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Halbert and Carlton Interviews originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

It’s not proselytizing. It’s not trying to argue with them. It’s just teaching them and teaching them until they’re ready to be taught and they’re ready to change. I’ve met a lot of people who change their lives because they’ve learned and they’ve decided to learn and that’s the key. Education is probably the most profound answer I can give to that question. It’s just education.

Ralph Zuranski: What do you think about the “In Search of Heroes” program and its impact on youth, parents and business people?

Michel Fortin: Well, that’s the point. This is exactly what it is. What do you think it’s doing? It’s educating. This is exactly why I love this program and I was one of the first people to actually be fully aware of it and fully aware of my potential contribution to this program.

I do believe that this program is not just a point of going out there and being heroes. It is going out there to teach other people the power of being a hero. It educates them and then makes changes in their lives and the lives of the people around them. This will grow exponentially.

Ralph, you’ve seen the movie “Pay it Forward” haven’t you?

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah.

Michel Fortin: That’s my point. You don’t necessarily have to be a hero or you don’t necessarily have to get somebody to become a hero. All you have to do is to educate others on how powerful it is to become one. If they do become one, then they do it to others and then they do it to others and then they do it to others. It’s one huge multi-level marketing process.

Ralph Zuranski: What are the things parents can do that will help their children realize they can be heroes and make a positive impact on the lives of others?

Michel Fortin: Well, if I had to, if I could boil it down, I think I said two core actions or two core activities on this call. They are teach and listen.

Michel Fortin: How can parents make changes in the lives of their kids – the first thing, of course, is to listen.

A lot of the strife that we have in today’s world, I believe, and I’m a firm believer, is because we are all so busy with the goings-on in our lives. We don’t stop and listen as much as to our own selves and as much as to the people around us and more importantly to the kids in our lives… if you take a chance to sit down and just listen! And, the second part, is to teach, to educate.

Teachers are probably the most underrated people in our society, the most underrated profession in our society. I’m a big believer in teachers. I mean, I used to be one. I’m a teacher right now, being a copywriting coach as much as a motivational speaker or whatever you want to call it, but it’s all teaching. That’s all it really is. It’s not motivation. It’s not all that stuff. It’s teaching. So, yeah, that would be those two fundamental activities:listen and teach.

Ralph Zuranski: If you had three wishes for your life and the world that would instantly come true, what would they be?

Michel Fortin: That I would, well the first wish is that I wouldn’t have any wish. I believe in just being. This might sound a little “woo-woo” to some people, but I don’t want any wishes because I just want to enjoy my life now. I don’t want to wake up at 67 years old and look back on my life and say is this it? And then those are the times that you wish.

Those are the times when you realize what you’ve done wrong. No need to wish; just do. Don’t wish for something now. Just be!. And then you enjoy the process. Then when you are 67 you won’t need to have any wishes because you’re going to look back and say I’m happy. I’m satisfied. I’m fulfilled. I did what I needed to do. I did what I loved to do.

The second wish would be that more people followed those two things I mentioned earlier, to listen and to teach. And the only way that I can do that is not necessarily to wish for it but to actually do it myself.

The more you actually listen and teach yourself, the more you’re actually teaching other people to listen and to teach. The third one is a little hard for me because I don’t wish for much.

Michel Fortin: I wish that if people listening to this call found some grain of something that helps them, whether it’s at that very moment or later in their lives. It doesn’t matter. To me that would be the one wish I have.

Ralph Zuranski: Those are wonderful wishes and I just really appreciate your time in answering these questions and just sharing your wisdom with the world. I just can’t tell you how much I appreciate you.

Michel Fortin: Oh, same here, Ralph, same here. I think that we are both kindred spirits. You know, the thing is when we meet at seminars sometimes and we just discuss some of the things that are going on in our lives like you and your parents and all that stuff, the fact is that it’s not that I just stand there and take time to listen to you, but you also do that to me.

You are the perfect embodiment of everything I spoke about so the whole point is I appreciate you as much and I appreciate what you are doing with this program, Ralph, this is a great program and I wish you the most, the best.

Ralph Zuranski: Well, I thank you for that. You offer to help in the early part of the program really inspired me. I have been working on the program for 13 years.

Michel Fortin: I understand absolutely.

Ralph Zuranski: And I just want to thank you again.

Michel Fortin: You’re most welcome.

Michel Fortin Interview Part 5 of 5 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Whether you’ve built wealth because you produce a product or provided a service that was at the service of others or you gave value to other people’s lives or you gave your life to charity serving others, to me that is so important.

By doing that it is like forgiveness in a sense, where you can get out of that this huge feeling in yourself that you’ve accomplished something that is true to you, not something that is going to be a goal that you reach in the future, not something that is going to be true to the other people around you who you’re serving and you’re thinking that you’re just doing this for other people.

No, you’re doing it for yourself. Gosh, you know, it’s so important for you to understand and I’m speaking to the people listening to this call. It’s so important for you to understand that when you give of yourself, the law of karma is there.

You get back, and sometimes ten times more, what you give out. It’s the same thing in a bad way. If you are bad to the world, if you don’t serve others, if you withhold the goodness that you can put out in the world, it will come back and bite you in the butt. So yeah, I believe in being at the service of others, absolutely.

Ralph Zuranski: How important is it to maintain a sense of humor in the face of adversity?

Michel Fortin: The greatest cure for pretty much all disease that has actually been scientifically proven. Although it’s premature now, but there are more and more tests proving that laughter is the greatest immune system kicker.

I don’t know where these tests are, This is anecdotal so I can’t back this up. I read so much about it, but there are tests that have proven in the moment of laughter that your endorphins get kicked in. The dopamine in your brain and your body gets kicked in.

Your hormone levels get kicked up a notch and those things in turn increase the immune system. Those things help to fight off disease. I’m not saying that that’s true in every case. I mean, I don’t want to say a person who has cancer should laugh their way until they’re healthy again.

Michel Fortin: That’s not my point. But, maybe if they’re hurting while they have cancer, laughter is a good way to take their mind off of it. Michel Fortin: It is basic and fundamental to being able to help cure yourself. Laughter is the source of goodness in the world but it is also the source of goodness in your own self, body-wise as much as mind-wise.

Ralph Zuranski: Yeah. Other than Jim Rohn, who are the other heroes in your life?

Michel Fortin: Oh, my goodness, do you have a couple of hours?

Ralph Zuranski: Sure.

Michel Fortin: I have a lot of mentors in my life but I think there’s quite a few of them. I’m not a religious person. I am a very spiritual person. I read a lot of spiritual leaders because I believe they have a lot to teach us… whether it’s Jesus or the person actually I’m really referring to is the Buddha.

I’m not a Buddhist, but I enjoy reading a lot about the Buddha. I’ve read the Dharmapadda and the Bodghivad Gita, for example, and other books of other spiritual leaders. They’re mentors to me because they show and they lead by example.

They’re the perfect example of love and goodness in this world. What they teach is important.

Now, I’m not going to say that you should not believe in the virgin birth and the crucifixion and all that stuff in Jesus’ life but, did you actually take the chance to stop and just read the words that Jesus uttered, for example, on the Mount?

The lives that they led were inspirational and I don’t mean to say that from a religious perspective. I’m just saying, “Listen to what people teach you. Listen! You want people to realize you are saying, “Yes, I hear what you’re saying.”

Those are the mentors that mean a lot to me. Another few mentors, modern-age mentors… I’m a big fan of Brian Tracy. I’m a big fan of Jim Rohn, of course Tony Alessandra. And, the funny part about it is I have learned a lot of things from current spiritual leaders. I do believe that Joseph Campbell, who is probably one of my biggest mentors in that realm, has taught me so much about the power of the inner self. Joseph Campbell is the one who uttered those famous words, “Follow your bliss.”, He is one of them.

Michel Fortin: Florence Scovel Shinn is another and John Randolph Price. Those are more of the spiritual kind of guys, but also Louise Hay. I read a lot about that stuff. Now, you can say it’s all “metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.” The point is not to believe in whether it’s metaphysical or not.

The fact is I just listened and learned to apply whatever I learned in the way I want my life to go. That’s the whole point of any religious, philosophical and thinking process. It is not to believe in what people tell you. It is to make use of it.

Ralph Zuranski: Do you feel that there are any real heroes in our society today that aren’t getting the recognition that they deserve?

Michel Fortin: Absolutely, but you know, those who are the real heroes are people who don’t seek recognition in the first place. They’re not heroes for the sake of recognition. They’re heroes because they’re heroes.

To answer your question with a very blunt answer, “Yes of course there are heroes out there today in the world that do deserve more recognition!” But when you ask them that question, what do you think they’ll say? “I don’t care. I do what I feel is right, point, period.” And that’s the more important thing about that.

Ralph Zuranski: Why are heroes so important in the lives of young people?

Michel Fortin: Everything that’s going to happen in this world, even today, is molded, created, prepared by, built on by first of all people. And people were once children.

They were once kids. Their lives today very often are molded by the things and the people and the instances and the events and the circumstances of their childhood as much as what is going on in their lives today.

I was lucky. Well, I guess I’m not lucky because I believe everybody has that capacity. It’s not luck. But I was lucky. I guess a better way to say it is, “I was fortunate to look at my lessons in my life and look at them as the most beautiful gifts in the world, and to have mentors and heroes in my life that have helped me.”

But there are so many kids out there that fail to go through this “fortunate” process that I went through. So if they have an opportunity to have heroes in their lives, boy oh boy, can you imagine the goodness that we can unleash in this world? They will be molded. Their future will be molded so that they will be the molders of the future.

Michel Fortin: So today the people that make differences in people’s lives is because they had differences made to them in their own lives when they were young. It is when you are young that your entire life is almost dictated. Now, good or bad, you can have bad stuff happen to you and it dictates your life in a good way.

You know, there’s an old story about the two sons of an alcoholic father who grew up. One became an alcoholic and one became a very successful businessman. When an interviewer asked them the question “why are you who you are today?” and they both answered the same answer, “Well, I didn’t have any choice; look at my father.”

One blamed his father for being the way he is. The other one looked at his father and used that as a springboard for not being like him. So fortunately, they might have had heroes in their lives that made them go that way, especially the one that’s positive, but the thing is whether it’s true or false. The thing is we all need heroes but the kids need them the most because they are the molders of the future.

Ralph Zuranski: How does it feel to be recognized as an Internet hero?

Michel Fortin: I would be very misleading if I said it didn’t feel good, because it does feel good. I think that’s the ego part of me. But what I feel best about is I have testimonials on my website about the lives that I’ve changed. And that makes me feel good. But what I put on my website, what I put out in the world as a way to prop my own self up is just the tip of the iceberg of what I get every single day.

We talked at the beginning of this call about all these emails I get every day. A good percentage of those emails are just tiny little words from somebody who I made a difference to in their lives. It doesn’t have to be this huge thing that I can actually use as a testimonial.

It doesn’t have to be an actual business or a success or whatever. I had people who emailed me after the big seminar and said, “Michel Fortin Fortin, you’re a person that I’ve been following for so many years and it was such a huge honor and pleasure to have met you.”

Michel Fortin: That brightened up my day. To me I don’t need to have recognition in the other way where I actually have to put out stuff in the world to get recognized. One tiny little email made the difference in my life just as much as what we were talking at the beginning.

About spending just five minutes with somebody at a seminar somewhere, how much of a difference you made in that person’s day. And that’s the kind of recognition I enjoy, even more than the actual pats on the back that I get in the public way. I prefer the small private little ones because they put a smile on my face.

Ralph Zuranski: How are you personally making the world a better place?

Michel Fortin: By being me. That’s probably the best answer I can give you. I follow what I believe in. I am true to myself and most important, I do what I love to do. When you do what you love to do, we were talking about giving good service or being at the service of others.If you love doing what you do, how much better are you going to serve the people around you?

How much more passion and zest will you have for not only what you do but what you expresses about service to others. If you had a choice to buy a product from two different service providers or two different stores and one person hates their job and the other one absolutely loves their job, how much more willing will that second person be to help you.

How much more in service of you will that person be? Of course, a lot more. So, how do I expect to make a change in the world just by being me? Just by being Michel Fortin! Just by being the person who loves to do what he does because that will give all these byproducts of everything we just talked about on this call.

Ralph Zuranski: There’s a lot of problems facing societies all over the world today, like racism, child and spousal abuse and violence among young people. Do you have any good solutions for those problems?

Michel Fortin: Education! Education. We cannot change the world by forcing it but we can change the world by educating it. I was once a college teacher. There’s such a great sense of fulfillment that one gets when they teach other people.

Michel Fortin Interview Part 4 of 5 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

You will be able to go down the right road. Fast or slow doesn’t matter and that’s not optimism. That’s just being. That’s just following your conscience. That’s just being a realist. It’s not being a pessimist. It’s not being optimist. It’s probably an optimal point of looking at it, an optimal point or way to look at things, but it’s not necessarily optimistic.

Ralph Zuranski: Do you think it takes courage to pursue new ideas?

It absolutely takes courage. You know courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the ability to take risks when there is fear. As the old saying goes for people who, like speakers when they speak onstage, they say you’ll never be able to get rid of those butterflies. Your job is to make those butterflies dance in formation and that is courage.

Ralph Zuranski: How important is prayer?

Michel Fortin: If I pray to any one God or any one Spirit or any one process in this world, I pray for three major things strength, courage and wisdom. I pray for the strength to be able to do what is necessary, the courage to be able to go ahead and do it, the courage to be able to also accept defeat when you need to accept defeat, and wisdom.

Exactly, that’s the prayer of serenity that they use for example in “Alcoholics’ Anonymous,” And that’s the most beautiful prayer in the world because then you have the wisdom to know the difference, the wisdom to know what to do, when to do it, how to do it, who to say it to, at what time, and when not to do things, when to shut up, when to stop yourself from doing things that you shouldn’t be doing and stuff like that. So to me courage, yeah, that’s it, absolutely.

If you have a new idea, you’re always pushing the envelope in every day of your life because you’re always growing and evolving. The problem is are you going to be pushing it by a millimeter today or are you going to be pushing it by a yard. And that takes courage. It also takes courage to realize that in the first place, not just the courage to do it. That takes strength but to me courage is absolutely necessary, absolutely.

Ralph Zuranski: Do you think that in the process of pursuing new ideas and using that courage that you’re going to experience discomfort in the pursuit of your dreams?

Michel Fortin: Well, absolutely. It’s going through life. If you’re ever going to do something, you have to take the goods and the bads with it. The good will outweigh the bad, of course, but there will always be bad. There’s always going to be discomfort.

Here’s the point. If you do what you love. If you do something that you have zest and passion for and you’re so fully absorbed in the process, you tend to not even think of the discomfort even though you are actually feeling it. Your body is feeling it. If I’m doing something that I love I’m going to finish this because it’s important.

If I do something that I love, the discomfort level will be on the back burner in my mind, although it will always be there. Yanni, a very famous composer who writes New Age-type music, he’s like me in a certain way. Whenever he writes a whole CD or a new song or even a new kind of symphony, he locks himself in his room for two, three weeks at a time. He forgets to bathe. He forgets to eat. He forgets to sleep, because he is so engrossed in the moment.

Discomfort, yes, but are you actually focused on your discomfort? No, if you do something you love, then you’ll have a chance to look at all the things that are uncomfortable, drudgery, perfunctory or even painful, as things that are important to you. They’re part of something that gives you purpose. You will turn the important into the urgent.

You will turn the discomfort into comfort. It’s a natural, physical knee-jerk reaction. I can’t really express it well enough in words. Essentially you’ll be able to turn the uncomfortable into the comfort. Or you’ll be able to accept or have a tolerance level higher if you were doing something you absolutely love because that purpose drives you. Everything that happens to you, that may be bad or may make you uncomfortable, is so in the back of your mind, you just trudge along. You will be going wherever you want to go.

Ralph Zuranski: How important is the belief that your dreams will actually become reality?

Michel Fortin: First of all it is extremely important, but it’s not important to the degree that you might think. I don’t feel people should believe that their dreams become reality because belief is something you can’t change on a whim. How can you believe something that you don’t believe?

Can you force yourself to believe in something? Can you believe in your dream? No, you can’t. It’s not something you can change on a whim. If I don’t like asparagus today, do I have to force myself to like asparagus? No, I mean, I can’t change the way I feel. If I don’t believe in my dreams today, I can’t switch it just like with one flick of a switch and say, “I’m believing in my dream,” but here’s the difference.

If I have dreams and I do tiny little things that will make me consciously purposeful every single day as I head towards my dreams, the more and more this internal switch will flick on for you, not only to believe in your dreams but to know that your dreams will become reality. And there’s a big difference between belief and knowing.

Ralph Zuranski: That’s a profound point. When you are trying to achieve your dreams there’s a tremendous amount of doubts and fears. And, a lot of people in your life will try to crush your dream because they don’t want you to change for fear of having to change themselves. How did you overcome your doubts and fears?

Michel Fortin: By journaling is the one way. The other point is to always constantly listen to yourself. Be true to your own self. You know, to thine own self be true, in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” And the one thing that you have to understand is, this is absolutely so true.

I don’t mean to proselytize for any religion. And I don’t mean to sound religious, but we are all like Jesus, where we’re crucified between two thieves, tomorrow and yesterday… in other words, fear and guilt.

The fear of what’s going to happen tomorrow and the guilt of what happened in the past, they are always gonna be. But, like Jesus, he was true to himself. He did what he needed to do. If you have fears and you have doubts, that’s perfectly fine as long as you realize that the more focused you are on yourself the more you let the “inner you” tell you what to do, guide you in what you’re doing.

Michel Fortin: The more you write to yourself as much as even talking to other people about how you feel about certain things, that is learning process that will give you the ammunition to destroy lack and limitation.

There’s also another thing. I know, I think it’s the most important. The greatest creator of fear is a low self esteem. Any lack and limitation in your life that are there, you know. They’re not just lack and limitations, because they exist. They’re lack and limitations because you believe they are lack and limitations.

The only way to circumvent, to overcome, to destroy those fears, at least to reduce it, is to increase the belief that you have in your own self. The more you work on your own self-esteem, the more you have confidence in yourself.

The more you work on having confidence in yourself, all the other fears and all the things that are destroying or attempting to destroy the things that are good to you in your life, the things that you want to do in your life, will almost dissipate by themselves. The reason is because you’ve become a bigger believer in the best thing that ever happened in this world, and that’s you.

Ralph Zuranski: Well, is there anybody that helped give you the willpower to change things in your life for the better?

Michel Fortin: Well, like I said, whenever I grew up, I had a mentor. And I’ll tell you one thing that really had the most profound impact in my life. He kept telling me every single day and it may not sound profound, but he said, “turn off the tape recorder”. Okay? Now, let me explain what that means. I was a salesman and as I grew up and I was trying to make sales. I had fears and doubts but a lot of times it was because I was saying that to my self.

There was a tape recorder in my mind that kept telling me, “I’m stupid. I’m a failure. I don’t. I’ll never amount to much. I will always. I’m going to fail. This is not for me. This is too lofty of an ambition for me. Or, this is impossible for me to reach! Blah, blah, blah.”

My mentor sometimes he would just look at me and I wouldn’t even say a word. He would look at me and say, “Turn the tape recorder off, Mike”.

Michel Fortin: And that is the most profound thing that I’ve ever, ever been taught because we all have tape recorders in our minds. We do become what we think about. You reap what you sow.

If you think you’re a failure, if you think that you will fail, if you think that you’re not good enough or whatever, then you are. You are what you think! And, a big philosophy that I go by is by the Latin philosopher Rene Descartes. In 1637 he said, “I think, therefore I am”. If you think you’re a failure, you are!

If you’re thinking you’re a success, you are. So that thing that my mentor kept telling me, “turn the tape recorder off” is just a very modern way to look at it. But it’s so true! And, that has changed my life.

Ralph Zuranski: How important is it to forgive others who upset, offend or oppose you?

Michel Fortin: Ralph, did you now that forgiveness is a very selfish thing? Did you know that actually forgiving is not because you’re doing it for the other person? You, you know, forgiveness is probably the most selfish act you could ever do. And it’s a good selfish act because when you forgive you are releasing all the tension, all the bad stuff that you’re holding on to that’s going to cause you great problems, great turmoil.

If you forgive and you let go, it’s unbelievable the release that you get in your life. I used to be stubborn. I would look at each person and the person who would do me wrong. I would be stubborn enough to say, “I hate that person and I’ll never talk to that person again.” But who’s really being hurt here?

Now, I’m doing it because I’m thinking that I don’t want to give the person either the pleasure of my forgiveness or I just don’t want to show the person I’m really mad at that person.

Once you forgive, you let go. Guess whose life is going to be more enriched? Both of yours, of course, but the most important person is you. So forgiveness is extremely important because the more you forgive the more you can let go rid of all the nasty stuff and start working on the good stuff in your life.

Ralph Zuranski: How important is service to others as a source of joy? Do you find joy in serving others?

Michel Fortin Interview Part 3 of 5 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

I’m a very humble person. I always like to take the low road. I do like the approval. I do like the limelight. But, if I feel that somebody else can take it for me, if I feel that if there is something that I can do, that it takes away from me, but it makes somebody else’s life better, I will do that. That’s a really hard lesson to learn in humility.

Whenever you look at, for example, some of the discussion boards that I’m participating in, sometimes you get these really fierce battles. And there was a couple of times when people actually were against some of the things that I’ve either actually said or had done.

And I will go into the board and I will say, “You know, I so understand how you feel.” I have to look at it from the perspective of the other person. And I humble myself by saying, “Listen, every single person in this world is a teacher.”

Everybody teaches you in some way, the people who are nasty to you as much as people who are good to you. They’re all just teachers. They’re not good. they’re not bad. It’s not black and white. Things that happen to you or things that people tell you, it’s all teaching you something. Your consciousness is where you come to the realization that I am ready to learn, just like the old Confucian saying that, “When the student is ready the teacher will appear.”

To me teachers are people or events or things that happen. And as a humbled person, my guiding principle is to always look at every single thing as some kind of a lesson. And that’s the principle I would sacrifice for. Yes, absolutely!

Ralph Zuranski: Everybody has low points in their life. I know you’ve had a fair number of those events in your life. What was the lowest point in your life and how did you change your path to have victory over the obstacles at that time?

Michel Fortin: I recently wrote – that’s actually not true. I wrote a book over ten years ago that I just recently put on the Internet for free. And it was a book that I’d written as a way to teach my self how to go through some of the hardships that I was going at that time. I was a go-getting, goal-achieving, goal-oriented, Type A personality, do as much as you possibly can-type person. And I realized that I was achieving a lot.

Michel Fortin: I was making a lot of money. I was a salesperson working on commission. And I was doing very well until I realized that I was neglecting and ignoring other things, especially my own self, the quality of my life. I was focusing too much on quantity of time rather than quality of life.

Well, “lo and behold,” in what seemed like a matter of hours I lost everything in my life… my home, my car, my furniture, my wife. I lost everything and then I went into bankruptcy. I even had to look at sleeping at the YMCA for shelter. And then I started writing that book. And I realized there are far more important things out there than material things. First of all, people are more important. Second is time.

Time is a commodity, a scarce commodity. And what you don’t do in this moment is something you will never be able to do, in that moment anyways. When that moment’s gone, it’s gone.

Do you want to spend it working on your business? Sure, if it gives you some kind of feeling that I’m doing something that I absolutely love to do. Or do you want to work in a job dreading those years until you retire?

Or are you going to work so much that you neglect the people that you love or the people who love you? So the point, I’m saying, is that the low of the low that I have gone through was the most precious and beautiful gift that I have ever received. It was the biggest lesson that I had to learn. And that’s what encompasses everything I just said up until this point.

Ralph Zuranski: People fear to do anything because they fear they’re “gonna” fail. And when catastrophic events like that occur to some people, they never recover. Would you say that it’s those events that change the course of our life for the better?

Michel Fortin: Those are events that do change your life. But you have to know there are things like death. There’s a grieving process to go through. When you’re in the thick of things, at that moment in your life, you’ll probably be depressed. You’ll probably have a hard time trying to see the lesson for what it is.

But when you have a chance to go through the grieving process, this pseudo-grieving process, you need to take a step back and look at your what is happening.

Michel Fortin: That’s why I’m a big believer in writing in journals. In fact, the book that I just mentioned was a book that was actually a way to write to myself on how to deal with the things that I was going through in my life. But, it was like writing in my own journal because that way you can teach yourself to be better.

You can teach yourself to accept things better. You can teach yourself to get out of that rut. Jim Rohn said it best.

If you are in a low point in your life, go help out somebody else who’s in a low point, the same low point as you. By teaching others or by helping others, you are actually helping your self. Because, then you can take a step back and say, “Well, gosh, I’m telling this person how to get out of this situation and I’m in the situation myself.”

And then you realize, because what happens is you let this intuition flow, this consciousness flow and you realize that you will get out of that rut by helping others. To answer your question, that’s what I would do.

Actually, writing in a journal is good. But, most often when you have an opportunity to go through the grieving process, do, be depressed. Be sad. Those are things, if you’re unhappy because something really bad happened to you, that is perfectly fine. When that’s done take a step back. And then you’ll learn. You’ll see the lesson for what it is. And you’ll grow from it.

Some people don’t step back. They keep themselves in that depression mode. Some people have bad things happen to them in their lives and they stay there for a very, very long time simply because they want to stay there.

Wayne Dyer said it best. “Your body has a natural ability to heal itself.”

If you have a cut on your arm are you going to force it to stay open because you want the world to see, “Hey, look.!, I have an open wound here. I’m hurting. I’m hurting. Take care of me.”

It gives you some feeling of grandeur, the fact that you are hurting, that it means something to you. No, your body’s natural process is to heal itself, the same way if something bad happens to you emotionally or psychically as well as physiologically.

Michel Fortin: Your body has a natural tendency to heal itself. Let the healing do its own job. It takes time. You don’t heal overnight of a cut wound, just as you won’t heal overnight of a bad situation or a bad event that happened in your life. But once you heal, now is the chance. That scar tissue is your body’s process to strengthen that one area that was broken.

You know bones that are broken, when they heal become even stronger than they were before. That’s the process of even a bad event that happens in your life. Something bad happens to you. Once you’ve healed, yes, you will have scars. But, you can turn your scars into stars! Because those scars are like shields that will protect you in case this stuff happens again. And it will make you stronger. And I believe in that totally.

Ralph Zuranski: It’s funny that you talk about journaling. Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero, who’s another copywriter, suffered sexual abuse as a young person. She’s now creating a course using journaling to help other women overcome the same trauma of that situation while growing up. So it’s fascinating that you would talk about journaling. Did it really help you also?

Michel Fortin: Oh, absolutely. I hurt in my journals so much, especially in those, those dark times in my life. It’s also a great reference tool because it makes you more resilient that next time something happens in the future. If it happens again, or whenever, you do have a chance to go back and reflect and review entries in your journal. You realize how far you’ve grown and that in itself it is a strengthening process. Because, then you can see, “Wow, I really went through that. I really felt that way? Oh my goodness, how far I’ve grown.” And that in itself makes you grow even more, even in good times.

Ralph Zuranski: What is the dream or vision that sets the course of your life?

Michel Fortin: I live by one motto and one motto alone. I don’t believe in goals. I don’t believe in an end result specifically in my life. You know, there is two types of people in this world.

There are the people who always will live in the future where they always have something that they want to look for, a vision or a dream or whatever. Like you just said. Then there are people who are in the rapture of the moment, people like artists. I think it was, I can’t remember exactly who, but I believe it was Dr. Tony Alessandra who said, “You’ve got rowers and you’ve got drifters and then there’s nothing bad with either one of them.”

Michel Fortin: People who row, going toward a destination, will row. People who drift will enjoy the scenery along the way as they drift in that river going towards the ocean. Me, that’s what it is and the point is this. If you want me to say that I do have a dream or a vision it is this, to always do what I love. Joseph Campbell said it best, “Follow your bliss. Do what you love. The money will follow. The business will follow. The success will follow.”

Even if those things don’t, the fact that once you go through your life and you end up looking back on your life and you say, “I really enjoyed my life. I’ve really done something that I totally love.” So do what you love or love what you do. That’s the ultimate vision and it’s my vision.

Ralph Zuranski: Well, in everybody’s life, there is positive. There are setbacks. There are misfortunes and mistakes that we make. How important is it to be an optimist and take a positive view of things?

Michel Fortin: Well, optimism has a lot of sometimes bad connotations as much as good connotations.

Ralph Zuranski: Really?

Michel Fortin: Optimism is not motivation and people misinterpret that. Optimism is a positive mental attitude. The one thing that you need the most and that’s beyond being an optimist is not just being a realist but being a student. If you have a bad situation, try to learn as much as you can. That’s why journaling is so important. Try to learn as much as you can in terms of looking at the positive aspect of what happened.

There is a technique called the “best and better technique.” Look for what’s the best you can pull from every situation and how you can be better next time, how you can better your own self from the event. Is that an optimist? Not necessarily. People will take optimism and look at it as some form of motivation.

Jim Rohn said it best. “If somebody’s going down the wrong road, they don’t need motivation to speed them up, they need education to turn them around” So being an optimist is not some “Pollyanna,” bang your head against the wall and hey it hurts but hey, I’m happy about it and I’ll keep, you know, bumping myself against the way.

Michel Fortin Interview Part 2 of 5 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Ralph Zuranski is the creator of the "In Search Of Heroes™" program, whose aim is to generate income to fund beneficial community programs, activities, equipment, software, training and travel through cash donations and affiliate marketing, particularly for, or geared towards, disadvantaged kids.

Ralph Zuranski, a former special feature’s writer and photographer for the Coronado Eagle Newspaper, created the In Search Of Heroes™ Program for High School Students in 1992-1993.

The entire community of Coronado worked together to help students discover and develop their own heroic potential. After they believed they could be heroes, they were matched up with mentors to help them identify and interview local heroes. They created articles, newsletters, websites and videos to spread the Good News about neighbors, family members, friends and community residents who were helping others.

This "hobby" soon blossomed into an Internet website with interviews of local and now international, Internet-based heroes. Why? Because Ralph realized in the year 2001 that the internet is the perfect vehicle to spread Good News world-wide instantly and inexpensively.

Michel Fortin is one of them.

Click here to listen to the interview on audio.

Michel Fortin Interview originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

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

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

It is truly amazing. He is a copywriting scientist.

How are you doing today, Michel?

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

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

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

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

Michel Fortin: Yes, that’s right.

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

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

Ralph Zuranski: What is your definition of heroism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel Fortin: Absolutely.

Ralph Zuranski: Does that fit your definition?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel Fortin Interview Part 1 of 5 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Some people have said this about my copy for John Reese’s famous million-dollar day launch of his course Traffic Secrets. Others have said this about other major product launches. But I can tell you, nothing can be further from the truth.

Arguably, everything that goes into a launch is what makes it successful. Recruiting big-name affiliates, having JVs, writing powerful affiliate copy, using targeted lists, applying scarcity (such as a countdown to a launch), adding social proof, creating buzz, etc.

And some people (albeit not as many as some purport) will buy the product on the power of those alone. But even when all the cards are played right, copy still does play a role.

A major role.

Recently, I conducted a special interview with copywriter Mike Morgan and his client, Sterling Valentine, author of JV Formula, on the power of copy during a major product launch.

Mike and Sterling dispell the myth that good product launches practically sell themselves, without the need for copy. If you listen to this call, you will soon realize that copy plays a vastly more important role during a major product launch.

And Sterling and Mike have the test results to prove it.

On this call Mike and Sterline were gracious enough to talk about their initial “flop” when his product launched, and how they turned it around into a massive success, all with just the power of great copywriting.

Click here to download the call. Also, check out the salesletter in question talked about on the call. Click here to view “JV Formula.”

The Myth About Product Launch Copy originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

However it was, if it was, if your wife had unexpectedly had triplets I think you’d be interested in the message. And, and, and that, that’s a point, uh, I think it’s really important ****.

By the way, someone else asked a question uh, and I, I don’t see the letter here, but it’s is a really good question and, and I want to answer that because I think I have the answer to a question.

You know one of the things I preach and, and other good marketing people preach is sell to a starving crowd and the, the question was how do you find new starving crowds? Uhm, and uhm, I’ll tell you the best way I know is to visit a big bookstand and look at the magazines and you’re going to find out that there are magazines that you wouldn’t even believe and really.

Now I want to tell you something about magazines that people don’t know it. The, like if you’re getting mailing lists of magazines newsstands sold magazine mailing list are much more valuable than subscription sold mailing list because you might subscribe to a magazine because you, you got a free. Are you there Mike?

Michel: Yeah, yeah.

Gary: You got a free walkie talkie with it. Uh, or you might subscribe to a magazine you’re still getting three years later that you’ve lost interest but if you’re buying a magazine at the newsstand uh, you know that is because you are really interested in it and as equally important you’re interested right now. Now for example, there are several magazines on the subject of watches. Some people are just freaks about watches.

Uh, a few years ago there was a magazine phenomena, it’s died out now, called “Cigar Affectianato” for all of a sudden people came in heat about smoking cigars and couldn’t know enough about them.

The, the things that are, that are kind of surprising for example, uhm, the uhm, I don’t want to insult anybody but uh, if you got to hotels now and you watch the television programs, the paid programming 70 percent of all paid programming is adult programming. Uh, I will tell you another thing that’s kind of interesting that I didn’t know.

You know hip hop music, the kind that that person hates? Do you know that, that the sales of hip hop music is more than all other forms of music combined? More than rock and roll, folk, classical, everything. Hip hop music sells all of them put together. Here’s another kind of thing that’s kind of interesting. You know these, I don’t even know much about them, but you know these games you play with the joystick on your television or you computer?

Michel: Hm mm.

Gary: Do you know that that industry is bigger by far than the entire **** movie and, and music industry and, and the way you can find these things out is you know, any, any time there becomes a large enough group and people and I don’t think it has to be very large. Somebody puts out a magazine about it.

And that’s a very valuable tip for making money because you can jump on those magazines, probably advertise in them for chump change and if they’ve got a mailing list, you’ve got a little gold niche that you can go find. Now, before we close Mike there is something else that I do want to say but I want to have all the questions finished first. So if you’ve got more let me know.

Michel: I, I, I do. Did you want to finish first or did you want me to answer some of the questions — -

Gary: — – Well, well, no I have something to say toward the, oh, there’s one thing I do want to say now that I, uhm, I’m working on one or two newsletters that require a lot of research and those newsletters are about, I am single handedly going to reduce international, uh, intellectual theft on the Internet by a double digit percentage and I am going to reduce Internet theft, theft of my intellectual properties by a hundred percent and I know exactly how to do that and I think you’ll be happy to know that probably.

And I also am going to uh, do something, I, I’m going to end what people think they have a free right to say anything they want about anybody on an Internet forum. After I write my newsletters everybody, to be quite frankly, is gonna be scared shitless and rightfully so to do that.

And I want to tell you something and this is not what I’m wanting to say at the end but uh, you know, I’ve always been pretty visible for a long time in the field of direct marketing. But, lately, my, my visibility has gone up astronomically. Uh, and, I couldn’t figure it out because I haven’t been putting that many newsletters up or anything and uhm, I.

You know what it is? It’s because of the blogs.

And, and I type in Gary Halbert blogs or forums and like there’s a thousand groups of people out there who are devoted to talking about me. And I’ve been going on those blogs and some of the, I’ve learned some amazing stuff about myself. Uhm, it, you know, uhm, I learned that uhm, I, I think you know Frank Kern. I don’t know him. But someone said I had written a long, teamed up with him and written a long scammy letter with Frank Kern. There’s a whole big dialogue in it.

I don’t even know Frank Kern. I think I met him once at a seminar but I don’t even know him. Uhm, also, John Carlton sent me a link I should go to and this web site had a big headline that said “If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from Gary Halbert lately it’s because he’s in prison”.

Michel: Oh yeah, I remember that.

Gary: And, and then there’s another one. There’s a big dialogue on this thing about uhm, uh. Do you know that I own the, the, the web site, radarpark.com?

Michel: No.

Gary: Now, I have no idea what that site is about. I think it’s about some kind of device you put on your car where you back up into something and if you’re about to hit it, it gives you an audio signal.

But you should have seen the dialogue between this guy who really owned the site and another guy. He doesn’t know me, the guy that owns this site, and he’s trying to explain to this other guy that he doesn’t know me and this guy won’t give up. And he says I know this is a Gary Halbert letter. Well, I’ve never heard of radarpark.com. And then there’s something else Mike.

You know, uhm, a guy was writing about how I had an idea at 9:00 in the morning one time and I had turned it into $50, $250 million profit by noon. Now you know how I’m getting old Mike?

Michel: No.

Gary: It used to be that every time I got sent to prison or made a quarter of a million dollars in three hours I would remember it. And now I don’t even remember this stuff, you know? And what’s, what’s funny is almost everything written about me is positive, some of it’s negative but it’s all tortured. It’s all convoluted. You know? And uhm, Joe Polish one time said Gary, there’s, there’s a whole uh, forum about you in Bill Meyers’ web site. Don’t you want to go read it?

And he couldn’t believe I didn’t want to go read it. And I said now. And he said why? And I said because these people don’t know anything about me. It doesn’t matter if they say anything good. You, you know, people say a lot of great things about me but you know what? I know this is hard to believe but I really didn’t make a quarter of a million dollars in three hours unless my memory has failed more than I think it has failed, you know?

And the, the, the guy that, that said I was in prison? I called him up and I said this is Gary Halbert. I’m calling from Miami and uhm. He said oh hi Gary. Good to talk to you. And I said well, don’t you wonder how I’m talking to you since I’m in prison? He says oh, yeah. I said why did you put this on your website **** prison. He said, well he had bought the franchise rights to, to some newsletter and this was a feature article of the newsletter, okay?

So I, I had a little talk with him and I gave him a picture of what the rest of his life, how, how it was gonna play out be, if I went back to his site in 60 minutes and my name was even mentioned on there, and he was just a young kid and, so I went back an hour later but it was down. But you know I can take almost any kind of sling or insult but I don’t want people saying I’m in prison or you know, I had sex with a farm animal or something like that. Or, or even that I made $250 million dollars in three hours and, and I didn’t and uh.

Uhm, oh yeah and another thing I want to say because I am researching, so much research is going into this because I think, don’t you think that’s a pretty important endeavor to end intellectual theft on the Net and stop, stop slander? You know as justice learned in the hand said freedom of speech does not give you the right to yell fire in a crowded theater and I’ll tell you another thing.

When you, I’ll tell you something that most people don’t know. I can write a letter to you Mike and say any negative thing about you that I want and there, there, there won’t be any consequences to me because I haven’t injured you unless you show that letter to somebody else. However, if I write that letter to you and carbon copy three other people on that you’ve got me for slander and you can sue my ass off.

The same thing is a forum is not a private dialogue. You can email me if you don’t carbon anything, anything about somebody if you want to, to a friend but if you carbon copy it or you say it on a forum, it better be true.

And I’m gonna tell you. There’s gonna come a point very shortly in time. Anybody that says anything negative about me that’s not true I am going to sue them and ruin their life not because I, mainly because I want to teach you and everybody else how to do it. Well, in the meantime, since I’m doing that I thought I don’t want to neglect my readers. And of everything I’ve ever created that, that people have thanked me for, it’s the boron letters. And the boron letters are a collection of letters that I wrote to my son that have been turned into a book. And it’s a, it’s a 181 page book and I think it sells for $297.00.

Michel: I look at, I’m looking at my copy right now uh, Gary.

Gary: Oh, okay. And those, those, that book has become a, a cult favorite. There are guys who keep that book with them wherever they travel in the world. And anyway, I have uhm, I have a, a strange belief about something and I’ll tell you something. I wrote a health report for men that, that would improve their health a lot. I, because I’ve learned something about that and my secretary Teresa, my trusty assistant for almost 20 years was crying when she typed that and I said why are you crying? She said because there isn’t anything like that for women.

So I sold it for $197.00 and I sold a bunch of them and then I thought, you know, if this is helping so many people I said anybody who wants to can reproduce this as long as they don’t sell it and use it as a premium or disseminate if the information of that want is that valuable anything I create, I, I have a tendency of giving it away.

So you can, if you search for the Gary Halbert Health Report uhm, you will find it on the net and I actually wrote down the address where it is and I don’t have it right now. Kaleb if you can hear me and you can see, and you have that address, you can bring it over, but let me tell you what I’m getting at.

The boron letters? I forget how many letters there are but I’m gonna consider each letter a chapter and starting next Tuesday if you go to my site I am going to put up a new chapter every week, free. You can just go to my site, read the boron letters, Chapter 1, the born letters, Chapter 3.

Next week the boron letters, Chapter 3. And I hope you enjoy them and I hope you download them and so do you have, okay Caleb doesn’t have the address, but if you search around for the Gary Halbert Health Report somebody will find it and maybe they can disseminate that address to the rest of your group. And should I say my final thing before I take anymore questions?

Michel: Well I’m going to answer just two very quick questions if I may Gary.

Gary: Okay.

Michel: Two people have asked, asked, one person asked how do you find a starving crowd on the Internet and here’s some of the tools I used. First of all your very, very best tool is the Google search engine. But more specifically a tool that Google actually offers. A lot of people know about this but some people don’t.

It’s called the Google sandbox. If you actually go to Google, I don’t actually have the exact address but if you go to Google and you type in Google sandbox it will give you the page at which this is located and what you do is you can actually type in keywords and it will give you a list of not only how many times a particular keyword has been searched but it’ll give you variations of that keyword.

And that will give you also a good idea of, of different types of niche markets for that particular category or product. And sometimes the most profitable products are usually the niche market ones. And I’m a big fan of niche marketing.

In fact this is the second tool that I would suggest highly is called Niche Finder and the web site that you can actually, I think there’s a free demo but you have to buy the product, it’s a software program, it’s Nichemarketresearch.com, N-I-C-H-E marketresearch.com.

Gary: Get that Caleb and look up Boker.

Michel: Niche Finder, here’s what it does, it will scour all the major search engines for keywords. It will give you variations of those keywords. It will give you in a column format the number of times a specific keyword was searched for and it will give you a number of how many web sites actually cater to that keyword.

So the bottom line is you will not only find a supply but also demand. You want to find a niche that has some kind of supply because when there’s a keyword that’s been searched for a lot but there’s no demand, there’s no supply for it maybe that’s telling you something. Maybe it’s because nobody’s buying that particular niche.

But if you have a keywordthat’s been searched for, and you can have keywords like 10, 20, 30,000 times searched in the last let’s say day or week and there’s you know maybe 1,000, 2,000 web sites, it will actually give you a really good idea of supply and demand for a specific keyword and the variations, a whole bunch of variations of the keyword. This is a tool I use a lot. It’s called Niche Finder.

The second question, and this is the last one, is some people are asking how do you do teleseminars like you do Michel with Gary. Well, there are two ways that you can go by this.

The first one is that if you actually do a teleseminarlike the one I’m doing right now with Gary there is a wonderful lady, her name is Shannon Seek, she’s the one who actually takes care of my teleseminars. And her web site is rentabridge.com and you can actually rent a certain amount of lines from very small conferences to very larges ones like this from you know five people to sometimes 1,000 and you, you, you pay for the seminar of course but you do advertise it and they have a special code like you have pressed yourselves whenever you entered this particular conference room. And then you have people you know who are calling in from a host code number like what Gary and I have done.

And then we give the seminary. You also have maybe discussions. If you have very small seminars, I couldn’t do it tonight because we’re packed with all our lines busy and I’m actually getting emails right now with people actually begging to get on the call and they can’t get in because all the lines are taken, but you have the ability sometimes to do very smaller teleseminars and the ability to open up the lines and then ask questions and all that stuff.

The second way to do this if you’re doing it and one person actually asks more specific question as how do you post it online like you did at your web site Michel. Well, there’s a service I highly, highly recommend. One of my best friends in this business, his name is Armon Morin. And Armand has a service called Audiogenerator.com, audiogenerator.com.

It’s a monthly fee but here’s what it does. You can actually record online with a microphone or call a phone number, a 1-800 number, and you can actually record either a small even testimonials because a lot of people use testimonials under cell numbers, that’s how it’s done. Or a conference like the one that we’re doing and it will encode it and put it under server, give you a very small nip it code that you just put on your web site and there you go.

What I do for example very often is when I do very quick phone calls with people then they’re not large because you know some of these calls are really, really large. But if we do a very small phone call I have it three- wayed with Audio Generator or I record the call with the service like for example a person who is actually recording the call tonight, his name is Michael McCoy and his web site is actually you can reach him at his email, Michael@internetaudioguy.com.

He will actually record like he’s doing right now for me. And what I do is I upload this file to Audiogenerator.com and it will give me a nip it a code that automatically gives me the ability to put it on a web site very, very easily. And anyway, that’s, that’s all I wanted to say Gary is just because those are questions that I’m getting a lot.

Gary: Okay, well, let me finish up what I want to say. You know I want to go back to the question of writing for different markets and I’m telling you there’s no difference. And a lot of people talk about ask well how do you write for a women’s market, is it different.

The writing is no different but you really, women are really very different creatures from men and you, you need as best you can to understand the female market if you’re working the female market. But I want to make a couple of observations about the differences between males and females at least as they pertain to marketing.

I think women have had terrible obstacles to overcome living in America compared to men and it was not long ago where if a woman worked in an office you know she would be treated sort of like a toy. You know the good old boy would be at meeting and a guy would say hey hun would you get us all some coffee and sugar and then give her a little pat on the behind and send her on her way and that’s, that’s, that was very demeaning. And that doesn’t happen much anymore.

It could cost you $1 million to do that now. And I think that’s, that is just because I don’t think any, I don’t like to see that kind of injustice or indignity perpetuated on any group of people. And, but I’m going to tell you one basic difference between men and women and I’m not trying to be salacious here at all but I’m trying to make a point. And it’s been scientifically validated that men think about sex several times a minute and women think about sex far less than that. I think most of the women I know think about it about twice a year but anyway that’s just my story.

But anyhow, and I’m going to tell you something that I think almost everything a man says to a woman, you know he says you’re into knitting, I like knitting too, can be translated as I’d like to have sex with you. Or if, if a man says gee that’s a pretty dress it can be translated into I’d like to have sex with you.

And that is, and I was talking to John Carlton and I said you know how bad it must be to be a woman and know that that’s true. And I said I’m going to tell you in a way that you can understand how painful that’s got to be. Imagine, and you imagine this Mike that after you meet new people in your life and they’re befriending you and you get interested in them and, and in every case you find out what their bottom line is is they want you to write a free sales letter for them. You know I mean that would begin to jade you would it not?

Michel: Oh yeah.

Gary: And that I think is happens to women is that men fake interest in other things and it’s basically a lie and we’re wired that way. Well I want to, I want to make a comment about that because it can go a couple of ways. You know if you are in the public figure, in the public eye at all, if you, if you’re on stage or if you are a strong personality on teleconferences like this, there is, there’s a certain type of women that are attracted to what they perceive as a man with a strong personality or the guy that’s on top of the crowd or everything.

And I’ve, I’ve had that experience at seminars that after I came off the stage that women would be very interested in me and sometimes in a very salacious way and you, what you’ve always got to remember if any of you guys are doing seminars or teleseminars is that is not indicative that you have a lot of sex appeal because what they’re not interested in you, they’re interested in something that they believe you represent which is power and intelligence and humor.

And here’s the rub with that, what they are seeing you is they’re seeing you at your best doing what you do best and if you end up with a relationship with one of those women they’re going to find out that you’re not so good once you’re home and they’re living with you for a few days.

You know they’re going to find out that maybe you shine when you’re standing up in front of an audience you know selling hardware widgets but that when you’re off that stage you know, there’s a lot of guys that became famous as movie stars and all the women swoon over them and they wonder well why are they swooning over me now and when I could walk down Ocean Avenue and nobody would even notice me yesterday.

And it’s because, it’s not because of you it is because of phenomena, a sort of cache that, that excites some women you know that’s associated with a little bit of fame. And I want to say something about that from the heart because I’m kind of a good-sized fish in a microscopic pool and some of that stuff happens to me and it never goes anywhere. I always shine it on because I know for what it is. I mean I know I am not really an attractive guy to women.

Believe me, women don’t come up to me on the street and say hi I’d like to get to know you or something.

But you have one woman on your side and I, I don’t know her full name and apparently she was attracted to how she thought I was. But when I started getting the emails and they were kind of salacious I do mind that. And I think every women on this listening to this thing will agree that you know it’s, it’s not so bad, a man isn’t just a slime ball when he asks you to go out but when you say no, no means no.

And I don’t know what it is with this woman, I don’t know who she is, one of her emails she explained to met hat she was trying to delivery a subliminal message that she was a very sexually interested woman and here’s my point, you know saying things, negative things or stuff about me in a forum is one thing but sending me emails because you want to have some kind of relationship with me or an affair with me and you know maybe the first time it’s okay but no means no.

For the record I am very much in love and very, very faithful and monogamous to my, to my girlfriend. I think she’s wonderful. And I really think that people do not have the right to send sexually oriented material even if they’re offering what they think something you would be interested to other people and I would like it to stop.

And I’m not going to identify this woman but I do, I think she’ll know who I’m talking about. And I just want to say this, I don’t want anymore emails from you, I’m not interested in any women except the one I have, I am totally faithful and no means no. Don’t send me anymore emails or I will put some pain in your brain. I’m sorry but that’s it.

I don’t want anymore of that you know and I, I think that you know I’ve welcomed banter back and forth between me and other men and me and other women and all of this stuff but there is a line and I don’t think that line should be crossed.

And that ties in with what I’m working on on, I guess sending someone an email like that couldn’t be construed the same thing as intellectual theft or slander because they’re sending it only to you but you know I, I think respect for everybody and dignity should be something that’s important. And you know some people just demean themselves by their activities and I hate to see that.

You know these calls and these forums, I’m not making any money from doing this, Mike isn’t making any money from doing this and, and you know, and, and some of the other comments you know I just shine them on but they’re comments from people like from guys that you know I got one email about a guy bitching about the way Mike asked me questions you know.

Oh they’re getting millions of dollars worth of information and me and Mike stumble for half a second and this loser doesn’t like the way Mike asked me questions or I stumble for a minute and lose my way and forget to finish a sentence and they call me on that. And you know you need to develop a mindset where you take, you just need to look at the beginning.

You know Ernest Hemmingway said something about women that I think should apply to almost everything in life. He said the best thing I’ve learned about women, the only thing I’ve learned is to remember them on the best day that you knew them and forget the rest.

And you know if there’s an author that you like you should remember those good books he read and not dwell on the fact that it turned out he was a drug addict you know. It just because that’s not a factor in your life. And I don’t know if I’m making myself clear or not but you know.huh?

Michel: Yeah you’re making yourself perfectly clear.

Gary: Yeah I just, I mean I don’t welcome, I’m not interested in sex with anybody besides you know the relationship, outside my relationship. I don’t welcome those kind of comments. I don’t think they’re funny. I don’t think that the emails are exciting or anything.

I think it’s in really bad taste and I just want to say no means no. And I, I am, I don’t think anybody else on the call’s going to know who I’m talking about and I don’t want them to but I think the person who’s doing this will know what I’m talking about and I want it to stop. That’s my peace.

Michel: Gary I want to thank you so much. You know besides this we’re ending on a bit of a somber tone and I, and I appreciate where you’re coming from because that is kind of hard to deal with but I can tell you that in the last two hours you’ve given so much great information to me anyways and I do hope that you have taken a lot of notes down because Gary has opened up a mass reservoir of million dollar ideas and strategies to me anyways. And I really hope that’s the same for you.

Gary: Hey you want to hear something that’s kind of funny?

Michel: Sure.

Gary: Listen, listen to this. Mark Joyner decided to retire from the Internet business I guess. And he went and lived for a year in New Zealand. And he came back to the States to do a consulting job for I think a guy named Mike Chin or Tommy Chin or something like that.

Michel: Mike Chin yeah.

Gary: Mike Chin. And they, he was staying at the Mandarin Hotel which is the best hotel, the best five-star hotel in Miami and you know I mean I can see it looking out my window just about. And so we met, we met over at a place called Bayside, the Latin caf‚, and we go to talking. I, I had no idea who Mark Joyner was.

I just heard his name you know. Well it turns out that he is the first real Internet guru or at least one of them and he wrote the first e-book or at least one of them. It was about search engine optimization. I guess it was downloaded over a million times. And he and I got to talking and he was so interested in what I had to say and I was so interested in what he had to say.

You know it was like a high tech guy talking to a guy that’s as old as a fossil you know. And he had, he had a satellite linked Internet connected PDA and he’s punching as fast as he can as I’m talking into his stylizes and I’m taking notes with a ballpoint pen on napkins and on the back of the notes and all the rest of this stuff. And I don’t know if we’ll ever do it but we thought I’ll bet you if we had a seminarwith me and him together I don’t think there’s any question on online or offline marketing we couldn’t answer.

You know we’d have guys like you there, guys like Carlton there and I, I don’t know if we’ll ever do that. But I think if we do it’ll be, it’ll be funny. But I want to tell you something else funny. I’m working with a guy now and he is actually a rocket scientist, an honest-to-god rocket scientist.

He’s an engineer who worked for NASA for 20 years up at Cape Caravel. And his wife lives in Miami Beach and is a producer for very expensive commercials like Coca-Cola and stuff. So after 20 years he came, he decided to come down here and get into direct marketing. And he floundered around until he met me and now we’ve kind of teamed up.

Well, then there’s another lady down here that I’ve written a promotion for if you ever want to see one of my promotions go to zapwrinkles.com. That’s appearing in newspaper ads all over the place. It’s for a great cosmetic cream called Deception. And well anyway, but I wrote it for Julie Brumlik and she lives for computers and she’s wired in you know. And so we end up going to a place called Pink on Collins Avenue down, and it’s a real popular eating spot. This is a couple weeks ago.

You know and there’s Julie on her wireless computer because you know this is a wi-fi hot spot. And there’s Mark with his new PDA you know that’s Internet connected you know and can bounce signals back from Mars and tell you what the humidity is in Paris and he’s jabbing away on this and my other friend is on a cell phone.

And I said damn you people I’m sitting here with four people and I’m alone you know. You know they’re all sitting there in these, these wireless places and all this stuff and you know I, I, I, the way the world is going it’s, you know what the biggest thing is you can buy with your credit card now, other credit cards.

You know in South Beach you can buy a parking meter credit card. You can go to public grocery department and use your credit card to buy a parking meter credit card and they got a slot for it. You know you can buy a credit card instead of giving money at a place for sunbath. I used to go to Kinko’s and hand them a bunch of papers and say make me ten copies of each of these and some pretty girl would go make it and come back and smile at me, ask me for money, I’d give it to her and go out. You go, you go to Kinko’s in Miami now, oh for your convenience you do it yourself now and so you have to go to a machine and put in your credit card that gives you a Kinko’s credit card.

Now that’s a learning curve for me. Guys like you it would be nothing. That’s a learning curve. Then to go over and make a copy you got to use the credit card in the Kinko copy machine. You got to learn how to do that and then you have to learn how to work the Kinko copier you know.

And the, and in my own building, I live in kind of a skyscraper building, now I live in a fairly big apartment but the smaller apartments don’t have washers and dryers, you can’t put money in the washer and dryers. You have to go down to the mailroom, put your credit card into a machine that lets you use your credit card that lets you work with your washer and dryer. You know and I just, I just want to bitch about this. The world is passing me by. Well no anyway.

Michel: You made a great point because whenever we were talking tonight about people who were, the very small amount of people who really didn’t get it and they were bitching and complaining about stuff, even though you might be, I consider you Gary the techno-phobic kind of guy and, and I guess Mike Joyner as a techno-file.

The fact that you were both eager to learn from each other proves what the students should be doing. Whether you know, rather than whining and complaining they should be learning. They should be taking every you know finding the one good thing, the one good idea, whether they have to pay for it, whether it’s you know even a free call.

Gary: Yeah but I’ll tell you something else by God there should be a law passed that nothing else is allowed to be invented you know. With, there was a comedian, a female comedian years ago said I’m not going to buy anymore music until they promise not to invent anything else you know.

And now they invent, and everything has, and I was in Circuit City today and I’m looking at all this stuff and it’s all great but it all has, you know I bought a little, a little tape recorder the size of, of a piece of a pack of gum. It’s just great. And I opened the manual and I just went into homage. You know do you know the first thing the manual says, how to set the clock and calendar. I don’t want this thing to be a clock and calendar. I just want to tape record stuff on it you know. I don’t want my blender to be a CD player you know. Anyway, that’s, that’s just my own personal stuff but.

Michel: On that note we passed the top of the hour so I have to close it out now. I want to say Gary thank you gosh again you’ve over-delivered and I want to thank everybody who are on this call too and, and please if you have some comments or any questions maybe I want, I don’t want to have a full drawn out question again like I said at the beginning of this call.

But you can send them to me or send them at support@michelfortin.com. I will forward Gary all the good stuff and just keep the bad stuff for myself. By the way, I did get one question and the guy said you know he’d been a loser all his life, he’s not making anything and he’d been to other gurus and he found out I was the source and his just question is he wanted to know the fastest and easiest way that he could become a multimillionaire or even a billionaire you know.

And I decided I’d defer that question to you.

Gary: Well find the most richest bank around, buy yourself a 44 magnum.

Michel: At any rate, folks thank you so much Gary, thank you and we’ll see you next time.

Gary: Okay. Goodbye folks, I hope you found it entertaining and substantial. Bye bye.

Michel: Bye.

2nd Gary Halbert Call Part 4 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Should we even attempt that the answer is yes but you, you should attempt, do I, do I know of a case where it has been attempted successfully. Ah, no I don’t but I bet it has and yes I think you should attempt it, but the way you should attempt it I believe is you should try and sell them the bone density testing first, and with the markup and then go from there to the high price thing.

What I would actually do is tell people they could take a free hearing test over the telephone and I think you’d have a much better chance on that. But I think you could make some money at this, but for sure you only sell, want to sell one thing at a time.

Okay. Gary, I sell $197.00 home study course online. When someone exits from my order page, what strategy do you suggest: (1) down sell; (2) special discounts; (3) survey of why leaving; (4) other. I need to know, I know I need to test but which one would you suggest I start with.

People are going to do tests that prove what I am about to say is wrong in some cases, but in most cases I think I’m, what I’m about to say, most cases will be right, and what this guy should do is get rid of his order page and say it’s easy to order. All you have to do is call 1-800 whatever. And, they, you, you should just get rid of the order page.

Okay, here’s another one. What is an example of a three-step sequence on the web? Well, that would be a website properly designed, and if it is properly designed it is a sales letter and then it would offer them to make a telephone call to get a free book or free report/sales letter and then that would offer them the opportunity to buy something and you could continue it into step after step.

And then the other step should be follow ups to the people that rose their hand and actually I know that a lot of you people on here are only interested in online marketing and I’d like to say something about that.

You should not think of yourself as an online marketer or a direct mail marketer or a newspaper marketer or a television marketer or a radio marketer. You should think of yourself as a marketer and you should market wherever you can make money.

You know, if, if direct mail can make you money, maybe you should also be on the web and make money there, and maybe you should also be in magazines and newspapers and make moneythere, and maybe you should make money, you should be on television making money, but I do think that you should sequence those and I want to say one thing for you.

Another thing there are only three things that are involved in marketing. There is the product, the pitch and the delivery system. Now the product is of course whatever the product is. The pitch is the, the, the sales piece that sells it in whatever form it appears: in the form of a letter, a mail order ad, a piece of web copy; and the delivery system is the delivery system for the sales pitch.

There is an internet. The internet is really basically as far as marketing goes a delivery system. Television is a delivery system. Direct mail is a delivery system and I would like to write for you the delivery systems that will most likely give you the best ROI (Return on Investment).

Number one, you absolutely cannot beat direct mail followed by newspapers, and after direct mail and newspapers, I don’t know where it would go from there but I actually think other than maybe matchbook covers; the internet is the weakest delivery system in the world.

Ah, you know I was recently working with a guy who is making a lot of money because he was mailing 30 million letters a day, emails a day, to generate leads and he would get about 3,000 responses which were worth about $10.00 a piece for him.

Now that game is pretty much over unless you want to go to jail, but do you know how out of 30 million what percentage or response to the 3,000 is, and if somebody could figure out on the call real quick. But it is like 1/100 of 1 percent and I recently, my most recent lead generating ad was done by direct mail and we were getting a 7 percent response and you take 1/100 of 1 percent.

So if I got 1 percent and I was doing a hundred times more leads than he is for the same amount of contact and since we were getting seven it was 700 times more. Not 700 percent more; 700 times more. And, what it is, is a matter of math. And people get lost on the internet because they think it is “free or at least very, very cheap.” You want a, you want a good way to make money?

Take great internet sales letters and transfer them into print. Just steal them and transfer them into print.

Michel: That’s exactly what’s happening right now with a lot of copies that I have written is that -

Gary: It’s going to be happening more and more because I’m taking some of your copy.

Michel: Hey, yeah. Well, a lot of the guys that are actually going to, that have actually written copies for and we found out that they, they’ve worked really well, they’ve sold very well, there’s a really high conversion rate, they’re now converting those into direct mail pieces and using them in direct mail and, as I, yeah, yeah, that’s a great, great, great suggestion there Gary.

Gary: Okay. Here’s one. How do you suggest mailing businesses using direct mail? Would you use the business address or try finding the owner’s home address? Would you use an envelope or post cards for the most effective response?

I actually, on business-to-business, would absolutely use Federal Express but in line with the question, I would, I would never send post cards to business-to-business people. I would use envelopes and because people change so much, what you want to do is address it not to an individual.

The first thing I would do, unless it’s a giant mailing, is I would call the company and say who is in charge of buying widgets and then I would direct my mail to that person.

Now, if you’re mailing like a million people and that’s an impractical thing to, I would write to, um, you know, ah, the widget buyer for ABC Company, probably. And, our, you know, or the advertising department or something. But don’t send post cards. And don’t sent an envelope and try sending Federal Express at least if it’s worth anything at all.

Okay, let me see what else I got here.

What do you consider the most important factors in creating packaging and marketingE-books online via sales letter websites? Ah, and, ah, he said he’s a business partner of Timothy Brumlick. He told me to tell you hello. Timothy Brumlick is also a good friend of mind so I’d appreciate it if you would say hello back to Timothy Brumlick.

Timothy Brumlick has more stamps on his passport than Kissinger. I think he’s in an average of three different countries a week. Ah, but to get back to the question. Ah, creating packaging and marketing E-books, I think E-books should be 8 « by 11 typed letters with a kind of a nice cover on them. Um, you know, a typeset that you might know more about that than I would Mike, I mean, you know?

Michel: Um, the format that has been the winning format for E-books is in Adobe.pdf format and the reason why is because Adobe.pdf which means portable document format is downloadable or useable or readable on pretty much every PC out there, on every computer out there, on every MAC computer out there.

Most of my E-books are on Adobe.pdf format and, and I, and basically what you usually do, and can very easily do is you buy, first of all, and, and, and every **** infopreneur on the internet has this is either a pdf converter software or have bought Adobe.pdf software and you, you can actually type out your book in any, you know, just like a regular, normal book, and then you would convert it into a pdf format. Um, that is the best way to do it .

And, and, what I usually do is, ah, we have, ah, what I do also when I write sales letters for example, is I create covers for the book even if it’s an intangible product. I sort of try to get people a sort of an idea or a feeling of what it is as if it was tangible and then they would easily access that book that way and when you print it out, it also prints out exactly the way it looks. When you look at that on your computer, it’s 8.5 x 11 and it looks like a normal standard book.

Gary: Um, you better sit down for what I’m about to say but I’m going to blow your mind. If you send me something in pdf I can download it. I can actually do that. Can you imagine that?

Michel: ****. I am totally blown away.

Gary: It says, hi, guys, what do you specifically do to get into the mind of your prospect. You know what you do is you just do a lot of work. You read the books that they read, you magazines that they read, if possible you go out and talk to those people.

Ah, it’s just work. I mean, you have to find out what they’re all about and, ah, and you go on the internet and research them and look at the other appeals that are being made to them and, um, it, it’s just work. The answer to many of these questions is just work. Ah -

Michel: Well, here’s my little shortcut. I, I do copy sometimes for people like, you know, ah, not that I have written copy for you Gary, but people who are like you who are not really people who, who type out all these answers to my big long questionnaire.

They prefer to do it on the phone and what they do is they record the call and get it transcribed and, but that’s not where you stop. What you do is when you interview them, you try to get them to open up the floodgates of passion about their product and what I do often is when I get into a phone call, I three-way the call with another service called idictate.com, I-D-I-C-T-A-T-E dot COM at a 1-800 number that you call. It’s free, toll free.

Ah, of course, they charge you a penny a word but they, they have a real live transcriptionist. You know, a lot of these speaking software that, that actually converts your speech into text, if they all goof it up, you have to train it and all that stuff, well, idictate is actually done by real people. And they send it back to you within an email attachment within a few hours but, and what I do is I, I three-way the call with that service.

What I do is when I speak with the client, I ask a few questions and get the ball rolling. Sometimes it’s a little slow until I get them to become really passionate about their product and I, they, they’re actually selling me on the product. And you can actually sense the, the enthusiasm they have for their product.

And, you know, copywriting is like what Zig Ziglar said, ah, you know, it’s selling and it’s selling in print and he said, it’s transferring the enthusiasm you have for your product into the minds and hearts of your prospects. Well, when I do that, I get this transcription, you know, this transcript in my email which is basically half of my copy written right there.

Gary: That’s brilliant. Ah, um, you know a year from now I will giving, I will be giving people that same type of advice and taking credit for it?

Michel: I know you Gary.

Gary: Okay. All right.

Michel: Hopefully I’ll be retired and they won’t **** there.

Gary: Ah, you mentioned in your, listen, I, this, this question, before I read it to you. I, I gotta, I gotta tell you, I had something happen that, you talk about making your day. This made my year. There is a guy named Eric Weinstein. He used to be my listings broker.

And he had files of hundreds of control pieces, ads, direct mail and everything, and he, he’d gone on to do something else. And he was about to throw them away. These are all winning sales pieces. And he said, I thought you’d, I’d give you a call and see if you’d want them before I threw them away.

Michel: Oh, yeah.

Gary: And I immediately sent somebody up to get them and it’s two giant files of proven winning things, the best swiped file you can humanly imagine.

And here’s the guy’s question. Hi Gary. That was a fantastic teleconference a couple weeks ago. I wanted to thank you for your complete no BS, tell it like it is style. You mentioned in your talk the list broker who had given you all those folders of tested letters and copy.

My question: How can I get my hands on them? Could I fly down from Indianapolis, bring a copy machine and copy them myself? Seems to me there might be gold to be panned in them there folders. Thanks and regard. A new Sir Gary fan.

The guy’s name is Mark Roselus. Mark, you can come down and copy them as long as you make a copy for me because I intend to sell this swiped file and **** swiped file and I am never going to get around to the time to do it myself. You know, I actually hire people to go to the bathroom for me now because I have so little time.

Michel: ****.

Gary: So, the answer is yes, you can do that. Ah, let’s see the next question. Ah, they may not be world-class, but the letters I write or at least average or better. However, the response rates are always less than profitable. Where can I get more responsive lists?

I’m gonna delete that guy. I’m not gonna mention that guy’s name, but, um, ****, I, I, I, I think, ah, the letters you write are not at least average or better. Um, if the response rates are always less than profitable, ah, I think you might want to go back to the grindstone and as far as getting more responsive lists, what you need to do is dialogue with a good list broker and, and let them guide you on the list. Um, but, ah, ****, they, ah, I’m not going to make any further comments on that.

Michel: ****.

Gary: Um, Michel and Gary, what exercises would you all suggest for a novice copywriter to practice getting into the head of a reader, and getting to know the target audience, and that.

I think I’ve already asked, ah, answered that. It’s just a matter of work.

Um, this one. How can I raise my prices significantly for a high-ticket service without losing too many customers?

Um, the first thing you need to do is you need to make your product or service more valuable. And, by the way, if some of you would like to have a relationship with me, a business relationship and get on the good side of me, I’m looking for people to help me do some of this. I want to create a, hm, course on how to win in online poker. And I would love somebody that plays online poker to, I don’t know, you know, you’ll know what I’m talking about, Mike.

I know what I want but I don’t know how to describe it. I would like to capture what’s happening on the screen so I could put it on a DVD or video and advertise you will see actual hands being played, do you understand what I’m talking about?

Michel: Gary, you’re, you’re, what you’re talking about is a screen-capturing program. I use it when I do critiques for copy and I deliver it online. It’s a program called cantasia and that program is actually available, is at a website called techsmith.com.

You download it, you, and when you load up the program you click on the one that says record and it actually records what’s going on on your screen at that point.

Gary: And, and, and, not just frame by frame, but like in, like the movement and everything.

Michel: Yeah, yeah, yeah, everything. It’s, it’s, it’s actually the movements, the clicks, um, ah, and most of the courses that you see now, the infoproducts that you see online like John Reese’s, Mike Kern and Ed Dale are all done with cantasia. It’s, it’s an absolutely wonderful, I use it all the time.

Gary: Listen. I have my, the, the young man I’m mentoring on the phone and I want to make sure he got that, so would you give that website again?

Michel: Absolutely. Techsmith. T as in Tom, E, C as in Catherine, H, S as in Sam, M as in Mike, I, T as in Thomas, H dot com. Techsmith.com. The software is called camtasia and I’ll, I’ll give you an example.

My website, I have a website called thecopydoctor.com and that website is a membership site where you pay 30 bucks a month and you actually watch me live going through a sales letter or a website and you actually see my mouth movements, you actually see me write the copy but I also have a microphone and I record what I say and I critique the copy and I tell it, I, I, I actually tear the copy apart but the beauty is that you actually understand what’s going through my mind and what I see. It’s like if you were looking over my shoulder as I’m actually going through the sales letter so that is the software, cantasia.

Gary: Ah, listen, Mike, that is great information and this guy, Caleb, I’m working with, he’s really not the sharpest knife in the drawer so could you possibly give him that website again? I’m teasing him obviously, cause.

Michel: How about if I just email it?

Gary: Oh, okay. Just, just email it to me and, or to him, or both of us. Okay?

Michel: I will ****.

Gary: All right. Will you talk about the first sentence, paragraph of a letter, not that it’s important, that’s obvious; but your approach to writing it. Maybe some extemporaneous examples for some fictitious products or services.

You know, there is one opening line that is so good. I almost always use it. And it, it’s, you know, it, it’s, I’m getting bored with it, but you know, there’s an old advertising truth, is that you will get bored with your campaign before the readers do and here it is. If you are interested in getting rid of your arthritis pain, this will be the most important message you will ever read.

Here’s why. If you are interested in making money in online poker, this is the most important message you will ever read. Here is why. If you are interested in how to make money online without having a computer, this will be the most important message you will ever read. Here is why. I can’t improve on that one. And, um, that’s, that’s a good one. It, it, then, ah -

Michel: Well, what I usually do, Gary, if you don’t mind, what I usually do is I try to start a story, um, and, and the way I do that is by saying, you know, please, you know and you can say it in different ways, but it’s like, stop what you’re doing, put down whatever you’re holding in your hands and just read every single word that I am about to read because this is going to and this major bring promise that I’m, that I’m making.

Ah, whether it’s, you know, if you want to start out with, this one is the most important letter, I do use that a lot. Ah, I, I, I’ve done this form example on ****, traffic secrets for John Reese, which is I urge you to lock the door and take the phone off the hook and grab your favorite beverage and just sit down and study every single letter, word of this letter because it’s about to change your life and here’s why.

Gary: Okay. Um, the, um, I’ve listened to many of your interviews and tapes, etc., etc., etc., and read all of your newsletters and so forth, and so forth. It is obvious you have a lot of ideas, likely more than you can do any, anything with; hence, my question.

When you have say five things to work with that all seem exciting and interesting to you, how do you prioritize what to do? I tend to work on all five and get bogged down in all of that. Do you have a process that you go through to determine what to work on next?

You know, that was something that vexed me for a long time. But when I was in Los Angeles and John Carlton was working with me, we came up with what we call Operation Money Suck and, and we would just sit there and think what thing can we work on that’s gonna make us the most money in the least amount of time and that’s it. That’s what we go for. And I think that’s the best way to prioritize there is.

Okay, um, now. Here’s a guy. Gary, there’s so much stuff out there, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. Even if my budget was $5,000.00 a month. I don’t know what’s good and what’s not. This host or that host. This auto responder or that one. This mentor or that one. The dumb webs, this dumb website or that one. The deal of the century or maybe all of the next 300 deals.

Bottom line, this is BS, so guess what? I’m not buying anything. If I do the next offer will be better. More expensive and useful bonuses will come with the third. And, but then two or three will come with promises to spill their guts and give you free all the tools they ever bought or stole for $699.00.

But if you wait three weeks they will sell you all that plus all their buddy **** for the special price of $4.00. Man, it’s like incoming fire and nowhere to hide. Maybe if I took a vacation when I returned you might send me back the money for the newsletter that I can now get for free.

Michel: ****.

Gary: This is the ****. You know, um, I don’t, I don’t think there is an answer to that question. Um -

Michel: I think you did answer it already before when you said that you know, that the people that actually do make it are the people that spend some money on their own self-education.

Gary: Yeah.

Michel: And, you know, whether something becomes free in the future is not an important thing because the fact is if you buy something right now, and I’m not saying for, for, for buying stuff that has been pirated. To me, people who actually buy products and then go on E-bay and then sell it and, and, and actually willfully defraud people or willfully steal stuff, that’s, that’s, that’s a whole different idea. And, and, and, and many of these suck shit by the way.

But if you actually have a product that later on becomes free, um, that’s fine, because at least you were the first one to buy the product and start putting it into use and if you’re not making enough money from that to buy the “next best thing,” then there’s something wrong someplace.

Gary: Yeah. And you know what you need to understand is that you’re living in the world you’re living in and stop being a whiner about it. You know, ah, two days ago, I, I, I have a couple of cell phones and I use prepaid cell phones. And, ah, I can usually fill them up by just using my credit card but, you know, they, Cingular bought Bell South, they made it more difficult so I found a retail location and I wanted to buy, put $100.00 in prepaid minutes on my card and they, they asked me, do you want to spend $20.00, $60.00 or $100.00. I said, I want to spend $100.00.

They said fine, that will be $110.00. I didn’t even ask them why it was $110.00. I, you know, it’s not the clerk’s fault, it’s whatever, you know. I mean, it, somebody came up with a concept I think that is a good one. Everybody has a mental limit of money they’re, they, they’re not going to think about. You know, I mean, ah, you know, if I want something.

Here’s an obvious one, an example. If I want something and it costs a dime, I’m not going to think about whether I should be paying a nickel for it. Ah, and, you know, there, there’s a certain point; you should establish your point where you’re not going to waste a lot of time and energy, some dollar amount, ah, that, um, the, ah, on that. The um, I want to, um, I’m about wrapped up with these questions. Do you have any more?

Michel: Oh, yeah, I, I, actually, I’m getting some more right now as we speak. Um, didn’t you, first of all, I can ask *** you a few more but did you want to add anything else?

Gary: Yeah, I do. I do. Um, I’d like to switch to something kind of serious for a moment. Um, a lot of people ask the question about what is the difference between writing for women and as opposed to writing for men. And it’s just a variation of my customer’s are different.

What is the difference between writing for rocket scientists and people who like to buy Rap music? Ah, what is the difference between writing to carpenters and for people who are writing to computer geeks?

The truth is there is no difference whatsoever to writing any of the group. What you need to do is to be imparting information that’s important to those people in the clearest way humanly possible.

And I’m going to give you a real good example of that. I’m going to guess that most of the people on this telephone call are not interested in knitting. So I want you to imagine that I wrote the most brilliant add you can ever imagine on the subject of knitting and you’re reading in USA Today or someplace and I offer a great price which is a fraction of where you buy it otherwise and the copy is scintillating.

Probably no matter how good that copy is, you’re not going to buy the knitting machine. In fact, you’re not even going to read the copy. Now let’s, let’s switch to another example. Let’s say that you’re a man and your wife is pregnant and she’s pretty close to being due and you have to be someplace; you just have to be. But you have your cell phone at the ready and you, you have her or someone else standing by to tell you if the, if your, your baby is being born. And lo and behold…

2nd Gary Halbert Call Part 3 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Then you mail 1000 letters out of that, you have to rent 5,000, but I often rent 5,000 and test only 1,000, and if you get enough money back that the arithmetic says that you have made a profit doing this and you did it with your own money then you are entitled to call yourself a copywriter.

If you cannot do that you are defrauding people when you hold out your shingle as a copywriter who knows what he is doing and can work for other people. It is because; just think about this, everything was under your control.

From the selection of the list, to the creation of the product, to the sales letter, to price, everything, and if you can not do it when everything is under your control how are you going to do it when a client dictates to you what you have to say? So that is the real acid test of whether you are a copywriter or not.

Okay?

Now. I am going to do something that I really find offensive and that is I am going to answer these questions. This first question asked all three of those so I answered all three of those in and says. Okay, now here is the next question that I have in my hand.

Is there an update on the old AIDA formula? AIDA for many of you that might not know stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, and if so what is it? The answer is no, there is no update that I know out of that. I do not know of a better formula than that. There probably are a few other things, I mean, I think you could put proof in there or something but the answer is no, there is not an update on that formula.

Okay, now this guy, I am not going to mention his name, because he offends me. I want to tell you what he has said, “You are asking me to give you time out of my life, why? When I or any other person is dying we cannot recall to get back the hours of our life. You have not shown why anyone should listen and give up any time out their life to another online marketer’s call.

Are you going to pay them for their call? The current trend of online calls is not showing any value at all and yes, there are sometimes recorded and offered or sold subsequent to the calls, big deal. In fact, the time I have spent typing this email maybe just another waste of my time. The payback is you have to read it.”

Well, you know, I think this guy is frankly despicable. Here we are offering something completely free and offering something valuable and he is still bitching.

I want to tell you something, and I want all you people out there to listen to this. I can tell who is a great marketer when I visit in their home. You know what I do? As soon as we get comfortable I ask them if I can see their library, and I was talking to Michael Fortin the other day, and he was telling me, you know, he spent half a million dollars for his direct marketing education, and you know, I spent probably more than that.

I would buy books when I couldn’t afford to pay the electricity or they were turning off my water, and whenever you hear somebody whining about buying information just get them out of your life because if they are whining because “Oh I had to buy something” you know what? You should buy something.

If you pay $500.00 and get two good ideas out of it you have got your money’s worth, and stop being such a pussy, and such a crybaby, and stop whining. You know, if you want to get this done and you want to do it you have got to pay the price and that is all there is to it. I was talking to Mike, Mike how much, I will ask you, how much have you spent for your direct marketing education? Mike: Oh half a million dollars.

Gary: How long did it take you get as good as you are?

Mike: Twenty-five years.

Gary: Okay, where there is a lot of people in this hall who want to get it for $2.50 and get it in three hours. Guess what? You people all suck.

Okay, now, and I am going to answer his questions anyway. Is there a huge difference in mail order verses direct mail assuming you use a targeted audience? I do not even know what that question means but all I know is that if you mail order, I guess if he means newspaper advertising or magazine advertising, newspaper advertising is difficult because there is so much waste circulation because such a small fraction will be in the market for any such other thing. Magazines can be very targeted and direct mail is very targeted.

So, no, there is no difference, at least no difference in copy.

Now here is another question. How is this for a headline to an ad looking for people who are fed up with their job? Are you suffering from job dissatisfaction? Actually that is a headline that sucks and I will tell you why it sucks. Because it is cute, because it is tricky, you know, this guy is really proud that he has come up with job dissatisfaction.

Okay, here is another question, now we are starting to go into other people’s questions so I am going to be kinder and gentler here. Another person: Oh, what a surprise. Original speaker: Everybody will hang up as soon as I do. At one of our entrepreneur boot camps I had you speak at many moons ago you had everyone get out a couple of blank pages and you dictated the sample letter, complete with lots of blah, blah, blahs.

For some reason, I do not have that in my files anymore, and it might be a good thing to do on your live seminar, and that is from Mark Stallard, an old and dear friend of mine. Mark, if you are listening, I think what you are talking about is the dollar bill letter and if all else fails write a dollar bill letter and here is the copy again.

Dear Friend: As you can see I have attached a nice crisp one dollar bill to the top of this letter. Why have I done this? Actually there are two reasons.

One, I needed some way to make sure this letter would catch your attention. Two, and secondly, and since what I am writing to you about can help you make a lot of money or help you save a lot of money I thought using a dollar bill as an eye catcher was a good idea.

Anyway, here is what it is all about; and then we go into all the blah, blah, blahs of what it is all about. Now the rest of the formula for that is after you send that dollar bill you wait a few days until they have had time to get it and then you call them, and you say hi, this is Mark Stallard, I am just calling.

I sent you a piece of mail and I just wanted to make sure you got it. You will remember it if you did because there was a dollar bill attached to the front page of the letter; and at that point something very important is going to happen.

You are going to get your first yes nod. You won’t be able to see it on the phone, of course, but somebody will say yeah I got that I got the dollar; and then you are going to say well I wanted to check because, you know, you can not be too careful when you are sending money in the mail. Is not that right; and he’s going to go yeah, you could not be too careful; and then you are going to say “Well, you did get the letter, the dollar was intact and you have had a chance to read it?”, and then you will get your third yes, nod; and if you cannot take it from there you should get out of marketing. You know.

So first I want to say Mark was glad to hear from you again but I think that is the answer to your question. By the way, Mark reminded me of a quote of mine, which is one of my favorite quotes, especially since it is mine, “Nothing is impossible for a person who refuses to listen to reason.” Okay. This is Gary, looking forward to the call tonight.

Question: We are doing split gate, I do not know what that is, but the radio station they run spots and we show up and do training and split the total revenue. I guess that is what it is. We are shooting for 500 people at $59.00 each. Not sure how to make the spot stand out in the glut of other average commercials. It is talk radio.

They volunteered to create the spot but I know radio stations are awful at the creative and I thought you could add some spice to it. Could you address this tonight?

Yes I will. The best thing you can do to make your spot stand out is avoid all bells and whistles, all music, all trickery, and everything, and it just should be a voice, probably a male voice, talking, explaining what it is all about, and the main thing is you do not want to detract from your message, and the trickery, and the music, and all that stuff detracts.

If you are not going to use, something that is equally as good as a male voice is a female voice from the south, a southern accent.

Now I am going to tell you all a secret that almost nobody knows and it is this. If you run a full-page ad in a newspaper you should budget, at least some of the time, $3.00 per thousand. Like if the circulation of the newspaper is 100,000 then allow $3.00 for each thousand so $300.00 and on the day the newspaper comes out you should pay $300.00, these are rough figures and not exact, to a radio station, and by the way when you buy radio commercials there is only two kind of stations you want.

Country music and talk radio; and that reason for that is that is the only radio that people are actually listening to. All the rest of them, they might be bouncing along to the music, but they are paying attention to this, and what you should do with that is you should advertise you advertisingand say, “Are you interested in losing weight, if so read the Miami Herald today, look for the page that says NASA Scientist Invents New Way to Lose Weight.”

Now, by the way, you can do that on television and if you are buying a 10 seconds spot on TV, which is about all you can afford these days, when the day your newspaper comes out somebody should be standing there with the ad, in front of the camera, showing them the ad and say, “Are you interested in losing weight, look for this page in today’s Miami Herald. A NASA Scientist Reveals a New Way to Lose Weight.” That is called advertising the advertising; and while I am on that I will tell you another trick.

Newspapers are so huge today that I have ran ads that came out in newspapers where to find my own ad I personally had to go through it seven times looking for my own ad, and as a general rule, if you are running in newspapers, if you can manage it, always run on a Tuesday because you want to run in the skinniest paper there is.

Now here is a big trick when you are running in fat papers. Advertise the advertising with little one-inch ads in other sections of the paper; and you say, “What to know a new way to lose weight invented by a rocket scientist? See page 74 in the C section.” Sprinkle those ads throughout the newspaper that will get people to go to a section that they would not have gone to normally.

Okay? Let us see what else we have got here. One, do you Gary Albert know when to write short copy and when to write long copy? Are there objective criteria for making the determination? Anything you can describe? Any source material to read or listen to or is it all a matter of guts, guts, and experiment?

You know, what you really should do and all of you are suffering from this, is I suspect most of these people here do not know what a world class swipe file is. I would guess that you, Michel Fortin, have thousands of examples in your swipe file, as I do. Michel: Oh yeah.

Gary: And you should look at small ads, and you should at long ads, and you should be writing them out in your own handwriting till it is embedded on a neuro basis.

Second question. What do you do to make sure you write good copy about something you consider disgusting? For example, I hate gangster rap but if a guy wants to me to sell a gangster rap training course how can I (a) quickly get up to speed on the subject and (b) get in the frame of mind that lets me write copy so good that I might even change my own feelings about the subject?

First, I think you should avoid, unless the wolf is at your door, writing about things that disgust you. It is hard enough to make all of this work by writing things that you are passionate about.

But if you have to write about gangster rap, which I hate too, then what you want to do, is you want to read hip hop magazines, you want to talk to the people who play it, you want to talk the people who listen to it, what the biggest thing that people fail to do, I saw a great picture on the Internet the other day that somebody had been able to capture a complete picture of an iceberg, the part above and below the water, the conditions were just right.

But David Oglebee was asked one time, what was his long suit in advertising, and he said it is research, and I will tell you something, everybody that is good in advertising, that is their long suit, research, and you just got to do the research and that is all the way there is to it.

Three, is there a quick way to find the starving crowd you often talk about when a customer who does not yet have customers of his own? Well, first of all, if you can you should avoid working for people who do not have customers of their own. But I do not know how, you know, this question indicates that you and your client are going for it backwards.

In other words, a product or service has been created and you are going out to find the market. That is absolutely backwards. What you want to do is find the market and then create a product or serviced to service that market.

Briefly, the primary features and functionality of the Stack Tee are one, the capability to stack multiple tees together, which make it easy to adjust the height of a golf ball for any kind of tee shot.

Two, it interlocks making it easier to carry a stock of tees in your shirt or pocket.

Three, it is made out of a polymer material with a lower surface hardness than did hard birch wood tees and it will not damage, scratch, or leave paint marks on expensive thin face drivers.

Four, it is designed to minimize the kinetic energy lost from a club tee interaction weighted only a third of the standard wood tee.

Five, it functions as a standard tee holder and can be used to adjust the height of wood tees.

Five, it is golf course friendly made from a biodegradable polymer material that can easily cut or vacuum by lawnmower.

I am not a marketing guru but what some people consider a technical geek PhD. engineer. By the way for you that do not know PHD stands for Piled Higher and Deeper, but I try to keep my head out of the clouds and I have common sense.

I plan to send out a flyer discovering feature, functionality, and samples of the Stacked Tee to all the U.S. dealer/distributors of golf equipment and the golf courses. According to my research approximately 500 billion golf tees are consumed annually. My question for you is what is the best way to market this new product? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Thanks for the invitation I look forward to your feedback.

This guy has really put some effort into trying. So the first thing I am going to say, although it sounds discouraging, I am going to follow up with something not so discouraging. This does not have any sex appeal or sales appeal for golfers whatsoever.

John Carlton is the master at marketing to golfers and here is what they want. They want to hit longer, straighter, drives off the tee. You know, tee shot. That is the number one appeal. This is a very weak appeal.

But having said that, I think if you find people who distribute products to places that sell golf equipment that this is going to be an excellent adjunct to the line that they carry and that you should maybe put that in their line. But you are never, I should not say never because who I am to say? I said when I saw Star Wars, the movie, that it would fail, but you are not going to sell that at a profit via direct marketing. But I think you maybe can sell it as a distributorship and I wish you the best of luck on it.

Okay, here is another question. I would like to hear your insights on the differences in writing fascinations, by the way a fascinations is a word some people use for bullets, for an information product, such as a book, report, or newsletter, verses a physical product such a vitamin, gadget, etc.

The answer is there is no difference whatsoever. For the information product it is much more direct than some unique knowledge will be revealed verses the physical product, which has specific benefits but they are not teased the same way.

I would also like to hear your thoughts in the difference in creating magalogs verses other types of direct mail. First of all, he is on the wrong track in thinking that the creation of bullets differ from how you should go about it differently from a physical product than you should an information product. That is not true, and the best way to learn to how to bullets is go to the Gary Albert Newsletter.

You all know it, it is www.thegaryalbertletter.com click on view newsletter archives, and find the envelope that says Let’s do the Twist, and you will get a free education on how to write bullets.

Now he also says, I would also like to hear your thoughts on the difference in creating magalogs verses other types of direct mail, and here is what I would like to say about this. If at all possible, avoid creating magalogs. They are used by the biggest mailers in the world.

I am working for one of the now and some of the source material is the magalog they use; and so much work goes into creating a magalog, and so much expertise, and not only the writing, and also the layout, which you just about have to have a layout artist do it, that really and truly all the great writers I know, me, Scott Haynes, I don’t know about you Mike, I do not know if you do that, John Carlton, everything, somebody has a magalog job and they insist on it being a magalog, we turn the job down, and I will tell you the truth, a tear sheet mailing or a hard hitting direct mail letter will beat the magalog everyday. But magalogs are way too much work to be worth the effort.

Okay. Hi Gary, what is the best time frame to follow up on prospects by phone after sending them postcards? Okay. Number one, really folks do not send the postcards. It is just a little bit cheaper than sending them a killer hard hitting sales letter; and I want you all to get something straight in your head.

It is not how cheaply you can do it, it is how much of a return you can get on your investment. I would bet you that this person mailing postcards to get leads, I will bet you that she would make more money if she would send FedEx Letters and follow them up.

Now, actually, but to her specific question is about the time frame. Who knows when a postcard is going to get there? I would wait about five days, I guess, if I were sending postcards, because someone had a gun to my head. But it is much more predictable if you send a Federal Express package, it is much more impactful, and it is going to be much more profitable if it is well written, and if you send a first class letter you are going to make a lot more money too.

You know, I mean, I do not even know what a postcard costs because I never send them. Do you know how much they cost Mike?

Michel: No I do not.

Gary: Yeah, I mean I do not think very many really top marketers would even know what they cost, but everybody wants to do this because it is cheap. You should stop thinking about cheap and stop thinking about return on investment. I remember in the early days of the Internet guys crowing that they were able to make a telephone call for free on the Internet. Took them 18 hours to do it. Well, if you think 18 hours is free then you do not have the right mindset to even be in kind of business.

Another example of that is, I went to the Rolling Stones Steal Wheels concert and I took a bunch of people with me, and I paid about $300.00 for each of the tickets, and we sat in the second row center. I mean I could reach out and touch Mick Jagger. The people in front of me were bragging how they had got their tickets for $35.00 but they had also had to camp out for a day and a half.

Well, I guess I was the fool because I thought my time was worth more than three or four bucks an hour of laying in a sleeping bag in the rain.

So, that leads me to an extraneous comment. There are a lot of people, a lot of ways to beat people at direct marketing, competition that are not thought of. One way is to outwork them. Another very easy way is to out spend them. There is a lot of time you will find a real cheapskate person with a scarcity mentality that will be moving so slow, you know the biggest difference between winners and losers? Losers focus on the perils of defeat. Winners focus on the rewards of winning. So if you focus on, gee what could go wrong here, and all that, probably something is going to go wrong.

Okay, here is another one.

Another person: I just want to add one little thing Gary.

Gary: No, no, this is my call I do not want anybody interrupting me. You **** out here Pee-Pee. Gary Albert, what a creep, you know realize how many people you have on this call with no sense of humor whatsoever? These people should be working at McDonald’s and maybe made to eat dog food. Go ahead Mike.

Michel: I should not recite the first response you ever given me after I had written to you. But I just wanted to add that the only exception I have found, and the reason why I know this, is because I have actually written copy for Michael Kimble and Michael is the big shot in the postcard industry, and the only postcard that I have ever worked with that had worked really well are oversized, wall-to-wall, dense copy size postcards.

Gary: Yeah, but Mike.

Michel: And with an offer and with an actual call to action, and a response devise attached to it but not the tiny weenie postcards. I am talking about an oversized either letter or even legal size postcard and it is dense copy, it is like a whole sales letter on one postcard or on both sides.

Gary: It is worth a try, anything is worth a test, you know; and that sounds like it could be made to work you got it.

Here is one. I have an opportunity to do direct mail with another company sharing all expenses. Our customer demographics mirror each other. Same age, income, sex, education, occupation, etc., comprise the same material niche identical. Different products. One product hearing aids cost between $2,000.00 and $8,000.00 with a huge markup. While the other, bone density testing cost only $50.95 with a $30.00 markup. Two letters will be sent within the same envelope. Questions, how effective…

2nd Gary Halbert Call Part 2 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Gary Halbert: Listen, if you people would stop slurring my reputation.

Michel: Oh, there we go. Let me just mute this phone right now. We are in presentation mode and…

Gary: Just one second.

Michel: Sure.

Gary: Caleb, it’s on mute now. Nobody can hear you. Go ahead.

Michel: I muted the entire call because we’re expecting over 1,000 people on tonight’s phone call and I didn’t want to get too much feedback because whenever there’s so many phones going at the same time it’s just crazy. But, let me just say welcome to everyone on tonight’s call.

This is the second call with none other than the great Gary Halbert, my mentor, my friend and the king of copy, the prince of print. Gary, you know, he’s more than just a mentor and a copywriter extraordinaire because — and I don’t want to go through all the introductions that I did on the last call — but I want to give you a little bit of a heads-up.

If you didn’t listen to the first call, in Gary’s words, you’re insane. Because Gary revealed some of the most powerful copywritingstrategies on that very first call and in fact, you know, Gary and I had a chuckle on the phone the other day about that, about tonight’s teleseminar because some of the feedback we received from that very first call was pretty fascinating and some of it was pretty outrageous.

Ninety percent of the emails that I’ve got for example on that call was pretty good — mind blowing even. People were raving about it. They couldn’t believe we were giving this teleseminar out for free. But there’s a small minority — 10 plaintiff unfortunately — that were pissed off. They didn’t have a clue. They ranted about you know, Gary going on tangents and stories and such and never really getting any content.

Well, I have to tell you this right now. And I have to laugh about it, too, because people who didn’t get it — and with all due respect to everyone on this call regardless of where they’re at with their copywriting skills — they’re the people who unfortunately, will never be able to get it. They’ll never be able to write really good copy. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.

The power of what Gary taught during that last call was not in exactly what Gary said — although he delivered a lot of great content — but the biggest lessons you could pull from it — or what I pulled from it — and I guess you can say it this way — it’s not the message — it’s not even the messenger. Like comedy — it’s all in the delivery.

Now, I’m not talking about theatre and stories and such although that was a big part of it. What I’m talking about is how Gary drove his point home. How he got his points across. And about the choice of stories. What exactly he said and why he said it to you in order to drive those points home as well as the understanding of human psychology and human nature and that’s one of the most critical points in copy and something that I see missing a lot in most of the sales letters that I see today.

Once you do get it, though, you’ll be able to understand not only how Gary writes his own copy, but you’ll be on your way to writing world class copy yourself. So, if you can — and you should — if you haven’t really heard the first call, go ahead and listen to it. But if you have, go back and listen to it again and again and again. I’ll tell you right now — and this has actually happened to me — you’ll get stuff on the second, on the third and even on the fifth time of hearing that call.

And, so, anyways, that’s enough of an introduction but before we go on, a little bit of housekeeping.

The last time that we’ve done this call and we have introduced this call to you so that you can actually go online and download and hear it yourself, we’ve gotten a few emails from people who said they couldn’t download it. Well, I got to tell you, my server was crushed. The traffic was just horrendous and because of that and because my host was just absolutely wonderful — and I’m being sarcastic here — people had a hard time downloading the call. This is gonna happen again. Please try again a little later.

You will eventually get them and I do apologize and what I plan on doing for the second call and probably for the other call, too, is to open up my mirror server so that it can take some of the load from the first one. The second one is I asked you to send me some of your questions. Some questions were pretty long-winded.

What I want you to do is to be as brief and as specific in your question as possible. Rather than giving me some long story about where you come from, where you’re at and how we can save your life. We don’t want that kind of stuff.

The second thing is tonight is about copywriting. We might talk a little bit about, for example, Internet marketingbut a lot of questions were about Internet marketing and this is not what this call is about. It’s really about copy. Um, but we do, I can introduce a few things and I’m sure Gary will introduce a few things.

The third and final thing is we don’t do critiques. People have sent in questions by actually sending me their headlines, their copy and some of them actually forward sales letters and I usually forward some of these questions to Gary and some of them I didn’t because I thought it was just too absurd of a question to ask. We are not gonna do critiques although we can give you a lot of good ideas based on some of the questions we have had.

So please be specific and you can send your question — even right now as we speak if you would like — at support@michelfortin.com. And we’ve got tons of questions already so we might not be able to go through all of them and even if you send your question now I might not have a chance to answer that and have Gary answer that but what I can ask you this is that if we do have some time we will go through a lot of these questions right now and Gary promised me he’s gonna actually answer questions tonight.

At any rate, if you have don’t know Gary, you’re going to be in for a treat and for some of you, you’re in for a heart attack. So, that’s all I can say. Without further ado, please welcome my mentor, Gary Halbert.

Welcome Gary.

Gary: Thank you, thanks Mike. Listen, I, too, received a lot of feedback from that last call. In fact, hundreds of letters and overwhelmingly they were positive and some of them were negative. Obviously written by losers and some of them were negative that pointed out some things that I really was negligent in and that I could improve.

But before I start answering questions, I am going to read one response to you that I just got today. And the subject is almost arrested. Gary, I was listening to your call recorded with Michael Fortin while driving to a client from Tampa Bay to a recently discovered distant planet of at best questionable value named Winterhaven.

I was pulled over by an unmarked little car with it’s light pretending to be a big car. Anyway, I quickly concluded it was indeed the state police and wondered what the hell I had been doing. The officer told me he noticed I was laughing uncontrollably and talking in my vehicle but he couldn’t see anyone else in my SUV so he was thinking I had some people — probably Cuban immigrants — in the back of my truck.

The facts are I was simply listening to your recording that I transferred to my IPod. I was laughing my ass off and making notes into my cassette tape recorder since I have not developed the talent for driving at 80 miles an hour and writing at the same time. True story. No ticket. Policeman verified my explanation by listening to my IPod for maybe ten seconds and while he could not understand why I was laughing so hard, he did understand that I was on my way to a client.

Thank you for the great information and entertainment on that program. Your remarks about Gary Bensavanga, Jay Abraham and John Carlton should be memorialized. All the best to you and those you love. And that was from a guy named Steve Polit. But, that put a nice, I enjoyed that, thinking about that letter.

But, I want to start right off by clearing away three or four questions and a very valid criticism of something I did on the last call. One of the things that I, there are two things that I said and then because of my advanced age and dementia I started rambling and didn’t clean them up.

And one of them is what would I do if I had to make a million dollars in a year or I would be shot. And the other question was what is the thing that you have to do to prove that you are worthy of being a copywriter?

To answer those questions in, well the first part of the question in a fell swoop, it’s necessary for me to read you something and then I’m gonna explain something to you that should light a fire under some of you. And I’ll just start reading, I’ll read this and then I’m gonna explain the really significant things about it. Free book reveals… how to win at online poker especially Texas Hold’em almost every time you play.

Do you like to play online poker? Would you like to discover how professional card sharks are able consistently to win hundreds and often thousands of dollars almost every time they choose to play? Would you like to be so good at online poker that you never had to work at a regular job again? If so, this will be the most important message you will ever read.

Here’s why:

A small, privately owned publishing company — O’Dowd Publishing — has just released a brand new book that blows the lid off and reveals the little known but lethal techniques pro players use. Sub head — To sucker amateur players out of almost all their money.

Here’s just a few of the incredible secrets you will learn when you read this free book.

When are the three best days to play online poker. These are the three days most people have a lot of fog in their minds which makes it easier, much easier, to take their money away from them. When are the best hours of the day to play online poker. Believe it or not, there are three hours out of each day when beating the other players is as easy as falling off a log.

What days and what hours should you never play online poker. These are the days and hours the real card sharks come out. Why not just make sure they are not playing before you begin. How to win even when you have weak hands. Most serious poker players would sell their souls for this piece of information.

A certain way to bluff which will fool even very smart players. How to scare amateur players — the only kind you want to play — so badly they will fold even super strong hands. Three secret tips which make winning at Texas Hold’em almost a sure thing. A step-by-step formula developed by two Swiss poker players for winning at Texas Hold’em. By the way, they have both made more than half a million dollars by using this unique system.

How to set a betting trap which will cause every other player to lose their money and lose it to you. How to sniff out scared players and bully them into losing all their money. How to double dip — play in two games at the same time and double your winnings. The very best way for a low limit player — someone who doesn’t have much money to start with — to build a huge bank roll by playing online poker.

How to fake out all the other players and make them believe you have a stronger or weaker hand than you really do. How to develop almost X-ray vision to see through instantly and how to cultivate a canine sense of smell for sniffing out any player who is trying to bluff. How to remove the luck factor from online poker.

When you play online poker properly, it is no longer a game. It’s a business and a very profitable business. There’s a lot more you will learn from this book and it’s easy to get your free copy. All you have to do is call my voice mail and leave your name and address. As soon as you do that, I’ll send your copy of my book, How to Win at Online Poker Almost Every Time You Play, and I’ll send it to you immediately by first class mail.

Remember, when you call you will not get a live person. You will get my voice mail and you will hear me, Caleb O’Dowd, saying, “Hi. This is Caleb O’Dowd. Thank you for calling to get a free copy of my book that reveals how to win at online poker. Just leave your name and address after the beep and I’ll send the book to you immediately. Be sure to speak slowly and clearly and please spell out for me any unusual words in your name and address. Okay, here’s the beep and thanks again for calling.”

That’s all there is to it.

Make the call. Leave your name and address and you’ll get the book almost immediately. So, call now while it’s fresh in your mind. 1-305-whatever number.

All right. Now. I’m going to tell you this is the first part of what I would do if I had to make a million dollars in a year or one of my children would die and I’m gonna explain the reasons why. All the copy that I just read to you fits very, very legibly with a very prominent headline in a quarter page space of a newspaper — a quarter page.

Now, a quarter page is known as an SAU which is a standard advertising unit which means that you can buy it at remnant or stand-by space which is 90 percent off what you would normally pay. Now, what that means is that I can buy a thousand circulation for this quarter page ad for $4.00. In other words, I can put it in papers or a single paper with 100 circulation for $400.00.

Now, the second thing is I tell them that they are not going to get a live person when they call. They’re going to get a recorded message. That is very important; because people are much more comfortable calling to get a recorded message than they are to get a live person because they’re afraid if they get a live person they are going to get a high pressure sales job.

The second thing I do, I don’t know where I’m at now, the third thing or whatever, is that I tell them what they are going to hear when they call. Hi, this is Caleb O’Dowd. Thank you for calling to get a free copy of my book, etc., etc. so by the fact that I tell them this is what you’re going to hear and that is in fact what they do hear increases their comfort level.

Now, all of this is a process of taking the fear out of a sale and if you have something to sell that people want and have enough money to buy what you have to do to sell it among other things is take the fear out of the transaction.

Finally, you’ll notice that I said to call 1-305 whatever and that’s known as a POTS number which is plain old telephone service which means I can buy that for $7.00 a month and it will take up to 35 calls at the same time without anybody getting a busy signal and this is not like a television commercial where, you know, 5,000 people call at the same time. This would be running in different newspapers and so the calls will be scattered out.

Now, this is a lead generating ad and if you’ll notice it’s a very hard-working compelling lead generating ad. And I believe that it will generate good prospects at as cheaply as you can develop them. Now, what’s going to happen after they make that telephone call is that they are immediately going to get a free book but it’s really going to be a 20 or 30 page book that gives them really, really good information and then segues into a sale, a sales letter of why if this is of interest to you, then you should have my course.

Now, I haven’t priced it out yet but, you know, it’s going to be a minimum of $97.00 and probably considerably more. Now, once you have that name there is no name in all of direct marketing that is more valuable than a gambling system name. That is the single most valuable list of names you can get. They’re more valuable than any other type of names. And you just about can’t rent them at all.

If you ever find a list of gambling system buyers that you can rent, you can almost be certain that they are only up for rent because they are ten years old and the owner of the list has sucked every last cent that he could out of them because he’s mailed them 300 pitches.

So, that is, that is the formula, the most foolproof formula that I know and the truth is at $4.00 per thousand you can test that in a circulation of paper of say 50,000 will give you the answer and that’s $200.00 and you’re just not gonna get much cheaper than that. If you don’t have $200.00 you need to take a second job until you do.

Now, another thing about this is that when you do this what you do is you count up the responses you get and that will tell you, that will go a long way in telling you how to design your product.

First of all, if you get three, four, five, six, seven replies, what you want to do is abandon the project. And it’s important that you fail fast and that you fail cheaply. However, if you get 400 or 500 replies, you divide that, those replies, into how much money you spent to get them.

Let’s say you got 400 replies and you spent $400.00 to get this in front of 100,000 people then you’re buying leads at a buck a piece and that means for sure you have a gold mine because if the first offer you make doesn’t work then the, you’ll just keep going after it and after it until it does work. That is, I hope answers a question and the next thing I want to tell you is that that ad was 50 percent written by me.

The other 50 percent of it was written by a young man I’m mentoring named Caleb O’Dowd who comes from the Town of Limerick, Ireland. And I had him do the research on this and write the bullets and I worked him like a dog for about three weeks and he furnished me with everything I needed to polish that off and I think Caleb O’Dowd when he came over here from Ireland to work with me — and believe me, I charge a lot and he had to pay a very dear price to do it — this guy had never — he’s listening to this call right now in the next room — he had never even seen a direct mail letter.

They don’t have them in Ireland. There is no direct response industry in Ireland. He had never pulled a direct mail letter out of an envelope but he is on his way to becoming a world class copywriter. I can guarantee you that and he has the number one prerequisite for becoming a world class copywriter and that is he is obsessed with it.

You know he works so hard that I have to slap him upside the head every once in a while and say, “Hey, Caleb, it’s time for us to get a cup of coffee or something.” But if you want to ever get in touch with a future star or you ever want to inquire what it’s like to be mentored by me — and I’m not soliciting people to mentor because I hardly ever do it.

This is only the second time I’m doing it. I’m gonna give your email to the people and what he’s gonna write you back is he’s going to tell you that, “Well, I learned a lot from Gary Halbert but he is a bastard to work with. He just tortured me.”

Anyhow, he’s always bitching about it. He really does. He just constantly bitches about you know, I mean not about the work — he’s a hard worker but the way he perceives me as mistreating him and I just perceive it as teaching him.

But here’s his email. It’s calebod@iolfreee.ie. I’ll repeat that. calebod@iolfree.ie and I will tell you this guy is going to be for hire and he is good enough that I am actually doing this project with him and spending my money on it and his brother is coming over to help us and his brother’s name is John and he, guess who he was? He was Michael Dell’s right-hand man. And so this is really a good guy that you’re gonna want to know.

Now, I have only mentored personally one other person and I got a letter from him. And I have to read that to you, too. And it says, Gary, will you let the world or on your teleseminaron Thursday know that your first officially trained student a/k/a Dave Allard has written and is currently enjoying a 31 percent response rate on a self-marketing letter. It is very original and he appreciates your ideas a lot more than Carlton ever will.

I don’t know where he got that. You don’t have to tell him I said that. Also, a podiatry client David is working with is enjoying a 6 percent response rate and 100 percent conversion to appointments.

Lifetime value of these lost patients is over $168,000.00 in three short weeks from a non-sales oriented newsletter. Two really hot lists being worked by really one hot newsletter. I’m gonna give you his email address, too.

He is up and doing work right now. I’ve read his portfolio. He’s worked for 13 clients and I just think that in this business it’s important to know the good people and his dallard@midsouth.rr.com. That’s dallard@midsouth.rr.com.

I would like to recommend that the people on this call understand that it is important to dialogue with other like-minded people because basically if you’re a copywriter or a direct marketer it is a lonely, small world out there.

And I want to say something more, a little bit more, about that. When I did this first teleseminar, Mike, I had no idea who you were. And I have since read the sales letters that you have written for people and they blew me away. I mean I thought I knew every killer copywriter in the world and I didn’t. I didn’t know you and I can tell you this I’m gonna steal a lot of your ideas and letters. I mean because they are truly that good.

Michel: Thank you.

Gary: Now, and I mean that sincerely. I, you must know I don’t pay compliments easily.

Now, I’m gonna clean up another thing that a question that was asked and I rambled on and I’m gonna try and stay focused. I’ll lose it about 20 minutes from now I want you all to know that. The drugs will start kicking in, you know, and then but uh, but I said how do you tell if you’re a real copywriter worthy of the name and I’m gonna tell you exactly how.

You have to get the SRDS book. I think everybody here — the SRDS mailing list book. I think everybody on the call knows what that is. That tells you about the mailing lists and you have to go through and pick the market you’re going to work yourself. You pick it. Then you order 5,000 names from a list broker. Okay, now let’s suppose that you have picked golf.

2nd Gary Halbert Call Part 1 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

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

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

John: Right.

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

John: That’s right.

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

John: Yeah, I think we’ve covered -

Michel: We’ve covered it, yeah.

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

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

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

Michel: Right, right.

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

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

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

Michel: Okay, well -

John: You talk about the easy pickings out there.

Michel: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel: Uh huh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Right.

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

John: Yeah, right.

Michel: To do that.

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

Michel: Uh huh.

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

Michel: Right.

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

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

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

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

Michel: That’s not what I meant.

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

Michel: Okay.

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

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

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

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

Michel: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Absolutely, great idea.

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

John: Right.

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

John: Right.

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

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

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

Michel: Right.

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

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

Michel: Yeah, right.

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

Michel: Yeah, he said it was sterilized.

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

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

John: I do the same thing.

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

John: Uh huh.

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

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

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

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

John: Right.

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

John: That’s true.

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

John: Right.

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

John: Right.

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

John: Right.

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

John: Right.

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

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

John: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything else is mediocre.

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

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

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

Michel: Yeah.

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

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

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

Michel: ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel: Peterstonecopy.com, absolutely.

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

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

Michel: Yeah.

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

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

John: Uh huh.

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

John: Uh huh.

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

John: Oh.

Michel: And a few others too, John.

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel: Absolutely.

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

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

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

John: Right. Yeah, you’re right.

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

John: That’s right.

Michel: And the thinking process -

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

Michel: Uh huh.

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

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

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

Michel: Great.

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

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

Michel: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

Michel: And Carlton without the E.

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

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

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

John: Right.

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

John: Yeah. The big marketing group hug.

Michel: Yeah.

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

Michel: Absolutely.

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

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

John, of course, your web site is marketingrebel.com. Mine is thecopydoctor.com. And hopefully we’ll see you again on another call. Thanks, John.

John: Okay.

Michel: Goodnight folks.

John: Okay, bye, bye.

John Carlton Call Part 4 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Everyone thinks we’re, you know, either very noble creatures on the planet who deserve a special place or at worse, they think we’re a couple of steps out of the jungle and, you know, we’re still, you know, moving along, but basically we’re, you know, we’re at a very advanced stage. In reality when you’re a salesman you understand we’ve got one foot back in the jungle and one foot out. We haven’t moved hardly at all.

Michel: Right.

John: Civilization has brought all the accouterments that let us believe us that we’re okay, and when you watch TV, you never see people like, you know, go to the bathroom or, you know, do the things that, that, that, you know, eating, and, and getting sick.

They gloss over a lot of this stuff. The reality of life and especially the reality of marketing life and selling is closer to what happens in bad parts of town. You know, where there is no law, where there is no safety zones. You know, where there is no such thing as a quiet evening at home.

Michel: The biker bar mentality.

John: Pardon me?

Michel: The biker bar mentality.

John: Yeah, exactly. So by understanding that, and also I talk about, you know, I’ve, I’ve a degree in psychology and part of that was looking at animal behaviorism, how it related to possibly humans. You know, some people get upset about this. Just get over it. Go watch the gorillas at the zoo.

Stop being, stop pretending that we aren’t related to them and watch how they interact and what they do and, after a few minutes, you will recognize Uncle Bob, or you may even see yourself in these, and it’s the way they act, it’s the way they protect things, the way they get what they want, the way they decide what they want, the maneuvers they go through to get what they want when they’re not the top guy.

You know, how the top guy gets everything, but is tricked by his, by the females, or you know, when I’m talking about gorillas, typically the top gorilla has all the females, as all anthropologists know, the females are cheating on him constantly because otherwise the gene pool would get too screwed up.

So, and it just goes on and on and on; and the reality of, of, you can’t have shades over, you can’t have rose-colored glasses on your eyes and be a great salesman. You have to be able to see things as they are. Not as you wish they were or not as you were told they were.

Michel: Right.

John: How they really are, and what motivates people is often something you may, a lot of people may not even want to talk about. Like greed, for example. People have either a problem talking about how this is going to make you filthy rich. It’s gonna make you filthy rich really quick, you know, and so when they, you know, they’re kind of uncomfortable with this whole greed thing.

So when they get around to actually putting it into the copy, they either overdo it, you know, “You’re gonna get so filthy rich that, you know, Donald Trump will be, you know, asking you for a loan or something.” And it just becomes unbelievable and unreal and over the top, or they undercut it so much, they say, “Well, you know, you could make, you know, you could, you could up response by 2, maybe 3 percent by this time next year, you know.

Michel: Right.

John: And usually when you talk to the guys that are doing this, you know, you say, is, is that the best you can do, and he says, well no, there’s a guy that’s working with me who’s getting, you know, 25 percent, you know, every week, you know, in a bump.

Well, why don’t, you know, that’s the stuff you talk about is what people can attain, not the average middling stuff. You got to be bold, you got to step out, you got to make your case because you’re tickling a very deadened sense inside of your, of your prospect.

Michel: Mm-hmm. Well, that’s one of the things that I, that I usually tell people, especially when copy seems to be a borderline or even over-the-line hypie, or what people think is hypie, or what people are scared about -

John: Right.

Michel: — being hypie is that it’s just laced with adjectives and adverbs and one of my prized possessions being in your insider’s club is my power word list.

John: Right. Yeah, that’s, once, you know, it took me awhile to realize what I was doing, but, Michael, you’ve read “Struck and White” right?

Michel: Mm-hmm.

John: The element to start with.

Michel: Yes.

John: The one main thing, the one main lesson from that is stop using adjectives. Okay, so that’s one step, but the next thing that they talk about, which changed my life, was use action verbs.

Michel: Yes.

John: And it’s like one verb, you know, he walked down the street. He waltzed down the street, he floated down the street, he ran down the street in a panic. I mean, too many times we rely on, is it have, you know, to have, you know, verbs like that.

Michel: Right.

John: I’ve got something for you, you know. You start to explore. You should have a beat to death thesaurus on your desk. Don’t use the one on your computer, because you should have the actual physical sensation of going page to page looking for the word you’re looking up to find other words that mean the same thing or antonyms, and go to them because you’ll have happy accidents when you have the actual thesaurus in your hand and in your lap.

I’ve been using the same one for the last 25 years. It is, it is decrepit beyond belief, but I, it’s a, it’s a friend, you know. You just, when I flip through it, sometimes I’ll just stop and read a page because a word will catch my eye.

Guess what? When I’m flipping through a thesaurus and a word catches my eye, when I’m looking for something in the Ws and something in the Rs catches my eye, guess what that word is? It’s a power word.

Michel: Mm-hmm.

John: So, you know, it’s, that’s another thing about caveman technology. Well, actually Gutenberg technology, you know, having the written actual dictionary and actual thesaurus in front of you, it’s just, you know. Technology changes and sometimes it makes our lives easier and sometimes it, it, it hurts us. People, you know, I’m running into more and more people who have had their little addiction to Grand Theft Auto, you know.

You don’t want to get in the car with them until they’ve calmed down, after a ten-hour session with it. And guess what? They’re gonna, the first time they cop an attitude in a, you know, in a store or something, you know, thinking that they’re gonna pull out their secret machine gun and, you know, gun them down, it ain’t gonna happen and they’re gonna get their clock cleaned.

Michel: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

John: You know, reality is very much different. So technology has its drawbacks.

Michel: Right. Well, it’s, it’s coming back to, when you say the process of looking for a word and very often, even an action verb, it’s not necessarily the fact that it’s an action in itself. I think personally it’s because of the fact that people can instantly, in their mind’s eye, think and see the action being taken.

John: Well, there’s with words like humiliate, for example, or embarrass. All of us have a visceral reaction to words like that.

Michel: Right, exactly.

John: Right.

Michel: Because, I, I, I tell this story often where if you tell, you know, there’s a, I took a media communications course many years ago and, and they were talking about the fact that the mind thinks in relative terms, it never thinks in direct terms, because it goes back into its memory bank and its databank to find something that it has like a reference point that it can compare it to; and it’s like, you know, saying to people, “Think of a garbage can.”

Is that person gonna start thinking G-A-R? No, of course not. They’re gonna picture a garbage can in their mind, and this media communications course had this news report about a forest fire that was devastating the Midwest, and, and the show had this news anchor with the background picture of a helicopter view of the forest fire, and he, he turned around and he says, “Sally’s in the station helicopter right now above the scene of the fire.

Sally, how big is the fire?” Sally responded, “Oh, it’s about 104 acres of land” or whatever, I can’t remember the exact number.

John: Right.

Michel: But what she said after it because see, acres are 104, the numbers right. The mind doesn’t think in numbers, it thinks in pictures Mark Twain said. So she said it’s about 200 football field back-to-back for you and me.

John: Yeah.

Michel: Boom. You know, the mind had something it could fall back on.

John: Exactly.

Michel: And, and it’s the same thing with your power words because who wants to beat their competition? Who wants to increase your sales over the competition? They don’t want to do that. They want to murder -

John: That’s right.

Michel: — the competition.

John: That’s right. Slaughter them.

Michel: And that’s, that’s something that you’ve, that you teach a lot that I just, it just really is the key.

John: Well, you know, it’s interesting, Michel, that the literacy of America is actually going up because of the net. My, I have family members who haven’t written a letter in sometimes 50 years, and they got email and their first emails were obviously hunt and peck, very short, misspelled little missives.

You know, hi, got your, got your gift, thank you, that kind of thing. Now, they’re writing novels, and they’re very comfortable. Their typing skills have come back and they’re doing it, and I think, you know, there’s a resurgence of interest in writing with the web, especially with the amount of sales copy that’s being written for the web.

Michel: Mm-hmm.

John: So, it’s you, what I’d like to see, you know, I, you know, I don’t want people to think wrong of me. I love music. I’m a musician. I love stuff, but in a lot of ways, the current kind of music that’s out there right now, the popular music, is degrading the language too much.

Back when I was listening to rock and roll, and you too, language was still very much a part of it. It was, you know, the large part of the hook of the song was the way the words rolled off your tongue.

Michel: Oh, yeah.

John: On the chorus or something like that, and some of the great writers like Mick Jagger were, were excellent wordsmiths.

Michel: Right.

John: And you have, you know, to love the way, you know, Americans don’t love the language enough. French love their own language. Unfortunately it’s not the lingual franca of the world. You have to learn English. English, guess what, is more rich than French because we have more power words.

We have more ways to say the same thing and to, you know, to just tweak it a bit here and there; and by having a thesaurus, by having a dictionary, when you’re, you know, your main tool as a writer are the words that you use.

When we speak, and especially if you’re speaking to someone, you have the advantage of, you know, of, of using facial expressions, of pounding the other person in the chest with your finger, or jumping up and down or making little, you know, charade-type things. When you’re writing, you don’t have that advantage.

However, people may be thinking, hey, soon we’re gonna be selling with video on the web. It’s gonna all be video all the time. That isn’t gonna happen. Reading is always, and to my mind, always will be the secondary to the face-to-face sales job. The reading. It engages a part of the brain that isn’t engaged when you’re watching video or TV or something.

Michel: Right.

John: And it’s a more active part of the brain.

Michel: This is just a little comment and I’ll let you go on, but I was asked that question one time. Mike, do you think that the video is going to take over the web or should I do all my, my, my copy in audio, or whatever? And I said, you know, the, the eye needs to have some kind of thing that makes it, that keeps it busy.

If you are, especially on the web, if you’re going to try to sell with audio and video while it’s going on, that person’s gonna, you know, check out another couple of windows, they’re gonna Google something, they’re gonna have somebody pinging them on MSN, they’re gonna download their email. They’re gonna be so busy that they haven’t captured maybe that one little thing you mentioned on your video that might be the key, the hook, the pivotal point that’s gonna and close a sale.

John: And also need to be able to go back to it. How many times have you read a sentence and said, what the hell did I just read, and have to go back and read it.

Michel: Exactly.

John: Can’t do that on video. Well, you can, but the physical action of that is, you know, kind of, you know, mitigates the, the advantage to it.

Michel: Right.

John: So that’s, sure, that sounds good. I forgot what else I was talking about, Michael, so let’s move on. Oh, you know what? I wanted to say something about, I think, would you agree that people are a little concerned about the spacing, the blank page thing. Do you want me to say a little bit more about that?

Michel: Yes, yes, please actually.

John: Um, I say that writer’s block is a myth. It’s because there’s always something to be said, there’s always something to be done, but when I first started out as a writer, facing down the blank page and writing that first couple of words or getting going was kind of hard to do.

So there’s a couple of rules that I felt that really worked, and one was kill trees. Use as much paper as you can. Whenever I write, fortunately, on the, on, now that I’m working on a computer all the time, you know, I started out working on a typewriter. Not just a typewriter, but a manual typewriter at that, so that’s how old I am.

Anyway, you know, thank God we can go back and edit without having to print. However, I print all the time anyway. I print every hour or so when I’m working on a draft of something, ‘cuz I don’t, I don’t want to permanently erase something that may have been there when I’m trying it some other way. You want to keep a log of that.

So writing by long hand actually has its advantages if you can see what you crossed out or how, you know, where the genesis of where you’re at now, where your verbiage comes from. But getting those first words down sometimes is a real drag.

So just start writing. I think Howard actually talked about that before, you know, it’s, it’s the idea of don’t be afraid to write something you’re gonna throw away later. One of the great tactics that copywriters know about when they’re doing it professionally is that even for bettering copywriters, when you’re finished with a piece and you have an 18-page letter or something, the first page and a half to three pages, you can toss.

Michel: You can call it clearing your throat, I think.

John: Right, clearing your throat. It’s, it’s, you know, we do it all the time. When I’m going back and I got to edit something, say it’s gonna, it was a letter and now it’s gonna go in as a magazine ad or something, I got to edit it. I’ll look at the first part I write and I’ll say, you know what, I said the same thing six times and here’s a whole paragraph that’s absolutely irrelevant and, you know, often when I’m critiquing things, I’ll just go to the second page.

You know, halfway down the second page, I’ll, I’ll close my eyes and just stick my finger down and there’s a thing that starts and the guy will say, “Hi, my name is Jim Smith and what I’m about to tell you is going to up your, you know, your response on the blah, blah, blah”, you know, and it’s like before that, what was he talking about, you know, you know.

I imagine that you’re really frustrated with business you know, and all this rambling and mumbling and all the stuff that goes on. It’s like, hey, here’s where you start. Get rid of all this stuff.

Michel: My -

John: So don’t be afraid to be able to do that. Be brutal with yourself. Here’s, here’s another tactic when I was first starting out. I had writing clothes. I had a hat that I put on. I had a stinky set of sweats and a T-shirt and I had big floppy socks that would not allow me to put shoes on.

Now, when I put that on, it did two things. One, these were my writing clothes. You don’t, they could have been a Superman costume or they could have been women’s lingerie, you know, and it didn’t matter. When I put those on, I was gonna write. So I sat down.

The other advantage to make sure that I was gonna write was I couldn’t go outside dressed like that. I wasn’t, I wasn’t fit to meet people, so I wasn’t gonna go anywhere and I was sitting in front of the, you know, sitting at my desk and there wasn’t anything else going on.

You know, the TV was in the other room and I don’t have a radio in there and I’m sitting in there and, you know, okay, fine, so let’s just, you know, sometimes I’d food myself and say, and again with these little five by seven notepads, I would say, I’m just gonna write down a list of a couple of features. I’m not even gonna be exhaustive about it. And then you write those down and you say, I’m just gonna write a couple of benefits. In other words, give yourself room to be a loser, I guess.

Michel: Mm-hmm.

John: What happens is that once you engage, once that thing kicks in, once your, once your inner salesman wakes up, he doesn’t want to go back to sleep. So you will find a common problem with writers, and I’m sure you’ve had this too, is writers asphyxiation.

Michel: Yeah.

John: Writers tend to slump in their chair, breathe very, very shallowly, and the kind of sweat you produce is actually the kind of sweat you produce when you’re starving yourself. It’s like ketosis. It’s a very stinky sweat.

But what’s happening is that you’re breathing very shallow, you’re hooked into a part of your brain that is connected right to your fingers whether you’re writing longhand or whether you’re typing, and it’s just, and, and, I’m sure, you know, I’d be astonished if you didn’t have the same experience that, that I’ve had which is I’ll look up and two hours have gone by, just like that. I have no idea where those two hours went. I’ll look up and suddenly I’ve got all this stuff written and all this stuff down, and it’s because of total immersion.

Michel: John, I wrote my best copy and it took me a couple of days, and I realized I didn’t bathe, I didn’t shave, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep.

John: Yeah, yeah. It’s hard to, it’s hard to have people living with you at that time, and I’ve got a very, very understanding person living with me, you know. She, she knows that there’s gonna be some quirky stuff and there’s gonna be me walking through muttering to myself and I’ll be staring at the wall sometimes, you know.

So as long as they understand, but writing is taking the internal voice that’s going on in your head and setting it all up and, and bringing it all out onto the page. So having writing clothes actually works. I don’t do that anymore, well, actually sometimes I do. But you know the hat was great. It was one of those Sherlock Holmes hats, you know.

Michel: Right.

John: You can’t wear outside ‘cuz they’re ridiculous. But I always liked them, you know. It could have been a Greek, you know, war helmet, or something. It’s just, you know, and, but a part of that that I didn’t cop to or I didn’t understand until later was the idea that I was also stalking the computer

What would happen is I’d stand there, I’d look in the room, and it’s kind of like if you’ve ever lifted weights, what you have to do before you life a very large weight? You got to stand, you take a deep breath, you kind of move your shoulders around and you look down, and then there’s that moment of truth where you’re gonna reach down and grab it and you’re either gonna pull it up or you’re not. And until you get to that stage, you’re not gonna pull it up.

So you just, and it’s just like, finally it’s like jumping in the pool. It’s like, I talk about, you know, in other ways people standing on the edge of the pool of life bothering everybody that’s already in with questions like “How deep is it? Is it cold? Will the chlorine sting my eyes?”

When really what you got to do is jump in, whether you dive in, fall in backwards, do a belly flop, doesn’t matter. Get in the damn pool.

Well, that’s the same thing with writing. You know, you just, and when I talk about stalking the computer, sometimes I will circle the desk because it’s not time to write yet, it’s time to be thinking about this, and I’ll be, I’ll just, sometimes I stalk the desk, sometimes I actually go outside and take long walks.

Sometimes I take long showers, and I just, I’m thinking, I’m thinking, you know, and I’m mad and I’m getting, and I’m trying to get in touch with that part of me that is passionate.

And sometimes I’m not passionate because I’m a freelancer. Sometimes I couldn’t care less about this product. Well, I got to. That’s where the idea of the writer is the prostitute comes in because you, you know, you got to love the product at least at the time that you’re writing the thing. And we learn how to do that, we learn how to just turn it on and you, and guess what, you can do it too.

However, if you’re writing for your own stuff, you’ve got to have that passion there anyway, so just hook in there and think about it. Think about this when you’re sitting down to write. There are, if you really have a product of value, then you owe it to the world to sell that product to the people, to let them know you have it, to let them know that here’s how they can get it, and to wake them up to the fact that it’s out there. That’s your job. That’s why you’re here on earth.

Now, think about this. You know, your job is to sit down and do this. There are people walking around out there who want, need, and will thank you for letting them know that your product is available out there. If you have a product of value, then that’s what’s gonna happen.

Here’s the part that pisses you off. There are a bunch of people walking around out there with money in their wallet that belongs to you. It’s in their pocket right now, it should be in yours. The only reason that they haven’t taken it out of their wallet and put it into yours is because you haven’t asked them the right way; and if that doesn’t piss you off, then you’re not, then there’s not much I can do for you.

Michel: Well, it comes back to what you were saying earlier about technology and one of the downfalls of technology, and this is probably why in your case so good to use a typewriter, is technology also gives you the convenience to procrastinate or it gives you the convenience to edit yourself constantly.

John: Mm-hmm.

Michel: And I tell this to a lot of people that there’s a difference between a copywriter and copyeditor, and tons of people know, you were talking not too long about switching on the inner salesman, and I tell people switch off the inner editor.

John: Oh, absolutely.

Michel: And the one thing that a lot of people do that’s a big problem is they’ll, they’ll, you know, you call it the Ernest Hemingway disease where people stop halfway and they, you know, they think that they’re gonna be selling to grammar cops.

Michel: Right.

John: You know, and they’re not. You’ve got to keep on writing. Who cares, like you just said, who cares if it’s lousy, and then you can edit, you can go back and edit. Of course, you’re not gonna put out some really crappy copy, but in the process of writing, don’t stop.

Michel: Sometimes you will. Sometimes crappy copy does it. I use a lot of slang and I use a lot of words that would cause Mrs. Williams from, you know, the woman who tried to teach me English in the, in junior high, would cause her to have a heart attack and just keel over, and it’s because you’re not writing to please an English teacher.

You’re writing to get the message across, and when you start writing more in the way people talk or in the way people think about copy, then you’re getting farther and farther away from the very, very stilted way that people who have too much education write.

You want to write as, you know, when, when, one of the funniest things that happens when you transcribe something, it’s like what I just did before. I said that I stuttered for about three or four things, you know, just little words come out, and I’ve actually had transcriptions come back with every single um, aw, and you know.

And it’s hilarious ‘cuz you’ll look at it and you don’t know, I don’t notice it and most of the time people that you’re talking to don’t notice it. You, we’ll leave out words, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll finish thoughts with incorrect, you know, we don’t speak in correct sentences all the time.

Now, I’m not saying you should write like that all the time because as I said, you should be able to send out a piece that is like you would talk if you could go back and edit what you said.

So you take out all the “ums” and “ahs” and all that stuff isn’t there, but basically, you’re presenting it the way you would if you were speaking, if you were speaking, if you had a really good command of the English language.

Now some of us, through the years, have a, somewhat of a good command of the English language, but I don’t speak as well as I write. When I write, I’m hooking into, there is some kind of selection process that goes down. But sometimes I can stop and say, no, let’s not use that verb.

Let’s try this one. Oh, and there’s another verb I’ve been waiting to use for a long time, you know. That, that’s where the love of language comes in, you know.

John: Mm-hmm.

Michel: And you get to throw that word in, and it becomes second nature so quickly. And you know, we almost all write, can write right now better than we speak.

Michel: Right.

John: Um, but you know, we still want to, you know, you don’t want to get rid of the slang. You want to keep that, that freshness, that aliveness, you know. The sales letter that goes out is a living being. It’s a, it’s something that is vibrant in the person’s hand if it’s a letter or on their screen that they’re reading. It’s not, it’s not this boring recitation of what’s going on.

It’s the difference between the old boring cooking shows, you know, where they go, okay, three eggs, you know, crack now, whip it. And guys like Emeril, you know, bang, you know, and all this stuff. It’s theater, it’s the, it’s having a little fun with this because remember, people aren’t, you know, they’re not leading interesting lives. They don’t get to do anything. They don’t have any interesting friends.

You, you can be that interesting friend who shares their passion. You know a lot of guys, like bowlers and stuff; if you’re really passionate about bowling or if you’re an accountant. Say you’re selling stuff to accountants.

You know what that accountant doesn’t get to do. He doesn’t get to go home and talk about his day to his wife because she’s been sick of hearing about accounting since the day after he met her. He doesn’t get to regale the kids with stories about how the books weren’t balanced in the X-Y-Z perforation ‘cuz they could care less.

Michel: Right.

John: They don’t understand it anyway. You get to come in and be that guy where you can share not only what he knows about it, but guess what? You’re gonna let him inside a world that he can’t otherwise get into.

And you’re gonna share inside secrets and give him the, you know, the ability to expand his passion and be able to indulge in it to his heart’s content. I should have written that down, that’s pretty good.

Michel: This is the point. I think you’ve mentioned also in either a seminar that I’ve been on or went to or heard you from, and ties it a little bit in with this.

You know, we’re talking about switching off the inner editor and it’s the same thing I think whenever you present your copy to a client, and this is a question I keep getting from my clients with web copy is, “Should I have a page for about us, another page for pricing, another page for this, another page for that”, and there are ample studies and tests, split tests have been done to prove that long copy, long schooling copy outsells multiple-page copy. This is for a single offer.

But the problem that people don’t understand is, it’s just as much that we have a tendency to procrastinate at every opportunity, readers will procrastinate at every opportunity.

John: Yes.

Michel: And by putting multiple pages or giving, you know, or putting lengths to other web sites or whatever, you’re giving them every opportunity to procrastinate or to go on a tangent or to click on pages that will give them specific information that does not follow the flow that you want them.

You know, to me, to me copy and sales copy is like music. You know, you’ve got the intro, you’ve got the verse, the chorus, the solo in the middle, and then you’ve got the outro.

John: That’s right, and before the solo, you don’t stop the music and say, by the way, we did another song ****. Hey, Bob, play a stance of that song. Then you say, okay, now we’re going back to the song.

Michel: Right.

John: It’s a greased slide ride.

Michel: You mentioned this, and this is what you said I think on a previous seminar is where you said, “Do you actually sit down with a client and do a presentation face to face, belly to belly, and in the middle of your conversation, you say, okay, hang on, stop, one, two, three, okay, now keep on going?”

John: Right. And you know, you say you’re giving an excuse to procrastinate. Guess what? You’re inviting it. You are almost, you are, you are gonna murder your bottom line by doing that stuff. Links are one of the worst technological advances that have ever been invented for as far as the sales pitch goes. Now you can link the stuff, you know, later.

You know, you, once you’ve sold them, then you have another page where you can have links up the ying-yang ‘cuz it doesn’t matter ‘cuz they’re in your fold at that time, but to bring them in the first time, oh, my, God. Think about that process of what you’ve got to do. We didn’t talk about the synambulant blob welded to the couch.

Michel: Right.

John: But, you know, basically that’s the way I look at all of my prospects. I imagine this huge gelatinous mass of humanity welded to the couch that wouldn’t move to save itself from the burning building, and I’ve got to get it to, to watch something for a few minutes, you know, or read something and actually, you know, lean over and kind of pull it’s wallet out and pick up the phone and call or fax in an order form and fill it out.

My God, what a, what a difficult process that is ‘cuz this synambulant blob is snoring, doesn’t want to be woken up, doesn’t want to move and sure as hell doesn’t want to give me any money. So I’ve got to make the case. I’ve got to get this guy motivated, and you know how you make a synambulant blob move from the couch? You light a fire under its ass.

Michel: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

John: So, you know, this is why we have things, this is why we talk so much about urgency, about limits, about making this a one-time offer, about, about making the most famous copywriting acronym or whatever, A-I-D-A.

Michel: Mm-hmm.

John: That’s the most common one that’s been used, it’s the best. I think John Caples came up with it. It’s the one, it’s A-I-D-A, stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.

You know, so when you break copy down to four basic things, the fourth one is action, and that’s where people, people really miss the boat, because you are asking this guy to do something he doesn’t want to do, doesn’t normally do, may not have ever done before in his life, you know, the whole idea of sending money for something.

Think of the fire you got to light under his ass to get him to move to take out his wallet and do that.

Michel: Very, very similar to something I teach often, John, is the, my, I call it my three simple steps to writing profitable copy.

John: Right.

Michel: And the three simple steps is it’s not easy specifically. It’s easy in the sense that if people get those three down, they, they can write world-class copy and it’s basically based on three immutable laws, and the first law is that people never read anything at first.

John Carlton Call Part 3 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

If you are the guy who brings in the money into your business, then that’s your most important job. That’s your second most important job, your third most important job and on down the line.

If you’re the guy who brings in the dough, that’s what you’ve got to be doing. Every hour you spend fixing the copier or being on the phone talking to the post office about some postage problem, that’s an hour that robs you twice. That hour is gone and you haven’t spent an hour of bringing in money.

If you’re the guy, and especially for small businesses, if you’re the writer or the guy who’s doing the marketing or all of this, the only thing that should be important to you is to stay focused on operation money suck, bringing the money in. It seems simple when you hear it, but it’s really, it’s the crux of business and it’s where a lot of people go wrong — they get caught up in all the flotsam and jetsam of business life.

You know, my office looks like a bomb went off in here. I’ve got stacks of stuff that has been there for a year. There’s dust settling. I just — I don’t let the maids in. I don’t let hardly anybody else in here. This is my work space, and I like clutter because I like the discovery of seeing “hey, what’s in that pile over there.”

But I’m always — I don’t waste a lot of time trying to keep my desk clean, you know, it’s not important to me. In fact, it gets pushed back farther every day because there’s always — especially in my life — there’s always something I can do to — that involves operation money suck as opposed to just dusting off my, you know, my desk.

Michel: Well **** marketers are not immune to this because a lot of people who — especially the people who complain a lot are the people who, they like to browse forums and posts, and read forums and read email and download email and email their friends and -

John: Michael, let’s be honest, the web is like junk. It’s like heroin. There is so much to be done, you kind of scratch the surface if you — and then you can go a little deeper and God forbid you discovery pornography or something. It’s just — you know guys are gambling, it’s horrible for people who have gambling addictions, they just — you know, I guess people pass out from hunger. They just won’t leave the computer console.

So as a species, we don’t know yet how to deal with what this — what the web has wrought in our lives. But we’re learning as we go along. And one of the things you have to learn is if you want to be a top business man, or hell, not even the top, if you want to make it in business on any level at all, you have to exert a little bit of discipline.

And this is, there’s a common story in Hollywood about the — it usually takes place in the front lines of World War II or World War I or the Civil War or something. What happens is that a guy is a private and he’s bitching and moaning about the sergeants and the lieutenants and stuff because they’re always telling him to do stuff and the privates all get together and they think that they know better than the guys who are running the war, and then what happens is somebody gets shot or something and suddenly one private is plucked out of the crowd and suddenly he’s put in a position of authority.

And the story — the crux of the story is that, that splash of cold water in your face when you’re no longer one of the guys, you’re now the guy making the decisions and you’re responsible for the bottom line.

Michel: Right.

John: When you do your business, a lot of people don’t understand this. A lot of people don’t understand the responsibility and the concept and the whole idea of consequences, you know, that if you decide to not work today, there will be consequences tomorrow. If you decide to work today and do A, B and C, there will be consequences maybe later that evening.

And, you know, you can’t not take responsibility for everything you do and be, you know, in command of your business. And this doesn’t matter what part of the business you’re in either. You’ve got to be responsible for it. This is a huge shock to most people.

Michel: Oh yeah, and thing is especially with what we were talking about — the hook. Um, the internet, I’d say of course the internet is just a medium. But people don’t understand that whenever you’re selling your product, your widget and you’ve got a long copy sales letter, if you don’t hit them in the face with your headline right up front, they’re probably downloading a gazillion emails and one side, they’ve got about two or three or four or five browser windows probably opened up, they’re checking Google here, they’re doing a whole bunch of stuff and just as much as you need to sort of focus on operation money suck, you also have to focus on the hook that will grab those people into your copy.

John: That’s absolutely right, and you know, that gets back to salesmanship, the seam of what we were talking about. Most people write from their heels, and the reason — and when I say write from heels, it’s like you’re saying I got this would you please just maybe take a look at this.

You’re not doing anything else, you know, if you’re busy, I’ll come back later. You’ve got one foot out the door already. You can’t do that, you gotta be bold, you’ve gotta be that person that stands up and says “hey, I’ve got something you want. Here it is, here’s how to get it, blah, blah blah.” And this gets back to salesmanship. This gets back to making that bold statement and getting back to that responsibility thing.

When you are responsible for making the sale, whether you’re just the writer or whether you’re the marketer, whether you’re the guy who’s running the business or whether you’re all three, which I have a sneaking suspicion that most people online are, then that’s your responsibility — is to stand up and make the damn sale. You have to ask for action.

I think I talked about the six stages of a basic sales pitch. Um, I’ll rattle those off so I make sure I cover everything I do. You know, I say this over and over again to people, it’s simple, it kind of flies right pass. But listen to this, this is like the most simple checklist you’re ever going to have.

When you’re thinking about how you’re going to write your letter, here’s how you do it. You say, here’s what I’ve got. Here’s what it can do for you. Here’s why I’m the go-to guy that you should be dealing with. Here’s the story of the whole thing. Here are the details. Here’s how you can get it. It’s so simple. It’s so straightforward, it’s pretty much how most world class sales pitches operate.

Then, you start figuring out, once you can just get that idea down, answer those particular — well they’re not questions — fill in those blanks, then you go back and figure out — then you put yourself into the head of the person you’re talking to. You figure out where their passionate sweet spot is, then it’s a lot easier to figure out what the hook is to get them into that, because you start thinking about the benefits that you’re going to get.

You know, and then the USP comes about from the juxtaposition of your — of the benefits of your product and what the guy needs, how that fits together. That’s your unique sales position. And then you establish your credibility, then you get to boas and you start teasing and riling them up and then you offer to relieve the discomfort you created with the best offer you can come up with. And really it doesn’t get any more complex than that.

Michel: That’s perfect. That’s actually well said. I was -

John: I get paid for that Michel.

Michel: I was once asked you know what are the five questions you should answer with your copy. I was at a seminar somewhere -

John: Uh huh -

Michel: And my friend, Peter Stone, who’s actually the producer of this call, he was there, and the question was, what are the five questions? And I said, why? And the person said, well, can you elaborate. I said, why me, why you, why this name, why this product, why now and why at this price.

John: I like that.

Michel: You mean, why me and why should you listen to me? Because the worse thing and you said this John in your newsletter so much, is the worse enemy of the copyrighter is the reader that says so what.

John: Right

Michel: Then why you meaning why do I, why you, Mr. Prospect, should read this. Why is this important to you and there is a qualification process just as much as you would do in selling when you’re knocking on doors selling encyclopedias as much as you do in copywriting.

Then why this meaning why this product, why is it so meaningful to you? Why now using scarcity and like you were talking about how to get them into a lather where they can’t say no, and then why at this price — the value build up and the bullets and all of those things that go into the sale.

John: That’s right. You know, um, that also reminds me, the biggest blunder that rookies make, you know when I was listening to you talk just now — it’s something — the biggest mistake that folks make is that they bore people, you know, they just write boring copy and they just — you know, if you don’t have any, you have to look into your own passionate sweet spot too, but the one problem that people make when they aren’t natural salesmen and they think they’ve woken their salesman up but they really haven’t is they try to bully the reader into buying, and that’s not salesmanship.

Salesmanship is about persuasion, um, it’s not over the top stuff, and people get really confused, and I have to clarify that with people all the time because they look at my copy and think, wow that’s really ball to the wall and I have to think really aggressive and just knock them over. That’s not it at all.

That’s, it’s what I’m doing is uh, very careful persuasion and I’m staying in the emotional sweet spot of the person I’m writing to. I said emotional sweet spot that time, a passion and emotion, that irrational side of that person because almost all purchasing decisions are made irrationally.

We have, Mark Twain said there are two reasons why a man buys anything, the reason he’ll tell you he bought it and then there’s the real reason. That’s very important to understand when you’re selling stuff because the real reason that people want it often isn’t even known to them.

But the act of getting someone to open their wallet and giving you money is the hardest thing to do in business, and yet that’s the beginning and end of a successful business.

Michel: Gosh, it just hit me that something that you taught in the past, and I’m sure you teach it now still that I mentioned on the call with Gary Halbert and this is the problem I get a lot when I critique copy is that a small business, a small company, sometimes a one man operation, will want to write copy like Wal-Mart and Microsoft with this third person in highfallutin’ corporate speak and I mentioned on the call before this that I think the best kind of copy is just the guy you meet at the bar, you sit down and you “God, I got to tell you about this thing” and you know, blah blah blah.

That is, you know, like the just you and me talking kind of thing that you talk about a lot.

John: Right, the best kind of writing that’s done is I call it just you and me. I think there’s an official term back in the ’20′s I and thou copy. But basically, what it is, um, write like you would talk if you could edit how you, what you’ve said after you have spoken.

So, of course, I like to take it down to like being in a bar where you just overhear somebody mention something to somebody else and what he meant the problem that he complains about is exactly what your product solves. What would you say to the guy, how would you introduce yourself? Would you say, you know 95 percent of people, you know, with hemorrhoids, you know find — you know you don’t do this kind of stuff. You’re talking to another human being.

A lot of people make the mistake when they’re writing on the web or they’re writing a letter, you know they think they’re writing to this large audience — they’re not. It’s just you and the reader. Now there’s a lot of readers out there but each time, it’s one reader. It’s you and one person. It’s just the two of you.

So it’s just you and me sitting down and talking about a shared passion. And that’s you know, just understanding that, getting that down and you know, what’s funny is I was just interviewing somebody for an ad and he has these really blas‚ corporate-sounding ads and I asked him, I had a list of questions to ask him, but I never got to question No. 2 because question No. 1 was, you know if you were sitting down at a bar and I sat down next to you and you heard me say, hey I have this problem, and I didn’t even finish my question, he said here’s what I’d tell you.

He went on for 30 minutes. And it was the most brilliant stuff that I had ever heard. He, it was a great sales pitch, it was full of persuasion, it was full of emotional little check things that made the hair on the back of my head stand up because he was hitting me smack between my eyes.

It was like, you know, how do you, do you have enough money, is money going to be a problem? Are you, how does it feel to be 48 or something and not have enough money to be able to spend 100 bucks for something you really want.

Michel: Um hm -

John: And I said, have you ever just recorded this and transcribed it and sent it out, and he says well no, nobody wants to hear this stuff. It’s what everybody wants to hear and that’s the stuff that works really well. It gets around to what I call the voice and when reading is the passive behavior.

Be very, very aware of that. It’s not an active behavior on the reader’s part. When you hook somebody and bring them in, you want a voice that is going to join the conversation already in their head, so you want to be a voice, not some printed matter down there. You want to be a voice on the page because unconsciously, he’s going to be absorbing what you’re saying.

However, you are not letting him stay unconscious in this. You are not letting him stay submissive in this. You are building enough tension in him by teasing the Bejesus out of him so that when it gets down to the offer, if he puts your letter aside or goes off of your website or put your DVD aside or whatever, he’ll wake up in the middle of the night and just go Goddammit and he’ll get up and he’ll have to dial because he’ll know the answers to the s tuff you teased him about or he’ll have to have that product to see if it’s real.

Michel: Um hm

John: That’s the goal of the whole thing. And you can’t do that meekly. That’s why I write a little bit aggressively. You know, I don’t bully. I don’t go over the top. I go just under the top, I get attention and I want to always aim towards riling them up on the inside because you don’t want them to be comfortable.

You want them to be very uncomfortable reading this ad because you are — it’s kind of like that Roberta Flack song, you know, telling my story, what the hell is that called -

Michel: Killing me Softly?

John: Yeah, killing me softly. Killing me softly, that’s the whole idea. This person goes to listen to somebody sing and they think they’re singing about them, and it’s to the point that they think people are looking at them in the room. That’s what you want.

You want to get so deep into the psyche of the person you’re writing to. Now what does that mean you have to do? Part of your sales detection.

Okay, people understand the idea of doing sales detector work on the product. Guess what? You have to do it on your customer too — on your prospect or whatever. You have to understand that guy as well as you understand anybody else in your life. What moves them? What makes them tick? What makes them happy? What makes them sad?

Michel: Um hm

John: And especially, what makes them whip out the wallet and buy stuff. It is often not what you think it is. Common sense doesn’t exist. If people relied on common sense to become wealthy, then everyone you know who thinks they have common sense would be wealthy. Are they?

Michel: Right, right. It’s like the thing in salesmanship in sales training where they say that wimpy salespeople have succeeding kids.

John: That’s funny. I like that. Wimpy salespeople. You know, you don’t have to be the big — I’ve said this before 100 times you don’t have to be the big handsome guy who comes in and bowls everybody over with his charisma and stuff.

You can be the schlepy little mutt, and often that’s the guy who’s the best salesman. Dave Thomas of Wendy’s was the greatest example. I wrote about that in my last newsletter. He was so boring and so dull and so doughy and so nothing that the ad agency hated him because they couldn’t win any awards when they had him.

Michel: Right

John: Every time they took him out, sales would plummet. Now they had to put him back in. Now they’re putting him in posthumously because he’s dead.

Michel: Right.

John: I mean, they need the guy’s mojo, so you don’t have to be something that you’re uncomfortable with. Guess what? When you share a passion with an audience, what you’re comfortable with is what they’re comfortable with.

Michel: Very often when I write copy, I have a questionnaire, but that always is the — like you were mentioning about the one reason and then there’s the real reason. And I always get all that stuff that’s really not what I want.

So what I do is I — using the power of technology — you were talking about technology earlier, is I would three-way the call with a transcription service and I just — you know — I just ask probably a few questions to let them talk a little bit about their copy — about their product, but they’ll always say a few things about oh yeah, we’ve been in business since 1985 — whatever, blah, blah blah, but then they get to tell me some little stories, you know, oh yeah, that’s interesting, tell me more about that. And then they just go off into this big passionate blob, you know, and I let them spill all their guts -

John: Right

Michel: And then I record that, and I get this transcribed, and half of my copy is written right there.

John: Yeah. That’s absolutely true, because you tapped into the passionate sweet thought — you tapped into that conversation already going on in their heads.

Michel: Exactly. Well, this is something that ties into the next point I wanted to bring up. and it’s a point that we’ve covered in a previous call, but it’s something that I keep getting all the time anyway, and I thought that you would be the perfect person to ask is this issue of writer’s block.

John: Oh yeah.

Michel: What do you think would be some of the tools and tactics that people can use in order to either avoid or remove writer’s block?

John: Yeah, I’m sorry, my mind just went blank while you were talking to me -

Michel: You have speaker’s block.

John: Yeah, I have speaker’s block. You know, so many people that I work with who want to be writers, here is the most common problem, and this is more common in like the novel side — people trying to write literature than it is, well, it’s probably the same. Most people think they want to be a writer, but the truth is they don’t want to be a writer. They want to have already written something and be enjoying the rewards of their labor.

When you become a writer, you really have to learn to either love or hate, but at least feel strongly about the whole process. And this is where operation money suck comes in because sometimes people sit down and they go, you know it’s like they’re staring down the blank screen, you used to be staring down the blank page, but now everybody’s working on computers, so you’re staring at a blank screen essentially.

You know, you got that square there — it’s on the Microsoft window and how do you write the first word? How do you get the stuff down? Um, as Howard mentioned in the last call, there are tricks like just sitting down and writing down the bullets of everything, and the bullets mean, basically you say, you know let’s just do a future benefit thing, and what that does is that gets you writing, that gets you started. What’s easy to do or should be easy to do is the feature benefit thing. Just write it down.

Now, we should all know what the feature benefit is. I’ll explain it in a minute, but basically, if you don’t know it, then you don’t have enough research to write anyway, so you shouldn’t be sitting down staring at the blank screen.

You should be on the horn talking to somebody or you should be reading something or doing something, you know hitting the streets, to find out what the features and benefits are of the thing you’re trying to sell.

A feature is the physical property of the thing of, you know, how big it is, how much of it there is, what it looks like, the color, things like that. The benefit is what the feature does for the person using it. And this gets back to one of the biggest mistakes that rookies make when they try to sell. They confuse their product with their product.

Guess what? If you’re selling a five-CD, 15-DVD, 4 manual, you know, personal teaching course or something like that, that ain’t your product. That is merely the vehicle with which you have decided to deliver the wonderful stuff that you have, the information that you have. Your product is what all of those things do for the person.

So your product really is what you are delivering, and in a lot of cases, it’s a better life, money, it’s respect, it’s better position in your market — whatever. But what you offer is the benefit to the person, not the physical aspects of it.

So by sitting down, staring at the blank screen, you should be able to sit down and say let’s map this sucker out. What are the physical parameters of the thing I’m trying to sell. That would be the features. Then you list all of those. Hopefully, you have a lot of them.

Michel: Maybe you have six -

John: Maybe you have a dozen, maybe you have 500. It doesn’t matter. Just exhaustively write all of those down. Well, it goes really fast, it looks really cool. It’s, you know, it comes in six different colors, it comes in eight different shapes, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Um, you get it in CD or cassette.

Then go back to each of those and assign each of those a benefit. This is the simplest thing to do and this will start to kick in your inner salesman who for most of us is fast asleep and has been asleep your entire life.

You know what’s interesting about salesmanship, Michel, is that most people sit down and try to be the salesman in their business, and that’s where you are if you’re doing the writing — you’re the top salesman. They try to do it, and they don’t even have the chops to be able to convince a friend to go see a movie that the friend would enjoy.

Michel: Exactly -

John: You know, what’s the first thing most people do when they — if I tell people, go sell, go see a movie, now go sell somebody on seeing that movie. Now what’s the first thing they try to do? Hey, you really got to go see this movie, you will really like it, blah, blah, blah and they do this. What does that do — almost all the time, that sets up resistance to the person hearing it.

They think, yeah, well, I’ll make up my own mind about this. Then they wind up not seeing it, you know, they wind up not doing it. If they hear it from a third party or something, it’s their own discovery.

This gets back to the fact of bringing in third party endorsements, you know with testimonials and things. You know, if you can’t do basic salesmanship in your life, you’re not going to do it to a stranger when you’re asking them for money.

If you can’t get, you know, somebody who loves you to do a simple task for you, you’re not going to get a stranger to pull out 100 bucks and send it over for something he can’t see, feel, hold, or taste.

So, by getting the features down of the thing and getting to the benefits, what you’re doing is mapping out the entire psychological profile of the product which is, you know, and especially the benefits. That’s going to be the most important part. What does the thing do for the person using it?

And that means you gotta get into the mind of the user, you got to be the user yourself, you got to understand all of the ways that people get benefit out of this thing. And really, so when you sit down to write, maybe you’re still staring at the blank screen, so what you do is, you know, I work off of notes, anyway, I like these little 5×7 notepads.

I’ve got stacks of them all over the office because they contain about one thought. Enough writing for one thought. And I like to get all of those thoughts down.

Think about what the USP is or what is the unique sales position. And then, you know, write down who is the competition? What are they doing? What are they offering? What are their benefits? You know how you find that out? Hey, you go to the website or you get on their list, or you go look at their ads and you find out what they’re doing and then you write down all of that stuff, and then you get that and you say where’s the niche in here, and all of this — it sounds like work, but it should be fun because if you’re doing it for your own business, guess what you’re doing?

You’re doing operation money suck. You’re building the foundation for wealth beyond your wildest dreams. If you’re doing it for a client, then you should also be doing it, you should also be focused on the wealth that’s going to come in because when you get to be a good writer, you should be tied into a piece of the action anyway.

Michel: John, this is something that I learned from you that I usually say to my clients is this thing that you talked about, I heard you say this at the seminar one time is a really good way to dig deeper into benefits is to always, when you mention a benefit or what you think a benefit is, is you end up asking this one question at the end is what this means to you Mr. Prospect is this?

John: Right.

Michel: And, this is the way I explain it and you tell me, John, if I got this right, what I usually tell my clients is, sometimes when people say what a benefit is, I usually tell them it’s not a benefit, it’s an advantage. There’s the difference between features, advantages and benefits.

What I mean is this: a feature is what a product has, an advantage is what it does, but a benefit, a real true benefit is what that feature means to the prospect, and here’s a great example. I’ll tell you a story. This lady comes up to me and she had a website selling this cream, facial cream and she called it like, microdermabrasion which is a cream that helps to reduce wrinkles.

John: Right

Michel: She had on her website these features. She had, it reduces wrinkles, it comes in an easy to use home care kit, it’s pH balanced and all that stuff, and I told her those are just features.

Then I said, take a 3×5 card, create three columns, put your features under one column, now in the second column, I want you to tell me what you think are benefits and she wrote down like because it reduces wrinkles, it makes you look younger and because it comes in a home care kit, it’s easy to use at home, and the third one is it’s pH balanced, so it’s gentle on your skin, so I said okay, those really are advantages, and I used your technique about so what this means to you.

And I said in the third column, what’s the ultimate end result, the ultimate benefit that people can pull from it?

Okay, well, she says well, if it makes you look younger, then it means you’ll be more attractive, you’ll get that promotion at work, you’ll feel more confident, nobody will guess your age, you’ll fall in love all over again or you’ll be able to attract that person that you’ve been eyeing on.

The second one was that since it’s easy to use at home, you don’t have to be embarrassed by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, you know, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the comfort and privacy of your own home, and the third one was it’s gentle on your skin. She said well, there are no risks, no pain, no healing periods like those harsh chemical peels like people usually get, or surgery. I said, aha! Those are benefits. Am I on the right track?

John: Absolutely. Um, what was I going to say? I was thinking about the facelift in a jar thing. The whole thing, often what you will find when they start talking about benefits is, and likely you broke it down, because a lot of people that read a book on copywriting come away with weak benefits and you call them advantages, and I like that.

It should be set apart like that because the real benefits dig really deep. They touch on the emotional and passionate sweet spot of the person using it.

Michel: Yeah, the benefit within the benefit.

John: Pardon me?

Michel: What you teach, the benefit within the benefit.

John: Right. And so when you’re thinking about that, you’ll often be astonished at some of the benefits that come about. Like you mentioned, not having to go into a doctor’s office.

Now I don’t know, but from my experience, I would bet that that’s huge. But I would want to find out. I wouldn’t guess because I don’t use that kind of product, I don’t need to, you know, I think it’s mostly a female, or a product that women use.

So if I’m not sure about that, I will double check, and I’ll try to find out. If you have somebody that understands it like this woman — it sounds like this woman did. She probably also got into it because she was using the product or needed the product or was frustrated because this product didn’t exist so she created one.

When you start doing that, often, she will be astonished too at what some of the benefits that she comes up with like that thing about you won’t have to go into the doctor’s office, so people will be unable to guess your age. I know that when people get older, one of the things that they really get happy about is when somebody seriously underestimates how old they are.

Michel: Right

John: It makes them beam. So that’s something. You know, one of the big, I talk like 30 motivations too. Never underestimate — now I was going to talk about this — the whole jungle thing. You know, one of the problems that people have when they write is they have an unrealistic idea of who their audience is.

Michel: Um hm

John: People — it’s okay when you become a true salesman, your life is going to be different forever. You are never going to be able to look at anybody else the same because you’re going to have to get into the psychology of people.

When you do, when you understand what the basic things that move people are, you’re going to find out that most people get motivated by greed, by lust, by the desire to have something to lord over somebody, one of the greatest advantages I’ve ever found that I try to work in a lot is your neighbors and your buddies are going to hate you…

John Carlton Call Part 2 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

And, and this is so important because if you want to learn how to write killer copy that mesmerizes your audience and almost rips the money out of their wallets and, and make them feel good about doing it too, you’re in for a real treat. Because the person that’s going to be on tonight is a person that can actually teach you how to do that.

The person I’m going to introduce you to very shortly is a person who I followed for a while and somebody who’s taught me more about the single greatest deal you’ll ever learn about business, about copywritingand I mean it’s not about copywritingby the way but about business, copywriting and marketing in general. You see before I introduce you to John Carlton let me tell you a little bit about myself.

You may or may not know me but my name is Michael Fortin and, and people know me from my web site. For example at Thecopydoctor.com. I’ve been a copywriter for over 15 years and I’ve written a hard hitting sales copy for many of the world’s top direct marketers and Internet gurus like Jay Abraham, Michael Campbell, Yanik Silver, John Reese, Steven Pierce, etc. When I started out I was in sales. I sold everything.

I sold vacuums, I sold insurance, you name it. But of course I was really lousy and it and I even went bankrupt when I was starting out because I just didn’t make any commissions. And, and when I finally got it not only did I become a top flight salesperson but I later dove into copywriting and, and eventually was the person who was instrumental in selling over $35 million worth of products and services. And, and I say this because it’s really important.

You see tonight’s guest is a master copywriter. But you know you may or may not know John Carlton. You’ve probably heard of Gary Halbert and I talking about John last call. But John is, is still pretty unknown to a lot of people because he’s been like the secret weapon working under the radar for many, many years and, and the person which top direct marketing agencies have slipped through the backdoor so to speak to spice up their dull, unproductive ads and sales letters into profit pulling mega masterpieces that are still being mailed out to this day.

John Carlton now commands fees as high as $15,000.00 plus royalties for his copy and, and his clients pay him more than cheerfully because they know that his copy kicks butt. Of all the copywriters out there that I keep learning from there’s only one person who teaches more about this single greatest skill you will ever learn and need to learn to make it in copywritinglet alone direct marketing.

And what’s this single greater skill that I’m talking about?

It’s selling. Salesmanship. Get-them-hooked, close-the-deal and get-their-money selling. Because copywriting is really a printed form of face-to-face, toe-to-toe, belly-to-belly selling and this is what we’re going to be talking a lot about tonight.

If you want to learn about copywriting you go to learn about selling. So get ready because tonight’s call, this person that we’re going to be, if you’re listening tonight to tonight’s call is going to teach them on other things. How to throw icy cold water into the face of your inner salesperson so you can snap that person out of their slumber and get down to writing killer copy that grabs your readers by the eyeballs until they buy your product or service. And that person is none other than my guest tonight, Mr. John Carlton. Welcome John.

John: Hey, how you doing Michel?

Michel: I’m doing, I’m well. Thank you so much. You want to do a little bit of an intro?

John: That was a nice intro. I can’t wait to hear what I have to say. I got to live up to that. By the way Michel, grab your reader by the eyeballs, I, I’ve never used that. I think I’ll steal that line. Hey you know I, I want to start off with something that just occurred to me.

Right when I was waiting around for the call and it’s about something that’s been coming up a lot recently when I’ve been speaking at seminars, when I’ve been talking with people, and it’s about writing for the web. And I think you know that a lot of people you know we kind of roll our eyes but it’s, it’s a serious thing for people who are just getting into this.

They ask about writing for the web. They ask if you should write differently for the web and they, and they get caught up in the technology of the web.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: And I just wanted to address that right off the bat so we’re kind of clear on, I think what has become a basic obstacle to a lot of people getting into copywriting and salesmanship and that is a lot of us old caveman marketers like Halbert, me and, and you know Jay Abraham and other guys, we kind of trash the web a little bit. We talk down technology. Now I want to tell you why we do that.

Even though you know we use this cutting edge ourselves you know. I, I did blast email before this call, I’ve been on numerous teleconferences. I’ve even got a geek sprucing up my own web site. But the truth is you know I’m making a killing online. I’m using a lot of the cutting edge stuff. But the reason that we tend to talk down the technology a little bit, the technology of the web and the Internet is because, let me, let me tell you a brief story.

About 15 years ago during one of the first seminars that I produced with Gary Halbert, we had a guy raise his hand and he had a very important question. And he says I just bought the most tricked out computer that is made. I think he even, it even had a mainframe he said. And he told us about all the, all the whizzing stuff he had on this, all the bells and whistles he had on this, on this computer. And then he paused. He says so I had the computer. Now will you guys tell me how to make money with it.

And you know we just, we kind of rolled our eyes and we went you know it’s been a standing joke with us for a long time.

Because the computer isn’t going to make you any money at all. The computer is merely another medium of which to get your sales message out. I, I think about that guy a lot when I hear people talking about the web being so new and a lot of things happening because I was all, I’ve been on the cutting edge so to speak of a lot of different technologies. That’s just a factor of me being really, really old now.

I wrote one of the first infomercials back when we would literally go into the studio using scrap time at a local studio shoot and hours with a film for an hour infomercial, slap it up on time which we got for free from the cable channel because the cable channel had no idea what that late night time was worth. And if it worked we’d run it again and we’d know it worked right away because the phones would ring.

And if it didn’t work we’d slap up the next one we would’ve made that afternoon. In three hours we could do an entire hour long infomercial. It was just, it was wild and wily and there was no, there was no, reason not to be kind of sloppy about it.

Then things started to change. People just, to be able to do an infomercial now you have to be ready to spend six, excuse me $100,000.00 or more just to get your foot in the door to make a, an infomercial. And you’re going to spend a lot more than that on buying the time to be able to run it. And this is before you even know if you have something that works a lot.

So I, I just want to make clear that people understand that the web is going to change on you. So thinking that the bells and whistles and the tricks and stuff that, that are part of the web and part of the structure of the technology, this is all going to change. And it’s going to change on you sometime soon. They’re already talking about charging for email.

I have an article here from the Washington Times says the outgoing CIA director said that we need security measures to guard against attacks on the United States through the Internet. He calls it our potential Achilles’ heel and whenever the Feds start talking about protecting you know a resource like the web then you know they’re going to screw it up horribly.

So, I, I just want to you know it’s, and you know it’s, you and I were talking earlier Michael about new music. It’s like, it’s like the technology of music you know that we can go, in our homes now on our computers we have better technologies than the guys who were using even ten years ago to make the hits that dominated the radio. Yet just because we have that technology to be able to sound as good as the hits were ten years go doesn’t mean we’re going to have a hit because the technology has changed, everything has changed. So what you got is a really good sounding demo you know.

So what, what this all comes down to, what this longwinded kind of intro comes down to is that kind of plays off of what, what your introduction was which is all of this comes back to the caveman principles of pure salesmanship. It hasn’t changed since the first caveman traded a cave with a view for his cave and an extra slab of mastoid on it.

He had to sell the guy on doing that, he had to be persuasive, he had to give reasons why. All of this stuff happened at the dawn of civilization. And the stuff that works is the stuff that’s going to work no matter where you are, whether you’re on the web or you’re writing a letter, whether you’re on the TV or on the phone, whether you’re face to face with somebody.

And this is probably something that, that you know you came to grips with you know in your own personal story when you said you know that the long path to getting really good at selling. And so I just wanted to lay that out there to kind of, because salesmanship is so important and sometimes when I talk about copy and then I, I wander off into salesmanship you know people get lost and they think salesmanship how important is that. Well, guess what it’s the most important thing because everything else is going to shift from under you.

Michel: It’s the oldest profession in the book, not that other job.

John: Well they had to sell too so.

Michel: Well, well John it’s really a pleasure to have you on the call because you know one of the things that you’ve taught me and the thing that I’ve been always a strong proponent of is, is you know you made a reference to grabbing people by the eyeballs and I think it’s something that, that a lot of, especially web sites and web letters as well as direct mail pieces really lack is something that’s going to hook people into reading the copy. And, and one of the things I do a lot is critiques and I critique copy and I critique web sites and 90 percent of the copy that I critique it really boils down to a really crappy headline.

John: Right.

Michel: And, and/or the lack of a hook you know. If you watch a good movie or read a good book there’s a plot. There’s something that keeps you riveted through the whole movie. If you read a good book there’s something that keeps you reading almost every page in a single sitting.

And, and I discussed this very quickly with Gary Halbert, the last call about long copy and short copy and I want to bring it back up again. But the idea is if you’re a Steven King addict and Steven King puts out an 800- page book if it hooks you in you’re going to probably read it all in one single sitting and you probably wish the book was either longer or you’ll re-read it because it’s so good.

And one thing that you’ve taught me John and the thing that I also stress to a lot of my students and my clients is the power of the hook. If you want to talk a little bit about that because that’s so powerful.

John: Yeah. I read a lot of Steven King myself and you know what the main hook of Steven King was especially when he was just getting started on those first six novels or so?

Michel: No.

John: It was the unsaid promise that buy this book and you will have the living crap scared out of you. And people just lined up in drools. And they know that’s one of the reasons still when you go to the airport reading racks, I mean half of that is you know Steven King, the other half of that is Daniel Steele you know and then Grisham and all those other guys.

But it’s, it’s because of you know it’s, it’s, it is an unspoken hook that’s, that brings you in. But he’s very clear about it. Everything from the illustration on the front cover to the few words that, that he allows on his covers to kind of start the story going.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: And the hook is the single most important thing and it’s also the most misunderstood thing. I have people who have been reading my stuff and have been getting critiques from me for years who still struggle with getting the hook.

And I think, I think you know you had talked about before you know how talking about that you wanted me to talk about the actual structures of going through this process and you know this, that’s something that I think a lot of us really blow past when we try to teach people. It’s like you know you just tell somebody you need to have a hook in your story.

Well that doesn’t help them so much if they don’t understand how to get the hook. Well one of the ways that you can start learning about a great hook is to go look at a bunch of great hooks. Now one way that’s, you can do those by getting those swipe files together of ads that are proven winners and start paying attention to how those things hook.

But you know an even easier way is you can just go down to your local liquor store or drug store or even the Wal-Mart and just go to the magazine rack. And see how those magazines, the bestselling magazines in the world sell themselves and the way they do it is that they hook you and some of the best ones to do this are like Reader’s Digest, Cosmo is really good and of course our favorite, The National Enquirer.

My, the people who write the headlines and the blurbs, the little copy blurbs on the cover of these bestselling magazines are some of the highest paid writers in the world. And they are highly paid because when they write a hook on the cover of a magazine or a tabloid that, that moves those tabloids off the, you know off the shelf then they make a mint.

And if they don’t write something that works the tabloid will languish until the next one comes out. And those are some pretty hefty stakes. And you’re going to know right away whether you’re writing good stuff or bad stuff.

So the guys that have been on the job for a long time know their game. I, I, I say this a lot, people have heard me speak before you know have heard it but my favorite, National Enquirer headlines two of them. One was the headline “Boy eats own head”. And I, I love that. I have a copy of that still somewhere. It’s kind of rotting now but I loved it.

And not more than a couple of issues later in the same year, the same writer I think wrote this one, “Preacher explodes on pulpit”. What those, that one actually has a little liberation going with the P thing but what those are, those are hooks.

And the greatest hook that you can come up with and I want everybody to listen very carefully to this, is the incongruent jexta position of seemingly unrelated things or items or events.

So in other words the, the skinny guy beats the big guy up and gets the girl, the dumb guy wins out over the smart guys, the you know the weak vanquish the strong. And I’ll you know I’ll give some examples of some of the headlines I’ve used but it’s very important that you not just come out and be another voice in the wilderness.

As you’ve told people Michel you know the, the advertising world is a wilderness out there. It’s not a wilderness, it’s like a white sheet of, of storm ice coming at you. There’s so much commercialism, there’s so much advertising going on, so much marketing going on that the average American can’t get up, listen to the radio, look at the paper and drive to work without getting bombarded by advertising messages. So it becomes a white blur to them.

Michel: Right.

John: And you have to stand out. You can have the best product in the world and it aint going to do squat if you don’t get people to pay attention. You know the marketing graveyard is filled with you know really, really good products that just never caught on. So when we’re talking about the hook and we’re talking about that’s why I like those National Enquirer headlines “Boy eats own head”.

Well there’s no way that you know if you have this compels you excuse me to read to find out what the hell the guy is talking about.

“Preacher explodes on pulpit”. How did he explode? Was it a bomb, was it spontaneous combustion, what? You are, you are led in just reading a few words, you are led in to what will be a story. And, and of course just like we talked about with Stephen King, the, there was a natural glee going on as the reader is pulled in. A reader you know isn’t saying oh well here’s something I should read. He’s saying oh boy this is something I really want to read.

Michel: Right.

John: So a lot of this has to do with hooking into the person’s, your reader’s passionate sweet spot. And of course this is the basic, of course the No. 1 problem that most people have with writing good copy is that they’re writing to the wrong person.

Michel: Exactly.

John: You know you can’t sell a snowmaking machine to you know people who live in, in Alaska. I mean it’s, you have to identify your market first. And of course that’s the No. 1 thing is to find a hot passionate market. But a lot of people fall down even when they find a market. They have a product that the people they’re writing to should want or really would want if only it was explained to them clearly.

But to get to that point where you’re going to explain it to them you’ve go to get their attention. So you know it’s like, it’s like if you’re going to bowler sometimes the simplest hook you can use is hey bowlers you know how would you like to bowl your first 300 game one month from today.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: You know and, and that’s an interesting kind of bland way to put it and you’d probably get a lot of, a lot of attention that way. But you know what if you twist it around? Of course and in golf one of my more famous and most knocked off ads by the way, I now claim the title to the most ripped off writer in America.

I say that rather proudly but the headline for the first ad I wrote for the golf market was this, “Amazing secret discovered by one-legged golfer ads 50 yards to your drives, eliminates drives and slices and can slash up to 10 strokes from your game almost overnight.”

There’s no question there where the hook is coming from. The one-legged golfer is the boy eats own head type of thing. Now I didn’t make this kind of thing up. Where did this come from? Of course this is the story which again a lot of people have heard. I’ll tell it very quickly.

You do sales detection work and when you do sales detection work what you’re doing is you are, you are digging for the story that nobody’s talking about or that nobody really realizes is the story you want. Often what you’re looking, you’re looking for something past the company line.

It’s easier when you’re dealing with a client like if I, if I’m working with another client and I get to interview him, I interview the secretary, I’ll interview some of the people in the street to find out. But I want to find out about the rumors and I want to find out the stuff that they’re either afraid to talk about or don’t talk about or forget to talk about when they’re trying to sell it because they’re trying to talk about wants the product to have dignity whatever the hell that is.

Michel: Yeah what’s that?

John: Yeah more, more companies have gone belly-up you know striving for dignity than, than I think any other problem that’s presented himself. In searching for this, for the hook for this golf video I was doing I interviewed a lot of people and I finally interviewed the talent, the guy who was actually on the thing. And it wasn’t until like two hours almost into the conversation where I, I asked a question, what was your inspiration for this you know this new swing that you had. And I really wasn’t expecting much.

I was digging, I was desperate. I didn’t have anything to write about except hey golfers how would you like to hit farther and longer and whatever, you know the same old boring stuff. And he said well one day I was golfing and the group ahead of me one of the golfers was this one-legged guy and I saw him hop up there and when he took a swing I realized hey this is something two-legged golfers could, could use to hit farther because the guy hit the straightest, farthest, most gorgeous drive I’d ever seen on one leg and it was all about balance and he had the high experience you know.

And I said you know I realized this was the hook right away you know. And you know it’s like why didn’t you tell anybody before and he said oh that old story nobody wants to hear that stuff anymore. And what was, what the problem was it isn’t a problem if you’re writing copy for yourself because you have, you have to interview yourself.

You have to step back and be able to dig deep into your own psyche when you’re writing ads for your own product because you can get buried too deep into your own product. But you have to, you have to strip away the, the company line again, the you know now only that quest for dignity that quest for what you think is a serious sales position you know.

And you have to find, you have to think about how this thing got started, where the motivation came from, what was the imputes for getting your business together. And you have a lot of times your personal story is the greatest hook you’re ever going to come across. I was you know I just interviewed another guy, I don’t think he minds being mentioned, Ron LaGrande. The No. 1 you know real estate you know guru in the country.

Michel: Uh huh.

John: And he admits you know he was a broke redneck car mechanic who didn’t have a clue what was going on and he went through one simple little discovery he you know he made this realization that his sense created his empire you know.

You know he’s not only made beaucoup bucks himself but he’s helped untold actually who knows how many people he made because he has piles of testimonials, thousands and thousands and thousands of people he helped them become millionaires and change their lives. All because of just a small little thing and yet he came, he was that, that incongruent jex position. That guy with no education, with no advantage, with no money, with no nothing but a small little incendiary piece of little information that he took to the to Fort Knox.

Michel: I was browsing the web the other day and sometimes whenever people subscribe to my newsletters I get to see some of the domain names and some of them just out of interest I’ll check out. And there was this one lady, I’m not sure she’s on the call tonight, but she’s a professional speaker in the MLN network marketing business.

John: Uh huh.

Michel: And when I hit her web site it really hit me. It was something to the effect of the fact that she was some, some abused housewife who was kicked out. She was homeless, she was thousands of dollars in debt and she became a multimillionaire in less than a year, bla, bla, bla, bla.

John: Uh huh.

Michel: And that really just, just you know just grabbed me.

John: Yes, exactly.

Michel: And it’s the same thing with the one-legged thing because I, I did this before too and this is actually before I even heard about you John was, there was this guy who, who called me up and he wanted me to critique his copy. And what he did was he invented, he was like an inventor and he created these special straps that would sort of help to lessen the stress of whatever backpack you have, the weight of the straps or the weight of the backpack on your shoulders.

And the same idea as you, the same thing that happened is I interviewed the guy and he mentioned something just so casually as if it was nothing.

He says well you see I lost a leg in a car accident many years ago and I started to you know do these inventions at home too because I can’t work, I can’t do the same work I used to be doing before. And I said ah ha, one-legged man lighten hikers’ loads or something like that I decided to, to tell them on.

And that was the hook. And I think it requires a little bit of sales detection side you know. What you were mentioning before and some of the stuff that I’ve actually learned from you John is that you have to sort of put your sales detection hat and dig deep and find that passionate sweet spot.

John: That, that’s right and especially when you’re interviewing yourself you’ve got to put on and I call it the sales detection hat, you have to do detective work on yourself. You know an interesting side point, when the client I was working with saw how potent that hook was, and by the way that ad ran for I forget it was like eight to ten years.

Michel: Right.

John: Running in magazines and in direct mail and just it’s just been a monster it. And they’ve retired it since. They pull it out every year anyway and when it goes to a new line it’s just still works just as well. But by the way, now I’m getting ahead of myself, what was my point. Anyway, the ad also shocked the market it was in. The golf market was a very boring, serious market. And people turned their nose up at it.

But the people that turned their nose up at this kind of ad were the people that these guys weren’t going to sell anyway. They, it was the pros or the guys that had too much you know “dignity” to get involved in those kind of stuff. But the guys who are average golfers knew immediately this is something they wanted to get their hands on because it made sense to them, because you know most guys, you know the average golfer in America can’t break 100.

Michel: Right.

John: And yet in most golf magazines they assume that you’re almost you know pro quality. And, and the vast majority, there was an untapped market of, of people out there. Oh and I know what I was going to say. Once the client saw the power of the hook he actually went out and started finding clients who had hooks for me.

So it was, it was great. I mean we had a blind golfer. A true, true thing. There was actually a little club of blind golfers out there and they know some interesting things about striking the ball and proved wrong a lot of common, what is considered common sense about striking the ball. Hey, I’m blind you can’t keep your eye on the ball. Guess what so you know there’s, you know you can go looking for a hook.

Sometimes when you’re interviewing or you’re thinking about you know how am I going to position myself in this market. I’m in a, say you’re in a crowded market and god knows the weather’s getting more and more crowded all the time. So even if last week you had whatever niche you were in all to yourself by, by two weeks from now you’re not going to be alone anymore because people are sniffing this stuff out.

But if you’re looking at a niche you know one of the questions to ask yourself when you’re figuring out your USP which I call the unique sales position you know how you position yourself to sell within this particular market.

Think about how you can position yourself. Now in the, you know and people respond to personal stories. One of the most popular is I was dumb, broke and clueless and you know I made a discovery and that discovery led me to become rich, handsome and you know well loved. I mean you, you know you can make that claim or you know you should never lie about the stuff because it’ll show. It’ll shine like a searchlight and people will search you out.

But if you’ve got the real story to tell your passion will come through. Because one of the best things you can do is to hook into the true story of your own life or the life of the person who is behind the product or somebody that’s close to you. And, and do that because this, it’s back to the Stephen King thing about why good novels sell. They tap into that human part of us that’s, that craves human, human connection and human contact.

We hate being sold by robots. We hate being just, being thought of as just another number, just another you know clog in the machine. All of us have our own stories to tell and we respond to other people who have broken through the clutter and the noise and the distraction of modern life and, and broken out of that. And we all secretly yurn to do that.

You’re the monster that I’ve been teaching for a long time is that the one thing I don’t care what market you’re in, the one common thread through your, the people you’re trying to sell to is that they don’t get to do anything interesting, they don’t get to meet interesting people and they don’t get to go to interesting places. They are, they are living lives of quiet desperation. This is true across the board. 99.9 percent of the people are just you know at best are walking around in a daze.

Michel: Right.

John: And they’re just getting through their lives. There are small joys here and there but really those of us who have made it you know and Michael you , me, the other guys that you know have calls like this, we know there’s so much more to life. I think Betty Davis or Joan Crawford, somebody said life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.

Michel: Right.

John: And it just has to do with stepping up and you know don’t wait to be invited you know. You got to step up and do this.

Michel: Well this actually brings up another thing that’s so.

John: Yeah, let me just finish this.

Michel: Oh go ahead, go ahead.

John: The idea that your, your customer is leaving an uninteresting life of quiet desperation, that’s your opening. You come in and you be that guy, you be that one thing he reads today that wakes him up, gets him going, lights a fire under his ass and, and moves him. Because he’s going to welcome you into his life.

Right now as an ad you are an unwelcome distraction in his life. Even if it’s something he wants. Even if your ad has the right kind of hook and stuff, you are still an unwelcome presence in his life. Because now you’re forcing him to stop doing his, his semi-asleep routine and he’s got to think about this and maybe pull out his wallet and god forbid send money to a stranger for something he can’t see, hold, taste, see or feel.

Michel: Absolutely. And you mentioned, the reason why I was, I didn’t meant to cut you in.

John: No that’s okay.

Michel: But you were mentioning about motivation and, and getting people to come out of their “lives of desperation”, one of the things that you talk a lot about that I love learning from you is operation money suck.

John: Yeah.

Michel: And that’s something that you maybe you want to discuss a little bit because it’s so important to especially the copywriting but even selling in general.

John: Yeah it is. You know the, I’ll give you the short version of the story. Halbert and I, I just started working for Halbert and I was going down to his office and we were having like little one and two-hour meetings where we would discuss clients and then discuss ways we would write for them and things like this and this is how we brought money into the firm.

And that’s how you know I made my money and Gary made money I made money and I was on a percentage thing so the more he made the more I made. And I went down one day and when I sat down before we could close the door to his office the secretaries came running in and they said oh my god this is really a disaster, the computer was down, the phones had been cut off, the landlord was banging on the door for some…

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Gary: Well you just kept me riveted there, well, whenever you were telling me that. And that’s, it’s sort of what John Carlton says. If you were to sell something don’t think about selling it in a business room or something. Think about meeting your friend at a bar somewhere, just shooting the breeze, and, and, there’s a product that you have that you’re so excited about, what would you say to that person? Would you, you know, use this third person high falutin’ corporate speak or would you be personable and tell stories about it?

You know, hey, this, this is what happened to me the other day, or guess what happened to me, or whatever. And, and, this is something I think a lot of people are missing in their copy, especially uh, one of the questions I get in, in the list of questions that we’ve gotten was a lot of people say, “Well, I don’t have a story to tell. How do I come up with a story?”

Well you do have a story to tell. You haven’t done enough research. There’s a story within everything. John’s one-legged golfer ad is, you know, he, he dug for three days interviewing those people until one of them mentioned well, you know, he’s only got one leg. And John said, “What? This guy’s hitting the ball 350 straight yards down a fairway with one, and he’s only got one leg and you didn’t think that was important enough to mention?” And then the headline became “one-legged golfer,” you know.

Michel: That, that’s exactly what-

Gary: And, and if they don’t, if you don’t have a story you haven’t dug hard enough. And remember this. When Claude Hopkins was asked to do a beer commercial he couldn’t find anything that would distinguish that beer from the others as far as telling the story, but he noted all the precautions they took to make that beer clean and sterile. And he told that story.

Now, all the other beer companies did the same thing, but he’s the only one that told the story, and he put that beer on the map. There is a story in everything, but you’ve gotta dig for it. And you know one thing, what do most copy writers do wrong? They don’t work.

Michel: Yeah, exactly.

Gary: They don’t work. You know, they’re looking for an easy way, a magic pill, a freebie. You know, blah blah blah. You’ve gotta put your ass into this. You’ve gotta live it. You’ve gotta become obsessed by it. But it’s worth it.

Michel: Well this is a, a question I was also asked was how do you get in the minds of prospects?

Gary: Well, I, I remember reading that question. And, and a related question was how important do you think it is to interview a prospect.

Michel: Yes, yes.

Gary: Now the person that asked that question should also be beaten. I wish there were ways that we had, you know, I think there are stupid questions. Everybody says no question is stupid, and you know, if you don’t know the answer. I disagree. I think that’s a stupid question. But I’m gonna give an answer anyway.

You, you get in the mind of your prospect by hanging out with him, by interviewing them, by reading about them, by asking questions about them, etc. etc. etc. You get it by work, and you don’t get it by guessing what they’re like. And a big mistake everybody makes is they presume that everybody else thinks the way they do about things. And they don’t. They don’t. They think very, very differently about things. You know?

I had an experience yesterday, it was kinda sobering. Uh, sometimes it’s difficult to call my girlfriend in Costa Rica and for her to call me, cause the phone service is not perfect. So I have a voice mail that there’s no phone to the voice mail, but I leave messages for her and she leaves messages for me back when we can’t get to each other.

And I mistakenly, God, I, Jesus, I forgot that Sunday was her birthday. God forgive me. And uh, she had told me, and, and this is another example of my stupidity, that her birthday was gonna be Sunday, but she didn’t care about birthdays, you know.

Well, Sunday she calls me up. She calls the voice mail and she says, “You know, today is my birthday, and everybody’s been calling me to say happy birthday, and all my family, and all my friends, but the call I wanted was from my corazon and I call here and there’s no message.” Because I’d changed the message to, “Hi this is Gary,” you know, “If you’ll leave your name and number I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” And she said, she just called and said, “My name is Sirian Piedra. My number’s 833-0754. Please call me when you can.” On her birthday.

Well, that’s a little sign that I’d screwed up. So the next, but I hadn’t changed the message. Even though I’d went out and bought her some nice birthday things and everything, and she called up, and see I thought it’d be efficient if I could use that voice mail when people wanna call me. ‘Cause other than email there’s no way to get to me, you know, unless you just magically call me and I happen to be home, because I get an average of 600 calls a week. I can’t take them.

But I thought, you know, it’d be efficient if somebody wanted to know my number I’d give them that number, you know, for a couple of days.

Well, it was efficient. But you know what? I can get another voice mail for seven bucks a month, and you know what? My girlfriend thinks that’s her voice mail. That’s hers. It doesn’t matter that I spent hundreds of dollars buying her a gift. It doesn’t matter that I had me and my friend Hank sing Happy Birthday after she bitched about it. That was her email. That was her voice mail, you get it? That was hers.

Michel: Um hm.

Gary: And here I was, using it as a convenient method for other people to leave me messages. So just because I’ve gotten older doesn’t mean I’ve gotten smarter.

Michel: Great Gary, thank you. That was, that was awesome. I think one of the things that a lot of people also tend to, um, to, to forget when, especially when they’re writing copy, is uh, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s always a good hook lying somewhere. John Carlton is a big preacher of finding the hook, the one thing…

Gary: He’s as good as they get at finding them, man.

Michel: And, and the thing that I also tend to do a lot is to not only interview the client or interview the prospect, but at the same time is to get to use the product as much as I possibly can. And a lot of people tend to say, “Well, I, I don’t think my client’s gonna do this or my client’s gonna do that.”

Kennedy says it best, he says that people have this tendency, this error to think that their, that they are their own client, when they’re not. You’re never your own client.

Gary: Well first of all, um, only about half the time do I do a job that people hire me to do. Instead I do the job they need done. They don’t know what job it is they need done. That’s why I haven’t taken very many questions, cause most of the people listening to me don’t know the right questions to ask. That’s no sin. Nobody does, in the beginning, you know, of anything.

Michel: Well, you know, it’s a great thing, and I want to stop you, Gary, for a sec, because one of the questions I got was stupid for me, was um, um, “I have a product. How do I sell it?” And I, I almost feel like sending them your newsletter issue about a starving crowd.

Gary: Well you’re free to send it to them, but um, you know, um, people think if you’re a good enough copywriter you can sell anything to anybody. Like, and I really cannot sell refrigerators to Eskimos. I can con them, I can lie to them and make them think they’re space heaters, but the market is the very most important thing. And another piece of advice, uh, I’m going to give, and I’m gonna tell you a couple of things that are really important to get in before this call is over. Every one of you should have the SRDS mailing list book.

Michel: Um hm.

Gary: You can get it online, you can get it at the library. It’s non-circulating. And it tells you about every mailing list available in the United States, tells you how big the list is, how fresh the list is, and what the unit of sale was.

Now there’s a big difference between this list and Google adwords or anything like that, cause this isn’t a list of what people like or are interested in, it’s what they paid for. It’s what they will pay for. And even if you’re on the net this is more valuable than any other resource. Actually you can get this on the net. There’s nothing as valuable as that.

And I’m going to tell all of you how to tell if you are worthy of the title “copy writer.” Every one of you. If you can’t pass this test you should never take a dollar from anybody else for writing copy from them.

ou should go through the SRDS mailing list book and pick out what you think is the hottest list you can find. The, the list of the hungriest fish out there, and you should conceptualize an information product for that list. And then you should make a mailing to that list to sell that information product.

And let me tell you a really cheap way to get an information product. And you know, this is, one thing I learned from Jay Abraham. He’s the best guy in the world to brainstorm with. And Jay Abraham taught me how to work with him. I made three quarters of a million dollars brainstorming with Jay for 30 minutes. Me and John Carlton, with a copy, I went out and mailed 800 letters and made three quarters of a million dollars.

Michel: Wow. Wow.

Gary: The guy’s brilliant. But, but Eric taught me how to work with him. But if you’re gonna ever work with Jay you get him in a hotel room. You make everybody turn off all the cell phones. By the way, Ron LeGrand says you can guess the person’s amount of money in their bank account by how many times their cell phone goes off when you’re talking to them. It should never go off. It’s an insult.

And, but anyway, you put Jay in the hotel room. You have two big strong guys in a limo go get him. You bring him to the hotel room, you lock the door, you take the phone off the hook, you stop all calls, and you interview him, and you have a tape recorder on. And the first time Jay says, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ve got a letter that explains that back at the office, and I’ll mail it to you soon as I get back.”

You have the big guys hit him in the mouth a few times. Because what you don’t get from Jay in that room you’re not gonna get from him. So I don’t know what that related to, I was, I was talking about, I was babbling-

Michel: No, no, that’s about brainstorming, which is good.

Gary: Oh yeah.

Michel: About coming up with a good hook or a good story or, or, you know, when people have a hard time you can, coming back to the issue of writer’s block, because some people say, “Well, I don’t have either a USP,” or “I don’t have a hook,” or “I’m writing copy for somebody else, what do I do to find that one hook?” And, and I think brainstorming is a good point, and-

Gary: Well see, what, what a lot of you people on this call are doing is you’re censoring yourself, figuring the client’s not gonna like this. His wife’s not gonna like this. It’s, this is not gonna get by the regulatory agencies.

You have a built-in censor. You’ve gotta kill that built-in censor. Just write full out, write from the beginning. And the way you get the answers to this thing is you get his product, you get his testimonial, you get all his previous advertisements, all his previous controls, you interview him, you interview his men, you interview the customers, etc. etc. etc. You know, writing is like the tip of an iceberg. I did a, I did a piece for uh, Donna Mills, who was the star of Knots Landing.

Michel: Um hm.

Gary: And she was selling, uh, uh, beauty products for the eyes. And I was out in Santa Monica, California doing this, you know, and I just interviewed her. She was a really sweet lady. And uh, somebody said, “Man, you’re really good.” They said, “You’re fast, too.” They said, “How long did it take you to write that ad?” And I said, “Thirty-three years and 45 minutes.”

Michel: Perfect. Well said.

Gary: And that was it. You know, and what you’ve gotta do is, John had something like, I would like to play the guitar like John Carlton can. And he, he, he knows every song in the world. He can make the guitar talk.

And I tell him I want to do that, and what’s the secret? And he says, “When there, when a new guy tells an old hand to play the guitar, he’s taken up the guitar, they ask him two questions. And the first question is a trick question. How many lessons do you take a week? And it doesn’t matter what the answer is.

And then it says how many hours do you practice a day?” And John says, and it’s true, this is the answer to a lot of things. Ten thousand hours. And you know, I sat and figured out, I, I wrote winners before I became Gary Halbert. I first found my voice in the mid 1970s, and I have been writing since 1968. And it came out to about 10,000 hours. You’d better put your 10,000 hours in, cause you aint gonna do it otherwise.

If you want to write copy like Bencivenga, Halbert, Carlton, Scott Hanes, you know, a few other people, about 10,000 hours from now if you put it in you’ll have it. And you need to start tomorrow.

What you need to do is start with my letters or somebody’s letters, and you need to write them out, in your own handwriting, and you should do that every working day for the rest of your life, or at least until you’ve got 10,000 hours. See, I don’t use templates anymore cause they’re all embedded in my wiring. But you, you, most of you are not there yet. You’ve gotta get that embedded in your wiring.

Michel: I think it’s a good point to also say that you’ve gotta start right away. One of the things I’ve learned that, well, I wouldn’t say I’ve learned it but something that really hit me in the back with a hammer about it is something John Reese taught me when I was writing copyfor him, and actually when I saw him speak at a seminar was, you know, if you want to write, if you want to learn how to write copy write anything and put it up on the internet, and realize that that is going to be the worst it’s ever going to be. Now your job is to improve the sucker.

Gary: John’s a genius. He-

Michel: Absolutely.

Gary: He’s exactly right. He’s a genius. He’s got it exactly right.

Michel: Because all the people ask me, “How do you become a great copy writerlike you, Michel?” And I would answer, not necessarily the same way you do, you just did, Gary, but I would say, “I’m not a really good copy writer. I’m a fanatical tester, and I’ve written copy for fanatical testers,” and I’ve been lucky enough and privileged enough to have written copy. I’ve written copy that were winners.

But when I write copy for testers I know what works and I know what doesn’t, and I just keep on improving it. And John Reese really hit me in the back of the head with that hammer because a lot of times, sometimes in that, it comes back to what you’re saying about censoring.

Sometimes I would write a sales letter and I would go back and, and just, you know, pull my hair out, because I’m trying to figure out is there a better way of saying this? Who cares. Put it up. Test the sucker and improve on it. It’s the worst it’s ever going to be.

Gary: Well I’ll tell you what, Michel. You may have made the most important point of the evening. My friend Joaquin DePosada puts it another way pretty succinctly. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. And you know, I used to never want to do anything unless I was already good at it. Well you’re never already good at anything, you know, your first time out the box.

Michel: Right.

Gary: You know, there was a pro playing in a Pro Am tournament, and the amateur said, “I’m embarrassed to play with you,” and he said, “Why?” He says, “Cause your fair, you know, your T-shots are straight down the middle,” he says, “Your approach shots from, you know, fairway shots are great, you’re great around the green, you’re a great putter.” And the pro said to him, “Well don’t you think it would be a little strange after 20 years if I didn’t play like this?” And the amateur was comparing himself to somebody who had done the 10,000 hours.

Michel: Right.

Gary: And, and, and I wanna make what I think is a point of supreme importance. The, the un, the acceleration of the acceleration is accelerating. That’s my way of saying it. There is no way that anybody on this call knows what they’re going to be doing 24 hours from now, five years from now, five months from now, five hours from now. You can have a Christopher Reeves moment at any time. You’d better do what you’re gonna do right now.

In fact me and Mongo have come up to some, Mongo’s Scott Hanes, we believe it so strongly that if exercise is your priority, or writing copy, you know when you do it? You do it immediately when your feet hit the floor, before you even make up your bed. Because the chances are anything you don’t do immediately upon getting out of bed, life is going to crowd that in on you and you’re not gonna do it.

Well, I’ll put off exercising til just after lunch. Well, you know, I’ll put it off til dinner. You know, blah blah blah. The only thing that for sure gets done is what you do immediately upon getting out of bed. And another thing I will tell you, and it’s about time to conclude this, I think -

Michel: Yes.

Gary: But um, I’m gonna tell you a true story, and not only do you not know where you’re going to be, you don’t know what strange thing is going to happen to you. And I’m gonna tell you about a strange thing that happened to me, and I think it gave me a big advantage over everybody else at a very early age.

I was only 20. And I’ve told this story in seminars, and I once told it, and there was an 85-year-old school teacher in the front row from Alaska, and I thought she might be embarrassed that I was telling this story, but she laughed so hard I started worrying she was gonna have a heart attack right there.

And I’m gonna tell you a story, and, and I want you to know, this could’ve happened to you. That this really happened to me when I was 20 years old.

I was a military policeman. I was in Germany, and um, I was on patrol duty with another MP. I still remember it, he’s a big guy named Deroy. We got called to the station and we had to strip off our uniforms and stand in a line up, uh, and there was a German civilian there, and he, you know, was trying to pick one of us out of a lineup. When this lineup was over they told everybody to go but me. The German civilian had picked me out of the lineup.

And let me tell you what happened before that. That I was a great jokester, and when we stood role call before we went on duty, just like you see in the police shows, you know, they tell you the criminals to watch out for, this guy raped so and so, this guy broke into this convenience store, etc. etc., well there was a guy who uh, broke into a farm, a guy’s barn.

A farmer’s barn. And he sodomized the farmer’s cow. The farmer came out and caught him, and he hit the farmer, knocked him down, knocked over the bucket, which knocked over a candle, which started a fire, and then he ran off the property.

Now when you’re in the military all of your clothing, you have your serial number in there. And I had an overseas cap that was too small for me so I had thrown it away. And the guy who did this was actually wearing my overseas cap, and it fell off, and it was left at the scene. So they already had a predilection to think it was me.

Now, my life went in the blink of an eye from being an upstanding do-right MP to a guy who is under arrest for sodomizing a cow. And I want to tell you how that changed my life.

They only allowed me to do two things. I could stand role call and I could go to the mess hall to eat. And when I would go to role call, you know, they would say, “Smith,” “Here Sergeant.” “Downs.” “Here Sergeant.” “Baker.” “Here Sergeant.” They’d say “Halbert,” and 600 guys’d go, “Mooooo,” like that.

And you know, I couldn’t even imagine that I was in such a situation. I was engaged to a German girl that I later married. Her parents hated me. Can you see me, and this is true, sitting there trying to explain to them why they have to come down to the military police station and explain where I was on a certain night, because I was under arrest for having sex with a farm animal.

I really, that really happened to me. And, and I had to take a lie detector test. I won’t even go into that, but I think you will admit that is a bizarre thing. Now they caught the guy who did it, he was a Puerto Rican who stole my hat. It’s a good thing I didn’t catch him because I would’ve killed him, you know? I mean, but that’s how bizarre life can turn on a dime. And I learned that at 20 years old.

And I’ve also learned don’t, you know, the future, if you want to make God laugh tell him about your plans. Tell God about your plans if you want to make him laugh. And the point is, you want to be a great copywriter, you want to be a great marketer, and you want to achieve all these things, do it right now. Tomorrow might, tomorrow is promised to no man. And if all of you people enjoy this two hours of ranting of a madman and you want to do it again, we’ll do it again.

Michel: Thanks Gary.

Gary: As long as somebody sends me their snail mail address.

Michel: Well uh -

Gary: If anybody’s interested we’ll do this again. If you want to do it in a week or two I’m up for it. Because maybe I’ll even answer questions next time.

Michel: Alright, I have, just because I mentioned my email for, for that little call, I’ve gotten over 200 emails right now waiting for me. Um, I want to thank you, Gary. My God, this has been the most, the best two hours I’ve ever spent.

And of course, any time with you is, is just fabulous, but, and I know that you don’t like to be put on a pedestal, but, but I do look up to you a lot, and I think that this has just been a phenomenal two hours. I just want to -

Gary: I would ask you one favor.

Michel: Sure.

Gary: Don’t ever describe me to anyone as being sane.

Michel: I, I, I told a lot of people that listener discretion is advised whenever I emailed them. But I want to thank, thank just one person before we end this call, and it’s Peter Stone.

Gary: For sure.

Michel: Peter is a person that brought us together. Peter’s also a phenomenal copywriter. He’s done some, some work for me, he’s my editor, he’s my fresh pair of eyes sometimes when I’m too wrapped up and I’m doing, I’m writing copy sometimes five, ten, even 15 sales letters in one month, I just, I can’t handle the, the workload.

So sometimes he’s there to look at my copy and tell me what’s wrong and what’s not. And I look at it and I say, “My God, this man is brilliant.” Peterstonecopy.com is his email, uh, his web site address. And I want to thank Peter. And Gary, you’ve been, you’re the man. And I, want to thank you so much for -

Gary: I’d be the last to deny it.

Michel: Oh I’m sure you are. And I, and I-

Gary: And if anybody wants to they can email me at nosexgary@aol.com and say things like “I really enjoyed your call.” Now if you have negative comments I don’t want to hear them. You know, I just want positive comments. I don’t want the truth necessarily. You can email me and lie to me.

Michel: Great.

Gary: You know, I’d rather have a, a, a lie that made me feel good than a truth that made me feel bad, you know? I’ve got a, enough to, but I really do try and make my lessons important. I’m very passionate about teaching people, and, cause there’s so much garbage out there. You know, there are people teaching marketing that, they’ve never learned it. They have no right to be teaching it, you know?

Michel: Absolutely.

Gary: And, and I know what it’s like to be broke, and I’ve literally, I’ve been in a running house with no water and utilities because I spent the money on postage for orders that didn’t materialize.

Michel: Well, me and John Reese were chatting one day about that because there was a time when we were both, uh, I was bankrupt, and I was literally eating, you know those little packages of, of Ramen noodles?

Gary: Yeah.

Michel: For 25 cents or a quarter. I lived on that for six months. And, and, and exactly what you just said, Gary. Is that nobody really knows how to market if they don’t, if they haven’t gone through the school of hard knocks. So-

Gary: But somebody find me that cell phone.

Michel: Great.

Gary: Oh wait. Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait, I’ve got one more thing.

Michel: Go ahead.

Gary: It’s really kind of important. Uh, this will kind of interest, uh, some of you. Uh, I have a friend, he’s a paraplegic named Dave Kekich, and he’s a multimillionaire, and Dave Kekich, uh, is working with another guy, and they have a piece of software that is really pretty, uh, I’m looking to uh, I think this is it. I’ll tell you what this software does. And I’m not a geek, so the importance of it can be gauged by the other geeks here.

Um, it’s called Intellimine, and uh, Intellimine LLC owns exclusive commercial licenses to technology which searches the Internet globally in 61 languages for individuals with a high level of interest in any subject, product or service. This technology was developed under federal government contracts with the objective of searching the web for terrorist-related chatter.

It has been successfully deployed for several U.S. government agencies for a growing number of commercial enterprises who are finding new prospects and opening new businesses at near zero up-front marketing expense.

The Intellimine data mining technology is designed to bring any selected client in nearly any industry to market dominance. Our test indicates the ability to identify millions of customers worldwide who we can then contact with specific and highly motivational emails and all at virtually no cost.

Moreover, the software is intelligent. It continues to refine its searches and continually add email addresses as it gets smarter about the subject it is seeking. We believe this technology can be developed to the point where it reverses the typical web search.

Today a searcher goes to Google, Yahoo or Ask Jeeves to find information. A typical search uncovers hundreds or even thousands of hits, which must then in turn be researched to uncover information the searcher is seeking.

Our knowledge platforms, on the other hand, are well-organized resources eliminating the need for searching in the current manner and creating exceptional loyalty among our users, who then can be offered products and services in which we have ownership or shared revenue interest. In other words, the technology promises to provide us with a continuous stream of new prospects at near zero cost, and there’s some more about this stuff, but basically, uh, what this stuff does is it, Dave was telling me about it today.

It scours the Internet and only gives you names of people who are really interested, uh, here’s the rest of it real quickly. Only represents the biggest, um, the biggest expertise.

An important aspect of our strategy is to build the most comprehensive knowledge portal about most products and services available anywhere. A knowledge portal essentially combines all information, communication, sources and resources available to any subject to people who want information/knowledge on that subject.

For example we will provide chat rooms, forums, libraries, downloadable video products, discounts on related travel, calendars of upcoming events, unique resources relating specifically to a particular product or service and more.

This resource alone modified after huge knowledge portals already constructed by our licensor will provide a unique resource for customers and prospects and should instill great confidence in your company and its industry community worldwide.

Unlike current search engines our technology organizes all important information in one environment and then searches the web for parties interested in that subject who are then invited to join a community of parties with their common interest.

Our knowledge platforms are well-organized resources and eliminates the need for searching in the current manner. By providing rich content we believe we will create exceptional loyalty among our users, who can then be offered products and services in which we have ownership and shared revenue interests. Our data mining technology, according to its developers, is at least ten times more powerful and much more targeted than any similar technology while complying with spam issues.

The developers also believe they have a long way to go in terms of improving what already exists so we can look forward to an exclusive commercial licensing to breakthrough advancements without investing our capital in its development.

Our license covers all future improvements and advances to the $40 million technology — they spent $40 million bucks on this — which is under constant upgrading and refinement by its developers through tens of millions of dollars’ worth of ongoing contacts with U.S. agencies.

Now, I don’t know if you guys all understood that, but as I understand it they say they’ve done this, and they’ve emailed some of the producers of it, and they’ve never had an opt-out person yet, because it goes through and discovers the people that are interested in exactly the subject that you are selling. But anyhow, if you want to call this guy, and again, I’m not involved in this.

This is not a joint venture for me or nothing, it’s just something a little bit geeky I’d pass along so you guys wouldn’t think I’m just a stone age guy.

David A. Kekich, K-E-K-I-C-H. His telephone number is 310-265-8644, and for all you geeks who would rather, you know, uh, do things without actually pressing the flesh or communicating with people, it’s Kekich, K-E-K-I-C-H at transvio.com, and the web site is www.transvio, T-R-A- N-S-V-I-O.com.

Tell them Gary Halbert sent you, or you don’t have to tell them Gary Halbert sent you, but it seems to me somebody should find out what that’s all about.

Somebody should find me a telephone that doesn’t do anything except send and receive calls, and all of you who want to triple the profits of your web site almost immediately should send me your snail mail address. That’s all I have to say for the month.

Michel: Thanks Gary. That’s, that was awesome. I’m gonna leave on this note, because we, we are past our two-hour mark, so thank everybody for being on the, on the call tonight, and uh, and Gary, thank you so much for sharing this, this amazing stuff -

Gary: And have somebody send me a note to nosexgary@aol.com and say, “Boy, you were great on that call last night,” or something. You have, anything but an eat shit and die message.

Michel: Well I don’t want to, I don’t want to have any emails asking me, “Why is Gary’s email address is nosexgary@aol,” because I know the story and I don’t want to tell it.

Gary: Should I tell that? Or -

Michel: No, no, no. But actually, if there’s a lot of interest we’ll probably do this again, Gary.

Gary: OK.

Michel: Thanks

Gary: Alright.

Michel: Good night people

Gary: Bye bye.

Michel: Bye bye.

Gary Halbert Call Part 4 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Michel: Well, this is an important question because as we do, Gary, and as many of the people who do write good copy do, is that they have swipe files and I have a cabinet that’s just absolutely -

Gary: Oh, man, stop. I got to stop you. I got to tell you a story.

Michel: Go ahead.

Gary: I swear to God this is true and it’s fresh — fresh off the press. Eric Weinstein — I don’t know how many of you people know him — but he works in marketing and he used to be my list broker back in Los Angeles and for a while, here in Florida.

And he called me up and he said, “Gary, I just got back from Switzerland. You know, I’m not in the list broker business any more and I’ve got all these ads, you know, in folders that — and letters that are controls.” He said, “Do you want them? Because I’m going to throw them out.” I said, “Do I want them?”

I sent a guy up to get them. He just brought them back. There’s 200 folders of winning, tested advertising ****. Two hundred folders. They’re sitting in my other room right now. Is that — that story’s three days old. It was that — do I want them? Oh, no, you know?

Michel: But, Gary, you sell some swipe file resources yourself?

Gary: Yeah, I do. I — you know, I don’t want to turn this into a pitch because I really don’t, but I will tell you this, I’ve given a lot of seminars but the best one I ever gave in my life — I don’t know why it is — I was just at concert pitch and it — you know, nobody tells everything they know and — but this time, I said the hell with it and I gave it in Miami Beach.

It was called How to Write a Sales Letter That Will Make You Rich and it was the best on copywriting that either me or anybody’s ever given. That’s the first time the two mother letters I brought out, you know.

And I’ll tell you something. I was scared when I dictated those letters — made them write it because I thought people were going to throw stones at me. But I said, you know, you’re nothing but a wrinkled up old bitch, eat shit and die. But it got the point across and, by the way, I want to make a point about getting the point across.

If you’re a scuba diver, you don’t have to learn very much but the thing that you need to learn — the half dozen things you need to learn — you better learn them. Because if you don’t you’re going to die. And one of those things is that you learn that you don’t hold your breath under water. Now, I’m going to explain to you exactly why.

Let’s suppose that, um, you’re — you dive off a little cliff into the ocean that’s really deep and you hold your breath. You have no scuba gear on. You take a big breath and you fill your lungs to satiety, you know, in other words, you fill them as large as they’ll go. We’re all inclined to do that.

Now, as you go down and the water pressure pushes against your lungs, the area in there will get smaller and smaller and smaller. That’s okay. Because as you come up, you’re kicking your way to the surface, there’s less pressure and your lungs get bigger and bigger as the pressure gets less and less and by the time you return to the surface, your lungs are the same size as they were when you dove in. Everything’s fine.

Now, but let’s say that you’re 60 feet down and you want to get to the surface real quick and you take a great big gulp of air and you fill your lungs to satiety. Well, since the water pressure is compressing the size of your lungs, you have taken in five times as much air as you could take in if you were on the surface.

You hold in your breath instead of breathing and as you go up, the pressure lessens and your lungs expand and expand and expand, the air expands, until your lungs can’t expand any more and then the air goes through your lungs into your bloodstream and into your brain and other places and either cripples or kills you.

So, you’ll notice that when I make a point, I’m not really shy about it. I try and hammer it home. But here’s the point. I look at teaching people copy like I’m trying to save their financial life. Because if you guys don’t learn to write copy, you know what you’re going to have to do? You’re going to have to work for a living and if you have to work for a living, it’s going to kill you.

But the same with scuba diving. So if I am teaching someone to scuba dive, I make damn sure — I don’t just say, “By the way, don’t ever hold your breath when you’re under water. Got that? Fine. Okay.” And go on to the next thing. No, no, no, no, no. I make sure they understand that. Because in marketing, there’s only a dozen or so things you got to get right but you really, really have to get them right. You can’t paddle up or down the Mississippi River and get to Marietta, Ohio.

Michel: That’s an important point because one of the things that Peter Stone, the guy that actually is the foundation of this call, the guy that actually put this together -

Gary: Yeah, he did.

Michel: He — he said something that was phenomenal and a lot of people have heard this before. You’ve probably heard the saying that good copy is the temporary suspension of disbelief. Well, Peter Stone says good copy is the temporary suspension of critical thinking and the reason why he said that is because a lot of people were asking questions like — on the board that he’s the moderator of.

He’s one of my moderators — the question people ask is why do you have to explain so much in great detail and I think the best thing that I can say whenever I try to explain that, I use Peter’s quote but at the same time I say if you have to write copy and you leave out stuff where people have to think by themselves, they’re going to naturally be inclined to think about all the negative stuff as well and all the things that could easily get them to confuse what you’re going to say.

Gary: Well, that’s true — that’s true. But that’s part of the story. Now, you’ve got one part of it exactly right. Confused prospects never buy.

Michel: Exactly.

Gary: But you must convince people. And let’s talk about credibility. That was one of the -

Michel: Yes.

Gary: Questions on the site, the credibility and believability. If you have a retail location, you tell them we’re located at 123 Main Street right across from the police station next to the public library and you tell them — you tell them you’re telephone number with the area code. It’s 216-834-9067. We’re open from, you know, 9:00 in the morning to 5:30 p.m. Pacific Coast Time, but we’re never open on Saturdays and Sundays.

You tell them. Specifics build believability and you’re got to understand something.

All of us, you know, like, I know a great deal about marketing. I can hardly function otherwise. You know, God, most of the time, he apportioned skills, you get so much skill to balance your checkbook, so much skill to get your laundry done, so much skill — he gave 99 percent of it all to me for marketing and I — I just stumble through life, you know? I mean, I’m as dysfunctional as any human being on earth except Jay Abraham who’s totally dysfunctional. Okay?

But, you know, I bought a really neat little thing from Sharper Image. It was the size of a stick of gum. It’s — it’s a tape recorder and as soon as I opened the instruction book, I went into a rage. You know what it said? How to set the clock and calendar. I don’t want a tape recorder that you — you know, I want a catalog of stuff that I want — I would like to see catalog — the title of “stuff that only does one thing,” you know, because that’s all I can handle.

I can’t play my VCR. I have a 72″ direct view screen, not projection, and it’s got a VCR and a CD or DVD player and I don’t know how to play it. So you know what I did? You know what my solution was? I went out and bought another like 19″ screen that has these two little slots you stick the DVD in one and the VHS in the other.

Now I work with a guy who is literally a rocket scientist. He’s worked 20 years at Nassau and he laughs at me and makes these things work. But I can’t make nothing work, you know, and now they want — by the way, I have a challenge.

If there’s anybody out there, anybody on this call, that wants to endear themselves to me, I want somebody to find me something and here’s what it is. I never answer my messages that I get on my cell phone. I never answer messages that I get on my home phone. I do not know how to answer messages on those phones. I don’t want to come home and know them and I don’t even want to know that people called. I want a cell phone that has no features whatsoever. It won’t take a picture. It won’t do caller I.D. It won’t store numbers. It won’t let me put my to do list in there. It won’t function as a PDA. It won’t let me put a calendar. Nothing.

If you call me on my cell phone and I’m there and I can answer it, we’ll talk. But if I don’t answer it, I want to never know you called. Do you understand? And I want to be able to call out and take calls in. That’s all I want. A featureless cell phone.

I got on a plane to Los Angeles where my children are from Miami. It’s five hours. I decided to read the — this is really off the subject, but I decided to read all of the features. I said I’m going to read this book. I’m going to read it.

Well, I learned there’s certain laws about electronic things when you explain them. First of all, they have to be written in 17 different languages. Secondly, they have to be written in half point type. Thirdly, they have to — all these obscure government regulations have to be explained before you can get to the meat of it.

And with my phone, you could do all these amazing things. You could find out the humidity in Paris, you know. How deep you are under water. How high you are if you’re climbing a mountain, etc. etc. etc., but, and some of you already know about this, it has three video games on it and one of them is Snake and the way it works is you feed the snake and his tail gets bigger or something like that.

And I was bitching about this at a coffee shop the next day in L.A. and a pretty young girl said to me, “Oh, you’ve got Snake? Oh, me and all my friends have it, too.” I was a member of an “in club” because I had a cell phone that you could play Snake on.

That is not the way I want the world to work. I want the world to be a Zippo lighter. Not a Zippo lighter that’s a compass that you can access your email with and I’m done with that. Forget it.

Michel: But you drove the point home very well, Gary, because I think that the idea is is that whenever you write copy, some people tend to — whenever they try to get all those details, the point is, you want to be, not only as specific as possible, but you literally want to take a person by the hand and take them through the copy. In fact, one of the questions was, “How do you keep going from one paragraph to the other?” What happens for example if you have writer’s block?

Gary: I never have writer’s block and I can teach all of you how to never have writer’s block. Never. I can do it in 30 seconds. Do you believe that? Here’s what you do. You write something that you know to write. I want to tell you about a new blender that… And you’re stuck right there.

What you do is you write “blah.” “Blah, blah, blah.” And you never stop writing “blah” until it occurs to you that I — I want to tell you about a blender that, uh, blends not only vegetables and fruits but also walnuts and casserole and blah, blah, blah. And you keep writing — the thing is what stops writer’s block is movement. You just keep writing “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah” and that writer’s block will go away every single time. The movement of your hand across that piece of paper or the typewriter keyboard will “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Michel: Well, that’s interesting, because I think that’s a good point to make because a lot of people tend to use, to confuse between copywriter and copy editor. You know, they put on their editing hat rather than the copywriting hat.

Gary: They put it on too soon. You need both but you don’t — when you’re writing . let me tell you something that John Carlton and I don’t have that everybody else has. I don’t think Bencivenga has it. But there is nothing, no impediment between our brain and our hand. There are no clots whatsoever and you shouldn’t be thinking about whether this is true, whether this will offend the regulatory agency, you should just write your first draft as blazingly fast as you can write it.

The faster you write it, the better it will be. And write it as though God gave you permission to write anything.

Then, of course, just because you write it, remember this, all of you, get this in your head. Just because you’ve written something doesn’t mean you’re going to mail it or publish it. It’s a draft. And don’t take the enthusiasm out of the draft. Don’t kill the baby aborning. And I’ll give you another rule for your relationships with your friends, your creative friends.

When you first start talking about an idea and another guy says, “Well, let me be the devil’s advocate for a minute.” Hit him in the teeth as hard as you can. Right there. Just hit him as hard as you can and kick him out of the room because he doesn’t deserve to live and certainly not be in a room with real creative people. There is a place for devil’s advocate but not while the baby is aborning. The ideas are hard enough to come up with anyway.

Michel: Good point. That’s an excellent answer, Gary. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think also another question that’s sort of part of that was what kind of exercises should they do, should people do, to get into the flow and to get into the mind of a good, great copywriter that writes -

Gary: They should write his letters out in longhand. Every one of you should write a letter out in longhand every day. Hey, but before I forget, I want to make an offer to everybody on this call. It’s a free offer. Is that okay for me to do that?

Michel: Oh, yeah. Go ahead, Gary.

Gary: I can teach each one of you how to make — how to at least triple your Internet profits and you can do it with a metal object. I cannot send you this metal object through the net. I have to mail it to you. So here’s what you do. Write to Roxanne at the garyhalbertletter.com. Roxanne at the garyhalbertletter.com. And put your snail mail address there and I will send you this metal object which — and explain to you how to use it and I guarantee it will triple your profits.

Now, this is not necessary but if you trust me, I would also like you to put your telephone number and fax number there and I don’t abuse anybody’s information. You know me, I don’t even abuse — I don’t send emails everyday or anything but if we have to check, if the package got to you, or fax you, you don’t have to do that but I do have to have your snail mail address and I will mail this metal object out to you right away and teach you how to use it and I guarantee you will triple the profits of your website. How’s that for a guarantee?

Michel: That’s — that’s awesome. Actually, it’s leading into the next question is — and I know you’ve talked a little bit about this in the past, Gary, about how to structure a really good guarantee and I think there was a double your money back guarantee process that you’ve talked about a while back. I can’t remember the seminars I was at that you spoke about.

Gary: I do a lot of double your money back guarantees.

Michel: And what is your technique for writing a good guarantee?

Gary: Well, but don’t -

Michel: What’s your best guarantee?

Gary: I did that, I first did that when I was working as an outside consultant for Entrepreneur Magazine for Chase Revell and they were publishing these reports that sold for about $60.00 or $70.00 on how, you know, how to make money in the florist business or how to start a balloon vending business and the first half of the report was generic talking about getting your business card, getting your business license, etc., etc., and then the second half of the report told you how to do things that were specific to that particular business and their — they were getting clobbered by their refund rate.

And I said, “Well, I’ll fix it for you.” And they said, “How are you going to do it?” And I said, “I’m going to make it a double your money back refund. But I’m going to make it conditional.” And here was the conditions.

You send this — you say as long as you do it exactly as we tell you to do, we guarantee you will make a profit at this business and when you send the book out that says okay, the first thing you have to do is you have to get a business license.

The second thing you have to do is get stationary and envelopes and business cards printed up and blah, blah, blah. And said okay, if you give this a fair trial for 60 days and it doesn’t make any money, send us back a short written note telling us you followed all the instructions and write that note on your stationary, include a photocopy of your business license and your business card and that stopped refunds.

It increased sales by 50 percent and almost eliminated refunds because you know when people want a refund? They — I’ll tell you when they decide to get a refund. The moment they’re ordering. There are some cases when you send the garbage, they want their money back. But for the most part, the person who wants a refund knows that when he is ordering.

Now, here’s the way I do it on diets. A lot of times I’ll say we can’t make a lot of claims for this diet because it has not been inspected by the FDC. All the information is what’s called anecdotal. But we believe in this product very strongly. So we’re going to send you this diet pill.

You use it twice a day and follow the simple instructions. Use it for 60 days and if it doesn’t take off weight more than anything before, send it back. Send the empty container back and with a note telling us you followed the instruction and with a note, we send this with the product, telling us that you took the pills twice a day and walking for half a day as instructed and give us the name and the address of your doctor and the approximate date you went to him to get his approval to start this diet program.

Now that might seem tricky but what’s the alphabet agency going to say to you? Well, you told her to go to a doctor before she starts the diet program. Well, it’s kind of irresponsible not to, isn’t it? But nobody does it.

And I’ll tell you another thing about refunds. The longer the refund period is, the fewer the refunds you will have. You know, the worst thing you could do is you see ads with a ten-day money back guarantee? That puts a deadline right in their head. “I’ve only got four more days to return this.”

Put a six-month or a year guarantee in there. Do you think anybody gets a six-month guarantee and looks at their calendar and flips six months ahead and says last month — last day to return widget ABC? To Michel Fortin for refund? No, they don’t. The longer the guarantee period, the fewer the refunds. The double your money back guarantee should always be a conditional thing but I’ve seen guys try to copy what I’m teaching you now and they would make ridiculous demands.

Show me the insertion orders that you used to send the ad in, blah, blah, blah. I don’t ask them to do anything outrageous. It’s not outrageous to ask somebody to tell them before you start this diet program, visit your doctor and make sure there are no underlying health conditions why you shouldn’t be on this or any other diet program. That’s pretty reasonable. Isn’t it?

And if, you know, and it’s pretty reasonable to tell somebody don’t go into business without getting a business license and stationary. But they don’t do it. So the refunds go way down.

Now, let me tell you what to do, though, from a practical nature. Somebody wants a double your money back refund. First, you refund them every cent they paid. You do that without question. And then you tell them but if they want the double your money back refund, you are going to stand behind the guarantee but to furnish you with that information.

Michel: Awesome. That was great. Thanks, Gary. A question, also, that a lot of people have asked was I have, for example, a high ticket product, $2,000.00, $3,000.00, $4,000.00 product, and some people said well, I have also a free e-book that I’m giving away. How — how much copy or what kind of copy should I use for selling a high ticket product versus a free product or a free giveaway?

Gary: Well, first of all, um, that — that’s really a good question. That’s a very, very good question and I’m going to give you a really great answer to it and this is right out of recent experience.

I was selling something recently that costs $5,000.00 and we — I wrote a full page newspaper ad, full page newspaper ad, like 2,000 words of copy, all I wanted them to do is to call an 800 number, give their name and address to receive a free book. And the free book was filled with really valuable information and the last half of the book told you — or the last probably 25 percent of the book, 10 percent of the book probably, last 10 percent, told you how you could order if you were interested, you could order the multi-thousand dollar product.

Now, I’m going to tell you the exact figures on that when we did it direct mail. When we did it direct mail, it costs us about a buck a piece to mail the letters. So a thousand letters costs us a thousand dollars, right? We would get an average of a 7 percent response.

We mailed a thousand letters, we’d get 70 replies. For each one of those replies, to send them, we spent $10.00 working them, and we sent it Federal Express with a dollar bill letter attached, you know, a dollar attached to it because it costs us $10.00. In other words, the 70 replies cost us $10.00 a piece. So we’ve got $1,700.00 in the promotion. Am I making that clear enough?

Michel: Mm-mm.

Gary: Okay. And you know what we got from that? Exactly a 7 percent response. Seven percent of the 70 percent — in other words, we got five orders from the initial thousand at $5,000.00 a piece. $25,000.00 for spending $1,700.00.

Michel: Wow.

Gary: So, and here’s something that people forget and you never want to forget this. When you’re going for leads, write long copy just — just as hard and as long as . as strong as if you were going for a $10,000.00 sale. No lead, no sale. Right?

Michel: Right.

Gary: Sell the hell out of getting them to give you that name and — their name and address that you can mail them something to.

Michel: Well, I think it comes back to what you were saying at the beginning, Gary, that people -

Gary: Oh, by the way, and it is better to be redundant than it is to be remiss.

Michel: Good point.

Gary: And in light of that factor, I’m going to say it once again. You want to triple your website profits? I will send you something free and tell you how to use it to triple, triple, your website profits and I don’t make empty claims.

All you have to do is send your snail mail address to Roxanne at the garyhalbertletter, I guess at aol.com. Roxanne at the garyhalbertletter.com and just write John Jones, 123 Elm Street, Madison, Ohio 44646 and we’ll put it in the mail to you right away.

It’s a piece of — it’s a metal object and — and I would appreciate it if you would send your fax and telephone number but if you’re skeptical, you don’t have to.

Michel: If you’re ever stuck or if the email comes back for whatever reason, they can send it to michel@askgaryhalbert.com and I’ll forward it to the proper people. Um, is that okay, Gary?

Gary: Sure.

Michel: Okay. One question I also had asked a lot is the fact that telling a good compelling story — and this is something that I’ve been preaching for gosh knows how long — because a lot of people ask me, you know, how — how to write good copy and I usually say it’s because you have to be a good salesperson. Writing copy is just the writing extension of being a good salesperson. But every good salesperson and every good copywriter is a good storyteller and I want -

Gary: You know what happened to me recently? About six months ago?

Michel: No.

Gary: I was really sick and I was in the hospital and, uh, there was a woman there that was, you know, helping me and I was only in the hospital for a short period of time and she was a Haitian woman. She said she wanted to talk to me because she knew I was being discharged and would I talk to her for a few minutes and I got out and she said, “I want to give you something.”

And she gave me five of these little pills and she says, “I guarantee you they’re perfectly safe. They won’t do anything but good for you.” And she said, “They come from my country and we have an evil saint over there.” And they do, it’s called Baron Simidi and “I know this sounds like superstitious stuff to you but if you’ll take one of these pills every day for the next five days, you’re going to feel immensely better.”

And so I figured, what the hell, this woman isn’t going to poison me and I took one of those pills every one for the next five days. Now, you know these machines in the gyms, that’s a tri-step fold down and there’s a bunch of plates, then there’s a pulley that goes up and comes around a metal, you know, what do you call it?

I can’t think of the name but it goes around, comes down, the cable comes up around the pulley and there’s a couple of bars on it and how much weight you want to lift, if you want to lift just one plate, there’s a pin. You put it right underneath the first pin and you push this weight down to your — to you waist, you know, with both hands, your arms are straight out from your waist?

Michel: Uh-huh.

Gary: And then to work your triceps you push it down to your waist, bring it — or down to your thigh. Then you bring it back up to your waist and you push it back down. Then you bring it right up and you push it back down. And my goal for a long time was to be able to do half of the weight on that rack — half of all the weight on there. And I used those pills and I felt so much better after the five days, I went back and asked her if I could get some more. And she wasn’t trying to screw me out of money and I had to pay a little bit to get the pills and you know what I did three days ago?

Michel: No.

Gary: I went to the gym. I put the pin under the last weight so it was all the weight on there and I brought it down, all the weight on there, and I repped it 30 times.

Michel: Wow.

Gary Halbert Call Part 3 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.

Now, I am guessing that most of the people on this call do not knit very often unless Rosie Greer is on the call. I do not think you knit very often and it would not make any difference how much skill I used to write that letter but let’s take another scenario.

Let’s say that you are married and for some reason you have to be away from your wife. You cannot be at the hospital and while you are gone your wife gives birth to triplets and some guy comes up to you and he is trying to communicate with you that you wife just had triplets but his grammar is screwed up, his English is faulty but is there any way he could communicate to you that your wife just had triplets that would not be of interest to you?

That is the difference between world class response and all this mediocre stuff. It is knowing what is important to people. You know you could… you could write in pig Latin that you wife just had triplets and you could be Shakespeare writing about the knitting machine. It would not make any difference. You got to know what is important to people. I did not get very far before I stopped my rant, so I will try a little harder this time.

Michel: That was… that was a perfect explanation. Actually, Gary, I use that explanation when people ask me that question. What I…

Gary: You know what I think really… what we should do with that question… anybody that asks that question if… if they are in public, they should be slapped right across the mouth. There shouldn’t even be any discussion.

Michel: Or you should send them your cousin Guido.

Gary: Yes, or send to Guido.

Michel: I… I… I have somebody that commented about that and we had a posting on my copywriter’s board.com… somebody said I value my legs too much, I have got to be on this call.

Gary: Here is what I usually say and, by the way, that brings up another thing.

Michel: Sure…

Gary: Everybody in marketing almost, is afraid to have a personality. That is what you need to have, a personality, you know, and everybody is trying to hard not to offend somebody. I believe what Dan Kennedy says, if you have not offended somebody by noon, you are not a pro.

You know, look I have what I call the Boy George / John Wayne theory of marketing. You know, Boy George has his fans and John Wayne has his fans. Now, never the twain shall meet. Some people like big macho guys that mow down Japanese people with machine guns and other guys… other people like sexually confused singers who wear dresses.

There is nothing wrong with either of them but never the twain shall meet and the thing about Boy George and the thing about John Wayne is they give you something to say yes or no to, don’t they?

You know, stop this nonsense of trying to please everybody. You cannot do it. You give away thousands of dollar bills and you cannot do it.

Michel: I think you said something in a seminar not too long ago or quite a while ago, I cannot remember exactly when but you said about… uh… people are so preoccupied about selling to the foxes without upsetting the dogs.

Gary: Oh yeah… I… I said that… um… when I wrote that personal ad that got me women from all over…

Michel: Uh hum…

Gary: The world… I… you know, there were a lot of fat, ugly women with moustaches that were offended by my ad and I said I didn’t worry about offending the dogs, I concentrated on selling the foxes and that is something you people should take to heart. Let’s see how long I can go before I start another rant. Try a question.

Michel: That… that… but that is such a perfect explanation I just wanted to add my own comment is that I usually tell people if you were a Steven King fanatic and… and the fact that you are a Steven King fanatic means that you are a person who is targeted for a Steven King book. Steven King puts out a book and it is 800 pages thick, are you not going to buy it because it is too long?

Gary: No.

Michel: Of course not and not only that, you probably will buy it, sit down and read it all in one single reading because you just absolutely love the stuff. You probably wished the book was either longer or you will re-read the whole book again because it is so fascinating and that is the key… is the fact that there is a difference between boring copy and a long copy, actually I tell people there is a difference between long copy and long-winded copy.

Gary: Yes, that is a great way to put it. I am going to take credit for that though.

Michel: You sure can Gary.

Gary: There will be a point in time where I will forget you said it and I will take credit for it. That is a great way to put it, Michel.

Michel: Well, here is another question that is sort of tied to that, Gary. One of the questions that was asked was, “What is the difference between or how can you write copy that is… um… that is more…uh… that is cleaner, that is less hypey because a lot of people say they see a lot of hypey copy these days, especially on line.

So how can you tell the difference between, you know, copy that is hypey… how can you write copy that is not as hypey and for whom and how… how do you make sure that you just do not tell outright lies?

Gary: Well, first of all… um… hypey copy is used by people who really do not know what they are writing about and if they don’t know what they are writing about, the more adjectives there will be in the copy. If you have a lot of compelling facts, you don’t need the hype.

Now, hype has a place, I think… uh… but it…it is not nearly where you think it should be. If you will study the masters like Claude Hopkins or stuff, you won’t say that is hypey copy but the best letters… the best sales messages are really hard hitting and dramatic without using all those adjectives and the people are using the adjectives in… in place of substance and that is the problem with most sales writing today.

People don’t do their homework. You know, they don’t fill it up with substance and if you have a lot of substance, you do not need a lot of hype… um…

Michel: Well, actually that is a perfect lead in to the next question is, “What are the biggest mistakes you see copywriters commit?”

Gary: Uh… the biggest mistake that copywriters commit… uh… is they do not know how to do what they are doing.

Michel: That’s…

Gary: And they don’t study. I’m… I’m going to tell you a few things that… um… there are a lot of ways to write a sales letter and this is not the only way and it is not the only god way but it is the way John Carlton does it and it is the way I do it.

We write the bullets first because the only reason that people buy what you are selling from ad for the most part is because of the quality of the bullets. Now I have an ad in front of me that has… it was for a book I wrote called Killer Orgasms — How to Have the Best Sex Humanly Possible.

It has 64 bullets in it and… um… about 14 of those bullets would be irresistible to me but the point I want to make is a lot of people will buy something in a 14 page sales letter because they want to know the answer to one bullet.

Now I wrote a bullet for Entrepreneur Magazine one time and this was back in the 1980s when everybody was doing cocaine and I wrote “Fake Cocaine: A Legal Substitute that Fools Everyone, Even the Experts.” And do you know that for years, people were calling in to get that product just to find out just what the hell that was. And… and I mean it was buried in 150 other bullets.

Now this… ah… the promo for this sex book contains 60 bullets but I am going to read the one that I would want to know if I did not know the answer. There are very few of them. The real reason why Prozoc and Zoloft are so popular in this country. Almost no one, even doctors understands the starting sexual implications.

The single biggest sexual complaint women have about men, the single biggest sexual complaint men have about women. Now I put a star by this one — A dead giveaway that proves a woman is faking her orgasms.

They have to go to another… I am skipping over a bunch which I don’t think… um… what lesbians know about sex which men don’t and why more men today are losing their women to other women. The single most important thing a woman can do to make herself more attractive to the opposite sex. The single most important thing a man can do to make himself more attractive to the opposite sex.

And this is the bullet I believe gets more people than anybody else, than any other bullet to buy the book — three sure fire ways to tell if your spouse or significant other has had sex with someone else in the last 24 hours. The No. 1 rule which absolutely must be observed for women to have a truly spectacular orgasm.

And then there is a whole bunch of bullets I do not have a star by. Flirting sequence used by almost all women, that 95 percent of men don’t even recognize and how it instantly gets them makes sex ten times more exciting when he does learn to recognize and understand these little known secrets. The one best way to win the true undying love of a member of the opposite sex.

I am skipping over some of these because I’m… I’m considering this a PG call… um… a 15 minute change in the way you shower and dress which may very likely double your attractiveness to the opposite sex.

Now let’s skip that one. How to guarantee your lover almost never stops thinking about you and how to make sure her thoughts are supercharged with passion and white hot smoldering anticipation. Very important but almost unknown trick which will end nagging on both sides of the relationship forever.

Then there is a bunch more bullets I haven’t X’d and we come to one, the single most important thing a man can do to win a woman’s love forever. The most important and most little known quality a man must have if he wants to acquire a truly desirable woman and have any chance of success. Women will overlook everything except this.

Okay, I have nothing else starred but there is something really, really important about these bullets. None of them were hypey and all of them are based on truth and what you have got to know is you have got to know the truth. Now, if there are some women on this call and she… and they are listening to it with a man, you watch the woman when I tell the secret to the bullet and… um… and they will nod their head yes.

Okay, a dead giveaway which proves if a woman is faking her orgasms, do you know what that is? When women have orgasms, they always curl their toes, they cannot help to do it. The cannot help not to do it… um… okay, three sure fire ways… how about if we just change that to one sure fire way to tell if your spouse or significant other has had sex with someone else in the last 24 hours? Is there any hype in that?

Michel: Not at all.

Gary: Not at all is there?

Michel: No.

Gary: But isn’t that something you would really like to know? The one sure way to tell if your woman has had sex with another man in the last 24 hours? Well, there is a way. And I will tell you what it is and you will say aha as soon as I explain it to you.

Let’s suppose you or your wife or girlfriend is having an affair with somebody in the office. They leave the office, go to a motel and they have sex. What is the first thing they do after they have sex? They take a shower… they take a shower to remove the evidence.

They remove the makeup residue, the lipstick on the collar, the scent of the other person, etc., etc., etc. so if your spouse or significant other is all of a sudden coming home freshly showed at times where she wouldn’t be, like she wasn’t at the gym or the ballet class or nothing, the reason that she is taking no showers is to remove the evidence of an affair.

Well, the thing is… what I am trying to point out to you is these things are facts and I have twisted them into bullets and these are called blind bullets because I do not give away the secret. The No. 1 rule which absolutely must be observed for a woman to have a truly spectacular orgasm and we are going to stop talking about sex here folks because I know some of you are shriveling but do you know what that No. 1 rule is? The woman has to feel absolutely safe… um… and the… um…

There is another one I like here… um… the one best way to win the true undying love of a member of the opposite sex, especially a woman, you know what that could be? I will tell you what it is… small, unexpected gifts. Not gifts that you give her for her birthday, not gifts for the wedding anniversary, just small unexpected gifts that are special unto her. Like you know she likes to collect these little clay Peruvian figurines and you seek out and find one. It might cost you $5.00 and you have it delivered to her with flowers, unexpectedly, out of the blue and she will love you for that.

Um… and then there is one that… uh… it is not so much about sex as it is about relationships and… um… I am going to… I am going to put on my relationship counselor…um… hat here and… uh… and it says, a very important but almost unknown trick which will end nagging on both sides of the relationship forever.

My girlfriend and I, actually she is my fiancee, is a woman who has the best heart I have ever met. She is also, at least to me, the most attractive I have ever met and I made a deal with her when we first started going out together four years ago, and I have never broken that deal, and she cannot imagine that a man would make such a deal with her and here it is… the deal is if I do anything that offends you or irritates you, you will only have to tell me about it once and I will never do it again.

Now, my girlfriend is Costa Rican, for example. Everybody in Costa Rica, they never eat with a hat on so I take my hat off when I eat. A very simple thing.

Now that doesn’t mean I am going to let this woman tell me I can never go out on one of my boats again or something like that or I have to change my profession, but you know, the thing is if you do things that irritate your loved one, and they are pretty easy to quit, most of them, you know, let’s say that every day you come in the door and you take off your coat and you throw it on the floor and it irritates the hell out of her, just don’t do it any more.

We have a contract with each other that we never do something that the other one expresses that causes them consternation, we never do it twice and everybody can do that but yet that made a great bullet but behind that great bullet was a great truth.

I didn’t have to use any hype to write this ad because… do you understand? I was searching out strong truths… exciting truths and then writing those exciting truths and I didn’t have to say… uh…a really killer way to have an explosive mind blowing relationship, you know, that sucks the air out of the room and blah, blah, blah, blah. You just make a simple statement of what that is.

Now, when you write… you should… I… I would suggest to all of you, start working on your bullets first because if you are… you know… everything about the bullets, your whole piece is about the bullets, that’s… that’s what it is about and the rest of the piece is to get them to attract their attention to read the bullets and to attract their attention to… or… or to get them to believe the bullets. That is the only purpose of the rest of your letter actually… actually though there is the headline.

For example, I worked for Sam and Leslie Fishbaum, they had one furniture store in Denver and they have either five or seven now and… um… they only have certain… you have what you have to sell and that is all you have. So what they had was a wide selection of furniture, low prices, no money down, no interest, two years to pay, etc., etc., etc. What they had was what they had and we call it the yada, yada, yada — that is what they have to sell but the difference is, if you want to make it killer, you give the reader theatre and reason why.

Now, theatre would be attaching a dollar bill to the top of the letter as a grabber. Do you understand that? That would be theatre. Theatre would be attaching a real photograph to the top of the letter or attaching a coin or something like that.

A reason why is why you are getting such a deal on this mattress. And one of the letters that we wrote told them that they got such a great deal on this mattress because we could not sell them in retail although the mattresses are perfect, we could not sell them at retail because the manufacturer screwed up and sewed the labels on backwards. That letter worked so well we had the manufacturer sew the label backwards on all the mattresses and, you know, so we would say, you know, it has been raining here lately and we have water damage to some of the furniture and Sam would go up on the roof and drill a hole in it so that some of the water came down and screwed up some of the furniture.

It’s…it’s a variation if you haven’t read the Robert Collier book of the scratch and dent sale and that was the reason why. That’s… the first thing I described to you was theatre and the second thing I described to you is reason why.

But it all gets them to… when they read the yada, yada, yada, to believe it and to understand it. By the way, I would like to give a little bit of a pitch here. Um…

Michel: Go ahead Gary.

Gary: The… um… if I had to win a copywriting contest or one of my children would die, the person I would least like to have as my opponent is Gary Benzevinga and he publishes Benzevinga’s bullets and they are free and if you don’t read those, you are missing a monster asset.

Michel: Oh yeah, I agree.

Gary: And… um… it… the last bullet he wrote was about one of the most important words in advertising which is because and he articulated it better than anybody I have ever heard and Gary Benzevinga and I have had a mutual fan club… uh… respect for each other for years and one of my proudest moments is every Thanksgiving he sends a big one ounce gold coin to somebody that has made a big difference in his life and I got one of those coins, you know, and it is one of my most precious possessions and I will tell you one further story about Gary Benzevinga.

Jay Abraham came to me and he was showing me these financial… uh… sales lettersthat people were using to sell financial newsletters, etc., etc., and I said, Jay, these things are working because I never knew anything about that field yet and he said, why yeah, do you think you can do better?

I said Jay I can do better than this in a coma and I just cranked these out, one right after another, never had a loser. It was easy. It was **** and then I was sitting in my apartment, an Oakwood Gardens Apartment in Burbank, California and I read my first letter ever written by Gary Benzevinga and I almost vomited. Do you know why? Because vacation time was over. From now on I had to work for a living when I was writing those things because he is so damn good, it is ridiculous. So… and he is going to have a seminar… um…

Michel: In May.

Gary: In… in May and get your ass to that seminar. I’m… I’m going to pay to go there and be there… I… I mean, there are very few people for whom I will sit in a seat and learn but I will sit at the feet of Gary Benzevinga. I know I don’t have a **** with him.

Michel: I definitely will be there myself. It’s… it’s… you know if people want to subscribe to his newsletter, it is benzevingabullets.com and the last one was about exactly that…that… the use of reasons why and the one word that can trigger the most response and it was one of the questions that was asked a lot on that… uh… web page that we set up Gary and… and that leads me to a couple of things that I just wanted to throw in her.

You know, a lot of people ask… um… what kind of scarcity tactics do you like to use because a lot of people nowadays, especially on line, they go and visit this… this web site that sells some kind of ebook that says you have got to buy before X date and people know that they have this coding behind there that changes it every day whenever they visit the web page so they say, are there…

Gary: At first everybody knows that’s a lie and I don’t think that you should write lies. Uh… everybody knows if you say you will only sell 500 and people order 700, you are going to take the other 200 orders so stop doing that.

Michel: Uh hum…

Gary: Now, if you are talking about scarcity, you know, for your copywriting services, be good, there won’t be any scarcity. You know, I… I remember Denny Hats used to write a newsletter called who is mailing what and he mocked guys like me and Gary Benzevinga who said we could not take any more clients that we were booked for a year. Hell, Gary Benzevinga would be booked for two or three years in advance, the bastard!

Michel: So are there any other scarcity tactics, Gary, that you would like to… uh… to propose?

Gary: Well, I will tell you one and… uh… it is an important one that I use but it… it also… the tactics need to be based on truth. I tell people I can only take so many clients and that is the truth. I only can.

You know, I mean, I… I could… I could write continually but I like to take time out to see my girlfriend and my grandchildren every once in a while, you know, so that… the scarcity tactic, first of all, do not lie about it because… but I will tell you one thing that I have learned to offer people.

If you buy something from me, like a fairly expensive set of tapes that I have to sell, you know what you get with it? You get free access to me for an entire year to answer your marketing questions. They cannot duplicate that on Ebay.

Michel: Great… good answer. Actually, one of the things I wanted to go back on was bullets because one… one of the most common questions that I have gotten is, Gary, a lot of the copy that you write you seem to alternate your bullets between bold and unbold and so on and so forth…

Gary: It is a technique that provides eye relief.

Michel: Got you, perfect. In terms of… of headline and… and I… I believe truly myself that the single greatest part of your copy, besides the bullets that you just mentioned, Gary, the single greatest part is the headlines.

Gary: The headline is the single greatest part of the copy. By the way, I have got a great headline, I want somebody to help me fill in what comes after — half dead Cuban washes ashore in Miami with strange secret that can double the income of most U.S. citizens.

Michel: Awesome.

Gary: You know what the hottest headline I ever wrote was?

Michel: That was one of the questions, go ahead.

Gary: Toba Borgnine swears under oath that her new perfume does not contain an illegal sexual stimulant and the whole city of Los Angeles was saying does it contain… is a sexual stimulant legal? And we got 7,000 people to come out for her perfume launch, the biggest perfume launch in history and we couldn’t get any more in because the fire marshal wouldn’t let any more people into the Century Plaza Hotel.

Michel: Wow.

Gary: And one of the subheadings was wife of famous movie star agrees to give away 1,000 samples of her new fragrance in order to prove it is really safe to wear in public.” A little theatre there.

Michel: Well, here is a question that was actually based on that, the question was specifically for Gary Helber, do you think in this extremely cynical age that your traditional Toba Borgnine style promotions are still valid?

Gary: That question is almost too moronic to answer. What I do was valid when people were carving out their messages on a chisel on a piece of stone and they will be valid 2,000 years from now… uh… when everybody is getting text messages on microscopic cell phones imbedded into your brain.

Selling is selling is selling and it is all the same. The Internet has not changed anything about selling. Let me tell you about selling. There are only three things involved. You have a prospect, a pitch and a delivery system for the pitch.

All the Internet is, is a delivery system for a pitch. That is what you need to remember and people say, writing for the Internet and I know you do that, it is no different than writing for the newspaper, which is no different than writing for direct mail which is no different than writing for television.

The… the… what makes a good pitch is what makes a good pitch and let me tell you guys what you are all doing wrong, all the on line community, everybody is doing this wrong, you try and get something from the reader before you have delivered a lot of value he cannot get any place else.

I would venture to say I have one of the most profitable web sites on the Internet and I, honest to God, put that web site up after I had received thousands and thousands and thousands of letters from people telling me how my life had changed… how my information had changed their lives.

Mostly it was about money but sometime it saved them from committing suicide, it inspired them to go on and make it and save their marriage or whatever and I thought, well, hell if it is that valuable to people, I will just go ahead and start throwing it up on the Internet.

And, you know, I started putting them up and after about two or three months, people started writing me and said don’t you have anything to sell? I want to buy something from you and they started… and the last time I sent… um… a full fledged newsletter out, my **** rating, you know, jumps up and down whether I am putting stuff on the side or not, it was 1,630 and I… I don’t even know how to link my web site to somebody else.

I don’t even know how to work Google Ad Words. I know a little bit about that. I don’t even know how… uh… to maximize the effectiveness of a web site. I don’t know any of that stuff. You know why my newsletter is so popular? Because it contains content and a lot of you dorks out there are trying to make a lot of money without first figuring out how to serve people.

Michel: Good point.

Gary: I get riled when I talk. I… I… um… you know I talk about sex and politics this way too. Actually, I don’t.

Michel: Well, here… here’s another good… and you… you probably nailed…uh…about a good 50 questions right there, Gary, but one of the questions about the headline was, you know, a lot of people say they have seen so many of these very long headlines. First of all, are they still effective and what kind of formula do you use whenever you write a headline?

Gary: Well… uh… okay, I am going to try and get down to the level of somebody who would ask such a question. Um… I can get down to anybody’s level, I just give myself a lobotomy here and lower my IQ about 70 points, yes, long headlines are effective. Let me give you a few tips about headlines.

Um… if you are stuck, just start with the words “how to.” Uh…how to… and by the way, if you want to learn to write headlines, every one of you should have a copy of I can never get it right by Julia Hadelman or Hadelman Julius… the first 100 million…

Michel: Right.

Gary: That is the basis of all good headline writing in America. Read the first 100 million and you will know everything you need to know for the rest of life about writing headlines. Yes, long headlines do work, Patricia. Short headlines work too. You know, for example… uh… you will see little ads and it will just say corns?

Everybody is going to pass by that little ad unless they happen to have corns and that’s… that’s all it needed was that one word. You know, I mean, if you are dealing with a junkie, you would say, want to score some heroine? That is long enough. But most of you probably aren’t dealing with people who have corns for the **** market and…

Michel: I think… I think John Carlton whenever he says… he says a great word, he says… he called it pithisizing which is a big difference between being brief and being pithy because there is a difference between trying to be short and not sending the message you need to say rather than saying the message that you can say to the right kind of people in the shortest amount of words possible and… and a lot of people sometimes they have these very long headlines that are just… you fall asleep and I agree with that because you just don’t have the right copy but… uh… I have written headlines…

Gary: Wait, I will tell you one of the biggest differences between the people who really make it in this business and the people who don’t, the people who make it buy everything that is out there by every good guy there. You should have everything John Carlton has ever produced.

Michel: Oh yeah… oh yeah… definitely.

Gary Halbert Call Part 2 of 4 originally appeared on The Michel Fortin Blog. Please visit to subscribe to it, or Tweet This.