Michael: John here is a question from Marco. He says, “In copywriting it is extremely important to find out who you are writing for. With direct mail, you can get a lot of the customer profile from data cards, etc., but I find it much harder to find out the target customer for online copywriting. Do you have any feedback on that?”

John: A few years ago some of the guys who had one foot in the old world of direct mail and the other foot in the new world of online direct response marketing, realized what a boon the web was to this kind of research. They came up with something called an ASK campaign, A-S-K. These were cheap, fast and you could do them literally on the cuff from your kitchen table. It is just merely that you have a group of people who are in the target audience that you might be going after. Just ask them, “What would you like to see in a product? How are they disappointed currently in the products that they are getting?” You can ask them anything and they will respond. As you and I both know, people like the interactive nature of the web, this kind of response and sending out a question. You know you can give people a reward or you can develop some kind of bonding with them to get this kind of interaction back and forth. You can actually do like a paperclip campaign to bring people in and ask them questions in exchange for some free information. There are a lot of ways to do this. There are companies like SurveyMonkey.com, which have various looking survey software available or you can just do it on the cuff. I do it on my blog all the time just by saying, “Hey I have to ask you guys a question.” I ask the question and then we talk about things. Sometimes I offer a reward like a free copy of my course or something like that for the best answer. I will just get swamped with answers. People comment. They are very sincere and it is very true. These are some of the best kind of responses that you can get. Indirect mail; that would of taken me months to be able to give me the information that I can get literally overnight.

Michael: When you offer an ethical bribe compared to not offering what kind of different response do you see?

John: It is very interesting. The first couple of times on the blog, I would say offhand that it was probably four times the response minimum with a bribe. The first time that I did it I said I would give away a free copy of my Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets to the best answer as judged by me. I asked a very specific question. The responses just start piling up within minutes of me posting the blog because of the RSS feeds a lot of people get alerted to my posts right away. I let it go on for four days and I wound up giving away five of the awards rather than one because I just had so many good answers. I realized that, “Wow these people are all responding thinking they are all competing for one prize, even though that they could look and see that there was almost 200 responses.” These were not short responses. These were essay type of responses. These were people that invested 15 minutes to an hour in the response.

Michael: Do you remember specifically what that case was about? So when you got all of those responses, it gave you great content if you left it up there for your blog, number one. You could use the content if you were developing or writing a sales campaign. What else could you do with that information?

John: In fact Michael, I don’t remember the exact questions, but I do remember what I wanted to get from it. I was just starting to plan the launch of my simple writing system at home workshop. I was looking for what people thought was the main element, I believe, and the sudden, rapid rise of most of the top marketers because I hang out with a lot of the top marketers online, the top entrepreneurs and small businessmen. It is just part of the group that I hang out with. I know the inside stories on them. Oh I know what it was. It was the primary motivation that drove guys from that kind of grey area of maybe being successful or certainly being unsuccessful to kind of jump that gap from being not successful at all to being wildly successful; the main motivation behind that. I made people guess. I tease them mercilessly in my blog. I said that I would give a prize for the best answer. What I was looking for was, I knew what the answer was. What I was looking for what people thought the answer was. That information I was able to use to be able to counter objections when I wrote a later piece of selling the product. I didn’t mention the product by the way, but when I was doing it I started realizing what people thought about what it took to become successful. That gave me incredible insight as to how people who were on the other side of the divide, but haven’t been successful yet, thought about what it took to get over there and then it was a wealth of information because it led me into the thinking process. It led me into the belief system that a lot of people had. I was able to speak their language when I was talking to them about how I could actually help them get from where they were to where they wanted to be on the other side of the divide, so to speak.

Michael: Just as a side note, how did your launch for the Simple Writing System go?

John: It was widely successful.

Michael: So you hit it right on the head?

John: I will just say this. We went against the grain. I know Jeff Locker personally. He is a friend of mine. He is the guy that invented the launch formula. You know, I was talking with him as he was just chilling me to the bone because he said, “Everything that I am doing is going against the grid. We are trying to do it in a much shorter time period. We are trying to sell copywriting help, which is traditionally sales and launches.” We were offering substance essentially. Sure it is going to sell, but know that you got on a steeper hill than other people have to climb. We knew that going in so our secret weapon has always been superior marketing skills and writing skills. Of course that is what I was selling. If you have these skills, anything you do is going to be much better. It was kind of like a real-world promise type thing. I don’t know if you follow that, but I also had a challenge where a guy challenged me. We had essentially a two-week launch period. What I was doing is a lot of interviews with people. One of them was a challenge by a guy named [inaudible] that said, “Hey I have another performing weak web site that isn’t doing very well. We spent 6 months trying to fix it. We can’t fix it. I challenge you to do what you say you do and fix it.” I spent a half an hour with him and taught his rookie copywriter who only had 5 months’ experience writing. The guy had no marketing or business experience before that at all. I told him what to do according to the system. They did it and they tested it for one week. They were going to come back and we were going to finish the interview. This was live, no-net marketing theater. I was a little nervous because I was putting my rep on the line here, but the secret weapon is always that I know that this stuff works. I taught this guy what to do. I just told him what to do. They went out and they tested it during the first week of the economic crisis when the Dow lost what 50% almost. It was a horrible, turbulent week. That is when they tested it. They came back and what I told the guy to do doubled the response. It went from a 1.7 to a 3.4 sales conversion, which netted an extra $50,000 a month for the quality traffic he was getting.

Michael: Wow. That is incredible. That recording, was that a promotional recording or is that available? For more information, go to JohnCarltonOffer.com. That is JohnCarltonOffer.com.

John: We spent two weeks giving away content. In other words, I interviewed and I get that challenge. By the way, we are going to do a lot more challenges now because they are fun and I kind of like being challenged. I mean nobody who is on the upper end of the entrepreneurial and small business world likes boredom, but I interviewed everybody else. I interviewed Evan [inaudible], Frank Kern, Steven Pierce, Richard Cheflan, and got them to put up copy that they had written after being inspired by me. I helped all of these guys at some point, but it wasn’t just testimonial interviews. We actually dove into the copy and kind of tore it apart and did a reverse engineering on it. Here is why they used this, here is what worked, here is where we experimented with video, here we took video out, and we did some things like that. It was all very content driven. It had no selling at all of course. It was about a week and a half of the most intense give away of content that the market had really seen in a while.

Michael: Wow that sounds great. Is that accessible anymore?

John: We took it off. Of course it is not going to disappear. We haven’t quite recovered from the launch. When people here this content, I am not sure what the time period is going to be, but there will be opportunity. So the main thing is that just stay in touch with what we are doing because we will not sit on that stuff it is way too valuable, but we did as part of the agreement that we had during this simple launch is it is off the market right now.

Michael: All right let’s move it on to the next question. A question from Brandon Wilkins of Thefinancialfreedombuilders.com asked, “I am a financial coach and educator who shows people how to take control of their finances. I am not flashy and I don’t visibly flaunt how well I am doing financially. I am looking to break into a more fluent market, high-wage earners. What suggestions do you have for how to appeal to that market when at first glance they won’t see how valuable my techniques are.”

John: Well this is very interesting. I get this a lot. The first thing to do is to realize, and I think there are other questions that are going to tie into this. It is all about salesmanship. My little saying that I like to tell people, I say it over and over again. I have a lot of these. It is if you have a product or a service that your prospect can actually use to make his life better, then shame on you if you don’t do everything in your power to make him see that the most logical next step that he has in his life is to buy from you. That shocks a lot of people, because most people do what I call selling from their heels. They are reluctant to brag. They are reluctant to do what they perceive as hype. They are reluctant to get involved in any kind of aggressive selling. What I mean by selling from your heels is that imagine a guy face to face trying to sell you something and you have one foot turned sideways ready to bolt in the opposite direction. He says, “Here is what I have, it is really good, but you probably don’t want it do you?” That is the way that most marketers do it. I teach people to stand up. Be that guy that he needs you to be so that he can feel confident getting involved in your world. Whether that is buying your product, using your services, leaving his email and name on your site as part of a name squeeze. Just figure out who you need to be. I talk a lot about the go-to guy. Even the smallest entrepreneurial in the world can be the go-to guy in his niche, if he understands his people better – I mean you can even go up against IBM and beat them. On a web site for example, if someone is looking at your web site, they are not looking at another web site they are looking at yours. It is just you and him talking. It is just you and him. You have an opportunity to beat out the biggest, most well funded, well staffed, competitor if you can connect with him on a human-to-human level and be the go-to guy. Be that guy that he is going to think, “Oh, thank god that I know who this guy is. What a great resource this guy is. He thinks like me. He has looked into this stuff. He has more information. He is going to shortcut a lot of the process for me. He has the answers that I want.” So by being the go-to guy, you are that conduit to a world that your prospect either has no access to or is at a stage where he can piggyback on your experience or your deeper knowledge or your willingness to spend time doing what he has not got time to do, which may be just research. I mean take hobbies, like say you are into HO trains. To be a go-to guy in that market, you just know more about HO trains than the average prospect out there. You are willing to share it. You become that guy who allows that prospect to indulge in his passion to the degree that he wants to and feel that he is dealing with somebody who not only shares his passions, but actually has more time to spend on the passion, has more insight to it, and has done the footwork to be able to do thing. You know a lot of people get to guru status, so to speak, merely by saying, “I will be that guy who takes the risk and does more research than other people have time to do and do all of the stuff and call the people in this market and become friends with them.” I have friend, Joe Polish, who started out as a carpet cleaner. That is how he found Gary Halbert. He found me through that, and Dan Kennedy, and guys like that. He just learned how to market and became the most successful carpet cleaner in Phoenix. Then he decided that he was going to teach other guys to do what he did. He took the marketing skills that he learned from top marketing experts, translated it to the carpet cleaning industry. He became a billionaire doing that and then became a guru. So he stopped cleaning carpets and started teaching other carpet cleaners all over the world how to do this. Through that, he started things like the genius network. He started interviewing people like Halbert, like me, and like Kennedy. Then he started branching out. Now he started interviewing, who is that guy from Virgin Airlines?

Michael: Richard Branson.

John: Richard Branson. He is a best friend with Richard Branson.

Michael: Are you serious?

John: He is a good friend with Tony Robbins. He got involved with the guys over at Nightinghale Conan. They got to meet the son. He doesn’t much around with the low guys. He goes straight to the top. When that book The Four Hour Work Week came out, Tim Ferriss. He called him up and said, “How would you like to be interviewed by us?” The guy said, “Fine”. They became friends. Joe is a friendly guy. l like him a lot and I consider him a personal friend. I speak at his events a lot. I go out to his [inaudible]. He is one of those guys that is a connector. I have met a lot of the top people in the industry at Joe’s office in Phoenix. I will fly out to Joe’s office and there will be 6 other guys there, 4 of which are some of the top marketers in the world. So this guy came out of obscurity merely by raising his hand and saying, “Okay I will be the guy in this carpet cleaner world, who will go forward and not only learn how to make money and do all of this stuff, but I will come back and I will share it with you. Plus I will go to the extra step of I will just keep going and going and going because there is no limit to this and get involved with things. Like how did Virgin Airlines make this work? “ He just spent a week on Necker Island with Richard Branson and got to know these guys. Now he has moved out of the carpet cleaning business. He still has that as a side, but he is a now a major player in the general marketing efficient online business. He has kind of moved up in the world. He has never forgotten his carpet cleaning roots. Again, it is just a great example for how anybody who just has a passion. He parlayed a passion for marketing and finding out things that he didn’t know and sharing it without other people. He just turned it into a career. He is definitely going to be one of the who’s who of Internet marketing when they start talking about these 100 years from now and about how Internet marketing got going. We are really still in that gold rush period with the guys that are setting down standards for how Internet marketing happens right now. Those standards will probably be there for a very, very long time, several generations. These are smart guys who are applying stuff, making it work, and testing it. They are essentially creating the landscape of Internet marketing right now. It is happening right now and you are hanging out with these guys. It is like hanging out with the Robert Barons of the late 1800’s that formed the industrial age that shot America to the top of the ranks of world powers. You are listening to an exclusive interview found on Michael Senoff’s

Michael: Do you remember that guy Brad Richdale who was selling the TV course on Making Money Now on television?

John: I don’t.

Michael: He was all over TV. He was one of the early guys who learned all of this direct marketing stuff. He had a TV show; a 30-minute show. I remember a word probably 15 years ago off of the TV and then I got the tapes. You hear in the audience people going around the room and there is Joe Polish. He says, “My name is Joe Polish of Piranha Marketing. You are going to hear about me.” He had that passion many years ago and he knew that he was going to be there.

John: Yeah. One of the best things Michael, of course, is that we get to do, you and I, we get to drink of this ocean of passion that happens at the top. It is one of the rewards from moving up the ladder of success. It is that the guys that you get to hang out with, these are ethical guys brimming with integrity. It is just a joy to hang out with them. It is just the idea Michael, to brainstorm. I am about to go to another brainstorm in Vegas next week. I just got back from a Chicago brainstorm put on by Evan Vega about three weeks ago. In fact it was at that brainstorm in Chicago that I was sitting at a bar with Mike Philchamp and Mike looks at me and he is in the top Internet marketing. He looks at me and he says, “Hey can I give you a piece of advice?” I said, “Yeah, of course.” He told me, he said, “Just do the launch”. I was resisting launching this product. I was going to do it on a much lower scale. He said, “Just do it. All of us are going to line up and want to do interviews with you and do this stuff.” He was one of my first webinar guys. I was just astonished and I am humbled by the fact that he credits me with a lot of the inspiration, motivation, and the tactics and strategies that he used to get where he is. He also shared some stuff that he has never shared before. One of the central idea to the guys in Internet marketing as opposed to a lot of the offline marketing stuff, but online these guys are very aware of where they came from. Almost every single one of them to a man, there is a before and after story that will bring tears to your eyes. I am talking about dead broke, near suicide and they made it. One of the essential tenants of their business philosophy is to give back. You know the reason that I became a guru really was I was a paste-up artist at a catalog in Silicon Valley back in the late 70’s. I met my first copywriter. I had no idea that somebody was behind the words in it. I was in the art department. It was my first time in a real art department and I met this copywriter. I thought, “Wow this is great. This is something that I could really get into.” I asked her, “How do you become a copywriter?” She looked at me and she sighed and rolled her eyes. She said, “It is way too hard and you will never figure it out.” So I stole her copy of [inaudible] Tested Advertising Methods. I read enough of it before she stole it back that I realized that I could do it, but I had to do it on my own. To this day, the reason that I am a teacher is that I made a vow, then and there, that if I made it I would go back and help anybody else who wanted to make it too and I would share everything that I knew. That’s been the outstanding element of my teaching style, which I don’t hold anything back. I lay it out there. I can be a little harsh sometimes, but that is because money is on the line. You don’t learn with pats on the back and nice try. You learn when it is hardcore stuff going on. To this day, I’ll never use her name because I don’t want to be sued, but she motivated me negatively. By the way, that was the answer to the question on my blog. Now everyone wants to go back and look. Almost all of these guys had some negative motivation. Somebody told them no, you can’t do it. You will never be a success. You are a loser or you will never figure it out. It is astonishing what the juice that that kind of motivation can give you. Everyday you wake up and you are tired. You don’t want to do it. You want to just go back to bed. You think, no I am going to prove it to so and so.

Michael: These are the kinds of stories that you got back from that challenge?

John: No, that was the answer to the question that I knew from hanging with the top guys.

Michael: Oh, gotcha.

John: About half a dozen of the people nailed it, got that. They had some version of it. I gave them all the reward instead of just one guy. A lot of people had a lot of different ideas about what the motivation was. A lot of it was totally wrong and it made me realize how important psychology, street-level, salesmanship quality psychology. How important that is to understanding marketing, to understanding selling, to understanding how to make the business work. I have a B.A. in Psychology. That and 50 cents will get me a cup of coffee or $1.50 now at Starbucks, the insight that I got from a lifetime of studying behavior psychology. You know I take a client, when I was living in San Diego; I take them to the zoo. I have them watch the gorillas. Sometimes they would ask me, “Why are we here watching the gorillas?” I would make them watch for a while. Then they would go, “Oh, I get it.” What they realize is that there are elements of how people treat each other in the way gorillas act. I take people to the mall and I sit them down. They watch people in the mall for half an hour and they say, “Why are we here?” I say, “This is your audience. This is your people. How are they behaving?” You will die as a marketer if you think that you are going to intuitively figure out what people do. People are hiding what they do. The best marketers are realists. They don’t approach the market on how they wish it were or how they think the world ought to be, they approach the world on how it actually is. This is where the behavior of psychology comes in. We love this stuff. That is why we do so much research based on demographics and things like this. It is not what we wish. Most people, even political pundants and writers, columnists in magazines and newspapers, operate almost entirely on the way that they wish the world was or the way that they think the world ought to be. That is fine for opinion, but that doesn’t affect how people actually act. When you start getting into how people actually act, including what they buy, why they buy it and how they go through the process in their head, then you start to understand things. Like Mark Twain’s famous quote, “There are two reasons why a man buys anything. One is the reason that he will tell you he bought it and the other reason is the real reason that he bought it.” The most outlandish example of that is the guy having a midlife crisis and buying a Porsche. He will tell you it is a great car. It is wonderful and I have always wanted one all along, but there is a deeper psychological reason as to why he bought it. The guy selling Porsches knows this and that is how they sell a lot of Porsches.

Michael: Here is a question from Rusty Lagrange of the RightWayCo.com. He asks, “I want to break into catalog copywriting to get some regular income while I am developing my web site as a freelance copywriter. Each business contact lead I look into for catalog work has either no freelance writers, no need for writers now, or such high educational standards listed that I just don’t bother asking them for work. My question is, John, what is the best way to find the production manager or creative director and get a foot in the door if the web sites hide all of that info from the public? There are over 1,000 catalogs supposedly begging for copywriters, just who are they?”

John: That is a great question and I am going to beat Rusty up a little bit, but I do this out of love not out of any kind of meanness. Rusty, shame on you for letting the first obstacles that you come across stop you. In creative writing there are books put out by publishers about all of the agents and all of the publishers in New York and in fact all over the world. All of the guys who list their information, they either misspell their name or they give some other piece of incorrect information so that they can tell when someone is contacting them through that kind of a phone book of everyone in New York Publishing, for example because they don’t want to talk to people who have just pulled their name out of this book. Does this make sense Michael?

Michael: Yeah that is interesting.

John: Each business contact lead that I look into and they tell me that. That is the first answer. The first answer is always no when you are doing this. When I started my freelance career I ran into this myself and what I did was kind of sneaky and what most people probably can’t use, but this should be illustrative of the attitude you need. When I was down in Los Angeles I started my freelance career with a typewriter actually. This is before word processors. I had one tankful of gas left in my car, one months’ rent. I literally had no fall back position. I had to make this work. I went to the direct response agencies in Los Angeles and there happened to be a lot of them. I was armed with very little information except that I had read a couple of books. I had been in advertising through the catalog in Silicon Valley and I had done a lot of research. I even took a speed-reading course and went to the Torenson Library and read everything in the Dewey decimal system from 700 to 780, which is marketing, writing, salesmanship, business, and all of this stuff. I did this thinking that this was going to catch me up to everyone else, in fact it put me light years ahead of everybody else, but I am getting ahead of myself here. I would go to the agencies and I would try to set up an interview with the creative director. Often this was either going to be a 5-minute little brush up where I was going to rush in and rush out and he was going to make his decision on almost nothing. What I would do is I would get in there and I would notice something in the first agency that I went into. There was a desk in the front room with phones ringing, manned by a single person, usually a young woman who was their receptionist. I went up and I was always very nice. The first day I had some gum and I offered her a piece of gum. I said, “Would you like a piece of gum?” Oh yeah my mouth is really dry. I said, “Would you like me to go get you a glass of water?” She said, “That would be great I can’t leave the desk.” So I went and got her a glass of water.” I just chatted briefly. I didn’t flirt with her. I just chatted. I treated her like a human being. Receptionists in most of these buildings do not get treated like human beings. I didn’t have an agenda or a sneaky attitude. I am that guy. Later, I realized that when I called back to kind of hassle the VP of marketing to say, “Hey do you have any work?” I was going to call back. I said, “Remember, I am the guy that came in last week.” The receptionist put me through to the VP. She said, “Oh, John. I remember you.” She put me through to the VP while he was in another meeting that he wasn’t supposed to be disturbed at. At that point I thought, huh I might be on to something here. I actually worked the people; I didn’t try to go straight to the VP. I actually started working the rest of the building. When I actually got work at these agencies. I eventually became the guy that got snuck in the back door to do all the work that their staff writers couldn’t pull off. This was during my first year of freelancing. I got to know the guys in accounting. I got to know the other writers on staff. I got to know the gossip and I got to know all of this stuff. Because I got to know the guys in accounting, I would stop by on my way out and poke my head in. I would say, “Hey Bob what is going on?” Bob said, “Hey what are you doing here?” I said, “Ah, I just finished a job. I think they are going to pay me.” He would cut me a check, right then before he got the invoice from the VP. I realized that there is some advocate. What I developed is this attitude called sales detective work. Literally you can put on your Sherlock Holmes style hat and get a pipe and sit down and think. Okay what do I need to do to get past the barriers? I have this thing that I have written about in my newsletter before called There is Always a Way. Top marketers, they give me credit for it, but there is always a way no matter what obstacle you come across, there is always a way. The way that I illustrate this is I say, “You can bet on one of two organizations. You can bet on the United States Coast Guard and Military with their multi-trillion dollar budget for helicopters, radar, everything. You can bet on them or you can bet on the Central American Dope Farmer with an eight-horse powerboat coming across. You can bet on which one is going to succeed. Of course the answer is that you bet on the Central American Dope Farmer because he is going to find a way. He is going to look at this huge military complex, these helicopters and all of this stuff and he is just going to find a way through. Now there are better examples of course, and I don’t want to get into the politics of that, but it is the idea that the little guy looking at the big corporation or whatever and saying, “Oh my god there is no way”. How am I going to weasel my way into this catalog as a freelancer? You know I am just a little guy. I don’t have any contacts. I don’t know anybody in this business. “ Well figure it out. You know in Los Angeles for example. I don’t know where Rusty is, but in Los Angeles there was something called the Creative Guild. I don’t know if it is still there, but I found out about that early in my first year. I joined it. It was $35. They have meetings every Thursday. What it was, was a cocktail party with people from the Agency and stuff. I went in there and I just started making friends with some people and just talking. I didn’t sell myself. I did more of the bonding thing. One of the things you realize is that people love to gossip and people love to share stories and they like to vent so this detective work that I started developing for me just getting jobs, I used when I got a job so that I could start breaking things down. I interviewed not just the top guy at the company that I was going to write about, but I went and interviewed the feet in the street salesman. I went and interviewed the receptionist. I went and interviewed other people because I wanted to get the gossip and stuff that the top guy wasn’t hearing about. He has a certain idea of why people buy the product and how great his product is. The people that work for him have a much more realistic approach to it. They are the ones that are fielding the complaint phone calls. They are the ones handing out the refunds. They are the ones that are sitting there listening to people say, “I wish this product did this, this, and this.” The top guy doesn’t hear or doesn’t want to hear or it takes a long time to get there. So when I was looking for work, you know through the Creative Guild it was great because I started meeting other writers, I was getting the inside shot, and I was finding out who was doing this stuff. It was good stuff and when I started sending out letters to the various directors to be able to say I am a freelancer and I need work. I applied all of the salesmanship skills I had to that plus I did everything that I could through my detective work to make sure that letter wound up in their hands, including sending a Fed-Ex package. This was back when California had just started the lottery, so I would include three lottery tickets. I would start out with something like, “Hi Bob, this is John Carlton. I called you last week. I thought that I would just mail you this today because I am about to make you a millionaire.” These guys talk about this later. I would go to direct marketing meetings with 4,000 people in the audience and two guys would walk up and tell the story about John Carlton that sent them this letter with lottery tickets. I was astounded that other people hadn’t tried this stuff, that people weren’t doing this stuff. I got this name and of course very soon after that I met Gary Halbert and I left the agency world. I was told he was the writer and I started working for the biggest mailers in the world; Rodale, Phillips, [inaudible], within three or four years and actually found an agent who started giving me jobs. I left that work. I left millions to be able to go out with Halbert because I preferred the entrepreneurial side. It was just more fun working with these guys. I didn’t have to put up with people stepping all over my stuff because no matter how good the copy I wrote for an agency was, two or three guys were going to step all over it before it saw the light of day, which means that I couldn’t even say that I got these results from my writing because it wasn’t my writing by the time it finished up. That really ticked me off. For more exclusive interviews on business, marketing, advertising, and copywriting go to Michael Senoff’s

Michael: Let me ask you this, when you were doing all of your research like in the library and before you met Halbert, was there anyone other than like Claude Hopkins and all of the classic guys, was there anyone relatively unknown that you really learned a lot from, relating to copywriting that most people wouldn’t know about?

John: No. When I took that speed-reading course, I didn’t learn to speed read, by the way. I still read at a plodding. The tactic that I took away from there was not to rely on any one book. There are two stages of this. One, you give yourself permission at any point, when a book you are reading bores you, becomes irrelevant, or ticks you off or does anything, you pick it up and throw it across the room, banging off two walls and into the trash can. That freed me from the fact that I, like a lot of people, think that once you crack a book open that you are somehow committed to reading that book. So if a book sits on your nightstand for six months or a year that you won’t finish because you are bored with it, then throw it away. There is a lot of stuff out there, but company tactic is when you go to the library, you pull out eight books at a time, put it on a stand and go through them. Through speed reading, you learn to go through the table of contents, through the index pages, you read all of the chapter headings, you go in there and you start glancing around. You actually go through and you flip through all of those different pages before you sit down to read it. What you learn, even if you don’t know anything about the subject, because after you go through the third or fourth book, certain names will start to pop out, certain concepts will start to pop out. Even without reading a single full paragraph, you can start to tell which books are good and which aren’t. So you start segmenting them and then pushing the other ones aside. So when I was doing this at the library, what I came up with on my own was Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising and My Life in Advertising, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which is called the salesman bible for a reason. A book called How I Made My First Million in Insurance by Frank Bettger.

Michael: Frank Bettger, yeah.

John: And all of the table stuff and through table I started reading Oglebee, which didn’t really help me that was more of an insight. Oglebee doesn’t give you really [inaudible] but it is still great stuff. The top guys always quote Oglebee; he is still a big hero of mine. Probably the one book that I would say at the time was unknown because it was part of Wilshire publishing, which was a very small publishing house and I found it by going out there. Because it was actually nearby where I lived, so I went to this publishing house and they had all of these books out there. There was this book by Victor Schwab called How to Write a Good Advertisement. I was about 30 years old at the time and I started spreading that around and other people too. I worked at [inaudible], but that is typically one of those books that is now well- known and people reference it a lot.

Michael: Yeah. I just interviewed Melvin Powers about two months ago.

John: I didn’t know that he was still alive. God bless the guy.

Michael: He is still alive.

John: I picked up a couple of tips from him. One was rational emoted therapy, which was one of the things that was a precursor of MLP that Melvin Powers was publishing these guys when no one else would publish them. I just stumbled on that when I was out at the thing. I said, [inaudible] because again, that kind of fell by the wayside with the way the transactional analysis says I am okay, your okay and nobody knows about it. That was great stuff, but MLP just kind of swabbed the rest of that.

Michael: I’ve heard this story where Gary Halbert talks about how he hooked up with Melvin. I think I had mentioned it in the interview with Melvin. Gary Halbert wrote some copy for his mail order millionaire course. Did you introduce Halbert to Melvin?

John: I think that was before I met Gary. I met Gary at Jay Abraham’s divorce party in 1986, I believe. Gary had just started publishing and he had just got out of the Federal Penitentiary, which is a story. His sixth newsletter was The Dark Side of Success.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah.

John: It is all about death, but I met him right about his third or fourth newsletter, I think. He had just gotten out and he was raring to go. I met him and as I have written before he was the most arrogant, [inaudible], bastard that I have ever met. I liked him immediately. So I was working with Gary very, very long ago. He was my mentor, then he was my partner, then after we quit working we decided that he would remain my friend. He is just a wealth of stuff. Just to tie in with what Rusty was talking about. I met Halbert. This was all about recognizing opportunity and one of the main books that formatted the way that I did things was Think and Grow Rich. Right before and after, and I talked about this. I am not going to bore you, but Michael before and after is as bad as anybody. I mean when I discovered Think and Grow Rich, I had just lost my job, my girlfriend and a place to live all within a month. I was literally living in my car and looking up every friend that I had on the west coast who had a couch to sleep on and sleeping on it. I was really unrooted and was thinking, “What am I going to do now? What is going on now?” I wasn’t exactly destitute, but I was just in a bad place and it never occurred to me, because this isn’t the way that I grew up. I grew up in a working class house in a small town in Southern California. It had never occurred to me, and nobody told me because nobody knew among the people that I grew up with that you could actually have a goal and make up a plan and go after it. You can say, “I want to “x”. I want to own this. I want to make this much money. I want to meet this person. I want to have this kind of life and then make a plan and go after it.” That, to me, was literally one of those Saint Paul falling off his horse moments, you know, where just this blinding light of realization happened to me. I became this guy who started making goals. Of course, anybody who starts making goals realizes that there is a process that you have to go through because a lot of times the first goal is one that you think you want, but you don’t really want. Then you start to refine the process. Everything that I do is all based on this goal setting stuff that I learned in Think and Grow Rich. That was one of the fundamental books, that and Dale Carnegie and John Caple’s Tested Advertising Methods along with Claude Hopkins.

Michael: Where did you grow up? Did you live in San Diego for a while?

John: I did, but I grew up in Cucamonga. It is now called Rancho Cucamonga. They changed the name and incorporated Etiwanda. It was one of the oldest parts of southern California. I grew up a block from Route 66 and that part of Route 66 had been the Spanish Trail in 1700 and 1800. So it was a very old part of California. I grew up among vineyards and orchards and things. All of these things are gone now of course. I grew up in a very [inaudible], not exactly backwards, but I grew up in an American groupie type town. Frank Zappa’s dad taught at my high school. There was a lot of energy there. A lot of people that came from my little, tiny high school have gone on to great things. There should be some kind of study. There must have been something in the water there. It was very much a small town atmosphere and very much lost, very much totally prepared for the real world.

Michael: How long did you live in San Diego for?

John: I lived in San Diego for 6 months. I don’t want to go deep into this, but when I was living out of my car, somehow my old high school friend got a hold of me. He called somebody that called somebody else and he called me because he had just gotten divorced. He had just gotten a job as the city attorney for one of the cities around San Diego. I think it was National City. He suddenly got a hold of me. He said, “John I am divorced. I am living in a house down here. Why don’t you come stay with me?” Somehow he found out I was in dire straits. So I went down and it was in San Diego. I wound up staying 6 months and that is where all of this stuff started coming together. I answered my first direct response ad in the newspaper. I was hanging down in San Diego at this house, sleeping on the floor, with my type writer thinking I was going to be the next Jack Harrowack and I picked up the LA Times or maybe it was the San Diego Tribune. There was an ad there for the lazy man’s way to riches. That was the first ad that caught me at the perfect time. I was the perfect prospect. I got in. Of course that was my intro to Think and Grow Rich. That was kind of a translation of the goal setting thing. So that got me involved in that and I still have that newspaper. I don’t have the ad because I literally cut it out and mailed it in with my $10, $9 or whatever and got the book. I still have the newspaper. It set me off on this path that led me to how to get my life together, to decide that I could become a freelancer. I actually worked for a small company for a while as a staff writer just to kind of work my chops a little bit and to make sure that I had my skills down. It just kept progressing. Then when I was able to meet Jay Abraham that was through a small opportunity that I would of missed if I hadn’t been absolutely laser focused on any possible opportunity coming my way that I could jump on. I jumped on that and got moving. I met Jay Abraham. He wouldn’t of otherwise paid any attention to me, but we had a comment to a Claude Hopkins reading because that was the book that was out of print at the time and we both read. You start paying attention. I traded writing for a free run of his office. I started meeting people in the office. I knew that the opportunity was there. I wasn’t making a dime, but I was getting a million dollar education just hanging out.

Michael: That is a great story. Okay let’s go onto Alan Silverstein of Evergreen Marketing, LLC. John I would like to know how true it is that direct response mail out performs email and by how much?

John: Let me answer that. Whenever I speak at a seminar, well most of the times that I speak, if I have a minute I will pause no matter how big the room is and I speak in front of hundreds and hundreds and you know up to thousands of people. I will ask, is there anybody in here, because most of this crowd will be an Internet crowd usually. Now marketing things are full of the web or Internet marketing. I will say, “Is anybody here doing off line marketing, sending out direct mail?” There are usually four or five guys in the back of the room, who will reluctantly and meekly raise their hand. I will look in the back of the room and I will say okay and I will just pick one out and say, “What has it done for your bottom line?” They will pause and they will look at each other and then mumble. I will say, “What I can’t hear you.” It doubles the response. Those guys in the back of the room, and not because they are slackers, but they are so hip, they are there to hear me, they are there to pick up on all the info they can, and they don’t care about being up front. They don’t dress well. They don’t call attention to themselves. These are hard-core marketers. My problem back in the early 2000’s was trying to get my offline clients online. They were reluctant to go online. Nobody is going to use a credit card to buy anything online. It is amazing now these few years later how much the world has changed. My 86-year-old father gets his medication from New Zealand online using a credit card. So that is just astounding to me. My big problem was getting people who were all offline, online. Now my problem is getting people who are all online to experiment with offline stuff.

Michael: Okay, he also asks, “Using space advertising for developing sales leads, what size space ad and where in the newspaper, I guess positioning, or magazines should you have it displayed?”

John: This is all old-schooled stuff. Gary Halberg’s newsletter, the GaryHalbertletter.com is still up. I deal with his sons now trying to make that site as viable as possible so that the other things are being done there, but he talks about that. That is old school direct response, which there is a lot of wisdom in the old guys talking about this and Gary, of course, has talked about that a lot. The answer is fit it any size all the way to a full page. It is a numbers game. This is what any top veteran is going to tell you. It is a numbers game. Here is the main question. What is a lead worth to you? If it is worth a lot, there are people that will pay $500 for a lead; there are people that will pay $5,000 for a lead. If you are selling yachts and you have to pay $5,000 for a guy who is ready to buy a yacht, is it worth $5,000? Well yeah, but a lot of people focus on, I want the leads as cheaply as possible. I will tell you what; online I do not have the largest list online. I may not have even a middle-sized list. I have what is considered a modest sized list of people, yet I consistently out poll in response other marketers who have lists 5 to 10 times my size because it is quality over quantity. Some guys have big lists because they have been doing it and they want more. They just know that the more I have the more that the numbers are going to go up. It is not so much quality. It is quantity. That is a legitimate marketing decision to make. So what is a lead worth to you? If you are only willing to pay a nickel for a lead because in your experience that is all it is worth because you have to get 400 leads to make one sale and you are selling something for $39 then first off that is a bad marketing model, but if that is the game then taking out a full-page newspaper or magazine ad would be marketing suicide because you are going to pay at minimum $10 to $100 a lead there. If you do a little business card sized thing, maybe throw it in the classified ads and things like that, you are going to get 5, 10 leads. Maybe that is okay. Maybe that’s all you need, but for most people it is just that you sit down and figure out how many leads do I have? What is a lead worth to me? What is my most efficient way of bringing those leads in. You are going to test. Some people will do full-page ads in newspapers or lead generation, not ever sell any. That is what the counter is that a lot of guys get. Instincts, but they won’t do it. Other guys just find something that works and they will be in it. As far as placement, that all depends to because you are going to pay more for the excellent placement, which is what the third page or the last page in the sports section, or the first page following the lifestyle section. There are always little games that you can play, but you are going to play more for the best position. When you do anything more than a full-page ad, then you don’t get to choose position. That is a whole another game.

Michael: It all comes down to mathematics.

John: It all comes down to math, yeah.

Michael: Here is a question from Alex Maribou of makemoneyonlinefornewbies.org. He says, “John would you suggest in order to get targeted traffic as far as writing or copywriting is concerned; articles, ads, banners, paperclick, etc.

John: This is an easy one. Use them all. Now when he says as far as writing or copywriting, I am assuming he is talking about getting clients. Paperclick seems to be working the best, but the banners and the articles, the articles certainly. That is a PR game. That is part of getting your name out there. If you are going to introduce yourself, “Hi I am Alex Maribou and I am a copywriter.” Well yeah okay that is great. If you say, “Hi I am Alex Maribou. I am the author of blah-blah-blah or I am the guy that wrote those 5 articles for Tmnews.com that started the controversy and got all the response blah-blah or I am Alex Maribou, the guy that was just on Larry King talking about it then that is a different way of positioning yourself.” It is all about positioning and you don’t do that magically. You don’t do that by just saying, “I am Alex Maribou. I am the best damn copywriter in the Universe.” So are you now? “I am Alex Maribou, the guy who has been writing for Boardroom for five years. I have 6 controls right now. It is a whole different position.

Michael: Let me ask you this. What was your first real success in the copywriting field? You were working in that office. You were doing smaller work. When was your, I guess your most memorable very first success? For more information, go to JohnCarltonOffer.com. That is JohnCarltonOffer.com.

John: My first job. I went to this agency in Los Angeles. I was nervous. I went in somehow. I apologize. I can’t tell you how I got this. I was literally looking at the Los Angeles want ads and there was a section for writers or copywriters or advertising agencies. The agencies down there were hungry for freelancers. I think they still do it today, but back then they would say writer wanted, portfolio needed, and blah blah blah. I think I was just going there for an interview and I went in and I impressed the guy enough to get this job. What he gave me was an insurance job. It was a one-page letter selling insurance. They still do these kinds of mailings. It is just one page. Hey you should have this. I think it was life insurance or something. That is all they needed. They had tried it five times and the client had turned down five manuscripts, so they burned through everybody on their staff. So this VP of creative was going to try a freelancer for the first time. I come in and I am doing my best to become that go-to guy. He says, “Here is the letter, the latest one that they just turned down. Can you beat this? Can you get us a letter that the client will like? I just glanced at it and I said, “Yeah sure.” You know I didn’t know, but I knew that I was going to work as hard as possible. I had the resources of the John Cables and all of that stuff. He says, Okay. How long do you need?” I paused and I thought that I had never been asked this question. So this was 4 o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday. I paused and I thought about it and I thought. I said, “How about 10 o’clock tomorrow morning?” His eyes got really wide and he just said, “Okay.” I’m sure that he was thinking in the back of his head, “This guy is a nut case.” I went back and stayed up all night and wrote the thing. It wasn’t hard. It was a pretty basic straightforward letter. I brought it back at 10 a.m. The guy was astonished to see me there at 10 a.m., but Monday afternoon he was on the phone. He was saying, “The client loved it. It was the first one he did and we are going to run with it.”

Michael: What did you make on that?

John: Back then; I made what was standard, which was $2,000.

Michael: Wow, that is pretty good.

John: Back in the 80’s, that is probably $10,000 right now.

Michael: Wow, for a one-page letter.

John: Well, also overnight. What happened Michael was that I got tagged as the guy that turned it around overnight. Now he told me. He said, “John, I wasn’t going to tell you before. I was willing to give you two weeks on this. Next time I give you a job, I am going to insist that you take the two weeks. If you did this well in one night, it can only get better.” I would of gone to t he next job too and stayed up and done it overnight, which I actually did, but I became known as the guy that could turn this stuff around really fast. That moved my name up from the bottom of the freelance list to the very top of the freelance list.

Michael: Very quickly?

John: Yes. I can’t tell you what the results were. I will tell you that I got into an argument then. He put me in the room with the designer who had already designed the direct mail piece going out. She says, “Well the first thing that we have to do is cut half of this copy because there is not enough room for all of the copy.” I just put down my pen and I said, “You have to bring him back in because we are not cutting a word.” She said, “What do you mean?” She thought that she was going to bully me. She was this very experienced graphic artist and I have run-ins with graphic artists all the time because they like to consider copy as these great floating blocks of the design element. They don’t understand that it is all about the copy. The design is totally secondary. They don’t like hearing that, especially back then there was a raging argument about design. Long copy was long dead back then. I was doing semi-long copy, but certainly pushing for longer and longer copy. I would have run-ins with the graphic artists. I won that argument. That graphic artist hated me for the rest of her career and tried to trash me until I started sending work her way. Then I did the right thing. I just did that. I sent her some work and so she stopped trashing me, but she never went very far because she thought that copywriters should be subservient to design, which of course was wrong. I learned a lot in that first job. So regardless of the results, they mailed third class. I don’t know if they tracked the results, but the client loved it. I kept the account for that agency. The agency started giving me more and more work. They spread my name around. All kinds of things happened there and all because I was open to opportunity and stood by my gun. I did a really stupid thing, which was stay up all night writing copy.

Michael: That is another good solution to getting work. It is to come up with a winner and your client will want you back for more.

John: Exactly. A lot of times it is that first getting back to the grain that you were trying to break in. Don’t think about it as conquering the whole industry. Think about it as getting that first job. Doing well at that first job and then the rest is easy. It is like you are outside the wall and you are looking in the window and you are thinking, How do I get in. Somebody comes along and opens the door for you and lets you in even a step and then you are in. Now that is over with. Now it is how you perform as you are inside the walls. You are no longer outside looking in. You are inside. Now your next task is to figure out how to stay inside now to make it work for your best advantage. It can seem like the only problem you have is getting inside. It is really not. That is a solvable problem that once you do get it solved it is no longer even on your radar.

Michael: All right. That is great. Elliot Gordon asks, “Hello Mr. Carlton. Thanks for taking the time to be here. I am about to take my first steps into marketing consulting and I was wondering how safe is it to enter into the business at this time with the economy in shambles and rumors coming of a 1930’s style depression or worse. How would you approach selling your copywriting and marketing consulting services to small business owners?”

John: I have been doing a lot of interviews. You heard at the beginning that I talked about [inaudible]. The typical response, and I got this from Gary Halbert; I use to say this all the time. We talked about how to prosper in a rotten economy and things like that. The real answer is the first thing that you should do when you are up against a bad economy is give up. Cash in all your stuff. Liquidate all of your holdings and go up and find a nice cave and go curl into a fetal position until the storm blows over. That is the advice that we give people. If they take that then fine, you are that guy. It is a rare person that just looks and says, “Okay it looks like you are that guy in the boat.” Again going back to the farmer and working his way through the American Industrial Complex. You just have to find a way. None of the top marketers that I know are spending a second worrying about the economy. Not a second. Now they may adjust a few things here and there. They certainly don’t pretend that it is not happening, but you know the Dow is a roller coaster. The Dow is what 30 companies or 50 companies? It is not the whole thing. In fact, depending what market you are in there are always markets that rise up. In the 1930’s, you know entertainment, movies, were doing bang-up businesses. The economy doesn’t collapse. One of the first pieces of advice that I might give is to stop reading newspapers. If you are taking what you are reading and holding it in your gut and you are getting worried and upset of all this stuff happening, just stop it. Just don’t read the paper anymore. Go three months until you have kind of cleansed yourself of the doom and gloom. Don’t read stuff online and don’t follow that because humans follow grief like rats after cheese. We are grief magnets. We love it. That is why daytime television is the way that it is. That is why talk shows are the way it is. That is why talk radio is the way it is. We love grief. A lot of that is that a lot of people out there want to hear that they have an excuse not to succeed. This ties in with one of the reasons that you are going to have if you step forward and be that guy that is going to say, “Okay, I will become an entrepreneur and I am going to do it.” You are going to run into a lot of obstacles just on the business side. The biggest obstacle that you are going to run into is that you are going to have zero fan clubs. Your neighbor is going to secretly hope that you fail. Your brother in law is the cocky guy with all of the opinions. He is going to take great delight in every sale that you have. Your spouse might say, “I am going to leave this guy because he is not going to make it.” You are not going to have a fan club so you have to overcome a lot of obstacles as you go, not just the economy, but also everything. So you are going to have a lot of excuses to quit. The guys who succeed just look at those excuses and there is no such thing as a problem that stops you because there is always a way. A problem is merely a new lesson to be learned. Failure is a new lesson to be learned. A problem is merely a challenge to get by and things like that. The entrepreneurs that make this work, they love this stuff. He says, “Okay this is something new. It keeps it exciting.” What is that Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times. Well, we certainly live in interesting times. As you encounter these things, there is a point I was going to make. Let’s see he was talking about the economy and I was bringing up people wanting you to fail and I sort of lost track.

Michael: So he says how would you approach selling your copy in marketing consulting services?

John: Yeah. What do you offer that is proven, unique and gets results? I mean it is that thing of standing up and people are reluctant to brag. Somehow they want marketing to happen by magic or voodoo or something. Really you have to inform him and use salesmanship to say, “Look. Here is what I have. This really will help you. Here is how it will work.” My basic pitch is, “Here is who I am. Here is what I got. Here is how it is going to help you. Here is what you need to do now.” That little litany has changed a lot of people’s lives because when they are marketing they say, “Oh, I get it.” You can tell stories. You can do all of this clever stuff. The cleverness pales in comparison to the most basic salesmanship there is. Here is what I have. Here is who I am. Here is why you should trust me. Then that is where testimonials come in, third party validation, and all of that stuff. Here is what I got. Here is what it is going to do for you. That is for the benefit thing. I think there is a question here about benefits coming up. Here is what you need to do now. That is the forceful step before you say, “Look, I am the guy you really should deal with. I have all these resources blah blah blah. You can go try the other guys first if you want because you are going to end up coming back to me any ways. Here is what it is going to cost, the total guarantee. You are under no risk at all to deal with me. You can try this stuff out and give it a test drive and all of this stuff, blah-blah-blah- blah.” You take all the risk and put it on your shoulders, not on the prospects shoulders. Develop a salesmanship pipeline that conquers all of the objections that he has, it overcomes all of the problems that he has, and makes the next most logical step and emotionally satisfying step to him saying, “Okay I will give it a try.”

Michael: Okay, great. Here is a question from Volker Ritsca of www.flycamone2.com.au. He asks, “Living in Australia I see copywriting that mainly goes like this. “Buy now, don’t miss out, these won’t last long, buy at bargain prices, only a stock class, etc. Many of the ads sales copy have plenty of these catch phrases, but no or little product description. Every time I see them, I wonder if I am wrong for never using those phrases. I will try to not be pushy to the customer. Is there a use in using those “buy now” phrases, recommend using often, seldom or never?”

John: Okay. I have actually been talking about this during this entire call. It is all about salesmanship. Salesmanship is so misunderstood that other marketers wish I would stop trying to make it better understood because this is the “ace in the hole”, the secret weapon that top marketers have. All of the competition misunderstands salesmanship. They think hype is bad, that aggressive selling is horrible, and that anyone who tries to sell forcefully is no better than a used car salesman. They do all this stuff and this is the big problems that a lot of marketers have. They think, “My customers are different. They don’t respond to hype and they don’t blah, blah, blah. It is all nonsense. Hype is offensive. It is offensive to you. It is offensive to me. It is offensive to everybody. It tells that you need what is being hyped. Then it is just good solid info. What I mean by that is that you have this “buy now, don’t miss out”. If I need carpenter nails and I need a whole bunch of them right now and I hear someone shouting or something catches my eye that says, “Carpenter nails, on sale for half price, one day only. Come in and buy now.” If I don’t need carpenter nails it means nothing to me. If I am in the market for that that was the best thing that I could of seen today. Again back to the shame on you if you do everything in your power. We don’t tell people to shout and again I don’t like hype and I don’t use hype. There was a time when I used the exclamation mark in my copy. I don’t use it at all now. I will use bold and bold italic. I will use yellow highlighting and I even do it online in my copy occasionally, but I will also just do straight ahead stuff. I let the words do the selling. The people that respond negatively to anything that you say, if you say you really do need this, you need it now, you need to act right now, it is only going to be here for a very short time, limited supply, if you miss out you probably never are going to see it again. All of that stuff is meant to overcome the natural human inclination to not move in your own best interest. Having money that was his taken out of his wallet and give it to you. That is one of the hardest human transactions to happen regardless of how much you do it today. It is still hard to get someone to do it for the first time. It is hard to get people to come into your restaurant. How to get them to buy whatever it is that you are selling no matter how good it is, no matter how much it will help them. It is hard to get them to do that. That is why salesmanship is the way it is. It has to be psychologically pleasing, effective. There is a bit of bludgeoning going on. It doesn’t have to be the used car salesman stuff. Even the most smooth letter that you have read either online or in the mail or in an ad where it just glides and where you say, “Wow that is great. I am really glad I found that.” It is applying salesmanship. Sometimes they will raise their voice. If you are in a crowded place, you might need to raise your voice. If you are not, sometimes your raising your voice makes you rude or loud and that is not what you want to be. So if you can whisper the same words, if the guy can hear you when you are whispering, and I call this a nudge to the ribs kind of advertising. It is like hey, I have these carpenter nails to sell at half price. I am not letting it known to everybody, but if you need them. Do I need them? My god I was looking for them right now. This is the best thing that I could of heard. That is what your advertising has to be. You want to be that one thing that he reads today that makes his day. That makes him sit up, that makes him light up and that makes him think, “Wow. This is great. This is the best thing that I have ever come across.” It can really be if you are looking for a radio or something. You are thinking, “Well I guess I have to go to radio shack. I have to go somewhere and get a radio because I am going off where I am going to need a radio. We are going on vacation or something.” You are thinking at some point I am going to have to take the time. You see something. Radio Shack is having a sale right now on those radios. They are half price and it is one-day only and blah-blah-blah. That is the best thing that you could of seen today. So rather than sometime, you know eventually you will sort of get around to looking for a radio, you are going to hop in the car and go over there right now. That is how this stuff works. Salesmanship is the way it is because it works. It hasn’t much changed since the first caveman traded his cave for a better cave with a view for a slab. There is a little bit of salesmanship going on. We have some written records from ancient Rome with used chariot salesman. This just cracks me up. You know the stuff that they have used is the same stuff that you are seeing now. Salesmanship has not changed since the dawn of language.

Michael: Perfect. Michael Campbell of superhumansecrets.com asks, “What is the fastest way to identify the psychological hot buttons in a particular market; the real motivators that pries them off the sofa and into action?” I know we can talk for an hour. Give me maybe one or two of the fastest or most important.

John: There are three answers. One is know the target, which would be if you are selling HO trains to people to be an HO train enthusiast and then that passion usually comes across. If you don’t know the market, get involved. Get in on every HO train newsletter list there is. Get online and start Googling them. Go hang out at a convention. Go and hang out at a hobby shop. Get to know them. Third, talk about ASK. ASK people face to face, start ASK campaigns, get involved, due your due diligence in your research. It doesn’t have to be all there is, it doesn’t have to be a big hassle. It can be real easy. A savvy salesman who knows nothing about HO trains, can pop in the car, go downtown, go into a hobby shop and hang out at the HO train section of a hobby shop, talk to three people and figure it out.

Michael: Okay. Melvin of The Book Tribe asks, “Some products seem silly and useless at first, but upon launch people just snatch them up like there is no tomorrow. On the other hand, there are brilliant products that seem like guaranteed blockbusters, but the market just hates them no matter how they are positioned. As an experienced marketer what are your criteria in determining which product or projects are worth spending time on?”

John: This was the question, Michael that I referenced earlier about quality versus magic. To answer that, you just have to figure it out. I, too, grieve over this same issue because what I offer is huge substance literally mentoring the actual step-by-step process. I can’t sell what I sell as far as learning how to write and learning how to market stuff without having a little bit of work involved. I can’t compete with somebody who says it’s magic. Get this book and put it under your pillow and you wake up tomorrow as a marketing wizard. So substance will always lose out to magic. It is kind of like back in high school. The flashy jock who will soon be pumping gas is the homecoming queen. Adult life is just third grade recess and high school all over again. You know that is why I took guys to the San Diego zoo to watch the – really we are not that much. You will recognize people you know in the gorilla area of the San Diego zoo. I hate to keep saying it, but it does come down to figuring it out. I had a very successful launch selling, essentially work and some hard stuff in a bad market. You know against all of the stuff. It was hard. Other people have done launches selling essentially the same benefits that I had. They touted the stuff the same, but it was crap. It was nonsense. These guys shouldn’t even be teaching and what they did is find a way to kind of shortcut it. They offered magic. There is no way I could compete with that. I don’t want to. This is off the subject, but if one of the ways you decide you want in business is the amount of money that you make, great. People come to me and say, “I need to make a lot of money in a very short time. I don’t want to work. I don’t want to learn anything. I don’t want to blah-blah-blah.” I say, “Great, go rob a bank.” You will have a lot of money, but there is going to be a lot of consequence to that. So it is kind of like if you want to get into marketing, get into the diet market and start making claims. You will make a lot of money, but you will probably go to jail within the year. It is like how do you define how you win? I have never been motivated by money. I do not define how I win by money. I have a great life. I feel really good about what I offer. I offer substance and quality. I love teaching. I love writing. As you can tell, I am very passionate about this. For me to be in a position to look back on my 25-year-career and take this stuff that I learned and you know I just took notes the whole way. That is what makes me different teacher than anybody else. I took notes. I went through this stuff. I was on the front line the entire time. I made every mistake possible. I came from nothing and I can identify with everybody. I just feel really good about this. I couldn’t care less. I mean my goals are much more modest than the guys that want to buy their own island in the Caribbean and quit work. I hung out with the wealthiest people in the world. I have hung out with CEOs. I have hung out with people of enormous influence and power. You know what? They are some of the most boring people on the planet. I will sacrifice a huge chunk of wealth to keep my life interesting. I tell a story. This is a great story. I call it the 39th Auto supply store. This is very brief. It was a Gary Halbert seminar that I was co- producing. It was over. It had been a hard-core hot seat seminar. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was down in [inaudible] beach. So we are sitting around, Gary and I and a few of the teachers and a few of the attendees. We were sitting around a table on Ocean Boulevard having a drink, relaxing, and telling more stories and laughing. We were watching as the sun was sitting behind us. The waves were lapping up, a gentle tropical warm breeze was ruffling the tall trees, beautiful people were walking by; girls in bikinis, it was just a wonderful and great thing. The guy next to me, all he could talk about was opening up his 39th Auto Supply Store. I turned to him and said, “Stop. You are either going to leave or you are going to shut up.” I actually found out that he had a wife who hated him, kids who he was estranged from. He was 100 pounds overweight. He was miserable. He was so focused on life. He was wealthy beyond the dreams. What did that wealth do for him? Absolutely nothing. That is a lesson. I took that to heart and have always kept that close to my heart and gone for quality. So I could make a lot more money by reducing the substance. I mean it sounds odd, but it really true. By reducing the substance, I could make a lot more money because then you are closer to offering magic. I just can’t do it. I won’t do it and it is not worth it.

Michael: Let me just ask you this. With Alvin’s question, there is one thing that came to my mind was Halbert’s hamburger stand story. Would you tell that story for him because understanding that hungry market is really critical too?

John: Sure. Halbert’s hamburger story is – one of his first newsletters he told this story. He called it the starting crop. What it was is that he said, “I will give you any advantage you want in a market. I will beat you by choosing the one thing that I want. You can choose whatever you want.” He said that when he asked people that question, typical marketers would say, “I want a better quality product. I want the lowest price. I want to be positioned. I want a big ad budget.” They would give him all of these answers. He says, “Fine. You can have all of that. Not just one thing, but all of that.” He says, “All I want is a starving crowd. I will sell the worst hamburger for the highest price. I won’t have a clean establishment. We will be rude. We will be everything. All I want is that I am the only place to get food with a starving crowd.” That was it. That is the point he made. So the overall point is that the advantage that you really want is to find a market that is hungry and you offer what they want. That is where the ASK campaigns come in. You can go into the most crowded market with thousands and thousands of competitors that are better funded than you. They have been in the business longer. They are smarter. They have big staff. If you find a hole in what they are offering, it can be as simple as customer service. You say I am not a big company. I am one guy working out of his house, but I will tell you what when you call my office, I am the guy that picks up the phone, that kind of an angle. That may be exactly what is missing out there. That is how a lot of companies have come up. You know I bought three or four computers from Gateway when it was first coming out because it was one of the best places to get a computer through the mail. The customer service was hot. You could acatually buy extra and better customer service. I actually knew the lawyer for Gateway. He lived in Sioux City South Dakota. Over the course of a year, they just got worse and worse. For whatever reason, they stopped paying attention to customer service because it was so expensive. The bean counters rose in the executive ranks and they started cutting customer service. Finally they got to the point where everybody that I knew had a Gateway computer that didn’t work and they couldn’t get anybody on the phone. This happened in a very short period of time and that is when Dell came in. Dell’s big thing was what?

Michael: Service.

John: Customer service.

Michael: All right. Good story. Jed Hahn, he is an HMA marketing consultant in the UK. He says, “John, I have a marketing consulting business and I am studying copywriting to get a better understanding of the process and how I can use it to get clients. As well as to be able to use techniques and strategies more effectively with clients, but has John written for the UK market before and if he did what differences did he find in his approach and the response he got? If he hasn’t then what would his approach be to a more skeptical reserved market?

John: This ties in with something I said before. He thinks that people in the UK are different than people in the United States. I will grant you that the UK is behind the United States in that all of Europe is relatively right around the late 70’s as far as direct response savvy, meaning that before the EU, before the European Union, there was not a coherent mail service. So getting a letter from Italy to France was a problem. Now it is not. There were problems with money. Now that they are on the Euro instead of all these different currencies it is not a problem. The UK kicked in faster than the rest of Europe for various reasons. I was in Italy two years ago and saw my first infomercial and it ends up an American guy there, doing his thing in English and he has this gorgeous Italian model that would translate everything that he said. Now she didn’t exactly translate with all the enthusiasm. So you saw this guy jumping around like a loon, speaking a language you didn’t understand, which would be English and then this gorgeous Italian model would translate it for him in a very calm centered voice, but you got the idea. The answer is that Jed Hahn thinks the UK is different because they are more skeptical and reserved. I will tell you, “A” I have written for Europe. I have a lot of students over in England and the UK. They are not more skeptical. They are not more reserved. They are not different. There is none, zero, zip difference between going to the UK market than the United States market or anywhere else in Europe or anywhere else in the world. Now I will explain that in a second. Except for the slang. Except for how you describe things. If you spell skeptical in this with a “C”, s-c-e-p-t, then there are differences you need. You can also say, “Yeah I am an American and I am going to misspell some of this stuff. I don’t spell labor with a “U”, but here is what I have. If what you have is important enough then they will overlook that stuff and they will get by. In fact, we use to tell a story Halbert and I, about New Yorkers. If you have ever hung out with New York City dwellers, they think they are impervious type. You can’t screw anything over on them. They’ve heard it all. They have done it all. They have seen it all. A good salesman wants to come up against a prospect like that. He is more skeptical. He is more reluctant. You can’t fool him. That salesman is going to pause. He is going to come in the side door. He is going to make the fastest sale of his life. When you have some guy who is so called skeptical, reluctant. He is all, “You can’t sell me. There is no way this can be true and blah-blah-blah.” You just sneak in the side door. You come in there and you say, “I don’t think that this product is for you. You know product take away. It is probably not for you, but you may be interested in it because the guys who have gotten it they have actually blah blah blah. You know grow hair where they use to be bald if you are talking to a bald guy. You don’t say, “You should get this because if you are bald this will grow hair on your head.” You say, “This probably isn’t for you. You are way too savvy for this. This probably won’t work, but I am going to give it a shot any ways because I am one of those guys that just loves to fail because I learn a lesson.” Here goes, “I have this stuff and again blah-blah-blah.” You slip in the side door and you will make the fastest sale of your life. The guys who are doing this are in the UK. The UK copywriters who have learned from me are going out there and making a mint. I will tell you one more story. One guy in Japan took all of my stuff from Kick Ass Advertising Secrets, translated it, took a lot of my old ads, translated it into Japanese and modified them for other markets and was making $1,000,000 per month. People have been ripping my stuff. They stock my ads for years. That is why I decided to become a teacher because there was no other way for me to make money off of my old ad because people would find them and modify them. People would take a golf ad so that it would be the chiropractic-coaching field. Basic salesmanship is basic salesmanship. He didn’t do anything unethical. He was a big fan. I actually got in front of that, people ripping my ads. I gave a seminar License to Steal and taught people how to rip my ads because people were doing it wrong. I just said, “Here are five of my top ads. Here is how to rip them. Here is what I am doing in the headlines.” That is one of my better selling seminars.

Michael: Do you sell that still?

John: Yeah I sell it on DVD. I would highly recommend that anyone that really wants to get involved really deal with Michael’s connection with me. He has access to me. He is not going to give it out, but he is one of the privileged guys who have direct access to me. When I say privileged, I don’t mean that I am purposely hard to get. It is just because there are so many people trying to get a hold of me. I have to limit it. I am hard to get a hold of. I am impossible to hire. I haven’t taken on a new client in a couple of years. I am mostly teaching. I am doing this stuff. The best way to get net training and stuff is to do what Michael is going to help you to do.

Michael: Anyone who wants to see all of the things that John offers on his main site other than the blog can go to www.johncarltonoffer.com. That will take you to John’s site. John on that site, how is that different than the blog?

John: Well, I have many sites online. The site that you are sending them to is the most basic site where I offer a way into what I have to offer I guess. It is a way to get to that famous Kick Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel. I am so proud that it is on many of the top marketers desk, very much thumbed through. It is still used. It is a one-stop resource for a lot of things. It may be actually the only thing that you need to kick your marketing off. It is just a good example if you want to see a piece of writing by me. You will actually see some writing there and you will have an opportunity to see what other people have to say about me and kind of get a feeling for what is going on. You will have an opportunity to get involved if you want.

Michael: Very good. John I appreciate it. We have covered a lot of ground, even though we only covered two pages of about eight pages of questions. Let me make a tentative offer to any of the listeners and John, if it is okay and when it happens, when your schedule lets up next year if we are able to continue on and do another interview. Anyone who goes onto Johncarltonoffer.com and signs upon John’s site, when we get that second interview done, if we do, we will provide you part 2 of this unfinished interview. Is that fair?

John: That is very fair. It is a pleasure talking with you. I am really delighted with the quality of the questions. I went off on a couple of tangents, but that is what is fun about this. There is so much to know and so much to learn. It is fun for me to even go through some of the old stories. I know that from many years of teaching that this way of teaching, of relaying antidotes and making sure that you understand the stuff that happened to me or happened to people that I know, it is usable stuff, it kind of explains what is going on. It is the kind of teaching that I have learned from myself. It is the best way to get my point across. Dealing with someone like you and your list is just a joy because they are savvy, and they are interested. It is just fun. The hour and a half just flew by Michael.

Michael: I appreciate it John. I know you have a lot going on. Thank you very much again. Hopefully we will be talking to you again next year.

John: Okay Michael.

Michael: Thanks a lot.

John: It was a pleasure.

Michael: Bye.