21
Table of Contents Chapter 1
Introducing ”The Dream Team” of Internet Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Rich Schefren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mike Filsaime. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mary Ellen Tribby. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paul R. Scheele. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jeff Walker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tom McCarthy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Frank Kern. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jay Abraham. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John Carlton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gary Vaynerchuk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 2
3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 5 6
“Whoever You Think You Are...You Can Be Much Better” By Rich Schefren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
How to Take Advantage of Changes in Your Marketplace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 The Story Behind Strategic Profits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Strategic Profits’s Master Marketing Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Chapter 3
“Five Ways To Increase Online Profits” By Mike Filsaime. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Five Ways to Increase Online Profits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Get More Prospects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Increase Conversions at Point of Sale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Maximize Profit and Transactions at Point of Sale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Reduce Your Spending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Improve Frequency and Recurring Income.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Bonus Strategy: Use Integration Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 4
23 23 24 26 28 28 29
“Building your Internet Business with Direct Response Strategies” By Mary Ellen Tribby . . . . . 32
Mastering Direct Response Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ten Direct Marketing Terms You Need to Know.... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using Multiple Marketing Channels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Run a Direct Response Campaign (Early To Rise Style). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Questions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 5
32 33 35 36 38
“How You Work With Your Own Mind” By Paul Scheele . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
The Power of the Unconscious Mind. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Accelerate Your Inner Learner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Empowering Your Growth Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Balancing Your Hemispheres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How does Hypnosis Work?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Use Neurolinguistic Programming to Boost Sales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Use Hypnosis in Your Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Power of Unity Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Secret behind The Secret. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 22
40 41 43 43 44 45 46 46 47
Chapter 6
“Using the Product Launch Formula” By Jeff Walker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Hidden Benefits of Using a Launch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Turn Your Launch Into an Event. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Planning Your Launch Like a Movie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Turning the Sales Letter Sideways. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Use Your Launch as Indoctrination. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Objections into Hard Hitting Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Using Mental Triggers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Making Videos for Your Product Launch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Make Your Launch Bigger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 7
55 56 56 57 59 59 60 61 62
“Leadership Principles” By Tom McCarthy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Create a World Class Business Culture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Surround Yourself with A Players. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Be a Master Communicator. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Focus on Customer Satisfaction (Your Most Important Metric). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Set Challenging Expectations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Measure Your Team’s Results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Coach For Greatness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Encourage Synergy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Always Be Decisive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Love What You Do. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 8
66 68 69 70 71 72 72 73 73 74
“Making lots Of People Do Almost Anything (In A Cool Way)” By Frank Kern. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
What is Your Core Identity?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Core Influence works Better Than Persuasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Influencing People Through Congruent Communication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discovering Your Own Core Identity as a Marketer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why Making Money is Not What People Really Want . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Exercise to Find Your Own Core Identity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Your Core Identity vs. Your Empty Shell Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selling from Your Core Identity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Instant Bond Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Who is Bob in your Market?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . How to Communicate Better to Your Market. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 9
77 78 79 80 83 84 90 92 93 94 97
“Overcoming Marketing Challenges” By Jay Abraham. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Chapter 10
“17-Point Menu To Writing Kick-Ass Copy” By John Carlton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
How I got Started in Copywriting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 The 17 Point Menu of Great Copywriting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Chapter 11
“How to Become a Social Media Star” By Gary Vaynerchuk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Chapter 12
“Inspiring You To Do Your Own Thing” By Rich Schefren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
You Must Believe This is Possible. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Develop Your Ability to Focus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You Can Do It: There is No Failing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Make a Difference in Someone’s Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 23
135 136 137 137
Rich Schefren StrategicProfits.com
Richard Schefren has offline built, run and sold multimillion dollar businesses in the fashion industry, music industry, and the hypnosis industry. He’s been profiled in numerous media including the front page of The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNN news, Fox News, and dozens hundreds of other TV, radio, magazines and newspapers. Rich has continued his offline success online. He currently has over 70 niche specific product sites, and has orchestrated teleseminars with marketers like Jay Abraham, John Carlton, and many others that individually have grossed as much as $2.5 million. Currently Rich maintains an elite marketing coaching program, where many of today’s top Internet marketers and service providers are among his clientele. “Rich is a bona-fide, multi-media entrepreneur, expert in streamlining business operations, managing fast and dramatic growth, and profiting from EVERY direct-response media. His unusual mix of marketing and business management prowess has brought a who’s who of the marketing world to him, to partner, or for assistance in their businesses– in decreasing chaos while increasing profits…”
- Dan Kennedy
Mike Filsaime MikeFilsaime.com
Are you getting the maximum amount of profit-making performance out of your site or your business? If not then you’ll want to hear what Mike Filsaime has to say about how to change that. Mike is an author, software developer, renowned speaker, personal coach, business consultant, and most of all, an intensive marketer. As the creator of one of the fastest selling multi-media home study courses in Internet history – selling $1,000,000 in just 5 days – “Butterfly Marketing” – he’s responsible for promotions that make as much as $75,000 in less than 24 hours. He will share the power of safe lists, how to build your own opt-in list, the importance of name branding, how money can be made from free sites, the viral effect of membership sites, carbon-copy marketing, and much more. “Mike Filsaime has not only helped catapult me to online success and 7-figure earnings with his advice but he’s also one of the most genuine and helpful people you could ever meet. I feel forever indebted to Mike for his guidance and support in what has been my most successful year ever. His strategies played a massive par t in both of my 6-figure launches and his ideas shape a lot of my approach online. If you want to be truly successful online you need to listen to Mike Filsaime, learn from what he does and take heed of his advice. It’s that simple.”
- Michael Cheney, Adsense-Videos.com
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Mary Ellen Tribby EarlytoRise.com
MaryEllen joined the Early To Rise team as Publisher/CEO. She has built this Agora Publishing division into an over $20 million dollar business. She brings more than 20 years of publishing and business experience. After graduating from New York’s prestigious NYU, she accepted a position at New York’s PBS station WNET/Thirteen where her marketing passion was ignited. From there she went to Times Mirror Magazines, one of the largest publishing companies in the nation. Later she was recruited to manage a division of Forbes. From there her corporate resume includes Crain’s New York Business, Globe Communications and most recently Weiss Research where she served as President and created one of the biggest success stories in the financial and health newsletter market! As a publisher, MaryEllen is determined to provide the finest research, content and products as well as partner with and hire only superlative people in the industry.
Paul R. Scheele LearningStrategies.com
You are brilliant beyond your imagination! Paul R. Scheele has facilitated this realization in millions of lives. He guides people to achieve extraordinary results in relationships, work, money and health. Paul is an expert on learning how to learn to tap the other 90% of your mind. He believes everyone has an inner genius just waiting to be awakened. Paul is the developer of programs such as PhotoReading, Natural Brilliance, Genius Code, Abundance for Life, the Paraliminals, and many other courses to stimulate personal and professional success. These programs allow people to go beyond what the logical mind believes possible and break through stuck states. When you want high impact, Paul will entertain, educate, inspire, and move audiences to use their genius minds and achieve amazing abundance.
Jeff Walker
ProductLaunchFormula.com
Your site’s up, your product’s in place, and the clock’s ticking down to your “launch.” You get one shot at coming out into the marketplace and the best way to do it is with a blast that will propel your sales the instant you flick your site’s “on switch” or hit the “send” button. If you want to learn how to make the absolute most out of your next site or your next product launch then this is a must-see session for you. Jeff Walker is singularly regarded as the one person responsible for creating the “product launch.” You’ll leave with information and ideas that will send your mind reeling and the profits from your next launch skyrocketing into the stratosphere. “I’ve followed Jeff Walker’s advice to bring in over $1.3 million dollars since January... so I’m a raving fan. Jeff’s stuff works. I know from personal experience. In fact, it put a whole lot of money in my pocket yesterday when I ‘launched’ my Serializer Method Class and sold $370k in nine minutes (seriously, it’s hard to believe... but true!).”
- Frank Kern
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Tom McCarthy TomMcCarthy.com
Your business is up and running, you’ve got people and product in place, but it’s not the cash-generating cow you expected it to be. Something’s wrong, something’s missing but you just can’t put your finger on it. Well Tom McCarthy can and his unique perspective, powerful insights and performance-enhancing strategies have turbo-charged many business leaders and their Fortune 500 companies. Not only will you be inspired and invigorated, but you’ll come away with instantly applicable ideas that will impact the bottom line, increase sales, improve customer loyalty, dramatically impact productivity and help your people breakthrough to new levels of performance. more... “Tom McCarthy’s leadership principles, communication techniques and per formance-orient ed coaching can help any business executive become more effective. Tom understands clearly, that true business leadership is needed now, more than ever. Through his innovative programs, he equips today’s business leaders with the tools they will most need, to achieve lasting success in an ever-changing business landscape.”
- Troy McQuagge, President, HealthMarkets Agency Marketing Group
Frank Kern FrankKern.com
Frank Kern teaches “street smart” Internet marketing methods that help you create a profitable Internet business from scratch. He dropped out of college and was dead broke by age 24. After discovering and implementing a handful of “scrappy” Internet Marketing methods, Frank was able to turn his financial life around and create several highly profitable Internet businesses. He and his partner, Ed Dale, created the wildly successful “Underachievers Mastery System” for people like himself, who he considers lazy. He may be lazy, but he’s made millions for himself and other lazy people too!
Jay Abraham Abraham.com
Jay ’s uncanny ability to increase business income, wealth and success by uncovering hidden assets, overlooked opportunities and undervalued possibilities has not only captured the attention and respect of CEOs, best-selling authors, entrepreneurs and marketing experts, but his extraordinary successes have also earned him an undisputed heavyweight title in the business world as “America’s Number one Marketing Wizard.” Jay’s clients range from business royalty to small business owners. But they all have one thing in common — they have all profited greatly from his expertise and now you can too. His advice has helped clients increase their businesses by millions, and you’re guaranteed to leave his session with ideas that you can immediately apply to help you increase your company’s performance and profits. “I’ve met only two marketing geniuses in my life. The first was Vince Fagan, the man who came up with ‘When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight – Fed Ex.’ The second is Jay Abraham. Jay teaches you more workable, tangible, profitable techniques and strategies than you can probably apply in three lifetimes. But what he teaches you about mindset is his true gift of wealth.”
- Michael Basch, cofounder of Federal Express
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John Carlton MarketingRebel.com
Driving people to your website and/or your business and getting them to buy your products – that’s pretty much the bottom line, and it all starts with your message. That means you, or someone, has got to write copy to convince your reader that you’ve got what they want and they need to buy it right now. That’s what John Carlton does and he’s been doing it better than anyone else for the past twenty-five years as a super-successful award-winning copywriter converting the printed word into cold-hard-cash. Only sit in on this session if you’d like to learn invaluable tips and precious secrets you won’t find anywhere else from a man who’s made literally untold millions for thousands of entrepreneurs and businesses large and small. “John has created millions in profit for us. We pitted his ads and letters against big-city ad agencies, PR firms, and writers with lots of awards... and John slaughtered them all. He consistently hits ‘home runs’ for us — a 20-to-1 return in profit is not unusual. He has saved our butts on several occasions.”
- Robert Pierce, President, Tactical Response Solutions
Gary Vaynerchuk www.WineLibraryTV.com
Meet Gary Vaynerchuk (VAY NER CHUK), a 32 year old self-trained wine expert who is revolutionizing the wine industry. His webcast, “The Thunder Show”, on www.winelibrarytv.com, attracts over 60,000 viewers each day and his email queue typically holds 1,000 messages from obsessed fans, self-named “Vayniacs.” His roots in wine tasting come honestly – his Russian immigrant parents owned a liquor store when he was growing up.
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The Guru ’ s Guru
gives away the master thought process behind the success of S trategic P rofits including ... • How
the changing economy creates unprecedented opportunities for you as an
entrepreneur ...
• The
I nternet Business Manifesto ( and reports )...
secret formula behind the
it to write your own
how you can use
• A foolproof process for finding the real needs and desires of your marketplace... • Why giving away information for free will make you more money in the long run... This is what I think new beginnings really stand for. It means it’s never too late to be what you might have been. That’s a nice saying but I’ve had experiences myself where I’ve decided to radically change who I was; all it really takes is a decision. When I was in high school, I was a loner, didn’t have many friends and I decided that in college that was going to be different. I went to a college where nobody knew who I was and I just decided from day-one that I was going to be a different person and I was. I left college and then I got into the clothing business, once again I decided I was going to be a different person than I was before because I just figured out who did I need to be to excel in that place, in that market, in that position. All it took was a decision, a conscious choice of what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be and just get clear about that and then some other things we’ll talk about and cover in this presentation. What I want you to understand is one of the reasons why you can make that choice today is because of the massive change that’s going on. This is General Eric Shinseki. He was Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. He said, “If you don’t like change you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”
How to Take Advantage of Changes in Your Marketplace We’re in a marketplace and in a time where change is a norm. I want to explain to you how much change there is actually going on. This is what Arnold Becker said. He’s the chief economists of Fan-Pale Laboratories. He said, “There’s going to be a fundamental change in the global economy unlike anything we’ve ever seen since cavemen started bartering.” Since cavemen started bartering—that’s profound. It’s such a big change. 8 28
When Forbes came up with the top 100 companies back in the early 1910’s or 1920’s, they ran a list of the biggest companies in the world. Only one is still alive today. The S&P 500 when it first came into existence, there was only 23 left today; so massive change. The bigger you are, the more difficult it is, not easier. So we as entrepreneurs have a huge advantage because we can shift on a dime. We can change direction and change who we are and it makes all the difference. So, I don’t know how many of you remember the Iron Age and the Bronze Age when you were back in high school or elementary school but before the year 1000, it would take thousands of years for there to be a paradigm shift, a major shift in thinking. After the year 1000, paradigm shifts happened about every 100 years. In the 1800, there was more changes, more paradigm shifts, more changes to the way we lived, the way we integrated with technology than the previous 900 years combined. In the first fifth of the 20 century, the 1900s, there was more change than all of the 1800s. As we approached the year 2000, every decade there was a major change. He projects, based on that mathematical model, that there would be 1000 times more technological change, more paradigm shifts in the 21 century than there were in the 20 century. That amount of change leads to tremendous opportunity. It leads to tremendous opportunity because what happens when there is that amount of change; it leads to a certain degree of uncertainty for people to keep up, to stay up-todate. When there’s that much uncertainty people look for solutions. They look for answers. If you’re in your market and you’re the one who provides it, you can rise to the top extremely quickly.
The S tory Behind S trategic Profits
Strategic Profits started only 18 months ago. I released the Internet Business Manifesto about 18 months ago, that’s it, my first document. In 18 months, the company has grown, my positioning has increased and it’s all because of this fundamental that change is happening at an accelerated rate. For those of you that don’t know the story, I was doing Internet marketing and I was doing okay. I had some projects that I did well but I was working harder than I had ever worked before and I was making less than I had ever made before. That’s all relative right? So, it occurred to me one night while I was writing in my journal –let me see what the real problem is. I was bitching and moaning in my journal and writing out why am I working harder than ever and making less than ever. That’s where I came up with that whole “you” diagram. I was a member of the market, I was struggling and I was trying to figure out why was I struggling and by doing so I came up with this chart. Probably of all the graphics that I’ve had, created and used was the most important in the help of growing my company. So, here are the valuable lessons.
The I nternet Business Manifesto
You’ve got to remember, this is only 18 months ago. And 18 months ago, I released this document and my main trust was in order to be successful, online or offline, you had to shift from being an opportunity seeker to being an entrepreneur. What’s fulfilling, rewarding, etc. is that the people that heeded that message have gone on to greatness. Quite a few of the speakers here, when that report came out were independents. They were working by themselves in their own house. Now they have staffs of 20, 30, or 40. To compete with them today would be much more difficult than competing with them then. 9 29
My second thrust of the manifesto was is that you still have time to build the business but you had better move quickly.
The Missing C hapter
Then I came out with The Missing Chapter. The big idea there was that your business must be centered on your strengths. It’s not enough to be passionate about something. The example that I gave was I had this client, Jean Carlo. Jean Carlo is a top ranked tennis player. I love tennis. I grew up playing tennis. I started playing tennis when I was four. I was ranked when I was a kid but I’m 40 pounds overweight, I haven’t picked up a tennis racket in ten years and no matter how passionate I am about tennis, I’m not going to beat Jean Carlo. My passion is only going to get me so far. I have to have a strength. I have to be good at it. You need to have a business that you’re good at or you need to have some positioning in your market that allows you to express your strength or you’re fighting an uphill battle all the way through. The concept of this report was building a business around your strengths.
The Final C hapter
The next one, The Final Chapter, was exposing the business models the most successful [in the] market. Business models that most people would never have a chance to see but I had a chance to see because I consulted and worked with the different companies. It was my intension to bring to everyone else so that everyone could see it, could model it, and could follow it. I think that if you haven’t read this report, of all the reports that I’ve written, this probably has the best information in it. Because of the way it’s structured (if we have time, I’ll talk about that a little bit later) the way it’s structured it didn’t resonate as well. It had too many ideas as opposed to one fundamental theme. If you have too many ideas it becomes harder for the reader to grasp as opposed to just one idea and just keep backing it up with example, example, examples. I learned from this one. I never did that again. But I still think to this day, that the information in there is – most people are still missing and this would expose why.
“S tart U p
to
Freedom”
Then I did a series of videos. Everyone was saying that videos were the next big thing so I said, okay, let me do some videos instead of reports. I did this series of videos. The first one was “Start- up to Freedom.” It showed 11 steps on how to go from nothing, no business-no nothing, to being free. This is interesting because I laid it out and I didn’t really appreciate the difference that really was going on in the marketplace. Although I was hip to it, I didn’t realize how important of an issue it was. You would think or I would think that when you get involved in business, your goal is to build a business that can be the most profitable, the biggest, the most successful, etc. I think that was the case but I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think that, now days, entrepreneurs don’t necessarily dream about making the maximum of money. What they dream about is making a lot of money but also having a lot of freedom. I think there is no better example of that than Tim Ferriss’ book, The Four Hour Work Week, because that book was a phenomenon. Why? Because it tapped into a core desire of a lot of people who wanted to work less and have more freedom. It wasn’t promising you that you’d make a million dollars. It was promising you that you could work four- hours a week and have free time, enjoy life. The more you tap into that core desire in any piece that you produce, the more success you will have. 10210
Going in reverses for a second, back to the Internet Business Manifesto, that Manifesto has been knocked-off I don’t know how many times. Ten or fifteen different times that I’ve seen where they’ve cut and replace and they didn’t even replace all of them. So every once in a while it would say Internet Marketer when it was supposed to say real estate agent or stock trader. Each time it was successful. It was successful because the main message of the Manifesto was that dealing with frustration, people feeling like they do too much, not getting the results, overworked, and that feeling is pervasive in every industry, in every market. My belief is that more so than any other reason, that’s why the Manifesto took off as much as it did because it resonated with that core frustration, that core desire. Tim Ferriss’ book took that about 100 times further, even with the title. He split test titles, I don’t know if you know that, with AdWords. That title had inside of it this promise of relieving this core problem. I used the graphic instead to have that core problem exposed and then also to say that I have an answer.
“The Momentum S eries”
I did another video called, The Momentum Series. I focused on the four-steps that you need to get your business off the ground. It’s so easy these days to get unfocused; to think that there are 50 things that you have to do when in reality there’s only three. This series of videos was about your beliefs about an entrepreneur, are they accurate or are they inaccurate. Your market, picking the right market for you, figuring out the right offer – what are you offering them—and in case you haven’t heard me talk about it before, in our market because copy is one of the distinguishing elements, copy gets a lot of respect and also gets a lot of focus. In direct response, in general, it goes—list is the most important, offer is the second most important and way down on the bottom is copy. Copy is a variable that’s the easiest to change so that’s why it gets so much focus. The offer, the offer that you make to the marketplace has tremendous more impact than your copy. You could have a great offer-horrible copy and you will sell really well. If you have a horrible offer and great copy, you will not; so the offer is really paramount. I like reports better. I just don’t like watching video for an hour in front of my computer. There are about 100 other places I’d rather and 100 other things I’d like to do and I’m at the mercy of the person who’s got the video and their speed as opposed to my speed. I like reports and I guess that’s why my preference is reports.
The Attention Age D octrines
I came out with the Attention Age Doctrine because what I saw was that attention was becoming a scarcer and scarcer commodity. It has gotten 100 times worse since this report has come out. The next one: The Attention Age Doctrine 2. How do you win in a marketplace that is attention scarce? I didn’t have the answer back then. I thought I did but it wasn’t fully complete. It took me another four-months or something to write this and what I believe now is that the only way you win in marketing today is to be where the attention already is as opposed to trying to get attention yourself. Social media is getting attention. If people are giving their attention to other people then you have to figure out how to broadcast through people. If people are giving their attention to experts then you have to position yourself as an expert. I think the days are gone where you can just scream loud enough, interrupt often enough and get people’s attention. I think they block you out. So, the Attention Age Doctrine 2 was about that. Figuring out where in your marketplace, people are putting their attention and moving your business in that direction. If your business is online, then it’s experts and social media. 11211
The Maven Matrix Manifesto
This is the report that I just came out with; The Maven Matrix Manifesto. It has 11 steps in it of how to position yourself. For those of you that haven’t read it, you should download it and read it as soon as you can because it is really – I think it is pretty profound. Obviously, I wrote it so it’s hard to be unbiased. When I worked on these concepts that are spoken about in this report, it gave me a completely new perspective on a lot of stuff that I’d seen before. How many people saw on YouTube or wherever, Steve Job’s commencement address at Stanford? Quite a few, I’d say about 40 percent. It’s an amazing speech. It’s very uplifting. It went very viral. If you go to YouTube I think it’s been watched about a million and a half times. It’s a great presentation. I watched it again recently after I wrote this report. It’s still a great presentation speech but what’s really interesting is that it follows the principles that I was talking about in this report. He starts out by saying I’m going to share with you three stories from my own life. That’s exactly what he did. There is a reason why we know that Bill Gates bought the operating system that created Microsoft. There’s a reason why we know that Google was started in the dorm rooms of Stanford. We know that Oprah Winfrey was a struggling journalist in Chicago or that Phil Knight, the founder of Nike created the first pair with a waffle iron. We know these even though we’re not consciously aware that we know these because the person that we’re talking about said it as often as they could whenever they had the chance to say it. Because of that, we know it. Memory works by association, by linking stuff. If you have just a random piece of information, it’s very hard for that piece of information to get into long-term memory. But, if you have something in the mind then you can build out pretty easily anything that can link towards it. The creation story, that’s what we called that in the Maven Matrix Manifesto, is an important component of 11 components that we highlighted to help you get inside the mind. There were other ones like predictable behaviors. The essence is what you’re trying to do is seem familiar and friendly to your marketplace because we notice what our friends do and what is familiar to us. I talk about this concept too and I think it’s really an important one so let me stress this one too. There’s a component of the brain called the reticular activating system. The reticular activating system is the part of the brain that helps you filter everything that’s coming in at you. If you’ve ever had the experience of thinking about a new car and then all of a sudden seeing that new car everywhere or you’re trying to have a baby and get pregnant and seeing pregnant women all over the place, that’s the reticular activating system. You have millions of pieces of information coming at you at all times and this part of your brain is deciding what should come in and be noticed and what shouldn’t. That’s its function. I give this example in the report as well about how if you’ve ever been at a party engaged in a conversation –deeply engaged in a conversation so that all the other conversations just turn into a mumble but in one of those conversations someone mentions your name, all of a sudden it gets your attention. How could it happen? You had to hear what they were saying before that to hear your name as well. The part of your brain that is processing all of that doesn’t find any of that other stuff important but your name is always important. It automatically moves your attention. That’s important because ultimately what you want is for your marketplaces reticular activating system to know you. When an email comes in it gets noticed. When an offer is made it gets noticed. This report was all about how to do that; how to get into the reticular activity system. What are the common features that I found that anyone who has has? In a world that’s become very attention deficient or attention scarce that’s incredibly important.
A ll
of this in just
18
months !
That’s a lot of stuff for 18 months. I’ve been a busy guy. It seems like some of those were so long ago and yet they’re 13212
not. It’s only a year and a half ago. I hope the take-away is something that you can latch on to but also that to use it as a proof point of looking at how much things change. I think we take it for granted now some of the concepts in the Manifesto or the first Doctrine. We take it for granted but yet this all happened in 18 months. The best selling business books of the early 80s didn’t mention all the terms that are used today. It’s phenomenal the rate of change. So there’s this tremendous rate of change and we have too many options now.
S trategic Profits’ s Master Marketing S trategies Uncover the REAL Needs of Your Market
There are so many options and your marketplace has so many options because competition has become global even for local people because of the Internet. To understand the position that your marketplace is in, your prospects, your consumers, your clients, you have to understand that’s their viewpoint of the market. If you’ve tried to buy a new phone or a new camera or whatever, you experience that. You experience this ‘holy crap’ there are so many options, how do I choose the right one. That’s another crack in the door being opened for you to step in. When people have so many options in front of them and they’re not sure where to go somebody who steps up and says I understand and resonates with you, expresses your problems as good or better than you have so you feel comfortable that they know where you’re at and then points to a solution, you feel pretty comfortable about taking that solution; saying you should open this door not that door. Being the person in your marketplace that gives people the answer like this is where you want to go and I’m going to help you get there and that really should be thrust of every business. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling lights or information or cars or whatever. It’s I understand where you’re at and I’m going to help you get to the dead center, the right place for you, to take that one door and really show them the path and hopefully that path is with you. If you do that correctly, I think you will experience tremendous loyalty, tremendous growth in your business and also incredible fulfillment. Now, let’s go through it again but let’s just look at what I was doing so that you can take it and try and have something that has the same impact in your market.
R eveal
the
Fundamental Problem
of your
Market
I think the Internet Business Manifesto was really exposing the fundamental problem that everyone in the market experiences. If you can figure out what the fundamental problem is and express it better than it has been expressed that will make that work. Quite a few people told me that it didn’t really tell them that much that was new but it connected the dots. People knew that they had the experience of buying stuff and not finishing it. People knew that they were sometimes impulsive in their purchases and that they lacked some strategic direction but by creating this categorization of opportunity seeker versus strategic entrepreneur, it put all of that into perspective. Can you do that? Can you take a major problem of your marketplace and give it new perspective by articulating it better than it’s been articulated in the past? Now, what I will also tell you is that I try and go through a process with everything that I do; every report I’ve created; every video I’ve ever done. I call it preeminent and also – it will come to me three slides from now and I’ll tell you. It’s a way of coming up with a problem that makes everyone else a little irrelevant. In other words, preemptive problem solutions or problem creation. The way I do that and what I recommended to you if you try and take this approach is to list out all the problems that you have identified in the marketplace. Look at them and ask yourself how could these all be symptoms of a bigger 13213
problem? How could all these problems actually be symptoms of something deeper, bigger, more fundamental, and more powerful? When you come up with that, if you can come up with that one problem that turns all the other problems into symptoms what you’ve done is (1) you’ve distinguished yourself (2) you’ve made everyone else and their solution a band aid or a patch and you’ve created something that will resonate deeply with people. In the Manifesto, it was strategic entrepreneur versus opportunity seeker. I gave an example at the last seminar of information overload. Information overload is where people are experiencing too much information coming at them, their cluttered with stuff all over their desk, etc. If you give people the solutions that are typical and their typical because they work like – only touch paper once, create a filing system, all that kind of stuff—it just goes over people’s heads. They heard it before. It’s nothing new, it’s nothing unique, and you’re not distinguishing yourself as different. If you look at all the problems of information overload and you list them and then you say, what it looks like to me is – I’ve never have really thought about this enough to know if I really believe this or not but here’s the concept—it looks like to me that – I do believe there is a twinge of truth in it at least—it looks like to me that information overload all stems from self-esteem about the information that you produce and always valuing other people’s information more than your own. That drive to consistently go out and get more information, more information, and more information is internal because you believe that other people’s information is better than what you can create yourself. I don’t know whether that’s true but let’s say it was and that’s what you said and you were in the business of time management and information organization and stuff like that. You’ve immediately categorized everyone else as a band aid because unless you fix this core problem, you’re always going to experience all those other things no matter what other band aid approach you use.
R eframe People’ s Problems
That’s the approach I take when I write a doctrine and create a video. I look at all the problems and I say is there a problem that would turn all of these into symptoms. The reason I do that it wasn’t this evil marketing mind that came up with it, it was the fact that when I studied hypnosis and NLP which I did with the top experts in the world, Richard Bandler and all those types. One of the first things that they taught you when working with people was that their problem is never their problem. If they really knew their problem they would already have the solution. There’s a deeper problem going on. I just applied that concept to marketing. Let’s look at all the problems, let’s find the deeper problem so that I can position myself as very relevant and in the process preempt everyone else. The Missing Chapter was exposing a big mistake that most people make when starting. Can you do something like that? I came up with this report—this was the fastest report I ever wrote. I wrote it in a week. I wrote it because I had a conversation with John Reese. John Reese told me – he called me and said oh man I loved the Manifesto. It was great. I really loved what you did. I said thanks man. He said but you know, I think you have a problem. I said what’s the problem? He said I think that people who are reading it are going to think that they have to have a business already. If they don’t have a business which is the majority of the market you’re not going to be able to sell them. You’re not going to be able to resonate with them. You’re not going to be able to sell what it is that you offer. I said wow, I never thought of that. The conversation when on and that was it. After I got off the phone with him, I went through the Manifesto and I looked at it and I said wow, he’s right. That could certainly be the case. I felt the need that I had to address another part of the market; all the people who are just starting. So I asked at the end of the first Manifesto what would hold you back. 14214
What would prevent you from being successful now that you know this information? I’ll take a tangent for a second; that’s incredibly important, engagement. When someone goes to my blog and types in anything the level of relationship has just increased dramatically. There’s active learning and there’s passive learning. Passive learning is like when you read or watch. Active learning is when you do. Active learning has a much higher chance of getting into the brain. If you’re trying to become familiar with the reticular activating system, someone’s engagement is incredibly important because it gets you through to the brain a lot faster, a lot more certain. I looked at all those reasons that people gave me for the Manifesto, why they still couldn’t be successful and I tried to find the deeper problem, the one issue. What I felt after looking at all those problems and I think there were about 500 of them, was this answer—most people were starting businesses that were not built around a core strength. When they ask people—can you do the graphics and I’ll cut you in for a piece of my business and the people said no, it was because those people didn’t have any belief that person was going to be successful because it wasn’t built around one of their strengths. That was this report. The report had really two different things. One was to expose a big mistake that everyone in your market is making at the outset, in the beginning. The other is that deeper psychological thing; coming up with that deeper problem. Can you do that in your marketplace?
Teach Models
of
S uccess
The next one was just teaching the models of the people that are the most successful Internet he market. Can the people that are not the most successful learn from the most successful and can you translate that information to them? That’s a pretty straightforward one. In hindsight, what I would say is that if you can show awareness to a new concern, goal, issues for the marketplace, you have immediate resonance with everyone in the marketplace. People are too overworked, overtaxed; not feeling like they have enough time with their families and this one title can summarize it all. Showing awareness of new goals is incredibly powerful.
S how People How
to
Get S tarted
The next one, the “Momentum Series” is every market has people who are actively engaged in people sitting on the sidelines. Can you give people who are sitting on the sidelines an easy way of a very direct clear path on how to get started? That also resonates with a large segment because most people do sit on the sidelines; most people do not take action. Most people think about changing the lighting for years before they actually make the purchase decision. If you can meet them where they are and show them the easy path of getting started you will have something that resonates. The profit prescriptions, once again, this was through engagement, people told me what their problems were but once again, this is a great formula/model if you can surface each issue problem that’s going on in people’s heads and then meet it head on. Here’s why that’s false. Here’s why that’s incorrect. Here’s why you’re mistaken. So it’s exposing the wrong beliefs that are commonplace and giving them a way to fix it. Just to reiterate, the reason I’m going through these is that you can use these as blueprints. If you’re scratching your head wondering what I would write about, what would I create a video about that would really resonate with my marketplace, these are the templates. These are the models you can follow.
Highlight
a
N ew Trend
The Attention Age Doctrine is about highlighting a new trend. Every market has new trends. It just depends on big a deal you make it; to me this was a really big deal but to others it wasn’t. I want to take some of the mystic out of it too. This is not a new problem. The quote of Herbert Simon who was a Nobel Prize winner who talked about as information increases there’ll be further scarcity of attention; he said it much more eloquently than that but he said that in 1971, the year I was born. 16215
This is a not a new phenomenal, it’s not a new concept. If you look up attention economy, you’ll see a lot written about the attention economy. I changed it. I changed it to the Attention Age as opposed to the Attention Economy and I put my own spin on it. I did that so I could own the word. If you type in attention age in Google, I think there’s close to 100,000 references and they’re all for the most part – I would say 80 percent of them, 90 percent of them point back to me. That’s what you want. So when you expose a new trend and it doesn’t have to be a new trend is what I’m saying. It could be a new trend to you. It just needs to be a new trend to you. You’re like wow, this is a big deal. By exposing it, sharing it, you can have a report like this or a video like that. Once you expose that trend, there’s a place to follow-up which is to show them how to win. Show them how to get the results they still want now that trend is going on. Show them how to capitalize on that trend. The reason I wanted to do this and I hope this also is clear is that we’ve grown and we’ll probably break eight figures this year, we’ve done no SEO, we’ve done no Pay Per Click, we’ve done really nothing except what I’m showing you. My whole company was built on these free reports and free videos, everything. My whole reputation, the people that I partner with today, all that came about because of what I’m showing you. I don’t really want to create a report or free content or stuff like that, my thought would be you should really reconsider because I can’t think of a more effective way—I don’t think Frank Kern is in the room right now but he was here a few minutes ago. I saw his blond wig. I did a call with him. I think he articulated a core concept better than I’ve ever heard.
Move People Along
a
Timeline
He talked about how you could pretty much take a person where they are on the left hand side of your page and on the right hand side of the page their goal. Starting out I want to make a lot of money online and on the other side I’ve made a lot of money online. You can put a timeline between those two points. You can put hash marks for achievement. What he said is that your material should really give people results in advance. There is a series of steps that someone has to take to get to that final goal of going from I want to make money online to I’ve made money online. If you can start moving people into that right direction, maybe the first thing is to create a website or create an offer or start building a list or whatever, if you can help them accomplish step one, you’ve just moved them closer to their goal. I think that’s profound. I’ll tell you why I think that’s profound. I think it’s profound because I think your intensity and desire to accomplish a goal increases as you get closer to it. I gained 70 pounds working on the Internet. I’ve recently lost about 35. I can tell you now that my will is like steel. I’ve already lost 35 pounds. There are a lot of clothes I can’t fit into but I can fit into some of my clothes and I’m a lot more determined now than what I was 35 pounds ago. As you get closer to your goal, your desire increases. By providing someone with free content that moves them closer to their goal you just increased the desire to accomplish it. The other thing is that if you think about different levels of proof or different levels of persuasion, the way I like to look at it is that you have obnoxious selling which would be your standard website, big headline, stuff like that—screaming and yelling which will work one percent, two percent, three percent of the time. That’s why people do it. Above that would persuasion and that would be product launch formula using all the tactics of persuasion to get people to buy. It’s ten times more effective than an obnoxious selling website. I think above that, is influence. It a horrible example but it’s the first one that comes to mind, Hitler was able to get people to do things that I don’t think he could ever have gotten them to do by just persuading them. He used influence because the peer group—everybody was doing it—and when the peer group is doing it you can get people to take more action even that’s counter to their own thoughts than by just mere persuasions. Influence trumps persuasion. I think what trumps all of them is your own proof, your won results. So by giving someone results in advance like Kern was talking about, you’ve given them the highest level of proof possible. There is no doubting it. They have 16216
a personal experience with you now. That was a tangent but I think an important one as you look at everything that you provide the marketplace. Some of these reports don’t do that, obviously. When you’re exposing a new trend, you’re not necessarily moving people forward. So, what I would say then is that you then default to the other thing I was saying, take a look at all the problems and try and re-categorize all those problems as symptoms of this new trend, this new issue.
Help Y our Marketplace S et N ew Goals
The last report is reestablishing a new goal. It’s not that you really want this because if you want all those things, you really need to do this, you need to be this; the new goal that they should aspire to. Let me also say that these are all—looking at these in hindsight, I generate a lot of ideas and I get very passionate about those ideas so I didn’t create these all with that boilerplate template. I have a mindmap. I have a mindmap that I created of the Internet Business Manifesto. I created this mindmap after the fact, way after the fact. The reason I did it was is that when I wrote the manifesto, Jay Abraham called me and said, “Wow that was an incredible document that you wrote.” Michael Masterson said the same. Gary Bencivenga said the same. John Carlton said the same. Clayton Makepeace, every single top copywriter that’s ever lived that I know called me and said what an incredible document it was and how persuasive it was and all that. I didn’t write it from that standpoint. I wrote it from the standpoint that I had been teaching it and speaking on the platform and selling it from the platform so it had been tweaked to sell but I didn’t even consider that when I was writing it. I just wrote it like my presentation speech. After all these great people told me what a great document I created and I had no idea why, I went back through it to figure out what was it that they saw that I didn’t realize I was doing. The big thing is what I was doing was is that I had one big idea. Then every single sub-head supported that big idea or backed it up. There are a lot of elements. If you look at ‘The Doctrine 2’ all the elements in there are in there for a reason. It wasn’t just like fanciful. It took me longer to write that one than a lot of other ones and it’s because I made some tweaks to the presentation style that I thought were very effective. It was the most effective report that I’ve written to date; downloads and comments, etc. It trumps the Manifesto in its success. One of the things that I want you to appreciate and understand and not because it’s me but because of the concept— I’d like to consider myself an Internet marketing maven or a marketing maven and look at all the value of all those reports, all those videos that I’ve created for free for the marketplace. It’s no big mystery to me, at least, why my company has grown so fast, why I’ve gotten to the position I’ve gotten to so fast because look at all the value I’ve created for free.
Provide More V alue
than
Anyone
It made people want to know more and be more engaged. I think you could do the same. The background is MVP, most valuable player. I think you can aspire to be the most valuable player of your marketplace. I think if you did that the results come along with it. It’s almost like everything comes full circle. It’s like going back to how business was done hundreds of years ago where the people that provided the most value were the people that got the most business. There was this whole dark ages where you could trick people, you could convince people you were something that you weren’t but I think that’s all gone now. We’re back to this stage where you have to prove it.
Have
a
Big V ision
for
People
You also have to have a vision; a deeper vision of where you want to take the market; where you want to take the people that are reading, watching, listening, to whatever it is that you create. It should resonate and inspire every other piece that you’re doing. You have to get clear what your vision is. My vision is this, this is what I think about people starting online or starting a business. I think most people are like that surfer. I think there are a lot of sharks out in the water that would gladly like to take all their money before they get an ounce of success. 18217
The best way to sell an opportunity seeker is to sell as much stuff as possible to them before they ditch that and go on to the next opportunity; like Internet marketing is not for me I’m going to make my fortune in Forex Trading or real estate or whatever. I stand against all that. That picture to me encompasses my vision. It translates into everything that I write. Can you find a picture for you that helps signify what your main message is but that’s my message, that’s my vision. My vision is that you want to avoid those sharks. Make people prove to you that they are who they say they are. That their information is as good as they claim it is and not just with testimonials, not just with people saying their great but by actually proving it to you by giving you something that you experience that you know because I think that’s is the first bar that should be to entry into your life, into your world. Can you create a bigger vision for the marketplace of what you want to provide the marketplace, the role that you serve? The point is, this is my viewpoint, this is how I look at the world of marketing, Internet marketing, business advice, etc. This is how I see my role. If you can figure out a picture that does that for you, I think it makes all your decisions easier. It really is crystal clear what the right things to do for your marketplace and yourself so that you remain congruent.
D efine
the
Winners
and the
Losers
I like to break up the market into two groups; winner and losers. That’s pretty simple, right? I think people who lose in life—loser is a strong word—but people who lose in life they’re always a victim, they never believe it’s their fault and they’re not willing to do the work necessary. The work necessary is always more than what you think it is, always. It doesn’t really matter whose fault something is, it doesn’t really matter what conditions have gotten you here but that you’re here. You have an objective and a goal and you need to take it to the end and a hero doesn’t complain they move forward. That’s the antithesis of the loser. They complain, complain, complain and never really do much. So, what are some of the traits of some of the winners that I think are the most important. I think they’re willing to risk it all. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you should risk it all but they’re willing to risk it all. It was a very key decision releasing my second report. Writing it in a week and releasing it. The Manifesto was on fire. It was much more vital than I had ever expected. I knew that if I wrote a second report and it sucked that would be the end of it. It was like I was a one-hit wonder, the phenomena is over. I only had a week. I spent like months on the previous one but I figured that I could write one, if it doesn’t do well, yeah, I’m going to be shooting myself in the foot but if it works, if it resonates with people, it’s going to take me just that much further and I was willing to risk it. I think to win in these kinds of conditions of acceleration change, tension, scarcity, and all these kinds of things; that’s what you need to be willing to risk. You have to lose the fear of embarrassment. Everybody is so scare of attention they’re so busy, people do not notice what you’re doing as much as you think they notice. There’s really not that much embarrassment on the line as you probably think. Therefore, you have to be willing to just put it out there and if it’s great, it great, and if it’s not, well, you’ll figure out a way to make it great after the fact but losing the fear of embarrassment. Losing your inhibitions which goes in line with if you’re not afraid of embarrassment, if you’re not afraid of being embarrassed you’re inhibitions kind of magically disappear. Ultimately, lost concern of what others might think. At the end of the day, you have to feel certain enough about your own beliefs that you’re willing to go against the tide. I really believe that. I think that when you go against the tide, you end up distinguishing yourself from everyone else.
First
and
Foremost...Be D ifferent!!!
Being different today is greater than being better. Being better doesn’t get you noticed, being different does. In a world where it’s so hard to get people’s attention, you need to be noticed. Difference is greater than better. 19218
That’s not saying that you should strive for better but if that’s all you are is a better choice then you’re not going to get the business that you deserve. I’ve by instinct have always done that just because I like to do things differently than everybody else anyway. I think that’s been a key ingredient to my success is just being different, taking a different perspective on stuff. If everybody is running one way and you think that’s a mistake, that’s a righteous opportunity for you to talk about. The other issue is seeing problems like body builders see dumbbells or barbells. Brian Tracy talks about how being in business is really solving problems and that you’re going to experience problems all the time. That’s what running a business is—solving problems. Every three months or so, you get a break from your problems because you have a crisis. That crisis can sink your business and then you get the opportunity to then fix the crisis. I don’t know if I would agree to that extend but I do agree with him. Being in business is about solving problems. As the owner of your own company whether that company is just you or whether that company is several hundred, you’re a problem solver. You have to look at problems as something that actually teaches you something and take the valuable lesson away. I know that’s fluffy and airy and stuff but its true. I can tell you I would not have been at the pace that I’ve been on with all the reports that I’ve created, all the videos that I’ve created if I hadn’t had to solve certain problems. Problems that were my own mistakes, my own causes which forced me to have to fix the problem and fixing the problem created a report, created a video, etc. My problems helped me get where I am today by fixing the problems in a very big way. Trust me, I would have my way I would have wrote the first report and then I would have just sat and watched TV the rest of the time; maybe read a few books and gossiped on the phone.
Believe
in
Y our Power
to
C hange
I started with this and I just want to remind you it’s never too late to be what you might have been. If you’ve ever had the experience, I know I have, I’m kind of a emotional guy even though I sometimes don’t come off that way but when I watch somebody win at the Olympics, that touches me in a really deep way. I think that touches me because I can only imagine what working so hard and getting to the top can really be like. I hope that I could feel the same way. Whenever I see that, I’m always inspired to become better, to do more and to not have regrets. I just taught my five-year old, Ava, how to ride the bike with no training wheels. My daughter Ava for those of you that don’t know, she’s the Downy girl on every bottle, box, product of Downy; she’s the cover of it. She has a photo shoot for Hasbro or something like that coming up in a week but they said we need her to ride a bike without training wheels so my wife is like we’ve got to teach her right now and I’m preparing for presentations and I’m like okay but I can’t miss the opportunity to watch my daughter ride a bike with no training wheels. When she got on the bike and I was holding her –what I told her was look, when you fall that’s when you’re going to learn. Just be careful, fall into the grass but when you fall is when you learn. Be different, be willing to fall. I have made mistakes. I’ve made colossal mistakes and they’ve been seen by the entire market but I’m still here. My reputation has only improved in the last six months and not gotten worse. People are not just thinking about you. They’re thinking about themselves. So be different so you stand out and be willing to fall because that’s when you really learn. Another quote: “There are times in your life when you have a chance to really go for it.” To get what you need to really build the business of your dreams but you have to decide for yourself. You have to make a decision. How much are you going to go for it? Are you going to be more extraverted if you need to be, to meet people and build the peer network? Are you going to ask questions when you might feel uncomfortable because those questions might expose that you don’t know something? It just comes down to your desire; how much do you really want it and your willingness to go after it. You are never who you think you are. You can be much better. 19219
The
creator of Butterfly Marketing speaks for the last time ever on stage revealing his top Internet Marketing tactics such as: • How
to get your affiliates to do all the frustrating
will double your free time and your profits)...
PPC
work for you
(which
• W here and how you should use video to increase conversions ... meaning more opt-ins and sales... • T he one thing even the late great G ary H albert said you should test before anything else... • How to use the money sucking tactics of Amazon and GoDaddy on your website to double or triple the products purchased at the point of sale... In 2007, I was on the road or on a plane 60 percent of the year. What I was doing is I was traveling and I was offering my coaching program. I would have to be at an event for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I would leave on a Thursday, get there Thursday night, be there Friday, maybe speak Saturday, stick around for Sunday for the networking and the speaker panels, fly back on Monday (exhausted) Tuesday I would wake up and I had a presentation that I had to get ready on Wednesday for my coaching students. I had to take the latest courses and what was going on with copywriting or social networking and become a student so I could have all this fresh information and then I would create a presentation and teach it to my students on Wednesday. It was great because I was learning and freshening up, sharpening the saw at the same time. Wednesday I would do my presentation, Thursday I’m on a plane and I’m back out on the road. It got so bad; I learned an expression from Rich Schefren that I was practicing before the expression was even invented. It’s called email bankruptcy. I was declaring email bankruptcy every 14 days. Anybody know what email bankruptcy is? Email bankruptcy is when you have about 340 emails in your in-box and you’re spending three or four hours a day trying to get that down to like 300 and you have the stress that is never ending and now that you just did 30 emails, people start responding and you’re just in front of your email all day. With Gmail, they have this thing called archive. I would select all, hit archive and say, hurrah, you have no mail and I was like yes, now I can get to work. It was getting pretty bad. I had a business to run. Some of you know me; some of you may not know me. We have over 42 websites that are on the Internet. Last year we did $4.7M in sales. The year before that, we did $4.6M in sales. We only grew about $100,000 in a year and we had one of these rising charts and it peeked. I certainly wasn’t complaining but I came to the conclusion that very early on, I said I was going to stop the coaching the program on December 31 so I no longer coach. 20220
In 2006, I was doing a lot of traveling as well. My goal for 2007 was to stop speaking as much. Then all of a sudden it would be hey Mike, we’re doing an event in Australia. There is going to be 700 people there. Wow, you know, ten percent closing ratio at $5,000 a piece, get to go see Australia, all right I’ll do that. I’d see another speaker and they’d say hey, we’re going to be having an event here in Malaysia and there’s going to be 4,000 people. I’d get the calculator out and it just seemed like – my goal was to stop speaking—slow it down in 2007 compared to what I did in 2006 and I spoke more in 2007. Finally, after the last event with Rich in July, I said in order for me to do this I need to not only announce this publicly to my list but I emailed Armand Morin, the guys from World Internet Summit, Ken McCarthy, Rich Schefren, anybody that I’ve ever spoken at their event. I announced to them that I was no longer going to be doing any speaking. I didn’t want to be tempted. I wanted to be able to say I made a public announcement so now I would be going back on my word. Right after that, I got an email from Armand Morin, it rhymes with the following word, it was just one word, he just said, “wussy.” I just emailed him back and I said Armand I think I can do four-times better than what I do on the road if I focus on my own business. I started examining my own business. I went back to a book. There are a lot of different books that I like but the one that – I think everybody has a book that they really identify with and they say wow, this changed my life especially professionally. That book was called, “Good to Great.” Does anybody know what the first sentence of that book is—six words? Excellent! Good is the enemy of great. Good is the –what—enemy of great. I think I just sat; I didn’t go forward for several minutes. I stopped for a second. I was good is the enemy of great. If we settle for being good enough then that’s just terrible. God put us on this planet for us to be the best at who we can be. We owe it to ourselves and our family and our children and our parents and the world to be great. Just to settle for good, that’s a terrible thing. Good is the enemy of great. Here’s six ways I went back and began building a “Great” online business. These are the things I did to build what I consider a “Great” profitable business.
Five Ways to Increase Online Profits
1.
Get More Prospects.
That’s getting more traffic, more viewers, more listeners, more readers, whatever it is in our business. You always want to be focusing on increasing the number of prospects that you’re currently brining in to your market. It stands to say that if you’re getting a 100 visitors per or a 100 visitors per month, if you continue to get those 100 and get an additional 30, 40 or 50 you’re going to increase your profits. We said buy, create and borrow. Buying traffic, what are some popular ways that you can buy traffic? Ezines, Pay PerClick, Google AdWords, Yahoo Search marketing, you can buy banner impressions, there is CPAnetworks, there are many different ways that you can buy advertising. I’ve always focused on a couple of things and it was successful for me and if I was able to have somebody to work in my company just to manage my AdWords department and he was the right person, I would have him tomorrow. I would gladly spend $5,000 a month to make $7,000 or $50,000 a month to make $70,000. Social marketing. That’s creating Squidoo lenses and writing articles on the Internet and creating videos and using tools like Tube Mogle and Traffic Guiser and putting videos—thatare putting content out there to pull traffic back to your websites where you want to make money. It takes a little bit of time but I like to refer to it as planting seeds 21221
on the Internet. You’re not going to see a lot of results right away but after a while you’re going to see that you have these prairies of green lawn all over the place. That can be very profitable. How do you borrow traffic? Affiliate programs, JVs, The only thing is for a lot of my keywords, I’m number one in Google. For all of my products, there’s anywhere between 6 and 15 ads on Google for my products. What I decided to do very early on was to empower my affiliates to do this stuff for me. A lot of affiliate programs will say click here to join our affiliate program and then after you join the affiliate program they say here’s your affiliate link and then that’s it. They tell you how great their product is and all this other type of good stuff. One of the things I’ve spoken about; I started in Butterfly Marketing and it was because I did it and I spoke about it in Butterfly Marketing. If you look at my products like the Butterfly Marketing Manuscript or any site that uses Butterfly Marketing or Viral Friend Generator, I would encourage you to go to the www.butterflymarketingmanuscript. com/affiliate and see what we do there. There are 23 sets of tools that all the person has to do is enter their name and their ClickBank ID or their Pay.com ID, they hit submit and it fills out all those tools for them. Then we tell them, step one, copy and paste this blog review and put it on your blog. What I like to do is look at those footprints that it leaves out there and type it into Google and see something like 1683 times this unique footprint shows up. Let me click to page 43, there it is, ten more people with their blogs advertising my products with the keywords that I wanted them to use. I give them the keywords to put in on the blogs. If I’m empowering all these people to do this search marketing for me, now we’re creating content for people to use on their Skidoo Lenses. I would rather pay someone 50 percent after they make a sale and let me focus on the marketing and increasing my conversion and things like that than putting all that effort into social marketing. The same thing with buying traffic. I create the Google AdWords. I’ll create maybe eight different Google Ads and then I do some keyword research and I dump several hundred keywords in there for a particular product and I say here’s how you go to Google. Watch this video if you don’t have an account. I teach them how to go and create the account and I tell them that they may want to look into this product and I’ll recommend Google AdWords products for them and then they start testing those headlines. I don’t pay for any of this advertising that’s on Google. Of course I do when they make a sales but that’s better than paying for clicks and not making sales.
2.
Increase Conversions at Point of Sale
Number two was increased conversions at point of sale. You need to constantly test, tweak and improve. That’s why we test because if we thought we were right all the time then there would be no reason to test so make sure that you’re testing even the obvious. Make sure that you test audio.
Have Video in Sales Process
Make sure that you’re using video and test your video. I believe video in almost every instance can increase conversions when it’s the right message in the video and it’s done right. Certainly test your sales copy. Test your offer. We spoke yesterday for about an hour and a half on what an offer is. Test your guarantee and test your headlines. Remember we said the big rocks rather than focusing on whether the blue background is better than the gray background and all these types of things. What you really want to test are these big rocks.
Test the Offer First
I was on a call with Gary Halbert before he passed away years ago. I was a guinea pig with Russell Brunson and a couple of other people. It was a split testing software that came on and we were all going to be contestant but we got to meet these great copywriters before we put our test into place. There was Gary Halbert, David Garfinkle and 22222
a couple of other copywriters were on there. I remember each person got to ask these experts questions before we did our tasks and I asked Gary Halbert, this was – I was fairly new and John Reese had come out with Traffic Secrets and there was all this talk about Michel Fortin publishing that the blue background outsold this and you want to use it to Tahoma font in your headlines, size 18, medium red and every website in the world changed the next day to Tahoma font, medium red. I said to Gary, here’s my chance to ask one of the greatest copywriters of the 20 century of all time. I said, Gary, if I’m going to test something where do you think I should start? Should I test maybe the fonts or the background color or the headline? I figured I would throw the headline in there because that’s what I had always heard you had to test the headline. If any of you know Gary, you know he doesn’t hold back and he started screaming and cursing and g’damn it and all this type of stuff. I don’t know where you guys are getting this information and he said that stuff doesn’t matter, testing your page background. He says I’ll write the best damn sales letter in the world and I’ll put it on the ugly yellow background. I’ve been using it forever. It’s not the background that you want to be focusing on. He says the first thing you want to test is the offer. I said, oh, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I had no idea of what he was talking about. I didn’t know what the offer meant. You know what I thought he meant? I thought he meant it was your sales copy. Maybe have two different people write the sales letter or something like that and they’re writing different offers. I didn’t understand what he meant by testing the offer. For two years, and then I finally found out what it was by listening to good copywriters; guys like John Carlton and things like that. The way I see it is that the offer is what they’re going to get or what you’re going to give them and how they’re going to get it. What are you going to give them and how are they going to get it. Is it going to be mailed to them in two weeks, is it coming on a DVD, is it going to be an MP3, is it going to be streaming, do they download it once and never get access to it again? It’s what they’re going to get and how they’re going to get it. it’s what they’re going to pay and how they’re going to pay you. A lot of people just think that hey whatever it is its $47. It can be – you see very often in the commercials—send us nothing right now, use it for 30 days and if it doesn’t do everything we said it will and more then keep it and send us nothing. But if you like it, you’ll be billed after 30 days. Those are really good things that you want to start testing. When you hear a good copywriter saying did you test the offer, what they’re saying is did you do multiple payments? Was it a dollar trial and then $297? Recently Eben Pagan did DVDs of his event, right? It was free; it was a $1500 product. He shipped it to you for free and he even paid the shipping. If you didn’t like it, you simply sent it back and notified them and you wouldn’t be charged. If they don’t hear from you in 30 days, you’re charged $297 over five months. These are different things that you can test.
Try Risk Reversal
The other is your guarantee which is risk reversal. Many times we’ll be happy to say we offer a no-risk money back guarantee. Those are good words and those are important and you need to put it in your entire sales letter but you also want to consider risk reversal. All the risk is on us the seller because if it doesn’t do everything that we say it does; we’ll double or triple your money back. You tell them, see how easy it is for you to take advantage of us. We’d have to be crazy to make this offer but we’re just so confident that our product is going to do exactly what you want it to do that we’re willing to make that bold claim.
3.
Maximize Profit and Transactions at Point of Sale
This is a big one. When I start going over some of this with you this is really going to resonate with anybody that’s currently selling online. Some of this stuff you can immediately start implementing into your business and instantly increase your profits 50 percent, sometimes even more. 24223
The Thud Factor
Let’s take a look here. How can you increase your profits at the point of sale? You can increase your price and/or you can offer less. Sometimes there’s like The Seven Figure Code. I was talking to John Reese and he’s like what are you going to do and what’s your price point and what’s your offer? That’s the way we marketers talk. I told him and he said what are they going to get and how are you going to give it to them? We said we’re going to give them these DVD and we’re going to give them the transcripts for the event. He said, humm, so really Michael they’re going to be getting these eight Netflix packages. That’s the perception. He said you really need to create a bigger thud factor here, Mike. So I said what do you suggest? He said why don’t you take those transcripts and print them. I took his advice and we ran with them.
One-Time Offers
I think most of you know what that stuff is. It is doing down sales and up sales and cross sales and bumps and ads on your thank-you page. After they buy you can advertise on the thank-you page. I’m going to give you some different examples that I normally do with up sales, cross sales and bumps coming up in just a few seconds. Here’s one that I like. I’m looking for software. Maybe I’m talking with Rich Schefren and Rich says hey you’ve got to get the process map software or you’ve got to get this mindmap software. Now I’ve switched over to a Mac and some of these things don’t work there so I’m looking for a new one and I go to check out and I find this $47 and I check out and I’m just about to hit submit and its asking me for $97. I’m asking what just happened. I scroll back up and I look at the cart and they have pre-checked off a back-up CD for $29 that they’re going to mail me and then they have another checked off for premium phone support for $19. These are what are called bumps— upsells but they’re really more of these bumps—these little pre-checked things. You can go back and uncheck them but sometimes you even get to thinking I have a lot of different computers and I move around a lot, I’d probably prefer to have that backup CD right in my bookshelf rather having to go through emails for an expired download link. Has that ever happened to you? You find a download link and you click and it says that this page is no longer available. You’re like ugh, I’ve got to re-buy it again. Those are little bumps.
Use Upsells Like Amazon
The Amazon upsells, can you use that in your process before they check out or after they check out with like a one-click checkout feature once you have their credit card. Customers who purchase this also purchased... What psychological influence does that use? Social proof and conformity to group norms. People like to do what the norms do. You know that stuff where you look in your hotel and it says please help us conserve water by reusing your towel. You know what that’s for? It’s to save the hotel a lot of money and to use guilt to get you to do it by being better for the environment. They’ve tested that and they were pretty successful with it. Then what they did they added one line on there that says 80 percent of our customers prefer to use their towels. Suddenly everyone after reading that little card that they put on the bed, the conversions went up and they’re using less detergent and spending less money which was probably their main goal. You know where I read that? I read that from Robert Cialdini. Typed his name in; he recently published that about five months ago. It’s a great article that talks about conformity to group norms and social proof, they go hand in hand. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re giving people choices. People prefer contrasts. If you want people to go for an offer, create a higher offer at a more expensive price where the regular offer just looks like the best value. Then say something or find out what the statistics are and say something like – what’s interesting is you don’t have to say 80 percent of our customers choose this because that would probably be a lie because you don’t have that kind of conversion. What you can say is 89 percent of our customers who do buy choose this option. 25224
How GoDaddy Uses the Upsell Process
Anybody recognize that logo in the top left? That’s GoDaddy. Anybody ever register a domain at GoDaddy? Okay, let’s go through the process. You just put it in and it says “congratulation it’s available.” And then it says stop, you found a great name; you might want that non-profit never ending upsells.org and the ending upsells.info. They give you these two things and look at that, it’s pre-checked. Green means go, big green button. (Pavlov’s dogs) check out, continue-continue-continue. Where’s that no thanks? (The guys in the back probably can’t read that.) Yes, add these to my order; save 50 percent-stop. Now, we hit continue and it says it knows my name on my account. So it’s telling me that MikeFilsaime.name is available. Since nobody stole the dot-com from me I feel I don’t need the reason to get the dot-name. I’ll let someone else have it if they want. I could add that to my order for just $9.99 and I could also get Filsaimefamily.com for $9.99. I just don’t know who I could market that. Maybe one day I’ll regret that but today I didn’t buy that. We hit continue—oh, now, okay, what’s pre-checked right there? Two-years, that’s called a bump. They’re giving you two-years automatically and this is going to pay-off later for them when they start getting you for the hosting. When you’re paying $100 a year for hosting they just doubled their year. I’m not suggesting that you put your customer through this type of process. It’s crazy. Let’s face it; GoDaddy loses money on selling domain names. They’re probably selling it to you at or below cost. That’s why they’re the number one domain reseller. They’ve got a lot of staff. They’ve got these pretty ladies that have to pose in front of pictures for these cars for their Super Bowl ads. Obviously what they’ve realized is that they’re going to use the front-end to drive these back-end offers. If you’re already profitable on your front-end, that’s even better. Now there are different ways that you can start selling different things.
4.
Reduce Your Spending
Sometimes we’re so focused on profits we don’t realize that we’re more profitable when we find ways to cut cost and reduce loss and reduce refund rates and different things like that. How do you get a lower refund rate using things like stick strategies, better customer support, better training, create a better product? If people keep telling you that there are little problems with it, fix the products, keep improving, have a support form if needed, have help videos, help documents, a knowledgeable staff, those types of things are going to help reduce your refunds.
A Simple Refund Policy
Also, have a refund policy that offers one of your other products every time someone asks for a refund. If you want a refund for one of my products, Nancy will reply back to you and give you two or three choices for some of our other products or even a bundle and say Mike’s dedicated to your success, our team will help you use the software or product that you originally purchased and we’d also like to give you these other products as our way of showing you that we’re committed to your success. If we don’t hear from you within 24 hours, we’ll refund your money if you’d like to take us up on this offer, please let us know.
5.
Improve Frequency and Recurring Income.
Create a Newsletter
Finally; --forced continuity; create a newsletter. Give them the first month for free. Creating a newsletter is very easy. There are many different fulfillment companies that will handle this for you. All you do is email them a Microsoft Word document once a month. If you’re already on the Web then you already know how to do something like this. Simply just put at every checkout—receive our free newsletter; every single month get our first one for free and then you have the words that say if for any reason you choose not to continue receiving them, just let us know. If not, you’ll be billed $19 per month and then you get like $5 for shipping and handling or $9 a month or $49 a month—depending on your industry is going to determine how much you can go with this and depending on your credibility in the marketplace but very powerful stuff. 26225
Outsource your Backend Products
If you don’t have any backend products you can outsource your backend. You’d be surprised how many people have call centers that are related to your industry that you can get your leads over to them and you negotiate the terms. You can call the people three times, after that you have to delete all instances of customer information. You can not store their email address or their phone number or anything like that. Make sure in your terms of service that you don’t say things like we will never sell, rent, your email or your information with anyone because then you’re breaking the law.
Follow-up for Other Products
You know what you really should do is look at your autoresponder for what happens after somebody buys. If you say here’s your download link, that’s a waste of money if you stop right there. You can have – let’s say you’re selling –I’ll just use an example here just to get through this—you’re selling a domain type of system where they’ve bought a domain. The email should say “thank-you for the domain, if you need a quality Web host go here.” Get an affiliate program in that email and then from there your follow-up emails should be selling them other congruent products that are related to this particular marketing funnel. For me with many different products, it would be foolish to just tell somebody take these eight autoresponder follow-ups for backend products and paste it all the way through our products. For somebody that buys my carbon copy marketing is a newbie. They just demonstrated that because they’re not making any money online and they’re looking just to get started. Somebody that buys Viral Friend Generator may already have a website so it would be foolish for me to be introducing them to newbie based products. Make sure that you’re doing some type of follow-up, moving people through your funnel. Very quickly, follow-up for other people’s products, direct mail campaigns, email follow-up; many of you got a letter to get invited to this event. It came offline. Rich and I put an offline campaign together. Having a call center can increase your profits ten times if you’re in the information business.
6. Bonus Strategy: Use Integration Marketing
Integrated strategies for advanced marketers; these are two of the most recognized brands in the world. I don’t think too many people would argue with that. What’s the main difference between McDonalds and Coca Cola in terms of the way that you buy the product? You can shout it out—what do you think? Automation? They’re different but it’s not the one that I’m looking for. If you want to buy a cheeseburger from McDonalds you have to walk into a McDonalds. You want to buy anything from McDonalds you must buy it at a McDonalds; probably, 99.99 percent of the time. It’s not even coming to mind where I have bought a McDonald’s product that wasn’t at a McDonald’s location. Has anyone in this room walked into a store where there was a cleaner, a deli, a Chinese food store and a Coca Cola store and bought a Coke. Never! There is no such thing as a Coca Cola store. Many times we focus our marketing which is good, we need to with that McDonald’s method, that’s our website but we have a product to sell just like Coca Cola but they’ve decided to say let’s go where people are already buying and just integrate our little vending machines or our product along where the people are going to buy. Let’s compliment. This is so strong that a year ago I started this and we were doing $50,000 per month with our integration.
What is Integration Marketing?
Integration marketing is targeted complimentary offers. Basically what that means is identify a competitor. If you have a product about how to strengthen your abs or get those cut abs. There’s another product on the market, how to tighten up your butt. That’s person is number two in ClickBank and you’re number three or whatever the case is and you’re focused on going to number two and then number one and you see them go to number four and you’re excited, that’s when you’re looking at your competition—the other people in your market as competition. 26226
What I would venture to say is reach out to that person and say hey, let’s make a deal. What I’d like to do since you already have a buyer and you’re number three in ClickBank, you’re probably selling a 100 of these books a day. I’ve got a product that sells for $47. Why don’t I sell to your customers for $37 and I’ll give you 75 percent commission; normally we pay 50 percent. We already know that customers that just made a purchase are much more likely to buy, right? Here is a targeted customer so simple get them to put a little—customers who bought this also bought this. Well, if they want tight abs, they might want a tight butt or vice-versa. Here’s a person that’s getting 100 customers a day that just had their wallet out, already knows likes and trusts that other person, broke through that barrier and now you put your product right in there and you’re getting the best customers now. If you have a backend, after they buy that, they buy your backend products. What I’ll do, I’ll put your product on my thank-you page and we’ll grow each other ’s businesses together.
Downselling
No big long copy here. Hey, hi again, I have one final option for you. If you wanted the course but the $897 was just a big out of reach—I know psychology, I know the psychology of selling. You guys have heard it; commitment and consistency. If somebody just paid $97 for my manuscript, I have to believe that they would love to have the software. Its commitment and consistency. One of the most logical reasons that they pass on the other offer is that they just didn’t want to spend the $897. So we said, if you want the course but the $897 was just a bit out of reach, I can offer you the exact same package you just saw in a digital version. That means you get everything in the Butterfly Marketing plus all these $2700 worth of bonuses for all only $497. That’s it. Simply this means instead of me shipping – this is called reason why—I’m justifying the discount. Instead of me shipping the product and the course to you, I’ll give you the entire course right now to download to your PC and you still get access to the software. The only difference is that you download everything at your leisure and then its $497. One out of every ten people that buys the Butterfly Marketing Manuscript buys the $897 and one of out every ten people that buys it, buys this. So what that simply means is 21 percent of every single person that buys a $97 offers, buys one of these. That’s an incredible, incredible upsell, 20 percent. There are a lot of different things there. There’s good value, there’s urgency, there’s the video, a lot of different things. As you can see, there’s so many little things that you can start testing in your sales process. Add these up and you can transform your “good” Internet Business into a “Great” Internet Business.
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The CEO
of Early to Rise shares how she used these direct response principles to build revenues from $3 million to $36 million in just four years... • T he
fundamental mindset everyone on your team must have
you should fire them )...
( and
if don ’ t why
• H ow to expand your marketing campaigns from online to offline ... • T he seven million dollar tested direct response campaign strategies you can start using today ... • W hy analyzing ROI will quadruple your business like it did E arly to R ise ’ s ... It’s so nice to see so many people who are familiar with Early to Rise. It is a company that I love. As a matter of fact, I refer to Early to Rise as my fourth child very often. That’s how committed I am to this company and that’s how wonderful our organization is. Since you are familiar with that, you probably know that we are an extremely transparent company. We tell everybody all of our secrets. There’s nothing we hold back. And we do that for several reasons. We do that because we want to help our customers succeed. We do that because we want to help our competition succeed. We believe the better the competition, the better the marketplace. So what I’m going to share with you today, it’s basically kind of the history of Early to Rise. We started in 2000; actually, December 1999. But in 2004, we were a $3 million company. In 2005, we were a $5 million. In 2006, we were an $8 million company and last year we were $27 million company. That should say 2008 -- this year we’re projecting about $36 million. And how we got there, basically, is three key factors that I want to share with you. And this is really important, so please pay attention. Because the first one seems like it would be such an easy thing, but it’s not.
You Must get a Marketing Mindset!
Everybody in your company should understand that marketing is going to be one of the most important things that can happen. And that does not negate the jobs of everyone else in the company, but basically the job of everyone else in that company is to support marketing. We’re very proud of our product. We constantly strive to make that product better in every way. But if your people in your organization don’t believe that they’re there to support marketing, you need to fire them. I have been in organizations where we’ve had very high up people who hated marketing. And when that happens, your company just doesn’t not grow, it deteriorates. So that’s the first one, is mindset. 28228
Mastering Direct Response Marketing
The second thing that we’re going to talk about that has really helped us grow our business is the direct response fundamentals. And we’ll get to that. And the third, of course, is multi-channel marketing, which is something that I wholeheartedly believe in. So here’s a question. This question is going to make or break your business. What’s the difference between a direct response marketer and an internet marketer? Somebody tell me. I’m not going to do all the work. Somebody tell me; what’s the difference? Go ahead, what’s the difference? The channels they use. Wrong. Okay, somebody else try. Okay, well, this is kind of a trick question, because if it is a true internet marketer, the answer should be “nothing.” There should be no difference between an internet marketer and a direct response marketer. If it’s a bad internet marketer, the answer is “everything.” It is the difference between success and failure. It’s the difference between growing and sustaining a profitable business and a hamster on a wheel. And that’s kind of a term that Michael Masterson coined a long time ago. You know, the internet marketers who just have to make the next buck so they’re always on the wheel and they’re always running running running and they can never stop. Everybody should be a direct response marketer. It does not matter what channel of marketing you’re using. If your business is 100% online, you should be a direct response marketer. That is the difference I see in this world. I see guys like Mike, and I’m really happy that I’m following Mike because I think this presentation dovetails really nicely with his. I see guys like Mike and Rich, Jeff Walker, people who understand direct response principles. And then I see all these other internet marketers, and all they are, they have tricks in their pockets. And when one trick runs out, they’re like a magician. They shoot for another trick.
What is Direct Response Marketing?
It’s a form of marketing designed to solicit an immediate response which is specific and quantifiable. It’s immediate, it’s specific and it’s quantifiable. It is not branding. Branding has its place, you know, if you’re Nike, Coke, if you’re a McDonalds, but it is not direct response marketing. That’s not what I do. Branding is not what I do, so let’s make that very clear and I’m going to assume most of you guys are going for an immediate sale. So branding and direct response, I often use this analogy that opening your wallet versus memory, infomercial versus commercial, a highly targeted search versus a broad reach or an explicit interest or intent versus no conscious intent. Everyone understand that? There are five key components to a direct response marketing campaign. The first one is that it’s database targeted communication to a specific customer. The second one is interactive; it’s two- way communication. The third is there’s a response. There’s a way for the customer to respond to your offer. The fourth is there’s always an exchange, that the order can be made at any time. And the fifth one is there’s a measurable response. You can calculate the cost of producing and the resulting income.
Ten Direct Marketing Terms You Need to Know... Testing
What’s testing? It’s simply sending a marketing campaign to a small group of prospects before proceeding on a larger scale. And there’s no better way to test than on the Internet. In the old days in direct mail, testing was expensive and we had to wait for results. On the internet, that gives you a whole new opportunity to roll out in so many different channels.
Analyzing
This is reading your marketing results to acquire actionable data with the intention of rolling out on a campaign or remailing. 29229
Rolling Out
Rolling out is expanding your campaign to a larger group of prospects after you’ve had a successful test.
USP
A unique selling proposition. What is it? It’s what actually makes your company or product stand out from your competition from anyone else that’s out there. There are a zillion health newsletters; what’s different about yours? There are a zillion financial newsletters; what’s different about yours? There are a zillion different internet marketing products; what’s different about Mike’s? What’s different about Frank’s? What’s different about Rich’s?
ROI
Everybody needs to understand an ROI; return on investment. Simply dividing your ROI revenue by your cost.
Lead Generation
This is a new customer or reader that has not paid any money to receive your product. So Early to Rise, it’s free. Right? We have 300,000 people who receive Early to Rise every day for free.
Response Rate
A response rate is the percentage of people who respond to your offer. What’s your offer? It’s what your prospects get when they respond to your ad and what they have to do to get it. So it’s just not what they do to respond; it’s what do they have to do to get it.
Acquisition
An offer that is made to a first-time customer with payment and up sell. An immediate offer to your customers at your customer ’s first purchase.
Cross Sell
We do cross sells all the time within Early to Rise. And basically when somebody checks out, when they’ve made their purchase, before we let them go, we say, hey, hang on. If you like this product, you’ll like this product just as much. Only what we do is we use a very specific formula that’s been tested. The price of that is somewhere between 25 to 50 percent of the first price. The benefits are exactly the same. The product is very synergistic and we have about a 30 percent cross sell rate on our products. So if you’re not doing that, do it and use that formula. Twenty-five to fifty percent of the original price with the exact same benefits. That is pure money to your bottom line.
Channels
Channels are simply a form in which you communicate or ask your customer to purchase. So what are they? We’re going to talk a lot about direct email marketing today because so many of you probably are in that. But we want to introduce how you get into the market through multiple channels. So through direct email marketing we have dedicated or endorsed lists. We have sponsorships. We have JVs and swaps.
Squeeze Pages
A squeeze page is putting your promotion out there to a list on media, whatever you purchased, and it’s giving the customer about one page of reading. Now, in order for them to read the promotion, they have to give you their name; their email address and name. So before they can even read the promotion, they have to give you their email. If you’re not doing this again, I invite everyone to copy us, to go to Early to Rise. You’ll get many examples of this.
Using Multiple Marketing Channels
Why? Why, if you’re successful online and you’re only doing online, why would you want to go into multiple channels of marketing? Well, the first reason is that people who buy from two or more channels are between 20 to 60 percent more valuable to you. People who buy from three or more channels are 60 to 120 percent more valuable. Those are pretty big numbers. That comes right from the Direct Marketing Association. Plus, multichannel marketers buy a wider range of products. If that’s not enough, as a marketer you can reach your customers in the way they want to be talked to. So you’re solving your customer’s problem and your problem.
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Plus, multi-channel marketing is good for your customer and it’s good for your business. And I’ve talked about that a lot in presentations and in Early to Rise that we have two main rules at Early to Rise. When people want to JV with us or they want to contribute to our newsletter, we always say it needs to be good for the customer and it needs to be good for the company. And if it meets both of those standards, then you’re going to have a good business. These are practical tips that all your messages should contain.
Grab the Attention of Your Prospect
The first is you’ve got to grab the attention of your targeted prospect from the very start.
Create Need
Create a need for the product, show what it looks like and demonstrate how to use it. So many people go wrong right here at the very start.
Stay One Step Ahead of the Customer
Be proactive; answer questions as a good salesperson does. Reassure the buyer.
Talk about the Product
Provide the critical information about the product, about how to use the product.
Inspire confidence.
Minimize risk and establish that the company is reputable.
Make the Sale
Make the sale by explaining how to buy, how to order, where to call, and how to pay for the purchase. Now what is multi-channel marketing? It’s just simply offering your customers more than one way to buy. And the first thing that you need to do is you need to understand list segmentation. So you have a list and you’re going to basically get as much information from everybody as you possibly can. When you collect an email address, there are certain times where you absolutely can ask for the street address. You can ask for the phone and address. You need to do that and you need to segment your list, because the worst thing people do during multi-channel marketing campaigns is they fall into three E trap. They send everything to everyone everywhere. And one, it’s a big waste of money. Two, all you’re going to do is annoy your customers. So you never, ever, ever want to fall into that trap.
How to Run a Direct Response Campaign (Early To Rise Style)
So where are we going to start? Let’s start with the low hanging fruit. So start with things that are easy, that are cheap and that are effective. The first question you’re going to ask is what are your customers’ buying behavior? If someone came to you through direct mail, you’re going to slowly get them onto email. You’re going to try to get their email address and then you’re going to start communicating with them through email. And they might buy from you through email, or they might not. And you’re going to try email first because it’s the cheapest, it’s the fastest and it’s the most effective. When they don’t, if they came on through direct mail, more than likely they’ll buy again from you through direct mail. Have a consistent message in all your different channels. If you have a multi-channel campaign where you’ve got email going, you’ve got the phone going, and you’ve got some direct mail going, you’re going to make sure that you have the same price point in all those messages. Because I might see your email and I won’t respond. I might get a phone call and I’m thinking about it. But when I get that direct mail campaign, my third time, my third communication with you, I see that it’s the same price, it’s the same logo, it’s the same benefits in there. So please keep that in mind, that you’re always going to keep the consistency. And that goes right to the next point of repetition. It’s like any infomercial or commercial, if you guys know this, that basically someone needs to see a commercial four times before they purchase. Someone needs to get a direct mail piece four times before they purchase. So the repetition is very important. 32231
Agora is a successful company because we’re not a publishing company. We’re not a marketing company. What we are is an idea company. We believe that if you have big ideas, if you have good ideas, that transcends into marketing. It transcends into content. It transcends into product.
1.
Start with a Good Idea
2.
You’re going to start planning that overall campaign.
3.
You must write your Copy!
4.
Use the Phone.
So you always need to start with an idea; a good, big idea. Once you’ve got that idea, you’re going to start working on your copy and you’re going to start working on the channels.
So now you kind of slice and dice. So if I was starting out and I was just going to jump into this wonderful world of multi-channel marketing, the first thing I would do is I would do an endorsed or a dedicated email.
So you’re going to take that long copy that you had the great idea about and you’re going to put that into a dedicated email. From that long copy, you’re going to be able to take, you’re going to be able to pull right from that copy, your banner ads. You’re going to be able to pull your PPC ads. You’re going to be able to pull your sponsorships. So it only takes one set of copy. Now you’re just leveraging all that copy and you’re putting it in all these different channels.
Then I’m going to use the phone. I’m going to take that same set of copy and I’m going to script an inbound campaign, an outbound campaign and a teleconference. If you’ve never done teleconferences, I’m sure everyone knows Alex; Alex Mandossian. If you don’t, you should get his product. It’s wonderful. It’s all about teleconferences. I mean he’s the master. It’s such an easy way to communicate to your customers. People like -- you know, I think that’s why they like the internet, because it’s so quick and it’s so direct. But the phone is even quicker and it’s even more direct. It’s even more personal.
5.
Market Tip: Use Inserts
6.
Use Direct Mail
Your product may cost you $7, $8, $9 to mail. You know what that insert is going to cost you to put a one-pager in there? A penny. A penny. So make sure you insert every physical product that goes out the door. If you have a newsletter, that might only be costing you 57 cents to mail, but the insert is still costing you the same penny.
And now you can’t be afraid of the M-word, of direct mail. With the right lists and great copy, it is by far the fastest way to get the largest amount of paid orders in the door at once. But this is key. If you don’t have someone in your organization that understands lists and media buying, you cannot do this. You cannot do this. It doesn’t matter if you have the best copywriter in the world. But if you don’t have anyone who understands lists, that copy is useless. The most important piece of any campaign is the media or the list that you’re going to. Copywriters get really upset when I say that, but they know it’s true. Now copywriting is the hardest thing about your campaign and the most creative thing about your campaign, but you can have mediocre copy going to the great list and you will get results. If you have a mediocre list with great copy, it’s going to bomb. List is the most important thing.
7.
Analyze Results with Return on Investment (ROI)
All this helps, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is ROI from a business perspective. So you’ve gone out there and you’ve done everything we’ve just talked about. And you’ve done an endorsed or dedicated mailing and you spent $5,000 on that and you get $10,000 back. You got 100 orders and a 200 percent ROI. So clearly a very good channel for you. 33232
Then you did your banners. And you spent $5,000 on banners on media. You got a return of $7,500 with 75 orders, 150 percent ROI. You went out and you did your PPC campaigns. You broke even. You spent $10,000 and you got $10,000 in the door. A hundred orders and 100 percent ROI. Sponsorships were a real big winner for you because you did a lot of swaps and you didn’t have to pay for many of them. And you only spent $500 and you got $5,000 in the door. So 1,000 percent ROI. Inbound, another great campaign, you got a 200 percent ROI. Outbound, not as effective. You only got a 50 percent ROI. And teleconferences, another break even, 100 percent. Inserts, you have 150 percent ROI and with your direct mail you have 80 percent ROI. So at the end of the day, I, right, for new customers, for acquisition, always like to shoot for 100 percent ROI, because I have a whole back end to talk about. So I like to shoot for 100 percent. But here I’ve got 128 percent ROI. Who would take anything out of this campaign? Who would take any of these channels out? Anybody? Everyone would leave everything in? What would you do? Maybe the outbound. I generally would not take away a channel on the first try. If this is my first time, I would do something different, whether it’s the script, whether it’s the company. But again, and this is a big thing copywriters do. If something bombs, it’s never the copy. It’s the mail didn’t get delivered, or the other company didn’t blast your campaign. So I’d give it one more try on that outbound. So at this kind of ROI, I might take it out, but I would probably tweak it first, then take it out. What would you do? No, break even is 100 percent ROI. A break even is 100 percent ROI. So it means I spent a dollar, I got a dollar in. Break even. You have 100 percent of your money back. So direct mail, 80 percent. You know why you would roll the heck out of that? It’s because those buyers are probably going to have the best lifetime value. So again, it’s kind of a trick question because you really wouldn’t do anything until you’ve evaluated this for 30, 60 or 90 days to see what the lifetime value is of this. Again, I would tweak the outbound, but I would keep evaluating. I would have my up sell series ready to go and see what these people are worth to me. Now, basically I don’t really have anymore slides, so I want to take some questions from you. I want to see what else I can answer from you about the company or anything on direct marketing or multi-channel marketing.
Questions
How do you find and know that you’ve got the correct direct mail list?
Okay, you start with like lists. So you have a product, your own product. Then you start with like lists. You go after people -- your competitors. So there are a lot of ways to find those lists. If you can go to alexa.com and your Alexa rankings and they will show you people, web sites those people visit as well. So I would start there. I go to SRDS and look at lists there. If you don’t know how to do this, use a list manager or a list broker. They will help you with this. But you really need someone in your organization or an outside consultant, a real expert in this field.
How do you develop a back end?
Basically, imagine a triangle. And the bottom part of this triangle is our free section. In every division within Early to Rise, because we have what we call the Early to Rise division, which is our business building and our entrepreneurship, and then we have a financial division and we have a health division. But every division has the same business model. So think of a triangle and think of that bottom and that is basically the largest part of the triangle and that is free. Then every step of the way up that triangle, the price points go up. So the next price point would probably be between $39 to $100. And then your next price point is $100 to $500. Then $500 to $1,000, $1,000 to $5,000, and $10,000. So every single time someone comes in to Early to Rise, you go to a landing page. And this depends on the keyword that you came in off of. So depending on that keyword, we have about three or four different series. And you will get what you were promised, whether it’s a free report or direct access into Early to Rise. At that point, there will 33233
be an immediate up sell right there for a paid product.
So don’t forget what a back end is. A back end is just the next purchase. That’s what a back end is.
It can be a low priced back end or a high priced back end. So every single time someone comes in, we know where we want them to go based on how they came in and what they came off of. Does that help? What’s moreimportant to you? To have fewer customers at a higher price point or more customers at a lower price point? I like this model because it’s a nice balance, but I do believe that you’ve got to have these incremental prices along the way to get somebody from free to $10,000. And everybody that we had at that seminar was not a first-time buyer. Everyone at that seminar had been with us for a certain amount of time. I would say a couple of people were brand new but had bought product. So again, when we come in free, we have a specific product for them. It’s usually about $39 to $100. Then their next up sell from that is going to be the next price point and next and next. We just take them up the ladder.
So related to the triangle model you were mentioning, if your flagship product is, let’s say, a $300 a month coaching program and you have a $50 a month continuity program as well, would you ever lead with your flagship and then down sell to the $50 a month program or would you always build from lower price point and go up? No. I would absolutely go for the $300 a month. Now, how did they come to you? Do they come in through a free report, do they come in free, or are you just going straight at them for $300 a month? Okay. So I would definitely try it. And then I think Mike said that if that doesn’t work, or you can’t do that right now, then follow up with the $50 a month right away. But absolutely, because, again, low-hanging fruit. Go for the big ticket first at that point because there are going to be several people who take it. Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure presenting this to you today. If you’d like to see this process in action please visit www.EarlytoRise.com and sign up for our newsletter.
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Learning expert Paul Scheele teaches you how to use the power of hypnosis to: • W ake
yourself up from the limiting beliefs holding you back from online busi -
ness success ...
• U se
both hemispheres of your brain to master learning any material including
the marketing secrets of this
L ive 08
ebook ...
• B oost sales and customer satisfaction whether in person or online ... • T rain your subconscious mind to accomplish your business and personal ( even when you ’ re feeling stuck )...
goals
This morning’s session--Hypnosis and Non-Conscious Communication--has to do with how you work with your own mind but also how you work with the minds of other people. This is applicable not only to your self motivation, your ability to learn more effectively and integrate what you’re gaining here over these few days, but in addition how to structure your communication with those you’re marketing to to have more powerful influence in their inner mind and therefore motive to action as well.
The Power of the Unconscious Mind
So we have two real concepts here that we want to get at. It’s this idea that you have very large untapped resources within you. For lack of more sophisticated terminology like subconscious or unconscious or paraconscious, we simply talk about anything other than conscious. Did you know that the database that you’ve been operating on at a conscious level is outweighed by the database of your non-conscious mind--by 10 billion to 1? Now what that means is, for example, the human eye and brain process 10 million bits of information per second. But the conscious mind, out of that 10 million bits of information per second that it’s processing, your conscious mind, which you’ve been running your life with, right? You went to school and they taught you through the use of your conscious mind. They asked you to repeat what it is that you learned and if you couldn’t do it consciously you wouldn’t have learned it. Right? Remember that in school? Well, the conscious mind out of that 10 million bits of information per second that you’re processing, conscious mind only receives 40 bits. So that means there’s a huge amount of information that’s actually being worked on by your non-conscious mind that never reaches your conscious awareness. That’s a little bit scary for most people to think about, the idea that you could receive a stimulus outside of your conscious awareness, discriminate it from other stimuli, respond to it and never consult the conscious mind. But in fact, that’s exactly what’s going on. 35235
So what we’re going to do is show you how to tap some of those more vast resources of the non- conscious for your own benefit and the benefit of those that you serve. There are a couple of purposes or objectives that we would have today. To be able to use more of your mind’s fuller potential; to overcome obstacles to success that you might have; to be able to communicate more powerfully with others and to be able to attain your outcome. One of the things that happened very early on in my career, at age 19 I was a student at the University of Minnesota in biological sciences. And I had the opportunity to take a workshop on how to hypnotize. There were a couple of doctors of psychology that were in from Michigan and the local clinical hypnotist wanted to get more people to fill up the class. I got a call. I was invited. At that time I was into self-development. I was doing mind control. I was doing yoga meditation. Hypnosis is something I knew nothing about. So I agreed to go into it. The woman who was teaching it was named Zula Bowers. What a great name for a hypnotist, isn’t it? Zula--the amazing Zula. I kind of expected a big rhinestone in her forehead. It was anamazing training and what I found out during the training is that she had been told she had two months to live because she was dying of an inoperable liver cancer. But she had been given that diagnosis five years earlier. So she was really using the power of her mind to keep herself alive pain free and to be able to do the work that she was doing. She took me under her wing for a summer job while going to University. I did work as a professional hypnotist out of her clinic. Two years later, I was the executive director of the oldest established hypnosis practice in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. And I realized at age 19 that my job was not to put people into trances, but to awaken them from the self-limiting, self-defeating trances that they put themselves in. Interestingly, very recently a study was just done of hypnosis clients, hypnosis patients in functional MRI. And what they did is they produce hypnotic amnesia, did the MRI while they’re having this memory block, like this young kid who couldn’t remember his name, and then give the suggestion that they can remember it and notice what happened to the brain. So as a result of this study, what they found is that there’s an area very early on in the cascade of neurological events that would happen for you to actually remember something. What they found is that there is an abort mechanism. That the moment you say I can’t do this, you stop even trying. And because it’s so early in the process, you give up way too soon. And as soon as you say, well, I can do this, that clears. The rest of it happens and you can do it perfectly well. Now, my suggestion to you is to consider as you put all of what you’re learning into practice in your life, to build your business, to serve your clients, to achieve the financial goals that you would like, any time you say to yourself I don’t think I’m up to this. I’m not sure I can do this. This is probably too much. You’re absolutely correct, and you will abort all the capacities to be able to do it. If, on the other hand, you say my mind can do this. I don’t know how long it will take, but I might surprise myself. I might be able to do this much easier than I think is even possible.
Accelerate Your Inner Learner
Now, there is another story I’d like to tell you. A colleague of mine who just recently passed away -- I went to his memorial service just within the last month--was named Dr. Fred Noah Gordon. He did some very early research in the area of oral surgery. And what he did is he hypnotized patients prior to surgery and immediately after surgery to find out if they could change the healing rates. And it turned out that, in fact, they could. A person would heal very quickly, within three days, any surgical procedure that they did. One woman, however, did not. Three days went by and she hadn’t healed. A week went by and she hadn’t healed. Two weeks went by and they were beginning to worry that she might slough off the tissue graft that they had done. And so he asked her would it be all right with you if I took you back, using hypnosis, back through the surgery that I did to find out why you haven’t healed yet? She said sure. So using hypnosis, he regressed her back through the surgery and it turned out that she was able to report every single detail of the surgery from start to finish even though she was under general anesthesia. Not just the procedures that were done, but every word spoken in the operatory. Talk about this massive powerful mind that we 36236
have. It’s phenomenal. So during it, during the surgery, the anesthesiologist, who had a tendency to tell stories, by the way, told the story about his German shepherd. It was a very odd thing that happened. He had brought his dog in for surgery. And the strangest thing was that after surgery, she would no longer heel--meaning, come alongside when you call to her and walk alongside you. Fred Gordon stopped her and said hang on just a moment.When he told the story heel, did you turn that i nto heal? And she said yes. Did you then take that story to be about you? She said yes. Is that the reason why you haven’t healed yet? Yes. Could you remove that suggestion now? Sure. Do that, please. Three days later, she was healed. Now that was so impressive to Dr. Gordon that what he wanted to do is he wanted to make sure everybody on the team got what just transpired there. So he asked her would she go through the same procedure of regression with the rest of the team in attendance. She said sure. After the demonstration, the anesthesiologist stopped Fred and said hang on just a moment. I did the anesthesia on this woman. She was completely unconscious. When she was telling us all that happened in there, who was speaking? Who was speaking? And at that moment, Fred Gordon’s clouds parted and a shaft of light came down from the heavens and a chorus of angels sung and he said that is the accelerated learner. We all own one. It can receive a stimulus outside of our conscious awareness. It can discriminate that stimulus from other stimuli, differentially respond to it, even at the level of your physiology and never once consult your conscious mind. WOW! When he left the field of oral surgery, he became an accelerated learning instructor.
How is it possible for us to work with this vast non-conscious capability, this accelerated learner that can literally do anything that you set your mind upon? You may have heard of the work that I’ve done called photo reading where you actually learn to go through a book at a page a second. We start you at 25,000 words per minute. A page a second. It’s astounding what the mind is capable of. Do any of you feel you have too much to read and you can’t get to it? Yeah? And you want to read a lot more, especially after coming to a program like this. Especially if you want to put together a great promotion, right? The more information you have access to, the better. But if the only strategy that you have is one word at a time, left to right, it’s kind of tough, isn’t it? I’m getting a doctorate in leadership and change from Antioch University. In the first year, my stack of reading was that tall. It was fantastic. I loved it. I did most of it on the airplanes on the way to the residencies. It’s great. It doesn’t slow me down a bit. So what is your mind capable of that you’re denying in terms of functional potential? Real power? If you could release a little bit of that, would you be interested in learning how today? So as we go through this, consider that it’s better instead of writing down things that I say, and you’ve got in your notebooks you’ve got my Powerpoints and you’ve got the little note taking area, rather than writing down anything I say, write down thoughts that occur to you. What I call sidebands of consciousness. What thoughts do you think of that can enhance your application of what you’re learning here?
Empowering Your Growth Mode
So the notion behind this, this balancing the hemispheres of the brain, is really being in what we call the growth mode. There is a wonderful book by a woman named Carol Dweck who came out with a book called Mindset. It was about her research in psychology of studying kids who did well in certain subjects. And they found out that if they had the mindset that even if they can’t do it they can grow in their ability to be able to do it, they actually were able to perform. If they believe that their early performance is an indication of how well they’ll ever be able to do it, they actually got worse and worse and worse as the semester progressed. Sound familiar with what I was talking about earlier? So either you have a growth mindset or you have a fixed mindset. My encouragement to you is to have a growth mindset. 38237
Now what we’re going to do is a little centering exercise to get you into the ideal state of mind. So if you would, please, take a moment to set your hands on your lap. Put your feet flat on the floor. I’m going to ask you a series of questions and I don’t want you to answer them yes or no. I want you to experience the answer. It’s very simple. Can you notice the position that you’re sitting in? Can you become aware of your hands resting on your lap? Can you notice your breathing flowing in and out of your nostrils? Can you close your eyes? If you haven’t done so yet, please do so now. Can you notice where in your body you feel your breath? More in your abdomen, chest, or shoulders? Can you notice the inhales a little cooler? The exhale a little warmer? Can you let your shoulders drop a bit? Can you loosen your chin and jaw and relax your face? Can you become aware of yourself from head to toe, the position that you’re resting in right now? Can you allow yourself to attain your outcome for this session? What is it that you want to achieve as a result of your investment of time, energy and money to be in this session this morning right here and now? Can you feel your whole body elevating? Can you gently open your eyes? And if you haven’t done so yet, do so now and bring your attention back into the room around you. Very good. Welcome back.
Balancing Your Hemispheres
The idea of balancing the hemispheres and being in an ideal state of relaxed alertness is the best way to start any learning event. Very, very powerful way to bring the fullness of your resources to bear for any activity that you choose to create. When you listen to language patterns, sometimes it’s easy to miss what’s right before you. So what we attempt to do is break down the language patterns into subtler chunks so that you can make sure that you get all the components of it. We’re talking about multi-level communication; a communication which is directed to the conscious mind but simultaneously to the unconscious or non-conscious mind. When we do this work, what we are really doing is working with expanded brain states. We’ve got the action channel -- the ability to take action, be out here and go for it. We’ve got the relaxation channel. This isn’t cable TV. This is the ability to adjust our mind into a more relaxed state of alertness, which we did during the relaxation mind calm exercise just a moment ago. The learning channel, the ideal place where the real learner is. This is that part of you that Noah Gordon referenced; Fred Noah Gordon. It’s the idea that there is an accelerated learner within you. Then we’ve got that high creativity channel, the ability to really put out something phenomenally new that you might not have ever seen in the world before. And the ability that you have is to be able to change channels as easy as you would change channels on a television. You can go into all of these states at will.
How does Hypnosis Work?
By the definition of clinical practitioners of hypnosis, hypnosis is a limited focus of awareness within. So by the definition here, when a person sat here and closed their eyes, were they in a limited focus of awareness within? What was the suggestion? Close your eyes, think of the word relax repeating in a space behind your eyes to the exclusion of all else, right? Now right now, I could say can you become aware of the index finger of your right hand or the feeling of the shape of the roundness of the heel of your left foot. Of course; they’re both in your experience, but until I brought your attention to it, you didn’t think of either of them. Now, are you hypnotized the moment that I said that? Yes, by this definition, that it’s a limited focus of awareness within. Momentarily, yes. That’s the key. What happens is that throughout our day, we drop into trance for little one-tenth of a second moments and what we’re doing in that one-tenth of a second is we’re gaining access to something that’s actually stored within. An image; a feeling; something that’s already going on inside of you. Most of the time people are accessing dysfunction. They’re accessing incapacity, reasons why they cannot instead of a tremendous amount of power. 38238
We’ll take another definition of hypnosis, you see, because there are two camps. One is the trance paradigm and the other is the non-trance paradigm. The non-trance paradigm of hypnosis says there is no such thing as hypnosis. Hypnosis is anything that concentration, imagination and suggestion can create. And what we know about stress responses and a lot of what goes on in terms of dysfunction with the human mind and body is exactly that. We’re using concentration, imagination and suggestion to create all of the worst outcomes for ourselves for no good reason. So would you like to use this to make sure that you get the results that you want? What are you focusing on? What are you doing with your imagination? And what are the suggestions that you’re giving? And again, this could be for you or it could be for others.
How to Use Neurolinguistic Programming to Boost Sales
Two quick stories. When I first got into neuron-linguistic programming, I was one of the first certified as a master practitioner. In 1981, there were 70 of us in the world that were certified as master practitioners of neuron-linguistic programming. And I had this wonderful opportunity to get together with someone in Minneapolis who had used NLP in the early days to create a sales training program. He knew the power of it. He was involved with it when Richard Bandler hadn’t even named it. It was when they were doing work with Virginia Satier. And this fellow named Mark [Oarth] said this is such powerful technology, it’s got to be fabulous for sales. And so he created a sales training program and thought he would demonstrate it at something he knew absolutely nothing about, which was automobile sales. So he contacted as many automobile dealers in the United States as he could and nobody was interested. Except one group, which was Volkswagen America. And they happened to have a Porsche/Audi dealer in the Minneapolis area. High end automobiles. They were really streetable race cars at that time, in the early 70s. I mean it was when they were just coming out with these vehicles. Really intense; very expensive. And he thought, okay, I’ll do that. And they said, well, you’ve got to get your own job there and then if you can prove that it works, we’ll see and maybe we’ll be interested. So he gets a job at the Porsche/Audi dealer, psychologist Mark [Worth], and he goes and talks with some of the salespeople and they say forget it. I mean, you know, it’s going to take two years to get enough clients to even make a living at this. It’s really difficult stuff. High end cars, I mean you need all kinds of referrals, blah blah blah. So he said, yeah, well, whatever. In the month and a half that he was there, he outsold all of the salespeople combined. There were over a dozen of them on the sales floor there. And his commission check, this was in the early 70s, for that month and a half was $45,000. Not bad. So he took his check and walked away from it and said this is too powerful of a technology. I’m not going to give it to them. So I begged him for decades, please, please give me what you got. And he said no. But finally he did agree. I published it in a CD called Congruent Communications in a bigger course called “Abundance for Life.” And it’s fascinating, the verbal patterns that he used. If you listen to Frank Kern’s work--I managed to attend his session the day before--there is a lot of it there. Brilliant stuff. Recently, I had the opportunity to model a high end salesperson in the area of second home amenity community real estate. So this is where there’s a golf course or an ocean or a mountain, that sort of thing. And this fellow last year, with himself and two assistants, singlehandedly -- you’ve got to understand the most elite, most successful in that area last year sold, like, $12 million in real estate. This guy sold $55.6 million in real estate. So I went to Jacksonville, Florida. I studied this guy and looked at the verbal patterns and found out it was the same verbal patterns that Mark [Oarth] was talking about. Mark [Oarth] never had a client open the car door. He never had them sit in the automobile. He never had them test drive. He said he dared not, because those cars you can’t take for a test drive. They’ll blow out from under you so fast that they know that they can’t drive it. So he says, you know, you’ve got to learn to let this car teach you how to drive it. You can’t drive it. It’s got to teach you. So he didn’t dare have anybody go in it.
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This fellow who sells real estate? The year before he sold $66 million in real estate. He has three meetings with them before they ever see a property, before he really answers any questions about Wall Street Journal the property that he’s advertised in there. Then he gets them to go on their buying trip to the property. He’ll select four properties for them. He closes 90+ percent of the people that he interacts with. Sixty percent of his clients are referred leads. Amazing statistics. I mean mind blowing stuff. All of the verbal patterns are very, very important.
How to Use Hypnosis in Your Marketing
Now, when you start looking at some of these absolutely astounding marketing techniques, doany of you ever get the feeling that those results are impossible? How could they possibly get that sort of thing? Well, if you can run through five iterations, if you could move someone to use concentration, imagination and suggestion five times, and having already closed the sale, of having lived the end result that you’re presenting to them, guess what’s going to happen? They will absolutely be able to embrace it in a very powerful way at a level that they don’t understand and you might not, either. But this is what’s key here. Remember, concentration, imagination and suggestion. By creating a container in which a person can live the end result, they get to feel that it’s possible for them. So here’s this immense real estate transaction. This person has spent their life creating their wealth. Now they see the second home ownership possibility and they say that’s the lifestyle that I would like. I would like my grandkids to come here. I’d like to play more golf. I’d like to go fishing. I like to be in the mountains. Whatever it might be. The transaction is actually pretty easy. You’ve spent your life making a living. Now you want to take that wealth and create a life for yourself. Is that what I’m understanding? Yes, it is. It’s a very simple transaction. It’s about moving assets from here to here. And what I’m here to do with you is to help you be decisive. It’s my only job. Because you’ve been thinking about this; you’ve been considering it. There are a lot of opportunities in the world to do this. Your job is to make the decision to do it. My job is to help you be decisive and to protect you along that way. Let me show you how I’m going to protect you all along the way.
The Power of Unity Relationships
Isn’t that neat? Very powerful idea of moving into what we call a unity relationship. Now this concept of the unity relationship first came to me in a series of audio recordings by a Dr. Howard Watrous. Have any of you ever heard of Howard Watrous? Anybody? I don’t think anybody that I know of today has ever encountered his stuff. It is, to me, the basis of the depth of the work that I’m speaking about here. I don’t think you can find it anywhere. He’s kind of vanished from the planet. These recordings were amazing. I listened to them. My partner listened to them. And when we would go into corporations, we would see anybody that we’d want to see. We would get to the very top of the organization. We would network our way into any position that we wanted. And people would look at us and say how did you get in front of me? Nobody gets to me. It’s impossible to get to me. How did you do it? We asked who should we speak with? And they said this guy. So we never had any limitations. We were always able to create it exactly as we wanted it to be. Now, it’s about entering this deep unity relationship with someone. And the description of this is, in neuron-linguistic programming, talked about at a little more surface level, but let me share some of the ideas of it with you. What we’re talking about is speaking the language of the brain and being able to communicate in all sensory systems and be able to contact the pattern maker within the brain. The pattern maker is that part of you that decides how your behavior is going to go. And you may be familiar with visual, auditory, kinesthetic. It’s the three sensory systems. All of your thinking is coded in what’s called visual, auditory, kinesthetic and olfactory/gustatory sensory representations. A Dr. [Ossen], which hopefully over the next year I’m going to bring out the work of this fellow from Kasmir named [Ossen’s] Eidetic Psychotherapy. I’ll just plant that idea in your mind because this is really stunning stuff. He says everything in the world has a triple description. There’s an image, there’s a soma and there’s a meaning; ISM. Triple description, triple coding of the world. That image as he describes it is actually coded in these subtler modalities as well -- visual auditory kinesthetic, olfactory/gustatory.
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You have to bring it to their attention that this is what’s going on for them. It’s not good; it’s not bad; it’s not a judgment one way or the other. But where would they like to be. So we have the present state. We’ve got the desired outcome. So when we look at this, we’re really talking about three different sensory systems: visual, auditory, kinesthetic. When you think about your desired outcome, where you would like to be, my invitation to you is to think about a full sensory representation of what it would be like having already accomplished what you’re here to learn to accomplish. In other words, think of the what, not the how you’re going to get there.
The Secret behind The Secret
There’s a film out called The Secret . And one of the things that they talk about is focus on the what, not on the how. It’s an interesting hypnotic ploy if you think about it, because what it does is it gets you off of worrying about how am I ever going to be able to do that. Don’t worry about doing that. And what happens as a result is all the resources that are necessary to accomplish the end result are freed up to accomplish it. Well, I’d never be able to do that. You’re right. But by the law of attraction--ask, believe, receive--you should be able to do it. It’s a brilliant concept. Back in the 50s there was a man named Earl Nightingale who did a thing. It was the biggest selling non-musical recording in history and it was called “The Strangest Secret.” You become in life what you think about. There’s nothing particularly new about any of it. I’ve been teaching it for 30+ years. The fact that it hit global consciousness is amazing. Now is the time for that to happen. Rhonda Byrne, who is a producer of The Secret , was invited by Chris and Janet Atwood to come to our meeting of the Transformational Leadership Council. I’m one of the founding members with Jack Canfield of a group of transformational leaders. And it was our third meeting at Snowmass, Colorado, and Jack said, no, we don’t want a videographer to come in from Australia to do any filming. Then he thought about it that night. He thought, no, we should invite her. There’s something about that. So she filmed us. There were 56 of us that were filmed for The Secret . Some of us ended up on the cutting room floor, but the idea was that we all were just speaking about everything we’ve always been talking about. The law of attraction and how we create what it is we want to create in life. Pretty simple stuff. Been around forever. But boy, did it get into the public eye, didn’t it? Amazing stuff. If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to check it out. Now, I’m going to invite you through a process called positive outcome patterning. And like The Secret, it gives you a goal focus. It spontaneously helps you overcome barriers and it brings all of your non-conscious resources in mind. So this is a split screen. On one side you imagine the limitations that you’ve been dealing with up until now. All the I can’ts; what you haven’t been able to accomplish. The overload, not enough time, blah, blah, blah. Whatever it is. Whatever it is that keeps you stuck. We’ll have that on one screen. Then on another screen over there, we’ll have the image of excellence over here where you imagine what it is that you want to accomplish. But key here is that you’re already on the other side of having accomplished it.
So you don’t worry about how it’s going to happen or how long it’s going to take. You simply embody what it’s going to be like once you’re there. Now there is going to be a two-step process that we’ll do with this. One is that you’ll embody it in a full sensory way, step out of it, go to the other one, see it, and step into it. Make sense? There’s something called association and disassociation. Very common hypnotic technique. And the representation of the ideal end result is what we’re going for. Anybody object? Anybody concerned that I will manipulate you to do dastardly things? You’re all good? Come back here to where you’re sitting and allow yourself to feel neutral. Be in a neutral place. Now over to the right, imagine a large screen. And on that screen is an image of you having already accomplished the massive level of success that you’ve desired. What you know you can accomplish. What you wish you could accomplish. What you desire to accomplish in every part of you and every goal that you write. See it over there. Get the image of it having already accomplished it. Don’t worry at all about how you’re going to move to accomplish it, to see what it is. 42241
And as you look at it, feel inside of your body, do I indeed desire to accomplish this end result? Is this what I really want? If not, modify it so it is exactly what it is you want. It could be the lifestyle, it could be income, it could be success with a program that you’re running. You name it; it’s entirely up to you. Any level chunk size that you desire. And when it’s just right, when you say, yes, this, or something even better, then imagine getting up, walking right over to that screen and stepping inside of it. Now look through your own eyes through your own body at the result that you’ve created. Imagine looking through your eyes and feeling in your body and hearing in your own internal dialogue and in the successful congratulations that others say to you knowing that you have arrived. You have accomplished what you set your mind to. The vast powers of a supportive universe and all of the energy and capability within you finally freed to achieve what you desire. You’ve arrived. See it. Feel it. Hear it. And say yes. Yes. Now step out of that image and see it over there in front of you as a compelling future that you can move toward with each and every session that we have in this conference. And at a rate which is comfortable for you, gently rub your hands together. Bring your hands up to your face and open your eyes to the palms of your hands, covering your eyes. And then slowly, moving your hands away from your face and into the room, in this way changing your state of consciousness slowly with direct control. Very good. All right. Very simple process. Something you can do for yourself at any time. It’s essentially what you’re doing when you’re working with clients as well. There are a couple of types of communication that we engage in. Some are more overt and direct, like do this. The others are more subtle and indirect. I’m wondering if it’s possible for you to consider doing this. There are a number of ways in which I teach this to folks, things that I’ve used within our presentation here today. The mind calm exercise, positive self talk, relaxation training--I’ve given you four or five examples of it. I remember doing this demonstration of non-verbal hypnosis one time and a guy, before he sat down, he said, you know, I just want to share with you before I leave the stage, these are two pink pieces of paper. They’re prescriptions for relaxation prescriptions. I haven’t been that relaxed in six months. He said it only took 90 seconds. He said that’s phenomenal. He said I don’t need these now. So consider you’ve really gained quite a lot as we’ve been playing here. Concert readings, don’t worry about that. Guided visualizations, we’ve played with that. Positive outcome patterning. Affirmative self-suggestions; have you heard me use them throughout? Subtle and indirect, peripherals with messages. Information that’s outside of your direct focus attention. Verbals and non-verbals. Have you noticed me doing anything physically to mark out what it is that I’m speaking about? Creation of a positive atmosphere. Indirect suggestion by embedded commands. Metaphors. Have I told you a few stories? Parables, themes with deep meaning. What we’re talking about is something called the structure of influence. What’s the desired outcome? What’s the present state? By establishing with somebody that Mark [Oarth] and this real estate salesperson both would get what it looks like when somebody is living in their desired outcome. At any moment in time, they could calibrate. Are we moving forward or are we moving back? Present state desired outcome calibration. Then what we do is we match or mirror what’s going on in their present life. Interact with them in a way that leads them in the direction of the desired outcome. If they don’t follow your lead, that’s feedback. What we want to do is match or pace something else and continue that process. That’s what I would call the old technology, and the state is called rapport. The old technology said you match and then you lead. You pace and then you lead. But what these top salespeople do is they come from a place of such absolute congruence in their communication that they don’t have to match the other person. The other person steps into their world. So this is a level of sophistication of communication that is quite important. Rapport is a cooperative communication characterized by harmony, trust, positive emotional responses. What I’m advocating here is that the clearer you are on your message, the more powerfully you come from that place of knowing this will serve your clients, the more 42242
they’ll come into a unity relationship with you. Especially if they know you will do whatever it takes to get them where they want to go. So with that, we’re at our conclusion. My invitation to you at this point would be to take a moment to imagine how the rest of this day will go for you. So if you would, one more time, this will complete our fifth transinduction. Therefore, you can all enter a coma and return at the other side of it with all the learnings that you need. Take a moment to close your eyes, hands resting on your lap. Become aware of yourself from head to toe. Do you notice a little more brightness, a little more energy? Do you notice a little more possibility within you? We’re moving from the present state to the desired outcome. Interacting. Finding positive new choices and options that can overcome any problem or obstacle that you’ve been facing in your professional or personal life. More importantly, who you areas a learner is magnificent in every way. So drop into this moment in time, right here and now, and realize the genius capacities of your non-conscious mind. The vast resources within you, knowing that you are receiving positive and constructive ideas. Stimuli that are received and discriminated, that are taken in and integrated. That are used by you spontaneously and automatically in all appropriate settings whenever you want or need them so that you achieve your greatest dream, your deepest wishes, and the fulfillment of the life you choose to create. Give yourself a positive suggestion about how the rest of this day is going to go for you.
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Product Launch Formula Inventor and Mastermind Jeff W alker reveals the P ower of this G roundbreaking Marketing Process to: • C reate a business out of nothing ... overnight ... even if you ’ re still in college ... • W hy a launch can make millions with a tiny investment in video equipment ... • T he secret psychology behind why customers can ’ t wait for launch day ... and why they will pull out their wallets without even reading your sales letter ... • T hree persuasion triggers you can put in your email sequence that will make prospects click back to your blog or sales letter within seconds ... Rich and I have spent so many times talking on the phone at 1:00 in the morning, 2:00 in the morning or 3:00 in the morning trying to figure out the ways to take launches to the next level. He’s been very inspirational for me. Working with him and his launches has been fantastic. I remember when I was a kid reading about the Pony Express. The Pony Express was like the coolest thing in the world there, 150 years ago, to get something cross country in a week or something. That was like really, really cool. Instantly, the Pony Express was put out of business when I think it was the telegraph and the railroad when they invested that. The Pony Express had this ten year or seven year—a really short window where it was the way to communicate. Then the technology evolved. Now you look at what we take for granted, it’s just unbelievable what’s happening now. The speed of communication and the speed of productivity in the ability to get things done. These are launches that I did personally of me and my businesses; two businesses that I’ve personally launched to put food on the table for my family. The first one I did about $1600 in revenue on the first day. Back then, that was all it took to—I’m going to give you a quick version of a story. My family, I had two young kids and we were a struggling family. I did a budget and we had $400 total disposable income for the entire year. It was tight. With our kids, do we use disposable diapers – this is a terrible image I’m giving you but disposable diapers versus cloth diapers was like an economic decision for us. The $10 a week for disposable diapers was a lot of money. Terrible image, I don’t know why I couldn’t come up with something better for you guys. In any case, that $1600 was huge for me and I spent about six months building up to that launch. When I did it, it was like that was enough to see where the future was. It was an Internet business and this was late ‘96’ early ’97’. Fast-forward several years and I continued to run that business for a long time. I turned around and in 2005 I launched a new business using all these Product Launch techniques I developed in the first business. 45244
The second time around, the first day in revenue was about $289,000. That was really cool because that first business, it didn’t end in the most eloquent fashion. I got a phone call one day and I learned my business was ending. I picked up the phone, I had a business; put down the phone and I didn’t have a business. When I restarted the second business, I can’t tell you why due to legal agreements, I will say that it wasn’t anything nefarious, I didn’t get shut down by the FCC or the SEC or the FTC or any of those three letter things. I lost that first business. So the second time around coming out with $289,000 in that first day was really cool. I want to break that down a little different way. The first year was a total of $19,000, you can see it. The second time around with Product Launch Formula, using those Product Launch Formula techniques, I got to $1.3M in the first year. Here it took me six years that first time around to get to a million dollars in revenue, six years. The second time around it took me six months. That’s the difference between that Pony Express and the telegraph. I was thinking back, anyone seen The Big Lebowski? This is a movie. It came out in the mid-late 90’s. One of the things they were carrying around was this phone, like a cell phone. It was the size of half a briefcase. You remember those things? They have the handle on them and the thing like that. That was like the cool thing. They were driving around in limos with this thing. If course you know where we went. Then we got these cell phones. It’s just my cell phone. It only took from The Big Lebowski to this thing, five years and its way cooler. Two nights ago I was sitting around at dinner with a bunch of buddies and I pulled this thing out and they were laughing at this archaic phone because they all had their iPhones and their Blackberries and they’re like surfing the Web and pulling up Google maps. It’s the same thing, it is these quantum leaps. It’s like version 1.0 – here’s 1.0 and the iPhone is a version 2.0. I went from the first one not figuring out the Product Launch Formula, six months to get to a million bucks. Last summer in 2007, I helped someone launch a business. It’s a brand new business forum and it took them six days to get to $1M. I took a little poetic license here. It didn’t actually take six days. I just wanted to keep that six, six, six, going. It really took about four and a half days. Is it okay if I round it up to six just to make it look good? Are you guys okay with that? Just last month, we took the lessons; these are always cumulative lessons, right. You’re always learning more and more. Where did we go from six days? You guys are on it! But, I again took that poetic license. Is that okay if it only took us five hours to get to a million dollars? This is where it’s going. It keeps on getting faster and faster and faster. That’s because we keep on learning new stuff. The speed of communication and the speed on interaction just keep on increasing. How many people here own Product Launch Formula? Holy cow, oh my goodness gracious! So, 30 or 40 percent of you? How many of you have – we’re going to need a mic at some point because I just saw someone with a really good story. Not right now but we’re going to need a mic at some point. How many of you have seen me speak before? How many people haven’t seen me speak? Okay, so there’s a few. What I want to do is tell you guys about all the New-New stuff. Not the new stuff but the New-New stuff. It’s sort of like the free money. Some of you guys were in the workshop with me a couple of days ago and we were teaching and I don’t want to sound like some get rich quick guy but we were teaching how to get free money forever. Free money wasn’t good enough; we want to get free money forever. The next step as Frank Kern, who is going to be on this afternoon, says its free-free money. In other words, you get paid for cashing checks. You don’t just get free check in the mail but you actually get paid for cashing them. I’m sorry for the aside. Given the mix here, about half of you guys have seen me before and half of you don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m going to blast through this really quick. I’m going to give you the basic of the original Product Launch Formula and then I want to get to the new stuff. This gives you instant momentum. That’s what we’re talking about. Rich likes to talk about momentum. You can either have – I have to confess to you guys. I am like really, really nervous. I like to be up here on stage and its fun talking. I’m an introvert. I slip down in my cave down in the basement working away at home but I love getting out and talking to you. A lot of you guys have talked to me in the hall. You know that I’m very, very approachable 45245
and I love to talk to you guys. This time I’m extremely nervous. The reason I’m nervous is because my parents are sitting here. Stand-up—stand-up—that’s my mom and dad Joan and George Walker. They’ve never seen me speak. I’m looking right at them. This is awful. Jon, you should have stuck them in the back of the room where I couldn’t see them. I’m so nervous. Oh my gosh, you can speak to 1,000 people but you put your parents in front of you and its crazy. So work with me here. Instant momentum, what do you need? You need momentum and you need cash flow. You’re either growing or you’re dying. I put this as instant major because we’re all entrepreneurs. We know what it’s like when you have that fire in you belly when you’re building a business, right, when you get that idea and really cranking on it. Do you guys know what I’m talking about when you just really get – come on, give me a break. Give me a break, come on, hands up, hands up—when you’re just fired up, every one of us. If you haven’t had that feeling, seriously, you’re in the wrong room. If you don’t get fired-up thinking about a new business, if you don’t wake up at 4:00 in the morning with a new business in your head and you can’t begin to sleep for the next eight hours until you get down and write that whole thing down. That’s what we do. We’re entrepreneurs right? How about the flip side of that? How about you’ve been working on that thing really hard and it seems like there are obstacles and it’s just not breaking through—have any of you been there? I’m there all the time. When you don’t have that momentum, it’s a bad place to be. When you’re just starting a business out, you’re not sure if this things going to work or not, or you’re just starting a project out. You don’t know if it’s going to work that’s a tough place to break though. What we’re talking about with this launch stuff, it’s orchestrating the start of your business so you get instant cash flow and instant momentum. If you look at what Rich did, how many people learned about Rich through his original Internet Business Manifesto? Okay, a lot of you did. When Rich put that out he essentially had no business. He had no business. He had coached a few people but he had no real business. The business was him and an assistant – two assistants. Basically, he brought in $3.5M in approximately 20 hours or so. With that $3.5M, he took that and built out an organization. Built out what we see here with I don’t know how many cameras we’ve got going on. If you were to see what’s going on behind these curtains, there’s more technology back there than you could ever imagine. There are soundboards and monitors and in a room across the way there are more soundboards—not soundboards but monitors that – if you took a peek up in the back corner the technology and the staff that they’ve got putting this on is insane. Rich went from just him in his basement with two assistants to having this eight figure business, this huge staff, this huge organization based on the momentum from that first product launch; that first $3.5M. When you bring in that kind of money, all of sudden this train heading down the tracks at 200 miles an hour, no one is going to get in your way, it’s easy to track staff, and it’s easy to track partnerships. That’s what we’re talking. Instant momentum and instant mojo. You get your mojo back once you do a product launch. That’s your original mojo. It’s now been about $103M, roughly give or take, in product launches that either me, my clients, my Product Launch Formula owners have done. I’m only counting the ones over half-million dollars. I know I’m throwing a lot of big numbers out at you. Like I said, that first launch of mine for $16,000 completely changed my life. Quick story—I am not an impulsive guy. I plan things out. Right around that time when I did that first launch, like I said, our family was struggling. By then I thought the way that you get over that is you go back to school. I decided I was going to go back to graduate school. I’d blown up my career before that so I had no resume at all, I mean, no resume. I’m like how am I going to get into grad school? So I started a newsletter, a free newsletter online. I thought if I can get 500 or 600 people on this list, I could put that down on my resume and it would look good. That’s how I started my first newsletter. I don’t think I’ve ever shared that publicly but it was a weird, weird reason. I wasn’t even starting a business. I needed something to put on my resume. I started that out and I went through this process of trying to get into grad school. I found out that is tuff to do especially since I had no resume. I went and took a test, the GMAT test. I studied like a month and a half for that thing. I took that test and I did okay. I passed that and I actually put it on my resume that I got 600 people subscribed to my newsletter and they let me in. 47246
This is a big nine months to get into graduate school. Then I started in the winter term so classes started on say, January 4 . This was actually 1997. On January 1 was when I did that $1400. So, I went into the class and I’m sitting in there and this was a graduate finance class. It’s fairly dry stuff. I sat down and there were 100 people in this room. There was a professor up there talking. The Prof...and the peanuts that sound ... I’m sitting there, I’m listening, and I’m looking around, I’m thinking about that product launch I’d just done. Halfway through the lecture, I got up and walked out and I never went back to graduate school. Now you realize that in front of my mother, you just applauded me for quitting school? Anyway, you’ve probably heard about million dollar launches. Has anyone heard people talk about making millions? I just talked about million dollar launches so you hear all this hype. I know back in 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, if you talked to me about a million dollar launch it would like (A) I would not believe you – here’s a million dollars, I’m like—yeah, right. People don’t do that. That should be on an infomercial. It should be on an infomercial at 3 a.m. Then even if I did believe you I never ever, ever, would have believed that I could do it. Like I said, $1600 was enough to get me to walk out of school where I had spent nine months trying toget there. So, I want to talk about—oh yeah, I forgot about the changing diapers bit. That $1600 launch, I didn’t even have a merchant account yet. I couldn’t even process credit cards. People were sending me checks. It wasn’t even $1600 in one day it was like people were emailing me back and saying I’m putting the check in the mail. This is where I was. Then I got a merchant account like four months later so I could start taking credit cards. I remember back then they had to come out and take a photo of your office to give you one. Now it’s a lot easier at least in the United States; internationally it can be tough still. But back then, it was very, very difficult. They said we need to take a photo of your office. My office was literally the baby’s changing room. When they came out, I had to take the changing table and pull it out in the hallway because I was too embarrassed to have them take a photo of desk and my computer with the baby’s changing table there.
Hidden Benefits of Using a Launch
If you’ve ever tried to get people to promote for you, sometimes it can be a challenge. If you do one of these launches, it creates so much buzz, I’m going through it right now. I’m getting 5-10- 15 people every day are coming to me because they’ve heard something is in the works. Can we promote, can we promote, can we promote? Can we be an affiliate? Can we help sell your stuff? It’s amazing how this works. This launch is an interactive process. This interaction with the clients and prospects – it’s missing a word there between his and lists. If anyone can guess what that word would be, send the Pony Express up to me and I’ll be golden. The best product to sell is the product your customers want. The best way to find out is to get them to tell you. When you get a launch going, you get this conversation going then they will tell you. That’s what the real underlying key is interaction and conversation with your market and your prospects, your clients. How difficult is it to create video? You want to see what I create most of my video with? This is a digital camera. It can also shoot movies. This is actually the fancier one that I got. Its maybe $400 but for one of those flip phones camera is like $100 or $150, you can shoot good enough video with that to put on the Web. Is everyone familiar with Camtasia? This is one to write down in case you’re not familiar with it. Camtasia, that is a program... it’s almost like a VCR for your computer screen. If you have anything that’s computer based, you can basically record it while you’re speaking about what you’re doing. You can do a slide show, you can do a PowerPoint, you can walk through Excel, and you can walk through mindmaps. That’s something I’ve done. That’s what I do with Product Launch Formula and you’re recording that whole thing. That can essentially be a product. Camtasia works on Windows. If you’re a Mac person, there’s a brand new program out this week called ScreenFlow. It’s wonderful. Both of those—that’s what he did, he took his eBook and he recorded it as screen capture video and he added in some audio stuff and it went from being $27 to $297. The same basic information presented in a 47247
multimedia fashion. He was able to multiply his price by 10X. Because he’s doing a launch, it’s very easy to get that kind – you get to raise you prices during a launch, almost always. I’m going to spend 30 minutes to try to give you the original stuff and then I’ve got three more that I’ve developed for all the new stuff. There are three that are bigger than this one. Obviously, I’ve got to hammer this stuff and I’ll do as good a job as I can of communicating as much as I can. A lot of people want to know what type of product and what type of market. Here are some of the markets that people have used this stuff for. Just any market that you can think of.
Turn Your Launch Into an Event
Basically, what you’re doing is you’re trying to turn your marketing into an event. You’re trying to – you know I love Christmas. I love Christmas morning. You’re looking forward to it; your kids are looking forward to it. They just love it. They are counting down the days and it’s a ritual, there’s so much tradition that sets you up for that event. The Super Bowl, how long is there between the conference championships and the Super Bowl? Two-weeks. Did you ever wonder why there’s two weeks before the Super Bowl when all the other football games there’s only one-week. It’s the pre-launch. It’s to get them excited about the game. It’s a lousy anticipation to build up before the game. It allows the story to be told. By the end of the two-weeks, they have interviewed ever y single player down to the guy who never gets on the field. They interview the guy who tapes their legs. They interview the cameraman. They’ve interviewed everyone so it gives time for people to get excited, to get involved to learn about the story. So what you do is to turn your marketing into an event. Rich this past summer, he released a big PDF report. I don’t remember which one he called that. He’s released so many great reports but it was like the maven thing, right? What was that one called? The Attention Age Doctrine 2. Well, he told people about that for like three-months before it came out. Then when it came out, it’s a free report; people can get it anytime they want but people were like staying up all night to download that thing and in the first few hours he had like 10s of thousands of downloads. It was because he spent so much time telling people about it and building up and telling why it was going to be the coolest thing in the world. All that was all for this free report. He worked them into lather. It was crazy. Then he used the momentum coming out of that report to then release – I’m giving all his secrets away – but he built people up into his free report. They got so much anticipation and this tension is rising, rising, and all of a sudden he gives them the report and its ahh, the tension is easing off but then bingo, he’s instantly into the launch of his home study course and building that tension up.
Planning Your Launch Like a Movie
You look at the way horror movies do it. I’m not the biggest fan of horror movies but it’s like you know the bad guy’s or the bad creature’s right around the back of that curtain; just walking along on stage, getting closer and closer to that bad thing that’s about to jump out. And then I’m like, Oh, but no, that’s right, I had something over here. No, I think I will go. The tension is going up and down and up and down. Finally, I do walk around that corner and nothing happens and then you go ahh. And five seconds later that thing jumps around the other corner. You tell a story with your launch. This is the time line, here’s tension. As you’re going along the tension is building up. Just like in any story in any novel or any movie. The tension is building up, building up, building up and then you usually have a few little jags then right on launch day you give them the opportunity to all of a sudden buy your product and that’s were the tension release is. This is very, very powerful. Its stories that are the most incredible way to communicate with people and you’re basically turning your product release or your business release, your launch into a story. 49248
How do you do that? Well, that’s all about turning into an event, but you do it by creating sequences. We’ve all visited long sales letters on websites. Where you hit that page and you see that little scroll bar over at the side and it starts like and it’s getting like this and all of a sudden you’ve got a 70 page sales letter loaded. You guys probably read every word on those sales letters, right? None of us ever read any of those sales letters, right? But you’re trying to sell your products through sales letters, right? Your people are different, right? The people hitting your sales—they’re different. They read the entire thing, right? No, they don’t. They’re not reading any of it. They’ll see the headline, might read half the headline, they’ll skip down to the bottom and look at how much it costs, right? Anyone have a different experience? You think you people are different? No, they aren’t.
Turning the Sales Letter Sideways
What if you took that big long sales letter that is this long that no one reads and turned it sideways and made this your timeline and start off with your headline at the beginning two or three weeks before you even start to talk about selling a product. Now you’ve got them hooked into your stuff because it’s not – boy it’s funny. I love copy. I really love writing copy. I’m pretty good at it. Right now I can’t even think of one of the most—what’s a really classic headline that makes you groan when you see it. Oh, “They laughed.” “They laughed when I sat down at the piano.” If you took that and instead of saying in big red print, “They laughed when I sat down at the piano”, if you started three of four weeks out and you said, you know—actually I’m going to turn it to a guitar instead of a piano—you know, I’ve never been a musician at all. In fact I thought at my age there’s just no way that I could ever learn to play an instrument because I’ve never played anything. I did actually try to play the trumpet back in 4 grade but I made it like one week and then I quit because it was so frustrating. I just thought being a musician was some magical skill that people were born with. For some pretty weird reasons I picked up a guitar and started trying to play it. This was about three or four months ago I picked up that guitar and started trying to play it. It was frustrating, my fingers got really sore but then I stumbled onto this one little thing because over my life I’ve actually learned how to teach myself quickly and I thought I would try applying it. It’s normally like with business I’ve been able to teach myself quickly but you know what, I thought maybe I’d just try all this secret thing that I learned and I thought I would try it on myself with guitar. I thought I’d trick myself into learning to play guitar. There’s no chance that it’s ever going to work. Low and behold, four weeks later, I knew like six songs. It was incredible. I’m still no virtuoso. I’m still just like you. It still comes slowly but all of a sudden I can see measurable progress where I’m picking up a new song every two days. Now, I decided it was a little silly for me to be sitting in my basement and working on these songs and getting better without sharing it with anyone. So I think what I’ve decided to do is I think – it’s really hokey because I’ve got this silly little camera and I don’t even have a tripod, I had to stick it up in a bunch of books. I actually had to set it up on top of a bunch of books and reach over and press the recording button so there’s not like a cameraman. The sounds not that great but I think I’ve learned a way to not just teach myself and trick myself into learning song but I think I can help you trick yourself into learning to play these song. What I’m going to do over the next few weeks is I’m going to release some of these videos to you. Just opt-in on this page, if you look around there’s like a subscription box and go ahead and put your name and address in there and I’ll send you out these videos as soon as – I’ve got the first one done already so I’ll send you that right away but over the next few weeks, I’ll keep on sending you a few more. Did that sound compelling at all if you were interested in playing guitar? Do you see how that might be more believable and authentic and interesting than hitting a long form sales letter that says they laughed when I tired to play guitar? Did that work at all, you think? Do you think I could get people to opt-in? I am trying to learn to play guitar and I’m absolutely pathetic and I haven’t learned how to trick myself into that but if I had, hypothetically speaking, do you think I could get people to opt-in on that page? Do you think that if I gave them that first video and actually had a cool trick and then a week later I gave them another video and it had a cool trick and then I said, hey folks, I’m getting lots of great feedback on this. This is incredible. I think people want a 49249
ton more of this. They want to learn how to play all these songs. They want the next Super Ninja 2000 annihilation method that I just picked up that you can teach yourself to play a song in four seconds. I’m going to do that, but frankly I’m going to have to get a better camera for that and I’m probably going to have to pay my brother-in-law to film it. It’s probably going to be long enough where I’m going to have to put it on a DVD so I think I’m going to put together one of those fancy DVD things. It’s not going to be fancy because you can see how I do things but it is going to have my super secret sauce where you can trick yourself into learning to play guitar. I think I’m going to be releasing that as soon as I figure out, this is all real complicated stuff but as soon as I figure it out I’m going to release that. If you think you might be interested, could you go fill out this survey? Or could you go fill out this form and tell me what I really should concentrate on teaching you? Do you think people would go and fill something like that out? This is all hypothetical because like I said, I can’t play guitar. But, every one of you has something to share with the world. Where you really do know that secret sauce. What I just spoke and you put whatever you want in there instead of guitar in the annihilation method Super Ninja 2000, you could do the same thing. In the last couple of days, I just did a workshop; there were about 20 or 30 of us in there where I showed them how to spin those stories. When I say spin those stories, I don’t want it to have a negative connotation but you’re basically telling your story and the more authentic you can be and the more truthful you are in that story, the more powerful you are. In fact Frank Kern this afternoon is going to be talking exactly about that. If you’re not completely in alignment with your story, you’re not going to be able to tell it in a convincing fashion. Can I have the people that stood up; the people in the workshop for the last couple of days stand up. What I just spoke there about learning guitar, we went through a workshop and hot seated every one of their businesses. Do you think – does that story that you just heard from me – do you hear similar stories. I took that same story and I gave it to every single one of these guys for their business.
Use Your Launch as Indoctrination
Take that headline and put it at the beginning and make a promise and then deliver some free good content along the way and then all of sudden what you do is you’re building them up. You’re indoctrinating them. I just spent a couple of days with Frank Kern. He uses all these evil sounding words that make it sound cool; indoctrinating. You get people sucked into your marketing and you’re telling them that story and you’re going through and you’re giving them free stuff and they like you and then all of a sudden—so what could possibly be an objection to playing the guitar. Your right hand, you’re not quick enough. Your left hand, you don’t have good rhythm. You can’t read music. You can’t tune your guitar, that’s a big one, you can’t tune your guitar. What you do is – remember how I sent them to the survey to ask about this stuff. When they go to that survey and they’re telling you what they want to learn. Say they’re going to this survey which is free and easy. Just do it at www.surveymonkey.com. You send them there, they take the survey and its like -- what do you really need to learn about playing guitar. It’s basically what you ask them. If you could sit down with me, the guy who just went from not being able to play the guitar to being able to play six songs in four- weeks, I’m a beginner just like you are but I just figured out this super secret annihilation method to trick myself into playing.
Objections into Hard Hitting Content
If you could sit down with me and have a beer with me or have a coffee with me or go out to lunch with me, what would the first thing you’d want to ask me about this. Say like 20 percent of the people said, that sounds really cool but I’d really want to know how to tune my guitar. So what’s your next video about then? What is that? What is that when they’re telling you that they want to learn? What they’re doing is it’s an objection. They’re telling you what their objection. When you go down the road to sell this thing, their questions are really objections. Okay, that’s an objection is to learn how to play the guitar, I mean lean how to tune their guitar. 51250
What’s your next video about? It’s a video that show exactly how easy it is to tune the guitar. Say it was actually like rhythm with your hand on the guitar so that was another one. They said they could play but my rhythm is completely off with my right hand. So then the next one would be – a lot of people are really wondering about their right hand and getting their rhythm right on the guitar. It’s interesting because that was one of the first things I had to trick myself about. The deal is, I showed this to three friends of mine and literally within 37 seconds, they all fixed their rhythm instantly and it’s really cool, I actually just filmed the session on that that’s going on my course and getting your right hand rhythm nailed down. It’s really cool. In fact I filmed me teaching these guys and how they got those instant results. I’m exaggerating all this to try to be funny but so don’t let that cloud – this stuff works and it works really well. In fact, it’s sort of like that Spiderman thing; with great power comes great responsibility. You’re going to be able to sell tons of your stuff using these launch techniques. Like I said, it has to be good product and it has to be done ethically. There are several reasons for that. Because it’s the right thing to do but more importantly, if you have a lousy product –maybe not more importantly but another reason is if have a lousy product and you get 1,000, 3,000 people to buy that DVD and it’s a bad DVD, what did you just do? You just committed business suicide. So you’re going to be able to put this stuff in a lot of people’s hands but remember that first launch is just a first launch. You’re setting up a business to go. This is the quickest way to put yourself out of business if you have a really lousy product.
Using Mental Triggers
There are a lot of mental triggers. I did cover that, I covered sequences; you have a pre-launch equence, a pre-pre-launch sequence. There are a lot of mental triggers. I can’t go through all of these. In fact I can’t go through hardly any of them. If I’m going to get to the new-new stuff. How many people have heard of social proof? How many people haven’t heard of social proof? There is just a few of you. Social proof is the idea if we see everyone else doing something then we’re going to do it too no matter how silly it is. If all your friends are jumping off the bridge would you go jump off the bridge too? The reality is yeah we would. It is, it is, it’s the way life works. It’s like – one quick example. Find a strange airport, you walking off the plane and 50 people are in front of you, there are other 50 people that walk off and they turn that way and you walk off the plane, do you walk off and stop here and look for the baggage claim sign? No. What you do is you just follow the 50 people. If they’re going to the bathroom you just walk right into the bathroom. That’s what we do. We follow other people. It’s not a silly thing. This is something that is inherent in us and it’s been there for thousands of years and it’s because we have too many decisions to make as we move throughout our lives. Where am I going to put my next step, how am I going to go down these stairs. I don’t think about going down the stairs. There are all kinds of decisions we make unconsciously. One way we can short circuit the process and give our brain a break so we don’t have to make those 10 billion decisions every minute is just to follow what other people do. That’s what allowed us to survive was using social proof. Scarcity, if there is fewer of something, we’ll want it more. We’ll crawl over broken glass to get it. I’m going to move quickly but if you reflect on that you know that’s true. The iPhone, it’s a darn cell phone. Why did that go so ballistic in the first few days? One of the reasons is each store had only so many. Community, online we can create communities literally overnight. It’s easy to join a community; it’s hard to leave a community once you become engaged. So if you can engage people. You can actually engage them in your launch. Rich does this. He has people –sending people to the blog and they’re making hundreds of blog comments and then they start talking back and forth on the blog. They become a de facto community. People act the way they think their community is supposed to act. That’s why we all have manicured lawns because your neighbors have nice lawns. You’ve got to act like they act. That’s how the people in you neighborhood act. They have nice lawns. You live in a nice neighborhood. You’re going to get torked off if they don’t have a nice lawn so you know they’re going to feel the same way about you so you cut your grass, you’re putting fertilizer on. There are so many of these, it’s amazing. If you can create the expectation in your community that they would do something like buy your stuff, then they are going to buy your stuff. 52251
The mental triggers, these never change. Reciprocity, if someone gives you something then you want to give them something back. Rich gives you free reports, give you these fantastic free reports then you want to give him something back like your money. What’s the worst feeling in the world? It’s like Christmas afternoon. Someone knocks on you door, you go there, there’s you neighbor. Your neighbor has a gift for you. You’re just thinking, oh my gosh, I don’t have a gift for them. You feel like a total loser, right? We’ve all been there. The way you activate these trigger is always changing. The triggers never change but the way you activate them is always evolving. There’s that special blank screen that I worked so hard on. We used to hit it via email. When I did my first launch I didn’t even have a website. Then we could have via Web pages. Then we could add audio to our Web pages. Then we could add video to our Web pages. Then we had blogs. They are great for hitting social proof and scarcity triggers, commitment and consistency triggers, authority triggers. Now we’ve added Web 2.0, we’ve got Facebook, we’ve got Twitter, we’ve got YouTube, we’ve got MySpace, just more interaction, more ways to use these triggers. Really in this Web 2.0 world, everything is so interlinked. It’s really, really powerful. This is one of the places where I’ve really added the most to Product Launch Formula 2.0 is adding in the Web 2.0 components.
Making Videos for Your Product Launch
I’ve released a lot of case studies as video and the thing is people never, ever, ever confuse my stuff with infomercials. If you’ve seen any of my video, it’s like me holding the camera out like this and shooting. It doesn’t look like an infomercial but you don’t –looking polished is not generally the answer to selling stuff. Unless you’re selling like design services, graphic arts that type of stuff. People want to connect with people. They don’t want to connect with super glossy. You don’t connect with an infomercial, right? But people connect with my video. When they meet me its like Jeff, I feel like I’ve known you from you email and from your videos; I just feel like I know you. They know I can’t play guitar, they know I’ve been trying to play guitar and I can’t play guitar. They know I live out in the mountains. They know I like to go white water rafting. They know I like mountain biking. They know all these things about me because people get engaged with people not with companies, not with images, not with the logos. So its okay—I don’t want to say be amateurish but you want to be real. My video shot with the little digital cam has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars because I’m shooting and my lens cap will fly up. Forget being ultra professional. Don’t send emails that say we. We decided we had this Super Ninja 2000 way to trick yourself to play guitar so we sat down and created this—some people do that. They try to make their business sound big and professional. People buy from I and from me and from you, they don’t from we. If you don’t do anything else but go through all your emails and take out we every place it is then you’re a winner. In that workshop, remember your stuff is always written about your people. It’s written to them, to one person, not to a ton of people. “To you all’ -- isn’t cool. In very rare circumstances you can but in general you’re writing to one person. Get a picture of your typical prospect and put it over your computer monitor and you write to that person. It’s a one to one relationship even if you’re sending it out to 40,000 people.
How to Make Your Launch Bigger
The launches just keep on getting bigger and bigger and bigger. You don’t have to hit a million dollars in you first launch. You can hit $1400, you can get $10,000, you can hit $20,000, $30,000—that’s really, really cool and that’s probably going to be more impactful than when you do hit that million dollar launch. But the launches do keep on getting bigger and bigger. There is more competition especially in certain markets. If you want to sell how to make money online stuff? To do a launch there is harder because there is more competition. You really have to work hard. You really have to be different. You really have to differentiate yourself. If you’re in a niche like most of us are outside of that how to make money online stuff, it’s still pretty much wide open. It’s easy. There are a few markets that they keep on doing over and over again is like that learning the guitar market. A couple of those guys did buy my product and did 52252
some great launches. Now, they’re just knocking it out of the part. They went from $8,000 launches to $100,000 launches in that market. They’re starting to create more competition. The trading Forex, the trading future as more competition is starting to evolve there but almost in every other market it’s just wide open. If you do this stuff, selling your stuff is easy. It is easy. If you take this material, put together a product launch, selling is the last thing you have to worry about. This is hard to believe but it’s true. The tougher thing is making sure you get paid. You crunch $100,000 in your merchant account. Say you’re ticking along doing $2,000 a month and then crunch $100,000 in your merchant account that can be an issue. Getting paid is an issue and I don’t have time to go into how to fix that one but it is fixable. That shouldn’t stop you. If you want partners to promote your stuff, the competition to get partners to promote for you is where the real competition is these days. What you end up doing is you do a product launch on those partners. You get them to do all the same triggers. The anticipation, the social proof, the authority, the reciprocity and you’ve got those guys so end up in a trend or sequence, it isn’t just one email that says please promote me. It’s a sequence of emails that first tickles them about something coming, gets them excited, tell them why it’s a great launch and make money for them; then maybe you drop on and there’s going to be a content. Whoever sells the most is going to get this cool prize. You turn that into an entire sequence. You start messaging them weeks ahead of time. That’s how you win partners. This stuff works like gang busters. It’s just amazing. The reality is anyone who would be a partner for you; they have even less time and attention to give than your prospects because they’re business people. We all know if you have a business you never have time, right? You need great pre-launch content. There’s a huge emphasis on proof. I have a saying, no proof- no launch. That’s why this regular guy thing is going to lead off telling them about these regular guys and then if they opt-in they’re going to get the full length case studies; hour-long case studies with these regular guys that hit it out of the park with their launch. That’s what my pre-launch is going to be. It’s just going to be overwhelming proof. One-thing after another, after another, after another, after another showing how this stuff works. It works in every market and every situation—every market, every type of product and all kinds of situations. I’m going to give overwhelming proof. It’s like pile on more and more and more proof until you just – okay Jeff, I give up. Stop sending me that stuff. You’ve proven it to me, let me buy. You need a launch team if you’re going to go really big. If you just want to do like $20,000, $100,000, even a half-million, you can do that without a launch team but if you’re going to get in the millions and the multiple millions you start to need a launch team. In a launch team you need someone running partners for you, coordinating with partners, you’re going to need graphics people; you’re going to need tech people. Often they can be one or two people. You can pull off a launch – even a multimillion dollar launch with a team of two or three people. You get up into the $10M launches and you need a bigger team. The first zero to five hundred to six hundred thousand, no problem. You can actually pull that off yourself. Beyond that, you start to need a team. You need a crushing offer. It often comes down to really having the right offer. Offers – the easiest way to get the offer right is communication with your prospects. It’s the surveys. I already showed you how to do a survey with the guitar stuff. It’s the blog comments. I’m impossible to get on the phone. I am impossible, my phone doesn’t ring in my office, I don’t give out my cell number because frankly, I have to – otherwise I get nothing done. There is such a crush of people that want me to manage these launches because I only manage like two, three, maybe four launches a year. The worst launch that I’ve done in the last year did $1.6M so people see those numbers and they really want me to manage it. My brother Jon is my partner in that part of the business where we’re managing these launches. His job is to screen people and keep them away from me. I hate to say it but that’s what it’s come down to. I am very approachable here and I love talking to people but it’s tough to nail me down and talk to me five minute alone, ten minutes alone and talk to me on the phone. It’s doesn’t happen. I don’t know how I started talking about this stuff. This is it, in terms of listening to my prospects; the one time you really can get me on the phone is the few days 53253
before a launch. I’ll take the phone off forward and I’ll start picking up the phone just to tap into what’s going on. It’s a long way of telling you that as you get into the launch, you really want to be interacting with your people, with your prospects. Prospects are jaded so you have to educate them, teach them and you have to entertain them. Entertainment people, they don’t want to be sold to so we have what we call the covert launch. We sneak up with them, just like I illustrated with the guitar bit. It’s just a story of how I’m totally inept and how I made this discovery. Then, about three weeks later, they realize there’s something that’s going to be available and they’ll be able to buy. So you engage them in the story and get them totally engaged with you and your communications before you even think about selling to them. I talked about competing for partners. The launch is a conversation. I’ve talked about this over and over. You’re listening to them; you’re responding to them, they’re telling you where to go next with the launch. Just like I started a conversation with you guys asking you what I should do next. I want to know. I’m desperate to know what the people are thinking right now. I’m asking everyone. You have to be authentic. You have to speak from an authentic place. This is incredibly important. Frank’s going to spend like 90 minutes talking about this afternoon. So I’m not even going to worry about that. I talked about gathering objections and answering objections. We talked about that with the guitar bit. Remember if there’s no proof, no launch. A lot of times it tough to come up with up with proof if it’s a brand new product. So do a limited internal launch just to let some of your closest, tightest customers and prospects, do a launch when them when the bright, shiny lights of all your JV partners aren’t on you. Put 20, 30, or 100, or 200 people into some type of a program and then work with them, make sure they’re successful and then you’ve got proof to take to the great world. So start with this inner circle of people that have worked with you in the past. Even if you have to give them something. Even if you’re not selling to them, get them engaged and then you’re going to find out what you need to cover. What’s wrong with the product; you’ll learn how to teach it. You’ll create raving fans. Even if you only have ten raving fans, that enough. Frank Kern with Mass Control, he did this. He had a closed program with me and I guess 30 people or 50 people and of those people 4, 5, or 10 of them became raging success stories and then he was able to base his whole Mass Control launch on just sharing that inner circle and their successes. Does that make sense? This is very copy intensive but you can reuse this copy over and over. I’ve used basically the same copy that I used to sell Business Building Systems for a launch with How to Write Love Letters. You basically can use the same copy. People in my workshop saw how the story I just spun about guitar which I just completely made up, completely made that up while I was up here. We use basically the same story to sell self-help stuff or to sell adventure travels stuff. You can recycle the copy. It’s the copy leading up to the launch; it’s not the sales letter. You don’t have to get the sales letter right, you can screw up the sales because the last time we did a launch, the first time we pulled up the shopping cart, like 60 to 90 seconds after we went live, we had $240,000 in orders. About 90 seconds into the launch. We had the 40 page letter. I don’t care who you are but you can’t read a 40 page sales letter and fill out your information in 90 seconds. We obviously had them sold. We could have sent them to a blank page with a button that says order now and we would have done just fine. Timing, I’m sorry I’m pretty substantially over time so I’m going to have to crank through some of these. I can’t tell you about the disasters. There have been a few of them. This is what I want to leave you with. Rich started with this. He told you this. The ultimate profit enhancer is a real strategic and tactical plan for the marketing execution of your product launch. It will give you instant momentum, instant cash flow, instant mojo. I was just driving around going out to dinner a couple of nights ago with Frank Kern and John Reese. We’re getting in the car and we were talking about my upcoming launch and Frank was like oh that product launch stuff, that doesn’t work at all. We all started laughing. I hope I’ve convinced you guys that this stuff works. It works in your business and you can absolutely kill it if you get even 20 percent of the stuff right. My name is Jeff Walker. Thanks for being a great audience. 54254
Peak
performance and executive coach Tom McCarthy presents the ten leadership principles entrepreneurs can use to turn their business into a world class organization: • T he
one thing that your whole team must know and do daily for exponential
business growth ...
• H ow
to identify the
A level
players you need around you for you to grow your
website into a multimillion dollar business ...
• W hat
needs to be the number focus of your team ...( if you don ’ t want to fail
like most small business owners do )...
• Why and how to use metrics to keep your virtual teams productively humming along... Before I get into leadership, I’m going to share some ideas with you on leadership today that I would share with the biggest companies in the world. I think the great thing about what these big companies do is they put a tremendous amount of money into studying leadership and training on leadership and they create some phenomenal ideas that don’t just work in big companies, they work for any size company. As a matter of fact, how many of you are leaders in here? Is there anyone in here that is not a leader? You all know that you are leaders whether you have you as your company or you have a staff of 30 or 40 or 50. What you’re learning in this business is how to create virtual teams. Even though you may not have employees, you still are a leader and your virtual teams need leadership. We’re going to focus on that in just a minute. How can we get ourselves to perform at the level we’re truly capable of? I remember I was getting ready to give a talk on leadership many years ago. I think this was probably 12, 13, 14 years ago. I was talking to somebody on the phone and he was a former POW in the Viet Nam War. His name was Captain Gerald Coffey. He’d been shot down; he spent five years in the Hanoi Hilton being tortured virtually every day. I was just talking with him in this conversation and he said so, what are you going to be talking about? I told him I had a presentation coming up. I said I’m going to talk about leadership. He said what are you going to focus on when you talk about leadership? I said, well, I’m going to focus on this and this. I was trying to impress him. And he said make sure you remember to tell them the most important thing. I said, what’s that? He said make sure you remember to tell them that the most important person they have to lead is themselves. My presentation is going to be somewhat about self-leadership but it’s also about leading teams. As Rich mentioned, I have companies like Cisco and Merck and Disney and Microsoft and Wells Fargo and Cyntech Homes, Kuwait Oil Company and Kuwait Petroleum Company and all these companies that bring me in for leadership. The 55255
interesting thing is – sometimes if it’s a public seminar and they’re just sending people – I get organizations or leaders that are doing well but usually when I’m called in to go into a division or an organization it’s because they’re really struggling. They’re frustrated. They’re the bottom of the pack. It’s working with that leadership team to turn it around. We’re going to focus on outstanding leadership. What I’ve done, I normally when I’m out speaking and doing this in a public seminar, it’s like a two-day course and we do all sorts of exercises and demonstrations and they’re applying it to their business. I have like an hour and a half. What I did, I just said if I were in your business, if you hired me to come in and we’re looking at your business, what would be ten things I would be looking for that would tell me where your business is going to be a year from now. I’m not talking about the Internet marketing components because I’m not an expert at that. I’m talking about from a leadership perspective, what would I look for in your business to see if you really were on track to build something phenomenal, something that is going to change your life; something that is going to create an incredible breakthrough for you. I want to go through what those are.
Create a World Class Business Culture
The first thing I do whenever I go into a business and I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to be able to work in a lot of companies that have this. The first thing that I look for is what’s your culture like? When you talk about culture, what does that mean? Culture is to me is defined by a couple of things. It’s defined by your vision. What is your vision? How many of you have a vision for your organization? Leadership 101 says that the first job of a leader. A lot of people create these visions but how many have seen somebody’s vision and you look at it and it’s just not very inspiring. How many have seen that before?
Think Big
I think you need to look at your business and in my opinion you’ve got to create a vision statement that makes you, that makes everybody that you would attract to your business feel like they’re part of something that’s really special; world class. In doing this, think big. I went into an organization about four years ago, it was an insurance agency. They had just had some horrific things happen to their business where most of their agents had left, there was a rift between two partners, and this company was left in shambles. The owner of the company that was still there had me come in and speak for the organization. I remember afterwards for the small part that was left, I remember afterwards he called me into his office and he said Tom, I want to retain you. I want you to work with me. I liked what you said in that meeting. I want to retain you. I could see that he was really struggling. He was hurt from this separation. I remember talking to him and I said if I do work with you, you can’t see your organization anymore the way it was and you definitely can’t see it the way it is. The only way I’m going to work with you is if you’re willing to look at your company and see how you can create some niche where you are absolutely the best in the world. It’s probably not going to be the biggest in sales because there huge massive insurance companies out there, too hard to compete in that way but you’ve got to find a way where you can start telling the story of who you are in a way that agents that don’t know about you right now will want to come on board. In a way where agents that – good agents that you want to keep but are still here that might be thinking about leaving will stay. What he did, he got together and they created a vision that every single time I go up there, he talks about that vision. It’s not like he’s beating it into people that aren’t inspired. People around him – it’s phenomenal – the people that stayed changed. Then they saw a whole new set of people that came to them because they created this new culture.
Have Values
Vision is part of the culture; the other things are your values. What do you stand for? If you go to an organization like a Cisco—I actually have a Cisco badge. Every single day you wear your little badge that gets you in to the offices and on the back of your name badge which has your picture and that type of thing on it, right on the back is the vision. You literally carry the Cisco vision with you everywhere you go. Then, you have another badge underneath 56256
that. That badge has the Cisco values, what do we value? What are the guidelines for performance and action and so, at the very base of it – I’ll talk about his in a minute – is customer satisfaction. They’ve been driving customer satisfaction longer than anyone I know. They’ve been fanatical about it which we’re going to talk about in a little while but people know those values because they’re right there, right there defined. On the back of that badge of the values they have the organization’s goals which also define the culture. The first thing I would look at in your business is have you created a world-class culture or do you just have just a ‘me-to’ culture. Or, do you just have a – I’m trying to make some money – culture. You’ve got to create something if you want the best partners to be attracted to you and you haven’t had this phenomenal success so far and you want to track these super stars helping you out and working with you, you’ve got to have a great product. You’d better have a great idea but your organization – your team, you’d better have a culture that makes them want to be part of the Super Bowl Championship team, up and coming team. That’s the first thing I always look for. What’s a company that has – in your opinion – what’s a company that has a really phenomenal culture that you can see as world class? Maybe you’ve seen it in the past day or two. What company? How many of you say Disney? What do you do when you call – how many of you are staying here in the hotel? Most of you, okay. How many have had a wake-up call? At the end of it, what do they always say? Have a ...magical evening. Now that’s world class. You don’t hear that anywhere else. You don’t go to the Sheraton and hear “have a magical evening.” They probably say don’t bother us anymore.
Start Building Your Culture with You
What we want to do is have that world-class Disney culture even though we might only have ourselves. We’ve got a virtual team; we want to start building that in our mind. That’s what leader so. They see the future; they build it in their mind first. Last night I had a really cool experience. I was on my way to one of the meetings or mixers or whatever they are called and I’m walking outside by the pool and there was a housekeeper from the hotel and she was probably 10 to 15 yards in front of me. So I’m walking behind her. You could tell that she was tired. She’d had a long day, it was 7:30 – 7:45, a long day. She’s walking along and I noticed up ahead someone had left like a small towel, like a washcloth or something like that. It was out in the middle and it was there. Most hotels that don’t have a world-class culture, the housekeeper that is not on duty now—what’s she going to do? Walk right by it. She didn’t even know I was behind her. She was tired. You could tell she was really, really tired. What did she do? Because they have a world-class culture that demands performance and attracts people that will perform at that level, what do you think she did? She walked right past it—no, that would be a crappy story, right? What did she do? She picked it up. You know what, when I saw that last night, it reminded me of when I worked with Disney many years ago. I think ten years ago I was working on a project with the Disney Institute and I was partnered with Gladys Knight of Gladys Knight and the Pips, I was her little Pip for this project. What Gladys and I were doing, we were working with Disney on a talent camp for kids. Gladys is going to provide the talent, coaching, and bring in all sorts of different artist that were going to coach these talented kids in a week over the summer at the Disney institute.
The Power of Disney Culture
Then I was going to do the motivational part, the performance part and I remember being with a Disney Vice-President and we’re walking along – it was just he and I, Gladys wasn’t there – we’re walking along this part of the Disney Institute and we’re in this conversation. He’s totally focused on me. He’s paying attention and then all of a sudden he says, excuse me one second. I apologize, old that thought please and he reaches down and he picks up this tiny piece of paper. I didn’t even see it. He didn’t make a big deal. He didn’t say at Disney we create a magical experience and I’m picking up this piece of paper. He just said excuse me, he picks it up and puts it in his pocket and we continue on with the conversation. That comes from the culture. When you come into Disney – I don’t know if you know this, some of you probably heard this – when you come into 57257
Disney the first thing you do and it doesn’t matter whether you’re the Vice- President of Disney or you’re going to be the street sweeper out at the park, you go through an orientation where you learn a lot of different roles. If you’re a Vice-President, you go and sweep the streets. They all have to go through that, you sweep the streets. You do the roles that other people do so you start to really understand how you can bring world-class culture into every role. The thing about Disney is when you’re with them they’re always talking their vision and they’re living their values.
Surround Yourself with A Players
When I go overseas where they’re not really in tune with what this topic is about. I get people who sometimes get angry so I’m not trying to offend anybody but one of the things I believe and I know this it he Disney philosophy, it’s a Cisco philosophy, it’s the Jack Welsh philosophy—as a leader, as someone running a company you’re only as good as your team. You can know every leadership technique in the world, you can have it down and know exactly what to do but if you’ve got –we’re going to talk about it, there are A players, B players, there are C player and the lowest category I have is a D player but if you’ve got a team filled with C’s and D’s, you could be a miracle worker, you’re still going to struggle. How many of you believe in this philosophy? Yeah, so part of leadership is just motivating people and mentoring and coaching. Part of it also is putting a little gate out front that only lets the right people in to the culture you’ve created. Then once they get in, it’s developing them and enabling them to increase their performance and also once certain people get in and Jack Welsh even said this, he followed this philosophy and before he became diligent about it in terms of hiring people or taking on a JV partner or whatever it is in his situation. He used to make a mistake about 50 percent of the time. He’d get his relationships or his hires right about 50 percent of the time. He said once he really got diligent about it, he got it right about 75-80 percent of the time which means he still did what? He still made mistakes but they were a lot fewer. Then when he made a mistake, he knew that if he could not develop that person into someone who could play at the level he needed to, then he needed to redeploy them. This is a really critical factor in your business. When we say higher A players, if you’re hiring an employee or for a project, you’re hiring a copywriter. I’m going to show you what an A player looks like in just a minute but you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got A players. Here’s what an A player is. An A player is somebody that based upon what you’re paying for that role, whatever compensation plan you have for that role and the results that you see being created in that role, an A player is somebody who out of all the potential candidates that you could access for that role, an A player is someone who would be in the top 10 percent. You’re selecting from the top 10 percent to fill a role. You’re not paying any more money for an A player. If you have a percentage compensation, you’re not giving an A player a higher percentage, you might be paying more but it’s based on results. We have to figure out how to develop A players. We have to figure out how to get the best possible people in each position. If you look at this little chart that I’ve got here, the way I look at an A player is based on performance partly but what’s the other element that I have there? Can you guys see that? What does that say? Character... What do you think character means? To me, character doesn’t mean oh yea, she’s a great lady. He’s a wonderful guy. That’s part of it but what it really means is how can congruent are they with the culture we have in our organization? How congruent are they? In other words, we’ll look at different examples but let’s take a look at this. If you’ve got someone who’s low on performance and low on character, the kind of person that no only really wants to work with, they piss-off customers, and they do those types of things. So what’s number two? Number one was create a world class culture, what’s the second thing I would be looking at to see where you’re going to be a year from now? What would I be looking at? 58258
Do you have A players in every role? They’re virtual, okay. Are they virtual A players? Yeah. Do you have the best possible person in this virtual role? A lot of my business is virtual now. I used to have 30 employees and we had lots of office space and I’d be out traveling and speaking and I’d come back and I’d have to manage all that and then go out and travel and speak and it was crazy. I finally figured it out, I said I can go out and get the best people in the world, people that I probably couldn’t even afford to hire and move to where I’m at to be in my office. I get the best people in the world and I’m only going to work with the best people in the world and have A players in all those roles and I’ve been able to do that. One is them is right here, this guy that brings me to Kuwait, the college that I told you about earlier. That’s number two.
Be a Master Communicator
The third thing, what would I be looking for? It’s in your books. What do you need to be? I’d be looking at the way you communicate. Now, the ultimate goal of communication, what do you think it is? It’s probably on the slide there. What’s the ultimate goal of communication? Someone said listening. What’s the ultimate goal or result of communication? Build relationships someone said. The ultimate goal of communication is to what – increase, okay, that’s how I want you thinking about communication. So why do I want you to be better listeners. Is it just because it’s nice to be a listener? Being a better listener, what should that lead to—an increase in what? Increase in performance, yeah. How does listening increase performance? So by showing I care, maybe you’re going to be more motivated; you’re going to express more ideas; you’re going to be more creative? What’s that? Fewer errors which will increase performance. Also, does listening to other people’sideas – does it tend to increase your performance as a leader. What do you think? Yeah. Absolutely. So the ultimate goal of communication and you see organizations like Cisco say – one of our values is (one of their core values) open communication. I said you’ve got to take the focus off yourself. That’s what leadership is with communication. It’s taking your focus off yourself and putting it on to someone else. With communication there is a whole—there is a ton we can talk about but one thing I think is really important and it’s one of the five core principles even in getting a group presentation; it’s the number one rule of communication. I went to the University of North Carolina, I played football there. I’m partial to them. I’ve got to say, Mike Krzyzewski, basketball coach at Duke—who’s heard of him? He’s a phenomenal leader; phenomenal winner and I like his rule on communication. He said the number rule we have – the only rule we have in communications, when you talk to someone you look at them in the – eye. You look them in the eye. You maintain eye contact for that conversation. What you get is -not only is it respectful and does it show confidence and certainty but you get feedback. You get the see the facial expressions. You get to see ther body give off signals to you as to doubt or concern or confidence. You get to see what’s going on. You know the most important thing for someone giving a presentation to do, you know what it is? With an audience, you don’t look at an audience as a whole mass of people; you create a series of connected conversations. You literally look at one person and you create a five second-six second, long enough to get a point of conversation across then you’ll find someone else and then you focus on them. What happens is you become much more conversational and people feel like you’re talking to them. What’s the third thing I’m looking for guys, in your organization? What would I be looking for? How do you communicate? Are you communicating and are you allowing other people to communicate in a way that inspires increases performance.
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Focus on Customer Satisfaction (Your Most Important Metric)
Our next key – this is one that I first started seeing quite some time ago but the next key, (what I would look at in your business is to see if you really have a sustainable world class business) is how much focus do you have on customer satisfaction and how much focus do you have on creating a really incredible environment for your team members; different people have different things. Cisco is fanatical – John Chambers says the quickest way for your business to fail is to get too far away from your customer or too far away from your team members. Either one of those will cause your business to fail. Even though he’s a busy guy and he’s running this huge, big organization, he allocates 50 percent of his time out for him in the field with customers and with these team members. He says if I don’t do that we’re going to fail. He makes every leader do that, actually be out with their team members. If you look at this scale, this is from Cisco’s research. It was really related to customer satisfaction but what they found was that if your customers after buying your product or using your service, if you could get customers to be in a 4.5 to 5.0 range, they call that the zone of affection, these people with love you, they’ll be extremely loyal. Other people can try and woo them away with a similar product maybe at a discount price but they’re going to stay with you. If, however, your customer’s satisfaction score falls down into the 4.0 to 4.5 range, it’s still pretty good. That customer is six times more likely to leave you. I think that is probably true for your team members. If you team members don’t really love being part of your organization, if your partners don’t love working with you then they’re going to jump at other offers. Or the next time that you need them they might not be available. What do we need to do? I think we have to have a focus on this. How many of you are familiar with Richard Branson, Virgin? Yeah, there’s a new company that Richard has just launched that a friend of mine is the CEO of it. I’m going to be doing some leadership training with. Branson’s whole philosophy, he drives customer satisfaction by creating a really phenomenal environment for all the Virgin team members. He says if I treat them like crap and then go and tell them to take good care of the customers, what are they going to do? They’re going to treat the customer the same that they’re getting treated. He says if I create a phenomenal environment, it’s not like he’s overpaying them, it’s just the whole environment, the atmosphere, the values, the culture, if I create an environment that makes people feel respected, if I put the right people in the right roles where they’re fully engaged and they’re having fun and they’re really loving their work, then they’re going to go out and they’re going to treat customers great. That’s been his philosophy. You know what Cisco did? They looked at your customer satisfaction score for the year and they said 75 percent of your bonus is going to be dictated by how you do in customer satisfaction. So you’re going to get escalators or you get de-escalators based on that. Guess what started to happen to customer satisfaction scores? Because they attached what to it? Come on, wake up, what did they attach to it? Money! That’s right.
Set Challenging Expectations
Number five, what does number five say. Come on, wake up for me now. Number five—yeah. I would start to look at what kind of expectations do you have for your team and are they challenging enough. Are people clear and focused on what you want for them? Look at this chart here. The probably of success – if you can see this – goes from zero to one-hundred and then you’ve got motivation going from low to high. Where are people most motivated? What kind of expectations or goals do people need to really have high motivation? What kind? You say achievable but it’s not like when you go 100 percent probability of success. That’s really achievable but look at that in the bottom corner here, right here, 100 percent probability of success—where’s motivation? It’s too easy, yeah. Incredibly high probably of success, there’s not going to be a lot of motivation. And then the other one that we have we set sometimes these pipe dreams for people where we make these unrealistic expectations for them and we set 60260
them up to really decrease their motivation. For each role within your company, use a leader. Part of your goal is to figure out what does that look like where it’s enough of a challenge where it’s not like a no-brainer. They are going to have to work, they’re going to have to think, they’re going to have to be creative but it’s enough of a challenge where it’s going to be exciting, it’s going to be fun. It’s going to cause them to stay up a little bit late at night and think it through. Expectations—your expectations, the way you think about your team members. Does that determine your level of performance? What do you think? Who thinks it does? Yeah. Study after study will show you that. You know how teachers influence how well a student performs. A great performance plan has the top three to seven quantifiable results this person has to produce in one year. It’s something they know at the top of their head. If we say what’s your performance plan? You say here’s top results that I have to produce this year, boom, boom, boom. They say where are you with each of those? Behind on this one, on track on this on and I’m 30 percent ahead on the third one. You need that level of clarity in your organization to really be a great leader. So giving people challenging quantifiable results.
Measure Your Team’s Results
Now, we give them great results (number six) what do we have to do? Here’s what you need to achieve and we’re going to measure you so that you and I can have feedback. You don’t need to measure everything but you need to measure the key core components of your business. In the book, “Good to Great” they said one of the things all these business figured out a way to do was identify what is the core thing we have to measure and then make sure they measured it and had information that allowed them to be able to lead. I’m doing this thing now called, The Mental Diet. I’ve talked about it the last program, I’m writing a book on it. Part of it is creating the awareness in people that once you decide what you want you’ve got to eliminate thoughts and emotions that keep you from seeing those opportunities, keep you from acting on those opportunities. Remember I said you have to leave some things behind to get to where you want to go. The third part of a mental diet is you have to proactively start thinking new ways. You have to proactively start creating new feelings. I talk to people about that and they kind of get it. They probably go and think a new thought for a little while but then because it’s not being measured, it falls by the way side.
Coach For Greatness
Number seven; coaching, mentoring, huge. You’re a leader. It’s nice we hire an A player, we want them to ideally be this finished product, super star and by the way – A players, what kind of people do they tend to like to hire? A plus players. An A player is not afraid to associate or to hire someone better than themselves. A C player, who do they like to hire? A “C” minus player because they want to look good. They don’t want someone to be better than them. It exposes their weaknesses and that’s probably one of the reasons why they’re a C player. You’ve got to coach people. You’ve got to find people doing thing right. One of the things they’ve found in an organization I worked with, they took their top leaders, top ten percent, they compared them to the bottom 20 percent. They said there’s a difference in the way that these guys act and lead versus the way these guys do. That’s obvious. Guess what one of the differences was? Finding people doing things right. Positive communication, feed back, right. Now, one-to-one ratio would be, I see you doing something, that’s not great and then I see you doing something that is great and I communicate with you both times. What do you think the best leaders in the world, what is their ratio. What guesses do you think? Three to one, someone said seven to one. In this particular organization it was four to one. Now, most people go how am I going to find four things someone’s doing that’s good. My answer is you’ve got to go look. They’re out there but you’re not noticing a lot of things. You’ve got to get that ratio up. That’s the ideal ratio to increase performance and that is to coach someone is four to one. We think coaching is only finding them doing something wrong and then correcting it. That’s part of it but part of it is finding them do something right, noticing it, rewarding it where everyone else sees it so that they duplicate it and where that person will do it again and again and again. That’s coaching too. 62261
Who in here is a great coach? Who loves coaching? Who needs to love coaching? Raise you hand and say yes. You had better be a great coach, come on, and get better at it.
Encourage Synergy
Number eight -- I was going to do an example on this but we’re running out of time. Encourage synergy, the old model was you have this department that only knows what their doing, you’ve got sales and then you’ve got accounting or operations and they’re fighting because it’s their fault, it’s their fault. Have many have been in one of those organizations? New model that’s completely different. Operations, your responsible for your key performance but also you’ve got to know what sales is doing and you’ve got to contribute ideas, solutions, for them to be able to do it better. Sales, you’ve got to hit your numbers but you need to know leader of sales what the leader of operations is doing and what their biggest goals are and challenges are and you’ve got to provide resources and training and manpower if necessary to allow them to hit their goal. When that starts to happen, companies really start to click. Great leaders encourage that.
Always Be Decisive
Being decisive is so important. I was talking with a CEO on the way in. I might have mentioned this yesterday. He’s the head of a wireless company. He’s $70M in venture financing. He’d had another wireless company that he’d sold to Cisco. This company is amazing what they’re doing. I told him—I said I don’t envy any CEO in today’s day and time. With the pace of change and the way the whole industries disappear and year or two versus they used to be strong and thriving for 30 or 40 years in the past. I don’t envy you because in anything that you do you need to be decisive. Where do you go, where’s the place you can go to help make decisions? What do you have built in within you that are not 100 percent accurate but has a high degree of accuracy to help you be decisive. Do you know? Your conscience, okay. Your intuition. What is intuition? What is intuition? You know what intuition really is? It’s your subconscious part of your mind speaking to you. Remember Paul was up here and he said your subconscious mind can actually process 10,000 bits of visual information per second? The conscious mind can only process 40. The subconscious mind can actually process way more than 10M when you take everything else into account it’s doing, processing where your blood pressure is and how to moderate it and keep it in that level. How to make the hear beat. How to secrete different endorphins or enzymes, whatever is in there—40M bits of information per second. Your subconscious minds see so many things. That’s why it can give you this intuitive feeling about something that is far more accurate than what you can just see with the conscious mind. You’ve probably read books like Blink and different books that say people that trust their intuition, their lucky hunches usually end up being right. I think that’s a great place for leaders to go. It usually does prove accurate. They find the luckiest people in the world, that’s what they’re doing. Unlucky people ignore hunches and tend to suffer the consequences. We’ve got nine but how many did I promise you?
Love What You Do
Number ten is...I would look at you and see how much you love what you’re doing versus how much you’re just doing it because you heard that Internet marketing or being the business that you’re in is a great way to make money. Do you really love it? Who loves it? Who loves what they do? Let me ask you, do you love what you do every single minute or sometimes is it work? Is it work? Yeah. A lot of people think, oh yeah, of course Bill Gates loves what he does. Give me his pay check. Give me his stock; I’d love it, too. Does Bill Gates have issues? Does he have problems in his business? What do you think? Oh my gosh, come on. Yeah he makes a lot of money but there is something that every great leader does that lesser leaders never do. They do not love what they do. They’re doing it for a pay check. They’re doing it because it’s the only thing that they think they can do. So loving what you do is something that you’ve got to build inside. It’s an attitude. It’s a desire. It’s not just loving the wonderful great things that are happening. It’s loving the challenges, too. 63262
Fifty-five percent of your communication is your body language. They know, they feel it, they sense it, your tonality changes. They know it. Emotional intelligence says however the leader feels, ultimately everyone else in that organization will start to feel. Whatever the leader believes, ultimately everyone else –if the leader believes it’s possible even though it looks really difficult, other people start to believe that; if the leader really feels that way and believes it; you’re the driver. As you make all this money, as important as leaders you are in you communities and doing good with all this wonderful money you’re going to be making coming out of this seminar. You guys are leaders. You’re the ones that choose to be here. You’re the ones that have the resources to be here. You’re the ones that have the businesses that are going to make you very, very successful. People look at you just like you look at Rich and Jeff and these other people. People look at you and they notice. Your children look at you and you set the example. The final lesson of leadership that I want to leave with you is you are so important not only in your organization but people look at you in everything that you do and so I just want to challenge you to step up and be the kind of leader that you came on the planet to be
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Genius Internet Marketer
and self proclaimed lazy guy gives his most powerful presentation on the persuasive power of Core Influence: • H ow
you must match your core identity to the desires of your market if you
have any hopes of selling them your stuff ...
• W hat is core influence and how it differs from M ass C ontrol ... • T he simple process that took me from unhappy I nternet M arketer to living on the beaches of S an D iego making millions every month ... • H ow to determine what your customers really want ( hint .. it ’ s not money ... or your stuff )... I am not going to talk to you about Mass Control today. I am going to talk to you about something that could possibly be a greater force than Mass Control and it is something that Mass Control is built on, I guess. It is called Core Influence. And the big fancy title here is how to make lots of people do almost anything, but in a cool way. I don’t really like the word “make” there. That’s why I had to throw in “in a cool way.” So, I am sure you are all very good people. I am very proud to be part of this group. But if you would please just promise me that you will never, ever in your life use the stuff that I am going to show you now, or ever in the future for bad [ju-ju]. Is that cool? If you do and I find out, I will find you and I will persuade you to tattoo the word penis on your forehead. I can do this. I have that power. I learned it from Robbins. He says it all the time that he taught me that. Not really. Okay, today you will change your life. That’s a pretty big claim there. Let me give you some disclaimers. I learned that from the Feds. They could have just told me that to start with, you know. This could have been, like, “Dude, we were just thinking you might want to give some disclaimers.” Anyway, disclaimer number one. I am not a psychologist, I have not studied psychology, I have no idea what I am talking about, really and should never be listened to for any reason under any circumstances. Okay? So there’s that. Disclaimer number two is that I am not here to sell you anything. I officially forbid you to buy. I don’t have anything to sell at all, anyway. I have already sold out of my Mass Control stuff. It is the only marketing product I’ve got. So no one can buy anything from me. Do you promise not to even attempt to buy anything from me today? Would you please humor me and say that you will promise not to attempt – okay. I am in a little bit of a dangerous position, really, because I am known as this Mass Control guy and I think the perception is you never know what the real angle is with me. Like some folks might be saying, aw, he’s just trying 64264
to reverse psychology us and make us want to buy stuff from him more – which is not the case. I have nothing to sell you. Do not give me money, please. Fine. Please give me money. The final disclaimer is that this is a major departure for me, what I am going to show you. This is a bit of a weird presentation – weirder than normal, in fact – or weirder than most. I guess weirder than normal is kind of a stupid thing to say. Weirder than most presentations. It is a three-part presentation beginning with a nice refreshing appetizer of weird, heavy-duty psychological stuff. It is possible when you see me talk about this, you’ll be like, damn, this is heavy. It is heavy; not unpleasantly, depressingly heavy but it is like [makes noise] kind of heavy stuff. And then, after our super heavy stuff, we will get into something which is dangerously close to new age self-help stuff. So please know that I am not a motivational speaker or anything. That is not my role here. For the love of god, people, I have created a product called “The Underachiever Method, for Christ’s sake. So that’s not what this is about. We get into that for a minute and then finally at the end is our dessert. We have a nice warm batch of how to turn all this stuff into money. Cool? Hooray! Let me ask you a question. Have you ever been in the flow, like where everything just seems to work out right, like everything is just cool? You talk to people, you’re connecting with them. There is like you have this effortless communication. Everything you do throughout the day is pretty easy and at the end of the day you are like, damn, that was awesome. I wish I could be like that all the time. If you have ever had that experience, please raise your hand. Cool. On the flip side of that, have you ever – I guess I will use this. Have you ever like seen a sales presentation, maybe at a seminar or something or a business opportunity presentation where the person said all the right things and acted – did every thing perfectly, you know, dressed like you’re supposed to dress, said like you’re supposed to talk and stuff, smiled and all that stuff, but still for some reason you were just kind of like, aah. This whole Core Influence thing, literally, I believe, will give you the ability to get people to do just about anything you want them to do and there are two easy steps. Step one is to know what you really want and who you really are. I will submit to you now and repeatedly that the answers to those questions that we hold in our heads were false. Step two is to know what your market really wants and who they really are.
What is Your Core Identity?
So we will begin the heavy-duty, weird psychological stuff. I believe that most people carry around with them two versions of themselves. The first version is the identity that they walk around in every day. I call it the shell identity. So for example the dude who is a banker who is walking around saying, “I’m Bob, I’m a banker. I originate loans and stuff. I do banking things. Whatever they may be, I do them. Seriously.” So shell identity is who you think you are. So, if anyone ever says, who the hell do you think you are, you can say, I am the shell identity. The second identity is the person that they really want to be, and that is the identity that people really want. So when Bob is at the bank having the conversation with the teller, “Mrs. Jenkins, did you organize the deposit slips and do other banking stuff?” “Yes, Bob, I certainly did. It was fabulous.” During that whole thing, he’s daydreaming about living at the beach or being a rock star or a drug cartel or whatever it may be. That is the identity that he really wants. And I believe that that inner identity is our true identity. I believe this is true for everybody. That person that we daydream about, that life we daydream about, we really want to be that person. That’s our deepest core desire. Therefore, I call this the Core Identity and I believe this to be everyone’s true identity. 65265
I guess to really illustrate it, talking about Bob at the bank doing bank stuff, do you think that Bob at the bank, when he was a little kid envisioned himself being a banker, going to the bank every day? Do you think he thought that would be awesome or like he wanted to fly planes or something? Which one? Yeah, fly planes. So that’s who Bob really wants to be, and therefore I think, at the risk of sounding all hokey and everything, I think that is the real Bob. I think the rock star, the baseball player, that’s who Bob really is. He is just trapped in this banker thing because of social conditioning largely as a result of guys like me who make ads. Sorry, Bob. So I believe everyone’s core identity is held captive by circumstance and a lack of knowledge. I will explain circumstance easier because that’s the easiest one. Or I will explain circumstance first because that is the easiest one to explain. Bob wants to be a multi-millionaire playboy living in Monte Carlo. Circumstances might prevent that, such as Bob ain’t got any money. That’s an easy one, right? Lack of knowledge is the most insidious reason and that is because I believe that we don’t really know who our core identity is. Very few people ever sit around and think about that, sit around and think about, “Well, I wish I had a car or a new house,” or whatever, but that is not really stuff. It is not who we want to be. Stay with me here. Don’t make me ask you to jump up and shout and everything. So, core influence. It is the reason why I’m really good at this stuff; at selling lots of things to people I’ve never met. Core influence.
Core Influence works Better Than Persuasion
Most influence is done on the surface. We call it surface influence or head to head influence. That is very common stuff. I am talking to you, you’re hearing my words, you translate those into pictures in your mind or whatever, your brain uses a little bit of logic, your emotions kick in, you say yea or nay, I agree or disagree, I will do this, I won’t do this– whatever. Normal stuff, right? That’s how 99.999 percent of all influence is performed, on this surface level – surface influence, a head to head surface level connection. It works pretty good. Here is how core influence works. It is infinitely more powerful, therefore often making surface influence completely unnecessary. Just quickly a show of hands; how would you like to never really have to convince anyone of anything again ever in your life? Okay, cool. That’s what core influence does. I just want to make sure we’re keeping the big picture in the frame of our minds here. I think we communicate on two levels: head to head level and we communicate on the core level. We’re going to get a little heavy here. We’ re going to rope it in, but just bear with me on this heavy stuff. The lasting influence comes from a core connection. When I asked you earlier if you have ever had that experience where everything is going really well, and whenever you are interacting with people it just seems like everyone I’m talking to, you’ve got this great bond with them and it’s all really easy. Like when you go to a party and you meet a perfect stranger and you immediately connect with them. Have you ever had that experience? That is the core communication. That is what is going on there. It is just an unconscious thing that happens. You are congruent with your true identity, who you really want to be and they are too. When you are talking to each other, it’s just right there. There is that instant connection. In those moments, if you guys want to go do something or whatever, it wouldn’t take a lot of convincing because you are on the same plane. You’re pretty much like on the same little wavelength. Core connection. Pretty dangerous stuff here. We get into the sub-conscious. I don’t think I could even define what sub-conscious is but I will just pretend I know what the hell I am talking about here, with subconscious. I think it is your sub-conscious speaking to their sub-conscious. I am not talking about subliminal weirdness or any tricks. I think that your true person and your true intents are showing and it is speaking to what they ultimately want and those two are aligned. Does that make sense? Do you believe that our sub-conscious minds are really in control?
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Influencing People Through Congruent Communication
I say you can’t really control your sub-conscious; I think you can guide it, anyway. I think with the proper guidance, your sub-conscious will create a new core identity for you and this is the identity that will speak to your market on a core level. Let me rephrase it so it doesn’t sound all weird. The stuff you can do – first of all, I believe that none of us – until we do this exercise I am going to give you, which I did not create, incidentally – really have any idea who the core identity is. We don’t really know who that person is that we truly want to be. I am saying this to you at the risk of sounding, a) like an a—hole, by saying that none of you guys are happy with your lives and you all wish you were someone else. So that is not at all what I am trying to convey to you. I forgot about the other part of what I was going to say was. Yes, now I remember. It is when we as people become congruent, when we identify that core identity and we because congruent with what it is and who it is that we truly want to be, that is when effortless influence occurs – well, almost occurs. Do you remember when I asked you if you have ever seen a presentation where the dude said all the stuff, all the right things, did all the right things, dressed the right way, used the right body language and you were still kind of, eh, eh, eh? What you experienced was your sub-conscious picking up on the lack of congruence in core identity. So, to use that example, this dude is giving you this presentation like I am interested in you, you need to buy my stuff, we’re all going to make a lot of money, or whatever it may be. His core identity could be saying I hate people; I cannot wait to get off this stage. Just give me the damn money so I can home and do more blow. And your sub-conscious is picking up on that despite the fact that he has done and said everything correctly. Does that make sense? Now, here is where it gets good. When you can pinpoint what the true core identity of your market is, and you communicate with them congruently from your true centered state, that true core identity, you will have more power and influence than you ever thought possible – ever! Case in point being – let’s see – religion. Religious leaders – this is not true for all but some, such as like a Mother Teresa, was 100 percent congruent. She new what that core identity was, she stepped into that core identity and she spoke to the core identity of all the [distorted audio] influenced in the world, [inaudible], what their religious beliefs were. She spoke to that core identity within them [inaudible] a person who cares, who wants to give back to my fellow man, who wants to help and make a difference. Did it look to you like Mother Teresa was working real hard to convince anybody of anything? Yes or no? Uh uh. Core influence. So basically you are all going to turn into Mother Teresa – right after I do. Sure. But you are going to learn how to do this. You are going to learn some exercises that are very easy, fun and very beneficial to you that will cause this to happen. I have been doing this since 1999, marketing things on the Internet. I spent the first seven years of it convincing people to do stuff. I spend the last 18 months or so sort of convincing people to do stuff. I figured this stuff out by accident, really, and now I don’t have to convince anyone to do anything. It just works. So, as marketers, a lot of us what our greatest challenge is getting people to buy our stuff. The bottom line is when you do this, more people will buy your stuff and you’ll generate much cooler customers and your life will be a lot better.
Discovering Your Own Core Identity as a Marketer
So, remember step one was find out who you really are and what you really want? I am going to walk you through how to do that. Does that end the weird psychological part of the thing? Maybe. I am not sure if we’re still in the weird psychological part or if we are into the dangerously close to self-help, new-age stuff. As I said earlier we’re using the Bob the bank thing. I believe our deepest core desires give clues to our core identity. That is a weird statement to make because right now we are probably thinking of desires on a material level and that is not what I mean. So, why are you here, right now in this moment with me together, members of your community in this room? 67267
Sell more? Beauty, all right? Make more money. That is probably like the friend of mine saying, make more money, right? It is, after all, a conference about business. It is typically the function of business to make more money. Cool. Good answer. I like it too. Making more money is fun. Spending it is even funner. Paying taxes on it, not so fun. Another reason might be to network with your peers, right. It’s fun to go to the bar. These things remind me sometimes of Grateful Dead concerts but without the drugs because you see everybody, you see all these people that you would usually only see in that environment. It is almost like this traveling fun thing. So you get to re-connect with your friends and tell war stories and all that. It’s great. So network with your peers might be one. Get out of the house might be one. I’ve got two young children. They are two and five now, and when they were like a lot younger and neither of them spoke English – or you know, stopped screaming for more than 30 seconds at a time, I would come to one of these things. Good, you want me to come to the seminar and have people repeatedly throw bricks at me? Awesome! I will be there. Can I sleep past eight? Great. Throw whatever you want. Or maybe it is to contribute to the community, kind of like you said. Sweet. So, a typical thing to do and we do this a lot in sales when we’re trying to get inside the minds of our prospects. We say, well, why do you want that stuff, right? Why do you want that outcome? So an answer might be why do I want more money, why do you want to network with others, why do you want to contribute to your community, etc? So you might say I want more money so I can get a Ferrari, or whatever, or so I can quit my job. I want to network with others so I can form joint venture partnerships so I can distribute more of my products or whatever. Those are all acceptable answers but our brains will lie to us. They are surface level answers which are not to be discarded but they are not the absolute truth. When I say something like I want to make more money so I can buy a new car or a new Ferrari or a new house, all this stuff, typically that’s our brain giving us the surface level thing because it doesn’t want to work that hard, and that’s okay. Remember when I was saying that Bob daydreams of being the rock star, whatever? That is essentially like he is replaying these beer commercials in his mind. I wish I was that dude. It’s normal. We all do it, right? It’s cool. The truth is we all want to create and perpetuate experience. Goals and things are absolutely meaningless in the context of this who core identity weirdness I am talking about today. We all want to create and perpetuate experience. I will give you good concrete examples of that. Anyone ever know of a guy that might want a Ferrari? Anyone ever know of a man that said, damn, I wish I had a Ferrari; that’s awesome? Yeah? Is anyone here? Can I have some of what you are taking, please? Yes or no? Okay. Is that yes, I can have some of what you are taking, because if you all give it to me I think it might kill me. When a guy wants a Ferrari – I know because I have gone through the whole Ferrari thing – what we really want is to be like James Bond or something, or whatever internally having that Ferrari means to us. I want to be like James Bond or a rock star or whatever. Normal stuff. That is why you want the Ferrari, for the significance. Of course the big lie is that we tell ourselves and trick ourselves into believing every single day – millions of consumers believe it, too. We’re not alone. The big lie is that if you have the Ferrari you’ll be like James Bond or whatever, right? I can hereby attest to you in front of this council of my peers that not a single flashy sports car that I ever had, and I’ve had a Ferrari, two Porsches, BMWs – basically, I’ve had them all with the exception of Bugatti, Lamborghini and Bentley. None of them ever made me any cooler in person. It totally sucked. I was like, okay, when am I going to become cool? This blows! When am I going to become better endowed – surely! When I would trade the cars, the joke I would tell the sales person who would be like, why are you trading this Porsche in? It’s awesome. I would say, well, the penis extension mechanism is clearly broken. This didn’t work at all. What else do you have? Maybe you should try the Ferrari. Okay. Nothing. What we really want with all these goals and things and bullshit that our brains tell us is experience. You want that feeling and experience of feeling like James Bond. You want the experience – with the Ferrari thing. No you; we, whatever. I am not preaching at you. We want the experience of having the heads turn or whatever and feeling like that rock star. Right? Yes? Cool. 69268
I am going to show you an exercise in a second that changed my life. That is a really weird thing for me to say because normally when I hear about life changing and stuff, I’m like, god. But it did and I didn’t even know what was going to happen when I did it. I just did it for the hell of it. When you do this you will immediately – well, okay, it’s not immediately; it takes a couple of hours to do the exercise. So after a couple of hours you will get clear focus of what your true core identity is. The freeing feeling from that is absolutely overwhelming because it strips out the bullshit. It turns off the beer commercial and helps you get down to what is real. When you communicate from this core place, you’re centered, stable and focused, cool. You also attract matches and you are able to influence people effortlessly, specifically when you attract a match. Now, what a match is, is someone whose core identity is similar to yours. May I ask you a question? Do you think I’m insane? Yes. All right, great. A show of hands if your idea of a good, fun life is to build a business where you have customers who are dramatically different from you and you don’t really like them? Okay. Cool. Would it be fun to build a business and have customers who are a lot like you and you do genuinely like them and they do genuinely like you? Pretty fun. That is what I mean by you magnetically attract matches, because when you are totally congruent and you have stepped into that core, and as you will see, you actually will begin – at least it happened to me – you will begin to live that life that you map out. It’s bizarre. You’ll magnetically attract matches because they will see internally, sub-consciously – heavy s..t, I know. But they will sub-consciously be drawn to you because you are within the place that they want to be. Does that make sense? Cool. This is all new stuff for me, so I was really stressed out about teaching this. I was like, this is either going to go over or people are going to think I am the weirdest person in the world. I don’t really know if there is much I can do about the second part of that, but hopefully it goes over and you guys will get it and dig it. And plus, like me, you just might actually stumble into a new and better reality and experience. I used to thing the type of stuff I am talking to you about right now was the single biggest load of bulls..t only to be surpassed by something I could make up myself. Probably the reason was because I have been around a lot of psychotherapy stuff – my mother is a psychotherapist. I think she used me as guinea pig. So I had this – she’s like, well, let’s see what happens if we put him in the room with this subliminal message. Like, thanks. Thus explaining that incident with the cantaloupe. What? I just put salt on it? What the hell is wrong with you? Man. Rich said it was going to be a nice professional place and here you guys are. So it’s cool if this sounds hokey, all right? Let me tell you where I was before I did this. I had the Porsche, I had me one of them Ferraris, yea! I want you to keep in mind how significant that is to a guy my age, especially my age back then, like a young dude. That’s like, aw, gee, for some reason we’re compelled to believe that’s going to make you the happiest person in the world, again, probably because of people like us are convincing them that they are going to be – yeah, but still. I got to fly around on private jets. My daughter is two. Her very first time in an airplane was in a private jet. I flew her and my family to Deer Valley. I took them skiing. I took my mom. Moved to San Diego. Private jet. It was awesome. Pretty cool. Had time free. I lived in Macon, GA. I could do anything I wanted to do. Unfortunately there was nothing to do in Macon, GA. But had there been anything to do, I could have done it. If I could have done anything other than go to lunch and go to Barnes and Noble and then go like to Post Lunch, and then go to Barnes and Noble again, I could have done that, hypothetically speaking. I kid you not, we have this near family crisis trying to determine which big fancy mansion to buy, not because we needed a bigger house but simply because we could and therefore we thought, well, we should because you can, because that’s what you do. You’re supposed to show how significant you are by having a great big house. That was the big deal. Does that sound like a bad life or a good life? Those are your big problems. Not so bad. Absolutely miserable. Horrible. I mean totally miserable. Get up in the morning – what now? I go to my office, which overlooked the Loaves and Fishes homeless dude breadline stuff. 70269
Why Making Money is Not What People Really Want
Why did I pick that? Just absolutely miserable. One of the worst sensations I believe there is – well, maybe not the worst. I guess we could come up with lots of worst stuff. But a significantly bad sensation is to strive for your whole life for some goal and then attain it and realize it’s empty and it was all just an illusion. So when you have all the stuff that is supposed to make you happy and you wake up in the morning and say, now what, for about two months of that? Not so cool. It blows. So I hope by doing this, if anything, I can spare someone that pain because it is very significant. This is fun, isn’t it? I was born on a ranch. My parents threw me into a pit of fire. My business attracted the wrong type of customers because I wasn’t congruent with the life I really wanted. I was focused on get the money and all this stuff. I built the wrong type of business. I went for the business opportunity, the early biz op seekers, bottom of the barrel stuff. I attracted bottom feeding types of customers. I did not like them. I was so miserable from being inundated with all of these customers who I did not like and wished like hell to avoid at all costs that future business was deliberately sabotaged so I wouldn’t have to complete the cycle of lameness anymore. Well, if I do this then I’m going to get more of these customers and they are going to email me and I hate them. I am just laying it out, man. Trust me. It happens to a lot of folks. It happens for a reason, too. I was taught that you want to avoid your customers at all cost, and you get the money. The number one function of business is to get the money. I was taught that and I believed that for a long time. My life reflected it. Your beliefs reflect your life, for sure, right? All the money I made was – the end result of that was to buy things. If I make an extra $200,000, I can get a Ferrari, I can get a new house. I’m going to be miserable in my new house. I can drive my Ferrari into the garage and be miserable. I would go out and buy all this stuff and then instead of being like, this is great, I would sit around and worry about the stuff. When I would drive in Macon, GA – you’ve got to picture me living in this tiny little southern town of Macon, GA, driving a Ferrari. I got a little bit of attention in the thing. And I would drive around in it absolutely miserable driving in it because I was convinced that everyone on the road hated me and thought I was an a—hole by sheer fact that I was driving a Ferrari. So that is where my head was at. It sucked. I lived in a constant state of anxiety. What if one of my customers finds out where I live or something and they, like, call me? Dear god! It blew. Twenty five pounds overweight, insomniac, chronically paranoid. I promise you when a car would come in front of my home I would become anxious, defensive and angry thinking that might be someone that was coming to hassle me. Madness! A really compelling story. Oh, great. What else can you share with us? This is awesome. And if you act now this could be you! Now with 20 percent more misery! The exercise I am going to share with you, for lack of a better phrase, nine-month total life makeover. I did what I am going to tell you about without any real goal in mind. I just wanted to figure out what I wanted because here I am, I’m buying all these things, I’m still miserable, we have this dilemma of which fancy house – we literally went to see what the most expensive house we could possibly buy was so we could just find that one thinking, well, that will be good, right? Yea! I went from that state to a significantly better life which I will share with you in a minute. I did this exercise in late September of 2005 sitting at my desk overlooking the Loaves and Fishes Homeless dude thing, watching the junkies and the drunk people try to kill each other. Remember I was miserable, right? I hated my customer s; as a result, income had declined because I was sabotaging my business. In November 2005, I did my first Serializer launch. I made $360,000 in nine minutes! I attracted customers I liked. Pretty cool. December of 2005, I launched a product called Ultra Underachievers, and instant $100,000 per month recurring revenue business. Dang ole’ diggity.
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An Exercise to Find Your Own Core Identity
I then discovered La Jolla, California and immediately decided to move there. Prior to my doing this exercise, I never even knew La Jolla, California existed. February-March of 2006, I did my Serializer 2 class, made $640,000 in 45 minutes and became a cash millionaire for the very first time in my life. People talk about being a millionaire. Well, if you figure my house, my business, I’m a millionaire. If you can write a check for a million dollars, you’re a millionaire. So I had attained that goal, which was a big deal. I was, like, wow, I made it, great. And I was actually happy about it, which was cool. It was the first time in my life. March 2006, plane, a private plane, incidentally. Awesome. Touched down in La Jolla, CA. My family and I lived there now permanently. May of 2006, I did the Annihilation Method launch with Neal Strauss, bought my dream home, began surfing, created the dream business and started to become a little bit aware of this increased ease of influence that was happening. I was just like, you know, things have gotten significantly easy here. I didn’t put two and two together about this exercise until like years later. I’m a little slow. My personal income for that period, post September 2005, when I did the exercise I’m going to share with you, $1.5 million. Wow. I was really stoked, considering that it was just me and I was moving my family. Imagine doing all that, like moving cross country is stressful enough, right? So not only was I able to locate a new place, sell my house, move my immediate family, leave all of our relatives and everything, the home we grew up at, moved to a new city. All the stress and pressure and all that. I still managed to somehow make $1.5 million. Here is what the end result looks like today. All the non-fun businesses, I just turned them off. Some folks that are here are clients of some of the businesses that I didn’t really enjoy very much. For example, my Ultra Underachievers class taught niche marketing. I got to the point where I just ran out of stuff to teach. It’s like, well, I don’t really know how many other way I can say find out what people what and sell it in two years, so what am I going to do now? So I just turned it off to eliminate the stress of trying to come up with new rehashed stuff. Pressure gone. All the non-fun customers gone. See you later. Thank you. May you live your life forever in peace. I hope you find happiness eternal. Today I get paid a fortune – literally, just obnoxious amounts of money. I almost don’t want to tell anybody because I’m afraid that they will like go, oh, damn, dude. I’m sorry that was a mistake. You’re supposed to make like $7.00 an hour to essentially make, admittedly stupid yet fun videos with and for my friends and help people get rich by helping others. It’s my job. I essentially goof off, tell jokes with my weirdo friends and get paid a fortune for it, which is great. I am now a cash multi-millionaire, which is multiple times cooler than being a cash one millionaire. That’s pretty neat. And I get to surf more, which is awesome. Perhaps – well, actually not remotely the best outcome of this, but a significant one, it’s now within my market I have effortless influence and the income that I make within my market and my community, I do so effortlessly, without stress, without drama, without convincing, without arm twisting. Very few people get angry when I send them emails and try to sell them stuff, which is outstanding. So, before we begin, do you agree with me on any level at all, that goals and things and stuff are irrelevant in the big picture for our overall contentedness and happiness in life? Yes? A show of hands. Yep. Cool. We know that our brain tries to convince us – well, our sub-conscious knows better, but our brains try to convince our sub-conscious that these trivial things matter and I think in doing so what happens is we create this internal struggle that inhibits our ability to actually get anything done. So if you are like trying to sell I’m a nice person, you should be healthy and then you, like, really just want to live in Vegas and do a bunch of blow with hookers and stuff, it’s going to really be difficult to sell the “I’m mister nice guy, let’s all be healthy” business. It’s an extreme example, but it’s the easiest to understand. You get how that would be hard, when you have that internal struggle. You can dress right, look health, say the right stuff; it’s just not going to work out. People might buy your stuff but you are going to be miserable. It will blow. So what we want to do is we want to align our brains with sub-consciousness, which we are going to do today. All right. We can all breathe a sigh of relieve because this ends the somewhat weird, heavy-duty conceptual stuff. 72271
You know, that is not even remotely true. It is still going to be a little bit weird and heavy-duty and conceptual, but a little bit easier to follow now. Here is how it is. I figured out, maybe, the equation on a very basic level of how all of this stuff works. I would like for you to remember my earlier disclaimer that I am not a psychologist, I don’t know anything about it and no one should really listen to me ever for any reason. But if you were to listen to me, this is what I would tell you. The formula is E+I = L. E stands for Experience. I think we can all agree now that we don’t really want the stuff. Even Rich, earlier, said in the first part of his presentation yesterday. After thinking for so long that Internet entrepreneurs wanted the money – do you remember? What do they really want? Freedom. What is freedom? Experience. We don’t want the stuff, we want the experience. And we want the experience that the things give us. It’s starting to get a little heavy. Stay with me here. I stand for Identity. Our experiences, beliefs and values create our identity. You can actually have those experiences externally, such as I am now playing baseball and all that kind of stuff. Or you can have them internally while you are daydreaming, running the beer commercials in your mind. But that plus beliefs and values creates our inner identity. The L is Life. I believe that experience plus identity equals life. They work together, I guess, to form our lives, or at least our concept or perception of what our lives are. Here is the big ah ha. What we all want is, me, you, everybody else, is a new life. We don’t want the stuff. We want the new life. This is not at all remotely given to you from the perspective of, “So now you all need to go out and change your lives forever.” As far as I know, there is nothing wrong with your lives, right? Isn’t that funny, how it’s like, today is going to change your life. And you’re always like, yea! Like, no one ever says it’s going to change it for the worse. Like, what if it sucks? Like, today we are going to change your life. Yeah, because we’re cut off your left foot. It was pretty good to start with. So I will illustrate it. When a family buys a new home, they are not buying brick and mortar and shingles and carpet and stuff. They are buying that new life that they will experience in the home, right? They don’t want the home, they want the new life. That is a very basic thing. I believe that applies on some fundamental level to every single thing that is sold ever. Some part of your brain is saying is this going to move me towards or away from my core identity? All of us – mine, yours, all of the rest of the world out there; that’s the way it works. So here’s how to create a new life. First of all, when I told you about that whole nine month experience I had, would anyone like to experience something similar? Yes. Cool. You never know, right? Some people may be, like, no. I’m happy. The bank’s nice. I’ve got health benefits. Shut up, get a hair cut. What makes you think I haven’t already? Sorry, that was not intended for this audience. If we all live an average of 40 more years, give or take, I guess. On average all of us in this room might live another 40 more years and we’re going to live 14,600 more days, starting now, from today. Now if you look at what a life is, it is really made up of individual days. Remember when we said our experiences really shape our lives, our experiences and identity. Well, you get the experience from every single day. I believe that if we want to find out truly what this core identity we have within us is, and we want to learn how to identify it in other people, we have to create the ideal day. We have to identify what the perfect day in our lives would be. So typically, it’s like, well, what do you want your ideal life to be? Well, I live in this big house and I’ve got a Ferrari and all that stuff. And that’s okay but it is the individual day that holds the key to what you truly want, what we all truly want. When I say you, I am not like preaching at you at all. Like, forget me; it’s us. We are all collective. So here it is. That is a lot of build up leading up to this one question, right? Good lord, I’ve been here for like three hours! When I told you I did this exercise in September of 2005, the entire exercise was to simply answer this one question: If there were no limitations or consequences, what would your perfect average day look like? Not that heavy, right? Now we are into the dangerously new-age stuff, and we are no longer going to talk about weird conceptual heavy stuff, which is cool.
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Okay, language is very powerful. So let me dissect the question for you. When I say limitations, I mean if we have no financial, geographic, health limitations or limiting people. So if like a perfect day – your idea of a perfect day is you wake up on the beach in Hawaii and you live in Macon, GA. Well, let’s pretend that there are no geographic locations, right? Let’s pretend that we have all the money we could possibly want. If your perfect day is to wake up and go surfing and you’ve got a broken leg, let’s pretend that your leg is not broken. Easy stuff. If you have limiting people in your life and your perfect day is to be away from those limiting people, let’s just say you got away from them. Consequences are important, that stuff that could get you into trouble. So it might be tempting to say my perfect day involves waking up, drinking a liter of Vodka, going and racing my Formula I car to be followed by a cocaine binge with a truckload of hookers that will kill you. So I don’t think, realistically, that is your perfect average day. And finally, I use the word “average.” It’s very important that you really get the language right in this. You could do it every day and not get sick of it or get killed. Average, everyday stuff. Now you might be thinking – well, never mind. It is like a 400-part question, really. But it is still two easy steps. Step one: build a giant house. Step two; walk through the door. When you think of this perfect day, it is important not to think about stuff. We’re going for experience. That’s why the question is framed around a day. If you say life, you think about stuff. We all do. We think about the big mansions and the cars and the jets and that stuff. So where would you live in this perfect day? You don’t have to write all this stuff down. These are normal questions, right? What would your house look like? Would it be clean inside? What would it smell like? What time would you wake up? What would you do in the morning? What would you think about in the morning? What would you say? What are your first words of the day? What are your first thoughts of the day? It is vitally important to drill down to the seemingly mundane weird stuff. And when you do this exercise and I don’t expect you to do it now, because it took me – I’m a little bit slow – but it took me four hours to do it. I had literally 11 or 12 pages of the answer to the question. What would you have for breakfast? Mundane, but still, if you’ve got a certain thing you like to eat, don’t like to eat, place you like to go. I’ve got as specific as to drill down into mundane stuff like what I was thinking about when I took the children to school and what I was thinking about when I dropped them off and what I was thinking about when I got home. The more detailed you get about this, the more clear you become and the more profound your outcome will be. Where would you spend the first half of your day? Would you go to yoga? That is what my wife does every day – yoga. I got to say I am a big fan. I like that. There are a lot of benefits to that, you know. Hey, wow, this is great. Well, she could go to wrestling or something. I guess maybe that would be cool, too, now that we think about it. What would you have for lunch? Seriously. What would you have for lunch? Who would you eat with? What would your friends be like? When I answered this question I re-wrote the behavior of my friends. I believe the specific answer was, we have a healthy lunch at a good place that’s got fresh food that we enjoy, our conversation is not about idle gossip but more of a celebration of the fun we have had earlier in the day and since the last time we saw each other. So what will you talk about? What are your friends like? So imagine another way to frame this question is if whatever you write down you have to live that day, every day for the rest of your life. That is another way to look at it. What would you do for personal fulfillment? I’ve tried and you can’t screw off all of the time. You’ll end up wanting to do something for personal fulfillment. What life purpose would you strive towards? That’s a big one. Try to answer it honestly because you might find like I did that your answer is dramatically different from what all of your energy and time is focused on right now. If it is you’ve got a serious mismatch and that blows. It’s going to come across in every presentation you do. What would your business be? What time would you start work? What would you actually do at work? For mine, it was coming up with evil schemes. The use of the word evil there is not really very nice sounding, so I define an evil 73273
scheme as just something fun, as said in jest. What are your clients like? What is your relationship like with your spouse and your family? I wrote mine down. What do you and your kids talk about? What is that like? Not like we like each other, but why? What fun stuff do you do? What do you like about each other? What does your spouse like about you? What do your children appreciate within you? You have to live this day every day forever – every day. Just imagine Osama’s got the button on to destroy the world, or his finger on the destroy the world button. If you deviate from this day at all, he’s going to press it. So you’ve got to live it every day. Why I put this under the really big stuff I don’t know. I guess that is a reflection of where my mind is, right? Dinner is family stuff, right? It is in my house. So would you have dinner with your family? Would you go out? What would you like to eat? Who do you eat with? What would you talk about? What would you do at night? Who would you do it with? I had a little Bevis and Butthead moment there. I said, “Who would you do it with at night.” Hey, like, speaking of that, you don’t have to show this to anyone but if the answer is dramatically different from your current situation you should put it down. You don’t have to show it to anybody. I am not asking you to do that. I’m going to show you some of mine, though. Where would you do it? What would your thoughts be as you went to sleep? That was a big one for me. What are you going to think about, those last conscious moments of the day? Where is your mind? Where is it now? Do you go to bed worried about stuff? Do you go to bed thinking about where the next sales come from or what’s going to happen if Google slaps you? It blows. That’s no fun; I’ve done that. It is awful. All this build up for this one little question. Sound really hokey? Yeah? Maybe? Raise your hands if you’re like, “Dude, all this for one stupid question? What the hell?” One dude? Thank you for being honest. I would never have raised my hand. I would be like, “No man, its fine. Really, it’s cool.” I would have never ever – I really agonized over whether or not I should present this right now because typically it’s like I do these things, I rarely do them, I tell some jokes and disguise content as entertainment most of the time. It goes over very well and then people say we really enjoyed that and I get to go home and it was fun, right? But I was hoping I could really contribute back to my community today. So that is why I am here. So, I did the exercise. I did not do it as this I want to develop and identify my inner core stuff. Had anyone presented the exercise to me in that way, I would have never done it. I would have said, yeah, whatever, shut up. I just did it because I was like miserable and every day sucked. I was like, okay, what the hell do I want to do? And I was like, well, let’s pretend a perfect day, right? Check this out. [Indy] and I wake up with the sun and laugh about funny things our children did as we watch the day break over the ocean. Incidentally, the reason I am giving this presentation today is because I moved from one office to the other after my Mass Control launch. I moved into an office closer to the beach and I found the piece of paper – actually the notebook with all the answers in it. And I started reading it and I had this big ah ha moment. So I dug it out and here are the answers to some of my questions. So the first one is, what do you do when you wake up in the morning? What are you thinking about? That was my answer. Check this out. That is the view from my bedroom. Can you believe that? None of this was planned for me. It just happened. That is the first thing I see when I look out the window. That’s it. Ta da! Weird. I was starting to think this might not be so much bullshit but I need lots of convincing, so I am going to assume that you do too. In the morning we’re excited to get outdoors and exercise. Remember, I was 25 pounds overweight. My activity was to go eat lunch and then go to Barnes and Noble and then go have a re-lunch. I hated exercise. I wrote it down, though, because I wanted to have this in my ideal life. That was it. “In the morning we are excited to get outdoors and exercise. I look forward to this and view it as fun. It is not a chore or a mundane task but a source for continued fulfillment and well-being. It is fun and I would do it even if it wasn’t good exercise.” See the little dot. That is me Christmas morning, 2007. Every day. I lost 25 pounds. Maybe it’s not bullshit after all. I had never even touched a surf board in my life when I wrote that. Never! I don’t know if I had even seen one in real life when I wrote that. In mine, I would describe the house. I told you not to focus on things, so you don’t make it all about things but if something comes up like it did in mine, I described my home, write it down. “ After exercise we take a shower. Our shower is huge and made of marble and glass. It has a bench to sit on and lots 74274
of jets so we can both get in there.” I want to show you the shower. Six people can get in that shower. Three can sit on the bench and three can shower under the 14 jets that are in there. The people on the bench can help if they like, or they can simply watch. It is up to them. It’s marble. It’s marble. It has a bench. It has multiple jets. It’s the exact same thing I wrote without even consciously saying this is what I am setting out to do. It wasn’t a goal setting exercise. I just said, sure, this day sucks; what would a good day be? You can never really get anywhere unless you know where you are going, right? So the whole point of the exercise for me was not to have this entire life transformation. It was just to see, well, if I am so miserable now, what is it that I actually want?
Your Core Identity vs. Your Empty Shell Identity
So, shell versus core identity. My shell identity was motivated by things, goal driven, and status driven. The reason I was buying the car is because I wanted the people to think I was cool so all the people who thought I was a douche bag in high school could see how cool I was, right? Let’s get honest. Get the money, get the money, get the money. Zippity doo dah. Miserable. That was my shell identity, though, so common on some variation with all of us. The core identity was I truly didn’t give a shit about any of that stuff. I wanted to leave normal society, live at the beach, cultivate an ideal lifestyle and get paid to have fun and contribute to others by doing so. What do you know about that? Huh. What has this got to do with making money, which is the whole point of the conference. Well, I didn’t give you all the stuff that I wrote down. Remember when I said describe what you do at work, when you go to work, where you go to work, and all that stuff? Check this out. In describing my business – at the time, my business was a really big part of my identity. It is not so much, but I described what I wanted it to be. I wrote down, “My business is fun and easy. My main function is to simply come up with cool ideas that help me and my clients make tons of money without being obnoxious about it. It works so well that I am able to generate a huge income from only a small amount of sales.” Okay, check this out. “My customers are cool, fun and low stress. I actually enjoy interacting with them. If I were to encounter them on the street, I would be happy to see them and would not walk the other way.” A complete 180 from the life I was living and my mentality regarding my customers at the time. That’s a nice sounding title, isn’t it? Since I did the exercise in September 2005, I have generated almost $31,000,000 in revenues for myself and my clients. And my clients I mean the dudes I did stuff directly for. God knows what the people I have taught have made. I wouldn’t even count that. Right now my business, one of them, is on pace this year alone to pay me close to $2,000,000 in passive residual income if I never sell another product all year. Are you starting to believe me now when I say please don’t buy anything from me. I am not here to sell you; I’m doing okay. Because this is on video, I didn’t want to use people’s real name, so I used their nicknames. Muller is a friend of mine. I see him regularly. He is the first person who ever recognized me in public. He is my friend and he was one of my customers. As is Sizzle, Butter and Gypsy. And Sizzle, Muller, I see them very regularly, some almost every day. Customers. I hang out with these people. I went to Muller ’s wedding and wanted to. How many times did you actually want to go to somebody’s wedding? I was like, dude, this is going to be killer! All right! I wanted to go. Magic Ryan, Rabble Bowsky, friends of mine. These are all people who were customers, who fell into the previously dreaded, god help us all if any of these people ever call me on the phone and find out where I live category. About three weeks ago, I was leaving the new office, rode my new exotic vehicle, which is a Sector 9 skateboard. It cost me about $100. I rode it down to the beach to check the waves. Hanging out. Decided it was pretty good. I was going to go out and get in the water. I hear this, hey, is your name Frank? I look over and it’s a girl and a couple dudes. The girl was pretty good looking, too. I was like, this just keeps getting better. I said, yes it is. It turns out they were customers. They just happened to be in my neighborhood at my beach. Either that or they were psychotic stalkers. I am going to hope that they were customers. I was glad to see them. In my previous life I would have been horrified and mortified. You know what’s cool? They didn’t hassle me. They were like, ah, dude, you’re going surfing? Yeah. We’re in your class. We’re just making some videos down here. Have fun. Awesome, right? Check this out. 76275
Since I got here in Orlando – I arrived Thursday – I hang out with my buddy Johnny – two random, unsolicited just happenstance emails from New Mass Control students, one with a video attached where he made $25,000 in four hours, the other saying he brought in $90,000 in one week. Does that sound like a little bit of a transformation to you guys, from circumstance? Ah. Would everyone please stand. Do you want to stretch a little bit or something; jump around or whatever you’re supposed to do? Remain standing if having a business that pays you an obscene amount of money where you get to do something that is so much fun that you think to yourself I cannot believe I’m getting paid for this and your customer’s are cool people that you actually like and who like you and you want to hang out with them, remain standing if that sounds cool. That wasn’t a loaded question at all. Remain standing if right now you might be thinking I like life pretty good but I’ve never really sat down and thought about what an ideal day would be. I never really considered what the perfect life would be. If I were to say to you I have a workshop or a class or whatever where we’ll walk through this process together and you will have a clear path of what you want and based on my personal experience what happened to me, I believe it can happen to you as well, would you be interested? Remain standing if you’d be interested. Now, if I were to say this workshop cost $1,000, remain standing if you would be interested. If I were to say this workshop cost $2,000, remain standing if you would be interested. Most people are still standing, the good news is there’s no workshop— you can sit down. This was the experience, the experiment that I was telling you about earlier. This was why I was so emphatic about telling you that I was not really trying to sell you anything. I’m not. There is this fictitious product that doesn’t exist. Look at what just happened. I begun today’s presentation by telling you under no circumstances should anyone ask me to sell them anything. That was the absolute worst sales pitch ever. Don’t buy anything from me. Do not buy anything from me. I just got up here and talked to you guys about some of the weirdest stuff you have probably heard in months if not years especially at an Internet marketing conference.
Selling from Your Core Identity
What happened, with absolutely no effort at all and without any way at all trying to convince anyone of anything or to sell anything at all, the overwhelming majority of the room said they would buy the stuff. Why is that? It is because I’m speaking to you now from my core identity. I did the exercise. I figured out the life I want, who I really was, who I wanted to be, stepped into that person; I didn’t know what was going to happen. If I’d know that I’d done it sooner. I spoke to you from that core centered congruent place. Because I’ve serviced this market for so many years, I know that you guys share the same values as me. So while your dream life may not be to live at the beach or have the marble shower that fits six people, just saying it could, that’s all I’m just saying, or surf or whatever, or grow your hair long and not give a damn. That may not be the exact match. I do know that the core identity of this group is a group that values freedom and the lifestyle and the experience and contribution and overall contentment above all else. Therefore, was I communicating this entire time with your surface identity or with your core identity—core identity. It works. It sounds very weird. I am very weird but it works. We just proved that it works. I know this to be fact. If I actually said give me the money, not everyone that was standing up would say here’s two grand, maybe half would but still pretty good. No convincing, no being an a--hole, no obnoxious stuff, no stress, all is cool. Would you like to learn how to do the same? No thank-you. Okay. Well, the second step—first of all, if you do nothing please answer the question. Please. It will change your life. What more proof do we need? The Secret is out now and all that stuff. Even until a couple of weeks ago until I found the stupid piece of paper that I actually wrote, those people are such charlatans. They are full of shit. What more signs do we need to say this stuff works? Whether or not you do anything at all, please just answer that question. That will do you so much good and you’ll be happy.
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Step two; find out who your market really is. We talk about empathy a lot, right. With great salesmanship you must have empathy. You must know how they feel and think like they think. At least convince them that you do, that’s sort of the key. I believe that you must genuinely identify their core identity and know what their desired outcome is and know what life they really want. Had I focused this whole thing about things and money and you too can have a fancy watch and all that stuff, I wouldn’t have had 90 percent of the folks in the room –I think it was almost 100 percent say they’d give 1,000—90 percent said they’d give 2,000. That wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t speaking to that core. You have to figure out the core. This is critical; none of this will work if you don’t do this. None of this will work if you don’t do this. Low and behold, you must actually give a damn and you must actually help your prospects and customers move towards that core identity. If you don’t care, it’s not going to work and you’re not congruent with your core anyway. So if you’re in a business right now and you honestly don’t give a damn, you’re in the wrong business. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. I’ve been there too. It means you’re not in the right business. You’ve got to care and it’s got to work. You have to genuinely help people. It’s kind of a weird thing to say when we’re talking about helping people. Here’s the weapon I use to help people. I’m touted as a good copywriter, I’m not really. That’s nice to hear, thank you. I’m not a good salesman at all. I can’t even put on a decent pair of shoes. Not a good salesman, not a marketing genius, don’t go taking my trademark, damn it. I’ll take you out. I think I got all that reputation and stuff, people say oh Kern, man, good lord that man has the voodoo, especially right now because I just did this big launch and mass control and all that stuff. Oh yeah, this guys a killer. If you look back, I just do a good job of selling to the Internet marketing crowd. I couldn’t write copy for refrigerators or something. I couldn’t do that. We all know this; let’s just get it on the Internet. That’s all. So there’s a reason why I’m really effective at selling to this market. I’m going to tell you that I can sell to every market. I can’t. I sell really well to this one. I sold okay to the dating market. Had I known this stuff and other niche markets, I would have really been much more effective.
The Instant Bond Method
This is the method they call the instant bond method. This is step one of two of identifying your market’s core identity and learning to speak to it. Probably when I say your market I’m doing everyone a disservice including myself because person to person selling is most effective. If we sit down across the table or preferably side by side at a table, that’s most likely the most effective way to sell. In terms of closing the sale, it’s hard to get better than that. We always think of marketing as we’re marketing to this herd which doesn’t make sense. If selling face to face then we should always think face to face. So when we design campaigns, we usually market to a group of people. You need to design every piece of your marketing as if you were speaking to one person specifically. I’m in a very bad situation now, I’ve got these three bottles of water of here and only one of them is mine. I’m very thirty. I don’t want to have to drink after Walker. You never know what he’s put in it. How else do you think he’s so smart, you know. It’s the smart pills. Am I doing good so far, by the way? Okay, cool. I was very, very apprehensive about trying to convey this. I think if I didn’t have the photographic proof it wouldn’t have gone as well. So when you’re communicating with one person, I call it the core customer. I call it that because I came up with it on the plane when I made that slide. Call this person anything you want but this is like the core, this one person. Here’s how you create that person. If you could magically manifest one single person who would be the typical embodiment of the classic customer or prospect in your market, what would they be like? If you were to ask me to pick them out from a crowd who would you describe. How old are they? Are they married? Some folks that have been around a while might start thinking about list data when we’re doing this. That’s not what I’m getting at. I want you to think about demographics. We want to think about the life of this person. What a typical day in their life is like; who they are, not as a buyer but as a person because we communicate as people. When you get into I’m selling you the buyer stuff, its lame. Do they have kids? What’s their spouse like? The reason I ask that question and the following one which is what does the spouse think of all this foolishness is because we make so many decisions 77277
based on what we believe the opinions of others will be and one of the most influential people in the household is the spouse; except mine where I’m totally in control all the time. It’s all me, all the time. Right! What’s the relationship with the children like? What would this person be wearing? Would they be wearing latex helmet or would it be leather. There are so many forms of headgear now. What do they do for a living? What’s their biggest frustration? What’s their biggest surface desire? Stuff like that. I did this exercise and this was back when I was selling to the Internet marketing crowd from the perspective of newer people just looking to make money. Don’t read that because I can’t fit my description of Bob on the screen. When I did this, again this is for the beginners Internet marketing crowd. I did this exercise some time ago. I created my little dude named Bob. Here’s Bob. Bob is 45 years old and sells insurance. He’s married with two children who drive him crazy. His wife thinks he’s an idiot for trying this Internet stuff. He’s about 25 pounds overweight and wears glasses. He wears a short-sleeved buttondown shirt which is white and he wears kaki pants with it. His shoes are brown leather. His biggest desire is to make enough money to quit his job which pays him $45,000 a year. That’s Bob.
Who is Bob in your Market?
If you were to go right now—if we could teleport to a typical beginners level Internet marketing pitch fest seminar, that’s who you would see. Lots of Bob’s at those. Not so many Bob’s here, it’s not that event; different crowd. Who is your Bob? The question you need to do is you need to identify your Bob. Cool? This is step one of two steps. Remind me sometime to become a surgeon. We’re going to cut open the femoral brain lobe. No, sorry. Just by doing this exercise we’re already half way there to identifying your market’s core identify. You’re already 100 percent ahead of most people in the market. Everyone else is a little bit of a strong [inaudible]. What we’re doing right now, now that we know who we’re writing to specifically, you can influence them on the surface. When I identify who Bob really is, I know that Bob is drawn to the big paycheck images. I know that Bob wants the new car because Bob is new to all this stuff. Bob is the guy that’s at the insurance job miserable with kids that are driving him crazy. The dude’s coming home, he’s confused, he’s scared and all that kind of stuff. That’s what he wants right now. When I know that sort of stuff, we can influence on the surface level. Surface level influence works really well. Almost everything we’ve ever seen is surface level. When you do this, you’re better at selling to your market than most people are; just this surface level stuff. Most folks sell to their market without really thinking about who their customer is. It’s just step one. If you stop here at step one you’re still going to come away with a lot. I sold instant Internet empires based on step one. I did $640,000 personally in sales on the front- end; the backend sales were more. According to the FCC documents it was $640,000 anyway. I created a product called Info Millionaire which I really enjoyed selling. I thought it was a great product. I made around $300,000 or so from doing that. Pretty good, not bad, that thing was only up for a couple of months. I made my Underachiever Mastery Course, surface level influence after identifying Bob. Bob gave me a million bucks or so from it. Surface level influence with this empathy thing; Bob gave me around $2M. Thank you, Bob. If you want to absolutely crush it and have more influence and sales than you can stand to the point where you actually have to say in all seriousness, please do not buy anything from to a group of people with money who have proven to buy stuff from people like me, here’s what you do. You become Bob, metaphorically speaking. Do you remember the question that I asked you to ask yourselves about your perfect average day? Now that you know who Bob is, it’s time to pretend. You need to pretend like you are Bob. This is why I was telling you not to look at Bob like a person on a direct mail list data source. That’s why we need to know the mundane things about Bob; what his kids are like; what he wears; what he does for a living. We don’t care if Bob has an American Express card with $10,000 on it. We don’t care about that marketing data, we want personal data. Step into Bob’s shoes and you’re on the magic question effortless transformation 2000 exercise as if you were Bob. Are you going to be exactly right? No. You’re pretending to be someone who is a representation of thousands of people within a market. You’ve never met Bob. You’re going to be close enough. 78278
Now you know who Bob really is. Now you know what Bob really wants. So, remember when I was giving all my weird ethereal sounding stuff. When you meet someone and you have this connection with them, you don’t even know why but you really feel bonded to them and you like them and they like you and you feel like there would be no convincing or arm twisting or anything that’s involving you guys, when you do this now, you’re speaking from your core to Bob’s core. Here’s the real Bob. I think you should also know that when I came up with who Bob was, I did it years ago. It was by no-means any insult to this ideal person. There’s nothing wrong with making $45,000 a year or wearing brown leather shoes or whatever. I’m not trying to say that Bob sucks and should be taken advantage of or anything like that. Here’s the real Bob. Notice that behind the back? Pretty good. Real Bob is significantly afraid of loss and embarrassment in my market; significantly afraid of loss and embarrassment but does not want to openly admit it. Bob’s a typical male and we fellows don’t like to admit that we’re scared of stuff. We’re scared to. We’re afraid to admit that we’re afraid of stuff. Bob wants a lifestyle more than things. Bob wants significance and contribution more than being; significance and contribution--big drivers by the way. Bob wants respect and credibility. Bob wants to be young again. That’s the real Bob. Remember when I showed you the results of selling to Bob on the surface to surface basis before I really got to know Bob? Before I became a weird psychotic stalker and pretended to be Bob. Once I started figuring out who Bob was, the first thing I tried to sell was the Serializer System; one-million dollars from 100 customers. I got to keep it all, no affiliates, no big lists, no big fancy launch, nothing. This one sort of counts; I faked it with the Neil Strauss launch because I’m not in that market at all. I can’t really step into the shoes that much of the guy trying to pick up women and it doesn’t really speak from core to their core because it kind of weird’s me out a little bit. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it but it’s just that I’ve got daughters. Part of me is like here’s how you should pick up girls but if you ever do this with one of my daughters I promise you I will draw and core you. It’s not like it’s working out that well. But it still worked out pretty good $1.4M. Now that I have a better understanding of what Neil Strauss teaches and what that’s all about I think I could do a much better job of that but still as an experiment. I would like to say publicly that’s not what his product is about and that’s not what he’s about at all. He’s a genuinely good caring person. So, $1.4M isn’t so bad though. The first time anyone had ever tried to do a big fancy launch outside of Internet marketing. So he works in Internet marketing. Okay, let’s see. I hit the nail on the head with Stomper Net. Damn, I didn’t even want to do it; $18.3M. I’m the one that wrote and all that stuff. I’m the one that scripted those videos. I’m the guy that made the markets fall in love with Brad and Andy. It’s me; $18.3M smackers. Pretty good. Pipeline and profits, $3.1M. Mass control which I just launch a bunch, $400 billion, zillion dollars. The refund periods aren’t over yet and I don’t want to jinx myself. I exceeded my expectations, dramatically. It was the easiest one I’ve ever done. Strange, if you get this down, remember I said effortless influence, effortless income, it’s easy. Experiment began in September of 2005 which is right around two and a half years. Remember what I did on the surface level when I just did the empathy thing? Around $2M. Now it’s around $31M. It works. Very strange, right? I know lots of people are like okay, we’re going to find out what the best subject line is today. It works, do it. After I made this long protracted obviously strange presentation for you, it occurred to me that it had absolutely nothing to do with the stuff the sales letter for this event talks about. I worked myself into a bit of a panic because it was too late to change everything because it was this morning when I was reading the actual sales letter. I was like shoot; I’m not supposed to talk about this stuff at all. So, I know folks might be thinking okay that’s really cool and everything but what do I do and say specifically to people to get them to buy my stuff? Am I going okay on time, incidentally? Fellow? Am I getting the signals for yes or for no? I’m getting the no signal. I’ll speak quickly. Here’s the deal. Every piece of marketing that you do, every single thing that you do matters. Every single thing you do, say, think, or write to your market matters, everything. Does everything single thing that you say to market matter, yes or no? 80279
Okay good. I can say things like this to my children, I’ll be like--don’t draw on the wall and it comes out wrong because they still draw. I want to make sure that it’s not me. It always needs to validate the core identity and move them closer to it. If you look back at my most successful launch, perhaps not monetarily but at least with the greatest of ease and I got to keep a lot of the money this time which was nice, it was the Mass Control launch which I just recently did. If you go back and look at the marketing materials which you can find on my blog, www.frankkern.com, you will notice that throughout the marketing money was talked about very little in terms of you’re going to make a bunch of money with this. I didn’t go out and say you’re going to make millions of dollars. I used that big $23.8M figure to get their attention.
Sometimes you need to get attention on the surface level. Surface level attention—money—I’ve got to look at this guy but then went straight to the core once I had the attention. Every single piece of marketing in that launch addressed the core. It had pictures of me at the beach. I talked about living at the beach. I talked about my family. I had pictures of my children on my computer and the videos. It was all about significance and contribution that the market could make in their marketplace. How they could build a better life. How they could communicate more effectively for good. Not about the money, every single piece addressed that core identity and was written to them. What was the other thing I had on there? It moves them closer to it with results in advance. You can’t just talk about it and paint a pretty picture. Every single piece of marketing that you give actually has to help people. Imagine that’s just patently ridiculous but it does. If you look, every single piece of marketing that I gave out was not clever salesmanship, what not awesome copy or well produced video or anything; it was just be being a regular dude helping people out. You need to build a list, here’s how you build a list.
How to Communicate Better to Your Market
You want to learn how to communicate effectively and not be obnoxious? Here some tips that you can do. By the way, my stuff is pretty good, I think you might like it, maybe you can buy it. That was the whole message, results in advance. You can move someone closer to their goal in your marketing, every single step that you move them on that timeline to their desired outcome, every time you move them closer by helping them, their desire to buy your stuff increase as does your credibility. It goes up expediently with every single step. The results in advance list favor technique beach video – that was weird sounding line. If you look at my blog you’ll see my marketing stuff. You’ll see there’s a video that shows people how to build a list, results in advance. I give the people the technique which shows them how to get more money out of their money by doing them a big favor and then asking them a favor in return, results in advance, immediately applicable stuff that they can do now. The Beach Video which aptly entitled, naked dudes playing volleyball or something like that was speaking to their core identity because it showed me on a journey to the beach. I ended up at the beach. All core identity. Finally, sometimes to avoid seeming like you’re patronizing people, you can’t come out and say this is what you’re probably thinking to a market because no one wants to be told what we’re probably thinking over and over again. After awhile you’re like dude you don’t know what I’m thinking, shut up. That’s normal. Sometimes you have to borrow their voice and let someone else be their voice. In this case if you look on the blog and see my marketing, you’ll see a case study with a guy names [inaudible] Chantry, he is another Internet marketing dude who interviews me. He borrowed the voice of the market and said – when I saw this, I thought it was hype. What’s the difference between this and manipulation? Why is this so good? He basically grilled me. He borrowed the voice of the market, essentially. He spoke for them in a true congruent manner. That is it. I have to wrap up. Sorry, got to go. Thank you.
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America’s
number one marketing wizard Jay answers specific questions from the audience on:
Abraham
• How to go online profitably when you’ ve been doing business offline for years ... • S imple ways to approach ultra lucrative JV partners to create blockbuster endorsements that can explode your business exposure overnight ... • T he thinking process behind creating a USP as powerful as F ederal E xpress ’ s ... • T hree tips for connecting deeply with your prospects ...( so much so that they will come back to over and over again for advice and ... hint ... hint ... sales )... I’ve been around doing this so long that I decided today I’m not going to give you a theoretical or an ideological or a philosophical presentation because you’re probably going to have more of those yesterday, the day before and today. What I’m going to do for an hour and a half is offer to specifically personally address your biggest marketing problem, issue, challenge, or opportunity relative to my skills set. Just so we’re clear even thought this is highly, highly prejudice towards online marketing I don’t purport to be an online marketer. However, with that stated I’ve had the good fortune of impacting a ton of online marketers because general marketing principles are pretty universal. What I’d like to offer to do, if you wish to avail yourself, is a hybrid. I’d like to give you each a chance – I’ll tell you what I’d like to do because it would probably have the greatest value. I would like to give each of you the chance to go around your table and discuss what the most universally valuable question or issue or problem you could pose to me for the whole group as opposed to self-servingly would be because there is a lot more leverage in it. Pick one and then we’ll try to get as many –we’ll randomly have runners go up and down the table to each table and make one of you like the chairman. If you wantto do that, I think that would have more value to you. Do you want to do that?
How do I integrate online marketing and offline marketing when you have an offline presence but you don’t exist online? The question is your presence offline, local, and regional, national, international. Do you want online to be an expansion or just a support? I think the first thing is strategically you’ve got to get clear of what your goal is and why and whether you can use your current offline as a leverage sort of a springboard to get you to a more expansive presence. The biggest problem with most people in business, entrepreneurially and I’m expecting and suspecting that the vast majority of you are going to be startup to a small business or medium which means zero to maybe $20, $30 million. Most small business people don’t achieve much of anything because they don’t have goals. The goals are 81281
not reverse engineered. The goals are not done with the end in mind so you’ve got to start by saying what am I trying to accomplish because if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish integration is a joke so let’s take some scenarios. Then if the strategy you’ve settled on has you transcending the scope of where you’ve been in the past. Let’s say you’ve been a localized merchant or retailer or service provider but now you’ve figured a way through the Internet or through operatives all over the country or the world that you could be intergalactic, first thing you have to do and its part of what we’re teaching this thing we’re doing tomorrow, you’ve got to believe. It really is, belief system. You’ve got to see yourself deservingly capable of manifesting and realizing that. Then you’ve got to realize before you go forward – I always try to preemptively think about all the problems. I learned early in my career, I was a problem solver. I had to figure out what I’ll call forks in the road. Every time I looked at a scenario I thought okay if it goes this way what happens and if it doesn’t what happens. If it goes this way what are the new forks? I always try to get people to think before they even pull the trigger on anything what are all the negatives? What are all the issues? What are all the problems? What are all the difficulties? What are all the differences that I haven’t really dealt with before so that you can integrate those before you jump in with both feet and you’re finger on your nose. Does that help a little bit?
We want to know how we can identify the leverage points in a business. We know the power of the leverage points in each business but how can you identify them? What is the best way to identify them? Okay, you’ve got a business. In a business there is usually 10 to 40 key leverage points. It differs certainly amongst one business to the other but you start by identifying the revenue generating process that is driving the business right now. You look at leverage points in terms of income generation, in terms of higher productivity, in terms of higher qualitative-ness, there are lots of different factors but let’s take my side first because you can look at operation other sides but I’m not expert in that. The first thing you do is take your business and you lay it out. You break out all the processes that integrate together. The gentleman talked about integration; they integrate together to drive the revenue process whether you’re online or offline. Let’s say you’re offline and online. If you’re offline lets say you have a retail facility. The retail facility runs ad, it has yellow pages, and it draws from the shopping area, the facility whether it is a strip mall or whatever. Maybe you do direct mail, you have a mailing list and maybe you have an email list even though you are an offline business. If you have an online presence you bring people in and it is the classic marketing 101 online as you bring a home a lead, somebody who becomes a devotee. You send them something, a report or an email and they start a dialogue. Maybe you have an initial purchase that’s either nominal or whatever and you want to migrate it along. So you lay out all the different progressive areas. The next thing you do is you try the best you can to measure and quantify how they are doing on some criteria that makes sense to you. Again, one size doesn’t fit all. It can be just pure percentage. I do this and I get two percent, the two percent I convert to four percent and at four percent the average order is $22 and the $22, I get four more purchases a year and is this...you’ve got to start – I think it was Deming something about measurability and predictability go alike. You’ve got to know where you are, you’ve got to quantify everything. Most people I’m talking in a little broken. Rich and I have something in common, we’re both poster boys for adult attention deficient so I’ll try to shift a little bit but I’ll try and stay on point. One of the things that most people in business, fail to do is to understand how everything integrates. They all want to go outside. They want more traffic. They want more access to other people’s business. I always start with where you are. There are two philosophies in business growth. I don’t care if it is on or offline. The first is to maximize what you’re already doing. It is the safest and the smartest and the most leverage able to start with because you already have what I’ll call critical mass and velocity in motio. You have stuff going on. 82282
The first thing to do is make whatever is happening better even if it is lame and it is not the best thing you could or should be doing, it’s what brought you to the party so far if your business is reasonably and making a living it is what is supporting you, make it as strong as you can so you’ve got the time and the capability to identify, experiment, breakthrough. For example, in the retail scenario, let’s say that you get so much traffic every day or month. If you don’t know what it is you’ve got to measure it? Then you’ve got to look at what the average sale is. Then you have to look at what people are saying. I’ve tested so many things and we’ve tested everything from the signage outside a store, we’ve been able to double or triple people walking in. We’ve tested the way people are greeted when they walk in the door. We’ve been able to triple. This is all the same traffic, the same dollar, the same cents. We’ve tested different methods at the point of sale and been able to increase two or three times. We’ve tested pre-programming of people with an expectation for a sequence of follow-up activities, efforts, phone calls, visits, letters, emails, whatever it is going to do and been able to increase. You can’t do any of that until you know how you’re doing on or offline. Does that make sense? Does that help a little bit? Again, I wish I could go on and I’m not trying to titillate or tease you, I could get four hours on any one of these and it wouldn’t be a disservice but I’m trying to give you some balanced perspective. Is that adequate for all of you? Will that at least get you started? What you want to do is, first thing; maximize what you’re already doing. You can’t do that until you first know what you’re already doing. You can’t know what you’re already doing until you take the whole process and break it into the processes, sub processes, those are leverage points. The beauty of marketing whether it is online/offline or integration of both is that it is the last bastion of incredible leverage. We have integrated it into our seminar theme for tomorrow but one of my very good friends is Stephen Covey’s son, Stephen M. R. Covey, he’s got a new book out called, “Leading at the Speed of Trust.” I’ve dwelt my whole life in leverage, upside leverages. There are two kinds of leverage in life. There is the kind that if it goes like nothing down real estate. If it all works and everything happens and the market grows and your cash flow increases, you’re fine. If anything goes wrong you lose you’re behind. Then there is marketing leverage where you can make the same effort, the same dollars, the same people, the same opportunity cost, the same marketplace, the same access vehicle, produce three to five times yield and if you have 20 or 30 leverage points and you can get each one of those improving 20, 30, 10 percent, the aggregate impact is hundreds or thousands of percent and you all have that leverage in whatever you’re doing and those of you that are just starting up you’ve got that same leverage in whatever you’re going to do. Does that make sense?
When is the right time to approach the maven in your industry and what approach would you use to contact them?” Okay, that’s a little different. When I was starting out I had a belief system and I still believe it, you have a moral obligation not to use anybody of importance as you guinea pig, unless they do it knowingly and I’ll give you a scenario and caveat for that. I always believe you have an obligation or responsibility to first identify why somebody would –there is a concept of making irresistible offers. That is pretty evident in on or offline marketing. Right? And yet, almost everybody in life and business and matrimony and romance whether they’re trying to get a job or trying to get laid or whatever, they make resistible offers. The first thing is figure out what is going to be irresistible. Then we try to identify before we go, all of the reasons they would be unwilling to do it. If it’s a real maven they’ve probably got more opportunities presented to them than a bus stop has busses coming in a course of a month. So you’ve got to figure out the first things as is certainty it will work, certainty they’re going to be paid, certainty they’re not going to have any problems, certainty they’re going to get the right reporting and then you’ve got to be able to counter the fact that they’ve got lots of other offers. If the maven is somebody extremely desirable and having him/her sanctioned and work with you and it opens the door for you to have a lots more, you might give them the lions share or even all of the profit because you have a 83283
better strategic game you’re playing. You’re not really doing it just to do a promotion with a Jay Abraham or a Rich Schefren, you’re doing it because of Jay Abraham’s sanctions that you can go to the whole world and say hey, they did it and everyone else will take the deal at fair profit splits. Again, I’m sorry I can’t give you one size fits all. I’m not an avid believer – one of the reasons I have lots of different methodologies, principles, concepts, strategies is because you’ve got to create a hybrid that works for you because we’re all not a size 12 perfect whatever. When I’ve done deals and I’ve been very fortunate. Again, I’m not an online marketer but we did like $20 million online in the last 18 or 19 months with joint ventures, I go and I test it. Then I go to people and before I ever ask them to do it, I submit to them the proof, I extrapolate, I give them all the marketing pieces so they can see it. I show them why the website is great. I show them this. If it is a recorded teleconference, I give them the transcript. I show them the three or four other ones I’ve tested so they know that I put effort into it. When I was starting out I had to show credibility in the beginning. I am not belittling you but you are a little person even if you’re a big fish in your own pond. If you’re not known you might get some other people to credentialize you; some influential people that you know in other realms that would give you either letters of testimony or call. When I was getting my first book published, I had all this stature in my industry but nobody knew me in the publishing field and the guy wanted to give me a contract was a very lucrative high six figure contract said how do I know you’re real? I said great question. Nobody else asked me that in the interviews and I went back to my room and I had Tony Robbins, I had Sam George’s—Tom knows him from Tony Robbins. The president called. I had the cofounder of Federal Express call. Fran Tarkington called. Ten people called and left a message on this guy’s phone that I was the real thing and we got the book deal. The point is it is not just like hey maven, you want to do a deal for me? Keep in mind also the big felicity and its been true since I first burst on the scene 30 years ago, most people have things backwards. When you go to a maven you can’t say will you do this for me. You’ve got to say I’ve got an offer that is unique and more valuable to your marketplace, to your readers, to your members, to your buyers than about anything else. Not everything else but anything else. Here are the seven reasons why. Then if the maven is really a king lynchpin to your long term strategy maybe you’re shameless but ethically bribe him or her and you say here’s the deal. You do this promotion. If it only does this you can have all the money. If it does that you can have three-quarters of it and if it does that I want some of it but if you’ll go first, first of all I’ve got to prove that it works, I’ll give you an overwrite of everybody else that takes it on after you for the next six months.
The question people have is how to create a USP? What is the process that you would go through? Of all the things that I’ve taught and I’ve taught USP. I’ll tell you a book that you all should read, it’s very esoteric. It’s called, “Reality in Advertising” by Rosser Reeves. Rosser Reeves, former president of J. Walter Thompson or Leo Burnett or something. He was the man who in the 50’s really discovered, refined and articulated the concept of USP. Of all the things I can teach most of them are relatively easy to grasp. I can give you a fragmented three or four minute answer, you grasp it but maybe it isn’t complete but you can run with it. USP is a very deep and difficult concept not just to grasp but to perfect. I cannot and will not try to answer it in five minutes but I will give you some exercises to help you answer it for yourself. First exercise; think in your life both as a consumer, as a husband, father, mother, as an employee, or as a business owner; business, job, career, also in any other extra curriculum activities—sports, church, political groups that you’re in. What resources you turn to in terms of provider of services, products that you trust implicitly. When you can identify them write their names down. Try very, very ardently to work deeper and say what is it that they represent that other people don’t and how do I see them. That will give you some ideas there.
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Then start looking at as many fields as you can and interview all your friends, neighbors, coworkers who are involved in anything and ask them who the leading source they turn to is and if they got into marketing have them to bring it to you and start analyzing what it is about them. You have to realize USP is a very challenging concept. In its purest superficial sense you want to basically telegraph the most unique preemptive benefit that you possibly can to the target audience that is so self-serving that he/she is its irresistible. We have evolved it to now we call it—you just don’t want to be just a unique selling proposition you want to be seen as the only viable solution to a problem or an objective goal or an opportunity that you alone understand empathy and you alone can verbalize that a clear, more dimensional level than even they can themselves even though they feel it. It gets a little bit tricky from a strategic standpoint. If you really want to come up with USP that is going to give you leverage, distinction, advantage, wealth, you have to understand what the marketplace already is getting and whether or not you can dramatically improve on that or whether you got to, as I said, zig or zag and go from a different point. When I started, my USP was – I found overlooked assets, hidden opportunities, underperformig activities, under value relationships, turn them into windfall profits and convert them to steady ongoing revenue streams all without any risk or cost to you is a pretty good proposition. Then I trained the better part of everybody online and offline who is a marketing consultant and they started marginalizing so you’ve got to keep changing your premise? Does that help a little bit?
Since one of the major strategies that every business is going to use to leverage themselves is going to be joint ventures, could you give us three or four process oriented steps that we should follow to create a joint venture? Oh, okay. I’ve done joint ventures to the tune of $3 billion in 400 industries. Again, let me start with a couple of scenarios. The first thing you have to do is figure out who already has access and trust and a communication channel that is reasonably direct and accessible to the market you want to reach. We have templates and matrix that we’ve created just because I’ve refined it but it can start by whom, what else they buy before, during and after the time they would buy your product or service. What other alternative means do they have that they might pursue besides your generic type of product and service. What other known constance are true about them? Maybe they are a member of a certain group or profession. What other commonalities do they have? You make a list of all these things because when I started doing client work, my first clients were in the gold, silver investment market. The first thing I did was figured out who owned – who owned people wanted to be investors. Duh. Newsletters, seminar companies, people who wrote books and sold them, direct mail, mail-order, and then I said who else has influence not exactly as direct and then there were authors, columnists, former heads of political parties and I started working many different stratums at the same time. I went to all the newsletters and I went to them and I figured out what would make them more money than they were making on their regular business. I showed them in this scenario that the newsletters they were so passionate about were making them a couple of hundred of thousands dollars a year because it was a very marginal business but a labor of love but my making my clients their backend and letter me turnkey, orchestrate, regular, sequential, systematic communication to their lists, this was before emails and direct mail, I could make them millions of dollars and I did and I was very persuasive because I always had their best interest in mind. You’ve always have to be external and be looking at them. If you’re self-serving it won’t work. When I couldn’t make joint ventures with all of those, I would find an influence that was sitting sort of dangling with no allegiance. I would get them. One time, for example, when we were going to the outside market, we got Fran Tarkington to 85285
sign a letter because he was known back then. One time we got Scott DeGarmo, the former publisher of SUCCESS. Even though nobody knew Scott DeGarmo, they knew his distinction. So the first thing is to find organizations where not just the company but a personage within the company, Jay Abraham of Abraham Group or Rich Schefren of Strategic Profits, or Bill Gates of Microsoft, will sign a letter or do an interview or do something that through implication and through association credential-izes you. When you do strategic alliances, the first thing you have to realize is almost nobody is sitting anxiously waiting for your call or your email. I don’t do most of them with emails. I do most of mine with letters followed up by calls. I’ll send them FedEx or I might even send them with – I might pay a $100 to have my propositions delivered by a messenger and I might even pay a legal messenger to sit in the office and not leave until the recipient signs for it. If I don’t revere it why should I want him or her to? I was giving you some quick nuances. There is a lot of psychology in doing strategic alliances. The first thing is that you’ve got to be able to demonstrate to somebody – I’m giving you a lot of little fragmented little points here. You’ve got to be able to demonstrate to somebody that your proposition will augment but it will not supplant what they’re already doing. Then you’ve got to be able to show them how you protect them from all kinds of non-verbalized but highly important fears that will surface either specifically or abstractly. You’ve got to show them how the money is protected, how they’re going to get paid, how their client is never going to have a bad experience, if there is any problem its made right whether made right means giving their money back, giving them another one, you’ve got to think of all the things that would be negative or a reason I would reflect, contemplate, procrastinate, defer or reject something and you’ve got to pre-overcome that with a preemptive initial salvo and that requires some very deep critical thinking which is a discipline that most people have never been taught to do. When I do strategic alliances, the first time I ever proposed them most people say no, even my friends. You know I’d say no too the first time if the tables were turned and then I would look at this and that and I’m on a merciless, a tenacious long-term sequential communication. I know that even if they say yes the deal hasn’t happened. A lot of people get real cocky. They call somebody and they say yeah, yeah, we can do it and they think they’ve made a deal. That’s not a deal. That’s willingness. Getting someone, first of all, to embrace it—its hilarious. We get all these emails that say—we’re doing this thing and we want you to be because you’re a man of influence—we want you to promote it and you have 20 percent of the gross. We can do deals all day long and keep 90 percent of the gross if I want to or 100. I can show someone that they’re lucky to have me – I mean this very candidly and not—they’re lucky to have me involved. They can pay me not only all the money but a part of the backend and they’d be lucky to have me do it. You’ve got to realize that true mavens, no matter what the category, they may not be masterful in knowing the leverage they have in strategic alliances but they don’t need you, you need them. If you come to them with weakness they’ll never work. You have to demonstrate that you see a critical area within their business that you can contribute to; that you can enhance that’s better for them and better for their market. It could be a profit center for them, it could be a missing link and you’ve got to be able to explain it and again that’s probably I can do right now.
If you were here and wanted to be there could you talk about the three to five most impactful actions that you would take to be the maven in whatever market it is? First thing I would do is really learn what I have come to refer to as the strategy of preeminence. I’ve done it a bunch of times for people. Maybe I’ve done it for Rich’s audience, maybe I haven’t. It starts with wanting to be seen as the most trusted advisor. It starts having incredible empathy trying to understand how somebody feels, what they’re trying to do, what the problems are they never have realized. It is a shift of not falling in love with your product or your company or your industry but falling in love with the clients you serve. It has to do with developing the ability to project into the future the improvement, the protection the enhancement in their life that will occur when your product or service or company is at work protecting and that’s the first thing. 87286
Second, my skill came from a genuine interest in human beings. I love human beings. I get tired being on stage. I’ve been doing it for 30 years but I love the entrepreneurial animal. I love the hopes the dreams. I love the qualitative ones. I don’t like the ones that are just doing it for the money and not doing it for the market. I start with that empathic respect for the market I’m trying to serve. I think my respect and my appreciation and my connection dramatically exceeds everyone else because I’m more in love with them in the figurative sense. I’m massively interested in everything and everyone outside of just the industry and the specialty. The real greatness of creativity and innovation of wisdom, of knowledge, of whatever you want to call it, global CAT scan understanding comes from extending yourself. I read everything I can that is not relevant to marketing. I engage everybody I can about anything. I’ll engage the janitor, the housekeeper; I want to know as much as I can. Then I spend an enormous amount of time trying to put myself in the mind of the market. When I work for a client, with all due respect, if everyone of you who have a big company came rushing up here and said take me on, take me on, I would qualify it and say well maybe I will but you have to realize if I do you’re not my client, your market is. You’re transparent. It is not about you, it is about them. So I’m very mindful of being focused on the marketplace I’m trying to address. I think about it a lot. I communicate from the heart. If you read my communication whether you like it or not, it’s not dissimilar to how I talk because it is real, it is genuine, it is authentic, it is not hyperbolic although sometimes I may use some – I like Polly – I like a lot of big words. I get very fascinated intellectually but I spend an enormous amount of time trying to think about what it would be like to be them. The next thing I do and I’ve told this everybody it is one of my secrets. I call it the Amazon.com school of business, USP, empathy, knowledge. I go to Amazon.com all the time. I look up the top 25 books in as many different variations of a category that I’m working on. I look at all the titles of the best sellers because most of them the books are selling not because of the editorial brilliance but because of the title and the subtitle. I write all the titles and subtitles down so I can master that understanding of problems, solutions, desires, and then I go and review the reviews; the fours and fives and the two, ones and zeros. The four and fives are un-hedged subconscious expression in passion of what people really got out of it that they wanted. So, in their own words the two, ones, are angry, passionate subconscious expression of what they’re frustrated by. It really helps you to have an understanding of them. It is hard. My mind is wired a certain way. I’m very fortunate. I’m been doing this for 30 years in 465 different industries and hundreds of thousands of businesses and thousands of real clients that I’ve worked with so it is a little different. I think I would learn to ask a lot of questions. When I got started I worked all night at a job and I was a young 18 – I got married when I was 18 and I had two kids when I was 20. The [need is someone 40] but the world didn’t care. I had no education. I worked in a bunch of horrible and medial and pretty wretched jobs at night to pay the rent. During the day I found all these – you would call them semi-mavens; prominent people in Indianapolis and different fields of endeavor. I was such a young and fascinating enigma that almost all of them let me sit in their office for hours at a time at my own expense watching them do business and then everytime something was done, asking them lots of questions. I think the fallacy, Noah, is that most people believe – I’m not saying this to be disrespectful to Rich or any of my contemporaries who do seminars — we do too, we’re doing one tomorrow. You think that in a couple days or hours or if you listened to a set of CDs or DVDs you’re going to transform yourself? It doesn’t work that way. This is nothing more than preparation. You’ve got to go out and do it. Most people have been inculcated by a bunch of superficial online marketers and offline marketers to believe that – the greatest secret is there is no secret. You’ve got to do it and you’ve got to keep doing it. You get up in the morning and if you don’t bath and you don’t put clothes on, if you don’t eliminate, if you don’t hydrate and take nutrition, sooner of later it is not going to work anymore.
How do you craft an offer and make it valuable to the customer? The first, I think, is the ability to express powerfully that you understand something that they desire that they’ve never put in words. That’s not just a headline but it is a whole integration in the offer. Then it is engaging them – I think most of the copy, certainly online and offline it is a lot better. There is a lot of really cool offline stuff. There 87287
is a book that was written a couple of years ago. I think it is still around. It is call, “Million Dollar Mailings.” It’s by a guy named Denny Hatch. He publishes like 40 mailings that just lasted for 20 years and still pulled and you can see how engaging they are, how respectful they are, how natural they are, how they demonstrate really who they are so you want to be able to really connect. You can’t connect if you’re not genuine. If you’re not writing the copy you have to find a copywriter who is not going to just throw a bunch of hyperbolic phrases there and a bunch of bullets and a bunch of bonuses because I think the market is pretty immune to that. You do want to – I think it is very important today to take people—there is a concept and Gary Halbert and all those guys were friends of mine. We were at a conference one time and there was a guy who I think is still around and alive. We get older and we don’t keep track anymore. His name was Ben Suarez.. He was in Ohio and he was very, very successful marketer. He had a concept called a greased chute, sort of like a slide. The idea is that you have to take them on a journey that they can’t stop and you don’t have any spikes that will catch their knickers and get them hung up going down the slide. You start with an understanding—what are all the things that I would want? First of all, I would want you to show me that I understand something you want that no one else said. Then I would walk you through a scenario that demonstrated that I understood what you were going through in your life. Then I would walk you through a scenario to show you how much better off it can be. Then I would prove it to you and I would prove it different ways. There are lots of ways to prove. One is by demonstrating other people you’ve helped but not hyperbolically telling stories. Rich is very astutely – I’ve always said one of my great skills is I’m a very good raconteur. I can tell a story from the heart with sincerity that ethically seduces people because it is so believable. It’s so exciting but not in a hyperbolic way. I think understatement is pretty powerful. I think then when you get into the proposition you can’t sell me something until I know that I want it and I know that I believe it will work for me and I know what my life could or would be like with at work for me. Those are things people seem to forget to put in and then you’ve got to authenticate it. Most of it is like its so unbelievable that it is yawn able. You authenticate things many different ways. You can authenticate things with – way back when we started this was pretty cool. When we started doing seminars we used to do thousands of people at $5,000 to $25,000 a year. This is when I was this guy’s age and I had more stamina. We would run 20 page inserts in the airline magazines. Hopefully, it has been a pleasant hour and a half. I’ve enjoyed it. I hope I’ve made some meaningful contribution. I hope to see some of you in our program tomorrow and the next days. I hope all of you got a lot out of Rich’s program. Thank you.
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Hard hitting A list copywriter John Carlton presents new 17 point copywriting formula for the first time:
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• T he three basic questions that make writing sales copy ten times easier ... • What three books you should read in order to get a solid foundation in writing copy... • H ow to position yourself in tone ... and the type of testimonial that will make you the “ go - to guy ” that your customers will want to buy from ... • The “greased chute” secrets that A-list copywriters use to keep prospects reading... I gave a day and a half workshop on Saturday and Sunday just prior to this. We had about 20 to 25 people in there. How many people wanted to come to that but just couldn’t make it happen? A lot of people in the room. It was killer. You really missed out. The rest of your life will be less for that loss. I am not some kind of great savant and I’m not a genius. I think I have to give Frank Kern credit for the word genius now. He’s got the trademark on it or something. There is nothing special about me except that around the age of 32, I realized that I was one of the biggest losers on the block. I was a slacker. I was totally clueless about life, about marketing, about everything. I was doing dead-end jobs and not just not going anywhere just stuck in a rut. I had an epiphany and I got busy and the things that makes me different than other people is that I took notes during the entire journey that I went on. So over that 23 year journey when I finally hit a point where I decided it is time for me to start sharing what I know with other people in a serious way becoming a guru as we call it, I had the notes. I had stacks of them. So the thing that sets me apart if nothing else is that I paid attention on the way. I did it the hard way and I came from a place that is probably even worse than the worse person in the room here. I was sleeping on a couch not even on a friend’s couch. I was sleeping on a friend of a friend’s couch down in San Diego and I happened to see a Los Angeles Times lying there, looked and saw my first direct response ad. It was Joe Carvel’s “Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.” How many people have that book? Not very many, you should probably try and track it down. I think it is out of print. The point is that book was a summation, a take-off on Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich.” How many people have read that? Leave your hands up, how many people have read it more than once? How many people read it every year? I read it every year. I also read Claude Hopkins, “My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising” every year. Short books, I always find something new whenever I go back. If you did not raise your hand you did not read “Think and Grow Rich” you need to go do that right now. Order it tonight on Amazon. Anyway, ordering that book by direct response threw me into the world of direct response.
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Anyway, my entry into direct response was as you will remember Frank Kern said the same thing. Rich talked about the same thing. Anybody else will tell you and their journey started, not with just that single step but often with a stumble or more likely an accidental stumble sideways or something that happened that they didn’t plan for, didn’t expect, had no reason to expect and often we were at the nadir of our personal journey in life to that point. You always hear us talk about how broke we were and stuff. I was really broke. I probably had $50 in the bank, a rattle trap car, sleeping on the couch of a friend of a friend. From that journey, once I started get-going, it was the wildest ride of my life. It’s been almost over 25 years now. I think that is why a lot of you are here now. How many people are in—not the nadir, I don’t think you would be able to afford to come to a thing like this but how many people are at a point where you really think you’re either on this beginning of a journey or you’re ready for that journey to start if you can. I think we’ll get right into this. What I’ve got for you is this 17 Point Menu to writing every piece of copy you will ever need. This is the sum total of what I have done unconsciously in my career.
How I got Started in Copywriting
Over the course of my career I shot quickly up through no fault of my own except for the fact that I really dove into this because I grew up clueless. When I was a young man in Cucamonga, California where I grew up—it is a real town. I walked around in the perpetual state of anxiety because I was convinced that everyone knew what life was about except me and they were withholding it from me. So not only was I clueless but I had that negative attitude about even trying. So what I did was – well, my story is kind of long and convoluted and I won’t bore you with it here but basically I took a speed reading course, went and read everything I could in the Torrance Municipal Library from the Dewey Decimal System of 600 to 780 which includes sales, marketing, writing, advertising and all that. Sped read my way through it, found a lot of the books that I thought were really good, read them again and those turned out to be the same books that Gary Halbert and Jay Abraham and other guys that became my mentors had on their bookshelves too. I knew I was on the right track then. I was reading all of that stuff because I thought I needed to do that to get up to speed with everybody else in the advertising world. I was going to go out as a free lancer and try by hand as being the guy that writes the stuff. I really had no clue what I was doing. I had no portfolio, I had no experience really. What I discovered when I walked in to my first agency to ask for a job was that reading alone put me light-years ahead of everybody there. Advertising was in a dark age in the 80’s when I got into it. Long copy was considered a faux pas. Trying to actually sell something was considered futile at best, an offensive thing to do to a reader at worst. It was interesting. Books like the Claude Hopkins books, John Capel’s books; those had gone out of print. The John Collier Letter Book, they were out of print. They are now back in print because I was part of that vanguard that just kept buying the used copies. The 17 Point Menu was what I was unconsciously doing through those years. I was running copy through a gauntlet but I was doing it unconsciously. I had my little list; I was trying to do things. I was knocking off ads. I was doing everything I could to write but I didn’t know exactly what I was doing so it was kind of a hodgepodge. I had a vague idea that I was getting in the right direction. My copy, even the first stuff I wrote, turned out to kick-ass of experienced copywriters at these agencies who had been working for 20 years in the business. The reason was I paid attention to classic salesmanship tactics. I had some inkling that it just struck me as a good idea that long – not just long copy but copy that actually sold. Copy that told stories. Copy that delivered a punch would work where the vapid, boring, crap that they were pouring out both in direct mail and on TV and in print advertising at the time was falling short. What I did in the last couple of years is I started paying attention to that process that I had gone through internally and I came up with this 17 Point Menu. 90290
This is real simple; why learn the pro level secrets of writing copy. This is my motto; nothing good will ever happen in your business until you copy gets written even if you’re doing spontaneous video—and I love video. I think it is great in the last half year or eight months or so, so many people have gotten high speed Internet access and Google video has come around so that we can use video more. There were some technological barriers to be able to use it just a year or so ago. That’s all gone. Even if you’re staring into the camera, you just woke up and you’re sending out a quick message. You saw Jeff Walker walk around with his hand-held video. He’s still writing copy in his head. There is a process that you go through to think about what you’re going to say. When you get good at it you can do it spontaneously. You just go into that mode. You say what you need to say to have the person listening to what you say, do what you want them to do. I really like that acronym KISS—keep it simple stupid. I had that printed out and put above my desk for a long time because we all tend to complicate things. Really, who thinks the Web is complex and complicated in all the technology is kind of daunting? Be honest, a lot of people do. I will tell you that in most cases it is not. If you come across technology that you can not wrangle hire somebody to take care of it. The essentials are the marketing, salesmanship, creating the product.
The 17 Point Menu of Great Copywriting
These points are in the order that I run through them as I prepare to write copy, sit down to do a video, it can be at light speed, neurons firing off or maybe I have to sit down, take a walk, maybe I have to spend a day or two thinking about it.
The Basics of a Great Message.
This has cleared up more confusion in advertising than probably all the books on your shelf right now. Here is who I am, here is what I have for you, here is why it is important for your life, and here is what to do now. Anybody confused by this? Anybody recognize the eloquence and elegance of this simple approach to salesmanship? Raise your hands if this triggers something inside of your head. As I go on, this will become more and more profound.
Your Hot Seat Grinder
Number two is the plug and play elements of your own peculiar elevator chat. The elevator chat that we talk about is when you get into an elevator and it is only a couple of floors before you’re going to have to get off and somebody that you would like to talk to says so what is it that you do for a living? Most people stumble, mumble and are incoherent and at best start a story that will require them holding the elevator doors open as they finish it. Really, the more succinct and the more concise you can make your message—who are you, what do you sell, why are you in this biz, what do you do for your customers, the more precise. This should be a couple of sentences; very short, very profound, very straightforward. If you can’t answer these questions and not take 15 minutes to do it then you’re either in the wrong biz, you don’t know what your biz is or you have trouble communicating.
Your Credibility (be the Go To Guy)
When I write for clients this is what I try to get them to realize. When I write for myself I have to step back and see how I fit into this. People who are writing for themselves you are going to have to figure out what your credibility means to the person that you’re trying to write to. I’ve broken it down into two subsets. Now when we talk about the go-to guy, the go-to guy—the way to stand out in your niche is to be that first guy that somebody thinks of when they have a question about the niche you’re in. You want your email to be received with a smile and not a – oh, god, not another email from Joe. This is where it gets kind of fun. There are two subsets. One is the rational reasons to explain the reason why he bought. He has to go back and by “he” I mean the generalized person that you’re going after—it could be she. He has to go back to his dubious spouse, his nosey neighbors and even worse his arrogant brother-in-law who really wants him to fail. How many people have that brother-in-law in 91291
their life? A third of the room. Those are rational responses. When we talk about the reason why copy—when we talk about giving a person a reason to buy, what we’re talking about is giving him some rational reasons not to just explain to himself but to explain to those people in his life who are really part of the major obstacle of him pulling the trigger and taking out his credit card and buying. The other part is the more fun. It is the emotional eight brain reasons that seal the deal deep inside. There are two reasons why anybody buys anything. There is the reason they’ll tell you they bought it. I like to give the example of the guy in the mid-life crises buying the Porsche. He will tell you it is a wonderful automobile, it is a fine piece of machinery, it is a great investment, and he’ll give you all these reasons that have nothing to do with why he bought it. Why did he buy the Porsche? Of course, he wanted to get in touch. He wanted to feel young again; he wanted to get the pretty girls to give him a look. He may not admit that to himself but that is what you have to know. That is what you have to understand. That is part of connecting with the person you’re writing to. Frank spent a long time on this yesterday and he called it –what did he call it? It was a prospect bonding with her prospect connecting with the – the what?
Identify Your Customer Avatar
Bob, right. The word Avatar – are there any gamers in the room; any online gamers? Avatar is essentially a term that means it is the manifestation of your online presence. So if you’re in a game whatever photo you choose, you can be Superman or a dragon or a wizard or something. They call it an Avatar. It is an old word that goes back to the Greek. We use it just to explain who it is you are selling to. Try to get that image in mind. The idea that Bob is very good but make sure that you understand what her needs are, where it hurts and again, what does she need to hear from you to feel good about buying. This seems simple and straightforward. It is the hardest part of becoming a salesman. I’m going to keep asking these questions. How many people consider themselves natural salesman in the room? Okay, a few do. I will tell you I was not a natural salesman. Every time I picked up a book or talked with a guy who had done face-to-face selling or any of that, I was riveted. I was right there. I wanted to hear everything there was to hear about it. I have a degree in psychology which gave me a little bit of insight, not much. When you start thinking about what does she need to hear from you to feel good about buying. It is not what you need to feel good about; it is what she needs to feel good about. That little instance of empathy makes all the difference in the world. It is the crux of all good advertising.
Get Kick Ass Testimonials
I’ll have some examples of some later stuff that we’re getting, we’re only on number four; here’s five. You saw examples of testimonials, I ran through them. This is the fundamental proof and support for your big promise and your credibility. We’ll be talking about big promise in a minute, credibility is very, very important. How many people have a lack of testimonials that they routinely use in their advertisement. Okay, it should have been the entire room. How many people are rookies and don’t have a business and are here really starting that thing out. Okay, so there are some rookies. Good for you. This is often the kind of step that you take where the opportunities come to you. That is the point I think I was trying to make before about me being clueless. The one thing I had going for me was the – as Frank talked about – the suspension of belief. I didn’t believe that I could actually get out of that hole I was in. I knew I wasn’t going to be sleeping on a couch the rest of life because – actually I wasn’t thinking in the future at all but I had an inkling that at some point I was going to be a job that I’d stay in for a long time and just do the nine-to-five and do all of that. By breaking out of that, all it took was just a desire to just change things, to get doing and do some action. If I needed to read or I needed to put myself out or actually take some risks whether it was financial which wasn’t much of a financial risk for me. We never outdid anything so I didn’t have any money but what I did, if I had $2500 92292
in the bank and I needed to spend $500 of that to get something, a course or something like that, it was kind of a no-brainer even though it was significant portion of my net worth at the time because it was all investments. I was no longer thinking of money as something I needed to hoard and bury in the backyard but rather as a conduit or ticket to the better life. So money became a means to an end. As you go along in your business, for those of you who are rookies, for those of you who are in business and do not have the testimonials, you need to get them. I have had a number of people come up to talk to me at this seminar and they’ve said you did for this for me and it was great or I read this that you put out and did this and it did all these things and my response is always the same; dude, you owe me a testimonial. The testimonials should be specific, short and spicy. The worst kind of testimonial you can have is a rah, rah, testimonial; Joe’s a great guy; you really ought to get his stuff. Ah, it really doesn’t do much. Rather the ones like there, they are specific, they are short and they are spicy. Specific means I was clueless, I was making $500 a month, I took that one idea that you gave and three months later I am not pulling down $15,000 a month; very complex business that has a lot of competitors and I want to thank you for that. That would be an example of a specific, short testimonial. The spicy stuff is—some of my favorites are—one guy said I read John Carlton’s stuff like a 13 year old reads Playboy. I thought that was pretty cool. One of my favorite testimonials came from Jeff Paul who said Carlton really pisses me off. I read his stuff to rip off his ads but I always wind up buying what he is selling. This is another multimillionaire marketer. That is one of my favorite testimonials. Get that rack of testimonials. If you go to my site, www.marketingrebel.com I’m not asking you to go but if you do you will see that there is a wall of testimonials there. That is a fraction of the ones that I have. Most of them were unsolicited, by the way. But if you don’t have them, go ahead and get going on them. That is how you support your credibility. Anybody want to guess why – the people that were in the workshop, you don’t count; don’t blurt it out. You know why you want testimonials? Social Proof. If you say it, it is bragging but if someone else says it, it is a third party endorsement.
USP
USP, briefly, is a term that comes from classic advertising around the 50’s. I think it was Ross or Reeves who was a television guy who did slogans for beer and stuff. He talked about the unique selling proposition. In long copy and in direct response, especially online, that doesn’t quite cut it so I changed it. I’m using the same words but I change it a bit. Your USP should be positioning yourself uniquely in your market in order to sell. Fulfilling on those three things will help you dominate a niche. Positioning yourself means you have to know what the competition is doing so that you are uniquely different than them. However, you’re always thinking abut selling. You can be different than everyone else; you can just be the crazy guy. The guy who never bathes and walks around in a bathrobe all the time and is incoherent, that would set you apart. You wouldn’t sell anything – actually, I say that and then there are all these guys that have been speaking here that do exactly that. Sales detective research means you sit down and you think what is it that I need to find out to get the goodies that are going to sell this stuff. When you write your first ad, the company line is what freelancers have to come across. When I have a client that pays me a lot of money—I’m very, very expensive, although I’m not taking clients anymore now—somebody pays me $30,000 to write an ad, I’m going to sit down and talk to the guy who wrote the check first. He’s going to give me the company line; what he thinks the product is and why he thinks people are buying. I will tell you that in my 25 years as an “A” list freelance copywriter that guy is almost universally dead wrong by up to 180 degrees. He doesn’t know why people are buying it. He doesn’t know what his product really does, even if he invented it. Why? He’s in love with it. I didn’t even bring it up. I think it was Tony that brought it up. In the workshop we talked about how passion for your product—we talk about try to get into something that you are passionate about; follow your bliss, all that stuff. It can be a handicap if it blinds you to what it is about your product that makes it real to someone else. 93293
A very simple exercise that I tell people to do and I encourage all of you to do it especially the rookies, try to get a friend who likes you to go to a movie you just saw that you know he will like. Anybody tried to do that? What are the results? Nine times out of ten he will not go. A friend who likes you, who would like the movie that you recommend will not go because of your enthusiasm. In fact, the more enthusiastic you are about it, the more his defenses will come up. Once you know little psychological tricks like that, you know that just being enthusiastic about a product, being in love with product is not enough. My job was always to get past the company line. So what you want to do is become a sales detective. When I was working for a client I’d want to talk to the secretaries, the feet in the street salesman, the guys in the back room, the guys who were ordering, everybody else. I want to hear the rumors, the gossip. I want to hear what they’re saying behind the owner ’s back because that is often the story, that’s where the hooks come from and that is where the real stuff comes from. If you’re selling for yourself, how many people sell their own stuff online? Okay, most of the room. You’ve got to find a way to do this. Hire somebody to come in, be super critical, you can do ityourself but you’ve got to step out of yourself and you’ve got to be hypercritical about what you recognize as your own company line. One of the easiest ways to do it online is by “Ask” campaigns or get into some kind ofcommunication with your social networking, with your audience of however big it is. If it is five people get five pieces of input about why they bought. You may think it was because of the headline you had or the wonderful things you did or because you’re such a great guy and they will tell you—no, I bought because it really fit this particular need or I liked that one bullet you had on page nine is what flipped it for me. I will tell you that in long copy and I’ve written for the largest mailers in the world, I realized early on that often in a direct mail letter or a magalog with 30 or 40 bullets and we will get to bullets here but 30 or 40 little pieces of information, it will be one of those that will flip the people and make them start buying. I won’t be the same one with each person, either. Somebody was asking last night about how to approach the same market with variations of the same market. It was gender actually he was talking about. If you know how to sell the guys how do you sell to the women in the same market? We do that by surrounding the objections that people have and making sure that you’re covering everything. Every single possible objections that person comes up with.
Huge promise
What can you say truthfully and without blushing that will set up believable opportunity? Those of you that have been listening to these guys up here, I think a lot of you actually fit into that model of not being in a good place and then having some opportunity come by, maybe quickly, maybe it was sitting there all the time but in your previous life of even a week ago you wouldn’t have jumped on that opportunity. But that is how the adventure starts is when you look at an opportunity, you suspend disbelief and you say you know I think I will just try it. I’ll give it a shot. You job then becomes helping other people make that same step. It is a very difficult step to make. Direct response has a bad reputation because of all the guys writing you emails from Nigeria and all the long copy ads that were selling the Brooklyn Bridge essentially or swampland in Florida which actually is paved. It took 50 years but the swampland –they had to drain it first. Justifiably so, long copy advertising and a lot of marketing has a bad wrap. That doesn’t mean that the tactics that they used aren’t still good. It gets down to classic salesmanship. You want to fix what is wrong, you want to eliminate fears and this is the biggie—you want to fortify the sense of power and confidence among the powerless and the unconfident. That was me. In just that little bit of sense of – what the heck, I’ll give this guy a try that got me on to that first step on that path where I had to go. I viscerally understand what needs to happen to get somebody to take that first step. When it comes down to selling, a lot of people get really meek about it. I believe we’ll be talking about that in a bit. Here’s an example that I wrote for the guitar magazines. This thing ran for a couple years. It went from the magazines, I think it was a three-page...it might have been a two- page ad of solid copy, “The music industries secret guitar wizard finally reveals his embarrassingly easy short-cuts that can take anyone from raw rookie to stage-ready ‘get all the girls’ guitars in just one short weekend.” Outrageous! It did very, very well. 95294
This is one that I wrote for a freelance course that I have, “How to turn your ability to string two sentences together into a freelance copywriting career that if you’ll just follow the simple map I’ve laid out for you can easily earn you over $100,000 your first year.” That was actually an understatement. The first three testimonials down there were for $500,000 to $1 million in the first year. I’m not saying everybody is going to do that but the basic thing was you can if you follow the map and the fact is it really was string two sentences together. I wasn’t trying to teach writers how to write better. I’ve said this time and time again; I would rather take a near illiterate but street savvy salesman and turn him into a copywriter than try to turn a guy with a PhD in English literature into a salesman. Did I say that right? I would take a near illiterate streetwise salesman, turn him into a copywriter than try to take somebody with a degree in English literature and turn them into a salesman. It’s about the salesmanship. You don’t need to know how to write.
Knock Him Out of His Zombie State
This is a biggie; be the one thing that he encounters today that shocks him out of his zombie state. In almost every market that you guys are in, every niche, most of the people that you are going to be trying to convince to go from prospect to customer is what I call a somnambulant blob. When I write, I like to think of the person as this large blob like creature welded to the couch so seriously that he will not get up to leave the house if it is burning down. I’ve got to get him so excited, light a match under him to get him so motivated that he is going to move; that action is going to ensue. Reading is a passive behavior, watching video is a passive behavior, it is like watching TV. The job of good marketing is to wake people up. People walk around in a semi-sleepy white noise state that I call the zombie state. That’s not putting people down. One of the things that happens when you learn how to write copy and become a good salesman is you actually have to wake up. There isn’t a single marketer that you’ve seen or that you know of that knows how to write their own copy and do this stuff that isn’t wide awake and wired into the sweet spot of life. Living life well, understanding life well, seeing things in a way that most people do not see things, out of this comes the attitude, hooks and tall tales and what I like to call the incongruent juxtaposition of compelling sales elements. I have an example of that. This is my first golf ad that I wrote although it was many years ago, “Amazing secret discovered by one-legged golfer adds 50 yards to your drives, eliminates hooks and slices and can slash up to 10 strokes from your game almost overnight.” This really outraged the people at the golf magazines. They were laughing hysterically saying we’re going to take their $70,000 a page, it was a three- page letter, full pages and they thought we’re just taking them. About the fifth time that my client bought space then they started thinking, oh my god, now what are we going to do? This guy is going to run this forever and they started realizing that it was working. My ads have actually changed the way ads look in a number of different magazines, bodybuilding, the guitar mags, and golf, a few others. I’m proud of that. That is the incongruent juxtaposition of compelling sales elements. One-legged golfer, it doesn’t fit in your head. It is a square peg and all you’ve got is round holes in there, it doesn’t fit. That’s part of the act of waking you up a little bit. You can’t just shock people, you have to be relevant. The incongruent juxtaposition of compelling sales elements, the little guy wins the girl from the big, handsome guy; the broke guy becomes wealthy which ties into before and after shockers. My favorite and the one that you’ve been hearing a lot about is inside info on the sly. All of us lead lives of – what is that Thoreau said—Quiet desperation. Take that to heart. The people you are after are leading lives of “quiet desperation.” They think they are missing out on the party and the fact is they are in a lot of cases. This is something I wrote for one of the largest mailers in the world, “An amazingly fun opportunity to catch up to and even pass everyone who is having better sex than you are right now and it is a free look, too. The most exciting sex of your life, the most satisfying intimacy of couples who know (and then blah, blah, blah) life is too short.” Did anybody spot the semi-subliminal appeal to their neighbors and such in there? It’s saying everyone else is having great sex and you’re not. Verifying what a lot of people suspect, by the way. 95295
Marketing Decisions
When you write, again when I go through this process, I really haven’t written a word of copy yet. I’ve been prepping and I’ve been thinking about things. Mine is the marketing decisions, what kind of campaign are you going to run? An evergreen just means that it is going to be a page that is up there and people find it on AdWords or whatever and they’re going to buy. There is the launch process, the joint venture, you have to think about what you’re trying to accomplish. Always write your copy – again, whether you’re going to present it on a video or whether you’re going to do it in email or a series of emails, if you’re going to do it face to face or in a phone call, Web conference, always have a goal in mind. What do you want your prospect to do or what do you want them to bring away from this? Usually think about what it is you want them to do even if it is you want them to think about what you’ve got. You haven’t given them an opportunity to sell yet. It’s going to be a bit of time but you want to prep them for the next email that comes. When you think about that (this is huge) nobody sits down and just writes copy willy-nilly and throws it out there. Actually, I take that back. A lot of marketers are doing that right now. Those are the guys that are struggling. It’s no biggie to try and think about what it is you want your prospect to do.
Delivery Systems
The delivery systems - email, video, websites, direct mail, print ads, PR, and the blog sphere with social networking which you’ll be reading about a lot- but when you think about these delivery systems you need to know the nature of the delivery beast. There are limits and demands to the technology and the expectations of your prospect for time, length and attitude. This is something that I’ve been talking a lot in the green room where I hang out with the guys behind the scenes. What is interesting is we are in a new golden age online mostly because of the way video has launched to the forefront. There are more people watching YouTube now than logging onto Google. Isn’t that right? It was just recently that YouTube has overtaken Google as a stunt. What are the expectations of your prospect when you do this? You can get away with an hour long video but is that the expectation of the person you’re going after. Maybe in your market nobody else, including you, has ever got over three minutes. Then if you go an hour, you have to make that decision. Is that a mistake or does that make you standout? Maybe it is a good thing but you’ve got to think about it. The constant rules--that would be like going in direct mail, things like that.
Features and Benefits
I will tell you that the average person that comes to me for a consultation does not know what he is selling. He believes that what he is selling is a seminar or a course or a book or a service like he is a divorce lawyer. That is not what he is selling. That is the delivery system for what he is selling. That would be the features. When I have your bing, crash, dunk and stats, I mean the physical stuff, the thud factors of stuff. Even if it e-Book, that is a feature. Benefits, I have yummy, ooh-la-la, warm fuzzes, benefits are what the features do for the person using it; this is huge. Rich didn’t sell a seminar here. He sold the benefits of coming to the seminar; coming away with a deep profound knowledge of Internet marketing especially the social networking part of it and the opportunity to go really deep by listening to certain speakers who may help trigger that first step onto your own journey. This is something that I put into my very first talk back at a big seminar many years ago. I like it so much I like to throw it in. I called it the marketing rebel appeal-meter. Can you all read that? On the left—wait I’ve lot my little laser. I love this thing. Anyway, this is a graft sort of. Up here you’ve got almost everyone, down here you have almost nobody. Down here you have cold, hard to reality and over here you have magic. Here is the line of response. The closer you get to saying magic, take this pill and go to sleep and all the weight will disappear. Take this pill, go to sleep, you’ll wake up with a cute blonde next to you in your romantic woes will be gone. The more that you get to that magic idea, the more you will appeal to almost everyone. The more you start talking about cold, hard reality, the further down the ladder you get. 96296
How many people are in what we call the biz opt market? (Business opportunity) One of the things that is often a shock that is even have the word work in any of your stuff you’re going to lose a huge part of your audience. They really want that magic. One of the things that continues to give direct response marketing a bad name are all these claims that weight loss products tend to have. About every ten years people forget why they stopped doing, saying some of the things like lose weight while you sleep or lose weight automatically or eat all you want and continue to lose weight. The reason that people stop saying those things ten years ago because everybody who was doing that went to jail and rightly so, they were lying. I’ve noticed that just in the last year we’re seeing more and more of that popping up. People are actually saying that. I will tell you that the alphabet agencies of the Federal Government will finally at one point get their valkyries ready and come swooping down on those people very, very soon. But, without some kind of regulation, without some kind of internal governance, a lot of marketers will just go over the line to that magic side. You don’t need to. I’m not saying you should but you need to be aware that the closer you are to magic—take a pill and it will happen. My favorites back in the 80s when subliminal tapes—how many people bought subliminal tapes? They were big in the 80s and the idea was as I was reading some of the copy for some of the stuff was you buy these tapes and you run it at night and you don’t even have to hear them. You wake up in the morning, you’re knowledgeable and you have all this stuff. They were getting to the point that you buy these tapes and you don’t have to plug them in. Just having them in your room you will start to absorb all this knowledge. I was thinking about writing a book. You don’t even have to read the book. You slip the book under your pillow as you sleep at night and the stuff will magically absorb. There are people that will buy that. That is that magic sense. Be aware of this, don’t do it, but get somewhere – find the sweet spot. There is magic to what you offer. The magic may not be that you don’t have to do any work but the magic may be that you offer the shortcut secrets. Almost everybody who offers some kind of info thing, if you were there and you went through the path such as I did, I can shortcut – I can legitimately say I can shortcut your trip by 10 to 20 years.
Bullets
I talked about bullets before. I will give you some example here, but I want you to read this before you do that. The one-two punch of emotionally satisfying practical use with a little tweak of shock and delight plus the occasional direct assault on common sense. Good copywriter, the top copywriters who work in the game. We call them the “A” list and there are only at most a couple of dozen. As another writer who was here that Tony mentioned is really of the top of the top. There is only about seven or eight. That holds true even as the ones on the top retire or go off to do something else, the new ones coming up there aren’t that many. They live and die by bullets. I will show you an example. I will say I invented it but I really didn’t; the one-two punch, the idea of doing it. I become known as the best bullet writer in the business for a short period of time. I don’t know if that is true anymore because I’m out of that “A” list writing market. “A” list writers still to this day call me to have me go over their bullets to try to work on them. I’ll tell you the secret is this one-two punch; the emotionally satisfying practical use with a little tweak in there. I’ll show you some example. This is from a sex letter that I wrote. Anybody want me to skip the sex bullets? Are you going to be offended? I saw a lot of guys bolt to attention there in the middle of the room. These are bullets. When you’re reading a piece of advertising copy there will be parts that you come across where the bullet is literally the little – they are square there but the original bullets on typewriters were like dots and they looked like bullet holes, thus the term bullet, very straightforward. It can be—the finger point at it, you’ve seen that in the old ads or any king of highlight that separates these things, we call them bullets. The next one; “How to destroy your guy with the best sex he has ever received.” This was actually going to women, by the way. No, no, this was going to couples. I apologize. I’ve written some just to guys and I’ve written some just to women. This one was going to couples. This mailed for a long time, by the way. “How to destroy your guy with the best sex he has ever received (he’ll be your slave for life, grateful, and super eager to return the favor.)” On the very bottom highlighted in color, “are your sexual needs normal, the answer may shock the heck out of you.” Anybody here have normal sexual needs? I will tell you from the stats that you do not. 97297
This is from a marketing piece, “How to create your own perfect product over a short weekend so you can start earning your fortune even if you don’t have a real business or anything to sell yet.” “The quickie idiot’s guides to consumer psychology instantly understand exactly what makes your customer tick and learn how to tickle his consumer hot buttons to the point of frenzy.” I might have one more, I do. “Learn the shortcut secrets of instantly playing 99 percent of all rock, hard rock, and new wave tunes out there (most songs are stunningly simple once you know the pro level tricks.)” The third one down, “Skip years of frustration by learning the one power cord used by most hard rock and metal guitarists. In two minutes, using two fingers, you’ll know how to play over 200 rock songs.”
Create An Eye Popping Offer
Now you start creating your eye-popping offer. You want to appeal to the bargain hunter ’s sense of discovering something that is not only good but the bargain is tremendous.
Heart Skipping Outrageous Value
I really try to make my readers’ heart skip a beat. You do that by pilling on the value.
Mooch pleasing bonuses.
In the old direct mail jargon, mooch was somebody who replied to an offer just to get the freebies. As much as you really didn’t want those people to get away with something you had to make it pleasing to those people to be able to bring everyone else in. If you couldn’t make a mooch excited about the offer with the freebies then you certainly move anybody who actually had a legitimate need or a legitimate want for the product.
Paranoia and Calming Guarantees
People do get paranoid. Going back to that thing about the brother-in-law and the wife, if you buy something online and you come back and you can’t answer why you did it and why it wasn’t a bad idea, you’re in trouble. Your job as a writer is to give him ammo so he can calm the nervous spouse, put down the nosey neighbor. Who wins when two neighbors come home in the same with a new Lexus and they pull in the driveway. Who wins? The one who got the best deal, the bargain. How long does that win last? Until the next game. It could last forever.
The Close
The heartbreak of selling from your heels versus wealth beyond the dreams of ad verse is an old term. Ad verse is one of the seven deadly sins, I believe. The heartbreak of selling from your heels here is the big thing to talk about though. Most people sell with one foot ready to bolt. It is kind of like—here’s what I got but you probably don’t really want it and then they take off. I will tell you that most of you are selling that way in some way and in some fashion. There is nothing wrong with just stepping forward and saying here is what I’ve got and here is what it is going to do for you and here is what you need to do now. I won’t say that most people are sheep out there but you will not be disappointed if you take the idea that your market is really craving some kind of direction to help them get from where they are to where they want to be or need to be or a lot of time it is hazy. They have a hazy idea of where they need to go or what they want to do. They really don’t know. If you’re the guy that can take them there, they need you to say certain things, they need you to be that guy, they need you to have that credibility to be able to say I’ll come along. If you have something that they can use then shame on you if you don’t do everything in your power to convince them that you’re the guy they should be talking to. Here are some examples from some copies. Here’s what I set up for you, “To join this special operations club all you have to do is say yes to my invitation here. You do not have to pay a dime upfront and there are no membership fees ever. The only way anyone can join is to be asked, personally by me. I will immediately send you this instant advance fighting knowledge. (This was a self-defense kit by the way.) This package of video, CDs and special reports is yours to keep free and clear no matter what as 99 an invited member...blah, blah, blah.” 298
Down here at the bottom are the last two, “Even so, I’m giving you two months to decide. Just so you don’t ever feel pressured or rushed, take your time I trust you but here is the best part, no matter what the video will sell for to anyone else your price will never be higher than $49. It’s an inside deal.” It’s funny. I grabbed the piece of copy that showed my age. I came down here a couple days early to golf with my buddy Dean Jackson. I noticed he still had a number of the videos that one of my clients had sold and he still keeps a rickety VHS machine there just to watch some of the old videos. He’s one of the younger guys in the business.
Turbulence
This is big. Turbulence are the tools of action; everything from hand wringing urgency that would be the major tool of the launch process, greed inducing limitations. One of the things that I shock people with and I don’t want to go too much into it here but really top salesman know that there are only five or six basic emotional parts to the human animal. As somebody in the workshops said – Jesse was it you—basically take all the worst things you can say about somebody else—he is a greedy, conniving, selfish bastard. That pretty much describes everybody. It describes you too. We all greedy at heart, we’re all selfish, it is a constant battle. There is nobility in being human. When people first start learning how to sell, it can be a little daunting because the reality checks that required to get there. When you start looking at people without the haze of believing we’re this noble beast that left the jungle a long time ago. It is not a bad thing. You don’t get all depressed and want to end it all because you can’t stand living with a bunch of animals. However, by most of the top salesman know that not only did we not leave the jungle a long time ago but we have one foot still in it. I don’t love people any less. I love them more. Let the blinders fall away, have the reality checks you need and see people for what they are and what they really want and why they do the things they do. Did I just shock anybody? Is anybody upset now and they want to end it all? Good. Gary Halbert had a great phrase. He used to say the job of the copywriter is to get his little greed gland salivating. Once you understand that – getting somebody to take money that was once theirs whether it is credit card, cash, check or PayPal account and take money that was once theirs and give it to you is one of the hardest transactions in human behavior there is to go through. People don’t want to do that. It is really easy to get someone to say that sounds like a pretty good deal. It sounds like a pretty good product. You did your due diligence and that’s really good. I’m going to think about it. That’s easy. The job of the classic salesman is to get him off of there. Part of that is through turbulence.
Knock Them Off the Fence
Stimulating surprises as you get down to the actual of ordering the thing. How many people participate in any of the launches that have been going on? A lot of people. What happens as you get closer to the end? Ante starts going up doesn’t it; more and more stuff, more and more value. I like this. It’s your birthday, rare treat dumps. Make the person feel like – that feeling that they have, it’s their birthday again. I know a guy who – I’m not going to say who it is because I don’t want to give away his secrets but he gives seminars and he actually uses NLP to reduce entire rooms of people down to that state you felt when you had nap time in kindergarten. Remember, you bring the blanket out and you’d get the milk and cookies. I think one time he even served milk and cookies. You don’t have to go quite that far but if you can instill that thing, that feeling of when birthdays mattered. They don’t matter much to adults anymore but as a kid they mattered. You felt a little special. You do that by giving away stuff and making them feel like they are on the inside, giving them a treat. Free step up the ying-yang, more, better longer, bigger, knock them off the fence. Again, it is very easy. Any chump can get someone on the fence to agree that—yeah, what you have there is pretty good. Knocking them off the fence which means so they’ll buy, they will act, they will do what you are asking them to do, and that’s very hard.
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The Greased Slide
This is where most of the guys who have been talking that are good copy writers or know how to get a message across, where they excel. They have that riveting yet casual face-to-face – I call it a barroom conversation. The reason I say that is because I try to tell people how to imagine you’re sitting in a bar. Now it doesn’t have to be a bar; it can be a café. But people kind of like the idea of the barroom conversation because there is more of an element of suspense there. Somebody sits down and says - not to you, but to the bartender -- “I’m having a bad day.” And the bartender says, “What’s wrong, Jim?” And he says, - and what he says describes the exact fears or problems or whatever, what you have, fixes. So you turn to him and you say, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing what you just said, but I…” – but then what do you say? Think about that face-to-face situation and selling in an inherently hostile act. You are almost always an interruption in his day. Very rarely does your email arrive in his box as happy days, although I certainly strive for that and in my golf stuff, the Doc O’Leary character that I have been for, he is a real guy but I’ve been Doc O’Leary’s voice for a long time. The response that we keep hearing from people is that they get a letter or they get an email from Doc O’Leary and they say, usually I get that, “Oh, yuck,” response. Ah, another piece of direct mail or another – somebody trying to sell me something in the email. Instead, what they say when you do this right is they will say, “Hey! Another one from Doc O’Leary. I wonder what that nut case has to tell me today?” even knowing that there is going to be a pitch in that letter or knowing that that email is going to ask him to do something, to buy something. The story is going to be so fun, it’s going to be inside, going to be, as Frank said, right to the core of the person’s being that you are now welcome there. Still, when you get to that sales part, it’s going to be an inherently hostile act. You want to goose him out of his inherently hostile somnambulant blob state. Now this does not contradict what Frank was talking about yesterday with that empathy thing going on. I agree 100 percent with what he said. Try to be in a market where you are totally congruent with what they want and what you want is what they want and you’re living the good life because you’re all on the same wavelength. Still, until they wake up, most of the people are going to be in this semi-somnambulant, zombie state. Reading is a passive behavior. The videos you’ve been seeing and whatever it was that got you to get off your duffs at home, get on a plane and come out to Disney World and come to this thing, something happened. Think about that. How many people are here for their first marketing seminar ever? It was a startling event in your life when you decided to come, wasn’t it? Something goosed you out of your state. What is the easiest thing to do? Even when presented with the best possibility in the world or the best opportunity, what is the easiest thing to do? Say no. There is no penalty; there is no consequence to saying no. Not really – unless I tell you what the consequence is. Here’s a piece of copy I threw in here. I think this pretty much sums up the way I’ve written before. It is so easy you’ll be laughing after every explosive drive. It’s a golf piece, how to drive farther and straighter. “This brilliant new breakthrough by scientific golf geeks reveals a breathtaking and simple and super fast way for you to instantly trick your swing to tap the hidden payload of raw power you’ve been ignoring your entire life. But, hey, don’t believe me because you can check it out for free yourself. Hi, Joe.” Well, science has finally come to golf. It took them long enough. You go and waste you time on projects like landing on Mars and curing baldness for so long before you decide you have to pay some attention to something really serious, like golf. And I’ve got to tell you, you will be astonished and overjoyed at what science has discovered because for essentially lazy guys like you and me, it simply means we can blah, blah, blah. Okay? As I like to put it, you can wake up buck naked in a cornfield in Iowa. If you can get yourself together to get some pencil and paper and start to write, you will actually be able to communicate with people in a way where you can get your business going again, even if you don’t write. However, if you hire writers and you don’t know if what they’ve written fulfills what they need to do to get the stuff written to have your prospect do what he needs to do, you will be like a babe in the woods. You will spend piles and piles of money and I will tell you, I know a lot of freelance copy writers – they will do the minimum amount of work they can get away with no matter how much you pay them. So if you don’t know if what they write is any good or not, they will – well, you don’t want to be in that situation. 101 2100
I have only done this a few times but when I do it, it is my belief that if I can teach you to write a simple how-to sentence – and I will explain that in a second – that this will help you, not only with headlines but it will help you with subject lines, it will help you with your ad words, it will help you with bullets, it will help you with everything. We don’t have time to go very deep, but I want you to right now take five minutes – but first I want you to think of the person you are writing to. Those of you who don’t have a product, sell this seminar for Rich; a single line, how-to. The reason I choose how-to is that’s a basic headline. Pro writers will often write 50 headlines or more before they choose the headline that goes. It will be all over the map. We almost always start with how-to headlines because how-to is about as basic as you can get. So I am “here’s how to do this.”
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Social media and Web 2.0 star Gary Vayerchuk has 80,000 visiting his video blog daily...he has these tips: • W hy
over
you must begin a video blog immediately ... and the research you need to do
before hand ...
• The mistake Internet Marketers make when entering the social media Web 2.0 space... • H ow to get H ollywood to find your video blog ... it ’ s simpler than you think ... • The number of times you should release a video every week to ensure your success... You know I only have an hour and I like to speak for seven hours so I’m going to get right to the point. Before I start anything, it’s 80,000 viewers a day to my show, not 8,000. Before I get into the details of that, let me just give you a little background. In 1978, my family emigrated from Belarus and we came to America because in Russia you think in America you think the streets are paved with gold. My grandma got mugged the third day we were here and we quickly realized the game was a little bit different than we thought. I lived with ten of my family members in a studio apartment in Queens. My dad got a job as a stock boy in New Jersey and that’s how my [inaudible] into this world started. He worked hard and eventually became partner and then owned a store. He did real well and very quickly I lived a very solid middle-class life in New Jersey and things were great.
My Story
I was always very entrepreneurial. I was very much a lemonade stand kid. My mom said no season was safe. I was very much like taking the flowers off people’s yards; like ripping them out of their garden and selling it back to them. That was a great business model. I already knew they like the flowers, it was solid. I miss those days. You know, shoveling snow, lemonade stand all that stuff; then baseball cards. I’m telling you right now, I was the most hated baseball card dealer on earth. Why? I was 13, I looked four, I came to the baseball card show, I walked around the show, memorized every price, went back to my table and undercut every single dealer at the show. That’s right, you can clap that up. It was awesome. When I was in the 8 grade, I was making three, two, eighteen hundred dollars, on a slow day, the weekend selling baseball cards. In 8 grade in Hunterdon County, New Jersey which is really boondocks, that made me a trillion-aire. I was the guy. I was making more than all the parents of the school. So it was awesome. Then, disaster struck. I turned 15 and my dad dragged my ass to the liquor store because being first generation, immigrant family, you have to work in the store. That is what Pops did and I made ice for 10 hours a day getting 2102 102
paid $2 an hour. So I want from $18 hundo, being the man and being my own boss to making $20 bagging ice and it sucked. I cried every single Saturday that dad dragged my a-s at 6 a.m. and took me to the liquor store. I hated it. About 16 years old, I started working the register and I wasted all my money on scratch-off tickets after the first hour to two. It was brutal. I ate about 40 Slim Jims and then started reading the Wine Spectator. What I realized because we were in Springfield, New Jersey surrounded by very affluent areas like Short Hills and Livingston and Summit. We would have this wine crowd but my dad’s store was called Shopper’s Discount Liquors. It wasn’t very conducive to the wine culture but we still had these customers around the area. Once I realized they started collecting wine—there was an issue of the Wine Spectator which came with a special select was named wine of the year. On that day a lot of people came in. I was like – nice. I was like s—t what’s the difference between Pete Rose and [Soroke] it’s all the same stuff. That’s where my interest in wine started. I learned a lot.
Building My Brick and Mortar Business
I’m going to fast forward now. I got involved full-time in 1998; we did $3M in business in 1997. We did $10M in 1998. No change except branding. We changed the name from Shopper ’s Discount Liquor Store to Wine Library. That’s not true actually, I worked the floor every hour and if you came in for six bottles you were leaving with 49. So that also helped. Branding was big. I built the business, I launched www.winelibrary.com in 1997. When everybody thought that websites were an extension of your business. This is where you’re going to need to pay attention. Where people thought it was a catalogue. Even today, some of the other experts on this panel have talked about online/offline, the differences. The online customer is a little more fickle; not as good. To me, everybody is a human being, online or offline. They are a customer. I don’t care if they’re in Iceland in a spacesuit, I want them. Right, you want them. I think people need to realize one thing right off the bat. The online aspects of business are exploding. A week ago, Wine Library TV celebrated its second anniversary. I started Wine Library TV because on my 30 birthday I was driving to work — I live in Manhattan, the store is in New Jersey — and I freaked out, on my 30 birthday. I was like – I suck. Let’s rewind; in eight years I grew my family business to $50M; built a 40,000 square foot store. The property is worth a crap-load alone. Even if we go back to prohibition, I’m okay. I sucked because I wasn’t doing something life-changing. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was fun because I love my wine library family, I love my 110 employees, things were great but I knew I had something more. I knew it! I knew I could do something more. I’ve been following the Web 2.0 space. What I really want to do today is help a lot of you talk about Web 2.0 because I think there is a lot of value in it. A lot of the stuff that I’m listening to today, I left the room earlier because I was worried that I might run up here and start talking. That’s how excited I am to be here. I’m so ticked off at this clock right now because it’s already at 53 minutes 41 seconds. An hour is going to be gone soon. I really don’t want to sit up here and brag about the stuff I did. I just wanted to give you some sort of structure so you didn’t realize I was some jerk-off New Jersey kid just talking up here. I really wanted to give you a little facet of – I’m very passionate. Jay said something awesome, he loves people; me too. If you love people, you’re going to win. And if you hate people, you can still win but you have to embrace your hate. Something that I’m really understanding – I know, I know; something that I’ve seen is people in a crowd are like how do I become you? You know, Jay, how do I become you? Eat lunch with me. How do I become you? Rich, you’re the best. I’m down on that. I’m real down on that. You need to be what you’re about. I promise you if you were the biggest collector of green socks, you could make an obnoxious amount of money. You Need to Stay Up on Your Market by Reading Blogs You’ve got to follow what you’re about. What I saw yesterday at the Affiliate Summit in Vegas, listen...Jason 103 2103
Calcaneus—how many people know who Jason Calcaneus is, raise your hand. Higher, not a lot. How many people have a Twitter account in this room? Raise your hand, high. That’s solid. Facebook, raise your hand. Yeah, they’re doing well, huh. How many people go to Digg every day? TechCrunch? Let me tell you a thing about TechCrunch since four of you read it. Every single TC on earth reads TechCrunch every single day. The greatest way to have TC money is to understand what the TCs are thinking.
Quit Chasing Money and Be Yourself
The fact of the matter is all of you guys can do this. It doesn’t take a lot but you have to be committed to who the heck you are. You’re chasing. People are chasing. I really don’t want to pick on this gentleman, sir, I’m not but the guy comes up and he goes I’m a serial entrepreneur. The next thing that comes out, I’m in the global warming space. Of course you are. You know what I mean? Twenty years ago you were throwing Pepsi cans out the window. You’ve got to be who you are. Maybe you’re not. The fact of the matter I hope you erase more than anything else is the understanding that no matter how big or small your niche is that if it’s what you are, you’re going to dominate. I’ll be very honest with you; I should not have done a wine blog, video blog. I could be charismatic about things I know. The only other thing I really know like wine is New York Jets Football. Watch it—but I could definitely pull off a big time fantasy baseball and fantasy sports video blog and if you don’t think there’s a crap load of money in that space, I’d be rolling in it.
Legacy is Greater than Currency.
Jay talked about what he cares about now, a fourth wife. What he really cares about is legacy. One day you’re going to have—you know what the sneaky part is, I can see it in your face. There are a lot of you that have boatloads more money than everybody else up here. I want to change the wine industry. I have 5,000 Facebook friends. I’ve limited it out. I can not have anymore. Facebook is not MySpace, my friends. These are real friends, fans. I’m only one of only 30 people that have had that accomplished. That’s sick. I’m a wine guy, niche, but I’m true to myself and I know how to brand. I promise you right now this is going to obnoxious. Let me preface this. I really like everybody on earth, big time. I’m only very confident and really, really like the model because I delve in. I really feel that no matter what space I would go into, I could dominate because I understand the playing field first. Jay killed it by saying don’t jump in, understand where you’re going. That’s huge.
Do Your Research on Web 2.0 Before Jumping In
I spent like six months trying to understand Web 2.0. Then what I knew was – oh, do I have a story for you guys. Jumping off again, that’s that ADD stuff. Ready? One year ago, one year ago, I went to London to an event called FOWA (Future of Web Applications). I sat in the crowd and watched all the keynotes. Kevin Rose at Digg Michael Arrington, all these guys and I was like, yeah. I need to be friends with those guys. That’s what you guys are trying to do, right? How do we JV with you? You’re a big brand. I was doing the same thing, like yeah. If I could be friends with him maybe they’ll mention me on Diggnation and I’ll be huge. One year later, I’m here in town, on Friday I’m going to Miami and I’m keynoting the event. It’s a big deal because that’s a tough, tough, tough place to get into. Web 2.0 is the hot [ship] celebrity status, rock star, its craziness. I’m excited about it. The nice thing is everybody is in California and they all want to know about wine. I know, I got it, they like that stuff. He dissed on the whole culture of affiliate. He bunched them together as snake oil salesmen. How many of you guys have seen these guys that hold up their affiliate checks? They have like $100,000 or $300,000. Raise your hand. A good amount, I understand, it makes sense. There’s crossover. He like dissed on them. He was like look at this clown; he has a $300,000 check. He’s taking a picture with it. I’ll be honest with you, I’m impressed. I’ll take the $300,000 for building something for five days and then just cashing in on it. He’s arrogant about it so he sold 104 2104
Web [bloggings] for $30M. I get it but I would never do that. I do not understand your space. I don’t. I am quick learn. I picked up a lot of stuff because marketing is marketing. Heck, that whole like writing the stories, selling something—the last session. I’m sorry, that really hit home. You know why? I have a 400,000 person email list that we sell to on www.winelibrary.com. When I buy a load of wine, I’m the only one allowed to send the email. I understand bullet points. I love bullet points. I get it. I understand that one word can change the entire emotion. I want to tell you something right now. If you don’t have that in your heart, if it’s not in your DNA, you’re not going to do it. You’re going to pick up stuff but you’re never going to kill it. You’re just not. I’ve been training the best people I have. I have people that are running my $50M company but they send an email on a product, we’re going to sell 39 cases and if I send it, we’re going to sell 4,000 cases. I know that one little word or that misspelling. I think I failed every English class I ever took and I’m not kidding. You’re going to laugh and think I’m joking but I’m not. You have an intuition and a feel for the market. It’s a market that I’ve grown up in and understand. It doesn’t take me long to embrace and understand another market because it’s all based on people’s emotions and how to execute and get people excited.
Build Your Brand by Being Yourself
Ten thousand people are watching Wine Library TV right now that don’t give a rat’s ass about wine. That’s awesome. I’m represented by CAA, the largest talent agency in Hollywood. They represent Derek Jeter, Brad Pitt and me. That’s ridiculous. It’s stupid because I’m true to myself. My are you sitting there saying, great dude but you’re like so over the top and loaded with charisma and so good looking, I can’t do that. The fact of the matter is you can. You’re not going to hit Oprah level but you can hit big. You can be a maven in your field and let me tell you right now, this is where I need to sit down and get real serious because this is what I believe in more than anything at all. We are fundamentally in a gold rush right now. We are. I’m going to tell you why and I don’t say that kind of dumb stuff often. I’ve never said it before but because I’m spending so much time in Web 2.0, and I’m spending so much time in Hollywood. I met with the biggest producers a couple of weeks ago; the guys who are doing Run’s House. Do you know how cool that is? I love that show. These guys are courting me to do a Jim Cramer type wine show or a reality type based show, it’s crazy. Guess what, I’m not running into the TV space just yet because I very much believe in the Internet space. I do open my laptop every day and my email because I promise you that you need to. It’s 2008, I promise. So, Hollywood fundamentally understands that their next core of celebrities is coming from the Internet and you can be it. It’s that ridiculous. It sounds preposterous and you’re saying to yourself I’m not that but you’d be shocked what you can do. Understand this game. It’s the same game that it is globally on earth.
Winning the Branding Game
Why do you guys want Jay Abraham to sign off on your newsletter or whatever? Why? Because he’s a brand. What do you want to take a picture with Rich? He’s okay, I like the chain, I like the chain...because he’s a brand. You might want to take that picture and put it on your blog or use it or do something or you just like him, that’s fine. It’s all branding. Understand that if you brand yourself...there’s a gentleman in the crowd that I love, Mark, right? Let me ask you guys a question, if tomorrow Rich and Jay team up and launch a Facebook type small niche marketing social network, tell the truth, how many of you are creating a profile. Don’t lie, raise your hand. If Rich and Jay combine and launch marketingworld.com and it is the Facebook for this society, how many of you are signing up a profile? If I launched marketingworld.com two weeks ago, how many of you are signing up? You’re the man! You’re the first, I appreciate it.
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You understand its branding, guys. You know what (this is going to get me killed) a lot of you are continuing to build the brand of the people that are bigger than you within the world. A lot of you are building the brand of people that are ahead of you. You don’t need endorsements from people that are in the same game with you that are ahead of you. You need to differentiate yourself and establish yourself. Don’t buy lists, make lists. There’s not a person in this room that thinks they can build the next eBay and Google. I promise you, I felt the energy—maybe one, there was some random person that I felt something. Nobody! The way you guys work and how hard, you guys all can. I’m not kidding. Why are you shooting for singles? That’s a lot of what’s going on. Quick scores, in and out, chasing, I just think there’s a better way. One, you’re going to be pumped. How many people collect something, raise your hand, like seriously. That’s money all day long. That’s eBay affiliates to your face falls off and you’re the brand within that world.
Who Thinks it’s Hard to do a Video Blog?
Honestly, don’t lie. Who thinks the technology is tricky? Really, that few of you? Even at the Affiliate Summit which is even more Web driven, a lot more were scared. But that’s fine, you want to lie to me, I understand. It’s getting easier every day. You don’t have to be anybody but yourself and I guarantee you’re going to win. The fact of the matter is a lot of you guys are talking about lists all day long – lists, lists, lists. I’m telling you right now—I’ve got to remember where I am—lists are awesome but you don’t know enough about people. Let’s talk about business. If I had 400,000 accounts on email, that’s good I can sell stuff, right. Send an email, make my 20 bones ahead, life is good; eighteen-million dollars in eighty-three minutes. If I knew what those people were doing, do you know how much money you can sell to marketers and real advertising companies? Do you know that Proctor and Gamble and Mercedes and all these guys want you bad if you’ve got that info and will pay you so much money you won’t know what to do with yourself if you know what these people are doing. The way you do that is by building a social network. Do you know that Pepsi used to drop so much money on colleges that they didn’t know what to do with themselves; that they don’t give a care about college anymore because all they have to do is go to Facebook and pay them. Don’t provide the content, provide the framework. Have you guys thought about that? Oh, I love it; they’re writing it. That’s a good statement, right? You can be a blogger and you can write an email and you can do all your stuff or you could create the place where everybody goes. I guarantee in this world there is a major forum that everybody chills at, the beginners get into; it’s a place. Is there a big forum in this world? I have a website that I bought called www.corked.com. It was a social network for wine. I bought it because I don’t just talk it, I want to live it. I’ve haven’t gotten to it because the show completely exploded after Conan and Nightline in a short period of time, it got crazy. I haven’t been able to execute. I threw one affiliate program on there. Not even linking back to my own retail store because church and state is a big deal. Somebody asked... how do we give value to our customers when we send out the thing? My table got a kick out of when I said, give them real value. Has anybody ever thought about giving something away for free, like lots of it? How about all of it? How does these lists or DVDs that sell for two or three bones, two or three G’s, how about if you gave all that away that stuff for free? Maybe you’re not as good as somebody else but you’re close. What happens? I’ll tell you what happens. You get two or three hundred thousand people—I don’t know how big the market is. It could be a million, I don’t know. Right? You can leverage against that in 45 seconds. Let somebody brand against it. You can get all your money back and guess what—the community is going to love you.
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Give Your Content Away for Free
I’ll say it again, DVD or a list or whatever, the words, give it away for free—forever. If you make a DVD that you’re selling for $2,000, now give it away for free. Get as much info as you can, make them create a profile. You’ve got to have a profile. I want you to live in my world. Then, you will be able to sell advertising against your forum. You own the world so much more than the quick score of selling that application or that DVD. Do you understand in the next three years every single music that is put out is not going to give the artist one penny? Music is free, period. Not $.99, free. If Konye West wants to make money, he’s got to do private events; he’s got to sell the opportunity to be on his record in the next record for $5M. He’s got to sell tee-shirts. Content, my friends, is available for free. You can find it. When you let go of trying to make money on content and try to really bring value and build your brand, then you too are on the path to doing some serious damage. When you start giving it away for free, if your stuff is good, if you’ve got the chops—do you know why I’m winning the wine game? Because I can kick all those wine douche bags a-s when we taste wine blind, every time. I’m going to tell you right now. You give your stuff away for free, you spend $20,000 to $30,000 – when you sell DVD for $5,000, it’s not so hard and you build a very good site where people create profiles. Okay? People now have profiles, right. Everybody comes to your site because it’s free and you’re good and if you’ve been selling it for $5,000 – if it’s free, people are coming. They’re creating profiles then you spend all your time doing dirty, dirty work; hard work. Every time somebody creates an account. You email them and thank them. Thank you for getting onboard with us. You then email and ask them what’s important. You follow every message that somebody leaves on somebody else’s board and if you can give content that is valuable, you answer it for free. Then all of a sudden then we go to everyone else’s sites that are not competing against you because if they’re selling it and you’re giving it away for free then they’ll go scr--w yourself but we’re going to go on the fringe, right? We’re going to get really smart with a long tail.
How to Market on MySpace
I learned that MySpace was cool in 2004. Okay, I went in there. I went to Spain to buy wine for 11 days. Every night after my 11 hours worth of tasting, I spit everything so I wasn’t cocked, I’d go to my room and I would spend four to five hours on MySpace trying to figure out what these kids were talking about. They like talking to each other on the wall but they don’t want to do any regular text. They want to do it in fancy text with glitter on it or in red or with P. Diddy’s face in the background. So I spent two-hours and had my developer create a tool that allows people to say anything they want and can control the font, the color, the glitter, you can do this right now as well. I guarantee you’ll make $10,000 to $15,000 a year by doing nothing; if you spend the time doing real hard work. Once I made that site I put AdSense on it. The trick was when you go on the site, you’d put something like “hey John” or “thanks for hooking up last night” or “awesome beer we drank last night” whatever you wanted to say to that person, you’d go through the motions, you’d say generate it. You’d get code. That’s how it works in the MySpace world. You’d grab the code (control C) you’d go to the MySpace page and you’d hit control V on the wall and it will say “hey john, thanks for hooking up last night.” That would awesome if people did that. Anyway, now it sits on that wall. Do you know what happens? P. Diddy comes over and says that’s cool and clicks it and it goes back to my website. Then I spam Justin Timberlake’s site for 500 days in a row by putting “I love you Justin” with my tags. Real hard word, that sucked a-s but I did it since Justin Timberlake is huge and everybody went to that site. They started using that tool too. They became my friends on my space which is one of my steps because I wanted to control the data and not just the email. I would tell them, we’ve got a new background. We put Young Jock on the background when he was big or whatever was big. It was very easy to find out what was big because I’d got to MySpace and see who the top artists were because I understood the culture now. 107 2107
I did that for three months and then stopped. I made $140,000 over $80,000; I don’t even really know to be honest with you. It was something I did to teach my brother how stupid things can be when you think. I highly recommend doing it yourself if you have the bones to do. Go to Digital Point or SIPoint. Find yourself an outsource coder or if you know somebody. Pay somebody $20,000 or $30,000 because then you can really control it. Flux is a tool, right? It’s not yours and they’ve got the data, too. When you’re the only one with the data, you win. I’m the only one with this list. You want my list, you got to pay me. If somebody else had the list, you start competing against each other. Wine is a $28B industry. Not only are they willing to pay, my friend, they’re dying to pay because they are buying other things that are not as niche. Look at what has happened to me. I’m here today, right. Look at this; I’m a wine video blogger. Look where I am. Think about that. This is something worth clapping up. This is where personal brand gets crazy guys. If you’re doing the right thing and you’re pumped doing it because it’s your thing, right, you’re not global warming it. You’re talking about the Chargers from 1974 to 1983.
Build Your Business Around What You Love
The thing you love with all your heart. You’re going to be happy along the way and you’re going to find your opportunities. There are so many opportunities. Then, guess what’s going to happen; something that happened to me. Fortune 500 companies contact me every single day. What do they want to talk to me about? Wine? No, they want to know why this punk kid has so many people watching him and they have no idea why 25 minute video on the Internet when its suppose to be three minutes, is dominating because I know my stuff – wherever you like, sir. Whatever you feel like. I own those brands. I am Wine Library TV. I am Gary Vaynerchuk. I am www.winelibrary. com. To me, I don’t want to build Gary Vaynerchuk yet. I really don’t. It’s not what I’m interested in doing right now. Right now my focus is Wine Library TV. I want to continue to build Wine Library TV then I’ll become Rachel Ray and then I’ll become Oprah and then I’ll hire the cigar guy, the cheese girl, the travel guy and become the biggest lifestyle brand in the world and then I’ll sell it and buy Jets and I’ll be done. It really matters as to what you want to accomplish. People are telling you to do person to person, what do you want to do? Whatever you want to do is what you’re going to execute best anyway, I promise you. When you’re a cow you can’t be a pig. You know what I mean? If you’re going to be who you are; and you have to be focused. You do have to know what you want to do. I don’t want to build Gary Vaynerchuk right now because I’m not ready to be the marketing guru and work for these Fortune 500 companies because I want to become Oprah. That’s a bigger fish for me right now. I’m going to ride this wine thing out, see if I can pull it off. I not, I can always go and work and do that. I’m in a market that a lot of people don’t understand. As a matter of fact, there have been several here who have told me I shouldn’t be in it. You do understand and I’m going to tell you why because you just mentioned it. I am marketing a social networking site, it is not mine but I am an investor in it. It is called www.madebig.com. It is not public yet, it is private. It has been in beta stage for a year and a half. Do you want to know what it looks like when you run a company that’s doing $50M a year and you’re the CEO and you stop and start tapping a show to do on the Internet? I do. My entire staff lost their mind. Don’t be afraid to brand yourself. Everybody is scared. I don’t want to come off obnoxious. I need somebody else to say I’m awesome. Of course you can’t be a dick about it but you can definitely do it. You’ve got to talk about yourself. If you’re not pumped about yourself, who’s going to be pumped about you? 109 2108
Begin Reading Your EMail
You have to work you a-s off. Do you know what I did? I had this huge company, making all this money, everything is great and I started taping this show and spending nine hours a day emailing other wine bloggers saying—check me out. It’s cool what I’m doing. It’s a video, its wine all day long. Every single email that I get to this day I respond to; every single one. Are you ready for this—1,000 to 2,000 a day. It’s what I do for a living. I tape my show and I answer every email. You know why? Because when Sally from Minnesota emails me and says Gary you’re shockingly handsome. That’s how they usually start. I love your show. You’re the best. You’ve changed my wine world. I don’t just drink Yellowtail anymore. I’m having Stew tonight, what should I serve? Everybody that runs in my circle –young big business people, think I’m a clown for answering that. I’m going to tell you right now, there is nobody on this earth that is more in tune to the wine consumer than Gary Vaynerchuk. I read every one of them, it’s not filtered, and you know what things happen. So I get this email from this guy in Chicago and he goes dude, you’re the rock star, we love you. Me and my friends love you, we’re like 22. We thought wine was for girls. Now it’s awesome. They say we’ve got a story to tell you. When we go to the bar and we see a hot chic, we’d always say to our friend, oh, you’ve got to hook that up for me. But now we say link it up. I said huh, really? So what did I start doing? I started building the brand of my cameraman like he was bigger than me. He’s straight cult. I’ve got 19,000 emails in a folder right now and you know I’m still building it up as I know you know. I’m still building up the demand. Nineteen thousand emails in a folder waiting to buy a $20 link it up Mott tee-shirt. Not too shabby and definitely would have never happened if I didn’t read that email and notice that there was something happening there. How am I monetizing? That’s not too bad. You know, $3.33, $19.99, $19,000 before we go out the gate, not horrible. You’ve got to build a brand. Sometimes its you and sometimes it’s the camera man, sometimes it’s your website at the moment. It really depends on what you want to build. If you want to build for the long term, think about the guys up here, you have to have lunch with me for four-hours.
Join The Bigger Conversation
Become part of the conversation. How many of you go to blogs that have to do with this subject matter and leave a comment that’s not selling yourself and is actually valuable? Raise your hand, tell the truth, don’t lie. I promise you—good stuff—I promise you that if you go to every blog that’s out there and leave good stuff and not—oh, this reminds me of what I did at Johnnyjohnson.com. If you go to these sites and really leave content value and your name is linked to your site, you will dominate this space in six months. You’ll become just as equally of a brand— you’ve got to work it. The work is the thing that scares the crap out of everybody. I don’t think so from this group. There is a lot of passion. There are people that are working. You’ve got to work smart. I always told my dad – my dad is a hard working immigrant. I worked so much but I was like dad, I want to work smart, too. Working hard is easy because I’ve got that DNA but I want to be smart about it. Definitely, add content— be part of the conversation. Social Currency is huge. If people like you, you’re going to win. If people hate you, you’re going to lose unless you’re awesome and you’re unstoppable. That happens, too. I’m a very big fan of becoming part of the conversation. Anybody here, no matter how good or bad you are, if you left a comment on the top 30 bloggers in this space every day that was legitimate and your own thoughts and good stuff, you’d be huge in six months, huge. Empower your readers to do things for you. I just did a spread the thunder contest because I called Wine Library TV the Thunder Show. It was awesome. One guy got an actual Wine Library TV logo tattooed on his arm and didn’t win because it was a random drawing. 110 2109
That’s crazy. Why would he do that? One person loves the show so much they put 50,000 fliers in Grand Central Station. People love you when you’re a brand, remember? They cried when the Beatles came. This Miley Cyrus chic or whatever, they love that girl. Aren’t we in her land here— Disney? When you are a brand you win. I saw you taking pictures with the crazy guy that had his shoes off. Honestly, I’ll be more than happy to send you a personal email and post it and do something. To me, it’s not this horse s-it one through seven. It’s not. When you’re doing what you love it’s so natural you don’t need one through ten. You don’t need a DVD, you just execute on intuition because that’s your intuition not Jay’s intuition, not Gary’s intuition. Anybody else? Too many people are scared of something. Yesterday somebody was like I don’t like it when they play videos at the end of my video. They show you other videos. I was like why? I don’t know. That’s not a good enough answer. I’m a big—share the wealth—be part of the community, the good stuff wins guys. The good stuff wins. I don’t if anybody knows this but everybody knows everything about everything. There is no privacy. The other thing you’ll be able to hang onto is your Social Security number, maybe. It’s out there.
Marketing is Queen
How many have heard that content is king, raise your hand? A lot more, that’s good. Marketing and PR is the queen and we all know who runs the household. We need a bigger applause for a marketing group than that. You could make those videos and rocket and if you’re not hustling for ten hours after that video goes up to get everybody to talk about it. Why do I have twitter? Because 2,000 people--when the Washington Post wrote an awesome post about me, I got my link in three seconds. I posted it on Twitter; all 2,000 of my friends saw it. Why is that better than email? If you’re my friend and I sent you a link that said guess what, I’m cool, I’m in the Washington Post but I have no idea who you are. When you go to her page because you’re following her, you see that I’m in the Washington Post. It’s more viral. Social media is more viral than emails guys. People don’t forward emails not the way you see in social media. Go ahead. You said that I said that I didn’t believe in buying lists. What would I do to build a list rapidly? Let me start by saying, this is important, I don’t want to diss on a foundation of a business. There might be enormous value in buying lists. There may be. I don’t understand that because I’m not built that way. I’m built to make lists. I want to make lists. That’s what I’m about. How do I do that? I go to the community that’s out there that I’m trying to get and I become part of the community for free and give them everything I’ve got. I could sell Wine Library TV videos that I’m about to do for you live here every day of the week. I could sell a truck load of videos. People would buy them all day long and they’re all free. But you’re going to say yeah you have the business.... you’re right but if you can afford to go half pregnant which is a bad term, I don’t like being half pregnant, I want to be all in. But, you might want to be half pregnant because you’re in a money place. You start getting out of it being content. You see what I mean, start giving away parts for free but you’re still making enough money to be able to do that and eventually turn on the switch. And that’s how you go from business to rock star Web 2.0 content.
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Rich
closes this audience to:
Dream Team
lineup by motivating the
• Find the one mindset that makes success on the Internet inevitable... • Strengthen their ability to focus on turning their ideas into reality... • Why making a difference and creating value will position you to succeed in any marketplace... It is really important that you try and get as many different perspectives as possible because there is not one way to success. That is really a major point that you’ve got to take away from here that Jay is going to do it his way, Frank is going to do it his way, and I’m going to do it my way. You have to figure out what your way is. Really, it is about embracing your personality and letting it shine through, whatever your personality is. When Jay and I were working on the document, The Maven Matrix Manifesto, one of the things that we felt was so important that probably was the biggest obstacle that we had to overcome was actually convincing people it was possible, that they could actually be at the front of their market. That is just our belief, that that is the biggest obstacle that most people have to overcome, that it is possible.
You Must Believe This is Possible
Until you believe it’s possible, obviously you’re not going to do the work that is required. So step one is believing it is possible and it really is never too late to get started. There were also a bunch of people that asked me – shockingly – it was kind of interesting that you could be at an event of mine and not know who I am. So I don’t know how that worked. I guess maybe because Frank brought his whole posse here that a lot of you didn’t know. There’s so many big time guru’s I’ve coached. If you know Internet marketing you should recognize pretty much each and every one of those names. So those have been some clients of mine. I am not going to go through them. That is not the point of this. For those of you who didn’t know who I was, that’s why you should believe me when I say that you can do it too. That is the only reason I put it up there is so that you know that I have a lot of experience coaching gurus and that when I tell you that it is possible for you, it’s not just like some belief I have. It’s the fact that I’ve worked with so many of them and I’ve coached them in helping them grow their businesses that I have, I think, a unique perspective to be able to share with you that I don’t think very many people could that says, I know, I’ve worked with them. Some of them 111 2111
are absolute geniuses; some of them are absolute zeroes. And everyone else in this room is as smart or smarter than them. So that is the only reason I put it up there. Remember this. Try and find that picture that represents to you your market and what you do, what you provide them. For those of you who came late, what I was explaining was is that everything I write, every video I create, this is the picture that inspires me because I believe that our market is full of sharks, people that are just like circling around like wanting to deliver crap or to basically sell you all these things that you probably will never use and take advantage of that opportunity seeker that we all have inside of us. I try and write from the perspective against that, being the lifeguard in the situation. So that picture means a lot to me. It won’t mean as much to you because it’s my picture. You have to find your picture. But if you can have a frame of reference of where you are coming from, it makes your communication that much more forceful, and that’s it for me. You’d have to be brain-dead not to have gotten some great ideas at this event. What you do with those ideas obviously, is going to determine whether you are a massive success or not. So I want to talk to you about ideas, execution and my viewpoint about it, what I have learned over the years and hopefully that helps you, because what I have found is that most people go about it the wrong way – the application. So if I were to ask everybody to shout out – and I am not going to because I really just want to cut to the chase here – but if I was to ask you how many great ideas you got, how many do you plan on applying, I think I would get numbers all over the place. And if I asked you how many you’re going to execute, once again, I think I would get number all over he place.
Develop Your Ability to Focus
And the big idea that I want you to take away from this is that every time you say yes to a new idea, a new project, you’re saying later to everything else you’ve already decided. And every single person that spoke to you had some degree of focus to get here. And if you don’t have that kind of focus, you can watch this thing just extend out to infinity. I want to go back for a second. I want you to really soak that in and remember this because most people that I work with in business do not. This is like a major awakening. This is one thing that changes businesses right away. You start making money after three weeks or it expands out to infinity. You decide. And all that is the differentiator is whether you can say no, later. I was speaking to someone the first night and I explained to her that the more successful you get, the more your no muscle has to get. If you were just magically transported into great success and you didn’t have that no muscle developed, you would be decimated in a short period of time. As many good ideas as you got here, my strongest hope is that you write them all down, you figure out when you’re going to apply them, but you just focus on the first one first. Now how do you figure out which one is the first one? Well, once again, from the theory of constraints. I didn’t ever realize that I was taking so much from the theory of constraints, but nonetheless. So everyone has heard that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. That is a cliché, right? Well, a process, a system is only as powerful as its weakest component. It means that in any system – what I just said, because I know that that doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense yet – what it means is that there is usually – not usually; there is always one thing in any system that is the bottleneck. There can only be one thing. Now, once you fix that bottleneck, there will be a new bottleneck. But at any moment in time, in any system there is only one constraint. I like to give this example because I think it clearly illustrates the point; the human body. The goal of the human body is to live as long as possible. Let’s just assume that, that our bodies try to live as long as possible; that is the goal. Now, if, let’s say, I died by having a heart attack, then the constraint to living longer was my heart. It wasn’t my kidneys, it wasn’t my liver, and it wasn’t my eyes. It means that if I work on my kidneys or I worked on my liver or I worked on my eyes, they would be all false efficiencies. They would not extend the life. Now we can argue that certain components might make the job of the heart less and I wouldn’t disagree with that except that for this discussion and how it relates to your life it’s 100 percent appropriate. I wouldn’t need to work on my liver if I’m going to get a heart attack first because that is the constraint to living longer. I’ve worked with so many businesses at this point and I have helped so many businesses grow, and the way that I have always done it is 112 2112
I try and sniff out that constraint. If I can find it, and it is only a question of the dialog that I have and the information that I get, but if I can find it, then that business can grow dramatically overnight, because when you remove that constraint the business grows immediately. So of all the ideas that you got you have to look at what is your current constraint and how can you apply it to it.
You Can Do It: There is No Failing
But you fall, you learn. And if you are afraid of making mistakes, you’re never going to get there. In the interview that Gary and I had, Gary mentioned that there is like eight or nine or maybe there was 20; I don’t remember how many, but there were a certain number of shows that he did that were not up to the same level that the rest of them were. It pains him to think that some new person might find that one first. But if he was always worried about that he would have never started the show. I had already written the Manifesto, I had already written The Missing Chapter, I had already released The Final Chapter, and I still had those big failures, those big embarrassments. I don’t lose any sleep about them now. I am totally okay about it. I didn’t have to go see a therapist to work out my issues about it afterwards because I realized that I’m going to make mistakes and it is totally cool. I just pick myself up and go again. And really, you learn so much more from your mistakes, so I just really hope that fear does not become the limiter or the constraint for you. It can be kind of scary to create a video when you don’t feel like you know really how to be entertaining or charismatic, but if you never start, you will never get good at it. I have had so many people come up and thank me before the contest that we had because it got them started. It got them to create their first video, and they didn’t win and they were kind of upset about that, but nonetheless they were happy because now they were doing video. I hope that you realize that every single speaker here was here for just one reason; to really make a difference in your lives. They didn’t try and sell you something on the stage; they didn’t do any of that. Events like this are a huge undertaking when you go that route because that is a huge profit stream – that is a huge profit stream.
Make a Difference in Someone’s Life
So I want you to remember all of those speakers the next time they release a product or visit their blog. These are the real deal. These are people that do what they do because they love what they do and they love what they do so much that they were willing to speak when normally they could make a couple of hundred thousand dollars from speaking and from selling, and they were willing to speak without making that kind of money just to make a difference in your life. So now it’s your turn. You’ve heard everything you need to learn from these presentations on how to start and run a business. Whether online or offline. Whether with an email list or with a video blog. Whether through face to face or through hard hitting copy. Find the problems and needs of your marketplace. Then work hard...real hard...to find unique solutions and market yourself like crazy until you’ve gotten your message out. Give out answers for free and you too can build a fantastic business like we have. Remember this is all about helping people. The more you give the more the universe will give back. It’s been a pleasure and an honor presenting these people to you. We’ll be talking soon.
Rich Shefren. 113 2113