Gary Halbert Call Part 1 of 4

Michel Fortin: Gary you on?

Gary: Let’s roll.

Michel: Hey, Gary, wel­come. Well folks, we’re gonna have a great call tonight. I think it’s going to be one of the calls that I would do, I’d be on if I was just an assert­ing copy­writer because what we’re going to do tonight is talk about some of the most effec­tive strate­gies, some of the most press­ing ques­tions that you have about writ­ing an effec­tive copy itself.

I want to intro­duce you to Gary, but first before that, do not, I’m going to tell you a lit­tle bit about myself. My name is Michael Fortin and some of you know me as the suc­cess­doc­tor and you prob­a­bly also know that I’ve been the copy­writer for some of the biggest names on the inter­net today. For exam­ple, I’ve writ­ten copy for John Reese, Yonix Sil­ver, Michael Kim­ble, Kirk Chris­tensen, Stephen Pierce, Shawn Casey, and many more.

I only started out in copy­writ­ing­be­cause I had no choice. I was a sales­per­son in my early career and I was just not mak­ing any head­way with some of the more tra­di­tional door knock­ing tech­niques so one day I decided to write my first sales let­ter and then lo and behold, by writ­ing copy, I noticed myself start­ing to sky­rocket because now I was attract­ing peo­ple to come to me qual­i­fied peo­ple that I could eas­ily sell to.

And then later on, I dis­cov­ered direct mail. I was writ­ing direct mail pieces and sell­ing with sales let­ters and copy­writ­ing. I was also writ­ing TV com­mer­cials and pro­duc­ing TV infomer­cials for some cos­metic sur­geons and hair trans­plant sur­geons and then later on, I decided to plunge into copy­writ­ing full-​​time and now I write copy almost exclu­sively for the internet.

One of my men­tors through­out this entire process is a man they call, I believe, the King of Copy or Prince of Print. I think Gary writes some of the most com­pelling copy in the world today and even on the web, if you study Gary’s let­ters and prob­a­bly the sin­gle great­est copy­right on how to resource online which is the​gary​hal​bertlet​ter​.com, you will prob­a­bly build, oh you will build the not only the sin­gle great­est most prof­itable skill you can ever learn, but you will also have an edge over 99.99 per­cent of the peo­ple out there and by study­ing, I don’t mean just read those letters.

I mean, write them out word by word, if not all of them, and look at how Gary uses tempo, uses psy­chol­ogy, the sub­tleties and nuances, how he tells com­pelling sto­ries, how he uses the emo­tional grab­bers, how he presses emo­tional hype but­tons all of those things are super impor­tant. How he makes these com­pelling offers that makes you whip out your wal­let and buy now.

Because I mean, before long when you do that, you’re going to find your­self writ­ing copy that grabs the atten­tion of the reader until the very last find of your copy until the order your prod­uct or service.

So be pre­pared because this call is prob­a­bly going to be the most power– packed call you’ve ever been on and dare I say, the most impor­tant call of your life. So with­out fur­ther adieu, it gives me great plea­sure to intro­duce you the great­est copy­writer of all time, my men­tor, Mr. Gary Halbert.

Wel­come Gary.

Gary: Thank you, thank you very much.

I’m going to talk a lit­tle bit before I address your ques­tions because I want to kind of moti­vate you to really learn this. I live in Miami and every day on the east­ern coast here in south­ern Florida, peo­ple wash ashore from other coun­tries, mainly from Haiti and mainly from Cuba. I want you to imag­ine that two Cubans wash ashore on the same day, maybe ten miles apart but they’re both barely alive but they’re healthy okay and they make it.

One of those Cubans use to work as a dish­washer and he found a way to rip off some of the guests at the hotel where he was and he had $500,000.00 in a water­proof bag strapped to his body. He comes ashore with $500,000.00.

The other guy comes ashore and he doesn’t have any­thing except a tat­tered pair of bathing trunks on. He has noth­ing, noth­ing what­so­ever except that he is a brain sur­geon. He was a brain sur­geon in Cuba.

Now let’s fast for­ward to about three years from now and take a look at both of those guys. The first guy, the guy who had $500,000.00 that he stole, it would be my guess that he will no longer have his $500,000.00, that he’ll have gone through it, that he’ll have par­tied his way through it, and now he will be scratch­ing to make some money.

He’ll prob­a­bly end up being some­thing ille­gal, in drugs, he’ll prob­a­bly be dead, he might be in jail or some­thing, but he won’t have much.

The guy that came ashore with noth­ing, he’ll live in one of the best sec­tions of Miami, he’ll maybe live in Coral Beach. He’ll have a Mer­cedes, prob­a­bly a great wife and the begin­nings of a fam­ily, a very lucra­tive and high pay­ing career in a hos­pi­tal, etc.

The dif­fer­ence is that the guy who, the last guy I talked about came across with true wealth, the only wealth that really exists, which is the wealth between your ears. Some­body can take your money away, but if you have it between your ears, you can never be poor.

You can only be broke and that’s always a tem­po­rary sit­u­a­tion. And in my opin­ion, there is no more valu­able skill in the world than to be able to write a writ­ten sales mes­sage. Every, a writ­ten sales mes­sage is the basis of every­thing from tele­vi­sion script to radio to news­pa­per ads to inter­net, etc.

I once did a sem­i­nar called how to, it’s the best thing I ever gave, how to write a sales let­ter that will make you rich, and that, the word let­ter should have been changed to mes­sage. But if you can write a sales let­ter and I’ve done it, you can lit­er­ally reduce your over­head to like a dol­lar nine­teen cents for a legal pad and a cou­ple of ball­point pens

You can do it any place, you can do it from the Rain For­est, etc. A lot of peo­ple, if they’re copy­writ­ers, they ask me, you know I’m a copy­writer, how do I get a client. Well that is an indi­ca­tion that he hasn’t really learned his skill yet.

Because a good copy­writer never even has to think about get­ting clients. If, if you want clients, I mean if I wanted to work, I can guar­an­tee you, I could work 40 hours a day, 365 days a year and never begin to scratch the sur­face of the num­ber of peo­ple that want to hire me.

About three weeks ago, I wanted to have a lit­tle extra money. I wrote an email, it took me 11 min­utes to write it. So far, I’ve made $95,000.00 for it. I was just bored for a few min­utes. You can really get to the point where you do that too.

Now I could tell you all the suc­cesses I have had, a lot of peo­ple know about those. The most widely mailed let­ter in his­tory that mailed 600,000,000 copies and a lot of things. But I am telling you, you can do that from the jun­gles of Brazil, you can do it from a jail cell, it is a portable skill that is the most valu­able skill you can ever learn and if you learn it, I promise you, you can have any­thing in the world you want.

You could use it to get your­self all the money in the world, you can use it to get your­self the finest spec­i­men of the oppo­site sex you could pos­si­bly want, you can use it to pro­duce pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. I am lit­er­ally begged by both par­ties and I won’t work for them because I don’t think if I worked for any of them, that the party that I worked for could lose an elec­tion and so, what, it’s really worth learn­ing to do this right.

And I like to kind of tell you some­thing that I think will, I try to, you know what I try to do is I, I try and write in a way that has an impact on peo­ple and I want to read two let­ters to you. And I do a lot of, I start my sem­i­nars this way and both of these let­ters are writ­ten to your mother, whether she’s liv­ing or dead. We’re going to assume, it doesn’t matter.

And I’m going to tell you what I have every­body do is I give every­body two first-​​class stamps, two num­ber 10 envelopes, I have them write the address in the upper left hand cor­ner of the enve­lope for any­body that’s really a novice out there, that’s the cor­ner card of the envelope.

And I have them add one addi­tional thing which is the date and the day because I never want them to for­get this and then I have addressed to the mother, but to their own address. In other word, the attendee’s address. And then I have, we, we, I have them write, hand­write two let­ters to their mother and I want to read to you the first letter.

Dear Mom, I’m very busy right now and I don’t have time to call so that’s why I’m writ­ing you this let­ter. You know mom not only are you respon­si­ble for my very exis­tence, you are also the nour­ish­ment that has made my life sparkle.

I’m under a lot of stress right now and for some rea­son, I started think­ing about you. It has occurred to me that maybe I haven’t let you know recently how much I appre­ci­ate you and how much I love you.

I espe­cially like remem­ber­ing you and then I have them fill in some­thing spe­cial like, on my 18th birth­day when you gave me that gold Rolex watch, or what­ever it was. Any­way, I’m going to make it a point to see you just as soon as I can and then you sign love, and your name.

I have them fold that up, put it in the enve­lope, put a stamp on the enve­lope and seal it.

Then, we do it all over again with the sec­ond enve­lope and they write their name at the top of the enve­lope in the cor­ner card and below that they write the date and they write the time which will be just a few min­utes later. They address the enve­lope once again to their mom to their home and then they write another let­ter to their mom. This time it says:

Dear Mom, If I weren’t such a long way from home, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have the guts to tell you this but the fol­low­ing has been true ever since I was born. You have made my life a liv­ing hell.

Every per­son I know has a mother that is supe­rior to you in every pos­i­tive way imag­in­able. You are noth­ing more than a wrin­kled up old bitch and as far as I’m con­cerned, the biggest waste of skin God ever created.

Speak­ing of God, as the good Lord knows, you’re cer­tainly not too men­tally swift either. So just in case your low IQ keeps you from under­stand­ing what I’m try­ing to say, let me make it per­fectly clear.

And then we have a sub­head. Eat Shit and Die. Please don’t call or write me. I have no incli­na­tion what­so­ever to com­mu­ni­cate with you ever again. Reluc­tantly your son or daugh­ter, you sign your name and then it says P.S. dad sucks too.

All right, I wish I could hear the reac­tion to peo­ple on the line lis­ten­ing to that, but I’m going to pre­tend I can and I’m going to ask you the same ques­tions that I asked the peo­ple in my seminar.

First of all, I want to, I would, I don’t know if you could un-​​mute this just for a sec­ond so I can get a reac­tion, but I want to know how many of you peo­ple on this call think that had your mother received one of those let­ters or the other that there would be much of a dif­fer­ence in her reac­tion from which, depend­ing on which let­ter she got. Do any of you think that’s true?

Can you un-​​mute and have them tell me that.

Michel: Sure, just a sec. Here we go.

Gary: Okay.

Michel: I, I don’t think I can un-​​mute because we have over, the call is so packed that we have so much peo­ple on the line here.

Gary: Okay, I’m going to assume that most of you are smart enough to real­ize that there would be a dra­matic dif­fer­ence in the reac­tion of your mother depend­ing on which of those let­ters she got.

And then, I would ask all of the atten­dees and I’m going to ask you, what is the dif­fer­ence in the cost between the two envelopes? Vir­tu­ally none.

What is the dif­fer­ence in the energy that it took you to address the two envelopes? Vir­tu­ally none.

What is the dif­fer­ence in the amount of postage that you paid to mail those two envelopes? Vir­tu­ally none.

What is the dif­fer­ence in the cost of the sheet of paper upon which you wrote the let­ter? Vir­tu­ally none.

What is the dif­fer­ence in energy and time it took you to write that let­ter? Vir­tu­ally none, all right, and yet one of those let­ters would have cre­ated a great warm bond­ing feel­ing and another one would have caused despair and a great deal of grief and unhappiness.

And what was the dif­fer­ence? There was only one dif­fer­ence in the world and that’s the words, the words on a piece of paper. There is noth­ing in the world that is stronger than the words on a piece of paper, whether they end up being spo­ken in a speech deliv­ered in a script or any­thing but the writ­ten word is the strongest most source of power in the entire universe.

Now, I’m going to tell you some­thing else before we get into ques­tions. Really and truly, you can, it doesn’t mat­ter after a degree how good of a writer you are. It depends, what you really want to be is a good knower. You need to know things that other peo­ple don’t know. That will make the big dif­fer­ence between your response.

Now, I’m going to give you an out­landish example.

Let’s sup­pose that you’re at a New York cock­tail party, very sophis­ti­cated and there’s a beau­ti­ful woman in there. And, every­body is try­ing to hit on this beau­ti­ful woman and there guys that go in there that tell her they can get her into show busi­ness, there are guys that tell her they are multi-​​millionaires, there are young guys with ripped abs, there are guys that talk about their cars, you know, there are guys that talk about how they own a mod­el­ing agency, etc., but you have some spe­cial secret knowl­edge that nobody else in that, all those guys in there try­ing to pick her up knows.

And what you know is that she’s a heroin addict and she’s dying for a fix. So every­body can make their pitch but you can walk over to her with a bag­gie of pow­der and show it to her and say hey, I just scored some good scag would you like to try it out with me.

That girl will be out the door with you in a split sec­ond because you hit what she really wanted. Now that’s an exag­ger­ated thing but I would rather make my point in an exag­ger­ated way than have you not get them.

So the first thing you need to know is you need to start know­ing things. You need to know about peo­ple, you need to know about strate­gies, you need to know a lot of things that you don’t know.

I’m going to tell you a few of those things to get started.

Let’s sup­pose that you had a rich uncle who died and left you a thou­sand homes all over the United States and for some rea­son, they all had to be sold in 90 days and they all had to be painted and they could only be painted one color.

Would you know what color to paint them? I would. You would have them painted yel­low. Why is that? Because yel­low is the color that has the most what if, if you live in Amer­ica, you should paint them sil­ver, because that’s American’s favorite color for cars right now, it’s silver.

This is an exam­ple of know­ing things. You need to know those things, you need to study peo­ple. Now, I’ll tell you some things that you don’t know that were really impor­tant for you to know.

Decades ago, Claude Hop­kins con­ducted an exper­i­ment in news­pa­pers in New York City with mil­lions of cir­cu­la­tion and he was intro­duc­ing a new prod­uct to mar­ket. You didn’t have to pay to get a sam­ple of this prod­uct because they knew that once you sam­pled this prod­uct, you’d become a life­long customer.

So, he divided the call to action into three cells. The first one was it’s easy to get your free sam­ple of this prod­uct. All you have to do is write your name and address on a piece of paper and send it to us. As soon as we receive it, we’ll send you the free sample.

Cell 2, it’s easy to get your free sam­ple of this prod­uct. All you have to do is call such and such a num­ber, give the oper­a­tor who answers your name and address, and we’ll send the prod­uct right out to you immediately.

Cell No. 3, it’s easy to get your free sam­ple of this new prod­uct. If you want, you can write your name and address on a piece of paper and send it to us or you can call us and give the oper­a­tor who answers your name and address. Either way you choose, as soon as we have your name and address, we’ll send you the sam­ple of the product.

Now, I can’t hear you, we can’t talk, but I’m assum­ing your still there. I always get the feel­ing that I’m talk­ing to, into the air, when I do these calls. But assum­ing you’re still there, I bet you would like to know the answer and the answer is the call only option triples the response for lead gen­er­a­tor, triples the response.

Now, there is a rea­son for this.

The other two responses allow the per­son the option of delay and delay is the death of a sale. But wait a minute, that was done 50 or 60 years ago. What hap­pened if it does, I’ve tested it 17 dif­fer­ent times and it, the phone only option triples the response every sin­gle time, it triples it. I bet some of you didn’t know that. I’ll tell you some­thing else some of you didn’t know and you need to start get­ting off your ass and find­ing these things out if you want to get world class.

Did you know that more peo­ple will call a POTS num­ber than a toll-​​free num­ber. POTS means plain old tele­phone ser­vice. Did you know that if you lived in the (702) area code and you asked peo­ple to call that num­ber, you will get more calls and they’ll be free than you will if you put an (888) or an (800) num­ber. Take your own guess why, I know it’s true, Agora Pub­lish­ing knows it’s true, we’ve just tested it over and over.

My guess is, that when the peo­ple call a toll-​​free num­ber, they are afraid they are going to get a high pres­sure sales­man or they’re going to get trapped in voice mail hell. But it really doesn’t mat­ter. I don’t really care what the answer is, I only care that I know the answer, okay.

Now, a bunch of you peo­ple are work­ing online and I’m going to let you in on a lit­tle inside secret. Ed Dale tracked me down one time and he said, he came over from Aus­tralia and he said I’ve been going every place and telling peo­ple I want to be the best copy­writer in the world and he says all roads seem to lead to you right here in this liv­ing room.

And we talked and I said that’s very flat­ter­ing and we talked for a lit­tle while and I said hey Ed, you got some web­sites dontcha and he said yeah, I’ve got five of them. I said I’ll betcha I can talk to you for three min­utes and dra­mat­i­cally improve the response of each one of your web­sites, every one of them, no mat­ter what they’re selling.

He had five web­sites and I said if I win, you owe me a din­ner, right. And he said okay, and I said do this. Don’t take away the page that says Click Here to Order.

By the way if you’ve got a web­site and you’ve got a page that says Click Here to Order, you are throw­ing money away, you’re throw­ing it away and I said here’s what you do, you say it’s easy to order. Just pick up your phone and dial such and such a num­ber and give the oper­a­tor who answers you know your order­ing information.

He made that change and it worked so well, he went back to doing it the other way because he didn’t want the rest of the online com­mu­nity to know what he was doing and we talked on the phone and I said, hey Ed, do you owe me a din­ner or not. And he said I think I owe you din­ners for the rest of your life because the least improve­ment that he made was 200 per­cent and it went up to 1,000 percent.

Now, for you online guys, there’s some online secrets I am not going to tell you. I mean, you’re not ready for that pow­er­ful a secret, but I’m going to tell you some pow­er­ful, one very pow­er­ful one.

I’m going to tell you a cou­ple very pow­er­ful ones. One of them is you get some­body to come to your site and a lot of peo­ple and Michael you did this at AskGary​.com, and I told you there was a fatal flaw and I was going to tell you what it was?

Michel: That’s right.

Gary: You said put your name and email address here. That stops a mon­ster per­cent­age of peo­ple from going any fur­ther. Now I myself signed up for Class​mates​.com much to my dis­may as I’m sure a bunch of you other because they never ever stop hit­ting me. And peo­ple fear that.

Now, you notice on my web­site, you can click here to view newslet­ter archives and the other thing is click here if you want to be on my announce­ment list. Now I have thou­sands peo­ple on my announce­ment list because they’ve learned to trust me but you don’t have to be on my announce­ment list. You can just go there.

You can just go to my web­site and read all the stuff and I don’t have to know your web address, so that is a killer. Now, you got a lot of ques­tions but instead of 500 ques­tions now, you would prob­a­bly have you know, 3000 ques­tions if you hadn’t put it there.

Michel: Right.

Gary: Now here’s the other mon­ster mis­take and I can see all your heads out there buzzing, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talk­ing about, blah-​​blah-​​blah, which is going to lead me to talk­ing to effi­ciency ver­sus effectiveness.

But first I’m going to tell you, if your web­site says click here to order, you are stand­ing on a cliff throw­ing your money away because I will tell you some­thing, click here to order, how many peo­ple visit your order page and how many peo­ple order. I’ll tell you what the aver­age stat is. One out of 20 peo­ple who visit your order page order.

Now why would you guess that is? Do you think these peo­ple just like to win­dow shop order pages? No. That’s not it at all. The thing is, it is much eas­ier to not fill that form in as some­thing they want than it is to make the tele­phone call. That’s a, and you want to give them only the option of call­ing to get it. And peo­ple will say but I want to cap­ture their email, what a sale, okay.

So you make them call you and another thing about order forms that every­body hates, com­put­ers are com­pletely unfor­giv­ing. You’re going to ask them to type in their name, their address, a bunch of stuff, their credit card stuff and if you trans­pose one num­ber bong, an error thing goes off. I know a guy, Scott Haynes, very good copy­writer, a very good friend, wanted to order a piece of soft­ware and gave up after 17 tries.

You know, and the order form is an invi­ta­tion to sales doom. Any­body that has a click here to order is throw­ing money away.

But, I tell you what, you guys thing but it’s so effi­cient. Now I’m going to talk to you a lit­tle bit about the dif­fer­ence between being effi­cient and being effective.

I was born in Park­ers­burg, West Vir­ginia. That is on the West Vir­ginia side of the Ohio River. If you travel on the river 30 miles north and go to the other side, you will begin Mari­etta, Ohio. Now, the Mis­sis­sippi River is pos­si­bly a thou­sand miles west of the Ohio River.

Now I want you to imag­ine that two guys are in a canoe in the Mis­sis­sippi River and I don’t care which way they’re pad­dling, north or south. But they’ve learned how to pad­dle that canoe like pros. They have a per­fect J-​​stroke. You know, they hardly rip­ple the water. They get the most for­ward move­ment for the least energy expended but guess, you know, they’re very efficient.

Just like every­body on the net is. They strive for effi­ciency but guess what, they’re never going to get to Mari­etta, Ohio. Because Mari­etta, Ohio ain’t on the Mis­sis­sippi River.

Now let’s put some­body on the Ohio River that doesn’t even have a canoe. Let’s put him on a log and make him pad­dle with his hands. This is about the least effi­cient way he could do it. But as long as he’s going north, he’s going to get to Mari­etta, Ohio because he’s doing some­thing that’s effective.

I wish I could get some feed­back from you but do you all under­stand the dif­fer­ence. You know, you strive to be effec­tive, effi­ciency is a bonus, but every­body on the web says I just, this is just so effi­cient you know. You want to learn to do what is effective.

Okay, that’s a few open­ing com­ments and now we’ll answer some ques­tions until I think of another rant to go off on.

Michel: Thanks Gary, that was awe­some, thank you very much for shar­ing that. I have so many ques­tions as you know, I could have prob­a­bly had more if I had -

Gary: You just did, just try them.

Michel: Well let me answer the ques­tion about long copy versus -

Gary: This is the one ques­tion I think out of 500, I’ve got about 25 per­cent of just that one question.

Michel: Okay, first I want to tell you that I think every­body that asks that ques­tion is a com­plete moron but hav­ing said that, I’ll try and redeem myself by explain­ing it to you.

I want you to imag­ine that God came down from heaven and if you have a wife or a girl­friend that you love, he took her away from you and you could never have her back. And he put 100 women on an island and God said to you, “I just feel like hav­ing some fun and so because I feel like that, I’m going to make you select the woman you spend the rest of your life with from one of these 100 women and just because I’m God and I’m feel­ing ornery, I’m going to make it a lit­tle bit more dif­fi­cult for you.

I’m not going to let you talk with any of these women on the phone. I’m not going to let you see a pic­ture of them. I’m not going to let you see a video­tape of them, noth­ing. I’m going to ask every one of those women to write you a let­ter about her­self and from those 100 let­ters, you have to select the lady you’re going to spend the rest of your life with.”

What do you want that let­ter to say. Hi, I’m Bunny. I’m an Aquar­ius and I like to walk on the beach in the moon­light? I don’t think that’s the kind of let­ter you want. I think you want to know every­thing about Bunny. I think you want to know how old she is and how tall she is, how much she weighs, what color hair she has, what her teeth are like, that’s just phys­i­cal stuff.

You want to know what she’s in to, what kind of edu­ca­tion she has, you know, just every­thing. You’re going to spend the rest of your life with this woman. I’m Bunny and I’m Aquar­ius doesn’t get it, does it.

Now, let’s bring that down to earth a lit­tle bit more because that’s kind of exag­ger­ated. Let’s make it a car. And for some rea­son, you are no longer allowed to see the car that you’re going to pick. The gov­ern­ment came down and said from now on, nobody can see a car before they buy it. They can’t hear about it, any­thing. The car mak­ers just send you a letter.

Well, what would you want to know about the car? Hey, this is a good car, it gets great miles per gal­lon, you know goes from 0 to 60 in 5.4 sec­onds and it’s real com­fort­able too. I don’t think that’s what you’d want, I think you’d want a 50-​​page let­ter telling you every­thing there was to know about that car.

And so it is with sell­ing. The peo­ple who are not inter­ested don’t want to hear any­thing about what you have to say, won’t read any­thing. To hell with them, we don’t care about them. We’re going after the buy­ers. One more illustration.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

• How to Capture and Captivate Attention
• The Real Problem With The Flaw of Attraction
• Two Shining Stars in an Age of Darkness
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