Power Story Selling: Why Nothing Is More Important Than Stories with Perry Belcher and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #360

Here were the end results. 200 items bought for $1.25 each. 200 items sold for an average of $41 $41. It's a 39x ROI by Writing Stories. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and this is the I love Marketing PO.

Perry Belcher is the co founder of Digital Marketer and the Traffic and Conversion Summit and he's also an investor and marketing specialist in the direct response space. Digital Marketer is one of the largest digital marketing training companies in the world and the Traffic and Conversion Summit attracts thousands of marketers each year to learn what's new and working in the online space. In this episode, Perry will share why he attributes his success to his ability to tell great stories. You'll learn his proven formula for telling stories that engage and inspire buyers to act immediately. Perry will also reveal the steps to masterful storytelling and how you can turn those stories into windfall profits. 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 Perry Belcher grew.

Up as the son of a single mother in a housing project in Paducah, Kentucky and has become one of the most innovative business leaders and investors in America today. Using his background in multi location retailing, importing and manufacturing, Perry became an early leader in the digital commerce world. To date, Perry has recorded some $500 million in direct online sales for his companies and and has advised his clients to sell billions. In 2008, Perry founded Digital Marketer with his partner Ryan Deiss that would go on to be the largest digital marketing training company in the world. During the 13 year partnership, Ryan and Perry have gone on to grow their Traffic and Conversion summit into America's largest marketing event and birthed the now infamous War Room Mastermind. From there, Perry founded the B2C Native Commerce Media Company that achieved coveted Inc. 500 status two years in a row as one of America's fastest growing companies. In addition, Perry has founded or Co founded 11 companies, seven of which have resulted in seven and eight figure exits. He is known as a master copywriter, storyteller, media strategist and inbound marketing expert. His skills at managing outsourced teams and leveraging sales automation have made him a true unicorn in the business world. Today, Perry spends most of his time as an active equity investor and advisor to companies poised for accelerated growth, most recently conventions.com and global business outsourcing company Scalewind. Perry is married with four children and lives between his two homes just outside Las Vegas and his second home in Southeast Asia. Always approachable and willing to help his peers, Perry is known as the regular guy legend in the industry.

Give it up for Perry Belcher. It's amazing how good you can see if you write your own shit. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. How you guys doing? All right, cool. This is where people usually tell you about their home life. I'm not going to spend much time on this because I do this at other presentations a little longer. I think they'll do some pretty groovy crap. Right. I fly on private planes, I live in. I go to really nice hotels, I collect cars, I go in the shark tanks. I do all this crazy stuff. So the big question is, how does a high school kid from Paducah, Kentucky, a dropout. A high school dropout from Paducah, Kentucky, two weeks before graduation. It was a principal's thing with the principal. Yeah. Get to live like this? And the answer is telling stories. It's all that I've ever really done. I was naturally, I think, fairly good at it without knowing that I was good at it. Right. So as I've kind of. Every year I study something different. I spend a whole year studying a subject, a very narrow subject. I've done politics, I've done primates, I've done. Which is not too much difference between the two. Seriously. Really. One of the best talks I ever did was at TNC a couple years ago. It was called Monkeys and Politicians. And the similarities are striking. So there's a good quote that those who tell the stories rule the world. I want to prove that point to you right now. In all of our businesses, we have challenges, regulatory issues, in some cases, very, very, very informed customers. I just watched this. Listen to the lady that now, I guess, is running IBM, doing the quarterly call, and she was talking about how they have to really change the entire way that they sell. The whole world needs to change the way it sells because customers are just way more informed than they used to be. I just bought a Porsche. I never owned a Porsche in my life. When I went to buy the Porsche, I knew so much more about the car than the guy selling it to me did. So that's really changed the way things are. And customers are very skeptical. I've said for a long time that I think it's the hardest time on earth to get people to give money to you. The first time it's probably the easiest time in history to get people to give money to you the second, third and fourth times. So stories really help you to overcome that barrier. So I just want to spend a little bit of time proving that point to you. So does anybody know who these two ladies are? Right. So they just did a survey, 10,000Americans, and they said if the whole world had to be ran by one of these two ladies, who would you choose? Right. A 70 year monarch that's been through crazy amounts of history, wars, et cetera. Came in at 37%. J.K. rowling at 63%. Just because she tells better stories. Right. I knew when Donald Trump debated Hillary Clinton, I knew that she was in major trouble because he told stories, he connected with people, she stated facts and information and she lost miserably because of that. Although I don't care who you are, I think everybody would agree. Probably a much more qualified candidate for the job. Right. Whether you liked her or not, she had qualifications that were far superior to the challenger, but the result was the result. So the best proof I've seen of the power of storytelling in business is the example I'm about to show you. And I love this example. So there's a writer not long ago who wanted to prove a point. So he bought 200 items on eBay for an average of $1.25 each. He asked 200 of his writer friends in a forum to write a fictional story about each of the item. 100% fiction. And then he relisted the items for sale with the same headline and the same photo. Right. So one of the first items was this duck tray he purchased for $3. Right. So the writer wrote a story about a woman whose husband had died and he had left his change in this tray when he went to the hospital and never came back. So the remaining eight years that she lived in the house before she passed, she would dust around his chain. She never moved the tray. Never moved the chain. She would clean around it.

Right.

And then they bought the tray at an estate sale and they were selling it, but they told a story behind it. Right. Of why it was such an important piece in these people's lives. By the way, These stories are 100% fiction. The duck tray sold for $71 on a relist. I'm going to give you a reference to all 200 stories are on a blog post. The blog site this guy does. It's fascinating. The plaster horse's head was the craziest one. 99 cents for a plaster horse's Head probably made by a kid at kindergarten or something. So this story, I'll just give you a snippet of it. My father was more or less a garden variety drunk. He got neither mean nor gloomy when he had a lot of wine, just generally loose, Followed by a major case of sleepies when my mom and Ben first met. So basically she tells the story of her mom at a big party. Her dad got drunk and fell asleep. So they took him out to the barn where a horse had died, and they sewed his whole body up to the neck into the dead cadaver of the horse and all sat around and drank from, waiting for him to wake up so he would freak out in the horse's body. Again, total fiction, right? But also the story also talked about her mother's superior oral skills and all sorts of other things, right? Crazy stories about 1500 words. Horseheads sold for $60. Risted with the story. So the stories had a couple of things that ran through them, right? Sex, death, and tragedy were the three biggest common denominators of the stories that performed the best. Followed with a strong dose of nostalgia. I was listening to George Jones song. Who's a country western fan in the room? Anybody? All right, there's a few good people here. So George Jones songs are all about nostalgia. Most country songs are. If you play a country song backwards, by the way, your dog comes back, you get your horse back, your wife comes back, get your truck back. The real scientific reason nostalgia is so powerful, it stimulates chemicals in the brain. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. Nostalgia simulates or stimulates chemicals in the brain that are produced during normal activities.

But.

But when you're reminded of those previous activities, you get another dose of that drug. And humor. Humor was a big piece. Those were the four big things. Sex, tragedy, death, humor, and nostalgia. The most successful of all was the fake banana that they bought for 25 cents at a yard sale and sold for $76 because they created a cartoon strip called Fake Banana. And the cartoon strip came with the banana when you bought it. Here were the end results. 200 items bought for $1.25 each. 200 items sold for an average of $41. $41. Right. It's a 39X ROI by Writing Stories. So if you can think about how that might calculate into your business, you might want to pay attention to the balance. I'm going to show you how to write a really good story in a minute, too. 39. Yeah, 39 times with stories significantobjects.com if you want to go to that site. It's fantastic. The guy has all 200 items, all 200 stories. And some didn't do so well, some did extraordinarily well. And you can kind of. I like looking at the stories that didn't do so well to find out what they were missing. And it's largely they were missing those five elements. Alright, so a story about stories. Who's read Sapiens so far? Yeah, quite a few. It's a great book. 200,000 years ago, they assume men really didn't gather in groups of more than about 5, 6, 10 is the best guess. Just like most animals. And we were pretty far down on the food chain. There aren't hardly. There aren't any animals really on Earth other than maybe insects and such that gather in more than a few hundred. Right. Other than humans. So what was the difference? Well, in 40,000 B.C. they started seeing stone carvings, 20,000 B.C. kind of blood, ink or stains on the side of walls, cartoons, telling stories. And all of a sudden weird things started to happen. People started to communicate via story. They shared information. They became more eff hunters, but they built community. They learned the value of building community when superheroes were introduced. Basically gods, right? Gods or God, or whatever your God is. Stories became much, much, much more powerful. They became a tool to manage the masses. Right. And the next thing you had was the Roman Empire and so on. Right now we have cities of tens of millions, 50, 20, 30, 40 million people, all based around stories. All of civilization was grown based on storytelling. It's that powerful of a thing. So you kind of get it. So how do stories work? Stories create a temporary suspension of belief in the mind of the reader. So not only is it powerful, it's enjoyable. Right? We go to movies for this reason. We go to movies for the same reason that we drink or we do drugs. The exact same reasons. We want to escape our normal everyday world. But what happens when we do that? When you're telling someone a story, be it in film or in person or even in writing, and the person's engulfed in that story, there's all sorts of suggestion that you can make to the mind of that reader. Very much like they've been hypnotized, so to speak. So it does that by, like we were saying before, stimulating brain chemicals. If you've not read Loretta Bruning's Meet yout Happy Brain Chemicals, which is a really terrible title for a pretty awesome book, you should read it. It's really good. Did you guys publish that? That seems like something you guys might publish. It's a really good book. This lady's a primatist. She studied apes for 20 or 30 years and made the correlations between primate behavior and human behavior as it pertains to chemical balances and imbalances in the brain. But basically, you've heard all this before. So there's dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphin. Dopamine is a drug that's released when you anticipate all these. The big thing to learn here, I think, that most people don't get that brain chemicals are released on the anticipation or remembrance of something good happening, not on the actual act itself. So most people believe that endorphin releases happen at a point of orgasm during sex. They don't. They actually happen just prior to dopamine. Releases happen just prior to something good happening. So if you were in the desert, walking across it, and you were dying of thirst, and you found water, when you saw the water, your dopamine would spike, right? As you got closer and closer and closer to the water, your dopamine levels would go crazy. But just as you reached down to get the water and brought it to your mouth, they would begin to drop before you ever had the first drink, right? And they go away very quickly. Dopamine only lasts in a system estimated 30 to 60 seconds. Serotonin is the status drug. So you get a new car, you get a new watch, get a promotion, you win the Academy Award, right? That serotonin is another positive brain chemical release. So when we're reminded of times when we were champions or when we go back thinking about playing high school football, and that was a high point in your life, that serotonin, if you can remind people of that, if they're watching Hoosiers and they were a basketball player in high school, they're going to get that serotonin release again. Oxytocin is the love drug. It's the feeling of. Of family, belonging, romance, love, and then endorphins. A pain reliever, basically. And it comes with excitement. Things that are exciting for the most part, but. And all those can enter into the stories. And when you're releasing those chemicals, things happen. That's basically how a story works. Let's talk about how to write a story. And this is the number one rule that I always have that I use in story writing, because I learned it from a guy who did a TED talk in the UK who was a book jockey for a big publisher there. I Can't remember who it was, but. Older guy, he was in his 80s, but he had read literally tens of thousands of manuscripts to send them on to either be published or to not be published. And he did this great TED Talk. And he said, okay, I'm going to tell you this. And everything else I tell you for the next 19 minutes is bullshit, right? The one thing to remember is that nothing is interesting other than trouble. So when you're telling stories, if you think about it in the way we naturally tell stories. If you go on vacation and you come back, you don't usually talk about how beautiful the beach was. Or how nice the hotel was you stayed in. You might for a second or two. But you'll spend way more time talking about the cab driver driving over your foot or they lost your luggage or all the bad things that happen on the trip. So why do we do that? Because we immediately recognize that that's the only thing that our friends are interested in. They don't care about the good time you had while they were at work. They hate your guts for that. Right. They want to hear about the disasters. If you break a toe and post it to social media. Bleeding you'll get 10 times the engagement you'll get. From all the photos you take on your next carnival cruise. I can absolutely assure you that trouble leads. If it bleeds, it leads, right? So there's a formula. There's a soap opera formula I'm going to give you now. There are a lot of ways to write stories, but I have a brief amount of time, and this is the one I used 99 times out of 100. The soap opera formula of writing a good story. Does anybody know why soap operas are called soap operas? So soap companies. So Procter and Gamble, what happened, it was quite by accident. So back in the 40s, television gets popular, right? Procter and Gamble's trying to sell soap, right? So they run commercials everywhere. But they found that when they ran commercials in highly dramatic romantic programming, they sold more soap. But that programming didn't work in primetime. So there were a few shows that came on in daytime television. And Procter and Gamble caught on quickly. And they came in and said, look, we'll produce the shows, take 100% of the risk out of the network. And buy all of the advertising for them, if you will. Let us make the programming be the kind of programming that we want. Was the programming about soap? No. Right. It wasn't about operas either. Exactly. It's a long damn way from being about operas. But they found that if they could just get women into this temporary suspension of belief that they were highly suggestible to go by joy. And the result is obvious, right? So I used to sell, I wrote a piece, you can look it up now, it's still good. It's called the 21 step sales letter formula. There've been thousands of sales letters written by it. I taught it for years, I don't use it anymore. I had 21 steps of long form copywriting selling that like Joe and I grew up on this sort of stuff, right? It was a variation of a number of different people's systems. Now I just make a promise, tell a story, make an offer, and I highly suggest you follow. Try at least following the same process. If I have time, I'll read one to you before I go. So there's three steps to telling a good story. And the first step is probably the most skipped step of telling a good story. And it's the one that makes the story kind of flat, right? And that's the step of setting the scene where the story takes place. Most people want to start telling you a story, but they haven't set a context or a scene for it. You have to be drawn into the place. Aaron Sorkin starts all of his. All of his stories start in the middle of a sentence, not the start of a sentence. He calls it the water cooler effect. He wants you to have the effect that you have when you walk by the water cooler and people are talking, but you don't know what the conversation's about and you're automatically drawn in, right? So setting the scene is super important. So what makes a scene? How do you set a scene? There are commonalities. Date, time, place, hot cold, season, age, texture, dark, light, names, colors. These are the bigs, right? There are more, but it's basically the senses, right? It's sight, smell, sounds, touch, et cetera. So this is what sets a scene. Nobody does this better than songwriters, basically every ballot you've ever heard in your life. A ballad is a three act play. The first act sets the scene, drive home the message with the chorus. Second act introduces the trouble, right? Third act, there's the bridge and then there's the conclusion. Every country song or every ballad, even rock ballads like I Met a Jen so far Room Queen in Memphis. Why does it have to be Memphis, by the way? Do you know Memphis is a word? Memphis is the city they use in a song. When they have no city, it means nothing. That's the reason there's so many songs about Memphis that's true. True story. That's step one, set a scene. Anybody here from Memphis? I hope I didn't offend you.

There's tourism that's generated from Memphis.

Oh, a shitload. Yeah. Memphis is like a mystical. It's not a real place.

Right.

It's just where people have recorded so much music there. It's become that. So step one, set the scene. Right. Step one, set the scene. That's what draws people in. If you read. Who reads Stephen King? Anybody? Yeah. So a bunch of hands. So Stephen King will spend three pages setting a scene to deliver one line of dialogue, right. It's crazy. Yeah. So two, you gotta build your characters. There are four primary characters to every story. There's the protagonist, in other words, the hero, the antagonist, the villain, a love interest and a sidekick. And those are the most common four characters to a successful story. Each one needs a character diamond. You should sit down with each of your four characters and kind of develop this little diamond that shows you their North Star, you know, what's their primary character trait? What's the counter to that? Right? Like Forrest Gump was, weirdly was an idiot. That was his primary character trait. What was his secondary character trait was quite the opposite. He always seemed to be right and quite wise, right. There were certain things he would never do. There were certain things he would always do, right? So this is the hill that, you know, the one thing that he was never going to do. He's not going to do that one wrong thing. Something he's prepared a hill. He's prepared to die on characters today. This is a pretty basic diamond. The characters now the diamonds are much more complex. They'll like do a double diamond where they'll square this up and hit four more points. Because like back there's a great show on right now called 50 Years of Television. If you get a chance to watch it, you should. It's on, I think you get on Netflix. It was a PBS special. But it talks about how like the TV stars of past days were very simple characters. Superman, you know, DC lost to Marvel,000% because DC's characters were too one dimensional. Superman was always good, you know, he was never going to bang out Lois Lane and go drink beer and get hammered, right? He was never going to do that. Where Deadpool, right? Who's popular now? Deadpool. Who you like better, Deadpool or Superman? Hell, everybody loves Deadpool, right? So good characters all have flaws, right? They all have flaws. And the reverse is true with a villain. A villain that has a cause is a Much better villain, right? Like Dexter, for instance, is a great character. Right now he's a serial killer. We're all rooting for or Tony Soprano or whoever you want to talk. Breaking Bad Guy, right? So those are the first two things. So try to get those right. They're not hard. And then you want to shape your story. There's a great video by Kurt Vonnegut on YouTube called the Shape of a Story. And he goes through a bunch more shapes than just the one I'm going to show you. But this is the one most commonly used. So they say that Die Hard, the movie Die Hard is probably the best textbook example of a modern day story, right? So everybody remember that movie? Has everybody seen that movie? Is there anybody that hasn't seen that movie? Yeah, right. The best. Yeah, yeah. Very few people haven't seen this movie, right? So it's a real simple story, right? You have to set the scene. They set a scene. The guy's in the basement, he's pulling up in the limo with a big teddy bear for his kid. This is act one. And you establish a norm. So when you're telling a story, you want to set the scene and establish the norm. What's the normal everyday life? What's going on? Da da da da. The guy's just flipping through life and the girls are flipping through life. Everything's fine. But there's something that happens that shakes the hero's world upside down, right? It makes it go crazy. And then he has to accept or turn away the call to go fix it. Which in every good story, they accept the call, right? This is a variation of the hero's journey. Usually right around the end of the first act, the villain is introduced into the story. So you figure out who they're up against. And first challenges happen. He runs into difficulty or she runs into difficulty in her mission, right. Usually around Act 2, there's an introduction of a love interest. Sometimes the love interest, like in Die Hard, was baked in. It was his ex wife. But you'll notice they don't really go back to her until the second act, roughly of the of the movie. More challenges happen. Things get even worse. That's called drama. Drama is things getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse to the point of impossibility. Then there's an intro of a sidekick. Who was a sidekick in Die Hard? The cop. The cop in the car eating the Twinkies. Right? The cop downstairs in the car eating the Twinkies was the sidekick. So there's an introduction of the Sidekick. Just as a sidekick is introduced, there's usually a minor victory in the story. Like, oh, he's going to be okay now. Everything's going to be fine. And then something happens that's absolutely impossible, right? And like in Butch, Sassy and the Sundance Kid, they're surrounded by all the Mexicans and they obviously die. That's a tragedy, not a drama. So if your hero wins at the end, it's a drama. If the hero loses at the end, it's a tragedy, right? So then somehow there's this surprising victory. And this is the part I still don't quite have down yet, but this writer still has me puzzled with this phrase, and I get it, but he says that every great story has a surprising yet inevitable ending. You sort of expected it, but it's still a surprise, right? So you kind of. You didn't expect McCain to lose, right? You expected him to win. So you. It's expected, but there has to be a surprise. By the way, little side note down here somewhere, you need to introduce the solution just briefly, right? So they. They showed the. If you go back and watch Die Hard in the first scene, they flash over to the nail gun for a second with no explanation, and then back, right? And then finally, how does he get out of trouble? Nailed him. He shoots a guy with a nail gun, right? So that's how he gets out, right? So act three. Act three. The hero wins, the villain loses, gets the girl, he makes a friend, a lesson is learned, everything's better than ever, and you make a goddamn offer. Right? So, Right. So, yeah, exactly. It's the part the movie industry hadn't figured out. They could make millions if I could just catch that last minute of every movie. So this is all true. So a lot of people call this a story arc where they'll draw it like this, right? It's more of a story, Cliff, honestly. Because when this happens and the tension is released, you've got this person's attention in that adulterated state for just a few more minutes, they're going to come out of the ether. As soon as the bad guy loses, for sure, you get up and leave the theater. You're leaving, right? You're done, or you turn off the tv. That's the reason horror movies made the thing where the guy comes back from the dead one more time, right? Just to keep you interested, that's the arcs. So that was an action movie, but let's look at a movie, a comedy movie like Shrek, right? It's the same story. Die Hard to Shrek are the same story, right? He's just flopping around in his mud puddle. The princess gets dropped on a thing. He has to take her back to the castle. Lord Farquhar comes around and a little midget on a horse. And the love interest, he falls in love with the princess and he is more challenged. And who's the sidekick? Donke. Right. And then everything kind of gets better, though. They kind of have some wins. Donkey helps them out, and you think things going to be okay. And then the whole army comes and takes the princess, but she eventually turns to the ogre, and that's what saves the day. But they introduced that when she was in the tent by herself way back here, right? Same story. Even a slapstick comedy like Tommy Boy, right? It's the exact same story, guys. That's my point I'm trying to make to you. You don't. Do not reinvent the wheel, right? So he's doing keg stands, everything's cool. Dad dies, accepts the call. He's got all kinds of villains, right? Love interest, who's his sidekick? Richard, who's your favorite team? Is that the Yankees? So it's a minor victory. And then everything you remember, they get everything. The orders all get screwed up, and then everything's impossible. And then he has a surprising victory and he wins. The villain loses. He gets the girl, he makes the friends. Lessons learned better than ever. They just forgot to make the offer, right? So does every get kind of how you can incorporate this into what you do now and how it can make it a whole lot better?

You're just talking about how this applies to your business. The character diamond stuff that you were talking about, like digital marketers. Character diamond is Forrest Gump. It's Forrest Gump.

Yeah.

When you think about, like, what.

So we have. We have character diamonds for our brands, right? So we're going to be goofy. You know, we're. We're smart, but we're goofy, right? We're always going to do the right thing. We're never really going to do the wrong thing. So it's kind of. That's the. You know, we're going to make fun of the other guy that does the wrong thing. We're almost making fun of him, right? Let's go to the White House again. If you want to learn. If you really think you might want to learn this more, a great resource is this. I do this all the time now. It's a goofy thing. But it's imsdb. It's a database of movie scripts and Television scripts. And if you want to understand how these stories are written and how similar they are, you can download the scripts to almost any movie or television show from here. It's free. Print it out, set it on your lap and then watch the movie and kind of see how the screenwriter wrote the movie. And it's surprising. One of the big things that surprised me on this is how small movie scripts are. 80, 90 pages for a whole movie script. Unless it's Aaron Sorkin and then it's 250 pages because he writes a lot of dialogue. I write in something called Hemingway App. All of my stories I really try to tell Mark Ford from Agora. I work with the Agora companies now have a partnership with Agora Companies. And Mark Ford's been a hero of mine forever. He writes his Michael Masterson. If you've ever read any of his stuff, you should buy it all. Everything he's ever written, you should buy it all. All. All for your marketing is great. But anyway, he kind of turned me on to a fact that was really cool. They took all of the Agora sales letters over the years. They did $1.6 billion a year selling financial advice and have for 100 years. And they've got 30 years, I think, and they've got all these letters. They've written thousands of letters, but only about, I think it's 30 of the letters have made up 80% of the revenue of the whole company for all these years. So he takes them all to Nicaragua to his compound to try to figure out what the common denominator was between all of them. Was it the story? Was the hook? Was it a particular writer that did better than everybody else? All that they could find no common denominator. Just like you can't find the magical formula for what makes a book sell. They didn't know. But the one thing they did find, the only thing they found was in all 30 letters, they were all written at below a fourth grade level. That was the only common denominator they could find. And they found inversely when they went past an eighth grade level in writing. They were almost universally failures. So if you're writing using big words to your audience because you think your audience is sophisticated, these are guys selling complicated financial advice to astute people. But this app called Hemingway App. Has anybody used this to write in right now? Yeah, you might have told me about this actually. Yeah, years ago. It's freaking amazing. So it'll do a lot for you. It'll just take all the fluff out of Your writing and get it really trimmed down. I think. Isn't the theory that basically it takes your thing and writes it the way Hemingway would have written it? Right. No. So it just. Yeah. Sort of critiques on that. It doesn't rewrite it. It. Right. Yeah. So you write on a clean sheet. Right. And there's nothing in your way. And then you click the other button to the right. You got write and then edit. When you hit edit, you're just gonna see all kinds of red and green and shit and you're gonna hate it.

But you can absolutely train yourself to do this without having to use the editor. So Perry and I used to nerd out about this all the time. Cause I used to write a lot of Perry's copy. So it started out that it would just be massacred. It'd be like a high school reading level. And I used this for probably like, what was it, three months maybe.

And you just kept natural.

And then we were challenging each other. So I would write an offer and send it to him. Like, look at what it. Like third grade reading level, first try. And he'd be like, thank you.

It's using short words, short sentences, simple concepts. You can express very complicated ideas in very simple terms. Very simple terms. Yeah. So. But if you. If you like. I love Johnny Cash a lot. I'm a huge Johnny Cash fan. You can imagine. So. But if you listen to Johnny Cash wrote tons of hit songs. Most of his biggest hit songs. He had the highest usage of single syllable words in his songs. That was his biggest common denominator. And the Beatles too. Love, love me, do you know I love you? I'll always be true. Shakespeare says about 60% of Shakespeare's single syllable words. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible what difference it makes. So when I'm done with that and I've gotten whatever I'm writing the way I think I need it to be written. By the way, emails, just your email campaigns. Start doing your email campaigns in this. You get 100% bump in email. The last thing that I do when I think I've got it perfectly the way I want it, I take it over to this site called Natural Readers and I have a human voice read it back to me. And I'll usually do three more edits. Because I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll do it again, again and again until finally it makes sense and sounds right. Why don't you read it yourself? That's what we always talk about. I can't read it out loud. And hear it. If you read it to a person, you can, yeah, if I had a person. But nobody wants to hang out with me. Nobody wants to hang out with me. Yeah, nobody wants to hang out with me. But it really is great. And you'll find if you do those two things, the stories are really flow. It's very conversational. And you'll find yourself saying things when you hear it back. Like, I've used three different methods to do this, such as you never use. Such as sitting at a coffee shop talking to your buddy. It's bullshit, right? But you see it in writing all the time, so it makes your writing unconversational and nothing will. You can actually get by with that in informational writing, but in story writing, it'll just kill the essence of the story. Yeah. Some people look at fictional stories as unethical, right? But then I'll ask, you ever read who Moved my Cheese? Do you think the mice were really talking to each other? Right. Did you get value out of that? Yeah. Right. So fictional stories are fine, right? But this was not a fictional story. But I just went to Google one day and I looked up Hero Stories, YouTube, and I found a story about a woman in Nashville, Tennessee, in the Nashville floods, that her house flooded. She had to go to the top of her house, she had her dog, all this stuff. And I found. It was an Ellen DeGeneres show clip. Her house, she got on the roof of her house and she got rescued by her neighbor on a jet ski two minutes before her house exploded from a gas explosion. Right. I couldn't make that shit up. Right? But I borrowed the story and I told it. As you know, it really was much more impactful in selling our continuity program because at the end, the lesson learned was that she wasn't prepared and the neighbor was. He knew. He had a plan. He had tools, he had training. What's your plan? What are you going to do in a disaster? And then we pitched our disaster training. So you can borrow, I'd say borrow other people's stories. I've used something in the past, really good. Like if you're writing about arthritis, right? I've googled before. Like arthritis, bracketed so bad. Forum. So I want a forum story with a real human talking about how awful their arthritis was. Thank you all so much. I really appreciate it. I'll end on that note. Yeah, exactly. The best ending of all time, right?

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