John Carlton Call Part 3 of 4

John: This, this, this thing going on and, you know, it digs deep and the rea­son it, the rea­son we don’t under­stand when, until you get into clas­sic sales­man­ship, you may not under­stand those, those kinds of ben­e­fits, is because we have this unre­al­is­tic idea of who we are.

Every­one thinks we’re, you know, either very noble crea­tures on the planet who deserve a spe­cial place or at worse, they think we’re a cou­ple of steps out of the jun­gle and, you know, we’re still, you know, mov­ing along, but basi­cally we’re, you know, we’re at a very advanced stage. In real­ity when you’re a sales­man you under­stand we’ve got one foot back in the jun­gle and one foot out. We haven’t moved hardly at all.

Michel: Right.

John: Civ­i­liza­tion has brought all the accou­ter­ments that let us believe us that we’re okay, and when you watch TV, you never see peo­ple like, you know, go to the bath­room or, you know, do the things that, that, that, you know, eat­ing, and, and get­ting sick.

They gloss over a lot of this stuff. The real­ity of life and espe­cially the real­ity of mar­ket­ing life and sell­ing is closer to what hap­pens in bad parts of town. You know, where there is no law, where there is no safety zones. You know, where there is no such thing as a quiet evening at home.

Michel: The biker bar mentality.

John: Par­don me?

Michel: The biker bar mentality.

John: Yeah, exactly. So by under­stand­ing that, and also I talk about, you know, I’ve, I’ve a degree in psy­chol­ogy and part of that was look­ing at ani­mal behav­ior­ism, how it related to pos­si­bly humans. You know, some peo­ple get upset about this. Just get over it. Go watch the goril­las at the zoo.

Stop being, stop pre­tend­ing that we aren’t related to them and watch how they inter­act and what they do and, after a few min­utes, you will rec­og­nize Uncle Bob, or you may even see your­self in these, and it’s the way they act, it’s the way they pro­tect things, the way they get what they want, the way they decide what they want, the maneu­vers they go through to get what they want when they’re not the top guy.

You know, how the top guy gets every­thing, but is tricked by his, by the females, or you know, when I’m talk­ing about goril­las, typ­i­cally the top gorilla has all the females, as all anthro­pol­o­gists know, the females are cheat­ing on him con­stantly because oth­er­wise the gene pool would get too screwed up.

So, and it just goes on and on and on; and the real­ity of, of, you can’t have shades over, you can’t have rose-​​colored glasses on your eyes and be a great sales­man. You have to be able to see things as they are. Not as you wish they were or not as you were told they were.

Michel: Right.

John: How they really are, and what moti­vates peo­ple is often some­thing you may, a lot of peo­ple may not even want to talk about. Like greed, for exam­ple. Peo­ple have either a prob­lem talk­ing about how this is going to make you filthy rich. It’s gonna make you filthy rich really quick, you know, and so when they, you know, they’re kind of uncom­fort­able with this whole greed thing.

So when they get around to actu­ally putting it into the copy, they either overdo it, you know, “You’re gonna get so filthy rich that, you know, Don­ald Trump will be, you know, ask­ing you for a loan or some­thing.” And it just becomes unbe­liev­able and unreal and over the top, or they under­cut it so much, they say, “Well, you know, you could make, you know, you could, you could up response by 2, maybe 3 per­cent by this time next year, you know.

Michel: Right.

John: And usu­ally when you talk to the guys that are doing this, you know, you say, is, is that the best you can do, and he says, well no, there’s a guy that’s work­ing with me who’s get­ting, you know, 25 per­cent, you know, every week, you know, in a bump.

Well, why don’t, you know, that’s the stuff you talk about is what peo­ple can attain, not the aver­age mid­dling stuff. You got to be bold, you got to step out, you got to make your case because you’re tick­ling a very dead­ened sense inside of your, of your prospect.

Michel: Mm-​​hmm. Well, that’s one of the things that I, that I usu­ally tell peo­ple, espe­cially when copy seems to be a bor­der­line or even over-​​the-​​line hypie, or what peo­ple think is hypie, or what peo­ple are scared about -

John: Right.

Michel: — being hypie is that it’s just laced with adjec­tives and adverbs and one of my prized pos­ses­sions being in your insider’s club is my power word list.

John: Right. Yeah, that’s, once, you know, it took me awhile to real­ize what I was doing, but, Michael, you’ve read “Struck and White” right?

Michel: Mm-​​hmm.

John: The ele­ment to start with.

Michel: Yes.

John: The one main thing, the one main les­son from that is stop using adjec­tives. Okay, so that’s one step, but the next thing that they talk about, which changed my life, was use action verbs.

Michel: Yes.

John: And it’s like one verb, you know, he walked down the street. He waltzed down the street, he floated down the street, he ran down the street in a panic. I mean, too many times we rely on, is it have, you know, to have, you know, verbs like that.

Michel: Right.

John: I’ve got some­thing for you, you know. You start to explore. You should have a beat to death the­saurus on your desk. Don’t use the one on your com­puter, because you should have the actual phys­i­cal sen­sa­tion of going page to page look­ing for the word you’re look­ing up to find other words that mean the same thing or antonyms, and go to them because you’ll have happy acci­dents when you have the actual the­saurus in your hand and in your lap.

I’ve been using the same one for the last 25 years. It is, it is decrepit beyond belief, but I, it’s a, it’s a friend, you know. You just, when I flip through it, some­times I’ll just stop and read a page because a word will catch my eye.

Guess what? When I’m flip­ping through a the­saurus and a word catches my eye, when I’m look­ing for some­thing in the Ws and some­thing in the Rs catches my eye, guess what that word is? It’s a power word.

Michel: Mm-​​hmm.

John: So, you know, it’s, that’s another thing about cave­man tech­nol­ogy. Well, actu­ally Guten­berg tech­nol­ogy, you know, hav­ing the writ­ten actual dic­tio­nary and actual the­saurus in front of you, it’s just, you know. Tech­nol­ogy changes and some­times it makes our lives eas­ier and some­times it, it, it hurts us. Peo­ple, you know, I’m run­ning into more and more peo­ple who have had their lit­tle addic­tion to Grand Theft Auto, you know.

You don’t want to get in the car with them until they’ve calmed down, after a ten-​​hour ses­sion with it. And guess what? They’re gonna, the first time they cop an atti­tude in a, you know, in a store or some­thing, you know, think­ing that they’re gonna pull out their secret machine gun and, you know, gun them down, it ain’t gonna hap­pen and they’re gonna get their clock cleaned.

Michel: Mm-​​hmm, mm-​​hmm.

John: You know, real­ity is very much dif­fer­ent. So tech­nol­ogy has its drawbacks.

Michel: Right. Well, it’s, it’s com­ing back to, when you say the process of look­ing for a word and very often, even an action verb, it’s not nec­es­sar­ily the fact that it’s an action in itself. I think per­son­ally it’s because of the fact that peo­ple can instantly, in their mind’s eye, think and see the action being taken.

John: Well, there’s with words like humil­i­ate, for exam­ple, or embar­rass. All of us have a vis­ceral reac­tion to words like that.

Michel: Right, exactly.

John: Right.

Michel: Because, I, I, I tell this story often where if you tell, you know, there’s a, I took a media com­mu­ni­ca­tions course many years ago and, and they were talk­ing about the fact that the mind thinks in rel­a­tive terms, it never thinks in direct terms, because it goes back into its mem­ory bank and its data­bank to find some­thing that it has like a ref­er­ence point that it can com­pare it to; and it’s like, you know, say­ing to peo­ple, “Think of a garbage can.”

Is that per­son gonna start think­ing G-​​A-​​R? No, of course not. They’re gonna pic­ture a garbage can in their mind, and this media com­mu­ni­ca­tions course had this news report about a for­est fire that was dev­as­tat­ing the Mid­west, and, and the show had this news anchor with the back­ground pic­ture of a heli­copter view of the for­est fire, and he, he turned around and he says, “Sally’s in the sta­tion heli­copter right now above the scene of the fire.

Sally, how big is the fire?” Sally responded, “Oh, it’s about 104 acres of land” or what­ever, I can’t remem­ber the exact number.

John: Right.

Michel: But what she said after it because see, acres are 104, the num­bers right. The mind doesn’t think in num­bers, it thinks in pic­tures Mark Twain said. So she said it’s about 200 foot­ball field back-​​to-​​back for you and me.

John: Yeah.

Michel: Boom. You know, the mind had some­thing it could fall back on.

John: Exactly.

Michel: And, and it’s the same thing with your power words because who wants to beat their com­pe­ti­tion? Who wants to increase your sales over the com­pe­ti­tion? They don’t want to do that. They want to murder -

John: That’s right.

Michel: — the competition.

John: That’s right. Slaugh­ter them.

Michel: And that’s, that’s some­thing that you’ve, that you teach a lot that I just, it just really is the key.

John: Well, you know, it’s inter­est­ing, Michel, that the lit­er­acy of Amer­ica is actu­ally going up because of the net. My, I have fam­ily mem­bers who haven’t writ­ten a let­ter in some­times 50 years, and they got email and their first emails were obvi­ously hunt and peck, very short, mis­spelled lit­tle missives.

You know, hi, got your, got your gift, thank you, that kind of thing. Now, they’re writ­ing nov­els, and they’re very com­fort­able. Their typ­ing skills have come back and they’re doing it, and I think, you know, there’s a resur­gence of inter­est in writ­ing with the web, espe­cially with the amount of sales copy that’s being writ­ten for the web.

Michel: Mm-​​hmm.

John: So, it’s you, what I’d like to see, you know, I, you know, I don’t want peo­ple to think wrong of me. I love music. I’m a musi­cian. I love stuff, but in a lot of ways, the cur­rent kind of music that’s out there right now, the pop­u­lar music, is degrad­ing the lan­guage too much.

Back when I was lis­ten­ing to rock and roll, and you too, lan­guage was still very much a part of it. It was, you know, the large part of the hook of the song was the way the words rolled off your tongue.

Michel: Oh, yeah.

John: On the cho­rus or some­thing like that, and some of the great writ­ers like Mick Jag­ger were, were excel­lent wordsmiths.

Michel: Right.

John: And you have, you know, to love the way, you know, Amer­i­cans don’t love the lan­guage enough. French love their own lan­guage. Unfor­tu­nately it’s not the lin­gual franca of the world. You have to learn Eng­lish. Eng­lish, guess what, is more rich than French because we have more power words.

We have more ways to say the same thing and to, you know, to just tweak it a bit here and there; and by hav­ing a the­saurus, by hav­ing a dic­tio­nary, when you’re, you know, your main tool as a writer are the words that you use.

When we speak, and espe­cially if you’re speak­ing to some­one, you have the advan­tage of, you know, of, of using facial expres­sions, of pound­ing the other per­son in the chest with your fin­ger, or jump­ing up and down or mak­ing lit­tle, you know, charade-​​type things. When you’re writ­ing, you don’t have that advantage.

How­ever, peo­ple may be think­ing, hey, soon we’re gonna be sell­ing with video on the web. It’s gonna all be video all the time. That isn’t gonna hap­pen. Read­ing is always, and to my mind, always will be the sec­ondary to the face-​​to-​​face sales job. The read­ing. It engages a part of the brain that isn’t engaged when you’re watch­ing video or TV or something.

Michel: Right.

John: And it’s a more active part of the brain.

Michel: This is just a lit­tle com­ment and I’ll let you go on, but I was asked that ques­tion one time. Mike, do you think that the video is going to take over the web or should I do all my, my, my copy in audio, or what­ever? And I said, you know, the, the eye needs to have some kind of thing that makes it, that keeps it busy.

If you are, espe­cially on the web, if you’re going to try to sell with audio and video while it’s going on, that person’s gonna, you know, check out another cou­ple of win­dows, they’re gonna Google some­thing, they’re gonna have some­body ping­ing them on MSN, they’re gonna down­load their email. They’re gonna be so busy that they haven’t cap­tured maybe that one lit­tle thing you men­tioned on your video that might be the key, the hook, the piv­otal point that’s gonna and close a sale.

John: And also need to be able to go back to it. How many times have you read a sen­tence and said, what the hell did I just read, and have to go back and read it.

Michel: Exactly.

John: Can’t do that on video. Well, you can, but the phys­i­cal action of that is, you know, kind of, you know, mit­i­gates the, the advan­tage to it.

Michel: Right.

John: So that’s, sure, that sounds good. I for­got what else I was talk­ing about, Michael, so let’s move on. Oh, you know what? I wanted to say some­thing about, I think, would you agree that peo­ple are a lit­tle con­cerned about the spac­ing, the blank page thing. Do you want me to say a lit­tle bit more about that?

Michel: Yes, yes, please actually.

John: Um, I say that writer’s block is a myth. It’s because there’s always some­thing to be said, there’s always some­thing to be done, but when I first started out as a writer, fac­ing down the blank page and writ­ing that first cou­ple of words or get­ting going was kind of hard to do.

So there’s a cou­ple of rules that I felt that really worked, and one was kill trees. Use as much paper as you can. When­ever I write, for­tu­nately, on the, on, now that I’m work­ing on a com­puter all the time, you know, I started out work­ing on a type­writer. Not just a type­writer, but a man­ual type­writer at that, so that’s how old I am.

Any­way, you know, thank God we can go back and edit with­out hav­ing to print. How­ever, I print all the time any­way. I print every hour or so when I’m work­ing on a draft of some­thing, ‘cuz I don’t, I don’t want to per­ma­nently erase some­thing that may have been there when I’m try­ing it some other way. You want to keep a log of that.

So writ­ing by long hand actu­ally has its advan­tages if you can see what you crossed out or how, you know, where the gen­e­sis of where you’re at now, where your ver­biage comes from. But get­ting those first words down some­times is a real drag.

So just start writ­ing. I think Howard actu­ally talked about that before, you know, it’s, it’s the idea of don’t be afraid to write some­thing you’re gonna throw away later. One of the great tac­tics that copy­writ­ers know about when they’re doing it pro­fes­sion­ally is that even for bet­ter­ing copy­writ­ers, when you’re fin­ished with a piece and you have an 18-​​page let­ter or some­thing, the first page and a half to three pages, you can toss.

Michel: You can call it clear­ing your throat, I think.

John: Right, clear­ing your throat. It’s, it’s, you know, we do it all the time. When I’m going back and I got to edit some­thing, say it’s gonna, it was a let­ter and now it’s gonna go in as a mag­a­zine ad or some­thing, I got to edit it. I’ll look at the first part I write and I’ll say, you know what, I said the same thing six times and here’s a whole para­graph that’s absolutely irrel­e­vant and, you know, often when I’m cri­tiquing things, I’ll just go to the sec­ond page.

You know, halfway down the sec­ond page, I’ll, I’ll close my eyes and just stick my fin­ger down and there’s a thing that starts and the guy will say, “Hi, my name is Jim Smith and what I’m about to tell you is going to up your, you know, your response on the blah, blah, blah”, you know, and it’s like before that, what was he talk­ing about, you know, you know.

I imag­ine that you’re really frus­trated with busi­ness you know, and all this ram­bling and mum­bling and all the stuff that goes on. It’s like, hey, here’s where you start. Get rid of all this stuff.

Michel: My -

John: So don’t be afraid to be able to do that. Be bru­tal with your­self. Here’s, here’s another tac­tic when I was first start­ing out. I had writ­ing clothes. I had a hat that I put on. I had a stinky set of sweats and a T-​​shirt and I had big floppy socks that would not allow me to put shoes on.

Now, when I put that on, it did two things. One, these were my writ­ing clothes. You don’t, they could have been a Super­man cos­tume or they could have been women’s lin­gerie, you know, and it didn’t mat­ter. When I put those on, I was gonna write. So I sat down.

The other advan­tage to make sure that I was gonna write was I couldn’t go out­side dressed like that. I wasn’t, I wasn’t fit to meet peo­ple, so I wasn’t gonna go any­where and I was sit­ting in front of the, you know, sit­ting at my desk and there wasn’t any­thing else going on.

You know, the TV was in the other room and I don’t have a radio in there and I’m sit­ting in there and, you know, okay, fine, so let’s just, you know, some­times I’d food myself and say, and again with these lit­tle five by seven notepads, I would say, I’m just gonna write down a list of a cou­ple of fea­tures. I’m not even gonna be exhaus­tive about it. And then you write those down and you say, I’m just gonna write a cou­ple of ben­e­fits. In other words, give your­self room to be a loser, I guess.

Michel: Mm-​​hmm.

John: What hap­pens is that once you engage, once that thing kicks in, once your, once your inner sales­man wakes up, he doesn’t want to go back to sleep. So you will find a com­mon prob­lem with writ­ers, and I’m sure you’ve had this too, is writ­ers asphyxiation.

Michel: Yeah.

John: Writ­ers tend to slump in their chair, breathe very, very shal­lowly, and the kind of sweat you pro­duce is actu­ally the kind of sweat you pro­duce when you’re starv­ing your­self. It’s like keto­sis. It’s a very stinky sweat.

But what’s hap­pen­ing is that you’re breath­ing very shal­low, you’re hooked into a part of your brain that is con­nected right to your fin­gers whether you’re writ­ing long­hand or whether you’re typ­ing, and it’s just, and, and, I’m sure, you know, I’d be aston­ished if you didn’t have the same expe­ri­ence that, that I’ve had which is I’ll look up and two hours have gone by, just like that. I have no idea where those two hours went. I’ll look up and sud­denly I’ve got all this stuff writ­ten and all this stuff down, and it’s because of total immersion.

Michel: John, I wrote my best copy and it took me a cou­ple of days, and I real­ized I didn’t bathe, I didn’t shave, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep.

John: Yeah, yeah. It’s hard to, it’s hard to have peo­ple liv­ing with you at that time, and I’ve got a very, very under­stand­ing per­son liv­ing with me, you know. She, she knows that there’s gonna be some quirky stuff and there’s gonna be me walk­ing through mut­ter­ing to myself and I’ll be star­ing at the wall some­times, you know.

So as long as they under­stand, but writ­ing is tak­ing the inter­nal voice that’s going on in your head and set­ting it all up and, and bring­ing it all out onto the page. So hav­ing writ­ing clothes actu­ally works. I don’t do that any­more, well, actu­ally some­times I do. But you know the hat was great. It was one of those Sher­lock Holmes hats, you know.

Michel: Right.

John: You can’t wear out­side ‘cuz they’re ridicu­lous. But I always liked them, you know. It could have been a Greek, you know, war hel­met, or some­thing. It’s just, you know, and, but a part of that that I didn’t cop to or I didn’t under­stand until later was the idea that I was also stalk­ing the computer

What would hap­pen is I’d stand there, I’d look in the room, and it’s kind of like if you’ve ever lifted weights, what you have to do before you life a very large weight? You got to stand, you take a deep breath, you kind of move your shoul­ders around and you look down, and then there’s that moment of truth where you’re gonna reach down and grab it and you’re either gonna pull it up or you’re not. And until you get to that stage, you’re not gonna pull it up.

So you just, and it’s just like, finally it’s like jump­ing in the pool. It’s like, I talk about, you know, in other ways peo­ple stand­ing on the edge of the pool of life both­er­ing every­body that’s already in with ques­tions like “How deep is it? Is it cold? Will the chlo­rine sting my eyes?”

When really what you got to do is jump in, whether you dive in, fall in back­wards, do a belly flop, doesn’t mat­ter. Get in the damn pool.

Well, that’s the same thing with writ­ing. You know, you just, and when I talk about stalk­ing the com­puter, some­times I will cir­cle the desk because it’s not time to write yet, it’s time to be think­ing about this, and I’ll be, I’ll just, some­times I stalk the desk, some­times I actu­ally go out­side and take long walks.

Some­times I take long show­ers, and I just, I’m think­ing, I’m think­ing, you know, and I’m mad and I’m get­ting, and I’m try­ing to get in touch with that part of me that is passionate.

And some­times I’m not pas­sion­ate because I’m a free­lancer. Some­times I couldn’t care less about this prod­uct. Well, I got to. That’s where the idea of the writer is the pros­ti­tute comes in because you, you know, you got to love the prod­uct at least at the time that you’re writ­ing the thing. And we learn how to do that, we learn how to just turn it on and you, and guess what, you can do it too.

How­ever, if you’re writ­ing for your own stuff, you’ve got to have that pas­sion there any­way, so just hook in there and think about it. Think about this when you’re sit­ting down to write. There are, if you really have a prod­uct of value, then you owe it to the world to sell that prod­uct to the peo­ple, to let them know you have it, to let them know that here’s how they can get it, and to wake them up to the fact that it’s out there. That’s your job. That’s why you’re here on earth.

Now, think about this. You know, your job is to sit down and do this. There are peo­ple walk­ing around out there who want, need, and will thank you for let­ting them know that your prod­uct is avail­able out there. If you have a prod­uct of value, then that’s what’s gonna happen.

Here’s the part that pisses you off. There are a bunch of peo­ple walk­ing around out there with money in their wal­let that belongs to you. It’s in their pocket right now, it should be in yours. The only rea­son that they haven’t taken it out of their wal­let and put it into yours is because you haven’t asked them the right way; and if that doesn’t piss you off, then you’re not, then there’s not much I can do for you.

Michel: Well, it comes back to what you were say­ing ear­lier about tech­nol­ogy and one of the down­falls of tech­nol­ogy, and this is prob­a­bly why in your case so good to use a type­writer, is tech­nol­ogy also gives you the con­ve­nience to pro­cras­ti­nate or it gives you the con­ve­nience to edit your­self constantly.

John: Mm-​​hmm.

Michel: And I tell this to a lot of peo­ple that there’s a dif­fer­ence between a copy­writer and copy­ed­i­tor, and tons of peo­ple know, you were talk­ing not too long about switch­ing on the inner sales­man, and I tell peo­ple switch off the inner editor.

John: Oh, absolutely.

Michel: And the one thing that a lot of peo­ple do that’s a big prob­lem is they’ll, they’ll, you know, you call it the Ernest Hem­ing­way dis­ease where peo­ple stop halfway and they, you know, they think that they’re gonna be sell­ing to gram­mar cops.

Michel: Right.

John: You know, and they’re not. You’ve got to keep on writ­ing. Who cares, like you just said, who cares if it’s lousy, and then you can edit, you can go back and edit. Of course, you’re not gonna put out some really crappy copy, but in the process of writ­ing, don’t stop.

Michel: Some­times you will. Some­times crappy copy does it. I use a lot of slang and I use a lot of words that would cause Mrs. Williams from, you know, the woman who tried to teach me Eng­lish in the, in junior high, would cause her to have a heart attack and just keel over, and it’s because you’re not writ­ing to please an Eng­lish teacher.

You’re writ­ing to get the mes­sage across, and when you start writ­ing more in the way peo­ple talk or in the way peo­ple think about copy, then you’re get­ting far­ther and far­ther away from the very, very stilted way that peo­ple who have too much edu­ca­tion write.

You want to write as, you know, when, when, one of the fun­ni­est things that hap­pens when you tran­scribe some­thing, it’s like what I just did before. I said that I stut­tered for about three or four things, you know, just lit­tle words come out, and I’ve actu­ally had tran­scrip­tions come back with every sin­gle um, aw, and you know.

And it’s hilar­i­ous ‘cuz you’ll look at it and you don’t know, I don’t notice it and most of the time peo­ple that you’re talk­ing to don’t notice it. You, we’ll leave out words, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll fin­ish thoughts with incor­rect, you know, we don’t speak in cor­rect sen­tences all the time.

Now, I’m not say­ing you should write like that all the time because as I said, you should be able to send out a piece that is like you would talk if you could go back and edit what you said.

So you take out all the “ums” and “ahs” and all that stuff isn’t there, but basi­cally, you’re pre­sent­ing it the way you would if you were speak­ing, if you were speak­ing, if you had a really good com­mand of the Eng­lish language.

Now some of us, through the years, have a, some­what of a good com­mand of the Eng­lish lan­guage, but I don’t speak as well as I write. When I write, I’m hook­ing into, there is some kind of selec­tion process that goes down. But some­times I can stop and say, no, let’s not use that verb.

Let’s try this one. Oh, and there’s another verb I’ve been wait­ing to use for a long time, you know. That, that’s where the love of lan­guage comes in, you know.

John: Mm-​​hmm.

Michel: And you get to throw that word in, and it becomes sec­ond nature so quickly. And you know, we almost all write, can write right now bet­ter than we speak.

Michel: Right.

John: Um, but you know, we still want to, you know, you don’t want to get rid of the slang. You want to keep that, that fresh­ness, that alive­ness, you know. The sales let­ter that goes out is a liv­ing being. It’s a, it’s some­thing that is vibrant in the person’s hand if it’s a let­ter or on their screen that they’re read­ing. It’s not, it’s not this bor­ing recita­tion of what’s going on.

It’s the dif­fer­ence between the old bor­ing cook­ing shows, you know, where they go, okay, three eggs, you know, crack now, whip it. And guys like Emeril, you know, bang, you know, and all this stuff. It’s the­ater, it’s the, it’s hav­ing a lit­tle fun with this because remem­ber, peo­ple aren’t, you know, they’re not lead­ing inter­est­ing lives. They don’t get to do any­thing. They don’t have any inter­est­ing friends.

You, you can be that inter­est­ing friend who shares their pas­sion. You know a lot of guys, like bowlers and stuff; if you’re really pas­sion­ate about bowl­ing or if you’re an accoun­tant. Say you’re sell­ing stuff to accountants.

You know what that accoun­tant doesn’t get to do. He doesn’t get to go home and talk about his day to his wife because she’s been sick of hear­ing about account­ing since the day after he met her. He doesn’t get to regale the kids with sto­ries about how the books weren’t bal­anced in the X-​​Y-​​Z per­fo­ra­tion ‘cuz they could care less.

Michel: Right.

John: They don’t under­stand it any­way. You get to come in and be that guy where you can share not only what he knows about it, but guess what? You’re gonna let him inside a world that he can’t oth­er­wise get into.

And you’re gonna share inside secrets and give him the, you know, the abil­ity to expand his pas­sion and be able to indulge in it to his heart’s con­tent. I should have writ­ten that down, that’s pretty good.

Michel: This is the point. I think you’ve men­tioned also in either a sem­i­nar that I’ve been on or went to or heard you from, and ties it a lit­tle bit in with this.

You know, we’re talk­ing about switch­ing off the inner edi­tor and it’s the same thing I think when­ever you present your copy to a client, and this is a ques­tion I keep get­ting from my clients with web copy is, “Should I have a page for about us, another page for pric­ing, another page for this, another page for that”, and there are ample stud­ies and tests, split tests have been done to prove that long copy, long school­ing copy out­sells multiple-​​page copy. This is for a sin­gle offer.

But the prob­lem that peo­ple don’t under­stand is, it’s just as much that we have a ten­dency to pro­cras­ti­nate at every oppor­tu­nity, read­ers will pro­cras­ti­nate at every opportunity.

John: Yes.

Michel: And by putting mul­ti­ple pages or giv­ing, you know, or putting lengths to other web sites or what­ever, you’re giv­ing them every oppor­tu­nity to pro­cras­ti­nate or to go on a tan­gent or to click on pages that will give them spe­cific infor­ma­tion that does not fol­low the flow that you want them.

You know, to me, to me copy and sales copy is like music. You know, you’ve got the intro, you’ve got the verse, the cho­rus, the solo in the mid­dle, and then you’ve got the outro.

John: That’s right, and before the solo, you don’t stop the music and say, by the way, we did another song ****. Hey, Bob, play a stance of that song. Then you say, okay, now we’re going back to the song.

Michel: Right.

John: It’s a greased slide ride.

Michel: You men­tioned this, and this is what you said I think on a pre­vi­ous sem­i­nar is where you said, “Do you actu­ally sit down with a client and do a pre­sen­ta­tion face to face, belly to belly, and in the mid­dle of your con­ver­sa­tion, you say, okay, hang on, stop, one, two, three, okay, now keep on going?”

John: Right. And you know, you say you’re giv­ing an excuse to pro­cras­ti­nate. Guess what? You’re invit­ing it. You are almost, you are, you are gonna mur­der your bot­tom line by doing that stuff. Links are one of the worst tech­no­log­i­cal advances that have ever been invented for as far as the sales pitch goes. Now you can link the stuff, you know, later.

You know, you, once you’ve sold them, then you have another page where you can have links up the ying-​​yang ‘cuz it doesn’t mat­ter ‘cuz they’re in your fold at that time, but to bring them in the first time, oh, my, God. Think about that process of what you’ve got to do. We didn’t talk about the synam­bu­lant blob welded to the couch.

Michel: Right.

John: But, you know, basi­cally that’s the way I look at all of my prospects. I imag­ine this huge gelati­nous mass of human­ity welded to the couch that wouldn’t move to save itself from the burn­ing build­ing, and I’ve got to get it to, to watch some­thing for a few min­utes, you know, or read some­thing and actu­ally, you know, lean over and kind of pull it’s wal­let out and pick up the phone and call or fax in an order form and fill it out.

My God, what a, what a dif­fi­cult process that is ‘cuz this synam­bu­lant blob is snor­ing, doesn’t want to be woken up, doesn’t want to move and sure as hell doesn’t want to give me any money. So I’ve got to make the case. I’ve got to get this guy moti­vated, and you know how you make a synam­bu­lant blob move from the couch? You light a fire under its ass.

Michel: Mm-​​hmm, mm-​​hmm.

John: So, you know, this is why we have things, this is why we talk so much about urgency, about lim­its, about mak­ing this a one-​​time offer, about, about mak­ing the most famous copy­writ­ing acronym or what­ever, A-​​I-​​D-​​A.

Michel: Mm-​​hmm.

John: That’s the most com­mon one that’s been used, it’s the best. I think John Caples came up with it. It’s the one, it’s A-​​I-​​D-​​A, stands for Atten­tion, Inter­est, Desire, and Action.

You know, so when you break copy down to four basic things, the fourth one is action, and that’s where peo­ple, peo­ple really miss the boat, because you are ask­ing this guy to do some­thing he doesn’t want to do, doesn’t nor­mally do, may not have ever done before in his life, you know, the whole idea of send­ing money for something.

Think of the fire you got to light under his ass to get him to move to take out his wal­let and do that.

Michel: Very, very sim­i­lar to some­thing I teach often, John, is the, my, I call it my three sim­ple steps to writ­ing prof­itable copy.

John: Right.

Michel: And the three sim­ple steps is it’s not easy specif­i­cally. It’s easy in the sense that if peo­ple get those three down, they, they can write world-​​class copy and it’s basi­cally based on three immutable laws, and the first law is that peo­ple never read any­thing at first.

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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