29 Copywriting Secrets Stolen From Dan Kennedy (Part 1)

The power of a secret. Let me explain why I feel like this is so important. I struggle with my weight. My twin brother over here, that doesn't exist, does not. Right. I want to believe that he's doing something or knows something or there is something that is the difference. And I don't want to believe that it's his hard work. I'd rather believe that there's just some secret he knows. He's not even keeping it from me. He doesn't even know it's a secret, but I don't know it.

So.

So we have this need to believe that there's some information that is missing that we don't have. That if we had, we'd get the outcome, we'd get the result. Right. I felt like when I read that book on ADD, I had tripped upon a secret. When I write my reports, each of those were written from the standpoint of a person who discovered a secret, who was excited to share it with you. There's a lot of things in copy I don't like. I don't like being told it's not my fault, even though I want to believe it's not my fault. I'm not a conspiracy guy. I don't believe in stuff like that. But I certainly believe that there are many secrets I don't know. Right. So for me, that's why. That's my style. It's what I would buy into, and it's therefore what I use. Hello. Wow. I'm super excited. So we're going to be talking about copywriting today. Obviously, copywriting is the language of marketing. If accounting is the language of business, copywriting is the language of marketing, and also the language of profit. I want to tell you a little bit of a backstory, but before we even go into the backstory, what my intention today was to share with you notes that I took over 20 years ago when I went to my very first copywriting seminar. These notes helped me make a lot of money. And so my hope is that they help you make a lot of money. And what else? So I've never considered myself a copywriter. I still don't consider myself a copywriter. I've written a few sales letters. They have done well. I've written some reports, and those have done well. But I've never written outside of my space. And so that's why I don't really consider myself a copywriter. I know how to write to people like me or in my market, but I've never gone into an industry I knew nothing about. Had to write something for someone else and learn it. So that's why I don't consider myself a copywriter. And actually I was having a conversation with Mars, my friend, and it might even be downstairs in my backyard. One of the things that Mars pointed out to me is that all I've really done has taken what I have always done, right, talking to lots of people, finding out what's working, what's not, and taken that part of my life and shared it with you. And that's really like another way of looking at steal our winners. And that's why I've always been at the forefront, because I'm always asking people. And then it's that cross pollinization of ideas, right? Of seeing what's working in multiple places that then gives you new ideas for things that nobody has ever done. So just another way of kind of thinking about it. All right, what was I going to tell you? The first business I had was the clothing business. We turned the store into really like the hottest store in Manhattan where all the celebrities shopped, all the designers shopped, was the first store to bring brands like Diesel into the United States. We were also the first store to have DJs in it. I believe I could be wrong on that. And we were the first store to create our own music as well. Built a recording studio right in the middle of the store. Electronic music was hot at that time or had gotten hot. So we did well. And then I decided I didn't want to be in that business anymore. And so I took a year off. I went trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I actually went back to college because I had dropped out my senior year. So I finished my degree, got my accounting degree, which made my mom really happy. And then after that, was trying to figure out what was next for me. I was reading timeout magazine, saw an article about a hypnotist. Her name was Julie Flanders. I decided I wanted to get hypnotized. I had never been hypnotized, didn't know whether I was hypnotizable or not, but wanted to experience it and ended up going for hypnosis and. And had such a profound experience because I'm highly hypnotizable. And that then put me on this path of wanting to learn hypnosis. And when I built a business around it and we opened our first office, I thought I understood marketing. I thought I understood how to make things cool and hip. And I had. Right, that's what I had done. And so all the Advertising we had done up until that point, like in the music business, in the clothing business was image, right? So we didn't run any direct response advertising. We ran all image, style. And so now that I had a hypnosis center, now we had to get the phone to ring. And what I found pretty quickly was that the more that I liked an ad, the worse it did, the more cheesy I thought it was, the better it did, the more embarrassing I felt it was, the better it did, the more cool I thought it was, the worse it did. So I recognized pretty early on that there was something that I was missing. That is what led me to have to start learning first. Even understanding and learning the word copywriting and what it meant and then starting to learn copywriting. Just out of curiosity, I know that I've shown it way ago, but I have a three minute video about the store. I have shown it before. Curious how many of you have not seen it? Here we go. Sorry about that, but here we go.

We don't consider it a job, we consider it a lifestyle. There's always something exciting. Every day there's new stuff coming in and every day there's new stuff coming out. The store isn't the same from Monday to Tuesday. The customers here are looking for refill. It's okay to do this with that because it's your life. So, so do it your way. And that's what the Antique boutique is. We created a place where you can use your individuality to pick out the kind of clothes that you want. And with that, you come out of the store with a completely different look. Every time I come in here, one of the sales people is like, oh, we just got in. I think you'd love. And they show me like something with glitter, sparkles. And I always love it here. Really. All our customers, in a way, you meet individuality. All about individuality. It's all about the phrase that we like to think of that you're constantly changing, you're constantly going through. And therefore the style here can't be defined. There's no name for it. Everyone creates their own style. My favorite thing about working in, we never suppress individuality. Our dress code here, we want people to be themselves so that can be projected out to the customer.

We get a lot of freedom.

I get a lot of. I get this grip. We know fashion, we know what people like. The store is based on personality and the clothes speak for themselves. But the employees here, we try to groom them to be different and interesting. That's making the selling Experience fun. I entertain them, I serve them, I give them, I make them look good, I give them an attitude. I make them cheap. And that's what we tried to do also inside the store. Aesthetically creating an environment that's completely different than any other environment out there. Here we use both vintage clothing, and that's really the only way that allows for a unique originality. The clothes are really great, nice and stylish and trendy. I just left over the place and I bought something immediately. Retailers from across the world come in here from big tank like the Dap. And the reason they come here is because we're constantly changing the environment. They want to understand what's going on. We consider ourselves the south batch of retailing. And we're constantly trying to change what retailing is all about. And the industry knows that, and that's why they keep coming back. If we're just constantly trying to better ourselves, it's not going to work. What we have to do is constantly reinvent ourselves. We have to constantly figure out how we're going to get this place to a totally different direction. And it's like doing that. There are no competitors, there are no substitutes. There's nothing like this store anywhere in the world.

So that was my store. It was one of Madonna's favorite stores. Drew Barrymore. Tons of celebrities and also tons of designer shop there. So it was a very interesting experience. But that's not the purpose of today. The purpose of today is to tell you that I thought marketing was just that. But my point is that cool and direct response often are not in parallel. And I see he, Uma Thurman is the other that, yeah, used to shop there. Also, fun fact, you saw the front of the signs. They used the front of our store for Seinfeld. The store was called Rudy's Antique Boutique. And yeah, that was mine, and I had to sign off on it so they could use it. Who were the designers? Dolce and Gabbana came in all the time. And if you've watched enough of my live streams, you probably noticed that my weight goes up 10 or 15 pounds, goes down 10 or 15 pounds. They would notice that too. Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani. All the designers from Diesel would come in. I would take them to my warehouse. Anyway, it was like the number one store in Manhattan at that time. And if you can imagine, sleek, cool and hip, it doesn't generally go hand in hand with direct response before and afters and things of that nature. Right. I wish I could find some of the ads that bombed Getting this to work, getting the advertising to work was challenging. I didn't even know what copywriting was before the Internet. Everything wasn't as connected, right? It took me a while to figure out there was this thing called copywriting, that there were people that were good at it. That kind of started the process for me. So I went to the seminar not knowing very much and wanting to know a lot more. And so I thought it would be great to share this with you. You should see Dan. Copywriting seminar. Fantastic. You got to remember, this is me as a beginner, right, Coming in and learning copy. You can sell just about anything through direct response methods. He made a big case about that. We've seen the ads for Rolls Royce, et cetera, so it can be done. You can also lay out how you choose to do business. You can lay out whatever sequence you want to take people through, which was really useful information. The Internet has only multiplied that, right? So you can determine how you want the world to do business with you, if that makes sense. Because through direct response, you're laying down a path for people to give you money. So that's his two big selling points at the beginning about direct response. You can sell anything and you can dictate the way it's sold. So what do we do before we write? And I think a lot of people don't spend enough time here. A long time ago, I used to be friendly with Harlan Killstein. He used to knock off my ads, my hypnosis ads, the ones that I wrote. And a lot of times he would do them better. And I told him that he should be a copywriter. And I actually brought him to this seminar as my guest, so. So that he could see what copy was all about and learned anyway. So what do we do before we write? It's amazing how little knowledge most people have of their direct competitors. And it's no different online. Even though online it's about a thousand times easier, right? It's literally a thousand times easier to do. Competitive intelligence, and it's immediate, but nonetheless, most people don't spend enough time on it. It's free research, right? You gotta be on top of what everyone else is doing. And competitive research is very important.

And.

And it really should be built into your processes from a standpoint of understanding what offers are currently resonating in your market. That's really the most important thing. Comparables, right? So when Dan is talking about comparables, it's not only like direct competitors, right? It's anyone that is selling to that target market, the Same target market as you. Something else revolved around what it is you offer. Most of the people that I do affiliate deals with and joint ventures with, you could say, really, we're not direct competitors. We sell similar things to similar people. We're not direct competitors. And back when I had my hypnosis centers, right, the comparables for that were plastic surgeons, one on one fitness, right? TimeShares, anyone trying to get people to come in for a free consultation. Timeshares and free consultations because that's how we sold. We got people to come into our office for a screening. But understanding what timeshares did to get people in for a meeting, I could use and study and get ideas from for my business. And I could look at gyms, I could look at one on one fitness centers. I could look at plastic surgeons, I could look at cosmetic dentists. These are all about improving your appearance. And same with hypnosis. We use primarily for that as well. So I could look at those comparables, right? Example $3,000 coffee machine, no competitors. Comparables are people who, who are selling anything incredibly overpriced. Right? So this is just my notes to me about what a comparable is. Answer all the ads in these areas so you can see what their sales letters look like, their incentive, their bonuses, their premiums, et cetera. Right? And that's what I'm saying. It's so much easier online because you can just do a search of their site. You just have so much more access to everything online. In addition to using something like Ad Beat, which allows you to look at the most successful banners that are currently in rotation on the top traffic sites, or looking at advertiser history in Facebook, or using the archive.org and going back and looking at how sales pages have changed. There's just so much out there, right? In addition to opting in, in addition to copying pages, screenshots, et cetera, right? Answer all the ads, right? Always check two categories, no matter what the product, weight loss and money making opportunities. Because these are the most competitive markets and because of the most competitive markets, we watching what they do will give you ideas. The more proof you have, the better. No matter what, always be looking for ways to validate and prove what is being said. People often overlook the hook that the whole campaign should be based and most of the time it should come from something in here. Research, science, documentation, proof, right? So one thing to maybe even put a post it note below your monitor to be on the prowl for proof. So often my best ideas come to me over time, right? Allow it to marinate in my head. And as I'm thinking about it, I bump into something or I see something that gives me that idea. Clayton Makepeace told me that anytime back in the old days, before the computers, if you were a copywriter, a lot of times you'd get a box full of stuff for your next project. He would always stop what he was doing, even though he'd generally be in the middle of a project and spend a full day going through all the research and then go back to his other project. And the reason for that was to prime the pump to get some of that info into his head. So if he came across things, he would be more likely to spot it. So my point, we have many times, not just once, many times stepped right over some great proof that we could have used to grow our business. And so the point here is that's something that you can never have enough of, love. And you should always be on the lookout for more. It's very dangerous to make assumptions or to take things as fact based on one experience. Separating opinions, assumptions from facts. Do you really know who you're selling to? Couldn't we go through all the old files and put together a demo list to tabulate job categories, age, et cetera? It's a note to me saying, couldn't we go through all our patient files? You really must do this. Everybody's business has at least one of these secrets. And in most cases, we don't find them because we don't look. The secret you find today might be different three years from now. So you have to constantly be on the lookout for them. Where's the bias in your list? Mail order brides, 60% of the buyers are truckers. Right. Dan Kennedy, 80 to 90% of his buyers lean politically conservative. Right. The biggest mistake most people make is that they start to write too soon. Do the research first, even this, right? You'd love me to just dive into some cool tactics. And I'm slowing you down by talking about what to do before you write. But more often than not, the problems you have in writing stem from the previous step not done. Well, if you do research and then write an outline, right. If you can't write the outline, something went squarely in the research. I forget the way it was explained to me. Generally, problems in the writing process, when you experience a challenge, it's because the step before wasn't done that well. And the experience that I've had at Agora, where the whole primary part of the sales that are somewhat templated Approach, it's just the big idea and the hook and the lead that is so integral and that copywriters will spend weeks, if they have eight weeks to write a sales letter, they might spend five or six weeks just on the big idea, the headline, lead, hook, and then just spend two weeks on the rest of the package. And so this should show you that if you are writing sales letters or writing sales pieces, by just jumping on and writing it with no pre thought or just a little thought, odds are you are sacrificing conversions. All right, so let's move on. Okay. Establish authority. This is what Dan has always taught, even in presenting. You gotta establish who you are, why you're here early in the conversation. There's two questions there. Why are you someone I should listen to? And why should I listen to you about this specifically? This is not a place to be modest. Use everything that you've got. I would disagree with this now. And I'd say that because I think that there are really clever ways to introduce authority, introduce credibility, without necessarily being as over the top about it. I know I've made that mistake. Oftentimes I would get feedback that I seemed really arrogant. So I think that there is a proper way to do this and there's a wrong way to do this. And when it's done wrong, it can be offensive and be a major turn off. In fact, I remember coming across a blog post years ago. I'm sure it's still out there and I should find it. But this woman wrote this blog post how she wishes she would have listened to me years earlier, but that I was speaking at a Frank Kern event and for the first five minutes all I did was talk about my accomplishments. And so she tuned me out. Later on she found out that I'm an introvert and I'm uncomfortable talking to groups and she cut me some slack. And what I was talking about would have saved her many years, whatever. So that was the idea anyway. This is not a place to hold anything back. But you want to be subtle in the way that you introduce these things. I wouldn't say that I'm the best at it. I think Russell does it really well. Kern can do it really well. Do you have any good examples of subtlety with this? I think social proof videos are the fastest way to assert authority and credibility online. Okay. Telling them what something is not. And I just remembered this recently because I'm thinking about possibly doing something like this for Steal our winners. Steal our winners is not your traditional pay $50 a month, get A single guru inviting another single guru on when they have something to pimp out. That's not what Steal Our Winners is. Steal Our winners is not eight pages of whatever's on my mind each and every month. It's not that either. It's not this, it's not that, it's not that, right? So telling the prospect what the product isn't is a reliable, selling, successfully used copywriting technique. This is especially useful when you're staying blind and do not want to reveal exactly what the product is or wish to delay it to build up response. The not list is always a way of allaying objections. Your prospect has a list of things he or she doesn't want your solution to be like. So if you're selling weight loss, right, they don't want prepackaged foods, they don't want starvation diets, they don't want to have to exercise like crazy. They don't want to have calorie count, they don't want to have to be hungry, they don't want to take dangerous pills, they. They don't want to weigh in once a week like they do at Weight Watchers. Whatever, right? Another way to use the what is not approach is via a without. I completely forgot about that. I could do a Steal our winners ad, that is build your next multimillion dollar funnel or online business without buying another course, without joining a coach or without could be another interesting way to do it. It's not your fault. Now this is the one that bothers me the most because I think if you're good at what you do, you, you shouldn't have to say it. You can get people to think it, right? Nonetheless, it is important. You have to remove blame from the prospect. If they've tried and failed, you have to make it clear to them that it wasn't their fault so that then they know they can still solve the problem that it wasn't them. It's really the method, right? Or a secret wasn't told or something. But ideally you aren't saying it's not your fault. They're thinking, it's not my fault. It's the difference between showing and telling. And also like when someone's trying to sell you, how much do you believe of what they're telling you? There's a really big difference. If I go into a car dealer and I get a compliment on my shoes from the salesperson versus someone who I'm not in a sales situation, it's totally different. And same here, we tend to discount what's said In a sales situation, what if there was finally a weight loss pill that really worked? If you've tried to diet after diet and still unable to lose weight, it's not your fault. If you tried and tried to lose weight but haven't, do not blame yourself. You get it hopefully, right? People are always searching for ways to get off the hook for their problems. You have to put the blame on someone else other than them. So we're on. Five. Fear and anxiety. In many cases, it's easier to fear cell than to benefit cell. Fear has a tendency to move people the fastest.

Fear.

Find your fear statement, the one thing that can scare people into response. You may be one diet away from a massive heart attack. You may be one diet away from developing diabetes. You want to be as far away as possible from prevention. You cannot sell prevention. Right? That's the difference between medicine and vitamins, right? You can't sell prevention. You can sell relief. If you're going to do fear, don't do it halfway or don't hold back. You must go for the jugular. Go all the way. You must scare the person nearly to death. Build the list of scariness and develop each point. Using a person's anxieties and insecurities requires less drama and is more in keeping with the Robert Collier principle of entering the conversation already occurring in their mind. If you're going to use fear as a motivating force in copy, you must pull out all the stops. Fear should be piled on and made as dramatic as possible. Remember that prevention is the most difficult of all sales to ever make. So when dealing with it, you must scare the person nearly to death. All right, so let's take a look at some of the questions and then we can see what we have here. Let's see. All right. All right. Hi, Rich. In my opinion, it's not possible to create unique copy out of these box softwares, except perhaps use them as a draft copy creator. So perhaps there are a couple of things to consider before buying one or two. I would agree. I don't think there's any out there currently where you can just press a button and you're going to have like copy that you can actually just throw on your site without having to do anything.

But.

But I would say that a lot of them can get you like 70 or 80% of the way there, and that's pretty huge. That's a huge savings of time. Jay Abraham used to pay copywriters, like, just have them on retainer just to write sales letters for products that didn't exist, and he would collect them, and then when it was time for him to write copy, he would sit down and look at all of them and get all different kinds of ideas to then use from the copy that was written for him. And this is no different. In fact, I had a call today with Conversion AI, which is much more, I would say, for the content marketing side than it is for the sales letter side, but really cool stuff. I do think that AI is going to be very much incorporated into copywriting and content marketing. We just did a webinar for Copy Pro, and of all of the AI tools, I do know that Copy Pro is really good for sales. Letters will only get better. And if I was going to pick a second, it'd be Conversion AI. But I'm just starting to play with Conversion AI, so I can't say that much intelligent stuff about it yet. How much time do you spend researching before writing a promotion? Remember? Right, Wayne, I'm not a copywriter. I don't do research for promotion. But I do research when I used to write my reports and I did a ridiculous amount of research and. And I would be doing research until I came across something that got me so excited and that I believed in because then I could go to the market and do the very same thing. Right. But definitely a long period of time. And it's about finding that idea, finding that thing that has people want to lean in and hear more. Is the big idea the same as the hook? And do you think the headline will always reveal them? No, no. The big idea and the hook can be the same. It all depends on who you're talking to. Right, Right. And we're talking about generic words too. So there is no one definitive definition of big idea. Right. If you come from the Agora world, then the big idea makes the prospect want to lean in and learn more. What is so important at Agora is to bypass categorization. A prospect can't know what it is ahead of time because if they do, they're already now deciding whether they're going to interest it or not before they've read the sales letter. So you're always at a weighed disadvantage, which is why you generally hide it, at least at a gorse. It's not the same as a core concept either. So I developed the core concept, which is really the one idea that people need to believe in order to buy. Right. And that's what Russell took his one idea from. And that would be the theme of, let's say, a webinar. And then Every content piece has to tie back into that theme and support that theme. You're trying to get them to believe that one thing. And if they believe that one thing, they'll buy. So that's a core concept. The big idea is generally something bigger than that. You're generally chunking up and speaking in general. One of my favorites was this guru was Pro Gold coins. The copywriter talked about this secret currency that the Rockefellers used that the melons used, that all the richest families have used, that was outlawed in the United States for 40 years and has just recently been legalized again. And now you can use the same currency that these families have used to amass great wealth and blah, blah, blah. It doesn't say that it's gold coins anywhere in the promotion. It's a secret currency. So that is a big idea. Right? The same investment vehicle that the wealthiest families of all time have used, which was illegal in the United States up until recently, is now been made available. And let me show you how to get in on it. Hey, Rich, at one point you mentioned two of your favorite Dan Kennedy programs or books. Can you repeat what they are? My two favorite ones from Dan were Opportunity Concepts and Influential Writing. Opportunity Concepts. How do you package your offer like an opportunity? And Influential writing was all about newsletters and how to use them for persuasive things. Is the big idea more of a kind of new positioning or new opportunity? No big idea is more about like how this idea, this whatever's going to be presented, relates to the prospect and relates to the world. It's more that it's not really necessarily a new positioning, although it's like positioning of the offer. You could say, but I wouldn't make it that deep. It's a sexy idea that sells the product for an existing mechanism. Yeah, copy research question. I'm working on my flow journal and putting together a subscription model which will include a Facebook group for accountability with a deeper dive workshop. In doing my research, I found a company that has a journal and is doing accountability too. Looking at their sales page, pretty good. How much can I copy the layout and perhaps some of the selling points. But in my words, where if you compared the two, you would see similarities. Comparing the two and seeing similarities is not a big deal. And in general, I would try and make everything that page has and just make it better. That would certainly be the way to go. You're selling the same thing. So similarity is okay. It just can't be one, identical or verbatim. And two like you should be able to make it so that yours is a better option. You could also go, Denise, into archive.org and just see, like, how many times the page has changed over the years. See if they've split, tested it and made any permanent changes so you can get an idea of what doesn't work. And I certainly would buy it, and I would certainly be looking at all their messaging and seeing who links to that site. Maybe there are some affiliate deals. There's a lot that you can learn by doing a really thorough review. Denise, how do you prevent the big Idea crossing over into hype? Got a few products recently, not bad products at all. But I felt the big idea oversold what the product actually was. That is a good question, Adrian, and I don't have a great answer for it. I think it is part of the copywriter's job, really, to get you to want something. And overselling it is not really being dishonest. It's just like hyping up your expectations, which is problematic because the higher the expectations, the more there'll be disappointment. But I'll tell you what I did, Adrian, with a client of mine that had a like, five or six million dollars business. Two people working for him made really good money. Maybe his overhead was like a million of the 5 million or something like that. Sold a trading course program that also had, like, a black box software. He changed his webinar from a logical selling webinar to an emotionally selling webinar. He boosted conversion rates very significantly, but at the same time, he also increased refunds dramatically. Not enough to not make it still financially worthwhile to do the emotional sale, but enough to bother him. And so what we did was we took the original webinar that sold based on logic. He took the pitch out, which then meant he was reselling them logically after they were sold emotionally. And I would imagine something like that could work. Adrian, which online course do you recommend for a beginner who wants to learn about copywriting? There are so many good resources out there right now, really, literally. I would read the Gary Halpert letter. John Carlton's a great teacher. Learned a tremendous amount from Clayton. Makepeace does depend on what kind of copy you're going to write. The Robert Collier Letter book was a phenomenal read, and what a great writer. That's a really old book, but phenomenal. And of course, there's like, how to Write Good Ads by Vic Schwab or Scientific Advertising. Those are all classics. They all should be read. And really, if you want to get good at copy, you should take some courses. There are plenty of great people to learn from. The way you get good is by writing copy and also analyzing copy. That is good. Right? So looking at controls, taking every paragraph and understanding why that paragraph is there. Creating your own outlines of successful sales letters. So now you have templates that would be a great way to start. And then you find the teacher who you resonate with. And I would follow them. But any A level copywriter, David Deutsch, David Garfinkel. I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of other Sean Vossler. I love Sean Vossler's book. It's much more a marketing book than a copywriting book. But you learn a lot there. Yeah, there. There are so many and it's hard for me to say which is the best. I really enjoyed. I'll tell you. I don't even know if it's available anymore but John Carlton used to have a 150 page home study course workbook with a like six audios. And that just brought it down to the simplest thing. Sell the damn. Here's how you sell the damn thing. And I got a lot of value out of that. I already walked into that course knowing quite a bit. But sometimes like a simple course is sometimes better than a comprehensive one because it just hits you over the head to know what are truly the most essential ones. The big idea in TV commercials is different, often revealed in the tagline what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, where's the beef, et cetera. Yeah, totally agree. Good point, Leon. All these landing page funnel softwares are useless if you don't know how to market. So true. How would you define a hook then in the context of a big idea, Core concept or unique mechanism? Usp. I have them all distinguished properly other than the hook. Think of the hook as for ease, I would say think of the hook as a big idea. Generally it's a bigger hook, but they're very comparable. So I don't think you'd be off on that. But what I would say is that a lot of times there is no big idea, but there is a hook. Rich, a few times you mentioned that you were really not a copy guy. What is your strong suit then? Strategy? Systems, Marketing. Like those are my primaries. Remember I was a business coach, coached a lot of people on success. I wasn't coaching them on their copywriting ability. More in that vein, I'm not really hirable as a marketer. Can't hire me to do marketing because if I'm going to do that, I'll do it for myself and I'll always make more. It's hard to pay me to do a marketing project where I couldn't make more just doing my own marketing project. But yeah, I'm a business strategy guy who's mastered marketing, you could say. I guess that's what I would say. In training. I've watched of yours, you say when you're doing research, you're looking for clues as to why people aren't getting the results they want. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, sure. So I find that people, they're impatient, they haven't done a lot of research or original research. That could be another reason. I like the show Forensic Files. When a crime happens, police are called. In that moment, they're much more interested in looking for clues that will lead them to who did this. So they're not looking for answers, they're looking for clues. That's what I mean, that when I'm doing research, I see everything as clues. And where is this leading to? Right. Trying to see patterns. It's interacting with the information. So what's the implication of that? If that's true, what should happen next? And next that's true. Who else might be talking about this and what might they be saying about it and what words might they be using so I can do a search for it? It's about recognizing that whatever I come across is really just a jumping off point to the next point, as opposed to thinking that I found my spot. That's probably the best way to look at it, that everything I'm finding will lead me to the spot, but it isn't the spot. And that if I want some research, if I want to come out with something that blows people away, stuff that they might have thought, might have had an inkling of, but never articulated, that's only going to come from doing more work. You're not going to just come up with something like that. So that's where I'm coming from. Should we even learn copywriting given that we have software like Copy Pro? Yes, because how are you going to tell the difference between good and bad? How are you going to take what is decent and make it great? Everybody should know some minimal amount of copywriting. Even though I don't consider myself a copywriter, I've read hundreds of books on copy. I've written copy. I know how to write copy. I think understanding what gets people to buy the language of selling is incredibly important and everyone should know about it. Hello, Rich. Have you heard or tried conversion? AI Yes, I was talking to the owner today, which is an AI driven software app used to generate sales copy, amongst other things. I think Sean Vassler is an affiliate there. He is in the house. 7 Secrets of Persuasion by James Crimmins is a solid read, as is your book, which I would hold up right now. Wait, I think it's there. Hold on. My new favorite book on marketing, right here, written by Sean Vossler, which is just absolutely awesome. I don't know. There you go.

Yeah.

So anyway, good to see you, Sean. Your name came up like four times today in different conversations. I spoke to David. Thanks for that hookup, man. Want to catch up? All right, that's it. Kick ass copywriting Secrets of a marketing rebel. That was so simple and basic. You get in and out of it in two hours and it was just like, okay, just sell the damn thing. There was a lot of good stuff in there. In your opinion, which better, short or long copy? I usually find long copy very boring. And I scroll down to the conclusion and the offer. It all depends. Amit. Short copy can work at times, long copy can work at times. Generally, though, if you're talking to the right target market, the as long as it needs to be without being boring is the important part. And there are things I would imagine emit that you would read a 20 page sales letter on. Maybe not the things that you've come across, but if you had a challenge and you struggled with it for a long time and it was written in a way that wasn't hyperbolic, but it was explaining to you, like, why you didn't get the results and what you could do to get the results and why this method works and blah, blah, blah, you would read it. Right. So there have been times when you've read copy, maybe you just haven't come across any great copy. Recently Rich has one of the first bound copies. Yeah, I flew all the way to San Diego just to get my hands on it. The book is beautiful and the content's even better. I owe Sean ridiculous amounts. He's awesome. I've learned a lot from him in the year or so that we've become friends. Yeah. And I've never met someone who is a more, what would be the word, aggressive researcher than I am. And man, if you think I'm a nut, Sean is nuttier than I and blows me away when it comes to the research. Sean, when I say that you're a better researcher than me and that you're just like balls to the wall with it, people are like, no way. And I'm like, take a look at this. All right, so guilt. Guilt is the hidden emotional baggage carried around by most people waiting to be triggered and exploited. Oh, wait. Someone asked me when I was saying about fear and anxiety. They said, isn't that manipulative? And look, there's a million ways to dance around this. At the end of the day, copywriting is manipulative. It just is. Like you're trying to get someone into an emotional state that will get them out of their status quo. We manipulate people all the time. We just don't like. The best book I've ever read on Persuasion, which really tackles this, I think Head on, is Blair Warren's the Forbidden Keys to Persuasion. And he talks about it like the first time that your mom gave you a bad answer and you went to your dad. That's manipulative. We manipulate all the time. So, yes, making someone be scared, making someone feel guilty is manipulative. And copywriting and marketing is manipulative. It could be used for good, it could be used for bad, but at the end of the day, it is manipulation. I mean, take it for what it is. So that's the way I look at it. Is there a difference between persuasion and manipulation? Is there a difference between persuasion and manipulation? Teaching, that's all context. So anyway, guilt is a hidden emotional baggage carried around by most people waiting to be triggered and exploited. If you were going to do this, then go all the way. Don't hold back. We use guilt about health, et cetera, and that makes total sense. Our goal is not to manipulate. The implication being that we're acting only with our interest in mind and with unscrupulous, tactless. No. Our goal is to persuade. The difference being that everybody wins in the equation is. And our reader has come to their decision fairly. Yes. Spoken like a true copywriter. All right, so let's do one more here, and then we're going to figure out what's next. Okay. Secrets. It's important for copywriters to understand the psychology behind secrets power. The power of a secret. I think this is really important. I'm going to take myself off the screen because I really want you guys to get this one. Because it's not just about secrets. It's the psychology of why people need to believe that there has been a secret. It's important for the copywriter to understand the psychology behind secrets power, so you will be more inclined to use this tool. There are two underlying reasons why secrets work. We have been conditioned since childhood to believe in and want to believe in secrets. And by extension, conspiracies of greater importance. People need to believe that their problems are the result of secrets kept from them and conspiracies against them. The alternative is to admit to responsibility and fault. Let me read the rest and then I'll. That, to me, though, is incredibly important. The existence of a secret kept as a conspiracy is used frequently to sell diets to tabloid readers. The belief in secrets and the desire to be let in on what has been secret is one of the most powerful of all buying motives, easily manipulated by the copywriter, letting them off the hook. People must believe that their problems stem from some secret that they don't know, preferably kept from them by some conspiracy that, if they found out, would resolve their problems. The secret is the hope. We are in search of hope. We live for hope. Because the alternative is unacceptable. There. This is one of the most powerful techniques. There is always one secret that you didn't have before. Hope is a drug of mankind. They've got to have it, so you might as well use it. After secrets, then you go into what it's not, because you can't tell them what it is, or it wouldn't be a secret. All right, so let me explain, though, why I feel like this is so important. So I struggled with my weight most of my life, right? I was really fat. Then I discovered the Atkins diet, and that was a secret. It wasn't a secret being kept from me, but it was a secret to me. I didn't know it, right? Most things that we learn before we learn them, they were secret to us. It's not that people were trying to keep this secret from you. Like the big pharma is trying to keep you fat, right? But if you don't know it, it's a secret. I struggle with my weight. My twin brother over here, that doesn't exist, does not. Right? I either have to believe that he knows something I don't. A secret, or that I'm fat and lazy and he's not. And I should just accept my lot in life. I don't want to accept that, right? I want to believe that he's doing something or knows something, or there is something. That is the difference. And I don't want to believe that. It's his hard work, his ability to curb his appetite, his ability to say no to the second Oreo or the tenth Oreo for me. And I don't want to believe that it's any of those things. I'd rather believe that there's just some secret he knows. He's not even keeping it from me. He doesn't even know it's a secret, but I don't know it. So we have this need to believe that there's some information that is missing that we don't have, that if we had, we'd get the outcome, we'd get the result. Right. I felt like when I read that book on add, I had tripped upon a secret. When I write my reports, each of those were written from the standpoint of a person who discovered a secret, who was excited to share it with you. So I'm not a conspiracy guy and I. There's a lot of things in copy I don't like. I don't being told it's not my fault. Even though I want to believe it's not my fault. I don't want to be told that there's like some secret cartel that's trying to keep a secret from me. I don't believe in stuff like that, but I certainly believe that there are many secrets I don't know. Right. So for me, that's why that's my style. It's what I would buy into, and it's therefore what I use. So what I'm thinking, I've introduced a bunch of concepts to you, but I haven't really taken it to a point of usability. I want to show you some things that I've done that have helped my copy quite a bit. Some easy things. I'll also put these notes in the Strategic Profits Facebook group, so if you're not a member, please join. We'd love to have you there. Lots of heavyweights in there, including the big Sean Vossler 10th Oreo for the win. Yeah, if I could stop at 10, it would be okay. All right, Sean, just because you asked, I'll tell the story one last time. But the reason I don't like telling the story so much is that everyone harps on the book and the book really has nothing to do with the story. Although for this point, maybe it does because we're talking about the book. A psychologist recommended that I might have add. When they told me that, I thought that was the stupidest thing I've ever heard because I tend to hyper focus not knowing that hyper focus actions actually is a tendency of add. And so a year or two later, I happened to be in a bookstore. On the end cap, they had the book Driven to Distraction, written by John Brady and Ned Hallowell. It felt like they were describing me and it made me feel as if I really only had one problem all these problems that I was experiencing were really just symptoms of add. And that's what my entire free report model is based on. And Driven to Distraction is not the only book that does that. E Myth does that too. You open emit thinking that like you have X problem, you have Y problem, you have Z problem, you close that book, you think you have one problem, you have a systems problem getting things done. Your to do list is the problem, right? So all of these books are repositionings of the problem. They're paradigm shifts on the problem. And so the Internet Business Manifesto, the Entrepreneurial Emergency, these were all like following that template, following that model. So hopefully that is elucidating to some of you. Just once again, thanks for being here. I hope I gave you some things. Think about what things are not. Think about how you can install new hope, right? And what secrets, what knowledge was missing from your prospects that lets them off the hook, that gives them new hope that now that they have what they're going to get right now, everything will be different. One of the things I used to always say to Todd Brown was tell me how this changes everything. So with that said, rah, rah, rah and I will see everyone on Tuesday to hire profits of Beyond. Over and out. Richev.