John Carlton Call Part 4 of 4

Michel: The sec­ond law will never believe any­thing at first. And the third law is peo­ple will never do any­thing at first. So the three steps, I call it the three P’s. Pull them in, prove your case, push them back. And copy, when you should pull them in, the head­line, peo­ple will scroll down a web page.

So you’ve got tons of things that you can do to pull them in. Head­ers through­out the copy, the story. Prove your case is of course cred­i­bil­ity and proof and all that stuff, and your offer and value buildup and guar­an­tees and tes­ti­mo­ni­als. And push them to act is of course ask­ing for the order, mak­ing the offer.

Don’t be wimpy about it, don’t be shy about it. And I think that that tsunami, the **** story that you just men­tioned is some­thing I read a lot too from you, is so impor­tant because peo­ple are inher­ently lazy.

John: Right.

Michel: Peo­ple are all lazy. And they will pro­cras­ti­nate at every oppor­tu­nity. And if you have that in your mind­set, in the back of your mind when you are writ­ing copy, you know, rather than writ­ing some­thing about how great your com­pany is or it’s been founded in 1985, blah, blah, blah, who cares about that?

John: That’s right.

Michel: Did you — We have just a lit­tle bit of time left here, and you have men­tioned to me that you wanted to also talk about a bit of mar­ket­ing, I guess, and you talked about, for exam­ple, the pass­ing parade and easy pick­ing from the gold­mine. Did you want to talk a lit­tle about that?

John: Yeah, I think we’ve covered -

Michel: We’ve cov­ered it, yeah.

John: I actu­ally think we’ve — I was think­ing about have we cov­ered that or not. You know, one of the phrases that I use, I don’t know where I picked it up at, was get into the con­ver­sa­tion already in your prospect’s mind. That taps into the get­ting into the pas­sion­ate sweet spot.

Peo­ple are pas­sion­ate about stuff. There are a num­ber of peo­ple who aren’t pas­sion­ate about any­thing, they’re called dead. To any mar­ket you go to, for every hun­dred peo­ple there’s going to be five prob­a­bly that buy from you. You know, so you’re never going to sell everybody.

But, you know, when you start nar­row­ing that down, so rather than just going to a hun­dred peo­ple, what if you went to a hun­dred bowlers. You know, instead of just a hun­dred peo­ple, you know, out of the gen­eral population.

Michel: Right, right.

John: What if you went to — What if you nar­rowed it down even more and went to a hun­dred bowlers who have bought some­thing before on bowl­ing. What if you nar­rowed it down to a hun­dred bowlers who have bought some­thing before over $100.00. You know, keep nar­row­ing that down.

What you do is you start updat­ing the value of that cus­tomer. And even­tu­ally that’s what you’re house lists at. If you go to a hun­dred thou­sand peo­ple and you get a thou­sand peo­ple out of that who buy some­thing from you, then they buy again, well, right then that’s the begin­ning of your hot list.

And your hot list is peo­ple who have raised their hands and said, I want what you have and I’ll buy even more of what you have. And those are the peo­ple that are going to cre­ate the wealth for you.

Michel: Okay, well -

John: You talk about the easy pick­ings out there.

Michel: Right.

John: You know, some of us have been blessed, and you know when the web started really being used by a lot of peo­ple it opened up a lot of mar­kets where peo­ple were just walk­ing in. And it was just like walk­ing into a, you know, say you’re a cave­man in the for­est and you walked in the part of the for­est where nobody had been, and there’s all this low hang­ing fruit.

You know, you’re hun­gry, you’ve got a hun­dred peaches and pears right there, you don’t even have to work at it. So if you’re the only guy there you don’t have to work very hard at all. Any­thing you send out. If you’re the — you know, if you’re the only guy sell­ing ham­burg­ers to a starv­ing crowd, you know, as Hal­bert has talked about quite a bit, you don’t have to have good hamburgers.

You don’t have to have any­thing at all. And in fact, you may only have to whis­per to one guy at the edge of the crowd, I’ve got ham­burg­ers. And that’s all you need to do. So you can get away with bad copy, sloppy mar­ket­ing tac­tics and stuff when you’re the only per­son in the market.

I don’t think there’s any mar­kets left on the web or any­where else in our cap­i­tal­is­tic soci­ety where you’re the only guy any­more. So you don’t have — all that low hang­ing fruit has been picked. All the big chunks of gold in the mine have been picked up.

So you’ve got to start get­ting to, you know, start refin­ing your tac­tics, you know, be able to climb the tree or be able to find new parts of the orchard, you know, that hasn’t been picked over or, you know, find other ways to do it.

Or, at some point, you’re going to have to find a way to — like they do, you know, in Nevada here, we have sil­ver mines that are 150 years old and every five or ten years tech­nol­ogy advances to the point they go back through the dirt that was taken out of the mine, you know, back in the 1850s, go through it again and they find enough sil­ver left over that pre­vi­ously tech­nol­ogy didn’t find that it makes it worth while, you know.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: But they have to wait another five or ten years for the tech­nol­ogy to advance again to do it again. So they’re con­stantly going through the pil­ings, as they call them. So, you know, it’s — look­ing at your mar­ket, it’s like what I was talk­ing about with the chang­ing nature of technology.

You know, things change. And you know, don’t get — a lot of peo­ple either start out as rook­ies and they try to go into really crowded mar­kets like diet mar­kets or, you know, how to be a web guru, you know, how to, you know, some­thing where they’re just going to be up against peo­ple who know more than they do, have been in it for longer, have learned more and have bet­ter skills.

You know, there are mar­kets out there that are crowded but guess what, they aren’t crowded with the kind of peo­ple that have direct mar­ket­ing savvy. They don’t, you know, they don’t have good ads. Just like that first golf ad, that was the first really good direct response golf ad that has ever appeared in Golf Digest or Golf Mag­a­zine or Golf Tips, ever.

And it just — it was — you talk about low hang­ing fruit, it was like you walked through the orchard blind­folded and you just pull your shirt out and the fruit drops in, you know, it was just massive.

And then of course other peo­ple caught on and this has hap­pened with sev­eral mar­kets I’ve been in, you know, it actu­ally changes the nature, the look of the mag­a­zine as more and more peo­ple start real­iz­ing, well, copy works and I can’t get away with the bull­shit Madi­son Avenue type of ad they were using before. So, things start to change, so. Does that answer your ques­tions? Did I go off on a tangent?

Michel: No, no, no, no, that was per­fect. I was just men­tion­ing a lit­tle bit ear­lier about some­thing you teach a lot is the power of per­son­al­iza­tion and you were talk­ing bowl­ing ear­lier and going after the, you know, the easy pickings.

John: Right.

Michel: Well, I think, I think one time you men­tioned about if you’re try­ing to sell a bowl­ing prod­uct to, you know, bowlers — any kind of one spe­cific type indus­try is always going to be pas­sion­ate about that one indus­try. You know, peo­ple that fish, the golf­ing indus­try, etc., etc., but you were say­ing some­thing like, if you can even be more spe­cific, like rather than say­ing, dear bowler, you say, dear left handed arthritic bowler.

John: Yeah, right.

Michel: To do that.

John: Keep knock­ing it down, keep, you know, you know, the best list you’re always going to mail to is the house list that loves you dearly.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: And every step you take away from that you’re going to have up the ante a lit­tle bit, it’s not going to be so easy to sell your­self to them. You know, even to your house list, by the way, seller per­son­al­iza­tion, you know, never for­get that people’s lives are like 15 year old girls, you know, a 15 year old girl’s life will change three times in an after­noon because so much stuff is hap­pen­ing. Your — The per­son you’re writ­ing to, he may have just bought some­thing from you for $1,000.00, but tomor­row he’s not going to remem­ber your name, necessarily.

Michel: Right.

John: So don’t take that kind of stuff for granted. There’s too much stuff going on. You know, there’s — get­ting back to that 15 year old girl, she may have loved Brit­tney Spears yes­ter­day, Brit­tney Spears is old news, you know, tomor­row, you know, that kind of thing. You just — It changes so rapidly and you’ve to, you know, you’ve to keep re-​​establishing your­self in the, in your buyer’s mind.

That’s where really know­ing your USP comes down, you know, just talk about the unique sales posi­tion that you’re in, unique, that’s, you know, how you fit into this person’s life as the go-​​to guy, essen­tially as the per­son they should be going to.

Michel: If you use those detec­tions and you can’t seem to find any­thing unique, then man­u­fac­ture it.

John: Well, you can do that or, you know, when you start think­ing in that way. You know, I never rec­om­mend that peo­ple lie, I think that’s -

Michel: That’s not what I meant.

John: Yeah, but I’m kind of clar­i­fy­ing that because it almost sounded like you did.

Michel: Okay.

John: You know, you don’t want to — you know, you don’t want to start — Peo­ple think it’s so easy to lie, and that just puts you in a whole dif­fer­ent group of mar­keters and shame on you and all the hor­ri­ble things that will hap­pen to you should hap­pen to you if you lie.

But the rea­son you shouldn’t lie is also, you don’t need to, there’s always some­thing there, you know. That’s why I use the exam­ple of, you know, Dave Thomas, the dull bor­ing guy, you know, he’s nev­er­the­less, some­body that stands out, some­body that peo­ple trust. You have — Every­body has a story.

I wish we had some time, that’s prob­a­bly another call, to get into the art of sto­ry­telling. Most peo­ple think they can’t tell a story. It’s because they just don’t try.

You know, yeah, if you’ve never told a story in your life or if you never got to talk around the table, you know, the din­ner table at home or you always had older sib­lings who told you to shut up, then yeah, your first cou­ple of attempts at telling a story are going to bomb.

Michel: Right.

John: But each one’s going to get bet­ter and bet­ter and, you know, sto­ry­telling is so essen­tial to the human, you know, the human expe­ri­ence, espe­cially in mod­ern days, that the more you think about it and the more you actu­ally try it, it’s — it just hap­pens quickly. It hap­pens very, very quickly.

It’s like the first time you try to wad up a piece of paper and throw it across the room into the trash­can. Yeah, you might miss, espe­cially if you have no skills like that, but the third, fourth or the fifth time you’re going to get closer and pretty soon you’re going to be nail­ing that thing, you know.

So just — Peo­ple are so afraid of a lit­tle bit of dis­ci­pline. You know, I’m one of the lazi­est guys on the planet and a lit­tle bit of dis­ci­pline goes so far, and espe­cially when you say, okay, that didn’t work, let’s try it again, well let’s try it again, and have some fun with it.

Start mov­ing away from your com­fort zone. You know, branch out a lit­tle bit, spread your wings, stop being timid, just be bold. And one of the best things you can do to be bold in your mar­ket is to real­ize if you have a prod­uct of value then there’s no rea­son at all why you shouldn’t be just as bold as the bold­est guy out there because you can stand up with pride and say, I have some­thing that is going to change your life, I really can.

And then back it up, tell your story, give your cred­i­bil­ity, your tes­ti­mony, let other peo­ple brag for you.

Michel: Just to clar­ify what I meant by man­u­fac­tur­ing, is to cre­ate some­thing and maybe to even cre­ate either a new prod­uct or add a dif­fer­ent twist in order to match a spe­cific mar­ket or to change your offer by adding some­thing to it or tak­ing some­thing away to make it unique.

John: Absolutely, great idea.

Michel: It’s the story of the Mon­a­han broth­ers with Domi­noes Pizza, you know. Thirty min­utes to your door or it’s free kind of a hook.

John: Right.

Michel: And that’s what I meant by man­u­fac­tur­ing, is that if you really can’t find one -

John: Right.

Michel: — you know, you could cre­ate it. I’m not say­ing lying, I’m not say­ing cre­ate it in your copy, I’m talk­ing about the hook itself. You can cre­ate it so that it makes it unique.

John: That’s a very good point. In fact, you know, it’s funny I didn’t know it was the Mon­a­han broth­ers, so I knew that some­body had to do that 30 minute thing, I didn’t know it was them, but you know it and so, you know, that’s part of your home­work as part of Oper­a­tion Money Suck is to, you know, know enough of that stuff to have it a func­tional part of your plan, of your mar­ket planning.

So if you sit back and say, what have — you know, just come up with — to start off your mar­ket­ing come up with ten ideas that peo­ple used, just like you said, Domi­noes was in a mar­ket that was crowded, all they had was pizza, it wasn’t even nec­es­sar­ily bet­ter than any­body else’s, but they knew that peo­ple wanted it fast and they were get­ting it in like an hour and a half, they were get­ting cold pizza in an hour and a half.

Michel: Right.

John: How can we posi­tion our­selves. And do it some ways that other peo­ple are doing it, you know, Coke against Pepsi, just think about the var­i­ous things. This will help you read books on mar­ket­ing and not be bored by them.

You shouldn’t be bored by them any­way, but some of them are kind of bor­ing, but if you’re think­ing, you know, how does this apply to me? How can I take the les­son here, you know, like the old — one of the famous is Claude Hop­kins writ­ing for Schlitz Beer, you know.

Michel: Yeah, right.

John: Schlitz Beer was just like very other beer, but he sat down and he said, and he went and he inter­viewed peo­ple and he came back and said Schlitz Beer is made with pure spring water and it’s puri­fied six times through a, you know, pure cop­per, what­ever, he went on and on and on.

Michel: Yeah, he said it was sterilized.

John: He didn’t men­tion that all beer was made that way at the same time. So he just came out and said — the other beer man­u­fac­tur­ers squealed like stuck pigs, we do that too, but it was too late. They came in with me too and other peo­ple were talk­ing about fresh beer, they were talk­ing about Schlitz. You still there?

Michel: Yeah, sorry, just dropped my phone here. As you’re talk­ing I stand up a lot, when­ever I’m on these tele­sem­i­nars I don’t sit down, I usu­ally walk because I can — I think bet­ter on my feet. And -

John: I do the same thing.

Michel: And it’s strange because this ties to what we’re talk­ing about. Very often, when you were talk­ing about stalk­ing your computer -

John: Uh huh.

Michel: — I do that. I very much do that.

John: Yeah, it’s like a preda­tor hunt­ing prey, you know, and your prey really is the per­son that you’re after, but the medium you’re going to go through is that com­puter. He’s the mas­ter of your dominion.

Michel: Yeah, well the thing is it’s pure sales­man­ship, really. And one of the things in sales­man­ship I was taught when I started out my career from my men­tor in those days was the abil­ity to think on your feet. And it’s noth­ing to do with wit, per se, but the abil­ity for exam­ple, to over­come objec­tions and the abil­ity to be able to be ready for any kind of killing ques­tion, objec­tion, whatever.

And very often, when I’m on my feet, when I’m stand­ing up, it’s the same thing as if I’m speak­ing at a sem­i­nar or I’m on the phone or when I’m think­ing about what I’m going to write in terms of my copy, I usu­ally tend to stand up, I walk around and I get all these things and these ideas going in my head, not because it’s what I really want to talk about but it’s sort of these lit­tle spring­boards from which the whole copy and the whole hook and the whole sales pitch and the flow of the sales pitch will come from.

John: Right.

Michel: And I think sto­ry­telling is so impor­tant, you were men­tion­ing that. And I think we should spend almost an entire call on that because this is some­thing I’ve been teach­ing for God knows how long is all great copy­writ­ers and all — are great sales peo­ple but the one com­mon denom­i­na­tor from both copy­writ­ers and sales peo­ple is that they’re great storytellers.

John: That’s true.

Michel: And if you can tell a com­pelling story, heck, very hon­estly when I first started out I always bombed. But when I got bet­ter it wasn’t because I had got­ten bet­ter it’s because I was notic­ing how peo­ple, their body lan­guage was chang­ing when I was telling the story.

John: Right.

Michel: What thing I said to cause them to lean for­ward, to rub their chins, what have you.

John: Right.

Michel: And then I real­ized, and this comes back right exactly down to what you were say­ing about the pas­sion­ate sweet spot, when you’re telling a story, first of all you get them hooked with your story but to keep them hooked is to tap into that pas­sion­ate sweet spot, and I think if you tell your story — talk­ing about sto­ries here, this guy comes up to me and he had a copy, his name was Mark. He cre­ated a soft­ware — He was one of those guys that goes to these, you know, self-​​helpmotivational seminars.

John: Right.

Michel: And he had a soft­ware that helped you track your goals. And I cri­tiqued his copy and his copy was not bad, but when I dug deeper I found out that this guy used to be a geek for bil­lion dol­lar com­pa­nies like, I can’t remem­ber the names, but like Hertz and all that stuff.

John: Right.

Michel: And I found out that his strength was mak­ing sys­tems or cre­at­ing soft­ware processes that would bring nor­mal tra­di­tional busi­ness processes that took weeks to cre­ate or to do down to sec­onds, you know, almost.

And I thought, there’s your hook. So we talked about the story in his copy and said, if I can do this for bil­lion dol­lar com­pa­nies, wow, what can I do for peo­ple — ordi­nary peo­ple like you and me try­ing to reach goals.

John: Right.

Michel: I can help you, you know, squeeze your goalachieve­ment time down to what­ever, you know, a frac­tion or what­ever the case may be. But the power of his story was so — it was so huge. And I think that every­body has that story in them.

John: Exactly, espe­cially when you’re really pas­sion­ate about it. One of the prob­lems that peo­ple have is that they have trou­ble, like the accoun­tant com­ing home to a, you know, to a wife who doesn’t want to hear about it. You know, they think, well, I don’t have any­thing inter­est­ing to say. That changes.

If you go to a con­ven­tion of accoun­tants, you know, and I’ve actu­ally, I’ve actu­ally been in a bar once with a bunch of accoun­tants when they’re drink­ing, I mean they are, they are wild. To us it’s so deadly dull, but to them, their eyes are light­ing up, they’re like, oh, oh, I can top that. And, you know, you can just see the pas­sion com­ing out about what, to the rest of us is the most bor­ing thing in the world.

You know, it’s just, you know, you’ve just to, if you can just tap, you can be a lot less skilled sales­man if you tap into the pas­sion and you offer some­thing of value.

A lot of other stuff can fall by the way­side, a lot of the tech­niques and tac­tics and stuff, because basi­cally if you can, you know, if there’s a bunch of peo­ple and they’re all nois­ier than you and they’re louder and they’re taller and they’re bet­ter look­ing and they have stuff, you know, even­tu­ally, if you can just be heard just a lit­tle bit and what you have fits bet­ter with what the peo­ple want, then you know you’re going to do okay, you’re going to get some­thing going there.

Then you can get — you know, I talk about the three dif­fer­ent kinds of copy there is. You know, there’s bad copy, mediocre copy and then there’s world-​​class copy, and the rea­son I divide it that way is, you know, bad copy just makes you go broke.

You know, there’s, so there’s bad copy and then you’re gone, you’re out of there. The world-​​class copy is every­thing above a home­run. In other words, what we all want to hit is that thing that the ad runs over and over again, that keeps, con­tin­ues to pull and gets the busi­ness just mov­ing for­ward either quickly or at light speed or whatever.

Every­thing else is mediocre.

And the — and while bad copy will mur­der your bot­tom line, mediocre copy will just break your heart because you know you’re only get­ting a drib­ble of what you should be get­ting if you had world class copy out there.

So, but still with mediocre copy you can sur­vive off it. And then start to build your skills, start to get that stuff up, but you’ve got to get some­thing out there right away. So the best way to do that is to tap into the pas­sion of your mar­ket and share that passion.

Okay, we’re about at the, I show about the 10 min­utes left, is that right?

Michel: Yeah.

John: Okay. I — Is it okay, I wanted to tell peo­ple they could get something.

Michel: Yeah, absolutely, go ahead. I apol­o­gize because a lot of this stuff, we’re pas­sion­ate about our craft.

John: Well, you know, I never get to talk about this stuff — well, I do actu­ally, I talk about it all the time, but you know, I’m on the phone, I call peo­ple up. I have a phone net­work of peo­ple, you know, Hal­bert and a lot of other writ­ers and other mar­keters, you know, just hours go by and I don’t even real­ize it because we’re talk­ing about some­thing that we truly, you know, share a pas­sion about. So -

Michel: ****

John: I was just going to say, I was — I have a bunch of cas­settes here from the Scut­tle­butt Inter­view series I did, and I’d just like to offer some peo­ple, I think it’s some­thing that’s kind of relevant.

I inter­viewed a lot of movers and shak­ers and if you will — if these peo­ple will just send me their snail mail address, I need that because I’m send­ing the actual prod­uct, my email is john@​marketingrebel.​com and just give me your snail mail address and your name, I’ll send you a cas­sette of me and Gary Hal­bert shuck­ing and jiv­ing on prob­a­bly what I think is the num­ber one les­son of world class busi­ness, and it’s some­thing I touched on before and the name of the tape is The Go-​​To Guy and we both talked about this so much over the years when we talked that I finally said, we’ve got to get this down on tape.

And I have about 50 copies of this thing here, it’s a cas­sette. I know that’s a has­sle for some peo­ple but that’s what we got. And so the first 50 peo­ple that email to me, I’ll keep track of it and I’ll send out this cas­sette to you. No problem.

After 50 I have other cas­settes, I have to dig into my — into the scut­tle­butt tape archive, but I’ve got cas­settes by Dan Kennedy, I’ve got other ones by Hal­bert and me and a bunch of really great stuff cov­er­ing top­ics like pros­per­ing in a rot­ten econ­omy, that was me and Gary talking.

This is great, six really easy ways to screw up your busi­ness, me and Jeff. Clas­sic sales­man­ship, the secrets, that’s a great one with Sam Fishbine.

Dan Kennedy and I talk about the secrets to suc­cess is to scare most peo­ple half to death. So we were, you know, these were very spe­cific things, I was very happy. And the prod­uct, you know, is some­thing I offer but I wanted to give away some­thing free for the peo­ple on this call because I know they sat through two hours of blab­ber­ing and I wanted to reward them.

There’s a few peo­ple on the call, I think, who are already in my world, a lot of peo­ple from my hot list knew about this. I wanted to thank them for sit­ting in and I hope you learned some­thing. That’s about all I’ve got to say.

We thanked Peter Stone, didn’t we? He, you know, actu­ally sold me on doing this. We had a con­ver­sa­tion a cou­ple of weeks ago, what, it’s peter​stonecopy​.com.

Michel: Peter​stonecopy​.com, absolutely.

John: Yeah, you know, I was happy that he kind of lit a fire under my ass, you know; Michael, you and I have had email con­tact but we’ve never really explored ways that we can help each other out or actu­ally spread the word or get, you know, do this kind of stuff.

And you know, this stuff is fun, I mean, and it’s nec­es­sary. And it’s not, you know, it’s — we’re not all going to be around for­ever, and there’s a lot of really bad infor­ma­tion out there.

Michel: Yeah.

John: So to get the chance to clar­ify stuff and to bring home the truth, you know, it’s a won­der­ful thing. So I’ve got to thank Peter for light­ing a fire under my butt.

Michel: Well, he’s one of the guys, you know, there’s only a few — and when I say guys, I mean gals, too, because I know Lori’s, she’s another copy­writer and so many other peo­ple that I know in my entourage, and Peter’s one of those guys. He’s really the guy that got it.

John: Uh huh.

Michel: Give you a small exam­ple, one time there was some­body — I have a form for copy­writ­ers. And we all con­gre­gate and we sort of give our­selves mini cri­tiques. And one per­son asked a sim­ple ques­tion and Peter gave a lit­tle sug­ges­tion that lit­er­ally dou­bled, I think it was 117 per­cent his response ratio. I’m talk­ing about increase here.

John: Uh huh.

Michel: And that’s just one of the many, many things that Peter does. So Peter is a great copy­writer in his own right, and he’s, he’s also my go-​​to guy. And if you want to get the scut­tle­butt tape, I have that tape by the way.

John: Oh.

Michel: And a few oth­ers too, John.

John: Yes.

Michel: But I think you sent it with your insid­ers or I have it from buy­ing videos from Hal­bert or some­thing, but -

John: Yeah, I’ve sent them out, and I’ve got a pile here. I was think­ing about what I could offer here and I saw this pile, we have about 50 there, so — but even after 50 I will honor send­ing one of the scut­tle­butt tapes to people.

That first one, the go-​​go guy, just so impor­tant because it’s a mis­un­der­stood con­cept about what it is to be a go-​​to guy, what it is to have go-​​to guys in your life and the impor­tance of both hav­ing and being and under­stand­ing the nature of the go-​​to guy.

Because most peo­ple sort of wan­der through life like they’re in a pin­ball game, you know, they just kind of bounce from one thing to the other. And to get ahead, to really set­tle down and get your, you know, your focus and every­thing going and put oper­a­tion money into full bloom, you’ve got to under­stand what it takes to move quickly, effi­ciently and with, you know, money mak­ing vigor through life.

And it’s not the skills that you came out of school with, it’s not the skills that you learn in most busi­nesses and it’s not the skills that you come across nat­u­rally, you have to learn these.

Most peo­ple have to be shown these things. They have to come across them in life. That’s why guys like us, who offer this stuff out there, our stuff really is guidelines.

I, you know, I have no trou­ble at all stand­ing up on a stage in front of a thou­sand peo­ple and just telling them, you need to get this stuff right now, it’s mine, it’s going to cost you, but here it is. I have no trou­ble with that because I have some­thing of value.

Michel, you’re in the same posi­tion. You know, there’s no embar­rass­ment, there’s no, you know, think­ing, well, I’m really sorry to have to be pitch­ing this, screw that.

You know, if you’re in busi­ness and you want to make mon­eyand you want the inde­pen­dence that comes with hav­ing the skills like copy­writ­ing, like under­stand­ing mar­ket­ing, like being a go-​​to guy and under­stand­ing how all this stuff fits together, you know, you’re an idiot not to buy every­thing you can.

You know, peo­ple — one of the big mis­takes rook­ies make is that they think, oh, geez, this is a hun­dred bucks, this is two hun­dred bucks or it’s a thou­sand bucks or what­ever it is, gosh, how am I going to fit that into my bud­get. Well, you know, if you’re buy­ing the right stuff from the right guys, and there are a few of us out there, it’s not an expense, it’s an investment.

Michel: Absolutely.

John: And that invest­ment pays off some­times the same day, like you just men­tioned — Peter Stone just men­tioned one thing. Most of my tes­ti­mo­ni­als that I run on my mar​ket​ingrebel​.com web site, you know, there’s a whole bunch of those, peo­ple say, hey, that one tip you gave me just quadru­pled sales, you know, that one word change in the head­line just, you know, dou­bled response, you know, things like that. And that’s because these things are so pow­er­ful. You know, these lit­tle things.

And you know, once you learn that trick you can use it again, and then if you learn another trick then guess what, you’ve started your own lit­tle bag of tricks there.

Michel: That’s some­thing that I’ve learned a lot from you, John, is that gun to the head mentality.

John: Right. Yeah, you’re right.

Michel: And a lot of peo­ple have — There are a lot of rook­ies have to have that in order to get to the point of world-​​class copy, is to think or to have or even force your­self to have a gun to the head almost.

John: That’s right.

Michel: And the think­ing process -

John: You know, it’s like these calls, you know how pumped up you and I get.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: I think a lot of peo­ple lis­ten­ing to this also get pumped up. Hey, use that. It will go away. In a few days your enthu­si­asm may start to lag and your moti­va­tion starts going, you may start think­ing, ah, geez, but you know one of the things — one of the rea­sons that copy­writ­ers, top copy­writ­ers talk to each other and, you know, walk around and spend two hours on the phone is because we thrive on that kind of, on that moti­va­tion, we thrive on that feel­ing of being pumped up, you know, and you know, being part of the network.

We’re always pump­ing each other up. Halbert’s call­ing me all the time to pump him up and I call him all the time. And there’s, you know, a dozen other guys I call and we talk to.

And it’s like you and I were talk­ing about music before, you know, we were trad­ing emails about music. I mean it’s just, after I talked to you, I went out, you know you men­tioned the Stones and I went out and lis­tened to the Rolling Stones for an hour -

Michel: Great.

John: — and I just got all pumped up again, you know. We thrive on this stuff. Because it can get you down. Because sit­ting in an office all day or think­ing about how you’re going to make money from your site and just, you know, just — if today is the same as yes­ter­day and the same as the day before and it looks like it’s going to be the same tomor­row, then there’s no pas­sion going on there.

You know, a really vibrant busi­ness, things are hap­pen­ing, things are hop­ping and it’s kind of, it’s the feel­ing you get when you write an ad, you sit down and you get excited about it and you think you’ve hit it and you send it out and you get to see what that lit­tle puppy does in the real world. There’s no other feel­ing like that.

Michel: Absolutely.

John: So I guess we’re at the two-​​hour mark.

Michel: That’s per­fectly fine, we’ll end it here. But before I do that I just want to repeat a cou­ple of things and I want to — First of all, I want to thank you, John.

Man, it’s always a plea­sure to talk either with you or on a sem­i­nar like this because you’re not only a wealth of knowl­edge but, you know, you were talk­ing about the pas­sion­ate sweet spot, well you’ve hit mine by talk­ing the way you talk and it’s just so incred­i­ble because the infor­ma­tion you give is, I mean, I’ve been writ­ing copy for 15 years.

I’ve bro­ken records and I still learn every sin­gle day and I still learned today on today’s call. And I’m the first per­son to admit that. And I want to thank you so much for tak­ing some time. And peo­ple, if you want that free tape from John, please send your snail mail address to john@​marketingrebel.​com.

John: I also wanted to say, I started my Blog today. It’s — you know I was talk­ing about get­ting involved in some of the geekier stuff. I actu­ally started a Blog. I don’t know how often I’m going to be putting it up there, but I think we’re going to be putting it up there a fair amount, and that’s at john​-carl​ton​.com. If any­one wants to just check that out and maybe book­mark it and go back and see what kind of blath­er­ings I’m going to have on that.

Michel: And Carl­ton with­out the E.

John: Yes, john-​​carlton. I noticed in a past thing you put the E in. Dan Kennedy is still putting the E in my name after 15 years. You know, it’s — What’s great about the peo­ple that are in this is that we, you know, when you start get­ting involved in the per­son­al­i­ties and stuff of the peo­ple in mar­ket­ing, it really is fun.

It’s just a pas­sion­ate group of peo­ple who are mov­ing and shak­ing and doing a lot of stuff. And you know, the abil­ity to get invited to that big damn round­table of insid­ers is just a mat­ter of suc­ceed­ing. It’s just a mat­ter of get­ting down and work­ing at it and share that pas­sion to the point where at some point you are one of the guys.

Michel: Oh, yeah. Many of the sem­i­nars that I go to, that I even speak at, the bulk of my busi­ness is not done in that sem­i­nar room or even on stage.

John: Right.

Michel: It’s in the hall­ways, it’s at the restau­rant, at the bars. At that sem­i­nar, it’s out­side. It’s, you know, it’s where we share the pas­sion rather than just being in a sem­i­nar room.

John: Yeah. The big mar­ket­ing group hug.

Michel: Yeah.

John: All right, lis­ten, this was great, really enjoyed it, I think my voice is about to go. I hear yours about to go.

Michel: Absolutely.

John: So what do we do, do we just hang up or?

Michel: Well, this is what we’re going to do, we’re going to hang up but I want to thank every­body. Thank you so much for being on this call, it’s been an amaz­ing call and thanks to Peter Stone, the pro­ducer of this call, peter​stonecopy​.com.

John, of course, your web site is mar​ket​ingrebel​.com. Mine is the​copy​doc​tor​.com. And hope­fully we’ll see you again on another call. Thanks, John.

John: Okay.

Michel: Good­night folks.

John: Okay, bye, bye.

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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