Michel Fortin Interview Part 1 of 5

Ralph Zuran­ski: Hi, this is Ralph Zuran­ski. I’m on the phone with Michel Fortin. He’s one of the lead­ing copy­writ­ers in the world today. He is so suc­cess­ful in his writ­ing that he’s helped a num­ber of the Inter­net mar­keters achieve $1 mil­lion dol­lar days in sales.

He has been at a num­ber of the Inter­net con­fer­ences. Michel Fortin knows more about copy­writ­ing and test­ing copy than any­body that I’ve ever met.

I think that’s one of the rea­sons why he’s such a great teacher and also such a great copy­writer. He tests every aspect of copy­writ­ing to find out what works. I know that most of the time, on any of the copy­writ­ing pieces that he cre­ates, he has four or five tests that all run simul­ta­ne­ously… the color, the fonts, the place­ment of images.

It is truly amaz­ing. He is a copy­writ­ing scientist.

How are you doing today, Michel?

Michel Fortin: I’m doing well, Ralph. Thank you very much for asking.

Ralph Zuran­ski: I really appre­ci­ate you tak­ing your busy time. I know you get thou­sands of emails a day. You’re in incred­i­ble demand. I hope that’s not all spam.

Michel Fortin: Oh, actu­ally those are real emails. I prob­a­bly get two or three thou­sand emails that include spam.

Ralph Zuran­ski: Well, I remem­ber that you’re one of the first peo­ple to help vol­un­teer with the “In Search of Heroes” pro­gram back at the big sem­i­nar when I put the wrong name on your photo.

Michel Fortin: Yes, that’s right.

Ralph Zuran­ski: I was so embar­rassed. You con­tacted me and said you’ve got some­body else’s name on my photo. I think that endeared your­self to me imme­di­ately. I was so embarrassed.

Michel Fortin: Well, I didn’t mind it so much. The other guy was a lit­tle bit bet­ter look­ing than me.

Ralph Zuran­ski: What is your def­i­n­i­tion of heroism?

Michel Fortin: If some­body goes out there and does one tiny lit­tle thing that makes some kind of a change in the world it is good. It doesn’t have to be a huge legacy-​​type thing.

It could be one tiny lit­tle thing, like going to an orphan­age and just spend­ing ten min­utes with an orphan. Or you go to a seniors’ home. Or you see some­body who’s try­ing to cross the street and has dif­fi­culty. Whether it’s a per­son who has some kind of hand­i­cap or even a per­son who is fear­ful. You help them cross the street.

Michel Fortin: To me that’s some­body who’s a hero. They impressed in that one person’s tiny lit­tle time­frame of their life, that lit­tle grain of dust, some­thing that means a lot to them.

You know, there’s an old proverb, an old story of a per­son who was walk­ing along the beach. And they saw starfishes that were beached. They took one and threw it back into the ocean.

And the other per­son said, “you know, how can you make a dif­fer­ence when there’s so many of these starfishes on the beach?” He said, “Well, I made a dif­fer­ence with that one.”

And that’s the point! You don’t have to be a huge suc­cess. You don’t have to do some tremen­dous thing in order to be a hero. You can do some­thing that is a blink in eter­nity, that can mean some­thing to some­one. To me, that’s a hero.

Ralph Zuran­ski: Yeah, and boy that’s true. Gre­gory Alan Williams, a per­son that wrote a book about sav­ing a man’s life in the L.A. riots, says “There’s a lit­tle bit of good in the worst of us and a lit­tle bit of bad in the best of us. When some­body just does some­thing good for some­body else, they actu­ally become a hero.”

Michel Fortin: Absolutely.

Ralph Zuran­ski: Does that fit your definition?

Michel Fortin: Absolutely. Oh, yeah. You know, one thing I do, for exam­ple, when I go to a sem­i­nar. Whether I’m a speaker or just some­body in the audi­ence and some­body comes up to me and asks me one sim­ple ques­tion, I spend time with them.

Now, it could be some­thing business-​​related, but it also could be some­thing in terms of the sem­i­nar. It could be some­thing as easy as what kind of, what do you think about the speak­ers, whatever.

You know, those are things of course, but the thing is that per­son val­ues my opin­ion. What­ever I say I am going to make a dif­fer­ence… maybe not in that person’s entire life. I may make a dif­fer­ence in that person’s day or that person’s, next hour. But, I made a dif­fer­ence and that’s what a hero is, to make a dif­fer­ence… big or small.

Ralph Zuran­ski: Yeah, that’s one of the things that really impressed me. You took the time. No mat­ter how many peo­ple came up to you at the dif­fer­ent con­fer­ences, you always drop what you’re doing. You made sure you devel­oped a rela­tion­ship with that per­son. That’s pretty rare for some­body that’s attained the fame that you have in this industry.

Michel Fortin: Well, there is some point where I’m about to burst. I need to take some time out. Ralph, it has hap­pened to you.

But, I can tell you that I truly believe in the Will Rogers dogma where he says that he finds a lit­tle bit of some­thing inter­est­ing in every sin­gle per­son he meets.

And that’s true. I meet peo­ple where that per­son may be to a degree, in my busi­ness, insignif­i­cant. But “holy geez,” when you spend just five min­utes talk­ing with that per­son you’ve either made a dif­fer­ence in that person’s life, and that makes you feel good, or that per­son might have given you one tiny lit­tle tid­bit of an idea… some infor­ma­tion, feed­back that will make a dif­fer­ence in your life

To me, I don’t want to lose those oppor­tu­ni­ties. Every sin­gle per­son I meet I will try. I can­not guar­an­tee, but I will try to spend some time with each and every person.

That’s why I think that’s cru­cial. You don’t want to block­ade your­self because the biggest amount of learn­ing I have made in a sem­i­nar is in the hall­ways, in the bars, in the restau­rants, out­side the sem­i­nar when peo­ple are chat­ting and smok­ing or what­ever the case may be.

Those are the oppor­tu­ni­ties for you to learn a lit­tle some­thing that can make a dra­matic dif­fer­ence in your busi­ness. If some­body passes you by and even if you just needed to take 30 sec­onds, you miss that oppor­tu­nity. You could have made either a lot of money or changed your life, made you hap­pier at least for that day.

Ralph Zuran­ski: Boy, isn’t that true? Well, I know that you had a pretty rough child­hood. Did you ever cre­ate a secret hero in your mind that helped you deal with those difficulties?

Michel Fortin: Well, not nec­es­sar­ily. I have been on the Inter­net for quite a long time. And the date was pre-​​Internet, like Bul­letin board ser­vices and stuff like that. There were some games that I used to play like Dun­geons and Dragons.

One of the things that I loved about play­ing those kinds of games was peo­ple didn’t know who I really was. So peo­ple didn’t have to dis­ap­prove of me because I had this huge fear of rejec­tion, this huge need for approval when I was grow­ing up because of the abuse of my childhood.

Michel Fortin: So the peo­ple, the friends that I’ve made on those Bul­letin board ser­vices, even though I was lost, I really wasn’t a socia­ble per­son… a quasi-​​agoraphobic, I guess those peo­ple were my heroes.

Those peo­ple were the peo­ple who every time I logged in, and I remem­ber hav­ing a 300 baud modem in those days on a Radio Shack Color Com­puter 64, which is com­pa­ra­ble to the Com­modore 64 with a one-​​line text browser where you type in one line of text. You press “Enter” and it takes about 15 min­utes for you to respond.

Well, those peo­ple were my heroes. And later on as I grew up and became a teenager, there was a gen­tle­man who became a men­tor of mine. He was a big fan of moti­va­tional speak­ers, spir­i­tual thinkers, psy­chol­o­gists and peo­ple who actu­ally have made dif­fer­ences in the lives of other peo­ple. So, I became a fanat­i­cal stu­dent of Jim Rohn.

Jim Rohn is prob­a­bly the pre­miere gen­tle­man who has made changes in my life. In my busi­ness life it was Dan Kennedy, who’s also a big believer in hav­ing a pos­i­tive men­tal atti­tude, in mak­ing the best out of your day.

So those were my, I guess if you want to call them secret heroes. They were my heroes. You know, I’ll give you an exam­ple. There is a quote that’s hang­ing above my desk.

I’m look­ing at it right now as I speak to you, Ralph. It’s been hang­ing there for almost a decade. It’s from Jim Rohn and it says, “There are some things you don’t have to know how it works. The main thing is that it works. While some peo­ple are study­ing the roots, oth­ers are pick­ing the fruit. Life or suc­cess or what­ever you want to call it, it just depends on which end of this you want to get in on.”

And that, to me, changed my life around because I was always over­an­a­lyz­ing. I was always try­ing to per­fect. I was always try­ing to fig­ure out ways to deal with the cer­tain prob­lems I had when I was grow­ing up as a child.

And that made me real­ize just do what needs to be done. Do what works and don’t ques­tion it, and that changed my life around.

Ralph Zuran­ski: Well, there’s a real con­tro­versy these days about good­ness, ethics and moral behav­ior. What is your perspective?

Michel Fortin: I can debate about this and we can go into big philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments about what is right, what is morally right and all that stuff. I’m a big believer in some­thing that is very spe­cial to me. It is that we all have three minds.

We have the con­scious mind and the sub­con­scious mind, but we also have the super-​​conscious mind, a term that was orig­i­nally coined by psy­chol­o­gist William James.

What hap­pens is that the super-​​conscious mind, your intu­ition, your con­science, is telling you every sin­gle moment of every sin­gle day what to do. And what is right. And when peo­ple feel shame or guilt or some­thing that makes them feel that they’ve done some­thing wrong. It is not because it’s either wrong or right. It’s sim­ply because it was not in a proper align­ment with their own set of val­ues, their own intu­itions, their own super-​​conscious mind.

If you are in the process of think­ing about doing some­thing, take some time out to think about it twice rather than just going at it. Sure, some­times you need to be expe­di­ent but look at it from the per­spec­tive of, “Is this some­thing that meets and matches my con­science?” “Is this some­thing that I feel is right?” And that’s the point.

We can talk about the arbi­trary gray area of what ethics is and what it isn’t.

I don’t think that it’s a legal thing. It’s not black and white. But, every­body has a con­science. If you really want to do what is good in the world, if you want to do some­thing that’s “eth­i­cal”, it’s not a reli­gious ques­tion and it’s not a moral ques­tion. It is an inner ques­tion. Does it meet your con­science? Does it fol­low your intu­ition? Does it feel right rather than is it just right. Or is it text­book right. Or is it right accord­ing to the law right?

Ralph Zuran­ski: There are cer­tain prin­ci­ples that peo­ple are will­ing to sac­ri­fice their lives for. Are there any prin­ci­ples that you’re will­ing to sac­ri­fice your life for?

Michel Fortin: I think so. The one thing that I believe in terms of prin­ci­ples is, the biggest one is, humil­ity. And it’s some­thing that I’ve learned in the process of my grow­ing up and learn­ing from prob­lems, going through the prob­lems that I went through when I was a child.

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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