The Hypnotic Selling Formula With Joe Vitale

There is a quote that is incorrectly attributed to P.T. Barnum that says, there is a sucker born every minute. Now that's actually incorrect. And Joe Vitale would fight you tooth and nail on that fact. Today on the Magnetic Marketing Podcast, we get to listen to Dan Kennedy and Joe Vitale, and Joe Vitale is going to reveal to us his hypnotic selling formula. This is a 3-piece formula. He's going to give you everything you need in order to make sales using this formula, how to use it in your copy, and then how to use this as an info marketer, both online and offline. Now, I can't tell you how excited I am to be able to have you listen to this audio. This is something that we've been talking about internally across the office for a while. Joe Vitale's library, everything he's done on hypnotism, is spectacular. His book, There's a Customer Born Every Minute, about P.T. Barnum, is a wonderful masterpiece, plus all the other books he's done on sales copywriting and his programs that he has. So when Without further ado, let's listen to the Hypnotic Selling Formula with Joe Vitale.

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. Hello everybody, welcome to another Marketing Gold Tape. I have a great interview that's going to kind of wander around the waterfront on several different marketing topics. Today with an author and online marketing genius and a very skilled sales copywriter, Joe Vitale. Joe, I'm going to let you sort of do your own introduction and give everybody a thumbnail sketch of your background.

Well, I love that you said I was an online genius. Boy, I have to get that in writing.

Well, yeah, and of course I mean that in the best possible way in comparison to me.

Wow. Well, let's see. I used to list on the back of my business card all the books I had written, but now it's at the point where I only put one line on my card that says, "Author of way too many books to list here." So I've written a lot of books. Everything from a book on P.T. Barnum that I greatly love called There's a Customer Born Every Minute. It's a great book, by the way. Thank you.

It really is terrific.

It was fun. He is a genius and I hope we get to talk a little bit about him. I also wrote one of the first books on internet marketing with a book that is now out of print called Cyberwriting that came back in the early days when I began as an internet skeptic. And of course I have books on people like Bruce Barton who was John Caples' boss back in the early BBDO days called The Seven Lost Secrets of Success. I have a program with Nightingale-Conant called The Power of Outrageous Marketing. So I've got numerous books. I am primarily an author. I do copywriting and of course these days I am 98% internet driven. So I have a large online presence. I'm doing a lot with the digital world and selling a lot of ebooks and e-audios and other e-products. I absolutely love it. It spoiled me in many ways, but it's also made me, well, pretty rich and pretty notable, at least online. So that's it in a nutshell. Author, online copywriter, and jack of all marketing trades, I guess.

Well, we'll hop around some if you don't mind. So let's just stay with the internet since we wound up there.

Sure.

And I know that you are especially adept at using that technology to drive people to sites and especially adept at email marketing. If I'm not mistaken, I think you've had either a quarter of a million or a $300,000 day, which, you know, one of those a month, as they say in Alabama, a fat hog will get you through the winter. So what can you tell our folks that they may not know about how to create that kind of sales frenzy that you are so adept at online?

Wow, geez, that's like the million-dollar question of the day and it would take quite a bit of time to answer it. Let me try to give it in a nutshell. I'm thinking on my feet here because I didn't expect that question. I would say basically it is having allies, having a strong sales message, and having bonuses that are irresistible. What I mean by that is I have a mailing list of my own and I could I can milk that and do incredibly well with just that list, and I do. I mean, I'm mailing those people almost daily, and there have been days when I mailed them 2 or 3 times in a day, which was incredibly unusual, but I had reasons for it. And I can do well just with my own online list. However, if I want to do that $500,000 in a day, or if I want to do anything of that kind of caliber on a regular basis, I need to have other lists to be able to go to. So that's the first thing I would think that we need to do is to create allies. And you did that fairly recently with your Valentine's promotion that I helped participate in. And basically you're not just mailing to your list saying I have a special offer to celebrate this special day. You went to people like me and to other list owners and said why don't you make this offer to your list and you will get an affiliate commission for doing so.

To be fair, Bill did all the work on that. I didn't. But you're right, it was a very successful promotion. It generated large numbers in a hurry. And as you say, it's totally dependent on having a bunch of strategic alliances in place.

Well, let me put this in offline terms. What we're really talking about in my vocabulary is cross-promotion. And this goes back to when you walk into a dry cleaners to pick up your clothes, and there on the counter is a certificate to get your oil changed, or there on the counter is a certificate to get $5 off your next pizza. There was some cross-promotion going on there, and hopefully the next time you went in to get your oil changed, on the counter there was a certificate to get something off on your dry cleaning, or there was a certificate there to get $5 off on your next pizza. And when you went into the pizza parlor, there hopefully was a coupon there that said get $5 off on your next dry cleaning or get blah, blah, blah off of your next oil change. All of these people were working together for win-wins. And that's what I love about the internet and it seems to happen in a giant way when people are willing to share a big part of the pie. And what I mean by that is all of the most successful campaigns I've done online were when I went to other list owners and said help me "with my big campaign on this such and such date to sell my home study course Hypnotic Selling Secrets or to sell my next book," whatever it happens to be, "and I will give you 50% of every sale." Now offline in the brick and mortar world, that's pretty high. My experience has been that they usually don't give anywhere near that much money.

If anything.

If anything. But online, I learned way back in the early days of being online with people like Mark Joyner who actually got me started with online marketing. He was very willing to give 50%. And I thought this is incredibly high and what a motivator. Because when I went to these list owners, I gave them the copy that they were going to send out. I always advised them to write their own, but knowing that most of these people are pretty lazy, being human nature and all, that they were probably going to take the copy I gave them and send it out. And I would say you don't have to do anything but hit send on your computer. Computer. Here's the copy. When the orders come in, we will track them and you will get a 50% commission for every one of those. Well, I just extended my reach. So when I go and talk about making $500,000 in a day or two with a big promotion, it wasn't just to my list and it wasn't just me. I had allies. I had a good product. I had a good offer. Then the other part of this equation that I mentioned earlier were the bonuses. I have found that we need to have what I think Jay Abraham, or maybe it was you, named an ethical bribe. I love this concept of the ethical bribe. When I did the big promotion last October for Hypnotic Selling Secrets, which is my home study course, just about everything I've ever done on marketing is in that course, we collected the largest amount of bonuses ever recorded in internet history. At that point we said, "If you buy this program," which I think sold for $1,500, "you can get $21,000 in bonuses." And this was not junk, which is important when you come up with a bonus. You don't want to just give people stuff they can get on their own somewhere. It needs to be truly valuable, and in terms of the online world, it needs to be downloadable because you don't want to get into the business of shipping bonuses when you're actually selling a downloadable product. It's just going to shoot yourself in the foot. So we collected $21,000 worth of bonuses. Where did we get the bonuses? All of the list owners that we asked to do a promotion for us. We would say, do you have something of value you can contribute to our campaign? Why would they contribute it? Because they got a free ride on our marketing train. Every time we promoted our product, we would say you would get this gift, this bonus from Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, and the whole list of people that were there. They got free advertising.

Well, yeah, each one of them is entering everybody else's list as a result of the cross-promotion. You know, you've hit on two really important things that I want to emphasize for people. One is somewhat philosophical and the other is practical. The philosophical is, and you may very well take it for granted, that this is the way you think, but it is a big distinction I see amongst people. And you said, you know, as long as everybody's willing to share the piece of the bigger pie. And I find, you know, that you really can separate people into those that have what I call a finite perspective and those that have an infinite perspective. Those who think that there's only there's so much money to be divided up and if I let you have a dollar of it, it's a dollar that I may not get versus those who think there's an unlimited amount and that everybody working together expands the size of the total pie. And you got to find people in the second category to work with. But I think it's important that that's your kind of thinking, it's my kind of thinking.. And people kind of need to be aware of where they are.

What a beautiful statement. Thank you for pointing that out. I want to jump in and ride on that for just a moment. I practice what I call karmic marketing. And karmic marketing is my own term, of course. People probably have never heard of it before. But it's the old give now because you're going to get later. And that doesn't mean that I'm just giving away things mindlessly. When I'm giving away things, whether it's a bonus, somebody comes to me and they say that they're going to do some sort of campaign on the on the internet, do I have a bonus to contribute? Yes, I do. I will find something, I will make something, I will create an excerpt from one of my books or my audio, something, and give that to them. I know that on a philosophical level, on a karmic, if you will, level, by my giving now, I will be receiving later. Now, this is kind of a metaphysical universal principle that I'm talking about. It might sound like woo-woo to some people, but it works very practically for me. And if you want to strip away all the metaphysics and just say Yes, by giving now I am advertising myself to people who possibly never heard of me before. So it behooves me to give them something because yes, I will get something in return if only my name, my publicity, and possibly building my list as a result of giving away.

Well, you know what, and you can explain it in a lot of different ways. I mean, Jim Rohn's simple language of plant seeds. In spring, harvest in fall. Dr. Ed Kramer, who I'm sure you've read, although a lot of people haven't. Kramer has that great line, "The hole you receive through is the same size as the hole you give through." But you know what? It's a strategy online/offline that a lot of business people miss, and that is really aggressively looking for opportunities to give something to someone else to give away as a free bonus. Absolutely. You do that. I do that. A Platinum member, Ted Thomas, is very good at that. But even on the local bricks-and-mortar business level, if somebody was really alert and adept, they'd be paying attention constantly to who else has the kind of customers they'd like., and they would proactively seek out those merchants and say, "Here, I can give you this to give away to all your customers." Beautiful.

And that's one of the things I explained on my Nightingale-Conant program, The Power of Outrageous Marketing. And quickly I can tell you that exercise is something like taking a sheet of paper and writing on it who your customers are, just in a general nature. If you do have that dry cleaning shop, it's all the people in your neighborhood that need dry cleaning. Then extending from that, you're making a type of mind map and you're clustering on this piece of paper. You ask yourself, "What other businesses, who are my other competing businesses who serve the same customers?" By competing, I don't mean they're not another dry cleaner. They're not somebody in your same business. Who has a business that serves the same customers that you serve? Maybe it is the pizza parlor. Maybe it is the local movie theater. Maybe it is the local vitamin store. I don't know what that is. But all of those people are running businesses who are seeing potential new customers for you. You want to be creating win-wins with them. You want to be making contact with them, going to them and saying, "Look, I will give you this," whatever it is for you. It could be as simple as my earlier example. It's a $10 off coupon for their first time they do business with you.

It could be printed on the coupon, "Gift from the name of this other business." Well, you know, you're an author as am I, and so we both look at the bookstore business with sadness and frustration. It has always astounded me, and every time I talk to a bookstore owner I try and sell them this idea. Why they aren't joint venture marketing with movie theaters is utterly beyond me because you've got books in the store that match up with the movies that are in the theater.. It's easy to go to that theater owner and give them something. As you say, a printed excerpt out of a book, a coupon, something. I think I've seen it 3 times in my entire life in the entire country.

I was just thinking I don't know that I've ever seen it, but what a brilliant idea and so obvious.

I did a teleseminar as part of the promotion for my last books for independent bookstore owners. Just free. You know, it was a promotional thing. Needless to say, the number on the call was disappointing. Amazing. As near as I can tell, there was one person on the call who got it based on the follow-up communication. At the small business level, this is a powerful opportunity because it's no out-of-pocket.. And you rarely see it done, and so it's a great tip and a great conversation. Let me leap to— let's actually go back to Barnum and let's talk about a couple of your books, if that's okay.

Sure.

Because I didn't even know you had the Bruce Barton one myself.

Oh, you haven't seen The Seven Lost Secrets of Success?

No, so I want to talk about that before we finish, and I want to get a copy. Uh, you did a lot of research on, on Barnum. I asked you actually off mic about the Chautauqua thing where P.T. built a house and annoyed everybody, um, in the state, uh, community by promptly painting the whole damn thing pink. Uh, what, what kind of got you, uh, interested in doing all the research?

And, and tell us a bit about the book. Well, thank you for asking, because I love P.T. Barnum. What a marketing genius, and what a fun guy. I had heard of him, probably like everybody on the call, and knew that he was involved with the circus. But what I didn't know until I read his autobiography was the whole life, a whole 80-year career that he had where he was involved in promoting the oddest things. And he ran a museum in New York where he really got his first start and his claim to fame. I read his autobiography, and that was the turning point. I fell in love. I thought, my God, this guy's This guy is charming. He's a storyteller. He's brilliant. And the thing that really fascinated me is that he would look at what everybody else was looking at and he would see an opportunity. He would see something there that everybody was missing. My favorite example is when he went to Connecticut, which is where he was born and raised and he loved it there. And he was in upper Connecticut and he met a family who had a little child who wasn't growing. The little child's name was Charlie Stratton. And everybody looked at little Charlie Stratton and they said, "How sad that he's not growing, that he's staying so tiny." P.T. Barnum looked at him and thought, "Superstar." He renamed him General Tom Thumb. He trained him to sing and dance and put him on the theater and put him on tour. And he made that little guy world famous. He made this little kid who everybody else felt sorry for into one of the country's first superstars. He made him a millionaire. General Tom Thumb, Charlie Stratton, lived to be 40 years old and had the most remarkable life of just about anybody, all thanks to P.T. Barnum and his particular way of looking at people and looking at events and seeing opportunities. I was fascinated with that, and I still am obviously today as I talk about him. He did that with everything. He was a genius at marketing and promotion. On his deathbed, he revealed one of his secrets.. This is one of my favorite secrets when it comes to marketing.

That's a great line of copy, by the way. We're going to talk about copy later, but it's a great way to start a paragraph.

On his deathbed, he revealed one of his secrets. I actually wrote a news release that began like that one day. That actually led to me being on A&E Biography. So many things to tell you about Barnum. Okay, so I did write a news release and it did have that. What P.T. Barnum said, and I don't remember the exact words, but basically Basically it was, to paraphrase, that he owed the massive fortune that he had acquired to the newspapers of the United States. He was doing what I ended up doing. He was sending news releases out all the time. He was getting the media to send business to him. He was a master at that. When I sent a news release out about P.T. Barnum's deathbed and what were the 10 secrets to his success, I sent it out over a wire service and I didn't see any immediate response. Which is the nature of the news. You never know what your news release is going to do, but I treat it as a seed, and I know that I'm planting something, and it'll hatch later. Months down the road, on national TV, A&E Biography had recreated a biography of P.T. Barnum they had done a long time ago, and they found out it was full of errors. So they reshot it, they recreated it, they re-aired it. At the end of it, the host said, "Are P.T. Barnum's Secrets to Success valid today?" Now get this, Dan. He held up one book, my book, and he said, "According to author Joe Vitale, they are." And then he went on to read part of my news release about when P.T. Barnum was on his deathbed, he revealed his secrets to success. It was all from my news release. My book sold out overnight. My publisher was Amacom, which is a very conservative publisher. Like most publishers, they don't have a clue about marketing. They were taken by surprise. The book went out of print almost instantly.

Yeah, well, that's always the good news/bad news as an author, isn't it? Oh my God, you sold books.

Well, we got no books. Yeah, we sold books and they didn't know what to do about it. It's like, go print more. You know, but anyway, Barnum is a genius at marketing. He brought Jenny Lind to this country, and Jenny Lind at that point was unknown here but famous as an opera singer over in Europe. He wanted to bring her here. He had heard about all of her fame overseas, and he decided to book her. He went out of his way to make an arrangement with her. He quickly found out by talking to a hotel worker where he was staying in New York that nobody in America knew who Jenny Lynn was. So he worked night and day. He hired publicists. He sent out news releases, and he created this international buzz. When Jenny Lynn got off the dock in New York, there were 30,000 people waiting to see her. And this is waiting to see her where previously they never heard of her before. P.T. Barnum was this amazing marketing genius with an eye towards publicity that he's still my guiding light and my little angel over my shoulder whenever I'm writing copy or writing a news release. I'm thinking, how would P.T. Barnum look at this? What would P.T. Barnum say? This is the man who put a mermaid on display in his Barnum Museum in the 1850s. And when people said, "Why in the world are you putting this mermaid on display?" Because the mermaid is not, you know, this half-naked female that most of us are thinking of right now. The mermaid that he put on display was this atrocity that was half monkey and half fish. It was ugly. And he put it on display in his museum. And people said, "Why are you putting this thing on display?" He said, "As soon as I announced there was a mermaid, my ticket sales went through the roof." Ticket sales tripled. That's why he did it.

I can go on about Barnum. I love him.

Tell me about the Bruce Barton book. Bruce Barton, I fell in love with because of Robert Collier. Like many copywriters, I was deeply influenced by the Robert Collier Letter Book and think Robert Collier was one of the greatest copywriters ever. In it, he talks about Bruce Barton being this author of a bestseller in the 1920s called The Man Nobody Knows, which was about Jesus as a businessman.

Yeah, which I've read and many people—

yeah, it's good. Yeah, and that book, an edited version of it, is still in print. Correct. But Bruce Barton had many books and many bestsellers. He was the co-founder of BBDO, one of the largest advertising agencies, Batten, Barton, Durston, and Osborne.

Which I sometimes call Batten, Barton, Durston, and Doofus, but that's their current version.

I was going to say, that's the modern version of it. Yeah. Not during— Bruce Barton's days. Bruce Barton was an incredible copywriter. He was an incredible author. He was one of the most well-known business celebrities in the Roaring '20s. He was like the David Ogilvy of the '70s or '80s, maybe. He was a recognizable name in the business world. I became fascinated because he died in 1967, 80 years old. Unknown, totally, or virtually at least, forgotten. All of his books out of print. And I thought, how did this incredibly influential man fall through the cracks of history? And I began, much like I did with Barnum, this self-motivated quest to learn all I could about Bruce Barton. And I ended up finding all I could about him and writing this book called The Seven Lost Secrets of Success. And I didn't call it Bruce Barton: A Biography for one main marketing reason— nobody would buy it. Bruce Barton: A Biography. How many people heard of him? Nobody. So I repackaged the whole thing and just said The Seven Lost Secrets of Success. And the subtitle is something like, How the Lost Secrets of One of America's Founding Fathers in Advertising Can Help You Become Rich Today, or something along those lines. And I focused on the 7 things that I thought Bruce Barton did. One of them that is worth mentioning was sincerity. And it might sound like, well, that's pretty obvious. You should be sincere.. But I don't see that happening. I can find ads on television or in the newspaper or even in direct mail that are obviously misleading people and taking for granted people's intelligence. Bruce Barton was definitely against that. He was very much in believing that sincerity sold. So he was very sincere in everything that he ever did, and it just reeked of it when he wrote his campaigns. There's a sales letter in the book The 7 Lost Secrets of Success that got a 100% response. I'm pausing for dramatic emphasis there. You and I both know— Notice I did not step on your paws. 100%! This is miraculous. This is off the scales in terms of results. Miraculous. It's legendary. This is the kind of thing that goes down in the history books. It was a fundraising letter.. And it was sent out during the Great Depression. Everybody is broke and he is asking for money. He wrote a very long letter, but it was so deeply sincere, so personal that people all responded. I think they had to spend $1,000 each as I remember. Now this is $1,000 in the 1920s or 1930s during the Great Depression. This is an unheard of amount of money to ask for. So Bruce Barn was an incredible copywriter. He was John Caples' boss for a time at BBDO. They were buds for a long time, and I am a disciple of John Caples. So that's kind of it in a nutshell, but he's another one I love.

By the way, maybe the most insincere ad ever, Jon Stewart showed it last night on The Daily Show.

I don't know if you watched Stewart's show. Yeah, I saw it. Did you see it?

The Metamucil ad?

The Black History ad. Oh my God!

What could you be thinking? For everybody listening, in Ebony magazine, which this month is, when we're recording this, is Black History Month, Metamucil ran this ad, full-page magazine ad. Somehow, I forget now the tortured link, but they actually managed to link Black History Month to digestive tract health and eating Metamucil. Yes.

And that's a pretty long stretch, don't you think? Well, it was so obviously inappropriate that the announcer last night held it up on national TV for everybody to see.

But you know, some idiots at that company approved this thing. Oh, it was—

From a bunch of idiots at an ad agency who thought this was brilliant, I suppose. Frightening. They may be bragging about the fact that they got airtime last night, though.

Yeah, maybe. And it will probably all win a Clio. Hey, I want to get you into your main topic here for about 10 minutes, which is your hypnotic selling program and the formula that you have for that.

Yes. Well, all the things we've been talking about tie into that. I've created a system for doing marketing that I've been calling Hypnotic Selling Secrets. In short, I sometimes refer to it as the Hypnotic Selling Formula or Hypnotic Marketing in general. But it's a 3-pronged, 3-step integrated, holistic, synergistic type of a strategy. It works on 3 levels. You'll hear how I was inspired by Bruce Barton and P.T. Barnum and a lot of the other people I've studied, as well as bringing in little bits of contribution of originality from Joe Vitale himself. The way. But I'm obviously well-read and mostly a researcher, so I've gained from a lot of other people's pain and their work and their blood and applied it to a system that seems to work for me and the people I've been working for. So in essence, the very first step of this is to use the media. I see so many people in business who are totally ignorant about this, or if they hear about it, don't know how to use it, or if they have a clue on how to use it, they aren't doing it at all. What a missed opportunity. I'm a big disciple of Paul Hartunian, who you know very well. Paul is the one who really educated me about the power of sending out one sheet of paper, which we call a news release, to get the media's attention for your business. Of course, I also learned this from P.T. Barnum, who was able to stir the country to go and see his programs, whether it was Jenny Lind or a Fiji mermaid or a little boy he's renamed. So it all comes from a piece of paper. Now the thing that I do differently is that I don't want to send out a news release just just to have my name in the paper. Too many people in business do that, and that's ego gratifying, but it's as pointless as that ad we just mentioned that was on the Daily Show. So what I try to do is send out a news release that contains the seed of a story that an editor will run, but here's the catch. It leads to step 2, which is driving people to a website.. Now in the simplest form of explaining this, the news release might contain 10 ways to save money on your taxes if it's going to be in April. Or it might be— we went through Valentine's Day recently— it might be, you know, 20 ways to show that I love you. And I'm thinking out loud, so these aren't particularly innovative, but you get the idea. You want to come up with something like a tip sheet, and there's 10 tips or 15 tips or 20 tips. In this news release, but you don't give all the tips in the news release. You give the first 5 of the 10 or the first 10 of the 20, with the rest of them being on your website.

This is the simple equivalent of if you walk down Bourbon Street in New Orleans, a guy will run up to you and ask you if you want a free shoeshine. Yes. And if you say yes, he shines one shoe, which is exactly what he promised. A shoe shine. He then asks you for money for the second one, and if you object, he points out he didn't say shoe shine, mister, he said shoe shine.

We're just doing it on a little more elegant scale. Yes, I was just going to say I'm trying to up the class here a little bit, but it's the same concept. Yes, I am teasing them. I am using this curiosity, which in hypnosis terms— and you know, I am a hypnotist, I do speak at the hypnosis conventions, I am using a lot of hypnotic principles in everything that I do— to Curiosity is incredibly hypnotic. I'm trying to milk this curiosity factor with people, including editors. Editors are humans too. They've got personalities and they're driven by the same things you and I are. I think it's this fundamental myth that a lot of people in business have is that their clients don't respond to the same motivators everybody else responds to. Absolutely. Big problem. I think that's so ridiculous. The same motivators that worked in the 1800s or even the 1500s are working today. You know, love and sex and food and security and recognition and status. Those hidden deep motivators seem to be right in our DNA. And curiosity is one of the most powerful ones. So my first step is to send out a news release that milks curiosity. And that leads to step 2, sending people to the website where that curiosity is fulfilled. That curiosity of course needs to be something like the 20 ways to, well, not get your shoes shined, but 20 ways to say I love you on Valentine's Day or save money on your taxes when you're self-employed. Whatever it happens to be, it's more fully explained on the website. But also on that website, there needs to be a way to capture the name and address of the people visiting. This is crucial because it leads to step 3, creating an email relationship with these people. So the first step is the news release, working with the media. The second step is the online presence, having an internet site that answers that news release and develops it some more, giving people a reason to give their name, address, phone number, and email, especially their email. And then the third is you use that email to begin a relationship with these people. Because just like offline, that list is your gold. And I have— I keep growing my list. My list isn't gigantic, but it's enough to keep me living in luxury and doing whatever I please. And milking anything that comes along my way.

So those are the 3 steps in a nutshell, Dan. Let me ask you for some specific hypnotic copywriting techniques that are necessary, of course, to make this work.

Well, the very first one for me, as I mentioned, I love curiosity. So I try to write copy that deeply plays on that. One of my own million-dollar tips, or my own million-dollar secrets in writing copy is I love using questions in the headline. I love using questions throughout the copy, but I use them in a particular way, in a very hypnotic way. Most people who ask the question in the headline ask a yes or no type question. I stay away from that because if it can be answered with yes or no, it closes the mind. I need the person's mind to remain open. This is fundamental to hypnosis because I need their mind to be open so I can shove some suggestions in there. I need to be able to deliver my message to them, and if their mind's closed, I can't get it in. So instead of asking, do you know how to save money on your taxes, where they can say yes I do, goodbye, or no I don't, I don't care, I'll say something along the lines of what are the 7 best ways to save money on your taxes in 2005? You can't answer that question. You cannot answer that question without at least beginning to read my copy. Now this is assuming you're at all interested in saving money on your taxes. I'm making up this example, but you would make up something relevant to your business speaking to the people listening. If it is the dry cleaner, it might be, "Do you know the 7 most common mistakes people make when they drop off their clothes at a dry cleaner?" Well, that question actually is not the best because you can answer it with yes or no. I would change it to something like, "Which of these 7 ways that people drop off their clothes cause the most problems when they go to the dry cleaners?" But you get the idea of what I'm doing here. I like to ask a question that cannot be answered with a yes or no, and preferably cannot be answered at all unless they start reading the copy. And when they start reading the copy, I do not immediately answer the question. I keep them engaged. This goes back to the traditional formula in marketing: attention, interest, desire, and action. The old AIDA formula. I might have got their attention with an open-ended, curious, hypnotic question, but I don't want to lose their attention as soon as they start reading it by just answering it. One of my favorite examples recently, I've been on a lot of teleseminars of late, and I would say on them, what was Homer Simpson What was Homer Simpson's middle name? And most people don't know. And you know what? They suddenly want to know. They suddenly want to know. It does not matter to them, to their well-being. It does not matter to their bottom line. It does not matter in any way, shape, or form to them personally or professionally. But suddenly they need to know, well, what was Homer Simpson's middle name? This is the power of trivia. This is why trivia is so popular. It engages the mind, which is a very hypnotic principle, and you don't feel satisfied unless it gets answered. So my questions when it comes to copywriting are engaging the mind on this kind of level. And in case people want to know, Homer Simpson's middle name was Jay.

J-A-Y.

Really?

I didn't know either.

And it's—

sorry, and I'm one of the few maybe who was not engaged by the, by the question. But I, but I get it. And it's a, you know, it's a really important principle, the whole issue of thinking in terms of how can I get this person to now have an open mind rather than a closed mind. Exactly. And, and it's a mistake to start trying to shove message at them until you've accomplished that.

Uh, give me another one. I'll milk you for one more. Sure. I love telling stories, and this one ties back to what I learned from P.T. Barnum and even from Robert Collier and of course from Bruce Barton. All of these men were fantastic storytellers. When you asked me early on what got me excited by P.T. Barnum, and I read his autobiography, which I encourage everybody to read— it's fun, fun reading and very educational— what I find in there is story after story after story. And all of those stories are hypnotic, they're engaging, and they're all teaching me something. They're delivering a message. This is fundamental to hypnosis because you want to hold somebody's attention, and it's very You don't know who Milton Erickson is, but Milton Erickson was one of the most influential modern hypnotists of all time. The hypnosis I'm talking about in copywriting is Ericksonian-type hypnosis. We are telling a story. Now, I don't want to confuse people, so let me try to simplify this and say the best example could be telling a story about somebody who came to your place of business who had the problem that most people have when they come to your business, who had it resolved as a result of your product or service. Telling that story is brilliant copywriting if you do it well, of course. The thing that I'm striving for with all hypnotic writing, with all hypnotic copywriting, is to put people into what I call a waking trance. Now in hypnotic terms, there is such a thing as a waking trance. It's simply a trance where your eyes are open. The way that I get people to understand what I'm talking about is to imagine the times when you were driving down the highway late at night or when there wasn't much traffic on the road and you kind of zoned out. You know, you might even have missed your sign. You were just— what, you know, minutes passed and you looked up and go, oh my God, what, I was I driving for the last 20 minutes? How did I get this far? You were in a waking trance. But what I want to do here is to get people into a waking trance as they're reading my copy. I learned this from some of the great writers. I used to read Mark Twain and Jack London and Shirley Jackson and William Saroyan. Some of these literary greats were able to write things that moved me to laughter or to tears or actually got me afraid as I was reading, perhaps Edgar Allan Poe. And I would read these and I would go, "How did they do that?" These authors were using the same words available to you and to me. They had the same alphabet at their disposal, but somehow they sewed these words together in such a way that they got me to feel something. I was about to say you know you're really reading something masterful when you have a physiological response. Yes. Yes. And I want to translate that to sales copy. That's what I've been teaching people to do through my home study course. That's what I've been teaching people to do in my talks and workshops. That's what I strive to do. The easiest way that I can think of right now on the tip of my tongue for people listening to do this is to tell a story about somebody who had a problem.. And they came to you and they had it resolved. Tell that story and you communicate how your business solves the problem that people are coming to you for. Now of course it has to be well written. I'm not glossing over the fact that if you're boring in telling this story that nobody is going to read it. You'll have broken the trance. You'll have lost interest and you won't get the sale. But if you do it well, then you have kept people reading all the way to the end. One of my favorite hypnotic writers in copywriting is you. Dan, you send out some of the most hypnotic copy. When I taught my closed-door seminar last September in Austin, 10 people attended it. They paid $5,000 each. One of the letters I held up and dissected was a letter I had just received from you the day before. So you are the guy that everybody needs to be studying.

I mean, read my books, of course, but as for a hypnotic copywriter, Dan Kennedy is it. Well, gracias. I'm going to loop just a little bit now into the information business itself. And so for the last 5 minutes or so, let me just pick your brain a little bit about what you've discovered that serves you best as an information marketer.

Okay. Information online or off or both? Either one? Well, first of all, I love being in the information business. And being on the internet has spoiled me because there's instantaneous gratification going on both sides. If somebody buys my e-product, whether it's an eBook or e-audio, whatever it happens to be, they instantly get the product because they get the download link. And I instantly get their money because they paid for it just right before they got it. So talk about instant gratification. It has spoiled me and I absolutely love it. I never imagined how many people are buying products, e-products, information products online. I began as an internet skeptic. When Mark Joyner started his company Aesop out in California a long time ago, and he came to me after reading my early books and said he wanted to take a book of mine, something I hadn't published yet, anything, or I'd write something new and turn it into an eBook. I said, "You're nuts. Nobody will buy an eBook." I turned him down. He kept writing me and I kept turning him down for 2 full years. This shows you how smart I am and how much of a futurist I am, because I didn't think anybody would buy an ebook. Finally, just to shut him up, I dusted off an old book, gave it to him called Hypnotic Writing. He wrote a sales letter, put it up at hypnoticwriting.com, sold 600 copies of the book overnight at $29.95 a pop. I tasted blood because I realized there was no shipping, there was no fulfillment, there was no printing, there There was no warehousing. There was no real, in physical terms, book. I thought, "Oh my goodness! This is amazing!" And we charged more for it than what you would charge for a traditional book that you'd find in the bookstore or on Amazon. That led to me coming out with anything else he wanted. Advanced Hypnotic Writing immediately came on the heels of that, as well as a whole lot of other products. I have found that people will buy these e-products very quickly. The thing that you have to keep in mind is they have to answer a problem that these people. Because when these people go online, and this is really a million-dollar insight that's going to seem obvious to some of your listeners and it will seem like an enlightening moment for other listeners. When people go online, they're not looking for an eBook. They're not looking to buy an e-product. They're looking to get a solution. The best example that comes to mind at this very moment is about a year and a half ago on a flight to Vegas, I had an asthma attack. Attack. Now that is not where you want to have— you don't ever want to have an asthma attack, but you don't want to have one on a flight. You can't open a window, you can't get off the plane, you're strapped in your seat and you're drowning because you're not getting air. Very horrible experience. And of course when I got to Vegas and I had to go to the hospital and so forth and they told me, "Well, you had a mild asthma attack." It's like, "Me? I'm healthy. I don't get sick. I don't have asthma. I don't have any problems." When I finally got out of all of that circumstances, what did I do? I got online and started looking for asthma "asthma cure." Looking for asthma cure did not mean I was looking for an asthma ebook. I was looking for an asthma cure. A few things came up, and one of them just happened to be an ebook that talked about a method that was created by a Russian doctor. It is literally unknown, or virtually unknown, in this country, but very popular in Australia and New Zealand. What did I do? I paid my $19.95 and bought that little ebook, and that ebook was very enlightening to me. It gave me a lot of resources which I did follow up on and ended up spending more money money on, about $300 more in books and tapes that would help retrain me for breathing and educate me about this whole asthma phenomenon. But my point is I did not go on the internet searching to buy an eBook. I went on the internet searching to buy a solution to a problem. That is the million-dollar clue of the day for any information merchants whether they're online or off. Have a solution that a particular group of people are looking to have resolved. Offer that solution to them. And if it happens to be in the form of an eBook, wonderful. If it happens to be in the form of a home study course that you have to ship to them, wonderful. But it has to solve their solution. A particular group of people, you can find them online. You can post Google ads for them, which is how I found this. When I did the asthma cure search at Google, One of the ads on the far right was for somebody selling their book that had a promise of an asthma cure. That's how I was led to it.

So I think there are some lessons and some conclusions just in this brief little story I've told. It's extremely valuable and important really for everybody selling everything, not just information. But it certainly applies to our information business. It's easy to get focused on the thing you're selling.

Rather than what the customer is actually looking for and wants. I think the more specific we can be, the better. A lot of people still— and I think this is another big mistake that I see— they still think their product is for everybody. And almost never is it for everybody. It's usually for a very select group of people, and you can usually get to that group of people. For example, I just just today released a new eBook. You can read the sales letter at www.endselfsabotage.com. But this is not a book on ending self-sabotage for everybody. It's specifically for people who are trying to write, publish, and market their own eBooks. So the argument here is if you have read all the books on how to write an eBook and you haven't written it, or if you've started your eBook and you've not promoted it, or if you've started to promote it and you're at a loss or you're you're not getting motivated or you're procrastinating and so forth, maybe, just maybe, you are self-sabotaging yourself, in which case you should check out EndSelfSabotage.com. This is a very niche book, but the audience for it is huge because Jim Edwards and I have a book out there called How to Write and Publish Your Own eBook in 7 Days. It's at 7DayEbook.com, www.7DayEbook.com. Thousands and thousands of people buy that book every month and have been doing it for 5 years. I am staggered by how much money Jim and I have been making for 5 years off of this little eBook. If nobody else has got it, you ought to go see if somebody has got EndWritersBlock.com. I don't know if they do or not. My point is all of these people who are buying the eBook are not all writing an eBook. Even though the method obviously works because enough of them go and write their own eBook promote it and so forth. But they don't all go and write the book. So why not? That led to me creating this co-authored book with a cognitive psychologist on how to end self-sabotage for eBook authors. I announced it and immediately sales started coming in. But I didn't come out with a book that said, "End self-sabotage for the world." It's too broad. That's the shotgun approach. I might sell a few, but I'm not going to do anywhere near as I can with a very rifle shot.

[Speaker:STEVE] It's painful to watch people do that. Do that.

What a waste of money. Hey, Joe, the clock has about got us. Too bad because this has been a riot.

I love these questions and our interaction. Thank you, Dan. Well, it was a great call and I certainly appreciate your time and all the great ideas you gave our group.

Hey, thanks a lot, Joe. Thank you, Dan. 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 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.