Carl: He got this idea for putting Osama Bin Laden’s picture on a t-shirt and he starts selling them by the bushel full. In fact, he was selling so many that he was getting more orders for t-shirts than he had capital to be able to buy them in advance to make them and then be able to deliver them promptly. So, he had to actual borrow some money and he had his dad go around and borrow about $30,000- $40,000 for him so he could have some sort of a buffer and get those things done. How he started this thing, he put up a website called T-Shirt Hell. The last I heard, he had moved from New York City to Malibu Beach. He had a three-story beach house on Malibu Beach. Had someone else running his company for him and they were looking for the first six figure week. That’s week not month. All through the Internet…

Michael: Tell me, what are you finding from your experience today that people really want to know how to do that you can give them some ideas that will help them?

Carl: I think people want to make money and be independent. They want to be independently wealthy -- meaning that they have the freedom to work on their own without having a boss over them who knows less than they do. If they want to go to a movie in the afternoon or to their child’s play in the afternoon that they can do that. If they want to spend time with their family during the afternoon when it’s nice as opposed to only seeing them in the evening when it’s dark and no time left to do any real thing like that. They want to have freedom, the freedom of choice and they want to be able to make good money at the same time. [Music]

Michael: Where were you born?

Carl: I was born in Trenton, New Jersey.

Michael: Do you have brothers and sisters?

Carl: No. I’m an only child.

Michael: What did your parents do?

Carl: My father was a truck driver and my mother worked in a factory, General Motors factory. They were basically uneducated. I think my father went up sixth grade or something. He didn’t even go to junior high school. I think my mother might have even gone to ninth grade or something.

Michael: Was he on the road at lot?

Carl: No, he mostly did local stuff. So, he was very seldom gone for more than a day.

Michael: Were you entrepreneurial as a kid?

Carl: As far as I can remember, I was. I loved technical stuff and electronics when I was about 12 years old; I got my ham radio license. This was odd because at school I’d failed English twice and was getting “Bs” in most of my other subjects and here I was passing a Federal Communications examination that I personally knew people who were 21 and older who were failing it. And it had trigonometry and advanced electronics. That’s because I’m oriented toward things that interest me and I kind of let everything else go by the wayside so to speak. So, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about my teachers in that particular grade, but the very next year I go straight “As,” so it depends on whether I’m interested in it or not. I built my own transmitters and receivers and antennas and all sorts of other…

Michael: So, what the real appeal with that?

Carl: The real appeal is the fact that here you are, you can communicate all around the world either by voice or Morse Code. So, here I was in my little room here in Trenton, New Jersey communicating all around the world.

Michael: Were you doing Morse code?

Carl: Yes, primarily because I didn’t really have enough room for a really good antenna, but I did have a friend of mine who was about a year younger than me and we both got our licenses about the same time and kind of ran into each other on the air.

Michael: Did you do any other entrepreneurial ventures? Did you ever sell anything?

Carl: Yes, I was always looking for something to do. I got those printing catalogs where you’d go around selling printing. I signed up for selling pots and pans door to door, but I never actually did it. I was too young. My mother said you’re not going around selling door to door. 3

Michael: Looking back on it, were you influenced by some of the ads in the back of the magazines?

Carl: I used to read magazines primarily for the ads. To me that was the exciting part of the magazines just because you got to find out all the stuff that was going on. And I learned more from reading ads than I did reading the rest of the magazine.

Michael: Did you order stuff through the mail?

Carl: Yes, occasionally I did. I didn’t have a lot of money as a kid, which probably is why I was so entrepreneurial oriented. I always wanted to know, okay, how can I make more money here. At 12 years old, you don’t have much money and I lusted after all of this expensive ham radio equipment that I couldn’t have. To some degree, it was sated by the fact that my friend had this equipment. So, I’d go over his house and use his equipment and stuff. His father was a doctor, so he could buy virtually anything he wanted. We always did things entrepreneurial together and later, in fact, formed the first computer company that I formed.

Michael: Did you have a good time at college? Was it fun for you?

Carl: It was sort of fun. What appealed to me because I love learning, but I just couldn’t stand being in a classroom; just a regimented, spit back to me what I want you to spit back to me on my exam. And then playing this game of guess what we’re going to put on the exam kind of a thing. To me that just seemed to be a waste of time. I actually did want to be an electronics engineer. The real reason why I wanted to be an electronics engineers is because I wanted to design things so that I could them. My thing was entrepreneurial. I can remember going through Popular Electronics magazines, figuring out what the prices I could get these different parts for so that I could build this thing at a wholesale level and then sell it for a profit.

Michael: What happened next and let’s get into your first experience with all this copywriting?

Carl: Way back in 1964, I had read David Ogilvy’s book Confessions of An Advertising Man and got the advertising bug and started this little ad company one summer as a summer job. But what happened is one summer I didn’t have a summer job, so I decided to sell advertising. So, I came up with this idea to sell advertising on book covers, and sent out this letter to universities offering to give them free book covers with advertising on it. I sent out 100 letters 4 and got four universities to sign up with it. So, that was a four percent response. I was ecstatic. And then I was working for a computer company doing programming. So, I was the 13th employee. It was real small at the time. That branch later became the basis for Exxon office systems. Somewhere along the line there, I started working for another company called Princeton Consultants. About that time I was interested in seminars and I had an idea that there’s a lot of money being spent on seminars and I’d learned a lot from seminars. So, I’d gone to some real estate seminars. I’d gone to some computer seminars. Nothing marketing related, but I said there are a lot of people here spending money; where’s all the money going. I found out what it would cost to rent a place. That’s part of the money, but not the biggest chunk. And then getting speakers, that’s not the biggest chunk either, but it’s part of it. The biggest chunk is in promoting the seminar. So, I decided I needed to know as much about promoting as possible in order to make this doable. So, I began getting interested in that.

Michael: You want to start somewhat of a sales seminar or a seminar business.

Carl: Exactly. I knew that it was a great to learn stuff.

Michael: What year are you at right now?

Carl: We’re in the 80s. We’re about ’87.

Michael: That’s when I first started seeing you in the Gary Halpert seminars, in ’89 and ’88.

Carl: Right, exactly. And so what happened was that I started studying more about copywriting and marketing and stuff. And I had Entrepreneur Magazine, which I’d read religiously. And I always wanted to get these books they had that would tell you how to start all these businesses and stuff. So, I was looking in there and I decided I’m going to get some of these things. I’m going to get the one on seminars. I’m going to get the one -- various other things, I forget what it was. So, I called up to order these things and it turned out that what I wanted to order was almost as much as some special package they had. So, they up sold me to this special package, which is really a good deal because it gave me everything I wanted plus a heck of a lot more for not too much more money. But it was an up sell, and that up sell was designed by Jay Abraham. And as a result of that… 5

Michael: Do you think that up sell was specifically designed by him for Entrepreneur at that time?

Carl: Yes, he did that for Entrepreneur at the time. He was the guy who said take all this information you’ve got in reports and put them into these packages and then up sell them on the telephone. So, I was one of those upsellees and I’m thankful that I was because if I hadn’t done that, I probably wouldn’t have been on the list that Jay Abraham sent out his first promotion for his first newsletter, which was Your Marketing Genius at Work. And I’m sitting there saying $500 for a newsletter. I never spent that much for a newsletter. You paid your $500 up front and got it over 12 months.

Michael: You go that sales letter in the mail?

Carl: Right, and the reason is because I had bought this entrepreneurial package. And so, in one of the things that I read, I read this really great guy’s letter to his son teaching him about marketing. I said this guy is great. By the way, in the beginning I said if I’m going to pay $500 for this, I want to know everything this guy tells me. If he mentions a book, I’m going out and getting it. I’m going to read it. The thing I was impressed with most about Jay was his getting $2,000 an hour for a consultation on the telephone at time. And I said if he can do that, I want to know everything he knows. So, I said I’m going to find out all the books he reads. Whatever he mentions, I’m going to get them. So, he started mentioning some books and I’d go around and call up all over the country trying to get them. They weren’t in the bookstores, so you kind of special ordered and all this good stuff. Some of them were out of print, etc. So, this one guy I had read, I said I really need to call Jay’s office and ask who this guy is because he didn’t say. And within two or three days I get this letter from him. It’s Gary Halpert and he starting his first newsletter. I called up immediately, I said that’s the guy and I knew it was him because he had mentioned the ___ promotion. The reason it’s called Boron is because it’s written from Boron President. The Boron letters were in edited form in Jay’s American Genius at Work, but he didn’t mention who it was, but the Boron letters mentioned the ___ ad. The promotion I got for Gary’s newsletter mention it right on the first page mention the ___ ad, so I put it together. I called up immediately and ordered and Paulette who was his girlfriend at the time answered the phone and signed me up. And later I found out, she said, you were one of our first people. I said yes, I knew exactly who it was and I wanted that good information. So, whenever Jay or Gary would mention a book, I’d go out and I’d track it down. And one of the books they mentioned was the Robert Collier letter book, which was out of print and you could not get it anywhere. So, I devised a system. I went 6 through inter-library loan. I got to be an expert at getting things from inter-library loan. At the time they had a computer system set up where they could find the book in other libraries and order, get it in, and I could take it out for a couple of weeks. And what I’d do is I’d take it out and I’d Xerox it and give it back them and I’d have a Xerox copy for myself. When I got the Robert Collier letter book, it was so great I said I need to get the reprint rights to this. So, I contacted Prentice Hall, got the reprint rights to it and reprinted it.

Michael: Tell me specifically how that process worked. You wanted to get the reprint rights to it…

Carl: I called the company and I actually got lucky because the person I was put together with was preparing to leave the company. I didn’t know what I was doing and I said how does this work. I don’t know. Can you tell me? So, she kind of took pity on me and she gave me the inside information and she said look, here’s what the normal deal is. And so, we did the thing. I had to give them some money up front.

Michael: How much?

Carl: I think I to give them $500 up front and another $500 when I published the book. This is an advance against royalties. But I didn’t know how much royalty I’d have to pay. I forget, I think it was something like 7 ½-8% or whatever.

Michael: Of whatever you sold?

Carl: Yes, the selling price.

Michael: Is this how it probably still works today?

Carl: I know a lot more about it now. You could probably negotiate something between five and ten percent. It depends on the publisher and the book and stuff like that.

Michael: Give me an example. If I wanted to call a publisher and I was interested in -- let’s say I went on Amazon.com. I found a book that’s out of print. Got the publisher. I’d call him up. What would be the best thing to say? How to approach them?

Carl: First you have to find out whether they have any intentions of publishing it again. If they don’t, then you can negotiate something with them. If they do, then it’s going to be real difficult because they’ve already got plans. You’re going to have a deal that’s so 7 lucrative that they’re going to put their plans on hold, which is not an impossibility because they’re always looking for better ways to use their money. They usually don’t republish backlist stuff. Backlist is stuff that they’ve already promoted. The way book companies work now a days is because of the tax laws -- and I know this guy Don Lancaster who has go like 28 books published says that the IRS is responsible for burning more books than Hitler ever did. Because of the structure of the tax laws, it makes more sense for them to destroy the books at the end of the year than to carry them over and pay taxes on them because they have to pay taxes on the full retail value of them. It only costs them five or ten percent of the retail, so the taxes end up being more than the cost to print the book. What this gal informed me of is at the time, we’re talking about the late 80’s I think, $1,000 was a typical up front royalty fee and you paid half on signing the contract and the other half when you actually printed the book; when it was actually published. And then, of course, you had to make royalty payments if the royalty went above $1,000. So, you do that and then you negotiate what the royalty payment is. And that can be anything from five to ten percent. Sometimes it’s also whether it’s based on the retail price or the wholesale price. But the publishers are not stupid. They do this themselves. They’d rather have it based on the retail price to get as much as they can. And then they negotiate for the author. They have an arrangement with the authors.

Michael: All right. So, you negotiated the Robert Collier letter book?

Carl: Right. And got that printed and start selling that because you couldn’t get it anywhere. And very few people knew to get it through inter-library loan. And if anybody knew about that, then those copies would be in constant circulation.

Michael: Were you the guy really responsible for kind of brining Robert Collier back?

Carl: Yes, definitely because before that people couldn’t get a hold of the book. Jay and Gary would say you got to get the Robert Collier letter book no matter what you do. Go to the Library of Congress and take it out. Well, who is going to go to the Library of Congress in Washington and take it out and read the book? That’s an expensive proposition. So, reprinting the book was a real service.

Michael: That was the first one you got the reprint rights to?

Carl: Yes. 8

Michael: I know that you were selling them. You had gotten in with Jay or Gary Halpert where you were a source for hard to find books.

Carl: Yes and they’d refer people to me to buy the Robert Collier letter book. And when people would call, I’d say, by the way, are you looking for any of those other books they’re recommending? Most of them weren’t out of print, but they were hard to get. So, I’d contact the distributor and buy them at wholesale and resell them.

Michael: So, you had a little hard to find book business.

Carl: Exactly.

Michael: So, you ___ to devour everything in that Marketing Genius at Work?

Carl: Right.

Michael: So, you devoured that. Now you’re on Gary Halpert’s newsletter. Had you gone to any other seminars yet?

Carl: I had gone to one of Jay’s $5,000 seminars that was in New Jersey for coin dealers.

Michael: The coin dealer boot camp?

Carl: Right. I started doing some copywriting at time and was getting good because I was listening to what Jay and Gary were talking about and I’d been to seminars. I was kind of pretty smart on the subject. I was reading everything in Gary’s newsletter and I’m storing this. I’m reading Claude Hopkins and Robert Collier. So, I was kind of learning the best read copywriters at the time and doing fairly well. So, Gary had this $7,000 college of millionaires, he called it. And it was the first one. He sent it out to his list and I got it and I said gee, I can’t afford $7,000.

Michael: Do you know if that was first seminar that he did?

Carl: Yes, it was the first seminar that he did since starting his newsletter and I think it was the first marketing seminar he ever did. No, I could be wrong about that. He might have done some others before that. He did something in Spokane and I’m not sure what the timing was on that.

Michael: The marketing revolution with Mark Stoddard. 9

Carl: Yes, he was doing stuff at the Jefferson Institute. He was doing Jay Abraham, Ted Thomas. Ted Thomas used to buy Robert Collier letter books from me all the time. He’d be doing these Jefferson Institute things for $5,000 a piece and he’d give people a Robert Collier letter book with it.

Michael: How many of these books did you sell at the time, hundreds of them?

Carl: No, it was good steady business, but I forget how many years I was selling them. I think I just sold about a couple thousand copies.

Michael: They put you in contact, though.

Carl: That’s the biggest thing because it put me in contact with people and I’d have really good conversation because it got me on the phone and I just never stopped talking. Jay’s people would call me and Gary’s people would call me. I’d get to know all of these people.

Michael: Let’s go back to you got the newsletter from Gary Halpert $7.000 seminar.

Carl: He mentions in this thing that’s he going to have copywriters there. So, I said let me promote myself as a copywriter. So, I wrote him this letter that basically was like a sales letter selling him the idea of using me as one of those copywriters. And lo and behold, he hired me to be one of the copywriters at the seminar and that was in Key West. That’s where I met Ken Kerr and a number of other people. What he had was he did that thing and he had copywriters assigned to different people. He’d do hot seats, which were you’d get one of the attendees who paid $7,000 up and he’d describe what their business was, what he was doing, and then he’d come up with this dynamite headline and concept. And then the copywriter who is assigned to that person would then go off and actually execute the copy for it. It was excellent. Obviously the people that were paying $7,000 were not newbies. These are people who had some money to spend.

Michael: So, that was your first ___. Did he pay you to come down there and do it?

Carl: He paid our expenses. He didn’t pay us beyond that, no, but we kind of got the seminar for free. We got client work out of it because we got to be known amongst the attendees. So, we got some client work out the thing. In fact, one of the things, there was a guy there, 10 he and his wife were doing a how to pick up girls kind of a book. I had also made friends with Paul Hartunian who had a similar type book and the other guy Ross Jeffries who had a seduction book. I was talking to Ross Jeffries on the phone one day and he said he’s going on Donahue, so I quickly called up Paul Hartunian and this other guy and said this guy is going to be on Donahue, maybe you should call and see if you can get on too. So, Paul got on and this other couple got on as well.

Michael: Do you know what happened as a result of being on Donahue as far as sales of their books?

Carl: Ross Jeffries in business. He’s like the number one how to pick up women bookseller today.

Michael: Sells thousands of his books as a result from Donahue -- that one show.

Carl: From the one shot I don’t know what the figures were off of Donahue, but it launched his career. As far as Paul is concerned, he was coming out with his book at the time and I actually did the book design and typesetting on it. Paul was considering coming out with it in a small format like 6 x 9 and I said are you going to sell this through the bookstore or through mail. He said no through mail. I said if I get something through the mail for $14.95, I want it to be big. I don’t want it to be small. First of all, I suggest selling it for $20, like $19.95 and second of all make it 8 ½ x 11 format because when they get it in the mail it’ll be bigger and it doesn’t cost much more because of the form factor. He said it won’t have very many pages then. I said, well I’ll design it for you. It’ll have enough pages in it. It had like 80 when I started and by the time we got finished, we added some things to it, made the type nice and big, proper spacing in there and got it up to about 120 pages or so.

Michael: Do you think it’s important to beef up a book like that when you’re selling it through the mail?

Carl: Yes, it’s better to put more information in, but Paul had good information already and it was sufficient information. But when someone receives something in the mail, they want to see some substance to it especially if they pay some good money for it. So, he made in that form factor and insistently every year since then sells about 15,000 copies of it at $20 a piece.

Michael: So, at this time were you seriously devouring Robert Collier, Claude Hopkins, and anyone else you could find? 11

Carl: Yes. I picked up this thing called News Track Advertising Classics, which was the only thing I could find on the marketing classics that was on tape and I used to listen to that over and over again.

Michael: That Jay Abraham had the rights to?

Carl: Not at the time -- no. It was put out by a company called News Track.

Michael: Did you buy the rights to that?

Carl: I didn’t buy the rights to that, but I was buying them through News Track until they went out of business and then they sold it to Jay and I was getting them from Jay after that.

Michael: That was one of the first things I got.

Carl: We still sell it.

Michael: What are you doing for a living right now at this time? Are you still working?

Carl: I was writing copy at this time. When I got Jay’s first newsletter, the Marketing Genius at Work, I went in a quit because I was so excited about the possibilities that I could do with this marketing thing and they thought I was lying to them. They thought I had another job and didn’t want to tell them. And I said no. And then they thought, well maybe you just don’t like working for us and I said no I like you guys. Do you not like the work? How about the pay? We can probably give you more in a few months when things get going better. And I said no, the pay is fine. You guys are fine. I like the work, but I’m just really fired up passion about this marketing stuff and I want to give it a shot. They thought I was crazy, of course. My wife had thought I’d gotten fired and just didn’t want to tell her. I made that bold leap. I read about -- who is the guy, Alexander the Great who burned his ships behind him or somebody else -- so I was burning my ships behind me. I quit the job. Didn’t have anything to go to; just going to make this marketing thing work. So, there I was.

Michael: Were you getting some copywriting clients?

Carl: Actually the company I’d worked for hired me a few months later to write copy for them. I wrote a kick-butt Yellow Pages ad for them that like tripled their business. 12

Michael: Were you using some of the techniques you learned from Jay Abraham as far as asking for…

Carl: Yes, everything I learned from Jay Abraham, Gary Halpert, Claude Hopkins, Robert Collier, John Caples, David Ogilvy, Lester Wunderman, Elmer Wheeler; a whole bunch of those guys. Max Sackheim, Vic Schwab. John Caples knew Ogilvy. They knew each other. Robert Collier pre-dates these guys and post-dates Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins, Albert Lasker and John Kennedy knew each other.

Michael: Out of all these guys, who really impacted you the most -- any one person?

Carl: It’s hard to say. I’d have to mention a few people. Certainly Claude Hopkins was a major factor. He’s one of the big guys. Robert Collier is another one. John Caples, David Ogilvy, John E. Kennedy absolutely. I consider John E. Kennedy, Albert Lasker, and Claude Hopkins to be kind of one guy. They’re almost one guy. I consider them altogether. Robert Collier is by himself. John Caples by himself.

Michael: Was Robert Collier an entrepreneur working for himself or was he a copywriter working for a company?

Carl: He was mostly a copywriter working for a company. He later on did some things. He did do a lot of entrepreneurial stuff especially in publishing, but it was outside of the realm of marketing and copywriting. He actually did a lot of spirituality-based stuff.

Michael: You’re __ in copywriting, you’re studying all the master, you have attended a first Gary Halpert seminar, you’re meeting people who are interested in this type of material, you’re now doing freelance copywriting; what were you charging at that time for your copywriting services?

Carl: I think it was somewhere between $5,000 and $6,500 per a typical direct mail response letter. How I came up with that rate is there was this publication that showed the rates of all these different copywriters and I kind of averaged them all out and they averaged out to $5,500.

Michael: What was the publication? 13

Carl: Who’s Charging What? It was put out by Denny Hatch. I basically take the median range and that’s based on a typical direct mail response letter, which is typically eight pages.

Michael: Tell me some stories about successes that you’ve had with your clients as a result of your skill as a copywriter and what that could mean for a business? Can you illustrate some stories that really stick out in your head or your copywriting really produced some great results?

Carl: I told you about the Princeton Consultant hiring me back right in the beginning. There was another client, All American Collectibles. We just send out a mailing promoting these collectible lithographs that were hand signed by famous sports figures and things like that. I wrote a letter for T1 for Joe DiMaggio. We sold millions of dollars worth of those things. I think we sold millions of dollars each mailing and I did probably a dozen mailings.

Michael: How did you meet this client?

Carl: We actually had met personally at a Jay Abraham seminar. We had exchanged cards, but nothing happened right away. They contacted me later on and they were interested in doing something. So, we started up something.

Michael: So, they were sold primarily through direct mail?

Carl: Yes. They did some advertising to get leads. They had a whole phone room that would close them once they called in, but they chiefly responded to people through direct mail. They got leads from ads and then they had their mailing list that they would send out to buyers and people who were interested. That was all direct mail.

Michael: Now, at this time was this one of your first clients, as a result of your copy, you made some serious money for them? Was this one of your bigger first earlier clients that you made a lot of money for through your copy?

Carl: I’m not sure how early it was. It took place over a number of years. I can’t even quite say how many years because I’m not sure. It was a bunch of years; three or four for them and then a little while later do some more for them.

Michael: You’re studying this stuff and you’re reading, but actually seeing the results in a letter is something different. At what point did it really 14 click that you said my God this is incredible what words on paper can do. Any one particular project?

Carl: Yes, actually it was one of my own projects. Actually a series of things. Here’s the genesis of this thing. I had -- Ted Thomas got this idea for doing a seminar and it’s called the information marketing super conference as opposed to the Internet marketing, which is my seminar. His would be information marketing super conference in Los Vegas. He tried to get that thing going, but wasn’t successful. I was one of the speakers. It wasn’t successful because the speakers didn’t promote it to their list. So, I was talking to him about it one night and said what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to give them a sales letter to send out and if they want to modify it or write their own that’s fine. But a lot of them are too darn busy to do that. They’re just going to take your sales letter, reproduce it, and send it out. So, he hired me to write the sales letter for that seminar. And we go back to why did I get involved in copywriting and marketing? Why was I interested in the first place? It’s to sell seminars. So, this in essence was my first opportunity to do that. I wrote a letter. He sent it out to all the speakers. We sent it out. We got 550 people to the seminar.

Michael: Was this the first one he did?

Carl: Yes. He doesn’t do information marketing anymore and he did foreclosures and tax lien and tax lien is the primary one that he does now.

Michael: The reason I’m asking is when I interviewed Brian Keith Voiles; he says he wrote a letter…

Carl: He did the second one.

Michael: He did the second one, got you. So, you did the first one and you filled the room with 500 people.

Carl: Yes.

Michael: Was that mainly from the speakers sending out the letter to their customers?

Carl: That was all of it.

Michael: That was all of it. It wasn’t any cold direct mail to any list that had never really heard about information marketing? 15

Carl: I don’t think so. I’m not sure actually who he gave the thing to, but my understanding was he primarily gave it to the speakers. So, that was one early one thing. Here’s an interesting thing that happened at the seminar. I presenting on stage there and I was talking pretty much about info-preneuring and licensing and things like that. Well, I come off the stage and who comes up to me but Robert Allen and he shakes hands. He says I want to shake your hand. That was the best presentation that I’ve seen today. And I said thank you very much. I noticed his tag and it said Robert Allen and I was almost going to say are you the Robert Allen because I wasn’t sure. It’s a fairly common name. He was the Robert Allen. I was pretty impressed by that. And later on he came up to me and he said I noticed you used a pen on your overhead slides. We were using overhead slides in those days. There weren’t any LCD projectors. And he said do you mind if I borrow that. I said sure. He says now I may use all the ink in it. I say use all the ink in it; how are you going to do that? I said well, I’ve got extra ones; it doesn’t matter. What are you going to do with it? He says to sign these dollar bills. He had a stack of dollar bills and he’s signing his name on each one of them. And I said why are you doing that? He says come watch my presentation. You’ll find out.

Michael: And he was speaking there, too?

Carl: Yes. And so I watched his presentation and I’ve never seen anything more brilliant in my life. It turns out that part of that brilliance -- he was trained by John Childers on a lot of this stuff and other people that John Childers was one of the people who works for him.

Michael: John Childers did a lot of training for him. Has John Childers been around that long?

Carl: He worked with him in creating these presentations. And he still does today. He speaks at round robin events. I really didn’t know who John Childers was at the time anyway. So, I watched it and I was totally amazed because by the end of his talk, he had people running up to him, like hoards of people running up to sign up for this $2,000 wealth retreat program. The long and short of it is he’s holding these regularly and we’re talking on the phone and he invites me to come out and do part of the presentation. Actually Ken Kerr and I. I went out there and I did a presentation on copywriting and marketing and info-preneuring and licensing and things like that. And I did this one segment. He lets you do a pitch at the end of one of your segments. So, I did this one hour talk and at the end of the hour talk, it was about licensing, the day before I’d 16 given him two letters and I said read these two because we’re going to use this tomorrow when we talk about licensing. I’m going to show you how this works. So, I did at the end of my presentation, I said if you’re interested in this deal, I’ve got a special deal for you today. I’ll give you two years of license for free if you buy my copywriter protégé program, which we didn’t talk about how that started, but we’ll backtrack that. So, at the end of this thing, I’ll go over to the table. There were about 30 buying units in the room. By buying units I mean if a husband and wife are together is one buying unit, speakers, and stuff like that in audience, so probably maybe about 50 or 60 people, but about 30 buying units. I sold about 18 right then and there. And it added up to about $15,900 in order that I booked after an hour talk.

Michael: Did you use some of the stuff you heard from Robert Allen or you just did your own thing?

Carl: What I used was my copy. See, what I had given them was I had given them the sales letters to read the day before. And I just used my copy as an example of explaining licensing to them because one of the sales letters sold a license to my marketing made easy workshop, which is a product I had created. So, that was something that I said wow, yes, this copy really does work. The other thing was I copywriter a protégé program.

Michael: When did you develop that?

Carl: 1992. And what it was, there was this guy by the named Lawrence Tabak. Did you know Lawrence?

Michael: I didn’t know him personally. I know the name, his book.

Carl: He had a book called How to Fatten Your Wallet.

Michael: Yes, I’ve got it.

Carl: And basically it was a knock off of Gary Halpert’s How to Make __ in Minimum Time, but in Lawrence’s own style. It wasn’t any plagiarism or anything. He just did a similar kind of book on marketing and copywriting, but in his own style. He sold it through magazines and he sold a ton of thee things. And at the back of the book he had an offer. It was a consulting thing and he said unlimited consulting. Call me whenever you want to, $695. Well, I’m saying to myself how could he possible make that thing work?

Michael: Unlimited…say it again. 17

Carl: Unlimited consulting is a program. I forget what he called the program. When you sign up for it for $695 you got to call him up. He had some control on it. He had a secretary, so you couldn’t just call him up and spend all your time on the phone with him. But he had a secretary that was screening calls and would set up a time and you had a few minutes with him, but you had no limit on how much you could do this.

Michael: And this offer is in the back of the book?

Carl: Right. And I said you must be tied down and doing a lot of that stuff. And I got to thinking I’d like to do something like that for copywriting because I was thinking about creating a program. I said people would call me, Jay Abraham’s people and Gary Halpert’s people and, of course, now Lawrence Tabak’s people would be calling me because one of the things he did in his book he listed three books they had to get and he said here’s the easiest way to get them, call Carl Galletti and my phone number. So, I was thinking of coming up with my own product, I need to be making some money here. I’m spending a lot of time on the phone talking to people and that’s wasted time. I don’t make any money on that. I need to figure a way to get paid for it. Well, Jay had had this protégé program and that wasn’t what I was going to do, but I like to the name copywriter protégé program, but the reason I came up with copywriting is whenever someone would call for the Robert Collier letter book or one of the other books, sometimes they’d say, what book do you recommend first. I always thought it was a silly question because in my experience of all the people that I’ve every dealt with, the people who are most successful didn’t call up and ask for which one book would you recommend; they got them all. They got as many as they could, at least. And they owned a lot of them. So, if they asked for one that shows me you’re probably not going to be successful. You’re going to give it a try, but eventually you’re going to have to wake and smell the coffee. When someone would say what book or books do you recommend, I’d say well it all depends on what you’re doing. So, what is it you want to know how to do? Well, the number one answer was they wanted to write copy. So, I decided, well what really helped me kind of jump start my copywriting ability is when I got good enough to be able to work another copywriter; we’d critique each other’s stuff. That’s when I found most of the jump to light speed so to speak.

Michael: Who did you do that with? 18

Carl: Loretta Duffy, another one of Gary’s ex-girlfriends. We met each other at his seminar. She was a copywriter at that point and still is. So, we’d trade off and she’d critique my stuff and I’d critique hers. I worked with some other people like Ken Kerr and Brad Peterson. So, I just said this is valuable. I’m going to set up a protégé coaching program. Now, the reason coaching is because I’d worked with Rob Gilbert who is also a friend and introduced me to Paul Hartunian. And Rob coached me for about a year without me even knowing it. He was on sabbatical and what he used to do -- he’s a university professor and he did paid speaking, but what he’d do is he’d call me every day and we’d talk. And I thought we were just chatting and I later on realized that he was coaching me.

Michael: His name is Rob Gilbert.

Carl: From that I learned what coaching was all about and how to do it. So, I figured why not a coaching program around copywriting because the thing that accelerated my progress most is working with another copywriter. But most copywriters are too busy to give newbies the time of day and help them out. So, I said I’ll be one of those people who is willing to do that. So, I created the copywriter protégé program and I wrote this sales letter. It was about 30 pages long. I sent it to Loretta and I asked for her critique on it. And she sent it back to be and said this is really a great idea. Oh one thing, I’ve got to connect Lawrence Tabak with this thing. I knew that Lawrence Tabak was charging $695 at the time. I also knew because he had called me up. I wasn’t in the first book. He asked if he could put my name in the second book to refer people to buy books from me. I said yes, sure. Then I started talking to him about how can you do this for $695 and he said I’m raising it to $1,995. He raised it to $1,995. But before that, I knew he was doing it successfully because when I was at the Gary Halpert seminar and I met Loretta Duffy, she had been to a previous seminar with Lawrence and she had asked him about that. And I said how does he do that and she says he says that most of the calls he gets is in the first two or three months because he offered a yearlong program.

Michael: Right. I’m only in it for a year.

Carl: So, I said okay. So, I was going to offer mine for $1,000. This is before I think I found out he raised it to $1,995.

Michael: Your letter was initially just for coaching. Did you have the videotapes of your copywriting seminar? 19

Carl: No.

Michael: This is just a coach program on copywriting.

Carl: Right. They had to call me up once or twice a week, give them stuff to do. I didn’t even send them anything in the mail, but I put together a little package of things because I felt this is the start of something and I’ll add it to it as I went along. I sent the letter to Loretta. She said it’s a great letter. She said but I think you’re not charging enough for it. What do you mean, isn’t $1,000 enough? She said no. You’ll be able to get at least $2,000 for this. I put the price at $1,995 and I sent the letter. I had 300 copies of the letter printed up. I distributed them in various different ways. I sent some to people who bought books from me. I handed out some at a seminar. After I got done distributing the first 300 copies, I had 18 people sign up.

Michael: That’s incredible.

Carl: And do you know what the number one comment was?

Michael: What?

Carl: Why is it so cheap?

Michael: Unbelievable.

Carl: It was really because here I am for $2,000 training you to write a sales letter that you go out and now get $6,500 each.

Michael: Yes, absolutely. Is that letter anywhere on your site?

Carl: On my website. What happened is, two years after I started the program I pretty much knew what people needed to know. So, what I did is I sent out a promotion to my list -- at the time you had to do it with mail, of course and got 25 people to the seminar. It was a four-day seminar. I had it video taped and audiotaped. So, we recorded the whole thing and that became the bulk of the product. After that when people would buy the program, I’d say, listen, what you do is you go through the videos because all of the questions I think you’re going to need answered are on there and then at the end we’ll do critiques and follow ups and stuff. And if you ask any questions, I’d give a yearlong thing; the same thing, call me up any time you want for a yearlong. And it worked like a charm. Actually I put more printed material in there. I had audios. Altogether the package weight 35 pounds and when it would land on their 20 doorstep, they’d say wow this is really something. Now, remember how we got the page count up for Paul Hartunian? You have to give people bulk so that they know that they’ve got something there. So, what they had was 25 hours of video. They had 25 hours of it on audiotape so they could listen to it in the car. And then they had another 25 hours of audio, which was not the protégé program, but it was other things; my marketing ___ workshop, which is a 12 hour workshop with hot seats and another 12 hour program, which was Paul Hartunian and Rob Gilbert and I did something called a wealth retreat roundtable and a couple of other tapes. So, we had 50 audiotapes, 25 videotapes an hour long each, and over a thousand pages of printed material.

Michael: Do you still sell this package?

Carl: Yes. It’s no longer $2,000 because my time is involved and it’s now $5,000. It’s still a bargain when you consider that nothing’s for sure and we want to do our FTC disclaimers and say nothing is for sure, but it’s probably the best way to get up to speed on being a copywriter where people pay you $6,500 and up. Even a rank, beginning copywriter charges no less than $2,000-$3,000 for a typical sales letter.

Michael: So, it not only teaches you the business of how to get clients.

Carl: Yes, there’s some of that in there and I used to do some of it by phone, anything that needed to be customized. The attitude I took is I tell them anything they needed to know, which included how to pick a product to sell, how to create the product, how to pick the mailing list, how to go about doing the mailing list. I’d cover the whole avenue, it wouldn’t be just copywriting. It depends on what they needed.

Michael: With the $5,000 package today, does that offer consulting where they can call you up?

Carl: Yes, exactly.

Michael: For a year?

Carl: Yes.

Michael: That’s exciting. Let’s talk about that. You have 18 buyers, so what happened out of those 18 people, how much time did it take on the phone with these? What was the experience with those 18 people? 21

Carl: I didn’t keep good track of how much time on a person, but some people would call and they would call for probably the first two or three months. Some people never called. They didn’t have any printed material to speak of. In the beginning, I had a little packet. Maybe it was about two inches worth of stuff just sample letters and things like that. A couple of people never called at all. But most people usually spent the first two or three months and I’d get them up to speed. They’d be happy with that. I’d critique their stuff. What I found is where the real high experience occurs is in the critique because that kind of customizes all the things they’ve learned and makes it concrete in their real life application. So, I’d always try to get people to have a real life application to write copy for. That was always the best thing if they had something like that. If they didn’t, then we’d create something.

Michael: This is your first major product.

Carl: It was my second one. The first one was my marketing made easy workshop. We’ll have to backtrack on that because one of my first things when I got all the Jay Abraham stuff and Gary Halpert and went to a Jay Abraham seminar, all that stuff linked up with this guy who had an ad agency on Madison Avenue; small little ad agency. He actually hired me as the Vice President of his ad agency and we did some projects together. One of the things that we did is a weekend retreat in Woodstock house up there and he kind of built a base of people he knew up there and had held one of the like learning annex type called Woodstock University. We did a class on marketing and I said why don’t we do it like a workshop on marketing. We’ll charge like $295 for a weekend. It actually was 12 hours. So, he said yes, we’ll do that. So, we did that and we had small workshops with 12 people or so from diverse businesses and industries -- everything from local to regional to national and international businesses. It covered product, businesses that sold products, businesses that sold services. Well represented in a full gamut. We did a hot seat with each one of them and did a make over. First we did a basic marketing, teach the marketing and then we did hot seats where they participated and found that it really worked because they came up with some really good ideas for people in the hot seat.

Michael: Did you tape that one?

Carl: Yes, that’s the marketing made easy, but only audio taped it. What I did was 12 hours there and then I put it together with about seven to nine manuals. It depends on how you count them. Some of them I wrote and some of them were classics like John E. Kennedy’s 22 Reason Why Advertising, Robert Collier Million Dollar Sales Letters. It’s a collection of 15 sales letters. Those two are actually public domain things. I bought the John E. Kennedy stuff out of public domain. I was doing public domain back in 1989. I did one call how to write million dollar sales letters where I took the sales letter that I did for my copywriter protégé program. I basically explained who the letter was put together and why it worked. So, the tapes were done before I had a copywriter protégé program, but the manuals were added to later and it was after I started the protégé program.

Michael: Give me another story about another client you wrote copy for because you started just doing copy for yourself that really did well.

Carl: They’re sort of all intermixed anyway.

Michael: Did you like writing for clients?

Carl: No, I hate writing for clients. They never want to do what you tell them to do. I remember this one guy; it was an interim client kind of a deal where he had a client that was a car dealer. He wanted me to write a letter for him. So, he really hyped me up and everything and I wrote this letter that was really pretty good, but from a car dealer’s point of view. This guy thought it stank. It was a piece of crap. He was giving me all this stuff and I said I don’t need this. Forget it. Don’t write him a letter. Don’t pay me. Don’t do anything. I don’t need this. It was a letter that probably would have worked real well for him, but it was beneath him to send out the letter.

Michael: Can you give me some names of some students that I may know of that you trained?

Carl: Well, I can tell you people who have my course. We can drop a few names there. Of course, Brian Keith Voiles, Kurt Christiansen.

Michael: Now, when Brian Keith Voiles came to you was he pretty new in the copywriting do you think?

Carl: Yes. When he came to me before that Ted Thomas seminar. He already knew me at that time. So, it was before then. And that was 1992 or 1994. It had to be after 1992 and before 1994. He was one of those first people. There’s Craig Hanes who owns TWI Press.

Michael: Craig Hanes is the owner? 23

Carl: Craig Hanes, yes. Bret Ridgeway runs the TWI Press portion. Recent guys that have gotten it are Brad Herman, the Affiliate Review; Yanik Silver has a version of it, Armand Morin, Alex Mandossian. Alex just wrote me a very nice testimonial.

Michael: And these are all guys who seriously want to learn copywriting?

Carl: Oh yes.

Michael: Bring me to the Internet.

Carl: Obviously I have a computer background, so it kind of made sense and I’d known about the Internet early on, too. It wasn’t called the Internet. It was called ___. I sort of knew about that, but I hadn’t really been turned on to the thing yet. Then Gary Halpert had something called The Atom Bomb seminar and I was one of the speakers there. And that’s where I introduced my marketing workshop. And in the audience looking at Mike Enlo talk about the Internet and saying to myself why am I not involved in this. I’ve got this huge computer background and marketing. It’s an absolute marriage, right? This is like 1995, I think. That’s when I started I’d better look into this thing. I got email and then started doing something with that. I finally got an Internet account. So, by 1996, I was kind of doing some stuff and I saw the Web was there, but not everybody was using it yet. So, I had to kind of grow into these things. But I’ll tell you about my first experience with a website. That’s interesting. People calling up regularly and asking for my catalog. People are starting to use the Internet. Enough people who called me are on the Internet. I’m going to put up my catalog. So, I thought of this and then some guy wanted to do this for me. So, I hired him to do it and he put up my catalog on the Internet. I remember the first time when it was active I said wow, this is great because people used to call me up, order the catalog, I have to print a copy, staple it, put it in an envelope, send it out to them. It would take about a few days to get there. It cost me about $1.50, maybe a little more with postage and takes a while to get there. I really wasn’t good at getting them out promptly. It could be a week or two before they got it. I said this Internet is fantastic because all I have to do now is give them a web address and they got it instantly. I said my sales are going to double. The next person who called I said do you have Web access? They said yes. I said well my catalog is up on the web and I gave him the web address. I saved some money. I instantly responded to them. They have my full catalog accessible on the Internet. I could expand it really well. This is great stuff. Well, a month later I tabulated all my results and discovered that my sales dropped by half. 24

Michael: Really?

Carl: Yes. I said what the heck. Why is this? I finally analyzed it and found the answer. The answer was that when you go to a website, you may bookmark it or not. I used to bookmark it. After a while, you don’t bookmark them anymore. It’s a losing proposition. There’s so many of them. But even when you bookmark it, you rarely came back. What was happening was they’d go on and they maybe wouldn’t have time to go through the whole catalog so they bookmark it and say I’ll come back to it, but never did because how are they going to get reminded of it. If they have a physical catalog there, every time they see the catalog on their desk, they’re reminded of it. They pick it up. They take it to the living room with them, to the bathroom, read through it, start filling out the order form with what books they want. When they get finished, they call up or fax in their order and I got an order. They didn’t do that with the Internet.

Michael: That makes sense.

Carl: The reason is because the Internet was reactive as opposed to proactive. And that’s why now a days what you have to do is you have to get their email address because you have to remind them to take a look at that catalog or whatever product you’ve got to offer. Now, I don’t sell the books like I did anymore in the catalog. I gave it over to TWI Press and they sell it, but the same principle applies that if someone isn’t reminded of it and how are you going to remind them of it is the question.

Michael: Tell me, what are you finding from your experience today that people really want to know how to do that you can give them some ideas that will help them?

Carl: I think people want to make money and be independent. They want to be independently wealthy meaning that they have the freedom to work on their own without having a boss over them who knows less than they do. If they want to go to a movie in the afternoon or to their child’s play in the afternoon that they can do that. If they want to spend time with their family during the afternoon when it’s nice as opposed to only seeing them in the evening when it’s dark and no time left to do any real thing like that. They want to have freedom, the freedom of choice and they want to be able to make good money at the same time. The Internet actually came along just in time, companies taking over other companies and then laying off -- just say firing half of the workforce because they 25 duplicated the jobs. Computers actually created less of a need for as many people. So, that got rid of a lot of jobs and what are all these people doing. Their companies are down sizing. Computers are replacing people. What are all these excess people doing? They’re learning about computers. They’re getting on the Internet and they’re starting businesses. And some of them are doing really well. For example, this guy, the son of a guy who worked with a friend of mine and they worked in timeshare and his son lived in New York City and was essentially out of work. He was kind of referred to his son as a bum because he didn’t work at all and he just mooched off his parents. He’s probably a creative guy sitting back and looking at the world and after 9/11 he got this idea for putting He got this idea for putting Osama Bin Laden’s picture on a t-shirt with some irreverent saying or whatever. I don’t even know the exact genesis of that. But he starts doing irreverent t-shirts; I mean just real raunchy, no holds barred t-shirts. And he starts selling them by the bushel full. In fact, he was selling so many that he was running out of money or running out of t-shirts. He’s getting more orders for t-shirts than he had capital to be able to buy them in advance to make them and then be able to deliver them promptly. So, he had to actual borrow some money and he had his dad go around and borrow about $30,000-$40,000 for him so he could have some sort of a buffer and get those things done. How he started this thing was he put up a website called T-Shirt Hell. The last I heard, he had moved from New York City to Malibu Beach. He had a three-story beach house on Malibu Beach. Had someone else running his company for him and they were looking for the first six figure week. That’s week not month. That was long enough ago to where I’m sure he’s exceeded that.

Michael: And that was all made through the Internet.

Carl: All through the Internet. He didn’t sell it any other way than the Internet.

Michael: And he had a product that hit an emotional cord with the market.

Carl: Yes, it’s a product that probably you or I would take a look at and say I wouldn’t wear that anywhere. It’s like really embarrassing stuff on the t-shirt. The Internet is great because you can reach those people and especially even if it’s the weird, the far out the better because those people have no way they can get what they want through normal means because no body would sell it. So, that’s even better. So, that’s one example. Another example of a client of mine is this 21-year-old high school dropout from the U.K. He’s not even English. He’s German. English is a second language for him. He put up this website, a standard $30 a month website. It was a 26 membership website and he never sold it on the Internet. He sold it through direct mail in a joint venture with another guy who is in the financial services business. He had 300 paying members who were paying $160 a month. And then he had some other ancillary things. He had actually a hardcopy newsletter of the thing, but he was making over $670,000 annualized from that little thing.

Michael: What was it? What was he selling?

Carl: Stock charting program.

Michael: A stock market type program.

Carl: It was a stock charting service actually. He did stock charting. In fact, when I talked to him I said one of thing you ought to do is auction off a day of your time to someone. I think you’ll probably get like $10,000. He said I don’t want to do that. He had tried this before. Somebody paid him $1,000 for a few hours of his time and he was embarrassed because he’s only 21 and this guy is like much older. He felt strange.

Michael: He didn’t have the confidence.

Carl: Yes, exactly. Whereas this guy knew that he did and it’s kind of strange.

Michael: And so he took your copywriting course and helped hone his sales letter for the Internet or for offline.

Carl: Right, for offline. He also did another project showing people how to do memberships like his.

Michael: All right. Tell me another story. These are great stories.

Carl: There’s another guy that I did a joint venture, this is my product, though, but he had done some work for Jay Abraham concerning computers; installing computers in his office and buying them at the right prices and stuff. He does this all basically gratis and Jay owed him some favor. Jay let him talk for an hour at one of his seminars; this is a $5,000 seminar.

Michael: What was his name?

Carl: Adam Bush. So, Adam calls me up and he says Jay’s given me an hour to talk at his seminar, but I don’t have anything to sell. I need someway to monetized this. Do you have any ideas? I said okay 27 let’s put something together. So, what we did is we took my copywriter protégé program letter -- pretty much the same one that’s on www.copycoach.com -- we took my marketing made easy workshop license, the letter for that. I said look, here’s the biggest problem anybody has in marketing is getting someone to read their sales letter. So, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to offer these people an incentive to read these sales letters. So, what kind of incentive could we use? Well, it turned out that earlier, probably a year or so earlier, one of Jay’s assistants, Jeff Taylor chatted me up and said we’re having one of these $5,000 seminars, would you like to come. I said sure. He said you pay your own expenses, but you don’t have to pay $5,000 to get in. I said that’s very nice. He called back the next day and he said by the way, would you mind while you’re here to give our staff a little workshop on copywriting? I said, no I’d be pleased. I’m saying I’m going to be doing this two- hour consultation. I’m going to bring a tape recorder. So, I brought a tape recorder with me and I taped the two hours. And basically, if someone sat down and said teach me the most important things you know about copywriting or advertising -- pretty much copywriting, but advertising in general -- this is the two hours I’d give them. Obviously, it gave the most important stuff to Jay’s staff.

Michael: You have this on audio?

Carl: I don’t yet have something up on my site selling it. I have that in the process.

Michael: It was just one of those situations that you really gave them your all and it just came out a really good presentation.

Carl: Right. At the time, I was charging $250 an hour for my consultation and I reasoned that this was worth $500. And what I did is I said this is worth $500 and I only charge $100, but special $49.95; that’s basically all I sold it for. And we sold a bunch of those. So, what I did was they were on two, one-hour audiocassettes. By the way, later I’d reasoned that I’d really undercut myself because if you really consider this, what did I do is if these weren’t worth $500, $250 an hour, they were worth $5,000 because I’d bartered a $5,000 seminar for these. So, two hours of my time was bartered for $5,000. The perceived value went up, but I hadn’t realized it at this time, so we figured it on being worth $500. We had a bunch of these cassettes made up -- two cassettes. Here’s the deal. Adam presented this. By the way, I wasn’t even in the seminar room when he presented this. I was outside the seminar room, but I wasn’t inside. It took him about 15 minutes and he says here’s the deal. Carl Galletti wants you to take a look at his sales letters. He’s just 28 recently changed them, which was true. And he wants a critique from you because he knows you guys are up to speed on the marketing techniques and everything. He wants your opinion of each sales letter. So, read them tonight. Give them back to me and if you do, if you’ll just fill out this brief survey for him, we’ll give you this tape set that he’s done for Jay Abraham’s staff where he’s taught the staff about copywriting for two hours. It’s worth $500 and you’ll get this for free if you hand in the survey form.

Michael: Let me just understand. The sales letters that they were going to read that night was what?

Carl: Two sales letters, one was from my copywriter protégé program and the other one was from my marketing made easy workshop license, reprint license.

Michael: So, what happened?

Carl: Part of the deal was you had in the survey form, we’ll give you the tapes, and by the way, if you’re interested in this deal, you’re probably not on his list, but if you’d like to take advantage of it, we have a special. If you buy the copywriter protégé program, we’ll throw in the license to the marketing made easy workshop for free. We collected, I don’t know how many; there were about a couple hundred people there. I think we collected about a hundred and some forms and we took orders for $35,900.

Michael: That’s incredible. It would never have happened unless you bribed them to get them to read the letter through that bonus.

Carl: Exactly. These are people at a $5,000 seminar that have more important things to do than read somebody’s sales letter. They had to do it in their off time, which wasn’t very much because Jay kept them going from morning to evening.

Michael: You had to pay them to read this sales letter.

Carl: Exactly and then hit them with a $500 tape set that basically cost us a couple of dollars.

Michael: But a $5,000 value. Do you still use that technique in your marketing? It seems to really work to get people to read.

Carl: I don’t use it as much as I should. The funny thing about both of these things, I used a similar technique at Robert Allen’s seminar. I use a technique. It works and then I just don’t use it again. And 29 every once in a while I say to myself, what don’t I use that anymore. I’ve got a guy, Ken McArthur, who runs the Affiliate Showcase. Ken has this site, which sells a book on how to make money doing surveys for companies. In fact, he was one of the first people who go into that market. He’s got a list of about 160,000 people on there. These are people who are interested in doing surveys and making money from doing surveys. There are legitimate ones out there that will pay you money for answering their survey, but a lot of them now on the Internet are just cover-ups for getting your email address and stuff like that. It’s a minefield out there. You’ve got to know where you’re walking. So, what we’re going to do is I made up this survey, read the copy on the website, answer these questions, and when you answer the questions, you get a free book -- a free e-book. The book is called Secrets from the Internet Marketing Super Conference. And basically what it is, is a couple super conferences back, we had Cory Rudl and Jonathan Mizel and Robert Allen and Marlin Sanders and Terry Dean and other people. What I did is I took maybe about 10 or 12 of them, I think about 10, and them transcribed and then edited heavily so that we took out all of the extraneous stuff and whatever. I put them into a book that I sell for $27.97. And so, that’s the book that they get for free when they answer this survey. It’s basically the same technique moved over into the Internet.

Michael: What else are people out there really having a hard time with when your students call you?

Carl: The most difficult thing new people writing copy has is they speak too much from their own point of view rather than the reader’s point of view. We like to call it we-we-ing all over your copy; like we do this. You want to speak to the person and generally if you use the work you or your, it kind of forces the issues. When you’re critiquing your copy, if you see something that says we or I, try to transmute that into you or your. So, just to take an example let’s say, I’m the best there is selling widgets, you can transmute that into doing like you can find out how to be the best person at selling widgets by just taking this course.

Michael: Just substitute all the “I’s” and the “we’s” with you and your.

Carl: It’s not exactly a substitution, but it forces the transmutation into changing the other words around to fit. It does work initiating that action. So, that’s one of the first things. Also, most people don’t spend nearly enough time on headlines, myself included. I have to catch myself. When I did the Internet marketing super conference thing, I showed it to Armand Morin and he said so where’s the 30 headline. Here’s the headline, testing, traffic testing and tools is the theme to the thing. So, I said I think I need a headline. So, what happened is this one 22-year-old kid who went to my first conference last year calls me up and says when is this year’s conference. I said coming up. I gave him the date and he said last month we had our first $60,000 month and we made over $100,000 so far this year.

Michael: There’s your headline.

Carl: I said wow here we go. My headline is 22-year-old has first $60,000 month after attending Internet Marketing Secrets conference.

Michael: Yes, it’s great. The real life situation is where the gold is instead of trying to dream them up. They’re right there. Can you take me through a little process? Let’s say you were going to take on a client again and they had a product. Can you take me through your process of how you deal with that client and how you create a piece of copy?

Carl: The first thing I want to do is I want to learn everything I can about the product and how he sells it and what’s worked and what hasn’t.

Michael: Let me even take you back a little more. What criteria must you have in place before you even consider taking a client on?

Carl: Let me precede this all by saying I don’t take clients on anymore because I’m my own client now. I still teach people copywriting with my copywriter protégé program.

Michael: They can get you virtually basically.

Carl: Yes, but that’s about as close as I come to writing copy for people. There are some friends that I will critique their stuff or in some cases even write some stuff for them, but I don’t hire myself out anymore as a copywriter. So, this for getting some copywriting business.

Michael: The main reason is why?

Carl: Because you can make a heck of a lot more money writing for yourself. I’ve known that since I started writing copy. Why write for somebody else when the bulk of the money is made by the person who owns the company and is the entrepreneur? I’m the entrepreneur. I’m interested in making money. To me copy is not a glamour job. At first it sounds glamorous. You’re a writer, but after a 31 while you get over that. I don’t really care about copy. I care about making money. I’m an entrepreneur. That’s what’s important to me. I’m excited about new and different ways of making money not by writing copy. Writing copy, quite frankly, is not that glamorous. What’s glamorous is sending out a sales letter that makes you a ton of money. But most people can’t afford to be hiring copywriters at $6,500, $10,000, $15,000 and up. They’ve got to be pretty successful before that and learning to write copy is an integral thing. It’s about as important to you as knowing how to make your own product. There are three things that I think integral to any

business: the product, the promotion, and the people. The people or the market you’re selling to. On the Internet that’s traffic -- getting traffic to your site. That’s integral. The next thing is converting the traffic; that’s the promotion, the sales letter, the copy on your site. And then the third thing is the product that you’re selling. And those three things have to play together. So, you could do a business, especially on the Internet, by only knowing how to do one of those three things, but doesn’t it make sense to know how to do all three of them. Aren’t they all as important for the whole process because if you’re just doing any one of them, then it’s not going to work? I’m known as a copywriter, but quite frankly given my choice I’d like to get away from that stigma. It is kind of like being type cast as an actor. The reason is because I never approach copy as being just writing words.

Michael: It’s just part of the system of selling something.

Carl: Exactly.

Michael: But it’s been integral. It’s the main part. It’s the word that gets people to buy things and without that, you’re dead in the water.

Carl: Exactly and it’s used all over even in the other three parts because if you know how to write copy really well, you can produce better products. If you know how to write copy really well, then it’s going to be a lot easier to generate traffic to your website because a lot of the things that generate traffic to your website are word related. We use words, whether they’re Google ad words or whether it’s the title in your search engine result page that people see on the search. Here’s something that very few people realize. They think of search engine optimization, all of the things you can do on your website to get optimized to get up higher in the rankings of a search engine and then they forget the fact that when someone does a search on your key word and you do come up in the top ten that what gets people to click on your link as opposed to the other nine are the words. And what are those words? Well, the bold line is your title 32 and the rest of it is your description. The description never even appears on your website. The human doesn’t even see the description on the website. They only see the search engine result page. And the title they can see at the top, very few people even look at that. But they do look at that search engine result page.

Michael: That’s a good point. People are so focused on search engine optimization, but they need copy optimization once they get there.

Carl: Right. What’s the most important part of any sales letter -- it’s the headline or an ad that’s the headline. We all know that. Maybe not everybody listening knows that, but I’ll just tell you it is. It’s one of the things you learn if you study this subject we’re talking about. The headline is one of the most important things. So, what’s the headline to a search engine? The headline is your title. The first paragraph, which is the most important paragraph, is their description.

Michael: Why is the headline so important?

Carl: If you go back and you look at how this thing has evolved. Take a look at when newspapers started. They started as one sheet little things and then they grew to bigger one sheet things. And then as they got to multi-pages, people couldn’t read the whole newspaper so they had to have a way of picking out what was of interest to them. And the newspaper came up with the idea of a headline, which is basically a few words in larger type, which would catch people’s attention and describe what that article was about. And so, they can pick and choose whether they wanted to read that article or go on based upon the headline. Same thing happens in advertising. You don’t want to read every ad, but you kind of scan the headlines to decide whether you do want to read them or not, whether the subject is of interest to you or not. So, a good headline would be how to make a six-figure income on the Internet, for instance. I can’t think of a bad headline, but there are plenty ads out there, believe me. The thing is, is that people will take a look at that and decide in a fraction of a second whether they want to read anymore or not. And on the Internet it’s no different. It’s kind of like someone sitting in front of a TV with a remote control and clicking through deciding which channel they’re going to land on. On the Internet, you’re search around deciding which site they’re going to read more about and, obviously, whatever the first thing they’re going to see is the headline. So, they’re going to need to be motivated by that. 33

Michael: When you’re really making an effort for a client to come up with a headline, how do you establish the headline that you’re going to use on your letter? What was your particular process in doing that?

Carl: My process is coming up with a lot of different ideas based upon good headlines that have worked in the past. So, having a good collection of headlines is important. I actually put together a book called 2001 Headlines: The Greatest Headlines of All Time -- 2001 headlines that have worked and used. Other people have assembled things like 100 Greatest Headlines. Vic Schwab’s book has 100 greatest headlines and stuff like that. That gives you a starting point, but it’s by no means a be all and end all. There are a few little programs out there that kind of tend to try to automate this process, but I don’t think as far as you need it to go. They do a good job of reminding you of what some possibilities could be for anything, but you still kind of have to work at getting them. The thing that you really need to do most is practice creating headlines. You need a good starting point and having headlines that have worked in past is a good starting point and just transmuting that and modifying it so that you can create a good headline. My favorite headlines are how to headlines. I think that just really says it all. Some of the most famous headlines of all time are John Caples’ they laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play…dah, dah, dah. That ran for 40 years successfully. What most people usually don’t realize about that ad is that it didn’t ask you to send any money. It was a full-page ad. It obviously is expensive because it’s a full-page ad. You didn’t send any money. You sent for a free lesson and it taught you how to play a musical instrument. From there they sold you via direct mail. The same thing with Max Sackheim’s you make these mistakes in English. Now, we talked earlier about mistakes beginning people make. The biggest mistake I see people make is they ask questions in the headline. You’ve got to be very careful when you ask a question because questions put people in state. If you study anything like NLP, you realize how you get people into state. It’s called in state, kind of like a hypnotic thing, is to ask them questions. So, if you sell widgets, it puts you in state of whether you’re selling widgets or not. So, if you say do you make mistakes in English, it puts you in state of making mistakes. That can be good or bad depending on how well you handle it, but it’s usually bad the way most beginners handle it. I advise them to stay away from it because you really need to know what you’re doing.

Michael: It gives them a choice between yes and no. 34

Carl: Right. Now, the reason do you make these mistakes in English were is because you can’t answer yes or no. Like take a typical question. Do you like dogs? Yes or no, it doesn’t matter turn the page. I just answered the question. But if I say do you like these dogs -- how can I answer the question unless I read what dogs you’re talking about. That’s what the headline is supposed to do is to get you to read the next thing. That’s the way to get that thing to work and headlines are extremely important in that regard. Do you make these mistakes in English direct your attention to well what mistakes are we talking about here? That went on and sold for 40 years. Again, no asking, no money; send for a free lesson to teach you how to write English. One of the first things that I find is a real big mistake with people when they’re first writing copy is they bury the important stuff later in the copy. For example, what you often find is that the thing that should be in the front, in the beginning of your copy is somewhere in the middle or to the end of it, or even just a few paragraphs in. And I always tell people this cute little story about the famous director Frank Capra. Frank Capra is one of the most famous directors in movie history. He directed movies like It’s A Wonderful Life, Lost Horizon; bunch of other things. He’s the first director to win the five major academy awards all in one season. He did this one called Lost Horizon, which was about Shangri-La and things were going along well. And as the movie is being made they have what are called dailies where they look at the previous days shooting to see how things are coming along -- that it was a good movie. It was showing well. When they put it altogether they had thing where they’d show it as a complete movie to a walk-in audience that was dragged off the street, not told what they were going there to see, could leave at any time, didn’t have to pay. This is a tough audience. So, they did that to test. They still do it today. And they do that to test movies. He did this one with Lost Horizon and they were walking out of the movie in the beginning. He couldn’t figure it out. Well, somebody had screwed up and scheduled two previews accidentally. It turned out to be a real good thing for Capra. And he agonized over it and the only thing he could come up with was that the first part of the movie just took too long to get to the interesting part, which is when he arrives at Shangri-La and discovers these people who have real long ages; it’s like a paradise and everything. So, what he did is that build up to Shangri-La was on the first two reels of the movie. So, he had the editor take off the opening credits, put it on the third reel. In essence removing the first two reels of the movie. And on the next preview they had he used that to show it. They loved it. They came out. They just loved the movie. It went on to win an academy award, several academy awards, I think. After that point his favorite phrase was throw away the first two reels. What he meant by that 35 was don’t spend so much time in building up your story to get to the interesting part. Start with it. That’s what he did from then on. That’s what I find is the biggest problem with people writing letters. They don’t get to the point right away. They don’t put the most important thing up front. One way of saying it is hire big guns first and the reason for it is, is because if you bury the most powerful thing that you can say mid-way or to the end of the copy even or anywhere or even past the first few paragraphs, your reader may never get to that to discover what the powerful thing is that you say because they’ll get disinterested way before then and leave. The beginning is the most important part. So, put the most important thing you have to say, the most attractive thing, the most attention getting, the most involving thing, the most curiosity creating thing in the beginning.

Michael: That’s good advice. Now, that brings me to the subject, especially very important in copywriting and that’s research. So, how does one know what the most important thing to say is and how does research play into that when you are a copywriter?

Carl: Well, it’s a good question. You first of all are looking for some kind of a hook. What a hook is, is a sound bite that just like hooks you into the involvement of the whole thing.

Michael: Give me an example. If you’re going to take on a client, you’ve got to know what this client has to offer. How do you go about digging out the research and finding those hooks specifically?

Carl: There’s no stand methodology. It’s a matter of having a trained eye to look at it. You’re approaching it as a reader, as if you’re learning, which you are learning, of course. So, you have to like really pay attention to your own reactions of something. I’ll give you a classic example, two classic examples, in fact, one by David Ogilvy and the other one by Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins was asked to do an ad for Schlitz beer. At the time Schlitz was number seven. In his research he was taken through a tour of the plant and they showed him this fascinating room to him, which was the steam room that distilled the bottles and steam cleaned the bottles and got rid of all the bacteria. And he said this is fascinating. Why don’t you say something about this in your ad? He says, well Mr. Hopkins every beer manufacturer does this. Well yes, but none of them say it and I never knew it. Anybody who doesn’t know beer doesn’t know this. So, he featured that in his ad and as a result of that ad campaign sales of Schlitz beer shot from number seven to number one.

Michael: It’s a great illustration. As a matter of fact on Claude Hopkins advertising dot com the collection of the 60 Claude Hopkins ads 36 that I have up there, that specific ad is right up there as a sample in the sales letter; the actual ad.

Carl: Yes, you should get as much of Claude Hopkins ads as you can get a hold of. They’re absolutely crucial in your learning material. The other example is David Ogilvy. In researching the Rolls Royce, he was going to write an ad for the Rolls Royce. He read an engineering report where one of the engineers complained about the ticking of the clock inside the Rolls Royce and said that it is excessively loud. They had spent a lot of engineering and money on making the ride the quietest as possible and here’s this darn electric clock ticking away inside. So, David Ogilvy picked up on that and he wrote the famous ad, which was 60 miles an hour -- the loudest thing you’ll hear in this Rolls Royce is the ticking of the clock. And when the engineer read that ad he says we’ve got to do something about that clock.

Michael: Do you know what some of the results from that ad campaign were for Rolls Royce?

Carl: It sold, I think more Rolls Royces than anything that they had ever done. It really put it on the map and got a few. If you bought a Rolls Royce then, I think they were only $15,000. $15,000 then was three years salary for an engineer. You have to put these things all into perspective. That’s the typical thing like how did Ogilvy spot that? Why did Hopkins pick out this steam cleaning? It’s just something that appealed to them. Ogilvy did another thing with Hathaway shirts. You have to have something that kind of like basically stands out and be different and unusual and attract attention, but do it in a way which people don’t mind and are not put off by it. He was traveling to do this shoot and he had the driver stop at a pharmacy and he put an eye patch on the model. It became the famous Hathaway shirt for Arrow. But they sold millions and millions of these.

Michael: It’s such a curiosity type thing. Why does this guy have an eye patch on his eye?

Carl: Exactly and that’s what attracts your attention. What does it say? It says well yes why? Do you make these mistakes in English? It raises curiosity. It involves people. They want to know more. That’s the hook we’re talking about. You create a hook; something, which says, what is that. I want to know more about that.

Michael: What advice do you have for list selection? If you have a product and you have a market and you’ve done some sales copy and you 37 don’t really have anyone or you’re not planning on doing any joint ventures and you want to select a mailing list, do you have some advice you can give me on anything that you’ve learned from your experience of buying mailing lists?

Carl: I think it’s probably not done enough anymore because of the Internet.

Michael: Do you think the list rental business is really hurting since the Internet?

Carl: I kind of think they are because I think the whole postal system is hurting. They’re still doing good business and you don’t need to send them donations to help them get through the next year. But I think their business is cut down dramatically from what it would have been. But I think that business wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for the Internet and computers anyway. It’s kind of hard to judge it exactly. As a for instance, I used to do a lot more faxing than I do now. I hardly ever use fax anymore. But I think that’s a missed opportunity and an under used opportunity now because I think mail is even more important now than it ever was. Companies are using mail, but depending more on the Internet, which they have to have an Internet presence. But I think the perfect combination is combining them together. You remember my example of that first catalog I did with the Internet?

Michael: Right.

Carl: By having that physical catalog there was much more important than having a website because it reminded them of it. That was the first example of how you really need to marry these two things together. Multi-source marketing, which is what I call it, is when you need to approach your prospective customer from more than one media. Before there was an Internet we knew that if you had a newspaper ad running and put an ad up on the TV directing people to your newspaper ad, it would triple your response. By the same token, if you had a TV campaign and sent somebody direct mail and directed them to, by the way, take a look at our commercial, it would increase response. TV Guide did something -- Lester Wunderman put together this thing where he had something in TV Guide and the commercials pointed to get your issue of TV Guide and look in the blah, blah, blah. It was for Book of the Month Club, I think. He said, see our ads in TV Guide and if you do, there’s a box, this golden box there and if you put this number on the screen in that box, you’ll get a free book as part of your Book of the Month Club. 38

Michael: And that worked well?

Carl: I don’t know the exact amount, but it was extremely successful.

Michael: That’s kind of like directing people through direct mail to directing them to the Internet.

Carl: Exactly.

Michael: So, it is effective and using the mail to direct people to a website. What about list selection? Did you have some experience renting lists through SRDS or list brokers?

Carl: Yes, I did. I just want to mention one thing is go back to what we said earlier about my client in the U.K. who was selling his Internet membership site via direct mail. Most of those people who got his direct mail came in through a series of promotions that started with a newspaper or magazine ad. That was for another person, though, but at the end, he joint ventured with him and got the list of people after he had worked them and sold everything he could to them. My client promoted his membership website to him and signed up 300 people at $160 a month plus other services. You definitely make the SRDS or similar book your reading material. SRDS stands for Standard Rate and Data Service. Many of the libraries have copies of them. Most libraries have copies of them in one form or another. They have different versions. Some are for magazines. What Standards Rate and Data Service does is they publish ad rates and they also publish mailing list rates. They publish rates of what it costs to advertise in places. For example, they have one for TV stations and if you want to advertise on TV, you look up the TV station and it gives you the ad rates for the TV station. They have one for radio. They have one for other things; newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV. But they’ve got one called direct mail -- rates and data. And direct mail, instead of the ad rates, they give you the rate to a mailing list. It shows you a lot of things, but the most important stuff is how is the list generated, what do these people buy, how much does it cost. It gives you all of that information plus a lot of other stuff. It’s valuable. According to this three point formula: recency, frequency, and unit of sale. Recency means how recently have they bought this thing. Frequency, how often do they buy it. And unit of sale, how much did they pay for it. And then you want to marry three things together with something that someone has bought that is very closely aligned to you. So, for example, if someone has bought a golf book before, in other words that how the list is generated, they bought this golf book -- those are hot clients for you if you sell a golf book. Recency is if they 39 bought it last week. Frequency is this is the third book they bought from the same company. And unit of sale is the book’s average of $29 each. If the book you’re going to sell is around $29, this is ideal for you. You’re going to want to rent that list. That’s everything you need to know about list rental really. The only other thing is to just get a list broker because it’s like buying real estate. It doesn’t cost you anything. The list broker pays for it; the list owner pays for it just like the owner of a piece of real estate pays the real estate commission.

Michael: Can you recommend a good printer list? Say that book like we were talking about Lawrence Tabak or that Gary Halpert style, 8 ½ x 11 bound book?

Carl: There’s several specialty printers out there and the thing you need to know about printing in general is that not all printers are created equal. That some are specialized in an area and can produce it cheaper for one thing than another, but that same printer can’t produce another thing that the other printer can produce cheaper. The reason for that is because the presses are customized for a particular type of printing. So, something that is made to print 8 ½ x 11 perfect bound book is not going to do well for a 6 x 9 because the presses aren’t set up for that and they probably aren’t going to reset the presses up. What they’re going to do is they’re going to go to a printer that does have a press set up for.

Michael: Farm it out.

Carl: They’ll get them to do it and just tack on an extra amount of money, which, of course, costs you more money.

Michael: Do you know of any printer who specializes in that larger size, 8 ½ x 11?

Carl: Yes, there’s a company called Morris Publishing. This is really good because if you go to their website, they will actually send you out a whole kit that gives you the publishing rates.

Michael: Morris Publish?

Carl: They’ll do perfect bound, they do spiral bound. They specialize in two primary sizes: 5 ½ x 8 ½ and 8 ½ x 11.

Michael: What do you recommend if someone wants to write a book or sell a book? I know we talked a little bit about a larger book has more heft 40 and more value, but the smaller one -- who would you recommend use that and for what purpose compared to the larger one?

Carl: The smaller one you want to use if you can use it like a business card, which I highly recommend. In other words, being a published author -- even if it’s self-published -- gives you have status and authority that you don’t have otherwise, so rather than printing up a business card, print up a book. Tell people what you know. That’s much more effective even if they don’t read the book, they’ll be impressed as hell that you even have a book.

Michael: Absolutely.

Carl: How many people have their own book? So, rather than carry a business card around, carry a box of books in your car and give them out. You can also sell them, obviously, but to important prospects and stuff give it out. Why -- because it makes you the authority. People assign a high degree of authority, notoriety, and celebrity to authors. You’re a writer and if you’re a published writer that means that you’re for real. It’s like a celebrity. One of my partners just ran into a guy from -- one of the guy who appeared on the show.

Michael: Troy?

Carl: Troy’s partner. He’s talking to him and the interesting thing was that Troy lost to Bill and to ___ and ___ and Troy are out there making over a million dollars off of deals that they got as a result of the show. Bill’s making $250,000. The people who lost too and why is that because of notoriety. Look at Star Search and all of the other reality programs. A lot of those people are off making money as a celebrity because if you’re on TV you get celebrity. Well, appearing on TV is a lot harder than publishing your own book.

Michael: Yes, it’s instant celebrity status.

Carl: Exactly.

Michael: What are some tools you use on a daily basis to run your business that you’d want someone to know about?

Carl: The primary tool I use, of course, is the Internet, the computer, the website. Worldwide web and email, obviously, are integral part of that. Beyond that there are tools within those tools.

Michael: What Internet browser do you use? 41

Carl: I use Windows Explorer. I actually had preferred Netscape up until a few years ago when it pretty much got impossible to get onto some website.

Michael: How about email program, what do you use for email?

Carl: I use standard Windows Outlook Express.

Michael: Do you use an email blocker or spam blocker?

Carl: I use Mail Washer. It’s a free program. I’m probably going to upgrade to -- it’s only $20-$25 to upgrade and I haven’t done it yet.

Michael: I could find it at Mail Washer dot com?

Carl: Yes, I believe that’s it.

Michael: And you’re pretty happy with it?

Carl: More happy than I have been with any other solutions that I’ve tried.

Michael: My biggest fear is I don’t want important emails coming to me deleted.

Carl: This is fairly safe that way. When you get to learn how to really use it, the primary advantage to it is that it has a black listing capability, which means that it will assign emails to categories. It has a friends list. You can set it up so that anything on your friends list doesn’t show up on Mail Washer.

Michael: I could import my entire customer database into it so if I ever got an email from one of my customers it’s not going to be washed.

Carl: I think so.

Michael: It’s pretty frustrating for me with all this spam and stuff.

Carl: Yes, it’s nearly impossible to get through a day’s worth of email without spending all your morning.

Michael: Do you use any other tools to answer your emails? I’m sure you’re getting a lot of emails every day. 42

Carl: Yes, I probably get about 400 or 500 every day. That’s why Mail Washer is kind of a necessity. The reason it works is because Mail Washer processes your mail before you download it into your Outlook Express. So, what Mail Washer does is it reads the headers; from-to lines, the subject line. It also gives a category to the email. What you do is you bring up Mail Washer before you bring up your email program and you check mail and it brings in all the mail and it shows you the from line, the subject line and a few other things. But it has a status and each one is given a status. If it’s on the black list, it’s listed as black list. There’s a filtering thing, which says filtered. So, I have certain things filtered, something like Viagra or Zanex in your subject line, it filters those out. And it has another thing called possibly spam and another one called probably spam, which is the same category. And it’s got normal. And it would normally have friends list and the way I have it set up is that people on my friends list don’t even appear on Mail Washer. They’re just not there because I don’t want to have to sift through people I already know I want to get mail from. I’m only looking for new stuff. People who have just written me, never written me before, or written me from an email address that’s never been received before. So, what I do is I order it so that normal is at the top; black list is at the bottom, and possibly spam is in the middle. And by the way, this also catches viruses and put them at the very end. And so all I have to do primarily is go through the normals semi-carefully. I’ll just give you an example. The first one has Vicodin and Zanex spelled with different letters. So, that’s obviously going. And what I do is I hit the minus button and it puts that into my black list. So, any time that person sends me an email from no on, I’ll never see it. Then the next guy here is John ___, the street kid. And I do get stuff from him, but for some reason he didn’t get on my friends list yet. I just transferred to a new computer so some of the people haven’t written me yet. So, I put him on my friends list. You just go through this and then when you get to the normal then you go faster through the possibly spam and you basically don’t even look at the black list. And then you just hit process. What it does is it deletes and/or bounces everything that you don’t want. If it bounces it, it sends them a message that says it didn’t get through.

Michael: The bottom line is it saves you time.

Carl: A lot of time.

Michael: What do you use to record conversations? Do you have a digital tape player? What is it?

Carl: I have a couple of things. I’ve got a ed-a-roll. 43

Michael: That ed-a-roll from Mike Stewart?

Carl: Right.

Michael: Can you record on that?

Carl: You can record into the computer with it. You do need a separate telephone patch. I’ve got two different ones. I’ve got a broadcast host by J.K. Audio, which is not working as well as it should be working. I’ve also got another one. It’s just another recording device. You can actually get something decent now a days at Radio Shack that works pretty well. I have two ways of recording. One is into the computer and the other is on a portable Sony digital recorder, which is a hand held.

Michael: That’s an IC recorder.

Carl: Yes, exactly.

Michael: That’s exactly what I have.

Carl: ICD-MSI?

Michael: I’ve got an ICD-ST25.

Carl: How many hours does it do?

Michael: Two and a half on mono.

Carl: Does it have the memory stick?

Michael: No.

Carl: This one has a memory stick, which I like because on a 128k memory stick I can store over eight hours of recording and then you take the memory stick and put it in a reader and you can read it into the computer. The advantage is that, for example, like we’re recording here. If you see the memory stick’s capacity, you can take one memory stick out and put another one in and then download your thing as you’re still recording.

Michael: So, you’re happy with that ed-a-roll?

Carl: Yes, ed-a-roll is fine. My broadcast host I’m not happy with and this other thing, which doesn’t have a name. That comes from one of 44 these spy outfits where you can surreptitiously record conversations.

Michael: Modem Spy? Do you have one that you downloaded the software?

Carl: No, this is actually a hardware thing. It costs a couple hundred dollars. You plug your recorder into it and you can record conversations. It supposed to balance the volume of my side versus your side. That’s the biggest thing in recording a telephone conversation. If one side is louder than the other…

Michael: You’ve got to do it manually.

Carl: The spy thing does it automatically. The broadcast host is supposed to do it manually, but I think there’s something wrong with mine because I can’t seem to balance it properly.

Michael: What are some of the best ways you’ve found to use the Internet?

Carl: First thing is concerning the Internet that you really need to be conscious of how to generate traffic to your site. That’s a big game of search engine optimization. I put off learning anything about search engines optimization for quite a while because in my opinion according to the people I talked to originally about it, it was long road to get your site listed in search engines; it was difficult unless you were willing to pay somebody big bucks to do it for you or spend a lot of your time pursuing it. It’s kind of like programming. You need to be doing it every day. Well, I wasn’t willing to do that, but it’s become such an important aspect of promoting online that I’ve probably switched gears and have been making over the past year a concerted effort in learning everything I can about how to generate traffic to a site. I know considerable amount now.

Michael: Is your most effective way through search engine optimization?

Carl: There’s no pat answer for that. I wish there was.

Michael: What’s the best way for a guy who is not going to take a year to learn search engine optimization strategies that you could give?

Carl: The first and best thing to do is to start writing articles and get them distributed. You can do that quicker than anything else; assuming you have something people want to hear about.

Michael: So, they’re distributed and hosted on other URLs? 45

Carl: Yes. How you get it distributed is use something called Ezine Announcer by Jason Potash. That’s the easiest way. It’s a piece of software you can buy and it’s used to announce your e-zine to the world. And it also has two primary uses; one is to announce your e- zine to all the sites that have directories for e-zines, so you can promote your e-zine. And the other thing it is useful for is promoting your article, getting it distributed on the sites that are directory sites for other people. For instance, when you list your articles on these sites, people come to those sites regularly to look for articles they can put on their website or put into their email or their e-book.

Michael: When you release an article, you’re saying you can use this freely - - the content?

Carl: Yes. Basically you’re telling people they can use it freely as long as they don’t change anything and keep the resource box, which is the box that has your link and your name intact. And people will take that and put it on their website, they will put it into their e-books, they will put it into their emails. They will basically make you famous.

Michael: What’s the site that hosts all those articles that someone who needs content for their site can get that stuff at? Where do they find that?

Carl: It’s not so much a site as it is a piece of software. I’ll give you an example. This is one thing that everybody can do. I have my current recommendations. I don’t think I have Jason’s. It’s a lot easier than telling somebody a whole URL over the phone, just direct them to a site. And I’m not sure it’s on this…

Michael: So, you found it to be effective, you said to make you famous. Have you seen some examples of that?

Carl: Yes. Take a look at Terry Dean for example. He was delivering pizzas. He started writing articles and distributing them all over the Internet. He’s probably one of the most published authors on the Internet. He was so successful with this technique that he doesn’t even operate his web business anymore. He’s kind of retired and it still keeps running for him.

Michael: Because once they’re published, they’re forever.

Carl: Yes. It’s like you can find Terry Dean’s articles all over the place. He isn’t writing anymore. Now, when he was doing it, there wasn’t any software. He was just using whatever he could come across 46 and people got to know him and came to him and found his articles. But Jason’s software makes it real easy to distribute it because it automatically will send your article notices and your articles out to all of these directory sites that are looking to post your articles there.

Michael: I could probably use something like that with some of my recordings.

Carl: Yes, definitely it would work for that, as well.

Michael: Terry Dean talks about some interviews. That’s good. That’s good advice. Anyone who wants to do that, what advice would you say when you’re writing an article not only to have good content, but the whole purpose of the article is to direct them to somewhere.

Carl: Yes, but you don’t need to do that really. The way you direct them is here’s my formula. You want a formula for writing a good article. The first thing is make it very focused and specific. You want to write less than 1,000 words; somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words is perfect. But take a look at some of the sites that publish. They have some guidelines, as well. But I think anything between 500 and 1,000 will get you safe. You want it on a very focused topic. In other words, you don’t want to do it on Internet marketing. You don’t want to do it on something very broad like golf. You want to do it on an amazing tip that will reduce a golf score by 36% and it’s just one thing. Do one thing. Spend 500 to 1,000 words describing now to do this one thing or relaying this information. And then at the end of the article say, for more information, see this site. And that’s the site that you want them to go to for more information. That site doesn’t sell anything either. That site gets them more information. But it directs them to other resources and other sites, which are hopefully yours where you do sell something, or it signs them up for you e-zine, or somehow gets them on a list. The object of this whole thing, this whole exercise, the object is to have them get to be on your list so you can proactively get them a message on whenever you need to have them know about what you’ve got. It’s kind of like my catalog sitting there on the person’s desk. It reminds them. When it was on the website only, out of sight, out of mind. Email allows you to say, hey take a look at that catalog sitting on your desk -- figuratively I’m speaking, not that you have a catalog sitting on their desk and you’re not reminding them of that. What you’re doing is you’re reminding them; hey I’m the guy who knows all about this golf swing thing and what I talked to you about in that article. And by the way, I just found out this new thing that you can do. Go to this website and find that out. 47

Michael: So, the whole idea is getting them on your list, obviously. What techniques have you found is the best way to get them on your list? How do you get them -- through Internet name and email address and/or do you ask for more information than that?

Carl: Offer them something of value in exchange.

Michael: Give me an example. What’s something you offer value to get them on your list?

Carl: An e-book, a piece of software that you have rights to. What my strategy is I’m going to have a lot of people referring to it and then I’ll start capturing email addresses when I’m ready at some point.

Michael: If you’re advertising a tool, is it there specifically to offer value and to capture names?

Carl: Yes, overall the capture mechanism is there, but if you download the book, my name and link is there.

Michael: It takes them back to your copywriting?

Carl: Right, but you really need to capture the name, which I’m not currently doing at that site, but it needs to be there at some point and it’s planned to be there. I just haven’t done it yet. There’s another way to do it that’s real good and it’s inexpensive to no cost and that’s to do joint ventures with people. If you’ve got a product and you don’t have a list, find people who do have a list, an ideal list for you and do it joint venture. That’s a little harder if you’re kind of not well known, which is why one of the things you want to do is try to get as well known as you can. Here’s an effective way to do a joint venture. Don’t approach the person with a joint venture first. Send them your product for free and say, hi, my name is Joe Blow. I’m the author of the XYZ book on publishing and I thought you might be interested in this. So, I’m sending you a free copy of it as a download link. I normally sell this for $29.97. I’ve tested it. It does pretty well. I’ve got a really good sales letter. The sales letter is producing nine percent return. Nine percent of the people show up on the website and end up buying the book. By the way, if you think this would be appropriate to your list and you’d be interested in promoting it to your list, I have an affiliate program. You can sign up for the affiliate program for free. You get a 50% commission. The part that most people leave out is giving the product for free to the person so that they can take a look at it. If you’re writing to promote 48 your product to someone, then give them something. It’s again, the Cialdini principle.

Michael: I’m looking here. Your scientific advertising and I see right under my Claude Hopkins collection.

Carl: Exactly. Obviously, anybody who is interested in getting scientific advertising probably wants a Claude Hopkins collection, don’t they?

Michael: Yes, absolutely. Since we’re on that subject, we’ve added 149 and we’re now testing it out at 79.

Carl: Great. That’s even cheaper.

Michael: Yes, so it’s even cheaper and sales were kind of lagging. Did you sign up as an affiliate?

Carl: It’s got my affiliate link in there.

Michael: What a nice surprise. Those are two great strategies. Do you know anything about Joel Christopher -- that master list building? I don’t know anything about it. Is that stuff for real or…?

Carl: I don’t know a lot about it either. He did speak at one of my seminars and he’s well known in the subject of list building. There are a lot of techniques in building lists and he’s been pretty successful in the co-regs business, I know that and making that work.

Michael: Co-registration.

Carl: Well, co-registration -- various sites around the Internet that kind of offer you something for free. It’s all over the place. Or a chance to win or whatever. And you sign up and they’ve got a whole bunch of check boxes and some of them are pre-checked and some of them are not. What that does is it puts you on somebody’s list. The reason co-registration is because you’re not registering for one person’s list, you kind of registering for more than one. Sometimes you don’t even know you’re registering for them. But that can be a can of worms and you’ve got to be very careful where you step in that minefield. The person that I know who makes that work the best is Craig Perrine. He’s speaking at our conference next month. It’s tricky to be able to do co-registration in way where the people are not thinking you’re spamming them. 49

Michael: Yes, they don’t know what they’re getting. It’s not a real qualified name.

Carl: You need to have a reliable source of those co-reg names and there’s no one I trust more in the business to do that then Craig Perrine. He’s got a lot of integrity. The way they generate the list is the highest possible quality you can get. Some of the people who generate co-reg lists -- I’m not going to name companies because quite frankly I don’t know them all. There are so many companies. Some of them are pretty schlocky. They’ll sell you just about any name. They sell it to a ton of people. They’ll sell it to everybody who comes by their site. Craig limits them. The name is never sold to anymore than five people.

Michael: It’s very expensive. Have you known some stories of some people who have made those lists work?

Carl: I have never heard of anybody who has ever made that list.

Michael: No, I mean the guy speaking at your…

Carl: The co-reg, yes, there are people making money all day.

Michael: Offering stuff to those lists?

Carl: Yes. You have to know what you’re doing, like I said. And Craig will work with you on showing you how do to it right; making sure you’re not throwing your money away. They’re looking for repeat customers. No body is going to repeat unless they’re making money with it.

Michael: Who else is coming to your seminar that really knows their stuff that you’re proud to have there to speak?

Carl: Everybody. Armand Morin has become the leading person on the Internet for creating traffic to a site. He’s taken a program called Traffic Equalizer, which is a $150 program that most people are misusing and are probably going to end up getting banned instead of getting traffic. And he’s figured out how to do it so that people are getting huge amounts of traffic to their site. He’s currently getting three million visitors per month to his site. It’s all off of this Traffic Equalizer thing, the way he uses it.

Michael: Can you explain briefly what it does and how it works? 50

Carl: Basically the Traffic Equalizer tool sets up a search engine like results pages in your niche area. So, for instance let’s say you want to sell golf products for example. It’ll create literally hundreds of pages on the subject of golf. They’re all results from the search engine feed that the Traffic Equalizer gets. They create these pages and they put them on the website for you or you put them on the website. It’s pretty easy to do. On each page there’s a link that you can have, one link like an affiliate code link. And you can also put ad cents, which are the Google ad words that you make money from every time someone clicks. And I’m putting together one of these sites myself based on Armand’s -- I’m taking his course basically. And I know people personally making a few hundred dollars a day using sites like this.

Michael: A few hundred dollars a day?

Carl: A few hundred dollars a day. It’s growing. There’s not a lot of competition out there for it.

Michael: Who else is coming?

Carl: Alex Mandossian who is kind of the premiere guy on converting traffic sites. And Alex was at my first conference. He’s just like Mr. Traffic conversion.

Michael: Using audio or what’s his secret weapon?

Carl: Well, he’s got a few secret weapons, but audio is one of them. He and Armand and Rick Raddatz are the three partners in Audio Generator.

Michael: Right. I’m real familiar with that.

Carl: Which is very successful and practically everybody is using that. And the reason is because it increases response.

Michael: And it’s such an easy tool to use. I use it even though most of my recordings on my site I have my web guy turn them into Flash. But I use instant audio version all the time.

Carl: Great. How do you do your steaming on your site?

Michael: Well, I do the recording like this recording I’m recording it in Sony and I’ll save it as a WAV file. I’ll do my editing in WAV. I’ll convert it into MP3 at a certain megahertz rate, which is compatible with Rick Raddatz’s thing if you want to upload it and then code it into a Flash file. Then I’ll just upload those MP3s to my site. I let my web guy 51 convert them for me and create a button. There’s software. I could do it myself, but I just let him do it. So, I do the editing. I get it up on the site in MP3; he converts it and creates those little green buttons. You could copy and paste my green button off my site and copy it onto your site and it’ll stream from my site.

Carl: Really.

Michael: Yes. It’s nice.

Carl: That’s an interesting thought because in reality you could do an e- book like that, too. You could cut and paste that into an e-book and have the streaming go through someone’s e-book.

Michael: I know you can copy and paste it onto any site because I’ve done it. Have you been to the Claude Hopkins ad collection site recently? This is really cool. I had a guy -- he was so appreciative of all my recordings, he sent me this CD Rom of all these classic old radio ads from the 20s and 30s. A couple of them were using the same Claude Hopkins things like the puffed wheat and wheat berries and I’ve got a sample of the radio ad up on my site because I’m using some of the ads as a bonus when you buy the Claude Hopkins ad collection. You could just copy and paste that off www.claudehopkinsadvertising.com site and put that as a sample right there. There’s so many possibilities with this audio. I love it.

Carl: It’s pretty exciting stuff. In the future, we’re going to be doing something similar with video, as well. So, we were talking about people at the seminar…

Michael: You were saying Alex Mandossian is great at converting traffic.

Carl: Exactly. The theme to the seminar is traffic testing and tools. We’ve got Ken Giddens. This guy will blow you away. Last year I had him get up and talk for about 30 minutes. He had a line of people waiting for him. You’ll learn more from him…

Michael: What does he do?

Carl: He’s an expert on getting traffic to sites and building these little sites that make money off of affiliate programs. He’s the guy who built Netscape’s first website. He just knows so much about how to get traffic to a website. He keeps up on the latest information about things and he’s just a wealth of knowledge about how to get your business to work. This guy makes a six figure income with affiliate programs that you and I would probably never even do because 52 there’s not enough money it them. They have like five percent or ten percent commission rates and, you know, who wants to be involved with that. We can make 60% selling an e-book. Ken just thinks the opposite. He thinks, well, I can sell a lot more traffic to one of those sites and get their commission even though the commission is lower. And he makes a six-figure income just doing that.

Michael: He’s probably looking at it from a market standpoint.

Carl: Yes, but he’s generally knowledgeable about everything you need to know about making your Internet business successful because he’s done it all. You know the people who create HTML who is a committee?

Michael: Yes.

Carl: He’s one of the guys they send the code to test.

Michael: How old is he, an older guy?

Carl: Probably my age.

Michael: How old are you Carl?

Carl: I’m in my 50s. I can’t be sure but…

Michael: He’s not a kid.

Carl: He’s not a kid, no. He’s been coming to my seminars the last few years and it’s like after last year, I said you’ve got to come here and talk. People want to know what you have to say. He’s got a lot of good stuff. Bruce Clay is another guy. He’s been in my audios for several years now. And one day I said, the search engine optimization stuff, there’s a lot of conflicting information. Who is right? One person says this; the other person says the opposite. I don’t know who is right, but I can tell you one thing, if they really know what they’re talking about, they’re going to rate high on the search engine. So, I figured, okay, on the subject of search engine optimization, who is the top guy here? I did a search on Google and Bruce Clay came up number one. He consistently ranks in the top four, I think with the new ranking system. He charges like $14,000 to do a search engine optimization. He knows what he’s doing.

Michael: I think I’ve got a lot of good content and we’ll wrap it up right here. I really appreciate you taking the time. This has been great. Have a great day. 53

Carl: You, too.

Michael: Thank you Carl.