Monthly Newsletters: The Power To Transform Your Business

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today's episode, we get to talk a little bit about newsletters. Now, if you've been in the Dan Kennedy world for even just a couple of months, you will know we have a monthly newsletter that goes out consistently. That is something that Dan Kennedy has kept consistent for decades. Does it work? That's the question of this episode. Today, we're going to be listening to Bill Glazer and Jim Palmer on monthly newsletters. Now, Jim Palmer runs a business literally creating newsletters for other businesses. He's going to share with you not only how often you should be sending out your newsletters, but should you do physical? What about digital? How do you market done-for-you services with newsletters? What other kind of services work with newsletters? And should you really look into this? If you've been dragging your feet on creating a newsletter, this might be the podcast that changes your mind. Let's listen in as Jim Palmer is interviewed by Bill Glazer, and we talk about monthly newsletters, the power to transform your business.

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.

So we're going to talk about newsletters. By the way, Jim, um, you weren't in the room. I don't know if you were in the room when I said this, but I asked him how many people here which I was shocked. How many people here right now are sending out monthly newsletters?

All right.

Yeah. So every month.

That's the big question.

Yeah. Well, I said monthly. Yeah. So like he's sending his, sending his out in January of 2008 over here. He's sending out February 2009.

That's the thing.

The, the So we got Jim Palmer here, who should not be at all a stranger to anybody in the room. He's a 3-time Cy Young Award winner, played for the Baltimore Orioles. No? So this is the real Jim Palmer. That's the phony Jim Palmer. So Jim Palmer, you have a company called— what's the name?

No Hassle Newsletters.

No Hassle Newsletters. So what I thought I'd do— is that Jim and I are gonna have sort of a conversation about newsletters because we're both big fans and he actually does them for others, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and there are other people in the room here that also do turnkey newsletters, right? Who, who else is doing turnkey? Put your hands up high. Who else is doing turnkey newsletters? There's a couple people in the room that are doing that. So, uh, Jim, why don't you give, let's start off with telling everybody your story.

My story.

And then we'll go from there.

Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. As Bill said, I am the real Jim Palmer. And, well, actually, a funny story about that. In a former life, people had to come deliver products to me. One guy, one of my vendors actually called me upset and said, "I have people fighting over who's going to deliver the product to you." I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Because somebody asked, 'Are you the real Jim Palmer?' and you said yes." I said, "Well, I am." So no getting away from that. Well, let me tell you, the Newsletter Guru was actually born on August 17th, 2006. '06. Now we all have certain dates that are very memorable to us, you know, for instance our anniversary, children's birthday, things like that. One of the reasons I remember August 17th of '06 was that was the day that I first discovered Dan Kennedy. This was the first book I read. It was under a big umbrella on Ocean City Beach in New Jersey. And I'm a cancer survivor, so I've actually had melanoma twice, so when we go to the beach, everybody's out having fun, running up on the boardwalk. I'm under this— I'm in constant shade, which is actually, if there was some sort of an upside to what I went through, I love to read and I love to read on the beach, and I can now just sit there with my pack of books and not be yanked out and do another thing. So that was a good thing. But I remember that day because if I was to tell you that reading this book was transformed the way I do business, that would be a tremendous understatement. Since I discovered this book and all the other Dan Kennedy books and the world of Glazer Kennedy, my business and my life and my lifestyle has been just revolutionized. The way I look at business, the way I conduct my business, working on instead of in, and most importantly, the way I market my business has been just dramatically changed. And I'm going to tell you a couple of ways that happened. Very often, and especially in the last year, I've been a guest expert on a number of teleseminars with Alexandria Brown, Melanie Benson-Strick. A couple weeks ago, I was on with Ari Galper, and one of the first questions I always get asked is, you know, what an interesting niche, Jim. How in the world did you get into newsletters? And for that, we need to go back, I think, actually about 27 or 28 years to the early '80s. Yet my youthful appearance may be deceiving. I actually just turned 50 on Saturday. So we had a real nice shindig. Happy birthday. Well, thank you. And in the early '80s, I was, I think I was 22 years old. I was married. I had my first of 4 children. I was managing a bicycle store in the greater Philadelphia area. And I was after more and more money. And the owner said, it has to come out of percentage of the profits. So I kept focusing on how to increase the profits and not just the gross because people would simply say, "Well, sell more bikes." Well, bikes have the lowest profit margin of any item in the store. They take a while to put together and then you also have to sell them. It takes a while. So I did a lot of research on everything we sold and the items that came up as having the highest gross profit margin, which will be no surprise to Bill, was bicycle clothing. Clothing had it 50%, 60%, sometimes 70%, 80% gross profit margin. Now the problem in the early '80s, if I told you it was not chic or stylish for men to be wearing tight black shiny Lycra shorts, that was the case. Nobody— it's pretty commonplace today, but nobody did it back then. Now I was a cyclist myself. I used to ride like 15 miles each way to work, and I really understood the benefit of having the shorts with a big pad there. When I would meet people on the sales floor and tell them, "You've got to put these on. I can actually ride 4 hours instead of 40 minutes and still not have a sore rump." When I talk like that, people would say, "Sign me up. I want to buy them." So what I did is I figured out if I could just find a way that I could communicate on a big scale to a lot of people, I could actually sell more clothing. So I sat down at my electric typewriter. It was an electric typewriter. I had a lot of the— if you remember that white tape, make a mistake. But I actually typed it out. It looked much more like a letter than a newsletter. I just really called it a newsletter. And I just started writing. Now, I'm gonna give you a couple golden nuggets of wisdom. And now that I'm in the, the Glazer Kennedy world, I realize some of the things I did were actually very smart, but I was just totally naive and going on my gut. So I sat down and I wrote out exactly as I was talking, and I dropped in headlines that instead of saying June special, $29.95 shorts, I would put how to ride 4 hours instead of 40 minutes. And then I would describe the bike shorts and why you'd want to wear them. And I described the gloves with the padding and things like that. And so number 1 is write your newsletter in a conversational tone. Engage the client in a conversation. And the second thing I did is I gathered every single name and address I could find in the store. I didn't try and segregate who has spent a lot of money, who spent over $300 in the last month or anything like that. Frankly, if they bought an inner tube and I had their name and address, they started getting the newsletter. The next thing I did is I figured in most retail businesses, your average customer comes from around 5 miles— most people, excuse me, most people shop within about 5 to 7 miles of their home. And so I knew that while we had a nice little display of clothing, all my competitors We're not even getting into it. So I wanted to find a way to get my newsletter out to those people. So I identified all the various bike clubs in the area that were like recreational riding clubs. And what I did is I went to those people and said, look, I got this newsletter. I'm trying to educate people and, you know, get into cycling and more— have fun doing it and being more comfortable and things like that. And so they actually gave me their mailing list. So I'm now sending my newsletter out. To people who are actually shopping at my competitor stores, which was pretty cool. Just to give you an idea, in 1982, we sold about $10,000 worth of clothing. And about 3 to 5 years later, at our high point, we were selling $100,000 worth of clothing. In the summertime, in the months of like May, June, and July, half of the store actually had clothing at at this point and half had bikes. When I first started, we had a couple of forearm waterfall racks, a couple of half rounders. I'm just trying to impress you with my knowledge of clothing apparel display material.

I'm very impressed with that. You did $100,000. That was like a good Saturday for us.

I am horrible at math, but I know from 10 to 100 is a humongous increase. That's what the calculator said. And so some of you may be saying, well, sure, you know, selling $10, $20, $30 items is a great thing for newsletters, but what is the upside? Now, I myself didn't know at the time, but let me fast forward. From there, I got hired away from one of my competitors who was now franchising his business, and he asked me to come help him with his marketing. And one of the things I did was create a newsletter. He didn't have one. The CEO of this company understood the value of a newsletter. The problem that I had, and some of you may have this if you have larger companies, most of the other directors in the company did not. Most of them saw it as a big waste of time, or if there was a newsletter, sure, we need to have a newsletter, we know it's important, but can we just do it quarterly? Every time there was a fire to be put out or they needed Jim to do something else, Jim's writing the newsletter. So it was really like bucking a lot of trends there. When he put me in charge of the franchise department, one of the things I did is I put everybody on the mailing list that called in through our lead gen ads, and we would spend— we were spending about $100,000 a year in Entrepreneur and Inc. and Wall Street Journal prospecting for franchisees, and when they called the 800 number, they would get some information, but now they also started getting our monthly newsletter. There was one gentleman that called and got into the system, and we went about 6 months with this guy. He got real excited about opening a store. We actually did some preliminary site work, and we really thought it was going to go somewhere, and then he just kind of disappeared into the woodwork. Now, that's not uncommon. If you have enough family members tell you, "Don't do it, it's a horrible idea," or, you know, financing falls through, your wife gets a hold of you, whatever, sometimes that happens. But about 8 months later, he recontacted our company and said, "I'm ready to go." So a few months after that, we had a store ready to go. Everybody comes in for a 2-week franchise training program. On the first day, they would always meet with me and we'd talk about marketing and store operations and things like that. So we're sitting down that morning and we're just sitting at a conference table and he had his binder with all this stuff he's been collecting, his training manuals and whatnot. And I said, Rick, I said, I'm just curious, it's been about a year and a half since you first contacted our company and now we're moving forward. It's kind of a long timeline. What happened there? And he goes, well, Jim, I was very excited about opening a business, something I've really wanted to do, but to be honest with you, I was not 100% comfortable on the security of your company. I said, fair enough. Well, what changed your mind? He opens his binder, this is a true story, he opens his binder and he holds up a newsletter and he goes, well, this did. And I'm like, wow, tell me more. And I've been reading your newsletter every month, and I was looking at the scorecard, and let me just say what that was. On the lower right-hand corner of the front page, I had what's called a scorecard. This might actually be pretty cool for No BS. And I would have stores open, stores in progress, total stores. So I know every month that number is going up, probably like the membership, which would be pretty cool to show. And he said, so that was going up, and I was reading about your franchisees and how they were surpassing goals and One of the things we did in the company, we had contests between company-owned stores and franchise stores. Franchisees were always kicking the company stores' butts because they were invested in the company. And some franchisees were opening their second and third location, and he said, "Finally became obvious to me, this is a company I want to be involved in." Now, I know that we've all been in sales situations or professional meetings where we're sitting there, you're supposed to look calm, cool, collected, this is something that happens every day, day, but in my mind, I am doing backflips up and down, all around the— I'm taking this newsletter and running to the CFO's office and saying, "This newsletter that we've been sending for a year now at a cost of maybe $12 just reaped in $150,000 plus 5% royalties for the next 10 years." So the way I like to wrap up that little story is my big lesson on newsletters is whether you're selling a $20 pair of bike shorts or $150,000 franchise, a monthly customer newsletter, and I would say sent monthly, is an awesome marketing tool. So let me bring you up to current. I'm almost done. In 2001, it's October of 2001, and I'm, at this point I've been actually unemployed for a year. I lost my job in 2000, and in the middle of being unemployed is when I got told I had cancer, so I've been through it. It's been kind of a crazy year. And I'm sitting there trying to figure out what am I supposed to do with my life right now. And I've always wanted to have my own business. And quite frankly, with 4 kids and, you know, mortgage and all that, leaving the direct deposit and the benefits just never seemed like a good idea. And it just all of a sudden occurred to me, my kids are used to having no money for the last year. It's not going to be a huge cultural shift if I start my business now. So I decided this is the perfect time to start a business. So thinking about what can I do well, and I've been doing newsletters for, you know, 20 years now, so let me go out and start a newsletter business. And what I figured is that if you— I really enjoyed it, first of all, because you're always doing something different. Every business needs a newsletter, so I figured I'd have a wide pool of prospective clients. And I started a company called Dynamic Communication, and I was working one-on-one with customers, private companies, associations, nonprofits, and things, and chambers of commerce, working on the full-color, glitzy quarterly or bimonthly at best newsletters that I now know are absolutely boring and it's the wrong thing to do. But over the next 3 to 4 years, I developed a nice clientele of about 20 to 25 clients. I was finally making decent money again, but what happened is I realized I was building something I shouldn't be building. I was building a keyman business. And if I wasn't doing the newsletters, if I wasn't meeting with the clients, there was no money coming in. I couldn't take time off, and I knew I had to make a major change. And what I decided to do was see if I could leverage what my skill was. And if instead of creating a newsletter that I would just sell to one, one time, I thought if I could just use technology and create these newsletters, fill it with content that I know people love to read, give folks an opportunity to put their name on it, give them a place to put their personal monthly message, monthly special offer, their photograph, and things like that. Through the internet, I could have people customize their newsletters, view them in real time through the software that I was using, and basically attach their mailing list and then sign off and go do their business. And what's happening right now while I'm here speaking to you is somebody in this country is probably ordering a newsletter and there's money going into my PayPal account. So that business in the summer of 2006, I had finally got that to where I wanted to go. I had no idea how I was going to market it, what I was going to call it. Dynamic Communication II, I really had no clue. And then I met Mike Capuzzi, who is the Philadelphia IBA. Mike and I had lunch and he says, "Have you ever heard of Dan Kennedy?" And I had not. He said, "Well, you ought to read his books." And he kind of gave me the warning, which I know a lot of people do. It's very different. Okay? He goes, "This logo you're showing me, forget about it. Nothing about logo at the top." He said, "Just read it." Mike begged me to have an open mind and just read it. I said, "Okay, what book should I read first?" He said, "This one." I got the book, went to the beach, and that's how I did that. I couldn't put this book down. I read it in one day. When I got back to the beach house, I had no internet. I actually put my laptop in the car. I drove around Ocean City. I actually found service in front of a church. Chevy dealer. I pulled over, hit Amazon, I ordered every one of the No BS Series books. I had them all read within 30 days and I was already implementing. And that's how I knew that— oh, sorry about that. That's how I knew I needed to create celebrity. I needed to anoint myself as the expert and the name of my company, which really doesn't have a logo, needs to tell people what I do. And so I figured out that what I really do now is I completely remove the hassle of producing a monthly newsletter. So that's why I called it No Hassle Newsletters. Now, in closing, and actually this will be a nice little segue, one of the things I do is I really believe in giving back and helping others. And I actually buy these in bulk now. And so whenever I meet somebody or I think somebody can use a helping hand, I give these books away. This is something I've been doing for a while. In fact, when I first met Lee Miltier here last February at the First Peak Performers, I shared with her that I had read Success Is an Inside Job and it was so impactful on helping to clean out the garbage that was in my head that's probably in a lot of people's heads if you really want to admit it or not. And so I said I ordered 6 books, 6 copies, and I sent them to friends. And in Superconference, I actually got to introduce Lee to somebody who I had given the book to, if you remember, Angela McGaskill. So anyway, this is probably a long shot in this room, but is there anybody in the room who does not own this book that would like to have it? Nobody wants to admit they don't own it in front of Bill. Oh, okay, come on up then. I'll give you this copy of the book.

You know, Kevin, you're like the last guy I would have guessed would own that book.

Kevin, there's one thing you need to do for me. If you can stand in front of that microphone and turn to page 174. Kevin, you'll see that I've highlighted two sentences that Dan Red.

By the way, Kevin, it proves the point that there's no such thing as a free book.

Turn to 174. You're going to see highlighting. Do you have it? Sure. Okay. Just read it to yourself. In about 20 seconds, I'll have you read it aloud. Do you see the words that I've actually underlined in addition to highlighting? Those are the words I want you to actually punch the air. I want you to sell this thing like you believe it with every core of your being. Core in your being. At this point in the book, just about wrapping up, and Dan's talking about building and maintaining your fence, which is a cool term. He's talking about postcards and email and all the other things you need to be doing. Then Dan says this. Go ahead. In addition to these sorts of things, my biggest single recommendation is the use of a monthly customer newsletter. Punch it.

Or for the really ambitious, more than one. Nothing, and I mean nothing, maintains your fence better.

I just about leaped out of my chair, sun be damned. I was running around the beach. Somebody else gets it. I love this Dan guy right away, so thank you for that. That is, that's my story, Bill.

Okay. You drove in all the way for that? So here, why don't you, why don't we talk?

Okay.

So first of all, let's talk. I'm going to ask you some questions.

All right.

What is the advice that you would give people as far as the elements of a good newsletter? What does a good newsletter contain?

In the 50,000-foot view, it contains work stuff and other stuff. And the work stuff is the stuff that either has to do with your business or the message that you want to get across. And the other stuff is the stuff that will most of the time get read and that people like to read. See, when Bill showed you up there earlier, the big kiss of death is being boring. That's absolutely true. What you— the most important thing to realize when you're writing your newsletter is you want people to read it and therefore you want them to look forward to and read the next one. So if you go on and on and on and on about your main business and if you go on and on and on about You've been ranked, you know, in some association, you've been winning awards, your insurance is now reduced because you're such a great business. It's just people will absolutely turn off and they won't look forward to it. The template that I give people with no hassle, and it's funny when people actually come to me and we do custom newsletters through our platinum level upgrade, a lot of folks will start out saying, Jim, I want to have a lot of opportunity to customize your template, so just give me a little bit of your, what they call fluff. Which is okay with me because fluff works. And what happens is they come back and say, "Let's redo the template." I really don't— less and less because it actually takes a little bit of time to do this. So, in one of the templates I give folks, it's called In Touch, I give what's called the From the Desk of pad. It actually looks like a message pad and it goes— you fill your name in there, it prints there your picture, and there's room for about 150 words of your personal monthly message. This is your opportunity to add personality and connect with people. People actually, I think it's a great idea to break down the barrier where people think that, oh, it's a corporation, it's a store, it's a business. No, this is an opportunity for you to connect one-on-one. And in the packets that we're going to be giving out soon, yeah, you can do it now. And there's some sample newsletters in there. One of the ones that just works, that does such an amazing job at that is actually Rob Berkley, who's back there. Rob is one of my clients and he does a newsletter called Vision Day. And it's probably one of the best examples that you could look at, and there's a copy in the envelopes. So this is Rob's Vision Day newsletter. And so Rob is one of the people who actually did want to have more room than your monthly desk of pad. So, we, on the whole first page, this is an area that Rob writes and actually customizes his template online with, and this is his monthly letter. And what Rob does really, really well is he tells you about clients, the success they've had. He talks about them coming to either Martha's Vineyard or Naples, Florida. Talks a little bit about the experience they've had. And in this article, and also the one on the back, which is Vision Accomplished. One of the great things about the copy in there is Rob will address actually some of the fears or trepidations that people might have. And so he addresses it in there. And then another thing we started, Rob and I brainstormed this, and we came up with the Vision Day strategy and About Vision Day, which About Vision Day is a constant, so that's always always in there, but we suggested that Rob, like Glazer Kennedy, start letting, start letting, peeling back the curtain a little bit. And so Rob now reveals in each newsletter some of the success strategies that he uses. The other thing Rob does really well, and this may not work, this is the calendar, this may not work with your newsletter, this works really well because Rob is doing a high-end coaching program and people want to see just like you read in the No BS Marketing Letter. People want to see the calendar and that you're filled and booked out and you're doing a lot of business.

Well, also, if I could just interrupt you for a second, it also sells coaching because, you know, people— not only does it see that you're busy, but it also sees that this thing exists without doing an overt pitch to sell coaching. Right. So, I mean, it's very valuable from that perspective. I mean, you know, Dan, you know, in the newsletter puts in the days that he's doing his one-on-one consulting. And years ago, although now I don't believe he takes any new clients, but years ago he did it because he wanted to let people know he does one-on-one consulting without coming out and saying, I do one-on-one consulting.

That's exactly right. And so this is a real good example. You can see, so those are some of the components there.

What's the inside? Isn't there an inside?

No, it's a 2-page newsletter. Oh, okay. And Rob, Rob bifolds it and puts it in an envelope and mails it that way.

So he's putting it in a 6x9 envelope.

He's putting it in a 6x9. I want to give you a testimonial. Rob was nice enough to send this to me right before a call I did. And in the last, it basically, I won't read the whole thing. This green sheet is a bunch of testimonials. Rob essentially says in In the last 7 months, they've spent about $5,000 sending out the Vision Day newsletter, and it is a direct result of $40,000 of new business. I know actually yesterday Rob just placed his next order for Vision Day, and I think the mailing list has increased judging from the numbers.

I got Rob coming up to the mic. You're sending this newsletter to whom? Let's start with that.

I send it to current and past clients and people we meet who are interested in the newsletter.

Okay. And the second question is, I know the answer to this, but I just want to make sure everybody else knows the answer is, this is not a paid newsletter, this is a free newsletter.

This is a free newsletter.

100% free.

Right.

What, are you ever in the 6x9 envelope, any months are you ever inserting anything other than this newsletter?

Almost every month, we use that same envelope to carry along either 1 or 2 other pieces. For the price of 1 first-class stamp, we can get in about 3 sheets.

That's about right. 4 pieces of paper to keep it under an ounce is a big dumb rule of thumb. How are you infusing yours? I assume it's about you and Debbie, right?

Right? Right.

How are you infusing your and Debbie's personal life into this thing?

In each one of the front articles, the idea is that we want to capture the sense of place that we work in. We work in two locations. We work in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., and Naples, Florida. Depending on the time of year, Part of that first page that you're looking at will have information about where we live and what's going on in the town or on the island. Secondly, it generally, one or the other of us writes it. I write about two-thirds of them, Debbie writes about one-third, but it's always about something that's going on. So the one that's up there right now is me on the auto train, so I I tell a little story about the Auto Train and how I'm bringing the car back from Florida while Debbie and the cat get to fly. We sort of want to give a sense of what's going on in our life so that there's this continuing and ongoing saga of what's happening in our business and personally.

All of you in the room read the No BS Marketing Letter. Because you read the No BS Marketing letter, what are— and we did this before, but it's important to reiterate this. What is it about Dan Kennedy that you know about him on the personal side? So he's got horses, that's number 1. Diabetic, number 2.

What? Took dancing lessons.

Took dancing lessons. Ron, what would you say?

Overcome a stutter.

Overcome a stutter. Was a professional speaker that was previously a very, very bad stutterer. Diabetic. Diabetic, we said that one already. Former alcoholic. Pardon me? Former alcoholic. Previously was an alcoholic, that's right. What else?

Used to speak with Zig Ziglar.

Spoke for 9 consecutive years on the number 1 success tour in the world. With Zig Ziglar. What else? Huh? Has 2 homes. That's very good. One in Virginia, one in Cleveland. Very conservative and has— who said daughter? Has a daughter. Actually has a son also, by the way. See, didn't know that. Huh?

Self-educated.

Self—

yeah, a high school graduate. Never went to college, which people find interesting and amazing. What else? Private aircraft, which I flew with him one time. It's like a flying coffin. I can tell you. It's a little—

what?

Oh, I didn't see that. I didn't know that. Wow, I didn't know that he broke his arm when he was small. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do remember that story now. That's right. That's right. And he couldn't— his father wouldn't take him to the hospital until he finished doing what he was doing. That's right. I do remember that story. Also, what about his habits? I mean, doesn't use email, not online at all, okay? No cell phone. Iced tea. Drinks iced tea. Only the—

pardon me?

Package once a week back and forth. Package once a week back and forth from his assistant, Vicky. Only— you can't get him on the phone. You can only speak to him by appointment. So diligent about time. So I mean, look at all those things. Now when you think about it, we just made him really into a person and revealing flaws and also for some people perspective strengths. But when you think about most newsletters when you read them, ain't none of that stuff in there. It's only about, you know, it's the Financial Times and we're going to teach you how to be more financially prudent, you know. And it's not anything at all about the person. And the person stuff is a whole lot more interesting. So, you know, Rob going along on the Autobahn. Autobahn? Is that where he went?

The Auto Train.

Auto Train. Autobahn was even more interesting, by the way.

That's next month.

That's next month. So, I mean, all that stuff is really interesting. And so when you do this, one of the best ways to do this is to is to do it in a way where you sort of figure out, okay, what are all the things that are happening in my life? And really, you should be, in many cases, you should be an open book about it because the more of that stuff that you share that you would prefer not to share, usually the more interesting that that stuff is. So—

Hey, Bill, can I say one thing?

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, when I first, started doing this, I'm very private and don't like talking about my private life. And people always come up to me, all the people that read this, and say, what happened with you was fascinating. Thank you for writing about it. It's inspirational. And that's what they remember. They don't remember all the dates we do, but all the personal stuff is what sticks. And that's really what seems to keep people connected. People say, you know what, I rip it open and I read it right away to see what you're up to and where you've been and what's going on. And I'm like, wow. And the more we put in, the more connected people are getting to this whole thing.

Two most common questions I get at the Superconference, people walk up to me, questions about my Porsche, questions about my daughter. Two most common questions. Not the marketing questions. Although then that comes and that's another problem. Show this one.

This one?

Talk about that one.

Thanks, Rob. This is a newsletter we do for the Glaser Kennedy IBAs on no-hassle newsletters. And so the major components of this one, well, on the front page you have the masthead. And these are the areas where each IBA can customize with their location and they They can put a little picture here, whether it has to do something with a timely event of the month or maybe their location. This is their "From the Desk of" message, so the name fills in there. This is basically how they write. They can upload a picture and a caption. Caption's always important with a picture.

That's interesting. That's Tom Rebar's newsletter? Yeah. But he didn't show a picture of him with Gene Simmons. He showed—

Probably pretty smart.

I think it was very smart.

He's not in the room, I guess. No, he's not. Okay, on the—

He'll be here tomorrow, as a matter of fact.

Okay. On the second page, this is what I consider the done-for-you portion. So this is what we put together. This is a message, a marketing message. I write this very much evergreen, so it's again coming from the— as if the IBA was writing it. We do put in chapter humor. This is always on page 3. We have some Glaser Kennedy information, which is either about a product or an upcoming event. We do book review, always on topic. And these are, these right here are two picture boxes which could either be business card ads or just more information about your chapter. On the back page, of course, the contact information, and we have a couple things to drive Attendees, of course, the meeting information, where it is, about the chapter. We give an opportunity for all the IBAs to actually put in their customized URL. This one would be for the web store. This is for the phenomenon. And then we have a free guest pass to— I like to encourage the IBAs to send this out to prospects, not just people who regularly attend, so get people to come to their meetings.

Why don't we talk about the marketing of done-for-you newsletters? This is a topic you didn't expect to talk about. So to sell your service to others, how do you find— what are some of the things you've discovered along the lines that helps people to, in order to subscribe to this?

The 3 things that work for me right now are doing teleseminars. So I'm getting in front of big herds that generally have an understanding for that. And I have two lead gen squeeze pages, one for a free 5-part e-course on the awesome power of newsletter marketing. And then I also have a free template. I actually take one of my— I did a— working with an SEO specialist, he told— we found out that one of the highest ranked search words was actually free template, which is actually people looking for free ezine templates. So what I did is I just put up a free newsletter template ad, which drives them to a website, which the first thing they see is my picture and, "Hey, I'm glad you're here. You're one step away from the free template." And I tell them a little bit about me and No Hassle Newsletters. Then I actually give them a template of my In Touch newsletter. This is the one I have one that's fairly generic. Any company pretty much can use this. I offer this in 2 and 4 page, and it also is either filled with content specifically aimed for either B2B or B2C markets. So there's, there's one for everybody. But what I do is I give them the template and I just take out all the content. And so if they can use the PDF, they can use it that way. But then I have a series of autoresponders that goes out for about a month at a time and said, hey, even though you You got the newsletter template. If you're still having trouble, keep in mind I will customize, print, and mail this for 99 cents. So I'll keep reminding them if you're struggling, even though I gave you the template. And of course I'm marketing to them in other ways, but that's essentially how I'm building my list.

So when you talk to entrepreneurs, and I assume most of these are entrepreneurs or small businesses, small businesses, what are some of the, reasons that you have to overcome in order to get them to understand that they need— this is the first question. This is a multi-step question. Okay. Get them to understand that they need a newsletter in their business.

Well, the first part of my website, which was the first thing I did after discovering Planet Dan, was the whole top part of the website is which talks about why you need a newsletter in the first place. I don't show them any templates. I don't show them, I don't try to sell them anything. It's all about, and it has testimonials, there's audio. So it's really, I'm just talking about how important it is to build and maintain a fence around your herd. Talking about what happens if you don't and things like that. And then I start to get into eventually, for essentially $12 a year, a year you can put a fence around your herd. And I start getting into the, you can have a newsletter for 99 cents in the mail including postage. So I start bridging the gap that way. And one of the things I purposely did with No Hassle is I made the minimum quantity 100 pieces because I wanted this to be available where in my private business, you know, my minimum, most of the people couldn't afford that. So I made the minimum low. And I've talked to them about why they need a newsletter in the first place and how beneficial it is. And most of the people— right at the top of the website, by the way, is again the Johnson box with the free course. So most people opt into that and start getting taught about the newsletter business.

And how do you handle the question— well, there's two questions that I can see that you could get. One question is, Jim, how often Do I have to send it out? Do I really have to send it out monthly or can I send it out quarterly or semi-annually? What's your response about that?

It has to be monthly. And that's addressed in the copy, but that is, I do have email. And I'm also, by the way, going to sign up with Eric Alper's ChatWise. I want to give that a try for a couple months. And to be honest with you, it was a little bit of a struggle there mentally for me because following Dan's advice about, you know, you can't just, I don't just to answer my phone and you talk to me, but yet here I am on the thing. But what I've decided to do, if other people are considering ChatWise, is I'm gonna do it for a month or two, and what's gonna happen, if nothing else, is I'm gonna develop a list of the frequently asked questions that I think are most on the people's minds when they're at the website. So I can probably retool my copy or put other ways to get at that.

Well, there's a lot of other big advantages to ChatWise, but I want to stick to newsletters. The other question that I think you get is, well, can I do this thing online instead of having to mail it?

Right. Email versus print is a huge question. Right. And I get that. We talk about that on a lot of teleseminars.

And what is your response?

My response is it's not an either/or. You've got to do both. You know, I definitely am right on board with 1 being the worst number. And they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I like to give a couple ideas on how each one promotes the other. For example, when you get somebody to a website or through a squeeze page and you get their first name and email address, you can start sending them an e-sign or through autoresponders. I mean, that's nice. You're building a list, but it's really not— the most valuable list is when you got the full contact information. So one of the things you can do, I suggest that when people start getting your ezine, promote every time, every issue in your ezine, by the way, if you like this content, you should, and you'd like to sign up for our print newsletter where we have some of this plus these additional topics, then have a squeeze, you know, then have a box, a sign-in box where you can collect their name and address. When they're getting your print newsletter, you can say, hey, you know, we hope you like in our monthly newsletter, if you'd like to get our weekly success tip or strategy tip, whatever you want to call it, you know, go to this page and get our e-zine. My suggestion would be not to simply send them to a homepage but send them to a specific, like a squeeze page. Hey, subscribers of the newsletter, glad you're here. Sign up here and we're going to start sending you our weekly tips. So they can cross-promote. Because let's face it, It's pretty easy to get some people to sign up for a free ezine through your website, so you could build into 100, 200, a couple thousand names, but start marketing to those people to give you their mailing address. That's where you can really maximize that.

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. Now 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 nobsltr.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, You also need 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.