John Carlton Call Part 1 of 4

Michel: We have every­body here now we’re going to start. And I, I want to wel­come you all to the call because tonight is going to be an amaz­ing call that’s noth­ing short of aston­ish­ing and it’s going to be some­thing that I, I really am proud of because you see if you want to learn how to write killer copy there’s some­thing that you need to learn above all that.

And, and this is so impor­tant because if you want to learn how to write killer copy that mes­mer­izes your audi­ence and almost rips the money out of their wal­lets and, and make them feel good about doing it too, you’re in for a real treat. Because the per­son that’s going to be on tonight is a per­son that can actu­ally teach you how to do that.

The per­son I’m going to intro­duce you to very shortly is a per­son who I fol­lowed for a while and some­body who’s taught me more about the sin­gle great­est deal you’ll ever learn about busi­ness, about copy­writin­gand I mean it’s not about copy­writ­ingby the way but about busi­ness, copy­writ­ing and mar­ket­ing in gen­eral. You see before I intro­duce you to John Carl­ton let me tell you a lit­tle bit about myself.

You may or may not know me but my name is Michael Fortin and, and peo­ple know me from my web site. For exam­ple at The​copy​doc​tor​.com. I’ve been a copy­writer for over 15 years and I’ve writ­ten a hard hit­ting sales copy for many of the world’s top direct mar­keters and Inter­net gurus like Jay Abra­ham, Michael Camp­bell, Yanik Sil­ver, John Reese, Steven Pierce, etc. When I started out I was in sales. I sold everything.

I sold vac­u­ums, I sold insur­ance, you name it. But of course I was really lousy and it and I even went bank­rupt when I was start­ing out because I just didn’t make any com­mis­sions. And, and when I finally got it not only did I become a top flight sales­per­son but I later dove into copy­writ­ing and, and even­tu­ally was the per­son who was instru­men­tal in sell­ing over $35 mil­lion worth of prod­ucts and ser­vices. And, and I say this because it’s really important.

You see tonight’s guest is a mas­ter copy­writer. But you know you may or may not know John Carl­ton. You’ve prob­a­bly heard of Gary Hal­bert and I talk­ing about John last call. But John is, is still pretty unknown to a lot of peo­ple because he’s been like the secret weapon work­ing under the radar for many, many years and, and the per­son which top direct mar­ket­ing agen­cies have slipped through the back­door so to speak to spice up their dull, unpro­duc­tive ads and sales let­ters into profit pulling mega mas­ter­pieces that are still being mailed out to this day.

John Carl­ton now com­mands fees as high as $15,000.00 plus roy­al­ties for his copy and, and his clients pay him more than cheer­fully because they know that his copy kicks butt. Of all the copy­writ­ers out there that I keep learn­ing from there’s only one per­son who teaches more about this sin­gle great­est skill you will ever learn and need to learn to make it in copy­writ­in­glet alone direct marketing.

And what’s this sin­gle greater skill that I’m talk­ing about?

It’s sell­ing. Sales­man­ship. Get-​​them-​​hooked, close-​​the-​​deal and get-​​their-​​money sell­ing. Because copy­writ­ing is really a printed form of face-​​to-​​face, toe-​​to-​​toe, belly-​​to-​​belly sell­ing and this is what we’re going to be talk­ing a lot about tonight.

If you want to learn about copy­writ­ing you go to learn about sell­ing. So get ready because tonight’s call, this per­son that we’re going to be, if you’re lis­ten­ing tonight to tonight’s call is going to teach them on other things. How to throw icy cold water into the face of your inner sales­per­son so you can snap that per­son out of their slum­ber and get down to writ­ing killer copy that grabs your read­ers by the eye­balls until they buy your prod­uct or ser­vice. And that per­son is none other than my guest tonight, Mr. John Carl­ton. Wel­come John.

John: Hey, how you doing Michel?

Michel: I’m doing, I’m well. Thank you so much. You want to do a lit­tle bit of an intro?

John: That was a nice intro. I can’t wait to hear what I have to say. I got to live up to that. By the way Michel, grab your reader by the eye­balls, I, I’ve never used that. I think I’ll steal that line. Hey you know I, I want to start off with some­thing that just occurred to me.

Right when I was wait­ing around for the call and it’s about some­thing that’s been com­ing up a lot recently when I’ve been speak­ing at sem­i­nars, when I’ve been talk­ing with peo­ple, and it’s about writ­ing for the web. And I think you know that a lot of peo­ple you know we kind of roll our eyes but it’s, it’s a seri­ous thing for peo­ple who are just get­ting into this.

They ask about writ­ing for the web. They ask if you should write dif­fer­ently for the web and they, and they get caught up in the tech­nol­ogy of the web.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: And I just wanted to address that right off the bat so we’re kind of clear on, I think what has become a basic obsta­cle to a lot of peo­ple get­ting into copy­writ­ing and sales­man­ship and that is a lot of us old cave­man mar­keters like Hal­bert, me and, and you know Jay Abra­ham and other guys, we kind of trash the web a lit­tle bit. We talk down tech­nol­ogy. Now I want to tell you why we do that.

Even though you know we use this cut­ting edge our­selves you know. I, I did blast email before this call, I’ve been on numer­ous tele­con­fer­ences. I’ve even got a geek spruc­ing up my own web site. But the truth is you know I’m mak­ing a killing online. I’m using a lot of the cut­ting edge stuff. But the rea­son that we tend to talk down the tech­nol­ogy a lit­tle bit, the tech­nol­ogy of the web and the Inter­net is because, let me, let me tell you a brief story.

About 15 years ago dur­ing one of the first sem­i­nars that I pro­duced with Gary Hal­bert, we had a guy raise his hand and he had a very impor­tant ques­tion. And he says I just bought the most tricked out com­puter that is made. I think he even, it even had a main­frame he said. And he told us about all the, all the whizzing stuff he had on this, all the bells and whis­tles he had on this, on this com­puter. And then he paused. He says so I had the com­puter. Now will you guys tell me how to make money with it.

And you know we just, we kind of rolled our eyes and we went you know it’s been a stand­ing joke with us for a long time.

Because the com­puter isn’t going to make you any money at all. The com­puter is merely another medium of which to get your sales mes­sage out. I, I think about that guy a lot when I hear peo­ple talk­ing about the web being so new and a lot of things hap­pen­ing because I was all, I’ve been on the cut­ting edge so to speak of a lot of dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies. That’s just a fac­tor of me being really, really old now.

I wrote one of the first infomer­cials back when we would lit­er­ally go into the stu­dio using scrap time at a local stu­dio shoot and hours with a film for an hour infomer­cial, slap it up on time which we got for free from the cable chan­nel because the cable chan­nel had no idea what that late night time was worth. And if it worked we’d run it again and we’d know it worked right away because the phones would ring.

And if it didn’t work we’d slap up the next one we would’ve made that after­noon. In three hours we could do an entire hour long infomer­cial. It was just, it was wild and wily and there was no, there was no, rea­son not to be kind of sloppy about it.

Then things started to change. Peo­ple just, to be able to do an infomer­cial now you have to be ready to spend six, excuse me $100,000.00 or more just to get your foot in the door to make a, an infomer­cial. And you’re going to spend a lot more than that on buy­ing the time to be able to run it. And this is before you even know if you have some­thing that works a lot.

So I, I just want to make clear that peo­ple under­stand that the web is going to change on you. So think­ing that the bells and whis­tles and the tricks and stuff that, that are part of the web and part of the struc­ture of the tech­nol­ogy, this is all going to change. And it’s going to change on you some­time soon. They’re already talk­ing about charg­ing for email.

I have an arti­cle here from the Wash­ing­ton Times says the out­go­ing CIA direc­tor said that we need secu­rity mea­sures to guard against attacks on the United States through the Inter­net. He calls it our poten­tial Achilles’ heel and when­ever the Feds start talk­ing about pro­tect­ing you know a resource like the web then you know they’re going to screw it up horribly.

So, I, I just want to you know it’s, and you know it’s, you and I were talk­ing ear­lier Michael about new music. It’s like, it’s like the tech­nol­ogy of music you know that we can go, in our homes now on our com­put­ers we have bet­ter tech­nolo­gies than the guys who were using even ten years ago to make the hits that dom­i­nated the radio. Yet just because we have that tech­nol­ogy to be able to sound as good as the hits were ten years go doesn’t mean we’re going to have a hit because the tech­nol­ogy has changed, every­thing has changed. So what you got is a really good sound­ing demo you know.

So what, what this all comes down to, what this long­winded kind of intro comes down to is that kind of plays off of what, what your intro­duc­tion was which is all of this comes back to the cave­man prin­ci­ples of pure sales­man­ship. It hasn’t changed since the first cave­man traded a cave with a view for his cave and an extra slab of mas­toid on it.

He had to sell the guy on doing that, he had to be per­sua­sive, he had to give rea­sons why. All of this stuff hap­pened at the dawn of civ­i­liza­tion. And the stuff that works is the stuff that’s going to work no mat­ter where you are, whether you’re on the web or you’re writ­ing a let­ter, whether you’re on the TV or on the phone, whether you’re face to face with somebody.

And this is prob­a­bly some­thing that, that you know you came to grips with you know in your own per­sonal story when you said you know that the long path to get­ting really good at sell­ing. And so I just wanted to lay that out there to kind of, because sales­man­ship is so impor­tant and some­times when I talk about copy and then I, I wan­der off into sales­man­ship you know peo­ple get lost and they think sales­man­ship how impor­tant is that. Well, guess what it’s the most impor­tant thing because every­thing else is going to shift from under you.

Michel: It’s the old­est pro­fes­sion in the book, not that other job.

John: Well they had to sell too so.

Michel: Well, well John it’s really a plea­sure to have you on the call because you know one of the things that you’ve taught me and the thing that I’ve been always a strong pro­po­nent of is, is you know you made a ref­er­ence to grab­bing peo­ple by the eye­balls and I think it’s some­thing that, that a lot of, espe­cially web sites and web let­ters as well as direct mail pieces really lack is some­thing that’s going to hook peo­ple into read­ing the copy. And, and one of the things I do a lot is cri­tiques and I cri­tique copy and I cri­tique web sites and 90 per­cent of the copy that I cri­tique it really boils down to a really crappy headline.

John: Right.

Michel: And, and/​or the lack of a hook you know. If you watch a good movie or read a good book there’s a plot. There’s some­thing that keeps you riv­eted through the whole movie. If you read a good book there’s some­thing that keeps you read­ing almost every page in a sin­gle sitting.

And, and I dis­cussed this very quickly with Gary Hal­bert, the last call about long copy and short copy and I want to bring it back up again. But the idea is if you’re a Steven King addict and Steven King puts out an 800– page book if it hooks you in you’re going to prob­a­bly read it all in one sin­gle sit­ting and you prob­a­bly wish the book was either longer or you’ll re-​​read it because it’s so good.

And one thing that you’ve taught me John and the thing that I also stress to a lot of my stu­dents and my clients is the power of the hook. If you want to talk a lit­tle bit about that because that’s so powerful.

John: Yeah. I read a lot of Steven King myself and you know what the main hook of Steven King was espe­cially when he was just get­ting started on those first six nov­els or so?

Michel: No.

John: It was the unsaid promise that buy this book and you will have the liv­ing crap scared out of you. And peo­ple just lined up in drools. And they know that’s one of the rea­sons still when you go to the air­port read­ing racks, I mean half of that is you know Steven King, the other half of that is Daniel Steele you know and then Grisham and all those other guys.

But it’s, it’s because of you know it’s, it’s, it is an unspo­ken hook that’s, that brings you in. But he’s very clear about it. Every­thing from the illus­tra­tion on the front cover to the few words that, that he allows on his cov­ers to kind of start the story going.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: And the hook is the sin­gle most impor­tant thing and it’s also the most mis­un­der­stood thing. I have peo­ple who have been read­ing my stuff and have been get­ting cri­tiques from me for years who still strug­gle with get­ting the hook.

And I think, I think you know you had talked about before you know how talk­ing about that you wanted me to talk about the actual struc­tures of going through this process and you know this, that’s some­thing that I think a lot of us really blow past when we try to teach peo­ple. It’s like you know you just tell some­body you need to have a hook in your story.

Well that doesn’t help them so much if they don’t under­stand how to get the hook. Well one of the ways that you can start learn­ing about a great hook is to go look at a bunch of great hooks. Now one way that’s, you can do those by get­ting those swipe files together of ads that are proven win­ners and start pay­ing atten­tion to how those things hook.

But you know an even eas­ier way is you can just go down to your local liquor store or drug store or even the Wal-​​Mart and just go to the mag­a­zine rack. And see how those mag­a­zines, the best­selling mag­a­zines in the world sell them­selves and the way they do it is that they hook you and some of the best ones to do this are like Reader’s Digest, Cosmo is really good and of course our favorite, The National Enquirer.

My, the peo­ple who write the head­lines and the blurbs, the lit­tle copy blurbs on the cover of these best­selling mag­a­zines are some of the high­est paid writ­ers in the world. And they are highly paid because when they write a hook on the cover of a mag­a­zine or a tabloid that, that moves those tabloids off the, you know off the shelf then they make a mint.

And if they don’t write some­thing that works the tabloid will lan­guish until the next one comes out. And those are some pretty hefty stakes. And you’re going to know right away whether you’re writ­ing good stuff or bad stuff.

So the guys that have been on the job for a long time know their game. I, I, I say this a lot, peo­ple have heard me speak before you know have heard it but my favorite, National Enquirer head­lines two of them. One was the head­line “Boy eats own head”. And I, I love that. I have a copy of that still some­where. It’s kind of rot­ting now but I loved it.

And not more than a cou­ple of issues later in the same year, the same writer I think wrote this one, “Preacher explodes on pul­pit”. What those, that one actu­ally has a lit­tle lib­er­a­tion going with the P thing but what those are, those are hooks.

And the great­est hook that you can come up with and I want every­body to lis­ten very care­fully to this, is the incon­gru­ent jexta posi­tion of seem­ingly unre­lated things or items or events.

So in other words the, the skinny guy beats the big guy up and gets the girl, the dumb guy wins out over the smart guys, the you know the weak van­quish the strong. And I’ll you know I’ll give some exam­ples of some of the head­lines I’ve used but it’s very impor­tant that you not just come out and be another voice in the wilderness.

As you’ve told peo­ple Michel you know the, the adver­tis­ing world is a wilder­ness out there. It’s not a wilder­ness, it’s like a white sheet of, of storm ice com­ing at you. There’s so much com­mer­cial­ism, there’s so much adver­tis­ing going on, so much mar­ket­ing going on that the aver­age Amer­i­can can’t get up, lis­ten to the radio, look at the paper and drive to work with­out get­ting bom­barded by adver­tis­ing mes­sages. So it becomes a white blur to them.

Michel: Right.

John: And you have to stand out. You can have the best prod­uct in the world and it aint going to do squat if you don’t get peo­ple to pay atten­tion. You know the mar­ket­ing grave­yard is filled with you know really, really good prod­ucts that just never caught on. So when we’re talk­ing about the hook and we’re talk­ing about that’s why I like those National Enquirer head­lines “Boy eats own head”.

Well there’s no way that you know if you have this com­pels you excuse me to read to find out what the hell the guy is talk­ing about.

“Preacher explodes on pul­pit”. How did he explode? Was it a bomb, was it spon­ta­neous com­bus­tion, what? You are, you are led in just read­ing a few words, you are led in to what will be a story. And, and of course just like we talked about with Stephen King, the, there was a nat­ural glee going on as the reader is pulled in. A reader you know isn’t say­ing oh well here’s some­thing I should read. He’s say­ing oh boy this is some­thing I really want to read.

Michel: Right.

John: So a lot of this has to do with hook­ing into the person’s, your reader’s pas­sion­ate sweet spot. And of course this is the basic, of course the No. 1 prob­lem that most peo­ple have with writ­ing good copy is that they’re writ­ing to the wrong person.

Michel: Exactly.

John: You know you can’t sell a snow­mak­ing machine to you know peo­ple who live in, in Alaska. I mean it’s, you have to iden­tify your mar­ket first. And of course that’s the No. 1 thing is to find a hot pas­sion­ate mar­ket. But a lot of peo­ple fall down even when they find a mar­ket. They have a prod­uct that the peo­ple they’re writ­ing to should want or really would want if only it was explained to them clearly.

But to get to that point where you’re going to explain it to them you’ve go to get their atten­tion. So you know it’s like, it’s like if you’re going to bowler some­times the sim­plest hook you can use is hey bowlers you know how would you like to bowl your first 300 game one month from today.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: You know and, and that’s an inter­est­ing kind of bland way to put it and you’d prob­a­bly get a lot of, a lot of atten­tion that way. But you know what if you twist it around? Of course and in golf one of my more famous and most knocked off ads by the way, I now claim the title to the most ripped off writer in America.

I say that rather proudly but the head­line for the first ad I wrote for the golf mar­ket was this, “Amaz­ing secret dis­cov­ered by one-​​legged golfer ads 50 yards to your dri­ves, elim­i­nates dri­ves and slices and can slash up to 10 strokes from your game almost overnight.”

There’s no ques­tion there where the hook is com­ing from. The one-​​legged golfer is the boy eats own head type of thing. Now I didn’t make this kind of thing up. Where did this come from? Of course this is the story which again a lot of peo­ple have heard. I’ll tell it very quickly.

You do sales detec­tion work and when you do sales detec­tion work what you’re doing is you are, you are dig­ging for the story that nobody’s talk­ing about or that nobody really real­izes is the story you want. Often what you’re look­ing, you’re look­ing for some­thing past the com­pany line.

It’s eas­ier when you’re deal­ing with a client like if I, if I’m work­ing with another client and I get to inter­view him, I inter­view the sec­re­tary, I’ll inter­view some of the peo­ple in the street to find out. But I want to find out about the rumors and I want to find out the stuff that they’re either afraid to talk about or don’t talk about or for­get to talk about when they’re try­ing to sell it because they’re try­ing to talk about wants the prod­uct to have dig­nity what­ever the hell that is.

Michel: Yeah what’s that?

John: Yeah more, more com­pa­nies have gone belly-​​up you know striv­ing for dig­nity than, than I think any other prob­lem that’s pre­sented him­self. In search­ing for this, for the hook for this golf video I was doing I inter­viewed a lot of peo­ple and I finally inter­viewed the tal­ent, the guy who was actu­ally on the thing. And it wasn’t until like two hours almost into the con­ver­sa­tion where I, I asked a ques­tion, what was your inspi­ra­tion for this you know this new swing that you had. And I really wasn’t expect­ing much.

I was dig­ging, I was des­per­ate. I didn’t have any­thing to write about except hey golfers how would you like to hit far­ther and longer and what­ever, you know the same old bor­ing stuff. And he said well one day I was golf­ing and the group ahead of me one of the golfers was this one-​​legged guy and I saw him hop up there and when he took a swing I real­ized hey this is some­thing two-​​legged golfers could, could use to hit far­ther because the guy hit the straight­est, far­thest, most gor­geous drive I’d ever seen on one leg and it was all about bal­ance and he had the high expe­ri­ence you know.

And I said you know I real­ized this was the hook right away you know. And you know it’s like why didn’t you tell any­body before and he said oh that old story nobody wants to hear that stuff any­more. And what was, what the prob­lem was it isn’t a prob­lem if you’re writ­ing copy for your­self because you have, you have to inter­view yourself.

You have to step back and be able to dig deep into your own psy­che when you’re writ­ing ads for your own prod­uct because you can get buried too deep into your own prod­uct. But you have to, you have to strip away the, the com­pany line again, the you know now only that quest for dig­nity that quest for what you think is a seri­ous sales posi­tion you know.

And you have to find, you have to think about how this thing got started, where the moti­va­tion came from, what was the imputes for get­ting your busi­ness together. And you have a lot of times your per­sonal story is the great­est hook you’re ever going to come across. I was you know I just inter­viewed another guy, I don’t think he minds being men­tioned, Ron LaGrande. The No. 1 you know real estate you know guru in the country.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: And he admits you know he was a broke red­neck car mechanic who didn’t have a clue what was going on and he went through one sim­ple lit­tle dis­cov­ery he you know he made this real­iza­tion that his sense cre­ated his empire you know.

You know he’s not only made beau­coup bucks him­self but he’s helped untold actu­ally who knows how many peo­ple he made because he has piles of tes­ti­mo­ni­als, thou­sands and thou­sands and thou­sands of peo­ple he helped them become mil­lion­aires and change their lives. All because of just a small lit­tle thing and yet he came, he was that, that incon­gru­ent jex posi­tion. That guy with no edu­ca­tion, with no advan­tage, with no money, with no noth­ing but a small lit­tle incen­di­ary piece of lit­tle infor­ma­tion that he took to the to Fort Knox.

Michel: I was brows­ing the web the other day and some­times when­ever peo­ple sub­scribe to my newslet­ters I get to see some of the domain names and some of them just out of inter­est I’ll check out. And there was this one lady, I’m not sure she’s on the call tonight, but she’s a pro­fes­sional speaker in the MLN net­work mar­ket­ing business.

John: Uh huh.

Michel: And when I hit her web site it really hit me. It was some­thing to the effect of the fact that she was some, some abused house­wife who was kicked out. She was home­less, she was thou­sands of dol­lars in debt and she became a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire in less than a year, bla, bla, bla, bla.

John: Uh huh.

Michel: And that really just, just you know just grabbed me.

John: Yes, exactly.

Michel: And it’s the same thing with the one-​​legged thing because I, I did this before too and this is actu­ally before I even heard about you John was, there was this guy who, who called me up and he wanted me to cri­tique his copy. And what he did was he invented, he was like an inven­tor and he cre­ated these spe­cial straps that would sort of help to lessen the stress of what­ever back­pack you have, the weight of the straps or the weight of the back­pack on your shoulders.

And the same idea as you, the same thing that hap­pened is I inter­viewed the guy and he men­tioned some­thing just so casu­ally as if it was nothing.

He says well you see I lost a leg in a car acci­dent many years ago and I started to you know do these inven­tions at home too because I can’t work, I can’t do the same work I used to be doing before. And I said ah ha, one-​​legged man lighten hik­ers’ loads or some­thing like that I decided to, to tell them on.

And that was the hook. And I think it requires a lit­tle bit of sales detec­tion side you know. What you were men­tion­ing before and some of the stuff that I’ve actu­ally learned from you John is that you have to sort of put your sales detec­tion hat and dig deep and find that pas­sion­ate sweet spot.

John: That, that’s right and espe­cially when you’re inter­view­ing your­self you’ve got to put on and I call it the sales detec­tion hat, you have to do detec­tive work on your­self. You know an inter­est­ing side point, when the client I was work­ing with saw how potent that hook was, and by the way that ad ran for I for­get it was like eight to ten years.

Michel: Right.

John: Run­ning in mag­a­zines and in direct mail and just it’s just been a mon­ster it. And they’ve retired it since. They pull it out every year any­way and when it goes to a new line it’s just still works just as well. But by the way, now I’m get­ting ahead of myself, what was my point. Any­way, the ad also shocked the mar­ket it was in. The golf mar­ket was a very bor­ing, seri­ous mar­ket. And peo­ple turned their nose up at it.

But the peo­ple that turned their nose up at this kind of ad were the peo­ple that these guys weren’t going to sell any­way. They, it was the pros or the guys that had too much you know “dig­nity” to get involved in those kind of stuff. But the guys who are aver­age golfers knew imme­di­ately this is some­thing they wanted to get their hands on because it made sense to them, because you know most guys, you know the aver­age golfer in Amer­ica can’t break 100.

Michel: Right.

John: And yet in most golf mag­a­zines they assume that you’re almost you know pro qual­ity. And, and the vast major­ity, there was an untapped mar­ket of, of peo­ple out there. Oh and I know what I was going to say. Once the client saw the power of the hook he actu­ally went out and started find­ing clients who had hooks for me.

So it was, it was great. I mean we had a blind golfer. A true, true thing. There was actu­ally a lit­tle club of blind golfers out there and they know some inter­est­ing things about strik­ing the ball and proved wrong a lot of com­mon, what is con­sid­ered com­mon sense about strik­ing the ball. Hey, I’m blind you can’t keep your eye on the ball. Guess what so you know there’s, you know you can go look­ing for a hook.

Some­times when you’re inter­view­ing or you’re think­ing about you know how am I going to posi­tion myself in this mar­ket. I’m in a, say you’re in a crowded mar­ket and god knows the weather’s get­ting more and more crowded all the time. So even if last week you had what­ever niche you were in all to your­self by, by two weeks from now you’re not going to be alone any­more because peo­ple are sniff­ing this stuff out.

But if you’re look­ing at a niche you know one of the ques­tions to ask your­self when you’re fig­ur­ing out your USP which I call the unique sales posi­tion you know how you posi­tion your­self to sell within this par­tic­u­lar market.

Think about how you can posi­tion your­self. Now in the, you know and peo­ple respond to per­sonal sto­ries. One of the most pop­u­lar is I was dumb, broke and clue­less and you know I made a dis­cov­ery and that dis­cov­ery led me to become rich, hand­some and you know well loved. I mean you, you know you can make that claim or you know you should never lie about the stuff because it’ll show. It’ll shine like a search­light and peo­ple will search you out.

But if you’ve got the real story to tell your pas­sion will come through. Because one of the best things you can do is to hook into the true story of your own life or the life of the per­son who is behind the prod­uct or some­body that’s close to you. And, and do that because this, it’s back to the Stephen King thing about why good nov­els sell. They tap into that human part of us that’s, that craves human, human con­nec­tion and human contact.

We hate being sold by robots. We hate being just, being thought of as just another num­ber, just another you know clog in the machine. All of us have our own sto­ries to tell and we respond to other peo­ple who have bro­ken through the clut­ter and the noise and the dis­trac­tion of mod­ern life and, and bro­ken out of that. And we all secretly yurn to do that.

You’re the mon­ster that I’ve been teach­ing for a long time is that the one thing I don’t care what mar­ket you’re in, the one com­mon thread through your, the peo­ple you’re try­ing to sell to is that they don’t get to do any­thing inter­est­ing, they don’t get to meet inter­est­ing peo­ple and they don’t get to go to inter­est­ing places. They are, they are liv­ing lives of quiet des­per­a­tion. This is true across the board. 99.9 per­cent of the peo­ple are just you know at best are walk­ing around in a daze.

Michel: Right.

John: And they’re just get­ting through their lives. There are small joys here and there but really those of us who have made it you know and Michael you , me, the other guys that you know have calls like this, we know there’s so much more to life. I think Betty Davis or Joan Craw­ford, some­body said life is a ban­quet and most poor suck­ers are starv­ing to death.

Michel: Right.

John: And it just has to do with step­ping up and you know don’t wait to be invited you know. You got to step up and do this.

Michel: Well this actu­ally brings up another thing that’s so.

John: Yeah, let me just fin­ish this.

Michel: Oh go ahead, go ahead.

John: The idea that your, your cus­tomer is leav­ing an unin­ter­est­ing life of quiet des­per­a­tion, that’s your open­ing. You come in and you be that guy, you be that one thing he reads today that wakes him up, gets him going, lights a fire under his ass and, and moves him. Because he’s going to wel­come you into his life.

Right now as an ad you are an unwel­come dis­trac­tion in his life. Even if it’s some­thing he wants. Even if your ad has the right kind of hook and stuff, you are still an unwel­come pres­ence in his life. Because now you’re forc­ing him to stop doing his, his semi-​​asleep rou­tine and he’s got to think about this and maybe pull out his wal­let and god for­bid send money to a stranger for some­thing he can’t see, hold, taste, see or feel.

Michel: Absolutely. And you men­tioned, the rea­son why I was, I didn’t meant to cut you in.

John: No that’s okay.

Michel: But you were men­tion­ing about moti­va­tion and, and get­ting peo­ple to come out of their “lives of des­per­a­tion”, one of the things that you talk a lot about that I love learn­ing from you is oper­a­tion money suck.

John: Yeah.

Michel: And that’s some­thing that you maybe you want to dis­cuss a lit­tle bit because it’s so impor­tant to espe­cially the copy­writ­ing but even sell­ing in general.

John: Yeah it is. You know the, I’ll give you the short ver­sion of the story. Hal­bert and I, I just started work­ing for Hal­bert and I was going down to his office and we were hav­ing like lit­tle one and two-​​hour meet­ings where we would dis­cuss clients and then dis­cuss ways we would write for them and things like this and this is how we brought money into the firm.

And that’s how you know I made my money and Gary made money I made money and I was on a per­cent­age thing so the more he made the more I made. And I went down one day and when I sat down before we could close the door to his office the sec­re­taries came run­ning in and they said oh my god this is really a dis­as­ter, the com­puter was down, the phones had been cut off, the land­lord was bang­ing on the door for some…

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
• Changes, Relaunches, and Extreme Makeovers
• Superior Value Equals Superior Sales

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