Gary Halbert Call Part 3 of 4

Gary: No, I trained him. Actu­ally, that’s not true. I did train him but he was really good by the time he got to me.

Michel: Well, this is an impor­tant ques­tion because as we do, Gary, and as many of the peo­ple who do write good copy do, is that they have swipe files and I have a cab­i­net that’s just absolutely -

Gary: Oh, man, stop. I got to stop you. I got to tell you a story.

Michel: Go ahead.

Gary: I swear to God this is true and it’s fresh — fresh off the press. Eric Wein­stein — I don’t know how many of you peo­ple know him — but he works in mar­ket­ing and he used to be my list bro­ker back in Los Ange­les and for a while, here in Florida.

And he called me up and he said, “Gary, I just got back from Switzer­land. You know, I’m not in the list bro­ker busi­ness any more and I’ve got all these ads, you know, in fold­ers that — and let­ters that are con­trols.” He said, “Do you want them? Because I’m going to throw them out.” I said, “Do I want them?”

I sent a guy up to get them. He just brought them back. There’s 200 fold­ers of win­ning, tested adver­tis­ing ****. Two hun­dred fold­ers. They’re sit­ting in my other room right now. Is that — that story’s three days old. It was that — do I want them? Oh, no, you know?

Michel: But, Gary, you sell some swipe file resources yourself?

Gary: Yeah, I do. I — you know, I don’t want to turn this into a pitch because I really don’t, but I will tell you this, I’ve given a lot of sem­i­nars but the best one I ever gave in my life — I don’t know why it is — I was just at con­cert pitch and it — you know, nobody tells every­thing they know and — but this time, I said the hell with it and I gave it in Miami Beach.

It was called How to Write a Sales Let­ter That Will Make You Rich and it was the best on copy­writ­ing that either me or anybody’s ever given. That’s the first time the two mother let­ters I brought out, you know.

And I’ll tell you some­thing. I was scared when I dic­tated those let­ters — made them write it because I thought peo­ple were going to throw stones at me. But I said, you know, you’re noth­ing but a wrin­kled up old bitch, eat shit and die. But it got the point across and, by the way, I want to make a point about get­ting the point across.

If you’re a scuba diver, you don’t have to learn very much but the thing that you need to learn — the half dozen things you need to learn — you bet­ter learn them. Because if you don’t you’re going to die. And one of those things is that you learn that you don’t hold your breath under water. Now, I’m going to explain to you exactly why.

Let’s sup­pose that, um, you’re — you dive off a lit­tle cliff into the ocean that’s really deep and you hold your breath. You have no scuba gear on. You take a big breath and you fill your lungs to sati­ety, you know, in other words, you fill them as large as they’ll go. We’re all inclined to do that.

Now, as you go down and the water pres­sure pushes against your lungs, the area in there will get smaller and smaller and smaller. That’s okay. Because as you come up, you’re kick­ing your way to the sur­face, there’s less pres­sure and your lungs get big­ger and big­ger as the pres­sure gets less and less and by the time you return to the sur­face, your lungs are the same size as they were when you dove in. Everything’s fine.

Now, but let’s say that you’re 60 feet down and you want to get to the sur­face real quick and you take a great big gulp of air and you fill your lungs to sati­ety. Well, since the water pres­sure is com­press­ing the size of your lungs, you have taken in five times as much air as you could take in if you were on the surface.

You hold in your breath instead of breath­ing and as you go up, the pres­sure lessens and your lungs expand and expand and expand, the air expands, until your lungs can’t expand any more and then the air goes through your lungs into your blood­stream and into your brain and other places and either crip­ples or kills you.

So, you’ll notice that when I make a point, I’m not really shy about it. I try and ham­mer it home. But here’s the point. I look at teach­ing peo­ple copy like I’m try­ing to save their finan­cial life. Because if you guys don’t learn to write copy, you know what you’re going to have to do? You’re going to have to work for a liv­ing and if you have to work for a liv­ing, it’s going to kill you.

But the same with scuba div­ing. So if I am teach­ing some­one to scuba dive, I make damn sure — I don’t just say, “By the way, don’t ever hold your breath when you’re under water. Got that? Fine. Okay.” And go on to the next thing. No, no, no, no, no. I make sure they under­stand that. Because in mar­ket­ing, there’s only a dozen or so things you got to get right but you really, really have to get them right. You can’t pad­dle up or down the Mis­sis­sippi River and get to Mari­etta, Ohio.

Michel: That’s an impor­tant point because one of the things that Peter Stone, the guy that actu­ally is the foun­da­tion of this call, the guy that actu­ally put this together -

Gary: Yeah, he did.

Michel: He — he said some­thing that was phe­nom­e­nal and a lot of peo­ple have heard this before. You’ve prob­a­bly heard the say­ing that good copy is the tem­po­rary sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. Well, Peter Stone says good copy is the tem­po­rary sus­pen­sion of crit­i­cal think­ing and the rea­son why he said that is because a lot of peo­ple were ask­ing ques­tions like — on the board that he’s the mod­er­a­tor of.

He’s one of my mod­er­a­tors — the ques­tion peo­ple ask is why do you have to explain so much in great detail and I think the best thing that I can say when­ever I try to explain that, I use Peter’s quote but at the same time I say if you have to write copy and you leave out stuff where peo­ple have to think by them­selves, they’re going to nat­u­rally be inclined to think about all the neg­a­tive stuff as well and all the things that could eas­ily get them to con­fuse what you’re going to say.

Gary: Well, that’s true — that’s true. But that’s part of the story. Now, you’ve got one part of it exactly right. Con­fused prospects never buy.

Michel: Exactly.

Gary: But you must con­vince peo­ple. And let’s talk about cred­i­bil­ity. That was one of the -

Michel: Yes.

Gary: Ques­tions on the site, the cred­i­bil­ity and believ­abil­ity. If you have a retail loca­tion, you tell them we’re located at 123 Main Street right across from the police sta­tion next to the pub­lic library and you tell them — you tell them you’re tele­phone num­ber with the area code. It’s 216–834-9067. We’re open from, you know, 9:00 in the morn­ing to 5:30 p.m. Pacific Coast Time, but we’re never open on Sat­ur­days and Sundays.

You tell them. Specifics build believ­abil­ity and you’re got to under­stand something.

All of us, you know, like, I know a great deal about mar­ket­ing. I can hardly func­tion oth­er­wise. You know, God, most of the time, he appor­tioned skills, you get so much skill to bal­ance your check­book, so much skill to get your laun­dry done, so much skill — he gave 99 per­cent of it all to me for mar­ket­ing and I — I just stum­ble through life, you know? I mean, I’m as dys­func­tional as any human being on earth except Jay Abra­ham who’s totally dys­func­tional. Okay?

But, you know, I bought a really neat lit­tle thing from Sharper Image. It was the size of a stick of gum. It’s — it’s a tape recorder and as soon as I opened the instruc­tion book, I went into a rage. You know what it said? How to set the clock and cal­en­dar. I don’t want a tape recorder that you — you know, I want a cat­a­log of stuff that I want — I would like to see cat­a­log — the title of “stuff that only does one thing,” you know, because that’s all I can handle.

I can’t play my VCR. I have a 72″ direct view screen, not pro­jec­tion, and it’s got a VCR and a CD or DVD player and I don’t know how to play it. So you know what I did? You know what my solu­tion was? I went out and bought another like 19″ screen that has these two lit­tle slots you stick the DVD in one and the VHS in the other.

Now I work with a guy who is lit­er­ally a rocket sci­en­tist. He’s worked 20 years at Nas­sau and he laughs at me and makes these things work. But I can’t make noth­ing work, you know, and now they want — by the way, I have a challenge.

If there’s any­body out there, any­body on this call, that wants to endear them­selves to me, I want some­body to find me some­thing and here’s what it is. I never answer my mes­sages that I get on my cell phone. I never answer mes­sages that I get on my home phone. I do not know how to answer mes­sages on those phones. I don’t want to come home and know them and I don’t even want to know that peo­ple called. I want a cell phone that has no fea­tures what­so­ever. It won’t take a pic­ture. It won’t do caller I.D. It won’t store num­bers. It won’t let me put my to do list in there. It won’t func­tion as a PDA. It won’t let me put a cal­en­dar. Nothing.

If you call me on my cell phone and I’m there and I can answer it, we’ll talk. But if I don’t answer it, I want to never know you called. Do you under­stand? And I want to be able to call out and take calls in. That’s all I want. A fea­ture­less cell phone.

I got on a plane to Los Ange­les where my chil­dren are from Miami. It’s five hours. I decided to read the — this is really off the sub­ject, but I decided to read all of the fea­tures. I said I’m going to read this book. I’m going to read it.

Well, I learned there’s cer­tain laws about elec­tronic things when you explain them. First of all, they have to be writ­ten in 17 dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Sec­ondly, they have to be writ­ten in half point type. Thirdly, they have to — all these obscure gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions have to be explained before you can get to the meat of it.

And with my phone, you could do all these amaz­ing things. You could find out the humid­ity in Paris, you know. How deep you are under water. How high you are if you’re climb­ing a moun­tain, etc. etc. etc., but, and some of you already know about this, it has three video games on it and one of them is Snake and the way it works is you feed the snake and his tail gets big­ger or some­thing like that.

And I was bitch­ing about this at a cof­fee shop the next day in L.A. and a pretty young girl said to me, “Oh, you’ve got Snake? Oh, me and all my friends have it, too.” I was a mem­ber of an “in club” because I had a cell phone that you could play Snake on.

That is not the way I want the world to work. I want the world to be a Zippo lighter. Not a Zippo lighter that’s a com­pass that you can access your email with and I’m done with that. For­get it.

Michel: But you drove the point home very well, Gary, because I think that the idea is is that when­ever you write copy, some peo­ple tend to — when­ever they try to get all those details, the point is, you want to be, not only as spe­cific as pos­si­ble, but you lit­er­ally want to take a per­son by the hand and take them through the copy. In fact, one of the ques­tions was, “How do you keep going from one para­graph to the other?” What hap­pens for exam­ple if you have writer’s block?

Gary: I never have writer’s block and I can teach all of you how to never have writer’s block. Never. I can do it in 30 sec­onds. Do you believe that? Here’s what you do. You write some­thing that you know to write. I want to tell you about a new blender that… And you’re stuck right there.

What you do is you write “blah.” “Blah, blah, blah.” And you never stop writ­ing “blah” until it occurs to you that I — I want to tell you about a blender that, uh, blends not only veg­eta­bles and fruits but also wal­nuts and casse­role and blah, blah, blah. And you keep writ­ing — the thing is what stops writer’s block is move­ment. You just keep writ­ing “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” and that writer’s block will go away every sin­gle time. The move­ment of your hand across that piece of paper or the type­writer key­board will “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Michel: Well, that’s inter­est­ing, because I think that’s a good point to make because a lot of peo­ple tend to use, to con­fuse between copy­writer and copy edi­tor. You know, they put on their edit­ing hat rather than the copy­writ­ing hat.

Gary: They put it on too soon. You need both but you don’t — when you’re writ­ing . let me tell you some­thing that John Carl­ton and I don’t have that every­body else has. I don’t think Ben­civenga has it. But there is noth­ing, no imped­i­ment between our brain and our hand. There are no clots what­so­ever and you shouldn’t be think­ing about whether this is true, whether this will offend the reg­u­la­tory agency, you should just write your first draft as blaz­ingly fast as you can write it.

The faster you write it, the bet­ter it will be. And write it as though God gave you per­mis­sion to write anything.

Then, of course, just because you write it, remem­ber this, all of you, get this in your head. Just because you’ve writ­ten some­thing doesn’t mean you’re going to mail it or pub­lish it. It’s a draft. And don’t take the enthu­si­asm out of the draft. Don’t kill the baby aborn­ing. And I’ll give you another rule for your rela­tion­ships with your friends, your cre­ative friends.

When you first start talk­ing about an idea and another guy says, “Well, let me be the devil’s advo­cate for a minute.” Hit him in the teeth as hard as you can. Right there. Just hit him as hard as you can and kick him out of the room because he doesn’t deserve to live and cer­tainly not be in a room with real cre­ative peo­ple. There is a place for devil’s advo­cate but not while the baby is aborn­ing. The ideas are hard enough to come up with anyway.

Michel: Good point. That’s an excel­lent answer, Gary. Thank you so much for shar­ing that. I think also another ques­tion that’s sort of part of that was what kind of exer­cises should they do, should peo­ple do, to get into the flow and to get into the mind of a good, great copy­writer that writes -

Gary: They should write his let­ters out in long­hand. Every one of you should write a let­ter out in long­hand every day. Hey, but before I for­get, I want to make an offer to every­body on this call. It’s a free offer. Is that okay for me to do that?

Michel: Oh, yeah. Go ahead, Gary.

Gary: I can teach each one of you how to make — how to at least triple your Inter­net prof­its and you can do it with a metal object. I can­not send you this metal object through the net. I have to mail it to you. So here’s what you do. Write to Rox­anne at the gary​hal​bertlet​ter​.com. Rox­anne at the gary​hal​bertlet​ter​.com. And put your snail mail address there and I will send you this metal object which — and explain to you how to use it and I guar­an­tee it will triple your profits.

Now, this is not nec­es­sary but if you trust me, I would also like you to put your tele­phone num­ber and fax num­ber there and I don’t abuse anybody’s infor­ma­tion. You know me, I don’t even abuse — I don’t send emails every­day or any­thing but if we have to check, if the pack­age got to you, or fax you, you don’t have to do that but I do have to have your snail mail address and I will mail this metal object out to you right away and teach you how to use it and I guar­an­tee you will triple the prof­its of your web­site. How’s that for a guarantee?

Michel: That’s — that’s awe­some. Actu­ally, it’s lead­ing into the next ques­tion is — and I know you’ve talked a lit­tle bit about this in the past, Gary, about how to struc­ture a really good guar­an­tee and I think there was a dou­ble your money back guar­an­tee process that you’ve talked about a while back. I can’t remem­ber the sem­i­nars I was at that you spoke about.

Gary: I do a lot of dou­ble your money back guarantees.

Michel: And what is your tech­nique for writ­ing a good guarantee?

Gary: Well, but don’t -

Michel: What’s your best guarantee?

Gary: I did that, I first did that when I was work­ing as an out­side con­sul­tant for Entre­pre­neur Mag­a­zine for Chase Rev­ell and they were pub­lish­ing these reports that sold for about $60.00 or $70.00 on how, you know, how to make money in the florist busi­ness or how to start a bal­loon vend­ing busi­ness and the first half of the report was generic talk­ing about get­ting your busi­ness card, get­ting your busi­ness license, etc., etc., and then the sec­ond half of the report told you how to do things that were spe­cific to that par­tic­u­lar busi­ness and their — they were get­ting clob­bered by their refund rate.

And I said, “Well, I’ll fix it for you.” And they said, “How are you going to do it?” And I said, “I’m going to make it a dou­ble your money back refund. But I’m going to make it con­di­tional.” And here was the conditions.

You send this — you say as long as you do it exactly as we tell you to do, we guar­an­tee you will make a profit at this busi­ness and when you send the book out that says okay, the first thing you have to do is you have to get a busi­ness license.

The sec­ond thing you have to do is get sta­tion­ary and envelopes and busi­ness cards printed up and blah, blah, blah. And said okay, if you give this a fair trial for 60 days and it doesn’t make any money, send us back a short writ­ten note telling us you fol­lowed all the instruc­tions and write that note on your sta­tion­ary, include a pho­to­copy of your busi­ness license and your busi­ness card and that stopped refunds.

It increased sales by 50 per­cent and almost elim­i­nated refunds because you know when peo­ple want a refund? They — I’ll tell you when they decide to get a refund. The moment they’re order­ing. There are some cases when you send the garbage, they want their money back. But for the most part, the per­son who wants a refund knows that when he is ordering.

Now, here’s the way I do it on diets. A lot of times I’ll say we can’t make a lot of claims for this diet because it has not been inspected by the FDC. All the infor­ma­tion is what’s called anec­do­tal. But we believe in this prod­uct very strongly. So we’re going to send you this diet pill.

You use it twice a day and fol­low the sim­ple instruc­tions. Use it for 60 days and if it doesn’t take off weight more than any­thing before, send it back. Send the empty con­tainer back and with a note telling us you fol­lowed the instruc­tion and with a note, we send this with the prod­uct, telling us that you took the pills twice a day and walk­ing for half a day as instructed and give us the name and the address of your doc­tor and the approx­i­mate date you went to him to get his approval to start this diet program.

Now that might seem tricky but what’s the alpha­bet agency going to say to you? Well, you told her to go to a doc­tor before she starts the diet pro­gram. Well, it’s kind of irre­spon­si­ble not to, isn’t it? But nobody does it.

And I’ll tell you another thing about refunds. The longer the refund period is, the fewer the refunds you will have. You know, the worst thing you could do is you see ads with a ten-​​day money back guar­an­tee? That puts a dead­line right in their head. “I’ve only got four more days to return this.”

Put a six-​​month or a year guar­an­tee in there. Do you think any­body gets a six-​​month guar­an­tee and looks at their cal­en­dar and flips six months ahead and says last month — last day to return wid­get ABC? To Michel Fortin for refund? No, they don’t. The longer the guar­an­tee period, the fewer the refunds. The dou­ble your money back guar­an­tee should always be a con­di­tional thing but I’ve seen guys try to copy what I’m teach­ing you now and they would make ridicu­lous demands.

Show me the inser­tion orders that you used to send the ad in, blah, blah, blah. I don’t ask them to do any­thing out­ra­geous. It’s not out­ra­geous to ask some­body to tell them before you start this diet pro­gram, visit your doc­tor and make sure there are no under­ly­ing health con­di­tions why you shouldn’t be on this or any other diet pro­gram. That’s pretty rea­son­able. Isn’t it?

And if, you know, and it’s pretty rea­son­able to tell some­body don’t go into busi­ness with­out get­ting a busi­ness license and sta­tion­ary. But they don’t do it. So the refunds go way down.

Now, let me tell you what to do, though, from a prac­ti­cal nature. Some­body wants a dou­ble your money back refund. First, you refund them every cent they paid. You do that with­out ques­tion. And then you tell them but if they want the dou­ble your money back refund, you are going to stand behind the guar­an­tee but to fur­nish you with that information.

Michel: Awe­some. That was great. Thanks, Gary. A ques­tion, also, that a lot of peo­ple have asked was I have, for exam­ple, a high ticket prod­uct, $2,000.00, $3,000.00, $4,000.00 prod­uct, and some peo­ple said well, I have also a free e-​​book that I’m giv­ing away. How — how much copy or what kind of copy should I use for sell­ing a high ticket prod­uct ver­sus a free prod­uct or a free giveaway?

Gary: Well, first of all, um, that — that’s really a good ques­tion. That’s a very, very good ques­tion and I’m going to give you a really great answer to it and this is right out of recent experience.

I was sell­ing some­thing recently that costs $5,000.00 and we — I wrote a full page news­pa­per ad, full page news­pa­per ad, like 2,000 words of copy, all I wanted them to do is to call an 800 num­ber, give their name and address to receive a free book. And the free book was filled with really valu­able infor­ma­tion and the last half of the book told you — or the last prob­a­bly 25 per­cent of the book, 10 per­cent of the book prob­a­bly, last 10 per­cent, told you how you could order if you were inter­ested, you could order the multi-​​thousand dol­lar product.

Now, I’m going to tell you the exact fig­ures on that when we did it direct mail. When we did it direct mail, it costs us about a buck a piece to mail the let­ters. So a thou­sand let­ters costs us a thou­sand dol­lars, right? We would get an aver­age of a 7 per­cent response.

We mailed a thou­sand let­ters, we’d get 70 replies. For each one of those replies, to send them, we spent $10.00 work­ing them, and we sent it Fed­eral Express with a dol­lar bill let­ter attached, you know, a dol­lar attached to it because it costs us $10.00. In other words, the 70 replies cost us $10.00 a piece. So we’ve got $1,700.00 in the pro­mo­tion. Am I mak­ing that clear enough?

Michel: Mm-​​mm.

Gary: Okay. And you know what we got from that? Exactly a 7 per­cent response. Seven per­cent of the 70 per­cent — in other words, we got five orders from the ini­tial thou­sand at $5,000.00 a piece. $25,000.00 for spend­ing $1,700.00.

Michel: Wow.

Gary: So, and here’s some­thing that peo­ple for­get and you never want to for­get this. When you’re going for leads, write long copy just — just as hard and as long as . as strong as if you were going for a $10,000.00 sale. No lead, no sale. Right?

Michel: Right.

Gary: Sell the hell out of get­ting them to give you that name and — their name and address that you can mail them some­thing to.

Michel: Well, I think it comes back to what you were say­ing at the begin­ning, Gary, that people -

Gary: Oh, by the way, and it is bet­ter to be redun­dant than it is to be remiss.

Michel: Good point.

Gary: And in light of that fac­tor, I’m going to say it once again. You want to triple your web­site prof­its? I will send you some­thing free and tell you how to use it to triple, triple, your web­site prof­its and I don’t make empty claims.

All you have to do is send your snail mail address to Rox­anne at the gary­hal­bertlet­ter, I guess at aol​.com. Rox­anne at the gary​hal​bertlet​ter​.com and just write John Jones, 123 Elm Street, Madi­son, Ohio 44646 and we’ll put it in the mail to you right away.

It’s a piece of — it’s a metal object and — and I would appre­ci­ate it if you would send your fax and tele­phone num­ber but if you’re skep­ti­cal, you don’t have to.

Michel: If you’re ever stuck or if the email comes back for what­ever rea­son, they can send it to michel@​askgaryhalbert.​com and I’ll for­ward it to the proper peo­ple. Um, is that okay, Gary?

Gary: Sure.

Michel: Okay. One ques­tion I also had asked a lot is the fact that telling a good com­pelling story — and this is some­thing that I’ve been preach­ing for gosh knows how long — because a lot of peo­ple ask me, you know, how — how to write good copy and I usu­ally say it’s because you have to be a good sales­per­son. Writ­ing copy is just the writ­ing exten­sion of being a good sales­per­son. But every good sales­per­son and every good copy­writer is a good sto­ry­teller and I want -

Gary: You know what hap­pened to me recently? About six months ago?

Michel: No.

Gary: I was really sick and I was in the hos­pi­tal and, uh, there was a woman there that was, you know, help­ing me and I was only in the hos­pi­tal for a short period of time and she was a Hait­ian woman. She said she wanted to talk to me because she knew I was being dis­charged and would I talk to her for a few min­utes and I got out and she said, “I want to give you something.”

And she gave me five of these lit­tle pills and she says, “I guar­an­tee you they’re per­fectly safe. They won’t do any­thing but good for you.” And she said, “They come from my coun­try and we have an evil saint over there.” And they do, it’s called Baron Simidi and “I know this sounds like super­sti­tious stuff to you but if you’ll take one of these pills every day for the next five days, you’re going to feel immensely better.”

And so I fig­ured, what the hell, this woman isn’t going to poi­son me and I took one of those pills every one for the next five days. Now, you know these machines in the gyms, that’s a tri-​​step fold down and there’s a bunch of plates, then there’s a pul­ley that goes up and comes around a metal, you know, what do you call it?

I can’t think of the name but it goes around, comes down, the cable comes up around the pul­ley and there’s a cou­ple of bars on it and how much weight you want to lift, if you want to lift just one plate, there’s a pin. You put it right under­neath the first pin and you push this weight down to your — to you waist, you know, with both hands, your arms are straight out from your waist?

Michel: Uh-​​huh.

Gary: And then to work your tri­ceps you push it down to your waist, bring it — or down to your thigh. Then you bring it back up to your waist and you push it back down. Then you bring it right up and you push it back down. And my goal for a long time was to be able to do half of the weight on that rack — half of all the weight on there. And I used those pills and I felt so much bet­ter after the five days, I went back and asked her if I could get some more. And she wasn’t try­ing to screw me out of money and I had to pay a lit­tle bit to get the pills and you know what I did three days ago?

Michel: No.

Gary: I went to the gym. I put the pin under the last weight so it was all the weight on there and I brought it down, all the weight on there, and I repped it 30 times.

Michel: Wow.

About the Author

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