Copywriting Super Panel - Part 2 with Richard Viguerie, John Carlton and Parris Lampropoulos from Joe Polish and Genius Network - I Love Marketing Episode #359

Now, the downside of having a big promise is it's not believable. But by doing this, you get them to believe it and you can sell basically anything. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish, and.

This is the I Love Marketing podcast.

Today's episode is a special copywriting super panel and it's the second part of a two part series. Experts Paris Lampropolis, Richard Vigory and John Carlton share how to make an airtight argument and position yourself as number one in your category. Whether it's nailing down your brand or dialing in your direct response copy, each pro has invaluable wisdom that every entrepreneur needs to hear. In this episode, four panelists will reveal the copywriting secrets they've learned from long and successful careers. Being the best. You'll learn how to fuel a burning desire in yourself and your prospects, how to earn unwavering trust, and why you should always study marketing. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at next year's Genius Network annual event, then apply today for your invitation to attend. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event or to apply, go to geniusnetwork.com there's only three.

Reasons people won't buy from you. Number one, they don't want what you're selling. Number two, they don't have any money. Number three, they don't believe you. Now, there's nothing you could do about the first two things. But the third thing, there's a lot you can do. Because today I'm going to tell you how to get your prospects to believe any claim you make in your marketing, no matter how outlandish. So let me start by asking you a question. Is there a cure for the common cold? We had one, yes. And in fact, there is a cure for the common cold. Pretty outlandish promise, right? Okay, so let me tell you about this. One day, I had a really bad case of the flu. I had the sniffles, the fever, all the upper respiratory systems aching. You know how when you're sick you just want to sleep it off? Well, I couldn't sleep it off because the mere act of lying on the mattress, it was just too painful.

Just.

That was painful. So I was in really bad shape. But luckily I knew about this treatment. And luckily there was a doctor in my town who offered this treatment. So I went to her office and I got an iv. By that afternoon, I felt like I just had a garden variety cold. Next day, went and got another iv. By that evening, I was shoveling construction debris On a construction product project. Excuse me, in my house. So I've had this done many times. Anytime I get sick, I get this done, and it goes away like that. And what it is, is intravenous hydrogen peroxide. They take the same stuff that you would put on a cut, except they dilute it. They put it in a regular IV bag, and they give you a drip for about an hour. And I'll tell you why it works. There's a number of reasons why it works. Number one, hydrogen peroxide is a free radical. And if you know anything about viruses, they hijack your cells. And the cells that are hijacked by a virus, they're compromised. So the free radical kills them. The other reason why it works is hydrogen peroxide is H2O2. So the O2, the oxygen, hyperoxygenates the cells of your body. And when the cells of your body are hyperoxygenated, it's like putting them on steroids. They're a lot stronger, and that includes the immune cells. So you have all these immune cells now on steroids, and they're going around gobbling up, killing everything.

And.

And what would normally take your immune system to do in a week, this does in a day. There's been lots of studies done it. It's done all over Europe. A lot of doctors do it. There's been about 5,000 papers written about it. So I just demonstrated to you that you can get rid of a cold in a day. A claim that's very outlandish on the face of it, but I think I've shown you that it's doable, right? So let me peel back the curtain and show you how I just did it.

And.

And you can do it in your copy whenever you make really big claims. So the first thing I did is I started with story, right? Told you guys a story about how I had a flu, really bad flu, got rid of it. The second thing I did is I segued from the story into the reason why explanation or scientific explanation. And the third thing I did is I told you about studies and data and numbers and facts, okay? Now, there's a reason why we do this in that order, people. You've heard this before. People buy emotionally and justify it rationally, right? So we start with the most emotional part, which is the story, right? Because if we started just with the studies, what am I doing? I'm putting you in logical, critical thinking mode. When you're trying to work someone up into a lather, do you want them in logical, critical mode? No, you want them in emotional load, so you get them emotionally hooked with the story. But then a story is great. But maybe there's the skeptical part of them that's saying, well, that doesn't prove anything. It may have been a fluke. And that's why you segue into the reason why explanation. And I told you how it works, because hydrogen peroxide is a free radical, how it hyperoxygenates your blood, how it boosts your immune system and all that stuff. And so now we've got a real reason. It's not just a fluke that happened one time. There's a scientific basis to it. And then finally we close with the hard data, studies, numbers, things like that. So when you do that, when you have the story and then the reason why explanation, and then the studies and the numbers, you've proven it three different ways. And you've made an airtight argument that's unassailable, unquestionable. So I do this in my copy all the time, anytime I have a big claim to make. So if you're making, like, if you're just making a small claim, like about toe fungus or something, you don't need to do this. But if you're telling somebody you have a cure for arthritis or something like that, or if you're telling them they're going to make millions of dollars, you use this formula and you can get them to believe. And the reason why this is so important is because the bigger the promise you can make, the stronger your promotion is going to be. Now, the downside of having a big promise is not. It's not believable, but. But by doing this, you get them to believe it, and you can sell basically anything.

This is an amazing opportunity to speak with one of the greatest business minds on the planet. So I'm going to actually read his bio just to make sure you have some context of who he is. Okay. His name is Richard Vigory, and he's transformed American politics by developing technology that empowered tens of millions of grassroots Americans. In many ways, Richard's technology was the Internet of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. For the first time, regular people could combine millions of small contributions, offsetting the power of political fat cats. For the first time, small organizations could communicate messages effectively and affordably across the nation. For the first time, the big media had grassroots competition in the marketplace of ideas. For these achievements and more, he's been recognized as the founder of the modern conservative movement, and he's been honored for empowering people of all political persuasions. Richard's company has mailed more than 4 billion letters over the past 40 plus years. Ronald Reagan's 1968 campaign manager Cliff White and journalist William Gill wrote in their book why Reagan Won. They said in every election from 1966 onward, the Vigory company and its score of imitators brought information to millions of Americans. Information that quite often the people could not obtain from newspapers or television or mass circulation magazines. Richard has appeared on countless television programs including Nightline, the Daily show with Jon Stewart, the Today Show, Good Morning America, ABC's this Week, meet the Press, Face the Nation, C Span Book Notes, PBS now with Bill Moyers, Larry King Evans and Novak and Lou Dobbs. He's also been a commentator for ABC's election night and inauguration day coverage. He's debated David Duke on the Jesse Jackson show, appeared on the pilot of other episodes of the Politically Incorrect, and appeared as both guests and co hosts on CNN's Crossfire. He and his wife Elaine have three children and six grandchildren and live in the Virginia countryside. So give it up for my friend Richard Vigori.

Our company is 50 years old this year. We'll mail between now and election day next year, November, about 150 million postal letters, 2,300 million emails. We have 75 employees. Most of them are really high powered direct marketers operating at a very high level. 1961, I get the opportunity to go to New York to become executive secretary of a political youth organization that had been founded a few months earlier, earlier on Bill Buckley's family estate. So I run this organization. I'm in charge of everything, including fundraising. And I found out real quick, like I didn't like asking. I asked some very famous people for contributions. Charles Edison, youngest son of the inventor, J. Howard Pugh of Sun Oil Company, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern Airlines. And they were generous, gave me nice contributions, but I didn't like that. So I started writing letters that seemed to work. I got something called a mimeograph machine, started turning them out with a mimeograph machine, hired secretaries, a few here and there. And after a year and a half of, hey, I want to be relieved of all duties in the organization except fundraising through direct mail. I want to focus on that. Did that for a year and a half and by then I had a wife and two babies. And I said, I'm out of here. I'm going to start my company. I thought I knew everything there ever was to know about marketing. Of course, I knew nothing. I didn't know a fraction of 1% of what I know now, but I thought I did. But what I was, I was blind in one eye and had blurred vision in the other, but everybody else was totally blind in terms of direct marketing. So I looked pretty good. And though I knew, I thought I knew much more than I did. Of course, there was one thing I knew I didn't have I needed, and that was names and addresses, people to communicate with. And in the summer of 64, I discovered that if you were running for president, you had to file with the clerk of the House of Representatives all of your $50 plus donors. I went down there for a couple of days with the legal pad and started writing Barry Goldwater's $50 plus donors. And I did that for a couple days and said, hey, Richard, you're not making a lot of progress here. So I hired five or six women, and after a couple months, I had 12,500. That gave me the courage, the confidence to quit a good job with a wife and two babies and to go where no one had gone before. No one had literally done political fundraising through postal mail before. And that's one of the most important things you can do in life. We'll talk about that here in a little bit about branding. If you can at all. You want to be first, can you be first? And if you can't be first in some category, find a category where you can be first and where you can own that category. I've been in multiple groups of different times, people talking about me, not knowing that I was in the group there, and they were talking about me because I was first. You know, who knows the name of the second pope who was the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic? You know, nobody knows. Okay, it's the first. So whatever, you know, find a category that you can own that you can be first in, and that's how you build your brand. So, anyway, I did that for the next 15 years and had no competitors, basically. And by the way, I caught a lot of criticism because I was doing something no one had ever done before. And I was regularly, literally regularly attacked on cbs, abc, NBC, cnn, New York Times, Time magazine, and Republicans and Democrats. The establishment was coming, you know, really hard at me. But all of the criticism stopped within a few hours. And a few hours was election night, November 1980. Aha. That's what Vigory has been up to, okay? The had been relying mostly for their campaign funds on involuntary sources. The union dues, corporation, foundations, et cetera. They ran out there real quick, like, and tried to replicate, duplicate what we had been doing. And I told my conservative friends, don't worry, you know, it's taken me 15 years to do what I'm doing here. And besides, I'm smarter than they are. So it's going to take them 20 years to catch up with us. Not so. And within three or four years, in my opinion, the left caught up with the conservatives. And to this day, they do a far better job, the left does, than the right does in marketing. Think of the 2008 campaign. Obama had 3 million donors to his campaign. I haven't been able to see numbers for 2012, but it's something north of 3 million donors plus 10 million additional names of his supporters on email. Huge Republicans had nothing like that. One of the things that I do to this day, at age be 82 in a few weeks, as I said, I spend two to three hours every day studying marketing. Okay, I don't need to do that, but I do two to three hours, six days a week studying marketing. And I said one thing, I can leave with you more than anything else. Study, study, study marketing. I don't know of a competitor that I have on the right that spends two or three hours a month studying marketing. Okay? I've developed something that I call Vigory's Four Horsemen of Marketing. You've got to get these four things right and get them right. Life is downhill, the wind to your back, pretty easy. Get any of them wrong, you're going uphill, the wind in your face. Highly unlikely you're going to succeed. And I'll explain each one, but just the four things briefly are position, differentiation, benefit and brand. Position is nothing more than a hole, hole in the marketplace. What hole in the marketplace can you occupy that no one else is occupying there? And you do that, by the way, privately. That's something you just, and I like to use the example, say of Rupert Murdoch, so. And Roger Ailes 20 years ago. They're thinking about setting building a national cable television news network. They don't sit there and say, well, CBS does this, we'll do this, ABC does this, cnn. They don't care what they do because they're going to occupy a hole in the marketplace right of center. 50% of the country is not being served by television news. Life gets pretty simple at that point. Okay, then differentiation is what you do publicly. So publicly they differentiated themselves from all the other television Networks with Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Hannity, Glenn Beck for a while, okay, that's how they differentiated themselves from the others. Third benefit is obvious. You get news and information on Fox you don't get anywhere else. Okay, fourth brand. Brand is the ball game, okay? Products these days are seldomly sold. They are bought. Okay? I bought this week a new car. Well, a new car to me. It's a few years old but they didn't sell me the car. I bought the car, okay? They could have had a hundred different types of cars out there. I was looking for at my daughter's strong and wife's strong recommendation for a Lexus, okay? I wanted a Lexus and that was it. I didn't have to be sold. I bought that car. You go into the supermarket now, 40, 50,000 items to be sold. Not one salesperson in the store. They will check you out, but Nobody's saying no. Mr. Vigry, you shouldn't buy this brand of paper towels. Buy this one over here. I'm a viva man, I like viva paper towels. That's what I'm going to buy. I'm sure Bounty makes a good paper towel. But I've been sold before I walk into that store. And so brand is so important for success. In your marketing position is what you do privately. Differentiation. You differentiate yourself from your competitors by, you know, whatever you do to differentiate yourself. Benefit is number three and then four. Fourth is brand. Okay?

John Carlton is just flat out one of the best copywriters in the world. Even other big shot writers freely admit this. Everything John writes is stocked, collected and studied by smart marketers who hope to steal a little of the sales magic he puts into his advertising copy. They do this because long ago John unlocked the code to writing great copy that sell. It sells like crazy. His resume reads like a modern business fairy tale. He has written for nearly all the largest mailers on the planet. His sex letter for Rodale knocked off their best writer and mailed it a profit for over five years to something like 30 million names. Now you do the math on that. You've probably seen his outrageous three page ads in publications like Men's Health, Golf Digest, Black Belt, Men's Journal and Muscle and Fitness. These super long copy ads run for years. They create fortunes for his clients and creating buzz that won't quit. The writing is just killer. It's almost impossible not to read when you see one of his ads, they are that good. Now John has spent over 20 years in the trenches of advertising learning the copywriting game better than anyone else. I seriously doubt there's another writer with the depth of experience that John has accumulated in his absolutely amazing career. In fact, he was the hot Shot writer. Los Angeles agencies literally snuck in the back door to do the work their own staff couldn't pull off. He had free run of Jay Abraham's office in the go go 80s. He has been friend and occasional partner with the legendary gary halbert for 15 insane years. In fact, that's where Joe met John throughout. John was also the featured star speaker at Dan Kennedy's last ever copywriting boot camp. He literally causes a fuss whenever he appears anywhere and I've seen him on several venues myself because for years he was considered the secret weapon behind the hottest action and direct response. He wrote one of the first modern infomercials. His website copy has been profitable for years. The writers he has co authored packages with reads like a who's who of advertising. I know his ads and letters will be studied for generations as the right way to do it. This guy has earned the massive respect he now enjoys. He's been working at the cutting edge of advertising for years on the inside with the true movers and shakers in the business. Now it's our good fortune that John has decided to share what he knows about copywriting and marketing. It's like having Babe read Ruth coming to you and showing you how to hit a baseball. It's that good. He is easily one of the best teachers you will ever find. What he can show you about writing Great copy in 5 minutes will change your life forever. Plus he'll crack you up as he does it because he's a funny guy. I know that Joe loved talking to John and he asked him to do this interview again. Though he had interviewed him previously. He says there's more to add here. Years have passed and you've got great genius to add to what you've said before. So as most folks already know, John's was the first two hour interview that Joe ever did. It was like a mini seminar on copywriting. Many people commented that they got more from that one take than they got from entire courses by other less experienced teachers. This is good stuff. This is player material. You're going to love this interview. So now, Mr. Joe Polish and John Carleton.

Hello friends and clients. This is Joe Polish, Piranha Marketing. You just heard some information about John and now I've got the man himself on the line. Can you hear me okay, John?

How you doing Joe?

I'm doing great. This is our second interview. I've been really looking forward to doing this because it's always enlightening and educational for my members and subscribers to my interview series to listen to you and it's also the same for me. I get just as much out of interviewing a guy like you as, I'm sure, all my clients that listen to my interviews. Because you have such enormous wisdom in the subject that we're going to talk about today, which again, is marketing and copywriting. And I did an interview with you in the past, which was awesome. And I've gotten a lot of requests to interview you again. So I've got a whole slew of questions that I'd like to ask you in no particular order. But for most people that listen to my interviews, they know who you are. Those that don't, maybe we could kind of go into a little bit of background on how did you learn to become a great copywriter? Meaning, what did you do? Whom did you read? Did you rewrite sales letters? How did you get to the level of expertise where you're at today? And then I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about how you do what you do.

That's an interesting question. When I was. I believe I was 32, and one day I just sat down and I said, this ain't working. This life of, you know, being a adventure bohemian, running around the country rock and roll guitarist thing just wasn't working for me. And I sat down and I made a simple vow to myself, which sounds kind of hokey, but it worked. And it's worked for me for almost 20 years now. And that vow was business before pleasure. And for a guy like me, and I think a guy like you too, Joe, that was a huge thing to do. Because before it was maybe business and pleasure try to balance it or maybe try to wring the most out of life. And then business took a back seat to the pleasures of life. And what I found was that a by putting business before pleasure, that meant that I couldn't go out and see some friends. I couldn't make plans, I couldn't leave the house until I got every scrap of business done. And what I found was that I found a new pleasure in business. Now, I'd been in advertising for about five or six years at that point, but really in the lower echelons and hadn't really tried to push myself as a copywriter. I started out as a commercial artist, became a graphic designer, and kind of worked my way into copywriting way through the back door. And once I sat down and buckled down and just decided, this is it. I'm going to make it or break it, I went out on my own as a freelancer. I had the Month's rent paid and enough money for one more month. I had a tank full of gas in a beat up old car that I had to pour water into the radiator every time I drove it somewhere. And I had a beat up Olivetti manual typewriter with a sticky F key and no idea what else I was going to do. And all I had was that burning desire to make it. I'd been fired or had left every single regular job I'd ever had. I'd been deep in the corporate world and I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to do that suit and tie, get up, go to a 9 to 5 job type of thing. And I had that kind of gun to the head attitude. I talk about that in my course a lot. Just the idea that if I didn't make this work, that was it. I didn't have plan B. It was. I had to go out and be a freelancer.

As an aside, I mean, is that something that burning desire, that energy, that whatever you want to call it, is that something you think could be taught to people?

It was taught to me. And I'm glad you got me back on track. What happened was I was the original slacker. I was a slacker before the term slacker was invented. I'm a boomer. I'm a baby boomer. And after college I was so lost. And I was just wandering around the country, kind of living the college kids lifestyle, you know, taking odd jobs here and there, never settling down, going back to advertising a lot. But what happened was the uncomfortableness of leading a life that didn't seem to be going anywhere just started to mount. But I still didn't have a burning desire to succeed. What happened was two things kind of happened in tandem. One, I met my first copywriter. I was working in an art department in Silicon Valley in the late 70s. I met my first person who was actually a professional copywriter. Now I'd known that somebody was writing all this stuff that appearing in the catalogs and magazines I was working on, but never really put two and two together. That there was actually somebody that sat down and typed out these words and did it. I mean, it seems silly now, but back then it's just I never made the connection. It's like a lot of people watch TV and don't realize that these people are spouting lines that were written for them. Somebody sat down and wrote that stuff. So I met this copywriter and I asked her, she was from New York. I said, this is amazing. I'm kind of a writer myself. I'd been writing fiction since the third grade. I said, how do you get to become an advertising copywriter? And she looked at me, she says, it's too hard. You'll never do it. And that was it. And she was not going to give me clue one, which really pissed me off. And I'm so glad now that she pissed me off. Because what happened was that after she left that night, I stayed late and went to her desk. And rifling through her desk, I found a copy of John Caple's Tested Advertising Methods. And I stole it. And that was my first book on copyright. And she stole it back. But I'd seen enough to understand that this was broken down in certain places. Now, this is, like I said, the late 70s, around 1980, there weren't a lot of books on how to do this. There was nowhere you could go and get a course anywhere, not at a college, not among the entrepreneurs of how to Write like this. But there were a few books, like Victor Schwab's how to Write a Good Advertisement. And David Ogilvy would give some tips in Confessions of an Ad man, things like that. But what happened was I realized there was a whole world out there that I could get involved in. And at the same time, I found Think and Grow Rich, which again, sounds like a cliche, but that book just turned my life around. And at the same time as that, I found Joe Carbo's ad. I responded to my first, first direct mail ad, which was Joe Carbo's the Lazy Man's Way to Riches. And his book was largely an inventive reinterpretation of Think and Grow Rich. So all this stuff got to me to the point that as a slacker, as a lazy guy, as a guy who was going nowhere, I could just sit down and turn that switch on. I believe we all have it. That's why I still give pep talks. I'm sure you have to give pep talks yourself to a lot of your colleagues, your clients, people that come to you for advice. And one of the first things you do is you kind of give this attitude, Go get them. You can do that kind of thing, which doesn't work 90% of the time, but the 10% of the time it works. You can turn someone's life around just by telling them, take a couple of risks, look at where you're at. Wake up. And that's the basic thing is Think and grow rich. Books like that are a wake up call to People who haven't got any fire burning. I didn't even have an ember in there. This thing went from almost overnight. It went from nothing from a cold, dead fireplace to a blazing fire. It was only because I heard the right things that I needed to hear. And it just kind of ignited that dormant desire to succeed, to have ambitious. You know, for a lot of people growing up, ambition is a dirty word because your peers don't want you to succeed as much as they love you. My family, God bless, I was blessed with a wonderful family, but it was still a working class family. And there's a sense of don't get too big for your britches among a lot of people in the working classes. They want you to be happy and they want you to have a good life, but they don't want you to succeed too much because it takes them out of their comfort zone to regard you as somebody that maybe is making too much more than they're making or that they ever made or get too much fame or too much recognition. Gary Halbert and I talk about this a lot. He came from West Virginia. That don't get too big for your britches. It's held more people back than anything else, I think, in America.

I agree, it's a comfort zone thing. And I think anyone that has any level of success in any area of life is going to come up against that hurdle. And how you decide to look at it and jump over it or deal with it or ignore it or whatever has everything to do with your progress forward in life. Well, you are one of the best in the world at this subject of copywriting and doing it. And I know you very well. We've spent many days together brainstorming. You've spoken at my events, I've seen you speak at other events, which is something you just recently started doing because you were the kind of guy that locked himself away, never became a public figure.

I like to be behind the scenes. It was a lot of fun being behind the scenes and making things work. Kind of like being the writer of a sitcom. Nobody ever sees your face, knows who you are, but you know that you're the magic behind the stuff that's working.

Speaking of that, you just said a word. Creating the magic. If you could maybe encapsulate or define what it is we're going to spend the rest of this interview talking about, which is creating compelling advertising copy, taking the listeners that are out there that all have products, services, processes that they want to promote, that they want to sell, they want to get people to buy, they want people to believe in them, whatever. How would you define the importance or the role of copy and marketing in a business's success?

Well, we call it the three legged stool. The basic thing that makes advertising work is a good list or a good audience. A good offer which includes whatever product you have is included in that offer segment, and then great copy. So the most important thing is to have the good list. If you're trying to sell hamburgers to vegetarians, you're not going to do very well. That's the basic thing. So people need to pay attention to list brokerage, to finding venues for their advertising. That works. A lot of people can make the newspapers work. They can make local newspapers work. They can make local newspapers outside of their hometown work, or they can make national newspapers work. Or they can move up to magazines, either niche magazines, say Tennis Monthly, or the broader magazines like US News and World Report, things like that. Or the large newspapers like USA Today or the Wall Street Journal that go nationally. But you got to find a way to reach your audience, and that is the most important thing. But that's not what I excel in. Because as important as the list stuff is, it's relatively easy to find good lists. You have to get a good relationship with list broker. You have to understand you can test various places to put your material on the web in magazines, whatever. A lot of my clients make magazines work and direct mail, that seems to be their best. And then once you have a house list, then you have a list that's already proven themselves as being the first place you need to go with anything that you want to test or anything that you want to sell.

Yeah, which is of course. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Your existing clientele, of course, being your house list. Well, you're right. We could talk about lists and it obviously is very important. But the fact is you're an expert in copywriting and I want to get as much of that advice and information out of you and for the listeners if you need anything regarding choosing lists. I recently did an interview on how to choose a mailing list with a list broker and a guy who's very knowledgeable on the whole list business. So that information is available through my genius network. So you can get that if you haven't heard it already. There's a ton of different directions that I could go with this, John, but I'd really like to start with a couple of things that just have to do with elements of writing copy. And so when writing copy, it's understood that creating a sense of urgency is extremely important. I mean, we all use that. What is the best way to create a sense of urgency? Meaning how do you do it without fabricating a story?

What's wrong with fabricating his story? Well, no, I'm kidding.

I was gonna say, to what degree does one use hype versus, you know, which we can also, you know, talk about that. Talk about hype.

You know, it's interesting you say that because hype is one of the things that Jeff Paul and Dan Kennedy and Gary Halbert and I have never found a good term for the kind of writing we do. I call it balls to the wall riding. Because basically it's a little outrageous. It's full of passion, It's a thrill ride. We talk about copy being a greased shoot, which means that what you want is you want the reader to come in at the headline or the opening and not be able to terrorize away from the page until he's through and come to the offer. And when he's at the offer, you want to make the offer so that he's so uncomfortable that he can't find relief until he's picked up the phone and given you his credit card number.

That's a good state that you want your readers to be in.

Yeah. And that's why 90% of the advertising world just hates our guts. Because A, they can't do it because they've never bothered to study it or to do what needs to be done. And it is kind of painful to write really well. You know, if it was easy to write really well, we wouldn't be having this conversation. And civilization would look very different than the way it does right now.

Can I mention something about that too? Because people that are uneducated on the value of good copy, which is really why I asked you in the beginning the importance of copy. I mean, they think writing a letter is like something that anyone should be able to do. And they think writing a letter means you stick paper in a printer and you type on the computer and hit print, and that's a letter. I mean, there's a huge difference between a copywriter like yourself writing a letter versus someone's assistant drafting a letter based on a two minute conversation with the CEO. There is magic in the ability to do what you're talking about. And yes, most people will not take the time to learn it. This is one of the most important subjects that any business owner could even be spending their time listening to. Listening to an interview with me talking to you about this subject.

Joe, just let me clarify exactly what you're talking about. I have told people I would rather take a near illiterate door to door salesman and I can turn him into a world class copywriter faster than I could take a guy with a PhD in English literature. It's not the writing ability that counts here, it's the salesmanship. It all comes down to salesmanship. In other words, one of the things that a lot of people hate about this balls to the wall writing that I talk about is that I violate rules of grammar. I violate the way that Amy Vanderbilt said you should write a letter to somebody and all these things. And it takes people out of their comfort zones. But that's what we want to do. The vast majority of people out there, including almost all of your customers, and I don't care what business you're in, they're asleep and your job is to wake them up. They are sleepwalking through life, most people, and I say this over and over and over again, and I will continue to say it through the end of my career, most people do not lead interesting lives. Nothing interesting happens to them. They don't meet interesting people, they don't get to go to interesting places. They're just in a fog. And you want to be that one thing that they read or hear or see today that gives them a little jolt of adrenaline so that it kind of picks them up a little bit, you know, so that puts a little pep in their step. And they're thinking, you know, maybe there is hope or, you know, maybe, you know, that really would be cool to have my life and I would really want this. And you help send a jolt of electricity through them and think about how hard that is to do. It's kind of like using a stun gun. That's what you want your advertising to be. Like walking up to somebody who's kind of snoring, waiting for the bus to come, and you hit them with this stun gun. You wake them up. Every system in their body is going at full board. They're pumping out adrenaline and they're right on edge. That's what we call advertising on the edge. Because these guys, no matter who you're trying to sell to, they're being hit with thousands of ads every day. It's constant and it's getting worse all the time. They just upped the number of ads that happen in a typical network hour on television. They can't even rerun I love Loose anymore without going back and editing out another five to 10 minutes. Because there's so many more ads now. The ads are shorter, they're more more aggressive and more stupid all the time. I mean, you just sit there and in a five minute period listening to the radio, trying to get through a regular magazine or watch a TV show, you're going to get hundreds of messages that your brain just can't handle. So you're going to turn off to all kinds of advertising. Your potential customer, your prospect, doesn't want you to be a good ad, doesn't want to want your product. He resents you being in his life. He didn't even know you existed five minutes ago or actually a few minutes ago. And it's just outraged that you have got his attention. He is resentful that you are triggering desire that you're waking him up. It's like disturbing a sleeping dog. But that's what you need to do.

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