- Chris Farley

Monday, 6:56 AM

Dear Friend,

I'd like us to work together.

See, I recently tested a new project… and the results were MUCH better than I expected.

In fact, the results were so amazingly good,  I've decided to drop everything and focus exclusively on rolling out this new project.

And that's where YOU possibly come in.

Do you have a list of business owners?

ANY kind of business owners?

…Online business owners (REAL ones… not the do-nothing dreamer wannabess who CLAIM they're "Internet Marketers" but don't actually have a REAL business), offline direct marketing business owners, copywriters, consultants, freelancers, brick & mortar business owners… or even professionals like doctors, accountants or, (God forbid) lawyers?

Do you need a speaker for a teleseminar, webinar or in-person seminar?

Although my copywriting fees have recently been raised to the "ridiculous" level… I'm actually a pretty cheap date when it comes to speaking at your event.

If it's the right audience, I'm available to speak for FREE at your teleseminar or webinar.

If it's an in-person seminar, I'll only need my travel expenses covered.

And remember, I grew up a lower middle class kid in Barberton, Ohio. I don't usually stay in suites with caviar, champagne and a personal concierge. (Although if you're paying for it, I'll reluctantly and graciously accept.)

What's the catch? Why am I such a cheap date?

It's simple…

I'd like to get in front of as many business owners as possible… as quickly as possible… to promote this new project I'm rolling out.

But don't worry…

Unlike most other seminar speakers, I'm not going to spend 10% of my presentation "teasing" and 90% pitching some overpriced "cutting edge breakthrough" $2,997 BSO (bright shiny object) product.

Quite the opposite…

My presentation will be 100% pure actionable content… that will GREATLY enhance the businesses, incomes and personal lives of everyone in attendance.

There will only be one quick little "by the way" mention I have something to offer… and it will be offered FREE.

And… there might be an opportunity for YOU to make a very nice recurring monthly income from all this, too.

Sound Interesting?

Click here to contact me with your e-mail, phone number and date(s) of your event.

Someone will get back to you very soon with my availability… or an appointment will be made so we can speak briefly by phone.

Thanks!

All the best,

P.S. I'm working on a new video you may find quite shocking.

I'm going to expose some little known "insider" secrets about a very famous Internet Marketing guru.

Stay tuned!

Monday, 9:41 PM

Dear Friend,

None of my usual Doberman Dan "banter" today. I have something very important and urgent to share with you and I need to cut to the chase.

Here's the deal:

A lot of business owners are struggling right now.

Maybe you, too.

And if something doesn't change soon, many of these business owners will not even be in business next year.

And that bothers me… especially because it doesn't have to happen.

See, for most of this decade many biz owners were doing pretty well with even just mediocre marketing.

That all changed in 2008… and the mediocre marketers started dropping like flies.

But there ARE a small group of business owners prospering right now in spite of the bad economy. These are the business owners who know a few simple techniques and secrets, when done correctly and consistently… can cause SUBSTANTIAL increases in your sales and profits.

And if YOU want to prosper and grow your business nowadays, it's CRUCIAL you discover and implement these secrets.

So I've set up a special teleseminar to reveal some of these secrets. I'm calling it…

"Make 2011 Your Best Year Ever!"

If you run ANY kind of business… online, offline direct response, freelance copywriting, consultant or you own a traditional brick & mortar business…it's CRUCIAL you attend this FREE teleseminar.

You'll discover some quick-to-implement secrets and techniques that can boost your income FAST.

I've found most business owners are working themselves silly to only make HALF (or less!) of what they were making just a few years ago… while unknowingly stepping over low hanging $100 bills that are just BEGGING to be grabbed.

I'm going to show you how to grab that low hanging (and profitable) fruit… quickly and easily.

My co-host for this free teleseminar is Mr. X from my recent seminar in Orlando.

Mr. X, aka Markus Allen, is going to reveal the jealously guarded secrets of some very successful "under the radar" online marketers. This is stuff you can easily add to your internet marketing arsenal to DRAMATICALLY multiply your online sales.

Markus showed me just one of these secrets a couple days ago and I was utterly mesmerized. I discovered a HUGE gaping hole in my website, leaking THOUSANDS of dollars… and I was completely unaware of it.

Just this one little tweak Markus showed me is going to provide a nice little five-figure raise next year… and it took me all of five minutes to implement it.

And that's just one of MANY things we're going to share with you.

If you want to get more customers, make more money and GUARANTEE 2011 is your most successful year ever… you simply CAN'T miss this FREE teleseminar.

Update: Our Thursday night teleseminar has come and passed. And it was just awesome. (But hey, I'm biased.) The recording is available for paid members of my "Doberman Dan" Secret Archive. Markus and I are doing a more comprehensive seminar on each and every Saturday in January… to participate, click here to get our "Low Hanging Fruit" business-boosting strategies…

All the best,

Dear Friend,

Last week I did a free teleseminar revealing how I leap-frogged over the "shameless whore" phase of freelance copywriting and jumped right into the high paying gigs.

My first official gig as a solo freelancer paid me equivalent to about $12,000 in today's rapidly declining dollar. (If things keep up, I'll have to adjust that to about $2 million in another few years!)

Anyhoo… if you made some excuse to miss it, you really did miss some good stuff. A lot of copywriters were slapped upside the noggin and had instantaneous paradigm shifts about this biz of putting pen to paper.

The ones who "got it" will…

Double, Triple or Quadruple
Their Income This Year!

But don't cry in your beer because you thought it was more important to catch the latest 30 Rock instead of being on my teleseminar. (I Tivo'd it. It was good, as usual… but my teleseminar was better, in my most humble, but accurate, opinion.)

Hey, you should know by now that DD's got your back. I recorded it for you.

Enjoy!

To hear your free MP3 click the play button below:

Big Bucks Copywriting Replay

All the best,

P.S. You're going to hear about my new protege program on the replay… but don't get your hopes up. It's already full.

And you REALLY missed out because it looks like I won't ever be offering this again.

See, after just preparing for the first official session starting next week, I've realized this is going to be a LOT more work than I anticipated… and I DRASTICALLY under-priced it.

These 11 proteges got the deal of a lifetime! Just one of their extra unannounced bonuses is worth more than the cost of admission.

So, sorry but you missed out on a truly once of a lifetime opportunity to work directly with me and get a LOT of personal attention.

Enjoy the replay anyway.

Dear Friend,

It's late and I can't sleep.

And counting sheep isn't helping. (Maybe I should try counting Dobermans instead, huh?)

See, I've been thinking about all the young copywriters I met at John Carlton's Action seminar.

A lot of these guys and gals are struggling. They're trapped in the "paying your dues" phase… or as John calls it… the "shameless whore" phase.

Have you ever been there?

You're stuck accepting crappy gigs you don't really want… with difficult clients who don't really "get" the value of what you do… for a mere pittance of what you should be earning.

You're scrambling for the meager scraps left over at the smorgasbord… after the "big dogs" have happily feasted on all the good stuff.

I'm Here To Tell You…
There's A Better Way!

You see, I never really had to pay my dues as a freelancer.

Instead, I used the leapfrog method… totally bypassing the shameless whore phase and jumping right into working with clients who pay the big bucks.

In fact, my first paid gig as a freelancer was $6,500. That's equal to about $12,000 in today's money.

And $12k ain't bad for the first time up to bat, is it?

Trust me… I didn't get paid that much as a beginning freelancer because I'm the "best copywriter in the world"… like a few delusional souls claim on their websites.

No, there's one very simple reason I was able to demand… and get… much higher fees than most rookie freelancers.

And I'm going to show how YOU can do it, too… because I'm revealing all my secrets in a FREE teleseminar entitled…

"How To Attract High Paying Freelance Gigs
And Make The BIG BUCKS As A Copywriter!"

After decades of staying under the radar, why am I revealing all my best secrets for making big money writing copy?

You see, I'm tired of seeing talented rookie copywriters suffering needlessly for years paying their dues, making a pittance and living hand to mouth.

I'm also tired of the newbies who try to "fake" their way into the bigger money gigs before they're ready. They're destroying their reputations, doing a HUGE disservice to their clients… and giving the rest of us copywriters a black eye.

Let me explain…

A lot of inexperienced copywriters think they can attract high paying clients by simply faking a successful veteran's posture and attitude.

These are the exact same guys who claim to be "the best copywriter in the world" on their websites and newsletters. They think it will work for them because it worked for Gary Halbert.

Frankly, I'm getting pretty tired of it… and it's starting to piss me off.

It worked for Halbert because he had the chops and experience to back it up.

The posers do not.

In fact, the only thing claiming you're the "best copywriter in the world" accomplishes is… it announces to all the real veteran players in this biz that you're nothing but a mediocre hack at best.

And frankly, it makes you look like an insecure, self-aggrandizing, chest-pounding arrogant ass.

The point of this little rant (besides chastising a couple people who truly deserve it) is…

You Can't Fake Your Way
To The High Paying Gigs.

And the truth be told… you're going to struggle for years in the "shameless whore" phase if you don't discover my secrets for getting through it as quickly as possible… or completely leapfrogging over it.

Once you put my secrets into practice, you'll never have to go begging for business. In fact, the high paying clients will seek YOU out.

You won't have to beg for scraps of leftover, gristly hamburger. You'll have an automatic client attraction system that brings you the "filet mignon" of freelance work.

Look… the bottom line is this:

If you want to make a sizable and predictable income as a copywriter, attract the best possible clients and get the highest paying jobs… you simply can't afford to miss this free teleseminar.

DATE & TIME: Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 8:00pm Eastern

FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it's your choice)

Click here now to reserve your spot in this free teleseminar.

As soon as you do that, I'll send the log-in details to you by e-mail.

I'm looking forward to seeing you on the call!

All the best,

P.S. I'd like to give you a copy of my actual client prospecting letter. The one I've personally used to get some big money freelance gigs.

In fact, I recently mailed this letter to a handful of PWM's (Players With Money). Within just DAYS I had two competing heavy hitter marketers frantically scrambling to to hire me before the other guy did.

One of the prospects that recently called me in response to my letter is a really famous marketer… literally a household name here in the U.S.  This guy has made… and is still making… tens of MILLIONS per month with infomercials.

If you're on the teleseminar, I'm going to GIVE you a copy of my letter… absolutely FREE!

Feel free to shamelessly swipe it and use it to get some "big bucks" clients for yourself.

But the ONLY way you're gonna get a copy is to be on the call. So…

Click here now to reserve your spot in this free teleseminar.

See ya this Thursday!

Dear Friend,

A few weeks ago one of the best copywriters in the world, Carline Anglade Cole, was kind enough to share her most effective copywriting secrets with me.

I posted the MP3 here… but you may prefer to get your info in writing… so your buddy DD is looking out for you. I had the recording transcribed. It's below.

Enjoy!

All the best,









P.S. Carline revealed a LOT about how to be a successful copywriter… but the secret she revealed about how to beat a control could be worth a literal FORTUNE for you.




Doberman Dan: Welcome everybody to another edition of Doberman Dan’s Doghouse and today I am quite honored to have Carline Anglade Cole with me today.  Carline, I guess I didn’t prep you for this, but you are in what is now known as “the doghouse.”

Carline Cole: Oh my, Dan.  Thank you like telling me that now, Dan.  I appreciate it.

Doberman Dan: Hey, if I would have told you that before you wouldn’t have done it.

Carline Cole: Well, you’re smart; you’re smart.  Okay; well I’m in the doghouse so let’s see what happens.

Doberman Dan: In the doghouse.  I gotcha’ locked in for the next 59 minutes or so.  This is quite an honor.  Thanks for doin’ this, Carline.  Carline is one of a handful of people in the world who can be called what we call an A List copywriter.  Carline writes controls for big, huge, heavy hitter direct marketing companies.

Carline specializes in what she likes to call and what I like to call homerun packages.  These are pieces that aren’t just successful for the client.  They completely knock the ball out of the ballpark and just crush controls and she’ll tell us more about that in a little bit, but Carline has an extensive history of writing control packages.

To tell you how difficult that is I should probably explain what a control is.  A control is a marketing piece, either sent direct mail or used on a web page or whatever that has been tested against other copywriter’s pieces and has, one, being the most responsive in pulling in the most orders.

When Carline writes a control she’s up against the best copywriters in the entire world.  So to win a control is a very difficult thing to do for these big companies and is something that very, very few people are actually able to pull off and Carline has done that time and time and time again for the past ten years.

So, welcome Carline, to Doberman Dan’s Doghouse.

Carline Cole: Wow!  You have this thing taped, right, because I gotta play that intro again.  I feel like whew, boy, am I busy.  What a great job.  So thank you for the intro and thank you for havin’ me.  It’s been a pleasure.

I met you what about a year ago now, Dan, when we got together for the boot camp?  And it’s been nice getting to continue to know you and to be at work with you.  So thank you for having me and hopefully I can help you and your listeners, your shy listeners to be able to write their own kick butt packages.

Doberman Dan: Well I really appreciate ya’ bein’ on the call and I should also tell ya’ that we’ve got a bunch of people listening in on the simulcast website, which is this is being broadcast on a website and unfortunately those people aren’t able to chime in over the phone, but they can send in questions and answers over the website.

So if you’re listening in on the website, there’s a box down there that you can send your questions in and Carline says she’s gonna do her best to answer all the questions.  So keep the questions comin’.

So Carline we may have some shy people on the actual phone lines, but we’ve got actually a good group of people listenin’ on the web cast.  So ya’ feel like you’re talkin’ to yourself, but there are people.

So I hope I did a good job of introducing you.   I wanted to try to just explain how difficult it is to do what you do.  Also, one thing I didn’t touch on is you have a pretty extensive direct marketing background.  You worked for a huge direct marketing company, Philips Publishing before you went freelance.  So could you fill in the blanks I missed about your background and tell us more about your background.

Carline Cole: Sure; I actually sort of stumbled in the whole direct marketing business, as most people that I talk to end up.  No one starts off in life sayin’ I wanna be a direct mail marketer or I wanna be a direct mail copywriter, but I’d had my second baby.  My second daughter was a year old and I was lookin’ for a part-time job near home.

I originally went to school, got my degree in broadcast journalism and I wanted to be an anchor woman.  That was my goal, but I got married, started havin’ babies.  Then I was broke.  My husband and I were both broke and we were tryin’ to just make ends meet and I just needed a part-time job so I could be a stay-at-home mom and just enjoy having my kids.

So there was a job opening for a customer service department at a small, growing company called Philips Publishing in Potomac, Maryland.  I thought this is great, this is only 20 minutes from my house and they said flexible schedule, which is what I needed because my husband was a firefighter and we were determined to make sure we took care of our kids ourselves and not to rely on daycare.

So I thought wow, if I can get a flexible schedule, part-time job would be perfect.  I interviewed with the company and it was like as soon as I got into that company I was like there is somethin’ different about this place.  The people there were very entrepreneurial and it was just a great place to be.

I was workin’ in customer service, answerin’ the phones, opening mail, whatever needed to be done and I gotta tell ya’, that was probably the best job I coulda’ had looking back now because that was the job that actually got me in touch with customers.  I was listening to what they wanted, what they needed and how we were fulfilling their needs and wants.

It was a really great experience and I was there only about a year in the department, but just knowing how important the customer service role is I never thought I would need that later on in my career, but boy, did I ever appreciate that job.

So after, like I said, about a year in the company, I wanted to move up and do other things.  I ended up in the accounting department for a short period of time.  Then from the accounting department I found out that they were starting up this whole health division.  They were looking for people for different positions.

I had no marketing skill, background at all.  I liked health as far as just general interest, but I didn’t have any experience as a health anything, marketer or writer, but the company, again being so proactive and open and I was able to pitch myself to the president of the company and tell him I wanted a shot at workin’ in this department.

I think I must have done a good job ‘cause I got hired as a marketing assistant; part-time again to be able to help launch the health group.  It was just me and the group publisher at the time.  We had this one little product called Cardiac Alert and our mandate was to find out if there’s a market here in this health field that we can grow a business in.

I was there for 12 years working in different areas in the marketing, started off as marketing assistant.  I eventually became assistant marketing manager, then a marketing manager and senior marketing manager to marketing director, then a group publisher.  So I definitely grew in the company in those 12 years.

It was awesome experience, again, understanding how marketing worked, what direct mail was all about and then as a marketer I got to see these copywriters who were coming in and writing this copy and were just given these huge checks.

I was like how in the world do I get to do this because they get to work anywhere in the world and all they have to do is meet their deadline.  Nobody cares.  They give us a winning package, give us a control and they get money and keep getting money every time.

So I definitely found quickly that that was a gig I wanted to get into, but I just didn’t have enough skills to do it that way.  So as a marketing manager anytime I had an opportunity to try to write some copy I would try to do it and then I’d get somebody who was better than me to critique it and look at it.

So I found that I had a little talent for the copyrighting part early on.  I actually had my big shot was when we had a special renewal.  We were trying to get subscribers to buy our vacuum products.  So we had this special report that we were going to try to sell and they needed a writer because the person assigned to do it evidently I think left the company or somethin’ happened last minute and it was a meeting thing.

‘We need somebody to write this.’  I was like, ‘I’ll do it.’  They looked at me like – ‘cause nobody else raised their hand I guess and I got the job.  I wrote this two-page sales letter to get the subscribers to renew their subscription to Health and Healing Newsletter by getting this free report.

It did a four percent response for the company.  We were happy with about a one to one and a half percent on the back end.  So that got the attention of people.  They were like, ‘Wow!  This is pretty good, Carline.’  I’m like, ‘Heck, I just wrote to my mom.’  That’s how I wrote it.  It wasn’t like to some vast majority of people.  I just wrote to one person saying if I could sell this to my mom then I’m doing my job and it worked great.

So I got the copyrighting bug right at that time knowing I gotta do this more, but it still took several years of me still working in the company to get myself out there.

It was October of 1998 when my husband and I decided that I was ready to make the move, he was ready for me to make the move years before, but I was too chicken.  I finally said, okay, I need to do this ‘cause my family by now had gotten to be four children and the job itself was just too restrictive for me because as a marketer you have to be in the office at set times; 8:00 till 6:00 at night.

So I was either workin’ all the time or thinkin’ about work when I was at home and I wasn’t happy with that mix and I really wanted to make a change just to be able to satisfy my personal life so that I enjoyed what I wanted, which is to be able to raise my kids and spend time with my husband and just enjoy life; not make work my life.

We bit the bullet.  We put together a six-month plan and says, okay, if I quit my job how much do I need to make to be able to do okay on this.  We paid off as many bills as we possibly could so that come January 1st, 1999 I was a freelancer.

It was the scariest thing I ever did, but it was the best thing I ever did as far as a job is concerned because once that happened and I was thrown in to the mix going ya’ gotta make it happen, then had to do it.  I took on assignments as consulting and whatever I could do to make ends meet ‘cause no one was giving me a shot as a copywriter ‘cause I had nothin’ but my one little sales letter to show what I could do.

It was about a year or so of me consulting.  Then while working with one company in Florida I was consulting with them and then there was a need for a copywriter and I told them, ‘Hey, give me a shot at doing this.’  They still wouldn’t give me a shot, even though I was workin’ for a year, but they kept saying, ‘We’ll think about it, we’ll think about it.’

Then in the meantime another friend of mine who was a list broker had a client who had a male potency product.  This client found out that about 40 percent of his market was African-American.  He had the bright idea that hey, if I get an African-American male copywriter to write my copy, maybe they’ll be able to sell better to my house frau, be able to make me more money because they can relate to the market more.

So, the list broker, my friend’s job was to find a Black male copywriter to fit the bill.  Well, he didn’t know any.  I was the closest thing he knew.  He said, ‘Well, aren’t you half Black?’  I’m like, ‘Yes, I am.’  So she said, ‘Well she’s a Black and German woman.  Will that work?’  He got me a conference call with a guy and I told him, ‘Oh yeah, I can really help you out with that, understanding the Black male.  I’m married.’  And this and that.  Told him all the stories about yeah, this is the best decision you could make.  I got hired for the job.

In all honesty it was the dumbest decision he could have made because race has got nothin’ to do with it.  A lot of the White copywriters that I work with, White male copywriters were writing control for Essence Magazine and Ebony Magazine, but yet nobody knows that.  So he was all wrong, but I wasn’t gonna correct his thinking at the time ‘cause I wanted the job.

I got the job, was scared to death.  I was writing a male potency product for a newsletter – I’m sorry.  It was a supplement.  Like I said, I was scared to death, but I did it and I ended up beating the control, which was written by a guy and that was the beginning of my story because now I can go to other people and other clients and say, ‘Hey, I wanna work for you.’  They’ll say, ‘Well send me your samples.’

I’ll just say, ‘Well no, let me just send you my latest control.’  My latest control was my only control, but who the heck cares.  I have somethin’ to show them.  Once I had that, the client that I had in Florida that I had consulted with, when I show them what I did then they gave me a job as a copywriter and then it just started snowballing from there.  It was writing the copy, it was working and I was getting more jobs.

Hey, did I answer your question ‘cause I tend to go off ______ all the time.  So let me know if I went off again.

Doberman Dan: No; that’s awesome.  That actually triggered a bunch of thoughts and questions.

First of all, I had no idea you had wanted to be a news anchor and I actually can see you in that position.  You would have been great at that by the way.

Carline Cole: Hey, at the time Connie Chung was just makin’ it big.  I was in California.  I was goin’ to USC.  Even when I was livin’ in Maryland and I was in high school, I just wanted to get in broadcast journalism.  That’s what I wanna do.

I went out to USC.  That was what I was gonna focus on and I never stepped foot in a broadcast studio after then.  When I got out of college I got my first job writing sales, ad sales actually.  So I was selling radio advertising.  Then I got married and then started having babies.  I, okay, put the career thing on hold and never went back into it.  It was like my whole life had changed ‘cause I didn’t wanna be owned, again havin’ to be – I wanted to be 11:00 news, but I didn’t wanna be on the news at 11:00 at night.  [Laughter]

If I ________ I gotta be on the air at work at 11:00 at night to be 11:00 news.  That’s crazy.  So life kinda’ changed that, but that was my dream job was to be an anchor, a broadcast anchor.  I got to meet and interview Connie Chung for my school paper.  That was like the highlight of my sophomore year in college was that interview because she was real.  She let me know the things I could expect as a female and everything else.

But like I said, oh well.  I think I made the right decision.  I am definitely not complaining.  I think the salary’s a little bit better doin’ what I’m doin’ right now.

Doberman Dan: Yeah; I would definitely agree you made the right decision.

Carline Cole: Yeah; and I don’t have to be up at 11:00 at night unless I want to.

Doberman Dan: That’s right.

Carline Cole: So that’s a big difference.

Doberman Dan: Hey, I wanted to ask you a couple things.  First of all, I noticed that your first year as a freelancer was not a walk in the park, but it sounds like you really reached out and started networking with a bunch of people to try to make some contacts, right?  Like you brought up somethin’ I think would be possibly a really good idea for beginning freelancers is to start making contacts with list brokers.

Carline Cole: Oh yeah.  I actually started making contact before I quit my job.  When I knew I was leaving my job – I went in there in October of 1998 to quit my job and my boss talked me out of quitting and told me that if I stayed until the end of the year he would fire me instead.  [Laughs] I was like okay, what’s the benefit of that?

He said, ‘Well, you quit, then you give your two weeks’ notice and you’re outta’ here, but’ he said, ‘you finish’ – I was workin’ on this huge project for a cruise line that we were doing and we had our core customers who were going to be on the cruise for our first seminar.  I was responsible for puttin’ that together.  My boss, who was the president of the company at the time just did not want any chances of anything going wrong with 800 people who are his core market.  So I was the one workin’ on that project.

So I was gonna quit and he was like, ‘No, I need you to make sure this happens.’  The cruise was in November.  So he said, ‘You finish, do an excellent job for me on this cruise and when you come back from the cruise I’ll fire you.’  If I get fired then I got a six month severance package waiting for me if I do that.  So I’m like, ‘Oh, well that’s pretty sweet.  That works.’

So that took a lot of pressure from me off initially because I did a great job for him and I got fired, but I had a little bit of a cushion as far as a severance was concerned.  So, October when I knew I was leaving, I was calling everybody and letting them know, ‘Hey, I’m gonna be leaving at the end of the year.’  We worked together.

Because at one point people were callin’ me for jobs.  Now I’m callin’ them and it’s totally different when you’re the one that’s calling and asking for the work.  It’s amazing how different it is and not having any samples to show for it, too.  So I really just used that time to try to do my best to connect with people and who I could take out to lunch and let them know what I wanted to, my goals were.

Fortunately I had a good relationship with people for the past 12 years when I was working there so that helped a lot, but it didn’t necessarily give me a job immediately.  So yeah, my first job was actually just consulting ‘cause I knew how to do mail plans ‘cause I did that in the marketing side.

A lot of companies out there just did not understand how to do them well so they wanted to hire me to do marketing jobs.  That was fine.  It paid the bills, but that’s not what I wanted to do.  I didn’t wanna be a marketer.  I wanted to be a writer, but at that time I just said hey, I’ll take whatever I can get ‘cause I wanna be able to build up the rapport and everything.

Yeah; that first year all I did was consulting.  I tell you, when that last severance check ran out, that was six months into me being a freelancer and there was no turning back trying to go back to my job ‘cause I’m sure they had filled it by then and if you would have moved on, it was pretty scary, but scary is good because fear is a great motivator.

So I just kept going with it.  The key is you can be scared inside, but don’t let it come off if you’re afraid because people can sense desperation.  You know how it is when you’re desperate for something, it never comes to you, but when you’re willing to let it go, then all of a sudden it’s attracted to you.  That is very true.

So I had to learn to just be cool, calm and collected.  When somebody told me, ‘Well we’ll think about you six months down the road.’  I’m like, ‘Okay; no problem.  I may be available by then, too, so it could work out great for both of us.’

I’m sitting there going oh my goodness!  I have nothing to do for the next six months.  But you just gotta play the game a little bit and keep at it, but not being too pushy.  Like when you call somebody up, you have something to say, have a reason.  Not just, ‘Hey, I need a job.’  But try to have something as a benefit to them, like you’re helping them out in that conversation.  Give them some advice or information or whatever that’s beneficial to them.

That’s how you build it up.  So they’ll take your phone call the next time you call because it’s not like, ‘Oh, she’s just calling to get a job.  This person’s got some knowledge for me that I can learn something from.’

It is definitely an acting game because you gotta play it cool sometimes.  Just you don’t come off too desperate, but at the same time you gotta go after the jobs because if not no one’s gonna come knock on your door to give it to you.  That doesn’t happen until you have already made it and you are successful.  Then people come and say ‘Hey, can I work with you.’ Kinda’ stuff.

But those first few years, oh heck no.  You gotta be out there aggressive and goin’ out for it.  So meeting anybody I mentioned.  List brokers are great contacts ‘cause remember, a list broker’s job is to get the right list for the clients and mail the promotion piece to.  So the list broker gets to see the creative that’s gonna be mailed to the list.  Sometimes the list broker knows who the copywriter is also.

If the list broker is good at his job, he’s gonna have a little bit of any onto what’s good copy and what’s not good copy.  He may have a good sense for that.

Fortunately my friend who was working at Walter Carl at the time, his name was Dave Nelson; Dave was very involved with his clients.  He saw the promotion pieces in advance.  He was more of a consultant with them also.  So they told him, ‘Dave, we’re trying to find a copywriter here who can help us.’  So Dave knew me.

I would never have gotten to this guy.  I didn’t even know who these guys were, but Dave knew them.  He says, ‘Well if you can do a good job for me, then that means for the client you’ll be able to give them more of a successful package. They can mail more of my names.  So it’s a win-win situation all around.’

That’s how I worked.  So list brokers are great sources, people to talk to.  If you know any of them, but just about anybody.  Letting anybody who’s in the field or anybody you know, let them know what you’re doing because they may know somebody who knows somebody who can help you out.

Doberman Dan: Extremely valuable advice, especially about when you’re desperate, you gotta fake it till you make it ‘cause people can pick up on that desperation, too.

Carline Cole: Absolutely.

Doberman Dan: You brought up somethin’.  What was I gonna ask you?  Oh, I remember.  What you did at Philips, being a marketing director, what were those responsibilities and do you think that helped you in copyrighting?

Carline Cole: Yes; my responsibilities as marketing director was to hire copywriters.  I was responsible for the creative side of the business.  So I would assign out the job to a particular copywriter who I thought would do the best job for the project and then the copywriter would send me the draft and I would look over it.

Then we’d have a meeting within the company to decide what we thought about the package, anything we thought could make it better stronger, whatever.  Then I’d go back to the copywriter and tell him or her what I thought about it and what we needed from them.

So I had a relationship with the copywriters and that’s how I met Clayton Makepeace.  Clayton was a copywriter.  Actually I wasn’t a marketing director then.  I was just a marketing assistant.  But he was the king of copywriters, especially for Philips.  He was writing all of the controls at the time on the health side.  So I would see his stuff.  I got to read his stuff.  I was like man, this stuff is good.  I wanna buy it and I can get this stuff for free.

So just from reading.  I spent years just reading the stuff that he would send in.hen he came in to meet with everybody he was just as nice, spoke to everybody and was like, ‘Hi.’  He knew my name, as a hi, as a friendly saying.  Not as necessarily somebody who’s gonna help him in his field.

But it was a great opportunity because I got to know who the copywriters were.  I got to create a friendship with them, with many of them.  So when I was ready to leave I was able to call many of them up and say, ‘Hey, by the way, I wanna compete with you in that sense ‘cause I wanna be a copywriter, too.’

So I didn’t get a whole lot of help from them, except for Clayton who he was like my biggest cheerleader, next to my husband.  He was like, ‘I can’t tell you _______ ‘cause they’re my biggest client.  I don’t wanna be accused of stealing employees.’  He said, ‘But when you decide to leave, you give me a call ‘cause I know you could do in this field.’

So when I did actually terminate my employment then I called him up and he’s the one that got me the first job with that consulting company in Florida because he was working with – it was Wice Research at the time and Clayton was working with them and they needed somebody to help with marketing.  So that’s how I got my first job.

It wasn’t a copywriting job, but it was my first job as a freelancer, which again knowing somebody to help me get in there.  So networking is extremely, extremely critical with this field because your reputation is everything.  You get a bad rep as a lousy copywriter or a hard to work with copywriter it spreads like crazy because it’s such a small industry.

So having a great reputation is a good thing.  Because, ‘Oh, she’s great to work with’ or ‘She’s fast.  She gets it done and she understands the market.’  Or whatever.  So those are the kinds of things that people say about you in the industry and that travels.

Marketing directors talk to marketing directors and they talk to other people.  They get their little seminars together and they start throwing names around.  It’s a way to grow your business when the people start calling you instead of you having to call them.

Doberman Dan: What are some of the biggest mistakes that you think beginning copywriters make or just copywriters in general, that would get that word goin’ on like, oh, this guy or gal isn’t that great to work with?

Carline Cole: This industry is a people oriented business.  That’s all it is.  You’re writing to people.  Your prospects are people so you have to understand your people.  You have to get hired by people.

When I was a marketing director I wasn’t gonna take a chance on a new copywriter.  If I knew my budget only gave me four new packages a year and I had four new packages to be able to make my quota or hit my budget, I’m not gonna take a chance on somebody who has no track record at all.

I’m gonna go after somebody who has a track record unless there’s a really good reason for me to take that chance because remember, I’m trying to cover my butt and keep my job as a marketing director.

You have to remember that as a copywriter.  Don’t take it personal if they don’t wanna talk with you or don’t wanna deal with you.  It’s only because they’re limited.  They have X amount of promotions that they can get out and they need it to be a success as much as possible.  That’s why they’re willing to pay the top dollars for the top copywriters because the track record is that much better.

So they’re gonna say, ‘Well do I wanna spend $5,000.00 on a new copywriter who has zero track record or do I wanna go ahead and pay $25,000.00 for a copywriter I’ve got about a 85 percent chance I’m gonna get a success with.’  That $5,000.00 starts looking very, very expensive in comparison to the $25,000 because you spend 5 grand and you lose it, you’re done.

It’s not that you just lost the $5,000.00.  That’s not the big deal, but you’ve lost that opportunity.  You’ve lost that slot to mail your packages.  You lost the chance to continue having a winner.  You’re back to the drawing board with the next mailing cycle, but you don’t have a control.  So that’s the opportunity cost.

So that’s why a lot of times it’s not about the money.  I know copywriters that charge $50,000.00 to write a package and they get it because they’ll deliver.  So they’ll not say, ‘Well I’ll just charge you 10,000.  I’m much better of a risk than that.’  No, you’re not.  Unless you’ve proven that you can write a package to get them a control, then they’re not gonna look at the money necessarily as the main issue.

Now having said that, you can still have a copywriter writing a package and getting paid $25,000.00 and it still not work, but the odds are more in favor.  As a marketing director I’m gonna go with my odds of getting the one who’s gonna give me the best for my money and that’s what I learned a lot as a marketing director.

I never took it personal when they wouldn’t hire me because I understood where you’re coming from.  You wanna save your job.  So my job is to get myself a reputation, get myself a history, a track record that I could show you, ‘Hey, you go with me, you’re not gonna go wrong.’  Then that’s when I think if you can get those two things goin’, then you’ll get the job.

Doberman Dan: That’s good advice and to have somebody who’s been on both sides of the table so to speak, hiring copywriters and then going after the work as a freelance copywriter.

Carline Cole: Yep; it’s definitely a difference, but like I said, I didn’t take offense when I didn’t get the stuff because I understood why.  Still got sad I didn’t get the job, but I understand the mind set of what was going on.  I didn’t take it personal and just kept goin’.  Alright; well I gotta prove to you.

Then I didn’t go after the big jobs initially either.  It’s like, like I said, get a smaller job.  Do something on the back end.  Those are a lot easier to get into to write the sales letters, the two-page, the four-page, six-pagers, eight-page letters to sell to existing customers.  That’s not as glorified of a job.  It doesn’t pay as much, but still it gets you into the company.

You write a couple of those packages for them and they’re making money from it, well now they’re willing to take a chance on you on something like a direct mail piece because they go, ‘Well, she’s written for us on the back end and she’s done very well here.  Why don’t we give her a shot at working for us to acquire customers.’

Doberman Dan: That’s a great way to get your foot in the door then.  Ask the marketing director, ‘Hey, is there something like a newsletter insert or a back end promotion I can start with to prove myself to you?’

Carline Cole: Yep; exactly.

Doberman Dan: I wanna ask you about Clayton Makepeace in a second and your working with him, but first I just wanna address the folks listening in on the web cast web page ‘cause we got a nice group of people on there.

Carline, you never do these things, do you, Carline?

Carline Cole: No; this is my first one.  I’m a virgin.

Doberman Dan: You’re a _______ and you told me you have avoided doing these for ten years.

Carline Cole: Yeah.  I remember one time Clayton interviewed me one time.  It wasn’t for a web cast.  He interviewed me and he did it for his newsletter, for his total package newsletter.  That was fine.  That’s really the only thing I’ve done.

I’ve done a couple interviews, but this is my first one.  Yeah; I don’t know.  I don’t know what you guys wanna hear so it’s a lot easier if somebody asks me a question, I can answer what you want instead of me just rambling on and on about stuff because I can’t tell.  I feel like I’m in a vacuum.  I can’t tell.  Are you interested in this or what.  So I just go ugh, yuck, forget it.  I’ll just stop.  I won’t do this.  I’ll just write copy instead.

Doberman Dan: Here’s the deal, folks.  This may be the only time in your life you’ve got access to a copywriter this good, an A-List copywriter, which there are literally a handful of in the U.S. who are good enough to do the kind of work Carline does and you’ve got her at your disposal to ask any question you want.  So there’s a question box there on the website.  Just go ahead and submit your questions.  If you’re shy I won’t even mention your name with the question.  So we’ll handle it that way.

While they’re in the process of sending questions, Carline, I wanna ask you about how you got to work with Clayton Makepeace and how that was for you, if that was intimidating or scary or what.

Carline Cole: When I worked with him as a freelancer or when I worked with him as a marketing director?

Doberman Dan: Yeah; when you worked with him as a freelancer.

Carline Cole: Oh my goodness.  That was awesome.  What happened was Clayton – I had written some things before and like I said, I studied his stuff all the time, the nuance in his copy.  I just think he is just a brilliant writer and he can just nail his market like nobody can.

He wrote a launch package for a women’s health letter that you would have sworn a woman wrote that.  If you’ve met Clayton you know he is anything but a woman.  So, just the fact that he just can get into the mind set of his market was just awesome.

So I got a chance when I was working with a client in Florida – this is a kind of cool story – we got assigned to work on a project and this was like my first big direct mail piece.  I did the one on the male potency before then, but this one I’m working on it and got the job ‘cause the client felt like that he had this idea where it was a product.  It was a newsletter, but we were gonna talk about – it was like a sex approach to it, the difference in women and men and just issues about sex, getting older.

He thought, alright, well let me pair Clayton up with Carline.  So that here you got Carline, a female, and then Clayton a male and then maybe that would really help make the package really strong.

Then at the same time I was getting the training from Clayton because I would write copy and just make sure that – I knew I was covered.  I had a little net there in case my stuff really sucked, then he would be there to tell me no, this is weak, this is weak, go back and fix it or whatever.  So it was a great opportunity.

We ended up working on that package.  I would write stuff that I just thought was so wonderful and I’d send it back to him and he’s like, ‘Nope.’  Like mark it all up and get back and do this.  You _______ talking to and this and that or whatever.

So I got a lot of that working with him.  He uses a lot of cuss words.  I can’t say them all, but one point when I did the male potency package I had him look it over for me and his one comment was, ‘You write like a f_ _ _ in’ girl.’  I’m like, ‘Um, I am a girl.’  He’s like, ‘Yeah, but your market isn’t.’  That was probably the best crit I ever got in my life.  It’s like it’s not who you are.  It’s who you’re writing to.

So, that’s why I say that whole story about having to have an African-American male writer to understand the Black male potency market is a bunch of crap ‘cause the majority of people that I write to are White males over 50.  The last time I looked in the mirror I was none of those things.  [Laughter]

That’s got nothin’ to do with it.  It’s about talkin’ to people and addressing their problems and giving them a solution.  So anyway, we get going on this sex package and I’m writing it and I’m working on it and I’m really just trying to do my best on it and everything else.

We write the package and it is kickin’ butt.  It is doin’ so well and the client was so proud of himself ‘cause it was his idea to put a male and a female writer together to come up with this idea.  The headline was Forbidden Secrets of Sex and Healing or something like that I think.

So we were writing on that right there.  So Martin’s on the phone, Martin Wice is the president of the company in Florida.  He’s like, ‘Aww, this is great.  The results are phenomenal.  I’m really excited about that.’  He goes, ‘When I read about the tenderness and the compassion in the copy.’  I go, ‘Oh yes, that’s Carline coming through.’  I’m like, ‘No, actually that was Clayton.’

Then he’s like, ‘Oh okay.’  He goes, ‘But then when I read about the thrusting and the’ [Laughter] all of these guy terms he started using, he goes, ‘I knew Clayton was comin’ through for me.’  I’m like, ‘No, actually that was me.’  We had totally ended up changing roles and writing that copy that Clayton wrote a better copy as a woman and I wrote better copy as a man for that piece.

So whatever it took it worked and that was the package that actually I put a swimming pool in my backyard with the royalties on that package.  So ___________________ –

Doberman Dan: Oh, great.

Carline Cole: Yeah; it was pretty cool.  Clayton’s a wonderful person to work with, but he is an experienced wrier and he knows what works.  So like I said, he’s a wonderful person, wonderful friend, but the crit he will give you on your copy will make you wanna cry, but if you go back and make the changes he suggested you got a good chance of getting a winner when you do that.  So that was a really powerful lesson to learn.

I let anybody crit my copy.  I have just put my ego on a shelf and I’ll let somebody read this and I’ll just say, ‘What do you think?  When you’re reading this, mark where you get bored and mark where you feel like you mind just dazed on me or what you like, what you didn’t like.’  I have no problems.  Just tell me because I’m writing in a vacuum so I need to get some feedback from people and see what they think about things.

Sometimes I’m saying something and then once I hear somebody else say it, I’m like ooh, you’re not reading it like I said it.  So obviously that’s my fault so I gotta go back and fix it accordingly.  So it was very, very beneficial and I worked with Clayton for a few years when I first got started just doin’ stuff.

He had extra work I would do for him and what not.  Those were extremely important years because it helped me create my copy, helped me tighten up my copy, helped me really focus on who I’m writing to and what’s the benefit.

At the same time, I then started developing my own style where I’d see what he was saying and I would say, mm, but I’m gonna break that rule.  Then I would try my own way and do things, but I had to know what the rules were first before I could break them.  He was just an awesome master.  The fact that he’s got a website now and all that stuff he was teaching me, he put it down in writing and it’s free.  [Chuckles]

So it’s like you’d be crazy not to take advantage and just reading the stuff that he writes because the dude is phenomenal.  That’s all I have to say.

Doberman Dan: Yeah; I agree.  I met him at your seminar last year and he’s just a really nice salt of the earth type person.  His wife Wendy, too.  But I’m sittin’ there havin’ dinner with him, hangin’ out with him and we’re laughin’ and havin’ fun, in the back of my mind I’m thinkin’ he’s a really nice guy, but I imagine he’s just like a bear on crit and copy.

Carline Cole: Yeah; and the thing was, he always says, ‘You know I love you, but.’  Then he gets to the crit, but you gotta realize, you separate the two.  It’s got nothin’ to do with – yeah; everything you saw in him at that dinner that we had is exactly how he is.

He is down to earth.  He is no pretense about him.  What you see is what you get, but he also understands the business and it’s like the business is you gotta write copy that you’re competing against other people.  You gotta make a killer copy.  You’ve gotta do these things.

So yeah, when he’s looking at your copy, you don’t want – I don’t want somebody to crit my copy going, ‘Oh, this is really nice.  This is sweet.  This is good.’  I don’t care about that.  Tell me where the problems are.  What do you see.  What is the issue.

That’s what you want when anybody’s looking at your copy.  You want them to go at it and say, ‘Ya’ know what?  You lost me here.  What are you trying to say?  Well that’s a confusing illustration.’  Or, ‘You could make this a lot simpler.’

So he may say it in other words, but that’s the bottom line is his goal is to help you get a stronger sales letter that you can get out there and make a winner.  So I learned, like I said, having been thrown in it that way, I do not take offense.

If somebody tells me my copy sucks, I’m like, ‘Really?  Where?  Tell me where it sucks.  What do you suggest?’  I don’t mind.  I still like that, even to this day.  I will have somebody look at my copy and tell me what they think about it and if they hate it, I respect it and tell me where you think it’s terrible and I will try to fix it.

So that’s what it was like.  It was the best experience to be able to have someone like that take the time to do it and help you out.  That was phenomenal.

Doberman Dan: One of the questions we got and you answered a lot of it, but see if this triggers anything else.  They ask, ‘When you studied under Clayton Makepeace how much different was your copywriting skill, studying and working under a master?  What did he change in your writing?’

Carline Cole: He just taught me to focus on my market.  To who I’m talking to.  First thing is your promotion is gonna initially get mailed to about 20,000 to maybe 100,000 people to see if – you’re gonna test it to see if it works.

If it works, you hope that they will get mailed millions of times.  If you’ve got a strong package they can mail that package half a million pieces every couple months easily; millions and millions.  Clayton has packages that have mailed 25 million pieces over the years.  So yeah, all these people will be able to see your package, but the bottom line is you are writing to one person.

So he taught me to really think about who I’m writing to and visualize that person and understand their problems and not talk to them at arm’s length, but talk to them like I’m putting my arm around them that’s saying, hey, you know what?  When you getting’ up and you gotta sit up first before you can put your feet on the floor ‘cause you know if you try to stand straight up your knees will kill you.

Yeah; he just taught me to talk to people so that while they’re reading my copy they’re just nodding their head yes, that’s me, yes, that’s me, yes, that’s me.  You know me, you know me.  I think that was a huge lesson learned because that is what you have to do.  You’re writing a sales letter.  It’s a personal letter.  You have to forget that it’s going out to a lot of people, but just say no, it’s only gonna go to one person.

That first letter I told you I did when I was working at Philips, I wrote that vitamin letter.  I wrote to my mom.  I even had her name in the letter because I said oh, no, I’m talking to my mom here.  That’s what did it because I knew the problems my mom was struggling with when it came to understanding vitamins and supplements and all that.

So I just said she always talks about this.  She says these things.  She uses these words.  So I just did what she told me.  So in essence, copywriting is the easiest and the most difficult job at the same time.  It’s the easiest job because all you have to do is give people what they want.  That’s it.

The hardest thing is you gotta find out what it is they want and you gotta put it in a way that they’re gonna wanna hear it, but if you’ve got joint pain and I’m talking to somebody with joint pain I’m gonna use the words and I’m gonna talk about the stories and illustrations, examples, whatever that they can relate to.

It’s not about joint pain.  It’s about being able to pick up your grandchild without having your knees scream or your back go out or all these other kind of things.  It’s about being able to toss the ball with your arm.  So it’s not just shoulder pain.  It’s lifestyle that’s affected.  It’s about sitting down in a chair and watching your grandchild play the game versus being right there on the team with them.

So that’s what the experience with him and just reading his copy.  Whenever I read Clayton’s copy I just feel like they’re just talking to me.  Whoever it is is writing to me, this person knows me.  He’s talking directly to me about my issues and that is the key I think to being successful in writing a sales letter is just connecting with your market.  So that was what I learned the most.

The other things as far as the studying the masters and the various copywriting tools and rules and all this kind of stuff, that kind of came along with the territory, but I could have gotten that from a book.  It’s good to have that information, but I think that was the experience with Clayton being able to take my copy ‘cause I remember I would turn in copy to him and I’m thinkin’ this is great.

He’ll look at it.  He goes, ‘Alright, this is not bad.  This is pretty good.’  By the time I see my copy I think he left like three words.  It’s like where the heck is my copy?  Where’d it go.  He goes, ‘No, no.’

But what I was doing at one point for him was I was doing the draft and getting it to him, but to me it was a final, but to him it was just a first draft ‘cause he would just take that and then he would massage it and do his own thing.

So I’m going, ‘This is not my copy.  This is good copy.  That’s not what I sent him.’  But that was one thing that we did a lot where I would turn in something to him.  If he had a lot of projects to work on, he had me maybe work on a couple of sidebars, to write that copy for him.  Then I would write it and I would give it to him.

I’m waiting for the final piece to see my sidebar and like I said, it’s not there.  The thought is there, but he just took it to a whole new level.  That was like wow, I wish I had turned that into you instead of you having to redo it.  He was like, ‘That’s okay.  You’ll get there.’  And eventually I did.

Doberman Dan: Ya’ know you talkin’ about knowing your market and relating to your market and how that first letter you wrote you actually to your mom, you taught me somethin’ last year that every time I go to Walmart I think about.

You said, ‘When you go to Walmart look at the people around.  Those are the prospects.  Those are the people you’re writin’ for.’  Instead of goin’ to Walmart, like tryin’ to go in there and get everything done real fast and drag my wife out of there as quickly as I can, I’ve been goin’ in – course, every time I go to Walmart I think of you.  I don’t know if you think that’s –

Carline Cole: [Laughs] I love Walmart.  Are you kidding me?  That’s my favorite store in the world.

Doberman Dan: Every time I go there I’m there with my antenna up.  I’m observing people.  I’m actually eavesdropping on conversations.  I’m watching couples fight about what they gotta take out of their cart ‘cause they don’t have the budget for and it’s been really good for me to –

Carline Cole: It’s real life.  Walmart is real life.  At least in our marketplace.  If you’re into a high end – if I was sellin’ luxury automobiles, then Walmart may not be my ideal test market, but I’m sellin’ supplements to over 50 year old people, not necessarily affluent, but not poor either.  Just run of the mill people who have pain and they don’t wanna use drugs.  They want an alternative to their drugs.  That’s what they’re looking for.

I’m at Walmart and I’m listening.  I’m kind of eavesdropping.  I’m talking to people.  Just hearing what they’re saying and just making little mental notes of the words that they use and how they use it and what they’re frustrated about.

You can pick up all that stuff just hangin’ around there and just startin’ a conversation with somebody there who you feel is more your market or just watching people.  Somebody with arthritis.  Watch how they have to go pick up a jar.  Watch how they try to open up a jar.  Look at their face, the pain.  Get a visual imagery of all that kind of stuff because now when you’re writing to somebody with joint pain you can talk about that if you don’t have it yourself.

I am just now becoming my market.  I just turned 48.  So I’m not even at my 50 year old market yet.  So I’ve been in this business for 25 years so I’ve had to rely on other people to me to fuel myself to understand when they’re talking about joint pain, they’re talkin’ about blood sugar problems, talkin’ about all these issues that they have with their health, I have to rely on my grandmother and my mom and my father-in-law and all these people who are the market.  So I’ve gotta talk with them and see what they think about it.

Unfortunately now I have those pains so I can relate to them myself.  Like ow.  It’s just now that I’m starting to become my market for the most part, but doesn’t mean I can’t write about it for them if I know what their problems are and I’ve got a problem that can solve their issues.

Doberman Dan: That’s right.  Obviously you don’t have to be your market with the successes you’ve had, with the things you’ve written for.

Here’s a good question that just came in.  ‘What are your top three secrets for beating a current control?’

Carline Cole: My number one secret for beating a current control is never go after a hot control.  That’s just ridiculous.  The thing is every control has a life cycle.  So it could be a hot, successful control.  Why would you go after it when it’s at that point.  Let it go ahead and go through its cycle of it’s gonna be hot.  Eventually if a marketer’s doin’ his job right he’s gonna mail the heck out of that package.  The package is _________ fatiguing so the responses will become less and less fantastic.

Well when that happens, then you go after the control.  Don’t have your little text panel going up against a smokin’ hot control ‘cause you’re probably gonna lose.

But if you give it some time and that’s when somebody calls me and goes, ‘Hey, we have this package right now and it’s really doin’ well in the mail and we just think we could do better.’  I’m like, ‘Mm, ya’ know what?  Call me back in six months and let’s talk about it then.’  Because that’s ridiculous.

You wanna play your odds.  It’s an odds game.  That’s why I can say hey, 85 percent of my packages are controlled.   That’s an odds game.  The reason is that I’m not gonna go after a hot package because the odds of me beating that package are gonna be slimmer because first of all, I already know it’s already by an experienced copywriter.  So that is one of the things where I’m like, mm, I’ll just wait it out.

I learned that from Gary Bencivenga at his seminar a few years ago and if Gary Bencivenga won’t do it, why the heck am I gonna go and do that.  So that’s probably my number one secret is just if they tell you we have a package, we’ve mailed it for awhile.  It has definitely fatigued, then great.  This is the time to step in and come up with an idea of something that could possibly beat it because the package is fatiguing.

No matter how fantastic a package is it eventually will fatigue.  There are some packages that are called evergreen because they’ve been mailing for ten years or more and they’re still doing well.  That’s great, but there aren’t that many of those around.

Most packages within a year’s time or so start to fatigue because they’ve been over mailed and people have seen them enough. They’re recognizable and so it dies out.  It happens to my stuff all the time.  That’s why we have more work.  One package fatigues and the other one comes in.  So that would be the number one.

Now the question was again what’s my secret for beating a control?

Doberman Dan: Yeah; top – and that first one is a huge, huge secret.

Carline Cole: That’s huge; yeah; that’s huge.  Number two.  Oh, number two is don’t’ be afraid to beat your own control.  In fact, that’s the best scenario to be in.  I like it when my client tells me, ‘Hey, Carline, your package is fatiguing.’  Then what I usually will do I’ll say, ‘Hey listen, let me give you some new headlines.  Let me give you a new cover test.  Let me give you something to tweak the package to keep it going.’

That helps me because it keeps my royalties coming in, but even after several months of doing that, eventually my package is going to fatigue and a new package will be needed.

I love it when my client says, ‘Hey, your package is pretty much fatigued right now.  You wanna write a new package?’  I’m like, ‘Oh heck yeah.’  So being able to beat my own control is a great thing to do.  I have no loyalty to my controls.  They did their job.  Now it’s like okay, try to do something better from there.  So that was my second one is don’t be afraid to go after and beat your own control.

The third one for beating a control would be, there are a lot of crappy products out there.  I shouldn’t say crappy products.  There are a lot of crappy products out there, but I mean there are a lot of packages that aren’t that well written.  So a lot of crappy copy out there I should say more so.  So look for those.

If you get something in the mail and you think you can beat that package, get in touch with the marketing director or whoever you can make a contact with in that company and you’ve gotta prove to them why you think you can beat it, but go for it.

I had that experience happen with a weight loss product.  I’m not big on the weight loss stuff.  That’s not really me ________ don’t like it as far as what I like to write about, but a client of mine has this package that I got in the mail.  I recognized, I knew it was his.  He’s one of my clients.  I read this thing and I’m going, okay, they’re targeting 40 plus year old females.  Why is this not appealing to me at all as a member of that marketplace.

I read it and I just thought man, this copy is not good at all.  Why in the world did he even bother mailing this.  It’s confusing.  It’s this.  It’s whatever whatever.  That was my take on the copy.

So I called up the client and I asked him.  I said, ‘Okay, what the heck are you doing here ‘cause I don’t understand – if this thing is a control – you might as well shoot me because I would not even think that was the case’  He said, ‘No, I’m struggling with it.  It’s not doing well.’  Whatever.

I was like, ‘Well here’s why.’  I started talking about different things that could be done to make the package better and what not.  Finally he’s like, ‘Well ya’ know what?  Why don’t you write me the package yourself.’

I got the job right there on the spot to write a new package because I called him up to tell him hey, this is why this package – I said, ‘I know it’s not working.’  Just because of what I thought and I could have been wrong and he could say, ‘No, it’s the best thing in the world.’  I would say, ‘Okay, thanks, have a good day.’

But my gut instinct was no, this is not working well at all and I was right.  So I just said, ‘Ya’ know here’s why.’  That’s like giving away free advice.  Sure, the client could have said, ‘Ooh, I’m just gonna take everything Carline says and then give it back to the writer and tell the writer to do that.’  That’s fine, but my clients don’t really do that kind of stuff.  They know that is become second hand information and it may or may not work out the way I’m suggesting it.

So he got tired of me giving him ________ suggestions and he goes, ‘Well you just write one yourself.  Write it for me.’  And I did.  I wrote that package in a weekend and I beat it.  I beat the control.  So that’s the thing.  So my third secret would be look for the really weak stuff out there and go after those.

Gary Bensivinga calls those the low hanging fruit.  He’s like, ‘You don’t have to go all the way to the top of the tree to eat.  You can get the low hanging fruit.  Beat those.  Beat these things that you’re like oh man ‘cause now you’re building a reputation, you’ve got samples, you’ve got credibility and it wasn’t that hard.

The secret really is you don’t have to be, on a scale of one to ten, you don’t have to be a number ten or a number nine kind of copywriter.  You’ve just gotta be one better than the existing control.

So if you can assess that control as being, on a scale of one to ten, that control’s about a five, then you better write a six copy.  If your copy’s a six you’ve beat the control.  So you never made it to being a ten.  It doesn’t matter.  The client thinks you’re wonderful ‘cause you beat the control.

Then you can keep getting better.  So if the control’s a three, just be a four and you’ve got a winner.  I gave you three.  Not bad.

Doberman Dan: That’s awesome.  That’s great advice.  I know we’ve got a lot of beginning copywriters on the call.  You just have taken away all their excuses.  That’s awesome.

Ya’ know what?  It’s 2:57.  I know I said 60 minutes.  There’s a couple more questions if you don’t mind hangin’ around just a few more minutes –

Carline Cole: Well I do have to get this design okayed also.  I can hang on a little bit longer, yes, but I do have to get back to work.

Doberman Dan: I’m gonna read you a question and then I’m gonna tell you what I think he’s really saying.

Carline Cole: Okay.

Doberman Dan: It says, ‘What is the first step Carline takes when she’s building a letter?  The offer, the header, the bullets, study a control, drinking your favorite tea, etc.?’  Let me paraphrase what I think he’s saying ‘cause I hear this from a lot of copywriters.

It is hard getting started.  How in the world do you get started when you got all this information in front of you and now all of a sudden you’re looking at a blank page in Microsoft Word?  How do you go about it?

Carline Cole: The way I used to do it is I’d have a panic attack and then just run away from my computer, but I found that that doesn’t really help me get over the problem.

So the best way I get – and I do this all the time.  I’m just starting a new project right now actually and this is exactly what I do.  The thing is you never wanna start with a blank screen and if you’re a copywriter you never have to start with a blank screen.  Why?  Because guess what?  Every sales letter, every promotion has – there are certain elements that are definite elements that must go in your sales letter.

For example, you need an order form, you need a guarantee.  Those are two things that are definites.  You know you’re probably gonna have testimonials in there.  So here’s three elements right there.

I do work on my quality and control sidebar, explaining why the company is so good and how they go about making their nutrients and ingredients so much different than everybody else.  So those are all kind of staples in every one of my packages.

So I call up a Word file, a document file and I’ll name it immediately the name of the project and then draft one and the date.  Then I will immediately go from an old project, if it’s from one client I’ll go to the same client’s file and go and pick up an old order form, an old guarantee, some testimonial sidebar or something and I put those in the copy immediately because that means I’m not staring at a blank page.

All of a sudden just by cut and pasting I’ve got four pages of copy.  That ain’t _________.  I didn’t even – [Phone ringing]

Doberman Dan: _______________.

Carline Cole: Let’s see.  I can let that call go through.  Unfortunately it’s gonna ring.  Sorry about — _________ I may lose you so I’m gonna let it ring over to the other _________ and hope _________.

Can you still hear me okay now?

Doberman Dan: Yeah; I appreciate you sticking around.  We’ll only do one more question.

Carline Cole: Yeah; that’s okay.  I’ll call them back later.  What was I saying?  So put those elements immediately in your Word document because now you’re not staring at document – what I always do is I will highlight all of the elements that I know I’ve just dropped in place, I’ll highlight them in yellow or green.  One color, pick one color that tells me this is not original copy. This is a cut and paste job.

I just throw that in there and say okay, I’ll get back to that later.  It’s like huh, I’ve already done three pages already.  Whew.  You know you’re gonna need a headline somewhere, your sales letter has to have a headline.  So just put in in big 24 or 48 point impact font, big frickin’ headline goes here and just leave it alone for now.  You’ll get that later.

So that’s how I’ll start my package.  Then I usually take a break ‘cause that was hard work cutting and pasting ya’ know.  Then I will start my research.  My clients used to send me research kits.  Now everything comes by e-mail so I’ve gotta spend a day almost printing out tons of stuff, PDF files or Word docs or whatever and I’ll have a stack I’m looking at.

I’ll just pick a small chunk of it and I’ll just start reading.  As I’m reading the information, as I read something I think is interesting I call my aha moments, like oh, that’s interesting, I didn’t know that, aha.  Then I’ll just stop what I’m doing and I’ll just type it up or I’ll copy and paste it into my Word document.  Then I just move on.

If I have an idea as I’m writing – like right now I’m working on a project.  I haven’t even started the letter, but I’ve already got four different cover tests for it.  So I got these ideas as I was reading the research.  I’m like ooh, _________ covers.  I have all the covers done, but I haven’t gotten one single word of sales.

I have no idea what my theme is.  I don’t know anything else about it, but I know I like these ideas for covers.  They may or may not end up being in the final, but that’s okay.  It’s no problem.

So I’ll just read and if I find an aha moment I’ll stop, type it in, cut it, paste it in.  If I think it’s gonna be a sidebar I’ll just put it in bracket SB for sidebar, a bracket and then drop the copy in there, but it may end up being in the main letter later on.  I don’t know, but I don’t care.  I’m not limiting myself at this point.  I’m just gathering information.

By the time I’ve gone through all of the research information that they’ve sent me and read the books and everything else that they’ve sent me I usually have about a 30 to 50 page document I’m looking at, which is nothing but just ideas and thoughts I’ve just thrown into this document.

It’s all hairy-carey helter-skelter and it makes no sense at all yet, but it’s okay.  Then when I’ve done all my research, then for the most part whatever I’ve put in that document is what I’m gonna now either go in and weed out or enhance and that’s gonna eventually become my sales letter, my sidebars, anything else I need to have.

Then I’ll just go back to the order form and the guarantee and I will rewrite those when it’s time to get to that point.  If I have ideas of what I wanna write for or special report or premium I wanna give away I’ll put little notes to myself in that document.  That is how I write package.  There’s no mystery to it.

Once I do that, then it’s just – all that information – what did Michael Angelo – was it Michael Angelo, one of the real famous painters that they said they look at a slab of marble or whatever and they just chisel away at the stuff they don’t need and then there’s a masterpiece right there.  That’s how I look at the copy.

I have all of this information on here.  Then I start goin’ back at it.  I’m like ah, that’s kinda’ lame.  So on the very bottom of the document form I’ll have a section that says, ‘Extra Copy.’  I’ll just cut it out, cut it out of my main letter.  So I’m cutting up the stuff I don’t need and then I start moving some sidebars into a letter or taking some letter out and put into a sidebar, turning it into a poll quote or a great testimonial gets included in my letter.

That’s how I do it.  I just keep cutting away at the stuff I don’t need until the real good stuff is left behind

Doberman Dan: There ya’ go.  An awesome technique for not only relieving the blank page anxiety, but for getting things started and how to complete a package.  That’s awesome.

I personally have like a million other questions, but I’m just gonna ask one more from the subscribers.  ‘What do you see is the future of direct response copywriting?  Are there trends with social media?’

Carline Cole: If there are I don’t know if they are in all honesty.  I am so not social media oriented.  I don’t have a Facebook.  I’m not linked into anything.  I’m just happy I have a website now and I have a Blackberry.  That’s my social media.

People ask that question a lot as far as do I think direct response is gonna be dead.  I remember that controversy coming up when the internet first came up.  It’s like oh, that’s gonna be the end of direct mail.

I personally think that as long as we have humans living on this earth we’re gonna have a need for communication.  So in some form or another direct response is not gonna go anywhere.  It may take on different nuances.

For example, when I first started off I was a direct mail copywriter.  Now I write for the internet, too, but it wasn’t that hard of a transition because guess what?  Internet copy still is a sales copy.  You still have to catch the attention.

It may be laid out differently.  It may use different fonts and that kind of stuff, but for the most part it’s still a sales letter.  So I think you’re still gonna need to communicate with your marketplace.

Now the medium, how they do it with the Twitter and the social marketing and all the kind of stuff that they’re doing, I don’t know.  That’s not where my market is right now.  Maybe I should get better at it right now, but if I don’t, it gives somebody else a chance to become a pro at it.

I saw the transitions that I had to make into the internet and it was kind of scary at first ‘cause it’s like oh no, you have to write short copy for the internet.  That’s not true.  You write copy until it sells.  That’s the bottom line, whether short, medium or long.  That’s not necessary and you can always test it to find out does long copy pull ‘cause many times long copy pulls better than short copy on the internet depending on what the product you’re selling and what your offer is.

Many of my clients have just taken my entire direct mail piece and put it on the internet with very minor editing to it.  So I see that.  The bottom line is you still have to be able to write good, convincing copy to be able to sell a product.

So I think as long as people are selling something and they need a way to communicate their message to their prospects that the salesman is not gonna go anywhere or copywriter is not gonna go, but how my job evolves in the upcoming years, I don’t know.  I’m must willing to go with it.

I’ll go ahead and learn what I need to learn and get with the flow so I can keep myself employed.

Doberman Dan: Exactly.  Carline, I really appreciate you doing this.  I didn’t tell you this before the call, but I did an article about this, too.  I had a little health scare recently that made me kind of start reevaluating things.  I got to think, ya’ know, what are people gonna say about me when I die.

So the DobermanDan.com I decided it’s gonna be my legacy.  I’m gonna teach everything I know about starting direct response businesses and being a kitchen table entrepreneur and this’ll be my legacy.  I just can’t thank you enough that you have decided to be a part of my legacy by being on this call.  So this –

Carline Cole: Wow!  I didn’t know I was being part of a legacy in this call.  Woohoo.  Thanks for –

Doberman Dan: You are and actually in more ways than one.  First of all, you kicking my butt last year at the seminar and telling me to get back to work as part of –

Carline Cole: Yeah; ___________________ that was good; okay.

Doberman Dan: So yeah; I can’t thank you enough for taking the time out to do this thing.  You write an awesome e-zine newsletter.  So would you please give out your website address so people can sign up for that?

Carline Cole: Sure.  It’s CarlineCole.com, C-A-R-L-I-N-E and C-O-L-E.com and on my website you can sign up for my copy star newsletter, which I need to get an issue out soon.  It’s August already so I need to write one in the next couple of days so I have a new one coming out there.

But I just write the newsletters and share what I know, what I’m doing lately and what I think’ll work and help copywriters ‘cause I know it’s tough.  I’ve been there and I get tons of people asking me to help them out and that wanna be a copy cub, but I just can’t do it all.

I left the corporate world ‘cause I don’t want to have to work for a company or be responsible for managing a lot of people.  I like my freelance style.  So yeah, I hire copywriters that help me out as I need them at times on other projects, but for the most part, nah.  I like the stress free thing of writing my own stuff and having a low overhead.  I gotta great year, then I gotta great year.  If I have a bad year, hey, it’s still a great year.

So I don’t have a copywriting empire to hire hundreds of copywriters to help out the young ones to get their foot in the door.  So the next best thing I do is I do my e-zine and I really do give away stuff that I’m doing right now that I  call them – they’re not secrets ‘cause I’m giving them away, but they are practical and actionable advice that can be used immediately no matter where you are in your copywriting stages.

So that’s what I do that.  Then last year I did my copywriting boot camp on steroids.  Dan was there and participated in that.  I only wanted 20 people to be part of that and I got them.  That was huge.  That was a great success as far as helping a lot of writers.  The ones who are existing writers get off their butt and really do something with their talent or the new writers that kind of get started.

I was even able to help a couple other people there to get some jobs writing some premiums and special reports and stuff like that to give them a little bit of a head start in their field.  So that’s cool, too, but besides that I’m like okay.  I’ve got an e-book I’m working on.  That’ll be my fourth one.  That’s on my website too, whenever I’m done with it.

So that’s what I’m thinkin’.  Okay, I’ll share what I know.  This is what I’m willing to do ‘cause I can’t take everybody under my wing, but if it helps cool.  If it doesn’t, sorry.  But it’s there and it’s free information that you can do and use what you want.

Doberman Dan: Yeah; it’s great information.  I get a lot of value out of every issue so I encourage everybody to sign up for that.  Carline, thanks again.  I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.

Carline Cole: Oh, well you’re very welcome and I hope I helped you guys out.  The dog pound – am I in the dog house or the dog pound?

Doberman Dan: You were in the dog house.

Carline Cole: In the dog house; okay.  I’m in the hizzy.  Well, like I say, hope you guys took advantage, learned somethin’ in the past hour that helped you out ‘cause that’s why you give me your time to hopefully help you make something better for the rest of your time.  So hopefully I did that.

Doberman Dan: Yeah; you did that and more Carline.  Thanks again.  I really appreciate it.

Carline Cole: Alright Dan.  I’ll talk to ya’ later.

Doberman Dan: Okay; take care.  Bye bye.

Carline Cole: Bye bye.

[End of Audio]

I recently interviewed one of the top "A list" copywriters in the whole world…

Carline Anglade Cole!

Even though Carline really beat me up during her seminar last year (I really needed it, too!) she is one of the sweetest people you'll ever meet.

But don't let that sweetness fool you. She's one of the toughest copywriters working today. Many have tried to beat her controls… very, very few can.

Here's a chance to learn from one of the best copywriters alive today.

The secret she revealed about how to beat controls is worth a fortune! (I should be charging you for this, huh?)

Enjoy!

To hear your free MP3 click the play button below:

Carline Anglade Cole In The Dawg House

Want to read the transcription? Click here…

P.S. I was going to write a really killer sales letter with enticing bullets to get you to listen to this interview… but I'm just too busy right now with the work that actually supports my bad habits of eating and sleeping indoors.

So I'll just rely on the fact that you're smart enough to realize that when one of the best copywriters in the world shares her secrets… that's all the convincing you should need.

I recently interviewed Ben Settle, an excellent copywriter and kitchen table entrepreneur. Ben is a highly respected young up and coming copywriting star who has written copy for some of the biggest names in direct response and Internet marketing.

Ben's another one of my "go to" guys. When I need a sharp marketing mind to bounce ideas off of, he's one of the first people I call.

By the way, Ben came up with a great name for my teleseminars and I'm gonna steal it. He called it "Doberman Dan's Dawg House".

So welcome to the Dawg House.

I kept Ben in the Dawg House all night ruthlessly bombarding him with questions until he revealed every single secret he knows about getting good at copywriting as fast as possible and building a successful freelance business.

Here's just a FEW things Ben revealed…

• How to get good at copywriting as quickly as possible…
• The best way to get clients and build a freelance copywriting business fast…
• How to build a following of raving fans for your blog or website…
• How to write copy that sells like crazy… without all the hype…
• How to come up with the "big idea" when writing copy…
• The best way to make money as a copywriter when you're between clients… or maybe without clients…
• A proven way to extract the maximum value from any book, audio, DVD or home study course and permanently implant that information directly into your brain…

Ben really "spilled his guts" during this interview and revealed "gold nuggets" I've never heard any other copywriter talk about.  Things like…

• How to cut through all the "looky loo" copywriting prospects who will only waste your time… and get right through to the very best "top dawg" prospects who will hire you in a New York minute…
• Why "free" sucks. (You'll be shocked at this one!)
• How acquiring more and more copywriting and marketing books and courses can sometimes actually kill your progress…
• The selling secrets Ben discovered from Bigfoot…
• Ben's three simple secrets for honing your copywriting chops FAST…
• How to write ads that cut through the all the noise, grab your prospects by the throat and speak directly to your market at the visceral level…
• The fastest way to "leapfrog" your way to expert status so copywriting prospects actually seek YOU out.
• And much more…

Ben really pulled out all the stops. If you're even mildly interested in becoming a copywriter and kitchen table entrepreneur, you'd be a complete shitweasel to miss this one.

To hear your free MP3 click the play button below:

Ben Settle In The Dawg House

There's also a transcription available here.

We just had a great teleseminar with Caleb Osborne, one of my "go to" guys.

Caleb revealed all the secrets he discovered to build a thriving freelance copywriting business quickly.

In fact, one of the secrets he revealed about "bundling" services and how to price and negotiate your services could easily DOUBLE your copywriting fees.

He also revealed the fastest way to get clients and meet tons of highly qualified prospects. And exactly how to follow up with the prospects who aren't ready to hire you right now so you wind up being their new "go to" guy the very next time they need a copywriter. (And it's NOT sending them your portfolio.)

If you want to ramp up your skills and confidence… and get good at copywriting as quickly as possible… Caleb also shared the simple steps he took to get good enough in less than a year to get public praise from both Gary Halbert and Clayton Makepeace!

I especially liked the part where he shared how he used his copywriting skills to secure a $5,000 loan he needed to attend a seminar. Good stuff!

I thought some of the most important stuff he shared was what NOT to do. Learn from his experience and avoid these pitfalls that could hold you back… and hurt your income.

And every copywriter needs to hear what he revealed about starting your own projects. You're costing yourself BIG money if you don't follow his advice.

Caleb shared many more freelance copywriting success secrets and answered a bunch of subscriber questions, too.

If you're a freelance copywriter… or even thinking about starting a freelance copywriting business… you need to listen to this teleseminar right away.

All the best,

Dan

P.S. This teleseminar is 100% content. There's no sales pitches and Caleb held NOTHING back.  I really appreciated his honesty.  Even though he originally didn't want to, he decided to reveal some of his most embarrassing mistakes… so YOU don't wind up making the same ones.

[media:http://dobermandan.com/audio/Caleb_Osborne_Interview.mp3]

If you would prefer to download the MP3, click this link.

There's also a transcription here.

A few days ago I interviewed a good friend of mine who is one of the best online marketers I know.

I twisted his arm and got him to reveal his online marketing techniques he has used to successfully dominate a VERY large and highly competitive market.

I posted the MP3 of the teleseminar here… but I also thought you might want to have a transcription of it, too.

It's below.

Enjoy!

All the best,

Dan

Dan Gallapoo: Okay, everybody, this is Doberman Dan and I've got a special guest with us tonight, who only wants to be known as Mr. X, and he is one of the top online marketers.  He's in – I'll let him tell you more about it, but he's in what I consider almost a general market niche, a highly competitive market, and he has excelled in that market and is one of the top marketers in that market and just has a line of competitors just waiting to knock him off.

So that's basically why he'd like to keep his identity secret and also would like to keep his niche secret, and I can certainly respect that.  Like I said, it's an extremely competitive market because it is such a large market.  And I have known him for quite a few years now, and have seen him rise to the top, basically, getting started like I did.  And so I can vouch for the fact that he is one of the top online marketers in a highly competitive field.

So, did that pretty much cover it, Mr. X, why we're keeping your identity secret?  Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Mr. X: I think that's pretty fair.  I mean I think when we first started to reach our initial level of success, maybe ten years ago, we had a person put together an information product on Internet marketing, and he interviewed a bunch of the big names and we were one of – I think he interviewed like ten different big names in the Internet marketing field, and we were, I think, of the ten, one of maybe two who had a non how to get rich in Internet marketing business.  And that is meaning like we marketed a real product, you know, not a how to get rich product.

And the fella doing the information product who interviewed us, he did pretty well with the product, but what happened was, there was so much penetration within Internet marketing circles that pretty much the next month we saw all kinds of competitors popping up and knocking off, you know, what we were doing.  Some of em just blatantly copying, I mean just literally ripping off our copy, ripping off our product.

And we had to kind of reinvent our business model, and we've had to reinvent it several times, just because of the nature of the Internet changes.  You know, the Internet, as you know, kind of goes through an evolution every 18 months.  So a lot of the stuff that, you know, we were doing four or five years ago may not necessarily work or not necessarily work the same way today as it did back then.  So you're constantly having to reinvent yourself.

But in addition to that, when you kind of reveal a lot of your secrets, you know, because the Internet is so anonymous, it's very easy for people to just kind of copy and steal what you're doing and then, you know, it can negatively affect your bottom line.

So, my long-winded point in bringing this up is just that if you have somebody telling you how to make money on the Internet and they're telling you how to make money for, you know, for a small investment of $29.95, either they're only giving you a small piece of it or they don't really know what they're talking about.  I mean the people who really know what they're doing, they're not just gonna give you – you know, they're not just gonna give away their business model.

Fortunately, what I really like about Doberman Dan's stuff is that Dan does a really great job of showing you how to, you know, reverse engineer how somebody who is doing something successful is making money with what they're doing.

Dan Gallapoo: Thanks, I appreciate –.

Mr. X: Kudos to you.

Dan Gallapoo: Thank you.  You brought up several things that I'd like to address.  First of all, you know, I had a few people email me before the conference and like, what's with this Mr. X stuff.  This is kinda shlocky, you know, a lot of these online gurus pull this.  Well, you've explained why, you know, you prefer to keep things anonymous.  You're in an extremely competitive market with, you know, hundreds or probably even thousands of competitors.

Mr. X: Yeah, and just to give you an idea of the type of niche without revealing what the niche is, it's kind of a niche like – it'd be kind of like cars, like automobiles.  It's the type of niche where like everybody has an automobile, and granted, maybe everybody doesn't buy windshield wipers or, you know, doesn't buy XM radio for their car, but it's one of those niches where pretty much almost every other person has one of these things, and there's just a huge percentage of people who have problems with this thing.  And then, you know, look online for answers on how to deal with those problems.

So, it's a phenomenal niche, it incredibly lends itself to Internet marketing.  But what Dan and I are gonna talk about is how you can – one of the things we're gonna talk about is how you can identify other niches like this.  And, in fact, you don't even need a niche as broad as mine to make a lot of money in.  I mean some of the top Internet marketers that I've met are making money in little tiny niches that you've never heard of.  They're very narrow ditches, but they're very deep and Dan can probably elaborate on that a little bit later.

Let me also interject and ask how long is this program tonight, so I can tailor my answers to be either long or short-winded?

Dan Gallapoo: As long as the time as you need, you know.  I've been wanting to pull this information out of you for a long time.  So, you know, I'm just grateful that you're on the call, so you take however much time you need.

Mr. X: You know, you've been such a great friend and marketing sounding board, you know, over the years that I feel like I owe you something.  So I feel like I'm giving back.  Because you've really, I mean it's been 12 years now we've known each other, and you know, I can't remember how many hours we've spent on the phone over the years just bouncing ideas back and forth.  You know, so, you know, I really value the information that you've been able to give me.

Dan Gallapoo: Well, I appreciate that, and you know, you're one of my good friends.  You're a person I consider what Halbert used to call a go-to guy, and I know sometimes you get sick of hearing me whine but when – you know, when I have marketing problems or challenges, or I need – there's things I need to overcome or new projects I need to start, and I need answers, you know, Mr. X is the person I always call.  And yeah, I'll admit, sometimes I'm a big baby and I do whine to him, but there's very few people I trust, you know, to do that with.  And so –.

You know, and something else I'd like to point out, your niche has nothing to do with internet marketing, making money.  You're selling real products to real people, you know.

Mr. X: Right, right.  And also we should add that they're information products.  So, in fact, we started out, you know, kind of – I had an actual brick and mortar type of business when we first started out, and what happened was I got tired of dealing with my customers on a face-to-face basis.  So then I started looking into starting a mail order company within the same niche.  And right at about that time was when the Internet first started taking off.

And so we started selling originally a book which described, you know, how to find solutions to your problems within that niche, and then we eventually developed a series of five DVD products that went along with that initial book, as well as some audio products, like some cassette tapes at the time and we were selling it online.

But as the years progressed and high-speed Internet became more prevalent, we started taking all of those physical products and digitizing them.  And so now we're at a point where we just sell access to the digital content, you know, the either downloadable or streaming video or access through membership sites or a membership site to access that information.

So, where was I going with this?

Dan Gallapoo: About – well, we were talking about, you know, your niche and how, you know, you're not a guru, never have positioned yourself as one.

Mr. X: Oh, right, right.

Dan Gallapoo: Never sold make money on the Internet products.  You're in a real niche with real people, you know, selling real products .

Mr. X: Right, right.  So, when we say real products, we don't necessarily mean real, tangible products, although they were tangible products at one point.  But they're real products that solve real problems, but they're delivered digitally, so.

Dan Gallapoo: Right, right.  And you know, you brought up something else earlier that I do kinda want to address because we've talked about this a lot.  That, well, first of all, one of the reasons I'm really glad to pick your brain tonight is because, you know, you're one of the top online marketers but you're not a guru and you kind of – you basically refuse to get in that market, even though I've kind of tried to get you into that market a few times, because – how do I say this nicely?  Like, there's a lot of people who position themselves as gurus, that their only success is selling how to make money on the internet type of products.

Mr. X: Right, basically con men.  I mean I'll call it for what it is.  I mean there are just – I mean I would say at least 90 percent of the – are you there?

Dan Gallapoo: Yep, yep, yep.

Mr. X: Okay, 90 percent of the Internet marketing industry are just, you know, con men selling stuff that really doesn't work.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, and we know these guys and it sickens me.  I mean, you know, a couple guys who were, you know, guru-du jour a couple years ago, you know, one of em was saying he had a multimillion dollar business, well, I know – you know, I know this guy.  I knew details about his business.  He wasn't anywhere close to even multimillion.  I mean maybe multi-thousand, maybe a couple few thousand a month, but yet, he was all over the Internet and all over the seminar circuit, you know, claiming he had a multimillion-dollar business.  You know, and selling a $2,000.00 info product.

Mr. X: Yeah, and truth is that there's so many people who want to be, you know, just for purely egotistical reasons, they want to present themselves as a big swinging you know what, to coin Tom Wolf.  You know, they want to be seen up on stage, they want to be idolized.  They want people to come to them, you know, and you know, beg them to reveal the secrets of how to make money, but the truth is, they're the blind leading the blind.

You know, they're selling stuff that sounds good and they're golden talkers and they go to, you know, speech coaches to learn how to present and how to hock their goods.  But the truth is that, you know, I've met a lot of these guys and it's just – they're just selling products to people who don't know any better.

And to me it's, you know, it really hit me – I had a friend of mine, I got into real estate investing on the side several years ago, and I had a friend of mine who wanted to learn Internet marketing and was interested in what I was doing.  And he was a, we'll say, moderately successful real estate investor.

And we were sitting outside having lunch one day and we saw a guy walk by with a real estate investor how to make money course.  And the guy came up and he told us this long, drawn out story about how he had spent the last $5,000.00 of his money in the hopes of learning how to make money with real estate in this case, it wasn't an Internet marketing course but it could have been.

And his wife was dying of cancer and he needed the money to pay for the treatments.  And you know, we looked at that course and we realized that this guy was just another huckster.  And you know, I compare that through analogy to what a lot of these Internet marketing gurus are promoting and selling, and it's the same, same type of hucksterism.

You know, people are looking for how to make a quick buck.  And I mean if you have all of the – if you have the formula and if you have all the elements, you can make, you know, good and quick money on the Internet, but it's – you know, really it's a skill like anything else.  I mean you have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk.  And you know, the percentage of people who can, you know, start out making $10,000.00 a month, you know, after their first or second or third month in the business is very, very small.

Dan Gallapoo: Exactly, but it's always presented, you know, like buy my $2,000.00 course seminar –.

Mr. X: And you'll be able to make money in your sleep, yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.  And that's why, you know, I'm glad to have you on the call, you know.  And I should've sent in my email, because I mean people have been burned so many times by the guru market that, you know, any tele-seminar is actually not really a tele-seminar, it's a tiny bit of content and the only reason they have a tele-seminar is because the guru is gonna pitch something at the end, gonna pitch a high priced product.

There is no sales pitch on this tele-seminar.  This is pure, 100 percent content from a real online marketer, the top in his market, you know, telling you how to do this.

Mr. X: Yeah, if I had something to sell, I'd be revealing my name and, you know, what I do and what the website is and everything else.  You know, if I had a backend seminar or course or something to sell you, but you know, I don't, and because of that, I have no reason to profit from this, which is why I'm not revealing the niche.  You know, I'll reveal to you details about, you know, how I do what I do.

And by the way, if you take the time to learn the fundamentals, it is a great, great business, and it really is a business that, you know, can become virtually automated, to the point where, you know, you literally are making money in your sleep.  And the other beauty of this business is that you're not tied to the business for it to make money.  So I can be out, you know, at the store or, you know, shopping for clothes, or taking, you know, my wife out to dinner and the business is running by itself.

So it's not like I have to – you know, if I'm an auto mechanic and my income comes from spending time working on cars, if I'm not working in the business, the business is not making money.  But with Internet marketing, if you pick the right niche and if you set things up intelligently, you can really have, you know, basically a machine that will, in a very automated manner, process orders for you, sell your products or services for you, deliver the products and deal with all aspects of the business in a virtually automated manner.

So, it's a really cool business I'm in.  My hobby is actually evaluating different business models, and really this is – the reason I'm in this business is because it is the best business model I've been able to find, you know, so far.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, on the tele-seminar I did a couple weeks ago, or a few weeks ago, back in June, I got a ton of questions, but the question that kept popping up was, you know, how do you select a niche, how do you research a niche, you know, and figure out what you want to go into.  And I know that you, you know, you're not only successful in this rather large niche that you're in now, but you've been successful in a ton of other completely unrelated niches.

So, can you talk about, you know, your steps you take to research niches and how do you choose a niche, what are your, you know, factors in deciding that?

Mr. X: Sure.  Really the first thing that you want to look at is really what are you passionate about and I know everybody says that.  They say, do what you're passionate about, blah, blah, blah.  I'm not suggesting that you do what you're passionate about, what I am suggesting is that you use that as a starting point.  Because if you can find something that you're passionate about, and then if it meets all the other criteria I'm about to share with you, you're gonna have a tremendous advantage.

So, if you can find something that you're really interested in, something where, you know, maybe you're already part of the niche or you already spend time, you know, reading about or doing that activity, that's great.

And then the second thing I'll look for when I'm setting up a new site is immediately, being part of the niche, I probably already know where the hubs, where the places that people who are part of that niche go online to read or to communicate with other people in the niche.

So, what I look for is does the niche have a variety, I mean four or five different places where you can advertise and it's relatively inexpensive to reach the market.  So, what I want is, I don't want to be dependent upon one venue where I can only advertise in one magazine or on one, you know, discussion forum, and if that discussion forum owner decides he doesn't like me for some reason, I can't imagine why with my stunning personality, but if for some reason he decides he wants to get rid of the advertising or he gets jealous and he wants to release his own product which would compete with mine and cuts me out, I'm not up a creek, so I have, you know, I have four or five different places I can advertise for relatively inexpensive and completely reach that niche.

So that one tip right there is really, really important.  Because if you don't have an inexpensive way to reach your market, you know, you might have a great product but it's gonna be a real uphill battle and it's gonna cost you a lot of money to reach the market.  So that's what I like to look for is where is it easy to advertise.

And then the other thing that I think is really important in a niche is, I touched on this briefly before, is I'm not so interested in how wide the market is, how broad the market is, but rather, how deep the market is.  So, what I want is I want a market where instead of just selling them one product and selling five million people one product, I'd rather have a market where I have, you know, 10,000 people or 100,000 people, and I can sell them 10 different products or 20 or 50 different products.  Or, you know, let's say, for example, ten different DVDs and a seminar and a workshop and a series of audiotape lectures.

So, deep is really good, because a lot of times, I mean if you think about the things that you're interested in yourself, you know, a lot of times you get into a hobby or a niche or something that you're interested in, and you'll buy everything that you can find on the subject.  And those are the kind of niches that we look for, niches where people are just, you know, completely passionate about that niche, about being part of that niche.

And also one where people really enjoy spending money in that niche.  So, I'll give you an example.  I'm really into tactical firearms training, you know, I like going out to the gun range and shooting my gun and learning, you know, different tactics and ways to, you know, hit a target and hit a moving target and different tricks and things.  And you know, this is like one of these niches where, you know, if somebody releases a new holster or a new DVD or – it doesn't matter how many I've already bought, you know, I'm still buying more.  You know, show me the latest, coolest thing in the niche and I will whip out my credit card and buy the thing, because it's something that, you know, I enjoy doing.  I'm smiling about it right now.

So, if you can identify a niche where people are really passionate about it, and it's one of those deep niches, where you can just keep selling them different things again and again and again, you're gonna really make a lot of money with that.

Dan Gallapoo: That's great.  I'm just thinking out loud here, like, I'm trying to think an example of wide niche would probably be like the weight loss market, right.  It's huge, but you know, those people probably buy one product from you and that's the end –.  Because how are you gonna approach them a month later, like hey, I know that original product I told you was gonna help you lose weight, but you know, now I'm gonna sell you another – you know.

Mr. X: Yeah, maybe, maybe.  I think even that one could be – I think it would just depend on that niche.  I mean that's a broad – it's a broad niche that I'd probably further segment.  So, you might segment it by going specifically after women or specifically trying to, you know, shape and tone their legs or their butt.  You know, and then you can, you know, offer them the latest, greatest product – somebody's coming out with something new, so maybe you can offer them that.  But, you know, I agree with your point.

You know, my father is into playing craps.  You know, he likes to play dice.  And there's a guy who he subscribes to that sends out a little newsletter, which is really a sales letter.  And you'd think, like how many different ways to play craps, to play dice can this guy come up with, right, but he's been on the list for the last 15 years.  I mean I swear to God, every six months the guy has some new system that you've just got to have that will help you, you know, win money at the dice table and my father, he buys them all.

So, you know, it's one of those niches, you could do it with some niches, you can do it with others, but that's really what I'm looking for now is a niche where I can develop 10 or 15 different DVD titles.  I like DVDs because it's a real easy product that has a high perceived value but a low reproduction cost and I can reproduce a whole bunch of them real fast if I need to, almost overnight.

So, you know, for $1.65 I can sell a DVD for $40.00 to $50.00, and it has a tremendous markup and I can have somebody else do all the shipping and handling and order processing for me.  Even better if it's digital, but the DVD product is one I really like because you can have a variety of different titles and you can package the stuff together and you can sell them in all kinds of different venues.  So, I'm probably throwing more at you than you can process right now, but what else?

Dan Gallapoo: Nope, that's good stuff.  I was just thinking, you know, if I ask you anything that you don't want to answer just tell me.  So, I was also wondering, what made you decide – in your main market or in your main niche, what made you decide to transition into all digital products and then how did that affect your business, how did it affect your bottom line as – you know, did it lower your costs or how did that all turn out?

Mr. X: Yeah, that's a great question.  What happened was, at the time, I had gone through two or three different fulfillment houses, and for those of you who may not know what a fulfillment house is, it's a company that specializes in just doing order processing.  So they will warehouse your products and package your products and take the orders if you want them to and process the credit cards and ship the products out.

And I was – we were selling DVDs and hard copies of the books a the time, and I just got tired of it, because you get – there's a lot more problems, in the sense that, you know, somebody orders a product and then UPS delivers it but they put it on the back porch and they don't realize that the dog got the DVD and tore it up or the neighbor stole it off the front porch or – they just think that they never got it and then they call your order processing company back.  And of course, your order processing company, they charge you every time somebody calls regardless of, you know, what the issue is.

So, then, you know, a lot of times you have to reship them the product.  And so it's just a lot of headaches that I didn't want to deal with.  And then, you know, if somebody has a conflict with the order processing company and maybe they get online and just say I didn't receive this.  And it was just a whole lot of tracking and databasing and stuff I didn't want to deal with.

So, as the high-speed Internet took off, I started testing doing digital downloads of the product or digital access of the same product.  So, instead of having to actually physically ship them something, and have – like for a book, for example, maybe I had $3.00 into the cost of a book, and we sold the book for maybe, you know, $29.00, you have a lot more profit if you didn't want to have any, you know, physical cost.

So, I really liked the idea of that.  Of course, as high-speed Internet was just taking off, you know, I had a lot more problems than we do now, where people, you know, couldn't download stuff.  So there was kinda that hurdle to get over too.  But we're really at a point now where if you market it correctly, a lot of people actually will prefer the digital version, especially with something like a book because they get it immediately.  So there was that benefit, you know, people get that instant gratification.

And then, you don't have any shipping or any physical costs.  And with like the books, for example, every time you'd have to order like 1,000 to 5,000 at a time, and you have your warehousing costs and expenses and all of that.  So – and then, you know, you'd order a shipment of books and then you realize that they printed it a little bit crooked and you'd have to arrange to ship, you know, 1,000 – a pallet of them, you know, back to the printing company.  So it was just a lot of hassle.  So, I thought, digital download, that sounds good to me.

Dan Gallapoo: That makes sense.  Do the products that were originally DVDs, then, the customer can download those or watch them like directly online immediately after their order?

Mr. X: Yeah.  The way we have it set up now, most of – with the main niche that you're referring to, it's set up as more of like a membership site.  So once they pay to join for access, we have like a digital video section of the site, where they can go and actually watch the DVD online.  So it's not actually downloaded to their site, they have to be logged in to watch it.  And that, you know, prevents a lot of piracy and copying issues, you know, people sending the files to their friends or uploading it to YouTube and those kind of issues.

Now, that being said, the whole information marketer's life has been changed around a lot, because now there's services like Kunaki, K-U-N-A-K-I.com, that will allow you to take a DVD product, you know, or a video that you've shot, upload the video to their server, and then they will do one-off runs of your DVD product, including the packaging and the shrink wrapping and all of it.  And then even do the order processing and ship it to the customer, and they'll do it all for like $1.67 or $1.70.

So, that means that you don't have to have the – you don't have to order, you know, 1,000 DVDs at a time, have them shipped to your fulfillment house and then have them ship the product.  You know, it just eliminates a lot of different stats.  With Kunaki, basically, you upload it to their server and they handle everything.

So that's – you know, my main goal is not necessarily how much money, you know, I can make, although I'm making more money than I ever dreamed I could make, but my main goal is that I want maximum freedom in my life.  I don't want to be tied down with all the hassles and I don't want a lot of employees.  I mean as it is right now I have one operations guy who kind of runs the main businesses for me, you know, the day-to-day maintenance and operations, and then I have one virtual secretary and that's it.  So basically a three-man operation.  And occasionally my wife helps for different projects if we're working on a new marketing push or something.

But with Kunaki, you're able to deliver a hard product, which can be beneficial for some markets, because a lot of people like, for posterity reasons, they like to actually be able to touch that DVD or put it on their shelf.  So that's a pretty cool thing, too.  So I think having a variety of different things you can offer to your niche is a really good thing.  And I like DVDs again because, you know, it's a product that costs you $1.70, you can sell it for $40.00 to $50.00 on average and there's a real, you know, real high-perceived value to it.

Dan Gallapoo: With the Kunaki service, is that actually like on-demand, you don't have to have an inventory with them?

Mr. X: Correct.  Yeah, you can – basically, you can just put a – after you upload it, you can put a link and people can order it and they – everything's completely automated.  I don't know technically how they do it, but they have it set up in a way that they will, just as soon as the order comes in, they will start the machine up and do a one-off if the customer orders only one.  Or you can tell them, hey, send me, you know, send me 50 personally and I'll physically ship them out to my customers myself.

You know, if you wanted to do that, let's say you wanted to package – or let's say you were having a workshop or an in-person seminar and you wanted to have some quantity of your DVDs on-hand to sell in the back of the room.  You know, you can tell them to just send me 50, you know.  And ten years ago, you had to order, you know, a minimum quantity of, you know, maybe 500 to 1,000.  So this is really cool.  It's also really cool for testing new product ideas.  But generally for new products I like to do a landing page and see if I can get them to sign up for a free newsletter first, to give me an idea of whether or not they'll, you know, there's enough interest to buy.  You know what I mean?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.  That's – yeah, I want to get into that too.  Kunaki rocks.  If that service would have been available when we were first starting, I would have been like tripping all over myself to sign up for that.

Mr. X: Yeah.  I mean it really makes things so easy, because you have – you know, it just dramatically reduces your development costs.  I mean with a handheld, you know, camcorder, you know, and a clip-on mike you buy from Radio Shack, you can go out and basically create an information product by doing interviews with people.

You know, come home and with a $100.00 piece of editing software you buy at Best Buy, edit a video, upload it to Kunaki, and in literally less than a week –.  Oh, plus designing the cover, you have to design the cover, which you can do with, you know, Photoshop, which you can get for 50 bucks at Costco, you know, design the cover for the DVD and have a professional, retail-ready looking product complete with the barcode on the back, in less than a week, have a real product in your hands.  I mean it's just – the technology now is phenomenal.

Dan Gallapoo: Wow, that pretty much takes all the excuses away for product development there.

Mr. X: Yeah, it really does, you know, and you know, once – one of my philosophies is that, you know, even if you're not the greatest, you know, at Internet marketing and Google Adwords and everything else, if you have a really deep niche and you could develop a library of, you know, 5 to 10, or 15 different titles on DVD, you know, separate titles that your niche, you know, is salivating to buy, you're – even not being the best of Internet marketers, you're still gonna, you know, make a pretty good revenue stream for yourself.

Dan Gallapoo: True.  Hey, I want to talk more about selecting a niche a little bit.  Are there any tools or are there any methods you prefer to use, to like, to select a niche?  Like, on my last tele-seminar, I talk about one of my preferred methods is actually going to one of the big bookstores like B. Dalton or – the other one's escaping me, whatever, Barnes and Noble, stuff like –.

Mr. X: Borders, Borders, Barnes and Noble.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.  Look through magazines and look at the bestseller list.  But I'm just curious what methods or what tools you use or do you do it all online or how do you do it?

Mr. X: I do it mostly online.  You know, usually I'll use the Google Adwords tool, Google Adwords keyword tool.  And then you could also use Wordtracker, Wordtracker.com.  They have a pretty decent service.  And then just, you know, really knowing the niche.  You really have to be kind of part of the niche so you know where, you know, where the big discussion forums for that niche are, you know, who writes the big blogs for those niches.

And then also seeing, you know, how many Google Adwords there are when you do a keyword search for some of the big keywords for that niche.  Just the ones, you know, that first pop into your head and you type in on Google, you know, how many ads come up.  You know, that'll give you an idea of how competitive the niche is as well.

So the keyword research is really important but being a part of the niche, I think, is even more important, because you're gonna really have a good feeling for, you know, for what the niche wants.

By the way, I think one of the best ways to figure out what products – after you've chosen the niche or if you're just considering a niche, go to the discussion forums online.  And what you want to do is you want to look for the questions that keep coming up again and again and again.  You're gonna see people asking the same questions again and again and again.

So, you know, if, let's say you're looking at the Toyota's FJ Cruiser, you know, it's one of their 4x4s, and you know, this is a niche with a real passionate following.  So, if you go to the discussion forums, and you know, you see people asking again and again and again that the slant of the front windshield is in such a way that it tends to attract a lot of bugs when you're driving, and so people keep asking what's the best windshield wiper, what's the best windshield wiper, what's the best windshield wiper for my FJ 40 or my FJ Cruiser, you know, something like that.  If I kept seeing the same question being asked again and again and again, then if I wanted to sell a physical product to that niche, I would then go and maybe do some research and see if I can find the best windshield wiper and then build a site around that.

As it is, personally, I like the digital information products or the DVD products.  So, I might look at the niche and maybe, you know, maybe you see another question that gets asked, like, you know, where are the best places to take my FJ Cruiser, you know, off-road.  You know, so if I saw that question coming up again, I might come up with a DVD tell, you know, the top ten places to take your new FJ Cruiser off-road, you know.  And then do, you know, take the camera out and do some in-the-field filming and footage and interviews and you know, package that together.

And, again, if the people are really passionate about it and if it's a question that just keeps coming up again and again, you're gonna make money.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, so you got to get involved in the niche.  You got to become a member of forums, you know, start buying magazines.  So, I'll go back to what you said earlier –.

Mr. X: You know, I think if you don't, you're not really gonna hit it, because you really – you know, like Halbert said, you've really got to be able to speak their language.  You know, you need to use the same vocabulary that they use.  And if you've ever been involved in any niche, you know that anybody in a certain niche, you know, talks a certain way and it's different from how outsiders talk, you know.  And if you try and write a, you know, sales copy to appeal to that niche, you better be able to talk like they talk.

Dan Gallapoo: That's true.  And what you mentioned earlier about it really does help if you have a passion for it, because like, well, you know, I was in the martial arts niche a few years back and the reason –.

Mr. X: Dan, for those of you who don't know, Dan is a trained killer.

Dan Gallapoo: I can kill you with –.

Mr. X: Don't mess with Mr. Gallapoo.

Dan Gallapoo: I can kill you just by thinking about it with my mind.

Mr. X: Killer marketing techniques.  Killer copywriting.  Doberman Dan's killer copywriting.

Dan Gallapoo: So, I selected the martial arts niche, and Adam's joking.  You know, I took karate as a kid and that's pretty much the extent of it.  You know, and so I basically was not passionate at all about – I recognized it was a really good niche but not passionate at all about it, and got into it, and it was almost like ah, crap, this is succeeding, oh, darn it, I guess I got to, you know, make products and do fulfillment and blah, blah, blah.

And so I got out of that because it was worked.  You know, if it was something about guns, you know, or guitars, I'd be all over that.

Mr. X: Right.  And that's really a good point.  You don't want to spend all this time and effort and just create yourself another job.  I mean if you want a job just, you know, go out to Wal-Mart and get a job.  You know, you want to do something that's gonna give you a lot of freedom and that you're not gonna, you know, when you wake up in the morning, you're not gonna hate yourself.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, that's an important point.  There was a guy, one of Dan Kennedy's subscribers, who had some, you know, direct response marketing knowledge and background, who owned a martial arts school down in Louisiana, and he bought my martial arts course.  Because I was selling a marketing course for martial arts schools.  He bought my marketing course and he called me, and he was like, hey – he starts asking me questions.

And I told him all about it, and you know, told him I'm really not having fun with this, I'm not a martial artist.  This is like work, and he's like, yeah, you know, I should probably do something like this.  I told him, yeah, you know, you probably should.  Well, he is huge in that niche, man, he's a multimillionaire in the information business.  So, sometimes I think, huh, maybe I screwed up by getting out of that niche, but it was really – it was too much like work for me.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: You know.  Yeah, well, I guess I could've made a ton of money but I would've been miserable.

Mr. X: Yeah, and I mean there's a lot of people who say, well, you build up to the point where you can afford to have somebody else kind of run it for you, and that is – to an extent, that's what I've done with my main niche.  You know, I've been doing it so long that, you know, I kinda hit a point quite a while ago where I was fairly burnt out of it.  I mean it's still a big part of my life, I mean it's something that is and always will be a part of my life because it's just become part of who I am.  But that being said, you know, I've hit a point where, you know, I got to a point where I was successful enough with the business where it made sense that I could delegate a lot of the responsibility of the operations of the business to somebody else who was a really good marketer.  And he gets a pretty good, you know, a pretty good cut of the take for doing that.  But what it does is it frees me up to focus on the parts of the niche that I really enjoy.  So that's really important.

If I had it to do over again, I think I would probably have spent more time developing, you know, my main thing around something that was just, you know, a little bit more passionate about.  So that's important, but, you know, the numbers are important too, and again, this – you know, even just the main site is, at this point, is throwing off so much money, it's just it's beyond anything I ever imagined I would be able to do.  So – even in this bad economy.  So it just keeps, it keeps chugging along, so.

Dan Gallapoo: Let's say, okay, so you've selected a niche, what's your next step?  You select a niche, the research reveals that, yeah, this is a good niche, you can make some money here, you've gotten involved in discussion forums, like you talked about.  So you know the language of the niche and you know what solutions they're looking for or what products they're looking for.  What's your next step then?

Mr. X: After you've identified the niche and after you've identified what products you can develop?

Dan Gallapoo: Yes.

Mr. X: Okay.  Well, then you're basically – what I do then is pretty much start developing the site.  So, you want to get the basic mechanics of the site set up, so that you have a working site.  Yeah, I mentioned a little bit about doing a landing page, you know, where you have people come, you do some basic promotions, which can be just, you know, kind of posting some feelers on discussion forums or running some Google Adwords or just communicating with other people in the niche.

Send them to a landing page, you know, list the main benefits of the main – if you're doing a product you can list the main benefits of the product.  A lot of times what you'll want to do is you'll want to set up a free newsletter just as a lead capturing device.  So you get them – you list some of the main benefits and basically create a sales letter to get them to sign up for your free newsletter.  Because once you've got them on your list, your list is money.  I mean it's just the same as old time direct marketing.  The list is really where the money is.

So you know, once you build up a list, you're able to hit the person on the list, you know, multiple times with multiple offers or different products and stuff.  So, I would say of everything I do, probably the most important thing is the list.  I mean even if my entire site, you know, if the actual website went down, you know, I could still make enough money to, you know, keep myself in – you know, in the lifestyle that I've grown accustomed to, you know, just with the list.  And I could also get up on my feet again pretty fast with ________ list that I've built.

And we have – I mean you don't need hundreds of thousands, either.  We have a purged list of about 60,000 subscribers, which means that these are actual, active, live email addresses.  So, the sooner you start building your list the better off you're gonna be.  But then, you know, you want to get a basic site up as soon as you can, because the way Google looks at your site, the older your site is, the better they rank at.  So you want to get content up as soon as you can, even if you're not completely finished or if everything isn't completely perfect, you know, get it up there and start working on it.  Something is better than nothing.

Dan Gallapoo: When you start that site, initially, do you always start with like a squeeze page type site to start, you know, offering a newsletter or a free report to capture emails or do you start with just a site automatically selling a product?

Mr. X: Well, a lot of people do that.  I mean to be honest, the way I've done it is I've started – I'll actually start putting up the basic framework of a site, get a basic working site, even if I don't have a hundred articles in it yet.  I'll get a basic site up and do some minimal promotions just so I can start getting some feedback and see if there's kind of, you know, some excitement and some interest in the site.

And, you know, a lot of times you can do that by either posting on a discussion forum about the site, and you have to be careful about that.  You know, what I recommend is if you're not on a first-name basis with the owner, you know, offer to subsidize their forum by, you know, running an ad or becoming a sponsor.  And see what kind of response you get.  I mean if people seem to be real excited about it –.

Well, I'll give you an example.  We're developing a DVD product for a certain niche, and I floated the idea in one of the discussion forums without providing any links whatsoever.  But the amount of response that I got from it – I think I ran this one by you, the one most recently, I mean it was phenomenal.  I mean it was like, you know, within 24 hours, we got, you know, probably 12 or 13 people just from one discussion forum post on one forum, you know, saying, like, you know, I need this DVD.  You know, I'll buy it tomorrow if you have it available tomorrow.

So, you know when you get that kind of response, you can then say, all right, I'm gonna build a site around this topic and then the site is gonna be built around the product or products.  And that's another thing I should probably touch on as well.  When you build a site, you don't want to just randomly build a site.  There has to be like a starting point and a finishing point for that site.  And the starting point is basically the point where they get to the site.  And then there's got to be some logical progression that you take them through.

So, one might be, you know, okay, they land on your site because they found an article that you wrote.  And then at the end of the article it says sign up for this free ezine.  And then they sign up for the free ezine, and then the confirmation page for the free ezine redirects them to the sales letter page to the product that you're pitching, and then the sales letter page finishes with, you know, buy now, click here to submit your order.

So, you know, my main goal with any website is not just to present interesting information or you know, kinda put this stuff out there randomly, it's to ultimately funnel everybody through to the sales letter page, either sooner or later.  So, you know, hard sale or soft sale, eventually – I know that eventually they're gonna – I'm gonna have some way, because I make it real easy at the end of every page, to land on that sales letter page, read through it and then buy.  It's all about asking for money.

Dan Gallapoo: That's right.  Just kinda – that kind of answers the question I got.

Mr. X: Keep asking me till I answer it, okay.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay.

Mr. X: Sometimes, you know, I get go sidetracked that –.

Dan Gallapoo: No, this is great information.  People could submit questions before the tele-seminar and here's one from Tammy in Jonesville, I don't know what state, Jonesville, it could be Arkansas, who knows.  I'm just curious where Tammy lives.  It doesn't really have anything to do with anything.  She says the thing that has held me up on starting my biz is building a website that is correct in Google's eyes.  I've heard so much about penalties and Google slapping when your website is not perfect.  How does a person who is just getting started know how to build the perfect website to please Google?  Can you comment on that?

Mr. X: Yeah, my advice is don't worry so much.  You know, put good content out there, you know, make a truly informational site and don't worry about it.  I mean Google is really, really smart about this stuff.  You know, they know the people who are trying to scam them and trying, you know, to pull a fast one and use, you know, scraper content and all that kind of stuff to get by with something they shouldn't be getting by with.

So, my personal feeling is you're probably in most cases not gonna accidentally get slapped.  And again, what we do – you know, even though we want everything to end up back at the sales letter site, we're creating sites that have real value, you know, real content, you know, lots of information, videos, tips.  You know, you want to create something that's gonna be – basically, for your niche, it's gonna be like the place to go, you know, the place where all the cool kids hang out, the popular place.  Because you've got such high quality of information at your site, that it's just a real resource.  And Google lives or dies by whether or not they point to the best resources on the web.

Now that being said, I've found that it's really important to use the right tools, and the tools being the software that drives your website.  So right now, I mean if you're – I'm assuming most people listening to this are probably on a fairly tight budget.  WordPress is really one of the best solutions out there right now for somebody on a tight budget, and that's what I use for new, you know, new sites that, you know, may or may not work, because again, even the best Internet marketers don't know, you know, out of the gate, that everything they do is gonna work.  What's the number, like one out of seven?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, that's what I hear or even worse sometimes.

Mr. X: Yeah.  Yeah, so –.

Dan Gallapoo: WordPress is a blog software, but you can make it look like anything you want to, right?  It doesn't have to look like a blog.

Mr. X: Right, right.  And it does have some shortcomings, but in general, it is so widespread and it's so easy to find techs who will help you tweak it and do the things that you want to do, without, you know, charging you too much, that it's really a pretty good solution.  And they're free, they call them plug-ins.  They're like little add-ons that you can get for free that will make your WordPress site more search engine friendly, more Google friendly.  So that, you know, a lot of that stuff, you don't really even have to worry, you know, too much about.  So I really like WordPress in that sense.

And if, you know, if you're a more experienced Internet marketer or you already have a more advanced site, there's, you know, some other tools that I like to use, some other, you know, software tools, depending on what you want to do.  But, you know, something like WordPress is pretty cool.

Dan Gallapoo: Would you recommend – I mean basically to answer a question, would you go back to the old Halbert thing, motion beats meditation, don't get hung up on the details just get something out there right now so you can start judging results?

Mr. X: Yeah, absolutely.  I mean absolutely.  I mean you really – I mean you don't make any money if something sits in the planning stage for a year.  I mean I will be the first one to tell you, and even now, I mean my products have been – some of the products that I offer have been on the market for, you know, over ten years.  And – let me back up.

When I first got into the business, one of the first people that I hooked up with was reading Dan Kennedy's material, and Dan Kennedy's whole, his whole thing was like don't worry about how the product looks, you know, worry about the quality of the information.

And I'll tell you now, I mean some of my favorite blogs, some of the blogs that I read every single day are really crummy looking.  I mean they're just like, you know, they're very simple, you know, blog or just very simple HTML websites, but, you know, they have just great information.  I mean you think about it, you think about, you know, if you have the opportunity – if you want to learn how to play basketball really well and you have the opportunity to train with Michael Jordan.  Michael Jordan says come out to the court tomorrow at 5:00 in the morning.  I'm gonna be there and I'm gonna help you, you know, learn to dribble the basketball.  Are you gonna care how Michael Jordan is dressed?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, that'd be the last thing I'd think about.

Mr. X: Right, right, just give me the information.  Just show me how to be, you know, show me how to play basketball like you do.  So, I mean having a professional looking website, it's important but there's time for that later.  The most important thing is get it – get stuff out there, get stuff on the web, you know, create content, you know, promote, promote, promote, and you know, test different stuff, but you know, don't worry if everything's not perfect.  You know, nobody's gonna – the people who are gonna complain and scream about it are not the people you want as customers anyway.

You want the people who are just, you know, salivating for the information.  And those kind of people, you know, if your information is top-notch information, it's really good information, they're – really they're not gonna care.  They're just gonna be like I need that information now.

Dan Gallapoo: That's true.  So what you're saying though is that, I mean with – because you do this a lot in the different markets, you test.  You can get something up and going pretty quickly with WordPress that's gonna look pretty good too, right?

Mr. X: Yeah, and that's the other benefit.  WordPress has these things called themes, and you can get these themes – you can pay for some, but a lot of em are just free, and you download em.  And a theme is kinda like the window dressing for the site.  It's like something that has like a – well, a theme, you know, it's like a color theme or maybe some graphics and it kinda makes everything tie in together.

So you can get a, you know, a fairly nice looking website, you know, up really, you know, pretty quick.  And that way you're able to focus more on, you know, adding content and not have to worry about, you know, the HTML and all the formatting and stuff.  I mean there's still a learning process to it and there's a learning curve, but you know, you can get stuff up, you know, pretty quick.

And again, think about some of the favorite sites that you go to.  I bet that, you know, a lot of them don't look at that professional.  In fact, one of the biggest internet marketing sites online is the Warrior Forum, and I think, you know, maybe up until recently, anyways, they were using software that was like, you know, four years old and you know, it just looked real kinda hokey, but you know, that was the place that you'd go, you know, if you wanted to talk to a lot of different Internet marketers, not necessarily the best but a lot of different Internet marketers.  If you want to get a lot of different opinions about something, you'd go to the Warrior Forum and you'd pose the question.

So, you know, there were a lot of other marketing discussion forums that didn't have as much activity, weren't as successful as the Warrior Forum, you know, but they looked perfect.

And then the other problem with aiming for perfection is that most of the time, if you're a perfectionist, the site doesn't ever get finished, it never gets launched.  So the trick is, get it up there as fast as you can, you can tweak it later.  You can clean it up, you can get somebody else to clean it up, but you got to get, you know, something up there in order to start getting sales.

Dan Gallapoo: That's true.  You know, Halbert used to say, if you're gonna fail, fail fast, you know, find out real fast if it's gonna work or not.  And if, you know, if you get something out there and you don't think it looks that great but you're getting results, you know, no problem, it's already up and running, now you can tweak it as you –.

Mr. X: Yeah.  Yeah, and again, you know, if we're talking about specifically information products, you know, people are really out there for the information, they're not – you know, they're not so –.  You know, it's not like we're selling a Mercedes where it's got to be, you know, shiny.  You know, we're selling, you know, information.  So, you know, just give me the goods.

I mean you look at – I mean there's a fella named Ross Jeffries, who used to be kind of the guru in the how to meet women market, and you know, the packaging for his stuff was, you know, was kinda, you know, flim-flammy, it wasn't retail ready, put it that way.  But for his market, I mean they just did not care.  They were just like show me how to meet women.  You know, you could wrap the thing in a brown paper bag for all I care, people just wanted to know what he had to know.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.

Mr. X: Offer good information, in fact, offer the best information you can.  Become known as the Michael Jordan in your niche, and you know, don't worry so much about, you know, getting Google slapped or if the site looks a certain way or whatever.  Just, you know, become a resource, become a valuable resource and you know, and Google's gonna like that.

Dan Gallapoo: Did you want to talk about any other tools that you use or tools for advanced marketers or do you not want to get into that?

Mr. X: No, sure, I'll get into that.  I mean, again, because I don't sell Internet marketing information, I don't have a lot of the stuff very well organized, which is another reason I'm, you know, maybe a little bit long-winded, but let me see if I can go through a mental list.

I really like Aweber for my list server, you know, for building your ezine.  I've been using them for a number of years now and I haven't really had any products, and they offer a lot of tools for running, you know, a very professional ezine with a minimal amount of problems.  So, Aweber, A-W-E-B-E-R.com is a great resource.

I also like Links Manager for managing my link swapping campaign.  You know, if you have a site on corvettes and I have a site on corvettes, Google is gonna rank us higher if we are linked to each other, because Google figures that's like a vote for my site.

If your site on corvettes is linking to my site on corvettes, Google – and if you're an authority in your niche, in the niche of, you know, corvette owners and you're linking to my site, then Google thinks, well, my site must be pretty good if Dan's corvette site is linked into mine.  So, the way we manage that is through Links Manager, and that's linksmanager.com, and they offer a really good service.  It's really worth it to have a service like that that just, you know, manages all of your link swaps.

So, that way if Dan decides that his corvette website isn't gonna link to my corvette website anymore, Links Manager will automatically delete my link back to his site.  So that way, you know, nobody's getting any free, you know, something for nothing.  So, Links Manager is cool.

I like Host Gator for hosting, at least right now, and that changes a lot.  Hosting companies come and go, but, you know, for the last couple of years Host Gator's been a really good value.  For $7.00 you can get their – it's called the Baby Crock account, and you can have as many domains and as many websites as you want.

And they also have something called Fantastico, which is a – it comes with your $7.00 a month hosting account.  It allows you to pretty much automatically install a variety of different software products, free software products like simple machines discussion forum and WordPress and Group Hall and all kinds of different content management software that, you know, normally maybe you'd have to pay somebody to install it for ya, and this Fantastico thing, it does it with the click of a button.  So that's pretty cool.

I like Member Gate for membership site management.  It's a little bit more of an expensive solution but if you have – if you already have a successful site, if you have a successful niche and you're well known in your niche and you know that you're gonna be running a membership site with several thousand people, it's the best solution that I've been able to find so far.  It's not perfect, it's got some things that we've had to tweak or, you know, create work-arounds for, but you know, it's kinda like what they say about the U.S. Army, they may not necessarily be perfect but it's kinda better than everything else that's out there.  So Member Gate for membership sites is really worth it, for us anyways.

I use gmail for all my email stuff, because you know, I travel.  Dan knows this, I spent several years traveling around Latin America.  I've lived in Costa Rica and Panama and Columbia, and you know, all over the place, and I was able to run my entire business from my laptop.  And part of, you know, being able to do that means that if your laptop gets stolen, you need to have a way to continue accessing and running your business.

So, I like being able to have everything kind of online and gmail allows me to do that.  So that's kind of a cool factor.  Same thing with Aweber, you know, you have your list hosted with a list server online.

I also use a service called Fox Marks, which they've changed their name and I don't have it – I do have it in front of me, actually.  Now it's called X Marks.  So, if you have Firefox, you can use a service called X Marks and what it does, it's kind of like an online server that does a backup of all of your bookmarks.  So again, if you're traveling and somebody steals your laptop, you can buy a new laptop and download your bookmarks.  And you know, bookmarks can be, you know, really important to running your business, so that's kind of a cool thing.

I also use Mozy for backing up my – what's that?

Dan Gallapoo: I'm sorry to interrupt.  I had never heard of that service before.  Tell me the website address again, please.

Mr. X: I think it's X Marks, M-A-R-K-S, xmarks.com.

Dan Gallapoo: Cool, thanks.  I'm sorry, I interrupted.  Go ahead.

Mr. X: Pull that up.  Yeah, X Marks is it.  So it works with Firefox.  So let's say I'm flying out to Florida and, you know, I have my laptop, you know, for some reason it gets lost or, you know, it's shot or something and I lose the laptop, you know, I could log onto your machine and download all of my bookmarks.  So, you know, something like that can really save your hide, especially as you get more and more into this Internet marketing stuff.

And the other thing I use is Mozy, I believe it's M-O-Z-Y.com, which does automated backups of your hard drive, so you have all of your data backed up, which, you know, again, is really important.  So, you know, one of the – the benefits of this business is that you can, you know, make it pretty much automated and you know, the ability to take your business with you, you know, anywhere you want to go is a really benefit.  But you know, you got to have, you know, Plan Bs for all of it.

Dan Gallapoo: That's true.  I just have a hard time believing that anybody in Costa Rica, Panama or Columbia would steal your laptop.

Mr. X: Yeah.  Well, enough said on that topic.

Dan Gallapoo: Moving on.  What about getting traffic?  So, I mean you talked about, you know, maybe going into some discussion forums and testing the waters that way.  Once you figure out you're getting some results and this is gonna actually work and you got some interest, what techniques do you use to get traffic?

Mr. X: Well, natural searches and ranking is great.  I mean it's wonderful but it's one of those things that you can't really depend on because, you know, tomorrow you may have a competitor who's, you know, maybe better than you are with, you know, natural search engine ranking.  Or, who knows why, for reasons, you know, unknown, Google decides to shine on your competitors more than they shine on you.  So, you know, it's really – you do everything you can to get as much traffic as you can.

That being said, our best producer is still Google Adwords.  I mean there's just – there's no comparison.  I mean, you know, Google Adwords brings, in most cases, I'd say 80 percent of our traffic.  But in addition to Google Adwords, which everybody knows about and Yahoo's version, article marketing is great.  You know, you write articles, submit them to article directories or to other websites who are looking for content, and you have links within that article which link back to your website.  So that gets your name out there.  Press releases.  Social marketing.

Here's another one, Ping, P-I-N-G.com is becoming very popular.  What that does is with all the different, you know, MySpace and Facebook and Linked In, and all those, there's like, you know, 50 or 60 different services, plus YouTube and all the video hosting services.  What Ping does is you open up a free account with Ping and then every time you post something to Ping, it will automatically post it to all of those different websites.

And so, you know, the more you get your name out there, the more links you have linking back to you site, you know, legitimate links, we're not talking about spam here, the more of an authority site your site will become.  And also when Google sends their little spiders out to crawl the web, they're gonna see that, you know, you've got links on Facebook linking to you and you've got links on MySpace and on all these different places, and it helps with your natural search engine ranking as well.  So that's worked really well for us.

Let me think what else.  You know, just being a – oh, here's another tip that's worked really well for me.  Conflict works really well.  If you have a certain position on an issue within your niche and you very publicly challenge somebody else who has a big name within your niche, because you have legitimate differences, you will generate a lot of controversy.  That controversy will turn into sales.

I should say something else about traffic versus sales, more traffic is not necessarily the answer.  What you want is quality traffic.  So, what I mean by that is I'd rather have 10 people who are buyers, who are ready to buy, than 100,000 people coming to my site but only 1 of em is interested and is really a buyer.

Dan Gallapoo: Right, right, which would cost you a ton of money for a bunch of basically moochers, you know.

Mr. X: Yeah.  Again, let's say I do a video on how to – let's use the corvette example, how to make your corvette have 50 more horsepower, and it's a video, it's a real simple trick.  It's just, you know, something you can do at home by mixing vinegar and water together and – again, I know nothing about cars, so I'm just kind of spit-balling it here.

But let's say you did a DVD about that, and you start running Google Adwords or you start doing other, you know, Internet marketing promotions, and you know, you're advertising for the keyword cars and horsepower and increase horsepower, but the product is specific to really, you know, corvette owners, you know.  This is something that specifically corvette owners are looking for, not Subaru owners, not – you know.  You're really gonna be spinning your wheels and wasting a lot of time, you know, focusing on, you know, car forums and just real general stuff.  So just basic, direct response fundamentals.  You know, match your message to the market.

Dan Gallapoo: Makes sense.  I wasted a lot of money in the golf market once testing a product by doing just that, thinking, oh, boy, look how much traffic the keyword golf gets or golf equipment, you know.  And it brought a bunch of really nonqualified people and was expensive.

Mr. X:    Yeah, yeah.  I really – you know, the longer I'm in the Internet marketing game, the more, you know, it's really a balancing act, and this gets back to choosing your niche, but you know, the more specific you can get, the better off you're gonna be, generally, as long as it's a deep niche.

So, you know, if I have a really, really super specific niche, but it's super deep, you know, I would say – let's say I have a niche that consists of only like 100 people, but I know that those 100 people will buy like 1,000 different products on this one topic.  Like, let's say I'm doing a topic on – my niche is, you know, some aspect of Judaism, right, some aspect of like, you know, raising a child – you know, raising a Jewish child – raising a Jewish Orthodox child and –.  I don't know if that's a good niche or not, but just as an example.  And I have 100 people who are really into this very, you know, narrow aspect of Judaism, and I can sell them products going from birth all the way to the time the kid is 18 years old.  And they just, they love me, you know, I'm an authority on the niche, maybe I'm a top Rabbi or something, I can create all kinds of products.  It's not a real wide niche, but it's a super deep niche.

So those are the kind of things that I really like.  So if you can become an authority in your niche or if you can do a joint venture with an authority, you know, a content provider, where you control the marketing and they're able to provide the content, you're gonna do, you know, really well.  So it just, you know, a matter of getting in there and really knowing the niche that you're targeting.  And going for it, you know, just completing the products, completing the website, getting it done.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, you brought up a couple real important points.  I mean you've been successful in a lot of different niches.  Your main one is a really, really big niche, but you don't necessarily need a big niche to make a lot of money, like you said.

Mr. X: Yeah, and you know what, that's an excellent point too.  Even though we have a huge niche, I mean a lot of people think, you know, our niche is, again, it's like – it's kind of like cars, you think, oh, cars, everybody's got a car, yeah, but just because everybody has a car doesn't mean that everybody's gonna buy a car, you know, a fancy car stereo, for example.  You know, there's only a specific niche of people within the niche of car owners, who will buy real high-end car stereos, you know what I mean.

Dan Gallapoo: That's right.

Mr. X: So what we do is we focus on, you know, kind of a sub niche.  You know, what we like to do is we focus on people with problems.  You know, they're passionate about it.  It'd be kind of like – it's kind of like the marriage niche, for example, you know, you're married to a woman, you're committed to her, but you have relationship problems.  You know, so how do I deal with this relationship and how do I deal with the problems that I'm having within this relationship, you know.

And so, you know, our main niche really deals – it's that type of a niche.  So you have problems and people who are passionate about their niche and really need those problems fixed.  And you know, we come along – I mean everybody's married, everybody probably has marriage problems at one point or another, but there's only, you know, a select percentage of that giant market that has bad enough problems that they're gonna get online and do a web search and look for solutions to those problems.  But boy, when they do, we are right there with a solution.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, excellent point.

Mr. X: So, that's positioning, I guess.

Dan Gallapoo: You said something else I want to bring up too, about you know, when you're going into a niche or a market, you don't have to be the guy or gal, for – you know, you don't have to be the expert or the spokesman, you know, you can find that.  You can pay those people cheap to do that, can't ya?

Mr. X: Right, absolutely.  Just get it all in writing and make sure it's a flat fee, you know.  Or, if you are gonna pay them an ongoing fee, make sure that it's – you're paying them for the creation of content and not for a percentage of sales or royalties.  You know, the truth is that there are a million experts out there.  There are only a handful of people who really know how to take one of those experts and make them, you know, a superstar within the niche.

So, if you study marketing and if you really, you know, learn the things Dan's trying to teach you, you're gonna know how to take information and package that information and sell it.  And so, you know, there's so many people out there that you can get, and who would just be happy to be – you know, maybe they just want to get their name out there and you don't even have to pay em.  They just want to, you know, they want to kinda be famous and you know, it's for ego reasons.

Or maybe they're not, maybe they're just, you know, experts.  They happen to be, you know, in the local history department at a local university, and you know, you've discovered a niche on some aspect of history, you know, on some aspect of the Civil War and they happen to be an expert, you know, on that aspect of the Civil War.  And you know, maybe they'll do it for free or maybe they'll do it for a couple hundred bucks.  And then you create a DVD product or an info product out of it, and you could be selling that info product for the next 50 years.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.  Experts are a dime a dozen and –.

Mr. X:    They really are.

Dan Gallapoo: One thing you brought up, don't do a royalty arrangement, do a flat fee.

Mr. X: Don't do – exactly.

Dan Gallapoo: There's a ton of horror stories about that.

Mr. X: Yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: There are two things I'd like to talk about, and anything else you want to talk about, but there's one thing I do want to talk about.  As long as you don't think it's inappropriate to do, because I'd kinda like you to do like a mini hot seat with me about my website at DobermanDan.com.  Are you open to doing it?

Mr. X: Sure, let's do it.

Dan Gallapoo: I'm just – I'm thinking out loud here.  What I got to thinking was, you know, 'cause I'm gonna be – I'll expose to you some plans I've got for the site, and I want to get your feedback on that, but do you think that's inappropriate, sharing that information with the subscribers to the site?

Mr. X: Well, maybe I'm not understanding, doing a critique of your site or of my site?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, my site, my DobermanDan.com site.  Because –.

Mr. X: Yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: Here – I'm sorry, go ahead.

Mr. X: Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I guess what we could do is I can give you my, you know, my insights, what I would maybe do or change or suggest, and again, it's – you know, I've been successful, but I'm, you know, I'm not God or anything.  So my advice, you know, what I see may or may not be accurate, it's just, you know, you're the ultimate authority.  You have to – you know, you have to say yeah, this is good information or not.  But – you want to do that right now?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, yeah, I would.  Here's the deal.  How should I start, can I just give you a little bit of information on where I'd really – what I'd really like to do with this site?

Mr. X: Yeah, let's do it.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay.

Mr. X: I'm at your site right now, so.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay, all right, cool.  Well, first of all, I started that site, DobermanDan.com, initially, when I was still doing some freelance work.  So, I set it up to try to get more freelance clients.  Well, I don't do freelance copywriting anymore.  And then it basically turned into a passion.  I just wanted to share some of the stuff I learned and wanted to share a lot of the lessons I learned from Gary Halbert.

And I have, you know – it was hit or miss, I was on and off.  I'd post something maybe one month and then go for months without doing anything.  But most recently, within the past month or so, I'm really enjoying it more and I've got a small group of subscribers, but everybody's so nice, as opposed to my other niche, my bodybuilding niche, I get so many assholes, you know.  Get just completely asshole emails from people and you know, it's like – it makes me think, you know, I don't want to deal with assholes, but my Doberman Dan subscribers are so darn nice.

Mr. X: Now he's flattering ya.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.

Mr. X: The two of you who are left after my long-winded explanations, the two of you who are left, now he's flattering ya.

Dan Gallapoo: And after the flattery, here comes the sales pitch.  No, I'm really enjoying it.  I'm enjoying getting stuff down on paper or online, so to speak, lessons that I've learned years ago.  I'm enjoying sharing that.  I'm getting a lot of – definitely getting my ego stroked a lot by people.  I'm just really having fun with it.  I'm more excited about doing more content for that site than I am for my main niche.

So, one of the things I like to do, I would really like to build up my subscriber list and, two, I would like to somehow work at, you know, making a living from that site too, and if possible, maybe kind of bow out gradually or sell my other business, my bodybuilding business and focus on the Doberman Dan site, so there you go.

Mr. X: Yeah.  It sounds good to me, I mean especially if you're, you know, you're passionate about it.  And I mean you have – you're one of the few people who really, you know, I mean you have the pedigree.  I mean you've worked with – I mean you know pretty much everybody in the industry going back, you know, years and years.

I mean and you – you know, we've talked before.  I mean you have great stories, and about Halbert and Dan Kennedy, and all of these big – just a long list of pretty much everybody who was anybody.  So I think your positioned, you know, as good or probably better than, you know, 90 percent of the people out there who are selling direct marketing information.  So, yeah, I think you should do it.

What I would probably do looking at this site is, I think that – I'm a real big believer in not trying to reinvent the wheel.  So what I would do is I would find somebody who – and I mean you've talked about this in some of your stuff, find somebody who's already kind of doing what you want to do, and then put the Doberman Dan polish on it, you know.

So, set up the structure of your site and everything, just basically, you know, model their site and then improve on it.  I mean I really enjoyed the last video that you did, I think it was the last one, where you talked about the guy with the guitar, the perfect pitch ad.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.

Mr. X:    You know, how you look at something and then, you know, model it and then figure out how you can make it better.  And I mean I've done that.  I will freely admit, a big part of my success was –.  Actually, my initial site grew out of an initial sales letter and the initial sales letter was – some guy had a car book, and my niche, by the way, is not in cars.  I have several niches, but my main niche has nothing to do with cars.

But he was selling a car book or some kind of car secrets book, and I modeled my sales letter after his, the original one.  And then I found another guy who had some other – was selling something else, completely unrelated to my niche, and he some other kinda cool aspects to it and I incorporated that.  And then when I developed a full-blown site around the sales letter, you know, which included like the main niche page that you would land on, you know, I modeled it after somebody else.  So, you know, as long as you're not copying from the same niche, you're okay.

Dan Gallapoo: I've got something else I want to bring up too, since we've talked about this a lot, you and I personally have talked about this.  You know, I really don't want to get in the guru market.  I do not want to position myself as a guru.  I do not want to be lumped in with that crowd because, you know, like we said, unfortunately, a majority of them are basically con men.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, I mean not all of em, there's a lot of legit guys, Clayton Makepeace, John Carlton, you know, Michel Fortin, and I probably shouldn't have started naming names, because I'll leave people out and then, like, people listening to this will think, oh, well, so and so's a conman because Dan didn't mention him.  But, you know – but I just don't want to be lumped into that crowd, but also I know that what I have to offer is extremely valuable because I've done, you know, I've done what I teach, and I refuse to teach anything that I haven't done, you know.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: I don't want to talk about writing direct mail controls for Agora or for, you know, for credit card companies, because I've never done that.  I only teach what I've done, and I know that my knowledge is worth a lot of money but, you know, that's a big concern of mine.  If I position the DobermanDan.com site, you know, as that, and I do offer some sort of products or coaching or something like that, you know, I'm concerned about getting lumped in with that crowd.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: Do you have any thoughts on that?

Mr. X: Yeah, I think maybe – yeah, it's funny, because what I'm realizing as we're talking is that this is one of those things where, you know, it's like the shoemaker whose kids have no shoes.  You know, it's very difficult, I think for us sometimes, even though we know the fundamentals of marketing, to apply them to ourselves.  And I think that's what's been so cool about our friendship is, we've been able to hold up kind of like a mirror to each other and say, well, you know, you know all these rules and now you need to apply them to yourself and you've done that to me many times, so I'm gonna do it to you.

I think you need to really define who your market is, because you know, your market is gonna determine how you go about reaching the market and what message you hit them with.  You know, and I mean I really think that the reason that, you know, a lot of these con men are using these real, you know, real hard copy, you know, hard sales tactics, you know, and it's just real over the top and these huge claims, and you know, you'll make $30,000.00 today kind of thing, and you know, just all this hype, I think they do that 'cause they're kinda going after the lowest common denominator in the market.

So, I think maybe you need to decide if you – you know, if you want to direct your services to, you know, maybe, you know, people more like myself, you know, who are more experienced marketers and they're looking for, you know, somebody else who can, you know, help them take their business to the next level.

Dan Gallapoo: Right.

Mr. X: You know, or are you gonna go after the complete newbie.  And then, you know, decide, you know, decide, you know, who is your market, specifically and then tailor your message to that market.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, excellent point.  Do you have any recommendations for what I should be doing with the website or in general to build up the subscriber list?

Mr. X: Yeah, I think – you know, again, I think for your niche, I think that, you know, you definitely want to find a model, but I mean what – me personally, what I like in website is I kinda like the three-column design, you know, where you have a big middle column and then a, smaller left and a smaller right column.  And then you know, you got to have the sign up form, and you know, usually it's the upper right hand corner.  And then that way you're able to fit in a whole bunch of content as well as, you know, your sales message here.

Because I'm looking at, like, the above the page fold, and you know, I see this big banner, and it's a cool banner, but you know, I don't know if it really does anything.  It says, you know, Doberman Dan, Direct Response Copywriter.  Well, that's great, but it's kinda like, yeah, okay, you know, that's another copywriter guy.

And the other thing I was gonna tell you was, I mean you're really – I mean you are a direct marketing expert.  So what I would like to see is more like you kinda play up that part of it.  Is that, you know, I'm not just – I mean there's all kinds of copy – hiring a copywriter is like hiring an auto mechanic.  Hiring a direct marketing expert is like hiring – or is like, you know, dealing with a priest or a life coach or something.  You know, it's something more important and it's like, you know, you're more than just a copywriter, Dan.  So, you know, I think that that needs to be kinda worked in there.

And then what I would also do is I would also structure the site so you're throwing a lot more headlines to different articles more up towards the top.  So like right now you have one main kind of story here, you have your masthead and then one main story.  So you have basically two shots to grab me.  But with a three-column format, you know, you can have down, you know, like the left column, you could have like headlines from maybe 10 or 12 different articles.

Dan Gallapoo: Good point.  You know, this goes back to what you were talking about, using WordPress, because a friend of my, Caleb Osborne, another copywriter, actually as a favor for me, changed this site over a couple months ago to a WordPress site.  It's using the Thesis Theme.

Mr. X: Uh huh.

Dan Gallapoo: And I'm still going through the learning curve on it, but as far as changing the look of the site to what you're talking about, I think it's as simple as pushing a couple buttons or clicking a couple boxes and hitting publish, and I'm good to go.

Mr. X: It is, yeah, it is.  In fact, I'm gonna show you something that, you know, a new project that I'm working on.  Again, this hasn't been – it's not done.  I wasn't planning on revealing this here, but just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.  And again, this hasn't been monetized, but if you go to recessionanxiety.com, that's a WordPress site, and – have you pulled that up yet?

Dan Gallapoo: It's coming up right – this is pretty cool.  I didn't know you were gonna actually show an actual –.

Mr. X: Yeah, didn't either, but you suckered me in with your strong persuasion skills.

Dan Gallapoo: RecessionAnxiety.com.  I'm there.  It doesn't look like – yeah, it doesn't look like your typical blog, it's got a different look.  It looks like more of a, you know, a website look than a blog look.

Mr. X: A website, right.  And what I've noticed, depending on what browser you're using, it may look a little bit different.  But generally, it has the name at the top, which I'm not real crazy about having the domain name that big, but that was the theme thing, so we may play with that.  Then we have Survival Strategies for Hacking the Recession.  Okay, so that's kinda interesting.

And then you see on the right, it's not a three-column layout, it's a two-column, but you see that I've got like one, two, three, four, five, six different categories, okay.  And then on my screen, anyways, I have – there's two articles up top.  So I have –you know, we have the sub-head here, if the main name doesn't pull you into the site, we have the sub-head that might pull you into the site.  We have headlines for two different articles on the left, and then six different categories, each of them that has kind of the catchy name, which you know, you might find interesting right there.

And then as you scroll down, we'll probably end up moving this up, you see recent posts on the right.  You'll see there's like a long list of like 15 different, you know, recently added news stories here.  So the more I can move up kind of above the fold, you know what I mean by, you know, above the fold, the stronger the site's gonna be.

So, what I would probably do is in the upper right-hand corner, where it says search, go, you see that on your –?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, yeah.

Mr. X: On your screen?  What I would do in that area would be, I'd probably put a little blurb about why'd want to subscribe to my ezine, okay, because that's the top right.  And then below it have all the different categories and stuff.  There's just more – I have a – you know, it's like fishing with a hook that has like four or six different hooks on it instead of just one.  You know, you're giving yourself a much greater chance of hooking somebody.

And then when they click on one of these things – oh, and then I've also got the, you know, the menu bar which says Home, About and DVDs, and that'll be – you know, we're gonna expand that too, so it's got more stuff, all of it above the page.  So the chance that as soon as you hit on this, it's probably – you know, if you're interested in, you know, surviving the recession, there's probably gonna be something up here that hits you immediately that you're gonna find, you know, pretty interesting and want to go deeper into the site.

And as you go deeper into the site, I have a greater chance of funneling you over to, you know, my sales letter to sell you the DVD or a number of DVDs or, you know, whatever it is I decide I'm gonna sell.  So yeah, with this site.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, something else, in addition to the recent posts, like little thing on the right, I see what you mean now when you're talking about my site.  Like, you go to my site and it's basically only gonna show the headlines of two articles, and you got to actually scroll way down to get to the second headline of the second article.

Mr. X: Yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: But this one here, you know, like you've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven – I don't know, 12 or more headlines –.  It's a headline, just a tiny little part of the article.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: So there's way more headlines to grab attention and keep people on the site.

Mr. X: Yeah, yeah.  And there's room for more, and it still looks pretty good.  I mean it doesn't look like some of those sites that are just, you know, information overload.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, exactly.  So I – you know, I'll basically rip off your –.

Mr. X: Yeah, do it.

Dan Gallapoo: Layout here for the Doberman Dan site.

Mr. X: Yeah, exactly, exactly.  And you know, testing is so important.  I mean there's – I mean that's probably – you know, everybody talks about testing but it really is the most important thing.  I mean because you can – you know, I could talk all I want but until we actually test this site to see, you know, what the click-through rates are like, you know, we don't really know.

So, you know, we may find that there's really too much stuff on this site, too many distractions or –.  You know, one of the problems with this site is that when you click on one of the articles it takes you to the actual article which takes you away from the site, which is not good.  In fact, the way this was supposed to be designed was it should've launched a new window when you click on that.  So that – you know, this is a work in progress.

But again, this is a website that, you know, I literally started the website like two days ago, two days ago.  You know, so I've put in, you know, maybe like – maybe at the most six hours, and most of that was just kind of, you know, messing around, trying – you know, 'cause I'm still learning the software.

But anyway, so I mean it's pretty cool for a minimum amount of time.  And you know, normally I would use, you know, HTML, I would upload actual pages when I was doing the website.  But this, you know, WordPress, it's pretty cool.

Dan Gallapoo: Yep, that makes sense.  I see what you're getting at now.  How'd you get so much content up so fast?

Mr. X: We're using a feed, it's like a RSS feed, that pipes in content from the news servers.  So those are all, you know, news articles.  I haven't written – well, some of them, you know, we get from like free ezine articles, where they're people who write articles and then you post the article that they wrote on your site but with a link back to their site, so it helps them out and it helps you out.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay, all right, that's cool.  That's the – hey, I appreciate the example.  This was a little surprise I wasn't expecting.

Mr. X: Yeah, you know me, full of surprises.  And tomorrow there will be ten other recession related sites just like this one.

Dan Gallapoo: I guarantee it.  In fact, some of em will – might even rip off the exact – it'll be the exact same except up top it will have a light blue background.

Mr. X: Right, exactly.  It may not even have that, you know, whatever.  But yeah, I mean this thing, the – I'm looking at your site.  It says sign up for the Doberman Dan letter.  Why?  Why would I want to do that.

Dan Gallapoo: Right.

Mr. X: You know, so –.

Dan Gallapoo: Because it's pretty and my dog is pretty.

Mr. X: Yeah, exactly, exactly.  So, I need, you know, I need – I mean and you have so many reasons.  I mean it'd be like, you know, want to know what Gary Halbert told me when he was drunk and we were floating around in his boat on the coast of Florida, about the real secrets behind, you know, your favorite Internet marketing gurus, you know, sign up for the Doberman Dan letter.  I mean that's the type of thing where like, you know, you have the – you know, they call them in Spanish, the chisme, you know, the gossip, the juice.

You know, I mean something like that would like – you'd be like, yeah, you know, send me that stuff, here's my email address.  I want to know that stuff.  I want to know what – you know, once you separate the hype from, you know, all the rest, you know, what did Halbert really say, you know, what happened when you went to that seminar with Dan Kennedy and you know, they all got drunk one night and started telling you what the numbers were really like, you know.  Send me that information.

That's just me, again, you know, it's like you have to, you know, for your market, you need to figure out what it is, you know, what it is that they really want, and you know, maybe they're not a gossip hound like I am but they want, you know, they want to know something else.

So, I don't know, I think maybe – I mean, your credibility is important, but my guess would be that by the time they hit your site, they probably already know something about you, because they've read your posts on other discussion forums or they've seen, you know, some of your ads and stuff.  So by the time they hit your site, maybe it would work better if you offered more marketing information, like, you know, kinda the what's in it for them thing.  And then you know, have the – you know, all the articles linked to basically a sales letter which sells the service or the product that you want to offer.

Dan Gallapoo: Right, yeah, that makes sense.  You know, it's kind of funny because, you know, a lot of these gurus will tell you, you know, just put a bunch of content up there, you know, which is true.  I mean that's great to have good content, but you know, there also needs to be a reason why they should subscribe, you know.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: Although I still think, you know, I am pretty good looking in that picture and Donner's really good looking, so to me that seems like it should be enough to get em to sign up.

Mr. X: Well, it was interesting, I read through some of your comments.  It was interesting how much people wanted to know more about the dog, you know.  And I don't know what they think about your looks, but, you know, it seemed like everybody wanted you to write more about the dog, you know.

Dan Gallapoo: By the way, I should probably share that – did you hear Donner barking just a few minutes ago?

Mr. X: No, I didn't.

Dan Gallapoo: Oh, okay, well, he put a few barks in it.  It's almost like, you know, every tele-seminar I do, even though he's sleeping when I start, he always gets recorded somehow or another, like he knows, you know, like I want to make sure I get on this recording.

Mr. X: Hey, he's as much a part of this enterprise as you are, at this point.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, and you're directly responsible of that because –.

Mr. X: Right, yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, well, not – you're directly responsible for that, you're also directly responsible for the Doberman Dan moniker, you know, that I'm stuck with now, 'cause you introduced me to the breeder where I got my dog.

Mr. X: Well, in considering that Donner has to put his two cents in, you know, through barking into practically every tele-seminar you do, I think you should probably change the name of the site to Doberman and Dan.

Dan Gallapoo: I will definitely consider that.

Mr. X: Yeah, kind of a partnership.  You know, like Olgivy and Mather.  You know, it'll be Doberman and Dan.  They have to pay extra if they want to get Donner's advice.

Dan Gallapoo: That's right, and he probably will be able to word things more eloquently than I am, too.

Mr. X: Yeah, yeah.  No, dogs, there's a niche.  But I'll tell you, that's for another day.  So – listen, my wife is calling me, dinner is on the table.  I'm gonna get in trouble if I don't go now.

Dan Gallapoo: Nope, you better go eat.  Hey, I just want to say thanks, man, I really appreciate it.

Mr. X: Hey, my pleasure.  Let's do this again soon.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay, sounds good.  Take care.

Mr. X: Great, take care, bye.

Dan Gallapoo: Bye.

[End of Audio]

Today's article has been provided courtesy of Ben Settle from CopywritingGrabBag.com.

Ben interviewed me and included the interview as an appendix in his Copywriting Grab Bag book. Lots of money-making gems in his book.  I highly recommend it… and not just because I'm featured in it. There's a lot of proven direct response marketing nuggets you can use immediately to start boosting your sales and profits.

Without further adieu, here's the transcription from Ben's interview with me.

All the best,

BEN: Okay Dan, now you used to live for a brief time with Gary Halbert.  What are some things you learned about copywriting and business while you were living with him?

DAN: Wow… those lessons would take an entire book to fill.  Actually I'm kind of in the process of compiling or writing all the things down I learned from Gary.  They're all in my head, it's a matter of just getting them out of there and on the paper.  Gary taught me so many things.  Not just about business and copywriting and direct response‚ but about life in general.  Some of them didn't make sense at the time but now a lot of them are making sense.

Guess one of the most important things he taught me was he always said motion is better than meditation.  You don't have to get it perfect.  You just have to get it going.  And rather than sit on something and think about it for months and analyze it, just get it out there.  As he used to say, "This is good enough at this point.  It's not perfect.  It's good enough.  Let's run it up the flag pole and see how many people salute this thing."  And then he'd run the ad in the newspaper or do a direct mail test or whatever‚ an online test‚ and we'd see what would happen.

And one of the life-changing things for me was Gary and I wrote an ad for a book that we tested in a magazine.  I basically wrote the thing and then Gary looked at it and took some of the things I'd written‚ not all of them‚ and then rewrote the whole ad and told me basically he was writing it in the style of the old Joe Karbo, Lazy Man's Way To Riches ad.  And I thought it was a great ad.  And everybody else who read it thought it was a great ad.  We ran that in several newspapers and it was a complete bomb.  We got so few calls and Gary didn't even react.  There was no emotion, he just shrugged it off and his only response was, Okay, what else we workin' on?

We moved on to the next project and that for me was so liberating to see that, you know what?  Gary Halbert‚ as good a marketer and copywriting as he was‚  still had his failures.  And it was just a matter of getting it out there, testing it, seeing what happens‚ if we got something to work with, let's go forward.  If not, then that's dead and let's move on to the next thing.  There's no emotion involved.  There's no hand-wringing, oooooh this is a failure and I worked on it for months and it failed…  No.  It's just okay… next!

BEN: When you guys used to run your tests, did you test multiple different versions?  Or was it just that one version then if that didn't work you just moved on to the next thing?  Or how did that work?

DAN: For this particular thing it was that one version and that was it.  And it was dead in the water.  You know, Gary didn't go into specifics.  I guess he pretty much just knew this one was dead in the water.  We could spend some more time on it and try to revive it.  But we got other projects to test so let's test them and see what happens.

BEN: So basically, if it's a complete disaster, it's probably not going to get much better just by changing a headline or something?

DAN: Pretty much so.  Gary told me to look at Agora Publishing.  One of the biggest direct mailers in the country.  Probably in the world.  They hire the best copywriters in the world.  They have the best marketing minds in the country working there.  They have years and years and years of experience in all kinds of different markets.  These guys know their stuff.  And they have millions of dollars to test ideas.  And he said their numbers show 8 out of every 10 projects they test fail and they never move forward with it.

BEN: Wow!  I had no idea about that.

DAN: I didn't either.  And Gary's point was if Agora Publishing‚ with all the brilliant minds and the brilliant copywriters and all that experience‚ only hits a home-run or 20% of the projects are winners‚ don't expect to have better odds than Agora.  It's probably going to be the same for us.  You're going to test stuff, it's going to fail‚ next!  Move on to your next project.  You had a failure, great.  Join the club.  Don't let that stop you in your tracks.  Move on to the next one.  You just got to keep swinging at them until you get a hit.

BEN: Since then do you apply that philosophy to everything you work on‚ if it bombs that first time you just don't waste time on it and move on to the next thing until you get a winner?

DAN: I pretty much do.  If it shows some form of life… I try to figure out how can I make this better or why didn't this produce the kind of response I need.  But if it's just a dog… I had to learn the hard way.  I should have just followed Gary's example.  If it's a dog… I tried to beat a dead horse so to speak.  I've had several projects where I just believed they were going to work and I thought my copy was brilliant.  And they were complete bombs.  But yet I wasted time on trying to revive those and figure out what was wrong when I should have just thrown that thing in the trash and moved on to the next project like Gary taught me.

So if it's a dog and it's just stinkin' up the place with hardly any response and it's just not working, it's time to drop that thing and move on to the next one.  But I do have things that I didn't get that great a response on initially that I've stuck with and got advice from trusted marketers and have improved on them.  But if it's a dog I'm dropping it as fast as I can.

BEN: That is really good advice and definitely something I'll be applying to my own business very soon here.  Because like you said, it takes that pressure off.  If 8 out of 10 of Agora are failing with all their millions of dollars to test and pay for the highest copywriters in the world‚ the average business owner who maybe doesn't have a lot of skills yet‚ why screw around with the dead product like that?  Maybe it's just the product?

DAN: I agree.  I'll go you even one further.  Let's say that 1 out of 20‚ because we're not Agora, and I certainly don't put my copywriting skills up against any of these really good guys‚ so let's say I'm a hack copywriter‚ and I still have a lot to learn about copywriting and marketing‚ so let's say that my failure rate is 19 out of 20.  But that one project that hits‚ trust me‚ even if all 19 in a row are failures, Ben‚ that one project that hits will more than pay for all the time and money lost on those 19.

The only problem is most people don't push through until they get the hit.  The disappointment they take it personal.  They view the failure as a reflection on them.  And they view failure instead of being a result‚ okay, that failed, that's a result… that doesn't make it a bad result… just a result‚ and then the hand-wringing and the “Oh woe is me” starts… and then they quit.  They don't push on through.

BEN: Are you pretty much in that camp of thinking where the list is 50%, the offer is 30 and the copy is only like 20% anyway… and really it's such a small percentage that it's out of the copywriter's hand anyway?

DAN: You know what, in my experience that has proven true for me.  I've had fantastic results with‚ and I'll be the first to admit‚ with crappy copy.

BEN: One of the other guys I interviewed for this book was telling me, if the copywriters out there trying to sell their services weren't beating their chests and acting like they're the reason why a lot of these products are selling, maybe everyone else wouldn't have this complex like, “man I must really suck if this ad's not working…”  When there are so many factors outside the copy that come into play that it's almost kind of ridiculous.

DAN: Yeah… that's true.  And there's factors affecting things that maybe you're not even aware of.  It could be a breaking news event that all the sudden has captured everyone's attention and they're not watching your ad or reading your direct mail or Lord knows.

BEN: It could depend maybe on the day they test, right?

DAN: It really could‚ there's a lot of factors out of your control.  And I used to get discouraged a lot about that stuff.  Especially when I read and believed a lot of things I read on the Internet from alleged “gurus” who‚ every piece they write they get a 85% response and $10 million off of every mailing.  I used to believe a lot of that stuff.  And I used think, “Wow… I'm a real loser.  I only got 1% response on my last direct mail piece.  And geez… and it only brought in a a buck fifty for every dollar invested‚ I must be a serious loser and hang this up I guess.”

But there's so many factors like you said.  A good example is I've gotten fantastic results from crappy copy.  I just cranked out some copy real fast that was crappy… and I thought, “Huh.  This is half-assed copy.  You know what‚ let's do like Gary taught me, run it up the flag pole and see how many people salute this thing.”

But it was to a good list I had a previous business relationship with, or current business relationship with, and the offer was a good offer so my crappy copy was really successful.

BEN: And you can always improve on it later once you know it's worth spending time on.  Is that the way you look at it?

DAN: Yeah, exactly.  Or… if you want to take it further.  I got a piece of crappy copy that's been running the past year and a half that is just kicking ass!  And it is crappy.  And I've had several people who I really respect be real nice about it and say, “Uuuhmmm this is okay… you could improve this or that and this or that…” And I think, yeah, they're absolutely right.  I could improve it.  And I'll get around to that.  But in the meantime since it's making me a boatload of money I think I'll just keep my crappy copy out there.  I will get around to it.  I will do some split testing and I will try to improve it.  But it's working pretty darn good.

And like you said, there's other factors.  There's the list, the market, the offer.  Gary Bencivenga said it very eloquently‚ and I can't remember what he said‚ but it's basically, a gifted a product is much more powerful than a gifted pen or something like that.

BEN: Yeah… I believe he was quoting Rosser Reeves.

DAN: Ah… you know brilliant copy is not going to sell a turd.  You can write a brilliant piece of copy to sell a turd and it just ain't going to happen.

BEN: I remember reading some of those Gary Halbert letters and what I liked about those newsletters even more than just the content is he would show you an ad he wrote and he would say, “I don't know why this didn't work.”  The one I'm thinking about is for a car dealership.  And I'm thinking, “Man if I was a car dealer I'd buy this.”  But we just can't control this stuff.  And why worry about it?

DAN: I agree. Gary had an interesting way of teaching.  He didn't come out and say that stuff, “Dan, you have a dog.  Drop it!”  He did his thing and let me observe and figure this stuff out on my own.  But yeah, that's one of the most important things I learned from him.  You can't control a lot of that stuff.  So get it out there, see what happens, if it's a dog drop it and move on to the next one.

BEN: When I was reading your website I remember one of the things that you talked about that Gary taught you was to quit being 100% online and start going offline.  What's a good way for someone who is maybe 100% online to start cashing in on offline media?  How could someone go about that?

DAN: I feel like I'm the lone voice in the wilderness crying out this truth that nobody believes until they actually try it.  But if you've got an online business and you're not keeping a database of your customers' physical snail mail addresses and sending them direct mail at least every month… I'm going to have to channel the spirit of Gary Halbert.  If you're not doing that then you are a complete 100% shit weasel.

If Gary were here and he met an online marketer who wasn't sending direct mail I think he'd probably whack 'em upside the head and call them a shit weasel.  Because that one thing alone… can literally double your business in 30 days or less.  I love the response I get when I tell online marketers this.  And I've given this advice away freely which I will no longer do.  In fact, this is the last time I'm going to give this away free, Ben.  Because this is million dollar advice.  But when I give it away free people don't seem to value it.

I spoke with an owner of one of the biggest online marketers of supplements and asked about how often they're snail mailing their list.  And he said, “We don't keep a database of snail mail addresses once we ship the order.”  And I thought you've got to be kidding.  Here's a company that‚ based on the current sales‚ could probably add an additional $5 million per month if they would‚ and that's on the low side based on my experience‚ if they send direct mail snail mail to the list every month.  But the response is, “Yeah, but we capture email addresses.  And we send a weekly, daily, whatever email promotion.”

Well, for a lot of reasons the emails are not getting through to the recipients nowadays with spam filters and all the other problems.  Or, people's inboxes are so crammed full of stuff, they're deleting stuff.  You know this, Ben, stuff you've even subscribed to that you want to get you probably delete a lot because you don't have time to read it.  So an email nowadays has a very low perceived value.  But an actual snail mail letter or promotion that somebody holds that they received in their mailbox and hold in their hot little hands still commands more attention than an email in my most humble‚ but accurate‚ opinion.

BEN: Yesterday some idiot cut the phone line somewhere along the road here.  So, everyone who has Verizon service from Oregon through California for like 100 miles could not make long distance calls or access the Internet.  And I was thinking, “Man I gotta call Doberman Dan tomorrow, I hope this thing gets back on track.”  And it just made it completely painfully obvious that relying on the Internet or any kind of technology is just a real big mistake.  The technology of direct mail doesn't change.  It's paper, a stamp and you can do it whether the phone is working.  You can do it whether the Internet's working.  And you are going to get it in their hands 100% of the time.  I just wanted to add that in there.

DAN: That's a very good point.  And like I said it commands more attention.  The first thing you gotta do before you can make a sale is you gotta get your prospect's attention.  And if he's deleting your emails obviously you don't have his attention.  He's not reading your message.  But a direct mail promotion still commands more attention than an email and I learned that the hard way.

I'd had a little online business in the fitness-body building marketing that I kept going online, I was really concentrating more on client work at that time.  But I kept my little business going in that market.  And I was sending out weekly emails and everything and it generated a few sales.  It was really small but it was something.  I just got to a bad place in my life and was broke, moved to a new place in Miami, and it was Christmas time‚ the worst time in the year to try to sell something in that market.  And I was completely broke and sent out an email promotion and it got a trickle of sales like always.  I didn't know what I was going to do.  It was like the wolf was at the door like Gary used to say.  And me and my wife at the time sat down and I wrote out a direct mail promotion for one of my products and me and my wife sat down at the kitchen table which was the only piece of furniture we had at the time.  And hand wrote out a 1000 envelopes to my most recent customers.  Stuck the stamps on them all by hand.  This was like I said real close to Christmas.  And I dropped that in the mail‚ the last little bit of money I had went to pay for envelopes, printing and stamps.  And I dropped that in the mail with the hope that it would do something.

BEN: A Christmas miracle.

DAN: I was hoping for the Christmas miracle.  And it's a horrible time selling anything with direct mail in that market but I had to do something.  And prior to that with this little business I had never sent any direct mail to them.  I just followed the typical online thing that people do and just send email promotions weekly or monthly.  And the orders just flooded in.  And I thought, “I'll be darned!”  If I got this kind of response from direct mail‚ because these people knew me, bought from me before and had a good experience with me and I got a great response and little cash flow surge there‚ and I'll be darned, I think maybe I should do the same thing next month.  Did it next month and it was even better because January is a great month for direct mail.  And I just sat down and got to figuring it out because I had that little business going at that point online for like five years.  And I get to calculating and worst case scenario and thought ‚ “Wow!  If I was sending out direct mail pitches all these years I would have made at least another $100,000 per year.”

BEN: Oh wow!  Email is actually costing people money even though it doesn't cost anything to send it.

DAN: Exactly.  Gary always used to say email is cheap‚ or email is free‚ for people who place no value on their time.  His contention was emails are getting deleted, people aren't reading them, they aren't getting through.  If you spent the same time preparing a direct mail promotion and sending it out you'd probably get 5 to 10 times the response that you get on email.  And he was right.  That was the first thing he told me when he came to Costa Rica‚ I was living in Costa Rica at the time.  That was the first time he and I met in person.  And he asked what I was doing and I said I got this little business online.  And he asks how well how's it going.  And I said it's doing okay‚ you know it's doing this per month and this is what I'm doing I'm sending out emails and blah blah blah.  And he's like if you take that offline you can add at least one zero to the end of what you're doing right now in the next two months.  And I thought, man, this guy's full of crap, man.  This can't work.  Snail mail is old fashioned.  Email is the wave of the future.  This can't be true.  I basically ignored his advice for a long time.

BEN: Until that Christmas when you decided then to implement it?

DAN: Yeah, that was about two years after Gary told me to do it.  I'm just stubborn or thick headed sometimes.  And two years later when my back was against the wall I did what he told me to do two years earlier.

BEN: If that doesn't get the point across I don't know what does.  Let's say somebody is on a shoe-string budget, how would you suggest they go about doing their first direct mail project?  Should they just start small and work their way up, or how does that work?

DAN: I would do just like I did.  Whatever you can afford to do, take a segment of your customer list, and take your thousand most recent customers‚ or if you're really on a limited budget do whatever you can afford.  A first class stamp nowadays is 41 cents.  So if you can only afford forty some bucks in postage, then take your 100 most recent customers or whatever you can afford and get your promotion together and printed.  You can usually get those printed inexpensively.  Keep it simple‚ white paper, black print.  Make it look like a letter just like Gary always taught.  Get those printed and sit down at your kitchen table and hand write your envelopes out.  Hand write your return address in the corner card with no company name.  No personal name.  Just your address.  And then hand write your customer's address on there.  It's a bootstrap way of doing it.

And second of all, Gary always said that you'll get a higher response when you make your letter look like a personal letter.  So if you hand write out the envelope it's going to look like a personal letter with everything printed right on the envelope.  If instead of a live stamp it's got a postmark or whatever they call it‚ a printed indicia‚ it's obviously not a personal letter.  So even though you're on a budget and writing these out by hand, it's actually an advantage to you and it's going to help your response.  Stick the stamps on by hand or pay some neighborhood kid a few cents each one to address and stick the stamps on and stuff the envelope and drop it in the mail.

I think that's the cheapest way to get started because you can do it based on your budget.  If you can only afford to mail 100 letters this week then mail 100.  Wait until the response comes in, take that money you've made, roll that into some more letters.  If you make enough to mail 200 then mail 200 next week.

BEN: So if you're really in trouble you can start with 20 or 30 and just do that or is there a minimum number they should try?  Or how does that work?

DAN: Whatever you can afford.  Obviously you're not going to get real accurate statistical results if you're only sending 20, 30, 40, 50, 100.  Say you need to mail 1000, or 2000 to kind of gage what the response will be if you roll to the rest of your list.  That may or may not be true, it depends on every circumstance.  But the nice thing is you can mail out whatever you can afford.  You can do your direct mail for $100 or less.

BEN: Now let's say someone doesn't have a list of customers necessarily.  Maybe they just have an e-newsletter.  Should they not do direct mail because they're not proven buyers?  How would you handle something like that?

DAN: Here's something I did a few years back with that same business.  I had a decent ezine subscriber list, but I only had snail mail addresses of people who purchased.  So I wanted to get more snail mail addresses.  So what I did is I wrote a special report and sent an email to the list.  I didn't offer the report free.  I know I would have gotten more response if I would have offered the report free.  And then I could have tested to see how good those leads were.  I kind of wanted to weed out the mooches who only ask for free stuff because it's free and I asked something stupid‚ like a buck ninety-five or two fifty or two ninety-five to cover postage.  And by asking for a little bit of money I weeded out a lot of the mooches and the people who responded had credit cards because that was the only way to pay the two bucks or two ninety-five… or whatever it was.

So I knew I got a snail mail name of someone who is one of my ezine subscribers who had a credit card.  And that got me more snail mail addresses and the list turned out to be good.  They were a pretty good list of buyers, too.

BEN: So really somebody could whip up something with some value or maybe do what you and I are doing and just have a conversation with an expert, and offer to give it away free but maybe just charge for shipping and they're going to get people who actually have an interest in the subject and are willing to spend a little money on it.  And it's almost like getting a paying customer?

DAN: To me a snail mail address of even just a prospect‚ some who hasn't bought but somebody I know has interest in my niche or my subject matter‚ is infinitely more valuable than an email address.

And so, based on your numbers let's say you sell a higher priced product.  You could offer your report free.  So you've got some out of pocket expenses sending them the report, you know the printing and the postage.  But it may make sense for your particular market or product.  Because let's say you're selling a hundred dollar product and you give away your report free, you're going to get a higher percentage of mooches who just ask for something free that really aren't quality prospects to get some good quality prospects in there, too.  I just ask for the two bucks shipping in there just to weed out the mooches, because mine was a low priced product.  But if I had a higher priced product I would have tested offering it completely free and then see how it does from there.

You know, whatever you're offering‚ whether it's a report or a DVD or CD‚ the content has to be good.  You can't put together something that's crappy because you figure, “Ah… it's free so I'll just give them some crap.”  The content really has to be good because you're just going to blow your credibility out if they send for your report and it's all crap.

BEN: Yeah because then they're not going to want to respond to a sales letter I would imagine.

DAN: Exactly‚ if you're content's good they'll be like, “Wow‚ if this is his free stuff, imagine what his paid stuff is like.”

BEN: Yeah, and that can go either way.  If it's a quality thing it'll make it more likely I would think, and if it's a crappy thing it'll make them more likely to not want to buy it.

DAN: Yes, exactly.

BEN: Let me ask you this‚ now that we're talking about direct mail.  The swampy part of the direct mail world, from what I understand at least, is the list broker side of it.  Do you have any tips on finding a good list broker and how would you go about finding one?  I mean you probably already have one.  But what about someone who has never done this before‚ how can they find a list broker?

DAN: You just have to ask people who have experience with that.  I think I found the first one in the yellow pages or something like that.  Or maybe it was an online search.  It was years before I found a good list broker.

And it depends on your niche, too.  Like my list broker specializes in certain things.  Like she deals with health promotions and I forget what other niches because they're niches I'm not in, but she specialized in that.  But if you're in a certain niche then there may be a better list broker for your particular niche.  So if at all possible try to find an experienced direct marketer who is using the list broker and doing direct mail and ask who they use.

You'll go through a lot of them on your own if you're just trying them here and there‚ at least I did.  You know this is a small industry and word gets out and a good list broker is really helpful.  They know who's mailing what to what lists, they know what promotions are working in certain lists.  That's some extremely valuable information.  They'll tell you who's used this list, who's gone back and used it a second or third time‚ really good stuff.

If you find a list you like and want to look into it more they'll find you the promotion that generated the list.  Yeah, a good list broker is hard to find.  But when you find a good one they're worth their weight in gold.

BEN: Just getting the ad that built the list‚ man, you can't ask for better research than that.

DAN: Nope, that's for sure.

BEN: Will they show that to you before you rent the list?  Or do you have to rent the list first and then they'll show it to you?

DAN: No‚ while you're doing your research on the list.

BEN: So basically if I was going to the SRDS and I wanted to see the letter that created a certain list of maybe a million names in a certain niche, I could actually call a list broker up and they'll be able to show me that sales letter?

DAN: Yeah, a good list broker who's doing their job and wants to spend the time will do it.  One who's lazy and doesn't want to do anything will blow you off.  But yeah, they'll do that.  The only caveat I have or I should say is when you find a good list broker don't waste their time.  If you're going to rent the list and you're serious about renting the list then that's cool‚ do all the research.  But don't just waste their time and have them go through all these hoops just so you can get free information from them.  That's really unethical.

BEN: I remember a few months ago when we first spoke, you told me this interesting story about another circumstance when your back was against the wall, and you had to basically persuade the magazine person to run your ad at a substantial discount.  Not a lot of people can do that sort of thing.  What are some ways people can get good deals on magazines and newspaper space ads?

DAN: Now that we're into this interview I'm noticing a recurring theme about my life‚ I keep thinking of stories when my back was against the wall… for some reason that seems to be when I'm at my most creative.

I remember this time specifically.  And I didn't know anything about negotiating… or ads… all I knew is I had something that was working because I tested it on a small basis and I needed to get it in these magazines because I thought it was going to work.  And they sent me what they call a rate card and it was like I had the ad all prepared‚ it was a full page ad‚ I don't remember what the rate card was at the time.  It doesn't matter because whatever it was it was more than I could afford.  It was something like $5,000.  All I knew was that I could only afford to pay about six to seven hundred‚ maybe eight hundred‚ and so I didn't know anything about negotiation.  All I did was the "poor poor pitiful me" thing.  I am a small time guy trying to put a roof over my head… I don't have hardly any money.  And I'm not even sure this is going to work.  This could be a total failure and what little money I got saved could just be gone in an instant.  I've got whatever it was‚ $700 for this ad.  Is there any possible way we could do a just one time test of my ad for $700?  And I actually got a magazine to agree to that thank God.  Primarily because the ad rep was just a gem of a person.  His name if I can mention it…?

BEN: Yeah, go ahead.

DAN: Bob Rose.  And he works for Chelo Publishing.  And he's the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet.  One of those few guys where his word is his bond and you shake hands on it and it's good.  Bob's a great guy.  And Bob let me run that ad for $700 and it was supposed to be a $5,000 ad.

I got better at ad negotiation though as I learned more.  One other trick I used simply because I didn't how to negotiate and I actually felt uncomfortable on the phone asking for a discount‚ I'd call and ask for a magazine's media kit.  I'd look at the rate card‚ whatever it was it didn't matter because I couldn't afford it‚ I would have my ad ready to their specs that are laid out in the media kit.  I'd write out a check for whatever I could afford.  I'd send the check with the ad artwork‚ this is back when you actually physically had to send the artwork.  Now you can usually FTP it or email it.  And I'd send a letter explaining here's my full page ad.  Here's a check enclosed for X amount of dollars.  Which is the maximum amount I can afford to pay for this ad.  Feel free to cash my check and run my ad for this.  Or if you ever happen to get any remnant space‚ which is unsold ad space‚ feel free to cash my check and run my ad.  That worked 100% of the time and I didn't do it many many many times.  But the times I did it worked.

BEN: Is that the whole mindset of “it's really hard for them to give the money back once you send it to them?”

DAN: I think that's what it is.  I mean you got a check‚ you got an order with a check. So it's like, “Okay, something's better than nothing.”  And it worked well.

BEN: Man, usually you hear about remnant space and okay, here's a company that'll help you do it.  But I never thought of actually just doing it that way.

DAN: And you can't get ridiculous with it.  I've gotten ad space as low as 10-15 percent of the rate card.  If they're asking $10,000 for a full page ad you can't send them a $100 check with a note to run your ad.  If their asking $10,000 for a full page ad it's possible if you send them a $1,000 check using the technique I just described it is very possible you will get that ad in there.

BEN: It may not be on your time frame right?  But it could get in there within a few weeks or months or how does that work?

DAN: That's right.  It very well could.  If you've got more money to spend it's actually highly likely if you send a check for 20 or 30 percent of the rate card it's highly likely you'll get in there pretty darn quick.

BEN: You said it worked 100% of the time, but did you know when they were going to do it?  Or did you just happen to see it was run and your check was cashed, or how did that work?

DAN: I think a few times I was contacted.  And they said your ad will be running.  One time I wasn't even contacted.  They just cashed my check, put my ad in the publication and the way I knew it was in there is all the sudden I started getting calls.  And, “what the heck?”  and when I got the publication I found I was in there.

BEN: That is a great little tip.  I mean anyone who is reading this or listening to this there's no excuse not to do this now offline‚ at least test it if you can scrape some money together like that.

DAN: It's worked well and desperation was the mother of invention at that point.  I had no negotiation skills and felt extremely uncomfortable doing it so that's how I handled it.  And it worked.

BEN: Talk about a million dollar tip.  If anyone wanted to start cashing in on offline leads and things like that‚ I mean there you go.  More on these offline sales letters and ads, another thing I wanted to ask you was what your process was for when you test them.  Because it's fairly simple now to test things online.  It's really cheap and easy.  But if somebody was going to go offline how would you suggest they start testing their ads and sales letters?

DAN: Things have changed a lot since I first started in direct response marketing back in the mid to late nineties I guess.  Back then for example, my first project how I tested it was a two step ad actually.

I was selling a self published body building course and I just took out a very small display ad‚ the smallest size I could.  And had a headline whatever it was "Gain 15 pounds of muscle blah blah blah ‚  new free report reveals the secrets to gaining muscle mass and strength yada yada yada.  Call this toll free 24 hour telephone number and request your free report."

And that was set up with a voicemail number.  They called the voicemail number, left their name and address for the free report and I sent a free report that was a sales pitch of course.  And so, you had to wait for the ad to come out, which can be anywhere from two to three months.  Then the leads came in, and you had to mail out that first sales letter and judge the response from there.  So you got several months involved in doing it that way.  But it was the cheapest way for me to get a prospect list going and see if my offer was going to fly because the ad was inexpensive, the voicemail was $20 a month.  I did all the grunt work myself, I transcribed the names from the voicemail, hand addressed the envelopes, mailed them their report.

So it was a real bootstrap way of doing it.  But it was cheaper than me putting my whole sales pitch in a full page ad.  Plus if I did it this way‚ two-step‚ I captured the names and addresses so they didn't just get one sales letter from me.  Weeks later they got a follow up sales letter.  So it was months to really test something the bootstrap way like that.  That was how I did it.  It is way faster to test stuff online nowadays.

BEN: When you send somebody a free report which is really a sales pitch, is yours a flat out sales letter or do you actually give away really good information the first half, then kind of segue into it… or how do you do that?

DAN: Initially when I was just first learning it was just a sales pitch.  It was actually a darn good story.  The story was fairly intriguing.  But it was like some of the promotions Gary Halbert wrote.  The story just sucked you in.   But there wasn't really much or any content in there because I just didn't know.  It worked.  But nowadays if I were doing it, I would definitely put some really good content in there, too‚ that they'd read it and be like, “Wow!  I can use this right now in my business‚ this is good advice…” rather than just a flat out sales pitch.

But then again, I'm gonna also say that you have to test it, too.  You may get better results with a flat out sales pitch.  You may get better results putting some really good content in there.  But my first few projects done the two-step way like I just described was a flat out sales pitch.

BEN: Have you ever used newspapers or magazines or even direct mail to drive people online?

DAN: Yes I have.  I have not done it recently.  But back when I first got on the web, which would have been '97, I was running full page ads that were a one-step that sold a product right from the ad.  And the only ordering option was call a toll free option to order.  But then after I got my website up I also put the website address in there as a response device in my particular instance my response stayed about the same.  It didn't cause my sales to go down.  But instead of 100% coming in on the phone, now 70% came in on the phone and 30% came in online.  I'm going from memory here not exact numbers, just an example.

So yes I have done it but that was a one-step thing.  I've also tested small display ads.  Same deal as before like I described‚ people could call and get their free report, but instead of using the phone option I drove them to a website to enter their email to get the free report.  And that worked well, too.  And it was inexpensive.  A small display ad in certain publications was an inexpensive way to do that.

BEN: To me it seems marrying the two mediums that works better than either one by themselves makes more sense than going all online and not using all the tools at our disposal.  But a lot of people just stay online and don't even think about doing these things.

DAN: Yeah it makes sense to me and it's worked extremely well for me and several other people who I've advised to do it.  Sometimes I just think that it's incredibly stupid to have your entire business come from one single company.  And I'm talking about Google.  If You're completely dependent on Google for your business you're like in my opinion one step away from being out of business.  If they change their search engine parameters and all the sudden you drop from the top ten to number 400‚ you're out of business.  Or if your Google AdWords are the only thing bringing in leads and sales and all the sudden Google changes some small policy… or changes the rule about that and all the sudden your ads are deleted… or all the sudden you go from appearing in the top five to being 50 or below‚ you're out of business.  So it just makes sense to me to spread it around and use different ways to get business coming in.

BEN: I think Google‚ didn't they do that thing the “Google Slap” they called it last year and people literally went out of business overnight.

DAN: Yeah overnight.  And that's scares the crap out of me.  I use Google AdWords a lot to test stuff‚ and not just to test but to bring in business and leads, too.  But if that were my only method of bringing in business I'd be scared to death‚ I wouldn't sleep until I got other stuff going.  And all this stuff I'm telling you to do offline‚ that's what I'd be doing if I had something going on Google AdWords that was working, I wouldn't sleep until I got other stuff going because I know that in a nano-second Google can change their mind about something and you'd be out of business.

BEN: Yeah or the Internet could have a fart or something‚ who knows…

DAN: Exactly!

BEN: Reminds me of that thing Dan Kennedy likes to say‚ that 1 is the most dangerous number in business.

DAN: That's true.

BEN: Relying on one this or one product, one client, one media like a lot of people used to just use FAX and they couldn't do that, or telemarketing and they couldn't do that.  What you're saying here makes so much more sense to mix and match all these different medias.  Especially offline which doesn't really change.  When's the last time the technology of offline media changed?  It is what it is.

DAN: Exactly.

BEN: You know who has a very, very good‚ he wrote an article about this‚ a guy named Bob Serling.  He wrote something on his website‚ and I'm pretty sure this is free for anyone to read on his website‚ I think it's bobserling.com.  Or just put his name in the search engine and you'll find him.  And he talked about the absolute games these search engines play and how they have to keep screwing with your rankings‚ that's just part of the game.

DAN: Is that on his website?

BEN: I believe so‚ and the click fraud and all that.  It's not like it's bad to use those things‚ but to rely on them, like you said, how could you sleep at night just knowing one engineer could have an idea that might make sense for Google or Yahoo but kill your business in a nanosecond.

DAN: I have a friend who's got an online information marketing business who checks his Google ranking like five times a day‚ nervously checks it five times a day‚ because he's been put out of business several times.  Google changed their mind about some little thing and he went from being in the top five under certain key words that were bringing in all his business to going to number 200 and all the sudden he's out of business.  He's gotta scramble and figure out what he needs to do to get back up.

Wow… I don't want to live that way.  I want the multiple leg thing like Jay Abraham used to talk about.  You have a table with one leg‚ that's pretty shaky.  Two legs you're doing better.  You know I want about a 50 leg table… so if this leg falls off I'm not even going to miss a beat and probably notice it much and it's just going to keep going.  That's what I want and all that stuff that Gary Halbert used to teach in his newsletter is still applicable today and this stuff I'm telling you about is still applicable to online businesses, there's all kinds of bootstrap, inexpensive off-line ways to get leads and new business.

BEN: The guy I interviewed last week for this book‚ his name is Michael Winicki‚ he was talking about how easy it is to just include a sales letter or catalog with your order when you ship it out…

DAN: Exactly!  It's amazing and nobody does it.

BEN: That's exactly what he was telling me.  He's like almost embarrassed for our industry.  I think people are looking for the sexy thing and not for the thing that works‚ the simple, basic thing.  I don't know‚ you just see all the money being left on the table and it just kind of bothers you.

DAN: It does… it's crazy that‚ I mean some of the biggest online marketers out there don't include a bounce-back offer‚ that's what they call it when you put a sales pitch in with your outgoing order.  How many hundreds of thousands of dollars are they missing by not doing it.  It doesn't cost anything‚ you're already shipping the product!

BEN: Yeah… it's just hitching a ride.  It reminds me of what you were talking about earlier when you guys were modeling the Joe Karbo ad.  And from what I understand Joe Karbo somehow got away with not collecting the names or anything.  But everyone else since could never figure out how he did it.  It's like why even bother trying to follow that‚ his model I mean‚ why not just do these little things and include the bounce-back offer, put an up-sell on the order form and just all these little dumb simple things‚ and it just amazes me how much a difference they can make.

DAN: Yeah exactly.  According to what Gary told me, Joe Karbo just didn't know.  Massive success with that “Lazy Man's Way To Riches” ad and he just didn't know.  He was making so much money‚ he shipped out his book and threw away the names and it just didn't occur to him, hey I can keep these and sell more stuff to these guys.  Or, at the very least, rent his list to other people and make some money with it.  Apparently from what Gary says, Joe admitted after the fact that was a huge mistake that cost him millions of dollars.

BEN: I was recently reading some Dan Kennedy thing about that.  He was talking about how when he was just starting out‚ he was like I'm going to model that whole thing‚ put the ten dollar book in the full page ad and see what happens.  He was like it just wasn't working.  He was losing money left and right.  But then he noticed it was working for some people.  But then when he did the numbers he found out, wait a minute‚ they're not making a profit either.  How are they staying in business?  And the way they were staying in business is they were renting the names.  So they could take a loss and unless you have that strategy in place…

But like you said, there's another leg of the table.  Renting the list.  It's just good to know these things.

DAN: It is.  In my opinion, based on my experience, a snail mail physical address‚ customer list‚ is something that has immense value that can feed you for years and probably decades.  As long as you do it right and treat it right and do the things you need to do to keep the list active.  That's been my case, that's for sure.  Way… waaaaay more value than just an email list.

BEN: These emails they just‚ people drop their email address on a dime.  And it's not like you can just move on a dime.

DAN: That's right.

BEN: With the email it's gotten to the point where‚ and I know a lot of people, myself included‚ I don't even let people with like hotmail or msn join because all they do is push the stupid spam button and then it gets you in trouble because now you can't market to anyone else because now you're on a list and… AOL does that too.  Email is just so shaky, it's so unreliable now.

DAN: You know what that's something I didn't know.  I think I'm going to implement that‚ not allowing hotmail addresses.  You get a lot of complaints from them.  Good idea‚ thanks Ben.

BEN: I kind of want to segue into some copywriting questions here if that's alright because I've looked at your ads at your portfolio at your site and they're just great ads.  One of the questions I wanted to ask you‚ and I think you address this on your site‚ is how do you avoid things like writer's block?  Because you talked about how you sat down at the kitchen table with your wife and you just cranked out an ad when your back was against the wall.  How do you avoid that dreaded blank page and where do I start and that sort of thing?

DAN: I have had that problem sometimes of feeling just overwhelmed and so overwhelmed I just couldn't get started.  And when it's my own projects that's not a real big deal because I don't have a client breathing down my neck.  But when it's a client and you got a deadline that's extremely stressful for me.

First of all, I'm a pretty voracious reader of stuff about direct marketing and copywriting.  And I love to read promotions written by the masters.  Like you've been sending me the Jim Rutz stuff you found and Clayton Makepeace, John Carlton and all the other the masters‚ I don't mean to be leaving anyone out.  I like reading those to learn from them and that seems to just stuff ideas into my brain that seem to come out at later points in time.  So that's been a real help to me, just always reading stuff about direct response and reading good direct response promotions.

Plus, what's really worked is quit editing yourself as you write.  And just write.  Just because you're writing doesn't mean you have to use it.  Just because you're writing something doesn't mean it's going to go into your promotion.  Just write even if it makes no sense whatsoever.  Just write and get stuff flowing.

Gary had a technique which I've used‚ it's worked for me.  He guarantees it works every time and you'll never ever have writer's block.  He said you just write.  It's as simple as it gets.  If you don't know what to write, quit sitting there looking at the blank screen or the blank piece of paper and just start writing “blah blah blah.”  And literally B-L-A-H-B-L-A-H.  And keep writing “blah blah blah” until a thought pops into your head.

“7 Mistakes Business Owners Make That Are Killing Your Profits” you go blank again.  Keep writing, “blah blah blah blah blah.”  Or whatever you want to‚ keep writing “my dog has fleas my dog has fleas my dog has fleas” and you get the next idea that pops into your head.  “Are you making this mistake?  You're probably losing 50% of your potential sales if you're doing this.”  You blank out.  So go back to writing “blah blah blah blah blah.”  That's what's worked really well.

BEN: Is that that whole, “you just have to keep moving” basically?

DAN: I think so.  And quit critiquing yourself and editing yourself as you write.  You're writing something and thinking, “7 Reasons Business Owners Are Losing Money This Year‚ oh wait a minute, that sucks… 7 Mistakes Entrepreneurs…” you can't even finish the first sentence because you're editing yourself as you go‚ just write.  It doesn't matter if it's just pure crap or drivel.  Just write and later you'll pull the gems out of there.

BEN: Kind of like what you were saying at the beginning of this interview‚ you don't have to get it perfect, just get it down.

DAN: That's right.  Just get it going.  Motion beats meditation, that's for sure.  And the more you sit there fretting about it with the blank screen the worse it gets.

BEN: Yeah, definitely.  I'm sure that most copywriters have had that problem.  It just gets worse and worse.  That's great advice.  When you look at other copywriters what they're doing today‚ or I don't know if people ever send you ads just to say, “Hey Dan, can you look this over and tell me what you think?” What's the biggest mistake that you're seeing that people are making in their copy?

DAN: Well a couple things.  Not enough proof elements.  If you make a statement and you can't back it up you're just bragging.  “My course is going to increase your income by 50% in 60 days or less.”  Oh really?  Back that up.  Tell me how, give me testimonials of people who have done it or whatever.  You really can't have enough proof elements I don't think.

Here's a mistake I've seen recently.  Just promotions that are just really hypey.  With all these hypey words and exclamation point after exclamation point.  “Amazing” this… “Mind-Boggling” that…

BEN: Mind-boggling…

DAN: Read something written by the masters.  It's funny it's like the inexperienced guys‚ the copy is drawing attention to itself.  “Look at me!  This is amazing!”  You know, a really good piece of copy written by a master it's almost like it‚ at least if I could describe it this way‚ it's almost like I'm reading and I'm not really recognizing the copy or the words.  I'm drawn in by the copy‚ the copy isn't drawing attention to itself.  Trying to think of a better way to explain this.  Read anything written by Gary Halbert and it just flows.  And it just sucks you in.  And the copy doesn't draw attention to itself and I don't know if I'm doing a good job of describing it but I think you know what I mean.

BEN: I think you're doing a great job of describing it.  You're saying that if you notice the writing then you probably should go back and redo it.  Even if you did want people to notice the writing it's only 20% of the sale anyway.

DAN: Yeah‚ exactly.

BEN: It's all these other things‚ it's the inherent value of what you're saying.  Is that…?

DAN: Yeah‚ exactly.  That's what I was really trying to get at.  That's the mistake I see made a lot.  You can't hype people into buying your product.  There's got to be some good salesmanship.  If people see a bunch of hypey words and “amazing” has got to be one of the over-used words and ends with exclamation points all over the place.  It's kind of like “uuuggh… yuck!”

Of course I'll give a disclaimer.  You know you have to test.  You definitely have to test this stuff.  But when I read something written by Clayton Makepeace or Gary Halbert‚ Gary wrote a piece shortly before he passed away for a colon cleansing product.  That's another case of I read the ad to read it just because Gary wrote it.  And I have no interest whatsoever in that product.  And I wind buying the product just because it's so good.  I don't remember the headline exactly, “The Secret Of The World's Oldest Man” or something.

The story was so compelling it's like I got lost in the story.  And I'm specifically reading this copy to study it as a copywriter.  But it was so damn good, that now all the sudden that I'm in to it after just a few sentences… the copy is secondary.  I'm not noticing the copy because I'm sucked into the story.

You know, here's something else I'm thinking of now‚ and I'm not saying this to try and suck up to my interviewer either.  But you wrote a promotion for Ken McCarthy's copywriting course.  And first of all, I would be real intimidated personally, writing a promotion for a copywriting course.  Because I know the people reading this‚ a lot of them are going to be copywriters.  It's like I'm a guitar player and there's this old joke how many guitar players does it take to change a light bulb?  Well it takes six‚ one to change the light bulb and five others to stand around with their arms crossed talking about how much better they could do it.  That's how I feel about writing an ad for a copywriting course that I know copywriters are going to read.  I'd think, “Wow… these guys are going to be critiquing my copy.”

BEN: Thank you…

DAN: That is a stellar example of what I've been trying to say but not doing a great job of expressing myself correctly.  That ad is classic salesmanship.  But without hype and without drawing attention to itself.  It does the job of selling the product.

BEN: Now I wanted to talk a little bit about one of your newsletters.  I thought this was really interesting.  And you said you could teach people how to basically double their sales in 59 days or less.  I think that's what the newsletter was called.  How does that work?  What was that about?

DAN: Well, first of all I lied… I'm just kidding.  Yeah‚ I'm going to try and condense that down because I've done that several times.  I'll try to condense it down.  We talked about one of the things‚ if someone has an established business and they got snail mail addresses, one of the things they can do that very possibly will double their business in probably 30 days more or less, is to start sending direct mail to the list like we talked about earlier.

But another thing that very few people have the guts to do is‚ and I learned this both from Gary Halbert and Dan Kennedy‚ is if you got a product or if you're testing a product, give it away.  And sometimes it's a cheaper method of acquiring customers really fast.  Just to give your product away.

Or like Gary would always recommend, Gary would recommend a 30 day hold.  Now, that's where you say, “Hey, my product costs $97 but to prove it works and to let you try it without any commitment, I'm going to let you have it now for free and you can post date your check for 30 days and not pay for 30 days later.  If you don't like the product for any reason, just send the product back.  We'll tear up your check un-cashed.”  Or now in the days of credit cards we'll hold the charge‚ “we're not going to charge your credit card for 30 days.  If at any point during that time you think our product sucks give us a call and say 'hey‚ your product sucks' and we will destroy your credit card information and we'll never charge your card.”  Very few people have the guts to do that because they're afraid they're going to get ripped off.  And I will tell you this, you will get ripped off by a certain percentage of people.  But it also will vastly increase your response.  And you'll get increased refunds, too.  But it's a way to bring in customers really fast.  And we are all buying customers through investing our time and optimizing our websites for search engines or buying customers through the advertising we're paying for.  So this is just another form of buying customers.  And I've also tried it with giving away the product free‚ but the condition of that is they're automatically enrolled in a monthly continuity.

So those are several ways that I've used, either alone or in combination together, to more than double a business in 59 days or less.  And the example on my website where I took a business and had a 1400% increase in sales in like less than 5 months I used a combination of those things.  I took an online business, started doing direct mail, and offline advertising in magazines, and either did a 30 day hold like Gary taught, or did the first order's free and then they're enrolled in a monthly continuity program.  And that worked extremely well.

BEN: I find that very intriguing.  And one of the questions I actually wanted to ask you about was what are some ways that you use to keep those people from either dropping off or, even worse, doing charge-backs on you?

DAN: Well, several things.  The charge-back issue I've handled by if they place an order online they immediately get a thank you email, “Hey thanks for your order.  Just as a reminder you've enrolled in our monthly auto-ship program.  Every 30 days you'll get blah blah blah shipped to you.  It's easy to reschedule or cancel your recurring order at any time.  Just give us a call at this number or contact us through our customer service email.”

That gets sent by email.  The exact message gets sent with a product order just as a little reminder.  I'm trying to think if there's anything else.  Those are the main things I've done.  Just a reminder that if it's a 30 day hold that their card is going to be charged in 30 days if they don't contact us or they've enrolled in a monthly continuity program.

And also as far as like retention on a monthly continuity program, this is pure gold.  This took one of my continuity programs from just being not very good‚ people canceling like after one month or people immediately canceling after the first auto-ship.  This took it from that which was pretty crappy‚ it sucks to do all this work getting people involved in a monthly auto-ship only to have them cancel right after the first month or right before the first auto-ship kicks in.  I was having a large percentage of people do that‚ like 50% or more.  And then what I did is I started the bonus‚ they got a monthly newsletter.  You could make it a monthly report or whatever you want to call it.  They're all the sudden not just an auto-ship customer… they're now in the “Elite Blah Blah Blah” club.  And as a result of that they're going to get the special “Blah Blah Newsletter” exclusively for people in this exclusive club.

And here's what you can look forward to in the following months… you know bullet.  Really hot information that's really going to pique their curiosity and every month I started sending them an actual snail mail printed newsletter.  And it did not go out with their product.  It was mailed separately the first week of every month.  And the reason I did that, and the reason I did not do an online newsletter, is because first of all an online newsletter people would never get the notice about‚ or an online newsletter basically has very little perceived value.  But a newsletter that's printed has much higher perceived value.  And the reason I didn't send it with the product is because I wanted to be basically contacting these people twice a month.  They got contacted by me when they got their product order and then later that month they also got their newsletter from me.  And that really helped my retention go from a higher percentage of people canceling after the first month to basically having an average retention of four months.  Which is really good in that particular market with that particular product.  An average retention of four months made it really profitable.

BEN: How was that newsletter created in relation to the product?  Was it just industry type news or how was that done?

DAN: Some issues were about the product and some issues did have some success stories of people using the product‚ “Joe Blow from New York has phenomenal success with this product.  He's gained X and here's how he did it.  This is what he did in addition to using the product like we recommend to make these kind of gains.”  Because this was in the body building market.  So we'll detail his training and diet and he took our X product exactly as we recommend so we'll feature it in some issues.

Other issues it's just pure content like, “Okay guys, everyone wants bigger arms, here's a quick trick to add some vast size to your arms.”  Just pure content.  I just make sure that the content is really really good in this newsletter.

BEN: Did you say that the retention rate was about four months?  Is that pretty much about average on an auto-ship supplement type thing‚ four months?

DAN: That's been my average for this.  I know a couple other guys in selling health related products that three to four months seems to be about the average for them.  So I don't know if that's the average for that market or if that's just the average in general.  I take it back‚ you know what, I did an auto-ship program years ago with another little business I had and it was‚ with shipping and handling it was over a $100 a month.  And I had a lot of people stay on for years.  I even had one guy contacted me and he said, “Hey I was wondering if I could be temporarily off my auto-ship.  I've been out of the country for eight months and I'm not able to use the product.  So could you cancel me temporarily?”

And I'm thinking this guy's been getting a $100 plus a month charged to his card for more than eight months‚ and just finally got around to canceling it.

BEN: So with these auto-ships it's basically like selling the product four times but with the one time expense if you have them on for four months.

DAN: Exactly.  It definitely can add up and for certain products like in the body building market and health markets‚ to me it makes more sense because a lot of natural products are not at all like drugs where with a drug you're going to start getting the effects or the benefits hopefully within a matter of a few weeks or a month or so.  But a natural product usually you have to stay on it for several months.  So it's more beneficial to the customer that they receive them every month.

Another reason‚ some people do prefer a three month supply, four month supply, six month supply‚ but then the problem is we're all procrastinators.  Stick that in the cabinet and we might be good for a couple weeks taking the product or we go through the first bottle and then it just slips by our attention and the other bottles stuck under the cabinet and they don't continue taking the product like they should.

But if we get one bottle for this month and 30 days we're getting the next bottle it's kind of like a constant little reminder that we need to keep taking this product to get the results that we need.  That's one of the many reasons I like auto-ship in that particular market.

BEN: When you send out the auto-ship product do you‚ I'm just thinking from a charge-back point of view‚ did you put a reminder in there too that they can cancel at any time and blah blah blah… or did you not talk about that?  I'm just thinking what if they said, “Hey, who is this guy?”

DAN: Absolutely.  A letter definitely goes out with the first order reminding them they've enrolled in an auto-ship, their credit card will be billed by this company name and it's easy to cancel or reschedule your monthly shipments, just give us a call at this number.  No hassles.  Nobody is going to hassle you or bother you or anything like that.  We'll just cancel it if you want us to‚ it's a piece of cake.  And that goes out with the first order.  I do not send that letter with every monthly auto-ship.  But this is a consumable product, the company product information is on the product label, too.

I will be honest with you‚ I think there's a higher likelihood of getting charge-backs with an auto-ship or with a 30-day hold.  But, the increase in sales and the consistency of the sales in the case of an auto-ship that you'll get is way worth it in my opinion.  And if you do things right, you include your company information with the product, and you remind them that they're on auto-ship and they can cancel any time… and you keep in touch with them by the monthly newsletter like I talked about, the charge-backs won't be out of control.

BEN: Because you're showing up every couple weeks in their home and they know who you are‚ and they know they can find you now.  There's a great idea‚ that newsletter.  I don't think I've ever seen anyone doing that.  At least nothing I ever bought.

DAN: It's been very successful for me.

BEN: Speaking of these supplements… and I wanted to ask you this because this definitely is something that scares even information marketers… is all these regulatory laws and rules and I'm just wondering how you navigate some of those things.  Do you have a lawyer who looks at everything?  How do you handle that?

DAN: Well, the honest answer would be no, I do not have a lawyer look at everything.  Probably not a bad idea‚ there's been instances where I'll have a lawyer look at everything.  Hopefully it's a lawyer who understands direct response.  All the ones I know are severe deal killers.

But yeah, to be safe, you should have a lawyer look at this stuff.

I put the standard disclaimer on the health related stuff.  “These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA… blah blah blah… this product is not for the treatment of any disease or disorder blah blah blah… whatever it is… and before starting any exercise program or taking any supplements you should consult your physician…” stuff like that.

I put that disclaimer on there.  So the honest answer is no I don't always have an attorney look at this stuff.  But I guess to be on the safe side you should‚ especially this is an area I don't deal with‚ but especially if you're in like the financial area.  There's some laws and things with the SEC, the Securities Exchange Commission, that I don't understand that.  But apparently if you say the wrong thing in some of those markets you can be in real big trouble.

I follow the lead of a lot of the heavy hitters that are in the health market‚ like Agora and Healthy Resources and all these guys.  And when they make a statement they always back it up with certain proof elements like a medical study or clinical study done.  And they always put the disclaimer on there that these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA blah blah blah.

BEN: As much as we want to make profits, it's all for nought if we get busted for saying the wrong thing on accident.

DAN: That's for sure.

BEN: How can people find more about you and your products and your services and your newsletter?  I think everybody should be reading your newsletter back issues and your portfolio samples.  Where can they find more about you?

DAN: Thanks, thanks I appreciate it, Ben.  I have a website at DobermanDan.com‚ it's “Doberman” like the dog‚ D-O-B-E-R-M-A-N D-A-N dot com.

I started that website almost two years ago with the intention of using it to get clients to do consulting on direct marketing and maybe some copywriting work too.  And now I'm no longer accepting clients.  It'd be very extremely rare that I would accept a client.  Because I'm just focused on my own projects now.  But I started really enjoying doing the newsletter and the last one I did was shortly before Gary Halbert passed away.  And I've not been able to write one since then for a lot of reasons.  And I finally, after having several months to think about this and to mourn Gary's death, my new goal for the Doberman Dan website is‚ Gary Halbert was what Ken McCarthy said, the “Kitchen Table Entrepreneur's Best Friend.”

And Gary's newsletter‚ I was just always so excited to get it.  I would drop everything the minute that came in the mail.  This was when I was so broke I didn't have any direct response projects that were working.  But every time that newsletter arrived it just gave me so much hope that yes, I can do this.  I can start on an extremely limited budget on my kitchen table and build a really good business and that was so important to me back then.  And it's true that Gary's newsletter has taught thousands of people how to bootstrap their way to incredible businesses.  I know numerous people who have started on their kitchen table from what they learned from Gary Halbert's newsletter and have built phenomenal businesses making millions of dollars.

And so now that I've had time to think about it, my new goal and plan is to pick up the ball where Gary left off.  I will never ever ever be able to fill that guy's shoes.  And I don't delude myself into thinking that's even possible.  What I really hope to do is pick up the ball where Gary left off and have my newsletter be the kitchen table entrepreneur's best friend.

So yeah, I'm going to write about marketing stuff.  But I think my main focus is going to be, “Look, here's how you can find a project and here's how you can start this on a shoestring from your kitchen table and build this up.”   You know, if you read all of Gary's newsletters he's just got some incredible information in it.  Even today, even though a lot of those were written over 20 years ago, you could take that information today and just build an incredible business.

And so that's my new goal for the Doberman Dan Letter.

BEN: Thank you Dan for doing this and I really appreciate it.