Direct Marketing Titan Brian Kurtz: Lessons From Sending 1.3 Billion Mail Pieces and Over $80 Million Of Media Buying

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo. All right, welcome back to another episode. This is Brad and if you are a loyal listener, I welcome you back. And if you're brand new you've never heard the show before, I would like to welcome you and encourage you to subscribe to the show. I try to make every single one of these episodes so valuable that you feel as though you should have paid for it even though you didn't. And this is my way of getting to have some really awesome and amazing conversations with people that I might not normally get to have and pick their brains clean, extract out all the goodness for my benefit especially, but also yours. Now today I am very honored and thrilled to have a guy named Brian Kurtz on the other line. I'm also privy to the fact that this has been an amazing episode already because I've already recorded it. And I can tell you that you're going to want to take some notes on this, especially if you like marketing and direct response, because Brian is one of the titans of direct response. It's actually the name of his company too, but he's been in the business for about 30 plus years. He has sent between 1.3 billion and 2 billion pieces of third class mail over the past 20 years. At the height of his infomercial success, he was responsible for buying media in excess of $80 million, selling over 3 million books via Direct Response TV. That was just in a three year period. Brian has seen it, done it all, and he's got an amazing breadth of experience that spans even past the Internet. And when things were done, when we had to send postage stamps on everything, I was really honored to get him on the show today and interview him about really what's working. Some of the time honored principles. I can tell you right now. I took two pages of handwritten notes on this. So you're going to want to pay a lot of close attention to once more. This is one of those things. I think at the end of this you'll be like, wow, I can't believe I got that for free. So that being said, without, without any further ado, let's jump over to Brian. All right, Brian, welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business. It's a pleasure to have you on the show, man.

I'm glad to be here. And it's definitely one of the best titled podcasts I've ever heard.

Thanks. I appreciate was funny story that the reason that I'm doing it is because I just happen to have the idea for this name of bacon wrap business. And the way I had it was like I wasn't even going to do the podcast necessarily, but then I had thought of this name. I was like, ok, I almost have to make this into something. But I was sharing a friend of mine's podcast episode on Facebook and I was just like, listen to this. This is some bacon wrap business advice if I've ever heard it. And I was like, bacon wrap business advice if I was going to ever.

Do a show, that's what it was. Bacon wrap just accelerates the taste buds, right?

Exactly. Well, I don't know if you've seen the subtitle of it, which is Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits.

I love it.

So, yeah. But it's great to have you on. I've kind of followed you from a far for, you know, several years. Been a big fan of what you're doing. I remember, you know, with the boardroom, I think this was maybe back in 2009 or 10. And when I started with direct response and Internet marketing and all this back in 2008, I want to say. And I remember hearing that you guys were a, you know, one of the big heavy hitters. And I was like, how do I get on their list? And I went and bought. I forget what the book was, but it was like one of the big books of secrets or inside information or something like that. It's like, all right, I got to get on this list. I got to see what they're, what they're sending. And I can't remember if you know, how much stuff I got in my swipe file from you guys.

Probably, if you get. Yeah, I mean, we were renting our list pretty heavily. I mean, back then we were also selling books by the pound. So you got. If you probably bought a book that was five or six hundred pages and it was a really, really good model for many. And it's still going, you know, they're still able to sell books like that. It's just that direct mail, while it still scales in terms of response rates, in terms of if you do it right, it's still very, very profitable. But it does. You don't have the same amount of list universe available because so many people are no longer doing direct mail, which is a shame, but it is what it is. I mean, the Internet, last time I checked, it's a little cheaper postage.

Yeah. And that. Yeah, you get that. You get the postage going up, and then you get it. A lot more people probably just leaving, doing direct mail because of that. So, like, I never even thought about that until you just said it, which is if.

Yeah, the barrier to entry for online is just so low. And the funny thing is, is that there was a urban legend email that was floating around, I don't know, five, six, eight years ago, whatever, about how email was going to. They were going to start charging postage for email. I heard that and I thought that was the coolest idea. Because now, you know, yes, the barrier to entry would be harder for anybody to do email marketing, but all of a sudden you might start thinking about your messaging in a whole other way if you had to pay something. You know that every time you send something. And I even wrote a. I wrote a blog post once called why Paying Postage made me a Better Marketer. And I don't like to sound like grandpa at the picnic. I always say that I've heard this argument before. You've heard this argument before, I'm sure, because it's. I'm on reruns on it. But I will tell you that it's just so important because I don't. I don't think I'm so smart. I just know that what had to go into what we did, you know, in terms of direct mail before we sent something, was so much more thought and work and, you know, making sure the creative was right, the list segmentation was right, the offers on everything had to be so perfect because the cost per thousand was just so high. Whereas, you know, online, you can just sort of throw anything out there and something stick, Right? Yeah.

You can't afford to be sloppy, you know, when you're doing that. I don't know if. Do you know Luke Jayton by any chance?

Yeah, I do. I'm a big fan of Luke. Yeah, Luke was telling me Jeff Walker, mastermind, was very, very smart.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm a good friend of Luke's and he was on the show a long time ago. And that's one of the first things he was saying, too, because he's, you know, made his bones. And in direct mail, it's like, yeah, you know, just the. The level of detail and thought that goes into every communication had to be so much better. It makes you a better marketer. You can't really afford to be sloppy on that. But, but so, yeah, I mean, you've been, you know, as I mentioned in the introduction, you guys, was it like 1.3 billion pieces of mail that you helped over?

Yeah, it's not to the, to the exact number, but I did a pretty good estimate.

Count them all manually by yourself?

No, I didn'. Like every stamp, but, you know, 1.3 billion pieces of direct mail probably just over the last 20 years. So probably, you know, if I go back to my origin, you know, when I started at Boardroom, because we were really, you know, huge direct mailer for a long time, you know, probably we mailed, I don't know if it was 2 billion, but certainly somewhere between 1.3 and 2 billion with a B. And yeah, that's a lot of mail, you know, and, and you know, the mail didn't go out unprofitably. So, you know, there were metrics that were, were followed. We got, we got metrics that we, that we, we were like a religion for us. Yeah, no, we weren't going to throw good money after bad. So it's basically 1.3 billion or 1.5 billion or 1.8 billion, whatever it might be, of direct mail that was targeted and that actually made a profit. Even if it didn't make a profit in year one, it made a profit by year two. And that was also part of the metric because the metric of lifetime value, or at least understanding that you're going to make money in year two if you break even in year one or lose a little money in year one, is actually something that all of the best online marketers I've met since immersing myself in the online world. The best online marketers understand lifetime value as well as I did when I was doing direct mail. Right.

You know, for a new entrepreneur and with a new offer, I kind of, you know, because I've dealt with this in the past where there's that chicken or the egg syndrome which is, you know, that you will have a lifetime value of it, but you, I guess you just have to totally estimate it because you don't have the back tested data to prove what it is. But if you were going into something brand new right now, how would you kind of estimate that? Let's say you've got, you know, your front end offer is whatever and your, you know, your back end offer, you know, you know what that is going to be. I guess with your experience, do you just kind of call on, you know, past, past. I Guess averages for, you know, well.

Yes or no, et cetera. You want to use whatever experience you have. So you know, Jay Abraham's classics book, you know, getting everything you can out of all you got, which I highly recommend, probably his book. And that book, you know, you really want, really kind of drummed into my head that you got to go with what you got. I mean, you got to believe. Dick Benson, who was my direct mail guru mentor, used to say you got to believe your numbers, they're all you got. But a couple of things on your question about if you're just starting out with a new product, two things. First of all, a product is not a business and a promotion is not a business. A product is not a business is a quote I got from Chris Farrell, who's a great direct online marketer. And basically what that means is you already told me that this scenario you just gave me, you had a back end product already in place. So you know, no direct marketing business is going to survive without repeat business. And that was true in, you know, in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and it's true today. So the idea that, you know, you're, you have a product and you think it's going to be a killer product, that's going to crush it. And I just, you know, threw out terms that I hate. Crush it and you know, gonna crush it and, and you don't have any back end product or any subscription or continuity, you know, good luck with that. So you gotta be. So a product is not a business. That was Chris Farrell. And then a promotion is not a business. That's from the great copywriter John Carlton. And promotion is not a business means that, you know, you get this and kill or promotion that's working on clickbank or it's working on with affiliates and it's doing great and you're doing all this great stuff and you know, you did a million dollar launch, blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah, and you don't have any back end product, you're also dead. One, killer promotion is not a business. So starting there, that's the key. Having the second and third and fourth products is obviously key. Your question already assumed that. So now you have the second and third. How do you determine lifetime value and what you might want to lose on that first promotion in terms of your money so that you'll know you get it later on. And one technique I always did because I couldn't predict the numbers exactly, is that you want to have what I call, you know, low, medium and high scenarios. For everything that you do. So, for example, I would take whatever experience I would have. I had a lot more as time went on. But if you're just starting out, you may not have as much, but try to get as much on the field experience from other people you may know to share with you. What kind of. What kind of click rates, what kind of stick rates, what kind of, you know, if you have an affinity product on the back end, what types of numbers could you expect based on the price point? So if your first product is 47 and your second product is 99, find some people who've done that, get some rough numbers, and then do at least a low, medium, and high scenario so that you'll know what your worst case is on the low so that you'll know that maybe after year two, you won't break even, but you'll be okay. You won't be out of cash. The medium scenario, hopefully, will be something that will make you money in year two. And then the high scenario would be something where, you know, you're rolling in the dough in year two or something like that. So I think that's a really good rule of thumb, you know, and if you don't have the experience yourself, go get it. Be in mastermind groups with people who've been there and done that. But when you go to those groups, make sure that you're bringing your own knowledge, whatever that might be. Everybody's got experience. Remember, getting everything you can out of all you got.

Yeah.

So everybody brings something to the party, but bring something to the party and. And then find out what other people have done on the battlefield so that you can start doing those kinds of estimates to do all. Just best guess, not a good idea. You still may be wrong. I mean, it's true that you could do a low, medium, high for the back end, and you may be off. Maybe your low was too high or your high was too low, whatever. But you got to do something to start figuring out, because you don't have unlimited cash. And so you really have to make sure that you start calculating those things and figure out, you know, what's the worst case scenario, what's the medium case, and what's the best case. And that's how I did almost everything in business for 35 years when it came to marketing.

No, that's great. And that's a. That's a, like a great scientific way to kind of do it. Just because you're guessing is not gonna work. And I know in the past, I've just had to kind of guess and hope and pray, like, ah, okay. And I realize that that's never a strategy, but a couple things you brought up about the, you know, somebody else has the answers. A few years ago, I forget who told me this, but I kind of tried to. I would tattoo it on my body if I wanted a tattoo on my body, but it was that I don't have to know all the answers as long as I know the people who do, you know. So that's why I'm a huge fan of. That's why.

Yeah. You know, most stuff has, hasn't. You're not inventing. I mean, there are some people that are just inventors and that's, that's wonderful. But, you know, it's. It's kind of all been done before, and then you're putting your personal spin on it. Everything I'm talking about today, I didn't invent anything. I mean, I didn't, I didn't make up lifetime value. I didn't make up low, medium high scenarios. I didn't make up. A product is not a business, a promotion is not a business. But you take your accumulated knowledge and then adapt it to your business and the business of the people you're trying to help. That's all you can do. And it's a cumulative knowledge. It's sort of like, you know, do you have 35 years experience or one year's experience for 35 years? And that's a huge difference. And if you don't accumulate the knowledge and it's, you know, it's sort of like, it's sort of like compound interest, you've got to keep accumulating that knowledge. And that curiosity is key. And I know that's one of the reasons why you started this podcast.

100% of the reason is because I wanted to have conversations with people like yourself anyway, people that I find highly interesting. And I go, I may as well record it and, you know, share this with other people. And it obviously helps build my personal brand as well. But that's exactly the reason I do it. I mean, I'm, I probably the most. What do I want to say, Frank, about, like, I'm probably the most selfish podcaster in the business. And I like to say that, like, I, I oftentimes forget that there's anybody listening to this because I would want to have these conversations with or without my audience.

Right, right, exactly.

You know, like, okay, if you guys, you know, aren't into this, that's fine. I'm into this. So hopefully they Are, I think I've heard from them that they like it. But you know, one of the other things that you brought up about that just kind of going back to the whole idea of lifetime value, as I mentioned to you offline, and a lot of my listeners have heard me say, my wife and I recently launched a coffee brand called Stiletto Coffee. And this was what this is. One of the things that we're dealing with now is that because we're so new, we don't have that data and coffee is such a low margin business on just an individual product. Right. You're not going to make a lot of money selling one bag of coffee. However, it's got a tremendous, as an industry, it's got a tremendous reorder rate because if people find a coffee they like, they continue to come back for more and more and more. The one thing we don't know is because we haven't been doing it long enough is okay, once somebody's on a subscription, how long is the retention typically? Is it like in direct marketing information, three to four months max typically, or is it a year? So we're trying to decide that, like how much can we pay to acquire that front end customer? Because that makes a big difference what we're doing. So going through that exact same thing right now. But I like what you said of, you know, the low, medium and high, you know, hypotheticals and kind of treating it like that.

Yeah. You know, going, going to your situation. I would, you know, not only, you know, do you have to figure out what the, you know, what the stick rate is going to be and all that, but there's a concept that I learned early on in my career. You know, this whole idea of barrier to switch and barrier to switch is an incredible lure to increasing the amount of time someone's going to stay with you. And it's always based on what's the hassle factor for the consumer or the customer or the prospect or whatever to switch to some competing brand and in different categories. It's just, you know, it's not that deep. You know, for coffee it's a lot tougher unless you find something you love. But you have to, you know, that's why you have loyalty programs and accumulated points. That's why, you know, the first time I heard this concept was in relation to one of the first shopping services where I think was called Peapod. I don't know if it's still around. I remember was when, you know, you would go to the grocery store, you go online and you give Them your shopping list for the week and then you get it delivered from shoprite or whatever or ap, whatever the supermarkets that were participating at the time. And what happened was because of all the input that you put into that profile that they knew you wanted Scotty's two ply toilet paper instead of four ply. And because you input Jif over Skippy whatever, you wouldn't want to go through that again. It's sort of like when you're putting in a profile for anything. Why would I want to fill out a form again? Why do I. Why do people stick with health insurance? Why do people. You know, the inertia is just too great. As long as the service is good and the product is good. Of course, that, that goes without saying. You know, I think something like coffee is a lot tougher. I remember Javalier, which was the big coffee club. You know, there were a lot. I remember they used to work really hard. I was a member and I used to do. I used to rent my list to them and I used to watch their marketing. And they're an interesting model because, you know, they would give you the coffee maker. It's sort of like Keurig, right? Yeah. And it's the razor and the blades. Same concept. You know, once you had the Javalia coffee maker that was perfect for their coffee and it had the special thing and now it became too specialized. That's why, you know, K cups had to become more omnipresent for any, any maker. And now you have multiple makers besides Keurig. But you always wanted that situation that why would I switch? Because it's going to be a hassle. And so, you know, I know you've thought about all this and I know that probably most of your listeners know this concept, but I can't emphasize it enough. And then in that concept is the other one besides barrier to switch is the commodity versus specialty. And you either have to have a specialty over a commodity or you better have a great story and you better have something else going on. If you're competing as just a commodity and anybody who's competing as a commodity and just on price, good luck with that. I don't want to be in a business like that.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's been one of the reasons we got into it and also one of the biggest challenges as well, because it is a commodity. And although we've got amazing coffee beans and roast, there's nothing, there's nothing special about the coffee, like proprietary to say that, you know, our beans are Infused with, you know, pixie dust. But what we tried to do is, you know, utilize Eugene Schwartz's fifth level of market sophistication and not. Not talk as much. You know, we're not selling the coffee beans as much as we're trying to sell that emotional, demographic specific, you know, talk to the. You know, that's why it's branded and marketed mainly towards women. It's either going to work phenomenally or it's going to fall flat on its face.

Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I think, yeah, you got a bunch of things you're going to have to work in there, but I'm sure it's great coffee and I'm. Yeah, good luck with it. I mean, I think.

Well, I appreciate the, like, the whole barrier to switch and the stuff like that.

That's.

That's great because I've been thinking about, like, the whole loyalty program, which is not in there yet, and it's something we have to do. But yeah, anyway, that kind of goes back to what you were talking about, the lifetime value and really understanding, like, you know, can you go negative in the beginning or how much and what can you pay to acquire a customer? So these are things that a lot of I know entrepreneurs and my listeners probably face, you know, as well as I do, switching gears a little bit, because before the call, you talked about a whole bunch of stuff, and I want to touch on a bunch because it was gold and I definitely don't want to let that kind of go. But you talk about the 40, 40, 20 rule. You want to repeat what that is in.

Yeah, it's very, very important. I've been using it a lot lately because it feels like every one of my clients, whether they're online, offline, or both, needs to understand this, and a lot of them don't. And a lot of people who are listening may already know this. So I hope I'm not. You know, I don't mean to. To be too remedial here. And I think just a really important basic, though, of marketing and what the 40, 4020 rule says is that the success of any campaign, whether it's, you know, online or offline, direct marketing, for the direct marketing campaign is you're dependent on 40% of the list and the list segmentation, 40% on the offer that you make and 20% on the creative and the messaging and what that says a couple of things. It's a very, very. It sounds very simple and I don't want to start playing games with, you know, well, it should be 38% versus 42. It doesn't matter. The concept is sound, which is that if you think about doesn't mean that creative is the least important. But think about it. If you had the best copywriter write an amazing video sales letter online for you or a direct mail package or a space ad or a TV spot and it went to the completely wrong audience with a horrible offer that no one would buy, you're going to get zero response rate. Whereas the opposite, where if your list segment is ideal, like perfectly suited for you, your offer is the right offer at the right price because you've tested it and the creative is done by some amateur copywriter, you're probably going to sell something because the list and the offer is so targeted for that product that you probably didn't need world class copy to make it sing. Now put world class copy on top of that. Now you've got the, what I call the holy trinity of direct marketing where you've now done world class creative with great offer, with great list segmentation. It's all working together and that's how it just explodes. A couple of things that I want to mention about the 40, 40, 20 rule. I read something recently online that talked about that, the 40, 40, 20 rule. It was written by some, you know, online technologist that basically said 40, 40, 20 is really 25, 25, 25, 25. And I'm like, what does that mean? So I look at it and it's like, yeah, well, 25% less, 25% offer, 25% creative and 25% technology. And you know, not to say that I'm not a luddite. I think technology is wonderful. I love email, I love my computer, I love the Internet. But God, what a horrible way to look at marketing. Because basically what's that that's saying? And I'll quote the great Bill Bernback here, he was a advertising great old timer Doyle Dane Birnback, one of the great ad agencies of all time. And Bill Bernback had a quote that was something like never adapt the technique to your idea. Adapt the idea to the technique. So the idea that, you know, because there's some cool technology out there, let's work our offer into it is completely the wrong approach. The right approach is let's find out if there's demand for the product list, let's find out if there's a price point that works great. Let's find out if there's messaging that might work. And you know what if it ends up being something we just want to do on Facebook, great. If it's something we want to do in direct mail, great. If we want to do both, even greater. So this idea that, you know, the 40, 40, 20 rule is old hat. I don't buy it. And so I'm working really closely. Like the first thing I do with any new client online mostly is we start looking at their list. We start looking at who their customers are, you know, who, who's bought from them, who are, who are, who are customers, who are prospects, who are suspects. How are we messaging to each of those groups? Are we segmenting them based within the buyer's file by how much they bought? And then the other big concept over this whole thing is another basic tenant on top of the 40, 40, 20 rule, which is the rule of RFM, which has not gone out of style. RFM is the basic tenet of direct marketing, and it stands for recency, frequency, and monetary. And what it means is recency. Someone who bought from you three months ago is way more valuable than someone who bought six months ago or a year ago. So, you know, it's counter to what you would believe coming out of college. Why would, why would someone who just bought from me buy again from me? They just bought. Well, it's true. I mean, that's the way it's always been. So recency is key. Frequency. Put frequency on top of recency, which means that how frequently do they buy? Do they, are they multi buyers? Have they bought from you? Did they buy three months ago and two months ago? That's someone who's worth more obviously than someone who bought three months ago only. And then monetary, depending on the product, how much they spend with you, you should always know total spend of every single person on your list or on your database. And every single model that we ever did, we used to mail hundreds of millions of names, indirect mail. But the same is true anywhere. The concept of RFM ruled everything. We used to do these models on millions of names to try to figure out which 10, 15, 20 hundred thousand names to mail of the millions. And it was all based on models that were all based on rfm. They were all based on the transaction data, as we called it, of all of your customers, how recently have they bought? How frequently do they buy? How much do they spend? And then maybe there was some demographic data that was important. Like if we had obviously a book for women's health, you had to only be marketing to women. But I just want everybody to understand that while the demographic data sounds sexy, you know how much people make, how much you Know, gender, household income, blah, blah, blah. That stuff's really important. Do they own a home, are they married? All that stuff's important. But the most important thing when you're marketing is transaction data. We used to say it's transaction data, stupid. So it's transaction data how people buy what they buy. It's a behavioral thing. Once you have that information, the other stuff gets overlaid, not the other way around. And so I think what's happened now, and it's good. I mean, I think when you can segment on Facebook based on likes, based on people, what people follow. All incredible. But it's all based on database marketing. It's all based on frequency, recency and monetary. And it may not be as much monetary on Facebook, but the recency, frequency. You can see that finding people who are most frequently on multiple. If they're following multiple sites or products that you are, that are similar to yours. You can see how this concept of database marketing would pervade, you know, would permeate any, any medium online or offline. So, you know, I know you just asked about 40, 40, 20, but every.

But it all ties in.

It all ties in. It all ties in. This is direct marketing success playbook.

Yeah. You've been doing this for what, three decades or so?

Yeah, 35 years.

What was it like to have to calculate like RFM before the whole personal computers were ubiquitous?

You know, Good question. I mean, I remember, you know, believe it or not, you know, there were like big mainframe computers. I got into the business in 1981 and people were already doing some really sophisticated modeling at that point. But I remember hearing that Reader's Digest, which was kind of the big direct marketing company back in the 60s and 70s, they almost invented the sweepstakes. People might not know that. Which actually is today's Groupon. Right. And so, you know, the, the Reader's Digest, I knew they were doing these, what they call regression models using recency, frequency and monetary on mainframe computers I think in the 1960s and 70s. But it was much more painful, much more expensive. All the things that you would imagine with the technology being what it was in the early 80s, we did not have the budget at boardroom to do, you know, high end models. So we were basically hand, we were almost doing our RFM by hand, meaning that we would keep you able to keep track of when people bought by date. You had records on every single buyer. So you were able to do it on computer, but you had to do it based on, you know, names and addresses. It was A lot more difficult than doing it in mass. And by the 1990s, we had a sophisticated marketing database where we were able to do what we call regression modeling, which is an amazing concept, which is everything that's going on in Facebook today has at its roots. Some of the stuff that I learned about regression modeling and what a regression model is, is not just matching names from your list to a big database and saying they look like this. Those are called lookalike models. A regression model would mean that you would actually mail some segment of the bigger. Like, say, have a 2 million name universe of names you think you can mail. You would mail 50 or 100,000 of them in real time. Like, you would actually send your offer to them. That would actually lose money because it would be a cross section of the 2 million. But by getting real responses and people actually paying for products and services, that 100,000 became, you know, 1,000 or 2,000 buyers. And those 1,000 or 2,000 Buyers are the names you actually did your RFM analysis on. And by doing a model on those people, you would then go out to the entire 2 million, and you would find people that look like the thousand or two thousand, and you would start building these, what we call these gains charts that would actually predict what segments of the list you could go into and how deep you could go. Again, I'm not a statistician, even though I'm starting to play one on this interview, and I don't mean to. I was an English major. I mean, I knew squat about statistics, but I really started understanding this concept at the deepest level. And it was the key to all of our marketing success. It basically let you know you had to put some dollars behind it, but you let customers basically show you, with their wallets and their spending behavior and their purchasing behavior, how you would then go find people that were similar to them both in terms of buying behavior? Sometimes they were in certain geographic areas. It could have been some demographic data, but whatever it was, it started with the transaction data of what made this particular group of people buy. And then how do we find more people like them? Which is exactly what's going on on Facebook now, when you think about it, it really is.

Do you find that some of the clients that you work with now are not keeping track of that data like they should, and that when you start to work with them, because you do work with clients right now, right?

Yeah, Yeah, I have quite a few. Right.

So do you find that that's like a big, like, I. I don't know. And Then you have to kind of go in and forensically figure it all out.

Yeah, yeah. I mean I, I'd say some, not all. There are some that you know and some it's, it's not, it's not like the worst thing in the world because their list isn't that big. So we can go back in and there's so many tools out there that you can start segmenting out. But most of the people I work with, because I probably wouldn't work with them otherwise, not because I'm a snob, but because it wouldn't be useful. Yeah, they're not ideal. The ideal avatar for me as a client is someone that at least can identify who's on their database. The buyers, the high ticket buyers, the mid ticket buyers, the low ticket buyers, the prospects, the suspects, how people are coming in, the source of where people are coming from. So we can start messaging to different people. I mean everybody that I work with must be open because it uses my skills, otherwise they don't need me. But they must be open to messaging to different list segments based on behavior as opposed to one size fits all creative to one list. So the answer to your question is that even the least sophisticated marketer today can do some, some really good segmentation to at least do more than what they're doing now. If they're doing one size fits all creative to their entire list.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Just a second ago you mentioned the customers who are buying high ticket and the most expensive ones. And I know that this has always been a hot button for me as well as a lot of my listeners. And I have it earmarked here. There was an interview you did with the one I sent you earlier, the one you did with Joe Polish, where you even talked about. There was a bullet point on there that says one of the most effective ways to sell high priced products and services to high ticket buyers. And I didn't get the chance to listen to it before our interview, but I was curious if you have any insight on that that you care to share.

Yeah, yeah. And now that I thought about it, I remember what, what that discussion was. So basically what that discussion was about, it was an interview I did with Joe. It's called, it's on my site for.

Free and I'll link to it in the show notes.

Yeah, and it's called why it's something like when everybody's going right, time to go left or when everybody's going something like that. And you know, while. And I really set up the Interview because we wanted to talk about direct mail. And what I said to Joe, and Joe is a big proponent of direct mail as well. But I said, joe, we got to set this up correctly. We can't run around telling all these online marketers that they have to jump into direct mail. And, you know, it'll sound like we're telling them to give up something to go to something else, which we wouldn't. And I went a step further and said, direct mail is going to be way too expensive for most people to do cold prospecting. They're much better doing it online. However, the idea of going from online and going to an offline environment and then back online to me would be nirvana. And it's what I'm working on with a couple of my online clients now, taking their incredible online digital information product, creating hard copy physical product from it, then creating a direct mail campaign. Because the people who are going to come in from direct mail are going to be much more engaged with the promotion than they would say in an email or during an online launch. Although those people will be engaged to a large degree as well. And that you're going to get a different type of buyer coming out of direct mail. And then imagine taking that great new direct mail buyer who's way more engaged from day one, and then moving them online into an online funnel of some sort to sell them digital product, which would be a lot cheaper to deliver than the initial physical product. And now you got the best of all worlds. You've got a higher engagement level to start in direct mail, an online feeder program so that you can deliver less expensively. And I know that anybody who's done this type of thing can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the people who came in from direct mail are going to have a lifetime higher lifetime value. Now, the answer to that fascination that you brought up in that interview, which was what do you do with high ticket people? You should have high ticket people segmented so much differently than mid ticket and low ticket because Those are your VIPs, those are the people that can mail. It's the typical ascension program for any online marketer. $47 product, $99 product, 1500 dollar coaching, $25,000 mastermind, right? They move up food chain. It's the same principle here, but you got to have all that list segmentation done and you need to know what to do with the people at the top of the food chain. And you should be sending stuff that might be a lot more expensive to send physical product, lumpy mail Gifts, all sorts of stuff. Because they've already proven that they're your best customers and they're your best friends. I'll give you a quick example. I remember a friend of mine, great business. She's got an online business, does amazing. I mean, she's got about 4 or 5 million dollar business selling mostly information product digitally. And we were looking at a breakout. Let's say she had a list of 10,000 customers over the last three or four years or five years.

What general market is she selling into?

She's selling into more of a B2B market. But the principle is going to be really sound for everybody that's listening. So she's got a list, I'm gonna make up the number. It's 10,000 people. And she starts, I said, and I said, what's the breakout of your database? And she was sophisticated enough to be able to tell me. So she would say, you know, of the 10,000 people, I'm gonna make this number up. 8,000 people have bought just one product from us, one digital download or one, you know, course or something. Then of the, then another thousand people have bought two products. Then you know, another, you know, 600 above that, you know, now moving towards 10,000 have bought three products. And I'll make this up, but at the bottom of the spreadsheet, there's one person who bought nine products, which is all she has. Right? And so my joke, which was not much of a joke, I said, I said to her, I said, so let me ask you a question. That one person who bought the nine products, who spent, you know, tens of thousands of dollars with you, when was the last time you invited them over for dinner? Yeah, now, I didn't say that, you know, literally, although it could be, but it was sort of like wanting to get, to drive home the point that the person who also bought eight products is somebody that deserves a lot more attention than someone who brought two. And then what can you do with that person? Have a brainstorming session. It may not be just selling the ninth product to the eighth product buyer, but it might be engaging with them at a different level, getting them to participate in some of your content. Because clearly, you know, they're, they're so ingrained to what you're teaching and what you're doing. This is just one example, but you can extrapolate this to almost any business. And so, you know, the idea, I had another client that was selling a product that sold for $24,000. And it was a big, you know, big product that you Brought into like a big facility. And I'm not going to get into the details, but they had people on their list that bought two and three of these at 24,000. So basically of a list of hundreds, there might have been 28 people who spent like a minimum of 28,000 or $21,000 with them. Man, those people need to be communicated with in a whole different way. And all of a sudden your direct mail, so to speak, becomes direct mail to 28 people. But it's. It's targeted, it's personal. It's wanting them to do something. And I'm using this as like a very, very granular example so that people can understand how important it is to have your list segmented and to start changing the messaging like this particular one with the $24,000 product. So if they. I said, I said they, they bought three of them. So that would be a. Call it a, you know, $70,000 plus buyer. You know, I had them send them a $250 gift that was something they could use with the original product. And then the engagement factor had to do with referral. You know, who else do, you know that I could sell the $24,000 product to? So it was more of a referral mailing, but that was very personal. That was followed up with a phone call that sent out a $250 product. Sending out a $250 product to someone who spent $70,000 with you is nothing. Is nothing.

Yeah.

And that's.

Right. So smart. So smart to do.

And that's going to get opened, by the way. So that's the answer to the fascination.

Absolutely. I mean, as I mentioned to you on the, on the pre call that we did, you know, we sent out these video greeting cards to people and they just, you know, the people open it up and the video starts to play and it's got a personalized message. They don't throw it away, especially if it's a good message and not salesy or whatever. It's kind of like inspirational and cool. Yeah, they'll keep it there for a long time. And I'm a big fan of those. If anybody wants, you know, if anybody wants information on that, you can email me@askbradakenrampbusiness.com and I'll. And I'll send you the source for that. You talk about being an intrapreneur versus being an entrepreneur. You care to elaborate on that?

Yeah, I've talked about this a lot. I mean, you know, I was not born with a silver spoon in My mouth. But I also didn't have to eat what I killed from day one in my business. So, you know, I was fortunate to get a job at boardroom. You know, I had a salary and I had health benefits. It wasn't a high salary. My first salary at Borden was about 12,000 a year in 1981. And then I got a big raise to 14,000 a year. But it was a job, you know, it wasn't like I didn't start a business, but the guy I worked for was an entrepreneur. And I think working in an entrepreneurial business, I realized very quickly that, you know, I had to make sure that all the stuff I did was seen by the person that signed my check. So that's step one. So the entrepreneur, I needed them. I needed there to be a scorecard on me, good or bad, that the entrepreneur who was making calling all the shots knew what I was doing. Plus, I needed to figure out early on, what's the avenue for me to be a potential rainmaker? Meaning that what's the avenue for me if I had an idea to get my day in court, to get heard? That's not easy, you know, depending on the size of the company. But there's no reason, I think, over time, in an entrepreneurial company, if you're working your way up and you're doing all the work that you're supposed to do and adding as much as you can to that to become what I call intrapreneurial, where you start being able to get your ideas out there. And so I teach a lot of people, a lot of people on my list who are not ready to go out on their own. They're afraid to go out on their own. And, you know, I coach a lot of them on all the different things that they could do to get noticed, to get, you know, get their ideas heard in an organization. And then I also talk to the people who are the entrepreneurs, who I'm in mastermind groups with, who have a lot of people in their organization who they complain about. No one else has any good ideas. Right. You know, the entrepreneur always says I'm the only one with the best ideas. And to get them to understand that there might be a rainmaker in their midst in their company that they could be training, that they could be kind of bringing along. Like I was brought along by the entrepreneur who ran boardroom, Marty Edelston. So, you know, I was lucky he noticed me. I worked my ass off. You know, I did a lot of good things. So it wasn't by magic. But he also had an open enough mind and it was hard for him because he didn't think anybody had had good ideas besides him. And he had amazing ideas. He was, you know, an incredible, legendary direct marketer who people, you know, think is one of the greatest of all time as I did. But to keep your mind open that there might be somebody in your organization that might have as good an idea as you might have, or at least one that you can consider is, is step one. So it's this two way street that you have to try to create. And I think it's really hard to be in an organization where there's no avenue to be heard. And look, some people want to work in big organizations and that's fine. I'm not saying entrepreneurial or intrapreneurialism is right for everybody, but to do it, you got to really, really work hard. And I work really, really hard. At was frustrating at times when Marty wouldn't hear my ideas or basically pooh poohed my ideas and thought I wasn't, wasn't worth very much in my early days. But you know, you, you work your trust, you, you go out and learn, you bring ideas from the outside in. You don't have to invent everything as we've talked about. Yeah. So, you know, over time, I mean, you know, I don't know when it was. It was probably about nine years in where I became a partner in the business. And all of a sudden I became the second rainmaker in the company. And that took a long time. Probably took 10, over 10 years. But then once that happened, then all bets were off because now, you know, I've got my avenue. And so after 34 years of, you know, helping build that business with Marty, you know, he passed away. I stayed on for a little longer after that, but I realized it was time to, you know, go out on my own completely. And I had all the skills, you know, that I needed because I had learned from him what it is to be a great entrepreneur and understand intrapreneurs in my business. And then being an intrapreneur at the level I was, I didn't have any. I had some fears, we all do. But my fears were something that I knew I could deal with, you know, as I went out on my own. And it's something I could teach to people. So it was a good journey. But. And it's not, you know, not every path is as now that I've just said it, it sounds like it was just so easy. I snapped my fingers And I went from intrapreneur to entrepreneur, but it's not so easy. And you have to have the right circumstances, and you have to be a little bit lucky, which I was. But you do create a lot of your own luck.

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Switching topics, because I wrote this down prior to. And I definitely don't want to skip it because it's important to me as. Especially for some stuff I've got going on. But we talked about hiring creative and how that can be, you know, that can be really torturous for a lot of entrepreneurs. In the past, I've tried to hire copywriters, for instance, And I know copywriting is, you know, in your blood, and you've hired and worked with some of the best on the planet. And I know that one of the problems as a business owner who's about to go hire somebody to write some sales copy for them is your. To a degree, you're hoping it works. And you don't ever know if it works until you deploy that person's copy. And if it just sinks like a turd, it's gonna be, you know, you can be out thousands or sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. So knowing how to hire the right copywriter and creative can be very challenging. I know for myself, for some of the people that you know, that I know, my colleagues. You mentioned that you have some processes in place and some questions. You ask, what are some of the best practices in hiring creative and copy.

Yeah, so I've written a lot about this. So we can. We can also. I wrote a. I wrote a blog post not that long ago, but it was based on a previous blog post, and it was called you, you may not know it when you see it. And it goes through a whole series of things. And the analogy is, you know, people say about pornography, you'll know it when you see it. And with a copywriter, you won't know it when you see it, because it's gonna. They're all gonna look different. So I'm not saying this is foolproof, but what I did was after working with some of the best copywriters who've ever lived, I kind of came up with some. A list of things that all of them had in common. And so I guess that's a pretty good way to start the process, because if I. If they all had this in common, then they're probably traits that, you know, there's a trend there. Right. So some of those things are insatiable curiosity. So, you know, every great copywriter I've ever worked with is incredibly curious about the subject matter that they're diving into. And then to that end, not only do they have insatiable curiosity, but they are really passionate about that particular topic. The idea that one quick identifier of someone who might be someone that's a copywriter to throw up a red flag on is someone who claims to be able to write in any category for any type of product, any type of service. There are just so few of those. I mean, we're talking about, you know, dozens at most in the world.

And very expensive ones.

Yeah. And they're very expensive, but it took them years and years of actually getting there because they became so good at a particular niche or they became particularly good in a particular industry first and then branched out. It's sort of the narrow niche out to the wider part of the funnel. If you look at a. Look at a, you know, a, you know, a funnel and it's coming from the bottom of the funnel to be a master of some category and then start branching out. So, you know, I think the narrower the niche of where they started, the better. That's another good telltale sign. What was your journey like? Where did you start? Where were you always a copywriter that could write for anything under the sun. Right. Or did you start in the health category or the finance category and what division of what part of that category? So that's always a good giveaway of where they've been and where they're going. Also, I want to know what they read. Like, I always ask, like, what. What are the books that guided you to become a great copywriter? Telltale sign again, if the copywriter hasn't read books like Breakthrough Advertising and Scientific Advertising and, you know, they haven't read David Ogilvy and they haven't read Claude John Capel. Yeah. So it's just like, I'm not saying they have to have read them all, but like, are you a student of this craft or why, you know, or are you just, you know, a copyright because you say you're a copywriter, so that's a telltale song. What do you read? Also, who do you follow? Like, who are the copywriters that you follow? Like, and what swipe files do you have? Like, if they don't know what a swipe file is. Red flag.

Yeah, big time.

Look at the great packages that have ever been written, the great sales letters have ever been written, the great video sales letters, the great email marketers, whatever. But they should have a swipe file of all the stuff that they love and why they love it, why they want to emulate it in their own style. So that's another telltale sign whether they know another one is the stuff we've talked about. I want them to have a basic knowledge of marketing. Do they even know what RFM is? Do they when you assign them a project? Here's one. When I've assigned a copywriter or project, any copywriter who the first thing they wouldn't ask me for is a list history. If it's a product that's been around, what lists have you mailed? Or if you're online, what affiliates have you worked with? Who's the avatar for this product? The idea of a project start kit, if they don't want one as a copywriter, don't work with them. They should want every package that's come before them for that product. If it's not a new launch. If it's a new launch, what products and services was the client thinking about when they were launching this thing? If the product had mailed before, who are the affiliates they've worked with? What are the lists that they've mailed if they're not curious about and what packet? If it's something that's been around for a while, what creative have you mailed that didn't work? Because I want to see what didn't work. So if a copywriter is not asking you those kinds of questions, they should be asking you about lifetime value, you know, can you afford to lose? They should be asking you, are you looking to break even on your first sale? What? You know, they should be talking the language of direct marketing for my money, even if they're not marketing experts, because it's so tied into what they're going to write about and how they're going to write it. And, you know, if you can get past a lot of the gatekeeping that you need to do before you spend those thousands of dollars on copywriting, I think you're going to save yourself a lot of heartache.

Yeah, I think you're right. And I love some of those insights. I took a lot of notes on that. What about advice for somebody who's a relatively new entrepreneur and somebody who is, you know, they're. They're not necessarily coming at this with an enormous budget for copywriting, but they've got a budget and they want to hire somebody who's maybe not the most world class, but somebody who's really, you know, really good. Not just somebody who's starting out. What about in Terms of, like, structuring the compensation. Have you seen. And I know this can be all over the board, but when you are taking a big risk, if a copywriter comes and says, yeah, I can do this. I can do this package for $20,000 just to throw a number out there, Right. And sometimes they'll want a piece of the back end and. Or the performance of it, etc. Is there any advice you give to structure that for people who are. Maybe. Maybe this is the first time they've undertaken hiring a paid copywriter in the past?

Yeah, I think we're getting the car. I think the car. You go. You're going too far ahead for. I mean, you mix two metaphors there. In terms of a startup, they're not paying royalties to copywriters so quickly.

Not so much a startup. Not so much a startup, but not somebody who's doing like $10 million.

Yeah. But you're not gonna have a budget for it. So here's the thing. Most entrepreneurs that I know that are starting a business, they're not starting a business in, you know, coffee, if they hate coffee. They're not starting a business in information product for sell it. Buying and selling real estate if they don't know anything about real estate.

Right.

So my thought would be that they should be the best person that could at least do the first draft of copy for what they're working on. And what they really want is probably to hire somebody who could copy chief them. They call it copy chiefing, who might be someone they could actually, you know, pay for coaching, you know, 1000 or 1500 bucks an hour. But to look over their copy and to kind of cone it and help them with it, that's one way to go. I would be on a straight fee of some sort if they want to hire a copywriter. I mean, while I don't really like copywriters who do work on spec, and on spec means I'll write it for you. If you use it, you can pay me because I like having people work on something and not getting paid for their time. But if you can find somebody who likes your category who's been in the business for a while, and you can write a first draft and work in partnership with them and pay them, like a small fee against some kind of small royalty if it works, you know, that could be a really nice way to start finding somebody who you could actually partner with. You know, so many people, whether it's copywriting or anything else, they say, oh, you know, my vendors are my partners, and Most people talk the talk of that they don't walk the walk. And the idea of walking the walk is basically making them share in your success together if they're helping you write copy. I will tell you this. A lot of entrepreneurs I know have told me that one of the biggest game changers for them, especially if they were more guru like, or they had a real voice in what they were doing in their marketing, a lot of them used to say to me that the biggest game changer for them was finding a copywriter or someone that could write in my voice. And once they were able to write in my voice, then I could copy chief what they do. But that, that's a time consuming thing. So you want to like crawl before you walk. You don't want to like jump into a partnership or a relationship until you see that you can work together closely. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, dating that should go on. And a lot of it is, you know, we should share my blog post. You know, you'll, you'll know when you see it. So you can use those seven things that I have, the curiosity, the swipe files, the all of that. Use that as like a checklist to make sure that the person is at least someone who knows what they're talking about. And then start building this relationship by doing one project together. You know, definitely a little try it before you like it. And then as far as compensating, you know, again, you're right, it's all over the map, you know, as far as what you'll pay. But you know, a nice model is to pay them for their time, you know, a few thousand dollars to do their first job. And if it works, I'll pay you X percent of, you know, the net cash receipts of what comes from your, what you wrote for me. And all of a sudden, you know, you start paying them a little residual on top of what they charged you to do the original project and you start seeing that you can dance together. That's how great relationships and great partnerships are made in the copywriting world.

That's awesome.

I love that.

And there's some really, really good takeaways from there. You know, we're starting to wrap up here, you know, our time together. But there's a couple questions I still want to ask you. One of them is just with the work you're doing right now. So you, you were with Boardroom. Are you no longer with Boardroom now you're.

It's Titans. Oh yeah. You know, that's been, that's all news. Yeah. Yep.

So, yeah, tell me about the stuff you're doing now. Like what's, you know, what kind of clients are you working with? What are some of the kind of the big opportunities that you're excited about? Maybe any trends that you're seeing that are kind of cool that you're looking forward to capitalizing on.

Yeah, yeah. So a few of them. I mean the one that I really like is one that I hinted at before is what I call O2Ot, which is online to offline to online. And so the concept goes like what I mentioned before, it's like an online marketer. And by the way, I left Boardroom a year and a half ago. I started my own company, Titans Marketing. I've got two mastermind groups, one a bit higher level than the other. Although the other, the lower level one is not low level. They're still experienced marketers. They're just smaller companies who are in growth mode. Whereas the higher end group or more seasoned direct response marketers, usually between 5 million and 60 million in size, whereas the other group is probably below 5 million for the most part. So anyway, I have these two mastermind groups and so they're all based on multi channel marketing. So the idea that you can weave in and out of different marketing. So the example I'm going to give is a company that has an online information product. They've done launches online, they've done multimillion dollar launches online selling digital product. But they have physical product that they create from the digital product, whether it's DVDs, CDs, transcripts, whatever, books. And so what I want to do with one of them, and I have actually two of them I'm working on, but one in particular is to take their offline product, create an incredibly incredible, irresistible offer. Because I know that the lists were available offline for this product. It's a health product. And I knew how to go, I knew those lists do an offline version of the online product, create physical products, sell it, bring people in to buy that completely offline in direct mail. And then once I have this list of buyers in direct mail, start moving them back online by offering them all kinds of, you know, e newsletters, special online downloadable premiums to complement what they already bought offline. And now as you can see, while it costs me a lot to get that customer offline because direct mail was a lot more expensive with printing and postage and physical product, now I'm bringing them through a funnel on the back end online Raising price, you know, moving them through an Ascension program. And I mean, this is like a dream come true for me if I can pull this off with a few clients. Because I think now you've got, again, someone who came in offline in a more engaged environment called direct mail versus email. They will be a higher lifetime value, and I can deliver product and promotion both offline and line to them, which is going to reduce my cost. So I love that model. It's something that is a big part of what I'm doing. The other piece and another big piece of what I'm working on is this copywriter thing. I think. I think the paradigm for hiring creative talent has changed. When I did it, for most of my career, it was what I call hired gun. So you find the great copywriter who will write for you, and then they'll write for the next guy and the next girl and the next company and whatever, and they'll get royalties from all of them because they're so good and blah, blah, blah. And I think it's a lot tougher to do that with the level of specialization, the shortage of copywriters who can write for all categories. So I think the new paradigm is to be, like, so good at that one thing. Be the copywriter for naturopathic health, be the copywriter for stock options, be the copywriter for chiropractic or dental or real estate, but real estate for flipping houses, not just real estate. So the more specialized you become, the more you start understanding that particular avatar or demographic, you start becoming a great copywriter. And the irony, of course, is that instead of having multiple clients, you end up only with a few, or maybe even one. Which sounds like the opposite of being a freelance copywriter with all the freedom, but it actually could be much more lucrative to be that one writer for that one company that becomes so valuable to that entrepreneur that you'll make a lot more money than trying to be a hired gun. Where your products are being, your promotions are being beat all the time by competing copywriters. And especially online, they're going to get beat really quickly. In direct mail, you could keep a control, which means the winning package for months and months, if not years. You know, there's the story of these controls that hung around for 20 years in direct mail. That's not the case online. You could lose a control in a half hour. So you're not going to keep the control, which means you're not going to keep your royalty payment, which means, you know, you're going to be looking for the next job, right. We'll work, you know, it's like, you know, we'll write for food kind of thing. And you don't want to do that. So I think that the paradigm is shifting from hired gun many clients to niche copywriting for a small group of clients in your own personal passion. So I'm like out there working very, very hard to match up niche copywriters with niche clients who are just great fits for each other because I think that's the future. So those are a couple of big trends. The trend of OTA, O2O, the trend of new paradigm for how we hire creative talent and copywriting and then also just multi channel marketing that, you know, being beholden to one medium. Look, you wouldn't, you wouldn't put all your investments in once in one company or one stock. Right. You diversify your portfolio. Why wouldn't you want to diversify your media options? So even within online, you don't want to be just Facebook or just Amazon or just Search or just display. You want to diversify that and then you want to see, does my product lend itself to tv? Does it lend itself to online video? Does it lend itself YouTube? Does it lend itself to direct mail? Does it lend itself to newspaper or magazine print advertising? Believe it or not, you can get a lot of good deals there, but you want to diversify that as much as possible so you're not shut out when, you know, Big brother comes knocking on the door. You know, Facebook shuts you down. Your entire platforms on Facebook. I've heard that horror story. You know, I'm 100% on AdWords and Google shut me down now.

Yeah, being in being 100% like that whole put all your eggs in one basket thing and that, you know, it holds absolutely true for this.

And I'm the guy who can be helpful, I think, to marketers who want to be multi channel since I've had all this experience offline in addition to online.

Yeah, Brian, what's kind of a nut you're trying to crack right now in your business, your life or whatever. And I mean whether that's a problem you're trying to solve, a resource you're trying to get a hold of, a person you're trying to meet, just, you know, this is one of the ways that maybe myself and some of the listeners can even give back to you. Is there anything that you're.

There's no big need, I think. I mean, I'm in six mastermind groups and I run two. So I'm getting a Lot of feedback from a lot of people. Not to say that people listening to this who I don't know could probably be helpful to me, you know, but I'm just fascinated with all the different models. I used to have a thing on my computer taped to my computer. I probably should put it back up there. And it was like I used to say I am, I am two new models a day or something like that. And what it kind of reminded me that I want to hear about two new marketing models or ways to sell or ways to position. I want to hear about two a day at least. And like for example, we were talking before about publishing your own book. And so the other day I was talking to somebody who was talking about a book funnel on the back end when you're stuck selling through Amazon and how you can still get names of buyers by creating a back end funnel. And then if you self publish how you do it through a free shipping and handling offer and then move them through a different type of funnel. You know, learning that kind of stuff is just incredible. You know, learning how to do online launches. You know, I'm in Jeff Walker's, you know, product launch formula group.

Yeah.

And you know, I've never done an online launch in my life but I mean I've done versions of it and I've been launching stuff for 35 years. But to not understand completely how to do it the way Jeff teaches it has been a blessing, you know, all the different things, you know, so there's no one thing that's like a big missing link. But there's so many pieces of knowledge that I'm trying to accumulate. And again I think this, you know, this, this O2O2O thing I'm still learning because I'm going to bring these online guys into an offline environment and then they're going to teach me how. We're going to bring all these people back online who really like to respond through offline channels. That's going to be game changing for them and then maybe for a lot of other people in my world right now.

Would you still like for the, for the publishing and the self published authors? Because I know there's a lot of them out there and I know I have a lot of listeners who either have their own books or thinking about it and is there anything that you're particular like? I can see that easily working in the O2O2O strategy, but is there any. I know you've sold a lot of books and using everything from direct mail to Infomercials and whatnot. I mean, are you seeing many books or are you still being sold from infomercials? Are you seeing that as a tactic that still works really well, or is it.

I don't see a lot of it, no. It's hard to sell information products through direct response TV for the most part. It's not impossible. But you know, we did a franchise that probably did over $200 million between TV, direct mail and online, all working in tandem between 2005 and 2007. But I think the advent of, you know, all the, you know, how much DVRs have permeated our world and the world's changing on all of that. But again, that doesn't mean that everything shouldn't be multi channel. So, you know, there's a lot of different ways to do it. I mean, doing tv, doing, you know, online, you know, computer, video and, and there's all kinds of stuff. And I see a lot of people being able to use YouTube, you know, using almost like a direct response TV model. Yeah, but doing it through YouTube. So the techniques are there. As far as like the way we sold books, like big hardcover encyclopedic books. You know, I never went through an outside publisher. I actually bought the rights from outside publishers and created direct mail and direct marketing versions of those books. I, you know, that's a model for a company that's really in a, you know, really wants to publish and wants to, has, has a, has a big list that has an affinity to specific product, project products and excuse me, subjects. And you would go out to the publishers and say you have a book that's you're only selling in the bookstore and online, but you're not selling very many. I want to do a whole promotion around that book to my list and to list like mine. You know, those are kinds of deals you probably still can make. So I would, I would think that there's an opportunity there in terms of taking outside publishers books and bringing them into whatever your particular funnel is and paying a royalty on that.

Yeah, especially, especially books that I would imagine, you know, all books or most books do, you know, they have their heyday and then they kind of trickle out and it's, you know, been several years since the books ever been promoted or whatever. And being able, I bet you could strike some good deals with people who have some great books and they're just not, they're just not doing anything with them.

Well, that's what I did. I mean I created a whole book division where we sold tens of Millions of books that way. I, I think it's a different. Little different now. And especially it was really easy to do in direct mail back then. But yeah, there's a lot of books that out there that don't sell in big quantities because if they're with outside publishers, the outside publishers aren't doing anything on the marketing side. So you're absolutely right there. There's a lot of undervalued assets.

Is it pretty easy to get those things for, you know, very little upfront capital depending on.

Yeah.

Going after.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, again, you have to worry. You have to do all the, the due diligence on your price point, your how many you're going to sell, what's your margin, all of that. But for example, I'll give you the numbers on ours. When we used to go after books with big publishers, like a big health book, you know, we would, you know, talk about a four or five hundred page book and we would go to them and say, we'll give you anywhere from 5,000 to $20,000 against a 5% royalty that you have to earn out. So it was like an upfront against royalty. Then we'd get all the direct marketing rights to it. We would start promoting it in a different format. Like we would change the COVID change the title, add different premiums. So we would be very creative so that the book that we were selling with bonuses didn't even look like the book that was in the bookstore still. Yeah. And we would sell way more than they ever would because they had stopped selling it already. And you know, I think you probably can make those deals without a big upfront. We did it with an upfront to get the deal done quickly, but we were paying 5% royalty. And there was one where I remember we did well over a million dollars in royalties to them, you know, so that's awesome.

So you pay the upfront.

The.

You wouldn't pay royalties until that upfront was paid out.

That is correct.

Yeah. No, I love that. I love that. I think that's, you know, such a cool strategy.

Yeah. But I don't know a lot of people who are buying the rights up to books yet. But it's a concept that I think could play well again. But it's all about margins. It's all about, you know, what you're going to do with the book. And if the book is part of a bigger strategy, you can look at the, look at the value of the book based on your whole funnel.

Yeah, well, and especially like you said, if it's in health and you, you know, you get the rights to a health related book and then you've got other stuff that sells health, whether it's information or product, etc. It fits in well as a puzzle piece and it can be probably a shortcut and sometimes cheaper than getting the book written from scratch by yourself and not having a name to it, et cetera. So. So I see that as a cool leverageable strategy.

Yep.

Awesome. So if people really like this, if there's anybody listening who has, you know, who would like to learn more from you, whether it's as a just somebody who just reads what you put out and watches your videos or maybe wants to become a member of your masterminds or a client where, you know, where.

Should we direct them? There's a lot of places they can sort of find me. I mean, the best place. If they just want to opt into my list and get some of that content we were talking about in this interview, they just go to briankurtz me www.briankurtz me b r I A N K U R T Z me and there's a lot of free content there. There's an opt in. I'm trying to blog every week. I started doing some video blogs. If we could probably find a few blogs that I've done and we can put them as links to your folks if you want those. But once they're on my list, they'll move through it pretty quickly. My book comes out October 11th. I don't know when this is airing, but if we're after September, I don't know, probably September 15th or so, the book would be live on Amazon and the best way to buy the book would be to get all the bonuses that I'm putting together. What's the name of the book?

Go ahead, what's the name of the book?

The book is called the Advertising Solution and it's profiling six of the greats of advertising, David Ogilvy, John Caples, Claude Hopkins, Robert Collier, Gary Halbert, and Gene Schwartz. And how they're. What they taught are really eternal truths of marketing.

That's gonna be great. I studied all of them immensely, so I can't wait to dive into that.

Yeah, it's a cool book and it gives you a shortcut for those who don't want to read all the stuff from those guys that, you know, we took, taken out all the. My co author, Craig Simpson and I have gotten all the greatest hits basically from all six of them. So what we decided to do is I create, I'm creating a site. It'll be the Legends book.com T H E Legends L E G E N D S b o o k.com thelegendsbook.com and on that site you would go to that site and it'll describe all of these bonuses that we'll give you for free. A swipe file from all six of those people. We're going to have rare videos of Gary Halbert and Gene Schwartz and we're going to have a manuscript of a illustrated annotated version of scientific advertising by Claude Hopkins. Just an amazing array of bonuses. And so if they go to that site, they'll hit a button. They can go right to the. The buying choice of their what they want, whether it's Amazon, Barnes and Noble or one of the other book online booksellers. And then on that site, that's step one on the site. Step two is that you then send your receipt to an email address that's on there and you'll then able to download these incredible bonuses and you know, PDFs and, and. And online access to just some incredible treasure chest of stuff. So that will be www.the legendsbook.com and that's the way they would buy the book if they wanted to. Take a look. Anybody wants to take a look at the materials from my epic event from 2014, which was the Titans of direct response where I had Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham and Joe Sugarman and Perry Marshall and Greg Rinker and a bunch.

Of small players, right?

Yeah, a lot of small players. They could go to www.titansofdirectresponse.com talks about the event. I have a few copies left of the DVD package I sold at the event. I don't know if I'm gonna reprint that or not. And that's all big physical product with swipe files from. It was an incredible event.

Yeah, I heard a lot of good things about it. I had some friends who went, they said it was amazing. By the way, is there anything you're doing in particular to promote the book that. Because I know you'll probably. You've got a lot of great relationships and I'm sure that you'll have people help promote it and tell people about it. Obviously doing podcasts like this, is there anything else you're kind of doing kind of out of the ordinary?

Yeah, I think the podcast interview thing is like the best thing that I want to do because I really want to send them to the site so they can get all the bonuses when they Buy the book as opposed to just going to Amazon directly, but go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble through this site. But no, I mean, I guess the best thing would be to be able to do as many interviews and podcasts as possible.

I'm happy to hook you up with some other podcasters that I know who would love to have you on there. I don't know if you've done. If you've heard of Michael O' Neill or. Or I know, ClickFunnels radio, Dave Woodward, they've got a great, you know, Russell Brunson's company's podcast, but they've got a great big following.

And I know Russell. I've not done his podcast. I haven't done the other one that you just mentioned. I've done a lot.

I've done a lot of introductions, if you're interested. Because, I mean, I'd love it.

I'd love it.

Yeah, for sure. I think that'd be really cool, man. Brian, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed this conversation. It is. I have got, like two pages full of just handwritten notes of stuff that you said. And I'll try to make these. I will make these notes available on the show, notes of the episode. And yeah, this. Actually, the timing will be perfect. So this should be out right around September 15th. So if thelegendsbook.com is live, then try to get you some. Try to get you some buyers. I have a feeling that anybody listening to this, you know, this episode, or as I call them, Epic Sizzles, would be an absolute fool not to go grab it because it's cheap, too.

It's a paperback. I think it's 17 bucks or something.

Yeah. So not only have you just dumped a ton of value on here, but the people that you're profiling and talking about in there are the absolute legends of the industry. So, as I said, I can't wait to jump in and devour it. I look forward to meeting you sometime in, you know, in person, whether it's at an event somewhere else. I've really, really enjoyed this and I hope to stay in contact with you both as colleagues and friends.

That would be great. I really enjoyed this very much, Brian. Good.

Me too. Well, to all of my listeners out there, go check out Brian's book, his website, which will. Everything of this will be on the show notes. So you just go down there and click it. And if you have any questions at all for me, if you've got. If any of this brought up some issues in your own business that you're like, man, I could really use a second opinion on what I'm doing. I'm not 100% sure if I'm doing this right, and I'd like to maybe, you know, get your viewpoint on it. Brad. You can always send me an email to ask brad@baconwrappedbusiness.com I also happily accept great other business books and other life changing books that you may have read in the past. I've got a lot of visitors, not visitors, but listeners who send those to me. And once more, you can just send those to ask bradakenratbusiness.com and if this was your first time listening to the show and you stumbled across it because you saw the great Brian Kurtz was a guest on it and you're not a subscriber yet, if you're listening to itunes, especially, hit that little subscribe button. Or if you're listening on my website, you can jump on the newsletter where I only share news of really new episodes as well as training and some stuff that I don't really give out to anybody but clients. But I send those on my newsletter as well because I know you'll really appreciate those. It still blows me away, Brian, that I actually give these interviews away for free on podcasts. Sometimes I have to go, what am I doing? Because this was amazing. I used to have a product years ago where I did like monthly interviews with people like once a month for $20, and they were nowhere near as juicy as these interviews I'm doing.

Yeah. You know, the Internet's gotten a lot of people getting used to stuff for free. Right.

So, yes, I've thought so many times about how to put this shit behind a paywall.

Yeah. I'll leave you with one quote which I think kind of sums up that piece, which is, you know, just because the Internet's free doesn't mean that you just slot stuff together and send it to people. So I think everybody should, should have this quote on their wall. I have it on my wall. It's everything is not a revenue event, but everything is a relationship event in marketing.

I love that. You know, that's. Yeah, you mentioned that earlier and I wrote that out. Everything is not a revenue event, but everything is a relationship event. It's actually a very deep topic. We could probably Talk for another 30 minutes on that. But that's exactly why I do this show, is to build a relationship with my guests like yourself, and to build a relationship with my listeners and the audience. And hopefully it just makes them hungry for more.

Yeah, it's great. Thank you so much for having me on.

Thank you, Brian. To everybody else subscribe to the show. Leave me a review if you're not lazy.

Loser.

I mean, of course you'll leave me a review. I mean, it only takes, like, several minutes out of your valuable day. Just joking, guys. Love every single one of you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing and tagging me when you share it, because I love to see my listeners taking action on this and getting value out of this. I will see you on the next episode of Bacon Wrapped Business, and I will talk to you later. Boom. Okay, let me kill the recording now. That was great, Brian. I really appreciate it. I know we took longer than the typical because we were.