2nd Gary Halbert Call Part 2 of 4

Gary: Then you go out to a library or a book­store and get ten books on golf and out­line a prod­uct based on the ideas you got from those books. I remem­ber one book I really liked had a sim­ple title said, “The Secrets of Per­fect Putting”, but any­way you out­line your book then you write a direct mail let­ter as though your prod­uct actu­ally existed.

Then you mail 1000 let­ters out of that, you have to rent 5,000, but I often rent 5,000 and test only 1,000, and if you get enough money back that the arith­metic says that you have made a profit doing this and you did it with your own money then you are enti­tled to call your­self a copywriter.

If you can­not do that you are defraud­ing peo­ple when you hold out your shin­gle as a copy­writer who knows what he is doing and can work for other peo­ple. It is because; just think about this, every­thing was under your control.

From the selec­tion of the list, to the cre­ation of the prod­uct, to the sales let­ter, to price, every­thing, and if you can not do it when every­thing is under your con­trol how are you going to do it when a client dic­tates to you what you have to say? So that is the real acid test of whether you are a copy­writer or not.

Okay?

Now. I am going to do some­thing that I really find offen­sive and that is I am going to answer these ques­tions. This first ques­tion asked all three of those so I answered all three of those in and says. Okay, now here is the next ques­tion that I have in my hand.

Is there an update on the old AIDA for­mula? AIDA for many of you that might not know stands for Atten­tion, Inter­est, Desire, Action, and if so what is it? The answer is no, there is no update that I know out of that. I do not know of a bet­ter for­mula than that. There prob­a­bly are a few other things, I mean, I think you could put proof in there or some­thing but the answer is no, there is not an update on that formula.

Okay, now this guy, I am not going to men­tion his name, because he offends me. I want to tell you what he has said, “You are ask­ing me to give you time out of my life, why? When I or any other per­son is dying we can­not recall to get back the hours of our life. You have not shown why any­one should lis­ten and give up any time out their life to another online marketer’s call.

Are you going to pay them for their call? The cur­rent trend of online calls is not show­ing any value at all and yes, there are some­times recorded and offered or sold sub­se­quent to the calls, big deal. In fact, the time I have spent typ­ing this email maybe just another waste of my time. The pay­back is you have to read it.”

Well, you know, I think this guy is frankly despi­ca­ble. Here we are offer­ing some­thing com­pletely free and offer­ing some­thing valu­able and he is still bitching.

I want to tell you some­thing, and I want all you peo­ple out there to lis­ten to this. I can tell who is a great mar­keter when I visit in their home. You know what I do? As soon as we get com­fort­able I ask them if I can see their library, and I was talk­ing to Michael Fortin the other day, and he was telling me, you know, he spent half a mil­lion dol­lars for his direct mar­ket­ing edu­ca­tion, and you know, I spent prob­a­bly more than that.

I would buy books when I couldn’t afford to pay the elec­tric­ity or they were turn­ing off my water, and when­ever you hear some­body whin­ing about buy­ing infor­ma­tion just get them out of your life because if they are whin­ing because “Oh I had to buy some­thing” you know what? You should buy something.

If you pay $500.00 and get two good ideas out of it you have got your money’s worth, and stop being such a pussy, and such a cry­baby, and stop whin­ing. You know, if you want to get this done and you want to do it you have got to pay the price and that is all there is to it. I was talk­ing to Mike, Mike how much, I will ask you, how much have you spent for your direct mar­ket­ing edu­ca­tion? Mike: Oh half a mil­lion dollars.

Gary: How long did it take you get as good as you are?

Mike: Twenty-​​five years.

Gary: Okay, where there is a lot of peo­ple in this hall who want to get it for $2.50 and get it in three hours. Guess what? You peo­ple all suck.

Okay, now, and I am going to answer his ques­tions any­way. Is there a huge dif­fer­ence in mail order verses direct mail assum­ing you use a tar­geted audi­ence? I do not even know what that ques­tion means but all I know is that if you mail order, I guess if he means news­pa­per adver­tis­ing or mag­a­zine adver­tis­ing, news­pa­per adver­tis­ing is dif­fi­cult because there is so much waste cir­cu­la­tion because such a small frac­tion will be in the mar­ket for any such other thing. Mag­a­zines can be very tar­geted and direct mail is very targeted.

So, no, there is no dif­fer­ence, at least no dif­fer­ence in copy.

Now here is another ques­tion. How is this for a head­line to an ad look­ing for peo­ple who are fed up with their job? Are you suf­fer­ing from job dis­sat­is­fac­tion? Actu­ally that is a head­line that sucks and I will tell you why it sucks. Because it is cute, because it is tricky, you know, this guy is really proud that he has come up with job dissatisfaction.

Okay, here is another ques­tion, now we are start­ing to go into other people’s ques­tions so I am going to be kinder and gen­tler here. Another per­son: Oh, what a sur­prise. Orig­i­nal speaker: Every­body will hang up as soon as I do. At one of our entre­pre­neur boot camps I had you speak at many moons ago you had every­one get out a cou­ple of blank pages and you dic­tated the sam­ple let­ter, com­plete with lots of blah, blah, blahs.

For some rea­son, I do not have that in my files any­more, and it might be a good thing to do on your live sem­i­nar, and that is from Mark Stal­lard, an old and dear friend of mine. Mark, if you are lis­ten­ing, I think what you are talk­ing about is the dol­lar bill let­ter and if all else fails write a dol­lar bill let­ter and here is the copy again.

Dear Friend: As you can see I have attached a nice crisp one dol­lar bill to the top of this let­ter. Why have I done this? Actu­ally there are two reasons.

One, I needed some way to make sure this let­ter would catch your atten­tion. Two, and sec­ondly, and since what I am writ­ing to you about can help you make a lot of money or help you save a lot of money I thought using a dol­lar bill as an eye catcher was a good idea.

Any­way, here is what it is all about; and then we go into all the blah, blah, blahs of what it is all about. Now the rest of the for­mula for that is after you send that dol­lar bill you wait a few days until they have had time to get it and then you call them, and you say hi, this is Mark Stal­lard, I am just calling.

I sent you a piece of mail and I just wanted to make sure you got it. You will remem­ber it if you did because there was a dol­lar bill attached to the front page of the let­ter; and at that point some­thing very impor­tant is going to happen.

You are going to get your first yes nod. You won’t be able to see it on the phone, of course, but some­body will say yeah I got that I got the dol­lar; and then you are going to say well I wanted to check because, you know, you can not be too care­ful when you are send­ing money in the mail. Is not that right; and he’s going to go yeah, you could not be too care­ful; and then you are going to say “Well, you did get the let­ter, the dol­lar was intact and you have had a chance to read it?”, and then you will get your third yes, nod; and if you can­not take it from there you should get out of mar­ket­ing. You know.

So first I want to say Mark was glad to hear from you again but I think that is the answer to your ques­tion. By the way, Mark reminded me of a quote of mine, which is one of my favorite quotes, espe­cially since it is mine, “Noth­ing is impos­si­ble for a per­son who refuses to lis­ten to rea­son.” Okay. This is Gary, look­ing for­ward to the call tonight.

Ques­tion: We are doing split gate, I do not know what that is, but the radio sta­tion they run spots and we show up and do train­ing and split the total rev­enue. I guess that is what it is. We are shoot­ing for 500 peo­ple at $59.00 each. Not sure how to make the spot stand out in the glut of other aver­age com­mer­cials. It is talk radio.

They vol­un­teered to cre­ate the spot but I know radio sta­tions are awful at the cre­ative and I thought you could add some spice to it. Could you address this tonight?

Yes I will. The best thing you can do to make your spot stand out is avoid all bells and whis­tles, all music, all trick­ery, and every­thing, and it just should be a voice, prob­a­bly a male voice, talk­ing, explain­ing what it is all about, and the main thing is you do not want to detract from your mes­sage, and the trick­ery, and the music, and all that stuff detracts.

If you are not going to use, some­thing that is equally as good as a male voice is a female voice from the south, a south­ern accent.

Now I am going to tell you all a secret that almost nobody knows and it is this. If you run a full-​​page ad in a news­pa­per you should bud­get, at least some of the time, $3.00 per thou­sand. Like if the cir­cu­la­tion of the news­pa­per is 100,000 then allow $3.00 for each thou­sand so $300.00 and on the day the news­pa­per comes out you should pay $300.00, these are rough fig­ures and not exact, to a radio sta­tion, and by the way when you buy radio com­mer­cials there is only two kind of sta­tions you want.

Coun­try music and talk radio; and that rea­son for that is that is the only radio that peo­ple are actu­ally lis­ten­ing to. All the rest of them, they might be bounc­ing along to the music, but they are pay­ing atten­tion to this, and what you should do with that is you should adver­tise you adver­tisin­gand say, “Are you inter­ested in los­ing weight, if so read the Miami Her­ald today, look for the page that says NASA Sci­en­tist Invents New Way to Lose Weight.”

Now, by the way, you can do that on tele­vi­sion and if you are buy­ing a 10 sec­onds spot on TV, which is about all you can afford these days, when the day your news­pa­per comes out some­body should be stand­ing there with the ad, in front of the cam­era, show­ing them the ad and say, “Are you inter­ested in los­ing weight, look for this page in today’s Miami Her­ald. A NASA Sci­en­tist Reveals a New Way to Lose Weight.” That is called adver­tis­ing the adver­tis­ing; and while I am on that I will tell you another trick.

News­pa­pers are so huge today that I have ran ads that came out in news­pa­pers where to find my own ad I per­son­ally had to go through it seven times look­ing for my own ad, and as a gen­eral rule, if you are run­ning in news­pa­pers, if you can man­age it, always run on a Tues­day because you want to run in the skin­ni­est paper there is.

Now here is a big trick when you are run­ning in fat papers. Adver­tise the adver­tis­ing with lit­tle one-​​inch ads in other sec­tions of the paper; and you say, “What to know a new way to lose weight invented by a rocket sci­en­tist? See page 74 in the C sec­tion.” Sprin­kle those ads through­out the news­pa­per that will get peo­ple to go to a sec­tion that they would not have gone to normally.

Okay? Let us see what else we have got here. One, do you Gary Albert know when to write short copy and when to write long copy? Are there objec­tive cri­te­ria for mak­ing the deter­mi­na­tion? Any­thing you can describe? Any source mate­r­ial to read or lis­ten to or is it all a mat­ter of guts, guts, and experiment?

You know, what you really should do and all of you are suf­fer­ing from this, is I sus­pect most of these peo­ple here do not know what a world class swipe file is. I would guess that you, Michel Fortin, have thou­sands of exam­ples in your swipe file, as I do. Michel: Oh yeah.

Gary: And you should look at small ads, and you should at long ads, and you should be writ­ing them out in your own hand­writ­ing till it is embed­ded on a neuro basis.

Sec­ond ques­tion. What do you do to make sure you write good copy about some­thing you con­sider dis­gust­ing? For exam­ple, I hate gang­ster rap but if a guy wants to me to sell a gang­ster rap train­ing course how can I (a) quickly get up to speed on the sub­ject and (b) get in the frame of mind that lets me write copy so good that I might even change my own feel­ings about the subject?

First, I think you should avoid, unless the wolf is at your door, writ­ing about things that dis­gust you. It is hard enough to make all of this work by writ­ing things that you are pas­sion­ate about.

But if you have to write about gang­ster rap, which I hate too, then what you want to do, is you want to read hip hop mag­a­zines, you want to talk to the peo­ple who play it, you want to talk the peo­ple who lis­ten to it, what the biggest thing that peo­ple fail to do, I saw a great pic­ture on the Inter­net the other day that some­body had been able to cap­ture a com­plete pic­ture of an ice­berg, the part above and below the water, the con­di­tions were just right.

But David Ogle­bee was asked one time, what was his long suit in adver­tis­ing, and he said it is research, and I will tell you some­thing, every­body that is good in adver­tis­ing, that is their long suit, research, and you just got to do the research and that is all the way there is to it.

Three, is there a quick way to find the starv­ing crowd you often talk about when a cus­tomer who does not yet have cus­tomers of his own? Well, first of all, if you can you should avoid work­ing for peo­ple who do not have cus­tomers of their own. But I do not know how, you know, this ques­tion indi­cates that you and your client are going for it backwards.

In other words, a prod­uct or ser­vice has been cre­ated and you are going out to find the mar­ket. That is absolutely back­wards. What you want to do is find the mar­ket and then cre­ate a prod­uct or ser­viced to ser­vice that market.

Briefly, the pri­mary fea­tures and func­tion­al­ity of the Stack Tee are one, the capa­bil­ity to stack mul­ti­ple tees together, which make it easy to adjust the height of a golf ball for any kind of tee shot.

Two, it inter­locks mak­ing it eas­ier to carry a stock of tees in your shirt or pocket.

Three, it is made out of a poly­mer mate­r­ial with a lower sur­face hard­ness than did hard birch wood tees and it will not dam­age, scratch, or leave paint marks on expen­sive thin face drivers.

Four, it is designed to min­i­mize the kinetic energy lost from a club tee inter­ac­tion weighted only a third of the stan­dard wood tee.

Five, it func­tions as a stan­dard tee holder and can be used to adjust the height of wood tees.

Five, it is golf course friendly made from a biodegrad­able poly­mer mate­r­ial that can eas­ily cut or vac­uum by lawnmower.

I am not a mar­ket­ing guru but what some peo­ple con­sider a tech­ni­cal geek PhD. engi­neer. By the way for you that do not know PHD stands for Piled Higher and Deeper, but I try to keep my head out of the clouds and I have com­mon sense.

I plan to send out a flyer dis­cov­er­ing fea­ture, func­tion­al­ity, and sam­ples of the Stacked Tee to all the U.S. dealer/​distributors of golf equip­ment and the golf courses. Accord­ing to my research approx­i­mately 500 bil­lion golf tees are con­sumed annu­ally. My ques­tion for you is what is the best way to mar­ket this new prod­uct? Am I bark­ing up the wrong tree? Thanks for the invi­ta­tion I look for­ward to your feedback.

This guy has really put some effort into try­ing. So the first thing I am going to say, although it sounds dis­cour­ag­ing, I am going to fol­low up with some­thing not so dis­cour­ag­ing. This does not have any sex appeal or sales appeal for golfers whatsoever.

John Carl­ton is the mas­ter at mar­ket­ing to golfers and here is what they want. They want to hit longer, straighter, dri­ves off the tee. You know, tee shot. That is the num­ber one appeal. This is a very weak appeal.

But hav­ing said that, I think if you find peo­ple who dis­trib­ute prod­ucts to places that sell golf equip­ment that this is going to be an excel­lent adjunct to the line that they carry and that you should maybe put that in their line. But you are never, I should not say never because who I am to say? I said when I saw Star Wars, the movie, that it would fail, but you are not going to sell that at a profit via direct mar­ket­ing. But I think you maybe can sell it as a dis­trib­u­tor­ship and I wish you the best of luck on it.

Okay, here is another ques­tion. I would like to hear your insights on the dif­fer­ences in writ­ing fas­ci­na­tions, by the way a fas­ci­na­tions is a word some peo­ple use for bul­lets, for an infor­ma­tion prod­uct, such as a book, report, or newslet­ter, verses a phys­i­cal prod­uct such a vit­a­min, gad­get, etc.

The answer is there is no dif­fer­ence what­so­ever. For the infor­ma­tion prod­uct it is much more direct than some unique knowl­edge will be revealed verses the phys­i­cal prod­uct, which has spe­cific ben­e­fits but they are not teased the same way.

I would also like to hear your thoughts in the dif­fer­ence in cre­at­ing mag­a­logs verses other types of direct mail. First of all, he is on the wrong track in think­ing that the cre­ation of bul­lets dif­fer from how you should go about it dif­fer­ently from a phys­i­cal prod­uct than you should an infor­ma­tion prod­uct. That is not true, and the best way to learn to how to bul­lets is go to the Gary Albert Newsletter.

You all know it, it is www​.the​garyal​bertlet​ter​.com click on view newslet­ter archives, and find the enve­lope that says Let’s do the Twist, and you will get a free edu­ca­tion on how to write bullets.

Now he also says, I would also like to hear your thoughts on the dif­fer­ence in cre­at­ing mag­a­logs verses other types of direct mail, and here is what I would like to say about this. If at all pos­si­ble, avoid cre­at­ing mag­a­logs. They are used by the biggest mail­ers in the world.

I am work­ing for one of the now and some of the source mate­r­ial is the mag­a­log they use; and so much work goes into cre­at­ing a mag­a­log, and so much exper­tise, and not only the writ­ing, and also the lay­out, which you just about have to have a lay­out artist do it, that really and truly all the great writ­ers I know, me, Scott Haynes, I don’t know about you Mike, I do not know if you do that, John Carl­ton, every­thing, some­body has a mag­a­log job and they insist on it being a mag­a­log, we turn the job down, and I will tell you the truth, a tear sheet mail­ing or a hard hit­ting direct mail let­ter will beat the mag­a­log every­day. But mag­a­logs are way too much work to be worth the effort.

Okay. Hi Gary, what is the best time frame to fol­low up on prospects by phone after send­ing them post­cards? Okay. Num­ber one, really folks do not send the post­cards. It is just a lit­tle bit cheaper than send­ing them a killer hard hit­ting sales let­ter; and I want you all to get some­thing straight in your head.

It is not how cheaply you can do it, it is how much of a return you can get on your invest­ment. I would bet you that this per­son mail­ing post­cards to get leads, I will bet you that she would make more money if she would send FedEx Let­ters and fol­low them up.

Now, actu­ally, but to her spe­cific ques­tion is about the time frame. Who knows when a post­card is going to get there? I would wait about five days, I guess, if I were send­ing post­cards, because some­one had a gun to my head. But it is much more pre­dictable if you send a Fed­eral Express pack­age, it is much more impact­ful, and it is going to be much more prof­itable if it is well writ­ten, and if you send a first class let­ter you are going to make a lot more money too.

You know, I mean, I do not even know what a post­card costs because I never send them. Do you know how much they cost Mike?

Michel: No I do not.

Gary: Yeah, I mean I do not think very many really top mar­keters would even know what they cost, but every­body wants to do this because it is cheap. You should stop think­ing about cheap and stop think­ing about return on invest­ment. I remem­ber in the early days of the Inter­net guys crow­ing that they were able to make a tele­phone call for free on the Inter­net. Took them 18 hours to do it. Well, if you think 18 hours is free then you do not have the right mind­set to even be in kind of business.

Another exam­ple of that is, I went to the Rolling Stones Steal Wheels con­cert and I took a bunch of peo­ple with me, and I paid about $300.00 for each of the tick­ets, and we sat in the sec­ond row cen­ter. I mean I could reach out and touch Mick Jag­ger. The peo­ple in front of me were brag­ging how they had got their tick­ets for $35.00 but they had also had to camp out for a day and a half.

Well, I guess I was the fool because I thought my time was worth more than three or four bucks an hour of lay­ing in a sleep­ing bag in the rain.

So, that leads me to an extra­ne­ous com­ment. There are a lot of peo­ple, a lot of ways to beat peo­ple at direct mar­ket­ing, com­pe­ti­tion that are not thought of. One way is to out­work them. Another very easy way is to out spend them. There is a lot of time you will find a real cheap­skate per­son with a scarcity men­tal­ity that will be mov­ing so slow, you know the biggest dif­fer­ence between win­ners and losers? Losers focus on the per­ils of defeat. Win­ners focus on the rewards of win­ning. So if you focus on, gee what could go wrong here, and all that, prob­a­bly some­thing is going to go wrong.

Okay, here is another one.

Another per­son: I just want to add one lit­tle thing Gary.

Gary: No, no, this is my call I do not want any­body inter­rupt­ing me. You **** out here Pee-​​Pee. Gary Albert, what a creep, you know real­ize how many peo­ple you have on this call with no sense of humor what­so­ever? These peo­ple should be work­ing at McDonald’s and maybe made to eat dog food. Go ahead Mike.

Michel: I should not recite the first response you ever given me after I had writ­ten to you. But I just wanted to add that the only excep­tion I have found, and the rea­son why I know this, is because I have actu­ally writ­ten copy for Michael Kim­ble and Michael is the big shot in the post­card indus­try, and the only post­card that I have ever worked with that had worked really well are over­sized, wall-​​to-​​wall, dense copy size postcards.

Gary: Yeah, but Mike.

Michel: And with an offer and with an actual call to action, and a response devise attached to it but not the tiny wee­nie post­cards. I am talk­ing about an over­sized either let­ter or even legal size post­card and it is dense copy, it is like a whole sales let­ter on one post­card or on both sides.

Gary: It is worth a try, any­thing is worth a test, you know; and that sounds like it could be made to work you got it.

Here is one. I have an oppor­tu­nity to do direct mail with another com­pany shar­ing all expenses. Our cus­tomer demo­graph­ics mir­ror each other. Same age, income, sex, edu­ca­tion, occu­pa­tion, etc., com­prise the same mate­r­ial niche iden­ti­cal. Dif­fer­ent prod­ucts. One prod­uct hear­ing aids cost between $2,000.00 and $8,000.00 with a huge markup. While the other, bone den­sity test­ing cost only $50.95 with a $30.00 markup. Two let­ters will be sent within the same enve­lope. Ques­tions, how effective…

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

• How to Capture and Captivate Attention
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• Two Shining Stars in an Age of Darkness
• Changes, Relaunches, and Extreme Makeovers
• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales

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