have been copywriting since 1999 and I'm self-taught by studying you and Dan and Gary Halbert, John Carlton, a lot of the greats and reading all the books. I've written copy for Mark Victor Hanson, Leslie Brown, Joe Polish. I mean, I can name drop but the fact is I basically I'm one of the— in our industry, in the info market industry, I'm the leading female copywriter, and a lot of times people will come to me just because they want to tap into that aspect of reaching the female market, which is incredibly large nowadays. Oh, and I also have to throw in I'm related to Ralph Waldo Emerson because people love hearing that. Not that it affects my copywriting, but it's an interesting fact.

Good.

Why don't we maybe just first start out and talk a little bit about what your business looks like today, and then we'll get to the real meat of it, which is what's the same and what's different about writing copy for the female market. But you are in the information marketing business as well, right?

I am. My site is Red Hot Copy. It's got multi-prongs like you do. I teach copywriting. I do copywriting for a few select clients. I continually study, always. I would say that the thrust of my business has been lately, even because I see such a demand on it, has been learning more about what the female market needs and how to teach other people how to do that, what the similarities and what the differences are. What else can I tell you?

Let's sort of dig right into it then. Why don't we first start off with what I guess the similarities are in terms of writing copy for the female market versus writing copy—

For the male market.

Even maybe we should take a step back from that, which is sort of how do you approach it as well?

Yeah, sure. What I really want to share with people is how you find the women, first of all. Where are they? Why you should market to them. Where are you going to find them? Then once you find them, how are you going to catch them and keep them in your marketing funnel? How do you keep them loyal to you once you've sold to them? Because you want to not have to keep going out continually to get them. And there are a lot of similarities, I've got to tell you, between how you write for men and how you write for women. But the differences that are subtle are so powerful, it's going to make just a huge difference in your bottom line. But if it's okay with you, I just want to throw out a few statistics about why people should even care about marketing to women. Because I've heard some people say, I sell guitars. What do I care about marketing to women? You know, it's headbangers who are in their 20s who are going to buy my guitars. Well, no, that's not necessarily true. My son plays guitars. He owns 5 of them. He's 16. Do you think he has the money for that? No, he gets it from his parents. There's a huge influence whether the woman is actually making the purchase or not, although often she is. But even if she's not, she has a huge influence. On what the buying power is going to be. So let me throw a few stats out at you because when I started looking into this, I was blown away. 66% of all new computers are bought by women. 65% of the new cars. Women own 20% more new homes than men. They spend $5 trillion annually in America. With a T, $5 trillion. They buy more online products than men across the board. They— 70% of all new businesses are owned by women as well. And new businesses employ— owned by women employ more employees than all of the Fortune 500s across the globe just in America. So it's not just a niche market, it's just It's huge. It permeates everything, and it wasn't always like this, which makes things real interesting when you're looking at marketing. It wasn't— historically, this is the first time in ever that we've had women and men, and this is not going to be like a gender-bashing call by any means. I think there's no reason to go there at all. It's just a fact that women are making a lot more money now. We have 50% more college degrees than men, which give us a higher earning capacity across the board. And even when women are like in a relationship, whether they're married or there was a significant other, 83% of the women write the checks. So she's spending the combined income. It doesn't matter who makes the money. She's the one spending it. That's why we are as a gender given credit for spending 85%.

Of all purchases.

It's because we have influence on absolutely everything. And I thought it was just household stuff. I didn't really pay a lot of attention until I started doing this research. And it's just phenomenal at the areas that you can find women making decisions. Like for example, my husband owns a Harley. And actually, if you could see me right now, I'm wearing a Harley shirt. It's really cute. It's maroon with— these little sparkles that says Harley Girl. I will not get on a Harley. I don't like motorcycles, but I go shopping for Harley stuff all the time. I get it for him. I get it for me. They have really cute clothes, you guys.

Actually, one of our members, Rodney Tolleson's wife, just opened up a Harley— I don't know if it's just strictly Harleys, but a shop just for women who buy motorcycles down in Daytona Beach, Florida.

That's great.

A couple of other things I'll share with you. I do a lot of consulting in the automotive repair industry. Right. Much more women come in and get their cars repaired than men do. Often you think of cars, you think it's kind of a macho thing.

Right.

But more so, I spent 30 long years, almost a prison sentence, in the menswear retail business. And in the menswear retail business, I mean, women are buying much more menswear than men are for their men, you know. So especially in department stores, it's predominantly women buying in the menswear department. So, you know, a lot of times we sort of forget about them because we think of something else.

That's— yeah, you're absolutely right. That actually, the automotive thing reminds me of another point. When there's a buying cycle, when there's 5 stages to a buying cycle, and this is— I got this from Marty Barletta who wrote a great book called Marketing to Women. And there's— in the 5 stages of the buying cycle, the woman is responsible for 4 of them, but the most visual one is where the man is involved. And so a lot of markets erroneously feel that the man is the one making the decision. It goes like this, like for big-ticket items in particular. The woman will initiate the idea like, honey, we need to go on a vacation or honey, we need a new car. And then that's the first stage, initiating it. The second stage is doing the research because women are big on research. It takes us a long time to make a decision. You probably know that. But we want to find the perfect solution, so we do a lot of research beforehand, preliminary research. Of course, the internet makes that a lot easier. So then the third stage is when the man kind of comes in, and that's when like you're at the car dealership and the man is the one that seems to be in control and is the one that the dealers really deal with. And whether or not it's like, even if it's a car for his wife, it's, you know, women get a little intimidated, and like for good reason actually, with car dealerships in particular. They're just notorious for not treating women, you know, as buyers. But at any rate, that's where you see the man and that's where the money is exchanged. And so a lot of target— or a lot of marketers will say, oh, well, it's the man doing all this so we've got to focus on the man.

And then—

but then the stages go on and this is where I'm circling back to your point, Bill. The customer service or the maintenance piece of it is usually the woman's responsibility. That's where getting the car serviced, making payments, writing the checks out. If they have to call and complain about something, you better get on the phone and make them happy or else they're going to tell all their girlfriends how horrible your business is. Then the final stage is the referral stage where repeat business comes back because women are just notorious for referring businesses that we love and we're notorious for badmouthing businesses that we hate because it comes up.— in our everyday conversation, we're just— that's normal for a woman just to talk about her experiences to her girlfriends. So it's just interesting to me that you brought that up about the maintenance of the cars mostly being the woman because she is the one who's going to come in contact with that aspect of your buying cycle.

Well, you know, the joke that we used to always sort of have at Gage Menswear, my menswear store, which was we didn't share this necessarily with the customer too often unless we were very familiar with the customer, but it would always be like when the man would go into the dressing room to try something on, it would always be, "Well, go ask the wife if he likes that or not." It doesn't really matter. That was always the decision maker.

It's so funny. Yeah, we have the veto power. And even women who are single, our friend Alexandria Brown just bought a multimillion-dollar home on her own. She's single. We tend to have access to more money than ever before.

I will say something about the warm and fuzzy versus hard thing with women in business. It is my observation that for the most part what we and others are attracting and our ratio of women members versus male members and particularly of women members where she is the primary in the business rather than the secondary is not unique to us. I'm seeing it in other clients' businesses and therefore in other industries and even where the personality of the guru to that industry would be thought even less appealing to them than mine. For example, Tucker has an ever-increasing percentage of the people in his coaching group from the mortgage industry are women, not men. Wow. And he and I had a conversation about it the last time he was here for a day of consulting. And we have a term for it, actually. You may have noticed during the presidential campaign that one of the categories that they've identified that works well for Hillary is what they call women with needs, single women, low income, kids to raise. We have a term for this that Tucker and I have coined called "women with balls." Good, we can be PG.

I like that.

Well, actually, but it is shorthand for actually the change underneath the change. Meaning that the majority of these women business owners and entrepreneurs that— and sales professionals that seem to be now increasing in ratio in our population and in other industries' populations are women who are exhibiting what once were male characteristics and sort of a different personality than the woman customer that we may have had 5, 6, or 7 years ago. I agree. And I think that it— that has to be considered when you go to write to them, talk to them, sell to them, market to them. That it is not the woman business owner of a decade ago who often tended to be a dilettante and often tended to be in the business with rich husband's money. That's not what we're dealing with today. We're dealing with, as you mentioned, the independent who really is controlling the money. And really is controlling the business. It's an interesting change.

It's totally, totally fascinating.

It's not just a statistical change or some just pure demographic aberration. It's a psychological change of the customer herself.

Well, let's move into some of the different sort of differences that you look at in terms of copy. And you said many of them are very subtle differences. And, you know, and so why don't you start giving us a few of those that— how you sort of attack this differently.

Okay, definitely. Before I do that, because this is such a critical foundation of every way that a woman makes a purchasing decision, I have to just do just a little tiny bit of science stuff for you, okay?

Perfect. Okay.

All right. It's basically— and it goes a little bit back to what Dan was saying about our psychology or psychological makeup, how we are different. And the best way that I can tell you to tap into this where it's going to be consistent, you just check in with this visual every time you're doing your marketing and you're going to nail the female market every time. So what you have to do is you have to think about how our evolution was. You have to go back to the cave people. In fact, there's a quote from Psychology Today that says, "We inhabit our high-tech world with Stone Age minds because there has not been enough time to change our psychology to match our environment." Now, I think that may be changing, but basically what they're saying is that we're still hardwired like cave people. So we're like cave people driving around with cell phones and fast cars. Having internet, but we still— we have instincts as human animals that we may not necessarily be aware of. So as marketers, if you're aware of these emotional triggers and psychological hot buttons, you can pull it out in your copy, and it's going to really be a lot more effective. So it's real basic, and it probably just may not be brought to a lot of people's attention, but if you think about— the drive of a male caveman and the drive of a female cavewoman. His drive is to fight for tribe status. It's about competition. It's about winning. It's very single-focused. It's finding, you know, the best mate, passing on his genetics, and the more conquest, the better for chances of survival. Whereas the female's drive is really to be taken care of by the provider. It's to not be difficult. It's about community. So that's the huge difference. It's winning competition versus kumbaya community, we all want to get along. When you use the competitive language in your copy with a woman, it is not going to work. We're not competitive that way. And I'll even— those of us who are successful in business and who want to be more successful, we still don't really need to slash the throat of our competition. We're just not into that. So when you're using— when you're choosing the kinds of language, the kinds of words that you're going to use in your copy, just if you're trying to reach females, don't— just leave that part of it out. So I just want to lay that foundation that if you think of those two aspects that women are very, very community-oriented no matter how much our instincts are starting to change to work in today's world or not.— it will help a lot. So with that being said, the way to really, really reach the female market is to think in terms of community. And this is another reason why the social media, the, you know, Web 2.0, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, places where you can have interactivity, it's why they're becoming so important now is because it's not just women, but that interactivity and that sense of community is just permeating the internet. Any place that you can put membership sites and forums and interactivity into your marketing, into the products that you're delivering, you're going to win because we like to share. The more you tell, the more you sell. The famous— I may not have that right. I think there's— it's the more you tell you—

how does that go?

The more you tell, the more you sell.

Oh, that's it. I thought there was another word or two in there. At any rate, it's really with women, it's the more you share, the more you sell. So the more you talk about yourself, the more you're personal and you share about your life or stories. And Dan, I know you're a big proponent of putting story into the copy. And what's funny is that works for men too, obviously, but it really, really works for women because we're personality-driven much more so than specific-driven. It's just not as important to us. It's again, you know, the caveman single focus. The cavewoman is multi-focused. We're more community interested. So storytelling is really powerful. One of the things that I teach my students when I'm writing, and I also write in my own copy, is I find out what is the story of your business. Like, why did you go into the business that you went into? Because most entrepreneurs probably, if they've had, you know, 10 or 20 businesses throughout their lives, it's usually not the first thing that they've ever gone into, right?

Wouldn't you agree with that?

Yeah, I would. I mean, I think that successful entrepreneurs tends to, you know, constantly look to build businesses and actually splinter out additional businesses.

Right, exactly. And so there's usually a reason why they move from one business to another or maybe they'll have several at the same time, which is very— often happens as well. But like for me, for example, I went into copywriting because I was staying at home with my kids when they were little, and then I got divorced and had to go back to work. So I missed them terribly, and all I wanted to do was to be home with them again. There was the Columbine incident in Colorado. We were listening on the radio while I was at work about these kids going crazy, and I started fearing, "What if that were to happen to my kids if I'm not home?" being there to instruct them, anything could happen. So I made it my business to figure out a way to get out of the corporate world and be home with my kids. And luckily, this was in '99 when the internet started to explode, and I was able to do that. I limped along. I didn't have a great plan, but I ended up growing my business over time, discovering copywriting. I actually had never even heard of it before 1999. And it was just lucky that it all worked out the way it did. But at any rate, that was my story. Like one day I was working as a secretary in a marketing firm, this incident happened that changed my sensibilities and my motivation, and I figured out how to start a business. So that's how I encourage people to include that in their copy, how their your product or business came to be. Maybe they want to make a difference in the world. I know a lot of people, they just want to make money. That doesn't go over so well in copy, like, I just want to be rich. But if you have a compelling reason why you went from where you were before to where you are now, people love that and they get pulled in. Stories really boost credibility and I know, Dan, you've talked about before how we are We're raised with stories. It really lowers sales resistance because you're just— you get sucked in. You're suddenly— you're listening to what happened to somebody. You don't think about their being— that you're being marketed to. You're just kind of being entertained and you're reading the story. And it really— they spark an emotional connection, and emotional connection is really important with women. If we don't know, like, and trust you, we are not doing business with you. No matter how good your business is, we'll find somebody else. We draw that line in the sand. We're very, very particular about who it is. What else is good about stories is they can explore the pain of a problem without being in your face so much. In other words, if you want to paint the picture of suffering, of problem, agitate, and solve, a great way to do that is with a story. Story where you talk about how horrible things are and then how they get worse. And then finally there is the solution which is you or your product. And you can convey that in a story in a way that doesn't always come across in some of the traditional copy that works really, really well nowadays. So I'm just a big proponent of stories in the copy. And there is a danger in that that I will say as a caveat. That sometimes people get a little too self-involved. You want to be edited down. You want to have your story concise, you know, a little interesting, a few sentences here and there, but it can't go on for pages and pages. You've got to get to what it is that you're selling, but it's a great way to get people sucked into the copy. So stories work really well, and like I said, they work well with men too. It's just that with women in particular, we dig it.

We like stories. So Dan, a question I have for you. So for somebody who writes a tremendous amount of copy as you do, how would you interpret what—

Well, I off and on have and wind up doing written a fair amount of copy that is purely female-oriented and then because of the sort of sea change in the marketplace, may be writing copy into a niche that is going to both genders but now the ratio of customers male to female is swinging. Swinging in the female direction and even the value, which is a whole other issue of which is the more valuable customer over time. In most cases in the past, that was profoundly weighted to the male and it is even equalizing as we speak. So there are sort of two times that you're really writing to them. One is when you're writing to men and women at at the same time, which is always challenging, and the other is when you're writing purely to women customers about their particular interests. And I think that first of all Lori is right is that you can't beat storytelling. And so it certainly works with men. I mean, if you look at something like fitness, for example, and you go back to something like Charles Atlas, this is a business based on, that was totally driven by his bully who kicked sand in my face and I decided not to be like this anymore story. Variations of that story have been used again and again and again and again. Jim Rohn's "The Day I Decided to Turn My Life Around When I Didn't Have Money for the Girl Scout at the Door Selling Cookies" is really nothing more than the bully kicked sand in my face and I'm not going to be a weakling anymore story. But I think they are not essential to sell to men. So in the absence of a story, you can still effectively market to men and often conversations among men will be about the product purchased or the business dealt with whereas I think they are essential in selling to women. So for example, you can't find really a successful diet or weight loss product a successful promotion and certainly not a successful skincare promotion where there's not a personal story. And the women customers talking amongst themselves or in focus groups, while men may tell you about the product or the business, the women will, of the businesses that they patronize, will always know and be able to tell you the story of the person behind the business and usually the reason why story, which is what Lori was talking about. Why are you in this business other than just to make money? A male customer is actually willing to accept the proposition that the only real reason you're in business X is because you're a business person in business X to make money. And as long as you do have the clothes they want in your store or have a good repair technician in the garage, that's fine. Whereas women are almost unwilling to accept a business that exists only for business purposes. They want to believe that the owner is about something more than the P&L. So over and over and over again you see that these stories are not only powerful, but when selling to women they are almost essential. When you write copy for a client, as Lori said, you often have to hunt for this stuff because they're not telling it and they don't think it's important. They're all into the features and benefits and problems and solutions and all of the things about their business, whereas often their greatest point of leverage is in their origin story. Their story. Why are they in this business? How did they come to be there? And of course if the story is like then precisely matched to a segment within the market. So like the story Lori just told of I decided to quit my job and start a business and do business from home because of my emotional reaction to Columbine in the news and the desire to be with my kids. Well, now if Lori was selling something related to how to start your own business or how to start a career in copywriting and was able to aim that message directly at working moms with children of a certain age, now you've really got something because they will react to that— Exactly. —on a very strong and a very deep level. I noticed I was just the other day, we have to find a new kennel for the million-dollar dog. Here in Ohio when we travel from here. So there's a kennel that it— well, established for it in Reston. So the search for the kennel has been underway. And the highest end of the 3 or 4 on the list, they— first of all, they have a procedure for new clients. You have to you can only come there at 6 o'clock for the tour. You can't come any other time. And ultimately, by the way, to then be accepted, the million-dollar dog is reporting there Saturday for personal assessment and trial time in the— whatever the hell they call— oh, the day camp thing to make sure that it doesn't like eat the dogs or something. But it has to come in and basically take a test in order to be accepted. But what was significant was, and so I'm there with Carla and there are two other women, one with her kid in tow, and that's all that's on the tour. So basically there are three women with three little dogs and me. And the tour is of a Taj Mahal facility. There are 4 different kinds of suites and different size television sets and do they get stories read to them at bedtime or not and on and on and on. I'm not joking. But what was significant is there is an article about the owner framed on the wall, blown up from some publication, and it is his story. Why the devil he owns his business and why he started it and what career he came from and so forth. And very little of the conversation on the tour was what's the technical training of your staff, you know, what's the temperature in the room at night. That kind of stuff. And even that kind of stuff that he was pointing out, like 36 surveillance cameras, and really what the women wanted to talk to him about was his story and what kind of dogs do you have and, you know, why are you here. Um, and that's what was important to them.

Yeah, we don't care how many dogs have come in and out of the— there, we don't care about numbers and "Did anyone ask if you have any dogs died?" or anything like that. We don't know, we don't care.

No, the analytical questions of, you know, and now some of the information was volunteered, but it was not, it didn't like then cause any discussion because it kind of bounced off and went on by because that wasn't really what they were trying to determine. What they were trying to determine was, you know, can we trust this guy? Yeah. Do we like this guy? Does this guy really like dogs? You know, what is this guy all about? Not how many square feet and who picks the diet and yada, yada, yada. Yeah. And so that, I think, is the real difference. Is that the stories are helpful when selling to men and there's a certain way that you tell them. That really has a lot to do— the story is usually used to demonstrate outcome whereas when selling to women, the story is not optional, it's essential and its primary purpose is letting them, as Lori said, find emotional connection. Trust and belief in the seller.

I have a question. I'm going to actually, I guess I'm going to first ask it to Lori, but then Dan, I'd like to have your take on it as well. What I find that when I work with a lot of clients that I will write copy for, first of all, they never think in terms of— the story. They're always trying to give me information which is going to help sort of sell their product, you know, so more like features and benefits type of stuff. Right. And so my question is, Laurie, how do you go about finding the story that when you're working with a client— and I think that would be very helpful to all of our Gold Plus members that are listening because I mean, not that many of those are— many of our people are running copy for others, but in order to sort of figure out their own story that they should be telling in all their copy, the process that you go about in order to try to find that hidden story or the story that they think is hidden. Yeah.

I actually have a questionnaire that I give to my clients, and that's one of the stories is that why did you go into business? What's the story of why you— you're in business. And they're actually pretty cooperative. It may not be an exciting story, but once I have the nuggets of it, then I can go back and interview them and talk to them deeper. And I will do that. I'll do that on a phone interview and I'll record it. And this is something for people who are writing their own copy, they can do as well. Have someone interview you and record you talking about why you went into business and Do you remember the story that Jon Karlsson tells about the one-legged golfer when he was writing that copy? The guy didn't volunteer that information at all. He was— he couldn't— he had to just pull it out of him over time. It took forever. And finally the guy was like— he thought, well, everyone is bored with hearing that story. No one wants to hear that story again. But that was exactly what the hook was the whole time. So it sometimes You may have to actually— you get them on the phone and interview them or have someone interview you and record it. There's free— no-costconference.com. They have recording ability. You can have a bridge line be on there and have someone interview you. And ask the questions if you're the interviewer. Ask them to explain it more than once because the more they start to experience it and remember things and start to actually maybe even take themselves back to the time when they did go into that business. I can remember the color of the desk when I was listening to the Columbine stuff, and I can remember the glass. And the more— you know, I don't think about it all the time, but if you talk about it more than once, explain the story 2, 3 times, other details are going to come out that you may have forgotten. And if you record it, have it transcribed, that's a really good step. Starts as a germ of getting the story out. That's my two cents.

Actually, Dan, let me sort of get your sort of take on that question as well, and then I'll sort of give sort of the process that I use, which, Lori, you'll be surprised to hear is not too dissimilar from yours. Yeah, and mine's not either.

I do have a tip for people doing it on their own in a second, but I mean, mine is is that finding that little thing that can be exploited, that can be turned into the story, is normally all about conversational search. And so, like, When I spend a consulting day with a client, I'm asking a lot of questions about where the heck did you come from and what did your daddy do during the war and why do you live where you live and of course why are you in the business you're in and how did you get here and what does your spouse think about it and on and on. Hoping to find the thing that they don't really view as a valuable asset but is. When I wrote copy for the business opportunity called Gold Line Page, a company called U.S. Gold, and we had an infomercial on the air for 9 years, but I started redoing their print ads and their direct mail before we did television. And the second time I was in the client's office, which now this is something I don't do these days and so I'll miss things, but I noticed he had a framed thing on the wall of like 20 different business cards vertically, all his, and asked him about it and they were all business cards from his previous failed businesses before he hit it and had a big success with the current one. I integrated it into his sales letter for exactly the reason that coincidentally I think Bill said earlier in the call is that most entrepreneurs, most people who respond to a business opportunity ad, who go into business, are serial about it. They have been in others and there is a reason they are looking for a new one or moving to a new one or changing to a new one. Typically, the more successful they are, the more likely it is that they have some significant flops in their past. So this now His search and 20-some-odd disappointments ultimately leading to this find, this discovery, this great breakthrough is a powerful story that other opportunity seekers respond to. He had it on his wall and it was a personal interest to him. It had just not occurred to him to use it as a business asset. And I mean, I could go down the list. Michael Gravette wasn't using his Vietnam experience as one of the 8 people who did the spy research to spot the targets, but he's in the spy equipment business. On and on and on. And I don't think you often easily discover these things. You only discover them in working with a client over some time. Often I'll get it in a day, but it will pop up sometime during the day and experience allows me to sort of, antenna up, hear just a casual reference and then want to know more about that because I think that's the thing. The tip I would have for people doing this for themselves who, as you say, aren't professional copywriters but need to create their own marketing is there are resources. I'm sure there are some online unbeknownst to me, but if you go to the bookstore there are at least 5 or 6 books at any one given time that are basically fill-in-the-blank workbooks that are designed to help people write their own autobiographies or life stories with the idea that they are going to do them and leave them for their grandkids or they are doing it for family and personal purposes. These books ask you 6 bazillion questions to jog your memory about childhood experiences and school experiences and military experiences and likes and dislikes and funny relatives in your family and tragedies and etc. And any one of these would be a useful resource for somebody wanting to take kind of a fresh inventory of what personal story assets they may have and not be using that could be used effectively in their marketing. So a quick little trip over to a Barnes Noble and probably $12 or $20 will get you in the game this way. I used some of them as resources when I prepared for the influential writing workshop.

You know, I mean, I pretty much used pieces of all that, but I will tell you that, you know, what both Lori and Dan said was that oftentimes— not oftentimes, pretty much every time— you don't get the sort of sensational story early on in a conversation with a client or even with yourself if you have that. I mean, I have clients— I was working with a client today that I've been working with for 5 years and every time I meet with them I learn something new that I say to them, "Gee, I wish I would have known that 5 years ago because I would have used a lot of that back then." And I also will tell you that I'm just finishing up right now my 2-year book. The reason why I call it a 2-year book is it's taken me 2 years to finish it.

It's mainly taken me—

Robert Wurtschhoff called his "that damn book." Yeah, right. It's basically taken me 2 years to finish it because A) I used every strategy I could figure out to procrastinate. A) is I wanted it to be the perfect book, and then C) is— I don't even know what C) is. No deadline. That's right. There was no deadline. But in writing the book, the book is just loaded with stories in order to sort of teach what I'm teaching in the book. And a lot of these stories are so sort of in the back of my mind are things I haven't thought of for years but they are terrific stories that I think a lot of times people sort of have those stories buried deep inside and you have to dig those out because those are some of the really big ones. You know, Laurie, before I open up for Q&A, I do want to ask you one more question. Sure. Which is you had mentioned another —big commonality amongst the female buyer is sort of the fact that they look to belong to a community. Yeah. And what do you do in your copy in order to get that point across?

Well, you have to make her feel understood. You can't be condescending or talk down to her. She'll sense it right away. So the way you get that in your copy, one thing, this is just a little device that you can throw in there if you are actually, if this is authentic and you're really doing it, but women really like to know that you want to make a difference in the world and if you donate to a charity or something like that, you definitely want to put that somewhere in your copy to let her know you're part of a bigger picture. But as far as the community, sense that you want to weave into the copy. You just— it's some of the languaging that you're going to use like imagine your life as this and many other women just like you have benefited from this product, from this service and those sorts of things you can weave into with the languaging really. And if there's a way when you're actually creating an offer that you can include— have her include her girlfriend, like if you're going to an event or something. Like I'm actually having an event on this topic in October, and like if you can have a special price for bringing— you know, bring your girlfriend along and things like that that can be included in offers. Will really appeal to her. This isn't necessarily community in and of itself, but women really like to give our opinion. I guess men do as well, but we really like it. So if you have quizzes or you have surveys that we can take and let you know how we feel, that you are interested and you really care about what my feelings are then you're going to raise your trust factor tenfold because I'm going to feel like you really care. That's very important to the female market. We really want to know that ultimately you care because we want to know that once we are your customer that you're still going to continue to take care of us and you're going to continue to provide good service. If we have a problem, that you're going to be there to fix it for us. You want to make sure make sure that you weave that into your copy as well, that it's— not that you would bring up any problems necessarily, but just that with your guarantee, there's no issue, no hassle. We want to be there for you. If you have problems, call our customer service, fax us, email us. Give them lots of different options of ways to contact you. Give them— I'm actually getting away from the community part of it, but just things that I know will you should weave into your copy to appeal to women. Tips that don't have strings attached, like interesting statistics and facts that she can maybe share with her girlfriends. And if you can get her talking about you in any way about what it is that you offer, the word of mouth spreads really fast like wildfire and the girl can community.

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